Movies

Jeffrey Catherine Jones Film Update

~ Cheryl

Last year I blogged about a Kickstarter project to fund Better Things, Maria Paz Cabardo’s film of the life of Jeffrey Catherine Jones. The fundraiser didn’t make it, but the film still got made and, judging from the comments coming back about it from showings at film festivals, it is pretty good. It is also very much about art as well as about Jones, and I’m delighted to see people such as Moebius and Roger Dean involved.

I’m not going to be able to get to film festivals. I hope that it will be shown at World Fantasy, but there’s no guarantee of that; it’s just something I would want to do if I were running the con. But what we actually need is a DVD release. And lo, there is a fundraiser on IndieGoGo to facilitate just that. Do check out the video clips in the Gallery section.

Better Things

Does He Mean Us?

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I spent much of yesterday in Bristol. I had some important shopping to do for BristolCon, and there were two events on in the evening that I wanted to attend.

First up we had a Q&A session at Waterstones with local writers: Gareth L. Powell, Jonathan L. Howard, Emma Newman and Tim Maughan. That went very well, so congratulations to Paul & Claire from BristolCon for organizing it.

After that I headed off to the Arnolfini for an evening of queer entertainment. I was a bit late due to one event starting immediately the other finished, so I missed most of the Oscar Wilde stuff, though I did get to see a performance of the famous interview scene from The Importance of Being Earnest. It was followed by a showing of the Quintin Crisp film, Resident Alien, which was fascinating.

One thing I learned from it is that Sting’s song, “An Englishman in New York”, was written about Crisp. It works even better when you know that.

But what stuck with me most from the film was when Crisp made a comment about why he left England. He said something like this: “They don’t like effeminate men in England, but then they don’t like effeminate women much either.”

Of course Crisp’s reputation was built in a large part on making outrageous statements for which he didn’t really need proof, but it did get me thinking about women that England has taken a liking to. There’s people like Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Margaret Thatcher and Twiggy, none of whom are particularly femme. Princess Diana is an obvious exception, but both she and Felicity Kendall have a girlish innocence to them. Possibly it is OK to be feminine as long as you are not sexy. I suspect that sportswomen such as Jessica Ennis and Laura Robson will get pilloried by the tabloids if they glam up when not in competition. And I also think that Clare Balding will always be more popular than Gabby Logan; Delia Smith more so than Nigella Lawson; and that this won’t be entirely to do with their abilities at their jobs.

Of course I have no more evidence for this than Crisp, and its entirely likely that other countries are just as bad, but it seemed worth an idle conversation weekend post.

Africa Revisited

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Here are a few follow-ups on the subject of African science fiction.

First up, with thanks to DaveH for the heads-up, the BBC World Service has a programme narrated by Lauren Beukes which includes interviews with Neill Blomkamp (District 9), Wanuri Kahiu (Pumzi), Jonathan Dotse, and Nnedi Okorafor. It is well worth a listen (and includes Lauren pronouncing her last name). You can find it on the iPlayer.

In addition I attended an event in Bristol at the weekend at which Mark Bould and Roger Luckhurst presented a couple of French films on colonialism as works that could be interpreted as science fiction. This was, if you’ll pardon the phrase, a bit of an academic exercise, but it was interesting all the same.

Les Statues Meurent Aussi (literally Statues Also Die, but I’d translate it as Even Statues Can Die) is a 1953 film by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais about the effect of colonialism on African culture. The central argument of the film is that by removing African cultural artifacts from their cultural context and placing them in museums we are not preserving culture, we are killing it. That’s an important message, and one I need to take to heart as I’ll be helping stage a museum exhibition (albeit nothing to do with Africa) in the next few months. However, it isn’t in itself science-fictional.

What got the film into the event is the fact that at one point the narrator says, “We are the Martians of Africa”. He then goes on to talk about diseases, which makes it fairly clear that Marker and Resnais had Wells in mind when making the film. Wells, of course, wrote The War of the Worlds in part in reaction to the genocide of the native Tasmanian people by European (mostly British) settlers.

