Issue 5: Winter 2009 / '10

London Film Festival 2009

Although billed as 'cutting edge cinema, artists' film and video and the avant-garde', the Experimenta strand of the 53rd London Film Festival contained several films which wouldn't have felt out of place elsewhere in the festival, while there was work in other strands which would have been equally at home under this banner, perhaps proving that there continues to be a narrowing in the gap between 'artist' and 'art-house'. Examples of films from other strands included the riveting, captivating experience of Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void (2009) - which called to mind the swooping camera of Michael Snow's La région centrale (1971) and the flashing colours of Paul Sharits' work - and the transcendently beautiful but ultimately unsatisfying debut feature from visual artist Shirin Neshat, Women Without Men (2009), which began life as a video installation. Meanwhile, I wondered if the two films from Argentine outfit El Pampero Cine - the hugely enjoyable chase-film Castro (Alejo Moguillansky, 2009) and the fascinating labyrinthine 'thriller' They All Lie (Matías Piñeiro, 2009) - had been included for, respectively, not making much sense, and being a touch too cryptic and elusive.

More obviously belonging to the Experimenta strand were the found-footage films Double Take (Johan Grimonprez, 2009) and FILM IST. a girl & a gun (Gustav Deutsch, 2009). Self-styled as a 'myth-making documentary', Double Take draws from Jorge Luis Borges' short story August 25, 1983 to describe an episode in which Alfred Hitchcock encounters an older double of himself during the filming of The Birds (1963). Piling on layer after layer of doubling, the film finely spins Cold-War newsreel material, footage from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and new scenes featuring a Hitchcock look-alike into a multifaceted web from which audiences can weave their own story. Although ultimately a little too crammed and digressive, with some of the 'doubling' feeling a bit too tenuous, the film is nevertheless an effective investigation into identity, memory and, of course, Hitchcock and his work. It also serves as one of the more successful screen adaptations of Borges' work.

Assembled entirely using footage 'from the first four and a half decades of cinematography', FILM IST. a girl & a gun seeks to explore 'the confrontation of the sexes'. Things get off to a fantastic, frantic start with an intoxicating barrage of images in 'Genesis', the first of the film's five parts. Part two slows things down to a more lyrical pace, and its unfurling flowers soon become erotically Mapplethorpean in part three ('Eros'). Unfortunately, though, the film begins to become tedious as it progresses, partly due to a lack of clear momentum, and partly because the symbolism descends into clichés (e.g. images of a man and a woman on a bed being intercut with a fly landing in a flytrap, or the loading and firing of a canon intercut with explicit footage of sexual intercourse). There's no denying that the film includes some incredible material, but overall it doesn't quite hang together, and the filmmakers' description of the piece as a 'drama' is certainly pushing it.

Also based around pre-existing footage, though in a very different way, was Czech New Wave legend Jan Nemec's The Ferrari Dino Girl (2009). Detailing how he shot the first footage of the Prague Spring and subsequently smuggled it out of the country, the first half of the film plays like a thriller of sorts. Once the initial mission is accomplished, however, the film takes on a more reflective air, showing all 16 minutes of the unedited footage (which has previously been shown and used many times, including in Nemec's own Oratorio for Prague (1968)). Towards the end of this 'auto-documentary', Nemec (as played in the film by Karel Roden) states that 'I happily make my obscure artistic films nobody sees'. On the strength of this particularly poetic and touching work, one can only hope that more people start paying attention.

Less successful were Perestroika (Sarah Turner, 2009) and An Organization of Dreams (Ken McMullen, 2009), which were more interesting for the ideas behind them than as films in themselves, and Elementary Training for Actors (Martín Rejtman, Federico León, 2009), which simply wasn't very interesting at all. Of the two installations on show, Victor Alimpiev's My Absolution proved to be dull, while Laure Prouvost's Monolog was a witty and imaginative one-sided 'interaction' between the artist and the audience ('imagine the person next to you is naked').

The strand's two highlights, however, were Edwin's Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly (2009) and Eugène Green's The Portuguese Nun (2009). A slender 63 minutes, Edwin's film offers a non-linear, non-narrative, metaphorical examination of what it's like to be a Chinese living in Indonesia (though in such a way as to make the issues feel universal). Centred around a relationship between 'Linda, the girl who eats fire crackers' and 'Cahyono, who wants to be a Japanese', the film moves from one bizarre vignette to another with a surreal humour that belies its undercurrent of darkness (when Linda asks Cahyono what he wants to be when he grows up, he answers 'Anything but Chinese'). Challenging viewing in all the right ways, Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly manages to be sweet, tender and very disturbing all at the same time.

Also offering a challenge to viewers, The Portuguese Nun plays like a cross between Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003) and In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerin, 2007). Much like the former, The Portuguese Nun uses the story of an actress alienated in a foreign environment (in this case, Lisbon) to explore themes of isolation and loneliness, though Green imbues the film with a spiritual dimension found nowhere in Coppola's work. Explicitly refuting the chaos of the modern world (which offers the characters only sex, death and cars), the film's calm, quiet pace and strange, wide-eyed acting style have a hypnotic effect. Aware of its own construction, the film contains a knowing humour ('I don't see French films. They're for intellectuals') and uses diegetic music to comment upon the story. Although ultimately a little over-explained and a touch too sentimental, the film has a density masked by its seeming simplicity, and proved to be one of the highlights not only of the Experimenta strand, but of the entire festival.

- Alex Barrett