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If “graffiti artist” wasn’t the contradiction in terms it so often is … 
GIFF started small in the 70s and has grown and grown. Today it’s the largest of all the Nordic film festivals. Most importantly (for reasons of local pride) it’s bigger and more prestigious than Stockholm’s international film festival. (Ha! Take that, Capital City!) Gothenburg’s festival has now reached the stage where it offers some 450 long films (and dozens of shorts) shown in 9 or 10 different locations over a 10 day period, and attracts an audience of some 32,000 film lovers and cineastes. It’s also an important venue for the trade, with deals being done and prizes being competed for. The series of seminars and debates held in the new-since-last-year Lagerhus social central offers extra events to interest the general public, students of film and film buffs who may be taking a break from the rigours of end-on-end movie going. There are side events – this year’s video installation Curtain Callers at Magazingatan 3 for example. And there’s a social side to the festival which spills over into the pubs and clubs. I’ve attended GIFF annually since moving back to Gothenburg from Sundsvall in 1998, but I was a sporadic visitor even before, when I had the opportunity. The beginning of February, in cold-damp Gothenburg. Of course you want to be sitting in a packed cinema, all breathing together. As ever, this year, I found myself wondering if I would break my record and go down with a cold within the first 24 hours. But no, both I and my good lady Mrs SC remained remarkably healthy throughout.
And I managed to tweet all the way through the week about the festival and the various films and events I went to. This blog entry is based on those tweets. My first film was The Color Wheel. An American film shot entirely in grainy black and white. (I think the title was supposed to be a joke.) Lots of shaky Dogma-style hand-held camera action. There were some funny lines (especially in the first third of the film) and situations. Still, I wouldn’t choose to see it again. I had the feeling it was a student effort produced as a final, graduation masterwork. All the characters (bar one) seemed about the same age, friends or classmates of the director and writer? The principles, Carlen Altman (JR) and Alex Ross Perry (Colin) were clearly revelling in improvised backchat, some of the other actors though were clearly uncomfortable with this and were, simply, wooden. And the story … well, I felt the story hadn’t really been worked out and the conclusion was clichéd and a bit desperate. As the lights came up after the film was over, the guy in the seat next to me said “I don’t know”, and that was my reaction too. Two weeks on, I still don’t know.
My second film of the festival was actually a series of short art films by Ann-Sofie Sidén. All interesting and enjoyable each in its own way, and all of them of much higher production quality than I, at least, am used to seeing from films made for video installations. The first film was QM, I think I’ll call her QM in which a paranoid psychiatrist ‘studies’ a mud-woman (QM = Queen of Mud) imprisoned in a room in her house. I’m not giving anything away when I say QM escapes at the end. The second film was Head Gallery Piss Up. It documents the installation in a gallery in Vienna of a squatting, pissing, full-size model of the artist in bronze. Fascinating and surprisingly funny! The third film was Curtain Callers a film of events behind the scenes before, during and after a performance at the Stockholm Royal Dramatic Theatre. This latter piece (as mentioned above) was also being show as an installation (5 screens side-by-side with surround-sound audio) which I also managed to see later in the week. All 3 films were worth seeing, though they probably benefited from being seen together and with Ann-Sofi Sidén present and answering questions put to her by an interviewer and the audience. She was disappointed – to say the least – about the projection of Curtain Callers at the Bio Roy. Too bright, she said, too loud. Later the same day (this is Saturday 28th January) I saw my third film and first documentary, Deaf Jam in one of the lecture theatres at Gothenburg’s Technical University, Chalmers. Part of the fun of GIFF is getting to see films in places one wouldn’t normally visit. I’m only ever at Chalmers at festival time. I though Deaf Jam was fantastic. I tweeted that I was blown away. A film of deaf teens working with American Sign Language and imagery to create visual poetry … and then finding ways to communicate to/with hearing poets and on to an audience of predominantly hearing people. I was so impressed I tweeted an appeal to Swedish Educational Radio (Utbildnings Radio) to: Please! Buy Deaf Jam and show it on TV. No response though. OK – A bit long for a blog entry (but about par for me). I’ll break here with the intention of continuing in a later entry. I’m also planning to write some longer reviews of some of the films and post to the IMDb – I’ll add links as I go along. In the meantime, here’s the trailer for Deaf Jam.
