THE MOON AND THE SLEDGEHAMMER screening at The Revelator, 5th Nov, 17.30 Barclay Curle Complex, 739 South St, Glasgow G14 0BX

A dynamic combination of the old and the new – a 50 year old film screening in the most forward thinking sustainable venue

Click here for your free tickets

THE Q&A

We are thrilled to have a distinguished selection of Scottish voices joining director Philip Trevelyan in conversation following the screening.  Each one excels in their field and has shown that creativity, inventiveness and dedication can find solutions to many problems.

Host:  Sam Ainsley                Guests:   Philip Trevelyan, Alastair McIntosh, David Archibald                                 

Philip Trevelyan is the director of The Moon and the Sledgehammer.  Trevelyan’s film career spans 1964 to 1975 and includes Lambing, The Ship Hotel – Tyne Main, Big Ware, and Basil Bunting.  A master of pace and poetic expression, his constant theme features people who have found true contentment in life.  Critic John Russell Taylor of The Times recently called him ‘one of the few real poets of cinema’. Trevelyan took up organic farming in 1974, and now runs an organic miller co-operative, as well as designing award-winning ergonomic hand tools, specialising in chemical free weed control by the traditional but labour intensive practice of removing and permanently eradicating individual plants https://lazydogtools.co.uk     Link to Guardian article: https://tinyurl.com/xx4c8mre

Alastair McIntosh is a writer whose many books include Soil and Soul, Riders on the Storm and Spiritual Activism and a leading light in Scotland and beyond as defender of the natural world.  He is involved with Scottish land reform, especially on Eigg and campaigned successfully against the Harris super quarry.  He is a fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology, and helped to set up the Govan based GalGael Trust of which he is a non-executive director. In 2006 he was appointed to the honorary position of Visiting Professor of Human Ecology at the University of Strathclyde, (Department of Geography & Sociology) – the first such post in Human ecology in a Scottish university – and is now an honorary professor at the University of Glasgow.  
Further info on Alastair McIntosh and his works here http://www.alastairmcintosh.com/personal.htm#short-bio

David Archibald teaches Film Studies at the University of Glasgow . His publications include The war that won’t die: the Spanish Civil War in cinema (2012) and Tracking Loach (forthcoming, 2022). He also makes short films – most recently Drifting with Debord (with Carl Lavery), an experimental take on the life of Situationist International theoretician Guy Debord, and Comrades together-apart / Camarades junts-i-a-banda (with Núria Araüna), which explores how their ‘ragged-trousered cinema’ might be utilised to foster alliancial thinking and alliance building.

Sam Ainsley, who will be hosting the conversation, is a British artist and teacher, living and working in Glasgow, and was the founder and former head of the Master of Fine Art (MFA) programme at the Glasgow School of Art.
She has exhibited, curated and held residencies around the world as well as being a respected and published spokeswoman for the visual arts where she has contributed to a broad range of initiatives in Scotland and has served as a board member on many arts organisations.  She was also elected to the Royal Scottish Academy and was inducted into the ‘Outstanding Women of Scotland’ by the Saltire Society in 2017.
 

Stephen Skrynka

Skrynka’s work invites a dialogue through joyful and playful experimentation in his use of materials, painting and performance. His work is about the constant cycle of risk and failure, repair and renewal, always exploring ways of revealing the beauty and truth of human failure and the true path of following your dreams always involves an element of risk and a human cost. Challenging conventional notions of success and exploring the ways failure can be far more revealing and life-affirming. He works with recycled material which is or becomes damaged, and also through performance by taking on ridiculous challenges. Skrynka’s work follows a methodical sequence of production but the results leave everything to chance, the whole process inviting disaster.
Scotsman article on The Revelator:  https://tinyurl.com/39t65yt4

This special event has been created by film distributor Katy MacMillan and artist Stephen Skrynka.

