The End of Summer

Dewy flowers; photo: Val Phoenix

Well, if this rain is anything to go by, summer seems to have departed. Before it breathed its last, it shone on my screening at Wotever DIY Film Festival last week. I have had a stressful time of it recently and wasn't fully alive to the joys of the day, but it was great to meet some enthusiastic filmgoers and see work by my fellow retrospective-ees, Barrelstout and Krissy Mahan. I think they both have more of the camp in them than me, although my next projected film is highly camp. Perhaps I have been saving it up. But, I think their work responds more to pop culture than I ever have. I seem to dredge up rather obscure elements for my films. I don't fully understand them myself!

Looking forward to September, I anticipate eagerly publication of Carol Morley's 7 Miles Out, which is billed as fiction but seems to be autobiographical, if the publicity notes are anything to go by. Anyone who's seen her doc, The Alcohol Years, knows she is not averse to putting her eventful life under the microscope, which makes me wonder why it's a work of fiction. Why not just write some memoirs? Legal reasons? Well, she is doing some readings so perhaps this will all be revealed. I had not realised that Carol's life and mine had overlapped until she commented after the Wotever screening that she had met someone who appears in one of my films. "I knew her when I was 14", she said, and I burst out laughing as I suddenly realised the connection. "Six degrees", she added. A small world indeed, especially if it involves underground music and rebellious women.

So long, summer. Wish I'd got in more blackberries, but I ate all of the ones I picked without freezing any at all.

As a memento of the season, here are some flowers I shot recently. No idea what they are, though.

The Falling

Just out in the UK is Carol Morley's swooning girls drama, The Falling, which I referred to previously.

Here is an interview she did with Radcliffe and Maconie discussing the film. For some reason it won't embed.

But, I have been able to embed some of Tracey Thorn's music for the film.

Filmic Friday

And then it was back to the films, as I made a return to my old stomping ground of Brick Lane for some bagels and then a visit to the Little Joe Clubhouse currently in residence through Sunday (as part of Fringe!) in the basement of Rich Mix, a venue that didn't even exist when I lived around the corner 10 years ago.

The Clubhouse is a wood and textile construction that would do the Scouts and Guides proud and indeed one of the visitors was an ex-Cub, so we bonded over childhood memories of... not going out to the woods and making fires. Didn't happen in my Brownie chapter in the Bronx.

There was a lot of time for bonding, as the scheduled film, Star, was delayed for some reason. But when the DVD got going, we saw some very entertaining clips of two little-known Indian disco films from the early '80s. As presenter Shanay Jhaveri explained, this was an intriguing experiment in a cross-cultural youth movement translating to film. Not too successfully, as it happens, as the films bombed and the actors didn't work again! It was marvelllously camp, with sassy women and tight-trousered men rocking the disco beat, surrounded by totally OTT lighting.

Stumbling out of that humming one of the songs, I headed to the Southbank for two Made In Britain programmes. I have seen the work of most of the directors on show, but not that of the twice Oscar-nominated doc director Lucy Walker and was looking forward to two of her films, Devil's Playground and the recent The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom. In truth, I wasn't bowled over by either film, though she got brilliant access for both, as an outsider. DP is a 2001 account of the Amish tradition of rumspringa, when teens go out into the world to sample the forbidden before deciding whether to commit to the church or not. She found some intriguing subjects, most notably the wayward Faron and his on-off girlfriend Emma, who tempts him to leave the church and make a new life. But it felt overlong. Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom I found simplistic and a bit manipulative, with Moby's music used to push the audience's buttons in a way that is not necessary. The tragedy of the Japanese tsunami is powerful enough. It didn't need any cinematic trickery. It reminded me of Steven Spielberg's overly sentimental work. Perhaps this is something to do with Walker working in the USA.

