Rescued by Rover (1905)

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Further Reading

Notes

Alexander Mitchell, ‘Top film hits snags’, The Sunday Times, 16 November 1969.
Paul Barker, ‘Arts in Society: Boy in a Cage’, New Society, 20 November 1969.
Welland was well-known at the time for his character in BBC TV police drama Z Cars (1962-1978).

Corinna Downing

Performance (1970)

[Production Company: Goodtimes Enterprises. Directors: Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg. Screenwriter: Donald Cammell. Cinematographer: Roeg. Editors: Antony Gibbs, Brian Smedley-Aston and Frank Mazzola (uncredited). Music: Jack Nitzsche. Cast: James Fox (Chas), Mick Jagger (Turner), Anita Pallenberg (Pherber), Michèle Breton (Lucy), Anthony Valentine (Joey Maddocks), Ann Sidney (Dana), John Bindon (Moody), Stanley Meadows (Rosebloom), Allan Cuthbertson (the lawyer), Johnny Shannon (Harry Flowers), Kenneth Colley (Tony Farrell).]
Performance is an important British film for three reasons. Firstly, it broke new ground aesthetically, in terms of its visual style. Secondly, as a social document it gives cultural expression to a particular historical moment. And thirdly, it demonstrates how innovation in cinema is always dependent upon a particular set of industrial as well as cultural circumstances.
Colin MacCabe dubs Performance ‘the finest British gangster film ever made’ (MacCabe, 1998: 8). Yet Donald Cammell’s rendition of Sixties’ London gangland is but a point of departure. The film documents the formal dissembling of that acutely rendered underworld by the transgressive spirit of the counter-culture’s hallucinatory drug scene. This is embodied in the iconic rock star Turner (Mick Jagger) who ‘takes over’ the identity of gangland drop-out Chas (James Fox) in the gothic gloom of a Powis Square mansion. His provocative accomplices in this bohemian ménage-a-trois are Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michèle Breton). Depending on your view, it is a film about Romantic disillusion and dissolution; a Nietzschean fable of the twilight of the idols; a depiction of the hangover after the party that was Swinging London; a Marcusean exploration of the mythic potential of free love to overthrow class-bound capitalism; or, according to Cammell himself, a poetic treatise on violence.
The film owes its distinctive visual style to four key elements: the creative adaptation of key locations, the central performances, the photography of co-director Nicolas Roeg, and Frank Mazzola’s post-hoc re-editing. The first part of the narrative offers a grimly realistic view of London. Donald Cammell’s brother David was hired as production manager and his thorough location scout yielded a brazen view of the capital, by turns rundown and tarted-up, alighting at last upon the dilapidated former gambling club in Lowndes Square for Turner’s Notting Hill retreat in which Chas takes refuge in the second part of the film. The décor of these interiors – a combination of faded grandeur, prosaic dereliction and bohemian chic – was designed by Christopher Gibbs who had decorated the flat in Courtfield Road which Pallenberg had shared with Rolling Stone, Brian Jones. Jones’ drug-induced demise is believed to have provided Cammell with the model for Jagger’s Turner. This combination of friends-and-family film-making with a darker concern for the border between reality and fiction, distinguishes the nature of the film’s central performances.
Cammell, an artist by training and a dilettante writer by inclination, had never made a film, though he had sold a couple of screenplays. Perhaps his singular talent was social entry into the Chelsea set of the mid-1960s. This was a bizarre côterie in which Establishment-figures rubbed shoulders with London’s criminal fraternity at parties thrown by artists, fashion designers and pop stars on budgets provided by television executives, advertising agents, record moguls and pornographers. This was a select milieu but one which, at least temporarily, forgot class boundaries. New money was the great leveller, hedonism the common currency. But it was a vibrant, cocksure scene from which some, like Jones, ultimately dropped out. It provided Cammell with his creative inspiration, but also gave him the connections with those, including producer Sanford Lieberson and co-director Nicolas Roeg, who enabled him to realise his vision on film.
Of the central performers, only Fox and Pallenberg were trained actors. Fox was cast against type as the arrogant young villain Chas forced into hiding when, against orders, he over-reaches himself in an attack on Joey Maddocks (Anthony Valentine). Fox’s ‘method’ training in the Elephant and Castle pubs frequented by ‘chaps’ from ‘the firm’, was overseen by boxing trainer, print-worker and friend of the mob, Johnny Shannon, who relishes his screen debut as gang boss Harry Flowers (MacCabe, 1998: 24-27 and 38-43). In a late interview Donald Cammell credited Pallenberg with much of the inspiration for the second part of the film (Chibnall and Murphy, 1999: 110-116) in particular through her ability to totally be herself on screen (rather than playing a part called Pherber) and the effect this had on others (especially Fox). Fox told MacCabe she taunted him for being too ‘straight’, a conflict which comes across on screen. Her experience of working in the experimental tradition of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty brought an emotional intensity to her performance (MacCabe, 1998: 53-4). Fox suffered from the experience of the film, withdrawing from acting during the 1970s in pursuit of personal spirituality (Walker, 1986: 423).
Fox’s ‘professional’ willingness to succumb to the experiment of Performance was, ironically, quite at odds with Jagger’s ‘amateur’ reluctance to play the part of Turner, based as it so clearly was on the demise of Brian Jones. Jagger’s equivocation, between being himself and playing the part, between the personal charisma and iconic signification he brings to the performance, and the vulnerability and ordinariness visible through his untrained technique, is a tension at the heart of this film. Of course, it accounts perfectly for the nihilistic demise of the reclusive Turner which satisfies the narrative motivation, but it does more than this. It opens up the traditionally hermeneutic nature of screen stardom to a much more fluid, less deterministic, emotional register. The result is a powerful, charismatic quality which engages the viewer on a new kind of emotional level. It is because of the rawness of its improvised performance style that the characters communicate so directly, so accessibly to the viewer.
This directness is exacerbated by Roeg’s intimate photography, just as it is deflected by the disorientation of the complex editing style. Indeed, the viewing experience is an emotional fort/da game which mirrors Chas’s own subjective ordeal. The hand-held camerawork of the Powis Square interiors, much of it shot on 16mm and naturally lit, lends a claustrophobic domesticity and an awkward, voyeuristic prurience to the unfolding pantomime of mixed sex, mixed drugs and re-mixed rock ‘n’ roll.
Despite pushing the boundaries, the finished film ran into more problems with its paymasters (Warner Brothers) than with the censor. The deal, which Sandy Lieberson had struck with his friend and head of production Ken Hyman (whose father’s Seven Arts media corporation had taken over the studio following the retirement of Jack Warner), represented a modest studio investment of £400,000 for a film they believed would cash-in on the high profile of Jagger. However, as originally shot, the film not only delayed Jagger’s entry into proceedings for more than 30 minutes, but offered a mystifying, disjunctive narrative, liberally laced with ‘real’ sex and drug-taking. So while its 11-week shoot and original edit were completed by late 1968, Warners refused to release the film. There ensued eighteen months of legal wrangling, during which time the studio again changed hands, both producer Lieberson and co-director Roeg left for other projects, and post-production was removed to Los Angeles where editor Frank Mazzola and composer Jack Nitschze were drafted in to re-package the film.
The film shown in the United States in August 1970 has remained the standard and only surviving version of what was once a longer narrative. Mazzola’s staccato montage compressed the early underworld sequences to bring Jagger’s character on screen more swiftly, and shortened the more graphic scenes of sex (between Chas and Dana) and violence (the Joey Maddocks fight). Nitschze’s soundtrack of eerie electronic pulses also introduced the showcase numbers featuring Jagger in more recognizable performance mode.
For all the apparent compromise and confusion of the film’s post-production history, film-making of this originality is only achieved through particularly beneficial circumstances. In this regard we should note the favourable currency of British popular cultural exports which led eager Hollywood studios not only to invest in overseas projects but to risk giving relative autonomy to largely untried production talents. Indeed, by 1968 American investment in British film production had reached an all-time high of £31.3 million (Ballieu and Goodchild, 2002: 84). Hollywood studios in Britain became aware of the lucrative potential of the youth market in popular culture and found its lure, for a while, irresistible. In 1967 Warner Bros. had approached the highly bankable Jagger (notwithstanding his recent arrest in a high-profile police drugs raid) to act as their ‘youth advisor’, an offer which the singer declined (Walker, 1986: 416). Nonetheless, this symbolised the majors’ interest in this new cultural force. But opportunities in mainstream cinema were available not only because of the studios’ willingness to speculate. What was essentially a fragmented British film market (briefly bolstered by American investment) allowed for (and even necessitated) diversity and experimentation. Cultural significance (and briefly power) moved from the mainstream to the margins; the counter-culture came, for a short while, to fill the vacuum at the centre.
One of the claims of the late-1960s’ counter-culture which reached its apotheosis in the violent events of 1968, was that personal liberation was a political act. Performance remains a radical film in this sense since, in modernist guise, its rehearsal of personal liberation is also mirrored in its formal dissemblance, its disharmony. The film’s roughness of texture, its dis-equilibrium, represents a revolt of the world of ideas against the world of objects (so feted in earlier Sixties films). This quality resides not just in the constituent elements of design, performance, photography and editing. We have only to contrast the ordered contents of Chas’ dressing-table drawer at the beginning of the film with the subsequent charades of dressing-up, and undressing and cross-dressing, to recognize the frailty of the performance-of-self which constitutes social identity. And the film doesn’t shrink from demonstrating liberation as both an act of violence and love, physically disabling as well as spiritually enabling.
From the violent sex Chas metes out to Dana at the beginning of the film, through the shot he fires into Joey Maddocks, the narrative concludes with a single bullet (the ultimate penetration) which dissolves Chas’ identity into that of Turner. Liberating sex is posited (pacé Bataille) as death of the self and re-birth, redolent not only of the transcendent mantras of the counter-culture and the polemics of Herbert Marcuse but, moreover, rooted in the spirit of Romanticism (1). Jon Savage sees the ending of Performance with the liberating fusion through death of Chas and Turner as ‘satisfying and curiously hopeful’ (2). Yet the final dénouement, in keeping with the moral ambiguity of the film, also posits a darker fate: the violent destruction of the radical but jaded dream that was the counter-culture. Harry’s ‘Rolls’ into which Chas/Turner climbs also symbolises the hegemonic ability of capitalism to absorb, re-package and neutralise dissent.
Politically, 1968 was a watershed and Performance internalises within its own radical structure the twin potentialities of liberation and destruction, of radicalism and conformity. By the film’s release in 1970, with the war in Vietnam more entrenched than ever, the darkness of Performance overshadowed its light. Perhaps its most celebrated line encapsulates the problem of personal identity in the context of the political: ‘The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness. Right?’. (Cammell, 2001: 99-100) Herein lies the Nietzschean fable in all its portentous glory.
Notes

See Georges Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood, London, Marion Boyars, 1987.
Jon Savage, Sight and Sound New Series, Vol. 5, No. 9 (September, 1995), p25.

Further Reading

Bill Baillieu and John Goodchild, The British Film Business. Chichester, John Wiley, 2002.

Donald Cammell, Performance, London: Faber, 2001.

Colin MacCabe, Performance, London, BFI, 1998.

Jon Savage, ‘Performance: Interview with Donald Cammell’ in Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy (eds), British Crime Cinema. London, Routledge, 1999.

Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England. London, Harrap, 1986.

Justin Smith

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

[Production Company: Hawk Films. Director and screenwriter: Stanley Kubrick. Cinematographer: John Alcott. Editor: Bill Butler. Cast: Malcolm McDowell (Alex de Large), Patrick Magee (Mr Alexander), Michael Bates (Chief Guard), Warren Clarke (Dim), Carl Duering (Dr Brodsky), Adrienne Corri (Mrs Alexander).]
In A Clockwork Orange’s Britain, the thugs who roam the streets raping, pillaging and murdering at will are at once both the savages from whom the civilised need protection, and the protectors themselves. Alex’s psychotic droogs flip from outlaws to guardians of the establishment with the merest whiff of state power.
It is no surprise that the British Board of Film Classification had particular problems passing the film as it seemed a direct attack not only on the civilised values it set itself up to guard, but also on the mechanisms which purported to keep it civilised. As Janet Staiger notes, ‘Since the film itself criticised government attempts to control or condition youth behaviour with the proposition that interference by authorities was more immoral than Alex’s original behaviour, it might look too self-serving of the Board to question the film.’ (2003: 38) In the end they were saved the trouble of censoring the film by Kubrick himself who was disturbed by just how potent a cultural force the film turned out to be.
Following the film’s UK release in 1971, a spate of supposedly copycat violent occurrences were reported together with a number of threats against Kubrick’s own family’s personal safety. As a result, Kubrick chose to withdraw the film from distribution in Britain. It remained unseen in the UK from this point until after his death in 1999. It could be that he felt the film spoke so specifically to the youth of the UK that Kubrick chose to withdraw it from this territory alone. Or it could be that he would have withdrawn it globally had he the power to do so. But the fact remains that the UK is the only country where Kubrick demanded the film be taken out of public circulation. The question is, does this say more about the nature of the film itself or British culture? Either way the two seem inextricably linked.
By the time Kubrick made the film he had long ‘gone native’. Born in New York, he had moved to the UK with his family and set up permanent home far from the reaches of all but the most persistent envoys of Hollywood. Perhaps Kubrick’s outsider status gave him the necessary distance to carry off such a potent critique of Britain and British cinema. A Clockwork Orange is the ultimate antidote to the familiar school of British Social Realism which largely dominated UK art cinema of the time. Kubrick loved to use supposedly low-culture to undress high-culture. Science Fiction and Horror are commonly regarded as low-brow genres, looked down upon as ‘trashy’ by the literary elite. It seems a peculiarly American conceit to use a blend of these disreputable genres to dissect both British culture and the class-fixated school of Social Realism. Kubrick emerged with a visionary critique of the effects of Britain’s rigid society, where everyone knows their place, the law serves the powerful and the civilised values this elite dictate form the very foundation of Britain’s national identity.
If nineteenth century Britain were to identify any single value above all others as embodying Britishness, it likely would have been a notion of being civilised. As a result, for Britons, national identity has become almost interchangeable with the idea of being civilised. If this means being considerate, educated and charitable, it also means being right, powerful and in-control.
A Clockwork Orange challenges the very meaning of ‘civilised’ with its carefully orchestrated assault on the establishment. Kubrick has put together a checklist of characteristics of civilised Britain, placing them at the heart of the moral malaise running through his vision of a nation in decline. Classical music from Beethoven, and even more ironically, Purcell’s ‘Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary’ become synonymous not with the genteel drawing rooms of the educated, but with the sadistic erotic fantasies of juveniles. The bowler hat and cane once associated with that bastion of Britishness, the archetypal City Gent, is now turned into a uniform of terror worn by Alex and his droogs. Science and Medicine are now to be found working for the frightened, patronising and deluded government. The British institutional construct of the State is subverted and used as a locus for power, corruption and lies. The irony of the film is that it is this very same corrupt fear which is serving to produce a nation of disaffected amoral and frustrated psychopaths. Perhaps Kubrick meant to indicate that this was also exactly the personality required for Imperial expansion and the subsequent violent ‘civilising’ of the world.
The striking and much mimicked uniforms of the droogs took the tropes of the City gent and rendered them into something more akin to the identifiers worn by members of any number of contemporary youth subcultures, in itself a very British idea. It comes as little surprise that so many of these subcultures were first produced by the UK. In a grey impoverished post-war Britain, the youth sought to separate themselves from their parents’ ‘keep calm and carry on’ post war mentality and asked: ‘what has my county done for me?’ The answer appeared to be ‘not much’. And so the youth sought to distance themselves from their parents’ lifestyles and seek out their own more colourful identities often through the rising iconography of pop music. The Teddy-boys, mods, rockers, punks, headbangers – these were all established first in Britain before being exported to the US and beyond. Watching 1960s news footage of the clashes on Brighton Beach between Mods, Rockers and police, it’s easy to see where Burgess and Kubrick might have got their inspiration for Alex and his Droogs.
The disintegration of language is a further omnipresent force in the film. The so-called Received Pronunciation (RP) of the BBC newscaster and indeed virtually all public voices aired in the UK up to the 1960s is torn asunder by the droogs’ use of a slang called Nadsat. Slang is used ubiquitously by youth subcultures to differentiate themselves from the adults who control their daily lives, as a way of carving out one’s own identity and presenting a challenge to social authority.
Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange is perhaps the most potent example of Alex’s desire to live outside the state-sanctioned social system. Alex has chosen to embrace a way of speaking whose subtext is to say ‘I don’t want to be a part of the society into which I’m born.’ The BBC had long been seen, at home and abroad, as the voice of civilised British values in no small part because of the strongly associated intonations and accents of the dialect used by its reporters and presenters. This RP is also strongly associated with having a formal education, which in turn is often associated with being wealthy and coming from an upper-class background. Alex and his droogs wilfully discard any aspirations to belong to the social class of the power elite by embracing their own dialect, uniform, and criminality. In the same way, Kubrick actively subverts the tropes of so called civilised values through co-opting Purcell and the bowler hat, producing a peculiarly British critique of all that Britannia stands for. More than that, it’s a call for a very British revolution.
A Clockwork Orange sits a little uneasily in this overview of 50 key British films. Is it really a British film or actually a US studio film masquerading as British? After all, few of us would consider Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón 2006) a British film, even though much of it is shot on the familiar streets of London, any more than we would consider Our Man In Havana (Carol Reed 1959) a Cuban film. But what is it then that makes a film belong to one culture or nation rather than another? Traditionally, because of their high production costs, films are often constructed with a cultural universality in mind. It’s a rare film made outside of France, the US or Japan that can cover its production costs from within its domestic market alone. So where does this leave A Clockwork Orange? Is it British, American or simply the product of a global industrial process rather than the expression of any single nation’s cultural identity?
