Art in Eden Court

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In an unusual turn of events, Eden Court had three different art exhibitions on this month and liked them all, which felt worth noting for the record. 

First up, in the Stalls Gallery, Soundscapes: art inspired by music, by Clare Blois and Moira Harris is the kind of exhibition that I can – and have – come back to several times over, finding new details to enjoy each time. Clare Blois’ pieces are largely abstract, in fact according to the exhibition blurb the artist chose music as her subject in order to explore abstract art in opposition to her usual fare of landscape art. Moira Harris’ contributions to the exhibit are filtered through her experience as a classical singer, so are more afterimages of how the inspiring piece of music felt to be sung, the physicality of the experience rather than it’s narrative meaning. In combination the pieces are beautiful and strange, the colours rich and compelling, as though rhythm and timbre has been rendered into lines and textures. 

Further up the building – in the First Circle Gallery – there’s an exhibition from the Highland Quilters, of recent works – both large and small. I find quilting to be a fascinating craft, though not one I’ve ever explored myself, the way quilts vary from aesthetically pleasing practical objects, to carefully crafted heirloom pieces to straight up works of art that are clearly never intended to grace an actual bed. Most of the exhibition falls into the latter category, with one wall almost entirely dedicated to small works, often variations on a theme, clearly different quilters takes on a theme or prompt that were clearly made to be works of art, to hang on walls rather than lie on beds. Often exquisite pieces of fabric art where quilting was the medium rather than purpose of the piece. While others were bigger and seemed more intended to have a dual life – as object that were both beautiful and practical, an everyday kind of beauty. 

Lastly, on the Flow Photofest wall, there was an interesting little photography exhibition. On the Margins, by Ilana Cheyfitz – a US citizen now living in Scotland – takes extracts from interviews/oral histories she and her writing partner Avery Ravitz conducted with a range of people impacted by the US government’s slow dismemberment of the social safety net. The pieces in the exhibit are almost more collage than they are straight photography, but their re-imaging of classic US American advertising tropes and imagery is so pleasing that I happily forgive it. It’s a really evocative selection of images of dislocation and isolation, of the crumbling face of the American Dream. 

Tectonics 26

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Once again, we find ourselves in the season to take a walk on the wild side musically, with the return of the annual Tectonics festival to the City Halls (and Old Fruitmarket) in Glasgow. It was a damp and chilly bank holiday weekend, so really ideal weather to be attending and indoor music festival. And given how much of it I always end up spending sitting crosslegged on the floor of the Old Fruitmarket, my raincoat was definitely a welcome companion.

Avant garde tuba playing is not a sentence I ever expected to write, let alone in a complimentary fashion. Yet, Danielle Price’s performance was both lovely and deeply weird. It was, arguably, everything I’d hoped for from a brass focused experimental music piece. (I’ve complained at various points over my years of attending this festival that composers often neglect the brass section when I know from experience just how weird and wonderful are the sounds that a determined and curious brass player can coax out of their instrument when they put their minds to it.) All the gloriously weird internal noises of the tuba were on display here, the fluttering valves, the clicks, creaks and outright bubbling noises, amplified and looped to delightfully weird effect. It was a short set – Price is still working out some of the pieces, and has yet to fully commit to the stage name of Chops – but I knew from the first piece that it was going to be one of my favourites of the weekend.

There’s alway some kind of weird – and often wonderful – sound installation taking place in the Recital Rooms and this year it was a particularly delightful performance. Frederic Le Junter was this year’s artist, and while the chairs were neatly placed around the walls, he encouraged as forwards to watch close up as he set his performance going, constantly tweaking and adjusting both the instruments and the mix on the sound board. There’s something delightfully homemade and improvised about these instruments. At the end of the session I attended, someone asked if the motors were the kind you got for model railway sets, which delighted me somewhat as my own first thought was of the little motors you used to get with LEGO Technic sets. They felt, pleasingly, like they’d been crafted in someone’s shed, not shiny and perfected, but fragile and ever changing as though that were the point. That they could be easily disassembled and reassembled in a different configuration as the need or the artist’s whim took them.

All the pieces in the Saturday night SSO concert performance were interesting, compelling in very different ways. Things Are Against Us was probably my favourite of the pieces, though I can’t say that I liked it – in the sense that I wouldn’t sit down to listen to a recorded version of it – I did enjoy it, in that I found the performance both arresting and compelling. That feels as though it was a bit of a theme for my feelings towards all three pieces in that concert – I really enjoyed the performances even when the ‘musicality’ side of them wasn’t really working for me. (Angélica Castelló’s solo performance didn’t ever seem to live up to it’s own potential, but she was on fire in her collaboration with the SSO, making something intense, lively and wonderful of the piece she provided synths and other electronic weirdness to.) The soloists for all the SSO pieces – though particularly the Saturday night adventures – were particularly good this year, Lore Amenabar Larrañaga’s self designed quarter-tone accordian shenanigans on ‘Minding the Hive’ were particularly pleasingly weird.

Having really enjoyed GBSR Duo’s contribution to Laura Bowler’s piece the night before, I was pretty excited to see them on their own on Sunday afternoon, and they did not disappoint. The stage set was a joyfully chaotic melange of altered and improvised instruments – a deconstructed xylophone, wine bottle percussion, an awful lot of bluetak and clamps – that was apparently inspired by the duo’s own instrument strewn flat. As though we’d been invited to step inside their creative process. I particularly enjoyed the decision to have them both mic-ed up so that we could hear them counting time, foregrounding the need to communicate constantly to keep a piece as complex and changeable as this one from spinning out into dissonance. The interplay of irrationality and ritual, the way that routine and reassurance can descend into compulsion and superstition. (As a radio operator this is particularly interesting to me, as I know that I give more counts and cues to presenters and producers when either I or they are stressed. There’s a lot that exists outside your control in a live environment and those – often unconscious – acts of mutual reassurance can be both necessary and compulsive.) The way the piece plays with this while also remaining playful and experimental makes the things it has to say about the joys and the dangers of collaboration, all the more compelling and effective. Also there was a waterphone, I love a waterphone – though this was the first time I’ve seen one bowed instead of struck.

One of the really refreshing parts of the orchestral concerts at this year’s Tectonics is that – most notably with the Sunday night concert – the various composers, while doing all kinds of interesting an experimental things with sound, seemed to cognisant that they had an entire orchestra to play with. One section or other might come to the fore for a movement, but overall you never forgot that you were listening to an orchestra. A whole range of interesting sounds came out of the instruments in all sorts of unusual combinations – Nicole Mitchell made her flute to all kinds of delightful things, I’ve never seen someone employ loop boxes with a flute before! – and at no point would you have mistaken it for a classical concert, but they were all melodic in a way that I haven’t often heard in Tectonics orchestral performances over the last few years.

 

Storyville Spring

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I haven’t been watching a great number of films lately, but what films I have seen have largely been documentaries, so I thought that it’s been a while since I last went on a binge in the Storyville strand, there’s probably been a new series since then. I was correct, there was a whole pile of new documentaries to choose from so it seemed a good plan to have my own little mini festival and write up my favourites for the blog.

Songs of Earth

This is a kind of dreamy little documentary. It’s kind of a ‘year in the life of people/a place’, in this case, the Norwegian valley that plays host to the Jostedalsbreen Glacier where the director/narrator grew up and where her parents still live. It’s a requiem in a way, for a place that is at once being fundamentally transformed by climate change and yet remains remote and isolated in ways that we forget still exist in the modern day. The narrator worries about her aging father falling on one of his walks, being trapped injured on the mountain with no phone signal or otherwise cut off from emergency services. In return her father tells stories about the history of the place and it’s dangers, recalling tragedies from before she was born – whole villages swept away, a house full of people who survived a flood but were trapped and died before help could get through to them. (Throughout his stories there lingers the subtext that he has lived all his life balancing the love of the place with the prospect of sudden violent death that would be completely outwith his control, that he has long ago made his peace with that fact, that he would have left if he couldn’t cope with that.) It’s a pretty compelling experience all round.

It’s absolutely gorgeously shot, managing to neatly balance the intimate and the epic, contrasting the textural details of an old man’s skin with that of a frozen waterfall or an icefield. It feels very much like the kind of documentary it would have been really difficult to make before drone cameras became commonplace and reliable – there’s some wonderful journeys up both the glacier and the wider fjord that really sell the scale of the landscape, and that much aerial work would have been budget busting for a small documentary fifteen years ago. But there’s also lovely drone tracking shots through the wilderness following her father on his wanders that add to the intimacy of the piece, while giving the sense of him being as much a natural part of the landscape as the elk it also follows that I just don’t think you could have got with helicopter aerials.

Eternal Spring

Appropriate choice to the season, even if the title comes from the meaning of a place name rather than a season, being that it covers events that happens in the Northern Chinese city of Changchun. It’s a quietly moving animated documentary about the Falun Gong tv station ‘hijacking’ and more widely about the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China and the activism around it. (Strictly speaking, despite being referred to as a tv station hijacking, it was technically a signal intrusion event, the activists ‘hijacked’ the signal at the between the station and the transmitter to get their message on air. They were up various telegraph poles cutting and splicing wires. They didn’t burst into the TV station and force their way into a live news programme at gunpoint – I had visions of Ecuador reading the blurb. I appreciate that may seem like semantics, but as a broadcast technician it’s a pretty big difference to me.)

The art style is absolutely gorgeous, the decision to make the film part animated and part live action (the animation is used for all the sections in China that there is no archive for, and which they obviously can’t film reconstructions of, and does a brilliant job of integrating animation and archive footage) and to give us a back stage view of Daoxing drawing panels as he talks to witnesses and participants, really works in the film’s favour. We see the drawings tweak and change and reform as they talk. He describes it as drawing a shared memory, as though he’s taking all the different memories and stories about what happened and condensing them down into one mostly consistent idea of what happened .

Agent of Happiness

This is a fascinating and slightly odd little documentary. The tiny country of Bhutan is known as one of the happiest in the world, partly because for many years they had a thing called the Gross National Happiness Index, where they survey the population and try to apply the data from that to public policy. The film follows a pair of travelling surveyors – agents of happiness – as they gather the data from people from all walks of life.

I almost feel like the film got away from the filmmakers. As though they started making a much simpler and more life affirming documentary and as they gathered data and stories alongside the surveyors, they ended up making something rather more complicated and bittersweet.

Mostly they are the predictable stories of traditional rural life versus modernity – the way so many of the questions are skewed towards that traditional rural life as a measure of ‘happiness’ – but also interspersed with it are the stories of different messier lives, the lives of migrant workers, of dispossessed ‘non-citizens’ minority language speakers, a transgender nightclub performer and her family, whose measure of happiness is very different to the one offered by the forms. And throughout it all, we are following one of the surveyors Amber, himself a ‘non-citizen’ his life constantly on hold as he waits for the return of his passport, as despite having been born in Bhutan and lived there his whole life, like the rest of the Nepali population of Bhutan his citizenship was taken away during the ‘Five Year Plan’ during the 80s. The film feels, a little disjointed, that this wasn’t the film they intended to make, but that once they’d seen this side of the place they couldn’t avoid it, but remained uncomfortable about exploring.

Welded Together

This documentary also felt as though it had started out as with a rather different angle on it. This one felt rather more coherent as though the team making it had been rather less conflicted about the change. (Perhaps it snuck up on them, giving it all a rather more organic feel.) The film follows a young Belarusan welder, Katya, in the months leading up to a national competition where she’ll be competing to be acknowledged as the best young welder in the country. (Katya is clearly well-liked in her professional life, despite or perhaps because of her self-contained nature. Early on, in her work on the rural collective farms, we see her colleagues trying to set her up with young men who are also new to the village, to bind her to the community and convince her to settle there. And later in the factory, after her lack of success in the competition, her colleagues make her a little medal and laud her as the best welder they know, their champion if no-one else’s.) Alongside this, Katya is attempting to re-establish a relationship with her own mother who lives in Brest and is struggling with both alcoholism and raising Katya’s toddler half-sister.

We learn early in the film that Katya grew up in state care, her mother having become an alcoholic after her father’s death when she was six. For a while she moves in with her mother and little sister in the city and finds work as a welder in a factory, officially to try to rebuild their relationship, but increasingly to care for her sister. Interestingly we see her have several interactions with her own social worker – clearly part of a support system for people that grew up in the state orphanages – where we see both her own ambivalent attitude to the system and her deep rooted desire to help her mother get her own second chance to be the kind of mother to Amina that she wasn’t to Katya. (There’s always an undertone to these interactions. We know you love your sister but don’t throw away your own second chance to help her, help us help her instead. The heavily implied, she would have lost custody already if you weren’t here, don’t feel guilty for doing what you need to to protect that little girl.) The camera work does a lot of good work here, keeping us down on the floor with Amina and letting the drama – tenderness and confrontation, and so many unanswered phone calls – play out behind and above her in many scenes, while in others taking a literal step back, filming through windows and doorways, from across the road, bearing witness without encroaching on the protagonists.

Tua Mak @ The Tramway Glasgow

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I don’t often get out to The Tramway to see their exhibitions, they’re just far enough out that somehow don’t manage to find the time to head over in the regular course of things. I really should make the effort more often as all the exhibits I have managed to see there over the years have been delightfully, inspirationally weird. Presumably it’s something about either the space or the tactics of their commissioning team, that the artists really seem to commit to using the scale and the quirks of their main exhibition space to it’s – and their art’s – best advantage. (Perhaps I see too much art in soulless white boxes – not that clean white gallery spaces don’t have their place in showcasing certain kinds of art, it’s great for photography – that an interesting space for the art to interact with adds a certain something to the experience.) Being in Glasgow for a few days for Celtic Connections – rather than rushing around for work – I took myself out to the Tramway to see something different, and the current exhibition Tua Mak by Edinburgh artist Rae-Yen Song delivered that in spades.

About three quarters of the massive space that is the Tramway’s main exhibition hall, is taken up by a giant ‘microbeast’, a giant version of one of those microscopic creatures – a giant parasitic worm apparently – that live in pond water, rendered in gauzy multi-coloured fabric at a thousand times life-sized to create a structure that is part circus tent, part insect and part Chinese dragon. It’s an imagining of exhibition as ecosystem, a cycle of decomposition and rebirth, migration, mythology and memory, rendered in sound, light, fabric and ceramics, balancing traditional imagery and techniques with scientific equipment and 3D animation.

At the heart of the exhibition – and in it’s way of the giant ‘microbeast’ too – is a tank containing the transplanted biosphere of the family garden pond, with built in microscopes whose images are projected on to the walls and movement sensors that allow the tiny creatures within to control aspects of sound and lighting within the the space. (A particularly delightful moment for me was when I spotted a little water beetle make a break for the surface, sculling across it’s tank/pond and turning to the wall behind me saw it finish making the same journey from a different angle at 10 times the scale.) The exhibit has a delightfully recursive element to it, with all the elements feeding into each other. My favourite part was the ceramic votive items that surround the tank, as ceramic works inspired by the the magnified nature of the tiny creatures within the pond they are strange and wonderful in their own right. However, they gain a double life as they themselves have also been digitally scanned and then animated so they move as though buffeted by tiny watery tides as they’re projected into glass blown heads dotted around the periphery of the exhibition space. There’s a delightfully uncanniness to the way they move, as the brain insists that they still look ceramic so shouldn’t move – they remind me of coral creatures, part hard and fragile, part squirmy and organic – and yet move they do.

It’s a dreamy and slightly uncanny experience, and I really enjoyed being both unsettled and delighted by it. I particularly recommend seeing it at a quiet time, I don’t think I’d have enjoyed it so much if I hadn’t been able to wander around it freely, following the paths of the tentacles and soaking it all in.

Tua Mak is showing at The Tramway in Glasgow until 16th August 2026.

A collage of five picture of the art exhibition including close ups of the microscope image and the 3d animation in a bell jar.

Celtic Connections: Chasing Off The Winter Blues

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It’s Celtic Connections season once more, and I took myself off to Glasgow to resist the winter blues with a bunch of excellent gigs of various genres. As usual I had to fight against my own instincts to pack in too many things/activities for a long weekend in Glasgow. Still, I saw four excellent gigs and some fascinating art – more on that to come – ate some good food, caught up with my parents and some pals and generally was successful in driving off the January blues.

Allt and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra

First up, I only had one gig booked for last year’s Celtic Connections, having got my parents tickets as a New Year present. Unfortunately Storm Eowyn had other plans last January and not only did I end up stuck in Inverness, the weather was even worse in Glasgow so the gig – along with the multitude of other gigs on that evening was cancelled – but fortunately it was re-scheduled for this year’s festival. Being that it was rescheduled for the middle of the week, I decided to make a thing of it and do a run of gigs.

The unexpected highlight of this gig came courtesy of the support artist, Máirtín O’Connor and his band. The man in question having written a sea symphony for a different festival and which was orchestrated for the SCO to amazing effect. (I’ve spoken to a couple of other folks who were at the gig and ‘scene-stealing performance’ was the consensus about that last piece. Who knew you could make a button box sound like the ocean waves?) The main event was also well worth waiting for, I’d been listening to the album they were touring in the run up to the original concert date but not so much in the run up to this one, which had the disadvantage of meaning I didn’t have as strong opinions on the changes in arrangements, but had the decided advantage of letting me rediscover the pieces in real time while also being reminded why I liked them so much in the first place. I’ve seen Julie Fowlis live a couple of times before, and she’s always worth the money but this was my first time seeing Zoe Conway and she’s got a fabulous voice that really shone here.

