East End Review

Category: FILM

  • Documentary charts last days of the Haggerston Estate

    Haggerston Estate Funeral shoot. Photograph: Bryony Campbell
    Haggerston Estate Funeral shoot. Photograph: Bryony Campbell

    Sipping an expensive coffee in Broadway Market, it’s impossible to believe that a neo-Georgian block of flats a short walk away, with high ceilings and sash windows facing out onto the canal, was once on Hackney Council’s ‘hard to let’ list.

    But back in the late 1990s the Haggerston Estate had a really nasty reputation. It was ‘the heroin capital of Europe’ in contemporary press reports. Delivery men refused to enter and social tenants were desperate to live almost anywhere else. The buildings had fallen into disrepair and the plan was to demolish the estate before the turn of the millennium.

    None of which deterred German film-maker and university tutor Andrea Luka Zimmerman from making Samuel House on the estate her home for the next 17 years.

    “That’s my flat, there at the top,” she says, pointing out a row of three windows in the photo of Samuel House which adorns the flyer for her new film Estate: a Reverie, a ‘creative documentary’ about the last seven years of the building’s life. “It sounds crazy today but I applied to live there and got it within a month.”

    Samuel House was the gigantic brown-brick building that used to stand on the bank of the Regents Canal a couple of bridges down from Broadway, its windows filled with person-sized portraits of the remaining residents.

    It is now, finally, rubble, shut away behind a high fence. The date for demolition was announced seven years ago.

    Zimmerman’s film is about the changes in perception its subjects experienced once they knew their estate was going to be knocked down. It registers what Zimmerman calls “the thickening of the moment when you know you are going to lose something.

    “Suddenly you see what’s there and you know it’s not going to be there anymore. It’s that kind of time-warp – like if you know you’re going to lose something, then suddenly your eyes open. It’s about exploring that.”

    However, the film also seeks to challenge the negative public image of housing estates and the people who live on them. Zimmerman cites friends of hers who grew up on the estate and went to fashion college or became photographers. “You have people from this place who do things that you wouldn’t really associate with this estate. And I wonder why that is. The people who live there are actually normal people, they have normal jobs.”

    Zimmerman describes smashed windows, pealing wallpaper and leaky ceilings, but says the building was otherwise a pleasant place to live. “It wasn’t different from anywhere I’d lived before really. The neighbours were always very nice.” The main cause of problems, she says, was a lack of maintenance.

    “We were quite a strong residents’ association and we really tried to get the council to do repairs. But it didn’t happen, it never happened. In the early days they wanted to do either private partnerships or sell it to outside or have a housing association take care of it.”

    She’s sympathetic towards these failings, pointing out there were restrictions on how much councils could borrow to fund social housing – restrictions which are in large part still in place. “It wasn’t like Hackney Council didn’t want to do repairs, they just couldn’t afford it,” she says.

    However, she still feels it’s wasteful that a good building was allowed to go fall into disrepair. The Haggerston Estate was built in the ‘neo-Georgian flatted dwellings’ style, designed to resemble Georgian terraces. (That’s one reason why all the buildings and streets on the estate are named after characters from Samuel Richardson’s 18th century novel Clarissa).

    In the 1930s, hundreds of these structures were built around the country from a mass-produced blueprint, with individual variations in different areas. “Each individual council sort of made up their own version. It made it very democratic; it could be done by anyone,” says Zimmerman.

    The buildings were ‘thought through’, with, for instance, rounded walls where it was likely people would bump into a corner. Zimmerman believes this had more than practical value. “It’s symbolic, that it was thought through. Architecture is a symbol of values in our society.”

    They were also built to last, and for all that physical decay was a blight on the estate, Zimmerman believes there were deeper forces at work which ultimately led to the buildings’ demolition, making a comparison with “real Georgian buildings” which are over twice the estate’s age but have been lovingly maintained throughout subsequent generations.

    Social structures are as much a concern in Estate: a Reverie as architectural structures.

    “I’m really interested why it is that in buildings that are made to last – what is it structurally that destroys the community – in Hackney, in Islington, in Camden, Harringey?

