Cocktails and Records

Our local council has been embroiled in a long-running farrago regarding the local cinema. Walthamstow’s EMD cinema was once a much-loved Granada cinema, complete with 30s décor and Christie organ. In addition to the screens, the cinema was built with top-notch staging so in the 50s and 60s the likes of Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly, The Beatles, The Kinks and The Stones played there. In recent years though, the cinema has fallen into decline and now it lies unused in a fairly miserable state.

However, those trusty friends of the large historic building, Christian evangelicals (in this case the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, UCKG) have come to the rescue. Like Finsbury Park Astoria, they have bought the building and plan to transform it into a place of worship.

There has been much public outcry and local campaigning against this decision. Waltham Forest is the only London borough not to have a cinema, people have a genuine fondness for the traditional Grade II* listed cinema and there is very little trust in our local council anyway, particularly its attitude towards regeneration, the arts and heritage. None of this is helped by the fact that there are rumours that various cinema operators have proposed viable plans for refurbishing the EMD and running it as a profitable venue again, but have been rejected by the council. It is all a long, sorrowful story of mistrust between the local authority, the church and cinema campaigners.

So far so typical, sadly enough. This week though, two quotes from local councillors have really made me wonder what world I’m living in.

Councillor Matt Davis: ‘Do you not think the council needs to manage people’s expectations on the EMD, and make it clear that people can get Mick Jagger out and bunches of kids protesting but it won’t make a difference?’

Councillor Terry Wheeler: ‘[a new church will be] more attractive, to particularly young people, than a modified cinema.’

What is happening when public protests (even if they include Mick Jagger) are dismissed so out of hand? And more to the point, what kind of world is it where the council can even think about claiming that a church will more appealing to young people than a cinema?

I’m so out of touch with young people though these days that I wouldn’t have a clue. Maybe he is right. Maybe religion is more appealing to the ‘yoof’ than movies. This can’t possibly be true, can it?

Or thank God my school days are over

After a productive morning washing up and vacuuming, I took myself to the movies yesterday to see Palm d’Or winner The Class (or Entre les Murs). Since then the film has lodged in my mind and, like an annoying Robbie Williams song, I can’t seem to free myself of it.

The Class is a French film about well, a French class in a suburban Paris school and it stands out for a number of reasons:

1. This mixed, multi-racial school of kids from poorer backgrounds is not what you usually see in French cinema. Apart from rare films like La Haine, you could be forgiven for thinking that the entire Parisian population spends all its time having steamy affairs and/or arguing about Deleuze at swanky dinner parties. There are no dinner parties in this film. Not one.
2. Pretty much the entire film was shot in four locations: the classroom, the staffroom, the school playground and a school meeting room. Combined with long sequences of painfully realistic dialogue in class, this intense documentary-style focus on the school day serves to remind you just how claustrophobic and awful the place can be. School days are definitely not the best days of your life.
3. And (I have to say it) are schools these days really like this? The kids were appallingly behaved in the classroom. With non-stop backchat, bickering, insolence and obfuscation,  each lesson for them was a battle not to learn anything. My school certainly wasn’t like that and neither were my main sources of school-related information – Grange Hill, Degrassi High, Dead Poets Society and er, The Naughtiest Girl in the School.
4. The 14-15 year old kids in the film may have made me grit my teeth and grimace at their behaviour, but this is because they were entirely believable. How often does that happen when you watch a film featuring so many young actors?
5. The Class has the most subtle and nuanced plot and character development I have seen in quite some time. There are no cut-and-paste stereotypes – you really can’t hate the students, no matter how much you want to and you can’t entirely sympathise with the teacher either.
6. If a bunch of native French speakers don’t understand the finer gramatical points of the subjonctive imparfait then what hope do I have?

Conclusions:  It’s either a brilliantly humane look at adolescence and a tribute to the teaching profession, or a complete indictment of the school system today. Either way, The Class is fab – go see.

Carmen Miranda
The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat

‘I have a major weakness for old musicals’ I confessed to the guy behind the counter at the Cinema Store the other week. ‘Then you will absolutely love this.‘  he enthused, waving a copy of The Gang’s All Here at me ‘It’s the campest film of all time. It. Is. Fabulous.’ So I dutifully bought a copy.

And he was right! It may have the worst plot ever, some terrible, terrible acting and Benny Goodman has all the pizzazz of a stressed IT manager, but The Gang’s All Here  is fabulous. It does afterall, contain ‘The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat’, a work of musical genius if ever there was one. Busby Berkeley directing Carmen Miranda amongst a sea of oversized fake bananas and even faker smiles – it doesn’t get much better (or camper) than this.

