Small Axe (2020) Steve McQueen

Watch Steve McQueen’s first of a series of Films ‘Small Axe’ now showing on BBC iPlayer. Superb, powerful and timely film, the first film is ‘Mangrove’.

’Fifty years ago, on 9 August 1970, 150 protestors marched against police harassment in Notting Hill. This is the true story of the Mangrove 9, a group of Black activists who were arrested for leading the protest and who changed British history by taking a stand against racial discrimination.’

The second film ‘Lovers Rock’ tells a fictional story of young love at a blues party in 1980. The film is an ode to the romantic reggae genre called lovers rock, and to the black youth who found freedom and love in its sound at London house parties, at a time when they were unwelcome in white nightclubs.

The third film 'Red, White and Blue' starring John Boyega airs Sunday 29th November at 9pm.

There’s more about Steve McQueen including his other films and exhibitions on this Poool page
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Small Axe Q&A - BFI London Film Festival
Steve McQueen talks to BFI London Film Festival programmer Tega Okiti about Mangrove and Lovers Rock

More Q&A and talks about Small Axe from New York Film Festival

New York Film Festival hosted this talk, below, about The Making of Small Axe, ‘In this lively conversation with NYFF Director of Programming Dennis Lim , McQueen and his collaborators—including co-writers Courttia Newland and Alastair Siddons, cinematographer Shabier Kirchner, and actors Shaun Parkes and Letitia Wright—dug into the making of this sprawling project and the artistic and political ambitions that have shaped it.’

With his bold and multifaceted Small Axe anthology, Steve McQueen has made the films of the moment. The three parts screened in the NYFF58 Main Slate-Lovers ...

At around 17m 10s in talk above Steve McQueen talks about the ‘Silly Games’ acapella sequence in Lovers Rock.

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1 Second Everyday - Cesar Kuriyama

‘1 Second Everyday is a video journal that makes it easy for people around the world to create meaningful movies that include every day of their lives.

It all started in 2011, when video and VFX artist Cesar Kuriyama decided to take a year off from work to spend more time with family and friends and see the country on a 95-day road trip. To document the year, Cesar began recording short snippets of video every day, which he compiled into a six-minute video to encapsulate that entire year of his life.’

Self-filming: from Video Diaries to Mobile Journalism

Origins of Self-filming: Video diaries of Nelson Sullivan

‘Mobile Journalism has introduced a specific audiovisual language with self-filming as the main characteristic element.

If self-filming is fully associated with the Mojo movement and the era of social media, especially with the selfie in photography, this method of filming has already seen its appearance in the form of video diaries and vlogs.

This new culture of “Picture of Self” and communication with others has been able to flourish for some three decades.’
Read Essay’s by Terence Jarosz on Medium: Part 1 , Part 2, Part 3

Related articles

Also see:

The Academy’s section on filming and recording, including on smartphone (BBC)

BBC Academy blogs by:

BBC smartphone reporting specialist Marc Settle, who offers a fuller guide to working with a range of smartphone apps

Mobile journalism specialist Nick Garnett

Be a Lady they Said’, feat Cynthia Nixon

“Claire Rothstein’s Be a Lady They Said is a fashion film for the #MeToo generation and an unflinching look at the impossible standards forced on women” - Kate Finnigan, Guardian (28/2/2020)

Claire Rothstein, the British photographer and publisher of the fashion magazine Girls Girls Girls, is behind the ‘Be a Lady They Said’ video. The video is directed by Rothstein’s partner, Paul McLean.

Source and Owner Magazine: Girls. Girls. Girls.

Review (Independent) Review (Guardian)  

Film on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/393253445 

73 Cows (2018) Alex Lockwood

73 Cows is the story of Jay Wilde, a beef farmer who battles with his conscience every time he takes his cows to slaughter. Feeling trapped within an industry he no longer believes in, Jay knows he must make a change and do what no other farmer from the UK has ever done before. © Lockwood Film.

Below is video from conversation with Documentary Film maker Alex Lockwood, director of 73 cows and Freya (TeaAt3).

My America (2018) Barnaby Roper

My America is a 17-minute short documentary that raises the voices of a group that are often accounted for, but seldom listened to: youth. The film follows a small group of disenfranchised young people as they describe what their personal America looks like, and how they are trying to enact change in their own way.

