REQUIEM FOR AURORA

 November 2009

‘Aurora’ means dawn but in 2009 it rode off into the sunset.  This annual festival of experimental film, held each year in Norwich, UK, started on 5 November and culminated in a festival weekend on 13 to 15 November, but unlike the sun rising upon the earth each day, the dawn offered by Aurora is to be extinguished: it started in 2005, gathered momentum, but has now come to a halt – we were told that Aurora is to end, at least in the present format, as a result of funding difficulties.

 And that format is a highly stimulating one. I only attend the weekend rather than the whole 10 days, but that is built around one or two guest film-makers, supplemented by showing work by other mostly young film-makers who are exploring new areas of cinema, extending the boundaries as they do so.  Nor are they all young – which suits me.

 The two film-makers at the centre of the festival this year were Jem Cohen from New York and Milena Gierke from Germany.  Their films were fascinating to watch, but I admit to being bewitched especially by Jem Cohen’s street-level films from New York, especially his Lost Book Found, which cleverly finds a narrative in which to frame his diary films, made on super 8mm mostly with some on 16mm as well, and transferred to video, with the process of the transfer being manipulated to add tinting and different speeds. This process has given a hypnotic, floating pulse to the film, and at the same time human figures are often seen as fugitive images, what one might call a celebration of ephemerality.  This aesthetic was starkly confirmed in the exhibition of Cohen’s polaroid photos in the Norwich Arts Centre, where the festival was held.  These images cleverly combined smallness, softness and the specific stolen moment in order to create a poetic vision of the night city, emphatically unglamorous but all the more real for that.  I thought of street photographers such as Walker Evans (his subway photographs of 1938 and 1941) and Helen Levitt (who also made the marvellous film In the Street (1948) with James Agee and Janice Loeb), and street film-makers like Rudy Burckhardt (for example, Eastside Summer in 1957, and a film made in 1956 with Joseph Cornell, What Mozart saw on Mulberry Street), Jonas Mekas, Peter Hutton.

 Polaroids?  Super 8?  I had thought they were dead but they clearly are not, or not quite.  Because not only did Cohen use super 8, but Milena Gierke did as well.  Her films are mostly short one-reelers, but the best of them was Stillesleben/Still Life (2001), a 30-minute diary film soaked in the Mediterranean light of the south of France.  Milena imposed a particular discipline on her use of super 8, namely only to edit in the camera, as if the rigours of seeking to achieve a shooting ratio of 1:1 would concentrate the mind: you would have to think hard about the last shot before shooting the next one, with the result that each image is considered and free of the temptation to shoot on impulse, thinking you could discard what you did not like.

 It wasn’t all youth: Andrew Kotting (of Gallivant fame) lent his benign and stimulating presence, and Jon Bang Carlsen, a Danish filmmaker almost as old as I am, showed his entrancing portrait of Jimmy McEvoy in It’s Now or Never (2006). This is an astonishing piece of work, seemingly a documentary about Jimmy, an Irish sheep farmer, and of the community he lives in, but given a narrative about his search for a wife through a matchmaker, which is truly suspenseful: will he find someone or not? Will he be happy when he has? This is film-making penetrating to the heart of people’s lives, only achievable at an immense level of trust and truthfulness. It is 45 minutes long, so it fits very awkwardly into any film or even TV format, but I bought a DVD of it from Jon, so it’s in circulation. Its renown can only increase. [Go to  http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_22/section_1/artc9A.html for the entry on Carlsen in the 'Encyclopaedia of Documentary Film' which tells you more and gives a list of some of his films.]

 Norwich will miss Aurora greatly, but so will the rest of the United Kingdom because we have hardly any events like this anywhere.  We have been indebted to Adam Pugh and Kelly Ling for organising the festival, and to Gareth Evans for his astute guidance.

 See www.aurora.org.uk for more information.