Created in Birmingham

The Festival of Quilts is another of those seemingly niche events at the NEC that, on closer study, turns out to be rather more substantial. It’s not on until August 16-19th but already there’s a lot confirmed including grassroots quilting, studies of traditions going back thousands of years, surveys of international quilting movements and more, for want of a better word, highbrow work. This looks to be a quite inspiring showing the many aspects of Textiles through the prism of Quilts.

via D’log

The British Underwater Image Festival takes place at the NEC on March 16-18th. Covering all levels of ability from professional film makers to amateurs with compact digital cameras the only criteria seems to be that the lens must be beneath the water line.

Maybe I’ve been in landlocked Birmingham too long but I’m surprised by the scale of this competition with some fairly substantial prizes for the winners. Is underwater photography and film making really this widespread? I guess The Blue Planet has something to do with it.

If you see me wrapping my camera in a plastic bag and dunking it in the canal you’ll know why…

via D’log, photo by 2006 winner Zac Macaulay

One thing I’ve learning about the Arts world is that it’s endlessly concerned with funding, and that funding is the most fickle of mistresses, coming and going like the wind. A phrase that popped into my consciousness recent is “the coming ice age”, meaning, I think, the sudden and cruel termination of a decade or so of investment in arts and culture as the political climate changes.

Waiting for the axe to fall by Norman Lebrecht sumarises this concern well, looking at how proposed budget cuts – “Gordon’s big freeze” – might affect museums and galleries.

The national museums have put forward three options if cuts are imposed on the scale intended. They can reintroduce admission charges; they can stop lending items and exhibits to the rest of the country; or they can shut departments, buildings and entire institutions.

The removal of entry charges five years ago resulted in 85 million extra museum visitors and is being trumpeted as one of New Labour’s triumphs. There is no way the government will allow that egalitarian policy to be reversed.

Regional distribution is inviolate in much the same way. Although it costs London a fortune in wages and insurance to send cultural treasures around the nation, politicians are committed to equal distribution and will enforce continued touring.

That makes closures unavoidable.

He concludes:

We have been here before. In the 1990s, the Tories froze the arts to pay for the Millennium Dome. Now New Labour aims to rob the arts to pay for the Olympics. It is a petty act – the British Museum’s £46.8 million grant barely matches one ward in an NHS teaching hospital – and it is unnecessary by any rational accounting. The Games are ephemeral entertainments, museums bear witness forever.

The whole piece is well worth a read.

How does this relate to Birmingham? I’m in no position to make pronouncements but as we see an increase in funding for creativity around Eastside it might be worth noting where that money is actually going. Is it for “ephemeral entertainments” or things with more substance that will form a bedrock from which the city can grow?

D’log has more links and commentary.

The Birmingham Open Art Show runs from 10th Feb to 29th April in the Gas Hall and features 150 works by emerging local talent from the West Midlands. The art was selected by a panel of judges comprising of Kathleen Soriano, (from gallery Compton Verney), Terry Grimley (Arts Editor at the Birmingham Post) and Max Kandhola (Photographic Studies at Nottingham Trent University)

As well as being open to the public works will be available for sale and prizes will be awarded. The best in show is £1000 while the five categories (oil/acrylics, paper, watercolour, 3D and time-based) get £250 each.

Obviously the deadline for entering has passed but you might be interested in the entry form since this is the first of a planned annual event.

Hat tip: D’log

There’s been a lot of activity from Screen West Midlands and Film Birmingham to push the area as a good place for film and TV companies to do their work, emphasizing advantages such as centrality and low cost along with the variety of urban environments and countryside and resulting in a 40% increase in filming activity in the region.

The Locations database, launched on Thursday, is part of this initiative, with locations categorised by type and searchable on keywords. I had a quick play and looks pretty useful, though there could be a lot more added. Only one cemetery, for example.

There’s also a Crew and Facility search for companies based in the area offering production or supplementary services (effects, catering, animal hire).

As well as being available to film companies around the world the database is open to new submissions from property owners and businesses who are interested in working with said companies.

Tomorrow has a Postgrad Open Day at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design (BIAD) covering the departments of Visual Communication, Architecture, Fashion, Textiles and 3D Design, Theoretical and Historical Studies, Media and Communications and Art.

This has been your absurdly-short-notice post for today. via D’log.

The Rhubarb Rhubarb Festival dates have been set for 26th – 29th July 2007 and, along with the Arts Council, they’re offering eight bursaries for photographers from the West Midlands intended to help then prepare their portfolios and exhibit at the festival including six 20 minute sessions with international reviewers. The deadline for applications is Feb 22nd and full details are in this PDF. Worth noting that while the bursaries are aimed at up and coming photographers applicants must have “some experience of exhibiting, commissioning or publishing.”

Hat tip to D’log

It’s still a bit of a way off but dates for the 10th Fierce Festival has been confirmed, running for three weeks from 18th May to 4th June.

