20thcenturyflicks

A couple of weeks ago, I remembered this blog exists, and that I have set myself a task of updating it with some of my film related musings. I am not very good at keeping on top of the film release related news cycle, and often find myself wanting to write about films a month or two after the window in which anyone would consider paying me to do so has firmly shut. This one doesn’t have much of a video shop hook, other than that Flow, which I am writing about, has a physical release in the UK at the end of June, and we are definitely going to get it in. So think of this as an in-depth look at a future member of our catalogue. 

To mitigate the lack of relevance to this video shop blog, here is a short notice of what’s happening with Flicks at the moment: Next week, Forbidden Worlds Film Festival is happening again. I am especially excited about the premiere of The Big Picture, documentary maker Arthur Cauty’s feature length look at what the hell happened with the IMAX in Bristol. Dave and Ti and various other favourites appear in it, and I’m looking forward to seeing them all in ridiculously large form. That one’s sold out now, but there are lots of other screenings at the festival that you can and should go to. Dave and Ti were interviewed about all things Megascreen, which you can read here. Also, a couple of months ago, I wrote for a real publication (Little White Lies) about Flicks and why I love it. You can read that here. Anyway, Flicks news section over. Here’s why Flow upset me.

Two and a bit months after its Oscar win, I watched Flow. I had it in my head I wanted to see it at the cinema, on account of the animation. I love children’s films that centre around animals, in particular dog films. I was prepared for some friendly, possibly talking, animals going on a journey, reinforcing some of Latvia’s dominant cultural values along the way. I was instead presented with one of the most existentially horrifying pieces of cinema I’ve experienced in quite some time. 

Allow me to set the scene. It’s a 12pm Monday screening in central London, two months after Flow’s original release. I am one of three solo cinemagoers dotted across a 100+ capacity room. I’m used to being almost alone in cinemas; while cinema is very much a communal experience, my engagement with XYZ film is usually fairly unaffected by whether the screening has sold out, or half sold out, or if it’s just me. Watching Flow, I was unusually aware of the absence of people, in the room around me, and on the screen in front of me. 

Flow exists in an unsettling, albeit beautiful, dimension, where humans are everywhere and nowhere. The unnamed, big-eyed feline protagonist, and the band of friends he collects, are surrounded by the remains of abandoned workshops, half finished drawings, decaying architecture. In this world, cats are revered, immortalised as giant statues that slowly sink into the endless flood. Maybe the cats themselves are responsible, maybe it’s all the missing people. And what caused the flood aboard which our furry heroes scramble to survive in their little boat? 

As the flood begins, we see what lurks below the surface. And what lurks below the surface is dark, empty space, scored by swelling orchestral music. And some fish. I feel very alone in the cinema. Then comes a whale/fish/uneasy mythical hybrid. One of the most horrifying aspects of Flow is the one animal that is not from this world, contrasting with the recognisable cats and dogs and capybaras. Seeing a whale that was not a whale as we know it made me wonder: what happened to it? Who has done this? While the film was clearly not intending to explicitly suggest that humans had genetically modified the creature, or whatever the rational explanation for ‘why whale look fucked up’ is, Flow exists as a constant dance between human presence and absence, our world and another, that leaves a space in which the horrors of the unknown are allowed to take root.The film taps into primal, pre-rational fears of what lurks beneath, what happens when we are no longer there, what happens if we can only identify what we have become through fragmented remnants. 

Given the current moral panics around children in the UK, I’m finding it pretty funny that this existential abyss, loosely coated in the hallmarks of a children’s animation, is designated suitable for children. My guess is that a lot of children will watch it and think ‘nice cat’ or ‘why did the filmmakers hate dogs so much?’ and a select few – who are, like me, not like other girls – will find it as momentous and upsetting as I did. 

Flow is beautiful and uncanny and vast and terrifying, and I would urge you to rent it from your friendly local video shop when it arrives at the end of June.

Note: As usual, this was written independently of the day-to-day runnings of Flicks. Please direct any compliments or complaints to daisysteinhardt@gmail.com

This blog post is the product of extreme procrastination. 

The TV section of the video shop is adorned with the words “Television is called a medium because so little of it is rare or well done.” It’s attributed in the shop to American humorist Evan Esar, but a cursory Google suggests a lack of consensus on its original author. There is an entire blog post tracing the origins of the quote and its variations, which concludes that it can originally be traced back to media personality Fred Waring in 1949, but that it has been recycled by many comedians and humorists, and isn’t worth attributing to Waring as it was likely penned for him to deliver by a since-forgotten third party anyway. You can check out the blog here, other quotes are available. 

