The Last Picture Show

This evening we closed the doors of the David Lean Cinema for the very last time.

Here's Sam welcoming the audience and introducing the very suitable final feature.....The Last Picture Show (P Bogdanovic, 1971).

Seen from Row C Seat 3.

Mission

With all the upheavals going on around us it’s easy to forget what Clocktower Arts actually does…I wrote this mission statement last year and updated it a couple of months ago, its easy to get caught up in hyperbole with these type of things, but I think this one is pretty clear and sets out our stall reasonably well..

There’s so many things we do here its easy for our message to get lost in the melee … thought Id post it up to remind myself along with everyone else – why we are here and we’re meant to be doing…

Clocktower Arts Mission Statement 2011

Clocktower Arts is an organisation that strives to be as diverse and dynamic, as nuanced and eclectic as Croydon itself; an organisation that is made in Croydon in every possible way.

Building on established and groundbreaking arts participation work, Clocktower Arts will produce an artistic programme of events as unique as the community it serves.
Local in focus, national (at times international) in ambition, Clocktower Arts aims to be a leading arts and events producer for South London.

• Inclusive –working across a wide sector of the community, with a focus on hard-to-reach groups and children and young people.
• Relevant – with participation programmes led by the participants themselves, ensuring that the content speaks directly to and for them
• Contemporary – working with new and emerging artists, Clocktower Arts is a place for new work that holds a mirror up to and celebrates contemporary urban life.
• Challenging – not afraid to take risks, Clocktower Arts will celebrate and support the risk taker and boundary breaker, building on Croydon’s history of nurturing cultural catalysts from John Ruskin to Malcolm McLaren.
• Exciting –Clocktower Arts will be the spark of inspiration that will set the town ablaze.

Clocktower Arts will be regarded as an exemplar of how multi-arts companies can excel at participation, education, presenting and producing new work, events and festivals.
 

The Last Picture Show

The Last Picture Show
a film festival celebrating 16 years of The David Lean Cinema

Croydon 1st – 21st April 2011

With very special guest curators Ronnie Corbett and Julian Fellowes

For three weeks in April Croydon ‘s David Lean Cinema is staging a rather unique film festival, a festival that will be by its nature the first and last of its kind, one that  will be remembered long after the final curtain falls…Ladies and Gentlemen welcome to The Last Picture Show.

The David Lean Cinema has for 16 years been a shining light of high quality, independent arts provision in central Croydon. With 68 seats it was never going to compete with it’s larger competitors, but with a dedicated and adventurous audience it fought a good fight and has firmly established itself as the very model of an independent, community cinema.

Due to the wide-ranging cuts made by Croydon Council the cinema will close forever at the end of April, but far from going quietly The David Lean Cinema is celebrating 16 years of fiercely independent programming with a brand new film festival with three special guest curators Ronnie Corbett, Lord Julian Fellowes and our audience!

The Last Picture Show is a festival like no-other, a fitting tribute to 16 years of cinematic excellence, with a programme made up of one-off screenings, special events and old favourites, it promises to reflect the very special place that The David Lean Cinema has in hearts of many Croydon resident and for this unique cinema to bow out on a high.

The David Lean is an antidote to the impersonal and all consuming multiplexes, a respite from the pressures of everyday life and most importantly to be a welcoming environment where you can escape the rain and be entertained. We have over the years built up a dedicated and adventurous audience, particularly from the older sections of Croydon’s community and The Last Picture Show is our way of saying thank you for the years of support.

It wasn’t hard to think of the two men we should ask to curate our goodbye festival and it is a rather fine stroke of luck that they both agreed! As arguably Croydon’s best-known resident (certainly the only one who can be recognised by only the outline of his glasses) and keen Ronnie Corbett is a patron of the arts and has had a life-long love affair with movies and his choices show a deep appreciation of the golden age of cinema.

Barron Fellowes of West Stafford (to give him his full title) is an Oscar winning script writer, actor, director and novelist. A cinematic polymath who wrote ‘Gosford Park, the highest grossing film in our cinema’s history and reinvigorated a beleaguered ITV with his all conquering series ‘Downton Abbey’.  He is the man who redefined the quintessential English drama, supremely erudite in his depiction of the subtle nuances and prejudices of the class system, exposing its weaknesses when faced by the inevitable and seemingly vulgar onslaught of modernity, but as we at The David Lean Cinema can certainly attest – the only content is change….

