Gillies Mackinnon, born in Glasgow (1949), is one of the most interesting British filmmakers around at the moment. In 1995 he made Small Faces, about three brothers growing up in youth-gang dominated Glasgow in the sixties. It was produced and written by his brother, Billy.

Earlier films of Mackinnon are The Grass Arena, The Playboys and Trojan Eddie. Before he made films he studied mural painting in Glasgow and worked with disturbed teenagers. His latest film, Regeneration, is adapted by Allan Scott, in a very clear way from Pat Barker's Booker Prize winning novel of the same name.

As so often when we deal with quality film, and Regeneration is very good indeed, Mark Shivas' name pops up again as one of the producers. Shivas produced Anthony Minghella's Truly, Madly, Deeply and Michael Winterbottom's Jude, among many other good films.

Regeneration is set near the end of the First World War (1914-18) in Craiglockhart hospital near Edinburgh. Psychiatrist Dr Rivers, magnificently played by the always intriguing Jonathan Pryce, has the task of curing mentally wounded soldiers, so that they can return to the front.

The film focuses on three remarkable men. The poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and a young officer, Billy Prior, who lost his speech in the trenches and feels contempt for Dr Rivers. Prior is powerfully played by Jonny Lee Miller, who we know from Trainspotting. Siegfried Sassoon is portrayed in a strong and unyielding way by James Wilby. Sassoon is in the hospital, because he wrote a pamphlet against the war. Not because he is a pacifist, but because he thinks that those in power are unnecessarily prolonging the war. In the hospital he meets the gentle humanist Wilfred Owen (an amiable part by Stuart Bunce), who initially doesn't want to write about war, because he doesn't think poetry should deal with an ugly subject like that. Sassoon stimulates him to write about his traumatic experiences in the trenches, and this results in some of Owen's best poems like Anthem for Doomed Youth, Dulce et Decorum Est and Six o'Clock in Princess Street.

The film deals with the way Dr Rivers appears controlled, but inwardly he is in conflict as he deals with the sarcastic Sassoon, the romantic Owen and the angry Billy Prior. Throughout the film Mackinnon uses grey flashbacks of the trenches full of corpses, but he never wallows in it or sensationalises.

The strength of Regeneration is the script, which is to the point and focused, the careful and skilful direction of Gillies Mackinnon, and not to forget the superb production design by Andy Harris, topped off by the under-rated and therefore powerful playing of all the actors, including the sweet faced Tanya Allen, who is Prior's girlfriend. Jonathan Pryce deserved an Oscar for his role in this film, certainly he is one of the best British actors around.

© Jaap Mees 1998

The German/Romanian director, Andrei Schwartz won the Juris Ivens Award - named after the most famous documentary maker Holland has ever had.

The International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam attracted 1000 guests from all over the world, and 249 documentaries were selected. Altogether, 51,000 tickets were sold. As every year, the Festival is visited by well-known documentarists, like Frederick Wiseman, who showed his latest film, Public Housing in competition. Errol Morris represented his Fast, Cheap and Out of Control and Johan van der Keuken showed a short from test footage of his latest film Amsterdam Global Village.

Besides the competition for the Joris Ivens Award, there was a market "Docs for Sale" (where I showed my documentary Rainbow Days), and a Forum for the international co-financing market for new projects.

Another interesting part of the festival is the selection of ten top documentaries chosen by a renowned filmmaker. This year D. A. Pennebaker, who made Don't Look Back (1965) about Bob Dylan, and is regarded as the 'father' of fly-on-the-wall documentaries. Flicking through the festival catalogue it is remarkable to see the weight and seriousness of most of the documentary subjects covered. The Bosnian War, apartheid, prison-life, street children, etc. Substantial subjects have always been the strength of this Festival, but socially relevant films were mixed with lighter films about striptease dancers and roller-blade skaters.

 Auf Der Kippe, the winner of the Ivens Award dealt with people who live in and around rubbish dumps in Romania. Director Andrei Schwartz said: "I stayed for six months in their town of hovels with my camera. At first they kept asking what else can you possibly want to film. By the end it was, 'How will we manage without you for so long, Don Andrei?'"