Putting to one side the precise authorship of the quote, it’s one that holds a lot of truth, especially when considering the output of Channel 5. Given the ubiquity of on-demand streaming services it can be easy to forget that terrestrial television is still (just about) alive and kicking in the UK. Then a new TV show comes along, and you fall in love with the ocean, and remember the real meaning of Channel 5. 

The Good Ship Murder. The Good. Ship. Murder. Filmed aboard working cruise ship the MSC Virtuosa, the show stars 2005 X Factor winner Shayne Ward as Jack Grayling, resident cruise ship singer. Jack used to be a police officer, working on the serious crimes unit. Ward sings the show’s theme song, an upbeat little number entirely at odds with its purportedly grisly subject matter. He is joined by Catherine Tyldesley of Coronation Street fame as First Officer Kate Woods, and each episode the two join forces to solve a different murder, spurred on by what we are strongly encouraged to interpret as sexual tension. They are joined by a motley crew of ship staffers, including Jamil, a young man from Casablanca responsible for the legwork of the murder solving, and Kate’s fiance Piers, whose main schtick involves directly translating Flemish aphorisms into English. Once the murder has been solved each week, Jack sings a different karaoke hit (Daydream Believer; Every1’s a Winner; no Sweet Caroline as of yet but you get the idea) at the end of each episode, safe in the knowledge that order has been restored, and no one else needs to die under mysterious circumstances until next week. 

The show is made with the financial backing of Malta Film Commission, with Malta standing in for almost every holiday destination, providing a pleasingly Maltese quality to Barcelona, Casablanca, Rome, Alexandria and many more locations across Europe and North Africa. I mention this because without this information, viewers may be confused about the narrative trajectory of Season 2 episode 4, which centres around a father and daughter concerned about the impact of tourism on Malta, complete with Maltese dialogue and a marginally higher quality script. Also that Malta is viewed pretty unequivocally, if unofficially, as a tax haven. After the release of the first season, The Good Ship Murder was swiftly renewed for an additional two series. 

Moving swiftly on, as a viewing experience, The Good Ship Murder isn’t the easiest. Unlike in many (sorry Shayne) low quality TV dramas, the off-kilter pacing takes the show so far from predictability that it is almost structurally avant garde in places. The quality of post-production aboard the good ship is also far from the norm. The most striking example of this is in the first episode. Jack and Kate and the gang are in sunny La Rochelle (France in theory, Malta in practice), and they have a lead. The man in question is local fisherman Pascal Levigne, identified to the pair by a photograph, a photograph taken, as quickly becomes clear, from footage in the next scene, in which the detectives confront the suspect in the flesh. 

While it’s easy to write off The Good Ship Murder as standard Channel 5 trash, I believe that as a 21st century video shop worker and film student I have a responsibility not to dismiss it offhand, and follow the advice of legendary film critic Andre Bazin, who famously said that, “all films are born free and equal.” This is, at least, the excuse I’m using to justify engaging with it. I suspect Bazin is turning in his grave. Sorry Bazin. On a slightly more serious note though, as a cultural artefact TGSM is genuinely fascinating. 

Media Performance website (a TV branding campaign website blissfully unbothered by the notion of citing your sources) indicates that the core audience demographic of Channel 5 is “females with or without children.”* Making what you will of that, I think it’s safe to assume that Channel 5 at this point is largely watched by the older generation confined to network television, whose adult children or lack thereof haven’t quite got around to setting them up with anything more interesting. They’re probably bored, sitting around watching TV all day. Maybe they should go on a nice cruise. 

Titular murders aside, the show creates a similar viewing experience to what I imagine it’s like aboard the HMS Virtuosa, with as much focus on the spectacle of the ship’s amenities and jovial, welcoming atmosphere as the weekly murders. It may appear laughably gaudy to a lot of viewers, but if you’re already of the cruise going demographic, it’s probably just what you need to go ahead and make that booking. 

There is a fine line to be walked in trying to understand how a show like The Good Ship Murder got commissioned in the first place, let alone enthusiastically renewed. While the more cynical among us may have our suspicions that there could be a little tax dodging at play, it is important to note that a) this is incredibly difficult to quantify and b) international collaborations are by no means uncommon in TV production. 

