IX
After The Tempest it seemed a matter of months before a new project would be funded. But I miscalculated the resistance to anything that does not reflect the commercial norm. The budgeting of my films was virtually non-existent – no chance of anyone making much more than a simple wage; and the subject-matter, though acceptable to an audience once the films had been made, was wholly unacceptable in any of the legitimate channels for film-funding in this country. Not Sebastiane, Jubilee, nor The Tempest (except for a mad moment of commitment by Don Boyd) would have stood a chance of being funded by Wardour Street or the TV companies. Protected by my own substantial ignorance of all this, I had made three feature films.
Then came Channel Four, whose advent was whispered about by ‘alternative’ film-makers as though it were the panacea. Dutifully and optimistically I joined the queue with the others. Yet Channel Four, in spite of a much-vaunted alternative image, was to turn out all beaujolais nouveau and scrubbed Scandinavian, pot plants in place. It wasn’t our alternative: independent cinema was to remain independent, disenfranchised by a channel for the slightly adventurous commuter.
Writing film scripts without a stable income is a rather uphill task. The Tempest finished a moderate success. I embarked on Neutron, Caravaggio and Bob Up a Down with a variety of young collaborators who wanted to learn film. Time slipped by. The execs in the TV companies who drew their monthly pay cheques had little idea of the reality of films as art (as opposed to ‘art films’), and the involvement you must bring to a project as you tread an economic tightrope. Phones are liable to get cut off; and the cost of printing and binding scripts is a nightmare. Somehow you muddle by.
~
Broken English
(12 min. Film in 16mm and Super 8)
September 1979, Phoenix House: Marianne Faithful is elfin, difficult to get to know. She covers herself with veils, and even in the sunshine carries the night with her. After two hours of indecision, we drive down to Blitz. Here she huddles into a corner while the kids fall over each other to talk to her. She has created a legend by steering through the Scylla and Charybdis of ‘the music business’ – over-exposure too young, drugs, fast living and famous friends. Underneath the frail exterior she must have a strong sense of survival. The next day she talks of revolution, of Baader-Meinhof, in a small thatched cottage in the country while her mother serves tea and we observe all the proprieties.
When we film her, the boys follow and whistle; for them she’s an immortal, a flower pressed and preserved between two decades. Heathcote has written a song for her, ‘Why Do You Do It?’. She is excited, has discovered her own voice.
Sequence: She walks through London late at night in black and white, from St Paul’s with its haunting bells, through an arcade in Islington, around Eros in Piccadilly.
~
Surrey Docks – Marianne’s Super 8 Video: We arrived early in the morning and built a bonfire in the rubble of the old warehouses. Dark, ill-fitting dinner-jackets and old pink satin nightgowns, shimmering in the daylight, were distributed along with mirrors and masks. Michael Kostif dressed as a bishop; Gelinda wore a black soutane. Dave Baby stripped to show off his tattooed body, and improvised a love scene with ‘Marilyn’ on a pile of rusty anchor chains. Peter’s Monroe travesty is achieved with little more than bleached hair; today he wore a workman’s donkey jacket, jeans and heavy boots – but the illusion is so perfect that the locals, who arrived to see what we are up to, are completely taken in.
‘Broken English’ is the most successful of the three songs. We used old footage of Stalin and Hitler, cut together so that they smile and wave to each other in a ballet of destruction. There’s footage of Mosley, and video material that the Oval Co-op have given me of the police at Lewisham. The film starts with the Bikini H-bomb explosion monitored on a space-invaders machine; and ends with the destruction in slow motion of the huge concrete swastika that crowned the Nuremburg stadium. The final song, ‘Lucy Jordan’, has Marianne contrasted with simple scenes of domestic drudgery in one long continuous superimposition.
~
The Artful Dodger of Cine-History
At sixteen, Lee Drysdale arrived to guard the set of Jubilee. In the morning he would emerge from the mound of rubbish and graffiti that John Maybury, a film student, and Banshee Kenny had sprayed and collected. More energetic than a night at the Roxy, he would talk for hours in high-pitched Whitechapel about films, and carried on after into revolutionary politics. No one else could get a word in. He dressed like the dandy hero of a fifties’ pulp thriller, hat-brim pulled over eyes, and was a master of creeping into cinemas through their exits. For much of 1980 we fought a tournament which became the script of Neutron.
~
Neutron
There are six published manuscripts of Neutron, which zig-zag their anti-heroes Aeon and Topaz across the horizon of a bleak and twilit post-nuclear landscape. ‘Artist’ and ‘activist’ in their respective former lives, they are caught up in the apocalypse, where the PA systems of Oblivion crackle with the revelations of John the Divine. Their duel is fought among the rusting technology and darkened catacombs of the Fallen civilisation, until they reach the pink marble bunker of Him. The reel of time is looped – angels descend with flame-throwers and crazed religious sects prowl through the undergrowth. The Book of Revelations is worked as science fiction.
Lee and I pored over every nuance of this film. We cast it with David Bowie and Steven Berkoff, set it in the huge junked-out power station at Nine Elms and in the wasteland around the Berlin Wall. Christopher Hobbs produced xeroxes of the pink marble halls of the bunker with their Speer lighting – that echo to ‘the muzak of the spheres’ which played even in the cannibal abattoirs, where the vampire orderlies sipped dark blood from crystal goblets.
~
Neutron is the Sleeping Film – the shadow of the activity surrounding the Caravaggio project – a trailer for the End of the World based on the self-fulfilling prophecy of the Apocalypse. A dream treatment of mass-destruction, of the world’s desire to be put out of its misery, the now-established place the unthinkable has in the popular imagination. Neutron sleeps between its covers like a Cruise or Pershing in its silo, and is overhauled every eighteen months. Jon Savage and I have resurrected its rival protagonists, Aeon, Topaz, and Sophie.
How to make a rapprochment with the financiers?
Will the film be made before the event itself?
Now we’ve opened the film up, and given it an ambiguous ending – allowing Aeon to transcend his death, to set out in exemplary self-chosen poverty like a Bruegel pilgrim or Langland’s Conscience, complete with tall staff and wide-brimmed hat.
