myDylarama

Our Picks + The Obituary Of Tunde Johnson

Abla Kandalaft, Coco Green, Ryan Ormonde — 2021-03-23T12:30:49Z

This week, we are joined by poet and writer Ryan Ormonde to discuss Ali LeRoi's feature film The Obituary Of Tunde Johnson that was screened as part of the BFI Flare Festival.

The "timeloop" film which sees Tunde, a young Black gay man who is shot and killed by a police officer, relive his last day on Earth over and over again. We talk about the relationships, Black masculinity, race and of course drift off topic to talk about ice cream and skincare.

Top picks this week include Welsh crime drama Hinterland, Jack Black biographical comedy The Polka King and yet another Jack Black flick, Bernie.

As usual, comments and feedback welcome via Twitter @Mydylarama

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Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model - East End Film Festival 2016

Ryan Ormonde — 2016-06-16T13:41:08Z

London-based performance artist Bryony Kimmings first came to public attention with 7 Day Drunk, a show put together under the influence of alcohol. The subject of new documentary Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model is another ‘real world experiment' by Kimmings, who is now under the influence of her nine year-old niece, Taylor.

As an idea for a theatre show, this is brilliant: enough with Miley Cyrus! (That's 2013 twerking Miley Cyrus, not 2015 gender queer activist Miley Cyrus.) Let's come up with a pop star created by a child and reflecting a child's particular interests - like palaeontology, outer space and sweets.

Taylor is along for the intergalactic time-travelling ride, making Kimmings a shoe-in for the title of Best Aunty Ever. In the spirit of Robin Williams as Mrs Doubtfire (sort of), Kimmings gamely dresses up a sexually unthreatening figurehead for ‘tweens' (pre-teenage children). The sensibly named Catherine Bennett - or ‘C.B.' - is awkward, intelligent and, helpfully for Kimmings, not that good at singing.

All of this seems progressive, feminist, necessary and entertaining. The questions that arise are more to do with modes of presentation. Is this film a ‘popumentary' for a fictional singer? A documentation of an art piece? An extended trailer for a theatre show?
At one point in the film we are told that the purpose of the live show at Soho Theatre is to help publicise C.B.'s career. To really affect change, C.B. needs to succeed in the real world. Aunty and niece have even drawn up ‘Fame Aims' including a million YouTube views.

And yet the glimpses we get of the stage show (described on Kimmings' website as ‘not for kids') seem more interesting and complex than the Taylor-narrated story here. A scene in the documentary shows Taylor lying down with eyes closed and headphones on as her aunty tells the live audience things that are not for Taylor's ears. The stage set looks imaginative and mysterious; the costumes include silver armour in adult and child sizes, emulating warrior queen Boadicea.

In keeping with contemporary cultural (and commercial) modes, Credible… is clearly a multi-platform project. You might encounter C.B. on social media or when she visits your primary school. You can watch her YouTube video, download her music or see her do a gig. And there is this film too, at the very least an inspiring document of the project revealing the emotional impact on its creator, as well as a chance to watch C.B.'s hilarious debut music video in full. The East London Festival is presenting the screening with a Q&A, so it will be interesting to hear if there is still steam in the C.B. engine now that Taylor has progressed from tween to teen.

Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model has its world premiere at East London Film Festival on 2 July at the Hackney Picturehouse. See website for details.

Ave Maria - Oscars 2016

Ryan Ormonde — 2016-03-01T21:39:43Z

A short film directed by a Palestinian has been nominated for an Oscar this year. Ave Maria is a humorous story about a Jewish family who crash their car outside a small convent of five Arab nuns. For a film set in the present day West Bank, this film is as light as you could imagine, yet it still has a relevant message about the unnecessary restrictions imposed by strict adherence to religion. God-given rules prevent human communication – hilarity ensues.

Director and co-writer Basil Khalil tells the tale with precision and without fuss. The humour has a universal feel – it's not hard to see why the American Academy took notice.

There is a thesis to be written on the history of nuns in cinema, particularly their usefulness in diffusing otherwise tricky subject matter. I'm thinking more Sister Act that The Magdalene Sisters of course. At any rate, the funny nuns in Ave Maria merrily continue a certain tradition. The Jewish mother figure is hardly a novel prospect either, but these tropes help to give Ave Maria the right kind of comic tension, ensuring its simple truth is not obscured by the unfamiliar, particularly for an international audience.

