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Nixon confers with his aides on the social scourge of the Children's Television Workshop. Written & Produced by Matthew C. Johnson, performed by Chris Caniglia, BJ Gallagher and Matthew C. Johnson

The Memories of Angels (2008, Canada) is a documentary mashup of archive film of Montreal on the 1950s and 60s – explained here by the director Luc Bourdon. Below is the trailer. Both from the miraculous National Film Board of Canada online archive.

dir Jafar Panahi; Iran, 2001.

Another extraordinary film from Iran.  Really, what a country for film-making.

The Circle gives the interlocking stories of a handful of women who are on the run from prison, or heading back to it; we don't know their crimes and it seems unlikely they are guilty of anything much more than trying to survive in this man's world.  The circle is the traffic circle in Tehran, the circle of life, the circular moral code they're obliged to live by and the narrow world they're unable to escape from.  Like many Persian films, the story is slight and itself circular, and what's more important is character, circumstance and meaning.

There's little beauty on the streets, cinematographically or otherwise, and no real physical brutality either.  Their oppressors are reasonably courteous and in theory, there is a structure into which these women should fit, but they don't, and their lives are a mixture of frantic manoeuvering, tedious frustration and patient forebearance.  The pacing of the film is perfect - lull and panic in  balance - and the women are sympathetic without a trace of sentimentality or heroism:  neither immoral nor amoral, they have been divested of their rights and freedoms so completely that prostitution,  abortion and abandoning a child are just necessary steps in their survival, after which perhaps more complicated reactions may be allowed a look in.  Only the most naive, a girl of 18, has any kind of dream left to her; the rest are just astonishingly resilient in what seems to be a thoroughly hopeless life.  Banned in Iran.  Five stars.

There's a scene from it here.

Przypadek, dir. Kieślowski, Poland 1981; 122min.



Kieślowski was simply miraculous and this was one of his earlier films, made in 1981 though not released until 1987, as Poland started to emerge from wherever it had been. The international title is Blind Chance though I think (with my imperfect Polish) that the meaning is more than that: accident, incident?  And there is one, finally.  Witek the medical student is running for a train and catches it, misses it or misses it in a different way, and has three lives: apparatchik, dissident or happily married doctor. This concept of multiple possibilities is Kieślowski's thing, underlying also The Double Life of Veronica, and Three Colours - and apparently it inspired the much inferior Sliding Doors. The editing in Przypadek is a bit jumpy and each of the three segments is too short, but it's very Polish, and I like the fine detail: partly for the physical details of the Poland I knew 10 years later (the long windows, the tea glasses, the square buses, blackened courtyards and broken pavements) and partly for the humanity of such close attention to the personal. For all that it juxtaposes late-Stalinism with new Solidarność with religion with family and professional life, it's about one recognisably consistent ordinary guy living through his time.

It reminds me of Ashes and Diamonds, Jerzy Andrzejewski's novel (and Wajda's film) about the last days of the war as the various factions (then the communists, the AK partisans and the collaborators) come into sharp focus and people find themselves in the middle of it all.  Ashes and Przypadek sort of bookend that era in Poland - both very useful in explaining it.

The eyebrows! The eyebrows! It's a wonder the species didn't die out during the war, what with the tea instructors and the smug women. And anyway that's not how you make tea in the Hebrides:

1. Use a tin pot and warm it.
2. Use tea leaves, and boiling water but actually that doesn't matter so much as -
3. Put it on a low heat and cook it.
4. Stir and serve in the kitchen with a sideplate of at least 3 homemade things, involving at least one scone and one portion of crowdie-and-cream.
5. Converse.

Chan fhiach cuirm gun a còmhradh.

The Age of Stupid, dir. Fanny Armstrong, UK 2009; 92 min.



One of two films I saw while I was away. Effectively it's a selection of news clips from 2005-2008, with a handful of visits to people who are doing something to hasten or hinder the end of life as we know it and some animation to explain things. There's a little slice of 2055, in Pete Postlethwaite as the Archivist looking back at our suicidal stupidity. It's quite a mash-up of stuff, not terribly novel in its message (how could it be?), light on sentiment, not exactly moving but quite frightening, a powerful record and very much intended as agitprop (in a good way). I think the Archivist aspect could do with a bit of fleshing out - filling in more of what might happen between 2010 and 2055 - and, strange as this is coming from me, it needs a bit more science, but lots of interesting layers accrue (environmentalists who cause and suffer from climate change, victims who long to do what causes it) and there's a little bonus amusement for Helmies.

