Squat-punk.alt.film
no stars no funding no taste
So on a hot, humid Saturday night, while the rest of South London were fighting for a space on the grass of Clapham Common ReidsonFilm joined a crowd of fellow cinephiles at the Cinema Museum in Kennington for another festival of short films screened by Exploding Cinema.
We have featured the Cinema Museum on Substack before but it is worth repeating that this archive – just a few minutes walk from Elephant and Castle – is not only a treasure trove of cinema memorabilia (they also run guided tours) but they also have some plush velvet seats from where you can watch their regular screenings, which brings us back to this week’s event.
Yes…it’s Exploding Cinema, the now thirty-one-year-old underground collective with an anarchic, punkish vibe that you certainly won’t get at your local ‘independent’ Picturehouse. And their manifesto remains unchanged: to stick a middle finger squarely in the face of institutionalised filmmaking and detonate the demands of corporatised cinema.
They make no distinction between a film that costs £10 or one costing £10000. And Exploding Cinema has 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.
The range was impressive with filmmakers coming from as far afield as Moscow and erm… Croydon. Here are some highlights:
The Maths Teacher by Nadia Barbu
This short comes from a Romanian filmmaker, Nadia Barbu, now based in the UK who seems to be able to turn her hand to anything involving animation. Here we have an affecting docu-drama about an abusive teacher from her school days. And I mean abusive: sitting at the back of the class, insulting his pupils, before getting up and beating up a visiting child. Nadia uses interviews with her former classmates to tell the story with a mixed media animation, but just when you think you know where you are, she interviews the teacher himself…
You can watch the film here:
Lepidopterist by Sophie Black
This sci-fi short could be a modern-day tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and rightly won a clutch of festival awards. Co-written and directed by Sophie Black, who runs her own studio, Triskelle Pictures, Lepidopterist was shot in a wood and evokes a real sense of folk horror. The soundscape and photography combine to give you an accomplished melodrama that touches on our relationship with the natural world … all in under eight minutes. It’s also noteworthy that the film was shot and edited in 48 hours for the Sci-Fi-London 48 Hour Film Challenge.
Take a look:
My Great Funeral Movie by Adam Bernet
Adam Bernet’s black comedy opens with the funeral of the protagonist - Adam Bernet. In a Red Room strongly evocative of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, with an arresting free jazz accompaniment, the guests wait as a portable TV is wheeled out. A videotape plays and the dead man invites the mourners to watch as he re-enacts some of the ‘likely’ scenarios that led to his demise. Ranging from death by eating date-expired chicken to a failed attempt to correct a terrorist’s spelling, there were howls of laughter from the audience from start to finish. But was it the laughter of discomfort? You may recognise the forever-smiling Mr Bernet from his starring role in The Internet Remains Undefeated, but this short will have you reviewing your last will and testament:
The Mouse Escapes by Simon McLennan
A physicist with a strange lesion … a theremin … visions of a woman dancing alone in the wood, weaving a web. Simon McLennan’s unconventional cinematography and mysterious symbolism would certainly be considered avant-garde, but it was the haunting score (penned by McLennan himself) that really unsettles in this compelling short. We could advise repeated viewings if you want to grasp the meaning but that didn’t work for us:
Exploding Cinema returns on the 21st July, but this time back at the arts and music venue, Iklectik in Waterloo – with the bar that serves the impressive Negroni. Find the details here, and of course if you should happen to have a short film up your sleeve, why not give it a showing.
And coming next week … Dear Murderer(1947)
