brechtwork: FOUR THEATRE POEMS

Some fragments that articulate ideas these notes have been trying to get at:

"Whatever you portray you should always portray
  as if it were happening now."

"At the same time express the fact that this instant

 On your stage is often repeated"

"Nor should you let the Now blot out the

 Previously and Afterwards, nor for that matter whatever

 Is even now happening outside the theatre and is similar in kind

 Nor even things that have nothing to do with it at all"

"So you should simply make the instant 

 Stand out, without in the process hiding 

 What you are making it stand out from."

"You should show what is; but also

 In showing what is you should suggest what could be and is not

 And might be helpful."

(Emphasis my own, quotes from 1976 Eyre Methuen edition)

THE LONDON NOBODY KNOWS (1967)

Familiar places found in the images:

Old Montague Street. The buildings on the left are still there among trees. The buildings on the right no longer exist.

Ampthill Square Estate under construction

IRMA VEP (1996) As A Compass

- A carnival and poem about different processes of representation in the moving image, centred in the context of narrative cinema, presented in successive strophes with a structure that becomes more complicated than simply representing representation as a phenomenon of mismatched doubling (as a rhyming poem). A poem in which any line could rhyme with any (number) of the other lines - the number of combinations and ideas this could produce - would this also be achievable on the page (would the page be more suitable)? A film about making films as a good way to begin a map for a journey between different island/ideas of what the moving image could be or do, a route into the post-cinematic archipelago. In the first part of IRMA VEP each process of representation slowly adds another line:

The moving image itself as a representation of visual reality. 

Actors, including people representing themselves as in so many recent comedies, but in contrast to those here the actors are not exaggerating the negative aspects of their personalities, but portraying themselves as quite reasonable, which is oddly confusing. 

Images sampled from other films, including a video of a film from Hong Kong which the camera lingers on for a long time (where do these sampling moments situate the camera being used at the top of the structure as the sampler?).

The genre of the fiction film about making fiction films as in LA NUIT AMERICAINE (1973) and many others (as opposed to the production documentary in something like A.K. (1985), although the fiction idea and an impressionistic film like A.K. throw the whole idea of 'documentary' into confusion).

The culture of remakes.

The careers of actors with a distinctive style (like Jean-Pierre Leaud) as the slow construction of a persona.

The craft of the actor, using disguises, costumes, cosmetics.

The role of a stunt double.

The process of rehearsal, a scene where actors imitate motions first made by filmmakers.

Translation as a difficult attempt to represent in one language ideas expressed in another (the use of multiple languages in this film also makes subtitles effectively inevitable regardless of the audience).

The result of a working process as a representation of the original intention.

Representation in cinema in the political sense, particularly representation of women (in this film there is lots of attention paid to the difficulties this might put women working behind the camera in).

The rushes as a backwards representation of the future film.

Describing a film you've seen as a representation of that film.

Looking in a mirror.

- Each of these ideas is woven together in the montage, but you have to keep your attention up to think about what's happening because the camera dissolves smoothly between the different levels of illusion and it's easy to lose yourself, you are watching the film the characters in the narrative are making and then watching IRMA VEP again in seamless transitions (the mode of capture does not change).

- As the film continues the structure blossoms out from an overlapping constellation of these dualistic forms of representation into a compass pointing out different directions for the moving image, making arguments for each, while using each formal aspect of the cinematic apparatus to do so. Representation as a protracted struggle and practice as well as or rather than an ambiguous mirroring process?

- Within the narrative and dialogue, the fictional production breaks down and the characters begin to argue what the point of their film and cinema in general is; different viewpoints expressed include that cinema is apolitical, is based on desire, is a fantasy, is purely technical, or is repetitive and finished (using representation (the entertaining aspect of narrative) as a vehicle to critique representation, something ambiguous?). One scene features a journalist going on an extended rant in favour of action films, claiming this is what the public wants and that the state has no business funding smaller films. The narrative also attempts to show the production of a film as a protracted negotiation on the social level as well, particularly within the context of gender and labour relations.

- Different ideas of cinema are incorporated into the montage visually, including early silent films, action films and militant cinema from the 1970s that different characters watch on television sets (this  allows the camera to capture the crackling visual effects of video reproduction (one of these video-transferred films even features a sequence based around an old analogue editing table)).

- The soundtrack also experiments with different ideas, switching between using diegetic and non-diegetic music (as in a scene of a moped around Paris). There's a point where the soundtrack cuts entirely, putting extra emphasis on a mesmerising moment when a character in the fictional film performs a leaping stunt, a symbolic gesture of freedom in space - is this sort of performance a way forward? Later another of the characters mirrors this leap in everyday life as a spontaneous rather than scripted moment of liberation, suggesting a relation of cinema to everyday life, but this is rendered ambiguous: the second leap is also scripted.

- There is no clear answer or preference for any of these arguments which is to the film's credit. The ending suggests in 1996 the moving image as cinema was something that could could reproduced and recontextualised more than ever- cinema ends here in the film director's flat, on the DVD player among cats, serial novels and other relics of the 20th century ("Arletty, street thugs and slums" he yells earlier), sending even its most ardent cinematheque devotees to sleep, importantly in the comfort of their own homes, separated from one another. Throughout the narrative the crew members and filmmakers ultimately seem slightly bored with, if not completely sick of, cinema. 

- Yet the ending also points to the possibilities of new technologies, new forms of social/political organisation, and a return to smaller experimental modes of production as routes for the moving image to take. The rave replaces cinema as a more vivid communal experience of sound and light (heightened by drugs and their attendant paranoid episodes), while the analogue scrapes itself out of existence. It would be worth returning to this sort of inquiry in 2023.

Two Films By Vivienne Dick

- Two films by Vivienne Dick who moved from Ireland to New York City in the 1970s. 

GUERILLERE TALKS (1978)

- A record of people constructing their lives the way they want to in the city. Watching this film reinforces the idea that in this time and place a person could do that without so much resistance as usual - is this true? How much danger was shot through everyday life? The film does show that space and time were abundant (see the astonishing still at the top). (is this era accessed through artworks more than accounts?).

- thinking aloud: If a city won't allow people to decide how they would like to live, a film can. You can do what you like in a film, because it's temporary and because it's an image, it isn't exactly real. It's easy to get confused because the image in the film resembles the city near identically. This is also revolutionary, because you can see this convincing illusion of the city (it's more than that), but can also perceive in the same space that which is not everyday and of the rules of the city, but is made possible by the film. These two layers of ideas are transparent and overlaid on one another, become inseparable when experienced, and this combination of the two can produce radical and repeatable new ideas of everyday life. Film is transparent and overlaid on the city, but also contains part of the city (the light), a part which has already disappeared when the camera stops, disappearing further and further after. 

