Showing posts with label Trish Sheil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trish Sheil. Show all posts

Friday 18 December 2015

Pre-Christmas shorts, hosted by BFI Film Academy tutor Ryd Cook

Some Tweets about a film screening at CB1, Mill Road, Cambridge

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

18 December

Some Tweets (and other text) about this film screening at CB1, Mill Road, Cambridge on Friday 18 December 2015 at 7.00 p.m.

For those who do not already know Ryd Cook (@RydCook), who was hosting this event, a Tweet at the other end of this posting shows him (after the screening, and with pizza and blazing hair), or they may recall a guy who can be found at many times of day around The Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse), and is usually (invariably ?) sporting knee-length shorts (and almost as often a skateboard).



Quite concisely, when there was a lot of information that Ryd wished to convey, he introduced himself as a film-maker, on his own and others’ behalfs, who has taught (for six years) on the regional BFI (@BFI) Film Academy courses for 16- to 19-year-olds, and is a long-standing member* of Project Trident (@ProjectTrident), a collective of supportively like-mindedly zany individuals (at least one of whom is always involved in one of his own films**).



Ryd also thanked CB1 (@CB1Cafe) for the use of the space, Kim Bates (@Kimi_Maii, his producer) for making it all happen, and cinema colleagues Tony Jones and Trish Sheil for screen and projector, respectively (though Ryd started to confuse himself by trying to say it the other way around – not creatively instinctual for nothing !).





The first film that Ryd showed to us had been sent to him by Rory Greener (@rory_greener), who had been one of Ryd’s students.

 Afterwards, they had had a conversation about whether Rory wanted to try to get into a career in film, and (the answer to which Ryd said that he did not know about himself at that age) Rory said that he wanted to be a cinematographer. Ryd offered Rory some advice about how to do that, and was then very impressed by receiving Enough Rope from Rory, some months later.

 With some editing tips from Ryd, Rory had made a (slightly shorter) version, which is what we watched (and some people who had worked on the film turned out to be in the screening, whereas Rory had not finished for the term, and was not yet back)...





After an interval, and with only a very short introduction (those who had acted in the film were identifiable and could be spoken to afterwards), we came to Ryd’s film Aviatrix (2015) (#AviatrixFilm), which had been seen twice before*** : during Tridentfest [Project Trident] at Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF), and at Hot Numbers, in Gwydir Street (@hotnumbers / #GwydirSt), before a screening of a feature film there.



In directing the cast through what is, much of the time, a chamber-piece, Ryd lets us see closely into their different characters through their faces and expressions, and in the spaces between what is said.

 In a nutshell, albeit rooted in our world, Aviatrix symbolically, shows us the power of inspiration when we feel able to trust others, and they are as much inspired as we are. (In literal terms, we could not be uplifted by what might follow the closing sequence, but we embrace it figuratively, because cinema allows for the depiction of important moments.)


To close, as he judged that it had a Christmassy feel (it certainly has wintry light and snow, and a cheerful soundtrack), Ryd left us with the couple of minutes of Frosty Afternoon, whose settings on streets in and around Cambridge many would have recognized.

 For those of us thinking of making a film, he stressed how simple the cameras on most phones nowadays make it, and that he had not intended to make the film, but had just started shooting on what he had available at the time (a BlackBerry). He urged us to do likewise, as his film has twice been shown at film festivals.

 The film can be seen here, and Ryd’s channel on YouTube (@YouTube) is http://www.youtube.com/user/RydianCook.


The man of the evening himself, seen as he should be, Ryd Cook




End-notes

 * Although closely associated with Project Trident, Ryd was apparently not one of the founders, but joined within the first six to twelve months. The group’s web-site is www.projecttrident.com.

 ** When it is a project with which Ryd is personally connected, such as Thrown (2011) (written by Dave Clark, @BlueCrayon77), or Aviatrix (2015) (also written by Dave Clark), he operates under the name Little Victories Films, and appends it to the film.

Thrown had been the first film of Ryd’s seen, but there seems to be no sign of a review :



It can be seen here, and Ryd’s channel on YouTube (@YouTube) is http://www.youtube.com/user/RydianCook.


*** Tweets from those venues here :








 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday 15 November 2014

In my Father's house, there are many rooms : A Festival review of Ingmarssönerna (Sons of Ingmar) (1919)

This is a review of Ingmarssönerna (Sons of Ingmar) (1919)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

13 November



This is a Cambridge Film Consortium review of Ingmarssönerna (Sons of Ingmar) (1919) as performed at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) with live solo piano accompaniment by John Sweeney

If you missed it, the film is to be shown again on Sunday 16 November at 1.00 p.m.