The East Pointers

We’ve been playing these guys on the radio a lot over the last year, and I always enjoy hearing them, so when I spotted they were playing at Oran Mòr – for my money, still one of the best medium sized gig venues in the city – I knew I was going to need to check them out.

The East Pointers are a two-piece from Prince Edward Island in Canada – they used to be a three piece, but lost their third to an aneurism a couple of years ago, and he was clearly on their minds that night – and did spend a chunk of the gig trying to convince the audience to come to a festival there in the summer! It was more of a folky vibe than I expected – most of what I’d heard by them previously was more indie – but, it was Celtic Connections so it makes sense they’d lean into that side of their output for this gig. They’ve got some banging tunes on the new album, either way.

It was a packed gig, full of people who clearly loved the band and knew all the words. It was delightful to be part of that, even if I did not in fact know all the words, just feeling the joy in the room. (The delightful moment when the singer stops singing mid chorus and the audience carries on for them in full throat.) A really lovely atmosphere for a gig in what remains one of my favourite venues.

The Ayoub Sisters and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

This was fabulous. I’m not sure quite what I was expecting from the gig – the SSO are always good value and the blurb sounded interesting but otherwise I had no real idea what I was in for – but I was absolutely blown away. Sarah and Laura Ayoub are a pair of Scottish-Egyptian classical musicians – their primary instruments are cello and violin respectively but they’re multi-instrumentalists – who grew up in Glasgow and whose work blends the worlds of Western classical and music from across the Arab world. The first half was primarily orchestrations of works from their second album Arabesque so the pieces were interspersed with charming anecdotes about visiting the places the the various pieces either came from or were inspired by which was an additional pleasure. (On a non musical note, their dresses for the first half of the concert were incredible, I’m not really a big frock kinda girl, but gosh I had dress envy.)

The second half of the concert was incredible in a different way, as the sisters had written a symphony and this was it’s premier. (Also super cute, that they were both so excited that their former music teachers were in the audience that night.) It’s a really lovely piece, combining classical symphonic style with musical elements and flourishes from across north Africa. Most of the ‘new’ classical works I see orchestras tackle are much more self-consciously experimental than this, but it felt both fresh and comfortingly familiar, as though they’d managed to combine their favourite parts of the both the musical traditions they’d grown up with. Someone give them some film score commissions!

Le Vent Du Nord

Those of you who know me in real life, will know that trying and failing to see Le Vent Du Nord at Celtic Connections – and in other places, when inter-railing, I showed up in Lyon to discover they’d played the night before, at one point in my life it felt like they were haunting me – has become a running joke in my life. And in fact I wasn’t even meant to be seeing them this time – I was originally planning to see Dlù as I thought the friend I was going with would like them more, but that gig was sold out. (Perhaps that’s the only way I can see them, by accident, I need to plan not to see them and there they’ll be…)

It turned out to be an excellent gig, with an excellent Galician folk band, Alià as the support act. I was initially a bit unsure if they were going to be my jam, but they put some serious effort into winning over the audience and had us all singing – and swaying! – along by the end, so I consider us all well and truly won over.

I’d heard the headliners were a rather more raucous live experience than they turned out to be – though in fairness they were talking about having had over twenty years of touring behind them, and the friend who told me that first saw them around about then – however the friend I went with and I concluded that they were raucous enough for us, as we finished the gig tired and sore but happy anyway.

Revisiting Old Favourites

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Regular readers of this blog will know that I love a themed film challenge. Over the years I’ve done a whole range of these challenges from diversifying my film tastes with the 12 film POC challenge to watching more documentaries, and from A to Z by title to films that my fellow students on my Sound Design course thought had interesting sound design. I’ve gone on binges by director or by genre, and I’ve a long standing double feature strand here on the blog. However, lately, I’m just not feeling like watching new-to-me films. Normally, it’s my favourite form of escapism to sit down in front of a film I’ve never seen before and disappear into it’s world for an hour or two, but lately if I’m committing myself to sitting down in front of something for a couple of hours, I want to know going in that I’m going to enjoy it. I don’t want a sequel, I don’t want a remake, I want that thing that I already love.

As someone who maintains a fairly old school DVD collection of films, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had someone express surprise that I feel the need to not only keep, but have that collection easily accessible. Surely in these days of streaming video services, I don’t need the physical copies. (It’s become something of a meme in it’s own right, millennials with massive DVD collections in their attics that they never watch but can’t bear to let go.) However, for all the increasing domination of streaming services – and don’t get me wrong, they are super convenient for finding something to watch on a Friday night after work or catching that film that you missed in the cinema a couple of months before – the increasing fragmentation of the market means that while certainly the specific thing you want to watch might well be on streaming, the chance of being on one of the services that you happen to subscribe to – or of it staying there – is not actually that high. In fact, it’s starting to feel like streaming sites don’t actually want you searching for specific things, they just want to offer things that are like other things you’ve watched which might work for some things – I watch a decent amount of Korean films and lots of food programmes, yes I do want to watch a series exploring different parts of Korean cuisine – but if I’ve got a hankering to watch the heist film Ocean’s Eight then however much Sandra Bullock might be part of the appeal, offering me a horror movie like Birdbox or a romantic comedy like Miss Congeniality is not going to hit the spot.

After having successfully made a decent dent in my unwatched DVD collection with last year’s alphabet films challenge, I treated myself to copies of films I’d seen in the cinema, loved but not seen since. (Mostly from 2019, as for obvious reasons, films I saw and loved in the cinema that year had come down to affordable prices at time when I wasn’t out and about buying DVDs.) I’ve been working happily through a pile that includes: Rogue One, Ocean’s Eight, The Shape of Water, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Edge of Tomorrow and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Now in order to watch all those films on streaming I would need a subscription to Disney+ (Rogue One), Apple TV (A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night) and, well while the others are all available to stream on Prime, none of them appear to be included in a Prime subscription so would involve renting them individually with no guarantee that they might still be available from the same place or at all the next time you want to watch them.

