Film buffs step back in Tyne
BY
AN audience will be able to explore its taste in movies in a film festival’s smell-o-vision experiment.
Two chocolate-themed movies will be screened on Wednesday as part of the Whitley Bay Film Festival.
At key moments in the films, aromas linked to what is happening on screen will be released, including those of chocolate.
Because of the power of smell, the audience will feel more closely involved in the films, says Newcastle University social scientist Dr Duika Burges Watson, who is staging the event with chef Sam Storey at St Mary’s lighthouse.
On Wednesday, Like Water for Chocolate will be shown at 6.30pm and Chocolat at 9pm.
Duika’s research involves the fields of smell and taste and their roles in the enjoyment of food.
Her colleague Sam was shortlisted recently for a BBC Food and Farming award for Cook of the Year for his work in helping patients recover the pleasure of eating.
Sam is the in-house chef for a Newcastle and Northumbria universities co-led “altered eating” research project, which looks to address long-term eating difficulties.
Over the past five years Sam has been involved in “food play” workshops for survivors of head and neck cancer.
Along with a team of researchers, he has spent hours in a community kitchen experimenting with everything from curry to chocolate mousse, with the aim of bringing back the lost pleasures of food and eating together.
The workshops and research have generated a menu of interventions to address eating disruption, such as smell and taste training, cooking workshops, coping tips and hints.
The research team believe that these approaches could be applied to a wide range of conditions where altered eating is a concern, such as Parkinson’s disease and cancers of the digestive tract.
Duika said of the film event: “It will demonstrate the importance of od the sensory experience of food. Smell is linked to the emotional part of the brain.
“The power of smell is shown in the ability of some smells to transport people back to incidents in childhood.
“For people who have lost the sense of smell, everything can taste bland and they lose the joy of food.” SCREEN historian Chris Phipps believes he has finally solved a mystery behind the first major feature film to be made on Tyneside.
On the Night of the Fire was shot 80 years ago at a time when location filming was almost unheard of, as industry budgets were low and because of problems with early sound technology.
It had puzzled Chris, author of the book Forget Carter – The Definitive History of North East Films – why then rising star Ralph Richardson and the movie crew travelled to Newcastle in 1938 to make On the Night of the Fire.
There will be a rare chance to see the results of their efforts when the full film – regarded as the first British Film Noir – is screened tomor- row as part of the Whitley Bay Film Festival.
The event at 8pm at St Mary’s lighthouse will include an introduction from Chris, who lives in Washington.
Chris said: “It has always fascinated me and been something of a mystery why, when film industry budgets were very low and sound recording was in its infancy and dodgy, they decided to go on location to Newcastle when using a studio in London would have been far more convenient.”
Then Chris discovered that the grandparents of leading man Ralph Richardson – later knighted and one of the greatest actors of his generation – lived in Newcastle. His grandfather, John, owned a tannery and when his grandmother died, she left Ralph a legacy which financed his drama schooling. “Ralph would have visited his grandparents in Newcastle and would have had memories of the place,” said Chris. He believes that when director Brian Desmond Hirst and the crew discussed how to set the film in a bustling city, Ralph would have suggested Newcastle. “Ralph was a powerful figure and his views would have had some clout,” said Chris. He plays a struggling Tyneside barber whose shop is in the Quayside area. One evening, on impulse, he steals £100 from a local factory where a window has been accidentally left open – with terrible consequences. The film opens with Ralph looking down the Tyne from the area of the Swing Bridge, and ends on steps running down to the river near the High Level Bridge. There are also major scenes shot under the Ouseburn viaduct and the Quayside Sunday market, while scenes set in the barber shop, which had to be shot in studio, use a backdrop based on the area around the bottom of Dean Street.