helen's dungeness film
I managed to catch fragments of two events on Friday night. Namely the beginning of Norte Chico raising money for Macmillan Cancer Support at Islington Mill, and the end of Electronic Organica IV at The Britons Protection.
Norte Chico wouldn't normally have appealed but my friend Helen Shanahan was showing her short and deeply personal film Dungeness B, and I both wanted to see it at a larger size and to offer my support. Despite having been asked to produce something at short notice for the event, having spent most of the day of the showing (and a large part of the week to that point) finishing the film, and despite the organisers being aware that a film was to be screened before the day of the event, the actual screening was handled very poorly. I'd actually say disrespectfully.
Visually it was projected on the back wall twice with one image distinctly yellow. This might not have been a major problem except that there was a clutter of drums and mic stands in the way obscuring parts of the image, and the lights were not taken down enough. Simply having a screen in front of the stage, even just a sheet, or perhaps projecting onto an unobstructed side wall, and switching the lights off would have been an immeasurable improvement. If any the bands had to make do with a quiet, distorted PA people would have noticed and objected. Even worse, the microphones were left open causing the sound on the film to feedback and distort. Now when you know you're going to screen a film these are pretty basic things to get right.
Those people who were able to see the film, and who chose to watch it rather than talk amongst themselves (unlike awful ska-punk band Government Death Epidemic), saw something really rather beautiful. The film has three interlocking threads running through that might broadly be described as narrative. The first is a series of interiors in her grandparents' cottage at Dungeness as family sit and talk, or carry out normal domestic tasks. The second thread is a series of exteriors of Dungeness, showing the landscape, plants, buildings, power station, and grandparents walking along a road. The final thread is a sequence of memories and observations distilled to brief handwritten fragments superimposed on the image. Together they tell, without extraneous detail, of how Helen's grandparents are having to sell their cotage and move from Dungeness, severing a family link with a place of great beauty. A place that will now be filled "with lovies and artists."
Almost every shot is brilliant, and I could easily describe the whole film to you, but among some of the visual highlights are the closeup of hands as two men play a card game, two women dancing their way round each other in the kitchen, an interior door half closed behind someone that opens to follow them once they let go, a view through a rainy window, people walking along a road, and views of pebbles and other natural aspects of Dungeness projected onto a white sheet. This last image is important to the film. At first there's a kind of ambivalence, the sheet waves and initially you seem to looking through water. It brings a melancholy, lost quality to the image that matches the subject matter. The music is simple and stark, even forboding in places.
This might all seem to suggest a detatched, dream-like film. Nothing could be more wrong. The people, the physical reality of the spaces, the quality of the light, the sound of voices all give the film a strong immediate presence that reaches off the screen in a way no 3D ever could. It isn't a conventionally narrative film, and it lacks the talking heads, archive footage and carefully constructed, tendentious argument that you'd expect from a documentary. Instead it's a more impressionistic invocation of a place, and of specific physical and human spaces within that place, which bring it to life far more effectively than more traditional narrative techniques would. As such you feel the loss more strongly than if you were simply told what to feel. I think it may be made available online at some point, and I'll endeavour to let you know if and when it is. After the film was over I think we only stayed to watch Government Death Epidemic and then left. Mainly to meet up with friends at Electronic Organica.
We arrived to catch the end of Token Otter (or possibly Electronic Organica Quartet) who I thought were great, and the whole of Orfeo Five who only intermittently interested me. No particular problem, just too much saxophone being used as a conventional instrument, too much music and not enough noise. I simply preferred the more jagged and abstract shapes that the previous act sculpted. Orfeo Five in themselves were very good and did some really interesting things setting the saxophone against itself sampled, degraded, and played back as a phantom of itself. Or using vocals held on the laptop. I wasn't especially impressed with the preset rhythms which I found intrusive and not terribly well integrated with the other things that were going on. But other than that, I enjoyed the set. Token Otter (if it was them) beforehand were more interesting to me. Clusters of notes from the guitar. The saxophone reduced to breaths, sounds from the guitar or perhaps the saxophone processed to the point they sounded like a violin, stop-start rhythms. These kind of sounds are much more congenial to me.
