Have you got a head for heights? Come join us on Wednesday the 22nd Feb, when PASSENGERFILMS and UCL Urban Lab are back at the Roxy Bar & Screen again with a collaborative night on VERTICAL SPACE.

The feature film will be ‘Man on Wire’ (2008), James Marsh’s look at tightrope walker Philippe Petit’s daring, but illegal, high-wire routine between the World Trade Center’s twin towers. Soundtracked by Michael Nyman and using rare footage of the preparations for the 1974 feat (which is presented as an aerial heist movie), the documentary won the Jury prize during its run at Sundance.

We’ll also be showing Eva Weber’s ‘City of Cranes‘ (2007), which takes the viewer high in the sky to look at the world through the eyes and words of crane drivers – a must-see for anyone who has ever wondered what it is like to work hundreds of feet above the ground. The film is divided into four 3 minute chapters (‘The City Above’, ‘The Last Topman’, ‘Ballet of Cranes’ and ‘Solitary’). The second short will be Simona Piantieri’s ‘Vertical Expectations’ (2011), which explores the nexus between architecture, development and society through an ethnographic analysis of the construction of the Shard, the tallest building in the European Union, located just up the road from the Roxy Bar & Screen.

Eva Weber and Simona Piantieri will both be in conversation after the film and will give a directors’ Q&A chaired by Andrew Harris, lecturer in Urban Studies and Geography at UCL. Andrew has recently researched elevated transport projects in Mumbai and is currently developing a website called Tall Tales that collects public stories about tall buildings. Peter Adey, Reader in Human Geography at RHUL and author of Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects (2010), and an upcoming Reaktion book titled Air, will also give a talk considering the cultural connotations of air, particularly the histories of levitation.

This is the third screening of a season by PASSENGERFILMS and the UCL URBAN LABORATORY on urban architectures.

Wednesday the 22nd February at the Roxy Bar and Screen (128-132 Borough High St, London, SE1 1LB). Starts 7.30pm, entry £4.

Our next event, on the 19th January, will be on cinematic visualisations of urban change and the passage of time. We will be celebrating the publication of Mark Tewdwr-Jones’ Urban Reflections: Narratives of Place, Planning and Change (Policy Press, 2011) with screenings on the theme of URBAN PLANNING and its relationship with the narrative strategies of cinema.

The feature screening, Terence Davies’ ‘elegiac yet prickly’ Of Time and the City (2008), is a love song and eulogy to Liverpool in the 1950s and 60s, using newsreel and documentary footage supplemented by his own commentary voice-over and contemporaneous and classical music soundtracks. The film was chosen on its release as Sight and Sound’s Film of the Month, with the Guardian describing it as ‘a British masterpiece, a brilliant assemblage of images that illuminate our past.’

We will also show two other short films about the use of land in planning projects and on film. R K Neilson-Baxter’s ‘All That Mighty Heart’ (1962), shot by the Oscar-winning David Watkins for British Transport Films, shows a poetic ‘day in the life’ of London during the construction of the new Victoria Line. It includes fleets of Routemaster buses, the control rooms of the tube, early CCTV, vintage lights at Piccadilly Circus and children building sandcastles on the banks of the Thames. The little known ‘Destination Louvain La Neuve’, a short film from the New Town Archive, shows a historic snapshot of idealistic urban planning in Belgium and its promotion.

Mark Tewdwr-Jones (Professor of Spatial Planning and Governance at University College London’s Bartlett School of Planning and Architecture) will be giving a talk and introductions to the films drawing on ideas from his book, which will be available to buy on the night, followed by a Q&A at the end of the evening. The book draws on geographical, cinematic and photographic readings, offering a fresh incisive story of urban change, one that evokes both real and imagined perspectives of places and planning. One critic remarks, ‘We’ve long had books about places by geographers, and books about films and TV by critics – but they’ve remained in hermetically sealed compartments, separated by an impassable gorge. Mark Tewdwr-Jones has triumphantly bridged the gap. There will also be opportunities to talk to Mark during the drinks breaks.

This is the second screening of a season by PASSENGERFILMS and the UCL URBAN LABORATORY.

Thursday the 19th January at the Roxy Bar and Screen (128-132 Borough High St, London, SE1 1LB). Starts 7.30pm, entry £4.

