Caught by the Fuzz

Where was I?
Boxing Day. Snowed in, more or less. I find myself idly watching Sweeney 2 on the box. Made in 1978, it's not much of a movie. On screen it's inert, dead even, despite a decent budget by the looks of it (all those crowd scenes, all that location filming). Worse it's clumsy at moments - usually the important ones.
And yet I keep watching, seduced by the nostalgia of familiar faces (Denholm Elliott, Georgina Hale) and the accidental surrealism of the odd image - a car hanging halfway out of a shop window a few feet off the ground, a lollipop man killed in a shoot-out, his corpse covered by a blanket, his lollipop still beside him.
But its main interest is as social history. It's so very, very seventies - or a peculiar version of the seventies - boozy, laddish,reactionary. The flying squad frame their conversations by reference to the war and football, the villains live in Malta while lamenting the decline of Britain.
It ends in the pub of course with the curious sight of John Thaw dancing (sort of) and one of his fellow cops twirling around sans trousers in his brown and white (or where they red and white? I'm colourblind I'm afraid, horrible though whatever colour) Y-fronts. That's a kind of realism, I suppose. (TJ)

Concrete Poetry

Got the chance to see tomorrow night's BBC4 music documentary Synth Britannia a week or two back. It is a delight, particularly for those of us who were at an impressionable age when the Human League and Depeche Mode first made it onto Top of the Pops.
As well as its nostalgic appeal there are a couple of other reasons for watching it. Firstly (pace previous Bleak Moments) there's the opportunity to see places like Sheffield and Manchester as they looked in the seventies - a kind of council estate sci-fi film set - all concrete and long overcoats.



There's also a recognition of the importance of JG Ballard in late seventies/early eighties pop culture. There's an extract from some old Ballardian film or TV interview which included a few slowburn erotic images of a pretty woman and a car. Which prompted a memory of another music film that offered an element of auto-erotica in its make-up. I recall in Jon Savage's film about punk from some years back a sequence in which one vaguely punkily dressed (or undressed) model strips in an open car door cross-cut with a night-time car journey all soundtracked by some shredded guitar courtesy of David Bowie (from Diamond Dogs if memory serves).
Cars, sex, council estates. That's a recipe for the great British pop movie I'd say. Anyone come close to making it? Off the top of my head, Anton Corbijn's Control maybe? A couple of scenes in Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson. Anyone for dramatising The Human League story? Tom Hardy as Phil Oakey? I can almost picture it. (TJ)

Be true to your school

Took the kids to see The Belles at St Trinian's at the Edinburgh Filmhouse the other week. They weren't too impressed. "It's in black and white!" my seven-year-old exclaimed in horror as the 1954 film started.




Frank Launder's film is hardly a classic, but watching it for the first time in years I was surprised to find myself laughing now and again. Alistair Sim (who, as the plaque on the wall of the Edinburgh Filmhouse points out was "born near here") was always an actor worth watching,and in his double role as both headmistress and gambler (and sister and brother), he had the odd good line to flash out. Pointing out that his brother's daughter burnt down the gym Sim the headmistress said "There's been too much arson about". Then there was the schoo motto "In Flagrante Delicto".
Those moments, some familiar faces (Hermione Baddeley, Beryl Reid, Joyce Grenfell)and young starlets flashing their stocking tops playing suspiciously developed schoolgirls meant it was an agreeable time-passer.
Frank Launder and his film-making partner Sidney Gilliat were veterans by this time. And to be honest their best years were behind them by the time they started adapting the Ronald Searle novels.At some point I'll have to take a look at the films they made in the 1940s (it's my contention that I See a Dark Stranger is one of the great overlooked films of British cinema history.
Does it give us any sense of Britain in the 1950s? A little perhaps. A more racey, less deferential place perhaps than reputation might allow (albeit we are talking about a comedy). The fifties remains something of an enigma when all you have to go on is visual representations. British cinema in the fifties was all too keen to look back to the 1940s. And maybe it's only the films of the Boulting Brothers that we can get any real sense of the place. Yet, like America, Britain was going through the convulsions of rock and roll. You can't see it in the Cliff Richard movies of the time but it was there. Artists like Alan Davie, Eduardo Paolozzi and of course Richard Hamilton were responding to American influences and the youthquake of the sixties was in the act of being impregnated. Can you see it in the films that were being made in Britain at the time?
Only in the margins. Only in the stocking tops. (TJ)

