Visit the official Act2Cam website

Watch more videos at the Act2Cam Channel on Vimeo

Jobson here continues his masturbatory fantasies, begun with 16 Years of Alcohol (2003) and continued through films like The Purifiers (2004) – reviewed here – this time not only over-indulging the ego of a pampered and vulgar actor (the impossibly pathetic Dougray Scott) but further revealing his obsession with A Clockwork Orange (1971; dir. Stanley Kubrick) – just as 16 Years of Alochol recreated scenes and dialogue from that film, here clubbers are decked out in similar costumes. But whereas Kubrick was interested in things other than the visceral, asking questions about neo-fascism and British social obsessions, Jobson wants to recreate something he’s seen too many times down his local multiplex: the plot bears comparison with Das Millionenspiel (1970; dir. Tom Toelle) – also reviewed here – or The Most Dangerous Game (1932; dirs. Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack), but is strung-out in the most unconvincing and contained manner, which, accompanied by Jobson’s cliched and pretentious imagery, results in the film being less than the sum of its inspirations: there’s virtually nothing original or interesting here, only Jobson’s lack of cinematic intelligence.

Again, this film is co-financed by Scottish Screen, the national body for film and television in Scotland which pours public money into cinema and television projects with a realistic goal or ambition, and the question needs to be asked why money is being wasted on shit like this when more thoughtful and sustainable film projects could be completed at half the cost. Filmmakers like Jobson, whose CV increases almost every other year with fucking awful films like this, are given funding precisely because of the volume of their work, rather than their quality: once they’ve got their claws in an endless source of funding, their privileged position is maintained and elevated by those who run the funding bodies, in the mistaken belief that they are somehow supporting and establishing a sustainable film industry in their region. The sooner they wake up to the fact that audiences despise turgid crap like Jobson’s, and are desperate for a national film identity alternative to the one they see on mainstream cinema and television, then the sooner Jobson’s film career will come to a welcome close.

New Town Killers at the IMDb

This is the fourth in a series of high-budget, low-expectation films begun by The Terminator (1984; dir. James Cameron). Helmer McG and his creative team show themselves capable of exploiting the cinematic spectacle for a few powerful sequences – a battle along a desert highway marries Mad Max 2 (1981; dir. George Miller) with a sense of the epic missing from the similar Transformers (2007; dir. Michael Bay) – but too much of the film is purely perfunctory, relying on over-the-top sound effects and a whole spate of digital imagery that brings into question the validity and necessity of computer-generated images in cinema.

Modern cinema, especially the films of Hollywood and its imitators, has an over-reliance on digital manipulation that not only borders on the pathological but, whereas there is some argument to suggest that realism has no place in cinema, this practice denies the audience (and filmmakers) an essential sense of ‘the real’ – which is intrinsic to the success of a film. Terminator Salvation, Avatar (2009; dir. James Cameron) Australia (2008; dir Baz Luhrmann), The Lovely Bones (2009; dir. Peter Jackson) – reviewed here – or even The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007; dir. Andrew Dominik) rely on post-production techniques that belittle the power of the filmed image, and insult the work of artists and technicians who worked before the advent of computer technology to meet the same results through tangible and altogether more successful means.

Producers, directors and technicians who indulge in these practices hide behind their insistence that computer-generated imagery keeps costs down – this is bullshit. High-end commercial films today cost just as much, if not more, as they always have. The true reason for their increased reliance on CGI, which infects even the simplest productions, is born out of the media professionals’ anxiety at affordable, home-grown technologies: now anybody can shoot almost anything they want on broadcast-standard equipment, using real locations and real people. The mass audio-visual media, which constantly seeks to widen the gulf between their privileged positions and those of us they deem consumers, has added the saturation of digital post-production work, which represents a highly skilled and totally undemocratic profession, to its arsenal of elitist, hierarchical practices.

Terminator Salvation, and any other film that rejects the real world in favour of spectre-like illusions, further decreases the likelihood of modern cinema audiences feeling empowered enough to attempt film-making themselves, unless through the restrictive avenues offered by mainstream media education, which supports this . Anyone seeking honest alternatives to this widespread attitude of indoctrination through indifference should actively disregard digital manipulation in cinema and television, reinvesting time and effort in ‘the real’. Imagine a film like this with 99% real effects and locations – watch Lawrence of Arabia (1962; dir. David Lean), Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972; dir. Werner Herzog), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977; dir. Lewis Gilbert) or countless other pre-CGI films and you’ll understand cinema needs that tangibility to be truly powerful, and perhaps also why the MAVM would rather ignore that fact and retain the creative power for themselves.

