Film-maker Daniel Cockburn, in The Invocation (2024)
This year’s festival has a complementary No-Film Programme, considering films that can’t be seen, because they’re lost, withdrawn, fragmentary, never-made or completely imaginary. We commissioned film-maker Daniel Cockburn to produce a pair of video essays considering the Goncharov phenomenon and the vanished, Glasgow-filmed Batgirl.
THE INVOCATION We know what it’s like to procrastinate on a project by surfing the net, letting yourself fall down hyperlink rabbit holes. At least I do. But what do you do when a project requires you to surf the net, when the essential task is to purposely fall down a rabbit hole?
What if you’re making a video essay about the Goncharov phenomenon, that Tumblr thing from a few years back where suddenly everyone started pretending that there was a Scorsese/Garrone movie from 1973 with Robert De Niro and Cybill Shepherd about the Russian Mafia in Naples, and the internet filled with reminiscences and discussions and exegeses on the topic of this movie that never existed, and now if you care to, you can find endless dissection of its themes and enumerations of its motifs and readings of its coded sexual politics, and so if you need to make a video essay about that, the only way forward is down the rabbit hole, so I repeat my question, what do you do?
If doing the job is surfing and losing yourself in the unending chain of not-really-free association, then every moment of attempted productivity feels like it’s actually just procrastination, and you feel that familiar shame and guilt of avoiding work even though you’re actually working – but if you want to escape that feeling, what do you do? Procrastinate and surf the net? What a mess.
The Abjuration (Daniel Cockburn, 2024)
THE ABJURATION also can we pls talk about the word “canon” and what it used to mean vs what it means now and whether the cultures of fandom and corporate IP have a little more influence on our language & thought than would be optimal xthxbai
Daniel Cockburn
The Invocation and The Abjuration can be viewed in our No-Film Programme, which screens on a loop throughout our festival weekend. The Invocation will also screen with our opening night event, Make Good Choices: An Evening of Interactive Cinema, and The Abjuration with our closing night event, Overchoice: The 5-to-1 Game.
Daniel Cockburn is a Canadian moving-image artist based in Glasgow. His work deals with rhythm, language, and thought experiments, drawing on sources spanning video games, literature, power ballads, and sci-fi/fantasy/horror. His 2010 feature film You Are Here has been described as “a new kind of narrative for a new technological era” (Mark Peranson, Cinema Scope), “a major discovery” (Olivier Père, Locarno Film Festival), and “a whatsit” (Gavin Smith, Film Comment). He’s currently working on a live performance about medieval music and a movie adaptation of Mark Vonnegut’s memoir The Eden Express.
In 1993, writer/cinematographer/director Scott King found a beat up 1950s paperback called The Man Who Never Was. It tells the true story of two British agents who procure a dead body, dress it up as an officer, chain a briefcase full of phony invasion plans to its wrist and drop it in the Mediterranean. The Germans found the body and proclaimed the intelligence in the briefcase to be “beyond reproach.” Adolf Hitler himself gave the order to move the troops according to the plans found in the briefcase.
While this may have been the most successful counterintelligence campaign of any war, that’s not the part of the story that interested Mr King. For as the two men executed their plan, they created a complete identity for their body, one so detailed that it included movie tickets, bank passbooks, and, finally, letters, both to and from the dead man.
“I was fascinated by the way these normal guys would unknowingly write these very poignant and emotional letters,” says King, “and by the way that the letters, without the writers meaning to, revealed things about themselves that the book only glosses over.”
Director Scott King with actors Lance Baker and Nick Offerman, on the set of Treasure Island
Mr King spent the next five years mostly on research (while admittedly doing other things), stealing liberally from everything he could find: a 1910 two-volume Psychologis Sexualis, a 1943 Slang Thesaurus, biographies of minor historical figures, ration magazines, 1970s self-help books. Mr King: “I wanted to invent an entire fake novel that the film would be based on, giving the characters and the story a depth that myself and the actors could refer to. For instance, I knew that Samuel (Nick Offerman) was a mathematician and, in an early draft, wrote a scene where he calculated exact change at a grocery store. The scene was pretty boring but the idea of his character rebelling against his bookish self-image in a kind of hyper masculine way did wind up in the movie, even though it wasn’t explicitly in the script.” After the years of noodling, the script itself only took a few months to write.