My heartfelt thanks to everyone that came together to make this film happen - for sharing and trusting us with your stories and hope for America’s future. To our team, for making a 6,600 mile trip in 10 short days, one of the most enjoyable experiences in my life - your talent, drive, selflessness and ability to sleep for 10 hours a day in a 15 seat pass van will never be forgotten.

Director: Barnaby Roper
Editor: Matt Nee
Producer: Taylor Vandegrift
UPM: Brandon Robinson
DP: Isaac Bauman
AC: Payam Yazdandoost
Sound Mixer: Clint Allday
Drone Pilot: Gabe de la Parra
Music: Tristan Bechet

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Black Sheep - (Oscars 2019 Short Documentary Nominee) - Directed by Ed Perkins

Everything changed for Cornelius Walker on 27 November 2000 when Damilola Taylor was killed. Damilola was 11, the same age as Cornelius. He lived five minutes away. He had the same skin colour. Cornelius’s mother, scared for her son’s safety, moved their family out of London. Cornelius suddenly found himself living on a white estate run by racists. But rather than fight them, Cornelius decided to become more like the people who hated him. They became his family and kept him safe. And in return, Cornelius became submerged in a culture of violence and hatred. But as the violence and racism against other black people continued, Cornelius struggled to marry his real identity with the one he had acquired.

Also see, other documentary films on Guardian Documentary including":

After Windrush Betrayl - Paulette Wilson

GIRLHOOD (BANDE DE FILLES) Directed by CÉLINE SCIAMMA. (2014) France

‘One of the best coming-of-age films of our times, Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood follows a journey of self-discovery through the power of female friendship. By focusing on the lives of young Black women in Paris’ banlieue, Sciamma provides a kind of on-screen representation still too absent in cinema.’ MUBI

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MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001) - Dir. David Lynch

SYNOPSIS

After arriving in Hollywood, aspiring actress Betty (Naomi Watts) befriends an amnesiac woman (Laura Harring) and tries to help her recover her memory. The film establishes these characters but then proceeds to subvert any certainty about them, weaving its plot around L.A.’s signature industry.

MUBI’s TAKE

Initially conceived as a TV pilot, only to be transformed into a feature film, Mulholland Drive is lightning in a bottle of Hollywood fantasies, baroque emotions, and noir dreamscapes. Lynch’s surrealist masterpiece is a nightmarish puzzle box of doubles and desires, where nothing is what it seems.

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The Long Goodbye (2020) - Created by: Aneil Karia & Riz Ahmed

Actor, musician and activist Riz Ahmed has never been afraid to speak his mind. Whether in the roles he chooses or giving impassioned speeches in parliament, his work is reflective of what is happening in the world today. Now to coincide with the release of his new album, The Long Goodbye, Riz is releasing a new short film of the same name, as part of a collaboration with WePresent and directed by Aneil Karia. A sobering and powerful watch, The Long Goodbye imagines a dystopian near future and sees Riz unpack his feelings towards his country.

This film contains sensitive material, viewer discretion is advised.

In an online article for WeTransfer, Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff goes behind the scenes with Riz and Aneil during filming.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 - GÖRAN OLSSON (2011)

‘From 1967 to 1975, fueled by curiosity and naïveté, Swedish journalists traversed the ocean to film the black power movement in America. The Black Power Mixtape mobilizes a mosaic of images, music, and narration to chronicle the movement’s evolution.’ - MUBI

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Pressure (1976) - Horace Ove

Excerpt from Horace Ové's film Pressure available on nice DVD set from the BFI.

‘As UK Black Lives Matter protests roar, and the foulness of the Windrush scandal festers, it is a crucial time to dive into black British history. “Historic” certainly describes the first ever black British feature film: Horace Ové’s Pressure, an absorbing 1976 drama about the everyday struggles of a London-born son (Herbert Norville) of Trinidadian parents.’ - Ashley Clark, Guardian

I am not your Negro (2016) - Raoul Peck

Narrated entirely in the words of James Baldwin, through both personal appearances and the text of his final unfinished book project, this film touches on the lives and assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr and Medgar Evers. The film brings powerful clarity to how the images and reality of black lives in America today are fabricated and enforced. 

