‘oh, the MC5 manager’ or ‘the White Panther guy’, while older people say Poetry Is Revolution poster by ‘ah, the guy that John wrote the song about’ or ‘the marijuana guy’. Yumiko, Belle’s mum, remembered him as the poet we went to see at the Borderline a couple of years ago, playing with the Blues Scholars whose line-up that night included Chris Musto (Johnny Thunders’ former drum- mer) and Steve (now Stella) New (of the Rich Kids et al). ‘[The Artists’ Workshop] was experimental, we could do whatever we wanted. There were no constraints. We didn’t want to be popular, we did not care at all. To get a review in the paper meant nothing. The outside world meant nothing to us. We were in a different world. We were very happy there. And we had no use for squares’ , Twenty to Life

Maybe this is the point where I should sketch a quick Sinclair timeline. John Sinclair was born in Flint, in 1941. He founded the Artists’ Workshop which mutated into Trans-Love Energies. He was the manager of the MC5, the leader of the . He was sentenced to 9 to 10 years in jail in 1969 for having passed two joints to an undercover female narcotics agent who had infiltrated his commune. He’s a poet who has set much of his poetry to music… actually if I really were a real writer that’s maybe what I would have done at the beginning of this piece. ‘That a person is charismatic is one thing but what they do with that charisma is what’s intriguing. And John had a way of attracting these creative and exploratory people’ , Twenty to Life

‘So in the film Pun Plamondon talks about how Trans-Love Energies was ‘He was Lieutenant Stringfellow, headquarters.’ the link between the beatniks of the Artists’ Workshop and the hippies.’ ‘So he was the guy who was behind the desk, like supervising?’ ‘I came along in that little pocket right behind the beatniks and before ‘Yeah.’ the hippies. The first hippies were rock and roll beatniks. They were like ‘So what would you say to Warner Stringfellow now?’ beatniks who were into rock and roll, instead of, or in addition to, jazz. Jazz ‘Well he’s gone y’know. I don’t have to say anything to that creep.’ being the official music of beatnik.’ ‘When did he go?’ ‘You like jazz too, right?’ ‘I don’t know, in the ’80s, or ’90s maybe. He’s a dead man [laughs].’ ‘Yeah, I’m a beatnik y’know, I came up right under that.’ ‘At what point did you write the Stringfellow poem?’ ‘You have now the Blues Scholars, they’re not the Jazz Scholars, but ‘That was when he threatened to get me.’ there’s a little bit of jazz to what they do, right?’ ‘The first time he got you or the second time he got you?’ ‘I do jazz too but it’s all blues. Jazz is blues played through saxophones ‘First time. This was October ’66 when we had this confrontation’ [laughs].’ ‘Ahh. So he didn’t come back for you because of the poem.’ ‘So, when did you form the Blues Scholars?’ ‘Well, no, he had already threatened y’know. I’d had people tell me that ‘At the end of 1982’ they were arrested and taken down there to police headquarters, and they ‘And since then it’s been like a pick-up band, the concept is the same, had a poster of me that they used as a dart board [laughs]. I was not a but depending on which town you’re in…’ popular guy… I had moved into a little attic apartment on Plum street, I ‘Yeah, I’ve got a huge honour roll of scholars. Now that I’ve got a lot of was in the apartment and the door opened and him and one of his hench- my music documented, these are guys who listen to my records, and they men were touring Plum Street to see what was going on there. They just get all the arrangements done perfectly.’ happened on my door. And then we had a little verbal confrontation which ‘Steve uses the Blues Scholars in the movie as a regular cutaway rhythm I commemorated in that poem that I wrote right after he left. I think he said from one part of the story to the next, and it works very nicely.’ something to the effect of “I’ll drown you, you worthless prick” [laughs].’ ‘Yeah, and also he managed to bridge the concept. Sometimes the story will be advancing and he’ll cut to a performance that comments on what I ‘I think the reason the government was so harsh on John was just talking about. I thought that was really great.’ Sinclair was because he was an outspoken critic of the government and consumer society in general. But in this BOUT AN HOUR into the film Sinclair, with guitar player Bill country we have free speech so they couldn’t just put him Lynn, recites his poem. It’s very moving. And it in jail for what he was saying so they used the marijuana feels like Steve Gebhardt has structured it like it’s the middle- laws. The police set John up for a bust because they eight of the film, a film that has been 16 years in the making. wanted to get him off the street, and they succeeded’ A ‘Yeah, its kind of the backbone or the spine. As a poet it’s exhilarating Leni Sinclair, Twenty to Life for me to see. Y’know when we first talked about making this movie, we Here’s another funny thing. I’ve told a bunch of people that Sinclair is wanted to follow up on the other one and then twenty years later and he coming to Raindance to introduce the doc that Steve Gebhardt has made wanted to make my life story and I said “Well nobody really knows who I about him. And depending on what age they are they all seem to know am, so who’s going to be interested in this movie?” And a lot of the narra- know him from different parts of his ‘career’. Younger people to tend to say tive stuff, where I’m big and fat and got frizzy hair, was shot in 1991.’