See the full brochure here.....

Sputnik Poems by ju90

Where does flesh end? Where does the body begin? Where does the line start? Where does the machine finish?

Where does flesh end? Where does the body begin? Where does the line start? Where does the machine finish?

Where does flesh end? Where does the body begin? Where does the line start? Where does the machine finish?

Where does flesh end? Where does the body begin? Where does the line start? Where does the machine finish?

---

Take me to another world
A world far away
A world which offers a future
A world which offers a home.

Take me to another world
A world bright with hope
A world where everyone is valued
A world where everyone is free.

Take me to another world
A world full of light
A world where ideas blossom
A world where talents bloom.

Take me to another world
A world quite unlike this
A world where all are welcome
A world where all are loved.
Faltering
Hesitating
Wondering am I losing my grip? Are you losing yours?
Can we dare, can we dream, can we do this?

---

Slowly
Carefully
Painfully
Inching towards each other
On the brink of rolling away.

---

The future is what we make it.
The future is where we take it.
The future is here today.
Your wheels and my wheels
Two souls turning in tandem
The sky’s no limit.


Ju Gosling aka ju90

A Clockwork Orange, Still Juicy

When we began Clocktower Arts back in May 2010, doing away with the old ‘Croydon Clocktower Croydon’ nonsense…  We thought it would be a nice idea to try and shift how arts centres communicate with their audience, experiment with how we get our mission across to the people that matter – the people who buy tickets.

The result was ‘Ignore This!’ a magazine that doubled up at an events brochure, with all the usual listings and show information you would usually find in a season brochure but embellished with interviews and articles and with a design aesthetic that really made it stand out from the plethora of bland marketing materials churned out by regional arts centres across the country. It was a real statement of intent, meant to express exactly what Clocktower Arts stands for. This article is taken from the second Ignore This! We commissioned Will Carr from The Anthony Burgess Institute to write a short piece about the cultural impact of A Clockwork Orange.. Think it sums up nicely what ‘Ignore This!’ Was for… (our production of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ kicks off at the beginning of March btw – and it’s looking fantastic)

You can see versions of Ignore This! here http://issuu.com/clocktowerarts

A Clockwork Orange, Still Juicy 

A study by Will Carr Deputy Director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation

‘I meant it to stand for the application of a mechanistic morality to a living organism oozing with juice and sweetness […] Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.’ – Anthony Burgess (1986)

Well, what is it going to be then, eh? What does A Clockwork Orange taste like for us: should we eat it up or spit it out? Burgess’s 1962 novel exerts a vicious power over our imagination. Its powerful themes, such as the relationship of the individual to the state, the terrifying potential of the young, and the possibility or otherwise of redemption, remain entirely contemporary; and its linguistic innovation, totalitarian imagery, fierce ultraviolence and fiercer moral questions are still resqueezed and resucked throughout popular culture.

Burgess himself hated popular music, but bands take their names from his text (Heaven 17, Moloko, The Devotschkas and others), they write songs using its concepts (for example ‘Ultraviolence’ by New Order, ‘Horrorshow’ by The Libertines, Sepultura’s recent album ‘A-Lex’ ) and they dress up as droogs for their live performances (David Bowie, Guns n Roses, Usher and Kylie have all succumbed). Korova Milk Bars – places of vice and vodka – currently do brisk trade in New York, Melbourne, Glasgow, Manchester and elsewhere. ‘The Drughi’ are a feared group of ‘ultra’, indeed ultraviolent, supporters of Juventus FC. Bart Simpson, juvenile delinquent if perhaps not sociopath, frequently quotes Alex in cod-Cockney and has been subjected to variants of the Ludovico Technique. Cartman of ‘South Park’ suffers the same treatment. The list goes on. The book itself has never been out of print, and is in translation all over the world.