- Thinking again of PORTRAIT OF GA and THE FABELMANS. This revolutionary quality comes in films taken directly, improvised (without (traditional) actors/performers? cf. Rivette's films?), but then an expensive commercial production also often uses real locations; sometimes commercial films can have this quality too; maybe the idea is that the quality is more vivid and condensed in the improvised films, and the expense is not necessary. THE FABELMANS is interesting because it shows someone making a conscious decision to reject an improvised, chance method in favour of a rehearsed, representational one. Why is that choice made? Within that film's narrative the former is just too terrifying and creates too many moral quandaries. An inability to deal with the loss of control and the world as something various. Following this idea...

Still from RAGING BULL

- Also thinking again of the staged home-movie trope in cinema. The super 8 sequence in RAGING BULL is the most striking, and the most striking moment within it, which somewhat resembles the images in GUERILLERE TALKS, is when the faux-amateur camera strays away from the wedding and films the New York buildings - the aspect of the disappearing city. It's very stirring, especially with the romantic music, but it requires so many resources to get there.

- GUERILLERE TALKS consists of a series of durations (each the length of a full super 8 reel) in which different people are given access to the sound/image space of liberation. A series of PORTRAIT(s) OF GA, or a series of landscapes of people. A series of ideas for transforming everyday life in the city.

- Wearing sideburns and playing the Evel Knievel pinball machine while ignoring the camera for the full reel. Filming very openly, drawn to different details, with hands invading the shot without warning.

- As in PORTRAIT OF GA the camera can "think through the littlest objects" and details of interiors, like shoes and telephones. Unlike in Tait's film the sound here is captured as directly as possible; often the microphone is actually visible on screen. 

- People hammering nails into their heads, gesturing silently on a rooftop, or playing guitar in what looks like an old warehouse while people light sparklers. There's an amazing shot that tracks out of a TV set to someone swinging a light fixture through the space before returning to two guitarists who are slashing at their instruments.

- There's also a news report from some enviable waste ground with the reporter wishing for a normal place. Lighting a cigarette while a 45 record plays out. Being photographed by the subject, sometimes there's a chase involved. Opposite of the Warhol screen test films, here people are given the opportunity to speak, perform or hide as much as they like. More like a collaboration between filmmaker and performers than a documentary or attempt to 'capture'/represent people. Sense of respect for the people in the film, who keep opaque what they want to keep opaque.

SHE HAD HER GUN ALL READY (1978)

- As in TAILPIECE this film features titles written on the landscape.

- This goes further than GUERILLERE TALKS, not by expanding narrative or character but by taking the ideas of the first film further into public space, activating different places. The film is full of gestures and people using the city; payphones, diners, subways, and fairgrounds. The chance approach means you get to meet people unexpectedly, like the manager of the fairground stall, or the kid serving drinks.

TAILPIECE (1976)

- The titles in Margaret Tait's films are always important, they are written into the image itself, drawn on bits of wood, made directly into the landscapes. 

- Here Tait writes directly on her house as it is vacated. TAILPIECE is a follow up to her earlier film PLACE OF WORK (1976) which documents the same building while inhabited as a house and studio. Marguerite Duras did something similar with the two linked films INDIA SONG (1975) and SON NOM DE VENISE DANS CALCUTTA DESERT (1976), which both have exactly the same narrated soundtrack, but in the second film the grand house and costumed actors are replaced by images of empty decaying buildings (camera moving through empty corridors in Chantal Akerman's HOTEL MONTEREY (1972)?). Tait's film also takes place as much on the soundtrack as the image. You can hear poems, children's voice and snatches of popular music. The radio station of your life, like in LONE STAR (1975) by Jeff Keen.

- What about the images in this film? They are somehow difficult to deal with. What is this image of newspaper, teacup, chair, glasses, fireplace or cat? A folded newspaper. The image produces an imaginary sensation of touch, the newsprint paper, or the sound of it. Dry surface of the paper, rustle of folding. People used to steam iron them. Headline: '"Phoenix" closes on October 1'. Local headline preserved by the film. Incorporating the word 'Phoenix' into the poem of the film. These images confront the viewer. You can neither hear nor touch them, but you still have this response (cf. the boiled sweets being unwrapped in PORTRAIT OF GA, or the long shots of domestic objects in SELF PORTRAIT IN DECEMBER (1995)). 

- from notebook: Cixous has an idea of "thinking through the littlest object". Where did this note fragment come from? Searching in vain for the original quote.

- Is the strength of Tait's films is the disconnection of sound and image? When making films doing this for the first time feels like a revolution. Suddenly the picture is doing something else entirely, is washing around at the bottom of a bowl full of water, while the sound has become a field. Thinking of films where the image is a placeholder, just an image of production there to allow sound to play (music of Silver Jews where the musical backing sometimes seems like a simple device to extend a duration into existence in order that the text can be said/sung aloud within it). Sound moves outward like the air, cannot be framed as easily as the image - is this true? Cutoff points off a clip of sound. Sound can echo, but so can a picture. In TAILPIECE a child's voice becomes an adult's voice. The adult voice says "A fish swam in the moon". When you move out of a place you live it becomes a between place, an interruption of the conventional (conventional? enforced? everyday?) arrangement of space and time. Moving out of this one soon, it's freezing, you can see your breath in the air and the drains are exploding.

- The song "Funny How Time Slips Away". Always thought Arthur Alexander wrote it, but it was Willie Nelson. Al Green also recorded a version of it. Walking through train stations at rush hour listening to it, looking at commuters faces. A scary idea from watching TAILPIECE of a cut of the same face in an instant from very young to very old.

- Sketches for longer notes on PORTRAIT OF GA (1952) a perfect film and quiet revolution. The gesture / language coup of placing a cigarette into the heather landscape. "Landscape of Ga" rather than portrait. Ga's movement and play is a way and lesson of living. Her dance is... ? Writing to think of an answer.

brechtwork: SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS (1929-31)

- Returning to the original texts as a way to go forward. Avoiding the biography of Brecht and the theoretical commentaries on the texts. This play lists the collaborators as H. Borchardt, E. Burri, E. Hauptmann.

- SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS implicitly posits an idea (will frame it here as such in the hopes of avoiding a totalising theory/reading & a discussion of intentions, especially given multiple authors) that the life of a person cannot be represented, but that ideas, attitudes, philosophies, motions of history, economic flows, and conditions in a structural sense, that create the conditions of that life, of the lives of everyone in a society, can be represented, in part because they are themselves representations of a sort, ideas and theories that attempt to describe phenomena occuring in the world (with a basis in written language, a common basic structure with a play). 

- These representations can be entertaining too, can be songs, though often the text becomes dominated by dry economic language. Yet there are also moments when the language erupts into vivid and striking diversions, often of a horrible nature. This passage illustrates both styles (content warning really gruesome writing here):

"Well, Lennox, now the underbidding's over.
You're finished now and I'll close up and wait
Until the market recovers. I'll clean my yards
And give the knives a thorough oiling and order some
Of those new packing machines that give a fellow
A chance to save a tidy sum in wages. 
There's a new system now - the height of cunning.
On a belt of plaited wire, the hog ascends
To the top floor; that's where the slaughtering starts.
Almost unaided, the hog goes plunging down
From the heights onto the knives. You see? The hog
Slaughters itself. And turns itself into sausage.
For now, falling from floor to floor, deserted
By its skin, which is transformed to leather
Then parting from its bristles, which become
Brushes, at last flinging aside its bones -
Flour comes from them - its own weight forces it 
All the way down into the can. You see?"

