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Welcome to the third Issue of One + One

Filmmakers Journal

One+One is comprised of interviews, essays and reports covering all aspects of film making and film exhibition. It is unlikely that you will find film reviews in these pages; personal reflection and opinion are certainly present, but it is not our aim to give bite- size opinions on the merit of individual films. Instead, we want to encourage discussion and debate about approaches to film making, and a deeper questioning into the nature, and future, of the production and exhibition of films. In each issue, we bring you interviews, essays and reports written by creators, for creators and for those interested in the artist’s process. Rather than something separate, we see analysis and criticism as being another part of the creative process. These articles feed in to our own work, and we hope that – whether you agree with their content or not – they inspire you in some way to do something yourself. This issue is both a celebration and a warning for those in pursuit of the independent and oppositional path. Chris Brown champions the focused vision of the critic-defying John Cassavetes and Samuel Kershaw discovers truly great comedy never ages. James Marcus Tucker finds that a British independent filmmaker Ron– Peck – can productively straddle experimentation and “industry”, and James Riley explores how the cinema of Peter Whitehead is used to overthrow our collective inertia. Daniel Fawcett’s discovery of Sussex based artist/filmmaker Jeff Keen, however, helps little to encourage the fledgling artist determined to toe the anti-industry/anti-commercial path. But this path must be trod - at least by the determined few - according to Bradley Tuck; for it is with them that our next Enlightenment will come. Please take a look at our new website www.filmmakersjournal.co.uk where you’ll be able to read articles from previous issues of One+One and find links to our Facebook and Twitter page where you’ll be able to keep up to date with news and events. For those of you interested in writing, please see the submissions section of our website or contact [email protected] for more information.

Daniel Fawcett and James Marcus Tucker

2 Filmmakers Journal

Contents

04 27 Directors under the Influence Laurel and Hard Lessons Learning from John Cassavetes Some thoughts on the films of Chris Brown Laurel and Hardy 09 Samuel Kershaw Cinema Revolution or the End 32 of Enlightenment Out of the Cinema to the Bradley Tuck End of the World Jeff Keen 16 Daniel Fawcett Peter Whitehead and Terrorism James Riley 21 Testing the Water Interview with Ron Peck James Marcus Tucker

Issue 03 Published on 15.04.10

Very special thanks to James Mackay for his advice and support. Proofreading: Melanie Hay Thank you to The Red Roaster Café. Cover image: Laurel and Hardy, The Hoose-Gow, 1929 Design: Benoit Schmit, www.buenito.com

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One + One has been produced collaboratively by a group of Brighton-based filmmakers, with internationally based contributors and writers and is a not-for-profit project. HTML and pdf versions of this journal and back issues are 3 available at www. filmmakersjournal.co.uk One+One

Directors Under the Influence

Learning from John Cassavetes Chris Brown

The term ‘independent cinema’ has be- asked listeners on a late-night radio show come increasingly problematic in recent to each send him a dollar; by the end of the years: much of what I’ve watched in fes- week he had received over $2,000 in contri- tivals or online lately seems to be inde- butions, mostly in the form of single-dollar pendent in financial terms only. Sitting bills.1 After a brief, unhappy spell directing in the cinema waiting for a film to begin, two studio films in Hollywood, Cassavetes I’m sure we’ve all seen the Virgin Media earned widespread recognition with his sec- shorts which ‘champion undiscovered ond independent work, Faces (1968), which talent’ or the ‘Volkswagen supports inde- depicted a bored middle-class couple pendent cinema’ spots encouraging us tempted by adultery. His wife, Gena Row- to ‘See Film Differently.’ Yet judging by lands, played a supporting role. This formi- the evidence onscreen, much of this tal- dably talented actress would appear in five ent might be better off left undiscovered, more of his films. creating space instead for those who really Cassavetes challenged basic Holly- do see film differently. Much supposedly wood form, the two crucial components ‘alternative’ work bears Hollywood’s indel- of which are story and visual presenta- ible imprint. But to be truly independent tion. Hollywood films generally adhere to is to be free from the influence or control a classic, three-act plot structure (begin- of others. Whether as part of a production ning, middle, end), and last between nine- company or as an aspiring amateur armed ty minutes and two hours. Important plot with nothing but a camera, the nature of points are clearly signaled. Each character Hollywood’s insidious influence must be has a clearly-defined motivation or back- understood and challenged. story. Visually, establishing shots are cut John Cassavetes was a pioneering figure back and forth between medium-range in independent cinema. He started out as close-ups of individual characters, broad- an actor, and is known today for his appear- ly following conventions like the 180-de- ances in hits such as The Dirty Dozen (1967) gree rule. Artistry in the visuals is rendered and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). He made his subordinate to the basic impulse of tell- directorial debut in 1959 with Shadows, ing of a clear, linear story: edited together, an impressionistic, jazz-infused study of shots create an illusion of time and space interracial relations in New York, which had that is easily accessible to an audience. much in common with the work of the Beat Cassavetes defied these conventions. Generation. The way in which Cassave- His films were long, clocking in at two- 4 tes financed it has entered film folklore: he and-a-half hours or more, shortened Filmmakers Journal

from director’s cuts which sometimes ran was depicted as an abject, passive victim, for seven or eight hours. Important plot unable to take action and offered no es- points were deliberately withheld. Ten- cape from her situation. sion was built up only for the expected Just what was the ‘influence’ of the moments of climax or catharsis never film’s title? Arguably, it is best understood to emerge. A great deal of screen time in the context of Cassavetes’ driving in- (sometimes twenty or thirty minutes) terest in the act of performance, the roles was devoted to scenes which most films people are forced to play in their every- would have avoided altogether, in which day lives. Nick is attracted to Mabel, “but nothing in particular seems to happen, only when they are alone,” the director and the audience is left to work out the explained, “Being embarrassed in front of meaning for themselves. Character mo- his family and friends is against all ‘rules.’ tivation often remains obscure. Instead, Society, embarrassment, his relatives, the focus is on moral and emotional dis- his men, his feeling that he is doing the integration: a focus sustained by the cap- right thing, all of this background comes ture of physical performance. Cassave- between them.”2 Nick’s role (the working- tes typically employs static long shots of class family breadwinner with patriarchal the characters’ movements within their authority) is sanctioned by society, where- domestic environments, combined with as Mabel’s inability to conform to an ac- extreme, freewheeling, hand-held close- ceptable role (the respectable housewife) ups, going in and out of focus, tracking is not. Culturally-conditioned, popular the faces of the characters. myths outlining the ways in which people His most famous film was probably ‘should’ behave were not only inadequate A Woman Under the Influence (1974). It when faced with reality, but actively de- depicts the mentally ill, working-class structive, precipitating pain and trauma housewife Mabel (Rowlands) who is increasingly unable to “ A great deal of screen time (some- cope with living alongside her times twenty or thirty minutes) was domineering husband Nick (Peter Falk). The film provoked devoted to scenes which most films extreme reactions: prominent would have avoided altogether ” critics were noticeably ag- gressive (Pauline Kael: “self-righteous when people failed to make the grade. ineptitude,” Stanley Kauffmann: “utterly Cassavetes was not alone in realising that without interest or merit,” John Simon: Hollywood, along with other mass me- “muddle-headed, pretentious and intermi- dia, had been complicit in disseminating nable”). The jury of that year’s New York these ideological myths. But crucially, he Film Festival (headed by Susan Sontag, understood that the reason it had been so Andrew Sarris, Molly Haskell, Richard successful was that audiences had, over Roud, and Richard Corliss) rejected it the years, through sheer repetition, been on the grounds that it had no ‘ending’ (it trained into a particular way of seeing. eventually screened after Martin Scorsese He explained that films depend on “a withdrew one of his films in protest). An- shorthand for living. You recognise certain 5 other source of contention was that Mabel incidents and you go with them. People One+One

‘shorthand for living’ – its formal conventions – was to tacitly accept, whether one liked it or not, its myths and mis- conceptions regarding how life should be con- ceived. Cassavetes had a first-hand understand- ing of Hollywood’s dead- ening effect, frequently referring to much of his film acting in terms of prostitution to the sys- tem: he had done it be- cause he needed the money. It is clear that his work was often unfulfill- ing, when one examines such films as Brian De- Palma’s Freudian-horror The Fury (1978). At the film’s climax, the villain- ous character played by Cassavetes explodes - thirteen times, in slow motion, from a plethora John Cassavetes, Image Courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archives of different camera an- gles - after being pen- prefer that you condense; they find it quite etrated by the energy of the vengeful fe- natural for life to be condensed in films. male protagonist’s telepathic orgasm. You They like it ‘canned.’ It’s easy for them. can watch it on YouTube. They prefer that because they can catch onto the meanings I won’t make shorthand films. In my and keep ahead of the movie. “ But that’s boring. I won’t make films there’s a competition with the shorthand films. In my films audience to keep ahead of them there’s a competition with the ” audience to keep ahead of them. I want Cassavetes conceived his films in op- to break their patterns. I want to shake position to this kind of nonsense. Many them up and get them out of those quick, critics found his style home-movie-like, manufactured truths.’3 but this, ironically, was what he wanted. Form and content were inextricable. He distrusted what ‘professionalism’ in 6 To unquestioningly accept Hollywood’s Hollywood cinema had come to represent. Filmmakers Journal

