Sheffield Documentary Festival 2011 – Live Feeds
by AshaLive News from Sheffield doc fest as it happens @futureartists and @janemcconnell
Extracts Below…. for full info head to M+ Magazine http://mplusmag.co.uk/
DAY ONE :
THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD
Or in fact, POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever sold (the juice company which stumped up the cash to have the title changed).
Morgan Spurlock is the sweet-talking punk who got the ad agencies to fund his $1.5million film budget for his movie about…advertising. And it’s hilarious. Hey- of you’re going to hell and back, bringing thousands of people in the audiene with you – you better make it funny.
Pomegranate juice, an MRI Scanner, a meeting in a Trump Tower, the top 100 ad agencies, shampoo for people and horses, Big Boi from Outkast and Morgan Spurlock: these are the essential ingredients which have helped to create one of the most vital meta-documentaries in the last 20 years.
The idea of product placement is nearly as old as the invention of PR itself – but it’s the way which it dominates the Hollywood film industry, which is the premise of this film.
“Smells like a brand new day!” Spurlock exclaims as he pushes Ban deodorant all over the place, barely containing his laughter as he realises that the FTSE pushers are actually helping him create a documentary that is blowing their world wide open. He is in no way cynical either, which we’d imagine would be massively easy when trying to create commentary about the billboards and sponsors which have become so entrenched in Western life. However, with a reputation bolstered by the overwhelming success of Supersize Me, he is a fantastic filmmaker whose relaxed attitude and great sense of humour explode through every pore of the film.
His style is brazen; also describe as ‘playful’ (as you’ll discover in the film…) he doesn’t treat the subject lightly and is ambitious in how advertising permeates every aspect of U.S. life. In discovering a school in a poor area of America, he finds that many feel under pressure to sell their fences as advertising space – just to save school programs that are under threat.
He talks about how, in 1989, a “the last barrier was broken”. In the U.S. high school children and teens must watch 12 minutes of advert-funded television everyday on Channel 1. With broadcasts beaming into every school, the ad slots are extremely, extremely lucrative. Those valuable seconds of exposure fetch as much $200,000 dollars. Nuggets of information like these are so well presented that we would be spoiling the film by revealing too much. We feel like we’ve done that already…
Anyway. It is only until you see a naked Morgan Spurlock – save for the logos and brands and a sign for the film title covering his privates – that you realise Spurlock has not sold out. Rather, this man has completely sacrificed himself for the good of better awareness.
In all honesty, it really only could be Spurlock who could get away with this: he is already known to audiences as a renegade director with a taste for becoming the guinea pig, asking the simplest – and therefore hardest – questions, and using cartoon-
style graphics to present the stats. Yet, as we discover in the film, Spurlock himself is kinda already a brand. Or at least, he has an identity…
This review was brought to you by M+ Magazine. And we love Sheetz…
Huh? Yeah. Just watch the film.
M+ : 9/10.
BY JANE MCCONNELL (M+ editor and Future Artist)
ADAM CURTIS
image:wikicommons
Adam Curtis (Adam Curtis)
Janice Hadlow (Controller of BBC Two)
image:wikicommons
Warning: contains opinion!
Jane E. McConnell at #sheffdocfest
In the belly of the spectacular Lyceum Theatre, just a few paces away from the train station, Adam Curtis and Janice Hadlow began a conversation – and a thoroughly challenging debate for both parties, which is how it should be, right? When you feel that little bit of awkwardness and wonder if they are genuinely arguing – that everybody wishes they had surreptitiously recorded. I sat right at the front as if there would be some sort of osmosis of genius, but needless to say, the osmosis did not happen but I definitely decided to write this piece about it.
Janice introduced the Q&A session. “A narrative of bold proposition…starling, sometimes controversial,” she read, as Adam Curtis looked rather composed, quietly gathering his thoughts and probably trying not to nervous when faced with half a bunch of media wannabes, and half a bunch of media wannabes (self included.)