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Handsworth Songs - John Akomfrah (1986)

Black Audio Film Collective, John Akomfrah, Handsworth Songs, 1986, single channel 16mm colour film transferred to video, sound, 58 minutes 33 seconds. © Smoking Dogs Films. Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Black Audio Film Collective, John Akomfrah, Handsworth Songs, 1986, single channel 16mm colour film transferred to video, sound, 58 minutes 33 seconds. © Smoking Dogs Films. Courtesy Lisson Gallery

‘A film essay on race and civil disorder in 1980s Britain and the inner city riots of 1985, Handsworth Songs takes as its point of departure the civil disturbances of September and October 1985 in the Birmingham district of Handsworth and in the urban centres of London. Running throughout the film is the idea that the riots were the outcome of a protracted suppression by British society of black presence. The film portrays civil disorder as an opening onto a secret history of dissatisfaction that is connected to the national drama of industrial decline. Handsworth Songs won Britain’s most prestigious award for Documentaries, the British Film Institute Grierson Award Best Documentary in 1986.’

The film features photography by Vanley Burke and was shot on his bolex camera as discussed in recent guest seminar with us.

The film is a Black Audio Film Collective production. Artists, filmmakers and writers associated with the group include John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste, Edward George Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson, Trevor Mathison .

John Akomfrah talks about his practice as a filmmaker, how he navigates between the gallery and cinema, what compelled him to make his 2015 work Vertigo Sea,...

Also see:

Question Bridge

Question Bridge is an innovative transmedia project that facilitates a dialogue between Black men from diverse and contending backgrounds and creates a platform for them to represent and redefine Black male identity in America.

Chris Johnson originated the Question Bridge concept with a 1996 video installation he created for the Museum of Photographic Arts and the Malcolm X library in San Diego, California

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE - Directed by CÉLINE SCIAMMA (2019)

Synopsis: In late 18th century France, painter Marianne is commissioned by a countess to paint the wedding portrait of her daughter Héloïse. While posing as her hired companion, Marianne is instructed to complete the portrait in secret. However, intimacy and attraction begin to blossom between both women.

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Bacurai (2019) - Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles

Superb film now showing on MUBI. Great soundtrack by John Carpenter too.

Synopsis: ‘Bacurau, a settlement in rural Brazil, is shaken by its matriarch’s death. But something strange is happening, the water supply has been cut off, and the village has disappeared from satellite maps completely. Under threat from an unknown enemy, Bacurau braces itself for a brutal fight for survival.’

MUBI’s Take: ‘ From Kleber Mendonça Filho (Aquarius) and Juliano Dornelles comes a daring, intoxicating blend of neo-Western, siege thriller and political allegory—powerfully resonating with today’s Brazil, where the film was a box-office hit! A winner of the Cannes Jury Prize, starring Udo Kier and Sônia Braga.’

Watch here (on till 18 April 2020). Students can sign up to Mubi for FREE Here.

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Found Footage

A collection of films that use existing works, or materials to make something new. Big Thanks to Irene Lusztig (UC Santa Cruz) for many of these ideas.

Also see: Archive page and Archive for Education links

SODA_JERK

By Soda Jerk (http://sodajerk.com.au), not me. A remix of the sequence from Stanley Kubrick's 2001 in which apes learn to use tools.
Hollywood Burn is an anti-copyright epic constructed entirely from hundreds of samples pirated from the Hollywood archive. It pits a righteous league of video pirates against the evil tyrant Moses and his Copyright Commandments. Determined to alter the present by changing the past, the pirates travel back to 1955 to construct the ultimate weapon: an Elvis Presley video-clone. Part trash cinema and part remix manifesto, Hollywood Burn adopts the tactical responses of the parasite, feeding off the body of Hollywood and inhabiting its cinematic codes. The unwitting all-star cast includes Elvis Presley, Charlton Heston, Jack Sparrow, Monkey Magic, Bette Davis, Batman, Jaws, Jesus, the Hulk, the Hoff and the Ghostbusters. Completed over 4 years in collaboration with artist Sam Smith, Hollywood Burn is available to view, clone, share, or screen and can be streamed or downloaded here. Or please get in touch if you'd like a hi-res screener file.

Also see:

A Movie (Bruce Conner, 1958, 12 min)

Adam Curtis

Material Worlds

Further Reading:

Project Ideas from Irene Lusztig (UC Santa Cruz)- Found Footage Module. Thank you!