See it if you can. It will be available for hire by community groups from May so if it's not already coming to Lewis, maybe we can organise some screenings out in the provinces. The website has more and an emailing group. It's also interestingly being marketed through social media rather than advertising.

The post-film panel discussion at the Filmhouse was a bit dry: changing lightbulbs, insulation and lobbying MSPs, which frankly is out of step with the apocalyptic message of the film. However, there is a Scottish climate change rally on Wednesday 22 April, 12-2pm, outside the Scottish Parliament to call on MSPs to deliver a strong Scottish climate change bill. For more information, email gail.wilson@rspb.org.uk.

Merci! dir. Christine Rabette, Belgium, 2003; 6m48.



I defy you not to laugh. Keep it in your medicine cabinet; Reggie Perrin could learn a thing or two (and his makers.) Thanks to @frankwkelly for pointing it out.

Too serious around here. Try this. It's almost art.

Dagur Kári, Iceland 2003.

A very cool blue film about not belonging.  Nói is not really an albino; it's a metaphor.  The town (tiny?  not by our standards) is a composite of three in the West Fjords and Nói, though odd and hard to warm to, doesn't strike me as suffering from more than a touch of existentialism.  In fact he seems to have reasonably warm relations with lots of people, just not his teachers.

Some striking scenes, like the blood scene above .  Light touch -   a lot of them, and in Making Of comments the director says

Dharavi in Mumbai is Prince Charles's favourite slum and is the heart of Slumdog Millionaire (my copy of which has not arrived yet).  Here's a piece on it from IIED:
Increasingly, [Mumbai] city planners are learning to listen to the interests of slumdwellers. Together they make up half the population of this great city and provide so many of the essential services needed to keep it moving - whether it's highly effective waste collection, the wealth of food stalls, or the basket makers and vendors of every kind of thing.

Dharavi's recyclers are in a class of their own: over 200,000 people work in the industry, primarily recycling plastic. Add in revenues from its thriving pottery and textile concerns, and Dharavi brings in an estimated US$650 million a year.

The skills on tap here extend far beyond those tied to consumption and waste. This is fortunate. A massive urban planning scheme called Vision Mumbai is due to replace the warren of lanes with high-rise housing for the slumdwellers, and luxury shopping malls. People from Dharavi have been recruited to carry out the surveys needed to plan for redevelopment, and their skills in building and upgrading are in demand.

Not all are convinced that Vision Mumbai is fully inclusive, however. There are worries, too, that when the recycling workshops are bulldozed, that service will disappear and a mountain of urban waste will engulf the city.
It's also got a sanitation problem.  The slum that constitutes the "horror and wonder that is Bombay" is the setting for Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters and A Fine Balance - the latter a superbly balanced book and quite devastating in the way that only Indian books can be, by the way.  Here's a tour.



There's another interesting article in the NYT on what Dharavi really is to its own.

This little English film is described by the BFI as being "for those who like their humour daft and thoroughly unsophisticated" which obviously I do. The actress is also the director: Florence Turner, the Vitagraph Girl, was born in New York and had a career in the new flicks before moving to England in 1913 to tour the music halls. So, sad to say, this gurning is not authentically British. Ben Fogle is cast as the husband* - he's older than I thought.

Dir. Florence Turner, England 1914; 8min55



*Actually it's Tom Powers, also American, who was in England in 1914 to make 20 films for Hepworth, including this one. He was later murdered by Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity.

Daniel O' Hara, Ireland, 2003; 9min21.



Kind of cute.

Dir. Carlos Sorin, Argentina/Spain 2004; 97mins.