Keith and kin

The recent death of Keith Waterhouse - after a long and, by all accounts, well oiled life, prompted a couple of quick thoughts.
I've long imagined you can see in the film version of Waterhouse's novel Billy Liar the moment when the interest in the angry young men of the 1950s gives way to the myth of swinging London.
It's not just in the fact that Tom Courtenay's Billy isnt really angry. He's a fantasist who's not willing to pursue his fantasies. In short, he's a Smiths fan avant la lettre.
But more than that, it's in the incarnation of his fantasy - Julie Christie.
Christie plays a girl that does the things Billy just dreams about. She gets on the train to London and goes, while Billy stays.
I've always imagined that she got off the train from Leeds and straight into the heart of the swinging sixties (and onto the set of Darling; a journey also made by director John Schlesinger who directed both movies). I like the idea so much I've never done the cursory research to see if Christie made any movies in between Billy Liar and Darling, safe in the notion that we're talking fictions here anyway and if I'm not right, the idea feels right.

The other Waterhouse notion is that in all the obits I've been reading one of his greatest achievements is overlooked or at the very least only appears near the end in the "he also wrote" section.






Perhaps that's because his TV series Budgie isn't quite as good as I remember it. That's possible. It's been the best part of two decades since I last watched it. And yet I remember it as very good, with nuanced performances from Adam Faith in the title role, Iain Cuthbertson as the Scottish criminal Charlie Endell and in particular Georgina Hale as Budgie's estranged wife, and some sharp writing by Waterhouse and his writing partner Willis Hall.
Am I wrong? (TJ)

Making a pure cult of it

I've been reading a proof copy of poet Sean O'Brien's debut novel Afterlife. It's being published by Picador in August. I thought it worth bringing to your attention in this space because of its rather fine asides on the state of British film in the mid-seventies.
I'm prone to approve of any writer who describes one of his characters as looking like Eric Portman anyway, but O'Brien's account of a trip to catch a double bill of Don't Look Now and The Wicker Man is great for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, it captures the decaying, mouldy reality of cinemas in the days before multiplexes: "In the auditorium it smelt of dust and sweat and the ancient lusts of those now senile or dead," he writes. His characters take their seats in the balcony - remember them? - to watch the local ads: "the advertisements were already playing, the familiar bleached, exhausted colours of generic pieces adapted for local use - the Indian restaurant, the local Ford dealership, the hotel with its misspelt function room."
Reading those few words I had some kind of popcorn equivalent of Proust's madeleine. I'd forgotten all about those tacky, worn-out bits and pieces of vintage hucksterism ("Kar Parts Camelon" has just sprung to mind as I write this). When did they disappear? They were still around in the eighties certainly. I guess they faded to black with the arrival of the multiplex.
As for the movies, O'Brien's narrator writes approvingly about Nic Roeg's Venetian chilly thriller, but is hugely disapproving of The Wicker Man: "Although the Wicker Man has somehow ascended to the status of a neglected classic in recent years, in my view (apparently that of a minority) it remains what it always was, a piece of half-arsed crap full of unintended humour and bungled eroticism - a sort of porno version of Whisky Galore with added human sacrifice."

Can I speak up as another member of the minority at this point? I've never really got The Wicker Man. It feels like just another bad British horror movie of that era (God knows there were enough of them). Silly, flatly filmed, underdramatised. To describe it as the "Citizen Kane of Horror Movies" as one magazine did, is risible. (And what would that make Don't Look Now - a more frightening, beautiful, erotic, cold, eerie, glitering, all-round brilliant movie?)
One of O'Brien's American characters sums it up best: "Jesus, so that's a British film. It's not even as good as the adverts ...No wonder your industry is broke."
This is not necessarily a widely held view. (TJ)

Adam Adamant

In yesterday's Guardian Charlie Brooker interviewed documentary film-maker Adam Curtis about his involvement with theatre company Punchdrunk (Damon Albarn and the Kronos Quartet too). He's now made a film, It Felt Like a Kiss, to be screened, alongside some live-action elements, in a deserted Manchester office block as part of the Manchester Festival. It sounds a curious, intriguing piece of environmental theatre and from the trailer it would appear to be about American pop, American power and American imperialism.



