Spank The Monkey

SPANK GOLD: London Film Festival 1994

Here's an anniversary that I suspect will go sadly unmarked this year: in 2009 it'll be 15 years since the first ever London Film Festival website went on line. (The original site was deleted long ago, so that link points to a partial archive held on The Wayback Machine.) Back then, the internet was a mysterious entity way beyond the capabilities of mere mortals, so the site was actually made by the IBM PC User Group, primarily as a demonstration of the amazing things you could do with web pages. Okay, so it doesn't look that amazing now, but how many web sites were you coding in 1994? Give them a break.

Anyway, here are a few things to note regarding LFF 1994. The programme suddenly changed to an LP-sized square format, as illustrated. (But in the three years the LFF used this format, the cover artwork always consisted of a rectangular image with wasted space up both sides...) Ticket prices were pegged at the same level as 1993, while the LFF's residency at the Odeon West End was now up to two full weeks out of the 18 day run. This may have contributed to my decision to take a week off work to catch a few extra afternoon matinees - it was the start of the slippery slope towards the festival frenzy you're familiar with nowadays. Here's what I can remember of what I thought about what I saw.

SPANK GOLD: London Film Festival 1993

Before taking a look at the programme for the 1993 London Film Festival, let's take a look at the programme - as in, the printed booklet where they initially announced what films were going to be shown. In 1993, as in all the previous years I'd attended, it was a chunky A5 beast, an expanded version of the usual National Film Theatre monthly programme. This would be the last year it would appear in that format - between 1994 and 1996 they experimented with a clumsily oversized 12" square affair, before settling on the A4 magazine we still have to this day. 1993 was also the last year when a big name artist (in this case Eduardo Paolozzi) provided the programme cover image - subsequent years would be more geared towards anonymous-looking graphic design, which was a bit of a loss as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway, the main reason why I'm going on about the programme booklet is because my copy of the 1993 edition has a pull-out insert with all the pricing information. I must have lost the equivalent insert for 1992, otherwise I would have realised that was the year when the matinee voucher scheme was brought in for the first time. (The 1993 programme describes it as 'back by popular demand after last year's success'.) For those of you graphing the prices as they increase over the years: in 1993 you'd pay £5.95 for an NFT screening, £6.95 for one at the Odeon West End, £8.00 for the Opening and Closing Galas, and £40 for a set of ten matinee vouchers.

Nevertheless, even with that sort of deal, I still wasn't taking time off work to catch cheap matinees. It still surprises me just how restrained I was at these early Festivals - generally one film a weeknight, occasionally two, with a small splurge in the middle weekend. Here's what I remember about them.

SPANK GOLD: London Film Festival 1992

We're four months into the Spank Gold project, and it strikes me that I've been a bit lax in namechecking the people working behind the scenes at the London Film Festival. Suze may well assume/hope that Sandra Hebron and her fetish boots have been around since the beginning of the festival in 1957. But back in 1992, we had Sheila Whitaker instead. Don't let the link to Socialist Review fool you (it's the only picture of her I could find): Sheila was a fun Director of the LFF, as could be gleaned from the way she'd outrageously milk her introduction to the Surprise Film each year. With the aid of Deputy Director Rosa Bosch (think a Spanish female equivalent of Michael 'Low Fat Morrissey' Hayden),  she presided over the LFF throughout its thirties, guiding it through a major period of growth during which it expanded into the West End from its initial South Bank base.

The 1991 experiment of taking over both screens in the Odeon West End for a week continued in 1992. As a consequence, the programme started to take on a peculiar split personality, with clear lines being drawn between the commercial fare (almost exclusively shown in Leicester Square) and the artier stuff (almost exclusively kept in the NFT and ICA). The interesting thing to me, looking back at the programme now, is how much great stuff there was in terms of early works by future big name directors - and how many of them I missed out on at the time, notably Wong Kar-Wai, Ang Lee and Takeshi Kitano.

25 items to report on this time, though two of those lasted an entire day apiece. No weekday matinees at all this year. Ready to see how it all worked out?