Norte Chico wouldn't normally have appealed but my friend Helen Shanahan was showing her short and deeply personal film Dungeness B, and I both wanted to see it at a larger size and to offer my support. Despite having been asked to produce something at short notice for the event, having spent most of the day of the showing (and a large part of the week to that point) finishing the film, and despite the organisers being aware that a film was to be screened before the day of the event, the actual screening was handled very poorly. I'd actually say disrespectfully.
Visually it was projected on the back wall twice with one image distinctly yellow. This might not have been a major problem except that there was a clutter of drums and mic stands in the way obscuring parts of the image, and the lights were not taken down enough. Simply having a screen in front of the stage, even just a sheet, or perhaps projecting onto an unobstructed side wall, and switching the lights off would have been an immeasurable improvement. If any the bands had to make do with a quiet, distorted PA people would have noticed and objected. Even worse, the microphones were left open causing the sound on the film to feedback and distort. Now when you know you're going to screen a film these are pretty basic things to get right.
Those people who were able to see the film, and who chose to watch it rather than talk amongst themselves (unlike awful ska-punk band Government Death Epidemic), saw something really rather beautiful. The film has three interlocking threads running through that might broadly be described as narrative. The first is a series of interiors in her grandparents' cottage at Dungeness as family sit and talk, or carry out normal domestic tasks. The second thread is a series of exteriors of Dungeness, showing the landscape, plants, buildings, power station, and grandparents walking along a road. The final thread is a sequence of memories and observations distilled to brief handwritten fragments superimposed on the image. Together they tell, without extraneous detail, of how Helen's grandparents are having to sell their cotage and move from Dungeness, severing a family link with a place of great beauty. A place that will now be filled "with lovies and artists."
Almost every shot is brilliant, and I could easily describe the whole film to you, but among some of the visual highlights are the closeup of hands as two men play a card game, two women dancing their way round each other in the kitchen, an interior door half closed behind someone that opens to follow them once they let go, a view through a rainy window, people walking along a road, and views of pebbles and other natural aspects of Dungeness projected onto a white sheet. This last image is important to the film. At first there's a kind of ambivalence, the sheet waves and initially you seem to looking through water. It brings a melancholy, lost quality to the image that matches the subject matter. The music is simple and stark, even forboding in places.
This might all seem to suggest a detatched, dream-like film. Nothing could be more wrong. The people, the physical reality of the spaces, the quality of the light, the sound of voices all give the film a strong immediate presence that reaches off the screen in a way no 3D ever could. It isn't a conventionally narrative film, and it lacks the talking heads, archive footage and carefully constructed, tendentious argument that you'd expect from a documentary. Instead it's a more impressionistic invocation of a place, and of specific physical and human spaces within that place, which bring it to life far more effectively than more traditional narrative techniques would. As such you feel the loss more strongly than if you were simply told what to feel. I think it may be made available online at some point, and I'll endeavour to let you know if and when it is. After the film was over I think we only stayed to watch Government Death Epidemic and then left. Mainly to meet up with friends at Electronic Organica.
We arrived to catch the end of Token Otter (or possibly Electronic Organica Quartet) who I thought were great, and the whole of Orfeo Five who only intermittently interested me. No particular problem, just too much saxophone being used as a conventional instrument, too much music and not enough noise. I simply preferred the more jagged and abstract shapes that the previous act sculpted. Orfeo Five in themselves were very good and did some really interesting things setting the saxophone against itself sampled, degraded, and played back as a phantom of itself. Or using vocals held on the laptop. I wasn't especially impressed with the preset rhythms which I found intrusive and not terribly well integrated with the other things that were going on. But other than that, I enjoyed the set. Token Otter (if it was them) beforehand were more interesting to me. Clusters of notes from the guitar. The saxophone reduced to breaths, sounds from the guitar or perhaps the saxophone processed to the point they sounded like a violin, stop-start rhythms. These kind of sounds are much more congenial to me.
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