What do you get when you put two couples in a room for the first time and add cutthroat tension and a bottle of scotch? Arguments, passive-aggressiveness, puke and well… just pure carnage. You wouldn’t expect such behaviour from bohemians Penelope and Michael (played by Jodie Foster and John C Reilly) and business types Nancy and Alan (played by Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz) when we first meet them. After all, they are adults who are trying to work out a dispute between their sons. They have come together to make peace (or at least we think that is what they were trying to do...)

Things get prickly from the start and it all goes downhill when no one is willing to let either the smallest things go (though the seemingly pleasant Michael stealing his child’s hamster and leaving it on the street probably isn’t a small thing). You can almost feel the tension coming out of the cinema screen and the middle class couples grit their teeth whilst getting sly digs in here and there. Alliances are made and broken and war is announced between the couples, the men and the women and even three on one at one point. We won’t spoil it, but there’s an incident between Nancy and Penelope’s beautiful coffee table books, which is unbelievably funny and unfortunate...

Carnage is entirely set in real time and in one New York apartment, which could have the potential to be a bit grim, but it actually works fantastically well. Roman Polanski adapted it from Yasmina Reza’s stage play, God of Carnage. There’s an interesting interview on The Guardian online where she talks about her experience of working with Polanski if you want to find out more. We were able to catch it at the Member’s Preview a few weeks ago and just couldn’t stop laughing.

The incredibly funny Carnage is out today. You can book tickets online, in person at the box office, or by calling 0871 902 5737.  
 
 

To coincide with our current exhibition, Republic of The Moon at FACT, we've challenged year 6 students from St Patricks’ Catholic Primary School to explore what it they think it would be like to visit the Moon.

They are working with Photographer Sue Sumner to create their own versions of the moons surface using everything from Gobstoppers to cheese as inspiration. During their exploration they will use macro photography, portraiture and creative writing techniques to create a fantastic exhibition for FACT visitors.

They have shared this sneak preview of their photos to date and you can come along and see the full exhibition on FACT’s ArteFACT wall on our first floor from 11 – 26 February.





 

Love to make crafty bits and want to find out more about making a bit of extra income with your talents? Then come along to the FACT bar on Monday between 6pm and 9pm. We have invited some successful sellers from top craft selling sites Folksy and Etsy to help answer your questions on how to sell your craft to the world.

If you don’t know already, both these sites are the ebay of the craft world, selling home made goods, original designs, vintage and craft materials. The evening will be hosted by Kirsty Jones, or Freshly Freckled if you want to use her Folksy pseudonym. Check out her page here, we love the Chipmunk Woodland Jar!

So if this sounds up your street, bring along your projects and get advice and inspiration from fellow crafters whilst having a good chat too!

If you would like to know more, or want to be more involved than just turning up on the night, get in touch with Kirsty by emailing liverpool@picturehouses.co.uk





 

Kosmica is a monthly event run by The Arts Catalyst that brings together people interested in sharing cultural ideas about space and will take over The Box at FACT tonight (check out this previous blog for more info)

We were excited to find out that there will be a special screening of Ulrike Kubatta’s She Should Have Gone to the Moon, a documentary about the American Pilot Jerri Truhill. She was a pilot in the 1950s and joined 12 other people to be secretly trained to become America’s first female astronauts as part of the Mercury 13. Originally more than 100 pilots had been invited, those with more than 1000 hours of flight time, but it was only 13 that could pass the strenuous testing. (This involved the freezing of the inner ear and electric shocks!) Unfortunately the Mercury 13 never made it to the moon, the male prejudice at the time proved too much. The first woman in space was Russian, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963, American had their first woman in space 20 years after this.

She Should Have Gone to the Moon explores the question - what was it like to get so close to leaving the Earth’s atmosphere but still keeping your feet firmly on the ground? Instead of making a “normal documentary”, the director puts herself in Jerrie’s shoes, trying to get just a taste of what it might have been like to be her in the 1960s as well as interviewing Jerri in the present day.

Kosmica will take place between 7pm – 10pm tonight and Ulrike be on hand to introduce her film. Entry is free, but tickets required. Book online, in person at the Box Office, or by calling 0871 902 5737. 

