We’re off up north tomorrow for a little show at Islington Mill in Salford. It’s an old cotton mill which has been converted into various things including artists studios, a gallery, a venue, a self-run art school and a B&B; comparable to our own Custard Factory but with a different ethos. Looking forward to exploring the place and playing some holiday films, including this from local boy Ian Gamester:

CREAM/EGG (Short Film) from Ian Gamester on Vimeo.

**Stop press**
Just confirmed that Gruff Rhys and Dyl ‘Goch’ Jones will be at the Green Man Festival this weekend to talk about Separado!, the documentary they made together about Gruff’s long-lost relative. René Griffiths is a poncho-wearing, Welsh-singing troubadour from Patagonia, whose story inspired Rhys to trace the historical links between Wales and the Argentinian badlands where many of his ancestors emigrated in the 19th century. The film is a real charmer which throws spaghetti western, Celtic dance and super 8 into the mix, so if you’re at Green Man get down to the film tent! It’s showing on Friday at 7:30pm, and full info on the 7inch Friday night lineup is here. The festival has sold out but the film is also showing in plenty of other UK cinemas during the next couple of months, and a DVD is in the works.

PS: Regular Birmingham viewers, please note that the film is back at the Electric from 20-24 August.

Birmingham’s love of threatened species and the soon-to-be-demolished has manifested itself again in a flurry of Central Library activity. Last night VIVID in Digbeth unveiled a new multi-screen video installation by Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry, filmed in the guts of the building on empty Sunday afternoons. It’s called Inbindable Volume, and runs until 21 August.

A group have also formed around the notion Project Brutal, aiming to celebrate the library ‘before it’s too late’, and this week Lucy McLauchlan has been painting a bird mural on the side of the building.

[via BiNS]

This might also be a good time to revisit the documentary about the man who designed the thing, John Madin, back when he had the world in the palm of his hand. This film helped inspire the writing of Catherine O’Flynn’s new book The News Where You Are, featuring an architect whose legacy gets demolished. And finally, when/if they do start knocking it down perhaps someone would like to film a sequel to this:

Birmingham timelapse from 7inch cinema on Vimeo.

PS: In anticipation of the big clear-out, there are some good film-books going cheap on the fourth floor at the moment.

The Bioscope is a font of useful information on silent cinema, delving comprehensively into neglected corners while also alert to new developments and events. It’s run by Luke McKernan, Moving Image Curator at the British Museum. Having not visited for ages here are some of the things I caught up with today…

> A tasty-looking silents festival in Berlin which kicks off tomorrow;

> The extended Metropolis is on at the BFI next month, as well as various archive events as part of the Long Live Film season;

>A potted history of football in silent film;
>A Muybridge exhibition coming to the Tate in September;

And most excitingly, news of the Strobotop Lightphase Animator, a hand-held optical gizmo which works along the same lines as Jim Le Fevre’s Phonotrope. The Strobotop was designed by Rufus Butler Seder – he also created the ingenious Scanimation books – and if I don’t restrain myself I’ll end up ordering at least 10 as presents.

The final Hospital Club 100 has just been announced, highlighting established and up-and-coming people across the UK’s creative industries, and we appear to be second in the emerging film category. Sandwiched – as it were – between Emily Blunt and Carey Mulligan. Most surreal. Many thanks if you voted! There’s more info in The Independent.

Stan Morgan worked at BBC Birmingham for over 20 years, a scene hand on the likes of Boys From the Blackstuff and All Creatures Great and Small. After he left he retrained in photography at Wolverhampton University, and then returned to Pebble Mill shortly before the building closed down to capture these behind-the-scenes shots. My abiding memory of the place is that it felt a bit like a polytechnic, so it’s nice to see shots of the Archers studio looking like a shabby 70s seminar room. A selection of the images will be on show next to the cinema at mac, alongside the aforementioned weekend of drama delights.

Stan died last year. His son Stephen took the portrait above and is keeping the photography flame flying. He has a show opening next week at the Wapping Project Bankside in London.

Images by Stan Morgan courtesy of Birmingham Library and Archive Services.

