Haneke Takes Top Honours At Cannes

Until Sunday night Michael Haneke had never won the Cannes Film Festival's top prize. Jury President Isabelle Huppert has starred in the Haneke films The Piano Teacher (2001) and Time Of The Wolf (2003) so it wasn't entirely unexpected that her jury would seek to remedy that situation this year by giving the Palme D'Or to Haneke's epic study of fear and malice The White Ribbon.

Cannes this year was all about celebrating the individual vision of the auteur in a global film cultural that seems more inclined towards the formulaic and industrial. Haneke is certainly a glorious example of the European auteur. The White Ribbon has echoes of Arthur Miller's The Crucible or Ibsen's An Enemy Of The People as it follows the way a community spirit is shattered by strange events, suspicions and misunderstandings on the eve of World War One. Like all of Haneke's films it makes nothing explicit, it is a brooding, enigmatic tale shot in glorious black and white in which the viewer is invited to speculate on whether this is about the loss of innocence at a moment of global catastrophe, a study of the human condition or a stark warning of what was to come in twentieth century history. I think It is a film that will continue to grow in the memory.

Haneke certainly seemed pleased with his triumph, declaring: "I can say this is a moment where I am truly happy." Jacques Audiard's brilliant crime drama A Prophet won the Grand Jury Prize with Red Road's Andrea Arnold winning her second Jury Prize for Fish Tank, a compelling but grim tale of a teenage girl whose life changes when her mother attracts a handsome, charming new boyfriend in the shape of sexy Michael Fassbender. It's the kind of film that won widespread admiration invariably followed by the comment that they can't imagine anyone paying money to see it.

The Best Actress prize for Charlotte Gainsbourg in Lars Von Trier's Anti-Christ was a big surprise although maybe it was more of a reward for enduring the hardships of that gruelling misfire than any acknowledgment of real accomplishment. Equally unexpected but rather inspired was the choice of Christoph Waltz as Best Actor for Quentin Tarantino's The Inglorious Basterds. He certainly stole the film with a mesmerising portrait of the blithe, chilling Nazi Colonel Hans Landa.

Big cheers too for the special prize given to 87 year-old Alain Resnais whose bizarre screwball comedy Wild Grass seemed to provide vast amusement for French colleagues in the audiences whilst leaving the Brits and other nationalities completely baffled. It is made with such verve and charm that you are almost persuaded to forgive Resnais his eccentricities and if it is his final film then it's not a bad way to end a career.

Blogger: GFF Co-director Allan Hunter in Cannes

The Basterds Are Coming

Wednesday was a perfect Cannes day. Blues skies. Shimmering seas. Piercing sunlight as soon as dawn broke yet by 8am some 2,300 journalists had filled the Lumiere cinema eagerly anticipating the world’s first press screening of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. The demand to see the film was so intense that an extra screening was added at 9am to accommodate 400 more journalists. The film itself is…pretty entertaining and borderline offensive depending on your feelings about how seriously cinema should address the legacy of World War Two. In Tarantino’s case WW2 is the inspiration for a big cartoon of a movie fantasy in which an elite unit of vicious Jewish-American soldiers use the power of cinema (quite literally) to stop the Third Reich. It bears no resemblance to history as we know it and has more of a feel of a spaghetti war movie (lots of borrowed Morricone music on the soundtrack) or as Screen International colleague Mike Goodridge dubbed it Kill Adolf, Parts 1 & 2. It feels as if Tarantino has written some great individual scenes (or chapters as they are called in the film) but doesn’t necessarily stitch them together in an entirely satisfying manner. Great roles for Diane Kruger and Melanie Laurent. A ridiculous appearance from Mike Myers as a tally ho British officer who is much too Austin Powers to take seriously. A few brief moments from Aussie veteran Rod Taylor ( The Time Machine, The Birds etc) as Winston Churchill. Michael Fassbender as a terribly stiff upper lip British hero. Brad Pitt disappointingly dull as Lt Aldo Raine-although lighting up the evening premiere with Angelina. Not as much action as the trailer might make you think but lots and lots of Tarantino dialogue and good Saturday night fun but somehow you can’t see it winning any prizes.

