You've Got Mail

Reading the book, Dear Me which I blogged about here made me think about how we communicate overall. When I was a lot younger my Mum used to make me write letters to my cousins in Nigeria. I used to hate it because I felt that it ate into my precious time when I could be watching TV or playing with my mates. Back then in the early 80s writing a letter seemed really laborious as it was difficult to go back and correct mistakes. So when the invention of email came along I was ecstatic. Not only could I communicate to anyone around the world at anytime, I was amazed by the wonderful fact that as soon as I pressed the send button my recipient would have my mail sitting in their in-box waiting for them to read. Email was fast, convenient and efficient. However as what normally happens to all great things, emails lost their innocence and pretty soon my in-box was full of spam messages and mails from fraudsters. It got to the point where I no longer looked forward to logging into my account as I spent 90% of the time deleting unwanted messages. Then Yahoo messenger came into my life and the concept of exchanging instant messages to someone on the other side of the world was very intoxicating. Of course after that various forms of social media kicked off ie MySpace where you could meet likeminded people from across the globe, Facebook where you could catch up with old school mates, find out what they are up to and last but not least is Twitter. Now this amazing facility allows you to natter on about anything you want at anytime to anyone � well as long as they are following you. It is also amazingly addictive as you can sit in on conversations and find various interesting people from anywhere. The 140 character limit makes sure that what you say is concise and succinct. Sadly with all these delightful forms of interaction this means that the urge to send an email is very small, I can�t remember the last time I sent or received an email that was non work and blog related. So one of my plans for 2010 is to start emailing again. So come on, make my day and drop me an email at ondolady@googlemail.com to say hi.

our true intent

Despite the fact that I have way too much work to do, I hopped across the road to Pure Groove (thankfully, I only live round the corner) tonight for a screening of the newish ATP (All Tomorrow's Parties or the uninitiated) documentary. I didn't think I'd be that crazy for it as it's just a bunch of random clips from a music festival. I know of the festival, obviously, but I've never been so I didn't know if I'd connect with the film or if it would only really work for those who've been to ATP. Thankfully, it was a fabulous film - it succeeded in completely pumping me up about the experience and as soon as I got home I started looking for tickets.

The doc is composed of basically three different types of clips: footage from holiday camps in the 50s and 60s (the festival is held in an out-of-season holiday camps), band performances, and random happenings around the festival. The music is amazing, with so many good bands making brief cameos: Les Savy Fav / Mogwai / Gossip / Octopus Project / GZA / The Dirty Three / Battles / Portishead / Daniel Johnston / Nick CAve / Seasick Steve. Apart from the performances, the best bits of the film were the random clips of spontaneous jam sessions breaking out in a room or on the beach or in the street, people falling down and just being generally ridiculous - a picture of this super chilled out atmosphere emerges where it seems like everyone attending is REALLY into their music.

Bit of a shame that the trailer doesn't give more away - you can't really get a sense of how good the docu is, but I suppose you get a sense of the fun.

If you're in London, you can check it out on the 4th of December at Bocking Street Warehouse.

people are strange

Plenty of culture to be had � Londres just now. It's art week mania with Zoo and Frieze and various spin off and satellite events. I'm off to Frieze this afternoon - with the AJ interns in tow - so will report back later. The London Film Festival also kicked off a few days ago and I went to see my first festival film yesterday. I should say films, rather, as I went to see the aptly titled 'People Are Strange' collection of short films.

First of all, let me make no secret of the fact that I love short films. Short films are to features what poetry is to literature. The best short films say more in 10 minutes than most features manage in two hours. In the same way that too many people say they don't like or don't get poetry, many film goers tend to say the same about short films.

Of the seven films I saw yesterday (4 from the UK, 1 from Australia, 1 from Iceland and 1 from Poland), all were very good, three were outstanding and only one felt mildly unoriginal. Most of the film-makers were present at the screening and a few things struck me as peculiar: two of the films were co-directed by brothers (have the Cohen's really had this much of an impact on an entire generation of film-makers?) and only one of the films was directed by a woman. As soon as I started to wonder why cinema - or at least this screening - was so male dominated, it also hit me that the film I thought was the least original - After Tomorrow - was also the only female directed film. Even though I wasn't very keen on the bizarrely titled, Spunkbubble, there's absolutely no way anyone could suggest the film was unoriginal.