Dry (Nic Wassell, 2011)

PASSENGERFILMS, UCL Urban Laboratory Film Society and Rushes Soho Shorts present a selection of new short films that put architecture at the forefront, with both documentary-style and experimental portraits.

CODIFIED SPACE, Justin Ascott, 5 mins

Architecture is a system of signs that structure patterns of social use, but what happens when a building falls into disuse and no longer serves the function for which it was originally intended?

DRY, Nic Wassell, 14 mins

A London-shot 16mm film about travel and memory, inspired by the Taiwanese films of Tsai Ming-liang.

THE FOLLY, Mira Aroyo, 15 mins

The cottage home of an elderly lady who has to adapt to her remote surroundings as she gets older.

MIRAGE, Srdan Keca, 42 mins

Dubai as an unfinished ‘post-apocalyptic’ city.

A THOUSAND TREES, Ed Lawrenson, 20 mins

A Scottish new-town built for a non-existent population that never came.

The screenings will be followed by a panel discussion with the filmmakers and Justin Jaeckle, Curator of Public Programmes at the Architecture Foundation, hosted by Ben Campkin, Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory, .

This is the first of a season of regular film screenings by PASSENGERFILMS and the UCL Urban Laboratory Film Society.

Monday 9th January 2012 at 6:15pm, Hackney Picturehouse (270 Mare Street London, E8 1HE, Tel: 0871 902 5734). £6, £5 conc, £4 Hackney Picturehouse members

Mirage (Srdan Keca, 2011)

If you go down to the woods today…

As part of the Scala Forever season in August, PASSENGERFILMS is tackling backwoods cinema, with this screening of ‘Eden Lake’ (a violent ordeal set in a chav-infested quarry in a British forest, described by The Guardian as ‘relentlessly upsetting’) and Ben Rivers’ short film ‘This is My Land‘ (a hand-processed portrait of Jake Williams, who lives alone and self-sufficiently within miles of forest in Aberdeenshire, Scotland).

Speakers will include Carl Griffin, who works on the link between forestry and spaces of dissidence, Owain Jones, author of ‘Tree Cultures: the Place of Trees and Trees in Their Place’, and Judith Tsouvalis (tbc), author of ‘A Critical Geography of Britain’s State Forests’. We’ll be talking about the idyllic and the feral connotations of the British woodland on screen. Ben Rivers is hoping to come and introduce his film, and Stella Hockenhull is hoping to come and introduce ‘Eden Lake’, having written about it in her recent book, ‘Sublime Landscapes in Contemporary British Horror: The Last Great Wilderness and Eden Lake’.

Add to the collaborative playlist on the theme of ‘Backwoods’ to listen to your music on the night and be in with the chance of winning a prize, which will include the DVD of the 2003 live New Year’s episode of ‘Most Haunted!’, in which the TV crew get lost in Epping Forest in search of Dick Turpin’s ghost and have to be rescued by park rangers.

7.30pm, Monday 22nd August, Roxy Bar & Screen, London Bridge. Entry £6. This is part of the Scala Forever season, dedicated to London’s legendary lost cinema – for updates on the rest of the programme join their Facebook group or find them on Twitter (@scalaforever).

Our next night back at the Roxy Bar & Screen will be an event on psychogeography, with a feature screening of John Rogers’ The London Perambulator (the film has a blog here which includes trailers and TV features), followed by a Q&A with John Rogers and with Nick Papadimitriou. They will be talking about the making of the film and its sources, as well as about their Resonance FM radio show, Ventures and Adventures in Topography (see blog), which combines perambulations in London with a look at old texts, guidebooks and maps.

Nick will also read a section from his forthcoming book, Scarp, about the North Middlesex/ South Hertfordshire escarpment, to musical accompaniment. We will also have a few words from Gale, Serena and Clare from the urban exploration project WALKWALKWALK , about their archaeological methodologies in routing and rerouting North East London, and from Roland Francois-Lack at UCL, who writes a daily blog about the connection between maps and film, THE CINETOURIST.

7.30pm, Tuesday June 14th, Roxy Bar & Screen, London Bridge.