26 FIFTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

‘That stuff looks like it was shot on on 16mm, it has that kind of texture.’ ‘He made that before he switched to high definition video in ’98. Before that we had to stop and start. We’d get a two thousand dollar grant from an arts council and go out and buy some film and do a shoot, hire a camera- man and hire a sound man and a gaffer, shoot the stuff and get it to the lab, get it developed and then try to get it edited. Each step was costly. It took us a while to really get our rhythm. Then when he got that in ’98, then he could just go somewhere and shoot stuff. He came to Europe with me for the Cannabis Cup. He shot all that stuff after 1998, he shot when we were recording the album in New Orleans. Anyway when I moved to New Orleans and I formed my band, that was the first band I ever had that would rehearse with me, and we worked out music for about five hours worth of poetry really. Then I made my first record in ’94, it came out in ’95 then I thought “Well I’d like to do more of this” [laughs]. So then he started filming me in different kinds of situations. Then I got excited about the movie ’cause it also had what I was doing now, as a counterpoint to what happened 35 or 40 years ago.’ ‘Steve had an earlier movie called Ten for Two which was a commission by John and Yoko.’ ‘A document of the John Sinclair Freedom Rally of December 10th 1971.’ ‘Having never seen it, or come across a copy of it, I imagined that might ‘Well you’re in prison, you have to just A, do the time, or B, kill your- be what it was, is it parts of that that are in this film?’ self. So I thought B was not acceptable. You just have to do the time, ‘Yeah the Lennon stuff, and the snippet of and the Ginsberg you don’t have any choice. I did my time, and I really directed my defence stuff. They made the movie and by the time it was due to come out the and directed our [White Panther] Party from prison. I used to write seven government was harassing Lennon so much that he withdrew from every- single-spaced typewritten pages every night and send them home. I was thing. It was their film and they decided not to release it because it would involved in everything in a very intimate way although I wasn’t there. So have just given them more trouble.’ that kept me from being depressed and maudlin. More and more people were supporting the idea that I shouldn’t be there and that just kept me ‘It was inevitable to me that I was going to do time alive spiritually, until the end when John Lennon said he was coming to get or get killed. I didn’t care. I had no idea that I would me out. Yeah [laughs]! Thank you [laughs]! I did everything I could from that do two and a half years in prison on this fucking case position to get myself out and to keep advancing our goals and then when where I was challenged on marijuana laws and they I came out, we spent the next two years doing the same thing in Ann Arbor ruled that I was a danger to society. But I would have which culminated in the five dollar Ann Arbor marijuana laws.’ been offended if they hadn’t said I was a danger to their society. I was determined to be one’ ‘I came out of jail pretty much determined to try to John Sinclair, Please Kill Me permanently alter the marijuana laws. I kind of regarded myself as a confirmed, lifelong smoker of marijuana. And ‘What was it, in your own mind, that defined you as a danger to society?’ I thought that it would get fairly tedious if every year one ‘I was determined to overthrow the entire social system, not just the had to go through this rigmarole with these maniacs of the government, but the whole capitalist system – that was our goal, so that’s law, the scotch and bourbon establishment so to speak’ kind of dangerous in its way.’ John Sinclair, Twenty to Life ‘What was it that radicalised you?’ ‘The police. The constant harassment by the police.’ ‘…and then everyone applauds. I love that part. That was in Ann Arbor, ‘In that particular period of the mid to late ’60s?’ dope capital of the mid-west.’ ‘Yeah. We had the Artists’ Workshop. We were about as far out of the ‘So Ann Arbor has particular marijuana laws?’ picture as you could be. We were a fringe, underground group. We didn’t ‘Yeah that’s what we instituted in the ’70s. You only get a fine, a ticket.’ care anything about being in the papers. We just wanted to be beatniks, ‘Like a five dollar fine, or it was five dollars then?’ read poetry, listen to jazz, watch underground films.’ ‘It was five, they adjusted it for inflation, I think it’s twenty-five now. They ‘But you would already have been perceived as a danger to society.’ tried to get them thrown out, but the voters wouldn’t do it.’ ‘They didn’t like any of that. They didn’t like the fact that we smoked ‘If we wanna gamble in casinos or spend our money in a pot and took acid. This gave them the keys, the tools that they needed to whorehouse, give the president a blow job in his big chair harass us under the law and the more they harassed us the more I began in the White House, walk around the streets with all our to realise “Wait a minute, this isn’t just some isolated thing, this whole thing belongings in little bags, sleep in doorways, piss in the is wrong, this whole system is crazy”. That’s how we got radicalised. We gutter.… and if it comes to the end of the line for us we followed the example of the who were the first people have every right to blow our motherfucking brains out, or to stand up and oppose them with weapons, to say “You can’t do this to jump off the bridge, or take ourselves away from here any us”, we just thought this was the greatest thing that we’d ever seen in our way we might want to – then baby, please we got our right lives. But the harassment just never stopped. It just got more intense each to our bad habits and it ain’t nobody’s business if we do’ year. I did time and they came right back after me, they just never let up. So John Sinclair, Bad Habits finally we thought “We’ve got to oppose this” and then there was the war. We hated the war, what they were doing to black people, we hated that Sinclair moved from New Orleans to Amsterdam in late 2003. I imagine and we wanted to change it.’ that Amsterdam must be something of a comfort zone for him. So what ‘How did you cope with jail?’ made him decide to move across an ocean?

28 FIFTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL Opposite stills from Twenty to Life: Riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention, Black Panthers, White Panthers, Frank and Above Hill Street crater, Ann Arbor, photograph by David Fenton. As Celia Sinclair describes in Twenty to Life: ‘a crater that the commune dug to protest the bombing in Vietnam’

‘I just like it there so much better than anywhere else I know. And I’ve T’S ABOUT A week later that I get to speak to the film’s director made quite a few friends there and there were some people that were Steve Gebhardt. And it turns out that while Twenty to Life has been urging me to come there. And then in America everything was just dete- 16 years in the making, it’s actually very much more of a labour of riorating so much politically. And after the 2002 congressional elections, love than that. It has its origins in Ten for Two – an earlier film that where the right wing took over everything in the country, I didn’t want to IGebhardt shot for John and Yoko in Ann Arbor, Michigan, of the John be a part of that.’ Sinclair Freedom Rally of December 1971. Gebhardt was the Lennons’ staff I have to take Belle to the bathroom. When I come back Jesse is talking filmmaker at the time (he also directed The One to One Concert, released about the Doors. John says ‘You know, not a day goes by in Amsterdam in 1972), but despite a limited theatrical release in London at the time, Ten when I don’t hear Riders on the Storm at least once’. For Two never really saw the light of day Our time is nearly up. John has to get to the airport for a flight in about two hours time. We haven’t talked about the MC5 yet. I’ve kind of avoided ‘When did you first meet John Sinclair?’ the MC5 because I don’t know what more I can possibly say about that, ‘Well I met him, but not to develop a friendship or anything, but I met him that hasn’t been said about them already. with the MC5 at the Black Dome in Cincinnati, Ohio, in April of ’68, but that ‘Is there anything about the MC5 period that I should include?’ doesn’t mean anything because he doesn’t remember that, and the next ‘Well I don’t know, I mean all the good stuff is in the film and you get time I met him was after he got out of jail.’ to see them; and I love the way Steve cuts the riot to the Motor City Is ‘So the footage in the film when he comes out of jail, is that your foot- Burning part, that’s brilliant that part.’ age, or did you get that from somewhere else?’ I’ve got about one minute left, and one question that any real journalist ‘No, some people in Ann Arbor went out there and shot it, sent us the would have asked a long time ago. footage and we used that because we’d gone back to New York and that ‘To what extent do you think there is an underground any more?’ was that. John was in the stir and then he got out. Who knew that he was ‘I think there is an underground now of which I have been a lifelong den- going to get out of prison three days later. And then all that business with izen. The underground is that mental space outside the mainstream where the phonecalls that you hear when he got out, that happened the next creative people of all stripes live and work without much recompense or week. When John and Yoko knew he was free, they gave him a call. But I recognition of any kind from the surface world of television, movies and was at home, probably. Having dinner, out having a drink, I have no idea.’ pop culture. I move from underground scene to underground scene all ‘So it was the Lennons who commissioned Ten for Two?’ over the western world. The thing is that the underground is ever further ‘Yes, well I worked for them. I was their staff, and there were this cadre outside the knowledge of the mainstream culture, so less and less people of us who did their films. We were finishing up Imagine at that point. We even know about it with each passing year.’ had aspirations of getting Imagine placed on television, we had a sponsor and so on, and then we were shooting shit every day. I mean it was a full [Tape cuts] time, more than full time job working for them, because they had erratic

FIFTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 29

Left John Sinclair back at school, from Twenty to Life. Right Steve Gebhardt, photograph by Joe Cockerill schedules, they expected you to be there when they were up, whenever ‘Well that’s how they get everybody. It’s the way things are done here that was, and so on, and I had some semblance of a life, but that’s all I did and it happens all the time. Here and in your country. There’s a reason for was work for them… Anyway, I left their employ in May of 1973, we were the way the film ends, that you’ve got a right to your bad habits and your in London when I got put out to pasture. We were working on ‘Ladies and weaknesses. That’s what that’s about. I knew that was the conclusion and Gentlemen: the Rolling Stones’ and one of their guys, a friend of mine, everybody’s come down on my head for using that because of the presi- came and dismissed us. At that point we were really a film company with- dent’s blow job in his big chair and he talks about every sort of perversion. out a product, because Ten For Two wasn’t going to go out.’ It’s sort of like the film The Aristocrats, in a sense.’ ‘So because of their own complexities, and for whatever reason, they ‘It’s a good ending, I think.’ decided not to do anything further with it?’ ‘I think it’s a great ending. There are issues in there that really bother ‘Well, they’d have been nuts. They could have decided to distribute it, but me, that the government does whatever it chooses to do, and that’s what the fact of the matter is that they decided that their term in the US was this thing is about. They’re wire-tapping here and… who knows what they more important than Ten For Two, because it attracted the attention of do in England.’ Nixon and all that shit started on John [Lennon].’ ‘I’m sure they do the same.’ ‘But there’s a connection between Ten for Two and Twenty to Life, not ‘Well of course they do.’ least because of you and John Sinclair.’ ‘Do you think that there is an underground anymore?’ ‘Well since it was obvious after twenty years this one’s not going to get ‘It’s a serious question. To me it’s sort of like broken glass. If there was out, I thought “So let’s do this”. And we started it then, Twenty to Life, and one, there ain’t no more, because it’s all been co-opted. What do you have we just decided then to throw caution to the wind and start a film. Sinclair, left? I like the idea that people are concerned about the environment, global he was living his life, and I was a filmmaker, and I was finishing this Bill warming. I appreciate all that and I am for those things too, but the fact is Monroe movie in ’93 and that gave me all sorts of cachet to get crews, that I don’t think that there’s much of a reaction because the governments and whatever… But [after John and Yoko] it was a pretty difficult situation have us by the short and curlies. I don’t even know how you could have a trying to make a film when your last film isn’t bringing you money. I was revolution, imagine that they pull off any of this business that they did back dispossessed, as you will, I had to go start my career over again.’ then, they’d be shot. It would be like Kent State only worse. Nobody’s in the ‘So after all that time in limbo, you and John decided to start making a mood for it. They started the war. During the Vietnam experience, Nixon film about John, like a real biopic, a real documentary about his life.’ screwed himself and their system by being who he was. After that the war ‘I didn’t know what it was going to be, but I wanted to cover the story of ended and there were different fish to fry. I don’t mean that people just this guy who was in the pokey. I decided I would use reference materials of quit, but they sort of did, you know, everybody went off and did something him getting out of jail and Lennon being there as sort of the lynch-pin. So I else, and this is what happens when you…’ started Twenty To Life. That was easy, coming up with that title, but beyond ‘When you turn forty…’ that it was just scheduling trips to Michigan and getting him to Cincinnati. ‘Hahaha, when you turn forty. Or when you turn twenty. I’m just afraid A bunch of it was shot here, some of the concert pieces, stuff at the radio that people like to be lulled to sleep, and this is what I think has happened place, we shot here whenever he could come to town. Then I started chas- to whatever there was of the proletariat. It’s like just trying to live, because ing him around the country. There were lots of efforts that ended up not it’s gotten a lot harder to live. It’s not the same world it once was. There going into the mix. My goal with this thing is that people like John, and was hope, and I would say that there was good reason for it back then. don’t just think of him as a weed-head, because he’s much more.’ There was every reason to think that the laws about reefer would change ‘He talks about marijuana in the film but he doesn’t talk about it a whole and that we wouldn’t get into another war and then you see what hap- load, I mean there’s only so much you can say about it.’ pened. The ’91 war gave George W the premise to do this Afghanistan ‘We’re trying to get it on a more serious level. If you can’t smoke it then post-9/11 reaction which is all these wars, and you say “Well, how’d he do forget it, you don’t need to talk about it too much. We’re not trying to turn that?’, well, how did he do that, but that’s the problem, people will have got him into the big salesman of Amsterdam. My intention is to use his situa- too much control, and this is what happens to us. We get sold down the tion to call attention to the stupidity of how these things are enforced.’ river – not that there aren’t other problems in the world, but that’s another ‘Leni Sinclair makes the point in the film that the marijuana possession day’s issue.’ r and the handing over two joints was really just an excuse, they wanted him John Sinclair and Steve Gebhardt introduce Twenty to Life – The Life and Times of John and that’s how they got him.’ Sinclair at 9:15pm on Saturday 29 September at The Rex Cinema. See page 64 for details

FIFTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 31

‘God is dead’ Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra ‘Don’t apologise. It’s a sign of weakness’ John Wayne, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon

– THE DA VINCI MODE –

TO SEE IS NOT TO LOOK SAYS AnGEL-EYED CULTURE TERRORIST PENNY RIMBAUD, WE’RE JUST PUTTING DESCARTES BEFORE THE HORSE

OR FIVE HUNDRED YEARS Western culture has been whereas, both in their very different ways, a landscape or a Pollock chal- being led down the cul de sac of spiritual bankruptcy lenge the consensual, demanding an involvement outside and beyond the which we have come to describe as ‘the everyday’: retail predictable. But how did that come to be? therapy (what’s Next?), Big Brother (he ain’t watching We can all see, but it is you who looks out on a world which is purely you, you’re watching him), mobile inanity and Internet your own, unique as the iris of your eye. Looking is a symbiosis between insanity (you know where you are and so do the cyber seeing and thinking, but whereas everything is seen in the seeing, an awful Fpolice), celebrity confessions and terrorist obsessions (different masks, lot can be lost in the thinking. It all depends on attitude. Because seeing is same facelessness), colonialism in the guise of globalisation (the trickle a natural function, no one can tell us how to see, but looking is altogether down effect of smallpox infected blankets), and then, of course, the key, a different matter. We look with our brains and, as we all know, brains can the Holy Grail of commodity culture, the syphilitic virus of Hollywood heist. be washed. And who were the fiendish perpetrators but Leonardo da Vinci (armed ‘As soon as you’re born they make you feel small, with Renaissance perspective), and René Descartes (armed with math- by giving you no time instead of it all’ ematical certainties)? John Lennon, Working Class Hero ‘But was it good for them too?’ Brainwashing, or social conditioning as it is euphemistically termed, is To see is not to look. We are born with the capacity to see, we simply can’t standard practice within the Western institutions of Family, Church and help it, but to look you need firstly to know who you are, and then, and only State. From birth we are brainwashed into believing that we are at an then, what it is you are looking at or for. Whereas seeing is a passive func- arrowhead of consciousness where there is standing room for one only, tion, looking requires mental engagement. our self: the modern-day individual, name and number. Within this con- struct, we become responsible not to ourselves, but for an idea of our self, ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you’ always once removed, incapable of direct experience because at best we While we might, for example, go to ‘see’ the Mona Lisa, we would almost can only experience our self experiencing. This is our prescribed fate, the certainly go to ‘look’ at the work of Jackson Pollock. We go to see a movie, ‘who, what and where’ of our existence. It is all we are permitted to be. No but we look at a landscape. The difference? Movies and the Mona Lisa do wonder, then, that we regard ourselves as the centre of the universe while, not question our perceived place in time and space, indeed they confirm it, conversely, feeling so alienated and alone in time and space.

FIFTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 33 to claim that thought is a noun, which implies that it must be a something (a something that no scholar has yet been able to define). Clearly, then, that does not offer any logical reason for verbing it, prefixing it with the ‘I’ and claiming it as proof of existence. In his search for the ‘indubitable’, Descartes harped on about the value of doubt, which makes it all the more extraordinary that having come up with his ‘cogito’ (which had he had the courage to pursue might have led him to some kind of real truth), he then turned his attention to establishing the indubitability of the Christian God, thus rendering himself unworthy of any further consideration. ‘I think therefore there is God’ – utter twaddle

Renaissance perspective fooled us into thinking that we stood alone in space as the singular viewpoint, but it was Descartes’ ‘cogito’ which handed us an identity with a singular point of view. A key factor in perspective was the ‘vanishing point’, the point at which we could see no further however hard we looked, the horizon and beyond. Unwittingly it was to there that we were drawn in our newfound ‘am-ness’, and there, tumbling into the void, the spirit was torn from us. Separated from the whole, we were left to find our own way out of the mess. The modern-day individual had been born. It was a big step for mankind: into the light, shadowed by angst. ‘I think therefore I’d best think again’

