Coffee-Table Notes

Four stars   Speculative Fiction has been predicting the future for several centuries now. This is to the extent that much of the hi-tech machine age prophecy highlighted on the page and on screens great and small as they were invented is now science fact.    So it goes with the six short films produced by the National Theatre of Scotland and BBC Scotland currently on a short tour of cinemas prior to a digital release in January 2027. Developed as part of the NTS’ 20 th  anniversary, each commission pairs already accomplished stage writers and directors with equally skilled film makers.   B ed to the Future finds a male couple embark on purchasing a new bed to rest their weary heads, only for one of them to be lurched forward in time. Written and directed by James Ley,    the narrative sees  Martin Quinn    and    Jay Newton as the couple find comfort away from the future shock witnessed.   Broth finds Carmen Pieraccini’s TV news re...

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh Four stars   A row of giant vegetables are lined up like they’ve just won first prize in the local village fete as the audience enters this very special silver jubilee celebration of Magnetic North Theatre Company’s assorted off-kilter adventures over the last 25 years. The smiles on the vegetables skins give the gave away, however, as this rogues gallery of very fresh looking life size produce are actually characters in `Pass the Spoon, a ‘sort of opera’ first produced at Tramway in Glasgow back in 2011.    This TV cooking show set collaboration between composer David Fennessy, artist David Shrigley and Magnetic North director Nicholas Bone is introduced by our hosts, June Spoon and Phillip Fork, before an overripe banana and a depressed egg appear as they await gluttonous guest star Mr Granules. With the vegetables mere appetisers, the result resembles an absurdist Masterchef/It’s a Knockout mash up scripted by Alfred Jarry.    T...

  Five stars As the historicisation of Scotland’s pop back pages runs on apace, Blair Young and Carla J. Easton’s study of the women too often written out of that history is a vital and necessary labour of love. From the 1960s pop adventures of Edinburgh sisters The McKinleys, Since Yesterday talks to post punk sheroes across the decades before pointing the way to the future in a mix of history lesson, personal essay and manifesto.   Drawing from her own experience as driving force of Teen Canteen, Easton’s narration unearths a hidden history of sisters doing it for themselves in a misogynistic music industry. Post punk auteurs such as The Ettes, Sophisticated Boom Boom, Sunset Gun and The Twinsets tell their stories, paving the way for 1990s home grown mould-breakers such as Hello Skinny, Lung Leg, Pink Kross and Sally Skull, with the likes of The Hedrons picking up the baton. And lets not forget Strawberry Switchblade’s bona fide pop stardom, as the only Scottish girl b...

Glasgow Film Theatre,  11 March, 9pm; 2 March, 12.45pm. Four stars When Camden Town indie-dance tearaways Flowered Up released Weekender in 1992, this snarling thirteen-minute dance culture anthem caused all sorts of bother. The just shy of twenty-minute film accompanying the record’s urgent paean to 24/7 working-class hedonism probably didn’t help. Only Channel 4 had the bottle to show it, as the gutter press frothed with predictably sensationalist ire.    An early outing from video director WIZ, aka Andrew Whiston, Weekender charted a big night out for likely lad Joe, played by TV actor Lee Whitlock, with all the highs, lows, pills, thrills and bellyaches that ensued. Some of the film’s mix of social-realist grit and chemically enhanced dreamscape may resemble the bleakness of Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, with whom WIZ studied, but it also set the tone for a million mad-for-it movies to come. Danny Boyle apparently said there would have been no Trainspotting fi...

Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2020 until October 11 th , 2020 Luke Fowler is no stranger to remixing the lives of crucial counter-cultural figures on film. Experimental and electronic music too has long fired Fowler’s oeuvre, from nights at Glasgow club, Optimo, to his own adventures in disco with the band, AMOR. Fowler’s new 21-minute study of Hi-NRG disco pioneer Patrick Cowley combines both strands, and follows Fowler’s 2017 study of American electronic composer Martin Bartlett, Electro-Pythagorus.   Premiering as part of the 2020 Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, which this year has moved its 53-film programme online, Fowler’s film continues follows his 2018 BFAMAF commission, Enceindre. That film was made with sound recordist Chris Watson, who opened this year’s festival with Dark Cinema, a sonic companion piece recorded in and around Berwick, and available in podcast form as part of the programme.   While seemingly worlds apart from Enceindre’s parallel images...

Edinburgh International Festival Five stars Dark times require enlightened responses. So it is with Edinburgh International Festival’s reaction to the enforced cancellation of the annual arts extravaganza due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. With no live events possible, as with so many endeavours over the last few months, EIF has turned to digital evocations of its assorted splendours to make up its My Light Shines On programme.   Hope Dickson Leach’s thirty-minute film for the National Theatre of Scotland takes its cue from the theatrical tradition of leaving a solitary light on in theatre buildings when they’re closed. Conceived with NTS artistic director Jackie Wylie and dramaturg/director Philip Howard, the result is a slow-burning cinematic love letter to those that breathe life into them when you’re not looking.    On the one hand, as the camera leads us on a back-stage tour of Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre, we get a bite-size collage of NTS greatest hits past, ...