Dir: Basil Khalil, 2015

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict - Bertha Dochouse

Ryan Ormonde — 2016-01-28T11:27:59Z

A documentary about an art collector who in the 1920s considered herself destitute with $450,000 in her bank account, Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict might sound a bit vapid, but even a passing interest in artists of the 20th century is reason enough to become acquainted with someone who met the best, bought the best and slept with the best. Derided throughout her career for being a New York heiress with an expensive hobby, Guggenheim's honest, unaffected character pushes her through. Unlike her contemporary Gertrude Stein, Guggenheim is hopeless at creating her own myth, but if you've slept with Samuel Beckett and introduced the world to Jackson Pollock, why bother? Just tell it like it is. Lisa Immordino Vreeland is as thorough and entertaining in telling Guggenheim's story as she was in capturing the life of her relation Diana Vreeland for the fabulous The Eye Has to Travel, although in this film there are probably fewer laughs. As a commentator observes, this is a sad life. Several people close to Guggenheim either abuse her, torment her, die, or all the above.

Art, of course, is the saviour, although whether the medium of film can adequately present paintings and sculptures is debatable, particularly in the context of a gallery owner whose dramatic and intimate exhibitions go further than even today's high-tech curatorial experiences, in terms of connecting a viewer with an art work. Rather, it seems the purpose of this film to point outwards. Immediately I wanted to visit Cork Street in London where Guggenheim set up her first gallery, not to mention her museum in Venice, a city with a reputation for contemporary art that is largely Guggenheim's legacy. Guggenheim was in an enviable position in the history of art and bohemian culture. She had enough money and luck on her side to make it happen and happen it did. For all her privilege and the extraordinary company she kept, her story is relatable to anyone with a passion. ‘Hold on to the art' is the message of Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict. Hold on to anything, one might add.

Dir., Lisa Immordino Vreeland, 2015

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict is showing at Bertha Dochouse, tickets and more information here http://www.dochouse.org/cinema/screenings/peggy-guggenheim-art-addict

Entertainment (2015)

Ryan Ormonde — 2016-01-21T17:22:58Z

The ironically-titled Entertainment plays hard on the expectation that a cinema audience requires something redeeming in its anti-heroes. The film is an extension of Greg Turkington's stand-up-as-performance-art project 'Neil Hamburger', a greasy peddler of puerile one-liners and vile, hateful patter (Turkington co-wrote the screenplay with Tim Heidecker and director Rick Alverson). In Entertainment, a fictionalised version of Turkington is presented so that his Neil Hamburger persona is able to fulfil its monstrous potential, rasping and seething beneath Turkington's non-responsive exterior.

An unremittingly beige expanse of Californian desert is the backdrop to the touring comedian's off stage encounters. On-stage, his routines are controlled studies in anti-entertainment, the Neil Hamburger character authoring responses to his performing environment that are designed to be as excruciating as possible, whether he finds himself in a backwater drinking hole or at a swish private party. Lines are blurred between character and performer and between the audience of the film and the audiences depicted within the film.

If this were a Borat-style mock-doc it would be easier to receive (and possibly to dismiss) as a clever twisting of American norms. Entertainment is more challenging. It's unclear where the joke is, if anywhere. Although the world is shown through the comedian's eyes, it is impossible to be entirely sympathetic to his continuing lack of response and lack of respect to those around him. Other isolated souls are presented; the overarching mood is hopelessness and stagnation. John C Reilly shines in a more sociable role which only serves to establish the recalcitrance of the lead character.

Ambiguous in message (if unswerving in tone), the clear success of Entertainment is to hammer out all that is agreeable in the movie lead archetype including any of its loftier, art house variants. A hateful hero is one thing, but here we are faced with the uneasy prospect of a monster who is pathetically human and not at all redeemed by its humanity.

Dir. Rick Alverson, USA 2015

Stories of our Lives - Film Africa 2015

Ryan Ormonde — 2015-11-09T10:54:01Z

Stories of our Lives is a sequence of five tales sourced from real life experiences of gay Kenyans. The film uses the same crisp, saturated black and white photography across its five sections. Even though this creates a flattening of visual tone, the films-within-the-film each have a different feel.

