EIFF Day 2

Mainly shorts today, some very "artistic" (in good and bad ways). My main question is how did Edinburgh City Council get planning permission for this without my receiving at least a letter?

Scottish Shorts

And "Bob" rears his head again, this time in Original Bob by Zam Salim, a pretty good little time travel tale about going back to try and get young you to fix your Big Mistake. A little predictable but good fun. Sandro Jandieri's Edinburgh-set Timekode is a bit opaque, but entertaining for all that, featuring lots of food, and a dining experience that makes your average spouse-swapping party pale in comparison. Rather excellent presentation of dialogue too. Caffalic Educashun (Bronagh Keegan) is also great fun, schoolgirl seeking some peace from bullying visits local church on lunchbreak & has a new take on the whole Jesus business. Return (Benjamin Kracun), Dansette (Rosie Toner), and Dead Man Falls (Simon Miller) all offer more conventional short fare, with DMF boasting good childrens' performances and scoring points for its presentation of Falklands War-era Britain (including Sinclair Spectrum!). Paper Anniversary (Joern Utkilen) encounters a somewhat monomaniacal woman on her first wedding anniversary trying to persuade her reluctant husband to "make babies". Her persuasive technique (including "Step outside. If I win …" during dinner) is interesting to say the least. Excellent stuff. Final piece is The Perpetual Twilight Of Gregor Black (Nigel Atkinson & Huw Davies), a wonderfully moody black-and-white vignette set in a world reminiscent of, I don't know, maybe a slightly raunchier Lanark against a background of a working couple (but what jobs!) at low-level war. Destined to become a shoe fetishist cult classic.

Gotta say that audiences at this festival are wildly variable: some are hugely enthusiastic and great fun to be a part of (such as the presumably largely home crowd at this session), while others are sheep (will clap if somebody gives them a lead) and others are just dead. Aside from anything else, if the directors are present I kindof feel that it's at the least polite to give a little applause, and some absolutely kick-arse pieces later today just got deathly silence at the end. I mean it's possible that the audience were stunned or in awed contemplation, but the slack jaws and richly sicksweet scent of decaying flesh tells me otherwise. At least they managed to suppress their otherwise incessant groaning of "brains" while the films were showing.

US Shorts

Slightly more mixed work in the US section (I'm perhaps going to be a little savage on the less-than-outstanding stuff for brevity's sake); Junebug and Hurricane (James Ponsoldt) is a single-mum-with-daughter tale, some lovely moments but a bit wistful in the end; The Dock (Nina Martinek) just didn't do it for me, some possibly dying, possibly suicidal, woman gets followed by a hick and then kills him, yay; Strangers (Guy Nattiv and Erez Tadmor) pits a Jew against an Arab and then together against some Nazis in a heavy-handed homily set in what has to be the best subway in the world (Haifa? I couldn't work it out), everything's slanted at an angle — platform, trains, everything (well just those both then); 9:30 (Mun Chee Yong) covers the running-away-from-the-one-you-love/homesickness/traveller thing, just not engagingly enough; Luke (Michael Jackson Chaney) is, oh, I don't know, some sickly moral good-Samaritan Arabs-can-be-lovely thing set presumably in the Iraq war. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that I saw it refer to some passage in the bible in the credits (Luke x:y-z), but didn't see it tell us what the verses in question said (I'll take a guess that it's about The Good Samaritan hm?). If I could remember the numbers I might even look, but for god's sake if you wanna shove the bible down our throats you can at least tell us the fucking words rather than smugly quoting numbers, I mean Jesus.

On to the good, which was very, very good. Cavities (Hope Dickson Leach) left me with probably the strongest sense of unease yet this festival, with its coverage of "weight issues" for a teenage girl. Keep Right (Tim Godsall), featuring Lance "Bishop" Henriksen if my brain's working properly, is great fun but I can't really say more for spoiling its crunchy goodness. Gowanus, Brooklyn (Ryan Fleck) twists the poor neighbourhood school childhood story interestingly and well. Shock Act (Seth Grossman) is a very good piece which looks initially like it's gonna be the old prison electric shock experiment thing and then turns out to be for real — they want people to be able to press the button all the way: specifically, they're looking to see if female prison officers can do same and are employing actors to test this. Works extremely well and finishes with the obligatory protest note against the death penalty.