Given when it was made, it is unsurprising that, despite their good intentions, Marker and Resnais come over incredibly patronizing at times, but the film is visually stunning. You can see the whole thing on Vimeo, though sadly only in French. There’s a subtitled version on YouTube, but because of length restrictions it is split into three parts.

The other film was La Noire de… by Ousmane Sembène, a Senegalese filmmaker who lived part of his life in France. The SFnal connection here is even less obvious, though the extreme lack of communication between the heroine and her employers has a lot to tell us about alienation. Diouana, a young woman from Senegal, takes a job as a maid with a French couple living in Dakar. When her employers return to France they invite her to come with them, with disastrous consequences.

I’m going to display my prejudices here. There are good reasons for studying films. There’s much more room to read meanings into images than with text. Also you get far more respect in the UK if your study of science fiction is confined to film. But equally it can be hard to get over a subtle argument in a film and this one left me largely with questions that got in the way of whatever story it was trying to tell.

Of course it doesn’t help that we are also working with a translation. Even the title is difficult. The subtitled version is called Black Girl, but that’s not what the French title means. Wikipedia translates the French title as “The black girl belonging to…” but (and hopefully Kari will correct me if I am wrong) I much prefer “The black girl from…”. That’s a much more accurate summation of how Diouana falls between two cultures.

Further events related to the African Science Fiction exhibition are happening this week. On Thursday evening there’s a talk about the relationship between the music of the Mbenga-Mbuti people (commonly known as “pygmies”) and the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Entrance is free, but you do need to book a place so see here for details. And on Saturday there are some free talks examining possible African futures: details here.

More On Africa

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

There’s another SF in Africa event in Bristol on Saturday. This one is a fairly serious academic discussion all about treating stories of colonization as if they were science fiction. My friends Mark Bould and Roger Luckhurst will be involved. There are more details over at the BristolCon website.

I won’t be there for the entire event as I have duties elsewhere as part of my involvement with the local LGBT History group, but I should be there at some point.

Africa in Science Fiction – The Exhibition

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Last week I discovered, much to my surprise and delight, that the Arnolfini in Bristol was staging an exhibition titled Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction. The Arnolfini is an arts centre in the Bristol docklands, situated opposite the Watershed which I’ve mentioned many times before. It is one of those “white room” exhibition spaces, but it also contains lecture rooms and I attended a talk by Tom Abba there earlier this year. The Africa exhibition opened on the Saturday, and there was a discussion panel involving the curators, Nav Haq and Al Cameron, and one of the exhibitors. I was there, as were Mark Bould, Tim Maughan and David Roden. You may have seen my tweets.

The exhibition is a mixture of work by Western artists who have visited Africa to make their work, and work by African artists. Personally I’d prefer to see the latter, but if you have an exhibition you need to fill then you take what you can get. I appreciate that the modern fashion is for very sparse exhibitions, but it did seem like there was room for more, so either the budget or the available material may have run out.

The importance of events such as this became very obvious during the panel discussion when we got on to talking about the idea of presenting positive futures for Africa, as compared to how African artists can make money. Suppose you are an African photographer. It would be nice to be able to sell your work to the Western media. To do that, you have to know what they want, and what they want is very simple: pictures of suffering. There’s no money to be made in Africa, we were told, by showing Africans as happy, healthy, self-reliant and successful people. What the Western media wants is pictures of Africa that play to the prevailing image of it as a failed continent: a place full over poverty, war, starvation.

Science fiction, then, gives us an opportunity to present a different Africa. Not Africa as it is defined to be by our media, but one which we claim to have made up, and can therefore be more real. Or not, depending on how much invention happens to take place. At any rate, there can be confidence, and hope.

