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Vanguard Film Festival at Arnolfini

Elizabeth Mizon — 2021-10-26T18:06:52Z

The Vanguard Film Festival was the final of three events making up Vanguard x Vans: On The Screen in Bristol this autumn, a “celebration of street art and skateboarding history”. An advertising boon for skateboarding apparel manufacturer Vans, no doubt, the festival also served to draw attention to street art collective Vanguard's debut exhibition at M Shed: Bristol Street Art: The Evolution of a Global Movement, which runs until 31st October.

That the organisations chose to split their festival into three smaller events seems unnecessary given the cohesion of their themes. However each event was distinct; the films at today's final offering, The Vanguard Film Festival, related specifically to the history of hip hop's street art elements, delivering an almost entirely documentary record of the birth of the graffiti movement, its political and economic fabric, and the connections made between US and UK grassroots cultures.

The line up comprised the world's “first hip-hop feature” and US cult classic Wild Style (1982); the UK documentary Bombin' (1988) featuring a young paint-can wielding Goldie; and Martha: A Picture Story (2019), a dynamic and touching documentary about veteran photographer Martha Cooper, who struggled to get the attention she deserved for devotedly capturing the 1970's NYC street art movement as it was born.

Cooper conducted this street photography around her assignments as the New York Post's first female photographer where her editor had directed her to simply “look for cleavage”. A favourite of mainstream documentary festivals around the world on its release, Martha: A Picture Story was an excellent choice to end on; it gave us a masterful, relatable character-led insight into a dynamic and resonant period of history and, unlike the film's direct contemporary Finding Vivian Maier, one from whom we can still hear. And we did - the festival flew Cooper herself over for a Q&A to finish the day's schedule.

The other two films were also plenty interesting, especially when viewed side by side. Wild Style is almost a drama-documentary; largely a fictionalised ‘slice of life' for street artist ‘Zoro' (played by legendary NYC graffiti artist Lee Quiñones), it has long segments showing parties, club nights headed by Grand Master Flash, montages of shuttling el-trains covered in technicolour lettering and (seemingly) improvised dialogue the authenticity of which is doubtless, if a little wooden. The film frequently makes for dated viewing, but is fun - and a crucial time capsule.

Bombin' then gave an insight into just how strongly the real-life characters of Wild Style would immediately influence art and culture in the UK, as young people discovering the messages of the hip-hop scene were also suffering at the hands of police, poverty, and inner city life. We saw young artist Brim Fuentes and his contemporaries invited to the UK to give hip-hop workshops, voraciously attended by young Thatcher-addled kids. We were also introduced to forerunning young British hip hop artists including a teenage Goldie who, in return, visits Brim in the Bronx. He, too, attended for a Q&A.

Vanguard x Vans: On The Screen was held entirely at the city's premier contemporary art gallery, the Arnolfini, which has often housed important and radical work. But the Arnolfini audience is staunchly white middle-class.

Hosting events celebrating ‘underground/radical/urban/[insert label]' culture in deeply white spaces is not uncommon for corporate funded events, but it was particularly rankling alongside the films characters' vocalisation of how poverty and lack of funding for their activities was affecting their lives. It wasn't a surprise that we didn't see today's Anglo-side equivalent of South Bronx youth turn up, even though the festival was free.

I often wonder in these situations whether the organisers explored holding the event in the community spaces of less affluent areas - numerous film festivals, events and individual screenings, almost certainly with less financial backing, do so throughout the year.

More importantly, it just seems like common sense; a clear effort towards making a small, but key, change to a segregated art scene almost 40 years after Wild Style and Bombin' showed us theirs.

Here's more info on the festival. All three film festivals ran alongside the exhibition Vanguard: Bristol Street Art which finishes on Sunday 31st October 2021.

The 5 Most Gruesome Non-Horror Films at This Year's Encounters

Elizabeth Mizon — 2017-09-28T14:44:08Z

Isn't brevity great? And managing to avoid scraping a bit of your septal cartilage off with the edge of your fingernail when you're picking your nose? Two things I really appreciate. Being gross, quickly.

As a filmmaker, film journalist and former film student, I've always preferred punchy shorts to epic features. I also like short distances, making Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival my favourite event of the UK's cultural calendar, being that it's held just 1.41km from my house.
I'm also a fan of filth, discomfort and terror, so I was pleased to find a real stronghold of the grotesque at this year's festival. Though the 2017 programme ended on two sessions dedicated to horror hosted by The Final Girls (who ‘explore feminist themes in horror cinema and highlight the representation and work of women in horror'), there were several wince-worthy films that stood out for me as part of a number of other programmes - thematically grouped by length (in the DepicT! programme) or style (in the animation sessions), for example.

Here are the top 5 films I caught this year that had no place in the festival's horror sessions, but earned a comfortable seat in the bloody chambers of my heart.

