Talk:Andrea Arnold

Birth info

An anonymous user, claiming to be a relative of Arnold, keeps changing her birth year from the grenerally accepted 1961 to 1968, and her birth place from Dartford to Erith. Firstly, it is not possible that Arnold was born in 1968. This would make her 13 when she first appeared in No. 73. If you watch early clips of the show on YouTube, she was clearly a full grown adult. Arnold herself has stated in press interviews that she left school in the late 70s and got her first TV jobs as a dancer at 18. This would fit in with the 1961 date. I can find no reliable source for the Erith birthplace, with Dartford being cited in press interviews and articles on Arnold. Crisso (talk) 00:06, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

General Notes

While the article in itself is educational and gives a good overview of Andrea Arnold the filmmaker, it lacks personal facts about her. This would be interesting in so far that the reader could then see how the personal experience of the filmmaker influences her work. After all in the section "Early Life" it states that Andrea Arnold's personal life influenced her short "Wasp".

However when I tried following the citation to the article linked to this quote, I could not find the quote. If we are going to directly quote a filmmaker then it should be certain that these are exactly their words! I am critical about some of the sources only in so far that they are press releases and therefore may not be categorized as neutral. It is uncertain whether some sources, such as one linking to a release date, can be categorized as neutral when it is unclear whether or not the studios funding Andrea Arnold's movies are the ones commissioning the press releases.

Lastly the wording and grammar of this article are at time lack luster and should be revised in my opinion.

JustusWrede (talk) 17:09, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Andrea Arnold, Defiant British Wonan Filmmaker

NEWS DETAILS- Guest Column BACK TO HOME

Andrea Arnold: Defiant British Director Pradip Biswas , 18-MAY-12

“I wish cinema could be braver” Andrea Arnold Pradip Biswas, a stalwart film scholar and a heavy voice of serious cinema, akin to life in ordeals, takes an unflinching peep into Women Directors and their films as they stand out in Britain of now. Thanks to International Film Festivals held in India, two of Andrea Arnold’s films, winner of Cannes awards, could be seen and evaluated with a degree of appreciation, a rarity indeed. Andrea Arnold’, the new woman director from Britain, seems to have triumphed at home and abroad with her gripping films made with minimal exposure, a trait unfound in the recent British cinema The moment the neophyte director Andrea Arnold sets foot on foreign soil, mainland Europe in particular, she finds herself highly acclaimed as a film-maker of international stature. Two of feature-length films, Red Road (2006) and Fish Tank, were legitimately offered berth into competition for the Palme d’Or in Cannes in the recent past that bagged the Jury prize for her. Incidentally, her short film Wasp (2003) won her an Oscar and rightly so for its innovative structure and non-formulaic pattern. It is followed by a string of successes at international film festivals of the world. But as soon as she returns to her native Britain, she falls victim to a vicious distribution system ruling British cinema today. The reason being the very needed exposure has not hailed her to the extent possible. No doubt, her films, more seen abroad, than the native country of Ms Arnold. It is indeed an irony of grotesque nature. Andrea Arnold is one of the most exciting British directors currently making films and she is set to have her new film Wuthering Heights screened at the BFI London Film Festival. Tally of women filmmakers in Britain is rather quite low. Along with spread of film culture in Britain, we find a frail growth of women directors. Those are on view include Sam Taylor-Wood with Nowhere Boy, Lone Scherfig with An Education, Andrea Arnold with Fish Tank., Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion, both trailing Oscar buzz for The Hurt Locker and Bright Star respectively. It must be said Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion are not surely the product of British cinema though they often interchange their minds and mode of filmmaking. Like Red Road, Fish Tank narrates the story of Mia (Katie Jarvis), a troubled girl of 15 on an Essex council estate, who embarks on a doomed relationship with her mother’s boyfriend (Michael Fassbender) but will not trouble the upper reaches of Britain’s box-office charts. The film is said to have opened on just 45-50 screens. Unfortunately, it ran only briefly at most of these venues. However, they have not gone unsung as the marginal viewers of Britain left theatres fully satisfied as it tells of their life. One doubts if Andrea Arnold has felt like a prophet without honour in her own country!! Said she:“I definitely feel sorry more people don’t get to see my films. They aren’t inaccessible, and if people got the chance to see them, I know they’d like them. I wish cinema owners could be braver, or had more money to help them show films like mine.” Added to it is Sally Porter, and Ramsey Lynne, two very intelligent directors tackle cinema for creative purpose. Red Road is a 2006 British film. It tells the story of a CCTV security operator who observes through her monitors a man from her past. It is named after, and partly set at, the Red Road flats in Barmulloch,Glasgow, Scotland which were the tallest residential buildings in Europe at the time they were built[1]. It is shot largely in a Dogme 95 style, using handheld cameras and natural light devised by Lars Von Trier of Danemark.

