NO SHOW
The Glasgow Short Film Festival will be shedding some lighti on a influential area of US cinema, writes Jonny Ensalli
She Had Her Gun All Ready
N o wave is a difficult term to pin down. The bands that collected together as part of this late-1970s and early-80s New York scene – The Bush Tetras, James Chance and the Contortions, DNA and Lydia Lunch’s outfit Teenage Jesus and the Jerks among them – had little to connect them other than a spirited, DIY ethos and an often violently overspilling sense of fun. Latterly, DJs and record labels including Glasgow’s own Optimo have catalogued and promoted this music, bringing its more danceable rhythms to a new audience of fans. Now it’s the turn of the Glasgow Short Film Festival to shed some light on the period’s cinema.
‘The filmmakers were very much coming from the same DIY ethos as the punk and post- punk music scene,’ says George Clark, the programmer of the two no wave strands
showing at the festival. ‘In the same way that people started picking up guitars and forming bands without any formal training, people started picking up 8mm cameras and making movies. The period has largely been understood and unified in retrospect, but there was an incredibly diverse range of work produced during this time – film, video, performance, art, music, poetry – that often blurred the lines between these areas. Many filmmakers were in bands for example.’ This is true of Vivienne Dick, an Irish-born filmmaker who moved to New York in the 1970s to shoot Super 8 shorts and play organ in Lydia Lunch’s pre-Teenage Jesus band Beirut Slump. ‘I saw a picture of Patti Smith in The Village Voice,’ she remembers. ‘And that brought me down to [legendary punk rock venue] CBGBs, and I was like, “Woah, what’s
5 TO TRY: GLASGOW SHORT FILM FESTIVAL
GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL
going on around here?” So I moved down to the Lower East Side.’ There, Dick collaborated with performers including Lunch, and Pat Place from The Bush Tetras to produce some stark, but witty and playful films that documented what Dick calls her ‘extended adolescence’.
‘The performers would forget I was there with the intention of filming, and they’d start messing around; put on a record, do whatever. And then I’d start filming. It’s on the edge of being documentary and fiction – it slithers between the two.’ Dick’s She Had Her Gun All Ready showing as part of No Wave 1: The Blank Generation, follows Place and Lunch on a fun-finding mission that leads them to Coney Island and, eventually, into a fight with each other. It will show after the 1979 CBGBs documentary, Punking Out, that features footage of The Ramones and The Dead Boys on untouchable, snarling form. The second programme, subtitled ‘The Para-Punk Underground’ explores the scene’s move into the cinema of transgression, with films including Beth B and Scott B’s Letters to Dad and Tessa Hughes- Freeland’s Baby Doll, both of which manage to be political and irreverent in equal measure.
Writing in The Village Voice in 1979, critic Jim Hoberman attempted to sum up no wave’s practices: ‘The new underground’s technically pragmatic films enact libidinal fantasies, parody mass cultural forms, glorify a marginal lifestyle, and exhibit varying degrees of social content.’
But classification is perhaps unnecessary considering that so many of no wave’s key players despised the idea they might be part of a movement. The simple joy of the work elevated it above muddy, postmodern theorising. ‘I didn’t think of myself as a filmmaker even,’ concludes Dick. ‘I was just doing – making something to show.’
No Wave 1: The Blank Generation, CCA, Sat 19 Feb, 9pm. No Wave 2: The Para- Punk Underground, CCA, Sun 20 Feb, 7pm. Full transcript of The List’s interview with Vivienne Dick is available at www.list.co.uk/gff
GSFF OPENING NIGHT COMPETITION 2:
STORY DESIGN IN THE MIRANDA PENNELL
GSFF AWARD
PARTY WITH LUCKYME The Glasgow arts collective LuckyMe has a reputation for throwing great festival parties. It will helm GSFF’s opening- night shindig, with live performances and DJ sets from American Men, The Blessings, Éclair Fifi and a special mystery guest. ■ CCA, 350 Sauchiehall Street, 352 4900, Fri 18 Feb, 10.30pm. LONESOME ROAD Travel is the theme in this programme of shorts, which includes the films Canopy Crossings (enjoying its world premiere), MRDRCHAIN (UK premiere), Madagascar, A Journey Diary, Shadows of Silence and the BAFTA- nominated LIN (these last three are Scottish premieres). ■ CCA, Fri 18 Feb, 5pm & Sat 19 Feb, 9pm.
SHORT FICTION FILM Filmmaker, screenwriting professor and film journal editor Richard Raskin delivers a lively presentation on script and story development in short films, with aid from a few judiciously chosen examples. Promises to be enlightening and entertaining in equal measure. ■ CCA, Sat 19 Feb, 11am.
RETROSPECTIVE With a background in contemporary dance, London-based filmmaker Pennell brings a keen eye for performance and choreography to her work. Among the films to be screened at this event – which Pennell will be attending – is her latest work, Why Colonel Bunny Was Killed. ■ CCA, Fri 18 Feb, 7.30pm.
CEREMONY WITH WOUNDED KNEE At this special closing event jury and audience award prize winners will be announced, the winning films will be screened and folk-electronica wunderkind Wounded Knee will deliver a special performance featuring archive film soundtracking along a ‘Bonnie Shoals’ theme. ■ CCA, Sun 20 Feb, 9.15pm.
17 Feb–3 Mar 2011 THE LIST 17