East End Review

Tag: Timothy Cooke

  • Hackney Downs Studios to host season of plays in “roundabout” theatre

    Cutting Off Kate Bush - Hackney Down
    Lucy Benson-Brown in Cutting Off Kate Bush

    Fresh from a successful spell at the Edinburgh Fringe, Paines Plough’s Roundabout Auditorium is back on the move and heading for the East End. The portable 168-seat theatre will set up camp at Hackney Downs Studios, with a series of Brave New Work running each night from 22-27 September.

    Met with resounding critical acclaim under the spotlight in Scotland, the material – penned by Duncan MacMillan, Alexandra Wood, Dennis Kelly and Lucy Benson-Brown – promises much. From Kate Bush to classroom trolls, audiences will be exposed to a “thought-provoking, funny and thrilling” bill of one-act, 50-60-minute productions, according to Louise Wellby, of the Hackney venue.

    “When we heard about The Roundabout Auditorium – the UK’s first small-scale in-the-round touring amphitheatre – we knew it would be an excellent fit,” she says, explaining that the flat-pack pop-up is just right for the studios’ 400-square-foot industrial performance space. “The mission of our theatre is perfectly aligned with the mission of Paines Plough.”

    Said mission is “to open up theatre to everyone”. Paines Plough, famously established in 1974 over a pint of Paines bitter in The Plough pub, believes that “everyone should have the chance to see the best new plays, no matter where they live”, and has taken an innovative approach to achieving its goal. The Hackney Studios gig is just one stop amidst substantial tour plans, with no village hall, community centre or warehouse off limits.

    The design of the theatre itself will contribute to a novel taste of the stage. “The shape of the Roundabout creates an intimate experience – there is nowhere to hide,” says Wellby. “We are excited about bringing brave new writing to Hackney, altering and opening up the way people experience theatre – making it accessible.”

    Every Brilliant Thing
    by Duncan MacMillan

    MacMillan’s six-year-old narrator is staring his mum’s dangerous depression in the face and wants to help cheer her up. The solution, he feels, is simple; he starts work on a list of all the brilliant things in the world that he can think of, hoping its contents might change her outlook. A pinch of audience participation helped this one-man comedy go down a storm with crowds and critics alike in Edinburgh.

    Lungs
    by Duncan MacMillan

    A first baby is on the cards for one half of central-couple M and W, but the other half takes the suggestion like a punch in the face. Thirty-something, well-educated and busy making fruitless trips to Ikea, the pair confront the moral dilemma of having a family in a world of overpopulation, erratic weather and political unrest.

    Our Teacher’s a Troll
    by Dennis Kelly

    With a Roald Dahl kind of no-holds-barred approach to the darker side of characterisation, Kelly has taken kindly to unsettling young audiences – in the best possible way, of course. Our Teacher’s a Troll is a three-person performance in which a set of scally-wag twins see their nervy headteacher replaced by a child-eating monster. As well as saving the school, the naughty pair must get peanut-buttered Brussels sprouts off the lunch menu.

    The Initiative
    by Alexandra Wood

    When an East London taxi-driver, with a taste for the scenic route, hears that pirates from his Somali homeland have seized a British couple he takes it upon himself to negotiate a release. Flying against his wife’s fears, Dalmar embarks on a journey of self-discovery – unwittingly so, perhaps. Wood’s thoughtful script is packed with thrills and weighty ideas about the nature of identity and belonging.

    Cutting Off Kate Bush
    by Lucy Benson-Brown

    Tracking the meltdown of a twenty-something Kate Bush fan-girl, Benson-Brown’s self-performed piece looks at family, loss and the backlog of an eclectic and eccentric pop star. Cathy’s mum is dead and things are falling apart around her; in keeping with modern trends, she turns to Youtube for a Bush-themed vent.