(UCSC students are asked to do two of these for the module)

PROJECT 1 (RE/HOLLYWOOD): Use Soda_Jerk’s Anarchivist Manifesto as a call to action for this project: “You are to infiltrate, sabotage and cut communications. Statements by authorities need to be messed with and set in motion. Texts and images must be used unexpectedly, tossed into the world—both commandeered and set free. Settings, views, and attitudes taken for granted have to be rigorously dissected, torn apart, reconfigured.” Inspired by this week’s screenings and readings, make a project that uses images from mainstream / mass / entertainment media—Hollywood, video games, network television, etc.—to critique, reconfigure, rearrange, analyze, scrutinize, or interrupt the intended message or values of the original media.

PROJECT 2 (DIGITAL DETOURNEMENT): This week’s viewing and readings invited you to think about online digital media—amateur YouTube videos, multiplayer online games, Google Maps, etc.—as emerging and rapidly expanding archives that artists might use as source material for the creation of new works. Your project this week should identify a genre, theme, type, or archive of digital / online found footage and use it to make something new that transforms, critiques, comments on, or changes our relationship to the original material. How can your creative recycling invite us to look at the Internet and user-generated content in new ways?

PROJECT 3 (MATERIAL WORLDS): Inspired by this week’s screenings and readings, make a project using found physical media (NOT digital or digitized media that you find online, though you may digitize the materials yourself to make the project)—as a point of departure, this might include photos, slides, cassette tapes, yearbooks, magazines, brochures, paper advertisements, printed personal ads, postcards or letters, written diaries, 16mm or super 8 film, instruction manuals, trading cards, or quilts. There are many other possible ideas! You might find materials at home, in your family’s home, on eBay, in a thrift store, in a yard sale, in a library, or elsewhere out in the world. How can 14 you take discarded, old, or unexpected media objects and give them a new context, meaning, or story?

PROJECT 4 (REVISIONIST HISTORIES): This week’s prompt asks you to consider the relationship between found footage, archives, and the (re)telling, revealing, or erasure of historical narratives. What histories are documented and catalogued in archives, by whom, and for what purpose or audience? What histories are erased, hidden, buried, or were never recorded? Who is behind the camera when historical images are made and how does that change the story that is told? How can you work with historical found footage to show us a previously recorded historical moment, event, or narrative in a new way? How can your intervention help us see alternate histories, speculative histories, revisionist histories, or gaps and absences in the historical record?

PROJECT 5 (PERSONAL ARCHIVES): Michelle Citron characterizes her family’s home movies as “powerful and necessary fictions that allowed us to see and explore truths that could only be looked at obliquely.” Use this idea to frame your project this week, beginning with materials from a personal or family archive (your own or someone else’s). What kinds of interpersonal dynamics are revealed through a close reading of images from a personal archive? How might you begin with images that look ordinary— christmases, birthdays, family vacations, baby’s first steps—and reveal what is extraordinary? Does your own family have home movies? Why or why not? How do personal images change over time, what does it feel like to look at intimate images from the past, and how can you convey these affective layers in your editing? What is hidden from view and how can you show that to us in your transformation?

PROJECT 6 (USEFUL FILMS): For this week’s project, choose a type of training, educational, or “useful” film to use as the basis for constructing your project. Yesterday’s useful films may no longer be so useful, but might shine a fascinating light on values, priorities, cultures, and norms of the past. Or you might make a project using “useful films” from the current moment (consider what types of training materials you have encountered personally: school shooter videos, health / workout videos, corporate training videos, etc.). What kinds of situations are we being prepared for, why, and how? How do ideas about “training,” preparing, disciplining, or learning reveal larger patterns of anxiety in our past or present society? Can you transform something useful into something other than its intended use?

You want more from The Avalanches ? This video below is great, also put on the album ‘Since I Left You’ and check out some of their other videos including the fantastic Frontier Psychiatrist

Desktop Cinema

‘A loose chronological primer on desktop cinema aka "Screen Life" aka desktop documentary’ by Conor Bateman.

‘Drawing In The Future’ by Laura Houlberg was the winner of Bertha DocHouse's Creative Response to Self-Isolation Competition #6 2021, 'Back to the Future.'

The etymology of "contract" is "to draw several objects together, to draw in." 2020 broke every social contract we thought we had. Big Tech continues to insidiously draw us into a new contract that requires us to always be online. And in response to all the chaos, I contracted into myself. It made me feel weird at first, but maybe a little cool down is just what we all need.

Check out a time capsule of the screening & party for the film, hosted in a Google Sheet: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/195AiOPubMfHvEIfYSfAduLIV31YT_LCiSzm1NzFgRVA/edit#gid=1293633960

Also see these threads for other ideas of films that could be explored in Lockdown/ with limited means: