Exploding Cinema returns...
Art should alway be a little bit dangerous
The Exploding Cinema crew were back at the Cinema Museum this month showing more short films from the cutting edge of cinematic creativity. No mainstream fare here. The bad news is that ReidsonFilm were holed up in a warehouse recording our next podcast. The good news is that for the first time in (our) history we have a guest review. So welcome, to a good friend of ReidsonFilm: James Norton - cineaste, bon viveur, and producer-director. Readers, enjoy.
Exploding Cinema makes no distinction between a film that costs £10 or one costing £10000. And they have a self-described radical anti-curatorial policy: they will screen any film, and that really means anything and everything, with one proviso – the film has to have a running time under 20 minutes…
With the sad closure in January of previous hosts Iklectik, yet another great venue lost to rapacious and soulless developers, Exploding Cinema has returned to the Cinema Museum, with its light shows giving this Aladdin's Cave of celluloid history a dazzling psychedelic spin.
Host Cliff Top - his nom de cinema (not Cliff Hanger?) - kicked the programme off with a trailer to his film The Crack of Life, then kicked it literally into the long grass with the Super 8 camera wielded in Jack Wormell's Rapture.
The capacity audience were then juiced up by Ben Mosca's Squeeze, where to the strains of the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme music, a space age Alessi rocket squeezer made epic contact with a planetary lemon... or was it a grapefruit, as an explosive debate broke out as the credits rolled?
Perhaps Exploding Cinema, who accept all submissions sent in for their screenings, which is part of their wondrous appeal, have a backlog but there were a surprising number of films said to have their origin in lockdown, which already has a rather dated sense to it, but also a constraint that stimulated creativity. Notably the crowd pleaser Steel Wool by Jonathan Bower, who bounded up on stage to explain the striking effects of his gorgeous abstract short achieved by setting fire to clumps of the titular material and staining the film negative.
Another such, The Soho Connection, presented by legendary chanteuse Anne Pigalle, is to be part of a longer project documenting the haunts and denizens of her beloved adopted district, now suffering total erasure by rapid gentrification and the depredations of meretricious developers. She has interviewed over fifty of these witnesses to glorious fading decadence, including stories of Francis Bacon, Windmill dancing girls and more. Anne continued the paean to her rackety adopted quartier, this time in verse with a spirited recital of her poem Soho Mon Amour, before an interval in which the audience were serenaded by the one-man Carnaby Showband.
As a fan of more experimental cinema, a highlight for me was the German Dagie Brundert's Muttitelefon, beautifully shot in grainy Super 8 and wittily linking the mycelium networks with which fungi communicate between trees and the film-maker making a tin can telephone call to her mum.
In the brief but powerful Cancer is a Ticking Clock, the American Claire Maske used found footage and home movies to address her anxiety over her family's medical history.
Proving that Exploding Cinema really is open to all, another international entry, Ivan the Wolf and the Grey Tsarevich, was made by two Russian film makers, a modern twist on a classic fairy tale that could be read as an allegorical tribute to, or critique of, the country's current leadership.
To great excitement, 3D glasses were then handed out to add an extra dimension to the ambitious Genital Reveal Party, ‘an exploration of gender binarism, violence, climate disaster, and the second coming of Christ’, trafficking in footage of absurd pyrotechnic gender reveal stunts which have led to catastrophic wildfires. As the glasses were handed back after the film having only partially enhanced the foregoing seven minutes of ghastly hilarity, our genial host admitted, “perhaps they weren't the right kind.”
Truly avant-garde, the next offering was a trailer for Where the Wind Stands Still, JK Wang's film made in the year 2312, an apparently pink and purple remake of Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us, whose release we eagerly await...
As Long As I Can Hold My Breath by Mohamed Thara alternates flocks of birds on wires and murmurations of starlings with refugees crossing borders and fleeing a sinking ship off Lampedusa set to a haunting soundtrack including Harold Budd and Allegri's Miserere, and prefaced by mystical verses by doomed poet Georg Trakl, a beautiful and disturbing meditation on migration, of birds and humans.
Not to be confused with yet another lockdown film, the accomplished A Long Held Breath, whose images of a nearly deserted central London were the background to film maker Adam Fergler's former partner Siu Kee Tang's troubled account of revealing his gay identity to himself, his professional peers and Chinese family.
This event being held on May the fourth, it had to include a tribute to Star Wars, magnificently achieved by Duncan Reekie's Deathstar, which entirely using AI tells the only slightly enhanced story of George Lucas's rise from experimental cinema geek, whose career is launched following an encounter with mythology guru Joseph Campbell after a street mugging, via meetings with a hyperreal Francis Coppola, to sci-fi movie mogul, who still just wants to make experimental films.
Duncan urged us to watch 21-87, the amazing found footage short from 1963 which really did inspire the young Lucas and so you should:
The evening ended with a polished slice of south London noir, Lifts, by Rohan Sudan, a tense thriller set in a Vauxhall Corsa on a darkened housing estate and a poignant story of childhood friends driven to crime. Perhaps a calling card for greater things for this engaging young director.
You can watch the whole event and the full programme of films here:
Exploding Cinema followed this event with another a week later at a suitably and fabulously named venue in Wales, Rhayader's The Lost Arc; their next show will be a seaside special at the Tom Thumb Theatre in Margate on June 22nd, and they return to the Cinema Museum on September 28th. If you want to join them, or just want to explore their mission, click this link: Exploding Cinema
…and there you have it. But before we let you go it would be remiss of ReidsonFilm not to point you in the direction of James’ own recent filmic endeavour. Likely to be one of the pinnacles of BBC arts programming this year, we invite you to join him on Rob and Rylan’s Grand Tour (all episodes now available on BBC iPlayer).
