Films at That Festival

I have just realised that I am not going to be allowed into That Festival at macrobert. Apparently it is for youngsters. I had hoped to nip up to Stirling, catch up with My Producer Harry - who is currently on sabbatical to a secret organisation somewhere between Stirling and The Bridge of Allan, working on the future of online radio - before catching a film programme curated by Mark Cousins.

So, I am going to miss Saturday's  Ecstasis Short Films (2pm - 6pm), which are free and on rotation. I might be able to slip in if there are no tickets, I suppose. But worse than that, Cousin's own What Is This Film Called Love (7pm) gets a relatively rare big screen showing.

Fair enough, a meditation on happiness might not be my usual thing - I prefer the meditations on existential dread, and I perform one of these most nights of the week. But Cousins made this film - apparently for a tenner, although I bet that doesn't include his budget for getting to Mexico in the first place - after starting to make a film about soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. Rather like I do, he got distracted, and ended up having a look at the nature of memory, the pleasure of walking (again, like me, when I race between venues in Glasgow) and landscape. 

I especially wanted to see that because Cousins has a critic's soul - he can make as many films as he likes but, like me and my plays, they come from a critic's perspective. And art made by critics is the future. I sent the memo last week.

The Sunday has Live Art Supergroup (as said by me in The Skinny and quoted on their website) Fish and Game giving punters a Backstage Pass. F&G do these special - well, they are sort of guided tours, sort of cinematic performance... you get an iPad and follow the path around and under the stages and corridors of macrobert to encounter the people and moments that bring it to life. I've seen earlier versions of this iPad performance, and they are mildly psychedelic, spectral and sometimes sinister. (2pm – 5pm run time 20 minutes, start every 15 minutes)

Cousins' film selection is equally intriguing. No surprise at first: The Story of Film: An Odyssey (1.30pm). It used to be fifteen hours long, but this is the remix - just over an hour. I think of it as being like a curated YouTube (without the trolls, who will be busy at Gareth Nicholl's piece on the Saturday) and the inane home videos. It uses over a thousand archive clips to piece together a history from the old silents to the contemporary digital movie.

It's followed by Hyenas. I haven't seen it, but this is the description on the press release. 

Djibril Diop Mambety / Senegal 1992 / 110min / TBC

A young woman is jilted by her lover.  She leaves home, becomes as rich as the world bank and then returns to the African village where she grew up half made of gold.  Yes, half made of gold.  Her old friends are amazed to see her.  They ask for consumer goods, refrigerators, etc...
She agrees, but on one shocking condition.  
Those who think African films are worthy, pleading, primitive things should see this amazing, angry parable, the sort of film that changes your sense of what movies are.

Not sure I can add to that...

But then, at six, it's the film that inspired the band. Holy Mountain is, as the press release admits, "the greatest acid trip movie." Quite why this is aimed at young people, I cannot explain. It has a naked man, who is a bit like Jesus, shit turning to gold, weird creatures, a huge mountain and a crazy landscape. On the one hand, it needs a clear critical eye to appreciate the alchemical depth of meaning, and the unique Mexican blend of religious and shamanic imagery.

On the other, it is riot of mayhem - it's surprising that the mind behind the ideas could keep it together to actually make a film from it. 

See Thru Sam

The Adventures of See Thru Sam, although it marks another variation in Random Accomplice's approach to theatre, captures the vitality and character of the company as they enter into their tenth year. Writer/director Johnny McKnight and producer/performer Julia Brown are both intimately involved in the creation of the piece - recently, McKnight has been playing away, mostly with pantomimes but also in the NTS' Appointment with The Wickerman, leaving Brown at the helm for the Double Nugget tour.

It aims at a younger audience than previous RA plays - the Big Gay Trilogy and Small  Town had a far less innocent vision of sexuality and while McKnight has talked about how his own life influenced the character of Sam, it's clearly not another semi-autobiographical number. Indeed, the depiction of school and home life makes See Thru Sam far closer to the issue-based plays often aimed at adulescents.

Fortunately - like David Greig's two plays for young people, Yellow Moon and The Monster in the Hall - McKnight's take on the struggles of the young adult is driven by character, not issue. There's a slight suggestion towards the end that Sam does suffer from some form of mental ill-health, when his aversion to green becomes pathological and he takes drastic steps to escape a vicious, but childish bully. And the plot is driven by Sam's attempts to cope with his parents' death: yet the script is far more interested in the way that the mythology of superheroes can provide a sense of identity to an outsider, and in the details  of the teenage crush than any grand statements about grief or alienation.

Teaming with an illustrator allows Random Accomplice to animate Sam's expansive fantasies: the use of video projection places Sam in a world that he can constantly manipulate through his imagination. A simple blank wall becomes isolated light-house, classroom or, in the romantic scene, a bedroom full of potential and promise: Sam is literally moving through a world that shifts according to the rules of comic book art.

Sam is a sympathetic hero, if sometime inpenetrable: the scene where his uncle tries to deal with Sam's inappropriate behaviour is at once recognisable - the inter-generational conflict, the mutual lack of respect and understanding - and disappointing, since it doesn't give the uncle much reason for his worries and is set, oddly, in the school. While McKnight is appropriately serious about the gap between Sam's fantasies and the reality of his parents' death, the final scene is undermined by having had Sam narrate most of the action: if death is seen as irrevocable in the case of Sam's parents, it is sentimental, even unimportant, in the finale.

Yet McKnight's gift for comedy, and a fast pace, ensures that See Thru Sam is engaging and entertaining. It struggles with resolving the various deeper issues, but thrives in moments of evocative detail - fear of the bully, that first crush, the doubt of the teenager, the bonds of friendship. It has the qualities expected of a Random Accomplice production: the appropriate adventurousness of format, cheeky humour, energy and charm. And it adds another level to their versatility.

That Festival Date...