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Cinema Review: BBC Art Screen

Lorna Irvine reviews two films from the new arts documentary festival.

Miss Hill: Making Dance Matter (12), directed by Greg Vander Veer, traces the founding member of the prestigious Juilliard Dance School in ultra-conservative 50s America, Martha Hill, and her contemporaries, such as Merce Cunningham, Mary Jo Shelley, Antony Tudor and Bessie Schonberg, who freed the art of dance from the rigidity of the five basic ballet steps.

A vast, swooping trek from her religious Ohio family's small town mentality which rejected even theatre as 'inappropriate' through to the avant garde of contemporary dance in New York, this unique film has incredible footage of students going through their paces from the 30s to the present day, and shots of a young Pina Bausch, among others, in training.

Choppily edited, the film itself is a dance of complicated steps, charting the wilful Hill, who as a young pioneer of just thirty took the Juilliard Department for Dance Studies into the stuff of legend, surviving near extinction with a move to the Lincoln Centre campus and who was a tad scandalous in her personal life, having an affair with a married man, the president of Colorado College Thurston Davies or 'Leftie' as he was nicknamed, whom she eventually married. Still working well into her eighties, she was a passionate, difficult but indefatigable woman and a true icon of American grit.

Meanwhile The Bruce Lacey Experience (18), directed by Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller and film maker Nick Abrahams, is a portrait of another, entirely different force of nature: 86-year-old artist, prankster, raconteur and iconoclast Bruce Lacey. They spent around fifteen days with him, which they admit was 'exhausting as he's so intense' and the result is an astounding, tender and hilarious documentary. Following him through his forty-year career and trailing through his incredible junk/curio-stuffed home, this affectionate tribute to invention is a restless, freewheeling trip.

From making props for TV to accidentally winning The Alternative Miss World contest in 1985, Lacey has led a more colourful life than most, suffice it to say. His homemade robot 'ROSA BOSOM' became so much a part of his life that, unable to be apart from her for even a moment, she became his 'best man' at his second wedding.

Footage of him is always endearingly bonkers, whether singing- or rather mauling- a cover of Oasis' Wonderwall through a drone and 'Vox Humana'- a voice distorter, to his 'fertility goddess' ritual at a festival after his marriage broke down.

Above all, it is his slightly bumbling charm which carries the film- an endearing, hippy loon whose mind is still sharp, railing against the commodification of art, culture and childhood. We need more Laceys in the world, and this film proves why it's all the better with him in it.

For more information: www.bbc.co.uk/artscreen.

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