In this newsletter:
1 Informal members’ meeting on Thursday May 14
2 One Potato Two Potato
3 See you next season
1 Informal members’ meeting on Thursday May 14
This is the occasion when we report to you our progress planning our programme for next season. If you would like to hear our thoughts, do come along, because we would like to hear your reactions. If we adjust our plans in the light of what you say, it won’t be for the first time.
Date: Thursday May 14 Time: 7.45pm Venue: Health and Wellbeing Centre
Refreshments will be served.
2 One Potato Two Potato
This is the added attraction to entice you to the members’ meeting. It’s the title of a 21 minute film made in 1957.
Script and direction were by Leslie Daiken, who “was not a member of the Free Cinema group, any more than he was even interested in becoming a filmmaker. He was known first and foremost as an author and educator, and more particularly as a specialist on children’s games, nursery rhymes and toys. His film, which documents contemporary street games (the title will be familiar to many as a counting out rhyme), was for him a new way of introducing the subject to the public.
“Yet the film is much more than a mere informational documentary or ‘filmed guide to children’s games’. In the end, Daiken must have really enjoyed his first and only filmmaking experience, because the result is a beautifully shot and delightfully fresh and spontaneous impression of young children at play on their ‘territory’, i.e. the streets and ‘playgrounds’ (read bombsites) of London. The games range from the traditional to the contemporary, from the elaborate group game to the more isolated activity. Produced, like the majority of the Free Cinema films, with a grant from the BFI, it was filmed with the same limited equipment and crew, and made use – with great success – of similar impressionist techniques of imaginative editing of sounds (mainly the children’s rhymes) and images of the children at play”
(Christophe Dupin – www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/444380/)
3 Next season
Our next annual programme of films will be our fortieth. Although in some ways 1975 does seem an awful long time ago, we feel that this milestone should have a flag run up it and be saluted in some way, and it will be. Those forty years amount to a third of the period since 1895 when the Lumière Brothers held the first screening of a film. Our (40th) first screening will be on Thursday October 1st. The new programme brochure will be out early in September and we look forward to seeing you soon afterwards, together with any friends and colleagues whom you bring along as new members.
Have a good summer!