aviary: Bumping Into Andrew Salkey

A series of chance encounters over a number of years.

- First Encounter: DON'T LOOK BACK (1967) in which a camera crew follows Bob Dylan at the height of fame, accompanied by an entourage, through a series of strange encounters with different people in the mid-60s UK. The most famous of these meetings are those with rival musicians and hostile journalists, but the value of the film is in the smaller, chance fragments that catch a moment in time, and the context of the place, around the music tour that is the intended subject.

A group of excited kids somewhere in Merseyside yell for Dylan to come out of a hotel, but when he appears they are lost for something to say. They ask the perennial question "Have you any brothers or sisters?".

Later the High Sheriff's Lady invites the entourage to stay at her mansion house in May, after she becomes the Lord Mayor.

A strange atmosphere throughout, tired out and strangely gentle, rainy landscapes glimpsed from big shiny cars, or old fashioned railway trains with the tall seats, through the glass old Northern townscapes are churned through Harold Wilson's white heat, becoming shiny and new.

Then there's a moment where Dylan meets another journalist, but there is something different about this encounter. This journalist speaks in a clipped, refined way and says he is producing a program for West African listeners for the BBC. There's something odd in his manner, using phrases like "The questions are four in number" before listing each interview question in full before actually asking them.

Yet this man is also friendly and engaged, even passionate compared to the other journalists in the film, and seems to throw Dylan off slightly by mentioning a play, MADHOUSE ON CASTLE STREET (1963) by Evan Jones. This play was broadcast on the BBC and featured a young Bob Dylan just before his breakthrough to fame. The interviewer says he and Jones went to school together in Jamaica, and then begins recording the interview, beginning with the first question we have already heard, which is met with an "Umm..." before the film cuts away to stock footage of Dylan performing in a field somewhere in the rural South at the height of the civil rights movement. 

It's a strange scene which to a degree uses this journalist as a figure of fun, placing his questions about political engagement in the context of a string of other scenes where this topic prompts increasingly exasperated responses, and placing his polite manner next to the detached cool of Dylan & his entourage. At the same time, the sudden cut away to the civil rights footage (a performance outside the comfort of a concert hall (looks like a farm) of the Medgar Evers-referencing song "Only A Pawn In Their Game") suggests the filmmakers had some sympathy with the idea Dylan had retreated from genuinely radical action. In the scrapped follow up film EAT THE DOCUMENT you can hear members of Dylan's entourage mocking this man and his way of speaking a year later.

- Second Encounter: later, looking for images for an essay on a book by Samuel Selvon, who stands on the left of this photograph by the filmmaker Horace Ové. In fact, though he is difficult to recognise behind glasses, hat and beard, on the right is the same man from the scene in DON'T LOOK BACK. Somewhere between the second and third encounters, this link is made, and this man is Andrew Salkey.

- Third Encounter: walking into a new friend's flat which feels as though it's by the sea, though it's really at the top of a hill in South London. At the top floor of the building, it feels like being high up in a sailing boat, rolling around on the sea, you can hear the wind. On the bookshelf is a copy of HAVANA JOURNAL (1971) by Andrew Salkey. Flicking through, this book is about a trip to Castro's Cuba to attend the Cultural Congress of Havana held in 1968. Salkey goes along with C.L.R. James and the publisher John LaRose, who stands next to Selvon in the middle of the photograph from the second encounter.

According to this article on the George Padmore Institute site, the three writers were directly engaged in the debates at the international conference, questioning the ideas that formed the basis of the discussions, and even holding their own independent meeting in a theatre away from the main venue (a marked contrast to Dylan's own disengagement with straight-ahead politics? By this time the folk singer was in self-imposed exile, no longer touring and living in the countryside).

- Fourth Encounter: later, near the same flat, walking into a tiny bookshop. There's a copy of ANANCY'S SCORE (1973) by Andrew Salkey. This book features a series of linked short stories which use the folk character of Anancy, who features in West African and Caribbean folklore. The stories are collages of themes and language, combining references to old and new narratives, for instance placing references to the garden of Eden and the atom bomb in the same story, and using a writing style that contains a multitude of slang elements. 