The Silver Wolf, the main award for best documentary shot on video, was won by the Belgian directors Benoit Dervaux and Yasmina Abdeliaoui for the film Gigi, Monica & Bianca. The theme is very similar to Auf Der Kippe, it is about two schoolchildren, Gigi and Monica who live in and around a Budapest station. The camera follows them around in their struggle for life. The only thing they have is their love for each other. When Monica gets pregnant, Gigi takes them back to his parents in the country. His father is not very welcoming, he says, "Monica has a butterfly in her head." It was very good to see this beautifully observed film win this prize. A delicious documentary was The Underground Orchestra by the Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigmann, who was born in Peru. The film portrays street-musicians in the Paris underground. Heddy Honigmann was able to gain the trust of the musicians and presents them in a subtle, straightforward and human way. We get really close to a harpist from Venezuela, a violinist from Bosnia and a black musician with an unbelievable life story. He was a slave, he has been in camps and comes across as a tremendously strong man. There are many more very talented musicians. At the end of the documentary one of the musicians, who are all exiles and political refugees, sings "I cry not to kill, I laugh not to cry" over shots of cleaners who hose the streets of Paris at night.

After the Festival finished there were rumours that a new film theatre will be built in Amsterdam, especially for documentaries. An interesting idea, much better than speeding £15 million on ludicrous IMAX cinemas which are only there to impress and attract tourists (could you be referring to the BFI IMAX cinema being built in London? Surely, not! - Ed). 

© Jaap Mees 1998

 Two major English novels of the early 20th century, both somewhat difficult and, on the face of it, unfilmable, have recently been adapted for the screen. The Wings of the Dove, published in 1902 as one of Henry James' final trio of long, dense, psychological novels, is about Merton and Kate, a young English couple who wish to marry but, owing to Merton's poverty, are unable to do so. They hatch a plot to cause Millie, a rich American girl who is dying, to fall in love with Merton and leave him a fortune. Most of the novel consists of finely detailed psychological analysis of each of the three main characters, as they play out their drama in London and Venice. James deliberately eschews all melodrama, simply by leaving out scenes of potentially high emotion (such as the final confrontation between Merton and Millie in Venice) and leaving the reader to use his or her imagination. 

The film, which takes on average one minute to cover each five pages of the book, removes these subtleties. Under Iain Softley's direction, all the emotional stops are pulled out, with a highly intrusive musical score telling us exactly we should be feeling. Visually the film is splendid, with the main actors (Helena Bonham Carter, Linus Roache, and Alison Elliot) all highly competent, but I do object to being told what I am supposed to be feeling. Compared with the three other well-known James adaptations, it lacks the gaiety and charm of James Ivory's The Europeans and The Bostonians, and the dark seductiveness of Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady. The film ends with a highly unJamesian sex scene which simply does not ring true. Read the book instead, if you have the time.

 The other offering is an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, set on a single day in 1923 when the 50-something society woman Clarissa Dalloway is throwing a party. Using the literary technique known as 'stream of consciousness', Virginia Woolf presents the random thoughts of the title character, of a friend who wanted to marry her 30 years earlier, and of a shell-shocked ex-soldier with whom she never comes into direct contact. Under the direction of Marieen Gorris and with a screenplay by Eileen Atkins (who has portrayed Woolf on stage), Vanessa Redgrave gives a predictably hypnotic performance in the title role, supported by a gallery of well-known British actors. With flashbacks to her younger self (admirably played by Natascha McElhone), the themes of ageing, the passing of time, and the frivolousness of society life are gradually implanted into the viewer's consciousness with gentle humour and without the overt emotionalism of The Wings of the Dove. Far better than the other Woolf adaptation, Sally Potter's Orlando, Mrs Dalloway eventually bears comparison with John Huston's superb adaptation of James Joyce's The Dead. 

At the time of writing The Wings of the Dove has a British distributor, but Mrs Dalloway has not. My views on this should be obvious.