The other crucial point here is that, for, and in many respects because of, all its faults, I absolutely love The Good Ship Murder. It fits so many of the hallmarks of cult cinema (or cult TV slop, whatever): an accidentally genius audiovisual piece that is beloved by fans (at the moment just my partner and I) for precisely none of its intended reasons. I’ve lost track of the number of times we’ve watched the first episode, singing along with the intro and joining Jack in telling Kate he “used to be a copper.” Realising that a friend is round who hasn’t seen TGSM, and swiftly rectifying that, provides a thrill that is hard to replicate.

It hasn’t quite achieved proper cult status (which is reached in the UK through screening at the Prince Charles Cinema) but I think we’re on the way there. So why don’t you stop whatever you’re doing, brush up on your Maltese, and set sail aboard The Good Ship Murder. Every1’s a winner! 

*I am including this ‘data’ as proof of my cursory google, but I think we can safely move on as if it hadn’t happened.

The Good Ship Murder is unfortunately not available to rent from Flicks; if you’d like to watch it, you’ll have to visit My5. I did make Dave watch several episodes though, so I’m sure he’d be delighted to chat about it in the shop.

I’m not at Flicks so much these days. I moved to London to do a film MA, which is so far proving nice and useful for shoving more cine-stuff into my brain. For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been looking at the politics of film archiving, or, on a reductive but for my purposes sufficient level: what gets archived and what doesn’t. The video shop’s collection has always been vastly restricted to films with BBFC certified physical releases. This is reducing further with the rise of digitised media, compounded by budgetary requirements meaning that we can’t buy anything and everything quite as liberally as we once could. Our physical archive is narrowing, yet the 21,000 odd collection still provides a more solidly consistent base of films than you can get hold of legally on much of the internet. 

I’m not getting into all this to lament the past of video shops. As much as I love handling DVDs and putting them in their correct place on the shelves, I try my best to present to the DVD renting public of the 21st century a shop that promotes earnest engagement with cinema above fetishisation of the format it comes on, however nice and shiny that format may be. 

Flicks in 2025 is often misunderstood as valiantly fighting the good fight against the streaming tyrants. Much as I enjoy hating on Netflix, the video shop is in no way attempting to compete with it. Digitisation happened, the streaming oligopoly is worth understanding on its own terms, and Flicks at this point is best described as just vibing. I do understand the gravitation of liberal media towards the shop, though. It’s an easy utopian picture to paint of the little video shop that could as an antithesis to the ugly endpoint of neoliberal capitalism. Unfortunately, it sort of forgets that, prior to the death of Blockbuster, there were endless debates about whether video shops were friends of foes of cinema. I haven’t read enough to come to any of my own half baked conclusions on the subject, but it is fair to say that some settled on foe. I don’t think anyone could seriously claim foe at this point though. 

It is through these thoughts (that I used to enjoy sharing with customers, with little regard for their levels of engagement or interest) that I feel emboldened to use the blog of a Bristol-based video shop and private hire cinema(s) to segue into relaying that earlier this week I attended a BFI preview screening of the 50th anniversary 4K restoration of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). It seemed a fitting first cinema trip after David Lynch’s death. I hadn’t seen it before, but went into the cinema with a vague idea of something dreamlike and slightly otherworldly. 

The restoration is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. The film is built on a world of desire, chaos, imperial violence, visible only in the cracks. It is so starkly both turn-of-the-century and 1975, that the visual clarity of the restoration works to enhance the eerie dissonance present throughout. There are also a pleasing number of dog cameos, enough for me to write ‘dog movie?’ in my friend Ellisha’s notebook. 

The film made me feel a lot, but even two days later, I’m still not sure what exactly I want to say about it. I had planned to write a dedicated piece, but there is so much pre-existing criticism waiting to be read, and I’m not so sure that I have much to add, at this stage at least. You’ll have to see it for yourself and draw your own conclusions. I see film restoration politics as the shinier cousin of archival politics; what gets restored is a yet more selective process hinging on compounding factors. A lot of films never quite make it, so I’m glad Picnic at Hanging Rock got its restoration.

