Right, mark off Monday 30th in your diary because we're back in the BFI with two more supremely talented filmmakers bubbling to the top of the sprawling Shooting People community.

Even though these events are irregular (and yes, this one was postponed a month because of me wanting to avoid a clash of superb Shooter events that fell into place last month...) I'd sort of hope that most of you roughly know the score by now; however since 599 new people joined in the past month alone I guess I'd better give a quick run down for those of you still blinking in the sunlight...

For some time I've been searching through the oceans of celluloid and digital tape produced by the populace of the great Shooter Nation keeping my eyes peeled for films that delight, inspire and entertain. In doing so I've been lucky enough to come across a great many brilliant films but I've been luckier to find a greater number of brilliant filmmakers. Often the most interesting and enjoyable part of the process has been following their careers and seeing their work grow, seeing their good films turn into better films. So this year I've been trying to share that pleasure with anyone who can squeeze into the BFI Studio on the Southbank... and in most cases anyone with internet enough to use the Watch Film pages of this very site.

Next on my list of filmmakers I think you should spend some time getting to know are Deva Palmier and Lee Kern.


Deva and Lee share a sense of the bizarre and also a delight in the mundane. They are fantasists who offer a vision of life that can be both funny and disturbing. Most of all though I felt that their work complimented each other because they are, in their own ways, forces of nature.

Stylistically they are very different. Deva is a classicist, film school educated her work is often, at first glance, what you might term "proper" filmmaking. Beautiful, controlled, and well crafted as they are, her films truly shine most when the indescribable Devaness comes leaking out. Her films are never quite what you expect, even when you think you've got her pinned. For instance in Fishy what you think is going to happen does, but where another filmmaker would have let the magical event that hinges the story be cute, in Deva's hands and with the immaculate Shirley Henderson playing the lead the moment is dark and uncompromising. She takes you to where the structure of the story dictates you should go, and satisfied like a good audience we happily follow - but then that oddness, that Devaness seeps in and you realise once again you're getting more than you bargained for.

Lee's work is sort of the reverse. His films sprawl across genres and include documentaries, animations and a sort of film essay that you really have to be Lee to pull off. At first glance he can seem amateurish, charming you with his apparent confusion. He wanders into films that are supposedly about something else with a disingenuous grin as if the whole process of making the film is genuinely slipping out of his hands. Be beguiled, but don't be fooled. At his best Lee's films are among the sharpest, smartest, and most perceptive you'll find. Original, hysterical and genuinely unique Lee's films are those rarest of delights which give cak-handed solipsism a good name.

Or to put it another way, this time I bring you a crazy genius and a genius who is crazy. I'll leave it to you to decide which way round you want to apply those.

6.30pm (7pm start) Monday 30th June at the BFI Studio on the Southbank. Admission is free but space is limited so please RSVP to jane@shootingpeople.org - if your name's not on the list then we will resort to cliche.

It's not often that a punch in the face leaves you feeling lucky. However that is the position that my benevolent fate has left me with. At the start of the month I was returning home with my girlfriend, it was late and the tube station car park was dark but it's not a bad area and it's a journey we've both made for years. Now there's a sentence that clearly paves the way for something bad...

I'm not going to go into much detail, partly because I don't want to think about it but mainly just because the act of retelling will naturally tend to give it some undeserved colour. All that matters for our purposes here is that I finally got the punch in the face that many Shooters have been longing to give me for years and three guys ran off with my laptop and the six months of unbacked up work contained thereon.

But as I'm sure you may have noticed I'm a lucky bastard. For starters in the middle of everything I was allowed a moment of clarity which helped get some useful priority back in my life. My girlfriend was unharmed, as, basically, was I. The laptop was expensive, but that's really quite low on the list of what matters. I had lost a lot of work and a lot of other digital clutter that, when I first realised it had gone, made its absence felt with a sharp pang of need and regret; but this was soon replaced with a sense of freedom. What mattered about all of that stuff was what was in my head.