    “What is it that makes some things possible and others impossible? How can you participate, how much say do you actually have?”

    Zimmerman first conceived of the project when in the early 2000s a private security firm was installed on the estate without the residents being consulted, with two rottweilers kept in one of the flats. It was a move which, in Zimmerman’s view, made everybody feel less safe.

    “Literally overnight they put up all these high security signs. It looked like a mess, it looked like a war zone.” This was compounded by large, orange Hackney Homes boards placed over the ground-floor windows. “It looked abject, run-down,” she says. “Nobody asked us about what we wanted.”

    An opportunity for the residents to take control of their own image arose in 2007 when the estate was taken over by the London and Quadrant Housing Association (L&Q ).

    L&Q wanted to take down the orange boards over the windows and that made way for the project I Am Here, the gigantic portraits of residents which used to look out over the canal. These portraits are now kept in a container, ready to be returned to their subjects as and when they ask for them.

    “Everything changed,” when L&Q took over, says Zimmerman. Under the stock-transfer agreement signed by tenants, it was agreed that the buildings would be demolished and residents re-housed. But for the remainder of its existence, residents were to be given free reign over the estate. “The new landlords allowed us basically to do what we wanted, because they knew it was going to be demolished and they wanted to keep us happy.”

    What ensued was a sprouting of folk art. Allotments were dug and table tennis tables were set up. Tenants painted the outside of their flats in different colours, including the discarded tyres that had lain in the lots for years. There were film screenings and bonfire nights. “It was amazing,” says Zimmerman. “I hadn’t seen people like that for years and years, because it had been rubbish.”

    Estate: a Reverie documents this period, with interviews with residents and footage of the way the community developed as it gained control over its environment, including historical re-enactments of living conditions experienced by the estate’s first residents before they were moved there 80 years ago. Just across the canal from the ruins of Samuel House is Bridge Academy, a very successful instance of providing a state-funded institution with autonomy and decision-making power.

    Zimmerman never suggests that Haggerston be used as a model for other estates, but she is concerned about the direction housing policy is going – especially the social implications of ‘Secure by Design’, a construction protocol for new social housing which eliminates open-access spaces and gives everyone a key-fob. “The younger generation grows up with fear and suspicion – and that’s a form of inequality. The home is safe, which means outside is unsafe.”

    She likes the new accommodation she has been given in compensation for the loss of her flat in Samuel House, but was no fan of the security system originally proposed, in which residents would need to use their door fob to operate the lift doors, which would only open when the lift was at their own floor: the building was designed with the assumption that residents wouldn’t know other people in the block and would never visit them. The residents managed to resist the imposition of this feature.

    There’s a bigger story to social housing in Britain, but Estate: a Reverie is a powerful voice for the residents at the centre of that story. It documents what can happen when people decide to trust each other, and goes a good way to disarming mutual suspicion, one of the biggest threats to anything prefixed with ‘social’.

    Estate: a Reverie is premiered at Rio Cinema, 107 Kingsland High St, E8 2PB on 22 November at 2.30pm www.estatefilm.co.uk

  • East London sees return of Fringe! Underwire and Homeless film festivals

    Jeffrey Hinton in Willy Nilly at Fringe! Queer Film and Arts Festival
    Jeffrey Hinton in Willy Nilly at Fringe! Queer Film and Arts Festival

    The big festivals have been and gone, but November sees a number of smaller independent film festivals vie for East London’s cinema audiences.

    Homeless comforts

    A screening of Jesse Moss’ Sundance Winning documentary The Overnighters, dubbed a modern day The Grapes of Wrath, will be opening the Homeless Film Festival on 1 November at Lower Clapton’s Roundhouse Chapel.

    The documentary, set during the North Dakota oil boom, highlights the plight of migrant job seekers caught up in an affordable housing crisis and the attempts of a Lutheran priest to help them.

    A panel discussion will follow the film, with speakers including the director Jesse Moss as well as producer Tony Garnett and Green Party MP Charlotte George.

    Fringe! benefits

    The Fringe! Queer Film and Arts Festival returns this month, and after securing Arts Council funding has become a week-long event with an expanded arts section and panel events.