Many of us thought that Michael Haneke’s latest The White Ribbon might be a strong Palme D’Or contender but after seeing it I’m not so sure. It is set in a small German village in 1913 and looks absolutely beautiful-gorgeous black and white images, snowy scenes straight from Ansell Adams. As with all Haneke films there is an unsettling atmosphere as the soul of the village appears to be contaminated. The children turn rebellious there are incidents and accidents, jealousy and malice. Everything is soured and yet nothing is explained. It could just be a reflection of human nature as the world lost it’s innocence in the last months before World War 1 or an indication of what was to come in the Germany of the 1930s. Everything is open to interpretation but after 150 minutes you really want more than ambiguity.

A few brief words on some other highlights from the competition titles-Ken Loach’s Looking For Eric is extremely funny and endearing as a despairing postie receives life lessons from the great Eric Cantona (“ I am not a man, I am Cantona” ). Well worth catching at the GFT next month as is the appearance from screenwriter Paul Laverty in early June. Pedro Almodovar and Penelope Cruz are reunited on the luscious melodrama Broken Embraces - a complex, assured slice of gornw-up filmmaking. I’ve tended to give Lars Von Trier the benefit of the doubt in the past but Anti-Christ convinces you it’s time for the padded cell and the pureed food. An intellectual’s idea of torture porn, it is extremely unpalatable complete with full frontal genital mutilation. Artificial Eye have bought it for the UK and we can only wish them the best of luck.

Blogger: GFF Co-director Allan Hunter in Cannes

Cannes Do Spirit

It is shaping up to be a pretty vintage Cannes with an abundance of good movies in most sections of the Festival. It is sixteen years since Jane Campion won the Palme d’Or here for The Piano and her films since then have often been very disappointing but she is right back on form with Bright Star, a beautifully crafted and ultimately very moving account of the tragic love between the poet Keats and his neighbour Fanny. It looks fantastic and has the kind of performance from Abbie Cornish that is already attracting Oscar buzz as they say. Also in the main competition is the brilliant A Prophet from Jacques Audiard, the man who gave us The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Imagine Prison Break crossed with an Alexandre Dumas novel like The Count Of Monte Cristo and you have the pulse of this gripping crime drama in which a petty criminal is sentenced to six years in prison and becomes embroiled in the turf disputes of warring inmates that he learns to survive and master. It is an incredible piece of storytelling on a par with Gomorrah and Optimum have bought it for the UK which makes it one to watch out for. Many other highlights include Mother from The Host director Bong Joon-Ho an epic tale of crime and a mother’s love that plays like a mixture of Miss Marple crime-solving and Almodovar melodrama. Completely compelling for a 140 minute running time. Also fantastic is Precious, the story of a very large, very sullen 16 year-old black girl who has suffered terrible abuse at the hands of her father and mother but rather than seeing herself as a victim she knows that she is a beautiful, wonderful person and sets out to take on the world. A glib sentence doesn’t do justice to the emotional power, daring and toughness of a film that deserves a huge audience. Disappointments include Ang Lee’s mild-mannered Taking Woodstock with Imelda Staunton channeling the spirit of the late Shelley Winters in an overwrought performance as an embittered Jewish momma and Johnnie To’s hilariously bad Vengeance, a kind of Death Wish Does Hong Kong in which French idol Johnny Hallyday (looking all of 112) sets out to avenge the Triad killing of his grandchildren and son-in-law even though he has a bullet in his brain and is fast loosing his memory. Probably a blessing if he ever had to sit through this codswallop. With a bit of luck we can avoid that stinker for the Glasgow Film Festival and continue to seek out the cream of the crop.

GFF Co-director Allan Hunter, in Cannes.

image: Jacques Audiard's A Prophet

The Only Way Is Up At Cannes

Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images

A grumpy old man has become the first big star of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Carl Fredricksen may be 78 years old and computer generated but he had critics applauding wildly after a screening of the Festival’s opening night film Up. The tenth feature from Pixar , the studio behind Toy Story and Monsters Inc, is the first animated feature to ever open the world’s most important film festival. Ed (Lou Grant) Asner provides the voice of the retired balloon salesman who finds a new lease of life when he ties thousands of balloons to his house and flies away to the wilds of South America. He is joined by eight-year old stowaway Kevin, a perky Wilderness Explorer whose wild enthusiasm is a complete contrast to Carl’s crotchety demeanour. “ I’m a sucker for sentimentality, “ claims Asner. “ The film has something to say about celebrating life, and the union of two souls is always much sweeter than the isolation of one.” Up will open in Britain in the autumn and was set to delight a celebrity audience at a red carpet opening night gala where Bryan Ferry paid musical tribute to 84 year-old French chansonnier Charles Aznavour who provides the voice of Carl in the French language version of Up. British hopes in the Festival rest on romantic drama The Fish Tank and the latest Ken Loach film Looking For Eric in which a British postman and dedicated football fan receive lessons in life from Eric Cantona.