    Brave New Work is at Hackney Downs Studios, Amhurst Terrace, E8 2BT from 22–27 September.

    www.hackneydownsstudios.wordpress.com/whats-on

  • 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.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • East End Film Festival – three films that stood out

    Winner of Best Documentary, Mistaken For Strangers
    Winner of Best Documentary, Mistaken For Strangers

    The East End Film Festival has been running for thirteen years, forging itself a reputation as one of the country’s foremost champions of fresh indie talent. With an alternative and cosmopolitan spirit coursing through its veins, this year’s fortnight-long event was as teeming as ever with memorable works from both home and abroad. Three films in particular left a lasting impression.

    You and the Night (Les Rencontres d’après minuit)
    Yann Gonzalez’s erotic debut feature is like The Breakfast Club meets Let the Right One In meets Drive, only it’s not quite as good as this combination might sound. It’s short on direction and substance, but a stuffing of sensual nourishment and a mesh of bold aesthetic ideas suggest a bright future for the French director.

    Fabienne Babe and Eric Cantona deliver standout performances as participants in an orgy of lost souls in search of sexual therapy. Cast in a neon-lit semi-future, this original avant-garde piece explores dreams, love, loss and Cantona’s outlandishly large member.

    Pleasing on the eye – and the ears even more so – You and the Night is very nearly a very clever re-imagining of traditional narrative techniques. Gonzalez is certainly one to watch.

    The Distance (La distancia)
    The Distance is strange and beautiful. It’s a Borgesian heist movie in which a trio of depraved dwarves, with telepathic and telekinetic powers, attempt to steal an abstract concept from an abandoned industrial power plant. Set in a surrealist Siberian landscape, the film was shot in Catalonia and captures a majestic kind of dereliction. The story itself isn’t completely satisfying, but through a fun combination of original sound and image – coupled with a hefty dose of dark humour – Sergio Caballero’s film leaves a distinct, Lynch-like mark.

    Mistaken for Strangers
    Named the festival’s Best Documentary, Mistaken for Strangers takes the rock-doc format to new and impressive territory. Tom Berninger, brother of The National frontman Matt Berninger, has lived in the shadow of stardom for too long; it’s his turn to shine, and shine he does. Invited to join The National on tour as a roadie, the amateur director takes a meta-introspective look at the distance between him and his iconic elder brother. Seemingly incompetent and completely disorganised, Tom roughly shuns any notion that he might be concerned with band dynamics or the music, subverting the genre to great effect.

    What follows is hilarious and moving. It’s a self-reflexive jaunt into the depths of the sibling psyche, reaching a bizarre and dramatic climax in which the focus is almost entirely on the making of the film. Mistaken for Strangers is uplifting and unforgettable, with a magical final scene and a hearty nod to Werner Herzog, who makes a brief appearance.

  • Sally Hawkins and Jim Broadbent star in East Londoner’s short film

    Sally Hawkins in The Phone Call
    Sally Hawkins in The Phone Call

    A few years ago James Lucas, of London Fields, took a rough script to his friend and colleague Mat Kirkby, a commercials director at Ridley Scott Associate Films. He’d written it on a three-hour flight to Bucharest. Kirkby saw potential in the work and so the pair set about an after-hours collaboration to bring the story to life.

    Two years on and The Phone Call, starring Sally Hawkins and Jim Broadbent, is pulling in rave reviews on the festival circuit, scooping Best Narrative Short at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival and qualifying for Academy Awards consideration along the way.

    “It’s really just taken off. It’s exceeded any of my expectations, that’s for sure,” says Lucas modestly. “It was nice to have our day-job roles and progress that into this creative collaboration. It’s not the norm but it seems to have worked rather well.”

    The film is a stripped-back, emotional short of rare power. It focuses on a single, twenty-minute phone conversation at a Samaritans-esque call centre between Heather, a quiet counsellor, and Stan, a troubled pensioner in search of comfort.

    “It was actually inspired by a close relative being a Samaritan and that got my creative ball rolling I suppose,” Lucas explains. “They’re like unsung heroes, they’re like angels. They’re people that willingly give up their time without any pay and deal with these very complex situations and scenarios and conversations. They do it I suppose out of empathy and I thought that’s just such a brilliant thing.