I started with Rogue One and Ocean’s Eight because they were the two that got me started on this particular rabbit hole when I spotted them in the sale in Fopp. I was struck by the notion that having had no great desire to watch any films lately I really wanted to watch those films again – that if I’d been standing outside a cinema and they were showing I’d have gone in and bought a ticket then and there. I saw Rogue One the first time at a midnight screening – I’ve always wanted to go to one, and never had the opportunity before, but a new Star Wars film seemed the ideal opportunity – with a small but enthusiastic audience who got very into the swing of things so I wondered how much of my enjoyment of the film was based on a wider experience of it. However, rewatching it again I found myself drawn into all the characters and relationships, the suspense and even remembering how it ended still hoping against hope for an ending where they all survive. For existing in a tight little spot in the canon, the film feels much less weighed down by the weight of the wider Star Wars universe than either the sequel trilogy or the prequel trilogy for that matter. These characters live in a world we know well and our bound by it’s rules, but they don’t exist in other parts of that universe – well, obviously now some of them exist in Andor but that’s happened since and is set before Rogue One – so they can live or die as necessary to this story, the only ‘fixed point in canon’ is that the plans have to get to the resistance everything else is up for grabs and the film really leans into and benefits from that freedom. The only real sour point for me in this film is the weird CGI Moff Tarkin, that was a full uncanny valley moment for me. (I’m less disturbed by Princess Leia/Carrie Fisher, despite having more personal affection for her as an actress, she died just after the film came out and was still making the sequels, so had presumably signed off on the CGI younger version of herself. Peter Cushing died in 1994, I know his estate signed off on it, but he certainly didn’t, it just feels super creepy.)

Ocean’s Eight is a great little heist movie. I’ve never seen the brat pack version, but I must have seen the noughties remake of Ocean’s 11 half a dozen times at student movie nights or in hotel rooms on work trips: witty banter, well-plotted heist, mild peril, there’s a reason that film got two, three if you count this one, sequels, it’s perfect Saturday night with a pizza and glass of wine fodder. Personally I really appreciated Ocean’s Eight’s pared down cast, as frankly despite how many times I’ve seen 11 over the years I’m hard pushed to remember the rest of the cast beyond Clooney and Pitt’s central pair. Eight also gets that the heart of those films is Ocean and Ryan’s dynamic, and puts a lot of effort into establishing the relationship between Sandra Bullock and Cate Blantchett and making it feel real and layered. I wasn’t familiar with either Awkwafina or Mindy Kalling before seeing the film, and I think maybe they benefited from that, I think if I’d been constantly waiting for them to do their comedy schtick I wouldn’t have been so easily charmed by the characters they’re playing. Also goodness it’s nice to see Helena Bonham-Carter in something a bit different – she certainly gave the impression of having fun doing something different. (I was less annoyed by James Cordon this time round? I remember thinking him insufferable when I saw the film the first time, but maybe he’s less oversaturated now than he was back then so now he’s just a mildly annoying comedian. If this film has a flaw it’s that it doesn’t always seem certain if it wants to be a heist film with comedic moments or a comedy film with a heist happening in the background. Don’t get me wrong, there are some delightfully funny moments but it does feel like they started off making one kind of film and ended up making another. If so I like the one they made better.) Anne Hathaway is the breakout star of the film though, just a delight to watch her send up the starlet image. Sometimes heists don’t stand up to rewatching because once you know how it works that’s all there is to it, but there are enough moving parts – to the heist, to the character relationships and dynamics – that I was caught up in it again and delighted to suspend my disbelief and watch the cast be funny and beautiful and really very competent.

Edge of Tomorrow is something of an outlier in this group, as it was, I think, the first film I saw at the cinema after I moved to Inverness. Definitely the first one I saw at Eden Court on a random mid week day off when my flatmates were working. I’d forgotten most of it, except the basics, that it was an interesting time-travel film with good action sequences and satisfying character development. (I’m amused that the DVD box has the tagline emblazoned across the front, I understand why they went for Edge of Tomorrow over the title of the source manga – All You Need Is Kill – to try and reach a wider audience and generally ride the trend of ‘elevated action movies’ but I do think they missed a trick Live. Die. Repeat. is a banger of title, even if it does imply something somewhat more B-movie-esque than the film we get.) I haven’t seen it since that first time in the cinema over a decade ago, so while I remembered the rough outline of the plot, I’d forgotten most of it. I’d also forgotten what an annoying little twerp Cage is to begin with. But the film holds up, it’s a solid concept and the effects haven’t aged badly, and perhaps most in it’s favour the reluctant friendship that evolves between Cage and Vrataski that hold it together. The evolution of their dynamic, from frustrated resentment – you’re the only person who understands what I’ve been through/going through and I don’t even like you – to respect and friendly affection really gives the film a heart that keeps you with it, and keeps the film from becoming just it’s tag line.

From Cuba to Japan: Exploring Unusual Art in London

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While I was officially, in London for the – frankly excellent – Scottish Ensemble/Anna Meredith gig at the Barbican, one of my main priorities for this particular trip was to just spend time wandering about the city looking at art and architecture, as though it were an actual city break to a foreign country. I’m normally in London for a specific purpose, to attend a course or a conference, to facilitate live contributions for my journalist colleagues or even back when a lot of my uni friends still lived in London, to visit and catch up with as many of them as possible. I almost always manage to carve out time when I’m there to spend a morning or an afternoon at a museum or art gallery, or to wander round somewhere interesting like Camden Market or Covent Garden soaking in the atmosphere. But I’m never really ‘on holiday’ there, with several days of unstructured time to play with as I would when I go somewhere like Madrid or Riga or even Aberdeen. After lockdown when foreign travel was impractical I took a few trips to Glasgow like that, for the film festival or for gigs, and just explored a city I used to work in as though I were a tourist, it was delightful, and it was high time that I gave London that treatment too.

