British art cinema: Creativity, experimentation and innovation 9781526133137

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British art cinema

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British art cinema Creativity, experimentation and innovation

EDITED BY PAUL NEWLAND AND BRIAN HOYLE

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2019 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN  978 1 5261 0087 0  hardback First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of figures page vii List of contributors viii

Introduction – British art cinema: creativity, experimentation and innovation Paul Newland and Brian Hoyle

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  1 ‘Art cinema’, 1920s British film culture: Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Asquith Tom Ryall

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  2 Humphrey Jennings: of images, poetry and Pandaemonium 34 Owen Evans   3 Out of the war, on with the arts: cultural politics and art films in post-war Britain Katerina Loukopoulou

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  4 Attitudes towards experiment in British cinema: the amateur art films of Enrico Cocozza Ryan Shand

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  5 Art cinema, British production and the 1960s Duncan Petrie

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  6 Happy accident: the symbiosis of Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter 103 Peter Jameson   7 The parameters of British art cinema: a case study of John Krish Robert Shail

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  8 The reputation of Nicolas Roeg Paul Newland

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  9 ‘As the first Black face on the scene, I had to push the doors open’ – Horace Ové and Pressure (1975) 144 Sally Shaw

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10 Art cinema and the British poetic realist tradition David Forrest

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11 The third avant garde: Black Audio Film Collective and Latin America 171 Paul Elliott 12 The rise of British art cinema in the 1980s John Hill

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13 Derek Jarman, trance films and medieval art cinema Jo George

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14 Twin traditions: the biopic and the composed film in British art cinema 215 Brian Hoyle 15 Don Boyd and the business of art cinema Phil Wickham 16 Shakespearean film as art cinema: Stage Beauty as a cerebral retort to Hollywood Sarah Martindale

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17 Boundary crossings and inter-subjective imaginings: Sarah Turner’s Perestroika 259 Kim Knowles Index 271





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List of figures

 1 This Sporting Life (dir. Lindsay Anderson, 1963) page 6  2 The Man Who Fell to Earth (dir. Nicolas Roeg, 1976) 11  3 Radio On (dir. Christopher Petit, 1979) 13  4 Listen to Britain (dir. Humphrey Jennings, 1942) 42   5 The cover of the Arts Council exhibition catalogue ‘The Art of the Film’ and a page from the British section, prominently featuring wartime documentaries: Out of Chaos (dir. Jill Craigie, 1944) and Coastal Command (dir. Ian Dalrymple, 1942) 55   6 Profile photograph of Enrico Cocozza (Scotland’s Moving Image Archive) 70   7 Image of Cocozza’s cinema (Scotland’s Moving Image Archive) 71  8 The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (dir. Tony Richardson, 1962) 90  9 The Servant (dir. Joseph Losey, 1963) 110 10 Performance (dir. Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1970) 134 11 Don’t Look Now (dir. Nicolas Roeg, 1973) 136 12 Pressure (dir. Horace Ové, 1975) 152 13 The Red Shoes (dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948) 217

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List of contributors

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List of contributors

Paul Elliott holds a PhD from the University of Essex and lectures in film at the University of Worcester. He is the author of Hitchcock and the Cinema of Sensations (I. B. Tauris, 2012), an introductory guide to the French psychoanalyst and activist Felix Guattari (I. B. Tauris, 2012) and a monograph on the British crime film (Auteur, 2014). He has also published articles on British cinema and television. Owen Evans is Professor of Film in the Department of Media at Edge Hill University. He has published widely on German literature and film, with special interest in the GDR and post-GDR narratives, as well as representations of history and cultural memory on screen. His most recent article looked at the German film Novemberkind, exploring the GDR’s legacy in the present. He is currently working on Humphrey Jennings’s career, as well as developing a research interest in the field of arts, health and wellbeing. He is co-founding editor of the international journal Studies in European Cinema (Routledge) and co-founding director of the European Cinema Research Forum (ECRF). David Forrest is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sheffield. His research explores issues of region, class and realism in contemporary British film, television and literature. His books include Social Realism: Art, Nationhood and Politics (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013) and Barry Hines: Kes, Threads and Beyond (Manchester University Press, 2017), with Sue Vice. With Beth Johnson he has edited Social Class and Television Drama in Contemporary Britain (Palgrave, 2017), and a special dossier of The Journal of Popular Television entitled ‘Northern Stardom’. With Jonathan Rayner and Graeme Harper he edited Filmurbia: Screening the Suburbs (Palgrave, 2017). He is currently at work on a monograph for Edinburgh University Press entitled New Realisms. Jo George is Senior Lecturer in the English and Film Studies Programme at the University of Dundee. She is a specialist in Old and Middle English with a particular interest in early drama, book history, neo-medievalism and Old



List of contributors

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English poetry. She is the author of numerous chapters and articles and two volumes in Palgrave’s Reader’s Guides to Essential Criticism series: The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (2000) and Beowulf (2009), the latter of which contains a chapter on Beowulf on film, which she is expanding to book-length. She also teaches a course on medieval literature and European cinema and is currently researching a monograph on PreRaphaelite drama. John Hill is Professor of Media at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author or editor of a number of books including The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (co-ed, Oxford University Press, 1998), British Cinema in the 1980s (Clarendon Press, 1999), Cinema and Northern Ireland: Film, Culture and Politics (British Film Institute, 2006), Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television (British Film Institute, 2011) and Film Policy in a Globalised Cultural Economy (co-ed, Routledge, 2018). Brian Hoyle is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and English at the University of Dundee. He completed his PhD on British Art Cinema 1975–2000 at the University of Hull. He is the author of The Cinema of John Boorman (Scarecrow Press, 2012). He has also written articles on Chris Petit’s Radio On and Don Boyd’s Aria for the Journal of British Cinema and Television, and on Derek Jarman for Studies in Documentary Film and Senses of Cinema. Additionally, he has contributed essays on Ken Russell in Ken Russell: Re-Assessing Britain’s Last Mannerist (Scarecrow Press, 2009) and Small-Gauge Storytelling: Discovering the Amateur Fiction Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). He has also written entries on British art cinema for The Directory of World Cinema: Britain (Intellect Press, 2012) and has published on Sally Potter, Joseph H. Lewis, Orson Welles, Fred Zinnemann and Bela Tarr. His other research interests include film writing and screenplays. He is currently writing a book on unfilmed scripts by British writers and directors. Peter Jameson is an early career researcher teaching at Queen’s University Belfast. His PhD thesis, The Go-Between: Theatre and the Cinema of Joseph Losey, examines the way in which Losey’s background in radical theatre in the 1930s informed his filmmaking. His article ‘Machines for Acting: Soviet Constructivist Theatre and the Use of Vertical Space in the Films of Joseph Losey’ appeared in the Authorship issue of CineAction (2013). Kim Knowles is Lecturer in Film Studies at Aberystwyth University and Experimental Film Programmer at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Her research interests lie in the field of experimental cinema, and she has published widely on French avant-garde film, poetry and photography, including the monograph A Cinematic Artist: The Films of Man Ray (Peter Lang, 2009, 2012) and articles in History of Photography, French Studies and Studies in French Cinema. Her more recent work focuses on technological transition and the politics and poetics of obsolescence.

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Katerina Loukopoulou teaches history and theory of documentary film at the London College of Communication (LCC) of the University of the Arts London (UAL). After completing her PhD at Birkbeck College on the cultural history of films on art in Britain (2010), Katerina held postdoctoral fellowships at UCL (2010–12) and Panteion University (2012–15). Her publications include journal articles in Film History, Visual Culture in Britain and the International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, as well as essays in the collections Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the US (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex (University of California Press, 2018). Her current project, supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, investigates the relationship between pacifism and documentary cinema. Sarah Martindale is a Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham and Training Programme Manager for the Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training. Her research qualitatively explores the ways people attach meaning and value to cultural artefacts and digital interactions. Sarah publishes about new media, e.g. alternate reality games, and the construction of heritage and identity within national cinemas. She supervises a range of PhD research, for instance about the development of brain-controlled cinema and interactive museum experiences. Paul Newland is Research Excellence Framework (REF) Manager at Bath Spa University. He is author of British Films of the 1970s (Manchester University Press, 2013) and The Cultural Construction of London’s East End (Rodopi, 2008), and editor of British Rural Landscapes on Film (Manchester University Press, 2016) and Don’t Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s (Intellect, 2010). He has published articles in journals such as the Journal of British Cinema and Television, Visual Culture in Britain and The New Soundtrack. Duncan Petrie is Professor of Film and Television and Head of the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of York. His books include Creativity and Constraint in the British Film Industry (Macmillan, 1991), The British Cinematographer (British Film Institute, 1996), Screening Scotland (British Film Institute, 2000), Contemporary Scottish Fictions (Edinburgh University Press, 2004), Shot in New Zealand: The Art and Craft of the Kiwi Cinematographer (Random House, 2007) and Educating Film-Makers (Intellect, 2014), co-authored with Rod Stoneman. He was Principal Investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, ‘Transformation and Tradition in British Cinema of the 1960s’. Tom Ryall is Emeritus Professor of Film History at Sheffield Hallam University. His books include Anthony Asquith, Britain and the American Cinema and Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema. He has contributed

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List of contributors

various articles on British and American cinema to collections such as A Companion to the Gangster Film (John Wiley & Sons, 2018), Film Noir Prototypes (Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2018), British Rural Landscapes on Film (Manchester University Press, 2016), Howards Hawks New Perspectives (British Film Institute, 2015), The Routledge Companion to British Media History (Routledge, 2014), A Companion to Film Noir (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), Modern British Drama on Screen (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Film Noir: The Directors (Limelight Editions, 2012), The Cinema of Britain and Ireland (Columbia University Press, 2005), and The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford University Press, 1998). He has written for journals such as Screen, Sight and Sound and the Journal of Popular British Cinema. Robert Shail is Professor of Film in the Northern Film School and Director of Research for the School of Film, Music and Performing Arts at Leeds Beckett University. He is widely published on post-war British cinema, with a particular focus on stardom, masculinity, and the role of the director. More recently his research has focused on children’s cinema including his monograph The Children’s Film Foundation: History and Legacy​, published by Palgrave/British Film Institute (2016). Ryan Shand completed his PhD, titled ‘Amateur Cinema: History, Theory, and Genre (1930–80)’, at the University of Glasgow. Since then he has worked on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded projects, ‘Mapping the City in Film: A Geohistorical Analysis’ at the University of Liverpool, as well as ‘Children and Amateur Media in Scotland’ at the University of Glasgow. He contributed chapters to the anthologies Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections (Palgrave, 2010), and Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place (Indiana University Press, 2014); article publications have appeared in The Moving Image, Leisure Studies and the International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen. Ryan is also the co-editor of Small-Gauge Storytelling: Discovering the Amateur Fiction Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Sally Shaw teaches Film, Media and Political Philosophy at the University of Portsmouth. Her PhD thesis ‘But Where on Earth is Home – A Cultural History of Black Britain in 1970s Film and Television’ was completed in 2014 and drew on extensive archival research and interviews with filmmakers including Horace Ové and Anthony Simmons. Sally has published articles in Critical Studies in Television, Crossings – Journal of Migration, Social Identities and Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. The most recent of these was concerned with multicultural programming in the early days of Channel 4. Sally is currently researching the work of the filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah.

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Phil Wickham is the Curator of The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter. He writes and lectures extensively on British film and television. He was previously a curator at the British Film Institute.

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Introduction: British art cinema

Introduction – British art cinema: creativity, experimentation and innovation Paul Newland and Brian Hoyle What is art cinema? Definitions of art cinema have long been contested, but the generic term ‘art cinema’ has generally come to stand for feature-length narrative films that are situated at the margins of mainstream cinema, located somewhere between overtly experimental films and more obviously commercial product. Whether it is through a modernist, drifting, episodic approach to storytelling; a complex engagement with high culture; the foregrounding of a distinct authorial voice; or a simple refusal to bow to normal commercial considerations, at its heart the term ‘art cinema’ has come to represent filmmaking which is distinct from – and often in direct opposition to – popular narrative film. But for Steve Neale, writing in a seminal article published in the journal Screen in 1981, the term ‘art cinema’ applies not just to individual films and film histories but also to patterns of distribution, exhibition, reception and audience engagement.1 Moreover, art cinema, in its cultural and aesthetic aspirations but also its audience, relies heavily upon an appeal to ‘universal’ values of culture and art. This is reflected in the existence of international festivals, where distribution is sought for these films, and where their status as ‘art’ – and as films ‘to be taken seriously’ – is confirmed and re-stated through prizes and awards. Writing in 2013, David Andrews argued that art cinema should be considered a ‘sprawling super-genre [like] mainstream cinema or cult cinema’.2 He elaborates, writing that this super-genre comprises all ‘traditional art films and (all) avant-garde movies, plus (all) the movies that have gained a more qualified and fragile high-art status by untraditional means at the cultural level, or, more usually, the sub-cultural level’.3 While Andrews may be correct, and popular perception has come to view art films as films exhibited in arthouse cinemas for serious, intellectual, culturally sophisticated audiences, ‘including small-budget but artistic foreign films, avantgarde films, and older classics’,4 such a definition is perhaps too broad to be helpful. Andrews tellingly alludes to the notion of a ‘traditional art film’, which implies that such a thing exists and can be defined. This, however, is not necessarily the case.

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In his 1979 article ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’ David Bordwell argues that merely ‘[i]dentifying a mode of production/­ consumption does not exhaustively characterise the art cinema, since the art cinema also consists of formal traits and viewing conventions’.5 These traits and conventions are what separates the art cinema from both classical narrative cinema and the avant garde. So, in addition to being an ‘institution’,6 art cinema might indeed be considered a kind of film genre. Yet it has rarely been referred to as such. The reasons for this are both cultural and practical. On the one hand, as Andrews notes, ‘cinephiles speak of art cinema as if this category could be recognised by its form, thus suggesting that it is a traditional genre, [yet] they seem reluctant to call it that, for in cinephile discourse the term “genre” smacks of commercialism’.7 At the same time, there is no immediately obvious criterion for what constitutes an art film. Other notable film genres (such as the western) contain numerous tropes and traits that can make them instantly classifiable by a viewer. One would however be hard pressed to find any obvious generic similarities between, say, Jean-Luc Godard’s A Bout de Souffle (1959) and Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963). This fact is also acknowledged by Bordwell, who argues that any attempt to call art cinema a genre will ‘invite the criticism that the creators of such films are too inherently different to be lumped together’.8 Yet despite this lack of familiar plots, character types, settings, techniques and themes typical of more obviously generic film forms, Bordwell nevertheless argues that in art films, ‘the overall functions of style and theme remain remarkably constant […] as a whole’.9 Moreover, despite the variety of concerns unique to individual nations and cultures and the highly individual nature of their film-makers, Bordwell argues that ‘we can usefully consider the “art cinema” as a distinct mode of film practice, [with] a set of formal conventions, and implicit viewing procedures’.10 In order to establish generic criteria to identify a certain film as an art film, then, one must look beyond the conventional notions of genre that operate on the surface of a film – horses, six-shooters and the like – and instead look to the manner of the film’s construction in terms of style, narrative, structure and themes. For many commentators, art cinema does represent a distinct form of cinematic practice and can be identified by several stylistic, structural and narrative conventions and underlying themes. Perhaps most importantly, art films are art films because they do not conform to the model of dominant mainstream filmmaking – as historically typified by Hollywood – in several ways. Firstly, art films define themselves in terms of directorial authorship, or auteurism. Although European cinema does not lack a star system, in art cinema the director is essentially the star. Indeed, each subsequent film by an art cinema auteur can often be seen within a growing oeuvre, and might feature recognisable stylistic trademarks and develop its maker’s favourite themes. As Ian Breakwell puts it, art films demonstrate that certain filmmakers ‘made films, just as authors wrote novels and artists painted pictures’ and that films ‘could be personal creative statements […] by Bergman, by Fellini’.11 Secondly, art films tend to be structured around psychological

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Introduction: British art cinema

problems and intellectual themes, or what Neale called ‘the interiorisation of dramatic conflict’,12 as opposed to classical Hollywood’s preference for following the actions of goal-orientated characters. The third related characteristic is art cinema’s approach to narrative. As Peter Greenaway, one of the doyens of contemporary British and European art cinema, provocatively put it: ‘most cinema is built along 19th-century models. You would hardly think that the cinema had discovered James Joyce sometimes. Most of the cinema we’ve got is modelled on Dickens and Balzac and Jane Austen.’13 But if classical narrative cinema typified by Hollywood is, as Greenaway suggests, still built along the model of the nineteenth-century realist novel, with its linear narrative, cause–effect logic and clear resolution, the art cinema has discovered Joyce. Indeed, art films like 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963), L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) and Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) stand as the cinematic equivalents of the work of modernist writers such as Joyce, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, with less clearly defined characters; episodic, fragmented narratives; and ambiguous, often unresolved endings. Finally, European directors often understood that a rejection of the narratives of Hollywood cinema equally required a rejection of its formal techniques, and new aesthetics had to be found to complement their new modernist concerns. Hence, Fellini’s fantasy sequences, Godard’s jump cuts, Resnais’s unannounced flashbacks, Truffaut’s freeze frames, and Jancsó’s sequence shots. While the definitions of art cinema proposed by the likes of Bordwell and Neale over three decades ago remain invaluable, they have their limitations. For example, Bordwell argues that art cinema is ‘ “a realistic cinema” which either shows us “real locations” or “real problems” (contemporary alienation, lack of communication), [and] “realistic” – that is psychologically complex characters’.14 Yet he does not recognise the fact that a classical narrative film such as On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) can also deal with real locations, real problems and psychologically complex characters. There are other inconsistencies. For instance, Bordwell argues that a film like Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) is an art film by virtue of its realism, but he ignores the fact that the film’s protagonist is as goal-orientated as any in a Hollywood film, whereas works like Last Year in Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) or The Round Up (Miklós Jancsó, 1966), which are indisputably art films, do not offer anything approaching psychologically complex characters. Moreover, the emphasis that both Bordwell and Neale place on auteurism does not make allowances for anti-auteur directors such as Jacques Becker, Louis Malle and others ‘who delight[ed] in adopting different themes and styles in each of their films’.15 If, as Bordwell puts it, art cinema exists somewhere between linear, classical narrative films with cause–effect logic and goal-orientated characters, such as Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1959), and experimental, avant-garde works typified by Stan Brakhage’s four-minute abstract film, Mothlight (1963),16 not all art films are situated directly at the midpoint between these two poles. Indeed, different films should be placed at different points on

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this continuum. Take, for instance, a Hollywood film like John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), which was made at a time when even major studios were not above funding innovative, director-led projects. The film’s avenger protagonist, Walker (Lee Marvin), is goal-orientated to the point of being single-minded, and the film borrows many of the trappings of the American gangster film genre. At the same time, however, Boorman structures his film in a non-linear fashion, which betrays the influence of Resnais and other innovative European directors. He also gives it an open ending, and fills it with ambiguous hints that Walker, who is shot in the film’s opening minutes, may in fact be dreaming the entire film as he lays dying. The result is a fascinating hybrid of American genre cinema and the art film, and would be situated closer to the Rio Bravo end of the art cinema spectrum. On the opposite end would be a work like Derek Jarman’s The Last of England (1987) which, as one of the chapters in this book will explain in more detail, comes close to being an avant-garde film in several ways, not least its use of amateur Super8 equipment, its lack of a shooting script, and its experimental structure. At the same time, the film’s length, and the way it was funded, distributed and exhibited, conform to the comparatively conventional model of art cinema. One could go on and place films such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), Wim Wenders’s The American Friend (1977) and Neil Jordan’s Angel (1982) at various points on the more conventional end of the spectrum, and works like Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1965) and Hitler: A Film from Germany (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, 1977) on the more experimental end, with ‘classical’ art films such as Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957), A Bout de Souffle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960), Jules et Jim (François Truffault, 1962), 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963) and If … (Lindsay Anderson, 1968) all located somewhere near the middle. As useful as it might be to think about art cinema existing on this continuum between the mainstream and the avant garde, the complexities of art cinema as a form eventually make this idea problematic. Indeed, it is not unusual to find works that have strong ties to both Hollywood genre cinema and avant-garde experimentalism. Take, for example, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), with its combination of big-budget special effects sequences, its episodic and often ambiguous plot (which is redolent of art cinema), and the avant-garde ‘stargate’ sequence which recalls an abstract film by Jordan Belson. Similarly, a film like Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance (1970) was, as Michael O’Pray notes, ‘funded, distributed and exhibited through the Hollywood-based film industry with a budget of hundreds of thousands and used rock stars as major actors, but formally it shared many of the concerns of the European art film […] with its radical montage, complex time patterns and desultory plotting’.17 At the same time, Performance also betrays the influence of American underground film-maker Kenneth Anger in ‘the rich colours and textures of the mise-en-scène for the drug scenes’.18 Films like 2001 and



Introduction: British art cinema

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Performance make it clear that there is no such thing as ‘pure’ art cinema, and as this introduction will demonstrate below, definitions of art cinema must resist notions of purity and should instead remain inclusive and flexible, taking into account simultaneous crossovers with more conventional and experimental traditions of filmmaking. Before doing so, however, it is important to address the marginalised place that art cinema occupies in Britain, and the internal resistance to it.

Art cinema in Britain Film history has generally tended to view British film-makers as aesthetically conservative and Hollywood-centric in their outlook, when indeed they have been mentioned at all. The lack of attention given to British cinema by international critics has been well documented. To give one example, Gerald Mast, an American, reserved a mere six pages for British cinema in his 1971 book A Short History of the Movies (one-fifth of the space dedicated to D. W. Griffith alone). However, Mast is not alone in perpetuating this bias. British critics have often seemed to concur with François Truffaut’s infamous dictum that there is a certain incompatibility between the terms ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain’.19 Indeed, as Lester Friedman notes, most ‘British critics who penned influential books or essays usually drew upon American rather than British films […] to support their theories’.20 This neglect has been doubly felt when it comes to discussions of art cinema in Britain. While the existence of an art cinema in a European country such as France, for example, is rarely if ever contested, such claims have very rarely been forcefully made about Britain. In his important essay, ‘The Last New Wave: Modernism in the British Films of the Thatcher Era’, Peter Wollen argues that British cinema only developed a modernist, auteurist art cinema, or a ‘New Wave’ in the continental tradition, when Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s. For Wollen it was ‘both inappropriate and misleading’21 to label the British New Wave of the 1960s as a true ‘New Wave’. A New Wave must be modernist in outlook, director-led, and must put ‘film first and not subordinat[e] it to literature or theatre’.22 He saw the British New Wave as running counter to all these things. For Wollen, the movement privileged realism over modernism, was writer-led and ‘plainly put film second’23 to its literary influences. At the same time, however, B. F. Taylor has noted that critics argued that films like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962) ‘relied too heavily on the kind of stylistic traits evident in the films of the nouvelle vague’,24 with what Penelope Houston called its ‘self-consciously cinematic emphasis’.25 Clearly there is something contradictory going on here, with one critic arguing the  films of the British New Wave were too self-consciously cinematic, while the other argues that they are not cinematic enough. Similarly, one critic wants to argue that they are too influenced by European trends, while

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the other seems to imply that they are too clearly aligned with the British cinematic traditions of realism and literary adaptation. What neither seems able to admit is that the British New Wave was not a mere cinematic offshoot of the ‘Angry Young Men’ writers, nor were the films of its directors slavish imitations of their French nouvelle vague counterparts. Rather, as Duncan Petrie points out in his chapter in this book, the British national film industry was ‘increasingly more complex and transnational’ by the 1960s, and the British New Wave was an art cinema that was both realist and modernist, cinematic and literary, inward looking and open to foreign influences. Moreover, it is worth pointing out that the reservations of British critics towards the British New Wave were not shared by film-makers like Alain Resnais, who greatly admired Karel Reisz and considered Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1963) ‘to be a masterpiece’ (figure 1).26 It is also worth noting Wollen’s assertion here that ‘nobody has made a serious claim for the auteurist credentials of Reisz, Richardson, Schlesinger and others’.27 This kind of dismissal of British film-makers has been disappointingly commonplace. Despite being a truly international phenomenon, art cinema has often been viewed as an exclusively continental tradition, typified by the work of a small group of auteur directors. The names of British film-makers have rarely if ever been included on such lists, even when they were compiled by British critics. For example, in his copy of Alexander Walker’s Hollywood England: British Cinema in the 1960s, Lindsay Anderson highlighted a sentence that reads ‘where in the period under review does one look for the British equivalent of Bergman, or Forman, or Rohmer, or Antonioni?’28 and wrote the word ‘thanks’ in the margin beside it. A similar sentiment was expressed by Derek Jarman in the early 1980s when he wrote:

1  This Sporting Life (dir. Lindsay Anderson, 1963)



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The cinema I love hardly exists in this country, and where it exists it is fragmented and discontinuous [and] largely ignored by the mainstream […] In continental Europe this cinema is called THE CINEMA, and you’ve all heard of its exponents. They are Godard, Antonioni, Pasolini, Rosi, the Tavianis, Fassbinder, Schroeter and a host of others, but here it is quite likely you may not have heard of Peter Watkins, Bill Douglas, Robina Rose, Terence Davies, Chris Petit, Ron Peck – and forgive me if I include myself – who are their counterparts.29

British art cinema: Creativity, experimentation and innovation largely agrees with the sentiments expressed by Anderson and Jarman. This book seeks to help redress the critical neglect of British art cinema by arguing that it is a highly significant strand of the nation’s film culture. But this has not been a universally held viewpoint. As Nina Danino argued in a 2014 essay on the place that visual artists such as Steve McQueen occupy in the British film industry, ‘the film world is still quite suspicious of art as film, film as art, artists’ films and other varieties of this relationship’.30 But film industry insiders are not alone in harbouring this suspicion, and many critics and viewers also characterise art cinema as ‘aesthetic, inauthentic and self-indulgent’.31 This is brilliantly illustrated in ‘Sunday for Seven Days’, an episode of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s much loved television comedy Steptoe and Son from 1964. In it, the son, Harold, who has social and cultural aspirations, wants to go to the cinema to see Fellini’s 8½. But his father, Albert, who would prefer to see the fictitious Nudes of 1964, counters by asking, ‘eight and a half? Eight and a half what? […] Maybe it’s his hat size.’ It is a wonderful joke, which exposes the potential pretentiousness of Fellini’s nonsensical title. At the same time, however, Albert also mocks the pretensions of Harold, who views the cinema as ‘an art form, not a tawdry peepshow’, and presents him as an elitist pseud. Albert, on the other hand, seems to speak for the majority of mainstream filmgoers who think that Last Year in Marienbad is a ‘load of old boots’ and prefer the pleasures provided by Hollywood. Perhaps the most notable and vocal critics of British art cinema are those who believe that native film-makers should follow the model of Hollywood and aim their films at the American market. This is the direction that has generally been favoured by both Conservative and Labour UK governments since Margaret Thatcher terminated the Eady levy in 1985. For instance, in 2012 the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, visited Pinewood and told representatives of the UK film industry that: Our role, and that of the BFI, should be to support the sector in becoming even more dynamic and entrepreneurial, helping UK producers to make commercially successful pictures that rival the quality and impact of the best international productions. Just as the British Film Commission has played a crucial role in attracting the biggest and best international studios to produce their films here, so we must incentivise UK producers to chase new markets both here and overseas.32

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There is no question that Cameron’s remarks were inspired by the runaway success of Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech (2010), which made a substantial box office return off a modest budget. Similar statements were made (and policies put into place) following the success of small productions like Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981), Four Weddings and a Funeral (Richard Curtis, 1994) and Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996). But in each case the attempt to compete with Hollywood eventually led to the production of expensive failures such as Hugh Hudson’s Revolution (1985), Julien Temple’s Absolute Beginners (1986) and Gillian Armstrong’s Charlotte Grey (2001), which led to the collapse (or near collapse) of production companies such as Goldcrest, Virgin Films and Film Four. Despite the boom–bust cycle that this approach clearly fosters, many important figures in British cinema still insist that filmmaking should be profit-driven and Hollywood-orientated. Many of them also feel the need to disparage art cinema at the same time. For example, Alan Parker, who was also the chairman of the UK Film Council from 1999 until 2004, has frequently attacked both Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway, perhaps most notably when he said he would leave Britain if the man who made The Draughtsman’s Contract (Peter Greenaway, 1982) got another film funded.33 But Parker has also spoken out against the British Film Institute (BFI) and Film Four, arguably the two bodies most responsible for supporting contemporary British art cinema, before ironically being made Chairman of the Board of Governors at the BFI from 1998 to 1999. For Parker, the BFI ‘represents the visually impaired, élitist and kill-joy cinema of the intellectuals’; while Film Four had a tendency to support ‘talking heads cinema’, which featured an aesthetic more suited to television than to the big screen.34 If the BFI aesthetic was typified for Parker by Jarman and Greenaway, he might offer a film-maker such as Mike Leigh as an exemplar of a Channel Four film-maker. On his official website Parker writes that Leigh’s films ‘with regard to cinematic skills are stripped down to the essentials – two people talking in a room and then climbing onto a motorbike to go and talk with two more people in another room – without even allowing us to see the imagined bike ride’.35 The idea that Leigh’s films are visually uninteresting is underscored by critics such as Geoff Andrew, who, despite their admiration for his work, argue that a film like Naked (1993) is ‘by far his most cinematic’.36 Andrew is damning Leigh with faint praise here and implying that films like Bleak Moments (1971) or Life is Sweet (1991) are somehow either theatrical, televisual, or whatever the opposite of cinematic is supposed to be. It is worth remembering, however, that several central figures in European art cinema (not least Ingmar Bergman and Eric Rohmer) have also been accused of making ‘talking heads’ cinema, while Andrew Sarris accused the former of having a ‘technique [that] never equalled his sensibility’.37 Michael Oleszczyk comes far closer to the truth, however, when he observes that ‘Leigh’s films were never beautiful to look at, but their beauty was always private and inconspicuous: more Yasujiro Ozu and Jan Vermeer than David Lean and John Constable’.38

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If Parker’s objections to British art cinema stem from what he sees as a lack of ambition and visual sophistication (strange things to accuse either Jarman or Greenaway of), as well as commercial viability, there is another school of thought that objects to both art cinema and Parker’s preferred Hollywood gloss. Indeed, several critics who have championed British social realism have also argued that art cinema is an elitist form aimed at a privileged, educated audience. Indeed, there is strong sense that the appeal of art cinema rarely crosses class divides. For example, Andy Medhurst responded to the success of Leigh’s Naked at Cannes (where it won both Best Director and Best Actor) by arguing that Leigh ‘is likely to be applauded for breaking away from his reputation for small scale, nuanced, domestic English tragicomedies […] but I do worry that Naked might give him an open passport to the European art cinema [as] British social comedy is far more important’.39 Comparing both Andrew’s and Medhurst’s responses to Leigh’s film is instructive. It not only echoes the opposing opinions about the British New Wave expressed by Wollen and Houston above, but also demonstrates that the debate about what critics think British cinema should be is still very much ongoing. One critic clearly longs for a more visually orientated, artistic British cinema, while the other places social relevance and realism over visual pleasure. These two visions seem hard to reconcile. Take, for example, the critical response to Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). On paper, Davies’ film, which depicts working-class life in wartime and post-war Liverpool, sounds like a prime example of kitchensink drama; but Davies’ elliptical, non-linear approach to narrative comes far closer to a work of high modernism such as Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959). As Wendy Everett notes, ‘any readings of the film as exemplifying social realism were forced to take account of both its extreme self-consciousness and its formal complexity, those very qualities that were traditionally used to define “art” film as the antithesis of realism’.40 She goes on to note that the ‘typical response was to view the non-realistic elements of Distant Voices, Still Lives as a fundamental flaw in its make-up’.41 It was not only those committed to social realism, or aping the Hollywood mainstream, who remained suspicious of art cinema. British film-makers working on the more experimental end of the spectrum have also had their objections. For example, during his time on the BFI Production Board in the late 1970s, the structural film-maker Malcolm Le Grice noted a general shift in the Board’s policy. While the BFI had previously allocated most of its production budget to short films which ranged from experimental works, such as Peter Gidal’s Condition of Illusion (1975), to more narrativeorientated outputs such as the three parts of Bill Douglas’s Trilogy (1972– 77), in the final years of the decade the Board’s chairman, Peter Sainsbury, began moving ‘towards longer and more complex productions’.42 This process culminated in Sainsbury’s decision to allocate the lion’s share of his annual production budget to funding a single narrative feature film, Radio On (Chris Petit, 1979). Sainsbury’s intention, as Le Grice notes, was to move ‘towards the possibility [of creating] a “British Arts Cinema” […] in

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the tradition of French art or Italian Art Cinema’.43 Perhaps spurred on by the efforts of independent film-makers and producers such as Jarman and Don Boyd, Sainsbury, as James Park remembers, ‘encouraged film-makers working with BFI Finance to cast their scripts within a narrative structure, use well-known names in the cast, and employ skilled technicians to secure the highest production values possible with a low budget’.44 Even experimental films produced by the Board at this time, such as Sue Clayton and Jonathan Curling’s The Song of the Shirt (1979) and Peter Greenaway’s The Falls (1980), were feature-length works that made concessions to narrative. Moreover, film-makers like Greenaway were convinced to abandon avantgarde film in favour of making comparatively conventional and commercial works such as The Draughtsman’s Contract and, as Christopher Dupin notes, there was a ‘progressive amalgamation of avant-garde, oppositional and art cinema throughout the 1980s’.45 While Park argues that Sainsbury’s aim was ‘to maximise the audiences for films which are innovative in the use of the film medium’,46 his policy was seen by some as a betrayal of Britain’s experimental film culture. What the critics of art cinema mentioned above have in common is a wish to maintain the purity of their preferred mode of filmmaking. Parker and his acolytes do not want to see commercial potential compromised by experimentation. The social realists see realism as an end unto itself and view modernist techniques as an unnecessary distraction, while Le Grice and the avant gardists do not wish to see purely experimental film watered down by commercial considerations such as narrative and feature-length running times. However, art cinema is never pure. Indeed, Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover have made a compelling case for the ‘impurity’ of art cinema. They argue that: To be impure is not the same as to be vague or nebulous. Rather, we contend that art cinema always perverts the standard category used to divide up institutions, locations, histories, or spectators. Art cinema’s impurity can be understood in a variety of ways. First, it is defined by an impure institutional space: neither experimental nor mainstream, art cinema moves between the commercial world and its artisanal other […] Second, art cinema articulates an ambivalent relationship to location. It is a resolutely international category […] Fourth, art cinema […] troubles notions of genre […] Lastly, art cinema constitutes a peculiarly impure spectator, both at the level of textual address and in the history of its audiences.47

This impurity does not stop with our understanding of art cinema as a category. On the contrary, we argue that British art films themselves are always impure. They are often amalgamations of various styles, genres and voices, and often with origins not only in Britain but also from across the globe. For example, as we briefly mentioned above, works like Jarman’s The Last of England bring together elements of the avant garde and art cinema in what Michael O’Pray called ‘an eclectic, hybrid manner’.48 The Last of England is not, however, an isolated case. Other critics have labelled films like Distant Voice, Still Lives and Naked as ‘social art films’, a ‘new and more hybrid

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2  The Man Who Fell to Earth (dir. Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

form which brings together traditional social realist discourse within the more self-conscious narratives of European art cinema’.49 Similarly, a work such as Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), which marries a provocative, intellectually challenging study of contemporary alienation (which Bordwell sees as the key theme of art cinema50) with large-budget production values, could be classified as yet another kind of hybrid: the ‘Hollywood art movie’ (figure 2). The Draughtsman’s Contract is a costume drama, a murder mystery, a meditation on painting and a puzzle without a solution in the mould of Last Year at Marienbad and Blow-Up. Radio On is a road movie, a detective film, a celebration of European modernism and a musical.51 One could go on, but the point is well made. There is no such thing as a pure art film. Furthermore, we argue it is often the hybrid nature of British art films that makes them such rich, interesting and complex works. Scholars besides Galt and Schoonover (2010), such as Mark Betz (2003, 2009), Andrew Tudor (2005) and David Andrews (2013), have begun to reassess the nature of art cinema. Collectively, their work has built on that of Bordwell, Neale and others and taken account of the problems inherent in trying to treat art cinema as a stable category of films. For instance, Andrews has called for a more ‘inclusive’ definition of art cinema, which ‘avoids reducing the genre to the theatrical art film, the avant-garde movie, or any other textual area, [… and] refuses to align the genre with any particular production practice […] any distribution practice […] or any particular exhibition practice’.52 Moreover, he calls for a definition of art cinema that is ‘value neutral’53 and breaks down the distinctions between high and low culture. This is especially important. Art films are generally perceived to be more artistically innovative and thematically serious than their mainstream counterparts, and their cultural prestige is further enhanced through participation in (and awards from) international film festivals. With this can come more than a hint of snobbery and a tendency to view art cinema as completely distinct from the mainstream. As the examples above prove, art cinema is in constant dialogue with the mainstream. Indeed, if art cinema

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does define itself explicitly against the classical narrative mode it must be aware of and play on its conventions. But there is more to art cinema’s engagement with mainstream cinema than simply knowing what one is reacting against. For most film-makers working in art cinema, the pleasures of mainstream cinema, especially Hollywood genre cinema, are very real. But these pleasures are never to be enjoyed uncritically. As an example, let us return to Chris Petit’s debut feature, Radio On (1979). This was a film that was self-consciously designed to help foster an art cinema in Britain. On its release, however, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith argued that it was ‘a film without a cinema’,54 at least in national terms. For NowellSmith, if Radio On belonged to any tradition it was that of the existential road movie in the spirit of Wim Wenders, who acted as the film’s executive producer. Richard Combs, however, was able to place the film in a wider context and saw it as a ‘tentative starting point for a possible British cinema (American movies, remodelled in Europe then refitted here?)’55 With this statement, Combs points to the complex relationship between American and European film, and Britain’s precarious space in between, as well as the equally intricate interface between art cinema and genre films. After all, the road movie was a quintessentially American form before Wenders so skilfully reinvented it, and his films are self-consciously indebted to the work of Hollywood film-makers such John Ford, Nicholas Ray and Arthur Penn. Radio On, then, is a British film in dialogue with the work of a German art cinema auteur whose own work is in dialogue with Hollywood. Moreover, Brian Hoyle has pointed out clear similarities between Radio On and a classic of British genre cinema, Mike Hodges’ Get Carter (1971), noting that both films ‘tell the story of a man leaving London to find answers about the mysterious death of his brother who, in each, was in some way connected to a local pornography ring’.56 But as the films progress, their differences – and those between the classical narrative film and the art film – become all too apparent. Michael Caine’s Jack Carter is a classical narrative anti-hero. Once he suspects foul play he investigates his brother’s murder and then relentlessly pursues his killers. In contrast, Robert (David Beames), the protagonist of Radio On, finds no explanation for his brother’s death and, like Claudia and Sandro in Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960), he soon gives up the search and ‘begins to wander aimlessly, unsure of where to go and what to do’.57 Radio On therefore offers a textbook example of Bordwell’s definition of an art film with a ‘certain drifting episodic quality to [its] narrative’.58 But while Terry Curtis-Fox correctly argues that Petit only ‘gives us hints of a thriller’ as ‘an excuse’59 to get the film’s real story, that of protagonist’s journey from London to Bristol, under way, the generic trappings of Radio On are far from incidental. Indeed, it is only through borrowing these conventions that Petit can subvert them and play with his audience’s expectations of how a film’s story should unfold (figure 3). British art films have often developed complex, challenging and innovative representations of sex and sexuality, which often stand in stark contrast to representations in mainstream British films. As Annette Kuhn and Guy

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3  Radio On (dir. Christopher Petit, 1979)

Westwell note, ‘art cinema’s “adult” themes became associated in the minds of audiences with sex and eroticism, with connotations of “quality” legitimising any risqué material’.60 For example, Michael Winterbottom’s British production, 9 Songs (2004), which has frequently been called the most sexually explicit film in the history of non-pornographic British cinema, offers a challenging fusion of art cinema and pornography. Peter Lehman, who discussed Winterbottom’s film alongside similarly provocative works by continental film-makers such as Catherine Breillat, noted that most ‘knowledgeable spectators would probably classify them as art films with some porn elements though some might call them porn movies dressed up with the trappings of art’,61 and the British reception of 9 Songs largely bore him out. Indeed, a review of the film like the one by Jim White in the Telegraph is worth examining, as it speaks volumes about the British attitudes towards both sex and the cinema: what is the point? We know what the purpose of pornography is, and this clearly does not share that end. Michael Winterbottom is a proper filmmaker, director of the wonderful 24-Hour Party People, which, incidentally, includes one of the funniest sex scenes ever committed to camera, a hilarious moment featuring Peter Kay and Steve Coogan in the back of a van, a romp straight out of the Carry On tradition of robust British humour.

White’s reference to the Carry On films here is particularly telling. This popular series, despite its reputation for smutty innuendo, ultimately refused to break taboos, and the films seemed increasingly conservative, innocent and out of touch as the sexual revolution of the ‘permissive’ 1960s made its way towards the lives of the British working classes in the 1970s. As Barry Forshaw has noted, the approach to sex in the Carry On films and other British sex comedies was ‘a repressed, allusive one in which any real celebration of sexuality, or sophisticated humour, was hardly to be found. This contrasted with the way that foreign directors repeatedly tackled such

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subjects – Jiri Menzel’s Closely Observed Trains (1966), for example’.62 In short, there remains a school of thought, which critics like White perpetuate, which insists that the British (and British film-makers) refuse to take sex seriously and are notably repressed in comparison with their continental counterparts. Films like 9 Songs should, however, stand as an important reminder that this is an unhelpful generalisation. Indeed, British art cinema has produced more than its share of controversial and taboo-breaking works, not least Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), which offers an example of the crossovers between exploitation and genre films and modernist art cinema; Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1968) and The Devils (1971), which still cannot be shown in the director’s preferred version; Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End (1970); John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971); Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971); Roeg and Cammell’s Performance; Roeg’s Bad Timing (1980); Jarman’s explicitly homoerotic Sebastiane (1976); and Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), which was cut by twenty-nine minutes to receive an ‘R’ rating in America and began debates leading to the abolition of the ‘X’ rating. Additionally, more recent films such as 9 Songs; Tim Roth’s incest drama, The War Zone (1999), which Gilbert Adair argued ‘should never have been made’;63 Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy (2001), with its unsimulated sex scene; Ashley Horner’s brilliantlove (2010); Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011); and Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy (2014) confirm the fact that British art cinema has not lost its taste for sex and its penchant for provocation. It is significant that many of the films mentioned above cannot be said to be straightforwardly British. Contemporary critics have acknowledged the ways in which film cultures have sprung up, nourishing and nurturing experimental or intellectual work in specific nations and across national boundaries. Indeed, it is no longer possible to view art cinema as simply a European institution bringing together several disparate national cinemas with their own systems of institutional funding and support. On the contrary, the prominence of figures as diverse as Satyajit Ray, Kenji Mizoguchi, Ousmane Semebene and Glauber Rocha, or more recently Hou HsiouHsien, Abbas Kiarostami and Wong Kar-Wai has shown that art cinema is a distinctly global phenomenon. Certainly, if we are to think about art cinema as a transatlantic phenomenon at the very least, to this list we might add Joseph Losey, John Schlesinger, Nicolas Roeg, Steve McQueen, Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold, among many others. The complexities of funding and distributing films, which often place artistic concerns over commercial viability, has led art cinema to become thoroughly transnational. Many art films are international co-productions, which rely on investment and talent derived from multiple nations and cultures. This is something Maria San Filippo sees as having ‘long troubled the conceptual and industrial borders of national (or continental) cinemas’.64 If the concept of a British national cinema is difficult to define, then, British art cinema becomes doubly difficult to pin down, due to art cinema’s institutional reliance on these border-crossing co-productions, which are often the only

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way by which small-scale, potentially uncommercial works can get made. Tim Bergfelder is surely correct when he argues, ‘rather than focusing exclusively on separate national formations, a history of European cinema might well begin by exploring the interrelationship between cultural and geographical centres and margins, and by tracing the migratory movements between these poles’.65 There are globetrotting British film-makers associated with art cinema, such as Peter Watkins and Ken McMullen, whose work is so international in character that it can become difficult to refer to them as British filmmakers at all. Nevertheless, their work serves as a reminder that art cinema in Britain cannot – and should not – be divorced from the notion of the transnational. After all, many of the key figures involved in making intellectually stimulating, creative, experimental films in Britain have been émigrés and immigrants; and many ‘British’ art films have employed aesthetic innovations influenced by artists who have worked in Europe and elsewhere. Powell and Pressburger, for example, relied greatly on a number of important continental collaborators both in front of and behind the camera. Indeed, despite ending with the words ‘Made in England’, films like Tales of Hoffmann (1951) along with The Red Shoes (1948) and Oh … Rosalinda!! (1955) perhaps feel more culturally European than British. Similarly, as Paul Newland has written, a film such as Radio On, which features characters speaking (unsubtitled) German, and was shot in a manner which makes the landscape between London and Bristol look decidedly alien, ‘depicts a Britain in which ideas of Britishness, if not absent, are problematized at every turn’.66 Another film-maker whose work demonstrates British art cinema’s challenge to pre-conceived notions of the ontology of British cinema is Ken Loach. On the one hand, Loach serves as an exemplar of a director whom critics would almost unanimously label as British, but on the other he demonstrates how hard it has become to draw and maintain national borders in art cinema. If one examines Loach’s films made after 1990, it is largely unproblematic to call the smaller scale films from the start of the decade, such as Riff-Raff (1991), Raining Stones (1993) and Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), British films. Despite the presence of multicultural actors and characters, each of these films is set in Britain and they were all funded solely by British companies such as Channel Four. However, as the 1990s progressed, and the scope of Loach’s films became more ambitious, the British identity of these films became increasingly contestable. For instance, his Spanish Civil War drama, Land and Freedom (1995), is, as Ian Christie notes, ‘truly European […] in all respects’.67 The film was funded with investment from companies in Britain, Spain and Germany; it was largely filmed on location in Spain; and the dialogue is distinctly polyglot, to reflect the nature of the International Brigade. Subsequent films, such as Carla’s Song (1996) and Bread and Roses (2000), are also clearly transnational in terms of language, setting, character and finance. Even seemingly British works such as the Glasgow trilogy of My Name is Joe (1998), Sweet Sixteen (2002) and Ae

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Fond Kiss (2004) are international co-productions collectively made with the financial assistance of over a dozen different companies from England, Scotland, France, Germany and Spain. Loach is hardly unusual in this respect, and notably British film-makers such as Mike Leigh, Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, Sally Potter and Terence Davies would not have been able to sustain their careers were it not for support from the Continent; and one must wonder if they will be able to continue benefiting from this investment after ‘Brexit’. As the contributors to British art cinema: Creativity, experimentation and innovation demonstrate, ‘British art cinema’ comprises competing and fragmentary discourses. It is the purpose of this book to demonstrate that the concept of a British art cinema should be inclusive, one which brings these seemingly disparate discourses together. Indeed, we argue that despite its reputation for being an elitist form, British art cinema as a concept is incredibly broad, if it encompasses all film production that clearly evidences creativity, experimentation and/or innovation. While it is not the purpose of this introduction to offer a straightforward history of art cinema in Britain, or to attempt to propose a canon, we would argue that the net of British art cinema can be cast wide enough to bring together, for example, the silent films of Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Asquith and Kenneth Macpherson; the documentary tradition from Humphrey Jennings, to Peter Watkins, to Nick Broomfield and Patrick Keiller; the large-scale, Hollywood-backed, genre-inflected productions of directors like Ken Russell, Nicolas Roeg, John Boorman and Neil Jordan; social realists such as Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Bill Douglas and Alan Clarke, amongst others; the flamboyant anti-realism of Powell and Pressburger; the more experimental work of Jarman, Greenaway, Isaac Julien and Steve McQueen; international productions by expatriates such as Stanley Kubrick, Joseph Losey, Richard Lester, Michelangelo Antonioni and Roman Polanski; the costume dramas of Merchant-Ivory; and films by directors as varied as Thorold Dickinson, Jack Clayton, Lindsay Anderson, Ken McMullen, Chris Petit, Sally Potter, Terence Davies, Michael Winterbottom, Peter Mullan and Lynne Ramsay, to name but a few; as well as the work of post-millennial film-makers such as Andrea Arnold, Peter Strickland, Ben Wheatley and Clio Barnard. It would be impossible for a single volume to do justice to the work of all of these film-makers and assess their collective achievement. Nevertheless, British art cinema: Creativity, experimentation and innovation, in its attempts to show the full potential of the breadth and depth of British art cinema, provides examinations of films dating from the silent era to the present day, running the gamut from documentaries, to amateur films, to experimental films, to Hollywood-funded features. The authors in this collection demonstrate just how inclusive and how central a part of our national film culture British art cinema has been and continues to be. Tom Ryall begins this volume by exploring the notion of ‘art cinema’ in Britain during the 1920s, and considers the cultural context in which

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British film-makers worked, the ideas and attitudes towards the medium, the intellectual atmosphere in which directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Asquith began their careers. Owen Evans argues for the inclusion of the great documentary film-maker Humphrey Jennings in the history of British art cinema, as an exemplar of the ‘expressive individual’ that David Bordwell has argued is fundamental to art cinema. Katerina Loukopoulou’s chapter explores the often overlooked link between the high aspirations held for film in 1940s Britain (especially within the realm of factual film) and the later flourishing of an Arts Council-sponsored art cinema in the 1970s. Ryan Shand examines the relationship between amateur and experimental filmmaking through an examination of the work of Enrico Cocozza in the 1940s and 1950s. Duncan Petrie provides a new critical overview of British art cinema in the 1960s. David Forrest argues that the debate around the status of British New Wave films as art cinema texts should not simply be one of nomenclature. Rather, he makes the case that social realism – so central to British national cinematic identity – might be judged beyond its effectiveness (or otherwise) as a political medium. Peter Jameson argues that the collaboration between the American director Joseph Losey and the British dramatist Harold Pinter – which resulted in three feature films between 1963 and 1971 and the publication of their unfilmed adaptation of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, The Proust Screenplay in 1977 – influenced British cinema and television in significant ways. Robert Shail provides a study of the work on John Krish, arguing that his oeuvre demonstrates a ‘deep awareness of the darkest corners of human experience, often treated with mischievous black humour, which is offset by an abiding faith in the redeeming instinct for empathy’. Paul Newland explores the reputation of Nicolas Roeg, alongside those of two films, Performance (with Donald Cammell, 1970) and Don’t Look Now (1973). Sally Shaw offers a case study of Horace Ové’s Pressure (1976), arguing that it is ‘more formally innovative than it is often given credit for’, and these formal qualities should be considered alongside the film’s historical significance and ‘polemical’ content. Paul Elliott explores the important work of Black Audio Film Collective, which was active from 1982 to 1998. He argues that the influence of the theorists and film-makers of Latin American Third Cinema allowed young Black and Asian British film-makers to find a ‘way of cultivating their own cultural identity’. John Hill revisits the British art cinema of the 1980s from a contemporary standpoint. Jo George explores the work of Derek Jarman and argues that a more thorough understanding of the film-maker’s interest in medieval literature and culture is required. Her chapter specifically examines two of Jarman’s more experimental features, The Last of England (1987) and The Garden (1990), and places them within the traditions of medieval dream-visions and avant-garde ‘trance films’. Phil Wickham looks at the career of the influential independent producer and director, Don Boyd, and specifically at his ambition to help foster a sustainable, commercially viable art cinema in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. Brian Hoyle’s chapter explores the

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importance of both the composed film and the artist biopic as sub-genres of British art cinema. He argues that these ‘twin traditions’ notably converge in the work of Ken Russell and Peter Greenaway. Sarah Martindale looks at Shakespearean film as art cinema, paying specific attention to Richard Eyre’s often misunderstood Stage Beauty (2004), which she sees as ‘a cerebral retort to Hollywood’. Kim Knowles explores crossovers between art cinema and video art in her chapter on Sarah Turner’s extraordinary study of identity and memory, Perestroika (2010). These final two chapters bring this volume into dialogue with what Newland and Hoyle have elsewhere called ‘post-millennial British art cinema’.68 Indeed, if the focus of this book is mainly historical, the editors are keen to remind readers that British art cinema is not a closed canon. On the contrary, established figures such as Greenaway, Davies, Loach and Leigh, and a younger generation as varied in their styles and concerns as Andrea Arnold, Peter Strickland, Ben Wheatley and Steve McQueen continue to make important contributions to British art cinema. It is the ultimate purpose of this book to demonstrate to this and future generations of British film-makers, as well as critics and students, that Britain does indeed have a long, rich and varied tradition of art cinema to draw upon, appreciate and study.

Notes  1 Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen, 22: 1 (1981), pp. 11–40.  2 David Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas: Foreign, Cult, Avant-Garde and Beyond (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013), p. 22.  3 Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas, p. 25.  4 Ira Konigsberg, The Complete Film Dictionary (London: Penguin Reference, 1988), p. 18.  5 David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 5th edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 716–24; p. 717.  6 See William Charles Siska, Modernism in the Narrative Cinema: The Art Film as Genre (New York, NY: Arno Press, 1980), and John Hill, ‘The Rise and Fall of British Art Cinema: A Short History of the 1980s and 1990s’, Aura: Film Studies Journal, 6: 3 (2000), pp. 18–32; p. 23.  7 Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas, p. 26.  8 Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, p. 717.  9 Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, p. 717. 10 Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, p. 716. 11 Ian Breakwell, An Actor’s Revenge (London: British Film Institute, 1995), p. 2. 12 Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, p. 13. 13 Emma Brockes, ‘Maybe I’m Too Clever’, Guardian, 10 May 2004, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/may/10/art. Accessed 4 March 2018. 14 Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, p. 718. 15 Raymond Durgnat, ‘Auteur Wars’, in Henry K. Miller (ed.), The Essential

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Raymond Durgnat (London: British Film Institute, 2014), pp. 25–31; p. 29. 16 Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, p. 716. 17 Michael O’Pray, ‘The British Avant-Garde and Art Cinema from the 1970s to the 1990s’, in Andrew Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (London: Cassell, 1996), pp. 178–90; p. 179. 18 O’Pray, ‘The British Avant-Garde and Art Cinema from the 1970s to the 1990s’, p. 180. 19 François Truffaut, Hitchcock: A Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1969), p. 100. 20 Lester Friedman, ‘Introduction: The Empire Strikes Out: An American Perspective on the British Film Industry’, in Lester Friedman (ed.), Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, 2nd edition (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), pp. 1–14; p. 3. 21 Peter Wollen, ‘The Last New Wave: Modernism in the British Films of the Thatcher Era’, in Friedman (ed.), Fires Were Started, pp. 30–44; p. 31. 22 Wollen, ‘The Last New Wave’, p. 31. 23 Wollen, ‘The Last New Wave’, p. 31. 24 B. F. Taylor, The British New Wave: A Certain Tendency? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 59. 25 Penelope Houston, The Contemporary Cinema (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 155. 26 Peter Cowie, Revolution: The Explosion of World Cinema in the 1960s (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p. 41. 27 Wollen, ‘The Last New Wave’, p. 31. 28 Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (London: Joseph, 1974), p. 462. 29 Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge (London: Quartet Books, 1984), p. 234. 30 Nina Danino, ‘The Film Industry Finally Wakes Up to What Artists Have to Offer’, The Conversation, 12 March 2014, available at: https://theconversation. com/the-film-industry-finally-wakes-up-to-what-artists-have-to-offer-24246. Accessed 5 April 2018. 31 Wendy Everett, Terence Davies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 89. 32 Allegra Stratton, ‘Cameron Calls for Tighter Focus from UK’s Film Industry Funding’, Guardian, 11 January 2012, available at: https://www.theguardian. com/uk/2012/jan/10/cameron-uk-film-industry-lottery-funding. Accessed 5 April 2018. 33 Douglas Keesey, The Films of Peter Greenaway: Sex, Death and Provocation (London: McFarland, 2006), p. 9. 34 Martin McLoone, ‘Boxed In? The Aesthetics of Film and Television’, in John Hill and Martin McLoone (eds), Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1996), pp. 76–106; pp. 77–9. 35 Alan Parker, ‘Quotes: British Cinema’, Alan Parker: Director, Writer, Producer, available at: http://alanparker.com/quotes/on-british-cinema/. Accessed 5 April 2018. 36 Geoff Andrew, ‘Naked’, Time Out Film, undated, available at: https://www. timeout.com/london/film/naked. Accessed 5 April 2018. 37 Andrew Sarris, ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962’, in Leo Braudy and

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British art cinema Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 6th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 561–4; p. 562. 38 Michael Oleszczyk, ‘Cannes 2014 Dispatch: Lust for Light in Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner’, RogerEbert.Com, 15 May 2014, available at: https://www.rogerebert. com/cannes/cannes-2014-dispatch-lust-for-light-in-mike-leighs-mr-turner. Accessed 5 April 2018. 39 Andy Medhurst, ‘Mike Leigh: Beyond Embarrassment’, Sight and Sound, 3: 11 (1993), pp. 6–11; p. 11. 40 Everett, Terence Davies, pp. 59–60. 41 Everett, Terence Davies, p. 60. 42 Jim Ellis, Catalogue of British Film Institute Productions 1951–76 (London: British Film Institute, 1977), p. 65. 43 Michael Mazière, ‘Interview with Malcolm Le Grice’, British Artists Film and Video Study Collection, undated, available at: http://www.studycollection.co.uk/ maziere/interviews/LeGrice.html. Accessed 7 April 2018. 44 James Park, Learning to Dream (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 51. 45 Christopher Dupin, ‘The BFI and British Independent Cinema in the 1970s’, in Robert Shail (ed.), Seventies British Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2010), pp. 159–74; p. 174. 46 Park, Learning to Dream, p. 51. 47 Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, ‘Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema’, in Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (eds), Global Art Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 3–27; pp. 6–7. 48 O’Pray, ‘The British Avant-Garde and Art Cinema from the 1970s to the 1990s’, p. 178. 49 Everett, Terence Davies, p. 60. 50 Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, p. 718. 51 Paul Newland, British Films of the 1970s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 70–8. 52 David Andrews, ‘Towards an Inclusive, Exclusive Approach to Art Cinema’, in Galt and Schoonover (eds), Global Art Cinema, pp. 62–74; p. 69. 53 Andrews, ‘Towards an Inclusive, Exclusive Approach to Art Cinema’, p. 64. 54 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘Radio On’, Screen, 20: 3/4 (1979/80), pp. 29–30; p. 30. 55 Richard Combs, ‘Ich bin ein Englander, or Show Me the Way to Go Home’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 52: 616 (1985), pp. 136–9; p. 136. 56 Brian Hoyle, ‘Radio On and British Art Cinema’, The Journal of British Cinema and Television, 6: 3 (2009), pp. 407–23; p. 414. 57 Brian Hoyle, ‘Radio On and British Art Cinema’, p. 416. 58 Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, p. 718. 59 Terry Curtis-Fox, ‘Radio On’, in R. Stoneman and H. Thompson (eds), The New Social Function of Cinema: A Catalogue of BFI Productions 1979–1980 (London: British Film Institute, 1981), p. 25. 60 Annette Kuhn and Gary Westwell, The Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 19. 61 Peter Lehman, ‘Introduction’, in Pornography: Film and Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), pp. 1–21; p. 7. 62 Barry Forshaw, Sex and Film: The Erotic in British, American and World Cinema (London: Palgrave, 2015), p. 151. 63 Gilbert Adair, ‘Film: It Should Never Have Been Made’, Independent, 4 September 1999, available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertain​

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ment/film-it-should-never-have-been-made-1116498.html. Accessed 22 April 2018. 64 Maria San Filippo, ‘Unthinking Heterocentricism: Bisexual Representability in Art Cinema’, in Galt and Schoonover (eds), Global Art Cinema, pp. 75–91; p. 79. 65 Tim Bergfelder, ‘National, Transnational or Supranational Cinema? Rethinking European Film Studies’, Media, Culture and Society, 27: 3 (2005), pp. 315–31. 66 Newland, British Films of the 1970s, p. 73. 67 Ian Christie, ‘As Others See Us: British Filmmaking and Europe in the 1990s’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), British Cinema in the 1990s (London: British Film Institute, 2000), pp. 68–79; p. 71. 68 Paul Newland and Brian Hoyle, ‘Introduction: Post-Millennial British Art Cinema’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 13: 2 (2016), pp. 233–42.

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‘Art cinema’, 1920s British film culture: Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Asquith Tom Ryall In a European country like Britain you would normally expect the most interesting films to be produced within the area of art cinema. Alan Lovell1

Art cinema, as a significant historical element of a national film culture and a counterbalance to the international power of the American cinema, has a secure place, established very firmly in the 1920s, in the histories of the major European cinemas, and represented, in particular, by the films of France, Germany and the Soviet Union. Despite having much in common with such countries – including roots in the prehistory of the medium, claimants to its technological invention, contributors to its artistic development especially in the form of the pre-World War One ‘chase’ film, and a susceptibility to the power of the American cinema – Britain and British films, however, remain tangential to discussions of ‘art cinema’ in historical terms. Indeed, for Erik Hedling, using a very tight definition of the concept, ‘Britain did not have an internationally well-known art cinema […] until Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman and other film-makers emerged in the 1980s.’2 During the 1920s, the French, German and Soviet cinemas produced films which formed part of the broader artistic culture of European modernism and had direct links to movements such as expressionism, Dada, surrealism and constructivism. These films are now acknowledged as canonical in the history of art cinema and principal constituents of what Andrew Tudor has called ‘the period of “formation” during which the very status of cinema as art was a central focus for struggle’.3 In contrast, to quote Charles Barr, ‘(n)o British feature films from the silent era belong to an internationally known repertoire’.4 British silent films failed in their endeavours to compete in the arena of popular cinema, with their American counterparts dominating British screens, and, unlike other European countries, also failed to produce an ‘art cinema’. The ‘absence’, indeed, was noted at the time; as Oswell Blakeston wrote in the highbrow journal Close Up in 1927, ‘(w)here in the history of British pictures are to be found films with the aesthetic merits of “Caligari”; “Warning Shadows”; or “The Last Laugh”?’5 Yet the British film industry, despite a mid-decade production crisis, produced a substantial number of films during the period, with around 800

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feature films shown between 1920 and 1929, and the omission of British titles from historical accounts of the 1920s is somewhat surprising.6 Recent writing on the period, however, has been more attentive to British achievement. John Orr has suggested that a handful of British films made towards the end of the decade, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Manxman (1929) and Anthony Asquith’s A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929), can be spoken of in the same breath as the French and German films as films that are ‘modernistic, experimenting with the possibilities of silent film narrative in an epoch of artistic modernism’.7 In a similar vein, Ian Christie includes A Cottage on Dartmoor in an article on key silent films drawn from an ‘international repertoire’ which includes work by leading European directors of the 1920s such as F. W. Murnau, G. W. Pabst, René Clair, Luis Buñuel and Carl Dreyer.8 This chapter explores the notion of ‘art cinema’ in Britain during the 1920s and considers the cultural context in which British film-makers worked, the ideas and attitudes towards the medium and the intellectual atmosphere in which directors such as Hitchcock and Asquith began their careers. Many discussions of the distinctiveness or non-distinctiveness of British cinema throughout its long history situate the nation’s films in a kind of cultural limbo flanked on one side by the commercial entertainment of American cinema, and, on the other, by the European ‘art’ film. What emerges is the notion of a hesitant cinema committed neither to the vigour of popular cinema nor to the sophistication of the ‘art’ film, and unduly dependent upon the traditional and more indigenously respectable cultural forms of literature and theatre for subject matter, themes, performance styles and so on. Certainly, in the 1920s, the powerful exemplars for the direction of cinema came from two broad sources. Firstly, from the abundance of titles produced by the fast-growing Hollywood industry which dominated British screens and provided the typical experience of film-going for a mass audience. Secondly, from the diversity of modes and styles in, for example, the films of Germany, France and the Soviet Union, which the London-based Film Society started screening to a minority audience in 1925.

British film culture in the 1920s As András Bálint Kovács has written, ‘(w)hen we speak of “art films” as opposed to “commercial entertainment films,” we are referring not to aesthetic qualities but to certain genres, styles, narrative procedures, distribution networks, production companies, film festivals, film journals, critics, groups of audiences – in short, an institutionalized film practice’.9 As in other European countries, the development of an ‘art film culture’ began in Britain in the 1920s with the emergence of a cinephiliac strand particularly among the young and the university-educated intellectuals devoted to the ‘aesthetic and cultural appreciation of cinema’.10 Although British

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film culture is often criticised for its parochialism, it has been suggested that ‘Britain during the 1920s was keen to engage with European and wider international trends in culture and intellectual thought, as well as more specific cinematic innovations and developments from abroad.’11 In many ways, the fountainhead of this emergent minority film was the Film Society, founded in London in 1925. Though sharing many of the ideals of the continental ciné-club movement, it has been argued that the Film Society differed in some respects from its counterparts in France and Germany. The Society, it has been suggested, ‘compared to its continental relatives, was relatively highbrow and bourgeois; it modelled itself on a theatre society and boasted famous writers – the explicit model was first and foremost literature and theatre’.12 Other constituents include journals such as Close Up (first published in 1927), and a cultural commentariat including figures such as Ivor Montagu, C. A. Lejeune, and Iris Barry writing on cinema in broadsheet newspapers such as The Times and the Observer, and in journals such as the Spectator and the New Statesman. In 1930, the publication of Paul Rotha’s The Film Till Now, the ‘first English-language survey of world cinema’,13 is a suitable culmination and summary of the intellectual climate in which 1920s British films were made and circulated, and defined in relation to the international trends of the period. The culture was not confined to the obscure fringes of the film world but drew in directors and producers working in the mainstream commercial film industry, especially through the agency of the Film Society despite its ‘highbrow’ orientation and a degree of scepticism in the industry. Montagu, the central figure in the Society, worked for a small post-production film company, and was the cultural and artistic driving force of the endeavour. He was joined by a number of significant figures from the commercial film industry such as veteran director and film pioneer, George Pearson; the producer Michael Balcon; Sidney Bernstein, head of the Granada cinema chain; journalist Walter Mycroft, who subsequently became a key producer at British International Pictures; film critic, Iris Barry; together with young aspirant film-makers such as Anthony Asquith and Angus Macphail. In addition, the Society drew upon support from the world of high culture including prominent figures such as H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw from the literary world; Roger Fry and Augustus John from the fine arts; alongside John Maynard Keynes, Julian Huxley, and J. B. S. Haldane from the intellectual and scientific community.14 The major animating principle of the Society was a keen interest in films coming from France, Germany and the Soviet Union which were radically different especially in terms of film style and technique from contemporary British films, and, perhaps a more important feature, from the Hollywood films which dominated British screens in the 1920s. As one writer has noted, ‘in the fifty performances of the (London) Film Society held between its foundation in October 1925 and the end of 1931, fifty-nine complete films over two thousand feet in length were screened. Five of these were Hollywood productions, three were Japanese, and fifty-one were

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European.’15 Ivor Montagu referred to its focus on the ‘unusual film’ though he also wrote that a ‘good epithet for our quarry is hard to seek. “Artistic” is pretentious, “cultural” bunkum.’16 Yet, ‘artistic’ is probably the correct term to refer generally to the kind of film favoured by the Society, drawing upon the emergent world of experimental, avant-garde, and modernist cinema developing across Europe in the 1920s. Broad though it was, such a cinema offered a range of alternatives to the commercial films of the time, and could be understood as occupying ‘the space in which an indigenous cinema can develop and make its critical and economic mark’.17 For the European (including Britain) and Russian cinemas attempting to establish or re-establish themselves following World War One, it was a matter of contesting the power of the American cinema both in terms of film style and genre, and in terms of audience appeal. The ‘critical’ mark is registered through thematic and stylistic differentiation from the ‘classical’ narrative form with its analytical editing, its unobtrusive camera techniques, and its subordination of film technique to narrative clarity. The ‘economic’ mark had to do with offering films which aligned themselves with ‘high culture’ and modernist development in the arts, to secure a niche international audience drawn from the cultural intelligentsia for whom the popular commercial cinema of Hollywood was at best a pleasant diversion, at worst a detrimental influence on the development of film art. As Ian Aitken has suggested, this was especially true of the major titles of German art cinema, which ‘were mainly produced as part of a commercial strategy, which consisted of finding a niche market within the international middle-class audience’, and he went on to suggest that ‘films such as Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari were not so much authentic works of art which carried on the aesthetic and oppositional mission of expressionism, but more the outcome of product differentiation within the more general commodification of the commercial cinema’.18 It may be that the balance between the artistic and economic impulses varied from one European country to another, but the general picture of the full-blooded commercial cinema model established by Hollywood counterposed to a European artistically orientated cinema is still an influential framework for meditations on national cinematic identity. A more nuanced version of the models of cinematic activity which contextualised European film-making in the 1920s, however, is provided by Higson and Maltby: Viewed in terms of reception as well as production, European film culture is perhaps best understood as a series of distinctive but overlapping strands. One strand is the Americanised metropolitan popular culture, confidently modernist, knowingly part of the emergent consumer culture and designed to travel. Another is the parochial or provincial non-metropolitan culture which embraces local or national, rather than international, popular traditions, and which is often inexportable […] A third strand to European film culture draws on the high culture of ‘old Europe,’ and embraces much of what we now understand as art cinema and heritage cinema: again this is metropolitan-based and designed to travel.19

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As has been noted above, the first strand, Hollywood films, had a powerful grip on the British audiences of the 1920s and, as such, constituted a template for British film-makers. The 1920s British cinema, however, also contained alternative strands which might be deemed ‘local or national’ in Higson and Maltby’s terms. There was a strong documentary element in British Instructional’s war reconstruction pictures such as The Battle of Jutland (1921), even before John Grierson began to influence British film in the late 1920s. There was also a vigorous and distinctive indigenous narrative cinema drawing upon the conventions of Victorian popular entertainment, theatre, painting and photography, from ‘a nineteenth-century past of popular visual narrational traditions’.20 Pioneer Cecil Hepworth’s 1920s features such as Tansy (1921) and Comin’ Thro’ the Rye (1924), with their tableau shooting style drawing upon theatrical modes of performance and fine art pictorialist conventions, ran counter to the analytical editing techniques being developed in the contemporary American cinema. As Christine Gledhill has suggested: Imagining film stories in terms of theatrical stages and pictures posed a challenge to a modernizing film industry seeking the capacity for narrative fiction now established by Hollywood. In particular, pictorial framing and frontal shooting inhibited the scene dissection facilitated by analytic editing, on which depended the illusion of a seamless fiction world that was fast becoming the norm.21

There was even a small experimental film strand operating both within and outside of the film industry involving founder members of the Film Society such as Montagu, Adrian Brunel and H. G. Wells, as well as the director Thorold Dickinson and Close Up editor Kenneth Macpherson. Short titles such as the mock travelogue Crossing the Great Sagrada (Brunel, 1924); the comic Bluebottles (Montagu, 1928), based on a Wells story; and the featurelength Borderline (Kenneth Macpherson, 1930), from the Close Up group, though emerging from somewhat different production contexts, constitute an avant garde of sorts to set alongside the better known elements of 1920s British cinema. Such films can be set within ‘a long tradition of satire, burlesque and parodic art which can be found not only in literature, but also in graphic art, theatre and cinema’.22 It may be argued that the ‘high cultural’ strands of art cinema and heritage cinema exist in some of the indigenous currents mentioned above, with ‘the avant garde of sorts’ moving towards an ‘art cinema’, and the Hepworth pastoral tales constituting a ‘heritage’ strand. The kinds of films which best reflect the ethos of the Film Society and of the minority film culture, however, are those of indigenous directors such as Hitchcock and Asquith, and the odd émigré film-maker such as E. A. Dupont, whose films Moulin Rouge (1928) and Piccadilly (1929), made at British International Pictures, might be considered as notable contributions to a British art cinema in the decade. The next sections will look more closely at aspects of the films of Hitchcock and Asquith which link them to the art cinemas of the period.



‘Art cinema’, 1920s British film culture

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Alfred Hitchcock and art cinema Though Hitchcock’s early career follows the familiar path of the British cinema of the time, with many titles including The Lodger (1926), Easy Virtue (1927), and The Farmer’s Wife (1928) derived from drama and literature, his 1920s films have nevertheless prompted the bold claim from prominent Hitchcock scholar, William Rothman, that ‘(i)f there is a modernist cinema, however, it begins with Hitchcock, in whose work film attains a modern self-consciousness’.23 Though in some respects embedded in the conventional framework of 1920s British film and produced within the confines of commercial mainstream cinema, Hitchcock’s work, from The Pleasure Garden (1926) onwards, can be positioned at the latter’s limits in terms of form and style. As David Bordwell has suggested, ‘the attraction of Hitchcock’s cinema for both mass audience and English literature professor lies in its successful merger of classical narrative and art-cinema narration’.24 Indeed, Bordwell’s judgement is prefigured in a contemporary trade paper review of The Lodger which described the film as ‘certainly one of the most remarkable British pictures made and is like Vaudeville, in that it will appeal to “popular” and “highbrow” alike’.25 Hitchcock, whose film career began in the early 1920s, ‘belonged to an informal progressive association of film people’,26 and had one foot, at least, in the minority film culture which developed in Britain. The main focus for this loose gathering was the Film Society and, as Patrick McGilligan notes, Hitchcock ‘took enthusiastic part in the Film Society and knew all the movers and shakers’.27 These included Sidney Bernstein and Ivor Montagu, with whom Hitchcock had social and professional contact, and also screenwriter Eliot Stannard who worked on most of Hitchcock’s films in the 1920s. Hitchcock’s 1920s films can be positioned in relation to the various strands of the British cinema of the period noted above though he was effectively American-trained. He was an avid admirer of D. W. Griffith whom he described as ‘the honoured Head of our profession’ in an article published in 1931,28 and he spent the early years of his career working at the Famous Players-Lasky British studio at Islington alongside experienced American film-makers and using the latest Hollywood technology. At the same time, he had also acquired a sense of European cinema, partly through working in German studios in the mid-1920s where he encountered the great director, F. W. Murnau, and experienced at first hand the preoccupation with visual design that was the hallmark of the silent German film. In addition, Hitchcock probably saw German films such as Waxworks (Paul Leni, 1924) and Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) at the Film Society. The impact was considerable. As Patrick McGilligan has written, ‘(a)lthough he could be evasive about his influences, when pressed Hitchcock would mention The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Murnau, Lang, even Lubitsch. And when asked in general about stylistic mentors, his reply was unflinching. “The Germans. The Germans.” ’29 In terms of the other strands of the 1920s British film, the

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documentary impulse can be noted in the openings of The Lodger (1926), The Ring (1927), and The Manxman (1929), a film which has also been drawn into the pictorial-theatrical strand identified by Christine Gledhill, who describes it as ‘the ultimate picture story of British cinema’.30 It is the German influence which is most frequently cited by critics and historians aiming to relate Hitchcock’s 1920s films to the evolving European art cinemas of the period. The locus classicus for such discussion is The Lodger, Hitchcock’s third feature film as director but, in his own words, ‘the first picture possibly influenced by my period in Germany’.31 The Lodger is drawn from the novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes based on the ‘Jack the Ripper’ legend but, in terms of German influence, it is worth noting that the inaugural Film Society programme in 1925 featured the expressionist film, Waxworks, which had a brief episode based partly on the ‘Jack the Ripper’ story. Stylistically, some sequences from The Lodger reinforce the notion of German influence. The lodger’s arrival at the boarding house is presented as a forward tracking shot of a shadow approaching the door, Daisy’s meeting with the lodger after his escape from the police is set in a courtyard with an artificial spiral lighting scheme, Mrs Bunting’s bedroom as she listens to the lodger going out late at night is shadow-laden, and the lodger’s departure utilises a central motif of the expressionist film, the staircase, shot from various angles to ominous effect. The Lodger, replete with striking camera angles, dramatic lighting schemes and its theme of violent sexual murder, certainly has affinities with the expressionist strand of German cinema. Yet, the film has many qualities which draw on other cinematic trends of the time. Charles Barr has noted that the narrative ‘is a construction typical of the strengths of “classical Hollywood”: a plot with a clear dynamic, advancing through purposeful stages towards the “creation of the couple” ’.32 The film also draws upon the editing techniques of classical cinema with the Griffith-like associative editing in the ‘pastry heart’ sequence, and exploits the ambiguities of montage in the suspenseful ‘poker’ episode which through a succession of brief shots hints at the lodger’s identity as the Avenger, the Jack the Ripper figure. The famous shot through a transparent plate glass ceiling of the lodger pacing about in his room points in yet another direction in its similarity to a shot in the French avant-garde film, Entr’acte (René Clair, 1924). Other dimensions include the documentary montage style early in the film in which the various communications media are depicted spreading news of a murder to a fearful public, and the modernist graphic style of the intertitles by the artist E. McKnight Kauffer. The Lodger might even be said to include the pictorial/presentational aesthetic, the ‘theatricalisation of cinematic space’, identified by Gledhill, in the two brief sequences at the dress salon where Daisy works as a model. The modernist impulse evident in The Lodger continued dramatically in Downhill (1927), Hitchcock’s next picture, which contains a bravura sequence depicting the protagonist’s descent into delirium during his return home in the final stages of the film. As Raymond Durgnat suggests,

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linking the director with the contemporary French impressionist avant garde, the battery of visual and editing techniques in this lengthy sequence produces ‘a visual bewilderment not unworthy of Entr’acte’.33 The film also contains an example of ‘the theatricalisation of cinematic space’ in the sequence in which Roddy, dressed as a waiter, is revealed to be acting the part on stage ‘as the camera pulls back to reveal his role in a swaying chorus line of similar waiters’.34 Other silent Hitchcock titles can be scrutinised in a similar fashion for stylistic ‘touches’ which indicate the director’s knowledge and awareness of developments both in the contemporary British film, and in the international cinema of the time.

Anthony Asquith and art cinema Anthony Asquith began his film career in the mid-1920s, and like Hitchcock, his near-contemporary, his cinematic formation was partly in the commercial cinema and partly in the world of 1920s British minority film culture. He joined British Instructional Films in 1926, a small company specialising in documentary reconstruction of World War One battles and the Secrets of Nature natural history series, at a time when the firm had become part of the large Stoll organisation, and was planning a move into fiction film. By then Asquith had been initiated into the world of the Hollywood film, though through informal personal contact rather than Hitchcock’s professional induction as an employee of the Famous Players-Lasky British company. Before entering the film industry in 1926, Asquith had lived in Hollywood for around six months as a guest of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, spending time observing a number of film-makers at work including Charles Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch.35 He was also a founder member of the Film Society and therefore more closely involved than Hitchcock, and, like his contemporary, he had some limited experience of directing in Germany, in this case on his third film, The Runaway Princess (1928). His privileged background as the son of a prime minister differed significantly from Hitchcock’s, however, and in Rachael Low’s words he was one of ‘the new generation of well-connected, well-educated young men, who unlike their parents, were prepared to take films seriously’.36 Asquith’s first feature film, Shooting Stars, though ‘supervised’ by A. V. Bramble, an experienced director, is usually regarded as an Asquith project; indeed, the film’s title card reads, ‘Shooting Stars by Anthony Asquith’. The film’s romantic opening scene, which begins with a close shot of the principal characters (Julian and Mae) kissing, is redolent of an American Western with Julian dressed in a stetson and a checked shirt. Julian rides away while Mae plays with a dove. The dove pecks her and flies off and she delivers a diatribe direct to the camera, while a cut to a shot of the camera crew at work reveals that the scene is actually taking place in a film studio during shooting. It is a familiar modernist trope, a play on illusion and reality, and its reflexivity is the first example of the vocabulary of art cinema in the film. There are also

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instances of the virtuoso cinematography, ‘the entfesselte camera’ (unfastened camera), made famous by German films such as The Last Laugh and Variety (Dupont, 1925), as in the scene of Mae walking from one stage to another adjacent one shortly after the dove incident, filmed in a high-angle shot from above as she traces a path through the studio floor. Later in the film, point of view shots from a swinging chandelier explicitly recall the shots from the trapeze artist sequences in Dupont’s Variety. Linking Asquith’s film to the Soviet cinema of the time, Roger Manvell has suggested an allusion to Eisenstein in the ‘impressionistic accident to the stuntman on the bicycle (which is similar in treatment to the shots of the man who falls near the beginning of the Odessa Steps sequence in Potemkin)’.37 Asquith’s second feature, Underground (1928), was less reflexive; indeed, contemporary commentators tended to comment on its extensive London location shooting, notably on the London underground railway, which gave the melodramatic tale about the interlocked lives of four young Londoners a powerful veneer of realism. Yet the film also moves in other directions drawing upon Asquith’s knowledge of European cinema and on his collaboration with the lighting expertise of the German Karl Fischer. Kate, one of the principal characters, is a somewhat timid and cowed individual and this character trait is conveyed in a series of expressionist-style images depicting her restless and nervous behaviour in low-angled shots through staircase bars and shadows reminiscent of the German cinema of the time. There is also an echo of the French ‘impressionist’ film-makers and their strategies for representing inner subjective life. Bert, after a fight with Bill in the pub, is shown in close-up with the shot of the punch superimposed a number of times on his brooding features as he plans his revenge. Asquith’s final silent film, A Cottage on Dartmoor, which was originally planned and released with a short sound sequence, also indicates Asquith’s awareness of the experimental trends in contemporary European cinema as well as having a firm basis in the narrative drive and movement of the American film. The film’s bold opening, a series of intercut images of a prisoner escaping across the bleak moorland, a mother bathing a baby, a prison warder discovering the breakout, the mother settling the baby for sleep, and finally the prisoner (Joe) confronting the mother (Sally) in the cottage on Dartmoor, is followed by a dramatic narrative shift in time, to the past and to the hairdresser’s salon where Joe and Sally worked together. It is an abrupt and inventive transition and from that point the film traces the series of events which lead to the confrontation in the lonely cottage on the moor. Flashback techniques were not uncommon in early cinema. Indeed, they were commonly employed in 1920s films both in Hollywood and in Europe, often to indicate a character’s mental images, memories, dreams and visions, frequently occurring intermittently in brief sequences. Asquith’s film is built upon the flashback structure with the bulk of the narrative framed, both at the beginning and the end of the film, by the escaped prisoner episode. It is a narrative structure not dissimilar to that of a Hollywood film noir of the 1940s, with the dramatic, heavily charged and enigmatic

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‘Art cinema’, 1920s British film culture

opening requiring a return to the past for explanatory purposes. Later in the film the influence of Soviet montage is evident in the scene in which Joe attacks Harry, his rival for Sally’s affections. A brief array of non-diegetic images, including a piece of string breaking and guns firing, presented in a Soviet-style symbolic montage, are used to depict Joe’s breaking point. Joe threatens Harry, an intertitle reads: ‘You’ve tortured me long enough – now it’s my turn’, then the attack takes place. Although there is one full shot of Harry staggering after the attack, the episode is largely presented in a flurry of brief images: close shots of the other characters’ responses, a shower hose spraying water, and a scent bottle spilling onto the floor. These shots, to use Murray Smith’s term, are ‘metonymic images’, which take the place of literal images of the attack and its aftermath.38

Endnote The case for a British art cinema of the 1920s is supported by the formal qualities notable in many of the films of Hitchcock and Asquith which responded to the experimental currents evident in the influential European cinemas of the time. Yet, such qualities were often blended with the styles and techniques of the Hollywood film, and with the documentary impulses which were beginning to emerge in the British cinema of the 1920s prior to the Grierson documentary movement of the 1930s. Both directors display a comprehensive grasp of the sophisticated formal processes of the art film, but seek to merge them with the ordinary excitements of popular cinema, with romance, action, violence and passion. Films such as The Lodger, The Manxman, Shooting Stars, Underground and A Cottage on Dartmoor display a sense of the vigour and power of the American cinema, an interest in the innovative forms of the European cinema and a tendency towards a reflexive modernist cinema, together with the strands of realism which subsequently came to dominate conventional discussion of the British film. In addition, both The Manxman and Underground have been drawn into the theatricalised pictorial cinema identified as a key strand in the British silent film.39 The familiar European art cinema/popular Hollywood cinema, the staple conceptual couplet for the examination of the British film, requires a considerable degree of nuancing to capture the myriad qualities of the British film as evidenced in the work of its most interesting silent film-makers.