Trish Shiel, of Cambridge Film Consortium, introduced the event, telling us that it was being projected from a 35mm print and that, to add in an English translation of the inter-titles (which are in Swedish), manual dual projection was being used - stressing that The Arts is one of a few cinemas equipped to mount such a performance.

She also said a few words about the film, its history, and its director, male lead and co-writer, Victor Sjöström, who later worked with Ingmar Bergman (who remarked of the film Where did Sjöström get the idea of composing these incredible sequences, these remarkable, exciting scenes ?). That said, nothing prepared for the pleasure of learning who played the principal female role of Brita (on whom, more below...) :





The title of Ingmarssönerna (1919) has been translated as Sons of Ingmar, but they are more like 'descendants' than sons : suffice to say that it reveals little to say that, in thought if not in reality (whatever reality is, when one can feel oneself to be part of a line of men who have occupied the same land for centuries), Young Ingmar goes to meet his father, Old Ingmar, with a dilemma.

And, before he gets there, we have visuals of a ladder up to heaven (and down from that ladder) that give us all the evocations from Jacob's ladder to Jack's Beanstalk to The Tower of Babel. Quite a quaint sort of heaven, however, where only the directly ascending, male relatives are there (and, from what follows, they are unaware of what befalls those still alive) ?

Be that as it may, Young gets Old to come into a side-room and tells him a whole story, where the inter-titles, from time to time, remind us with an icon that this is still in heaven and still telling the background to the dilemma...


A risky stratagem for a film, one might think, to rely on the patience of the audience with such a lengthy narration, and which is hardly a strength of the structure here any more than it is, celebratedly, in Anne Brontë's novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Yet, after the decision that is pressing on Young Ingmar has been explained, and when omens have been interpreted as guiding his way, the film distinctly picks up in energy and emotional pull, as the core story that was within that daring flashback now unfolds.


Harriet Bosse, playing in Strindberg (apparently in To Damascus)


Perhaps naively, we may imagine that, because film was in its relative infancy, a dramatic approach to contextualizing our mixed motives and feelings in life through this medium was necessarily novel. Put this in context, though, and this film's Harriet Bosse (as Brita) was, briefly, August Strindberg's third wife, and Strindberg wrote the roles of Eleonora in Easter (1901) and Agnes in A Dream Play (1902) for her (amongst others), the latter of which alone shows the psychological depth of theatre at the time :

Although Dream Play was not to be performed until 1907, that is a clear decade before the present film, so we can guess that Sjöström and Selma Lagerlöf - of whose novel Jerusalem this film adapts the first part (and Karin Ingmarsdotter (1920) the conclusion) - would have known some of Strindberg's significant plays, which date to when Lagerlöf was writing her work.


Though it is true to remark, say, that the preoccupations at the time of the United Artists, from Mary Pickford to D. W. Griffiths, were very different from that here**, one only needs to delve into an overview such as Francine Stock's In Glorious Technicolor: A Century of Film and How it has Shaped Us to realize that, just because these films now look old (physically, they are), we need not imagine their makers to be unknowing - any more than we should imagine that our grandparents knew nothing about sex.

Without giving away the main story, there are so many reminders here of other works. For the subject-matter, though it has its particularities, is universal :

* Schumann's last acts outside the locked door of the asylum

* Cocteau's La Belle et La Bête*** (1946)

* Shakespearean pairs such as Much Ado About Nothing's Beatrice and Benedick

* Even Chaucer's long-suffering Griselda**** (in The Clerk's Tale)


In the screening, what made the impact was the subtlety of Bosse's expressiveness, the action going on in the eyes and the look of her face (when not, very demonstrably, throwing herself on her pillow, or the ground), and one need only reach back in time to what she might have been like on the stage. Now, though, one is haunted by Sjöström's long-jawed face, and, in the context of the film, he is having himself be La Bête, with a largely down-turned, hangdog mouth, until he finds out who he is.

Which is where the story closes, not concerned with the expected resolution, but with a reverie of the kind that James Thurber gave us for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013), when we gained a name for that type of character / behaviour :

Since this is just the first part of the story (seemingly re-made, according to Amazon®, in Jerusalem (1996)), though it stands complete in itself (despite the puzzling absorption in Ingmar's being elsewhere), one might detect a hook here, from Sjöström, for Karin Ingmarsdotter...


In introducing the screening for those unfamiliar with silent film, Trish Sheil had rightly pointed out that the painting of the scene in the accompaniment is part of what makes such films different - as is knowing that it is the accompanist's skill to give that portrayal whilst keep pace with the unfolding of the film.

In his inspiringly colourful accompaniment, John Sweeney (who gave us Hitchock's Blackmail at Cambridge Film Festival (#CamFF) 2012) organized himself around themes for the various moods and evocations of the film, from anxiety to tenderness, or to depict energetic behaviour as against reflectiveness - and, likewise, using unsettling rumbles alongside bell-tones (the high and low registers of the keyboard).

