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Watershed October 2015 Podcast What is curation in the film exhibition world? And how is it different from programming, scheduling or booking? This may be something of an insider’s question as for the audience: do you care how a film comes to be on at a cinema as long as it is something you like and it is showing? There is a question mark after that sentence by the way so feel free to reply through the usual channels [email protected] or Twitter @msc45.
However it is a question that does come my way as my job title is Watershed’s Cinema Curator.
When I started out in the film business it was as a film programmer – then it was a Plymouth Arts Centre. Even although I had studied film - this was back in the 1980s - I had no idea how a film actually got into a cinema. The film studies I did was of the theoretical nature i..e I would have been able to talk to you about civilisation versus the wilderness as a shifting antinomy in the films of John Ford or rather the Fordian system but not how those very films would get shown in front of the audience. How did I get the job I hear you cry? Good faith on the part of the interview panel for which I am eternally grateful.
On my first day in Plymouth Arts Centre in October 1987 in my small office was a desk on which there was a phone beside which sat a sheet of paper on which was a monthly grid with a pencil lying over it and on the wall was pinned a list of distributors and telephone numbers. What I was to do was fill the grid with films. This first film you might like to know was Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers. Why that film when I could have booked D.O.A with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan or Jonathan Demme’s Married to the Mob? At the time I would have put it down to instinct - now I would put the practical steps of the phone call and the grid filling as booking and scheduling but the selection of the film and the placing of it within Plymouth Arts Centre as somewhere between programming and curating.
Programming I have never found a satisfactory word since it has been hijacked by the computer world and come to have a more technical/IT meaning. When I said I was a Film Programmer in the post digital world people asked what coding I used? I would leave that conversation flummoxed! Curation though connotes to me some kind of cultural intention in the choice and a concomitant desire to communicate cultural value and meaning. Thus whilst both D.O.A and Married to the Mob will most certainly have made more money at the box-office than Drowning by Numbers, my booking of it was driven by and informed by a desire to platform Greenaway as a filmmaker, engage with the ideas and content of the film (in retrospect maybe the film degree was invaluable) and position Plymouth Arts Centre as a place where audiences could have access to and engage with such ideas and film culture.
I raise this whole issue around the c word because we have recently been host to our latest cohort of Future Producers who are finding out what it is like to work in Watershed and have been tasked with putting together a season of films relating to the theme of Love. Love is the theme of the British Film Institute’s latest cinematic extravaganza taking place across this UK this autumn. When people are asked to put a group of films on I am interested in where the choices come from and what drives the decision. I was asked to share some thoughts with the group tasked with selecting the film season. My key piece of advice is always to go back to the film. (I am betraying a Leavisite tendency here fully reinforced by a film studies background in the Movie tradition of Perkins, Wood and Pye whose maxim was – is it in the text/film?) But I digress. Going back to the film means watching it and asking yourself why this? why now? What does it mean to put – enter film title here – in front of an audience in Bristol at Watershed in 2015. If you can satisfactorily answer that we are getting somewhere. If your answer is “because I like it.” Then we are not.
What arose out the session was that a number of the future producers separately had been interested in revisiting Jean Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 Amelie. If a number of people separately are interested in a title my ears prick up. There is something in the air! At this early stage other titles mentioned were Thomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In and Paul Thomas Anderson Punch Drunk Love. Following my maxim we set up a double bill of Amelie and Let the Right One In which produced a startlingly intense experience and also encouraged FPs to re-watch the other films in the list. Form this lots of ideas about which direction love could be explored through film from skimming stones in canals to sending gnomes on holiday to learning morse code to colour projections in the Café/Bar. You’ll need to watch the films if that doesn’t make sense.
The resulting films and related events can be seen over 5 late night Friday screenings through out October curated by our Future Producers.
For more information go to http://www.watershed.co.uk/love