Notes  1 Alan Lovell, ‘The Unknown Cinema of Britain’, Cinema Journal, 11: 2 (1972), pp. 1–8; p. 2.  2 Erik Hedling, ‘Lindsay Anderson and the Development of British Art Cinema’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, 3rd edition (London: Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, 2009), pp. 39–45; p. 39.

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British art cinema  3 Andrew Tudor, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Art (House) Movie’, in David Inglis and John Hughson (eds), The Sociology of Art: Ways of Seeing (Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 125–38; p. 127.  4 Charles Barr, ‘Before Blackmail: Silent British Cinema’, in Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, p. 145.  5 Oswell Blakeston, ‘British Solecisms’, in James Donald et al. (eds), Close Up 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism (London: Cassell, 1998), p. 41.  6 Rachael Low, The History of the British Film 1918–1929 (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1971), p. 156.  7 John Orr, Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 5.  8 Ian Christie, ‘The Peak of Silent Cinema’, Sight and Sound, 23: 11 (2013), pp. 42–50; p. 49.  9 András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 21. 10 Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant Garde and the Invention of Film Culture (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), p. 80. 11 Tim Bergfelder and Christian Cargnelli (eds), Destination London: GermanSpeaking Emigrés and British Cinema, 1925–1950 (New York, NY and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), p. 12. 12 Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back, p. 82. 13 Martin Stollery, Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), p. 18. 14 Low, The History of the British Film 1918–1929, p. 34; Jamie Sexton, Alternative Film Culture in Inter-War Britain (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008), p. 16. 15 Stollery, Alternative Empires, p. 26. 16 Reprinted in Don Macpherson (ed.), British Cinema: Traditions of Independence (London: British Film Institute, 1980), p. 105 fn. 17 Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen, 22: 1 (1981), pp. 11–39; p. 14. 18 Ian Aitken, European Film Theory and Culture: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), p. 49. 19 Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby, ‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America’: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1999), p. 20. 20 Christine Gledhill, Reframing British Cinema 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion (London: British Film Institute, 2003), p. 1. 21 Gledhill, Reframing British Cinema 1918–1928, p. 93. 22 Sexton, Alternative Film Culture in Inter-War Britain, p. 64. 23 William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 6. 24 David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema (New York, NY and London: Routledge, 2008), p. 158. 25 Quoted in Sidney Gottlieb and Christopher Brookhouse (eds), Framing Hitchcock (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2002), p. 44. 26 Alain Kerzoncuf and Charles Barr, Hitchcock Lost and Found: The Forgotten Films (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), p. 122. 27 Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), p. 76.

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28 Reprinted in Sidney Gottlieb and Richard Allen (eds), The Hitchcock Annual Anthology: Selected Essays from Volumes 10–15 (London: Wallflower Press, 2009), p. 81. 29 McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light, p. 64. 30 Gledhill, Reframing British Cinema 1918–1928, p. 119. 31 François Truffaut, Hitchcock by Truffaut (London: Paladin Grafton Books, 1978), p. 46. 32 Charles Barr, English Hitchcock (Moffat: Cameron and Hollis, 1999), p. 33. 33 Raymond Durgnat, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), p. 77. 34 Gledhill, Reframing British Cinema 1918–1928, p. 21. 35 Rubeigh James Minney, Puffin Asquith (London: Leslie Frewin, 1973), pp. 41–5. 36 Low, The History of the British Film 1918–1929, p. 82. 37 Roger Manvell, ‘Revaluations 3. Shooting Stars 1928’, Sight and Sound, 19: 4 (1950), pp. 172–4; p. 174. 38 Murray Smith, ‘Technological Determination, Aesthetic Resistance or A Cottage on Dartmoor. Goat-Gland Talkie or Masterpiece’, Wide Angle, 12: 3 (1990), pp. 80–97; p. 91. 39 Gledhill, Reframing British Cinema 1918–1928, pp. 25–8, 119–22.

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2

Humphrey Jennings: of images, poetry and Pandaemonium Owen Evans

The inclusion of Humphrey Jennings, the great documentary film-maker, in a collection exploring British art cinema might cause eyebrows to be raised. This chapter will argue, nevertheless, that he belongs in any such survey. It will argue that he needs to be seen first and foremost as a poet in the broadest sense of that word, whose entire oeuvre is characterised by a fascination with images, and that any appreciation of his films needs to take into account the full scope and diversity of his work. He can thus be seen as an example of the ‘expressive individual’ David Bordwell has argued is fundamental to art cinema.1 Indeed, by virtue of his polymathic abilities, his musings on formal and stylistic art traditions and his own practice, Jennings might be seen alongside the likes of artists-as-film-makers Pier Paolo Pasolini and Andrei Tarkovsky. As such, any study seeking to provide a more nuanced and broader understanding of British art cinema should find space for Humphrey Jennings, especially now that his film work has been re-released for the benefit of contemporary audiences. There have been many fine studies of his films, most of which mention his interests in painting, poetry, theatrical stage design, photography, acting and film, alongside his extensive critical, academic work, and helping establish the Mass Observation movement in 1937. However, such references are often made en passant, so that the full richness of the interplay between his myriad creative activities, of which film is merely a part, remains somewhat underappreciated.2 His cinematic productions need to be contextualised carefully to better appreciate their nuances, the nature of the images therein and their origins in his life and work as a whole. The chapter will start to look at them through the lenses of his other work and in the context of his lifelong preoccupation with the image. Summarising Jennings’s understanding of the image, Charles Madge likens it to the central principle of gestalt psychology, founded on ‘ “the combination of many effects, each utterly insensible alone, into one sum of fine effect” ’.3 A short appreciation of Magritte, written for the surrealist journal London Bulletin in 1938, offers a useful way to understand Jennings better as an artist. ‘In Magritte’s Paintings …’, Jennings noted how beauty and terror were juxtaposed in the artist’s work, while stressing that the ‘poetry is not

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Humphrey Jennings: of images, poetry and Pandaemonium

necessarily derived from the known regions of romance – a plate of ham will become as frightening as a lion – a brick wall as mysterious as night’.4 It is this quality, in Jennings’s opinion, that makes the paintings ‘essentially modern in the sense required by Baudelaire’.5 Of particular significance here, when considering Jennings’s own oeuvre, is his observation that Magritte’s ‘passionate interest in the concrete world has made him remember that a painting itself is only an image’.6 Jennings would continually be drawn to images throughout his career. He described his monumental study of the Industrial Revolution, Pandaemonium 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine As Seen by Contemporary Observers, which he spent his life collating and which was published posthumously in 1985, as an ‘imaginative history’ comprising evidential ‘Images’ that readers could interpret and challenge as they wished: I do not claim that [these images] represent truth – they are too varied, even contradictory, for that. But they represent human experience. They are the record of mental events. Events of the heart. They are facts (the historian’s kind of facts) which have been passed through the feelings and the mind of an individual and have forced him to write. And what he wrote is a picture – a coloured picture of them. His personality has coloured them and selected and altered and pruned and enlarged and minimised and exaggerated. Admitted. But he himself is part, was part of the period, even part of the event itself – he was an actor, a spectator in it.7

This preoccupation with images links his breathtakingly broad range of artistic and intellectual activity, though his films have drawn most scholarly attention. As John Orr has outlined so eloquently in Contemporary Cinema, Pasolini stressed the primacy of visual style in conceiving of a ‘new “poetic” cinema’ in which ‘[film-makers] must work with concrete images possessing a pre-grammatical and irrational history’.8 As this chapter will argue, it is a view Jennings would doubtless have shared, conceiving his own film work as similarly poetic. Jennings’s citation of Aristotelian poetics in his analysis of Magritte’s aesthetics as an implied ‘bringing together’ affords instructive insights into his own practice: The elements in a picture by Magritte are not forced together. Their ‘bringing together’ occurs in a passive sense in the painter’s imagination. Hence their simultaneous irrationality […] since their ‘bringing together’ is in fact an ‘event’ beyond choice. It is of the likenesses and discrepancies between the image and the reality that these events are composed, and it is in the relentless logic of these likenesses and discrepancies that Magritte sees the central human condition […].9

Jennings’s films might be seen similarly as ‘events’ organically composed of a combination of ‘images’ deriving from his colourful personality and all the creative pursuits that shaped it. For those cinematic images, which animate films such as Spare Time (1939), Listen to Britain (1941), Fires Were Started (1943), The Silent Village (1943), Diary for Timothy (1945) and Family

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Portrait (1950) to name but a few well-known examples, were coloured, selected, altered, pruned, enlarged, minimised and exaggerated as the result of a multi-layered career. His films were undoubtedly the most successful, and visible, outlet for his creativity, but I argue that they must be analysed through the prism of his work as a whole, not in isolation. A year after his fatal accident in 1950, his friend and poet Kathleen Raine described how ‘those who knew Humphrey Jennings took his genius for granted, as we do the sun’: ‘[Humphrey’s] greatness […] is something that only those who knew him can fully realise: for it was the total phenomenon of his remarkable mind, activated by the most powerful imagination I have ever encountered in a living man’.10 In this respect, the publication of Pandaemonium is the apotheosis of his career. Its kaleidoscopic collage of 372 fragments and extracts creates what the New York Times called ‘a complex network of internal cross-references’.11 It embodies the full extent of Jennings’s intellectual interests, and symbolises the ‘total phenomenon’ of his entire oeuvre. Jennings himself acknowledges a methodological overlap between his myriad pursuits, when he emphasises both the filmic and poetic nature of the way he structures Pandaemonium. He stresses how ‘this “imaginative history” does not consist of isolated images, but each is in a particular place in an unrolling film’,12 before highlighting the important role poets can play in conveying ‘the sense of complexity – the type of pattern and so the type of inter-actions of which [life] consists’.13 In effect, he conflates the role of poet and film-maker, an apposite ‘bringing together’ for the man whom Lindsay Anderson crowned ‘the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced’.14 It has become a canonical epithet, which Martin Stollery has since challenged as overly hagiographical. He argues that Jennings was not the pre-eminent documentarist of the period, but merely one of a generation of diverse talents, including the likes of Paul Rotha and Basil Wright, whose own accomplishments deserve as much attention as those of their peer.15 Philip French is arguably more measured in describing Jennings as ‘the supreme poet of British documentary’.16 In letters, talks and essays, Jennings championed the importance of art for the human condition in conjunction with a fervent belief in celebrating the unheralded achievements of ordinary people. These twin concerns are pivotal to Pandaemonium, and permeate so many of his most notable films. In Pandaemonium, where the ‘images’ deal with the coming of the machine and its impact on people’s lives, his call to balance the Means of Production with what he calls the ‘Means of Vision’ makes him an early advocate of art and culture’s importance to what we now call ‘wellbeing’. Of the ‘Means of Vision’, Jennings stated: I am referring not to the Arts as a commodity for Bond Street, or as a piece of snobbery in Mayfair, or as a means of propaganda in Bloomsbury, or as a method of escapism in Hampstead … but to the Means of Vision by which ‘the emotional side of our nature’ (Darwin’s phrase) is kept alive and satisfied and fed – our nature as Human Beings in the anthracite drifts of South Wales, in the cotton belt of Lancashire, in the forges of Motherwell – how



Humphrey Jennings: of images, poetry and Pandaemonium

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the emotional side of their nature has been used, altered, tempered, appealed to in these two hundred years [1660–1860].17

Jennings’s citation of Darwin is significant, deriving from an ‘image’ in Pandaemonium in which the naturalist laments his inability to abide poetry. For Darwin ‘the loss of these [poetic] tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature’.18 The citation lays early emphasis on the importance of wellbeing not linked exclusively to physical health but to a more holistic, eudaemonic understanding of emotional and spiritual health. When Jennings shines a light on workingclass leisure pursuits in Spare Time, he is not sneering as some of his contemporaries suggested; he is celebrating the emotional side of their nature. In Pandaemonium Jennings suggests that poetry had been ‘expropriated’ during the Industrial Revolution.19 When one looks at his career it is easy to conceive of a man for whom poetry, in its myriad forms, should be free and dynamic, a motor for personal and social wellbeing. The desire to reappropriate poetry thus permeates each element of his work. As an erudite Europhile, who translated work by surrealists André Breton and Paul Éluard into English and helped to organise the Surrealism exhibition in London in 1936, Jennings also valued the German cultural heritage, even as he made films like Heart of Britain (1941) and Words for Battle (1941), ostensibly to stir the British nation against the Nazis. He may therefore have been familiar with German Romantic Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of progressive Universalpoesie (progressive universal poetry), published as the Athenäum-Fragment 116 in 1798, which chimes with his own appreciation of the image. Schlegel proposed a new form of novel to challenge the classical paradigm, which would merge all literary genres, including letters, diary entries and other more fragmentary forms, but also comprise philosophy, rhetoric and criticism. As well as bringing all these forms into dialogue for their mutual enrichment, Schlegel believed that the resultant work would become the perfect mirror of the contemporary world, capturing it in all its complexity. By virtue of its creative compilation of different forms of artistic expression, progressive universal poetry ‘desires and should mix and blend together poetry and prose, artistic genius and criticism, art poetry and nature poetry. It should render poetry vibrant and sociable, and life and society poetic.’20 In the first of a series of radio essays for the BBC entitled ‘The Poet and the Public’ (1938), a detailed examination of the ‘expropriation of poetry’, Jennings argued, in Schlegelian terms, that ‘the two things that have got out of touch with each other are modern poetry and everyday life’.21 Jennings would subsequently mention ‘universal poetic writer[s]’ in Pandaemonium, ‘poet-sages’ who ‘dealt with all problems of life – religious, scientific, social and personal’ before poetry lost its autonomy.22 Jennings sought to reconnect poetry and society by combining his myriad artistic and intellectual pursuits as comprehensively as possible, into ‘one sum of fine effect’.

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Jennings the universal poet would never succumb to what Darwin felt he had become, a man with a mind like a ‘kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts’.23 His life and work would, instead, be the embodiment of tireless efforts to reconnect poetry, broadly conceived, with society. Growing up in rural coastal Suffolk, the son of an architect and an artist who were inspired by the guild socialism propounded by John Ruskin and William Morris, Jennings was often left to his own devices during his ‘wild, lonely childhood’.24 He escaped into his imagination, and experiences and preoccupations stemming from childhood would become leitmotifs inflecting his career, the direct inspiration for poems, paintings and photographs. In an unpublished poem, ‘Childhood’, he writes: When I was a child, there was a curious relation of horses and trains at Newmarket like this: My grandmother had a house up the Bury Road on the way to the heath. If you slept in the front of the house you were woken up in the morning by the sound of strings’ hooves going out to exercise and then again, as they came back. Running along the bottom of the garden behind the house was a railway cutting and on the left was a tunnel mouth where the trains came out of Warren Hill. On the far side of the line there were long deserted platforms – Warren Hill Station; only used on race days. Out of the mouth of the tunnel there was a permanent lock of black smoke twisting upwards.25

Jennings’s eye for the surreal alights on the ‘curious relation’ at the outset and the eerily empty station. But surrealism finds its truest poetic expression in the ‘permanent lock of black smoke’, a lyrical dissolve conflating permanence and absence, horse and train.26 Jennings’s obsession with both objects, common leitmotifs in his films, paintings and writing, is well known.27 Michel Remy has compared two of Jennings’s most famous paintings in this respect, Horse’s Head (1937–40) and Locomotive (1936–38), stressing the need to view them together to understand each image better, and thus the depth of the artist’s fascination with their juxtaposition. Remy suggests that ‘a double displacement reshapes reality, that of nature and that of the machine’.28 The two objects resemble each other in the artist’s hands, merging, dissolving together. Jennings argues that ‘an image of an object is immediately exchangeable with another image’, so that ‘an image of a horse can become an image of a train. How? Precisely through poetry and painting.’29 It is a telling observation, revealing not only his passion for these specific objects, but also his fascination with the rich dynamism of juxtaposed images in general, which would become a prominent feature in his films. Madge argues that Jennings was seeking ‘a cosmos in flux’ in his art: ‘In this flux are assemblages, or shapes, or patterns, of relative intensity, and fixity, and certainty. Paradoxically solid and fluid, the images are moments in the flow of human experience. The shape is solid, but the line that encloses it is fluid, as it awaits the next metamorphosis.’30 Such fluidity, fundamental to his paintings, would become a striking feature of his films, his use of montage evoking this same mutability of images.



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Jennings articulates his preoccupation with the mechanomorphic relationship between horse and locomotive further in his essay ‘The Iron Horse’ (1938). Alluding to Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ and Milton’s Paradise Lost, as well as to paintings by surrealists Max Ernst and Man Ray, Jennings observes: Machines are animal created by man. […] The idea of a machine that would go by itself (automatically – without the help of an animal) has long obsessed man because then it could be considered to have a life of its own – to have become a complete pseudo-animal. And as man is related to the real animals so every machine has a latent human content.31

With the juxtaposition of the mechanical with the organic, the essay and the many paintings of horses and steam engines that Jennings would produce anticipate concerns that would underpin his collation of images for Pandaemonium, most particularly several of its theme sequences such as ‘Man – Animal – Machine’ and ‘Poetry and Science’, but also the many cinematic images of people assembling machines – tanks and aircraft – or working in mines. Many of Jennings’s wartime films would feature sequences of aircraft or tanks being built, in which the machines possess something of an organic quality in the way they are shot, and then shown in motion at the end. It recalls Madge’s remarks about Jennings’s search to represent a ‘cosmos in flux’. In particular, the ‘bringing together’ of ‘Images’ of horse and train in Jennings’s imagination thus anticipates his cinematic collages, which, Keith Beattie argues, was the principal surrealist trait in his films. Beattie posits that ambiguity is an important ‘structural principle’ and central ‘to the forms through which Jennings represented content’.32 Ambiguity is ‘the most cogent definition of the “poetry” in his documentaries’.33 It is a compelling argument, although only an intimation of the merging of images is cinematically possible through montage, through ambiguity. Jennings needs to be appreciated much more as a universal poet, whose eclectic ‘bringing together’ of images between art forms and intellectual outputs provides an even richer representation of human experience, an even more detailed ‘imaginative history’.34 His film work is but one part of the whole, ‘utterly insensible alone’. But it is this inherent ambiguity in Jennings’s work as a whole, and not just in his films, that validates his inclusion in any study of British art cinema. For Jennings’s delight in challenging his viewers and audiences, highlighting the ‘likenesses and discrepancies between the image and reality’, anticipates what David Bordwell would see as characteristic of art cinema.35 ‘Uncertainties persist’ in art cinema, he argues: ‘but are understood as such, as obvious uncertainties, so to speak. Put crudely, the slogan of art cinema might be, “When in doubt, read for maximum ambiguity.” ’ 36 Although Bordwell’s focus is primarily on narrative, it is the ‘deviations from the classical norm’, the creation of ‘certain gaps and problems’ upon which Jennings’s work as a whole thrives.37 His films are no exception. Jennings’s prose poem ‘To Walberswick’ (1943) evokes Ruskin and Morris by highlighting the unwritten ‘story of the people’s resistance,

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­ ncelebrated in word their struggle and labour’ which built ‘the church u towers from the past, the jetties and piers, the mills and lighthouses, the farms and cottages, the roads and the ridiculous railways’.38 It foreshadows thematic concerns in Pandaemonium, and highlights another key tenet of Jennings’s complete oeuvre, namely the unheralded achievements of ordinary people. Such egalitarian values particularly permeate the most prolific period of Jennings’s cinematic career. The representation of working people is the backbone of Spare Time, Welfare for the Workers – the latter anticipating the coming of the welfare state after the war, which Diary for Timothy also contemplates – Heart of Britain, Listen to Britain and The Silent Village. In a letter of 1929 to Cicely Cooper, whom he would later marry, he wrote that ‘at the bottom of democracy, [there is you see] a snobbish idea that it is better to be a gentleman than a farmer; without realising that in a wellordered world there is plenty of room for both and both are equally essential […] Men are not born equal, they are born complementary.’39 The juxtaposition of Flanagan and Allen, entertaining a canteen of workers, with Dame Myra Hess, playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 before the Queen in the National Gallery, in Listen to Britain exemplifies this belief in social complementarity. Jennings’s personal correspondence frequently mentions his desire to devote himself solely to painting. As a finalist at Cambridge, Jennings wrote to Cicely: ‘I want to draw & I think you want me to draw – & that is the business of a lifetime not of leisure hours.’40 Remy notes his advocacy of contemporary French art in his social circle in Cambridge, and Jennings spent prolonged periods in France, where he mingled in surrealist circles. When financial hardship forced a return home, he wrote to the artist and poet Julian Trevelyan: ‘I sit about and paint and try not to lose my temper with this country and its ludicrous inhabitants.’41 Even during the height of his film career, he lamented to Cicely the lack of time available to paint. Lindsay Anderson dismissed Jennings’s post-war films, arguing that his ‘traditionalist spirit was unable to adjust itself to the changed circumstances of Britain after the war’.42 The widely perceived lack of inspiration in these late films might be ascribed to his attention turning much more to art again, though his final film, Family Portrait, is a better film than Anderson would have us believe. Nevertheless, the period after the war was arguably one of his most prolific as a painter and photographer, as the frequency of his film work tailed off.43 Jackson notes that ‘one of the greatest pleasures of renewed peace was that [Jennings] was once again able to look regularly at paintings’, when the surreally empty frames in the National Gallery captured in Listen to Britain were full again.44 In the 1930s, Jennings devoted his creative and intellectual energies to surrealism. He was part of the organising committee of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 alongside Roland Penrose. The work exhibited was truly international in scope, with all the leading names of modernism represented. Jennings himself exhibited six items, including a controversial pastiche of the famous Lord Kitchener poster. Along with a

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Humphrey Jennings: of images, poetry and Pandaemonium

small exhibition the following year, these were to be the only times his work was displayed publicly during his life. For Michel Remy, Jennings’s approach to painting ‘illustrates Surrealism’s widespread investigation of the liminal space between the real and imaginary in as many mediums as possible’.45 It relies on establishing images or ideas in apposition, but in such a way as to penetrate to a deeper understanding of the essence of things, by imagining reality differently through the apparent incongruity of the juxtaposed images. Jennings’s work, Remy argues, resisted ‘simple dualisms’,46 favouring collage as ‘an excellent way of probing the fundamental nature of relationships in what we take for reality’.47 Jennings would often take two banal photographs, placing one above the other to challenge the viewer to interpret the association, such as in ‘Armchair with Seal’; ‘Mountain Inn and Swiss Roll’; ‘Commode with Swiss Roll’; and ‘Tree with Rainbow Stripe’. Such incongruous juxtapositions also feature in some of his paintings, many of which revisited similar images, such as ‘Swiss Roll’ (1939), or the haunting ‘London in the Seventeenth Century’ (1936), in which a prism hovers ambiguously over the buildings. The painting evokes Milton’s description in Paradise Lost of the fallen angels ‘setting to work to mine, smelt, forge and mould the metals in the soil of hell’, the image which opens Pandaemonium.48 It encapsulates what Jennings described in his original notes for a proposal for Pandaemonium to Pelican as ‘evidence of man’s incapacity to deal with his environment’.49 The same problem informs House in the Woods (1936), in which nature encroaches menacingly on the building like something from a Grimm fairy tale, in which the German forest is always full of menace. His fascination with incongruous images would subsequently find expression in his films: the kazoo band in Spare Time, for example; the empty picture frames and sandbags in the National Gallery in Listen to Britain (figure 4); or the furniture in the river in The Silent Village. Much has been made of how the onset of war seemed to inspire Jennings to corral his diverse artistic talents, sharpening his focus to produce films with the power to move and inspire at a time of anxiety and destruction. As Anderson puts it: ‘It needed the hot blast of war to warm him to passion, to quicken his symbols to emotional as well as intellectual significance.’50 Anderson is certainly right that the wartime films mark a turning point in Jennings’s career in terms of his wider recognition as an artist. Jennings’s improving skills as a film-maker allowed him to capture a communal spirit he had long championed. Thus, London Can Take It! (1940), a film about the first days of the Blitz co-directed with Harry Watt ostensibly for an American audience, shows the King and Queen inspecting the devastation of their subjects’ homes and shops, at one with the people. Jennings’s skill is that he films British life at this time in precisely the way the people saw and experienced it, including surreal sights that would become the norm: the bus blown apart and upended, the shop with windows blown out and ‘more open for business’ than usual, or the ubiquitous barrage balloons, another leitmotif of his work.51 As Jennings’s many letters to Cicely and poems like

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4  Listen to Britain (dir. Humphrey Jennings, 1942)

‘I See London’ and ‘Bedford Square, 5 July 1944’ attest, replete with rich imagery like nascent film treatments, he witnesses what everyone else does. His wartime films collate individual impressions to form a unified view of the experiences of a nation at war, just as Pandaemonium would gather personal accounts of the Industrial Revolution. While Anderson may talk of Jennings needing the ‘hot blast of war’ to find his impact, his concern for society’s emotional and spiritual wellbeing, especially that of working men and women, had, in fact, been a lifelong preoccupation. Spare Time (1939) is a good pre-war example. Dismissed by some at the Film Unit as a condescending look at working-class leisure pursuits, it must be seen as contiguous with his work on Pandaemonium, as well as prototypical for the wartime films in terms of style and content. Reflecting the communities based around steel, cotton and coal in Sheffield, Bolton, Manchester and Pontypridd, with sparse commentary by Laurie Lee, the film anticipates Listen to Britain by allowing the images largely to speak for themselves, alone and in conjunction with the others. Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky argues that ‘the image is not a certain meaning, expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected in a drop of water’.52 Spare Time exemplifies that approach, anticipating Jennings’s subsequent films, and the orchestration of images in Pandaemonium, which ‘contain in little a whole world’.53 Spare Time also evokes the spirit of Mass Observation, which Jennings and Charles Madge described as ‘giving w ­ orking-class and middle-class people a chance to speak for themselves, about themselves’.54 Jennings acts as an amanuensis for the people, making their voices audible.

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Humphrey Jennings: of images, poetry and Pandaemonium

It is only the closing narrative that reveals his own hand: ‘As things are, spare time is a time when we have a chance to do what we like, a chance to be most ourselves.’ He accentuates the important balance between the means of production and vision that is fundamental to Pandaemonium, and to Jennings’s conception of wider social wellbeing. Quoting Jennings in a letter to Madge in 1951, Dillon Barry said he was concerned ‘that the coming of the machine was destroying something in our life’.55 With a Schlegelian aspiration to make ‘life and society poetic’, Jennings skilfully creates a sense of totality that allows the spectator a genuine overview of complex, sometimes incongruous, events. He sought to bring the world to his audience, to allow them to see themselves and the context within which they were living. His films thus capture his ‘unaggressive pride in the courage and doggedness of ordinary British people’, underpinned by a humanistic perspective that did not resort to hectoring belligerence, epitomised by the measured Listen to Britain, and most especially the melancholy of Diary for Timothy, with its sober meditation on how society might evolve after the war.56 Neither the wartime context, nor concerns expressed about peacetime, precludes the inclusion of often hauntingly beautiful and surreal images redolent of his paintings. The success of his films, and their enduring importance as cultural memory texts, validates his radio essays as a manifesto for his subsequent documentary work. Rather than seeing art as something practised in a rarefied atmosphere, Jennings argued over the course of ten talks that ‘the poet today has somehow got himself out of touch with the public’: If this is true, it means that the public is missing something that I think would be of use to it […]. The modern poet certainly has his or her own little public, but they’re not representative of the public at large. The great big public thinks of poetry, particularly modern poetry, as something highbrow.57

Drawing on Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, Jennings posits that poems ought to address topics ‘as simple and familiar as the things [the average Englishman] already has in his head’.58 He cites T. S. Eliot as an exemplary poet who understands how to ‘talk about something fairly ordinary, fairly up-to-date, in a fairly straightforward way’ and captures ‘everyday emotion’ while perhaps naively assuming that the epitome of complex modernist poetry would be readily accessible to a wide audience.59 Be that as it may, Jennings’s broadcasts emphasise his conviction that the onus lies on the poet to connect with the public, by ‘slip[ping] poetry over through a special medium of entertainment’, while remaining committed to the ‘social use of poetry’.60 In essence, he is describing in the radio essays precisely what his films would achieve, namely the capacity, in his own words, to ‘[capture] in a peculiar way the emotion of the people […] and [represent] it to the people’ in and through art in an accessible way.61 Jennings’s successful capture of such emotion can be ascribed to his universal poetry, uniting images, styles and content from all his artistic outputs, to make life and society poetic. The essays thus

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appear like a manifesto for how he would come to approach his filmmaking in the ensuing years. Jennings’s primary skill as a film-maker, indeed the key to his legacy, is the universality of his cinematic images, unencumbered by their wartime context. His earliest productions for the Crown Film Unit such as London Can Take It!, Heart of Britain and Words for Battle bear the hallmarks of overt propaganda, where the Germans invite ire and ridicule for believing that anything can disturb the heart of Britain; but they also contain images of great beauty, revealing a cinematic poet’s burgeoning mastery of technique. The dissolve in Words for Battle, for example, which conjoins Churchill’s rhetorical appeal for American support seamlessly with Abraham Lincoln’s statue in Parliament Square, is a subtle yet affecting transition, heralding the narrator Laurence Olivier’s concluding declamation of the Gettysburg Address. Yet the dissolve is almost too adroit for propaganda purposes; the viewer can only marvel at this holy moment, a cinematic dissolve echoing those in his poetry and painting. Such refined editing, often rendered in conjunction with Stewart McAllister, became prevalent in subsequent films, which, despite their production ostensibly as propaganda, appeared much less tendentious. Listen to Britain and Fires Were Started, arguably his two most well-known films, are more nuanced patriotic expressions, much less chauvinistic in tone. The former draws attention to the fact that Myra Hess is playing the music of an ‘enemy’ composer, Mozart, to an audience that includes the Queen, for example, while the latter eschews any direct reference to the enemy, merely capturing the heroic matter-of-factness of the volunteer firemen who risked life and limb during the Blitz. Both films focus on the heroic stoicism of ordinary people, who lead their lives as normally as possible. Without overt commentary, Listen to Britain is a sublime example of Jennings’s craft in capturing the everyday, representing a broad cross-section of Britain to itself, accompanied by the ambient sounds of the period. The film’s impact derives principally from the inherent juxtapositions, with images and scenes cut together to create a sense of social totality, of equality, inclusion and harmony. As in his surrealist collages, each filmic image effectively enters into dialogue with the others, creating a deeper understanding of the reality represented. Although the wartime context necessarily imposes constraints, Jennings liberates the images so that their construction is never an end in itself. He eschews the ‘total onslaught on the audience’ that Tarkovsky rejects in Soviet montage cinema, never ‘imposing upon them [the author’s] own attitude to what is happening’.62 Indeed, Jennings’s particular focus on working people, in factories, in the fields, down the mines, conjures images that infuse his work as a whole, culminating in Pandaemonium. The cinematic images composed in Listen to Britain and Fires Were Started stem from his preoccupation with capturing ‘in a peculiar way the emotion of the people […] and [representing] it to the people’ that pre-dates the war, and merely acquired additional significance during wartime. Somewhat overshadowed by the other films, the affecting The Silent

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Humphrey Jennings: of images, poetry and Pandaemonium

Village is arguably the finest articulation of Jennings’s preoccupations, exemplifying the ‘bringing together’ in his imagination of all his artistic and intellectual preoccupations in a representation of community wellbeing. It epitomises his universal poetry, comprising what Tarkovsky would call true artistic images, namely those granting the ‘beholder a simultaneous experience of the most complex, contradictory, sometimes even mutually exclusive feelings’.63 Ostensibly a propaganda-inspired reconstruction of the infamous Lidice massacre, a brutal retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942, but relocated from Czechoslovakia to the Swansea Valley to sharpen its potential impact on domestic audiences, the film concomitantly continues Jennings’s investigation of the Industrial Revolution’s impact on society. Not just the cinematic images, but his detailed, and poetically rich, letters to his family during his sixmonth stay in the Welsh mining village of Cwmgiedd, betray its close ties to Pandaemonium. This bond is underpinned by the invitation Jennings received to hold a series of talks in the Miners’ Institute in the Swansea Valley ‘on poetry and the Industrial Revolution which really is a golden opportunity’64 as well as ‘a way of thanking [the people of Cwmgiedd] for their hospitality and co-operation’.65 The pathos of Cwmgiedd’s eradication by the occupying Nazis – the men shot against the chapel wall while defiantly singing Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, the Welsh national anthem, the women deported to concentration camps and the children to Germany – is balanced by admiration for their spirited resistance and the film’s ultimate affirmation, voiced by miners’ leader D. D. Evans, that Lidice’s name will live on. But the film’s true emotive power derives from Jennings’s genuine appreciation of Cwmgiedd’s community spirit, founded in its political and religious life, and the strong sense of cohesion engendered by its cultural life, reflected by the predominance of the Welsh language and communal singing. Jennings’s admiration for such authenticity is palpable, and explains why, at the outset, despite the intertitles commemorating Lidice, The Silent Village is more redolent of an anthropological study of a Welsh mining village in the 1940s than anything else, recalling Spare Time and Listen to Britain and anticipating Pandaemonium. His letters from Cwmgiedd resemble detailed Mass Observation reports, revealing his passion for the community. In a BBC talk in May 1943, he provides a poetic description of the village, foreshadowing images that would pervade the film: There is the village of Cwmgiedd, with a little straight street that goes up into the hill and on each side – charming, beautiful little stone houses and down the middle, parallel to the street, is a mountain stream that comes running down – with a little water in the summer as we saw it and then as we got to know it in the autumn and the winter with floods coming down when the snow is up on the Black Mountains.66

His letters to Cicely furnish further details about village life, underscoring Jennings’s admiration for the close-knit community:

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I really never thought to live to see the honest Christian and Communist principles daily acted on as a matter of course by a large number of British – I won’t say English – people living together. Not merely honesty, culture, manners, practical socialism but real life: with passion and tenderness and comradeship and heartiness combined. […] We are photographing them as honestly as possible – neither like How Green – too theatrical, or The Grapes of Wrath – too poverty-stricken.67

His letters would not look out of place as ‘images’ in Pandaemonium itself. In view of his lifelong preoccupations, Cwmgiedd emerges as a model, a community where people are not overwhelmed by their environment, where the means of production and vision are in accord, where the ‘emotional side of [human] nature’ endures untrammelled either by the ‘coming of the machine’ or the Nazis. Despite its relative obscurity in comparison to his other films, The Silent Village reveals Jennings at the peak of his cinematic powers. It is carefully structured around repetition, juxtaposition and contrast of certain poetically composed key images. The highly evocative interplay between sound and image again recalls Spare Time and Listen to Britain. The opening eight minutes captures everyday life in Cwmgiedd, with the camera lingering lovingly over scenes of community harmony, so prominent a feature in Jennings’s work as a whole; aerial shots of the river and mountains establish the village’s idyllic location. The film comprises arguably some of his most beautiful and haunting shots, masterfully composed and cut together. Certain visual and aural leitmotifs are introduced with careful attention to when these reappear, and in what context. Shots of the Methodist chapel and colliery are juxtaposed at the beginning and recur throughout the film as the twin pillars of community life, symbols of ‘the honest Christian and Communist principles’ that Jennings had eulogised. The opening intertitles establish a narrative frame explaining Lidice’s fate and Cwmgiedd’s role in representing it, a flashforward which anticipates Bordwell’s argument that such narrative devices are a feature of art cinema, drawing attention to the authorial presence. In this case, it prepares the audience for the tragedy that is looming, sharpening the propagandistic dimension even as the film might initially masquerade as documentary. The opening shot of the chapel thus anticipates the later execution of the men. By contrast, shots of the colliery, another leitmotif of Jennings’s film career, represent the spirit of defiance within the community, captured best of all in the film’s final shot with its rousing non-diegetic Welsh choral singing, recalling the diegetic hymn with which the main narrative commences.68 In view of his lifelong fascination with the Industrial Revolution, Jennings incorporates many poetic shots of the mine, engulfed with the ‘belch’d fire and rowling smoak’ of Milton’s Pandaemonium in Paradise Lost.69 Industrial smoke often illuminates his paintings, such as London in the Seventeenth Century, House in the Woods and Bolton Allotments, his insightful photographs of Bolton life in 1937, and poems such as ‘As I Look’. The idyll established at the film’s outset, which draws on his letters and

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Humphrey Jennings: of images, poetry and Pandaemonium

anticipates poems such as ‘Wales in Snow’ (1943), is dramatically punctuated by the intertitle, superimposed over another shot of the chapel, that juxtaposes the village with its Czech counterpart. It is ruptured completely by the sound of German martial music and the voice informing the people, in English, that South Wales has been occupied. Henceforth, the beautiful images exist in stark apposition to the inevitability of the village’s destruction. The impending tragedy is anticipated by a series of poetic shots that are later repeated, but significantly undercut – a horse being led over a bridge at day’s end, for example, echoed later, to menacing effect, when the German car crosses the same bridge – or juxtapositions, such as a shot of a father filling a baby’s bottle while it nestles in its mother’s arms cut alongside a shot of the snowbound chapel graveyard. The most poignant, yet beautifully composed, shot of all, of broken furniture in the river after the village’s destruction, itself recalling the shot underpinning the opening credits, arguably owes much to Jennings’s surrealist collages, where the incongruity of the image is both poetic and unsettling. In this context, it serves as a potent epitaph to Lidice and a stark comment on mankind’s capacity for inhumanity. The sound design is similarly effective. The villagers use their native Welsh, reinforced by diegetic and non-diegetic choral singing, throughout. As Jennings explains: ‘Much of the film has been recorded in Welsh – not that the audience is expected to understand it, but it is the sound made by the people who live in the country. To a certain extent it may even suggest that it is Czech […].’70 The linguistic evocation of the Other – for Englishspeaking audiences at least – invites the audience to identify with the fate of the Czech village, but also demands that they interpret the images carefully, just as in Listen to Britain. Here they are listening to Wales, as if it were Czechoslovakia, a double displacement akin to his paintings. English is used sparingly, which lends dramatic weight to the harsh Germanaccented voice’s irruption into the soundscape. It possesses an unusual, yet intentionally crude, non-diegetic quality, an acoustic incongruity to mirror Jennings’s love of visual juxtapositions. The discordant sonic intrusion on the idyllic images signals the brutal imposition of German control in the narrative. The use of sound is exemplified in the haunting sequence where the Welsh resistance engage in acts of sabotage to the soft non-diegetic choral accompaniment of Ar Hyd y Nos (All Through the Night). As well as intrinsically evoking Welsh community life, the song serves as a defiant counterpoint to the German voice in the narrative context, ‘the language of the underground movement in this film’.71 In many ways, this nuanced artistic evocation of a Welsh village decimated by a fictional invasion of Britain, marrying documentary and fiction so powerfully and shockingly, might also be seen as typical of what Bordwell called the ‘ “illusion/reality” dichotomy of the art cinema’.72 Even if The Silent Village was not ostensibly conceived as anything other than propaganda, the Ar Hyd y Nos sequence epitomises Jennings’s mastery of the cinematic image, and a universal poetry that unites his myriad artistic interests into ‘one sum of fine effect’.

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Reflecting on the cinematic image, Tarkovksy proposes ‘the image as a precise observation of life’, suggesting that the ‘poetic image is able to express [the totality of the universe]’.73 When one considers Humphrey Jennings’s creation, and celebration, of images, in his paintings, poetry, essays, photographs and films, it is evident how carefully he watched, and listened, to the world. So many of his poems assume the stance of the observer, not in itself unusual for poetry, but it is the objects of his gaze that are telling: urban, rural and industrial scenes; people at work and play; animals; machines. They are central to his films. But to appreciate them fully, one cannot ignore all his various creative and intellectual outputs. His films are the most well-known ‘bringing together’ of those activities into images, perhaps, but their depth derives from the artistic imagination behind them, from the way the different media interact with each other, akin to exchangeable images. Jennings can therefore be seen as one of Bordwell’s expressive individuals, ‘the overriding intelligence organising the film for our comprehension’.74 In this regard, Pandaemonium with its collation of ‘images’ arguably best symbolises Jennings’s career as a whole. It was a very personal project; its focus on human wellbeing and the impact of the machine thereupon underpins his work. His creative and intellectual projects were predicated on an aspiration to relate poetry to the people, to represent the people through poetry, as befits the universal poet, who ‘dealt with all problems of life – religious, scientific, social and personal’,75 and thus provide ‘something that I think would be of use’.76 Jennings notes in ‘Poetry and National Life’: The poet can’t tell the community who they are unless he does two things: unless he talks about the things that the community knows about, the things that they’re interested in, and unless he also looks on the community’s past – at the figures, the monuments, the achievements, the defeats, or whatever it may be, that have made the community what it is.77

It is, perhaps, why Lindsay Anderson would call him the cinematic poet of wartime Britain, though that overlooks how important his poetic activities were to him throughout his life; the films were but one outlet. For Friedrich Schlegel, universal poetry ‘alone is able to become a mirror of the entire surrounding world, an image of their age in the same manner as an epic’.78 In his interweaving of different creative and intellectual pursuits, Jennings achieved something comparable. Ben Jones and Rebecca Searle appositely compare Jennings to Raymond Williams, as figures on the left who shared ‘the desire to represent the experiences of ordinary, everyday individuals […] combined with the attempt to represent those experiences collectively and open them up to understanding and critique’.79 In the myriad images Humphrey Jennings created and collated, one can argue that his career as a whole be seen as an ‘imaginative history’ wrought from poetry and Pandaemonium.



Humphrey Jennings: of images, poetry and Pandaemonium

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Notes  1 David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 5th edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 716–24; p. 720.  2 Ben Jones and Rebecca Searle provide a very effective counterpoint to this tendency with their nuanced reading of Jennings’s work on Pandaemonium, in the context of the British left’s engagement with modernity, and its links to Family Portrait, his last film before his fatal accident. They successfully make the case for its reappraisal alongside those films generally seen to be his finest. Ben Jones and Rebecca Searle, ‘Humphrey Jennings, the Left and the Experience of Modernity in Mid Twentieth-Century Britain’, History Workshop Journal, 75 (2013), pp. 190–212.  3 Mary-Lou Jennings (ed.), Humphrey Jennings: Film-Maker, Painter, Poet (London: British Film Institute, 1982), p. 47. Here Madge is quoting from Michael Faraday’s diary, an ‘image’ included in Pandaemonium.  4 Kevin Jackson (ed.), The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader (Manchester: Carcanet, 2004), p. 225.  5 Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, p. 225.  6 Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, p. 225 (original emphasis).  7 Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine As Seen by Contemporary Observers, ed. Marie-Louise Jennings and Charles Madge (London: Icon, 2012), p. xiii.  8 John Orr, Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. 3.  9 Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, p. 226. 10 Jennings, Humphrey Jennings, p. 50. 11 Kevin Jackson, Humphrey Jennings (London: Picador, 2004), p. 380. 12 Jennings, Pandaemonium, p. xiii. 13 Jennings, Pandaemonium, p. xv. 14 Lindsay Anderson, ‘Only Connect: Some Aspects of the Work of Humphrey Jennings’, in Jennings (ed.), Humphrey Jennings, p. 53. 15 Martin Stollery, ‘Only Context: Canonising Humphrey Jennings/Conceptualising British Documentary Film History’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 10: 3 (2013), pp. 395–414. 16 Philip French, ‘Philip French’s Classic DVD: If War Should Come’, Guardian, 19 July 2009, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/jul/19/philipfrench-dvd-war. Accessed 21 September 2016. 17 Jennings, Pandaemonium, p. xviii. 18 Jennings, Pandaemonium, p. 344. 19 Jennings, Pandaemonium, p. xv. 20 Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1958): ‘[Die romantische Poesie] will, und soll auch Poesie und Prosa, Genialität und Kritik, Kunstpoesie und Naturpoesie bald mischen, bald verschmelzen, die Poesie lebendig und gesellig, und das Leben und die Gesellschaft poetisch machen.’ Translation by the author. 21 Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, p. 255. 22 Jennings, Pandaemonium, p. xv.

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British art cinema 23 Jennings, Pandaemonium, p. 344. 24 Jennings, Pandaemonium, p. xx. 25 Jennings, Humphrey Jennings, p. 6. 26 He would later echo this image in his famous poem ‘I See London’, in which the lyrical I sees London ‘stretching away North and North-East,/ along dockside roads and balloon-haunted allotments/Where the black plumes of the horses precede and the white helmets of the rescue squad follow’ (Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, p. 296). 27 Jennings’s earliest films for the GPO Film Unit featured horses and trains extensively. Indeed his first film, Post Haste (1934), told the history of the postal service, documenting how the horse eventually gave way to the train, while his second film, Locomotives (1934), explored the origin of the steam train. But the juxtaposition of horse and train in his films, as well as in his painting and writing, would continue, right up to his final film, Family Portrait (1950). 28 Michel Remy, Surrealism in Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 189. 29 Jennings, Humphrey Jennings, p. 46 (original emphasis). 30 Jennings, Humphrey Jennings, p. 48. 31 Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, pp. 226–7. 32 Keith Beattie, Humphrey Jennings (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 7. 33 Beattie, Humphrey Jennings, p. 7. 34 Jennings, Pandaemonium, p. xiii. 35 Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, p. 226. 36 Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, p. 721. 37 Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, p. 721. 38 Jennings, Humphrey Jennings, p. 7. 39 Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, p. 90 (original emphasis). 40 Jackson, Humphrey Jennings, p. 93. 41 Jackson, Humphrey Jennings, p. 119. 42 Anderson, ‘Only Connect’, p. 59. 43 In February 1947, Jennings went to Burma to consider an adaptation of H. E. Bates’s The Purple Plain, which was never realised. He remained there till June, captivated by Burmese culture, and took many photographs documenting the trip. In returning to painting, he would often draw on elements of his films, such as the 1949 painting Listen to Britain, a modernist rendition of the canteen scene from that film. 44 Jackson, Humphrey Jennings, p. 331. 45 Michel Remy, ‘Humphrey Jennings’ “Imaginative Materialism” or the Mythopoetics of the Machine’, essay published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Humphrey Jennings: Painting, Collage, Film’, 8 September – 25 November 2012, Firstsite Gallery, Colchester. 46 Remy, ‘Humphrey Jennings’ “Imaginative Materialism” or the Mythopoetics of the Machine’. 47 Remy, Surrealism in Britain, p. 53. 48 Jennings, Pandaemonium, p. 4. 49 From the text accompanying the Pandaemonium exhibit at the ‘Humphrey Jennings: Painting, Collage, Film’ exhibition at Firstsite Gallery, Colchester. 50 Anderson, ‘Only Connect’, p. 58. 51 Artist Eric Ravilious was similarly fascinated by barrage balloons, which

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Humphrey Jennings: of images, poetry and Pandaemonium

recurred throughout his wartime paintings, such as Barrage Balloons Outside a British Port (1940). 52 Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on Cinema (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2012), p. 110 (original emphasis). 53 Jennings, Pandaemonium, p. xiii. 54 Jennings, Humphrey Jennings, p. 18. 55 Letter dated 22 January 1951. Exhibit from ‘Humphrey Jennings: Painting, Collage, Film’. 56 Anderson, ‘Only Connect’, p. 55. 57 Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, p. 255. 58 Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, p. 260. In all the quotations from these essays, the emphasis is present in the original text. Jennings often wrote with such emphatic flourishes in his essays and letters. 59 Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, pp. 275–6. 60 Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, p. 282. 61 Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, p. 275. 62 Tarkovsky, Sculpting, p. 118. 63 Tarkovsky, Sculpting, p. 109. 64 Jennings, Humphrey Jennings, p. 35. 65 Jennings, Pandaemonium, p. vii. 66 Jennings, Humphrey Jennings, p. 33. 67 Jennings, Humphrey Jennings, p. 33. 68 During his time in Cwmgiedd, Jennings would paint the colliery in Pithead (c. 1943), which is characteristic of the modernist style of his later work, as well as two paintings called Smoke, in 1949, which seemingly draw on the same inspiration. 69 Jennings, Pandaemonium, p. 3. 70 Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, p. 73. 71 Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, p. 73. 72 Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, p. 719. 73 Tarkovsky, Sculpting, p. 106. 74 Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, p. 719. 75 Jennings, Pandaemonium, p. xv. 76 Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, p. 255. 77 Jackson, The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader, p. 282. 78 Schlegel, Kritische Schriften, p. 37: ‘Nur sie kann gleich dem Epos ein Spiegel der ganzen umgebenden Welt, ein Bild des Zeitalters warden.’ Translation by the author. 79 Jones and Searle, ‘Humphrey Jennings, the Left and the Experience of Modernity in Mid Twentieth-Century Britain’, p. 207.

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Out of the war, on with the arts: cultural politics and art films in post-war Britain Katerina Loukopoulou From its foundation in 1945, the Arts Council of Great Britain (Arts Council hereafter) endorsed cinema as a serious artistic medium, directly supporting and sponsoring art films for almost fifty years. In doing so, even on a much smaller scale by comparison to its support for the traditional fine arts of painting and sculpture, the Arts Council nurtured experiments in film form and shaped the careers of many independent film-makers in a manner that helped to develop a specialised strand of British art cinema from the 1960s onwards. While parts of this story have been recounted in two substantial survey books – David Curtis’s A History of Artists’ Films in Britain (2007) and John Wyver’s Vision On (2007) – my aim in this chapter is to focus on the little-known early history of the Arts Council’s engagement with film in the 1940s and the contexts within which it took place. The starting point of this chapter is a landmark exhibition that is curiously forgotten in the annals of British cinema history, as well as in the aforementioned publications: namely ‘The Art of the Film’, organised in London by film critic and film historian Roger Manvell in 1945. This was probably the first exhibition about film (its history and aesthetics) to have been staged in Britain, and definitely the first to have been supported by the arts establishment. It also happened to be the very first exhibition that the Arts Council organised.1 Its absence in film and art histories of this period is striking, especially in British cinema histories preoccupied with issues of ‘quality’ and canons.2 In what follows, I will first position this exhibition and the Arts Council’s subsequent support for ‘films on art’ and ‘art films’ in relation to the cultural and political climate of post- World War Two Britain. In this way, the chapter will shed light on the often-overlooked link between the 1940s high aspirations for film (especially factual film) as an influential art form, and the later flourishing of an Arts Council-sponsored art cinema in the 1970s. But first, some clarification on terminology is needed for a historicised understanding of the relationship between ‘art’ and ‘film’ during this period. Alongside the aforementioned exhibition, the Arts Council’s association with film mainly revolved around non-fiction films about artists and

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Cultural politics and art films in post-war Britain

about the traditional fine arts. These types of films became known as ‘films on art’, as they were referred to in the film press and publications of the 1940s and 1950s. This term was often used as a synonym for short ‘art films’ (e.g. experimental films directed or designed by art school-trained filmmakers) and, from the 1960s onwards, for ‘art documentaries’. These terms had different connotations, depending on the context in which they were employed. Sometimes they were used interchangeably, but in most cases there were certain historical and national differences between them. In the US, non-fiction films about art and artists were described as ‘art films’ because they were often included in art theatre and arthouse programming of ‘foreign’ European films that had proliferated after 1946.3 Specifically, the term ‘film on art’ was even considered a ‘Britishism’, as a US art critic wrote in 1954.4 In the francophone world, a similar interchangeable use of the terms ‘film d’art’ [art film] and ‘film sur l’art’ [film on art] had its origins in the Film d’Art (1907–13) film adaptations of prestigious theatre plays.5 Thus, the name of FIFA (Fédération Internationale du Film d’Art / International Federation of Films on Art, est. 1948), the post-war UNESCOsupported organisation of films on art with which the Arts Council would collaborate closely, alluded to the historical predecessors of the genre. These nomenclatural variations are indicative of the shared networks of exhibition in art cinemas, film societies, film festivals, museums and non-theatrical venues, where these films mainly circulated. In Britain, the history of films on art is predominantly related to public service institutions, among which the Arts Council featured prominently. But above all, their emergence was part of a wider paradigm shift of the media ecology and art hierarchies in 1940s Britain which effectively enabled subsequent manifestations of British art cinema.

‘The Art of the Film’ in context: art hierarchies reconsidered The transformation of the wartime Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) into a permanent public institution in 1945 consolidated state support for the arts in Britain. The establishment of the Arts Council was announced on the BBC’s Home Service by the economist John Maynard Keynes, who noted that: ‘At the start, our aim was to replace what war had taken away; but we soon found that we were providing what had never existed even in peace time. That is why one of the last acts of the Coalition Government was to decide that CEMA with a new name and wider opportunities should be continued into time of peace.’6 At a time when the UK and the USSR were on good terms, Keynes evoked Soviet models of state arts patronage: ‘I hear that in Russia theatres and concert-halls are given a very high priority for building’; and went as far as to exclaim ‘Death to Hollywood!’7 Despite Keynes’s anti-Hollywood decree, the Arts Council’s first exhibition, ‘The Art of the Film’, was partly devoted to the history of American films, of which the majority were Hollywood

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productions. The cover of the exhibition catalogue, however, strategically featured a recent Soviet production, Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part 1 (1945) (figure 5). The exhibition’s aim, as articulated by Manvell, was to present ‘some aspects of the work of the more important artists who have advanced the potentiality of the film as an art, or produced films of a high artistic quality’.8 Manvell was a critic and public servant, who by the end of the war had managed to attract popular acclaim while at the same time exerting authority within state institutions. His Pelican book Film (1944), an overview of the cultural and social value of cinema, had quickly become highly popular. Writing this book was in a way Manvell’s response to the huge increase in the wider public’s interest in film as an art form, a shift that he had observed while working for the Ministry of Information’s (MoI) Film Services during the war. Manvell’s aim with this exhibition was to offer an inclusive account of film’s history: An exhibition of this character … can put films in an historical and artistic perspective, which is very difficult for the public to realise, subjected as it is to a constant stream of indifferent and bad films of no aesthetic significance whatsoever. The experimental film made abroad, the film shown once only and never reviewed, the documentary never shown at all in the commercial cinema, these may all be brought together and represented by stills in such an exhibition as this, along with acknowledged commercial successes which had also high artistic value.9

The types of films that Manvell alludes to here indicate a fluidity in the attribution of artistic qualities to film: experimental works, documentaries, and formalist fiction films like Henry V (Laurence Olivier, 1944). The exhibition consisted of film stills, arranged chronologically and thematically, and presented on large panels. It was divided into two strands. The first strand featured ‘The History of American Movies’, sent by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, probably the first museum to endorse film as a modern art since the 1930s and thus with this exhibition setting a model for the shaping of a similar discourse in Britain. The second strand of the exhibition was called ‘European Film Art, 1920–1945’, assembled by Manvell himself to form comparisons across European countries, Britain included. The European section of the exhibition was structured around the year 1939, featuring stills of pre-World War Two and wartime films from each of the ten European countries represented in the catalogue. At the centre of this section were panels offering a detailed analysis of the Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) juxtaposed, and in a way compared, with the Agincourt sequence from Henry V (Laurence Olivier, 1944). Manvell hailed these as the highest achievements of film as a ‘pictorial’ art form, but rather strategically tried to downplay their distinct political ideologies, considering that Battleship Potemkin was at the time officially banned in the UK (up until 1954), despite its unofficial circulation in film societies throughout the 1930s and 1940s.10 Still,

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5  The cover of the Arts Council exhibition catalogue ‘The Art of the Film’ and a page from the British section, prominently featuring wartime documentaries: Out of Chaos (dir. Jill Craigie, 1944) and Coastal Command (dir. Ian Dalrymple, 1942)

Manvell’s curatorial choices echoed Keynes’s aforementioned proclamations, while carefully positioning Henry V as an exemplar of a British ‘art film’ between the two poles of American and Soviet cinema. Manvell responded to the distinctive growth of British documentaries during the war by offering significant space in the exhibition to recent nonfiction productions, here hailed for their artistic rather than their informational or propaganda value. A much wider range of documentary films in terms of aesthetic experimentation had been produced and widely exhibited during wartime. Popular documentary films, like Humphrey Jennings’s Words for Battle (1941) and Listen to Britain (1942), would often represent the Home Front war experience through the means of bold audio-visual montage and a new emphasis on cultural themes. This was the case in Out of Chaos (Jill Craigie, 1944), a Rank documentary about the war artists that is now widely acclaimed as a unique record of modernist artists at work, such as Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and Stanley Spencer.11 The war artists were thus prominently portrayed as part of the war effort’s iconography, alongside RAF fighters in war films like Coastal Command (Ian Dalrymple, 1942). The organisation of this exhibition can be related to two areas of film history: the role of film in post-war cultural reconstruction in Britain, and

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the representation of art and artists as a powerful theme in both fiction and non-fiction cinema. That ‘The Art of the Film’ included Out of Chaos, directed by Craigie, a novice female film-maker, is an indication of this new media ecology. The impact of this exhibition can be inferred from the fact that it seems to have toured extensively. For example, a Sight and Sound report on the post-war ‘successful growth of the Film Society Movement’ mentioned this Arts Council exhibition as one of the sources of inspiration for setting up a film society in a provincial town in 1950.12 After the war, the non-theatrical network of film societies had grown significantly, also nurtured by the Central Office of Information (COI) and thus contributing to the formation of a new type of film culture in Britain. Film societies would mainly screen documentaries and a wider range of both British and international films. But in order to further unpack the novelty of the newly established Arts Council sponsoring such an exhibition, it is worth further exploring the various contexts that enabled it to happen. Certain cultural historians have discussed the wartime and post-war dissemination of the arts as symptoms of a state-driven ‘cultural consensus’, a process often considered to have imposed bourgeois cultural values on the masses: in other words, ‘civilising the Caliban’.13 Historians of 1940s and 1950s British art, however, who have followed inductive methodologies have reached different conclusions: that the post-war cultural policies were steered both by the public’s demand and by utopian visions of a ‘new world’ in which a ‘new art’ and new modes of dissemination would emerge.14 The Arts Council’s support for films can be seen as part of new institutional policies that expanded access to the traditional arts of theatre, opera, fine arts and classical music. The concurrent emergence of films on art as a new hybrid genre that aimed to popularise the ‘high’ arts in society chimes with the post-war momentum of a neo-romantic belief in the transformative powers of the arts, endorsed by a wide political spectrum of artists, filmmakers and critics. Michael Powell’s view on what art stood for in the late 1940s is relevant here. The Red Shoes, which Powell made in collaboration with Emeric Pressburger in 1948, was a spectacular Technicolor feature, which Ken Russell would later call ‘the first art film in British cinema’.15 The film consists of long sequences of ballet dancing, performed by well-known contemporary dancers such as Moira Shearer and Robert Helpmann, and features elaborate painterly set designs. Powell’s reflections on the unexpected popularity of such a film merit further quotation: ‘I think that the real reason why The Red Shoes [1948] was such a success was that we had all been told for ten years to go out and die for freedom and democracy, for this and for that, and now that the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go and die for art.’16 This pronouncement echoes the film writings and manifestos of the time that tended to associate fictional art films and films on art with progressive discourses that advocated the breaking down of cultural hierarchies as a means towards social and cultural reconstruction.17 Art and artists were envisaged as playing a new leading role in post-war society, not only

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Cultural politics and art films in post-war Britain

in economic and cultural terms, but also as purveyors of the anti-materialist ideals forged during wartime. Film historian Nicholas Pronay has argued that ‘by the close of World War II, significant sections of the British people had been treated to visions of a grandiose post-war Utopia which exceeded anything promised during World War I’. For Pronay, film emerged as ‘the most potent medium for making Utopias appear real prospects’, and with its projection of urban reconstruction and political change, it helped the Labour Party to win the 1945 elections.18 The use of film to popularise the traditional fine arts was implicated in the projection of such utopias in the sense that they problematised the rigid distinction between the ‘high’ fine arts and the ‘lower’ mechanical art of film, between the ‘autonomous’ art world of painters, galleries and museums and the industrial worlds of film. Revisionist histories of this period have challenged assumptions about elitist art versus popular culture. Historian Jonathan Rose, for example, has argued that during World War Two in Britain, the classical music concerts, visual arts exhibitions and performances of Shakespeare at London’s Old Vic theatre – organised by CEMA in a wide range of venues, including factories – proved so popular with working-class audiences that it provoked rivalry with the Entertainment National Service Association, which offered more ‘lowbrow’ programmes of popular songs, sketch shows and comedy acts.19 Studies like Rose’s highlight that an uncritical and ahistorical celebration of expressive culture emanating from below and a condemnation of the ideological enforcement of ‘high art’ from above has often distorted the discussion of the relationship between the exclusive world of art institutions and the popular art of film. Against this context, ‘The Art of the Film’ exhibition and its endorsement of Out of Chaos reflected the general public’s increasing interest in the fine arts and the unprecedentedly high ‘public estimation’ of factual films since the start of the war.20 As Craigie put it later in an interview: ‘Going to exhibitions was like going to the cinema.’21 And at the same time, going to the cinema acquired a new cultural status, not far from the one of going to exhibitions, with films of high production values and aspirations, like Out of Chaos and Henry V, becoming popular successes. Reviews of Out of Chaos focused on the originality of contemporary art as a theme for a documentary; the film appeared to have a ‘singular subject matter’.22 Another 1944 documentary, Battle for Music, about the London Philharmonic Orchestra, was similarly received as ‘unusual’, but nevertheless ‘pleasing’.23 What was ‘unusual’ about these films? Putting these reviews in historical perspective, what distinguished Out of Chaos and Battle for Music was the medium itself; film was employed to communicate new themes to the new audiences that World War Two had created. Out of Chaos was ‘unusual’ because it engaged with the traditional fine arts that until then had been considered a marginal interest, associated with the privileged classes. And it stands out as one of the first documentaries financed by Rank, a successful commercial film producer, indicating that non-fiction filmmaking was increasing its popularity. Classical music had been transmitted on

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BBC radio in the inter-war years, but Battle for Music broke new ground, because in this case a popular audio-visual medium was used to disseminate classical music not only aurally, but also visually, in order to elicit sympathy and support for the plight of musicians during the wartime. The deployment of film to democratise the ‘high’ arts indicated a shift in their social and cultural currency, but also a change in the uses of non-fiction film. The Arts Council’s engagement with the medium of film was a response to this new media ecology that had also foregrounded the cultural value of the non-fiction film at large. In 1949 Edgar Anstey, one of the key figures of the British documentary filmmaking movement, pointed out that ‘in the non-fictional field the British achievement has certain characteristics which have less to do with the content and manner of individual films than with an attempt to organize cultural and educational film production as a socially valuable whole’.24 Anstey refers to developments during and after World War Two that enabled new types of non-fiction films to flourish, as was the case of the films on art. The production and exhibition of films on art emerged out of two wartime conjunctures. Firstly, the war created new demands for educational films that led to a reassessment of the status of factual films both by the state and the film industry. To a large extent, this was enabled by the Ministry of Information’s direct support of the production, distribution and exhibition of propaganda films, creating wider audiences for non-fiction films in the theatrical and non-theatrical sectors. Secondly, unprecedented state support for the fine arts created an infrastructure for making previously exclusive art forms (painting, sculpture, opera) more widely accessible and comprehensible. This was mainly achieved through touring exhibitions sponsored by CEMA and the activities of the War Artists Advisory Committee, both established in 1939. Through the War Artists Scheme, the popular profile of contemporary painting was raised in the public sphere, superseding War Poetry, and provoking a manifesto-reaction from the literary establishment, entitled ‘Why not War Writers?’25 This question reflected an anxiety about changes in cultural and media hierarchies. Historicist analyses have shown that, alongside democratic access to health and education, debates about cultural democracy had come to the fore, with the rise of modern media in inter-war Britain and their association with politicised discourses, advocating a new type of cultural democracy.26 On an international level, the democratisation of the arts was debated at the time against two dominant models: the Soviet state control of cultural production and mass education since the 1917 October Revolution; and the model set by the American Federal Arts Project (1935–43) of state support for unemployed artists affected by the Depression. In pre-World War Two Britain, the state’s relationship with the arts lacked similar centralised interventions. Thus, in the 1940s, government support for the fine arts was a radically new policy. Janet Minihan’s detailed study of the ‘nationalization of culture’ in Britain, 1800–1945, has summed up the state’s role during this period as ‘sympathetic endorsements’, most

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Cultural politics and art films in post-war Britain

often resulting in ‘desultory action’. For Minihan, the transformation of CEMA to the Arts Council represented a historical shift: ‘In a single decade, during and after World War Two, the British Government did more to commit itself to supporting the arts than it had in the previous century and a half.’27 In 1940s Britain, access to the arts was transformed from an ad hoc, often philanthropic, concern to a government-sanctioned right. This new media ecology, where paintings, films and books had to compete with each other on equal terms, has been thoroughly documented in the first two reports that the Arts Enquiry (est. 1941) produced: The Visual Arts (1946) and The Factual Film (1947). The Arts Enquiry was a ‘fact-finding investigation’, sponsored by Dartington Hall, an educational trust, and published by the Political and Economic Planning policy group (PEP, est. 1931). Dartington Hall and PEP were independent, non-party think tanks with origins in the 1930s ‘associative culture’ of public policy initiatives. Specifically, PEP began as an organisation of ‘public-spirited experts and professionals, dedicated to disseminating specialist knowledge and fostering the growth of informed opinion’, gradually becoming influential in the debate on post-war reconstruction by submitting reports on export industries, the national press, and social and health services to the Beveridge Committee for the formulation of the Welfare State.28 The Arts Enquiry, with representatives from various organisations (PEP, CEMA, the British Council, the National Council of Social Service), conducted its surveys during the war and produced reports on the visual arts, design, music, drama and factual film. That the Arts Enquiry commissioned a report on the ‘factual film’ rather than film in general indicates the increasingly influential role of non-fiction modes of representation for the diffusion of specialist knowledge. The Arts Enquiry’s choice of art forms was strategic, recognising the political and economic pre-eminence of the visual arts and the factual film. The factual film’s newly acquired status owed a lot to the Ministry of Information’s support for the production, distribution and exhibition of factual films, by incorporating the General Post Office (GPO) film unit (renamed the Crown Film Unit), reorganising the Central Film Library, and applying exhibition policies to both the theatrical and the non-­ theatrical sectors. For the latter, the Ministry of Information appointed twelve Regional Officers, including Roger Manvell, to organise the nontheatrical distribution and exhibition of factual films supplied by the Central Film Library to venues with projection facilities, and by mobile cinema units to remote areas and venues without such facilities.29 This operation shared similarities with the Soviet model of ‘cinefication’, that is the state-supported uses of film for mass education and propaganda by targeting factory workers and rural populations.30 The adoption of such interventionist cultural policies in support of film exhibition altered the popular perception of what cinema stood for at the time, thus shaping a new kind of film culture in post-war Britain. As the Arts Enquiry report on The Factual Film put it:

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To most people the word ‘film’ suggests the cinema round the corner, and as the cinema has developed as a place of entertainment other uses of the film have largely been overlooked. Despite documentary achievements in the thirties, it was not until the war and the creation of the Ministry of Information’s system of non-theatrical distribution that large numbers of people began to see films used for other purposes than entertainment.31

‘Films for Villages’ and ‘1,000 Shows a Week’ were indicative headings of articles in The Times, highlighting the originality of the Ministry of Information’s film distribution.32 A Regional Officer’s report emphasised that the ‘best markets’ for the films were ‘the two extremes, city and hamlet. On the one hand the factories clamoured for films and lunchtime shows rapidly became the most important single block of bookings. On the other hand, the rural villages welcomed with great enthusiasm this completely new addition to their social life.’33 This description offers a snapshot of the Ministry of Information’s impact on shaping the wartime media ecologies and the attitudes of the general public towards film. An example of this shift of attitudes is that before World War Two the art and literary critic Herbert Read wondered ‘Why the English have no taste’ in a 1938 Pelican book for ‘the general reader’.34 Ten years later, a documentary for Rank’s cine-magazine strand, This Modern Age, posed a new question to cinema audiences: The British: Are They Artistic? (1947). This film confidently asserted that the British were indeed highly ‘artistic’ as long as they were committed to the arts, not as a luxury, but as a hard-won right: the freedom they had fought for during World War Two. The conception of The British: Are They Artistic? relates to the changes that took shape after the election of the Labour Party, which, for the first time in British history, had an absolute majority and for the first time attempted to implement new cultural policies relating to the democratisation of the arts. Immediately after World War Two, a stocktaking of achievements in the arts started, as evidenced by a series of British Council cultural propaganda booklets, entitled Since 1939. Each pamphlet traced the developments of an art form: ballet, drama, film, music, painting, poetry or the novel. The beginning of World War Two was perceived as the moment when what the arts stood for in Britain was redefined. The prevalent discourse of these booklets was one of exaltation about the post-war increased popularity of ballet, film, classical music and painting.35 It is worth noting that the influential film critic Dilys Powell, in her account of the impact the war had on the state of British film (in the booklet entitled Since 1939: Film), singled out the Ministry of Information’s non-theatrical film operations in factories and villages for their ‘magnitude’, and the longterm impact on matters of ‘taste’: ‘The British public, always a cinema-going public, had thus become doubly so during the war years. And with the increase in numbers, a certain sharpening of public taste is to be observed. Themes which would have been thought too serious or too controversial for the ordinary spectator are now accepted as a matter of course.’36 Such

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Cultural politics and art films in post-war Britain

changes were therefore part and parcel of the new cultural policies to support the arts, with CEMA becoming permanent as the Arts Council, and the Ministry of Information continuing its ‘cinefication’ programme under the new institution of the COI and its Central Film Library. At the same time, the 1944 Education Act, which made secondary education compulsory, also prompted an intensive reconsideration of pedagogy matters, with ‘visual education’ becoming a new trend within which the cultural film and 16mm practices expanded. The Ministry of Education endorsed film as a means of aesthetic and visual education, not only within the art world but also within the educational sector by launching an ambitious experiment to bring films into schools.37

The Arts Council as film producer and exhibitor Against the context discussed in the previous section, Anstey’s point about factual film as a ‘socially valuable whole’ chimes with the Arts Council’s commitment to art films as a means for the popularisation of the visual. From 1945 until 1956, the Arts Council’s support for film focused on the distribution and exhibition of films on art, mainly imported from the US and Europe. This involved the acquisition and circulation of art films, often in collaboration with the British Film Institute (BFI) and international organisations like FIFA. As can be inferred from the correspondence of its film officers, the Arts Council was the first point of contact for regional art galleries and museums in the UK for advice about suitable new films on art.38 The Council’s direct engagement with the exhibition of art films continued up to the early 1980s. But from 1956, the year that the Arts Council commissioned its first production – The Stained Glass at Fairford (Basil Wright) – until 1998, when the process of direct commissioning ended, the main focus of the Council’s support for film gradually shifted towards direct funding for the production of art films. During this period, it commissioned approximately 450 art films, ranging from experimental shorts and reflexive films on art to more conventional arts documentaries. With The Stained Glass at Fairford, the Council set a clear policy of commissioning films from independent production companies and by doing so it ­sustained, even on a small scale, a discrete, publicly funded art film culture that contributed to the development of new types of art films.39 By the late 1970s, the majority of the independent producers and directors who received Arts Council commissions launched their careers by making art films, a genre that allowed experimentation and reflexivity. Notable examples are the art films by Bruce Beresford, Lutz Becker, Edward Bennett, Noël Burch, Geoff Dunbar, Ron Peck, Dudley Shaw Ashton and James Scott.40 The production, distribution and exhibition of Arts Council films expanded considerably from the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. At the same time, the variety and frequency of arts programming on television also increased. From 1958 onwards, the BBC and ITV both commissioned

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new types of arts programmes, establishing the film on art as a regular genre of public service broadcasting, more widely known as ‘arts documentaries’.41 It was a series of films on Pop Artists, directed by painter-film-maker James Scott, that played a central role in increasing the popularity of the Arts Council films within the non-theatrical and art education sectors. This was mainly achieved through the organisation of an Art Film Tour that operated from 1950 until 1980. From the late 1960s, the Arts Council’s increased budget allowed it to fund more productions, to expand the scope of films it supported, and thus to respond to developments in the art world, filmmaking practices and new audiences. The determining factor for this was the White Paper, A Policy for the Arts, which led to an unprecedented 45 per cent increase in the Arts Council’s grant-in-aid for 1966–67.42 Moreover, the appointment of the first Minister for the Arts, Jennie Lee, and the shift of responsibility for the Council from the Treasury to the Department of Education and Science were the first significant interventions of the state in arts policy-making since the establishment of the Arts Council. Thanks to this increase in funding, the Arts Council commissioned a larger number of films on art, often linked with the exhibitions it organised. Such was the case of James Scott’s Richard Hamilton (1968) commissioned by the Arts Council for its 1969 exhibition Pop Art Redefined at the Hayward Gallery.43 The film was distinctive for the close collaboration between film-maker and artist, with each sequence offering an exposition of the source material that inspired Hamilton’s work.44 By constructing an audio-visual rhetoric from Hamilton’s rich terrain of images and words, Scott produced a filmic exploration of the artist’s creative process. Richard Hamilton became popular with Art Film Tour audiences, especially at art schools, which increasingly represented one of the main types of venue visited by the Tour.45 The film’s popularity was enhanced when it became part of the first retrospective exhibition on Hamilton at the Tate Gallery in early 1970. A special cinema space was constructed within the exhibition, and over 14,000 people saw it.46 Scott’s career is typical of independent filmmaking of the 1970s, as a founding member of both the Independent Filmmakers Association (IFA) and The Other Cinema, significant institutions of independent film culture of this era in Britain. He was also a member of the Berwick Street Collective, a group of film-makers and artists (Marc Karlin, Humphrey Trevelyan and Mary Kelly) with a political agenda. With this collective, he co-directed two radical documentaries about the strike and working conditions of night cleaners in London offices: Nightcleaners (1974) and ’36 to ’77 [also known as Nightcleaners Part II] (1978).47 This kind of trajectory was attuned with the emergence of what Peter Wollen called ‘the second British avant-garde’: Toward the end of the sixties, under the dual impact of New York ‘structural film’ and the European experiments in narrative of Godard and others, a film avant-garde crystallised for the first time in Britain since Close Up. It



Cultural politics and art films in post-war Britain

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was built around the BFI, the Other Cinema, the Workshop Movement, and the Independent Film Makers’ Association.48

The majority of the independent film-makers that the Arts Council commissioned films from during this period were members of the IFA and the milieu that Wollen describes. In the 1970s, two of the main sources of funding for independent film-makers and artist-film-makers were statefunded institutions: the Arts Council and the BFI’s Production Board, the successor to the BFI’s Experimental Film Fund (1952–66). In late 1960s and 1970s Britain, for many film-makers like Scott, making Arts Council films was a rite de passage towards experimental projects and independent filmmaking. At the same time, Scott’s films catalysed further changes in the Arts Council’s film commissioning. By the 1970/71 Tour, Richard Hamilton had become widely recognised as one of the most successful films produced by the Arts Council, allowing Scott to move into bolder experiments in later films. Thanks to the extensive screenings of Richard Hamilton in art schools, it attracted the interest of artists and teachers who had until then been sceptical about films on art, associating them with more traditional documentaries. Rodney Wilson, then an art teacher at Loughborough Polytechnic, saw Richard Hamilton during an Art Film Tour and this led him to apply successfully for the post of Film Officer at the Arts Council in 1970, a position he held until 1998, and under which he proactively supported independent and experimental film-makers.49 During the 1970s, the catalogues of the Arts Council’s Art Film Tour offered radically new films that were, in a way, direct visualisations of contemporaneous critical debates in art history. In 1978, film theorist Noël Burch appraised this distinct mode of reflexive audio-visual rhetoric a propos of two Arts Council films: England Home and Beauty (Christopher Mason, 1976) and Hogarth (Edward Bennett, 1976). Burch argued for ‘the usefulness of such work in such a country, and of the need for those who take a dissenting view to examine and defend it’.50 Burch’s motivation to engage with these Arts Council films on a theoretical and historiographical level is worth quoting: I feel that in view of the need for English filmmakers to examine the backwater in which history has placed them, it would be useful to dwell briefly on two films which attempt to do just that, which attempt from inside a highly coded practice, a new look at the presuppositions of the ‘documentary on art’, as well as at some of the ideological pre-suppositions [sic] of the society which have given it value.51

In a similar vein, Ian Christie concluded his review of another Arts Council film Four Questions about Art (Edward Bennett, 1979) with the observation that: ‘[The film] is a substantial justification of the Arts Council’s current policy of encouraging reflective films on the arts, and an important stage in the continuing resuscitation of that familiar museum-piece, the British

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Documentary’ [italics in original].52 That Burch and Christie positioned the Arts Council films in relation to both film history and national attitudes towards cinematic experimentation suggests a historical tension in the relationship between art and cinema in Britain that by the 1970s had started to be questioned. A contributing factor was of course that by the early 1970s films on art had become a staple of television broadcasting, with pioneers of the genre like Ken Russell leaving the BBC and graduating to making feature films about artists. To a large extent, films on art had acted as catalysts for the art establishment in Britain to interact and collaborate with film and television institutions. For example, films on art were often the result of co-financing between the BBC, the Arts Council and the British Film Institute (BFI). Their previews, usually at the National Film Theatre and at art cinema venues like the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street, brought together in the same physical space art and film critics, traditional fine artists and film-makers. The study of the contexts within which films on art emerged and flourished in Britain from the 1940s onwards sheds new light on the debate around what Ian Christie has identified as ‘the barriers of taste and tradition that have kept art and film apart in Britain, perhaps more resolutely than in any other country’.53 Even momentarily, these barriers were challenged and partly collapsed during the state of emergency of World War Two, when both factual films and the traditional fine arts reached new audiences – often simultaneously. The post-war consolidation of some of the World War Two visions for democratic access to the arts bestowed on the medium of film an unprecedented cultural value, a historical process that contributed to the subsequent formation of a fertile ground for a British art cinema.

Notes  1 The official date of the Arts Council’s establishment is usually given as 1946, when it gained its Royal Charter. But its formation as a permanent public body to replace the wartime CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) was announced on the BBC by Maynard Keynes in July 1945 and hence the exhibition ‘The Art of the Film’ adopted the ‘Arts Council of Great Britain’ (ACGB) as the name of its institutional organiser to feature on the cover of its catalogue and publicity material.  2 For example, there is no mention of this exhibition in: John Ellis, ‘Art, Culture and Quality – Terms for a Cinema in the Forties and Seventies’, Screen, 19: 3 (1978), pp. 9–49; or in Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film (London: British Film Institute, 1994).  3 Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art: A Panoramic History of the Movies (New York, NY: The New American Library, 1959), pp. 263–7.  4 Theodore R. Bowie, ‘About Films on Art’, College Art Journal, 14: 1 (1954), pp. 28–9.  5 Fanny Etienne, Films d’art, films sur l’art: le regard d’un cinéaste sur un artiste (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), pp. 13–16.

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 6 John Maynard Keynes, ‘The Arts Council: Its Policy and Hopes’, The Listener, 12 July 1945, p. 31.  7 Maynard Keynes, ‘The Arts Council: Its Policy and Hopes’, p. 31.  8 Roger Manvell, ‘The Art of the Film’, in The Art of the Film, ACGB Catalogue of the Exhibition (London: Lund Humphries, 1945), n. p.  9 Roger Manvell, ‘The Art of the Film’. 10 British Board of Film Classification, Battleship Potemkin, available at: http:// www.bbfc.co.uk/case-studies/battleship-potemkin. Accessed 10 February 2017. 11 Out of Chaos is available to watch at: http://player.bfi.org.uk/film/watch-out-ofchaos-1944/. Accessed 10 December 2016. 12 Anon, ‘Film Societies: The Other Side’, Sight and Sound, 19: 1 (1950), p. 45. 13 Robert Hewison, Culture and Consensus: England, Art and Politics since 1940 (London: Methuen, 1995); Frances Borzello, Civilising Caliban: The Misuse of Art, 1875–1980 (London: Routledge, 1987). 14 Brian Foss, War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity in Britain, 1939–1945 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007); Margaret Garlake, New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1998). 15 Ken Russell, Fire Over England: The British Cinema Comes Under Friendly Fire (London: Hutchinson, 1993), p. 34. 16 Michael Powell, A Life in Movies: An Autobiography (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. 653. 17 For example, see Congrès International du Cinéma à Bâle, Cinéma d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Trois Collines, 1945). This was the first international post-war congress about cinema and its role in post-war reconstruction, where art films featured prominently. A similar discourse can be found in the collection: Roger Manvell (ed.), Experiment in the Film (London: The Grey Walls Press, 1949). 18 Nicholas Pronay, ‘ “The Land of Promise”: The Projection of Peace Aims in Britain’, in K. R. M. Short (ed.), Film and Radio Propaganda in World War II (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), pp. 53–4. 19 Jonathan Rose refers to this rivalry as evidence for his arguments about the intellectual pursuits of the British working classes, who had tuned into classical music on BBC radio since the 1930s, and how CEMA constructed its activities for existing audiences. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002), chapter six: ‘Cultural Literacy in the Classic Slum’. See also F. M. Leventhal, ‘ “The Best for the Most”: CEMA and State Sponsorship of the Arts in Wartime, 1939–1945’, Twentieth Century British History, 1: 3 (1990), pp. 299–301. 20 Roger Manvell, Film, rev. edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946), p. 113. 21 Jill Craigie interview, Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, no.14293, August 1994. 22 See ‘Out of Chaos: Film of Artists’ War Work’, The Times, 7 December 1944, p. 6; ‘Shorts Reviewed’, Kinematograph Weekly, no.1965, 14 December 1944, p. 34; ‘Short Subjects: Out of Chaos’, Today’s Cinema, 63: 5123, 13 December 1944, p. 10; ‘Short Subjects: Out of Chaos’, Today’s Cinema, 65: 5272, 28 November 1945, p. 17. 23 Review of Battle for Music, Monthly Film Bulletin, 11: 122 (1944), p. 13. 24 Edgar Anstey, ‘Development of Film Technique in Britain’, in Roger Manvell (ed.), Experiment in the Film (London: The Grey Walls Press, 1949), p. 265. 25 Arthur Calder-Marshall, Cyril Connolly et al., ‘Why Not War Writers? A

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British art cinema Manifesto’, Horizon, 4 (1941), pp. 236–9. On the ‘War Poets versus War Artists’ debate, see also Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–1945 (London: Pimlico, 1996), pp. 501–23. 26 D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Janet Minihan, The Nationalization of Culture: The Development of State Subsidies to the Arts in Great Britain (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977). 27 Minihan, The Nationalization of Culture, p. 215. 28 Daniel Ritschel, ‘Political and Economic Planning’, in F. M. Leventhal (ed.), Twentieth-Century Britain: An Encyclopedia, rev. edition (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2002), p. 446; R. C. Whiting, ‘Political and Economic Planning’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, Oxford University Press, 2008. 29 Helen Forman, ‘The Non-Theatrical Distribution of Films by the Ministry of Information’, in Nicholas Pronay and D. W. Spring (eds), Propaganda, Politics and Film 1918–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 224. 30 On the meaning of the term ‘cinefication’ in the Soviet context, see Vance Kepley, ‘Cinefication: Soviet Film Exhibition in the 1920s’, Film History, 6: 2 (1994), pp. 262–77. 31 Arts Enquiry, The Factual Film (London: Oxford University Press, 1947). 32 Anon, ‘Films for Villages’, The Times, 4 October 1940. 33 J. R. Williams, ‘Non-Theatrical Films at Work in England’, The Educational Screen, 24: 4 (1945), p. 138. 34 Herbert Read, ‘Why the English Have No Taste’, in R. S. Lambert (ed.), Art in England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938), pp. 124–30. 35 For this reason, the booklets on these arts were published as one volume in 1948: Arnold Haskell, Dilys Powell, Rollo Myers, and Robin Ironside, Since 1939: Ballet, Film, Music and Painting (London: Phoenix House for the British Council, 1948). 36 Dilys Powell, ‘Films since 1939’, in Haskell et al., Since 1939. 37 Educational films on art were amongst the production of the Ministry of Education’s involvement with film production. For a history of this, see Alex Southern, The Ministry of Education Film Experiment: From Post-War Visual Education to 21st Century Literacy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 38 Primary sources: Arts Council Archive, Folder ‘Art Films, 1950–1965, ACGB/56/85’. For an account of the history of the Art Film Tour as a mode of non-theatrical cinema, see Katerina Loukopoulou, ‘ “Films Bring Art to the People”: The Art Film Tour in Britain (1950–1980)’, Film History, 19: 4 (2007), pp. 414–22. 39 Before 1956, the Arts Council had supported four BBC productions of arts documentaries shot on film, quite rare for BBC television of the time, when it was a predominantly live medium. The Council included these films in its distribution catalogues, thus securing their subsequent long-term exhibition in film societies and the wider non-theatrical and educational sector. For more details of these early co-productions, all directed by John Read (Artists Must Live, 1953; Black on White, 1954; Graham Sutherland, 1954; John Piper, 1955), see the Arts on Film Archive, available at: http://artsonfilm.wmin.ac.uk. Accessed 10 December 2016. 40 For further details and online viewing copies of their films, as well as an annotated filmography of all the Arts Council productions, see the Arts on Film

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Archive, available at: http://artsonfilm.wmin.ac.uk. Accessed 10 December 2016. 41 The history of British arts television is thoroughly covered in: John A. Walker, Arts TV: A History of Arts Television in Britain (London: John Libbey, 1993); John Wyver, Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). 42 Wyver, Vision On, p. 101. 43 John Russell and Suzi Gablik (eds), Pop Art Redefined (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969). 44 Richard Gooderick interview with James Scott about the making of Richard Hamilton, 2010, available at: https://vimeo.com/22704232. Accessed 10 February 2017. 45 As evidenced in correspondence and records of the venues visited in the relevant folders of the Arts Council Archive: ‘ACGB/56/1 Art Film Tours, 1951–1979’; and in ‘ACGB/56/54 Art Film Tour Reports, 1972–1980’. 46 Arts Council, Art Film Tour Catalogue 1970/71 (London: Arts Council, 1970). 47 Clive Hodgson, ‘From Artists to Cleaners: An Interview with James Scott’, Film (British Federation of Film Societies), 2: 4 (July 1973), pp. 6–7. 48 Peter Wollen, ‘The Last New Wave: Modernism in the British Films of the Thatcher Era’, in Michael O’Pray (ed.), The British Avant-Garde Film 1926– 1995: An Anthology of Writings (Luton: John Libbey, 1996), pp. 239–60; p. 255. 49 Author’s interview with Rodney Wilson, 1 June 2004, London. See also David Curtis, A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain (London: British Film Institute, 2007), pp. 67, 121, 150n45. 50 Noël Burch, ‘Hogarth, England Home and Beauty: Two Recent British Films and the Documentary Ideology’, Screen, 19: 2 (1978), p. 128. 51 Burch, ‘Hogarth, England Home and Beauty’, p. 123. 52 Ian Christie, review of Four Questions about Art, Monthly Film Bulletin, 47: 552 (1980), p. 22. 53 Ian Christie, ‘The Odd Couple’, in Philip Dodd and Ian Christie (eds), Spellbound: Art and Film (London: Hayward Gallery/British Film Institute, 1996), p. 42.