Still from The Continuing and Lamentable Saga of the Suicide Brothers

It was a bit of a surprise to see Keira Knightley and Rupert Friend on screen in the short film, The Continuing and Lamentable Saga of the Suicide Brothers, though I've since discovered that Friend wrote the film alongside its third actor, Tom Mison. While the film is sinisterly beautiful to behold, there's something of a vanity project vibe about it. Though another benefit of short films is that you can forgive a 10-minute beautifully shot vanity project in a way that you simply can't forgive a 2.5 hour vanity project. Everyone wins with short films.

Still from Cicada

I think my favourite of the lot, though by no means the most creative or most original, was Amiel Courtin-Wilson's Cicada. In fact, it wasn't so much a short film as it was a mini documentary. It's just ten minutes of one man telling a story - in extreme close up - straight into the camera. Given that there are few cuts and that it's nothing other than this man's face, the ten minutes are absolutely gripping. I could only find a few stills, but what sadly doesn't come across in the stills photography is the quality of the cinematography. It's beautifully back lit so that the intense blue of the man's eyes are perfectly set off against the white glow of the background. My only complaint is that Courtin-Wilson mucks up the end a bit, by putting in some arty hand-held shots of the man walking through darkened streets - totally gratuitous and unnecessary given the power of the simplicity of the previous nine minutes. I suppose though, that this is the thing that distinguishes the truly great artists from the just plain good: knowing when to stop.

tell me about that time...

I watched a charming little film last night, La lectrice. I think only the French could make an entire film about the seductive powers of literature, but especially the power of reading aloud - that fabulous frisson created between two people when one reads to another. Or even when one reads to a larger audience. I can only really think of The Princess Bride as another great film with storytelling at its heart, but it only really uses storytelling as a vehicle to tell the story - if that makes sense - not as a theme for exploration, like La lectrice.

I love it when someone reads to me and I love reading aloud. I think it stems from childhood and having parents and grandparents who read to me as well as attending a school where the teacher read aloud to the students. Certainly, context changes everything. For if you are two lovers in bed reading to each other, there is a kind of comfort, a vulnerable familiarity which is completely different to the electric frisson of one potential lover reading to another - before any physical connection has occurred. Even still, the tenderness of a parent reading to a child, or a friend reading to a friend, or the intellectual stimulation of a teacher reading to a student, all different, yet equally potent emotions tied up with the art of reading aloud.

I don't know when or why we stopped reading to each other. We still read, of course, but it's become such an intensely personal thing. Even when we participate in book clubs or discuss a book amongst us, the actual experience of reading the book still takes place on an individual level. Only the discussion and analysis is shared. Why not a reading aloud book group?

In light of this deficit, I'm hosting a story reading night at our salon [london] event in August. I think it would be great, if even perhaps a little regressive, to have a storytelling evening - that feeling of sitting around the campfire and going back to more primitive entertainment - an evening inspired by Homer and the oral tradition. I haven't collected all my story-tellers yet so if you want to be involved, let me know. Read your own story or not, just come and read.

the one minute "found" footage film exercise

This is a hilariously poor, yet somehow quite bemusing, one minute "found" footage film project. It had to be made using stuff I already had and be no longer than one minute with no other sound than what had already been recorded.

Don't ask why I already had a clip of me saying, "this is a film about ducks." Let's just call it serendipity.

Special props to the kid in the park, who still gets a laugh from me every time, and to BC for humouring me...

the poetics of film school

Turning to the Page

I remember that cavernous silence

after my first declaration of love,

then, feeling I must have been misunderstood, saying it again,

and, years later, with someone else,

exclaiming, "That was so good!"

and the foreign language she - who was

speaking English - used in response.

I learned there's nothing more shaming

or as memorable as an intimacy

unreturned. And turned, therefore,

to the expected silence of a page,

where I might simultaneously assert

and hide, be my own disappointment,

which saved me for a while.

But soon the page whispered

I'd mistaken its vastness for a refuge,

its whiteness for a hospital

for the pathetic. Fill me up, it said,

give me sorrow because I must have joy,

all the travails of love because

distances are where the safe reside.