    Films to look out for include Camp Beaverton: Meet the Beavers (9 November, Rio Cinema), a documentary about an all-women, trans*-inclusive sex camp at Burning Man Festival, and Naomi Campbel (8 November, Rio Cinema), in which a trans* woman desperate for gender alignment surgery decides to audition for a reality TV show to win the plastic surgery of her dreams.

    Contemporary queer culture in all its forms is to be represented, including shows from artists of national and international repute such as Stuart Sandford, Jeffrey Hinton, the Superm art-duo, Sara Davidmann, Pauline Boudry and Renate Laurenz.

    Feminist fix

    Usually a November staple, the London Feminist Film Festival is taking a break this year to plan for the future of the festival. But those needing a fix of feminist film won’t be found wanting as Underwire, the short film festival dedicated to promoting women working in film, will be returning to the Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick.

    Ring Masters (13 November), is a night of short films produced by women. Featured shorts include Gold, about an only child’s close bond with her goldfish, and He Took His Skin Off For Me, the story of a man who takes his skin off for his girlfriend and ends up regretting it.

    The Homeless Film Festival (1–14 November, www.homelessfilmfestival.org)
    Fringe! Queer Film and Arts Festival (4–9 November, www.fringefilmfest.com)
    Underwire (11–15 November, www.underwirefestival.com)

  • Ray Winstone: I got my big break on the way I walked down the corridor

    Ray Winstone. Photgraph: Fergus Greer
    East Londoner: Ray Winstone. Photgraph: Fergus Greer

    Hair whipped back and donning a heavy leather jacket, Ray Winstone stalks film journalist Danny Leigh to the front of a small screen at the Hackney Picturehouse. The room is nowhere near capacity, but members of the actor’s old boxing club have filled a good few seats towards the rear.

    As the two sit and settle smoothly into conversation, the atmosphere is understandably hushed – stunned, even. We’ve just sat through Scum (1979), Alan Clarke’s ice-cold and earthy portrait of young life in a borstal prison.

    The film, which was remade after the original BBC version was banned two years earlier, was Winstone’s first big- screen role. His bruising performance as reluctant hard-nut Carlin is explosive and utterly convincing, packed with furious emotion.

    We join the adolescent rogue as he’s inducted into a brutal regime, where adults beat and bully their young charges into shape – or not, as the case may be. The politics and dynamics are full on and fascinating, with Mick Ford’s delightful veggie inmate, Archer, providing an insightful social commentary. It’s a bleak vision peppered with glum landscapes and even sadder characters – heavy but vital.

    “It’s a film really that shows what kids do to other kids and what establishment does to kids and what men do to men, you know?” Winstone says softly, soaking the words in his unmistakably gruff Cockney twang and moving on to explain how he got the part.

    “I’d been kicked out of college that day and a lot the kids I was at college with were going up the BBC for an interview, and I went with them – just to say goodbye and have a beer with them after and all that.”

    Whilst there, he was persuaded by a pretty receptionist to have a chat with Clarke, who, once their apparently fruitless discussion was over, escorted him to the exit.

    “I got the part on the way I walked down the corridor,” he says. “I just really didn’t give a fuck. And so it was nothing to do with any talent because I had none – I had no idea about technique or anything like that. But it just shows you sometimes it pays to be a little bit of a fucker, you know? And it stood me good stead that, for a while.”

    One of the reasons for the screening is that the star has recently penned Young Winstone, about his early life in London. Reflecting on his days growing up in Hackney and Plaistow, it looks at how the city has changed since the years soon after the Second World War – “sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.”

    “London was a bomb site and it was where we used to play,” he says. “When they was building the rest of Europe they weren’t building England – they weren’t building London.

    “But it was all right, I was pretty lucky: my dad worked in the meat market, the fruit market eventually, and we had uncles in the fish market and in the docks, where there was plenty of spillage, so we never went hungry,” he continues.

    “But [the book is] about community – it was a community, you know. Then they built flats, then you moved round. You don’t know who your neighbour is anymore. And it’s really about that. But it’s not just about my life… it’s about that generation.”