OUR UNCONVENTIONAL FILM FESTIVAL SCREENING DURING COP26 
VENUE:   The Revelator, Barclay Curle, 739 South Street, Glasgow, G14 0BX 6-7^th November

The Revelator will host a selection of old and new films from around the world during COP26 on 6-7^th November. 
The films look at different visions and versions of sustainability: some feature those who have had to find inventive, sustainable ways of solving problems through necessity, while others show those who have found contentment and joy in life without succumbing to consumer traps.  We will also be featuring works that highlight the dangers of wonderful traditional skills being lost in our modern world which comes at a price we cannot afford. 
Together these films highlight that creative thinking and a will to change can actually change the world.  

Films will be screened FREE of charge (booking is essential through Eventbrite).  Our aim is to allow the public to fully absorb all the potential of sustainability and hope this inspires change.

 

 GLASGOW’S UNOFFICIAL FILM FESTIVAL OF COP26,   NOV 6^th – 7^th, 2021

Real change can only come if the will of the people is behind it, pushing politicians from the ground up.  Using Art as inspiration, this rare opportunity to view a collection of films from around the world, curated for the festival,  show different versions and visions of sustainability; some offering inventive solutions, (Dance of Joy) some highlighting the high cost of progress, (Bait, The Raven’s Dance, Slow Glass, The Lost Legacy of Bida Bikini).  Others feature those who have found contentment and their place in life without falling into the consumer trap, (Big Ware, Lambing, The Glory of the Garden).

All films are being shown free of charge thanks to the generosity of the film makers.  Booking is essential and can be done through Eventbrite.  Masks must be worn throughout.

GLASGOW’S UNOFFICIAL FILM FESTIVAL

FILM FESTIVAL PROGRAMME 

TITLE                                                                 DAY                  TIME                   RUNNING TIME

The Moon and the Sledgehammer           Fri 5^th Nov           17.30                    65 mins

Eat the Peach                                                      Sat 6th Nov         13.00                    99 mins

Govan Young/Drifting with Debord       Sat 6th Nov         15.00                    47 mins

Big Ware                                                               Sat 6th Nov         16.30                    42 mins

Slow Glass / Dad’s Stick                                Sat 6th Nov         17.30                    43 mins

Bait                                                                          Sat 6th Nov         19.00                    89 mins

 

The Glory of the Garden                               Sun 7th Nov        13.00                    59 mins

The Lost Legacy of Bida Bikini                 Sun 7th Nov        14.30                    57 mins

Lambing                                                               Sun 7th Nov        16.00                    26 mins

Dance of Joy                                                      Sun 7th Nov        17.00                    93 mins

The Raven’s Dance                                       Sun 7^th Nov         19.00                    80 mins

 

 

Venue: The Revelator, Barclay Curle Complex, 739 South St, Glasgow G14 0BX

 

THE FILMS

THE MOON AND THE SLEDGEHAMMER Dir. Philip Trevelyan UK col 1971 65 mins
Fri 5^th November 17.30

Philip Trevelyan’s acclaimed cult classic, now an astonishing 50 years old, opens the festival.  It features a real family, the Pages, who for generations have lived in their isolated off-grid homestead deep in a Sussex woodland, the forgotten remnants of a once-thriving rural community left behind by progress, whose independent life is free of MSM, bank managers and clocks, but out of kilter with time and societal norms.

It offers a glimpse into their self-constructed albeit unusual universe where they have formed their own philosophies about the world around them.  There, in their woodland paradise and being part of the Nature they inhabit, they believe the world has followed the wrong path.

Director Philip Trevelyan said in a recent Q&A celebrating the film’s 50^th that he wanted to record them because
“I found them freer than most people.  They had found a way of enjoying life and I wanted to capture that”.

Presented like a cinematic poem, (critic John Russell Taylor compares it to Cocteau, Vigo and Jennings), there is nothing overtly political about the film.  Instead, the director allows the audience to draw their own conclusions.  By the end, modern lifestyle pressures, stresses and consumer traps are left far behind as values are challenged like never before.
Trailer:  https://vimeo.com/357703054

 

Following the screening a conversation will be held with director Philip Trevelyan, Alastair McIntosh and David Archibald, hosted by Sam Ainsley

