My last day, and it looked to be a challenging one. First up, Val Lewton, Man in the Shadows, a film made for TV, under the banner ‘Martin Scorsese presents', a recommendation indeed. Not only did Scorsese produce the film, he also narrates, superbly, this documentary by film critic and historian Kent Jones about Lewton, the producer of a series of chilling black and white masterpieces made in the 40s. This screening at Bradford was to be the only big screen showing of the film in the UK, a great privilege indeed. Scorsese's voice, authoritative, engaging, is perfect for this considered, erudite and above all enthralling film.

Born in Russia, and dying at the age of only 47, Val Lewton produced some of RKO's best films of the 40s, usually in conjunction with his friend French-born director Jacques Tourneur, low budget, both highly popular and poetic, full of a sense of apprehension they deal with lives slightly skewed from the normal, and with a feeling for the hardly understood dark urges and dreams just below the surface of seemingly ordinary people. This film shows the complexity of the man, also what an important guiding hand, beyond the influence of most producers, he had in the making of his films. You may have been lucky enough to see Cat People, I walked with a Zombie, or The Leopard Man, for example, on late night TV, but seeing clips from these shimmering, unsettling films on the big screen was a real treat and left you hungry to see them again.

STOP PRESS: Man in the Shadows, along with Cat People, will be showing at Bradford's Fantastic Films Weekend, 13-15 June

Next two films by a renowned, revered, but undeniably difficult avant garde American film-maker.

Casting a Glance is James Benning's film about Robert Smithson's 1,500ft-long art installation Spiral Jetty, a construction on the edge of and spiralling into the Great Salt Lake at Utah, built in 1970; 80 minutes of static shots, close up, distant, and everything between. This was my first Benning, and while not an acquired taste exactly, I feel that the admirers who instantly fall in love his austere works will be few, and his is an aesthetic to be learned and awakened into. I did not find the images particularly beautiful, as many do. Lake levels rise and fall, the light shades things differently, the water is clear or milky, the rocks dry or shiningly wet. Extraneous sounds (a passing plane, a shot, music from a car radio) intrude into the calm or sooth it further, but there's mostly a great stillness, with the only constant from shot to shot the sound of lapping water. I found it contemplative, engrossing, interesting to be directed to look at something one would without such restriction look at differently - but in the end frustrating because increasingly I felt held back from the images, I wanted to be there and out of the warm and artificial setting of the cinema, to experience physically the air and smells, and to cast my own glance. I didn't feel, honestly, that looking at the art work in this mediated and constricted way actually intensified or opened it up to me, or showed me a way of seeing that would illuminate my viewing of the world otherwise.
A big problem, and it's one I really don't understand, is the fact that while each shot is given a specific date, from the 70s to the present day, the film was in fact shot between May 2005 and January 2007. While I should say knowledge of this fact is very important to a viewing of the film, it is hardly, if at all (I have to admit I'm not sure) made clear actually during the film itself, and viewers watching without benefit of catalogue will see something quite different from those in the know - to them it will appear a heroic effort over 30-odd years, and a chronological narrative of the jetty. What this...almost deception... really means, I do not know - it becomes a re-imagining of the artwork's existence in time, which is fair enough, but should this not be made clear?

Unfortunately though I found Casting a Glance intriguing, occasionally beautiful, and watchable, I cannot report the same for the second Benning of the day, his latest work RR, 112 minutes of static camera showing in all 43 trains crossing the screen, at various locations in the US. To quote the director of the Austrian Filmmuseum, which premiered the film at the Vienna Film Festival last year, it is a ‘majestic film of moving trains and how they define the Z axis in pictorial space... a swelling of velocities in space and of cultural and political meanings'. The film observes trains passing across the screen, mostly diagonally across the frame, for precisely the length of the time it takes for each to pass. Then we move on to the next subject.

I like trains myself - I spent much of my youth living three fields away from a railway track and the sound of a train and the sight of its sinuous passage across the landscape still brings me pleasure. But sadly I found the sight of one after the other of these monsters neither illuminating, meaningful or beautiful. The most interesting section of the train - the locomotive itself, is gone in a flash, and it is the bland tankers and containers with their unknowable cargoes whose passage fills most of the screen time. Is this meaningful? I'm not sure. To me they were nothing but abstracts, any ‘cultural and political' constructs put on them fanciful. I wanted time to see the sliced-through landscapes in a moment of repose after the passage of each train, a sense of nature and the US landscape indomitably returning to what it had been; but it was scarcely ever granted. The very occasional sight of a human being - a man beside the tracks, a car at a level crossing - was welcome. My nerves were jarred by the sounds and I even became unaccountably tense waiting for each to pass (admittedly I was slightly anxious on a personal level, about, ironically, missing my own train, as the programme was running late!). I didn't want to walk out but I did want it to end, brow-beaten by these, to me, ugly machines, and once out of the film I made a beeline for fresh air and weather and and the haphazard cityscape of Bradford outside. I felt frazzled by the overbearing, inescapable screen; I felt genuinely sad, because though I knew the films would be difficult I'd hoped for some kind of epiphany; and I felt rather stupid, because people whose opinions I respect can see so much more in them. Benning may be a lost cause for me; I will certainly try another if the opportunity presents itself, but without much enthusiasm or hope. Art for a very specialised palate, I think. But here's to Bradford for giving a UK audience the rare opportunity to taste it.