Back to the Future

After a cosy festive season which saw me secluded in a converted fisherman’s cottage in the gothic North Yorkshire coastal town of Whitby, I was craving some cutting edge urbanity by the time 8th January rolled round.  A quick perusal of London’s top listings mag and an email/ Twitter probe pointed to Lido Love or Future Shorts One. Spoilt for choice, I thought, until the riotous artistic celebration of London Fields Lido’s anarchic past sold out while I was still making my mind up. Shaking off self-reproach at this school girl administrative error and resolving to book absurdly in advance for next year’s love-in, I swiftly coughed up for the film festival in miniature.

Audaciously billed as a ‘simultaneous event’ to be screened across 12 countries in 15 cities, it was to be the inaugural Future Shorts event at the Old Cholmeley Boys Club in Dalston, migrating across the river from Battersea Arts Centre. And Battersea’s loss was incontestably Dalston’s gain.  The London incarnation of Future Shorts has been carving a bespoke niche in the film world since 2003. The brainchild of filmmaker Fabien Riggall was a maveric bid to ‘take cinema out of the cinema,’ which paid off by harnessing sponsorship deals by Mini and Windows Phone to reinvigorate the deadening viewing conventions imposed by the multiplex. The promotion and distribution of short films is just one arm of his Future Cinema brand which is perhaps best known since 2008 for the genre defying Secret Cinema. Having seen their monumental staging/ screening of Bladerunner in the Docklands last May, during which compliant ‘cyber-punks’ were herded by coach from Canary Wharf to a disused warehouse, peopled by the hustlers and hookers of a downtown LA dystopia, I had high expectations of this sister event. The brevity of the material, scaled down setting, more modest entourage and comparatively cheap ticket (£12.50 rather that £25) might suggest a lesser event all round, but Future Shorts is a different beast to its extravagant counterpart. Not to mention the audience of 25,000 it lays claim to from simultaneous international and online transmission.

Granted, you don’t get the thrill of anticipation and speculation as to the mystery feature and venue that you do with Secret Cinema, but then there’s always the chance that someone will blurt it out and kill the element of surprise anyway (as I found out to my dismay), now that the ‘surprise’ is held on five consecutive nights. But stepping into the faded Victorian civic splendor of the Old Cholmeley Boys Club on Dalston’s Boleyn Road, you could be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled on a well kept secret. In fact, I shudder to recollect that I’d worked in the neighbouring Gillett Square for three months a few years back and had next to no knowledge of the place. Oozing dusty, draughty character from the cavernous balcony to the handsome C.S. Lewis-esque wardrobe and inexplicable king-sized bed in the corner, it felt as if we’d broken into the school hall after hours. The spirit of childish transgression was rewarded with bags of sweets on the door and a cloud of balloons inviting you to make a wish for 2011 by scrawling an inscription in marker pen. Cynical thoughts of hot air and inflated egos were cast aside as the interactive allure won me over. The streamer-bedecked hall was strewn with all manner of curious paraphernalia, including a black board on which to chalk up the life expectancy of your New Year’s Resolution (one for the cynic, then) and a cat’s cradle of a chandelier that featured yet more bon mots and flashed in time to the music- possibly overkill when competing with the back projections but amusing none the less.

But what of the entertainment? We shuffled in shamefacedly half way through Thomas Truax‘s set, a Manhattan- born performance artist whose experimental blues-punk put me in mind of a one man band, albeit one fond of audience participation. In red shoes and spinning light up glasses last seen on Orbital but with an inadvertent nod to Timmy Mallet, he warmed us up with the crazed squelching and belching of a host of home-made instruments, including the ‘hornicator’ (think ear trumpet) and ‘string-a-ling’ (a harmonica- drum hybrid fashioned from ducting tube and a yoyo, possibly). Eccentric, yes but surprisingly accessible. And the affable lads of Love Da Pop!, plying a virtuous trade in hand-popped popcorn while dressed in the candy striped waist coats of cinema’s golden age, were entertainment in themselves.

And the films? After refuelling with a watermelon cocktail (weak but beautifully served) from the makeshift bar (littered with candelabra and stray taxidermy), we squeezed on to the edge of a leather sofa and settled down for the movies. Of the nine shorts from six counties, four were stand outs for me. German dance piece Oval-Ah! delivered an arresting opening and deserves mention for making ballet downright filthy, the  prima ballerina strutting and contorting and carving crop circles in the dirt with no regard for costume or comfort. Next up was a Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck collaboration, the music video Heaven Can Wait which had a forgettable soundtrack but a wicked line in deadpan, incongruous moments of disaster befalling the unsuspecting; Schadenfreude in montage. Cody Stokes’ Heartland Transport was an affectionate, fly on the wall doc following a bus load of same-sex couples from St.Lewis to Iowa City to take advantage of the legalisation  of gay marriage. Candid and unvarnished, the premise was encapsualted by one groom’s reflection on his pilgrimage: ‘the personal meeting the political.’

