Grim. Down is an animated short film about a hole that gets bigger the more is put into it, and which has a morbid attraction for people.
An analogy for the Covid pandemic, the narration is in the form of emails back and forth between two workers, one of whom was initially sent to assess the hole, and the other who is responsible for escalating any requests to management. In contrast to the otherworldly and inexplicable hole, these emails remain flatly mundane. When the guy on site reports how the hole is not obeying the laws of physics, the office worker responds by telling him to put some cones up.
Their lack of urgency and deadened reactions are mirrored by the behaviour of the general public, who take picnics by the hole’s edge, and generally treat it as something that is livening things up a bit. The ever-increasing numbers of people who are throwing themselves into the pit, never to return, causes the hole to expand until it looks set to engulf the country.
While initially determined to keep others out, if only for the sake of procedural compliance, both workers begin to express a draw towards the pit. The on-site worker becomes convinced he can help stop it if only he can get close enough. The office worker becomes curious for details, expressing a fascination to know what is at the bottom. But the final shot shows us that what is at the bottom is simply a giant mount of the all the dead bodies of the people who have thrown themselves in.
Bleak, it clearly parallels the initial lack of interest by authorities and the lack of seriousness by the public about the Covid threat. The needlessness of all those lives lost and the danger posed to the whole country is emphasised by its stark ending.
Filters is a short film about Kira, a woman whose insecurities are increasingly exacerbated by image filters.
Kira has years of work experience in admin, but struggles to find a job. Doing interviews over Zoom, she notes a distinct drop-off in interest when potential employers see she has Down Syndrome. Her friend suggests she use a filter, something which will alter her appearance to be more within society’s ideals. (Don’t worry, I’ll kick off about it in a minute, let me tell you the rest of the story).
As, depressingly, the filter trick works, Kira becomes evermore obsessed with her appearance, and starts to weigh herself, and look critically at her body in the mirror. She eventually messages her favourite Insta star, asking for weight loss advice, and how she can be more like her.
The Insta star sees how fucked up this is, and makes an announcement saying she will be removing her profile, as all the photos are manipulated through filters, and it is effectively a persona account and none of the content is ‘real’. She apologises to anyone hurt by her actions.
As a result of this, Kira gains the confidence to reveal her true appearance to her new employer, and is relieved when they offer her the contract regardless.
Right. Let’s start with the rage-inducing elements. Kira’s fears about her employment prospects are, unfortunately, very well founded. Disabled people are much more likely to face discrimination in the job market, and have higher unemployment rates. What can be obscured by even these dismal stats is the difference between people with a visible or invisible disability. Visible disabilities carry a whole host of their own challenges, and are more easily subject to bigotry. While some might point out laws protecting against employment discrimination, it can be really difficult to quantify the cooling of someone’s attitude towards you, once they clock your disability. To Kira and the audience, it’s obvious, but it would be really hard to capture it in writing.
The intersection between gender and disability here is an aggravating factor. Much more than men, women are judged on their appearance. Women face employment inequality challenges all their own. So as a disabled women, Kira is in a double-bind.
The solution of the filter is fucked up. While all women are forced to compete as objects, certain criteria like disability, race, or fatness can permanently exclude you. For some women, societal objectification might come at the cost of some make-up and uncomfortable shoes, but for those whose physicality immediately discounts them, the costs can be far more damaging, in the form of skin-lightening creams, unnecessary surgeries, and denying and hiding your stigmatised self.
Kira initially bristles at the suggestion, and states, “I’m not ashamed”. She doesn’t have a problem with her disability, its the employers that have the problem. But when the filter works, and she gets a job, she starts to internalise the message it sends. It’s one thing to suspect that if you didn’t have your disability, your life would be easier and you would be treated better, it’s another thing entirely to experience it. It’s like glimpsing a world where, ironically, with the use of the filter, people can actually see her for who she is. That’s something very tempting to chase, and that is why she internalises such a damaging lesson.
Then it starts to infect everything. It doesn’t stop at the job, and she starts weighing and critiquing herself. She goes from having no shame and confidence in herself, if a bit knocked, to actively seeking out strangers for guidance on how to change her appearance in real life.
The lassie who runs the instagram profile, I feel she is unfairly scapegoated. It’s sometimes simply fun to play with your appearance in photos. Adding dog-ears or looking like a chipmunk doesn’t mean you are feeding into patriarchy. The problem’s not looking different in your photos, the problem is how a set margin of appearances are unduly favoured and valued in our society, and those are ableist, racist, fatphobic, queerphobic, and misogynistic standards. The lassie takes down her profile, like that’s gonna change the world. Like that’s gonna make Kira’s employment prospects any better, or remove the pressure all women are under. She also apologises, as though this is a situation of her own creating. She identifies her behaviour as harmful, but is her behaviour harmful? She’s not turning anyone down from jobs, or stopping them from being on tv or models, or just normalised within the course of representation. If anything, she’s just doing what Kira’s doing, and she’s just as much a victim as Kira.
