The day after I returned from London, I was straight into more films, thanks to the Darklight Symposium, a sort of mini-festival now occuring inbetween the Darklight Festival’s main programme every other year. I’d never really engaged with Darklight before the symposium, mainly due to the impression that they were focused exclusively on digital media to an unproductive degree—but this weekend boasted a very impressive lineup that was not at all restricted to digitial content. Most impressive was the focus on older Irish cinema: three of our most important First Wave filmmakers—Joe Comerford, Pat Murphy and Vivienne Dick—had films showing over the weekend.
I missed Murphy’s and Comerford’s films (as well as the wide range of workshops and panel discussions that took place), but caught the three-film mini-retrospective of Dick’s work curated by Maeve Connolly. While a longer programme would have been desirable, the three chosen films—GUÉRILLIÉRE TALKS (1978), VISIBILITY MODERATE (1981) and SKINNY LITTLE MAN ATTACKS DADDY (1994)—were actually excellent choices, forming a cogent trilogy that showed the progression of Dick’s work from her beginnings in the New York “No Wave” scene through to her return to Ireland and transition to working on video. GUÉRILLIÉRE TALKS is one of the great avant-garde portrait films, a series of seven unedited Super 8 rolls each documenting a different woman. VISIBILITY MODERATE is an insane tour-de-force trek through the eccentricity and hysteria of 1980s rural Ireland, using audio clips from Irish ads and weather forecasts to painfully funny effect. SKINNY LITTLE MAN ATTACKS DADDY, the only of her video works shown, is a more subdued and formal work, owing both to the shift in medium and a more directly personal focus, focusing on her relationship with her family. The work was also accompanied by an excerpt from Fergus Daly’s landmark documentary, EXPERIMENTAL CONVERSATIONS (2006) in which Dick features (and which, as far as I know, Maximilian le Cain has been the only one to write at length about).
The other highlight of the symposium was the double bill screening of Michael Snow’s WAVELENGTH (1967, pictured above) and Hollis Frampton’s ZORNS LEMMA (1970). The films, curated by Esperanza Collado, were paired together as seminal examples of structuralist/materialist cinema and, like Morata’s programme, were positioned as relevant precedents to new media art practices. I’ll be forced to grapple with Snow’s work in words when I get around to my Lucca report, so I think I’ll save my thoughts on WAVELENGTH till then. As for ZORNS LEMMA, it (kind of literally) speaks for itself, and if you can’t wait for a print to come your way, you can watch it online here. With regards to both, Collado said it best in her introduction: before you watch them, “forget everything” you thought cinema was supposed to be.
The accomplishments of Darklight may have delayed me from feeling the usual disappointment with Irish culture that comes when returning from somewhere as imaginatively rich as Berlin—but the Galway Film Fleadh made sure it kicked in eventually. I’ve attended the Fleadh for some six years now, and while they have showcased and played host to some some excellent directors over the years (Kiarostami, Roeg, Sokurov being the three I remember most fondly), their programming seems to be getting increasingly bland. While not yet at the mediocre level of the Dublin—sorry, Jameson—Film Festival (which just takes a range of new films, charges 10 euro and screens them in the same multiplex where many of them will end up playing on general release anyway), its programme this year was completely absent of the kind of curatorial imagination that made Darklight, or most of the events I attended in Berlin, so exciting.
The festival is, however, the industry one in Irish terms, and is always fascinating (if not exactly pleasant) as a litmus test in that sense. The three big things getting talked about this year: the astonishing and growing success of ONCE (2006, pictured above) in the States, the astonishing quality of Lenny Abrahamson’s new film GARAGE (2007), and, to a lesser extent, the astonishing amount of Irish films in the programme that weren’t bankrolled by the Irish Film Board.
A large portion of this year’s “Real Deal” seminar on film financing was dedicated to trying to work out what made ONCE work, and while lots of interesting points were made (one panellist’s concept of marketability—how easy a film is to market—and playability—how well a film plays to an audience—as the two primary, and often contradictory, factors in selling films was very smart, if a little scary), the consensus seemed to be, essentially, hard work + luck = ONCE; hard work + bad luck = everything else. It also doesn’t hurt that, like everybody’s favourite Irish short film, ONCE is also a very exact and hard-to-contrive mix of sincerity and familiarity, edginess and safety that seems to be the secret recipe for indie cinema success.
As for GARAGE, if it lacks that same balance, it’s no worse for it. Probably the first really mature Irish entry into the “cinema of small things” (in the sense I used the phrase when I wrote about Tom Noonan’s work), Abrahamson’s direction, O’Halloran’s script and Pat Shortt’s surprisingly understated performance manage to squeeze all the comedy and all the drama needed out of the tiniest things: a simple phrase, the way Shortt makes a sandwich or fixes a pipe or the way a thought flickers across his face. In these stakes, Abrahamson may not be a Tati or Noonan—at least not yet—but in the context of Irish cinema this is still something remarkable. Its depiction of rural Ireland as disconnected, emotionally stifling and expressively inert is all the more damning for not being remotely didactic or rhetorical, but merely the implicit effect of the accumulation of details.
As for all these new IFB-independent Irish features, they were mostly bunched into a one-day program entitled “Wild Cards”, which, I confess, I completely missed. So, whether this is our Mumblecore (Wafflecore?) or just more entries in the well-documented Irish tradition of country lads making action movies in their dad’s field, is still up for discussion. Judging from the brochure synopses, and the tandem piece on these guys in Film Ireland, I think it could go either way.
[...] ONCE is the most interesting case study because it’s such a small movie—but I was at a seminar at the Galway Film Fleadh discussing how it happened, and the conclusion seemed to be it was essentially a lucky accident. You can’t design for successes like that. [...]