(taken from Frank Jones translation in 1976 Methuen edition)

- The characters in this play are hardly characters at all in a conventional sense. Set in the enormous Chicago meat yards in the 1920s the play follows a struggle between the workers and the company owners. The text doesn't particularly bother with filling in details about biographies (so popular in contemporary narratives), few of the characters have names, and when they do that's about all we know of them save for the occasional illustrative anecdote, like Gloomb, the man who loses his hand in a tin can machine. 

- Instead a lot of the dialogue is performed by choruses with labels like "The Workers", "The Meatpackers", "The Stockbreeders", "The Wholesalers", "The Brokers", and so on. The text uses these choruses to enunciate (critical) ideas about the way a market economy functions (this is the basis of the representations in the play of ideas and economics rather than characters). These chorus passages are ironically very confusing and it's as difficult here to follow what the comments are on economic phenomena as it is trying to read about stocks and markets generally. However these passages never become boring because the dialogue and arrangements of characters are musically structured into rhythmic stacks of text that build an atmosphere of increasing panic, which read on the page or aloud form a sort of concrete poetry or sound version of the landscape of the block by block American city (the banks are always the tallest buildings).

- At the same time this play relies on a sort of identification with the main character, Joan, who is a stand in for the reader/audience, being pushed and pulled by the various social forces, ideas and arguments in the play until reaching the ones the text probably wants us to be left with (can only ignore authorial intentions for so long)- in this case the message is to join the organised workers and follow orders (Joan fails to do this and the strike is broken). Hence Joan is the only substantial character, except for the super capitalist "Meat King", Mauler. Our relation to him seems to be: these people will never change, do not ever trust them (despite seeming at times to be having a change of heart Mauler ends up richer than before while exploiting the image of Joan as a sentimental martyr figure to keep control of the yards).

- the idea of some notes like these is to look at different texts and works and to figure out how they work, what ideas and strategies they include, what effects these might have, without necessarily claiming any one method to be better than the other. maybe then the notes could be a resource, a bak of these different strategies that people could rifle through. maybe that critical choice or evaluation becomes necessary later but it feels completely wrong now. maybe a representative style is more useful or morally or ethically better, or maybe a play like this is a way forward. maybe closer examination of these different traditions reveals that they are not nearly as concrete as they seem. "The world is various". examining what is happening in an active sense, a practice of writing for constantly changing contexts? rather than an attempt to produce totalising principles and structures? is this just a complete evasion of taking responsibility? guilt is everywhere. hopefully a reader might find some use in these notes, maybe...

DER MOND IST AUFGEGANGEN (1981)

Some short notes on reading, or was it watching, or was it walking:

- This film by Hanne Darboven, better known as an artist who produced installations and drawings, begins with shots of a carnival. Old caravans make an impression, the thin material they are built from, false wood, and the camera moves but is somehow walking much taller than everyone else - it feels a bit like being in the head of a monster. Oddly suitable as a viewpoint to the environs of a funfair, it's fascinating seeing kids jump up into the frame - one holds up a motorcycle helmet on their arm, a strange gesture.

- Then into a town landscape accompanied by classical music - a blank landscape, cigarette adverts, waste ground, cars, cobbles and houses, sunshine in West Germany. The building site is like the funfair - a handheld camera almost held like a waltz, somewhere uncertain, like trying to capture the feeling of walking in a place, that movement of objects past the body, yet the use of jarring music completely takes that feeling away. 

there is a manner of reading and approaching something new and unfamiliar as though everything in it was made by god, was perfect, and must be read as such immediately - is it a blank approach, without a context? things do not emerge from nowhere or necessarily have their own consistent internal logic - is the idea a need for tools or values or a philosophy to interpret something? but then these have their limits - so an archipelago of different philosophies, different lenses to add and remove and consider next to one another

- Cycling through different lenses of interpretation. Looking at the frame formally/technically in terms of camera height or failure to expose for indoor light or the use of a fluid zoom; thinking of contemporaneous films by Wenders or Fassbinder which often feature diverting background scenery, this film is like walking into that scenery (Darboven also dedicated an installation to Fassbinder); the landscape of West Germany with ample capital, there are snatches of English, a poster showing a map of New York City; a search for a structural rigour that would be consistent with the artists other works,

clinging to something like the 'ABC' sign on one side of the suburban buildings as an arrow pointing to it.

THE FABELMANS (2023)

- A film that is difficult to read without being driven on to the path of the biography of an individual, but becomes interesting when you wander off that path.

- THE FABELMANS is also a series of ideas about the nature of the moving image, which can then be projected back into the film itself. These are somewhat surprising given the position of this film squarely within an American commercial narrative film context.

- The ideas are pushed through a narrative of a child growing up, depicted via the practices of the characters in this narrative in relation to the moving image, and include the moving image as:

1. an irreversible intrusion into the unconscious

2. a space that allows for violent impulses to take place safely and outside of everyday life

3. a space that has nothing to do with the intentions of users

4. a space that reveals in pictures the unconscious drives and desires of its users, usually deeply disturbing them in the process, something that is placed here in the context of the social culture of the USA in the 1950s; the moving image disrupts this culture and dismantles seemingly indestructible everyday structures like the nuclear family or an idea of conventional masculinity

5. a technology that has very little to do with a sentimental idea of cinema with a capital C, or cinema seen as a historical art form (adding this here with no comment on these ideas of cinema - and these ideas are a reading too, ideas read from the film regardless of their value - where is this going...)

Still from PORTRAIT OF GA (1952)

- The relation of these ideas of the moving image are in contrast to the film itself, which is a scripted, intentional piece of fairly conventional narrative cinema. There's a scene of dancing to join to the chain of fragments that has slowly been forming in these notes, where a sudden leap into a freedom of motion is caught in a family super 8 film; we are shown this dance in the headlights in two contexts, as staged super 8 and within the staged montage of the film itself. The characters all seem to agree that this film, based on a moment of chance, has more value than the narrative film the protagonist is also producing, but it's too scary for them, and we end up back in conventional cinema with this film as a looking-back representation of real events. Throughout the narrative control ("Everything happens for a reason") and chance square off against each other, and in the end control wins out in a simple lesson on framing from a mythologised John Ford. In the other direction is a film like Margaret Tait's PORTRAIT OF GA (1952) and Ga's transcendent, genuinely spontaneous dance with the cigarette. 

