London Loves…

I've been really rubbish at seeing anything at the London Film Festival this year, but then again, I always am a bit rubbish at seeing anything at the LFF every year. The only thing I've managed to see is something I didn't need to have pre-booked tickets for: London Loves, which was screened in Trafalgar Square last Friday evening.

London Loves was a couple of hours' worth of clips from films throughout the twentieth century, with live musical accompaniment. It was pretty was good fun, as there was quite a varied selection, and it was very interesting to see the parallels between the London of then and now. Even a century on, some parts of the city are completely unchanged, which made me wonder what the people on the screen would have made of the people watching them 100 years or so later. Would they have been surprised that, although we still don't travel around in flying-cars, many of us have portable communication devices that connect instantly with people thousands of miles away without any need to go down to a public telegraph office?

There were a couple of complete, short films that I found particularly interesting, and quite touching. One was London Contrasts, a silent film about the last day of the very last horse-drawn bus, which showed scenes of the City that look exactly the same today (e.g. the view outside the Bank of England hasn't changed much, which you can make out in Malcom's picture), but which also showed other parts of London which are completely different (e.g. there's no bustling marketplace in Caledonian Park anymore). The other one was also about the last day of a type of transport, this time a paean to the final days of London's trams in the 1950s, called The Elephant Never Forgets. The filmmaker, John Krish, was there to introduce it, and mentioned that he'd made it with borrowed equipment which had caused him to lose his job, but he didn't sound particularly regretful about that. It's a wonderful little film, quintessentially English in the same way as other cinematic love-letters to London such as The London That Nobody Knows or Patrick Keiller's films; affectionate, wistful and slightly eccentric, focussing on mundanities that most people tend to ignore. It was interesting to see just how much it paralleled recent experience with the last days of the Routemaster buses a couple of years ago — there was one panning shot of the final route numbers in a tram-shed which included many of the same route numbers that were among the final Routemasters. Although the sheer numbers of people who came out to wave off the last ever London tram were absolutely staggering, seemingly comparable to a post-war Victory parade. There was nothing like that for the old Routemasters!

Speaking of The London Nobody Knows (which I may come back to at a later date), there's a free screening of it at Wilton's this Saturday, November 1st. I might go along if I'm not busy, just for an excuse to visit Wilton's again (I wrote a post about it last month).

And speaking of Routemasters, I hope Ally doesn't mind if I show off this photo of hers, 'cos I think it's fab (but I'll take it down if she does):