Breaking the ice at a film festival...

This is a Festival preview of In the Same Boat (2016) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

6 October

This is a Festival preview of In the Same Boat (2016) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2017)

The synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here

Screens on Tuesday 24 October at 5.15 p.m. and on Wednesday 25 October at 2.45 p.m.

A : Hello, again ! What are you watching next – the Chinese epic, in Screen 1 ?

C : Oh - hi ! Sorry, I was deep in thought. You mean Mountains May Depart… ?

No, I’m not doing that one (or re-watching We Need to Talk About Kevin) – I’m going to see a documentary in the Catalan strand, Camera Catalonia…


So we might imagine these two, chatting in the bar for a while at Festival Central on Day 7 of #CamFF2017, and wondering what might draw one (A) to a film that, at 131 minutes, is nearly an hour more than the length of C’s - and bearing in mind that, curbing the time available to converse, C needs to be seated for a start that is fifteen minutes earlier than A's.

As we see, we say a documentary, or we ask what is the film ‘about’, but maybe (perhaps with C’s guiding ?) they might enter into talking about whether there is any one such thing as a documentary - any more, perhaps, than there is a Hitchcock film, or a film about the environment (although this one, as the title In the Same Boat implies, does touch upon such questions) ?

If we are reacting to John Akomfrah's use, in The Nine Muses¹ (2010), of snow and mountain scenes in Alaska (often featuring water, and vessels on it), and with or without one or more brightly-jacketed 'observers' (or 'sentinels') – how, for example, does that ice and the implied cold make us feel, and how do we imagine that the figures feel ? It is this that Akomfrah wants us to relate to.

By contrast, some reviewers might typically might call a film (or a piece of music) 'evocative' - which may well be so, but what do the key scenes (or what does the music) evoke, and why is it not useful and important to try to say it to the reader (and potential viewer / listener) ? (In truth, it may well be several feelings (or past experiences), so it is probably best to try to characterize the principal one(s).)


In Akomfrah's films², it is in the moments between the words - or in words translated, to footage that he shows from the 1950s and 60s, from Homer's The Odyssey, or from Dante - that the deep communication begins, of alienation and feeling awkward.


Here, in In the Same Boat, the soundtrack that director Rudy Gnutti has written (and including the closing song) is used to attend recurrent imagery, which overall suggests entering new territory, but which, in introducing the five sections (and then being reprised at the end), specifically makes us think of : hesitancy (at an audience left in awe) ; a suspensive quality (as of waves and the wind) ; of being carried away (by fast cello arpeggiation on a soaring string-base) ; and of the impulse of percussive-beats, high strings, and then arpeggios underneath.

The strength of Gnutti's score is not the least of those of this film, which has speakers crystallize thoughts and concepts for us :

We don’t master globalization. Globalization masters us. ~ José Mujica

In the film, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman describes us as all in the same boat - but asks where the oars, or the engines, are...

From the outset, we have a suitably theatrical Master of Ceremonies in Àlex Brendemühl³, sitting behind his stagily-lit desk and microphone as if a radio-host, greeting us :

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen - welcome back, once again ! As always, you and me - here and now.

In a prologue to In the Same Boat (2016), Brendemühl recalls that John Maynard Keynes, in a speech to La Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid, in June 1930, predicted where we would be in a hundred years with the economy - complete with Gnutti’s clips from Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and from films by Georges Méliès (from 1898 to 1912).

Both unseen (whether giving us quotations from writers from antiquity, such as Martial, Seneca or Boethius) and seen (telling us the truth of the distribution of wealth in the States - as against what people thought ideal, or think is the case), we gather the impression that he is broadcasting to the whole world.

In shots - monochrome, but for a pinky red - of everyday life around the world, and everyday conversations in countries from Russia to Nigeria to Argentina. In all of these, we feel connected and included, as people converse about things that are familiar to us, such as what the value is of teenagers nowadays obtaining university qualifications.

Zygmunt Bauman (sociologist) ; Mariana Mazzucato (economist) ; José Mujica (former President of Uruguay)

The pervasive imagery, again, suggests that what we hear these and various economists and other theorists say⁴ is also for everyone to hear, whether it be to ask how we can continue to live on Earth when there has been a decoupling between the levels of growth and that of employment...

Or how the distribution of wealth looks back to that of The Pharaohs (according to economist Mauro Gallegati), and whether - which is widely discussed in the closing section, about 'a new way', and with the enthusiasm of economist Rutger Bregman - there is a solution.

Rutger Bregman

Gnutti closes his film with a very powerful combination of showing us a disappearance into the unknown, and his strong lyrics, with an African singer accompanying, presumably, his own voice (with all that raw brittleness of Peter Gabriel at his best) :

If you help me, one more time,
I can change this crazy life

IMF: Higher income tax rates for the rich would help reduce inequality without having an adverse impact on growth https://t.co/7xNiioSb16

— Billy Bragg (@billybragg) October 11, 2017

Screens on Tuesday 24 October at 5.15 p.m. and on Wednesday 25 October at 2.45 p.m.