Picnic at Hanging Rock’s 50th anniversary 4K restoration is in UK cinemas from February 21st. The unrestored version is at 20th Century Flicks now, unless it’s out on hire. This blog is updated independently from the day-to-day runnings of the shop, so please direct any compliments or abuse to daisysteinhardt@gmail.com

Hello! This is a very short post that I am making as I get to grips with how WordPress works. 

My name’s Daisy, and I worked regularly at Flicks from 2018 until earlier this year, when I moved to London to find fame and fortune and further my student debt pursuing a film MA. Though I find it hard to stay away from the video shop for too long, the 100 miles between us means that, with the upcoming exception of the first week of January, I am generally not there any more. As a result, I have decided to resurrect the flicks blog for the purposes of writing about films from the archive, advance screenings I have snuck into, and other video shop adjacent musings that I think are worth inflicting on the video renting general public of the 21st Century. Posts prior to this one were written by film critic and former flicks worker Tara Judah, apart from the very effusive one I wrote aged 16, following a week of work experience at Flicks.

I am posting this…post with the primary objective of guilt tripping myself into actually updating it semi-regularly. Only time will tell if this works out, or if it’ll be a repeat of the ideas I had of starting a video shop podcast, making a Clerks remake, or learning to crack into the safe next door by listening to relevant clicks.

Given that I am largely running this blog independently of the day to day runnings of the shop, I have been asked by HQ to direct future compliments, complaints, and more of a comment than a questions to daisysteinhardt@gmail.com.

Stay safe and warm, and see you in the new year! xx

It’s been an absolutely brilliant year for film, with blockbusters and indie titles bringing us all manner of glee for months. But we know some of you may have missed a few, so we thought we’d help you catch up!

This year, the three of us put together some thoughts on our favourite films released on DVD in 2017.

DAVE TAYLOR’S PICKS:

1. Toni Erdmann
2. Hunt for the Wilder People
3. Personal Shopper
4. Hidden Figures
5. Twin Peaks 3 (out on DVD and in the shop next week!)

“Honourable mentions go to Get Out, The Villainess, Dispossessed: The Great Housing Swindle, Hell or High Water and Elle. My top five are films that I either immensely enjoyed watching at the time (Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Hidden Figures), or films I kinda liked while watching them and was still thinking about days later. On the second – or third! – watch, their inscrutability developed into something much more affecting and they have now become cherished favourites. Toni Erdmann is the standout for me in this regard; I eagerly await what Maren Ade makes next.”

DAVE WHISKEY’S PICKS:

1. Hell or High Water
2. Kubo and the Two Strings
3. Birth of a Nation
4. Lady Macbeth
5. Free State of Jones

“A solid year for movies with a superb action-thriller at the top of my list, a family animation that’s magnificent, and three powerful period dramas bringing up the rear. Enjoy.”

TARA’S PICKS

1. The Levelling
2. Certain Women
3. The Work
4. The Fits
5. The Love Witch

“Some years I struggle to make a list because there’s so much mediocre crap being released. This year, making a list was tough because there were so many great films – a relief and a genuine joy. Four out of my top five are films made by women, about women or girlhood; The Work is a masterpiece about the failings of masculinity.”

We also asked a few of our good friends for their top five votes and put it all together to make a keen Top 10 (Dave, Dave and I weighted our choices worth double points so that it stays representative of what you’ll be told in the shop!) This our collective Top Ten Titles:

1. Toni Erdmann
2. Get Out
3. Hell or High Water
4. Kubo & the Two Strings
5. Personal Shopper
6. The Levelling
7. The Work
8. I, Daniel Blake
9. Certain Women
10. Hunt for the Wilderpeople

We also looked at what our top ten most popular films for the year were and, in order of most rentals, we have:

1. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
2. Hell or High Water
3. Arrival
4. Kubo & the Two Strings
5. Captain Fantastic
6. I, Daniel Blake
7. Manchester by the Sea
8. Lion
9. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
10. John Wick (it may be from 2015, but it’s still one of our best renters, because it’s one of very few films all three of us here love.)

If you haven’t seen all (or any) of these films then you need to get down to the shop and get renting! We’ll have a fuller list of the year’s recommended titles for you to pick up in the store, too.

Thanks go to our friends for their votes and continued involvement with the shop. A little on who they are and what they chose, below:

Liz Chege is a curator and writer, and a member of the film collective Come The Revolution.  Liz has taught in the Flicks’ Kino.