Links The Color Wheel trailer on YouTube >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOtO8JBtxpE QM I Think I’ll Call Her QM – trailer and info from Market Road Films >> http://marketroadfilms.com/pr_qm.html Deaf Jam internet site >> http://deafjam.org/
My primary resolution was to write for at least two hours every day, and that I seem to have kept. To be sure I missed one or two days, but I seem to have worked for about four hours every day between the 9th and 29th January. My best day was Tuesday the 17th when I wrote for nearly 7 hours. On average I’ve written around 1400 words each day, but I’m counting not just the words I’ve written creatively, but also everything I’ve written as translation work, for my blog, and in letters and tweets. I don’t think this is cheating (he said, crossing his fingers. All my writing is creative of course. My writing resolutions also included producing about 10,000 words for Elin’s Story: sadly I only managed half of that. Though my most productive day for creative writing was Tuesday 24th when I wrote nearly 2700 words, of which 2350 for Elin. I was also supposed to write a complete short story, and to submit a short story to a market somewhere, this in order to live up to my commitment to the W1S1 project. Well, I started writing a short story and I managed to write 900 odd words for it, but I haven’t completed it yet. As for submitting a story, I have one to send but the mental threshold of making it ready and putting it in an addressed envelope turned out to be rather higher than I anticipated. I shall grit my teeth and send it off this month. I did write a couple of articles (about 1800 words) and submit them together with a pitch to an online magazine. If they’re accepted then I have a market for, say, another 15 articles of about 500 words each submitted over the next five months. I don’t know whether web journalism really counts as story writing though; grey area maybe. About 6000 of the words I wrote were teaching material for Mera Förlag, and so something I will get paid for eventually. It would be nice to be paid for everything I wrote, but I’m grateful to have a small income at least for some of my writing. I also resolved to try and publish at least one blog entry every week. I’ve managed to keep this resolution though it hasn’t been as easy as I had anticipated. I’m really not terribly satisfied with a couple of the blog entries I published in January. One (Resolutions) is the truncated remnants of a podcast script four times as long that I spent hours writing but eventually had to abandon. It was a disappointment, but I was right to abandon it – I was letting it take up far too much time and it wasn’t going anywhere. Well, that’s my review of my writing in January. As I say, not as outstanding as I could have wished, but not a complete failure either. I’m hopeful I will be able to do better in February. This entry also posted on my blog at the Written Word Ning.
The faces are to be found painted on the rocks bordering Dr Allards gata up against Landal Egnahem between Dr Fries torg and Wavrinskys plats. Painted (so the artist says) with eco-friendly paints that will fade with time leaving no poisons, they were made during 2011, probably before the summer. The artist is Joakim Stampe, a performance artist from Göteborg. There’s a gallery of his work here: http://gallery.me.com/joakimstampe
As we fumble our way into 2012, I’ve spent some time pondering the concept and history of New Year Resolutions. My good wife has pointed out that in Sweden people don’t make resolutions at the New Year. That would be Nyårsbeslut. Instead they make Nyårslöften - New Year Promises. Swedes are a more moral people because they make promises; English-speakers are more amoral. Of course Swedes are no more likely to keep their Promises than English-speakers are to keep their Resolutions, so we all end up in the same slush pit of failure. I don’t know if Swedes form the scum on the slush (because their promises were, after all, moral ones) or the dregs at the bottom of the slush (because to fail morally is worse than failing amorally). To be sure, in the slush pit we all look much the same. We keep on doing it, though, making and breaking our New Year resolves. There also seems an abiding interest in asking why – why we do it and why we fail; an abiding interest, but not in getting a real answer. At least, that’s my conclusion after having scoured the Internet for the History of New Year Resolutions. There are literally dozens of sites that hash over the same misunderstood, misquoted and misleading handful of facts, and misquote and misunderstand them all over again in an orgy of twisted meanings, half-truths, wishful thinking and in some cases (I suspect) deliberate mischief.