Sweeney had a very warm round of applause at the close, and had provided us with an excellently enjoyable musical experience to match the emotional range of the film.

And now there is a follow-up piece about the effect of inter-titles in the film...


End-notes

* Which, thanks to marketing manager Jack Toye's Tweet from the second screening, looks frighteningly complicated :




** With, for example, Pickford continuing to play the role of a young girl / woman when she was very much older - just as, here, Bosse and Victor Sjöström are too old to be taken literally for Brita and Young Ingmar (Bosse was 41 at the time of the film's release).

*** In Young Ingmar, a similarly gruff and hidebound figure, desiring wisdom, but finding himself locked in by duty, and Birta, against her will, in the equivalent of La Bête's domain : even requesting Birta's hand, his vacillating nature intervenes, and his heart is never quite in it.

**** The magnanimity of You'll have to forgive me for all the pain that I have caused you, Ingmar and I wanted to ask your forgiveness, although also the exposed feeling of O, dear God, I will be saved of nothing ?, when he insists on reading her letter.



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday 26 April 2012

Wreckers comes home to roost: report on a Q&A at the Arts Picturehouse

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

26 April

NB This is a report on the answers given to the more significant questions, and a review of the film (presently in draft) will appear elsewhere. * In consequence, please be aware that there will, almost inevitably, be spoilers *


On Tuesday night, I watched the screening of a first feature by Dictynna Hood, someone to whom I had previously spoken, several years ago, about the documentaries that she was making. (Before she was lionized by Tony Jones and his crew, of whom Trish Sheil was going to introduce Dictynna - who wrote and directed Wreckers (2011) and host the Q&A afterwards, I just had time to ask her whether she had enjoyed making this film, which she largely had.)

As, with a Q&A, I formulate a question mentally and try to hold it during the rest of the film, to ask as soon as the initial questions from the person hosting have died down (so that I do not forget my formulation), I came out with (something like):

You mentioned fairy tales and stories from Fenland – what I found in this film was delight, a sense of possibility, things revealed, things overheard or witnessed, tension, jealousy, menace, fury, and I wonder, Dictynna, how deep you had to dig in yourself – or in ancient sources – to find these impulses?

The latter part of the question, with its humorous implications that she might do or want to do the things that her characters do, made her laugh infectiously. She had already mentioned that she had taken strands from real experiences and the lore of the four Oxfordshire villages, now changed beyond recognition by the overlay of the motorway and its traffic, so she had filmed in and around Isleham - and she mentioned the looks and queries that she had received at another screening in Oxford the day before.

As the questions came (and there was a good turn-out and much interest), Dictynna said more and more, opening up as the film does – opening up vistas – as questioners wondered about the status, as dream, of the start of the film (which, as it stands, someone had wanted her to consider dropping, and for which she had also shot a scene in a chapel, also in or near Isleham, which she said was so beautiful as to be unusable, because it looked as though it belonged in a different film – maybe, someone suggested, still to be made, when she alluded to the footage being on the cutting-room floor*).

Others asked about menace during and at the very end of the film, and it turned out that not only had the ending had been thought of very differently, but that, at one point in the conception, the whole thing could even have been much more of a horrorfest! However, not perhaps as alarming as parts of a wheat-field (whose owner Dictynna was most pleased to see in the audience) - the ones that we did not see, which had been trampled by the crew to get the on-screen shot.

In comments, there was interest in and appreciation of how the countryside had been presented, and I asked a further question about location, because there are many instances of people walking, often enough in twos, both in the village and elsewhere: Hood explained that, in shooting in Isleham (which, although not on a through-route, is apparently busy), she had focused on Dawn with David’s long-lost brother Nick (Shaun Evans) on the pavement and shut out the cars to create a deliberate effect.

The perennial question about when in the making the composer (Andrew Lovett) had been involved came up, and, unusually for films, the answer was that, as one of three with whom Hood had worked before and had been approached when it was at script stage, he self-selected by his desire to engage with the work.

Dictynna also commented that the use of music had been deliberately sparing on his part, and he had made use both of silence, and processing the actors' voices to make sounds that one could not quite distinguish, which people present seemed to agree imparted a dream-like element that they also found pervasively in Wreckers, a blurring between what was dream and what seen.

Towards the end of the session, Dictynna revealed more, including a source of the main story in a Viking text, and also a story about the devil (though Nick, she stressed, has other qualities than mere devilish ones). (As she agreed with me when I said a few words afterwards, there are all sorts of resonances, including Shakespearean ones).

Finally, we were told that two more projects are being worked on, one - of all things - a romantic comedy, so watch this space…


End-notes

* It's always made me think, subconsciously, that hairdressers must be much more house proud, because there the floor is swept clean of cuttings several times per day...
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