Each Fringe is very much of its time and place. Peer through the clouds of leafleters, and the Old and New Towns are plastered with posters for shows jumping on the bandwagon of the latest popular TV show, and headshots of the latest handsome young comedian. This keeps the crowds coming, but it’s good to be transported to somewhere different; somewhere a bit more eccentric. The Free Fringe is providing a number of those opportunities.
Max Scratchmann’s Moving Pictures (A Sideways Look At 40 Years of Eccentric Cinema) fits the bill. In the screening room at the back of The Banshee Labyrinth, the audience is far away from the crowds a few yards off on The Royal Mile. And then very far away, as Max transports his listeners from India to Dundee to Bangladesh to Surrey.
Film is the door Max uses in this spoken word show to tell stories of growing up as the son of a jute wallah in India and Bangladesh in the ’sixties, interrupted by a brief return to a Dundee where the household help to which his family has become accustomed are replaced only by grey weather and declining industry. This life, and particularly the movie theatres in the clubs for the families of the workers in the Asian jute mills, leaves a lasting impression on Max. His love of film endures, and as VHS knocks on the door Max finds himself watching silent, seven-minute black-and-white versions of Stars Wars, and attending movie nights with other aficionados in Surrey complete with intermissions and a screener’s wife acting a an usherette.
Moving Pictures is an engaging insight into the romance of celluloid, providing other fans with an opportunity to revisit its old, odd glory, and a host of quirky insights for the neophyte.
Max Scratchmann’s Moving Pictures is part of the Free Fringe, at The Banshee Labyrinth, 14:20, Aug 24.
Submitted by Ricky Brown
