VI
January 1975
I met James Whaley, who was to become the producer of Sebastiane, at a Sunday lunch. He asked me what I did. Films. ‘What sort?’ ‘Little ones.’ Have you ever thought of features? No – impossible! Well I’m going to make one, he said, what ideas do you have? The Tempest perhaps. I’ve always dreamed of that; I chatted with John Gielgud for a whole evening about it. He said if he did it he would film it in Bali. I’ve made a script of it. Prospero’s a schizophrenic locked into a madhouse – Bedlam. He plays all the parts – Miranda, Ariel and Caliban; the King of Naples, the Duke of Milan and the rest of them visit him and watch his dissolution from behind the bars. It works very well, but uses less than one third of the play. Then there is Akhenaten the heretic pharaoh. Heliogabalus! EPICS!! and St Sebastian. We should make that one, he said. Well why don’t you write a treatment, I said – not really believing the project would survive the coffee. We chatted about Sebastian and the London Film School, where James had just completed the course. A few days later James arrives with a synopsis.
~
On our journey through Italy three years before, Patrik Steede, fascinated by the St Sebastians in every gallery and church, dreamed up the idea of writing a film. During the next year Patrik lived at my studio at Bankside and in Sloane Square, and the project lurked in the background. But Patrik was reticent about putting pen to paper – he had written a play which he threw over Southwark Bridge one evening. So Sebastiane remained firmly in the mind – he came with me to Rome on the Gargantua project in 1973 to write Sebastiane; but six weeks later, after the project collapsed, we were back in London with nothing done. Before he left Sloane Square in February he promised me that I’d have the script by summer. But when we met up in NYC the subject was evaded and nothing more was said about it; and Pat cloistered himself with a young American producer. Maybe I had misinterpreted the situation, believing the project would be written for me. James’ enthusiasm presented a problem – was Sebastiane to be made that summer or not? Time was the factor.
After talking to Anthony, I decided to go it alone. The lines to NYC went dead. Three years later, when the film opened in the Village, Patrik told me: ‘I took my lawyer, but at the end of it he said, “It’s so terrible it’s not worth suing.”’
~
Sebastian. Renaissance. Pretty boy smiles through the arrows on a thousand altar pieces – plague. Saint. Captain of Diocletian’s guard. Converted, stoned, and thrown into the sewers. Rescued by a Holy Woman. Androgyne icon banned by the bishop of Paris. Danced by Ida Rubinstein. Impersonated by Mishima. In love with his martyrdom.
~
February 1975, Sloane Square: James wants an oil and vanilla film full of Steve Reeves muscle men working out in locker-rooms. Paul Humfress, who is to edit, wants a very serious art film, slow and ponderous. I want a poetic film full of mystery. The debate rages as I write, and the script is caught in a tug-of-war between the grey mirrors of Sloane Square.
~
March 1975, Sloane Square: Jack Welch, a Latin scholar from Oxford, has arrived with the translation of the script. It’s brought a coherence into the work. the poems sound good:
Sagitta funesta acu tetigit
Umbraque tegit aquas
Et aura tacet
Aves non canunt
Deficit ab orbe color.
Sebastianus de mundo discessit
Ad solem modo sagittae advolat
Nox non umquam eum occupabit
Discessit ab horis orbis atris.
Ecce vulnera sagittarum
Sanguis vitae fluit in harena
Calthae solis in radis folia
Explicantes surgunt.
Flores apollinis aureos
Sebastiane
Sebastiane
Da iuveni deo qui luminibus aureis est multa basia
Da amatori multa basia
Et vesperis in luce
Mundum hunc recordare.
(The fatal arrow has found its mark / A shadow has fallen across the waters. / The breeze is still / No birds sing / Colour has deserted the world. / Sebastian takes leave of the world / Like an arrow he flies to the sun / No night shall ever shroud him / He leaves the dark hours of the world. / See the arrows’ wounds / His life blood drips in the sand / Marigolds spring up spreading their petals in the sun’s rays, golden flowers of Apollo / Sebastian / Sebastian / Shower kisses on the young god with his golden eyes / Shower kisses on your beloved / And in the evening light / Remember this world of shadows).
~
16 April 1975, Sloane Square: Ken Hicks, who is playing one of the soldiers, brings over a Roman strigil to show me how the boys in the bath-houses used to scrape the oil from their bodies. I filmed him as he covered himself with oil and started to scrape the excess with the bronze patinated sickle. It’s a very charged object for him and he uses it quite often. He says he gets a hard-on imagining where it has been.
~
17 April 1975, Sloane Square: Sebastiane has to be the first feature made without a telephone. Outgoing calls are made from the phone at the Royal Court stage door downstairs, and if anyone wants to see me I have a rule that I’m always at home for tea after five.
Later that day: We’ve begun to make the props and costumes, which are few but very important. The half-circular cloaks are made from unbleached oatmeal wool, hemmed and painted with natural dyes in the colours of the Etruscan wall-paintings in the mysterious tombs at Tarquinia. We are making gold strigils and gilded frisbees. Today, the black leather nose for Max arrived, like the one Christopher painted for the Super 8 film A Garden at Luxor.
~
24 April 1975, Rome: James Whaley and I have been in Rome for nearly a week at the hotel Senato. Our windows open on to the Pantheon, now besieged by flocks of nuns, Holy Year tourists, and pilgrims. We’ve spent most of our time in the prop-and-costume-houses looking at shoes and armour, shields, spears, Roman oil lamps, wooden practice swords. It’s been made easy as everyone recognises me from the Gargantua project; and envisaging an enormous film, give us plenty of time. James, with his flashing blue eyes and easygoing love affair with Italy, speaks the language fluently and strikes bargains.
~
25 April 1975, Rome: I asked Leonardo Treviglio to play Sebastian. I hesitated all morning as he seems so melancholic, but Nando Scarfiotti, who designed Death in Venice for Visconti and who is an old friend of both of us, says he’s the one. I remember how beautiful Leo was when he came to London with the Keralese dancers at the Roundhouse. Now he has grown a beard. James is completely thrown. He has an image of Sebastian which is out of GQ – sexy and muscle-bound – and he makes fun of the beard all day.
~
27 April 1975, Sardinia: Cala Domestica is a perfect location. An hour’s drive over the mountains brings you to two small rocky coves with sandy beaches. An old Etruscan watch tower stands guard on the cliffs, above sharp luna rocks with bright green rock pools, and a blue sea beyond. Except for a ruined cottage – once a fisherman’s house – at the top of the beach with two ancient fig trees growing in the dunes, there is no sign of habitation as far as the eye can see.
We are using the ruined fisherman’s house as set and barracks. Each night a group of us stays to guard the place as it is full of indispensable props. By the light of the Roman oil lamps, we talk late into the night, eat the local rough bread and goats’s cheese peccorino, and drink the local red wine. The sky is crystal-clear – for each star at home at least one hundred seem to shine here. The cove is bathed in soft moonlight.
At four, I wake with a start. The valley is alive with bells and barking dogs. I light an oil lamp and throw on a pair of jeans. Piero appears out of the dark, the youngest of three shepherd brothers who graze their sheep on the hillside. They provide our food and the horses for the film. Antonio, the eldest, is in love with Guy – who offended him this morning by brewing coffee and failing to hand him the first mug. Piero is the most handsome of the young men, and deep in the night he gives you the feeling that time has stopped; a blanket thrown across his shoulders resembles an antique cloak. He carries a crook.
A storm has blown up and waves are smashing against the cliffs in a continuous roar. I grab a bottle of wine and one of our Roman cloaks against the cool of the night, before we climb the mountains together to the Etruscan tower. Meanwhile, Piero whistles at the dogs who herd the large flock each of which wears a copper bell. We climb the tower and sleep there wrapped in blankets, until the sun rises. A fine spray from the waves crashing far below falls like dew.
~
June 1975, Cala Domestica: Gerald Incandela insists on travelling to Sardinia by boat from Marseilles; he arrives two days late, carrying a huge old plate camera over his shoulder, and a swallow that he’d rescued from the sea. He’s dressed in white bathrobes and a straw picture hat. Daniel, who’s helping with the stills, follows up behind with the three enormous suitcases that contain his darkroom. This is built into a storage cupboard on the stairs of the hotel in Iglesias … There’s a lot of musical chairs about rooms, but they finally settle together on the top floor.
While we film, Gerald weaves crowns of wild flowers by the sea shore, sings chansons and dances with Daniel. When he is tired he sun-bathes on the silver reflectors. Every now and then he takes a photo. In the evenings he organises ‘events’, ties up local youths with sellotape and grumbles. He is always one step ahead in any rocky climb and has the stamina and stubbornness of a camel. He carries improbable souvenirs, pieces of broken greying mirror and large rocks across continents. Today he poses in a bikini too brief for Bardot, does a ‘work-out’, and makes up those parts the sun never reaches for our all-over camera work!