Terminator Salvation at the IMDb

Footage from the fourth week of Act2Cam workshops during the spring term course of 2010 – some of it shot by the students themselves. Watch as we experiment with characters and situations, working towards the scenarios that will feature in the finished film, and see a full scene play out with off-screen direction.

Visit the official Act2Cam website

Watch more videos at the Act2Cam Channel on Vimeo

Read and compare the original screenplay (45.4KB PDF)

Watch Damon Dark on YouTube

Visit Adrian Sherlock’s official website

This film bears comparison with the similar Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971; dir. John D. Hancock), but has stylistic parallels with a number of European films in the horror genre at the time, notably Les lèvres rouges (1971; dir. Harry Kümel) and Operazione paura (1966; dir. Mario Bava). Helmer Blackburn, who also appears as a perverted reverend, takes his cue from the abstract, subjective masters of fantasy cinema and weaves a gothic nightmare that spits in the face of lesser, more obviously stateside efforts like Night of the Living Dead (1968; dir. George A. Romero) or Targets (1968; dir. Peter Bogdanovich). By ignoring convention and reason, Blackburn’s film seems to be an attempt to restore oneirism and grand guignol to a cinematic style that, even today, is littered with people who would rather dot their i’s and cross their t’s than disturb their audiences.

With a colour pallette of blues, reds and browns, recalling not only Bava’s lighting effects but the traditional shades of children’s fairytales, Blackburn tells a simple yarn that reeks with corruption and ambiguity, capturing the ethos and implicitness of H. P. Lovecraft (with whom the work shares many familiarities) much more effectively then the dire The Resurrected (1992; dir. Dan O’Bannon) – reviewed here. Although the filme comes a little unstuck during its climactic moments – and this possibly reinforces Hitchcock’s adherence that, in suspense or narrative cinema, the proverbial bomb should never explode – the first two thirds of Blackburn’s achievement not only surpass the best supernatural or horror traditions, but remind us that a simple, child-like wonder is essential to the construction and success of the cinematic spectacle.

Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural at the IMDb

Following on from our introduction to the world of Damon Dark, an independent webseries created and produced by Adrian Sherlock – the full text of which you can read here – we’ve had the privilege of writing two original screenplays for the series.

Watch the first one here, and the latest, an exciting journey into an unexplored metaphysical realm for Dark, below:

The concluding episode, and the original script, available here.

Watch Damon Dark on YouTube

Visit Adrian Sherlock’s official website

The recent British Academy Film Awards, hosted by the British Academy for Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), and the unforgivable precedence the ceremony has given in recent years to Hollywood films – with 8 awards this year given to the disgustingly propagandist The Hurt Locker (2008; dir. Kathryn Bigelow) –  highlights the plight of the British film industry, which, through their insensitive treatment of it, BAFTA and its members have all but acknowledged as non-existent. As we’ve regularly suggested on this blog, this country does not possess a film industry of any identifiable sort, never mind one that is unique to our national identity or sustainable within our shores, and we will not achieve one when a filmmaking giant like Hollywood is pandered to by the figureheads and so-called leaders of our trade, who excuse their ludicrous, deplorable and sycophantic behaviour by suggesting they are “exposing British talent to the world”.

Unlike other countries, who do possess growing or already sustainable film industries, British cinema is in the unforgiving grip of a foreign power, and we are occupied by them as a country invaded: our cinemas are crammed with vehicles for their fundamental indoctrination, our educational system with regard to the media regurgitates and revolves around their didactic, inhibiting processes, and we are forced to accept their level of commercial saturation as the benchmark for our own pathetic attempts at film production. In this way it is not without reason that we can see BAFTA and its members, thanks in part to their ineptitude and apathy, as a Vichy government that rules over filmmakers and film theorists without any real power, and fawns to their masters with red carpet exposure that only serves to further power the Hollywood machine, driving a wedge between what Britain is capable of and what they think we must achieve. Like the equally redundant UK Film Council, the BAFTA ceremony has no interest in building recognisable British brands or supporting otherwise ignored British talent, but in freely handing over important marketing space to Hollywood players and their product, mostly in a vain attempt to have some of that kudos rub off on itself. This is a situation that must change in order for filmmaking in the UK to move ahead this century.

As with all puppet governments, the act of resistance must come from without. The next generation of filmmakers in this country, who are consistently denied the same exposure their American cousins are afforded by organisations like BAFTA, should aspire to their own level of success rather than those imposed on them by a Hollywood-centric tyranny of gold statuettes, formal wear functions and negative cultural attitudes. Regardless of what this momentous piece of cinematic treason tells us, we must look at ourselves and our own country – by which we mean identifying what’s important to us, what’s happening here now, even what our own meagre cinematic history can teach us – in order to identify what we as a country can achieve on film and television. Likewise, it is not xenophobic or reactionary to suggest that an awards ceremony in this country should concentrate solely on British films and filmmakers, especially one as conspicuous as the BAFTAs: we can only begin to acknowledge the successes outside of this country when we have achieved our own, and to reach that end we must ignore foreign product (Hollywood in particular) and look, as already suggested, into ourselves.

Next year, BAFTA should concentrate on British films, and the homegrown talent they contain, rather than following Hollywood trends and applauding sick, infantile, over-budgeted crap. That they won’t is further proof that a British film industry will only come out of hard work and perspiration by those of us at the forefront of low-budget, alternative filmmaking. There are opportunities now to lay the foundation work that can, in the next 30-40 years, build a sustainable film industry unique to this country and this country alone. These opportunities are not presented by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, the UK Film Council, the Regional Screen Agencies or any other body that supports, and believes in, the supremacy of Hollywood products and processes, but from the next generation of filmmakers who have it within themselves to forge new directions in British cinema.

Visit the official BAFTA website

Here’s footage from the third week of Act2Cam workshops taking place during the spring term 2010, focussing on how far the students have come with their improvised dramas, and how far they have yet to travel.

Visit the official Act2Cam website

Watch more videos at the official Act2Cam channel on Vimeo

Stephen Knight’s elaborate Masonic theory for the infamous Whitechapel murders of 1888, first presented in his book of the same name in 1976, has since become a figure of ridicule in the world of professional ‘ripperology’, despite offering the most concise and approachable explanation for a riddle that still befuddles countless policemen, historians, psychoanalysts and armchair sleuths. The scant regard which his theory is given by contemporary writers and critics perhaps indicates the depths to which modern thinking has plummeted: the notions that Knight puts forward seem so abhorrent to certain commentators, who themselves it must be said have a vested interest in the perpetuation of certain Ripper myths, that they would rather support alternative theories that have little credence than admit the Victorian Establishment, and certain well-respected personages from that period, were cruel and bigoted tyrants that advocated time and again unacceptably brutal methods of social and political suppression.

Recent high-profile events, and the reaction to them by the mass audio visual media, likewise betray a growing sense of what celebrity skeptic Richard Dawkins has dubbed “the enemies of reason”. Dawkins uses this to (quite rightly) argue against the growing coverage given to, and the subsequent dependency on, irrational superstition not only by the media but in various health services and entertainment industries – exemplified on film and television by the likes of The Fourth Kind (2009; dir. Olatunde Osunsanmi) or 6ixth Sense with Colin Fry (2002-Present) – but his undeniably accurate assumptions can also be applied to the inability or refusal of media practitioners and theorists to adequately question not only a specific issue but their place within its wider context – suggesting through an alarming willingness to accept things at face value, the even more disturbing lack of introspection and awareness on the part of modern media professionals when dealing with current social, cultural or political topics. We can add to the blanket disregard for Knight’s unequivocally grounded theory, the open hostility many programmes and programme makers display for racial equality, feminism and ecology, and the growing trend of populist documentaries that support a frightening Chrisitan subtext (an example of which, and the subsequent debate it arose, can be found here).

To deny the multitude of perspectives available of the human condition is to deny and inhibit the development of humankind as a whole, and in modern media examples, many of which are heavily didactic and disgustingly biased, we can see the suppression of truth and the encouragement of moral standpoints that are intolerant toward alternative lifestyles and mindsets. In Stephen Knight’s theory, with its suggestions as to the ingrained bigotry and egoism of those in power at the time of the Whitechapel murders, we have a parallel to the modern hierarchical structure of the mass audio visual media, which likewise seeks to obliterate any threat to its supremacy. Only through application of egalitarian production processes – examples of which we have suggested here and here – can practitioners and theorists attempt to build relevant material that, instead of dictating and directing, suggests and encourages its audience, allowing them important access to critical debate – an essential media process that is criminally inhibited by state-sponsored media education and commercially-minded film and television production.

Again, we must argue that change should be implemented at the earliest, most basic level of education in order to dissuade the next generation of media professionals from committing the same anti-intelligence sins we are witness to time and again in today’s media climate.

Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution at the IMDB