At Home with John and Debbie

To Birmingham, last night, for an engaging evening in the company of “Godfrey Salter and his Invisible Ducks”, at the Electric Cinema.

As part of the First Flatpack Film Festival, this was a portmanteau of film, almost film, and music with a flavour of the Edwardian touring entertainer.

The problem was, we turned up and it was sold out. Feeling a bit flat about it, we made to turn away, but someone outside suggested we check whether there were any cancellations. There weren’t, but we agreed to wait in the foyer to whether anyone failed to turn up.

The Electric’s staff were very nice to us, and with the performance starting late, and us having waited 45 minutes, not only did they give us some drinks on the house, but when it turned our there were no seats after all, they let us crouch at the back, at least for a while.

Our first treat was “Telly Savalas Looks at Birmingham”, a short film made up of shots of Birmingham in 1981, with a voiceover by Telly: “Birmingham sure is going places — here’s lookin’ at you kid”. Telly was particularly impressed with the roads. The audience quaked with laughter for the most part, but shots of the old Bullring markets caused a collective sigh of nostalgia.

Astonishingly, a whole row of people left after Telly’s look at Birmingham — their appetite apparently sated. We moved to seats in the front row. Vladimir, a quietly spoken lady from Portland, Oregon, presented her “Vladmaster Experience”. We were treated to two Vladmaster experiences — each experience a set of four ViewMaster disks, which we looked at through a loaned viewer each, to a soundtrack played through the cinema’s system.

The first was a story of adventure from the persepective of a cockroach, which left me feeling a little repulsed. Cockroaches are, after all, horrible. The second was the story of a man who shoots a deer then has a nightmare about it. I think.

It was great for novelty, and there’s something about hearing a room full of people all clicking on to the next frame at once.

Next, instead of visual art, music. “Many Fingers” is a one-man-band from Bristol. Instead of fixing cymbals to his knees, though, he plays into a looping sampler, using piano, drums, cello, autoharp etc. to build up enormous trip-hop walls of sound. He didn’t seem pleased with his performance, and kept thanking us for being patient with him, but it sounded pretty impressive to me.

Finally, we had a performance from The Destroyers. Get a good idea in your head of what a band called The Destroyers might look and sound like. Then erase it, because they were dressed as Edwardian gentlemen in bow ties and bowler hats, and they were a full “big band” configuration with a brass section, strings, drums, banjo, flute and accordion. They played music which can only be described as “jaunty” to accompany (in perfect synch) films from the BFI’s 19th century Mitchell and Kenyon collection.

The best audience reaction was to a piece accompanying some children doing a military drill, involving touching their toes. Some of the kids’ hats kept falling off — funny in itself — but the real fun to be had was watching the children behind failing to keep a straight face.

The Electric has been tarted up a bit since I worked there. Screen 2 has become a film sound studio. The screen 2 foyer has become a snug little lounge, where you can sup on drinks from the new fully licensed bar. You can also take those drinks to your seat in Screen 1, and if you choose one of the sofas at the back of screen 1, you can put your drink on the table in front of it, and have refills brought to you. How very civilised.

We finished the evening in the most convenient way possible: a nice curry at Shah’s Station Street Tandoori. Then we went to a hotel and slept.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2006 at 21:24 and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.