Two of the most famous literary residents of Stoke Newington are Daniel Defoe, who owned a civet cat farm on Newington Green, and Edgar Allan Poe, of whom Walter Besant remarked ‘Let us hope the eccentricities of this wayward poet were not due to the influences of Nonconformist Newington’! Both of these men have strong links to Stoke Newington Church Street, where Poe went to school and where Defoe lived, so on Friday 3rd June, to celebrate the first night of the Stoke Newington Literary Festival, PASSENGERFILMS and Ryan’s Bar will be showing a weird collection of short films and animations based on both authors, including adaptations by Luis Bunuel, Webber and Watson, Jan Svankmajer, Roger Corman, Ted Parmelee, and the Van Beuren Studio. There will also be some music from the odd folk below.

Late license, DRESS CODE: MACABRE.

http://soundcloud.com/miserysquid
Misery Squid is the music of Jenny Anderson. Brutally honest lyrics sung by an incredible & most unique voice, accompanied by simple guitar lines, this will be Jenny’s first live show in over a year. Don’t wait another year to see her play! She is what is technically known as ‘a good lass’with music and that.

In her own words:
Misery Squid is an oily troublesome inky little squid that follows me about and makes me sad sometimes. It used to be songs written and recorded by me under the name ‘Catherine’s Cocoon’ but now I’ve got extra lovely musican friends who play live with me to pad out the sound a bit and cover my chord changes.

Sorrell
http://www.myspace.com/noplato
Poignant & beautifully crafted songs from the huge voice behind No Plato. A rare outing prior to No Plato’s hotly anticipated debut album.

http://www.myspace.com/gunsorknives
Guns or Knives is one man, one guitar and various other noise making instruments. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes experimental but always on the money.

Into Eternity (2010), dir. Michael Madsen

PASSENGERFILMS is going green… literally. We just bought some green body paints for our eco-horror party on Friday night.

The first ever UK Green Film Festival is launching this Friday, and PASSENGERFILMS is one of the team running it all in London (other venues are in Cardiff, Leeds, Leicester and Glasgow). This is a not-for-profit festival engaging with environmental themes, with full details on the website here.

We thought we might give you a heads up of some of our personal highlights from everything which will be going on at Shortwave Cinema this weekend, and the tie-in events taking place outside in Bermondsey Square. On Saturday the Bermondsey Farmers’ Market will be joined from 10am till 4pm by Mediterranean fine food stalls, puppet making by the Southwark Green Party, and honey stalls and a real live bee hive brought by the London Beekeepers’ Association. After the Vanishing of the Bees screening there will be a Q&A with Alison Benjamin from Urban Bees, who’s also the deputy editor of Society Guardian. She’ll be signing copies of her books, A World Without Bees, Keeping Bees, and Making Honey in the Woolfson & Tay bookshop across the square and will also have small honey jars for tasting.

On Sunday, Southwark Cyclists will be running a bike ride starting at 9am at the cinema, stopping for lunch, and returning in time for the screening of Breaking Away at 3pm, probably the best film about cycling counter-culture. Details of the bike ride here. The film will also be introduced by Jenny Jones of the Southwark Green Party, talking about cycling politics and developments, fresh from her appearance on The Bike Show.

End of the Line (2007), dir. Maurice Devereaux

Our two must-see films (apart from Friday’s Triffids party) are Into Eternity at 10.15pm on Saturday and Wasteland at 8pm on Sunday.

INTO ETERNITY: ‘Finland’s Onkalo waste repository – the subject of Danish director Michael Madsen’s documentary, Into Eternity - is an underground network of tunnels intended to store 1% of the world’s nuclear waste. The construction will take a century to complete, and is intended to last for one hundred thousand years—the approximate half-life of radioactive isotopes in high level nuclear waste. As it is likely that the ways humans communicate will change drastically before the tunnels are safe, the engineers of Onkalo have been faced with the question of how to warn future generations about the dangerous waste concealed below. Foreboding symbols, “Rosetta Stones” containing warning messages in all of the world’s languages, an image of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, even legislative measures obliging future generations to “remember to forget” the existence of Onkalo have all been considered as viable options. And, as even the research scientists behind Onkalo have conceded the futility of scientific inquiry in this particular area, Madsen’s film pursues a more epistemological discussion of Onkalo: of the Finnish government’s plans to “remember to forget,” and of the idea of shaping mythology, of planning into eternity.’

WASTELAND: ‘(T)his is undoubtedly a bold raid into an unknown territory – both geographic and conceptual – that the prosperous classes prefer not to think about. When we throw out rubbish, it is easy to assume that it somehow vanishes. In fact, of course, it largely goes to landfill sites such as Jardim Gramacho in Rio De Janeiro: the world’s biggest dump, a huge, undulating, foul-smelling, seagull-covered landscape of garbage which is home to about 3,000 people.’