A Clockwork Orange has a largely British cast, crew and setting and is adapted from a British author’s novel. But it is directed by Stanley Kubrick, arguably the most significant of all American directors. Kubrick found finance for the film through Warner Brothers at the very heart of Hollywood. The US studios were actively seeking to fund their very own art-movies in order to compete with the raft of films from Europe which had lately been sweeping up awards, critical praise, and above all dollars around the globe. Using American money to fund what seems on the surface like a very British picture might have been the industrial equivalent of building a cultural Trojan Horse. Britain has long been perceived as a kind of cultural beachhead between Europe and the US thanks largely to its common language. Warner Brothers could easily have conceived of using A Clockwork Orange to colonise the European art-house market from within. With their more challenging and adult approach to subject matter, films like The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci 1970), Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard 1965) and Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel 1967) were selling tickets almost as fast as they were breaking taboos. It’s likely that Hollywood wanted a piece of this action and thought that by producing something abroad, which tackled potentially controversial themes, it could beat the Europeans at their own game while keeping the international box-office receipts in-country. Looking at A Clockwork Orange’s national identity this way opens up an intriguing argument for the film as a kind of US imperialist indoctrination of the UK in much the same manner as the film’s anti-hero, Alex, finds himself brainwashed by state power. The cultural and industrial muscle of Hollywood equates easily with the financial and ethical authority of the British state as depicted in Kubrick’s film.
However, A Clockwork Orange can hardly be labelled a US film simply because of its US director and funding. It is very hard to imagine the film functioning as successfully if located in any other country in the world besides Britain. It is this exploration of the iconography of the UK which confirms A Clockwork Orange’s cultural identity as truly British. There is something inherently British in the way the material addresses social flux in a timeline which could begin with a past depicted in If… (Lindsay Anderson 1968), continuing through the disaffected present found in Trainspotting (Danny Boyle 1995) and arriving at the dystopian future in which A Clockwork Orange is set. Kubrick uses an idea of Britain, a memory of Empire, casting its eye over the past of this once powerful British Imperial Civilisation and presenting us with a vision of an atrophied future where the savage and civilised have become one.
Perhaps this film is, in a perverse way, Kubrick’s paean to Britain. It seems somehow a fitting tribute to the artistry of A Clockwork Orange that it resonated so powerfully with British youth culture while simultaneously galvanising the outraged attention of Middle England’s moral Right. ‘Of all the films that [Kubrick] made in Great Britain, [Barry Lyndon and A Clockwork Orange] are, paradoxically, the only ones whose cultural background is truly English.’ (Ciment 2005: 411) What other film in the history of UK cinema has been rereleased nation-wide thirty years after its original debut in over 250 cinemas? If there remained any doubt over A Clockwork Orange’s national identity, this should triumphantly confirm its position as a key work of and for British cinema.
Further Reading

Michel Ciment, ‘A Clockwork Orange”, in Alison Castle (ed.) The Stanley Kubrick Archives, London, Taschen, 2005.

Janet Staiger, ‘The Cultural Productions of A Clockwork Orange’, in Stuart Y. McDougal (ed.) Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Simon Ward

Get Carter (1971)

[Production Company: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer British Studios. Director: Mike Hodges. Screenwriter: Hodges. Cinematographer: Wolfgang Suschitzky. Music: Roy Budd. Editor: John Trumper. Cast: Michael Caine (Jack Carter), Ian Hendry (Eric), Britt Ekland (Anna), John Osborne (Kinnear), Tony Beckley (Peter), George Sewell (Con), Geraldine Moffat (Glenda), Bryan Mosley (Brumby), Rosemarie Dunham (Edna), Petra Markham (Doreen).]
The word ‘cult’ in film terms is synonymous with director Mike Hodges’ debut 1971 feature Get Carter; a film that in its short lifetime has gone from being a critical disaster to Total Film’s greatest British movie. From its eerily haunting theme music, through its harsh realism and brutal characterisation, to its postmodernist plundering of British film history (long before postmodernism was de rigueur), Get Carter has affected successive generations of film fans, eventually persuading critics of its worth.
Set in a decaying Newcastle-upon-Tyne at the end of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ the story deals with gangster, Jack Carter (Michael Caine, in a role forever associated with him), returning to the north to bury his brother, uncovering the murderous truth of his demise, and taking calculated, violent revenge. Amidst this Hodges paints pictures of a world of change, where progress is as unstoppable as Jack Carter, and as equally brutal and unconcerned for those swept aside. Get Carter signifies an end to the ‘Swinging Sixties’, and an end to the ‘old’ in all its contexts, and yet the dawn of the new that it heralds is tainted, decadent, deviant, and ultimately deserving of the same emotionless dispatch that Hodge’s protagonist finds at the end of the film.
Decay is on screen from the pre-title sequence in crime ‘boss’ Gerald Fletcher’s flat where the London ‘mob’ Carter works for sit around in the lacklustre decadence of a half-hearted orgy, watching pornographic slides that themselves have a brutal yet detached reality about them. Masterfully shot by Wolfgang Suschitzky, the characters are dissected by the frame, reflecting their incompleteness, loss of self, and cold separation. This is followed by a title sequence where the immaculately tailored Carter is travelling north by train, and is seen taking unidentified drops and tablets (undoubtedly ‘uppers’ and ‘downers’) and becoming progressively dishevelled – even the ‘honest villains’, the folk hero-monsters of the 1960s, have fallen foul of the pornography and drugs they pedal, slipping into decadence.
This is the decadence of the south, of London, and whenever and wherever those connected to the London ‘mob’ appear there is a degree of ineffectuality, disconnectedness, and of being somehow ‘missing’. Nowhere is this shown more clearly than in the gratuitous (though laden with symbolism) phone sex scene, where Carter and Fletcher’s wife Anna (Brit Eckland) are literally disconnected by some two hundred and sixty miles. Carter’s detached, soulless persona allows him to indulge in a graphic sexual conversation with his lover, whilst his landlady sits only feet away from him, her movements in the rocking chair reflecting growing passions. After the sexual liberation of the sixties, what was left? A sensual, erotic scene, rendered seedy and unsatisfying: a fitting prediction for the 1970s. The scene itself ends with a degree of ineffectuality, with Gerald Fletcher arriving home to his wife writhing on a bed, phone pressed to her ear. His only reaction is, ‘What’s the matter? You got gut trouble or something?’ (Hodges, 1999: 25), leaving Anna unfulfilled and Carter disconnected (though with the possibility of reconnection to a different number – Edna, his landlady).
Whilst decadence captures the South, the North is depicted as a place of decay, in the fabric of the industrial yards the film uses as a backdrop, and in the attitudes, aspirations, and morality of the working-class that populate the mise-en-scene. There is an evident dereliction in the core industries - gone is Harold Wilson’s ‘Britain... forged in the white heat of this revolution’ (1) of the 1960s, replaced by a harsh, aging industrial landscape, populated by harsh, aging caricatures: flat-capped, toothless, beer-bellied men, and bouffanted, weighty, hardened women.
Aided by an almost documentary realism (2) sections of the action are played out within traditional working class places: the pub, the races, the bookmakers, the café, the bingo hall, etc. There is irony in the use of a form that was once seen as a force for unifying the nation, to record a society so deeply divided and so evidently in decline. There is similar irony in the socially predictive nature of the film that seems to offer pre-echoes of Thatcherite Britain, of the pervasive drug culture of the 1990s, and of the sexually open ‘gangster’ culture of the turn of the millennium.
The documentary feel is enhanced by Hodges’ use of local Tynesiders to ‘flavour’ the action. Suschitzky frames much of the action against this local backdrop, often off-centring the principals to emphasise their place within a wider local grouping. When Carter arrives in Newcastle and heads for a pub, it is the reaction of the ‘locals’ to his request for a beer that not only lends a sense of difference but a clear sense of realism, highlighting a class divide, and a north – south divide that was to set the political and social battleground for the next three decades.
CARTER

A pint of bitter

The barman picks up a glass mug and begins to draw the beer. Carter snaps his fingers at him.

In a thin glass.

(Hodges, 1999: 6)
The documentary look is consciously relaxed when Carter comes into contact with those controlling events around his brother’s death (and consequently this part of Carter’s life), and either consciously or subconsciously indicates that the Cliff Brumbys and Cyril Kinnears of this world are somehow disconnected from reality, or perhaps cushioned from it by their wealth and position. Their demise however revives a documentary feel, which suggests a postmodern playfulness in form that sets this film apart from most of its predecessors.
Throughout the film there are conscious nods towards the documentary tradition, but none are so foregrounded as the intertextual referencing of the classic pre-war documentary Spare Time (Jennings, 1939). The ‘northern’ mise-en-scene of pubs and dancehalls has its antecedence in Humphrey Jennings’ seminal work, as can be seen from the scene where Carter and Edna’s lovemaking is juxtaposed with shots of a kazoo marching band, ‘The Pelaw Hussars’, who are reminiscent of the marching band in Spare Time (even to the small boy leading / dancing at the front). The intertexutal reference is confirmed at the end of their sequence where the sound of the kazoos can be heard across a Carter/Edna scene and they are playing a refrain from Spare Time. The scene itself is one of moral decay, with Carter’s illicit liaison being set against the innocence of youthful activity.
Carter’s scenes with Edna are indicative of a broader representational theme, as the roles of women in a post-sexual revolution period are explored. Feminism was only just reaching public consciousness, and Hodges displays a mix of the familiar and yet different in the women he portrays. All are secondary to the main protagonist, yet all are prominent in the choices that face Carter, choices that lead ultimately to an inevitable end. Whilst reflecting cultural changes and the impact of gender politics, Hodges maintains Carter as a typical noirish anti-hero, whose ultimate downfall has women at its root. Similarly, these proto-feminist women that Hodges places on the screen fulfil the destinies of the femme-fatale, regularly kissed and slapped in an image of the victim, whilst manipulating scenarios to their advantage with little concern for the consequences to others.
Yet Hodges provides a twist in a neat noir conclusion to an analysis of Get Carter through two of the principal female characters, Glenda (Geraldine Moffat) and Doreen (Petra Markham). Glenda initially fulfils the role of the archetypal femme-fatale, in working for Cliff Brumby to ensnare Carter. She works through the noir handbook, bringing Carter to the true villain, saving him from adversaries, offering herself sexually to him, and then paying the price in death. However, Glenda is not the traditional manipulator of noir, but instead a woman surviving in the grip of crime, but with no view of the larger picture, and no motive other than the immediate desire to prove her worth to those who have power. Indeed it is Glenda who offers the narrative ‘reveal’ (in a scene where Caine’s acting is demonstrated at its best) through ignorance of Carter’s situation, and by absenting herself from the scene, leaving Carter with a key piece of evidence to finally connect the pieces to understand the reason for his brother’s murder.
It is in this scene that the reality of Doreen’s situation becomes clear and becomes the plot point for the final act of the film. Doreen is Carter’s niece, but in an early scene a throw-away line offers a possibility that she is in fact Carter’s illegitimate daughter. The morality of Doreen is shown throughout, and she realistically represents the noir ‘virgin’ whose role (often unsuccessful) is to save the protagonist. The ‘reveal’ however shows her to be just another ‘actress’ in one of the porn films that flicker through the plot, and it would seem one that was not necessarily under duress. Is she simply taking the opportunity to make money without concern for consequences that lead to the death of her father, and the death of her revenging uncle/father? If so, she is no longer the noir ‘virgin/victim’, but is instead a different and emergent character, presaging a profound change in the representation of women on the screen and their societal roles.
Get Carter’s central theme of revenge for the blood of family in the face of capitalist and criminal greed was one that resonated with audiences at the time as it was seen as a man ‘doing what men do’. To some in a modern, post-Thatcherite audience, this gangster, this killer, is simply representing the disenfranchised fighting society’s dominant and controlling forces: a born-again David with Goliath in the sights of his shotgun. To those whose vision of the gangster world comes from the films of Guy Ritchie, Carter has a sense of authenticity, of believability, whilst retaining style and a set of quotable witty one-liners. When he throws Brumby to his death off the multi-storey car park, there is anger, but tempered with a brutal professionalism. Yet the sophistication of his revenge against Kinnear, and less obliquely Fletcher, shows a level of malevolence and manipulation that takes him out of the role of noir protagonist and into that of tragic hero, who must have realised his actions would result in his own death.
Setting the British gangster film bar high indeed, Get Carter was undeniably of its time and yet (for film audiences and censors worldwide) significantly before its time. Its ending shocked and still shocks; having been prepared for and witnessing Carter’s successful revenge it seems fundamentally ‘unfair’ that he has only moments to savour it, and more so that he is dispatched so callously from afar at the point he is renouncing his past life. It is at this moment, and moments like this throughout the film, where audiences are taken out of a cosy ‘narrative reality’ and faced with events that are all too ‘real’, that they either ‘get’ Get Carter or struggle with it until it comes round again, calculated, relentless, and unstoppable.
Notes

Speech at Labour Party Conference, Scarborough, 1^st October 1963.
Wolfgang Suschitzky began his career as a photographer and cut his cinematic teeth working with Paul Rotha. His camera operator was Dusty Miller, later responsible for the gritty London look in TV’s The Sweeny and Minder.

Further Reading

Michael Caine, What’s It All About? London, Arrow, 1993.

Ali Catterall and Simon Wells, Your Face Here: British Cult Movies Since the Sixties, London, Fourth Estate, 2001.

Steve Chibnall, Get Carter: The British Film Guide 6, London, Tauris, 2003.

Steve Chibnall, and Robert Murphy, (eds) British Crime Cinema, London, Routledge, 1999.

