"Losing your temper isn't going to help." "I haven't lost me temper yet!" BFI has debuted an official trailer for an indie from Cornwall, England titled Bait, a modern vintage film shot on actual 16mm stock. Written & directed by Mark Jenkin (Happy Christmas), the film takes place in a harbour village in modern times about a fisherman named Martin struggling with life weighing down on him. It was filmed on a 1976 16mm clockwork Bolex camera, using 100ft rolls of B&w Kodak stock - allowing for a maximum of 28 seconds per shot. "Shot with a single lens for a consistency of aesthetic. A total of 130 rolls or 13,000 ft of film was hand-processed using an antique Bakelite rewind tank. No two rolls come out the same." Bait stars Edward Rowe as Martin, plus Giles King, Mary Woodvine, Simon Shepherd, Isaac Woodvine, and Chloe Endean. This premiered at the Berlin Film Festival...
- 6/16/2019
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
For his debut feature, writer-director-cinematographer Mark Jenkin takes a parable about a contemporary fishing community under threat from wealthy outsiders and presents it in a style reminiscent of documentaries of the early 20th century, namely Robert J. Flaherty’s 1934 film Man of Aran. The result is titled Bait, a punky, pastoral little movie that draws from the mysticism and iconography of documentaries like Flaherty’s but with a narrative and ironic wit that is inescapably of the here and now. Put it this way: the director may have had those films in mind when he chose to shoot Bait on 16mm and have it processed by hand–for purposes of wear and tear–but perhaps less so when he wrote the scene in which a man on a stag party boards a boat dressed in a large penis costume.
It is that kind of anachronistic counterpoint that makes so much of Bait such a blast.
It is that kind of anachronistic counterpoint that makes so much of Bait such a blast.
- 2/28/2019
- by Rory O'Connor
- The Film Stage
What a difference 85 years can make. In the decades since nonfiction pioneer Robert Flaherty developed the aesthetic that is irresistibly evoked by U.K. experimental filmmaker Mark Jenkin in his 2019 feature debut, the categorization of Flaherty’s films has evolved as his fidelity to what we now accept as documentary truth has been debunked.
But today, the tension that exists in Jenkin’s hand-processed, 16mm, black-and-white “Bait” is not between real and staged — indeed, the archly antiqued technique, from the warm, scratched fuzz of the film’s surface to the beautifully creaky and ever-so-slightly out-of-sync post-dubbing of dialogue and sound effects, consistently reminds us that we’re watching fiction. Instead, the film’s crackling chiaroscuro serves to make “Bait,” which in narrative terms is slight, feel in form and presentation part of the same ongoing conflict as that which cues its story.
A tale of Cornish fishermen whose traditional livelihoods...
But today, the tension that exists in Jenkin’s hand-processed, 16mm, black-and-white “Bait” is not between real and staged — indeed, the archly antiqued technique, from the warm, scratched fuzz of the film’s surface to the beautifully creaky and ever-so-slightly out-of-sync post-dubbing of dialogue and sound effects, consistently reminds us that we’re watching fiction. Instead, the film’s crackling chiaroscuro serves to make “Bait,” which in narrative terms is slight, feel in form and presentation part of the same ongoing conflict as that which cues its story.
A tale of Cornish fishermen whose traditional livelihoods...
- 2/28/2019
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
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