Taking the experimental route

Desperate Optimists may have given up the shock tactics, but they have kept the innovation in their film-making, writes Donald Clarke

In 2004, the prize for best British short film at the Edinburgh Film Festival was presented to Who Killed Brown Owl, a fiendishly ingenious exercise in pastoral absurdity by Desperate Optimists. Christine Molloy, who, with her husband, Joe Lawlor, makes up that artistic partnership, remembers the aftermath with some amusement.

"I was looking at this website called Shooting People, which is aimed at helping people in independent film," she says. "There were all these people who had gone through the usual route - going to film school, making a video and so on - and here we were just making a funny film and we'd won this award. Suddenly this question was being asked on the site: who the hell are Desperate Optimists?"

Anybody lurking round the western end of Temple Bar this weekend might ask themselves the same question. The Irish Film Institute is presenting a season of films programmed by the Optimists entitled The Theatricality of Cinema. At the heart of the event, commissioned by Project Arts Centre, the company has inserted a suite of its own short pictures named Civic Lives. Beginning with Brown Owl, this nest of busy, witty vignettes, each apparently comprising just one 35mm take, travels across urban areas of Britain and Ireland - Ballymun, Tyneside, West Bromwich - in search of striking vistas and unusual stories.

So Desperate Optimists is a coalition of film-makers? Well, yes. But the story is a little more complicated than that. When, back in 1992, the couple formed themselves into a company, Lawlor and Molloy, both born and raised in Finglas, saw themselves as a mix of theatrical terrorists and community activists. That makes them sound rather scary, but they are, in fact, gentle, chatty folk, articulate without being pretentious.

I first saw them working with any number of media at the Project in 1996. That show, Dedicated, ended with them mailing a record of the evening to various prominent organisations. One particular missive to the Brown Thomas department store was regarded as sufficiently suspicious for the Project's then director, Fiach Mac Conghail, to be hauled before the Garda. Thankfully, the future head of the Abbey escaped the slammer.

"We were easily the toughest in that particular scene," Joe Lawlor says. "We were the SAS of that scene. We were quite unfriendly towards our audience. I remember Fiach brought a show over to Project and he was literally attacked in the Clarence Hotel afterwards. People were insulted by it. Mind you, there was nothing unique about Dublin. We were hated in all kinds of places."

A DECADE BEFORE the Brown Thomas incident, Lawlor was harbouring ambitions to be a musician. The future Optimists grew up within a few streets of one another, but did not formally meet until the 20-year-old Joe went out on a date with the 18-year-old Christine's best friend. At the time Lawlor, like everyone else, was in a rock band. "The laziest band in the world," he says. When the date didn't work out, Joe invited Christine to see the group play in his back garden and they have been together ever since.

There were a few up-sides to the depressed economic climate of the 1980s. Creative unemployed youths, gifted endless free time, uninhibited by any great expectations, were able to devote hours to artistic experimentation.

"Nobody went to university in any serious numbers then," Molloy says. "I mean, if we had got into university we wouldn't have been able to afford it. But there was a lot of energy about then. There was a lot going on, because people couldn't find a job."

Their interest in the arts was properly accelerated when Lawlor was offered a choice of placements with AnCo, the training body of the day. One option was to learn how to be a travel agent. The other was a programme on community work taught by the writer, Peter Sheridan.

He plumped for the latter, which involved a brief film course, and the couple subsequently plunged themselves into creative work. They developed a relationship with Dublin Youth Theatre and were instrumental in setting up the National Festival of Youth Theatres.

Then, in 1987, taking advice from Peter Sheridan, they enrolled in Dartington College of Arts in Devon. "We thought it would allow us to leave and come back to Ireland as activists, not as artists," Molloy says. "To be honest we really didn't think of ourselves as artists." As things worked out, Lawlor and Molloy, having excelled in the rarefied atmosphere of Dartington, went on to produce a degree show of some note. Now leaning more towards multi-media performance, they elected to form Desperate Optimists and, thus branded, returned to Dublin on a scouting mission in 1992.

"We lined up about 10 meetings with various significant cultural figures to try and get a temperature reading," Lawlor reminisces. "The pessimism was amazing. That might have been the year before the Celtic Tiger, but it didn't even seem in the air. We got to person number four or five and we thought: let's just cancel the remaining meetings."

