Explore Columnists October 2006
Journalist Zoe Williams on the horrors of Halloween, Bill Knott on why we should revive the traditional harvest festival and Sandra Hebron on the importance of The Times bfi London fi lm festival for the British film industry
SPEAKERS’ CORNER
ACCORDING TO JOURNALIST ZOE WILLIAMS, WE BRITS HAVE A NASTY HABIT OF STEAL ING AMERICAN TRADITIONS – AT LEAST THE FUN ONES. LOCK UP YOUR CHOCOLATE AND HIDE YOUR PURSE, BECAUSE HALLOWEEN IS BACK
I HAVE MIXED feelings about Halloween. On the one hand, I am only too happy to meet the demands of a gang of sugar-motivated, almost feral, human young, as their minds struggle to make the connection between dressing up as Frankenstein and going into a diabetic coma. (It would be a post-modern kind of twist, kids, if one of you could actually dress up as a diabetic coma. For that, I’d give you all the sweets in the house, plus the amaretti holiday biscuits.) On the other hand, of course, this is an American invention, and copying it makes us look stupid. It’s like the younger sibling stealing Duran Duran paraphernalia or the class geek catching on to a fashionable footwear item two years too late, and that’s who we look like.
There are some things that you can steal from other countries and it makes you look cool and open minded and middle class: you can steal cuisine (as a broad concept) and recipes (for the nitty-gritty). You can’t steal national dress (although it is Halloween), but you can steal a sartorial atmosphere. Let’s say you wanted to come over all Euro, you could tie a pastel cardie round your shoulders and wear loafers, and there would be no problem. You can steal weather. This summer we stole the weather from Greece, and I was fine with that.
You cannot steal customs. Think of customs as accents. They develop like rock formations over centuries, the result of a million collisions so tiny that humanity can only see them in its soul. Sure, you could imitate someone else’s accent, and if you were super good at it people who didn’t know you might be fooled for a number of minutes, but there would be no authenticity to it and your mum would go, “Why are you talking like that?” Sure, it’s lovely the way the Americans say “Happy Holidays” when it’s clearly Christmas, but it is not lovely when we do it. We sound like blowhards, and we also sound like a directive from Sydenham Council asking its employees please not to upset each other by referring to a Christian festival, and while we’re here, please not to put shiny paper in the paper recycler, since even though it looks like paper, technically it’s… oh, why bother? Isn’t it enough just to watch Friends? Why do you want to live in Friends? And while we’re on the subject of wishing strangers well, can I just remind us all of how badly we do it? Try a cheery “have a nice day” after your next social transaction. How do you feel? Upbeat and generous-spirited? Or covered in toxic pink English shame?
Interestingly, we have no difficulty at all in ignoring American traditions that require a lot of energy.
We have never, for instance, taken up their practice known as “drinking coffee in the street” because we all knew, with no discussion, that the whole point of coffee was that it was an excuse to have a little sit down. We’ve never taken on their duvet days, or their two-weeks holiday a year culture, or indeed, anything that could be filed under ‘work ethic’.
They have one and we don’t, and there’s been no argument about that, none at all. Give us a baby shower, though… a totally specious party, featuring no alcohol and a lot of whining about indigestion, and we’re right there, hankering after gifts that haven’t even been invented yet in English shops. (A nappy stash in the shape of a lion, Mr Woolworths?) If you can buy it, we’ll nick it; if you can drink it or eat it, we’ll nick it; if you have to work at it, we’re not interested.
We’re like the delinquents of international culture. That’s going to be my Halloween outfit. International Cultural Delinquent.Someone give me some sweets!
FLYING THE FLAG
BRING BACK THE LOST ART OF LOAF PLAITING, SAYS BILL KNOTT
IT SEEMS TO me highly revealing that the new buzzword amongst British foodies should be ‘seasonality’. A mere three or four decades ago, the seasons were obvious, and the harvesting season was clearest of all, marked by harvest festivals in schools, churches and village halls festooned with corn dollies and plaited loaves. Grateful farmers thanked the gods for their bounteous harvest (or the Common Agricultural Policy for their subsidies) and much merriment was shared by all. Boy Scouts and Girl Guides would trawl their neighbourhoods, soliciting tins from the back of people’s cupboards to be given to the needy. Quite why items so unseasonal as cans of sardines should be part of a harvest festival is difficult to fathom, but it seemed perfectly sensible at the time.
Of course, the whole idea is splendidly pagan and, like Christmas, was appropriated by the church for its own ends: a few genteel choruses of We Plough the Fields and Scatter may have been considered morally preferable to the ritual slaughter of goats on the village green.
Now that the seasons seem to be coming back into fashion, perhaps it is time to reclaim the harvest festival for the profane, as well as the sacred: farmers’ markets would provide perfect venues, and plenty of suitably seasonal produce. With the emphasis placed more on community spirit than on pagan ritual – well, maybe just the occasional goat – the markets might, for a week or two, broaden their focus from middle-class smoked-garlic fiends to include the whole of society.
The markets could also act as repositories for those tins collected by children and distributed to old people’s homes. After all, no harvest festival would be complete without the bemused smile of a grateful pensioner, now the proud owner of tins of peaches, mulligatawny and spam. A rich harvest indeed.
CINEMA GREATS
SANDRA HEBRON REMINDS US WHY BRITISH FILM IS SO FANTASTIC
THOSE OF US who earn a living in the UK film industry regularly indulge in a level of gloomy introspection that makes it seem incredible that any British films get made at all. It would be naive to pretend that UK filmmakers don’t face difficulties, particularly those who want to make the kind of groundbreaking work that The Times bfiLondon Film Festival thrives on. But as someone who watches close to 1,000 films a year, from all around the world, I’m willing to stick my neck out and say that British cinema is in good shape. And it isn’t alone. There are stunningly creative films being made from Buenos Aires to Brighton, from Hollywood to Helsinki.
London in late October provides a place where audiences can expect to see stories from just around the corner, as well as from the other side of the globe. Film, the so-called 20th-century art form, has moved into the 21st century and new technologies mean it now finds its way to us in ways we couldn’t have imagined even a few years ago. Despite that, there’s still something magical about the shared experience of sitting in a darkened cinema and the ripple of expectation when the image first lights up the screen. Why else would over 100,000 festival-goers make their way to cinemas across London, often to see films they’ve never even heard of? Some people book days off work to see them, others skive off work, some meticulously plan ahead, others turn up to queue, or occasionally waltz right in.
Any festival worth that title will have a few stories to tell, and a festival with a 50-year history has more than most. Try, for starters, 1968 – the year French iconoclast Jean Luc Godard was apparently so incensed by the version of Sympathy for the Devil that his producer submitted, he allegedly not only punched the producer but staged his own guerrilla screening of his preferred cut. Or the Festival’s championing of David Cronenberg’s Crash, subsequently banned by Westminster’s licensing authority.
Passions aroused, sensibilities ruffled – arguably no bad thing for a festival committed to encouraging discussion and debate. The Times bfiLondon Film Festival is above all a celebration of cinema that promises pleasure and inspiration. It might even change your life (though hopefully without a fight).