1. Moonlight
2. Christine
3. I Am Not Your Negro
4. Get Out
5. Jackie

Lorena Pino is a film programmer and writer, she’s worked with Cinema Rediscovered and Bath Film Festival. Lorena has taught in the Flicks’ Kino.

1. Sonita
2. The Handmaiden
3. Paterson
4. Hidden Figures
5. Moonlight

Peter Walsh is co-curator and co-director of South West Silents and part of the team for Cinema Rediscovered. Peter has taught several courses in the Flicks’ Kino and was on Eggheads with us last year.

1. The Love Witch
2. Lion
3. The Work
4. Zoology
5. Baby Driver

Ti Singh is founder and programmer of Bristol Bad Film Club and the author of the forthcoming book, Born to be Bad: Talking to the Greatest Villains in Action Cinema.  Ti was also on Eggheads with us last year.

1. Get Out
2. The Big Sick
3. War for the Planet of the Apes
4. John Wick 2
5. Baby Driver

Alice Taylor-Matthews is a comedian and programmer. She stages events at Cube Cinema and is an integral part of the brilliantly funny Tales of Adventure.

1. Your Name
2. I, Daniel Blake
3. Train to Busan
4. Toni Erdmann
5. Raw

Ben Brewer was co-host of Movie Mondays on Made in Bristol TV and is an occasional member of staff at Flicks.

1. Alien: Covenant
2. Personal Shopper
3. Raw
4. Catfight
5. The Handmaiden

Daisy Steinhardt is a student and did her work experience at Flicks.

1. I, Daniel Blake
2. Get Out
3. Raw
4. Kubo & the Two Strings
5. My Cousin Rachel

Ingmar Bergman is a colossal name that almost hangs over popular cinema, a name many recognise but only a few dare comment on. Some might even whisper that he’s almost impenetrable, but that’s not the case!

Over fifty years, Bergman shaped not only Swedish cinema and theatre, but also left an indelible mark on what we regard as art-house cinema, and influenced a slew of the century’s most important filmmakers.

Considering the historical and national issues at play in his films, this introductory course will lay out key themes and motifs in Bergman’s work. How do identity and silence intersect, and how might a sense of dry Swedish humour give us a better understanding of how Bergman treats and plays with Death?

Kicking off on Tuesday night, Encounters Short Film Festival is back, now in its 23rd year. We love Encounters at the video shop and we are SUPER EXCITED to announce that there’ll even be a little bit of the festival here at Flicks. 

WHAT’S IN THE SHOP

Perpetual Cinema: From 1pm – 6pm Wednesday through Sunday this week (20th-24th) we’ll have a running loop of short films showing in the Kino and it’s FREE* to attend! 

AVA Festival Archive: A brand new terminal has landed in the shop and it’s been specially jam-packed with Encounters archives so you can enjoy even more Encounters after your screenings. 

*The Kino seats a maximum of 11 people at any one time

A VERY SPECIAL SCREENING + Q&A

We watch a lot of films at Flicks and our eagle eyes love to tell you when we see something remarkable. Having had the absolute pleasure of already seeing Mark Jenkin’s Bronco’s House (2015), I can hand-on-heart swear that this is one screening you won’t want to miss. Shot on a clockwork camera and hand processed in instant coffee – yep, coffee – the film (which will be screening on a stunning new 35mm print) tells the story of a young couple looking for ‘a home’, and all that that implies. Bronco’s House is cloudy and grainy which lends it a beautiful, dream-like realism. Part of Encounters’ Shorts2Features strand, it runs at a unique 44 minutes and filmmaker Mark Jenkin will be present for a Q&A after the screening, hosted by Tara. More info + tickets here. 

WHAT WE CAN’T WAIT FOR

UWE_Film: We’ve made a tonne of video shop friends over the years out of talented filmmakers from UWE and we cannot wait to see what the recent graduates have come up with. 

‘Women in Puppetry & Puppet Animation’, Bristol Festival of Puppetry Showcase:   Bristol has earned a brilliant reputation when it comes to puppetry because the talent is real and their spotlight on female views on sexuality, conflict and relationships sounds like a dream programme come true. 

The Final Girls Present: Strange Creatures Body horror or body image? Yes please, we love anything and everything about being grossed out, feeling gross and getting over it in the name of feminism. 