It was very sad to hear of Alan Plater’s passing last week. A writer with a brilliant ear for dialogue whose theatre and TV career spanned over 40 years, and a lovely man by all accounts. I first discovered him as a kid because my dad was obsessed with The Beiderbecke Affair, and A Very British Coup is also well worth digging up on DVD. If you’ve got an hour to spare there’s an extensive interview with him at the British Library’s Theatre Archive project.

Alan Plater had a long association with BBC Birmingham, and you can see two of the films he wrote for them at mac this weekend. The first, Land Of Green Ginger, is a 1973 Play For Today which used an evocative Hull street name for its title. It was the first time Plater had been given free rein to to write a film set in his hometown, and includes choice lines like “Bugger shopping. I was only going for a bag of sugar and a bit of scandal.” The second was made over thirty years later and has another distinctive title: The Last Will and Testament of Billy Two Sheds. It stars Likely Lad and Beiderbecke collaborator James Bolam, and was filmed on Birmingham allotments. The producers of both films, David Rose and Will Trotter, will be present at the screenings.

Alan Plater (15 April 1935 – 25 June 2010)

After our Mobile Cinema event last month we were alerted to a lovely project in the south-west. A few years ago a rusty Bedford cinema van was retrieved from a field in Devon and has been carefully restored to tour the region showing archive films.

A fleet of seven of these were commissioned by Tony Benn when he was at the Ministry of Technology in the 60s. That perspex cockpit would originally have housed the 16mm projector, beaming the image onto a screen on the van’s back door for up to 28 punters at a time. Now it seats 22, and uses HD digital projection and 7.1 Dolby sound. We want one!

Cinemas on wheels have a long pedigree in the UK, from fairground bioscopes in the 1900s right up to Highlands juggernaut The Screen Machine. Taking their lead from the kino trains they’ve often had a political purpose, whether it be the workers agit prop of Cinema Action or ‘Touring Talkies’ bringing Labour propaganda to the masses, pictured below. (Sample slogan: ‘WOMEN VOTE LABOUR – FOR THE CHILDRENS SAKE’)

A few more up-to-date examples:
- Video activists Undercurrents have got into the mobile cinema game with a refitted caravan:
- A group in Market Harborough decided against a fixed building and are trying to raise the money to renovate a portable unit;
- Flicks in the Sticks recently celebrated ten years of bringing movies to village halls across Shropshire and Herefordshire.
- and Volvo are bank-rolling a touring drive-in.

Supposedly it’s our quiet time, but there’s loads going on. Including…

> 7INCH no.38 – Old-school gaming special
Hare and Hounds, Sunday 27 June

> IT CAME FROM PEBBLE MILL – 70s drama extravaganza
MAC, 2-4 July

> GREEN MAN FESTIVAL – big-top fun
Glanusk Park, 20-22 August

Plus other possible August gigs at the Big Chill and in Manchester shaping up, more on which shortly, and I’m making a slight return to academia to give a paper on ‘cinema’s ongoing love affair with its own demise’, in Leicester in July. And remarkably enough we’ve been nominated for the Hospital 100, an annual run-down on creative Britain’s ones to watch. Make our mums proud, and chuck us your vote!

Yesterday I drove to London to pick up two hefty black boxes which contain The Mobile Cinema, starring at the Hare and Hounds this Tuesday. The word ‘Mobile’ is used quite loosely here. Although Romana Schmalisch, the artist who created it, has carted this contraption around Europe I imagine she risked life and hernia to do so.

The inspiration for The Mobile Cinema came from The New Moscow, a 1938 urban planning comedy made by Aleksandr Medvedkin. It tells the tale of an idealistic young designer who treks into the capital from Siberia to present his utopian model for a new city, a table-top diorama with intricate moving parts which have a tendency to malfunction at the wrong moment. Earlier Medvedkin had been involved in the kino-train movement, when revolutionary ideals were transported across the USSR using trains converted into cinemas and film production units, and all of this history and plenty more besides has been stirred into the mix of Schmalisch’s performance.

The Mobile Cinema can also be seen throughout June in Nottingham, Norwich and all over Scotland.