    After asserting that he’s “an Essex boy really,” he goes on to detail his rich family connections to Hackney and the East End, explaining that his father went to school on Lauriston Road and that many relations are scattered around “Vicky Park”. He also spent time as a boy living with his granddad on Well Street – the Frampton Park Estate – when his dad “had the right hump” with him.

    He seems to drift into a haze of nostalgia, talking in a slow and fragmented stream of consciousness. Realising that his latest tangent might be going nowhere, he quickly plucks an anecdote from thin air: “In fact, when I was three I was in a push chair and a geezer flashed me by all accounts,” he says. “So I was flashed at an early age.”

    After touching on Sundays spent with his cousins at the Landsdowne Club, and how he can’t help but remember his old street bathed in sunlight, the questions turn to Hollywood.

    He describes Leonardo DiCaprio, who he worked with on The Departed, as a “smashing kid”, and proceeds to execute an uncanny impersonation of Martin Scorsese. He’s less taken, though, with Jack Nicholson, who’s a “fantastic actor to watch… [But] he does think a lot of himself.”

    It’s a criticism you certainly can’t fire at Ray. Humble in the extreme and desperately likeable, he’s something of a working class hero. Contrary to his own self-deprecation, Scum is undeniable evidence of talent by the bucket load.

    Slightly hunched, he walks out with his arm around the shoulders of a chum from years back, chattering away about old times.

    Young Winstone is published by Canongate RRP: £20 ISBN: 978-1-78211-246-6

  • Love Hotel documentary – leaving reservations at home

    Love Hotel
    A guest at the Angelo Love Hotel in Osaka. Photograph: Native Voice Films

    It’s been estimated that not far off three million people drop in at one of Japan’s 37,000-odd ‘love hotels’ every day. These often strangely designed establishments are something of a subversive institution – a designated space for play, fantasy and exploration, where couples can escape the pressures of a rigid social structure.

    With unprecedented access behind the scenes at the Angelo Love Hotel in Osaka, filmmakers Hikaru Toda and Phil Cox – of Native Voice Films in Hackney – have spent the last four years working on a documentary that sheds light on this offbeat strand of Japanese culture. The result is Love Hotel, a curious film streaked with beauty and truth.

    In many ways – and not just because it’s Japan – it’s like reading Murakami: you’re drawn into a neon-lit sub-reality where the unconscious plays out like real life. But what’s fascinating, and at times easy to forget, is that this is real life. Within the four walls of each individual room is a different world, a slightly tweaked dimension (enhanced by the bizarrely themed décor) in which the narratives are generally rich and engrossing.

    But just to be clear, the window that Cox and Toda offer is not about sex or voyeurism: it’s about people.

    The characters followed are an intriguing and diverse bunch, with a 40-something married couple and two gay lawyers taking much of the focus. Perhaps most interesting, though, are a divorced couple who come together to share a dance once a week, or the 71-year-old widower who watches porn and writes reflective letters about not being able to write like – ironically – Murakami.

    One particular sequence in which a businessman is kitted out in squeaking latex rubber and hung from the ceiling by a young dominatrix demonstrates the directors’ considerably refined artistry.

    Just as fascinating, though, are the ins and outs of running the hotel, with a busy backroom staff pulling the strings to keep the ethereal illusion intact. It’s like theatre, or dramatic therapy of some sort.

    Having spent hours and hours at a time in the rooms with their subjects, the co-directors have captured some moving moments of confession, desire and frustration. This is tempered by a heavy dollop of humour that, while undeniably entertaining, might occasionally distract from the stark sadness of a situation.

    As the film progresses, a political arc emerges concerning the changing laws regarding love hotels, giving the piece the thread it needs to ride through to a successful conclusion. In all it’s a unique, thought provoking and deftly-executed feature, flecked with magic.

    www.nativevoicefilms.com

  • Free film festival to get under way in London Fields

    Ryan Gosling in The Place Beyond The Pines. Photograph: Atsushi Nishijima
    Leave your wallet at home: Ryan Gosling in The Place Beyond The Pines. Photograph: Atsushi Nishijima

    Cinephiles mourning the loss of the Film Shop on Broadway Market may be heartened to learn that London Fields now boasts its own film festival, which is set to take place for ten days starting this weekend.