Alice Winocour’s Kitchen was the most accomplished work. An elliptical vignette- a housewife driven to distraction by the self-imposed necessity of cooking live lobster for her husband. Minimal dialogue, understated camera work and monochrome palette framed the mounting neurosis of the protagonist who paces the kitchen in high-heels whilst brandishing a meat cleaver. A stylish, subtle fusion of the absurd and the macabre.

Relieved as I was that the vocal, appreciative audience had been capped at a hundred or so to make for an intimate evening, it was a shame the majority drifted off as the credits rolled. The DJ played out the night with some real floor fillers but in the absence of after show dancing we fell into fireside film critique to banish the January chill around a roaring log fire. You don’t get that in a multiplex.

Future Shorts One is a monthly event.

Photographs by Kirsty McQuire

‘This song reminds me of swimming’

Swimming pools: it’s love/ hate. When I was first marched to the local pool in Lichfield for lessons aged four or so, delivered by a very hands-on teacher who looked like David Bellamy and smelt strongly of bacon, I had no apprehension that I’d still be swimming, of my own volition, some twenty-two years later. “It’s a skill for life,” my Mum had told my brother and I, but my own enthusiasm waxed and waned through childhood and beyond, until I fell into my current adulthood regime.

I can’t have been the only child turned off swimming by the trials of splashing, chlorine in the eyes, the shame of remaining in the ‘middle group’ indefinitely, or the public humiliation of coming last in every gala, as simple recreation increasingly became competitive sport. And all this with the prospect of a cold shower and an anxiety-ridden communal changing room still to come! But it had its moments, even then- the Zen-like trance I used to enter when permitted to do lengths of backstroke, dreamily counting the slats on the ceiling, or the weekly promise of fish and chips on the way home if we behaved ourselves. Best of all was the phenomenal take-away pizza in the unlikely setting of Swadlincote in Derbyshire. Following a weekend swim with my Dad, to this day it is the best I’ve ever tasted. Whether we had stumbled across a truly artisan pizzeria in the Midlands, or the food was merely transfigured by the profound physical exhaustion and raging hunger that are the coda of any good swim, it mattered not. But no such incentives followed PE swimming, which simply condemned the fairer sex to an afternoon of damp locks and the inevitable chill that followed when waiting at the bus stop. The fetching 80s ‘snood’ my Mum supplied me with was no defence; the letters verifying pre-menstrual, menstrual and post-menstrual indisposition that she and other lenient mothers wrote at their daughters’ behest were, up to a point.

So when did I fall in love with it? Discounting swimming abroad (which is almost always more salubrious, with the combination of kinder climate and holiday humour), the leisure centre eventually became my refuge from library and bedroom during those dark days of dissertations and finals when pubs, clubs and cafes were off limits. I couldn’t bear the mechanised hot house of the gym, or face pounding the pavement with hardier joggers in the January chill- but a solo dip to clear my head of cabin fever and stretch my limbs out of desk-induced cramp, suddenly seemed incredibly appealing. I’ll be honest- I’m not a strong swimmer- I can’t dive, I never mastered butterfly and my front crawl leaves a lot to be desired. But I was sufficiently impressed with the refreshing and restorative effects of a plunge into the medium lane to keep it up at home in university holidays, even undeterred by an embarrassing episode in which I was accidentally permitted to enter a ‘Nifty Fifties’ swim session. Although I was hauled out within minutes by a disgruntled lifeguard, it warmed my heart and strengthened my swimmer’s resolve to know that I had the support of my elders in the pool- ‘there’s enough watter for us all, int there?’ one OAP spoke up in my defence.

It was outdoor swimming, though, that really captured my imagination, once I’d made the move to the metropolis. The juxtaposition of an al-fresco, immersive experience in the shadow of a tower block was somehow thrilling; experiencing the elements on a far more visceral level than is the norm in the air-conditioned- centrally-heated – double-glazed interiors of modern urban sprawl, and all underscored by car alarms, sirens and planes overhead. My landlord at the time extolled the benefits to the circulation and the immune system of an early morning, open-air plunge, and whether it was anything so physiological or simply the enlivening and clarifying sensation, half low-impact work-out and half spa-treatment, it worked for me. I’ve heard that diving passes were issued to the first high-finance expats to populate the Cayman Islands for the same reason- losing yourself through water combats island fever as well as London fever.