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4

Attitudes towards experiment in British cinema: the amateur art films of Enrico Cocozza Ryan Shand Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper. Jean Cocteau

In 1937, B. Vivian Braun, of the Experimental Film Exchange, wrote, ‘At one time or another every film director has said “If only I could make the film I want.” To the amateur film director that is no hopeless wish. He can […] For every amateur who takes into his hand a motion picture camera becomes a film director, an artist, and an artist with the most potent means of expression there has been.’1 While an examination of the amateur film movement may at first seem out of place in a book dedicated to art cinema, David Andrews has suggested that, ‘To get a sense of the true scope of the art cinema super-genre, then, we must acquaint ourselves with sectors that legitimate critics rarely, if ever, visit.’2 Moreover, from the mid-1930s until the early 1960s the organised amateur film sector served at least partially as a feeding ground for talented individuals into the professional film and television industry. As has been noted, ‘Amateurism has produced many of British cinema’s most notable mavericks’, including Norman McLaren, Ken Russell and Peter Watkins.3 Indeed, the amateur film festival network has enabled numerous film-makers to present their early works to appreciative public audiences. However, during the late 1950s there was some concern that filmmakers in Britain were being distracted from the true calling of the amateur: To my mind, the production of ugly monstrosities in the name of the avantgarde (whatever that might be), and the attempt to justify meaningless rubbish by calling it “highly personal,” are as far from the kind of filmmaking that matters as the suburban pre-occupations of nine-tenths of British amateurs […] Of course, it takes more skill and just as much energy, to do the small clear thing, than to try to be an imitation Cocteau or a poor man’s Orson Welles.4

Jack Smith is arguing here that those trying to make profound artistic statements were simply making empty copies of works by the masters. However, while the aesthetic criticism is overt, there is also an implied socio-cultural critique evident in his recourse to ‘suburban pre-occupations’. Throughout

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The amateur art films of Enrico Cocozza

the years, there was a continual tension between mainstream and specialist film cultures at work within the pages of the British amateur film press. Richard MacDonald has explained that ‘In basic terms, film societies acted as independent exhibitors of films unavailable through commercial cinema outlets.’5 Yet as the amateur cine movement became more popular, columnists writing in key magazines such as Amateur Cine World and Amateur Movie Maker frequently caricatured film societies as excessively formalist and culturally elitist. This taste gulf is brought into sharper focus when filmmakers schooled in art cinema strategies, through their membership of film societies, made films informed by their viewing habits. When the cultural assumptions of the film societies merged with amateur film practice, as they did in the films of Enrico Cocozza, this taste gulf is made manifest in the reported reception of his work at amateur film festivals. Enrico Cocozza (1921–97) was an academic who pursued film production in his spare time (see figure 6). He was working as an Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Italian Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow, when in 1949 he helped found a film society in his home town of Wishaw, Lanarkshire. In the pages of Amateur Cine World it was reported that ‘His great joy is his own private cinema, The Connoisseur, built, with the aid of enthusiastic friends, in an old auction room at the rear of his business premises. It seats 109 and is the home of an advanced film society, The Connoisseur Circle, of which he is honorary secretary.’6 This cinema became the centre of much activity related to both film appreciation and film production in the town (figure 7). The cinema itself was designed to resemble professionally run exhibition spaces in a number of respects. For example, The Connoisseur had ‘two sound systems in case one fails; auditorium and stage lights which dim professionally; a curtain which draws over the screen at the touch of a button in the operating-room’. In order to secure film prints for screenings, Cocozza became a member of the British Film Institute, which carried ‘with it the privilege of hiring books and films from the National Film Library in London’. There were three rooms adjacent to the cinema, including a private bar, and copies of Sequence and Film Forum (published by the Federation of Scottish Film Societies) were available in the lounge during intervals. MacDonald has further noted that ‘Essentially, a film society was a private club, organising “closed” performances of films for a restricted membership. As such, film societies were vulnerable to attack as elitist bodies, and often regarded as places where cinema was “worshipped” by an intellectual clique.’7 The Connoisseur Circle was vulnerable to such charges as these impressive facilities were not available to the public, being accessible only by members of the society, and associate members in nearby towns. Membership was ‘open on an elective basis to all members of the public over the age of 17’ and each application was decided during a vote of the committee members, with two objectors being sufficient for a refusal. Therefore, an air of exclusivity is apparent not only in the name of this society, but also more significantly in its formal operations.8

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6  Profile photograph of Enrico Cocozza

In the coming years, this film society’s membership formed the basis of Cocozza’s production team, as these individuals moved between the film society network and the amateur cine movement. Over the next decade or so, Enrico Cocozza made many amateur films using the resources of The Connoisseur Film Unit. However, for many years this work was little known, even in Scotland. Towards the end of his life Cocozza donated his film collection to the Scottish Screen Archive and the unusual qualities of his own work started to become better known. A television documentary titled Surreally Scozzese (Les Wilson) was broadcast on STV in 2001, and a number

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The amateur art films of Enrico Cocozza

7  Image of Cocozza’s cinema

of years later Mitchell Miller authored a biographical survey of his oeuvre titled ‘Enrico Cocozza as Amateur Auteur – Ideas Above His Station?’ In this chapter, Miller noted that ‘The reputation of Enrico Cocozza (1921–1997) as an amateur film-maker of unusual verve, style and imagination has been growing of late.’9 In the years since its publication, there have been two screenings of Cocozza’s short films at the Glasgow Film Theatre, as well as a play titled ‘Smart Boy Wanted: Enrico Cocozza’s Life in Film’, in which Mitchell Miller’s book chapter is quoted by one of the characters.10 This case study will consider Cocozza’s films within the context of the amateur film sector during the 1950s, establishing in that process a series of questions concerning the possibility (and/or desirability) of an amateur British art cinema. Analysis of the films and their subsequent reception at film festivals points towards tensions within the amateur filmmaking community and its attitude to ‘artistry’. It has been asserted that ‘Being avantgarde was often something to sneer at north of the border.’11 This claim will be examined with reference to three prize-winning films made for exhibition at the Scottish Amateur Film Festival (SAFF), which were not as enthusiastically embraced by the festival audiences as they were by the adjudicators.

Surrealist narratives In relation to Cocozza’s film practice, the influence of Jean Cocteau (1889– 1963) needs to be noted at the outset. Cocteau was a French poet, novelist,

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playwright and visual artist and a key figure in the French avant garde, whose surrealistic feature films would later become mainstays of post-war British film society screenings. Many of Cocozza’s films evidence links with techniques and themes associated with Cocteau. Indeed, Cocozza’s first fantasy film, which was made in Italy, La Mort et le Poète (1943), has a title that alludes directly to Cocteau’s debut Le Sang d’un Poète (1930), so it is not surprising to learn that this short feature was shown and discussed at the film society that Cocozza helped set up.12 Cocteau’s subsequent films, La Belle et la Bête (1946) and Orphée (1949) were also featured among the society’s regular screenings of English language classics and European art films. Indeed, according to Cocozza’s collaborator Jim Craig, ‘Cocteau was a patron of the Connoisseur Film Society’, after ‘they wrote to him and he agreed’.13 As an aspiring professional film-maker Enrico Cocozza made numerous semi-surrealist works for exhibition in the SAFF, conceived very much as ‘calling cards’, hopefully easing his movement into the professional sector. They attempt to reconcile a surrealist aesthetic with narrative accessibility. While surrealist purists may call this a compromised version of a movement that prides itself on its radicalism, these contradictions become fascinating as they are played out in the films themselves. The two films initially demarcating this category of ‘narrative based surrealism’ are Fantasmagoria (1948) and The White Lady (1949). From a narrative and thematic point of view each explores similar terrain; both were filmed on the Coltness Estate in Wishaw. To shoot on private property, Cocozza had to ask the permission of Col. The Hon. R. A. B. Hamilton, The Master of Belhaven. Cocozza later claimed that the Master of Belhaven’s reaction to seeing the finished products was somewhat extreme: ‘When the Coltness owner saw the film he told me never to set foot on his property again.’14 However, this story is perhaps exaggerated for publicity purposes, as the Master of Belhaven was also honorary president of The Connoisseur Film Society.15 While these films tended to be critically acclaimed, general audiences were often hostile. This might have been difficult to reconcile; clearly, however, Cocozza gained mischievous enjoyment from scandalising the patrons of the Cosmo (an arthouse cinema now known as the Glasgow Film Theatre), while establishing his surrealist credentials. After all, this would have been part of the surrealist calling: to shake up and reawaken perception of the unconscious in complacent spectators. Both films follow a similar narrative pattern: a young man enters a country park surrounded by trees, either alone or in the company of a young woman. What initially looks like a nice day out in natural surroundings quickly turns into a nightmare of paranoia, seduction and betrayal. Mitchell Miller notes that ‘Fantasmagoria (1948), the first film produced by the group, strongly reflected Cocozza’s own tastes, and is in effect, a remake of La Mort Et Le Poete.’16 This sense of building a coherent body of work, which references and develops previous efforts, has been a defining feature of auteurism, and this form of analysis is especially productive to considera-

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The amateur art films of Enrico Cocozza

tions of Cocozza’s films. However, Fantasmagoria was a collaborative effort, as it was written and co-directed with Cocozza’s friend James Thompson. In relation to its narrative, Fantasmagoria (1948, 42 mins, b&w/sound) features a simple storyline in which a young woman (Edith Kay) is seduced by The Evil One (played by Enrico Cocozza, who is dressed in a long black cloak) while her boyfriend (Tom MacLaughlin) is away picking flowers for her. Under The Evil One’s influence, the bond of trust between them is broken, which is signified by her clothing becoming completely black. She is led away and her boyfriend must find her again. During his search, she is shown killing an unsuspecting angler (George Cuthbertson) by biting him in the neck. Miller notes that ‘the female vampire of Fantasmagoria literally sucks the life out of the men she ensnares’.17 The implication is that no one is safe. Your loved ones could turn on you at any minute if you are not vigilant. When her boyfriend finally locates her, she kisses him passionately. During this kiss, the young man looks at his partner in a wholly new light. He realises that she is now under the influence of The Evil One. He stabs her using a small sword (given to him earlier by an old man with a long beard) and she falls to the ground. The Evil One appears behind him and he has to fight for his life. The boyfriend strangles The Evil One and his girlfriend is brought back to life, once again attired in the white clothing she wore at the beginning of the story. Somewhat surprisingly, given the tone of the rest of the film, Fantasmagoria has a happy ending: the couple manage to escape The Evil One and the nightmare ends. As the Wishaw Press had it, ‘it depicts the triumph of love over pure evil’, a fairly conventional reaction to a film that is anything but conventional.18 For example, a bracketing device features a motorist (Bill Pender) who stops outside the estate for a cigarette. Surprisingly at the end of the film we discover that all of the fantasy characters in this story have their real life counterparts. In a concluding meta-fictional scene we see Enrico Cocozza, along with the rest of his cast, walk past the motorist in their everyday clothes. Critical reviews of the film, which can be found in festival reports that ran in local and national newspapers, struggled for comparisons from the professional sector. According to Robin Millar, Cocozza ‘uses methods seen in some early German freak films’.19 Forsyth Hardy, writing in The Scotsman wrote, ‘As I watched the film, I was reminded at one moment of Jean Cocteau, at another of Carl Dreyer’s eerie fantasy, “Vampyr” ’.20 Gordon Irving reported that the adjudicator of the festival, Stephen Watts, then film critic on the London-based Sunday Express, had commented: ‘ “It is the problem picture of the Festival,” said Mr Watts. “I congratulate the director on his courage in making it. It shows great imagination – undisciplined imagination”.’21 This remark apparently summed up the feelings of the packed Cosmo crowd: ‘This description of it by adjudicator Stephen Watts was applauded by the audience who, with him, had admired its courage, but failed to follow its fantasy all the way, and sometimes had an indulgent laugh for Mr Cocozza’s over-high ambitions.’22 Perhaps more practical issues were at stake. Most of the fifty-seven entries ran for four

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minutes or less, while Fantasmagoria lasted just over forty minutes, a length that his fellow film-makers seemed to resent. Robin Millar confirmed this: ‘At times a critical audience chuckled, for the film was run through too fast. It needs cutting.’23 Reading this response is difficult at second hand; it may be that this was not the laughter of derision, but that the audience were genuinely surprised by what they were seeing on screen. After all, fantasy films can provide a space for the unexpected. More suggestively, the judge went on to relate the film’s operation to specifically amateur concerns: ‘He detected a fear of simplicity, that fear which haunted all amateurs. He felt the maker was running away from simplicity and was so determined to be obscure or difficult that he became a little self-conscious with worry.’24 However, Cocozza’s work gained genuine support from other critics, in particular Forsyth Hardy, who was one of the first people to recognise something of value in the film-maker’s work: I do not pretend that I fully understood the film; and there were many in the audience who remained unpersuaded, if not frankly puzzled, by it. But here was the kind of courage which often goes with genius. A director with fresh and original ideas had decided to cut clean away from Hollywood imitation and drab documentary.25

Making artistic films, especially ones eschewing the usual modesty and selfrestraint expected in amateur productions, ensured that Cocozza would struggle to be accepted in terms relevant to this sector. The avoidance or subversion of genre conventions is often seen as a defining feature of art cinema, with David Bordwell observing that in these films ‘the narration tends to be less generically motivated’.26 In this respect, Cocozza’s reported working practices mirrored high-profile auteurs, as he ‘is the bane of scriptwriters; he will never keep to the scenario and is convinced that the best parts of his films are those which were not planned on paper’.27 Along these lines, this survey of the newspaper coverage of Fantasmagoria suggests that the adjudicators were making a concerted effort to avoid the use of ‘horror’. Cocozza clearly did not make conventional horror films, but films such as Fantasmagoria are probably best thought of as horror stories told in an expressionist style and featuring experimental sequences. Cocozza’s conscious desire to make films of this kind was most clearly articulated in comments attributed to him during the 1951 Scottish Amateur Film Festival. A reporter noted that ‘In 1948, apparently under the influence of Cocteau, he attempted a fantastic hocus-pocus (the words are his own) called “Fantasmagoria” which created something of a stir at the 1949 Scottish Amateur Film Festival.’28 This phrase ‘fantastic hocus-pocus’ has clear resonances with what film scholars today would most likely term a sub-genre of horror. Joan Hawkins has even suggested that an identifiable crossover category termed ‘art-horror’ can be seen in certain titles throughout film history, arguing that ‘the line between what is generally regarded as low culture and what is regarded as high art can be very difficult to see’.29 There can be significant overlaps between the formal strategies employed by art



The amateur art films of Enrico Cocozza

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and exploitation films – a tendency that can even be discerned in scholarly descriptions of supposedly very different sorts of filmmaking. For example, Steve Neale has noted that: Art films tend to be marked by a stress on visual style (an engagement of the look in terms of a marked individual point of view rather than in terms of institutionalised spectacle), by a suppression of action in the Hollywood sense, by the consequent stress on character rather than plot and by an interiorisation of dramatic conflict.30

Similarly, Hawkins has pointed out that ‘horror films are often characterized by a much looser plot structure and a more experimental visual style than mainstream cinema’.31 In both these examples, art and horror films are defined as aesthetic deviations from mainstream film practices. Mitchell Miller perceptively notes that ‘Early horror films and crime pictures seem as deep an influence on Cocozza as the canonical “classics” circulating through the Film Societies movement.’32 The influence of Cocteau was clearly being subverted by more popular sensibilities that threatened to undermine the intended serious reception. In fact, in keeping with his surrealist antecedents, Cocozza seems to have revelled in being misunderstood. This can be seen in the ways in which Fantasmagoria’s old man with a long white beard (played by Roderick Ravenscraig) was generally interpreted. A reporter from the Wishaw Press interpreted the figure as ‘representing the devil’: from this perspective, the story is thematised as that of a young couple resisting the evils of temptation. Stephen Watts, however, was less sure: ‘Mr Watts remarked that the old man in the film mystified him. He could have been Sir Laurence Olivier playing “King Lear” or he might have been Pettigrew and Stephens’ Santa Claus!’33 The manifest humour involved in dressing up in outlandish costumes and wearing an obviously false beard seems to have been lost on this overly sober crowd. While a measure of scepticism towards the framework of ‘auteurism’ (which newspaper reports such as these tend to work within) is probably appropriate in this context, Cocozza’s own account of the film is revealing of the thinking behind his amateur-orientated practice. In a subsequent interview: Mr Cocozza, who welcomed all the criticism, told The Wishaw Press that the “old man” was meant to represent the medieval conception of Christian ideals and the reason why he was shown with a false beard was because he was being seen through the eyes of a young man who, belonging to this modern era, looked upon the medieval Christian ideas as being essentially false.34

This mischievous quote foregrounds Cocozza’s inheritance of surrealist principles, with their links to anti-clericalism and an atheistic stance being made quite openly. Cocozza’s early film practice was consistent with André Breton’s stated objectives for the wider surrealist movement: ‘The ultimate goal, however, is not mere self-expression but the “resolution of the principal problems of life,” the transformation of the world by resolving dream

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and reality into a surreality.’35 Likewise, Cocozza conceived of his filmmaking as occupying a liminal space between dreams and reality. In his report of the festival published in The Scotsman, Forsyth Hardy was extremely encouraging of Cocozza’s surrealist efforts. He continued: Enrico Cocozza, chiefly responsible for the conception and execution of this 40 minute film, is clearly a man capable of thinking and feeling in cinema terms. He will make simpler and better films than “Fantasmogoria,” and he should feel no resentment over the laughter which it occasionally provoked from the Cosmo audience. He should remember that it is a little startling to find a surrealist orchid among the film daisies and buttercups. He gave the Festival its most stimulating moments.36

In short, what is found here is a horror film with surreal moments, rather than a surrealist film per se. The divide between the reactions of the general audience and the critics to this narrative-based surrealism was wide, and subsequent films did not narrow this chasm. Despite this controversy, from a field of fifty-seven entries at the 1949 SAFF, Fantasmagoria went on to win the Andrew Buchanan Cup for the Best Scottish Film – any class – and the Glasgow Film Society Prize.

Return to horror A year later, Cocozza had clearly learned some lessons from the unsympathetic audience response. This time he chose to direct the film by himself, although the scenario was based on a ghost story by Sir Walter Scott, suggested to him by William Martin.37 Thus although clearly growing in ­confidence after the success of Fantasmagoria, Cocozza still relied on a small group of local collaborators to help on the production. Never what amateur film journals confidently referred to as a ‘lone worker’, Cocozza again functioned as part of a team on what was called ‘A Supramont Picture’. At one level, the aspiration to work within professional models of production is clear; at another, resources remain distinctly amateur: according to local press reports, William Martin had ‘recently retired from the managership of the Direct Labour Department for Housing at Bartonhall, Waterloo’.38 A background in the arts was not necessary to work on a Cocozza film, whose direction would draw on local ‘talent’ not just for starring roles in front of the camera, but also for general assistance with production. While Fastasmagoria ran to almost forty-two minutes, The White Lady (1949, 18.5 mins, b&w/sound) lasted a mere eighteen. Following his brief appearance in Fantasmagoria, George Cuthbertson (a garage mechanic by profession) was promoted to the lead, this time as a lone hiker who finds himself caught up in a nightmare during a ramble through the Wishaw Estate. As he walks down a quiet country road, a mysterious voice whispers to him to ‘come closer’. While Fantasmagoria featured a literary narration, spoken by Cocozza, achieving synchronised sound during screenings

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c­ ontinued to be technically difficult for most amateur film-makers, meaning that a silent film aesthetic was dominant in amateur cinema during this period. Supramont incorporated sound techniques into their amateur film aesthetic, something that would distinguish their work from most of the other productions being exhibited at the SAFF. In The White Lady the narration was incorporated into the diegetic world of the story, rather than commenting on it in the third person. The hiker then comes upon an isolated cottage. He knocks but there is no answer. Suddenly an off-screen figure pushes open a gate, and the voice of a ‘White Lady’ enjoins him to ‘come in and rest awhile’. A little later this mysterious figure (played by Sheila Stodart) leads him by the hand into the forest. She takes him to a clearing where a grave-digger (Roderick Ravenscraig) is making preparations for a burial. The hiker is told to ‘look into the grave’. Following a loud scream, and a shot of the setting sun, we see the backpacker being covered with earth. ‘Come to the door’ the White Lady again entices us, as we see shots of an empty sky. In style and theme The White Lady is very similar to Cocozza’s SAFF entry the previous year. A sense of ‘correction’ is apparent, with the filmmaker remaking the same genre of film, but this time with a reversal of the villain’s gender and their associated colour symbolism, along with concessions to the audience by reducing the narrative to focus entirely on one character, rather than a couple. He might have reasoned that this would bring him acclaim from both festival-goers and judges. But in this he would be mistaken. Festival coverage reported that ‘ “The White Lady” (1949) was criticised as echoing too obviously some of the “Fantasmagoria” themes.’39 The adjudicator Alexander Mackendrick, who that year directed Whisky Galore!, described it as not ‘everyone’s cup of tea’, but went on to say that ‘the man who made it is obviously trying very high. He is breaking fresh ground.’40 In his now annual review in The Scotsman, under the heading ‘Amateur Has Lessons to Teach the Studios’, Forsyth Hardy once again wrote like a fan, albeit one who this year was slightly disappointed: This is an exciting fantasy with a decidedly eerie flavour, directed with near-professional skill and most sensitively photographed in colour. I thought, however, that it echoed too obviously some of the elements in “Phantasmoria” [sic]. The director must find some less elusive form for the expression of his undoubted feeling for the cinema. Virtuosity alone is not enough.41

This criticism must have hit Cocozza hard. Mackendrick might have said that ‘He knows quite a lot about filmmaking’, but he would presumably have to rethink his filmmaking strategy if he was going to move up the ranks towards the professional sector. The consensus view was that his talent was undeniable, but that his choice of topic left much to be desired. His desire to present ‘lowbrow’ subject matter in an art film style has a long history in cinema: ‘What directors are using the institution of the art film to reclaim, then, are not specific movies or specific forms of production

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and ­distribution; they are instead reclaiming materials that art cinema has historically abandoned to lower-status formats.’42 This might be a popular strategy for professional film-makers, yet Cocozza’s lurid (yet fun) explorations of the nature of evil did not go down well with audiences. Amateur film-makers in the 1950s were encouraged by sectorial guardians to pursue more respectable forms of film practice. Similarly, Miller suggests that the ‘obvious intellectualism of the work may also have been an issue’.43 This is suggestive, as it points towards the conflicting taste cultures that were in play in amateur film festivals, much like their professional counterparts. Indeed, Andrews similarly argues that, ‘Unlike most commercial movie categories, art cinema has been reliant on its organizing concept; the category is more intellectual than visual, narrative, or aural.’44 Enrico Cocozza’s inclination towards these intellectual film practices, which might have been nurtured in avant-garde circles, ensured that his films were often seen as problematic within the amateur sector. That year the festival received seventy-nine entries, and The White Lady won the fiction category, and was presented with the Alfred Hitchcock Cup and the British Film Institute Prize of £10. Cocozza also won the Lizars Cup (named after the camera retail chain) for a more conventional comedic film in the personal record section, Ric Has a Bath, where two boys try to bathe an Alsatian. Over the next couple of years Enrico Cocozza experimented with various film genres including social realism, parodies of Hollywood biblical epics, and even science fiction. The search for this ‘less elusive form’ shaped the next few years, and a range of forays into amateur production.

Amateurism in Glasgow Glasgow was a particular location where a convergence of very different avant-garde practices emerged out of a dynamic film culture. The Glasgow School of Art Kinecraft Society made a number of notable films during the 1930s, while Supramont Pictures and its later incarnations through the 1950s specialised in the production of surrealist short films. Both of these groups were influenced by artistic traditions outside of Britain: the Kinecraft Society by ‘revolutionary’ films from the Soviet Union, and Supramont Pictures by ‘art cinema’ work from France and Italy. This may cause critical hesitancy, as they do not fit neatly into canonical British filmic categories, but a close consideration of their work might go some way to constructing more inclusive, locally based histories of the avant garde. While some cine-clubs existed on the margins of amateur cinema culture, it is interesting to note that in their marginality there was still dialogue and exchange between their very different cinema practices. For example, on Saturday 27 February 1954, Enrico Cocozza gave a lecture entitled ‘Experimental Amateur Films in Wishaw’ at a special meeting of the Clydeside Film Society, a workers’ film group, held at 16–17 Woodside Terrace, Glasgow.45 The use of the Scottish Film Council facilities, ­especially

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the small screening room known as The Studio Cinema, meant that along with his lecture, four recent films produced by Supramont could be shown to illustrate his presentation. What is clear here is that even at the time, Cocozza was regarded as the originator of these films; a brief mention is made of the Connoisseur Circle in the introduction of the programme notes prepared for the occasion, but Cocozza is being marketed as their sole author: To say that Mr. Enrico Cocozza is well-known as an amateur film-maker is an understatement. Ever since his Fantasmagoria startled and intrigued audiences at the 1949 Scottish Amateur Film Festival his succeeding productions have continued to make an impact on viewers.

This statement demonstrates how much of an impact his debut film made on the amateur film scene in Scotland at the time. The alliance between these two film groups may seem unlikely, a contradiction between the pursuit of politics and art, which the programme notes attempt to elide: He describes his productions as ‘experimental’ and there is little doubt that his freshness of approach to the cinematic medium and his keen interest in worthwhile and progressive cinema were the factors which persuaded him to become a member of the Clydeside Film Society from its inception.

It is possible that the Cocozza films were being interpreted as radical surrealist works in line with the writings of André Breton, even while the more obvious influence came from an enemy of the political Surrealists, namely Jean Cocteau. This dialogue between societies and the mutual support offered must have been energising for both parties. Andrews notes that ‘Just as vital to raising the profile of the art-film idea were several new distribution paradigms, including those of the film d’art movement, and new exhibition contexts, like little cinemas, ciné-clubs, museum theaters, and film festivals.’46 Therefore, despite their aesthetic differences, it was in their best interests to be united in the face of the relative hostility they experienced from the rest of the amateur cinema scene in Scotland.

Final festival entry Ten years after producing The White Lady, Enrico Cocozza returned to the Wishaw Estate to film The Living Ghost (1959, 25 mins, b&w/sound), marking a return to previously established themes and methods, many years after they were first abandoned. ‘It was shot in Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews and Crail harbour and took about three months to complete’ recorded the Wishaw Press. The opening credits announce, ‘A film by Enrico Cocozza’; with the film-maker again positioning himself as an auteur. Returning to familiar locations and reprising recurring themes, The Living Ghost however exhibits much less reliance on the tropes of the horror genre and a more pronounced poetic edge than was evident in his previous festival entries. The challenges the protagonist faces come not from

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monsters that physically attack, but instead from internalised struggles that threaten to overwhelm his psyche. The narrative of the film was summarised in the following synopsis: A young man, injured in a car crash, lies at the point of death. Crushed by loss of faith in everything, frustrated and bewildered, he longs for the final release, but his body pleads desperately for a reprieve. The film brings to life his dying thoughts as they range through days of hunger and unemployment to opulence.47

A newspaper article claimed it was about ‘the frustration of young people today’.48 It can then be seen as an existential version of the ‘angry young man’ films that were popular in Britain at the time. Like certain films of that cycle, it features a young male protagonist filled with anxiety about the prospects of his relationship with his girlfriend Karen progressing inevitably into a life of domesticity and child-rearing. The narrative is, however, altogether abstract in terms of story development. Unlike Fantasmagoria or The White Lady, this film has a non-linear structure. Repetitive shots and sequences make The Living Ghost a demanding puzzle which viewers have to re-order in their imaginations as the film progresses towards its circular climax. An elaborate internal monologue is also added, expressing Johnny’s (Billy Stewart) existential angst and his repressed love for a woman named Fiona, which was devised by Chris Clemant and Cocozza, adapted from poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and Cathy Rain. Clemant and Cocozza double as narrators for extra artistic expression, relating phrases such as ‘My feet fall soundless, like a living ghost.’ Kim Grant has observed that ‘The nature of language and the relationship of words to things is a central issue of surrealism.’49 This poetic approach is taken to an extreme in The Living Ghost. The literary voiceover relates that the protagonist is ‘Hungry but not for food alone’. This subjective approach to topical issues conforms to Bordwell’s description of art cinema in which ‘social forces become significant insofar as they impinge upon the psychologically sensitive individual’.50 Significantly, at a time when colour processes were more available to the amateur film-maker, this film was made in black and white, and featured unsettling handheld shots moving through an empty graveyard. The visually striking rendering of the climatic car crash was inventively filmed in an extended take in which the camera is held closely above the moving road. The film-maker’s increasing technical sophistication in relation to the soundtrack is also showcased during a scene featuring Johnny dancing to a rock ’n’ roll song that alludes directly to the title of the film. A report from the SAFF published in Amateur Cine World says, ‘Many people in the audience at the Cosmo cinema in Glasgow and at Edinburgh disliked it intensely because of its melancholy, macabre character. Some may be weary of the theme of mixed-upness and aimless frustration.’51 This film, perhaps the most experimental of Cocozza’s entries to the Scottish Amateur Film Festival, was taking familiar subject matter in an altogether more experimental and less popular direction.

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That year the festival received eighty-six entries and the adjudicator responsible for the final decisions on the awards was Alfred Shaughnessy, the Ealing Studios producer and director. When reporting Shaughnessy’s comments the festival correspondent for Amateur Cine World became more personal and effusive in their praise for its achievements: everyone with any feeling for film will agree with him that Cocozza has a remarkable flair for creating nightmare atmosphere and in The Living Ghost has made a film of impressive virtuosity. Those who know Cocozza’s work (and to know is to admire, even though the treatment may not always appeal) will probably agree that it is the best film he has ever produced.52

Once again, despite the lukewarm audience reaction, The Living Ghost was critically successful, taking the premiere award, the Victor Saville trophy. However, in many ways this entry represented an end of an era. Mitchell Miller points out that ‘In press clippings for The Living Ghost, his last SAFF victory, Cocozza hints at “taking a rest” from the competition.’53 In a personally written filmography covering his filmmaking up to 1961, it is apparent that Cocozza was profoundly disappointed by the reception of The Living Ghost, writing that ‘it won the major award – the Humphrey Jennings or was it the Victor Saville trophy (I can’t remember which because I never brought it home) at the Scottish festival and marked my final ‘triumph’ before retiring from the art of film-making’. Following this victory, he never again entered another film into the Scottish Amateur Film Festival. His damning judgement at the time was that ‘this was my last serious film – as pretentious as the rest’.54 These are fascinating films in many respects, however the relatively resistant response the Cosmo audience exhibited towards Fantasmagoria, The White Lady and The Living Ghost is revealing, and deserves further examination.

Amateur hostility to art cinema As can be seen from the newspaper reports of the reception of the films ‘by Enrico Cocozza’ at the Scottish Amateur Film Festival, ‘highbrow’ filmmaking was viewed with scepticism and might be subject to cruel mockery by a general audience of other amateur film-makers. Not surprisingly, therefore, while adjudicators from the professional sector often encouraged this formal experimentation, the amateur film-makers themselves were frequently not as accepting. Along these lines, Miller observed that ‘A number of references suggest Cocozza’s ability to attract the admiration of SAFF judges irked fellow competitors and audiences alike.’55 However, this audience antagonism was not necessarily personal, but most probably a result of wider cultural factors, especially a suspicion of anything that might be seen as somewhat ‘intellectual’ during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Reports from the 1962 SAFF published in Amateur Cine World confirm this:

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The Victor Saville Trophy and the Scottish Film Council’s cash prize of £15 for the outstanding film of the festival went to Dada, a 16mm. colour interpretation of Dadaism in the art world, made by K. Schaumann of Germany. According to an ACW correspondent who was present at the Cosmo screening, it was anything but a popular choice. ‘Most of the Scottish amateurs in the audience’, he writes, ‘gave the impression that they knew little about Dadaism and cared less.’56

The professional adjudicator and the general audience were again using different criteria to judge the same film. This is not just because of a closed-mindedness on the part of Scottish amateurs in particular, but instead reflects wider attitudes disseminated to and within amateur cinema throughout Britain. A cursory look at articles written in amateur cinema journals will confirm this. During the 1950s, popular mainstream journals such as Amateur Cine World often published scathing attacks on what they saw as ‘extremes’ of filmmaking practice. An article written by Jack Smith is particularly illustrative. Entitled ‘The Highbrow and Lowbrow Fallacy’, Smith begins his attack by focusing on a recent Scottish production by the Norton Park Group, a cine-club based in Edinburgh.57 This school group’s recent effort, The Grey Metropolis (1952, 14.5 mins, b&w/sound), which attempted to combine a voiceover reading from Robert Louis Stevenson’s observations on Edinburgh with contemporary visuals of the city, came in for particular criticism. ‘It tries to provide a visual parallel to some turgid pseudo-poetry by Stevenson, quoted extensively on the sound track; this takes the picture even further back from reality’, Smith writes.58 Films that have such poetic ambitions as The Grey Metropolis are frequently condemned as pretentious and dull. However, Smith reserves his most scathing criticism for what he sees as the malign cultural influence of the film societies: Most amateur films have no content worth bothering about, and therefore they’re all too often judged by the superficial effectiveness of what many people seem to think is ‘good cinematic technique.’ As if there were such a thing as ‘good technique’ as an admirable thing in itself! I’m afraid that this is too often the ‘Film Society’ attitude, which judges ‘good cinema’ using Orson Welles and his imitators as a criterion of excellence.59

It is clear that articles such as this one, along with Ivan Watson’s ‘Experimental … A Word That Covers a Multitude of Junk’, echo much of the reported audience reaction to the Cocozza films screened at the SAFF.60 In their columns, both Smith and Watson make it very clear that average amateur film-makers showed little desire to pursue an overly artistic amateur cinema. It may be tempting to interpret the reported audience reaction to these three films as being indicative of ‘issues arising from Cocozza’s reception as Scottish film-maker’ which ‘problematize the relation of such work to conventional understandings of nationally-conscious film practice’.61

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The amateur art films of Enrico Cocozza

However, it is more likely to have been due to tensions within the ideologies of amateur cinema culture itself. These films demonstrate what Pierre Bourdieu termed Kantian taste. Bourdieu summarised this tendency by noting that ‘In order to apprehend what makes the specificity of aesthetic judgement, Kant ingeniously distinguished “that which pleases” from “that which gratifies” ’.62 This distinction helps offer an explanation for divided reaction to his entries in the SAFF: while festival audiences often merely wanted works that pleased and confirmed their expectations of film as a medium for entertainment, Cocozza was making films that gratified the critical desire for a cinema of imagination and experimentation.

Conclusion The work of Scottish film-maker Enrico Cocozza offers a fascinating example of amateur art cinema. In this case study I have explored the relationship between surrealism and narrative with a particular focus on work entered into amateur film festivals. This chapter has also explored the relative disjuncture between the aims and ambitions of both the film society network and the amateur cine movement, which was arguably illustrative of the changing politics of cultural distinction within Britain during this period. Jim Craig, a key creative collaborator of Cocozza (he was co-editor on The Living Ghost), has admitted that they consciously adopted a confrontational attitude in their film practice, saying that the ‘Connoisseur Group saw themselves as avant-garde – surrealist – pushing the edges of film and enjoyed the controversy that they created at SAFF. Sometimes he recalls now they took themselves too seriously.’63 Most of Enrico Cocozza’s films might have been shot in Wishaw, yet he refused those limits of domestic and local concerns, making films that drew on influences from both popular and artistic culture. This unusual mixture resulted in a divided reception, illustrating the gaps between popular and critical sensibilities during this particular era. Through this historical study of Cocozza’s films and their reception at the Scottish Amateur Film Festival, we can see that, in terms of the content they championed, film societies and their associated production units were not as elitist as was generally assumed. The avant garde, art cinema and popular culture have historically had more in common than has perhaps been admitted by scholars of British cinema. Recently, David Andrews has noted that in relation to professional filmmaking, ‘legitimate art cinema is not yet as open to distinguished horror films as it is to distinguished dramas and romances and even thrillers’.64 There are clear overlaps between the reception of both amateur and professional films when they mix influences from popular and artistic traditions, therefore this case study of Enrico Cocozza’s experience is perhaps indicative of wider issues in relation to the reception of art films. This re-evaluation of Cocozza’s surrealist narratives at amateur film festivals might go some way towards creating a history of

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filmmaking in Britain that would be more sensitive to the pleasures of the cinema of the artistic imagination.

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Notes  1 B. V. Braun, ‘Amateur Avant Garde’, Home Movies & Home Talkies (December 1937), p. 294.  2 David Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas: Foreign, Cult, Avant-Garde, and Beyond (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013), p. 109.  3 Mitchell Miller, ‘Enrico Cocozza as Amateur Auteur – Ideas Above His Station?’, in Ian Craven (ed.), Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 270–300; p. 292. For more on Peter Watkins’s and Ken Russell’s amateur films, see J. R. Cook, ‘ “This is not Hollywood!” Peter Watkins and the Challenge of Amateurism to the Professional’, in Ryan Shand and Ian Craven (eds), Small-Gauge Storytelling: Discovering the Amateur Fiction Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 183–200, and Brian Hoyle, ‘ “Start as You Mean to Go On”: Ken Russell’s Early Amateur Films’, in Shand and Craven (eds), Small-Gauge Storytelling, pp. 201–20.  4 Jack Smith, ‘The Highbrow and the Lowbrow Fallacy’, Amateur Cine World, 22: 11 (1959), pp. 1122–3; p. 1123.  5 Richard MacDonald, ‘Screening Classics: Film Appreciation Canons and the Post-War Film Societies’, in Craven (ed.), Movies on Home Ground, pp. 208–36; p. 210.  6 (Anon.), ‘A Gallery of Prize-Winners’, Amateur Cine World (May 1951), pp. 28–9; p. 28.  7 MacDonald, ‘Screening Classics: Film Appreciation Canons and the Post-War Film Societies’, p. 210.  8 Information from Enrico Cocozza’s scrapbook of newspaper cuttings, held by the Moving Image Archive, National Library of Scotland, item number 3/7/1.  9 Miller, ‘Enrico Cocozza as Amateur Auteur – Ideas Above His Station?’, p. 270. 10 The screenings featured new scores by local bands who played live as the films were projected: Butcher Boy provided a soundtrack for Chick’s Day and Smart Boy Wanted in June 2009, while HAWSE played during The Silver Trumpet screening in September 2015. The play ‘Smart Boy Wanted: Enrico Cocozza’s Life in Film’ was written by David Belcher and performed at the Hidden Lane Gallery, Glasgow in 2015. 11 Miller, ‘Enrico Cocozza as Amateur Auteur – Ideas Above His Station?’, p. 294. 12 (Anon.), ‘Wishaw Film Society Membership Now 223’, publication unknown (1949), Enrico Cocozza papers, The Moving Image Archive, National Library of Scotland. 13 J. McBain, ‘Notes on Conversation with James “Jimmy” Craig’ (2000), Enrico Cocozza papers, The Moving Image Archive, National Library of Scotland. 14 J. Davidson, ‘Film-Maker Returns With A Celebration of Street Life’, publication unknown (1978), Enrico Cocozza papers, The Moving Image Archive, National Library of Scotland. 15 Information from Enrico Cocozza’s scrapbook. 16 Miller, ‘Enrico Cocozza as Amateur Auteur – Ideas Above His Station?’, p. 276.

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17 Miller, ‘Enrico Cocozza as Amateur Auteur – Ideas Above His Station?’, p. 278. 18 (Anon.), ‘Wishaw Film Startled Critics: But Won Premier Award in Scottish Class’, Wishaw Press (1949), Enrico Cocozza papers, The Moving Image Archive, National Library of Scotland. 19 R. Millar, ‘ “Freak” is Best Scots Film’, publication unknown (1949), Enrico Cocozza papers, The Moving Image Archive, National Library of Scotland. 20 F. Hardy, ‘Amateur has Lessons to Teach the Studios: Review of Scots Film Festival’, The Scotsman (1949), Enrico Cocozza papers, The Moving Image Archive, National Library of Scotland. 21 G. Irving, ‘Film Festival Winner “Daft” of a Classic’, publication unknown (1949), Enrico Cocozza papers, The Moving Image Archive, National Library of Scotland. 22 M. Crichton, ‘Mamie Crichton’s Showtalk: Scots Share in Film Festival Awards’, publication unknown (1949), Enrico Cocozza papers, The Moving Image Archive, National Library of Scotland. 23 R. Millar, ‘ “Freak” is Best Scots Film’. 24 Judge’s comments in the paper archives of the Moving Image Archive, National Library of Scotland. 25 F. Hardy, ‘Amateur has Lessons to Teach the Studios: Review of Scots Film Festival’. 26 David Bordwell, ‘Authorship and Narration in Art Cinema’, in Virginia Wright Wexman (ed.), Film and Authorship (London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), pp. 42–9; p. 42. 27 (Anon.), ‘A Gallery of Prize-Winners’. 28 (Anon.), ‘A Gallery of Prize-Winners’, p. 28. 29 Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 168. 30 Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen, 22: 1 (1981), pp. 11–39; p. 13. 31 Hawkins, Cutting Edge, pp. 242–3. 32 Miller, ‘Enrico Cocozza as Amateur Auteur – Ideas Above His Station?’, pp. 278–9. 33 (Anon.), ‘Wishaw Film Startled Critics: But Won Premier Award in Scottish Class’. 34 (Anon.) ‘Wishaw Film Startled Critics: But Won Premier Award in Scottish Class’. 35 Kim Grant, Surrealism and the Visual Arts: Theory and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 75–6. 36 F. Hardy, ‘Amateur has Lessons to Teach the Studios: Review of Scots Film Festival’. 37 Information compiled from: (Anon.), ‘Amateur Film Stars Compete for Their Own Oscars’, publication unknown (1949) and (Anon.) ‘Amateur Film Society Turns Old Auction Room into Cinema: Tip-Up Seats and “No Smoking” ’, publication unknown (1949), Enrico Cocozza papers, The Moving Image Archive, National Library of Scotland. 38 (Anon.) ‘Amateur Film Society Turns Old Auction Room into Cinema: Tip-Up Seats and “No Smoking” ’, publication unknown (1949), Enrico Cocozza papers, The Moving Image Archive, National Library of Scotland. 39 (Anon.), ‘A Gallery of Prize-Winners’, p. 28. 40 (Anon.), Daily Record, Mon, April 1949a.

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British art cinema 41 F. Hardy, ‘Amateur has Lessons to Teach the Studios: Review of Scots Film Festival’. 42 Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas, p. 89. 43 Miller, ‘Enrico Cocozza as Amateur Auteur – Ideas Above His Station?’, p. 277. 44 Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas, p. 197. 45 Programme from the Dawn Cine Group papers, in the National Library of Scotland. For more on the Clydeside Film Society see Ryan Shand, ‘Visions of Community: The Post-War Housing Problem in Sponsored and Amateur Films’, in Richard Koeck and Les Roberts (eds), The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 50–68. 46 Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas, p. 6. 47 (Anon.), ‘Themes the Prizewinners Chose: Triumph of the Macabre in Scottish Amateur Film Festival’, Amateur Cine World, 26 January 1961, pp. 42–3; p. 42. 48 (Anon.), ‘Premier Award For Cocozza Film’, Wishaw Press, 1959, Enrico Cocozza papers, The Moving Image Archive, National Library of Scotland. 49 Grant, Surrealism and the Visual Arts, p. 83. 50 David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, Film Criticism, 4: 1 (1979), pp. 56–64; p. 58. 51 (Anon.), ‘Themes the Prizewinners Chose: Triumph of the Macabre in Scottish Amateur Film Festival’, p. 42. 52 (Anon.), ‘Themes the Prizewinners Chose: Triumph of the Macabre in Scottish Amateur Film Festival’, p. 42. 53 Miller, ‘Enrico Cocozza as Amateur Auteur – Ideas Above His Station?’, p. 287. 54 This filmography forms part of the Enrico Cocozza papers, which are available to consult at The Moving Image Archive, National Library of Scotland. 55 Miller, ‘Enrico Cocozza as Amateur Auteur – Ideas Above His Station?’, p. 291. 56 (Anon.), ‘German Film Wins Premier Award: Nobody Wants to Know About “Dada” ’, Amateur Cine World (20 December 1962), p. 936. 57 Smith, ‘The Highbrow and the Lowbrow Fallacy’, pp. 1122–3. 58 Smith, ‘The Highbrow and the Lowbrow Fallacy’, p. 1122. 59 Smith, ‘The Highbrow and the Lowbrow Fallacy’, p. 1122. 60 I. Watson, ‘Experimental … A Word That Covers a Multitude of Junk’, Amateur Cine World, 49: 2 (1961), pp. 1036–7. 61 Miller, ‘Enrico Cocozza as Amateur Auteur – Ideas Above His Station?’, p. 271. 62 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 41. 63 J. McBain, ‘Notes on Conversation with James “Jimmy” Craig’. 64 Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas, pp. 31–3.

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Art cinema, British production and the 1960s Duncan Petrie

Introduction The application of the concept of ‘art cinema’ to British film production in the 1960s immediately poses certain problems of definition. If we adopt Steve Neale’s institutional perspective, highlighting how the concept was used in France, Italy and Germany to foster indigenous national cinemas that could resist the threat posed by Hollywood by emphasising the cultural value of film,1 then the evidence suggests a rather different set of priorities in the case of Britain. For the UK film industry had long been oriented towards the production of commercial entertainment, and by the 1960s the power and interests of the vertically integrated duopoly of the Rank Organisation and the Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) was only matched in importance by the Hollywood majors, who through the activities of their UK distribution subsidiaries had become the dominant funding source for British producers in the 1960s.2 Moreover, film policies intended to support local production such as the Eady levy and the National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC) had been explicitly designed to support commercial enterprise rather than create any alternative.3 The conservatism of the film industry establishment was matched by that of the trade unions, with hard-won agreements on pay and conditions reinforcing conventional approaches to filmmaking techniques, budgets, crewing levels and technical standards. New entrants required a union card and so the ‘closed shop’ served to further protect the status quo against non-conformists. Such arrangements also constrained the kinds of creative innovation that had underpinned the various ‘new waves’ of filmmaking and the experiments in modernism that had revitalised European cinema in the post-war period. At the same time a more broadly humanistic idea of film as art, embodied in the critical discourses of quality and prestige, had been applied to certain British films for some time, as John Ellis has shown.4 This discourse continued to be significant during the 1960s, with Sight and Sound magazine, and its editor Penelope Houston,5 continuing to support British films of quality and ‘commitment’. However, a rather different critical position was struck by V. F. Perkins in the editorial of the first edition of the journal

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Movie in 1962 in which, despite talk of a New Wave or renaissance, he declared British cinema to be dead: ‘We are … unable to find evidence of artistic sensibilities in order.’6 The categories of quality and prestige had also been endorsed by key players in the industry, notably J. Arthur Rank and Alexander Korda, and regularly informed the production of films geared towards the international market. This was particularly significant in the United States where many British films were handled by specialist ‘arthouse’ distributors and exhibitors.7 Thus Neale’s assertion that considerations of art cinema almost always entail a balance between national and international factors does have some relevance in this context.8 Moreover, these developments also shed important light on the organisation and operations of an ostensibly national film industry that by the 1960s was becoming increasingly more complex and transnational. Indeed, during that decade British cinema came to be associated with an unprecedented cosmopolitanism, encouraged in various ways by an increasing dependence on American finance, the development of new coproduction initiatives with European partners, and the increasing attraction of London as a destination for international film-makers. Aesthetic influences were also increasingly varied, and while popular genres such as comedy, crime and horror/fantasy continued to dominate production, a space was also opening up for the exploration of more personal thematic and stylistic concerns, regarded as key attributes of art cinema. Such attributes were central to the leading figures of the British New Wave – Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson – who had been formed by a new critical culture, during the previous decade, that stressed the importance of artistic freedom and creative independence. Moreover, these filmmakers were also caught up in wider social, political and economic shifts; the first stirrings of a process that for Arthur Marwick constituted nothing less than a ‘cultural revolution’.9 As the New Wave gave way to the hedonistic exuberance of ‘swinging London’, these film-makers would maintain a commitment to innovation and radicalism that helped sustain the idea of a British art cinema, albeit one increasingly dependent on Hollywood finance. As London became a cultural magnet for the rest of the world – Time magazine famously pronouncing it as ‘the swinging city’ in 1966 – so more overseas interlopers arrived to make ‘British’ films. Some, like Joseph Losey, Stanley Kubrick and Richard Lester, had already settled permanently, but they found themselves joined by a host of temporary visitors including Michelangelo Antonioni, Roman Polanski and François Truffaut. But the collective challenge they posed to mainstream narrative cinema was increasingly bound up with a wider shake-up of cultural convention informed by the pursuit of personal freedom, political activism, sexual permissiveness, experimentation with drugs and the popularisation of other forms of psychedelia and exoticism. Such ‘excess’ inevitably left its mark on British cinema in the second half of the decade. In this chapter I shall attempt to demonstrate how the idea of cinema as

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‘art’ was able to gain traction in relation to British cinema in a decade that began with the breakthrough of a ‘New Wave’ inspired by developments elsewhere in European art cinema, and ended (symbolically at least) with the production of Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s provocative contemplation of human identity, Performance (1970), memorably described by Colin MacCabe as ‘one of the very few genuinely modernist texts of the cinema’.10 Above all, the 1960s was a period of significant transformation in the national cinema, one in which different and sometimes contesting conceptions of film – commerce vs culture, national vs international, American vs European – underpinned a shifting institutional, creative and critical landscape.

Enter the New Wave The standard histories of British cinema associate the beginning of the 1960s with the moment of the ‘New Wave’, a (very limited11) group of films adapted from the plays and novels of the ‘angry young men’ that marked a new and more authentic engagement with British working-class life, a bold commitment to the aesthetics of realism and a staunch advocacy of film as personal expression by the key players involved, notably Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz. All three had contributed to the cultural ferment of the 1950s as critics writing in magazines like Sequence and Sight and Sound and as nascent film-makers through participation in the ‘Free Cinema’ documentary movement, whose manifesto, written by Anderson, asserted that ‘no film can be too personal’, an unambiguous expression of artistic intent. Their graduation to feature films was facilitated by the impact of the novels and plays of the ‘angry young men’, which gave voice to the experiences and the frustrations of young, working-class characters living in the industrial cities of Northern England and the Midlands who craved a different life to that of their parents. But the challenge was to develop an aesthetic appropriate to rendering these stories for the cinema screen.12 Working under the auspices of his production company Woodfall Films, formed in 1959 with John Osborne, Tony Richardson led the charge. As Robert Shail points out, ‘throughout his career Richardson was dedicated to the notion of an art cinema, one which recognised film-making as a source of profound personal vision and self-expression’.13 While Richardson’s memoirs cite an eclectic range of inspirational films and film-makers, including notably the Italian neorealists who had similarly turned their attention to the plight of the working classes,14 his approach to making films is informed more directly by the French nouvelle vague, particularly his desire to make independent, low-budget films on location. But the prevailing structures and practices of film production in Britain obstructed this aspiration as Richardson’s colleague, the cinematographer Walter Lassally, argued in a 1960 article for Sight and Sound in which he identified ‘the Dead Hand of apathy, of complacency and convention whose grip is felt on all sides of the

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industry’.15 According to Lassally, the roots of this lay in the fact that distribution companies were too dependent on proven formulas, financiers regarded films simply as product, technicians were suspicious of directors from nonindustry backgrounds, while the unions were reluctant to shoot on location with anything other than a large unit and ‘in the emphasis on polish, on strict continuity, on smooth cutting and cold, glamorous camerawork at the expense of invention, of spontaneity’.16 But the extent to which Richardson persevered with his vision can be seen in the shift from Look Back in Anger (1959), his debut feature which was made largely in the studio on a budget of around £250,000 provided by Warner Brothers and ABPC and featuring a major international star in Richard Burton (on a fee of $125,000),17 to his third film, A Taste of Honey (1961), shot by Lassally entirely on location in Salford and London on a budget of £121,60018 provided by independent distributors Bryanston and the NFFC and featuring a cast led by newcomer Rita Tushingham. The latter production, which follows the fortunes of an unmarried pregnant teenager’s attempts to establish her independence against a backdrop of urban squalor and social conformity, clearly represented the closest British cinema had come to the rough-edged vitality of the early films by Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol, a style that Richardson and his team took a stage further in their next feature, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (figure 8), which includes experiments with flashback, variable shooting speeds and a freeze-frame ending invoking Truffaut’s iconic debut, Les Quatre Cent Coups (1959). A different kind of European influence was discernible in This Sporting Life (1963), the debut film by Lindsay Anderson, Richardson’s Free Cinema and Royal Court Theatre comrade in arms. While the look of the film was inspired by Polish cinema,19 the narrative structure owes more to the work of Alain Resnais in its use of temporal experimentation to explore

8  The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (dir. Tony Richardson, 1962)

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the emotional and physical torment of Richard Harris’s rebellious rugbyplaying protagonist. The Hungarian film-maker, Robert Vas, who had also contributed to Free Cinema, argued that This Sporting Life marked a crucial development from the film-maker as reporter or sociologist to a fully fledged artist: ‘I cannot recall any British film (perhaps since Jennings) which has thrown itself so courageously and with such hungry intensity into the complicated texture, interaction and social background of human feelings, and which sorts them out in such an exciting process of artistic discovery’, something which for Vas set Anderson’s film apart from the ‘flustered inconsistencies of the later Woodfall productions’.20 Key to this is how Anderson’s use of flashback facilitates an exploration of the interior drama that serves as a counterpoint to the surface realism. While noting that This Sporting Life may not have ushered in a full-blown British art cinema in the manner that Vas or Anderson might have hoped for, Robert Murphy suggests that nevertheless it ‘did seem to provoke British film-makers into making more artistically ambitious films’.21 Murphy goes on to provide an extensive list of examples, beginning in 1963 with Joseph Losey’s Eve and The Servant, Wolf Rilla’s The World Ten Times Over,22 Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies, Clive Donner’s The Caretaker, and culminating in 1970 with Cammell and Roeg’s Performance. Significantly, he stops short of claiming these as evidence for a distinct British art cinema, preferring to emphasise a more fluid integration between art and commerce. While in the home market the New Wave films were released as commercial entertainment on the major circuits by the UK major distributors, in the United States they were handled in a very different way. As Sarah Street has argued, British films benefited from the growth in the art and foreign film market in America during the 1950s and their appeal to a more discerning, middle-class, educated audience, catered to primarily by specialist independent distributors and exhibitors.23 The key player in this regard was Continental Distributors Inc., a company run by Walter Reade Jr which handled a range of British product but became closely associated with the New Wave films. Beginning with Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959), Continental went on to distribute The Entertainer, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Billy Liar and This Sporting Life in the US.24 The support they provided could sometimes be substantial, with Continental advancing $162,000 for The Entertainer (Tony Richardson, 1960), a third of the film’s total budget. In the case of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960), Reade bought the Western Hemisphere rights for $100,000 after viewing the finished film; while on A Taste of Honey Continental invested $85,000 up front plus 5 per cent end money.25 By 1963 the New Wave had effectively run its course, but the loosening up of film form it had helped to encourage fed into a different set of aesthetic and thematic concerns. A key transition film here was Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), adapted from the picaresque novel by Henry Fielding, which was the director’s first period film and his first in colour. Despite its

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eighteenth-century setting, this playful, bawdy and hedonistic tale featuring Albert Finney’s charming ‘young man on the make’ not only chimed with an emerging trope that characterised films of the ‘swinging sixties’, but Richardson’s even more liberal use of formal experimentation was now met with mainstream success and approval. Tom Jones was a huge box office hit on both sides of the Atlantic and won the coveted best film Oscar. However, the response of British critics to the ‘art cinema’ credentials of Tom Jones, and Richardson’s reliance on nouvelle vague techniques, were notably mixed. Writing in the Sunday Times, Dilys Powell argued that ‘[Richardson] has handled the medium with a gaiety and a freedom which are a pleasure to watch. Borrowings or not, what does it matter if they work? And they work.’26 Philip French in the Observer was more ambivalent, appearing to approve of the influence of recent French films, ‘including those of Jean-Luc Godard and his “Breathless” cameraman Raoul Coutard’, yet going on to note that ‘the tricks are sometimes a little laboured, a substitute for style: one feels the nouvelle vague has really swept up the Thames past Ealing’.27 While an anonymous review in The Times criticises the false gusto derived from the self-conscious techniques borrowed from Godard (jump cuts), Truffaut’s Tirez sur la pianiste (1960) (wipes and irises), and Malle’s Zazie dans la metro (1960) (silent comedy tricks). The rather more substantial budget of £420,000 required for Tom Jones proved too costly for a modest British distributor like Bryanston, and United Artists stepped in with a 100 per cent financing deal and worldwide rights. This served to blur the lines between commercial and arthouse in terms of how such films were sold in the American market. Sarah Street indicates that Tom Jones was promoted in different ways to ‘highbrow’ and general audiences with great success, grossing $17 million in the process.28 In the following year United Artists would also back a more modest black and white film, A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1964), featuring the Beatles and filmed in a breathless and zany style that made Richardson’s visual pyrotechnics look restrained by comparison. What is beyond doubt however is that Tom Jones and A Hard Day’s Night helped to open up British cinema to a more experimental, irreverent and self-reflexive approach to narrative and visual style, in line with certain concepts of art cinema but also manifest in concurrent developments in other cultural fields including television, advertising, fashion and pop music that helped to define the quintessential style and mood of the ‘swinging sixties’. Moreover, this shift would be largely bankrolled by Hollywood finance, apparently confirming Robert Murphy’s assertion of a greater integration between ‘art’ and ‘commerce’ in British cinema of the period.

Modernism and 1960s British cinema If Tom Jones succeeded in harnessing the irreverence and self-reflexivity of the nouvelle vague for a mass audience, a cooler, more critical and

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c­ hallenging form of cinematic modernism also began to make inroads into British filmmaking. On one hand this was exemplified by the Brechtian influence epitomised by the collaborations between the American exile director Joseph Losey and the British playwright Harold Pinter: The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go Between (1971) – discussed elsewhere in this volume by Peter Jameson – and Lindsay Anderson’s feature film, If … (1968). But it was also confirmed by the arrival of Antonioni in London to make his own statement on the culture and mores of the period, Blow-Up (1966). The role of cultural outsiders here is crucial: John Orr identifies an ‘expatriate eye that defined the new British modernism on the 1960s’29 with a roll call that includes Losey’s and Antonioni’s films alongside Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing (1965) and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), an intense study of a sexually repressed and lonely young woman’s descent into madness. Orr develops his analysis of the expatriate eye by way of ‘a parallax view of British culture where it provides antithetical readings of image, action and motive within a single narrative’.30 This constitutes something more than David Bordwell’s ‘aesthetics of ambiguity’31 as a defining aspect of art cinema to capture a sense of parallel readings of the same narrative that create a bipolar vision on the part of the viewer. For some commentators The Servant represents the breakthrough. Nick James argues that it ‘initiated a new kind of cinema in the UK, one distinctly more ambitious than the social realism of the Woodfall films’.32 Losey and Pinter’s study of the power dynamics between James Fox’s naive master and his manipulative manservant, played by Dirk Bogarde, both provided a fascinating meditation on the enduring British class system and offered profound insight into the fragility and mutability of selfhood and identity, all played out in the claustrophobic space of a Chelsea townhouse. Its innovative contribution was clearly recognised by veteran critic Dilys Powell in her Sunday Times column: ‘In moments of patriotic fervour I have sometimes wished that the English cinema might make a film which would be adventurous in an English way: which would begin to do for our screen something of what the great Italians and the best of the young French have been doing for their own screens. The Servant … is that kind of film.’33 The substance of the Losey/Pinter partnership was confirmed by Accident, a study of moral duplicity, existential crisis and petty jealousies between two Oxford academics played by Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker. While the fluid dollying and deep focus of The Servant is replaced by a more austere visual style, Accident features a more complex experimentation with time, starting and ending with the accident of the title that serves as the catalyst for the drama, which pivots on the mid-life crisis of Bogarde’s Stephen. Writing in the New Statesman, John Coleman introduces Accident as ‘a very artful piece of cinema indeed but with the art that mostly conceals itself’ and concludes with the statement that ‘this is a clever, feeling and allusive film, steadily making one aware of the intricacy of tendrils beneath a surface: of the ambiguous blandness on top’.34 While in Sight and Sound, Tom Milne makes various connections with the work of Alain Resnais:

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Accident forces one to look and look again, to make connections where none are apparent … Losey has made a film in which nothing is signalled, nothing is given away. As with Muriel you have to do your share of the work, watching patiently and absorbedly as the characters live their lives, cook their omelettes, exchange their trivial chat, and rewarded almost constantly by the moments of glittering illumination.35

Paul Mayersberg makes an even stronger case for the film’s art cinema credentials, by criticising the various reviews that ignored or dismissed Jacqueline Sassard’s performance as the beautiful but rather blank young student, Anna, the object of Stephen’s desire which he is palpably unable to express. For Mayersberg, the root of this difficulty for critics lies in the film’s rejection of mainstream convention: Accident is not a film of action. It is a film of reaction … If Accident were a conventional film, it would be the story of Anna, what she wanted, why she wanted it and how she went about getting it. But Accident is like Antonioni’s L’Avventura or Resnais’s Muriel, not stylistically but because its story derives from the characters’ reactions … The style of Accident comes from a chain reaction of incident, rather than a narrative of events.36

Losey and Pinter’s modernist dissection of an enclosed and claustrophobic English bourgeois world has links to Lindsay Anderson’s second feature film, If … (1968) which is set in that iconic bastion of imperial and class privilege, the public school. The film follows the exploits of the selfstyled romantic radical, Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowall), who challenges the brutal authority and hypocrisy of the masters and prefects by staging a revolution within the school. Like Losey, Anderson was heavily influenced by Bertolt Brecht, a connection initially explored by Alan Lovell in Screen in 197537 and subsequently developed by Erik Hedling. The latter argues that Anderson’s short film, The White Bus (1966), marked his entry into a fully fledged modernist or art cinema mode of filmmaking.38 But these impulses are more powerfully and fully articulated in If … and Hedling explores the influence of Vigo’s Zero de conduit (1933) and other intertextual borrowings, and the deployment of Brechtian strategies such as epic satire, Verfremdungseffekt and theatricalised space in the creation of his bellicose satire.39 The specific techniques deployed in If … include the use of eight chapters, the random shifts from colour to monochrome (a decision dictated by economics as well as aesthetics) sequences tinted sepia or magenta, and deployment of ambiguous, surreal and dream-like imagery, culminating in the climactic attack by Mick and his fellow ‘revolutionaries’ on the school. On the other hand, the style of shooting and cutting deployed on If … was almost classical. The film gained a surprisingly positive response from the critics, despite David Robinson’s otherwise very perceptive remarks in The Times that ‘Lindsay Anderson – bearing more relation to Bunuel, Vigo or Franju than to any of his English contemporaries – stands alone as an artist in a cinema that has always depended upon the excellence of craftsmen. And, of course,

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as any prophet in his own land, he must expect little thanks for that.’40 If … was also located firmly with European art cinema by other critics. Both Paul Mayersberg in New Society and David Spiers in Screen invoked that other bona fide Brechtian film-maker, Jean-Luc Godard,41 with the former also noting that the titles of some of the film’s chapters take on the force of chapters in a manual for revolutionaries: ‘the whole structure of If … and its visual style reflect the mind of Mick as a man in revolt’. While John Coleman in the New Statesman cites two other ‘anarchistic pieces of cinema: Jean Vigo’s Zero de conduite and Bunuel’s L’Age d’Or. Anderson ‘is closer to Bunuel in his iconoclasm, and the closer he subsequently gets to that master the better (I hazard) his work will be’.42 Further confirmation of the film’s significance was provided by its award of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1969. The previous film to win this coveted prize had been another British production, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, two years previously, the 1968 festival having been a casualty of les evenements on the streets of Paris that May. This film – funded by MGM and produced by Antonioni’s compatriot Carlo Ponti – also exemplified the increasingly transnational nature of ‘British’ cinema during the decade. Moreover, Antonioni had become a benchmark of ‘serious cinema’, in Penelope Houston’s terms,43 and he was invoked by Raymond Durgnat to identify a certain quality in Wolf Rilla’s The World Ten Times Over (1963),44 while Houston herself framed The Pumpkin Eater (1964), directed by Jack Clayton from a Harold Pinter script, in similar terms: a film ‘ratifying the British cinema’s entente with Europe’.45 Despite the affinities, neither of these films quite succeeded, and it took the arrival of the maestro in London to make his first international production to show the locals how it was done. Blow-Up depicts the exploits of a successful but disillusioned photographer, Thomas (David Hemmings), who after taking pictures of a young woman and a man in a park believes he has unwittingly recorded a murder. But the more he blows up the images in the search for evidence, the less his photographs actually reveal. For John Orr, Blow-Up epitomises the parallax view and is replete with double readings: the tension between the objective shot and the subjective point of view is played out in the photographs of ‘the murder’, the fake constructed nature of the ‘real’ park (which is contrasted with the artificiality of Thomas’s studio), the possibility that the film is the fantasy of the vagrant who appears from the doss house at the beginning, etc. As Orr argues, ‘the image in Blow-Up is always tactile. The locations existed there and most, including the park, still do. This is and was 1960s London. Yet the indelible real is at the same time ghostly and surreal, so that practically every image seems to operate on two levels, belonging to a surface world and a subterranean world at the same time.’46 The figure of Thomas was clearly inspired by the likes of David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy, iconic figures in a British culture increasingly obsessed with image – although as John Orr points out, the shots that Thomas takes of the homeless men in the doss house were by Don McCullin who is associated more with photo-journalism in war zones

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than with fashion and glamour. As Carey Harrison comments in Sight and Sound, when Antonioni arrived in London in 1966 the speculation was intense that his film was to be ‘a devastating expose of the swinging scene and the lascivious world of fashion photography’.47 But as it transpired, Blow-Up was more concerned with Thomas’s realisation that the outside world is just as opaque and ‘unreal’ as that inside his studio, undermining his belief that he can faithfully interpret reality through his camera. Writing two decades later, Seymour Chatman notes that despite being more exciting and accessible than Antonioni’s previous films, Blow-Up continues some familiar preoccupations, notably distraction, which ‘is no longer simply a bad habit: it has become a way of life’.48 Indeed, Thomas’s chronic inability to finish anything suggests a less hysterical version of Christopher Booker’s critique of the ‘cult of sensation’ that he argued defined the culture of the 1960s in his book The Neophiliacs.49 Booker’s idea of the fantasy which gives way to nightmare is obliquely reflected in Thomas’s alienation, his inability to communicate or connect meaningfully with others and in his ultimate realisation of his own impotence as an interpreter of reality. As Chatman notes, ‘Antonioni … had in the past always treated surfaces as the only reality. But now even the surfaces have become deceptive.’50 Photography – like art in general – can never be more than illusion, as Thomas’s blow-ups prove. Cammell and Roeg’s Performance, on the surface a heady vision of gangland violence and bohemian sex ’n’ drugs ’n’ rock and roll featuring James Fox as Chas, an East End gangster who seeks refuge in the house of Mick Jagger’s burnt out rock star Turner, can also be regarded as a culmination of the strand of filmic experimentation under consideration here. Indeed, Peter Wollen states that ‘its direct predecessors were The Servant, Repulsion and Blow-Up’.51 Form dictated content and vice versa: for just as Turner and his female companions Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michèle Breton) systematically undermine Chas’s sense of himself – an exploration of the fragility and mutability of identity as performance rather than essence – so the film-makers interrogate and deconstruct the conventions of film language, creating one of the most provocative and challenging films to be produced in Britain; simultaneously a precise document of the social, cultural and intellectual moment of its creation and a profound and transcendent work of modern art. Shot in 1968, Warner Bros’ decision to delay the release of the film meant that when it did appear the decade had not only ended, but the optimism and possibility it had engendered had substantially soured, rendering the film as a kind of coda. The pessimistic tone, if not the intellectual substance, of Antonioni’s earlier critique can also be discerned in the response to the more generalised impact of 1960s zeitgeist on the style of British films. This is particularly applicable to the consequences of the spirit initiated by Tom Jones and A Hard Day’s Night, developed by films like The Knack … and How to Get It (Richard Lester, 1965) and Morgan … a Suitable Case for Treatment (Karel Reisz, 1966), and widely imitated thereafter as the innovations

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of the New Wave fed into the experimentalism and psychedelia of the ‘sex and drugs and rock and roll’ generation. Writing in The Times, John Russell Taylor notes that ‘Television men such as Ken Russell, Ken Loach and Peter Watkins and Peter Collinson seem to have swallowed modern cinema whole; they are full of tricks learned from Godard, Resnais, Fellini, Antonioni and almost anyone else you care to name, but show little sign so far of knowing how to integrate them into a style which is either personal to them or generally functional.’52 While in Sight and Sound, David Robinson argues that ‘new directors from television … had rediscovered the devices which Méliès had used with charm and discretion but which they wielded like bludgeons: uncritical and unassimilated admirations for Godard … the wilder excesses of Fellini; the post-Antonioni rejection of conventional narrative and the post-Resnais taste for mystification’.53 Thus, for some, the intersection of European art cinema (or at least its discernible influence), American finance and the cultural terrain of ‘swinging London’ ultimately resulted in incoherence, excess and self-indulgence. Moreover, by the end of the decade the box office failure of too many films resulted in a major withdrawal from British production by the Hollywood studios – a moment that also witnessed the first stirrings of a serious engagement with European art cinema by a new generation of American film-makers.

The emergence of an alternative space The idea of a British art cinema was also germane to developments beyond the mainstream industry in the 1960s however. One alternative institutional space that facilitated an alternative ethos was the Experimental Film Fund, initially established by the British Film Institute in 1952 under the chairmanship of Sir Michael Balcon. Between 1952 and 1966 the Fund provided a space for new talent to make films on modest grants, with around fifty short productions supported at a total expenditure of just £30,000.54 While many of the films produced were documentaries on art, the most significant development was the Fund’s involvement with Free Cinema, which began in 1956. Not only did this help to kick-start the film careers of some of the key figures who would go on to provide substance for a British art cinema as explored in this chapter, but as Christoph Dupin argues, the aesthetics and production methods of Free Cinema also proved influential on the Experimental Film Fund Committee’s subsequent selection policy.55 Moreover, by the early 1960s, the Fund’s mix of films on art and socially progressive documentary began to be augmented by more formally experimental films such as Man of Rope (Michael Elster, 1961), The Pit (Edward Abraham, 1962) and Untitled Film (David Gladwell, 1964), broadening the concept of film art in the process and paving the way for what would come to be categorised as artists’ film and video. By 1963 the Experimental Film Fund’s resources had run out and for three years it remained quasi-dormant. But in 1966 the BFI received a

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substantial increase in its grant-in-aid from Jennie Lee, the UK’s first arts minister, appointed by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. This led to the Experimental Film Fund, now renamed the BFI Production Board, being reconstituted with annual recurring funding of around £12,000 and run by a full-time production officer, the Australian film-maker Bruce Beresford.56 The new board continued to be chaired by Balcon and its membership included the documentarians Edgar Anstey, Arthur Elton, Jill Cragie and Basil Wright; producers John Brabourne, Carl Foreman and Anthony Havelock Allan; directors Karel Reisz and Bryan Forbes; and the technician Baynham Honri; alongside art critics David Sylvester and John Berger; theatre director William Gaskill; and Walter Lucas of the British Drama League.57 The predominance of established industry figures serves to confirm Dupin’s observation that the initial Experimental Film Fund regarded ‘ “experiment” not as a practice against the industry (as would be the case in the 1970s), but, rather, on its behalf and to its benefit’.58 While the Production Board’s resources were still tiny compared with the funds available for mainstream film production, Beresford was able to support almost seventy films over a five-year period. These included works by aspiring mainstream film-makers like Stephen Frears – The Burning (1968) – and Tony Scott (who had appeared in his brother Ridley’s film Boy and Bicycle which had been supported by the Experimental Film Fund) – One of the Missing (1968) and Loving Memory (1970) – alongside more experimental artist film-makers such as Jeff Keen, Mark Boyle and Tony Sinden. The BFI Production Board had helped stimulate a new climate marked by the emergence of new companies set up by film-makers interested in exploring the medium’s social, artistic and political potential. As Margaret Dickinson points out, one of these companies was Mithras, formed in 1963 by Maurice Hatton, John Irvin, Richard de la Marre and Tim Pitt Miller, which made films for the Labour Party in the run-up to the 1964 election before providing the basis for Hatton to write and direct a feature film, Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition (1969) which featured John Thaw as a Trotskyist Revolutionary.59 Other examples included Lusia films, formed in 1964 and subsequently the basis for the group Cinema Action and then the Berwick Street Collective. Around this time a more overtly oppositional film culture began emerging, ‘conceived of as part of a cultural wing playing a supporting role in a political and economic struggle’.60 Inspired by the ideas and liberationist struggles of the New Left and animated by an engagement with the discourses of Marxism, feminism and anti-imperialism, much of the politicisation of film culture was played by proto-workshops which produced, distributed and exhibited work. The formation of the London Film-Makers’ Co-Op in 1966 is important, as was the establishment in 1968 of Cinema Action in London and Amber in Newcastle. The workshop movement gained momentum, paving the way for a more vigorous flowering of an oppositional film production sector in Britain in the 1970s.61 But the key achievement as far as a 1960s British art cinema is concerned is the release in 1968 of Herostratus, the first full-length experimental feature

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supported by the BFI Production Board. Named after an ancient who burnt down the temple of Artemis at Ephesus on the night that Alexander the Great was born, Don Levy’s film offers a poignant critique of 1960s idealism, new forms of celebrity and mass consumerism in its depiction of a young poet, played by Michael Gothard, who convinces a marketing firm to turn his planned suicide into a media event. Levy initially approached the Experimental Film Fund in 1962 and with the support of Karel Reisz and BFI Director Stanley Reed they provided £1,500, one third of the total budget, which was matched by similar investments from the BBC and former BFI Director James Quinn who produced the film with Levy. Herostratus finally went into production in the summer of 1964 but after nine months it became clear that Levy required a further £1,700 from the three funding partners. On 9 April 1965 the Experimental Film Fund agreed to provide an additional £250 to finance a rough cut.62 The production continued to be a rather protracted process and in July 1967 the Production Board provided a further £1,150 to help Levy complete his film. Herostratus was chosen to open the new cinema at the ICA and finally released in May 1968, the same week as Stanley Kubrick’s epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Concluding remarks The consideration of the relevance of art cinema to British films in the 1960s raises some key issues. While London provided a physical and cultural focus for British cinema, the increasing importance of inter- and transnational forces are of particular significance. Firstly, the influence of European auteurs and wider movements on British filmmaking begins with the New Wave and feeds into both the self-conscious exuberance of the films of ‘swinging London’ and the more oppositional ideologies and practices of practitioners operating on the fringes or outside the mainstream industry. Secondly, the production of more substantial, modernist filmmaking in Britain was predicated on the presence of various expatriate film-makers in London. Thirdly, the increasing role of Hollywood finance in British production underpinned many of the key films discussed in this chapter. Indeed, these can be seen as part of a wider development in which the market potential of internationally oriented art cinema came to be recognised – epitomised by Antonioni’s three-picture deal with MGM and producer Carlo Ponti.63 Commercially oriented British companies also got in on the act. Elstree Film Distributors, set up by the agent Leslie Grade and the Associated British Picture Corporation to make films with the pop star Cliff Richard, backed The Servant; while Roman Polanski’s first English-language feature, Repulsion, was made on a shoestring budget by the exploitation film specialist, Compton.64 In this way, any consideration of art immediately invokes the relationship between the national and international dimensions of ‘British’ cinema during the 1960s. Finally, the emergence of alternative sources of support for filmmaking within the BFI

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and Arts Council, outside the mainstream industry also initiated an alternative sphere of creative activity that would in time yield significant fruit.65

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Notes  1 Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen, 22: 1 (1981), pp. 11–40.  2 See Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (London: Joseph, 1974).  3 The Eady levy was a tax on admissions that was redistributed, via the British Film Fund, to producers in proportion to their box office takings, thus rewarding commercial success. The NFFC was a specialist film bank advancing loans to producers, usually comprising the last 25–30 per cent of the production budget.  4 See John Ellis, ‘Art, Culture, Quality: Terms for a Cinema in the Forties and Seventies’, Screen, 19: 3 (1978), pp. 9–50.  5 See Penelope Houston, The Contemporary Cinema (London: Penguin, 1963).  6 V. F. Perkins, ‘The British Cinema’, Movie, 1: 1 (1962), p. 3.  7 See Sarah Street, Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA (New York, NY: Continuum, 2002).  8 Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’.  9 See Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). 10 Colin MacCabe, Performance (London: British Film Institute, 1998), p. 78. 11 At its most inclusive this corpus consists of just nine films: Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959), Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959), The Entertainer (Richardson, 1960), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960), A Taste of Honey (Richardson, 1961), A Kind of Loving (John Schlesinger, 1961), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Richardson, 1962), Billy Liar (Schlesinger, 1963), This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963). 12 See John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963 (London: British Film Institute, 1986). 13 Robert Shail, Tony Richardson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 3. 14 Tony Richardson, Long Distance Runner: A Memoir (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 67. 15 Walter Lassally, ‘The Dead Hand’, Sight and Sound, 29: 3 (1960), p. 114. 16 Lassally, ‘The Dead Hand’, p. 114. 17 Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 58. 18 Bryanston Films statement of earnings to October 1963, Michael Balcon Papers, British Film Institute Special Collections, MEB 1957 J/33b. 19 See Duncan Petrie, The British Cinematographer (London: British Film Institute, 1996), p. 83. 20 Robert Vas, ‘Arrival and Departure’, Sight and Sound, 32: 2 (1963), p. 57. 21 Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1992), p. 71. 22 Raymond Durgnat compares Rilla’s approach to the cool, detached modernist vision of Antonioni in A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), p. 204. 23 Street, Transatlantic Crossings. Some British films distributed in the US, such as the ‘Carry On’ series, handled by Grosvenor Films, were not regarded as arthouse product.