They returned to London and remained there. The Optimists' peculiar brand of performance - turntables, video, shouting - was invariably categorised as performance art, but they always placed themselves more in the theatre tradition. As the 1990s progressed, the team gradually tired of the perceived need to appal.

"We thought: that's enough of being the shock troops," Lawlor says. "Let's pass the baton on to the next batch of angry hard-asses and let them do that. We decided to stop doing performances in 2000. Our last show was a version of Playboy of the Western World - it was called Playboy - and at the end we shot each other. We died on stage. That's it!"

Like David Bowie announcing the death of Ziggy Stardust at the Hammersmith Odeon? "Yes. We set ourselves a very particular goal. We would make a feature film by 2005. Doing that, we would find a line of continuity between the background we came out of and the performance work. We haven't done it, of course. We had a child and that scuppered things a bit."

Though they have not quite kept to their timetable, Desperate Optimists have achieved a great deal. Who Killed Brown Owl has their inquisitive camera travelling among the citizens of Ealing. Scored to Vaughan Williams, the film begins as a cheery idyll before taking a blackly comic turn.

The Civic Lives series continues with Moore Street, which follows a group of citizens from Dublin's African community drifting about that thoroughfare after dark. Leisure Centre, filmed in the startlingly modern new leisure complex in Ballymun, focuses on a young man who has just had his first baby, but the film, created in conjunction with Ballymun's Breaking Ground programme, is as much about the cool, clean architecture of the building as it is about its protagonist.

Each of the films manages the tricky business of making grand, wide-screen cinema in conjunction with civic bodies and other artistic non-combatants without appearing condescending.

"What you are hoping to do is to let something happen with people who aren't skilled or who aren't being driven toward any particular perfect moment," Molloy says. "We only have these people for a few hours in the day. Everybody turns up about midday and has lunch and then we aim to have a first shot by four."

So why limit yourself to a single shot? (Or, rather, the appearance of a single shot. Leisure Centre, the longest piece, had to be composed of three separate takes.)

"There are some economic reasons," Lawlor says. "We shoot on film and we only have to pay for one cut. We don't have to set up all these different shots. But also, we didn't come through film school, so, though we do think about shots, we don't necessarily break down stories in that way. We come from another tradition. We are looking for that certain theatricality."

WHICH BRINGS US nicely to the Theatricality of Cinema season. It is, in many ways, an unusual event. That word, "theatricality", with its suggestions of mannered staginess, is often used pejoratively in film criticism. The Optimists, perverse as ever, seem to be aiming to reclaim the term. Over this weekend punters can enjoy such diverse treats as Miklós Jancsó's Hungarian classic The Red and the White; Shirley Clarke's Connection, a tale of addiction from the 1960s, and French director Eugéne Green's recent debut, Toutes les Nuits.

"We are trying to think about how people deal with narrative, time and space when they are working outside the film-making box," Molloy says. "We are thinking about what sort of work we would have done if we hadn't gone through this journey, if we hadn't come through this more experimental route of making theatre."

The season also marks an interesting departure for Project. But Willy White, the artistic director, seems characteristically nonchalant about decamping next door to the Irish Film Institute for the weekend. "I was certain I wanted to work with them. Lawlor and Molloy did say to me: is it unusual for you to have an artist work off-site? That is looking at it the wrong way round, I think. We look at the artists and then decide where is the appropriate place for the work to be."

With that award from Edinburgh on their mantelpiece, a Liverpool Civic Life episode in development and a feature script doing the rounds, Desperate Optimists, once art terrorists, might be in danger of turning into an institution. That they continue to remain innovative is a measure of the creative energy that still buzzes between them. Does that imaginative juice continue to flow when they are at home? Do they exchange ideas over the Coco Pops?

"Well, yeah," Lawlor laughs. "There are moments together with child-minding, of course. It's funny. Of course we argue. But the arguments are usually within work space. Work arguments are very different to personal arguments. Work arguments go pretty quickly. I think we wrap up a lot of the hatred we have for one another in work hatred. If we didn't work with one another then maybe the real relationship might come out."

The Theatricality of Cinema season runs at The Irish Film Institute, Dublin, from Friday until Sunday. The Civic Life series screens tomorrow at 1.30pm. Toutes les Nuits tonight at 6.30 will be introduced by the film's director, Eugéne Green. The Civic Life series is available on DVD from The Public. www.desperateoptimists.com