‘The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat’ from The Gang’s All Here, 1943

‘Sunset drive-in, Amarillo, Texas, 1974,’ by Stephen Shore

To celebrate the credit crunch, I have indulged  myself and bought a copy of American photographer Stephen Shore’s ’seminal’ work Uncommon Places, a book I have been lusting after for years. The book was originally published in 1982 and collects together the colour photography Shore took on his road trips across the States in the 70s.

This image of the already rundown looking ‘Sunset drive-in’ in early 70s Amarillo set me off on a bit of a reverie. I’d almost forgotten that such a thing as a drive-in ever existed.

We had a drive-in in the town where I grew up and my parents took us there every now and again. Although I’ve long forgotten the films, I clearly remember the excitement of the huge, huge screen, the novelty of sitting in the car and the fact that you could wander around between the darkened cars during the boring bits. If you were lucky you could see couples kissing. [Errghh... yuck] I also remember being disappointed that we were never served popcorn by glamorous girls on rollerskates.

The drive-in’s glory days were long over by the time of our visits in the early 80s and in retrospect, I’m suprised that it didn’t close earlier. When the drive-in finally did shut in the mid-80s I remember going past the desolate grounds and feeling sorry for it and its abandoned cinema dreams. Wonder what’s there now.

I’ve always liked film soundtracks – they do afterall, combine two of my very favourite things together. I have a mental list of favourite soundtrack moments which has been pretty fixed for quite some time. It isn’t very original and contains all the predictable films you might expect:

- Mean Streets
- Saturday Night Fever
- Trainspotting
- Vertigo
- Scorpio Rising
- Manhattan
- Shadows
- Reservoir Dogs
- The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

etc. etc. etc.

However, just this past week I’ve been taken by surprise at the cinema and have been forced to add two more to the list:

Lift to the Scaffold /Ascenseur pour l’échafaud
(Louise Malle, 1958)

An excellent and stylish B&W 50s thriller best known for low-key naturalistic lighting and a make-up less Jeanne Moreau moodily wandering the wet Parisian streets. This was pretty good admittedly, but I was most pleased by Louis Malles decision to fully embrace 50s cool with an improvised Miles Davis score. Not that any of the reviews I’ve been able to find have bothered to mention this.

Killer of Sheep
(Charles Burnett, 1977)

Tagged the ‘greatest unknown film’ this brilliant depiction of ordinary Black American life from the 70s was in film purgatory for 30 years because the director never cleared the music rights. And it’s the music which makes this film for me – Dinah Washington, Earth Wind and Fire, Scott Joplin, Paul Robeson, Etta James and Rachmaninoff really lift those beautifully composed images off the screen. Typically, not one review I’ve read of the film has discussed the impact of the soundtrack.

Don’t any film critics listen to the music?

What with being snowed under with work, it being miserable hayfever season and having bought way too much new music recently, I’ve been rather lax on the blogging front compared to usual.

But last night I saw ‘classic British film’ Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) and it has completely inspired me. I’d never seen Brief Encounter before and what a fantastic film it is! I was completely transfixed throughout.

The trusty film notes provided by BFI Southbank where I saw the film, tell me that Brief Encounter is ‘quintessentially British’ in its depiction of restraint. I really don’t understand this in the slightest. I know that the cliche says that ‘the British’ are the very epitome of restraint and are reserved and polite, stiff upper lip and all that (except on a hot day after a few pints of Stella), but really…?

I read the film, where two married people meet, fall in love and have a 4 week affair, as the classic struggle between individual desire and family obligation. Showing emotional restraint area in this area is hardly unique and particularly not in 1945. I was actually suprised that the couple were so unrestrained in seeing each other in public places – I’d constantly be terrified of being seen (as they indeed were).

No for me, the most moving (and British) thing about Brief Encounter was its combination of realism and romanticism. Two ordinary people, in ordinary relationships, doing ordinary things in an ordinary town suddenly find each other and fall in passionately in love. So I wasn’t struck by the infamous British ‘restraint’ but by the crushing reality of their boring lives and the fact that thousands and thousands of people have sat there watching this film since 1945 wishing to God that it could happen to them.

When I’m not reading children’s books and listening to jazz-funk, I like to go to the cinema…

This week I’ve been to see This Sceptred Isle, a package of holiday memories from the British Film Institute archives. The screening allowed me to wallow in nostalgia for long lost holidays I never had – coach tours around the B roads of Britain (c.1958), hop picking in Kent (c.1933), being blown along the Cornish Riviera with my long skirts and fancy parasol (c.1904) etc. etc.

But the place that I really want to be is Blackpool in 1957. Well, the Blackpool depicted in this fabulous film called Holiday made by British Transport Films. With its Chris Barber soundtrack, saturated colour and sheer gleefulness, Holiday is summer perfection. And they’ve got champagne on draught.