The majority of the exhibits are short films. I want to return to this in a little while, but first I want to highlight some of the exhibits, and that fact that many of them are on film means that I haven’t had a chance to see the whole thing. I’ll be partly going from descriptions in the exhibition brochure, and partly from what I know of the material in question from other sources. First, however, a few things I can talk more authoritatively about.

The one item that is entirely text is a transcript of a round table discussion that took place on ARPANET in 1976. That’s remarkable enough, but the participants include American political economist, Francis Fukayama, and the South African activist, Steven Biko. That’s a conversation that it is fascinating to be able to step through time and listen in on.

Another exhibit that is easily and quickly viewed is Icarus 13, a series of photographs accompanied by a model and some text. The installation was created by Angolan artist, Kiluanji Kia Henda. He was supposed to be present at the panel discussion, but was unable to leave Angola. There was no explanation as to why, but I fear he may have been denied entry to the UK.

Icarus 13 is based on an Africa joke about a past President of Mozambique with big ideas. He is supposed to have decided that his country would launch a manned mission to the sun. On being told that the rocket would burn up in the sun’s heat he declared, “we will go at night!” So the joke is that the presidents of newly independent African countries have ideas way beyond their ability to deliver. Yet Henda had created a exhibit which shows photographs of the supposed sunship being built, and even the astronauts returning home. There’s a picture of the ship below, taken from the website of the research organization, Former West, and you can read the amusing description of the mission that Henda provided at this Spanish arts site. The “ship” is actually a real building in Luanda, the capital of Angola. It is the Agostinho Neto Mausoleum, a memorial to the country’s first president.

Icarus 13

A second photographic exhibit is Common Task: Mali, by Paweł Althamer from Warsaw. He and his crew traveled to the lands of the Dogon and dressed in gold suits so that they could get pictures of “aliens” visiting Mali. The Dogon, of course, are one of the peoples whom Erich von Daniken claimed had been visited by extraterrestrials (The Sirius Mystery, debunk here). I can see what Althamer was trying to do, but without context the pictures just looked like a bunch of rich Westerners peering at the unfortunate savages, which I’m sure wasn’t the message I was supposed to take away.

On then, to the films. The first one I’d like to note is Neill Blomkamp’s Alive in Joburg. This is something he shot as a trailer for District 9. It features a number of real Johannesburg citizens complaining about the influx of immigrants to the city. In District 9 these immigrants are aliens, but Blomkamp got the footage by asking his subjects to talk about human immigrants from Zimbabwe.

Superpower – Dakar Chapter is a film by British artist, Mark Aerial Waller. He was present at the panel, and clearly knew a bit about science fiction — he kept citing Phil Dick. In the film, a group of Senagalese astronomers discover a gas cloud that acts as a mirror, reflecting light from Earth back home. In this way we are able to watch images from our own past. I’m not sure about the physics of this, but it reminded me of Robert Charles Wilson’s Blind Lake. It was a nice SFnal idea. Mark tells me that much of his work has SF themes. You can see more of what he does at his website.

Finally we have Pumzi, a film by Kenya’s Wanuri Kahiu. Nnedi Okorafor has been enthusing about this for time, and Gary Wolfe added his voice after she got him to see it. Peggy Kolm mentioned it too, and I blogged about it early in 2010. At last I am going to be able to see the whole thing myself. This is classic science fiction. (Tim, who has seen it, says it reminds him of films like Logan’s Run and THX-1138).

Overall I am very pleased that this exhibition exists. However, I do have some reservations about the nature of the content. Firstly, of course, films do not make good art gallery exhibits. How many visitors are going to wait for the next showing of Pumzi to start, and then sit through all 21 minutes of it? Not many, I suspect, so the material won’t be shown to best effect.

Of course I’m concerned about the lack of any literary material in the exhibit. I am, after all, a literary critic. And as I showed in my earlier post, there’s a lot of science fiction being written about Africa, and by Africans. Sadly it is difficult to get the British arts establishment to take literary SF seriously. Tell them you are doing work on science fiction films and they’ll be happy to support you. Tell them you are working on science fiction books and they’ll turn their noses up.