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24 Look Back in Anger had been distributed by Warners and A Kind of Loving by Governor Films, who regularly handled the US releases of Anglo Amalgamated’s films including the ‘Carry On’ series. 25 17 November 1961, Letter from Maxwell Setton to Elliot Hyman, Michael Balcon papers, British Film Institute Special Collections, MEB 1936 J/7 a. 26 Dilys Powell, Sunday Times, 30 June 1963. 27 Philip French, Observer, 30 June 1963. 28 Street, Transatlantic Crossings. 29 John Orr, Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 102. 30 Orr, Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema, p. 116. 31 David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, Film Criticism, 4: 1 (1979), pp. 56–63. 32 Nick James, ‘Joseph Losey, Harold Pinter: In Search of Poshlust Times, Sight and Sound, 19: 6 (2009), pp. 30–6. 33 Dilys Powell, Sunday Times, 19 November 1963. 34 John Coleman, The New Statesman, 10 February 1967. 35 Tom Milne, ‘Two Films (1) Accident’, Sight and Sound, 36: 2 (1967), p. 59. 36 Paul Mayersberg, ‘A European Reaction’, New Society, 16 February 1967. 37 Alan Lovell, ‘Brecht in Britain – Lindsay Anderson (on If … and O Lucky Man!)’, Screen, 16: 4 (1975/6), pp. 62–80. 38 Erik Hedling, Lindsay Anderson: Maverick Film-Maker (London: Cassell, 1998). 39 Hedling, Lindsay Anderson: Maverick Film-Maker, p. 98. 40 David Robinson, The Times, 20 December 1968. 41 Paul Mayersberg, New Society, 19 December 1968; David Spiers, Screen, 10: 2 (1969), pp. 85–9. 42 John Coleman, New Statesman, 20 December 1968. 43 See Penelope Houston, ‘Keeping Up with the Antonionis’, Sight and Sound, 33: 4 (1964), pp. 163–8. 44 Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror For England, pp. 203–4. 45 Houston, ‘Keeping Up with the Antonionis, p. 167. 46 Orr, Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema, p. 132. 47 Carey Harrison, ‘Two Films: Blow Up’, Sight and Sound, 36: 2 (1967), pp. 60–2. 48 Seymour Chatman, Antonioni: Or, the Surface of the World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), p. 140. 49 Christopher Booker, The Neophiliacs: The Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties (London: Pimlico, 1992). First published 1969. 50 Chatman, Antonioni: Or, the Surface of the World, p. 142. 51 Peter Wollen, ‘Possession’, Sight and Sound, 5: 9 (1995), p. 23. 52 John Russell Taylor, ‘New Faces of British Cinema’, The Times, Saturday Review, 30 December 1967, p. 17. 53 David Robinson, ‘Case Histories of the Next Renascence’, Sight and Sound, 38: 1 (1969), p. 36. 54 This funding comprised an initial investment of £12,500 provided by the film trade, a subsequent grant of £10,000 in 1961 from the Gulbenkian Foundation, and subsequent earnings from supported films. Information provided by British Film Institute Director James Quinn for a meeting of the Experimental Film Fund Board on 6 November 1961, Michael Balcon Papers, British Film Institute Special Collections, MEB 1946 J/17. 55 Christophe Dupin, ‘The BFI and Film Production’, in Geoffrey Nowell Smith

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British art cinema and Christophe Dupin (eds), The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture, 1933–2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 56 Dupin, ‘The BFI and Film Production’, p. 202. 57 15 December 1966, Meeting of the British Film Institute Production Board, British Film Institute Special Collections, ITM 15893. 58 Dupin, ‘The BFI and Film Production’, p. 200. 59 Margaret Dickinson, Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–90 (London: British Film Institute, 1999), p. 30. 60 Dickinson, Rogue Reels, p. 35. 61 Whether this serves to extend the concept of art cinema or involves a break away towards the rather different concept of Third Cinema is a complex debate that cannot be dealt with here. 62 9 April 1965, Minutes from Experimental Film Fund Board, British Film Institute Special Collections, ITM 15893. 63 In addition to Blow-Up, this deal resulted in the production of Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Passenger (1975). 64 In facilitating a space for distinctive, alternative film-makers and practices, the exploitation sector arguably dovetailed with the concerns of art cinema. 65 On the fringe of the fringe one could find interesting activity by truly independent artisans like Margaret Tait, who had been making self-funded work since the early 1950s.

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Happy accident: the symbiosis of Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter Peter Jameson

The American director Joseph Losey invented ‘a new brand of AngloEuropean art cinema in his 1960s collaborations with Harold Pinter’, according to a 2009 Sight and Sound special issue in which editor Nick James looks back on the partnership.1 In examining the three Losey-Pinter features – The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1970) – this chapter weighs the films’ significance compared to other 1960s candidates for a British ‘arthouse’ designation. It also looks at sequences from the films for evidence of how the partnership functioned and explores the influence of the collaboration between Losey and Pinter on British cinema and television. James’s estimation implies that the involvement of both director and playwright were necessary for the films to be elevated to ‘Anglo-European art cinema’ status. This chapter considers whether this in turn might suggest a kind of ‘joint auteur’ position for Losey and Pinter. Losey’s individual significance as a film-maker was merely a by-product of his ‘pretentious tendencies’, according to James, who employs the Russian term Poshlust to describe the ‘vulgar clichés’ and ‘bogus profundities’ in Eve (Losey 1962).2 James suggests that this aspect of Losey’s filmmaking had a positive influence on others’ work: ‘Sometimes pretentiousness is just a rehearsal for brilliance, the brilliance you find in, say, Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 Venice thriller Don’t Look Now.’ He argues that Losey had to be reined in before he could produce his best work. ‘The standard view is that Pinter saved Losey from his excessive tendencies’, writes James, who declares The Servant to be superior to Eve, and Accident to be ‘Losey’s finest film’. The third Pinter collaboration, The Go-Between, is lacking in emotional force, James writes, because Pinter had perhaps become ‘infected by Losey’s tendency to overreach’. James’s ‘standard view’ has been an enduring one: forty-two years earlier, Penelope Houston, in her review of Accident for the Spectator, declares her ‘tremendous relief’ at Losey’s overcoming his ‘instinct for excess’ which had always kept his films ‘half an inch off real distinction’.3 David Caute writes in his 1994 biography Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life that ‘Joe Losey became “Losey” ’ with the release of The Servant,4 and he describes Accident as the director’s ‘best film’.5 So, was Losey a flawed film-maker who achieved greatness – or at least

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the ability to make art films – only when his excessive and hysterical tendencies were restrained by a gifted playwright? A different analysis exists. In Paris, Cahiers du cinéma lauded Losey as early as 1961; in the article ‘Un art de laboratoire’/‘A laboratory art’ Jean Douchet analyses and praises Blind Date (US title: Chance Meeting, 1959) and contends that ‘Losey is above all a researcher […] His approach is modelled on that of the scientist.’6 This canonisation was consolidated across the Channel in the May 1962 launch edition of the journal Movie, in which Victor Perkins, in a state-ofthe-industry editorial, identifies Losey as the potential saviour of British cinema.7 In a 1963 Motion article on the director’s film The Criminal (US title Concrete Jungle, 1960), Robin Wood writes that Losey’s recent works ‘are incomparably the greatest “British” films so far made’.8 The inaugural Movie issue also features a chart placing British and American directors into six categories from ‘Great’ to ‘The Rest’. Losey, an American exiled to Europe in 1952 by Hollywood’s anti-Communist witch-hunts, is the only director in the ‘British’ section to reach the second tier – the ‘Brilliant’ category. (Two directors in the American section are accorded the top accolade, ‘Great’; they are Howard Hawks, like Losey from the mid-western United States, and Alfred Hitchcock, who was from east London, and did not move to Hollywood until he was an established 40-year-old film-maker.) Not least because it illustrates Losey’s adoption by one strand in the then-contentious milieu of British film criticism, the Movie chart might be viewed as a provocative volley aimed in the direction of Penelope Houston at Sight and Sound. Reviewing Caute’s biography for Sight and Sound, Charles Barr points out that not all commentators agree with Caute’s estimation of Losey’s output. Barr posits the alternative viewpoint: ‘The Servant is still the turning point, but as an entry into a much less vital kind of cinema than that represented by The Prowler (Hollywood [1951]) or the British Time Without Pity [1957] and The Criminal.’9 Robin Wood – like Barr, a critic with close ties to Movie and its approach – had by 1968 shifted his position considerably, criticising Losey’s ‘perniciously constricting and degrading’ later films, which he sees as characterised by a ‘morbid preoccupation with systematic degradation and destruction’. The Servant exhibits a ‘disturbing discrepancy between intellectual concept and emotional effect’.10 Wood, then, identified what he saw as the pivotal moment of Losey’s decline as his early 1960s move from the bracket of journeyman genre director into the world of European art cinema. His ‘moment of release from the confines of the British studio system’ came because Jean-Luc Godard had pulled out of directing an adaptation of the James Hadley Chase novel Eve. The film’s co-star, Stanley Baker, had made two films with Losey, and recommended him as a replacement.11 Connections to the European filmmakers revered by Losey were evident in Eve. The film was lit by Gianni Di Venanzo, who had served his apprenticeship as a camera assistant on landmark Italian neorealist films Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1943), Paisá (Roberto Rossellini, 1946) and La Terra Trema (Visconti, 1948),

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The symbiosis of Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter

before becoming Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinematographer of choice. Di Venanzo developed a distinctive visual style for Le Amiche (1955), Il Grido (1957), La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962),12 and the ‘austerity’13 of La Notte is certainly in line with what Losey called the ‘cold, bleak and strange’ Venice of Eve (aka Eva).14 Di Venanzo’s appointment would connect Losey to Europe’s art cinema elite, just as selecting Jeanne Moreau to star as Eve created a link with the directors who cast her, including Michelangelo Antonioni, François Truffaut, Louis Malle, Jacques Becker and Roger Vadim. Eve was beset with problems – Losey maintained that the producers wrecked the film by making a final cut without his knowledge15 – but it was followed by increasing success and autonomy for Losey, who would work to correct the lack of modernist impetus on the big screen that he described in the late 1970s: ‘There are few advances in the cinema comparable with those we have seen in music, painting or even literature.’16 How the working relationship with Pinter contributed to this breakthrough will be examined shortly, but it seems appropriate at this point to look at British film to see where the characteristics of ‘art cinema’ might be manifested. The Servant was released in 1963, in the same year as Billy Liar (John Schlesinger) and This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson). The latter two films were nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, respectively, underlining their international arthouse credentials. Both directors have been identified with the British New Wave, and the two films are regularly so described, albeit as late examples of the classification.17 Steve Neale, in his 1981 analysis of the then-rarely defined term ‘art cinema’, sets out various criteria which pertain to these two films and their ilk within the overlapping, sometimes interchangeable, British New Wave, ‘social realism’ and Free Cinema categories. Neale identifies ‘a stress on visual style’ and ‘a suppression of action in the Hollywood sense, by a consequent stress on character rather than plot and by an interiorisation of dramatic conflict’. The features of art cinema ‘contrast with those of Hollywood. Simultaneously, and partly for this reason, they are features which circulate as the signs of art in established cultural institutions.’ In differentiating themselves from Hollywood productions, art films ‘turn to high art and to the cultural traditions specific to the country involved’.18 This last point could be interpreted as a reference to the link from Griersonian documentary traditions to notions of realism in British fiction film at various times, but specifically here from the 1950s onwards. Whether the Free Cinema/social realist/New Wave canon qualifies as art cinema is discussed elsewhere in this book by Duncan Petrie; but the films’ characteristics fit Neale’s formula closely enough for a case to be made that either they aspire to such a status or critics have made such claims on their behalf. Samantha Lay underlines the point in her study of British social realism, suggesting that critics came up with the British New Wave label in response to realist movements in theatre and literature, later through perceived similarities with French New Wave cinema. She goes on to argue for Italian neorealism as a more appropriate parallel,19 but the point remains that British directors

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working in the area of realism were offering up an alternative to Hollywood – a key art film ingredient in Neale’s study. The relationship between the concept of the auteur and that of art cinema takes Neale’s analysis into another area, one which has ramifications for the Losey-Pinter partnership – more of this later. Neither Losey nor Pinter joined the striving for authenticity so prevalent in late 1950s and early 1960s British cinema and theatre. Pinter’s remark in 1961 that ‘what goes on in my plays is realistic, but what I’m doing is not realism’20 is a sentiment which applies also to Losey’s work, although the two took different routes towards their similar goals. In Losey’s filmmaking, a paradoxical realism operates in the spheres of mise-en-scène, performance, cinematography and editing. His 1950s and 1960s British films habitually have a realistic look and sound, but these elements are constantly compromised by understated and disturbing modifications; speech may be mannered or heightened; subtle jump cuts are inserted; props or settings are slightly scaled up in size or quantity; music and sound effects are unconventional and sometimes troubling; camera moves are unexpected or exaggerated. All of these formal devices and more contribute to a baroque atmosphere of heightened realism, an edginess which can grate subtly for long stretches or explode into violent hysteria.21 Pinter’s dissections take place in the writing of dialogue, where ostensibly mundane, vernacular speech patterns are configured through repetition, ellipsis, rhythmical manipulation and other techniques into disorienting, sometimes poetic, often menacing, studies of human behaviour. The approaches of the two men turned out to be complementary – and, as will be demonstrated, not necessarily in the ways suggested at the outset of this chapter. Losey said that he and Pinter only fought once over a script, and that was during opening discussions of The Servant. Pinter had already written a screenplay from the Robin Maugham novel for the director Michael Anderson. Losey heavily annotated this script, which offended Pinter but, according to Losey, the two then established a harmonious working relationship which would last for fourteen years. ‘We got to understand each other very well’, Losey said, ‘and I think it’s the best and most useful collaboration I’ve ever had.’22 Pinter seems also to have enjoyed the relationship. Lois Gordon reported a conversation in 1970: ‘He had just been filming The Go-Between, and he discussed his pleasure in working with the gifted Joseph Losey.’23 Pinter’s biographer, the theatre critic Michael Billington, wrote that the two men shared ‘a contained rage against the injustice of society’. In addition, both were ‘gifted with an overpowering sense of place and of the effect of rooms and possessions on their inhabitants’.24 Losey believed that their working relationship owed something to their sharing of ‘a very acute awareness of class dynamics and contradictions’.25 This awareness might have had something to do with the outsider– insider status of both men: Pinter growing up in the East End of London as the grandson of Jewish immigrants; Losey as a middle-class American entering his second decade as an exile in Britain. As Losey commented:

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The symbiosis of Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter

‘[Pinter] lived and was educated in quite a poor area. His father was a small Jewish tailor. And this combines with me coming from the nineteenthcentury Mid-West and my transformations. The two of us together can have a look at aspects of England that probably no others in the world could have.’26 Certainly, for whatever reason, there were many thematic concerns in common. Both men, up to the point of working together, had explored issues of class, sex and power. Beverle Houston and Marsha Kinder, in their analysis of the PinterLosey collaborations, identify game-playing as a common thread between the films and Pinter’s plays, offering an expressive channel for exploring the manipulations and strategies employed in the characters’ attempts to gain the upper hand. They also looked at Pinter’s adaptations of the original novels and found he had altered the material to fit in with a worldview he shared with the director: All four works reveal that in his combining and eliminating characters, omitting explicit motive and explanation, and developing complex events and relationships, his goal is to preserve and enhance an impenetrable mysteriousness that he and Losey believe lies at the center of human experience.27

Both men also shared a concern with the nature of time, and the Houston and Kinder analysis of temporality in the three completed films reveals an increasing fracturing of linearity. This develops from The Servant’s linear structure (with little ambivalence in terms of placing events in time), to Accident (with its experimental uses of flashback, non-synchronous dialogue and other devices to disrupt and confuse the passage of time). The Go-Between takes the process further, using flashbacks and flashes forward to create a shifting, slippery timescape in which the nature and reliability of memory and of time itself are called into question. The progression seems to be moving irresistibly towards Pinter’s fourth screenplay for Losey, an adaptation of Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. It was never filmed, but it was published in book form as The Proust Screenplay in 1977.28 The critics and commentators cited at the start of this chapter suggested that Pinter influenced and enriched Losey by tamping down his excesses, histrionics and melodrama, but this seems an over-simplification, at best. Losey praised Pinter’s skill at writing dialogue, recognising the ways in which he went beyond the conventional, and sometimes beyond narrative functions. The following exchange with New York Film Festival founder Amos Vogel is from a television discussion to accompany The Servant’s screening at the inaugural event in 1963: vogel: I wonder if you agree … that film should be primarily a visual medium rather than a literary one. losey: Oh, very much so – and so does Harold Pinter. There’s actually very little dialogue in this film … and he uses it in many different ways. Sometimes as sound effect, sometimes as rhythm, sometimes as poetry, sometimes not to communicate as well as to communicate.29

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These supra-narrative effects of Pinter’s writing would become an integral part of the densely cohesive whole in each of the three Losey-Pinter films. Billington wrote that ‘Losey’s visual stylishness amplifies Pinter’s exactness and precision – in [The Go-Between] a series of plunging vertical camera shots reminds us of Leo’s Icarus-like descent after flying too close to the sun.’30 Houston and Kinder point out that ‘Extreme camera angles are unusually significant in Losey’s films, frequently shifting the mode of reality and accentuating the absurd tone of Pinter’s dialogue.’31 Camera angles were not the only technique employed to accent the mood set in the screenwriting; in an unplanned but fortuitous moment in Accident, Pinter’s script has Laura (Ann Firbank) watering her garden as Stephen tries to talk to her about her husband’s infidelity. Heavy rain delayed the shoot, according to Losey, until he finally decided to film the scene with Laura watering the garden during a downpour ‘which has to do with her own distraction, her state of mind’.32 The irrationality of the situation reinforces the awkwardness and futility infusing Pinter’s dialogue. The symbiosis between Losey and Pinter is illustrated throughout The Servant, a film adaptation of the Robin Maugham novella in which the aristocrat Tony (James Fox) employs a manservant, Hugo Barrett (Dirk Bogarde), to tend to his needs and run his London home. Barrett makes himself indispensable to Tony before inverting the master–servant relationship. As is customary in a Losey film, the setting – in this case, an early nineteenth-century Chelsea townhouse – is closely and meticulously wedded to the psychological and emotional elements of the story. Pinter briefly describes the interior a few pages into his script: ‘House well lit and carpeted. Furniture rather too large for the rooms. It has come from Tony’s family house.’33 In Richard Macdonald’s set design, which Losey described as ‘Probably the best thing he’s ever done’,34 Pinter’s directions are extended so that the furniture and fittings – ill-fitting in scale and taste – generate a claustrophobic, unnatural ambience. The staircase running up the centre of the three-storey house provides by turns a complementary and an ironic commentary on Barrett’s climb towards dominating and humiliating Tony and Susan. Gilles Deleuze comments on Losey’s predilection for a ‘Victorian’ setting ‘where the staircases assume a fundamental importance, inasmuch as they delineate a line of the steepest slope. The impulse scours the milieu, knowing no satisfaction other than that of taking possession of that which seems to be closed to it, to belong by rights to another milieu, to a higher level.’35 In Deleuze’s interpretation, the staircase symbolises not just vertical differences in status, but also a connection to the Victorian era, when the social order was differently, more explicitly, delineated. His analysis also anticipates Barrett’s rise within the household. The following sequence provides numerous indications of the creative contributions of Losey and Pinter. Tony’s fiancée Susan (Wendy Craig) is visiting Tony at home, where he is in bed with a cold. Pinter’s script calls for ‘An uneasy silence’ as Barrett interrupts the couple to leave Tony’s post on the bedside table.36 Blocking, performance, sound design, lighting,

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The symbiosis of Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter

c­ inematography and editing all reinforce this single phrase – unease permeates the entire sequence. The dialogue acts as a counterpoint to the dynamics of the developing situation; for example, Susan mocks Barrett, with Tony’s connivance, just before the servant enters. This might, to her, come from a position of superiority, but everything else in the sequence indicates that Barrett is forcing a wedge between the couple and that he is building a dominant position. As the sequence unfolds, Losey’s cinematic strategies constantly manifest and amplify the underlying conflict taking place behind Pinter’s words. The opening shot shows the far wall of the bedroom, dominated on the right-hand side by an ornate, gilt-framed oval mirror hanging above the fireplace. A wooden dresser is reflected in the mirror, and because the mirror is tilted forwards, the dresser appears to be at an angle, adding an area of distorted perspective, an expressionist disturbance to the composition. Children can be heard playing in the street outside. In the mirror, we see a door opening and Susan enters. She looks dwarfed by the grandness of the room, and out of place as her angled image disturbs the calm, ornamented space in the shot. She approaches the bed until the couple are in medium two-shot. Tony grabs Susan’s arm and tries to pull her closer to him, but she breaks away and heads back towards the door, which is out of shot to the left. As Susan goes out of shot, her back appears reflected in another mirror across the room from the bed. Just as when she arrived in the room, her image is diminished in size, surrounded by the ornate fittings in the room, and by the figure of Tony in the foreground. Susan opens the door; it seems that she has to enter and leave the room through mirrors, the shots suggesting that she is an Alice passing through the looking glass into a male Wonderland where she can no longer rely on her notions of reality. As well as conveying the sense of bizarre events unfolding, the mirrors reduce and ensnare Susan, emphasising her diminished power and status in a world outside her own experience – an example of Losey’s penchant for mirrors as filmic devices serving more than one purpose. Susan walks out onto the landing. Barrett, cleaning books in the hallway below, glances up and Susan returns his gaze. She picks up a vase of flowers, turns and carries them back towards the bedroom. The sequence cuts to the bedroom, with the camera in position as before, behind Tony’s bed. Now the mirror is filled with the reflection of the flowers which obscure Susan’s face as she closes the door. She places them on a table and Tony apologises for not thanking her earlier for bringing them to the house. She walks over and sits on the bed and complains, in as light-hearted a tone as she can, about Barrett’s presence: ‘Every time you open a door in this house that man’s outside. He’s a Peeping Tom.’ Tony replies: ‘He’s a vampire too on his Sundays off’, then tells her that Barrett has advised against keeping flowers in a sick-room overnight. There is a knock at the door. As Tony says: ‘Come in’ and in the mirror we see the door swing open to reveal Barrett entering, the sound of children playing outside suddenly ceases. Barrett’s reflected image appears to hang in the air, separating Tony and Susan for a moment,

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before he enters the frame proper. He carries a tray over to the bed, standing between the couple as he gives Tony his medicine and the post. As Barrett turns away from the bed, Susan asks Tony about his doctor, but she is watching the servant out of the corner of her eye. As he lifts the vase of flowers, she says brusquely: ‘Put that down!’ Barrett hovers over the table until Tony, in a mixture of conciliation and impatience, says: ‘Oh, put it down, Barrett’, and the servant complies, muttering: ‘I beg your pardon, sir.’ He leaves – the mirror is again the portal – and Tony mildly berates Susan for ‘yapping at Barrett all the time’, adding: ‘It’ll be a bastard if he leaves.’ He explains that it would be difficult to find ‘another like him’, pointing out that Barrett ‘may be a servant, but he’s still a human being’. Barrett’s interjection has served to break up Tony and Susan’s two-shot. The unorthodox sound design lends further emphasis to this disruption, with the children’s shouting and laughter outside ceasing on Barrett’s entrance into the bedroom. The silence persists until Susan leaves the house, experiencing another uncomfortable encounter with Barrett on the way. As he opens the door for her, the children’s laughter starts up again, but now carries a sense of mockery. In Pinter’s direction, Susan leans against a lamp post outside ‘Suddenly looking lost.’37 The unorthodox sound edits bring an almost supernatural element to the ‘uneasy silence’ briefly mentioned in Pinter’s script. The choreography of the two characters throughout this sequence and their interplay with the staircase and bedroom layout underline that this is what Laurie Ede describes as ‘a design-led film’ (see figure 9).38 For Losey, ‘design’ encompassed every aspect of the film, and this sequence shows how Pinter’s words are among several mutually supporting components in Losey’s overall concept.

9  The Servant (dir. Joseph Losey, 1963)

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The symbiosis of Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter

Apart from the handful of instances indicated, Pinter’s published script contains none of the cinematic business which amplifies the ambience of Pinter’s words. The ‘added’ material includes the use of mirrors, the sound of the children, the stop–start gestures of intimacy between Susan and Tony, Barrett’s passive-aggressive cleaning and the movements of the characters. Another sequence illustrating the Losey-Pinter interplay occurs in a key sequence from The Go-Between. A deviation from Pinter’s script produces what Neil Sinyard describes as a cinematic ‘master-stroke’.39 The film is centred around Leo Colston (Dominic Guard), a 12-year-old boy who carries messages to and from farmer Ted Burgess (Alan Bates) and his secret lover, the aristocratic Marian Maudsley (Julie Christie), the older sister of Leo’s school friend Marcus. Leo’s first conversation with Ted takes place at Ted’s farmhouse, where the farmer has brought the boy to patch up a cut knee. Ted asks Leo whether he can trust him to deliver a letter in secret to Marian. Pinter’s script reads: ‘Because … you see … it’s a secret. (Pause) All right. I’ll trust you.’ He fetches pen, ink and paper and sits at a table to compose the letter, all the while explaining to Leo that this is secret business and that nobody but Marian must see the letter. The next brief scene in the script takes place back in the large country house where Leo is staying as a guest of Marcus’s family. He sits at tea with Marian, her parents and Marcus’s brother Denys. They are discussing Leo’s encounter with Ted, praising the man for his kindness, and Marian offers to dress the wound. There is a cut to the bathroom, where Pinter indicates in his screenplay that Ted’s handkerchief is resting on the edge of the bath. Marian glances at it and asks Leo whether it is Ted’s. Leo replies: ‘Yes. He said he wouldn’t want it back. Shall I throw it on the rubbish dump?’ Marian says it seems quite a good handkerchief, and that she might wash it out. The action moves on to Leo producing the secret letter, and the handkerchief is not mentioned again. In the filmed version, during the farmhouse segment, Ted ties the handkerchief to Leo’s knee out of sight of the camera, behind a large enamel bowl. The two then discuss the messages and are in medium two-shot, Leo’s back to the camera, as Ted delivers the line ‘It’s a secret.’ There is a cut to a large close-up of Leo’s uncomprehending face for the first half of Pinter’s pause, then to a large close-up of Ted for two beats before he delivers his: ‘All right. I’ll trust you.’ A further cut back to the close-up of the boy is followed by a cut to the ‘master-stroke’ shot, an extreme closeup of the bloodied handkerchief on the side of the bath back at the country house with Marian. The intervening dialogue with Ted, his writing and handing over the letter to Leo and the country house tea scene have all been removed, replaced with a powerful image dense with overtones of damage, loss of innocence, intimacy, ritual and exchange. Pinter’s writing is concise, economic and rich with meaning, often beyond the mere literal sense of the language. But Losey’s visual sense makes it possible to convey the same emotional and narrative information with even fewer words and actions. Pinter repeatedly provided ideas which Losey expanded into powerful cinematic devices. In Accident, for example, when Stephen (Dirk Bogarde)

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visits his former lover Francesca (Delphine Seyrig) in London, Pinter’s screenplay has the entire sequence played out in silence. The only sound comes in the form of halting, repetitive voiceover by the two actors, representing just ‘fragments of conversation … distributed over the sequence so as to act as a disembodied comment on the action’.40 In his notebooks, which pre-date the script, Pinter had written that there was ‘never to be synched sound’ during this sequence.41 This ‘metaphor of alienation’, as Louis Giannetti calls it, 42 is taken up by Losey, and augmented by his framing devices. These include a striking image of the couple sitting opposite one another in a restaurant, shot from the street outside through a rainstreaked window. Although it appears only natural that Losey dominated the cinematic input into these films, Pinter was hardly ignorant of cinematic techniques and possibilities. From an early stage, he discovered himself enjoying the control afforded by the film editing process. He described in a 1964 Herald Tribune interview his delight at being able to cut dialogue and insert pauses: ‘You can delete dialogue, alter rhythm. This is marvelous.’ Film offered him unprecedented command over the nuances of economy and timing in the vocal sphere; tracing his progress through published screenplays reveals an increasing confidence in inserting camera moves and framing devices into his scripts. In Accident, for instance, Pinter gives precise directions for a game of tennis. His cinematic contribution to this sequence is singled out in Houston’s review, in which she describes the film as ‘a dazzlingly good piece of movie-making’. She adds: ‘The language of this screen novel, at all points, is the language of cinema.’43 As the tennis game gets under way, it is watched by a seated Rosalind (Vivien Merchant), and it finishes with a shot, indicated by Pinter, of Rosalind’s chair, now empty.44 This type of direction in the script, along with increasing use of cinematic terminology – the Go-Between script includes liberal use of phrases such as ‘two shot’, ‘three shot’, ‘wide shot’, ‘close-up’ and ‘zoom in’ – suggests that Pinter was developing his filmic eye. By the time he had completed his screenplay of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu in 1973, Pinter was sufficiently immersed in cinema to specify shots and cuts. Indeed, the opening of the published screenplay comprises thirty-six separate shots or transitions, with directions including ‘to be shot on colour stock in black and white’.45 Describing how he approached the difficult task of starting work on the script, Pinter said in 1977: What I was immediately plunged into was the question of what caught me – well everything caught me, I was totally consumed – but what I was aware of in terms of film. I’m pretty sure that I suddenly went straight into images. I actually threw a lot of images down on paper and found myself left with them.46

With each collaborator displaying his own particular awareness of cinema, the question of authorship arises, as to who contributed exactly which ideas to the films, particularly when Pinter was on set – which was ‘very often’,

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The symbiosis of Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter

Losey said, for The Go-Between,47 rarely, according to Pinter himself and actor Sarah Miles, for The Servant.48 There is no categorical answer, although Steven H. Gale, who has written extensively on Pinter’s screenwriting, gives him credit for many cinematic and visual devices. He contends that ‘Pinter’s involvement in the collaborative aspect of film making is extremely important and cannot be ignored’.49 He gives the example of the use of an ­eighteenth-century military painting towards the end of The Servant.50 As Barrett consolidates his dominance over Tony, a scene between the two men opens with a camera tilt down across the painted image of a British army officer, sword raised and standard in hand, victoriously leading his lowerranking men. The irony, given Tony’s standing as a former army officer, is clear. No mention of the painting appears in Pinter’s script, although this is not conclusive evidence: Losey’s films are among those that frequently contain material missing from the formal scripts. However, the shot and the use of the painting are exemplary Losey tropes; in the opening shot of Time Without Pity (1957), for example, a strikingly similar camera tilt down a brutal Goya painting of a bull prefaces a young woman being thrown down a flight of stairs. In the follow-on shot from the painting in The Servant, the camera rests on a card table on which a game of Patience is in progress, the ‘royal’ cards being manipulated into their places by a lone, unseen player who, of course, turns out to be Barrett. This is not mentioned in the script either, and again has the familiar feel of a symbolic Losey device; in a less subtle example pre-dating the Pinter collaborations, once more from Time Without Pity, David Graham (Michael Redgrave), an alcoholic trying to save his son from the gallows, is in a drunken stupor on a London Tube train. He awakes to see the noose-like handle of the strap he is holding, and the shock jolts him back into action. There is evidence, then, that some of the visual ideas attributed to Pinter might have originated with Losey. Notwithstanding the difficulties in tracing authorship of particular cinematic moments, it is clear that the Losey-Pinter working relationship spawned many significant images. Losey said of Pinter: ‘He does superbly evoke the visual for me, but I don’t think he has any visual sense at all.’51 This seems somewhat at odds with Pinter’s account of his work on the Proust screenplay, but it remains a plausible notion that Pinter needed Losey to provide him with inventive and sophisticated visual and cinematic elements which were generally not within his range as a playwright-turnedscreenwriter; arguably, the cinematic flair behind the use of the bloodied handkerchief in The Go-Between, for example, was attributable to a symbiotic process involving both men. The three Losey-Pinter collaborations satisfy Steve Neale’s ‘departure from Hollywood’ criteria discussed above in relation to British Free Cinema/social realism/New Wave films. Neale goes on to look at the particular characteristics of the auteur-driven art film, concluding that the authors associated with art cinema encapsulate and unify the various elements that distinguish art cinema from Hollywood, including the opposition between the latter’s ‘impersonal profit-seeking and entertainment’ and the former’s ‘creativity, freedom and meaning’.

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Whether these factors combine to qualify The Servant, Accident and/or The Go-Between as art films is a matter for debate. However, evidence of these films’ influence on later British cinema and television is compelling. Mainstream film commentators such as Geoffrey McNab of the Independent continue to make a conspicuous 1960s comparison: ‘You can trace a direct line from Losey’s [The Servant] to Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1968), another claustrophobic, mind-bending British drama exploring sexual and social identity.’ Lindsay Anderson, a founder of Free Cinema who articulated the principles of British social realism of the 1950s and 1960s from the beginning, was experimenting with fractured time through the use of flashbacks in This Sporting Life, but went for full-out arthouse-inspired anarchy with If … (1968). Abstraction, intensity of image and sound and a casting-aside of the need for ‘authenticity’ were emerging throughout the 1960s, both in film and television. Storylines were changing, with character-driven material and film-makers’ personal expression displacing the popular-novel formats of the mainstream. The small-screen work of the generation of directors to follow Losey – Dennis Potter and Mike Leigh being notable examples – shows a thirst for experimentation, modernism and art film sensibility which surely owes far more to the LoseyPinter collaborations than to the significant but narrowly focused output of the British social realism movement.

Notes  1 Nick James, ‘Joseph Losey-Harold Pinter: In Search of Poshlust Times’, Sight and Sound, 19: 6 (2009), pp. 30–40.  2 James, ‘Joseph Losey-Harold Pinter: In Search of Poshlust Times’. James attributes the term ‘poshlust’ to Nabokov, out of Gogol.  3 Penelope Houston, ‘Losey’s Hand in Pinter’s Glove’, Spectator, 17 February 1967, p. 195.  4 David Caute, Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. xv.  5 Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 182.  6 Jean Douchet, quoted in Colin Gardner, Joseph Losey (Manchester and New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 70.  7 Ian Cameron (ed.), Movie Reader (London: November Books, 1972), p. 10.  8 Robin Wood, ‘The Criminal’, Motion, 4 (1963), p. 10.  9 Charles Barr, ‘Life of Exile [Review of Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life by David Caute]’, Sight and Sound, 4: 6 (June 1994), p. 38. 10 Ian Cameron and Robin Wood, Antonioni (London: Studio Vista, 1970), p. 107. 11 Caute, Joseph Losey, p. 155. 12 Cameron and Wood, Antonioni, pp. 142–3. 13 Moliterno Gino, The A to Z of Italian Cinema (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), p. 116. 14 Michel Ciment, Conversations with Losey (London and New York, NY: Methuen, 1985), p. 221. 15 Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 222.

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The symbiosis of Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter

16 Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 306. 17 See Samantha Lay, British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit Grit (London: Wallflower, 2002), p. 58. 18 Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen, 22: 1 (1981), pp. 11–40; pp. 13–15. 19 Lay, British Social Realism, pp. 59–60. 20 Harold Pinter, Richard Findlater and Martin Esslin, ‘Writing for Myself’, Twentieth Century, 169: 1008 (1961), pp. 172–5; p. 172. 21 Losey’s techniques developed from his earlier-career involvement in European and Russian modernist theatre, particularly the work of Bertholt Brecht and Vsevelod Meyerhold. See Peter Jameson, ‘The Go-Between: Theatre and the Cinema of Joseph Losey’. PhD dissertation. Queen’s University Belfast, 2014. 22 Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 240. 23 Lois Gordon (ed.), Pinter at 70: A Caseboook, 2nd edition (New York, NY and London: Routledge, 2001), p. xxiv. 24 Michael Billington, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 150. 25 Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 242. 26 Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 262. 27 Beverle Houston and Marsha Kinder, ‘The Losey-Pinter Collaboration’, Film Quarterly, 32: 1 (1978), p. 22. 28 See Paul Newland and Gavrik Losey, ‘An Involuntary Memory? Joseph Losey, Harold Pinter and Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu’, in Dan North (ed.), Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), pp. 33–51. 29 Camera Three, CBS Television arts programme. Available on YouTube under: ‘Camera Three Losey Mekas Vogel Roud’. (Accessed 28 May 2013.) 30 Billington, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, p. 208. 31 Houston and Kinder, ‘The Losey-Pinter Collaboration’, p. 25. 32 Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 268. 33 Harold Pinter, Five Screenplays, 1st edition (London: Methuen, 1971), p. 10. 34 Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 236. 35 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 136. 36 Pinter, Five Screenplays, p. 16. 37 Pinter, Five Screenplays, p. 17. 38 Laurie N. Ede, British Film Design: A History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), p. 141. 39 Neil Sinyard, ‘Pinter’s Go-between.’ Critical Quarterly, 22: 3 (1980), pp. 21–33; p. 24. 40 Pinter, Five Screenplays, p. 256. 41 Steven H. Gale, Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter’s Screenplays and the Artistic Process (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), p. 179. 42 Louis D. Giannetti, ‘Cinematic Metaphors’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 6: 4 (1972), p. 57. 43 Houston, ‘Losey’s Hand in Pinter’s Glove’, p. 195. 44 Pinter, Five Screenplays, p. 245. 45 Harold Pinter, The Proust Screenplay: À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, ed. Joseph Losey, Barbara Bray, and Marcel Proust (London: Eyre Methuen in association with Chatto & Windus, 1978), p. 6.

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The parameters of British art cinema: a case study of John Krish Robert Shail

What is British art cinema? Finding the answer to this question is far from easy. Other nations seem to have found the task simpler; one of the earliest French production companies called itself Film d’Art and was dedicated to making ‘cultural films’.1 By the early 1920s a group of international avant-garde artists, including Man Ray and Fernand Léger, were settled in Paris pursuing their creative interests through the comparatively new medium of cinema. Yet when Erik Hedling wrestled with the term for The British Cinema Book (2009) he was forced to concede that ‘Britain did not have an internationally well-known art cinema in this sense until Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman and other film-makers emerged in the 1980s.’2 The ‘sense’ that Hedling refers to is the widely used definition arrived at by David Bordwell, which describes art cinema as a ‘non-classical form’ inviting ‘higher-level interpretation’.3 At the same time, Hedling refers tantalisingly to other ‘critical and cinematic practices which connected British film culture to the development of the European art cinema’,4 without specifying what these might have been. His article makes a case for Lindsay Anderson as a key figure in a British art cinema tradition. He also notes a distinct artistic thread within British cinema with its roots in the documentary movement, an appropriate observation considering Anderson’s admiration for Humphrey Jennings, the movement’s most celebrated figure. Hedling’s essay suggests two directions for further exploration. One acknowledges the pre-eminent role of the auteur in definitions of art cinema, inviting the possibility of making a case for a given film-maker based on the auteur principles of technical accomplishment, signature style and depth of meaning (as established by Andrew Sarris).5 This approach has seen serious attention given by scholars to a range of idiosyncratic British film-makers from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger through Ken Russell and John Boorman, up to Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway and beyond. The second identifies a curiously meandering line of historic development whereby the British documentary movement (along with other realist modes, from Humphrey Jennings through the New Wave to Ken Loach and Mike Leigh) has often been considered within a notional

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art cinema. It is worth recalling here how Roy Armes in A Critical History of British Cinema (1978), the first single-volume account of British cinema history, argued for a narrative of national cinema based on auteurs, and offered an overview in which the documentarists, Powell and Pressburger, and Russell all loom large.6 That directors as contrary in temperament and output as Russell and Loach could be mentioned together as auteurs is an indication of the fragmented, even contradictory nature of British film production.7 This is amplified within the marginalised contexts of a British art cinema, where realism and anti-realism are often bedfellows, which brings us to John Krish. If the agenda of British cinema studies in the last thirty years has been to recover neglected aspects of our national film story,8 then Krish seems a strong candidate for reassessment and inclusion in the still open and contested canon of British art cinema. A brief portrait of Krish in The Encyclopedia of British Film (2003) refers to an ‘idiosyncratic career’,9 while Peter Hutchings’s overview in Directors in British and Irish Cinema (2006) suggests something more of his qualities, with reference to his documentary work as ‘creative and compassionate’, but still scarcely scratches the surface of his achievements.10 Signs of a reassessment are there in the warm appreciation of him by archivist Patrick Russell on the BFI Screenonline website, as well as in the recent DVD releases by the British Film Institute.11 If a defining feature of the auteur in British art cinema is a tortuous career path then Krish’s record certainly confirms this, but he also provides evidence of a coherent, personal vision. As this chapter will demonstrate, Krish’s oeuvre demonstrates a deep awareness of the darkest corners of human experience, often treated with mischievous black humour, which is offset by an abiding faith in the redeeming instinct for empathy. Although his was a career that veered between documentaries and feature films, his finest work is generally considered to have been in the former category. His documentaries, however, show the form at its most poetic, and often pushed at the boundaries of what might constitute the creative treatment of actuality.

An idiosyncratic career Krish’s long career in British cinema began with the Crown Film Unit (CFU) in the 1940s. His love for documentary had been sparked by a youthful viewing of Night Mail (Basil Wright and Harry Watt, 1936), which led to a job as trainee editor at the CFU. He was an assistant editor for Watt on Target for Tonight (1941) and for Humphrey Jennings on Listen to Britain (1942), an experience which shaped his approach to documentary.12 He further established his career in documentary in the post-war period working as a director with Richard Massingham and the Central Office of Information (COI), before making The Elephant Will Never Forget for British Transport Films (BTF) in 1953. This is the film

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A case study of John Krish

which first showcased his distinctive look and style. He gravitated into sponsored documentary during the 1950s and built a reputation based on celebrated works such as They Took Us to the Sea (1961) and I Think They Call Him John (1964). In the 1960s he made a halting attempt to cross over into feature film production. The experience of working in the commercial industry was a chastening one, and he would later note that ‘betrayal is endemic in feature filmmaking’.13 In the end, he completed just four mainstream features: Unearthly Stranger (1963); The Wild Affair (1965); Decline and Fall (1968); and The Man Who Had Power Over Women (1970). Only the first of these, a stylish and disturbing addition to the British paranoia cycle of the period, enhanced his reputation as an auteur. Steve Chibnall and Brian MacFarlane in The British B Movie (2009) cite it as ‘perhaps the most explicit treatment of the “otherness” of women in British cinema’.14 It provides a glimpse of what might have been had Krish benefited from the support of a more sympathetic industry. His time working in television was no easier and he found the process often chaotic.15 Having supplied the stylish credits sequence for The Avengers, he went on to direct three episodes during 1967 and his other television credits include an episode of another fashionable 1960s series, The Saint (1963). Earlier in the decade he contributed two episodes to the more sober detective series Stryker of the Yard (1961 and 1962). More substantial were the three films he made for the Children’s Film Foundation (CFF). His first assignment for them was the engaging The Salvage Gang (1958), but this turned out to be another chastening experience due to his disagreements with the then head of the CFF, Mary Field. He has said that he ‘felt her view of childhood was out of touch with most children’s lives and out of date, even in the 1950s. She wanted everything to be “nice” but this really meant genteel in practice.’16 Krish’s preference was for poetic realism, along with a liberal agenda. This was expressed more openly in both Friend or Foe (1982), adapted from a novel by Michael Morpurgo, and the morally complex Out of the Darkness (1985). These films remained among his proudest achievements and he noted that ‘It is important to convey moral values, and I think I was able to achieve this with my films for the Foundation in an accessible way.’17 Few directors boast such an eclectic curriculum vitae, ranging from a film designed to prepare British servicemen for the horrors of torture if captured by the enemy, to making The Jesus Film (1979) for evangelical groups in North America. It is undoubtedly the work that Krish produced within the documentary form which provides the basis for his auteur status, particularly as these films, like those of Jennings and Anderson, were at the more formalist and personal end of the realist spectrum. In these films he expressed a distinctive sensibility, as well as a concern for pushing the boundaries of documentary into areas where the border between actuality and creative invention could be stretched in ways which both Jennings and Anderson might have appreciated.

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Krish’s documentaries The most widely celebrated aspect of Krish’s career has been his work in documentary, as acknowledged in the Guardian’s obituary, which declared him to be ‘one of Britain’s finest documentary film-makers’.18 His ability to use the form to express an individual viewpoint was apparent as early as 1953, with The Elephant Will Never Forget. This eleven-minute work was commissioned to record the last tram journey in London, an event seen by the head of BTF, Edgar Anstey, as one for celebration as it indicated the modernisation of the capital’s transport infrastructure. Krish wanted instead to make an elegiac film focusing on the affection which many Londoners felt towards the trams. In a characteristic gesture of independence he made the film his way, defying Anstey’s instructions. Its popularity seemed to justify his position but it didn’t save his job; Anstey fired him and he didn’t work for BTF again for more than twenty years.19 When he returned it was with the even more contrary The Finishing Line (1977), but by then Anstey had retired. If The Elephant Will Never Forget illustrates Krish’s independence and the warmth of his approach, it is also indicative of his working methods. The majority of Krish’s documentaries were commissioned by public bodies including government departments, charities and trades unions. For Krish, these relationships were always fraught and he once noted: ‘I was never handed a brief that would make a film – I always had to change it.’20 He was never afraid to blur the line between fiction and actuality, arguing that reality provided the subject of his films and their social purpose but that his job was to use his cinematic skills to illustrate that subject as effectively as possible. He was willing to employ techniques in opposition to the cinema vérité methods prevalent at the time, mixing professional actors with the public and carefully scripting and editing the films. The closest Krish came to using a purely observational method can be found in They Took Us to the Sea, made for the NSPCC in 1961, which depicts a trip to the seaside arranged for a group of deprived inner city children from Birmingham. Unusually he employed four cameras, accompanying the children on their journey to Weston-super-Mare, collecting footage as they went; the majority of the shots were handheld. In a sensitive manner he had thrown a tea party for the children so they could become familiar with the crew and cameras. The result is a montage of natural-looking shots capturing the children’s excitement, although his directorial skill is always evident in the framing and selection of images.21 The meaning of the film’s commentary on society’s lack of compassion is conveyed to the audience when the children inevitably return home at the end. Krish’s more typical approach is evident across a series of beautifully composed shorts including I Want to Go to School (1959), Mr Marsh Comes to School (1961), and Our School (1962). Mr Marsh Comes to School, made for the COI, overcomes a routine format to illustrate the work of the Youth

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A case study of John Krish

Employment Service by focusing on how an eccentric school careers officer engages some bored teenagers. It handles the subject with humour, mixing in simple camera tricks like jump cuts. Krish’s two other school films were made for producer Leon Clore, a frequent collaborator, and commissioned by the National Union of Teachers to show the positive effects of educational reform in the state sector. Krish’s method was to spend time in the schools getting to know the children and teachers, taking copious notes which formed the basis of a script. He then shot the script in the manner of a fiction film, directing his performers in their everyday activities. This enabled him to produce a documentary where the images are tightly composed and convey the message clearly. Never afraid to challenge sponsors or to select his participants with deliberate intention, Krish insisted on using the more rebellious pupils as they worked better on screen. He saw no contradiction in scripting sequences. Rather, he argued that: ‘Film is a contrivance … a documentary is an essay and it must contain the essence of the maker.’22 For Return to Life (1960), a moving account of the challenges faced by refugees arriving in the UK commissioned by the Foreign Office, Krish used real-life refugees but wrote an illustrative narrative to encapsulate a broad sense of the difficulties they encountered. His intention was to help the audience ‘feel what it’s like to be a refugee’; empathy and identification were key devices of his repertoire.23 The most touching of all Krish’s documentaries is I Think They Call Him John (1964). The film was sponsored by the Craignish Trust to highlight the problem of loneliness in old age and follows one day in the life of a widower, John Ronson, as he goes about his everyday tasks in a small flat in a London tower block. The film was constructed employing Krish’s characteristic techniques, so he spent time getting to know his subject, observing his daily rituals and informally interviewing him to get an accurate picture of his life. From these notes he developed a carefully structured script and then brought in his crew and meticulously directed his subject as they recreated the minutiae of his daily round – this extended to the simplest actions such as making a cup of tea; the film was shot without sound so that Krish’s shouted instructions cannot be heard. In place of spontaneous observation, we have a reconstruction of John’s life, which mirrors the methods adopted in documentaries like Night Mail where the interior of a train carriage was exactly recreated in the studio from photographs and drawings of the real thing. The film encapsulates a single day within thirty minutes of screen time, beginning with John waking, getting shaved and dressed, and then making his breakfast. The camera never ventures outside and there is only the diegetic sound within the flat and a few brief moments of voiceover. What appears at first as simply observational is actually artfully composed, including a striking image of John shaving with the camera apparently sitting inside his mirror looking out. John is frequently seen framed in doorways or through the serving hatch which links the kitchen to the living room. In one shot he is even framed by the stand which is used to hang a cage

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containing his only companion, a small bird. These images present John as caged himself, a feeling intensified by the use of a wide-angle lens which captures the claustrophobic interior of the flat. The slow pace, static camera and long takes emphasise the lonely drag of the day, and the atmosphere is intensified by lengthy silences. The voiceover reminds us of John’s service in World War One as we hear the sound of distant gunfire. Other small details point to John’s innate dignity, such as his clothes put out for the morning on a chair, including his pocket watch, or framed photographs of his wife. The voiceover written by Krish is often poetic. John’s wife is evoked by the phrase: ‘They used to share a double silence but now it is just a single silence.’ As this is heard, Krish’s subject lays the table for one and eats a cold dinner of leftovers. Further commentary is unnecessary, the acute close-up of his wedding ring tells us everything we need to know about the loneliness of old age. The result is an existential contemplation of isolation in the modern world, a fitting encapsulation of the director’s skill and empathy. The film is strongly reminiscent of Lindsay Anderson’s Academy Awardwinning Thursday’s Children (1954) in its quiet empathy and is every bit as moving. Krish’s documentary work lies firmly within the traditions of the British documentary movement, combining actuality subject matter with carefully structured narrative and aiming for a formal, poetic quality. What particularly distinguishes his contribution to the movement is the tenderness and depth of feeling extended to his subjects. Here his personality is to the fore, in a manner consistent with the work of other auteurs in British art cinema, and confirming David Bordwell’s argument that ‘art cinema foregrounds the author as a structure in the film’s system’.24

Pushing the boundaries of the actuality film In a manner experienced by many British auteurs, Krish frequently found himself earning a living making instructional films or brief public information films (PIFs) for government departments. Despite the pragmatic aspect of this work, it produced pieces which are highly characteristic of his personal vision, combining dark humour with a sense of horror or unease. Sewing Machine (1973) was made for the COI to remind parents with young children to be aware of the dangers of their offspring wandering into the road. Krish approaches the subject with ingenuity, picturing a mother at her sewing machine who fails to notice that her little girl has gone outside to play. The final minute of the child’s life is conveyed by a clock counting down in the corner of the screen, while a deadpan voiceover reinforces the message. The effect is strangely ominous, a quality even more apparent in Searching (1974), made to warn of the risk of household fires. Krish imagines a scene of total devastation as his camera prowls through the remains of a burnt-out family home. As we proceed to the bedrooms, we hear the distressed voices of children crying out for help. The distorted sound quality

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A case study of John Krish

adds to the hallucinatory horror of the scene. The film received a Golden Lion at Venice, the kind of international recognition often equated with European art cinema.25 It is part of Krish’s achievement that he brought his distinctive vision to material not normally associated with art cinema, thereby extending its potential definition. Krish’s move into the more defined world of the PIF and of training films allowed the darker side of his personality to emerge and facilitated greater experimentation with form, pushing the boundaries of actuality to incorporate not just the elements of formal composition and rhythm he had learned from Jennings but also his inclination towards blurring the distinction between documentary and fiction. Familiar structural devices are employed in H.M.P. (1976), an hour-long film made for the Home Office as a recruiter for the prison service. Here three men are followed on a four-week induction as they learn about the work of various members of prison staff. This is structured into a series of interviews, most notably with the chaplain, where the questions are obviously scripted but the responses are spontaneous. The result is a remarkably frank depiction of life inside a prison, as likely to deter as it is to encourage new recruits, but frequently moving in its depiction of the attempts by staff to help inmates find a new direction. Its combination of narrative structure with observational footage extends the formalist dimension which had marked the British documentary tradition. A lighter touch, along with elements of fantasy, is evident in Drive Carefully, Darling (1975), an award-winning fifteen-minute PIF made for the Department of the Environment, which vividly depicts the conflict within the mind of a car driver when the differing forces at work eventually lead to an accident.26 The scene inside his head is shot in soft focus as we see three white-coated boffins representing his Brain, Memory and Ego. It is the latter which gets the upper hand, initially with comic effect, but its actions eventually result in tragedy. I Stopped, I Looked, I Listened (1975) was made to address an audience of senior citizens and highlight the risks of crossing busy roads. However, in Krish’s hands the film becomes a celebration of age and memory with members of Lewisham Darby and Joan club, who have spent the first half of the film reciting obviously scripted dialogue, digressing into a charming discussion of the ‘old days’, including an impromptu sing-along. The most memorable of this group of films is Captured. Made by Leon Clore’s World Wide Pictures in 1959 for the Army Kinema Corporation, it was intended to prepare British soldiers for what might happen if they were captured by a hostile enemy, in this case North Korea, and subjected to psychological and physical torture. The script was based on first-hand accounts given by combatants in the war and from further interviews which Krish conducted.27 The events we see depicted are based on verifiable reallife incidents but in his characteristic manner Krish then develops this into a ­narrative so that we follow the experiences of an individual soldier, played by the professional actor Alan Dobie, as he is captured and then held in a

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prisoner-of-war camp. When he refuses to answer any questions beyond his rank and serial number he is subjected to a brutal, prolonged interrogation. The cast are a mix of actors and non-professionals and although the film was entirely staged and scripted, it is shot to resemble a documentary, with considerable attention given to creating an authentic appearance to the camp using the information that Krish had gathered from combatants. The captured men are subjected to psychological manipulation and attempts at ‘re-education’, then to outright torture including sleep deprivation and waterboarding. The depiction of this was graphic enough to so alarm the intelligence officers who had commissioned it that it was banned for more than forty years until the film’s eventual rediscovery by the British Film Institute. Krish adopts a strikingly austere visual style for the film, and the bleached-out black and white footage is some distance from the luminous cinematography typical of his other documentaries. The setting is deliberately anonymous, taking place in a few wooden huts on a bleak plain. The one constant is the howling wind which is audible in almost every scene and gives the film a peculiar cohesion. For long sequences this is the only audible sound, giving the film an almost abstract quality. The much darker outlook which is a feature of Krish’s informational and public health films is evident here. Although the film ends on a defiant note of resistance, much of the action focuses on the disintegration of a group of British prisoners as the guards sow seeds of doubt and mistrust among them. They gradually turn on one another, looking to see which one is the informant and planning violent retribution. This is a theme Krish was to return to again in his CFF film, Out of the Darkness. There is a concern here for moral choices, which is another constant of his work, but the warmth and humanity that tends to mark his documentaries has been replaced with a sombre meditation on man’s inhumanity. The cruelty depicted is beyond the specifics of the Korean War and becomes universalised, heightened by the stark visual style. For Krish, the film was more an anti-war statement than a warning about a specific enemy.28 The most extreme example of Krish’s disregard for the conventions of realism, as well as his liking for mischievous confrontation, is The Finishing Line, his belated return to BTF. Like John Mackenzie’s similarly shocking Apaches (1977), the film is an extended PIF made with a more substantial budget and a twenty-minute running time to allow for maximum effect in tackling its subject, in this case the dangers for children when trespassing on railway lines. Krish admitted to being stumped by the brief, which prohibited him from showing any vandalism on the line. He came up with a surreal concept which, by his own admission, he did not expect to be accepted.29 We see a young boy on a railway bridge daydreaming about a unique school sports day organised next to the railway line and including events like fence breaking, throwing stones at a moving train, ‘last across’, and finally ‘the great tunnel walk’. A brass band plays and official scorers award points for the children’s efforts in each game. However, the games are increasingly

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A case study of John Krish

grotesque. The stone throwing results in bloody injuries to passengers, while the final walk through a tunnel while a high-speed train enters at the other end leads to a scene of apocalyptic carnage. The mood shifts from bleak humour to tragedy as the bodies are piled on the line and the band play a mournful dirge. The film provoked an outcry, garnering numerous tabloid headlines. The Daily Express quoted a child psychiatrist who claimed the film could traumatise its intended audience,30 while the Daily Mail reported being inundated with complaints.31 Krish’s macabre sense of humour was evident in his own reaction to the outcry, which he described as ‘lovely’.32 Krish’s work in PIFs and training films extends his oeuvre in fascinating ways. Formally, the films further confuse the distinction between documentary and fiction, combining elements of both, and even introducing fantasy and the surreal. In terms of his auteur trademarks, the typically sympathetic tone of much of his more mainstream work is replaced by black humour and cynicism. What links these films to his other work is a continuing concern for ethical choices, for doing the right thing, as well as a concern for man’s inhumanity. They are also evidence of a directorial approach which takes actuality material rooted in real life but treats this with a concern for formal cinematic conventions.

Conclusion Few careers provide better evidence of the fragmented nature of British film production in the post-war era than that of John Krish. He weaved a path through documentary to television and on to feature films and then back again to documentary and sponsored films. Yet despite battling insensitive producers and ill-informed sponsors, he created a body of work driven by underlying principles and a clear aesthetic. His artistic roots lay within the British documentary movement and he embraced its tendency towards combining everyday realities with a sense of how the poetic or even the surreal can inform mundane experience. In his PIFs and training films he pushed this aesthetic further, drawing actuality sources into a narrative framework that could embrace imagination and stylisation. In doing so he helped pave the way for film-makers like Bill Douglas or Terence Davies, whose work has reshaped the realist strain within British art cinema. His concern for form is matched by the authorial voice which emerges in his work. This can shift from deep sympathy for the suffering of the individual to despair at the dark cruelties human beings are capable of. Throughout there is a drive to make a moral cinema, an approach which marks him as an auteur. In his essay on Krish’s documentary films, Patrick Russell suggests that Krish never had a vision of his own as he was always the servant of the audience and his sponsors,33 although by the end of the piece he seems to have his own doubts about this. However, Krish’s concern for his audience was always motivated by his desire for a moral response. If he did much

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of his best work for sponsors, these were public bodies whose agenda he was always broadly sympathetic to. In his filmed interview with Russell in 2010, Krish explained that his career had often been a battle with those who employed him but one where ‘I wanted the message to get through’.34 The consistency of his work, with its unwavering faith in the ability of cinema to convey moral truth is surely testament to the fact that this message was always uniquely his own. It is a body of work which, with its characteristic combination of realism and personal vision, both conforms to the parameters of British art cinema and extends them.

Notes  1 Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 44.  2 Erik Hedling, ‘Lindsay Anderson and the Development of British Art Cinema’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, 3rd edition (London: Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, 2009), pp. 39–45; p. 39.  3 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 212.  4 Hedling, ‘Lindsay Anderson and the Development of British Art Cinema’, p. 39.  5 Andrew Sarris, ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962’, Film Culture, 7 (Winter 1962–63), pp. 1–8.  6 Roy Armes, A Critical History of British Cinema (London: Secker and Warburg, 1978).  7 Armes groups the two directors in a chapter titled ‘The Art of the Real’.  8 See Alan Lovell, ‘The British Cinema: The Known Cinema’, in Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, pp. 5–12.  9 Brian McFarlane (ed.), The Encyclopedia of British Cinema (London: Methuen, 2003), p. 372. 10 Peter Hutchings, ‘John Krish’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), Directors in British and Irish Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2006), pp. 352–3. 11 See screenonline.org.uk and the British Film Institute releases for Captured (2013) and A Day in the Life – Four Portraits of Post-War Britain by John Krish (2011). 12 See ‘Shooting the Message: The Films of John Krish’, an interview on the DVD of Captured. 13 John Krish interviewed by Patrick Russell, A Day in the Life. 14 Steve Chibnall and Brian McFarlane, The British ‘B’ Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan/ British Film Institute, 2009), p. 282. 15 John Krish interviewed by the author, 11 February 2013. 16 John Krish quoted in Robert Shail, The Children’s Film Foundation: History and Legacy (London: Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, 2016), p. 101. 17 John Krish quoted in Shail, The Children’s Film Foundation, p. 104. 18 Kevin Brownlow, John Krish obituary, Guardian, 23 May 2016. 19 See Paul Collins’s essay on The Elephant Will Never Forget in the booklet accompanying the DVD A Day in the Life. 20 John Krish in conversation with Patrick Russell, filmed at the National Film Theatre, London (8 November 2010) and included on the DVD A Day in the Life. 21 John Krish interviewed by the author, 11 February 2013.

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22 Interview with Patrick Russell. 23 John Krish interviewed by Rodney Giesler for the BECTU History Project (March 1994), quoted in the booklet accompanying the British Film Institute’s DVD Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain 1951–1977 (2013). 24 David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, in Catherine Fowler (ed.), The European Cinema Reader (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), p. 97. 25 See Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen, 22: 1 (May 1981), pp. 11–40. 26 The film won the Grierson Award for best British short film and a prize at the Montreux Industrial Film Festival. 27 See ‘Captured’ by James Piers Taylor in the booklet accompanying the DVD of Captured. 28 John Krish interviewed by the author, 11 February 2013. 29 See ‘Shooting the Message: The Films of John Krish’, an interview on the DVD of Captured. 30 ‘School Film Lays Death on the Line’, Daily Express, 18 February 1977. 31 ‘Playtime of Peril’, Daily Mail, 3 September 1977. 32 ‘Shooting the Message: The Films of John Krish’, an interview on the DVD of Captured. 33 Patrick Russell, ‘Shooting the Message: John Krish’, in Patrick Russell and James Piers Taylor (eds), Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, 2010), pp. 260 and 269. 34 John Krish interviewed by Patrick Russell, A Day in the Life.

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8

The reputation of Nicolas Roeg

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Paul Newland

In this chapter I want to reflect on the ways in which the reputation of the British film director Nicolas Roeg has developed from the 1970s through to the twenty-first century, and to consider how this might tell us interesting things about the discursive and cultural frameworks that shape particular films (and their critical reception) historically within the contexts of British art cinema.1 Looking specifically at Performance (co-directed with Donald Cammell, 1970) and Don’t Look Now (1973), I will argue that through an engagement with the ancillary discourses that have circulated around Roeg’s reputation and the reputation of the films he has worked on over the last fifty years we might develop a more nuanced understanding of how British art cinema can be seen as a set of complementary and competing, historically contingent discourses, informed by concepts of aesthetics and authorship, narratives of production, exhibition, reception, but also, significantly, reputation.2 Moreover, I will make the argument here that there is a significant amount of evidence that Roeg himself has had a level of agency in the development of his own artistic reputation and the concomitant ongoing development of the reputations of films he has worked on. The documentary film Arena: Nicolas Roeg – It’s About Time was broadcast in the UK on the arts channel BBC Four on 28 June 2015.3 The title of the documentary was a neat pun, as contributors noted that one of Roeg’s chief interests as a film-maker was the nature of the passing of time and memory, but also that this singular British filmmaking artist had not had the kind of critical appreciation he perhaps should have had in comparison to other respected British directors. The film features interviews with the directors Ben Wheatley, Danny Boyle, Mike Figgis and Bernard Rose – all citing the importance of Roeg’s films to their own artistic development, and all referring to the idiosyncratic nature of the director’s work. 4 For example, Boyle argues that Roeg is an ‘original’ because he chose not to follow the British filmmaking trend for social realism in the 1960s and 1970s. Wheatley suggests that Roeg effectively ‘invented his own cinema’ and became a ‘oneman-genre’, much like Stanley Kubrick. The documentary also features contemporary interviews with Roeg conducted in the comfort of his own home in west London, with images of the director – now a softly spoken,

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The reputation of Nicolas Roeg

bright-eyed man in his eighties – moving slowly through rooms and corridors, reading poetry (including lines from W. H. Auden) and perusing old photographs. The overall message of the documentary – which also features new interviews with important figures in Roeg’s career such as Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Jenny Agutter and Theresa Russell – is evidently one of celebration: the celebration of Roeg’s idiosyncratic talent, the length of his career, and the formal brilliance and artistic legacy of his films. Significantly, the opening line spoken by the narrator of the documentary (Dilly Barlow) is: ‘Nicolas Roeg is one of Britain’s greatest film directors. He is also one of the most elusive, usually preferring to let his work speak for itself.’ This is reminiscent of widely held views of Kubrick. The main focus of the documentary is the films Performance (1970), Walkabout (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Bad Timing (1980), Eureka (1983) and Insignificance (1985). This is perhaps unsurprising, as these are the films in Roeg’s oeuvre which have evidently had the biggest impact on the development of his reputation. In 2011, four years before Arena: Nicolas Roeg – It’s About Time was first broadcast, the British Film Institute (BFI) held a major retrospective on Roeg’s career at the National Film Theatre on London’s South Bank, which was widely covered at the time by British broadsheet newspapers. This prestigious event – and the discourses that circulated around it – unambiguously signalled the fact that it was now time to take Roeg seriously as a film-maker. Moreover, in recent years a number of other events have occurred to facilitate the further development of Roeg’s reputation as a cinematic artist. In 2013 Faber and Faber published The World is Ever Changing, a collection of Roeg’s autobiographical reminiscences about life and art. From 1998 onwards, the prestigious US home video distribution company Criterion Collection released new editions of Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bad Timing and Insignificance on DVD and Blu-ray. These releases featured restored, high-definition 4K digital transfers supervised and/or approved by Roeg himself, alongside original trailers, deleted scenes, interviews, commentary tracks and comprehensive booklets with essays. The Criterion Collection website states that ‘The Criterion Collection is dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions of the highest technical quality, with supplemental features that enhance the appreciation of the art of film.’5 Although Criterion has branched out to embrace a more eclectic range of films,6 it is significant that Roeg’s key films were deemed of the quality required to place them alongside the work of art cinema superstars such as Robert Bresson, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, Michelangelo Antonioni, Agnès Varda, Ingmar Bergman, and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Roeg’s decision to engage with the production of Criterion’s premium products offers evidence of the director’s desire to secure the artistic reputation of his films, films which otherwise have had rather chequered histories of exhibition and reception. As I will show, we can also read the publication of The World is

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Ever Changing as an effort on Roeg’s part to secure his own reputation. In a 1989 article about the reputation of Alfred Hitchcock, Robert E. Kapsis was interested in the role of an artist in moulding their own public image, and argued that there is evidence that Hitchcock ‘made a concerted effort to reshape his reputation among serious critics’.7 I want to demonstrate that in some ways this has also been the case with Roeg. One thing that is intriguing about Roeg’s agency in the recent making and remaking of his own reputation as a filmmaking artist is the way in which he has chosen to articulate himself. Interestingly, what comes across in the book The World is Ever Changing and in Arena: Nicolas Roeg – It’s About Time is how far the director has sought to not only resist simplistic interpretations of his films but also in effect to echo the avoidance of straightforward linearity or rationality (or to echo, what is, for some, their inscrutability) of these films. Indeed, Roeg’s often protean approach to articulating himself with regards to his work has divided critical opinion. For example, writing in the Guardian in August 2013, the critic Christopher Bray called The World is Ever Changing a ‘baffling … mess of a book’.8 But in the Independent Ian Thomson insightfully noted that the style of writing echoed Roeg’s recurring interest in how memory has no continuity of time, and praised this ‘book of reflections on film and the art of illusion’.9 Indeed, Thomson recognised the book as a Roegian ‘montage of memory’ – as another example of the artist’s way of seeing the world. What becomes clear in The World is Ever Changing is that Roeg is very open about his desire to avoid any simplistic linear autobiographical narrative, remarking ‘My thoughts are the “bio” of my life. They are in no form of time and continuity.’10 Roeg admits these are his ‘scattered fragments of connected thoughts’.11 But a level of obfuscation has also informed his responses to interviews. For example, when interviewing the director for the online magazine The Quietus on 27 June 2011, Colm McAuliffe noted that Roeg ‘talks in a restless, fragmented fashion […] His speech is far from linear and he steadfastly refuses to pinpoint the centre for you.’12 It should be noted that this approach to engaging with questions about his work was noticeable some time before the publication of Roeg’s memoirs in 2013. For example, in his offbeat, idiosyncratic 1989 study of Roeg, Joseph Lanza noticed that the director had developed an inscrutable way of articulating himself: ‘When interviewed, Roeg seems quite comfortable in a netherworld between order and chaos. He even talks like his films as he ponders over the limitless shades of a single idea and fragmented and often inconclusive bursts of insight.’13 Indeed, Roeg tellingly chides Lanza, ‘I realize you’re probably going to murder me by assembling my life and career into some kind of neat little order.’14 It is evident that what we might think of as Roeg’s performative, obfuscatory idiolect has become more pronounced in recent years, because in earlier interviews (during the 1970s in particular) the director demonstrated much more clarity and precision in his responses to questions about his working practices. In his 1972 interview with Gordon Gow in Films and

The reputation of Nicolas Roeg

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Filming, for example, Roeg was happy to discuss his development as a film-maker (and the individual films) in a very matter-of-fact, straightforward, honest and lucid way. And in a major interview in Sight and Sound (Winter 1973/1974 edition) with Tim Milne and Penelope Houston, Roeg is similarly clear and forthcoming in his responses to the questions about the making of Don’t Look Now, and is evidently happy to shed light on the development of the project. I want to move on to explore how Roeg’s reputation has developed alongside the development of the reputation of a film he co-directed with Donald Cammell, Performance (1970).

The reputation of Performance Filmed and set in London in 1968, Performance stars James Fox as a London gangster, and the Rolling Stones frontman, Mick Jagger, as a reclusive rock star. It was produced by Sandy Lieberson (Goodtimes Enterprises) for Warner Bros (by then owned by the Seven Arts media corporation), but was initially shelved and subsequently re-cut ‘by no less than seven editors’15 primarily because of objections to the bisexuality, violence and drug taking on display.16 Eventually released in 1970, Performance has developed a very complex reputation over the subsequent years. It was funded by Warner Bros and features a global rock star and a major British actor in its key roles. But the film was formally experimental, and through its focus on fractured, incoherent identities and alienation it shares many of the concerns of major European modernist art films of the 1960s.17 The film also demonstrates generic fluidity, touching as it does on the horror genre as well as the gangster/crime genre and the musical. Performance was co-written and co-directed by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell (as I will show, one could argue that as Roeg’s reputation as a film-maker has grown, Donald Cammell’s central role in writing, directing and editing the film has often been comparatively marginalised). The immediate critical response to Performance was mixed. In the New York Times John Smith thought that it was a ‘loathsome film’.18 Furthermore, in a 2015 interview, the producer Sandy Lieberson remembered the premiere of the film in Los Angeles as: a total disaster. The ratings board originally gave it an X certificate, at a time when major movie companies had a pact not to distribute X-rated films. For a while, my career was in the toilet. I can’t recall if, as has been said, a Warner executive’s wife vomited at a screening – but somebody did throw up at one in Santa Monica and they stopped the show.19

But a number of critics praised the film at the time of its release. In Monthly Film Bulletin, for example, Jan Dawson advocated that ‘Performance is the kind of brilliant, baffling film about which it would be marginally more easy to write a book than a review.’20 Dawson further argued that the film displayed ‘purely cinematic language’ and was ‘Visually stunning’.21 Moreover,

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in Sight and Sound, Philip French appeared to understand the ambitions of the film to explore and critique rational views of identity, writing that ‘dreams can become reality and reality become a dream, systems of rational speculation can lead to a nightmare demonstration that life is like a labyrinth, both carefully ordered and meaningless’.22 But despite these strong reviews, in the words of Chuck Kleinhans (writing in Jump Cut in 1974), Performance ‘was generally abhorred by establishment reviewers but quickly became a cult film among the young’.23 So from the outset, Performance developed a complex, conflicted, fragmented reputation. But in his 1978 book on Roeg, Neil Feineman recognised the fact that the reputation of Performance had grown noticeably in the eight years since its release.24 Feineman writes: ‘Performance’s excessiveness, self-indulgence, and precociousness is, however, most forgivable because it stems from the most artistic and ambitious of sensibilities.’25 It was the tension between the artistic ambition of the film and its apparent excesses (but also, incidentally, the narratives of excess that circulated around the production of the film) that primarily shaped the reputation of Performance throughout the 1970s. This tension also led to the film developing a cult reputation. For Justin Smith, the cult reputation of Performance has been informed by ‘Firstly, the use of real locations, secondly, the employment of non-professional actors, and thirdly, the editing process.’26 We have a range of definitions for cult films. For Mathijs and Mendik, the anatomy of a cult film might include ‘innovation’, ‘badness’, ‘transgression’, ‘genre’, ‘intertextuality’, ‘loose ends’, ‘nostalgia’, and/or ‘gore’.27 Certainly, ‘innovation’, ‘transgression’ and ‘intertextuality’ are evident in Performance. Moreover, writing in 1985, Alexander Walker also acknowledged the film’s developing reputation as a cursed and dangerous text: ‘Performance remains a film maudit. It did indeed seem to have a curse set on it early in its conception and it fully lived up to all the disquieting rumours about it one heard over the years. The years!’28 Walker’s view of the reputation of the film evidently took into account narratives that had circulated about events that occurred during shooting (especially concerning sex and drugs), the issues that Warner Bros had with the film, and the subsequent effects the film appeared to have had on the actor James Fox in particular. Fox had objected to filming scenes in bed with Jagger,29 and subsequently took a break from film acting to engage in ‘evangelical good works’ as a member of the Navigators sect.30 As Mathijs and Mendik put it, ‘The “political economy” of a cult film can be evidenced by its “production legends and accidents”.’31 Certainly, as we can see then, Performance has developed a reputation built on (or at least informed by) a number of such ‘legends’. One of the key aspects of the cult reputation of Performance (tied to its production, exhibition and its contested authorship) is its status as a heavily edited film. Carefully charting the cuts made to the film, Justin Smith notes that the first studio editor assigned was ‘totally unsympathetic’, but that post-production supervisor Rudy Fehr then brought in Frank Mazzola who, along with the co-director Donald Cammell, edited the m ­ aterial

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The reputation of Nicolas Roeg

down, shortening the first half of the film so as to introduce Jagger more quickly and to reduce the early sex and violence. Smith also notes that Sandy Lieberson and Roeg were unhappy with the results. By late 1969, Warner Seven Arts had been taken over by Kinney National Services, and the new studio head, John Calley, agreed to release the Cammell/Mazzola cut, but not before the president of Warners, Ted Ashley, ordered fresh cuts, resulting in the version eventually released in the US in August 1970.32 It is worth pointing out here that many other films Roeg has directed have been cut by their producers. Significant cuts were also made to US prints of Walkabout,33 and twenty-two minutes of cuts were made to US prints of The Man Who Fell to Earth.34 This has led to a number of different prints circulating of these films, which has impacted upon their cult reputations and the concomitant developing reputation of Roeg as a cult director who has refused to work within recognised rules of the mainstream.35 The cult reputation of Performance was further secured in Britain when it was screened on television on Moviedrome in the mid-1980s, itself a cult Sunday night BBC2 television programme (1988–2000). Indeed, the presenter Alex Cox claimed Performance as a cult film in his introduction to this broadcast. Furthermore, the growing cult reputation of Performance in Britain was also evidenced in popular culture in the 1980s, not least by the first verse of Big Audio Dynamite’s 1985 pop hit ‘E=MC2’, which is effectively a short plot summary of the film, and the Happy Mondays’ track ‘Mad Cyril’ on the 1988 album Bummed, which features voices sampled from the film. By the end of the twentieth century a number of books had been published on Performance, further cementing its reputation as a cult film, including Mick Brown’s Performance: The Ultimate A–Z (Bloomsbury Movie Guide) (1999) and Performance (Pocket Movie Guide) (2000), and Paul Buck’s Performance: A Biography of the Classic Sixties Film (2012). Interestingly, all three books spend as much time exploring the ancillary narratives circulating around the making of the film (links to the history of the Rolling Stones and the Kray twins) and its aftermath and rumours about the relationships between the characters involved in the production (primarily Mick Jagger, James Fox and Anita Pallenberg) as the film text itself. Further proof of the development of the complex cult reputation of Performance can be found in its inclusion in Ali Catterall and Simon Wells’s 2002 book Your Face Here: British Cult Movies Since the Sixties36 and Sarah Barrow and John White’s 2008 book Fifty Key British Films.37 Justin Smith persuasively argues that Performance is an ‘important’ British film because it broke new ground aesthetically, because it has become a social document that ‘gives cultural expression to a particular moment’, and because it demonstrates ‘how innovation in cinema is always dependent upon a particular set of industrial as well as cultural circumstances’.38 Despite its growing cult status, Performance has also continued to develop a strong reputation as a piece of experimental, art filmmaking. That is, it has also been taken seriously as cinematic ‘art’. For Peter Wollen, writing in

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his ‘25 years on’ piece ‘Possession’ in Sight and Sound in 1995, Performance was the British film ‘which comes closest to a modernist art film in the New Wave mould’.39 The film was also described by Colin MacCabe in his 1998 book as ‘one of the very few genuinely modernist texts of the cinema’.40 For Neil Sinyard, writing in 1991, Performance was also ‘A rare bird in British cinema: a major modernist movie.’41 Critics such as Steve Neale and David Bordwell have set out the parameters of modernist art cinema. For example, Neale showed that art films are marked by a stress on visual style, a suppression of action, a stress on character rather than plot and by an ‘interiorisation of dramatic conflict’.42 Neale also raised the important issue of how far art cinema situates itself as ‘art’.43 In some senses Performance does this through its emphasis on strikingly memorable visuals, its use of colour, and especially through its mise-en-scène and editing schema. Furthermore, David Bordwell argued that ‘the art cinema defines itself explicitly against the classical narrative mode, and especially against the cause-effect linkage of events. These linkages become looser, more tenuous in the art film.’44 Art films often feature psychologically complex characters lacking defined goals and can have ‘a certain drifting episodic quality’ to their narratives.45 This is certainly the case with Performance (figure 10). Performance has developed a complex, contested reputation informed by three key discursive strands. Firstly, the reputation of Performance has been informed by the discourse that marks it as a path-breaking, experimental, trans-generic film in artistic terms. Secondly, the reputation of Performance has been informed by the discourse that has developed around its fragmented, multi-layered authorship. It is very significant that despite Donald Cammell’s central involvement in Performance, its authorship is more often than not tied to the developing artistic reputation of Nicolas Roeg. Indeed, I am aware that this chapter is also doing this by using the

10  Performance (dir. Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1970)

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The reputation of Nicolas Roeg

film as an example of the development of Roeg’s reputation, and I certainly do not want to argue that Cammell was less important (indeed he was possibly more important) to the making of this film. Some might say Performance is much more a Donald Cammell film than a Nic Roeg film. Colin MacCabe details how far the film developed out of Cammell’s life experience (crystallised in his script), and how far he was involved in direction and editing.46 It is fair to say, though, that the film was largely the result of a partnership between the two men. For MacCabe, ‘Roeg and Cammell functioned as one’.47 Nevertheless, many fans of Performance (including Roeg’s own son Luc, as he admits in Arena: Nicolas Roeg – It’s About Time) find it difficult not to perceive Performance as anything other than a Roeg film. This highlights the fact that the reputations of art films are not always securely based in historical fact; they can also develop through the circulation of misinformation and myth. Thirdly, linked to these first two strands (artistry and authorship), is the discourse of the steadily developing cult reputation of Performance, which has been informed by mythical narratives linked to the production and reception of the film, and the subsequent activities of the key players, but also some of the art film qualities that mesh with cult forms of appeal such as the transgressive and trans-generic. While not as clearly informed by issues of blurred or even contested authorship as Performance, most of Roeg’s films have developed contested reputations that balance discourses of artistry and cult. These include Don’t Look Now (1973), the film to which I now want to turn my attention.

The reputation of Don’t Look Now Adapted from a short story by Daphne du Maurier and produced by Peter Katz via the London-based production company Casey Productions and Rome-based Eldorado Films, Don’t Look Now (1973) tells the story of a married couple, John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), who, grieving the tragic death of their young daughter, travel to Venice, where Baxter (an architect) has been commissioned to restore a church (figure 11). While in Venice the couple encounter two clairvoyant sisters who explain that their dead daughter is trying to contact them. While Laura is willing to countenance the claims of the sisters, John instead refuses to believe in such non-rational forces and is subsequently murdered in the infamous climactic sequence of the film. Like Performance, Don’t Look Now is a film with at least one international star in the cast, and which brings together aspects of genre cinema (this time horror as opposed to crime/gangster) with aspects of experimental art cinema (a non-linear structure, elliptical editing, impressionism and ambiguity) and the eroticism that was so often associated with European art cinema of the 1960s. From its release in 1973, Don’t Look Now, like Performance, developed a complex and in many ways conflicted reputation. This conflicted reputation

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11  Don’t Look Now (dir. Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

was initially facilitated by decisions taken concerning the exhibition of the film. For example, Chuck Kleinhans notes that in Chicago Don’t Look Now opened in an arthouse theatre ‘for a moderate run’ before being screened as second feature to ‘a slick schlock thriller’, The Possession of Joel Delaney (1972).48 In the UK Don’t Look Now was screened in a double bill with The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973), suggesting that exhibitors did not know what type of audience the film might attract. But on its release in late 1973 Don’t Look Now was widely admired by critics. For example, Stephen Farber in the New York Times wrote ‘This disturbing thriller is possibly the most sophisticated horror film ever made.’49 Variety argued the film was ‘neatly-made, splendidly acted’.50 Gordon Gow (in Films and Filming) thought it was ‘a thriller of some depth’.51 Penelope Houston in Monthly Film Bulletin wrote ‘Roeg sees with a camera – perhaps he thinks with a camera – and from the audience’s point of view the title of this film should be “do look now”: visual connections are constant, swift and compelling, and the story is told through them.’52 But for Richard Wagner, writing in the US film journal The Velvet Light Trap in 1974, Roeg was perhaps displaying pretentious tendencies: ‘In many scenes Roeg displays his growth as a film-maker but sometimes shows that he has become slightly over-indulgent.’53 This view of Roeg as a pretentious film-maker links him in other ways to art cinema traditions, as many other broadly comparable directors have suffered similar criticisms. Don’t Look Now also caused controversy on its initial release in the UK and US, primarily due to the now infamous sex scene featuring Christie and Sutherland (it was rumoured that Christie and Sutherland had full penetrative sex during shooting). This sequence (and responses to it) has continued to inform the reputation of the film in a range of ways, not least through its development of cult status. The reviewer in the British newspaper the Daily Mail (5 October 1973) wrote that ‘One of the frankest love scenes ever to

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The reputation of Nicolas Roeg

be filmed is likely to plunge lovely Julie Christie into the biggest censorship row since Last Tango in Paris.’ The cult reputation of Don’t Look Now was also facilitated by the fact that the film was given an ‘R’ (for ‘Restricted’) rating in the US, which was a ‘kiss of death at the box-office’. It was given an X (adults only) certificate in England, which similarly restricted its potential audience.54 While discourses surrounding the Don’t Look Now sex scene have come to play a significant role in the cult reputation of the film – and by extension of Roeg as a director – the representation of sex in almost all of his films is one of the key markers of Roeg’s reputation. Neil Sinyard argues ‘Roeg’s cinema is extremely passionate, extremely sexy. He is the most Freudian and the most Lawrentian of modern directors.’55 But it is also significant that the representation of sex has been a key aspect of the development of art cinema more broadly. As Steve Neale points out, ‘With the opening of a market in America, European films were able to trade more stably and commercially both upon their status as “adult” art and upon their reputation for “explicit” representations of sexuality.’56 While the cult status of Don’t Look Now has been informed by the stories that have become attached to it surrounding the sex sequence, other near-mythical narratives have played into its reputation, such as the tragic drowning of a young child at Julie Christie’s farm in Wales in 1979, which some took to be related to the unforgettable sequence in the film that sees the Baxters’s daughter drowning in a pond in the garden of their English country home.57 Interestingly, similar near-mythical stories also inform the cult status of other Roeg films. On The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), for example, the star David Bowie (who plays the alien Thomas Newton) became seriously ill on the shoot.58 And the Bad Timing (1980) shoot traumatised the cast and crew, which, according to Roeg, ‘fucked up more people in my crew than anything else I’ve done’.59 This was especially the case with Art Garfunkel, whose fiancé committed suicide.60 The development of the cult reputations of Roeg’s films has also been facilitated by the growth of the cult nature of their eclectic soundtracks, which snake through jazz, classical, blues, popular music, American folk and roots, avant-garde, improvised and classical music. For example, Performance features Merry Clayton, Ry Cooder, Jack Nitzsche, Mick Jagger and Buffy Sainte-Marie on its soundtrack. Bad Timing features Keith Jarrett, Tom Waits, The Who, Billie Holiday, Harry Partch, Thelonious Monk and Beethoven. Interestingly, the influence of music on the films continually bleeds out into related cultural texts, as evidenced by the critically acclaimed albums made by the cult American musician Jim O’Rourke named after Roeg’s films Eureka, Bad Timing and Insignificance (O’Rourke’s album The Visitor is incidentally named after an album released by David Bowie’s character Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth). Don’t Look Now was first shown on British television on 30 December 1979 (with the sex scene significantly cut). In subsequent years its reputation has grown. For Mark Sanderson (in his 1996 book on the film), ‘Don’t

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Look Now can be looked at in several ways: as a brilliant example of literary adaptation; as a gothic thriller; as black comedy; as an exploration of grief.’61 As such, the film, like Performance, has a generic fluidity that has facilitated the development of its cult status. Moreover, Sanderson notes that the sequence in which Baxter follows a figure in a red hooded coat (that he believes to be his dead daughter) through dark Venice alleys, only to be brutally murdered by a dwarf, is seen to be one of the most impressive in modern cinema.62 This sequence combines innovative editing, colour and carefully designed sound in order to create an almost unbearable sense of tension. In 2010 John Orr calls it ‘one of the great montage sequences of the sound era’.63 In recent years some critics who wrote about the film in slightly negative terms on its initial release have changed their positions on it considerably. For example, Roger Ebert, who initially thought the film suffered from a ‘weakness of the denouement’ has recently admitted that it is a ‘masterpiece of physical filmmaking’.64 Don’t Look Now was voted best British film of all time by Time Out magazine in 2011, in a poll of journalists, actors, producers, directors and other industry players. In recent years the reputation of Don’t Look Now as a genuine artistic achievement has been facilitated by the decisions of a number of film-­ makers to pay homage to the film in their own work, or at least to note its influence. For example, the director Lynne Ramsay has signalled the importance of Don’t Look Now to her own artistic development, and the films In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008) and the James Bond film Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006) visually reference the film in key sequences.65 In terms of Roeg’s reputation with academic historians of British cinema, much of the work of the director sits in a complicated position within existing critical paradigms. For Neil Sinyard, in his 1991 monograph, for example, Roeg was best understood as part of the ‘mad poet’ stream of British cinema that included Powell and Pressburger, Ken Russell, John Boorman and Michael Reeves.66 Joseph Lanza also notes the influence on Roeg of Powell and Pressburger’s sense of rich colour and complicated narratives in particular.67 Roeg himself has spoken of his admiration for Alfred Hitchcock,68 and of the influence of Truffaut.69 It is interesting to note that the artistic reputations of Powell and Pressburger, Russell and Reeves, especially, have all advanced significantly during the period in which Roeg’s own reputation has developed, no doubt due to increasing academic engagement with their work and the concomitant ‘taking seriously’ of their legacies. Roeg’s films do not always sit easily within the fantasy/realism dichotomy that has fuelled much criticism of British cinema.70 Moreover, one can see from the shifting critical responses to the films of Roeg that one of the key aspects they share is a desire to resist simplistic generic classification. Joan Hawkins argues that ‘hybrid genres like art-horror films simply point up the problems which have historically characterized all attempts at genre definition’.71 This might be the case with Don’t Look Now, especially. Writing about 1960s films, Mark Betz argues ‘Clear-cut distinctions between high and low are difficult to establish in most marketing materials for European



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art films of this period. They are quite fluid and porous texts.’72 This is also arguably the case with all Roeg’s films, which often actively transgress distinctions between high and low culture, modernism and popular culture. The casting of pop stars Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Art Garfunkel in Performance, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Bad Timing respectively has certainly facilitated this.