Mike Hodges, Get Carter: The Screenplay, Eye, ScreenPress, 1999.

Get Carter: the original site (http://www.btinternet.com/~mark.dear/carterindex.htm)

Get Carter Tour (http://www.aouq09.dsl.pipex.com/getcarter)

Freddie Gaffney

The Wicker Man (1973)

[Production Company: British Lion Film Corporation. Director: Robin Hardy. Screenwriter: Anthony Shaffer. Cinematographer: Harry Waxman. Music: Paul Giovanni. Editor: Eric Boyd-Perkins. Art Director: Seamus Flannery. Cast: Edward Woodward (Sergeant Howie), Christopher Lee (Lord Summerisle), Britt Ekland (Willow), Diane Cilento (Miss Rose), Ingrid Pitt (Librarian), Lindsay Kemp (Alder MacGregor).]
Although celebrated by Cinéfantastique as ‘The Citizen Kane of horror movies’, The Wicker Man has only one genuine moment of terror in the final dénouement (Bartholomew, 1977: 4).In many ways it is not really a horror film at all. Moreover, it has had a chequered history and very nearly disappeared without trace. So this tribute is evidence at least of the canonical status which certain, once debased, texts later enjoy amongst a cognoscenti (of loyal fans, devoted critics and now scholars too). More recently, that process of elevation for The Wicker Man reached new heights when it received that most dubious of accolades: a terrible Hollywood remake (Neil LaBute, 2006).
So if it is not really a horror film, what kind of film is The Wicker Man? For the most part it is a curious mixture of detective story and folk musical. And the fact that it is an amalgam of many genres makes for its idiosyncratic charm. As Eco suggests, a cult film must firstly ‘provide a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan’s private sectarian world’. But furthermore, in order for a fan to engage with it, it must be possible ‘to break, dislocate, unhinge it’ (Eco, 1987: 198). We need to enquire how a film which can be so fruitfully disassembled was put together in the first place.
Christopher Lee (who plays the laird of the remote Scottish island, Summerisle) was central to The Wicker Man project from the outset. In the late 1960s, weary of Count Dracula, he had approached the playwright Anthony Shaffer who promised to ‘write him an intelligent horror film’ (Brown, 2000: 14); drawing inspiration from David Pinner’s 1967 novel Ritual, concerning a police investigation of a child’s death and occult witchcraft practices in a remote Cornish village, Shaffer began work on an original screenplay. A more fruitful source was J.G. Frazer’s Victorian cod-anthropological study, The Golden Bough, which provides much of the symbolic iconography and ritual practice of Summerisle. Shaffer encouraged his friend Robin Hardy, recuperating after a mild heart attack, to research the ‘old religion’ with a view to constructing a story about the nature of sacrifice.
Meanwhile, the financially-beleaguered independent producer British Lion had been bought by property tycoon John Bentley, who appointed Canadian Peter Snell as head of production. Keen to avert union fears of peremptory asset-stripping at Shepperton Studios, Bentley charged Snell to instigate some new projects. Snell met with Shaffer, Hardy and Lee and persuaded the studio to film The Wicker Man script. But there were strings attached to the modestly-budgeted enterprise (£420,000). It had to be an all-location shoot, and it had to begin immediately. Not only was the production team thus assembled with unseemly haste and without proper location planning, but they faced the challenge of re-creating a blossoming Scottish May-time in a wet, cold autumn 1972.
What the ensuing conflicts recorded by Bartholomew and Brown demonstrate (beyond their contribution to the film’s cult notoriety) is how creative tensions in the collaborative process produce certain kinds of results on screen. They show an assemblage of individual creative contributions not properly synthesized by a singular vision, sometimes working against one another, pulling the film in different directions. This last point is a tendency noted by early reviewers and is partly a product also of the editing process.
During post-production British Lion again changed hands and Peter Snell was sacked. The Wicker Man, edited by Eric Boyd-Perkins, was released in an 84-minute version and put out as a B-feature on the same bill as Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973). It previewed in London’s Victoria Metropole in December 1973, before its official opening on 21 January 1974 at the Odeon Haymarket (Brown, 2000: 113-4).
Most reviewers recognised the film’s concept and damned its execution, praised the script and the calibre of the actors, but deemed the whole less than a sum of its parts. The Financial Times was not alone in its claim that the film’s ‘fascinating ingredients do not quite blend’. (1) The Sunday Telegraph said the film lacked the balanced ‘inter-relation of the ordinary and the extraordinary that marks the best fantasy fiction’. (2) Such negative reactions not only reflect the common difficulty in locating the movie within established generic conventions, they point to the very lack of narrative cohesion which gives the film its cult appeal.
Meanwhile, at a preview screening, Christopher Lee suggested much of the original footage was missing; the ensuing investigation, which has passed into legend, reached the unlikely conclusion that the outtakes had been disposed of near Shepperton in the foundations of the M3 motorway. Lee has subsequently developed an elaborate conspiracy theory which charges the studio with deliberately suppressing much of his finest screen performance, and swears to this day that somewhere the original film exists.
Later a print of a longer (102-minute) cut, originally sent to veteran American independent producer Roger Corman with a view to US distribution, was rediscovered, and New Orleans film buffs Stirling Smith and John Simon launched a campaign with Hardy and Lee, to get this version restored and released. It was eventually shown some twenty years after its first theatrical release, on US cable television in 1993.
The complicated history of the film’s different versions begged a definitive ‘Director’s Cut’ that Hardy was only too pleased to endorse. Such flamboyant marketing ploys are designed to appeal to the film buff, the cultist and the collector – to re-brand a past product with classic status. It is significant that the DVD edition of The Wicker Man (released in 2002) offers both the 84-minute and the 102-minute edits. Important to cult fans is the existence, side-by-side, of different versions that can be compared, replayed, debated and dissected.
Aside from the loss of the opening mainland scenes (102-minute cut) which serve to establish Sergeant Howie’s dour, spotless Christian copper (Edward Woodward), the other major narrative change in the shorter (84-minute) version is the conflation of the two nights Howie spends on Summerisle into one, and the excision of the initiation rite of Ash Buchanan (Richard Wren). The three-day term Howie endures the islanders’ Pagan practices in the longer version, building towards his May Day sacrifice, carries a weight of religious symbolism the shorter version loses. And the ritual offering of a virgin youth to the landlord’s daughter Willow MacGregor (Britt Ekland) establishes her as the Siren Howie must resist during the second night. Furthermore, in the 84-minute version we are denied the introduction of Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) who brings the boy to Willow’s window, with his elegy to fecundity and the promise of tomorrow’s ‘somewhat more serious offering’. Howie’s initiation into Pagan practices is as strongly rooted in its procreation creed as it is in its death rituals. No accident then that his final ‘sacrifice’ in the cage of the Wicker Man’s abdomen, should symbolise a return to the womb for this man who has, on religious principle, thwarted his own entry into the phallic community. The symbolic androgyny of this defining moment is plain: fatal incarceration within a male womb. It marks both the culmination of the profound anxiety about earthly sexual difference which is conspicuous throughout the film, and the spiritual transcendence (in Christian orthodoxy) to a realm in which sexual difference doesn’t matter.
There are many self-conscious elements in the narrative which seem at first to jar, but (particularly on repeated viewing) have a resonance that propels them into cult appeal. These manifest themselves in several ways: symbolic reference, acting styles and body language, the use of music and the juxtaposition of certain camera shots. But together they conjure a sort of dissonance which might be termed the spirit of play.
This playful subterfuge begins from the moment Howie sets foot on the island and is met with denial by the harbour-master’s inscrutable cronies, and continues with postmistress May Morrison’s (Irene Sunters) resistance to the idea that her daughter is missing – she has a daughter, not Rowan, but Myrtle (Jennifer Martin), whom she introduces.
The barroom drinking song that evening disrupts the impetus of Howie’s investigation just as he has intruded upon their bawdy entertainment. There is a distinctive slap-stick style about this musical interlude, involving the whole company in an obviously rehearsed set-piece which impinges radically, if playfully, in the diegesis, and wrests power from Howie’s serious purpose. Later, as the hapless Sergeant takes the air before retiring, he witnesses couples openly engaged in sex on the village green. This sequence is shot in a stylised slow-motion which conveys the drowsy, hypnotic sexual power which has descended upon the villagers with nightfall.
The initiation of Ash Buchanan introduces Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle whose body language is curiously stiff throughout, as if he were wearing a corset. There is something strange about the way he holds himself: the lower back, neck and shoulders. He is, we might say, a living totem: his physical power (and thus his political status amongst the islanders) is expressed symbolically (rather than actively) in this rigid, muscular, constrained posture. There is something sensually alluring and gratifying in his physical symmetry and command. Indeed, his whole body resonates with phallic power.
By contrast, Howie’s waning authority is echoed in the literal stripping of his body: first, as a sexually tormented figure sweating in his pyjamas at Willow’s potent dance, then in the donning of the Fool’s costume stolen from Alder MacGregor (Lindsay Kemp), and finally in being attired in a plain, messianic shift at the moment of sacrifice.
The discovery of a hare in the coffin of Rowan Morrison (Geraldine Cowper) is captured in close-up with an accompanying musical twang from the Celtic harp. This is another repeated technique in narrative italicising – almost cartoon-style – which is overdone throughout. Similarly, there are visual gags such as the lingering close-up on the organ stop ‘flute d’amour’ at Lord Summerisle’s castle which confound narrative verisimilitude. The body of web-based fan commentary on the film provides ample evidence that it is precisely such self-conscious, jarring discords (in camerawork and sound) which the cultist adores and, on repeated viewing, anticipates with relish.
Cult films tread these cracks in the paths of narrative engagement in the way they subvert codes of cinematic realism. In so doing, they become celebrated and cherished, as much for their hyperbolic flaws as their visual excesses. Such textual incongruities open up narrative spaces for that fan intervention so peculiar to cult films. They rehearse playful rituals which fans appropriate, re-enact and invest with meaningful pleasures beyond the realm of the text itself. The Wicker Man, then, offers the believer the raw materials of religious, sexual and political transgression within the safe, fairytale world of vicarious play.
Acknowledgement

