Ah so, another week in the hectic life of a filmmaker and what have I done? Well, oddly, I've actually been doing something rather to the point. No, I've not been making a film, obviously not, I'm a filmmaker living in Britain and so I respect the legislation passed which underlines the fiscal principle that, like children in a newsagent, the economy cannot support more than two filmmakers working at any time.

However no one can stop you writing. They can distract you, but they can't actually stop you. So Chris and I cranked up our group of cranks and spent a very long weekend camping on a friend's sofa and forcing him to feed us whilst we forced other people to be funny so we could write it down. We've then spent most of the rest of the week trying to cajole all the pursuant nonsense into some sort of orderly shape and with a bit of luck this pattern will repeat for the next few weeks...

In this task we have been very ably aided by a rather fantastic new piece of screen writing software which both Chris and I have fallen in love with. Scrivener is a British made piece of Mac only writing software which is still in comparatively early stages of development, but it's already a brilliant all round writing tool.

Now first of all I must come clean, I've never used Final Draft. I'm sure for some of you that's a bit like me saying I've never used Final Cut or a biro. However the simple truth is that for all the bells and whistles I never fancied the idea of paying $200 for something to write with. It's a lot of biros. It always felt like buying a home gym instead of going for a walk. Scrivener is currently $39.95 which would still keep one in ink for a few months but it's no rowing machine. If the words you write are still rubbish you're not going to feel quite so cheated.

Cost issues aside what I'm really enjoying about Scrivener is that it has been designed by somehow who knows how writers think. Index cards, outlining tools and actual pages are all seamlessly integrated enabling you to move from a structural overview to the actual words with the touch of a button. All your research lives in the same project, right next to the draft, and in whatever form it takes (providing that it is in someway digital of course, mp3 is fine but memory is, at the moment, still non-downloadable).

It's also nice that the programme is not a screenwriting tool, but a writing tool. It comes with a series of different templates, screenplay format, stage format, radio play format and so on and is really just designed to help you manage any long writing project - and to do so in a way that Mac addicts like me will find instantly understandable.

It comes with a free 30 day trial period as well and if you'd like to try it you can find it here www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener and if you have any thoughts on it then I for one would love to hear them.


A delight to many - Scrivener will probably be keeping me a little quiet on the blog for a while, however for those of you who, for some reason, may miss me, you can find me wittering in person tomorrow in Stratford as part of the East End Film Festival where I will be chairing an NPA hosted discussion between more interesting people about how best to work with others in film.

That's me, Jes Benstock and Rachel Tillotson talking from 2pm to 3.30pm with plenty of deviation, hesitation and repetition at:

Stratford Circus
Theatre Square, Stratford, London, E15 1BX

Are you an aspiring film professional who has already banged your head against too many doors and is starting to feel like the whole stupid idea was a pointless waste of time and you'd have been better off becoming a plumber?

Can you see how your entire creative and professional world could change if only you could get yourself some better friends, meet some people further along with their career and get some solid one to one advice about the things you should never ever do?

Well, you've got until 5pm on Tuesday 29th April to get your application in for your next best chance of finding exactly the help and support that you're actually looking for. Brilliantly Guiding Lights, the mentoring scheme that I graduated from a year or so ago has been given a second year of funding and is once again offering to match a group of the best struggling talent with some of the industries real achievers.

Thanks to Guiding Lights, my brother and I were taken under the paternal wing of Gillies MacKinnon and I simply can't stress enough quite how brilliant it was to have someone like that at the end of the phone to give you script feedback. Painful, sure, but well timed, well judged and exactly what we needed. Not only did Gillies help us unstick our projects and enable us to move forward (or stumble forward in the usual vein of the industry...) he also helped us to stop worrying quite so much about that strange and difficult motion of developing a film. Getting to see how the process works at first hand, getting to see how hard it is for someone as gifted and experienced as Gillies to get a project off the ground and seeing the way he deals with the ups and downs of it all... it's the best learning experience you could ever ask for.

