We have only now just finished winding everything down after this year’s festival, it was lots of hard work for all involved but once again it has been an enormous success with full houses throughout the weekend and many sold out screenings. We wanted to take this opportunity to offer a big THANK YOU to all those who supported or attended the festival, as well as our volunteers and guests.

For those who missed it the above image is a pdf of the limited edition screen printed poster designed by Wicklow artist Gavin Beattie. The poster was on sale throughout the weekend (a snip at 20 euro) and there are still some left (it is a limited edition of 100), you can contact us at filmfestival@killruddery.com if you’d like one. We were really delighted with the design and if you like the image above they look even better in the flesh as each one is hand printed, you can find more of Gavin’s brilliant posters here.

Some of my own personal highlights of the festival -

We received particularly strong feedback about the Children’s Shorts Programme especially for the stunning Russian animation The Hedgehog in the Fog which is well worth a look if you missed it-

We were delighted to have the wonderful Matt Zoller Seitz with us throughout the weekend and he presented a fascinating lecture on the video essay on the Saturday, if you haven’t seen his Following shot video essay (embedded below) you really should.

Eilis Lavelle put together an amazing set of artist’s films which played throughout the weekend. In particular I remember plonking myself down in front of Grace Weir’s stunning short film Dust Defying Gravity on Friday night, when I could finally take a breath. I drank a large brandy and was delighted to watch the film five or six times in a row. On the Sunday we also had a collection of 16mm films presented by Elisa Kay who was also with us throughout the weekend, all in all it was a great programme, thanks Eilis.

Artist's film at Killruddery

Of the silent films particularly popular were the melodrama Lucky Star with its ludicrous but entirely convincing and romantic ending. The documentary Chang was stunning and it was a delight to finally get to see The Wind properly. All our musicians throughout the weekend were amazing, including Josh Johnston whose chops were tested when the film he had prepared refused to work and we had to make a last minute change. Stephen Horne was as incredible as ever impressing us once again with his many talents including his ability to competently play the piano and the flute at the same time without looking like he is showing off! We were also delighted to have Elaine Brennan, who was wonderful, performing her first live accompaniment to silent film, we look forward to working with her again in the future.

Silent films in the library

All our guests were brilliant including John Boorman who gave an hilarious introduction to Seven Days to Noon in which he basically dared the audience to like it.

The filmmaker John Boorman on his way to introduce his selection for this year's festival

The artist Jennie Moran also presented a number of subtle interventions, introducing another dimension to several of the screenings throughout the weekend via her adapted lightbox/trolley (see below)

Film festival artist in residence Jennie Moran

The composer Roger Doyle presented a mesmerising variation on his score for the very well received contemporary silent film Budawanny to a packed house on the Sunday and it was wonderful to have himself and Bob Quinn with us through the weekend.

Bob Quinn and Roger Doyle Budawanny screening

Some of my own final highlights include watching people fall out of The New World teary eyed and dizzy, the presentation of a surprisingly violent scene with sound added by our children’s foley workshop team, sitting on the ground for The Wind and I Know Where I’m Going because all our seats were full and of course late night lambing.

Many thanks for coming everybody I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did, if you have any feedback, nice photos or comments email us at filmfestival@killruddery.com we’d love to hear from you. We will take a little break now before we start planning next year’s festival, although we already have some ideas about exciting potential guests for 2011 and loads more great films we’d like to show you, we’ll keep you posted.

See you next year,

Daniel Fitzpatrick (Festival Director) and the Killruddery Film Festival team.

Killruddery Silent Film Festival 2009 from DOCUMENTAVi on Vimeo.

Just one day to go until Killruddery Film Festival kicks off and we’re all getting giddy. Above is a short video about last year’s festival to give you some idea what to expect. Some more news and updates below.

-We have now updated our website, with more extensive (and accurate) programme notes for each film. We are also still updating the blog regularly  (whenever we can steal a few minutes) so keep an eye on that too. Our most recent entry details the extensive programme of artist’s and experimental cinema that will be presented throughout the festival. This programme consists of site-specific film installations screening through the weekend in the house and gardens of Killruddery as well as a programme of screenings presented by Elisa Kay and Eilis Lavelle. While tickets for this second event are free they should be booked in advance.

-You can hear an excellent feature on the festival that appeared on Arena (RTE Radio 1) yesterday here, it starts from about fifteen minutes in and includes an interview with Kevin Brownlow and clips from several of the films.