In 2007 Fierce celebrates its 10th festival with our most ambitious programme yet. Get ready for three weeks of eye-popping, stop you in your tracks performances and spectacles taking place in theatres, galleries and unusual sites and locations across the city. Fierce 10 brings some of our old favourites back into town alongside some of the most explosive new performance talent from across the world.

Fierce famously brought the astonishing Franko B to the city, amongst many others.

Stripsearch, the ongoing project to identify and support comic strip illustration talent in the West Midlands run by Hi8us, is currently touring an exhibition of work produced at workshops run by John McCrea.

Out Of The Bedroom is currently showing in the Custard Factory Reception on Gibb St from 9am-6pm until Feb 9th. The following artists are involved (with links where I could find them)

Simon K Woolford
Duane Blue Leslie
Anthony McClure
Jonathan Dukes
Lee Bradley
Tony McGee
Karoline Rerrie
Nicola Johnson
Abbey Baguley
Lisa Hill
Lizz Lunney
Giuseppa Barresi
Jane McGuiness
Liam Keane
Peter Inscoe

(Note to Hi8us – putting links on your site would be really useful for anyone wanting to contact the artists to offer them work and such, especially emerging artists who aren’t so visible on Google. I’m just saying.)

Full details are in this press release.

5 Days of Apple is a series of five free hands-on workshops, seminars and demonstrations run by the New Technology Institute in Eastside. Topics covered include video editing and effects, photography, 3D model rendering and games creation. Booking is necessary as places are limited.

Link via Ten4.

A weekly grab from the Birmingham Flickr community. (Usually posted on Friday, unless I forget, like this week…)

© nobody knows anything

© tanyalupton

© redcrayon

© harri b

To suggest photos for this feature post them to this thread on Flickr or leave a link in the comments here.

This is part three of my Flatpack Film Festival preview guide covering Sunday. Previous parts covered Friday and Saturday. Once again, these aren’t necessarily recommendations as I don’t really know what I’m letting myself in for in a lot of cases. But the programme is absurdly packed so you might find this useful.

I’m going to have to rush through this else I’m going to miss the Friday daytime stuff so here goes.

22 Green Street is the same as on Friday, which is handy for those who work 9-5, with the Harrachov Exchange and Jinpow exhibits on display. Entrance is free and it’s open from 12-5pm.

Then up at the Island Bar I’m drawn to Scart Trio because it sounds odd. “Non linear film making that IS non-linear. Their outcomes are unclear with unrehearsed stories emerging from the ether. Artists and Harry Palmer and Olly Shapley use flawed analogue AV processing to engage ‘the hand of chance’ and together perform a diagnostic synthesis of two films played simultaneously.” 5.30, free entry.

The rest of the day gives us a quite absurd number of films. Seriously, this festival could run all week. In fact I’m kinda annoyed it’s all crammed into just three days as I’d love to see most of these.

The Channel 3 anthology of shorts submitted to the festival continues at the Electric (1pm, £6) with a load of animation followed by a Q&A.

Bike Shorts (MAC, 1.30pm, £3.50) will probably slip off my schedule which is a shame as I like bikes. The highlight here is Ridley Scott’s 1958 film Boy and Bicycle starring his brother Tony and Bike Kill also looks fun, about the “notorious” Black Label Bike Club. It’s on YouTube but that’s not quite the same. Or is it?

Faust: Nobody Knew If It Ever Happened (Odeon, 2pm, £5.40) is concert footage from a legendary performance at the Camden Garage in which the Krautrockers took to the stage with welding equipment. Also features naked hairy men, which is always a good thing.

Norman McLaren (MAC, 3.30, £4.50) is described as “the closest thing Flatpack has to a patron” which makes this collection of shorts intriguing if you want to try and understand where the festival is coming from. Very hard to summarise from the blurb but I think this should be tagged “must see”.

If you like Danielson Famile you’ll already be down to see Danielson: A Family Movie (Electric, 3.30, £6) but I’m not too bothered myself.

Instead I’ll probably be at the Odeon for Paprika (4pm, £5.40), a batshit mad looking Japanese animation from Satoshi Kon that looks to take a trad sci-fi premise and run with it until it explodes. Just how I like my Anime!

On the other extreme is Penda’s Fen (MAC, 6pm, £4.50), a 1973 Play for Today film written by David Rudkin (who’ll be doing a Q&A afterwards), directed by Alan Clarke and set in the countryside south of Birmingham.

If you’re thinking it’s been a while since we’ve had any very old films accompanied live by contemporary musicians with a dash of experimental cinema to boot, and it must have been hours, Bodies of Water (Electric, 6.30, £8) by collective Photon Hex should fit the bill. Their instruments include laptops, electronics, double bass, trombone, guitar, tabletop guitar, percussion and amplified objects and I’m intrigued by the news that one of them is an ex-member of Napalm Death. I think this is a must see.

The big budget festival film looks to be Science of Sleep (Odeon, 6.30, £5.40) by Michel Gondry, he of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and countless neat music videos. At any other time this would be the really odd banana in the bunch but here it seems positively mainstream. Not that that’s a criticism. Judging by the trailer I really want to see this.