Norman Rockwell - Saying Grace (1951)

- The image in the film has a treated, sheen effect which along with the decorations gives the whole work the feeling of a Norman Rockwell painting in motion. Other media and film stocks are incorporated into this montage, including sound and footage cut directly from THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (1952), and staged 8mm films. Always end up crying at this technique regardless of its content, thinking also of the staged family albums and super 8 films from MEAN STREETS, RAGING BULL and GOODFELLAS which shouldn't provoke such sentiment when you think about it, a strange double effect.

Still from GOODFELLAS (1990)

- As the film progresses the camera becomes more erratic, beginning with heavily structured shots and rhythms that recall musicals (especially in the movements of the family group) and an older mise en scene, then shifting into more radical techniques as the 1950s passes and the social conventions of the characters lives are gradually punctured; the cleanliness of the image and montage is punctured too and the camera begins to move more fluidly. This is maybe where cinema with a capital C comes back into the narrative, recalling Nicholas Ray in the scenes of violent racism and intimidation in the high school sequence, and ending with fluid shots with a wide angle lens, pointing toward the developments that would take place in American cinema in the later 1960s: and you end up back at the biography of an individual again!

Still from REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)

archipelago: AFTER WORK (2022)

survey of works by Celine Condorelli, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh

- So far these notes have often been attempting to follow a trajectory proposed by Jacques Rancière, of artworks as a space that allows for the making-real of something materially possible, the production of an alternative, a politicised aesthetic process. In The Emancipated Spectator he wrote “The point is not to counter-pose reality to its appearances. It is to construct different realities, different forms of common sense - that is to say, different spatiotemporal systems, different communities of words and things, forms and meanings”.

- A development from writing about this so far has been that this is theoretically all well and good, but (happily) leaves a space open: what exactly will these different realities or space-time configurations consist of? What will they propose? How will these proposals relate to the status quo? Celine Condorelli's practice might be carrying out this concrete work, by mining into history and by actually building spaces.

- This was one way to read and process the variety of this retrospective of works (though it inevitably came up against limits), which was presented as a series of spaces, usually engaging with histories of architecture and industry. Engaging with these histories formed the basis of the concrete nature of the works shown, ideas and proposals for space and construction were actually made. Each space was quite distinct, and often each invited contributions from other artists, leading to a transformation of the series of gallery rooms into a sort of democratic archipelago of different proposals and ideas. A fragment of text from the exhibition stated: "We have joined together to execute functional constructions and to alter or refurbish existing structures as a means of surviving in a capitalist economy".

account of visit:

- The first space featured structures inspired by the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, including simple designs for sun shades held in place by stones and ropes, and a rock garden with tropical plants. Alongside these constructions was an intervention in the opposite direction, to remove parts of the gallery walls, revealing windows that are usually obscured. This had a threefold effect. First, it let an element of chance into the space, allowing bars of sunlight in motion to be cast into the room. Second, it created a view into the city outside, which was dominated by scaffolding on a building opposite, the ever-present image of constant development. This led to the third effect, an opening up of the space of proposal to include a view of what an alternative is being proposed to (a brilliant and essential idea for this idea of practice). 

- Another space featured a presentation of AFTER WORK (2022), a collaborative 16mm film made with Ben Rivers and poet Jay Bernard, which documents the construction of a children's playground designed by Condorelli. The soundtrack is a reading of a poem by Bernard. Again the context around the construction of a new design is never forgotten, with accounts on the soundtrack of life in the city or images in the film of animals coming out at night around the playground. The elements of the film are allowed to remain independent from each other yet cohere, appropriately as a sort of game being played with each other; the construction in workshops of different playground elements is a great opportunity to play with different camera effects, while the poem on the soundtrack delights in games of language and recollection. The montage itself becomes a form of play for the authors to create different combinations of images, and it creates a playground for the viewer to play in. The space the film was shown in pushed this further, containing elements of the playground design. Saw this film earlier in the year at a different exhibition and it was interesting to see it twice months apart, some images from the first time were stuck firmly in the head, while others suddenly appeared as though never previously encountered, like a white cat leaping (out of forgetfulness). 

Work by Grace Ndiritu in the installation "Thinking through skin"

- The final and largest space in the retrospective was a collaborative multi-media space which featured works by Condorelli as well as many other artists, including Grace Ndiritu and Isa Genzken. This space, despite including an enormous number of works of great depth, managed to avoid spilling into the overwhelming glut of information these spaces can sometimes become. This was achieved by using a soundtrack which joined the works together without becoming too intrusive, allowing each to still remain separate within the overall union. Natural light was allowed again to enter the space, letting the world in again rather than creating a cut off space of pure intentions. The works were well placed within the space and it was comfortable to move around with places to sit. The overall effect was a kind of three dimensional film constructed from other films, as well as pictures and objects, a work made of works, and a calm yet engaging place to think and listen.

- This assembly of works was surrounded above by an installation in a series of old vitrines which brought together different research objects, including postcards, ceramics and spinning tops. These objects were allowed to remain tangential and open to interpretation.

- Throughout the show there were also smaller spaces dedicated to different series of wall pieces, each using visual montage to open up and activate ideas and histories. There were prints based on playground designs by Jacoba Mulder and Aldo van Eyck which produced another set of games for the eye; montages revealing the colonialist histories of plants commonly used in offices, houses, hotels and the Museum of Modern Art; and prints based on an extended residency at a tyre factory which brought together images of rubber plantations, documents from the company magazine and photographs by Enzo Nocera showing the realities of industrial life.

poemwork: ME AND MY BIKE (1948)

 - This is the first in a series of notes attempting to chart some possible relations between written texts, particularly poems, and the moving image.

- ME AND MY BIKE is an unfinished film script by Dylan Thomas, though it does not read like a conventional script. According to the foreword by producer Sydney Box, Thomas stated in relation to this text "I want to write the first original film operetta". As such most of the dialogue is intended to be sung, some of it by animal characters, for instance a stable full of horses with Yorkshire accents who sing about oats. Therefore the published text is not formatted as a script, but as a series of songs in verse form intercut with prose paragraphs detailing the rest of the movement of the possible film. These prose sections have a visual style which pushes in three directions. 

The first direction is towards a static, pictorial, illustrative visual style, toward painting and drawing (which is helped along in the published version by illustrations by Leonora Box). This is evident in the first sentence: "We see, in half-darkness, a large country house". Subsequently: "Two candles are lit behind the two little curtained windows above the stables. A wooden stair reaches from the rooms above the stables to the yard". This is a neat picture of where the main character, Fred the stable boy, lives.

The second direction is a transition between the first and third, and is toward animation. The singing horses grin, roll their eyes and kick a sack of oats out of a stable boy's hands; though it was apparently not Thomas' intention to write an animated film, it's difficult to read these actions without that idea occuring. The movement to the third direction becomes clearer in the nature of the transitions between events in the text: "Fred scrambles through his washing, runs a horse-comb through his hair, and climbs another flight of wooden steps that leads from the yard to the granary". The picture of the setting created in the first direction is extended into comic motion.

