GFF 2010: Make It Art John

The film programme at The Tramway invites audiences to explore the limits of the moving image.
Event preview by Keir Roper-Caldbeck.
Published 25 February 2010

Watching Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967) is an unforgettable experience, not necessarily in a good way. Described by one critic as 'The Birth of a Nation of Underground Film”' it is the archetypal avant-garde, experimental film. It consists of a forty-five minute, incremental zoom across an anonymous room. The soundtrack is an electronic whine of varying frequencies. It's an experience akin to be being stuck in an Accident & Emergency waiting room on a Friday night: stultifying boredom, time passing at a speed beneath human comprehension, all underscored by the faint hum of threatened violence. Film-makers like Snow claimed they were pushing the medium of film to its limits. They were testing their audience just as harshly.

So it was with some trepidation that I approached the Glasgow Film Festival's new strand exploring art and film. Centred on Duncan Campbell's film Make it new John, now showing at the Tramway, it includes three specially programmed evenings of film at the same venue. With Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood crossing over into conventional film-making, and a younger generation of artists like Rosalind Nashashibi, Luke Fowler, and Campbell himself, all with strong ties to Glasgow, maintaining film's place at the forefront of contemporary art, there has never been a better time for the festival to embrace the art film. My only hope was that they would be gentle with me.

Make it new John is a film of three parts. The first is a collage of archive film which takes us on an impressionistic journey through American culture, from 1950s teenagers to the oil crisis of the 1970s. This dizzying montage, given an eerie spin by an off-kilter soundtrack of footsteps, whoops, and surf music, serves as an introduction to the cultural dreamscape that would spawn the Delorean supercar, the subject of Campbell's film. The second segment uses contemporary news footage to tell the story of John Delorean's doomed attempt “to build the American Dream in West Belfast”, whilst the final, dramatised section plots an unlikely course from 1980s labour relations to a Samuel Beckett-like denouement of stasis and despair. These three parts add up to a suggestive and allusive artwork, an examination of an episode of financial boosterism that has many contemporary resonances.

The echoes of Beckett in Campbell's film must be purely intentional judging from his first choice of film for the screening on Feburary 24th. The Irish playwright wrote and was intimately involved in the making of Comedie (1966). Images are reduced to white faces against an impenetrable, black background. Through rapid zooms and cutting these faces recede to tiny dots and then rush back to fill the screen. Campbell's second choice, Here is Always Somewhere Else, documents the life and work of Bas Jan Ader, a tall, charismatic Dutch/Californian artist, whose short films of himself falling off the roof of his house, riding his bicycle into a canal, and falling from a tree seem like scraps of archive from a land where silent comedy never died and Buster Keaton is king. They are given a melancholy undertow by the knowledge of his mysterious disappearance at sea in 1975.

The second evening of screenings (25th Feb) features two programmes of film and video work, Mouth Room and After School Special, curated by the artist James Richard and including work by Duncan Campbell. It should provide a fascinating taster of what's happening in art film today. The third and final programme at the Tramway (26th Feb) is devoted to a screening of Peter Watkins' Punishment Park (1971). Using non-professional actors, improvisation and documentary techniques, this ambitious feature portrays a fictional world where the Nixon administration has declared a state of emergency and is forcing an assortment of student radicals, black militants, and pacifists to choose between a prison term and playing a deadly wide game in the desert. With its portrayal of the ruthless use of presidential decree and trial without jury the film seems more relevant than ever; yet with its cast of freaks and squares, its over-the-top acting and obsolete rhetoric it has also become a fascinating period piece.

In an age when we consume ever larger quantities of moving images, artists working with film and video provide a chance for us to step back and examine what these may actually mean to us. But as well as testing the limits of the medium they also understand its magic: the first thing that strikes you when you see Make it new John is the beauty of the huge glowing screen floating in the immense darkness of the Tramway's main hall.

Comments (0)

Add a comment »
  • There are no comments yet. Why not post one?
Leave a comment on this article