| Emily James on climate direct action film Just Do It The 'wilfully optimistic' film-maker Emily James talks about the frustrations of filming direct action and how she hopes to harness the power of the crowd to fund the projectWhen you're filming environmental activists who make dawn raids on airports and attempt to invade power stations, you can't really write up a filming schedule. That was one of the first things film-maker Emily James had to learn in the making of Just Do It, an upcoming documentary about the climate direct action movement in the UK which she is currently in the painful process of raising money to finish. James says: "I'd get a call, giving me a time and a meet point, and the issue – like, it's a coal action. Sometimes you'd have no idea what time you'd be home again, and with some actions we'd meet the day before and then, for security reasons, nobody would be able to leave again till the action had taken place." The project came into being after a friend involved in anti-aviation expansion group Plane Stupid asked James, a National Film and Television School-trained film-maker who had been the executive producer on the Age of Stupid climate movie, to come along and film the group blockading part of Stansted airport. James explains Just Do It's genesis: Even then I wanted to film what was happening before and after. I could really see the possibility of making a documentary about these people, who were engaged on a huge endeavour. So I asked if I could film the discussions leading up to the action, and got a resounding no. People were really concerned about the safety implications, worried that they could be implicated on conspiracy charges. But being a stubborn pigheaded sort of person I kept on going, and went to talk to legal firms about ways of managing the problem, and over time we worked out ways of being secure and keeping the tapes away from the authorities.Still struggling to get the access she needed, she went down to film the demonstrations at the G20 in London last year, and was one of the only cameras still there when the police, having "kettled" the Climate Camp protest on Bishopsgate, finally began to release the protesters at midnight. The Climate Camp legal team used some of her footage in the subsequent row, "and after that I think they saw me as a trusted person". James now had unprecedented access to meetings and actions by Climate Camp, Plane Stupid and Climate Rush, and over the next year would log more than 300 hours of film. But getting the access, it turned out, was just the first of many knotty problems in a job that has completely taken over her life during the past two years. Of making choices during filming, for example, James says: "It's oddly difficult to film direct action, because you just don't know what's going to happen, you feel like you're constantly in the wrong place and worrying about should I follow this guy or that guy, or be over there." In the edit suite now she finds herself sometimes banging her head against the wall, wondering why she hadn't gone that way or round that corner. "I sometimes catch myself trying to justify it to myself. It can be incredibly frustrating."And the finances of the film have been just as hair-raising. Early on in the process James began the usual round of looking for a commission before realising that with a subject this legally sensitive any broadcasting channel would demand compromises that she just wasn't prepared to make. Instead she is hoping to make a radical funding model work; Lush cosmetics have agreed to donate £10,000 match funding and she is hoping to persuade people to donate small amounts of money in return for promises of advance downloads, or tickets to the film premiere, depending on how much they give.In the end the whole film has depended on this kind of collective outsourcing effort; dealing with the 300 hours of logged footage, for example, was helped along by editors who volunteered through the film industry network Shooting People to take away big chunks of film and edit them down to manageable sorts of sizes. "We had some really great people give us their time, including one guy from Top Gear, who wanted to kind of offset what he did with a project like this one." Other video makers who were at the demos gave James some of their footage, and the whole project has been supported throughout by volunteers, even if they had no more technical skill than making tea. At her most upbeat, James hopes that enough buzz can be created around the project to get it off the ground. "People from a business background think we're being naive. But we're really not; we do understand how the business world works. I prefer to think of us as being wilfully optimistic." Does she advocate this as a model for other films? God no. But for this particular type of film, where you have a subject that a great number of people really care about and feel is worthwhile, I think it can really work. The idea that crowds can come together and make things happen in a way that didn't happen before, the power of swarms, the power of the crowd, these are the sorts of ideas that we're tapping into with this film. And that's what direct action is all about too. On so many levels it makes sense." It's harder to manage though, I say. James laughs, and says with feeling: "It's all hard to manage. But I've had experiences I'll