Adrian Wootton explains the background to his upcoming illustrated talk, The Rolling Stones on Screen 1963 - 2012, on March 4th

The Rolling Stones’ fame (some would say notoriety) and enduring popularity for 50+ years is inextricably linked, not just to releasing records and live performance but to their appearances on television and film. Just like the Beatles, the Stones capitalised on burgeoning opportunities of TV exposure in the UK and the US and honed their image and stage personae, not just in front of live audiences but within the context of television studios. 

The Rolling Stones on ABC in 1964 (by Terry O'Neill)

They also rapidly saw the potential of film to give them even greater exposure, although their more outlaw, maverick identity pushed them towards documentary and art movie, rather than the musical entertainment vehicles initially developed by, for example, the Beatles. This means that the story of the Stones on celluloid is fascinating, idiosyncratic and unsurprisingly, often controversial.

Gimme Shelter (1970)

As a huge admirer of the band and intrigued by their forays into both small and large screen, I want to trace that history to explore the stories behind the legendary appearances on things like The Ed Sullivan Show and the quirky and often shocking revelations given in films like Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil and the Mayles Brothers' Gimme Shelter. Thus, my talk whilst working through a chronological filmography, also describes the sometimes extraordinary circumstances of the different conditions that films got made (partly based on research and partly on conversations I have had with some of the people involved) and also hopefully reveals how the Stones were changed by how they were depicted on screen. 

Sympathy for the Devil (1968)

Nevertheless, the talk is both an exploration and a homage, with a plethora of clips and images that reaffirms just how great 'the Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band in the World' can truly be.

Adrian Wootton

Chief Executive 

Film London and the British Film Commission

The Afternoon Talk, The Rolling Stones on Screen 1963 - 2012, will take place on Tuesday, March 4th at 16.00. Tickets €5 (on sale now).

Jean-Luc Godard's Sympathy for the Devil will screen directly after the Talk, at 18.30, as part of the IFI's Rock 'n' Roll season in March. Tickets are on sale now.

Kasandra O’Connell, Head of the IFI Irish Film Archive, talks about erotic films from the archives as we launch the first of three months of seasons dedicated to excess, presenting examples of how cinema has taken on sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. January focuses on sex on film.

Sex in the Archives
Films with erotic content are as old as the medium itself, not long after the Lumière Brothers’ first public screening of moving images in December 1895, French filmmaker Eugene Pirou produced Le Coucher de la mariee (1896) in which Louise Willy performed the first strip tease on screen. Even the well-respected Georges Méliès was in on the act, being one of the first filmmakers to present nudity on screen in Après le bal (1897) which he advertised in his film catalogue as being ideal for bachelor parties (Robinson, 1993). The silent era of film was a time of great experimentation and discovery for viewer and creator alike and the success of these early risqué films encouraged the creation, in parallel with the mainstream movie business, of a lesser known, but almost as prolific industry producing erotic one-reel films for private consumption.

Le Coucher de la mariee

Having discovered a lucrative market for this suggestive material, by the mid-noughties directors in France, Germany and the United States had progressed to making one-reel films that included live sex acts with prostitutes, which were shown at bachelor parties and in brothels. The earliest surviving examples of these explicit films are Argentina’s El Sartorio (1907) Germany’s Am Abend (1910) and the American stag movie A Free Ride (1915). These one-reels were often bought by wealthy private collectors, who in turn commissioned more erotic movies and so fuelled a secret industry. Collections of this nature can be found in most affluent countries with a tradition of filmmaking and surprisingly some of the largest collections exist in predominantly Roman Catholic nations such as Mexico, France, Spain and Austria (Swanson, 2005).

Après le bal

Amateur Erotica

The IFI Irish Film Archive collections, however, are not renowned for their scandalous content and unlike many other national film archives we have no home-made or semi-professional erotica lurking in our vaults. Of our amateur collections the most provocative material we hold is from the collection of Lord Desmond Leslie. Lord Leslie, whose family estate is at Glaslough, County Monaghan, was a novelist, filmmaker, composer, Spitfire pilot and spiritualist (Daily Telegraph, 2001). Leslie was known as a bit of a philanderer and his love of women certainly translates into his filmmaking activities. One his films, Sally, features a kittenish young lady whom Lord Leslie met on a skiing holiday in 1955. He films her in various stages of playful undress while she strikes cheesecake glamour poses and the sequence finishes with her wearing nothing but a see through nightdress. The film while certainly suggestive could hardly be described as more than mildly erotic.