Red Road is the first film in Advance Party, a projected trilogy following a set of rules dictating how the films will be written and directed. Idea is conceived that these will all be filmed and set in Scotland, using the same characters and cast. Each film will be made by a different first-time director. The Observer, to this end, polled several filmmakers and film critics who voted it as one of the best British films in the last 25 years. It progresses thus: Jackie Morrison works as a CCTV operator for Glasgow City Council. She watches over a small part of the world and takes her duties to protect people seriously. In the film, she is presented as a person who observes parts of Glasgow through the CCTV lenses, but rarely participates in this world. She lives somewhat of an isolated existence. She is there and not there, an oxymoron of sorts. One day a man appears in her monitors, a man she thought she would never see again. Now that the opportunity presents itself, she is compelled to confront him. She becomes obsessed with following this man, both in real life and on the CCTV. Jackie attends a party at the man's flat on Red Road with a view to finding out more about him. The tension builds as it is not revealed immediately in the film as to why she is so obsessed with the man. The audience receives very little information as to why Jackie chooses to pursue this person with such determination.

Fish Tank, like Red Road before it, is the work of a film-maker who doesn’t pander to audiences seeking escapism. The film is made in the fashion of Free Cinema in Britain started by Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, and Karel Reisz in the 50s. Thus what we see is that the lives it depicts are as grim as the surrounding gloomy landscape, grey, grimy and restricted. There is no darkling thrush like that of Hardy. As for obstreperous Mia and her self-absorbed mother (Kierston Wareing), their profanity alone sets them apart from polite society. Arnold has argued: “I get frustrated because I feel it’s more complex than that. I got asked in Cannes a lot about bleak housing estates, by people, film journalists, who probably have quite privileged lives – nice houses, decent holidays and according to David Gritten, the British critic, Andrea Arnold believes: “They’re looking at characters who haven’t got a lot, are living in poverty, and it annoys them, I’m sure. They don’t want to be reminded. But I’m not trying to reflect everything about that way of life, just a few people’s lives at a particular time.” It is clear that while probing this, she, just about manages to sound good-humoured and pinching. It is said though she can be prickly – especially about the media – in person she is affable, free-mixing and down-to-earth, with a mane of reddish-blonde, below shoulder-length hair. In fact, she first turns very popular on children’s television, as a presenter of such shows as Number 73 that provides wholesome perception and enjoyment. She is said to have grown up on a council estate in Dartford, Kent. “I don’t think estates are grim places,” she says. Her life style stays with the ordinary and often emulative of reeky low-down life. Says she: “I love the communities there. People live close together. They’re connected to the world more than in some gated, isolated middle-class place. I know where I’d rather live.” While reading her mind this critic finds it has different personalities as you go along with it. Says she “There’s empty car parks near Dagenham where the Ford cars used to be, and empty factories, but there’s nature and wilderness too.” In Fish Tank she also repeats a narrative device she has employed in Red Road – finding shafts of hope in apparently irredeemable, bleak situations. Again, the sense of uplift seems so subtle it’s easy to overlook. “It’s a very small way of saying life goes on,” she explains. She is pleased that Jarvis, a first-time actress, has survived the Fish Tank experience – though when it was shown in Cannes, Jarvis could not attend, having only recently given birth to her first baby. The amazing part of it is despite having no acting experience she auditioned and landed the role of Mia. Not only she passes through crucible with ease but also set her goal in the process. Incidentally, she was worried after Cannes, because there was so much talk about her. But now she’s doing interviews, getting auditions and offers to go to festivals. Now she seems to have attained new vista of life. Arnold speaks as one who’s in it for the long run herself. She is now mulling over three possible ideas for her third feature, and has “offers of money”. By instinct she works on tight budgets and her films are reflective of measured costing configuration. Her debut film Red Road cost £1million, but the Fish Tank is twice that amount. She weeps her side if films suck blood. This is why she retorts: “To me, £2million seems like an awful lot of money”. But it’s how she modulates it. Instead of having a sizeable crew and shooting for a few weeks, she pegs herself down to having the smallest crew possible and shooting for three or four months at best. According to her that’s what Terrence Malick did with Badlands.” Just as Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. The thumb-line for her is: “As long as you keep your budgets small, there’s a way of making films.”

