A festival of silent film

The biggest misconception that people have about silent cinema is that it was silent. In fact, early cinema was never silent, as there would always be a musical accompanist present.

If you’ve had the chance to actually see silent films in this way then you’ll understand how wonderful it can be. It brings not just the films, but the whole era, to life, in a way thats difficult even for later cinema. It isn’t difficult to see why an audience in 1924 would enjoy silent film, because you’re enjoying it in the same way. Silent films stop being objects from an earlier, intangible past and become something that is current, a performance, something that engages with you.

If you’ve yet to experience silent films in this way, then this year’s British Silent Film Festival is a good place to start. It starts today and runs at the Barbican until Monday.

The use of sound and music in British silent cinema is the Festivals theme. It will be showing some of Britain’s best interwar silent films, many of which haven’t been screened since their original releases.

Musicians such as Neil Brand, Philip Carli, and John Sweeney will accompany the films, and there are a number of other presentations and events.

Highlights include the world premiere of the restored original score for Morozko, a Soviet film based on the Russian fairytale “Father Frost”; Yasujiro Ozu’s classic I Was Born, But…, and a lecture by Matthew Sweet from Radio 3’s Night Waves, on the stories behind the history of British silent cinema, and the role of gossip within it.

So long, farewell to 16mm film

The visual artist Tacita Dean wrote an interesting piece in the Guardian last week about Deluxe buying the London-based Soho Film Laboratory, and how as a result they will no longer be processing 16mm film. It’s worth a read. Dean focuses on the effect this will have on artists such as herself, but I’d argue that there’s another group that also thrives on 16mm: film students.

The appeal of digital for film schools is understandable: it’s cheaper for the course runners, and is easier to use for the students. Speaking as a former film student myself, the first 16mm films that one makes inevitably end up looking like bawdy British sex comedies from the 1970s. It’s depressing.

However, the value in 16mm is not in the picture quality (although it can look gorgeous, actually) but what’s gained from the process of using it. There’s a horrible sinking feeling that accompanies the knowledge that you have more footage left to film than stock left to film it with, and it’s one of the most valuable things a film student can learn. Not only does it force you to be economical, but it teaches you to be creative and decisive. What is the most efficient way of telling this story? How do you want to shoot it? These are things you can’t learn when it’s possible to leave the camera running all day.

If British Cinema in the 2020s is bloated and unwieldy then this decision by Deluxe can be pinpointed as its genesis. Dean has started a small campaign of letter-writing and has created an online petition; if you’re interested in signing, its online here.

Adult Life Skills: An interview with writer-director Rachel Tunnard

The protagonists of debut films sometimes resemble their creators, but in keeping with Rachel Tunnard's impassioned advocacy of collaboration, the editor-turned-director states that her lead character Anna in Adult Life Skills is a combination of herself and two of her actors, Jodie Whittaker and Rachael Deering. The inspiration for the film – a sensitive comedy-drama about a bereaved twin living in her mum's shed – came from a holiday the three friends took together in 2009, where they commiserated over how rarely they saw women like them believably represented on screen. While Rachel herself has never suffered such a loss, at 29 she found herself in a similar morass of late twenties confusion, moving back into her parents' house “like a bloody teenager.” The experience was one of many to feed into the screenplay: “There's lots of stuff in there that I've taken from different areas of my life,” she explains. “You patch them together until it feels like a cohesive world.” Ahead of its release in cinemas today, we spoke to Rachel about making the film.

Do you think Anna would be experiencing the same existential panic if she hadn't lost her twin? How much is her lack of direction tied to her grief?

I think if you're somebody who's creative you can have a little bit of a crisis around the end of your twenties. You might have done an artsy degree and you imagine that you're going to work in the arts and get an Oscar or whatever, and then suddenly you're 30 and it hasn't quite worked out the way you thought it was going to. Your parents are looking at you wondering is this ever really going to work out. Potentially Anna would have had an early mid-life crisis anyway, but I was interested in twin loss because it manifests itself differently to normal grief. It provokes an identity crisis and in my work I like to explore big existential ideas in a really lowbrow way.

Film production notes are usually very staid and formulaic, but the ones for Adult Life Skills are covered in irreverent annotations by you. They have the same handmade quality as Anna's various projects in the film. Where does that impulse come from?

It's how I present everything really, mainly because I can't use Photoshop. I draw stuff and then I take a photo and that's how I've always done it. As an editor you get sent statements by directors and I always find them really dry. But the main reason it came about is because the credits says “A film by Rachel Tunnard” and I completely hate it. All the way through the production I said I didn't want that credit, and in the end my agent pointed out that it was something her male clients actually ask for. It seemed really arrogant. Even though I've done loads of jobs on this it's a collaboration between so many different people. It's our film, so I wanted a chance to add the words “and everyone else.”

Are small creative endeavours a useful outlet when you're working on one large project like this film?