Bring to me, it said, continual proof

you've been alive.

So I mentioned in one of my last posts that I bought two new books of poetry the last time I went to Oxford, one of which was Stephen Dunn's 2004 The Insistence of Beauty. I must not have paid very close attention when I was picking it out as I read the whole thing last night and was somewhat disappointed. The only poem I really liked was this one above, Turning to the Page. The rest of the poems feel too watered down, too unfocused, and though it sounds strange, not enough about words. I think he loves himself more than he loves words and it shows on the page.

I don't really love the poem above, but I think the last two stanzas are brilliant and perfectly encapsulate two of the 'big' ideas of writing. One is the how and why we write, the need to validate a life lived in words and on paper, to understand actions through disciplined phrasing. I love especially 'mistaken its vastness for a refuge' because I think that any writer can understand the feeling - sometimes a blank piece of paper is a curse, a taunt. But most of the time it is a refuge, 'a hospital for the pathetic', the melancholy, the lonely and I think he captures this sentiment very well. The other thing I loved about this poem is its undercover reference to poetic history - the Wordsworthian 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' which comes through clearly in the first half of the poem, but especially in the idea that 'distances are where the safe reside.' Personally, I don't agree with Wordsworth's poetic prescription, but still it's interesting to see contemporary poets striving toward this model and how it works itself out in their poems.

In other completely unrelated news, I had my first digital film-making class last night. I think it will be fun to learn how to make a film and finally get off my lazy arse and work out how to use Final Cut Pro, but I'd forgotten what some aspiring 'creatives' are like. I don't want to pre-judge my fellow students too harshly, but why is it that people are just desperate to do something as a career when they hardly even like the medium they so desperately want to work in. I took this class because I love film and have always wanted to learn how to make films so that I can mess about on my own. I don't necessarily want to work in the film industry or become a filmmaker - I'd just like to learn more about it. Like most of the other art forms I'm interested in, craft is fascinating to me. For me, film should be a marriage between storytelling and photography - all my favourite films balance this well, even if I do tend to favour films which are technically or cinematographically (making up words again...) more interesting than the story they're trying to tell. I suppose Russian Ark is a good example of this - as stories goes, this one is pretty meh, but shooting an entire 90 minute film in one single take is nothing short of miraculous.

And this is where the film-making class gets really interesting, because I don't even think any of these other 10 people who profess to be desperate to work as film-makers have even thought about the visual side of film. Maybe it's because I have a background in photography that I get so hung up on the visual and the cinematography, but I nearly died when, at the end of our first course, the instructor gave us 20 seconds to decide on our favourite film and share it with the class. I can't remember them all, but of the ones I can people said:

Annie Hall

Kill Bill 2

When Harry Met Sally

All About My Mother

High School Musical 3 (Sadly, this isn't a joke)

Steam: The Turkish Bath

I have to make a short film with these people!!!!! The course instructor said his favourite film was Star Wars, which even I can admit isn't a horrible answer - if we're going for cinematic history and breaking new ground - but it's a coward's answer. I toyed with saying Lars Von Trier's The Five Obstructions - probably the only film I've ever watched more than 5 times - or Andrea Arnold's incredible Red Road , which was shot largely in Von Trier's Dogme 95 style - a movement I'm very interested in that focuses on 'purity' in filmmaking: hand-held cameras, shot on location, no additional sound work, natural lighting and so on. In the end though, I went with Bertolucci's 1970 film The Conformist which I saw last year at the BFI on a big screen. It's possibly the most visually stunning film I've ever seen - the story is compelling enough to hold your interest for two hours - but the amount of care that went into the photography and editing of this film is obvious in every single frame. To make a movie with such precision and such artistry, this is what I think the goal of film-making should be.

It's all for fun anyhow, something to distract me from my looming chapter deadline. And I'm looking forward to seeing the final project and messing around on my own in between. So keep your eyes peeled - in 10 weeks I'll have a monstrosity of a short film created by a group of rom-com loving 'storytellers' (as the course instructor now insists on calling us) to post up here for your viewing pleasure.

the man without a head

I bought the European Short 16 DVD http://www.cinema16.org/dvd.php?dvd=2 about a month ago. I still haven't watched all the films. For some reason the first film I watched was by Juan Solanas called l'homme sans t�te. It's an animated short and I didn't think I'd like it, so I don't know why I watched it first, but I'm immensely glad I did.