The five directors of Treasure Island, plus one
When it came time to actually shoot the film, producer Adrienne Gruben sought out people who had made their own films. Script supervisor Robert Byington had previously directed Shameless and Olympia, the latter which opened the 1998 South by Southwest Festival in Austin and closed the 1998 Slamdance Film Festival. Gaffer Philip Glau was the director of Circus Redickuless, a feature documentary about a punk rock circus which has also toured the festival route. Sound man Dante Harper directed The Delicate Art of the Rifle, which was honoured with Best Film at Chicago’s Underground Film Festival. First assistant director Abe Levy was the director of a film called Max 13, while camera operator Jonathan Sanford’s first film, The Big Charade, played a number of festivals, including South by Southwest.
Shortly after principal photography, producer Gruben told IndieWire, “I’ve noticed on films with first time directors that the crew sits around saying, ‘If I were making a movie, I’d do it this way.’ I didn’t want the crew against the director; I wanted some padding, so they’d all have some empathy for Scott in this situation. I hired people who I thought had matching personalities. I hired a bunch of diplomats, basically, who had training in certain departments.”
The crew of Treasure Island
Today, King would tell any first-time film-maker that the only way that they will ever make a halfway decent film is to surround themselves with talented people who really know what they are doing. “As a hopeless control freak, I was amazed at how people who believed in the project were able to stand up and do such an great job that I was unable to hate them for doing so. When it’s all over, there’s a tendency to forget what kind of cooperation it takes to make a film; I’m happy to be the spokesman of Treasure Island, but now that I’ve gone through the actual experience of making it, I have to admit I’m not the author.”
For the look of the film, the team wanted to create a glimpse into the ’40s that we had only suspected before. “A lot of people remember this day as a Life magazine photo,” says Mr King, “especially the one that depicts the sailor kissing a strange woman in the middle of a celebratory street. In reality, the last day of the war turned the country into Dallas when the Cowboys win: a near riot condition, where looting, rapes, random beatings and murder were not uncommon. I was hoping in the film to show what happens underneath the kiss in the photograph.”
Filming the VJ riot in Treasure Island
In order to shift today’s perspective of the 1940s, King wanted the film to look exactly like one that might have been made at the time. Shooting in black and white with a 1936 Mitchell camera and using old fashioned processing techniques, the cast and crew strived to create the feeling that, despite all beliefs to the contrary, people lived their lives pretty much the way they do now.
This attention to the look of the film continues off the set, where King and his production designer, Nathan Marsak, are obsessed with the period depicted in Treasure Island. in their day-to-day lives, they are surrounded by rotary phones and pneumatic tubes, interwar cars and chalk-stripe suits. As producer Gruben puts it. “Their preoccupation with detail and obsession with historical correctness bears no relation to anything ‘retro’, they don’t go swing dancing, they build dirigibles.” This attention to visual perfection creates a real environment where it’s possible, if only for one second, to see that people living 50 years ago swore, did the wrong thing, lived their lives with no hope of ever knowing themselves, and, yes, had sex.
Original Treasure Island trailer
Shooting wrapped in July of 1998, and as the crew finished up the editing, sound and music in November, the film was accepted into the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. This turned out to be an overwhelming experience for everyone involved. Film-maker King: “There are people who go to this festival expecting to see something they can market, commercial movies on a slightly lower budget. Treasure Island was not that kind of film and it made some people very, very angry. But I think a number of folks were happily surprised to be exposed to something, well, provocative. I didn’t enjoy being so vocally criticized, but when you know you’re getting to people, one way or another, it has to feel a little like a success.”
Despite the festival’s reputation for million-dollar napkin deals, Treasure Island was not the kind of film that distributors, even the smaller ones, were looking for. “We had a lot of a distributors who went out of their way to say how much they liked it”, said producer Adrienne Gruben. “I mean, they could have just run away and hid, so I don’t think they were lying. I think it’s the kind of film that works well for people who’ve seen a lot of movies, but there was an unspoken understanding that them liking it and the film making them a ton of money were two totally different things.”
Poster for Treasure Island‘s new 4K restoration, by Beth Morris
After winning a Special Jury prize at Sundance, an award for outstanding artistic achievement at Outfest in Los Angeles, and a IFP Independent Spirit nomination for best first feature (under $500,000)1, Treasure Island continued to screen at more festivals around the country, still unable to secure any kind of distribution deal. After finding theatres in New York and San Francisco who were willing to take a chance on a film without any money behind it, All Day Entertainment head David Kalat happened in on a screening in New York’s Cinema Village. Kalat, who has made a reputation for himself releasing lost classic films like Fritz Lang’s The Eyes of Dr Mabuse and ’70s cult masterpiece Ganja & Hess, has a great affinity for unseen films. “Even though the film takes place in 1945”, says Mr Kalat, “Treasure Island is the first contemporary film I’ve even wanted to put out [on DVD]. It’s not a film for everybody, but for the right audience, it really has the potential to disturb and enlighten.”