~
14 April 1980, Geneva: Guy Ford and I flew to Geneva to meet David Bowie and talk about Neutron. The project hangs on his decision. We show him The Tempest … He is interested, but we have to find the money without using his name.
During the following months we met, and crept into Berkoff’s Hamlet and Cage Aux Folles. He took me to hear ‘Ashes to Ashes’, and in September we saw him in The Elephant Man in New York, but by then the deadline had passed and I put Neutron quietly back on the shelf.
Bowie is the tuning-fork of the media humming to perfection. He is a transparency by Avedon, a xerox by Laurie Chamberlain, a voice embalmed in vinyl. He is the mirror of ambivalence and a monarch of the invisible threads of communication – touch fingers and you hear voices. The people in the streets are drawn to him, a Pied Piper who leads the dance. In repose, he is the still silence at the centre of a dust devil.
The disarray at Kendon Films, with Don Boyd absent in America, made it impossible to pull the film together in the short time that Bowie was able to give. Maybe there’d be another time. He left his sunglasses and a scrumpled pack of Marlboro on my mantelpiece. I returned the glasses but left the cigarettes. The next time he came he saw them and tore them up into pieces. I felt like a souvenir-hunter, caught with a lock of hair. Then I recalled that after seeing Jubilee he’d asked me if I were a black magician.
~
20 July 1983 – They’re Fucking Around with the Oblivion Digits
Jon Savage and I are looking at the script for Neutron – ‘The rich ones dug deep on their mortgages and emerged to laugh at the dead.’ Outside, in the garden in the Chiltern hills, the sun blazes down. It’s the hottest July since they started measuring. The privet hedge is covered with a froth of white flowers which have mesmerised a host of peacock butterflies – they have spent the whole day drinking in the nectar. The yellow brimstone butterflies keep their distance and stick to the scarlet runner beans. A solitary brilliant orange comma suns itself on the pebble drive and occasionally circles the garden, hedged in by a dark beech wood, with subliminal swiftness, before returning to its chosen spot. Ken Butler sits on the garden bench and reads the life of the sixties’ superstar Seedy Edgewick. Every hour or so we break our work round the circular table for a game of croquet on the uneven lawn. The gentle tap of the mallet and ball camouflages a competition as fierce and lethal as Monopoly … repeat – you have the name of being alive but you are dead … over … do you hear me … you have the name of being alive but you are dead.
Later in the afternoon we walk through the beech woods down into the valley and up back along a deep lane whose sides are strewn with flowers. Jon says, ‘What do you think will remain of any of this?’ Nothing much … It’s not really our concern … We walk a long way in silence, which is interrupted by a good-looking boy who whistles by on a racing-bike and disappears down the lane.
~
Wasps
September 1980, New York City: The New York Times review of The Tempest has blighted my visit here. The audience at the British Film Week Festival (where the film is being given its American première) is incredulous. They ask if they have seen the same film as the NYT critic, Vincent Canby. But such is the power of print over media-sapped minds they half-believe an article like this even as they reject it. The film closed after four days. It’s no consolation, but I’m told Hollywood has a lot of money tied up in the projected Masursky Tempest: so perhaps it’s a cold, calculated job to leave the field clear for the big guys. The review was vitriolic: ‘The Tempest would be funny if it weren’t very nearly unbearable. It’s a fingernail scratched along a blackboard, sand in spinach – like driving a car whose windscreen is shattered’ and so on for a few paragraphs that ended ‘There are no poetry, no ideas, no characterize, no narrative, no fun.’
All this has darkened my disillusionment with America, and particularly New York City – a city of glittering towers built on deep foundations of alienation and misery. I’m surrounded by the brittle indifference of Manhattan artists and their hangers-on, almost all of whom are blinded with consumption, incarcerated in their precious lofts. They take everything by right, and in this way are victims of their own propaganda, namely, that NYC is the centre of the universe. They honestly believe that these hard surfaces, which cover an abyss of paranoid insecurity, constitute the matrix of Art.
To a whole generation of young English painters, brought up in the fifties, the United States was Shangri-La. So many of them drifted to well-heeled oblivion in the cultural mid-Atlantic. I can think of none whose work benefitted as a result.
The gay ones went for sex in the bath-houses and clubs of Manhattan and Fire Island. Now all this has turned into a desert of ageing lawyers and execs with hangdog moustaches and work-out muscles; brawn triumphs here after midnight, while the scrambled brains are left somewhere in the closet. Did the young men who waged the battle of Christopher Street in the sixties know where they would lead us?
Of all my friends only the photographer Gerald Incandela has had the cunning to reap any advantage – but he was always a refugee and has a gypsy’s stubborn charm, which insulated him.
I stay with Gerald in his apartment, high on the fourteenth floor at Lexington at 26th. He’s been living here for nearly two years, ever since he left his friend Thilo’s flat in Clapham, London. The flat is light and airy, with windows from which you can see all of Manhattan.
Gerald is photographing architecture. In the spring he’s planned a journey to the chateaux on the Loire. Meanwhile, young Art executives in suits call to view his work – they are paralysed by this wheeler-dealer from the souks. They buy what he tells them; Gerald is now himself a collector. He has photos hanging in the White House and at the Metropolitan Museum. He’s making books which will cost hundreds of dollars apiece. Europe is fading – just a place to take a photo. He makes me a photo in return for a particular recording of Don Giovanni, a picture of the Statue of Liberty on which he has written
VOUS LA-BAS! VOUS ALLEZ SOUVENT AU CINEMA?
~
A Classic Dance
November 1980 – the London Palladium: Lynn Seymour’s solo performance this evening might have been called ‘Eat Your Heart out Johnny Rotten’. In fact I think it was called ‘Fuck You London’ – although it certainly didn’t appear as that on the menu Princess Margaret was holding in the row in front of me, at the Royal Ballet Gala for One-Parent Families. The place was packed to capacity with the rich and the famous, come to watch the stars of classical ballet perform to classical perfection in a honeyed love-in-the-mist atmosphere, occasionally punctuated by a jokey pas de deux set in twenties’ Henley Regatta style to sibilant strings. Lynn Seymour, back from Germany, was expected to make a triumphant return to the arms of her old company with a piece choreographed by Bill Forsythe. She appeared looking extremely dishevelled and wearing a filthy mac. To the sounds of ‘Money, money, money, it’s a rich man’s world’ at Throbbing Gristle decibels she danced, or rather crawled and rolled through a feminist suicide of lipsticks and mirrors pulled from a handbag, before ending the piece, and her career in classical dance, with a gunshot aimed at the temples. A few of us began to applaud, before the unearthly silence drowned us out.