    “I’m not going to be too dramatic, but in a world that seems increasingly selfish and self-obsessed I was just interested in looking at the other side of that, at people who still retain a sense of empathy.”

    His desire to shine a light on the delicate, relatively underexplored realm of phone counsel was shared by Kirkby, who also has family working in the field. On receiving the script, the director’s first creative task was to structure the narrative and flesh out Heather’s character.

    “I made her this little sort of mousy character that you maybe underestimate,” he says. “You perhaps learn that she’s actually very tenacious and she doesn’t want to let go of this guy.”

    Hawkins, who was recently nominated for an Oscar for her part opposite Cate Blanchett in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, is extraordinary in the role. The camera is zoomed on her desperate features for a good portion of the film’s 20-minute running time, capturing a fluid facial performance that brilliantly bears the weight of an extremely heavy situation. 

    Kirkby explains that during filming the actress would work through the entire script in single takes. “She’d get into the whole flow of this 20-minute performance and feel it. She was shaking and crying and after each take she had to have a good old sit down,” he says. “I don’t know if I’ll ever see anything like that again. It was like watching it happen live, it was quite incredible.”

    Having waited close to a year for confirmation that Hawkins would be available for the project – with a two-week window confirmed at short notice – the Academy Award-winning Broadbent signed up two days later. “So one was ten months and one was two days,” Kirkby says. “You get someone like Jim Broadbent straight away because he would love to do it opposite Sally.”

    In a bold and decisive directorial move, Broadbent’s character remains anonymous throughout the film, never physically appearing onscreen at the other end of the line.

    “There was an audacity in not showing his face,” says Lucas. “I think it’s almost like a novel where it’s left up to you to construct that character and that character’s physical features and his or her persona – just for the fact that it gives it added personal poignancy, I think.”

    Kirkby elaborates: “To me it’s a massive dramatic device because if you see the person on the other end you immediately make judgments on them or you can see what their problem is,” he says. “I think the minute the question marks stop, that’s when the drama stops. You have to have the viewer asking questions. To be honest, when we found that we’d got Jim Broadbent I was like ‘Oh bugger, I’ve got an Oscar-winning actor and my plan is not to film him.’” 

    The Phone Call has taken the talented pair on a journey all over the world – from the London Film Festival to Tribeca in New York and events in Cork, Dresden, Miami and Aspen – where the piece has been met with overwhelming praise and acclaim.

    With talk of a full-length feature based on the material, the friends are sure to link up again in the not-so-distant future. “To stand up in Tribeca Film Festival on stage together and then be shaking hands with Robert DeNiro. Yeah, I’d quite like to continue that,” Kirkby laughs.

    What started as a loose idea and a common interest between colleagues has grown into a sensitive work of serious artistic merit, stretching the short format to its complete and glorious potential.

    “It’s been about making something meaningful rather than sensational, something thoughtful,” Lucas affirms as we say goodbye, summing things up rather nicely.

    www.thephonecallfilm.com

  • Hackney’s Finest hour?

    You talking to me?
    You talking to me? Chris Bouchard’s Hackney’s Finest

    Director Chris Bouchard – the man behind sensational Lord of the Rings spin-off The Hunt for Gollum, which has raked in over 13 million views on Youtube – has turned his creative eye to Hackney for a first full-length feature, set to premiere at the East End Film Festival this month.

    Hackney’s Finest is billed as an East London gangster flick that follows a troupe of hapless drug dealers as they clash with Russian thugs, Welsh-Jamaican rude boys and a pair of villainous coppers. Going by the trailer, it looks to be a mash-up of Guy Ritchie and John Mackenzie, with a squeeze of Tarantino to boot.

    “It’s quite extreme,” says Bouchard. “It’s got lots of drug use, it doesn’t shy away from strong language and violence, and it’s trying to reflect what things might actually be like on the streets of East London. It’s real but it’s also having fun. It’s entertaining and it doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it’s not totally ridiculous. You could almost believe that these characters could be out there somewhere – Hackney Wick probably,” he laughs.