‘Ask me Nicely' is briskly punctuated by a school bell but its scenes are also divided by images of clouds, in turn expressive of the absurd conventions and nebulous hopes that define possibilities for its central lesbian couple. Society's disdain is embodied by an imperious head teacher but this is not a simple ‘us against the world' tale. Here, a gay relationship is like any other friendship: sometimes we punish each other for no good reason.

The second story in the sequence, ‘Run', uses slow motion and muffled sound to capture the tingly transgression of a first brush with gay culture. A plaid shirt (good for black and white footage) represents this ‘other' life. In cinema, as in societies where LGBTI identities are repressed, the visual is all important.

Whereas in ‘Run', monochrome adds a slick edge to urban scenes, in ‘Athman' it lends itself well to beautiful, sunlit fields and branches against a clear sky. This pastoral setting is the backdrop to a very natural and sympathetic portrayal of a friendship between a gay man and the straight man he loves.

‘Duet' has a fairly interesting premise: a Kenyan in London has saved up his money to have sex with a prostitute, eager to find out if white people are different in the sack. This sets up some nicely prickly dialogue: ‘We're from Sudan and Ghana or wherever, not Africa. Africa is huge.' But in the end, the truth of the encounter seems to have got lost in transition to screen. Still, there's some pretty kissing.

In ‘Each Night I Dream', Africa does seem like a constricting continuum: the central character knows that trying to escape Kenya in any direction either leads to another gay-hostile African nation or the Indian Ocean. So instead she imagines an island paradise. Or is she is an alien from a more enlightened planet? ‘Maybe we came here to find out what it's like to be human,' she wonders.

Stories of Our Lives is a welcome project from the Nest Collective. A quiet defiance runs through it, rather than outrage. Colours are shut out from the narrative as well as the photography, but there is clarity in the telling.

Rocks in My Pockets

Ryan Ormonde — 2015-09-16T22:38:51Z

Signe Baumane's Rocks in My Pockets is a magic realist cartoon, revelatory in its examination of the repercussions and repetitions of mental illness within a genealogy. The hand-drawn animation is flat, jerky and superimposed onto footage of gloomy papier-mâché sets painted in bold colours. Fluidity of movement takes second place to the power of transformation as humans repeatedly change into monstrous or animal versions of themselves, illustrating social and psychological tensions. The huge and intimidating legs of a psychotherapist are visible under her desk until, towards the end of the scene, the proportions switch and her legs are dwarfed by her upper body.

The characters in the film are mute, but Baumane's own expressive narration holds our attention, an expository style which brings to mind autobiographical trends in live art and that genre's appropriation of lecturing and storytelling. Baumane's honesty is a key to her creative process, here she writes about the impetus for Rocks in My Pockets: “The very idea of making a film on depression happened one November day in 2010 when I was struggling through another bout of obsessive thoughts of self-elimination. I started to write down the different scenarios of how I would not commit suicide (I am very finicky and controlling about those matters). Written down, those thoughts became absurd, funny and harmless. It occurred to me that other people might relate to this thought process and might find it amusing and disarming to hear them aloud. I then asked myself where these thoughts might come from, and the whole story started pouring out of me”. Baumane's questioning of the root of her own depression leads her to an inquiry into her grandmother's death. In trying to construct a full portrait of her grandmother, the stories of other Latvian relatives are told in a matter-of-fact style that recalls the prose of Gertrude Stein and shares her curiosity in how personal identities are formed.

Animation is a famously labour-intensive process and it's nearly impossible for an auteur-animator to produce a feature length film in which the artistry of the medium is fully realised. In its stripped down approach to movement and its commitment to the imaginative potential of language and drawing, Rocks in My Pockets is a fully realised work of art on its own terms, feminist and fearless in its exploration of histories and minds.

Dir., Signe Baumane 2014

Interview with animator Richard Williams

Ryan Ormonde — 2015-08-29T07:45:28Z

Ahead of Bristol's Encounters Festival, Ryan Ormonde talks with Richard Williams, the award-winning animator, most famous as director of animation on the technically ground-breaking Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Encounters will be screening his new short film Prologue, entirely drawn by Williams himself, as part of their Rise and Fall programme.