Later, at a table with Kenneth MacMillan and various nonplussed eminences grises of the ballet world, Peter Logan’s support for Lynn was met with icy silence and the sort of condescension usually reserved for the insane. I heard that the organisers of the event had discovered Lynn in her bedroom before the performance dressed as Jackie Kennedy in a pink blood-spattered Chanel number. They were horrified and asked her to change. She wavered and put on the mac; but even in this emasculated form the dance was a most brilliant provocation of an audience. A violent reaction was impossible due to the royal presence. The audience remained stunned for the rest of the evening, and doubtless left clutching their wallets.
~
The Ghostly Galleon
Saturday 29 November 1980: Vanessa Redgrave collected us this morning at 4.30. Three of us, Shaun, Alasdair and myself slept uncomfortably for a few hours in my bed. Outside it was grey and freezing – powdery snow drifted across the streets while we drove around collecting people. At 7.30 we joined the bus at Kings Cross, which took us, with several stops, to Liverpool. We assembled for the march and Vanessa pushed scarlet banners into our hands. Then the sun came out, and a sharp sea breeze blew up and scattered the clouds. There were thousands of marchers from all over the country; and our contingent, the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, was somewhere near the end. Three hours after the march had begun we were at last on our way, a great scarlet galleon blown through the derelict streets of this sad and beautiful city. Every now and then an old lady would hang out of a window in one of the tower blocks and shout encouragement.
At last, when dusk was gathering, we arrived in front of the Liver building cheered on by a group of burly Welsh miners. Someone behind attempted to lead a chorus of the Internationale, but it quickly died away.
I’ve been on several marches this year. They are oddly internal and ritualistic events – passers-by seem hardly to notice. But I expect they glimpse it later on television.
~
Pyschic Rally in Heaven
(8 min. film in Super 8 and 16mm)
23 December 1980: I filmed Throbbing Gristle’s Psychic Rally in Heaven with wax earplugs, because for half an hour I had to lean into the speakers to get the best possible angles. I threw the old Nizo Super 8 about in time to the music, at ‘stop frame’. The band is restrained, almost static on stage. Genesis P. Orridge stands on the spot in his combat-grey; Peter Christopherson adjusts the controls, twiddling a few knobs here and there. Later I refilmed the result, cutting it together with old black and white footage from the film of Dante’s Inferno. The result had a persistent strobe which synchronised with the music of the 2nd Annual Report. It had a powerful effect on audiences. Tony Rayns said that at Melbourne the festival audience hated it one and all, and shouted while the film was being shown. At the ICA Jenny Runacre told me she had to leave because the film was affecting her physically, although she liked it.
This work takes experiments with superimposition and refilming, begun in 1972 with In the Shadow of the Sun, as far as I can go.
~
New Year’s Eve, 1980: At six this evening I was surprised by Vanessa, who rang up and asked me what I was doing for New Year’s Eve. She caught my indecision and announced she would be around in half an hour and we would go out selling the party’s daily newspaper, Newsline.
We drove up to the flats in Marchmont Street, near where I had lived in 1963, and worked our way down the dimly lit corridors in the freezing cold. The building, once the pride of architectural students, is streaked with London grime and beached, like a scuttled battleship, in the remains of Bloomsbury. The reception at each flat was unexpected – a small bald man cautiously peered round one door, and when he recognised Vanessa his eyes popped. He quickly disappeared, and we heard an excited whispered conversation. Then he reappeared, with the words – ‘Go away Vanessa, we don’t want your type round here. We vote Conservative.’ And closed the door firmly. I couldn’t help smiling, and I think Vanessa caught me. Later, she abandoned me outside the Aldwych with an armful of papers and a collection bucket. While the usher boys eyed me suspiciously I made a spirited attempt to sell the cause, and got two customers.
~
The Last Supper
24 January 1981, Kensington Town Hall: Vanessa sits on the campaign chair drinking tea and chain-smoking. From her briefcase she sells tickets for lectures and film shows, subscriptions for Newsline. She carries on talking as she discovers more pamphlets: Trotsky on art, Trotsky on internationalism. She hovers on the edge of her seat desperate to share this vision; she shakes as she speaks of conspiracies.
On the stage of Kensington Town Hall this evening she sits at the end of a long table draped in red under a huge portrait of Lenin. The WRP celebrates Eleven Years of a Trotskyist Daily Newspaper, seated at the long table the Committee-members look like Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’. Instead of bread and wine we are given words. Meanwhile, not one printing worker takes the rostrum, nobody involved in the actual production of the newspaper. I left early. Thereafter the lines went dead.
~
March 1981, Berlin: In the Shadow of the Sun, which the German Film Archive has rescued and blown up to 16mm, was shown late last night to a large audience on an enormous screen. I had the TG music turned up loud and sat in the front row where the film was a blaze of impressionistic colour. The fiery mazes of sawdust and paraffin in which various friends perform, the footage from Avebury, Fire Island and Castle Howard fused with fragments from The Devils and our riverside improvisations – I took the footage and refilmed it with two projectors, using my Nizo 480, a series of coloured gels, and a postcard as a screen. Everyone said it was impossible, that nothing would come of it – but by a miracle everything synchronised to make the film which at first was called an ‘English Apocalypse’. Then it was rechristened, and shown in the mid-seventies at the ICA. At the end of that first public showing a few people remained in the cinema, including one old German lady who was incredibly enthusiastic. Last night in the festival cinema there was a large and serious audience many of whom enjoyed the film as much as she did. The Germans are much more excited by my work. The English remain suspicious; they want prose, socially committed stuff to bore their pants off so they can leave the cinema and believe they have seen ‘reality’.