Regardless, I understand what her action is supposed to mean, a rejection of bullshit objectification and an embracing of being your true self. It’s a healing message, and an attempt at solidarity. Overall, I like it.
A good wee film focusing on the harder parts of intersectional oppression and its new manifestations and challenges in the technological sphere.
A horror-comedy short film. It’s like Hitchcock’s The Birds but with fly-tipped mattresses. Gotta say, I really enjoyed watching the ominous lurking of a dingy tartan mattress. Full to the brim with horror tropes, beautifully reworked for a ludicrous threat. Just when you thought it was safe to emerge after the pandemic, little did you know, the streets now belong TO THE MATTRESSES!
Really liked this one. 4 people select a work of art of their choosing in the Tate galleries, and express their reaction to it through dance. Some of the dances take from the meaning of the artwork, some the form, some simply from the emotion it evokes.
The first dancer takes Maggi Hambling’s 2016, a painting of a sinking boat from above. It is an image emblematic of so much of what was happening in that year. In the literal sense it is a familiar image because we saw every day the images of desperate escapes by refugees on sinking boats and rafts in the Mediterranean Sea. Climate change increasing became the focus of concern, as more and more events, such as severe hurricanes and cyclones, provided tangible proof of it already in motion. And also that sense of us all in the same boat, all pulling in the same direction, that notion of society, felt like it was breaking down, with the rise of the far-right, and their successes in mainstream political discourse, such as the election of Trump and the vote for Brexit. The first dancer expresses the urgency and anguish of the image by embodying that sense of the choppy, devouring sea, and the desperation of rowing descending into more and more frantic actions as they are tossed about on swells, before finally sinking into stillness beneath the waves.
The second dancer takes on Gillian Ayres’s Distillation, an abstract painting that rebels against the conventions of composition and form. The dancer is inspired by this freedom, using their body to mimic the swirls and curves of the painting, while also bursting free with spontaneity and creativity.
The third dancer picks Victor Pasmore’s Square Motif, Blue and Gold: The Eclipse. While focusing on the base geometrical shapes, Pasmore conveys the sense of an eclipse. The dancer enjoys embodying these shapes, engaging the pleasure they are experiencing visually with the participation of their whole body.
The last dancer chooses Henry Fuseli’s Titania and Bottom, depicting the scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is a painting packed with purpose, telling the story of each character, the scene, and its place as a whole within the play. The image is at once filled with motion of interacting characters, but also still, frozen in one deliberate pose. The dancer tries to convey that mixture of movement and stillness.
The film also shows the dancers interacting with architecture of the galleries. Sliding on the floor, dancing down the halls and up the stairs. It was really interesting to see the space used in that way, and kinda made me wanna go and dance there myself.
I loved this. There used to be shorts like this on the telly, where they would talk about an artwork for 5 minutes or read a poem, and it would give you an idea of what you might to see or borrow from the library. I remember being told they were part of the Channel 4 Schools programme, I didn’t know that, I was just catching them when I flicked channels between episodes of Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman. I loved catching them, and I don’t get why there isn’t more stuff like that. In an ad break, just take one gap to read a poem, or show some art, or put on something like this. I like just happening upon art.
A woman interacts with animations of things that annoy her over the course of her day. The first film endeavour of Wendy Belcher, it is an amusing look at mundane irritation. Enjoyably curmudgeon.
Tom Lightfoot works at a call centre that is essentially Google over the phone. He has the answers to everything except how to deal with his secret. Inside his heart is a flutter, and over the course of this short film, he finds the courage to set it free. A beautiful design appears on his chest, and at the hole in the centre, out flies a flock of birds. As he stares at their beautiful patterns in the sky, he begins to dance with the murmuration. A call to celebrate what is inside of you.
Music video for Danielle Makes Songs’s Can’t Stop Drawing. It is about her love of expressing herself through artwork, be it drawing or painting. She dances, sings and signs about her creative drive.
A cute little animated short about a Covid-19 virus called Colin. In down-to-earth comedy fashion, he apologies for all the fuss he’s caused, which has admittedly got out of hand, but he just wanted to travel and see the world. Now he’s seen everywhere, he dispenses handy hygiene advice to get things back to normal. Sweet and gentle short film.
Went to see the Oska Bright Film Festival’s Best of the Fest 2022 selection. First up was This Is News Radio, an Australian comedy short film. It shows the radio presenters playing all their jingles live, instead of just using a mixer of recordings, and it’s actually really amusing. Their producer is like, ‘Again, with passion!’ and they’ve got to keep themselves at the top of their game, just to produce the beats behind their introduction to the news. It’s shot in a grainy black-and-white, like some serious musical retrospective, which only makes it seem more absurd and hilarious. 7 minutes of fun.