End-notes :

¹ Or, in Akomfrah’s The Unfinished Conversation (2012), in the juxtaposition – across three screens at Tate Modern (until January 2018) – of a street-scene in London (with milk being delivered), a fairly static view of colonial Jamaica and, perhaps, shots of clouds and the dawn light, all overlaid with audio of footsteps and clinking bottles, and a reading – timed to early morning – from a text, in this case Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (but also from Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, or from Blake, etc.).

² This preview started by mentioning Akomfrah, because it is relevant that there are elements in the two films referred to, particularly The Nine Muses, that lead some who write about film to describe them as essays. (Here is a link to a video of Akomfrah in conversation at Sheffield Documentary Festival 2015 (www.sheffdocfest.com / Sheffield Doc / Fest).) :

This preview started by mentioning Akomfrah, because it is relevant that there are elements in the two films referred to, particularly The Nine Muses, that lead some who write about film to describe them as essays². Irrespective of the exact application of that terminology, though, what these films have in common with other highly meditative and powerfully affecting films such as Leviathan (2012) - one of many films, even in the same year of release, of that title - or Visitors (2013) is that they feel more poetic than many feature films, and also, precisely without spelling it out orally, to have more to say.


³ We may recognize him from Camera Catalonia in 2013 El bosc (The Forest) (2012), where he played Ramon (Dora's husband).

⁴ With the exception of José Mujica (President of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015), and Professor of economics Serge Latouche, everyone is identified to us directly, and all (except Mujica) speak from within a conventional indoor interview set-up (where the answers imply the questions asked, which are sometimes points that other speakers have made). Some, such as Zygmunt Bauman, stray from looking at the interviewer to looking directly into the camera...


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

The Confession – Living The War on Terror (2016) : An atypical talking head

This is a review of The Confession (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

12 September

This is a review of The Confession (2016)

Those outside documentary circles may puzzle that film-makers choose to call their works ‘features’ (e.g. Alison Rose, regarding Star Men (2015)). However, amongst the variety that is documentary, The Confession (2016) is probably best described thus – a quality that may have helped make it ‘a hot ticket’ at Sheffield Doc / Fest (@sheffdocfest).

On first impression, though, one is more reminded of John Akomfrah with The Stuart Hall Project (2013). A very different style, but both Ashish Ghadiali and he observe subjects with powerful intensity : here, Moazzam Begg, and what he says about his life between first going to Bosnia, to see for himself what was happening to Muslims there (as he broadly put it), and his other exploratory travels. Chronologically (but, as far as Begg is concerned, not otherwise), they led to his being detained, in Bagram and then Guantánamo, for almost three years without trial. (In 2014, until charges were dropped, he was also a maximum-security prisoner, under UK counter-terrorism provisions.)

Sensationally promoting technical aspects of Boyhood (2014), or Russian Ark (2002), might make untutored viewers appreciative of apparent real-time verismo, but how will they register the achievements that make The Confession distinctive ? (Not its title, already being this year’s sixth entry on IMDb (@IMDb).) An experienced director of photography, as well as with credits for two shorts (whose themes are complementary), Ghadiali draws them in – almost unperceived – with a highly prepared interview set-up, so they may not realize how he uses it to curate the sense of integrity that they feel. (Subtle sound-design (Luke Shrewsbury) and original scoring (Nitin Sawhney) also create, or accentuate, tensions in the narrative-line.)

Edited from nine hours’ shooting, the interview is occasionally remitted, usually cut together with other material : often, stock footage to indicate countries (or locations) that Begg visited, but also his father’s television avowals of his son’s innocence (or concern for his whereabouts) – and, eventually, Begg interviewed elsewhere.

For, after a few youthful snaps, we keep seeing him in front of us as he is now, but this lets Ghadiali surprise us with Begg on camera, on the Turkish–Syrian border (a trip instrumental in Begg’s remand, pending trial, in HM Prison Belmarsh). Thereafter, the lens prompts us directly :


* What do we think of him ?

* What would we have thought of him then ?

* What is his confession ?


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Seen at Sheffield : Doc/Fest films with full reviews

A list of films fully reviewed* (with links) at Sheffield Doc/Fest

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

8 June

In alphabetical order, a list of films reviewed in full* at Sheffield Doc/Fest (with links) :


A Sinner in Mecca (2015)
Doublethink in Mecca : Being devotional despite inflicted modernity


A Young Patriot (2015)
Full circle in Shanxi province


Containment (2015)
Containment – the vessel and the djinn


Iris (2014)
Big glasses to Big Eyes


Monty Python : The Meaning of Live (2014)
Sheffield – God's own City ~ Michael Palin at The Crucible


The Nine Muses (2010)
The best of Sheffield Documentary Festival 2015 : in the John Akomfrah retrospective


End-notes

* The same reviews can also be found linked in A round-up of events at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015 (@sheffdocfest).