When we return to London he haggles and barters over his photos like an old carpet salesman from Shiraz; for in business Gerald is an old soul and wins his way with charm. Tick-tock and the photos are printed, upside down, sideways-on, ten of one and none of another. He arrives with them on his moped, bundled against the cold in a huge fur-lined banker’s coat circa 1910 Berlin, bursting at the seams and tied together with a leather thong. Today he is complaining about the iniquities of our film company, Megalovision; his pictures are spread on the floor; when they are not the luxe calme of Matisse, the photos seem to chuckle perversely, like an old goat that has butted you and then frisks away before it can be caught.
~
Vidi Vici Veni
June 1975, Iglesias: When I told the cast, at our first meeting in the hotel, that we were really going to be filming in Latin they looked incredulous. They’d spent all day with the frisbees, getting sun-tanned. Jack Welch, our classicist, promised individual tuition, and I promised to swap the Latin around and rewrite for those who couldn’t manage their lines, while Jack came up with instant translations in what he called ‘silver’ Latin.
~
We are using everyone’s talents – Ken Hicks plays his recorder – Leo Treviglio dances his Keralese dance – Donald Dunham organises his Chinese shadow-boxing with Leo and Ken. Gerald spends the day weaving crowns.
~
The hotel in Iglesias which we have taken over is straight out of a black comedy. Octavia, the huge pregnant wife of the miniscule hotel-owner, sits at her front door and every now and again starts a battle over the shower, which we are meant to use without wetting the floor. Sometimes she wins, as the shower has a habit of drying up unexpectedly.
~
We’re up at six; a quick cup of black coffee and a dry roll are provided by the hotel. This has been supplemented by boiled eggs after complaints about the meagre breakfast. Then we’re off over the rock-strewn dirt track to the location, where those who’ve stayed the night have brewed tea on the camp fire. We are filming by about 10.30, and carry on with a short break for lunch – wine, mineral water, fruit and rolls, which Luciana buys at 5.30 in the morning at the market. Then work until six, before trekking back over the mountain to a proper meal in the hotel. It’s a long day, and with temperatures soaring into the nineties, exhausting. After four weeks of this the idyllic cove and desert landscape shimmer with a subtle malevolence – trudging through the sand dunes with heavy equipment across razor-sharp rocks and through thorn bushes parallels the isolation of the group of Roman soldiers in their remote outpost, and has given the film an edge. If any of us thought we were making ‘boys in the sand’ when we arrived that illusion is now dispelled.
~
July 1975: I arrived back at Sloane Square and collapsed with withdrawal symptoms. On the last day at Cala Domestica I somehow managed to touch one of the poisonous plants that grow in the dunes, and rub my face, so that my lips and cheeks blew up like giant puff balls which was more frightening than uncomfortable. Vasily had the same experience with a vengeance when he took a pee after touching one of the fatal plants …
~
July 1975, Cala Domestica: The love scene between Ken and Janush this afternoon caused the group to fragment into warring factions. The leader of the coup was Paul. He walked out, accusing me of being a pornographer as he blinked back crocodile tears.
It was scorching hot by the rock pool and Ken, desperate to get the scene together, found himself unable to get a hard-on as he’s totally unattracted to Janush, who’s playing his film lover. Leo, with whom he is in love, has been acting with true Latin jealousy all morning. Ken, adamant he should have a hard-on, asks me to banish the rest of the crew, including Paul, who are sitting around on the rocks watching. Paul stumps off in high dudgeon. Ken gets his hard-on; we complete the filming, pack up, and clamber over the rocks to be met by a revolution. Paul screams at me. He’s got Daniel in tears and has wound Leo up. I stand silently while I’m subjected to a barrage of abuse; then he says he’s going back to London and is taking the crew with him. I say great, see you in London. The first vans leave and Paul pulls out with them. I decide to stay alone in Cala Domestica that night and leave them to fight it out in the hotel in Iglesias. At about nine, as the sun’s going down, Howard Malin, the co-producer, arrives back with Ritchie Warwick having done the drive both ways to see if I’m all right. The next morning there are apologies all round. We’re so hot and exhausted by the pressure of filming that tempers are easily lost.
~
Nando Scarfiotti arrived with Joe d’Allesandro at Cala Domestica this evening, and we all went swimming in the cove. James wanted me to put Joe in the film but I refused point-blank – it would completely unbalance the cast who are all equally unknown, and lead to more problems than it’s worth.
~
During the middle of one shot a local lad and two girls suddenly appeared over the rocks into the little cove where we were filming, to discover the cast romping about in the nude. By the time Howard had blown his whistle and the cast had dived for their pants it was too late.
In the evening Iglesias was alive with rumours, and James was up before the local police commissioner, who insisted that unless we were confined to the hotel we’d have to leave town. He said we were causing too much commotion among the youth of the town. With Danny shinning up lamp posts and flirting with the boys, Gerald tying them up with sellotape to photograph them, and Barney James drumming away in the garage, he was probably right.