Even more interestingly, the interview reveals that in the future Curtis's work will be produced for the internet.
I'm not sure how I feel about this revelation. The worry is that this is another example of the banalisation of British telly. Curtis's films The Trap and The Power of Nightmares are compelling and hypnotic, idea-heavy and visually dense, layering found image on found image on found image. They deserve a place in the mainstream media. To be fair it is the BBC which will host Curtis's site and who's to say that it is not Curtis who has decided on the net as his vehicle (criminally it's nigh on impossible to find his work on DVD? Still, I wouldn't mind an Adam Curtis season on BBC4. (TJ)

Edinburgh Nights

The Edinburgh International Film Festival kicks off tomorrow (Wednesday) with Sam Mendes's new film Away We Go. Among the British films that have caught my eye there's Boogie Woogie, Duncan Ward's adaptation of Danny Moynihan's novel about the New York art scene here commuted to London, Unmade Beds, Alexis Dos Santos's by all accounts Wong Kar Wai-influenced woozy vision of young love, and Moon, a sci-fi movie made by Duncan Jones, who was once known as Zowie Bowie, which is pretty sci-fi as it is.


Unmade Beds

On the badness of British Movies: 1

Basic Instinct 2

Of course in some alternative universe where all the films that stalled at pre-production or were never more than an idle rumour actually made it to the big screen,David Cronenberg's version of Basic Instinct 2 is a regular midnight movie at your local arthouse cinema (in rotation with Bertolucci's 1970s adaptation of Hammett's Red Harvest starring Jack Nicholson in his prime and Nic Roeg's gorgeous, perverse take on Flash Gordon).
As it is, in the real world we're stuck with the Michael Caton Jones version, which isn't quite as appetising. Given his cold blue vision of sexuality in Crash Cronenberg might have offered an intriguing alternative to the ridiculous blood-hot sex scenes in the original Paul Verhoeven movie. Instead we get Caton-Jones who seems if anything a little embarrassed about the whole thing.



He's not the only one. Why is it when good British actors appear in trashy movies they are always so terrible? Are they just unwilling to go with the flow and enjoy themselves unless there's an arthouse director onset?
Here David's Morrissey and Thewlis, admittedly saddled admittedly with a silly script by Leora Barish and Henry Bean (both of whom had very creditable screen credits to their name; Desperately Seeking Susan in Barish's case, Internal Affairs and the underappreciated Deep Cover in Bean's), both look hugely uncomfortable. It's a stupid movie that makes Verhoeven's silly, overheated original - a 99p Shop take on Vertigo, sort of - look ever so slightly better because at least it had some kind of conviction to it (ludicrous though that conviction might have been.)
Still, watching this the other night for the first time I was rather taken by the surface gloss of the thing. Hungarian cinematographer Gyula Pados does make London look rather sleek and cold, Caton-Jones gets to shoot in the Swiss Re Tower and you can at least see the moneyed sheen onscreen.



This was most obvious in the opening sequence in which Sharon Stone and Stan Colleymore careen through a suspiciously empty city in a very flash car while indulging in a bout of mutual masturbation (auto-erotica at its most basic). If we can overlook the brain-frazzling combination of Sharon and Stan, the sequence has a grubby kind of glamour to it, a fashion magazine slickness.
Of course it's the stuff of a million film openings. But usually they are films shot in New York, LA or Hong Kong. Not in the UK, where we do seem to acquiese to social realist notions that Britain can't look smart and glitzy. London looks glitzy in Basic Instinct 2. And yes, like Sharon's perky bosom, we know it's not real. But if we're going to make trash it should at least look good. And Basic Instinct 2 does. It's not much of a claim but it's the best the film can muster.
Oh I've just found this fine archive blog entry from K-Punk which is much more positive than I am about the movie suggesting it aspires to the "ridiculous sublime" (after Zizek). I think it's way too kind but it's flushed with a kind of pervy joy in the movie's hyper-real chrome plating that you want to like the movie more having read it.

The leaving of Liverpool

I was watching Terence Davies's Of Time and the City on DVD the other night. And once again I was half compelled, half repelled by the director's rich, clotted narcissism. It is in the end a film more about Davies than Davies's home city of Liverpool.
Fair enough, I suppose. It is Davies's Liverpool we are seeing even if most of the imagery is made up of found footage and photographs (in particular Bernard Fallon's black and white photographs of Merseyside during the sixties and seventies).
The director left Liverpool in 1973 so it's the postwar city that he documents here, not so much the city of the eighties and today (although the city of today is in there). Here is Paddy's Wigwam still in a state of partial construction. Here are street games no longer played. Here are faces that have long since wrinkled and maybe even decayed.


