Glasgow Film Festival 2010
Sounding off The Glasgow Music and Film Festival is a forum for some fiery disagreements, as well as some beautiful collaborations. Jonny Ensall quizzes the key players
Tokyo Stories
Paul Dale picks the best from Departures, this year’s Japanese film strand
Every year the Glasgow Film Festival focuses in on the cinema of a country or region where new voices are emerging. This year’s world cinema strand docks at the land of the rising sun with Departures: New Japanese Cinema. Taking its name from Yojiro Takita’s morbidly enjoyable 2009 Academy Award-winning recession comedy it’s certainly a good time to turn our gaze east, where an ongoing economic collapse seems to have done little to dint the Japanese artistic spirit.
Yet it says a lot that amongst this selection, by far the most interesting are remakes. Locally popular filmmaker Isshin Inudou reworking of Seicho Matsumoto’s celebrated crime thriller Zero Focus (and earlier 1961 film adaptation) reminds us that real Hitchcocks can only come from messed up little islands. Takeshi Miike’s Yatterman (pictured, above) continues his usual perversions with an adaptation of 1970s television anime and Island of Dreams is a direct remake of a 1951 Nikkatsu film noir. Like Hindi cinema, Japan now seems to be remaking its greatest hits from a time when the only agenda was hope and reconstruction.
So let’s cut the chase, if you have only the time or the money to see one Japanese film at the festival, go properly retro and see Akira Kurosawa’s Ran. Made in 1985, it is the master’s epic take on Shakespeare’s King Lear. Misguided trust and economic ruin have seldom been better portrayed. ■ Ran, Cineworld Renfrew Street, 6pm, Fri 26 Feb and 12.30pm, Sat 27 Feb.
The Music and Film Festival is a strange beast, full of contradictions and tangents that threaten to pull apart its coherence, but ultimately make it the most exciting strand of this year’s Glasgow Film Festival. Co- curated by the Arches, and featuring Mogwai and Thomas Truax among others, the organisers have put together a programme of screenings and live performances that explore the screen and sound relationship in its seemingly endless variations.
Enter Zombie Zombie, the pair of Parisian analogue synth enthusiasts whose debt to the eerie tones of John Carpenter’s films will be acknowledged in a live performance of the director/composer’s film scores, including music for The Thing, Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13. ‘He uses the same instruments as we do, all analogue synths and analogue delay, so it’s pretty easy to get close to the same sound’, explains Zombie Zombie’s Cosmic Neman (real name Neman Herman Düne). ‘We’ve got this delay pedal called the Space Echo. When you put anything through this machine –
like a scream – it makes it ten times more frightening. That’s how they do the crazy shit in horror movies.’
Düne’s homage is ultimately joyful – ‘We just want to make everyone happy’ he says – however Cleveland avant-garage band Pere Ubu will explore a darker strain of the relationship between audience and image in their performance, Long Live Pere Ubu! The Spectacle. ‘You know they have a thing down here in Brighton called the Everything Sandwich,’ says the band’s, now UK-based, frontman David Thomas. ‘That’s sort of what this is. We have the animations from the Quay Brothers, which run constantly, and most of those we synch our live playing to, because they’re all planned out that way, and everybody in the band acts as particular characters, leaving their instruments at various points, taking up dramatic roles as it were; slipping in and out of character; doing the dance routines and various other bits of choreography. basically and
It’s the
MUSIC & FILM GALA
OUT OF THE PAST BEST OF BRITISH
1234 L’Affaire Farewell
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman Down Terrace
GALA Whip It!
One for the dreamers, Giles Borg’s debut feature casts the trials and tribulations of band formation in a wryly amusing light. A charming British feature as part of the excellent Music and Film Festival. GFT, 8.30pm, Wed 24 Feb. Complex, compelling and moving political thriller detailing the real life 1981 espionage case which triggered perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union. Cineworld Renfrew Street, 8.45pm, Wed 24 Feb and 6.15pm, Thu 25 Feb.
Rare cinema screening of wonderfully lush 1950 romantic fantasy starring Ava Gardner and James Mason. Feel the awesome power of Technicolour. GFT, 3.30pm, Thu 25 Feb.
Low budget, blackly comic drama about a paranoid ex- con father and son at odds with the truth about who and what landed them in the clink Impressive debut feature from Ben Wheatley. GFT, 6pm, Thu 25 Feb. Roller girls are go in Drew Barrymore’s gutsy directorial debut. Ellen Page, Juliette Lewis and Marcia Gay Harden are part of an impressive ensemble cast. Cineworld Renfrew Street, 6.30pm, Fri 26 Feb and 3.30pm, Sat 27 Feb.
26 THE LIST 18 Feb–4 Mar 2010