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The Darklight
Festival: Or, how to spend 12 straight hours in a cinema and
not go crazy
Reeling from the sustained effects of persistence
of vision, Aidan Beatty reports from a marathon viewing session
at the Darklight festival 2006.
With films on show from Spain, Finland, England and America
there was an enjoyable international feel to this programme.
Crooked Mick, a surreal mix of live-action and digital
animation set in the Australian outback stood out as one of
the more memorable pieces. But as was to be expected, Irish
films predominated. Marian 98 Cork St, a profile of
a Romanian boy (the eponymous Marian), and Don't Try This
at Home!, a cruel presentation of all the novel ways to
torture earthworms, were the more memorable homegrown offerings.
The programme of political films was somewhat uneven; some
of the views expressed had a tendency towards simplification
or just a basic lack of knowledge. Though obviously it wasn't
all bad, Collision Petroleum Pipeline used a slick
mix of digital animation and harsh, fast-paced electronic
music to create an uninviting industrial landscape filled
with various power lines and pipelines while Ligne Verte
was an excellent comment on the controversial Israeli 'security
wall' in the West Bank. Many of the other entries did err
towards that dread construct 'Video Art' – the kind of
work for which an art gallery rather than a cinema often seems
a more appropriate setting.
The short documentaries were also a mixed bag. Some, such
as Walk and Consume, it would be a stretch to
define as documentaries. Work such as All Songs Cast Long
Shadows, a musical travelogue through the Islamic Republic
of Iran, and Martyr Myths, a selection of interviews
with ex-terrorists in Ulster, were more conventional in their
subject matter, albeit with the ubiquitous digital trickery.
The Day it Rained Sweets, from the Dogmedia video collective,
was the tale of a group of Dublin pranksters who handed out
free sweets to school children in Clondalkin, all the time
knowing they would be labeled suspected pedophiles by moralists
at the Evening Herald. A suitably light-hearted conclusion
to the documentary proceedings
The political tone of much of Saturday afternoon's screenings
segued nicely into Palestinian director Khaled Abu Ajamia's
From Hell to Heaven. In a briskly paced hour the documentary
profiled the life of a 17-year old would-be suicide bomber
girl, intercut with scenes of the abject destruction and violence
that the forty-year Israeli occupation has visited on the
refugee camps of the West Bank. In his personal introduction
to the film, Abu Ajamia asserted his intention to make an
impartial work on the conflict. The absence of any Israeli
perspectives, any context to the Israeli actions whose brutal
consequences we see in shocking close-up detail, and the frequent
inconsistencies in the polemics of our young protagonist would
either belie this claim or merely suggest that the director
is just wearing his political heart on his sleeve – which
is hardly a bad thing.
After so much earnest political work, the late show, Jan Svankmajer's
Lunacy, seemed like it would be a welcome relief. Having
only seen his last film Little Otik, I laboured under
the misapprehension that this would be a similarly playful
dark comedy. Opening with a monologue from Svankmajer himself,
we're informed that 'Ladies and Gentlemen, the film you are
about to watch is a horror film, with all the vileness and
degeneracy attendant to the genre. This is not a work of art',
though I still thought I knew what to expect. The main plot
concerns a man named Jean Bollet, a mentally troubled wayward
traveler in 1850s France who has the misfortune to fall in
with 'The Marquis', a Sade-type figure. One night Jean happens
to see The Marquis in a blasphemous orgy involving four men,
three women, a cream-filled chocolate cake, a giant crucifix,
and a large bucket of nails. Disgusted, he confronts The Marquis
the next morning about his heretical tendencies only for The
Marquis to choke to death on his breakfast, which Jean takes
as a sign of God's wrath. He and the butler bury The Marquis
in the family vault only to find him alive and well the next
day, the whole event being one of the Marquis' many cruel
practical jokes. That night Jean has a violent recurring dream
that always strikes at times of great stress in his life.
The Marquis tells him he has a solution for this problem and
brings Jean to a nearby lunatic asylum where the inmates have
complete freedom, all of which has shades of Herzog's Even
Dwarves Started Small, even down to the near constant
defenestration of chickens (there's a phrase you don't get
to use often enough). Bollet learns that the director of the
asylum is actually a lunatic himself, the real director and
his orderlies having been tarred and feathered and locked
in the basement a year previously. As The Marquis and the
mad-director use lunatics to recreate a real-life tableaux
of Delacroix's La Liberté guidant le peuple
as a celebration of the one-year anniversary of their taking
of the asylum, Jean sets out to free the real director and
restore order. Although, as is to be expected, nothing goes
as he plans. All of this is inter-cut with a second plot;
stop-motion animation of a gang of sirloin steaks whose hi-jinks
mirror the main plot.
Underneath all of this is a cogent political commentary. The
various methods of controlling lunatics employed in the film
unfolds into allegories on how societies are controlled by
various classes of governmental rule. Something like Brian
Yuzna's Society, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò
or Lindsay Anderson's If… would be a good
point of reference. All of which meant that Temple Bar at
1am seemed slightly less surreal as I left the IFI and made
my way to the nitelink.
www.darklight-filmfestival.com
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