Oddly, because my good fortune continued, this sense of serenity and freedom, the joy of release from the clutter encouraged by a large hard drive, didn't last all that long. A passerby, clearly drawn by the noise of the event, noticed the three men as they jumped into a car and drove off. With a presence of mind I doubt I could muster she memorised their number plate and came and found my girlfriend and I as I was on the phone to the police. She gave their registration which was traced to an address at which, five hours later, a man was arrested in possession of my laptop.


At this point in the narrative some people have said that were this in the script of "one of those films of your's Ben" it would be seen as unbelievable. So before you make that mistake I will just point out that this isn't so dissimilar to the plot of classic heist movie "The League Of Gentlemen" starring Jack Hawkins and Richard Attenborough, in which a hand picked gang of crack bank robbers is eventually caught simply through the keenness of a child collecting number plates... but I digress.

But then, now I come to think about it, life has digressed too. After all it's not just "The League Of Gentlemen" that contains echoes of what happened. There's barely a moment from the attack that you cannot find replicated in the archives of film. What is harder to find, for obvious narrative reasons, is anything that comes close to the quiet emptiness and frustration that's followed.

My laptop and contents are safely sealed in an air tight back somewhere in Colindale police station. Two weeks on and I'm still not sure when it'll be released. I've been told that they no longer need it, and also that they cannot let it go until after the trial, a date for which isn't going to be set until August. An odd limbo, but in many ways the least of my worries.

I went shopping the other day, just to the supermarket to get some food. It was late afternoon and the offices were shutting. A bunch of work colleagues were hanging about, I walked past and, well I think they were playing kiss chase which is perhaps an office bonding game too far, but for whatever reason three or four them suddenly came sprinting after me. Not after me of course, nothing to do with me. But ridiculously the sound of their feet froze my guts.

I'm lucky. Nothing bad happened to me. As far as being mugged goes I think the only way it could have been a better experience is if before running off they'd given me an ice pack for my jaw an a complimentary t-shirt with a funny logo like "I got mugged and all they left me with was this lousy t-shirt!!" But never the less I feel like shit. I feel like a part of my life has been turned black and white.

Mugging someone is brilliantly filmic. So is being mugged. It's a great story and if you buy me a beer and I'll do the voices and everything. What doesn't work as a story is the endless grey truth that followed. The hundreds of narratively baron ways in which a forty second transaction has altered things. This is what I really appreciate now. This is why I feel lucky.


However this is neither the only trial nor the only good fortune that I have to relay. I'm delighted to say that The Sitcom Trials are returning and are opening their doors now for new submissions for their autumn run. Not only that but the success of last year's run has enabled them to expand the programme as you'll see if you read this.

For those of you not aware of the Trials the idea is pretty simple. Each week they host a live theatrical run off between four prospective sitcoms and the audience vote for their favourite. The winners eventually going through to a final laugh off at the Soho Theatre with an audience of industry figures including the legendary Geoff Posner.

Last year's finalists included "The Good Guide" which, though not the final winner, was definitely mine and Chris' favourite. We've been working with the writer, Sara Pascoe, ever since, helping her shape it into something more saleable and I'm delighted to say that our talent spotting instincts were on form again because, entirely due to her own stand-up brilliance, she's now signing Dawn Sedgewick, agent to, amongst others, Catherine Tate and Simon Pegg. Which I think means she is now legally termed "hot".

What was so good about the Sitcom Trials though was that it took very little skill to see that Sara's script was really funny because we were sat in a room full of people laughing... More over the whole process was great for Sara because it enabled her to put her words in the mouths of some brilliant actors (including Cariad Lloyd off of our Panda film and Nick Ewans who really is due some sort of award for his dedication to short films, if you're reading this and you've not worked with him then you really can't call yourself a filmmaker...) something which really changed the course the script took after the competition was over.

