Cinema
LIFF25!
Last weekend, the 25th annual Leeds International Film Festival launched its programme, ahead of the festival in November. There’s heaps and heaps of exciting things to look forward to in what is, surely, one of the UK’s premiere film festivals, so I thought I’d do a (very) brief preview here.
The Official Selection is the home of the big names, high-art and gruelling drama but really does host all sorts of things. It’s nice to see the festival score the coup of a whole bunch of UK premier showings of European and World cinema as well as a handful of very exciting retrospectives. Psycho on the big screen is surely one not to be missed and, though I’ve seen them before, Waltz With Bashir and Persepolis are both great and worth a cinema trip. For the more hardy, Bela Tarr’s epic Sátántangó - which is seven and a half hours long! - is screening in the Hyde Park Picture House. Thankfully it comes with two interval breaks!
In the gleefully brutal and bloody Fanomenon strand, meanwhile, there are also a few exciting treats to look forward to. Heading up the classic genre film retrospectives are Alien, Aliens and Invasion of the Body Snatchers but even these treats don’t seem so tasty when compared to the bounties on offer in the new films selection. Monster Brawl, which pitches all the horror favourites against each other, looks too-good-to-miss whilst _Exit Humanity’_s American Civil War zombie apocalypse would surely be the most gloriously insane zombie adventure imaginable, were it not for it being partnered up with Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Hell Driver and Cuba’s very first zombie film, Juan of the Dead. Oh my! That’s three slices of very different but very exciting ZOMBIE ACTION! Hurrah!
Thirdly, and no less excitingly, comes the fabulous news that all Cherry Kino film screenings are FREE (!) this year! Cherry Kino is the semi-independent experimental film strand of the festival and hosts screenings and workshops of ‘wondermental’ films all year round. CK has it’s own web presence in a blog (HERE!) and should bring some reliably curious, strangely beautiful experimentation to the screen. And it’s FREEEEEE!
This is, obviously, a brief and over-excited preview. I didn’t even find space to squeeze in a mention of the exquisitely bonkers-looking Japanese sub-section of the Fanomenon strand (hint: it’ll be weird!), the Cinema Versa documentary strand or the short films strand. And the Official Selection definitely demands some more attention too. More to come soon!
The death of cinema?
So I’ve been meaning to write this for a few days now. Shame it’s taken me so long…
As reported in the Guardian and many other places on Sunday, several big-name directors have joined the cinema industry in attacking movie-industry plans to shorten the amount of time between the cinema debut of a film and its home availability, by making video-on-demand (that’s streaming) films available as little (?) as two months after the film’s release.
They roll out some interesting claims to fight these plans: VOD releases will increase piracy, they say, and will force cinemas to close. These are BAD THINGS and, if big, important names are saying them they MUST BE TRUE. Right?
Wrong.
One of the marks of almost any cultural industry (ugh, I hate pairing those words) is that those who’ve climbed their way to the top tend to have an (entirely to be expected) fondness for the status quo. Things are how they are and should be as they should be. Why would you change anything?
Sadly for them (but not for us), life doesn’t work like that. We like progress. We like exciting new things. We like big shiny fun things that no-one else in the history of mankind has ever had. Hence we invent stuff, we find new ways to look at the world, we radically alter our relationship with life, culture, art and the environment. I am by no means suggesting that this is always positive - it’s not, the obscene quantity of human-created human suffering is testament to that - but I am suggesting that it’s inevitable: we’re just not adapted to maintaining the status quo. Things will change.
So let’s return to Earth for a moment and go back to look at their claim. It will increase piracy. It will. Will it? The evidence that it would is very shaky. Let’s be blunt: it’s very easy to find films on the internet. I (obviously) am not about to link to anywhere you can get it but the current box office smash Fast and the Furious 5 is all over the internet. I have no idea what kind of quality it is, but it’s there and that’s enough.
Now, what we have here is the Film Industry’s Music-Industry-Moment. For the music industry, this happened somewhere around the whole Napster deal. Faced with a very clever technology (hello internet!) capable of delivering high quality content at (even then) fairly decent speeds, they were poised to make an industry revolution. They bottled it. Years later and the Beatles music has only just been made available online (November last year). No-one was keeping count, but thousands of Beatles albums were certainly downloaded in that time. Today’s online music sites still often provide higher quality music than some shops sell.
The point I’m approaching (slowly) here, is that refusal to engage with digital distribution for fear of increased piracy is futile and narrow-minded. The Film Industry has to take the initiative and provide a decent service that people will pay for before they get used to downloading films. If they wander blindly into the same place as the music industry there is no way back.
The second point, and I think the one I object to more, is that it will mean cinemas to close. This relies on out automatic linking of “closing things = bad” without pausing to think about the relation in question: why will people choose to watch a film at home rather than in a cinema?
Some of the answers are related to progress again - we have bigger better TVs with bigger better speakers, the gap between home and cinema has narrowed - but there’s also an implicit condemnation of the way cinemas are run and have been run for years.
Cinema visits in the UK are horrendously expensive. The price for a single ticket is already bordering on the price for a DVD in some cases. I might like the cinema but I can’t afford to go as much as I’d like. If me and four friends each bought a DVD we’d have spent little more than it’d cost the five of us to go to the cinema and we’d see five times as many films.
It’s also astonishing (and, depressingly true) how regular it is to hear serious film-fans describe the cinematic experience as being deeply disappointing. We brave the ticket prices, stump up and march in. The sticky floors and chewing-gum covered seats are what welcomes us. The bunches of screaming kids chucking sweets at each other and talking continues throughout. You leave thinking, ‘I wish I could’ve seen that in my own house’. Seriously, what would it cost a cinema to have a member of staff to kick out the people who ruin a film for everyone?