A slight but charming film by Carlos Sorin, in which a middle-aged, newly-unemployed mechanic is given a showdog, finds a new life and perks up a bit.  It's  much like his earlier Historias Mínimas:  a sort of road movie, though slimmer in plot, also filmed in Patagonia and using (entirely?) non-actors, who with one or two exceptions are  exceptional.   Historias Mínimas has a touch of the overblown western, with flights of absurdity that jar with the baseline of the film, but this is much more grounded, and better for it. In the making-of that came with my dvd he gives his practical tips for working with 'real people':

He'll shoot maybe 20 different takes for a scene, and the raw material is largely disappointing, but there will be moments of truth when they're not pretending, when it's real.  The ratios are big,  40:1 or 50:1.  You can't have people playing characters too far from themselves, but the character development comes in the editing.  There's no script, the dialogue arises from the situation,  and he's more interested in motivation.  They shoot in narrative order, and geographically correctly:  if they have to drive a thousand miles for a scene and then five hundred back again for the next, that's what they do, and they do reshoots immediately.

The light is great (though not in this clip); and the dogo is particularly good, of course.  Evidently Coco, the lead, was Sorin's car-parker.  For a man with few facial expressions, he's fully expressive.  I like.

A letter from Emma Thompson:
Dear Greenpeace supporter,

On Wednesday there will be a vote in parliament on a third runway at Heathrow. Ahead of this vote we urgently need your help to put pressure on Labour MPs to vote with their conscience and say NO to a third runway. We already have the support of the LibDems and Tory MPs.

The government is treating us as if we're stupid. They're asking all of us to reduce our energy consumption while they build another runway at Heathrow. I think it's the most egregious piece of hypocrisy I've seen in a long time.

Fifty-seven Labour MPs signed an Early Day Motion against airport expansion last autumn and now we need those same MPs to vote against a third runway in parliament on Wednesday.

This won't be a binding vote, but cross-party opposition to the runway will put enormous pressure on the government. It will certainly be a big blow to the government's insane plans to expand Heathrow.

Please take a couple of minutes today to send a letter that will go to all 57 MPs who have opposed Heathrow expansion and ask them to stick to their principles at the vote next Wednesday.

I joined the campaign because I want to stand in the way of airport expansion. There are now more than 30,000 beneficial owners of a plot of land on the third runway site and more are joining everyday.

This is the first opportunity for all of us to show the government we're not going to let this runway go ahead. But we also need to get a lot more people involved. Once you have emailed the MPs, you can sign up to become of beneficial owner of the plot and please tell your friends, family and colleagues and ask them to do the same.

Thank you for joining with me to stop airport expansion, together we will make sure this runway doesn't go ahead.

Dir. Nicolas Philibert, 2002.



Être et avoir is a documentary by Nicolas Philibert that observes the subtle happenings in a single-teacher, 13-pupil primary school in the Auvergne, over the course of six months.  My first thought, in the opening minutes that show children being collected by bus on a dark morning of wet snow, was how easily it could be the Highlands, with an easy but not always warm community, and an indifference to rubbish weather.

The pace is very gentle and the stories slight and fragile, and the result is exceedingly natural, frank, undramatised and nicely unintrusive, and unsentimental, with mostly unremarkable cinematography, though the changing seasons are evident.   The teacher and his students are appealing, but not excessively so, though Jojo steals the show a bit.

Fragility comes up a lot in Philibert's comments on the film, and his conviction that it is possible to make a compelling thing out of 'les petits riens'.  He speaks of making films with, rather than about, his subjects, and of not imposing a literary construct, but at the same time:
Bien que mes films soient des documentaires, j'essaie avant tout de raconter des histoires à partir des lieux que j'investis. En somme, par leur forme narrative, leur construction, je crois qu'ils ne sont pas si éloignés de la fiction.
I suppose this is freeing up the documentary to arrive back, via a degree of fictionalisation, at the real stories.  He makes the point that he is not aiming for journalism and harsh reality.  Inevitably there are so many decisions to be made in the course of a day, that the result is a construct that tells a story - he doesn't comment on whether that story needs to come from the subjects, but it seems inevitable that it does, particularly given this fragility, and the simplicity of the stories.  How could such light, clear material possibly be misrepresented?

Ultimately it strikes me as subtle, sensitive and realistic fiction, rather than well re-cut d