~
30 March 1980. Phoenix House
There is only one English feature director whose work is in the first rank. Michael Powell is the only director to make a clear political analysis in his films, his work is unequalled. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is the finest English feature, and A Canterbury Tale and A Matter of Life and Death are not far behind. When he made these films he was heavily criticised for his treatment of serious themes. Blimp was banned by Churchill and remained in a savaged version for nearly forty years, a plea for tolerance and regard for the enemy as human made at the height of the war – there is no more courageous English film. It is a tragedy he has made so few films in the last twenty years, none in the last ten, and a lasting condemnation of all those who make films. He was a major casualty of the spurious social realism of the sixties, whose practitioners have grown fat and invaded the media with their well-scrubbed minds. Their films are never seen by the communities they are made in, but transported via the colour supplements straight to a land where the consciences of the Conscious are titillated and prizes for honesty are won.
Last night I was chatting to an eighteen-year-old lad. He was drunk and distraught. I never divulged I made films and acted like a sympathetic punter. He had always dreamed of being an actor since he had played an eight-year-old in Kes. Ken Loach chose him, though any of us might have done the same. He came from a broken and deprived family. For a few weeks he was a film star; his own and his friends’ expectations were aroused. Then the film crew departed, and he was left with ambitions that could never be fulfilled. Comparison: Visconti made Bjorn Andresen (who played Tadzio in Death in Venice) his ward, knowing the damage that can be wrought by this kind of exposure.
~
May 1981. Cannes
It would be hard to find a seedier-looking bunch than the British Film Industry after a week of free drinks in Cannes. This evening they are standing, so to speak, around a swimming-pool downing champagne from the Chrysalis empire. The Managing Director announces ‘Joe Orton’, the British Cage Aux Folles: I could see Steven Frears’ heart go through his boots – he is the director-in-waiting. All through this charade Jack Nicholson, or a look-alike, swam around the pool causing the maximum diversion from the business at hand. Steven, who is one of the few talents in British TV, smiled manfully through it all. At the poolside he spied Gary Glitter and decided he would make a perfect Halliwell:– I went over to Mr Glitter with one of the souvenir programmes and asked him to sign it, which he did with a wild stroke of the pen that stuck and spluttered into spots across the paper. ‘Stars,’ I said with a smile, and he agreed. Later, I gave it to Steven.
~
September 1981, Phoenix House: I picked up the script of Bob Up a Down which Tim Sullivan rewrote for me last year in Christopher’s studio. Although there are some good moments, the script has its difficulties. You need a year or so on projects as complex as this. A first draft usually reveals the lie of the land; in a rewrite you discover the terraces, and can view it from different angles. Bob Up a Down has been brewing longer than Caravaggio. It started years ago as a medieval allegory, like the Roman de la Rose but based on Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle. It has to be retold, and the central character of the anchoress who has visions must be integrated with the everyday love affair of Prophecy for the wild man Bob Up a Down.
~
The Straight Media
Friday 18 September 1981 – Granada TV: I came up to Manchester to talk over the script of Bob Up a Down with Tim. I planned to sit in the library here for a few days and map out the screenplay, as he is unable to get to London. But work of this serious nature was quite impossible. The library is noisy and its medieval section consists of a few school primers; apart from that it’s mostly stocked with bound colour supplements.
The centre of this cheerless building is the bar, where the disillusioned drown their mental fatigue in subsidised alcohol. Each year Granada takes in a few young graduates from the Universities who are naïve enough to believe they will be able to express their vision of the world in these eggbox surroundings. Illusions are quickly dispelled, but by that time they are hooked on fat pay cheques; and soon they are media junkies trapped in a mediocrity that isn’t even their own. Granada smells and looks like a school. On the walls of the corridors Francis Bacon replaces the map of the world. Everyone grumbles about his own work and tears his colleagues’ to pieces. But woe betide any outsider who criticises the place – then they turn like a savage pack to protect their unbearable existence.
~
Overcast
The TV replaced the hearth in the fifties. Where the fire had nourished dreams, allowed the mind to wander like the flickering flames that danced in the coals, the TV numbed the mind. Its images had to possess you, bombard you. It reinforced the tyranny of the family as a parent usually controlled the switch. In our house the weather forecast grew like a demon god – absolute silence and concentration was demanded by my father as the announcer pushed the sun and clouds over a map of England, pronouncing weather fair or foul like an oracle of the gods. The outcome was often quite different. Like the priest praying for victory in battle you could never be quite sure the gods would favour you.
~
2 April 1983
With the invasion of video, the Super 8 camera is becoming a thing of the past. This saddens me as the video image is still a poor second. However, that will soon change. What worries me is that each advance in technology reinforces the grip of central control and emasculates opposition – though this can work both ways, and it is for us to ensure that technology will promote greater independence and mobility. This is the key battle in our culture, one which has hardly been joined because a thousand political diversions are flown by different vested interests to obscure it. Our centralised culture mounts a concerted attack on human expression. Organisations like the BBC and the television companies talk about responsibility to their audiences, but their conduct is irresponsible. They remove expression from the individual and flood the mind with carefully selected information which is passed through their dead, institutionalised hands. It’s amazing to see how blind these monopolistic arbiters of our culture can be. By now everyone knows that the idols of popular music are the figments of their promoters’ bank balances. It’s extraordinary how the media men are unable to perceive that they are themselves fabricated in the same way, that their success has nothing to do with integrity or intelligence, just opportunism. The ugliest film I saw last year was The Wall, in which the director Alan Parker caused the maximum GBH to the human spirit, while ignoring the glaring truth that he and his allies, the Pink Floyd, were themselves the Wall that had to be torn down. In this film an ad-man assaulted older institutions – school teachers, who might just be telling their students to think for themselves, were painted as monsters of conformity in order to inject the false vision of a media junky into the young. The film had the power-mad glamour of a Nazi rally and used that imagery to effect.