The Descendants is in good company in this year's Oscar nominations list, third only to The Artist and Hugo after gaining five including best actor in a leading role for George Clooney and best director for Sideways’ Alexander Payne. Not bad!

The film is set in Hawaii and is an adaptation from the novel of the same name by Kaui Hart Hemmings. George Clooney plays a middle aged lawyer called Matt who has labelled himself, “the back-up parent” and who the Guardian have labelled… 'like Peep Show’s Super Hans!' He enjoys staying in the background when it comes to the kids as he has other things to do, like sealing the deal on the sale of his ancestor’s land in the tropical paradise.  

This family dynamic changes when Matt’s wife is put in a coma after a speedboat accident. He has to step up his parenting game but soon realises that he doesn’t actually know that much about his 10 and 17 year old daughters. Things also get more complicated when Matt finds out that his wife was having an affair at the time of her accident.

By questioning what it means to be a family in the mixed up world of Matt, The Descendants lies somewhere in between a comedy and a drama. If its nominations are anything to go by, it is definitely one not to be missed.  

You can buy tickets for The Descendants online, in person at the Box Office, or by calling 0871 902 5737. 


 

Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans is a tale of sex, threats, murder and a bit more of all three for good measure. Made in 1927, it was one of the last great films of the silent film era as Hollywood was moving onto the “talkies” and directed by German director, F.W. Murnau.  

A 1920s femme fatale (dress head to toe in black satin smoking that all important cigarette) has arrived in a small farming community on vacation and has set her sights on a young farmer. That wouldn’t be so bad, except the farmer is already married. She dances a crazed dance and the farmer cannot get her, and her promises of a better life, out of his head. There is witchcraft afoot. Soon the femme fatale entices the farmer into plotting the plan for a perfect murder, the murder of his wife. 

The characters in Sunrise don’t actually have names, this is meant to give the viewer the sense of a universal love story (though how universal a love story is which involves the murdering of your wife… I am not sure!) The first intertitle reads, “this song of the Man and his Wife is of no place and every place; you might hear it anywhere, at any time”. Pretty menacing...

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans will be screening at 4.30pm on Sunday. You can buy tickets online, in person at the Box Office, or by calling 0871 902 5737 

Michael Szpakowski, one of the artists featured in tonight's Artist Cine Club tells us what to expect...

For the last four or five years filmmaker Kerry Baldry has been curating and organising national and international showings of selections of artist made films united by the sole criterion of being a minute or less in length. Each ‘volume’ is between 50 minutes and an hour in length and features both long standing and well known makers of artist film, such as Guy Sherwin, Steven Ball and Catherine Elwes but spans the whole gamut to newcomers and ‘outsiders’ too.

The first three volumes were compiled on an invitation basis, volumes 4 & 5 as the result of both invitations and an open call.

Baldry has received no funding for this; it is a labour of love and it is all the more impressive that she not only compiles and elegantly sequences the volumes but seems, in a quiet way, to be unable to take no for an answer when it comes to arranging screenings.

There’s a long history of valuing the miniature in most art traditions; the Japanese netsuke (and of course the haiku, a form that springs insistently to my mind at least when I watch many of these films), the Indian and Persian miniature, the place of the study, sketch, album-leaf and impromptu at the heart of the European cultural tradition and a cult of the fragment arising out of the material circumstances of the transmission of the European Greek and Roman heritage – Catullus, Sappho &c. and the subsequent reflection of this, particularly in a strain of 19th century romanticism.

Apart from the general cultural antecedents of the One Minutes there’s a particular tale to tell in moving image: the quality of being both lapidary and epic that pertains to the early films of the Lumière brothers, then the gigantism that gripped some of the greats of the experimental film tradition –Brakhage, Markopoulos, Frampton, the pithy one-liners (even when long!) of Fluxus and the narrowing down of size that came with the opportunity in the, perhaps less market driven than today, late sixties through to the early eighties for artist film to get a showing on TV, sometimes as ‘interventions’, sometimes in small gaps between programmes, sometimes in dedicated late night strands, the influence too of a growing tendency to present in galleries as well as screenings.

