EN VANAVOND NEMEN WE BABEL (AND TONIGHT WE TAKE BABEL) (Hans Van Den Boom, 1977)

'Comparisons are reductive.  And the critical game of trying to describe a piece of art by naming two others is not only lazy, but cheating.  If I were to say that this film is a blending of Jodorowosky's Holy Mountain and Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line (with the mystical terrorism of Michael Mann's The Keep), I would feel a sense of embarrassment about my ability to describe what I see to you.  But I did mention them, and even in withdrawing them I leave something for you to go on (like a prosecuting lawyer who draws groundless pictures which will inevitably be struck out by the judge, knowing that the pictures are in the minds of the jury and cannot be unseen).  A fake, maybe, but now you have a turnstile into the correct ballpark that holds And Tonight We Take Babel, and you can feel the ebb and flow of its game, restricted seating or otherwise.' Mitch Michener (1)

A spy has already given her life in exchange for smuggled footage, taken by microcameras hidden in her hair.  Based on this information, the psych-drum was struck, calling the men.  Soon, the corridors echo with humming nuns, one sitting in every home that has sent a soldier.  Families launch night-time candlelit vigils through the centres of towns.  Silently.  They walk a strict route as an omen of disaster, the song of curlews at night, has been heard.

We will witness, from beginning to end, a military attack on an enchanted meadow of noise.  The need for this land is never entirely clear, but we can gather from the bubbling voicebox thrum coming from it that it is more than a symbolic or strategic significance, and that the holy din therein can cause men to believe that they can swim new rivers and end all wars. 

The weather spoils one advance, leaving platoons marooned at the foot of the hill.  As they await instructions, their supplies, which consist mainly of powdered drinks, run low, and they are forced to brew soups from the spillages of wildlife.  They haven't seen the enemy yet, but know that too long spent in the valley could see them fatally outflanked.  The mood is itchy.  The prophylactic errors in boudoirs of towns on the trail must be left behind, a new spiritual strength must be found for the assault.  But where?  The valley is filled with exotic foliage.  Broccoli trees loom up to fifty feet, but are yellow and inedible at this time of year.  Endless shining truths loom on the horizon, ready to poison a corporal.  The men know that waiting until the solstice will make the attack harder.  But striking on the night itself, the longest there is, might swiften the end.

In the meantime, the regiment's icon is placed on a tablecloth at the head of the advance.  It sits, hot as an electric fence, crackling with premonitions of action.  Soldiers take turns making offerings, hoping to wash their arms with oranged energy before battle.  Their prayers seem to be grammatically unconnected lists, as if proving to their god that Babel Hill, with it's surfeit of language, must be delivered; without it their words have no meaning.  Despite their claims to blankness, corrupt imagery seeps through their syllables.

Generals in their tent discuss ball games from home to avoid talking about the paradoxes of battle:  We do not need to fight.  But we need to win.  We do not have a reason to fight unless we win.  Then meaning follows. 

One general, more thoughtful than the others, has been observing the men:

'Although the battle plan imposes few constraints on the movements of its soldiers, I learn with interest that individual performances do not diverge significantly from one another, nor does the regiment degenerate into chaos.  The fact that this does not happen is of considerable interest, because it suggests that somehow a set of controls which are not stipulated in the plan arise in battle, and that these "automatic" controls are the real determinants of the war.  Optimistically speaking, we are perhaps far more telepathic than we suspected.  On the other hand, perhaps we lack any imagination. This is fascinating, and could prove decisive in either direction.'

Psychic soldiers behind our lines sit and project an invisible netting over the battlefield.  Their concentrated efforts not only slow the movements of the enemy, but give our men the opportunity to advance through the air.  Teams of six can, with a combination of molasses, Diet Coke and prayer, lift off the ground and spin over the battlefield. Many of these early scouts will be shot out of the sky and move on to Valhalla introductory ceremonies, but the drama of their percussive deaths allows our army to find new positions.  The rest of us salute them, and run into our new positions.  The objective is now in view.

The enemy sends shunts into our psychic field.  These low-resistance connections in the circuit form an alternative path for a portion of the current. This bypass allows their guerrillas passage into our body channels, and if not stopped quickly, they can surgically divert blood from out vessels.    Instructions to the front line become ever more damaged and confused, arriving as whispered rumours.  The battle rages for days.

The general:
'Perhaps the only way to truly outflank this enemy is if we find a brand new pattern of assault.  I propose that we send a platoon through the unguarded pass we call The Afterlife.  Once there, these men can cause havoc with the minds of the enemy, who do not believe in what they cannot see.  Once these men have plotted coordinates, a massive rush of men behind them will swing the battle decisively.'

An explosion, and suddenly we are in a quiet room.

Young, young men smile and escort us through the white.  They are sort of astronauts, but with all the psychological aspects of sailors.  Their calm smiles lead us to a banquet.  We tell them of our orders, to take the pass, but they insist that we sit.  Slowly, the guilt we feel about abandoning our colleagues fades, and as course after course of delicious food is brought to us, we begin to believe that perhaps we have won.  For surely, only the owners of the melodious field of Babel could provide such a meal.

And Tonight We Take Babel Directed by Hans Van Den Boom Produced by Ronny van der Linden Written by Hans van den Boom Starring Willem Joos, Rutger Hauer, Herman Brood, Jeroen Krabbe, Hans van den Boom  102 mins OranjeFilm/ Rank Organisation Release Date UK: Sept 1977 US: N/A Tagline:'War Is Hill.'

1. First Lines From The Front Lines  (MacMillan, 1985)

BEAT STAR (George Pammell, 1960)

The first thing you have to do is get an audience with Donald P. Impressario.  He's the main brain.  He has a stable of lads, all with names conveying undoubted star power.  Some will tell you that you should go it alone, employ a manager rather than be employed by one, that some singers earn 500 pounds a week, and that Impressario will only pay you 20 at first, but what they don't tell you is that he gives you a five year-contract, and he knows how to put you on the right bills.  He's a starmaker, and no mistake.

And look at his list: Dickie Brown, Bobby Dream, Luke Famous, John Gently, Vic B.Goode, Nelson Drive, Jimmy Lies, Dougie Anger.  Masters of the suggestive.  To a man they can rock a civic hall with a beat or bring the girls to screams just with the way they light a cigarette. 

Some of them are in Chichester on Friday.  This is your chance.  You know some chords.  When you worked on the barges after you escaped from that horrible comprehensive you held that job for a while, and you even liked it.  When it was quiet, the old fella Joe taught you a few blues runs on his homemade guitar, and you'd picked it up alright, Joe had said.  But they'd sacked you in the end, just like the other places, and now your Dad is all over your back with talk of the army.  You're eighteen in two weeks, and it is now or never. 

You put on your best blazer, the one you picked up in London when you went there that time, the one with the green silk lining that cost a packet that you hide under your bed.  You don't ring your mates, because they'll want to lark about and throw fag ends at girls, and they don't even know you've got some songs anyway.  They won't want the hassle of the train up to Chichester and back anyway, they reckon the big beat is silly half the time.  Elvis came out four years ago, and this fad will be done soon, they reckon.

The doorman is distracted by a blonde in a polka-dot dress, so you step by, push through the girls at the stage door and you're in.  A man asks you what you want, and you say you're looking for Mr Impressario.  That's me, he says.  Whereupon you tell him you've got some songs for his boys.  He takes you to the dressing room, where Bobby Dream is doing his hair.  Up close he looks even younger than you, has some acne, but still has that something.  American cars in his eyes.  He gives you his guitar and you carefully strum through one of your numbers.  Mr Impressario watches and says nothing, just keeps asking if you've got any more  Each one you play causes Bobby to tap his feet, click his fingers and fidget.  Sometimes he laughs at a particular change or lyric.  You can't tell if he likes the songs or not.

So you want to be a beat star,  he says, and you say no, no, you just want a publishing deal.  It doesn't work that way, he says.  Mr Impressario gets up, puts his arm around you, and leads you down a corridor.  The brush-off is imminent, you're sure, and he pushes you through a door.  There are lights in your face.  You turn back, and there is a red curtain.  You turn again, and see that you're on stage.  There are girls screaming.  You're mad, you've been tricked.

Sell it son, Mr Impressario shouts through  his laughter.  You're stricken.  You can't move.  You hate him for showing you up.  But the girls keep screaming,  and looking at you expectantly.  They can't see through the illusion.  They buy it.  You play a few awkward chords, and they still buy it.  You give them a number, stammering over a word or two, and they love it even more.