Conclusion Through critical and academic recognition of the formal innovations of films such as Performance and Don’t Look Now, Nicolas Roeg has come to be seen as a poetic, innovative figure working at the vanguard of British cinema. But his reputation is not straightforward or even secure. While in some ways Roeg’s work has been seen to be engaged with art and experimentation and has displayed the influence of high culture, thus significantly pushing the boundaries of what a British cinema might do, he has also often been written about and spoken of as a figure equally interested in popular culture, violence, sex, eroticism and irrational, unmanageable forces. These interests have seen him develop a reputation as a cult director of cult films. These reputational tensions – and the fact that Roeg often worked outside of Britain and away from the British film industry, but also outside the conventions of genre filmmaking – have led to a situation in which academic historians have struggled to place him within the contexts of histories of British cinema. Recent works such as David Andrews’s book, Theorizing Art Cinemas, notice overlaps between categories such as ‘art’ and ‘cult’ in film culture.73 Roeg’s reputation would seem to fit a more fluid, nuanced understanding of British art cinema. In addition to this – and perhaps in some ways because of it – Roeg himself has evidently been eager to actively facilitate the making of his own reputation as an artist, especially since the turn of the millennium. As we have seen, he has done this primarily through his involvement in the production of a range of ancillary texts related to his life and career. Intriguingly, Roeg has often developed and shaped his reputation in a performative way through these ancillary texts,74 by sometimes employing a level of obsfucation which effectively mirrors what, for many, is the irrational inscrutability of the films themselves. Timothy Corrigan has written about examples of ‘the contemporary auteur’s construction and promotion of a self’,75 using Francis Ford Coppola as an example. What the documentary Arena: Nicolas Roeg – It’s About Time and Roeg’s subsequent book The World is Ever Changing demonstrate, for example, is that Roeg has similarly been engaged in the construction and promotion of his own reputational ‘self’. It is now evident that these ancillary texts – and the film texts they pertain to – have developed a symbiotic relationship in recent years. They have become interlaced in a complex discourse of reputation-making which continues to feed into Roeg’s still-emergent filmmaking identity.

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Notes  1 While Roeg’s reputation has been primarily built on the films he made between 1968 and 1980, it is important to recognise that before working on Performance with Donald Cammell he spent a decade as a camera crew member, progressing to second unit work. He was a cameraman on The Masque of the Red Death (Roger Corman, 1964), The Caretaker (Clive Donner, 1963), Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, 1966), Far From the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967) and Petulia (Richard Lester, 1968), and second unit work on Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962).  2 In her work on the melodramas of the US director Douglas Sirk, Barbara Klinger argues that changing responses to films and film-makers across decades – informed by shifts in cultural contexts and, in particular, academic approaches – bring about new and often increasingly complex sets of meanings. Klinger argues that Sirk often effectively lost control of the meaning of his films ‘through their relationship to social and historical developments that dominated the terms of their reception’. Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 158–9.  3 The remit of BBC Four is ‘to reflect a range of UK and international arts, music and culture. It should provide an ambitious range of innovative, high quality programming that is intellectually and culturally enriching, taking an expert and in-depth approach to a wide range of subjects.’ See http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/our_work/services/television/service_licences/bbc_four.html. Accessed 10 July 2017.   4 Roeg’s influence has been felt far beyond British cinema. It is evident in the work of Todd Haynes, Steven Soderbergh, Wong Kar-Wai and Charlie Kaufman, among many others. Christopher Nolan has remarked that Memento (2000) would have been ‘pretty unthinkable’ without Roeg. See Ryan Gilbey, ‘Nicolas Roeg: “I Don’t Want to be Ahead of my Time” ’, Guardian, 10 March 2011, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/mar/10/nicolas-roeg. Accessed 10 July 2017.  5 www.criterion.com. Accessed 30 September 2016.  6 See James Kendrick, ‘What is the Criterion? The Criterion Collection as an Archive of Film as Culture’, Journal of Film and Video, 53: 2/3 (2001), pp. 124–39; Kate Egan, ‘The Criterion Collection, Cult-Art Films and Japanese Horror’, Transnational Cinemas, 8: 1 (2017), pp. 65–79.  7 Robert E. Kapsis, ‘Reputation Building and the Film Art World: The Case of Alfred Hitchcock’, The Sociological Quarterly, 30: 1 (1989), pp. 15–35; p. 22.  8 Christopher Bray ‘The World is Ever Changing by Nicolas Roeg – Review’, Guardian, 25 August 2013, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2013/aug/25/nicolas-roeg-world-changing-review. Accessed 14 December 2018.  9 Ian Thomson, ‘Book Review: The World Is Ever Changing, By Nicolas Roeg’, Independent, 12 July 2013, available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/books/reviews/book-review-the-world-is-ever-changing-bynicolas-roeg-8706126.html. Accessed 14 December 2018. 10 Nicolas Roeg, The World is Ever Changing (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), p. 4. 11 Roeg, The World is Ever Changing, pp. 4–5.

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12 Colm McAuliffe, ‘Leaving it to Chance: Maverick Director Nicolas Roeg On Don’t Look Now’, The Quietus, 27 June 2011, available at: http://thequietus.com/ articles/06489-leaving-it-to-chance-maverick-director-nicolas-roeg/. Accessed 29 June 2016. 13 Joseph Lanza, Fragile Geometry: The Films, Philosophy, and Misadventures of Nicolas Roeg (New York, NY: PAJ Publications, 1989), p. 15. 14 Nicolas Roeg, interviewed by Joseph Lanza, in Lanza, Fragile Geometry, p. 91. 15 Jan Dawson, ‘Performance’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 38: 444–55 (1971), pp. 27–8; p. 28. 16 Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (London: Orion, 2005), p. 418. 17 Michael O’Pray, ‘The British Avant-Garde and Art Cinema from the 1970s to the 1990s’, in Andrew Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (London and New York, NY: Cassell, 1996), pp. 178–90; p. 179. 18 Lanza, Fragile Geometry, p. 40. 19 Sandy Lieberson, interviewed in Jack Watkins, ‘James Fox and Sandy Lieberson: How We Made Performance’, Guardian, 21 July 2015, available at: https://www. theguardian.com/film/2015/jul/21/james-fox-sandy-lieberson-how-we-madeperformance. Accessed 11 October 2016. 20 Dawson, ‘Performance’, p. 28. 21 Dawson, ‘Performance’, p. 28. 22 Philip French, ‘Performance’, Sight and Sound, 40: 2 (1971), pp. 68–9; p. 69. 23 Chuck Kleinhans, ‘Nicholas Roeg: Permutations without Profundity’, Jump Cut, 3 (1974), pp. 13–17; p. 13. 24 Neil Feineman, Nicolas Roeg (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1978), p. 32. 25 Feineman, Nicolas Roeg, p. 58. 26 Justin Smith, Withnail and Us (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), p. 47. 27 Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik, ‘Editorial Introduction: What is Cult Film?’, in Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (eds), The Cult Film Reader (Maidenhead and New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Open University Press, 2008), pp. 1–11; pp. 2–3. 28 Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 422. 29 Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 415. 30 Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 423. 31 Mathijs and Mendik, ‘Editorial Introduction: What is Cult Film?’, pp. 7–11. 32 Smith, Withnail and Us, pp. 50–1. 33 Lanza, Fragile Geometry, p. 43. 34 Lanza, Fragile Geometry, p. 53. 35 This conception of Roeg as cult director relates to existing definitions of cult authorship. See for example the definitions given in Mathijs and Sexton’s chapter on cult authorship in Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton, Cult Cinema: An Introduction (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001); Wikanda Promkhuntong, ‘Wong Kar-Wai: “Cultural Hybrid”, Celebrity Endorsement and Star-Auteur Branding’, Celebrity Studies, 5: 3 (2014), pp. 348–53; Kate Egan, ‘Precious Footage of the Auteur at Work: Framing, Accessing, Using, and Cultifying Vivian Kubrick’s Making the Shining’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 13: 1 (2015), pp. 63–82; and David Church, ‘The “Cult” of Kubrick: Cult Cinema in the Land of the Auteur’, Offscreen, 10: 5 (2006), available at: http:// offscreen.com/view/cult_kubrick. Accessed 14 December 2018.

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British art cinema 36 Ali Catterall and Simon Wells, Your Face Here: British Cult Movies Since the Sixties (London: Fourth Estate, 2002), pp. 68–91. 37 Justin Smith, ‘Performance (1970)’, in Sarah Barrow and John White (eds), Fifty Key British Films (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), pp. 147–51. 38 Smith, ‘Performance (1970)’, p. 147. 39 Peter Wollen, ‘Possession’, Sight and Sound, 5: 9 (1995), pp. 20–3; p. 23. 40 Colin MacCabe, Performance (London: British Film Institute, 1998), p. 78. 41 Neil Sinyard, The Films of Nicolas Roeg (London: Letts, 1991), p. 11. 42 Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen, 22: 1 (1981), pp. 11–40; p. 13. 43 Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, p. 33. 44 David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 5th edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 716–24; p. 717. 45 Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, p. 718. 46 MacCabe, Performance, pp. 22–3. 47 MacCabe, Performance, p. 23. 48 Kleinhans, ‘Nicholas Roeg: Permutations without Profundity’, p. 13. 49 Stephen Farber, ‘Don’t Look Now Will Scare You – Subtly’, New York Times, 23 December 1973, p. 67. 50 Lanza, Fragile Geometry, p. 46. 51 Mark Sanderson, Don’t Look Now (London: British Film Institute, 2012), p. 22. 52 Penelope Houston, ‘Don’t Look Now’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 40: 468–79 (1973), p. 205. 53 Richard Wagner, ‘The Search for Self in the Films of Nicolas Roeg’, Velvet Light Trap: A Critical Journal of Film and Television, 13 (1974), pp. 31–5; p. 35. 54 Sanderson, Don’t Look Now, p. 22. 55 Sinyard, The Films of Nicolas Roeg, p. 3. 56 Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, p. 33. 57 Lanza, Fragile Geometry, p. 46. 58 Lanza, Fragile Geometry, p. 52. 59 Lanza, Fragile Geometry, p. 58. 60 Lanza, Fragile Geometry, p. 58. 61 Sanderson, Don’t Look Now, p. 9. 62 Sanderson, Don’t Look Now, p. 69. 63 John Orr, Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 114. 64 Roger Ebert, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-dont-looknow-1974. Accessed 12 November 2016. 65 See Wally Hammond, ‘Martin McDonagh in In Bruges’ (2008), Time Out, 15 April 2008, available at: http://www.timeout.com/london/film/in-bruges; Vanessa Thorpe, ‘Cannes Sensation Lynne Ramsay Finds Inspiration in her own Family Drama’, Observer, 14 May 2011, available at: https://www.theguard​ ian.com/film/2011/may/14/cannes-lynne-ramsay-family-drama. Accessed 12 November 2016. 66 Sinyard, The Films of Nicolas Roeg, p. 4. 67 Lanza, Fragile Geometry, p. 20. 68 Tom Milne and Penelope Houston, ‘Don’t Look Now: Nicolas Roeg Interviewed by Tom Milne and Penelope Houston’, Sight and Sound, 43: 1 (1973/74), pp. 1–8; p. 5.

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69 Gordon Gow, ‘Identity: Nicolas Roeg in an Interview with Gordon Gow’, Films and Filming, 18: 4 (1972), pp. 18–24; p. 21. 70 See Julian Petley, ‘The Lost Continent’, in Charles Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1986), pp. 98–119; Charles Barr, ‘Introduction: Amnesia and Schizophrenia’, in Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, pp. 1–30. 71 Joan Hawkins, ‘Sleaze Mania, Euro-Trash and High Art: The Place of European Art Films in American Low Culture’, in Mathijs and Mendik, The Cult Film Reader, pp. 119–32; p. 131. 72 Mark Betz, ‘Art, Exploitation, Underground’, in Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lazaro Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andy Willis (eds), Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 202–22; p. 210. 73 David Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas: Foreign, Cult, Avant-Garde, and Beyond (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013). 74 Cecelia Sayad argues that authorship can be seen as a performative practice. See Cecelia Sayad, Performing Authorship: Self-Inscription and Corporeality in the Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013). 75 Timothy Corrigan, ‘The Commerce of Auteurism’, in Virginia Wright Wexman (ed.), Film and Authorship (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), pp. 96–111; p. 102.

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‘As the first Black face on the scene, I had to push the doors open’ – Horace Ové and Pressure (1975) Sally Shaw Pressure was the first British feature film to be written and directed by a Black film-maker, Horace Ové. Made during a particularly turbulent period in British race relations, and released in the UK in 1976, Pressure tackled thorny issues such as racism in the workplace, Black homelessness and police brutality head-on. As this chapter will argue, Pressure was much more than a polemical film. In its sensitive portrayal of the gradual political awakening of Tony (Herbert Norville), a ‘second generation’ Black youth, Pressure also had much to say about intergenerational conflict within ‘immigrant’ families – a subject seldom touched on in film before. Moreover, Pressure is more formally innovative than it is often given credit for. The film was shot on location in and around London’s Ladbroke Grove, and much emphasis has (perhaps rightly) been placed on what Kobena Mercer has described as its ‘documentary realist aesthetic’.1 Ové’s interest in surrealist film, however, allied to what Paul Gilroy would term as a diasporic ‘double-consciousness’, ensured that a pivotal sequence in Pressure eschewed documentary realism. This chapter will posit that it is the combination of documentary realism allied to the transcendental dream sequence, in which Tony brutally confronts Britain’s colonial past, which enables Ové’s film to be situated within the taxonomy of ‘art cinema’. This chapter will therefore argue that Pressure not only directly paved the way for other Black British feature films such as Babylon (Franco Rosso, 1980) and Burning an Illusion (Menelik Shabazz, 1981), but also allowed for the dynamic exploration of postcolonial histories and contested diasporic identity as espoused in the work of Sankofa, Black Audio Film Collective, Ceddo and the creative practice of Ngozi Onwurah. In his book The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy highlights the ‘creative cultural exchanges, spaces of belonging and “contact zones” that occur between (at least) two … cultural assemblages’.2 Furthermore, Rajinder Dudrah envisages diaspora as a dynamic conversation, best understood in terms of ‘socio-cultural loops’, rather than simple ‘flows’ from ‘home’ to the place of settlement and back.3 It is therefore necessary to explore Ové’s personal ‘diasporic journey’ in relation to the subsequent making of Pressure. Horace Ové grew up in Trinidad, attended art school in London in 1960, worked in Italy (as an extra in Cleopatra), and returned to London, where he

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Horace Ové and Pressure (1975)

studied at London Film School and practised as a photographer and worked as a director on the BBC’s World About Us documentary strand, before he made Pressure. The notion of diaspora is important when considering Ové’s work, but perhaps Pressure is the text that most fully encompasses the cultural, political and spatial vicissitudes of his creative practice. Certainly, in interview, Ové was keen to point out that the film’s narrative had strongly autobiographical elements (and that Pressure owed as much to Fellini as it did to the British documentary tradition) and that his Trinidadian background was integral to his creative vision as a film-maker. Indeed, his youth in Trinidad influenced his ‘world in filmmaking’ in several crucial ways.4 The history of Trinidad and Tobago is a complex one, but some consideration of both temporally distant socio-political events, and those that took place from the time of Ové’s birth in Belmont in 1939 until his leaving for England in 1960, is necessary in forming a wider understanding of his work. The island of Trinidad and Tobago (separate territories until 1888) has a complicated past of repeated colonisation ‘by competing European powers’.5 Trinidad, which was originally colonised by Spain in 1498, was subject to invasions from ‘the English, the Dutch and the French’ throughout the seventeenth century. Around this time, hundreds of slaves, forcibly removed from the African continent, were imported to Trinidad to toil on its sugar cane plantations. Trinidad’s ‘plantation economy’ drew in more settlers, most notably French Haitians.6 In 1797, Britain, drawn to a lucrative source of revenue from the sugar cane plantations, laid claim to Trinidad; it was declared a British Crown Colony five years later. Trinidad’s slaves were emancipated in 1834. Following a subsequent British-brokered free-trade agreement, a wave of Indian, Portuguese and Chinese migrants settled in Trinidad – numbers are estimated at around 150,000 between 1845 and 1917. Tobago’s history was even more tempestuous than that of Trinidad, with more changes in ‘ownership’ than ‘any other Caribbean territory’.7 Although it too became a British Crown Colony, this was contested by the French in 1781 and 1802; it was finally returned to British rule in 1814. As with Trinidad, Tobago, with its sugar cane plantations – built and maintained on African slave labour – was a prosperous source of income for Britain. However, the abolition of slavery and a natural disaster (a hurricane) ensured that Britain no longer regarded Tobago as ‘viable as a separate colony’; to this end Britain amalgamated it with Trinidad in 1888.8 One consequence of this turbulent history was that Trinidad became what Ové described as a ‘multiracial melting-pot’: ‘we had all these people living in Trinidad, French and the Spanish and the Portuguese and people like that […] Africans, Indians […] people from India and who knows’.9 European colonisation and African slavery cast a long shadow over Trinidad’s history (and this narrative would subtly permeate much of Ové’s work, not least Pressure). The fissures in Trinidad’s contested ‘ownership’ and the enslavement of African peoples ensured that certain important aspects of its culture were built on strongly socially oppositional premises. Indeed, as Yusuf Hassan has compellingly argued: ‘Those who thought that

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they could depoliticise African aesthetics [were] … in for a rude shock. Black people have long used culture as a weapon in the struggle against imperialism (and colonisation). It has proved a very effective tool to mobilise and raise consciousness.’10 Carnival, an integral element of Trinidadian social life (and one which Ové would later document in his seminal 1973 documentary King Carnival for BBC 2’s World About Us strand), had its origins in the late eighteenth-century masquerades and dances held by French plantation owners on the island.11 African slaves, who were excluded from the ‘celebrations’, constructed their own oppositional ‘Mas’ which drew on political orature, traditional folklore and the bacchanal – it was this iteration that would form the basis of Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago.12 Indeed, when the Trinidadian tradition of Carnival was exported to London’s Notting Hill in the mid-1960s, it was colloquially referred to as ‘playing Mas’.13 Relatedly, Calypso developed in Trinidad when African slaves were first brought to the island in the seventeenth century to work on the sugar plantations.14 Again, this was an oppositional cultural form, one that grew as a response to the banning of slaves from communicating with each other as they laboured.15 Calypso became both an alternative form of communication between enslaved people and a way in which the cultural mores of the plantation owners could be ridiculed.16 It is telling that in Ové’s 1970 documentary film Reggae, a Black male interviewee responds thus to the question, ‘what does reggae mean to you?’: ‘Well it’s like Calypso, it’s straight from the heart, from the mother country. Reggae is a sound that only Black men understand.’ Ové was born into a highly politicised and socially turbulent Trinidad. The decade leading up to Ové’s birth in Belmont in 1939 witnessed the widespread organisation of trade unions and people took to the streets to press for greater local democracy.17 Shortly before Ové was born, striking and rioting reached a crescendo in Trinidad.18 While ostensibly concerned with the social inequality perpetuated by the colony’s British-owned oil industry (under which white foreign managers enjoyed a much higher standard of living than the indigenous population), at the heart of these protests was not only a plea for better working conditions and universal adult suffrage, but an overarching desire for the country’s independence.19 A further aspect of Trinidad’s history had an influence on Ové’s subsequent filmmaking career. Early in World War Two, Winston Churchill, under the auspices of the ‘Destroyers-for-Bases Deal’, granted permission for American military bases to be built throughout the British West Indies.20 Two major bases were established in Trinidad in 1941 and ‘large numbers of white American soldiers arrived in the colony’.21 As MacDonald has written, the impact of this was Janus-faced. On one hand, it facilitated an ‘economic boom’ for many of the working-class indigenous population, a large proportion of whom were employed by the American army to improve the colony’s infrastructure and technology, with the large-scale building of roads and the modernisation of Port of Spain’s docks.22 Less welcome was the ­‘re-colonising’ of Trinidad by America, which could actively be seen in

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Horace Ové and Pressure (1975)

‘discrimination [and exploitation] practiced by US personnel’ against local people; prostitution, for example, increased exponentially.23 Despite rising levels of local protest, manned US military bases remained in Trinidad until long after World War Two; it was not until 1977 that the US withdrew.24 The facilities built for the troops based in Trinidad included numerous cinemas, which were evidently frequented by both US army personnel and local people. In interview, Ové recalled that in his youth cinema-going was a popular leisure pursuit in Trinidad: ‘They [the US military] built a lot of cinemas … So when they weren’t doing anything, they went to the cinema, and so did I.’25 While many of the films shown in the cinemas were from Hollywood, French, Italian and Spanish features were also exhibited, a factor that Ové attributed to demand from Trinidad’s ‘multi-racial’ population. For Ové, exposure to a wide range of films ‘built up my early interest’, as did the fact that ‘a few features’ were made in Trinidad and he was able to watch some of the filming.26 This, allied to Trinidad’s multi-racial, colonised, and heavily contested socio-political culture, helped to pave the way for Ové’s future creative life. The timing of Ové’s employment on the set of Cleopatra in Italy was particularly auspicious. As he remembers, ‘I arrived in Italy when the ­filmmaking was really interesting there. Fellini and Antonioni and several others were making realist and surrealist films. And that’s how in my head I got even more into filmmaking.’27 It is useful to reflect on Ové’s stated interest in ‘realist and surrealist films’. In interview, he discussed the importance of dreams and the subconscious, and the way in which as a youth in Trinidad dreams were perceived to be imbued with portent and meaning, were taken seriously, analysed and openly discussed. For Ové, Fellini’s films, alongside those of Luis Buñuel, with their distinctive mixing of fantasy and reality, offered an aesthetic freedom to the film-maker; and, to him, they were ‘a revelation’.28 As will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter, this blending of realism and surrealism is apparent in Pressure and, to follow Eleftheria Thanouli’s definition, enables us to discursively position the text as an ‘art film’: the main characteristics … of art films are objective realism, subjective realism and authorial presence […] a realistic construction of the story world … the episodic construction of the plot, and the open-ended resolution. The desire for verisimilitude in the construction of time and space [is] translated into a preference for location shooting, natural lighting, and temps mort in the action, striving to offer the viewers a more realistic experience than the one found in the fantasy world of a Hollywood film […] Subjective realism [allows for] the depiction of characters with an emphasis on their psychological state. Art-film protagonists often … drift aimlessly from one situation to another. Their […] mental states are represented with subjective images like dreams, hallucinations and fantasy […] The stylistic and narrative options in art cinema can be complementarily motivated by these principles, but a clear balance is rarely achieved; whenever the two types of realism clash with the interventions of the auteur, the art film seeks to solve the problem in a sophisticated way: through ambiguity.29

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Ové’s time in Italy persuaded him that his future lay in filmmaking, and to this end he enrolled with the London Film School. Following this period of study, Ové made two independent documentary films, Baldwin’s Nigger (1969) and the aforementioned Reggae (1970). He then went on to direct several documentaries for the BBC, including two episodes of the BBC2 television series The World About Us. In interview, Ové asserted that these early experiences of documentary making were of seminal importance to the subsequent making of Pressure in several crucial respects. Not least, they allowed for his informal networking with highly skilled, politically aware creative practitioners, some of whom Ové was able to call on to work with him on Pressure for free. As he explained: You see, the lucky thing with me in the 1960s and 1970s, and especially because of that whole movement, the radical movement [which encompassed the British Black Power movement], there were white film-makers who I had [previously] worked with, who were supporting the type of film that I was making. So when I made Pressure they came and they said, ‘listen, we will help you. We know that you do not have the kind of budget that you will need, so we will come in and help you’. And they would give me a certain amount of time […] a week for free working [for me].30

However, Ové also recalled that working as a Black film-maker in Britain during this period required high levels of determination and tenacity on his part: ‘as the first Black face on the scene, I had to push doors open’. Indeed, his recollection of his first meeting with a producer of The World About Us was particularly telling: ‘I made an appointment [at the BBC] and wrote my name when I arrived. And when I came there, everyone was looking at me. And when I walked in, he [the producer] looked at me. He said, “Who are you? What do you want?” I said, “I’m Horace Ové, the film-maker.” He said, “Really?” ’31 The charismatic Ové was able to persuade the producer to hire him, but this example perhaps says much about the challenges and racism faced by Black film-makers in the 1970s (and beyond). As Ové explained, this experience fed directly into Pressure’s script; when the main character, school-leaver Tony (Herbert Norville), attends an interview in an office, the dishevelled middle-aged male boss (who has been reading a pornographic magazine, hidden in a file) is visibly shocked to notice that his interviewee is Black. After a few perfunctory words, Tony is dismissed and walks the long gauntlet of the cigarette-smoke-filled office, where the white workers stare at him with open hostility. Pressure grew out of a Play for Today script Ové co-wrote with the Trinidadian writer, Samuel Selvon (author of The Lonely Londoners). Although the play was commissioned by Robert Buckler (a script editor for the BBC), it was never made. Ové and Selvon then decided that Pressure could work as a feature film. Much of Pressure was based on Ové and Selvon’s own experiences of living in the Ladbroke Grove area of London. It should be noted that the Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill area of London had become the key locus of the British Black Power movement from the

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Horace Ové and Pressure (1975)

late 1960s; the area housed various Black Power-affiliated headquarters and outdoor stalls (such as that manned by Colin in Pressure).32 Indeed, as the poet, playwright and co-founder of the Black Theatre of Brixton, Jamal Ali, recalled in interview, ‘Ladbroke Grove was the Black political beating heart of London [during the 1970s].’33 As part of their research, Ové and Selvon recorded ‘dozens of interviews’ with young people living in Ladbroke Grove, including a group of youths who were squatting in a derelict house.34 Ové and Selvon then wove their testimony into Pressure’s narrative. Keen that the film should be as authentic as possible, Ové used a mixture of experienced actors (such as Oscar James, Norman Beaton and Lucita Lijertwood) and non-professional actors from the many London-based radical Black theatre groups (such as the aforementioned Black Theatre of Brixton) that had grown partly in response to the hostile socio-political climate of the 1970s.35 Indeed, radical Black theatres and workshops provided a regular source of actors recruited for film and television work in the 1970s and I have written elsewhere about the unprecedented degree of practitioner ‘crossover’ in this decade.36 For example, Herbert Norville – who played Pressure’s main character, Tony – was recruited by Ové from a Black drama group in Islington.37 Certainly Pressure’s hitherto unprecedented degree of Black authorship was recognised by Race Today, which heralded the film as being ‘the first full length feature film in Britain [to be] inspired, scripted, directed and acted in the main by Black people’.38 As previously mentioned, the majority of Pressure is filmed in a documentary realist style; it is heavily reliant upon location shooting with handheld cameras, has real naturally lit interiors (with minimal set-dressing) rather than studio work, an emphasis on naturalistic conversations and situations and, as a consequence, a degree of narrative ambiguity. Certainly the film avoids simplistic hero/villain archetypes. A major strength of the film is that characters are shown in their flawed complexities; partly this is the result of a degree of improvisation on the part of the actors and Ove’s use of testimony from young people in his community. The film tells the story of Tony, a 16-year-old Black school-leaver. Unlike his parents and his politically radical older brother Colin, Tony was born in Britain and his character consequently occupies a metaphorical hinterland between Britishness and ‘back home’. In an early scene, Bopsey (Lijertwood), Tony’s Trinidadian mother, serves up bacon and eggs for her younger son’s breakfast. Colin, meanwhile, eats avocado with chilli sauce and sarcastically refers to Tony as a ‘white boy’. Here, as in other pivotal scenes throughout the film, Ové captures the complex and conflicted nature of a diasporic lived experience (as does a sudden and unexpected flashback of Tony’s experience of being taunted and poked at as the only Black child in a school playground). Tony is certainly made daily aware of his own geographical and, by inference, corporeal liminality. His response to his brother’s taunting is to state that at least Colin has an actual memory of ‘sun, sea and palm trees’, whereas he is positioned as an ‘outsider’ both in his Trinidadian family, and in much of white British society. Despite being well-mannered and in possession of

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good qualifications, Tony finds that his colour puts him at a disadvantage when seeking work. As his white school friends gain employment, Tony is faced with rejection upon rejection (something which puzzles his friends as they recognise him as being academically gifted). As Ové stated in interview, he was keen that Pressure would show the nuances of life in London for a young Black man in the mid-1970s. In this way, the film steers away from depicting a simplistic White/Black ‘race relations’ dichotomy. Tony has white friends who show him kindness and support, and in one of the many arguments that Tony has with his brother, it becomes apparent that Colin has a white girlfriend. For Ové, it was important that Pressure revealed that ‘some white people were kind, especially women’ but that ultimately the interventions of a few well-intentioned people could do little in the face of widespread societal and institutional racism and hostility – a point that is savagely underlined when Tony is thrown out of his white girlfriend’s house by her landlady, who screams in his face: ‘get out, get out, you Black bastard’. Ové sensitively depicts Tony’s gradual political awakening; unemployed and despondent, he meets other young Black people during his frequent wanderings around Ladbroke Grove, including a group of young men who live in a squat. As their stories are shared, Tony realises that his situation is similar to that of the young men – parents who are unable to understand why a ‘decent English education’ doesn’t lead to a professional job, and constant harassment from a broader society (not least the police) who regard young Black men with hostility and suspicion. Consequently, he becomes increasingly involved in Colin’s world of Black Power meetings and campaigning, and is taken under the wing of the charismatic American, Sister Louise (Sheila Scott Wilkinson in a role which is clearly strongly modelled on the political activist Angela Davis). As Pressure progresses, Tony becomes increasingly estranged from his parents, who are firmly of the opinion that his failure to find a professional job must be due to a personal failing on his part. ‘It’s this Black Power business’, laments Bopsie, as Tony once more returns home from an interview jobless. As Ové emphasised in interview: ‘So much of Pressure was to do with the generational thing. It tore families apart. Parents couldn’t understand their children [and vice versa]. The film was telling [a story] about the whole race struggle. But, you know, the film did not just deal with that. It was about the problems of the family.’39 In a desperate attempt to rein in what she regards as Tony’s ‘self-destructive’ Black Power tendencies, Bopsie forces her younger son to accompany her to church. As the pastor (played by Norman Beaton) urges his congregation to ‘cast out all Black sin’ from their souls, Tony’s discomfiture is complete. Back in the family home, Tony and Bopsie once again clash. ‘Oh God save us!’, wails Bopsie. ‘God is a white man ma’, is Tony’s telling response. Increasingly radicalised and alienated from his parents, Tony leaves home and moves into the squat. At Colin’s Black Power group, he is spellbound by the powerful speech given by Sister Louise. It is at this meeting that Tony experiences police brutality at first hand: ‘Where is your warrant?’

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Horace Ové and Pressure (1975)

screams Sister Louise as a policeman slams her hard against a wall. ‘The law is not concerned with your lot’, retorts the policeman. Colin is arrested and his parents’ home is raided by the police. A distraught and emotionally broken Bopsie sits on the floor, surrounded by the detritus of a ransacked home, her wig askew. When her husband comes home, she blames Colin for ‘making trouble’. However, Colin’s father, in a rare flash of temper, blames Bopsie for the fact that the family migrated to England in the first place: ‘I was an accountant, now I am a shopkeeper […] it was you who did this Bopsie. You with your white dream.’ Ové switches the focus to Sister Louise’s house, the day after the police raid. Tony and other Black Power comrades sit around the kitchen table, eating and painting banners protesting against police brutality and the unlawful arrest, brutalisation and incarceration of his brother Colin. As a bruised and bandaged Sister Louise watches the news on television, she belatedly notices that a cannabis joint is being passed around the men; she berates them and takes it away, but not before Tony has imbibed and fallen asleep. It is at this point, towards the end of the film that, as Paul Newland has written: ‘[We see] the most extraordinary example in Pressure of a move away from the aesthetics of documentary realism, social realism and naturalism towards modernism and the avant-garde.’40 Ové now cuts to Sister Louise’s bedroom – it is dark and a naked Tony rummages around in her bedside cabinet. The use of Dutch camera angles adds to a feeling of tension and unreality and marks the suspension of a documentary aesthetic in the film. It seems clear to the viewer that the couple have had sex; the camera pans back to Sister Louise, who is naked but for a silk sheet that clings to her body. Tony steals some money from Sister Louise’s purse and then discovers and takes a huge knife from the drawer. Reminiscent of the first scene of Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967), it is only when events take an extremely surreal turn that the first-time viewer realises with a jolt that what is being depicted is a dream/fantasy sequence rather than ‘reality’. We see Tony walk past the Mangrove Restaurant (a significant locus of Black political history which would culminate in the infamous Mangrove Nine trial in 1971, only three years before Pressure was made – the protests and demonstrations linked to this were much photographed by Ové at the time).41 The action then cuts to the daytime. Again, as with Belle de Jour, there is an impressionistic soundtrack. Ové adds ‘the faint sound of African singers [and] … birdsong’.42 Tony, brandishing the long knife, advances on a stately home. This confrontation of Britain’s colonial past (and perhaps a critique of the contemporaneous societal positioning of the Black man as ‘savage’ and ‘other’) comes to full fruition when Tony enters the house, advances to a bedroom, removes his clothes and brutally stabs at what appears to be a sleeping person under a silk sheet (figure 12). Blood gushes out over the sheets, screaming is heard and it is subsequently revealed that the ‘body’ is that of a pig. The transcendent dream sequence signals Tony’s complete radicalisation and full rejection of the world of his ‘accepting’ immigrant parents. With its obvious connotations of colonisation and slavery, I would

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12  Pressure (dir. Horace Ové, 1975)

argue that it is possible to further reflect on Ové’s own ‘diasporic journey’ – in this sequence, the contested and conflicted history of Trinidad is layered with the British spoils of such slavery and exploitation, exemplified in the stately home. Moreover, the allusion to the Mangrove Nine case allows for a reflection of the ways in which Black people in ‘babylon’ are still enslaved within British society. Furthermore, as Bunce and Howe remind us, ‘pig’ was a much-used term for the police (indeed, many of Ové’s photographs of the Mangrove Nine protests and trial clearly show this word written on numerous home-made placards).43 Importantly, as Paul Newland argues, the sequence can also be read ‘in terms of its formal hybridity … [it] echoes developments seen in the work of a number of postcolonial writers and theorists who were attempting to develop new ways of articulating aspects of Black experience’.44 Ové switches back to documentary realism for the final part of the film – where Tony and his Black Power comrades take to the streets to demonstrate about Colin’s incarceration. Pressure received funding from the British Film Institute (BFI) Production Board and the National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC). The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) awarded it an ‘AA’ certificate. However, archival evidence reveals that the examiners Ken Penry and Rosemary Stark were at loggerheads when it came to the film’s classification. Penry argued that ‘strong dialogue (“17 fucks”)’, the portrayal of ‘considerable police brutality’, but above all the violent and troubling dream sequence, ‘all placed it in the “X” category’. Stark was more sympathetic

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Horace Ové and Pressure (1975)

and eventually won the argument: ‘To me the film seems to discuss … with sympathy and … balance, the simple Black politics of despair … it raises the sort of questions Black teenagers must be discussing.’45 The film premiered at the 1975 London Film Festival46 but it did not gain a general release until 1978. Despite the fact that finding distribution was (and remains) a challenge for independent British art films, Ové has subsequently claimed that Pressure was deliberately ‘banned by people who thought that the film should not be shown [due to the scene in which] the police raided the Black Power meeting’.47 Certainly, distribution was patchy and the film was something of a ‘slow burner’ which was intermittently shown in niche cinemas and art colleges. Arguably, this is one of the reasons why Pressure’s influence was most deeply felt (and realised) in the early 1980s and beyond, allowing as it did for the dynamic exploration of postcolonial histories and contested diasporic identity, as seen in the work of Sankofa, Black Audio Film Collective, Ceddo and Ngozi Onwurah.

Notes  1 Kobena Mercer, ‘Recoding Narratives of Race and Nation’, in Kobena Mercer (ed.), Black Film, British Cinema (London: ICA, 1988), pp. 4–14.  2 Paul Gilroy, ‘The Black Atlantic’, in Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (eds), Theorizing Diaspora (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 50–4; p. 50.  3 Rajinder Dudrah, Bollywood Travels: Culture, Diaspora and Border Crossings in Popular Hindi Cinema (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 100.  4 Horace Ové, interview, 23 June 2009, Hampstead.  5 ‘Trinidad and Tobago: History’ (n.d., n.a), available at: http://thecommonwealth.org/our-member-countries/trinidad-and-tobago/history. Accessed 14 December 2018.  6 ‘Trinidad and Tobago: History’.  7 ‘Trinidad and Tobago: History’.  8 ‘Trinidad and Tobago: History’.  9 Ové, interview, 23 June 2009. 10 Yusuf Hassan cited in Mercer (ed.), Black Film, British Cinema, p. 103. 11 Peter Mason, Bacchanal! The Carnival Culture of Trinidad (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998), pp. 13–14. 12 Mason, Bacchanal! The Carnival Culture of Trinidad, pp. 13–14. 13 Robin Bunce and Paul Field, Darcus Howe: A Political Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 14 Mason, Bacchanal! The Carnival Culture of Trinidad, p. 21. 15 Mason, Bacchanal! The Carnival Culture of Trinidad, p. 21. 16 Mason, Bacchanal! The Carnival Culture of Trinidad, p. 21. 17 Scott MacDonald, Trinidad and Tobago: Democracy and Development in the Caribbean (New York, NY: Praeger, 1986), p. 59. 18 MacDonald, Trinidad and Tobago, p. 60. 19 MacDonald, Trinidad and Tobago, p. 60. 20 MacDonald, Trinidad and Tobago, p. 63. 21 MacDonald, Trinidad and Tobago, p. 64. 22 MacDonald, Trinidad and Tobago, p. 64.

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British art cinema 23 MacDonald, Trinidad and Tobago, p. 64. 24 MacDonald, Trinidad and Tobago, p. 70. 25 Ové, interview, 23 June 2009. 26 Ové, interview, 23 June 2009. 27 Ové, interview, 23 June 2009. 28 Ové, interview, 23 June 2009. 29 Eleftheria Thanouli, Art Cinema Narration: Breaking Down a Wayward Paradigm, 2009, available at: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/scope/documents/2009/june-2009/thanouli.pdf. Accessed 14 December 2018. 30 Ové, interview, 23 June 2009. 31 Ové, interview, 23 June 2009. 32 Bunce and Field, Darcus Howe. 33 Jamal Ali, interview, 12 March 2012. 34 Pressure production notes (n.a., n.d.). BFI Discover Film screening notes for Pressure. London, Tate Gallery, 5 June 2009. 35 See Sally Shaw, ‘ “But Where on Earth is Home?” A Cultural History of Black Britain in 1970s Film and Television’. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Portsmouth. 36 See Shaw, ‘ “But Where on Earth is Home?” ’ 37 Pressure production notes. 38 Akua Rugg, ‘Pressure’, Race Today, 7: 12 (1975), pp. 283–4; p. 283. 39 Ové, interview, 23 June 2009. 40 Paul Newland, British Films of the 1970s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 116. 41 See Bunce and Field, Darcus Howe. 42 Newland, British Films of the 1970s, p. 116. 43 Bunce and Field, Darcus Howe. 44 Newland, British Films of the 1970s, p. 117. 45 Ken Penry and Rosemary Stark, BBFC report ‘Pressure’, 22 November 1976. 46 Rugg, ‘Pressure’, p. 283. 47 Ové, interview, 23 June 2009.

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Art cinema and the British poetic realist tradition David Forrest

Between 1969 and 1981 Ken Loach worked on a series of films which explored the landscapes of South Yorkshire and their political and emotional textures. When viewed together, Kes (1969), The Price of Coal (1977), The Gamekeeper (1980) and Looks and Smiles (1981) comprise what Jacob Leigh has described as Loach’s period of ‘sympathetic observation’,1 in which Loach’s familiar interest in class politics was reimagined with a pointedly lyrical, poetic voice. This newfound poeticism, I will argue, was the direct result of an intense collaboration between Loach and Barry Hines, the Barnsley-born author and screenwriter best known for the novel A Kestrel for a Knave (1968), the source novel for Kes.2 Kes, The Gamekeeper and Looks and Smiles, with their emphases on semi-rural Barnsley, the countryside between Barnsley and Sheffield, and the urban gloom of recession-era Sheffield respectively, share a number of distinctive aesthetic features: loose, episodic plot lines; sustained and lingering engagements with external space whereby figurative meaning is accommodated alongside a tangible and authentic sense of place and time; an authenticity of performance, marked by the casting of non-professional actors recruited as much for their experience of their characters’ environments and occupations as for their dramatic skills; and an interest in dislocation, both political and emotional (although they are inextricably connected), combine to shape what we might understand as a poetic tendency within Loach’s work with Hines. With these characteristics in mind, the films might also be categorised within the broader context of art cinema: in short, British art cinema can and should have a place for what we might understand as poetic realism. By this, I mean a recurring tendency within British realism towards elements of stylisation, symbolism, narrative ambiguity and subjectivity, anchored by the traditional tenets of the mode: locational verisimilitude, a focus on under-represented or marginalised groups, and an awareness, explicit or otherwise, of the social and economic determinants of everyday life. Poetic realism is of course understood here as distinct from the historically, generically and geographically situated use of the term to describe studio-bound films by the likes of Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné made in 1930s France. However, although for-

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mally removed from its French forebear, we might think of British poetic realism as similarly engaged in what Dudley Andrew in his study of the French tendency calls a broad aim to ‘sublimate the everyday’.3 Indeed, following Bazin, Andrew’s observations on French poetic realism as a pursuit of that which ‘is true to life, yet more concentrated and intense than life’,4 as that which seeks ‘a “balance” between attention to the everyday and a heightened concern for subjective mood’,5 and as aspiring to the representation of ‘inner and outer states’,6 might be repurposed to help trace the ‘poetic’ dimensions of British realism through art cinema. In his seminal essay, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Steve Neale foregrounds art cinema’s ‘stress on visual style’ and a focus on ‘character rather than plot’7; while Angela Ndalianis speaks of a ‘looser narrative form’, of ‘drifting, aimless protagonists; and an open-ended structure’8 in art films; and David Bordwell, in his foundational study, emphasises that art cinema deals ‘with “real” subject matter, current psychological problems such as contemporary “alienation” and “lack of communication” ’.9 These definitions and taxonomies can be aligned with the historical development of realist film practice, as Galt and Schoonover argue: ‘Art cinema’s cohesion as a category first emerges with the popularity of Italian neorealism, and it retains a close association with the thematic and aesthetic impulses of the post-war tradition.’10 The reference to neorealism is significant because it establishes a precedent within European cinema for the balancing of verisimilitude with lyricism. As Peter Bondella points out, ‘it represented a common aspiration to view Italy without preconceptions and to employ a more honest, ethical, but no less poetic cinematic language in the process’,11 in much the same way as Loach and Hines approached their shared work. The debate that I am proposing around the status of these films as art cinema texts is not simply one of nomenclature. Rather, it is about making the case that social realism, so central to British national cinematic identity, might be judged beyond its effectiveness (or otherwise) as a political medium. ‘British cinema’, and perhaps more specifically British realism, is, as the Polish film-maker Pawel Pawlikowski argued, ‘drowning in Sociology’,12 to the extent where it is defined within the popular and critical imagination by its ‘grit’13 and not its grace. When we have spoken of art cinema in Britain, we have been drawn towards the 1980s, when, for Newland and Hoyle, Britain was operating ‘a fully-formed national art cinema comparable in some ways to the French New Wave of the 1960s and New German Cinema of the 1970s’.14 British realist cinema has usually been understood within these paradigms only through its convergence with what Martin Hunt calls in his analysis of Terence Davies’ ‘social art cinema’.15 Christopher Williams goes even further: the British, traditionally, had no art cinema, and later no specific equivalent of the European art cinema, no medium in which the leading issues of subjectivity (individual identity, sexuality, personal relations) or of socio-



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cultural developments and consciousness (history, community and national relationships) could be directly addressed in image related forms.16

According to this statement, the British New Wave, the various phases in Loach’s career up to the 1980s, and the television plays of Mike Leigh and Alan Clarke in the 1970s, are apparently not worthy of the status of art cinema. However, Brian Hoyle’s exploration of British art cinema is altogether more inclusive and historically sensitive. For Hoyle, the convergence between the traditional but no less worthy realism of Loach and Leigh and the modernism of film-makers like Davies defines the broad church of British art cinema. As he notes, ‘This duality encapsulates the way in which contemporary British art cinema as a whole draws from the history of its own mainstream cinema and that of continental Europe to create an art cinema that is at once classical and unique.’17 It is within this broader tradition that we might accommodate the poetic realism of Loach and Hines. The reasons for the apparent incompatibility between British realism and British art cinema are multifaceted. Undoubtedly, the political commitment of film-makers like Loach brings a resistance to discourses which might emphasise ambiguity in a field where conviction and clarity are prized. As John Hill argues, ‘Although Loach’s films have clearly departed from mainstream conventions, eschewing the tight plot structures and patterns of action characteristic of “classical” narration, Loach has sought to avoid ‘ “showy” techniques and has vigorously denied that he makes “elitist or arty” films.’18 Indeed, as we will see, Loach has retrospectively decried the self-consciously ‘arty’ nature of Looks and Smiles, the final film in his collaboration with Hines. We should also note the words of another of Loach’s long-time collaborators, Tony Garnett, when discussing the pair’s early work: ‘We were very firmly not doing art, right? We were just trying to make sense of the world.’19 While realist film-makers consciously resist labels which might detract from their ethical and political endeavours, the fundamental disconnect between art cinema and realism in Britain has also been reflected through critical and scholarly discourses. Because of its literary origins, critics such as Peter Wollen20 and Raymond Durgnat21 have dismissed the ‘New Wave’ status of the so-called ‘kitchen sink cycle’ of 1959–63, and in turn have denied the authorial emphasis which is so often central to art cinema discourse. It could be argued, however, that the British New Wave did begin to form the basis of a realist-inclined art cinema. The explorations of workingclass subjectivity in films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1963) and This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963) can be viewed alongside the cycle’s expressive and authorially foregrounded use of location shooting as key art cinema characteristics. Indeed, subsequent work by British critics, such as John Hill’s Sex, Class and Realism (1986), has countered Wollen and Durgnat and made the case for the self-styled auteurist tendency within the New Wave. At the same time, however, Hill’s

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focus on the films’ innate ideological conservatism and problematic gender politics overshadow their possible location within a wider pantheon of postwar European art cinema. Andrew Higson’s often-cited article ‘Space, Place, Spectacle’ (1984) – a critique of the New Wave’s ‘spectacular’ use of space – makes similar criticisms to Hill’s, but its discussion of ‘poetic realism’ is central to our attempts to re-examine British art cinema. Higson’s argument here is centred around John Krish’s discussion of the ‘Long Shot of Our Town from That Hill’, a recurring iconographic trope typical of the New Wave’s painterly approach to urban and semi-urban working-class landscapes. Higson argues that the shots self-consciously reflect the practice of ‘poetic realism’ which, through a kind of proto-art cinema discourse, ‘foregrounds the work of the director’, and generates ‘a tension between the sociological and the aesthetic, the moral and the poetic’.22 For Higson, the New Wave’s authorially marked ‘self-conscious aestheticisation’23 constructs and privileges ‘the sympathetic gaze of the bourgeoisie’, in the process ‘producing the working class figure as the “victim in the city”, who elicits sympathy from the morally committed spectator’.24 This convincing critique of the political limitations of poetic realism has undoubtedly diminished its potential as a distinctive component of British art cinema. Higson’s argument hinges on the class politics of poetic realism: the New Wave directors were almost all socially ‘outside’ their subjects; and their heightened and distanced authorship is made evident through their conspicuous and apparently unethical treatment of working-class space and place. These features are absent in the next cycle of poetic realism realised through the films of Loach and Hines. To return to the question of art cinema, contemporary engagements with the concept have moved on from the rigidity of Bordwell’s c­ ommerce– art binary, with Galt and Schoonover arguing that ‘impurity’25 is its defining characteristic and David Andrews identifying its ‘basic diversity’.26 The notion of art cinema as in some way ‘pure’ emerges partly from its conflation with discourses of auteurism. As Galt and Schoonover argue, such a point of emphasis ‘either personalizes style and mode of production out of all locational context or reifies style in terms of national cultural specificity’.27 Arguably, the authorial discourses of the British New Wave are similarly limiting and as Higson shows, the pursuit of poetic realism in the films is tainted because their aestheticisation is achieved at the expense of ‘authentic’ class representation. Yet, I want to suggest that by seeking to understand British poetic realism through the shared work of Hines and Loach we are necessarily required to challenge those frameworks which position the art cinema project as apparently opposed to British realism. As David Andrews argues, ‘by refreshing our ideas of auteurism, we can refresh our ideas of art cinema, too’.28 In the case of Loach and Hines, then, understanding the ‘poetic’ dimension of realism necessarily requires us to challenge the tradition of the filmic auteur in British cinema. Despite the centrality of collaborative relationships to Loach’s career, his status as a British auteur is well established and

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has been perpetuated through commercial and critical discourses. As much as monographs by the likes of Jacob Leigh and John Hill recognise the contributions of collaborators such as Hines, Jim Allen, Paul Laverty, Chris Menges and Tony Garnett, they are still predicated on authorial readings which emphasise signature characteristics and thematic (political) principles as markers of Loach’s auteurism. This has the effect of curtailing the possibility of exploring the specific historical development of Loach’s style through a focus on the many (collaborative) phases of his career. The ‘sympathetic observation’29 of Loach’s work in the late 1960s and up to the early 1980s is fundamentally predicated on a poetic realism which is as novelistic as it is cinematic, and owes as much to Hines as it does to Loach, and yet auteurist (and we might add art cinema) reading strategies are dependent on a linear and reductive focus on the director. As Andy Willis argues in his account of Loach’s work with Jim Allen, ‘Loach’s increased profile as the auteur of the Left has had the effect of diminishing that of one of his most important collaborators’,30 and the same can be said for Hines. To return to Andrew Higson’s discussion of poetic realism in the New Wave, it should be made clear again that aesthetically the work of Hines and Loach differs from the New Wave films. Most obviously, there is a much clearer sense of class politics in the Hines-Loach collaborations, and, as we will see, the process of adaptation from page to screen is more fluid and symbiotic – these two points are, of course, connected when we consider the proximity of the writer to the locational and social context of the films. Yet, just as in the New Wave, the films repeatedly and in sustained ways foreground external space and place; are rooted in everyday rituals and practices; tend to focus on the isolation of a protagonist or protagonists; and end in often unsatisfactory and ambiguous ways. Again, these characteristics can be united under the broader framework of art cinema, which can in turn be used to reimagine poetic realism as a progressive strain within British film culture more broadly. To begin this process, let us start by focusing on Hines and Loach’s first film together.

Kes The place of Kes within the British cultural imaginary is well established. Its ‘classic’ status has been confirmed by numerous polls,31 and its repeated evocation in parodies and satires of Northern life suggests its enduring familiarity.32 Less is known, however, of the nature of its production and the crucible of influences from which it draws its enduring poetic realist qualities. In 1967 Tony Garnett approached Hines to offer him the opportunity to write a Wednesday Play for the BBC. Hines declined but told Garnett that he would be interested in adapting for the screen his as yet unfinished novel, A Kestrel for a Knave, about a working-class boy from Barnsley who finds hope through his training of a kestrel. Garnett read the manuscript, shared

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it with Loach, and with great enthusiasm the project began. Unlike Hines’s later collaborations with Loach, the screenplay for A Kestrel for a Knave was given as a co-credit (between Garnett, Hines and Loach). However, Tony Garnett recently suggested that ‘Ken and I should not have had the credit’,33 while Hines called the collaboration a ‘composite thing’,34 and Loach has remarked that ‘the script was a collaboration, but I don’t want to make anything of that. The film is so close to the book anyway.’35 This last statement is especially significant because I want to argue that much of the film’s poetic emphasis emerges from the novel and from the collaborative rendering of its lyrical qualities. The sense that poetic realism is an individuating, auteurist discourse can therefore be challenged, with those behind Kes suggesting a more diffused, ethical and collective endeavour. Garnett, drawing on his experiences of the film, is fundamentally opposed to the notion of film as an individual art form: ‘all films are social activities […] we dissolve ourselves into the social project’, adding ‘a film is a collective work’.36 I want to reflect on Hines’s contribution to this ‘collective’, because it is from his work that the film draws much of its poetic sensibility. In describing the film’s locations, Loach reflected that ‘Barry showed us the places we had imagined in the book, including the school he had taught at.’37 Although it never evokes a specific location, preferring the generic ‘town’ and ‘city’, the novel was inspired by Hines and his brother’s childhood in the mining village of Hoyland Common. As Loach suggests, then, the film is faithful to the specifics of the geography of South Yorkshire, where the rural and industrial collide. This is a contrast fundamental to the film’s lyricism, as John Hill argues: In a scene initially suggestive of rural tranquillity, for example, Jud is shown walking through the sun-bathed countryside. The shot that follows, however, reveals that Jud is actually on his way to work at the coalpit. In this context, the world of nature does not signify an alternative to, or escape from, the world of work and industry but rather the very location in which such mundane, everyday activities are undertaken.38

This tension between the natural idyll and the economic determinism of the pit in the film is embedded within Hines’s own experience of the location. The poetic impulse is therefore as autobiographical as it is cinematic. The extent to which Hines’s poetic treatment of these spaces informs Kes is evident when viewing archival material relating to the film. For example, early shooting scripts held in the Ken Loach archive show that in the absence of stage directions, Garnett, Hines and Loach used long passages from Hines’s novel to bridge exchanges of dialogue, thus illustrating the film’s emergence from within the poetic register of Hines’s prose. For example, after Billy (David Bradley) fails in his attempt to rouse his friend Tibbutt (David Glover), he goes into the woods. This is the point in both the film and the novel when Billy first discovers Kes, and Hines describes in precise, lingering detail Billy’s exploration of nature: ‘The undergrowth thins out, giving way to brassy clearings between the trees. Overhead their

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branches web into a green canopy, and in places shafts of sunlight angle through, dappling the grey-green trunks, and bring up the colour of the grass and the foliage. Light and shade, a continuous play of light and shade with every rustle of the leaves.’39 This excerpt is taken from the script and is part of a much longer passage; the only difference between its presentation in the script and the novel is the use of the present tense. This passage and others like it are not merely placeholders. Instead, the central presence of Hines’s prose within the film’s development suggests a rich creative synergy rather than a faceless adaptation process. Consider the concurrent moment in the film. The sequence, played to music, runs for 1 minute and 56 seconds and is comprised of four shots: the first, a gentle tracking shot as Billy moves through the woods, is longest, at just over one minute; the second is a shorter, closer shot of around ten seconds; the third is an aerial shot with the perspective emanating through the leaves of the trees, literally ‘overhead’ as Hines describes; and the fourth is a shot of around twenty seconds which mainly shows Billy navigating a puddle. The length of the takes and the sustained foregrounding of Billy within the natural space establishes the central components of the film’s poetic impulse: Billy’s intimate, nurturing relationship with nature. The repetition of the shadow imagery in the prose (‘shafts of sunlight angle through’ and ‘Light and shade, a continuous play of light and shade with every rustle of the leaves’) is echoed and rendered filmically through the patient pacing of the shots, their distance and their proliferation. The film’s treatment of space, emerging as it does from the novel, and visualised across multi-layered authorship, does not fit within Higson’s critique of the tendency of poetic realism towards the veneration of the selfconscious auteur. Indeed, as we have seen, Hines’s vision, so critical to the film’s aesthetic, emerges from within its locations rather than from outside them, and it is deployed within an established collaboration. However, the sequence we have described could easily be found in a New Wave film. Indeed, the woodland location, the use of light and the lone figure all evoke Colin Fisher’s (Tom Courtenay) solitary runs in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, in ways which begin to suggest a visual relationship between rural spaces and fleeting emancipation for the otherwise marginalised working-class protagonist. These visual parallels suggest hitherto underdeveloped continuities: in embracing the ‘impurity’ of art cinema, we are thus able to revisit and broaden the parameters of British poetic realism.

The Gamekeeper In 1975, Barry Hines published his fourth novel, The Gamekeeper. The eponymous protagonist, George Purse, is a former steel worker who is now employed on a ducal estate in order to provide a better life for his family. In reality, however, the Purses fall irreconcilably between two classes, and the novel, following a year in their lives, is a powerful account of their corrosive

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alienation. In 1980 Loach, now working with ATV, filmed an adaptation of the novel, written by Hines himself. Although the film was broadcast on British television in December 1980, it was screened at the Cannes, New York and London film festivals40 and in 1981 received limited theatrical distribution in Europe. Once again, it is possible to trace the film’s poetic realism and by extension its art cinema credentials to Hines himself. The most striking element of the film is its structure: it begins with a caption: ‘Winter – Catching up the Pheasants for Laying’, and its final section is entitled ‘September – Shooting Grouse’, in a manner which reflects the novel’s organisation around the four seasons of George’s (Phil Askham) working life. For Hines, this episodic approach to narrative was subordinated to the pursuit of documentary realism. Describing the book in an interview to promote its publication, he commented: ‘It’s a documentary – I suppose it has to be called a novel, but really it’s just a little documentary of a year in a gamekeeper’s life. It starts in February with the catching up of the pheasants and finishes in November with the pheasants being shot down.’41 Five years later the film’s press release would list it as a ‘Documentary’, and just as they did with Kes and would do with Looks and Smiles, Hines and Loach enlisted actors with first-hand experience of the film’s subject matter and milieu. As evidence of this, their casting notes list not performance attributes, but hunting experience: ‘redfaced, farmer, ferrets etc. …’; ‘shoots, from Leeds’; ‘dogs, shoots, ferrets, quite good, use’.42 The commitment of the film (and the novel) to quotidian, episodic structures and its minimal narrative create the space for a poetic examination of class and exploitation. For Jacob Leigh, the film’s ‘essential theme’ is ‘isolation’43 and the film ‘expresses the paradox that to live as a gamekeeper in a country idyll, on property owned by someone else, George and his family must live in an alienated way’.44 Thus, just as in Kes, the film’s art cinema credentials (here its examination of alienation within a neorealist framework) can be interpreted both through a socio-political lens and, as we will see, an aesthetic one. In The Gamekeeper, Hines and Loach develop their brand of realism so that its class politics is more clearly enshrined within its mise-en-scène. As Hines said of the book, it is ‘about class, not gamekeepers. You don’t have to say anything; you just show it.’45 Loach’s comments on the film confirm its symbolic visual language: ‘the images were so concrete – it’s about ownership and who does what for whose benefit, and I think that the luminous images of the land that Chris Menges captured helped encapsulate that’.46 Hines and Loach are describing the processes by which the film encases its poetry within tangible, plausible units of meaning, and vice versa. This convergence, at once allegorical and realist, is at the heart of their poetic realism and it is central to Hines’s craft as a writer. As Tony Garnett put it, in Hines’s writing: ‘the generalities come out of the concrete and the specific’.47 In The Gamekeeper, this means that we are shown both the details of everyday life on the ducal estate and the underlying forces that determine them.

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This synergy of the poetic and the realist is established early on in the film. After George has had breakfast with his family, he goes to work, and the film cuts to a long shot as he emerges from the misty fields to climb over a gate. It then cuts to a panning shot which moves with George until it rests at the Duke’s large stately home. The house at the back of the shot engulfs George in the middle and he seems confined within the frame. Whereas the first image foregrounded George’s affinity with nature, the second asserts his subordination to capital. The third shot in the sequence again works to absorb George and overwhelm him within the estate, as it uses an imposing archway as its central focus so that George, in long shot, appears small when he emerges from within it. George’s intention is to visit the estate’s builder’s yard to ask for a new window frame. The one at the front of the Purses’ house is rotting, and desperately needs replacing, in another reminder of the family’s exploitation and their servile reliance on their employers. Hines’s meticulous stage directions emphasise the sequence’s figurative intentions: George is on his way to the builder’s yard in the village. We see him pass the Big House where the Duke lives. Then he reaches the yard, which used to be a farm. The yard now contains timber and bricks and other building materials. The house and the outbuildings are now used as offices and workshops to deal with the improvements and repair of the Duke’s tenanted house and farms.48

George’s short journey is a reminder of his (and his class’) relationship with the landed aristocracy. The imposition of the ‘Big House’, and the former farm which is now an enterprise to service the ducal assets, underlines the sense of servitude that underpins the gamekeeper’s existence. The demarcation and ownership of space is thus critical to the film’s symbolic system and its examination of alienation. In another early scene, George’s youngest son Ian (Peter Steels) brings a cat home from school, but George angrily rejects the new arrival, despite protestations from his wife, Mary (Rita May). Ian’s journey from the school to his home is highly significant, centring on a forty-second panning shot which shows Ian firstly swamped by a vast redbrick council estate, before staying with him as he crosses the road, and watching him climb over a wall to walk up to the path to his home, with the estate gradually moving out of the frame. The road crossing is also a kind of border crossing, as Jacob Leigh points out: ‘The length of the take and slow pan signal an interest in the character’s actions and the setting in which he acts – the estate, the Duke’s land, and their proximity to each other.’49 Again, Hines’s stage directions are significant for their detail, implying a symbiosis between writer and director: Hines both poeticises and describes the action; Loach, inspired by poetic prose, finds the shots: Home time. We see Ian leaving the school and start to run. The kitten is down his jerkin. He is supporting it with one hand and he keeps stopping and looking down his jerkin at it. The School is built on a council estate and we can see the streets of the estate as Ian runs through them. He reaches the

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edge of the estate, crosses the road and goes through a gate into the wood. When he arrives home his mother is hanging out the washing in the yard.50

The emphasis on the tension between the two estates is crucial. The council estate, where Ian goes to school, serves as a reminder of the class from which the Purses are now irreconcilably disconnected. George seems proud when he guards the ducal estate from the council estate’s residents, yet he has none of the sense of place or fulfilment that exists amongst his former friends and colleagues. The length of the take (thirty-six seconds) concentrates our attention on Ian’s own ‘inbetween-ness’ – as a result of his father’s occupation – to the extent where our focus is drawn to two clear sources of diegetic sound layered amongst each other, vying for primacy: on one hand the sounds of the school and on the other birdsong, which seem again to point to the binary at the heart of the film’s symbolic system. Indeed, the absence of non-diegetic music in The Gamekeeper is a marker of the film’s evolution from the poetic realism of Kes, where the distinctive nondiegetic soundtrack can be seen to shape the film’s emotive structure. In The Gamekeeper we find an ever more distinctive formal sparseness where long takes and figurative treatment of mise-en-scène work to generate a Bazinian realism of time and space which is at once sensitive to rhythms of everyday life and, to return to Steve Neale’s useful phrase, indicative of an authorially conspicuous ‘stress on visual style’.51 Loach and Hines were here shaping a politically committed and aesthetically bold brand of British art cinema.

Looks and Smiles A year after The Gamekeeper, Looks and Smiles, Loach and Hines’s final film together, was broadcast on ITV, before receiving a limited theatrical release the following year. If The Gamekeeper saw a development of the pair’s art cinema signature, according to Loach, Looks and Smiles took their distinctive brand of poetic realism to its limits: I was aware that we’d got a bit self-indulgent momentarily. It should have been a funnier film than it was. I think I just wasn’t tough enough in the shooting and in the cutting, and I think it should have just been a bit sharper and tighter and a quarter of an hour quicker. It’s too lethargic and gently paced and when I think about it now I want to give it a kick up the arse.52

Loach’s retrospective criticisms of Looks and Smiles have probably minimised its position within his oeuvre, and yet as an example of art cinema and poetic realism it stands at the peak of his creative partnership with Hines. As Loach implies, the film is sparse, stylistically conspicuous and organisationally loose. Shot entirely in black and white, it maintains the long takes and photographic style of The Gamekeeper but is around twenty minutes longer. The narrative is minimal, concerning two friends of school leaving age in Sheffield, Mick (Graham Green) and Alan (Tony Pitts), as they struggle to find fulfilling work. Eventually, Alan joins the army and goes to serve in

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Ireland, while Mick meets Karen (Carolyn Nicholson), a shoe shop worker, and the two begin a relationship. The film ends just as it began, with Mick searching for work. Despite Loach’s claims, the film is both highly effective as an aesthetically striking document of a city haunted by the ghosts of its once thriving industrial past, and as a sensitive study of the corrosive aimlessness of unemployment. Just as in Kes and The Gamekeeper, Loach, Hines and Menges combine a documentary realist aesthetic, authenticated through the use of non-professional actors drawn from South Yorkshire locations (Graham Green was a fitter in a pit near Doncaster), with a poetic attentiveness to the symbolic potentials of everyday working-class life. Jacob Leigh echoes Loach’s ambivalence about the film, arguing that Looks and Smiles ‘has such a loose, open-ended quality that it could end anywhere. When it does end, Mick has not resolved any of the problems in his life, and the film offers no hope for resolution.’53 One way of reconciling these criticisms of the film’s sparseness is to point to art cinema’s capacity to reflect in its episodic, non-linear qualities the rhythms and frustrations of everyday life, as the film generates a rhythm which matches the repetitious, depressing nature of Mick’s experiences in line with Steve Neale’s description of art cinema’s ‘stress on character rather than plot’.54 Certainly, the film’s approach to causality is, at times, strikingly loose. While at one point Looks and Smiles feels like an urban courting drama – which had been Hines’s original plan for the screenplay before the ‘storm clouds of recession’55 began to gather – the plot line involving the young couple is abruptly suspended when they have an argument at a Sheffield United match. Karen is then not mentioned for some twenty-five minutes, as the film documents Mick’s continuing frustrations in finding work; a drunken brawl he’s involved in before Alan’s departure to Ireland; and a flirtation with petty crime. Karen suddenly returns when, with little narrative justification, Mick arrives at her flat. However, the film’s elliptical narrative is intentional. Hines and Loach began the project in 1978, with Hines writing a novel alongside the screenplay. There were a number of drafts and re-drafts which point to a much fuller and more developed narrative, involving the further development of Mick and Karen’s relationship and significant changes to Alan’s trajectory. Indeed, Loach may not have been so quick to dismiss the film for failing to create the sense of ‘outrage in the audience that should have been there’56 had he retained Hines’s original ending. Hines had intended for Alan to be killed by a booby trap in a dramatic climax, with his father making explicit the political nature of Alan’s death at his funeral: ‘He should have never been in Ireland. What’s our Alan got to do with Northern Ireland? It’s not his fight. (Pause) He’s been killed for nothing. Wasted. A life just thrown away.’57 The justification for this plot line is clear: Alan’s death would be regarded as symbolic of his exploitation within the capitalist system; unable to find work, he is forced to fight for the state in an unjust war. In this early version of the screenplay, there is also a wider focus on

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the film’s socio-political context: with a heightened emphasis on Mick’s own father’s increasingly precarious employment in the steel industry, and with Mick being forced to leave Sheffield (and Karen) to search for work in Birmingham at the film’s conclusion. These discarded scenarios would have made for a much clearer and more definitive ending – placing the film’s underlying ideological analysis front and centre. Yet Hines instead adopts the aforementioned dole queue ending. The final shot is a freeze frame of Mick staring blankly into the distance, in a manner which seems to evoke another art cinema expression of entrapment in Les quatre cents coups (François Truffaut, 1959). Hines and Loach then once more resist offering definitive judgements on their subjects, instead offering only opaque interpretations. This wilful pursuit of an art cinema style in Looks and Smiles – its stark cinematography, its realist performance, its quotidian mundanity – saw mixed responses from critics. The Morning Star, perhaps predictably, attacked the film from the left: ‘what’s needed today about youth unemployment is a long-term view which goes beyond a statement about boredom and frustration’;58 Philip French took issue with its wilful sparseness, decrying it as a film of ‘fragmented scenes’;59 while Michael Church was similarly frustrated by its narrative minimalism, writing that ‘Time and again the chances to heighten dramatic tension were routinely thrown away.’60 The film’s poetic atmospheric is of course reliant precisely on its art cinema characteristics, a point acknowledged by critics such as Alan Brien in his discussion of the non-professional actors’ placement within the heavily stylised Sheffield location: They are simply ‘there’ – the most difficult achievement in the cinema. Chris Menges’s camera captures them and their world in black and white compositions which seem at once unsparingly realistic and yet as graphically vivid as etchings by Doré or Piranesi – the factories and furnaces in the background like mediaeval castles, the subways and backstreets like tunnels into nightmare.61

Brien’s interest in the use of location is echoed by Nancy Banks Smith: ‘And they had Sheffield working for them. The sheet metal, the plate glass, the flats, the flyovers, the acres of faces.’62 Both critics suggest that the conspicuous foregrounding of Sheffield’s post-industrial landscape is at the heart of the film’s poetic power, with Brien explicitly evoking the etching-like quality of its treatment of the city. Again, we can find evidence for this poetic foregrounding through analysis of the collaborative processes at the heart of the film. For example, the pattern of conspicuous landscape shots that occurs throughout is established early on in the film as a series of five static, long takes of various aerial shots within the city accompany the film’s titles. Their frequency and length thoroughly establishes the city as ‘character’ and their pacing sets in motion the film’s mournful tone. Hines’s notes on the script at this point emphasise his role in the poetic construction of the shots: ‘roofs & flats above; Attercliffe: industrial scene, houses flattened; Karen’s block of



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flats: w.s.; Karen’s block of flats: bridges seen through opening; New houses amongst industrial scene; Town Centre shot?’63 He is determining both the spatial characteristics of the shots and their content, indicating specific places in the city, and moving between industrial imagery and housing. Hines’s ‘writing’ of the shots reflects his own novelistic treatment of Looks and Smiles, and the specifics of the mise-en-scène suggest a distillation of the film’s central themes: the interface of everyday life, labour and the city.

Conclusion My analysis of Ken Loach and Barry Hines’s collaborations shows that the poetic realist tendency in British cinema can move beyond its apparently indelible association with the British New Wave. As I have shown, the characteristics of Loach’s and Hines’s particular brand of realism draws together the specificities of realist performance and social context with a sparseness of style and a lyricism which lends itself to more universal, figurative interpretations. Moreover, by foregrounding the films’ diffused authorship, and their origins within fixed geographical and political contexts, we are able to challenge the association of poetic realism with individuating discourses of authorship and cultural tourism. In exploring the films’ textual characteristics within an art cinema framework it is possible to ask new questions of British art cinema more broadly, in the process reassessing the place of realism within narratives of British film history. I have argued elsewhere64 that contemporary social realist texts might also be understood within a more inclusive national art cinema framework, under the auspices of their poetic qualities. We might consider, for instance, the foregrounding of isolated protagonists in films such as Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009) and Shane Meadows’s This is England (2006), amongst many other examples, as forming a line of continuity with the work of Hines and Loach. Like the earlier films, the work of Arnold and Meadows features landscapes which function both as markers of specific socio-political realities (the Thatcherite wastelands of This is England; the edgelands of Fish Tank) and more loosely as sites of figurative contemplation. The poetic realist tendency begun in the 1960s is alive and well in the ‘postmillennial British art cinema’.65

Notes  1 Jacob Leigh, The Cinema of Ken Loach: Art in the Service of the People (London: Wallflower, 2002), p. 131.  2 For the purposes of this chapter, I do not draw explicit reference to The Price of Coal. Although the two-part television drama shares a number of similarities with the other three films, it never received a theatrical release – and Chris Menges, so critical to the distinctive aesthetic qualities of Kes, The Gamekeeper and Looks and Smiles, was absent from the production.

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British art cinema  3 Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Films (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 336.  4 Andrew, Mists of Regret, p. x.  5 Andrew, Mists of Regret, p. 14.  6 Andrew, Mists of Regret, p. 271.  7 Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen, 22: 1 (1981), pp. 11–40; p. 13.  8 Angela Ndalianis, ‘Art Cinema’, in Pam Cook (ed.), The Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 2007), pp. 83–7; p. 83.  9 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 206. 10 Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, ‘Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema’, in Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (eds), Global Art Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 3–31; p. 15. 11 Peter Bondella, ‘From Italian Neorealism to the Golden Age of Cinecittà’, in Elizabeth Ezra (ed.), European Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 119–39; p. 120. 12 Jen Foley, ‘Pawel Pawlikowski: My Summer of Love’, BBC, date unknown, available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2004/10/11/pawel_pawlikowski_my_ summer_of_love_interview.shtml date. Accessed 20 May 2016. 13 Vanessa Thorpe, ‘Reality Bites Again’, Observer, 23 May 1999, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/1999/may/23/1. Accessed 15 September 2016. 14 Paul Newland and Brian Hoyle, ‘Introduction: Post-Millennial British Art Cinema’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 13: 2 (2016), pp. 233–42; p. 238. 15 Martin Hunt, ‘The Poetry of the Ordinary: Terence Davies and the Social Art Film’, Screen, 40: 1 (1999), pp. 1–16, p. 6. 16 Christopher Williams, ‘The Social Art Cinema: A Moment in the History of British Film and Television Culture’, in Christopher Williams (ed.), Cinema: The Beginnings and the Future – Essays Marking the Centenary of the First Film Show Projected to a Paying Audience in Britain (London: University of Westminster Press, 1996), pp. 190–200; p. 194. 17 Brian Hoyle, ‘British Art Cinema 1975–2000: Context and Practice’. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Hull, 2006, p. 27. 18 John Hill, Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television (London: British Film Institute, 2011), p. 168. 19 Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (London: Joseph, 1974), p. 375. 20 See Peter Wollen, ‘The Last New Wave: Modernism in the British Films of the Thatcher Era’, in Lester Friedman (ed.), Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism (London: University of Minnesota/UCL Press, 2006), pp. 30–45. 21 See Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), p. 129. 22 Andrew Higson, ‘Space, Place, Spectacle’, Screen, 25: 4–5 (1984), pp. 2–21; p. 5. 23 Higson, ‘Space, Place, Spectacle’, p. 10. 24 Higson, ‘Space, Place, Spectacle’, p. 21. 25 Galt and Schoonover, Global Art Cinema, p. 6. 26 David Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas: Foreign, Cult, Avant-Garde, and Beyond (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013), p. 21. 27 Galt and Schoonover, Global Art Cinema, p. 9.

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28 Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas, p. 37. 29 Leigh, The Cinema of Ken Loach, p. 131. 30 Andy Willis, ‘Jim Allen: Radical Drama Beyond Days of Hope’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 12: 2 (2008), pp. 300–17; p. 303. 31 See Dave Calhoun et al., ‘100 Best British Films: The Full List’, date unknown, available at: http://www.timeout.com/london/film/100-best-british-films-thefull-list; Anonymous, ‘Best 100 British Films – Full List’, BBC Entertainment (23 September 1999), available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain​ ment/455170.stm. Accessed 4 November 2016. 32 See Bo’ Selecta! (Channel 4, 2002–9) and, more recently, ‘Ken Loach’s Star Wars’, which has attracted over 150,000 views on YouTube, available at: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSSFNhF4HSk. Accessed 4 November 2016. 33 Tony Garnett, personal communication, 9 October 2015. 34 Mo Bhula, interview with Barry Hines and Natasha Betteridge, ‘Kes: Programme’ (Spring 1999), Barry Hines Papers, University of Sheffield (hereafter BHP), KES/21. 35 Ken Loach quoted in Graham Fuller, Loach on Loach (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 42. 36 Tony Garnett, personal communication, 9 October 2015. 37 Ken Loach quoted in Anthony Hayward, Which Side Are You On? The Films of Ken Loach (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), p. 94. 38 Hill, Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television, p. 116. 39 Barry Hines, ‘Kestrel’: Copy 1, British Film Institute Ken Loach Archive, KCL /6/1, p. 32. 40 See Hayward, Which Side Are You On?, p. 157. 41 Richard Else, ‘Interview with Barry Hines’, ARTEFACT, date unknown, page unknown, BHP/GAM/5. 42 Casting notes, British Film Institute Ken Loach Archive, KCL/14/2/2. 43 Leigh, The Cinema of Ken Loach, p. 125. 44 Leigh, The Cinema of Ken Loach, p. 128. 45 Hines quoted in Hayward, Which Side Are You On?, p. 157. 46 Loach quoted in Leigh, The Cinema of Ken Loach, p. 118. 47 Tony Garnett, personal communication, 9 October 2015. 48 Barry Hines, The Gamekeeper, ‘handwritten script’, BHP GAM/3/2, p. 4. 49 Leigh, The Cinema of Ken Loach, p. 128. 50 Hines, BHP GAM/3/2, p. 5. 51 Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, p. 13. 52 Loach quoted in Fuller, Loach on Loach, p. 60. 53 Leigh, The Cinema of Ken Loach, p. 131. 54 Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, p. 13. 55 Barry Hines, Looks and Smiles: Schools Edition (Longman: London, 1985), p. 1. 56 Ken Loach quoted in John Hill, Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television, p. 159. 57 Barry Hines, Looks and Smiles, rejected scenes, BHP/LOO/13, p. 129. 58 Stewart Lane, ‘Beyond Boredom and Frustration’, The Morning Star, 19 May 1982, BHP/ LOO/14, page unknown. 59 Phillip French, ‘Looks and Smiles: Review’, Observer, 19 December 1982, BHP/ LOO/14, page unknown. 60 Michael Church, ‘Looks and Smiles: Review’, The Times, 20 May 1982, BHP/ LOO/14, page unknown.

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61 Alan Brien, review, Sunday Telegraph, 19 December 1982, BHP LOO/14. 62 Nancy Banks-Smith, review, Guardian, 20 May 1982, BHP LOO/14. 63 Barry Hines, ‘Looks and Smiles: Annotated Production Script’, British Film Institute Ken Loach Archive, KCL/15/1/4i, page unknown. 64 See David Forrest, ‘Shane Meadows and the British New Wave: Britain’s Hidden Art Cinema’, Studies in European Cinema, 6: 2–3 (2009), pp. 191–201. 65 Newland and Hoyle, ‘Post-Millennial British Art Cinema’, p. 233.