Festivals

In the main the only time we encounter objections regarding the sexual content of films in our collection is when they are exhibited in foreign territories. The Archive sends Irish films to venues all around the world and we have to be mindful of the mores and restrictions in each country. In 2004, a significant cultural festival called ‘China Ireland’ proved very difficult to programme with China’s strict censorship laws precluding almost every modern Irish film from being shown. Things were taken to the extreme when a festival print of When Brendan Met Trudy was unceremoniously relieved of its sex scenes in Kuala Lumpar. The projectionist physically cut them out of the film and they had to be painstakingly re-inserted by Archive staff when the print returned from its travels. Occurrences such as these are uncommon, with little of the material in our collections giving cause for moral outrage, however our collection does contain two films that on their release failed to receive certificates from the Film Censor of the day. 

She Didn’t Say No

In 2001 the Irish Film Archive acquired a print of She Didn’t Say No (1958) thanks to research of American Academic Ann Butler. Based on Fermoy-born Una Troy's novel, We Are Seven, the film depicts the lives of the Monaghan family, six children and their unmarried mother Bridget, in the town of Doon, County Waterford. The children's various fathers are local men - who attempt to find a way to rid the town of their embarrassment.  

Although She Didn't Say No was scheduled to be produced in Ireland, permission was refused just weeks before shooting was due to begin and production was moved to Cornwall and Elstree Studios in the UK. According to Ann Butler, who under took extensive research into the making of the film while researching a biography about Troy, the film is disconcertingly based on a true story. In reality Moll McCarthy from County Tipperary was denounced by the local parish priest for fathering children by a variety of men and accused in court of being an immoral mother. Although she kept her children, her home was burned to the ground, leaving her fighting for compensation for many years. She was murdered in 1940 allegedly by Harry Gleeson, who was believed to be the father of her final child. The case caused great controversy at the time, with many believing that Gleeson, who was eventually hanged, had been wrongly accused.

The furore that occurred when the film received its first outing at the 1958 Brussels World Film Festival resulted in headlines denouncing the film as immoral and a slur against the Irish. The Irish Department of External Affairs called for it to be banned and due to this media and government outrage the film was never submitted to the Irish censor. The unconventional Monaghan family circumstances aside, the film itself is an enjoyable piece of whimsy and one wonders if the strength of feeling that prevented it being made or released in Ireland would have been so strong if it had not been based on such a controversial true case.

Lee Dunne
Several of the more controversial films in the Archive collections are adaptations of works by the Dublin author Lee Dunne, who has been described as ‘the most banned author in Ireland’ and deposited in the Archive by American/Irish film collector, Paul Balbirnie.

Lee Dunne

I Can’t I Can’t..., or Wedding Night as it was called in the USA, is a curious drama that is very much of its time (it screens at the IFI on January 22nd). It features popular British stars of the day Denis Waterman and Tessa Wyatt as a newly married Catholic couple unable to consummate their marriage due to the young wife’s fear of sex, which is a result of her mother dying in child birth on her own wedding day. The inclusion of topics that were generally off limits to Irish audiences, such as birth control, miscarriage and the sexual obligations of women within marriage, resulted in this film not being screened in Ireland after the year of its release until 2011, when the IFI Irish Film Archive accepted a print from Paul Balbirnie and screened the film as part of the IFI’s annual Open Day programme.

I Can't I Can't...

Paddy, Lee Dunne’s film adaptation of his controversial book Goodbye to the Hill was banned by the Irish censor due to its sexual frankness. As with I Can’t I Can’t... a copy of the film  was found in America by film collector Paul Balbirnie and it was added to the IFI Irish Film Archive collection. The risqué story depicts Abbey actor Des Cave as a sort of ‘Irish Alfie’ who spends most of his time seducing a succession of women around Dublin. No-strings sexual exploits including three-in-a-bed antics, whips and paid afternoon romps with Maureen Toal are the order of the day. Its carefree depiction of sex and on-screen nudity resulted in Paddy being refused a screening certificate when it was submitted to the Censor in 1970.

Paddy

On acquiring copies of these films the Archive submitted them to the current Censor John Kelleher in order to allow them to be include in the Archive’s programme of screenings at the IFI. In 2006, Paddy was able to receive its Irish premiere when the Irish Film Censor’s office issued the film with a 12A rating, while commenting that ‘by today’s standards it is charmingly old–fashioned’ and that ‘it was banned in a different era, a very different time’ (Sunday Independent). She Didn’t Say No was presented with a PG rating in 2003 allowing it to be legitimately screened for the first time in four decades - surely a sign of changing Irish attitudes to sex on film. 