Later Julius Caesar altered the calendar and gave his own name to a month at the opposite end of the year. (I don’t know what this has to do with New Year Resolutions, but a lot of Internet sites think it’s very important – probably because they don’t think anyone really cares about Janus but they expect people will have heard of Julius Caesar. I’m guessing.) The Babylonians made New Year Resolutions because it was a part of their culture. (We, of course, do it because that’s what you do at New Year.) But the New Year is particularly good for Resolutions because it is the beginning of a New Year! It’s a time to throw away old things and buy new ones. For example, in China everyone throws away all their old clothes at New Year and buys new ones. This is why the Chinese textile industry is so successful. And at New Year in Sweden people throw all their old furniture out of the window and take the Volvo to IKEA to buy new. This is why IKEA is so successful. The Christian Church also messed things up for a while there in the Dark Ages when they moved the New Year to 25th March, because the Roman New Year celebrated the pagan God, sorry, King, er God-King Janus. But once they had properly taken over the Roman Empire the Church realised the error of their ways and sometime in the 1600s, or the 16th century, switched New Year back to 1st January. The British tax authorities, however stuck with March 25th, but then added 10 days to change it to 6th April. (Count them!) I could go on, but perhaps I’ve made my point? I suspect that we humans are always in need of turning over a new leaf, starting a new phase in our lives, making a new start. When the events of our lives don’t give us a clear-cut date on which to make change we look around for another date, and find the first day of the New Year – whenever that happens to fall. My guess is that it’s a practice that stretches back long, long before the Babylonians and doesn’t anyway come from a single culture. I would be unsurprised to find it among prehistoric farming communities from 10,000 years ago or among isolated hunter-gatherers in our own age.
He’s not, of course. He’s the god of purification. The Roman year was pretty straightforward. First they resolved to conquer another country and swore to Janus in January, then they purified themselves and strengthened their resolve before Februus in February, finally in March the month of Mars they marched off to war. But that’s the Romans. For us, now, the fine blades of our January resolutions are shaken and bent by the cold blasts of February. By night the dark spirits of the slush pit laugh at our pitiful promises and the memories of previous failures call us down. By day a weak sun lights up the dark corners of our pitiful ambition and shows the grime of postponement and the dust of prevarication we let accumulate. Oh dear, oh Lor! He’s getting poetical. Time to bring this to a close I think. At least, as I stumble to the end of the third week of 2012, I’ve managed to keep that one-blog-entry-a-week resolution for one week more. |
he Göteborg International Film Festival (familiarly known as GIFF) takes place annually at the beginning of February in Gothenburg, and has done so for 35 years. Or is it 34? I know they jumped over the number 13 but can’t remember if they managed afterwards to make the numbers correspond to the years. Not that it matters really.
’ve done quite well in keeping to my writing resolutions this past month, but I haven’t been as successful as I might have been. I didn’t really get started until some days into January and I didn’t start keeping a log until the beginning of the second week. (Yes, I’ve been keeping a log in a spreadsheet!)
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ometimes you just never know what you’re going to find. Someone says: That rock’s looking at me! And you look closer and you see … faces. Faces everywhere. Calm faces, angry faces, wise faces, sleeping faces, troubled faces, amused faces.
long with all my usual resolutions for the New Year about being a better person and leading a healthier life (which get converted soon enough into trying to be a better person and trying to lead a healthier life, before being quietly forgotten) there are a small collection which have to do with writing. One of them is: Write at least two hours every day. Another is: Publish a blog post at least once a week.
ew Year Resolutions go back to Ancient Babylon, two whole millennia ago in 4000 BC, but the silly Babylonians got the date wrong, thinking it started with the first full moon (or new moon) in March. It took the Romans to fix that. (Some sites will even give you the exact date when New Year Resolutions were first made: 153 BC. Oh yes!) Anyway the Romans chose 1st January for the start of the New Year because a Roman King called Janus (who had two faces and guarded doors and bridges) gave his name to the month.
very year we promise ourselves — or we resolve — to lose weight, eat more soundly, quit smoking, get a better job, learn something new, help others. Every year we fail. By February the failure is obvious. If Janus is the God of New Year Resolutions, Februus must be the God of Broken Promises.