So there, if you're sat at home rereading and rereading the pages you've just written trying to work out if it's just you that's laughing then get in touch with Simon at the sitcom trials through his website every1sacritic.com

And if it all goes wrong and it's not funny, remember there are many worse things in life than people not laughing.

Well apologises to all six of you who asked me where I was and why I'd stopped writing. Truth is I haven't, I've just been concentrating on writing things other than rambling gibberish intended to distract and divert you from your day in the office...

However, that's not all I've been doing because I stumbled across a rather good site called The Open Video Project which offers an astonishing collection of old films for public use. On the whole they are non-fiction, but since this includes all those stunning public information films of the fifties and sixties, not to mention a seemingly endlessly supply of jaunty newsreel footage sponsored by Chevrolet, it is a veritable treasure trove of oddity and delight.

To prove my excitement here's a video I cut together from a couple of films about the perils of drink and drugs amongst the youth of the 1970s. Who could ask for more!

Ah so, another week in the hectic life of a filmmaker and what have I done? Well, oddly, I've actually been doing something rather to the point. No, I've not been making a film, obviously not, I'm a filmmaker living in Britain and so I respect the legislation passed which underlines the fiscal principle that, like children in a newsagent, the economy cannot support more than two filmmakers working at any time.

However no one can stop you writing. They can distract you, but they can't actually stop you. So Chris and I cranked up our group of cranks and spent a very long weekend camping on a friend's sofa and forcing him to feed us whilst we forced other people to be funny so we could write it down. We've then spent most of the rest of the week trying to cajole all the pursuant nonsense into some sort of orderly shape and with a bit of luck this pattern will repeat for the next few weeks...

In this task we have been very ably aided by a rather fantastic new piece of screen writing software which both Chris and I have fallen in love with. Scrivener is a British made piece of Mac only writing software which is still in comparatively early stages of development, but it's already a brilliant all round writing tool.

Now first of all I must come clean, I've never used Final Draft. I'm sure for some of you that's a bit like me saying I've never used Final Cut or a biro. However the simple truth is that for all the bells and whistles I never fancied the idea of paying $200 for something to write with. It's a lot of biros. It always felt like buying a home gym instead of going for a walk. Scrivener is currently $39.95 which would still keep one in ink for a few months but it's no rowing machine. If the words you write are still rubbish you're not going to feel quite so cheated.

Cost issues aside what I'm really enjoying about Scrivener is that it has been designed by somehow who knows how writers think. Index cards, outlining tools and actual pages are all seamlessly integrated enabling you to move from a structural overview to the actual words with the touch of a button. All your research lives in the same project, right next to the draft, and in whatever form it takes (providing that it is in someway digital of course, mp3 is fine but memory is, at the moment, still non-downloadable).

It's also nice that the programme is not a screenwriting tool, but a writing tool. It comes with a series of different templates, screenplay format, stage format, radio play format and so on and is really just designed to help you manage any long writing project - and to do so in a way that Mac addicts like me will find instantly understandable.

It comes with a free 30 day trial period as well and if you'd like to try it you can find it here www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener and if you have any thoughts on it then I for one would love to hear them.


A delight to many - Scrivener will probably be keeping me a little quiet on the blog for a while, however for those of you who, for some reason, may miss me, you can find me wittering in person tomorrow in Stratford as part of the East End Film Festival where I will be chairing an NPA hosted discussion between more interesting people about how best to work with others in film.

That's me, Jes Benstock and Rachel Tillotson talking from 2pm to 3.30pm with plenty of deviation, hesitation and repetition at:

Stratford Circus
Theatre Square, Stratford, London, E15 1BX

Are you an aspiring film professional who has already banged your head against too many doors and is starting to feel like the whole stupid idea was a pointless waste of time and you'd have been better off becoming a plumber?

Can you see how your entire creative and professional world could change if only you could get yourself some better friends, meet some people further along with their career and get some solid one to one advice about the things you should never ever do?

