LIFF 2018

As you almost certainly don't know, Leeds has a good claim to be, literally, the first film city in the world. It is therefore no surprise that it has a well established film festival. I have been to three screenings this year, the first, and best, of which was 'Twelve Angry Men'. It's an undisputed classic except perhaps to the astonishing seven and a half thousand people who have awarded it one out of ten on IMDB. One can only suppose that they didn't like its message that the process of justice ought to be taken seriously rather than be the subject of capricious whim, bigotry or indifference, or the telling subtext that it is often the immigrant rather than the native born citizen who adheres more closely to 'American' values. What certainly looks quaint from today's perspective is that the murder was carried out with a knife and there was only one victim.

Second up was 'Cléo de 5 à 7', part of the French New Wave of the sixties, which I found charming and ultimately, and surprisingly, optimistic. It's a hard film to explain - these French eh? - but it works. Someone told me that there were plans to remake it starring Madonna; that wouldn't work, for sure. The choice of these two films to screen was because a theme of this years festival was films that play out in (more or less) real time. It's a bit of a shame that they didn't show 'High Noon'.

Which brings me indirectly on to the third film, 'Tampopo', which is sort of 'Shane' with noodles. It's a funny, colourful paean to the links between food and love, both physical and spiritual, with many references to other films. There is a scene in which a down and out makes an omelette which is fairly transparently inspired by Charlie Chaplin's tramp character. Also in 'Cleo from 5 to 7' there is a short, silent film within a film, one which is definitely as unfunny as Chaplin always seems to be to me. So let's have an even earlier silent film; in fact what might conceivably be the earliest moving pictures ever shot, a few brief frames of Leeds Bridge in 1888:

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life. 

            - Derek Walcott