Kasandra O’Connell

Head of the IFI Irish Film Archive

Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll is a three-month season dedicated to examining how cinema has taken on sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. January focuses on sex on film.

I Can't I Can't... will show at the IFI at 18.30 on January 22nd as part of From the Vaults, our monthly screenings from the IFI Irish Film Archive.

This article was originally published in Film Ireland.

Bibliography and further reading/viewing

Georges Méliès: Father of Film Fantasy - David Robinson (London: BFI/MOMI, 1993) 

Good Old Naughty Days - Polisson et Galipettes - DVD

Home Viewing: Pornography and Amateur Film Collections, A Case Study Dwight Swanson, 

The Moving Image - Volume 5, Number 2, University of Minnesota Press - 2005

Pornography - The Secret History of Civilisation - Marilyn Milgrom, Channel 4 Press, 2001

Leslie Obituary - Daily Telegraph -22/11/2001

Paddy Rides Again and Again and Again - Sunday Independent - 13/8/2006

Material relating to the She Didn’t Say No outcry can be found in the paper collection of the IFI Irish Film Archive, the originals are in the National Archives and National Library

Thanks to Ann Butler for her help in finding She Didn’t Say No and uncovering its fascinating history

IFI Head of Programming Michael Hayden discusses the career of Bruce Dern to coincide with a focus on his work and his new film, Nebraska

In The Wild Angels (1966), Roger Corman’s brash precursor to Easy Rider, Bruce Dern plays a character called Loser, a rebellious biker in a gang of swastika sporting Hells Angels. He’s dead inside the first 30 minutes of the film, a victim of The Man, of course. When Loser’s funeral becomes an anarchic happening inside a church, his corpse is dragged out of its coffin and passed around the party like a leather jacketed rag doll, fags and booze put in its mouth. It is some credit to Dern that he can command a screen he shares with Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra while playing dead meat.

(The Driver)

Much of the press that has greeted Dern’s great performance in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska has focussed on how underrated he has been as an actor, and it’s true that the only significant recognition he has had prior to the Best Actor award at Cannes this year, a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for Coming Home in 1979, seems meagre reward for a career as enduring and distinctive as his. It’s likely this has something to do with the roles that he’s most famous for, characters characterised as “wackos and sickos” by David Letterman in an interview, more poetically described by Dern himself as guys who “live just beyond where the buses run”, though neither description does justice to the variety of his roles he has taken. He has been cowboys, cops and criminals, soldiers and swindlers, straight men and fall guys. Dern appeared in Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964), though it was in TV and with Roger Corman’s low budget gems where he really cut his chops, emerging from the Corman stable alongside the likes of Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson into a cynical 1970s Hollywood and a generation of filmmakers who were far from happy with the status quo. He worked with Nicholson on Drive, He Said (1971) and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), and is particularly brilliant as the bunco artist failing to convince his brother to come in on a dodgy deal in the later of these two BBS productions. Silent Running (1972) became a platform for cult hero worship rather than further leading roles, and he became defined as a character actor, playing opposite the genuine movie stars of the period; Nicholson, Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby (1974), Ryan O’Neal in The Driver (1978). Coming Home and the Oscar nomination were expected to be another stepping stone to bigger roles, and while these never materialised, he never stopped working, and by the 1990s, a younger generation of filmmakers were casting him with due reverence. His performance in James Foley’s underrated Jim Thompson adaptation After Dark, My Sweet (1990) is pitch perfect, sleazy and outsmarted, a character less clever than he thinks he is; playing an alcoholic vet willing to give serial killer Aileen Wuornos (as portrayed by Charlize Theron) the time of day in Patty Jenkins’ Monster (2003), he emerges from the film as its one unambiguously sympathetic character; and he’s along for the ride in Quentin Tarantino’s slavery romp Django Unchained (2012).

(The King of Marvin Gardens)

Tarantino recently referred to Dern as a “national treasure”, and his appearance in two of the year’s key releases, as well as all the seasonal awards buzz around Nebraska, give that claim credibility. Notoriously, Dern was the only actor to have killed John Wayne on screen, shooting Wayne in the back in The Cowboys (1972). After that film, Dern received death threats. It seems that enough time has passed and now Hollywood can forgive him for messing with The Duke.

(Nebraska)

Michael Hayden

IFI Head of Programming

A focus on Bruce Dern's career runs at the IFI from December 14th to 22nd. His latest film, Nebraska (directed by Alexander Payne) is currently showing.