When you leave the stage, Mr Impressario puts his arm around you again.  He thinks you can do a deal.  And he's got a name for you.  Ricky Nervous.  It's a good name, he says.  You don't normally stammer you say, and will be sure to be more confident next time, when it won't be a surprise.  But he wants you to stammer for England.  Stammer like there's no tomorrow.  The girls don't love Elvis because he is tough, he says, they love him because he's a Mummy's boy, and that's why they'll love you too.


Beat Star Directed by George Pammell, Produced by Tom Harverd, Richard Richardson.  Written by Ron Stockwell  Starring Vince Eager, Max Miller, Marty Wylde, Anthony Newley Red Arrow/ Rank Organisation 94 mins UK Release Date: March 1960 Tagline: 'So you wanna be a beat star, eh?'

MONA (Lance Adams, 2012)

Jeff Hudson (Patton Oswalt) is thrilled when he lands a job as a writer for Bona Comics. He's been drawing and self-publishing his own titles for years with little success, and this opportunity is beyond his wildest dreams. His friends are confused that his chance has come now, and tease him about his love for Bona's most famous creation, Mona.

To them, Mona is nothing more than a refracted Wonder-Woman, a photocopied Supergirl; she has had so many shapely forms over the years, and been redrawn so frequently, that her face is a pixelated wash of back-stories. Up-close the dotted print of her skin is pockmarked with cancelled and re-cancelled origin tales, her hair burnt with re-dyed roots. But Jeff is in love, and encouraged by a dream in which it was prophesied that he would write 'The Greatest Story Ever Told In Boxes,' he approaches Bona with relish.

He has never before been past the lobby of the crumbling art-deco building in Midtown that has been home to Bona Comics since the late fifties, and he bounces his excitement off the high ceilings. His new colleagues are less enthusiastic. The other writers are depressed cynics who make it clear to Jeff that his writing abilities will rarely be used; The legendary originator of Bona and creator of Mona, Paul Bona (Frank Langella), has written every one of her stories for fifty years, and only takes on scraps of the team's ideas. Her shifting identity serves as testament to his obsessive attempts to perfect Mona.

Paul Bona lives and works on the top floor of the building, and rarely leaves. The writers send their efforts up to him in a dumbwaiter, and otherwise idle their days away playing pool. Jeff's illusions about his new employer are challenged, but when a combination of social ineptitude, persistence and a slapstick delivery mix-up (involving weary elevator man Tom Waits) results in Jeff stumbling into Bona's secret lair, he finds a surprise.

Rather than being the genius control freak of lore, Bona turns out to be a shambling wreck. He invites Jeff to stay and share Chinese food, and the pair sit in a dark room on furniture covered with sheets, while Bona tells his story. In the early years writing was easy for him. On any wet afternoon in the late fifties, Bona might invent and sketch a dozen superheroes, and fill in their histories before the bar closed. Those hopeful years were fuelled by his caffeinated energy and boozy enthusiasms. Of all of his creations, he loved none more than Mona. She grew from a blurry Amazonian pastiche into a modish icon by the mid-sixties, and flickered on the edges of mainstream success. Her small but loving fanbase stuck with her through manifold puberties and menopauses, as her powers evolved from the standard karate-expert/detective beginnings, on through various borrowed abilities, until the Mona we recognise today (a telekinetic sensitive),was established in the 1980s.

Bona tells Jeff that this was around the time that he realised, through the receding haze that was his recovery from alcoholism, that for a long time he had not been writing the stories. He'd always shared credits with younger writers to get them an avenue into the industry, but had written all the Mona stories himself. He hadn't remembered writing many of the seventies Mona strips, of course, because he was drunk for the whole decade. But that wasn't what he meant. 'At some point it dawned on me... that Mona herself has grown her own intelligence and is writing her own stories. She's already managed to siphon company funds into a new account in the name of her alter-ego, Jodie Green. I don't really understand how she did that. But I'm more concerned with what happens next.'

The shifting identity of Mona over the years wasn't caused by Bona's ego, fashion, or market forces it seems; but by Mona's own hand, as she aimed to craft her own personality. She is making herself into the woman she most wants to be.

Bona expects Mona to somehow make her escape. Can he stop her, with Jeff's help? Should they stop her? Would a flesh and blood Mona, filled with the good values Bona tried to instill in her, be a blessing to the world? And how will Jeff react to the prospect of his heroine threatening to become real?

Mona Directed by Lance Adams Produced by Rich Thompson Written by Art Poize, Lance Adams Starring Patton Oswalt, Frank Langella, Marianne Faithfull (voice), Tom Waits Universal Pictures 115 mins. Release Date UK/US: May 2012 Tagline: 'And Woman Created Woman.'

LE BOTOX (Jean Champi, 1957)

In the 54 years it has taken to officially arrive in this country (this country being, variously, America, the USA, or some virtual construct located in both, either or neither) Le Botox (1) hasn’t aged a day. Its joy is as infectious as ever, its anarchy still as cutting (and cutting still as anarchic) as that of the far more celebrated Godard; and the free-and-easy techniques once described by Andrew Sarris as “of very mixed quality” look not only resolutely masterly but succinctly modern. There is a long shot following Pierre along the street, past the market and crowds, which makes a similar sequence in À bout de souffle look almost contrived; And during the scene in which Paulo (Michele Abbruzzo) serves at the Riviere restaurant, the elegant complication of Champi's tracking shots, weaving like slick ghosts through a staged bustle, couldn't have been guided any more perfectly by anyone else. His later sequence, following a family's departure from Tours and out into the Loire Valley, is studded with such quiet gold as to render the need for such gimmickry as colour, smell and 3-d as almost superfluous. All this without modern lightweight cameras too.

That Champi is not thought of as one of the French directors who 'turned the 20th Century about-face'(2) in the fifties and sixties is the kind of cruel sequence that the director himself conspires in his films, and one which he dealt with phlegmatically. 'True pioneers get lost in the wilderness years before civilization even knows they're gone,' he said at Cannes in 1972, when a campaign to have a new cut of Le Botox shown at the festival failed. But by the time he had come to be convinced of his genius, it had left him. His last two films, Paris Dans L'Ombre (1969) and La Fiction Est Fiction (1971) had failed completely, the thrusting camerawork obstructing the audience's embrace. He surely knew, after that, that Le Botox would be his one masterpiece, never to be bettered. Such knowledge so early in life (Champi was twenty-four when he made Le Botox, and sidled into Cannes two weeks before his fortieth birthday) is a sore test.

Traces of Le Botox can be seen across the contemporary cinematic landscape, as if we still cannot deal with it in its entirety. The subplot in which Paolo, prompted by a writing class exercise follows and becomes obsessed with a woman is blown up to fill the narrative in both David Thewlis' skinny and grim Lecher (2008, in which the director himself plays the man who ends up murdering the girl) and Neil Burger's Exercise (in which Christian Bale follows a girl, only to discover that his wife is paying her to drive him insane by acting out a biography of his fantasies).

Champi's screened illusions, showing us the trickery and wonder of our surround, hover just out of view, despite the microscopic attention thrown over this period of French cinema. He was never as caustic as Chabrol, as aggressive as Godard. He couldn't keep as cool as Rohmer, and he lacked the energy of Truffaut. He could match none of them for stamina. But filmmaker and friend Agnes Varda knew his worth. She describes Le Botox as '... the forgotten vowel of the French cinematic language. If we could only remember it, and remember how to fashion its form on our page and in our mouths, we could complete secret sentences of new perfections.'(3)

Le Botox Directed by Jean Champi Produced by Jean Champi, Michael Ravelle Written by Thomas Brix Starring Michele Abruzzo, Maria Lucho, Francois Truffaut SRV Films 119 mins Release Date UK/Fra: Oct 1957 Tagline: 'Too rich, too poor, Too hungry for more'.

1. Le 'Botox' being a French word for a 'hearty appetite' or an 'eager young boy', according to Merriam-Webster, or a 'hungry young cocksmith' according to Mary M. Webster (citation needed).

2. Sarris' famous phrase included the core group of Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol and Rivette

3. Sight & Sound, March 2008

ANDY WARHOL'S RYAZANTSEV (David Salle, 1970)

If one were to compile a book of pictures of the Soviet star Tanya Ryazantsev (and indeed someone has, but it might not count: as the evidence is absent from the web in body of image and of thought. He was a Ukranian photographer (with the distinctly un-Ukranian name of Sauvage), whose collection did not survive Glasnost to arrive safely in the ultimate age of carbon-dated ephemera retrieval, the digital one), one might see a study in the the effort that it takes to construct a frown: for rarely has an icon made looking iconic seem so hard-earned. If she has pedagogical eyes and learned limbs, then she is straining every last branch of her family tree to appear this way.