Finally, of course, in 2005, came YouTube. I’m not arguing that the films you’ll see here tonight have all been directly influenced by YouTube and video on the net (some clearly have, but the making of a number of them preceded both innovations) but that our tolerance of and understanding of short form video, which enables a programme like this to seem not only possible but almost inevitable, arises out of the new relationship with the moving image that sitting closely in front of a monitor and watching (until very recently) works that were of necessity somehow miniature, has gifted us. (Miniature, initially, both in window size and length, now to some extent still length, though the whole ground is shifting again substantially.) Actually I’d argue that the one thing missing in the public showings of the One Minutes is that ability to pause, to replay, almost to ‘handle’ characteristic of the PC – perhaps a DVD for sale sometime?

I want to say a bit about the films themselves.

There are some kinds of content that extreme short form moving image seems to make particularly welcome:

• What might be called the unlooped loop where one could conceivably start and finish at any point, where the content is abstract or non-representational.
• The one liner – often, but not always, humorous - where the whole piece unfolds inevitably out of a single initial premise (and as you’ll see, the form does lend itself particularly well to humour)
• Animation (and here the precise and fluent control at the level of the frame made possible through digital technology allows for a quite remarkable level of carefully structured visual incident within a very short time frame)
• The documentary – characterised sometimes by what stills photographers would call the decisive moment – the camera is there, ready to capture something beautiful, absurd, terrifying, touching or, indeed, all of those. At other times simply be an examination - an exercise in close looking and wonder.
• The juxtaposition – here’re two or three things, facts, events, views, objects put together in some way – often the whole will be more than the sum of its parts. Or the process lays the sometimes well-camouflaged fact of editing bare upon the surgeon’s table. Or a strange found poetry is discovered.

Finally, and in conclusion I throw this down as a kind of gauntlet, there’s a very special kind of one minute film where, after seeing it, we blink our eyes in disbelief that only a minute has passed because what we have just seen seems to have been so packed with incident or so suggestive of the breadth and wonder of the world we live in, or has brought forth so many powerful and (we thought) long buried resonances from our unconscious. 

I have no intention of identifying my two or three candidates in this volume for that kind of richness. I leave it to you, dear reader, to watch attentively and thoughtfully and decide which are yours.

Michael Szpakowski  Jan 2012
Artist, writer and Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at Writtle College

Note:

(1) There’s a fairly substantial review by me of the first four volumes of the series in the forthcoming first issue of the Moving Image Review and Journal, which should be out in the next few weeks. www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=207/

In connection with that review I posted a few examples from previous volumes on the curated video site I edit: DVblog.org www.dvblog.org//?p=8049 / www.dvblog.org//?p=6212

and there’s another piece by Kerry Baldry here: www.dvblog.org//?p=6270

Kosmica is a monthly event run by The Arts Catalyst that brings together people interested in sharing cultural ideas about space (moon colonisation, hunting aliens, space kitchen equipment… you get the drift). It is venturing out of London for the first time to accompany the current exhibition, Republic of the Moon, here at FACT on 31 January.

This month’s Kosmica is programmed by WE COLONISED THE MOON (who have a weekend astronaut in residence in our Gallery 1) and artist and curator Nahum Mantra who coordinates ITACCUS (International Astronautical Federation’s Technical Committee on the Cultural Utilisation of Space)!  The all female line up will include presentations by Hilde de Bruijn of the Moon Life Foundation, Space Psychologist Dr Iya Whiteley, Bee Thakore of the Planetary Society and filmmaker Ulrike Kubatta.

The Moon Life Foundation’s mission statement speculates on the possibility that humans will live in space in the future and with that in mind, the foundation invites artists, architects and designers to create futuristic and radical concepts for an extreme lunar environment. One thing that it has produced is the Moon Life Concept Store, which contains products for life on the Moon developed by artists, designers and architects at the foundation’s Moon Academy.  Some of its products include a compass that would always point to Earth, a Vogue from the year 2050 and a handbook about daily life on the Moon, all essential items for a future space explorer. 


Photo: Ilya Rabinovich

Kosmica Liverpool will take place at FACT on the 31 January from 7pm – 10pm. Entry is free but booking is required. You can get your tickets online, in person at the Box Office or by calling 0871 902 5737. Watch this space for a preview of other featuring artists in Kosmica!