In sixth week, the Oxford University Film Foundation will be holding its annual festival. This year’s exciting programme of events includes a talk and Q&A session with screenwriter William Nicholson (Gladiator, Les Misérables), a music video showcase from emerging classical-meets-indie band Clean Bandit, and a 24-hour filmmaking challenge. I met up with OUFF President Tom Shennan to talk about the festival.

What can we expect from this year’s festival?
There’s something for everyone. There’ll be competitions, screenings and talks by people with all levels of experience. We’re showing student films, independent films, and there’s a Q&A with a director as well. Anyone can get involved, whether they’re at a basic level or have already done filmmaking before. First there’s the 24-hour film challenge, which is perfect for people who have never made a film before, as it’s just a bit of fun. Then we have a Cuppers competition, for slightly more experienced filmmakers who have made a film up to six minutes in length. Then finally we are also having a screening night for students who have made films between 15 and 30 minutes.

Most of the festival programme is made up of short films. Do you prefer them to feature-length pictures?
If you’re a student filmmaker you don’t have a big budget, or a lot of time, or a big team. Short films are the easiest way of showing what you can do, and experimenting with what you like. It’s probably best to make a five-minute documentary and find out you hate it, rather than a 20-minute one. Also, this year I’ve opened the competition up to music videos and play trailers, because they’re a big thing in Oxford. You have to make films where you can. There’s a big audience for theatre here, but not so much for films.

How are the films being judged this year?
Half of the OUFF committee is entering films themselves, so obviously we can’t judge it! Instead we’ve got Tim Barrow, who’s a Scottish actor/director/writer/producer to judge all the Cuppers films. African Outreach are sponsoring our 24-hour challenge, so they’ll be judging the entries and deciding on the brief. It could be a theme, or a line of dialogue to include, or a prop to use in the film. Finally, we’re holding a scriptwriting competition in participation with North Oxford Property Services, for which they’ll be awarding a £100 prize.

So how did you first get involved with filmmaking?
I started out making a few music videos on my handheld digital camera, no HD or lenses or anything. Then I entered a competition run by Polydor Records on Youtube. I got to the national final, which made me think I could actually make a career out of it. So I bought a proper DSLR camera. I’ve shot a few trailers since then, and I wrote and shot a 15-minute drama last term. It’s going to be shown at the longer film night, and also at the Ultimate Picture Palace later this term.I’m thinking of applying to the National Film and Television School postgraduate course next year.

What do you particularly enjoy about making a film?
When I’m actually shooting a film, there’s nothing I dislike. When I was doing my short film, from getting up at 6am to getting home late at night, I had fun the whole time. What I didn’t like was having to help my producer get all the props beforehand, which involved carrying filing cabinets around central Oxford! I used to like editing when I made my first films, but after having spent all of Christmas doing it, I will never edit again!

Who would be your dream speaker for the festival, and why?
Edgar Wright. He was friends with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost at university, and went on to direct Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Then he went to Hollywood to do Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. It’s such a nice career arc. And I like that his directing style is instantly recognisable. I invited him to come, but unfortunately he couldn’t make it.

How do you think the Oxford filmmaking scene compares to other universities?
The culture of theatre, which I think is greater here than at other universities, has a big impact. Anyone who might be inclined to direct or act in films is taken into the theatre world. It’s a good thing in some respects, because the actors here are already brilliant and don’t need much direction! But I think we do suffer because we don’t have access to proper lighting rigs, or a green screen, like many universities do. One thing we do to combat this is by having Brookes students on the OUFF committee. They really know their stuff, and we’re always trying to negotiate deals to use their equipment.

What would be your advice to a novice filmmaker?
Just do it. Don’t worry about what could go wrong, because everything will. It can be fun to work within constraints. You have to be inventive to achieve the effect you want. You end up doing things like putting a tripod on a towel and pulling it across a table to get a tracking shot. Anyone can make a film nowadays: you can shoot HD on an iPhone. And if you’re a member of OUFF, you can come to all our workshops for free, and they’ll give you all the skills you need. Filmmaking’s just mucking about really.

Finally, what are you looking forward to the most about the festival?
I think most people would say William Nicholson. But I’m most looking forward to the awards night, where we get to see all the Cuppers entries. It’ll be really interesting to hear what Tim Barrow has to say about the films.

For the latest news about the OUFF 2013 festival, check out its facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/OUFF2013.
Tickets for non-members are £4 for one event, or £10 for the whole week. They can be purchased here:  www.wegottickets.com/OUFF2013.

★★★★☆

Four Stars

Flight is a truly universal film. It’s a film that deals with two problems that rip thousands of families apart every year: alcoholism, and the guilt that comes from crashing an airliner under the influence of Class A narcotics.