The photos would show all of her body parts, in varying sequences: the tight calves, stretched as if about to snap; the protruding collarbone, as distinct from her upper torso as a garland of ceremonial tibias; eyelashes, thin and fair, invisible in the sun.

Warhol's treatment of the star in many ways fits his treatment of everything: Ryazantsev's cheekbones are flattened, her expression deadened, her complexion rendered as pale as one of his own palid hairpieces. Warhol, the story goes, lost interest in the star long before he'd finished shooting her, passing her onto David Salle. Characteristically, the Factory host found the scenes that were shot and edited by Salle to be among the finest work that he himself ever produced. If Warhol traced the dichotomies between commerce and art, his most profound statements were the ones that crossed the production line: the silk screens made by others, for example. The films at which he cast but the most cursory glance are the ones that bear his stamp most surely. Such is the paradoxical grip of a certain brand of nihilism.

Ryazantsev then, an enigma of passions, her face a colony of efforts. But to what end? She certainly had none of the ambitions that seem to drive most actresses, and starred in only a handful of films in America, and then erratically. She supposedly turned down many big names over the years, only to say yes to the made-for-TV John Milius actioner Death Or Death? Ryazantsev returned to Russia in 1990 to 'walk the countryside and breathe the air. That is all.' Ryazantev, one suspects, is far too stupid or clever to care about her legacy. If her departure from cinema threatens to lend a Garbo tint to her narrative, the robust quietness of her post-fame life quickly distills such fancy. Garbo quit the screen because she cared, Ryazantsev because she couldn't care less.

In the final shot of the film that sealed her fame across Communist Eastern Europe, дневник моего заключительного года (Diary Of My Final Year, Lev Mikhailov, 1955) the girlish Tanya conjures a frown so delicately indecisive that the viewer feels tricked; its ambivalence strikes a contrast with the repeated mantra of her inner monologue ('You have to love yourself before you can hate anybody else, you have to love yourself before you can hate anybody else...') which spins ever onwards, until the words collide on the soundtrack, overlapping, and splitting, much like Alvin Lucier's sound piece I Am Sitting In A Room. The words become hollow and meaningless in repetition, an idea that Warhol, in particular, understood.

Ryazantsev Directed by David Salle Produced by Andy Warhol, David Salle Written by David Salle, Tanya Ryazantsev Starring Tanya Ryazantsev, Geri Miller Release Date US: Oct 1970 Tagline: 'Yes. No. Maybe. Maybe Not.'

FUTUR (Piotr Janas, 1958)

'Forty years and I have learned nothing, nothing useful, about the people, factories, politics and personalities of Hackney. The name has declined to a brand identity. A chart-topper: worst services, best crime, dump of dumps. A map that is a boast on a public signboard, a borough outline like a parody of England. My ignorance of the area in which I have made my life, watched my children grow up, is shameful. I've walked over much of it, on a daily basis, taken thousands of photographs, kept a, 8mm film diary for seven years: what does it amount to? Strategies for avoiding engagement, elective amnesia, dream-paths that keep me submerged in the dream.' Iain Sinclair

In 1947, Piotr Janas moved from Gdansk in Poland to London in England and immediately started work on his only film. His script revolved around a young man in wartime Poland who slipped forwards and backwards in time, and when he began shooting in the bereft streets of postwar London, the problem of the setting was evident. 'I didn't know if London was big enough to stage my memories of my bombed and occupied hometown. Even though it dwarfs Gdansk, the intensity of my destroyed home looms large.'

Janas never planned to leave anything more than just this one artifact, a nine-hour compendium of 'every thought, waking, sleeping, and the delicious etherworld in between.' He shot hundreds of hours of footage in London between 1947 and 1953, and became intrigued by the way that the narratives of different places can echo. 'I filmed so much, imprinting my memories of a now dead past onto my new home, that the effect was dizzying. I began to see doppelgangers of childhood girlfriends in the windows of London buses, and a turn down a calm street in Notting Hill one day drew me to my childhood road completely, even though they bear few similarities, except my own presence at one time, and then another.'

Compelled, Janas shot more footage throughout 1955 and 1956, bleeding his new autobiography into his script. 'All films are really, of course, about making films. The viewer cannot help but be aware, somehow, of the fact that their view is one given to them by an invisible hand. This was even more true for mine, it being my one and only attempt.' Janas' biography of his own time in London was being folded in on itself, ingredients inseparable from his time-travel plot: The process as the art.

In 1958 the film was released under the name Futur (the final 'e' being dropped because Janas wanted to acknowledge the unfinished quality of even an exhaustive work like this.) It is largely a science fiction narrative following a man as he jumps between occupied Poland and a dreamy future. But for long periods our hero is gone, vanished from the text, lost amid documentary footage of Picadilly Circus, Hyde Park, or Hackney's Mare Street. During many sequences, Janas' voice walks with us. His words are a jumble of his story and that of his character:

The future is made up of versions of the past, of course. Sometimes, our brain traces links, apparently to make the distortions more palatable. When I am in the future, I have memories of the present, and feel uncanny nostalgia for a variety of pasts. Walking down a London street, I know this is the near-future, so I scan the surroundings for clues, and tread carefully. It is busy, there are lots of people and cars. A girl loading furniture into a van wears a face mask to protect her breathing; a passing cyclist does the same. Other faces in the crowd wear them too, but not everyone. I pass a row of shops. Outside the pavement is filled with flatbed trolleys, the kind used to bring large amounts of milk or bottles of water back and forth. This makes the pathway hard to get through, so I step up onto one of the trolleys to let walkers pass in the other direction. Amongst the austere bustle, a dark-eyed woman smiles from under a furry Russian-style hat and fur coat. She looks like a school friend, fully grown, and is the only person making eye contact. Others move in and out of the supermarket with what I read as a life-during-wartime hollow calm, the kind that sets in after the realisation hits that panic stations cannot be manned permanently. Perhaps I am wrong.

I pass the supermarket. Behind me, a notably cheerful man camply declares that he will eat it (what? leftovers? something) with a few slices of FG. His female companion laughs. I walk on, debating in my head what FG might be. Conclusion: Fresh Golden, bread, and this sets a hunger off in me. I cross the street to a bakery selling the warmest, freshest loaves.

Home, at mother's. Except it is different. I reason that she has moved. It can't be too far into the future, but something has happened. This is a big, gorgeous house. I eat the bread with cheese, tomato and cucumber. My mother-in-law comes downstairs, and I remember that her and my father-in-law are staying here. My mother is out. My mother-in-law is carrying a cleaning device that is uses a vacuum- she has just done the upstairs bedroom, I guess, typically keeping busy. I show her the bread, and she is suddenly very hungry too. I cut more for her. I scan her face and the room for clues, something to bring back to my present, but I see none.

The unnamed central character never quite finds what he needs in either time. His frustration grows; this gift of foresight frequently proves useless to him, and the slivers of future he encounters contain little to carry back to the past for profit or nourishment. Before long, all he can see in the future is a looming absence: a world that rolls on, even after his death.

Futur Directed by Piotr Janas Produced by Thomas Standish Written by Piotr Janas, Tomas Lewandolski, Richard Smith Starring Robert Colt, Louise Mather Rabbit Films/CKF 552 mins Release Date UK: March 1958 US: 1982 Tagline: 'The Futur Is Murdr'

CHOCOLATE CASSETTE (19--)

My dreams are gone. I awoke with a phrase in my head that I knew was the key to unlocking a whole narrative, and repeated it to myself many times. I came up with an abbreviated set of codewords to help me recall the phrase, and an acronym of those words.

But it has all gone.

I first heard about Chocolate Cassette from David H, who (among many things) was the cultivator of a collection of anecdotal evidence of the wonder of pop culture's hidden corners. He had tracked down rumours of the film's existence across playgrounds and video shops of the West Midlands. His vivid descriptions, over several weeks, of the film's plot, dialogue, decor, acting nuances, and grand themes were, I knew, too complex to be completely true. His enjoyment of the telling was too obvious, and he would string us along at the end of a lunch break, withholding details until next time.

I stuck to him closely, convinced that he had seen the greatest film ever made, and that we, by being proxy witnesses, were glimpsing gold. And the more he told us, the more I knew it. I was sure it was a film pulled from my consciousness, and when the others lost interest (long after the most salacious details had been spent, their power rubbed out through repeated retellings), I hounded David H into further examinations, even prompting him when he forgot his own lines. Disappointed at his own waning absorption, I began writing down everything I could about the film. Before long I stopped bothering David H to check my work, and spun out alone.