SPANK GOLD: London Film Festival 1991

You've probably realised by now that the London Film Festivals in 1989 and 1990 don't bear much resemblance to the glossy, star-packed event we had in 2008. As Jon noticed from a casual flick through the programme while I was researching this piece, there was a lot more old-school arthouse filth showing in those days: the American independent sector was still finding its feet, and wasn't the dominant force in film festival programming that it is today. Also, those earlier festivals were physically much smaller affairs, with little room for big commercial premieres: most screenings were held at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank, with just the occasional foray into the West End.

1991 was the year that started to change. With the refashioning of the Odeon West End into a two-screen cinema, the LFF saw its opportunity to grab a prime location for the final week of the Festival. It was a huge success, giving them access to passing trade that they just couldn't get on the South Bank. Over the next couple of years, that one week expanded to two: and soon the Odeon had taken over from the NFT as the home of the LFF, with a subsequent skewing of the programme towards more mainstream fare.

It's an arrangement that's just come to a screeching halt - the 2008 Festival turned out to be the last one to be held at the Odeon. By the time this October comes around, work will have commenced on tearing down that entire block of Leicester Square in order to build another hotel. As yet, there's been no announcement about where the 2009 LFF will hold its West End events: perhaps the Vue, or the Curzon Soho, or somewhere else entirely.

In the meantime, back to 1991. Only twenty films in total, with no weekday matinees at all: pressure of work appears to have been the cause. Funny: in my memory I've assumed that I always took loads of time off for the Festival, but it seems that didn't really start happening for at least another couple of years. Still, let's see how those twenty films panned out.

SPANK GOLD: London Film Festival 1990

I'll have to try and be tasteful about this. By now, you've read the introduction to the Spank Gold series, and seen how in 1989 I put in motion several schemes to make myself more socially active. You've probably jumped to certain conclusions based on the evidence, and yes, you'd be right: I wasn't getting any at the time, since you ask.

And then, suddenly, in the autumn of 1990, I was. I'd like to be able to say that my diary fizzled out from that point into an unreadable scrawl, but that wouldn't be true. It would, however, be true to say that I'd abandoned the diary by December of that year, because I had better things to do.

But here's the thing: I had so many better things to do, that it ate into the number of films I saw that year. The article below tells the story: a mere 22 events, roughly half the quantity that I catch most years. I can tell you're shocked. Anyhoo, I was still keeping the diary back in November, so let's see what I had to say about this lot.

SPANK GOLD: London Film Festival 1989

1989 was a busy year, as I've already noted elsewhere. Within a couple of months of frying my brain with the overload of my first ever Edinburgh Festival, I was doing it all over again with my first ever London Film Festival. And it's a similar story to Edinburgh, really: I dived straight in, made quite a few mistakes, but made sure I learned from them for future years.

The main mistake I made here was to do with weekday matinees. No cheapo matinee vouchers in those days, meaning I had to pay the full ticket price of (gulp) £4.50 for every screening. But somehow, I'd got it into my head that I could do my day job and see lots of films simultaneously: or more accurately, spend a week working mornings in the office, and seeing films in the afternoons and evenings. Inevitably, this left me a complete and total nervous wreck: in future years, I'd experiment with taking more and more days off work to dedicate totally to the LFF. 

As for my choices of films back then... well, you'll have to read on and see how that turned out. I was still keeping my 1989 diary as late as November, so I've got contemporary records of what I thought of everything when I saw it. I reserve the right to change my mind, though.

Spank's LFF Diary: The Wrap Party 2008

[LFF index: 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008]

In a tradition that's now lasted eleven years and counting, here's our final summary of the high and low points of the 2008 London Film Festival, brought to you about a week or so after everyone else has stopped caring.

Spank's LFF Diary, Thursday 30/10/2008

Reviewed today: Babin, New Town Killers, Slumdog Millionaire, Yah Chayka!

Spank's LFF Diary, Wednesday 29/10/2008

Reviewed today: Charlie Kaufman Masterclass, Night And Day.

Spank's LFF Diary, Tuesday 28/10/2008

Reviewed today: The Brothers Bloom, Not Quite Hollywood, Synecdoche New York.