The third direction, the one we are really concerned with, is towards a photographed moving image, but not in the simple, conventional relation a script normally has. Instead the writing is itself constructed of images in motion, cuts and transitions, producing a cinema which did not, perhaps does not, yet exist. 

/not in an anachronistic way - not projecting later developments into texts from the past, but rooting a possible contemporary practice in the unfulfilled promise of various texts, finding possible new avenues from different points of origin. finding other examples of this kind of forward-moving writing as the basis for a series of notes/

An idea of the normal relation between script and image is still visible - a picturing of a production of the text in the style of Ealing films of the late 40s; a square black and white frame, slow camera movements, slightly scratchy overdubbed sound. Overlaid on top of this is a different picture closer to the text itself. This picture is faithful to the level of detail in the text, particularly the attention paid to sounds:

"As he opens the granary door, he looks around him at the park, growing lighter, at the wide frosty paddocks with their gate and water jumps, and at the great manor house, slow wisps of smoke coming out of its chimneys. A cock crows, far away, then its morning warning is taken up here and there from the manor house and the farms beyond."

This short passage presents an extremely sophisticated montage, featuring radical changes of scale and accumulative layering of different sounds.

/struggling to get at the idea here. imaginary films in the minds eye, slow survey of a park with ice on the grass, cutting to the curly smoke rising from the red chimney pot. the farms beyond, a way to make a picture of the sense you get from the word "beyond". a film that could show these movements in detail - not that some haven't been made. the point isn't that the older mode of production was inadequate, or that writing allows different transitions than moving images. is the point a possible film?/

- This third visual style, a possible-cinematographic style, is not simply the result of someone producing an imaginative film script. It's even more evident in an earlier story by Thomas, THE MOUSE AND THE WOMAN from 1936. There is a passage in this story where someone wakes up in the dark and can still see the carousel of images from their dreams. These striking pictures are linked by striking transitions that would be quite possible to achieve with a camera. 

"... there were symbols he could not remember, they came and went so quickly with the rattle of leaves, the gestures of women's hands spelling on the sky, the falling of rain and the humming wind."

/wouldn't this make such a lovely sequence as an arrangement of pictures, cuts and noises?/

"The dream had changed. Where the women were was an avenue of trees. And the trees leant forward and interlaced their hands, turning into a black forest. He had seen himself, absurd in his nakedness, walk into the depths. Stepping on a dead twig, he was bitten."

/a double exposure of hands joining together matched with a natural arch of trees in motion, fading into the same setting at night. a figure walks down the middle, the sound of the branches moving in the wind is interrupted by the amplified noise of a snapping twig/

"Candle light threw the shadows of the room into confusion, and raised up the warped men of shadow out of the corners. For the first time he heard the clock. He had been deaf until then to everything except the wind outside the window and the clean winter sounds of the night-world. But now the steady tick tock tick sounded like the heart of someone hidden in his room"

/slow addition of overlaid sounds/

Particularly interesting is the final paragraph of the passage which features a cut accompanied by a long distance jump and change in scale:

"...he saw a block of paper and sat down at the table with a pencil poised in his hand. A hawk flew over the hill. Seagulls, on spread, unmoving wings, cried past the window. A mother rat, in a hole in the hillside near the holes of rabbits, suckled its young as the sun climbed higher in the clouds."

/maybe this series will be a series of ideas for adapting texts/

- Some of the sequences from L'ATALANTE (1934) approach the structure of these texts, for instance the double exposure sequence when the two characters are separated from each other.

Or there's RYSOPIS (1964) which begins with someone waking in the darkness and lighting the frame with a match, before walking out into the street where slowly more and more figures emerge, ultimately ending the sequence with huge shadows cast on the walls of a tall building. The film cuts in sudden long jumps between spaces and playful images, sometimes people address the camera; the frame is dominated by an enormous heap of scrap before moving to a hand manipulating a clock, a mirror in the centre of the image, or a dogs head taking up half the picture.

chance: Advertising Moving Imaging

Notes based on a series of television adverts seen in the breaks of a football broadcast.

- Adverts defy attempts to conclude, to rationalise, to attempt to find patterns, to think, and to draw anything but the most obvious conclusions. They move too quickly to comprehend, they seem to function without a pattern. They reproduce in the mind as signals without form, half-remembered sounds. Will they reproduce here? You cannot learn anything from them - can you? 

- For instance, could you retain any credibility by borrowing the language of adverts for a sincere purpose? It's a truism that advertising sucks up ideas from artists, especially when artists try to defy advertising, and that sometimes this process has gone the other way. Is there a way to go beyond this dualistic dynamic? Something not based on trying to follow the difficult value of authenticity.

- Adverts use the language of contemporary commercial cinema: the two become ever more indistinguishable, particularly in the region of sound (the situationist ideas of detournement and subverting advertising, and those of artists appropriating advertising, are usually visual in nature - what would this sound like?). That booming sound of the cinema, and the way it is cut into suddenly, suddenly there's the noise of a gas hob from close up, extremely loud. There are two adverts for cinema releases here, new Hollywood films with premises based entirely on well known products. Aspect ratios change from clip to clip, sometimes using a false widescreen effect that still signals cinema.

- There's a consistency of tone (also from the cinema?) on a spectrum from a jolly, false humour to pure sentimentality. At one end there's the weirdness of something that has all the construction of humour without being funny (particularly popular is animals carrying out various human activities). At the other there's a completely cynical use of diluted liberal values shorn of any context or idea of political change. Is it worth writing about this at all?

- What is competition? What is the market? Something vicious, underhand, bulls, profit, cutting costs down to the bone, something that is rendered invisible here, along with the actual visceral nature of production lines. Maybe there is no competition, and the odd cosiness of advertising reflects the monopoly. 

- Avoiding the discourse of the manipulated audience - is advertising often simply ignored? Then again there's always the uncomfortable, alienating and disturbing moment of noticing yourself tearing up at an advert, despite knowing what is on the screen is complete nonsense.

- Recently noticed there are more and more videos online where people have noticed the way everyday moving images are constructed, then perfectly recreate their rhythms for the purpose of parody (adverts and the way BBC series are edited is a particular target). How does the online space compare with the television adverts?

- The overall impression of the world given by adverts is that of life averaged down, without the hint of any possibility of something else. The key image is that of a street that is recognisable but does not exist, a street of detached houses neither fancy nor run-down, beneath a forever blue sky.

- Recurring motifs: people turning into cartoon characters, symphonic music with booming drums, people flying into the air. The flying consumer is particularly prevalent. Why is this image of escape the most popular?

- More than any of these is the image of motion (the economy in motion). Marathon runners, chemicals being synthesised into new formulas, people stomping across entire cities, the camera tracking fast through restaurant kitchens, dishes pushed at speed toward the lens, foodstuffs tumbling through the air, brand new cars speeding in silence towards the interchangeable skylines of unnamed North American cities, and flames.