By now, no-one else cared about the film, and only the curious insult taken from it lingered: Me? well you're as out-of-date as a chocolate cassette! My immersion into the world of the film I hadn't seen continued, to the point that I was certain that I had, after all, seen it. Hadn't I? In the time since I'd got a television for my eleventh birthday a couple of years earlier, I'd seen countless films. (In a way all of the entries in Fictional Film Club evoke a feeling in me, a feeling of falling asleep late at night close to my 14 inch portable television (in one of many possible bedrooms it lived), and waking up a little later to find a film underway. The sound levels of a film are vastly different to other television shows, and sometimes the drop to a quieter level wakes a dozer. In this particular scene and hundreds like it, I awake near the beginning; the protagonists are already involved in their story, but not so much that I can't keep track. In the days when more movies were on tv and less was written about them, you could stumble over them. B movies, classics, all treated equally, shown after hours. I saw many this way, not knowing until several days or years later what they were. Some are still lost, just vague structures of image and plot, evoking that Edward De Bono line about memory being that which is left when something happens and doesn't completely unhappen. There's the one where the kids break into what turns out to be a horror house, with the emaciated fella living in the walls (The People Under The Stairs, Wes Craven, 1992), or the man with nine lives performing dangerous jury duties in mob-ridden Chicago (Disclaimer, Tommy James, 1954), or further examples, on the tip of my-)

Chocolate Cassette lingered on the periphery for years until a recent visit home turned up some old diaries. A phone rings. Out of shot, a memory gathers. I knew nothing of this film until it popped into my head one day, sent there by a thousand ghosts. My writing from then is its own world, quite separate from the film. I quote:

'Sept 16, 1990.

I was about to go to bed last night when a film began on Channel Four. I idly watched the opening scenes, recognising both the father in the family who had played not only the leader of an unruly band of warriors (who also included an actor from an Australian television soap) in a lesser piece of sci-fi, but had been the host of a daytime gameshow in more recent years. The actress playing the mother I also recognised, but I couldn't place her. Their son found a diary, anyway, a plot point that seemed somewhat buried, and so I was subsequently baffled when the film swung on it. Anyway, grandparents loft, dusty light, treasure chest. Kid smashes the lock, finds nothing inside but shreds of newspaper. He thinks. But at the bottom is a diary. He takes it out. Leaves it in his room. Mum finds it one day. She opens it. Reads a random page:

'Dear Diary,

I cannot gather enough prose to talk about this. But I can put a clipping from the local rag below:

'Local Man Invents Chocolate Cassette'

[The following passage is highlighted.]

'....the ephemeral nature of song. You can record a tune which only plays once. A song that melts upon completion. No one can really remember it. It is a romantic one-off that you give to a loved one. They can eat the delicious mess. Ingest your melody.'

The distortions, from the real film, through David H's exaggerations and my own appropriations, only expand in time. Lies grow and grow, echo and echo. If I saw the film now, I'd probably overlook it, another face in the crowded station, so different it would be from my idea. Chocolate Cassette is my favourite film, at least until I see it.

BABY SHOWER (Leo Katzenberg, 1977)

Todd Rundgren stars in this oddity (produced by Blake Edwards) about a man who, taking the advice of a successful gigolo (Cliff Robertson), begins gatecrashing baby showers in the Cincinnati area, arriving with presents in the hope of meeting women. Before long, he cannot successfully navigate any romantic encounter unless it takes place at one of these gatherings.

Time spent watching Baby Shower and trying to tell apart genuine gags and missteps of taste is time wasted. Take, for example, the Todd-sung refrain, added below. It reprises itself at least thirty times on the soundtrack, reflecting (rather too directly) our hero's sickening addiction. (1)

Baby Shower by Rodd Tungsten

Baby Shower Directed by Leo Katzenberg Produced by Blake Edwards Written by Dom Perdue Starring Todd Rundgren, Maud Adams, Cliff Robertson Songs by Rodd Tungsten 88 mins Pink Productions Release Date US/UK: May 1977 Tagline:'Get out your one-sies and have some fun-sies!'

1. The songs, it should be noted, are credited to 'Rodd Tungsten'.

JACKY (Jean Antoine, 1993)

'Obviously narration is only an act of memory; on the other hand, it holds nothing in reserve for future use; it merely derives a little pleasure from the states of dread by trying to formulate them as aptly as possible;from enjoyment of horror it produces enjoyment of memory.' Peter Handke (1)

'In the 1930s Warner Brothers developed a serious line in earnest, inspirational films celebrating great scientists, liberators and social benefactors, usually played by Edward G Robinson or Paul Muni, dedicated to Longfellow's lines in his "A Psalm of Life": "Lives of great men all remind us/ We can make our lives sublime/ And, departing, leave behind us/ Footprints on the sands of time." But Variety's contemptuous neologism "biopic" stuck, and biography has never had much standing in the cinema – unlike the literary world where, under the larger rubric of "life writing", it's a serious matter both to practise and study.' Philip French (2)

Joann Star's 2010 biopic Gainsbourg (vie héroïque) followed recent rock star narratives (Ian Curtis, Edith Piaf, Brian Jones, Peter Sellars, Bob Dylan) that eschew the Oscar-sweeping epic treatment of Gandhi or Lawrence of Arabia and settle for something more impressionistic or cheeky. Gainsbourg captures the nonchalant arc of its subject's life, is enjoyably raucous and thoroughly entertaining, but somehow it still leaves the viewer knowing less about the man that President Mitterand described, upon Gainsbourg's death in 1991, as somoeone who 'through his love for the language and his musical genius, lifted the song to the level of an art.'

The real truth is in fiction, of course. At the time of his death, Gainsbourg was filming a rollicking tale of a lady-killing singer. Jean Antoine's Jacky was fashioned from tall stories, and yet it can inevitably be read as a biopic of the star, whose own episodic life (with great highlights and a fair amount of mediocrity) serves as a bold confirmation of the print-the-myth ethos. After his death, the production continued without Gainsbourg, leaving a jumpy narrative that makes perfect nonsense, and thus his turn as the titular ungallant gallavanter is a bold sign-off, a self-penned eulogy, and somewhere between brilliant and disappointment.

Gainsbourg's existence is one that comes to us framed as a series of anecdotes (smoking in hospital post-heart attack, insulting American singer on television, being banned by the BBC for being too sexy, et cetera, et cetera), all fully-formed squares in a mythological tapestry, their veracity unimportant, their greater truth illustrative of something we admire: a man living to the edge of his capacities, world be damned. So too, Jacky's life is potted and episodic, every step a deviation from the road. The character is lifted from the Jacques Brel song of the same name (the galloping chanson that begins with the careering lines: 'And if one day I should become/A singer with a Spanish bum/Who sings for women of great virtue/I'd sing to them with a guitar/I borrowed from a coffee bar/ Well, what you don't know doesn't hurt you'), the one that treats its subject like a dreamy mystic, a pickpocket pragmatist, an ambitious romantic; the man who outdrank the Roman army, outsang Frank Sinatra and outfenced (Biblically speaking) Casanova, or so he says.

There is Gainsbourg, his face like a literary allusion, weighty and important as he can muster, knowing it is all a joke. His frequent accomplices (for he needs an audience, a victim, a stooge, someone to verify and spin) are excited by him. He is calmly crumpled in the residue of party after party, the veneer of noise on everything about him, but never on him; his eyes are hollows never to be full. In exchanges with another musician in a bar, we see a riff on Mae West cheek, making rich women buy them drinks so they can spill them on the suits of husbands. They step outside into the cool Marseille night, drunker than all hell, fighting their memories to put a face to a name: Steven Angiers, wasn't he at your college? A man you knocked out in a streetfight or prizefight? The man your mother left your father for? Or someone else?

But later, after many deviations, there is a Steven Angiers, and it is Jacky himself, overseas and in pseudonym, a man with no reason to live other than to prove that he can. Exposed to the winds, Jacky takes in Paris, Tangiers (because it rhymes with 'Angiers'), Bogota and Prague, actively looking for his lottery to throw a ticket towards. This snakes and ladders progress flicks the edges of destitute, and contains champion moments of alcoholic logic bereft of boozy remorse. 'I am Jacky, and I have a full compliment of fingers and toes,' is the repeated line to the changing faces in changing fauna, as if in a life of no clear path, such simple facts can stand as a humble gospel.

In the final scene, when Jacky takes the microphone in an empty bar, he doesn't know what his next song will be, and doesn't seem to care. (3) Absolute confusion looking very much like absolute bliss, and that is as it should be.

