Volume 3 | Issue 2 | Summer 2006

EDITORIAL

Volume 3 - Issue 2 - On the Edge of the Encounter

By Vertigo


For the first time in its history Vertigo has produced an issue that that has not been put onto paper, but has been produced as an electronic edition, on CD and online. This will be the first of the new quarterly Vertigo's annual electronic issues, which will go on sale every summer. The key additional feature in using this new format is that we can actually show some of the moving image work that we are engaging with. We also don't have space constraints on how long each article is – they are simply at the length at which we think they work best.
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Content

ARTICLE

Britdoc Festival 06: The Art and Business of Documentary

By Hannah Patterson

Riding the wave of documentary’s current popularity, the Channel 4 British Documentary Film Foundation has launched Britdoc, a new annual festival – based in the UK for filmmakers from around the world.
REVIEW

Weather Report: Chris Welsby on DVD

By Steven Ball

Chris Welsby’s films are among the most rigorous works by a collection of practitioners who emerged with a flurry of landscape filmmaking around the British structuralist film scene of the early seventies, and this new British Film Institute DVD release provides a good introductory survey of the range of his activities.
REVIEW

The Cinematic Works: Elija-Liisa Ahtila

By Maximilian Le Cain

Going on the evidence of the BFI’s handsomely produced box set of Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s films, it would be hard to imagine a better introduction to her work than Me/We (1993).
INTERVIEW

An interview with Artist Ben Rivers

By William Rose

Ben Rivers has been experimenting with film since he studied at Falmouth School of Art in the late 90s. He has made over nine short works which have been shown at festivals, galleries and fancy boutiques around the world.
INTERVIEW

An interview with the Director of Heading South

By Peter Fraser

As co-writer and director of Heading South, a film ostensibly about sex tourism in Haiti in the 1970s, Laurent Cantet found himself in, at least, a triply problematical position.
ARTICLE

Older Women in Feature Films

By Rina Rosselson

Women’s acting careers seem to suffer from what one writer calls double jeopardy. Not only do actresses receive fewer roles and have less star presence than actors, but this difference increases with age.
REVIEW

Andrzej Munk's The Passenger

By David Balfour

In 1961, Polish director Andrzej Munk died in a car crash halfway through filming what would become his last work, The Passenger. After his death, the film was finished by his friends and crew members.
INTERVIEW

The London Film School at 50

By Robert Chilcott

To mark its 50th year, former student and governor Franc Roddam recalls his time at the London Film School...
ARTICLE

Angles of Projection, Exhibition and Symposium

By Adam Kossoff

Walk into Tate Britain and go into the video space on the ground floor. It is completely dark. So dark it takes a good ten minutes for my eyes to adjust and locate the seating in the centre of the space.
REVIEW

Making Short Films: The Complete Guide from Script to Screen

By Nancy Harrison

Increasingly, unprecedented accessibility to moving image technology such as DV cameras and simple computer editing programs, and even mobile phones, coupled with an unsurpassed sophistication in the understanding of images and visual culture, has fuelled our willingness to engage with and employ these...
VIDEO

Super Kagao Brothers

By Kagami Shinohara

This animation is a parody of the well-known Nintendo console game “Super Mario Brothers”. The main character, Mario is replaced by Kagao, who is very weak, vulnerable and easily killed in the game. However, Kagao is prepared to stand at the start-line again, ready to fight.
ARTICLE

Who Cares about Kid's Viewing?

By Cary Bazalgette

The children’s media sector is up in arms about the impending ban on TV advertising of unhealthy foods to children. ITV claim that this will cut their revenue by 18% and will consequently reduce or perhaps end all their UK-based production for children.
ARTICLE

Jean-Luc Godard at the Pompidou

By Corin Depper

Forty-two years on from the joyous headlong rush through the Louvre of his three protagonists in Bande à Part (1964), Jean-Luc Godard asks for a much greater attention span from visitors to his own exhibition, entitled Voyage(s) en Utopie, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris...
ARTICLE

The Memo Book: The Films and Video of Matthias Muller

By Stefanie Schulte Strathaus

Matthias Müller is a filmmaker and an artist. He is a movie spectator, an analyst, a choreographer of memory and feelings. He discovers hidden spaces and times and rearranges the familiar: Hollywood and queer cinema, experimental film and the fine arts, history and imagination, words and images...
ARTICLE