This year the possible mentors include Paul Greengrass, Kevin Macdonald, Nira Park, Mark Herbert, Emma Thompson, David Yates, Julia Short, Patrick Marber, Kenneth Branagh, Seamus McGarvey, Cameron McCracken and Paul Webster and more are being added. If you are not where you want to be in your career and you don't apply to this then you've got no one but yourself to blame...

www.guiding-lights.org.uk

Not that you can really see in these pictures but there was also a entire screenplay in German, gently being transformed by the rain into a single soggy lump.

And also a business card from someone in the BBC Wales Sports Department.

A strange relationship with Paris.

As both of you who check this blog regularly will have noticed, I've been away for the past month enjoying the peaceful bliss of not having broadband internet, not answering the phone and being barely able to understand what most people in the world are saying. It is surprising how nice it is to be uncomprehending. Massively frustrating at times too, even, for someone endlessly verbose like I am, depressing. However it is nice how easy it is to ignore the constant blather of guilt and greed that leech from adverts into your subconscious when you have very little idea what they are actually saying. Celebrity magazines are finally rendered as meaningless as they are and the moans and whines of bored children are as sweet as birdsong.

However the first time my girlfriend and I went to the cinema it was with the deliberate intention of watching something Version Originale so that we could hear people talking our language. What's odd about watching a film in English with subtitles you can't really understand is that it's still very hard to not read the subtitles. It's also quite interesting watching how a film is translated, what is lost and what is changed. Best of all for this was going to see some Beckett at Peter Brook's Parisian home, Bouffes Du Nord. Because Beckett was fluently bilingual the matinee performances are in French and the evenings are English with French surtitles. I can only presume therefore that the surtitles, which again I found I had to read and try and understand, are not merely the best effort of a third party to translate the meaning, they are Beckett himself gleefully rewriting his own work in a second language. Things that in spoken English have two meanings, like describing a woman as staring out through the pane, don't come across in the French translation - and I'm sure vice versa, I definitely noted a gleeful rhyme in the French for gambling and god that the alliteration doesn't quite capture.

After three weeks and having already seen "Juno" and "There Will Be Blood" (which, oddly I thought, was a title never translated to French) we did however feel brave enough to try watching Kristin Scott-Thomas' new film "Il y Longtemps Que Je T'aime." or "Love You Long Time" as it is not called in English. I'm not quite sure why the fact that we knew the star was bilingual made us feel we might be able to understand her better when she was still talking in a language neither of us can really speak, but somehow it did seem like because she was English we'd sort of manage to get along...

It seems like a brilliant film and I can't wait for it to come out here in translation so I can see it again and actually understand what was really going on. Certainly it got to the French, about two thirds of the way through, seemingly apropro nothing at all, most of the audience burst into tears. However, even if we didn't quite follow the nuances of each scene it was nice to see how much of the general plot and emotion you did pick up even if you don't really know what people are saying to each other. Also, as with being able to turn off the blather of everyday life, it was also much easier to sit back and enjoy the way the director was telling the story, his eye for detail and the controlled way he let scenes run or played with the narrative perspective.

Having seen a French play, albeit one directed by an Englishman, written by an Irishman and staring an English woman, A Dutchman and an Italian and watched a French film (yeah, with an English star), and having loved them both we were feeling rather full of the joys of the city. It is, after all, an easy city to fall in love with, the design is enticing, the architecture attractive and the food amazing. But more specifically, from our brief stay, it seemed like the French had the right approach to life. Bouffes Du Nord, with it's ripped out beat up grandeur is one of the most attractive theatre spaces I've ever been in. It reeks of dedication to the theatrical moment and the bare simplicity of the place makes the entire building seethe with an energy that I've never felt in the west end. Likewise standing in the pouring rain in a queue to get into a cinema may be dampening and irritating but it's also not something you'd imagine an English audience doing - especially not for an English film.

