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Text: Alex King & Daniel Neofetou
Ian Francis interviewed by Alex King
Layout: Alex King
My Flatpack Summary:
The last time Birmingham found its way onto the cinematic map was in 1970, for all the wrong reasons with Cliff Richard’s Take Me High. More famous for its spaghetti junctions, cinema is not something people think about when they think of Birmingham. But courtesy of Flatpack Festival, for one week in late March that all changed.
To launch the festival cinema’s faithful gathered together for an an extended period of worship at the altar of the 1927 classic Sunrise. Arguably the greatest silent film ever made, it was screened with a live orchestral accompaniment in St. Martin’s Church in the Bull Ring. Without exaggeration I can honestly say that the evening was the single greatest cinematic experience of my entire life. Great films deserve to be shown in fitting surroundings. The beautiful black and white print shining out from the eery darkness of a Victorian gothic church truly was a sight to behold. Your average local coke-stained and popcorn-strewn multiplex this was not.
Unlike major festivals that seem so beholden to stars, glitz, gossip and red carpets that the films often seem to take a back seat, Flatpack’s focus is firmly on film. It reminds us of the diversity of the film medium. Other festivals would have you believe that the limits of cinema end and begin with the 90-minute feature. Flatpack’s definition of film is so expansive it takes in just about anything that can project a moving image on to the screen. Lanterna Magicka took us back to where cinema began; with early optical toys such as the magic lantern and zoetrope. Julien Maire’s Demi-Pas gave us a modern reinvention of the magic lantern show by using modified slide projectors with laser-cut ektachromes containing tiny objects, motors and electronic devices.
Shorts made up the bulk of Flatpack’s programming and the variety and inventiveness on offer was staggering. Given the huge range of material not every single one would have appealed to everyone. However the considerably large amount of invention and imagination had gone into every one of the films I saw over the week made me appreciate every one. A highlight was Javier Chillon’s Die Schneider Krankheit. A spoof newsreel from the 1950s about a virus spread across the world after a space probe containing a chimpanzee crashes in West Germany, it captures perfectly the dark, clunky feel of old newsreels yet every single shot is created through original footage. The scene where an innocent 50s nuclear family sit around the television all wearing sinister WWII gas-masks while the narrator explains how “normal family life” has continued despite the epidemic is one of the most chilling things I have ever seen on film.
Flatpack’s animation programme also proved that the possibilities within the medium are greater than we ever tend to think. Puppets, pens, paper, paint and plasticine, no material seemed to be left out of the pallet that Flatpack’s animators drew from when creating their awesome selection of animated shorts.
Kanizsa Hill for example used old newspapers, pens, ink and paints to create a living and breathing collage that struck me with its beautiful hand-made feel.
Teabreak used a clever mix of animation and live action to make us feel for the plight of… err, teabags. Seeing the slow and excruciatingly painful death of his friend as he is thrown into boiling water, one teabag takes a stand and exacts his brutal revenge on a teabag murdering human. Tea-fiends take note.
In a similar vein, Bubblewrap brought bubbles to life in order to witness their painful demise at the hands of bored humans. Practically every animated short on offer exhibited a fresh new animation style I had never seen before, and even the traditional mediums like the clay-mation of Debt were given new life through inventive ideas.
Without doubt my favourite short of the whole festival was Divers. A simple premise, this computer animated wonder had a team of red swimsuitted divers leaping from a diving board high up in the clouds, falling through the sky in a synchronised formation and finally plunging into water miles below. The three minute descent had me captivated by its beauty.
Saturday night was taken over by feature films and the most impressive was Double Take. An odd homage to Hitchcock and his television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents… that ran from 1956 to 1963 the film was composed primarily of archive footage from this period. Loosely based around the premise of Hitchcock encountering an older double of himself while filming The Birds, the film managed to tie Hitchcock’s story to the narrative of the Cold War and the promulgation of fear into American society at the time. Not the easiest film to understand, but if anything it left me with fact that Alfred Hitchcock is perhaps one of the coolest people ever to have lived.
Cinema-going is often seen as a solitary pursuit, but Flatpack seems to challenge that, turning film into a highly social affair. A Plasticine Party offered a chance to unwind after a hard day sitting about watching immensely cool films. It invited it guests to get involved in making their own plasticine creations. Cue an hour of silence as I and my girlfriend sat on the floor surrounded by scores of equally eager guests all attempting to outdo one-another’s plasticine masterpieces. This sense of getting involved sums up what Flatpack is all about about. Last edition Boar film tried and failed to come up with a definition of the festival, but maybe it’s this: Flatpack-get involved and see what you make of it.