After a brief pause, it was on to the second programme, Carol Morley's The Alcohol Years, which I have been keen to see since finding Dreams of a Life. Somehow I missed TAY when it was on Channel 4 all those years ago. It was preceded by two shorts, Everyday Something, which is really quite comic and disturbing at the same time and The Madness of the Dance, which I saw years ago at Raindance and hated. I still find it an uncomfortable mix of quasi-scientific pontificating and musical numbers, and I really, really don't like the final scene, which seems to ridicule the notion of mass hystaeria as experienced by women. But, I accept I may have misinterpreted it, as Morley's other films exhibit a keen empathy with her female protagonists. In any case, it certainly illustrates her fascination with real-life subjects, which she finds through newspaper clippings.

TAY, of course, is about her search for herself, as seen through other people's eyes. Having lost five years of her youth to alcohol-fuelled hedonism in Manchester, Morley journeyed back in 2000 to ask people who knew her then to recount their memories, and it really is a fascinating portrait, utterly unsparing in its criticism of her, her behaviour, her promiscuity and her relationships. What isn't said by anybody, really, is that this was clearly a vulnerable child seeking attention and love and not finding it. Speaking onstage afterward, Morley referred to two or three people in the audience as saving her, but her public demeanour is utterly lacking in self-pity or -congratulation. It's very Mancunian, I would venture to say. As a non-Mancunian, I did find the lack of captions most irritating, as the only people I recognised were Liz Naylor and Pete Shelley, but that is another Morley hallmark, as she likes to let the audience meet the characters without being prompted by captions. This quirk aside, I do find her work quite impressive, and look forward to her next project, which she teased would feature adolescent 1960s girls as we've never seen them on-screen.

Dreams of a Life

My Quietus story on Dreams of a Life is finally live, although I could have written something twice as long, such was my enthusiasm for the film and the abundance of quotes I had from my chat with director Carol Morley. There is so much to say about this documentary on Joyce Carol Vincent and about how people in cities can become strangers to each other.

I reviewed the film briefly when it premiered at the London Film Festival, but only saw it on a preview DVD, so am curious to see how it plays in a cinema with an attentive audience. It's out in the UK on 16 December and also has a preview at the spanking new Hackney Picture House on 9 December, with Morley and star Zawe Ashton conducting a Q&A.

There is also a very strange interactive companion piece, Dreams of Your Life, which I took for a spin a couple of days ago. It's a bit like sitting down with an inquisitive therapist or taking a phone call from a menacing stranger. Not for the easily disturbed.

LFF: A Troubled Life

Carol Morley's doc Dreams of a Life receives its world premiere tonight at the LFF. Morley is known for her flights of fancy with the documentary form, but here she reins herself in for a gripping and troubling consideration of the life of Joyce Carol Vincent. Who? Who, exactly, for Ms. Vincent was the unfortunate soul whose dead body lay undetected in her London flat for more than two years.

How did a woman described by acquaintances as beautiful, vibrant, intelligent, ambitious and so forth come to such a grim end, surrounded by unopened Christmas presents? Why did nobody look for her? In search of answers, Morley (unseen and largely unheard behind the camera) placed adverts asking for those who knew (or thought they did) Vincent to come forward, and their on-camera interviews form the narrative of Dreams of a Life, as they offer sometimes contradictory assessments of a woman who seemed to hold herself apart and may have chosen to die alone.

Also mixing the dramatic and the documentary is Shock Head Soul, Simon Pummell's inventive telling of the story of Daniel Paul Schreber, a self-styled mystic who was committed to an asylum in Germany in the early twentieth century. Schreber resisted his diagnosis, explaining that he received messages from God, and he wrote up his ideas in an document that was praised by Jung and Freud, among others.

While Pummell allows the eloquent Schreber his space and displays the brutal treatments he was subject to, the mix of genres doesn't always work. In particular, the use of modern psychoanalysts (in period dress, no less) offering testimony and sometimes addressing characters directly is incredibly awkward. The animation sequences, as well, illustrating Schreber's visions also become intrusive after awhile. Ambitious, but flawed.