Cinema's Outer Limits: preview of Crossing the Line @ GFF 2013

How often do you become truly aware of a medium being stretched to its absolute limit? The limit of comprehension for example. The limit of personal endurance, or of sensual intake. Great films can often approach these without alerting a casual viewer to the experimentation at play, but such is the immersive nature of cinema that to consciously push at these boundaries is to turn the camera on itself, thus drawing attention to the creative process. Consider Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take, a film that’s loosely centred around an imaginary encounter between Alfred Hitchcock and a lookalike on the set of The Birds. The combination of archive footage, Cold War coverage, original material and on set shots of Hitchcock double Ron Burrage constitute a film that’s not just about cinema itself, but one that thoroughly documents its own genesis. A film about a film about film, and one that is self-absorbed, enlightening and wonderfully daft in equal measure.

GFF’s Crossing the Line programme gives festival goers a chance to witness a diverse selection of directors disregard convention and pursue the ideas contained in cinema’s self-reflexive elements to the outer limits. Grimonprez himself is present as part of Random Acts, a collection of 24 three-minute films with other contributors including Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović, Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and noted pretty-boy James Franco. The individual films deal with a variety of topics, including the use of child soldiers, the final resting place for Britain’s clapped out Clios, and a vicious scam widely referred to as conceptual art. A common theme ties the pieces together - in the past, all contributors have been involved with works that seek to subvert the politics and aesthetics of the omnipresent beast we call television. Random Acts may thus be considered a conference of minds from multiple disciplines, cultivating ideas together on what methods and motives lie behind the airwaves.

Also featured in the programme is Weerasethakul’s feature length Mekong Hotel, an exploration of how solid entities and ideas can, over time, transform into amorphous and fictional forms. Set on the Mekong River near the Thailand / Laos border, an area devastated by floods in early 2012, the film has the director’s regular cast ruminate on his many recurring themes, essentially transforming the piece into a collaborative process. These include romance, childhood ghosts and Thailand’s bloody legacy of violence, dictatorship and revolution. With this follow up to his Palme d’Or winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Weerasethakul has been hailed a visionary, unafraid to hold a mirror up to his art and focus on the cracks. Other works from the program include Stephen Sutcliffe’s Margaret Tait award commission Outwork, as well as a documentary on the illusive, Orkney bred filmmaker herself entitled Margaret Tait, Film Poet. 

One particularly relevant offering comes in the form of Staande! Debout!, a piece that speaks of industry, a sector that fell in the West long before the high street. Shown as part of CCA’s Economy exhibition, the film follows Felix, an ex-car factory worker who along with 4000 others brought Belgium to complete halt as part of industrial action in the late 90s. A fictionalised account based on true events, Felix deconstructs the myths produced by solidarity and struggle, and in doing so asks questions about the nature of source material and the trauma of truth.