Scott King’s 25th anniversary, 4K restoration of Treasure Island premieres at Weird Weekend on Saturday 26/10, with post-screening Q&A. Tickets available here.
It was bested in this category by The Blair Witch Project↩︎
Katy Bolger as Holly, George Kuchar as Martin and Rufus Seder as Edgar, in Screamplay
Screamplay (1984) was the only feature length film I ever made, but it was not at all the first film. I had been making short films for almost 20 years (since I was 12 years old), many of them international award winners (Cannes, Krakow, Ann Arbor).
As a college student, I bounced back and forth between the East and West Coast. First, I was a film student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, where I met and collaborated with other film students. Then, I was a Directing Fellow at the American Film Institute in Lost Angeles, where I met actor Ed Greenberg and with whom I co-wrote Screamplay (then titled Death City) in his West Hollywood apartment. “Slasher Pics” were big then, and we wrote it with an eye toward Ed starring as Edgar Allen and with me directing. While we had some nibbles on the script, we had no takers.
The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra (Robert Florey, Slavko Vorkapić, 1928)
At the AFI, I also had the rare pleasure of catching elderly film theoretician Slavko Vorkapić’s last lectures on the Gestalt theory of filmmaking. Inspired, I returned to Boston and with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, formed the Boston Black and White Movie Company with fellow students from the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts. We shot, acted in and processed and printed our own black and white reversal 16mm short films ourselves and showed them around town with live musical accompaniment. Many of these films were shot in my 3,200 square foot South End loft, which I converted into a film studio.
After another frustrating visit to Los Angeles, I decided to return to my Boston studio and to raise the money to make Screamplay myself. To raise interest and assemble a cast and crew from my original Boston filmmaking cohorts, I made a 4′ square matte painting of the Welcome Apartments with removable sections, then took a hammer and saw and built the steps and walls to be used in the movie. With these, I was able to demonstrate to my friends how the sets could be swapped around and combined with the matte painting to convincingly convey the impression of a three-story courtyard in Hollywood. With $25,000 raised from friends and family, we prepared to make the movie. Ed Greenberg could not leave LA to participate, so I decided to take the role of Edgar as well as director.
Rufus B Seder as Edgar Allen, on the set of Screamplay (photo by George Kuchar)
Artist Cheryl Hirshman stepped in to complete more matte paintings (and the poster for the movie), and animator Flip Johnson, in addition to playing one of the cops, developed additional special effects such as the undulating water in the apartment complex swimming pool (filmed real time through the matte painting – no actual water used), and Nicky’s motorcycle accident (a filmed scale model motorcycle and truck transformed into dozens of 8″ x 10″ black and white photos onto which Flip ink-stippled splatting blood and then re-animated).
L-R: George Cordeiro, Basil Bova and Ted Braun, on the set of Screamplay (photo by George Kuchar)
To create the other visual effects, we built a front projection system (a la Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 ape sequence) using a large beam splitter and a lot of 3M retro-reflective material. My father, Gus Seder (who also played Al Weiner in the movie), designed an electro-mechanical “phase lock loop” which synchronized a 16mm movie projector to my 16mm Bolex camera, permitting us to project pre-filmed footage behind the actors. We designed and constructed a special tripod for the Bolex which would keep the nodal point of the lens in one exact spot at all times – essential to keeping the live action set from spatially displacing from the cutout portion of the matte painting when we tilted and panned.
Contemporaneous TV feature, behind the scenes of Screamplay
Underground filmmaker George Kuchar and I had become friends by then, and we flew him in for a month to play the part of Martin, the manager of the Welcome Apartments and the villain of the piece. I’ll never forget the first take we did of him: He was to step out of second floor apartment, glower down (presumably at Edgar) and frown. George did all that, and to top it off, he spat over the railing (right onto our brand-new set). That’s when I knew I had chosen right guy for the role!
Shooting went well until filming of the final fight scene in Edgar’s storage room, when disaster struck. George, approaching me from behind to strangle me, slipped on a garden hose (part of the set), fell and broke his ankle in three places. As he did not have insurance, we raised more funds to cover his $20,000 hospital cost, effectively doubling our budget from $25,000 to $45,000. During his hospitalization, we filmed the fight scene using one of our crew members, filmmaker Ted Braun, as a “stunt double” for George. As soon as he was well enough to leave the hospital, George returned to the set and we propped him upright to film reaction shots to intercut. The final edited fight scene flows smoothly and you can’t tell it’s not George if you don’t know.