-Our opening screening of A Cottage on Dartmoor, which as Raymond Durgnat describes “out-Hitchcocks Hitchcock”, has now sold out completely. Tickets are also selling well for  both Down Wicklow Way archive programmes, Lucky Star, Chang and our closing film The Wind.

-We have decided to move Saturday evening’s screening of Powell and Pressburger’s spellbinding I Know Where I’m Going indoors as we were a little worried people’s ears might fall off! (while the forecast for the weekend is decidedly good, these evenings insist on remaining stubbornly chilly).

-While we will not have a full bar for this year’s festival (next year definitely!) the cafe will remain open to patrons all through the weekend and they’ll be happy to open any bottles you’d like to bring for a small corkage fee.

-For those still looking for recommendations for this year’s festival or undecided about what to see-

-For kids (any age) our Children’s Programme will include the amazing 1975 Russian animation The Hedehog in The Fog (voted ‘NO 1 animated film of all time’ in Japan in 2003), Chuck Jones’ hilarious Feed The Kitty which is perhaps the best of all Looney Tunes cartoons. After spending some time trying to decide which Buster Keaton short we’re gonna screen his excellent short One Week. Should be fun.

-While we sometimes might not immediately think of silent film in terms of its lyrical wit, and the power of its dialogue to make us laugh, this is precisely where The Patsy garners a good deal of its charms. Full of zingers like ”When in Bagdad do as the Bagdaddies do!” and ”After all, a caterpillar is nothing but an upholstered worm”, it is hilarious and unmissable, you’ll be quoting it for weeks.

-Nina Paley’s wonderfully entertaining animated film Sita Sings the Blues from 2003 was described by the great Roger Ebert as “a miracle” and his full gushing review can be found here.

-Terence Malick’s underrated masterpiece The New World is in many ways the anti-Avatar, creating a similar sense of  spectacle but without any need for visual effects. It is a three hour epic which really deserves to be seen on a big screen, here’s NY Times film critic Matt Zoller Seitz (who will be in attendance this weekend in Killruddery) gushing about his experience of first seeing the film.

-On Sunday we have the perfect Mother’s Day film in Red Dust starring Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. Steamier (and better!) than Gone With the Wind which was also directed by Victor Fleming several years later.

Lots more here to choose from too.

Looking forward to it and hope to see you there,

Daniel Fitzpatrick

Festival Director

Saturday 12am- A Future Past, featuring High Treason by Maurice Elvey, 1929

A screening of the silent film classic High Treason, accompanied by Josh Johnston on the piano and hosted by the filmmaker Andrew Legge. Following the film, people will be treated to the delicious spectacle of cryogenic icecream made before your eyes using liquid nitrogen.

High Treason, like Seven Days to Noon, is a pacifist oddity. Its original tagline was ‘The Peace Picture and it was put together by an aviator/inventor/politician called Noel Pemberton Billing. The film tells the story of a future Britain and a developing conflict between ‘The United States of Europe’ and the empire of ‘The Atlantic States’. The ‘Peace League’ intervene after a group of terrorists sabotage a railway tunnel and the president of Europe orders immediate induction of all young men and women. As it is the future (the then far off 1950s) people here drive cars that look like rocket ships talk to each other through televisions and dance in nightclubs to weird electronically programmed music. As with many science fiction films it isn’t its prophecies it gets wrong just its time-frame, as we can see below.

Video calls in the 1920s

Jeff Keen -Marvo Movie, 1967, Sound, 5mins, 16

Brittanica & other stories

Britannica & other stories is a specially curated presentation of artists’ films for Killruddery Film Festival 2010 with two overlapping strands; a number of installations curated by Eilis Lavelle and a screening co-curated with Elisa Kay. Artists include J. Tobias Anderson, Ailbhe Ni Bhriain, Cliona Harmey John Latham, Jeff Keen, Annabel Nicholson & Grace Weir.

Combining slow filmic meditations on time and rapid-fire animations a selection of artist’s films will be presented within the historical surrounds of Killruddery House and Gardens.

Grace Weir, Picture of the floating world, 2007, HDV, 4_30²

Artists’ Film Installations at Killruddery

Friday 12 – Sunday 14 March

Artists include J. Tobias Anderson, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Cliona Harmey, John Latham & Grace Weir.