When I visited Madrid last summer I had no real concrete plans, but friends and colleagues who’d been there themselves, nodded when I told them that, and told me that the place was full of art – both in galleries and on the streets themselves – so I’d love just wandering around looking at it and they were right. So while I was taking a very different kind of holiday this year, I wanted to bring some of the same attitude and quality to another city equally full of art.

My first stop off was at the Tate Modern as it was just a couple of stops from my hotel and the first time I visited, back at the tail end of 2019 I’d really wanted more time there. Unfortunately, the fascinating sounding new exhibition in the Turbine Hall was still being installed when I got there, but that didn’t stop me finding some interesting art to visit while I was there. I never made it into the Tanks – the former oil storage tanks from the building’s former life as a power station – when I was there last time so that’s where I started and found a really cool sound and ceramics – there’s a combination you don’t often encounter – exhibition inhabiting one of the spaces. A collaboration between artists Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons and Neil Leonard, Mantanzas Sound Map is a sculptural and sonic cartography of the region of Cuba where Campos-Pons grew up. Originally created for a Greek art festival, the piece has been adapted and expanded for the space – and particularly the acoustics – of the Tanks. The sound element is made up of three vignettes that form ‘choirs’ so sounds ranging from the ‘songs’ of birds and insects to those of a rumba group and interludes as diverse the cries of street vendors and of a solo saxophone. The Tanks are an interesting environment to host sound installation, the sheer size of them obviously sets a practical challenge for a sound artist to get the best out of the space acoustically but the very separateness of the space makes it a preferable space as it illuminates the issues of audio bleed from the installation into neighbouring exhibits and extraneous noise from other sources from bleeding into it.

Admittedly I probably spent just as much time in the bookshop in the Tate as I did anywhere else in the gallery, but the books I came home with were all excellent reads, so I can’t complain. But that’s kind of the point of that kind of trip, just spending an hour on the spur of the moment in a bookshop, admiring the art books, and wondering why the adorable little crocheted Miffy rabbits are wearing outfits patterned after famous works of modern art.

My last stopping off place was at the V&A in South Kensington. Last time I was there was about 16 years ago, and on that occasion I was also trailing luggage and extremely grateful for it’s cloakroom facilities. (I absolutely did not remember where that was, from last time, and did get lost trying to find my way back at the end of my visit.) The big ticket exhibition wasn’t really my bag – and the Marie Antoinette exhibition wasn’t yet open, and while there was a charming history of Architecture exhibition on upstairs it was aimed at a rather younger audience than me – so I went with no expectations of seeing anything to blog about. So naturally, I came across a fascinating little fashion exhibit in a temporary space – behind which all sorts of interesting construction noises were emerging.

It was my favourite kind of exhibition, the kind you stumble on by accident – in my case I glanced through a doorway and spotted the colours, fabrics and lights and was intrigued and drawn in – and so enjoy all the more for coming in with no expectations.

The series by Japanese artist Ryunosuke Okazaki is inspired by the sculptural pottery of Japan’s Jomon period (c 14,500, to 300BC) which is one of the oldest known examples of clay work, and I think it’s to the exhibition’s advantage that the V&A has a nice example of Jomon pottery to include alongside it and give Western viewers a bit of context. The symmetrical forms and complex curves of these beautiful old pieces are very much reflected in his futuristic garments. The pieces seem caught between high fashion pieces and works of delicate structural engineering rendered in fabric. Resulting some reminiscent of both the costuming for a futuristic science fiction film and some particularly adventurous glass blowing experiments. A delightful glimpse at an alien world.

Mantanzas Sound Map ran at Tate Modern until 19th October 2025, while Jomon Jomon ran at the V&A South Kensington until 20th October 2025.

IFF25 – Highlights

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Sometimes in the past at this film festival, I have accidentally picked myself really grim selections of films, or really hard-going selections – whether that means lots of death and murder or lots of political heavy thinking films – but this year I appear to have picked myself a selection of really sad films. They’ve been generally excellent films but I have spent a disproportionate amount of time crying in La Scala this year. My selections from the ‘Highlights’ strand was heavy on both personal highlights and cinematic sadness.

Pyre

This was the first fiction film that I saw during this year’s festival and my immediate thought was that the rest of the films I saw this year were going to need to put in a strong showing to beat it to film of the festival.

The best way I can describe this film is that it’s a film about ghosts and hauntings. Like several of the films in this year’s festival, it’s a film about depopulation and a dying way of life. It’s just that this film represents the step after the one that the other films are experiencing. Many of the houses are not only closed up and abandoned, but actively falling down. There are no children in this village, it has gone beyond the stage of the young people leaving and not returning, they’re actively coming back and taking their parents away. (The youngest character in the film is a young man who is six years post university and whose finally getting a job is the catalyst for everything else that happens in the film.) There’s no road to the village and the path up to the houses is so vertiginous that stretchering someone up or down is downright dangerous – when there’s no one to help Padan take Tulsi to the doctor, he refuses to come out to do a house visit, no matter how many goats Padan offers him.

(This subtext becomes practically text in a late scene in the film, where a heavy mist has descended on the village and Tulsi is shuffling around the paths looking and calling out for her neighbours who have all moved away. For someone so frail, whenever she’s not actively ill she moves with surprising speed. In fact if the postman Bishan hadn’t held onto her hands in one of the later scenes I’d have thought she was explicitly meant to be the ghost/spirit of the village.)

Given the subject of the film, it’s perhaps unsurprising that I spent the last five minutes of the film having a good cry. Surprisingly it wasn’t the thing that you’d expect to happen in a film like this that made me cry – I was ready for that – it was something else entirely.

The History of Sound

Obviously there was a film about ethnomusicologists going on field recording trips and falling in love, how could I not go to see it.