    The London Free Film Festival will see a variety of features, documentaries, shorts, animation and experimental films screened at local venues over ten days, with a special focus on London filmmakers and themes.

    There will be a chance to watch 2011 documentary Under The Cranes, a meditation on the multi-cultural history of Hackney by Emma-Louise Williams, who will appear with the poet Michael Rosen for a Q&A session afterwards.

    Hackney Attic will be hosting a ‘Ryan Gosling all-dayer’, a triple bill of films starring the so-called hottest man in Hollywood. There is also an evening of fashion shorts planned at the London College of Fashion on Mare Street.

    The festival has chosen some unusual local venues, such as Hollywood Springs cinema on Well Street, London Fields Gym and Hackney City Farm.

    Best of all, each event will be free to enter. The festival is organised by local volunteers and has been set up by Free Film Festivals, who have previously run free festivals in Peckham and Nunhead, Herne Hill and Camberwell.

    London Fields Free Film Festival is at various venues from 17–26 October.

    www.facebook.com/londonfieldsfreefilmfestival

     

  • London Film Festival – a focus on East London

    72-82
    Ten years of supporting artists: documentary 72-82 about arts organisation ACME

    London’s expansive and diverse cultural landscape has been inspiring filmmakers for decades. The programme of the 58th London Film Festival is no exception, with its twelve-day programme featuring more than ninety UK productions, several of which take place in the East End.

    Snow in Paradise is centred on the real life experiences of co-writer and co-star Martin Askew, a white, working class Hoxton boy who turned his back on his gangland roots to convert to Islam in 2001.

    Following a drug deal gone wrong, the central character, played by Frederick Schmidt, is forced to deal with the consequences amidst the changing landscape of the East End’s underground culture. A directorial debut for accomplished editor Andrew Hulme, it was nominated for two awards at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

    Hulme explains his desire to depict “a guy who embraces what is, in the Western World, quite a castigated religion. I felt that Islam is misportrayed in the media. People are really bored with seeing Muslims as terrorists. We wanted to be a little bit more complex and portray a different side.”

    William Raban, one of Britain’s leading experimental filmmakers, returns with 72-82, an hour-long feature documenting the first decade of the arts organisation ACME. Working exclusively with archive material from ACME, it shows the crucial impact the organisation had in supporting and providing housing for many London artists, including Richard Deacon and Helen Chadwick.

    In addition to music from David Cunningham, the archive footage is brought to life by voices of the artists involved. The director will be taking part in a post-screening Q&A at the BFI Southbank on 13 October at 9pm.

    Cinemas in Hackney will be taking part in the festival, including the Hackney Picturehouse, Rich Mix and the Rio cinema. For the full programme and to book tickets see below.

    BFI London Film Festival
    Until 19 October
    www.whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online

  • Bring food – not a ticket – to see Rainbow Collective’s documentary about Bangladesh

    Rainbow Collective 620
    Life in the slums: Rainbow Collective’s documentary Mass E Bhat. Courtesy of Rainbow Collective

    No tickets are required to see Rainbow Collective’s latest documentary at Rich Mix this month, though the screening isn’t free.

    Instead, audience members are asked to bring along a bag of non-perishable food, to be donated to a food bank.

    The Food for Films initiative shows how the East London-based Rainbow Collective is more than just a film production company.

    Its founders, Richard York and Hannan Majid, formed the social enterprise to raise awareness of human rights issues.

    Since its inception in 2006, the pair have shot, directed and produced documentaries in South African, Bangladesh, Iraq and the UK.

    Their latest documentary Mass E Bhat, which premiered at the East End Film Festival in June, is the story of one man’s struggle to grow up and follow his ambitions in modern Bangladesh, with an original score by John Pandit.