~
8 March 1983. Consumer Vision
Ian Sproat, the Tory minister, is in the Guardian this morning quoted as saying that Chariots of Fire helped the government over the Falklands with public opinion in the USA; it confirmed all my suspicions about a film which plays a tune reactionaries like to hear. If at first you don’t succeed … Chariots of Fire is a film delivering the ‘conservatism’ of an Andropov or a Thatcher. When the film first came out Puttnam suppressed any mention of the fact that Ian Charleson had been one of the brothers in Jubilee, and announced Chariots as his first film. Ian apologised to me in Cannes. I felt sorry for him as he’s scrupulously honest and I knew he never liked Jubilee, but was also embarrassed by the duplicity of the publicity for his new film. All establishments rewrite history. No shadows are to be cast over the Royal Command Performance. In Mitterrand’s France these dubious manipulators were careful to protest their Socialism.
~
Our Orphan Cinema
The English film world is mesmerised by Oscars, and almost any project has to pass the Hollywood test. All indigenous work has to be historic and ‘quaint’ – Brideshead or Chariots of Fire, a dull and overrated TV film, fit the bill. All the rest take their chances. Even the music films of recent years, Quadrophenia and Breaking Glass, have fallen on stony ground in the States. So attuned have American ears become to the English Theatrical Voice that if you step off the stage and on to the streets you have to be subtitled like Scum. The budgets to make these ‘American’ films are inflated; whereas a German or Italian film-maker has to do with £500,000. Here you must talk in millions or the investors can hardly stifle a yawn. American product is ‘cheaply made’ in our studios, so the price of film-making here is kept inflated till only the biggest and the worst can afford it.
~
31 January 1983. B2 Gallery
The first of a season of Super 8 shows took place last night. James Mackay and David Dawson organised an evening which was like the Super 8 shows at Bankside ten years ago. There were two particularly beautiful films – a boy filmed in pink, performing a slow, narcissistic dance behind muslin veils, details of hands caressing fabric. The boy’s torso was lit from above, and with his outstretched arms he looked as if he was flying. This was made by Michael Kostif, whose films are always a surprise. They are economically made, and are nearly always the best lit of Super 8 films. The second film, by Cerith Wyn Evans, was also immaculately crafted and lit like a razor blade. Michael Clarke, the dancer, was hanged while flowers burned leaving narcotic smoke trails. Later a boy stood in red, painted red, etched against a cobalt background with a vase of tulips and the light and camera in shot, while another boy lay face down on a mattress on the floor masturbating. He was lit with much greater realism. Evanescent images – sex and death. I told John Maybury that I felt like the ghost in the machine. He said that my presence gave the evening credibility! It’s wonderful to see this form of film-making continuing.
~
Other People’s Home Movies
28 January 1983: Last week the British Film Institute’s reception to launch their archive film of Royalty was attended by HRH, who talked loudly throughout the showing. When the 1937 Coronation came up she said loudly, ‘Where am I? I was there! Why didn’t they film me?’ Queen Victoria was greeted by, ‘She NEVER said that!’ Later, she buttonholed a group of admiring archivists. ‘Daddy took a lot of film in that old stock of yours. I keep looking for it but Elizabeth will never leave anything alone. You can’t find anything in the Palace – Elizabeth is always moving everything around.’ The Lady-in-Waiting, who was keeping an eye on the level of the whisky bottle, tactfully announced, ‘Time to go.’
At the BFI some home movies have arrived in brass canisters lined with red velvet and stamped with the Royal coat of arms.
~
Monday 2 November 1981: I took John Maybury to see Steven Berkoff’s play, Decadence. Steven gives an extraordinary performance with Linda Marlowe. They both play two roles from different social backgrounds on a stage which is bare except for a sofa and a light. Steven’s command of language is electric, East and West; Cockney fucks the Elizabethan theatre. The result pours forth in an incandescent lava-flow. He tears manners to shreds and overacts to the point of apoplexy. His movements are mesmeric: he crosses and uncrosses his legs, ties himself in knots, swallows his words, takes great drags at invisible cigarettes, drinks, farts, and enunciates in such a way that the phrases fall like ice cubes into his gin and tonic. I have rarely seen so much energy on the stage. The next morning I ring him and we decide to turn the play into a film script.
~
November 1981, Devonia Road: Steven’s got some new chairs for his living room – scaffolding and classic leather Rover seats. You pull the lever to tilt them back. He slumps in them in his army khaki, sipping tea from a delicate silver lustre tea-cup. He creates ideas with his hands in the air, bounding words about, ‘Yes, yees, yeeees.’ We talk ourselves through the scenes and every now and then he starts to act them.
At home I take out the scissors and glue and paste up the play with rough indications of the shots. By Christmas I have a draft screenplay. I feel we must sleep on it – it will improve for waiting. I detect Steven’s impatience. His work allows him manoeuvrability. Having to cope with the slow, Satanic reels of cinema I am learning the waiting game.
~
Thursday 3 December 1981 – B2 Gallery: A month ago, David Dawson asked me to exhibit in his gallery at Metropolitan Wharf in a mixed show with Andrew Logan, John Maybury and Duggie Fields. I collected together the few landscapes that I painted with varnish glazes, pencil and metal dust last year. Apocalyptic visions of fire, with skulls and minute people lost in eternity under strange moons. Then I took up my brushes again and painted dark canvases of a different kind – Night Light, Canvases of Fire, Fire of the Soul. Icons to spark off reveries.
~
Dark Lights
The three films take place in quite consciously different light – Sebastiane in the sunlight, Jubilee in a stormy twilight, and The Tempest in the night.
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January 1982, Phoenix House: Christmas passed and I carried on painting into the New Year. It is therapeutic: the smell of oil paint in Phoenix House gives me an old high. The canvases are very small, as I have so little space to work. I clear everything away after I have finished each evening. There is one canvas, an erased fragment of Heraclitus like a Victorian sampler, gold and black with a hint of fire. I call it ‘The archaeology of words’ – ‘Death is all things we see awake, all we see asleep is sleep.’ I have broken the stranglehold of my landscapes. They had become tedious, a fine balancing-act that I had mastered. They were no longer an adventure.
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Wednesday 10 March 1982: Ken Russell rings and asks me to design the Stravinsky Rake’s Progress to open mid-May at the Pergola Theatre, Florence. Michael Annals has just told him he cannot do it. I’ve two weeks to complete the designs. Fortunately I’ve seen the opera in a rather indifferent production at the Coliseum.
