THEATRE/FILM
Super Night Shot
The Arches, Glasgow
THERE’S a strange tension built into Anglo-german theatre group Gob Squad’s long-running instant cinema project. Having taken to the streets of whichever city they’re mounting their prowhat duction in an hour before screening the end results, the four-person team conclude the shoot by filming themselves re-entering the venue while the waiting audience cheer them on like conquering heroes. It guarantees their single-shot film – shown on four adjacent screens with a live sound mix (a concept borrowed from Mike Figgis’s Timecode) – has a triumphant final scene. Sadly, however, Super Night Shot’s first Scottish outing – which took three attempts to get working – wasn’t especially deserving of the preemptive whoops.
Brought to Glasgow by The National Theatre of Scotland, sounded in theory like a unique blend of theatre and film played out more like a pleased-with-itself theatre troupe’s outdated idea of cutting-edge cinema. At its best, it served up a few accidentally beautiful shots of the city.
At its worst, it revealed Gob Squad to be thoroughly illequipped to react to anything genuinely serious – as happened when two of the cast separately skipped past an ambulance crew attending what looked like a body lying on the street: a grim irony given they were making a superhero film.
True, sections of the capacity crowd did cheer throughout, but in a city that provided Under the Skin with a memorable backdrop for Scarlett Johansson to target unsuspecting members of the public, Super Night Shot felt like it had passed its sell-by-date.