Henry Coombes – The Twilight Zone

With a record 368 events programmed, GFF can expect to get more bums on seats this year than ever before. But in a city with a long history of art-music-film crossovers, there are a more than a few filmmakers whose work isn’t best experienced in a traditional cinema format.

In response to this, Henry Coombes has organised Entre Chien et Loup, a night of artists’ films shown with a live sound performance and a party in the swanky surroundings of the Grand Central Hotel ballroom. ‘Between dog and wolf’ is the French expression for twilight, when it’s difficult to see and all may not be as it seems.

“The idea of it being ‘between the dog and the wolf’ is that it’s in between the mediums of art and film, a crossover,” Coombes explains. “Obviously a lot of the artists involved do more major projects throughout the year, so I thought this was a good chance for them to show work that is maybe more experimental, more sketchy. It’s been left totally up to them. The only restrictions were that it has to be a ten minute silent film and have a live sound performance.”

The evening will feature a stellar cast of Torsten Lauschmann, Erica Eyres, Rachel Maclean, Craig Mulholland, James Houston and Raydale Dower. Houston is working with Julian Corrie, aka Miaoux Miaoux, while Dower is collaborating with Tut Vu Vu bandmate Jamie Bolland and performance artist Romany Dear.

Erica Eyres will present a new film inspired by Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, about a Wall Street copyist’s alienation and degeneration in the eyes of other people. Compiling found footage of streakers, Eyres’ film brings together a series of short, subtitled narratives that are based on lethargy and relationships towards television.

Working with Steev from Errors, this will be the first time Rachel Maclean has shown her film LolCats with a live performance. In Maclean’s grotesque and overloaded kitschy style, the film follows a female character through an erratic landscape, half lost civilization and half touristic theme park, to chart a potted history of cat worship.

Coombes won’t be showing a film himself, but has grand plans for how the evening will unfold. "I was originally going to have one of my own films in it, but it felt like it was getting curated by me and I hate the idea of putting your own work in a show and curating it,” he says.

The event has been promoted as a spectacularly lavish affair sponsored by Randolph Kemp Potter, a Mayfair gallerist with plans to patronise the arts in Glasgow and capitalise on the much-hyped Glasgow Miracle. Coombes is excited about bowling over the usually conservative art scene with something ridiculously decadent. He had conceived the party’s theme as the Gold Ballroom scenes from Kubrick’s The Shining, but it has since ‘grown legs.’

“I just think the Glasgow art scene is so dreary and sexless, the energy of it is like a grey sponge full of dirty water – I mean, that’s my experience of it. So the event is kind of looking at that. Randolph Kemp Potter’s sponsoring it and he’s getting girls and boys to serve drinks in hot pants, beads and waistcoats, so they’ll look like Richard Hammond from Top Gear in hot pants. The Gold Ballroom’s slowly becoming – I don’t know how this will fit in – quite camp. It might lose its definition and its way somewhat.”

Wherever the night takes you, one thing you can count on is the quality of the films. So confident of this is Coombes that he won’t even be seeing them prior to the night – unlike most of the other events in the festival’s Crossing The Line strand, which have been swabbed and vetted beforehand.

Actively making provisions for these more experimental films within GFF is something Coombes sees as vital for the future of film and video art. “There are a lot of artist filmmakers in Glasgow whose work doesn’t have an appropriate distribution context. Some of it doesn’t get to festivals; it’s shown at galleries in Glasgow but some of it’s actually better at an event – otherwise, you don’t engage with it for the whole duration. It hit home to me when LUX came up and they were thinking of setting up another branch in Scotland. I realised there was a lack of contexts for work like this to be shown.”

He gives the example of Rachel Maclean, who can’t show her work at festivals because it would breach copyright, and – though hugely talented and prolific – has never yet had a solo show in Glasgow. “I couldn’t believe it when I found that out. And if this type of work doesn’t get shown in galleries, then where does it get shown?”

With such a sparkling night planned, perhaps it will be the first of many crossover events at GFF. “Hopefully it’s the last thing you’d expect at a Glasgow opening, to be served drinks by a 19 year-old boy in hot pants. It just makes me giggle in a really juvenile way.” [Jac Mantle]