At the heart of the film is Denzel Washington as Captain Whip Whittaker, a pilot who takes more miniatures from the trolley than a hen party on the way to Magaluf. He then operates the plane, which, in a devastatingly tense opening act, crashes into a field. It sounds like a hard-hitting opening, except for the fact that, rather than being hung out to dry for being pissed, Denzel gets a gold star and is held up as a hero.

The film then becomes an exploration of rampant alcoholism and drug use, and though it can’t match the tone or sheer balls-in-hand terror of that opening (Robert Zemeckis’ finest live action moment in years, drawing on the slightly wimpier plane crash in Cast Away) the film does manage to be affecting, mainly because two-time Academy Award winner Denzel Washington is just so fucking good at acting. The fact that he manages to never slip into villainy, nor make us sympathise too much with his predicament, is testament to how well earned his reputation is. He’s going to lose to Daniel Day-Lewis at the Oscars next Sunday, but it’s reassuring to know that he still has the chops to carry a high-profile drama on his own.

It should be mentioned that there are some other actors involved. Kelly Reilly (who, in real life, is English and not an alcoholic) plays a love interest who meets Denzel in the hospital whilst he’s recovering from his little plane crash. She’s good, although the character never quite feels fleshed out enough and is a bit too inexplicably moralistic. Flight also has John Goodman and Don Cheadle, playing a drug dealer (a fat, middle-aged, white drug dealer?!) and a lawyer (a young, handsome black lawyer?!) respectively. The roles are not quite as fun or subversive as they could be, but Goodman in particular seems to be enjoying teaming up with Zemeckis – even if Cheadle seems to be enjoying his role about as much as an amateur colonoscopy.

The film, overall, is an extremely fun drama, which might seem a little pejorative but isn’t really. This isn’t half as heavy as Zero Dark Thirty, or a thousandth as weighty as Amour, but it’s also a lot more fun than watching waterboarding or an old woman slowly dying. Definitely worth watching, if only to remind yourself that you’ll never be half as awesome as Denzel Washington.

John Hughes is my hero. It’s basically his fault that I spend a lot of time wishing I’d been a teenager in the ’80s, at school with Judd Nelson and/or Ferris Bueller, rather than the rather lifeless noughties. And it seems that his ’80s hits are making a funny sort of comeback under the radar.

Hacked Off Films’s decision to screen Ferris Bueller for their immersive cinema experience in Oxford earlier this term, and its considerable success, is a great indicator of how relevant Hughes’ feel-good, close-range plotting is to our age group. Two recent Hollywood blockbusters have employed his work in a way which suggests his messaging is more relevant than the confusing knitwear combinations and gravity defying hairdos might initially appear. Yet these homages seem to fall a long way short of doing him justice, or even understanding what he achieved in his early work. 

Hughes’ brilliant mastery of the art of soundtrack is (rather horrifyingly) re-employed in last year’s act-trocity Pitch Perfect: lead boy introduces lead girl to The Breakfast Club and romance ensues, with the climax being her recognition of its (and thus by some logic also his) brilliance. The problem is that the Hughes classic, its soundtrack and its images are introduced with no noticeable connection, and the iconic final freezeframe of Judd Nelson’s fist-in-the-air triumph, with Simple Minds’ classic anthem ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’, is used and re-used to the point where even its meaning in the original becomes confused, let alone its significance in a film about a singing competition.

A marginally less appalling appropriation of Hughes is Easy-A, which is guilty of trying the recreate the Judd Nelson salute, this time in the context of an entirely predictably romantic ending which provides neither character with a moment of self-definition or personal triumph (the entire Brat Pack would roll in their video-cassette box.)

These films which so desperately seek to recreate Hughes’ memorability and emotional engagement seem to have missed Hughes’ central genius of characterisation, and this is what creates the black hole into which references to him fall. Their two-dimensionality (Pitch Perfect’s girl-with-divorced-parents-and-therefore-Commitment-Issues is genuinely toe curling) is a poor board on which to pin the genius of Hughes, and so what seems like a kooky and cinematic allusion becomes an unwise way of demonstrating how comparatively poor the film actually is within the genre.

That said, Olive herself delivers the following line, which might be timelessly relevant (particularly in such a week as this): “Just once, I want my life to be like an ’80s movie, preferably one with a really awesome musical number for no apparent reason. But no, no, John Hughes did not direct my life.”

Watching the Life of Pi trailer, I was amazed. The glorious, sweeping shots of the ocean, bright, clashing colours, and top-of-the-range CGI washed over me, and they’d even managed to make a Coldplay song slightly less annoying. It was a great trailer, both punchy and sheer visual spectacle. However, my first thought was, “they’ve peaked too early.”

