Lars Laumann

Lars Laumann's film 'Shut Up Child, This Ain't Bingo', is a great subject for debate on how we view film as film, or film as art. Laumann centres on Norwegian artist Kjersti Andvig in the months pre and post the execution of Death Row prisoner Carlton Turner, with whom she had an artistic and emotional relationship. At nigh on an hour long, this feels like straight documentary - albeit an irritating and badly edited one. Yet we find out almost nothing about Andvig and Turner except what's presented on screen - her chatting in her trailer-park lodgings, mainly about Turner and her view that he will be resurrected after death.

Because both subjects fit social stereotypes - Andvig is young, blonde, pretty, European and an artist, while Turner is American, a convicted criminal and black - the messages here should be the redemptive power of art and the hopelessness of a brutalised American underclass. But as the film unfolds, the opposite view emerges: it's Andvig who's lost, disconnected from reality and desperately in search of something to believe in, and it's Turner (from the little we hear of him through his prison phone) who, despite his impending execution, appears the more sober, centred and self-aware. Annoying, overlong art documentary or cleverly subtle and provocative piece of filmmaking by both artists? Perhaps it's a nod to the latter that I still can't decide.