Today we had the police commissioner and his wife out to inspect the filming – but we managed to get by with James’ impeccable manners and a system in which we rehearsed with pants on. When I shouted that this was a take, James made the police commissioner duck while we quickly stripped off and filmed. Everyone had their pants on before I called all clear. I’m certain he couldn’t have been fooled that easily, but nothing was said. The whole day was spent in this game of hide and seek.
~
4 June 1975, Cala Domestica: I wanted Sebastian tied to a palm tree for his death scene, not to the bare-looking stake they’ve erected by the tower. James was fraught because he’s been having trouble with the Iglesias police again and was worried they might discover the film was about Saint Sebastian and not a Roman romp. The town is deeply religious, and palm trees have their special place in popular myth. After immense trouble, some fronds were brought out to the location in a lorry; but it was impossible to fake up a tree with them. So in order not to waste them, we put them behind Max in a scene in which Justin is tortured. Tempers became more frayed as the day passed. The temperature was in the nineties, and a howling wind burned into Leo who was tied for hours at the stake while angles were discussed – even covered with his cloak, the burning continued. Signor Rombaldi, the special effects man, whom we flew in from Rome at huge cost and put up at the best hotel, took for ever, as though we were working on Cleopatra. He stood around, in a pair of Bermuda shorts, with his fat assistant, Isadoro; holding his glue pot, he complained that Leo’s nudity made it impossible to fire the arrows. This brought laughter from the other actors as during the last three weeks they have been used to wandering about like naturists – and I’d given him a huge write-up at dinner the night before: telling them about the mechanical Gina Lollobrigida he’d made for a car-crash scene. He announces that arrows without clothes are impossible; at which Leo loses his temper, and sulks with Ken. Hell breaks loose as everyone throws in their tuppenny-worth of ideas. Fine nylon wires are stretched between posts with hollow arrows whose rubber heads are to thud into Leo. When Donald, after hours of preparation, fires the first arrow it bounces right back along the invisible thread. Other arrows fly off mark; pins are attached to them and one sticks into Leo’s leg. Leo becomes even angrier.
~
August 1975, Sloane Square: The film has grown organically out of the harsh and rocky landscape. The script, a fragile skeleton conceived in Sloane Square, barely held together in the brilliant sunlight of Cala Domestica. Some sequences, particularly those which revolved around props we made or bought in London (like the pearl shell in which Sebastian hears the voices), came to life just as they had been written.
Seashore
On a group of rocks Justin and Sebastian rest after swimming. The sunlight sparkles on the water, the scene is quiet and contemplative. Justin points to a shell which glitters in the water:
SEBASTIAN: Quid vides? (What can you see?)
JUSTIN: Testam candidam. Ecce testam ostreae. (A beautiful shell. Look! A pearl shell.)
SEBASTIAN: Potesne eum contingere? (Can you reach it?) Justin dives into the water.
JUSTIN: Ecce Sebastiane ea est tibi. (Here, Sebastian, it’s for you.) He climbs back on the rock, Sebastian looks at the shell and puts it to his ear.
JUSTIN: Quid audis? (What can you hear?)
SEBASTIAN: Audio deos veteris ab imis pectoribus suspirare. Et tu? (I hear the old gods sighing … and you?)
JUSTIN: Nihil. (Nothing.) Iterum proba! (Wait!) Gaviam flere et tempestatem magnam. Adio nomen tuum. Sebastiane! Sebastiane! Delectissime Sebastiane! Huc ausculta! (A seagull crying and a great storm. I can hear your name. Sebastian! Sebastian! Much loved Sebastian! Here listen!)
~
Other scenes, which demanded a physical prowess or a command of Latin that the actors did not possess, were abandoned, while a whole series of new sequences were hastily put together inspired by the location – such as the pig-hunt and a scene built around the big black beetles that cling to the poisonous plants which live in the sand dunes.
~
September 1975, Butlers Wharf: During August we painted Andrew Logan’s studio upstairs at the Wharf as Diocletian’s palace, and we festooned the place with gold material. Christopher gilded a caryatid – everyone was invited for nine in the morning and asked to dress Roman. At the last moment Andrew painted the floor pink marble. James and I spent a day at Berman’s hiring everything that was gold: copes, capes and crowns.
By eleven that following morning we had the strangest lot of Romans ever assembled. Andrew arrived in a toga with a tin-plate medallion of the Eiffel Tower. Duggie Fields got together a distinctly Miro toga. Johnny Rosza dyed himself pure gold and carried a lyre. Robert Medley (Diocletian) looked splendid in bishop’s robes and a crown with turquoise and pearl drops. Christopher encased Leo in solid gold and jewelled armour. Neil Kennedy, the wicked Max, had a gold nose to replace the black one; and Jordan arrived, her hair piled up like candy floss, in black leather bondage gear.
