Cucalorus Dispatch #4 Revolves Around Movies About Movies: SCALA!!! and Kim's Video

SCALA!!!
(Ali Catterall and Jane Giles, UK, 2023, 96 minutes)

It's unlikely I'll see a better documentary this year than Ali Catterall and Jane Giles's SCALA!!! (love those three exclamation points), an artful, no-holds-barred look at the celebrated London movie palace that existed under various names and permutations for hundreds of years. Against all odds: it's still standing.

Giles, a former programmer was at the screening with former theater worker Vic Roberts--who now lives in Wilmington--had previously compiled a large-format Scala Cinema Book for FAB Press, so she was well positioned to segue to a documentary about a subject she loves dearly.  

Through present-day interviews, archival footage, and an abundance of fair-use film clips, Catterall and Giles recount the history of the place, including the first UK appearances from proto-punk legends Lou Reed and Iggy and the Stooges, while concentrating specifically on the years 1978-1993 (a plaque now commemorates the historic 1972 concerts). 

During that time, Scala was as much of a haunt for aspiring filmmakers, like Isaac Julien and Mary Harron, as musicians, like Douglas Hart (Jesus and Mary Chain) and Barry Adamson (Magazine, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), who composed the finger-snapping, Elmer Bernstein-inspired score (at the screening, Jane noted that it will be coming out in some form, possibly on Mute Records). Editor and producer Andrew Starke also deserves credit for marshaling the material in such a clever, fast-moving manner.

SCALA!! is currently making the festival rounds while Catterall and Giles work out the distribution situation. To judge by the reaction of the capacity crowd at Jengo's Playhouse, the documentary will be making a lot more enthusiastic fans in the future, and maybe it will even inspire more theater owners, like the fine folks at Seattle's Beacon Cinema, to throw caution to the wind when it comes to film (and other kinds of) programming.

KIM'S VIDEO
(David Redmond and Ashley Sabin, USA, 2023, 85 minutes)

Unlike some of the other documentaries I've seen at Cucalorus, especially Georden West's beautifully burnished Playland, Kim's Video is not a pretty film, but as much as I love a handsomely-shot or creatively-constructed work of non-fiction, a case can be made for those films in which the storytelling--and the sheer fearlessness it takes to tell the story--reigns above all. That film is David Redmond and Ashley Sabin's Kim's Video.

I would imagine that these experienced documentarians (Intimidad, Girl Model) didn't have the budget for a cinematographer, because aside from co-directing, David--who has a very pleasant voice--narrated and shot the film. 

I couldn't say what kind of camera he used, but the images have  a consumer-grade look, like the camera work in The Blair Witch Project or Ti West's Trigger Man, after which Ti turned to professional DPs. For what its worth, the imagery isn't as wobbly as either of those films. 

It's also possible that the filmmakers simply wanted to be as nimble as possible, since David had to travel from New York, where Youngman Kim once owned several popular video stores, to New Jersey and South Korea, where he maintains homes, and remote Salemi, Sicily, where the entire collection ended up after Kim's went out of business (Karina Longworth previously recounted the labyrinthian journey for LA Weekly in 2012).

So, the storytelling is the thing, and David is relentless in trying to establish the links between "Centro Kim," as the collection was known in Salemi, and the various mobsters and politicians who took it up as a cause, while also ensuring that nothing was ever digitized and that the thousands of films, in whatever form, were never properly shielded from the elements or made available to the public as promised.

There's a happy ending, and David helped to make it happen. When a filmmaker inserts themselves into a story, bad things can happen, but just as Jane Giles's passion fueled the Scala book and documentary, David Redmond's passion for Kim's Video inspired him to go above and beyond mere image-making. Maybe someday he and Ashley will again make a film that looks better than this one, but their storytelling is hard to beat.  

There are no more screenings of SCALA!!! or Kim's Video. Images: Alan Delaney / Screen Daily (Scala), Mick Rock / Happy Mag (David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop), James and Karla Murray Photography (Kim's Video), and The New York Post (Youngman Kim in one of his stores).