Excerpt from Holiday, 1957, BFI National Archive

One thing I particularly like about winter is that I can go to the movies guilt-free. Not that I ever feel particularly bad about spending so much time at the cinema, but when the sun is shining I always feel that I should be outside enjoying it rather than sitting in a darkened room.

So to make the most of this winter, I’ve managed to get to the cinema at least 8 times in the past two months. And out of those films I’ve seen, two have particularly managed to stick in my head: Oscar winning Daniel Day Lewis showcase, There will be Blood, and Chinese director Zhang Ke Jia’s Still Life. 

Set in the early part of the 20th century, There will be Blood is essentially the story of one man – Daniel Day Lewis’s character, Daniel Plainview – a ruthless, single minded oil prospector who transforms a loose collection of houses and a church into a makeshift town focused on liberating the lucrative oil beneath their feet. The real impact of the film comes from its focused, relentless examination of a power driven loon dealing with life’s quintessential issues – family, relationships, community, faith, death etc., but I was also taken by the casual daily risks that people took in the oil drilling work that often resulted in disability and death. Wow, I found myself thinking despite myself and my cynicism, I just can’t ever believe that people actually lived like that – isolated, alone, in the middle of nowhere, doing such tough, dirty high risk work. Then I saw Still Life.

Still Life is two different stories about a nurse and a coal miner both going to Fengjie, the site of the infamous Three Gorges Dam project in China, to find lost loved ones. The film is beautifully shot, almost documentary style, and the story is so-so, but what really strikes is the absolutely believable depiction of everyday life for people in this rapidly changing part of China. People are being forced to leave places they have lived all their lives because of the dam construction, others have travelled hundreds and hundreds of miles across the country to find work there (usually bloody hard, unrelenting manual type work). Everyone is living amidst either half demolished buildings or rapidly thrown up new ones. It’s a masculine society full of people isolated from their families trying to make do. And like in There will be Blood, there is absolutely no concept of health and safety – people die at work and accept this as par for the course.

And this is today, not 100 years ago. I know that Still Life is a film and that Zhang Ke Jia is political film maker, but there is a point where you have to trust what he is saying. Still Life suggests that China at the moment is like the West was during the industrial revolution – rapid change, no workers rights, the individual slave to rampant capitalism at the expense of all else. This is a daily reality for millions of people. And here I am at work having to have training on how to pick up a box.

It was only the other week that I was writing about my music format crisis, but it seems there is a wider technological crisis going on that I hadn’t even thought about. This time it’s in my other love, cinema.

This article in the New York Times explores the impact of digital technology on our filmed heritage. In a nutshell, film stock keeps well and is cheap to store, and digital isn’t. It costs about US$12,514 a year to store a digital master compared to US$1,059 to keep a conventional film master.

The article suggests that the heady combination of cost and inevitable technology shifts (basically not being able to easily upgrade digital film back-ups) could mean that in the future it might be easier to access easily preserved pre-digital films than current ones.

Obviously there is an upside to this (we’ll always have Jimmy Stewart but not neccessarily Tom Hanks) but it means that huge swathes of our current culture could one day be ‘digitally extinct’. Pity really.

We went to see Alfred Hitchcock’s last British film The Lady Vanishes over the weekend. It was great, quite possibly the funniest Hitchcock film I’ve ever seen. I particularly liked the way it gently poked fun at the English abroad, as well as at traditional ‘English reserve’.

Ironically, in the packed cinema where I saw it, one man in our row showed no sign of any reserve whatsoever. He was a proud father taking his young daughter to the cinema to share with her what was clearly a favourite film. It started off well. Briefly. Then about 10 seconds into the opening credits his excitement at the occasion started to overwhelm him:

‘Alfred Hitchcock!! See, he’s the director. I love Alfred Hitchcock!’
‘I know Dad….’

This set him off for the next 90 minutes, meaning that the rest of the film was punctuated by his exclamations and her writhing in her seat, trying to ignore him.

‘The next scene has the lady who vanishes… that’s her!’
‘Don’t worry, she vanishes soon.’
‘She vanishes in this sequence, I think…’
‘Yes, it’s this one.’
‘Ooooh, this bit’s good.’
‘No, this scene’s better. This one’s my favourite.’
‘He doesn’t actually kill the lady you know…’
‘Isn’t this bit just great?!’
‘Did you see that? Genius!’
etc. etc. etc.

Unfortunately, I was overcome by my reserve and didn’t tell him to shut up. Let’s hope it was all worth it in the end though, and father and daughter successfully bonded. At least she’ll have some memories (fond or otherwise) of going to the movies with her Dad, and she’ll probably always remember his love of The Lady Vanishes. As will I.