Hotdog Hands

Likely my favourite entry of all I saw this year, Hotdog Hands is a hilarious, touching and disturbing animation about a suburban woman trapped in her home, due to the embarrassment of relentlessly growing loads of fingers. The chant of her unfortunate nickname by the local teenage bullies keeps her an isolated, tearful mess (I feel you girl), until one day she receives a mysterious coupon that promises affordable surgery. However, to redeem that coupon, she's first got to make it all the way to the postbox across the street…

Luckily, though, the postbox turns out to be a magic cave full of malnourished baby creatures who require nothing if not a never-ending supply of hotdogs to munch off someone's limbs, and we've all been there. Well done to Matthew Reynolds for making something so surreal, yet so relatable.

[Hot Dog Hands is our short of the week: watch it here in all its gruesomeness]

Don't Think of a Pink Elephant

Another brilliant animated offering from the student body of NFTS (see last year's Man-O-Man) was this piece by Suraya Raja, about a young Liverpudlian girl suffering from OCD. Tasked with looking after her younger brother for an afternoon, she cannot rid herself of the distracting, violent thoughts she experiences around sharp
household objects. It doesn't help that her brother knows this, and finds it fun to make a game out of…
A genuinely sweet mix of family drama, mental health study and coming-of-age narrative, the impressive craft of the claymation holds both its playfulness and gripping, toe-curling body horror. I never would have guessed that a nano-second-length clip of a clay hand getting lacerated by a cheese grater could be so haunting days later. Watch the trailer here.

I Know I Shouldn't Like It, But I Do

This entry into DepicT!, Encounters' 90-seconds-or-less film competition, is a dark and satisfying poetry film that explores those viscerally guilty desires and delights that few of us tend to admit to. Creative writing student-turned-filmmaker Ben Williams-Butt has grasped every last second of his 90-second allowance by taking a piece of writing from his university days, and cutting it beautifully with bleak and grotesque imagery that can't help but make you grimace, and with recognition.
The ‘good-pain' of pressing on a bruise; the relief of pulling hair out of your crack; the fantasy of murdering that kid who's bullying your little brother…okay so none of that's in the film - I don't want to ruin it for you - but we can all relate to my neuroses, yes? Yes.

Neverlanding: a Bad Thriller

It wasn't until half way through this piece that's slowly revealed to be (loosely) about a die-hard Michael Jackson fan that I thought back to the funny title and “uhhhhhhh, geddit”-ed to myself. A dialogue-free, parallel-post-apocalyptic world sees a grimy, lanky man make himself an MJ costume out of foodstuffs. A single glove sewn from
chicken skin, facial ‘prosthetics' made of minced meat and affixed with saliva, and an attempt at wig-making from dyed tagliatelle strings precedes a surreal tribute performance in an old boys' bar in the outback. Even though there was zero incest going on here, the grimy, carnal environment reminded me of the worlds of Bad Boy Bubby and Precious, which tells you all you need to know - except that this was far, FAR more light-hearted. Saying that, it was perhaps not the intention - considering the tagline for this 14 minute short from Belgian director Wim Reygaert is simply: “Escape. Escape. Escape.” Watch the trailer here.

Die Brücke über den Fluss (The Bridge Over the River)

Swiss director Jadwiga Kowalska has managed not only to achieve powerful emotion in the tone of this simple animation, but also to convincingly switch up that tone half way through - a general nono in every Directing 101 manual - without losing an audience. What begins as a heartbreaking glimpse of a lone and suicidal man on the precipice of a bridge develops into a story of hope and community, as one by one people gather on the next bridge along, and shout words of encouragement.
However, on his retreat from the edge, the sheer power of the hordes' celebration on the adjacent bridge ends in the comic relief of mass death. If there were ever an allegory for the reasoning of the depressed individual amongst the ignorant, self-destructive masses, well, here we are. Watch the trailer here.

Elizabeth Mizon is a Bristol-based writer and film director. Follow her follow @elizabethethird.

Short of the Week: Hot Dog Hands by Mark Reynolds

Abla Kandalaft, Elizabeth Mizon — 2017-09-28T14:38:28Z

This truly original yet mildly nauseating multi-award winnerma and Encounters favourite is, in the words of our Bristol-based reviewer Elizabeth Mizon, "a hilarious, touching and disturbing animation about a suburban woman trapped in her home, due to the embarrassment of relentlessly growing loads of fingers."

Hot Dog Hands from Matt Reynolds on Vimeo.

Check out more of Matt Reynold's sublime work on his website.

Sheffield Documentary Film Festival 2016 - Thoughts and recap

Elizabeth Mizon — 2016-06-18T07:40:32Z

"In that silent room, I heard two sounds. One high, and one low. Afterward I asked the engineer in charge why, if the room was so silent, I had heard two sounds. He said: “Describe them.” I did. He said “The high one was your nervous system in operation. The low one was your blood in circulation.”

– John Cage, on his experience in Harvard's anechoic chamber

At this year's Sheffield Doc/Fest I saw Stefan Sagmeister's dick, live voguing, and more than one dead child. The massive range and power of documentary storytelling felt fully present at Doc/Fest 2016, and gripped me completely. I loved it for that. For everything that was explicitly communicated at SDF this year, however, there was something glaringly unspoken – at least in any public, panel-sanctioned forum.