An intriguing part of the Disney myth occurs in the chronology at some point between Bambi and Cinderella. A 15 year-old boy has travelled from Toronto to Anaheim, California with a clutch of drawings, mostly copied from the Golden Age cartoons he grew up watching. He circles the walls of the industrial fortress until somehow, with a bit of Disney magic, he is welcomed in, introduced to the artists and Uncle Walt himself, and allowed to stay there for two days to observe everyone at work. His picture is taken for their publicity: young Richard Williams, a shining and prodigious example of the Disney dream.

67 years later, I ask Williams, now renowned for his innovative work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, what Disney meant then to that wide-eyed 15 year-old. ‘Well it was the most tremendous thing for me as you can imagine,' he replies over the phone, from his home in Bristol, ‘Walt saw my drawings and was very impressed.' But the advice that changed his life was given to Williams by a freelance illustrator who happened to be working at Disney at the time: ‘He finally said “listen, Kid, I know you can do these cartoon drawings and everything, I mean it's kind of impressive.” But he said, “learn to draw, and I mean really learn to draw – not cartoons, not animation. And if you want to do animation, pick it up later, you can always pick it up, but go and learn to draw.” [...] So I went home full of the Disney thing, you see, and about two weeks later, I stumbled into the art gallery in Toronto and there was a room full of Rembrandt and I saw this stuff and I just burst into tears and I realised, “Oh! That's what they mean by art!” And I've never been the same since. So I always wrestled with this – I mean I'm a draughtsman really and it's always been a battle between doing bug-eyed men and real ones.'

Williams made his name as the head of an award-winning animation studio based in London's Soho, specialising in commercials. In 1980, he was filmed for a television programme, while he and his team were working on The Thief and The Cobbler, a project that had already been years in the making and was to be subject to another decade of torturous production, before being taken over by a studio and released in a bowdlerised version that Williams has never seen. In the television programme he says to camera, ‘animation hasn't got as good as Rembrandt's the Man in the Golden Helmet, but it could do.' In 1964, in conversation with Philip Crick for the journal Film Williams is quoted as saying, ‘I'm in the same business as Goya and Rembrandt: I may be rotten at it with nothing of the same quality or talent, but that's my business.'

Now aged 82, Williams sees his new short Prologue as the true beginning of his career as an artist: ‘the first thing in my life that I've felt I'm content with. I couldn't do it any better [...] Everything I'm doing [in Prologue] has never been done. It definitely hasn't been done, even by the guys I admired, [they] couldn't do this. Maybe [they] wouldn't want to! I think they would. I'm into new territory and the only reason I can do it is because of 60 years of immersion.'

When I ask Williams what the impetus was for the new film, he refers me back to that teenager moved to tears in a Toronto art gallery: ‘I've been thinking about this thing since I was 15 [...] It describes an incident in the Spartan-Athenian wars 2,400 years ago. A little girl is a witness [as] warriors battle to the death. There's no dialogue [...] it has nothing of “cartoon” about it, so it's just drawings. [...] I have this rule: If I can't get it on one sheet of paper it doesn't go in. There's no cels, there's no other stuff, there's no other people's work, it's just what I can draw on one piece of paper [...] You're very conscious that they're drawings; they move realistically, they're drawn realistically, but you can see the pencil.' Which is so different from where mainstream animation is headed, right? ‘Absolutely, but it's not to get away from what other people are doing, it's just that I'm doing what I would have done in my early twenties.'

I ask Williams if there are any younger animators he's noticed. ‘I just noticed a Brazilian girl who's won a lot of prizes; her work was at Annecy [International Animated Film Festival] when we were there. [...] Her name is Rosana Urbes - but she's very much an amateur, there's everything wrong with her stuff. But she has natural acting ability and natural charm and a very individual approach and I wish I had her here and I could tell her what to do to make [her work] much better.' Oh yes, I say, you have to meet her. ‘Well I have met her; she was completely drunk,' Williams laughs. ‘She won the award, she was very pleasant, she was a slight little thing and two of her friends had to carry her on the stage because she was so drunk, and she thanked everybody saying “I'm so drunk, I'm sorry but I'm very pleased”. Anyway I met her and she's learned everything from my book – but she hasn't learned enough! If she was sober I'd say let's have a coffee and I'd tell you to read the book a bit better.' He laughs again. ‘But she's somebody who'll be very good, she's a natural. It's marvellous to see somebody with their own individual take on it and all they have to learn is the craft.'