    “There are definitely nods to those guys who’ve made these brilliant films and it’s a sense of humour that I really appreciate, but it’s got its own twist. We’ve got these characters that you haven’t seen before in the Guy Ritchie films.”

    Bouchard came across the script soon after the success of Gollum, his debut short. He explains that his mother was attending a creative writing class in Gloucester when she met Thorin Seex, a burgeoning screenwriter. Foreseeing a fruitful collaboration, she put the two in touch.

    “He’s an interesting guy. He’s an ex-squatter from Hackney and now he’s in insurance,” Bouchard says. “He’s willing to admit he’s had a very misspent youth, and he’s written all these crazy stories.”

    The film has already courted some controversy, meeting with a mixed response from viewers at private test screenings. In addition to the violence and language, the director readily admits that Hackney’s Finest makes light of persistent and substantial drug use. He describes the decision to treat the material in this way as tough but correct.

    “The drug use is pretty strong, it doesn’t hold back. It’s got quite a flippant tone to it and so some people were a bit horrified at this and then other people who were a bit more open-minded were like, ‘Wow, this is pushing it a bit beyond what we’ve seen before’. So yeah, there are some strong themes in there.”

    With its full cinema release not scheduled for another four or five months, Bouchard is thrilled for the feature to be premiering at the Hackney Picturehouse as part of the East End Film Festival.

    “It’s just perfect isn’t it? We’re just really happy about that,” he says. “Hackney Picturehouse is a great cinema and the whole story happens just round the corner so it’s pretty cool. It’s the perfect place really.”

    No matter what happens at the premiere on 14 June, Hackney’s Finest is sure to leave a mark.

  • Iain Sinclair looks back at 70×70 birthday film project

    Iain Sinclair. Photograph: Belinda Lawley
    Iain Sinclair. Photograph: Belinda Lawley

    For the last year, Hackney author and filmmaker Iain Sinclair has been involved in a work of Odyssean proportions. In celebration of his seventieth birthday last June, he was asked to curate a personal project entitled 70×70, choosing 70 films for a series of special screenings and discussions across the capital. The task has taken him on a voyage into his own past, through a history of independent film and deep into the cinematic consciousness of London. 

    Speaking on a Saturday morning – stealing an hour before he must set off for a showing at the Elephant and Castle of three obscure features I’d not heard of – he gives me a brief overview of the experience.

    “When I took it on I had no idea quite what it would involve. It seems like one of those ideas you get sitting down in a pub or having a late breakfast somewhere off Broadway Market and someone says ‘would you like to pick 70 films?’” It was a notion proposed to him by Paul Smith of King Mob, a spoken-word label that released CDs by Sinclair in the 90s.

    “It sounds like a great sort of birthday present,” he continues. “And one way of looking back at the part films have played in my life, but in actuality it involved writing descriptions of all of these 70 films and then travelling out night after night to funny parts of the town.” 

    The films chosen have been a peculiar and intriguing bunch. The list includes the likes of Herzog, Fassbinder, Godard, Hitchcock and Hopper, not to mention a vast catalogue of directors you’ll never have come across. It’s a gold mine for film-lovers looking to fill their pockets with rare and forgotten gems. 

    “It’s kind of an act of archaeology and rescue and salvage and scavenging in lots of ways, in the same process as people comb through car boot sales or markets and pick up strange lost videos and DVDs and so on.” 

    The process of picking such a large number of films might sound difficult, but while the physical side of 70×70 has taken its toll, Sinclair explains that selection itself was not so much of a challenge.     

    “It was literally about going back, using my books that I’ve published, looking at what films were referenced in each of these books, making an initial list and then including some films that I’ve been involved with to give a fuller sense of a life in London that was largely hung around the presence of certain films.”

    To borrow a phrase from his excellent book about the Beat poets, American Smoke, the project seems to have been like a raid on his own past. He describes the act of editing as similar to piecing together a kind of autobiographical documentary. However, not simply a linear map of films he’s watched along the way, the project explores the medium in a geographical sense, retracing the changing environment of film viewing and almost resurrecting a pre-internet sort of cinema experience. 

