Issue 5: Winter 2009 / '10
Different Directions 2009
Hearing the theme for the second annual Galway-based Different Directions Film Festival, I couldn't help having the initial impression that it might be a mistake. Granted, the first year's programme was already a successfully eccentric slant on the festivals' self-identified role as Ireland's experimental film festival. As Maximilian Le Cain has already written in these pages, it emphasised "extreme and baroque mutations or variations of cinematic narrativity" over the large body of experimental cinema for which the materiality of the medium supercedes any concern with narrativity. But this year's thematic focus on works inspired and adapted from the great works of literature seemed to carry within it all sorts of counter-intuitions: surely experimental cinema's strength is in its originality, its ability to elude the restrictions of verbal enunciation and formulate a fundamentally different form of utterance?
Luckily, these concerns were answered by programmer Fergus Daly's catalogue notes and assistant programmer Katherine Waugh's lively speech introducing the festival-and further defeated by the wonderful selection of films that screened over the weekend in Galway's Nun Island Theatre. What each made clear was that the key justification for such a staid theme is its fertility as a territory for subversion. What Waugh called the festival's "proselytising function" was a recontextualisation of literature's relevance for cinema, not as a reservoir of characters or plots but rather, as Daly puts it, "a form of thinking that allows experimental cinema to constantly reinvent itself".
Each of the chosen films embodied a different line of inspiration between literature and film. The festival's guest filmmaker, Mirko Tzotschew, presented a series of Super 8 shorts based on Kafka's short stories. Rather than adapting or translating the stories, Tzotschew draws on them, embuing the grit and texture of his chosen medium, and his haunting east German locations, with the emotions of Kafka's stories. The textural expressivity of different mediums is highlighted in Dithyrambe pour Dionysos (Béatrice Kordon, 2007), which transposes the myth of Dionysus to the vineyards and grape-processing plants of southern France. The earthy, sunstruck vineyard scenes are shot in Super 8, while the steel and fluorescent interiors of the factories are in miniDV. The film's drifting, nomadic form manages to imbue these essentially documentary images with a genuinely mythic charge. The legacy of the ancients takes an even more embodied form in Méditteranée (Jean-Daniel Pollet, 1963), in which a rhythmic cycle of images (including Greek ruins, mummified corpses and Spanish bullfights) is repeated with variations alongside an abstract commentary by Philippe Sollers. The literary antecedents here are not specified but there is an overarching, almost preternatural, sense of the diffusion of history and literature in the materiality of the present. Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson's Facs of Life (2009) is rooted in the work of one author in particular, but since that author is Gilles Deleuze, the result is no less expansive. Taking as a starting point videos of Deleuze's 1970s classroom lectures, Maglioni and Thomson create a work that is neither "about" Deleuze nor an interpretation of his books but, rather, a utilisation of his ideas in a cinematic form.
Despite all this, the highpoint of the festival was undoubtedly the double bill of The Fall of the House of Usher (Jean Epstein, 1928) and Vampyr (Carl Dreyer, 1932). In some ways the most conventionally narrative films in the programme, both nonetheless use their characters' points of arrival and departure, goals and obstacles, like all the best horror films, as a springboard for states of intensity that range from the most bodily and visceral to the most transcendental and ethereal.
The regrettable postscript to all of this must be that the festival is not receiving the support it deserves, either from funding bodies or the film-going (and film-making) public. Because of this, its 'proselytising function' is somewhat still-born. Which is a shame, because if there was a community willing to engage with these ideas, Different Directions could be a terrific forum for exchange and a catalyst for future invention.
- Donal Foreman