I have a slightly odd relationship with this film, because when I was watching it I loved it. (Josh O’Connor is one of those actors – like Ben Wishaw in Peter Hujar’s Day – that I can just happily watch for hours, just a really compelling performance.) But this is a film adapted from a short story, and I can’t help but feel that it was stretched too thin by the adaptation process. You have too long with the characters to not see the places where it doesn’t quite know what it wants to say with it’s story. The strongest parts are the ones where they’re tromping around the backwoods of Maine, recording folksongs on wax cylinders and being young and in love. (I presume that was the heart of the original story, an old man reminiscing about his lost love and the twin passions that they’d shared.) It’s a historical piece, the chances of our central pairing getting a happily ever after is slim even without the looming presence of the First World War, but oh, I would have given a great deal for it to have been a bittersweet tale of years of sporadic field-trips recording old songs, talking to the people the song belong to, stealing time from the world.

It’s a lovely film, but I do yearn for the film it might have been.

The Thing With Feathers

I was somewhat cautious about going to see this film. It’s always dangerous going to see an adaptation of a book you love, it’s never going to be a neutral experience. I don’t tend to buy novellas in physical form, I prefer to read them as ebooks, however I picked it up in Waterstones one day in 2017, started reading the first chapter to see if I liked it and read about half of the book standing there in the middle of the shop floor. I couldn’t put it down, so I bought it, took it home and finished it that evening. Strange and compelling, but exactly what I needed say my notes from the time and that’s a good description of the film too.

The film is very different from the book – the prose of the book is very poetic, and we’re much more inside characters heads in it – Crow is much more threatening and ominous in the film than I remember it being in the book. (I’d always imagined Crow as an actual crow, perching on your shoulder, pulling at your hair, nibbling on your ears.) But honestly I feel like that works, the sense of living in a horror movie, a nightmare from which you can’t awaken, feels very true to life. Another reason I was a little cautious is that I’m not generally a fan of Benedict Cumberbatch – he’s a fine actor, but he was rather overhyped and over exposed for awhile there so I’ve avoided films starring him for a while because I was bored of his face – but he’s very good in this, properly disappears into the character. But what I think they got really right in this adaptation is the voice of Crow, both in the aural sense with David Thewlis, doing a stunningly good voice performance, and narratively the way Crow and the grief it represents are the driving force of everything that happens, messy and scary and awful and necessary.

(Also I’d far rather read the graphic novel about Crow and grief that the dad is writing in the film than the book about Ted Hughes that he’s writing in the novella.)

I do think it’s fitting that they’ve abbreviated the title here – the novella is making conscious reference to the Emily Dickinson poem Hope Is The Thing With Feathers – because its ending is very much a reminder that the other thing with feathers still remains.

Nouvelle Vague

This is technically a film about the making of A Bout De Souffle/Breathless (Goddard, 1960), but really it’s a love letter to the whole of French New Wave Cinema.

I did spend a chunk of the early parts of the film wondering who exactly the audience for this film was meant to be – obviously the answer to this was that it was the one I was sitting amongst, who were volubly enthusing to their companions about how much they enjoyed it on the way out – it’s certainly a much more fun way for film students to get a crash course on nouvelle vague cinema and how the players all connect to each other than a documentary full of talking heads. (Don’t look at me, I got into nouvelle vague via a book on Luc Besson’s filmography, and ended up down a rabbit hole of french new wave cinema in pursuit of understanding the references.) Though honestly, I had some strong feelings about these films/this trend in film making so I have made a film about it, feels very true to that whole period of Cahiers Du Cinema so fair play Linklater, I’ll give you this one. This is a film for film nerds, full of the little behind the scenes details of film-making, it’s a delightful one though, so if you happen to love nouvelle vague cinema too then it’s well worth your time.

IFF25 – Frederick Wiseman Retrospective

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I do enjoy the slightly scattershot nature of the retrospective strands at the Inverness film festival. In 2023 it was a couple of Powell and Pressburger films as part of a larger BFI re-release of all their films, a few years before that it was Iranian cinema – the Afternoons in Iran season. This year it was the documentarian Frederick Wiseman, presumably prompted by screening his latest release Menu-Plaisirs, and while it seemed a fairly random selection of his massive backlog it did give you a good overview of the breadth of this subjects and the length of his career. We start with High School from 1968 and ended with La Danse from 2009. I committed myself to seeing everything in the retrospective before I’d figured out where I knew the name from – I saw Ex Libris about the New York Public Library, not when it screened at the film festival seven or eight years ago but apparently at a free screening during the Ness Book Festival in 2019 – which I remembered seeing when it came up in the pre-film introduction to High School but not whether or not I’d enjoyed it! (Probably for the best that I didn’t know that before I booked the tickets – because my review of it is scathing!) Which did add a certain frisson to sitting down to watch the film, thankfully, turns out I do largely like his work, even if I sometimes want to take to the film with the old razor blade tool.

High School

This is the oldest and shortest of the documentaries in the retrospective, at the much more conventional seventy five minutes long. I’ve seen this film described as Wiseman’s most accessible film, and while you can see that he’s still trying to find what will become his signature style – this was only his second film – even at this early stage he’s fully committed to his observational, slightly voyeuristic style. Mostly it’s a fascinating little timecapsule of high school as encapsulation of wider societal changes, of the places where change is treated as inevitable and leaned into and the places where the whole system is straining to ignore or resist the wider societal changes taking place.

(It’s also quite interesting to consider this in comparison to another film that was showing at this year’s festival Nouvelle Vague (Linklater, 2025) about the making of A Bout De Souffle/Breathless (Goddard, 1960) as pioneering examples of cinema vérité. Having seen so much of the camera and camerawork of the latter film’s DOP, I’m pretty curious about what camera this was shot on.)

Central Park

This film has such a strong sense of time and place. It covers all kinds of events and activities taking part across a much longer swathe of time, but it’s nicely structured around two days in the park. You get a lovely sense of Central Park as New York’s back garden, and the varied attitudes of people from different walks of life to what that means on a practical basis.