Combining slow filmic meditations on time and rapid-fire animation all the films have been selected with John Latham’s film Erth, 1971 as a reference point, charting a journey from outer space to the centre of the world, in which consciousness itself is revealed as a form of sedimented history. With distant views of the approaching Earth punctuated by black and silence, light years are compressed into a cosmic imaginary. Includes sequences of Britannica where Latham has animated the entire encyclopedia, with one frame of film for each page: the history of human knowledge becomes an illegible, strobing stream of images.

Artist Grace Weir presents four films, among them ‘Picture of the floating world’, 2007 which explores the idea of the passing moment in which a woman simply observes the beauty of nature: goldfish lazing in a pond, a rain of cherry blossoms falling on grass, bubbles swirling and eddying on the water’s surface, the reds and yellows of a duck’s beak. At a certain point the bubbles on the water’s surface begin to rotate around each other, reminding us of planets orbiting the sun. We cannot be sure that what we are seeing is real…

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s work The Suspension Room, 2009 is an installation of six video monitors and sound that explores representational constructs, spaces where theatre and landscape scenes merge in combination with still and moving elements displayed in a dimly lit space. In contrast Cliona Harmey’s work Skying uses natural light filtered through a small live cctv camera through a ground glass focusing screen from a medium format camera. The resulting live feed is a very slowly changing geometric image.  In this instance the slow projection charts the changing ambient light from the nearby window and plays with the idea of a reversal of the photographic image.

879 Colour by J. Tobias Anderson is based upon 879 drawn still images from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic “North by Northwest”. The images, chosen from the Swedish translation of the movie, were placed in chronological order, two frames per illustration, and through this a completely new expression and a new work is created. Anderson’s Bodega Bay School and Where Am I to go? are also shown here.

John Latham, Brittanica, 1971, Silent, B&W, 6mins, 16mm

Screening of experimental film by John Latham and others: Sunday 14 March at 1pm

Britannica & other stories also includes a short programme of experimental films from the 60’s & early 70’s featuring John Latham, Annabel Nicolson & Jeff Keen.

The screening will be introduced by Elisa Kay curator of the John Latham Foundation, Flat Time House in London.

Experimental filmmakers and artists in the 1970s tended to see the experience and material of film as a source of subject matter or, in John Latham’s case, as a way of recording and documenting other work. Latham’s filmmaking began as a means of recording the evolution of his bookwork’s Unedited Material From Star, 1960, but he developed abstract animation in the 1960s, and works made for television in the 1990s.

Films were made in ways that were closer to painting than conventional narrative cinema. Techniques such as painting and drawing directly onto the film as in Annabel Nicolson’s film Slides. Her film uses scratched and painted scraps of translucent materials, working in a way more familiar to an artist’s studio than a film studio; cutting and stitching 8mm, 16mm and sliced 35mm to choreograph what Nicolson called  ‘A chance to see/create by movement, a kind of dance between the printer and myself.’ Jeff Keens Marvo Movie is experimental film-making personified, avoiding the use of narratives and making extensive use of animation, double exposure, collage and the surreal.

The screening ends with John Latham’s film ‘Speak’ about which film critic Ray Durgnat wrote:

Not since Len Lye’s films in the thirties has England produced such a brilliant example of animated abstraction. SPEAK burns its way directly into the brain. It is one of the few films about which it can truly be said, “it will live in your mind”.

A Killruddery Arts Production

Hosted by Killruddery House & Gardens

In partnership with Mermaid Arts Centre

Supported by The Arts Council & Wicklow County Council



Caoimhe and Jean hard at work

Killruddery Film Festival are looking to build a new generation of film fans/filmmakers (we’ll do our best to blur the distinction between the two). With this in mind we have two programmes aimed at kids this year- apart from an excellent selection of children’s film, see here we will also have a Foley Workshop for children aged 10 and up.

World renowned Foley artists Caoimhe Doyle and Jean Mc Grath may have one of the best jobs in the business. Their credits include films such as Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones and The Spiderwick Chronicles. For anyone unfamiliar with what precisely foley is roughly speaking it is all the sounds in a movie that are added manually (more than you would think in most cases). Typically when we think of a foley artist we think of the man banging two pieces of coconut together to replicate the trot of a horse or walloping pieces of metal with a stick to reproduce a storm. Obviously this is a very simplified version but you get the idea.

The workshop is aimed at all children over ten and lasts about two and a half hours. It breaks down as follows-

What is Foley?

The workshop begins with an introduction to foley (definition-  all filmic sound effects which are produced manually) in which foley artists Jean Mc Grath and Caoimhe Doyle will provide an entertaining walk through the history of foley highlighting some of the best examples of the form. This introductory section will end with a screening of some great sound/foley moments in film.