    Born in Maesteg in South Wales, Sinclair was living and studying in Brixton when he first “chased a film” to what’s now the Rio cinema in Dalston. This element of travel – an almost topographical approach – was an essential aspect of the work. 

    “It was my first visit to the East End,” he explains. “In a sense the geography of London was involved with where I saw certain films and that went on for a number of years. Obviously now the whole way of looking at films is very different with DVDs and the way that films can be found that once upon a time involved terrific geographical chases to track them down.”

    The idea of simply finding a film on the web is still a foreign one to him; perhaps he sees it as a lazy, even defeatist mode of viewing that detracts from the fun of the hunt and the pilgrimage he so values.

    “There’s something very magical still about seeing them actually in the community of the cinema, this building which goes back so deep into the culture of London – a bunch of people staring at this huge screen on which this rather wonderful and exotic product that’s come from somewhere is being shown just for that day, for that week. It was very special. 

    “Now the whole sense of it is very different. Obviously you can just type in a name and something comes up on your small screen and you think you’ve sampled it, but you haven’t had that complete sensory experience that also involves the journey and the community that you’re watching it with.”

    It’s an invigorating message and one that lends itself to a wider understanding of Sinclair’s approach to his own work. Research seems to come hand in hand with experience and almost always involves a trip, an exploration – in the fullest sense of the word. 

    For his acclaimed book London Orbital he traversed the 120-mile length of the M25; for Swandown – a delightfully bizarre poetic documentary made with friend and collaborator Andrew Kötting – he pedalled a plastic swan from Hastings to East London via the back rivers of Kent; and more recently he walked the entire London Overground in a single day for a new book about the railway’s effect on the urban landscape and life therein.

    Over the years, Sinclair’s literary output has established him a reputation as a pioneer of British psychogeography, a discipline he might not have been able to skirt entirely for 70×70 but one that is largely absent from his chosen films. When I first heard of the project, I half expected a compilation of documentary essays by Patrick Keiller, Julien Temple, Paul Kelly and the like, but, as he suggests when I put this to him, I may have been guilty of a kind of cultural branding. 

    “That’s very strongly why they’re not on my list. I didn’t want to go down that particular route because essentially I’d written it,” he says. “If I was just picking films I liked, Patrick Keiller would very probably have come into it, but it was a bit tautologist to do that in this particular context because it’s already such an academic industry. I felt I didn’t need to do that.”

    With the series nearing its end, Sinclair looks back on the first event in July last year with particular fondness. Two films were screened at the Hackney Picturehouse – a building he made good use of years ago when it was public library – that mean a lot to him: The Sorcerers, a 1967 piece by his friend Mike Reeves, and The Cardinal and the Corpse, an early 90s collaboration between himself and Chris Petit for Channel 4. “Everything about it felt good,” he says. “I thought that was a rather magic occasion and there’s been many others since.”

    The ambitious undertaking of 70×70 is set to finish at the Barbican on 7 and 8 June, with an event that will include an intimate programme of films Sinclair has been directly involved with. He will be joined in conversation by Kötting, Petit and Robert Macfarlane, among others.

    “I could easily sit down and do it again with a totally different 70 but I don’t want to,” he laughs, describing the end as a kind of watershed. “I’ve actually recovered a different sense of what film is in London at this moment by doing this project. And hopefully we finish up at the Barbican at the end of it all with a couple of days worth of films that are really personal to me.”

    A few days after our interview, I send him an email in search of some extra information and ask how the screening at the Elephant and Castle went. Three films were shown that apparently hadn’t found a niche elsewhere: Too Hot to Handle, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie; it was attended by just four people, three of whom were a part of the project and the other a lone outsider.

    “It was like a wake for a certain kind of cinema,” he writes back, in typically brilliant fashion.  

    www.barbican.org.uk/film/series.asp?ID=1364

  • Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat review

    Still from La Jetee (1962) by Chris Marker
    Still from La Jetee (1962) by Chris Marker

    Blending fiction and reality with a punch of politics and a twist of time travel, Chris Marker’s images, be they filmed, frozen, multiplied or computer-generated, are as rich and potent as they are disorientating.