A longer version of this work appears in Jonathan Murray, Lesley Stevenson, Stephen Harper, and Benjamin Franks (eds) Constructing ‘The Wicker Man’: Film and Cultural Studies Perspectives, Dumfries, University of Glasgow Crichton Publications, 2005.

Notes

Nigel Andrews, ‘Holiday Fodder’, Financial Times, 14 December 1973.
Margaret Hinxman, ‘Sting in the Tail of the Year’, Sunday Telegraph, 23 December 1973.

Further Reading

Manthia Diawara, ‘Power and Territory: The Emergence of Black British Film Collectives’ in Lester Friedman (ed.), British Cinema and Thatcherism, London, UCL Press, 1993.

Sheila Johnston, ‘Filmmakers on Film: Horace Ové on Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds’, Daily Telegraph, 17 September 2005.

Sarita Malik, Representing Black Britain: Black and Asian Images on Television London, Sage, 2002.

Jim Pines ‘Black Films in White Britain’ in Margaret Dickinson (ed.), Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945-90, London, BFI, 1999.

Jim Pines ‘British Cinema and Black Representation’ in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, 2^nd edn, London, BFI, 2001.

Sarah Barrow

Jubilee (1978)

[Production Company: Megalovision. Director: Derek Jarman. Screenwriter: Jarman. Cinematographer: Peter Middleton. Music: Brian Eno. Editor: Nick Barnard. Cast: Jenny Runacre (Elizabeth I and Bod), Nell Campbell (Crabs), Toyah Wilcox (Mad), Jordan (Amyl Nitrite), Hermine Demorrane (Chaos), Ian Charleson (Angel), Karl Johnson (Sphinx).]
Jarman is a troublesome case and appears to relish his role as a thorn in the official flesh of the British cinema…He is no less troublesome to the avant-garde. (1)
The cinema which dominates our world consists mainly of fictional narratives; it often features established star performers, and fits within or extends established genres. Most of its films last between two and three hours, some are part of a series and through the past hundred years of their history these ‘feature’ films have often been adapted from novels, plays, short stories and comic books.
This is important, for it reminds us that when cinema was created it quickly adopted many of the devices of theatre and literature to guide its development. Because this commitment to narrative seems somewhat ‘natural’ we rarely ask why it developed in the first place and in particular why it developed so quickly in a medium – film – which was in the early 1900s, almost wholly a visual medium with the possibility of a musical accompaniment. Why was this new medium with no facility for words beyond its disruptive inter-titles so swift to adopt the techniques and conventions of literature and theatre and why, has it remained preoccupied with narrative, character-centred fiction?
Despite the dominance of narrative fiction there are alternative approaches which reach back many decades including montage, surrealism, abstraction or the search for an ‘authentic’ documentary realism. These possibilities have continued to interest film (and now of course, digital video)-makers and their influence can often be seen superficially in pop videos, movie trailers, television advertising and the general ‘flow’ of moving images throughout our lives. However, it is wrong to consider these ‘alternatives’ as a single coherent opposition to ‘Hollywood’-style fiction.
One of the characteristics of modernist, avant-garde practice in all the arts has been a tendency for practitioners to seek comfort in groups of like-minded artists, proclaiming to the world through manifestos and critical writing their commitment to a particular approach to aesthetic production and their (often vehement) rejection of other kinds of work. In the world of experimental film many of those who pursued a kind of pure abstraction rejected the narrative references of surrealism. The surrealists in turn proclaimed a preference for popular cinema over the bourgeois pretensions of the 1920s avant-garde.
Occasionally a film-maker would emerge with so specific a vision and approach that he or she did not fit easily into any such groups. Derek Jarman was such a film-maker for he seemed to produce work with a powerful visual style, an imaginative use of sound and music and yet an interest in character, narrative and both contemporary and historical documentation. His work seemed to discover and draw upon the range of film practices where other artists would commit to a more limited approach. This multi-dimensional vision might have seen him acclaimed as one of the more remarkable film-makers of the recent past; yet in fact Jarman’s films, including Jubilee, often upset many of the people they might have most impressed.
Jarman was born in the London suburbs in 1942. From public school he went through art college, studying painting at the Slade and mixing with some of the leading British ‘Pop’ painters of the 1960s. He worked as a designer for the Royal Ballet, the Royal Opera House and on Ken Russell’s films The Devils and Savage Messiah, before making 8mm films while continuing to paint. In 1972 he published his first book of poems and four years later released his first feature film Sebastiane.
Jarman’s second feature film Jubilee was released in 1978. It might be described as a punk film, a film about punk or an avant-garde film of its period. Any of these claims would invite criticism which would reveal much about the place of Jarman in British film history. In retrospect, punks have been highly critical of the film, suggesting that while it was made at the time of punk it does not ‘represent’ what happened in any authentic way. Meanwhile, as Jubilee began showing on the mainstream circuit the British avant-garde regarded this as ‘selling out’.
This is typical of the reading of Jarman as the outsider, the man who never found a place in any group other than his own, despite his prolific and sociable creativity. As Michael O’Pray has suggested: ‘Jarman is an awkward case in the great art tradition: neither a Wardour Street nor an avant-garde film-maker, nor a recognised painter’. (O’Pray, 1994: 20)
This diversity is intriguing and perhaps explains why Jarman was attracted to punk in his film. O’Pray added that Jarman contributed significantly “across a wide spectrum of art” but in some respects it is the negatives in O’Pray’s statement which are most interesting in that they force us to think imaginatively about how we might summarise clearly the enterprise and contribution of Jarman to British cultural life. We may be able to say what he was not, but can we say what he was?
Jubilee adds to the complexity of any analysis since it is in one sense the major contemporary British punk film, yet it is not greatly admired by many key figures in the British punk scene of the late 1970s. For example, Colegrave and Sullivan recorded how in Jubilee: ‘Derek Jarman produced his own fittingly anarchic and sensationalist view of punk…with plenty of unscary violence, unerotic sex and an uninteresting storyline’. (Colegrave and Sullivan, 2001: 291)
In the same publication, Sullivan also suggested that the film was ‘a badly-acted, over arty and gratuitously violent pile of rubbish’ (ibid: 317). He suggests that Don Letts’ contemporary ‘documentary’ Punk Rock Movie was always more ‘relevant’ as a ‘testament to the era’.
This raises a fascinating question about the extent to which any film which appears to represent a particular era or set of historical events should be judged against such ‘realist’ criteria. Was Jubilee intended to be a punk ‘documentary’ and even if it were, might it now function as a film in its own right without being obliged to represent British Punk circa 1977? If we accept Hebdige’s (1979: 62-70) identification of Punk as one of the key British subcultures of the period between the 1950s and 1980, then it is interesting to ask to what extent any of the other groups he identified including teddy boys, beatniks, rockers, mods or skinheads were represented effectively in contemporary feature films. The answer, of course, is very little. One key reason is that feature films, unlike recordings, magazines, news stories and even television documentaries take too long to emerge from inception to circulation. In addition there is a romantic view that ‘authentic’ subcultures always exist underground so that by the time they emerge to be represented in film their essential features have been diluted. This may be an issue for any readings of Jubilee by those who claim to have been there ‘at the time’. So, Jubilee may be better considered as a fictional and somewhat experimental work of cinema in its own right.
Nonetheless even if Jubilee fails to satisfy the demands of contemporary punks, it may offer us insights into a certain ‘sense’ of how punk impacted more broadly upon British life in the second half of the 1970s and this might in turn present ideas about how the film is a punk film even if it is not an ‘authentic’ film about punk. This is particularly because in certain respects both punk and Jubilee resisted popular dichotomies between mass culture and the avant-garde. Both brought together an uneasy collision of aesthetics and anger, convention and chaos, protest and posturing. In punk this occurred through a stylistic merging of proletarian rock and art school invention – in Jubilee, through an uneasy mix of experiment, personal vision and narrative conventions.
Punk may be seen as a matter of contradiction, extending beyond the first innocent rebelliousness of previous subcultural groups. It emerged in the 1970s, the decade of high cultural theory, alongside the early public formulations of postmodernism and in a period of significant expansion in higher education when, nonetheless Britain celebrated tradition with a fervour for flags and 1940s-style street parties. It grew from disenchantment with 1960s idealism and is driven by frustration and competing opposites. It was always as Hebdige puts it, sliding ‘between poverty and elegance’ (ibid: 66), it used the signs of Empire in a knowing irony, it is angry and oppositional yet caught up in the signs of opposition and unable to make any real difference outside the world of youth culture and consumption.
If Jubilee is unsatisfactory to the central players in punk it can nonetheless be seen to embody and even describe these contradictions while pursuing a fairly British literary yet visual experimental film aesthetic. By the summers of punk, Jarman was in his mid-thirties – too old to be an ‘authentic’ punk although like Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood a plausible influence. Rowland Wymer (2005) for example tells us that Jarman began the film with an interest in Jordan who worked in McLaren and Westwood’s shop – she had already appeared in his film Sebastiane – and Jarman had also shot some early footage of the Sex Pistols performing in London. This interest in Jordan develops through the film into a depiction of the young punk women as dominant and more decisive than their male counterparts, a point which the openly gay Jarman emphasises through his representation of Britain’s two Queen Elizabeths.
However, Tracy Biga (1996) points out that the male and female characters in Jubilee seemed to have exchanged sexual and social roles – almost anticipating the dominance of a female British prime minister in the decade following the film’s release. She notes that the men’s lovemaking
consists of soulful kisses and long looks in a tastefully under-decorated bedroom and outdoors. The women’s names – Bod, Crabs, Mad and Amyl Nitrate – suggest their more graphic, nitty-gritty approach to sex…The women’s ambition to enter the media society fuels their destructive rampages.