I just do all of that stuff without thinking about it. My husband and I write pep talks to each other which are nonsense, and I started doing this thing called Tunnard Tasks, where I made my mum, dad and brother do a task every month, like write a limerick. My parents begrudgingly do them when I ask but it's really interesting to see what my 68-year-old dad writes in a limerick about our house growing up. I can't stop it. The film is one part of that continual amalgamation of crap.

Before making Adult Life Skills you directed a short called Emotional Fusebox that you've described as being a “pilot” version of the film. How did it come about?

The Adult Life Skills script was getting some attention from the BFI and Creative England but I hadn't directed anything. They asked if I wanted to direct it and I said no, so they suggested all these other people and I kept saying I don't know, I don't know. Somebody told me if I didn't direct it then I had no right to complain about the fact that there are so few female film-makers, and they were right. But before we received the money to do the film I had to prove I was going to be able to direct it, so I wrote a short film based on the characters.

Was it a good exercise?

Absolutely, because I wasn't 100% sure I wanted to do it. I knew that I liked editing and writing, but I wasn't sure if I was going to enjoy directing. I'd never considered it before. Rachael Deering who plays Fiona in the film said it was like when we were at uni and used to make projects together, and I saw it a bit like that too. We were just going to make something and it could be shit or it could be alright, but we were going to have a go regardless.

So did you enjoy directing in the end?

Yes! I loved it. I felt very secure with the cast and the crew. I'd worked with a lot of them before and we were careful in trying to put a crew together that would all get on with each other. I was adamant that people had to be positive and friendly and have a good sense of humour, because low budget film-making is like going into battle. It's tough and you need to be surrounded by people who really care about it and want to do it. When we were making the selections for heads of department there was a pressure to choose the most experienced person we could possibly get, whereas I felt it was much more important to get the one who cared the most.

Did you find that making a low-budget film gave you more creative freedom? Was it important to have that sort of autonomy?

It depends on what you want to do. I'm in a relatively privileged position to have written, directed and edited a film, and what that means is that whether you like it or not it's got a distinctive style and feel. I'm not particularly interested in taking the big money and having no control – I'd much rather have less money and more creative freedom. But then I'd also really like a massive house with a water slide from my bedroom into a swimming pool.

Adult Life Skills is in cinemas now. You can read Jason's interview with its lead actor, Jodie Whittaker, in issue 31 of Oh Comely, also out now.

High Rise: An Interview with Director Ben Wheatley

After four decades of abortive attempts, J.G. Ballard's dystopic 1975 novel High Rise has finally made it to cinemas. Set in a near future that happens to be the 1970s,  the film depicts a luxury tower block as it becomes isolated and descends into savage factionalism. Amid a cast of morally ambiguous residents, the film's nominal protagonist is Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), a pragmatic survivor who is able to navigate intricate class loyalties and unafraid to eat dogs when he needs to.

One of the main reasons that Ballard has proved resistant to cinematic adaptation is that his formally inventive prose is so idiosyncratic that it requires an equally distinctive film-maker to successfully translate it. In the case of High-Rise, it required two: director Ben Wheatley and screenwriter Amy Jump, the husband and wife team behind Sightseers, Kill List and A Field in England, who are among Britain's most promising and ambitiously imaginative film-makers. Ahead of High-Rise's release, we spoke to Ben about his work on the film and having faith in his own voice.

High-Rise is often deliberately disorientating. How did you strive to get the tone?

It's kind of a taste thing and it's also intuition, how you make it all balance out. There was a lot of watching the movie again and again. During the six months that we cut the film, it was assembled within two months and the rest of the time we watched it every day, editing for thirteen, fourteen hours at a time. Every little change rippled up the whole movie, so we couldn't really alter anything without watching it all. That's a bastard on something that's two hours long, but it was the only way. We created the tone frame by frame across the whole running time.

It must be difficult to get critical distance at that point. When you've been working on a movie for years and you're watching it every day, how do you know what's right for it?

Because that's the job, you know? There are ways of working where you throw yourself at the mercy of groups of people and surrender your authorship, but I can't imagine ever working like that. There's two of us editing it, Amy and I, and she's written it as well, so there's enough oversight that that wouldn't happened. Amy is particularly ferocious when it comes to cutting. She'll strip it down and strip it down until it's as hard as a diamond. And then when we're happy with it ourselves, that's when we stop.

On a film like High-Rise everyone can have an opinion on what they'd change, but that doesn't necessarily make the film better, it just makes it different. We wanted to make sure that the translation of our taste and our decisions to the screen was as unfettered as possible. Where things go wrong is if you start taking on other people's ideas: even if in the moment they might be right, by the time you get to the end your film is slightly fucked because it doesn't have a proper viewpoint. It needs one voice, for better or for worse. We stand by ours, and it might not be to everybody's taste but that's just tough. If you feel too afraid and try to double guess what the audience are going to want then you've already lost. You've got to assume that the audience is within you. What you're doing as a creator is producing stuff that you want to see and then making the assumption that others will feel the same way.