Black Box 2: Time Regained
"Film as memory, as reliquary of the past, as record: all these works — however different in style and technique — share this common aim." — EIFF

Much more arty stuff in the Black Box, and too much of it demonstrated how persistent is the pernicious idea that to make Great Art all you need do is induce epileptic fits in your audience (even if I was sympathetic to the whole zombie theme of the worst offender, reMi's seciron_RA). That said, the two recovered film works, Johannes Hammel's The Bathers (Die Badenden) and Bill Decasia Morrison's Light is Calling were ravishingly gorgeous — LiC particularly so, leaving me wanting to see Decasia all over again: I tend to get depressed reading centuries-old stuff which demonstrates that in many ways we haven't learned to deal any better with shit than we used to hundreds of years back (Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists anybody? — only one hundred, yes, but …), and Light is Calling, for all its cancerously decayed celluloloid is just so crisply beautiful, the fragments of smiling faces and people just being human kindof restores my faith a bit.

Found medical-themed Out Of The Ether (Kerry A. Laitala) pretty entertaining, particularly the flying bedpans and scissors. Restored Weekend (Gerd Gockell & Kirsten Winter), a fake film "reconstructed" around the first sound collage was also engaging; imagery ranged from the industrial to the abstract, with spots of Decasia-like stuff too. Moira Tierney took on 9/11 in American Dreams #3, and kindof lost: there's been so much on this subject that I'm becoming numb to it, and while at least this take isn't a thoughtless polemic, its clouds of smoke and distant views of people on Brooklyn Bridge weren't enough — my main sense of connection with it was from seeing the same views myself when visiting my brother. Compare Aljandro Gonzalez Iñarritu's gut-wrenching piece in 11'09"01 <shiver>.

Loretta (Jeanne Liotta) was IIRC (and that's not a certainty; my memory is collapsing under the strain of identifying some of the twenty-seven shorts I saw today) was a very pretty abstract film. Not the same thing at all, Violette (Violet) (Jean-Phillipe Farber) mixed women (naked), women (lingerie), women (chador), women (guns, various items of clothing) mainly running around in a pastoral setting. A bit of a Chicks With Guns (or whatever it is) for the confused Islamic bucolic. The headshots in the orchard grass (reminding me of nothing so much as My Bloody Valentine's You Made Me Realise cover art) were pretty — in fact it was generally pretty — but I wasn't comfortable that this was anything other than wank. I mean the French filmmakers I've heard speak have had very intellectual approaches to their work, with very definite ideas of what they are trying to say, so I'm sure that something is being said here (it was an orchard, I'm sure of it), but I'm not entirely sure I'd be happy even if I knew what it was.

Finally, there was a (for me) surprise showing of a new Bèla Tarr short, Prologus (Prologue). I could probably watch a Tarr film of a brick wall (arguably frequently do) until kingdom come and be happy. This was just a single long tracking shot (I'm sure you've heard me rave about Werckmeister Harmonies' 11-minute opening shot) along a queue to a soup kitchen window, along with the first few people actually getting served. But what faces, what photography, and more Mihaly Vig soundtrack goodness too. Happy happy.

Kenny Does Dougal
"Dougal Wilson was recently described as being ON FIRE — winning Best Video Director at this year's Music Vision Awards. Seems he can't put a foot wrong." — EIFF

Live interview chaired by Richard Kenworthy of Shynola, including lots of Wilson's advertising and music video work. The two of them are obviously on very good terms and this led to a very relaxed, occasionally pally, interview with them trading insults and plenty of entertainment provided. Not a lot to say otherwise (tiredness perhaps); the ads and videos were all good, we got to see one he did for Irn Bru which apparently only got shown once in Scotland's cinemas — featuring Teletubbies with babboon bottoms and a vengeful Mr Cloud I can guess why :) Interesting bit on IP, in that he seemed happy to admit a debt to Amelie for a series of gnome-centred Virgin travel ads he did, and not terribly disturbed by other "creatives" incurring similar debts to his own work. Also discovered that Mike Streets Skinner had a previous existence as something called Grafitti, which is recognisably him (in faux-protest-video What is the Problem?), so that was interesting.

Old Boy
(Park Chan-wook / South Korea / 2004 / 120 min)
"The most eagerly-awaited thriller of the year, from the director of Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance." — EIFF

I don't know whether the advertorial will claim that this film has a twist or not — was the first thing that popped into my head as the plot got underway — but it's a great film nonetheless, and the way it moves on from the revelation-thing is fairly brilliant. Central character is kidnapped and held for reasons unknown in a kind of prison-hotel-room for fifteen years before being, just, well, released. What-the-hell-next…? Often brutal and extremely violent (but in a good way) (um, his weapon of choice is a clawhammer), this'll be two hours spent on the edge of your seat. Hugely visually appealing and with stunningly mad hair too.