And yes, of course the million dollar question should be asked as to who or what conceived of the ‘I’ for Descartes to then be able to think it and, through the fallacious use of the ‘ergo’, assert it as an entity. Sure as hell it wasn’t God. In the beginning was the word, and the word was ‘lie’ ‘I will admit as true only what has been deduced from indubitable common notions so evidently that it is fit to be Prior to the Renaissance there were, of course, individuals with individual considered as a mathematical demonstration’ outlooks, but there was a broader spirit of belief (albeit dominated by the René Descartes, Principles indoctrination of the Church), a sense of community and belonging, a spirit of vision and a vision of spirit. The deceit practised by da Vinci in his use of perspective was that his (the artist’s) viewpoint was ours, when in fact he T WAS THE Greeks who had invented perspective, but it was da had handed us no more than a global indentikit iris. We had been divorced Vinci who successfully contrived to develop it into both a science from spirit that we might be ‘our self’, but that self was a lie. Cast in this and an art. Hitherto, painting had either taken the form of the icon very different light, we no longer knew who, what or where our self was. as a devotional aid, or was allegorical in that it was something to be Ilearned from rather than engaged in. By employing rules of perspective, da We no longer belonged. We needed guidance, and it was only a matter of years before we were given it. Vinci created an illusion of space which entirely altered the viewer’s rela- tionship with his or herself, with the world and with the concepts of reality ‘I think therefore I am’ which supported it. Paradoxically, the viewer had been removed that s/he From now on the truth of our being was to be governed by the deceits of might then be engaged. But if s/he was to engage, s/he first needed to the ego: I the individual (no Gods, but, as it turned out, plenty of Masters). know what or who s/he was. It was Descartes who later had come up with Descartes’ ‘cogito ergo sum’ was the construct which defined that indi- the answer of ‘I the am-ness’ and from then on we were divorced from the vidual. It was a temporal concept as spurious as that which suggests that whole that Reason should win out. if there is a beginning there must therefore be an end, and in that respect To reason is to collude. To factualise is to delude it was not merely temporal, it was apocalyptic. Unwittingly, da Vinci had written the spiritus mundi out of the story. Standing ‘I am therefore one day I will not be’ at and as the viewpoint, withdrawn and divorced from the divine canvas, he No wonder, then, that Descartes is lauded as the father of ‘modern thought’, was alone in time and space, quite literally limited to his own point of view, those philosophical and scientific conceits that have systematically baffled and so were we. Where the spirit had once been within everything, it was us in our quest for authentic being (and don’t bother to protest, because now removed and, despite Descartes’ later efforts to prove God indubita- no one is listening). ble, demoted to being no more than a fading memory. In a series of artful brushstrokes, Western mysticism had been dealt a death-blow. No wonder, Bleep, bleep (or is it that godawful ?) then, as history set its trajectory towards the Age of Reason that Martin ‘Hello, hello, where are you?’ Luther waited breathless in the darkened wings of the boudoir while Isaac ‘I can see, but I haven’t looked, so I’m fucked if I know’ Newton sharpened his quivering quill beneath the conjugal bed. ‘Well, I can hear you, but I haven’t listened, so fuck you too’ Had the Catholic Church realised that this was what Leonardo and his Before turning again to the pedantry of Leonardo da Vinci (he who started chums were involved in, it would have had them hung, drawn and quartered, the whole paintball rolling), a little more on Descartes. True, he could think, or whatever it was that happened to heretics in those days. As it stood, it but that doesn’t mean his thoughts were anything more than ‘thought’, in had been happy enough to buy into the new conceits if only because they which case, who or what was his ‘I’? For his own convenience (and to our reflected that most quintessential of human vanities, Papal primacy. Now, if greater detriment) he verbed the noun. Whatever it is, it seems reasonable that isn’t supreme individualism, what is?

34 FIFTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL Opposite Penny Rimbaud, photograph by Gee Vaucher. This page collage by Gee Vaucher. Previous page photograph by Yumiko Tahata ‘Forgive them, Father…’ However hard they tried not to, models moved around, and over the day the light and shade could alter dramatically. Nothing stayed still. Yes, through The demonstrable fact of the power of perspective is that from the the use of linear perspective I could pull off a reasonable illusion of space, Renaissance onwards its rules governed pictorial art and, through its richly but in no way at all could I give my drawings the reality that I sought. I then seductive illusion of an illusory reality, deeply affected the manner in which began to suspect that the reality I was pursuing was not a reality at all, but we perceived ourselves and the world around us. But as I have already a ‘sense of reality’, an artifice, but I had to wait forty years for Hockney to demonstrated, it was more than simple illusion, it was a falsity, presenting finally explain why it was that I had come to think that way…. the world from the viewpoint of a fly on a wall which wasn’t there or, worse, the centrepoint of an individual who didn’t exist. It took five centuries and ‘….the tyrannical, monocular vision of the lens Paul Cézanne to begin to undo the damage done. [which] ultimately reduces the viewer to a particular spot in space and time’ ‘Cézanne’s innovation was that he put into his pictures David Hockney, Secret Knowledge his own doubts about how objects relate to himself, recognising that viewpoints are in flux, that we always Since childhood I had been assured by the status quo, be it in the form of see things from multiple, sometimes contradictory, family, school, church, State or post Renaissance art, that I was no more positions. It is human, binocular vision (two eyes, two than a spot in time and space. I didn’t like it. I wanted to be me, not a spot viewpoints, and therefore doubt) that functions here’ or a fly. I had been sold a reality and then told how to behave in it (but still David Hockney, ‘Secret Knowledge’ I vowed one day to become a bohemian. I’d show ’em). But did my superi- ors truly believe that their ‘reality’ was as fixed as they claimed, and were After almost five hundred years in the wilderness of reason, doubt had artists and writers there to give weight to their perceptions, or did artists returned to human consciousness. In revolt against the rampant despiritu- and writers manufacture a way of seeing which then became the accepted alisation, individualisation, specialisation, industrialisation and militarisation ‘reality’? Hockney’s book finally confirmed my lifelong suspicion that it was of the Age of Reason (sic), the Age of Bohemianism was born. The the latter. It was a truly profound revelation. I felt released from a lie. Impressionists painted the world rainbow, the Dadaists dodoed, the Throughout my life I had ‘seen’ reality through the eyes of another, and Surrealists smoked haddock and then, with a flick of the wrist, Pollock took whenever I ‘looked into’ that reality I was seized by doubt. Just as in my us back to our primal roots. But was anyone looking? youth I would stare in wonder at a Caravaggio painting, so I would recoil ‘Nah, I don’t get the point he’s trying to make’ in horror from photographs of the pits of Auschwitz. They both seemed to belong within a particular ‘field of vision’, one portraying what I thought to Which was, of course, exactly the point. Pollock wasn’t making a point, he be the supreme achievement of mankind, the other its absolute depravity. was destroying one: the viewpoint. His art was totally non-figurative and Beauty and the beast, light and dark, good and evil, but for all that, they totally divorced from consensual thought. It was ‘itself about itself’. appeared to me to be one and the same. For reasons I couldn’t explain, I ‘Blimey, a chimp could do better’ felt that in some strange way Caravaggio’s paintings ‘confirmed’ the death camp photos, gave them an uncalled for added gravitas (and vice versa). It So where was Descartes’ ‘I’ within all this? Simple, it was drowning in the was as if they were of the same ‘matter’. deep ocean of soul where reason flounders and there is no law to contain the human spirit, sinking without trace into Sartre’s ‘being and nothingness’ ‘Hold it right there’ in which consciousness ‘always is what it is not, and is not what it is’. At last We are repeatedly told that the camera can’t lie, but it does. It lies because we were free again to look beyond the see-able. The grand illusion was it abstracts us from time, pins us to a wall and then deprives us of the over. But then, just when we felt it was safe to go back into the water… right to reply. What could I do for those piles of emaciated bodies? I felt