Well, you've got until 5pm on Tuesday 29th April to get your application in for your next best chance of finding exactly the help and support that you're actually looking for. Brilliantly Guiding Lights, the mentoring scheme that I graduated from a year or so ago has been given a second year of funding and is once again offering to match a group of the best struggling talent with some of the industries real achievers.

Thanks to Guiding Lights, my brother and I were taken under the paternal wing of Gillies MacKinnon and I simply can't stress enough quite how brilliant it was to have someone like that at the end of the phone to give you script feedback. Painful, sure, but well timed, well judged and exactly what we needed. Not only did Gillies help us unstick our projects and enable us to move forward (or stumble forward in the usual vein of the industry...) he also helped us to stop worrying quite so much about that strange and difficult motion of developing a film. Getting to see how the process works at first hand, getting to see how hard it is for someone as gifted and experienced as Gillies to get a project off the ground and seeing the way he deals with the ups and downs of it all... it's the best learning experience you could ever ask for.

This year the possible mentors include Paul Greengrass, Kevin Macdonald, Nira Park, Mark Herbert, Emma Thompson, David Yates, Julia Short, Patrick Marber, Kenneth Branagh, Seamus McGarvey, Cameron McCracken and Paul Webster and more are being added. If you are not where you want to be in your career and you don't apply to this then you've got no one but yourself to blame...

www.guiding-lights.org.uk

Not that you can really see in these pictures but there was also a entire screenplay in German, gently being transformed by the rain into a single soggy lump.

And also a business card from someone in the BBC Wales Sports Department.

A strange relationship with Paris.

As both of you who check this blog regularly will have noticed, I've been away for the past month enjoying the peaceful bliss of not having broadband internet, not answering the phone and being barely able to understand what most people in the world are saying. It is surprising how nice it is to be uncomprehending. Massively frustrating at times too, even, for someone endlessly verbose like I am, depressing. However it is nice how easy it is to ignore the constant blather of guilt and greed that leech from adverts into your subconscious when you have very little idea what they are actually saying. Celebrity magazines are finally rendered as meaningless as they are and the moans and whines of bored children are as sweet as birdsong.

However the first time my girlfriend and I went to the cinema it was with the deliberate intention of watching something Version Originale so that we could hear people talking our language. What's odd about watching a film in English with subtitles you can't really understand is that it's still very hard to not read the subtitles. It's also quite interesting watching how a film is translated, what is lost and what is changed. Best of all for this was going to see some Beckett at Peter Brook's Parisian home, Bouffes Du Nord. Because Beckett was fluently bilingual the matinee performances are in French and the evenings are English with French surtitles. I can only presume therefore that the surtitles, which again I found I had to read and try and understand, are not merely the best effort of a third party to translate the meaning, they are Beckett himself gleefully rewriting his own work in a second language. Things that in spoken English have two meanings, like describing a woman as staring out through the pane, don't come across in the French translation - and I'm sure vice versa, I definitely noted a gleeful rhyme in the French for gambling and god that the alliteration doesn't quite capture.

After three weeks and having already seen "Juno" and "There Will Be Blood" (which, oddly I thought, was a title never translated to French) we did however feel brave enough to try watching Kristin Scott-Thomas' new film "Il y Longtemps Que Je T'aime." or "Love You Long Time" as it is not called in English. I'm not quite sure why the fact that we knew the star was bilingual made us feel we might be able to understand her better when she was still talking in a language neither of us can really speak, but somehow it did seem like because she was English we'd sort of manage to get along...

It seems like a brilliant film and I can't wait for it to come out here in translation so I can see it again and actually understand what was really going on. Certainly it got to the French, about two thirds of the way through, seemingly apropro nothing at all, most of the audience burst into tears. However, even if we didn't quite follow the nuances of each scene it was nice to see how much of the general plot and emotion you did pick up even if you don't really know what people are saying to each other. Also, as with being able to turn off the blather of everyday life, it was also much easier to sit back and enjoy the way the director was telling the story, his eye for detail and the controlled way he let scenes run or played with the narrative perspective.