The Final Girls Present: The Final Girls Teenagers, camp counsellors, a masked killer and the eponymous final girl – another all round yes from the team at Flicks, you know we love our horror, and draped in discourse is when it’s at its best. 

These are just a tiny taster of what’s on offer at Encounters this year so check out the full programme here, get your tickets and we’ll see you over the coming days; in the shop and at the cinema – and probably in the bar, too!

And if you can’t wait till Wednesday, you can watch past winners online: http://encounters-festival.org.uk/watch-films/

Though we all watch a lot of movies in here, we don’t often get to see stuff together – such is the nature of #videoshoplife that we usually watch movies at home and reconvene in the video shop to talk ’em over, disagree wildly and lovingly mock each other’s opinions. But, every now and again, we manage a shop outing to the cinema and see something together after scoffing burgers at Five Guys (the video shop cliche is real).

One movie I really wanted us to see as a sort-of video shop posse this year was Jordan Peele’s GET OUT. Partially, my motivation came after Liz Chege of Come the Revolution recommended it to me (she has great taste in film). It was also partially motivated by the age old decider of genre: most video shop clerks have cross-over taste when it comes to horror.

Of course, when I say we went as a video shop posse, I should clarify that it’s a hap-hazard crew, made up of some people who do or have worked in the video shop plus others who are loosely associated with the shop and minus our dear Co-Director Whiskey who, since having a child some four years ago, has not yet managed to join us for a late night cine-jaunt.

So off we went and together we watched Jordan Peele’s thrilling and wonderfully uncomfortable for white folk social satire, GET OUT. I sat, literally in nail-biting, edge-of-my-seat position for the entire film, enthusiastic and ready to gush after the credits rolled – it had been the perfect choice for a movie night out! But, much to my chagrin, my post-movie excitement was met with varying degrees of ‘meh’ from my video shop pals. It seems that my male movie buddies were a little underwhelmed, some finding the horror a little predictable or not to their liking and others thinking it was good but not great.

Let me just say this: I love those guys but they’re all absolutely wrong. GET OUT is one of this year’s finest movie treats and now that it’s in the shop on DVD to rent we can finally prove my colleagues and pseudo-colleagues wrong! So, if you wanna read an intelligent article on why the film is great, head to Overland.org.au where Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson have already done all the hard work with their article, ‘We’re on your side: white violence and the horror of representation’ . And, if you want to see it on the big screen, then you have another chance this weekend at Cinema Rediscovered thanks to the good folk at Come the Rev who are showing it as a comparison piece with Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

Otherwise, come and get it at the shop and take it home where you go, undisturbed, to the sunken place on your sofa.

Get Out/Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner trailer courtesy of Cinema Rediscovered.

Last week we had a work experience placement at 20th Century Flicks. We take very few student placements and have reached our capacity for 2017. At the end of the week, we asked Daisy to tell us a little something about her experience in the shop and this is what she had to say:

I began my week at 20th Century Flicks with a fairly good idea of what to expect. I have been visiting the shop regularly for a while now, during which time I have gotten to know the ‘licensed video rental personnel’ quite well. I found this very helpful, as it allowed me to skip past the awkward “Oh hi, you must be Stacey,” “No, it’s Daisy, like the flower,” stage and get on to the real talk, on to subjects such as how safe it is to open superglue with your teeth [Ed’s note: obviously it isn’t!], if customers looking for ’70s (MISOGYNISTIC) erotica were renting them ironically, and what on EARTH that awful smell was.

Knowing everyone also meant that I was trusted to talk to customers, something which, even over this short period of time, I believe has improved my people skills. With these newfound skills, I managed to strike up a conversation with a man on my bus ride home on Tuesday about his uni course and how much I hate living in the countryside – much to his badly concealed irritation. Talking to customers also allowed me to meet some really interesting people, some of whom I recognised as the week progressed, notably, a boy who came in three times to eat his own bodyweight in free skittles. The varying film preferences and general interesting-ness of the customers meant that, on the whole, I found them very enjoyable to talk to. I also (just about) managed to refrain from recommending Sharknado 3 to anyone, something that I have involuntarily done several times on previous visits from the other side of the counter.