The residents of the tower block all have very different objectives, so are we supposed to identify with certain people and not others? How much sympathy do you wish for the audience to have for the characters?

I'd like to think that I'm even-handed. That's important, as part of the emotional realism of a film is that the director isn't short-changing the characters and setting them up to fail. Audiences can detect that really quickly, and life isn't like that because everyone has shades of grey. One character commits an awful act later in the film, but at the same time he's a human being and though he does despicable, terrible things it doesn't necessarily mean that everything he's ever done is despicable and terrible. It's very safe to imagine that people who do bad things are evil, and I don't think that's true.

Other than the change in mediums, the most significant difference is perhaps that book takes place in the 1970s, while the film is set there. What interested you about that?

That's true, but then the book is also a predictive fiction to the near future. It was written in about 1974, so it's predicting somewhere between 1978 and 1983. We made the decision to not do the same and set it in our near future because too much of the technology would break the central core of the book. Social media totally destroys the idea of being able to hide away in a tower block somewhere going crazy because everyone would know about it.

We thought it was a look from our perspective of being born in the 1970s, knowing that our parents would have been like these characters, around the same age. At this point we're in the far future ahead of the story looking back, so we have an insight into what happens after its events. It's almost like we're reaching back from the future to join the book, and from that position is where the film exists.

High-Rise is in cinemas now. Images: Optimum Screenings.

Film Interview: Nina Forever

Nina Forever is constructed around a single elegant metaphor. Depressed supermarket employee Rob (Cian Barry), still mourning the death of his girlfriend, begins an uncertain relationship with his co-worker Holly (Abigail Hardingham), but whenever they try to have sex Nina (Fiona O'Shaughnessy) comes back to life to harangue the couple. The internal is made physical: Rob's grief assumes physical form, and it's that of the loved one he's lost, appearing naked, bloody and sardonic at the symbolic event of him attempting to moving on

With its ambitious visual language and sensitive depiction of bereavement, Nina Forever is the striking feature debut of Chris and Ben Blaine. We spoke to the brothers about lost loves and the benefits of close collaboration. 

Bereavement is a sad, dramatic topic, but the film is also funny with horrific elements. Was it difficult to balance that tonally?

Chris Blaine: Not really. Partly it's a function of how we write, in a variety of different moods all at once, but I think it came out of our experience of grief. Often in films grief is the bit where you're sad and you look at the dead leaves and you go for a walk by yourself, and we both found that it was incredibly sad but also weirdly funny and terrifying. You have this strange embarrassment and almost magnetic sense of feeling everything all at once.

Ben Blaine: You also feel incredibly horny because you've lost someone and there's this big gap. So much of it is that presence of the person, their touch and their feel and their smell, so you've just got this desire and you kind of latch on to the next person that you see. I think Rob does that, where he's not jumping into this thing because he's thought about it, but because there's something deep within that craves the attention of someone else. He's lacking it from the person he really wants to still be there.

So many of Nina Forever's most crucial scenes take place during sex scenes that are using lots of practical effects. There's blood everywhere and the cast are all naked, and you're trying to tell an emotional story. How did you accomplish that?

BB: It was a challenge but one we knew we were getting into, and I think it was one of the things that excited us about making the film. We liked the idea of these scenes where the characters are totally honest and everything is absolutely stripped away both physically and emotionally. It was very difficult, that mixture of sex scenes with naked actors and the technical challenge of it all, but the emotions gave us something to steer us through. We could focus in on that, so we knew where our priorities were in the scenes. We knew that what really mattered was that the audience understands how these people are feeling, and as long as we were getting that we were on the right course.

As a film-making team how do you divide your labour? Do you do tasks together or do they naturally separate?

CB: In terms of writing we used to try to do individual passes of scripts, but we found that the best thing for us was to be in the same room and to talk about it constantly, and that's kind of how we do things all the way through to the edit. It's really liquid and it's not like there are assigned jobs. We slowly but surely we keep improving on each other's ideas because we're talking about the ideas rather than the words on the page.

BB: It's easy to fall in love with the way you've written something, and easy therefore to forget that no-one's going to see the script. The script is a blueprint and often not a particularly useful one, and so we find ways to talk about the ideas that we're actually going to put to the audience. Similarly that fluidity extends to the actors and the crew. It becomes a creative space for everybody who works with us, and anyone can come up with ideas.

That makes a lot of sense: the creative process starts as a conversation rather than the choices of a single person, and so it can easily expand.

CB: We really enjoy that. It's one of the things about film-making that's so great, the fact that you're working with loads of other people and it's not just you on your own. You've got a full cast and crew around you and crew who are all coming up with magical stuff and it makes the work and the experience so much better.

Nina Forever is available on DVD and Blu-ray from 22nd February. For a chance to win a copy courtesy of the Blaine Brothers, head over to our Facebook page and leave a comment on the post. The film will also screen at select cinemas throughout the month: https://www.ourscreen.com/film/nina-forever. 

Images: Fetch Publicity