Then we met up with a French friend of ours called Margot, who'd been out of the city for most of our stay. Within minutes she was raving about how lucky we were to have the West End, how there was nothing in Paris that really come close to it and how much she loved British Cinema, especially Richard Curtis... What she especially liked was the way we approached the arts. For her the subsidised theatre just made French actors lazy, it makes a lack of professionalism hide behind a mask of artistic integrity, it makes learning your lines look like trying too hard. Likewise with the French films she'd seen recently, they all felt, too French, too lazy, as if the director had been too high and mighty to bother working out what the plot actually was...


Paris is like London through the Looking Glass. They cities made of the same basic stuff, peopled with the same basic people, but brought up by different parents. We are siblings, and, like all siblings, we want nothing so much as what the other has.

One of the clever things that I've just worked out about the blogging interface that George got me to use when this whole malarky was set up, is that if I set the date in advance then the entry pops up in the future without me having to be there to actually upload it.

Consequently if you are reading this then it means I've not been able to delete it and prevent it appearing, which in turns mean I don't have the internet in Paris.

I'm in Paris for the whole of March. Yeah, I know.

See you in April my loves.

xx

Well I'm delighted to say that following the success of the first Split Focus event at the BFI we've been allowed back for a second bite of the cherry...

For those who've not been paying attention, Split Focus is a new programme of screenings Shooting People are putting on in an attempt to give a platform to proven talent. For some time now I've been trying to find the best films being made by members of the Shooting People community. My aim has always been to support the films that reach an audience and give the rest of us something to aspire to. However, since I'm mainly looking at first or second films by new directors I've often found myself coming across films that aren't perfect, films that don't really stand up on their own, but which never the less excite me and clearly demonstrate that their creators are gifted and grappling with some amazing ideas.

To put it another way, to make a single amazing film always requires a degree of good fortune; to make four or five films less than perfect films that never the less stretch the imagination and delight the senses takes a gifted and dedicated director. So, with thanks to the BFI, we've started putting on showcases for some of the more delightful and dedicated filmmakers who are using Shooting People to get their work made and seen. This time round our focus falls on Daniel Cormack and Kara Miller.


Whilst last time I chose two filmmakers with very differing styles, this programme brings together two directors with a shared love of simple, powerful story telling. Drama is a very dirty word at the moment, usually being used to conjure a certain humdrum quietude which is far from compelling. What I love about Daniel's film "Amelia and Michael" or Kara's "Elephant Palm Tree", is that both demonstrate the directors' ability to set the simplest of scenes on fire. These films are dramas, short plays which bring you for a moment into the lives of strangers and peel back the layers, revealing, showing but never telling. If you don't watch a lot of films then these are the sort of films you imagine get made all the time; if, like me, you watch far too many films you begin to appreciate the subtle skill and grace that makes something as simple as two people talking over breakfast so electrifying.

What is also so refreshing about these films is that it is only when watched together that you realise quite how much work Daniel and Kara are putting in. Like swans, the furious paddling is going on under the surface and rather than having your attention constantly drawn to the fact that you are watching the work of a director, all the focus is given to the story, to the characters, to the emotion, to the things that engage on the basic human level.


For this show Daniel is returning to the BFI for the second time in as many months, having already had one retrospective there this year, as part of the Disability Film Festival. His epilepsy meant that he couldn't watch TV as a child and consequently spent his childhood in the cinema. It is unsurprising then to find that he has turned into a classicist, his films full of all the hallmarks of someone with an innate understanding and love of cinema in the truest sense of the term. Though his first film "Amelia & Michael" is, I think, still his most successful, my favourite is "A Fitting Tribute" where he takes what other directors would shape into a glib film with a twist and injects it full of pathos. What he's done is not complicated, he's just shown the story, the characters and indeed the audience the respect that they deserve.

Similarly, Kara's background writing for both the radio and the stage helps explain the skill and care she uses to craft her characters and dialogue. However if her most visually accomplished film "Elephant Palm Tree" strains at the edges of theatricality, then her follow-up, my favourite of hers "How To Make Friends" shows her heading off in a much looser and more cinematic style. She is a great writer, but here she lets her directorial side take over and the results are delightful.

