A Love Story to Coventry - and other buildings: Living With Buildings VII
Living With Buildings VII at Priory Visitor Centre, March 12
Review by Annette Kinsella.
I’ve never really imagined the sort of people who attend an experimental film festival, but if I were to, I’d probably imagine people in berets smoking Gitanes and wearing sunglasses. Now I come to think of it, I don’t know why I conflate film buffs with 60s beatniks. But this is all academic because my perspective changed on Wednesday, when I myself became a Person Who Attended A Film Night. Curiosity drove me to the Priory Visitors Centre, where curator Adam Steiner and former Litten Tree Building manager Alan Denyer hosted the seventh film evening Living With Buildings.
Billed as a festival of films that explore themes of people, poetry and place, the evening featured about 15 short films on the unique perspective of urban buildings and their relationships with humans and the place they inhabit.
The evening kicked off with Invisible, a peon to Coventry. Featuring footage of instantly recognisable and often unlovely landmarks – West Orchard Shopping Centre and the ring-road by night rubbed shoulders with the Godiva clock – the film showed shoppers and drivers caught perpetually in a loop of time, the ethereal head of the filmmaker superimposed over the footage. The occasional reversal of the images illustrated the cyclical nature of life in a city centre, repeating day after day.
By contrast We Made This followed the transformation of a former derelict industrial estate into a vibrant social hub, complete with bar and scooter shop. The complex – a bit like Fargo in Gosford Street – saw Mods mixing with couples and families, showcasing how buildings are dynamic, adapting to the needs of the urban environment.
Towers was my favourite, offering a glimpse into life on a brutalist London high-rise estate. The filmmaker asked residents to record what they saw from their windows for six minutes in a day. The documentations were beautiful, the windows capturing the moment dawn transforms from stark white to soft blue, accompanied by a soundscape of birdsong and traffic as the city wakes up. For Pulp fans among us, this was the video to Sheffield Sex City – itself a love poem to the city’s Park Hill estate – that never was.
Most disturbing was City of Tomorrow, a thought-provoking video essay on a utopian/dystopian modernist architect dream. The film juxtaposed minimalist structures reminiscent of an Eastern Bloc complex with captions bearing sinister adages like FREEDOM BRINGS ORDER, while the narrator intoned the need to build on a clean site. Very Orwellian. Or, to give a specifically British 80s reference, it was the sort of idyll that could have been designed by the chilling Mr Men book characters Mr Tidy and Mr Neat, who together made up the dogmatic Tidy Up Brigade, beating poor Mr Messy into conformist submission by relentlessly barking ‘NEAT AND TIDY’ at him. Untidiness is a subversive act, kids.
The choice of venue – the recently-rescued visitor centre next to Coventry Cathedral which lay empty for years – added a meta level of context to the evening. There surely can be no greater metaphor for the evolving nature of buildings, than sitting in the midst of history repurposed to watch films on architectural transformation.
Overall, this was an engaging and thought-provoking selection of films, and well worth a visit.
The next Living With Buildings evening is on July 2. For more information visit: disappear-here.org
For more information on the Priory Visitor Centre visit: https://www.prioryundercrofts.org/
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