Having seen a French play, albeit one directed by an Englishman, written by an Irishman and staring an English woman, A Dutchman and an Italian and watched a French film (yeah, with an English star), and having loved them both we were feeling rather full of the joys of the city. It is, after all, an easy city to fall in love with, the design is enticing, the architecture attractive and the food amazing. But more specifically, from our brief stay, it seemed like the French had the right approach to life. Bouffes Du Nord, with it's ripped out beat up grandeur is one of the most attractive theatre spaces I've ever been in. It reeks of dedication to the theatrical moment and the bare simplicity of the place makes the entire building seethe with an energy that I've never felt in the west end. Likewise standing in the pouring rain in a queue to get into a cinema may be dampening and irritating but it's also not something you'd imagine an English audience doing - especially not for an English film.

Then we met up with a French friend of ours called Margot, who'd been out of the city for most of our stay. Within minutes she was raving about how lucky we were to have the West End, how there was nothing in Paris that really come close to it and how much she loved British Cinema, especially Richard Curtis... What she especially liked was the way we approached the arts. For her the subsidised theatre just made French actors lazy, it makes a lack of professionalism hide behind a mask of artistic integrity, it makes learning your lines look like trying too hard. Likewise with the French films she'd seen recently, they all felt, too French, too lazy, as if the director had been too high and mighty to bother working out what the plot actually was...


Paris is like London through the Looking Glass. They cities made of the same basic stuff, peopled with the same basic people, but brought up by different parents. We are siblings, and, like all siblings, we want nothing so much as what the other has.

One of the clever things that I've just worked out about the blogging interface that George got me to use when this whole malarky was set up, is that if I set the date in advance then the entry pops up in the future without me having to be there to actually upload it.

Consequently if you are reading this then it means I've not been able to delete it and prevent it appearing, which in turns mean I don't have the internet in Paris.

I'm in Paris for the whole of March. Yeah, I know.

See you in April my loves.

xx

Well I'm delighted to say that following the success of the first Split Focus event at the BFI we've been allowed back for a second bite of the cherry...

For those who've not been paying attention, Split Focus is a new programme of screenings Shooting People are putting on in an attempt to give a platform to proven talent. For some time now I've been trying to find the best films being made by members of the Shooting People community. My aim has always been to support the films that reach an audience and give the rest of us something to aspire to. However, since I'm mainly looking at first or second films by new directors I've often found myself coming across films that aren't perfect, films that don't really stand up on their own, but which never the less excite me and clearly demonstrate that their creators are gifted and grappling with some amazing ideas.

To put it another way, to make a single amazing film always requires a degree of good fortune; to make four or five films less than perfect films that never the less stretch the imagination and delight the senses takes a gifted and dedicated director. So, with thanks to the BFI, we've started putting on showcases for some of the more delightful and dedicated filmmakers who are using Shooting People to get their work made and seen. This time round our focus falls on Daniel Cormack and Kara Miller.


Whilst last time I chose two filmmakers with very differing styles, this programme brings together two directors with a shared love of simple, powerful story telling. Drama is a very dirty word at the moment, usually being used to conjure a certain humdrum quietude which is far from compelling. What I love about Daniel's film "Amelia and Michael" or Kara's "Elephant Palm Tree", is that both demonstrate the directors' ability to set the simplest of scenes on fire. These films are dramas, short plays which bring you for a moment into the lives of strangers and peel back the layers, revealing, showing but never telling. If you don't watch a lot of films then these are the sort of films you imagine get made all the time; if, like me, you watch far too many films you begin to appreciate the subtle skill and grace that makes something as simple as two people talking over breakfast so electrifying.

What is also so refreshing about these films is that it is only when watched together that you realise quite how much work Daniel and Kara are putting in. Like swans, the furious paddling is going on under the surface and rather than having your attention constantly drawn to the fact that you are watching the work of a director, all the focus is given to the story, to the characters, to the emotion, to the things that engage on the basic human level.