impotent. Equally, knowing now that Caravaggio achieved his perfection Jaws 2, the sequel through the use of lens projections, I can understand the negative feelings IKE ALL ACTS of illusion, Leonardo couldn’t truly have pulled that his work left me with. It was that very same sense of impotence which it off without a little help from his friends, in this instance they I felt with the death camp photos. In both instances I was being forced to being neither God nor the sequinned lady in the box, but the be a fly on the wall, helpless in that I was there, but not there at all, impo- Llens makers of Northern Europe (as documented in detail in tent in my ability to do anything but passively see what was placed before Hockney’s extraordinary work Secret Knowledge). On its own, linear per- me. Hockney’s staggering exposé on the use of lenses released me from spective was formulaic and dry, creating an illusory space, but not the cerebral myopia. I now realised that as a fly I had wings, I could soar with staggeringly ‘convincing’ portrayals of ‘reality’ that we associate with post the angels, glide with the fairies. I was free to look at it my way, free to do it Renaissance art. Since the early fifteenth century many Northern European my way. I was free at last to rise on the warm thermals of my own destiny. artists had been using optical lenses. By the sixteenth century their bag of Because I quite simply couldn’t cope with the riddles it posed, I had tricks had reached Italy and lenses were becoming de rigueur. By project- years ago abandoned painting for writing. Almost all my work as a writer ing images onto the canvas, artists were able to portray static moments in has been concerned with issues of time and space and the quest for an time with an almost photographic intensity. Secretive as magicians in their authenticity either within or beyond the conceits of post Renaissance ‘rea- trickery, through sleight of hand they conjured up a ‘reality’ which from soning’. Increasingly I have grown to abhor its illusions and falsity, the ‘this then on defined and determined the manner in which we looked at ‘our’ is it’ element of life which always it is not. Because of their power either world. The illusion was a fait accompli. to construct and control realities or to create deliberate heresies against For four years as an art student during the mid-sixties, I struggled with given ways of thought, artists and writers are a dangerous threat to reli- life-drawing in a vain attempt to replicate the skills of the ‘great’ masters. To gious and political regimes, left, right or centre. say that I became disillusioned would be an understatement. I just couldn’t ‘Man is owner and ruler of nature’ do it, and was at a loss to see how they had. But what worried me was that René Descartes, Meditations I was making so much effort to produce something that however hard I looked I just couldn’t see. Life models simply weren’t like the drawings of No wonder, then, that the Age of Reason gave rise to the horrors of Nazism. da Vinci, or Ingres, or at least if they were it was only momentary. It was the natural outcome of the enclosure of human spirit.

36 FIFTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL raindance_catFP_3 24/8/07 15:26 Page 1

DOGWOOF.COM STREAMING NOW LIVE! ‘Destroy the Bauhaus! Burn the books and, ITHIN THE CONCEITS of ‘I the camera’, we are obliged whilst we’re about it, throw in the Jews!’ to turn on, tune in and cop out. Within this construct, our optical and cerebral vision is always drawn to the psy- Had the main subject of this article been that of philosophy and lit- chic vanishing point: the cinema screen, the TV screen, erature, I would now make a concerted attack on the intellectual Wthe computer screen, the tabloid headlines, the mobile text message, the stranglehold that Oxbridge has upon the written word, the stifling flashing neon, the braying billboards, the sales of the century, the cut price thrall of academia. As it is, my main interest here is in the visual arts, offers. Buy, buy, buy. Technology, ideology? Schlockology. Whatever it is, in which case let me quickly turn to Hollywood before it turns to you. we take the easiest option which, had we the eyes to look, does noth- ing but confirm our spiritual starvation. When do we ever make timeto OR FIVE HUNDRED years the lens held sway, giving us the consider ourselves as anything but bit players in the global soap, made world, but at the same time taking it away from us. Cézanne in Hollywood, directed by Rupert Murdoch and produced by the CIA (with challenged that monovision at around the same time that generous help from the Rockefellers via the White House)? Is this all we Nietzsche created his Übermensch. But at the very moment can really hope for? Is this all we really are? Reactors to the given? Fthat we might have risen to those great heights, taken our lives into our As individuals isolated in time and space, is it any wonder that we see own hands and become free from the ‘tyranny of the lens’, we were being ourselves as rulers of the universe? Is it any wonder that that universe is told to watch the birdie. in decline and that greed and selfishness has become the norm? Is it any Photography had been invented and was in common use. Movies were wonder that Margaret Thatcher was able so casually to claim that ‘there only a decade or so away. Following the false logic which, for example, is no such thing as society’? Where within all this is our deeper, authentic claims that wheels are an easier mode of transport than feet, we fall time being? Are we always to be drowning in the mire (read Maya) of a prede- and time again for the conveniences of technology: quick answers to termined, corporate reality? unanswerable questions, www.whatislife.con ‘American Express?’ ‘Don’t mind if I don’t’ ‘At the start of the [20th] century most images were Because Hollywood so cynically exploits intellectual paucity, we are easy still made individually by hand by artists. At the prey to its brainwashing. Because it portrays life as having clearly defined beginning of [the] new millennium very few are, yet beginnings and ends within which there operates a tragically limited range millions of people see the world through images made of human responses, we are brainwashed into accepting a cushioned, with a lens. But are these images the honest depictions complacent and confined mortality. Because it gives nothing but cosmetic of reality we once thought they were? Has photography, appearance and catch-phrase attitudes, we are brainwashed into accept- for so long seen as vividly real, diminished our ing sterile vacuity as a way of life. Because we feel safe within this celluloid ability to see the world with any clarity? family despite its psychopaths, woman haters, cellulose freaks, gun toters David Hockney, Secret Knowledge and good old neighbourly Bush voters, we lose touch with the greater fam- Whilst early twentieth century European artists and philosophers strug- ily of humankind. Divorced from our roots and blinded by the socio-political gled with concepts of meaning against the backdrop of the war to end propaganda of elitist white trash, we have all too readily come to accept all wars, the American State (read Empire) maintained a strict policy of the lie that ‘this is how it really is’. ‘non-intervention’, which meant that it continued unabashed to eradicate ‘Well, it’s human nature, isn’t it?’ its ‘injuns’, lynch its slaves and make its repeated incursions into Central America. Is it any wonder, then, that rather than follow the European trend You can’t know a person through a screen, nor see one through a lens towards bohemian dissent, America chose to stick with the lens, panning (least of all yourself), but that is how it has been for five hundred years. up the yellow brick road to the pearly gates of Hollywood? It was there We have been tricked, lied to and brainwashed by da Vinci’s ‘I the lens’ that Fortress Reality could be shored-up against all invaders. Sod cubism, and Descartes’ ‘I the ego’. Above all else, it is Hollywood that doggedly try this for a laugh. Dada? Gone with the wind. Abstract expressionism? maintains those conceits. Yoh, give us the address and we’ll send round a crew. Hollywood doesn’t Twentieth Century Pox just act as the major propaganda wing of the American State, it writes the scripts. Who but a Hollywood hack could have thought up anything as pat- We are not separate entities with single viewpoints, nor are we the centre of ently transparent as the WTC fracas? the universe. We are fluid matter, a constantly shifting force within nature, a divine expression of flux, the very being of stardust. We are spirit. 9/11? It was cinepolitic heaven ‘Now you see me, now you don’t’ And now it’s in the can. Goebbels would have given his reich arm for the power of Hollywood. A monovisioned culture belching out its point- But walk down any Western high street and there they are, the celebrity edly monotonous portrayals of ‘life as it is’ to a global audience eagerly clones strutting their very own Sunset Boulevard. Poshes by the sack- awaiting the next instructions. Dumb glamour clones, confident that peo- load, Botox in the bucketload, empty faces, empty minds, silicon busts and ple across the world will hang on their every platitude, bleatingly insisting surgical behinds. The tough guys in the singlets, the angels with diaman- that their blinkered reality is the only true reality. Rewrites of history that te winglets, big brothers playing the game, little sisters doing the same. studiously ignore the diversity of other cultural voices and the multiplicity Hoody boys showing off bling, lace-thonged girlies doing their thing, texts of personal viewpoints (those that haven’t been gunned into extinction by a-tapping, mobiles a-rapping… the American State). On 8 2007, UNESCO’s Convention for the ‘Everybody’s talkin’, but no one says a word’ Protection and Promotion of Cultural Diversity became official, with the John Lennon, Nobody Told Me ratification of fifty-six nations. The USA refused to adopt the convention. ‘For us or against us’ has never meant so much. It’s as if there’s no other And still La Giaconda wears her passive smile. If only she’d known the choice, as if our own eyes are not there for the looking, as if our unique trouble she’d cause. r being is not mirrored in the irises of our eyes, as if the potential for infini- Penny joins Hugh Metcalfe and Mick Duffield for an evening of Super-8mm + Live tive differences of vision is a heresy against the New World Order. Performance at 9pm on Thursday 4 October at The Rex Cinema. See page 53 for details

