African Cinema

AFRICAN CINEMA: ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN Thirty years after Sembene's pioneering Borom Sarret, this is a moment of celebration but also of self-assessment for emergent African cinema -- an opportunity to think through questions of funding, the basis of production, and the way that various African films address their different audiences. Pieces of Identity In Europe and North America a nebulous imaginary unity is projected onto Africa. This lazily assumed misconception continues to underpin the distorting insularity and ignorance of the north. It is precisely an imaginary, implicit unity and not to be confused with the distinct political unity proposed by the project of Pan-Africanism, built from conscious political and cultural alliances. One does not have to be too familiar with the continent to understand that there are also many Africas -- culturally, politically, socially. Indeed more than a thousand languages are spoken in Africa and there are as many..

Inside The Room and Beyond

INSIDE THE ROOM AND BEYOND A cult film like The Room challenges our unquestioning acceptance of well-made mainstream cinema. When The Room first screened in Los Angeles in 2003, apparently people were rolling in the aisles within the first ten minutes; Variety's review described it as "so hopelessly amateurish that auds [sic] reportedly walked out" and it was quickly and hyperbolically dismissed as "the worst film ever made". Since then this very strange film has gradually been discovered by cult audiences around the world. Tommy Wiseau is producer, director, writer, and actor - he plays the central role of Johnny - the film emanates from a single source, he allegedly paid $6 million to have it made...

Film and the Digital

RECYCLED ELECTRONS: FILM AND THE DIGITAL I - Algebra in CorkTo begin with a digression from digital history, which is a short history - the prehistory to the development of the digital world that we now inhabit is rarely in focus. It was a 19th century Irish mathematician, George Boole, who created a novel mathematical logic, describing a new algebra which sketched the structure of choice and created a paradigm for human, and now electronic, decision making. He wrote The Mathematical Analysis of Logic in 1847 and The Investigation of the Laws of Thought in 1854. He lived, thought and is buried in Cork. His work showed chains of information and choice categorised into the two logic states of true or false: "Shall I go out and not stay in? Is it raining or has it stopped? If I go out and it's raining should I wear this..

Five Easy Pieces

  THIS BRIEF and itinerate survey of the airwave spectrum, a somewhat arbitrary scan across the audio visual radar, takes a glancing read of some current films and television programmes. There should never be any inhibition or snobbery about the range or pluralism of the material we take seriously, in fact there is an imperative to attend to the things that most people watch. Even if these five fragments, very different pieces from different places in film and television, cannot possibly add up to a balanced overview, they form some part of the pattern of how things are now. 1) Kill BillAs the opening credits announce, this is indeed the fourth film by Quentin Tarantino; (it's worth remembering that Ford, Hawks and Huston used to produce that number every couple of years rather than over a decade and a half). But this is part of the enhanced self-promotion of..

the industrial versus the artisanal

UNDER THE SHADOW OF HOLLYWOOD: THE INDUSTRIAL VERSUS THE ARTISANAL IN 1848 a certain manifesto began with the words: 'A spectre is haunting Europe...' Now, almost 150 years after that seminal pamphlet was written and in the post-industrial epoch, the sentence could well continue with the words ' -- the spectre of Hollywood.' A range of statistics indicate the urgency and seriousness of the situation: American films have gained more than a 90% share of the Irish and British markets in recent years and the proportion is similarly unbalanced in most other countries of the world.(1) The figures are stark correlatives of debilitated production sectors and weakened reception structures -- European cinema as a whole may be in a period of remission... Given the scale of the incursion that has already taken place, the belligerent discourses and robust negotiation of the American industry in relation to the 1994..

Soft and Hard: Intimations Insinuations Implications

SOFT AND HARD: INTIMATIONS INSINUATIONS IMPLICATIONS At a time when television was extending its bravery and its boundaries, when it offered creative space for the world's film-makers, when a cinema of ideas was still possible... In 1985, working as Deputy Commissioning Editor in the Independent Film and Video department of Channel 4, I took on both the programming of a Godard season and the production of a new piece of specially commissioned work from Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville originally entitled A Gentle Conversation on Rough Subjects, which became A Soft Conversation between Two Friends on a Hard Subject (1985) or Soft and Hard for short. Channel 4 was an extraordinary and exciting laboratory at this time, "rebuilding the ship at sea" as a new and radical version of public service television; a publisher broadcaster with a remit to "innovate and experiment in the form and content..

The Pop Promo

LOVE, MUSIC, COMPROMISE: THE POP PROMO Whether it is called innocence or ignorance, a certain unreconciled naivety is the basis for survival in this culture. A naivety which leads to repeated ingenuous expectations of reappraisal, innovation and renewal. What are the forces that can engender change, the possibility of play and freedom to experiment in the face of Power, in the grip of Industry? The machinery of pop video production exemplifies the strange dynamic of culture and commerce, an unsteady relation between compromise and artistic realisation generated when business encounters creative desire. A micro climate shifting between uneven and unpredictable weather patterns... Unfinished Business From the perspective of the rich, variegated histories of the many previous experiments with image and music in film one might have expected that the development of music video in the late Seventies would open a unique terrain for diverse visual exploration to reach..