“Even if you’ve got this really cool, energetic independent movie, it’s still going to struggle to get the review space it needs. Our job now is to find other ways of publicising our films.”"Britain is definitely under-screened for new and different cinema,” is the assessment of Robin Gutch, who heads the FilmFour Lab, the dedicated cutting-edge cinema division of Channel 4’s film-making arm. Like Thomas, he’s in the business of innovation on a tight budget, yet prepared to take a longer view on the success of the projects under his wing, winning some (teen comedy Large already has a distribution deal through Hollywood-backed UIP next year), losing others (the Lab’s digital feature Daybreak made its Edinburgh premiÿre with a resounding thud). “We invest in the films that we do because we think they’re creatively worth doing. By definition the film-makers are people we want to invest in, and with whom we’ll hopefully have a relationship in the future, when we can recoup on that investment.”With One Life Stand behind her, Thomas would certainly not discourage anyone from the DIY route. “I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to change industry perceptions of their work so they can get the next one made on a proper budget.
Don’t join the queue for money for your first feature because you might not get any, and life’s too short not to make movies.”‘One Life Stand’ screens at Raindance Film Festival, Metro Cinema, W1 (020 7287 3833), today at 8.30pm, tomorrow at 2.30pm. Film Studies
Film Studies
Film magazines are one of the big problems in our household “Are you really going to go on keeping them?” my wife asks There is the spark of auto-da-fé in her eye. She nods in the extensive direction of shelves bowed beneath the gravure paper, the surface of which has nearly rubbed away from use My Sight and Sounds, for instance. They go back to the late 1950s, and there’s a treasured item – the issue for autumn 1955 – where the tattered cover is separate from the body of the magazine. But I can’t let that cover go: it’s Françoise Arnoul and Jean Gabin dancing together in a still I’ve never seen elsewhere from Renoir’s French Cancan. As for the inside, it has “More Light” by Josef von Sternberg himself, a memoir that would appear later in his book, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, and there’s the second of two essays on Fritz Lang in America by Gavin Lambert.It’s absurd, with all the pressures on space we have, and it was sillier, decades ago, to ship the collection back and forth across the Atlantic when I wasn’t sure where I was going to be. I daresay they’re all on microfiche and the web now, but I love the silky things themselves, and the memories they bring back.
“But what about the videotapes,” my wife interrupts, “most of which are absolutely unfit for the children to see. Or me!”Well, I winced a few days ago when I read in Variety (bulky, but essential) that Cahiers du Cinéma was being revamped with “a snazzier design”. The circulation, it seems, was down to 25,000 and that has inspired the ownership – ultimately Le Monde – to employ a more up-to-date “look” and to have more stories on box office, strike measures, deal-making, and so on. All this was being done as part of an effort to help the magazine “break even”. I winced not at that vulgarity being imposed on Cahiers’ dense texts, but that my collection of it stopped back in the 1980s. I can only read stuff I don’t understand for 20 years or so.Except that, even schoolboy French could make enough of the yellow-covered days of Cahiers in the late 1950s and early 1960s to know it picked the right pictures to rant about and was a treasury of ravishing stills.