All day it rained like thunder on the metal roof – making sound almost impossible. But as it turned out this hardly mattered: by the time everyone was assembled we had to cut the filming to the bare action. Lindsey Kemp and a gang of boys danced a lascivious dance with barber-pole cocks, and ended it with a condensed milk orgasm. Modern London winked at ancient Rome. Our original intention of a cruel cocktail party where the glitterati met Oriental Rome disappeared – even the truncated version took till nine in the evening.
~
Sebastiane – Scene 1
I was always rather sad that the first scene of the film was never developed, though Paul and others were relieved. But there was method in the ‘campness’, and the vicious decadence of Diocletian, the ageing, isolated and paranoid Emperor who unleashed the last great purge of the Christians, might have been brought vividly to life.
Setting: 25 December 303. A party to celebrate the festival of the Sun and Moon. Diocletian reclines on his couch in the banqueting-hall of the golden pavilion. The camera pulls back to reveal Vigilantia, a gossip columnist, and her two secretaries, Dulcissima and Euphorio. Vigilantia is dressed à la moderne, very chic. She sips champagne and introduces us to the cast in hushed Dimbleby tones.
Music and adoratio: Ave deus et dominus noster.
As the party hots up into an orgy of killing, the court gossips.
VIGILANTIA: Everyone who’s anyone is here tonight. There’s Galerius and Maxentius, and that’s Constantine, ruler of Gaul and Britain, with the Lady Imperial Valeria …
(Close up) VALERIA (aside): Galerius and I are so bored with Rome – all this crime. Mind you London was quite dreadful.
VIGILANTIA: … and those strange ones over there are the Kings of the Barbarians – Vahram of Armenia and Narses, Prince of Persia. That’s Tagis the new chief augur standing with the priests of Isis from Thebes. The Imperial Mother Diocla is talking to Tagis. She really looks wonderful at seventy-five. She’s wearing one of the hats she designs; who could guess that such an elegant woman started out as a slave girl in Anolinus’ estate in the Pontine Marsh …
Close up of Diocla with extravagant hat.
DIOCLA: I made it myself for the Circenses adiabencis victis when my husband was made a god.
TAGIS: Exquisite.
DIOCLA (calling a slave to powder her nose): I have to look my best, you know, now I’m a goddess myself …
… and so forth.
~
This sequence was researched for me by Dorn Sylvestre Houedard, the concrete poet and Benedictine historian, who sent twenty pages of meticulous notes and family trees in the smallest of hands with a thousand ideas of who might have been at such a reception, with a host of scurrilous suggestions about their relationships.
~
Ula’s Chandelier
August 1975 – a wake: Ula’s Chandelier (15 min. film in Super 8) Luciana and Andrew organised a garden party to pay for Ula’s fine. Andrew auctioned clothes and bits and pieces that people had brought.
Ula had been caught liberating a chandelier from Harrods. Rumour had it that she’d worn a sort of chastity belt with a hook, and had hung the chandelier between her legs under a massive ethnic skirt. All had gone well until she arrived at the escalator, which proved extremely difficult to negotiate and caused her downfall. People stopped and stared as she jangled tortuously towards the exit, and a Harrods detective sniffed a rat. The magistrates did not find the story amusing, fining her several hundred pounds.
James brought Liliana Cavani and we paid our dues for a really pleasant afternoon on the lawn. Liliana spent her time talent-spotting for her projected film Nietzsche, and I made a stop-frame film of the whole afternoon. Somehow this sunny party, with its long-haired musicians, was the last ghost of the sixties. The guests smiled and sat in the sun. Duggie wore a T-shirt that said Amour Amour, while Rae Mouse and Little Nell cavorted across the makeshift stage selling the clothes they were wearing to raise the money for the fine.
~
January 1976, Sloane Square: Anthony sailed through life on unpaid bills. When he received unpleasant-looking brown envelopes through the post he put them into the kitchen cupboard unopened. Every now and then he tripped up. This month has been overshadowed by the court case over a year’s unpaid rent at Sloane Square – which the landlords have refused to accept from me as they would be able to charge a fortune for his flat if they could get it back into their hands. It’s £15 a week and worth over a hundred.