Since publication in 2002, Williams' handbook has become a bible for people starting in animation, later repackaged as a DVD box set featuring in-depth lectures on his process. The title – The Animator's Survival Kit – prompts me to ask Williams if he is himself a survivor. ‘Oh, absolutely! I'm 82! You're talking to an old man!' Is that how you see yourself though? I ask. I know you've been through some ups and downs in the industry... ‘I never expected to have an easy ride. I never had an easy ride at school or when I was growing up, I just figured that was part of the thing.' Is it this ability to roll with the punches that has got Williams to the esteemed position he now occupies? ‘Resilience is the main thing isn't it? What is that old song “into every life a little rain must fall”? The other thing they always say is “this too shall pass” ...so I think it's just how you handle it. ‘I'm so interested in medium and what I feel I can do [...] I've achieved the facility now to fully express myself on my own terms [...] I own this medium now, it's mine, quite apart from what anybody else does, it's mine now and I can do what I want.' That sounds like the best feeling. ‘They can't stop me now!'

Williams really does seem at peace with himself and energised by his new work. He has his own Twitter account and, in a recent tweet, he says that attending a screening of a working version of his former bête noir The Thief and the Cobbler was a ‘very special moment' for him and his wife. I ask what he is working on now, and if it's connected to Prologue. ‘It's related to it but it's separate again. I'm into [animating] funny stuff with women, which I'm enjoying. I'm really, really pleased with [that]. It's almost exactly what I wanted to do.' Speaking of funny stuff with women, I say, do people often ask you about Jessica Rabbit? ‘Oh yeah, yeah...' says Williams, before quickly bringing me back to the present: ‘I've got some stuff coming up that's better than Jessica – sexier! Sexier!' Wow, I say. That's quite a statement, you know.
‘No, no - definitely, definitely' Williams insists, ‘It's close to shocking!'

Encounters Festival runs from 15-20 September 2015 in Bristol
For more info and the full programme, click here.

The Company of Strangers - London Feminist Film Festival

Nisha Ramayya, Ryan Ormonde — 2015-08-22T07:45:27Z

The London Feminist Film Festival (20th-23rd August 2015) is a celebration of international feminist films past and present, established ‘to support women filmmakers in the male-dominated film industry and to inspire feminist discussion and critique.' The programme includes a documentary about female hip-hop artists in the UK, an event to raise funds for Rape Crisis England and Wales, a series of feminist shorts, and a screening of ‘feminist classic' The Company of Strangers, followed by a panel discussion with representatives from the Older Women in Film group and the Short Hot Flush Film Festival.

The Company of Strangers (1990), directed by Cynthia Scott, depicts the aftermath of a bus breakdown in rural Quebec. Eight women (seven elderly women and one younger woman) set up camp in an abandoned lake house, getting to know each other as they work together to survive for three days. Featuring non-professional actors and unscripted dialogue, this docu-fiction realises Scott's ambitions to make a work in which ‘every once and a while there would be a scene of such magic that whatever was happening on the screen was more than what was happening on the screen – […] a combination of the real humanity of the people and something happening because they were participating in a creative act which was the making of this movie.'

*
Do you hear the frogs?

No.

Do you hear the white-throated sparrow?

Yes.

The Company of Strangers sounds like singing: women singing while playing poker, singing while fixing the bus; some women singing so that others may dance.

They are singing love songs and songs of praise: Keep the love light glowing / In your eyes so true / Let me call you sweetheart / I'm in love with you.

Do you live alone?

When was the time you were most frightened?

Photographs of the women appear – an editorial element reinforcing the use of real people and their true stories.

They come in search of the best summers of her childhood.

Happy dancing
Happy hunting
Happy playing
Happy love – walking on air

There is the fear of being destitute, the fears that come to you when you're alone at home. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? What will happen when they are no longer here, with their feet in the water?