And so it is inevitably, for the most part, a ghost story. a depiction of a long-lost world, what Davies calls the stuff of "emotional memory".
What's also missing is perhaps the Liverpool we know best. The Liverpool of the eighties, the one decade when film-makers and TV executives were most interested in the city - the city of riots, Militant,football and Brookside, of Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale, a city in decline and at odds with the political mainstream, its sense of civic pride holed and battered, with only its football teams dealing in the business of success. A city unrecognisable from the one that appeared in the background in Stephen Frears's debut Gumshoe in 1971.
But what struck me the first time I saw Davies's film last year and again on DVD the other night is how, in general, the city has been absent from the screen apart from that period in the eighties. There's the odd movie (51st State) after that, the odd sitcom (The Liver Birds) before, but these are exceptions. It is the absence of the city that, when you think about it, becomes most visible. What was most interesting about last year's coverage of Liverpool's reign as European capital of culture was the unspoken sense that this was a look at a strange,novel place.
The most explicit dichotmy in British TV and cinema is the distance between town and country. And that's there. But the really deep divide is between London and the provinces. Even now, five decades after free cinema that's still the case. It's not that films don't take advantage of the streets of Sheffield (The Full Monty), Gateshead (Get Carter), Edinburgh (Trainspotting) or Glasgow (Red Road). But that when they do they so often have a clear playing field. They're rarely competing with other visual representations of those streets. Too often we live in a country that views itself only through local news bulletins and the football scores.
Davies's film is - for all that he says he always felt an outsider (distanced by his sexuality, his distaste for the Beatles) - is an insider's view of the city, coloured by a nostalgia for his own past. Compare the footage he uses of holidays in New Brighton which is all primary coloured happiness with Martin Parr's photographs of the resort in 1985, which are full of crying babies and dirty beaches.


Locales change in time of course, but Parr's vision is ultimately not as forgiving, not as willing to see the pleasure available in familiar places.

Ghost Stories

"I'm trying to get at that mood of Hammer films and other European horror movies of the late sixties and early seventies - it's their cheesiness, their bad effects and sound quality that often gives them an unworldly quality and indefinable otherness, beyond the director's intent."
Jim Jupp, Ghost Box


There's a new exhibition of the graphic work of Jim Jupp's Ghost Box co-founder Julian House. It's tiny. A few posters, a few book cover mock-ups and a couple of TVs showing videowork. So tiny it's almost spectral. But there's enough to project a tracing of the visual ideas behind the musical output of Ghost Box. The references to be found in Ghost Box visuals are children's TV of the seventies, Penguin book covers of the same time, the horror stories of Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, public information shorts ("I am the spirit of dark and lonely water") - what House calls "a very British kind of weird".




Simon Reynolds has written extensively and astutely about the nostalgia that's embedded in Ghost Box sounds and visuals. He talks of a search for futures past and alternative futures ("looking for latent, undeveloped possibilities in glam rock, light entertainment ... and that genre of movie-score Britjazz that fills your mind'e eye with hues of brown and yellow ...": Reynolds, The Wire, Nov 2006). A kind of revivification of yesterday's pop cultures.

Can't argue with that. But I wonder if there isn't something simpler going on here too, a haunting of a different order. Is there perhaps an elusive, incohate nostalgia for childhood itself? And the mysteries of childhood, when the world - especially the adult world - can seem strange and imcomprehensible. A mystery that evaporates as we get older and understand - or think we understand - more about the world. Is Ghost Box - music and viuals - an attempt to recreate that mystery, refracted through the science fiction and horror stories we watched on TV and in the movies when we were young.

Who haunts us? Often it's the ghost of our younger selves. (TJ)

R.I.P Jack Cardiff

The news that cinematographer Jack Cardiff has died at the age of 94 triggered a rush of celluloid memories. Mostly Powell and Pressburger moments, it has to be said. The escalator taking the dead airmen up to heaven in A Matter of Life and Death, the redness of the lipstick Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) wears in Black Narcissus, and a leather-clad Marianne Faithfull in Girl on a Motorcycle.
Cardiff was a great director of photography, though his attempts at directing never really hit the bullseye. But he always had an eye for beauty and for colour. And he knew sometimes the best answer was the simplest. This is him talking about A Matter of Life and Death as recorded by the BFI: "The beginning of the picture when David Niven thinks that he's in heaven was taken on the English coast. Of course he's supposed to look and see this long shot of a beach, thinking he's in heaven. In the script is says 'Fade in' and Michael said, 'This sounds corny. I wish I could do something different.' So I said, 'Michael, look through the camera'. He did, and I went to the front and breathed on the lens so that it went foggy. After a few seconds it cleared. Michael was delighted".

One elephant, two elephants ...

"Well, to put it bluntly, isn’t there a certain incompatibility between the terms 'cinema'
and 'Britain'?"
Francois Truffaut

"Bollocks to Truffaut."
Stephen Frears


Most days, if I drive to work in Glasgow, I think of John Gordon Sinclair. It's at that point on the A80 where the dual carriageway flashes past Abronhill High School in Cumbernauld. At which point I invariably flash on Sinclair's silly, stuttering dash across the playground of said school in Bill Forsyth's sweet 1981 movie Gregory's Girl. I've done it so many times now that the drive and the movie are linked in my head, bound together, the mundane daily routine and the celluloid image burned into my mental hard disc.




It's inevitable, I suppose, this "closeness" of British cinema, of British images to the lives we lead. But not just because of geographical proximity. There must be an element of emotional proximity too, surely? Growing up in Northern Ireland in the seventies my earliest screen memories (both big and small) are all British, essentially. Watching Carry On Screaming on my eighth birthday. Coronation Street and Match of the Day. My dad taking me to see Zulu at the pictures (the reels shown in the wrong order; one moment Jack Hawkins is being driven away from Rourke's Drift, the next he's back behind bars). The latest James Bond.

Of course I grew up and fell in love with Hollywood screwball comedies and film noir and auteurism and L'Atalante and David Lynch, Almodovar and Wong Kar Wai, and American sitcoms and Edward Hopper and abstract expressionism, and ... oh you know, all the usual stuff anyone of my age group fell in love with.

And yet. And yet. I remember reading something the critic Andy Medhurst wrote sometime back in the mid-nineties (while writing, rather too kindly about Peter Chelsom's Blackpool-based comedy Funny Bones). I can't remember the exact quote but if memory serves it was along the lines that he, Medhurst, didn't grow up wanting to watch movies set in New York and LA, he wanted to watch movies set here, in Britain, reflecting a life he understood (if I'm misrepresenting him, I apologise. I will have to look out the quote). And I remember kind of agreeing with him. Because there is something about seeing your own place, your own world reflected back at you that's particularly mesmerising, beguiling, seductive.

Frustrating too, it must be said. Only the other week Anne Billson was writing in The Guardian about the badness of British film (Can British Films Get Any Worse?), and though I haven't seen The Boat That Rocked it's hard to argue with much of what she says about the lameness of Britfilms (mostly because I have seen Love Actually).

It's true that to get a sense of what this nation (or these four nations, if you prefer) it's often better to listen than look (to Jarvis or Damon, or Stephen Patrick or maybe even Lily). Ian Curtis painted a much more vivid picture than Richard ever will. But there are still moments when British image-making gives us a vision of ourselves that either chimes with who we are - or think we are - or, better still, gives us a new, alien vision of ourselves. We're there in the films of Powell-Pressburger and Mike Leigh, in Clement and La Frenais sitcoms (Jones and Corden sitcoms too), and sometimes lurking in the corners of bad movies and ropey TV shows.
I suppose this blog is going to be about those corners. It's about looking for reflections - sometimes distorted - of ourselves in the movies and TV and visual art we make.
A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to be in Venice on holiday during the Biennale. In a palazzo in the centre of town I sat on a hard floor and watched Willie Doherty's video art. Ghost Story it was called. A piece about Northern Ireland. I knew the place Doherty was trying to show us. The physical place and the mental landscape. It wasn't home. Not quite, thankfully. Not my home. But it was in the neighbourhood of home, as I remember it. Or close enough to stir some ghosts.

What follows is about what haunts us. The shiver of recognition we get when we see British images.