I put on my grey suit and sat through the afternoon in the magistrates’ court. Capital and County mounted a really mean attack through Bob the porter, accusing Anthony of everything in the book short of sodomy, but that was hinted at as well. I thought there was no chance but we won. The judge asked how many bedrooms there were – ‘Two’ – ‘Well if that’s the case I see no reason for Mr Jarman not to live there and take care of the place.’ The landlords brought up the lack of furniture, which Bob himself had helped to remove in the last onslaught when he let the bailiffs in. The judge smiled when I said that Mr Harwood, a writer, lived a Japanese lifestyle – ‘It’s better with no shoes,’ he wrote, ‘no shoes at all.’
January 1976: Michael Ginsborg telephoned to say that Anthony died suddenly this morning in New York – at the time I was alone, listening to Brian Eno’s elegaic ‘Another Green World’.
When Guy Ford arrived at tea-time I told him to ask Eno if he would do the music for Sebastiane. Guy was pleased as it’s his dream that Eno should be involved with the film.
~
May 1976, Sloane Square: Within a few days of Anthony’s death Bob stopped me in the hall with a glint of triumph in his eye, to say how sorry he was. A couple of days later a letter came through the door starting the court case business all over again. The landlords, with Machiavellian perspicacity, had stopped my first cheque to them. At the court case today they won outright. As the first judge had given me the right to pay rent, they claimed two years’ rent, reparations and all the court fees. The whole business has left me penniless as the year we have been working – putting Sebastiane together bit by bit – has left me with no income. This evening Anthony Redmile told me he’d buy all the grey mirrors – which will help. But I’m homeless again.
~
Completion of Sebastiane
Paul Humfress started to edit Sebastiane in the autumn of 1975 after we had received further promises of money from the investors. Funds came through in dribs and drabs, and by the time the film was finished it had cost about £30,000. The film was edited in Paul’s cutting-room in Westbourne Grove, where I would spend two or three days of the week. It was a complicated business because our four weeks’ shooting had produced barely enough footage to make a film; and Paul had to cut the film as slowly as possible to make up the eighty minutes plus which was the minimum for a feature. He did a marvellous job. Our rushes were in black and white, so we had no idea how the final film would look. By April we were nearly finished.
James and I took the cutting copy to show the Cannes selectors in Paris, but met with no success. Then in June the director of the Locarno Festival arrived in London to look for British films, and took it for his festival in August. Meanwhile Eno had agreed to do the music, which he produced like a magician in a couple of nights in the studios, juggling small pieces of paper marked with cryptic hieroglyphs. Then we received our answer print for grading, and discovered that the black and white images we had grown used to in the past year had turned into the most beautiful colour. Peter Middleton’s kitchen-foil reflectors, which we all held at various times, had done the trick.
~
Removal Party – July 1976
(12 min. film in Super 8 and 16mm blow-up. Music by Simon Turner). The destruction of Sloane Square is complete: the mirrors are down and the whole place is sprayed with multi-coloured graffiti, on the floor, walls and ceiling. The windows have neat little crosses engraved on them with a diamond. Last night we gave a removal party in which the guests were invited to take the wiring, taps, anything they could pocket. This morning I spread the ten years of newspaper clippings I found in the end cupboard ankle-deep across the floor; and glued one about the curse of the Hope diamond to the living-room window. Everyone who possessed this diamond came to a sticky end. Then I left for Locarno, two weeks before the court order for possession was to take effect. I left Bob a neat note saying the late Anthony Harwood and I couldn’t thank him enough for his kindness during these years, and enclosed the front-door keys. I wish I was a fly with a video when the tough emerald lady who brings bad news and Bob open the door. I think I have realised all their little black lies at the court case, and visualised them to the power of ten.
~
The Premiere of Sebastiane
At Locarno the film was shown to an audience who barracked and protested throughout, stamping their feet and getting up noisily. At the end a petition was raised demanding the resignation of the festival’s director. Paul and I sat at a news conference in the courtyard of the festival as the left and right attacked us and then each other. On the way back to the hotel a Catholic priest came up to us and said how much he had enjoyed the film, particularly the Latin.
~
The year 1976 was the last in which I concentrated almost exclusively on my Super 8 films. A few paintings were finished, and a set of twelve glasses engraved with alchemical texts; but the bulk of the work that year consisted of two scripts with watercolour illustrations for complicated Super 8 features intended to follow up the work on In the Shadow of the Sun. Both the John Dee script and a second reworking of The Tempest would in fact become feature films in the next three years. A third script, for an epic on Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh, remained as a gilded book with beautiful watercolours which Christopher Hobbs painted from small thumb-nail sketches.
~
August 1976, Lee Studios: Ken Russell rang and asked me if I’d do a quick job designing a set for a Nescoré coffee ad. He was rather sheepish about the whole matter, as we both shared a dislike of the duplicity – to put it mildly – of the ad world. No one, given the chance to judge for themselves, would have chosen Nescoré in preference to fresh coffee – though I am aware that most British people are blind with regard to food and drink, and are hooked, as I am, on those dyed green peas that used to be the mainstay of British cafes.
So we both consoled ourselves with the spurious argument that unless you’d gone into the camp of the enemy you would never really understand. But the truth was that after two court cases I was penniless.
Part one of the ad was a Marilyn Monroe look-alike sipping the brew on a heart-shaped bed and fingering croissants. These croissants had been flown to Wembley from a particular shop in Paris solely for their luscious appearance, which flagged on the journey and had to be restored with a bottle of glycerine to give them sparkle. Meanwhile the Nescoré execs fluttered around arguing about the exact degree of gold on a series of coffee sets.
Part two was a lost-looking model boy – who had been flown over with the croissants – dressed as an Earl’s Court Arab impersonating Rudolf Valentino. Ian Whittaker and I fussed around the set, installing potted plants and hookahs in a sea of Persian carpets and cushions, while the make-up lady fought to transform her wooden charge, who needed more than glycerine to make his personality sparkle.
In the middle of this, at 9.30 on a Thursday morning, a fully grown African lion arrived in a van, and was prodded into reluctant action by six or more keepers. Coaxed on to the set under the glare of the lamps he suddenly decided to take off with an ominous growl, dragging his keepers with him, and most of the set, tangled with his chains. The terrified Valentino buried himself in the cushions as the coffee set went flying and the potted palm trees toppled. Ken and the camera crew, safe on a platform high up near the lighting grid, shouted orders, while Ian and I held the front line. After a while the huge moggy was coaxed back. He flopped into his film position and we covered his shackles with cushions. Then just as the camera rolled he decided to get playful, yawned and rolled on his back with his paws in the air, sending everything flying again.
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August 1976, Butlers Wharf: The Andrew Logan all-stars have dominated the social life of London since the beginning of the decade, since David Hockney went into tax exile with the other working-class heroes of the sixties. They missed the sixties, but inherited the daydream which they tried to make a reality for a second generation. But they were the flash of the Super Novae before darkness. Now the seventies have caught up, and been pulled from under their feet by a gang of King’s Road fashion anarchists who call themselves punks. They have stolen the all-stars’ hairstyles, taken them to an extreme, and turned them on their heads. Unlike the glitterarti these boys and girls have the music business behind them to give them a real high with its coke-rolled banknotes of international finance. They’ve turned our gentle ineffectual friends into Demons of Nostalgia, while claiming that they are New. The music business has conspired with them to create another working-class myth as the dole queues grow longer to fuel the flames. But in reality the instigators of punk are the same old petit bourgeois art students, who a few months ago were David Bowie and Bryan Ferry look-alikes – who’ve read a little art history and adopted Dadaist typography and bad manners, and are now in the business of reproducing a fake street credibility. No one will admit that in a generation brought up on the consensus values of TV there is no longer such a thing as working-class ‘culture’ – to have any voice puts you firmly in the middle classes whatever your background. But at sweet seventeen you can kid yourself that no one has ever made love before – or that this carefully manipulated mythology is something new.
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Gerald’s Film
October 1976, Redcliffe Gardens: Gerald’s film – (12 min. film in Super 8). I spent the weekend with Gerald and Thilo in the Temple in Essex, at the end of the lake with its huge eighteenth-century sweet chestnuts, a deep golden brown in the autumn sunlight. Buried in the woods is the boathouse which has lost its roof – and is in such an advanced state of decay that it would collapse if you breathed near it. Gerald shinned up a tree, climbing through a hole in the wall and into the room upstairs, which was a mass of sunlit diamonds. The rafters threw diamond shadows on the diamond panelling, and the sun shone through the diamond-leaded window panes. Gerald tiptoed across the mossy wooden floor and sat in front of the stone fireplace which is covered with carved corn and ivy leaves. I filmed him through the diamond panes. He looked like one of the workmen who might have built the place a hundred years ago, with the green felt hat from Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales and the white scarf wound around his neck.
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Sebastiane Opens
October 1976: Sebastiane opened at the Gate cinema in Notting Hill last night after a day of record attendances and good reviews. At the opening Barney James, who plays the centurion, sat next to my parents. At the end of the film he turned to Dad and said, ‘I don’t suppose forces life was ever like that.’ To my surprise Dad replied, ‘I was out in the Middle East before the war and it’s really quite accurate.’