Notes On Notes No. 1

- don't want to deal here with intentions, only ideas for going forward, produced so far from an actual practice of writing 

- notes not as a critical or academic project but as a piece of creative writing, charting a little adventure (an adventure of mistaking images of places as places themselves? or an adventure of images of places as the (democratic?) creation of new and possible places?)

- notes as extracting imaginative ideas from the works engaged with, always with a mind toward the production of moving image work

- an attempt to consider a broad range of  moving images and construct relations with other fields, to do something difficult, tread different paths

PREDATORY COGNITION (2022)

dir. Ashlinn de Schonen

A video which leaves a long wake after viewing.

A puzzle for the viewer without a clear solution or meaning, therefore a sort of thinking machine, but not in a dry, structural way - instead the video is wittily aware of its own puzzling aspect, which becomes fun and playful, like dressing up or being read a story. However this takes place in a productive fashion that might allow the viewer to work through ideas (perhaps this is always part of dressing up and being read stories).

This productive aspect is produced by the varied mix of elements that make up the video, which is small-c catholic, including costumes, music, choreography, and lots of locations. Sumptuous and rich, yet democratic, again because nothing is made obvious or condescending to the viewer (a generosity).

The video suggests ideas about being introduced into knowledge structures (like the alphabet) and structures of movement through space (both are linked) - in childhood these have a freedom and uncertainty (rather like the film itself), until suddenly the grid of an alphabet teaching diagram becomes the windows of tall buildings in the city, where running around becomes policed and prohibited.

Therefore a decision in the video to work in public space, the place of emancipation. Here the costumes and fantasies of childhood, an enormous horse, rollerblade through the empty financial places. This recalls street-set musicals, for instance the films of Jacques Demy, or the performances in Derek Jarman films, like the ballet by the fire in JUBILEE (1978). A thought in the wake, why don’t we all go out and dance too, transform the space around us, is the cumulative effect.

Still from JUBILEE (1978)

DRIVE MY CAR (2021)

-  A drive through representational cinema, a journey by car through the relation between representation, trauma and technology.

- Image: following the eponymous car moving through fields divided by electricity pylons. One of the only horizontal shots in the film, blue cut-out mountains in the background. 

This shot could be a step toward producing the feeling of freedom, but stripped of the cinematic emotion-manipulation machinery (but is it? It's still an intentioned image on a screen within specific conventions). What is produced is simpler and more effective. Without music, it's closer to what this really feels like. A depiction of temporary, vagabond friendships made more recognisable by a formal reduction of elements. 

'what this really feels like' - struggling to get away from a prosaic discussion of representation / identification within the conventions of cinema, leading back to an old idea of just an alternative narrative (realist?) cinema (which is dominant at present). also constantly returning to affect-related ideas in these notes - but why? what what really feels like? a memory of something, a memory of many journeys by car? it disappears the longer it is considered

This formal idea is also the way the characters in the narrative, theatre actors, approach the plays they read, reducing everything out but the text. It's also how the quiet character of the driver is played, the opposite of the mad, romantic American road-trip hero, somewhat subverting identification. The theatre rehearsal as a site of constant negotiation recalls films by Jacques Rivette.

- The quiet climactic scene rejects spectacle in favour of the absurd, two accidental killers confessing to one another, presented as a wide shot, making faces small. Then a cut to the odd world of objects, rain and wakes behind ferries. A big white hill of snow, a blank landscape, a limit, inescapable and necessary, necessarily inescapable. You can't get out of duration. 

- Freedom Image: still can't help thinking of Hollywood, the open window of a Greyhound bus at the end of THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994). Always returning to an escape from narrative into the way and the journey. In DRIVE MY CAR that feeling (feeling? a desperate search for something called freedom - looking for this in moving images?) is subtler but extended out, for instance the long sequence of driving at night and smoking out of the sunroof.

notes february 21; brechtwork / sohowork / saylework

- continuing through cities and texts

- beginning in the city and beginning with brecht

text notes 1: BRECHT: A CHOICE OF TWO EVILS by martin esslin (3rd edition) (1980)

- bertolt brecht is everywhere and nowhere. “it’s brechtian”. SE says: “that means breaking the fourth wall”. but it’s rare to actually read his plays or see them performed in english (according to esslin his work is extremely difficult to translate). found this biography by chance and began here. trying to work out what brecht is all about (albeit again through the lens of another person, at least to begin with). trying to cut through myths and assumptions. then through moving image works. looking for surprises.

some notes:

- brecht was a poet in the tradition of arthur rimbaud and francois villon. he began as a sort of bard in southern germany accompanying his poems with music. in his collection BERTOLT BRECHT’S DOMESTIC BREVIARY (1927) he suggests some of the poems be accompanied by a guitar. at the base of his plays is his own poetic language (he also published many books of poems).

- martin esslin identifies 4 elements of brecht’s language:

1. everyday language of southern germany (this is particularly difficult to translate)

2. an “anti-metaphorical poetry of colours, textures and other concrete images”

3. bureaucratic jargon which is related to a carnivalesque sensibility, the folk and circus tradition

4. “anglicisms and other exotic expressions” - things taken from other languages

- furthermore esslin details brecht’s idea of how to write poetry without using rhyme and regular rhythm (traditional methods). brecht says “i always thought of the spoken word”. according to esslin, brecht’s technique was to create:

“a language in which the words already contain the gesture that must accompany them”

“the language itself implies and compels the corresponding action”

“this element of implied gesture keeps unrhymed irregular verse as poetry in quality”

“brecht discovered the power of such irregular rhythms in the slogans shouted in unison by the unemployed and the news vendors of the streets of berlin”. streetwork / listening to the city.

- esslin also suggests brecht’s theatre was not entirely a modern project. another aspect of it was returning to the past; his reaction was against the theatre of the 19th century which was where the idea of illusion began, of believing that what was happening on a stage was actually real. before this is the baroque and the carnivalesque which have no such pretensions.

- brecht wanted the actors not to inhabit the characters but narrate what they were doing.

- brecht also anticipated later developments in cinema:

1. leaving details out for the viewer to fill in, as in films by robert bresson, abbas kiarostami or marguerite duras

2. attempting to thwart the viewer’s identification with characters and fictional environments, preceding feminist and structuralist-materialist moving image

3. separating and making visible the different media used in production, for instance visible musicians performing the soundtrack (as in some of jacques rivette’s films, for instance DUELLE (1976)).



- continuing through soho

THE COMIC STRIP (1981)

- following on from WIDOWS (1983), an older soho also phases in and out of this film, which calls itself the “10p opera”. there are shots of the real soho, specifically the seedy neon lit walker’s court where the comic strip group of comedians held their club night on the premises of raymond’s revue bar. again here soho is a kind of giant cheap arcade place you’d go on a saturday night - the soundtrack is full of the noise of beeps and whizzing and coins - not an exclusive place, crowds seen in the film are composed of all sorts of people, presumably all real punters. ML: “when you go to soho today you can’t even imagine that this had existed”.