    The documentary follows Nasir, a social worker in the slums, who reflects on his early life working in rubbish dumps and sweatshops and how he achieved his dream of an education and the respect of his community. Along the way we meet several children whose lives mirror Nasir’s past but whose futures are uncertain.

    Rainbow Collective crews are always diverse and often include students and local volunteers. “We wanted to use our skills as filmmakers to create social change,” says Majid.

    Mass E Bhat wasn’t an easy film to make. Early on, Majid and York struggled to find the right structure that would hold the film together.

    But then they did some work for Al Jazeera, which gave them experience of shooting quickly and under pressure. Returning to the documentary, they made “brutal edits” and managed to create a more focused film. The result is a striking documentary that manages to capture the movement, life and colour of Bangladesh.

    Education and youth are a key part of Rainbow Collective’s vision. Footage that failed to make it into the final cut is going to be used to provide students with film training, with students getting the chance to re-edit the outtakes.

    “So much of our work is about young people, which feeds into our youth projects,” says York.

    This training aspect is designed to make entrance into the film industry more accessible. The filmmakers see Mass E Bhat as a way of reaching out to cinema goers and raising awareness while passing on the skills of documentary making to another generation.

    Food for Film screening of Mass E Bhat with Q&A and live music from John Pandit is at Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, E1 6LA on 15 September
    www.rainbowcollective.co.uk

  • Sir Charlie Darwin Film Festival’s ‘natural selection’

    Eric Schachter
    Eric Schachter

    New films are to receive “trial by fire” at a festival opening this month at Oslo inspired by the famous amateur nights at New York’s Apollo Theater.

    The Sir Charlie Darwin Film Festival invites all-comers to submit their films, and has promised to screen all full-length features.

    But whether the films are shown in their entirety is down to audience members, who are encouraged to vocalise their views and give the films the thumbs up or down.

    Frustrated filmmaker Eric Schachter conceived of the idea after becoming fed up at an industry he felt is not an “open door”, and where getting ahead is a question of money and contacts.

    “I knew it wasn’t a fair game we were playing,” he explains. “So I decided to establish a festival where there was an audience response and films basically got awarded or accorded attention simply from an audience.”

    Schachter cites Amateur Night at the Apollo, the New York singing competition that spawned the careers of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and the Jackson 5 among others, as his inspiration.

    “In the early days of the Apollo all and sundry came along and the criticism was savage. It was trial by fire, and though I’m not expecting anything that savage, it is the principle by which I’ve established the festival.”

    Schachter, who has spent much of his life living in Canada, has made three feature films of his own. But any plans to show them at the festival will have to take a back seat due to the sheer volume of submissions already received.

    “I actually don’t have a life now,” he jokes. “I’m just preparing for a festival!”

    The hunt for a charismatic compere to host proceedings is ongoing, although judging by our conversation the outgoing Schachter is himself a suitable candidate.
    “I’d have to blunder myself through three nights before I found my feet,” he says, batting off my suggestion.

    For now, the only other concern is whether audiences will have the stomach to jeer and make judgements aloud about the films.

    “The British have an extraordinary capacity for forbearance and not thinking they deserve more than they’re given,” says Schachter delicately. “So somehow we’re going to have to break down that sort of patience. It’s a lovely quality –but it doesn’t make for the Apollo!”

    Sir Charlie Darwin Film Festival is at Oslo, 1a Amhurst Road, E8 1LL on 8 and 22 September.

    www.sircharliedarwin.com

     

     

  • Crime is of the essence: Where now for the East End gangster flick?

    Hackneys Finest - Sparky 620

    “You know if I looked at one of them they’d piss in their pants,” scowls Richard Burton’s Vic Dakin, a vicious East End hoodlum not loosely inspired by Ronnie Kray.

    It’s the final scene of Michael Tuchner’s Villain and Dakin, tracked down to an industrial wasteland, is cornered, armed and facing years in the can. The public peer on from high-rise balconies. “And who are you?” he asks of Inspector Bob Matthews. “Keeping Britain clean on 30 quid a week… Respect? You don’t what it is.”

    Released in 1971, Villain has all the hallmarks of the Kray era: sharp suits, family values and a currency of fear and violence. It’s an early instalment in a sprawling canon of films set in and around East London, depicting a brutal and complicated landscape steaming with vice.