(Biga, 1996: 21)

Despite these contemporary representations, one of Jubilee’s central characters is the first Queen Elizabeth who, accompanied by the philosopher John Dee, travels from the past to encounter the dissatisfactions of the second Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee year in a Britain struggling with economic and political problems. This link with history is characteristic of much of Jarman’s work for he may be seen as the artistic innovator with a deep love of the history and traditions of his culture, yet he simultaneously produces a film of anti-establishment, sacrilegious, sexual and violent images. In Jubilee, the visitors from three centuries earlier are dismayed by the lack of optimism they find in their country’s anarchic future and they ask fearfully of the whereabouts of God.
Jarman’s film-making is highly individual – as independent aesthetically as it was economically. Ultimately it may be that the impossibility of locating Jarman clearly within any apparently coherent group, movement or dominant aesthetic that leaves him as an awkward figure within British cultural history. Wymer has pointed out that the ambiguities in Jubilee do not merely distance Jarman from the ‘simple-minded punk aggression’ they also help ‘to expose contradictions within punk itself’ (Wymer 2005: 59). We might see Jarman’s whole approach to film-making as spreading that same sense of uncertainty – thereby explaining why he has remained a somewhat marginalised figure despite considerable critical interest. Perhaps we are generally more comfortable with stories that resemble other stories. If so, neither Jarman nor his films offer us that comfort.
Notes

Simon Field, ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, The Face, 21 January 1993, p 62.

Further Reading

Tracy Biga, ‘The principle of non-narration in the films of Derek Jarman’ in Chris Lippard (ed.) By Angels Driven: the Films of Derek Jarman, Trowbridge, Flicks Books, 1996.

Stephen Colegrave and Chris Sullivan, Punk London, Cassell, 2001.

Dick Hebdige, Subculture: the Meaning of Style, London, Routledge, 1979.

Chris Lippard (ed.) By Angels Driven: the Films of Derek Jarman, Trowbridge, Flicks Books, 1996.

Michael O’Pray, ‘If you want to make films’, Art into Film: Sight and Sound Supplement, July 1994, pp. 20-22.

Rowland Wymer, ‘Anarchy in the UK: Jubilee (1978)’ in Derek Jarman, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2005.