Bob White as Lot, on the set of Screamplay (photo by George Kuchar)
We first showed Screamplay at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival (sharing the screen with the Coen Brothers’ first feature film Blood Simple. We immediately got interest from New Line Cinema whose Nightmare on Elm Street had just hit big and who wanted to release our film as a midnight movie but only in its original 16mm. When we insisted they blow it up to 35mm for a proper theatrical release, they dropped it.
We also had interest from Troma (who promised to blow it up to 35mm), but chose instead to “world premiere” Screamplay at a local theater in our hometown of Boston, hoping to get good reviews which might entice “classier” distributors. Our strategy backfired when lead Boston Globe film critic at the time, Michael Blowen, panned it roundly. “It is customary for film reviewers to bend over backwards to support independent filmmakers,” he wrote, “But in this case, that contortion is impossible.”
We had no choice but to accept Troma’s offer. The deal – for US distribution only – was that we would start receiving royalties after Troma recouped its cost of blowing up the film to 35mm. Troma never made that money back.
Original Screamplay poster, by Cheryl Hirshman
Internationally, the film enjoyed more success, especially in Germany. It was a hit at the Berlin Film festival, playing to packed midnight crowds. We sold it Bayerischer Rundfunk (German TV) where it was aired as a Halloween special for many years. And I was invited to show the film and serve on a panel with independent filmmakers Frederick Wiseman and Shirley Clarke at the Melkweg Cinema in Amsterdam.
The brutal Boston reviews and the lackluster performance of the film in the US had taken its toll, however. I took it hard, feeling disgraced in my hometown and deserted by some of the friends who had helped me make the film. I ran away back to Los Angeles, where I convinced producer Bill Benenson to pay me to write a script about Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. After fourteen drafts and ten years, I had fashioned it to be a 35mm, hand-cranked black and white silent movie to be shown with live orchestral accompaniment. Bill Benenson thought I was crazy and insisted it be in color with sound. We almost got the money to make it from American Playhouse (educational TV), but when they saw me and Bill arguing about this issue, they dropped it like a hot potato.
James M Connor as Nicky Blair, Katy Bolger as Holly in Screamplay
Back in Boston, I regrouped, teaching film at the Museum School and working as a movie projectionist for a number of years. At one point I picked up my old 16mm Bolex, loaded it with film and went out to film something – anything – but could not think of anything interesting to film. I was finished as a film-maker.
After some soul-searching and introspection, I decided to focus on stuff that gave me personal satisfaction, which led to my lifetime career as a world-class public artist/inventor specializing in optically animated murals, books and toys. Anyone interested in knowing more about my “life after Screamplay”, they can watch my half hour video on YouTube, entitled “Magic, Art and Scanimation”.
Rufus B Seder
Our brand-new, 4K preservation of Screamplay, made from Rufus’ own 16mm print, premieres at Weird Weekend on Sunday 27/10/24. Tickets available here.
Yongman Kim, subject of Kim's Video (Ashley Sabin & David Redmon, 2023)
We’re thrilled to announce that Weird Weekend returns in 2024 with monthly screenings leading into the WWIV festival, 25-27th October 2024!
Every month, we’ll be screening the best New Weird Cinema alongside brand-new restorations, while the festival itself will be more focussed than ever before on strange and unseen cinema from around the world. We have a special focus this year on the programmers, curators and archivists who champion, preserve and celebrate these films, expanding the cult canon and exploring new perspectives.
We also have a new venue in the GAMIS Cinema, a brand-new screening space in Glasgow’s Govanhill. The GAMIS Cinema is an emerging venue, aiming to bring cinema to the Southside alongside artists studios, exhibition and community projects. Directly opposite Queen’s Park train station, the GAMIS Cinema will be growing and developing over the course of 2024.
Our monthly screening series, taking place on the final Friday of every month, commences on 29th March with the new documentary Kim’s Video, followed in April by Third Window’s brand-new restoration of The Crazy Family (first screened at the inaugural WW in 2018) and in May by Bertrand Mandico’s She Is Conann. All screenings are priced on a sliding scale and feature Descriptive Subtitles for the entire programme, optional Audio Description and live captioning for intros and Q&As.
Tickets for the first three monthly screenings are on sale now.
Weird Weekend is funded by Screen Scotland. Screen Scotland drives the development of all aspects of Scotland’s film and TV industry, through funding and strategic support. Screen Scotland is part of Creative Scotland and delivers these services and support with funding from Scottish Government and The National Lottery.
