Beyond The Multiplex

Tilda Swinton in I am Love

Wild-eyed and desperate, Toshirô Mifune scuttles along the balustrade of his wooden castle. Arrows pierce him like a pin cushion. One skewers him through the neck. He staggers forward, and dies. That’s one of my younger son’s favourite film scenes. He’s 8½ years old. Throne Of Blood, Akira Kurosawa’s samurai version of Macbeth, isn’t what you’d consider a children’s film. But if you show it to kids, they love it. No matter that it’s in black and white and Japanese. It has spooky spirits, a grand castle, a very creepy villainess, warriors in fabulous armour, and that hilariously gruesome death.

Young children have a more catholic taste in movies than we give them credit for. Given the chance, before their preferences get hardened by teenage cynicism, the little tykes will happily sample all sorts of strange and exotic dishes, even if you have to sit with them and whisper the subtitles. But that’s a chance we don’t normally give them. As we gather in Cannes to indulge ourselves in another spicy feast of global filmmaking, back home the next generation is being weaned almost exclusively on a diet of fast food, and educated to regard anything else as unpalatable and indigestible. They grow up knowing only the addictive flavour of the Hollywood blockbuster, with its facile emotional beats, its Happy Meal tie-ins and its cynical appropriation of whatever it can steal from global culture to serve one overriding goal – making money out of our kids.

Thank heavens, then, for Tilda Swinton and Mark Cousins. This quixotic couple – she an Oscar-winning actress, he a writer and filmmaker – are determined to challenge Hollywood’s iron grip over the imaginations of our children. Their 8 ½ Foundation is dedicated to helping kids discover the magical and joyful realm of world cinema that lies beyond the multiplex.

It’s a revolution that’s starting in Scotland, where they both live. But it has the makings of a worldwide movement, a grassroots campaign for real cinema, with influential support from the likes of Jane Campion and Martin Scorsese.

Eight-and-a-half is the age when Swinton and Cousins both fell in love with movies for the first time. So their idea is to create a new birthday for kids – their “film birthday” – on the day they turn 8½. The foundation will send each child a present, a DVD picked by the kids themselves from a selection on the charity’s website, along with a party kit to turn the screening into a homemade special event, and to welcome them into what Swinton calls “the blessed State of Cinema”.

Tilda Swinton and the Eight-and-a-half Foundation

It could be Mon Oncle from France, Bag of Rice from Iran, The Singing Ringing Tree from the former East Germany, The Steamroller and The Violin from Russia, Palle Alone In The World from Denmark, The King of Masks from China or Paddle To The Sea from Canada.

Swinton and Cousins want to encourage mothers and fathers, godparents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and friends to add their own gift of films that are special to them. Drawing on the deep curatorial knowledge and passion of both Cousins and Swinton, the 8½ Foundation will provide parents and teachers with a map to guide children on a voyage of cinematic exploration and adventure.

After piloting the project last year in Nairn, where Swinton lives, to enormous local enthusiasm, Swinton and Cousins will roll it out across 10 more locations in Scotland over the next two years. Funding will come partly from the Scottish Arts Council, partly from private donations and any industry backers who can be persuaded to lend their support.

What’s so refreshing is that 8½ offers a positive vision to counter the negativity that usually dominates the debate over children and cinema. Instead of seeing film principally as a threat from which kids must be protected by age-restrictive ratings, it embraces the humanistic power of the medium to enrich and liberate young minds, to expand their horizons, to show them worlds far beyond their ken.

Swinton expressed these thoughts four years ago in a speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival, delivered in the form of an open letter to her own son – then 8½ years old. She described cinema as “that place where anything you can imagine is mirrored, where nothing is real and everything is really possible… a broad, a catholic old church that repels no borders, knows no limits… tells you stories with unexpected endings and shows you landscapes and conversations and gestures and pictures that open your mouth and your imagination and let you know that your wildest dreams are met… Like all great states, it is a state of mind, borderless and with no policy of exclusion or deportation.”

She found a soulmate in Cousins, who previously ran the Edinburgh Film Festival, and wrote a seminal book on world cinema, which he’s now turning into a Channel 4 TV series. He recently travelled to a village in northern Iraq that was gassed by Saddam Hussein, to show the kids there films such as ET and The Red Balloon, to record their responses and to give them digital cameras to make their own little films. The result is a heartfelt documentary called The First Movie, which draws parallels with his own “tenderising” experiences growing up in Belfast during the Troubles and finding refuge in movies.

Tilda Swinton and the Eight-and-a-half Foundation

“We’re not against American cinema, just unimaginative cinema,” says Cousins. “We are for off-their-head, boingy films that stretch kids’ imaginations and feel like a tumble down into wonderland – Cocteau’s surrealism, the colours of Curtiz’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, the pantomime of Tati, the soul of Mambéty’s La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil, the dancy films of Norman McLaren, the belonging in the films of Iran’s Talebi.”

My sons first saw Throne Of Blood last summer in a mobile cinema parked near Cawdor Castle (Macbeth, get it?), as part of the inspirational Pilgrimage film festival organised by Swinton and Cousins. For five days, they led a merry band of 40 film fans pulling the Screen Machine – a 30-ton truck that opens out to become a movie theatre – by hand and rope across the Scottish Highlands and along the shores of Loch Ness, stopping in remote villages to show three films a day.

The films ranged from Busby Berkeley’s frothy Footlight Parade to Robert Bresson’s austere Au Hasard Balthazar, from Charles Laughton’s unsettling The Night Of The Hunter to my own personal all-time favourite, Powell & Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale. The programme wasn’t tailored for children, but the spirit was childlike and celebratory, with music and dancing in the aisles before each screening.

So the 8½ Foundation is about much more than just film birthdays, and it isn’t just about kids. It’s about unleashing the 8½ year old within us all, about rediscovering that sense of wonder and freedom that we first experienced as children in the darkness of the movie theatre. Above all, it’s about fighting for the future of the art form we love.

Tags: 8½ Foundation, Mark Cousins, Robin Hood, The Night Of The Hunter, Tilda Swinton

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