    A pioneer of the documentary essay and one of those rare visual artists revered as a poet, philosopher and filmmaker in equal measure, Marker was a figure synonymous with mystery and provocation. But even in the darkest, most obscure corner of his remarkable portfolio there lies clarity.

    An extensive collection assembled from his kaleidoscopic body of work is currently on show at the Whitechapel Gallery. Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat offers a nourishing journey through the latter half of the twentieth century via the mind of a true multi-media visionary.

    Before his death in 2012, aged 91, the wildly creative Jack-of-all-trades had turned his probing lens to a plethora of subjects, including war, revolution,travel, artefact and history. Here, all are laid bare and dissected with clinical precision behind Marker’s signature veil of ambiguity.

    On entering through the gallery’s heavy double doors, the trail leads past a wall of introductory prints, down a thin corridor and into a dark room ablaze with a fizzing myriad of television screens – “memory boxes” as Marker once called them.

    The surreal images vary from the mundane to the deeply unsettling, flickering below the noise of an intriguing interview in nightmarish fashion. It’s a captivating start.

    Central to the exhibition is the selection of Marker’s classic films projected onto screens that hang from the ceilings, including: the beautiful Statues Also Die; a mesmerising sequence from San Soleil; Le Joli Mai; and, if you have the time, a stripped-back, 180-minute showing of the epic title feature, A Grin Without a Cat.

    Of particular note is La Jetée, a spiralling sci-fi photo-roman addressing themes of time and memory,birth verses death, the mobile and immobile image,and the history of place and cinema. Just as complex as it sounds, it’s a quiet masterpiece that rocks to a gentle rhythm before descending gradually towards a turbulent finale.

    That Terry Gilliam found inspiration for 12 Monkeys in the 27-minute gem, with Werner Herzog’s The Wild Blue Yonder of no distant relation, speaks volumes of Marker’s sprawling influence.

    Walking through the ground floor space, it’s hard to miss the overlapping quality of the work on show. It’s somehow appropriate that the sound of one installation momentarily eclipses that of another. The pieces feed off their neighbours, producing a shambolic harmony akin to Marker’s own fragmented style.

    The deft arrangement evokes a loose line from one of his many seminal works of experimental cinema: “Don’t patch up a broken crystal,” someone – perhaps from the future – warns.

    While the extended films are the highlight of the show, the clusters of still images that pepper the walls are of no small interest; they are complimented significantly by the words pasted beside them: “In another time I guess I would have been content with filming girls and cats. But you don’t choose your time.”

    Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat tears right through Marker’s time, driven by his will to locate and relocate the boundaries of artistic endeavour. The exhibition revolves around two ever-pressing questions: where have we come from and where are we going? It is, dare I say, a memorable experience.

    Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat is at the Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX until 22 June

     

  • Calvary review – ‘An incisive, thrilling and original piece of work’

    Brendon Gleeson and Kelly in Calvary
    Kelly Reilly and Brendon Gleeson in Calvary

    John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary is at once raging and solemn. It rushes back and forth between the two states to dizzying effect, washing through its 101 minutes like the crashing waves of Ireland’s west coast sea, on which the film’s central, and sinful, parish rests. It’s a darkly comic musing on the fragmentation of an uprooted society and its most famous – or infamous – institution, the Catholic church. For all its splendour, though, there is something amiss, something distinctly Irish.

    The film opens to a shadowy confession-box exchange between Brendan Gleeson’s Father James Lavelle and a troubled parishioner, who promises to kill the good priest in vengeance for the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. He gives Lavelle a week to put his things in order before a high noon-style showdown on the waterfront. “Killing a priest on a Sunday,” he says –  “that’ll be a good one.”

    The early scenes often slide into stunning overhead shots of County Sligo, evoking something of Ireland’s champion of religious critique, novelist John McGahern, who was born in the adjacent County Leitrim and would set many of his bruising portraits of rural-Catholic life in the wilds of the bordering Roscommon. It’s an evocation that I couldn’t shake off for the entire film, doing McDonagh something of a disservice.