Jacky Directed by Jean Antoine Produced by Alain Terzian Written by Jean Antoine, Serge Gainsbourg Starring Serge Gainsbourg, Christian Clavier, Sabine Azema Strand Releasing Release Date UK/US: Jan 1993 126 mins Tagline: 'Too Many Pretty Singers, Not Enough Pretty Songs'

1. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

2. The Observer, August 2010.

3. The Gainsbourg-penned and performed songs 'Le Botox', 'Amour Cruise' and 'Mon Amant Avant-Dernier' appear in the film. The latter includes a verse sung in French, and then repeated in English:

You're my penultimate lover

The one before the one before the end
After you my energies will be sucked through the vacuum
By some peachy nymphet in a gloomy backroom
And I'll expire there sweating on the Indian rug
While she calls in the others to watch me slip down
To the spiteful netherworlds, where feeling so smug
I'll buy a drink for the jailer in exchange for a favour
A call to my love whose love never wavered
I'll tell her that down here it really is hell
O hello I'll be here a while , alas, oh well
Sort out her Lucifiction from her Lucifacts
Some of the boys have got on the escape committee
We know it's impossible, no room for self pity.

M.JAINET'S ETERNAL ZIGZAG (Francois Lepin Eziot, 1949)

Plotwise, this is as simple as those early cinematic experiments entitled Tennis Match or The Motorcar Departs: A man is pursued, endlessly, across borders. We pick up our sympathies from the details: small habits and clothing tell us that he is a member of the resistance and his assailant is a Nazi spyhunter. His name is M. Jainet, and he will run and run and run. The Nazi, trapped in hopeless caricature, has no name. Even as the film begins, we are clued in to what they both know: that this chase does not end when the war does. This is their own private battlefield, a psychic chess, and it knows no international law or politick. Their situations could be reversed, and they would behave in the same manner. Like Japanese soldiers lost in the jungle, a mutual suicide, keeping alive only to spite the other, clueless as to what death to either would mean.

Eziot takes a simple stylistic concept and holds it for 85 minutes, a captain clinging to his mast through a storm. An exercise in repetition, each scene is made up of a single shot, usually with an unmoving camera. Sometimes, a scene can sit empty for minutes: an abandoned market at night, a doorway outside a glowing bar, a towpath along a canal at dusk. But always, it seems, stairs are present, lifting through the darkness hopefully, to who knows where. Frequently, we have a three-quarter view, slightly elevated, a privileged angle on these cityspaces as smoky, desperate Eschers, cold geometries which our pair pass through. Diagrams freshly-built but anciently anatomical. Tension is never relieved, as every revelation is followed by a mind-wiped new scene. As soon as one man spots another (his body stiffening ecstatically out of the jetlag for a moment), his actions are quick and decisive, but ultimately mean nothing. Not unless we see capture and an end to the cycle, and we do not. For a new scene, in a new part of town, will surely follow. Sometimes Jainet finds the stairs, and our hopes are lifted. But he has only escaped to the next screen, to begin again.

In some scenes, nothing happens; there is no-one. In others, we might only see the pursuer or the pursued (perhaps searching eagerly, or hiding, or even, on occasion, relaxing, putting the danger aside for a moment (the latter of which is frequently the most affecting)); in at least one, both pass each other without noticing. Every time, we look for those faces: the twitchy, hopeful Jainet (played by Serge Reggiani, the popular French-Italian singer) and the lumbering never-tiring Nazi (Gaston Modot, who played another angry German in Jean Renoir's La Regle du Jeu (1939)).

At first, Eziot's espionaged theatricals seem like a game for the viewer, and each scene a mystery puzzle, a Where's Waldo? in frosty greys and blacks. But soon, the beautiful complexity of an eternally repeating screen (with the water-torture tension of infernal Pong) affects us, as does the knowledge that when Jainet ricochets himself into the edge of the screen, that is the end of it, but only for now.

Eziot tinkered repeatedly with his film, and the most widely seen cut from 1949 is by no means the most definitive. In 1972, He toured a 72-hour version entitled M.Jainet's Eternal Zigzag '72, with reels replayed in random orders; a stiffening, endless, Spy vs Spy, zen warfare, perpetual fear.

Francois Truffaut wrote about the experience of watching this version for Cahiers du Cinema: (1)

'In the theatre, the fans celebrated this event in various ways: there were poetry recitals at the back, and a drinking game near the front that fell away by the halfway point of the film. One group began to cheer the Nazi, perhaps finding in him the perennial despair of Wile E. Coyote, perhaps just yearning for a conclusion. Near me, a couple slept in each other's arms for the entire weekend, not looking up once. At one point, I became convinced that the roles had been reversed, and that Jainet was tracking his pursuer; Eziot had hypnotised me, or perhaps Jainet had realised that the best way to avoid capture was to follow... Despite the singular pacing of the film, the overall mood ebbed and flowed throughout: at one point, almost everybody cheered each carefully created scene, at another they were slow-clapping, and at others it seemed like it didn't matter what we were watching... after about eighteen hours, the backgrounds through which the two men move become less like Vichy France and more like other wartime outposts- Morocco, Stalingrad, Cyprus. By the fiftieth hour, I recognised nowhere. The longer one watches, the further away from the original place we are. One comes to feel that if one were to watch Jainet running for several weeks, he might end up leading his pursuer into the sun, or the outer rings of heaven; similarly, the viewer would leave the cinema to find themselves in a completely different city, on another planet, or in another body entirely.'

The film was homaged in Rick Marving's home computer games for the ZX Spectrum in those glorious early-1980s years of quick inspiration, bedroom programming and whimsical in-jokes. Monsieur Janney's Eternal Zig-Zag '82 and Monsieur Janney's Still Running, were both famous for being never-ending, self-generating puzzles, with no game over or prize screen.

M.Jainet's Eternal Zigzag Directed by Francois Lepin Eziot Produced by Jean Eziot Written by Francois Lepin Eziot Starring Serge Reggiani, Gaston Modot DisCina Films 99 mins Release Date UK/US: March 1949 'How long can you avoid yourself?'

1. July, 1972

GOONER (Peter Harris, 1996)

'Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.' Joyce Carol Oates

'The recurring image, the one that says more than any of his videos or statements, is the Warholian one we now have: bin Laden watching a video of himself, caught in a jihad for fame.' Christopher Hitchens

Some real-life fictions have an immediate impact on Hollywood ones. Nothing stops production, of course, but this month, the death of the world's most wanted man has created a conundrum. Two weeks ago there were two Osama bin Laden films being shot, and both must be hurriedly rewritten. Now, the general public will not abide by Kathryn Bigelow's as-yet untitled film about the fruitless search for the al-Qaeda leader. The ending must now be bloody and final. Word is that Bigelow's liked tale only because it had no 'closure' (a hopelessly modern term that, when used, sounds like it means something, but rarely does); now there must be, imperfect and prosaic. Similarly, Oliver Stone's fever dream With Us Or Against Us, (imagining a predictably bombastic afterlife in which a certain former US President and his nemesis collide with sticks, resulting in mutual destruction) was due in 2012, but now seems an exercise in angry cartoonish bloodlust too far: why put up with such overcooked satire when the wreckage of a real-life lynch-job is ripe for the picking?

Through flickering videotape, one man slipped into an iconography that it seems it didn't need his death to seal. He was already a ghost, turning up in Western dreams since before he was born.

He is there in Vick Kissing's The Phantom (1942), which follows a manhunt through Montana that ends in starvation and freezing to death. The group discuss the whys and wherefores of their eye-for-an-eye existence, but the audience never discovers the extent of the actual murderer's guilt. His size, ethnicity and gun hand are all argued over, and their harried accounts seem to describe a several different men. The fracturing and failure of the group seems inevitable from the outset, leaving the question of whether the killer exists at all (and by existential extention, whether a group hunting a non-existent man can 'exist', not to mention an audience of a film about them). Clint Eastwood,(1) himself existing somewhere between icon and human, remade it as A Horse With No Rider (2004). His last Western, it fit into a Bush narrative all too easily, with a posturing son leaning ever more on the Descartian double-bind: 'We're chasin' him. He must exist!'

1996: The year the Taliban took control in Afghanistan, and Arsene Wenger began introducing a new purist mindset to Arsenal Football Club. Twin narratives, two sets of idealism. Arsenal were hitherto the epitome of English gung-ho: Tony Adams drink-driving, Ray Parlour letting off fire extinguishers in Pizza Hut (and is there a more tawdry metaphor than that?), on a heroic death-charge for the old guard of banal boozers, facing up to their own terms of endangerment in a new world. Footballers in England would now eat pasta and drink soft drinks. They would no longer be seen gurning down the lens on Top of the Pops, arms around each other in a parade of uncool fun, like rictus Astleys.