© Alan Pavelin 1998

Iran is one of the unlikelier countries to have produced some of the most interesting filmmaking in recent years. This is largely due to one world-class director, Abbas Kiarostami, whose 1989 film Close-Up was recently released in Britain, and whose Cannes prize-winner A Taste of Cherry was given a single sell-out screening at the 1997 London Film Festival. Kiarostami'a films are particularly characterised by an interest in the boundary between fiction and documentary, and often concern the nature of filmmaking itself. This self-reflexivity is more than just a matter of films about filmmaking (like Singin' in the Rain, Day for Night, or, more complexly, Fellini's 8 1/2). For example, his 1994 film Through the Olive Trees is best described as a reconstructed documentary about the making of an earlier film, And Life Goes On, which itself is a reconstructed documentary about the aftermath of his previous film Where is my Friend's House? An actor plays the director himself, while another actor plays the actor playing the director. This Chinese-box approach may sound a rather pointless intellectual exercise, but when it is combined with a neo-realist style worthy of Rossellini, a humanistic love of his characters worthy of Satyajit Ray, and an objective camera recording events at some distance (occasionally an inordinate distance), the films become fascinating. Added to which, Where is my Friend's House? is, quite simply, the best and most moving film about childhood I have ever seen. Kiarostami also wrote (but did not direct) The White Balloon, another delightful film about childhood which achieved a degree of commercial success in this country.

And so to Close-Up. At its simplest level, this is a (partly reconstructed) documentary about a real-life court case in Tehran where a man was accused of impersonating the leading Iranian film director Makhmalbaf, and of hoodwinking a well-to-do family into thinking that he wanted to make a film in their house. The trial was actually filmed as it occurred, with the consent of the judge. The film actually altered the course of the trial, not just because Kiarostami himself was allowed to question the accused but because even its timing was changed to suit the director's needs. The events leading up to the trial were reconstructed, using the actual characters (the accused, the family, Kiarostami, and an investigating journalist). Even in the reconstructed sections we often hear the whirring of the camera, presumably to give the impression of being further documentary footage. As the audience knows that these scenes are reconstructed, and Kiarostami knows what it knows, this is one example of his playful blurring of 'fiction and reality'. Another comes in the final section of the film, where the impostor meets the real Makhmelbaf, and the sound equipment proves faulty during the filming of this: whether or not it really was faulty is left unclear.

 So Close-Up is partly about illusion and reality, and on this level is fascinating. It is also wholly sympathetic to the impostor, who it transpires comes from a poor background and sees his pretence as a way of fulfilling himself and his artistic longings. Like Kiarostami's other films, it pays great attention to the tiny details of everyday life, and is also extremely funny. The media often give the impression of Iran as a country run by, and riddled with, fanatical religious fundamentalists. Kiarostami's films, whether in a rural or (as here) an urban setting, show that the people are just like ourselves, with the same everyday problems and joys: remember that most of his performers are not professional actors. This is ordinary life, brought to the screen through a master's touch, and we should be exceedingly grateful that this type of filmmaking is still going on.

  © Alan Pavelin 1998

In February (1998) the National Film Theatre held one of the most important cinematic events in Britain for many years: a retrospective of nearly all the extant films of the great Kenji Mizoguchi, 100 years after his birth, and woefully neglected here for far too long. For example, at the time of writing only two Mizoguchi films are available on video in the UK, compared with 15 in the United States.

Despite the fact that this retrospective was almost totally ignored by the mass media, who apparently thought we all needed to know yet more about Titanic , the season was a huge success. Several screenings at the NFT were sold out, which is relatively rare outside of Tarantino-type movies.

Two events of his younger life made an indelible impression on Mizoguchi, his sister was sold to a brothel, and his back was horribly scarred by a knife-wielding geisha. This determined the subject-matter of nearly all his films; a fierce feminism, and in particular a hatred of the male-dominated area of prostitution. In fact it is said that his last film , made in 1956, was largely responsible for the banning of prostitution in Japan in the following year. Most of his noble figures are women, while men are generally presented as stupid, grasping and hypocritical. His films of the 1950s, following his conversion to Buddhism, tend to emphasise the acceptance of one's fate more than the earlier fierce films, but their power to move is if anything even greater. To my mind only one other director is comparable in this respect, namely Carl Dreyer with his portrayals of suffering women.

