Movie magic kicks off Flatpack Festival
Terry Grimley looks ahead to the third Flatpack film festival.
An event at the Town Hall tomorrow night should be equally unmissable for fans of early cinema, local history and Balkan-flavoured jazz.
Curzonora celebrates the work of pioneering showman Waller Jeffs (1861-1941), who introduced cinema to the Birmingham public with his regular shows at the long-vanished Curzon Hall during the first decade of the 20th century. It will feature a Jeffs-ish programme of films from that era, combining classics like Georges Melies’ famous Journey to the Moon with film despatches from the front (the Boer War) and scenes of Edwardian Birmingham from the treasure trove of films by Mitchell & Kenyon which were rediscovered in a shop in Blackburn a few years ago.
This rare treat will be served up with a spicy musical accompaniment supplied by The Destroyers, Birmingham’s own 15-piece gypsy-jazz big band.
Curzonora launches the five-day Flatpack Festival, the third edition of the idiosyncratic festival which concentrates on the small-scale, experimental and often mobile.
Flatpack is the showcase of 7 Inch cinema, an organisation set up six years ago by Ian Francis, who worked for five years on the Birmingham International Film and Television Festival and Pip McKnight, whose background is in youth and community work.
“I started doing screenings outside cinemas when I left the festival in 2001,” says Ian. “I knew that what I was going to be interested in was that sort of mobile presentation. We started in 2003 with regular screenings at The Rainbow in Digbeth. The idea of Flatpack was to gather up a lot of this year-round work in a concentrated period that could have a higher profile.
“The festival started in 2006 to about 2,000 admissions over three days. The main venue was, and is, The Electric Cinema and it grew around that.”
Flatpack’s association with the Electric is ironic, because the opening of this cinema in 1909 (there is some debate as to whether it is the oldest surviving cinema in the country, though it has not been in continuous use as a cinema) was one of the nails driven into Walter Jeffs’ coffin. “The business model was the wrong way round,” Ian points out. “He was hiring his venue and buying his films.”
On Thursday at The Electric, Vanessa Toulmin will give an lllustrated lecture on The Amazing Mr Jeffs which will include more of the newsreels he commissioned from Mitchell & Kenyon. Subjects include Joseph Chamberlain at home and pupils of the Blue Coat School waking to Curzon Hall. In total. there is around 40 minutes of Birmingham material in the Mitchell & Kenyon archive.
Looking at the festival programme, which includes screenings in shop windows as well as a specially-commandeered post-industrial space in Digbeth, it’s not difficult to see why Flatpack sees itself as Jeffs’ spiritual heir.
“We’ve always wanted to do something about him, but we were always waiting for the right venue,” says Ian.
“In the 1900s, before permanent cinemas, films were shown by travelling showmen like Pat Collins, but Jeffs was all about trying to pull in a more respectable audience. From 1901, he was putting on two-hour film shows at Curzon Hall when film was still a bit of a sideshow.
“What we really liked about him was his imaginative approach to the market and his real sense of occasion. You can tell from the write-ups in the press that each screening was a real event – you would have a military band accompanying film of the Boer War, dancing bears and all sorts.
“It was a Wild West period when cinema first came along, because people didn’t know what to do with it and, in many ways, we’re back in that period because the cinema model is under threat today.
“The system of having 35mm prints lugged around the country is being supplanted by new technology and the ease of getting material out there. We love cinemas and work with them all the time, but I sense there’s room for a lot more imagination about how we use venues.”
Hence Floodgate Kino, the temporary venue on Floodgate Street, just across the river bridge from the Custard Factory, which will host numerous events at the festival. A team of theatre design students from Birmingham City University has been recruited to help give this stark industrial space a suitable ambience. Although the festival programme includes feature films (including two, Felicia’s Journey and Privilege, shot in Birmingham), the main focus is on the small-scale and innovative.
“We’ve always tried to resist being an animation or a music film festival but mixed together lots of genres into one programme,’ explains Ian. “That’s a harder sell because it’s hard to sum up, but we’ve got really good local networks and the national profile is growing now.
“It was great for us to be picked up by the United Kingdom Film Council as one of seven nationally-significant festivals. We took a year out from the festival to take a chance on that because, without it, we were on the treadmill of raising funds from scratch each year.”
A new feature this year is a programme for children and families next weekend at the Electric, which includes Albert Lamorisse’s famous short The Red Balloon, which is more than 50 years old.
Vintage documentaries with a local interest include a BBC film from 1965 about Birmingham architect John Madin and the Led Zeppelin movie The Song Remains the Same.
There is a trail of film installations in city centre shop windows, from Digbeth High Street to Corporation Street and other installations at Floodgate Kino reflect Flatpack’s fascination with the archaeology of cinema and such pre-film devices as flick books (patented in Birmingham in 1868) and zoetropes.
An interesting aspect of Flatpack is its identification with Digbeth as an alternative cultural quarter.
Planned from 7 Inch’s office in the Custard Factory, all its venues apart from the Town Hall and the shop-window trail are in Eastside or neighbouring Southside and include South Birmingham College, Ikon Eastside and Eastside Projects as well as the Electric and Floodgate Kino.
Flatpack overlaps with the exhibition at Eastside Projects, As long as it Lasts, which is the largest devoted to Birmingham artists Simon & Tom Bloor.
They have a programme of short films complementing their exhibition which will be screened at the Custard Factory on Saturday afternoon, but they have also chosen two films which are showing alongside the exhibition.
I recommend Beatrice Gibson’s A Necessary Music, a surreal evocation of New York’s Roosevelt Island. It’s 25 minutes long but sufficiently mesmerising to make you want to stay the course.
* For further information, visit www.flatpackfestival.org. As long as it Lasts is at Eastside Projects, 86 Heath Mill Lane, Digbeth until April 4 (Thur noon-7pm, Fri, Sat noon-5pm; admission free)
