ALT/KINO is covering the Experimenta strand of this year’s London Film Festival via a series of correspondences between Patrick Gamble and Sophia Satchell-Baeza. In the third of these missives, Patrick reflects on the obfuscation and emergence of narratives within and around films screened.
Roary (David Leister, 2022)
Hey Sophia,
Thank you for your last correspondence. It sounds like you’re having quite an intense festival. I hope Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica hasn’t pushed you over the edge. I certainly wouldn’t judge you if you did walk out. When it comes to depictions of human physiology I find the line between fascination and revulsion can seem very thin. Watching the film made me acutely aware of my own body; like wearing an outfit that didn’t quite fit properly.
I also had a pretty powerful reaction to David Leister’s Roary, which screened before the world premiere of Lewis Klahr’s The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness. A psychedelic ode to one of the most enduring images from the Golden Age of Hollywood, Leister loops three 16mm reels of Leo the Lion, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s famous mascot, until the colours bleed into one another and the sound goes out of sync. I found the film strangely moving, and couldn’t help but draw parallels between the endangered status of lions and the demise of celluloid. On a side note, did you know that the roar we hear during the MGM logo is actually a tiger? It came up during the film’s Q&A. Apparently lions don’t sound very ferocious, so the studio decided to dub him. How embarrassing for poor Leo.
While we’re on the topic of misdirection, I’m glad you managed to catch the end of James Benning’s The United States of America. When I saw the film during the Berlin Film Festival, my initial reaction to its ending was one of anger. I was working to a tight deadline, so had mentally started writing my review during the film, confident that once the credits rolled I could rush back to my hotel and type it up that evening. Benning’s little joke at the end meant I had to start from scratch. I was pissed off at the time, but now I can’t help but admire his striking mix of formal rigour and mischievous invention.
The barren landscapes of The United States of America also reminded me of lockdown, and how empty and eerie the streets of London were during the pandemic. After a week of navigating the busy pavements of Leicester Square and the Southbank, I have to admit, I kind of miss it. The first time I covered a festival using correspondences like this was during the pandemic, when Ben and I covered the 2020 25FPS program remotely. The intention was to use these correspondences as a way to imitate the communal experience of a film festival; creating a space where our thoughts could coalesce into new ideas. Even though we’re ‘back to normal’ I’m glad we’ve continued with this approach. How else would we be able to discuss lip-synching lions and the existential crisis of pandemic-era Pret a Mangers.
Like you, my view of America was also shaped by a “series of fantasies culled from comic books, records, and the movies”, perhaps that’s why I enjoy Lewis Klahr’s collage work so much. After all it’s a very literal deconstruction of this false and superficial image of America. His latest, The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness is a collection of six films unified by their fascination with the opacities of narrative and a sense of romantic longing. I always enjoy the simple pleasure of searching for a narrative thread in Klahr’s work and seeing where it leads you. More often that not, I find myself at a dead end but I was comforted by Klahr’s candid post-screening Q&A in which he told us not to worry about feeling stupid when watching his films. “If you’re struggling to follow a narrative it probably means it isn’t there,” he told us.
The film with the most ‘conventional’ narrative in the program was probably Alcestis, in which a house party full of Greek gods dressed as comic book superheroes unravels into a humorous, yet surprisingly profound, distortion of this eponymous Athenian tragedy. It would be unfair to label Alcestis the stand out of these films, it's just the only one I can talk to you about without giving a purely subjective reading. But rest assured, what I felt whilst watching Klahr’s elliptical narratives was not confusion, but the coiled charge of possibility contained within each of these meticulously constructed artefacts.
Finally, before I leave I thought I should mention another film in the program that you might find interesting; Anthony Ing’s Jill, Uncredited. A celebration of the unsung heroes of cinema, the film is a compilation of footage featuring prolific extra Jill Goldston, whose extensive array of cameos and walk-ons ranges from movies like The Elephant Man and Flash Gordon, to episodes of The Bill and Doctor Who. Inevitably, combining these clips allows new narratives to emerge, like the moment we spot Jill being removed from a car by paramedics during an episode of Minder, only to reappear moments later as a nurse on an intensive care ward.
The job of an extra is to not stand out, and with almost two thousand uncredited film and TV appearances, Jill has mastered the art of being invisible. That means we have to work extra hard to find her in some of these scenes, with Ing encouraging us to adopt a broader view of cinema, and consider the lives of those characters just outside of the frame. That’s all from me for this year, but before I slip out of focus, I’d like to finish by saying thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences with me. I look forward to hearing how the rest of your festival went.
All the best,
Patrick
You can read the other parts of the Experimenta correspondence here: #1, #2.
The 2022 edition of London Film Festival runs from 5 - 16 October
Patrick Gamble is a writer on film and culture, whose work has featured on Hyperallergic, BFI, Calvert Journal and Kinoscope. Further links to his writing can be found at patrickgamble.contently.com.