I catch the train to the Lake District and spend the afternoon and evening jotting down notes. The main drift of Ken’s mind is to update the work. He wants an underground station instead of a graveyard. Apart from that the designs will parallel Auden’s stage instructions.
The next morning I’m back down to London on the train. I spend two days at breakneck speed collecting magazines and books that throw up ideas – punk, ‘new romantic’, the Royal Family, horse racing, etc. – and leave on the Monday for Florence. Exhausted, I’m pushed into one of those Italian meetings where everyone shouts at the top of their lungs – to an outsider it looks as though it will end in a fight, until everyone starts laughing. The Management asks me for the designs. I show them the books and explain that the design will be a collage. They look dubious. I explain I’m never going to be able to make finished drawings for an opera with nine separate sets and about one hundred costumes in ten days.
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Wednesday 17 March 1982, Florence: I’m embarking on this project for three reasons: first, after a year of waiting for Caravaggio I’m broke; secondly, I’ve always enjoyed working with Ken; and thirdly, it’s a kind of revenge.
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18 April 1982, Florence: Every evening Ken and I find a different restaurant to eat in. We establish a routine. At about eight we have a drink at the bar on the Piazza Signora. He crosses the square with his white hair and sailor suit. You can spot him a mile off, he has great physical presence. We have one strong common bond: a love-hate relationship with our art which sparks off ideas.
Ken is deeply disillusioned with the cinema, the end of a love affair. Whenever the subject comes up there is sadness, tales of betrayal and hopes dashed. Making Altered States was a nightmare. He had no support, only petty opposition from the film company. He tells me that when Paddy Chayevsky died his heart leapt – ‘He was a truly evil, monstrous man.’ Ken is a romantic who sees the world in vivid black and white. His vision of the artist is pure nineteenth century. ‘Tchaikovsky’ – he has twenty-six recordings of one of his symphonies; he goes to enormous lengths to find obscure recordings, spends all his spare time in record shops. Every day dry opera critics arrive to interview him and catch him out, but his knowledge of music is enormous. Maestro Chailly, the conductor, often stops orchestral rehearsals to ask Ken’s opinion and acts on it.
Ken tells me that this is the happiest project he has worked on since his early days at the Beeb.
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12 May 1982, Pergola: There are more than enough scandalous moments in The Rake to keep the journalists happy and the myth of an ageing enfant terrible afloat. These are also weak spots, as they allow copy to be sold sensationally at the expense of a truly original mind. We have the brothel-keeper, Michael Aspinal, in Queen Mother drag, leading the chorus who are dressed in Falklands fatigues. The Rake wears a T-shirt depicting Mrs Thatcher as a vampire holding a skull – ‘Alas, poor England, I knew her well.’ He croons with a set of scarlet Mohican dancers from Milan. In the auction scene, John Dobson the auctioneer sells a sex-doll – this has driven me crazy because you can’t buy the things in Italy, so it had be ordered from London, and the opera management were even more unhappy when they found it cost £70.
We have created a most novel production. If this Rake opened in London it would never be forgotten. There are several moments of genius – the handling of the Blind Baba is done without a fault: she is a TV star, a world Ken knows well. The ‘graveyard’ scene will never be bettered, set in the Angel underground station, with the Devil, a drug-dealer in a heavy black leather coat, confronting the Rake, now destitute, with his heroin death-kit. It is startling and simple. The movements and actions are minimal, allowing the music to take over. The Devil’s exit on the shorting rails, with flashes of magnesium powder, is a knockout; and the set is classic, simple, and fits the action to a tee. The Hogarth paintings work well as adverts in the underground. Ken wants them graffitied – I have refused.
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13 May 1982, Florence: Modern London is perfectly at home in the Pergola Theatre. My operatic punks and new romantics have a flamboyance which mirrors the eighteenth century. Outside, Florence is a grey, dull city, invaded by hippy drug-addicts who have crawled out of another era – everything is history here; these tired hippies pound away aimlessly at African drums under the graffiti-stained arches of the Uffizi, gawped at by herds of deadpan blue anorak tourists from the North. Michelangelo’s fake David towers over the other statues. It reminds me of the story of the American lady who exclaimed in a loud voice in front of Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’ – ‘C’est la originale?’ The indigent population, who presumably always were bank clerks, treat us no better than our devalued money. It rains and the granitic streets are like dead prisons. The Arno runs vomit-coloured through the middle. The Renaissance: camouflage for rapacity.
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19 May 1982, Pensione Elisa and Santa Croce: The window of our room in the pensione opens on to Giotto’s bell tower – round its multi-coloured marble geometry the jackdaws circle on air currents. As you lie in bed and watch they seem almost motionless, there high above. At night the geometry fades to a chalky white, while the golden ball on the dome glows in the moonlight. On the window I’ve placed a rough slipware jug dappled with green glaze; it is filled with marigolds and blue cornflowers which fade to paper-white. At dawn the mason with his newspaper hat climbs the scaffolding, takes out his mallet and starts tapping … the jackdaws caw.
Yesterday as the service ended in Santa Croce an old dwarf lady – blind as a mole and dressed in her Sunday best, plaid kilt and furs – pulls the skirts of a pretty young girl at the holy water basin, who then scoops the water with her hands and kneels with it. The old dwarf lady dips her hand in the water and crosses herself. Suddenly the young girl gives a deep curtsy. The little old lady follows the walls as the choir sings, past the gigantic tombs of Michelangelo and Dante, feeling her way in the darkness to the door.
