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An
A-Z of Low and Micro Inspiration
Tony
Keily proposes a viewing list for anyone venturing into
the world of creative/innovative filmmaking on modest budgets.
[Extract]
Next
person tells me that Irish Film is dead, I swear I'll give
them London Punk's reaction to the demise of the King: "Oh
good!" 2002 is being seen by some as a lull, an industrial
downturn. But we might hope that it signals the beginning
of something new, a handy line to draw under Irish Film Mark
II. As Ruth Lysaght ponts out elsewhere in this issue, "a
distinctive Irish film style ... indeed, a greater confidence
with the medium ... has yet to evolve." In other words,
although there are many Irish films, there is still no sign
of anything we could call Irish Cinema. One of the reasons
why Irish films rarely go beyond the quite good, and have
never to date achieved excellence, is because the graffiti
grazed into their glass ceilings usually read 'competence':
look, we can make films too. Big deal.Too few filmmakers in
Ireland seem to live and breathe film, or show enthusiasm
not for deals, schemes or awards, but for what they've seen
on the screen. Which is where it starts and finishes. The
greater confidence referred to above will only come when people
stop watching themselves and what they're doing and start
watching films. After that they'll have to assume competence
and make that (possibly ruinous) plunge. I've seen real confidence
only once on the Irish screen in recent times, and that was
in a horror short.
What follows is a viewing list compiled quickly and unscientifically
with the aim of inspiring anyone venturing into the low and
micro-budget field. Obviously it's personal. Gaps yawn, but
that was the effect the thought of another entry on Cassavetes
or Clerks had on me too. Stranger Than Paradise
did slip in, but you have to have no heart to leave it out.
Godard got in on the technology thing. There's a preponderance
of the new. The emphasis is on the personal and anti-mainstream,
and on what producer Liam O'Neill (see FI 88) calls "turning"
genre (though horror in general is being saved for anothert
time), in the belief that there is a future here in Europe
for distinctive cinema made on modest budgets.
This is early enough Fassbinder that the glossy PVs haven't
yet kicked in. In fact, it's an outrageously ugly film, shot
in ugly locations using mostly very ugly actors (including
Fassbinder). The tale of a love affair (re-working Sirk's
All that Heaven Allows) between an ageing German woman
and a young arab (El Hedi Ben Salem, Fassbinder's lover and
a non-professional actor), it's an excessive, funny, diffcult,
overwrought, extremely melodramatic portrait of what might
be called Alltagsfaschismus: the fascism of ordinary
life (see in this regard, Show Me Love). When total
melodrama's married to kitsch and money, you get the overrated
cooings of Almodovar. When it's marriued to a low budegt and
corrosive social analysis, you may get wonders. Try retelling
His Kind of Woman in the docklands of Drogheda, starring
the INLA. You never know.
One
the most accomplished film ever made in Ireland (see FI 85),
this is political cinema at its best. Paul Greengrass's use
of reportage style to film action scenes is especially memorable.
His supression of personal stories and sentiments (countering
a tendency that has wreaked creative havoc in so many irish
films) in the search for the larger shape of events is brave
and successful.The desaturated visuals, fades to black, uninvolved
camera positions and jarring editing are extremely reminiscent
of another admirable piece of political filmmaking, Mark Levin's
Slam (1998), a portrayal of a black poet's struggle
to survive in contemporary urban America.
Godard
meets MTV in fast food settings.The film that launched Wong-Kar
Wai worldwide as the coolest filmmaker alive (see FI 79).
Legend has it CE was shot for relaxation mainly at night during
a six-week break in the production of WKW's massive and lavish
Ashes of Time saga. A relatively shoestring budget
was raised on the back of the fact that the stars were pop
idols and models. A script? Who needs one. A plot that seems
to go anywhere it feels like, tailed by handheld camera shooting
low-light stock. Main characters who eat, smoke, flirt, talk
rubbish. "California Dreamin" played 9000 times,
and the Cranberries in Cantonese played once. WKW followed
this up with the even more exhilerating Fallen Angels
(1997). Imitate at your peril. Even Chris Doyle, responsible
for the bravura camerawork, was quite unable to reproduce
the magic in his own Away with Words (1999).
Another
case of locations generating movies, here free-form, with
8mm inserts. Alain Tanner chooses Lisbon as an unforgetable
backdrop to the mental disintegration of beached seaman Bruno
Ganz. Tanner's strangely fogotten oddball Irish outing Light
Years Away (1981) again uses both the Wicklow mountains
and Dublin's (then) decaying North Inner City to great effect.
Still
the best example of a film which actively maps out a DV aesthetic
for itself (See FI 86, pp 20-21 on three approaches to DV).
These scenes wear their pixels like medals. It's been commented
too often that Festen is essentially a classic big-house
drama, crying out to be shot on 35mm (even the cast demands
this). This is precisely why its being shot on the smallest
technology available made it revolutionary. Apart from DoP
Dodd Mantle's distortive visual experiments, especially during
the transfer process, there are the effects that the format
had on the narrative process (a sort of compression and acceleration
of all developing situations, sometimes to the point of hysteria),
and the re-definition of the production space deriving from
the tiny size of the camera and crew. All too few films have
bothered to engage creatively with the visual potential of
the new technology. Ireland's own November Afternoon
(1996, John Carney, Tom Hall) is one of them.
The
full text of this article is printed in Film Ireland
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