On studying her films, this critic finds her particular passion for car chase, the reason best known to her. May I remind cine-buffs that the critic’s task is not to fill the work in; it is to seek out the principle of its conflicts of meanings, and to show how this conflict is produced by the work’s association to ideology. In instant case, there lies thin fluff, a lacuna. It is said every time Andrea Arnold sees a film with a car chase, she always wants to fast forward the car chase. This partly inclination as we find in her may not always go in favour of the director. More so when she makes herself the protégé of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. It is apparently an anathema. It shows somehow she is a bit obsessed with this aspect of traditional thriller model. It's not a shocking answer from an average maker of low-budget British dramas, but Arnold has created enough tension in her two features to make anyone but Hitchcock jealous. With its focus on a closed-circuit-camera watcher stalking a mysterious man, her first full-length film, Red Road, is unsettling and surprising, and it took home the Cannes Jury Prize for all the discomfort it brought to the audience. Her second film, Fish Tank, centers on aspiring dancer Mia and her uncomfortable relationship with her mother's boyfriend, Connor (Michael Fassbender, Hunger). Last month, the British Independent Film Awards gave her their paperweight for Best Director for the film, and IFC puts it out in limited release, starting this Friday. After The Playlist named her one of the seven directors to break through in 2009,people were excited to sit down with the filmmaker to discuss her latest festival favorite, which we'll review later this week. Red Road and Fish Tank are deemed as experiments in discomfort, so it's not surprising that Andrea Arnold mentions Michael Haneke as one of her favorite filmmakers. However, she doesn't necessarily try to create tension in her films. "I guess the one thing that I could think of is that I'm telling it from one person's point of view," she explains. She thinks that can be quite an intense experience because you're always going with them and seeing the world through their eyes and experiencing things as they experience them. When she wrote Red Road, and she gave it to someone to read first of all. They considered “it's a thriller”. But she cuts across such fixation saying it's not really so. For she does not think it's really a thriller....It doesn't occur to her. She just tries and sketchs the characters and their journey as truthfully as she feels it." Andrea Arnold also names David Lynch, Terrence Malick, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne as favorites, and it's not hard to see the touches of those artists in her work. The filmmakers who direct their own scripts draw most of her adoration, and she raves about Jacques Audiard's Un Prophete, her top film of last year. But it's Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky that seems to earn most of her praise. "I know he's not everyone's cup of tea, but I love him," she admits. It is a bit surprising to note that she does not know what it is he does, but she has really emotional responses to his films. Mysteriously they leave a magnetic pull on you. In Britain there was obstreperous debate as to why some people might recoil at the thought of another British film set on a council estate. Is it worthy? Condescending? Grim? Ideal? In fact, in my search, I find that most of the people with orthodox taste stupidly see more evidence of a young filmmaker awkwardly following the genres created by Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. More often they move to call it fetishes, though they are not. In the backdrop of such fear Red Road is a film that brilliantly and sensitively pulsates with life and offers its very own take on our world and our city. It delivers in spades “attitude, humour, sadness, love, anger and hope”– all wrapped up in a way of telling stories that is very much the director’s own. In other words it’s realism, but it has an intimacy, an immediacy and a dash of poetry that offers a new power and vision on familiar territory. She has a keen eye for the border between danger and fulfilment when it comes to sexual feelings, and here she trains that eye on one vulnerable but strong adolescent teenage girl, Mia (Katie Jarvis), who you can’t help but feel for drawn pathetically. We tend to understand – even after we watch her call a friend’s dad a ‘cunt’ and head-butt. Remorse strikes when we see blood pouring down her face. And that’s just the first five minutes. We are given the impression that Mia lives in a flat in Essex, near the Thames estuary, with her mum Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and her little sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffith). Correspondence of jabs are there when Mia calls her little sis ‘fuck face’ and little sis calls her ‘cunt face’ back. The TV blares out reality shows and makeover programmes. Outside, director’s camera clocks the territory on which she films; flats, busy roads, flyovers, scraps of land and suburban shop parades being woven in a way that lends a strong sense of place without any sense of gawking or romanticizing. This is Mia’s world, murky, shady, remorse-full. In a spin, it can sometimes look ugly, sometimes beautiful. Andrea Arnold’s DoP Robbie Ryan shoot in the unusual 1.33:1 aspect ratio, so the screen is almost square Against this her next film Fish Tank feels more like a series of personal Polaroids than TV, the glare of the sun often dancing across the lens in the manner of home snapshots. Truly, the way she weaves her fabric with a thin plot, nothing about all this feels miserable in sight or feel. May I say that Arnold tells her tale at the height of summer so that the sun is always shining with eloquent heat. It also spots queer way of presenting Mia to viewers so as to stay close to her at all times, to show us her world from her point of view. Crucially, we’re there, alone with Mia, when she regularly decamps to an empty flat and practices her hip hop dance moves. We know there’s more to Mia than antagonism and knee-jerk