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Saturday 25 September 1982
Phoenix House – The Final Academy
At 5.30 this morning Genesis P. Orridge arrived in the darkness and we drove to Heathrow to collect his guru, Mr W. S. Burroughs. I carried my camera, and took a few shy snaps as we travelled back to Chelsea where Gen had booked the party into the Arts Club. During the next week Mr B. was banqueted at the B2 Gallery, filmed and interviewed across London, and did four nights of readings at the Ritzy in Brixton and one night in Heaven. I clicked away with my Nizo at him, Brion Gysin, John Giorno and others. WSB emerges tortoise-like to greet his audience. He stoops like a cadavre in the catacombs of Palermo and talks of mummies and immortality. To speak to him is almost impossible, as he is always on the move in little erratic circles. At rest he retires into himself and puts out a signal, ‘Leave me alone.’ The only thing to do is to be photographed with him, and that is what everyone attempted to do. His readings are immensely funny. He drawls out his lines in a Southern monotone, punctuating it only for sips of water. What might give you the shivers on the page becomes the blackest of black comedy. Brion Gysin fights an old battle with him; but William’s junk vision has won out against Brion’s magic and the battle isn’t joined. Brion described William fishing for inspiration in the sewers of Paris. They do not share accommodation on this trip, and their friendship now seems cemented only by the common platform that their young admirers have provided. Time has parted them: Brion the Parisian with his dream-machine and Bill in Kansas with his junk.
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18 November 1982. Edward Totah Gallery
My exhibition of paintings at the Edward Totah Gallery went off like a damp squib. There isn’t a more interesting show opening this week and it should have thrown up more than enough ideas for any critic to get his teeth in. Many of the misgivings I felt about painting in the early seventies resurface in the wake of this disappointment. For a start, memories are very short. No one remembers or mentions the Lisson shows. No one has paid the least attention to the films and their relation to the work. The art world exists in a vacuum, however exhilarating it may be for the artist. The results are marooned in art reference in hushed galleries. At the D’Offay Gallery you don’t hear Julian Schnabel’s crockery smashing – embalmed in lashings of oil paint. The end of a love affair? Wait, my friends, he’ll soon have his hands on the Sèvres service; and after D’Offay’s, the Tate, courtesy Saatchi and Saatchi. Britain isn’t working any more.
At my private view, swilling drink, after one hour the Tate ‘buyer’ was asked by Norman Rosenthal of the Royal Academy whether that institution would ever buy a Derek Jarman. ‘Who is Derek Jarman?’ was the response. Did the Tate know they had a Schnabel exhibition? No hope for the home-grown unless of course you dye your hair or wear silly suits – but never allow eccentricity to lapse into your manners. With the aplomb of a banker, you’ll end up in the most hideous living-rooms in the world. The coffee-table bears the sanitised book of your work, and the magazine next to it illustrates your patron’s good taste, status and investment rule.
It’s interesting that art reviews, unlike film reviews, usually start with the dead – today I’m sharing the honours with Van Dyck in The Times, damned on his reputation. One wouldn’t expect a film review to be dedicated to a revival of Ivan the Terrible at the NFT and The Tempest compared in a paragraph at the end.
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20 November 1982. Phoenix House
I worked on the paintings in January, stopped for The Rake, and worked again through September – the paintings are altering significantly. The first group drew on the fragments of Heraclitus, the technical drawings of Robert Fludd, Athanasius Kircher and seventeenth-century hermeticism. In black and scarlet they are austere, emblematic paintings. In Florence in May I gilded one of the sets for The Rake and came back to London with several spare books of gold leaf. The second group of paintings in September used this gold as a ground, and were based on nineteenth-century photographs of the male nude mixed with sexual and religious iconography, back-room paintings, which culminated in a large painting based on El Greco’s ‘Pietà’. Caravaggio deeply affected these paintings. I called the show ‘After the Final Academy’.
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Hares and Tortoises
Nicholas telephoned to say that Caravaggio had been put in the hands of a new lawyer, who was dealing with the papers much more professionally and there should be some movement at last. It was something of a relief as for the last week, with no money to paint and just the paper and ink for the Diary, I drifted uncertainly, caught on the apron strings of ‘The Tortoise’ as Vera Russell unflatteringly described Nicholas. ‘Why don’t you get yourself one of those Indians like James Ivory, darling? I saw Shakespeare Wallah and it was so much better than Ginger Rogers.’ I said that perhaps Nicholas was the tortoise of fable, in spite of the fact that Barry Flanagan’s hares are now the fashion in art. In any case, these two years have not wasted my time. I’ve done the theatre design for The Rake and started painting again. ‘THEY WERE NO GOOD,’ retorted Vera.
Later, Robert Medley and I had dinner at Jimmy’s, which was completely empty. ‘The recession,’ said Robert, ‘if Jimmy’s, which must be the cheapest restaurant in Soho, is empty, it must be biting hard.’ It was snowing outside. The gang of gruff waiters played cards with the lady who commands the till with a smile. Conversation drifted back to painting, and Robert said that the English were only interested in illustration. Witness Peter Blake’s ‘Bonjour Mr Hockney’. Peter Blake had announced in an interview that he was a better painter than David. Robert glowered. ‘Beside them David’s work sparkles with wit and invention.’ Then he switched to hares again.
~
Gerald Incandela sat in the cafe with his leather hat from the Ozarks casting a hillbilly shadow across his face, and lambasted the new painting in New York – particularly the set-up behind Julian Schnabel, whose success marks with a vengeance the invasion of PR and advertising into the art world. Here the Saatchis carved a great hole in the Tate to show weak paintings, remarkable only for their size – while back in NYC the backers of his gallery were also ad-men who meticulously and secretly promoted the work through the media with a very clever campaign. Money was no object and each show was sold out to these PR men, creating the illusion of success. While this comes as no surprise in the art market, the fact that this ambivalent world of half-truth has managed to invade the public institutions is a disaster. It’s now the turn of painting to receive the sugary brochures of the armaments industry, who produce their weapons for peace. Gerald says that the only hope for the world is its poets, for their language cannot be corrupted, or their product so easily sold.
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Over dinner at Norman Rosenthal’s we talk about Berlin: the Neue Zeitgeist, the Wall, and the restored museum between the two secret police HQs. Then the conversation drifts to Gilbert and George, and their various, well-publicised obsessions – evensong, rough trade, flower arranging, William De Morgan pots, all held together with an interior designer’s chic. They certainly titillate the closet cases of Bond Street where their sartorial style seems like a revolution, reproduces nicely and makes money. In their film there’s an image of an immaculate soldier marching on the spot. Land of hope and glory. Would they sit on the fence in their tweeds watching the firing-squads, sipping beaujolais nouveau?