For this show Daniel is returning to the BFI for the second time in as many months, having already had one retrospective there this year, as part of the Disability Film Festival. His epilepsy meant that he couldn't watch TV as a child and consequently spent his childhood in the cinema. It is unsurprising then to find that he has turned into a classicist, his films full of all the hallmarks of someone with an innate understanding and love of cinema in the truest sense of the term. Though his first film "Amelia & Michael" is, I think, still his most successful, my favourite is "A Fitting Tribute" where he takes what other directors would shape into a glib film with a twist and injects it full of pathos. What he's done is not complicated, he's just shown the story, the characters and indeed the audience the respect that they deserve.

Similarly, Kara's background writing for both the radio and the stage helps explain the skill and care she uses to craft her characters and dialogue. However if her most visually accomplished film "Elephant Palm Tree" strains at the edges of theatricality, then her follow-up, my favourite of hers "How To Make Friends" shows her heading off in a much looser and more cinematic style. She is a great writer, but here she lets her directorial side take over and the results are delightful.

Lastly, the other thing that unites these directors is their shared ability to find great actors and allow them to give great performances. Anthony Head, Natasha Powell, Tamsin Grieg, Dudley Sutton, Dona Croll, the truly immense George Harris and the ever rising star Tom Nelstrop all give of their best in this collection of films and that is, with apologises for the pun, indeed a fitting tribute to the talents of directors Daniel Cormack and Kara Miller.


The event is at 6pm on Monday March 10th at the BFI Studio, part of the shiny new bit of what use to be called the NFT. Both Daniel and Kara will be there and will be chatting after the screening about the way they work and what they're working on next.

It is FREE entry, but obviously we're limited by space and judging by last time you need to RSVP to Jo to make sure you can get in.


You can find out more about Daniel Cormack from his website www.actaeonfilms.com

And more about Kara Miller from her website www.arawakfilms.com

And there is a facebook page for the event with pictures and everything here..

OK, having been on a bit of an artsy tip for the past couple of weeks I feel duty bound to bring to your attention Alex Emslie's short film "Portrait Of An Artist."

It features two superb comic performances... but I can't wait for the film to rebuffer so I can scroll to the end to get the cast's names. Alex! Fill out the cast details on the film page!

Anyway, though I have to ask the question "Is Mockumentary A Hateful Waste Of Time? (Discuss)" I have to say that this is a charming and delightful film. (Click on the links to watch it!)

Ahh dear. Five more gangster related films uploaded to the watch film site. All of them ploughing the same worn furrows of men shouting and holding guns.

I'd love someone to explain why they made those.

I don't know if it's me or if I'm merely responding to what the rest of you are doing but at the moment the films that are really catching my interest are unashamedly arty. A case in point are the recently uploaded cluster of little gems from David Palazon. His work snuffles in the bushes somewhere between art documentary and art installation and is generally marked by a charm and a visual invention that makes his best films sparkle.

My favourite is his recent film "Free Ride" which documents the latest art work by Francis Thorburn who performs in the streets of London with a man powered chariot. Or at least, David describes this as Francis' performance. I'd describe it as being a bit of a twat in a desperate attempt to get people to notice you, but I'm probably splitting hairs. It is though the measure of the quality of this delightful five minute film that an art project as insipid as pulling people round the streets gratis in order to try and prove, I presume, some sense of humanity within the inhumane city, does eventually come over as a worthwhile and positive enterprise. At first I wanted to hate Francis Thorbun, I wanted to see him cut up by a van or seriously injured by a bus but as the film progresses I was left with a sneaking admiration for him. A great deal of this is down to the fact that Palazon tells his story with all the craft and eye for beauty that is lacking from a piece of art that involves acting as an unpaid skivy for tourists. If I'm honest I'm still unsure quite what Francis has achieved by this, but I do know that David made me smile broadly about how perfectly silly and beautiful London can be.