Building a scene

The second half of the workshop involves an actual Foley session where each member of the workshop helps recreate an entire soundscape to a sequence from Sergio Leone’s One Upon a Time in the West. The group will use a variety of props and tools to slowly build an elaborate sound design for a sequence, getting right inside the process of foley (all props supplied). Each foley performance will be recorded to make up one final single piece. This is where the fun begins.

The Final Screening

The final sequence, including all contributions by workshop members, will be screened in our 100 seater cinema before a live audience including family and friends.

Full Duration 2-3 hours. Final screening will take place at 3.30pm and will last about twenty minutes including presentation by Caoimhe Doyle.

Tickets are €26 and bookings can be made at the Mermaid Arts Centre Box Office @ 01 2724030 or can be booked online here

“I reached the point of thinking there were no more masterpieces to discover, until I saw I Know Where I’m Going!” - Martin Scorsese

Killruddery Film Festival is all about undiscovered masterpieces and I Know Where I’m Going (1945) is certainly that. Although there has been a recent rise of interest in the film it was overlooked for many years. Above is the remarkable train/dream sequence from the film, a sequence which shows Powell & Pressburger at their most playful. The scene presents Joan Webster, the female lead played beautifully by Wendy Hiller and in many ways a truly contemporary heroine. She is a headstrong city girl and a shameless materialist and in the scene above she is on her way to a remote Scottish island to marry a very dull, and very wealthy, industrialist, but as she says she seems to know what she’s doing.

It is only when our heroine dreams that her more complicated truths begin to reveal themselves, here the industrialist becomes personified as industry itself, and to make matters even more complicated the priest marrying her to industry is now her father. Eventually when she arrives in the isle of Kiloran, and meets it’s laird, she will slowly be won over by a location and a way of life with its own distinct set of charms.

Michael Powell, according to his autobiography, had in fact initially wanted to shoot this film in Ireland but couldn’t because of the war-time situation. The film however remains perfect as is, a truly magical romance that should not be missed. This very special screening will take place in the gardens of Killruddery itself, in the amphiteatre, where we will be providing hot water bottles, hot drinks and hot blankets to keep everyone cosy. If it is absolutely too cold and/or too wet we will move it inside to the library where we will watch it by the fire instead. Looking forward to it already.

BOOK HERE

A close to complete list of the filmmakers featured in this year’s Killruddery Film Festival-

- Thom Anderssen - J Tobias Andersen - Anthony Asquith - John Boorman -Frank Borzage - Fergal Brennan - The Boulting Brothers - Kevin Brownlow – Charlie Chaplin – Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedshack - Julien Duvivier - Maurice Elvey - Victor Fleming – Buster Keaton – John Latham -Andrew Legge - Terence Malick - Rebecca Miller - George Morrison – FW Murnau - Yuriy Norshteyn - Alan J Pakula - Nina Paley - Powell & Pressburger - Bob Quinn - Satyajit Ray - Victor Sjostrom - King Vidor - Grace Weir - Matt Zoller Seitz -

“There’s no more beautiful city in the world, provided it’s seen by night and at a distance.” Roman Polanski, Chinatown

Thom Anderssen’s epic video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself (see extract above) is a notoriously difficult film to see. An often hilarious, consistently fascinating insight into the history of a city, a history written in film.

The film contains extracts from over 200 films and is painstakingly constructed to create a portrait of a city that often feels like it only exists within the cinematic imagination. J. Hoberman aptly described it as “a city symphony in reverse” and the film takes us on an historical tour of an L.A. constructed and deconstructed through the cinema. Thom Anderssen, a professor of film studies himself, is our idiosyncratic tour guide, moving swiftly through sterling A-pictures and trashy B-movies in order to dicover precisely what the movies have to say about his city. The director never gained clearance for any of the many films used to construct his argument, an impossible task considering the scope of the project, and now, as a result, the film can never receive any kind of proper distribution. It remains then, almost entirely inaccessible to audiences, existing in a kind of limbo state and only showing up very occasionally at film festivals or repertory houses. In spite of this the film managed to turn up on several ‘best of the decade’ lists last year and it seems anyone lucky enough to have seen it has been quick to cite it as a masterpiece.

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Festival Programme available from the 13th of February.

Tickets on sale from the same date.

Full Festival passes available- 100euro