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The third avant garde: Black Audio Film Collective and Latin America Paul Elliott

During the 1980s, a number of British filmmaking collectives sought to combine avant-garde practices with the emerging field of postcolonial analysis.1 Drawing influence from Latin America, Asia and Africa, the work of groups such as Ceddo, Sankofa and Retake in the 1970s represented a break from the more avant garde wing of British art cinema that was, by and large, dominated by structuralism, materialism and an onus on form. Their work was consciously political and deeply rooted within the communities the film-makers sprang from. The films they produced challenged the dominant language and form of mainstream cinema but also provided an alternative to the European- and North American-inflected timbre of the British avant garde in this period. Chief among these groups was Black Audio Film Collective. Consisting of seven young film-makers, writers and students, Black Audio Film Collective was formed in 1982 under the tenets of the ACTT (Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians) Workshop Declaration.2 The Declaration, backed by the British Film Institute (BFI), the Greater London Council (GLC), Channel 4 and a number of other bodies, ensured that independent film-makers received funding for projects that had specific educational, regional or cultural value. The collectives formed under this agreement varied greatly in both their backgrounds and their artistic aims, but (in the period covered by the Declaration at least) they shared a common political mandate and even, in the case of Black Audio Film Collective and Isaac Julien’s group Sankofa, a common distribution network. Black Audio Film Collective was extraordinarily diverse in its influences and we can detect a range of filmmaking histories and strategies in the fourteen films produced by its members between 1982 and 1998. Their work displays a mixture of genres and modes (art installation, fiction, essay film, music video) but it was the documentary film that they constantly returned to, reinventing and often challenging its properties and its claims to truth. Aesthetically, Black Audio Film Collective drew from film-makers like Sergei Parajanov and Sergei Eisenstein, African auteurs such as Souleyman Cisse and Ousmane Sembène, European avant-gardists like Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard, and American Independents like

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Charles Burnett and Haile Gerima. Politically they were influenced by the emerging fields of postcolonial and cultural studies, citing Homi Bhabha, Edward Said and Stuart Hall among the major figures in their intellectual development. In the rich pantheon of influences that shaped Black Audio Film Collective’s work, however, Latin American Third Cinema practitioners and theorists loomed large. In a piece published in the journal Undercut, the founder member of the Collective, Reece Auguiste, is clear about how Latin American (and latterly African) Third Cinema practices influenced them: ‘Black British independent film-makers are the product of the New World, also of Africa and India, and whether born in the Third World or in the spectacle of declining British inner cities, they have a generic connection with the perils, pleasures, passions and contradictions, the cultural landscapes of the New World.’3 As this chapter will argue, during the high point of Thatcherism in Britain, filmmaking groups such as Black Audio Film Collective looked at least in part to working practices and aesthetics formed outside of Europe and North America for their inspiration. Facilitated by English translations in journals like Jump Cut and Framework, Latin American cinematic manifestos provided a radical alternative to the traditional language of film theory available to film-makers in the West. Black Audio Film Collective especially drew from writers and film-makers such as Julio García Espinosa, Tomás Guitérez Alea, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, and created work that was both transcontinental and specifically British. The Collective combined Third Cinema practices and aesthetics with postcolonial theory to explore areas like memory, ethnicity and cultural identity. The cross-cultural fertilisation of theory from Latin America with film-makers in Britain served to disrupt the binary of the traditional two avant gardes of Europe and the US that, as Peter Wollen stated, can be ‘identified loosely with the Co-op movements [of New York and London, and] film-makers such as Godard, Straub and Huillet, Hanoun [and] Jansco’.4 The extent to which this last point is true is exemplified by the discussions that surrounded Black Audio Film Collective’s major works in the 1980s.5 Such debate did not centre on the nature of the Collective’s avantgarde practice, but on whether it could be considered avant-garde at all. This was part of a larger debate about how British Black and Asian video artists should situate themselves within a cinematic history that was primarily white. Coco Fusco opens her influential essay ‘A Black Avant-Garde?’ with a quote from Sankofa’s Martina Attille, who echoes many of those involved in Afro-Caribbean arts in Britain during this period: As we begin to think about images and about our politics, we realize that the history of independent film and Black images was pretty dry politically speaking. And political films were also really dry stylistically, mostly straight documentary. And there is always the problem that there hasn’t been much space for Black filmmakers in Britain. In terms of political film also, there wasn’t much room for pleasure.6

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Black Audio Film Collective and Latin America

As Fusco details, films like Sankofa’s The Passion of Remembrance (1986), Isaac Julien’s Territories (1986) and Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs (1986) radically redrew the lines of demarcation in terms of British experimental film and issues of race and ethnicity, forging new aesthetic debates in an area previously dominated by structuralism and documentary realism.7 I want to suggest here that, spurred on by screenings in cinemas such as the Rio in Hackney and the Other Cinema in London’s West End, Latin American Third Cinema theorists and film-makers offered a way out of this cultural cul-de-sac and simultaneously allowed young Black and Asian British film-makers a way of cultivating their own cultural identity. The concept of Third Cinema was posited in 1969 in the now seminal essay by Solanas and Getino: ‘Towards a Third Cinema’.8 The ‘thirdness’ in question referred to cinema that was neither reflective of the industrial practices and products of Hollywood (First Cinema) nor of the auteurist counter-cinema of the various global new waves (Second Cinema).9 Whereas First Cinema was seen as neo-colonial and exploitative, Second Cinema was taken to be politically disengaged and bourgeois. Neither model allowed for the specific aesthetico-political positions of film-makers harking from the developing nations, especially Latin America. This was a position that chimed greatly with Black and Asian film-makers from Britain’s inner cities. Just as pertinent to a consideration of the influence of Latin American film theory during the 1980s, however, was the series of essays published around the same time as Solanas and Getino’s, such as Glauber Rocha’s ‘An Esthetic of Hunger’ (1965); Julio García Espinosa’s ‘For an Imperfect Cinema’ (1970); Fernando Birri’s ‘Cinema and Underdevelopment’ (1967) and Tomás Guitérez Alea’s ‘The Viewer’s Dialectic’ (1988). Whereas ‘Towards a Third Cinema’ attempted to draw a blueprint for a tricontinental political cinema, these other, less stringent manifestos called for an activation of national identity through film and the development of an aesthetic that would more closely reflect the subaltern experiences of first nation and indigenous peoples. Where Solanas and Getino called for an end to neocolonial oppression, Espinosa called for an aesthetic revolution that would ‘enable spectators to transform themselves into agents – not merely more active spectators, but genuine co-authors’,10 and Glauber Rocha would talk of a cinema that might ‘ultimately make the public aware of its own misery’.11 Both Rocha and Espinosa would make films that specifically dealt with Latin American postcolonial identity (Rocha was Brazilian, Espinosa Cuban), putting their theories into practice. Their work had a great influence on the exportation of Third Cinema outside of South and Central America. Teshome Gabriel’s book Third Cinema in the Third World (1982) added yet another dimension of ‘thirdness’ to Third cinema when he suggested that it be considered in the light of Frantz Fanon’s genealogy of Third World culture. The ‘thirdness’ in question here refers to the combative phase of

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postcolonial cinema’s development as it frees itself from the influence of First World culture and begins to depict and facilitate the political, social and economic struggles of previously colonised populations. As Gabriel says: ‘The industry in this phase is not only owned by the nation and/or government, it is also managed, operated and run for and by the people. It can also be called a cinema of mass participation, one enacted by members of communities speaking indigenous language, one that espouses Julio García Espinosa’s polemic of “An Imperfect Cinema” […].’12 In his work on Third Cinema, Gabriel constantly referred to the aesthetics of liberation13 and to the form of revolutionary film. Drawing from all of the Latin American manifestos, Gabriel attempted, through his criticism, to encourage a praxis that was conscious of its own form and that challenged the aesthetic as well as the political hegemony. Such self-reflexivity might be considered commensurate more with an avant garde than might have originally been intended. However, the use of the term here reflects its original militaristic sense of an advanced fighting force. It was in this developing and contested field that the 1986 Edinburgh International Film Festival held a British Film Institute-sponsored conference on Third Cinema – an event that many of the Black and Asian filmmaking collectives, including of course Black Audio Film Collective, attended and spoke at. This event, along with a number of allied articles in film journals such as Screen, concretised what was an emerging dialogue between British marginal film and Latin America. For a brief period in the 1980s, Britain became a nexus for Third Cinema both in terms of practice and theory. This chapter looks at three of Black Audio Film Collective’s most emotive works: Expeditions (1982–84); Handsworth Songs (1986) and The Last Angel of History (1996). Aside from describing the arc of Black Audio Film Collective’s career, these three films represent differing layers of the group’s engagement with the tenets of Latin American Third Cinema, as they move from postcolonial analysis to identity politics. As with all Black Audio Film Collective’s work, each film is united by a shared concern, but at the same time differentiated by an evolving style.

Expeditions Expeditions was Black Audio Film Collective’s first major work. Produced between 1982 and 1984, it was first screened at the British Film Institute’s Summer School and then at various events throughout the 1980s, most notably at the London Film-maker’s Co-op in the November of 1984 and the Black Arts Festival in Finsbury Park. Expeditions (in two parts, Expeditions One: Signs of Empire and Expeditions Two: Images of Nationality) consists of a slide projection with accompanying soundtrack composed by Trevor Mathieson, who would provide the music for much of the Collective’s future work. Consisting of some 105 separate images, the Kodak 35mm slide projector that was used to project them allowed for a series of dissolves

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Black Audio Film Collective and Latin America

between each image, giving the effect of what Jean Fisher calls ‘a decelerated film’ or an ‘animated still photograph’.14 Images from Britain’s colonial past are intercut with those representing the height of European Enlightenment, suggesting immediately the dialectic that exists between Western rationality and the justification of exploitation. At one point the film shows images of white colonists being carried in sedan chairs by African males. A few moments later we are presented with the image of a white baby on the knee of a Black nursemaid. Such images implicitly highlight both the means and the outcomes of colonial subjugation, what Fusco calls nationalism’s ‘dialectical negation’.15 Using stencils, text was printed onto the projected images. However, rather than language fixing their meaning, it served to further underscore the slippage between word and context. The disjuncture between the colonial search for meaning and the postcolonial is reified in the slides, and quotations from George Bernard Shaw and other Western authors sometimes complement and sometimes contrast with the images themselves. The text, however, also functions as a means of continuity between slides, connecting two pictures together in a multi-layered montage, providing a structure that binds the flow of images together. In this way, Expeditions enacts several of the themes and techniques that would become crucial to Black Audio Film Collective’s successive work: the interplay between image, text and music, the redeployment of the visual archive, the search for cultural origins and the plurality of perspective. Fisher’s notion of the decelerated film is an important one when considering the relationship between Expeditions and the avant garde. In terms of form, Expeditions is the most obviously experimental of all Black Audio Film Collective’s oeuvre. We can note similarities and resonances between this film and others that use still images to tell their stories: Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) is an obvious example, but Dušan Hanak’s Pictures of the Old World (1972) and the opening of Solanas and Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces (1969) use similar techniques. Although Expeditions does use still images, the dissolves from one to the next create a movement of sorts and the meaning of the film arises as much from change as from stasis. Unlike Pictures of the Old World, Expeditions does not allow its viewer to studiously contemplate the image as if it were a photograph, but to slowly discover meaning as it appears then disappears. The true meaning of an image may not become apparent until the next slide contextualises it – a situation that is more in keeping with avant-garde film than photography. As T. J. Demos details, however, Expeditions disrupts the purity of both forms, suggesting not so much hybridity as syncretism – another concept crucial to both Third Cinema and postcolonial studies.16 Kobena Mercer utilises V. N. Volosinov’s notion of the internal dialectic to underscore the interventions that diasporic artists and film-makers enact in the field of language, both social and visual. The language of colonialism has, by its very nature, a double articulation that allows for subversion and reappropriation; as Volosinov suggests, ‘every living sign has two faces,

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like Janus’.17 Mercer relates this to the creolisation of language and to the overturning of the master-codes of colonial discourse. For Volosinov, this double articulation makes itself felt at moments of socio-political crisis and is the first indication of the impossible contradictions in the dominant ideology. Expeditions proves that this relates as much to the visual as the linguistic. Such thinking can be glimpsed in the Latin American manifestos of the 1960s that sought to appropriate and subvert the dominant mainstream language of film. For example, Glauber Rocha stated in 1960 that ‘every discussion of cinema made outside of Hollywood must begin with Hollywood’,18 and Guitérez Alea points out that even revolutionary cinema must rely on technology originally developed for bourgeois entertainment. It is, however, Espinosa’s ‘For an Imperfect Cinema’ that most directly highlights the mechanisms and aesthetics of Expeditions. Espinosa’s essay was first translated and published in the UK in the film journal Afterimage in the summer of 1971 and then in a revised form in Jump Cut in 1979. This second translation was also published in the seminal British Film Institute collection Twenty-Five Years of Latin American Cinema (1983), a book that fed directly into establishing the Third Cinema conference in 1986. Also, in August 1985, Espinosa’s essay ‘Meditations on Imperfect Cinema … Fifteen Years Later’ was published in the Screen journal. In the same edition, Black Audio Film Collective published slides from Expeditions, strengthening the connections between the two filmmaking cultures. As Kobena Mercer states: ‘I would argue that new modes in Black British filmmaking are instances of “imperfect” cinema, in Julio García Espinosa’s phrase: conducting research and experiments, adopting an improvisational approach and hopefully learning from active mistakes through trial and error.’19 Key to the notion of imperfect cinema were changes in technology, especially the emergence of cheaper cameras and socalled ‘amateur’ formats, such as 16mm film and later video. Imperfection, in Espinosa’s conception, provides a radical alternative to the perfection of mainstream cinema. It is both political and aesthetic, challenging the technological determinism that the culture industry is predicated upon. Expedition’s use of the domestic slide projector is an example of artists utilising the products of consumerism to critique the status quo. Commensurate with this, Expeditions (and later Black Audio Film Collective works) was accompanied by audience participation, open questions and dialogue with the film-makers.

Handsworth Songs Black Audio Film Collective’s most celebrated film Handsworth Songs announced itself with two high-profile events. The first was an (in)famous exchange between Salman Rushdie, Stuart Hall and Darcus Howe in the pages of the Guardian in which the purpose and aesthetics of Black and

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Black Audio Film Collective and Latin America

Asian filmmaking was hotly debated and negotiated. The second event was the film winning the most prestigious documentary award in the UK: the Grierson prize. Handsworth Songs has continued to stand at the heart of debates concerning the difficulty of radical filmmaking in Britain. It has been described as representing ‘the emergence of a Black British cultural politics’20 but also of failing to depict the variety of experience in Handsworth’s multi-racial communities and of obscuring the ‘rich … language of [its] subjects’.21 James Chapman asserts that Handsworth Songs draws both from the history of the British documentary and from European avant-garde practice,22 whereas Mercer states that it is shaped by the spirit and structure of the carnival.23 It is a film that intentionally elides definition and characterisation. Handsworth Songs both borrows and distances itself from the cinematic history it was born out of, in this case the British documentary, and attempts to redefine the difference between mainstream and avant garde. It was precisely this mandate that linked the Black and Asian film collectives of 1980s Britain with the output of Third Cinema in Latin America.24 Solanas and Getino’s division of cinema into three categories (First, Second and Third, see above) anticipated John Akomfrah’s assertion that Black independent filmmaking in Britain needed to ‘breach what has been an impossible gap between the mainstream and the independents’.25 A point that was also reflected in calls by Isaac Julian to redefine the relationship between the cultural margins and the centres.26 Third Cinema advocated a popular avant-gardism that attempted to break the immersion of Hollywood cinema without falling back on the self-contained artistry of cinematic modernism. The recycling of news images, the use of music, of narration and of rhythm in Handsworth Songs can be understood through what Robert Stam (referring to Solanas and Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces) calls the transmogrification of unpromising footage into art.27 Stam’s description of the aesthetic choices of The Hour of the Furnaces could easily be describing much of Black Audio Film Collective’s work throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as he states: Time and time again one is struck by the contrast between the poverty of the original materials and the power of the final result. Unpromising footage is transmogrified into art, as the alchemy of montage transforms the base metals of titles, blank frames, and percussive sounds into the gold and silver of rhythmic virtuosity. Static two-dimensional images (photos, posters, ads, engravings) are dynamised by editing and camera movement.28

Stam here echoes Volosinov’s notion of the internal dialectic, and such techniques can be seen in The Hour of the Furnaces but also in the work of Cuban documentary film-maker Santiago Alvarez whose films shaped parts of Handsworth Songs. Alvarez reused archival film footage to explore the internal inconsistencies of colonial discourse. He added music to alter the meaning of images and to expose their double articulation. Importantly, Alvarez is one of the few film-makers mentioned specifically in Solanas

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and Getino’s Towards a Third Cinema, and his film Hanoi Tuesday 13th (1967) was discussed alongside Isaac Julien’s Territories and Signs of Empire in a text edited by Reece Auguiste in the Spring 1988 edition of Undercut magazine. Handsworth Songs contains both original and archive footage. Filmed during and after the Handsworth riots of 1985, the film not only features interviews with Handsworth residents and contemporary news footage but also borrows extensively from historical BBC documentaries and the films of the British Documentary Film Movement. In this, Handsworth Songs does more than utilise its images; it sets up dialogues with filmmaking histories, challenging and counter-appropriating their discourse. In order to understand the extent to which this occurs it is important to consider the history and the context of the texts that it draws from. Handsworth Songs opens with a scene appropriated from the BBC documentary The Colony. The Colony, directed by Phillip Donnellen, was a sympathetic portrait of Afro-Caribbean migrants produced in 1964, and featured Black Britons working, talking and socialising. It also featured debates about what a multi-racial Britain might look and feel like. Handsworth Songs not only borrows but changes the meanings of the images from The Colony. By adding an atonal and heavily percussive soundtrack and intercutting scenes from contemporary newsreels, director John Akomfrah explores the disappointment and betrayal felt by a great deal of second generation communities. What were meant, in the original context, to be symbols of successful integration are shown in Handsworth Songs to be images of alienation and frustration. This extends into the musical montage that punctuates the film’s sixty-one minutes. At various times the audience is presented with a heavily electronic dub version of William Blake’s Jerusalem by Mark Stewart and The Maffia. This is offset by an orchestrated version of the same song, hinting at the syncretic nature of the diasporic experience. Video images are also edited together with 16mm footage to continue the mixture of styles. Examined closely, it is possible to discern the extent to which texts like The Colony are reworked and reedited in Handsworth Songs. One sequence shows a series of Afro-Caribbean workers in a Midlands steel factory: they work on the punch, they haul the steel plates and they engage in repetitive manual work. Again, The Colony suggests that these are positive signs of a changing Britain (a voiceover proclaims such) but in Handsworth Songs they are transformed (by music and montage) into a postcolonial elegy, as Homi Bhabha details: Two memories repeat [in Handsworth Songs] incessantly to translate the living perplexity of history into the time of migration: first, the arrival of the ship laden with immigrants from the ex-colonies, just stepping off the boat, always just emerging – as in a fantasmatic scenario of Freud’s family romance – into the land where the streets are paved with gold. This is followed by another image of the perplexity and power of an emergent peoples, caught in the shot of a dreadlocked Rastafarian cutting a swathe through a



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posse of policemen during the uprising. It is a memory that flashes incessantly through the film.29

Another section of Handsworth Songs reuses scenes from the 1939 film Chains, a work produced by Birmingham Commercial Films that details the working lives of the chainsmiths in a Black Country foundry. The inclusion of Chains in Handsworth Songs is a reminder of the role of industrial centres like Birmingham in colonial exploitation. Like many of the films of Third Cinema, a major mandate of Handsworth Songs was to write suppressed narratives into history. Black Audio Film Collective re-visions the cultural archive, finding in it Black and Asian faces that had been there all along but lay largely hidden. The refrain from Isaac Julien’s Territories attempts similar aims when it suggests that: ‘Behind each conflict there is a history, a her-story. We are struggling to tell a story, a herstory, a history of cultural forms specific to Black people.’ Handsworth Songs then is concerned less with postcolonial betrayal and more with the impossibility of its articulation. It has no distinct solutions and is deliberately polysemic, a point that is brought home many times by the film’s repeated line: ‘there are no songs in the riots, only the ghosts of other songs’. John Corner is right to highlight this point when he calls the film a ‘debatable text’,30 one that utilises techniques and aesthetic strategies that are more usually associated with the avant garde and that foreground indeterminacy and lack of closure over a unified narrative. Glauber Rocha also advocates the utilisation of this marginalised voice; echoing Fanon, he highlights the role of cultural starvation in colonial oppression. The colonised are starved of their own history, he states, they are denied the sustenance of culture, they experience ‘philosophical undernourishment’.31 Cinema, however, can provide a way of reordering the dominant discourse (in Rocha’s terms), ‘freeing us from the debilitating delirium of hunger’.32 Rocha is often cited by Black Audio Film Collective as a major influence on their work. Along with European avant-gardists like Godard and Marker, Rocha lent a method of conceptualising cinema as revolutionary in both form and intent. Rocha’s mandate in the 1960s and 1970s was to forge a new, specifically Brazilian cinema from the technology developed by Hollywood and the West. Speaking in 1970, Rocha echoes the sentiments of the Black film collectives of 1980s Britain, stating: ‘We are currently researching the popular forms that are tied to the people through theatre, music, dance, and literature. In extracting certain forms that can still be used today, we are searching for a means of communicating with the public through a language already familiar to them, one that uses many elements created by the people themselves.’33 Music, popular culture and communal events such as the carnival informed the work of groups such as Black Audio Film Collective, and some of the major figures of this period would go on to produce work that would attempt to be more mainstream in orientation, Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels (1991) for example, Black Audio

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Film Collective’s own Who Needs a Heart (1991) or John Akomfrah’s Speak Like a Child (1998). Handsworth Songs is the nearest British film culture has come to Third Cinema in the form originally conceived by Solanas and Getino – a point that was acknowledged by Paul Willemen in his influential essay ‘The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections’ (1994). Despite being influenced by Latin America, however, it is also a film that speaks about nationality and regionality. It is rooted not only in the British experience but (as the constant references to the history and demographic of Birmingham attest to) the specific dynamics of the Midlands. It is the re-visioning of the archive, a point that is the film’s clearest mandate, searching British film history for voices and faces marginalised by mainstream culture.

The Last Angel of History In 1996, at the British Film Institute’s African cinema conference, John Akomfrah reportedly stated that Third Cinema was dead. In fact, the reluctance on the part of Black Audio Film Collective to declare their own work Third Cinema had always been there. In what is the Collective’s most sustained statement on this, ‘Black Independents and Third Cinema: The British Context’, Reece Auguiste stated that: Although there are historical reasons as to why we are in agreement with the theoretical explorations of Third Cinema practitioners from Glauber Rocha to Safi Faye, we also believe in giving the privilege to historical and geographical contexts in the formation of our film sense … it is absolutely redundant to reproduce the filmic categories and organising principles of Third Cinema theory in the metropolitan centres […].34

Such cautiousness on the part of Black Audio Film Collective to declare their own work Third Cinema was matched in the 1990s by moves in the field away from the revolutionary politics of the previous decades to an approach more concerned with cultural identity and the politics of subjectivity. As outlined in the influential collection of essays edited by Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanyake,35 Third Cinema during and after the 1980s was expanded to include areas such as gender, sexuality and cultural and aesthetic hybridity. The emergence of diasporic and migrant identities prompted by geopolitical ruptures demanded a more flexible conception of political cinema, one that was not based on the fixity of nationhood or cultural history. Black Audio Film Collective’s work throughout the 1990s reflected this change of focus, both distancing themselves from the label and (in turn) anticipating the changes brought about by postmodern subjectivities. The Last Angel of History (1995) was one of Black Audio Film Collective’s final major works and it is one that revisits the concerns and themes that can be detected throughout their career. It was produced,

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Black Audio Film Collective and Latin America

along with other late works, in collaboration with the German television networks ZDF and Arte, and utilises the aesthetic of an increasingly digital televisual field. Exploring the area of Black engagement with science fiction and technology, the film’s narrative is told from the perspective of the Data Thief (Edward George), a time-traveller able to comb global histories looking for answers to the problems of the future. What emerges are the parallels that exist between sci-fi narratives and the Black cultural experience, especially the collective memory of slavery. Both types of narrative are built around shared images: the sudden abduction, the alien identities, the longing for the homeward journey and the overwhelming technology used against individuals. The film explores Black culture’s engagement with space exploration and, especially, its manifestation in music. Musicians such as George Clinton, Sun Ra, Goldie and A Guy Called Gerald are cited as exemplars of Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American involvement in technoculture. Their work is far from the rural home of Black music in the West – the blues. The Last Angel of History explores the diasporic experience from the position of the future, however like all science fiction it is mainly a commentary on the present. It highlights the importance of Afrofuturism to the formation of Black identity in Britain and the US. In this of course the film is able to look forward as well as back, highlighting the contribution of Black artists and scientists to contemporary culture, while at the same time asserting the dominance of Africa and the Middle East in the history of mathematics and Reason. Although Kodwo Eshun denies the status of The Last Angel of History as ‘third television’, there are clear parallels between this work and what might be thought of as the postmodern turn in Third Cinema practice that occurred during the 1990s.36 The cultural identity that emerges from The Last Angel of History is, by its very nature, fragmentary; born out of images and sounds that are syncretically bound together by common ancestry and time. The Data Thief stands as a metonym for Black Audio Film Collective itself, archaeologically plundering the archive, creating narratives from the shards of cultural memory and providing a bridge between such memory and myth. Both in their working practices and their aesthetic, the Black British film collectives of the 1980s drew from Latin American Third Cinema’s conception of the archive. Although responding to a spirit more than specific politics, groups like Black Audio Film Collective created artistic links that went beyond the traditional roots of either mainstream, art film or avant-garde filmmaking in Britain. In his recent work, John Akomfrah is still utilising ideas and aesthetics formed outside of North America and Europe. Films like The Nine Muses (2010) and Vertigo Sea (2015) draw from a variety of influences but it is possible to discern reflections of the work of Latin American directors like Lissandro Alonso and Carlos Reygadas, Indian directors like Ritwak Ghatak and Mani Kaul, and South East Asian directors like Apichatpong Weerasethakaul and Lav Diaz.37 Migration and the

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e­ xperience of the Homeric wanderer become central images in all of these texts and take an increasingly central role in Akomfrah’s films. British avant-garde filmmaking has a long tradition of drawing influences from Europe and America. However, as groups like Black Audio Film Collective show, there is a discernible thread of work that was influenced by artists outside of those histories. Third Cinema is one such area. We could assert more than this however: that through the 1986 Edinburgh Film Festival and the various theoretical texts that were spawned by it, Britain, for a brief period of time, became a central voice in this movement. Third Cinema (and the various groups it inspired) has gone on to influence sexual politics, diasporic filmmaking and radical culture all over the globe.

Notes  1 My thanks to Reece Auguiste and David Lawson for their help in writing this chapter.  2 John Akomfrah, Lena Gopaul, Edward George, Reece Auguiste, Trevor Mathieson, Claire Joseph, Avril Johnson. Joseph was replaced by David Lawson in 1985.  3 Reece Auguiste et al., ‘Aesthetics and Politics: Working on Two Fronts?’, in Nina Danino and Michael Mazière (eds), The Undercut Reader: Critical Writings on Artists’ Film and Video (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), pp. 153–62; p. 154.  4 Peter Wollen, ‘The Two Avant Gardes’, Studio International (November/ December 1975), p. 171.  5 See for example Judith Williamson, ‘Two Kinds of Otherness’, in Kobena Mercer (ed.), Black Film, British Cinema (London: ICA, 1988), pp. 33–6; Coco Fusco, ‘A Black Avant-Garde? Notes on Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa’, in Coco Fusco, Young British and Black (New York, NY: Halliwell’s Art Centre, 1988), pp. 7–22; Auguiste et al., ‘Aesthetics and Politics: Working on Two Fronts?’.  6 Martina Attille cited in Fusco, Young British and Black, p. 7.  7 See Fusco: ‘[Sankofa and Black Audio Film Collective] are interrogating “radical” film theory’s cursory treatment of race-related issues, and subverting the all too familiar division of independent film labor [sic] between first-world avant-garde and third-worldist activism’, in Fusco, Young British and Black, p. 8.  8 For a thorough outline of the history and development of Third Cinema see Michael Chanan, ‘The Changing Geography of Third Cinema’, Screen, 38: 4 (1997), pp. 372–88; Anthony Guneratne, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Third Cinema’, in Anthony Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake (eds), Rethinking Third Cinema (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 1–28.  9 As Chanan states, we should not assume that by ‘Second Cinema’ Solanas and Getino are referring only to the various European New Waves as they also include the film-makers like Fernando Birri and Glauber Rocha’s early work, that provided the impetus for the various Latin American New Waves in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Chanan, ‘The Changing Geography of Third Cinema’, p. 375. 10 Julio Garcia Espinosa, ‘For an Imperfect Cinema’, in Michael T. Martin (ed.), New

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Black Audio Film Collective and Latin America

Latin American Cinema, Volume One: Theory, Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 1970 [1997]), p. 75. 11 Glauber Rocha, ‘An Aesthetic of Hunger’, in Martin (ed.). New Latin American Cinema, Volume One, p. 61. 12 Teshome H. Gabriel, ‘Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films’, in Michael T. Martin (ed.), Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence, and Oppositionality (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 1995), pp. 70–90; p. 73. 13 My italics. 14 Jean Fisher, ‘In Living Memory: Archive and Testimony in the Films of the Black Audio Film Collective’, in Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar (eds), The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), pp. 16–28; p. 19. 15 Fusco, Young British and Black, p. 11. 16 T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 9. 17 V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 23. 18 Glauber Rocha, ‘History of Cinema Novo’, in Coco Fusco (ed.), Selections from New Latin American Cinema (New York, NY: Halliwalls/Contemporary Arts Centre, 1987), pp. 10–29; p. 10. 19 Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 65. 20 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 223. 21 Salman Rushdie, ‘Songs Doesn’t Know the Score’, in Mercer (ed.), Black Film, British Cinema, pp. 16–17; p. 16. 22 James Chapman, A New History of British Documentary (London: Palgrave, 2015), p. 255. 23 Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle, p. 60. 24 See for example Coco Fusco, ‘My own interest in the Black workshops came out of my perception of the many continuities with New Latin American cinema and, to some extent, its aesthetics.’ In Fusco, Young British and Black, p. 37. 25 Fusco, Young British and Black, p. 52. 26 See Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, ‘De Margins and De Center’, Screen, 29: 4 (1988), pp. 2–11. 27 Robert Stam, ‘The Two Avant-Gardes: Solanas and Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces’, in Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (eds), Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998), pp. 254–66; p. 261. 28 Stam, ‘The Two Avant-Gardes: Solanas and Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces’, p. 261. 29 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 223–4. 30 John Corner, The Art of Record (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 40. 31 Rocha, ‘An Aesthetic of Hunger’, p. 60. 32 Rocha, ‘An Aesthetic of Hunger’, p. 60. 33 Julianne Burton, Cinema and Social Change in Latin America: Conversations with Filmmakers (Dallas, TX: University of Texas, 1986), p. 108. 34 Reece Auguiste, ‘Black Independents and Third Cinema: The British Context’, in

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British art cinema Jim Pines and Paul Willeman (eds), Questions of Third Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1994), pp. 212–17; p. 215. 35 Anthony Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake (eds), Rethinking Third Cinema (London: Routledge, 2003). 36 Kodwo Eshun, ‘Drawing the Forms of Things Unknown’, in Eshun and Sagar (eds), The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective, pp. 86–99; p. 96. 37 See for example ‘An Interview with John Akomfrah’, in Saër Maty Bâ and Will Higbee (eds), De-Westernizing Film Studies (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 257–74.

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The rise of British art cinema in the 1980s John Hill

Introduction Writing in 1969, Alan Lovell observed that Britain apparently lacked the kind of stylistically self-conscious art cinema characteristic of other European countries.1 If Britain had an art cinema, he argued, it had taken the form of the documentary film which had characteristically subordinated aesthetic experiment to educational and ideological purposes.2 By the 1980s, however, it had become much easier to identify a recognisably British ‘art cinema’ and to see it as a significant strand of British and, indeed, European filmmaking. Thus, it is a British director, Peter Greenaway, whom Thomas Elsaesser identifies as being a ‘sustaining pillar of the European art cinema’ during this period.3 The consolidation of a British ‘art cinema’ at this particular juncture, however, not only depended upon the emergence of a number of talented film-makers but also a structure of support which made their work possible. ‘Art cinema’, in this respect, may be understood not simply as a body of films but also, as Steve Neale suggests, as an ‘institution’ which depends upon specific ‘modes and circuits of production, distribution and exhibition’ as well as ‘relationships with the state’.4 Therefore, it is the changing economic circumstances of the British film industry and the consequent emergence of a new institutional infrastructure congenial to the development of an indigenous British art cinema in the 1980s with which this chapter begins.

The changing space of British cinema For Neale, art cinema traditionally offered, to European countries especially, a way of occupying ‘a different cultural space and a different sphere of the industry and its market’ from Hollywood.5 For Neale, the occupation of this space depends upon a process of ‘differentiation’ whereby a cinema avoids direct competition with Hollywood through the provision of films that are distinct from the Hollywood norm. A certain form of differentiation has, however, always been a feature of British film production. Thus,

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even mainstream British films of the past have sought to distinguish themselves from Hollywood films through local variations of popular genres, the adoption of ‘realistic’ elements, or the creation of ‘quality drama’.6 What was new, therefore, about the 1980s was the way in which this process of differentiation occurred in a changing industrial and cultural context. One part of the explanation for this lies in the decreasing commercial viability of ‘popular’ British cinema, especially during the 1970s and early 1980s. British cinema audiences reached an all-time high in 1946 when admissions totalled 1,635 million. From then until 1984, when attendances fell as low as 54 million, cinema-going in Britain went into decline. Although numbers subsequently increased, largely as the result of the opening of multiplexes devoted to showing Hollywood films, cinema admissions remained a small fraction of what they were in the 1940s. In an era when cinema box office remained the main source of revenue, it therefore became increasingly difficult for British films to make a profit in their home market. As a result, the profitability of British filmmaking declined steeply and all of the major film companies in Britain, such as Rank, Thorn EMI and Cannon, abandoned film production during the 1980s while the regular production of popular genre films aimed at the domestic market came to a virtual end.7 It was against this background that the rise of British ‘art cinema’ in the 1980s may be understood. For as British filmmaking became less profitable so it also became increasingly dependent upon state funding and quasi-governmental forms of organisational support. While there was a history of state support for film production (in the form of quotas and the Eady levy on exhibition), this had largely been directed, in the post-war period, towards the maintenance of a commercially oriented industry. In this regard, there was a certain shift in British filmmaking, during the 1970s and 1980s, towards what Elsaesser refers to as a ‘cultural’ mode of production in which the commercial imperatives of film production are tempered by cultural goals.8 As the commercial British cinema entered a period of crisis, the financial and institutional support for an emergent British ‘art cinema’ was provided by three main bodies: the British Film Institute Production Board, the National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC, subsequently British Screen), and the television broadcaster, Channel 4. The BFI Production Board began life as the Experimental Film Fund in 1952 when it was chaired by Sir Michael Balcon. Funding, however, was not regularised until 1966 when the BFI committed itself to an annual grant. Up until the 1970s support for film production was largely confined to shorts. However, under a new Head of Production, Mamoun Hassan, and following a modest increase in government funding, there was a shift towards the financing of low-budget features such as Peter Smith’s A Private Enterprise (1974) dealing with Asians in England, David Gladwell’s elegiac Requiem for a Village (1974), Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s historical drama Winstanley (1975), and Horace Ové’s pioneering Black film Pressure (1975). During this period the Board also supported the early work of both Bill

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The rise of British art cinema in the 1980s

Douglas (My Childhood in 1972, My Ain Folk in 1973) and Terence Davies (Children in 1976). According to Peter Sainsbury, Head of Production at the BFI from 1975 to 1985, this change in BFI policy represented a self-­ conscious attempt ‘to establish a British Art Cinema based on narrative feature forms’.9 Following a period of support for political documentary and avant-garde work, Sainsbury himself carried on this project by initiating what he referred to as a re-engagement with narrative towards the end of the 1970s. A series of low-budget features followed, including Chris Petit’s Radio On (1979), Menelik Shabazz’s Burning an Illusion (1981), Pat Murphy’s Maeve (1981), Edward Bennett’s Ascendancy (1983), and Sally Potter’s The Gold Diggers (1983). The first of these films, Radio On, also benefited from the support of a changing NFFC. The National Film Finance Corporation had been established in 1948 as a specialised bank to make loans in support of British film production and distribution. Although it never succeeded in becoming commercially successful it was nevertheless under an obligation to support films on a commercial basis. It was, therefore, only in the late 1970s, when Mamoun Hassan joined the company as managing director, that the NFFC’s brief was amended to take account of cultural factors and to encourage support for ‘films that … feed ideas and invention’.10 This new spirit became evident in support for Ken Loach’s historical drama Black Jack (1979), Franco Rosso’s controversial film about young Blacks in south London, Babylon (1980) and, most strikingly, in the case of Radio On. Radio On was a West German co-production fashioned after the work of Wim Wenders (whose company co-produced the film). Its combination of oblique narrative, aesthetic stylisation and ‘existential’ thematic concerns made it very different from previous NFFC productions and the film was generally regarded as providing an opening for a new kind of Europeaninfluenced British art cinema.11 However, it was probably Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) that represented the most significant breakthrough for British art cinema at this time. The BFI Production Board had supported Greenaway’s work during the 1970s, including funding A Walk Through H (1978) and The Falls (1980). The Draughtsman’s Contract constituted, in Greenaway’s own words, a movement away from ‘the experimental-movie closet’ towards a more conventional engagement with narrative form.12 Following critical acclaim at the Venice Film Festival, the film proved a surprise ‘hit’ and propelled Greenaway into the international arthouse circuit. More than any other film of this period, The Draughtsman’s Contract appeared to demonstrate the economic viability and cultural cachet of the newly emerging British art cinema and encouraged the BFI to maintain its policy of support for arthouse features by backing Greenaway’s next feature, A Zed and Two Noughts (1986), Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986) and Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). However, the resources of BFI Production were modest and its capacity to sustain this programme depended on Channel 4, which had begun

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funding BFI Production in 1981 and also provided half of the budget of The Draughtsman’s Contract. The channel also went on to increase its support for the Board when the British Film Fund Agency ceased to provide the BFI with funding in 1985 (following the abolition of the Eady levy), as well as providing sustenance to the British film industry more generally. Channel 4 was launched as the fourth national television channel on 2 November 1982. Although financed by advertising, the channel possessed a clear ‘public service’ remit to complement the services provided by the other three channels and to encourage ‘innovation and experiment in the form and content of programmes’.13 The channel also adopted a ‘publishing model’ of broadcasting whereby it did not itself make programmes but either purchased or commissioned work from outside sources. It was also this combination of public service principles and a commissioning model of broadcasting that provided the framework for the channel’s policy towards film. The channel’s first chief executive, Jeremy Isaacs, was aware of the role that German and Italian television had played in encouraging filmmaking (including the New German Cinema of the 1970s) and, in his application for the post in 1980, expressed his desire to support the production of films intended not simply for broadcast but also for proper theatrical release.14 While television assistance for film production was not entirely unprecedented in the UK, the degree of support provided by the channel certainly was. According to the company’s own calculations, it invested £91 million in 264 different works between 1982 and 1992.15 Two departments were the main sources of film finance. The Drama Department was responsible for the ‘Film on Four’ slot and supported many of the channel’s most successful or critically acclaimed films, such as The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983), My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Letter to Brezhnev (1985), A Room with a View (1985), Mona Lisa (1986), Comrades (1986), Caravaggio (1986), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), Drowning by Numbers (1988), Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), Life is Sweet (1990), Riff-Raff (1991), The Crying Game (1992), Raining Stones (1993), Shallow Grave (1994), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Trainspotting (1996) and Secrets and Lies (1996). The more politically radical Department of Independent Film and Video also provided support for more experimental low-budget independent films, which included Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance (1983) and Zina (1985), Sally Potter’s The Gold Diggers (1983), Mick Eaton’s Darkest England (1984), Derek Jarman’s The Last of England (1987) and Peter Wollen’s Friendship’s Death (1987). This department also funded a number of workshops which were involved in producing feature-length films, including Amber’s Seacoal (1985) and In Fading Light (1989), Cinema Action’s Rocinante (1986) and Sankofa’s The Passion of Remembrance (1986), a key film in the emergence of a Black British cinema. It would be hard to over-estimate the contribution of Channel 4 to the maintenance of British filmmaking during the 1980s and early 1990s. As the above list indicates, the channel was not only responsible for many of the most distinctive films of the time but also nurtured and sustained the

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The rise of British art cinema in the 1980s

filmmaking careers of virtually all the key directors of this period, including Danny Boyle, Terence Davies, Bill Douglas, Stephen Frears, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Neil Jordan, Isaac Julien, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Sally Potter. That it was able to do so, however, was the result of its commitment to cultural as well as commercial principles. Although Channel 4 enjoyed a few spectacular box office successes (such as The Crying Game, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Trainspotting), the bulk of its films failed to turn a profit. However, as its revenues derived primarily from advertising, Channel 4 did not depend upon direct financial returns in the same way as conventional film production companies. As a result, it was in a position to provide a degree of financial ‘subsidy’ for film production (while deriving considerable international prestige for doing so). As Isaacs explained in the early days of ‘Film on Four’, he regarded such films as having ‘a socio-cultural provenance and purpose’ which went beyond their financial returns or contribution to the ratings.16 So while television funding of film was not a formal government requirement, as in Germany or France, it did effectively function as a form of indirect ‘state support’, insofar as the channel’s funding arrangements and operating principles were a responsibility of government. In this way the channel provided the cornerstone of an interlocking organisational structure that cultivated and developed a British art cinema in the 1980s. It not only funded its own films but also provided financial support to the BFI Production Board and the Scottish Film Production Fund. The channel was also one of the three original funders of British Screen when the NFFC was ‘privatised’ in 1985. Up until 1994, when British Screen struck a controversial deal with the satellite broadcaster BSkyB for pay-television rights, the channel was also a key partner in its productions, co-investing in a substantial number of its films between 1987 and 1992. While a ‘private’ company, British Screen continued to receive government funding, including support for the European Co-Production Fund when it was established in 1991, and to pursue a remit which combined cultural and commercial objectives. In this way, the company continued to provide support for a diverse range of films including Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect (1987), Derek Jarman’s The Last of England (1987), Mike Leigh’s High Hopes (1988), Jarman’s Edward II (1991), Ian Sellar’s Prague (1991), Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993), Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom (1994), the Quay brothers’ Institute Benjamenta (1994) and Michael Winterbottom’s Butterfly Kiss (1994). Due to the shortage of production funding from within the UK, there were, of course, added incentives to look to Europe as a source of finance. As a result, there was a growth in European co-productions during the 1980s, and European television in particular became an important source of finance. The German public service broadcaster, ZDF, for example, cofunded, amongst others, Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives, Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance and Derek Jarman’s The Last of England and The Garden (1990). However, it is Peter Greenaway’s work in the 1980s

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and 1990s that probably benefited the most from European investment. Thus, in a striking example, Prospero’s Books (1991) received support from Eurimages, even when the UK was not a member, due to the fact that three other European countries – the Netherlands, France and Italy – were partners in the film’s production.17 This ‘Europeanisation’ of British cinema not only influenced the kinds of British films that circulated abroad (encouraging a movement towards European models) but also rendered the character of British cinema more complex. It has, of course, been common for art films to be seen as a particular kind of ‘national cinema’, drawing on specifically national concerns which simultaneously endow the films with an international appeal. Thus, in his discussion of Ingmar Bergman, Thomas Elsaesser notes the apparent paradox of how a personal and poetic cinema may nonetheless be held to embody the ‘essence’ of a nation’s character.18 In a sense, the growing internationalisation of art cinema through economic and cultural collaboration encouraged a certain severing of this link between the individual and the national. If we take the example of Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book, it is easy to see how the ‘national’ credentials of this film are complicated. It is a Dutch-French-UK production, involving a Dutch producer (Kees Kasander), a French cinematographer (Sacha Vierny), and, in the film’s lead role, a Chinese actress (Vivian Wu). The story itself involves relatively few British characters and the film is set entirely in Japan and Hong Kong. It is therefore the authorial stamp of Peter Greenaway, whose own relationship to British (or more properly English) culture is highly ambiguous, that provides the film with its tenuous links back to Britain. In this sense, the film may be seen to function more as an exemplar of a ‘post-national’ or ‘transnational’ cinema in which the (cosmopolitan) auteur plays an even more unifying role for the text than had even been the case in earlier European art cinema. Although the extent to which this occurred in other films of the period varied, the emergence of a British art cinema more generally may nevertheless be seen to have entailed a certain degree of movement away from modes of ‘national’ address towards the international and less culturally specific.

The changing characteristics of art cinema However, if organisations such as Channel 4, British Screen and BFI Production provided the basis for the emergence of a British art cinema, there is also a sense in which the kind of art cinema which emerged was of a diverse and novel kind. David Bordwell has attempted to identify the key features of art cinema in terms of a particular set of formal conventions which distinguish it from both classical narrative cinema and the avant garde. These include the loosening of narrative structures, a concern with ‘realism’ (both ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’), authorial expressiveness, and textual ambiguity.19 Steve Neale has also suggested a categorisation of

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art cinema in terms of a suppression of action, a stress on character and the interiorisation of dramatic conflict, and a foregrounding of style and authorial enunciation.20 However, for Bordwell, the ‘apogee’ of art cinema occurred in the years between 1957 and 1969 – when directors such as Antonioni, Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut and Resnais achieved widespread international recognition – and his attempt to define art cinema in terms of generic features only goes so far in capturing the full range of ways in which European cinema has subsequently circulated as ‘art’ rather than ‘popular’ cinema.21 As Nowell-Smith suggests, art films have departed from the mainstream in such a variety of ways that it is very difficult to assimilate art cinema into any one ‘single category’.22 In the case of British cinema, there are two matters to be considered here: both the way that British cinema was repositioned within the marketplace during the 1980s and early 1990s (and the consequences this had for the distribution and exhibition of British films) and the characteristics of the films themselves. As has already been stressed, ‘art cinema’ has never simply been a matter of textual characteristics, but has also been allied to a particular system of production (typically state or television subsidy) and distribution (festivals and a specialist arthouse circuit). As British films became more dependent upon television and international audiences, so even relatively conventional works began to circulate as ‘art cinema’. This was the case, for example, with the ‘heritage films’ (such as A Room with a View, Howards End and Mrs Brown) which rose to prominence during the 1980s. They successfully carved out a niche in the US and across Europe by delivering ‘quality’ drama of a kind that was clearly distinct from mainstream Hollywood but devoid of the narrational and stylistic features characteristic of earlier European art cinema. The ‘art’ of ‘art cinema’ in this instance, therefore, derived less from the films’ formal self-consciousness or textual ambiguity than the cachet of ‘high art’ which such films borrow from their literary or theatrical sources. As such it is, in John Caughie’s useful description, a cinema which enjoys ‘the prestige of art’ but has none of ‘its difficulty or formal excess’.23 The second strand of art cinema may be associated with the ‘realism’ of film-makers such as Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and, to some extent, Stephen Frears. While art cinema is often understood to involve a departure from realism, some reference to ‘realism’ (as in the case of Italian neorealism) is characteristically involved in the conceptualisation and practice of ‘art cinema’. In the case of British cinema, realism (be it a matter of subject matter, narrative structure or visual style) has often been identified as one of its defining traditions and has been central to the way British films have historically differentiated themselves from Hollywood ‘escapism’. However, this has generally been realism at the service of mainstream narrative cinema, as in the incorporation of documentary elements into British wartime drama or the British ‘New Wave’ of the 1960s. Erik Hedling has rightly identified elements of contemporary art cinema in the work of Lindsay Anderson.24 David Bordwell also includes an example from

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Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) in his discussion of art cinema narration.25 However, while films such as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and This Sporting Life (1963) undoubtedly display a degree of narrational self-consciousness and visual expressiveness typical of art cinema of the period, they still, with differing degrees of success, circulated within the UK as ‘commercial’ cinema. Indeed, as Nowell-Smith observes, part of the instability of the ‘art cinema’ category is that films that are regarded as mainstream products in their country of origin may often circulate as art films abroad, and, historically, this has certainly been true of the way that British films have been received in the US.26 What is therefore significant about the 1980s and 1990s is the way in which British realist filmmaking increasingly travelled, within the UK and elsewhere, as ‘art’ rather than as ‘popular’ cinema and, in doing so, came to depend much more heavily on international, rather than national, cinema audiences. Thus, in the case of Ken Loach’s Riff-Raff, the film was seen by more people in cinemas in France than in the UK, while the same director’s Land and Freedom was a big box office success in Spain but was hardly distributed at all in the UK. These changing economic circumstances were also associated with cultural shifts. The idea of art cinema has, of course, been characteristically associated with that of the auteur. As Bordwell argues, viewing procedures that regard the art film as ‘the work of an expressive individual’ have traditionally underpinned the way in which art cinema has been read and received (and, indeed, valued).27 However, while ‘authorship’ may be visible as a textual property (in the form of an overt inscription of the authorial voice into the text), it is also, as Bordwell indicates, the product of an elaborate infrastructure of critical writing and reviewing, education, promotion and marketing (which has become increasingly important for all forms of cinema). Thus, as British cinema came to occupy the terrain of art cinema at the level of production and distribution during the 1980s, so it also became more common for British cinema to be characterised, and promoted, in terms of personal styles and approaches. Whereas 1960s realist films such as This Sporting Life, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Poor Cow were still by and large promoted in terms of their stories and stars, directors have now become much more important in the ‘branding’ of British realist films, which function simultaneously as representations of contemporary social realities and forms of authorial expressivity. In the process, British social realism itself underwent a degree of change. Thus, for Christopher Williams, a key trend of the 1980s was the emergence of a British ‘social art’ cinema in which what he regards as the traditional ‘social’ interests of British cinema – debate on ‘issues of present social and media concern’, the use of ‘elements of observational, cultural and stylistic realism’ and an ‘interest in group rather than individual entities and identities’ – are combined with the more individualistic and stylistically self-conscious concerns of the traditional European art film.28 There are some peculiar aspects to Williams’s formulations. He is concerned,

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for example, to differentiate what he regards as the ‘social’ and the ‘realist’ traditions of British cinema but then proceeds to include a variety of poorly distinguished forms of realism in his definition of the ‘social-diffuse’. His choice of what to include in the category of ‘social art cinema’ also seems to be relatively arbitrary, apparently embracing Wish You Were Here (1987) and Letter to Brezhnev (1985) but not The Ploughman’s Lunch and Meantime (1983), two films which arguably fit the category better. He also over-estimates the extent to which this was a new development and ignores the way in which the British ‘New Wave’ had already achieved a degree of rapprochement between social realism and art cinema narration. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that the fusion of elements Williams identifies did gather momentum in the 1980s and was given a particular impetus by Channel 4. This, in turn, may be accounted for by the channel’s combined commitment to supporting a ‘quality cinema’ (that would win prestige at home and abroad by circulating as ‘art’) and fulfilling a public service remit (which encouraged attention to matters of contemporary social and political concern). As Martin Hunt has suggested, the work of Terence Davies provides a good example in this regard.29 Thus, in Davies’ film Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), dealing with working-class experience in the 1940s and 1950s, there is a clear combination of subjectively marked, aesthetic stylisation (indebted to art cinema) with a semi-autobiographical concentration on the realities, and deprivations, of working-class life (more akin to the British social-realist tradition). The third strand of British art cinema comes closest to what has conventionally been understood by the term and partly stands in opposition to the preceding two. In an article proclaiming ‘the last new wave’ in British cinema, Peter Wollen argues that British cinema has had an over-reliance on literature and theatre (as in the heritage film), a subscription to a realist aesthetic (as in Loach), and an absence of distinctive authorial signatures (or what he describes as a ‘project of directorial “authorship” ’).30 For Wollen, it is the emergence of visually oriented, anti-realist ‘auteurs’, such as Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway, that therefore defines his ‘last new wave’. While the term ‘New Wave’ may seem inflationary in relation to two directors whose work is characterised by substantial differences, there is little doubt that these were the two directors most clearly identified with the emergence of British art cinema in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, it was an art cinema of a kind that complicated earlier models. Bordwell’s identification of ‘art cinema’ as a distinct mode of film practice, for example, had rested upon a differentiation not only from classical Hollywood but also from the avant garde. In this respect, art cinema was to be distinguished from both a ‘first avant garde’ devoted to non-narrative formal experiment and a ‘second avant garde’ in which formal and political radicalism were combined.31 However, as Michael O’Pray suggests, it was much harder to draw such distinctions in relation to British films of the 1980s and strategies typically associated with the avant garde began to converge with those of the art film.32 Thus, while Bordwell characterises

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art cinema as a sort of ‘domesticated modernism’ in which modernist selfconsciousness was combined with an interest in narrative and character, this is much less so in the work of Jarman and Greenaway. Jarman, for example, began making ‘personal’ home movies and experimental shorts in the 1970s and subsequently imported the aesthetics of his shorts (and the use of Super8) into his features, characterising his work as ‘home movie-making really gone sort of slightly grand’.33 Thus, in films such as The Last of England and The Garden, there is a virtual abandonment of conventional narrative patterns, characterisation and dialogue. Instead such films combine a (first avant-garde) interest in perceptual play and formal processes with an ‘underground’ taste for the ‘visionary’, the surreal and the transgressive (particularly in the use of homoerotic imagery). However, insofar as Jarman’s work was also characterised by a growing identification with queer politics it was not simply a ‘personal’ cinema but also displayed the concerns of a (second avant-garde) ‘counter-cinema’ as well.34 Greenaway also imported the formal concerns of his early experimental work into his features, and this is apparent in the way that his films are as much governed by numerical or formal principles as narrative ones. Greenaway’s films also abandon many of the humanist concerns of earlier art films and his interest in character is rarely psychological or predicated upon patterns of emotional engagement. The premium the films place, in this respect, upon the display of the body, physical appetite and corporeal decay also identify them with an avant-garde tradition of ‘shock’ and taboobreaking rather than conventional art cinema (albeit this has often relied upon sexual frankness for much of its international success). Through the use of digital image technologies, Greenaway’s films (such as Prospero’s Books and The Pillow Book) also increasingly moved away from the narrative and photographic features of (art) cinema by emphasising their graphic qualities and exploiting the possibilities these technologies provide for complex combinations of text and image. As such, it is perhaps odd that Wollen primarily associates the work of Jarman and Greenaway with ‘modernism’. For while their work may be linked to the cinematic self-consciousness and self-referentiality of modernism, it is the intertextuality and eclecticism, the erosion of aesthetic and technological boundaries, and significatory play associated with postmodernism that seem to emerge as predominant features. In this respect, the hybridity that is evident in such work appears to be a more general feature of films of the period. Thus, the Black film movement of the 1980s not only carried on the political radicalism of the 1970s ‘independent’ film (or second avant garde) but, as in The Passion of Remembrance, typically blurred the boundaries between avant garde, art cinema and documentary practices. Films such as The Hit (1984), Parker (1984), Mona Lisa (1986), Melancholia (1986), The Company of Wolves (1984), The Magic Toyshop (1986) and Hardware (1990) also combined the generic conventions of the thriller, the horror film and science fiction with the thematic and stylistic concerns of the European art film. In this respect, the growth of British art



The rise of British art cinema in the 1980s

cinema not only involved a degree of convergence between the avant garde and art cinema, but between art cinema and genre cinema as well.

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The end of an era? These arguments primarily concern the kinds of British ‘art cinema’ that emerged during the 1980s and early 1990s but which, to a certain degree, began to falter thereafter. This may, in part, be accounted for in terms of the individuals concerned. Both Bill Douglas and Derek Jarman died (in 1991 and 1994 respectively) while still in their fifties. Peter Greenaway began to spend less time on films and more on exhibitions (such as The Stairs); Terence Davies undertook work in the US (where he shot The Neon Bible in 1995). However, it is also the case that the institutional infrastructure upon which British art cinema had depended began to change. This was particularly so in the case of Channel 4. From the start of 1993, the channel became responsible for selling its own advertising. This had previously been the responsibility of the ITV companies and provided Channel 4 with a degree of financial shelter in its early days. With the channel no longer guaranteed its income and in competition with the other television companies for advertising at a time of television growth (due to the spread of cable and satellite), there were inevitably pressures to make programming both more ‘popular’ and ‘economic’. This, in turn, had consequences for the channel’s support for film. In the case of the Department of Independent Film and Video, growing commercial pressures led to a withdrawal of its ongoing support for the workshops and an end to its financing of low-budget film features. In the case of ‘Film on Four’, particularly in the wake of such big successes as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Trainspotting and Brassed Off (1996), the channel become more obviously market-driven and less prepared to ‘subsidise’, or ‘deficitfinance’, films on cultural grounds. This policy intensified with the creation of FilmFour as a ‘commercial subsidiary’ in 1998 and the launch of a much more explicitly commercial and ‘big-budget’ production strategy. Although Channel 4 also established FilmFour Lab in 1999 in order to support more experimental, low-budget work, there can be little doubt that during the 1990s there was a definite narrowing of the range and diversity of films that the channel supported. To a large extent, this reflected a more general shift in attitudes towards support for film in Britain. For while the 1980s may have seen the emergence of a more varied body of films than any previous era of British filmmaking, it also became perceived as an era when the British film industry lost commercial credibility and became dependent to a large extent upon television and state support. As a result, government policy on film (both under the Conservatives and Labour) was largely directed towards finding the means for sustaining a more commercial industry rather than cultivating cultural variety.35

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This meant that, while additional public money became available during the 1990s, it was, with a few exceptions, used to support a generally less adventurous range of features. In 1995 the government agreed to allocate a share of National Lottery revenues to film funds administered by the Arts Councils of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. While the requirement of ‘additionality’ meant that lottery money was expected to supplement rather than substitute for private finance, the desire to enhance the commercial viability of British film production was evident in the way that the Arts Council of England, the largest of the lottery funds, allocated its funds. This included backing the Greenlight Fund, managed by British Screen, designed to support higher budget films, such as Wilde (1997), The Land Girls (1998), and Ordinary Decent Criminal (1999), as well as three franchises – The Film Consortium (Hideous Kinky, 1999; Fanny and Elvis, 1999), Pathé Pictures (An Ideal Husband, 1999; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1999) and DNA Films – which would combine production with development and distribution and finance a slate of British features on a commercial basis. While substantial sums of money were invested in these projects (with relatively small returns), plans for a fund aimed at the ‘cultural sector’, which would support lower budget and more experimental work, were never implemented. Thus, while the Lottery did support the occasional film that fell within the art cinema tradition – such as Andrew Kötting’s self-reflexive documentary Gallivant (1997) and John Maybury’s exploration of the life of Francis Bacon, Love is the Devil (1998) – there was a degree of aesthetic conservatism in the work that was financed in comparison to British films of the 1980s. This tendency may be seen to have gained added momentum in 2000 when the newly established Film Council (UKFC) assumed the responsibilities of the Arts Council of England’s Lottery Film Department along with those of BFI Production and British Screen. Set the task of developing and maintaining a ‘sustainable’ UK film industry by a market-friendly ‘new Labour’ government, a particular premium was placed on the creation of a UK film ‘hub’ and the support of commercially oriented feature production through the establishment of its Premiere Fund.

Conclusion John Ellis has defined what he calls ‘the space of cinema’ in terms of its conditions of existence and relations to other institutions of representation (such as television).36 In a sense, the ‘space’ of British cinema changed radically towards the end of the 1970s and during the 1980s as commercial filmmaking went into decline and British film-makers adjusted to their new ‘conditions of existence’. In this respect, the emergence of a British art cinema during the 1980s relied upon the development of a new institutional infrastructure provided by Channel 4, British Screen and BFI Production. However, as the climate of broadcasting became more commercial and competitive during the 1990s, and the rhetoric of film culture began to

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change, so the pattern of support for British filmmaking also began to alter. This meant that, while the British film industry still remained economically weak, the discourses of ‘commerce’ and ‘industry’ nevertheless achieved a growing dominance over the discourses of ‘culture’ and ‘art’ within public service broadcasting and publicly supported institutions. This, in turn, led to a weakening of support for the ‘project’ of a British art cinema and a certain narrowing of the range of British feature production more generally during the 1990s. However, although the UK film industry may have gone on to experience an upsurge in UK-based Hollywood production (partly encouraged by generous tax incentives), the commercial policies pursued by Channel 4 and the UK Film Council proved less successful. Film Four Productions was unable to operate at a profit and was returned to the channel’s Drama Department in 2002, prompting a degree of return to a policy supportive of more modestly budgeted, culturally innovative projects (such as Better Things, 2008; Hunger, 2008; Tyrannosaur, 2011; Berberian Sound Studio, 2012; The Selfish Giant, 2013; and A Field in England, 2013). The level of recoupment achieved by the UKFC’s Premiere Fund also turned out to be much less than had been anticipated, with the result that in 2010 the Premiere and New Cinema Funds were combined into a single production fund with less demanding financial targets. The UKFC’s New Cinema Fund had provided financial backing to a fairly diverse group of films, including a number – such as Fish Tank (2009), Nightwatching (2007) and Yes (2004) – with affinities to an earlier era of British ‘art cinema’ (even though this was a label that the Film Council itself rarely used). This more ‘cultural’ strand also carried over to the BFI when, following a further shake-up of film institutions by the incoming Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010, it incorporated the main functions of the UKFC. Although the BFI did retain many elements of the Film Council’s approach, it also fulfilled its traditional cultural remit by providing support to a range of less mainstream works that included Under the Skin (2014), Sunset Song (2015), High Rise (2015), The Duke of Burgundy (2015) and Lady Macbeth (2016). To this extent, despite the various changes undergone in the 1990s and early 2000s, the BFI and Channel 4 have continued to provide the institutional underpinnings of a British ‘art cinema’ even though the films concerned may be seen as even more diffuse than hitherto and rarely referred to as such (by funders, makers or audiences alike).

Notes  1 This chapter is a slightly revised and updated version of an earlier essay that appeared under the title, ‘The Rise and Fall of British Art Cinema: A Short History of the 1980s and 1990s’, Aura, 6: 3 (2000), pp. 18–32.  2 Alan Lovell, The British Cinema: The Unknown Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1969).

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British art cinema  3 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Peter Greenaway’, in Philip Dodd and Ian Christie (eds), Spellbound: Art and Film (London: Hayward Gallery and British Film Institute, 1996), p. 77.  4 Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema and the Question of Independent Film’, in Rod Stoneman and Hilary Thompson (eds), The New Social Function of Cinema Catalogue: British Film Institute Productions ’79/80 (London: British Film Institute, 1981), pp. 41–5; p. 42.  5 Neale, ‘Art Cinema and the Question of Independent Film’, p. 42.  6 See Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), and John Ellis, ‘Art, Culture and Quality – Terms for a Cinema in the Forties and Seventies’, Screen, 19: 3 (1978), pp. 9–50.  7 John Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).  8 Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (London: British Film Institute/Macmillan, 1989), p. 9.  9 Peter Sainsbury, ‘Independent British Film-Making and the Production Board’, in British Film Institute Productions 1951–1977: Catalogue (London: British Film Institute, 1977), p. 11. 10 National Film Finance Corporation, Annual Report and Statement of Accounts for Year Ended 31/3/79 (London: HMSO, 1980), p. 5. 11 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘Radio On’, Screen, 20: 3/4 (1979/80), pp. 29–39; Neale, ‘Art Cinema and the Question of Independent Film’. 12 Quoted in Jonathan Hacker and David Price, Take Ten: Contemporary British Film Directors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 199. 13 Broadcasting Act 1981 (1982) (London: HMSO), p. 13. 14 Jeremy Isaacs, Storm Over 4: A Personal Account (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), p. 25. 15 Monopolies and Mergers Commission, Films: A Report on the Supply of Films for Exhibition in Cinemas in the UK (London: HMSO, 1994), p. 151. 16 Quoted in Stephen Lambert, ‘Isaacs: Still Smiling’, Stills, 6 (May–June 1983), p. 26. 17 Ian Christie, ‘As Others See Us: British Filmmaking and Europe in the 90s’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), British Cinema of the 90s (London: British Film Institute, 2000), pp. 68–79. 18 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Putting on a Show: The European Art Movie’, Sight and Sound, 4: 4 (1999), pp. 22–7; p. 23. 19 David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, Film Criticism, 4: 1 (1979), pp. 56–64. 20 Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen, 22: 1 (May 1981), pp. 11–40. 21 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 230–1. 22 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘Art Cinema’, in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed.), The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 570. 23 John Caughie, ‘The Logic of Convergence’, in John Hill and Martin McLoone (eds), Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television (Luton: John Libbey Media/University of Luton Press, 1996), pp. 215–23; p. 218. 24 Erik Hedling, ‘Lindsay Anderson and the Development of British Art Cinema’,

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in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 1997), pp. 178–86. 25 Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, p. 210. 26 Nowell-Smith, ‘Art Cinema’, p. 567. 27 Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, p. 59. 28 Christopher Williams, ‘The Social Art Cinema: A Movement in the History of British Film and Television Culture’, in Christopher Williams (ed.), Cinema: The Beginnings and the Future (London: University of Westminster Press, 1996), pp. 190–200; p. 194. 29 Martin Hunt, ‘The Poetry of the Ordinary: Terence Davies and the Social Art Cinema’, Screen, 40: 1 (1999), pp. 1–16. 30 Peter Wollen, ‘The Last New Wave: Modernism in the British Films of the Thatcher Era’, in Lester Friedman (ed.), British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started (London: UCL Press, 1993), pp. 35–51; pp. 36–7. 31 Peter Wollen, Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: Verso, 1982). 32 Michael O’Pray, ‘The British Avant-Garde and Art Cinema from the 1970s to the 1990s’, in Andrew Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (London: Cassell, 1996), pp. 178–90; p. 179. 33 Quoted in Tony Peake, Derek Jarman (London: Little, Brown, 1999), p. 443. 34 Martin Quinn-Meyler, ‘Opposing “Heterosoc”: Jarman’s Counter-Hegemonic Activism’, in Chris Lippard (ed.), By Angels Driven: The Films of Derek Jarman (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1996), pp. 117–34. 35 Department of National Heritage, The British Film Industry, Cm. 2884 (London: HMSO, 1995); Film Policy Review Group, A Bigger Picture (London: Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 1998). 36 John Ellis, ‘The Institution of Cinema’, Edinburgh ‘77 Magazine, 2 ‘History/ Production/Memory’ (1977), pp. 56–66.

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13

Derek Jarman, trance films and medieval art cinema Jo George

Derek Jarman occupies a central place in British art cinema. Indeed, John Hill argues that it was Jarman, along with Peter Greenaway, who made it ‘much easier to identify a recognisably British art cinema and see it as a significant strand of British and, indeed, European filmmaking’1 in the late 1970s and 1980s. On closer inspection, however, several of Jarman’s films are not so easily identified as examples of art cinema. Certainly, his early 16mm features, Sebastiane (1976), Jubilee (1978) and The Tempest (1979) as well as subsequent 35mm films such as Caravaggio (1986), War Requiem (1988) and Edward II (1991) can be viewed as art films in the classic sense as laid out by David Bordwell,2 Steve Neale3 and others. Works such as The Angelic Conversation (1985), The Last of England (1987) and The Garden (1990) are, however, noticeably more radical in terms of their form, content and structure. Shot on amateur Super8 equipment (or, in the case of The Garden a mixture of Super8, 16mm and video), without conventional scripts or dialogue, these films push the notion of art cinema as being ‘explicitly against the classical narrative mode’ to its absolute limits. For Michael O’Pray, these films are, in fact, ‘difficult to appreciate within the conventional terms of art cinema criticism’, and instead ‘bring together art cinema and the avant-garde’ in ‘an eclectic, hybrid manner’.4 This chapter will examine The Last of England and The Garden and will bear out O’Pray’s assertion by demonstrating their kinship with key works of avant-garde cinema such as Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet (1930), Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and At Land (1944), and Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947). At the same time, however, I will also show how Jarman brings these experimental cinematic psychodramas into dialogue with the far older tradition of dream-visions in medieval poetry. By doing so, this chapter will place Jarman’s work squarely within a rich canon of British and European art films which engage with the Middle Ages, a period whose profound influence on Jarman has yet to be fully appreciated. At first, it may seem difficult to reconcile the influence of medieval poetry and of the experimental films of the 1930s and 1940s on Jarman, and this kind of eclecticism has confounded more than a few of his critics. As the film-maker wrote in his journal in the early 1990s: ‘Shakespeare, the Sonnets,

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Caravaggio, Britten’s Requiem, what more traditional subject matter could a film maker take on? And yet I’m still seen by some as a menace.’5 This is a very revealing journal entry, contrasting as it does the public perception of Jarman as a provocateur and experimentalist with his own view of himself as the most traditional film-maker of his generation. The irony, however, is that both assessments of Jarman are correct. Jarman was a radical, but at the same time the idea of tradition was central to his thinking and his practice as an artist and film-maker. Critics such as Brian Hoyle have argued that this apparent contradiction may, in fact, be the key to understanding Jarman’s work. Indeed, Hoyle has usefully dubbed him a ‘radical traditionalist’,6 a Janus-faced figure with one eye trained (not uncritically) on the art, culture, history and politics of the past and the other locked onto the avant garde, searching for the art work of the future. For example, his second feature, Jubilee (1978), was ‘Britain’s first official punk movie’7 and a legitimate reflection of the zeitgeist of the late 1970s; yet Jarman sees it as a ‘healing fiction’ which ‘harked back to Pearl and Piers Ploughman’,8 poems within the medieval dream-vision tradition.

British art cinema and the avant garde Jubilee is in many ways the direct precursor to The Last of England and The Garden. All three were very much films ‘of the moment’, with the latter two brimming with topical attacks on Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government, homophobia and the spectre of AIDS. At the same time, as will be demonstrated below, The Last of England and The Garden were also directly inspired by medieval dream-poetry and its conventions. The key difference between Jubilee and the later films, however, is one of style. As O’Pray has noted, ‘in a reversal of most directors’ careers, Jarman’s film style became more radical as he grew older’.9 Jubilee, on the whole, is ‘conventionally shot and edited’.10 The same cannot be said for The Last of England and The Garden. As stated above, both films were either entirely or predominately shot on Super8, an amateur film format. Art cinema may challenge many of the assumptions of mainstream cinema, but it nevertheless remains tied to the industrial apparatus of filmmaking. Generally speaking, art films, be they by Fellini, Bergman or Greenaway, make use of the same professionallevel cameras, sound equipment and production facilities that are used by mainstream film-makers. Less expensive ‘amateur’ formats like Super8, video, and in its early days, digital, have rarely been used in feature filmmaking. They have, however, been widely used by avant-garde film-makers, who often identify more closely with amateurs than they do with their professional counterparts. As Maya Deren puts it: The very classification ‘amateur’ has an apologetic ring. But that very word – from the Latin ‘amateur’ – ‘lover’ means one who does something for the love of the thing rather than for economic reasons or necessity. And this is

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the meaning from which the amateur filmmaker should take his cue. Instead of envying the script and dialogue writers, the trained actors, the elaborate staffs and sets, the enormous production budgets of the professional film, the amateur should make use of the one great advantage which all professionals envy him, namely, freedom – both artistic and physical.11

Jarman, it seems, shared Deren’s views on ‘amateurism’ and artistic freedom. His first forays into filmmaking in the early 1970s were Super8 short films that were, by his own admission, ‘home movies’, featuring the friends who gathered in his Bankside studio. In many ways, these early films were not dissimilar to the 16mm films that Jarman’s father shot of the young Jarman and his sister (some of which appear in The Last of England). Even when he moved on to more industrial filmmaking in the late 1970s he never fully lost sight of his amateur artistic roots. Super8 material found its way into several of Jarman’s larger-gauge features, including Jubilee and War Requiem, and there has always been an unashamed sense of amateurism about his films, which his frequent collaborator Tilda Swinton neatly summed up as having ‘the whiff of the school play’.12 Moreover, Jarman never felt the need to acquire the technical virtuosity that is often associated with art cinema auteurs. On the contrary, he drew inspiration from the films of Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol, which he argued were ‘close to something one could actually do oneself [and which demonstrated] that it didn’t matter if you didn’t adhere to all the technicalities and rules’.13 The specifics of the Super8 format also had a profound impact on the aesthetics of both The Last of England and The Garden. The film image, when blown up to 35mm for theatrical exhibition, had a grainy, painterly feel that Jarman liked. Moreover, the Nizo Super8 cameras he favoured were lightweight and handheld and could therefore be moved with far greater freedom than their 35mm or 16mm equivalents. This allowed Jarman to film from a variety of unusual angles and get closer to his subjects than one normally could. The Super8 format also allows the camera operator to alter the frame rate while filming, meaning that Jarman could rapidly change the texture of his film by speeding up and slowing down his images. Also, as the thin, delicate strip of 8mm film did not have room for a soundtrack, both The Last of England and The Garden were essentially shot like silent films, without any conventional dialogue scenes. The lack of dialogue is crucial for two reasons. Firstly, it allowed Jarman far greater freedom in the editing room. Without any dialogue to cut, conventional cutting patterns such as ‘shot-reverse-shot’ can be eschewed. Freed from such filmic conventions, Jarman was able to experiment. As John Hill notes, the montage in The Last of England violently contrasts ‘colour and black and white, the grain of the image, speeded-up and slowed-down images, disorientating camera movements and angles, [and] quickfire editing’.14 Perhaps the most concentrated example of this is the ‘disco’ sequence at the centre of the film, which contains over ‘1600 cuts in six minutes’15 (more than Jarman’s previous film, Caravaggio, featured across ninety minutes). Jarman argued that

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it ‘crashed into the film unexpectedly, the pace is relentless. It should wind the audience.’16 Indeed, there is little to compare this sequence to in British art cinema. Instead, we have to look either to one of Jarman’s own music videos, such as for The Smiths’ ‘The Queen is Dead’ (1986), or to a work of late silent cinema, such as Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927), to find a montage of equal speed and aggression. The Garden, on the other hand, is even more of a collage than its predecessor. In The Garden, black and white again clashes with colour and tinted footage; speeded-up footage clashes with slowed motion; and static tableaux with wild, handheld camera movement. What is perhaps most striking, however, is the intercutting between different film and video formats. Each time footage shot on video and 16mm jars with the Super8 images, it is a direct acknowledgment of the medium itself and a reminder that one of the key points of overlap between avant-garde and art cinema is the modernist concern with self-reflexivity. Watching the stream of images in both films, we are also reminded of Deren’s assertion that ‘Artistic freedom means that the amateur [and avant-garde] film-maker is never forced to sacrifice visual drama and beauty to a stream of words, words, words, words, to the relentless activity and explanations of a plot.’17 Indeed, working with amateur equipment and without sound also meant that Jarman could shoot these two films without a script, therefore further severing their ties with conventional cinema. If, as David Bordwell asserts, the protagonist’s itinerary in an art film only ‘has a rough shape’,18 Jarman moves even further away from the classical narrative mode. The Last of England, for example, has no named characters and does not tell a story so much as, to borrow the words of Michael Almereyda, move ‘in bursts, surges and jolts, leaping from one inspiration to the next’.19 Similarly, the unseen narrator (Michael Gough) of The Garden promises to take the viewer on ‘a journey without direction’. At the same time, however, Jarman’s films are not entirely without structure. On the contrary, several critics, including Tony Rayns writing in the promotional press pack to The Garden, have argued that both it and The Last of England are feature-length examples of ‘trance films’.20 According to P. Adams Sitney, the ‘model for [the trance film’s] development’21 was Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet, in which he visualised the dreams of a sleeping poet who was a surrogate for both Cocteau and the figure of the artist in general. The trance film, which Sitney describes as being ‘cast in the form of a dream beginning and ending with images of its hero as a sleeper’,22 subsequently came to full fruition in the works mentioned above: Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land, and Anger’s Fireworks. In these films it is not an actor or a surrogate, but rather ‘the filmmaker himself [or herself who] plays out a drama of psychological revelation’. Indeed, Deren and Anger appear in their respective films and are shown falling asleep in the opening minutes of each. The short narratives that follow (each film is approximately fifteen minutes) are located firmly within the film-makers’ subconscious minds, and follow an appropriately absurd dream-logic as they depict fantasies about sex, suicide and selfhood.

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In accordance with the tradition of the film-maker appearing as themselves in trance films, Jarman inserts himself at the start of both The Last of England and The Garden. But unlike his role as a reporter in Jubilee or as a cardinal in Caravaggio, these are not Hitchcock-style cameos. Rather, Jarman is ‘playing himself in the opening shot of The Last of England’,23 and in The Garden he is first seen in his study at Dungeness, sleeping at his desk, where he is ‘clearly dreaming the film into being’.24 Later, in a scene which recalls the opening of Deren’s At Land, in which the semi-conscious film-maker washes up on a beach, Jarman is depicted sleeping on his sickbed, which has been moved into the sea. Although one never sees Jarman sleeping in The Last of England, the mise-en-scène of the film still depicts him as a visionary who conjures up the film’s dream-like imagery. In this film Jarman is once again seen working at his desk, writing and drawing in one of his ornate notebooks. The handheld Super8 camera picks up details of the words he is writing with an old-fashioned pen and ink, and shows the film-maker rubbing his tired eyes. At this juncture it is worth examining O’Pray’s assertion, quoted above, that both The Last of England and The Garden are ‘hybrid’ works, which bring together aspects of the avant garde with the comparatively conventional formal qualities of art cinema. Certainly, Jarman’s adoption of the trance film’s structure, his reliance on amateur equipment and the seemingly improvised nature of the films mark them out as avant garde. At the same time, however, Jarman’s variants on the trance film distinguish themselves most obviously from those of Deren and Anger by virtue of the fact that they are of feature length. As William Verrone notes, the history of the avant garde is largely one of short films or occasional films such as Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963) or Ken Jacob’s Star Spangled to Death (2004), which greatly exceed normal feature length.25 As a result, avant-garde films are not typically exhibited in cinemas. Rather, according to Verrone, they often ‘float on the peripheries of cultural, historical and cinematic society where only a small contingent of ardent film scholars and cineastes find them. [… Indeed] many short avant-garde films cannot be (readily or easily) seen, [as] they are either in the hands of their creators, museums, or rentals through cooperatives […] which limits their circulation.’26 For avant-garde film-makers like Deren, this obscurity is the price of artistic freedom. Their productions are not ‘expected to return profit on a huge investment by holding the attention of a massive and motley audience for 90 minutes’.27 Art cinema, on the other hand, shares a system of distribution and exhibition with the mainstream. Even works like The Last of England and The Garden, which are on the avant garde end of the art cinema spectrum, are still released with commercial intent and must conform to certain conventions in terms of length and format. Indeed, despite being shot on Super8, both of Jarman’s films were blown up to 35mm, the preferred gauge of professional film-makers, for their cinematic release. Despite what O’Pray sees as their ‘lack of professional sheen’,28 films like The Last of England and The Garden nevertheless belong as much

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to the world of art cinema as they do to the more overtly experimental realm of the avant garde. As much as it pleased Jarman to distance himself from the conventions of narrative cinema, films like The Garden, with its retelling of Christ’s Passion, have what Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit call a ‘powerful narrative directionality’29 that distinguishes it from most experimental films. Additionally, several other important factors push these works closer to art cinema than the avant garde. For instance, the presence of recognisable actors (including Tilda Swinton, Vernon Dobtcheff and Michael Gough), Simon Fisher Turner’s evocative soundtracks, the use of rich locations (London’s derelict Docklands in The Last of England and Dungeness for The Garden) coupled with Jarman and Christopher Hobbs’s keen sense of design, lend the films far better production values than most experimental films could ever boast. Moreover, the films share many of the key traits of European art cinema in terms of their funding and marketing. For instance, both films were international co-productions (between Britain and Germany, and Britain, Germany and Japan respectively) and both competed for and won prizes at the Berlin film festival. Finally, then, in The Last of England and The Garden Jarman is working within a clear tradition of European art cinema, but he also seeks to push that tradition to its very limits by marrying it with the more experimental impulses of the avant garde.

