Hullfire #1: Glimmers of Cinema's Potential

Originally published: 30th October 2011


Hullfire URL: http://www.thehullfire.com/en/index.php/arts/469-glimmers-of-cinemas-potential

Cannes, Sundance, Venice, New York, Hull ... What do all of these places have in common?  They are all, of course, the homes to some of the most respected film festivals in the world.  Okay, maybe Hull is a slight anomaly in this group, but it is the home of an exciting and inspiring film festival nonetheless – Glimmer 2011: The 9^th Hull International Short Film Festival.

Glimmer, despite the name, may not feature the glamour and sparkle associated with most other film festivals, but what it does do is bring to our humble city, and even our own campus, enough creativity to make up for the lack of movie stars and red carpets.  The festival, which this year ran over a weekend in early October, showcases short films by budding directors from all over the world.  Events included a 48-hour film challenge, competitions, and screenings of BAFTA nominated short films, but the highlight was a truly unique and slightly bonkers experience which kicked off the festival and took place in the university’s own Middleton Hall.

Two short films, I Married a Foley Footstep! and Hands of Hair formed a double bill by Mancunian artists Ben Gwilliam and Matt Wand.  The concept is simple but effective: a combination of newly shot and found footage are edited together and set to a soundtrack of Foley sound effects performed live by Gwilliam and Wand.  Foley is the art used in the film industry of recreating every day sounds in order to make the world of the film as realistic as possible, and requires a certain amount of ingenuity on the part of the artist. (One of the most well known examples of Foley is that the sound effect for the doors opening and closing in the original Star Trek TV series was achieved by sliding a piece of paper in and out of an envelope.) 

Gwilliam and Wand are not professional Foley artists by any means, but it is fascinating to see how they use the kinds of ordinary objects you could find under your kitchen sink to create a film soundtrack, including shaking rubber gloves to simulate the flapping of a bird’s wings, and crunching cat litter to mimic footsteps in gravel.  All of this is performed live in front of the audience as the film rolls, and is almost more intriguing than watching the films themselves.  In fact, the footage shown is not what’s important here (although it does make a brilliant point that by taking existing footage, shifting it around a bit and adding a different soundtrack can put a new twist on an old story, even changing its message entirely); the real impact that the films have is that they make one wonder where this experimental technique could fit into mainstream cinema.

At the moment the ‘big thing’ in cinema is 3D, a novelty that the studios have brought back from the dead in an attempt to tackle piracy.  By now we will all have donned the glasses at least once to see what the fuss is about, and in some cases it truly is a wonder, but the fact is that 3D has many flaws - headaches, a darker image and increased prices to name but a few.  Eventually Hollywood is going to have to find another way to wrangle us away from our computer screens.  In the last edition of Hullfire Olivia Sturrock tackled the debate of theatre vs. cinema, and what Gwilliam and Wand have done with their experiment is raise the question, ‘Why not merge them together?’  After all, their live sound performance to a pre-recorded film harkens back to the days of silent cinema when films would often be shown with a live orchestra performing the music.  It brings a certain kinetic and theatrical energy to a form of entertainment which has arguably fallen into routine.

You might ask, what’s the point in having the sound effects or music performed live at all?  In a Q&A session after the screening, Gwilliam and Wand explained that they purposefully made some of the effects out of sync, otherwise you may as well just play a pre-recording of the sounds like an ordinary film.  Admittedly, it was a little distracting to see an image of someone walking on the screen and hearing their footsteps a fraction of a second out of time, as was seeing a man waving marigolds about in your peripheral vision when you are trying to pay attention to the film. 

The precise method used here is not necessarily suited to mainstream cinema, and the idea of live sound effects and music may not be the answer to tackling piracy at all.  But what we can learn from this, and other experiments from Glimmer, is that there are alternative ways to make cinema interactive, immersive, and worth leaving the house for.  What Hollywood chooses as its next craze, we will just have to wait and see.