The annual 5-day event is a massive undertaking, allowing the UK its (mostly) premiere glimpse of the crème de la crème of the year's international documentary films. The festival guide is a bloody tome, thicker than most bestselling paperbacks, containing 160 films, and such an array of talks, competitions and networking sessions it's impossible for anyone to experience the festival in its entirety. The films I chose to see were a mixture of what I thought would be moving or would be fun, and happened not to clash with others I thought would be movinger and funner.

Considering recent events, a huge amount of the programming this year was traumatic. I purposely bookended my schedule between A Happy Film and Michael Moore's Where To Invade Next? (which I'd argue is his best film since Bowling For Columbine.) As much as I appreciated the exquisite design of the former, its narrative choices are equally fascinating and questionable. I began my weekend leisurely, considering the merits, and lacking, of a story helmed by an eccentric and wealthy designer in tandem with two consecutive directors.

Special mention goes to Cameraperson, cinematographer Kirsten Johnson's feature montage of stunning offcuts from her career, during which time she's worked with Laura Poitras on CitizenFour, Michael Moore on Farenheit 9/11 and Kirby Dick on The Invisible War. The film begins with a statement describing the images included as those which have ‘marked' her.

Several of them – hearing off-camera surprise at capturing a bolt of lightning, followed by a pause, then a sneeze that rocks the frame; her mother, in the full throes of Alzheimers, standing physically sturdy yet mentally absent in an increasingly violent gale; a prosecutor describing images that he holds in his hand, but we never see, of the corpse of torture victim James Byrd Jr. – marked me also. I have not yet fully processed the combined experience of these story fractions; I felt genuine relief at being able to attend the Documentary and Trauma workshop the next day, secretly hoping, for the sake of all future Doc/Fest attendees, that it would run every year.

There is no doubt that this antidotal scheduling of experiences was a privilege. But then, the entire thing was a privilege. I was able to attend due to a grant scheme (and I'm not even that broke). For two days I, alongside others from the Radical Film Network - a nascent, international web for progressive filmmakers of whatever stripe – were gifted free accommodation and passes, due to the network being awarded development funding to provide costs for events such as this. This incubates it, fosters its growth and may help it become greater than the sum of its parts while it has no solid means of survival except its participants' need, and free labour.

How many of us can afford between £100 and £300 for a festival pass, a £400-ish hotel bill, probable £50+ travel and spare change for extras (like eating) for the best part of a week? Removing blame from any one door belonging to the festival, the government, the global economy for a moment – it was and is simply a rhetorical question; one that is way too old. It came up in conversation with other lucky SDF punters over and over again; not unlike the conversation I've had over and again in my hometown about prices at our primary arts centre. The £6.50 benefits concession might be a significant drop from the full price ticket, but it's still 10% of a weekly jobseekers allowance.

‘The arts' is currently confined to this cost/equal access paradox. It's become no one's fault but everyone's responsibility. Much of this decade's cultural conversation has foregrounded complaints about diminishing access to anything and everything, and the arts in particular, after comprehensive public funding cuts, attacks on schools' humanities syllabuses and the destruction of commons spaces by gentrification. And still, participation in events such as Doc/Fest is prohibitively expensive. The best I can say about a panel on diversity in filmmaking that potentially costs £700+ to get to is that it's… annoying.

I wish I could share the breadth and depth of narrative chunks I experienced first-hand. How saturated the programme was with stories about desperation, and dangerous migration, and torture and then, following a year of political moments, reflect together on the change (or not) at SDF 2017.

That only-those-wealthy-enough have full access to the cultural event of the year (in official documentary terms) - where they can bombard themselves with timeout that allows input, output and regeneration of ideas – is a truth perpetuated to the nth degree. It's my feeling that the cultural framework around documentary, as a stark and revelatory exercise, should be ‘better' than that.

The best documentary films tell true stories about change, and the best of those facilitate it. To fully recognise that, cultural infrastructure needs to cultivate transparency around its own journeys. I'd hope that the SDF team might launch itself into an explicit conversation, and find a workaround that guarantees wider participation in the near future.

My experience of Doc/Fest 2016 was maybe best captured by The Pursuit of Silence, as part of which composer John Cage describes entering an anechoic chamber, hearing nothing but the inside of his own body. Listening to his own nervous system work without realising it. To be able to communicate well we must be able to take time out of the lock-in of every day in a space dedicated to reflection, to hearing others in the world as well as ourselves in ways we didn't know were possible.

It needs to be less homogeneous if the field is to truly thrive. This is a bigger problem than one event, but the cultural fall-in-line is the silent support of these economic mechanisms. We all know this – if we would collectively and publicly and emphatically confront the reality of that narrative, we would more likely move towards actually changing it. Doc/Fest is a brilliant space – I want to be able to return, alongside a band of new bloods.

Elizabeth Mizon is Elizabeth Mizon is a staff writer at The Canary, the producer of media documentary The Fourth Estate and co-director of the Bristol Radical Film Festival.

Follow her at @elizabethethird
elizabeththethird.wordpress.com