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“… the film establishes itself as being about something else altogether: the magic of cinema”
- from Stewart Gardiner’s notes on F For Fake, presented at Monorail Film Club in 2007
my friend Stewart is writing about Glasgow’s Monorail Film Club over at Wrong Number, and reminiscing about how it started, on twitter. Monorail was the influence behind and model for our Film Club, in Bristol, and thinking about it reminds me of why Film Club exists, what a democratic monthly screening programme is meant to achieve.
“Back in 2007, I was delighted to be asked by Stephen and Katrina of The Pastels to help make their idea for a film club in Glasgow a reality. It was very much Stephen and Katrina’s baby, but Al Kingsbury and myself were involved at the start. (I believe it was our status as big movie nerds that got us the gig.) Monorail Film Club at the Glasgow Film Theatre was born. Musicians, artists and writers were invited to select and introduce a film. The cinema goers were invited to discuss “music, cinema and life in an informal and random way” in the bar afterwards. White wine was consumed on a Sunday night.”
I started going to Film Club as soon as I moved to Glasgow, a little after it started, mainly catching films that were off my radar, part of an eclectic programme that still had a thread running through it. there were lesser-known works by name directors; stray music documentaries; a disproportionate focus on the films of Hal Ashby, something at odds with what I knew of his reputation; & connoisseurial European art cinema picks - A Blonde In Love and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. the films were always introduced - either contextualised, historically, or remembered, personally. afterwards you’d filter out into the café and talk. it wasn’t really a circle-of-chairs thing, but there was sufficient crowd-density to ensure that it was lively, conversation bubbling over Michel Legrand soundtracks playing at the bar. I met my friend Al there: he was the first person I met who knew who Claire Denis was, and he could roll his Rs, doing justice to Latin American film titles, pronouncing the French movies I’d nervously mumble. something about the geography of Glasgow, or maybe the particular, insular geography of the places I routinely visited in Glasgow, is conducive to forming relationships; you’d see people at the cinema & then see them again, catching something, a week later, or around town at shows. you could tell that you were at least vaguely, culturally attuned.
if you like music, live music can be an awkward fit: you go see the group you like but you have to wait around for them to start; the sound’s weird, not loud enough to really get involved in or not the right kind for you to be able to process; you can’t get comfy, a guy in front of you lurches around. but the cinema is different: there are ways it can go wrong, but when it works it works - you’re alone with a film, projected so large that it doesn’t leave room for distraction. watching is a solitary act, even if it still feels like a conversation, so there’s no outside influence to make you less receptive. you can’t pause a film at the cinema, so its rhythm flows as intended. & after a film ends you’re back in the world. to have a cinema with a nearby social space seems like some vestige of Ancient Greek civilisation, the kind of idea cast into stone to forge societies, making sure that conversation could spark, debate could happen between individuals who shared priorities. filmmaker Thom Anderson says, For me, movies are, first of all, ‘tools for conviviality,’ to borrow a phrase from Ivan Illich, a means of sharing images and ideas to create a circle of friends, or virtual friends. the cinema seems like some kind of less didactic school Literature class, one without homework, one where you’re told to watch and then encouraged to think. this model is especially valuable at the moment, as a theatre’s monopoly on film viewing dissipates into other spaces: at home you can watch what you want, follow the strands your own investigations and inclinations pull you towards. but at the cinema you benefit from the expertise and enthusiasm of others, whether the programmers or the audience. they add the possibility of pollination of ideas and of specific cultural artefacts. they promise the possibility of access to the next thing you’ll see that wasn’t on your horizon, that you can’t find because you aren’t looking for it. the cinema sits at a juncture of curation and socialising and debate and art and society: of course there should be Film Clubs, so people can talk and share. Monorail founder Stephen Pastel said ”films and records make societies, and societies populated with interesting, educated people”.
Stewart’s notes on his Orson Welles pick soon digress, into Godard and Rivette, throwing out Celine and Julie in case you haven’t seen it. I remember hearing about Dreyer’s Ordet in the bar, which I’d never seen, which had been on Stewart’s shortlist & which I caught a while later, a whole new thing, a new camera, a new mood. in a room full of people there is a lot of understanding about a film, a useful mass of reference points and directions to pick up on and unravel. it isn’t just that this makes for a useful apparatus to better understand films, an efficient Customers who bought this also enjoyed- way to harvest new cultural picks; it’s that you’re talking about how you spend your time, and about Thom Anderson’s shared images and ideas, the texts that are important to you because they pushed you in a new direction or spoke to what you were thinking about. whenever there’s a new Smog record, I rush and buy it, ready for new Smog songs. but I’m also buying it because it’s the medium through which you hear what a guy has distilled into a song, has thought worth examining: to family is all you can do, or how could I run without becoming lean. the building that shows you Poliţist, Adjectiv or Xala or Syndromes and a Century, or that kindles debate about blackface in Marx Brothers films, or that informs and encourages you to look deeper into something you already know, is a crucial community resource, like a library. that there’s a social dimension to this is important. the cinema is the steamroom you go to to discuss scripture, the park you go to to play chess, the clubhouse you become a member of so you can trade trips and refine your knowledge.