Ian Francis Interview:
Boar film caught up with Ian Francis at a career talk he gave to Warwick film students. The Flatpack film festival co-founder offered his thoughts on everything from YouTube to Cliff Richard’s Take Me High. He also shared some valuable advice.
Boar Film: How has warwick helped you as a platform to your career?
Ian Francis: The space to think and research is probably really important. There aren’t any other film courses like the Film & Lit course at Warwick. When I was shopping around for universities there wasn’t anywhere else I really wanted to go. Because watching and talking and writing about films was what I really wanted to do. It’s still really important. While I was studying here I was under no illusions it was a natural step to working in the same field. So it’s still slightly miraculous to me now, that I managed to carry on doing it for a living.
BF: What advice would you give students on getting involved in film? Is it an uphill battle?
IF: Not necessarily. But you do have to be prepared to work very hard for limited financial return, I think. And it’s working out, you’ve got to have a, which isn’t to say you should just work for free for years and accept it. You’ve got to make sure that if you are working for free it’s taking you further along the road you want to go down.You’re not just doing it because you can’t think of anything else to do.It’s got to be a genuine development for you.
From my point of view there was a lot of volunteering involved before I got to actually earn anything dong this kind of work. Don’t rely on the jobs pages to tell you what’s out there. A lot of it is about getting to meet people. Not just networking, but getting a sense of what different organisations there are, what needs they have. Building up a sense of what your strengths are, as well. Some people are very good at selling themselves or selling events. Some people are very good at the nitty-gritty of events and putting on a show. So I guess try and find a role that suits your strengths.
BF: How did Flatpack develop?
IF: I got increasingly interested in doing non-cinema, non-theatrical film events. So using pubs or community centres or churches or warehouses, to screen films and put on music. It’s something there seems to be a real appetite for. We started out putting on a film night in a pub in 2003. It was a sort of social gathering point and a place to show submissions from filmmakers and work that we found on the internet along with live bands accompanying movies or AV performances. So that was the kind of basic formula that we’ve then gone on to use for larger scale events, and I suppose Flatpack was a natural progression from those smaller pub gigs. I guess we focus on making it a memorable social experience.
BF: Flatpack seems definatly alternative, do you see it as being an addition or an antidote to the mainstream?
IF: We like having a mainstream to define ourselves against I suppose. It’s not necessarily an antidote. But the reason we keep harking back, the reason we return to different periods like 1900s when film first started out it’s because it feels like film could have taken so many forms, that the mainstream multiplex experience is just one version of filmgoing that just happens to dominate the market. There are so many other different ways of enjoying films that it seems daft to limit yourself to just one.
BF: Flatpack seems just as concerned with looking forward as looking backward. Tell me how do the two strands reconcile with one another?
IF: When you find interesting new work you often find that its drawing on something from the past, that nothing is entirely original. We’ve got a hundred years of film to draw on. It just seems like a natural thing to combine the new with the old. To put it in context, and to give people a sense of how film’s changed. I think it’s one of the things I’ve brought with me from Warwick really, is it’s really enjoyable to dig around in archives and libraries and find pioneering work from the past that resonates with what people are making today.
BF: You also try to highlight the local aspect. What influence do you think Birmingham had on UK cinema?
IF: Birmingham has always had a tradition of mad inventors and innovators. People coming up with strange new ideas in their potting sheds. The city of a thousand trades. It’s got a kind of independent mindset. As far as great films go, there’s very few been made in Birmingham. There’s some shocking celluloid moments like Take Me High-Cliff Richard. It’s not a city that’s been well filmed. Although it’s got great potential in terms of different locations around the city. There’s a tradition of showmen and entrepreneurs that we like to kind of like celebrate in the archive work that we do.
BF: Do you feel the way we’ve come to watch films has changed, if so do you prefer the way we watch films now?
IF: I wouldn’t say it’s got worse or better. I just think it’s a completely different environment. The main thing for me is I’d like to see people gathering in one place to watch a film, and not just retreating into their own little pods. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but it’ll be interesting to see how the cinema experience sustains itself over the next few years. The social factor is integral really. The films are important but they’re almost a pretext for getting out into the world. We’re firm believers in the old fashioned communal film experience.
Interviewed by Alex King
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