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MostlyFilm

“A Blog Mostly About Film”

Monthly Archives: January 2012

31/01/12 Going Loco at the BFI Southbank

by Phil Concannon January is a dismal month. Grey skies, biting winds and post-Christmas debts tend to darken the mood for the majority of us, but this weekend LoCo – a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to supporting comedy filmmaking – did its best to raise spirits with the inaugural LoCo Comedy Film Festival at the BFI [...]

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30/01/12 Lis Rhodes: Dissonance and Disturbance

by Ann Jones Lis Rhodes isn’t an easy artist to write about. That the exhibition Dissonance and Disturbance at the ICA represents her forty-year career in seven films doesn’t help. There is a world of difference between the abstraction and pattern of Dresden Dynamo, Rhodes’s 1972 cameraless film in which sound and image come from [...]

27/01/12 Mostly Links

by Susan Patterson This week Mostly Links, like everyone else, is pondering the Oscars nominees.  The Catalans are consoling themselves over their disappointment that Pa Negre (Black Bread) didn’t make it into the final five for Best Foreign Language Film, with the two nominations they did get.

26/01/12 Nine Muses

by Ann Jones That it’s hard to know where to begin writing about John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses is illustrated by the fact that this is my fifth, or is it sixth, attempt at an opening paragraph. And that’s just the ones I’ve actually typed; there are several more rattling around in my head. And [...]

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25/01/12 Monoglot Movie Club: The Dutch Angle

by Spank The Monkey   Here’s a scenario that’s been played out in several locations over the last decade. I walk into a cinema in country X, and say to the box office attendant “I’d like a ticket for Y, please.” In that previous sentence, X is a non-English speaking country, Y is the title [...]

24/01/12 ‘People Do Not Sing When They Are Feeling Sensible.’

Lissy Lovett:  I go to the theatre quite a bit, maybe once or twice a week on average.  I’m lucky enough to see a lot of different kinds of things, Big West End musicals, straight plays in the subsidised sector, fringe productions, but I have only ever been to the opera twice.  Once was to [...]

23/01/12 Coriolanus

by Uncle Frank Filming Shakespeare successfully is a bit of a trick, especially if you want to reach an audience who would normally run screaming from the idea of watching a 16th century play in a theatre. Not only do you face the challenge of transferring a work from one medium to another, but of [...]

20/01/12 Birdsong

BY JOSEPHINE GRAHL It’s now almost twenty years since Sebastian Faulks’s novel Birdsong was first published and it comes as something of a surprise to realise that it has never yet been brought to the screen. It seems like a tale that’s ripe for adaptation, with its potent combination of passionate sex, the horror of [...]

19/01/12 L’Atalante at the BFI

by Indy Datta Jean Vigo turned in the first rough cut of L’Atalante from his deathbed: over the gruelling winter location shoot the young film maker – already frail, tubercular – had fallen fatally ill with pneumonia and septicaemia. He would do no further work on the film, or ever see it again, and would [...]

18/01/12 I Don’t Like Loose Ends: Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire

By Niall Anderson The first problem with auteur theory is that it made everyone want to be an auteur. The second is that auteurism made versatility a matter of special regard, rather than an essential part of a director’s make-up. As auteurism took hold in the 70s, the salaried DIY wizards of Hollywood’s middle years [...]

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