Did it need to be three hours long? Objectively no, and I think if I’d been watching it newly released, or if it’d been made more recently then I’d definitely be on the side of thinking that it had no need to be that long. (I spend too much time at public meetings professionally, I did not need to watch as much of one as was happening in that Tennis section as I did – if I go to the toilet during a scene and it’s still going when I come back, it’s too long!) However, from the perspective of watching it nearly forty years after it was made, it feels like a priceless historical document. As a portrait of Central Park specifically, but also of New York more widely, it’s attitudes, interests and priorities at a very specific time, then yes, I’m very glad that it exists in all it’s glory.

La Danse – Le Ballet De L’Opera De Paris

This was easily my favourite of the retrospective documentaries, and a strong contender for my favourite documentary of the festival. (Would I have tightened it up a little given the editing scissors? Maybe. But not by much. Would I have watched it as a 3-part series as part of the Storyville strand and then ended up binging all three parts in one evening, probably yes I would so realistically I didn’t want it to be shorter, I wanted it to have an intermission. That could probably hold true for many of Wiseman’s films.)

La Danse was the film of the retrospective that I was most interested in seeing – if I could only have seen one film in the retrospective it would have been this one – and it was definitely the one most relevant to my interests. Both because I work in media, so I love the behind the scenes aspect of it – it does a great job of giving you a sense of tension and secret pleasure of being in the wings of a live performance – and I was tap dancer as a child so I absolutely love seeing all the dance rehearsals, watching the physical challenges and impacts of the work and being close enough that you can hear the rustling fabric of costumes and the squeak and scuff of bare feet and dance shoes on the floor as people dance.

So having got my biases acknowledged and out of the way, I think this subject was ideal for Wiseman’s film making style. It’s a closed institutional space, with a large but limited cast of characters and that we follow over time and are able to get to know through repeated eves dropping on the professional tribulations and successes of their lives. La Danse really leans into Wiseman’s signature style of sitting back and watching, with lovely successions of shots through doorways or from odd angles as though the camera had just been set up and left running to let people get used to it and forget it and the documentary team were even there. (We see enough repetitions of different parts of the ballets in rehearsal, watch the dancers struggle and innovate, that it’s a joy to watch the finished performances, see everything they were trying to achieve come to fruition.) It feels a very honest film, honest about it’s artifice and construction and much less beholden to a sense of rawness and unpromptedness than some of his other work.

IFF25 – Small Docs

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On of my favourite things about the Inverness Film Festival is the commitment to showing all kinds of short films, and as many Scottish shorts as they can. Short films are of course a vital part of the independent film ecosystem, but outside of specialist nights, they tend not to get screened in actual cinemas. (Outside of the film festival, if I go to a screening of short films, it’s highly likely that a high percentage of the audience will be there because they know someone involved in making one of the films.) As a fan of short films, it’s always a delight when you show up for a film and there’s a surprise short film at the start. I do tend to prefer short documentaries to short fiction films if I’m going to a full screening of them, as even if I don’t like one of them I’ll generally learn something while I’m there. However, this year was a vintage one for short documentaries between this screening and the Bridging the Gap films, producing some excellent films and no actual duds – the worst I could say for any of them was they didn’t leave me with much to say, there was nothing that caused me to take a strategically timed toilet break – a delight!

Chasing Whales

This is dreamy little film, a properly short arty film – the narration is in French! – about whales and the relationships with the people who have built cultures around them.

Neil Armstrong and the Langholmites

I’m never entirely sure how I feel about funny documentaries. Light-hearted is one thing, but actively trying to be humorous can be decidedly hit or miss. Thankfully this one was more hit than miss with the interviewees seeming to take an equally light-hearted view of the subject matter that would have made it fairly difficult to make a ‘straight’ documentary out of it. Perhaps I’ve seen too many short documentaries over the years where the director didn’t have the experience or thought they were funnier than they really were and couldn’t quite pull it off, leaving the audience cringing quietly or sniggering awkwardly. Handily director Duncan Cowles is experienced enough a director to push through that awkwardness and find the humour. (Looking up his filmography I can see that I’ve actually seen a sizeable chunk of his films over the years – I thought I recognised the style – and some of them have definitely worked better than others for me.) It was a charming little portrait of a place and it’s people, even if the rest of the audience was clearly finding it funnier than I was!

Twa Doubles Doubles

This film takes it’s title from a traditional Shetland fiddle tune. At the heart of the film is a project that a couple of Shetland musicians are making where they’re experimenting with recording old tunes they’ve uncovered in Tobar an Dualchais that only exist as these field recordings made at someone’s kitchen table decades ago. It was also, without doubt my favourite of the films in this selection.

There’s a lovely little B-story thread winding through the film about the metaphorical similarities between folktales and working in the creative industries. One of the contributors makes an effective allusion about going away for your career being akin to going under the hill to play for the Trows, both of which involve coming home after seemingly short periods of time to be confronted with how much things and people have changed while you were away.

Cahā

A film about tea, language, queerness and colonialism! I don’t have a lot to say about this film, other than that I could have glad spent considerably longer listening in to the the conversation between the two interviewees.

In On The Act

I wasn’t sure that this documentary was going to work, based on the blurb it was documenting a community arts outreach project that Eden Court was doing over the last year where they were essentially putting an artist in residence in various communities to work with them and make a show. (The reason I was dubious was that to me it sounded like the kind of documentary you make to show the funders where their money went rather than the kind you show to audiences.) However, it worked surprisingly well, there were enough interesting artists and passionate locals to keep the viewer interested in the projects as they progressed. My favourites were definitely Morven and Lairg, as those were the ones that left me with the strongest feel for the character of the communities in question. I’m sure the other two projects were great too – I did really enjoy that the Skye project’s main musical collaborators were the Skye Wind Band, there’s just something about that that says ‘not for tourists’ about a project, and I was delighted that Balmacara got the funding for their hall – but I didn’t come away with as strong a sense of their ‘community’ feeling as I did with the other two.