Scalarama is just around the corner and we have some of our biggest and best events lined up for it this September. First, we team up with Video Namaste for an event inspired by Everything Is Terrible, the Found Footage Festival and Adam Buxton’s Bug. Then we have a very special event celebrating the 20th anniversary of Chris Morris’ landmark TV comedy Brass Eye. Our Glasgow events culminate on our regular date at CCA with our very first live score commission. Finally, we’re using Scalarama to launch our first ever tour, bringing back John Paizs’ masterpiece, Crime Wave for its theatrical debut across the UK.
07/09: Video Bacchanal at Nice N Sleazy
The ‘90s in cinema were an amazing nightmare. A sugar-syrup throb of VHS scanlines, dire fast food tie-ins and probably the weirdest time in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s life. Come join the Video Namaste boys in a wee trip through the weird videoshop hellscape of 90s cinema and all the amazing stuff that orbited it. Have a drink, gawk at us forgetting to remember and then have a wee dance with us as we play some Exxtra Special ‘90s soundtrack songs afterwards.
17/09: Oxide Ghosts: The Brass Eye Tapes with director Q&A at CCA
Made from hundreds of hours of unseen material from his personal archive, director Michael Cumming’s film shares insights into the process of making the legendary TV series Brass Eye. Michael directed both the pilots and the series and, over a two-year period, witnessed the highs and lows of Brass Eye from a very personal perspective.
Part documentary, part artwork – the film is designed solely for live screenings and is made up almost entirely of never before seen footage. Oxide Ghosts carries the blessing of Chris Morris and provides a rare glimpse of his extraordinary working practices.
Michael will be doing a Q&A after the film – spilling beans, shattering myths and letting a few cats out of the bag. Celebrating 20 years since Brass Eye’s transmission in 1997, this film and Q&A session are a must for fans of the series but will appeal to anyone with a curiosity about how great comedy is made.
21/09: Cowards Bend The Knee with live score by Ela Orleans at CCA
Guy Maddin is one of the most distinctive and idiosyncratic directors currently working. The Canadian auteur has mined and subverted the imagery and style of late silent and early sound cinema in such films as The Forbidden Room and The Saddest Music In The World to disorientating, often hilarious effect. Cowards Bend The Knee is one his greatest, but least-known films. Originally conceived of and presented as a peephole show, the film’s ten chapters concoct an alternative cinematic biography for Maddin, torn between the influence of his hockey star father and his attraction to Meta, the beautiful girl from the local beauty salon / illegal abortion clinic.
This is Guy Maddin in purest form, the most concentrated and probably craziest film of his career. Never have hockey, hairdressing, homophobia and hand amputations collided to such dizzying effect, in perhaps the most authentically surrealist film of the 21st century. For Scalarama, Matchbox Cineclub have commissioned Ela Orleans to write a new score.
Ela Orleans has gained an international cult reputation for her haunted, noir-inflected torch songs. She recently came to more mainstream attention when her magnum opus Circles of Upper and Lower Hell was nominated for the SAY Awards. However, the Polish-born musician has a parallel career, scoring film soundtracks having studied composition under David Shire (The Conversation, The Taking of Pelham 123) in New York. She has composed new soundtracks for films as diverse as Frank Borzage’s Lucky Star, Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures.
After the screening, journalist Brian Beadie will discuss Ela’s work and approaches to film scoring.
September and beyond: Crime Wave DCP tour at various UK venues
One of the greatest and yet most perversely overlooked debuts in Canadian movie history, writer-director John Paizs’s Crime Wave announced the birth of a new genre in Canuck cinema: what cultural critic Geoff Pevere dubbed “prairie postmodernism.” Crime Wave’s recent restoration by TIFF debuted to a rapturous reception during Glasgow Film Festival 2017, programmed by us. Still unavailable on DVD, VOD or streaming, Paizs’ lost classic now comes to UK theatres for the first time. Dates are confirmed at DCA (Dundee), Castle Cinema (London), Hawick and HOME (Manchester).
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