Of course, in the lido you were just as likely to glide into a stray plaster or knot of hair as a fallen autumn leaf, just as likely to be stuck behind painfully slow Sunday swimmers, lane-hoppers or reckless paddlers as at any swimming bath. I’m thinking of those serial offenders who display flagrant disregard for personal space and wade right through yours- there’s nothing like an unwanted underwater scuffle of limbs, with only Lycra protecting your modesty, to violate your personal lagoon fantasy. And squeamishness is an inevitable consequence of letting the mind dwell too long on the gruesome solution of bodily fluids and debris, vomit and verrucas in which we might be wilfully marinating ourselves. Certainly this revulsion gripped a friend of mine on a recent visit to a Turkish bath in Budapest- I was in seventh heaven, she, repulsed. Does this phobia hark back to a time pre-dating water filters and chlorine, I wonder? A time when public baths were just that- communal washing facilities built as a civic duty to counter the spread of disease amongst the burgeoning urban population of the 19^th century, under the Baths and Washhouses Act of 1846. Cleansing, certainly, but only if you got in early.

But back to the blissful open-air exhilaration. Brit Art doyenne Tracey Emin- a champion of lidos, amongst other things- has compared the experience to ‘being baptised. My muscles sprang into action and said: “Thank you, God,” she wrote in her column for the Independent in 2007. And novelist Alan Hollinghurst perfectly captured his characters’ hermetically-sealed thought processes, suspended within a public sphere of decadence, athleticism and homoeroticism, in his 1988 debut, The Swimming Pool Library:

‘…the swimmers loom up and down unaware of each other, crossing sometimes in the soft cones of brightness. All this makes the pool seem remote from the rest of the world….

It was a bizarre occupation, numbing and yet satisfying. My mind would count its daily fifty lengths as automatically as a photocopier; and at the same time it would wander. Absorbed in thought I barely noticed the half-hour- one unfaltering span of pure physical exercise- elapse.’

There seems to be a contradiction in the portrayal of swimming in art and popular culture, something akin to the Freudian virgin/ whore complex that has divided simplistic representations of women. From fairy tales to horror movies the swimming pool or marine world is consistently shown as a liminal, transformative space, outside of the realms of everyday society. In Charles Kingsley’s 1862 novel The Water Babies, drowning is akin to rebirth, once the innocent child-victim proves their moral worth. The heroine of earlier work The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Anderson is punished for sacrificing her aquatic origins to pursue an earthly mate, ultimately dissolving into foam or air, as a result of rejecting the utopian sea kingdom. Beyond Victorian didacticism, we find swimming pools and swimming opportunities celebrated as places of liberation and transgression- from David Hockney’s sun-kissed 1960s Splash paintings, to the lurid aesthetic of Francois Ozon’s 2003 thriller The Swimming Pool.  Burt Lancaster charts a surreal and cavalier course home through the pools of his affluent Connecticut neighbours in the 1968 movie The Swimmer. What begins as a romantic stunt soon degenerates into an itinerary of middle class, midlife crises in microcosm. An open-air pool was similarly used to signify opulence, glamour and to provide the backdrop to sexual awakening in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, or Danny Boyle’s A Life Less Ordinary. Not unlike Hampstead’s male bathing pond in Hollinghurst’s 2004 novel The Line of Beauty, later lavishly adapted for TV. A comparatively lack lustre public pool gives Naomi Watt’s character solace and rehabilitation following grief and drug addiction in 2003’s 21 Grams. However, there is an altogether more menacing association to be found in the horror genre, from the silhouetted stalking scene of a lone female swimmer by an anthropomorphic predator in Cat People from 1942, to the torture of a young boy made to hold his breath after a swimming lesson in Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In of 2008, an offence for which his vampire girlfriend takes revenge by decapitating the bullies, exiting by walking on water and leaving her victims’ heads to float on the surface.

Plenty to percolate through the newly hydrated consciousness then as you strike out for another length. But I agree I agree with Laura Barton’s assessment that Loudon Wainwright said it best. Rufus and Martha’s dad encapsulated the life-affirming liberation of propelling oneself in water in the 1973 lyrics of Swimming Song, immortalised by his late wife Kate McGarrigle and sister Anna: ‘This summer I went swimming/ This summer I might have drowned /But I held my breath, kicked my feet / And I moved my arms around…’

Photograph by Kirsty McQuire

Wet Wet Wet

I reviewed the Wet Sounds 2009 installation at the London Fields Lido for Amelia’s Magazine.