Lastly, the other thing that unites these directors is their shared ability to find great actors and allow them to give great performances. Anthony Head, Natasha Powell, Tamsin Grieg, Dudley Sutton, Dona Croll, the truly immense George Harris and the ever rising star Tom Nelstrop all give of their best in this collection of films and that is, with apologises for the pun, indeed a fitting tribute to the talents of directors Daniel Cormack and Kara Miller.


The event is at 6pm on Monday March 10th at the BFI Studio, part of the shiny new bit of what use to be called the NFT. Both Daniel and Kara will be there and will be chatting after the screening about the way they work and what they're working on next.

It is FREE entry, but obviously we're limited by space and judging by last time you need to RSVP to Jo to make sure you can get in.


You can find out more about Daniel Cormack from his website www.actaeonfilms.com

And more about Kara Miller from her website www.arawakfilms.com

And there is a facebook page for the event with pictures and everything here..

OK, having been on a bit of an artsy tip for the past couple of weeks I feel duty bound to bring to your attention Alex Emslie's short film "Portrait Of An Artist."

It features two superb comic performances... but I can't wait for the film to rebuffer so I can scroll to the end to get the cast's names. Alex! Fill out the cast details on the film page!

Anyway, though I have to ask the question "Is Mockumentary A Hateful Waste Of Time? (Discuss)" I have to say that this is a charming and delightful film. (Click on the links to watch it!)

Ahh dear. Five more gangster related films uploaded to the watch film site. All of them ploughing the same worn furrows of men shouting and holding guns.

I'd love someone to explain why they made those.

I don't know if it's me or if I'm merely responding to what the rest of you are doing but at the moment the films that are really catching my interest are unashamedly arty. A case in point are the recently uploaded cluster of little gems from David Palazon. His work snuffles in the bushes somewhere between art documentary and art installation and is generally marked by a charm and a visual invention that makes his best films sparkle.

My favourite is his recent film "Free Ride" which documents the latest art work by Francis Thorburn who performs in the streets of London with a man powered chariot. Or at least, David describes this as Francis' performance. I'd describe it as being a bit of a twat in a desperate attempt to get people to notice you, but I'm probably splitting hairs. It is though the measure of the quality of this delightful five minute film that an art project as insipid as pulling people round the streets gratis in order to try and prove, I presume, some sense of humanity within the inhumane city, does eventually come over as a worthwhile and positive enterprise. At first I wanted to hate Francis Thorbun, I wanted to see him cut up by a van or seriously injured by a bus but as the film progresses I was left with a sneaking admiration for him. A great deal of this is down to the fact that Palazon tells his story with all the craft and eye for beauty that is lacking from a piece of art that involves acting as an unpaid skivy for tourists. If I'm honest I'm still unsure quite what Francis has achieved by this, but I do know that David made me smile broadly about how perfectly silly and beautiful London can be.

If you enjoy "Free Ride" then I would also recommend David's earlier films "Use Your Head" and "Eye See". I must though come clean and admit that, despite this blog currently reading a bit like a it's been hijacked by an Arts Foundation course, I am basically an out and out populist. Consequently I'd suggest you avoid David's film "She And Her Crossing" which documents the performances of Dianna Brinsden and Martina von Holn in the 2007 Camberwell Arts Festival. Once again David manfully enters into the spirit of things and brings a lot of his own creative ideas to shape his documentary, but there's nothing he can do to hide the fact that this is just two women in big dresses fannying about with balloons and a road. Again, despite my high hopes, nothing bursts their creative balloons by hospitalising them after impacting with their performance at sixty miles an hour, not even a supercharged Francis Thorburn who I found myself wishing would make a fatal cameo appearance.

