Concrete visions

I was reading an article in The Independent this morning about the crumbling future of Britain's post-war concrete buildings. It reported on the Culture Minister Margaret Hodge's decision not to list the Birmingham Central Library, which dates from 1974. The same article also mentioned that Preston Bus Station has also been refused a listing by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
In all the arguments that swirl around the brutalist architecture of the postwar era I'm much more interested in form rather than function. Maybe because I don't have to live in Robin Hood Gardens, some might say. But even so I do think there is something beautiful about many of these buildings. Actually, I'm not sure beautiful is the right word on reflection. Perhaps extraordinary works better. Last year I visited Preston and the bus station is the thing that has stayed in my memory if only for the ambition and excessiveness of architect Keith Ingham's design. "The station is a thing of swoops and curves," according to architectural critic Jonathan Glancey, who has described the building as "cinematic, sculptural, heroic" and a "20th-century baroque cathedral".
It is architecture as a Kubrick film set, Glancey suggests and there is certainly something clean-lined,overpowering and monumental about it, a structure that you could imagine Stanley might have responded to.



Coincidentally, yesterday I got a chance to have a very quick look around the retrospective exhibition of Toby Paterson's work in the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh.
Paterson has spent the best part of a decade using his art to explore and rediscover the romantic intentions of postwar architects. His paintings recreate brutalist architecture from around Europe, juxtaposing and dissecting details and, through colour and design,I don't think it's not too much to say, beautifying the buildings.
What's interesting about the exhibition can be found in the downstairs section (the upstairs "ethereal" section is too empty for my tastes). Down here, painting and plan and model are piled on top of each other in a dense concatenation that simulates the urban cityscape. Better still, Paterson's paintings on perspex allow one to see other work through the one that is immediately in front of you, to catch it from oblique angles and corners.
Wandering around I found myself recalling walking down the well-heeled spruceness of Grey Street in Newcastle last year with the bulk of the Trinity Square Car Park (familiar to film fans for its appearance in Get Carter) floating ahead of my vision on the horizon. And of sitting in the cafe of the LRB bookshop in London earlier this week, supping soup while looking out at the Post Office Tower perfectly framed by two Bloomsbury streets in my eyeline.



I've always found Paterson's art beautiful in its clinical precision, but I would concede that seen individually they could appear academic. The Fruitmarket show removes that possibility. Here they aspire to urban complexity.
Of course in their romantic perfectionism, Paterson's paintings and models are also unreal. The Fruitmarket's accumulation of Paterson patterns is a wonky simulation of the urban landscape because they're too perfect, too pretty.
The fact is that even if I do want to argue that the Preston Bus Station has a kind of beauty to it, it would be misleading not to acknowledge that it's a shop-soiled beauty at best, a rundown, weather-beaten, rain-dirty beauty.
Now and again that grimy, gritty, bulky beauty is captured on the big and small screen. One of my guilty pleasures on TV last year was Channel 4's riff on "what if Skins was crossed with superheroes" drama Misfits. One of its many cheap pleasures was the choice of location - on and around the modern architecture to be found near Southmere Lake in Thamsemead, south-east London. The programme makers don't make any statements abut the architecture. It would appear to be just something that caught their eye and they liked the effect of it in front of the lens. It simply looked interesting.
You can see the same kind of approach in the late Anthony Minghella's film Breaking and Entering when the director turned his camera on the 1968 estate Rowley Way, a kind of recognition of the novelty of this urban space when it's removed from the social and poltical context in which it exists in reality. (Minghella might have argued that he wasn't blind to the politics. After all, he places the film's Bosnian immigrants in Rowley Way,an acknowledgment that modern architecture has become - in tabloid terms at least - home to the low paid and unpaid. Yet the film's gaze rather glides above that subtext and just enjoys the patters it sees.)



I'm always surprised by how much location filming actually happens in British cinema. Even a cursory glance disproves the notion that postwar Brit movies play out in the drawing room In recent movies I've caught glimpses of such postwar British thrillers as The Blue Lamp and League of Gentlemen and been pleasantly surprised by how much of these films happen on the British street.
At the same time, though, I'm struggling to think of a British film that uses architecture as an organising principle. I can think of a couple of film-makers - Nic Roeg in Don't Look Now,a film as twisted and twisting as the Venice streets it's filmed on. And John Boorman's vision of Los Angeles in Point Blank. But both men are looking at foreign cities not British ones, so they don't count.
And it's interesting to compare the way Minghella uses Rowley Way, for example, with the way Matteo Garone uses Napolitan locations in his Italian mafia film Gomorrah, in which the city's modern architecture is revealed as one giant trap (not a very kind vision of brutalist buildings, but as a visual metaphor it works).
I'm half-bluffing here, but I wonder if there isn't some kind of symmetry between modernist architecture and modernist cinema. They seem conjoined. Think of the way Antonioni used architecture to frame his characters. Perhaps it says something about our cinema and our cities that the connection isn't as obvious on this side of the channel.
Or maybe I'm just missing the obvious example. There was one film that used the same locations as Misfits and possibly - I have never actually seen it - in a more forensic manner. Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. (TJ)

London, the sequel

Just a heads up. James Bridle has started an intriguing - and rather daunting - project, to catalogue all the shots in Patrick Keiller's 1994film London and, then going even further, to actively reshoot every shot of the original to give us a 2010 version.
Keiller's film is certainly worth such detailed attention.

The Art of Crime

Intriguing snippet in the Guardian yesterday by Adam Dawtrey about British screenwriters Louis Mellis and David Scinto. Mellis and Scinto wrote Gangster No 1, Sexy Beast and Ray Winstone's new film 44 Inch Chest.



The British - or in this case -London crime thriller is so overdone these days (well, for about a decade now) that I've rather ignored 44 Inch Chest. And I'd hated Gangster No 1 - a film that for all its slick sheen was as feral and ugly as Paul Bettany's lead character beneath his bespoke suit, although it did bring to mind something Brian De Palma once said about the British crime film, that they seemed to come straight from the schoolyard. I always assumed he meant in the way the arguments that escalate to horrific violence in so many of these movies are at heart ridiculous and infantile.
Sexy Beast, though, is one of the few British thrillers of the last couple of decades that does merit any attention. Not because of Ben Kingsley's over-the-top, over-praised, very actorly vision of psychosis (Ian McShane says much less but is much more convincing in his menace), but because of Winstone's astonishingly quiet performance at its heart as a gangster who's gone to Spain and softened, and for what I had always assumed was director Jonathan Glazer's visual nods to magic realism.
Maybe that's unfair on Mellis and Scinto. It seems they found inspiration for all three films in fine art. According to Mellis, "Gangster No 1 was originally influenced by Bacon, Sexy Beast was Hockney, 44 Inch Chest ws Magritte."
That's almost enough to make me want to see 44 Inch Chest just to see if it lives up to such a bid for high-art association.

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)