Blogger: GFF Co-director Allan Hunter

Goran and Mr Paul

“IN A FAIR world, I think Billy’s one of the people that would be knighted forever. He should be treated like royalty and I wanted to make that statement.”
Swedish filmmaker Goran Olsson is referring to his use of jazz lingo’s honorary prefix, HRH, (His Royal Highness) but also to this hour-and-a-half long documentary of veteran Philadelphia soul artist, Billy Paul; Am I Black Enough For You?
“Fifteen years ago I was driving from LA to Las Vegas and I stopped for gas and we bought a cassette of Billy Paul. I fell in love with the music. Billy’s more than a singer; with his voice he’s a composer, arranger and interpreter.”
Later, back in “cold and depressing” Sweden, Billy’s music helped Olsson deal with troublesome bouts of northern angst.
“ I had all Billy’s records on my iPod and it was comforting. I used it as therapy basically”. Olsson cites this film as payback.
Billy Paul is best known for his 1972 Grammy award-winning single Me and Mrs Jones, and to mainstream audiences for not much else, but this jazz-trained singer with a richly textured and sophisticated voice is regarded by many as one of the most underrated performers of the soul era.
Now in his early seventies, with a brace of black music awards and the keys to numerous cities across the States in his pocket, he continues to tour and to run his own label with his wife, Blanche.
The follow up single to Me and Mrs Jones was the eponymous Am I Black Enough For You? It was a move that, despite his black consciousness, Billy Paul was against, and one that nearly destroyed his career, given the socio-political climate in the US at the time.
Olsson says: “That’s the storyline of the film. He had a conflict with the record company and we explore that in the film as a narrative structure.”
The record company was Philadelphia International Records, owned by the legendary writing and producing duo Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff.
“Gamble and Huff were very militant, they were friends with Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. They used Billy as a political tool. He wanted to be a popular singer”. Am I Black Enough For You? received almost no radio airplay from nervous radio bosses, and it took until 1974 for Paul to re-enter the Top 40.
More recently, in 2003 Kenny Gamble lost a lawsuit to Billy Paul for unpaid royalties, resulting in a payout of half a million dollars. Gamble appears in the film and Olsson says their relationship is complicated.
“Gamble and Huff sold I think around one hundred million records around ‘72, ‘73 and became enormously rich. They started with real estate and things and abandoned the record company and the artists in some ways. It was common in the music industry, it took a long time for artists to know the contract and claim their rights; it’s a nasty industry.
“I wouldn’t say that Kenny Gamble is a crook, but that it’s a crooked business”. But I respect him. And Billy Paul was not an easy character, he was a wildcat.”
Olsson thinks involvement in his film has had an influence and that they are approaching each other again: “They’re not enemies anymore, they’re over the hurdle and patching things up.”
Olsson and crew spent a summer with the Pauls in Philadelphia and followed them on tour to Brazil and Paris, much to the bemusement of Billy and Blanche: “Coming from Sweden they thought it was an unlikely thing for us to want to do; we’re Swedes, we look so blond and they think we’re like Eskimos and they loved that we paid attention to this stuff.
“But he’s a smart guy and he understood.”
Olsson also wanted to deal with Paul being married to the same woman, who is also his manager, for forty years; their relationship, love and respect: “Blanche is very much part of the film, she’s very witty, funny and entertaining”. The film also features Questlove; producer and drummer with hip hop band, Roots, hip-hop artists Scholly D and Malik B and music industry legend Clive Davis.
Visually, Olsson took his inspiration from Bruce Weber’s film about Chet Baker, Let’s Get Lost. “I did a very close analysis of Bruce Weber’s masterpiece and I took a still image of every single cut in the film and made a montage on the wall.
“It’s black and white, it’s in the ‘50’s, it’s in California and it’s about heroin. We transformed that to the ‘70’s, colour, Philadelphia and cocaine.
“I wanted to treat it as respectfully as I could. I wanted to make a beautiful film so we shot it on film and we did it all, except for one scene, (where Billy places a gardenia on Billie Holliday’s grave) during nighttime because I wanted an intimate, soul feeling to it.”
Olsson has tackled more controversial subjects in the past, like that of notorious Swedish rapper, Leila K, but he says this is “basically a fan film”. As to whether the finished result fulfilled his aims he replies: “I don’t know yet. I’m thoroughly happy that I got the opportunity to meet these people and to put light on these beautiful artists. So I’m feeling blessed. I don’t care about the rest.”