One thing I hadn’t quite understood before the week, despite my fairly frequent visits for tea and the odd bit of lamination, is how stressful managing a small business can be. I hadn’t really stopped to think, perhaps naively, that the shop’s financial status is entirely dependent on the number of daily Kino bookings and film rentals. Because of this, it isn’t a ‘go in, get paid, piss off’ type of job, rather, one that requires a great deal of emotional investment. A mixture of this, the eccentric atmosphere of the shop, and Dave having only just returned from Glastonbury made for a surprisingly intense few days, something I had definitely not anticipated.

At the end of my week, I had learned several new things, the main one probably being how to use the shop’s film cataloging system. I also now know how to dismantle a jammed-up laminator, and, most importantly, what on EARTH that awful smell was. On a more serious and personal note, what this week has proven to me is that jobs I find interesting do exist and it has reassured me that, perhaps, in the future, I will find some form of work that I am passionate about. I certainly know that I’ll be very lucky if I ever end up working anywhere as amazing as Flicks.

Written by Daisy Steinhardt for (and edited by) 20th Century Flicks. Please note that we have already accepted the maximum number of work experience placements we can accommodate for 2017. We will post other scheduled work experience responses here in due course.

I recently finished a six week course on National Cinema(s), which was hosted by 20th Century Flicks: Bristol’s last remaining video rental shop (it also has a cinema room that can be hired and is home to two adorable cats – what more could you want from life?) The big question, going into this course, was, ‘What is National Cinema?’ and over the next six weeks my fellow classmates and I attempted to answer this through film screenings and discussions, each one organised around a particular national focus (British, Australian, Swedish, Venezuelan, Kenyan, European/Borderless).

While the economics of a film’s production and distribution is arguably the biggest factor in determining which ‘national cinema’ it falls into, I was very much fascinated by the discussions around the filmic content and the idea of ‘national genres’, or to put it more crudely, what type of films do we associate with certain countries? For example, when asked what Swedish films we had seen, the majority of those cited, particularly those that had been the most commercially successful, could be considered to fit the description ‘Scandi-noir’. This made me wonder how much this ‘national genre’ really represents Swedish interests and how much it is influenced by its exportability to international audiences, i.e. Swedish film-makers may be more inclined to work within this genre because it is more likely to sell well abroad. This is because it seems to be much easier to market a foreign film when a nation is predominately linked with a particular style of film-making. Further examples might include French Arthouse, Japanese Anime and Indian Bollywood.

Additionally, ‘Scandi-noir’ raises further questions regarding the geography of national cinema(s) and the grouping of films from several countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden – perhaps because this is easier to market internationally). What then might be the exported British ‘national genre’ (grouping England, Scotland and Wales)? This is difficult to judge since I am living in Britain and exposed to the wider range of its film productions but literature on this subject indicates that heritage cinema seems to enjoy particular international success: the Merchant Ivory productions of the 1980s and more recently The King’s Speech (Dir. Tom Hooper, 2010) and The Imitation Game (Dir. Morten Tyldum, 2014). The wider socio-political implications for these exported ‘national genres’ is something that really fascinates me and I hope to explore this as I take up research in this area.

With this in mind, the National Cinema(s) course was a wonderful opportunity to watch films that we may not normally have seen due to their lower visibility in the international film market. Putting Australia’s hugely successful Mad Max franchise to one side, I watched two lesser known films: Charlie’s Country (Dir. Rolf de Heer, 2013), a depiction of an Indigenous Australian dealing with the loss of his land, and The Boys (Dir. Rowan Woods, 1998), a disturbing drama about violence, hate and crime within a suburban Australian family.

As part of our focus on Swedish cinema the featured screening was not a ‘Scandi-noir’ but a sensitive, sweet account of two teenage girls falling in love in a small town: Show Me Love (Dir. Lukas Moodysson, 1998). This screening was quite a nostalgic experience for me, proving that questionable fashion choices, bubblegum pop and ‘hanging in the park’ are late 1990s teenage experiences that transcend national borders.

The course also exposed me to some films from countries that I must shamefully confess I knew very little about in terms of their cinema: Pelo Malo (Dir. Mariana Rondon, 2013) explores issues of racism, homophobia and poverty through the tense relationship between a mother and her son living in Caracas, Venezuela; Nairobi Half Life (Dir. David ‘Tosh’ Gitonga, 2012) is a hard-hitting insight into gang culture in Nairobi, Kenya.

Many thanks to Peter, Tara, Lorena and Elizabeth for selecting an array of truly fascinating films and for leading such insightful discussions.

Written by Sarah Kelley for 20th Century Flicks.