1996 also saw the filming of Nick Hornby's loveletter to boyish men and Arsenal, Fever Pitch (David Evans, 1997). It also saw the release of a lesser known North London narrative: Gooner (1996) is Peter Harris' account of Osama bin Laden in London in the 1980s, going to see Arsenal play at Highbury. Or is it? Harris took the loose facts, that bin Laden had been known to frequent Gunners matches in the Thatcher years, and spun a tale about how a rich and bored man might be swayed by religious dogma or weekly worship of a sporting kind. This came out before the World Trade Center fell, of course, but after the earlier failed attempt in 1993. Harris' film does not predict the significance of his subject to a worldwide narrative (and it must be said, he has always claimed his character is a fiction, known only by the name 'Al'; Harris he also denied all knowledge of bin Laden until after his film was finished, but this matters little). Alfred Molina (2), that man of a thousand ethnicities, plays Al with no little sympathy. He seems lost and unsure as he buys up Arsenal memorabilia.

This could be the lost British terrorist film, Molina flickering across London like M.Vurloc in Conrad's The Secret Agent, unsure of his sympathies, building his resentments. Harris' denials fit the Osama myth perfectly, erasing a man from his own biography, until he is only a figment of the world's imagination, hiding in a dark cave of the collective mind. There are parallels with Chris Morris' Four Lions (2010), but the action is looser, less dramatic; like Gus van Sant (in Elephant or Last Days mode) if he had been asked to interpret a Hornby novel shorn of women and music, leaving only the football.

Gooner Directed by Peter Harris Written by Peter Harris, Rob Watts Produced by Rich Robbin Starring Alfred Molina, Dexter Fletcher Flickknife/BBC Films 99 mins Release Date UK: Sept 1996/US: N/A Tagline: 'Who Are Ya? Who Are Ya?'

1. Eastwood's films frequently deal with the potency of symbolic masculines. Could any other action hero dissect his own mythology so frequently and cuttingly? Compare and contrast with other tough guys as the butt of their own jokes: Vin Diesel, Hulk Hogan, the second half of Sylvester Stallone's career. And don't think that Arnold Schwarzenegger's barrage of limping comedies of the early 90s (think Twins, Cinderfella, Kindergarten Cop, Austrian Thunder and Last Action Hero) display any kind of self-examination, as they are all one-note riffs on the same big-guy slapstick he'd always wrought.

2. There is a rumour that Alfred Molina has appeared in every film made during his lifetime, and even some that preceded it, such is his multi-faceted glory. He is one of those faces that link texts, jumping between them at rapid speed, cementing them as real live artifacts. His startling turn as John O'Neill in He Knows Everything And It Doesn't Even Matter (2006) was as hidden from view as Osama Bin Laden at the time: sporadic video showings, unverified. Peter Bradshaw praised the film, but said that 'it suffers from a huge problem. That John O'Neill's story spins on a real-life irony too implausible for fiction: the FBI's best man on al-Qaeda who, having been forced out of the Bureau for maverick genius, takes up his new job as the head of security at the World Trade Center. He died on his first day at work, on September 11th, 2001, and this is too perfect to ring true, even though ity is true. Truth can be stranger than fiction, but it can also be more truly fictional. Sven Hassel's gutbusting By Their Necks (1965) does not suffer from the same problem, as the musclebound romps through Torah Borah lay no claim to credibility.'

MENSCH VERSUS MITTWOCH (MAN AGAINST WEDNESDAY, F.G. Hoch, 1930)

There is a sequence in F.G. Hoch's Mensch Versus Mittwoch in which protagonist Eli, played with brilliant care by Emil Jannings, leaves a bar drunk and walks down a Berlin alleyway. He is set upon by an unseen assailant, who beats him to a bloody pulp. The whole thing is filmed in the reflected retina of a feral cat, watching the action before passively turning away to toy with a dying mouse. It is such an extravagant piece of camerawork, stepping beyond the stark theatricals of the Weimer Expressionists (and through a portal of territory unmarked at that time, except perhaps by Man Ray's Alice dans le Pays des merveilles, the lost bravura short from 1932) that it jars the viewer from the narrative: Hoch acknowledges this by showing the next scene, in which Eli recovers in his room, twice. Many first-time viewers do not notice this playful repetition, this record-skipping break of the verisimilitude.

He was rarely so bold again. As film scholar Joseph Pranden said in 1962 when reviewing F-G's career downward spiral, 'the early prognosis of 'terminal genius' was hasty, and with time the outlook receded to the less spectacular: extreme spells of inspired sickness (Gestalt Honey in 1932, Zwölf Jünger (Twelve Disciples) in 1935) punctuating long spells of banal and lazy health, in which the ability to function is taken for granted (and too many titles to mention fall into this category).'(1)

His departure to America in 1937 was an ending. Far from flourishing in Hollywood like counterpart Fritz Lang, he froze. But here he fires beautifully, his promise coinciding with Weimar studio Ufa, just as the Expressionist movement was both flourishing and about to be stifled by the rise of the Nazis.

Man Against Wednesday applies overt noir sensibilities to a plot that stretches whimsy until it is a desperate and sad dirge. Eli experiences the week as seven individuals with an agenda: to him, each day is a person, lurking in the shadows, bumping into him in the same sequence, over and over. They all wear different colours, he is certain, and although their appearance is otherwise identical, he becomes convinced that they all have defining features. Monday, always one step ahead of the dullard Tuesday, is a red-pen wielding thought-editor whose vision has receded so much that he can only swivel his eyes in two dimensions, across the ledger and down the page, to the bottom line. Sunday is calm and apologetic, meeting Eli in parks and cafes, but the others all mix brawn with punctuality, a frightful combination.

Eli tries to reason with Sunday, asking her to visit more frequently, maybe twice a week; but she clams up, refusing to talk. This is how it must be, Eli.

Eli formulates a plan. If he can avoid Wednesday, the most timid of the rest of the days, he might disrupt the chain, and escape the clutches of their routine. But where can he go where Wednesday cannot? Week after week goes by, no refuge can be found. Eli changes his regular paths, throws everything out of sync, and loses his job and friendships because of it. But still, the days always catch up with him, and their aggression only grows. Eli drinks, and tries to sleep through entire days, but wakes to find that his assailants have visited, destroying his room.

He resorts to a final plan: barricading his room and waiting. If Wednesday can't find him, Eli wins. In a sickeningly slow final scene, Hoch allows us to live with what we know, and what Eli should know: that someone else is there in his small apartment. It takes an age, but when Eli finally turns his back, Tuesday steps out from behind the long curtains and unlocks the door, letting in his eternal successor. They nod grimly, their celestial relay handover as smooth as ever, and Wednesday enters, knife drawn.

Mensch Versus Mittwoch Directed by F.G.Hoch Produced by Franz Lammer Written by Lisbeth Heinz, F.G.Hoch Starring Eli Jannings, Maly Delschaft, Max Hiller, Werner Krauss UFA/ Goldwyn Distributing Company (USA) 87 mins Tagline: none.

1. Film As A Popular Art Form, Scholar Books

I DREAM OF 'TO THE BRINK' (Peter Davies, 1988)

A boy (Matthew Rhys) dreams about a television show that he is convinced must be real, so rich is the detail in his head. He spends a day walking around his small Welsh town, asking people if they have heard of it. They have not. Every time he sleeps, he is taken to this world, a forgotten comedy-drama from the 1970s, an alternative past that only he can access.

Upon waking, he carried back with him the fully-formed history (life, loves, unloves) of a character he knew to be fictional, and yet: it was perfect in all the ways that a plausible outline should be, but vague and imprecise at the exact points that made it seem flesh rather than a carefully sculpted invention (taking into account the obvious, which is that art must consider logic in a way that real life does not, swathes of this dreamt figure's history were in the shadow, as blurry as a stranger at a station about which nothing is known except their keenness for the arrival of a train).

In the dream, the man was an English actor, a descendent of the Barrymore clan, whose name was Richard, or Rich, or maybe he was just rich. He was handsome in a slightly exotic way, dark like Tom Conti, but taller. Richard Barrymore then, estranged nephew of Sir John, who played posh con artist Hugh Brinkman in 70s sitcom To The Brink. He knew that this didn't exist, this show, but it sat in place in his mind as comfortably as those that did. To The Brink, numbers could be fabricated that seemed correct: 140 episodes, between 1974 and 1981, with a Christmas special in 1983 completing the cycle. By that point, Barrymore was starring in minor British films, small cameos in Hollywood productions, a grey beard for the stage, the usual. He died on-set in 1989, liver failure, the drink. 53. Loved, missed. They said nice things about him as a man, more than his acting. His technique was neither here nor there, his charms were his chops.