Dave Allen

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

[Production Company: Channel Four Films/Working Title Films/SAF Productions. Director: Stephen Frears. Screenwriter: Hanif Kureishi. Cinematographer: Oliver Stapleton. Editor: Mick Audsley. Music: Ludus Tonalis. Cast: Saeed Jaffrey (Nasa), Roshan Seth (Papa), Daniel Day Lewis (Jonny), Gordon Warnecke (Omar), Derrick Branche (Salim), Shirley Anne Field (Rachel), Rita Wolf (Tania).]
My Beautiful Laundrette is indisputably one of the most important British films of the 1980s. It took risks, asked questions, and broke boundaries. The first boundary it broke was that between film and television. Filmed for Channel 4 in 16mm for the extremely modest sum of £600,000, it created such a sensation at the 1985 Edinburgh Film Festival that it was decided to release it as a feature film. This was contrary to director Stephen Frears’ intentions; he had tailored the film for a television audience and liked the idea that it would be seen once by a sizeable audience and prove an instant talking point, rather in the manner of a trailblazing drama such as Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home (1966). If it had been proposed as a feature film in the first place, he seriously doubted whether it would ever have been made: after all, he reasoned, who on earth would pay to see a film about a gay Pakistani opening a laundry in a run-down area of London? In fact, the film not only crossed media boundaries but geographical and cultural ones as well. When it opened in America, Pauline Kael, the influential critic of the New Yorker magazine, praised its freshness and it was to earn an Oscar nomination for its writer, Hanif Kureishi. (1)
The freshness comes from the style and particularly the perspective. This is a look at Margaret Thatcher’s Britain from the immigrant’s point of view. It is a country seen as characterised by racism, inequality, gender prejudice and entrepreneurial greed, but the particular viewpoint gives an unexpected twist to this, reversing expectations and stereotypes. The beneficiaries of this materialist, conservative spirit are shown to be upwardly mobile Pakistanis, making the most of the commercial opportunities available and, in the process, upending the power structures of old colonialism. They are now the ones with money, property and jobs, and it is the young white racists with time on their hands who are the new underclass – sidelined, homeless, angry and unemployed. A further irony is that, at the centre of this capitalist success story, in which a young Pakistani, Omar (Gordon Warnecke) is bankrolled by his uncle Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey) so that he can open a new laundrette, is a gay, interracial love affair – something not on the Thatcherite agenda. Omar loves Johnny (Daniel Day Lewis), a former National Front activist now trying to shed his violent and racist past, and wants to involve him in his venture.
At the time of making the film, Kureishi said he was reading a lot of George Orwell essays claiming how decent and tolerant the British were: this did not exactly square with Kureishi’s experience as an Asian in England. His screenplay courageously explores some of the tensions and contradictions of immigrant life in a so-called multi-racial society, where, as Nasser’s associate, Salim (Derrick Branche) says, you are nothing without money and where the sense of home and belonging is always elusive. Born in London of a Pakistani father and a white mother, Kureishi felt that the characters of Omar and Johnny represented two aspects of himself, and the film was his attempt to bring them together in harmony amidst all the frictions. He knew that his portrayal of the Asian community might cause offence. He shows them as ruthless landlords, drug dealers, purveyors of porn, but, as he insisted, he never shows them as victims: there is a real vibrancy to the characterisation and great variety too. There is not only generational conflict between parents and children, but also ideological difference between the same generations. Nasser’s dynamic, rampant commercialism (‘There’s no question of race in the enterprise culture’, he tells Omar) is in stark contrast to the passive idealism of Omar’s father (Roshan Seth), whose political journalism has forced him into exile from his home country and who believes that college not commerce is the key to his son’s future. Women are domesticated and secondary in this society, though in Nasser’s daughter, Tania (Rita Wolf), there are stirrings of rebellion and a reluctance to accept female subservience as the status quo.
These are serious themes and the film will build to a powerful climax when the tensions erupt into violence. Nevertheless, Kureishi and Frears seem well aware of the George Bernard Shaw maxim: ‘If you want to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh, or they’ll kill you.’ Unlike other British films of the 1980s with a political axe to grind, the tone is satirical more than polemical. The mood is often lightened with some deft comedy, as in the scene where a drugs delivery turns out to be hidden in a man’s venerable grey beard, or in the very name of the launderette ’Powders’, a sly hint at how the operation is being financed. There is even a touch of surrealism, when Nasser’s wife casts a spell on his mistress, Rachel (Shirley Anne Field) in an attempt to break up the relationship. It works too: as Rachel reasonably explains to Nasser, she cannot continue with a romance that causes her to come out in a hideous rash and where her furniture starts moving.
This occasional element of play is niftily negotiated by Stephen Frears’ direction, which nudges the material away from realism and towards family melodrama. It also has its virtuosic moments, as in an extraordinary shot towards the end of the film, far more elaborate than one would expect in your usual television feature, when the camera cranes from the laundrette up and over the roof to disclose the gang of white racists readying themselves for trouble. Frears was just making use of a giant crane that had been mistakenly delivered one day, but it is a shot that gives a spectacular new dimension to the story, heightening the tension and lifting it off the streets. Like his mentors Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, for whom he worked as an assistant on Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966) and If…(1968), Frears had absorbed their gift of presenting familiar things in an unfamiliar way. Like them, his base is broadly realistic, but it is realism with a kink; and although he claims the secret of a good film is in the script, he has a visual flair that brings good writing to life. My Beautiful Laundrette turned out to be his breakthrough film: it was on the strength of it that he was offered the direction of Dangerous Liaisons (1988), which proved a big Hollywood success. Curiously, the theme of ’dangerous liaisons’ was to prove a leitmotif in a number of Frears’ films, however strenuously he might disavow the auteur theory: apart from Omar and Johnny in Laundrette, where the danger of discovery is one of the film’s principal sources of tension, there is Joe Orton and his murderous gay partner in Prick Up Your Ears (1987), the precarious friendship at the heart of Dirty Pretty Things (2002), even Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in The Deal (2003). This in itself is no guarantee of interest or quality, of course, but the recurrence of this pattern might partially explain why the script for Laundrette excited him more than any he had read for years, because it combined a favoured narrative and character pattern with a trenchant political critique with which he fundamentally agreed.
Early on in the film, Omar is invited to a party at Nasser’s house and is ushered into his uncle’s room. There is a striking point-of-view shot as he pushes gently on the door and it opens quite slowly, as if to mark an entry into a whole new world. In some ways, the shot symbolises Frears’ approach too. He not only likes outsider-heroes, but he enjoys coming into films himself as an outsider. Unlike many directors who prefer making films about what they know, Frears likes making films about things he initially knows nothing about, thus becoming a tourist in other people’s universe and seeing their world afresh. The appeal of Laundrette for him was precisely its unusual perspective. Yet, buried within its structure, there is a kind of familiarity to it, which Frears, as an affectionate historian of British cinema, might subconsciously have recognised. (2) It has some similarity to the Ealing comedy, The Man in the White Suit (1951), made by one of Frears’ favourite directors, Alexander Mackendrick, notably in its focus on a hero whose inventiveness arouses the envy and ire of a vengeful mob.
Even more strongly, it follows the narrative paradigm of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, famously adapted for the screen in 1946 by David Lean and which Frears describes in his documentary as a ‘wonderful film’. For example, as the young man rising out of his station in life on a tide of criminal money, Omar is clearly the equivalent of Dickens’ Pip; as his best friend, who started by fighting him but who is now his devoted business partner, Johnny is obviously Herbert Pocket; Omar’s principled but ineffectual father, who visits the laundrette but feels out of place in his son’s new world, recalls Joe Gargery. And the film’s Miss Havisham, the hero’s supposed benefactress but who is actually contaminating his soul? Why, Margaret Thatcher, of course. In a decade when the Conservative government explicitly extolled the virtues of what it called ’Victorian values’, the work of Dickens (often critical of institutions, the law, injustice) became an important counter-symbol of Victorianism in artistic productions like for example, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s legendary version of Nicholas Nickleby in 1982, the BBC’s eloquently bleak TV serialisation of Bleak House in 1985, and Christine Edzard’s melancholy two-part film of Little Dorrit in 1987. My Beautiful Laundrette was a particularly imaginative (possibly unconscious) addition to this trend, a wholly individual work in its own right but worthy of the ’Dickensian’ epithet by virtue of the audacity of its symbolism, the range of its characterisation, its satirical rage. Dickens would undoubtedly have loved the central symbol of the laundrette, this new curiosity shop that becomes a focal-point of ’English’ enterprise and envy and where the tensions of the main characters finally converge and explode.
At the end nothing has been resolved. In retaliation at Salim’s deliberate injuring of one of their members, the white gang has beaten him nearly to death; they also assault Johnny and vandalise the laundrette. In a tender coda, Omar and Johnny lovingly tend each other’s wounds, leaving an audience to ponder their future and also leaving us to ponder the social wounds the film has exposed. In the spirit of its remit to cater for minority tastes, Channel 4 helped to fund a number of offbeat and challenging British films during this period: among them, Another Time, Another Place (Michael Radford 1983), The Ploughman’s Lunch (Richard Eyre 1983), Another Country (Marek Kanievska 1984), Letter to Brezhnev (Chris Bernard 1985), Dance with a Stranger (Mike Newell 1985), and High Hopes (Mike Leigh 1988). Hugely entertaining, finely acted and socially resonant, My Beautiful Laundrette was also the product of this fruitful relationship and one of its finest examples. It remains the artistic yardstick by which the cinematic representation of multi-cultural Britain is measured.
Notes

The eventual winner of the Screenwriting Oscar was to be Woody Allen.
Frears’ affection for history was revealed in his 1994 documentary for Channel 4, Typically British: A Personal History of British Film.