Perhaps I am a cynic. Perhaps I'm missing the point. Is two women crossing the road in Camberwell so different from a bunch of people walking past a static camera with stuff balanced on their head, which is, I warn you, all that happens in "Use Your Head"? Is it only the exoticism of Ghana when compared to Camberwell? No. I think it's the humour. In David's best films you can feel him grinning from behind the camera, it is a grin that, Chesire cat like, infuses every edit. Dianna and Martina seem so desperately sincere that it robs the pointless activity of it's fun.

Likewise, though Christopher Frayling speaks with great erudition and passion about the photographic exhibition that forms the real content of "Eye See", this is no match for the visual wit and curiosity of the photographs that follow. Mr.Frayling takes up the first half of this 10 minute film and I think is likely to bore many of the audience into clicking away to other films - but don't! Let it download and spin on to half way through and watch the photographs - they're brilliant. As is David.

Laurence has been kind enough up load his interview with Dutch painter Marcelle Hanselaar to our very own virtual boudoir. Watch it all in one go here!

Once again this entry, which due to the wonderfully post-modern narrative device of the blog will appear before my earlier comments, is really a continuation of the previous piece, however I have split them into two because this is the more apposite and I wouldn't wish to deter people from watching a film simply because they've had to plough through an acre of my, hopefully life enhancing, prose. If you find yourself laughing at the phrase life enhancing then please do read the previous entry and I hope you will see that I am being scientific, if selfish, rather than simply arrogant.

As I said, or, if you will insist on reading this in a linear fashion, as I will say in what is my past but your future, I fight a constant battle with a complexity that I admire but accept can be confusing and off-putting. In many ways this is the fundamental battle of the artist, how to express an idea in a way that is both clear and accurate enough to truly express it. Too much accuracy and the thing is muddy and obscured by details the casual audience is often not equipped to deal with. Simplify too much in the name of the clarity and you end up expressing something other than what you intended.

The Media, in the contemporary sense of the now virtually inescapable babble of opinion content to which I am currently adding, has it's foundations carved out of the twin rocks of commerce and expediency. We simplify everything. No distortion is too great as long as it enables the central idea to be re-expressed in a pithy and eye catching manner. This sells and also, it is faintly hoped, may encourage some people to try and look deeper. On the whole though this fails because few real depths are allowed through to tantalise.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the visual arts, which is why I was cheered by discover Laurence Fuller's Art Influence website. In painting the message is very simple, dead painters were astoundingly good and created beauty but that's over now and it's all been done. Now art is a practical joke, you either laugh with it or at it but either way it is the same anger that sustains both sides of the familiar furore. Fuller's project, an online Arts magazine dedicated to keeping alive the aims and ambitions of art critic Peter Fuller, is an attempt to be more accurate and than simple.

Even so I have to say that my heart sank when the interview with Marcelle Hanselaar started with Laurence asking "Do you think that shocking images will captivate people more?" this is accompanied by a self portrait of the artist apparently being shot in the chest, a spurt of blood leaping from her body. Marcelle begins to talk about the need to grab attention and the theatrical nature of painting and there follow images of naked women being harassed by dogs. It feels like familiar territory. It feels like the painter as London Tonight would have her, some batty foreigner doing rude, crude drawings of sexual violence and in simple terms that is the case. However here is the difference between simplicity and accuracy.

Asthetically there is a lot to complain about in Laurence's interview. Twenty minutes long it is, for the most part, a single locked off shot of the artist talking in her flatly lit studio, the sound creaking in through the camera top mic. What editing there is is often startlingly bad, on a couple of occasions sentences are clipped short which is the sort of hamfisted work it is impossible to quite forgive. Still the lack of artifice within this twenty-minute documentary (split into two ten minute chunks for youtube) is also it's biggest strength and charm. Laurence is clearly not a filmmaker but he is very definitely a kind and considerate interviewer and it is very nice to watch something where the focus is on the subject, not the documentary form.