before I moved to Glasgow I sent a message to Monorail on myspace, enthusiastic about Film Club, saying I wished there was something similar in Manchester, and got a nice message back, something that signed off saying that maybe I should start my own. the first year of Film Club Bristol just wrapped up, the programme beginning again after the Summer. it’ll be different when it returns (about which more soon), with Katarína and Billy working on the programme. a few days ago Al, at Arnolfini, & I sat outside, wondering if we could find an excuse to muscle F For Fake into the programme. last week we screened Knife In The Water, shown at five on the kind of pavement-dapplingly-sunny afternoon I assume will deter people from cinema visits. but people came, and saw, the rippling water & peppery Komeda score somehow seasonal, the chiaroscuro of the 35mm print hypnotic to sundazed eyes. and afterwards we squeezed onto a bench outside and talked, Polanski’s film springboarding into arguments about Steve McQueen and perspectives on digital cinema and opinions on people having opinions about typography. if you live in Bristol you can come to Film Club and see something you haven’t seen before; or sit in the dance studio and watch and listen and talk at Film Exercise; or see Citizen Kane, or the new Béla Tarr, at Watershed; or head to the Cube to catch neglected Fritz Lang or Rick Linklater films with 20th Century Flicks, or hear the Bioskop guys tell you that the secret to understanding Pasolini’s Salo is to watch it ten times, or catch the cult-film & music intersection of Hellfire Video Club. these things exist to increase our options, to manufacture possibilities and new directions. I think of what Christine Smallwood writes, the words we use on the site to describe Film Club: In the theater you are captive, or you should be, and so your mind ranges more freely, because it traverses the same course, bouncing against those images, again and again, back and forth, until it arrives at last at someplace new. getting together to watch a film in public both depends upon and acts against the thinking and watching we do alone, or at home. when I think about evenings at Monorail Film Club I find it hard to quantify specifically what it was they offered - the mix of art and friends, post-film enthusiasm and community difficult to separate into strands, or to imagine conforming to any kind of grand plan. but it happened, and still happens, and if it wasn’t happening you’d invent it, because of what it can do.
thanks for coming!, everyone. Knife in the Water felt breezy on a day we should have been spending outside; feet in the surf, Komeda playing summertime music. thanks to Jonathan for the excellent intro & for picking the film: it made for a neat conclusion to our first year.
Film Club is taking a Summer break, before returning in September. we’re spending the next couple of months planning the next few screenings; if you are interested in being involved, if there’s a film you’d like to introduce, if you want to help organise or create poster art for Film Club, get in touch through tumblr or by e-mailing repertoryfilms/gmail/com.
![Oxhide III will focus on the difference between the real life and the interior world or imagination of her family. She’s not quite sure how she will achieve this effect. When pressed, she says she is considering using voice-over narrative to express the thoughts in people’s heads, but rules out using digital effects, CGI or flashbacks. “Flashback,” she whispers in mock horror at the suggestion, then making a strangling sound with her voice. “Flashback is the last choice. Very scary.” Instead, she wants to find a way to achieve some of the psychological subtlety that can be achieved in literature. “Film is not good at picturing the inside mind,” she says. “I’m going to find a solution.” She then laughs at the ambition of her plan, then says, “Then I will conquer AIDS and cancer.”
[from a Global Times article on Liu Jiayin]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3r1qxLYJm1qg7mglo1_500.jpg)
Oxhide III will focus on the difference between the real life and the interior world or imagination of her family. She’s not quite sure how she will achieve this effect. When pressed, she says she is considering using voice-over narrative to express the thoughts in people’s heads, but rules out using digital effects, CGI or flashbacks.
“Flashback,” she whispers in mock horror at the suggestion, then making a strangling sound with her voice. “Flashback is the last choice. Very scary.” Instead, she wants to find a way to achieve some of the psychological subtlety that can be achieved in literature.
“Film is not good at picturing the inside mind,” she says. “I’m going to find a solution.” She then laughs at the ambition of her plan, then says, “Then I will conquer AIDS and cancer.”
[from a Global Times article on Liu Jiayin]
if you’re interested in being involved in Film Club -
picking guests, choosing which films are shown, helping to track down prints or working on posters and promotional materials - shoot Mark an e-mail, at repertoryfilms/gmail/com, or get in touch through Tumblr.
oh Lord the table.
thanks so much for coming!, everybody. I’d managed never to see La Grande Illusion; it was as moving & as human as everyone always said.
Film Club moves back to Sunday screenings next month, when Jonathan Bygraves introduces Roman Polanski’s Polish new-wave classic Knife in the Water. it’s a rare opportunity to see the film on 35mm. 5pm, Sunday 27 May, at Arnolfini.
tonight at seven, at Arnolfini:
a repertory screening of Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, introduced by Andrew Kelly [image via Unexplained Cinema]
Banned in Italy by Mussolini, and in Germany by Goebbels (naturally), it vanished during the war, only to be recovered in 1946 in a truncated state, finally reconstructed by Renoir during the late 1950s. Despite these tribulations, Grand Illusion has retained the look, sound, and feel of a classic. Made just three years before World War II, it gazes back to a different era, and to a war, in the words of the director, “based on fair play, a war without atom bombs or torture.” Hitler had not appeared. “Nor,” says Renoir, “had the Nazis, who almost succeeded in making people forget that the Germans are also human beings.”
- an extract from Peter Cowie’s essay at Criterion.com
Thursday at Arnolfini: Andrew Kelly introduces Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion
