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Last week I attended the 19^th Raindance Film Festival in London, watching six films out of the 12 days. Looking back, I wish I had gone to more screenings, but alas, there were only so many films I could process in a single day (it’s not advisable to hermit oneself away in a dark room). The Apollo Theatre in Piccadilly had been specially transformed for the festival – the waiting foyer was artfully arranged with posters, flyers and Raindance programmes.  A wall of Polaroid photos (nostalgic) showed who had attended already: directors, writers, actors etc. from all over the world.

The films I watched ranged from the ridiculously low budget (‘Days Gone By’) to art council funded projects (‘X’ and ‘By Day and By Night’). The biggest audience was for ‘War Games’ – it was almost completely full in the theatre – although that might have been because nearly all of the cast and crew attended the screening and each brought along their family and friends. Being an independent film festival, several of the films ran with some problems (ear-splitting volume, frames freezing, giant watermarks on the reel itself), but all in all, it was an extremely successful week that saw a 62% rise in box office this year.

Here were the award winners for this year’s festival:

Best International Feature: Just Between Us / Rajko Grlic – Croatia/Serbia/Slovenia
Best UK Feature: Stranger Things / Eleanor Burke/Ron Eyal – UK
Best Debut Feature: Tilt / Viktor Chouchkov Jr. – Bulgaria
Best Microbudget Feature: Monk3ys / Drew Cullingham – UK
Best Documentary: How to Start A Revolution / Ruaridh Arrow – UK
Best International Short: Words /  Sven Vinge – Denmark
Best UK Short: Love At First Sight / Michael Davies – UK
Film of The Festival: Reset / Nicolangelo Gelormini – Italy

I shied away from these award-winning films, however, and instead hand-picked an eclectic mix to watch – there were a few misses but there were also a few surprising hits. That’s the best thing about festivals like Raindance – you could end up watching a film you would have never heard about.  My personal favourite (although the films I chose greatly differed in genre) was ‘LiTTLEROCK’ by American director Mike Ott, a film about two Japanese siblings – Atsuko and Rintaro – whose rental car breaks down in rural America en route to Manzanar. At first glance, the town holds little fascination: it’s full of lazy drunken rednecks who sit on their porches all day smoking and drinking. But Atsuko soon attracts a few admirers and she decides to stay there for a few more days, by herself, while Rintaro continues to San Francisco. Nothing really happens in this film, but it has a really good cast, an incredibly soundtrack (the Icelandic Amiina and local band ‘The Cave Singers’) and touches on interesting themes: homophobia in small-town America, language barriers, and the real reason the Japanese siblings travelled to Manzanar – to find a little piece of their own history deep in the centre of America.

Still from LiTTLEROCK

Other notable films included ‘X’, an appropriately titled (it was very graphic) Australian thriller about two prostitutes on the streets of Sydney. One of them is about to retire, the other has just started. They witness a murder and it soon turns into a game of cat and mouse – or cop and prostitute – filmed with incredible clarity and pace. A special mention has to go to young actress Hanna Mangen Lawrence, who played down-on-her-luck newcomer Shay. ‘By Day and By Night’, a Mexican film, was also incredibly powerful. The ridiculously beautiful cast (all Aquiline profiles and liquid eyes) pulled off the film perfectly, showing how the world was split into Day and Night shifts – basically, scientists developed an enzyme to alter people’s body clocks, so if you’re a Day person, you fall into a coma when the sun goes down and wake up at sunrise. One of the protagonists, Aurora is missing a child (Luna) who used to live with her in the Day night. Unbeknown to her, Luna has been switched to a Night Person (seemingly impossible) and is hidden from the authorities by doctor Urbano, who himself was switched when he was a child. There are some absolutely heartbreaking scenes where Aurora pines for Luna, never knowing that she is safe – just not awake when she is. The closing sequences are devastating and yet beautiful. What struck me about the film was its subtlety in handling this particular subject – there were no explicit ‘this is the year 3500, we are all night and day people’ slogans or messages. Instead the audience was left to slowly process and understand the strange future world the director had created.

Still from 'X'

Dates for next year’s Raindance has already been released – 26^th September to 7^th October 2012 – see you there!

Film adaptations are becoming a very common trend, but where are all these stories coming from? Here are five books written by British writers that have made it big on the silver screen.

1. This list wouldn’t be a list without the obvious mention of Harry Potter; that cheeky little wizard spanned a school life of seven books taking on sports, fellow wizards and lords of the underworld. Somewhere in there he grew from a man to a boy, got a girlfriend and had a pretty good time. Rowling’s work made well into the hundred millions, been turned into a theme park and made her the most recognisable British author in a very long time.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

2. Alan Moore, British comic book writer and graphic novelist, was the brains behind epic superhero flick Watchmen, as well as V for Vendetta and From Hell. Moore’s unique work has created roles for Johnny Depp, Heather Graham, Natalie Portman and Stephan Fry. The Watchmen is probably the most famous and successful of the three adaptations of Moore’s work, taking over fifty-million dollars in the first weekend of the films release – twenty million more than From Hell had done in its entire run at box office.