Medieval Jarman There can be no doubt that Jarman self-consciously conceived The Last of England and The Garden as trance films. Indeed, he was more than familiar with the form and those who pioneered it. For instance, in the final minutes of his extraordinary swansong Blue (1993), Jarman’s voiceover reminisces about being in St Mary’s Hospital for treatment with a fellow patient who ‘looks like Jean Cocteau without the poet’s refined arrogance’. He also spoke frequently of his admiration for Kenneth Anger and placed Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon on a list of his ten favourite films. Another work on that list was Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1972 adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1972), and the image of Jarman at his desk at the start of The Last of England, sporting a white cap, directly recalls the final section of Pasolini’s film in which the director himself appears as Chaucer. Here, Pasolini, who is also wearing a white hat, sits at his desk in a pose reminiscent of Hans Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus. The poet has a vision of hell directly inspired by Hieronymus Bosch, complete with images of torture, degradation and the devil excreting friars before he imagines the pilgrims’ arrival at Canterbury Cathedral and writes the word ‘Amen’ at the end of his manuscript. By evoking this image of Pasolini playing Chaucer, Jarman is doing far more than simply paying homage to a film and an artist he admired. On the contrary, he is informing the viewer that his film is also a work rooted in a medieval visionary tradition. Indeed, the sight of Jarman

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seated at his desk brings Neil Tennant’s impression of him to mind: ‘He looked like a monk in the thirteenth century—doing calligraphy or copying out the works of Augustine. There was something weirdly ecclesiastical about him.’30 Critics have made a great deal of the ‘interface between the Renaissance and the present’31 in Jarman’s work, and five of his eleven feature films – Jubilee, The Tempest (1979), The Angelic Conversation, Caravaggio, and Edward II (1991) – engage directly with the art, literature or history of this time. Few, however, have recognised that an equal (if not greater) number engage with the Anglo-Saxon and medieval periods. Indeed, there can be no doubt that Jarman was a serious student of the Middle Ages, and his love of the epoch began in childhood. He wrote that: My first grown-up book from a shop in Charing Cross Road; The Cloister and the Hearth [a historical novel set in the fifteenth century written in 1861 by Charles Reade] – the exquisite bright painting irradiated with pure clear colour. At the risk of giving you a reading list, before I abandoned the ‘sources’ for something of my own, I took up with Hildegarde of Bingen, Marjorie Kempe, Richard Rolle [all three were medieval mystics] and sailed into the cloudy unknown [this is a reference to The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous fourteenth-century work of Christian mysticism].32

Peake’s remarks about Jarman’s extensive engagement with early period literature are also worth quoting here: ‘His study [at King’s College, London] of Old and Middle English, of mediaeval and Elizabethan texts, would provide him with a multifaceted literary compass with which to navigate the coming years. Piers Plowman, Chaucer, Donne, Marlowe, Shakespeare all profoundly influenced his thought and in many cases fed into subsequent projects.’33 A brief survey of the medieval influences on his films will reveal that his first feature, Sebastiane (1976), was a saint’s life in the hagiographical tradition; while the imagery in The Angelic Conversation, which is often characterised as a film based on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, actually owes far more to an Old English poem such as The Wanderer; and, as noted above, Jarman saw Jubilee operating in the tradition of Piers Ploughman and Pearl. The same can also be said for The Last of England and The Garden, the latter of which Jarman even toyed with naming The Dream of the Rood, after the Old English poem depicting the Crucifixion. As Peake notes, the framing device used in both films was ‘that of the dream allegory: as the film’s maker, Jarman would dream his film into being’.34 Indeed, in medieval poetry of this nature, like in the trance film, the ‘poet’ falls asleep and ‘wakes in a visionary landscape where he encounters personifications of psychic states’.35 This is also seen in William Langland’s late fourteenth-­century dream-vision, Piers Plowman. This was a poem that Jarman returned to again and again. He declared that it would make a ‘great film’,36 and though he never managed to adapt it for the screen he does seem to have used it as a source for The Last of England. Like Piers Plowman, for example, Jarman’s film is a deeply political, apocalyptic attack on its contemporary society. In

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Langland’s case, he was responding to the ‘fallen’ state of English society ­following the Black Death and the decline of feudalism. With Jarman we have a visceral attack on Thatcher’s Britain. Jarman’s presence, as well as his employment of the medieval dreamvision, is even more pronounced, however, in The Garden. The personal nature of the film cannot be denied, but its function as a dream-vision must also be examined further. Like all medieval dream-visions, The Garden is allegorical. O’Pray even goes so far as to say that ‘it is through its allegories that it achieves its critical force’.37 These ‘allegories’ apply both to the film’s characters and its landscape. When Jarman is first seen dreaming, he is surrounded by Christian iconography. The two lovers (Keith Collins and Johnny Mills) who, because of their sexuality, suffer persecution are clearly allegories of Christ (we even see them jointly carrying a cross at one point in the film) and even Jarman-the-dreamer functions this way at certain moments here. The setting of The Garden, Jarman’s own garden at  Dungeness, however, is especially symbolic. As Deborah Esch writes, there are: the obviously allegorical dimensions of a garden that thrives against the odds in the long shadow of Dungeness B nuclear power plant while its gardener fights to forestall the opportunistic infections that batter an immune system weakened by HIV. (The garden is thus among the ‘Landscapes of time, place, memories, imagined landscapes’ to which he [Jarman] alludes in a subsequent memoir entitled At Your Own Risk.)38

Gardens are, unsurprisingly, the traditional setting for the medieval dreamvision. In Chaucer’s Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, for example, the poet-narrator returns home after a day spent out in nature, falls asleep and ‘mette how I lay in the medew tho’ (‘dreamt how I lay in the meadow’, line 210). It is also possible that Chaucer’s poem was Jarman’s source for the scene in The Garden where the bed that Jarman-the-dreamer is sleeping on suddenly materialises outside on the beach. In The Legend of Good Women, the poet-dreamer has his servants make up a bed outside in the garden (line 200) and then promptly falls asleep on it. The other thing that clearly ties The Garden to the medieval dream-vision is the fact that around one-third of the way into the film we see Jarman in an indigo blue shirt (à la William Morris) writing in one of his handmade sketchbooks. Suddenly Tilda Swinton’s voice is heard calling ‘Derek’. Jarman would have been very aware that one of the conventions of medieval dream-poetry is the calling of the poet by name within the text. This tradition goes all the way back to Caedmon, the first named Anglo-Saxon poet, whose story is told by Bede in The Ecclesiastical History (731). According to Bede, Caedmon’s job was to care for the animals at Whitby Abbey. One night this illiterate man fell asleep and dreamt that someone called him by name and asked him to sing something (‘Caedmon’, inquit, ‘canta mihi aliquid’). At this moment Caedmon began a new life as a poet. Similarly, the dreamer in Chaucer’s House of Fame is called ‘Geffrey’ (line 729) and the visionary of William

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Langland’s Piers Plowman is identified in the text by his Christian name, ‘Will’. Perhaps the most famous example of all, however, is found in Dante’s Divine Comedy where Beatrice refers to the poet by name (Purgatorio, 30.55). This moment is highly significant for Dante (and it is equally so for Jarman when he too is called by name in The Garden), as James Nohrnberg explains: ‘When Beatrice designates its author, Dante’s poem becomes his story.’39 This comment is akin to Tilda Swinton’s remark that when she saw The Garden ‘She felt she was in his [Jarman’s] dream.’40

Medieval art cinema As this chapter has demonstrated, The Last of England and The Garden operate within the traditions of both art cinema and the avant garde. At the same time, watching both films one becomes acutely aware that Jarman saw the avant-garde trance film as a modern descendant of the medieval dream-vision. In addition, there is another longstanding cinematic tradition that Jarman would have seen his films being a part of, and this is a tradition that I will call medieval art cinema. Indeed, European art cinema has a long history of engaging with the Middle Ages, and many of its most notable auteurs have made significant films about the period and its cultural heritage. For example, in the silent era Fritz Lang made his two-part epic Die Niebelung (1924) and in 1929 Carl Theodor Dreyer produced The Passion of Joan of Arc. These works, and Lang’s in particular, influenced Sergei Eisenstein’s subsequent medieval films, Alexander Nevsky (1938) and the two parts of Ivan the Terrible (1946–48). Significant wartime works such as Marcel Carné’s Les Visiteurs du Soir (1942) or Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944) offered allegories of the occupation and effective propaganda respectively. Roberto Rossellini’s Francis, God’s Jester (1951) was a neorealist take on the traditional saint’s life which greatly influenced Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew (1963). This, in turn, influenced The Garden. It was, however, Ingmar Bergman who produced the most famous of all medieval art films with The Seventh Seal (1957), and he would revisit the period again in The Virgin Spring three years later. The 1960s saw a flowering of medieval films, many of which served as allegories of the growing counter-culture. This phase began with Robert Bresson’s riposte to Dreyer, The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), and perhaps ended with Franco Zeffirelli’s hippie version of the life of St Francis, Brother Son, Sister Moon (1972). Between these were works such as Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966–69), František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová and The Valley of the Bees (both 1967), Andrzej Wajda’s The Gates of Paradise (1968) and John Huston’s pan-European production, A Walk with Love and Death (1968). This cycle culminated in Pasolini’s paeans to prelapsarian sexual innocence in the form of unashamedly bawdy adaptations of The Decameron (1971) and The Canterbury Tales. The 1970s gave rise to a serious international engagement with the Arthurian legends, with French contributions in the

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form of Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac (1974) and Eric Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois (1978), German films such as Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s 1982 adaptation of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal (itself drawn from the poem Parzifal by Wolfram von Eschenbach), and British films such as Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981). As Umberto Eco has demonstrated, the reasons these film-makers, like so many artists working in other media, have been drawn to the Middle Ages vary greatly and range from nostalgia for a mythical past, to feelings of nationalism, to ironic revisitations.41 More often than not, however, these films use their medieval settings as allegories of the present. For instance, a film such as The Seventh Seal is as much about Bergman’s own spiritual anxieties and the fear of nuclear Armageddon as it is about the actual Black Death. Similarly, The Last of England uses the structure of a dream-vision, which is often apocalyptic in nature, to present Thatcher’s Britain as a wasteland. It is also worth noting, however, that for directors such as Bergman and Jarman the Middle Ages did more than just influence the content of their films – their very approach to the making of art was essentially medieval. When considering his work as a film-maker, for example, Bergman likened himself to those who rebuilt the great cathedral of Chartres after it had been destroyed in a fire. In the final sentence of his introduction to the published screenplay of The Seventh Seal he wrote that ‘Regardless of whether I am a believer or not […] I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.’42 The use of ‘collective’ is key here, for just as the medieval artist did not work in isolation, the modern filmmaker is similarly reliant on teamwork to realise his or her own creation. Jarman’s philosophy was ultimately the same, as O’Pray attests: ‘When asked why he made The Last of England, Jarman replied, “For the camaraderie”.’43 It may at first seem difficult to reconcile the accepted view of both Bergman and Jarman as auteurs who made deeply personal films with these statements about the collaborative nature of filmmaking. As Joseph Gomez notes, Jarman was an ‘absolute’ director who nevertheless ‘hired established artists (composers, designers, choreographers) [and] allowed them the freedom to contribute their own ideas to film projects’.44 Don Boyd, who produced several of Jarman’s films, has usefully compared this approach to ‘the studios of the Italian Renaissance, where painters employed other highly creative craftsmen and artists to help them execute their work’ and while ‘each technician made unique contributions […] his [Jarman’s] personality pervades every frame’.45 Although Jarman never directly made a film about the Middle Ages, we do know that he toyed at various times with adapting Beowulf and making a film about Joan of Arc.46 Jarman also, tantalisingly, left behind the unfilmed screenplay of Bob-Up-A-Down, a film which was to be set in the Middle Ages. In the published treatment for this work, Jarman wrote that it was to be ‘A wild and tragic tale of a love affair which destroys a community. “Bob Up A Down” will be filmed with extreme simplicity, like Dreyer’s “Saint

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Joan”.’47 Indeed, Dreyer’s hagiography of Joan of Arc was, in Jarman’s eyes, the gold standard when it came to films based on medieval sources. ‘There are no well designed medieval films’, Jarman declared, ‘with the exception of Dreyer’s Joan.’48 This comment is particularly telling, as Jarman was, of course, one of the more design-conscious British film-makers. He studied stage design as well as painting at the Slade, and his first professional film job was creating the sets for Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971). The sets Jarman built were deliberately anachronistic and contain more than a passing nod to Dreyer’s film. When describing the look of The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer said that he ‘did not study the clothes of the time, and things like that. The year of the event seemed as inessential to me as its distance from the present.’49 Jarman clearly responded to this approach to visualising the Middle Ages as it rejected potentially spurious notions of historical accuracy. At the same time, he could be damning of other works set in the period. For instance, Jarman openly criticised what he saw as the ‘stylistic confusion’ in Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944), which, in design terms, was ‘caught between the artificiality of the medieval miniatures in the Tres Riche Heures, and the damp naturalism of the Irish countryside’.50 This, coupled with Jarman’s own outspoken aversion to British cinema’s penchant for costume drama, which he once witheringly described as ‘lurex for an Oscar’,51 may explain why he never made a film that was directly set in the Middle Ages, and why he instead preferred to engage with the medieval through the lens of the modern. It is, however, interesting to note that Jarman considered filming BobUp-A-Down ‘in the medieval barn at Avebury’,52 thus linking this sadly unrealised work back to his ‘delicate and beautiful’53 A Journey to Avebury (1971). Shot on Super8, this ever so much more than a ‘home movie’ was made when Jarman went for a walk to ‘that lesser Stonehenge’54 with Andrew Davis, his former English teacher. Peake sees A Journey to Avebury as illustrating ‘Jarman’s fascination with the past, how the past leaves traces of itself and how those traces – in this case a circle of stones – have spiritual and mystical properties on a par with the landscape itself’.55 The Last of England and The Garden are amenable to similar readings. Peter Clark asserts that wastelands, from the Middle Ages to the present day, are ‘generally unbuilt and uncultivated, areas of transition and ambiguity, as well as being outside of official control’.56 A garden is therefore the wasteland’s shadow; and in both films the contrast between the lushness and fertility of gardens and the encroaching wasteland evokes the conflicting landscapes of medieval romances such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For example, the home-movie footage shot by Jarman’s father, with its warm colours and pastoral settings, clashes with the bombed-out urban landscape on which the majority of The Last of England is set. The presence of these home movies, taken in the early 1950s, imbues the piece with a strong sense of nostalgia and loss. There is a similar contrast between landscapes in The Garden. Much of the action was shot around Jarman’s own seafront garden in Dungeness, which Alys Fowler once described as ‘a garden that sits on the

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edge of the world’.57 Planted on the rocky beach in the shadow of a nuclear power station, Jarman’s garden is an incongruous sight, and in the film it is a stand-in for both Eden and Gethsemane. It is a paradise and a refuge, but it is not an entirely safe space, as it is here that the film’s two gay Christ figures are arrested. Although it has not been widely commented upon, Jarman saw his work as belonging to a British tradition of neo-medievalism that begins with the Victorians. ‘I was always a Pre-Raphaelite: William Morris[,] Tennyson’,58 Jarman confessed, and perhaps nowhere is this identification more apparent than in The Last of England. It is common knowledge, for example, that Jarman took the name for the film from the title of a wellknown Pre-Raphaelite painting done in 1855 by Ford Madox Brown. The painting has the circular form of a Renaissance tondo (so, like Jarman, Brown too borrows from the past traditions) and depicts a boat with two emigrants, a husband and wife, in the foreground leaving England with their baby for Australia. The man wears an anxious expression akin to those on the faces of the refugees fleeing London in Jarman’s film. The woman’s expression, however, is more resigned, perhaps even serene, and she therefore seems to bear little resemblance to Jarman’s exiles. Perhaps, however, a speculative connection can be made between the husband and wife in Brown’s painting and the woman/wife in the wedding dress (played by Tilda Swinton) who cuts up her garment in a fit of rage towards the end of Jarman’s apocalyptic film. In true medieval fashion, Swinton’s character may be read allegorically; she partly represents, in her wedding dress, the state of matrimony itself and is in this way linked to the wife in Brown’s painting. When Swinton’s character angrily takes her shears to the white garment, however, a loss of innocence and subsequent descent into rage and madness (precipitated by England’s similar violent collapse) is suggested. In this way, she harkens back to the husband in Brown’s tondo whose anxiety about the future may very well turn into something darker as time goes by. The neo-medieval tradition which begins with Tennyson and the PreRaphaelites, continues into the twentieth century by way of the cinema. Indeed, there is a distinctly British tradition of medieval art cinema: one that begins with A Canterbury Tale, and moves through works such as Excalibur, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Gilliam’s subsequent Jabberwocky (1977), through Jarman’s films, to more recent works such as Leslie Megahey’s Hour of the Pig (1993), Chris Newby’s Jarmanesque Anchoress (1993) and Paul McGuigan’s The Reckoning (2002). Jarman was often critical of British cinema; he did, however, argue that A Canterbury Tale was the second greatest British film, after Powell and Pressburger’s earlier The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). He also praised the early films of Boorman. This is especially telling, as Boorman shares Jarman’s fascination with the Middle Ages and medieval literature. Indeed, with the exception of Excalibur, Boorman, like Jarman, has engaged with medieval sources in subtle, subtextual ways in films that are set in the present. For

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instance, Hoyle has noted that three of Boorman’s first four features contain strong parallels with the Arthurian legends. On the surface, Catch Us if You Can (1965) is a comic road movie featuring the Dave Clark Five, and Point Blank (1967) is a revenge thriller that marries the conventions of the American hardboiled crime film with the influence of European art cinema stalwarts such as Alain Resnais. At the same time, both films are about quests for elusive grails. Similarly, the protagonists of Point Blank and Leo the Last (1970), Boorman’s most overtly European film, are variations on the figure of the wounded Fisher King. Boorman has even claimed that aspects of Beyond Rangoon (1995), his Hollywood thriller about the political situation in Burma, were based on the medieval poem, Pearl.59 Boorman’s evocation of this medieval dream-vision also reminds one that directors like Powell, Boorman and Gilliam (as well as Jarman), who make up this British neo-medieval filmmaking tradition, are also ones who would agree with Luis Buñuel’s assertion that the cinema is ‘the best instrument to express the world of dreams’.60 This interest in dreams brings things full circle. A. C. Spearing has noted ‘the astonishing popularity of the dream-poem among medieval English poets, and the fact that so many of these poems are major works of literature’. He also developed a theory of the dream-vision, defining it as: ‘a poem which has more fully realised its own existence as a poem. Compared to other poems, it makes us more conscious that it has a beginning and an end (marked by the falling asleep and awakening of the narrator); that it has a narrator, whose experience constitutes the subject matter of the poem; [and] that its status is that of an imaginative fiction (whether this is conceived as a matter of inspiration, or mere fantasy, or somewhere between the two).’ They are deeply self-reflexive works, which foreground the presence and personality of the author, and exist in an imaginative space comparable to what Cocteau would dub ‘l’irrealite realiste’ or ‘realistic unreality’. In short, medieval dream-visions share virtually all of their defining characteristics with the trance films of Cocteau, Deren and Anger and Jarman’s two most experimental feature films. In placing The Last of England and The Garden within the context of the cinematic avant garde, what is best described as ‘medieval art cinema’, and medieval dream poetry, this chapter has attempted to demonstrate that one of Jarman’s greatest gifts as an artist was his ability to reconcile seemingly disparate influences and traditions into a singular vision.

Notes  1 John Hill, ‘The Rise and Fall of British Art Cinema: A Short History of the 1980s and 1990s’, Aura, 6: 3 (2000), pp. 18–32; p. 18.  2 David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, Film Criticism, 4: 1 (1979), pp. 56–64.  3 Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen, 22: 1 (1981), pp. 11–40.  4 Michael O’Pray, ‘The British Avant-Garde and Art Cinema from the 1970s to

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the 1990s’, in Andrew Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (London: Cassell, 1996), pp. 178–90; p. 178.  5 Derek Jarman, Modern Nature (London: Vintage, 1992), p. 234.  6 Brian Hoyle, ‘Derek Jarman: Radical Traditionalist’, Senses of Cinema, 43 (May 2007), available at: http://sensesofcinema.com/2007/great-directors/jarman/. Accessed 5 February 2018.  7 Duncan Petrie, ‘Jubilee’, Time Out Film, available at: https://www.timeout.com/ london/film/jubilee. Accessed 5 February 2018.  8 Derek Jarman, The Last of England (London: Constable and Co., 1987), p. 188.  9 Michael O’Pray, Derek Jarman: Dreams of England (London: British Film Institute, 1996), p. 9. 10 O’Pray, Derek Jarman: Dreams of England, p. 156. 11 Maya Deren, ‘Amateur Versus Professional’, in Bruce R. McPherson (ed.), Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film (Kingston, NY: Documentext, 2005), pp. 17–19; p. 17. 12 Tilda Swinton, ‘In the Spirit of Derek Jarman: A Keynote Speech given at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Saturday 17th August 2002’, Vertigo, 2: 4 (2003), available at: https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/ volume-2-issue-4-spring-2003/tilda-swinton-in-the-spirit-of-derek-jarman/. Accessed 10 January 2018. 13 Jonathan Hacker and David Price, Take Ten: British Film Directors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 249. 14 John Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s (London: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 161. 15 Jarman, The Last of England, p. 16. 16 Jarman, The Last of England, p. 16. 17 Deren, ‘Amateur Versus Professional’, p. 18. 18 Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, p. 58. 19 Michael Almereyda, ‘Notes on Derek Jarman’, in John Boorman and Walter Donohue (eds), Projections 4 1/2 (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), pp. 233–8; p. 233. 20 Tony Rayns, ‘The “I-Movie” ’, in The Garden press book (London: Artificial Eye, 1990), unnumbered. 21 P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 18. 22 Sitney, Visionary Film, p. 87. 23 O’Pray, Derek Jarman: Dreams of England, p. 163. 24 Rayns, ‘I-Movie’, unnumbered. 25 William E. B. Verrone, The Avant-Garde Feature Film: A Critical History (London: McFarland, 2012), pp. 6–7. 26 Verrone, The Avant-Garde Feature Film, p. 93. 27 Deren, ‘Amateur Versus Professional’, p. 18. 28 O’Pray, ‘The British Avant-Garde and Art Cinema from the 1970s to the 1990s’, p. 185. 29 Leo Bersan and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio (London: British Film Institute, 1999), p. 49. 30 Neil Tennant, ‘Commentary’, in Stephen Farthing and Ed Webb-Ingall (eds), Derek Jarman’s Sketchbooks (London: Thames and Hudson, 2013), pp. 202–4. 31 Colin MacCabe, ‘A Post-National European Cinema: A Consideration of Derek Jarman’s The Tempest and Edward II’, in Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, pp. 191–201; p. 197.

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British art cinema 32 Derek Jarman, Up in the Air: Collected Film Scripts (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 81. 33 Tony Peake, Derek Jarman (London: Little, Brown, 1999), p. 71. 34 Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 445. 35 Jarman, The Last of England, p. 188. 36 Jarman, Up in the Air, p. 81. 37 O’Pray, ‘The British Avant-Garde and Art Cinema from the 1970s to the 1990s’, p. 179. 38 Deborah Esch, In the Event: Reading Journalism, Reading Theory (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 120–1. 39 James Nohrnberg, ‘The Autobiographical Imperative and the Necessity of “Dante”: Purgatorio 30:55’, Modern Philology, 101: 1 (2004), pp. 1–47; p. 3. 40 O’Pray, Derek Jarman: Dreams of England, p. 182. 41 Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1983), pp. 68–72. 42 Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal (London: Lorimer, 1968), p. iv. 43 O’Pray, Derek Jarman: Dreams of England, p. 155. 44 Joseph Gomez, ‘The Process of Jarman’s War Requiem: Personal Vision and the Tradition of Fusion in the Arts’, in Chris Lippard (ed.), By Angels Driven: The Films of Derek Jarman (Trowbridge: Flick Books, 1996), pp. 84–102; p. 90. 45 Don Boyd, ‘Introduction’, in Derek Jarman, War Requiem (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), pp. vii–x. 46 Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 283. 47 Jarman, Up in the Air, pp. 81–2. 48 Jarman, Up in the Air, p. 81. 49 John Aberth, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), p. 281. 50 Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge (London: Quartet Books, 1984), p. 188. 51 Derek Jarman, Queer Edward II (London: British Film Institute, 1991), p. 86. 52 Jarman, Up in the Air, p. 81. 53 Adam Scovell, ‘In Profile: Derek Jarman’s The Last of England’, The Double Negative (November 2014), available at: http://www.thedoublenegative. co.uk/2014/11/in-profile-derek-jarmans-the-last-of-england-1988/. Accessed 2 February 2018. 54 Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 194. 55 Peake, Derek Jarman, p. 195. 56 Jennifer Nee, ‘Wastelands in Cities from the Middle Ages to the Present: A Lecture by Peter Clark’, iForum: The Charles University On-Line Magazine (30 April 2016), available at: https://iforum.cuni.cz/IFORUMENG-593.html. Accessed 3 April 2018. 57 Alys Fowler, ‘Planting on the Edge in Derek Jarman’s Garden’, Guardian, 24 September 2014, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/ sep/24/derek-jarman-garden-dungeness-alys-fowler. Accessed 2 February 2018. 58 Jarman, Up in the Air, p. 81. 59 Gavin Smith, ‘Beyond Images: John Boorman Interviewed’, Film Comment, 31: 4 (1996), pp. 46–50; p. 46. 60 Luis Buñuel, ‘Cinema as an Instrument of Poetry’, in Garrett White (ed.), An Unspeakable Betrayal: The Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 136–42; p. 138.

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Twin traditions: the biopic and the composed film in British art cinema Brian Hoyle

In his personal meditation on British cinema, Fire Over England (1993), Ken Russell quipped that indigenous critics and audiences might have been more accepting of his work had he been named “Russellini”.1 What might at first seem like a throwaway comment is, in fact, a provocation typical of one of British cinema’s most controversial figures. Reading between the lines, Russell’s statement is a thinly veiled attack on the inbuilt prejudice in British film culture towards home-grown talent that dares to produce work that is visually flamboyant, technically experimental and artistically ambitious. As Wendy Everett has pointed out, this kind of filmmaking, for many British critics, is ‘aesthetic, inauthentic and self-indulgent’ and entirely in opposition to the ‘gritty, realistic and authentic work in the tradition of British documentary’.2 This attitude has, no doubt, contributed greatly to the perception that Britain has no real art cinema tradition to speak of. At the same time, it has also served to push figures such as Russell to the margins of the British film industry. Indeed, during the final decades of his life, Russell found himself unbankable and almost forgotten, while many historical accounts of British cinema have portrayed him as, at best, an idiosyncratic eccentric or, at worst, an embarrassing aberration. One thing that both his champions and his detractors can agree on, however, is the fact that Russell is one of British cinema’s true auteurs, with a highly distinctive and instantly recognisable style, defined by its ‘baroque excess’.3 But while it is tempting to argue that Russell’s visual sense bears closer comparison to the colourful and operatic studies of decadence that Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s than it does to the work of any British film-maker, this is simply not the case. Russell, for all his idiosyncrasies, is not a sui generis figure within British national cinema. On the contrary, his work should be placed within a very clear tradition, which Sarah Street has identified as a school of ‘deviant, non-realist British cinema’.4 Alongside Russell, this tradition includes what Peter Wollen sees as the flowering of neo-romanticism and expressionism in late-war and immediate post-war British cinema, including, most notably, the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, as well as works by Laurence Olivier, Thorold Dickinson and Alberto

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Cavalcanti.5 It continues in the 1960s and 1970s with the work of Russell, John Boorman, Nicolas Roeg and occasional works by Joseph Losey. But perhaps the richest period for this tradition came in the 1980s with the films of Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, Terry Gilliam, Sally Potter and Neil Jordan, to name only a few major figures. This school has conspicuously turned away from the themes and aesthetics of social realism in favour of a sensibility that combined aspects of Romanticism, modernism, the avant garde and, at times, the fantastical. A thorough investigation of this director-led, visually orientated tradition of British cinema – with its suspicion of social realism – would take a book-length study; and, as Julian Petley points out, it would have to take account of more popular genres which engaged with the fantastic, such as Gainsborough melodramas and Hammer horror films, alongside more serious-minded anti-realist films.6 Therefore, this chapter will focus instead on some of the overlaps between this anti-realist tradition and British art cinema. It will do this through an examination of two smaller, but artistically significant traditions in British filmmaking, the composed film and the artist’s biopic, and will assess how these forms have been exploited by two key figures in British art cinema: Russell and Peter Greenaway. First, however, this chapter will briefly examine the influence of Powell and Pressburger on the composed film.

Powell and Pressburger and the composed film ‘Composed film’ was Michael Powell’s adopted term for a work that was substantially or entirely shot to a pre-existing music score. While Powell and Pressburger’s experiments in this area have been well documented by critics such as Ian Christie and Andrew Moor, they bear repeating in a book dedicated to British art cinema. After all, it was this pair, more than anyone else working in Britain, who sought ‘to make film into a significant art form’7 by using it to synthesise the other arts and show, as Powell put it, that ‘all art is one’. Powell and Pressburger first flirted with the idea of shooting to music while making Black Narcissus (1947). As Powell himself notes, ‘Owing to my decision not to shoot [the film] in India and try and combine real location photography with studio scenes, I was left free to compose a sound-track, which would be an organic whole of dialogue, sound effects, and music, very much in the way that an opera is composed.’8 To this end, Powell enlisted the services of Brian Easdale who, like his contemporary Benjamin Britten, was a serious composer of opera and ballet who also had some experience scoring short documentaries for the General Post Office and Crown Film Units. Easdale, Powell and Pressburger decided that the film’s climactic confrontation between Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) and the lapsed Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) should be shot as a composed sequence, without dialogue, which in Powell’s own words ‘was planned step by step, bar by bar, by Brian [Easdale] and myself’.9 The director also remembers that ‘the crew were amazed’ when he and Easdale appeared on

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Twin traditions: the biopic and the composed film

set ‘with stopwatches and exact timings’10 as well as a piano reduction of the score. For Powell, this sequence was unquestionably the highlight of the film and he has confessed that, for him, ‘this was the only way to make films […] film-making was never the same after this experience, and it was to lead me and my collaborators into tribulations as well as triumph’.11 This experiment was repeated on a far grander scale in their next work, The Red Shoes, which Russell called ‘the first art film in the history of the British Cinema’ (figure 13).12 While not a fully composed film, its centrepiece was a twenty-minute ballet sequence, which was choreographed, shot and edited to an original score by Easdale. One of the most justly celebrated sequences in British film history, the ‘Ballet of the Red Shoes’ was not presented as a canned stage performance, but rather, in the words of Joseph Gomez, as a ‘film-ballet’,13 which could not have been produced in any other medium. At the same time, for Powell, it was also a ‘Freudian ballet’14 – a dream sequence which uses choreography of the dancers and camera to visualise the inner workings of the protagonist’s mind as a kind of stream of consciousness. In this respect, the scene is in keeping with the ‘interiorisation of dramatic conflict’ that Steve Neale identifies as a key trait of art cinema.15 But The Red Shoes is also an art film by virtue of its relationship to the ‘high’ arts, most notably classical music and ballet. Indeed, the film featured significant contributions from, amongst others, the dancers Léonide Massine, Robert Helpmann, Moira Shearer and Ludmilla Tchérina, and the conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham. Most importantly, however, both the ‘Ballet of the Red Shoes’ and the film more generally represent a

13  The Red Shoes (dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)

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s­ elf-conscious attempt to demonstrate that film is ‘in fact, the ultimate art form […] a form of Wagnerian synaesthesia, [and] the ideal medium for bringing all the arts together in a spectacle that included word and image, music and movement’.16 Powell and Pressburger would finally achieve their ambition of making a feature-length composed film with Tales of Hoffmann, their 1951 version of Jacques Offenbach’s unfinished opera. Building on the Wagnerian vision of cinema suggested by The Red Shoes, Tales of Hoffmann presented a heady fusion of opera (an English-language version, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, was commissioned for the film); ballet (many of the principal roles were played by dancers, several of whom had appeared in The Red Shoes); literature (Hoffmann’s short stories); and theatre (the entire film was shot on a sound stage, with highly artificial backdrops courtesy of designer Hein Heckroth). It was also, however, wholly cinematic, with Powell using an impressive range of techniques, including stop-motion, jump cuts, superimpositions, bold lighting effects and the liberal movement of an unblimped three-strip Technicolor camera. Indeed, a short note at the start of the unpublished screenplay clearly demonstrates the film’s remarkable fusion of the arts. It explains that: Since the action of the film is pre-determined by the music, the reader of this screenplay will find, accompanying the description of the action, the corresponding page number in the Score, also the same divisions (e.g. Scena; Trio; Song, etc) The screenplay should be read in conjunction with the Published Score and with the new libretto. In order to get a complete picture of the Production it is necessary to hear the new recording by Sir Thomas, to consult Hein’s designs, and to see Ashton’s choreography.

Thought by some to be ‘the wildest Expressionist film ever made in Britain’,17 Tales of Hoffmann runs counter to the realist tradition at every turn. One might expect a film such as this to be one of those eccentric oneoffs that British cinema excels at producing, but it is far from it. When it comes to art cinema’s crossover with opera and serious music, one might be forgiven for recalling Continental titles such as Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Chronical of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) or Moses und Aron (1973), Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute (1975), HansJürgen Syberberg’s Parsifal (1982), Federico Fellini’s And the Ship Sailed On (1983), Francesco Rosi’s Carmen (1984), and various works by Franco Zeffirelli and Werner Shroeter, before any British examples. Nevertheless, despite the general suspicion towards art and experimentation in British film culture, one could argue that British cinema has in fact fostered an incredibly strong tradition of such films, the origins of which can be found in The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffmann. This tradition includes opera adaptations like Joseph Losey’s Don Giovanni (1979), Tony Palmer’s Death in Venice (1981) and Don Boyd’s Lucia (1998); Boyd’s multi-director portmanteau production, Aria (1987), which featured contributions from Ken

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Twin traditions: the biopic and the composed film

Russell, Nicolas Roeg, Derek Jarman and Julian Temple; Russell’s film of The Who’s ‘rock opera’, Tommy (1975); as well as Jarman’s feature-length film of Benjamin Britten’s oratorio, War Requiem (1988). To this list one could also add Sally Potter’s Thriller (1980), an experimental feminist deconstruction of Puccini’s La Boheme, and, as this chapter will show, various works by Peter Greenaway. Finally, there are also the numerous composer biopics by Russell, and subsequent examples by the likes of Palmer and Bernard Rose. Like Powell and Pressburger’s ballet films, the British works listed above are art films due to their ties with high culture. More than this, however, these films also often contain self-reflexive elements, a key trait of modernist art cinema, not least in their use of virtuosic techniques ‘that constantly amaze and dazzle the audience into an awareness that it is watching a film’.18 They are also clearly auteurist works, which foreground their makers’ concerns and personality. For instance, Losey’s Marxism and the influence of Brecht are easily detected in Don Giovanni, just as Jarman’s voice is clearly heard alongside those of Britten and Wilfred Owen in War Requiem. Finally, like Powell’s work, these films are also linked by a desire to experiment with the vocabulary and techniques of the cinema and to raise it to the level of the Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk. Indeed, viewed collectively, the canon of British composed films bears out the assertion of the composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, who argued that ‘the cinema contains potentialities for the combination of the arts such as Wagner never dreamt of’.19

Ken Russell: fusing the biopic and the composed film If Powell and Pressburger were the fathers of this fascinating sub-genre of musically orientated British art films, Ken Russell would go on to become its most prolific and visible exponent. As Gomez notes, Russell directly ‘followed in Michael Powell’s footsteps by attempting to employ cinema as a means of bringing together multiple art forms’.20 It is worth noting, however, that with the arguable exception of Tommy, Russell never fulfilled his ambition of making a full-length opera film like Tales of Hoffmann. (In the late 1980s, in the wake of Aria, he and Don Boyd had tried to secure funding for an adaptation of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde – a tantalising prospect, which was sadly never to be.) Rather, in a manner closer to The Red Shoes, Russell made films in which relatively conventional dialogue scenes would alternate with (often extended) passages in which dialogue was eschewed in favour of music, images and dance. Although they are not exclusively limited to those films, most of what I will call Russell’s ‘composed sequences’ appeared in his biopics of famous composers. Like the ballet sequence in Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, composed sequences were designed to comment on the psychological state of the characters as well as the emotional and, at times, programmatic elements of the music. Therefore, in these segments, the aesthetics of the composed film and the complex concerns of Russell’s unique brand of biopic are fused.

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There are countless examples of such scenes in Russell’s oeuvre, and they are often difficult to unpack critically, so a single example must suffice. Take, for instance, the often-derided ‘1812 Overture’ sequence in Russell’s Tchaikovsky biopic, The Music Lovers (1970). Dismissed by critics such as Time Out’s Paul Taylor as ‘pure Monty Python’,21 it is, in fact, one of the key scenes in the film, and a prime example of the complexity of Russell’s work. Indeed, as Jack Fisher rightly asserts, Russell’s detractors rarely give his films the full consideration they require; but for ‘anyone who has been paying attention to the sexual and visual structure of [The Music Lovers] the fantasy is a logical development of the abnormal’.22 As always, the subjective fantasy sequence is carefully integrated into the fabric of the film. Therefore, the ‘1812 Overture’ is introduced in the preceding scene when Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) is reeling after being cut off by his former patron and platonic par amour, Madame Nadezhda von Meck. His brother, Modest (Kenneth Colley), tries to convince the rather introverted composer to take up conducting, stressing both the personal and financial benefits of doing so. ‘If it’s love you want’, he argues, ‘an audience will give you that.’ As he continues, Russell axial cuts from a long shot to a medium two-shot of the brothers in their carriage. At the same time, Modest says, ‘if only you’d conduct, you’d make a fortune’ and Russell quietly places the ‘La Marseillaise’ theme of the overture, played on the horns, under the dialogue. The music begins to build as Modest continues to try to cajole his brother, with the strings playing ostinatos beneath the horns. ‘You could be famous, Peter’, he argues. ‘It’s like a bonfire. It’s all laid, it’s set. It just needs the final touch and … wooosh.’ As Modest says these words, the careful viewer/ listener will become aware of the way in which Russell is coordinating the dialogue, editing and music. Those familiar with the overture will recognise that the score has entered its final third and is inexorably building to the first wave of cannon blasts; and as Modest onomatopoeically signals the lighting of the bonfire, Russell cuts to an image which brilliantly exploits the film’s ‘Scope ratio’. On the left of the screen is a close shot of Tchaikovsky’s spurned wife, Nina (Glenda Jackson); next to her on the right is the muzzle of the cannon, which is pointed directly at the camera and the audience. It fires. With this startling, violent image, Russell makes the leap from reality (Modest and Peter talking in their carriage) to a subjective, fantastical space. We then see Tchaikovsky running through a barren field dodging an artillery barrage fired at him by the assembled ‘music lovers’, including Nina, Madame von Meck, the composer’s sister, his pupils and his former homosexual lover. With the logic of a dream, Russell then match cuts to Tchaikovsky running through the streets of Moscow being pursued by his hangers on in carriages, on horseback and on foot. Again, the images and the cutting clearly take their cue from the score. In the lead-up to the Overture’s climactic victory bells, Tchaikovsky has the strings play an extended descending scale, lasting around forty seconds, which also gradually decreases in tempo. Russell responds to this change in speed firstly by extending the length of his shots, and finally by over-cranking the camera.

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Twin traditions: the biopic and the composed film

This culminates in two intercut tracking shots, both filmed in slow motion, which show Tchaikovsky running the gauntlet past a row of open windows as all those who have competed for the composer’s love and attention reach out like ghouls and try to grab him. The combined effect of the music and the image slowing down in tandem is extraordinary and it perfectly demonstrates the combining of the arts that Russell, like Powell, strove for. Indeed, the music and image are so closely entwined here, that one gets the impression that the decreasing tempo of the former was caused by a slowing of the film apparatus, the camera and the projector, rather than careful scoring, conducting and playing from the orchestra. As the overture moves into its climactic section, in which the bells ring out in celebration of Russian victory over the French, Russell once again demonstrates his skill at timing and cutting to a pre-existing musical source. Having temporarily escaped the ‘music lovers’, Tchaikovsky is spotted by his brother Modest, who directs a throng of adoring fans towards him. The crowd carry the composer off to a parade where he is feted with flowers and brightly coloured streamers. The victory bells lend an appropriate level of grandeur and pomp to Russell’s depiction of this parade. Modest hands his brother a baton and motions to him to start conducting the crowd. The composer complies, at first reluctantly, and then with great enthusiasm. Before long, he is conducting from the roof of an Orthodox church as Modest, separate from the adoring crowd, collects and counts piles of banknotes. As the bells reach a crescendo, the music changes tempo and tone one final time, and suddenly segues into an exaggeratedly up-tempo reprise of the composer’s theme, which had previously evoked the advancing French army, but which now depicts their hasty retreat. Russell matches this with an equally abrupt cut to a close shot of Modest, grinning with a cigar between his teeth, surrounded by the kicking legs, frilly skirts and suspenders of a bevy of Can-Can dancers, whom his brother is conducting with an equally big grin. It is mostly this moment, and what follows, that critics have taken objection to in this sequence. The intent of this part of the fantasy sequence can, however, be summed up in another superb widescreen composition which shows Modest and the dancers, who take up the full width of the screen, performing on a stage in front of an enormous picture of the composer’s face, framed by a laurel wreath. In the foreground of the shot, Tchaikovsky can be seen conducting. He then turns to face the audience and looks directly at the camera, grinning from ear to ear as he beats out the simple time signature of his most populist work. It is a highly amusing image, but Russell’s lampooning always disguised a more serious purpose, and it shows the audience how Tchaikovsky prostituted his talent for fame. Can-Can dancers may offer up a parodic and clichéd view of French culture. But so too, Russell is saying, does Tchaikovsky’s overture, with its numerous quotations from ‘La Marseillaise’ (a tune which Napoleon had essentially outlawed in 1805, so would not have been popular when France invaded Russia). Moreover, the Can-Can is above all associated with the work of Jacques Offenbach, a

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master of operetta and light music who wrote little of weight aside from Tales of Hoffmann. Tchaikovsky, however, was a serious Romantic composer, who in Russell’s mind produced some of the most sublime music ever written, not least the final three symphonies, Manfred, Swan Lake, Eugene Onegin and the Piano Concerto in B-flat minor, which the film-maker credited with igniting his passion for classical music. To Russell then, a work like the ‘1812 Overture’ represents a travesty and an unforgivable squandering of Tchaikovsky’s immense talent. At the same time, this sequence serves as a reminder to the audience that it is usually the frivolous and the simplistic that sell, and it was off the back of works like the ‘1812 Overture’ and the ‘Serenade for String Orchestra’, and his 1888–89 conducting tour of Europe that the composer first became a household name. The most controversial moment in the sequence is not the Can-Can dancers, however, but the visualisation of the final ten cannon blasts in the score which come immediately after. Here, Russell depicts Modest gleefully firing a large cannon in increasingly comical ways. This includes his riding it like an over-sized phallus and setting it off while pedalling an antique tricycle. His targets, however, are the ‘music lovers’ who have now gathered together in a box in the concert hall where Tchaikovsky is conducting. With each blast, Russell cuts to one of these characters and they are bloodily decapitated. On a superficial level, the meaning is obvious. The composer’s new-found financial success and public adulation has allowed him to symbolically destroy the ‘music lovers’ and their hold over him. On closer inspection, however, things are not so simple. Firstly, it is not Tchaikovsky but rather Modest who is firing the cannon and, in effect, destroying his rivals. Throughout the film Modest is depicted as a jealous, possessive and manipulative figure (and there is plenty of biographical evidence to support such a characterisation), and here Russell is telling us that he has won and can now exploit his brother’s talents without interference. Secondly, although the other ‘music lovers’ are destroyed by Modest’s cannon fire, Nina is not. On the contrary, rather than show her decapitated after she has been fired at, Russell instead cuts to a tighter close-up of her smiling. The implication is unsettling. With nobody else to distract him, Tchaikovsky is left free to fully contemplate his betrayal of the woman he married knowing full well he could never love her, and it is this guilt, according to the film, that finally pushes the composer to suicide. Russell’s segue from the colourful, boisterous ‘1812 Overture’ fantasy to the grim final reel is masterful. As the bells chime, signalling the end of the score, Russell depicts Tchaikovsky being carried to and placed on a plinth in the town square, where he conducts the last bars of the overture draped in colourful paper streamers. As the final notes fade away Russell films the composer, his baton and arms stretched towards the sky, from a low angle. There is then a match cut and the man has become a statue. To some degree it is an image of triumph. Tchaikovsky has won the acceptance and fame he so desperately craved. At the same time, however, it has a very bleak undercurrent. The coloured streamers have gone, and the palette is now decidedly

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Twin traditions: the biopic and the composed film

muted, taking its cue from the cold, grey stone of the statue. Moreover, it is winter time, and the camera tracks back to reveal an empty square where the adoring public had once cheered. Attempting to summarise both this last shot and the sequence as a whole, Fisher argues that ‘within a few minutes we are shown what it is like to be swept up by fame, and then in the dissolve the frenzy dies down and becomes stale. All of this is clear and precise in painter’s terms, and all done without a single word.’23 While Fisher is right to stress the clarity and boldness of Russell’s visual storytelling, there are also ambiguities here. Most obviously, one cannot be certain whose vision one has just seen. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that it is Tchaikovsky’s dream of success, but it might also be that of Modest. At the same time, the vision is also clearly Russell’s own, in which he sets out both his admiration for, and problems with Tchaikovsky as an artist. It is this tension, and the ability to simultaneously present multiple viewpoints about a subject that make Russell’s biopics so complex and groundbreaking. Gomez has identified a ‘tripartite perspective’ in each film which ‘incorporates the protagonist’s own romantic self-image, a more objective view revealed by the perspective of time, and finally Russell’s personal vision of his subject’.24 This is a far cry from the form of the traditional biopic. According to Dennis Bingham, the biopic has always been a ‘respectable genre of low repute’.25 A popular, and often prestigious form during the heyday of the Hollywood Studio system, biopics normally veered towards hagiography and offered a celebratory and sanitised view of their subjects. For Bingham it was also a ‘producer’s genre’,26 and any ‘survey of studio biopics soon makes clear that the films were almost never made by the directors from the era who were later singled out as auteurs’.27 Much the same can be said for the rather staid British biopics made around the same time such as Norman Walker’s The Great Mr Handel (1942), Sidney Gilliat’s The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (1953) or Ken Hughes’s The Trial of Oscar Wilde (1960). It is therefore not an exaggeration to say that Russell, more than any other figure in British, and perhaps even world, cinema, ‘revolutionised the nature of the bio-pic’.28 Moreover, one could argue that he did this by bringing this popular, conservative genre into contact with art cinema. Indeed, Russell dragged the biopic away from hagiography towards a more ambiguous and complex ‘warts and all’ depiction of the life in focus. If his most popular biographical film, Elgar (1962), is atypically uncritical of its subject, his subjects from The Debussy Film (1963) onward, to borrow a phrase from Bordwell, ‘act for inconsistent reasons […] or may question themselves about their goals’.29 This is certainly true of Russell’s depiction of Tchaikovsky, but also of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in Dante’s Inferno (1967), or the eponymous protagonist in Mahler (1974), to name but two more. Russell is also not afraid to analyse his characters and lay their psyches bare on film, as he does throughout The Music Lovers. In this respect, his films are also, to again quote from Bordwell, ones of ‘psychological effects in search of their causes’.30 At the same time, Russell also practically invented

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the notion of the auteur biopic in which the authorial expressivity of the film’s director is as important as the personality and biography of its subject. Lastly, Russell’s biopics, with their visualised dreams, their composed sequences that eschew dialogue, and their elliptical, episodic and unconventional structures (Mahler, for instance, takes on the shape of a musical rondo), unquestionably ‘define themselves directly against the classical narrative mode’.31 The films that Bingham cites as his examples of American ‘auteur biopics’, such as Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992) and Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008), and other notable American art cinema-inflected biopics such as Bob Fosse’s Lenny (1974), Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), all unquestionably owe a debt to Russell in terms of their structure and approach to the genre. In Britain too, there is a small but significant tradition of art cinema biopics which betrays Russell’s influence. This includes Peter Watkin’s Edvard Munch (1974); Ken McMullen’s Zina (1985, about Trotsky’s daughter, Zinaida Volkova); Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986) and Wittgenstein (1992); Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy (1986); and John Maybury’s Love is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998). Additionally, there is a further sub-classification of films which have merged the biopic with the composed film, such as Tony Palmer’s Wagner (1981) and Testimony (1988, about Dimitri Shostakovich) and Bernard Rose’s Immortal Beloved (1994, about Ludwig van Beethoven) and The Devil’s Violinist (2013, about Niccolò Paganini), and have built on Russell’s work both in terms of form and visual style. Indeed, Rose went as far as to dedicate The Devil’s Violinist to the late director, who died in 2011. Ironically, however, the film-maker who has assumed Russell’s mantle as British cinema’s doyen of both the composed film and the artist’s biopic is one who never confessed to feeling a great affinity with either Russell’s work or British cinema in general: Peter Greenaway.

Peter Greenaway: new innovations in the composed film and the biopic The names of Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway are often linked in studies of British art cinema. On one level, this is entirely understandable, as the two men defined (and some would go as far as to say ‘introduced’) the concept of British art cinema in the 1980s. At the same time, however, there are significant differences between the two film-makers that are not always fully accounted for. The two, for instance, diverged greatly in their opinion of British national cinema and their place in it. While Jarman had little time for what he called the ‘spurious social realism of the sixties’32 and heritage costume drama, he clearly saw himself working within a British art cinema tradition, albeit a marginalised one. He saw himself struggling alongside fellow film-makers such as Peter Watkins, Bill Douglas, Terence Davies, Sally Potter and Ron Peck. He also spoke highly of the early films of Nicolas

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Twin traditions: the biopic and the composed film

Roeg, John Boorman and Neil Jordan.33 His favourites remained Ken Russell, of whom he wrote that ‘there was no better director to learn from’,34 and, above all, Michael Powell, whose work he thought to be ‘unequalled’.35 Their influence can also be clearly felt in Jarman’s work. Caravaggio, for example, is an iconoclastic artist’s biopic very much in the Russell tradition, while War Requiem is a composed film in the mode of Powell and Pressburger. Greenaway, as noted above, has often tried to distance himself from British cinema and has preferred to align his work with continental film-makers such as Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais. He has, for instance, said that ‘apart from Peeping Tom, I am not a great fan’ of Powell and Pressburger.36 As for Russell, he admits to having ‘always enjoyed The Devils’, but at the same time he was somewhat baffled when a critic called him ‘the intellectual Ken Russell’.37 Nevertheless, Greenaway’s work still bears close affinities with theirs, not least in his use of music, and, more recently, his interest in the biopic. Greenaway’s preference for Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) is particularly telling. It is Powell’s most overtly meta-cinematic work, which, according to Roy Armes, incorporates ‘elements of film-within-a-film with a complexity worthy of Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog’.38 Like many other art cinema auteurs, including Godard, Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Greenaway both makes and favours films which are self-reflexive and call attention to their artifice. One of the primary ways in which he does this is through his use of music. As Alan Woods notes, ‘artifice requires that we constantly be aware of music as an element in [a Greenaway] film’.39 For example, his collaboration with the composer Michal Nyman, which lasted from his early experimental shorts of the late 1970s until Prospero’s Books (1991), reversed the traditional method of composing film scores. Usually, a composer is given a rough cut of the finished film and a cue sheet detailing the sections in the film where the director wants musical accompaniment. Nyman, however, would compose the music first, having seen no more than the screenplay. Greenaway was therefore able to shoot and edit the film to the score. At other times, Greenaway would use music that Nyman had written for other occasions. For example, in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), Greenaway took Nyman’s funereal march ‘Memorial’, which was originally written in 1985 to commemorate the Heysel Stadium disaster, and shot large sections of the film to playback of this piece. This is evident in the long lateral tracking shots in the film that move through the kitchen into the dining room of the La Hollandaise restaurant. The pacing of these shots, and the actors walking in them, is clearly dictated by the steady 8:8 time of the march. This gives the film a deliberate, choreographed quality which is unashamedly artificial and stylised. Another example is the opening title sequence of Prospero’s Books. Here, Greenaway takes Nyman’s piece, ‘Prospero’s Magic’, which was written in 4:4 time, and intercuts the action with staccato shots of a flame every four beats. His decision to cut on the downbeat is what Bobbie O’Steen describes as a ‘hard cut’, which ‘is emphatic and calls attention to itself’.40 This runs counter to convention,

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which dictates that editing should be an ‘invisible’ art, as O’Steen notes when he writes ‘an editor should not, as a rule, cut his images exactly to the beat of the music, because it will seem as if the music is pulling the visuals along’.41 For Greenaway, however, this is not an undesirable outcome. On the contrary, it adds another layer of self-reflexivity to the film by laying bare its devices. As the director himself states, ‘I want people to hear the music in my films independent of what’s going on in the film. That sense of artificiality is part of the vocabulary I have developed over the years to point out that you are only watching a film.’42 While comparisons could be drawn between the collaboration of Greenaway and Nyman and, that of say, Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Prokofiev, or Federico Fellini and Nino Rota, where the music was similarly written before the film was completed, it is also comparable to the way that Powell and Pressburger worked with Brian Easdale. Indeed, while Greenaway has never made a feature-length composed film, he has collaborated with the Dutch composer, Louis Andriessen, on a short film, M is for Man, Music and Mozart (1993), which is entirely set to music. Moreover, his feature films contain extended and obvious composed sequences, like those mentioned above or the wedding masque sequence in Prospero’s Books, which is almost a self-contained mini-opera, akin to the ballet scene in The Red Shoes. At the same time, Greenaway’s use of music also bears comparison with that of Russell, despite the latter’s protests. Russell, who equally cannot be counted as an admirer of Greenaway’s, has written that Nyman told him that ‘he usually supplies the director with reams of music, not necessarily composed for any particular scene, which Greenaway cuts into arbitrary chunks according to his needs’.43 Russell clearly sees this as a slight to the composer. But he too has never been averse to cutting and rearranging a composer’s music. Indeed, in the train carriage sequence in The Music Lovers, in which a naked Nina drunkenly tries to seduce her visibly disgusted husband, Russell took the most dramatic passages of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred and Pathetique symphonies and edited them together in a manner which matched the intensity of the scene. Similarly, in Mahler, Russell is constantly patching together fragments of the composer’s symphonies based on themes, such as nature or death. While their approach to music is in many ways similar, Greenaway perhaps comes closest to Russell in their shared affinity for the biopic. While Russell is synonymous with the genre, Greenaway has come to it relatively late. Although he had engaged with the work of Jan Vermeer directly in both A Zed and Two Noughts (1985) and in Writing to Vermeer (1998), an epistolary opera he wrote with Andriessen, he did not make a proper film biopic until Nightwatching, his 2007 film about Rembrandt van Rijn. He did, however, begin the twenty-first century by making The Tulse Luper Suitcases, a mammoth multi-media project comprising three features, a sixteen-part television series and several books, exhibitions, interactive CD-ROMs and an online game. Those who are familiar with Greenaway’s early experimental films of the late 1970s and early 1980s will know that

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Tulse Luper was the fictional ornithologist and cartographer featured in A Walk Through H (1978), and the structural film-maker in Vertical Features Remake (1978), as well as a recurring presence in Greenaway’s epic avant-garde film, The Falls (1980). The Tulse Luper Suitcases, then, was an enormously ambitious biopic of a fictional character, which follows Luper from his birth in South Wales in 1911 to his disappearance at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Throughout the feature films an ‘expert’ on Luper’s life and work, and several of his acquaintances, are called upon to give testimony (usually in a direct to camera address shown in a small frame within the main image of the film). In this way, Greenaway gives his fictional story an air of veracity and documentary truth. The final scene of the film, however, returns to Luper’s childhood in Wales and reveals that he, in fact, died aged 10 when a wall collapsed on him (an event the audience had previously seen him survive). The ‘expert’ then tells the audience that Luper’s ‘life, in all its complexity, was a construction, created by his best friend, Martino Knockavelli’. This ending is typical of Greenaway, who revels in revealing artifice, but it also says a good deal about his attitude towards biographical filmmaking. Despite the presence of so-called experts and the pretences it makes toward telling established, historical facts, The Tulse Luper Suitcases is an elaborate fiction. For Greenaway, however, it is no more of a fiction than a biopic of Rembrandt or Vermeer would be. All biopics, he tells us, and all documentaries for that matter, are artificial, fictional constructions, which tell a story and offer a subjective viewpoint. The three theatrically released Tulse Luper films were as formally radical as anything Greenaway had ever produced. Building on the experiments he had begun in A TV Dante (1989), Prospero’s Books (1991) and The Pillow Book (1995), the Tulse Luper trilogy is full of multi-layered, digitally manipulated images which combine text and image, and frequently shift aspect ratios. Despite this formal innovation, the films also form a classic bildungsroman which tells Luper’s life story from his childhood to his death. It is therefore, ignoring the revelation that Luper died as a child, a conventionally structured, if unusually long and detailed biopic. His next forays in the genre would, however, play more with its conventions. Nightwatching, for example, was stylistically the director’s most accessible work since The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. The film features no superimposed text, split screen, or multi-layered images, and the digital post-production does not visibly extend beyond a few discreet ratio changes and exacting colour grading which helps the film recapture the subtle quality of Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro lighting. It is not, however, a standard biopic. Rather, Greenaway offers a subtle subversion of the genre, in a manner that appropriately parallels Rembrandt’s subversion of the conventions of the militia group portraits that were so popular during the Golden Age of Dutch painting. Firstly, the film is not a bildungsroman. It instead focuses on a relatively short period, the two years between 1640 and 1642 during which Rembrandt painted The Nightwatch, and his wife Saskia died. Intercut with

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this main narrative are short scenes which depict Rembrandt’s early married life in the mid-1630s and his old age in the 1660s. Typically, one would expect the actors in these flash-forwards and flashbacks to be visibly aged, through a combination of make-up and their performances. This is not the case in Nightwatching, however. For instance, Martin Freeman, who plays Rembrandt, was 36 at the time of filming (roughly the same age the painter was when he finished The Nightwatch), and he looks this age throughout the film, whether he is playing the painter aged 28 or 60. This is not the most extreme example. Emily Holmes, who was 30, plays Rembrandt’s servant and later lover, Hendrickje Stoffels, from her teens to her forties, without any visible physical change, whereas Nathalie Press, who was 27, plays a (fictitious) 10-year-old victim of child abuse, who Rembrandt incorporates into his canvas. On the one hand, this is clearly a device in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt, which seeks to remind the audience that they are watching actors perform. It also, however, disrupts any obvious sense of chronology and the audience must work hard to determine where some scenes would take place on a linear timeline of events. Such ambiguity would be unthinkable in a more conventional biopic. Regardless of whether its plot is linear, to explain its subject, the classical biopic relies heavily on cause–effect narrative logic and a clear chronology which often leads to a watershed moment. As Ellen Cheshire notes, many biopics begin ‘at an incredibly high or low point in that life and then flash back to the start to see how that success or failure was reached’.44 Nightwatching greatly subverts this model and is, in fact, as much a biopic of a single work of art, The Nightwatch, as it is of the man who painted it. Despite taking several years to find cinematic distribution in Britain, Nightwatching marked a relative return to prominence for Greenaway, and it earned him some of the best notices of his career. He followed it up with Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012), another highly unconventional biopic about the Dutch printmaker, Hendrik Goltzius, and his attempt to find a patron to support his plans to print an edition of the Bible complete with erotic illustrations. Since then he has announced that he will be making a film about Hieronymus Bosch that will form the final chapter in this ‘Dutch Masters’ trilogy. Running concurrently with this is another proposed biopic trilogy, in this case about a single artist, the Soviet film-maker, Sergei Eisenstein. The first part of this trilogy, Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015), again eschewed a tradition bildungsroman structure in favour of something more concentrated. In this case, the film takes place over a mere ten days, and offers a semi-fictionalised account of the director’s first homosexual encounter during the filming of Que Viva Mexico! Despite this narrow time frame, however, the film offers the audience what Brian Hoyle has called ‘an excess of information about its subject’.45 Throughout the film Greenaway uses digital editing techniques, including split screens in which the actors are shown side by side with photos and footage of their real-life counterparts, and composed sequences set to the music of Eisenstein’s key collaborator, Sergei Prokofiev. Moreover, the densely layered script includes

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Twin traditions: the biopic and the composed film

several monologues about Eisenstein’s theories and travels that cannot be fully absorbed on one viewing. These are clearly intended to encourage the ‘audience to stop being viewers, with all the passivity that the word suggests, and instead to become (inter)active researchers’.46 If, as Hoyle suggests, a work like Eisenstein in Guanajuato ‘perhaps offers a useful model for the art cinema of the future’,47 one which embraces new technology and interactivity, he is also keen to stress Greenaway’s position as a traditionalist as well as a radical. For example, by making both Nightwatching and Eisenstein in Guanajuato the opening instalments in trilogies, Greenaway is engaging with a well-established art cinema tradition. Indeed, as critics like Erik Hedling have stressed, the idea of the thematically linked trilogy is a privileged one in the auteurist world of art cinema,48 where, as Bordwell puts it, each film ‘offers itself as a chapter in an oeuvre’.49 By making biopics about painters such as Rembrandt and film-makers such as Eisenstein, Greenaway is also self-consciously drawing parallels between their work and his own status as a visually orientated experimental film-maker who has sought, by his own admission, to bring ‘the aesthetics of painting to the cinema’.50 It is perhaps ironic, however, that Greenaway’s identification with artists he perceives as being somewhat marginalised or misunderstood in fact brings him closer to the centre of British art cinema. Just as Greenaway’s preference for using music to stress the artifice of his films aligns him with a tradition in British cinema that begins with Powell and Pressburger, his identification with certain artistic forebears is a trait he shares with Russell, who clearly felt a kinship with many of his subjects, perhaps most notably Henri Rousseau and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, whom he made Always on Sunday (1965) and Savage Messiah (1972) about respectively. Whether he likes it or not, Greenaway can therefore be seen to be working in two richly overlapping traditions of British art cinema, that of the composed film and the artist’s biopic. Moreover, his work clearly demonstrates that this tradition is alive and well, while also hinting at what it might look like in the future.

Notes  1 Ken Russell, Fire Over England: British Cinema Comes Under Friendly Fire (London: Hutchinson, 1993), p. 86.  2 Wendy Everett, Terence Davies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 89.  3 Pamela Church Gibson, ‘Ken Russell’, Screenonline: The Definitive Guide to Britain’s Film and TV History, available at: http://www.screenonline.org.uk/ people/id/467596/index.html. Accessed 17 January 2018.  4 Sarah Street, British National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 149.  5 Peter Wollen, ‘The Last New Wave: Modernism in the British Films of the Thatcher Era’, in Lester Friedman (ed.), Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, 2nd edition (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), pp. 30–44.

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British art cinema  6 Julian Petley, ‘The Lost Continent’, in Charles Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1986), pp. 98–119.  7 Nanette Aldred, ‘Hein Heckroth and The Archers,’ in Ian Christie and Andew Moor (eds), The Cinema of Michael Powell: International Perspectives on an English Filmmaker (London: British Film Institute, 2005), pp. 186–206; p. 192.  8 Michael Powell, A Life in the Movies (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. 581.  9 Powell, A Life in the Movies, p. 583. 10 Powell, A Life in the Movies, p. 583. 11 Powell, A Life in the Movies, p. 583. 12 Russell, Fire Over England, p. 34. 13 Joseph A. Gomez, ‘The Process of Jarman’s War Requiem: Personal Vision and the Tradition of Fusion of the Arts’, in Chris Lippard (ed.), By Angels Driven: The Films of Derek Jarman (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), pp. 84–102; p. 89. 14 Aldred, ‘Hein Heckroth and The Archers’, p. 192. 15 Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen, 22: 1 (1981), pp. 11–40; p. 13. 16 Aldred, ‘Hein Heckroth and The Archers’, p. 192. 17 Gomez, ‘The Process of Jarman’s War Requiem’, p. 89. 18 Gomez, ‘The Process of Jarman’s War Requiem’, p. 89. 19 Arthur Jacobs, ‘Some Recent Trends in Opera’, in Rollo H. Meyers (ed.), Twentieth Century Music (London: John Calder, 1960), pp. 74–86; p. 75. 20 Gomez, ‘The Process of Jarman’s War Requiem’, p. 89. 21 Paul Taylor, ‘The Music Lovers’, in John Pym (ed.), Time Out Film Guide (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 786. 22 Jack Fisher, ‘Three Masterpieces of Sexuality: Women in Love, The Music Lovers and The Devils’, in Thomas R. Atkins (ed.), Ken Russell (New York, NY: Monarch Press, 1976), pp. 39–67; p. 54. 23 Fisher, ‘Three Masterpieces of Sexuality’, p. 55. 24 Joseph Gomez, Ken Russell: The Adaptor as Creator (London: Fredrick Muller, 1976), p. 35. 25 Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives are they Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), p. 3. 26 Bingham, Whose Lives are they Anyway?, p. 18. 27 Bingham, Whose Lives are they Anyway?, p. 20. 28 Gomez, Ken Russell, p. 89. 29 David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, Film Criticism, 4: 1 (1979), pp. 56–64; p. 58. 30 Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, p. 58. 31 Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, p. 57. 32 Jarman, Dancing Ledge (London: Quartet Books, 1984), p. 216. 33 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 234. 34 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 105. 35 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 216. 36 Alan Woods, Being Naked, Playing Dead: The Art of Peter Greenaway (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 254. 37 Woods, Being Naked, Playing Dead, p. 254. 38 Roy Armes, A Critical History of British Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 227. 39 Woods, Being Naked, Playing Dead, p. 203. 40 Bobbie O’Steen, The Invisible Cut: How Editors Make Movie Magic (Los Angeles, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2009), p. 42.

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41 O’Steen, The Invisible Cut, p. 42. 42 Nicholas Renaud and Daniel Lynds, ‘Cinema Speak: Peter Greenaway Conference Notes’, Off Screen, available at: https://offscreen.com/view/peter_ greenaway. Accessed 17 January 2018. 43 Russell, Fire Over England, p. 168. 44 Ellen Cheshire, Bio-Pics: A Life in Pictures (London: Wallflower, 2015), p. 12. 45 Brian Hoyle, ‘When Peter Met Sergei: Art Cinema Past, Present and Future in Eisenstein in Guanajuato’, The Journal of British Cinema and Television, 13: 2 (2016), pp. 312–30; p. 317. 46 Hoyle, ‘When Peter Met Sergei’, p. 321. 47 Hoyle, ‘When Peter Met Sergei’, p. 327. 48 Erik Hedling, ‘Lindsay Anderson and the Development of British Art Cinema’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 1997), pp. 178–86; pp. 178–9. 49 Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, p. 59. 50 Veron Gras and Marguerite Gras, Peter Greenaway: Interviews (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), p. vii.

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15

Don Boyd and the business of art cinema Phil Wickham

Art cinema, just like its mainstream counterpart, needs audiences to be sustainable. Reaching those audiences requires structures to finance production and to distribute and exhibit work: in short, a business. Without this business, films remain largely unseen or the preserve of a coterie of insiders. Art cinema as a cohesive genre emerged in Britain comparatively late, in the 1970s,1 and its survival since then has not just been achieved through the talents of film-makers but also by producers, distributors, exhibitors and programmers enabling films to be made, circulated and seen. Art cinema has often been defined in terms of authorship, with directors promoted as the prime agents of creativity, but film is inherently collaborative so film-makers work with others to create and realise a vision. As David Bordwell and Steve Neale have argued, the institutions of art cinema are integral to an understanding of the form.2 As making films requires significant financial commitments – before the advent of digital even low-budget titles were expensive to make, and art cinema’s ambitions have often demanded the opulent – the business of art cinema is central to that collaborative creative process, allowing challenging films to compete for audiences with more mainstream fare. Any success in doing this can be partly ascribed to the people working in this business, who often had to be as tough and uncompromising in promoting their products and protecting their talent as their Hollywood or Wardour Street equivalents. To persevere in these efforts over many years in the face of myriad obstacles also requires a complete commitment to cinema as an art. In Britain, however, much of this business focused on ensuring that indigenous audiences could experience the worldview of Bergman, Fellini or Kurosawa rather than discover talents closer to home. Since the 1920s a large group of British intellectuals and cineastes, including The Film Society and critics such as Iris Barry, saw art cinema as something quintessentially foreign in its appeal, perhaps expressed most forcefully by Kenneth Macpherson in his editorial for the first issue of Close Up in 1927.3 Before the 1970s, companies (such as Gala, Contemporary Films and the Academy Cinema) existed primarily to bring art cinema from elsewhere to British audiences. A smaller group, however, has been dedicated to creating and ­sustaining

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Don Boyd and the business of art cinema

a distinctively British art cinema, building a framework that included various departments of the British Film Institute (BFI), festivals such as Edinburgh, and individuals like Jeremy Isaacs at Channel 4. Most of all, though, it has been the story of producers. As John Caughie articulated thirty years ago, a case can be made that ‘the history of the British Cinema is a history of producers’ because ‘outside of a studio system or a national corporation, art is too precarious to be left to artists: it needs organisers. The importance of the producer-artist seems to be a specific feature of British cinema, an effect of the need continually to start again in the organisation of independence.’4 More recently, Andrew Spicer has developed this idea of the ‘producerartist’ or ‘creative producer’ and their place in British cinema history, suggesting that ‘it has been these enterprising, imaginative producers, passionate about film, who have been best-placed to exploit the confined spaces that have occasionally opened up in the British film industry’.5 Producers, then, can act as the dominant creative force within projects or they can strive to ensure that the directors they admire can realise their vision on screen – sometimes they work in both modes at different times. This work has contributed to the creation of a British art cinema (depending on the ever malleable definitions of the term) able to compete on the international stage, covering a range of styles and visions from social realism to experimental formalism, all of which is informed by an engagement, for better or worse, with Britishness itself. In this chapter I will argue that Don Boyd’s career as a producer ­demonstrates the truth of Spicer’s case: his creativity and innovation have opened up the British film industry’s ‘confined spaces’ and made a significant contribution in establishing a distinctively British art cinema. He has explained that his producing work can be defined by ‘a feeling that I should give access to the inaccessible’6 and for nearly forty years he has collaborated with a diversity of talents through a multiplicity of means to achieve this goal. Boyd occupies a unique place in this history, distinctive in two key regards. The first of these is that he is not only a producer and executive, but also a film-maker himself, directing and writing a number of features and documentaries throughout his career. This allows an understanding of the importance of the film-maker’s particular vision, and indeed Boyd is always keen to stress that he sees himself primarily as a writer-director.7 From relatively early on, however, Boyd has combined his own work with producing others’ in order to ‘find interesting directors that were making work that most people would have thought weren’t going to get a huge public but would benefit from my passion and enthusiasm, my technical knowledge and my knowledge of what it is like to be shooting a film and perhaps not being serviced by a producer, not looked after creatively’.8 He has always believed that producers should encourage freedom within reasonable budgetary constraints: ‘I try to help the director as much as possible to ensure that his product is made in the best possible way without outside interference.’9 He is also, however, very much a ‘creative producer’ who wants to be

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engaged with the artistry of the project, rather than merely a ‘facilitator’.10 He explains this offer of both artistic freedom and creative support as ‘I always felt that I was rather wasted if I didn’t express myself and share the venture, and so I’ve always made it clear that I was around for that sort of stuff but the moment I felt intrusive, I backed off.’11 Secondly Boyd is a figure that spans both art cinema and more commercial film, refusing to see them in opposition to each other. Rather, as he states, ‘my intention is always to give the director the best possible conditions in which to work. After that I feel my next responsibility is to market and sell the finished product in the manner to which the subject is best suited.’12 As Dan North points out, ‘Boyd didn’t see “art film” as necessarily in conflict with popular cinema, something to be played down in publicity material.’13 Although his relationship with the established British film industry when he came to prominence was frequently troubled, he did not cast himself outside it; instead he aimed to change it from within and build a better, more radical one. He saw how the practices and reach of commercial cinema can be used to make art cinema more sustainable and accessible and the talent, creative vision and ideas of art cinema can enrich commercial filmmaking. I will look at three particular engagements with art cinema in Don Boyd’s career as a producer. Firstly, I will consider his work with Derek Jarman, with whom he worked on four occasions: The Tempest (1979), The Last of England (1985 co-produced with James Mackay), War Requiem (1989) and a segment of the opera portmanteau film Aria (1987). Secondly, I will look in detail at his work as executive producer on Chris Petit’s film An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1982). I will be using resources from Don Boyd’s archive at The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter, where I am the curator. Lastly, I will look at some of Boyd’s recent work running the web platform HiBROW, which produces both filmed performances of art forms such as theatre, classical music and dance, and also creative cinema documentaries, many made by the critic and film-maker Mark Cousins. Briefly it is worth putting these projects in the context of Boyd’s career, some parts of which have been covered in more detail by Dan North and Brian Hoyle, and earlier in works by Robert Murphy and Alexander Walker.14 Don Boyd attended the London Film School, where he imbibed the greats of post-war art cinema and noted that in Britain they were shown ‘in exhibition outlets that allowed what we now know as art cinema, which were foreign films with subtitles, but outside that, in Italy, if you were Fellini, your movies had a big public’.15 He then enjoyed a lucrative few years making commercials, before directing two features, Intimate Reflections (1974) and East of Elephant Rock (1978). While the critical reception of these films was mixed, Boyd’s energy and commitment impressed, as well as his enthusiasm for a new ethos for the British film industry. These ideas led to the formation of Boyd’s Company, a vehicle for a mixed slate of titles funded in part by Roy Tucker’s firm Rossminster, who

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Don Boyd and the business of art cinema

made use of tax shelters to finance Boyd’s ambitions, a practice which later became a standard mode of film production but was then controversial. The Boyd’s Co. slate for 1979/80 ranged from The Tempest to more mainstream films such as Hussy (Matthew Chapman, 1980) and Sweet William (Claude Whatham, 1980), and at this point Boyd’s Co. appeared to have the potential to act as a more dynamic British studio than the monoliths of Rank and EMI who dominated the industry at the time. The British film industry was hitting its nadir at this point and really only Boyd was demonstrating energy, enterprise and enthusiasm, leading him to be dubbed a ‘one man film industry’.16 Their biggest commercial success came from the film version of Alan Clarke’s Scum (1979), the incendiary story of borstal life that had been banned from being screened as a television play on the BBC. Boyd acted as executive producer, helping to fund a reworking of the play as a feature film but retaining the services of Clarke, now seen as one of Britain’s greatest art film-makers, as director. As Boyd reasonably points out, ‘he was very revered in the TV drama world as a director, but Scum put Alan on the map as a movie director so a lot of his work subsequently has been seen in those terms, even if it was for television’.17 The public had not seen the TV play and had not been made aware of Clarke’s talent in the same way that film directors were promoted, at least until he developed his distinctive steadicam technique in the 1980s. Boyd describes how Clarke went to him when he was under pressure from others in the production to cut the graphic suicide scene and he overruled them, backing Clarke’s belief that it was necessary, despite potential censorship issues – bearing out his assertion that he is prepared to support the creative conviction come what may.18 Boyd then went to America for two years to work as producer on Honky Tonk Freeway (1981), a project he had originally hoped to direct but which was taken up by EMI and became a huge, although unsuccessful, big budget production helmed by John Schlesinger. It was ‘the only time’19 in his production career that he has felt that he should have been directing the project he was producing, and the experience made him both keen to return to making films in Britain and to ensure more creative control in the future. He had continued to operate Boyd’s Co. in his absence but in 1982, after the production of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, both his career and the company went into freefall after his directorial project Gossip had to abandon shooting when it transpired that he had been conned over the film’s finances. Here he feels that he was punished for his antipathy to more conventional forces in the industry: ‘I think there was a certain naivety combined with arrogance in the era of Boyd’s Co., because I didn’t engage with the traditional British film industry. I didn’t want to hobnob with the Head of Rank or EMI particularly so I was seen as this slightly revolutionary c­ haracter … I think for that reason when everything went wrong I was appalled at the degree to which the industry didn’t in any way find a way to support me.’20 In 1987 he restored his fortunes with Aria, which gathered together numerous leading directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman and Nicolas Roeg to visualise recordings of operatic arias. This is a project where he exerted a ‘huge

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influence’ on the concept and vision of the film so that he feels it is ‘a good example of myself acting as creative producer’.21 It could be argued that Aria acted as a showcase for global art cinema in the manner of earlier portmanteau titles such as Ro.Go.Pa.G (1963), which also featured Godard. Since then his career has undertaken a number of turns and incorporated a number of different companies (such as Anglo-Amalgamated and Lexington Films). He directs his own work, including features such as My Kingdom (2004), and in particular has moved towards documentaries such as Andrew and Jeremy Get Married (2004) and working across new media, as the creative leader of the HiBROW web platform. Don Boyd produced two of Derek Jarman’s features, The Tempest and War Requiem, and co-produced The Last of England with another Jarman regular collaborator, James Mackay; Jarman also contributed a segment to Aria. The Tempest and War Requiem are interesting because they form something of a contrast with much of the rest of Jarman’s oeuvre. His work with James Mackay (whose archive is also held at The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum), including many short Super8 films and features such as The Angelic Conversation (1985) and The Garden (1990), represents his identity as an artist working in film and experimenting with form, and his development as an activist. Such work established a small but loyal audience and Mackay was extremely effective in getting it made and delivering it to that constituency. These films, videos and installations are central to Jarman’s art but the Boyd collaborations were instrumental in presenting Jarman’s talent as part of art cinema, rather than just the avant garde – with The Last of England as something of a bridge between. The Tempest was indisputably Jarman’s vision, but as a Shakespeare adaptation it could be sold to a broader public than his previous work. Boyd set about this with gusto and the film proved very successful in art cinema markets around the world; indeed Boyd’s sales agent Terry Glinwood suggested that it was nearly (but not quite) a commercial proposition.22 Boyd describes his decision to produce Jarman, after he had been sent a thirtyfive-page script, as follows: ‘I’d seen the work. I loved him and I loved the idea of him interpreting The Tempest in that way. It was a visceral connection and I love individualistic work that stands out as being from one person’s mind. And his ideas were so strong, he articulated them well and his process was interesting. That was seductive and I never, ever regretted it.’23 On The Tempest he describes delegating line production to his then personal assistant Sarah Radclyffe, who acted as his representative. Boyd only visited the set on a couple of occasions; however, at Jarman’s request he did look at the rushes every morning and spoke with the director daily to share thoughts. In another example of his role as a creative producer, Boyd was able to use his technical expertise to advise Jarman on the experimental processes that he was trying to use with Super16 stock and the film’s editing and sound design. The experience on War Requiem a decade later was very different. The film used Decca’s original 1963 recording of Benjamin Britten’s oratorio

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Don Boyd and the business of art cinema

based on Wilfred Owen’s World War One poetry and the Latin Mass; and under the terms of the contract the soundtrack could not be altered in any way. Here Boyd ‘was on set the whole time. I was massively involved from the very beginning, because basically I persuaded Derek to do it.’24 Very unusually, Jarman did not generate the project himself – it was Boyd’s idea to ‘construct the film so that its visualisation pitted the two quite separate elements of the poem and images together’25 and together they conceived its structure.26 Some of the elements of the film, notably Laurence Olivier’s appearance at the beginning to read Owen’s poem ‘Strange Meeting’, were very much instigated by Boyd, with an eye to the advantage this would give in promoting the film and helping it to find sales and a theatrical exhibition prior to its transmission by the BBC, who co-funded the project. The influence of Boyd, not to mention Britten, Owen, and the war theme, may make War Requiem seem less unequivocally a Jarman vision; indeed Boyd says that Jarman complained that Boyd’s creative involvement had made the film ‘less gay’ than if he had been the sole creative force (a charge Boyd refutes). The archive makes clear his commitment to bringing a bigger, broader audience to Jarman’s work. In his on-set diary Boyd addresses this issue: ‘I wondered why he has yet to graduate to worldwide recognition in the way lesser directors have.’27 The answer is probably that Jarman was not much interested in such recognition, but the films with Boyd opened up his work to many who may not otherwise have encountered it. Boyd acted as a ‘creative producer’ on War Requiem, but their relationship on set seems to have been productive, harmonious and mutually admiring; in the diary he notes that ‘Derek maintains a singular vision of the entire film, despite the obvious flexibility he enjoys in creating the film, he never moans about lack of time or lack of money.’ It was a challenge for Boyd to mount the film after his problems with Gossip and subsequent struggles with the unions, and he was trying to achieve the project on a very small budget; Jarman’s willingness to work under these restrictions helped ensure that harmony. Boyd’s creative involvement succeeds in delivering what remains, to the viewer at least, unmistakably a Derek Jarman film, complete with homoerotic tableaux, Tilda Swinton’s performance and the use of Super8 footage to symbolise lost memories. Boyd’s interest in working with film-makers with a singular vision and encouraging them in whatever project they chose to pursue can also be seen when Boyd’s Co. produced Chris Petit’s film An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Boyd was officially executive producer on the film, although as he and the archives both make clear, he was unequivocally in charge, despite being in America for some of the shoot.28 The film demonstrates Boyd’s willingness to mix arthouse and mainstream cinema conventions together. The juxtaposition of Petit, who had been the film critic of Time Out and had made Radio On (1979), a critically acclaimed black and white art film clearly influenced by New German Cinema, with a traditional detective novel by P. D. James seems unusual, but Petit came to Boyd with the project. The film was mounted with support from Goldcrest and the National Film

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Finance Corporation (NFFC), combining elements of the mainstream film industry with a rare foray for Boyd into state funding. Petit was anxious to show that he was capable of and willing to make a film that would prove to be commercially successful as well as artistically credible; in its press book he says that ‘I hope we have a very commercial subject with An Unsuitable Job for a Woman … although, on a different level, the story has much more depth than usual.’29 Notes he sent to the production staff underline this desire to ape classic Hollywood as well as contemporary German models and he is keen to emphasise the differences he sees between this project and Radio On.30 When viewed, however, the film does predominantly feel like art cinema, albeit from a genre source of a particularly English and chilly kind. It is a fascinating, if flawed film; Petit’s lack of interest in plot or character tends to detract from the potential generic pleasures of the detective story but there are some other strengths evident, deriving from the conventions of European cinema but rooted in English repressions and desires. The visual style, with cinematography by Wenders’s cameraman Martin Schafer, features repeated long shots and recurring visual motifs of reflections in mirrors, and there is use of techniques such as Super8 film to evoke memory. Particular sequences are loaded with symbolism in a striking manner. The scene where the private detective heroine, Cordelia (Pippa Guard), places a noose round her neck to experience what the subject of her investigation, Mark Callendar, felt when he died, and starts to hang by accident, only to be rescued by a passing feral child, is genuinely unsettling, emphasising the film’s theme of empathy as obsession. Similarly, when Cordelia is thrown into a well, a sense of dislocation and panic is created through unusual camera angles and a dissonant, subjective sound design. The themes of sexual obsession, transgressive gender politics, dysfunctional families and the alienating effects of wealth are intrinsic to the film and are privileged within the frame. The shoot proved to be difficult, with Petit struggling to communicate his ideas to a crew recruited from the mainstream film industry. According to Boyd, Petit wrote to him to say that he would have to quit because he was not getting the co-operation he needed. Boyd’s solution, having returned from America, was to visit the set and congratulate all the crew on working so well to realise Petit’s fantastic vision.31 He had similar problems with the film’s funders, who were concerned at Petit’s lack of experience beyond low-budget experimental works. Boyd proved decisive and steadfast in his support of the film-maker. A letter in the archive to the NFFC, who as an organisation had expressed doubts over Petit’s credentials and requested directorial tests, is worth quoting at some length: We like the book, we buy the option on it. We fund several versions of the script. We budget the film. We have serious casting sessions. We do location research. We discuss sequences with a cinematographer, and all with or for a particular director – Chris Petit … I could not make this script without him, nor would other financial partners put up the money without his name attached to it.32

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Don Boyd and the business of art cinema

In a subsequent letter to the NFFC, Boyd also asserts his authority over the project as executive producer, quashing rumours that his attention was elsewhere by stating that ‘creatively and administratively this film’s very existence is down to me’.33 He is very clear that he is in charge of the progress of the production and is accountable for the success of the film; however at the same time he vigorously defends Petit’s right to make the film he wants to make and on his own terms. Petit’s subsequent career shows that this kind of support is not necessarily a given in the industry, and that film-makers with a singular vision working in British art cinema cannot always be accommodated. His account of the demise of his feature film career states that ‘I wanted to work faster than the system allowed … but I lacked the constitution, the drugs, or the funding, perhaps the courage, and possibly the right country. Speed is rarely possible when you’re making movies in Britain, and British careers are notable for their hiatuses’,34 and he subsequently concentrated on experimental and documentary work that bypassed the usual frameworks of British art cinema. Boyd’s financial fall from grace for some years in the mid-1980s contributed to the lack of opportunities for film-makers in British art cinema beyond television support through Channel 4 and from state funding through bodies such as the BFI. Interestingly, with occasional exceptions, such as NFFC’s role in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, Boyd rejected both these potential routes. His suspicion of state funding was ‘mainly because, and this is still the case, there are a variety of hoops that you have to jump through, which are ones that I find have a tendency to destroy the sense of being independent and destroy the creative autonomy a filmmaker should have’,35 although he now feels that he would be happy to work with state funding organisations as the element of intrusion is at a more acceptable level.36 Boyd was openly critical of Channel 4’s films, stating in a letter to David Puttnam that ‘you know of my hatred for television: I agree that it is a fact of life but I think everything should be done to preserve the cinema as an art form and as a social phenomenon’.37 This antipathy seems based on television as an emulator of cinema; when it comes to distinct television forms then he has engaged creatively with the medium, particularly through his work in documentary in the last two decades. In contrast to these areas where Boyd felt that his independence as a producer would be compromised, he has been anxious to seize opportunities that he felt offered a greater measure of creative control, even if they involved new forms beyond traditional cinema exhibition. Early in his career in the late 1970s he embraced the possibilities of early video technology to make a visualisation of The Four Seasons, which was distributed on home formats as well as a cinema short. Indeed Boyd was a never a purist over the sanctity of 35mm and prided himself on his technical flexibility.38 Recently this willingness to use new technologies to express and enable creativity has been manifested in an embrace of digital filmmaking and internet platforms. While still

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making films as a director and as a producer, Boyd’s energies over the last decade have been particularly concentrated in creating the web platform HiBROW, which hosts and makes films on the arts curated by leading practitioners. The project reflects Boyd’s lifelong interest in combining film with the performing arts, seen in Aria and his Jarman collaborations. HiBROW aims to ‘provide on a global level work that people wouldn’t normally get to see’,39 aiming to serve both a niche market and a broader constituency who might be unfamiliar with the work. Initially HiBROW was not intended to be a distribution platform for cinema, but now documentaries on film-makers and festivals as well as trailers and some of Boyd’s back catalogue appear on the site. Boyd has also developed a productive relationship with another critic turned film-maker, Mark Cousins. Cousins makes essay films meditating on art, culture and ways of seeing, such as Here be Dragons (2013) and Life May Be (2014), which receive limited theatrical screenings and can be purchased through video on demand sites (including iTunes) and will eventually appear free on HiBROW once revenue streams have been exhausted. Boyd characterises his role as producer here ‘as a kind of creative friend’. ‘I have a miniscule impact on the choice of what he’s going to do, certainly the way he’s going to do it. He does involve me in editing. He’ll phone me up and say what do you think? And I know I have quite an impact on that.’40 The HiBROW model offers one possible route for the future of the business of art cinema in an environment where the relationship between the text and the audience appears to be constantly changing. The battle to create a sustainable revenue model that allows film-makers to keep working and innovating and that can sustain businesses to support that work is still raging, but Boyd feels that eventually audiences will be prepared to pay, at least on some kind of subscription model.41 Like his previous ventures he believes that it is imperative to ‘peg what you’re doing in cost terms to what the market can accommodate’42 and in the digital era the costs can be much, much lower than previously, so that now he feels ‘rather optimistic about the whole system’.43 Don Boyd’s long career since the 1970s is indicative of the challenges that those involved in the business of art cinema in Britain have faced but is also very distinctive. There has not really been anyone else quite like him in Britain; Jeremy Thomas is probably the closest but his role has been more to enable work by leading international directors like Bernardo Bertolucci or David Cronenberg than to be an active, eclectic, creative force like Boyd, and Thomas has been clear that he believes ‘the director is the prow of the ship’ and to him a producer ‘cannot be an author’.44 Boyd has certainly faced many critics, notably from those in the industry and the unions who in the early part of his career felt him to be reckless in his financial dealings and overly critical of their own operations. Yet one would hope that even those old foes would acknowledge his ability to overcome significant setbacks in order to get the work he believed in onto the screen. He has been unlucky too; he started his career at the nadir of the British film industry

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Don Boyd and the business of art cinema

and at a very young age found himself to be one of very few willing to engage and invest in new artistic voices. Similarly he launched HiBROW at the time of the financial crash when financial projections that would have seemed plausible a year earlier suddenly became impossible, but has battled on to create a space for the kind of arts programming that is otherwise not available to many audiences and which can make and distribute the singular work of Cousins. Ultimately the combination of his own creative talents and passions with the belief that individual visions in filmmaking should be encouraged has allowed him to make ‘the inaccessible accessible’ in Britain and played a crucial role in the development of its art cinema.

