Will Oldham (aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billie) and Alex Neilson

While growing up as a pluke farming teenager in Leeds with a penchant for free jazz and traditional folk music, discovering the music of Will Oldham was a revelation. It combined arcane/familiar melodies with a looseness that verged on the audacious. Old Testament imagery sang in a faltering voice, with musicians that sounded to be learning the songs as they were recording them, seemed to draw attention to the act of creativity itself. This was tremendously exciting to me and embodied many other interests, as well as a quote I enjoyed around the same time by Patti Smith on William Blake: “Spontaneous pronouncements on the violence of inspiration”.

Fast forward four years and I was invited to play drums on a series of tours with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy across America and Europe. Stroking the skins behind the person who had done so much to define my aesthetic interest was an unspeakable thrill and a frontline insight to the craft or sullen art of songwriting. Around 2009, I started to write my own songs for the first time and drew upon a lot of these experiences, colliding them with many other burgeoning passions to form Trembling Bells.

Lavinia Blackwall and Will Oldham

In 2011 Trembling Bells and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy recorded a collaborative album together with many songs written as duets. To conceive an album with that particular dynamic was challenging in many ways but also a validation of many of the impulses sketched out above. The Marble Downs was released on Honest Jons records in March 2012, with a UK tour following in the April/May. The subsequent live album, The Bonnie Bells of Oxford, recently released as an exclusive download via our website, was a product of this trip. Touring for a living is a treacherous occupation- equal parts fun and deranging – and this one brought its own stresses and illuminations. But the music was among the most rewarding of any tour I have been involved in – always full of vitality and imagination. We would often segue BPB and TB songs – revising tempos and decapitating choruses to create new, writhing hybrids. Making flesh connections between the development of my songwriting and the shadow of influence Will’s music had cast over my creativity.

Bonnie Bells of Oxford Artwork by Lucy Stein

The titular Bonnie Bells of Oxford was recorded in one of my favourite cities on Earth. I have drawn immeasurable inspiration from frequent visits to my girlfriend’s family there, and find it a place of hallucinatory splendor. To tread past the same ornate sandstone buildings as Turner, Philip Larkin, Paul Nash, Jane Morris and more- crumbling gold and ochre against the morning sun – is profoundly evocative. I was glad to include it in the tour schedule and, though the venue is more like the proverbial ‘indie toilet’, it made for a dynamic environment to record in.

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At a special event at Encounters Short Film Festival last November, outgoing programmer Mark Cosgrove explained his approach to selecting films. He assesses each submitted film with the aid of ‘Mark’s Compass’ – a curatorial tool which places the dramatic tension of Dylan going electric as its True North. South is represented by a Cézanne still life – conventional on the surface but abstract and chaotic in detail. West is the funky bass of Bootsy Collins, East the paranoia of Tom Wait’s ‘What’s He Building In There?’

It’s an ingenious solution to the problem of defining how a short film programmer selects films, a task that, truth be told, is probably three parts experience to two parts intuition and one part personal prejudice. Since then I’ve been trying to define the criteria I use in similar terms – the other night at a Bonnie Prince Billy gig I made a realisation. Each film I view must pass the Will Oldham Test.

The Will Oldham Test examines how each film attempts to balance a series of apparently opposing properties. Is the film sincere in its intent, without taking itself too seriously? Does it find something new to say, and new ways to say it, without losing its grasp on narrative conventions? Is it accessible to new viewers, whilst offering signs of an artist in transition to those already familiar with his/her work? Does it show signs of both sharp intelligence and fearless emotion? Does it manage to appear stylish whilst sporting a bushy beard, wine-stained shirt and shabby dad-jeans?

Okay, that last one doesn’t quite fit, but you get the idea. Will Oldham’s performance (that night and every other time I’ve seen him) was effortlessly passionate, articulate and experimental. He showed a keen respect for musical history, without treating his or others’ songs with too much reverence. And he was more than a wee bit rough around the edges. All of which qualities just about transfer to short film.

Our international competition selection is stuffed with films that share these qualities. Goodbye Mandima is an autobiographical meditation on a lost childhood in Zaire, constructed from clues glimpsed at the edges of aging photographs. A Piece of Summer is a masterful documentary portrait of a Polish city boy spending his summer with his wild-man-of-the-woods grandfather. German filmmakers Christina Ebelt and Mischa Leinkauf draw on the wildly varying stylistic influences of Lars Von Trier and Michael Haneke in their frightening, funny and on-the-money corporate exposé Power! A baby interacts with puppets in the hilarious Las Palmas and Will Oldham himself turns up in Pioneer, a film that courageously breaks that key rule of filmmaking: Show, Don’t Tell.

The whole GSFF12 programme showcases ramshackle, boundary-devouring, sincere but light-touch filmmaking. Recent film from Iceland is featured in four specially curated programmes. Our strand devoted to film archives includes several recently rediscovered Margaret Tait works and the early student film by Bill Douglas, Come Dancing. Chicago-based 16mm alchemist Ben Russell presents a series of visionary works exploring naturally-derived psychedelia. Slacker 2011 is a none-too-reverential remake of the the Richard Linklater indie classic, with 24 Texan filmmakers each revising a single scene in wildly diverse ways.

One film spans the various strands in the programme. At 54 minutes, the Icelandic film Paradox stretches the definition of short. This strange documentary, screening for the first time outside Iceland, tells the story of an unfinished short film, shot in 1967 but never completed. As such, it serves as a reminder of any filmmakers’ colossal achievement in completing a project. But the story doesn’t stop there. Forty years later one of the original actors obtains the rushes and recruits a young editor and composer to shape a finished piece. But the original filmmakers have other ideas… Paradox is a fascinating study of the creative process, generational differences, and the filmmaker’s responsibility towards archive film. And Will Oldham would improve.

Film still from ‘Pioneer’

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The GSFF is very kindly offering 2 pairs of tickets to the screening of Paradox on Thursday, 9 Feb at 9pm to Central Station members.

To put yourself in the running to win, just send us an email to hello@thisiscentralstation.com with the subject line ‘GSFF – Paradox‘ or let us know you would like them by adding a comment below.

Winners will be notified on Wednesday, 8 February.

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