V for Vendetta

3. Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, although made here in Britain, definitely made an impact over in the States. The film, nominated for an Oscar for its screenplay, highlighted a world that many people would never see and launched Ewan McGregor into an acting career that has included roles in Moulin Rouge! and the Star Wars prequel trilogy. The film gained excellent reviews in Entertainment Weekly and Los Angeles Times – for these critics it signalled the arrival of Danny Boyle.

Ewan McGregor in a scene from 'Trainspotting'

4. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, written over a space of twelve years by J.R.R. Tolkien, have become the second highest selling novels of all time – beaten only by Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Tolkien’s work creates an epic fantasy world mixed with action and adventure that is portrayed in Peter Jackson’s on-screen version with stunning visual effect. A third of the books sales have come since the arrival of the trilogy of films. The film grossed $2.91billion; The Return of the King picked up eleven academy awards, matching the all-time record of Titanic.

Treebeard from 'The Lord of the Rings' films

5. Finally, this film is yet to be released. However Twentieth Century Fox have announced that they have bought the rights to, and will be adapting, Mr Men and Little Miss books (the work of Roger Hargreaves) into a feature length film. The project has yet to be attached to a director or writer but Shaun Levy, producer of Night at the Museum and Date Night, has been given the task of turning the film into a success. The books themselves have sold over one-hundred million copies world wide so a high grossing film should be expected.

Mr Happy has already starred in a Specsavers advert

Keith Hodges

Information as material

Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street

28th April, 7pm

Making Nothing Happen

Writer collective information as material (iam) begin their residency at the Whitechapel Gallery on the 28th of April, marked by a screening of Making Nothing Happen by Simon Morris.

Making Nothing Happen introduces the work of 2010 Northern Art Prize winner Pavel Buchler. Combining audio documentation, installation photography, text, interview and commentary it pays tribute to Buchler’s humourous conceptual style, with a framing of his own reframing of Beckett, Kafka, Cage and Warhol. The screening will be followed by a discussion between Simon Morris and the artist. Prints of Brooklyn based Lucia della Paolera’s poster poem Information Manual will also be available on the night.

Established in 2002 iam explore conceptualist approaches to writing and performative approaches to reading. They plan to create a space for poetic and critical engagement with ‘undesigning’, anti-expressionism and cultural piracy.

Tickets are priced at £6 (including a complimentary drink and A1 lithographic print).

To find out more about the event and to book tickets, visit the Whitechapel Gallery here at: www.whitechapelgallery.org.

For more details on iam check out their website here: http://informationasmaterial.com/iam/.

David Fowkes

Brighton provides the atmospheric setting for Greene's novel and its adaptations

A new film adaptation has brought attention once again to Graham Green’s 1937 masterpiece Brighton Rock. I took a trip down to Brighton, the beloved venue of my student days, to reacquaint myself with the city that Greene so vividly brings to life, and to see if the new adaptation can do justice to the novel’s slow-burning tale of murder, begrudging romance and seething guilt.

Brighton is a place alive with possibility – a city crammed into the space of a town.  I lived there for three years whilst studying, and having been away for about six months, the thought of taking a trip to reacquaint myself with the city seemed like the best way to re-read Greene’s novel in context. Many critics believe the novel’s brooding study of poisoned romance and fierce emotional suppression to be too big to contain in two hours of film, though filmmakers do seem to relish the challenge; Rowan Joffe’s new adaptation follows a 1947 film by John Bolting, famous for Richard Attenborough’s portrayal of the ill-fated anti-hero Pinkie Brown. Brighton Rock was written whilst Greene began to scrutinize his own Catholicism, spurred by both the socialist persecution of Mexico, and General Franco’s attack on Republic Spain. It was whilst travelling to Mexico that Greene witnessed the destruction of the towns and ruined churches, and he ‘began to examine more closely the effect of faith on action’. It was here that he corrected the proofs of Brighton Rock, a tale that began as a detective story, but became ‘a discussion … of the distinction between good-and-evil and right-and-wrong, and the mystery of the appalling strangeness of God’.

The story follows Pinkie, who becomes the leader of a small-time mob following the death of mentor Kite. Pinkie is introduced as a man who controls the city as if it were his own yard, whose face forms no expression and dead-grey eyes show no hint of humanity. The novel opens with a chase, Pinkie’s mob seeking journalist Charles Hale to revenge Kite’s death. As Hale runs about the seafront-crowds, flailing in fear, Greene’s prose is luminous; ‘he thought he could lose himself safely in a crowd, but now the people he was among seemed like a thick forest in which a native could arrange his poisoned ambush’. Every metallic glimpse of sun reflected by a chrome car bumper reminds Hale of the impending threat of the mob’s flick knives, ‘the thin wound and the sharp pain’.

