Watershed's Head of Programme Mark Cosgrove visited the Tampere Film Festival in Finland during March 2006. Tampere Film Festival is the oldest and the biggest short film festival in Northern Europe. Mark was looking out the latest talent in short filmmaking for his role as Creative Director of Brief Encounters International Short Film Festival in Bristol. Below is Mark's diary written during the festival.
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Before heading to Tampere from Stansted I stop off in Cambridge to hear Prof Ian Christie give a lecture entitled 'Film as Modernitst Art'. Ian is giving The Slade public lectures on the 'Avant Garde: Film as the Art of the Future'. A statement I fully sign up to. The focus of this talk is Peter Wollen’s seminal 70s article 'The Two Avant Gardes' which mapped a trajectory for avant garde film practice and suggested a third way which combined the art based practice of say the New York 70s scene or British directors like Malcolm Le Grice with the political avant garde of eg. Jean Luc Godard. At that time Peter Wollen was working with Laura Mulvey - now established in the critical canon with her seminal essay on Visual Pleasure - on films which I guess they thought were examples of this third way. Ian screened examples of a range of work I hadn’t seen for sometime - Malcolm Le Grice’s exceptional 'Berlin Horse', Godard’s infuriating and provocative 'One plus One' featuring the rolling stones rehearsing Sympathy for the Devil amidst various Maoist interventions.
His talk takes me back to studying film in the early 80s where invocations of rupture between sign, signifier and signified all but seemed to eradicate the notion of pleasure from watching films. If that didn’t then Laura’s article made you (men certainly) think twice about the kind of pleasure they were getting from the screen. Those structuralist Marxists have something to answer for! Thank the lord for Roland Barthes and jouissance. But it struck me the importance of film writing and theory in the 70s and also the impact and importance then of the Edinburgh Film Festival as a forum for debate which the critical writing was generating. Directors such as Douglas Sirk, Max Ophuls, Sam Fuller were all reconsidered, rediscovered and championed amidst heady discussion (ps I wasn’t there, too young, just heard about it).
Going back to Ian’s lecture he ended by suggesting that a figure like Peter Greenaway perhaps was a lasting example of this third way in avant garde film practice. Greenaway is certainly feted much more in Europe and say Japan than he is in the UK. “Pretentious” usually about covers the UK response but he deals with film as part of the toolbox of artistic practice and not an end in itself – see his latest project The Tulse Luper Suitcases for further evidence. Ian also floated the idea of when does a film(maker) become art(ist) . Given that these touch on some of the debates we are looking at when the British Art Show comes to Bristol, I took the opportunity of asking Ian down to Bristol in July to discuss further.
Thoughts on watching Zorns Lemma - the text street signs run up in alphabetical order and riff in my brain conjuring up a mosaic of references, Captain Beefheart's great opening line Pachuco Cadaver on trout mask replica “A squid eating dough in a polyethelen bag is fast and bulbous. Got me.” shoots through my head as the word squid recurrently comes up. I enjoy the film better when it becomes more image based a kind of mathamatic poetry in the company of unsere afrika rise. The structuralist style was big influence on John Smith but I have to say his films like 'Associations' for me pulls off the same effect but in a richer way and also with a sense of humour - but maybe I’m being unfair. There is a cumulative pleasure in 'The Frampton'.
There is also a debate going through my mind about art and art for arts sake. I instinctively shirk at this slogan and feel that surely there has to be a social, cultural even political context. If you replace the word art with butter it becomes more interesting. Butter in and of itself is an interesting substance but put it with a piece of bread and a fried egg and it becomes a different proposition altogether.
Arrive in Tampere 11.00pm - its dark and its freezing minus 20! But its Tampere and it feels great.
It’s a reasonably early start, breakfast at 8.30am with Brief Encounters chief Sue Lion and press and PR guru Clare Wilford. Some familiar faces are around - that guy from that festival in Germany, that gal from that festival in Copenhagen. I must get better at remembering peoples names. The Tampere team have decided to keep festival programmers separate from filmmakers and we are in the rather grand Tammer Hotel whilst the filmmakers are at the equally grand – and taller – Hotel Ilves. Its probably a wise move as these things can get quite messy! Get registered at 9.30am and head for first screening at 10. And we start with a wonderfully strong programme. If this continues then we could be in for a vintage year. But lets keep that optimism in check. Its first screening of 11 International programmes. Three programmes later the Encounters team acknowledge we have some good stuff here.
Tampere is quite rightly described as the Manchester of Finland, if somewhat smaller and more delicately located on a river between two lakes. It has these wonderful Victorian style cotton mills - now repurposed for the modern age and filled with shops bars and cinemas. The Finlayson building is where the festival delegate centre is. Now Finlayson is not exactly a Finnish name and you will not be surprised to find out that it was set up by a mister James Finlayson, of Scotland. What exactly he was doing in this neck of the woods in the late 1800s is a bit of mystery but he did introduce the first light bulb in Finalnd. I later find out that Mr Finlayson was trading with the romanovs in nearby(ish) St. Petersburg and may have got waylaid on one of his journeys and found himself in Tampere
Thursday night is 'sauna night' at the festival, one of the festival's major social events. It’s a great opportunity to share in one of Finland's great rituals and feel like your getting healthy as well. Although with the amount of food and drink laid on by the good offices of Tampere City Council strike that last bit. The evening is kicked off by a speech from the Head of Culture at the city and it transpires that Tampere will be going for the European City of Culture in 2011. Sue finds out that they will be going to Liverpool to see how they get on with their celebrations. If ever a city deserves the accolade then Tampere must be it.