This is one of the most brilliant films I've seen in a long time. It's so beautifully put together and it's one of the most original and intriguing worlds I've ever seen on screen. I also loved that I thought I knew exactly where it was going and then constantly had my expectations flipped upside down - that's such a rarity. And I also love how this film manages to make a statement about allowing yourself to be who you truly are without resorting to gratuitous emotional manipulation.

I found this video of it but it doesn't have subtitles (I'm not even sure if it has sound at all as I'm at work and can't hear anything on my computer), but you don't really even need to understand what's being said to get the jist of what's going on. It's a bit long (about 15 minutes in all), but seriously well worth it.

Solanas - L'homme sans t�te
Uploaded by Morpheus51100

Why we should all give Cruise a break

The Philosopher and I went to see Valkyrie last night. Given that I generally regard Tom Sutcliffe and Co on Radio 4's Saturday Review as my arbiters of taste and they didn't like this film, I wasn't expecting to like it either. The week that the panel was reviewing this film, most had a fairly negative view and one dude was downright convinced that the film was a vehicle for propogating Tom Cruise's freaky scientologist views - and this is on Radio 4! I wasn't super excited to see the film, but I thought I might as well check it out and I'm swiftly learning that arriving at the cinema with low expectations means you're bound to win: if you don't like the film you've lost nothing, and if you do like it, you're pleseantly surprised.

I'll admit that I've always had a soft spot for Tom Cruise (sans scientology, of course) partly because I came of age just after all the Top Gun insanity and because I like Magnolia and Rain Man and Mission Impossible (did you see the opening sequence of MI 2?!) and Minority Report and Jerry Maguire, but it's also because he reminds me of my dad. Weird right? But give the guy a break, seriously. Why are we so bitchy about actors who are just trying to have successful careers? We're convinced they're out to con us to see their crap movie, while they grasp their slimy little hands up each rung of Hollywood's greasy ladder, but a film only costs �10 (at least in London) - I can't see how that's a big deal. Sure Cruise has been in a few shite films (Far and Away, anyone?), but he's been in more decent films than most actors, and his truly awful films are few and far between.

Yeah, okay, Valkyrie isn't a great film, but it's far more interesting and ambitious than a lot of crap Hollywood churns out. And even if I thought it was a "star vehicle" for Tom Cruise, at least Valkyrie shows he has an eye for an interesting story. While Christopher McQuarrie's screenplay (he also wrote The Usual Suspects) isn't always well conceived - there's an excellent sequence about 3/4ths of the way through which is so agonisingly tense I was hugging my knees to my chest, but then the sequence ends in a total anti-climax only to have nearly the exact same sequence repeat again as the actual climax of the film and the second time around it isn't nearly as gripping. Such a silly thing to do - you're supposed to build to one climax - not build, deflate, build, deflate.

This isn't a rom-com or a band-of brothers testosterone fulled turbo-cop shoot 'em up piece of thoughtless Hollywood trash. Even if it isn't perfect - and maybe if the actors were unknowns and it was all done in German there may have been more gravitas - it's still packed with pathos and I think you have to give credit to TC for staring in and producing a film on souch a touchy topic . Given that the film's plot is such an interesting historical subject, it's surprising that no one has tried to dramatise it before. I'm not saying TC is a hero for acting in and financing a film about an inside plot to assassnate Hitler, only that the guy should get a bit of a break sometimes. He's just doing his job. And as far as I'm concerned he isn't doing too bad at it.

My first film...

It's horrible, but sort of amusing in its hideousness. I haven't figured out how to use any proper editing software, and though everyone always talks up Mac's great video editing, iMovie sucks. It's like ClarisWorks, if any of you are old school Mac users...

Still, considering I was just screwing around with the camera on my phone (only 2 megapixels!), it could have been worse... Maybe? Hopefully.

I'm working on it. Give me a few months and hopefully I'll have made something I can be proud of...