There are parallels with Bob Dylan's use of structures, characters and narratives from folk stories in combination with different sensibilities (rock music or slang or the city itself as a setting, that whole feeling of 50s/60s American underground culture). There are also some overlaps in ideas and outlook, one passage reading for instance

"It happened now one daytime when Brother Sun was stretching far up into the big blue, Brother Anancy and his wife were walking up and down the banana field in the place called The Beginning. You might think that the name of this garden is a funny coincidence of a name, but that is the personal business of all names. Names must lead people on and cause a lot of botheration. Believe me: there's no other way that names and tags can serve any purpose, particularly when people looking up to names and tags, and using them to settle affairs for all time. People trap names and treat them as final judges."

The book also features illustrations by Errol Lloyd, a Jamaican-born artist who was part of the Caribbean Artists Movement.

One of Errol Lloyd's pictures.

- Fifth Encounter: washed up, walking down the street one day, slightly lost, unsure of anything that is happening. There's suddenly a main road and another bookshop. Something about it calls out, and it produces two little artefacts. The first is an anthology for schools called Caribbean Prose, edited together by Andrew Salkey. There are stories by George Lamming and Edward Braithwaite. The second is a postcard of Victoria Square, Birmingham, 1932.

- Slowly putting together a sense of the work of Andrew Salkey. According to his obituary by Stuart Hall, he was born in Panama, went to school in Jamaica, and eventually settled in London, also working in Massachusetts. He created an enormous body of work, including an epic poem about the history of Jamaica that took two decades to write, and through working at the BBC, editing anthologies, working in publishing, and helping to start the Caribbean Artists Movement, he was instrumental in supporting and popularising work by Caribbean writers. According to the British Library, "He was jokingly labelled ‘Chief Recorder of Caribbean authors and their whereabouts’ by close friend Sam Selvon".

- What is there to say about this little journey? Encountering Salkey in all these different places, it seems like he is still travelling around and still spreading the word. Looking back at DON'T LOOK BACK, especially after looking at the great stories in ANANCY'S SCORE, the encounter between Salkey and Dylan seems a terrible waste, a missed opportunity, at best a failure of communication and circumstance, at worst something more sinister, potentially even ignorant, malicious. 

- Happy times trailing around bookshops with friends, discovering all the famous and rebellious writers, but almost exactly at the same time finding by chance a copy of THE LONELY LONDONERS by Samuel Selvon, a quieter doorway into an incredible, seemingly endless constellation of writers and artists that is still quite difficult to access, slowly finding more old books by C.L.R. James, George Lamming, Joan Riley.

- travelling through texts, which travel through fictional places and representations of real places, or travel through real places as books, setting down on shelves, or travel with people, C.L.R. James losing Nan Milton's manuscript of her John Maclean biography somewhere in the underground, all the text put together is a big city full of chance encounters, encounters with histories that are overlaid back on the real city, a place to read in the park on the bus or with a friend, finding texts with friends and reading to each other, starting journeys through the places of texts and through real places that are pulled back through texts that are filtered back through places, texts begin the journey or come along and change it, and vice versa, you travel between the islands of the text and the place and the journey, all the text put together is an ocean crossed by readers and writers who crossed real oceans, 

aviary is a series of videos, radio broadcasts and texts, which can be sequenced in any desired order or combination, and is based on a series of journeys and pilgrimages tracing different histories around a group of islands & nearby places

THE BEIDERBECKE AFFAIR (1985)

- A television series which is simultaneously

  - an essay on architecture in a specific place (Leeds and related places, the group of islands Leeds is in),

  - a political tract concerning public space, everyday life and policing,

  - a poem about the relation of texts (including music and maps) to everyday life,

as well as being an engaging drama which takes the detective story format in a different direction to other works that revise or reuse this format. 

- Instead here the motion is towards something gentler, more ordinary and more integrated into everyday life off-screen (for instance in terms of the locations and characters). An idea of the detective story narrative as a journey/path/route, even an excuse, that allows the text to visit, examine and potentially transform everyday spaces and places, is already inherent in the stories of Raymond Chandler for instance, and is here amplified to subversive effect, shorn of the violence and macho tone in amusing ways (which oddly produces a result a little like the films of Jacques Rivette, approached from a completely different angle). You end up with a set of instantly applicable ideas for living. 