Talking Movies: Contemporary World Filmmakers

By Bernd Herzogenrath

“When I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach out for my Browning!” – this quotation from Hans Johst’s Nazi-play Schlageter, performed on Adolf Hitler’s birthday in 1933, has been variously associated with both Hitler’s Fieldmarshall Herrmann Göring, and the aesthetics and politics of Dadaism...
INTERVIEW

Talking Movies: An Interview with Asif Kapadia

By Jason Wood

Having won a Cannes Grand Jury Prize and the Grand Prix at the European Short Festival with The Sheep Thief, his graduation film from the Royal College of Art, anticipation was high for The Warrior (2001), London-born Asif Kapadia’s feature debut.
VIDEO

The West Stone

By By Pepe Baena | Margaret Dickinson

On the Southbank in the rain a group of people carrying flags assembles. Someone is filming them. Why? They gather in front of a tormented bronze figure dwarfed by the London Eye. It is a memorial to the International Brigades, those who volunteered to fight in Spain in 1936.
REVIEW

Antonioni's The Passenger

By Henry K. Miller

Do you speak English?’ The first line in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) only reinforces the film’s already palpable commitment to disorientation.
ARTICLE

Censorship and the BBFC: A Young Person's View of the UK's Censors

By Annie Mae Rorke

At the Cambridge Film Festival this year there was an event to debate the current censorship guidelines. Students from local schools came to take part, from a broad age range of 11 to 17. John Dyer from the British Board of Film Censorship explained the key issues...
INTERVIEW

Future Cinema: Pictures that Talk, Sing and Dance

By Peter Fraser

James Cameron, the US director both revered and reviled for such special-effects heavy blockbuster epics as Titanic and the Terminator films, recently argued that for cinema to survive in an era when films can be downloaded onto a television, a laptop or a mobile phone it would need to offer something uniquely ‘cinematic.’
ARTICLE

Cinema 16: American Short Films

By Chris Lane | Simon Cropper

REFRAME is DVD playing computer software that allows film and video to be combined with unofficial critical commentary. The software employs Shockwave (an Adobe file format for web-based multimedia) and has emerged from research collaboration between Tony Cryer, Nick Haeffner, Chris Lane...
DOCUMENT

For Tomorrow’s Witness

By The filmmakers of Lebanon | Israel

The cost of the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon is now more than 300 deaths and more than 1,000 wounded. 500,000 people have left their homes and become refugees.
AUDIO

Podcast: Vertigo Meets Cahiers du Cinéma

By Vertigo

The long overdue collaboration between Paris and London's two most intellectually ambitious film magazines, Vertigo and Cahiers du Cinéma, finally came together with a series of talks, paired screenings, Q&As and UK premieres in June 2006.
 

Volume 3 – Issue 2 – Summer 2006


This issue is dedicated to KB and everyone I've had the pleasure of working with at Vertigo – good night and good luck.

Editor: Metin Alsanjak
Multimedia Editor: Chris Lane
Original Cover Design: Will Hui
Production: Nancy Harrison

VERTIGO MAGAZINE TEAM

Managing Editor: Holly Aylett
Editor: Gareth Evans
Editorial Assistant: Pepe Baena
Publication Manager: Nancy Harrison
Marketing Co-ordinator: Peter Fraser
Original Website Developer: Gauthaman Ravindran
Intern: Annie Mae Rorke

Editorial Board: Metin Alsanjak, Holly Aylett, Emilie Bickerton, George Clark, Michael Chanan, Gareth Evans, Gaylene Gould, James Leahy, Thessa Mooij, Hannah Patterson, Julian Petley

Advisory Network: John Akomfrah, Asu Askoy, Yossi Bal, Gill Branston, Robert Chilcott, Kieron Corless, Don Coutts, Alain Fountain, Catherine Fowler, Lina Gopaul, Keith Griffiths, Sylvia Harvey, Judith Higginbottom, Asif Kapadia, Ruth Lingford, Sarah McCarthy, Martin McLoone, Robin Macpherson, Kevin Rockett, Keith Shiri, Sarah Turner

CD produced by Orbis Digital, Coatbridge, Scotland

With Special Thanks to: Nancy Harrison, Jon Rexter Crawford, Chris Lane, Gauthaman Ravindran, Ben Rivers, Will Hui, all the hard work of the contributors, Holly Aylett, Gareth Evans, Yoram Allon, Natalie Brady, Margaret Dickinson, Pepe Baena, Ben Cook, Alex Bratt, Emilie Bickerton, Luke Morris, Tony Cryer, Katherine Bratt, Andy Townsend, Jill Reading, Zoe Flower, and the support of our funders, the Arts Council, UK Film Council and Jerwood Charitable Foundation.