EAT THE PEACH    Dir. Peter Ormrod Ireland 1986 99 mins         Sat 6^th Nov 13.00
A film based on a real life story about two Irishmen who follow their dream by building a wall of death on their farm. The story takes place in an Irish village a few miles from the border with Northern Ireland.  The two out of work men see Elvis ride in a carnival Wall of Death – a high walled barrel-like tank where centrifugal force keeps the rider up in the air circling.  Straight away they begin to draw diagrams, make plans and measurements and clear a patch of land near their house . . .
A tale driven by passion showing how ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K2OBSS5fzw

 

GOVAN YOUNG   Dir. David Archibald, Martin Clark and Cara Connolly UK, 2017 col. 30 mins
Saturday 6^th November, 15.00
Govan Young shows an inspirational way of engaging children into learning about history.

It follows a group of local schoolchildren as they learn of the Viking invasion of Scotland and the mediaeval kingdom of Strathclyde.  How will the children react when they learn that Vikings and Kings roamed around beneath their feet?

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGF8jol3qOI

DRIFTING WITH DEBORD Dir. David Archibald, Carl Lavery UK 2020 col. 17 mins
Saturday 6^th November 15.30
Channelling the spirits of David Bowie, Suzi Quatro and Karl Marx to debate the life and legacy of Guy Debord, theoretical leader of the Paris-based Situationist International and author of ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ and ‘Theory of the Dérive’. Transposing Debord’s ideas on the dérive from street to screen, this 17-minute film explores what a drifting cinema might look and sound like as it drifts from Paris to Glasgow, from present to past, and both with and away from Debord himself.
Trailer:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PExLrJsepQ0&t=2s

 

BIG WARE           Dir. Philip Trevelyan, UK 1971, col, 42 mins    Saturday 6^th November, 16.30
Trevelyan’s lyrical films offer portraits of resolutely local communities seemingly fixed in time and people who live in intimate communion with the land, finding true contentment through their work that confirms their invaluable place in life and in society.  Big Ware, a portrait of an aging potter still working tirelessly, delights as both a documentary of a dying art and an ode of sorts to English soil, the clay-veined terroir transformed into moon-shaped vessels.
Trailer:  https://vimeo.com/357707736

 

 

SLOW GLASS            Dir. John Smith, UK, col, 1988-91, col. 40 mins   Saturday 6^th November, 17.30
By legendary filmmaker John Smith.  Smith describes the theme thus: ‘The story is used to convey to the audience not to take for granted what you have because you never know when it can be taken away from you.  Although slow glass would supposedly prevent people from forgetting, it only serves to bring back the painful memories of what they had but didn’t appreciate.’ A mesmerising experimental documentary that presents the discussion of the manufacture of glass as a way to explore memory and transformation. “Slow Glass” also quietly ponders the weightier issues of Urban transformation and the value placed on craftsmanship.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEtj_Yu2A_A

 

 

DAD’S STICK       Dir. John Smith, UK, col, 2012   3.01mins   Saturday 6^th November 17.30
A moving and beautiful love story from a son to his father and the intrinsic values of things, Dad’s Stick features three well-used objects shown to the artist by his father shortly before he died, their form and function almost completely obscured by history.  Focussing on events relating to its history, Dad’s Stick creates a dialogue between abstraction and literal meaning.  Looking back over half a century, the film hints at the character of a “perfectionist with a steady hand.”

 

 

BAIT         Dir. Mark Jenkin UK 2019 B/W 89 mins      Saturday 6^th November, 19.00

Winner of 9 awards including two BAFTAs; written and directed by Mark Jenkin.  Starring Edward Rowe as a struggling fisherman, the film deals with the tensions that arise between locals and tourists in a Cornish fishing village set against a backdrop of second homes, short-term lets, and gentrification, driving out locals, changing centuries-old fishing traditions and ways of life.

Martin Ward is a fisherman in a picturesque Cornish village. He struggles to make ends meet fishing without a boat, while his brother Steven uses their late father’s vessel to offer cruise trips to visiting tourists.

Meanwhile, tensions arise between Martin and the out-of-town Leigh family, who use the harbour-front ‘Skipper’s Cottage’ they bought from Martin and Steven as a seasonal holiday home and short-term rental business.