Three generations of Lithuanian Cinema during the IFI Lithuanian Film Focus

Santa Lingevičiūtė, Artistic Director of the Vilnius International Film Festival, talks about three generations of Lithuanian cinema ahead of the IFI Lithuanian Film Focus (Dec 6th – 8th)

Gytis Lukšas is one of the last of the Mohicans of the so-called ‘golden’ generation of Lithuanian cinema. He is a jack of all trades: director, screenwriter, chairman of the Lithuanian Association of Cinematographers, and member of Culture and Art Council. His films, Autumn of My Childhood (Mano vaikystės ruduo, 1977), Summer Ends in Autumn (Vasara baigiasi rudenį, 1981), and English Waltz (Anglų valsas, 1982), are considered his best and already belong to the Lithuanian classics archive. Lukšas is one of those directors who perceived the cinematic potential of Lithuanian literature therefore most of his films are adaptations. Very often he questions the concept of morality; his films are very intimate and this intimacy forces the spectator to seek connections with one’s biography. Lukšas‘s cinema is a rare example of unity: music supplements the image or acting, or vice versa. His latest film Vortex (Duburys) is an adaptation of a novel written by Romualdas Granauskas, the winner of the Lithuanian National Prize. It is traditional, black-and-white drama where the relationship between people are watched very closely and attentively. As Lukšas himself put it “it is not simply a story of one man’s life, but also of my own generation.”

Šarūnas Bartas is one the most internationally acclaimed Lithuanian film directors, whose career started in the early ‘90s. As most film people of the former Soviet Union, Bartas graduated from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, aka VGIK. During Soviet times VGIK was considered as one of the top film schools. Šarūnas Bartas gained international recognition for his first feature-length film Three Days (1991), which was awarded the prize of the Ecumenical Jury and Special Mention of FIPRESCI in Berlinale in 1992. This festival was a major breakthrough for the director. His following films were also screened in such A-class film festivals as Berlinale, Cannes (Un Certain Regard Section), Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary, Locarno, London etc. Bartas is a true auteur who rejects traditional narrative. All his films are of loose structure, minimalistic, raising philosophical questions. Bartas’ oeuvre is little known and analysed in Lithuania, but he has a lot of fans outside his homeland. In his latest film Eastern Drift the director tries a genre of classic crime film with some deviations: it is a mixture of peculiar existential drama with stylistics of action film and film noir. Bartas uses his trademark – a non-linear montage. The spectator is transferred to the magical world of the film, leaving one’s space of mundane existence.

Kristina Buožytė represents the young generation of Lithuanian filmmakers. She is probalby most hard working and much more mature in terms of filmmaking among her contemporaries. She has made two feature-length films and both achieved wide international recognition. Buožytė already has a distinctive style. She is interested in the confrontation of double-sided reality. Characters of her films are tortured and betrayed by their own thoughts. Kristina Buožytė is like a surgeon who dissects human character and consciousness with the camera. The subject of examination of inner world is supplemented with subtle feminist nuances. Her first film The Collectress (Kolekcionierė, 2008) was the antithesis of poetic realism, so popular in Lithuanian cinema. Her latest film Vanishing Waves (Aurora) is called a fantastic-psychological-erotic techno-thriller. One can recognise references to Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky and David Lynch but without feeling plagiaristic. Buožytė professionally uses a method of appropriation so popular in contemporary art.

Santa Lingevičiūtė

The IFI Lithuanian Film Focus runs at the IFI from December 6th to 8th. Director Kristina Buožytė will attend the screening of Vanishing Waves on December 6th and take part in a Q&A.

Calling all IFI Explorers!

IFI Explorers is our club for 15 to 18 year olds who want to discover a world of film beyond Hollywood blockbusters. Student Oleg Kuvsincikov came up with the club's name and here he explains why: 

I chose IFI Explorers as a name for the IFI teen film offer because the films that are shown in the Irish Film Institute are unusual and different to the ones in other cinemas.  

In my opinion, ‘explorers’ creates that sense of discovering something new about films. For example, I watched a film called Shun Li and the Poet (pictured above) with my school in the IFI and I discovered that even though the film had barely any action in it, it was still very interesting because of the plot and the conflict in the film.

I personally feel that the IFI teen film offer will help teenagers explore a world of film and that is why I have chosen the name IFI Explorers to reflect that.

Oleg Kuvsincikov (Age 15)

SPECIAL €3 TICKET OFFER FOR NOVEMBER!  

This month we are offering the special price of just €3 a ticket for screenings between 1pm and 6pm to those aged 15 – 18. Don’t forget if you buy a ticket for three films, you get your fourth ticket FREE! Check out this month's films.

