23: Blam

Mr Bricks --------- Ok, so there’s an old man shouting in the churchyard, he’s shouting at all the kids who are playing. He doesn’t seem to want hem to play there. He’s stood at the rickety gate that leads from his garden into the graveyard. He’s shouting and waving his walking stick. The noise seems to come from his throat rather than the solar plexus or lower, which would date him around 85 to 90 years old. There’s what looks like a Daily Mail in his pocket. He’s now turned his attention to the parents, well I assume they’re the parents. He seems to be calling them communists and braggarts, possibly because one of them is doing what I believe is the tree pose while the other is photographing them. I can’t quite make it out, but I think one of the children is called Mr Bricks. Blam! Blam! ----------- Every time I make a film I'm conscious that I want each frames to assault the surface it's projected on, yeah? They're being fired rhythmically: film and projection is fired at a screen, it's like a barrage, it goes from the projector and it's blam blam blam, and the sound of the film, the dialogue, the musical accompaniment is all secondary to this blam blam, like ammunition firing, each frame is loaded with just the right quantities to explode the wall and this is shot out, that's what I'm with, that's where I'm at. I make a film to have a period of time to sit with that sound, that barrage: blam blam. I edit for long periods so that I can be with that all the longer. Indeed maverick director Anna van Shrieder recreated this highly personal experience at family meals during the filming of her last picture, 'Dome for sale, Alburquque'. The dining rooms lighting was set up to flash with amplifiers mic'd up projectors in her screening room feeding in the hallowed soundtrack she most craved. She was so overwhelmed by it she began to take her dinner in the garden watching the rest of the family through the french windows from a raised deckchair, knocking whenever her daughter tried to put on sunglasses, or husband stuffed mash in his ears, or son deviated from the meals script. Do you feel someone watching your films is missing out on this? That the ritual of the viewer is somehow lacking one of the most intrinsic elements of the piece? Yes, of course, at a screening I attended of one of my films that I just walked in off the street to watch I sat in the first row, and I was kicked out after 20 minutes, cos i didn't recognise the film. I sat down and I was like, "Come on film! Do it for me! Yeah, you are the film I know I love! Do it! Do it! Do it! Do it! Do it!" And I ended up just shouting at the ... shouting at the goddam screen, what is this baloney? What's this rubbish it's projecting, no honestly, there's no ammunition, there's no bang, there's no blam, there's nothing. I left with ears bleeding as i was scratching at them trying to make space, tried to get a guy to scrape the gunk out with a popsical stick as i thought they were full of like wax or something and couldn't get any more sound in, as it was full of all the sounds that I'd seen in the street, no, sounds I'd heard in the street, sorry, you don't see sound, or you do see sound, I see sound in my films, and I cried uncle when I was in that cinema and they dragged me out. It was like I was watching a Mucky Mouse films, or one of those Doggled Duck animations, those fuzzled cropping schtick, you know? That they pump out of the studios with like rabbit voices, you know? It was like my film had become reduced to like one of those sort of things.