I hardly dare admit it, but in this festival of many new and exciting and challenging films the one I actually enjoyed most was this one, made 8 years ago, buoyant and full of life and beautiful people. A lovely hark back to the days of wild-man hair, floral shirts, and exploding electric guitars, the film was shown as a companion-piece to a talk earlier in the festival on Led Zeppelin by Dick Carruthers, concert, record and dvd producer and director.

In a thinly veiled autobiographical tale by writer/director Cameron Crowe, 15-year-old William (Patrick Fugit) is a precocious yet sheltered teenager who writes like an angel about his beloved rock bands - so well that Rolling Stone commission him, unseen, to cover a tour by the legendary ‘Stillwater'. His daffy, straight-laced liberal arts lecturer mother (an utterly delightful performance from Frances McDormand), who thinks even Simon and Garfunkel are dangerously subversive, reluctantly loosens the apron strings with great reservations and dire warnings about drugs, and off he goes, under the protection of legendary rock chick Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) and encouraged by rock critic Lester Bangs (as delicious a turn as ever by Philip Seymour Hoffman), into the glamorous, crappy world of the rock tour. It's silly, it flirts in cavalier fashion with subjects like loyalty, honesty and growing up, the music is pretty awful, but Patrick Fugit's beaming innocence and Kate Hudson's luminous joie de vivre, the wit and colour and pzazz, carry one along on pure full-strength pleasure.

Next up, a double bill of American documentaries. First is Fish Kill Flea, a portrait of a run-down flea market held in the dilapidated remains of a once state-of-the-art shopping mall in the New York State town of Fish Kill. Sadly the bleaching of a bad print virtually wiped out the contrapuntally used archive black and white material of newspaper photos and publicity material celebrating the brave new mall this once was, with its luxury showrooms, atriums and clubs where available girls and gleaming consumer goods displayed themselves, offering all the heart could desire. Unlimited sex and spending proved not all they were cracked up to be, and now in this dog-end of commerce, smaller desires are catered for - a watch, a knife, a cock-eyed lamp, old shoes, second hand fruit machines, Nazi memorabilia. The amiable customers and traders all have a scruffy charm it's impossible to dislike, so when news comes that the market may be closing you are unexpectedly concerned. A little gem, full of small incidental pleasures.

Second in the documentary double bill, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, directed by John Gianvito. Although its subject is gravestones and memorials, this is in no way a gloomy film. The graves are those of American heroes of the anti-establishment, workers, strikers, pacifists, fighters for rights and freedoms. Unnoticed beside busy highways or in peaceful meadows and woods, modest stones set flat into the ground or heroic statues, above them all blows the whispering wind, through grass, flowers, trees, around desolate vacant lots. At first I took it to be a mourning sound, but gradually, either it or one's attitude alters, and it becomes part threatening, part celebratory, but above all persistent, omnipresent, a representation of the spirit of alternative America which will not go away. Present-day film of anti-war protests, a loud and almost shockingly lively eruption into the peaceful contemplative mood, underlines the idea that protest and free-thinking still continue. A highly patriotic film, in the best sense, and intensely beautiful.

Next, a film from one of the festival's featured directors, Julien Temple.
Vigo: A Passion for Life (1998)
Although Jean Vigo's body of work is very small (he died of TB at the age of 29), his 3 major films are all stunning in their different ways: A propos de Nice, a landmark documentary; Zero de conduite, progenitor of so many school rebellion films but still the best of them all; and L'Atalante, the only one of them of full feature length, a highly romantic love story without an ounce of sentiment; all showing a precocious talent, a poetry, a fluidity of camera which was peculiar to him. Unfortunately these qualities are mostly absent from this romanticised, clichéd version of his life. It's certainly beautiful, but then it would be hard not to make 20/30s Paris beautiful in its belle laide way. The screenplay is uninspired, much going unexplained (who put Vigo into that expensive-looking sanitarium, apparently against his will, for example? And what did all those merry bohemians live on?) Then there's the odd way of acting that comes over the English when they're being foreigners, a flapping of the arms and a strange over-articulated way of speaking. James Frain in his left-wing pullovers makes the most of his Gallic features, emoting like mad with his eyebrows, railing against this and that. But perhaps the worst offender is Jim Carter, whose Bonaventure, vieux copain of Vigo's father (an anarchist, who died mysteriously in prison when Jean was 12), is one of those tedious shouty types who always gets his scars out to show you at parties. That's what it was like in those Paris bistrots, where ideas for films were hatched at the drop of a hat...
But then I suppose if seeing this film has made anyone seek out the films themselves, it will have been worthwhile.

The long day ends with more music - this time live. Bradford hosts the premiere of Cipher's presentation of The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Cipher is the duo of jazz musicians Theo Travis and Dave Sturt, who for over 10 years have been writing new scores for silent films. Their darkly visceral music, saxophone, bass, flute, keyboard, with additional electronic sampling, perfectly fits the claustrophobic, fin de siecle atmosphere of this tale, where even partying seems tinged with a desperate melancholy. Christine Daae, newcomer to the Paris Opera, is tutored by an unseen master, who ensures she becomes a star, at the expense of relinquishing her childhood sweetheart, Raoul. But rumours abound of a phantom who lurks, hideously deformed, in the other world beneath the theatre, a place of dark tunnels, trapdoors and secret rooms. Christine's tutor and the phantom are, of course, one and the same. Rupert Julian's vast canvas of life in the theatre is an enormous pleasure, the people like insects squirming with life, even if the melodramatic scenes of the trials of love are a little too drawn out for modern taste. Mary Philbin is surprisingly natural and modern looking as Christine (later a casualty of talkies, which revealed her ‘girlie' unbankable voice, and a tragic love affair - though she lived until the age of 90), Lon Chaney majestic as the doomful Phantom.

The Cipher presentation is now touring the UK until the end of May.