You're alive – you can still love

Living and surviving
Living is communal – all of the women, except Alice, live alone.
Living and desires, dreams – all her desires have left her.
Living and fears
Living with women – living behind the closet door
Cissy: My grandchildren are my life, and my son, of course.
Beth: I've never been happy since my son died.
Mary: Constance is afraid of death, and so am I.
Alice: I'm not going to die, I'm going fishing.
Catherine: You don't let yourself be stopped by things.
Constance as one who is dying rather than living.

Living with or without heaven or god

We're alive!

Shouting out

All of the women, except Constance: Is anybody there? We're alive! We're all alive!

(She imitates the sparrow's song perfectly, but cannot hear its reply.)

What has been left out?
Leave it to the imagination, says Winnie. What is unfinished. The sense of a person, the missing details. Art. What you tell each other.

25 years later...

Alice

Constance

Winifred

Cissy

Mary

Catherine

Michelle

Beth

Dir., Cynthia Scott, 1990

East End Film Festival 2015 - Crumbs

Ryan Ormonde — 2015-08-10T13:26:00Z

East End Film Festival 2015: Crumbs (Miguel Llansó)

Last October, the Guardian's Africa Correspondent David Smith wrote a profile of Ethiopia, 30 years on from its infamous famine. Smith describes a country of ‘frenetic urban expansion', ‘an Orwellian surveillance state, breathtaking in scale and scope'. Crumbs, a post-apocalypse vision of Ethiopia from writer-director Miguel Llansó, shows us a country laid to waste. In the words of the apocryphal literary quotation that serves as a prelude to the film: ‘the survival instinct and the faith in the conservation of the human species had dissipated'. Historians consider Ethiopia to be the birthplace of the genus Homo, so it is fitting to imagine humanity's last days in that area of the earth.

Post-apocalypse films provide an opportunity for a particular kind of humour that trades off the perceptions our future descendants might have of us, their ancestors. Here, the ‘crumbs' of the title are mysterious and valuable antique objects, among them a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pendant; a poster of Michael Jordan, now refashioned as a shrine; a vinyl copy of Dangerous by Michael Jackson and a plastic toy gun attributed to Carrefour, believed to be one of history's last great artists. Carrefour is in fact the French version of Wal-Mart, its name emblazoned on the toy's flimsy packaging.

What is strange about this film is the sense of sadness that surrounds these misattributions. The central couple, played by Daniel Tadesse and Selam Tesfaye, imbue their possessions with more than just historical worth: they are sacred and auspicious signs. It is as if the performers are handling ancient tribal artefacts that have been replaced in post-production with tacky bits of plastic. The effect is to show how essential is belief for humanity, how arbitrary yet somehow vital are objects of faith and how the universal lie of culture is the only truth for humankind.

Events only get more absurd for Tadesse's and Tesfaye's characters, referred to as ‘Candy' and ‘Birdy': a quest centering on an old man who has adopted the identity of Santa Claus; an awkward confrontation with the mute operator of a ghost train; the goings-on of a seemingly haunted bowling alley. Candy does not have a conventional body shape: he is diminutive in stature and his bones protrude. In the language of the movies he is clearly an outsider, while Birdy is a Disney princess. All their hopes are symbolised by a daft, until recently decommissioned spaceship hovering in the sky, resembling Monty Python's hand of God.

For all its postmodern panache, this is a languid and sad tale. The camera lingers on the faces of its protagonists, on the region's extraordinary desert landscape, its lush vegetation and its forlorn architecture. Llansó lives in Addis Ababa but is originally from Spain and as such this is a view from the outside in (to compare, the first ever Ethiopian film to be shown at Cannes - this year's Lamb - has been described as ‘made entirely from the inside out'). There may be a lot to read between the lines: for example, a joke about bureaucracy seems particularly pertinent in the light of Smith's ‘Orwellian' characterisation of present day Ethiopia. At its primary level however, Crumbs is a tragic, short treatise on the cognitive dissonance of humankind, our pitiful dreams and our meaningless objects.

Crumbs, Dir. Miguel Llansó, 2015
Teasers and trailers at https://vimeo.com/lanzaderafilms