Contact Dee Quinlan for more information, or sign up to receive the IFI Explorers newsletter (scroll down page to enter your name and email).

Keeping the summit dreams alive

What is different about seeing a wide-shot Everest, the world’s highest mountain for the first time in The Epic for Everest (1923), to seeing it captured on camera today? To my untrained eye, at least, nothing observable about the mountain has changed but context here is everything. To see the mountain rear up above the cameraman as an pure unconquered frontier of our planet feels entirely different to seeing it now, knowing the mountain is strewn with commercial expeditions, egos, industrial disputes, rubbish, fixed ropes, corpses, and a ladder allowing the most difficult climbing to be bypassed.

It’s not just getting to the top and back that matters, climbers and mountaineers rigorously debate the ‘ethics’ of what they call ‘style of ascent’. That’s why the climbing community made such a fuss last week when Ueli Steck climbed the smaller (though fiercely dangerous) Himalaya mountain Annapurna. Not only had he found a new route on the South Face, he’d gone up and down unroped and alone without supplemental oxygen in one astonishing 28-hour push.

While most modern mountaineers wouldn't object to the tactics used by Mallory and Irvine on Everest, the footage of the Tibetan people that the climbers used as porters and passed through en-route to Everest certainly lacks a different kind of style. The raw Imperialist viewpoint espoused by the intertitles which seems to barely distinguish Tibetan man from baby donkey is enough to make anyone squirm, though this patronising tone gives way in parts to an irrepressible wonder at the ancient monastic civilisation the team passes through in the high valleys of the Himalayas.

One thinks of Steck again, earlier this year the victim of a horrific confrontation between the Sherpas and a group of fast and light Alpine climbers on Everest, possibly exacerbated by the Western team having apparently outgrown the need for traditional Sherpa support. The Epic of Everest shows us this mutually exploitative relationship that shaped 20^th Century Himalayan mountaineering in its very infancy.

Do we crave and seek adventure in our own lives? What level of risk do we deem acceptable in pursuing it? For most of us it would fall far, far below the risks that Mallory and Irvine knowingly and paid for with their lives. Even today Everest remains, by any scale of human activity, phenomenally dangerous and yet thousands attempt it, sometimes controversially suppressing the most basic human instincts to aid ailing climbers to avoid harm or to keep their own summit dreams alive.

We’ll probably never know if Mallory and Irvine summited Everest before falling; it seems unlikely. But The Epic of Everest is a great chance to see a real frontier of human exploration.

Patrick Stewart

IFI 

The Epic Of Everest is showing, EXCLUSIVELY at the IFI, from October 18th to October 24th.  

Very extremely dangerous Jerry McGill

A year since its debut at last year's IFI Stranger Than Fiction Documentary Film Festival, Paul Duane returns with his feature film, Very Extremely Dangerous, a tragic story of Jerry McGill, an aging rocker and the last American outlaw. So why make a film about him? Director Paul Duane explains.  

Jerry McGill is too obscure to even be called a cult figure.

Only those who've read Robert Gordon's seminal It Came From Memphis or seen William Eggleston's dark, outrageous 'home movie' Stranded in Canton would have the vaguest idea who he is, or those rockabilly completists who own a copy of Sun 326, Lovestruck, recorded by Jerry and his band The Topcoats in 1959, his first and only official release. It's not even a particularly good record (the B-side is better).

So why make a film about him when there are so many other, probably more deserving musicians out there?

Well, back in mid-2009 I was facing a blank wall – my first cut of Barbaric Genius, my film on John Healy, had been rejected, all further funding placed in question & it looked as if it would never be completed.

So when I got an email from Jerry's fiancée Joyce telling me that he'd been diagnosed with lung cancer, had booked a recording session in Memphis next week, and wanted myself and Robert Gordon to meet him there, I grabbed an idea out of thin air.

The story of a man who blew all his chances the first time round, who turned his back on a promising music career in favour of a criminal life,  trying to redeem himself while staring death in the eyes. I knew Jerry was charismatic and a great storyteller from my phone conversations with him, but could he carry a film? Who knew?

Out of nothing more than that idea, and Jerry's insistence that he wasn't going to go quietly into the night, that he was finally going to follow up his one and only record, myself and Robert Gordon dragged this film, kicking and screaming and fighting us every inch of the way, into existence. Was it worth it? You tell me.

Paul Duane
Film Director

Very Extremely Dangerous opens on Friday, October 18th, 2013, exclusively at the IFI. There will be a post-screening Q&A with director Paul Duane following the 20.30 screening of the film. BOOK NOW!