Then we get down to the serious business of sauna, gender divided of course! Please, you brits are all the same. Fortunately the festival also maintains its policy of keeping filmmakers and programmers separate. After extravagant extremes of hot and cold - its still minus 20 - with a serious bit of sweat thrown in we settle back in to log cabin fire comfort. As the evening continues amidst colleagues from festivals in Ragensburg, Pia, Wintertour, Brest and Uppsala, I Bluetooth a 10 minute CH4 documentary about the worst table tennis team in London to Christopher’s phone and he bluetooths on to raegensburg and on it goes……. We have instantly established our own sauna based distribution network. What could be nicer?
I’ve been asked to do two things during the festival and the first is early this evening. I now wish I hadn’t so readily agreed to it. I and Nicolas from the Uppsala film festival have agreed to watching student films from the Helsinki College of Art Media and Design and then give the students a crit afterwards. The upside is it’s in a bar next door to the cinema. The other positive is that Nicolas and I acknowledge after the screening that it was a strong programme of work so we can be positively critical. These filmmakers clearly have talent.
Although, one of their tutors is in a grumpy feisty mood, constantly lighting up in a no smoking area and being told off by the barman. She bridles at my mention that experimental documentary is a genre. We get into an interesting debate about the word, some people tend can feel genre is a low down term of abuse which obscures the very essence of the creative spirit - how dare it be labelled! – try telling Douglas Sirk or Larry Cohen that, I say. The reason it came up is that three of the films are indeed experimental documentary, one in particular I enjoyed a lot - 'Quickland' directed by Jaakko Ruusko. I had no idea what it was about but got lost in its rythms and juxtaposition. Transpires the young director is very much into poetry and I think again of Zorns Lemma and the attempts of Frampton to bring a poetic like structure to film. Impose a structure perhaps where this Jaakko is more free form?
Between the three of us we’re notching up the films. Clare is on a blinder and enthuses about the range of good work she is seeing. I begin to feel that classic festival guilt of ‘i’m just not seeing enough.’ Maybe I’ll book out a viewing booth in the market and settle down to some serious watching.
The festival has a focus on animator Bill Plympton who is in town taking the quite right applause for his films. Sue and I watch his new one in the market and it is first rate. Not as edgy as previous work and surprisingly but delightfully sweet. The scale of the festival constantly alarms me. We are focusing on the International films but there are whole festivals within festival. The bunch of kids we saw on the plane from Stansted are all here for a parallel kids festival. There is a focus on a varietry of filmmakers including Matthias Muller and the great Norwegian animator Pjotr Sapegin, Romano cinema Global football, Islamic cinema….. Never mind the late night hip hop entertainment.
My other formal duty is to speak at today's conference which is looking at different platforms for short film exhibition and distribution and the impact digital is having. Tampere’s director Jukka-Pekka Laasko was doing research on itunes and came across Watershed's 90 Second Challenge moving image downloads. Realising it was linked to Watershed, he asked me at the last minute to join the discussion.
The event kicks off with Cinema 16 publisher and producer Luke Morris giving a typically robust and straight-talking presentation of the growing Cinema 16 empire. I remember him getting started and asking for the John Smith classic 'Girl Chewing Gum' for the British Cinema 16 a few years ago. Its great that John is there wedged between the likes of Ridley Scott and Mike Leigh. Its also great that classic shorts are both preserved and made available. Luke is working on the third installment which is Cinema 16 America and already has a distinguished line up. As if that isn’t enough, Luke has his new short in the festival 'Heavy Metal Drummer'. It was made through the 'The Smirnoff Expeirience Reel Talent Awards' and we screened it at private do at Brief Encounters last year. I finally see it and i'm impressed, it’s a well constructed 5 minutes of a Morrocan boy who plays in a wedding band but aspires to heavy metal heavan. I talked to Sue about screening it in main competition starnd of this year’s festival.
Other speakers in the morning give an insight into what mobile companies are up to in Finland and Tilman Scheel who I seem to be following around having bumped into him twice over the past few month, tells us about the European Union programme Reelport which digitises and makes available moving image works. www.reelport.com wonder if we can access it once we get the UKFC’s digital projector in?
It gets round to me and I take the stage with enough nervous energy to keep me pacing about the floor rather than sit on the hot seat to talk about Watershed 90 filmmaking strands - DepicT! and 90 second Challenge. I open with the growth of DepicT! and as is my wont, screened the two winner's from 2004 - the controversial Non-fat and 6 Goats - two different approaches to 90 seconds you could not imagine. Non-fat always goes down a storm to first time viewers. (The hearty laugh at the back I discover is from Niels Aalbaek Jensen from the filmmakers TV-channel from Sweden whose brother co-owns Zentropa with Lars von Trier. Over lunch we discuss the making of 'Breaking the Waves' - Von Trier really nailed 70s Scotland free Presbyterianism - but move quickly onto the differences between a talisker and a lagavullen. I offer to email him a route through the distilleries of west of Scotland.) Whereas 'Six Goats' requires a more committed viewing. I have to admit both stand the test of time. Move onto the 90 Second Challenge which seems to keep growing and getting a phenomenal amount of downloads. Time is tight and lunch is looming. I finish up with my other pitch - "There is life before ipod and life after ipod (BI and AI as it were)". I restrain myself from declaring cinema is dead long live the mobile phone which came into my mind when we were going Bluetooth crazy in the sauna but rather make a hasty exit for lunch.