Partycrashers is an on-going series of video dispatches from critics Michael Pattison and Neil Young.
They won’t all be like this. Responding, after our inaugural dispatch, to the international vlogger community’s insistently histrionic cries that we get ourselves a cameraman, Neil acquired the skills of a friend’s friend who was also in town for the 16th edition of New Horizons, in Wrocław, Poland. We won’t always, it should be noted, have the luxury of such handy professional contacts. The location for this conversation was the roof of Wrocław’s Monopol Hotel, from which could be seen, not far away, a yellow Liebherr crane. Knowing the company has a branch in Sunderland, Neil speculated with much optimism that the crane might be from there—like him.
Due to a technical mishap beyond our control, the published video concludes ten minutes sooner than the real-life conversation did. We have, though, an exchange covering Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin, Miguel Gomes’s Arabian Nights, Peter Tscherkassky’s The Exquisite Corpus and New Horizons’ focus this year on Lithuanian cinema. What we don’t have are closing thoughts from Neil on Grzegorz Królikiewicz’s Neighbors—his find of the week—and from me on communism and the meaning of life. As regards the latter, such omissions are perhaps for the better. Every cloud. —Michael Pattison
ADDENDUM 24 August 2015: Researchers sifting through the riches of our Partycrashers Archives have found a whole twelve minutes of extra footage, now tactfully added to end of the original 30-minute video. There’s a slight jump-cut where the edit takes place—less a nouvelle vague homage than an apparently unavoidable, half-a-second gap due to the way in which industry-standard cameras record and handle long takes these days.
Partycrashers is an on-going feature by critics Michael Pattison and Neil Young of video dispatches from various international film festivals.