In the dream, the boy is looking at black and white photos from this show under a Christmas tree at his grandmother's old house, the one that stayed as a constant in his childhood. He can see the faces of the cast, including the grumpy pub landlord with the catchphrase ('Last orders, gentlemen. You too Mr Brinkman.'), the very common and very pretty Susie Soap, who works for Hugh in some capacity or other, and Mr Constable (played by an actor who was clearly well-respected and famous, because despite appearing for only one scene every week he was billed in the credits in large lingering letters as 'featuring Leo Carmichael as Mr Constable', to canned applause), a pensioner who Brink stops in to check up on, as some kind of penance or display of his virtuousness, lest the rest of the show leave us in doubt as to the golden heart below the caddish exterior. To The Brink survived the axe with the introduction of thick but loveable Jamaican sidekick Malcolm in the second series, a step that caused the show to be both praised for racial diversity and attacked for an apparent lampooning of immigrants. The boy loved Malcolm, and laughed just thinking of him.

Escapades: Brink always needed money, despite being to the manor born. Each week he would trip into some scam designed to return his crumbling estate to fortune. But everybody around him, except a select few, thought that his bank account was overflowing, and were trying to rip him off at every turn. Thus the frequent situation where Brink would be lavishing presents on a disinterested socialite while trying to convince would-be gangsters of his poverty.

There always seemed to be a scene where, Brink, cornered by some heavies/ an annoyed husband/ the police would feign a cockney accent and talk his way out of trouble; an inverse Eliza Doolittle, dropping 'is H's like smart bombs, for deliberate effect, and burying schooled vowels in South London lock-ups with the documented evidence of his five-hundred year-old family tree.

The boy even recounted some of the lines, pulling off approximations of the normal cut-glass Brink voice and his rougher alter-ego, but the town just laughed indulgently, and spoke of other television shows that they remembered, and were actually real. But none of them were vehicles, souped-up or otherwise, for the elusive and charming Hugh Brinkman.

I Dream Of 'To The Brink' Directed by Peter Davies Produced by Vic Marshall Written by Rick Green Starring Matthew Rhys, Thomas Bowen, Laura Ashe, Willie Ross Channel 4 Films 107mins Release Date UK: Nov 1988 US:N/A Tagline: 'Come Back, Hughie Brink, Your Drink Needs Drinking!'

MATHEMATISCHE (GEOMETRIES, Cecil Franck, 1960)

This hypnotic film from the solipsistic eye of Cecil Franck is part of a larger exercise in narrative and mind-mapping that the filmmaker returned to throughout his career. Essentially an internal monologue over the top of images of a boy walking the streets of suburban Stuttgart, it hints at the melancholy of Albert Lamorisse's Le Ballon Rouge (1956). The footage, featuring Franck's nephew Jens, was shot in 1955, and subsequently reused by Cecil in over 100 films, recut and combined with different voiceovers and swathes of musics, an ever-evolving exercise in film. From 1955's Light Line to 1984's Lazer, Franck's manipulation of just an hour of the same visuals, over and over, is an endless working towards the central questions of art and meaning(lessness).

Mathematische uses an English language voiceover. A boy speaks:

'When I was a child I would love to make games out of everyday activities. any walk was a race with imaginary opponents. Or I might consider cars to be my enemy, and attempt to pass a lamppost before they did. This worked fine on quieter streets, where the noise of the car in the distance would serve as a challenge; I'd pick a marker ahead of me, one which seemed to be far enough away to not be so easy for me to reach before the car. A truly satisfying judgement would result in me dipping slightly to take the tape mere feet before the car passed unknowingly. On busier streets it would be harder to pick out individual cars in the hubbub, so I would change the game. One might be to see the sections of grass between the pavement and the street as safe zones behind which passing cars were no threat. In this case, I could not pass between them across a driveway entrance at the the same time as a car went by. Again, I could not run or stop, but by adjusting the pace of my stride, I'd hope to navigate an entire street without being 'hit' by a passing car. I would spend a lot of time imagining lines, running from the edges of the grass through perpendicular angles across the road and across the pavement. I'd also imagine similar lines across the front and rear bumpers of cars fizzing at 90 degree angles across the pavement, shots of invisible laser or light that would be repelled by the grass but would otherwise continue across the unguarded pavements, burning all in their path. Imagining these lines became second nature; They'd spin out from parked cars (also designated as cover sometimes) and benches, walls and any vehicle. Geometric prettiness from unseen shapes, dealt with by checked strides and sudden spurts.'

As late as 2005, with the release of Luxuriant Jay, Franck was still making films with the same piece of footage he had shot of Jens in 1955. 'I have not lifted a camera or been on a set in fifty years,' he said, 'for the images I collected then contain endless possibility. There are a million films to be made from those sequences of Jens, and I will never be finished. I am like a musician composing using only one chord, on one instrument, and through this repetition I discover anew things that I could not with a wider palette.'(1)

Jens Franck died in the year 2000, aged fifty-one. His uncle continues to remake his image, combining it, in various constellations, with various music (self-composed minimalist electronics, or commissioned/borrowed works from (among many others) Klaus Schulze, Holger Czukay, Robert Wyatt, Francoise Hardy and Die Krupps) and snippets of broken words. 'Now Jens is gone, I feel like my mission has sharpened, my idea more correct. In these fifty-five minutes, over and over, I can reflect his life, his family, his loves, his passions, through the way in which I edit a small section of his life as a boy. It is all in there, his entire existence, if only I can reframe it, highlight it, show it. For him.'

Mathematische Directed by Cecil Franck Produced by Cecil Franck, Tomas Duhbyoose Written by Cecil Franck Starring Jens Franck Franck Filmproduktion 55 mins Release Date: UK/US: None (shown on German television in 1973, and at Stuttgart's ContemptArt since 1995) Tagline: 'Still Here.'

1. KINO magazine, April 2005

LANDFILL (George Eliott, 1974)

Locals debate the meaning of a quarry in a poor small town in the Midlands. It is 1969, and the swinging sixties, a media hologram only filled in with hindsight, hasn't been seen here. A gargoyled sexless rock'n'roll bled through years too late, however, leaving a residue of shabby Teddy Boys with fists. A town of scared people looking anything but, hard-minded and shut down. This is not the quiet inarticulation of Leigh or Loach; the abstract murders herein hover like reanimated carrion, where bacon-faced sons seek only a swifter nip of spite in a nonsense world of hypercolours. Flick-knives hide behind lead-in lines and 'penny-for-the-guy' smiles, and devils hang signs in the centre of town, unseen in plain view. Landfill takes a paving slab to notions of British Realism, creating a slim but swampy Anglo gothic shorn of manors and barons. No Billy Liar fantasies of escape here; they know there's nowhere to run. The youths are distressed geographers, circling their homes. Our notional hero, a tough bundle of sticks named Smithy, chases down frustrated a philosophy, but it only appears to us in fragmented voiceover, dribbles of poetry:

'England. You're free to destroy the borders, but you can't see 'em. They're not big red lines. Counties don't interlock together in some miraculous patchwork, fitting exactly, as I thought when I was younger, meeting exactly at the edges. Rather, there are spurs and burrs, overlapping edges that rut like horny stags, and dead ends that don't match up, tunnels to nowhere. You ever notice how many walls in this town don't hold anything in or out? You can walk along them but they don't go anywhere. They're just endings. The grassy mounds, piles of rubble, even shops that no-one goes in. If you can even imagine a hero being here, you can just see him walking in and knowing that this is the kind of place that sporting hope ignores, and that this is where he gets cornered without his sixgun.'

Gangs fight over ownership of the night in various places, Smithy is enlisted. The prize location: the quarry, where bad things happen to children, and it is always their own fault for being there. Over the landfill site the dug-out soil stands as a semi-permanent hill, Mount Crud. The locals christen it, laugh at it, climb it, tut at it's grim appearance on their horizon, but it becomes evident that it represents far more than municipal decision-making and ugly waste-management. It is totemic, a vibrating hulk; at night the distant motorway hums, but so too does Mount Crud, as if when it was lifted from below the topline it brought with it deep messages that it articulates solemnly. A local copper breaks a leg chasing some kids up it, and some locals say the eyesore is a nosesore and earsore too, breaking out in itchy spots. Everyone wants to move it, everyone is desperate to fill the quarry in, but it doesn't happen. Superstition, once attached, is difficult to shake from even the flintiest of shins, and after a while most repeat, as if in the same voice: I don't know much, lad, but I know we aren't going to see the end of Mount Crud.