What Laurence does that nowhere else will do is give his subjects the time and space that they deserve. Given the time to really explain and explore her work and her working methods Hanselaar reveals herself to be an utterly delightful companion. Thoughtful, passionate, intelligent and humane. Given the chance to think about her work beyond it's initial shock value I found myself moved. She is a superb artist with a superb and, for me at least, inspiring take on the world. I cannot thank Laurence enough for taking the time to record this interview and if you, like me, ever feel like paint is a dead medium then go spend twenty-minutes with Marcelle and she and Laurence will change your mind.

The Interview.
Marcelle's work.

I seem to have confused a lot of people with my recent description of the film "Zeitgeist" and, reading my words back, I will at least admit that the prose is rather woody and this has made it easy for incautious minds to leap to accusations that I support Sharia law or deny the halocaust or something. I have fought, and indeed continue to fight, a long battle with syntax. For whilst I am well aware that we no longer live in an age where a five hour oration is considered peppy and though the sad truth now is that anyone who took the whole of the first three pages to describe the London fog would get nothing but a stern phone call from their editor, I find it impossible to truly free myself from a love and admiration for the serpentine sentence.

I like to imagine that for some time I've been doing quite well. Having spent far too much of my time over the past three or four years carving away at the craft of writing saleable treatments, I think I had finally forced some part of my mind to accept that for ease of understanding it is always better to write in short staccato bursts and thus aim to emulate the great tit rather than the blackbird. Then I heard a man on the radio talking about death and the end of life, which are not the same things. One of his discussions was about alzheimer's and he made the horrible announcement that a recent study has shown that certain behaviour in your late teens can be predictive of your chances of suffering the most common form of what is a syndrome not a disease. Lying in bed late at night this is not precisely the sort of thing I wanted to hear. My late teens, whilst not a distant memory, are neither near at hand and so the thought of finding out that I'd already ballsed up and there was nothing I could do but sit around and wait for the inevitable shot me through with a sudden thrill dread. It's bound to be more exercise, I thought, it's always more exercise.

I should have turned it off and if you are feeling a little queasy about finding out what it is you should have done but now cannot, then I'd suggest you stop reading and perhaps click on this link to watch something that'll take your mind off it.

The programme went on to detail a survey of nuns. Apparently, and with no small irony, nuns are great for study because the communality of their existence makes them the perfect control group. Also the good record keeping of convents meant that it was possible for the researchers to not only autopsy the dead body but to peer back over their long life in an effort to see if there were any common and therefore predictive factors that lead to the manner and means of their passing. Their conclusion was that those nuns who, in their late teens, wrote in short simple sentences tended to suffer alzheimer's, whilst those who preferred a more complicated sentence structure didn't. I am not ashamed to admit that at this point I punched the air and shouted "Get in!"

Consequently the forces of simplicity have taken a bitter of a battering recently as all the commas and semi colons that hang my meanings in mid air, have crowded to ends of my finger tips and starting offering themselves up to me as a way of keeping insanity at bay. Alas it seems, that whichever path I go down, I will not be understood.

Happy days are here! Two superb short films just added to the Watch Film site by Chris Amundson. They're actually commercials so they're only a minute long which basically means you have almost no excuse for not watching them. The first one is good, the second one is better, but watch the first one first because then you're on an up curve.

Watch "Cheeto and Vin"
Watch "Lights Out"
Meet Chris Amundson

Though it is shaming to admit that drunkenness and exhaustion have led me to watch BBC One's panegyric to a pre-industrial bucolic idyl, "Lark Rise From Candleford" two weeks in a row, I am delighted to note that the schedulers have clearly read my recent writing on the way that views of the past tend to the utopian whilst those of the future major on disaster and have chosen to emphasise my point by following "Candleford" with "The Last Enemy" a tedious near-future conspiracy thriller about how bad things are.

It's also interesting to note the way certain fantasy visions are so in keeping with our current feelings that they become the base note of all others for the period. The Lord Of The Rings has achieved this, guaranteeing that for some years to come all visions of otherworldliness come coloured by the geography of New Zealand. Twenty years ago the tone and design of the future was laid down by Bladerunner. Finally it seems we have found a new master template for dystopia though since, rather than being set in the near future, "The Last Enemy" appears to be set in "The Children Of Men".