I enjoyed the film, but my apprehension wasn’t entirely baseless. The trailer was a beautifully made little nugget of cinema, and the fact is, a 127-minute film just can’t quite pack the same punch. I’ve been burned before on this; I was obsessed with the Watchmen trailer when it came out, and the excitement that came from it wasn’t exactly matched by the flawed film. In both artistry and content, trailers increasingly seem to ‘ruin’ their films.

Trailers are big business. They even have release dates, generating anticipation for the ‘first look’ at a film that fans have been rabidly awaiting. Often, there’s not just a trailer for a film: there’s a ‘teaser’ trailer first, and perhaps even a ‘teaser’ for the teaser trailer; 10 seconds of a 90-second trailer for a two-and-a-half-hour film. The style has evolved too; we’ve seen the scrapping of expositional voiceover for moody lighting, stark captions, thudding beats and a soaring soundtrack.

Trailers are now works in their own right; the art of editing taken to its extreme. If a trailer does not fit in with these higher standards, it can be jarring; Quartet debuted with a trailer that harked back to the old days, complete with voiceover and horrible colour palette (too much purple) that made it look like a Year 9 media project. I’m not a slave to the aestheticism of trailers, but I was repulsed, and consequently less likely to see the film. Arguably, it was far more straightforward than the modern style, and more informative, but if I wanted that I’d boot up IMDB.

I suppose I’m not the intended audience for Quartet. Increasingly, trailers seem geared towards people who already know what they’re getting: big franchises and tentpole releases barely have to include half a sentence of explanation to make an impact. More original films can struggle to attract audience members, and as such use their trailers tactically. Famously, many walked out of Sweeney Todd and demanded refunds upon discovering that it was a musical, a fact played down by the trailers. This move is often employed by foreign films, which feature a lot of spectacle without showing too explicitly that people aren’t speaking that language we do. But honesty can go too far. Recently, a trailer for Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods raised ire for giving too much away. Clearly, mindful of the entitled nature of movie-goers, the filmmakers didn’t want to be accused of ‘deceiving’ anyone.

It’s a difficult tightrope to walk: give too much in the trailer, and you risk upstaging the film you’ve spent years creating. Too little, and nobody will want to see it. As studios seek more ‘builtin’ audiences, and with the rise of video-sharing websites like YouTube, trailers have become both more accessible and less meaningful. They’re less of a teaser, and more like a Sparknotes of the whole movie. I’m not sure whether it’s a terrible indictment of the lack of mystery in cinema, or just progress.

Cherwell’s verdict: “Criminally good”

ROPE is not a murder mystery. Far more disturbingly, it is the explicit depiction of a cold-blooded, motiveless murder, conducted for no other reason than to achieve the “perfect crime”, drawn from the notorious Loeb and Leopold case of 1923. Brandon, one of the two murderers, chillingly and proudly describes it as a “passionless, motiveless, faultless and clueless murder.”

Director Susanna Quirke has drawn inspiration for her play from the original play by Patrick Hamilton, on which Hitchcock based his 1948 film. Hitchcock set his version in New York, but Quirke keeps the Oxford setting, adding an unsettling edge to the parallel between the characters and actors.

ROPE portrays two intelligent and aristocratic Oxford students, Brandon and Granillo (Joe Prospero and Jonathan Purkiss). They strangle fellow student Ronald Kentley with a rope to prove that their superior intellect enables them to commit murder without being caught, and to satisfy their disgust for Ronald’s inferiority. What is most disquieting is that the two students serve dinner on top of the very trunk their freshly killed corpse lies in; the crowning touch that gives the whole murder its “piquancy,” as Brandon gloats. Yet, one of their guests, Rupert Cadell, a poet who they consider their intellectual equal, acted by Jared Fortune, begins to unravel their secret, revealing that there is no such thing as the perfect crime.

The actors maintain an agonisingly tense atmosphere throughout as innuendos are dropped here and there by Brandon, and the guests playfully accuse the murderous pair of concealing rotting bones in their bizarre chest. Prospero delivers a well-mastered frightening fluctuation between terse and unnatural self-control to hysterical paranoia, and Purkiss’s calm arrogance seems unsettlingly natural. The most promising character was perhaps Rupert Cadell; Jared Fortune completely immerses himself in the role as if it were his second skin. The butler Sabot, played by Luke Rollason, even infuses this shadowy play with some unexpected humour every now and then.

Admittedly there was the odd slip-up, but this first act preview already assures an absorbingly sinister performance.