But it is after Hale’s murder that Pinkie’s grasp of Brighton unravels. Greene shows the reader that beyond the composed veneer, Pinkie’s nails are bitten and the soles of his shoes are worn right through. He is a self-conscious 17 year old whose fear of dependence and determination to assert his potency as a gang leader entangles him in an escalating web of murder that he can’t escape. He is a character in turmoil, caught between adolescence and manhood, and his descent from kid to conflicted killer is mirrored by Greene’s description of a sea gull; ‘a gull dropped from the parade and swept through the iron nave of the Palace Pier, white and purposeful in the obscurity; half-vulture and half-dove. In the end one always had to learn’.

Pinkie is obliged to keep a waitress, Rose, sweet lest she provide evidence of his wrongdoings. Pinkie is terrified of being dependent, either on substances or people, as in his mind it is a sign of weakness. This is why he resolves to not touch alcohol, and why he is so disgusted by his creeping desire for Rose . He coolly dispatches with member of his own mob, but the creeping desire that grows for Rose horrifies him. Their relationship, borne out of obligation, breeds dependence, and this dawns on Pinkie whilst they stand in an alley after he has talked her parents around to their underage marriage; ‘‘You were wonderful”, she said, loving him among the lavatory smells, but her praise was poison: it marked her possession of him’.

Greene’s Brighton begins to conspire against Pinkie with constant reminders of his guilt; every gust of salt wind smarts the lips, carries the temptation of vice in the form of the smell of port on a woman’s breath, and transports music from saloon bars that delivers a foreboding sense of damnation. Integral to the intoxicating atmosphere he creates is music, with the sea breeze carrying refrains into Pinkie’s ears, or lyrics intersecting dialogue during conversations in saloons. During the aforementioned chase of the late Charles Hale, Pinkie tracks him down in a seafront pub, and their tense dialogue is intercut with lyrics being sung in the room next door. The song about fidelity and lost innocence is an ominous precursor to the trajectory of Pinkie and Rose’s relationship; ‘A wreath of orange blossoms, when we next met she wore; the expression of her features, was more thoughtful than before’. A witness to Hale’s murder, begins to follow the two teenagers in hope of incriminating The Boy, and this mirrored by the lyrics ‘The watchdog on our walks, talks, talks of our love’, which, Greene tells us, ‘bit, like an abscess, into his brain from the Palace Pier’.

Pinkie believes throughout the book that as long as he can keep Rose quiet, he can be saved from damnation by repenting once he is safe  – one confession ‘to wipe out everything’. But he realises by the novel’s conclusion he is in far too deep for his prayers to be answered, and that ‘only death could ever set him free’. This web of deceit and guilt is spun brilliantly by Greene, his prose marrying the grainy squalor and horror with the visceral and poetic.

But this is such a complex and slow-burning story that it is impossible to convey the seething complexities of the two character’s relationship bubbling under the surface in two hours. The two adaptations can only provide a sketch of Greene’s novel, with differing results. Joffe’s new film is set in 1964 against a context of youth-culture conflict, the year significant for the clashing Mods n’ Rockers, and as the last that the death penalty loomed as punishment in Britain. Other than these shifts, Joffe provides a relatively faithful condensing of Green’s novel, but one that ultimately fails to capture the sheer visceral urgency of the book. As mentioned, Greene’s luminous depiction of Brighton is, as much a character as any other which haunts Pinkie and Rose with its howling winds; Joffe’s adaptation fails to capture the thick, salty tension of the book.

The Bolting film, made in 1947 under a context of strict censorship, did not have the option of explicit depictions of violence, and thus had to convey the torment of its central characters implicitly through tense dialogue and a soundtrack that elicits skips of the heartbeat. The dialogue-free chase scene in which the mob hunt Hale is inspired, and Bolting’s use of music and haunting lyrics is faithful to Greene’s text (Joffe’s mostly instrumental soundtrack misses  a trick here). The 2011 production brings the violence of the story to the screen in a truly graphic way, but is no more effective as the underlying sense of impending horror is missing.

However, there are many decent moments in Joffe’s film. The finest arrives when Pinkie is haunted by the shrill cries of a new-born emanating from the bedsit next door, shortly after Pinkie begrudgingly consummates his marriage to Rose. But Sam Riley fails to do justice to Greene’s deeply conflicted character, and the sense that Pinkie is caught in a transition between adolescence and the horrors of the adult world is lost. In contrast, Richard Attenborough made an excellent Pinkie; all twitches and bile, a kid who truly ‘held intimacy back as long as he could at the end of a razor blade’.

Ultimately, Greene constructed a complicated and slow-burning tale of its characters wrestling with hatred, love and absolute fear of eternal damnation at the same time, and this is immensely hard to portray within the confines of cinema. In Greene’s novel, the grainy squalor of the story is coupled with a lyrical tenderness, a balance difficult to emulate. But I’m sure Joffe’s will turn new generations onto Greene’s outstanding book, as well as the Bolting’s film, so that new generations can join Pinkie in the discovery of ‘the greatest horror of all’.

Rob Fred Parker

You can find out more about the recently released film adaptation of Brighton Rock at the BBC Films website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfilms/film/brighton_rock