Spank's LFF Diary, Wednesday 16/10/2024

Reviewed today: Official Competition Shorts (A-Ma), One To One: John & Yoko, Silent Sherlock: Three Classic Cases.

12.00pm: One To One: John & Yoko [trailer]

Sometimes, you’re just trying to fill a slot. We’ve taken eight days off from our jobs to attend this festival, and it seems like a waste to not see any films during the daytime, so once in a while you hit drought days when you end up just grabbing a ticket for whatever’s available. No disrespect to Kevin Macdonald, one of our finest documentary makers. But it’s not that long since we spent eight hours watching the early days of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s relationship in Get Back: and earlier this year we saw a couple of rooms dedicated to what happened after that at the Beatles Story exhibition in Liverpool. They’re one of the most heavily documented couples of the 20th century: is there really anything new that can be said about them?

Actually, it turns out that there is. Macdonald’s approach is to focus on one specific time period: the two years that John and Yoko spent living in a two-room apartment in Greenwich Village. Macdonald’s camera prowls around what appears to be a spookily accurate recreation of that apartment, if the one contemporary photo we see of it is anything to go by. More often than not, the camera comes to rest on their TV, which was an important part of their home life: Lennon in particular took the optimistic view that it gave him “a window to the world”.

That world was in a pretty turbulent state between 1971 and 1973, and Macdonald uses fast-cut clips of news broadcasts, entertainment shows and commercials to set the historical context. Early on, it starts to look like the film’s going to be 10% John and Yoko, and 90% random clips (though they’re entertaining as hell, with some witty juxtapositions). But gradually they settle into showing you the turmoil that pushed Lennon into becoming more politically active: the continuing war in Vietnam, the victimisation of hippies, the campaign to give Nixon a second term as president. (We also get a brief reference to Watergate, the setup for a payoff that wouldn’t come for several years.) Meanwhile, Ono is always by Lennon’s side whatever he does, but also doing her own thing: attending feminist conferences, and continuing her art work. (One of the funniest subplots in the film involves her assistants trying to get hold of a thousand or so flies for one of her pieces.)

Aside from the two characters at its centre, John & Yoko is a great time capsule of the early 70s Greenwich Village scene, with most of the big names passing through as cameos. There's Allen Ginsberg, claiming the West will fail because we keep using toilet paper instead of washing our bums: Jerry Rubin, preaching revolution on prime time TV: AJ Weberman, rifling through Bob Dylan’s dustbins to prove he’s now a capitalist pig: and many more. And if you’re worried that all this doesn’t leave much room for music, don’t worry, we get that as well. At the centre of this film is some lovingly restored footage from a charity gig the couple played at Madison Square Garden, for a cause they first found out about... from a TV news report. See? It’s a much smarter linking device than we thought.

3.15pm: Short Film Competition (A-Ma) [watch all shorts here]

Once again, the ten shorts in competition for this year's LFF award are available for anyone in the UK to view on the BFI Player (or at least until Sunday 20th October: I'm not sure if they'll still be around once the festival ends). Vote here before Wednesday 23rd once you've decided what your favourite is. As for me, I'll be looking at five of them now, and the other five in a couple of days.

We're taking them in alphabetical order, and I'll rattle through the first three fairly quickly. Juliana Kasumu's Adura Baba Mi [official site] is a very personal film in which the director talks to her parents about coming to the UK from Nigeria, and what their religion meant to them. The film of their church back in Nigeria has one notable quirk: where they'd normally have a depiction of Christ on the wall, they've got a poster of Robert Powell. Ellen Evans' Cold Snap [official site] is the sole live-action narrative short in this set, a quietly intense mother-daughter drama with a surprisingly resonant final shot. And Lisa Ott's Dragfox [official site]  is a cute animated fable about a young boy who tries on his sister’s dress, and an Ian McKellen-voiced fox who tells him it’s okay to do that. It's largely built around a musical number by the fox, and unfortunately the song's a bit too on the nose for it to really work.

Sarnt Utamachote's I Don’t Want To Be Just A Memory [official site] is another personal documentary, a detailed portrait of the queer scene in Berlin. It looks at the breakdown in its mental health that's happened since the pandemic, and the communities that are trying to drag people out of their isolation and back into the world. There's a lot of intriguing imagery and words here, but they're thrown together in a haphazard order that suggests the film’s aimed more at the community themselves, rather than at outsiders unfamiliar with the people being commemorated.

Given the undeniable emotional heft of Memory, it feels wrong to be saying that the best film out of these five is the cartoon for kids, but here we are. Daisuke Nishio's Magic Candies [official site] tells the story of a young loner whose life changes when he gets hold of half a dozen sweets with magic powers. The sweets give a nice chapter-based structure to the story, and zig-zag between being whimsical and just life-lessony enough. Probably my favourite so far, but we’ve still got five more to go.

7.30pm: Silent Sherlock: Three Classic Cases [trailer]

When they do screenings of old silent films, they should get the accompanists to play the music for that year’s LFF trailer too. Just a suggestion.

Nine years ago, we got to see a restoration of the first ever Sherlock Holmes film from 1916. Now, the BFI are leaping forward to the early 1920s, and presenting the first fruits of a major restoration programme of the Stoll Films adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories - a project which will eventually run to 45 shorts and two features.

They've chosen to premiere these films in a venue that was active at the time they were made, the Alexandra Palace Theatre, with an accompaniment by a band of ten musicians from the Royal Academy of Music, conducted by Joanna MacGregor on the piano. It's a perfect location for the event in every aspect bar one: the sound is terrible, with the PA system adding a heavy reverb to everything we can hear in the balcony seats. I could live with it if I wasn’t committed to coming back to this venue in 48 hours... but that’s another story.

We have three half-hour adventures, all starring Eille Norwood as the great detective, a more thoughtful and dramatic depiction than the one William Gillette gave us in 1916. (Norwood was Conan Doyle's favourite Holmes, apparently.) Each one has a score written by a different composer, starting off with Joseph Havlat's music for A Scandal In Bohemia. In terms of both plot and music, it's the lightest of the three: it isn't really a classic case, more the Irene Adler origin story. It is, however, a good introduction to the idea that whenever you see a previously unseen character on screen for more than a few seconds, it’ll usually be Holmes in an outrageous disguise.

Veteran of LFF silent screenings Neil Brand is next up, and his score for The Golden Pince-Nez is up to his usual high standard. It's probably the most traditional of the three, as befits the only film in this set where Holmes does any proper detecting: within seconds of examining the only clue on the crime scene, he's deduced the murderer's gender and nose size. Watson (Hubert Willis) even gets a proper ‘but Holmes, I don’t understand...’ scene at the end.

Joanna MacGregor gets the best job of the lot, scoring The Final Problem. After a slow start where Holmes is moping around his house complaining that three attempts have been made to kill him so far today, it's all action: a daring raid on Moriarty’s lair, some skullduggery at Waterloo station, and the final confrontation between Moriarty and Holmes (relocated to Cheddar Gorge for budgetary purposes). That’s a lot of drama in 25 minutes, and MacGregor throws everything at it – including what sounds to me like a cheeky quote from the score of Vertigo over the final few seconds, if you know what I mean. So, congratulations to the Alexandra Palace Theatre on the occasion of its first LFF event, but please try to fix the acoustics by Friday so that everything doesn't sound like a Gary Glitter record.