38 FIFTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL ništa nije ništa bass clef vialka chrome hoof scout niblett pj harvey oxbow free 15-track music media other CD animal collective spread the joy

antifolk (UK) meet the opposition future of the left daft punk

issue 25 £3.50 0 9

9 771744 243022 september 2007

Plan B is an impassioned monthly alternative Available on the first Monday of each fuelled by enthusiastic, articulate and driven month from WH Smith, Borders, Virgin contributors; forever on a quest for the thrill Megastores, HMV, and all good record of the new, whatever year it hails from. We shops and newsagents or from love what we do. We hope you might too. www.planbmag.com

raindance ad.indd 1 10/09/2007 13:51:06 Sergio Lambretta lends his ear to BROOKLYN-BORN Renaissance gent Ronni Raygun for a lowdown on composing for film

T WAS IN ITALY while covering the 30th annual Vatican Film Your compositions have an interesting assortment of instru- Opposite Festival that I first came across the name ‘Ronni Raygun’. It ments, more than most modern musicians. Was that a conscious

struck me as an odd name and I wanted to learn more about decision or is that where the music takes you? Ronni Raygun on Coney Island Boardwalk, before live scoring of Up at Lou’s Fish, courtesy of Maureen Reilly the fellow. After some research, I made contact with this young I get bored a lot, I have attention deficit whatever you call it, and am addict- lad who had composed the original score for Vatican official ed to things that make noise – specifically things that vibrate. As a kid selection Girlfriend in a Kimono. His music is best described as I used to sit at my window, plucking a taut curtain string for hours, just Ihypnotic psycho western and, as he informed me – not for everyone. blanking out. Then I stole a guitar from this kid Peter Brown. Later I found a bass… and on it went. So the assortment of instruments is no indica- It is a pleasure to meet you. I am a huge fan. I really enjoyed tion, to me at least, of the regions they represent. I use the banjo to get an Girlfriend in a Kimono, I thought it was terrific Arabic sound and my cumbus [a Turkish fretless mandolin] to get a country Well thank you. And likewise, I’ve read a lot of your work. It’s an honour western sound. It’s all in the application. How’s that for pretentious? The film came second place for the prestigious Banco Immobiliare Very. I understand a lot of the work you do is commercial but that Award, what do you think about that? you are branching off and beginning to do more creative work. This film is always coming second place, it came second place at Coney What is the difference there? Island, at Halloween, even second place at Raindance for crying out loud It’s a pretty obvious difference. I’m currently working on a score for a docu- The main actor Jesse Vile was really great, so handsome, so mas- mentary called ‘Up at Lou’s Fish’ about the re-location of a landmark New culine, but with a certain kind of femininity. And Penny Rimbaud York fish market. When I was approached to do the score I thought ‘What brought some real Shakespearean class to the project I thought the fuck do I know about fish?’ Then I bought a fishing pole and realised They were certainly good but I thought we were talking about my music they are basically giving me free rein to put a musical voice to their film. How exactly did you develop such an original sound? Commercials give you barriers which is not always a bad thing and in some Well Sergio, it’s a strange thing. I don’t really hear a specific sound – I’m ways is easier. Kimono was dropped on me with directions to put some not a trained musician and so my style involves a series of chords and banjo music to a film. The guy just said ‘Make it all redneck as hell’ progressions. From that I emulate the styles of music I enjoy listening to. How did you get involved in that film? For instance – Girlfriend in a Kimono – that soundtrack is me pretending The director, Dominic Thackray, and I are old friends from a different time to play lonesome cowboy country western and if there is originality I am and we’ve always wanted to work together. We’ve worked together in the very glad. I have been told I have a unique style. I’m not sure if that’s good past but not in this kind of situation. I saw this more as a partnership in or bad. Van Halen has a unique sound and they suck a creative way, basically he structured his film around my music. I have a You don’t suck – you’re great huge respect for his creative talents and jumped at the opportunity to work Thank you – that means a lot coming from you with someone I consider to be the last great artist of the 20th century

40 FIFTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

3 ® CREATIVE SUITE It’s here - the post-production ®

e ciency you’ve dreamed of. PRODUCTION PREMIUM ADOBE Production Premium moves you seamlessly from concept to delivery, outputting to virtually any platform, from  lm, SD and HD to DVD, the web and mobile devices. Available for both Mac and Windows®!

Creative license. Take as much as you want www.adobe.co.uk/creativelicense

©2007 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Adobe, the Adobe logo and Creative Suite are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. Mac is a trademark of Apple Computer Inc., registered in the United States and/or other countries. Windows is either trademarks or registered trademark of Microso Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

CS3_Production_ad_raindance.indd 1 13/8/07 18:18:56 rex_raindance.qxd 6/9/07 12:25 pm Page 1

