Video
The first festival
Duncan FaIlowell There are more video machines in Great Britain, per head of population, than anywhere else in the world, and now in honour of the puberty of a marvellously flexible new art form the International Video Festival has begun here, thought up by Norrie Maclaren, the concept-artist from Fort William. After three weeks of frantic screenings organised by him and the concept-actress Jenny Runacre in various quaint parts of Chelsea, the first festival, 11 and the first ever of its kind, came to an end at the weekend among applause, catcalls, and broken glass in a garden strung with fairy lights off the King's Road. But it wasn't just another concept. There were over 300 entries in five categories feature, documentary, music, art, anima- tion — and the winners were presented With, among other things, wooden cats which will presumably turn into bronze as the event acquires eclat — and money. At the moment what it has is élan, although already reputations are being made, others trodden on — Denis Norden's daughter was eSPecially piqued that her highly parochial Posers, about young mutants and new romantics flashing each other in the King's "ad, had no laurels flung at it. But to ig- nore the Chelsea ghetto in the interests of a wider world was wise of the judges, who in-' eluded incidentally Diana Quick, the non- Concept-actress from Brideshead Revisited (she still pronounces her 'es as if Chewing `tried figs), and Michael White, the im- Presario famous for putting on parties. , Video has done for film-making what the box camera did for photography: Ruined it. The moving image has been freed from the obligation to be institutionalised, profes- sional, and obvious. Because video is simple IIoUse, portable and relatively cheap, it is .‘v possible to pursue your celluloid fan- tasises without recourse to EMI or MGM or having to endure lunch and humiliation With television executives. As a result the world of video makers has more in common with the world of books, the world of neurotic personal statement, than with the world of film. It is full of variety and inten- sity, of young men twitching with grievance, older men unhappily obsessed by the Patterns created on an eau de nil carpet by slowly melting jelly, concept-artists, con- 1 a. rtists, even artists proper, women who've lust about had enough — or not enough maybe. Of the last the most memorable was Vivienne Dick's Beauty Becomes the Beast, 'an exercise in anarcho-punk feminism' starring Lydia Lunch who's clearly had more than enough of something.
The films seemed to resolve into three basic types: arty, angry, silly. A fourth type — dirty — was sadly missing, and that the organisers were frightened of being arrested is a rather lame excuse. Art and sex are not illegal and the police are only really worried about so-called 'splatter' films where sex meets violence.
The winner of the Golden Eyeball, the main prize of £500 presented by Time Out magazine for best overall film, was ex- tremely arty, Studio Work in which sheets of painted polythene turn prettily in the light, made by Philip Aird, a student at the Chelsea College of Art. Far, far too soothing. Sharper and more modern was the winner of the art category per se, Domestic Arrangements by Bristol Univer- sity in which Sarah Broadpiece talks about her soap phalluses while the camera ex- plores.
When it comes to anger the video is being used the way the 17th century used the pam- phlet, although the vocabulary differs. The big word here is 'struggle' which has the ad- vantage at least of being rather more lively than 'alienation'. For example Jose Romanillos — Guitar Maker by Andrew Jackson: 'Jose's struggle for life in a politically oppressed society is juxtaposed with the struggle of man against wood.'
The angriest film by far was UndeRage, currently showing at the ICA. Made by Kim Longinotto and Lizzie Lemon, it is a reminder of how little hope there is in the wastelands north of Aylesbury. Here the struggle is to be noticed at all. To this end Coventry skinheads cover themselves in tat- tooes, shave their heads, and generally simulate the appearance of convicts — in 58 minutes they express their unpleasant and frightening emotions. A group of Coventry councillors succeeded in getting the film banned from a showing in the Midlands because it fails to present their city as being full of geraniums and fresh orange juice. You've read the novels perhaps — William Burroughs's The Wild Boys, Anthony Burgess's Clockwork Orange. Now try the reality.
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