    A striking difference between the director and McGahern lies in the latter’s tender handling of a fading way of life. Despite the scathing nature of his work, the author would delicately lament the loss of elements of the farming communities of which he wrote. It’s not that McDonagh’s work is off the mark in turning its back on local identity, it’s that there is too little of McGahern’s fascinating Ireland left for my liking, beyond the rolling hills and tattered reputation of the ailing church.

    This is perhaps the result of the 20-plus years that have passed since the author’s thumping Amongst Women was nominated for the Booker Prize, with the generational shift leaving too little of that past to justifiably cling on to. Not one of McDonagh’s characters appears to belong, and while this is intentional, and affective in its own right, the absence of history leaves a gaping hole – for me anyway. The film’s gorgeous sounds and images suffer from a kind of hollowness as a result. Even Lavelle is an outsider, drafted onto the land that was once every bit a part of its inhabitants – for better or worse. The majority of Calvary’s figures are displaced and at a loss; it’s a bankruptcy that is a harsh but honest reflection of the times.

    This half criticism is based on a personal grievance and should take little away from the film’s considerable merit. Gleeson is sublime as the widower priest, who, to begin with, looks only mildly perturbed by the murderous threat hanging over his head. Recovering from alcohol addiction and offering counsel to his damaged visiting daughter – who, following her father’s departure for the priesthood, was left to deal with the loss of two parents in quick succession – the good shepherd continues to tend his wayward, eccentric and exasperating flock, knowing that one is the mysterious confessor set on spilling his blood.

    With a tongue as sharp as cheese wire, chewing hungrily on the nourishing dialogue, but softened by deep, compassionate gestures, it’s hard to think of Gleeson in better form. His composure as he marches on towards his reckoning is mightily impressive. It’s reminiscent of his turn in McDonagh’s brother Martin’s comic gem, In Bruges; I half expected Colin Farrell or Ralph Fiennes to pop up at any moment as the would-be killer.

    Overall, McDonagh has plumped for and executed something that is effective almost to a fault. While I can’t help wonder if it would work better on the stage, there is no denying that Calvary is an incisive, thrilling and original piece of work. Packed with an abundance of distinct and amusing characters, coupled with penetrating insight, it might just be the best McDonagh film, and that’s saying something. I’ll have to watch it again and see – with McGahern stashed away on the bottom shelf for good measure.

    Calvary is showing at the Barbican Cinema, Beech Street, EC2Y 8AE until 24 April. 

  • Interview: ‘It’s much easier to build resentment on the care system than on your parents’

    Jenny Molloy (left) with her daughter (right) and granddaughter (centre). Photograph courtesy of Jenny Molloy
    Jenny Molloy (left) with her daughter (right) and granddaughter (centre). Photograph courtesy of Jenny Molloy

    “Most kids in care do want to write their story,” says Jenny Molloy, author of Hackney Child. “I think it’s because when you’re in care everything is written about you, you’re not really allowed to read any of it and you’ve got no control.”

    It’s Saturday afternoon. Over the crackling phone line Jenny sounds bright, cheerful and very much in control. Since the publication of the first part of her memoir, which recounts in stark detail a childhood wracked by poverty and neglect, life has changed dramatically for the former project manager.

    As well as enjoying a spell in the Sunday Times Bestseller List, the book is on sale in Tesco, Smiths and Waterstones, and has proved a popular choice with Amazon shoppers. With such success Jenny has found herself somewhat in demand.

    “I was so inundated with requests from social workers and ministers and all sorts of people to come and help them improve the care system that I gave up my job,” she says. “Now I’m a consultant in the care world.”

    Over the past few months, she has been working with both the children’s minister’s office and Ofsted, sharing her considerable expertise to help support vulnerable children.

    It would be nigh on impossible to question her suitability for the role. At just nine years old she arrived at Stoke Newington Police Station with her two younger brothers, demanding to see their social worker. She had decided it was no longer safe to live at home. Jenny spent much of the remainder of her childhood in care.

