Is this a boom?

An article in last Friday's Guardian highlights the economic facts of life behind the current artistic success of British art films like Sleep Furiously (pictured right), Hunger, Unrelated, Better Things, Soi Cowboy, and Of Time and the City.
According to the article, Sleep Furiously took £74,000 at the box office. "(It reportedly cost £230,000, itself a relatively tiny sum.) Helen, did much worse, mustering around £22,000 – 'It got very good reviews but nobody went.' Joanna Hogg's Unrelated took £102,000, and won the inaugural Guardian first film award." The most successful recent art film, Hunger, took £750,000, against a £2m budget and a £250,000 Film Council grant to assist distribution.

"Clare Binns, the programming director of the arthouse chain City Screen Picturehouses (which owns 18 UK venues and programmes films for more than 30 others), has the job of deciding, every Monday morning, what stays and what goes. Binns is matter-of-fact about prospects for British art cinema: 'There's certainly commitment out there for people to release these films, but were you to ask me if they were huge successes, I think it's a struggle. The fact of the matter is, a film like Sleep Furiously, which got good reviews, did not do well at the box office. So you have to make decisions every week, and it's got to be about people choosing to spend their money to go and see them.'

"Does she feel any responsibility to nurture talented but less popular film-makers? 'On a Monday, when these decisions are made, it's about who takes most money. We have always tried to support as many films as possible, but this is a tough old world. We could fill our cinemas with all the films we like, but then we wouldn't have the cinemas to put them in.'"

Is sex too good to be wasted on the young?

Cloud 9 (Wolke Neun)

Andreas Dresen, 2009

Some of the sweetest love-scenes in cinema feature a man in his Seventies and a woman barely a decade younger. Their bodies are weathered, used, matured like old wine - and (in Malcolm X's oft-quoted words) they are beautiful.

But there is more to this touching and ultimately tragic tale than its soft-porn love scenes.

Though it ends (disappointingly) with a bow to conventional sexual mores, the scenario challenges a number of contemporary conventions. The married woman, Inge (played wonderfully by Ursula Werner), cheats on her husband (Horst Westphal) not because she has fallen out of love with him, but because she is consumed with lust for this other. True, the husband is a bit of a dry old stick, listening to his LPs of classic steam engines (the one we hear is actually a loco from the old GDR), but see observe similar tenderness in their love scenes. And as she tells her lover (Horst Rehberg), she enjoys the mystery excursions her husband plans, rail journeys to who knows where, so much more interesting than autobahn trips.

And then when she confesses her transgressions to her daughter, Petra (Steffi Kuhnert), instead of being disgusted at her mother's romps with another man, Petra kisses congratulates her - making her promise not to tell anyone else about it.

Needless to say, this is a promise she can't keep, and everything spirals out of control when she tells her husband about the affair.

And the film spirals down into a more conventional morality.

It might have been more interesting if, instead of getting angry, he also had embraced her and assured her that he would love her through thick and thin.

It gets worse: having set up an unconventional (but far from unique) situation, the director then settles for a rather unconvincing denouement, in which the husband (conveniently) dies, and Inge faces a guilt-ridden future.

Yawn!

Nevertheless, this is a remarkable piece of film-making, all the more remarkable since the dialogue was entirely improvised.

There's a moment, during shooting, when the lover was supposed to be sharing the secrets of his past life, which went through take after take, and just didn't work.

Andreas Dresen instructed Rehberg to tell a joke. He does so, and Ursula Werner (who hadn't known the joke) is convulsed with laughter, which seems just so real. Later, she re-tells the joke to her husband, who doesn't find it at all funny (he doesn't know, at that time, what she's been up to).

Actually, it's not very funny, but it it does provide one of the high points in the story.

The film will be released on DVD next year. It's available in Germany right now.

A War in Hollywood (Hollywood contra Franco)

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives & the San Francisco Laborfest Film Festival

presents the U.S. premiere screening of A War in Hollywood (Hollywood contra Franco)

Directed by Oriol Porta, with Walter Bernstein, Susan Sarandon, and Moe Fishman, the film will be shown on Sunday, July 26, 2009, 2pm in The Delancey Street Screening Room, 600 Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94107.

A WAR IN HOLLYWOOD is an in-depth look at the impact that the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship had on the North American film industry.

Hollywood used the Civil War as a subject in more than 50 films. The defeat of democracy in Spain left an “open wound” in the heart of liberal actors, directors and screenwriters in the US, who used affection towards democratic Spain as a symbolic feature to define the romantic spirit of their characters. This sympathy, however, was shaped according to the American political tendencies of each period.

This evolution is narrated through the personal story of Alvah Bessie (pictured above), a Hollywood screenwriter who fought as a member of the International Brigade.

This documentary includes excerpts from Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Way We Were among others, and commentary by actress Susan Sarandon, screenwriters Arthur Laurents and Walter Bernstein and cinema historians Román Gubern and Patrick McGilligan.