The buzz word for this year’s Film London Jarman Award is diversity. Never has there been such an eclectic mix of eccentric, artistic, and unusual work competing for a single prize.
Since 2008 the award inspired by Maverick artist Derek Jarman has celebrated imagination, innovation, and experimentation in cinema.
With off-the-wall historical provocation like Rachel Maclean’s The Lion and the Unicorn and Uriel Orlow’s Yellow Limbo and Anatopism, and artificially-generated images concerned with insular obsession such as Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths by Ed Atkins and Osculator by Hannah Sawtell, Jarman’s legacy still has a strong pulse.
Last week these, and the six others shortlisted, were featured in an intriguing profile session at Manchester Cornerhouse, combining an X Factor-esque show and tell with a decidedly more inventive display of talent.
Grace Schwindt, whose film Tennant was one of the features, said: “The idea is to take systems apart, to undo systems, looking at small conversations.”
This was quite clear in her extraordinary film. A naked man sat across from an Asian woman at a table, and they talked of a couple separated by the Nazi state.
A small boy walked across the screen and unplugged a telephone, and a woman dressed a shark appeared and put a wet tissue over the woman’s face.
Destabilising, seemingly-unrelated images such as these are certainly pushing boundaries and through the medium of these sparsely-connected characters the themes of home, family and the disruption of war are vividly apparent.
M20 Death Drives by Emma Hart is also a strong contender. Narrating a 20-year-old car accident through a mish-mash of irons, calculators, and alcoholic drinks vaguely referred to in the recounting, Ms Hart captures the value of everyday objects when a sense of grounding is lost to us.
“There is a gap between the real world and how we capture it. What I want to do is make things a bit more messy,” she said.
Through her narrative passage on trauma and its mental repercussions she certainly achieves a phenomenally shambolic atmosphere of clutter – others were more difficult to comprehend.
Charlotte Prodger, whose film :-* is shortlisted this year, said: “In my work I am working through my ambivalent relationships with the moving image and minimalism.
“I am fascinated by the way desire gets sequenced online and how this sometimes works in tension with the messiness of human life.”
Such knotty and individual motivation is difficult for an audience, as was the means of narration. Through a series of personal emails, Ms Prodger overlays her voice on two strange YouTube clips featuring the slicing open of a trainer and an over-lengthy footsie session to create an altogether inexplicable piece of cinema.
Similarly, Pageant Roll by Jessica Warboys was too self-reflective and insular to invite the audience into its bizarre world.
Tracing the life of a painted egg, from rolling around in its entirety to being crushed on a hand, and panning a camera around stone structures is perhaps poetic, but like all good poetry it might take years to strike a chord with social understanding.
More simplistic than these unconventional creations is John Smith’s Dad’s Stick.
He said: “The perception of time is a recurring idea in my work, but films should speak for themselves.”
As the artists remembers his father the artist through a stick used to stir paint, along with a miscellany of other meaningful possessions, the passage of time, and its retrospective effect on those concerned, is as evident as the ingenuousness of this piece, which may be something of a dark horse.
The favourite, however, has to be Rachel Maclean’s The Lion and the Unicorn – a great political satire on the historic and ever-changing relationship between England and Scotland.
Created using dubbed voices, a wonderful and well-rooted setting, and some very eccentric but well-made costumes, Queen Elizabeth II and the absurd yet playful heraldic figures of these long-sparring nations talk through the thorny issues of devolution and the impending referendum.
“I am quite interested in the power that is inherent in the voice, but also the playful nature of taking someone else’s voice,” Ms Maclean said.
“The referendum is tied very much to the Scottish notion of independence, and on some level that’s absurd and I was keen to play with the absurdity of that, but I wanted it to be a more realistic space rather than a one-sided argument.
“Scottish identity is tied up with a sort of victimhood, and this victimisation is always interpreted as a romantic idea, but I didn’t intend to say anything definite.”
Despite the historical and topical weight of her subject matter, Ms Maclean’s film is also dryly funny.
“Humour can be a good way of talking about serious ideas, particularly in politics when things can be quite dry, especially as political discussions don’t always touch on the glaring aspects of national identity,” she said.
Still, film-making and viewing is all about the subjective experience. With this in mind the judging taking place before the announcement of who has won the prize on November 6 is sure to be as full of variety and individuality as the films themselves.
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