~
If we must have troops let’s have them in bed. Twenty years ago I was sitting on the seashore at Rhodes watching the ships of the Greek navy. I spotted two figures walking towards me, a young lieutenant and a tough-looking little sailor, both dressed in pristine white. The officer asked me if I would like to hear ‘the real Greek music’. I was led to a small apartment where the sailor danced a Dance of the Seven Veils, with a piece of chiffon spangled with silver stars which he trailed very delicately across his bronzed and muscular body. There was bazouki music and we were served sweet coffee. I fucked with the lieutenant behind a screen and later went out dancing to a bar filled with sailors who circled round, each attempting to seduce me.
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Padeluun
His home is a PO box number in Berlin. He travels penniless, an artist-mendicant with hollow Kafka eyes, shaved head, and baggy grey trousers tied with string. Whatever dark thoughts he harbours behind a smile and outward serenity they are kept hidden. He believes artists should work, take simple jobs, receive no funds from state or individual beyond what is necessary for the simplest existence. His last job was refilling the contraceptive dispensers at the service areas on the autobahn – after he had done the job he would glue on the machine an immaculate sticker in orange, blue and silver, which announced
DIESE MACHINE IST MEIN ANTIHUMANISTISCHES KUNSTWERK
with the PO box-number Padeluun Berlin. This evening we went to see The Tempest late-night in Finchley, and discovered that we also had to sit through the emotional slough of A Bigger Splash, Jack Hazan’s only too revealing film of the sybaritic demi-monde which surrounded David Hockney in the early seventies – the film is an uncomfortable reworking of the hangover after the carefree party of the sixties, at which I had been an extra. I appear for a few brief moments, fortunately disguised in drag, ‘revealing all’ at Andrew’s first Miss World where David had been a judge. Tonight the young audience, many of whom I expect were on the dole, viewed it with a scarcely veiled fury, or laughed with disbelief at the vacuous lives it portrayed, but mixed, I’m certain (though they would never admit it) with a sneaking envy for the easy life of that self-indulgent decade. The butterfly life of the sixties has become the villain, and at the end of the film the young audience hiss. On the whole I agree with them, though the lifestyles they now so readily embrace were forged during those years along with the uncritical enthusiasm that makes the period seem so suspect – I think it will prove harder for Mrs Thatcher to put the clock back than she thinks.
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Night Life
The apocalypse is fulfilled. It makes little difference now whether the end is delayed four minutes or four decades: the means are there and we live daily with this reality and all our actions are shadowed by it. And what is the proper conduct for an artist living with this enormity – we should go out and slay the dragon.
This evening at the Riverside studios Michael Clarke, a young dancer of supreme artistry, performed the dance, and as he danced raised this question – as to what he should dance. For the dance is so old and alive, and the dance he danced was new, but was dead; as dead as the fragmented universe we live in. Glue, I thought; but what glue to piece together the fragments on the blank canvas bequeathed to us by modernism? In a rush we have revived our own past, every -ism and decade. In Michael’s piece the videos flickered and Cerith Wyn Evans moved them with dexterity, and all this was surely done before by Merce and the others who followed him. Then perhaps it had meaning, when with a series of large NOs the old order was hemmed in, trapped. Now surely the time has come to banish the abstract space, fill it with our daily life transfigured.
Michael dances his dance at the edge of time. And if, I thought, if only he danced his own life we should all be transported – but then this was his own life. ‘Banish the blank black stage and fill it with a thousand roses,’ said John Maybury, and Cerith timidly handed Michael a garland which for a brief moment strangled the artifice. He commanded not only his own body but touched out to ours – dance against the void.
~
1O November 1983. A PS for Paul
Paul arrives: ‘Write something about the cinema you love. The chapter’s pretty bleak. Anyone not knowing you might think it embittered …’
I’m obsessed by the cinema, but the obsession has well-defined parameters. It’s a way of analysing the world about me, the garden of earthly delights, and the dirty tricks department. This analysis could easily be undertaken with the pen or paintbrush; I’m not trapped in Film. It was never an ambition, I came to it late and by chance, that’s my ‘Independence’.
The absence of praise in this chapter, Paul, is due to the fact that the cinema I love hardly exists in this country, and where it exists it is fragmented and discontinuous; it’s largely ignored by the mainstream and because of this it’s a cinema that is often private, that uses the direct experience of the film-maker, and is more likely to be in 16mm or Super 8 than 35mm. With luck it will have ‘real’ people, not Equity members who will be characters, not ‘ciphers’, which is the mid-Atlantic way. The director will have made it without the normal funding mechanism, and he or she will certainly never have worked for a TV company.
In continental Europe this cinema is called THE CINEMA and you will have heard the names of its exponents. They are Godard, Antonioni, Pasolini, Rossi, the Tavianis, Fassbinder, Schroeter and a host of others, but here it is quite likely you may not have heard of Peter Watkins, Bill Douglas, Robina Rose, Terence Davies, Chris Petit, Ron Peck – and forgive me if I include myself – who are their counterparts. The Film establishment will have taken them so ‘seriously’ as to leave them isolated. It’s the same philistinism that runs through our schools and universities straight into the established institutions. There are film-makers in the Overground of a previous generation as fine as anything from the continent. Nick Roeg’s Performance and Walkabout, and the early films of Boorman are exceptional. Boorman has championed Cinema and enabled Neil Jordan to make Angel, one of those rare first features like Radio On or Nighthawks.
There is a subtle distinction between this work and the ridiculous media posturings of films like The Ploughman’s Lunch, which could pass for cinema only in this country. Wouldn’t it be great if ‘they’ could be disposed of with the humour of The Lady Killers, a really wonderful British film. However I’m afraid it will take more than that because behind ‘them’ are the Americans who have brought you Cruise and Fame, and squatted our film to their own profit, and the whole thing’s much funnier and sadder and the ‘truth’ of the matter would quickly lead me into libel. For the English, locked into their institutions struggling for preference, always kill with a smile; and the critics with nothing to write about will continue to replace THE CINEMA with the cinema. That which was made with love will remain a footnote until the Oblivion Digits are finally added up and darkness envelops our world.
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Michael Clarke dancing, 1983 (Photo: D. Conway)