lend me ur eyes 090
I just went to Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna for a few days. It was my first “international film festival” since attending the Berlinale in February 2023 (say no more.) I hadn’t much missed film festivals, or at least I thought I hadn’t. On returning to those waters, albeit with a half-dipped toe, the things I struggled with remained the same. I can’t talk about films with people who take them so seriously and treat them as a security blanket, or at least I find it boring to do only that, and to do it in that weird festival man way, with such desperate conviction and competitiveness. And on top I don’t think I am all that good at watching any more than two films a day, at least not for longer than three consecutive days. It all blurs too much together and my faculties for proper absorption dissolve. But I did very much like watching old films, eating good food and drink, and, where possible, talking to nice people about things other than films. And one thing that I liked very much was meeting an old Italian man called Gianluca in the front row of one of the cinemas, who told me he had travelled in from Bergamo and was watching six films a day for the week, and does so every year and will do so until he croaks, because he loves the cinema. He was great, and he showed me his beautiful hand-drawn schedule and clash-finder as well as his diary in which he writes down every film he sees. He told me “Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Naruse” were his “absolute favourites,” to which I said “same” and we looked at each other and smiled. So I think I will go again next year if I can, because something about it was restorative for my passion of watching films and seeking out their fringes, encapsulated in this sweet analogue (bag)man doing it only for his diary.
More than this, what this exchange made me reflect on most about going to these things is the possibility they offer for the accidental experience or the incidental encounter, for being out in some unknown place for significant amounts of time and as a result something unexpected happening to you. There is a story I have seen going around the internet recently about Kurt Vonnegut. He is going out of the house to buy an envelope and his wife asks him why he doesn't just order one hundred of them off the internet instead, so he doesn’t have to always go out solely for one envelope. He explains that he likes to go out to get one envelope because he will have a good time doing so. “I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I'll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know.” The “moral of the story,” Vonnegut says, “is that we’re here on earth to fart around.” If you go outside, something might happen. “That is what the computer people don’t realise.” It is in this spirit that I wanted to remember some unexpected things that have occurred at film festivals I went to in the past. Things that, had I stayed in my home or indeed only inside the cinema screens of these locations, would not have happened at all.
San Sebastián, Spain (2014)
This is my first international film festival. I’m on a “young critic’s workshop” and I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve read online about what it means to be at a film festival and my experience doesn’t seem to really match what was described. I send a text message to NY, because we have had had some half discussions via Twitter before and he was a veteran of film festivals and therefore should know better than I how to behave. He replies, saying was planning to go to a hardcore show somewhere in the city that he had seen a flyer for and I was welcome to tag along. This idea is much more legible to me than the rest of the festival, which seems to run based on systems and shorthands I don’t understand. The show, which is a bill of all local bands, is being put on at a bar called Mogambo. NY likes this because it is also the name of a John Ford film that I hadn’t seen then and still haven’t seen now. NY navigates there. It is about a 40 minute walk out of the city centre into a suburb, which is perhaps where you would expect a local hardcore show to be held. When we get to Bar Mogambo, it’s very swish and totally empty. The only band that would ever be playing here is a nice quartet that plays lounge jazz, not grubby punks from the Basque underground. NY realises that San Sebastián must have two Bar Mogambos. The other one is nowhere near. We decide instead to walk back towards the festival’s centre, and maybe drink a beer on the way. It’s warm and nice. I remember walking through a school basketball court at one point, and the green concrete, white chalk, and haloed floodlights are imprinted in my mind. It wasn’t the plan, but it was another thing instead.
Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic (2016)
It’s the week after the Brexit vote and everyone I meet at the festival tells me I am from the “stupid country” and I can only agree. This is pre 2017 election but post 2015 and things are only going to get worse from here on. I’m always looking for odd things to do that aren’t film-watching when I’m at festivals and I had read somewhere about the walking trails immediately surrounding the city. At some point during my visit, I see Tsai Ming-liang’s documentary Afternoon in a cinema at the fringes of the city. As I come out, it is, fittingly, late afternoon, so I decide to take a walk up the elevated area that lies behind the Grandhotel Pupp, a massive and stately hotel with more than 200 rooms and a history that dates back to 1722. I assume that by scaling this steep wooded hillside swiftly I can catch the sunset, hoping there is some kind of view I can photograph. There are various views but most are partially obscured. What I discover instead is a group of wild pigs, which come snuffling out of a closing unexpectedly, running towards me like the boars in that scene in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. It was an amazing moment, and the most satisfying justification for having made that small climb. I think about it often, as a kind of blunt metaphor for the rewards for exertion and the promises of the unknown. Karlovy Vary, known primarily as a spa city that rich Russian people holiday in, and as the small settlement with countless historic buildings strangely circling a massive brutalist tower, is an odd place, but not without charm. The food is bad but the beer is cheap, and the fact that it is always hot when the festival takes place means everyone seems to want only to party. I remember it fondly but it is these symbolic pigs that I will never shut up about to anyone about.
Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2018)
I am attending the International Film Festival Rotterdam as press, and I have a commission to cover a project that has been created by Apichatpong Weerasethakul for the festival called SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL, which involves staying the night in a room that places hammocks before circular projections to create a kind of sleepover-space-cum-durational-installation, the logical extension to this filmmaker’s commitment to the idea of cinema as a dreamscape, and to forgiving those who fall asleep during his films. Being here feels to me very much like making it—not necessarily by any conventional measures but certainly by those of my own definition. At no point did I ever expect to be paid for any writing, nor for it to be published in somewhere like Sight & Sound. At no point did I think I would get free travel and accommodation, and certainly not of this totally unique kind. When I get to this hotel space I am feeling woozy, and it turns out I have contracted the flu. Instead of the lucid, analytical experience I plan to write about, the whole thing becomes some kind of hallucination, a drifting reverie of serene silent film imagery on circular screens that slide one into another as I glide in and out of a very sweaty sleep. It is much better for that, weird and wonderful and once-in-a-lifetime. The only shame is that I am too sick to meet and interview Apichatpong the next day, instead spending the remainder of my trip shivering in a Holiday Inn.
Lisbon, Portugal (2018)
I am at some bad film festival party and I stumble across CS. I was just about to go to bed but instead we have a beer or two and he says that while in Lisbon I have to experience fado live. All that I have heard about this type of music suggests that it is too earnest and would be faintly embarrassing to observe, and that only Portuguese people like it and rightfully so. About all of this, I am wrong. So we, along with a few other people, one of whom is importantly a local, go to this bar where they play fado, a restaurant and drinking hole that is ran by a man in his eighties that has no windows and no sign on the door. It is the kind of place that you simply cannot go without being taken to, and where everyone turns their head anyway when you enter the door. We drive there in a small car that only has two doors, playing a Karen Dalton album on CD loud with the windows rolled down. It’s a good journey, feeling free-spirited in a way that I don’t always tend to be. When we get there, it is already near to two in the morning, and it will be six by the time we leave. The way the place works is that you sit and eat and drink, talking loudly, but when it is music time everyone falls silent at once. The singer does a couple of songs, and then people talk freely again. The owner of the bar serves the drinks and even sings himself, and his wife cooks and I assume also cleans. It is old fashioned and lovely. I feel blessed to be in such a place, totally outside of modern time. And most unexpectedly, the music itself is actually good, in part because of the intensity of the setup but also because of the absolute sincerity and commitment of each performance. When the performer sings, the loud room cuts to total silence, the lighting drops to candles only, and everyone gives the moment their undivided attention. After each song, CS’s friend summarises the lyrics for us. It is all doom and gloom. His wife has left him, her husband doesn’t understand her inner pain. It is magical and intense, and unselfconscious in a way that I, damagingly British as I am, find terrifying and electric at the same time. But it is short-lived, a kind of melodramatic escapism that vents something for everyone. Song and talk cycles repeat until the sun comes up and we wobble groggily out into the stone-paved roads. Morning has come. All are happy, everyone had a good time.
lend me ur eyes is a linkdump of what i'm into month by month: music, books, games, movies, and other internet detritus, with misc editorial misgivings in the intro. lend me ur eyes friends, so that i can see.