Having been a painter, Mizoguchi was a visual perfectionist, achieving stunning effects by such means as long tracking shots and use of depth-of-field: several of his takes last about 9 minutes. His camera movements are incomparable in conveying emotion, while his approach to achieving period detail was painstaking and perfectionist. He rarely uses close-ups, and typically the frantic and emotional activity of his characters take place against the still beauties of nature. Many of his best-known films star Kinuyo Tanaka (herself the subject of a biopic by Kon Ichikawa), regarded as Japan's greatest-ever film actress, who combines outward delicacy with inner strength, rather like Lillian Gish.

For me the highlights of the retrospective were as follows:

Sisters of Gion (1936). Two geisha sisters, exploited and humiliated, cannot escape their situation. an astonishingly mature performance from the teenage Isuzu Yamada, another of Japan's great actresses, who finishes with a passionate plea for the ending of the geisha institution.

The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (1939): A long and wonderfully majestic account of a woman who sacrifices herself for her lover's career as a Kabuki actor. It contains some of Mizoguchi's most magnificent tracking shots, while the ending is unforgettably moving.

My Love Has Been Burning (1949). A semi-fictionalised biopic of a womens' rights campaigner of the 1880s, with a powerful performance by Tanaka. Liberal male politicians are devastatingly exposed as hypocrites in their private lives.

The Life of Oharu (1952). Galled by Kurosawa's international success with Rashomon, Mizoguchi threw everything into this adaption of a novel about a high-born woman who, through a series of misfortunes, ends up as an ageing prostitute and beggar. Probably Tanaka's greatest performance.

Ugetsu Monogatari (1953). A wonderful, magical, stunningly beautiful tale of potters, ghosts and the transience of life. The 'special effect' near the end, involving the unexpected and sudden appearance of Tanaka mid-shot, is infinitely more thrilling than anything in Jurassic Park or Titanic.

Sansho the Bailiff (1954). A truly Shakespearian, stunningly shot, tale that moves from brutality to civilisation in 11th century Japan. The title is strange, as the central character Zushio has far more screen time than the villain, Sansho. The final scene, with Tanaka as the blind old woman living on a beach, who is finally found by her long-lost son Zushio, is agruably the most powerful and heart-wrenching in all cinema.

Tales of the Taira Clan (1955). One of Mizoguchi's two films in colour, stunningly used in this portrayal of the rivalries of various competing institutions in 12th century Japan. The hero spends some time discovering his origins before becoming a great leader himself.

I was sorry to have missed Crucified Lovers (1954), due to an unsocial screening time, as Japanese critics consider it to be Mizoguchi's finest: also The Victory of Women (1946), highly acclaimed by a critic I respect.

It is to be hoped that the great success of this retrospective will lead to far more screenings and appreciation of Mizoguchi's films in this country.

  © Alan Pavelin 28 May 1998

Sometimes a film is more than just a film, it is an experience that enriches your life. You are probably thinking that every film should be like that, but be honest, how often do you see those larger than life movies? La Maman et la Putain is such a film, made by the French Nouvelle Vague director, Jean Eustache in 1973. It won the Special Jury Prize and the International Critics Prize at Cannes that year. It is very much a New Wave film, being low budget, unpolished and personal. Eustache was mainly interested in emotions and feelings, that are experienced by real and complex people.

The film deals with three main characters, Alphonse, Jean Pierre Leaud in the role of his life, as a drifter, writer and philosopher-of-the-street, who lives with an older woman, Marie (Bernadette Lafont). She puts up with his numerous affairs, and she looks the type who would not mind some adventures herself. The film is set against the backdrop of the Student Revolts and sexual revolution of the the sixties.

One day Alphonse sees Veronika (Francoise Lebrun), an attractive blonde, in a cafe. He approaches her and they start an affair. She works as a nurse in an operating theatre in a hospital. She sleeps with lots of different men and Alphonse is just a change of menu for her. At least that's what you are made to think initially.