Disappointingly "The Last Enemy" seems to be attempting to reshape a thriller in the mode of Pirandello, since so far it's just a bunch of stereotypes all frantically searching for a plot. I've never seen a thriller before where everyone looks so utterly bored and whilst this probably does get close to the true nature of a governmental conspiracy it's not much fun to watch. Perhaps that's the real point - trying to demonstrate how the government gets away with crimes against the citizen by being too boring for us to really notice.

The real problem for me was the near-future setting which instantly defused any of the political points that the script is clearly trying to make. To be fair it did seem that all concerned were aware of this and at one point sonnambulist-in-chief Benedict Cumberbatch had to give a big speech about how the government intrusion that was going on now (in the future) was no different to what had been going on for years (that's now for the audience, do you see? Do you see what we've done there?) On one level it's all very heartfelt and I'm sure I'd agree with them about it all if I was in the bar but I find there is something inescapably cheeky about the "near-future" as a setting for anything that is trying to be politically aware. In complaining about something that hasn't actually happened you generally do little than set up a straw dog, a paper tiger or which ever member of the inanimate beistary you prefer to have an easy victory over. I for one am not going to get outraged about a government that isn't in power, especially when my time could be better wasted getting angry about the one that is.


For those of you like me who feel like you haven't got quite enough creaky anti-governmental paranoid fury in your life, I'd strongly recommend that instead of wasting your time with the vicarious thrills of The Last Enemy's made-up "near future" you instead pop over to www.zeitgeistmovie.com and get really scared.

Zeitgeist is a documentary by Peter Joseph which has earnt it's name by finally slumping to being only the 3rd most watched film on Google video after sitting in the top spot for most of the last 8 months. Peter is planning to promote the piece further by having simultaneous screenings around the world on March 15th, so you don't have too long to wait if the thought of watching a 2 hour film at your computer depresses you. The length is a shame, especially after you've sat through the lengthy and amatuerish opening montage of things exploding to the beat of an angry piano. This is the sort of hand-wringing tragedy voyeurism that gets us nowhere and it certainly doesn't take 10 minutes to make the point that war isn't a good thing.

The rest of the film is divided into three parts and I wish that Peter had taken a moment to give a brief overview of his argument at the beginning rather than plunging straight into part one because for a good half hour I was left gloomily imagining that I was watching nothing more than a careful dissection of why Christianity is daft. Perhaps in America this is a vital and controversial message, perhaps it is increasingly so in Britain too. In my house though it comes free with the day being light and the night being not so. Twenty minutes in and with nothing to sustain one but ideas that "WAR IS BAD" and "GOD IS MADE UP" and I for one was starting to get cross and bored.

However things perk up massively for parts two and three which go on to detail why 9/11 was actually the work of the CIA and why the whole of the American economy is run for the benefit of a handful of rich bankers. The final part, the economic argument is not really much more surprising than the statement that "God is Made Up" though here I feel Joseph has much firmer ground for complaint. Having spent most of my teenage years locked in passionate dispute with RE teachers about the falsehood of religion, I'm not only bored of the argument but have had to admit that for all the negative social control of an established church and however bogus the central beliefs may be, there are a great many people who receive a lot of comfort and happiness from religion and a lot of beauty has been created in its name. Not that I'm delighted to see the return of a religious fundamentalism to our society, but I do find it hard to get so exercised in the effort to prove the historical bankruptcy of the Bible. None of which holds when you change the controlling power from religion to money.