After its opening at the Gate, where it played for four months before moving into the West End, Sebastiane opened all over the world to wildly different reviews. The Germans found our Latin untuned to their ears, and the French, at least so I was told, panned it. In the States it was classed S for Sex and we were unable to advertise it – so the audiences turned up expecting hardcore and were disappointed. However in Italy and Spain it was a stunning success with lyrical reviews. In Rome, Alberto Moravia came to the first press show and praised the film in the foyer saying that it was a film that Pier Paolo would have loved.
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1971 Bankside
The warehouse door opens into the ruinous and deserted Horseshoe Alley and no one would realise it was inhabited unless they noticed the small plastic bell tucked in a corner. Early this morning as I pushed open the door I knocked someone off the doorstep. I was surprised to find six or seven men standing deep in conversation and for a moment thought they must be visitors. As I put the heavy padlock on the door I asked them if I could help them, and as I did so I looked again and couldn’t believe my eyes, as the man I had brushed off the doorstep was instantly recognisable as Pier Paolo Pasolini, talking to Franco Citti. For a moment I thought I was hallucinating. I nervously introduced myself to him in broken Italian and asked him if he would like some coffee in the studio. Before a conversation could develop a rather officious English location-hunter brought it to a halt. I said to him I know this area like the back of my hand, but he was quite stony. Signor Pasolini is very busy, he said. I don’t think Pasolini understood this conversation. He smiled at me and I’m certain he would have been happy to climb the stairs. So I quietly retired and left them to find the locations for the Canterbury Tales after telling Pasolini how much I loved his films.
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November 1976
Since I returned from Locarno I’ve had a series of floors and rented rooms, each more cramped than the last. I’ve come to rest in Redcliffe Gardens in Earl’s Court – this is unbearable because the narrow street is a main arterial road down which the lorries thunder day and night. To sleep I have to use wax earplugs; but at least there’s my own front door, though it’s broken and anyone can wander in. Last night I disturbed a burglar, whom I mistook for a friend of Rufus or Donald, my flatmates. He was very calm. He said to me, ‘Hi, I’m just leaving.’ Something in his speed gave him away but by then it was too late. All in all Redcliffe Gardens is better than the rooming house in Drayton Gardens, guarded by its eccentric eagle-eyed proprietress (who’d taught dance to the Egyptian royal family before the war). Breakfast was a torture as you never knew whom you were going to meet; and bleary-eyed polite conversation with jolly, healthy Australians, or dull, indigestible German students, could set you up for a bad day. Also it was impossible to invite anyone back – Madame banned visitors after eight. One night I smuggled a lad in from the Coleherne, but the bedstead creaked and the floorboards even more. And we gave up.
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November 1976. Houston, Texas
(10 min. film in Super 8). Brian Montgomery’s bicentennial art junket to Houston is under way. I’ve ten of my slate drawings, Keith Milow’s brought his ubiquitous crosses, Mario Dubsky some drawings. On the plane this morning, which took us to Houston from Miami, a blonde hostess – modelled on Jayne Mansfield in The Girl Can’t Help It – did a sort of reverse striptease into her Mae West, posing at the end of each carefully choreographed passage for imaginary fans and photographers. Afterwards she had the plane-load of executives undressed and reeling all over the plane while she played a game of strip with bottles of champagne for prizes. It started innocently enough with, ‘Have any of you gentlemen got a hole in your left sock?’
We spent the day on an art tour of the Exxon skyscraper. The four corners of the top floor contain the four suites of the four directors. But before we were taken on a guided tour we were lectured on Texas and oil in the manner of Dr Strangelove: Ruskies and European faint-hearts were pushed to the periphery of existence. The first director collected tin construction helmets – they were beaten like the brass tables that are sold in the Middle East, and would have melted a clone’s heart – and intricate models in solid gold of oil rigs. The second director collected slices of redwood painted and varnished with sailing-ships and impossible romantic pre-ecological views. The third – capodimonte figurines of beggar boys. And the fourth – moderne arte. As a lapsed artiste I studied my fellow professionals keenly. Except for one loaded question from Mario Dubsky to Dr Strangelove, British good manners won the day.
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January 1977, Redcliffe Gardens: I’ve travelled to every provincial opening of Sebastiane to drum up publicity. The cinemas are wonderfully old-fashioned – no wonder they’re closing so fast. The proprietors are charming but from another world. The journalists from the local newspapers tread gingerly past the subject-matter of the film, but are either polite or jovial, or else unsure of themselves. In York the manager’s daughter was married to a Sardinian and there was sherry for everyone. For some reason Manchester brought a local comedian, who entertained me and the press. At Reading they were grumpy, at Bristol polite. In Hull no one turned up at all – this was after a whole night spent getting there on a freezing milk train, which moved at walking-pace and stopped at every lamp post.
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