Popeye Village back on film

Two entirely disparate films will collide at St James Cavalier Cinemas this Friday, with Peter Sant's conceptual short film "I Yam what I Yam... L'invenzione". The screening, which will be accompanied by a workshop discussion, will begin at 6.30pm.

Sant's 30-minute short deliberately mashes together Robert Altman's Popeye - the 1980 film which left Popeye Village behind, currently being used as a theme park in the limits of Mellieha - and the 1974 Italian film L'Invenzione di Morel.

But why these two films in particular? Sant explains how the choice was determined by a fixed idea he wanted to express - how the frequent use of Malta as a film location by foreign studios brings to mind the island's colonial past.

"I was amazed by how Popeye Village remains as a site that is at once uprooted from both time and place and fossilised as a kind of relic. From this I started researching other films shot in Malta and eventually came across Emidio Greco's L'invenzione di Morel," Sant said.

Greco's film deals with a shipwrecked man who stumbles upon a futuristic-looking mansion. In it, he finds a group of wealthy sophisticates who are trapped in an eternal present. They are the subjects of the invention of Morel: a temporal projector that forces them to repeatedly relive one week of their lives.

"At this point I became interested in the way Greco's narrative is echoed in the way Altman's set has continued to exist," Sant added.

One of the ideas behind the short film - which will feature local actor Manuel Cutajar wandering through an isolated Popeye Village - concerns the implications behind Malta's frequent role as a 'film servicing' location, which according to Sant, "parallels with the colonial project in general".

"I began to think about the way in which mainstream cinema projects itself onto localised ideologies through narratives that are manufactured globally through offshore methods of production... this brought me to the idea of melding Popeye with Greco's film, an act which I felt denoted an explicitly colonialist gesture - grafting a pre-conceived narrative and set of ideologies onto an existing set of local traditions and customs," Sant said.

Asked whether the film aims to express any particular aspects of Maltese identity, Sant explained how the use of Cutajar ("a well-known television and theatre actor"), will bring to mind to Maltese audiences the idea that "the arrival of the foreigner is replaced by the arrival of the local" (which goes directly against the premise of the original film).

Furthermore, "by re-enacting this scenario and dressing him in an orange t-shirt (a distinct article of clothing issued by the government to refugees) the project extends it's consideration from the role of cinema to touch upon themes of displacement and territoriality," Sant added.

The screening of the film will be followed by a  workshop discussion with by guest speakers, Dr Vince Briffa (University of Malta), Dr John Baldacchino (University College Falmouth), Prof. Mark-Anthony Falzon (University of Malta) and Dr Mario Vella (Edinburgh Napier University/University of Malta). Admission is free.