It is also this final part of the film where the evidence is most believable. The machinations of the American banks at the turn of the last century are well documented and all Joseph is doing is drawing your attention to historically documented facts and all too apparent economic truths. However where the film is most compelling, most startling and most frightening is in the middle section where he goes to great lengths to show that the destruction of the Twin Towers was an inside job, much like the sinking of the Lusitania and Pearl Harbour. You're probably either laughing out loud or rolling your eyes, in which case I urge you to go and watch the film. If you are still cynical afterwards then I would love to hear your reasons because if I have a more serious complaint about Zeitgeist than its childish opening montage it would be that Joseph presents a very partial case. This is something he probably feels very entitled to do since he is going against a global media that is clearly doing the same, however I do think that the inclusion of sceptical voices within the film would have done much to improve the balance and actually to make it more convincing.

I can see no flaws in the case he presents about the attacks of September 11th and, if true, it is a genuinely horrific and terrifying story of a government willing to commit mass murder against its own people simply to ensure it is given the freedom to act as it wishes and protect the interests of a small social elite. However I can't help but come back to my problems with the first part of the film because here I am much better versed in the terms of the argument. Joseph convincingly makes the case that the core beliefs and spiritual events in Christianity are all borrowed from earlier religions. Anything is hard to prove at the distance of two thousand years but it is certainly convincing to say that part of the process of drawing people into the Christian faith was to take existing religious celebrations and give them a Biblical dressing up. The problem with Joseph's argument though is that he over states his case when trying to claim that Jesus' birth of the 25th December is shared with various ancient pagan Gods from all around the globe and that the date marks the astrological turning point in the year. Not only does he have to muddy the water rather to make the 25th a significant date as opposed the actual solstice date of the 21st but we only celebrate Jesus' birth on the 25th of December because of the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1582.

This is where the inclusion of dissenting voices becomes important. I don't know enough about either terrorist attacks or the Federal Reserve to know if Joseph's case is accurate or extravagant myth but in trying to take on the whole of western civilisation in 2 hours it does seem that he has over simplified his case. A shame because that makes it easier to attack and easier to ignore what may be absolutely true. Never the less this is a fascinating and frightening film and one well deserving both a wider audience and a couple of hours of your time and if you can't be bothered to scroll back to the middle of this then here is the link once again...

www.zeitgeistmovie.com

Now then, the preceding entry is, I admit, rather gloomy (though still worth reading). I did intend to turn the argument round into something more positive and rallying, something standing in the face of the traditional divide of the past being good and the future being awful. However I then decided to put that bit here so that you would actually read it, rather than leave it languishing at the bottom of a longish piece about how rubbish everything is. Which it is.

However there is, I find, only one thing to do in the face of rubbish and that's call it by it's name and do all we can to cherish what is good. Our culture, our society, is hamstrung by a terrible misunderstanding of the nature and meaning of democracy. The idea that everyone has something valuable to offer in every field, the idea that there is no distinction between high and low art, that Eastenders is actually just as good as Dickens or Britany Spears is as good as Bach and anyone who says different is an elitist and on the side of the Nazis.

This is wrong. This renders everything we create as mere content, all of equal value. Vivienne Westwood has an interesting take on this in her new cultural manifesto which you can read and download here. Tragically this heartfelt and intelligent document is bound to fall on deaf ears because of her insistence on couching her argument in the sort of earnest dramatic prose that are more usually found in the mouths of teenage drama students. However I urge you to push on past the obvious metaphor of the Pirate of Progress and tip toe over the rather too obvious attacks on the visual art establishment. At its core this apparently batty document is a well argued and timely call to arms, even if it is also a clever marketing ploy for a canny business woman relaunching a fashion boutique.


Taking up her point that without judges there is no art let me now put forward two recently uploaded films on the Watch Films site. Firstly "Flashback Al Reves" by Chema Garcia Ibarra an animated music video which was done entirely using digital still photography and "34x25x36" by Jesse Epstein which is a quite fabulous documentary that says more in fifty seconds than many films manage in hours. Neither of these films are content with being content, both are the product of invention, dedication, craft and passion and both deserve you to take a few moments to watch them.

We're up to 499 films uploaded to the site now. Too many of them are total crap. Come on Shooters, lets do better than this...