violence and we’re curious about what’s going on in this girl’s head. That violence mixed with cunning movements emanates from a source of disgust and antinomy. Andrea Arnold takes care of nets falling on her characters as rats in trap-box. We’re there, too, when her mum brings home a man, Connor, who is soon living with them, doing the washing-up with his top off and taking them for a drive. Mia’s smiles show that she likes him, while he pays her more attention than anyone else in her life, praising her dance moves, giving her a piggyback, even tucking her up in human intimacy. However, when their relationship takes unusual spin to an alarming echo, Arnold avoids obvious judgments and explanations. Hers is an intimate but remorseful drama of grey areas chasing wee characters, floating in the most humdrum ordinariness. A proletariat tale indeed! This can be said that screenwriting is a key factor for Andrea Arnold, who has been writing since she was young. Also we note here few words such as "organic" and "grow" couched in conversation, and despite having malleable outlines for her films, she allows them to develop on their own. In Red Road, a character points to his carving, and he says, “at times we feel perplexed to confront the way in very bleak way, uncomfortable for us. Out of sheer artistic passion, the director applies a similar approach to her art. "I loved that line," she says. "Well, they say that about people who do sculpture. I read somewhere that...the shape is already in the stone, you just have to find it. I love that thought, and I feel like that can be applied to anything that you make, on some level. I do think when you start writing something, I feel like it does already exist on some level and it is about finding it...I love the idea that he's trying to find it and see what it wants to be and he's allowing it to be whatever it wants to be, and he's not forcing himself on it too much." This tactic makes it tough to identify exactly where her films are going, while most movies are content to make their intentions known from their first few minutes which do more than just tease. It is said she herself seems surprised by the directions her films can take, saying, "I will write out a sort of outline, a rough idea, but that's not set in tone at all, it's just a guide to help her start with. Her perception of placing characters reflects how it will always change once you get all the characters moving and walking about, it changes as you start following them around. This is her special facet, not seen so much in works of her contemporary directors. Similarly, the two main characters in Fish Tank are brought alive by actors at very quixotic points in their careers. Though she has cast Fassbinder as Connor before seeing his gripping performance in Hunger, the actor has since been cast in the acclaimed Inglourious Bastards and the upcoming Jonah Hex. Interestingly, young Jarvis was discovered at a train station while fighting with her boyfriend. Said she: "I knew it was going to be an interesting process because I had somebody who had absolutely no experience, and people who were very experienced," The way her films are made and shown it is clear that her characters and strong performances undeniably drive her films and music plays an essential part as well. However, this critic feels instead of making music a prop, the aspect of musicality is to be brought in to save a film from being chaotic. Says she: "I worked really hard on the music. The music...is like a character, and it's very much part of the story. And then it's storytelling, music, on some level." Fish Tank doesn't have a predictable soundtrack for an indie British film and this striking. All the music is diegetic so to say. Fish Tank is set in a bleak stretch of Essex, near Tilbury, where even the roadside vegetation has a wizened, bleak look. The protagonist is 15-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis), the kind of girl who's more usually a statistic than a person who art-film audiences get to know in any depth. She's the scowling hoodie on the corner, an embodiment of the tabloids' "broken Britain". We think we have her measure at the start when Mia strides angrily towards a gang of her peers practising a sullen girl-group dance routine, and head-butts one of them. Then she slopes off back to the council flat where her mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing) – more like a foul-tempered, abusive big sister – spits invective at her. It's a horrible, sour, piss-off world that Arnold paints. Officially a social problem, Mia is destined for a pupil referral unit where she will be off her mother's hands. A loner, Mia is only at ease in an abandoned flat practicing solo dance moves. Framing the film in a cramped, nearly square ratio, she evokes the claustrophobia of Mia's world, show how her natural energies are boxed in, urging to burst as she dances with angry, muscular intensity. I feel raising an issue about commitment that may have possessed the director. Commitment is more than just a matter of presenting correct political opinions in one’s art; it reveals, says Terry Eagleton, itself in how far the artist reconstructs the artistic forms at his/her disposal, turning authors, artists, spectators into collaboratots. Before I end, I need to signify one thing. This is about receptions of her films in Europe where British films make very little impact of now. To this Andrea Arnold has to admit: “I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t know what my films are more successful in Europe, but Fish Tank was third at the box office in France. In France they really care about film and they grow up, I think, with a big film culture. I think partly because we speak English we get lots of Hollywood films so our film culture has been very much swayed by them, and I think once you start feeding everyone Hollywood films that’s all they expect and come to know. Where as I think if people were to seek out some more challenging films, more European films, like those by the Dardenne brothers or Lars von Trier, I think people would love those films.” Search Site:

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