So there we have it. Cameron, Bigelow et al are clinging to what they love. The cinemas are using this as another excuse to neatly avoid considering why less people go to the cinema and they’re all intent on digging in their heels to slow the inevitable. And, I should add, by the inevitable, I certainly don’t mean the death of cinema. This is not the end. This is another chapter. I love the cinema and will continue to go but it shouldn’t need to be carefully protected: to survive it must make progress too, it must work to provide an absolutely inimitable experience that we’re prepared to pay for.
Suspiria
SUSSSSSSSSPIRIA! On a great big screen!
Last night, after a week of Argento film’s, I got to see his spellbinding masterpiece Suspiria on a cinema-screen in the National Media Museum as part of the Bradford International Film Festival. I’d obviously wound myself into a bit of a frenzied excitement about it through the week and it certainly did not disappoint.
Every time I hear someone say they choose to watch films at home rather than at the cinema, mostly due to all the other film-goers, I think to myself “You’ve just been going to the wrong films with the wrong people!”. Last night’s audience had almost all seen the film before and sat in captivated silence, tittering nervously at the occasional gentle comic moments and - even before fun - audibly anticipating oncoming moments of horror. If a bad crowd can ruin a film, a great crowd can make one. Not that Suspiria needed any help in that respect…
My first and only minor gripe is that it was very sadly the cut version. This was an original cinematic print taken from the Media Museum’s extensive archive and so was a print of the X-rated version that the BBFC approved in 1977, after demanding 1m13 of cuts (Cut info at Melon Farmers). Now, to those not familiar with horror film, particularly of BBFC-butchered horror film of a couple of decades ago, 1m13 might not sound very much. It also might not sound so important if I tell you that the full extent of the cuts involved removing a series of close-ups of stabbing, someone struggling through barbed wire and a dog biting a man’s throat. Cuts, however, do make a difference to the rhythm and pacing of a film. Suspira is a film that, like so many Argento, thrives on the atmospheric build-up, to the point that the death scenes actually become a kind of release. For a couple of them to be dramatically shortened here was a shame.
Still, whilst that was the downside to it being an original theatrical print, there were certainly upsides. The first (and some would reject this) was that the image did have a wonderfully scratchy look. Anyone who’s seen a film in cinemas that was filmed entirely in HD-digital knows how clinical and sterile it can look (I’m looking at you Public Enemy!) and, whilst I’m not suggesting scratchy is the way forward, there was certainly something enjoyable about watching a 70s film I thought I’d never see in a cinema, complete with all the visual wear and tear that a 30 year old 35mm reel has experienced (even if carefully looked after by the Museum)
The second benefit was the sound. The sound! Anyone who’s seen Suspiria, an Argento film or evne read any of my blog from this week will know that sound makes up an enormous part of Argento’s films. Suspiria is (arguably) the very best of these, scored again by the ever wonderful Goblin, and positively throbs, jangles and crashes at you. Original print, combined with cinema sound system made it an utterly fantastic experience that I’m sure I’ll never be able to repeat (especially as most commercial releases saw the soundtrack savagely remixed).
The film itself is a whirling, semi-nonsensical, breathtaking journey of colour and sound, moving from the giallo murder-mystery into something a whole lot more supernatural, with savagely brilliant results. I really don’t want to say too much more about the actual film, save to say that it is pretty much the best example of all the techniques I’ve been seeing this week in all his other films. It’s not perfect (the scene-with-the-bat is awful) but it’s brilliant, beautiful and should be seen by everyone.
Argento Week's FINALE!
Of course, all that Dario Argento film watching wasn’t just for fun, it was all to build up to the fantastically exciting screening of Suspiria tonight in the Bradford International Film Festival. It’s hardly going to be worth me reviewing it - I love the film so much already a review will probably be just a string of superlatives and smiley faces - but I’m hoping that, given the big screen treatment, I’ll find even more to love about it!
CRUNCH CRUNCH BANG
[CC Licenced photo by Katerha]
Now, I love going to the cinema. And I take it pretty seriously. Your behaviour in the cinema should be determined by the kind of film you’re watching.
Tense psycho-drama? Don’t talk, mutter, mumble or make a noise.
Comedy? Laugh.
Splatter horror at a film festival? Laugh along with everyone else at all the inappropriate gory moments that you all love.
Ok? Are we agreed? Good.
Now let’s move ourselves swiftly along to the contentious topic of eating in the cinema. Here, I make no apologies: I am near-fascist in my hatred of noisy food. There’s a certain kind of action film (hello Die Hard 4.0!) that totally permits the slurp of mega-sized fizzy drinks and the crunching of popcorn but… in most other respects, it’s just irritating. I love popcorn. I love eating popcorn at the cinema. But I also love those tense moments of cinematic silence, as we wait with baited breath to see if… CRUNCH MUNCH CRUNCH GUZZLE CHOMP ..oh. You just ruined that moment by scoffing a faceful of popcorn. Thanks.
Sometimes I wish say to myself “I’m going to kill that guy if he keeps rustling those sweets”
I am, however, a moderate and restrained kind of person, and so have never actually followed through with this mental threat. Sadly not everyone is quite as calm! The Telegraph reports that a 27 year old Latvian shot a fellow cinema-goer dead for the volume of his popcorn munching!
Eesh! Now bear that in mind next time you eat noisily at the cinema!
(Thanks to Cineshock for alerting me to this!)