Not much happens in this film, the three characters meet and talk in cafes, in their run-down apartments, with the mattress functioning as bed and sofa, and sharing walks in the streets of Paris. What makes the film so special is the honesty, self-centredness, openness and vulnerability of the characters. The dialogue does not just replace the air or push the plot forwards, but it is a way for Eustache and his actors to express ideas and feelings that really matter to them. Jean Pierre Leaud is magnificent with his expressive 'serious elf' face. In everything he does, he shows his grace, intelligence and intensity. He leaves an unforgettable impression.

Francoise Lebrun is excellent too, building her role to a heart-warming climatic monologue, in which she says that sex doesn't mean anything to her, but that people should only sleep together when they really love each other.

La Maman et la Putain is more than three and a half hours long, but fascinates from the first to last minute. Unfortunately, director Jean Eustache, who only made about five films, committed suicide when he was 42 years old. French critics voted La Maman et la Putain the best film of the seventies, and even with the passage of time this judgement still remains correct.

© Jaap Mees 28 May 1998

You can have a lorry load of qualifications, and experience up to your eyeballs but it is virtually impossible to get a job in the closed ranks of television (or any other media in this country).

Given that our television programmes are commissioned, produced and broadcast by an educated elite that has almost Godly status and power, what do they offer us?

Looking at all five terrestrial channels you see the same tired ideas, quiz shows; chat shows; soaps; dramas (usually about police, detectives or medical matters); cooking programmes, gardening programmes; real-life captured on camcorder shows and virtually anything to do with animals or hospitals.

We have had every combination of detective imaginable, though they nearly all are workaholics with some serious psychological flaws in their character (see Cracker, Wycliffe or A Touch of Frost). Perhaps these particular programmes are churned out because the commissioning editors can relate to their central characters all too easily?

What seems to be happening is that programmes that get ratings and are cheap to produce are quickly cloned and transmitted. The bandwagon becomes a veritable juggernaut before you can grab your remote controller to change channel.

Just look at how the success of The X Files has generated whole series of paranormal documentaries and programmes begging for a slice of the same audience (e.g. Dark Skies, Invasion Earth and The Visitor). On quick reflection even The X Files was not that original or ground-breaking (remember The Invaders, V or UFO?).

So why do TV broadcasters have such tough barriers to entry? Why do they only want to employ young people with degrees, when they are falling over themselves to attract audiences that need classes to learn how to dribble? It's like training someone for ten years to become a brain surgeon and then using them to wash car windscreens on street corners.

A senile blindfolded chimp could make better educated choices for entertaining and educating our nation. Today's TV programmes have been refined, defined and market researched into a deep, dark pit of shit. The creative talent (so-called) working in TV companies are no more than robots on an anonymous production line.

When the only recent innovative TV you can point to is the Telly Tubbies you know the process of dumbing down has begun in earnest, and is set to continue until we get TV that will be so bland and simple amoeba will enjoy it.

The fact is the audience for TV is better educated than at any time before, but it is treated as if it has had a lobotomy. Give us something exciting, risky and innovative. Give us ideas and experimentation. Give us a revolution, or at least startle us for a few seconds before the commercial break batters our senses.

Unfortunately, bland variations on the same tired old themes are the most likely prospect for TV viewers. It will be a matter of time before we see on our screens a shabby detective step out of a flying saucer, sow a bed of flowers, cook a five-course meal, stumble in to a chat show studio where his psychological flaws will be discussed by a hand-picked audience, and then be taken away by the police to a hospital after being bitten by a Jack Russell terrier recently rescued by Rolf Harris. A camcorder clip of the incident will be used in a quiz show when the prize will be a trip to the Rover's Return. The winner will appear on all the news programmes, and will be the guest of every holiday and cooking programme you can imagine, until they eventually end-up in a fly-on-the-wall documentary series. Oh, and the Jack Russell will get its own day-time show called Bite Back. The fleas on his back will no doubt anticipate a spin-off series of their own, and in the crazy world of TV they will probably get it.

Nigel Watson 28 May 1998

©Talking Pictures ISSN 0964-8364