    This bold and courageous move took place the morning after a mob of angry neighbours attacked their family home with missiles and graffiti, in response to the news that Jenny’s mother had been working as a prostitute. What the group did not seem to know was that the children were home alone at the time.

    “It’s funny, we were never asked about that night the whole time that we were in care. It was never resolved in any of us really,” she explains.

    While it seems absurd that such a severe trauma should be left untouched, Jenny is reluctant to criticise the care she received. In fact she is remarkably positive about a system in which she found warmth, comfort and solace.

    “I’ve had such serious backlash from so many people about me saying the care system was a positive thing for me,” she says.

    “The people that put round the bad stories are generally people who’ve either lost their kids or had a real terrible time, but a lot of the terrible times are to do with your childhood rather than being in care, if that makes sense. You know, you confuse the two and it’s much easier to build resentment on the care system than it is on your parents.”

    Jenny’s relationship with her own parents is complex. Contrary to what we might expect from this kind of story, there was always love, particularly from her alcoholic father, who died a few years ago.

    “With my dad, he constantly tried,” she explains. “There was never a point that my dad gave up trying to see us kids and trying to show us in his own way that he loved us. But his addiction was so serious.”

    As an adult Jenny has had the chance to browse her social services files, keen to learn about her history and get to grips with the story over which she had no control. It was in these documents that she learnt both her parents had been brought up in care, themselves the victims of terrible neglect. This commonality has helped her on the road to forgiveness.

    “They had hidden their own childhoods and all that shame and guilt and abandonment that was going on within them,” she says. “They never had any joy in their lives that I saw.”

    Despite the empathy she now feels, Jenny has decided not to see her mother anymore and does not know if she has read or is even aware of the book.

    Keeping care a secret is something to which the author can strongly relate. She originally wrote Hackney Child under the pseudonym Hope Daniels – on the suggestion of a social worker with whom she is still in touch.

    “The reason why I had a pen name was because I was never actually going to be doing any of this, no one was ever going to know I was behind Hackney Child,” she says. “I’d kept it a secret for all of my adult life from the majority of people I knew, including my kids.”

    But in writing the book, she has found the confidence to identify herself as a care leaver.

    “The thing that I learnt was that actually I’m all right. I’m not that kind of horrible person – I’m an all right person. I’m caring, I’m quite generous, I’m empathetic – all the things that the social workers were to me I’ve carried into adulthood. I would never have been able to describe those sorts of assets to you before the book.”

    Jenny explains that she began the book having entered recovery for alcohol addiction five years ago. It was there that she started to process what had happened to her as a child and embarked on the therapeutic journey of writing about her life. What she has produced as a result is honest, unpretentious and shocking.

    The often-horrifying memories on which she draws are interspersed with rare but poignant moments of gentle joy. She reflects on the kindness she found in the Hackney community of the late seventies and early eighties.

    “I remember having different people that I could go to at all different times, whether it was a lovely, kind person in the library up Church Street or someone in the fire station club. It didn’t matter where we went, we always had adults that were kind to us, that knew us, that took the time to get to know us.”

    But returning to Hackney has proved difficult. Jenny moved away soon after leaving care to start afresh and has since struggled with the place where she grew up.

    “It’s almost like that life happened to someone else. Thankfully, my life now is so far removed from any connection to our childhood that it really does feel like a different world.

    “When I go back to Hackney, in particular Stoke Newington, anywhere I look there are memories of my parents, of things that happened,” she explains. “But it’s a really complex feeling because when I go back there I feel like I’m home, but then I don’t want to be there.”

    Writing Hackney Child seems to have marked a turning point in this already successful care leaver’s life.

    “I’ve found acceptance, I’ve found forgiveness,” she says. “I’ve found all of these things that I never even considered before. I just thought that was my life – I’ve got all these horrible things from it and I’ve just got to accept that my life is going to be a little bit crap, but actually it’s not.”

    Hackney Child is published by Simon & Schuster UK. RRP: £6.99. ISBN: 9781471129834. Jenny’s next book is due to be published in July.