    Crime and culture are two strands of London life that have been twisting together and playing off one another for decades. Tuchner’s distinctive thriller came smack in the middle of a golden era for the British gangster flick. Not two years earlier, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’sexperimental masterclass Performance (1970) found its way onscreen, having been denied initial release in 1968 on the grounds of lewd content.

    Golden era

    Performance sees a notorious East End heavy uprooted to a Notting Hill basement, hiding out with a reclusive bohemian landlord, played by Mick Jagger, and his two European girlfriends. In stark contrast to his role as a tastefully-clad mob enforcer, James Fox’s Chas embarks on a journey of subconscious self-discovery. Panned at the time, this clever and aesthetically pioneering piece is bold and relevant, well-deserving of the cult following it has procured over the years. (The relationship between gangster, performance and celebrity is a thread not lost on more contemporary directors.)

    A decade later, John MacKenzie’s menacing portrait of a Docklands on the cusp of economic revolution immortalised Bob Hoskins and his barrel-chested ruffian Harold Shand. Not burdened by nostalgia, The Long Good Friday (1980), like Villain, rides high on its plausibility.

    MacKenzie’s film came from an extraordinary script by Barry Keeffe, a screenwriter who started work as a journalist. Capturing the onset of Thatcherism and a moment of high ambition, renovation and corruption, Keeffe eerily predicted an era in which the Docklands were revised and rebuilt. Violence is surprisingly sparse but extreme – honest and unglamorous. Few British films are of equal merit.

    Tabloid gangsterism

    Ten years on from MacKenzie’s pared-down milestone, Gary and Marin Kemp, of Spandau Ballet, took on the challenge of playing the East End’s most formidable criminal partnership: Ronnie and Reggie. The Krays (1990) explores the psychology of a post-war underworld where community spirit, manners and immaculate presentation are the order of the day. The violence is savage and in blunt contrast to the domestic setting of much of the film, where nostalgia runs almost to a fault.

    Although a poignant portrait of tabloid gangsterism, in which the whole of East London’s a stage for the twins to tread, Peter Medak’s drama is perhaps guilty of presenting a rose-tinted view of organised crime in Bethnal Green and the surrounding area. However, its lasting influence can be found in Nicolas Winding Refn’s pulsating biopic Bronson (2008), the tale of Britain’s most famous prisoner.

    A pathological performer, Charles Bronson – played with bruising vigour by Tom Hardy – narrates his story beneath a theatre spotlight, where he parades back and forth dressed in clown attire. The cartoonish villain, who was once embroiled in East London’s bare-knuckle boxing scene, tore his way into the hearts of the press via a run of severe misbehaviour on the inside.

    He recently made the headlines for selling a collection of his and Ronnie Kray’s artworks to fund a holiday for his mother, who was upset by his involvement in a twelve-man prison brawl. The film takes that link between celebrity, crime and performance to a new and intriguing level.

    Turn of the century

    Villain and The Long Good Friday – for me, the most successful examples of the genre –share something of a realist approach, resisting glorification. Over the years, directors, particularly of the post-Tarantino age, have increasingly hoicked style up over substance.

    Take the likes of Snatch (2000) and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), two punchy capers set in a mythical East End terrain populated by clichés and caricatures. These mildly entertaining Guy Ritchie features represent a kind of hyper-real gangster movie that fails to resonate with modern-day East London; the Krays’ cultural legacy having cut the landscape with a rough narrative sketch that filmmakers continue to adopt, regardless of its fading connection to real life.

    Then there’s Antonia Bird’s Face (1997), in which Robert Carlyle’s Ray, a former-commie activist, forges a career in armed robbery. Ray claims not to like crime films: “They never show criminals in a good light,” he says. Offering a strained analysis of the criminal conscience, coupled with a dose of post-Thatcher oppression by way of explanation, Face has moments of promise but ultimately fails. A ridiculously inflated final shootout in a police station does nothing for its credibility.