- the first of the series of many films made by this group which were shown on channel 4 - seemingly somewhat forgotten today (in contrast to THE YOUNG ONES which featured many of the same performers, minus peter richardson who featured in, as well as often directing, much of the comic strip series).

arnold brown performing in THE COMIC STRIP

alexei sayle as mr sweary inside and outside the narrative

- the narrative in THE COMIC STRIP is mostly a frame for documentation of the comic strip group’s different stage acts at the time. the fictional characters in the film are ultimately rooted in these stage acts and their different languages. as in brecht, the basis of the film is an idiosyncratic language composed of street talk and carnival elements (performance), but this time taken from stand-up comedy rather than poetry.

- then there are a number of unstable street locations which don’t look much like anywhere in contemporary soho, but as film sets these seem far too grand for this low budget film, particularly a building used to represent a salvation army headquarters. then a huge structure that looks like an enormous victorian tenement that has been taken over for the filming, which makes use of its stairwells and cavities for different exhibit-like scenes. are these demolished buildings or other parts of london?

- these locations and the way they are filmed evoke a fictional victorian soho, like the phantom soho in brecht’s play THE THREEPENNY OPERA (1928), a place, as with many settings in his plays, that to my knowledge he had never visited.

- alexei sayle of the comic strip group wanders through these sets dressed as brecht himself, a joke suggesting a bertolt brecht guided tour of soho (not that far from the contemporary karl marx tour). this begins a preoccupation with brecht that sayle followed through the 1980s.

COMIC ROOTS: A PUB CRAWL (1982)

- a creative and surreal essay written on and with the outside world. moves through space in an interesting way via editing, and through the constraint of places where you can get a drink over a 24 hour period. again here a base of live (text) work incorporating styles of performance taken from comedy, everyday life and the street, is extended into different media.

- crawling into an old world hotel bar in liverpool before cutting to waste ground where sayle verbally conjures up an imaginary prior version of the city. then cutting to an outdoor drink in stanley park, because the film was made before the licensing laws were changed (no pubs open in the afternoon). freedom of space, democratic use of space; why not. outdoor performance.

- then on to an inter city train to london - so much space covered in half an hour. drinks still available on trains in the afternoon. more outdoor performance as an old world northern comedian performs in the bar car; altering actual spaces for the purposes of the fiction/possibility.

- euston station; the way these places are treated like squares on an enormous board game. space of play and writing and performance (atlantic archipelago, ultimately small and traversable). possibility of different way of approaching space (and in the edit, time). emphasised by sayle’s monologue about a liverpudlian euston slum where he lives in a fridge for six pounds a week.

- three johns pub, islington. use of actual locations as a prompt for ideas and performances, a beginning place for writing. the way sayle marches from location to location, more games; orders a pint and his hat at the bar. inside sayle reprises his cockney character from THE COMIC STRIP, in that film called mr sweary, who wears his hat down low over his eyes. here he’s called john and talks to two other johns about a series of other johns (more use of everyday speech, this time cockney dialect). traces of this older islington still slightly visible, holloway road, balls pond road. old bar interior; crazy wallpaper.

- a health club prompts an impromptu musical sequence (brecht). the first of many. a funny song about drinking as a form of exercise. chelsea college of art union bar. passing through a wide variety of places in impossible time. one of those ye olde tourist pubs on fleet street (at this point there are still newspapers and journalists (a trade, not a profession) here). a nightclub covered in mirrors becomes a second stage for crazed singing and dancing.

- a few cracks at the wine bar craze of the 1980s and hampstead. a giant pub in hammersmith and fear of closing time (much earlier then, although most pubs i think still close around this time). london is still not really a 24 hour place (unless you have loads and loads of money). sayle heads for stringfellows cocktail bar populated with an outlandish cast of offscreen characters (yuri andropov, elvis). then to the comedy store which to my knowledge was where the comic strip group began before moving to their own revue, circling back to COMIC STRIP 81. sayle heckles himself from the crowd.

- brecht: the way these monologues spin out into jargon to the point of (funny) surrealism.


THE PRIVATE LIFE OF THE FORD CORTINA (1982)

- sayle then turned up in this interesting film from the arena documentary series. he continued to pursue odd preoccupations and routines through different media, even films made by other people. where do these preoccupations of sayle’s come from?

- this essayistic film joins together a plethora of bits of moving image to explore the cultural origins and significance of the famous cortina car, which seems to have been a touchstone that cut across the whole of society. footage used includes an auction, a convention, interviews with designers, tom robinson driving around singing his cortina song, sir john betjeman reading his cortina poem, an interview with a mechanic in brixton and a young couple’s super 8 cortina home movie complete with cortina fan letter to the essex plant. “it is part of the family”, she says in the interview. 

- these include sayle (introduced as an “automobile sociologist”) playing a specialist MASTERMIND round on the cortina in which every answer is “the cortina” pushing this preoccupation to the point of obsession. the cortina preoccupation also merges with the film, in the case of the mastermind scene being used to introduce different facts about the cortina car which highlight its importance. the quiz round is overlaid with different stock footages, commercials and images of the car being sent down an italian ski slope.

- dagenham; factory-image 1 (america on thames):

- more physical essay writing; sayle turns up at a real location, a cafe named for the car. then mr sweary returns for an interview with john mcvicar on the criminal possibilities of the cortina. more london images (where is this? a sense of glasgow).

- then more sudden musical performances, this time a song about fictional sales reps gone rogue in the badlands of essex, decking out their cars with loads of gaudy stuff. this links to the previous sequence in which the cortina goes as far as to become an indicator of a salesman’s social status, with any customisation of the factory model strictly forbidden.

- the cortina content builds and builds to the point of excess. a myth? difficult to think of a contemporary subject a similar film could be made about? (82- turning point to a different mode of production with thatcherism - less shared frame of reference - subsequent cultural stasis and fragmentation, dominance of revivalism - cortina replaced by the much maligned ford sierra at the end (sayle’s character is not pleased)).

ULLO JOHN GOT A NEW MOTOR? (1984)

- the cortina and cockney preoccupations are brought to a head through another medium in this surprising hit single, which combines the hat character and the sudden lunges into song and dance.

- part of why to write about these sayle and comic strip works is the images of london that populate the background; a sense of the real place, difficult to find. the music video manages to make images of london. those long wide roads that never become avenues, lined with brown townhouses and buildings with mysterious commercial functions, always dead and busy at the same time. the bus queue.

- more street performance. presumably the car dealer was in on the joke but much of the video seems to be sayle cavorting around in the presence of a bemused public. possibilities of public space: pretending to drive the bus.

- the song itself combines a manic monologue that strings together repeated street-jargon phrases that stop being meaningless when yelled over a beat. the music sounds like a premade backing track that could have been produced for adverts or lifts. misusing the prefab (brecht? the way brecht would use prefab structures like chicago gangsters or texts by other writers). using music to stretch out a text into a durational performance. the lyrics continue to explore other obsessions like alcoholic drinks (light and bitter) and london place names.

