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SOCIAL WORKS: NEW DOCUMENTARY FORMS<\/strong> Long before the celebrated \u2018Free Cinema\u2019 movement of the 1950s, British-based filmmakers were advancing the documentary form through innovative styles and techniques. Beginning with a hilariously absurd travelogue from 1924, this programme traces that development through good times and bad, resolute with humour and irony.<\/p>\n Adrian Brunel, Crossing the Great Sagrada, 1924, 35mm, tinted b\/w, sound, 10 min<\/strong> SOCIAL WORKS: NEW DOCUMENTARY FORMS<\/strong> CROSSING THE GREAT SAGRADA HOUSING PROBLEMS CALLING MR SMITH N or N.W. GERMANY CALLING NICE TIME PAPERCITY
\nFriday 30 May 2008, at 4pm<\/strong>
\nZurich Videoex Festival Cinema Z3<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n Arthur Elton & E.H. Anstey, Housing Problems, 1935, 35mm, b\/w, sound, 13 min<\/strong>
\n Stefan & Franciszka Themerson, Calling Mr Smith, 1943, 35mm, colour, sound, 10 min<\/strong>
\n Len Lye, N or NW, 1938, 35mm, b\/w, sound, 8 min<\/strong>
\n Charles Ridley, Germany Calling, 1941, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 2 min<\/strong>
\n Claude Goretta & Alan Tanner, Nice Time, 1957, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 17 min<\/strong>
\n John Bennett, Papercity, 1969, 35mm, colour, sound, 5 minutes<\/strong><\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a>
\nFriday 30 May 2008, at 4pm
\nZurich Videoex Festival Cinema Z3<\/p>\n
\nAdrian Brunel, 1924, 35mm, tinted b\/w, sound, 10 min
\n<\/strong>The film is a humorous spoof of a travelogue. Travel films were popular in the Twenties, documenting foreign cultures in a way that tended to reflect imperial, nationalist and often racist stereotypes. Brunel sends up many of the conventions of the genre familiar to audiences. (Jamie Sexton)<\/p>\n
\nArthur Elton & Edgar Anstey, 1935, 35mm, b\/w, sound, 13 min
\n<\/strong>A watershed in British documentary making. For the first time ordinary people spoke directly to the camera about their plight. The clumsy sound-recording equipment (packed into a truck parked outside the locations in Stepney) enabled the directors to achieve huge impact by filming the slum dwellers as they described life inside their wretched houses. The film was made to promote the use of gas as a clean and modern fuel by associating it with the throwing out of the old and the building of the new. (FourDocs)<\/p>\n
\nStefan & Franciszka Themerson, 1<\/strong>943, 35mm, colour, sound, 10 min
\n<\/strong>The Themersons call on \u2018Mr Smith\u2019 to support the war effort as an anti-fascist struggle, illustrating its appeal with examples of Nazi oppression in Poland. The film is experimental in technique, using anamorphic lenses, still and moving images and vivid colour. While the spoken soundtrack employs a rhetoric heard elsewhere in wartime propaganda, the overall tone of the film is unusually urgent and authentic and in some sequences, images combine with music (Chopin, Szymanowski) to convey a real feeling of loss. (David Finch)<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Len Lye, 1938, 35mm, b\/w, sound, 8 min
\n<\/strong>In N or N.W.<\/em>, Lye began to work with more conventionally \u2018dramatic\u2019 material. The film, advertising the benefits of writing letters and using the postal system, centred on a simple narrative of lovers at cross-purposes who are eventually reunited. Yet Lye used a number of unconventional edits, extreme close-ups, trick shots and superimposed animation in order to take a creative approach to such a conventional theme. (Jamie Sexton)<\/p>\n
\nCharles Ridley, 1941, 35mm, b\/w, sound, 2 min
\n<\/strong>A remarkable piece of British wartime propaganda which ridicules Nazi Germany by manipulating footage of Hitler, his party officials and troops of goose stepping soldiers. All are subjected to the optical humiliation of being made dance to the \u2018The Lambeth Walk\u2019, a song that the Nazi party branded as \u2018Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping.\u2019 (MW)<\/p>\n
\nClaude Goretta & Alan Tanner, 1957, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 17 min
\n<\/strong>Impressions of Piccadilly Circus in 1957: hot dogs and nude magazines; dumb cinema queues; posters advertising the glories of war and the horrors of science fiction; lonely faces; searching glances; the parade of amateur and professional \u2018talent\u2019; presiding over all, the ironic statue of Eros \u2026 The observation is untouched by nostalgia, and presents a devastating picture for anyone who thinks of Piccadilly Circus in romantic terms. (Monthly Film Bulletin<\/em>)<\/p>\n
\nJohn Bennett, 1969, 35mm, colour, sound, 5 min
\n<\/strong>Papercity<\/em> builds an impressionistic portrait of London through still photographs and time-lapse footage. Views of the city rarely feature in experimental films of this period, but this semi-commercial production, funded by the British Film Institute, is an evocative study of everyday sights and activities. (MW)<\/p>\n