Red wine, good company and some fantastic mind-feeding films - what more could we have asked for on our Opening Night? UnderWire’s second festival went off with a bang at Shortwave Cinema, with a full house of filmmakers and industry bods milling round, swapping cards and clinking glasses. There was such a spirited atmosphere, as filmmakers shared their films and discussed their work (it’s rather warming to watch filmmakers showering each other with compliments). Ticket sales also peaked after last night’s celebrations, so if you haven’t grabbed one yet, try and pick one up in advance!
We now want to hand you over to Jo Shaw, one of the winners of our Film Journalism competition. Jo has some insightful thoughts about our opening night programme and the whole subject of women making films.
Heroine Highs - Jo shaw
When filmmakers undertake a certain kind of looking and listening - whether that involves a particular person, story or set of circumstances - and are able to articulate well-observed characters and experiences, we revel in the recognition and discovery of finding people like us. Not only should we, as audiences, be receptive to those characters, we should demand them.
In the context of women being under-represented in the film industry, a programme built around female characters naturally prompts some consideration of how women are most often represented in that organic relationship between cinema, media and advertising. What stories are we not usually telling about women? Is there any connection between the women we see on screen and what happens for women behind the scenes? Two of the films in the XX programme (screened last night) involve women and men challenging the norms of female representation.
Myra’s (Dir. Dan Smyth) protagonist steps out of the familiar black and white media image of Myra Hindley and onto the stage of a working men’s club, lights twinkling behind her, empty floor in front, to deliver stand-up style recollections of childhood, and later public, perceptions. Intercut with scenes of her walking across moorland - a site of horrific acts - it’s a bitter, bold and haunting challenge to us to examine our own perceptions of a reviled figure, with an astutely pitched performance by actress, Caroline Burns-Cooke.
Symphony in Cellulite (Dir. Caroline Milsom) takes a cubist approach to its portrait of life model and writer, Isley Lynn. Within a montage of close-up details which gradually broadens out, an artist draws her, her home reflects her, and she discusses her own and others’ ways of seeing her. Engaging and incisive, she is a veritable ambassador for the act of life-modelling and considers how it can transform the way we think about identity and where identity might be located. And in an acute observation of how we can sometimes look but not see, she describes the drawings of a few A-level students, where she appears either “grotesquely out of proportion” or like a fashion model. She puts this down to the students being so used to visualising learned images of women that they either exaggerate the differences her body presents or instead, simply draw the mental image they know.
By giving a platform to complex and authentically drawn female characters, we have an opportunity for identification; to identify what might currently be hidden or buried in the predominant culture; characters to identify with, regardless of the audience’s gender, because these characters are about much more than gender alone. And just as, when we discover an unfamiliar word, it seems to crop up everywhere because it’s entered our consciousness. When we identify with these characters, our world becomes that much richer.