While Burgess’s novel developed a counter-cultural following in the sixties, with its prophetic colliding of drugs, music, youth culture and thrilling, violent release, Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film is of course the way in which the dystopia of A Clockwork Orange reached a mass audience. The violence in the novel, in some ways toned down but now of course painstakingly shot in vigorous colour, retains its ability to shock. Burgess sought to distance himself from what he viewed as the gratuitousness of Kubrick’s film and expressed frustration that his short novel would now forever be his best-known work, even while there were others – remorselessly prolific, Burgess wrote thirty-three novels in all, as well as twenty-five books of non-fiction, reams of journalism and over a hundred musical works – that he was more satisfied with. However, he never stopped writing about it, giving interviews about it, and preparing new stage versions of it: A Clockwork Orange continued to tick in his creative imagination. Kubrick worked from the American edition of the novel, which has an important difference from Burgess’s original text in that it leaves out the final chapter (Burgess claims against his wishes) and so fundamentally changes the conclusion; Burgess’s stage version reinstates it. There is no need to reveal what happens for you now, but the changes represent one of the ways in which Burgess sought to re-assert his authorship over the text and the ideas that it contains. It was always too late, of course, and new generations of performers and audiences will continue to grapple in new ways with the questions that A Clockwork Orange asks: this ambitious production by Fourth Monkey gives us an exciting and powerful take on a text that continues to resonate.

www.anthonyburgess.org

Fellow Traveller (a new film)

A new film made by artist Ju Gosling (aka Ju90) as part of the Sputnik phase II project from Fittings Multimedia commissioned by Clocktower Arts.

And it's a good night from him...

"I said Fork Handles"

As many of you will know -  due to council cuts we are unable to continue with the current live arts and cinema programme after april this year. The David Lean Cinema has, in its 16 years or so of existence, become an incredibly valuable resource, particularly to our older customer… I have found it endlessly fascinating seeing what films work here and what films don’t. An older audience by no-means means a less adventurous one and I find it heartening that there is always an audience for the more left-of-field, foreign and independent films in Croydon,  despite what the multiplexes would have you believe.

With April being our final month of films we thought it would be nice to try and do something to say thank you for 16 years of support. After quite a lot of procrastination between the living breathing embodiment of The David Lean, the supremely talented Christine Sales and I, we decided in lieu of a 2nd Croydon Film Festival, to do a unique festival of our own, one that celebrates 16 years of bringing fantastic film to Croydon, a month long celebration of why The David Lean is so important, so here it is… ‘The Last Picture Show’, actually we’ll probably get told to change that title, but as we’re showing the film anyway we thought the title sums up our month-long festival perfectly.

The programme is going to be made up of one-off screenings, Q&A’s and some very special events. We have everyone from The Powell and Pressburger Association through to The Rocky Horror Picture Show Fan Club involved, but most excitingly for me is the involvement of a very special guest curator in the very recognisable shape of Ronnie Corbett.

Its hard to think of a more famous Croydon-based octogenarian and I’m pretty sure this is a film festival first. Ronnie has very kindly agreed to pick some films that have been important to him through his life, I wont tell you what they are, but he’s chosen some real gems, he’s even coming down to have a little chat about them towards the end of the festival, I think it’ll be nice way to bow out, lets hope our audience agree.

SPUTNIK @ The Clocktower, Croydon

SPUTNIK
From Fittings Multimedia Arts

“Sputnik is a machine created by a mechanic from a woman’s dreams. It is a machine that when a travellers body
is fused with it in the right place and the right time, will take the traveller on a journey to their hearts desire”

Sputnik will arrive at Croydon this February and is awaiting its next voyagers to begin their journey.

SPUTNIK is an installation performance machine produced by Fittings Multimedia Theatre Company and Sharmanka. It's a weird and wonderful dream-time machine and it's in residence at The Clocktower until March 2 (it can be found in Clocktower's public Court space from 8am-10pm daily, free admission). On Saturday 19 Feb from 12-2pm there will be a public happening around Sputnik where artist and storyteller Dave 'Stickman' Higgins and video artist Ju90 will present and perform their artistic responses to Sputnik in Croydon; as well as sharing some of the work created by visitors to Sputnik over the period of its residency (ranging from the drawings of local school children to poems by adults with learning disabilities). For more information on Fittings check out: www.fittings.org.uk and Sharmanka at www.Sharmanka.com

A selection of work created by local groups:

Location:Katharine St,Croydon,United Kingdom