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

The best of Sheffield Documentary Festival 2015 : in the John Akomfrah retrospective

This is a Festival review of The Nine Muses (2010)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

24 June

This is a Festival review of The Nine Muses (2010), screened at Sheffield Documentary Festival 2015, in a retrospective of Director John Akomfrah’s work,
on Monday 8 June at 12.00 p.m.

The Nine Muses (2010) was easily the best film seen at Sheffield Documentary Festival 2015 (@sheffdocfest), and, this Tweet, from the previous night, proved prophetic :

So far, two main approaches from @sheffdocfest films : a broadly chronological unfolding (sometimes in real time) and complementary strands.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 7, 2015

The film opens with large, beautiful vistas, as if of Scandinavian fjords, across which we slowly pan, left to right.

They are perfect, but we sense the coldness in their perfection – and, when we come nearer to and look at the land from a craft, it seems washed out in a grey, inhospitable way (perhaps an effect achieved by colour grading ?). So these views stir something in us already, which builds with the accretion of readings from classic sources such as various episodes from The Odyssey and the opening Cantos of Dante’s Inferno (from The Divine Comedy*) : quite likely, director John Akomfrah intended, with this vivid, unmistakable choice of a land of ice and snow, that we should already be reminded – have stirrings – of ancient lore, such as in the following passages, mentioning a land of winter (and an ideal realm, too) ?

HYPERBOREA was a fabulous realm of eternal spring located in the far north beyond the land of winter. Its people were a blessed, long-lived race free of war, hard toil, and the ravages of old age and disease.

[…] To the south the realm was guarded by the bitterly cold peaks of the near-impassable Rhipaion mountains. […] Directly to the south lay Pterophoros, a desolate, snow-covered land cursed by eternal winter.

From Land Hyperborea

From that first implication, visual images of snowbound land- and cityscapes, and aural images of journeys, deception, captivity and slavery – as Odysseus and others revolve patterns of voyage, shipwreck, and escape combine and complement each other, whilst thoughtfully chosen archive footage** establishes a freezing Britain. Also established, by a title, is the theme of the Muses***, though it is probably harder to keep in mind the film’s apparent Muse-by-Muse taxonomy (or even to be certain whether that scheme is seen through to the end ?).

On a first viewing, certainly, it seemed more convenient to allow the film’s mutually reinforcing elements to work, as it were, impressionistically. For, apart from the ‘purely visual’, one is quite occupied with texts that appear on title-cards (e.g. from Emily Dickinson****), readings (much from Samuel Beckettt’s novels****, with some repeated passages), and music (such as Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel). (Director John Akomfrah went on to direct The Stuart Hall Project (2013), similarly rich in content for a single viewing, and seeming longer than its 103 mins.)

Meanwhile, as the film develops, with the specially shot scenes juxtaposing their more nearby context in the natural, material world with a figure***** in a synthetic jacket (sometimes two figures – if so, in jackets of different colour), we hear words of dislocation and disassociation from Beckettt (or Finnegans Wake, 'The Song of Songs', or Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy), and maybe reflect on the appropriacy of needing to belong where one is :

Beckettt, brought up in the halfway world of being Anglo-Irish, and all too easily appropriated as an English writer (though he actually learnt his craft by writing in French, and came to translate his prose into English), and finding himself by meeting Joyce in Paris and exiling himself in France – starting with Watt, for some, the worlds that he found to express in his novels, and which Akomfrah has fittingly and adeptly alluded to here by quotation.

Retrospective screening of our acclaimed #TheNineMuses today at @sheffdocfest by the visionary John Akomfrah! pic.twitter.com/D41rXeBsyA

— Miikka Leskinen (@Miikka_Leskinen) June 8, 2015

Achieving potency by its layering of material, The Nine Muses (2010) easily laid down a challenge to other film-makers at Sheffield to think to their craft (and worryingly many in the screening did not seem drawn by this work and willing to stay for the duration) – a challenge not, if this is regarded in essay style, necessarily to work within this format, but to remind them :

Cinema, when it is at its strongest and best, is not grounded or rooted in only the visual (and with what is found to accompany it), but in being a total entity, and, in a different sphere, one might think of the conception and execution of Tarkovsky’s final piece of work :

@ICALondon One for the diary... Tarkovsky. Amazing film maker, and artist. The Sacrifice was the film he made once leaving Russia..one year

— Katherine Da Silva (@KathyDaSilva2) June 23, 2015

Seen at Sheffield : Doc/Fest films with full reviews


End-notes

* All were credited as being on Naxos Audiobooks.

** Sacrificing concern at any grainy quality (or other issue) to concentrate on content and significance of the imagery.

*** A title tells us that they are the nine female children of Mnemosyne (the Goddess of Memory), fathered by Zeus.

**** Also, T. S. Eliot ('The Journey of the Magi' ?), and e e cummings. With Beckettt, Molloy and The Unnamable are credited (though one could have sworn that Malone was there, too).

***** There are credits for wearers of a blue jacket, two yellow jackets (one of whom was Akomfrah), and two black jackets.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)