Cine-City Brighton Film Festival 2010 – Round Up: Part II

Benda Bilili!

Over the last week the Brighton Film Festival has continued to offer a lively mix of film. One of the highlights was Benda Bilili!, a documentary by French filmmakers Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye. Set in the Democratic Republic of Congo and spanning over five years, the film follows a group of homeless men – many in wheelchairs – and street kids who have formed the band ‘Staff Benda Bilili’.

These seriously committed and talented musicians use many homemade instruments to create lively, harmonious and uplifting music. Living in desperate circumstances, Papa Ricky is the rock of the group. A deeply caring, benevolent figure, he fixes up school uniforms for the kids and advises them on the importance of appreciating opportunities to better their lives. The band rehearses in a grassy park area, that also doubles up as a zoo, with a sad assortment of monkeys and birds in small cages.

Although blighted by disaster and poverty, which delays the recording of their album, the documentary is full of positivity and humour as their unwavering devotion pays off and they fly over to Europe for the first time to perform at music festivals.

The Magical World of Silent Colour

The winter darkness of Saturday evening was brightened up by The Magical World of Silent Colour, a collection of short films brought together in a project commissioned by the Digital Film Archive Fund. Many were over a hundred years old, and had been hand painted, stenciled, or projected through Kinemacolor – a process using the Kinemacolor projector to shine red and green lights through the black and white film as it rattled through its course.

Silent film music composer and accompanist, Steven Hart, alternated between keyboard, flute and accordion – sometimes playing two at once – to provide an evocative soundtrack.  A favourite among Edwardian filmmakers appears to have been colourful puffs of smoke – and some eerie reversed footage that calls to mind David Lynch’s Black Lodge. The painted backgrounds behind the characters in these hand-coloured films gives them a strange aesthetic, with their disorientating layers of artifice.

Highlights included tinted footage of parades in Hasting in 1914, with men looking bashfully at the camera; a film of a bat transforming into choreographer Lois Fuller, whose billowing silk costume is illuminated by bright fluctuating colours as it ripples around her; and accelerated footage of flowers blooming in tinted hues, with Hart’s flute echoing their delicate writhing as they stretch into life.

Biutiful

Back over at the Duke’s, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new feature Biutiful unfolded to a full auditorium. Moody blues, lurid neons and pillarbox reds flood the images, with a supernatural element weaved into the squalid reality.

Javier Bardem is Uxbal, a devoted father of two, who hustles illegal immigrants for a living and keeps silent about his recent diagnosis of terminal cancer. In a brutal police chase, a vicious baton swings into the screen as the camera inhabits the vision of fleeing illegal street vendor.

The handheld, jagged camerawork tensely observes the scenes and scrutinizes the characters’ features, intensifying the visceral effect that is now a recognizable stamp of Iñárritu’s style. A crushing story, this is a stunning and haunting film, peppered with deeply unpleasant sights – so not one to watch if feeling a little fragile.

Double Bill: Coming Attractions + Film Ist. a girl & a gun

Sunday morning the screen flickered with old advertisement out-takes from Peter Tscherkassky’s Coming Attractions, and vintage porn in Gustav Deutsch’s archive epic Film Ist. a girl & a gun. Coming Attractions is compiled of uncomfortable excerpts from advertising shoots, divided into little chapters with titles such as ‘An unseen energy swallows face’.

In the first chapter a woman repeatedly looks off-camera, surprised, with slight nuances of gesture and expression running over her face as she recomposes herself. Themes of repetition and gaps between takes run through the film, culminating in a very funny final chapter. A farmer drives his tractor down a country lane and stops. He looks the camera in the eye and smiles warmly, tipping his cap. His smile wavers, he looks uncomfortable, but then breaks into another smile. The pattern of anxious looks and beaming smiles revolve as he waits for the director to spot that ideal smile and hat tip combo.

As this awkwardly continues, it is interjected with a close up of a man’s elated expression, from a completely different film, looking on in wonder. With ruptures of reversed exposure and a discordant soundtrack Tscherkassky’s film evokes early cinema and avante-garde film; highlighting an absurdity in performance that verges on derangement.

Film Ist. a girl & a gun evolves from notions of Greek mythology and its existence in the history of cinema. Sex, violence, science and history surge into one another in a stream of vintage clips that flow between fictional and documentary. Lonely electric guitar riffs and bursts of modern music echo against the tinted archive footage, as the film maps out the impulses of man under the influence of Eros.

One of the most spectacular images is an explosion erupting from under the sea, juxtaposing with the previous clip of a happy naked man playing at the shore’s edge. An ambitious project, the mythical intertitles are a touch heavy-handed at times, however, the old films are mesmerising in their colourful hues and bizarre content, which is emphasised by the separation from their original context.

For more information on Cine-City 2010 head to cine-city.co.uk

Cine-City Brighton Film Festival 2010 – Round Up: Part II (text) by Sophie Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.