On the initial inspiration behind his unique cut/contrast/fuse/cut even more style, Curtis remarked that it wasn’t anything that was entirely deliberate, that: “I just started playing around…it was merely a way out.”
…of the cutting room? A blush-evoking topic was that of the time it takes Curtis to serve up more of the good stuff. (YEARS. IT TAKES YEARS.) He was really, really bashful about it all and went red when Janice mentioned it. “Let’s not go there!”. It was quite a sweet and extremely rare moment – for us as the audience – of Curtis to have been completely opened up like that. It’s like telling Michelangelo he took ages, and that my supper got well cold while I was waiting for him, I don’t care about your back Michelangelo; just paint me some deity thingies. I’M HUNGRY. See.
For what felt like about twenty minutes (but was actually and hour and a half), Adam Curtis gave the packed-out theatre a rare insight into how, why and what motivates him to create films. We were shown a clip of Pandora’s Box, before he was grilled on the muses behind the series. “It was born out of desperation – as a lot of television is.” Interestingly enough, the need to tell a story was not necessarily born, for Curtis, out of a need to match his peers (this is arguably a trait of many filmmakers pushed in an environment where fast turnover and prestige become tantamount in importance. “Everything I’ve got, I’ve got from novels,” he said. “Documentaries are often very boring, very general.” Janice as chair of the discussion asked about Curtis as an artist and about technique, Curtis breezily said that he does, in fact, elements from “trash telly. And [then I] bolt it onto posh pretentious stuff.”
Most documentary-makers probably aren’t the biggest fans of Curtis. I’d imagine so anyway – he has an opinion, for starters, and ain’t neutral. (Curtis likes to say ain’t. Heehee. I know.)
He is both the narrator and the director, when traditionally, the two roles are separated. Finally – he likes the jump cut All. The. Bloody. Time. When the Q&A session was opened up to the floor, he was invited to comment on his ‘Britishness’ in terms of the tone used in shaping of voice and presentation of his documentaries – when his use of the road-less-taken choices of soundtrack and edits are, in Curtis’ view, more ‘American-styled’. Jump cut-y.
If there was one thing which was covered easily by the BBC Q&A – it was the Brooker link. Surprisingly, this sparked a whole new theme in the discussion about something that may be about to happen: The New Journalism. “The missing link these days is between what we feel, and big world events… Charlie Brooker: he reports himself and his reaction to things.” If you’ve ever seen Newswipe, you know exactly how cool this is.
Yet if there was one recurring theme throughout his enviously articulate stream of consciousness, it was the idea of “The Rat of Individualism”. Not, like, this massive and mischievous Rat who has smugly crowned himself the King of the ideological concept, (I am assuming The Rat is a Man which is unfair) but the ruling ideology that keeps us trapped in our habits – and to a greater extent, I guess, our machines, our computers, our Twitter accounts. This is a theme that Curtis hits on a lot in his documentaries, and especially his latest series, All Watched over By Machines of Loving Grace.
Best of all, Curtis is a great teacher. And rather honest: a reviver of sociology and a fearless explicator of the power structures which he understands are the driving forces behind our lives and often, our thoughts and feelings. Curtis explored this in depth in his second series, The Century of the Self. [You can Google Video it, we’ll post up links tonight.]
“There are powerful forces, powerful interest groups – not conspiracies.” These are surely the words of someone who is a journalist at heart. But not once did he refer to himself as an artist, or a director, or even a filmmaker.
He talked about journalism consistently and yet never described himself as a journalist. Perhaps a lot of the mystery that belies the enigma of Adam Curtis is, well, maybe none of us know ‘what’ he is. Except an absolutely mint artist, director, filmmaker and journalist…
BY JANE MCCONNELL (M+ editor and Future Artist) @janemcconnell
JUST DO IT – Post Premiere Q+A
WITH DIRECTOR EMILY JAMES