From the pile of filth some evidence is plucked: veteran lensman Herb Alcott began his career here, and stays his post with vigour, even if the camera flinches at the noxious fumes and racist countenances of certain characters. Child actor Bon Johnstone grew up to be the guitarist in post-punk brutalists The Pressure Group, whose seminal album 'We Are Not Against The Anti-Counter-Revolutionary Resistance' stayed perfectly unbought for years. Other faces are recognisable, turning up in all manner of British films and television, but no-one remembers their names. Their faces glisten briefly in the murk, a deja-vu. Director George Eliott stole her name from a local writer (but with a final, sarcastic extra 't', hovering like a provocation to pedants) who changed her name to be taken seriously by appearing to be a man; this gesture, in 1974, had the opposite effect, looming like a parochial blasphemy, something that Eliott the second clearly invited.

Landfill sank inevitably into the gloom upon entry, thrown into cupboards during the week of its release and into skips six months later. All is refuse, now and forever.

Landfill Directed by George Eliott Produced by Lew Grade, George Elliott Written by Simon Prince, George Elliott Starring Bon Johnstone, Eric Rudge, John Jules, Lucy Pine, Amanda Richards Red Films/Central Productions Release Date UK: Oct 1974 US: N/A Tagline: none.

SCALA QUARANTA (Beppe Nona, 1963)

This cannot be approached like other Nona films: Scala Quaranta, sensing our critical apparatus even when our advance is silent, hastily retreats into the undergrowth. Its enigmatic figure belies a hardy creature, one that can survive in a range of unpigeonholed habitats. It has rarely been seen in captivity (underwhelmed by early screenings, it shrank from view), and a firm category for its confusing silhouette proves elusive. Strong-arm critics throw it in with Nona's 'Casa' stage, the period of films made before his entry into the global bloodstream with the Bond/Barthes/bebop melange of Sigh Your Name (1966) and the subsequent theft of international hearts with Wine For Song (1967).

Scala Quaranta at first seems set for the kind of Old Country whimsy that delights outsiders: we follow a small god-fearing family as they work, eat and play in a small town in central Italy, with a beguiling lack of glamour. Violent routine prevails. The details of their lives are worked out exactly, and yet petty squabbles and jolly argument are forces that push and pull the day. Mamma (Alberta D'Agostini) is the sun of the house, never resting, except to play cards. The family sit at hands nightly, gambling for small amounts. A slow pace is thus established, seeming unbreakable. But then, in a delightful scene of creeping significance, drama intervenes.

One night, when asked to cut the deck, youngest son Beppe (the delightfully podgy Paolo Rossi) turns over a joker. This is seen as good luck. The family laugh, calling the boy fortunate. He denies this, suggesting that he has a special skill. When given a second opportunity, he does so again, against the odds. The family tease and hug him all the more. Pappa (Giancarlo Bianchi) bets him a week of chores that he can't do it again; but once more, Beppe cuts the deck and finds a joker. The family erupt. Amid the laughter, Mamma stops, and tells Pappa to shuffle the deck properly. He does so, at length, as the other brothers and sisters lean in. When Beppe cuts the deck and finds a joker once more, Mamma screams and crosses herself. She shakes Beppe, asking him how he is performing this trick, and accuses Pappa of fashioning a cheat. But they deny it vehemently, and Beppe, now upset, sits silently. When Mamma thrusts the deck in front of him once more, he at first refuses to cut; but under a barrage of shouts, he sullenly does so, drawing a joker again.

This just does not happen. The family argue the significance through the night, periodically finding new decks to offer Beppe. When he cuts, he finds a joker every time. After twenty-five consecutive jokers, they stop. This is no quirk. Meaning must be found. A priest, a doctor, a man of high learning, all react differently, all equally unhelpful. Mamma cleans ecstatically, she throws out belongings, domestic sacrifice, offerings; she spends money in tears, buying new decorations and trinkets to hang around Beppe's bed, his door, his neck. Are we saving the child from Fate or is Fate the child? Neighbours close their doors, but is it to the family's intertwining with Kismet or Mamma's apocalyptic euphoria? Some weeks the family give generously on a Sunday, some weeks they stay at home, the correct course yet to be found.

Throughout, Nona skirts with delicious indecision, never allowing the viewer to completely sympathise with or against anyone. The whole affair seems simultaneously ridiculous and staggeringly significant. Beppe is a proto-Damien and/or fearfully abused, Mamma a superstitious sadist and/or a brave matriarch. Only Pappa is the same in every reading, emasculated and pale, haunted by his own inability to act. The central mystery about whether the jokers are a clever trick or a supernatural sign is never explained, and the family drifts into the shell-shock of a self-imposed exile, not remembering what the question ever was, but searching the walls for an answer.

Scala Quaranta Directed by Beppe Nonna Produced by Gilberto Moretti Written by Beppe Nonna, Astrid Luna Starring Alberta D'Agostini, Paolo Rossi, Giancarlo Bianchi, Rosa Bianchi

Cino Del Duca/Janus Films 144 mins Release Date UK: Oct 1963/ US: Jan 1964 Tagline: None

THE LIBRARY AT QUEEN OF ALL SOULS (Leo McCarey, 1955)

'Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.' Archibald Macleish

'To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.' Virginia Woolf

'I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.' Jorge Luis Borges

A librarian, Josie Werner (Barbara Stanwyck) dedicates her life to the flourishing and development of a library in a small town called Queen of All Souls, Texas. It is 1954. Despite efforts to censor and diminish the library by several successive mayors and various townsfolk, the shack-like construct survives all winds. The collection, due to the work of Werner, swells, and begins to receive national attention as a bastion of liberal learning.

The attacks on Werner grow however; her relationship with a black man (Titus Chambers) is examined, and her past as a young unmarried woman with a series of romances is repeatedly held up as evidence of the impropriety of her books. The fact that she is played by Stanwyck means that we both believe that any story about her may be true, and love her for it.

And just when we seem set on a path of anguishing town politics and individual bravery (shown, perhaps in the form of impassioned speeches in a courtroom setting, or a defiant entrance into (or exit from) a town meeting), an apocalyptic plot twist sets us on our bums, the deus ex machina being an actual nuclear apocalypse. The Russians and Americans set on a path of mutual destruction, and those above ground have only hours of unburnt air left. All recriminations are deemed petty, and the town pulls together to begin the evacuation.

The film thus folds back on itself, and breaks at the middle. The second half of the film bears little relation to the first. The constant is Josie and her bloodymindedness. As convoys leave the town, heading for potentially safer mountains and bunkers, she refuses to go. She shows no panic, but slips into a quiet silence as she organizes her books. When asked why, she doesn't explain. Weeping relatives come to try and persuade her to join them in one of the protective areas. Mankind needs people like you. We need you. She refuses, saying that someone must tidy the books. Stanwyck's natural defiance here rings like huge deep bell, no trace of trebly spite, just true and low.

If Josie's reasons are unclear to us, they are to her too; indeed, McCarey seems to be attempting to figure out the meaning of a life's work during these slow minutes, in the increasingly empty town and near-silent library. The examination is a clear-minded one that still comes up with no answers, as if McCarey knows that his own position as a credible and brilliant artist might be secure (a director of Duck Soup and The Awful Truth bends and scrapes to no-one in any just celestial Hollywood cafeteria; if such artful shepherding of Marxes and Cary Grants and Irene Dunnes is not a karmic get-out-of-jail-free card, one wonders what might be), but also that this means absolutely nothing.

Nearing the end, Josie writes a letter:

'I don't believe that good people make the world better. And often times they make the world worse, despite themselves. Isn't that why the planet is dying? Good people making mistakes? But you should still try. One bad person can do so much damage that it takes generations to repair. But all the good people in the world I think keep the world afloat. And they shouldn't have ever worried about betterment or evolution because- what's changed? In 10000 years? Textural things. That's all. But human nature seems to be the same. Self-destructive.'

She then rips it up with a laugh so dismissive that we, the audience, feel ridiculousness at the weight with which we might have received her words. They are meant for us, there is no-one else left for Josie to talk to. But they are hollow, mere platitudes (perhaps even stolen, half-remembered from another production); an attempt at making retrospective sense of a decision (and many other decisions, millions of them across a life) that needs no explanation. Because there is none. McCarey spares us the fiery end we know is due, cutting away from Stanwyck as she smiles into the distance, dreaming of the twenty-four (and more) variations of the note that she could have written, all plausible but too pat, somehow; no line is big enough to suffice, to be more than a scratch in the dirt.

The Library At The Queen Of All Souls Directed by Leo McCarey Produced by Leo McCarey, Jerry Wald Written by Mildred Cram, Leo McCarey Starring Barbary Stanwyck, James Earl-Jones, Ray Milland 20th-Century Fox Release Date US: March 1955/ UK: Aug 1955 102 mins Tagline: 'Just Because You Didn't See It Coming Doesn't Mean You Don't Have To See'