Instead, he offered an alternate vision of tes remarked that filmingFaces , for exam- filmmaking as an interactive process. His ple, “became a way of life.”4 great originality was to understand his The numerous difficulties Cassavetes constricted circumstances and make eve- encountered in getting his films released rything and everyone around him part of have been well documented. Despite the his filmmaking. He financed his films using negative reviews, he tirelessly promoted A the earnings from his acting, and occa- Woman Under the Influence, to the extent sionally re-mortgaged his house. He cast that it gradually built up its own momen- family (his wife, mother, moth- er-in-law, children), friends, The actors were encouraged to and sometimes himself, in his “ films. He worked with a tiny explore different ways of interpreting crew, so that anyone who hap- their dialogue, which often resulted pened to be on set (including in rows or disagreements actors) learnt the basics of ” camerawork and shot footage. He filmed tum: remarkably, he and Rowlands went largely on location interiors, including his on to snag Oscar nominations for direction own house and those of friends and rela- and acting. This success was not to be re- tives: in A Woman Under the Influence, peated, unless one counts Gloria (1980), we never see inside one of the rooms his more mainstream, studio-produced in the house, because it served as his crime thriller. But The Killing of a Chinese makeshift office. Bookie (1976), Opening Night (1977), and The images onscreen were unpol- Love Streams (1984) enjoyed no commer- ished and unprofessional by Hollywood cial and limited critical success. In this standards. Booms frequently appear in sense, the overlap between life and art shot; some footage is overexposed; ac- had its downside: when Cassavetes died tors constantly block each other; sound at the age of fifty-nine of cirrhosis of the problems meant that dialogue often had liver (like many of his characters, he was to be synched or re-recorded afterwards. an alcoholic), the feeling amongst those But for Cassavetes, none of this mattered who knew him best was that the sheer ef- as long as the film’s emotional momentum fort involved in getting his films made had was maintained via a tight focus on the ultimately burnt him out. But his restless performers. The dialogue in his films was energy resulted in some of the most pow- not improvised as is often alleged, but erful film art I have ever seen. My personal carefully scripted. What is true is that the favourite is Opening Night, depicting the actors were encouraged to explore dif- emotional and physical breakdown of a ferent ways of interpreting their dialogue, theatre actress (Rowlands) in the run-up which often resulted in rows or disagree- to the first performance of her new play. ments, as people inevitably had different I go back to it again and again, each time opinions about their characters. Yet these mesmerized, allowing myself to get lost in tensions did not damage the films but en- its shifting mazes of art and reality. hanced them. Both on and off screen, life Cassavetes was prepared to risk mak- was a process whereby people worked ing a fool of himself if things didn’t work 7 things out amongst themselves. Cassave- out – and sometimes they didn’t. There are One+One

aspects of some of his films which I don’t editing in a particular way, you do sub- think work for one reason or another, but scribe to a set of values, whether you like considering that much of his experimen- it or not: it’s a way of seeing things. The tation worked so spectacularly elsewhere, Hollywood influence is insidious. It retains who cares? For Cassavetes, it was better dominance by virtue of the fact that it is to be bored or irritated with a film than to never questioned, that few people ever simply consume it unquestioningly. Many consider questioning it, that most of the filmmakers today seem reluctant to risk time they don’t even realise it exists. Many upsetting their audiences. Even though new directors end up subsumed into an their ideas might be thematically or ideo- ‘alternative’ which is not only defined by logically daring, in condensing them into the mainstream, but inevitably ends up standardised story forms, and employing reinforcing its strength. From Cassavetes similarly conventional visuals, their claim we can learn this: amateurism is a virtue to be truly ‘independent’ is compromised. if it encourages independent thought. The Worryingly, Hollywood form is so in- bulk of Hollywood films are boring. They’re grained in our sensibilities that many new trite. They’re predictable. They’re unim- filmmakers barely seem to realise its im- aginative. Many are ideologically suspect. plications. But the fact is, by shooting and Let’s not remain under their influence.

1. Marshall Fine, Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes In- vented the American Independent Film (New York: Hyperion, 2005) p79-80

2. Cassavetes on Cassavetes, ed. Ray Carney (London: Faber and Faber, 2001) p369

3. Ray Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p282

4. Ivone Margulies, ‘John Cassavetes: Amateur Director,’ in The 8 New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis. (Durham, NC: Duke Uni- versity Press, 1998) p286 Filmmakers Journal

Cinema Revolution or the End of Enlightenment

Bradley Tuck

“It’s midnight, you left the office at six o’clock. Where have you been Clive?” Unable to imagine a better excuse, Clive re- counts a familiar yet unbe- lievable tale. Her stern face remains unchanged… “That’s actually the plot of “Hotel California” by the Eagles. Where have you been Clive?” His head sinks and he looks downwards in shame, “I’ve been spit- roasting a hooker with your Dad”. Still from Monkey Dust • Such is the portrait of It is late at night; Clive solemnly walks Noughties Britain in the BBC3 Animated down a generic London backstreet. He TV series Monkey Dust. Set against the passes an electrical store where stacks backdrop of a gritty urban nightmare, the of televisions show Tony Blair promising characters struggle for some sensory he- a better future, but the boarded up shops donistic escape. Clive seeks to escape and rundown streets do nothing to sub- the banality of his existence, but all trans- stantiate his pledges. A car alarm sounds gression and all hope ends in failure. Far in the distance as Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t from liberating him, Clive’s act of “spit- Get You Out Of My Head” bellows out roasting a hooker” does nothing but re- from an overbearing tower block. The con- inforce the painful triviality of his day-to- crete city looms above him. Clive slowly day survival. In the world of Monkey Dust, walks up the stairs of his tower block and Blair -The New Hope, has not saved us. unlocks his door. He walks in to a dimly lit The Blairite and Thatcherite worlds could 9 flat to find his wife waiting for him. hardly be distinguished. If Labour had One+One

once been a party of hope, this was no world legitimated by Human Rights Laws longer; hope lies strewn in the gutter. has not done enough to support those too poor to afford them. The End of Hope? The putrid state of the modern human Haloed by a sprinkle of politically cor- condition breeds inequality of the most rect multiculturalism, the so-called “Left” degrading and despicable kind. How- shifted from class politics and equality to ever, help is at hand in the form of “kind diversity and identity. Mixing Affirmative philanthropists” (Bono, Madonna or Bill Action with Thatcherite Neo-Liberalism, Gates) who generously give the scraps these new Centralists could now say that off the side of their plates, keeping for even if the gap between rich and poor was themselves only a few excessive millions growing, at least both rich and poor would or billions. With these small excesses they be more ethnically and sexually diverse. could only save a few extra billion lives, Stalinism was over, but so was most and so they put their efforts into more Libertarian Communism and Socialism. important things like owning private jets, Now the bricks of the Berlin wall were carrying little dogs in bags and snorting being re-built in the name of capitalist cocaine with Bill Clinton. They flurry and hegemonies. Francis Fukuyama’s “End fuss about the dire state on the world with of History” 1 has been almost universally the subconscious hope that this serves internalised by most major political par- to distract from and justify the vast greed ties. Cultural Studies courses also inter- and despicable evil they hold in their wal- nalised the end of Socialism, privileging lets. They are much akin to the Plantation race, gender and sexuality, but ignoring owners who let their slaves go to church class. Sub-cultural movements shifted on Sundays, justifying their evil through towards apathetic meandering or mind- minimal acts of generosity. less escapism adopting figures such as The Western celebration of the end of Jordan and Marilyn Manson in contrast slavery should be completely mocked for to the politically vibrant John Lennon this farcical absurdity. With an estimated and Johnny Rotten of decades gone by. 27 million people living in slavery3, cel- However, if the Enlightenment is over, the ebratory rhetoric only hides the true re- need for it grows evermore. Whilst Mar- ality. In a world with an increasing divide ket-led capitalists grow stronger, they between rich and poor, venerability makes become increasingly unable to divert the possible the trading of people on a mass risk of environmental catastrophe and scale. If the causes of slavery are poverty the increasing divide between rich and and venerability then the path of modern poor. Placing our faith in “the invisible liberal capitalism only perpetuates it. hand of the Market” does nothing to se- With the excluded and disenfranchised cure a fruitful and flourishing continua- still in need of a voice and with the de- tion of the human species. In 2007 the mise of the mainstream Left, those left by UNDP reported that “The 40 percent of the wayside find a voice in the far-Right the world’s population living on less than groups, such as Al Qaeda and the BNP, US$2 a day accounts for 5% of the global whose ultra-traditionalism offers “lib- income. The richest 20 percent accounts eration” to its supporters but a dark icy 10 for three quarter of the world income”2. A night of repression to anyone in the world Filmmakers Journal

who does not or cannot assimilate. The tistic preoccupation with identity politics, demand for us to think and re-think our however noble and progressive, often world and our order becomes increas- enforces, rather than subverts, the domi- ingly pressing. The Enlightenment nar- nant ideology. In a world where Western rative of continual progress can only be political parties legitimate themselves with fully endorsed by those who are wealthy, the rhetoric of identity politics and liberal short-sighted or pig-ignorant enough to democratic compromise, such art is often perceive it. co-opted for their own personal agenda. With the Western media closely aligned For example, identity politics risks losing with the Washington Consensus and the its subversive potential in a world where art-world becoming increasingly caught even the Tories have floats at gay pride up in the cultural colonisation of the so- parades. The “good old days” where To- cial reality and dominated by consumer- ries were Tories and Commies were Com- ist logic, the need for artistic resistance mies is over. becomes ever more urgent. As art, es- In such a situation, the Art world is lead pecially film, becomes increasingly con- down the path of apathetic misdirection, cerned with what is marketable and can sensual escapism, aesthetic and concep- be tailored to bring in large audiences, the tual pre-occupations or commercial inan- ity, rather than toward anything that is genuinely progressive. If Art and “ If the causes of slavery are Filmmaking as a vocation is in cri- poverty and venerability then the sis, couldn’t Filmmaking (and Art) path of modern liberal capitalism as vocations also provide some only perpetuates it. form of remedy? In light of this, ” what ought to be the vocation of the filmmaker of the future? In what function of such films becomes not to el- ways does filmmaking contain what is evate humanity but rather to give people needed for the becoming of a new human- “what they want” or, more to the point, ity and a new order? what executives think will sell. However, artistic resistance has become equally 1. Subverting the Process banal. On the one hand, the appropriation The characters in John Waters’ Cecil B. De- of avant-garde rhetoric is used to justify mented take a vow of chastity and a set of the artist’s lack of subversivity and serves rules aimed at purifying cinema. On course to produce only an elite bourgeoisie ex- they subvert the process of filmmaking on perience. The most notorious example is a grand scale. They kidnap, shoot, disrupt certain strains of Performance Art, which and die in order to bring about an end to despite its subversive intentions ends bad Hollywood movies. Through their set up serving exclusively a status buffing, of rules they transform the cinema into a pseudo art-loving, mentally-impotent revolutionary act, where the actors become ‘intellectual’ elite who can watch in hor- activists and the film project becomes an ror and fascination as Franco B bleeds or attempt to bring about social change, rather than merely commenting on it. Their as Orlan undergoes cosmetic surgery in 11 front of a live audience. Similarly, the ar- film stops being merely an aesthetic form One+One

Still from Cecil B. Demented

and also becomes a revolutionary act, in handheld camera, did not use optics or fil- a similar way to how French culture slips ters and did not make a ‘genre film’. These from La Nouvelle Vague into the Paris riots rules served as an outline for a new order of May ‘68. The process of cinema-making designed to both increase the freedom of at its most radical promises to turn film into the filmmaker and decrease reliance on a radical Vanguard. Film no longer simply money or budgets to avoid Hollywood tries to represent the world from a distance, cliché. Sometimes the radicalism of Dog- it tries to change it. me95 was not so apparent in the content Waters’ film has parallels with the of these films, rather, its radicalism was filmmakers of the Dogme95 movement. the way that it engaged and attempted Whilst more moderate in ambition, the to change the social mechanisms of film- Dogme95 manifesto still contains radical making itself. Questions of how a film is import. The founders of Dogme95 sought financed, how it divides its labour and a new order by creating rules that would creates hierarchies are concerns that con- purify filmmaking. Amongst other things, tribute to the becoming of Filmmaking as these rules demanded that the filmmaker a vocation. Film should be prepared to make their films on location without the practice what it preaches and this implies 12 aid of props and sets, that they used a revolutions in process as well as content. Filmmakers Journal

However, this doesn’t mean that Hol- Godard’s Weekend, Solondz’s Paland- lywood isn’t laced with a little radicalism romes and Von Trier’s Dogville aesthetic of its own. The emigration of European devices are used to direct the audience’s directors (Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Edward attention towards its social content. In this Dmytryk, Nicholas Ray etc.) to America’s sense, these films are continuous with Bre- shores during the Second World War cre- cht’s Epic Theatre which aimed to distance ated a foreign element in the development the audience from the action and turn the of America’s film style. Faced with a new audience’s attention to critical engagement alien environment of McCarthy paranoia with what was happening on the stage. and suspicion, their depiction of the Amer- To achieve this Brecht sought to continu- ican-Hollywood dream was unsettling. The ally disrupt the realism with “alienation name for this unsettling vision was Film devices” (Verfremdungseffekts) “such as Noir. Implicit within this Hollywood formula characters talking directly to the audience, is a suspicion of it. At certain moments a “detached” style of acting, captions, pro- American cinema creates discordances jections, posters, song and dance”4. These that point to its own dark side. In Billy Wild- mechanisms would rupture the narrative er’s Sunset Boulevard and David Lynch’s causing the audience to reflect upon the Mulholland Drive the vision of Hollywood is social content of the piece. ruptured in a distinctly Hollywood way re- The narrators in Soy Cuba and Dogville vealing its dark underbelly. However, if Hol- play a similar role, turning the audience’s lywood is laced with the dream of its own attention to the social content of the story. demise, this does not mean that it will be The story, or stories, do not require strong brought crashing down. On the contrary, emotional engagement, but are instead Hollywood’s internal self-criticism does reminiscent of biblical tales taking the nothing to undermine the industry which form of moral parables upon which to re- allows it to function. Just as 60s protest flect. In Soy Cuba, the Narrator reinforces music and 70s punk is neutered by the in- the social content by poetically illuminat- dustries that re-invents them, Hollywood ing the message it seeks to express. In re-invents and re-claims moments of its contrast, Dogville’s narration often jars own transgression. However, transgres- with the action on screen, underplaying sions are not without radical import, in the horror of the events portrayed and giv- this respect that we can talk of a contrary ing a homely story-time feel, which only motion where the dormant radicalism of serves to reinforce the injustice. The film Douglas Sirk’s melodramas and other Hol- is full of jump-cuts and is set on a stage, lywood motifs are re-claimed by European where chalk lines stand in for real rooms radicals like Fassbinder and Godard. There and props are kept to a minimum. Whilst is a to-ing and fro-ing between Hollywood we soon forget the stage and let the dia- and its antithesis, which can only achieve logue shape the world that these charac- its real potential when critical elements are ters inhabit, the set simultaneously cre- brought to the fore. ates enough distance to allow for critical reflection. Similar jarring moments are cre- 2. Film as Social Criticism ated in Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork In Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba, Kubrick’s Dr. Orange, where classical music or camp 13 Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange, popular songs are ironically juxtaposed to One+One

Still from Dogville

horrific and terrifying images. In Weekend force us to see the world in a new way. It captions flash up upon the screen and is here they come close to what Axel Hon- characters directly address the audience neth calls “disclosing critique”. with long political monologues and in Pal- A Disclosing critique of society that at- indromes the central character is played tempts to change our beliefs by evoking by multiple actresses. The point of these new ways of seeing cannot simply use the aesthetic methods is not simply novelty, vocabulary of argumentative justification; but rather to redirect the audience’s at- rather, it can achieve its effect only if it em- tention from emotional and psychological ploys linguistic recourses that, by condens- engagement to critical social reflection. ing or shifting meanings, show up facts Critical reflections are created when, for hitherto unperceived in social reality.5 example, in Palindromes, pro-abortionist A disclosing critique employs literary liberals are presented as mirror images methods, to create a new way of perceiv- of anti-abortionist fundamentalists, or in ing reality. It is the coincidence of literary Dogville where supposedly “average, nor- and aesthetic methods and realist social mal people” are judged and condemned criticism that disclosing critiques gain for their evil. In such films, juxtaposition, their distinct character. Whilst appealing 14 metaphor and exaggeration are used to to artistic methods, it is reality, not fiction, Filmmakers Journal

that they are concerned with. It is for this an awareness of the process which main- reason that Honneth associates them with tains it and sometimes undermines it and theory, not art. an engagement with the process should It is in terms of this circumstance that not be treated as subversive in its own we can explain the difference between a right unless also supplemented by cri- disclosing critique of society and a work tique. Only then can a cinema of despair of art: whereas the opening of new con- become a cinema of hope. texts of meaning can transpire without I do not intend to provide here a recipe bounds, as it were, in aesthetic reproduc- for a “Brave New World” –nor is it likely tion, in social criticism it remains bound that cinema alone could provide one. Cin- to the limits set by the actual constraints ema will always risk becoming a silent cry of social reproduction.6 into a crowded auditorium, a complicity in For Honneth, disclosing critique uses the very system it wishes to overthrow. If an aesthetic mechanism in order to create the hope of a new Humanity, a new En- new ways of perceiving social reality, but lightenment and a new becoming is to be must be distinguished from art in that it is found within it, this will require diligence, not a well of boundless creativity. Disclos- scrutiny, struggle and even error. Only ing critique uses artistic tools to present time will tell if it will remain a helpless gasp reality, whereas art has no duty to present in an age of suffocation or a blossoming of “reality”. Whilst there is truth in this claim, hope for the future. the task of (re)presenting social reality is not one that is foreign to Artists and Film- This Article was written as part 3 of a series makers. Directors such as Brecht or Von of articles for One+One entitled “Cinema Trier seem far more preoccupied with and The Enlightenment to Come” revealing social reality than they do with boundless expression. It is in this context that they shift towards re-revealing social reality and engendering its social critique. • For Cinema and the vocation of Filmmak- ing, the future of hope resides in both its process and its critiques. Social Critique becomes redundant if it is not also trans- 1 See Francis Fukuyama The End of History and the Last Man. lated into social change. Whilst social Free Press. 1992. critique can provoke social change it can 2 United Nations Development Programme, Human Develop- ment Report 2007/2008. Fighting Climate change: Human soli- also become neutered and repetitively as- darity in a divided world, Palgrave, Macmillan, 2007. similated back into the system. Subvert- 3 Kevin Bales, Zoe Trodd, Alex Kent Williamson Modern Slav- ing the system requires engagement with ery: The Secret World of 27 Million People. Oneworld, 2009. the process, but subverting the process 4 Angela Curran, ‘Bertolt Brecht’, in Paisley Livingston and Carl alone risks becoming yet another empty Plantinga, ed, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, Oxen, p. 324 “avant-garde” façade. Only when the two 5 Axel Honneth, ‘The possibility of a disclosing critique of soci- interweave with each other can their truly ety: The Dialectic of Englightenment in the light of current de- bates in social criticism’, Constellations 7/1, 2000, p.123 subversive potential manifest. Film as a 15 social critique must be accompanied by 6 ibid One+One

Peter Whitehead and Terrorism

James Riley

seemingly endless public appetite for nostalgic six- ties anecdote. Towards the end of the session however, he was asked about his thoughts on contemporary film. As a director primarily associ- ated with the sixties, per- haps the pivotal decade of the 20th century, who in his opinion did he feel was making interesting work in the 21st? White- head paused momentar- ily before announcing that the greatest film of the 21st century had in Still from Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts fact already been made. It had been made in New York on September 11, 2001 and it had been made by Osama Bin Laden. Heads 1In April 2007, novelist and film- shook and there were no more questions. maker Peter Whitehead was invited to the In making this comment, Whitehead was ICA to talk about some of the pop promo recapitulating an argument he had made a films he’d made in the sixties. His fre- year earlier in ‘In the Beginning was the Im- netically edited clips of Eric Burdon and age, Before the Beginning was the Avant- World War II dive-bombers played on a Garde’. This was an essay on the current kaleidoscopic programme alongside work status of avant-garde art written as the in- by Gerard Malanga and Nam June Paik. troduction for La Cinéma Critique (2010), a Interviewed on stage after the screen- book on experimental film published by the ing, Whitehead patiently fielded the usual Sorbonne. In it he stated that in the current questions about his work with the Stones cultural context, the terrorist has rendered 16 and Hendrix in a further display of the the artist redundant having ‘learnt the tricks Filmmakers Journal

and gambits of Art’s Artifice’. Working from the basis that ‘the true purpose of the avant-garde’ is to ‘nurture (if not enact) acts of war […] a calculated violation of frigid sterile form’, Whitehead presents Bin Laden’s ‘cleverly contrived film of ‘Several Mis- sile Planes’’ as a supreme ex- ample. The events of 9/11 and the widely disseminated matrix of footage are seen to be monu- mentally effective in creating a work that is ‘directly and bellig- erently dangerous’. Whitehead goes onto suggest that Bin Lad- en’s ‘legacy- his ‘film’’ should be called Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, a phrase Peter Whitehead in 1967 that would have significant res- onance for his own subsequent work.1 He equally brutal performance art to suggest took it as the title for his 2007 novel which that violence is the inevitable outcome of he then adapted into a full length film that initially peaceful protest. recently premiered at the Viennale. Much of the critique in these films was Terrorism as art. What are we to make directed towards the paralysis Whitehead of this? The icy response of the ICA audi- saw as characterising mainstream re- ence indicates that the connection obvi- sponses to Vietnam; the public inability or ously doesn’t work as a joke. Is this un- unwillingness to adequately make sense comfortable juxtaposition intended as of a seemingly distant conflict. His com- provocation or an expression of misan- ments on Terrorism could be taken in the thropic delight? Whitehead is certainly no same spirit, a cultural wake-up call de- stranger to the former. As a filmmaker he’s signed to trouble Western complacency. best known for a series of documentaries, The problem with this comparison is that the most incendiary of which are Ben- 9/11 essentially fulfils the mid-sixties wish efit of the Doubt (1967) an account of the of Peter Brook and the Royal Shakespeare Royal Shakespeare Company performing Company; one of the entanglements of US, and The Fall (1969), an examination American foreign policy is devastatingly of the decline of the American protest realised in the domestic sphere. As such, movement. Benefit contains a sequence a crucial difference emerges. The perform- in which Glenda Jackson delivers a mon- ance documented in Benefit shows the ologue begging for the horrors of the Vi- use of an art form – dramatic theatre – to etnam War to be brought into polite Eng- galvanize political commitment. The eleva- lish gardens. Similarly, The Fall presents tion of the Twin Tower attacks to the level 17 the viewer with riots, police beatings and of art could be seen to offer the reverse of One+One

this stance. The act of aesthetising a physi- head, constitutes Terrorism, a process of cally traumatic event potentially erases its subterfuge that works to ‘expose the rules material implications and political hardwir- of the game being exploited by the be- ing. This is difficult in the case of 9/11 as holders of the Institutionalised Barbaric’.4 whilst the attack carried clear symbolic resonance as regards the conflict between two ideologies, the spectacular magnitude of the occurrence made it difficult to deny the ground-level consequences, most 2Terrorism Considered as One of the prominently the human cost. As musician Fine Arts directly enacts this strategy. The Mark Manning observed in Collateral Dam- film draws upon the plot of the novel and age (2002), when he first saw images of the the other two texts that make up White- burning towers, his initial experience of ‘an head’s ‘Nohzone Trilogy’: Nature’s Child unholy, gleeful sense of karmic Schaden- and Girl on the Train. MI6 agent Michael freude’ was quickly sobered by the ‘reality’ Schlieman is ‘assigned to Paris to infiltrate underpinning this shift of the ‘cosmic equi- a cell of Eco-Terrorists planning a high level librium’: ‘the firemen, the secretaries, the political assassination’.5 The group’s leader, innocent families’.2 Maria Lenoir, is said to have been responsi- Having highlighted these problematic ble for the death of two French agents and factors however, it is important to reiterate the only clues to her whereabouts lie in a Whitehead’s concern with the concept of series of seemingly cryptic e-mails. Realis- the ‘avant-garde’. In his argument, this fa- ing that the messages all refer to literature, miliar term of artistic creativity and experi- film and philosophy, Schlieman is able to mentation (which carries its own semantic decode the allusions and determine that echoes of attrition and warfare), signifies a the group is active in Vienna. He relocates mode of creative action that is at odds with his operation to the city and begins to drift the control mechanisms of late capitalism. around the two circles of the Ringstrasse He notes that currently, nothing can be tram, haunting Maria and the other mem- called ‘art, avant-garde or otherwise, un- bers of the cell. less it appears on a seductive Technicolor On the basis of this synopsis, it would screen or processed by seductive video seem that Whitehead is working within machines’.3 Here Whitehead is outlining the conventions of the detective and / or the cycle of recuperation that the Situ- espionage thriller. The film certainly draws ationists observed in the operation of the upon the language of these genres as it spectacle: the dominance of commerce is structured around a narrative of inves- and the associated ability of the mass tigation; makes use of a central voice media to neutralise oppositional forms of over; contains numerous femme fatales expression by incorporating and imitating and takes place within a foreboding ur- their imagery and technique. In response, ban environment. However, having estab- a form of outflanking is advocated that in- lished these signposts, Whitehead quickly volves the creation of ‘authentic art equal moves away from their expected usage. to the challenge, as powerful in its meth- The film as a whole is radically non-linear. odology as the brain-washing techniques Rather than depicting the terrorist actions 18 exploited by the Media’. This, for White- that the voice-over alludes to, the film’s Filmmakers Journal

imagery and on-screen quo- tations are arranged on the basis of their dissonant po- tential. Whitehead’s aim is not to move from uncertainty to certainty – as would be expected of the investigative narrative – but to produce meaning across the film’s 3 chapters as a consequence of the interference that oc- curs between his unexpected combinations of visual, audio and textual information. This structure carries sig- nificance for Whitehead’s Still from Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts project at the level of both form and content. It can initially be seen him.6 The multiple associative links that as instrumental in communicating to the the film establishes act as a record of this viewer the particularity of Schlieman’s hallucinatory psychogeographical move- subject position. Much of the film is con- ment. As Schlieman’s idiosyncratic cam- veyed from his point of view, a perspec- era I/eye traverses the multiple circles of tive which the references to Thomas De- Vienna - the city of dreams, the Freudian Quincey suggest is characterised by an unconscious and The Third Man – it cre- opium intensity. Specifically, the intention ates unexpected synaptic connections is for the character to mirror the figure of across different artistic, philosophical and Tiriesias as he appears in T.S. Eliot’s The historical zones. Waste Land (1922). Tierisias is the perpet- On a wider formal level, the application ual spectator, detached from the events of this framework enables Whitehead to he observes but his presence is also that make reference to the operation of film as which unites and motivates the poem. a medium insofar as it draws attention to Similarly, the substance of the film is what the operation of montage, cinema’s hidden hand. The tension that White- head establishes between the “ Whitehead sees it is necessary for film’s diegetic levels is instru- art to assume the efficacy of the street, mental in highlighting the ex- to be as explosive as a car bomb tent to which cinematic veri- ” similitude depends upon their largely unnoticed synchronic- Schlieman sees, and as in Eliot’s text, all ity. It is as if he uses the film to explode a the women he is in dialogue with are es- recognisable genre as a means to expose sentially one woman: they are different the devices that maintain a normative view facets of the eternally absent Maria that of ‘reality’. 19 Schlieman projects onto those around Jean Paulhan described a similar proc- One+One

ess of expression and critique in his book the fear of Terrorism ‘as a means of extend- The Flowers of Tarbes (1941). Writing on ing their manipulative repressive powers the subject of ‘Terror’ in literature, Paulhan over and through the Media and the Multi- argued that it represented a tendency in lit- national companies.’9 erature opposed to ‘Rhetoric’. Describing In light of this situation, what the film Rhetoric as a rule-bound imperative that outlines is a strategy of exposure that offers affords language communicative stability, a creative means of engaging with such a Paulhan offers Terror as an engagement power structure. When faced with the re- with ambiguity, a ‘continual aspiration to- pressive mechanism and blank surface of wards originality’.7 From this perspective, the contemporary mediascape, Whitehead the literary terrorist works within language sees it is necessary for art to assume the with the aim of creative reinvention rather efficacy of the street, to be as explosive than working at the utilitarian level of ‘ver- as a car bomb; as disturbing to the status balism’. For Paulhan, one way of perpe- quo as a cobblestone torn up and hurled at trating this terror is by signposting Rheto- the police. If Terrorism is to be seen as an ric, self-consciously highlighting cliché action that shocks, damages and affronts, and generic conventions as they appear then Whitehead’s pairing of it with art does in language.8 What we see with Whitehead not suggest an attempt at neutralisation. is a comparable foregrounding action. In Instead he is encouraging the development contrast to Benefit, with Terrorism White- within creative expression of an analogous head is not merely articulating what has capacity to disturb the ‘collective inertia’.10 previously gone unacknowledged but is pointing to some of the structures of re- Peter Whitehead pression that have conditioned the limits www.peterwhitehead.net of what can be said. Nohzone At this point Whitehead’s formal ex- www.nohzone.com perimentation can be connected to a wider cultural critique. The film repeatedly links

its fictional terrorists to a real life event -the 1. Peter Whitehead, ‘In the Beginning was the Image, Before sinking of the Greenpeace ship ‘Rainbow the Beginning was the Avant-Garde’, in La Cinéma Critique ed. by Nicole Brenez and Bidhan Jacobs (Paris: Sorbonne, 2010), Warrior’ in New Zealand 1985. The ship pp. 26-30 (p.28).

was attempting to disrupt nuclear testing in 2. Mark Manning, Collateral Damage (London: Creation, the area and was sunk by members of the 2002), p.6-7. French Secret Service, an act that resulted 3. Whitehead, p.28.

in the death of the Greenpeace photog- 4. Ibid. rapher Fernando Pereira. For Whitehead 5. Whitehead, ‘Synopsis: Terrorism Considered as One of the this sabotage constitutes an act of State Fine Arts’ (unpublished synopsis, Peter Whitehead Archive, 2009), p.1. terrorism, institutionalised barbarism. It is indicative of the way in which violence and 6. Tierisias described in T.S. Eliot, ‘Note 218’, in The Waste Land and Other Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1999). oppositional tactics are used on both sides 7.Jean Paulhan, The Flowers of Tarbes or Terror in Literature of the imaginary moral divide between the [1941], trans. by Michael Syrotinski (Chicago: University of Il- establishment and the attacker. He notes linois Press, 2006), p. 8,9. Ibid. that this type of correspondence is gener- 20 10. Whitehead, ‘Synopsis’, p.1.x Whitehead, ‘In the Beginning ally obscured by the State’s cultivation of was the Image’, p.29. Filmmakers Journal

Testing the Water

Interview with Ron Peck James Marcus Tucker

Fighters - Mark Tibbs (Left), Jimmy Flint (Right) , Ron Peck (centre)

Interviewing Ron Peck in life lead by its protagonist, film Cross-Channel before his East End studio felt like a teacher named Jim - I went to visit him made I had met a fellow traveller. made a big impact on me me smile – set on a cross- His first feature film Night- as a teenager, around the channel ferry, and shot on hawks – a film shot in 1977 time I was coming to terms a small DV Camcorder, and dealing with the then with my sexuality and also it reminded me of those taboo subject of homo- my own desire to be a film- teenage years when I was, 21 sexuality and the double maker. Watching his new by my own admission, a One+One

geeky shipping enthusiast. – they were showing films least to the people I was I would drag my parents from Greece, Japan and there with. I can see in it onto any passenger ves- Italy, and that was really a rough sketch of Night- sel I could, camcorder in eye opening. I was reading hawks. I formed a work- hand, to wander through magazines like Movie, and shop group called Four the lounges and corridors. then I bought a Super-8 Corners with three other There was, as Ron says in camera and from then on, people from the school the interview, something I knew I would try to make that is still going today with very “special” about these films. I wrote a lot of letters different people. ships – something magical as a teenager to filmmakers What was emerging about the world they con- such as Nicholas Ray and from Four Corners then tained, and majestic about to my amazement, a lot of was this idea to examine the ships themselves. those people replied! I find the world around us. There Ron’s films exist in the it incredible that I was able, became a strong feeling in gap between fiction and as a 16 year old school- me that as a gay man this documentary. Mixing play- boy, to meet Nicholas Ray. life should be expressed ful yet dramatic aesthetic I don’t know if that kind of and my own story was not styles in his documenta- thing would happen now. unique. Imagery of gay ries, and using non-pro- people from TV and film fessional actors and im- Q How did Nighthawks were so exotic and histri- provisation in his dramas, come to be? onic yet the people I was he embodies Grierson’s The London Film School meeting in the bars were belief that documentary is brought me to London. The so ordinary. There was a indeed, the creative treat- school was an excellent great desire for me to do ment of actuality. experience as it was so something – maybe I could hands on and there were a be a catalyst for some- Q What drew you lot of people from the doc- thing. We developed about into filmmaking at the umentary movement and 8 drafts for the film – it was beginning? from the Left, like Wolf Wil- all written but it wasn’t di- There was an element of la. We met Cassavetes and rect speech – it was more a escape initially. I was spell- were taught by Mike Leigh. rough grid than something bound by the whole make- But I was at a crisis point that should be stuck to. believe aspect of it. Like in my life. I had accidently any kid I was really pulled walked into a gay pub with Q The scene that re- into other worlds, and really some old University friends ally sticks out to me in I remember being besot- at a reunion, and after we Nighthawks is where the ted with epic movies such all realised and left, I went teacher is asked by his as Ben-Hur because they back myself the follow- class if he is gay and he were so far away from any- ing night. So it was a pe- is honest, which starts thing close by. At the time I riod of self discovery. You a debate. The children’s wasn’t really responsive to could say that the making responses are so au- British realist movies about of my London Film School thentic. How did you ap- life here. That all changed film It’s Ugly Head was an proach this scene? 22 through a local film society element of coming out, at All the kids in that scene Filmmakers Journal

were pieced together from hotel workers from the Ca- ending up in a completely brothers, sisters, nephews nary Islands, but they said depressing place because and nieces from people they couldn’t even con- of AIDS. Before making connected to the film. The sider being in the film. So it Nighthawks I recorded Su- scene was also bolstered is quite a narrow view. The per-8 of a gay march which with a few actors from film is about looking. That had about 300 people. So the Anna Scher Theatre was the connection with for Strip Jack Naked I went School. I remember we the film camera, and we out with a video camera talked to the kids in the tried to find a relationship and filmed 100,000 at a lunch hour before we shot between looking, track- gay pride parade and it the scene and planted ing, zooming. That’s where was much more of a car- some questions that came some of the tension is in nival. There were all these from the real life account of the film. young faces which were so John Warburton, a teacher unmarked by trouble and who was fired for being Q Strip Jack Naked is repression. It was inter- honest to his class about your 1991 documentary esting to juxtapose these his sexuality. Actually, the looking back at your life faces with those of Dirk kids were pretty enlight- and the making of Night- Bogarde in Victim and the ened and they were acting hawks. Why did you feel actor in Nighthawks. So it hostility – it wasn’t genu- the need to do this? was to go beyond AIDS, ine. Like the rest of the Nighthawks had found a it meant AIDS was not the film, it was done in long certain acceptance and it whole story. takes so the kids could re- was a shame so much ma- ally get into it. The film, and terial from it had never seen Q Your film Fighters is particularly that scene was the light of day. The film a documentary on the hy- followed up with tabloid was even being shown in per-masculinised world headlines about kids star- schools and colleges and I of East End Boxing. What ring in a gay film, and ask- thought maybe I could put drew you to this world? ing if it was pornographic some material together to I had made a film before this and all that nonsense. put a context to the film. called Empire State which But then it just grew. We was a first attempt to deal Q Is it an authentic por- didn’t shoot much, mostly with the area of London I trayal of 1970’s gay life? it was outtakes, scraps of was living in. It seemed then It is, but also a limited re- Super-8, bits of It’s Ugly to be 95% white working ality. I felt the people we Head. I think I just enjoyed class. I was trying to dram- could persuade to be in working with the form and atise the change in East the film were not necessar- being free of any particu- London within the Thatcher ily people who would go to lar narrative. I felt that to period of aggression and gay clubs. Those people explain Nighthawks I had competition. One of the were afraid of being spot- to make something bigger characters in the script was ted. I remember a whole than Nighthawks. I wanted a boxer and I went to see section of the script was to go beyond it, and see a play about boxing where about a society of people where we are now. Also they used real boxers. One 23 I had discovered of gay how can you stop the film of those boxers, Jimmy One+One

Flint, lit the place up so I left shooting on Fighters and it Angelopoulos, Tarkovsky. him my number and he was loosened me up. I thought They just let it seep in. very responsive. Due to the we could do all kinds of budget of £2,000,000, I had things. It was a kind of col- Q You used real box- to get some names into lage. I realised I didn’t have ers, and not actors to the film and couldn’t really to subscribe to any rules. play the roles in your do much improvisation. It That was partly a reaction next film Real Money, was such a fight, I didn’t re- to the feeling that Empire a drama about boxing ally enjoy making it. Fight- State locked me down. I and its links to organised ers was then a way to do went very instinctive with crime. How did you get something more personal. it, which became a very such unselfconscious Through Jimmy I met the direct relationship that I and natural performanc- boxing fraternity. It was an- didn’t want to lose. Fight- es from them? other world that was hidden ers originally didn’t have Trust. That is the basis and new to me. I was fasci- my voiceover, and I had no from which I always try to nated by the loyalties in this plan to narrate it. But some work. We had a cast and world. Plus the image of the of the boxers said at the crew screening of Fight- fighter meant something to fine cut screening that the ers at the ICA and they me. As a gay person try- one thing that was miss- were so pleased with the ing to make Nighthawks I ing from the film was me. film. Real Money became had to fight and stand up So the voice came in after- possible because of their for myself, so boxing had a wards and it really helped trust. As for performances, strong iconic image that no me to organise the dispa- it’s easier with non-pro- other sport had. rate material. fessionals. They are more open, and have no bag of Q Fighters has such a Q There’s a real sense tricks to fall back on. We wonderful mix of aesthet- of place in all of your just built characters that ics – black & white, colour, films. The club in Night- were close to who they slow-motion, long takes, hawks, the gym and East were without it being ex- handheld camera and London in Fighters, the actly who they were. We composed compositions, ferry in your new film began work on a third short narrative sections Cross-Channel. The lo- project entitled Gangsters and personal narration cation is a character in to be shot on 35mm with from yourself. Was this a its own right. many of the same actors. conscious decision going I have often thought of cer- However, funders would into the production? tain locations as arenas. not accept improvisation I shot a lot of research ma- The nightclub is an arena. or non-professional ac- terial at the gym, and a lot The gym world is an arena. tors which meant it was of that material ended up It is a question of looking dead in the water as the in the film. I didn’t think it long and hard at things. whole script had been in- would do originally. I was I am drawn to filmmak- formed by them. Going editing Strip Jack Naked ers who hold on a sense from meeting to meeting, at the same time that I of place. I’m thinking of being told you don’t have 24 was doing the preliminary Chantal Akerman, Sokurov, a chance, no matter how Filmmakers Journal

much they like the script was very depressing.

Q Your new film Cross- Channel continues your successful blend of nar- rative and documentary. There are two stories go- ing on at once. That of the unseen narrator, and that of two brothers trav- elling to France, both oc- curring aboard the ferry. There were a few starting points. I wanted to make a film about the ferries with Still from Real Money courtesy Second Run DVD a French friend of mine. I felt there was really some- cause of pacing. The ferry ing a script that everyone thing special about them. I imposes a certain pace has to approve, I started sent Brittany Ferries Fight- – it is an imposition, but with complete freedom be- ers, which they loved and also an opportunity. There cause of the minimal mon- gave me the permission to are other elements such ey I had, and I’ve ended up shoot whatever I wanted. as the engine room, the with something I feel works Away from this, I started bridge and the long take as a structure; it wasn’t to work on a script idea of Portsmouth’s skyline planned, it was arrived at. with Mark Tibbs who was that are not connected to in Fighters. We started the story, and with the voi- Q What issues do you workshopping on a story ceover I felt that it would encounter when trying to about two brothers, one add a complexity. raise funds for your films? of whom may be a small- I had very little money, The problem is that you time gangster. After doing and wondered if there was have to clear so many some video tests on the a way to make something things with so many peo- ships, I thought I could fairly complex with simple ple. It’s not just a question take the story of the broth- technology. Contrary to of holding your nerve, it’s ers and put it on the ferry. the normal way one is sup- having endless battles. One The ambiguity is important posed to start a film, what I of the problems I’ve found as the two brothers may started with was complete- is that some of the produc- be wholly, or partially, fig- ly open. There was lots of ers or financers I have been ments of the narrator’s im- footage, like interviews, to, our frame of reference is agination; or they may be that didn’t make it into the so far apart. There’s so lit- operating in a parallel nar- film. In fact, I had to do a tle interest in international rative of their own. transcript for French subti- cinema, of cinema of the tles, and so the script only I knew there would be a past...if you were to men- 25 lot of long takes, partly be- exists now. Instead of hav- tion the name Antonioni or One+One

Still from Nighthawks, courtesy BFI

Cassavetes, that would ac- cinema. I haven’t seen atory way. I do think that if tually go against you. Our anything recently in Brit- Cross-Channel works well filmmaking is so based on ish Cinema that even com- enough, it could prove a literary criteria. In a discus- pares to some of the best way forward for films to be sion with the Film Council stuff from Iran over the last made – in a way anyone on a project I brought to ten years. Where does that can do. It’s just the time them about Russia, they come from? That humility. you put in, what you bring told me that as it was a sort That patient documenting together. With distribution, of road film, I can just set of life that is not in any way I don’t know enough about it in Spain. There’s a lot of melodramatic. It’s a differ- the internet so I am talking talk there about diversity ent attitude to cinema, to to young people for whom but no real recognition of culture, to the world, to life. it’s second nature. That the diversity of cinema way you are making things and of different ways of Q What’s next for you? more freely. So I am work- making cinema. I am trying to produce ing on two parallel fronts I can understand why some larger-scale work and Cross-Channel is a such big sums of money that requires engaging testing of the water. need to be controlled. But with the industry but at the I think that in other coun- same time making smaller- tries they have achieved scale more personal work 26 a much greater range of in a freer and more explor- Filmmakers Journal

Laurel and Hard Lessons

Some thoughts on the films of Laurel and Hardy Samuel Kershaw

The month of September later this year unable to work for laughing so much, oc- will mark the hundredth anniversary of casionally forcing work to be suspended the westward Atlantic crossing made altogether. Similar events were reported in a cattle boat by a hungry and largely amongst his audiences in the world’s unknown English vaudeville performer movie theatres, members of which often in order to seek his fortune in Ameri- were escorted away – or even carried out ca. That performer’s name was Arthur – in hysterical fits. Stanley Jefferson, shortly to become Almost a century on, I myself have Stan Laurel. Among his companions was sometimes observed and experienced the young Charles Spencer Chaplin, who when watching Laurel and Hardy movies went on to achieve global stardom soon the same kind of crippling laughter report- after his arrival in America. Stanley had ed of the early showings. a rather longer road ahead of him, play- On at least one occasion of watching ing in music halls and taking bit-parts in one of Stan’s films I began to wonder if I films for many years, gradually develop- would ever stop laughing, and became ing and honing his style, all the while fearful that I should choke myself. It was carefully noting what worked and what a delightfully unpleasant experience, and did not work. When at last his moment taught me a valuable lesson: that it is a lie of opportunity came, Stan had prepared that comedy ages badly; that old comics himself sufficiently to make the very have nothing to teach us. The truth is that most of it. only bad comedy ages badly – great com- His years of hardship and relative lack edy has no age. But I wonder what it is in of recognition, during which time he had particular that makes Laurel and Hardy so very nearly given up film altogether, had ageless. How can they remain relevant to- hardened him into a splendid comic technician. Indeed, On at least one occasion of watching his overwhelming eventual “ success sometimes came to one of Stan’s films I began to wonder if work against him, for his film I would ever stop laughing shoots sometimes had to be ” abandoned during his best years. The gradual build-up of hilarity on day when so many of their counterparts are his film sets as various parts were worked today remembered only by film historians? Surely, at a remove of four generations, out and improvised frequently left the per- 27 formers, producers and stage-managers they can have nothing to teach us today? One+One

• to prefer hyper-emotionalism, faster cars, A great music conductor once gave the showier postures, bigger explosions and counter-intuitive but excellent advice that massive vehemences of every other kind. if one feels one is boring an audience, slow down. This is “If one were sound-hearted, one exactly what Laurel and Hardy would take every print of every Laurel did to the comic film. Cam- era trickery, fast cutting and and Hardy movie and burn the lot in the flashy stunts were the stock- town square ” in-trade of early comedy films, with many anonymous characters franti- But one eventually becomes desensitised cally chasing each other up the sides of and bored. The same is not true of human buildings and receiving endless fruit pies action and reaction. Indeed, the more in their faces. Stan Laurel’s achievement one sees recognisable human activity, was to slow the action and the violence the more one appreciates it and the less, down to a crawling pace. Instead of leav- indeed, one requires for equal or greater ing the camera at a distance, observing fascination to take hold. There is more in- the characters as a group with only oc- terest in a single one of what Stan called casional close-ups, Stan’s cameras are Oliver’s ‘fancy-dan gestures’ than in all of almost always tight in on the cast, with many examples of films which plan from long periods of silence in which a single the beginning to amaze their audiences character simply gazes out at the audi- with greater effect than ever before. ence. When recorded speech appeared in Laurel and Hardy are ordinary. Unlike the movies in the late 1920s, many film- many comics, neither were tortured souls. makers fell to the temptation to have all Both always insisted that they were unin- the characters jabbering away incessantly teresting people. When not working, Ollie for the sake of the novelty of it. Not so for spent his life golfing, cooking and feeding Laurel and Hardy. Speech was almost al- his chickens. Stan had little life beyond ways kept to a minimum, in order to keep work. On the few days when he was not the emphasis on film’s unique virtue of wrestling with editing equipment or work- pictures in motion. ing out plotlines and situations, he went It is true that arresting effects, stylish fishing. Part of their secret is simply that flicks-of-the-wrist and technological de- their quite complete lack of pretentious- velopments are fun and are almost always ness surfaces in all their films. This is why useful in one way or another, but film- their best work has weathered better than makers, as for all artists, who concentrate those of many other film-makers of the on such things are playing a dangerous time. That is not to say that they were su- game which not everyone is sufficiently perior artists, for they were not. But their equipped to win. An audience builds tol- intended effect on today’s viewer is far erance to films predicated on titillation. less diluted than that of many of Chaplin’s They may enjoy it at first, but sooner or and Keaton’s movies. They are not distant later one finds that more is required to geniuses whose immense powers of in- achieve the same effect. In one’s intel- vention and mimicry leave audiences sim- 28 lectual and emotional infancy one tends ply stunned. Indeed, Laurel and Hardy do Filmmakers Journal

other film and television comics appeal directly to us but these addresses tend to be incidental, while such things stand at the centre of Laurel and Hardy’s purpose. As a result, we feel as if we are there in person as mute partners, as Ollie constantly glances over his shoulder to us for confirmation that the world is indeed a parade of ridiculousness and as Stan looks to us in supplication for pity. But one’s corner in this not even enclose themselves properly in- triangle is an uncomfortable one. For one side their films as icons to be worshipped. does nothing but stare and laugh as Stan Often their movies have no real beginning and Ollie feel their way blindly through or end, as if Stan and Ollie were actually terrifying nether worlds of pain, slipping living these mad black and white lives between this universe and a parallel one somewhere in California and simply occa- in which they continually fail to learn that sionally happen to pass in front of a cam- everything is itching to burst into flames era – as if one could conceivably go and or poke their eyes out or crack their skulls see it all happening with one’s own eyes. in half. More importantly, the two of them give the Contrary to popular belief, Ollie says impression of seeing you with their own Here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten eyes, by incessantly looking directly down me into! rather infrequently. Many other into the camera. phrases crop up with equal or more fre- The composer Mozart once replied quent regularity, one of the most plain- to a question about what was the secret tively poignant being Why don’t you do of good music with the response, How something to help me? The question ap- should I know? Stan Laurel, as many of plies not only to Stan but also to us. If one the greatest comedians and clowns have had any decency, one would not watch done, used to give much the same an- at all. If one were sound-hearted, one swer to questions about where the roots would take every print of every Laurel and of comedy lay. But perhaps his particular Hardy movie and burn the lot in the town secret is that he and Ollie are not a dou- square, in order that Stan and Ollie should ble act but a triple act, with the audience not have to live and re-live these lives of member as the ‘third man’. They do not permanent horror. As long as one keeps distance themselves by pretending that watching, one condemns these blameless the camera is not there. Everything is done child-men to the rack of futility. Yet one for the sake of the audience; they never loves them too much not to spend time with them. One has the sad dilemma ei- forget us, nor do they allow us to forget 29 that they know we are watching. Many ther of annihilating them by turning away One+One

or of allowing them to suffer into eternity. more quickly or for shedding its leaves in In other words, one becomes locked the winter. I shall instead choose to be into the same type of muddly relation- one to praise that brief moment when one ship with Stan and Ollie as they have with first notices, usually already too late, that each other. For as much as one likes to the tree is in full leaf in the sun. lie to oneself, one does not choose one’s Laurel and Hardy speak to us of the he- friends. Friendship has a life of its own: it roic. I do not mean that in the corrupted is a unique type of parasite which requires sense of ‘heroic’ which simply means not one host to survive but two. Does that ‘good’ or ‘nice’, but in the sense that they sound bitter or unpleasant? On the con- lived in a period of all possibility of which trary: the body contains many parasites full use was made – good and bad. Amer- which are absolutely essential for its sur- ica was still young; the Old West was very vival. But it is as well to be honest with much in living memory; states were still oneself. And also to recognise that this joining the Union. As for the motion-pic- will never change, which is why Laurel ture industry, there were no unions. Most and Hardy cannot age. Theirs is a vision of in the business worked like dogs night people pushed together by forces above and day for little money. There are endless them; people who cannot suffer each oth- stories of broken limbs, crushed hands, er yet need each other desperately, just as terrible falls. James Finlayson knocked we experience them, and each other. Al- himself out cold during the filming of Big though they and we are free to walk, none Business. Buster Keaton broke his neck may escape. during the shooting of Sherlock Jr. – but • carried on regardless. And all spoke in But if Laurel and Hardy still mean some- later years of these early decades of film thing to us, is it the case that they are as being the happiest of their lives. Stan condemned merely to be a pair of zoo pitied later generations. creatures, gawped at and enjoyed but But Stan and his contemporaries were not thought to be models for life? If they not heroic in the sense of being rule- still speak to us, perhaps it is only be- breakers: there were few rules to break. cause their voices are powerful enough The spirit of improvisation, though now al- to reach us across the wasteland of the most completely lost to mainstream Holly- twentieth century. Things have changed: that is plain. Early film was a time of artis- “ Think of Laurel and Hardy’s films tic heroism, greater even than as rather like a form of visible jazz – its reputation. Laurel and Har- open-ended improvisations by mas- dy, and others like them, lived ter craftsmen on certain themes and in the happy gap which ap- characteristic signatures. pears in all arts and cultures ” between the chaotic and barbaric birth of a new method and its wood, was strong in those days. As far as later institutionalisation and fossilisation. Stan’s films went, someone in the studio – I shall not be one to criticise: one might perhaps Stan himself, perhaps one of the 30 just as well scold a tree for not growing gag-writers, sometimes even Hal Roach Filmmakers Journal

himself – would come up with a little comical idea. It would then be expanded upon by others around him, with H. M. Walker adding some dialogue. Stan and his crew would read through the resulting script and then, as often as not, throw it in the bin, instead improvising around the general ideas and the better lines, largely making things up as they went along. One might be tempted, given the time in which they were working, to think of Laurel and Hardy’s films as rather like a form of visible jazz – open-ended improvisations by master crafts- men on certain themes and char- acteristic signatures. become worldwide celebrities. When they In the very year that Stan made his visited England at the end of their ‘golden trip to America, the great Sergei Diaghilev period’ of 1929-1932, they were dumb- was sending earthquakes through Europe founded at the crowds of thousands who with his Question, which ought to pass the met them as they stepped off the ship at lips of every artist when they wake each Southampton. morning, Why should I rest now when I When the young Stan had crossed the have all eternity in which to rest? The late Atlantic in the opposite direction more twentieth century and the early twenty- than twenty years previously he had many first have encouraged us to forget that more years of hunger, obscurity and ap- there are no excuses to be made; no spe- prenticeship before him than had his cial rules. That one is tired and penniless travelling companion Chaplin. But when and doubting ought to hold one back no Stan spied his opportunity in the form of more than one ought to regard one’s own a small-time character actor named Oliver natural gifts as a guarantee that all one will Hardy and in the hands-off artistic policy ever do will be worthwhile. By refusing to of the Hal Roach Studios, he grabbed it rest before that final rest of rests, Stan and and held on tenaciously until he had done Ollie made more than a hundred movies what he had come to do. And this is truly together. Some were brilliant, some were what every artist may learn from Stan – a terrible – the important thing is simply that lesson which, again, can never age – that they worked like hell. In 1929 alone, they although one often spends years prepar- made fourteen short films. Indeed, so ab- ing and worrying, one must at last simply sorbed were they in their work that they work and say to oneself, I shall do as I barely realised that they had meantime must, regardless. 31 One+One

Out of the Cinema to the End of the World

Jeff Keen Daniel Fawcett

I met experimental filmmaker Jeff Keen in the parks and gardens, for ten years, this week, he is now 86 and sadly ill with it was pretty rough (...) it was good for cancer. I went to his house and met him me to do that, but then we had a terrible and his wife Jackie. We talked for sev- winter in the sixties and everything froze eral hours about art, Brighton, their life up and I got fed up with it, Jackie was together and of course his films. Jeff a student at the art college at the time came to filmmaking when he was in his and I got in with them and they wanted to 32 late thirties, he explains, “I was working make films but they didn’t have time, so I Filmmakers Journal

took on responsibility of making films to show at the film society.” So with some old unused black and white film stock that he found he shot some footage that would be- come his first short, Jeff began to make films regularly and show them at the film society. Over the next couple of years he gained some recog- nition which resulted in his films being shown in the foyer of the National Film Theatre. His films seem to have two strands, one is a kind of home-movie docu- mentation of places, peo- ple and events from his life, often edited in split- screen with two or four reels playing alongside each other with a nostal- gic Rock and Roll sound- track. Of one of the 60’s films he says, “that’s how I make them (...) over two days of improvising on a rubbish tip. Anyone can do it and it will be different each time, get that’s one of the really fascinating things a gang of people making films like that and about it”. The other is an extension of his they will appear different each time and drawings and collages. In these films with ti- tles such as Irresistible “Anyone can do it and it will be different Attack, Instant Cinema, each time, get a gang of people making Flik Flak, and Omozap, films like that and they will appear images are energetically created and destroyed different each time and that’s one of the constantly and feel like really fascinating things about it ” they could and should go 33 on forever. There’s never One+One

a resolution, just a point when they end. And who are you making it for? Where do With these films he is more than a film- you stand in relation to art and economy? maker; he is a painter or illustrator who It is only this year that Jeff’s work has uses film to bring his images to life. become available on DVD, the BFI have In the late sixties and seventies Jeff released a 9 hour overview of his work. gained some support and recognition Over the last 40 years he has been pro- from people and groups involved in un- lific with an output of hundreds of short derground film, his work was shown at films, drawings, poetry and books, now the London Filmmakers’ Cooperative that I know about him and his work I am and in ‘the first international underground shocked that he isn’t better known. Jeff film festival’ but as time went on he felt comments that the BFI have been “going increasingly unsupported by the film around catching interviews with old film- world. Jackie comments how she feels makers before they die, just in case they that other filmmakers and people in the are important”. He has had recognition in industry never really liked Jeff’s work but fits and bursts throughout his career and it was the Punks in the 70’s and 80’s who he thinks that this is because he is not really embraced him. Jackie seems frus- commercial enough. Jackie comments trated when she says that she was told that it’s because Jeff is the isolated artist it’s because they have “(…) never net- in the most traditional sense and has no worked. Jeff doesn’t bother himself with desire to network or suck up to the people such things. He is a very strong-minded in the industry. I admire this but wonder if man who knows what he wants, he likes the gains of ‘playing the game’ would be to give the impression that his films just worth the small amount of compromise. happen without planning or consideration For me this is a very relevant and immedi- but there is a lot more thought that goes ate debate as I am at an early stage of a into them than he would have you believe”. Jeff and Jackie have re- “ At what point do you compromise? cently found themselves Why do you want to make art? And in a difficult position; they who are you making it for? are being evicted from their ” home and have nowhere to go. Jackie talked about this a lot and it life as a filmmaker. I see in Jeff’s philoso- was clear that the situation was causing phy a reflection of my own and I wonder if them a great deal of anxiety. Jeff’s films I believe in myself enough to risk poverty have never made any money and due to and the anxiety that comes with it. I am as his uncompromising nature he has never yet at no resolution. worked in the industry or made films for What I like so much about his films is any other reason than personal drive. This the feeling that they have been made so is both admirable and a warning to young energetically, without hesitation and with artists. It’s a big issue that needs to be ad- instinct over intellect. There’s such great dressed at the start of your life as an artist. spontaneity and honesty. Little time is At what point do you compromise? Why spent on analysis; he just gets on with it 34 do you want to make art? and creates. He starts with an image or Filmmakers Journal

a single idea and everything grows from that. One image becomes the next and in turn each film leads onto the next. The greatest compliment I can give a film is that it makes me want to do something. It inspires me to action, to make, create and go out into the world. Jeff’s films have this effect on me. If you haven’t seen his films I urge you to do so.

For more information on Jeff Keen www.kinoblatz.com

First published on 35 www.apengine.org