Have you ever seen something that was absolutely barmy, and excellent at the same time? That’s this.
As a total newcomer to Peter Greenaway’s films, and this being the second of his films I’ve seen in a week, watching them feels like smoking strong dope, or that particular kind of absinthe drunk. He assaults the screen with bold, colourful, unflinching visuals. He strikes at the body. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover speaks constantly to the senses, with food and with sex. When he then hits you with disgust or violence, you feel it in your skin.
The star is Michael Gambon, playing Albert Spica, the titular thief, a gangster with a gastronomic monomania. He has bought over a high-end French restaurant called Le Hollandais, where he daily takes his meals with his retinue of thugs. He has a base animalistic avarice for food, but no higher appreciation of it, dead to all beauty, elegance and art. He talks endlessly on the subject of digestion, equally fascinated with the pleasure and the putrescence. The film begins with him punishing some underling for a perceived slight by force-feeding him shit. He is a brute, and absolutely foul.
Chained to him, like a woman tied to a weight and thrown in the sea, is Helen Mirren, playing Georgina, his wife. She has endured years of abuse at his hands, and now exists like the living dead. Unlike him, she has taste and refinement. She finds him disgusting and deplorable, but is resigned to what seems to be her fate.
That is, until she sees Michael across the restaurant. You’d never believe the pair of them were about to engage in a passionate love affair. He looks like nobody so much as Steve Davis, the boring, pencil-necked snooker player from the 90s. He’s balding at the crown, in a dull brown suit. But his stillness, silence, and humility contrast starkly with her husband’s braying, brash peacocking.
Michael also shows a real appreciation of the food, and sits quietly on his own, reading. Georgina sees immediately in him a kindred spirit, sensitive to literature, learning, and art. Wordlessly they meet and consummate their love in the restaurant toilets.
I cannot tell you how tense this film gets at times. Alone in an empty room, Alfred could make the place seesaw, careening with his violent mood swings toward bloody murder. But with the lovers having to make their assignations around the restaurant with him present at table, there is a constant threat of discovery by this cruel, narcissistic, callous child.
Almost the entire film is shot in one location – the restaurant. Framed like an open stage, the film set feels more like a theatre, with the sexual scandal among petty criminals elevated to the tragedy of Shakespearean plays. The camera follows with lateral tracking shots across the cross-sections of the rooms, trailing from the carpark, through the kitchen, and into the dining area. When people are sent above or below this level, they climb up bare scaffolding, with no attempt to portray a three-dimensional building with inner and obscured structures.
Each room is also flooded with colour, blue for the carpark, green for the kitchen, red for the dining room, white for the toilets. The actors’ costumes also change from room to room, as they seem to soak up the colour of the setting. With the vivid technicolour greens and reds, it made me think of the Wizard of Oz, with Georgina’s outfit changing like a horse of a different colour. The over-the-topness of it feels right at home with ecstatics of passion and the bombast of blaggardry. It also made me think of the coloured rooms in The Masque of the Red Death, that the saturation was a form of torture, just as Alfred’s singular fixation for food robs it of any sensitivity, and the tyranny of his possession of Georgina robs it of any love. Also, the interlinking rooms in Masque give an ominous feel, as if leading to a climax. This does the same, being generally unsettling to the eye, but also it seems to heat up as we move towards where the action is happening.
The carpark is blue, a cold colour for the outside, for the stony concrete. In the opening scene, Alfred pulls up two stolen refrigerated vans full of meat. Their chill is also complimented by the blue, as are the police lights when they come to claim them.
The kitchen is green, warming slightly. It is full of the fruits of nature, huge cornucopias of beast and foul, fruit and veg. Whether transformed into a dish, or still with their living appearance, a sense of the kitchen is evoked as a place of nourishment and life. It’s here most of the sex scenes take place, as new love grows.
And finally the dining room is bright red, the colour of blood. It’s here Alfred holds court. It is the colour of rage, and meat, and violence. The colour of passion, of heat, of murderous intent.
Boarst, the cook, played by Richard Bohringer, helps Georgina and Michael continue their affair, seeing in them two people who truly appreciate his talents. In fact, most people in this are actually quite nice, apart from Alfred and his crew. But the close quarters all but guarantee discovery sooner or later. And then what?
So good. It up-ends this story about a coarse little man, and this couple shagging in the toilets, to the pathos of classical theatre. It plums some of the depths of disgust, but so beautifully it’s undeniably an art film.
A series of contradictions executed perfectly. Loved it.