If you enjoy "Free Ride" then I would also recommend David's earlier films "Use Your Head" and "Eye See". I must though come clean and admit that, despite this blog currently reading a bit like a it's been hijacked by an Arts Foundation course, I am basically an out and out populist. Consequently I'd suggest you avoid David's film "She And Her Crossing" which documents the performances of Dianna Brinsden and Martina von Holn in the 2007 Camberwell Arts Festival. Once again David manfully enters into the spirit of things and brings a lot of his own creative ideas to shape his documentary, but there's nothing he can do to hide the fact that this is just two women in big dresses fannying about with balloons and a road. Again, despite my high hopes, nothing bursts their creative balloons by hospitalising them after impacting with their performance at sixty miles an hour, not even a supercharged Francis Thorburn who I found myself wishing would make a fatal cameo appearance.

Perhaps I am a cynic. Perhaps I'm missing the point. Is two women crossing the road in Camberwell so different from a bunch of people walking past a static camera with stuff balanced on their head, which is, I warn you, all that happens in "Use Your Head"? Is it only the exoticism of Ghana when compared to Camberwell? No. I think it's the humour. In David's best films you can feel him grinning from behind the camera, it is a grin that, Chesire cat like, infuses every edit. Dianna and Martina seem so desperately sincere that it robs the pointless activity of it's fun.

Likewise, though Christopher Frayling speaks with great erudition and passion about the photographic exhibition that forms the real content of "Eye See", this is no match for the visual wit and curiosity of the photographs that follow. Mr.Frayling takes up the first half of this 10 minute film and I think is likely to bore many of the audience into clicking away to other films - but don't! Let it download and spin on to half way through and watch the photographs - they're brilliant. As is David.

Laurence has been kind enough up load his interview with Dutch painter Marcelle Hanselaar to our very own virtual boudoir. Watch it all in one go here!

Once again this entry, which due to the wonderfully post-modern narrative device of the blog will appear before my earlier comments, is really a continuation of the previous piece, however I have split them into two because this is the more apposite and I wouldn't wish to deter people from watching a film simply because they've had to plough through an acre of my, hopefully life enhancing, prose. If you find yourself laughing at the phrase life enhancing then please do read the previous entry and I hope you will see that I am being scientific, if selfish, rather than simply arrogant.

As I said, or, if you will insist on reading this in a linear fashion, as I will say in what is my past but your future, I fight a constant battle with a complexity that I admire but accept can be confusing and off-putting. In many ways this is the fundamental battle of the artist, how to express an idea in a way that is both clear and accurate enough to truly express it. Too much accuracy and the thing is muddy and obscured by details the casual audience is often not equipped to deal with. Simplify too much in the name of the clarity and you end up expressing something other than what you intended.

The Media, in the contemporary sense of the now virtually inescapable babble of opinion content to which I am currently adding, has it's foundations carved out of the twin rocks of commerce and expediency. We simplify everything. No distortion is too great as long as it enables the central idea to be re-expressed in a pithy and eye catching manner. This sells and also, it is faintly hoped, may encourage some people to try and look deeper. On the whole though this fails because few real depths are allowed through to tantalise.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the visual arts, which is why I was cheered by discover Laurence Fuller's Art Influence website. In painting the message is very simple, dead painters were astoundingly good and created beauty but that's over now and it's all been done. Now art is a practical joke, you either laugh with it or at it but either way it is the same anger that sustains both sides of the familiar furore. Fuller's project, an online Arts magazine dedicated to keeping alive the aims and ambitions of art critic Peter Fuller, is an attempt to be more accurate and than simple.

Even so I have to say that my heart sank when the interview with Marcelle Hanselaar started with Laurence asking "Do you think that shocking images will captivate people more?" this is accompanied by a self portrait of the artist apparently being shot in the chest, a spurt of blood leaping from her body. Marcelle begins to talk about the need to grab attention and the theatrical nature of painting and there follow images of naked women being harassed by dogs. It feels like familiar territory. It feels like the painter as London Tonight would have her, some batty foreigner doing rude, crude drawings of sexual violence and in simple terms that is the case. However here is the difference between simplicity and accuracy.