Filmed on a clockwork 16mm camera and hand developed with the sound dubbed on afterwards, Mark Jenkin’s celebration of a hands-on craft approach to celluloid so neatly mirrors the sentiments of the film.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxwnJF8SU7g

 

THE GLORY OF THE GARDEN       Dir. Barney Snow, UK, col.  2018, 59 min     Sunday 7^th Nov 13.00

Hidden in the English countryside there’s a secret garden like no other.  A film about art, nature, toil and solitude, The Hereford Alternative Arts Centre is the singular creation of Black Country visionary artist Paul ‘Rick’ Jones.
The unruly garden is a labyrinthine junkyard wonderland, boasting delights such as a kettle tree, canoe hotel and a geodesic dome made of bed frames; an uncompromising attempt to force a truce between nature and man-made objects. In doing so he provokes us to question our constructs of order and beauty in a consumer age.
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/636985414

THE LOST LEGACY OF BIDA BIKINI             Dir. Remi Vaughan-Richards, Nigeria, col. 2021, 57 mins
Sunday 7^th November 14.30

At the crossroads of west-central Nigeria in the Nupe city of Bida, Masagá glassmakers manufacture raw black glass, creating breathtakingly beautiful objects.
The method is said to have migrated from Egypt to Nupeland in the mid-nineteenth century and has remained a secret for nearly two centuries.
Research revealed that only one ninety-year-old man retained this secret knowledge of glassmaking – knowledge in jeopardy of disappearing.
As the threat of a lost legacy looms, the documentary follows the story of the Masagá glassmakers who agreed to recreate bikini glass.  Trailer: https://vimeo.com/636965305   

 

LAMBING     Dir. Philip Trevelyan UK, B/W, 1964, 26mins   Sunday 7^th November

A unique opportunity to see Trevelyan’s award-winning student film on the big screen and chart his development as a film maker of unmistakable style.  Even here his early film uses poetry as the main narrative. He is already experimenting with and finessing his powerful control of time and space and ability to make his subject so at ease as to be seemingly unaware of the camera.  This throws up wonderful intimate glimpses and an air of peaceful contentment as we are slowly drawn into the shepherd’s world…
Trailer:  https://vimeo.com/244438917

 

 

DANCE OF JOY   Dir. Christine Booth, UK 2019 col. 93 mins Sunday 7^th November 17.00 
A truly remarkable film that shows how much can be achieved with so little.  Booth’s eye-opening documentary is about a centre in India which provides free prosthetic limbs for the many people, largely the poorest in society, who have lost one or both limbs.

Using the lowest imaginable tech and providing 60,000 new limbs a year, each one is fully bespoke, allowing the patient to walk out the same day on two legs.  Packed full of glorious images and individual stories, the joy and transformation in the patients is overwhelming in its reality.
                                                                             “When people get a new limb they get a new life”
This film has a feelgood factor off the scale and gives a powerful insight into a kind of world we all yearn for.
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/630936454
You can support this amazing centre by donating here: https://www.jaipurfoot.org/

 

THE RAVEN’S DANCE (Korpinpolska)       Dir. Markku Lehmuskallio, Finland, 1980 mins, 80 mins
Sunday 7^th November 19.00
 
Markku Lehmuskallio’s remarkable and mesmerising film is a symphony to the beauties of the earth and its creatures in all its harmonies, simplicities and complexities.  But where does man fit into this symphony?

The Raven’s Dance is about Northern nature and in particular about its forests.
In supporting roles are a smallholder family living in the wilderness where the distant sound of civilization is encroaching into the forest, coming ever closer . . .

The moral of the film arises from the right to use Nature being equal for humans and animals. A human has a right to use nature to survive. Where an owl hunts a mole, a human shoots an elk.
But where is the balance?  At what point does Civilization penetrating into nature become an act of plunder?
The film received an honourable mention at the 30^th Berlin Film Festival.
(Trailer to follow)

New York Times review:  https://www.nytimes.com/1980/11/06/arts/ravens-dance.html

 

 

 

For more images of the Revelator please click here:
https://www.instagram.com/the_revelator_clydebuilt/?hl=en    or   https://www.instagram.com/stephenskrynka/?hl=en