Then there’s the Flatpack Closing Party at the Market Tavern, Digbeth, from 7pm.

And then it’s all over.

This could be interesting! A debate in Coventry on 7th Feb is titled Chasing the Money: Who’s getting it, who’s not, and should the arts be funded?. It’s at the Herbert Cafe and is free, with the warning that it might get heated…

Link via D’log

Marketing the Movies: Promotion, Advertising and Film Studies is a conference at the University of Warwick in Coventry on Saturday 24th February.

More so than many other kinds of art, films exist primarily as commercial entities, with for-profit enterprises producing and distributing the vast majority of the works which are seen throughout the world. Selling these products to audiences often entails more money (and some would say, creativity) than goes into the production of the films themselves. Despite the prominence in film culture of movie posters, theatrical trailers, and television commercials for upcoming releases, relatively little research has been done within film studies on film marketing itself. Promotion has heretofore been used mainly as a supplementary component of reception studies, with materials such as studio guidebooks or staged promotional events being typically presented as constituting “useful evidence as to how the company involved viewed the film at the time,” to quote Colin McArthur, or helping to explain the journalistic reception of the films in question.

This event seeks to break from this pattern of using the promotion of films in such ways and to shift the critical focus to the materials and practices themselves, to treat them as the object of study while also reflecting on the ways in which they can, and should, be used as research resources. How do they go about getting people to see movies? How have they functioned and changed throughout the history of the medium? How do they work in differing national and cultural contexts? How should they be used to study films?

Registration is £20 (£10 students). Details here

Link via D’log. Image from the poster.

This is part two of my Flatpack Film Festival preview guide covering Saturday. Part one detailed my plans for Friday and Sunday will follow soon. Again, these aren’t necessarily recommendations as I don’t really know what I’m letting myself in for in a lot of cases. But the programme is absurdly packed so you might find this useful.

I’ve already got my ticket for Mark Locke’s Saturday Night Takeaway (previewed here) which pretty much puts me in Moseley for the evening. This collection of clips and shorts will be presented in a chat-show format with Mark being interviewed by Adrian Goldberg (of The Stirrer) while Misty’s Big Adventure play live. No idea how that’s going to work but that’s kinda the point. It starts at 8.30 in the MAC (£4.50) and, I’m told, should run for a good 100 minutes.

Meanwhile, up the road at the Jug of Ale, the Capsule organised Known Unknowns event is taking place. Run by the folks behind the excellent Supersonic festival this features six bands (links here) and a variety of moving images plus DJs and cake taking over the entire pub. It’s a fiver to get in and runs from 7pm – 2am so my plan is to go there first for an hour, rush down to the MAC for Mark Locke and then come back around 10.30 for the last few hours. I’d imagine others will be thinking along the same lines too.

That pretty much rules out the films in the city centre venues. I’ll regret missing High Score, a documentary about the people who are still trying to beat the record scores for vintage arcade games. The high score for Missile Command is 80,000,000 points and requires the player to stand at the machine for 48 hours. Bill Carlton reckons he can beat it. Accompanying the film is a performance from the excellent ZX Spectrum Orchestra. Electric, 6.30pm, £6.

During the day the main draw for me is the Modulate Sound Space at at their 22 Green Street space in Digbeth (map). Run as a drop-in event the attractions take place “from within a yurt in the middle of the warehouse” and includes a screening of Her Noise, “A collection of interviews and live performance documentation… celebrating women whose contributions to art and culture are often overlooked”, including Kim Gordon and Lydia Lunch. You can see it at 1pm and 4pm. Around this is a load of stuff that just looks intriguingly odd and well worth the £3.00 ticket considering it runs from 1-9pm.

At the Island Bar I’m drawn to Bibio + Artists Valley at 5.30: “Black Country-based musician/filmmaker Stephen Wilkinson is best known for two lps of gorgeously fuzzy finger-picking electronica under the name Bibio. This evening he and fellow Artists Valley cohorts will be laying on a tasty platter of film and music to freshen up jaded urban palates.”

At the Electric during the day the following caught my eye:

Channel 2 Shorts (noon, £6) is a collection of “sort-of documentaries” comprising the more personal and observations pieces submitted to the festival. More details at the link.

Interkosmos (2pm, £6) looks kinda mad being a lo-fi sci-fi film documenting an imaginary East German space mission in the 1970s. “Filmmaker and visual artist Jim Finn weaves a wonderful patchwork of clunky newsreel, stop-frame animation and Berkeley-esque musical numbers” along with a krautrock-esque soundtrack.

Finally, Kyle (4pm, £6) is a feature by John Bradburn from Redditch, filmed in DV with non-professional actors in the Bull Ring markets and estates in Kings Norton. “The result is a bold and engaging piece of work with an acknowledged debt to the likes of Herzog and the Dardennes but a sensibility all of its own.”

Assuming I survive all that, Sunday beckons and looks to be quite ridiculous. More later.