- Brief plot summary: two high school teachers in Leeds become involved with two men running a (legal) alternative economy, and subsequently all four are tracked by an over-eager young policeman. Eventually all of these characters realise they have unearthed corruption at the top of the local government and police force.

- The aforementioned modes (essay, tract, poem, (story)) are all related to one another, an archipelago of ideas, and are woven skilfully together in the construction of the series, through each formal element. In this way problems are dealt with in a complexity of pattern beyond simple oppositions (characters switch sides). A method of production which thinks by moving through space, and uses the tools of filmmaking to think (through space)(best exemplified by Varda's LES GLANEURS ET LA GLANEUSE (2000)). This space is the familiar spaces and places of the contemporary city (somehow little has been lost in relevance since the original broadcast / same economic era? / the beginning of the dodgy development, construction, rather than the industrial ruin, as the dominant marker in the landscape).

- Location: these are the actual spaces of Leeds 1985, filmed on location. 80s housing, post-war housing, pre-war housing, high schools, town halls, city centres, police stations, planning offices, mansions, building sites, demolition sites, allotments, modernist and anti-modernist buildings. Brecht's making an instant stand out without hiding what it stands out from. In being visually represented, already a fiction, these spaces are immediately also being subverted, producing alternative approaches to them. Working at a local level produces a practice, ironing out the generalising aspects of wider theories, for instance that of the state apparatus which is referenced by the young policeman. Is this a useful way of demonstrating there is something in these kind of theories?

- Image: use of framing as an immediate simple subversion: an astonishing shot that tracks up the outside of the regulated box structure of a high school building, but within the windows you can see the chaos of children chasing and fighting. Use of wide shots that track outwards to be comprehensive about each space (for instance the new housing estate where the woodwork teacher lives, or a roundabout).

- Writing: each episode begins with a title which will eventually be spoken by one of the characters, a puncturing gesture that immediately takes the viewer into a level above the text as well as the text itself: here is where the essay, tract and poem can take place (above the level of being (vaguely) engrossed? still a problem with this kind of thinking, a snobbery? to veer away from this familiar edge).

- Characters: the protagonists actions and uses of city space form a possible, simple, modest, gentle, everyday anarchism. They defy the categorisation and authority-structuring of space: a shed is an office, a parish church (and later a flat) is a warehouse. "Planners make a church a church". Within the home, falling asleep on the sofa (life's great pleasure - the scene in THE LONG GOODBYE (1973) where Marlowe wakes up in the middle of the night and goes to the supermarket - breaking down the day/night behaviour distinctions). A house as another building in the city; treating each building in the city as of equal use; using the city, actually going to a town hall and asking questions; running for a local election.

Still from THE LONG GOODBYE (1973)

- Simultaneously the characters defy established social relations. The priest is not actually a priest, and the two brothers are not actually brothers. Association and solidarity; a family who are not family develops. The villains (businessman, police chief and local councillor) are those who use the structure to gain power and capital, and illicitly subvert the structure for their own ends without transforming it in general (corruption). Chilly handshakes in the town hall. The two brothers-not-brothers are actively resisting the free market by running their own "white economy".

- Finding it more and more difficult to remember what is possible on a really simple level, squeezed by technology and the market. The characters in this series listen to jazz, wear good clothes (especially Barbara Flynn's character), build furniture, go to the cinema, work in the garden, walk around, fall in love. There's so little time to be together. 

- Maps: thinking of maps as a formal element of any moving image. This series features different kinds of map, some authoritarian (plans, police notes, computer archives) some anarchic and unconventional (jazz records, the chance images and encounters of wandering around). 

- Sound: jazz, popularly available, massively subversive, a way to make everyday life more fun, more colourful, to make a game of each day going to work and coming home again. Or simply a way to introduce new sounds into the listened-to-landscape. The narrative, familiar but warm and strange in a reproducible way, develops like a jazz piece, a collective journey that goes somewhere without stopping each individual from going on diversions of their own; it is actively produced across the duration of the series by these diversions. Like baseball or the grid of American cities, jazz, a structure as a simple frame for any number of other things and moments to be suspended in rather than dictated to. 

- How to write a series of notes with this structure? An archipelago of ideas, not authoritative, possible to join into larger networks of co-operation, possible to wander off (where has G gone? we stood in the supermarket. "he's gone to the moon").

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.