- then there’s the bizarre top of the pops performance of the song which features crowd members and professional dancers aping sayle’s hat style and dance moves. more use of mass media for subversive purposes, in the service of what?

ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS (1986)

- julien temple, who directed THE COMIC STRIP (1981), returned to a soho setting five years later with a different approach. have only seen a few clips from this film - it’s hard to tell but it looks like a soho that has been reconstructed on an enormous soundstage (presumably at massive expense), which the camera sweeps through. it’s both convincing and slightly off at the same time, capturing the small shop fronts and dense grid aspect, and recreating real locations (cinema house wardour street, bar italia, the coach and horses pub), before cramming them all together.

- making a trippy, condensed, cartoony soho is closer to brecht but the intention of this is murky; it’s not political, it seems to be in the service of showing what an exciting place it is, which is an idea produced much more effectively by the location shots in THE COMIC STRIP.

- esslin says brecht laid the groundwork for the hollywood musical; ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS might be an attempt to put brecht back into it. the “that’s motivation” sequence features a classical hollywood approach with more giant soundstages and even synchronised tap dancing, but in the service of a song about corrupt property development.

- contemporary western commercial cinema: the void left behind by the dismissal of basic forms of performance; singing, dancing, music.


DIDN’T YOU KILL MY BROTHER? (1988)

- by 88 sayle (with co-writers david stafford and pauline melville, and director bob spiers) had the chance to make a large scale project, a fully fledged tv film in the style of brecht, which brings together all of the preoccupations and tangents. the title and presumably beginning point came from another single released years earlier. a culmination of a practice that is suspended across different media.

- the tone is set in the introductory montage sequence which incorporates different media. first there is a film fragment of clowns dancing which cuts to a news broadcast (an aspect of this has been dampened? seeing an image that apes the form of a tv news broadcast on an actual television must have meant something different - but the form is somehow still recognisable). then there are location shots of wandsworth prison, and images of diplomas which belong to sayle’s character, one of a pair of (again) east end gangster twins (both played by sayle), clearly modelled on the krays, who are introduced by a black and white photographic still. stock footage of what looks like the blitz is used to illustrate their reign of terror, then more colour and black and white stills are used to introduce other characters and locations. then imitation documentary footage of the release from prison.

- this sequence introduces a range of very exaggerated and heightened fictional characters but also a range of real subjects and locations. the use of different media and this real aspect almost create an impression of an essay film (something informative?) yet it all sits within this comic fictional framework - this juxtaposition is the brechtian style? a bawdy show that aims to inform.

- the opening credits present the title song alongside a stop motion photomontage sequence of more black and white stills.

- traditional tv editing appears to reconstitute itself in the opening long shot which follows each character’s car away from the prison. each car is accompanied by the musical motif and genre associated with each character. (cartoony- the way the police have defaced their own van). the building is full of unused industrial equipment.

- unlike brecht or ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS the set is the real street. the main setting is this old school where the kids are nicking bikes (also alluded to in the introduction montage). more empty london roads in winter. wide grey pavements. always a high street in the distance.

- a hermetic world (a play) emerges, played out on the actual streets of the city, connecting the fiction and the ongoing political context of the late 80s - the result of the transition of brecht (theatre) to television program (moving image - you can film outside). all the characters are ultimately connected. kids cut down telephone poles with chainsaws and nick bikes. a plant pot turns into a robot. little kids talk in psychology jargon.

- there’s a scene where one of the twins punches himself in the head, and the other falls down. a strange structure. links back to the comedy club scene in COMIC ROOTS where sayle heckles himself.

- a party full of london intellectuals and a flashback to a group session for prisoners blend together textually with the prisoners spouting more jargon (this time marxist academic).

- then there’s the constant shots of bicycles and the direct addresses to the audience by the protagonist. “bicycles are important in this film. see how many you can spot”. a game runs through the whole duration.

- mr chipstick is a classic comic magistrate character in the vein of tiger brown from THE THREEPENNY OPERA (1928). his punishment for the street thieves is making them play cricket in the middle of a street in the middle of the night.

- meanwhile benjamin zephaniah, another artist figure who moved through different media appearing all over the shop in one long piece of work, is held in the van. there’s a bizarre scene where he and sayle converse in patois - another piece of brecht-text (borrowing expressions from other languages and dialects). in a later scene sayle’s character converses in fluent mandarin chinese. each character has their own personal form of speech constructed out of various materials.

- london images; bridges, pubs, always night time. back to the obsession with pub interiors and wine bars. a really funny scene where the gangster goes back to his old local, now a traditional east end boozer with smoke and pianos, and wonders what happened to the wine bar he used to know and love, harking back to COMIC ROOTS, revisiting the earlier jokes about folk singers in fictional form. new people have moved into the area; “it’s a postmodernist backlash! they don’t want sophistication”.

- the secret wine bar downstairs is the stage of the second song, this time a bawdy song about crime in the mode of brecht and kurt weill (mack the knife). the songs and style of brecht but in an actual london setting with real references “the traffic on the euston road is dreadful”. direct quote from brecht in this scene before the song begins. there’s more use of what sound like premade backing tracks of the most anonymous kind, subverted. the wine bar folksinger is incorporated into the musical ensemble as in a stage play.

- as in THE THREEPENNY OPERA the kids’ bicycle thefts are revealed to be part of a grand money making scheme run by the villain. eventually sayle’s protagonist unites this child workforce into producing rather than stealing bicycles in a collectively run workshop using the unused machinery at the school. but it’s still entertaining and a surreally funny throughout like the other films - a speech about uniting the workers descends into a bizarre dream story about a swimming pool full of puppies, and the villain’s royal family-obsessed gangster matriarch mother advises that you should always put a badger on a head wound.

- the third song features zephaniah reading poetry over more prefab sounds at the community police ball, “the over 60s reggae nite”, full of skanking coppers and judges singing “free nelson mandela”. 

- the spooky ambiguous ending - referencing PERFORMANCE (1970) - sees good twin murder bad, take his identity and begin to preach “idealistic socialism” from his new position of power. final brecht-y monologue straight to camera:

“and now our story’s finished, our tale is almost told, but can we find the moral in the story of the moss brothers so bold? this country’s based on stealing, the poor are on the rack, but men like me will always be plotting to steal this country back.”

- but then a final “didn’t you kill my brother?” suggests the two characters now inhabit one body; the struggle continues.


DREAD POETS SOCIETY (1992)

- zephaniah stars in this short tv film which shares a writer with DIDN’T YOU KILL MY BROTHER. most of the film takes place on a train to cambridge; an electrical storm brings the ghosts of byron and the shelleys into the carriage, causing a poetry contest. the romantic poetry styles are pitted against zephaniah’s improvised method.

- birmingham image 1: the old new street station