Asthetically there is a lot to complain about in Laurence's interview. Twenty minutes long it is, for the most part, a single locked off shot of the artist talking in her flatly lit studio, the sound creaking in through the camera top mic. What editing there is is often startlingly bad, on a couple of occasions sentences are clipped short which is the sort of hamfisted work it is impossible to quite forgive. Still the lack of artifice within this twenty-minute documentary (split into two ten minute chunks for youtube) is also it's biggest strength and charm. Laurence is clearly not a filmmaker but he is very definitely a kind and considerate interviewer and it is very nice to watch something where the focus is on the subject, not the documentary form.

What Laurence does that nowhere else will do is give his subjects the time and space that they deserve. Given the time to really explain and explore her work and her working methods Hanselaar reveals herself to be an utterly delightful companion. Thoughtful, passionate, intelligent and humane. Given the chance to think about her work beyond it's initial shock value I found myself moved. She is a superb artist with a superb and, for me at least, inspiring take on the world. I cannot thank Laurence enough for taking the time to record this interview and if you, like me, ever feel like paint is a dead medium then go spend twenty-minutes with Marcelle and she and Laurence will change your mind.

The Interview.
Marcelle's work.

I seem to have confused a lot of people with my recent description of the film "Zeitgeist" and, reading my words back, I will at least admit that the prose is rather woody and this has made it easy for incautious minds to leap to accusations that I support Sharia law or deny the halocaust or something. I have fought, and indeed continue to fight, a long battle with syntax. For whilst I am well aware that we no longer live in an age where a five hour oration is considered peppy and though the sad truth now is that anyone who took the whole of the first three pages to describe the London fog would get nothing but a stern phone call from their editor, I find it impossible to truly free myself from a love and admiration for the serpentine sentence.

I like to imagine that for some time I've been doing quite well. Having spent far too much of my time over the past three or four years carving away at the craft of writing saleable treatments, I think I had finally forced some part of my mind to accept that for ease of understanding it is always better to write in short staccato bursts and thus aim to emulate the great tit rather than the blackbird. Then I heard a man on the radio talking about death and the end of life, which are not the same things. One of his discussions was about alzheimer's and he made the horrible announcement that a recent study has shown that certain behaviour in your late teens can be predictive of your chances of suffering the most common form of what is a syndrome not a disease. Lying in bed late at night this is not precisely the sort of thing I wanted to hear. My late teens, whilst not a distant memory, are neither near at hand and so the thought of finding out that I'd already ballsed up and there was nothing I could do but sit around and wait for the inevitable shot me through with a sudden thrill dread. It's bound to be more exercise, I thought, it's always more exercise.

I should have turned it off and if you are feeling a little queasy about finding out what it is you should have done but now cannot, then I'd suggest you stop reading and perhaps click on this link to watch something that'll take your mind off it.

The programme went on to detail a survey of nuns. Apparently, and with no small irony, nuns are great for study because the communality of their existence makes them the perfect control group. Also the good record keeping of convents meant that it was possible for the researchers to not only autopsy the dead body but to peer back over their long life in an effort to see if there were any common and therefore predictive factors that lead to the manner and means of their passing. Their conclusion was that those nuns who, in their late teens, wrote in short simple sentences tended to suffer alzheimer's, whilst those who preferred a more complicated sentence structure didn't. I am not ashamed to admit that at this point I punched the air and shouted "Get in!"

Consequently the forces of simplicity have taken a bitter of a battering recently as all the commas and semi colons that hang my meanings in mid air, have crowded to ends of my finger tips and starting offering themselves up to me as a way of keeping insanity at bay. Alas it seems, that whichever path I go down, I will not be understood.