The Shortwave programme in a nutshell is below – remember this festival is volunteer run and the first of its kind, and for an excellent cause, so do come along and join the cinematic greenery!

Friday 20 May

15:00 The Plan. Directors, Michael Stenberg and David Osterberg

17:30 Plastic Planet. Director Werner Boote

20:00 PlanEat. Directors, Shelley Lee Davis and Or Shlomi

22:30 The Day of the Triffids. Director, Steve Sekely

Saturday 21 May

11:00 Wall:E. Director, Andrew Stanton

15:00 Vanishing of the Bees. Director, George Langworthy

17:30 End of the Line. Director Rupert Murray

20:00 The Pipe. Director Richie O’Donnel

22.15 Into Eternity. Director Michael Madsen

Sunday 22 May

15:00 Breaking Away. Director, Peter Yates

17:30 Gasland. Director, Josh Fox

20:00 Wasteland. Directors, Lucy Walker, Karen Harley and Joao Jardim

Waste Land (2010), dir. Lucy Walker

At 9pm in the cinema bar we will have Triffid face-painting by Muna of Artistic Strokes, a huge Triffid cake designed by Cakes & Crunk, and bright green cocktails made by yours truly. You can have one for free if you come in a good eco-horror costume, so don’t forget the green paint.

Not only that, we’ll also have (real) carnivorous plants taking over the bar for the night, from Essex Carnivorous Plants, one of which is pictured below. We’ve been trying to feed them flies all afternoon. And we learned all sorts of things from the man we got them from, including that one of them is so terrifyingly evil it once had a small bird stuck in it. A wren. Which had to be rescued.

Plus we’ll have some rare images on display which were very kindly sent from the John Wyndham archive in Liverpool, and include some nasty botanical illustrations and the international book covers for Triffids, like the one above. Finally, screening at 10.30pm is Steve Sekely’s The Day of the Triffids (1962), the original film adaptation of Wyndham’s sci-fi horror.

This is the first night of the very first UK Green Film Festival, which is all Friday and weekend at Shortwave, and it’s all volunteer run, so come along and make a fuss about it. We even got mentions in the Guardian and the Independent. It’s going to be blooming (hur hur) brilliant.

If you come along to our screening of Gus Van Sant’s beautiful GERRY tomorrow night (Tuesday 17th) at the Roxy, we’ve just been given three copies of Andrew R. Friedemann’s manual ‘Navigation Anyplace Wild’ to give away (see his navigation website), so come prepared to face a survival tips quiz by Andrew!

GERRY (2002) is a daring film about a hiking misadventure which leaves Matt Damon and Casey Affleck dehydrated and wandering in the American desert. With improvised dialogue, a minimalist soundtrack by Arvo Pärt, and plenty of long shots of grand, bleak landscapes. See trailer.

Liberty Rowley and Mark James will kick off the evening by talking about their collaborative project FourFeetFilms and the link it makes between walking and film-making, after which they’ll show a short film retracing the steps of the lost Syd Barrett.

A vast amount of human technology and skill was born out of the fear of being lost, and orienteering is designed to prevent this from happening. Yet it is also a great adventure to be lost, and to note this contrast we’ll have a reading from Rebecca Solnit’s ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’, given by cultural geographer Tim Cresswell. Aside from writing on film, Cresswell is the author of ‘The Tramp in America’; ‘Place: A Short Introduction’, ‘In Place / Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression’; and ‘Mobilizing Place, Placing Mobility: The Politics of Representation in a Globalized World’. His website is here.

Finally, we will give out some preliminary copies of maps created by Alec Finlay and Ken Cockburn in the process of their year-long wandering project round Scotland, the road north, which came to an end two days ago.

Uploaders of the best song to the collaborative Spotify playlist will win a golden compass, below. Best song so far is the TV theme to ‘Land of the Lost’ – can anyone come up with something better?

Finally, just in case the disastrous happens and you get lost on the way to the cinema, you might like to know that the ehow ‘How to Survive Being Lost’ page recommends that you descend as low as possible, form an X with rocks, and resist the urge to drink your urine.

7.30pm, Roxy Bar & Screen, Borough High Street, £4.