never forget." She picks out the Climate Swoop on Ratcliffe on Soar power station a year ago as a particularly memorable day:1,500 people openly stating a date, openly working together to stop the power station working. People walked right up to the fence in front of the police in open defiance, but without anger. They were saying: 'We've politely asked you to stop burning coal and you haven't listened, so we're just going to stop you.' It was quixotic and a little mad, a really incredible day. It's been good to work with people who can't just sit back and watch climate change happen, but want to stand up do something.ActivismProtestClimate CampClimate changeDocumentaryBibi van der Zeeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Carlos makes me nostalgic for terrorism the way it used to be Islamist extremists simply don't have enough idiot poster girls to make good movies, argues John PattersonWhy have film-makers recently become – if it's the right word – nostalgic for the old-school political terrorism of the 1970s? Movies are popping up everywhere about the glamour boys and girls of such deformed and often demented political groupings as West Germany's Red Army Faction and the Japanese United Red Army. Now there's Carlos, Olivier Assayas's five-hour globetrotting epic about the life of peripatetic assassin, kidnapper, Opec hostage-taker and ideologically addled playboy terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sánchez, AKA Carlos the jackal.Me, I blame al-Qaida, with their nihilism and grotesque misogyny, their stated preference for death over life and, worst of all, their world-beating humourlessness. (It took Chris Morris, in Four Lions, to find the laffs in Islamofascism.)Jeez, lighten up, fellas. Watching these guys dropping new fatwa videos and declarations of total war on, like, everything, one almost can't help but cast one's mind wistfully back to those halcyon days when sexy leftwingers far too young to be so insane were hijacking planes, kidnapping industrialists or purging their own ranks with Maoist zeal. And their (relative) lack of misogyny meant that there were plenty of pretty young women among their ranks; at a time when monogamy was considered bourgeois, reactionary, and ungroovy, baby, the free love flowed like spiked Kool-Aid.My enthusiasm for lefty terrorism gone bonkers derives from the fact that I find extreme ideological fanaticism incredibly funny, and because it often went hand-in-hand with formidable displays of incompetence. Carlos, for example, was forever shooting the wrong target or buggering up the simplest of kidnappings, as he morphed into a rock star revolutionary. Whenever Gudrun Ensslin, in The Baader-Meinhof Complex, starts a sentence with, "We know that Mao said …" you know that her rapt audience of ex-mental patients and disaffected students will hang on her every idiotic word (perhaps because she's played by the sextastically dead-eyed Johanna Wokalek).Just as the Faction meanly turned on comrade Ulrike Meinhof once they were banged up in Stannheim, so too did the Japanese Red Army engage in a quite blood-curdling auto-cull, chillingly related in the 2007 movie United Red Army. Holed up in the mountains in the winter of 1971, one faction managed to kill off – by shooting or by tying them up naked in the snow – no less than 14 members of its own nutty band, which only numbered 29 in the first place; the remnant went down in a violent siege on live TV. Next to them, the Angry Brigade looked like snoozing peaceniks.One thing's for sure: Islamist extremists won't get any decent movies made about them until they recruit more women prone to toplessness and mass murder. And somehow I think that glass ceiling remains indestructible.John Pattersonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The drama and arthouse 25: in pictures The complete set of our critics' top choices. Just click the film title for more information guardian.co.uk |
How Frank Capra laid the foundations for the Tea Party Evergreen satire Meet John Doe shows the little people being used by the media to serve its own ends. Sounds familiar, says John PattersonSometimes I blame Frank Capra for Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell. Capra's evergreen 1939 melodrama in the form of a civics lesson, Mr Smith Goes To Washington, peddles the notion that our most desirable elected representative isn't the richest, canniest or best-connected professional politician, but the honest, untutored back-country hick with a love for the founding fathers – or, failing that, Jimmy Stewart himself.It turns out that Capra, the director most closely associated with the 1930s, era of the Great Depression, had mixed feelings about The People whom the majority of his movies celebrate, and who are by and large depicted by him as dignified, funny, resilient and honest. The famous bus ride scene in his masterpiece It Happened One Night, when passengers take turns on verses of That Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze, is one of the finest evocations of on-screen togetherness and good cheer in economic turmoil. Capra, a Republican and later quite the commie-hunter, here celebrated working-class solidarity better than any left-leaning studio hack.Compare that warm scene with the climax of his far bleaker Meet John Doe, released seven months before Pearl Harbor into