    Gangster No. 1 (2000), Paul McGuigan’s memorably sinister and humourless answer to Once Upon a Time in America, came along just in time to rescue the genre from the horror show that was Love, Honour and Obey, released the same year. But perhaps the most successful of modern crime films with a touch of the East End about them are those that have taken the material to new horizons. Consider Jonathan Glazer’s turn-of-the-century masterpiece Sexy Beast, a classy thriller that doesn’t try to locate itself on the streets, nor in the consciousness, of a specific place. In Bruges (2008), ironically, can be looked at in a similar light.

    Seeking to take the violence that audiences crave in new directions – remember the spate of football-hooligan films that peaked with 2005’s disastrous Green Street – the canon has fragmented. East London films are now exploring new personalities. Wild Bill (2011) and Borrowed Time (2012) both portray hapless-but-hearty central characters in too deep for their own good – the former to great effect and the latter not so. 2007’s excellent Eastern Promises completely shuns the traditional Cockney crook in favour of the murky subculture of the Russian mafia.

    The future of the East End gangster flick

    This June saw the world premiere of Hackney’s Finest, which follows a pair of everyday drug dealers as they clash with Russian thugs, Welsh-Jamaican rude boys and a pair of thoroughly nasty coppers. It’s brave, bizarre, and very controversial, with decidedly little in common with anything that’s come before it.

    Since MacKenzie and Tuchner’s day, traces of their classic works have been repackaged and proliferated in various forms, but the gap between the material and the moment has grown ever wider – expanding in conjunction with rising house prices and a shifting local identity. As far as the relationship between film and East End crime as we’ve come to know it goes, perhaps the moment has passed.

    With Tom Hardy set to play both Kray twins in a feature likely to be released in 2015, we’ll have to wait and see.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Secret Cinema: Back to the Future review – a party for the fans

    Secret Cinema Presents Back to the Future. Photograph: Al Overdrive
    Secret Cinema Presents Back to the Future. Photograph: Al Overdrive

    Secret Cinema’s Back to the Future has been hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons, but now that the production is underway, was it worth the wait?

    Fifty quid is a lot to pay for an evening’s entertainment, but when I heard Secret Cinema was to stage my partner’s favourite film ever I swallowed my reservations and shelled out. And after the debacle of both suspending ticket sales after a booking system crash (that’s a lunch hour I’ll never get back), not to mention a spate of cancelled shows, Secret Cinema’s homage to Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 classic has finally gone ahead. And the good news is: it’s great.

    Arriving at the not-so-secret-location beside the Olympic Stadium in full fancy dress, the ‘residents’ of Hill Valley are treated to a lovingly-recreated film set replete with 1950s-era stores, a high-school dance in full swing, and dozens of actors manfully attempting American accents with varying degrees of success.

    Entering into the spirit of things, we wished away the looming carbuncle that is the ArcelorMittal Orbit and danced around with strangers as 1950s cars circled the venue. The queues for food were eye-watering (a 45 minute wait for a so-so £6 hot-dog was a special kind of hell) but the lines for the rides move more quickly as the evening wore on. Indeed, the best view of the production is to be had from the top of the Ferris wheel, where the scale of the undertaking becomes clear.

    My advice? If you love Back To The Future, and who on earth doesn’t, you’ll love this. The usual East London gripes apply – overpriced drinks and hipsters abound – and the success of the show is almost certainly dependent on good weather. Nor can you move without an opportunity to spend more of your cash – on haircuts, clothes, records, comics and much else. But if you park your gripes at the door (along with your mobile phone) and make sure to turn up on time, there’s plenty to justify the ticket-price and then some.

    A live band introduced the film, which the audience good-naturedly quoted along with as actors played out scenes. Fairground rides, food, drink, shops – the event is billed as an ‘immersive experience’ which is a pretentious way of describing what it is: a party for the fans. And it works, not least because at the heart of the whole evening is a terrific film, one everyone’s seen countless times, a big slice of eighties nostalgia repackaged and sold back to us with cream on top. When the credits rolled, we danced the night away, before we made like a tree – and got outta there.

    For tickets see www.secretcinema.org/tickets