Notes  1 Erik Hedling, ‘Lindsay Anderson and the Development of British Art Cinema’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, 3rd edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, 2009), pp. 39–46; p. 39.  2 David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 7th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 649–57; Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen, 22: 1 (1981), pp. 11–40.  3 For example, see Kenneth MacPherson’s introduction to the first issue of Close-Up (July 1927), p. 9.  4 John Caughie, ‘Broadcasting and Cinema: 1 Converging Histories’, in Charles Barr (ed.), All our Yesterdays (London: British Film Institute, 1986), pp. 189– 205; p. 200.  5 Andrew Spicer, Beyond the Bottom Line (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 67.  6 Interview by author with Don Boyd, Exeter, 17 September 2016.  7 Dan North, ‘Don Boyd: The Accidental Producer’, in Robert Shail (ed.), Seventies British Cinema (Basingstoke: British Film Institute, 2008), pp. 139–49; p. 139.  8 Interview with author.  9 Campaign book for An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, p. 19. Don Boyd Archive, The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter. DB 482. 10 Interview. 11 Interview. 12 Campaign book for An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, p. 19. 13 North, ‘Don Boyd: The Accidental Producer’, p. 146. 14 North, ‘Don Boyd: The Accidental Producer’; Dan North, Sights Unseen: Unmade British Films (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008); Brian Hoyle, ‘Producing as a Creative Endeavour: The case of Don Boyd’s Aria’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 9: 1 (2012), pp. 77–95; Alexander Walker, National Heroes (London: Harrap, 1985); Robert Murphy, ‘Three Companies: Boyd’s Co., HandMade and Goldcrest’, in Martyn Auty and Nick Roddick (eds), British Cinema Now (London: British Film Institute, 1985), pp. 43–56; pp. 47–8. 15 Interview. 16 Walker, National Heroes, p. 154.

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British art cinema 17 Interview. 18 Interview. 19 Interview. 20 Interview. 21 Interview. 22 Letter from Terry Glinwood to Don Boyd, 1 November 1979. Don Boyd Archive. DBC 18. 23 Interview. 24 Interview. 25 Note by Don Boyd. Don Boyd Archive. DB 084 (note file). 26 Interview. 27 War Requiem set diary by Don Boyd. Don Boyd Archive. DB 084. 28 Interview. 29 Campaign book for An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, p. 25. 30 Chris Petit notes. Don Boyd Archive. DBC 1149. 31 Interview. 32 Letter from Don Boyd to Mamoun Hassan, 12 March 1981. Don Boyd Archive. DBC 1345. 33 Letter from Don Boyd to Mamoun Hassan, 22 June 1981. Don Boyd Archive. DBC 1345. 34 Chris Petit, ‘Pictures by Numbers’, Film Comment, 37: 2 (2001), p. 38. 35 Interview. 36 Interview. 37 Letter from Don Boyd to David Puttnam (undated 1984). Don Boyd Archive. DBC 73. 38 Interview. 39 Interview. 40 Interview. 41 Interview. 42 Interview. 43 Interview. 44 Tim Adler, The Producers (London: Methuen, 2004), p. 167.

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Shakespearean film as art cinema: Stage Beauty as a cerebral retort to Hollywood Sarah Martindale At first glance, it must seem strange that a chapter in a collection on the subject of British art cinema should focus on a costume drama such as Stage Beauty (Richard Eyre, 2004), which features a cast of familiar British character actors alongside American leads. It may seem even more odd when one considers that the film is being examined as a counterpart to Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1998) – a runaway commercial success that won the Academy Award for Best Picture – with which it shares thematic and stylistic similarities, primarily a fascination with the work of Shakespeare. Patently there are other costume dramas such as A Field in England (Ben Wheatley, 2013), Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992) and, indeed, Shakespearean films such as The Tempest (Derek Jarman, 1979) or Prospero’s Books (Peter Greenaway, 1991) that more obviously exhibit the features of formal invention and artistic vision associated with art cinema. The primary purpose of this chapter is not to argue that Stage Beauty constitutes an example of British art cinema, although in many respects it does. Rather, the focus here is on the mobilisation of ideas about art cinema in the ancillary discourses that circulate around Stage Beauty, and the ways in which these ideas are used to frame, differentiate and evaluate it as a film product in the British marketplace. What complicates matters even further in this case is that questions of artistic credibility and conviction are bound up with other contested markers of cinematic value. Regardless of any middlebrow connotations associated with period genre trappings,1 the modest scope of financial backing provided to Stage Beauty by an international consortium of production and distribution companies confers upon it the label of an independent film, in contradistinction to a Hollywood studio film. But this was at a time when the definitional value of independence had been called into question by ‘crossover’ successes from studio subsidiaries, of which Miramax’s Shakespeare in Love is a prime example.2 Equally unclear is whether a meaningful cultural contrast to mainstream Hollywood cinema is offered by two films made in Britain by British directors working with largely British cast and crew, but American scripts, stars and funding.3 At the same time, any new work that takes inspiration from Shakespeare

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establishes a connection with a figure synonymous with British cultural heritage and artistic traditions that pre-date the mass media. In some respects, the act of quoting and incorporating Shakespearean material into another text is an immediate claim to cultural authority and canonical status, via association ‘with the very power source of theatre’.4 Highbrow value of this sort, though itself a nineteenth-century construct, is something that cinema has appropriated during its history as an art form,5 but that tendency is one that has been identified as detrimental to the developments and achievements of film art.6 Then again, for those primarily concerned with the cultural legacy of Shakespeare – in the form of the intellectual industry that revolves around the author7 – there is a quite different set of criteria employed to determine whether a new interpretation equates to a radical, imaginative and worthwhile addition to the corpus.

Telling the difference: Stage Beauty and Shakespeare in Love It is hard to find critical commentary on Stage Beauty that does not make reference to Shakespeare in Love, and the particular terms of those comparisons will be considered in due course. Even those involved in making Stage Beauty pre-empt and try to shape discussion of its resemblances to the earlier film – as illustrated by the defensive, challenging tone of the following comment from Hugh Bonneville who plays Samuel Pepys: ‘The hacks will grab on to it as Shakespeare in Love but different, which it’s not. It’s more cerebral than that.’8 The similarities between the two films are obvious: from shared cast members (Tom Wilkinson and Rupert Everett), to visual and narrative echoes. Both seek to reconstruct the performance history of Shakespeare and give the film viewer a glimpse behind the scenes of the theatre world. Stage Beauty is concerned with the point in the Restoration period when male actors portraying female characters were replaced by actresses on the English stage. Greg Colón Semenza argues that depictions of post-Restoration England tend to share characteristics with depictions of Shakespeare’s Tudor milieu, these two periods acting as jaunty ‘bookends’ for the ‘humorless [sic] and apocalyptic’ seventeenth century.9 And there is historical evidence for ‘some sort of continuum’ within the English theatrical community between Shakespeare’s theatre and Restoration theatre.10 In addition to sharing a nostalgic fascination with history as simultaneously archaic and a source of continuity,11 there are visual echoes of Shakespeare in Love discernible in Stage Beauty’s depiction of Shakespeare in performance. The heroine of Stage Beauty, Ned’s dresser Maria (who later reinvents herself as the actress Mrs Margaret Hughes), is introduced enraptured by a performance and mouthing along with the lines being delivered on stage, just as the heroine of Shakespeare in Love (Viola de Lessops) does when she first appears on screen. The finales of the two films also mirror each other closely, with off-stage action feeding into the denouement of a Shakespearean tragedy (Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare in Love; Othello in

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Stage Beauty), the performance of which thereby becomes very emotionally charged. This serves to heighten the dramatic tension because the tragic outcome of the play represents the climax of the film narrative too. It also implies that Shakespeare’s work reflects and articulates ‘real’ dilemmas and experiences, and this is the source of its lasting cultural power and significance. In these scenes the passionate acting is interspersed with reaction shots of the diegetic audiences and other members of the theatre companies. They are shown to be totally absorbed by the performance: gasping in shock; on the edge of tears. The narrative motivation is different: those watching Romeo and Juliet are horrified by witnessing the lovers’ fate for the first time; whereas the audience for Othello are startled to witness the murder of Desdemona enacted in an uncomfortably realistic way. But, in both cases, the portrayal of unguarded emotional responses to performance emphasises the importance of these moments, which underline the potency and longevity of these texts. Many of the characters in Stage Beauty – King Charles II, Samuel Pepys, Thomas Betterton, Sir Charles Sedley, Nell Gwyn and George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham – are based on real historical figures; just as they are in Shakespeare in Love, which features fictionalised depictions of Queen Elizabeth I, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Burbage, Will Kempe, Ned Alleyn, Philip Henslowe and John Webster, in addition to the eponymous playwright himself. In Stage Beauty, screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher fabricates an imaginative scenario around aristocratic and theatrical individuals, just as Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard did in their screenplay for Shakespeare in Love. In the latter historical information is used as the basis for postmodern jokes, such as the characterisation of John Webster as a macabre teenager, which plays on the infamously bloody tragedies he wrote. In Stage Beauty, history is treated less as a source of comedic potential, and more as narrative inspiration. The film’s director, Richard Eyre, frames it as ‘a true story’ in a promotional article written for the Guardian,12 although details of the historical record, and creative licence in the film’s appropriation of it, have subsequently become the subject of scholarly debate.13 The protagonist of Stage Beauty, Edward (Ned) Kynaston, was an actor on the London stage during the second half of the seventeenth century, who did indeed play both male and female roles during his career, and is recorded as having married a woman named Maria in 1661.14 Likewise, Margaret Hughes gave the first recorded performance by an actress in the role of Desdemona.15 The emphasis of historical representation in Stage Beauty is very much on theatre and imagining the cultural impact of changes in performance practice. This is in contrast to Shakespeare in Love, which includes frequent eruptions of postmodern incongruity into the period setting – for comic purposes, but also to establish a sense of continuity between Elizabethan theatre and Hollywood filmmaking, portraying them as equally committed to the ‘business of show’. Because of these parallels, Shakespeare in Love seems to comment on contemporary cinema as much as theatre history.16 Although the ending of Stage Beauty revolves

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around ‘anachronistic staging of the techniques of method acting’,17 the underlying message is about the potentially uncomfortable, cathartic effect of theatrical presence: ‘celebrating the (supposedly) irreproducible pleasures of psychic investment and release associated with having been there at a particular live performance’.18 This emphasis is not surprising, given the theatrical origins of Stage Beauty. The film was written by Jeffrey Hatcher, adapting his stage play Compleat Female Stage Beauty, and directed by Richard Eyre, following his celebrated tenure as artistic director of the National Theatre.19 Shakespeare in Love, on the other hand, despite the often mentioned contributions of playwright Tom Stoppard, originated with Hollywood screenwriter Marc Norman. It was initially developed by Universal and produced by Miramax, a subsidiary of Disney. The production background and box office profiles of the two films also contrast. Two journalists offer figures for Stage Beauty’s budget – £6 million and $12 million20 – and both report that securing this financial backing was a struggle. The film went on to make a little over $2 million on worldwide release. Shakespeare in Love was a $24 million film21 that earned nearly $300 million worldwide.22 It also enjoyed huge critical acclaim, with thirteen Academy Award nominations, while Stage Beauty won Overlooked Film of the Year 2004 at the Phoenix Film Critics Society Awards.23 So, despite the ubiquity of Shakespeare in Love as a point of comparison, Stage Beauty is a different type of film product, described by its director as ‘fairly sophisticated’,24 by dint of its thematic emphases and approach to representing the topic of historical Shakespearean performance. The repudiation of suggestions of mimicry and reproduction was part of the film’s promotional discourse (although one can assume that the phenomenal success of Shakespeare in Love played a role in encouraging investment in Eyre’s production in the first place). A Mail on Sunday feature quotes the director thus: ‘ “We never thought about Shakespeare in Love when we were making this film,” Eyre insists. “We didn’t just want to make another one like that”.’25 Other press coverage of Stage Beauty draws attention to the ways in which it diverges from the Shakespeare in Love precedent, although there is no consensus regarding whether or not these are desirable features. Going beyond a simple acknowledgement of similarity,26 many journalists offer comparative evaluation. Some give preference to the ‘far superior’ Shakespeare in Love27 as an illustrious progenitor.28 One even goes so far as to assess in terms of formally endorsed interconnection: ‘like most sequels, [Stage Beauty] isn’t quite as fun or as goodlooking as the original [Shakespeare in Love]’.29 In direct contrast, though, other journalists concur with the ‘cerebral’ characterisation of Stage Beauty through favourable appraisal, describing it as ‘a cleverer, edgier movie than Shakespeare in Love’30 and ‘infinitely more complex and rewarding’.31 One scholarly reading takes this argument a stage further, contending that Stage Beauty deliberately deploys resemblances to Shakespeare in Love to emphasise its own ‘fakeness’, and thereby critically comment on ‘a cheapening of the



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commodities offered up for sale, namely love and Shakespeare, in a transnational film market’.32

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The challenge of sexual fluidity in Stage Beauty: onscreen and in reception A recurring feature of discourse about Stage Beauty revolves around the theme of sexuality. One review comments: ‘Filled with catty comments, crossdressing and fabulous frocks, this is a kind of bitchy half-sister to the Oscar winning Shakespeare in Love’,33 thereby identifying the level of camp as a distinction between the two films. The pretext for tabloid-friendly puns such as ‘crossdresstoration’34 is provided by Stage Beauty’s depiction of the sexual attention that accompanies Kynaston’s celebrated performance of female roles in the theatre. After his performance as Desdemona, the actor is propositioned by two gentlewomen and agrees to accompany them on an excursion while still in character as a woman. In the seclusion of a carriage, the gentlewomen set about gathering hard evidence of Kynaston’s male identity beneath his skirts. Immediately after this encounter, when the three alight from the carriage, Kynaston is mistaken for a whore, and then groped, by a randy fop. On returning to the theatre Kynaston finds his lover, the Duke of Buckingham, waiting. As the two prepare to have sex in the onstage bed from the closing scenes of Othello, Buckingham asks Kynaston to don a long blonde wig, and to thus reassume a feminine appearance. According to the Daily Mail this sexual activity makes Kynaston ‘camper than a row of pink tents’.35 Other critics more accurately identify Ned’s bisexuality36 but connect this to socially undesirable traits such as promiscuity37 and prima donna behaviour.38 Writing in the Independent, however, Liz Hoggard expresses the view that Stage Beauty has ‘brave things to say about human sexuality’.39 In the context of a promotional interview with Rupert Everett, who plays Charles II, she comments on the dearth of sexual diversity within contemporary cinema: ‘Ironic that after years of being Hollywood’s only openly gay actor, he is the straightest thing in the movie.’40 What Hoggard alludes to in this article is the fact that Stage Beauty depicts sexual activity between consenting adults with greater openness and variety than is ordinarily present in Hollywood films. In this respect the film has more in common with the conventions of art cinema41 and new forms of pluralistic representation ­building upon ‘the art cinema legacy’.42 The unconventionality of Stage Beauty’s treatment of sexuality is reflected in some journalists’ uneasiness and attempts to dismiss ‘dour ruminations on … what it means to be a bloke in a frock’43 and ‘embarrassingly earnest lit-crit waffle about gender identity’.44 In an article about drag films an observation is made that the exploration of gender fluidity in Stage Beauty makes it both more interesting and less commercial than Shakespeare in Love.45 This conforms to established

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scholarly views about the portrayal of identity and desire in Shakespeare in Love. Sujata Iyengar focuses analytical attention specifically on the representation of sexuality in that film, arguing that it ignores the complexities of Elizabethan female impersonation on stage and associates conventional codings of masculinity and femininity with ‘true love’, through a depiction of heterosexual romance in which both sexes play their ascribed roles.46 Iyengar writes that the eminent American Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt ‘claims to have suggested an overtly homoerotic plot’ for Shakespeare in Love, and met with the response that ‘producers and audiences were not ready for a bisexual Shakespeare’.47 This view of Shakespeare in Love as a heteronormative narrative is also an integral feature of other critiques. Richard Burt agrees that the film straightens out any potentially ‘Shakesqueer’ material.48 Elizabeth Klett notes that not only the film, but also the journalistic coverage of it, concentrates on Shakespeare’s heterosexuality.49 Julianne Pidduck claims that Shakespeare in Love demonstrates far less transgressive potential than other 1990s films featuring cross-dressing, like The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (Elliott, 1994) or The Crying Game (Jordan, 1992).50 Overt homoeroticism is undoubtedly present in Stage Beauty, featuring as it does a scene of thwarted desire between two semi-naked male (former) lovers in a bathhouse. There is no question that issues associated with the historical fact of boy actors as objects of male desire on stage are prominent and complex within the narrative of Stage Beauty, whereas in Shakespeare in Love cross-gendered performance is a light-hearted plot device, selfconsciously signalled by a comic line addressing the inadequacy of Viola’s transparent disguise as Thomas Kent, which ‘wouldn’t deceive a child’.51 Some academics discern a regressive agenda in Stage Beauty, arguing that Kynaston is straightened out over the course of the film, embracing heterosexual masculinity when he is forced to abandon the feminine traits that have been imposed upon him.52 But other academics point out the respects in which the film’s treatment of sexuality is unusual: the fluidity of Ned’s gender identity, the frank depictions of homosexual encounters, and the connection of characters’ behaviour to historical norms.53 This is best illustrated by the aforementioned bathhouse scene, in which Ned is obviously devastated to be rejected by the Duke, who is himself under pressure to fulfil societal expectations that he will make a good marriage. Interestingly, given its presence in headlines and reviews, sexuality is largely downplayed in promotional material about Stage Beauty. Speaking about his main character, Eyre comments, ‘he’s bisexual, but the film isn’t really about him sorting out this dilemma’.54 While the probing of dilemmas (as opposed to the solving of problems) has been identified as a defining feature of art cinema,55 this comment suggests that the director does not consider Ned’s dilemma to be the chief thematic concern of his film. It is a lack of purposeful engagement with these issues that disappoints scholars, who perceive it to be a failure of ideological commitment.56



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Uncertainty about the ideology in Stage Beauty: race, gender and cultural authority When Philip French reviews Stage Beauty for the Observer he fails to find in Eyre’s new film a core message with ‘similar political bite to his first and best feature piece, the anti-Thatcher state-of-the-nation piece, The Ploughman’s Lunch’.57 Allison Pearson’s newspaper article about the director’s career chronicles his support of radical writers in the 1960s and contends that he remains ‘firmly of the Left’.58 But, in the course of that interview, Eyre himself expresses the paradox of being part of an artistic establishment while also seeking to critically comment on that artistic establishment through new artistic work: ‘You sort of think you couldn’t possibly be a member of the Establishment; you’re keenly critical of the status quo. And who are you fooling? You are it, the epicentre of the status quo.’59 Bearing in mind this context, it seems reasonable to consider categorising Stage Beauty as a post-heritage film that self-consciously subverts nostalgia for the past through pastiche.60 Yet one newspaper reviewer expressly states as a recommendation that this film is not ‘another highly-coloured period pastiche’.61 Although writing without the same approval, Cameron McFarlane has also offered the scholarly view that, despite addressing a liberal film audience (by dint of its subject matter), the issues explored in the film remain rooted in the past and not the present day.62 Evidence of the film’s reluctance to address contemporary political issues is reflected in the fact that the racial themes of Othello are not acknowledged or explored in Stage Beauty. This is consistent with a trend, identified by scholars of film depictions of the play, for reorienting adaptations away from racial themes.63 Throughout the film actors are shown performing in blackface, but this is entirely incidental to the narrative. The only point Richard Burt notes is that the contemporariness of Maria’s portrayal of Desdemona is emphasised because she is performing against Ned’s outmoded version of Othello.64 The still relevant theme of female empowerment plays a discernible part in the narrative of Stage Beauty, and the director acknowledges the ‘touch of parody (and implicit misogyny)’ attendant on female impersonation when he writes about his film.65 Because Maria is given the chance to increasingly pursue her own aspirations and make herself heard over the course of the film, she personifies characteristics associated with women in art cinema, who tend to be ‘treated as positive agents of their own desire’.66 Elizabeth Gruber has undertaken a feminist analysis of Stage Beauty, which reverses the emphasis on the gaze as controlling and possessive, and concentrates instead on the power of performance to transfix and command the gaze, even when the effect is horrifying.67 This power is demonstrated when Ned and Maria enact her reading of Desdemona as a woman who would ‘fight’ for her life rather than ‘die beautifully’, together producing a theatrical reality that is ‘almost too much so’. Despite the strong dramatic

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moment precipitated by Maria, Gruber feels that the representation of women in the film is inconsistent and conflicting, in the sense that Maria resists but masochistically succumbs to domination in rehearsal and performance, but succeeds in conveying the brutality (as opposed to the aesthetics) of Desdemona’s murder.68 By incorporating the tragic denouement, and excluding all other elements of Othello, Stage Beauty concentrates its attention on the theme of sexual violence, and intensifies this through repetition, implying a repeating cycle through history in which beauty is performed and then destroyed.69 For Eyre – who is of course the individual to whom creative authority over Stage Beauty is attributed – the boldest artistic gesture of his film is its attempt to explore the conventions of theatre through another medium because ‘many people love films and hate the theatre’.70 Art cinema ‘achieves ultimate resonance’ through authorship,71 and in the case of Stage Beauty this resonance is provided by Eyre’s passionate commitment to theatre, which he feels so deeply that antipathy towards the art form is personally ‘hurtful’ to him.72 As a public figure, the director personifies British theatre culture, following his decade-long stint leading the National Theatre, about which he has written a memoir entitled National Service, a title indicative of both duty and sacrifice for the good of wider society. Stage Beauty draws its inspiration from theatre in an ingrained and sustained manner. In articles and interviews about the making of Stage Beauty,73 Eyre repeatedly emphasises theatrical influences upon his film: the inspiration drawn from Japanese Kabuki theatre; Billy Crudup’s prior stage and Shakespearean experience as prerequisites for the role of Ned; the unusually lengthy (in cinematic terms) rehearsal process before filming started; and the thematic importance of performance as a continually evolving and socially determined phenomenon. Eyre is at pains to demonstrate that Stage Beauty engages with another art form in a serious-minded way. It is interesting to consider whether his cinematic engagement with theatre confers upon Eyre the same sort of intellectual cachet associated with directors who have parallel careers in fine arts,74 or whether theatre (especially Shakespeare and historical material) is ascribed with more middlebrow cultural status in post-millennial Britain. A good deal of academic work done since the release of the film has considered the role of theatre within it. Indeed, for theatre historian George E. Haggerty, the most valuable aspect of Stage Beauty, as a ‘bold experiment’, is the care with which it explores the complexities of gender in Restoration theatre.75 Of course, there have been plenty of films throughout cinema history that depict theatrical performance and revolve around a combination of backstage and onstage drama; they constitute a genre that has ‘longstanding appeal to a spectrum of directors and screenwriters, especially of European art films’.76 This appeal may stem in part from the benefits of cultural exchange between media. By representing theatre’s power to enthral actors and audiences, films claim this power for themselves.77 But when films reference Othello in particular the relationship between the two

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art forms can become more complicated, because a trope has developed in which film characters playing the title role in the play become murderously possessed by the source material. Such appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays offer ‘a deeply contradictory engagement with the residual cultural authority of the theatre, demonizing it and paradoxically rendering it available for appropriation by the cinema’.78 Amy Rodgers identifies another source of tension between the two art forms in Stage Beauty, arguing that the cinematic realism of the final onscreen performance, which leaves the Restoration theatre audience stunned, undermines the ‘spectatorial agency or energy’ that should be associated with the theatre experience.79

Uncomfortable aesthetics: Stage Beauty resists easy classification The question of genre proved contentious for journalists writing about Stage Beauty, with no consistency in how the film is classified. For example, it is described as a comedy drama80 and also as a period romance.81 Benedict Nightingale highlights the film-makers’ intention to deliberately create something that ‘fitted into no genre’ and, in other people’s estimation they seem to have succeeded in this aim.82 One reviewer praises the end product as ‘enjoyably different from the norm’;83 but another feels the result is a ‘peculiar’ film, with an uneven tone, because the romance is not ‘properly integrated’.84 Given this uncertainty among film critics, it is surprising to find Shakespearean scholar Kinga Földváry claiming that Stage Beauty is a romantic comedy.85 Her view is based on the shift in thematic focus from play to film, which Földváry feels is ultimately detrimental: ‘the centrality of sexuality and romantic love efficiently marginalizes the tragic overtones otherwise present in the plot’.86 But to interpret the film as following a conventional trajectory towards ‘true love’ (as a narrow cinematic construct) overlooks the more subversive features of this film. There is considerable narrative tension generated by the explicit depictions of Ned’s bisexuality in the earlier part of the film, which call into question whether Maria’s feelings will be reciprocated. And, of course, Maria’s own motivations within the narrative are themselves questionable. It is made apparent in early scenes that she is fascinated by Kynaston but, while there may be elements of physical attraction in this response, it also appears that she covets and craves the audience adulation he enjoys, and emulates him in order to realise her own ambitions, all of which suggests that Maria wishes to be like Ned, as much as she wants to be with him. Uncertainty is a feature of the relationship throughout, as Henry Fitzherbert identifies.87 The frustrated climax of the nascent romance between Ned and Maria is a scene in which the two characters explore different forms of sexuality and the roles involved in performing them. This scene has been read as the point in the film when the ‘natural order’ of heterosexuality is reasserted,88 but it is very far from a conventional, heteronormative love scene. It comes about after Maria has rescued Ned

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from the ignominy of a tavern performance in which his equivocal gender identity is being exploited for the titillation of prurient spectators. The pair have already discussed the representation of femininity in the context of changing theatrical norms. Alone together in an intimate situation, Maria asks Ned about sexual mechanics between two men and he illustrates by assuming different sexual positions with her, as if blocking out on stage; in the process they become confused about who is performing as the man and who as the woman in particular arrangements. Role play and reality continue to blur as caresses turn into theatrical gestures, with the couple mimicking each other’s feminine movements. Then, with the characters becoming ever more aroused by one another, Ned destroys the chemistry by quizzing Maria about her portrayal of Desdemona. In this moment Stage Beauty exasperates any desire for heterosexual consummation and focuses instead on sexuality as something that can be played with and adapted according to circumstance. The deliberate nature of this hesitant narrative position is signalled by Eyre’s comment that ‘everybody’s sexuality is more ambiguous than orthodoxy would have it’.89 The subversion of romantic expectations in Stage Beauty continues through the ending of the film, when Ned and Maria are presented as uncertain about what to expect of themselves and of each other. Elated after their performance of the death scene in Othello together, and having shared a passionate kiss, Maria asks Ned ‘who are you now?’ and he answers ‘I don’t know’. There is no clear resolution to this confusion, as a veil is drawn over the characters before they kiss again. Ultimately Ned does not conform to the romantic hero archetype, as he’s ‘in love only with himself’.90 Because his identity and desires remain indeterminate, he fits the model of art cinema characters.91 Far from being indicative of ‘the somewhat lower type of entertainment offered by comedies’,92 the open ending of Stage Beauty, which fails to deliver a neat ‘happily ever after’, effectively places the film in the mode of art cinema. David Bordwell highlights ambiguity as the most prominent feature that differentiates art cinema from classical cinema; and he identifies open endings as a mechanism for maximising ambiguity, by deliberately refusing to shut down ‘the play of thematic interpretation’ at the end of a narrative.93 In his review for the Sunday Express, Benedict Fitzherbert points in particular to the ending of Stage Beauty as atypical and unsatisfying, precisely because Ned ‘remains defiantly unsure of who he is’.94 Another cause for criticism, according to Fitzherbert, is the film’s ‘intrusive, hand-held camerawork’.95 Like the lack of romantic resolution, this stylistic feature could be interpreted as a mark of cinematic artistry. This camera movement is something that Eyre draws attention to as a significant creative decision in an interview about his film: ‘And backstage there’s the same mess and amiable chaos I know from every theatre I’ve been in, all over the world. In technical terms that means I tried to make the film light on its feet, so the camera moves a lot. I didn’t want to sit and rest and ask the audience to admire a composition simply because it’s the 17th century.’96 In this respect

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Eyre claims and draws attention to the technique as part of his individual directorial style: a deliberate aesthetic attempt to perturb and destabilise expectations through a form of edgy realism not necessarily in keeping with the subject matter. The lineage of this approach can be seen in Eyre’s earlier career as a film-maker, for example his Falklands War biopic Tumbledown, which managed to cause controversy by discomforting both right- and leftwing commentators.97 So, while Stage Beauty does not explicitly challenge the boundaries of film form in a manner associated with art cinema,98 it does intersect with auteurist discourses that celebrate distinctive visions and approaches. When Shakespearean films have previously been considered in relation to art cinema, for example in the work of Orson Welles, the notion of ‘filmic grammar’ has been an important part of the discussion, used to distinguish particular films from other interpretations of the same source.99 In Welles’s case, the idea that aesthetic concerns trumped all others is a prominent part of the story about ‘uncommodified’ products that never found a mass audience because they aimed to offer more than entertainment.100 A similar argument could be made about an ‘unfashionable movie’ such as Stage Beauty,101 which earned so little at the box office, despite going on wide theatrical release in the United Kingdom, that it has become noteworthy as an illustrative example of a cinematic ‘flop’.102 It is possible that the paucity of audience engagement with Stage Beauty was influenced by discomfort about the film’s depiction of tragi-romance in the context of a rather seedy and alien period milieu. One of the findings from a survey of English and/or media undergraduates, undertaken for my doctoral research, was that respondents who watch Shakespearean films for pleasure express preferences for examples that make Shakespearean source material feel applicable and familiar to their own experiences.103 As this chapter has detailed, Stage Beauty does not attempt to make the past seem less like a foreign country. Unfamiliar theatre traditions involving gendered play complicate normative sexual behaviour; a revered Shakespearean tragedy is distilled into a single, repeated instance of sexual violence; the problematic fact that the Moor of Venice is a part originally written for a white actor is not explicitly addressed; the conclusion of the film gives primacy to the characters’ artistic achievements over and above their personal fulfilment. Press commentators, assessing the film on behalf of the British cinema-going public, certainly express confusion about the film’s aims: ‘An enjoyably bawdy romp, but, like its hero, it has an identity crisis.’104 Academic critics also deem Stage Beauty ‘incoherent’,105 because ideological ambiguity is discomforting if one is seeking indisputably resistant political statements on race, gender, sexuality and even theatre as an art form. But, by this measure, Stage Beauty is no different to art cinema in general, occupying a ‘bourgeois cultural position’ between popular and avant-garde politics.106

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Notes 1 Amy Sargeant, ‘Making and Selling Heritage Culture: Style and Authenticity in Historical Fictions on Film and Television’, in Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (eds), British Cinema, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 301–15; p. 306. 2 Alisa Perren, ‘Sex, Lies and Marketing: Miramax and the Development of the Quality Indie Blockbuster’, Film Quarterly, 55: 2 (2001), pp. 30–9; pp. 36–7. 3 Anna Kamaralli, ‘Rehearsal in Films of the Early Modern Theatre: The Erotic Art of Making Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 29: 1 (2011), pp. 27–41; p. 28. 4 Ingo Berensmeyer, ‘Staging Restoration England in the Post-Heritage Theatre Film: Gender and Power in Stage Beauty and The Libertine’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 56: 1 (2014), pp. 13–30; p. 15. 5 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988); W. Uricchio and R. E. Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 6 Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography, trans. J. Griffin (New York, NY: Urizen Books, 1977), pp. 2–5. 7 Barbara Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). 8 Giles Whittle, ‘Hugh has Angry Riffs, about Transport Policy, and the Lack of Broadband in West Sussex’, Times Magazine, 28 August 2004, p. 9. 9 Gregory M. Colón Semenza, ‘Introduction: An Age for All Time’, in Gregory M. Colón Semenza (ed.), The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 1–21; p. 8. 10 Gabriel Egan, ‘A Public Talk to Introduce a Screening of the Richard Eyre Film Stage Beauty’, presented at the Broadway Cinema, Nottingham, 9 September 2004, available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2086/7001. Accessed 20 September 2016. 11 Semenza, ‘Introduction’, p. 9. 12 Richard Eyre, ‘A World Like Any Other’, Guardian, 21 August 2004, p. 16. 13 See for example Berensmeyer, ‘Staging Restoration England in the PostHeritage Theatre Film’. 14 www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/15821. Accessed 8 September 2016. 15 www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14085. Accessed 8 September 2016. 16 Geoff King, Indiewood, USA: Where Hollywood Meets Independent Cinema (London and New York, NY: I. B. Tauris, 2009); Sarah Martindale, ‘The Golden [Statuette] Age: How Miramax Sold Shakespeare to the Academy’, Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 7: 4 (2014), pp. 1–11. 17 Margaret Jane Kidnie, ‘Staging Shakespeare for “Live” Performance in The Eyre Affair and Stage Beauty’, in Martin Randall and Katherine West Scheil (eds), Shakespeare/Adaptation/Modern Drama: Essays in Honour of Jill L. Levenson (Toronto, Buffalo, NY and London: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 76–92; p. 85. 18 Kidnie, ‘Staging Shakespeare for “Live” Performance in The Eyre Affair and Stage Beauty’, p. 79.

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19 Allison Pearson, ‘ “Few Knew I was in Such a Bad Way.” Richard Eyre had a Triumphant Decade at the National Theatre but, as his New Book Reveals, it wasn’t Without Tears’, Daily Telegraph, 19 September 2003, p. 23. 20 Sue Corrigan, ‘Strange Beauty’, Mail on Sunday, 18 July 2004, p. 31; Benedict Nightingale, ‘All Dressed Up with Somewhere to Go’, The Times, 30 August 2004, p. 14. 21 Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 330. 22 www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=shakespeareinlove.htm. Accessed 14 September 2016. 23 www.imdb.com/title/tt0368658/awards. Accessed 14 September 2016. 24 Corrigan, ‘Strange Beauty’. 25 Corrigan, ‘Strange Beauty’. 26 Stephen Dalton, ‘Film Choice’, The Times, 15 March 2008, p. 37. 27 Tim Robey, ‘The Superhero from Hell’, Daily Telegraph, 3 September 2004, p. 22. 28 Christopher Tookey, ‘Theatrical Drama is Too Staged’, Daily Mail, 3 September 2004, p. 55. 29 Matthew Bond, ‘Sorry, Tom, it won’t Take Off’, Mail on Sunday, 5 September 2004, pp. 70–1. 30 Ryan Gilbey, ‘The Sighing Game’, Independent, 27 August 2004, pp. 8–9. 31 Wendy Ide, ‘Love in a Ghoul Climate’, The Times, 2 September 2004, p. 4. 32 Richard Burt, ‘Backstage Pass(ing): Stage Beauty, Othello and the Make-Up of Race’, in Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (eds), Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 53–71. 33 Allan Hunter, ‘Weekend Film: Grounded Hanks Hits Comic High’, Express, 3 September 2004, p. 48. 34 Richard Bacon, ‘Crossdresstoration’, Sunday People, 29 August 2004, p. 43. 35 Tookey, ‘Theatrical Drama is Too Staged’. 36 Jenny McCartney, ‘His Beauty is Her Curse’, Sunday Telegraph, 5 September 2004, p. 6. 37 Bond, ‘Sorry Tom, it won’t Take Off’. 38 Henry Fitzherbert, ‘In-Terminal Tale Never Gets Off the Ground’, Sunday Express, 5 September 2004, p. 67. 39 Liz Hoggard, ‘Prince Charming’, Independent, 21 August 2004, pp. 12–16. 40 Hoggard, ‘Prince Charming’, pp. 12–16. 41 Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen, 22: 1 (1981), pp. 11–40; pp. 31–3. 42 Maria San Filippo, ‘Unthinking Heterocentrism: Bisexual Representability in Art Cinema’, in Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (eds), Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 75–91; p. 89. 43 Paul Howlett, ‘Film Choice’, Guardian, 15 March 2008, p. 53. 44 Robey, ‘The Superhero from Hell’. 45 Charles Gant, ‘When He was a She’, The Times, 12 June 2004, p. 18. 46 Sujata Iyengar, ‘Shakespeare in Heterolove’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 29: 2 (2001), pp. 122–7. 47 Iyengar, ‘Shakespeare in Heterolove’, p. 124. 48 Richard Burt, ‘Shakespeare in Love and the End of the Shakespearean: Academic

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British art cinema and Mass Culture Constructions of Literary Authorship’, in Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (eds), Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 203–31. 49 Elizabeth Klett, ‘Shakespeare in Love and the End(s) of History’, in Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter and Imelda Whelehan (eds), Retrovisions: Reinventing the Past in Film and Fiction (London and Sterling, VI: Pluto Press, 2001), pp. 25–40. 50 Julianne Pidduck, ‘Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love: Screening the Elizabethans’, in Ginette Vincendeau (ed.), Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader (London: British Film Institute, 2001), pp. 130–5. 51 Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love (London: Faber and Faber, 1999). 52 Berensmeyer, ‘Staging Restoration England in the Post-Heritage Theatre Film’; Kinga Földváry, ‘Mirroring Othello in Genre Films’, in Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (eds), Shakespeare on Screen: Othello (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 177–94. 53 Elizabeth Gruber, ‘ “No Woman Would Die Like That”: Stage Beauty as Corrective- Counterpoint to Othello’, in Marcelline Block (ed.), Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 226–39; Kamaralli, ‘Rehearsal in Films of the Early Modern Theatre’. 54 Corrigan, ‘Strange Beauty’. 55 Filippo, ‘Unthinking Heterocentrism’, p. 75. 56 Gruber, ‘ “No Woman Would Die Like That” ’; Kamaralli, ‘Rehearsal in Films of the Early Modern Theatre’. 57 Philip French, ‘Boys and Girls Come Out to Play’, Observer, 5 September 2004, p. 9. 58 Pearson, ‘ “Few Knew I was in Such a Bad Way” ’. 59 Pearson, ‘ “Few Knew I was in Such a Bad Way” ’. 60 Claire Monk, ‘Sexuality and Heritage’, in Vincendeau (ed.), Film/Literature/ Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader, pp. 6–11. 61 Jenny McCartney, ‘Cinema’, Sunday Telegraph, 12 September 2004, p. 18. 62 Cameron McFarlane, ‘ “What’s the Trick in That?” Performing Gender and History in Stage Beauty’, Journal of Popular Culture, 44: 4 (2011), pp. 796–814. 63 Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, ‘Introduction: Ensnared in Othello on Screen’, in Hatchuel and Vienne-Guerrin (eds), Shakespeare on Screen: Othello, pp. 1–23. 64 Burt, ‘Backstage Pass(ing)’. 65 Eyre, ‘A World Like Any Other’. 66 Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 35. 67 Gruber, ‘ “No Woman Would Die Like That” ’. 68 Gruber, ‘ “No Woman Would Die Like That” ’. 69 Deneen Senasi, ‘Staging Beauty; or, a History of Violence: Rending the Aesthetic in Jeffrey Hatcher’s Compleat Female Stage Beauty’, in Lisa A. Dickson and Maryna Romanets (eds), Beauty, Violence, Representation (New York, NY and Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 42–54. 70 Eyre, ‘A World Like Any Other’. 71 Betz, Beyond the Subtitle, p. 4. 72 Corrigan, ‘Strange Beauty’.

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73 Pearson, ‘ “Few Knew I was in Such a Bad Way” ’; Corrigan, ‘Strange Beauty’; Eyre, ‘A World Like Any Other’; Nightingale, ‘All Dressed Up with Somewhere to Go’. 74 Paul Newland and Brian Hoyle, ‘Introduction: Post-Millennial British Art Cinema’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 13: 2 (2016), pp. 232–42; p. 240. 75 George E. Haggerty, ‘ “The Queen was not Shav’d Yet”: Edward Kynaston and the Regendering of the Restoration Stage’, The Eighteenth Century, 50: 4 (2009), pp. 309–26; p. 310. 76 Burt, ‘Backstage Pass(ing)’, p. 57. 77 Douglas M. Lanier, ‘Murdering Othello’, in Deborah Cartmell (ed.), A Companion to Literature, Film and Adaptation (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 198–215; p. 213. 78 Lanier, ‘Murdering Othello’, p. 200. 79 Amy Rodgers, ‘Looking Up to the Groundlings: Representing the Renaissance Audience in Contemporary Fiction and Film’, in Semenza (ed.), The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time, pp. 75–88; p. 83. 80 Trevor Lewis, ‘Film Choice’, Sunday Times, 16 March 2008, p. 52. 81 Richard Bacon, ‘Bacon on Films: Best Film on TV Today’, Sunday People, 16 March 2008, p. 49. 82 Nightingale, ‘All Dressed Up with Somewhere to Go’. 83 Tookey, ‘Theatrical Drama is Too Staged’. 84 Fitzherbert, ‘In-Terminal Tale Never Gets Off the Ground’. 85 Földváry, ‘Mirroring Othello in Genre Films’. 86 Földváry, ‘Mirroring Othello in Genre Films’, p. 180. 87 Fitzherbert, ‘In-Terminal Tale Never Gets Off the Ground’. 88 McFarlane, ‘ “What’s the Trick in That?” ’, p. 805; Földváry, ‘Mirroring Othello in Genre Films’, p. 186. 89 Nightingale, ‘All Dressed Up with Somewhere to Go’. 90 Nicholas Barber, ‘The Method comes to Restoration England’, Sunday Independent, 5 September 2004, pp. 16–17. 91 Betz, Beyond the Subtitle, p. 11. 92 Földváry, ‘Mirroring Othello in Genre Films’, p. 186. 93 David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, Film Criticism, 4: 1 (1979), pp. 56–74; p. 72. 94 Fitzherbert, ‘In-Terminal Tale Never Gets Off the Ground’. 95 Fitzherbert, ‘In-Terminal Tale Never Gets Off the Ground’. 96 Nightingale, ‘All Dressed Up with Somewhere to Go’. 97 Alison Maloney, Colin Firth: The Biography (London: Michael O’Mara Books, 2011). 98 Betz, Beyond the Subtitle, p. 5. 99 Kenneth S. Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 73. 100 Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen, p. 69. 101 Nightingale, ‘All Dressed Up with Somewhere to Go’. 102 Gant, ‘When He was a She’. 103 Sarah Martindale, ‘An Investigation of the Status of “Shakespeare”, and the Ways in which this is Manifested in Audience Responses, with Specific Reference to Three Late-1990s Shakespearean Films’. PhD thesis. Aberystwyth University, 2011.

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104 Nicholas Barber, ‘DVD & Video: Stage Beauty DVD/VHS Rental’, Independent on Sunday, 19 December 2004, p. 36. 105 McFarlane, ‘ “What’s the Trick in That?” ’, p. 811. 106 Betz, Beyond the Subtitle, p. 23.

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Boundary crossings and intersubjective imaginings: Sarah Turner’s Perestroika Kim Knowles In the opening moments of the British film-maker Sarah Turner’s highly personal essay film Perestroika (2009), the viewer contemplates the gently rippling waves of Lake Baikal at sunset, mist suspended above its surface like ghostly apparitions. The narrator, a composite character made up of both the real and the fictional, and whose physical identity is revealed to us only fleetingly through reflections, photographs and old video footage, reels off a series of events and experiences that will only make sense as the film unravels into both geographical and psychic space. Composed almost entirely of footage shot from a moving train as it travels from Moscow to Irkutsk on the Trans-Siberian Railway, Turner’s film is a complex and at times impenetrable interrogation of the individual located in history – the meeting point between interior and exterior. The ‘story’ is a retracing of a journey made exactly twenty years earlier, in memory of the film-maker/ narrator’s close friend and mentor Sian Thomas, who died in a cycling accident soon after accompanying Turner on the first trip. These details, however, emerge only in fragmented fashion, scattered amongst fictional constructions, historical facts and subjective meanderings. As is the case with many films that come under the ‘art cinema’ banner, the journey functions as a metaphor, a springboard for subjective reality. It is an exercise in the cinematic representation of thought, the unfolding of memories, associations and fears that refuse to be locked into the logical linear flow of traditional narrative. On its release, reviews of the film drew parallels with canonical auteurs of European art cinema: Andrei Tarkovsky, Chris Marker, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais and Chantal Akerman, as well as the British avant-garde tradition, including Derek Jarman, Emily Richardson, Chris Welsby and Chris Petit.1 In Sight and Sound’s ‘Film of the Month’ review, Chris Darke highlighted its ‘unclassifiable nature, both as a work and a viewing experience’.2 A similar foregrounding of the spectatorial encounter also emerged in Peter Bradshaw’s review for the Guardian. ‘It is the kind of film that is arguably better viewed on the wall of an art gallery’, he stated, ‘but the concentration that comes from watching these images in a cinema gives the movie its distinctive bleak power’.3 The difficulty of categorising

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and locating the film is a result of its hybrid nature, its evocation of a state of in-between-ness that is also deeply embedded in its narrative structure and visual form. In this chapter I outline some of the ways in which Perestroika represents a radical new form of subjective cinema that straddles the traditions of art film and experimental film, fiction and non-fiction, staking out new territory for British alternative filmmaking. Constantly shifting between waking and dreaming, past and present, stillness and motion, abstraction and figuration, presence and absence, experiencing and remembering, the film opens up powerful affective spaces that elude and transcend habitual ways of seeing and sensing both the world and oneself. I argue that these inbetween spaces take the film beyond a singular subjective position, towards a place where the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ of the narrational address collapse into a collective, inter-subjective state of awareness. With its emphasis on duration and interior time, Perestroika can also, I suggest, be understood as a form of ‘slow cinema’, connecting it with one of the key cinematic tendencies of the contemporary period and extending into the field of British women’s film. Like many film-makers working on the edges of traditional narrative forms, Turner’s in-between status emerges in part from her art school training. Having studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1980s and then at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and Design, Turner’s practice is imbued with a fine art approach to film and a sensitive awareness of the frame as a canvas (a feature that I will return to later in this chapter). Among her teachers was one of the key figures of 1960s and 1970s British avant-garde film, Lis Rhodes, and it is possible to trace the combination of semi-abstract poetic imagery and subjective narration in Turner’s films to Rhodes’s own Light Reading (1978), an intermedial collage that brings together still and moving images with spoken and written texts. From the short graduation film, She Wanted Green Lawns (1989), to her first feature, Ecology (2007), Turner has consistently explored languages of female subjectivity, seeking out alternatives to patriarchal modes of representation. Storytelling permeates these works, but like Light Reading, and other forms of feminine discourse (Turner has admitted to being highly influenced by the French novelist Marguerite Duras for example), traditional cause and effect linearity is eschewed in favour of elliptical structures that tap into thought processes and psychic states, where reality, memory, dream and the imagination coalesce. The years that Turner spent working at the London Film-maker’s Co-op in the early 1990s coincided with a shift from the largely formalist concerns of the previous generation (which included film-makers such as Malcolm Le Grice, Guy Sherwin, Mike Dunford, William Raban and Peter Gidal) to an artistic climate more attuned to identity politics. Race, gender and sexuality were the focus of works emerging throughout the 1980s and 1990s by, for example, Black Audio Film Collective, Tanya Syed, Alia Syed, Tina Keane, Nina Danino, Jayne Parker and Sandra Lahire, in which the ‘confessional mode […] reasserts the individual and social voice’.4 What drives Turner’s

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Sarah Turner’s Perestroika

work is a combination of individual subjectivity and inter-subjectivity, represented through both voiceover narration and a formal design that privileges the spaces between. In Ecology, for example, the respective stories of a mother, daughter and son on holiday in Majorca are spoken as internal monologues and presented in three separate ‘chapters’ to be screened in any order. As Janet Harbord has observed, this ‘possibility of viewing the three stories in any order confirms the circularity that is at work [in the constitution of identity] that denies causality to events’.5 The family members speak about but not to each other, building an inter-subjective psychic space that is framed by the surrounding landscape. Perestroika extends this creative approach, digging deeper into the use of landscape as a psychic metaphor and exploring overlapping subjectivities and circular thought processes that constantly loop back on and fold into each other. There are several resonances here with the field of the essay film, a broad-ranging sub-category of art cinema and documentary described by Timothy Corrigan as ‘the most important innovation in film practice since 1945’.6 Attracting a significant amount of critical and scholarly attention in recent years, this hybrid mode of filmmaking can be understood as ‘a meeting ground for documentary, avant-garde, and art film impulses’,7 where formal experimentation meets personal interrogation. Although it eludes fixed definitions, the essay film is frequently associated with a poetic form of self-searching expressed through an elliptical voiceover narration. Laura Rascaroli observes: ‘Of all the features that are most frequently identified in the essay form, both literary and filmic, two stand out as specific, essential and characteristic: reflectiveness and subjectivity.’8 Perestroika engages with these themes in a remarkably original way, but has until now been overlooked by contemporary discussions of the essay film. In fact, British examples of the genre have largely been limited to the works of Patrick Keiller and Derek Jarman, with little consideration of female voices on the one hand and the overlap between British art cinema and the avant garde on the other. As I will go on to discuss, Turner’s emphasis on intersubjectivity and intermediality opens up new directions for the essay film and creates a context for considering this area of film practice in a British context. A useful point of reference for this discussion is Alisa Lebow’s account of the ‘first person film’, a fluid designation that allows for multiple and overlapping subject positions. Extending the contextual frame, Lebow demonstrates how subjectivity is always already tied up with language, the first-person address inevitably implying the presence of another: ‘The first person grammatical structure can be either singular or plural. By not specifying which form is to be privileged, we allow the resonances to reverberate between the I and the we – to imagine indeed, that the one doesn’t speak without the other, that in fact the “I” inheres in the “we”, if not vice versa.’9 This notion of grammatical flexibility and its relation to cinematic representation has exceptional relevance to the modes of address employed throughout Perestroika. Partially influenced by R. D. Laing’s theories of

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relationality, Turner constantly throws into question the possibility of an individuated subject, with each enunciation being filtered through an explicit or implied other. The identity of the narrator is an amalgam of both the real Sarah Turner and her fictional double, the two so tightly interwoven that the viewer can never be certain where one begins and the other ends. This is further complicated by the tendency to dissolve multiple identities into one, as demonstrated in the film’s prologue. Over a series of images of Lake Baikal that intermittently cut to black, the narrator relates an incident, a confrontation that establishes the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ of the film. ‘Because, yes’, states Turner as the camera hovers restlessly above the water, ‘because yes, I was manic and reckless as I cycled away from you, from seeing you, in that place, in another time, a place you weren’t supposed to be in, at that time. With another.’ The accident that ostensibly then follows this confrontation is presented to the viewer as ‘only part of the story’, or, paradoxically, ‘the only part that made sense’: As I knew as I hit that car door, long before he opened the door. But when I hit it, as I hit it, I knew as I somersaulted over it that I was already dead. Long before my head hit that lamppost. I could never explain how, even now, but I watched it happening. And I knew as it was happening that a light was going out. And I was also strangely grateful for it.

It is only gradually that the viewer comes to understand that it was not Turner who directly experienced this event, but her friend Sian, whose ghost haunts the film’s images and sounds. The accident, which Turner imagines from her own perspective, forms the basis of the central narrative conceit: suffering from retrograde amnesia, she embarks on the journey to recover her memory by returning to ‘the site of Sian’s death’. It is possible to see, here, how the blurring of fact and fiction allows the first-person plural to unravel through the imagination, the place where inter-subjectivity resides. The absence of the physical body is central to this process, giving rise to a fluid identity that floats across and inhabits other bodies and spaces. A key characteristic of the essay film, the tension between bodily presence and absence, can be found in Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), Chantal Akerman’s News From Home (1977), Chris Marker’s Letter from Siberia (1957) and Sans Soleil (1983) as well as Patrick Keiller’s trilogy London (1994), Robinson in Space (1997) and Robinson in Ruins (2010). Here, the film-maker speaks through several layers of subjectivity, but is always physically absent from the frame. In Perestroika, Turner’s own voice is insistently present, at certain moments appealing to her interlocutor (whose identity also shifts between her partner, the viewer, and Thomas10) with a sense of urgency that verges on mania. Her body, however, is only fleetingly glimpsed in the window of the train, in the two still photographs from then and now, and in the archival video footage that briefly pans past her younger self as she sings with her co-travellers in a mausoleum. But it is this paradoxical sense of absent presence that allows Turner to develop one of the most striking and

Sarah Turner’s Perestroika



poetic passages in the film, where the disembodied voice settles on the body of a complete stranger standing outside a neighbouring train. ‘Captured on two cameras’, this unknown woman takes the narration almost seamlessly from a contemplation of the film-maker’s own physical experience – the suffocating heat of the train – to a series of evocative fictional imaginings:

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Because I can’t remember detail, the facts or the images, the feeling of anything other than heat. That’s why she’s taking in air. In such a thin shawl. There’s something really beautiful in how she stands there so stubbornly. Something very necessary about it. Maybe she’s the lady in the hospital ward who almost died, who should have died. She’s cold. She knows she shouldn’t be standing there in such a thin shawl. But she stands as if it’s amazing to be standing. Life is amazing. Amazing to be standing there, able to take it all in. Maybe she’s standing there because she knows she’s ill but she doesn’t know how ill. This journey is important. She needs to see her grandchildren. She thinks they’re doing fine but she’s not sure how fine. And she wants them to understand the possibility of elsewhere. She didn’t leave; she didn’t want to leave. She wants to tell them this and also tell them that the journeys you take in your head are sometimes the most important and also, somehow, the hardest to imagine. She doesn’t have any grandchildren. She’s the lady in the hospital ward whose family didn’t visit her. Her family should have visited her. People are pushing past her. She needs to get back in. The problem is I can’t open a window.

The circular nature of this sequence heightens its inter-subjective emphasis, moving from the personal to the interpersonal and back again, through a journey of existential contemplation. Throughout the film, Turner’s narration returns repeatedly, almost obsessively, to the woman in the shawl, whose various ‘stories’ emerge from the negotiation of Turner’s own fragile identity, her memories of Sian, and her relationship with her unseen partner. A relatively banal encounter functions as a springboard for an interrogation of the other and for exploring how the imagination might be used as a path towards a kind of ethical rapprochement that has the potential to transcend difference. The text of Perestroika therefore stakes out new territory for the essayistic mode, activating a form of narration that Paul Newland, in his discussion of subjectivity in the film, associates with Bracha L. Ettinger’s ‘matrixial gaze’, a feminist trans-subjectivity that reimagines the gendered and hierarchical Lacanian gaze as an alternative gaze of empathetic interlinking.11 The imaginative journeys that Turner describes are psychic boundary crossings that unmoor the self from a fixed position and bring it closer to the experience of others.

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In his survey of the essay film genre, Timothy Corrigan highlights the role of the journey in presenting fluid subjectivities and shifting identities. Through the process of ‘being elsewhere’, he argues, the self ‘becomes another and a different self’.12 The meandering mind is the corollary of physical displacement, as the film-maker/narrator, like the nineteenth-­ century flâneur, contemplates the effects of modernisation and globalisation on natural environments, social spaces and human behaviour. Observation and introspection become intertwined in the quest for alternative subjectivities. From Corrigan’s perspective, ‘the travel essay discovers another self in the process of thinking through new or old environments and thinking of self as a different environment’.13 One of the most frequently cited examples of this is Patrick Keiller’s trilogy mentioned above, in which two unseen travellers explore the post-capitalist landscapes of contemporary Britain, narrated from the perspective of the fictional character Robinson. In a similar, yet more personal vein, Perestroika’s journey functions as a dialogue between Turner’s present and younger selves, as well as those of her travel companions. The Hi-8 video footage shot on the original journey is woven into the contemporary imagery, creating parallels and resonances between the two time periods. Gradually, the two begin to bleed into each other as voices from the original journey float into the contemporary footage in an uncanny illustration of the workings of memory. This is, as the voiceover states, ‘both time travel and a memory work’, an intimate dialogue with the self across a twenty-year period. Not unlike Keiller’s films, this shifting across time frames is simultaneously a reflection on the impact of industrial development on the fabric of the country through the visible and tangible traces of environmental devastation. The snow-covered landscapes that feature in the archival footage from the 1980s contrast starkly with the notable absence of any signs of winter in the later journey. And while the younger Turner can be heard marvelling at the uninterrupted whiteness that stretches out for miles, her older self reports wearily that ‘it is the 30th of December, the middle of winter, and they are harvesting wheat’. The narrator gradually comes to identify this ecological crisis with her own body as she struggles to endure the suffocating heat of the train. ‘I was burning up’, she states desperately, to the sounds of melting ice. ‘My body was on fire, and so was the lake. All of the ice is breaking. Can you hear it? Can you hear me?’ Environmental collapse is represented as psychic meltdown in this powerful reassertion of the thread that connects the personal, the ecological and the political. As a mode of sensuous communication, the movement of travel also facilitates a dialogue between the film-maker and the viewer. In Giuliana Bruno’s words: ‘[T]he fixed optical geometry that informed the old cinematic voyeur becomes the moving vessel of a film voyageuse. Here we actually travel with motion pictures – a spatial form of sensuous cognition that offers tracking shots to traveling cultures.’14 Perestroika’s psychogeographical train journey explicitly stages this shift from the voyeur – the spectator on the outside looking in – to the voyageuse – the passenger on

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Sarah Turner’s Perestroika

the inside looking out. Travel and emotion become intertwined. Bruno’s term ‘moving vessel’, with its intriguing conflation of the human and the mechanical, provides us with a framework for understanding the Russian doll-like experience of the film: the spectator occupies both the moving train and the moving, feeling body of the film-maker – her reflection appearing as our reflection. At various intervals, Turner pushes the streaked impressions of the passing landscape to the point of abstraction, manipulating the imagery in post-production to create a play of pure form, light and colour. In these moments, time and space collapse into a hypnotic maelstrom that removes figurative contours, suspends thought, and envelops the spectator in a tactile embrace. Although based in/on movement, these haptic images – to employ the term developed by Laura Marks – halt the directional flow of the journey and carve out a space of embodied reflection, where individual identities dissolve into a state of collective becoming.15 While the persistent movement of the train is central to its aesthetic and conceptual framework, we might also consider Perestroika as characterised by a tension between stillness and motion, and by a constant negotiation between photography and film. In a broad sense, the film hinges on two ghostly images: a still photograph of Turner in her twenties holding a Hi-8 video camera that points out towards the viewer and a moving image of a woman who we later understand to be her late friend Sian in the act of taking the photograph before walking away. Captured simultaneously in still and moving forms, this rare instance of reciprocal reflection has an amplified emotional resonance emanating not just from the tangible impression of time passed, but also from the sense of loss and mourning that accompanies the image of Sian. ‘She fixes me, then walks away’, ruminates Turner on the soundtrack. ‘I’m framed, she’s leaving the frame. I’m fixed and she walks away.’ The arresting nature of the photograph contrasts with the uncanny life-giving force of the moving image that resurrects her dead friend and allows this lost moment to be re-experienced in the present. We are reminded, here, of Roland Barthes’s attempt to grasp photography’s conflation of past and present, presence and absence, through ‘a linguistic form capable of recapturing a present in the past’.16 Barthes suggests that the experience of photography can be understood as a sense of ‘That-has-been’, or, as Laura Mulvey interprets it, ‘this was now’.17 He explains, ‘what I see has been here, in this place which extends between infinity and the subject (operator or spectator); it has been here, and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred’.18 The element of deferment is intricately tied to the processes of memory, which negotiate the paradox of simultaneous presence and absence, and constitute the motor of Turner’s film. Since memory activates this past moment and brings it into the present, ‘[t]he Photograph’, states Barthes, ‘does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been. This distinction is decisive.’19 Like Barthes, Turner grapples with these images of the past, struck by Sian’s moving presence and her ability to resist the confines of the frame, whereas her own remains fixed, frozen in time. Nowhere is the

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complex association of photography and film with life and death more palpable than in these touching instants that resonate throughout the journey. The relationship between the past and present in the moment of recording is no doubt what motivates the technique of re-animating still images that marks Perestroika as a compelling example of intermedial expression. A significant proportion of the film is constructed from thousands of photographs taken on an intermittent timer and then re-assembled into moving images, giving rise to an uncanny conflation of stillness and motion and opening up a crucial in-between space – between, as in the film’s central fictional conceit, experiencing and remembering. It is in these interstices that Turner is able to articulate Barthes’s notion of deferment, of ­re-experiencing, or ‘afterwards-ness’ as she describes it. The repetitive click of the shutter, along with the intermittent beep of the voice recorder, becomes the film’s recurring motif, merging and overlapping with the rhythms of the train in a rich and tactile soundscape. The viewer’s attention is thus constantly drawn to the presence of photography within the film, and running under the surface is a desire to interrogate the ontological specificities of the still and moving image, as well as their points of convergence. Indeed, in breaking up the image into successive impressions, Turner illustrates Peter Kubelka’s famous assertion that ‘[c]inema is not movement. Cinema is a projection of stills – which means images which do not move – in a very quick rhythm.’20 In Kulbelka’s own work, like that of American experimental film-maker Paul Sharits, this leads to an interrogation of the space between the individual film frames, where the mental activation of the viewer comes into play. Akira Mizuta Lippit describes these ‘flicker films’ in terms of their ‘violent realignment of film time in single-frame units’,21 and Perestroika might be understood as engaging in a similar process of ‘rendering time photographic’.22 The space opened up between the still and moving image in Turner’s film, however, is not physiological, as with these earlier flicker films, nor does it break the temporal continuum in order to simply call attention to film’s photographic properties. It is, rather, an affective device that explores the experiential possibilities of the space between. Ontological certainty gives way to material indeterminacy in a fluid visual metaphor for that which cannot be articulated and, like both the image and memory of Sian, refuses to be fixed. The considerable body of scholarship on the relationship between the still and moving image attests to the enduring fascination with this field, but few accounts seem equipped to take into account Turner’s idiosyncratic visual approach. Neither a ‘cinema of stasis’ as described by Justin Remes,23 nor strictly a ‘film stilled’ as in Raymond Bellour’s formulation,24 Perestroika pursues a radically different approach to capturing experience through successive instants. There are some resonances with the avant-garde work discussed by Remes, particularly the films of Andy Warhol and Michael Snow, where the focus on extended duration emphasises the relationship between film and photography. Warhol’s Empire (1964) – an eight-hour static shot of the Empire State Building in New York – and Snow’s A Casing Shelved

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Sarah Turner’s Perestroika

(1970) – a single image of a bookshelf over which Snow narrates this history of the various objects it contains – blatantly resist the traditional association of film with motion on the one hand and character-driven causality on the other. Both film-makers can be seen as precursors to the ‘slow cinema’ movement,25 of which Perestroika, with its extended passages of visual contemplation and ‘intensified sense of temporality’,26 might be considered one of the few British examples. With its roots in the modernist cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky, Theo Angelopoulos, Miklós Jancsó, Robert Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu, slow cinema has emerged in recent years partly as an aesthetic response to a capitalist culture of speed and instantaneity, the culmination of what Mary Ann Doane describes as the ‘incessant rationalization’ of time in industrialised society.27 Films by Kelly Reichardt, Claire Denis, Tsai MingLiang, Jia Zhang-ke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Gus van Sant, Bela Tarr, Lav Diaz and Pedro Costa explore various techniques of de-dramatisation, making way for modes of contemplative immersion in the image and a deeper awareness of time as duration. The long take, minimal use of dialogue, focus on dead time, and a greater emphasis on space and place as indicators of mood are some of the key characteristics of slow cinema, many of them finding their way into Perestroika’s visual and narrative form. Turner invites the spectator into her own embodied experience of the journey, the long sequences of passing landscape collapsing exterior representation into interior reflection to create a form of cinematic psychogeography. The most obvious reference point for Turner’s foregrounding of photography is, of course, Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), a science fiction fantasy told almost entirely through still images and animated only in the spectator’s imagination through the voiceover narration. Yet while Marker’s film seems to draw its influences from the comic book or photo essay, Turner seems more compelled by the element of ‘convergence’ opened up by new digital media, which offers the ability to slide across medium-specific boundaries and, in this case, confuse the distinction between photography and film.28 It is from within this cross-media confusion that Barthes’s ‘third meaning’ or ‘obtuse meaning’ can be seen to emerge – a space of intellectual uncertainty that gives way to affective assimilation. In this sense, Agnes Pethö’s recent insights into the field of intermediality provide a useful theoretical framework for discussing Perestroika’s multi-layered visual form. Drawing on Henk Oosterlink’s claims that the crossing of media transgresses discursive thinking, Pethö argues that intermedial relations cannot be ‘read’ through intellectual means alone, but rather necessitate the activation of the senses, and demand, ‘more than anything else, an embodied spectator’. ‘Intermediality and most of all intermediality in the cinema’, she states, ‘is not something one “deciphers,” it is something one perceives or senses.’29 Pethö therefore advances a phenomenological approach to intermediality, one that is capable of understanding the sensuous nature of the film image. The oscillation between stillness and motion, between photography and film, creates, in Turner’s film, a l­ayering

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British art cinema

of affectual planes that the spectator inhabits but cannot necessarily consciously articulate. Through the technique of re-animation – the deconstruction and reconstruction of movement – reality takes on a tangible presence. As Turner states: ‘I’m possibly more concerned with feeling as a mode of thought, particularly in relation to that question of fact and fiction, in relation to experience […] Visceral, experiential, affectual: these are the words I’m interested in for the cinema.’30 As I have discussed earlier, the journey presents itself as a mode of personal reflection, where the environment and the psyche collide, and also where the film-maker negotiates the line that separates the perception of reality from the embodied experience of it. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception, this equates to a form of reversibility: ‘the look […] envelops, palpitates, espouses the visible things’.31 By opening up these tangible interstices, Perestroika’s formal approach activates a tactile reading. For Turner, as for Jacques Rancière, ‘[t]houghts and things, exterior and interior, are captured in the same texture, in which the sensible and the intelligible remain undistinguished’.32 Inter-subjectivity and intermediality combine to carve out multiple spaces between, with the former providing a visual framework for the latter. Beginning his review of Turner’s film in the Financial Times, Nigel Andrews asks the controversial question: ‘British cinema: dead or alive?’ Although the abolition of the Film Council seemed to many at the time the death knell of the national industry, Perestroika, he suggests, is a sign that British cinema is still flourishing in some form. ‘Last products of the old order?’, he ponders. ‘Or first signs of life in the new?’ Given the wave of innovative work emerging from British artists in the past decade, it is safe to assume that new directions continue to be forged. While the dramatic cuts to arts funding under the present Tory government has an inevitable impact on film-makers whose practice exists on the margins of more mainstream fare, production schemes such as Film London’s FLAMIN ensure that cutting-edge work such as Perestroika continues to be supported. Indeed, it is arguably within the field of contemporary British artists’ film that one finds the most rigorous, challenging and visually inventive work. From Sarah Pucill’s portrait of the French artist Claude Cahun in Magic Mirror (2013) to Alia Syed’s mesmerising exploration of the relationship between surveillance and colonialism in Panopticon Letters: Missive 1 (2010–13), British female film-makers in particular are exploring new ways of representing difference, otherness and marginality, all vital themes in our current political climate. However, this work is woefully under-represented on an international scale. Who are the gatekeepers in the circulation of British film and what are the consequences for the representation of these artists and film-makers in the critical histories of global art cinema? In aligning Perestroika with some of the central critical paradigms in contemporary scholarship on art cinema I hope to address some of this shortsightedness and place the film more securely on the map of creatively and intellectually pioneering moving image practice.



Sarah Turner’s Perestroika

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Notes  1 Sukhdev Sandhu, ‘Perestroika, Review’, Telegraph, 2 September 2010, available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/7978145/Perestroikareview.html, accessed 14 December 2018; Nigel Andrews, ‘Film Releases: Sep 3’, Financial Times, 1 September 2010.  2 Chris Darke, ‘Film of the Month: Perestroika’, Sight and Sound, October 2010, available at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/ reviews-recommendations/film-month-perestroika. Accessed 4 February 2017.  3 Peter Bradshaw, ‘Film Review: Perestroika’, Guardian, 2 September 2010, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/sep/02/perestroika-review. Accessed 4 February 2017.  4 A. L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video (London: British Film Institute, 1999), p. 110.  5 Janet Harbord, ‘The Fragile Relations of Ecology’, Vertigo Magazine, 3: 6 (2007), available at: https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/vol​ ume-3-issue-6-summer-2007/the-fragile-relations-of-ecology/. Accessed 8 May 2017.  6 Timothy Corrigan, ‘  “The Forgotten Image Between Two Shots”: Photos, Photograms, and the Essayistic’, in Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (eds), Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 41–61; p. 41.  7 Paul Arthur, ‘Essay Questions: From Alain Resnais to Michael Moore’, Film Comment, 39: 1 (2003), pp. 58–62; p. 62.  8 Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (London and New York, NY: Wallflower Press, 2009), p. 22.  9 Alisa Lebow, The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First-Person Documentary Film (London and New York, NY: Wallflower Press, 2012), p. 2. 10 Cecilia Sayad, Performing Authorship: Self-Inscription and Corporeality in the Cinema (London and New York, NY: I. B. Tauris, 2013), p. 59. 11 Paul Newland, ‘Phantom Rides: Journeys and Disappearances in Perestroika’. Essays to accompany the Perestroika DVD (London: LUX, 2013), p. 8. 12 Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 104. 13 Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker, p. 105. 14 Guiliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York, NY: Verso, 2002), p. 6. 15 See Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000), and Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 16 Ann Banfield, ‘L’Imparfait de l’objectif / The Imperfect of the Object Glass’, Camera Obscura, 24 September 1990, p. 75. Quoted in Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 57. 17 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, p. 57. 18 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 77. 19 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 85. 20 Peter Kubelka in an interview with Jonas Mekas, in Peter Gidal (ed.), Structural Film Anthology (London: British Film Institute, 1978), p. 103. This concept

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British art cinema of film as a series of still frames led to Kubelka’s theory of ‘metric cinema’, which underpins both his own work and, to some extent, the flicker films of Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad and Kurt Kren. See Peter Kubelka, ‘The Theory of the Metrical Film’, in P. Adams Sitney (ed.), The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York, NY: Anthology Film Archives, 1987), pp. 139–59. 21 Akira Mizuta Lippit, Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2012), p. 50. 22 Lippit, Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video, p. 50. 23 Justin Remes, Motion[less] Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015). 24 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Film Stilled’, in Between-the-Images (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2011), pp. 128–57. 25 Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge (eds), Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). 26 Jonathan Romney, ‘In Search of Lost Time’, Sight and Sound, 20: 2 (2010), p. 43. 27 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 11. 28 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York, NY and London: New York University Press, 2006). 29 Agnes Petho, Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), p. 68. 30 Quoted in Sophie Mayer, ‘The Tracks of Time: Sarah Turner’s “Perestroika” ’, Sight and Sound, August 2010, available at: http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/ exclusive/sarah-turner-perestroika.php. Accessed 10 May 2017. 31 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwest University Press, 1968), p. 133. 32 Jacques Rancière, Film Fables (Oxford and New York, NY: Berg, 2006), p. 3.



Index

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Index

Abraham, Edward 97 A Canterbury Tale 211 Accident 93–4, 103–14 A Cottage on Dartmoor 23, 30, 31 A Field in England 197, 243 Agutter, Jenny 129 A Hard Day’s Night 92, 96 Akomfrah, John 177, 180 Amber 98, 188 Anderson, Lindsay 26, 40, 48, 88–90, 93, 94, 114, 117, 122, 157, 191 The Angelic Conversation 200, 206, 236 An Ideal Husband 196 Anstey, Edgar 58, 61, 98, 120 Antonioni, Michelangelo 88, 93, 95–6, 99 An Unsuitable Job for a Woman 234–5, 237–9 Apaches 124 A Private Enterprise 186 Aria 219, 234–6 Arnold, Andrea 167 A Room With a View 188, 191 Ascendancy 187 Asquith, Anthony 23, 26, 29–30 Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) 87, 99 A Taste of Honey 90–1 A Walk Through H 187, 227 A Zed and Two Noughts 187, 226 Babylon 144, 187 Bad Timing 129, 137 Baker, Stanley 93, 104 Balcon, Michael 24, 97–8, 186 Baldwin’s Nigger 148 Bates, Alan 111 Battle for Music 57–8 The Battle of Jutland 26

The Belly of an Architect 189 Bennett, Edward 63, 187 Berberian Sound Studio 197 Bernstein, Sidney 23, 27 Berwick Street Collective 62 Better Things 197 Billy Liar 91, 105 Black Audio Film Collective 144, 153, 171–82 Black Jack 187 Black Narcissus 216 Blind Date 104 Blow-Up 93, 95–6 Bluebottles 26 Bogarde, Dirk 93, 111 Boorman, John 138, 211–12, 216, 225 Borderline 26 Bowie, David 137 Boyd, Don 218, 232–41 Boyle, Danny 128, 189, 219 Brassed Off 195 Breton, Michele 96 British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) 152 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 45, 53, 58, 61, 63, 145, 146, 148, 152, 159 British Film Institute (BFI) 61, 63, 69, 97, 124, 129, 171, 187, 233, 239 British Film Institute Experimental Film Fund 63 British Film Institute Production Board 63, 98–9, 186–7, 190 British Transport Films 118, 120 Brownlow, Kevin 186 Bunny Lake is Missing 93 The Burning 98 Burning an Illusion 144, 187

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Burton, Richard 90 Butterfly Kiss 189 Cammell, Donald 89, 96, 114, 131–5 Captured 123 Caravaggio 187, 200, 206, 225 Cavalcanti, Alberto 215 Ceddo 171 Central Film Library 59, 61 Central Office of Information (COI) 56, 118 Chains 179 Channel 4 188–93, 233, 239 Chapman, Matthew, 235 Children’s Film Foundation (CFF) 119 Christie, Julie 111, 129, 135–6 Cinema Action 98, 188 Clarke, Alan 235 Clayton, Jack 91, 95 Clore, Leon 121 Close Up 22, 26, 232 Cocozza, Enrico 68–84 Collinson, Peter 97 Comin’ Thro’ the Rye 26 The Company of Wolves 194 Comrades 188 The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover 225 Courtenay, Tom 161 Cousins, Mark 234, 240–1 Craigie, Jill 55–7, 98 The Criminal 104 Crown Film Unit 44, 59, 118, 216 The Crying Game 188, 189 Dalrymple, Ian 55 Darkest England 188 Davies, Terence 125, 156, 187, 189, 193, 195, 224 The Debussy Film 223 Decline and Fall 119 The Devils 210 Diary for Timothy 35, 40, 43 Dickinson, Thorold 215 Distant Voices, Still Lives 187–9, 193 Don’t Look Now 103, 129, 131, 135–9 Douglas, Bill 125, 187, 189, 195, 224 Downhill 28 The Draughtsman’s Contract 187–8 Drive Carefully, Darling 123 Drowning by Numbers 188 The Duke of Burgundy 197 Dupont, E.A. 26, 30

East of Elephant Rock 234 Easy Virtue 27 Eaton, Mick 188 Edward II 189, 200, 206 Eisenstein in Guanajuato 228–9 The Elephant Will Never Forget 118, 120 Elgar 223 Elster, Michael 97 Elstree Film Distributors 99 Elton, Arthur 98 The Entertainer 91 Eureka 129 Eve 103 Eyre, Richard 234 Expeditions 173–6 Experimental Film Exchange 68 Experimental Film Fund 97–8 Family Portrait 35, 40 Famous Players-Lasky 28–9 Fanny and Elvis 196 Fantasmagoria 72–6 The Farmer’s Wife 27 Figgis, Mike 128 Film Society 23–4, 26–7, 29, 232 Fires Were Started 35, 44 Fish Tank 167, 197 Four Weddings and a Funeral 188–9, 195 Fox, James 96, 108, 131–3 Frears, Stephen 98, 189, 191 Free Cinema 89–91, 97, 113 Gallivant 196 The Gamekeeper 155, 161–4 The Garden 189, 194, 200–12, 236 Ghost Dance 188–9 Gilliam, Terry 216 Gladwell, David 97, 186 The Go-Between 93, 103–14 The Gold Diggers 187–8 Goltzius and the Pelican Company 228 Goodtimes Enterprises 131 Greenaway, Peter 117, 185–95, 200–1, 216, 219, 224–9, 243 Grierson, John 26 Handsworth Songs 173–4, 176–80 Harris, Richard 91 Hassan, Mamoun 186, 187 Heart of Britain 37, 40, 44 Henry V 54–5, 57, 210 Hemmings, David 95 Hepworth, Cecil 26 Herostratus 98

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Hideous Kinky 196 High Hopes 189 High Rise 197 The Hit 194 Hitchcock, Alfred 23, 26–9, 130 Hogarth 63 Honky Tonk Freeway 235 House in the Woods 41 Howards End 191 Hunger 197 If… 93–4, 114 Independent Filmmakers Association (IFA) 62 Insignificance 129 Intimate Reflections 234 Isaacs, Jeremy 188–9, 233 I Stopped, I Looked, I Listened 123 I Think They Call Him John 119, 121 Jagger, Mick 96, 131, 133, 137 Jarman, Derek 117, 188–9, 193–5, 200–12, 219, 224, 234, 236–7, 240, 243, 261–2 Jennings, Humphrey 34–48, 55, 117 The Jesus Film 119 Jordan, Neil 189, 216, 225 Jubilee 200–12 Julien, Isaac 171, 173, 179, 189 Karlin, Marc 62 Katz, Peter 135 Keiller, Patrick 261–3 Kerr, Deborah 216 Kes 155, 159–62 The Knack…and How to Get It 96 Korda, Alexander 88 Kötting, Andrew 196 Krish, John 117–25 Kubrick, Stanley 88, 99, 128 Lady Macbeth 197 Land and Freedom 189, 192 The Land Girls 196 The Last Angel of History 173, 180–2 The Last of England 188, 200–12, 234, 236 Leigh, Mike 114, 117, 157, 189, 191 Lejeune, C.A. 24 Lester, Richard 88, 92, 96 Letter to Brezhnev 188, 193 Levy, Don 99 Lieberson, Sandy 131, 133 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp 211 Life is Sweet 188

Index Listen to Britain 35, 40–7, 55 The Living Ghost 79–81 Loach, Ken 97, 117, 155–67, 187, 189, 191–2 The Lodger 27, 28, 31 London Can Take It! 41, 44 London Film-Makers’ Co-Op 98 The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner 90, 91, 157, 161, 192 Look Back in Anger 90 Looks and Smiles 155–6, 162, 164–7 Losey, Joseph 88, 93, 103–14, 216, 219 Love is the Devil 196, 224 Loves Labours Lost 196 Macdonald, Richard 108 Mackendrick, Alexander 77 Mackenzie, John 124 Macphail, Angus 24 MacPherson, Kenneth 26, 232 Maeve 187 Magic Mirror 268 The Magic Toyshop 194 Mahler 223, 226 Man of Rope 97 The Man Who Fell to Earth 129, 133, 137 Manvell, Roger 52–3, 59 The Manxman 23, 28, 31 Massingham, Richard 118 Mass Observation 34, 42, 45 Maybury, John 196, 224 McDowell, Malcolm 94 McLaren, Norman 68 McMullen, Ken 188, 189 Meadows, Shane 167 Meantime 193 Menges, Chris 159, 161 Merchant, Vivien 112 MGM 99 Miles, Sarah 113 Ministry of Education 61 Ministry of Information 54, 60 Mithras 98 Mollo, Andrew 186 Mona Lisa 188, 194 Montagu, Ivor 24–7 Morgan … a Suitable Case for Treatment 96 Mr Marsh Comes to School 120 Mrs Brown 191 Murphy, Pat 187 The Music Lovers 220, 223, 226 My Beautiful Laundrette 188 My Kingdom 236

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Naked 189 National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC) 87, 90, 152, 186, 237–9 National Film Library 69 National Film Theatre 64 Nightcleaners 62 Night Mail 118 Nightwatching 197, 226–9 Norville, Herbert 144, 148–9 Olivier, Laurence 44, 54, 75, 210, 215, 237 Ordinary Decent Criminal 196 Orlando 243 Osborne, John 89 The Other Cinema 62 Out of Chaos 55–7 Out of the Darkness 119, 124 Ové, Horace 144–53, 186 Pallenberg, Anita 96, 133 Palmer, Tony 224 Pandaemonium 35–7, 40–8 Panopticon Letters: Missive I 268 Parker 194 The Passion of Remembrance 173, 188, 194 Pearson, George 24 Peck, Ron 224 Peeping Tom 225 Perestroika 259–68 Performance 89, 96, 114, 129, 131–5 Petit, Chris 187, 234, 237–9 Piccadilly 26 The Pillow Book 190, 194, 227 Pinter, Harold 93, 95, 103–14 The Ploughman’s Lunch 188, 193 Polanski, Roman 88, 93, 99 Potter, Dennis 114 Potter, Sally 187, 188, 189, 219, 224, 243 Powell, Dilys 60 Powell, Michael 56, 117, 138, 211, 215–19, 225 Preminger, Otto 93 Pressburger, Emeric 56, 117, 138, 211, 215–19 Pressure 144–53, 186 The Price of Coal 155 Prospero’s Books 190, 194, 225, 227, 243 Pucill, Sarah 268 The Pumpkin Eater 95 Puttnam, David 239

Quay brothers 189 Radio On 187, 237 Raining Stones 188 Rank Organization 87 Redgrave, Michael 113 The Red Shoes 56, 217, 219 Reeves, Michael 138 Reisz, Karel 88–9, 96, 99, 157 Repulsion 93, 99 Requiem for a Village 186 Retake 171 Return to Life 121 Richard Hamilton 62–3 Richardson, Tony 88–92, 157, 191 Riff-Raff 188, 192 Rilla, Wolf 95 Roeg, Nicolas 89, 96, 103, 114, 128–39 216, 219, 224, 235 Room at the Top 91 Rose, Bernard 128, 224 Rosson, Franco 144, 187 Rotha, Paul 24, 36 The Runaway Princess 29 Russell, Ken 56, 64, 68, 97, 117, 138, 210, 215–16, 219–24, 226, 229 Russell, Theresa 129 Sainsbury, Peter 187 Sankofa 144, 171, 173, 188 The Salvage Gang 119 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 91, 157 Savage Messiah 229 Schlesinger, John 235 Scott, James 62–3 Scum 235 Searching 122 Sebastiane 200 Secrets and Lies 188 The Selfish Giant 197 The Servant 93, 103–14 Seven Arts 131 Sewing Machine 122 Seyrig, Delphine 112 Shabazz, Menelik 144, 187 Shakespeare in Love 243, 244–7 Shallow Grave 188 Shooting Stars 29, 31 Sid and Nancy 224 The Silent Village 35, 40–1, 44, 46 Spare Time 35, 40–2, 45, 46 Speak Like a Child 180 Stage Beauty 234–53

Index



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Sunset Song 197 Sutherland, Donald 129, 135 Sweet William 235 Swinton, Tilda 205, 211, 237 Syed, Alia 268 Tales of Hoffman 218, 222 Tansy 26 The Tempest 200, 206, 234, 236 Territories 173, 179 They Took Us to the Sea 118, 120 This is England 167 This Sporting Life 90–1, 105, 114, 157, 192 Time Without Pity 104, 113 Tom Jones 91–2 Tommy 219 Trainspotting 188, 195 Trevelyan, Humphrey 62 Truffaut, François 88 Turner, Sarah 259–68 Tushingham, Rita 90 Tyrannosaur 197 Underground 30, 31 Under the Skin 197 Unearthly Stranger 119

Vas, Robert 91 Walkabout 129, 133 Warner Bros 96, 131, 132 The War Requiem 200, 225–7 Watkins, Peter 97 Watt, Henry 42, 118 Welfare for the Workers 40 Whatham, Claude 235 Wheatley, Ben 128, 243 The White Bus 94 The White Lady 72, 76–9 Who Needs a Heart 180 The Wicker Man 136 Winstanley 186 Winterbottom, Michael 189 Wittgenstein 224 Wollen, Peter 188 Woodfall Films 89, 91 Words for Battle 37, 44, 55 Wright, Basil 26, 61, 98, 118 Writing to Vermeer 226 Yes 197 Young Soul Rebels 179 Zina 188, 224

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