a frightened and isolationist America still mired in recession. The movie features Gary Cooper as a hobo who takes on the identity of an anonymous letter-writer, "John Doe" – who threatens public suicide to protest the callousness of society – entirely conjured up by reporter Barbara Stanwyck. As John Doe, Cooper begins to believe the things he's supposed to have written, and goes along with the pretence. Grassroots John Doe clubs spring up nationwide – like Glenn Beck's "9/12" clubs – as cynical politicians seek to harness this political energy for their own ends. Chief among these is DB Norton (Capra's favourite American fascist, Edward Arnold), who arrives at the climactic John Doe rally accompanied by his own private army of black-clad motorcycle outriders. Exposed as a fraud, Doe will finally ponder suicide for real. Here, Capra's People are deluded saps, suckers, cannon-fodder for causes not their own. All of which puts me in mind of the Tea Party, an incoherent typhoon of xenophobic lusts and recriminatory pathologies, already co-opted by political manipulators like the Norton-esque Koch brothers, and a Republican establishment desperate to annex itself some political vigour.Meet John Doe is the legitimate ancestor of media satires like A Face In The Crowd and Network. Like them, it fears the gullible, self-pitying audience as much as it loathes the media; right now it feels like it was filmed last week.By the bitter end, many may agree with Walter Brennan's wise hobo, The Colonel: "I don't read the papers. I already know the world's been shaved by a drunken barber, so I don't need 'em!"Tea Party movementJohn Pattersonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
British film emerges largely unscathed - but is that fair? Ed Vaizey keeps faith with funding the film industry, even if the UK Film Council goes. But why does film get all the help, while other creative industries get zilch... It's the story of a group of every day seamstresses whose demand for equal pay in the sixties has been saved for the nation. Not that Made in Dagenham was in jeopardy, but the future funding of British films like it was uncertain ahead of today's annnouncement by Ed Vaizey. But his largely sensible plan to keep the funding for British film going (even at the cost of wiping out the well meaning UK Film Council) shows you how important government intervention can be in supporting the media and creative industries.In film there is something approaching a functioning industrial policy, with the Tories have had the good sense not to dismantle. There's the slim £15m slice of annual lottery money that has gone to support British film, but that pales against the £100m a year of support that Hollywood and other big producers get from the tax breaks that are worth 16% or 20% of budget depending on how much is spent. It is that cash which has helped prop up the boom in film making in the UK, which is running at record levels - which in turn supports the jobs and skills of the future.That is the real core of British film policy, not, sadly, the UK FC that administered the lottery cash that went into the likes of Made in Dagenham. But beyond the healthy picture for inward investment, there is no British film industry, in that there are no British film companies (with the debatable exception of Working Title, which has long been Hollywood owned). A decade or more of lottery support, and bits of money from Channel 4 and the half interested BBC, have not had anything like the impact that had once been hoped where the emergence of indie studios were one of the aims.Nevertheless, the gains from the stream of Harry Potters shot over here are real enough. This is an industry that employs 44,000 - and up to 100,000 jobs are dependent on it. It attracts £1bn a year in overseas investment. No wonder then it was at the heart of Vaizey's speech today. If you want to reduce cinema to job creation, the tax breaks are clearly a good idea - with the only obvious problem is how to create an environment where British production companies also emerge.Yet, you have to wonder why film gets such a good deal. Television may benefit from a massive public intervention in the form of the BBC (as a result of which the UK makes television that exports around the world), but neither the press, music, nor computer games benefit from any support. The last government looked at a creating computer games tax break, only for George Osborne to tell Jeremy Hunt to go whistle when the Tories got into government given the Treasury had one or two more pressing financial issues to deal with first. But this was only dealing with part of the picture.Lord Carter briefly considered a 'media' or 'creative industries' tax break at the time of his Digital Britain review, a media neutral policy that would have allowed any media owner to offset spending on content against their tax bills, but this never got pushed forward. Ironically, though, the UK has proved capable of producing world leading newspaper, music and games companies at various points, none of which gets much help or attention from the Treasury, but perhaps none of this matters when you can look good in front of a film lobby that - a few large production facilities apart - is essentially foreign owned.UK Film CouncilBFIFilm industryGamesDan Sabbaghguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |