OBSESSED WITH W ALKING ©2010 Screen Australia, Flaming Star Films, Film Victoria A STUDY GUIDE by K http://www.metromagazine.com.auAty M Arriner http://www.theeducationshop.com.au Featuring notorious writer and cultural provocateur Will Self, Obsessed with Walking follows Self on a 120-mile trek from Los Angeles Airport to the heart of Hollywood, and interrogates the meaning of walking in a globalised, industrialised world. This study guide to accompany Obsessed with Walking (2010), a Flaming Star Films production, has been written for middle and senior secondary students. It provides information and suggestions for learning activities in English, Geography, Literature and Media. Obsessed with Walking has a running time of 26 minutes 30 seconds. SCREEN EDUCATION 2 os Angeles International Airport. A jumbo jet lunges onto the tarmac and taxis to the terminal. L An unusually tall and very thin man strides out of the terminal onto Century Boulevard. It’s Will Self, the novelist once notorious for his addictions and excesses but now known for his eccentric walking habits. Will has already walked from his home in South London to Heathrow. Now he’ll trek 120 miles across LA to Hol- lywood for a book he’s writing about the impact of the environment on the human psyche. Will chooses a route through the grittiest suburbs, the ‘un-places’ and the ‘interzones’, in search of a new kind of urban beauty. As he walks, he muses on the power of walking to connect us to place, time and memory and evokes the spirit of other walkers whose art has changed the way we think, see and hear: Rebels like Guy Debord and the Situationists (a pack of hard-living French bo- hemians who tried to overturn the urban order in 1950s Paris with the dérive – a walk without a route, destination or purpose. Amazingly, they almost succeeded when their ideas sparked the Paris riots of 1968) and Will’s enemy, the eighteenth-century poet and walker, William Wordsworth, whose poetry inspired a craze for walking in the English Lake District and, Will believes, kick-started international tourism. For Will, walking has become an obsession, as it was for the Australian composer, Percy Grainger, who prepared for performances by walking to the edge of exhaustion and pain. Five days after he set out on foot, Will threads his way through the crowds on Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame. But home again in London, he discovers that this walk has been a turning point in his personal journey. Part lament and part travelogue, Obsessed with Walking explores both the outer journey and the inner journey made through walking – traversing the physical world and traversing the spirit and the imagination.1 SCREEN EDUCATION 3 About the filmmakers Director’s Statement Rosie Jones | Writer, director and editor The idea for Obsessed with Walking began when I came across a fascinating book by the American writer, Re- Since graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts Film becca Solnit that explored the social and cultural devel- School in 1985, Rosie Jones has established a reputation as opment of walking as a leisure activity. Though I’d always an award-winning documentary writer, director and editor. been a keen walker, I’d never consciously thought about its history. I started voraciously reading and researching, Jones other films includeWestall ’66: A Suburban UFO all the while thinking about its potential as an unusual but Mystery, Holy Rollers, and Visions of Yankalilla. Her editing very accessible documentary. credits include numerous single documentaries and series commissioned by Australian and international broadcast- I was searching for a charismatic central character with a ers. She is currently in production on a feature documentary journey that could form the structure for a meditation on about the battle between government, big business and walking. I wanted the form of the film to reflect the form community over the St Kilda Triangle development, The of a walk – fluid and diverging – but I needed a strong Triangle Wars. story with a solid narrative arc around which I could weave historical material. Lavinia Riachi | Producer When I discovered that the writer Will Self had become an BBC trained, Lavinia Riachi has over twenty-one years’ ex- avid walker after giving up serious drugs a few years ago, I perience in television and film production. She has worked was very excited. I’d always been a fan of his dark humour with a variety of British, American, Australian and European and edgy satires and now he was writing a regular column Broadcasters and Production Companies, on a wide range about walking, called Psychogeography, for The Independ- of productions: from reality and observational to docudra- ent. mas and archive-based historical documentaries. As you’d expect, Will had some provocative ideas about Sharyn Prentice | Executive producer walking. He’d also started doing an eccentric series of walks from international airports to the centre of major Sharyn Prentice is an independent producer who, through cities. For example: South London to Heathrow/JFK to her company Flaming Star Films, has developed and Manhattan, which he then wrote about. When I heard he produced award-winning documentaries and edgy half- was planning to walk from Los Angeles Airport to Hol- hour documentaries in Australia and internationally for lywood, I knew I had found the dynamic central narrative. over twenty years. Her recent credits include A Thousand Encores: The Ballets Russes in Australia, Tasmanian Devil: Los Angeles is famous for being car-centred, danger- the Fast and Furious Life of Errol Flynn, See What Happens ous, choked with traffic and hostile to pedestrians. Not and Beyond the Royal Veil. only would it be a challenging walk in its own right but it would provide the raw material for a new book Will was planning to publish in September 2010 – Walking to Hol- lywood. I approached Will and he agreed to be filmed. 2 – Rosie Jones SCREEN EDUCATION 4 Will Self zines including The Independent and the New Statesman, Self Will Self was born in 1961 and raised in what he likes to is a vital part of the contemporary debate about cities and call an ‘effortlessly dull’ north London suburb by ‘intellectu- how we live in them. His latest book, Walking to Hollywood ally snobbish’ parents. When he graduated from Oxford will be published in September 2010. University, Self worked as a copywriter and a New States- man cartoonist before publishing his first collection of short stories in 1991. Psychogeography Self’s fiction includes short-story collections:The Quantity The origins of psychogeography can be found in the Situ- Theory of Insanity (1991), Grey Area (1994), Design Faults in ationist Movement of the 1950s. the Volvo 760 Turbo (1998), Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (1998), Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe (2004), Gritty, earnest and very cool, the Situationists came up with Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four subversive and inflammatory ideas while lounging about in Lobes (2008) and The Undivided Self (2008). He is also the cafes, drinking vast quantities of wine. One of their revolu- author of an illustrated novella, The Sweet Smell of Psycho- tionary techniques was the dérive, a drift on foot without a sis (1996) and Cock and Bull (1992) a volume of two novellas. route, purpose or destination that was meant to challenge Self’s novels are: My Idea of Fun (1993), Great Apes (1997), the goal-oriented walks of city commuters. The Situationists How the Dead Live (2000), Dorian (2002) and The Book of would absorb the urban ambience and use the informa- Dave (2006). His most recent novel is The Butt (2008). tion to produce new pedestrian-derived maps of the city. Though their ideas may sound absurd, their tracts against Self’s non-fiction includesPerfidious Man (2000), an examina- cars and their ideas for urban design still influence contem- tion of modern masculinity, and Sore Sites (2000), a collection porary city planners. of writings about architecture. In addition, Self has published collections of journalism: Junk Mail (1995), Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Situationist Guy Feeding Frenzy (2001), Psychogeogra- Debord as the study of the precise laws and specific effects phy (2007) and Psycho Too (2009). of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. A regular columnist for numer- ous newspapers and maga- The recent resurgence of interest in psychogeography has SCREEN EDUCATION 5 Using Obsessed with walking in the classroom Teachers may select from the following activities to support students’ viewing and close analysis of Obsessed with Walking. What are the benefits of walking? Given Will Self’s reputation as a writer of provoca- . Does your family ever leave the car at home and take tive and often satiric fiction and non-fiction, teachers a walk? should preview the online resources to assess their suitability for use with the classes they teach. Do you think walking is the best way to discover a place? . Do you always walk directly from A to B or are you more inclined to take a less predictable route to your destina- tion? come primarily from the UK, with writers and filmmak- ers such as Will Self, Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, Stewart . Stroll, amble and wander are all synonyms for walk. Home and Patrick Keiller documenting their unorthodox Working as a class, add more synonyms to the list. pedestrian wanderings. Psychogeographic ideas are evident retrospectively in the writing of William Blake and Thomas . Draw a map of one of your favourite or often taken De Quincey, and the rise of the flâneur on the streets of walks.