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)
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.
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.
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.
"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)
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".
"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.