It’s the 21st century I know. He hasn’t impressed me since 1999 In your opinion, what is the greatest song ever written? I think this is where I’m supposed to say that that is a tough question. But it’s not. For me, Greensleeves is the perfect song. I actually did a rendition of it a few years ago one Christmas, right before my son Odhran was born. It was in the spirit of the revised ‘What Child Is This?’ [laughs]. Also Del Shannon’s Runaway – every song I ever wrote is based on Runaway Some have said your music has a bit of a rough around the edges sound – is this intentional? I’m glad you asked. This is going to sound lazy, but the ‘rough around the edges’ or ‘fuck ups’ as I like to call them are essential to my music. EXCLUSIVE 1930'S PRIVATE MEMBERS CLUB WITH A 75 Composers like to avoid uncertainty, but uncertainty is a human emo- SEATER SCREENING ROOM SET IN THE HEART OF SOHO tion everyone relates to. My music is obviously uncertain – the hesitation before hitting a note is apparent and should be. I was barely encouraged 190 Capacity Cocktail Lounge as a young kid to pursue music. My older brother was probably the one Extensive Canapé and Buffet Menus person in my youth who gave me the confidence I needed, but aside from DJ and Live Music Facilities him I had no support. What’s the opposite of support? Not that I’m com- 3am licence plaining, although maybe I am. But that is why the ‘fuck ups’ are important. Bespoke Event Management Service to include: It reminds me that without confidence you might never be able to hit that Conferences, Weddings, Press Launches & Private Screenings note. It’s odd because my great uncle was a very famous composer Film Sourcing Service Who is that? Full Presentation capabilities I suppose his name was Frank Signorelli. My family didn’t tell me about him HD Compatible because they were afraid I might pursue a career in music. He was loaded. 35mm, DVD, VHS and Beta SP, (digi-Beta upon request) And brilliant. He wrote Stairway to the Stars, Blues Serenade, tons of clas- Live satellite feed sic New York jazz standards. I don’t like jazz, but from what I understand, he didn’t either. He thought of jazz the way your grandparents probably Contact the events team 020 7287 0102 or [email protected] thought of rock ’n’ roll. But like I say, I don’t know much about him Is this Ronni Raygun being deep? REX CINEMA AND BAR, 21 RUPERT STREET, W1 No it’s me being shallow. What’s next? Anything special coming down the pipes? Nothing special, just a film that I wrote with my good friend Dominic Thackray titled ‘Today A New Haircut, Tomorrow the World’. It’s about Hitler. And his hair. And that’s pretty much it. But it’s gonna have interesting music. Music that will make you think you are back in hillbilly Versailles all over again. Or was it Vienna? This time he said ‘Make it a little bit like the Misfits, the old Misfits, but as if the Misfits were doing Choral Evensong’ Do you see yourself as more pop musician than film composer? All the music I listen to is innately visual. I am a big Sixteen Horsepower fan. They are the most overlooked group of the past 20 years. Very heavy visual music. You can place their music over any piece of film and it will work. Also, very important is The Real Tuesday Weld. It’s like top 40 music for heavily medicated people in straitjackets in around the 1920s. Again, very visual. I think I’m the opposite. When I see a piece with my music I always feel like it doesn’t fit somehow. I think it’s because music ismy voice and a lot of times I’m too loud and I ramble and just go on and on. Meanwhile someone else is trying to say something kind of like what I am doing right now. I’m the type of guy who doesn’t like to finish the thought but likes to phrase it 17 different ways before letting you talk. And I rarely listen to what someone else has to say. So where was I going with this? I’m certainly not a pop musician but I doubt I’m a film composer either Yet your music is in films… So you claim

There is an odd silence and at the end we both get up, smile at each other and shake hands. After exchanging smiles I decide to wait in the office for a bit while Ronni leaves the building. I just didn’t want to get in the same elevator and subway with him after we had such a pleasant goodbye. The kind of awkwardness like when you say goodbye to a friend and then real- ise you are walking in the same direction for about a mile. r

Up At Lou’s Fish plays at 5pm on Monday 1 October at Cineworld Shaftesbury. See page 89

FIFTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 43

Left This Is Nollywood. This Is Nollywood. Right The Grace Amazing

PROFESSOR ONOOKOME OKOME ON THE RISE OF NOLLYWOOD

T’S AN EXCEPTIONAL CINEMATIC phenomenon. As a cin- popularity among its audience. The stories in Nollywood draw upon the ema of the people, and a practice that is continually defined fears, aspirations and hopes of the ubiquitous African city. These concerns by the aspirations of its marginal audience, it comes with all are expressed in four genres: the city, religious, comic and epic. As one the blemishes of third world cultural practice. Its presence on of the respondents puts it in the documentary film This is Nollywood, it is the continent simultaneously defines and defies the stultifying this audience that Nollywood caters for. It is not a cinema for those who presence of the modernity of the postcolonial condition. access the cultural activities of foreign embassies in Africa. IRecognition for Nollywood came in the early 2000s, two decades after This Is Nollywood, selected for this edition of Raindance, is an exquisite it had become a by-word in Nigeria and Ghana. It was then that curious portrayal of how this local cinema operates. Its insight is eloquent. Following film scholars and anthropologists from the West began taking note of this the making of one typical Nollywood film, it resurrects the myths about this cinematic form. For the local people it is intricately linked to the world industry. It captures how Nollywood sees itself and how it configures the that popular video films explore. The first serious essay on Nollywood was outside world in its own image. More importantly, This Is Nollywood rakes published in Research in African Literatures, in 1998. In 2003 and 2004, the eternal conversations that go on within the industry with a perspec- organisers of the 3rd and 4th editions of the African and Caribbean Film tive that essentially belongs to Nollywood filmmakers. Festival found Nollywood, showcasing it twice in a row. The appearance of The Amazing Grace, also selected for this year’s Raindance, is at the Nollywood at the 53rd edition of the prestigious Film Festival was high end of Nollywood’s aesthetic character. One can argue that in many the watershed for this cinema industry. Since then, Nollywood films have respects even though the jacket declares that it is ‘Nollywood’s first ever been going to major European and North American Film Festivals. In 2004, 35mm feature film’ it is not a typical Nollywood film. The narrative sequence Tunde Kelani, the brilliant and careful video filmmaker from Nollywood, was is neat and does not play into the digressional tendencies of the common honoured with a mid-life retrospective at the New York Film Festival. More Nollywood film and it was not made in ten days. The production itself got recently in 2005, the Nollywood actress and singer, Genevieve Nnaji, was external financial support and by Nollywood standards, it is a big budget the spotlight at the 34th edition of the Montreal film Festival. film. The story of The Amazing Grace is unique and hardly fits into any of It is not difficult to fathom why and how Nollywood has made a huge the emerging genres of Nollywood. It is not the city video film, it is not the splash on world cinema of late. Nollywood has made its cinematic gains religious video film either with its frail narrative design, nor is it an epic virtually out of nothing, cinema enthusiasts outside Nigeria and Africa are video film. It is about the history of slavery that took place on the coast of interested to know how this is acheived. In Nigeria alone, conservative esti- Calabar, the South Eastern part of Nigeria. Its intention is not to make a mates put the annual earnings of Nollywood at US $50m. This is testimony spectacle of this history or of the slave trade for that matter, but to give to the fact that Nollywood is hugely popular with audiences in Nigeria as narrative to a particular event. Its tone is conciliatory. The theme of The well as across Africa. Legend has it that 1000 films are put out every year, Amazing Grace is uncommon in Nollywood. Perhaps the one thing that which means that Nollywood out-produces Hollywood and Bollywood put marks this film as belonging to Nollywood is its cast, which comes from the together. It has developed a sophisticated star system, and has inaugu- pool that Nollywood has engendered in the last twenty years. r rated a distribution network that defies the activities of global distribution The Amazing Grace plays at 5pm on Saturday 6 October at Cineworld Shaftesbury Avenue. networks such as AMPECA and other film distribution cartels operating This is Nollywood plays at 2:45pm on Saturday 6 October at Cineworld Shaftesbury Avenue, in Africa. But this is not the only reason Nollywood has maintained its followed by a panel discussion. Please see pages 76 and 88 for details

FIFTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 45 Prisoner/Terrorist

JASPER SHARP TALKS TO MASAO ADACHI ABOUT HIS RETURN TO CINEMA

HIS YEAR SEES THE long-awaited return of Masao cially in the early stages of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ campaign that has Adachi, one of the most challenging, thought-provoking been engineered because of 9/11. Because of this the Japanese public has and controversial figures ever to emerge from the world had its memory refreshed about the Japanese Red Army and the Lydda of Japanese cinema. His new film Prisoner/Terrorist is Airport Operation. The general public who came to see the film knew this his first in over thirty years. backstory, and some of them were quite critical. Firstly, they felt disap- Born in 1939, Adachi emerged as a leading figure in pointed or let down because there is not enough political explanation or Tthe underground experimental scene of the ’60s, with films like Sain (1963) summary of the activities of the New Leftist movement in 1970s, but also, and Galaxy (1967). However, it is for his later associations with Nagisa they criticised it as being too much of an idealistic explanation. Oshima, in whose Death by Hanging (1968) he appears in the role of the The film is clearly about Okamoto, who is referred to as ‘M’, the prison guard, and more famously with Koji Wakamatsu, scripting literally JRA founder Fusako Shigenobu also remains anonymous. Why dozens of his most famous titles including Embryo Hunts in Secret, Go Go do you not connect these characters to their real counterparts? Second Time Virgin and Ecstasy of Angels, that he is best known. I have always depicted people who come entirely from my imagination And then he disappeared from Japan, apparently disillusioned with the – through my images I have always tried to explore characters who only direction in which the country’s commercial cinema was heading. He left exist within film. In the case of Prisoner/Terrorist, by using a real historical for Beirut where, in 1974, he joined the Japanese Red Army who were event as its basis and existing real-life people such as Kozo Okamoto, as assisting the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in their quest well as other historical revolutionaries and philosophers, I tried to create a to fight for the liberation of the Israeli-occupied territories. He was not to unique story and characters. So I did attempt to divorce the film from the return until 2000, after his associations with the JRA saw him extradited reality of the historical event and the real characters as far as possible. from Lebanon to face a brief jail sentence back in his home country. The actors and actresses were asked to create their own interpretations of Adachi’s return, after three decades, saw the name of this agent provo- their characters, and not to copy the real existing figures. cateur firmly reappear on the lips of local cinephiles, with retrospectives Can you to tell me about your own relationship with Okamoto? and DVD releases of his earlier work followed by the publication of Eiga/ Before his departure to the Middle East [before 1972], I had met him once Kakumei in 2003, a collection of interviews conducted by Go Hirasawa. or twice, just in passing. Our comradeship really began in 1985, just after Prisoner/Terrorist is his first film since his return. he was released from Israeli imprisonment through the International Red Cross in exchange for POWs and he rejoined the Japanese Red Army. In How much is known about the Japanese Red Army and the 1972 1997, after we were arrested along with three of our other comrades, we Lod Airport Massacre in Japan? were obliged to share a small prison cell for three years. In 2000, he was Because of the recent situation in the Middle East, with regards to Palestine granted political asylum in Lebanon while the four members of the JRA, in particular, the Japanese mass media have begun to write about it, espe- myself included, were forcibly sent back to Japan.

46 FIFTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL raindance ad 3/9/07 15:43 Page 1

Did Okamoto have his own strong political belief system, or was he swept away with the spirit of the times? Kozo Okamoto, was one of the typical student activists of the ‘Zenkyoto’ student movement in Japan at that time. He was the chairman of the student committee at Kagoshima University and studied a little about Marxist-Leninist philosophy, but he was not a dogmatic ideologist; he was ultimate more of a naïve activist who didn’t belong to any party or political organisa- tion. In addition, he had a rather special background. He had an incredible amount of respect for his elder brother who went to the Democratic performance People’s Republic of Korea after hijacking the JAL plane. He tried to fol- low his brother as a revolutionary and was determined to go to the Middle East and become an international volunteer for the Palestinian national lib- eration struggle. [His brother was Takeshi Okamoto, one of those involved in the famous Yodo hijacking of 1970, Japan’s first ever plane hijacking] What was the intention behind getting inside the mind of a man like ‘M’ ? I have tried to talk about the notion of freedom by drawing parallels between terrorist activity and state-terrorism (including prison itself, secu- rity intelligence, the prison guard system, and so on). In this film, I mostly concentrated on what happens to the inner world of a person – the world of individual belief, confidence, and thought – by expressing the discrepant lag of space and time in relation to the outer and inner sense of temporal- ity in a so-called terrorist life, of time under torture and incarceration, and the temporality of real society, that is, in the real world outside prison. I also tried to portray how a person who had had no confidence or belief in his own activities could start to deny all dogma and then create his own justification for both his revolutionary ideals and the actions of his own life, through his experiences within the space and time of a prison existence. So the most important aim for me was not to offer any justification for his confidence in his beliefs or actions. It was not to offer excuses or atone- ment for him on any level, but to try and seek out the meaning of individual freedom through his experiences. I’m talking on a more existentialist level, where ideas such as self-sacrifice and self-criticism really mean nothing. Using the character of ‘M’ I have tried to explain the meaninglessness of self-justification or dogma for an individual, on any level. What do you think of the situation for new filmmakers whose out now work or ideas challenge the establishment? In spite of the more limited possibilities for film screenings, if you opt to Mick Jones presents Nicolas Roeg’s go outside film theatres, in reality there are actually many other kinds of psychedelic masterpiece for the 15th opportunities for making challenging cinematic works nowadays. Using Raindance Film Festival Special Guest new high-tech methods and systems, I believe, we can work more and Screening. more to show our works freely to people all across the world, just as successfully as underground cinema and theatre has continued to. I’m planning to initiate some kind of fresh style film projects in the near future. Now, I’m trying to continue with a kind of ‘diary’ style of cinema. I’ll be the director/cameraman for this project, and at the same time, some musi- cians will start making noises while I am filming. So it’ll be a kind of free jazz session style, but in the form of cinema. Red Army – PFLP Declaration of War (1971) and Ecstasy of Angels (1972) were stopped from screening due to police pres- sure. Is the situation better for radical filmmakers now? I think that today’s ruling powers think they can develop a way of control- ling all the different kinds of media and information systems by way of the law. So almost every form of media (not just cinema but TV journalism, radio and newspapers too) falls under the authorities’ control both directly and indirectly. Furthermore, the media has its own strange characteristics regarding self-regulation and self-censorship that comply with the wishes of the ruling authority. I believe that even the situation for filmmakers has got worse. If you can work without any system of regulation or control, then you can increasingly utilise and develop a fresh mode of cinema. r Titles and prices subject to availability while stocks last at participating stores/online. © 2007 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved. Prisoner/Terrorist plays at 9pm on Saturday 6 October at Cineworld Shaftesbury Avenue, see page 73 for details. This interview has been reproduced in part from www.midnighteye.com

FIFTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 47

I=:H=DDI>C<E:DEA: H=DGIH9>G:8IDGN ;Z_j[ZXoJh_Y_WJkjjb[

GGE—'(#%% Edb_d[fh_Y[˜'-$//

H]ddi^c\EZdeaZ ;jaaBZbWZgheg^XZ ˜'*$//

GV^cYVcXZBZbWZgh][j˜'&e\\ H]ddi^c\EZdeaZbZbWZgh]^e

>ch^YZndj\Zi/ I^eej_d]F[efb[WjHW_dZWdY[ 8dbegZ]Zch^kZh]dgiÃab[jcY^c\XdciVXihVcY VYk^XZ[gdbi]ZeZdeaZl]dl^aaWjnndjgÃab 8dbZVcY_d^cjhVii]Z;VbdjhH]ddi^c\ 9dXjbZcihVcYgZhdjgXZhid]ZaendjWjY\ZindjgÃab!VhlZaaVh EZdeaZEjWFj^odc;g^YVn*i]DXidWZg hVbeaZhXg^eihVcYegd[Zhh^dcVaVYk^XZdc]dlidhXg^eindjg^YZV Vi,/(%eb^cI]ZGZm7Vg!GjeZgiHigZZi# Lg^i^c\VcYegdYjXi^dci^eh[gdbVlVgY"l^cc^c\h]dgiÃabbV`Zgh IZchd[edjcYhd[eg^oZhidWZldc Edhi"egdYjXi^dcgZhdjgXZhVcYhjeedgi

lll#h]dgihWdd`#Xdb Eg^XZhZmXajh^kZd[EE#DgYZghY^heViX]ZYl^i]^c(ldg`^c\YVnhidJ@VYgZhhZh# lll#h]ddi^c\eZdeaZ#dg\ BZbWZgh!gZbZbWZgidad\^cWZ[dgZejgX]Vh^c\!idXaV^bndjgZmXajh^kZY^hXdjci#

SPshortsbook_raindanceAUG07.indd 1 29/8/07 11:31:30