The problem with this, however, is that the emphasis on film immediately puts the Africans in a position of inferiority. Making a film is an expensive business requiring many people and complicated equipment. Science fiction films, in particular, are expected to include impressive special effects. Any film produced by Africans will inevitably be compared with the output of Hollywood and found wanting. Books, on the other hand, are comparatively easy to produce. All they require is a talented author with a computer and lots of time. Some African writers are already producing SF&F literature as good as, or better than, most Western writers can manage (for example NgÅ©gÄ© wa Thiong’o). By taking away the need for sophisticated technology, and the expectation of high production values, you level the playing field and allow artists from anywhere in the world to compete. It seems to me that for now we should be giving Africans that opportunity, not judging them solely on their ability to make movies.

Some Wasp Scenes

~ Cheryl

So yesterday, having decided that I wanted to see The Wasp in the next Avengers movie, I couldn’t stop thinking of scenes from that film. The only thing to do was write some of them down. I have posted a couple here so you can have a good laugh at my attempts at fanfic. Go here.

Film Review – Avengers

~ Cheryl

As Twitter followers will know, I went to see Avengers last night. I loved it, and consequently there is a review. Much of it, I’m afraid, comes from the point of view of an aged Marvel fangirl, but as least I think I have mostly avoided spoilers.

I’ve also got a bit carried away with suggestions for future movies. See what I mean about “fangirl”?

Film About Jeffrey Catherine Jones

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Some of you will remember my post from last year on the obituaries written for Jeffrey Catherine Jones. Thanks to Anne Gray I have discovered that a film is being made about Jones’ life, including many interviews with contemporary artists and writers (Moebius, Roger Dean, Dave McKean, Neil Gaiman). The filming was done while Jones was still alive and able to participate. It will be called Better Things: The Life and Choices of Jeffrey Catherine Jones and you can find the official website here. The director, Maria Paz Cabardo, has a blog here.

I’m mentioning the film in part because I’m looking forward to seeing it, but also because it is pretty much a one-person endeavor and without a cash injection it is unlikely to be finished any time soon. There’s an appeal for funds here. Here’s the trailer.

Sports Documentaries

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Over the weekend I finished watching a few DVDs I need to send to Kevin. Two of those were sports documentaries: Ken Burns’ Tenth Inning and Stevan Riley’s Fire in Babylon. Both are notable for using sport a a lens with which to examine social history.

There’s an interview with Burns in the extras for Tenth Inning in which he says he sees Baseball as a kind of sequel to his famous series about the American Civil War. Both of them are projects that examine American history. Tenth Inning fits right into that theory. Although it is fairly recent history, the Dot Com Boom and 9/11 are well worth historical examination, and once again baseball proves a fascinating lens through which to do so.

Fire in Babylon takes us to another part of the American continent, and another sport. It celebrates the creation and 15-year domination of the great West Indies test side. The stars of the show include Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards, Michael Holding and Bunny Wailer. I loved it, especially the extra that is made from a series of interviews with Sir Geoffrey, Lord Gower and Imran Khan where they talk about having to face up to the West Indies pace attack. If any of my American friends want to know why I think baseball players are a bit wussy (though I now understand the game much better than I did when I wrote this) they should watch this documentary.

A brief warning for my West Indian friends. There’s one extra that is an interview with cricket historian David Frith. He’s so smarmy and vile that you may end up wanting to punch your TV. I know I did. Thankfully the main film makes it very clear how West Indies developed their pace attack as a response to the physical battering they took from Lillee and Thomson, and the racist abuse they got from the Australian crowds, in 1975, and this exposes Frith’s comments beautifully.

