The ‘London Lives’ London Short Film Festival programme establishes a reality that long-time Londoners and visitors alike will recognise; that for a city of almost nine million, London can feel a lot smaller than it is. The city is always watching; its citizens always reacting, in some fashion, to its gaze. Whether this ought to be regarded as intimacy or intrusion is a matter of perspective, but there’s little doubt that London’s very physical construction encourages a sense of immediacy within a vast space. It’s a remarkable walkable city, diced by roads and canals that form concrete-lined arteries, connecting near to far. At the turn of a street corner, space can appear to spontaneously contract.
It’s with this lived knowledge that the first film in the programme, ‘Wanted’, feels so familiar. The narrative is frenetic, shot on a Bolex film camera and blended with quick-flash animated frames, depicting a boy racing across London with a mysterious backpack full of cash. Omnipresent security cameras - London is one of the most surveilled cities in the world - appear to bore into his neck, contributing to the tension. Why he runs, and where from the cash, isn’t quite clear, although that he’s being pressured by something, even if only the urgency of his own mission, or the desire to escape being watched, elicits sympathy. When he at last arrives at his destination, a homely photography studio, the sense of resolution is palpable, a relief and a joy.
Throughout ‘Wanted’, as the protagonist rushes, he has fleeting encounters with young creatives of different stripes, each on individual journeys. In one such encounter, a photographer watches his hurry from a bus, fascinated, and takes a snap. This moment is most certainly presented as a more benign instance of interpersonal surveillance, but is nonetheless another demonstration of the human and digital gazes that compress Londoners’ lives. The short drama ‘Blackout’ can be understood as expanding on the implications of intruding on another’s personal space within the city’s defined, concrete structures. In the film, Reuben lives on the upper levels of a tower block, and after hearing potentially violent noises from his neighbours’ flat, can’t help but eavesdrop. He goes as far as entering their unlocked front door in one particularly tense scene, only to find his neighbour deep asleep.
Only after Reuben is sexually assaulted by his boyfriend does he actually meet his neighbour. Both smoking on the floor’s shared balcony, he asks if she’s okay, only for that question to be repeated back at him, implicitly referencing their mutual experience of domestic violence. A wide shot of Reuben’s profile set against London’s vast skyline underscores his isolation, although the aforementioned conversation leaves open the possibility of a future bond between the neighbours. In ‘Blackout’, as in reality, a sense of community within as dense an urban environment as a tower block isn't given by virtue of proximity alone. Rather, life within the tower block can often remain confined to collection of atomised home units, absent a culture of neighbourliness. It’s true, that oftentimes on London’s estates and high-rises, community is a function of the solidarity of the oppressed. On a somewhat similar note, ‘Blackout’ unites neighbours within a cold space through a shared experience of trauma.
Like hearths yet to be lit, London’s inner city buildings can be generative spaces, with the potential to birth dynamic cultures of musical and somatic expression that insulate inhabitants from the city’s steely gaze. For Black Londoners in particular, disproportionately impacted by police, medical and educational surveillance, these spaces are refuges, points of connection. The computer-rendered short film ‘Continuum FM’ offers an evocative perspective on this note, documenting the history of pirate radio, how from the late 20th century through to the Noughties, illegal transmissions from tower blocks incubated the jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, garage and grime music genres, animating the city’s dancefloors. Interestingly, by juxtaposing shadowy urban images with scenes of lapping ocean waves, both this film and the tender short film ‘Oya, Dance!’ (reflecting on the Yoruba talking drum) recall Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic concept. In doing so, they represent music and dance as technologies for allowing Londoners to not only live and love within their enclosed urbanities, but to also venture outside, into the wider diasporic world.
“We will make the machines dance again”; a powerful call to action echoes at the close of ‘Continuum FM’. Arguably an acknowledgement of how restrictive urban conditions can ossify cultural expression, the statement also suggests the remedial potential for cultural technologies to promote movement and connection. With the body itself becoming a political arena under London’s racialised surveillance structures, to move is to make oneself free, whether through dance or, in the case of the short documentary ‘Old School’, a distinctly Black British bodybuilding practice. That film’s subject, retired bodybuilder and local gym proprietor Ian Dowe, recalls that he felt like a zoo creature in London during the Sixties, and consequently reflects on the liberating effects of his particular choice of somatic expression, for both his physical and spiritual selves. In one poignant moment, he shares that he’s “had friends unfortunately have died, in prison, you know, walking the street like some lunatic madman now”. London can be an unforgiving place, barren, without generative spaces for community and self-expression, like Ian’s gym.
Such is it to live in London; you have to keep moving through whatever physical and emotional terrains lie ahead, and it’s through this motion that the cityscape shrinks, bringing Londoners from disparate corners of the city into contact. However, with life’s fast pace, alongside the pressure of the city’s perpetual gaze, there remains a responsibility to take pause and really see the lives that we constantly brush up against, lest we succumb to the social isolation that London is infamous for.
There’s a point on Regent’s Canal, beyond Camden Town, passing London Zoo, towards Little Venice, where strewn furniture and litter lie beneath an underpass. Such a spot might evoke the reactionary visual imaginary of the ‘anti-social’; dirty and disregarded. It’s within a similar location, however, that the film programme's most tender scene occurs. At the close of ‘Karavidhe’, two characters, Albanian day-labourers, sit on discarded furniture beneath a canal bridge and fish for crayfish by the water’s edge, having finally found an ad hoc source of fresh food after being cheated out of their hard-earned wages. To watch ‘Karavidhe’ is to learn about migrancy and labour exploitation, and to be given the opportunity to imagine the manifold reasons why London’s marginal public spaces might become shelters for the socially-disadvantaged. The irony of diminished empathy in a city where cameras and eyes are almost always watching, is not lost.