I took this photograph, after my sea-swim last Sunday. The sun went behind the clouds and the sky had a menacing air. There was also a group of teens in the water. I could not help thinking of a water version of Texas Chainsaw Massacre or a scene from George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, where zombies emerge from the sea. Below is one of my favourite You Tube clips, an excerpt from the Italian director Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2.

Words cannot express my excitement regarding Paddy Considine's special Darklight/Screen Training Ireland Masterclass at Darklight 2008. He also is introducing a screening of Shane Meadows' modern masterpiece Dead Man's Shoes, which he co-wrote and stars in. The screening also features Considine's directorial debut Dog Altogether - see clip below. I wrote about the visceral qualities of Dead Man's Shoes in a January post called Docu-fiction and it would appear that Dog Altogether contains similar attributes. Joining Considine at Darklight '08 is Barry Ryan, the Head Of Production of Warp's new offshoot Warp X, who will be participating in a low-budget filmmaking symposium. Darklight have not announced their full programme yet, but their new website with programme highlights can be seen here - Darklight

In addition, I have a plan - which is to get Paddy to autograph my DVD cover of A Room For Romeo Brass and a graphic novel I have of Dead Man's Shoes. Subsequently I will either faint with shyness or babble insanely about how much I liked his mustache in Hot Fuzz.

I got a train last night from Cork to Dublin. Usually I would listen to some podcasts such as This American Life which intermingles stories that are true and some which are fictitious. Last night I decided to watch Control (2007 Anton Corbijn) on a 2 inch square monitor - sacrilege! David Lynch (a priest of cinema) believes that

'..you will never in a trillion years experience the film - you think you will have experienced it - but you will be cheated - its such a saddness...'

This quote is from the iphone ad (see below) in relation to watching a film on an iphone - here I am applying it to my ipod, who's screen is even smaller than an iphone. In Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century there was over 30 cinemas on O' Connell St. People went to the cinema religiously - at a guess around 3 times a week (now there is only 1 cinema on O Connell Street). Going to the cinema was built into people's everyday lives, now we frequent the cinema if we really feel a film is deserving of such an environment. Technology brought this change - Video and DVD's made it easier for people to simply stay at home. Subsequently, we have Apple products which are now defining how we watch films.

Control is a beautifully photographed film and I am actually saddened that I did not see it when it was screening in cinemas. However, my experience of watching it on an ipod and on a moving train, brought a strange sense of intimacy between me, what I was watching and what I was holding. You can wholly participate in a film through the sound of it - hearing Sam Reily (Ian Curtis) recite some of his poems was quite beautiful and this was embelished through the wearing of headphones. At one point in the film Sam Reily recounts a love letter from Ian Curtis to Annik Honoré (Alexandra Maria Lara) - something distracted me and I looked out the window. The lights of an empty funfair had caught my eye - I wondered where I was. Beside the fun fair was a flood lit stadium with a group of men striding in unison up and down the pitch - all at the same time i was listening to this poem. A kind of surreal moment but something I would not experience in the cinema - everyday life actually intertwining with a film. I may have escaped visually from the screen but what i was seeing outside seemed to fit in with what I was listening to.

Lynch does have a point, however, in my opinion there are obviously new methods of engaging with film. In the future, it is likely that we will see ground breaking film stemming from the generation that have an inborn connection to their hi-end MP3 Players.

Girls Rock! is a documentary just released in the States focusing on young girls in a Rock Camp in Oregon. The camps main aim is to learn Rock DIY style - forming bands, writing songs and building community.
The Rock camp provides a welcome break for girls being pressurised to conform and a temporary reprieve from being sexualized. The act of picking up a a guitar and making noise becomes a revolutionary act. The Majorette groups I have seen in the last few months may not be picking up a guitar but essentially they are picking up their specific tools - batons and pom pom poms and performing and representing their local community. The majority of their audience at competitions are women so I think they have a sense of good body-image. Through forthcoming interviews I will discover what they really think.

The Youtube video below is an interview with the directors: Shane King and Arne Johnson.