Hobbits and Memories

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

My Solstice present from Kevin this year was a set of the Extended Edition versions of the Lord of the Rings films. I watched the whole thing through over three days. That’s 12 hours of movie, which is quite enough for me, thank you. There is much in those films that is ridiculous, and more in the story that is disturbing, but there’s no doubting the visual and emotional impact of the films. They also have a lot of good memories for me. Probably the sharpest is meeting Sean Astin when he came to ConJosé to collect the Hugo for Fellowship. But of course I saw all of the films with Kevin. They were pretty much the only things we went to the movies for. I suspect that I am emotionally invested in those films. I’ll probably watch them next year too.

Moon Nazis Invade SFX

~ Cheryl

My goodness, some brave individual infiltrated the secret Iron Sky HQ in Finland and has spilled the beans on SFX. I wonder who that could have been?

I have, of course, seen rather more of the movie than I reveal. If I said any more the Moon Nazis would have to kill me. But you don’t have long to wait. The movie is due out on April 4th next year. The latest news on what my mad Finnish friends are up to can, as always, be found here.

The Long Way Home

~ Cheryl

Today I traveled from Turku to Helsinki, the long way, via Tampere. It is sort of like traveling from Bristol to London via Birmingham, except much more fun.

The first leg was a road trip through more beautiful Finnish countryside. Marianna, Karo and I were busily brainstorming ideas for next year’s Finncon for most of the trip.

In Tampere Karo handed me off to Jarmo, who gave me a guided tour of the Secret Base at which post-production on Iron Sky is being done. It is packed with processing power, giant screens and talented young men. Norm Cates would doubtless sniff with derision, because there’s no way the Iron Sky boys can match Weta’s money, but it was still very impressive. I wish I could tell you what I saw, but they’d kill me.

The second leg was by train through yet more beautiful Finnish countryside. I have photos for Kevin. It was a lovely train. Otto met me at Helsinki station (where we were just in time to see the daily Moscow train pull out).

Since then we have eaten curry and sat in the sauna. (Yes, Finnish homes often have their own saunas.) Tomorrow will be yet more travel, and if all goes well I will be back home in about 24 hours time.

Podcast Mania

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

This weekend has been busy. I have recorded over 2.5 hours of audio, most of it after midnight due to time zone complications. Today I get to edit it all. So the first thing I’m going to do is donate some money to the folks who produced Levelator, because without it today would be an utter nightmare.

Of course my brain is utter mush due to lack of sleep, and I have a stinking headache, so I’m doing things fairly slowly. To give myself time to wake up I listened to someone else’s podcast over breakfast. My good friend Terry Frost from Melbourne has a long-running series about old movies, the Paleo-Cinema Podcast. Mostly he talks about films I have never seen and am never likely to see. This week, however, to celebrate the 69th episode, he is talking about sex comedies, and inevitably that means Barbarella.

These days, of course, Barbarella is liable to be viewed as a product of the bad old days of sexual exploitation. Confused teenagers will be scratching their heads over why a film would name the mad scientist villain after an 80s boy band. But when it first came out the film was something entirely different. I first saw it on TV, so that must have been a few years after its theater release in 1968. I don’t mind confessing that teenage me very much wanted to grow up to be Barbarella (and have a mad scientist make me nice toys to play with). Of course it would have taken a massive fortune and the best plastic surgeons in the world to make me took as good as Jane Fonda, but hey, kids dream. And besides, here was a science fiction film with a female action hero. I mean, where were the female role models in 2001?

Thinking about the movie again also reminds me that, thanks to Heavy Metal magazine (Métal Hurlant, which literally translates to screaming or howling metal), my teenage SF consumption was influence almost as much by France as it was by the USA. The new issue of Salon Futura, which I’m working on at the moment, will have an article about the great French animator, René Laloux. That’s something for you to look forward to.

Anyway, thank you, Terry, for reminding me of Barbarella. Everyone else, if you are into old movies, Paleo-Cinema is a really good podcast. And because we now all have YouTube at our fingertips, let’s end with a gratuitous sex scene.