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Who are the heroes of Oxford film? Surely Jeremy Irons’ trademark narcissism in Brideshead Revisited must come to mind; perhaps John Thaw’s snobbish coolness as Chief Inspector Morse; without doubt, the speech by Michael Soares in True Blue – may it endure as the greatest (the only?) rhetorical display by a Catholic priest out to subvert the authority of a rowing club council. Above all, those “dreaming spires” that the film industry so loves have probably brought more attention to this town than any individual. Filming in Oxford, you say, has been done. Often it has been good – and at times brilliant – but, nevertheless, it represents an inevitable entry into the tedious realm of stereotype. However, despite this popular perception of film-making in Oxford, there are a number of students who aim to break the bonds of trite cinematic mediocrity.
The largest student film society in Oxford is the Oxford University Film Foundation (OUFF), which has been in existence for a quarter of a century and claims on its website to “aim to support all aspects of film appreciation and creation right across the university.” The society’s film cuppers, held in Hilary term of each year, represents the major event of the film-making calendar: six shortlisted films were shown before a panel of judges in the Pheonix Picture House this May, and the winner was given a distribution deal.
Entries in the past couple of years have represented a variety of approaches: the comic-pretensiousness of Terracotta, a film which explores the seven deadly sins through the medium of a ceramic plant pot; Ophelia’s origami animals in stop-frame; the downright demented This is an Art Attack, a spoof of the children’s television programme in which presenter Neil Buchanan was portrayed sniffing glue and attempting to recreate God’s image.
The winner two years ago was the inspired 1920s style surrealist work “Cauchemar de l’homme en Noir et Blanc.” Since then, co-director Matt Green has gone on to produce another surrealist work, The Tragedy of Albert, to be screened in London cinemas, with (all hail product placement) two thousand pounds of funding from that great arts-supporting capitalist enterprise: KFC.

This year’s competition was won by I Just Keep Thinking of Humphrey Bogart, a ten-minute film written and directed by Alec Garton-Ash. The film is a strange probe into the world of artistic imagination in which a young man gradually realizes that his life has become a film noir fantasy, and the plot climaxes with the manic onrush of a horde of Bogartesque figures. The colour is effectively replaced with black-and-white halfway through, paradoxically moving still images are successfully interspersed, and the main character’s battle with his shadow is convincing.
Garton-Ash says the idea of producing a film about Oxford did not appeal to him as much of the material produced by students, on stage or on camera, tends to be unimaginative and/or conservative. This is not for lack of resources; he borrowed equipment from St. Peter’s College Film Society, and put Facebook to good use in spreading the word that he required a large group of Humprhey Bogart impersonators.

Above all, Garton Ash stresses how easy it is to produce a film: you can just take a digital camera, get some friends together, and you’ve got one. This might not produce a masterpiece, but it does not require a massive amount of effort (or, necessarily, participants) to produce valuable work. Putting on a play requires a lot of know-how, preparation, and people; as a result, the number of those willing to put on a play who also know what they are doing is limited, and it is inevitable that a thespian clique emerges. But making a film, with university film societies providing support, is something that is fundamentally straightforward and democratic. Christchurch filmster Craig Webster also made an entry for film cuppers this year. Casting friends and, again, borrowing equipment, he shot it in a single weekend.

Indeed, there are some students who have exploited the democratization of media to bypass film societies and produce their own work entirely independently. Leading the avant-garde of Oxford documentaires is Alex Scrivener, whose filming of Abkhazia (a Russo-friendly breakaway republic in Western-looking Georgia) was shown on the partly-Murdoch-owned Georgian television channel Imedi. Georgians were expelled from Abkhazia as a consequence of the Russian-asssisted ethnic-Abkhazian uprising in the early 1990s and so Scrivener, who is himself half-Georgian, hid his national identity and posed as a “stupid English tourist” interested in going on holiday in a war zone. Because Abkhazia’s independence is not recognized by any nation (not even, officially at least, Russia), officials at the foreign ministry were only too happy to spend their time with Scrivener. He says: “So I just took a camera and started filming stuff – them, battle sites, stuff like that.” When he had left, he sent the tape to Imedi; because no Georgians had filmed Abkhazia for over a decade, the station was very enthusiastic and the film was shown on what Scrivener jokingly describes as “the Georgian Trevor MacDonald.”

As Scrivener’s experience shows, it is more than possible for an Oxford student to produce not only film with interest, but also with impact. However, the days of a generation ago, when the auditoriums would burst at the seams with students for whom the cinematic experience could be the highlight of the week, are now dead as dead can be: even Magdalen film society scarcely manages double figures in its average audience. You cannot help but feel that unless there is an even wider expansion of interest and involvement in the cinematic community, film-making in Oxford will fail to develop successfully. Nevertheless, there is a small but talented group of film-makers who are not to be written off.

Tom Corcoran

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