Am I Black Enough for You screens today at Grosvenor (18.45) and tomorrow at CCA (15.00) as part of the music and film festival. Click here for tickets and further information.

Blogger: Allison Young

Shorts Extra: Toggle

Joanna Susskind’s Toggle will be screening at the Unstuck programme at CCA on Saturday 14 February at 20.30 (click title for tickets). Joanna studied History of Art at Edinburgh University and then moved back to Glasgow to study animation at the Glasgow School of Art Since graduating Joanna has been doing work for the BBC and on various animation and design projects with the visualisation team at the GSA’s Digital Design Studio. Joanna was kind enough to share her thoughts with us.

What's your film about?
My animation, Toggle, represents the frightening notion that life is a never-ending and continuous cycle of events that are out of our control. I wanted to draw attention to humanity’s unexplained purpose and final destination in life. Essentially, none of us know why we are here or where we are going. We have no way of proving that the life we live is real and not simply a simulation or something similarly controlled by an outside source. Or on a lighter note… It’s a film about a girl stuck in a video game!

Why did you make it?
I made the animation in my final year of my masters at the Glasgow School of Art. I’ve always been interested in existentialism…(never really understood it fully) but I thought animation would be the perfect means of expressing what I do know about it. It’s a really horrible concept and I thought that by expressing it through drawings, colours and movement it might create a nicer way of understanding it.

Why should people watch it?
People should watch Toggle because it has a great soundtrack by the fabulous James Holden! (www.bordercommunity.com)

How important are festivals for short filmmakers?
Festivals like GFF are great for people like me. It’s such an exciting thing to aim for when you’re working on a project. The event and all the networking is just as important – I can’t wait to meet all the other film makers; its them I learn the most from!

Blogger: Michael Gillespie

Who Do You Think She Is?

^{Remembering Mary Gordon}

One of the pleasures of watching Hollywood films from the 1930s and 1940s is the chance to see the work of some of the wonderful character actors who were the backbone of the industry. Weasly little Elisha Cook Jnr seemed born to play the fall guy. Edward Everett Horton could delight with his dithering and Eve Arden could serve up a wisecrack more lethal than any vodka martini.

Glasgow-born Mary Gordon was one of that tireless team of supporting players who lit up Hollywood's Golden Age. She is best remembered now for playing the housekeeper Mrs Hudson in the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies but those films represent just a fraction of a very prolific career. If Hollywood needed a Scottish washerwoman, devoted Irish mother or loyal Welsh servant then they came to Mary Gordon. She appeared alongside Cary Grant and James Cagney, Katharine Hepburn and Mae West, James Stewart and Joan Crawford. She appeared more than once alongside Laurel And Hardy, notably in Bonnie Scotland (1935), and was a firm favourite of director John Ford who employed her in a string of films from Mary Of Scotland (1936) to Fort Apache (1948).

There are plenty of reasons to remember Mary Gordon and this year's Glasgow Film Festival has just the person to tell her story. Journalist Alison Kerr, a regular contributor to The Herald, is Mary's relative and has many insider tales to tell of Mary's journey from Glasgow to Hollywood and back. When Mary returned to Glasgow in 1946 for a visit she was accompanied by one of her many showbusiness pals, a talented musical fellow that you might have heard of called Irving Berlin.

Remembering Mary Gordon (click title for tickets) takes place on Sunday February 15th at 1.15pm at the Glasgow Film Theatre and will include clips from some of Mary's many films including Bonnie Scotland and the Sherlock Holmes series.

Blogger: GFF co-director Allan Hunter