THE TRANSCENDENTALIST (Charles Laughton, 1951)

The Transcendentalist finally makes peace with itself about an hour in, settling into a nonsense rhythm reminiscent of another sub-prime classic you'll have on the tip of your tongue, like the name of a minor lover you spent a long week promising to never forget on one of the more tousist-ridden Greek islands when you were eighteen and promptly didn't write to, ever, despite wanting to. (Why didn't you?) Gary Cooper, heretoforth vibrating with alacrity between folksy hero and weary cynic (a pendulum on which almost every Hollywood lead swings, at least if they're not on the one that ticks on homespun innocence and tocks, unbelievably but inevitably, on genius and glory. Neither are exclusive; many character arcs greedily take in both donging devices, or an unholy mixture of both), takes sixty minutes of chewing gum (beautifully, slowly, sexily, evoking the old Wrigley's slogan 'Too much mastication will make you go blind', a minor classic of inverse-advertising that made the kids chew their way through the fifties) before he ups the gears into something more, something om; He discovers a fifty-foot meta-Cooper at exactly the same time as James Agee and Dirk Langston's script begins to sing a second simultaneous song, spreading melodic shards in many new curves; this is also the exact moment that Charles Laughton's direction seems to twist into a new heaven, somehow capturing the exact moment that Western Philosophy meets east, causing a blissful Oz to permeate the director's canvas/Kansas.

Hyperbole? Watch it, and you too will think that the film suddenly shifts from black and white to colour. But it doesn't; it just seems that way, an illusion created by a coincidence of genius. ' Every one of my mother, Colin Cowdrey, Eleanor Roosevelt and Rin Tin Tin see the ending in colour,' said Graham Greene in a Times piece in 1956, going on to refute the myth that dogs are colourblind, instead suggesting that they see in fact a dim rainbow, in which blue is especially noticeable to their eye... 'so perhaps Rin Tin Tin appreciates the waterfall sequence here in a somewhat nuanced way'.

A metaphysical detective story becomes decadent, endless inqury; Cooper wanders into the golden countryside, not leaving a linear plot behind but somehow multiplying it tenfold and making even more sense. The gates of noir are flung apart.1 Somehow, you wonder, if in fact mankind would have been condemned long ago but for these curious puzzles we create to confuse the gods. Art doesn't just amuse us, it buys us time, until we can figure out a suitable escape plan. And so flippant jokes can actually be mordant philosophies, and Gary Coopers can actually be religious vessels, carrying our fevered hopes as far as they can before their knees buckle and they grow tired and tiresome.

'Our noons were in the same sky,' said Cooper of his time working with Laughton, Agee and Langston. The public wavered, however, finding the hard stare of genius too much to bear, and went to see other entertainments instead. 'Such is life,' remarked Laughton, I shouldn't wonder that if Christ was resurrected in our lifetimes, we would surely fail to notice.'

The Transcendentalist is the first of two one-hit wonders of Laughton's directorial career in Hollywood, the other being Night of the Hunter (1955), another slice of sublime dissonance.

(Nance... Nancy- that was it her name, knew her for a week in 1993. Or Susan. From Stepney, or Colchester. A six-foot tall tomboy in a West Ham shirt on the verge of blooming into a stunner, a fact of which she was all too oblivious. She was relatively spiteful in play on holiday, but wrote two letters full of longing back home. There was no response. She is thought of seldomly, but once every six months a girl with her likeness walks past and causes a wave of wistfulness.)

The Transcendentalist Directed by Charles Laughton Produced by Paul Gregory Written by James Agee, Dirk Langston, United Artists 92 mins Release Date US: Jan 1951/UK: Aug 1951

Tagline: 'He's gone.'

1. David Lynch was heavily influenced by The Transcendentalist, and the central motif of a detective encircled by mysterious evils was evident in Twin Peaks, with Lynch even naming his Special Agent hero after Gary Cooper.

HOW AUSTRALIA TOOK US (Franck Boston-Tobias, 2010)

Scene: In the midst of some kind of national crisis, a young man (Noah Taylor) sits in a police interview room, accused by a detective (Nick Cave) of murdering his lover (Isabelle Huppert). The young man proceeds to attempt to justify his actions by explaining that the cause of the American apocalypse is a disease which causes lovers to see, at the point of orgasm, every one of their partner's previous conquests. He suggests that this disease is an act of sabotage from outside. Monologue:

Australia's army was small, but their nous was acute. They picked off the sex-psychics first, exploded their skulls with cuckold imagery. Invasion unnecessary. No Billabong kids with crackling jaws were required to cross our borders, those smirking goblins just spent down their dreams to a fast edge to catch us cold. Smiling, the cool bullies infected us from afar, destroying our orgasms, rendering our small deaths into enflamed confusions. A series of internal bombs, hoaxes and smokescreens confuse us; secret war twitches our pens. When the key is the anagram of sex, the vanquished can't write.

The near-flaw in their plan of aiming for the libido of the nation was that they overestimated the value of sex to America. Our frigidity almost saved us. While they considered our fleshy levees to be lugubriously swelling, they were in fact obscured from our view, our decadence uncalculated. We appeared, at a deep glance, to be obsessed with rutting, but this disguised the facts. Unvisited orchards produced only apples.

But the plan worked, nonetheless. There's always enough sex to bring any civilisation down.

They scrambled our endings, Victoria's secretions. Before we knew what they had done, it was too late. No parachutes from the edge of the sky, no bloody hacking into our procrastination. After all, there was a labyrinth no interloper could ever pass through at the heart of our pentagon. Walls of fire, an infinity of code. Which we knew, because each previous failure to overthrow us had been paraded headless and hollow on television. Our digital safety was thus pledged. And as we were convinced that the only way they could come was through our plastic keyboards, we were comforted. But they found a backdoor we didn't know we had. Fantasies were sabota-
'-Mr Smith, you mean to say you didn't kill your girlfriend? That a foreigner did?'

Leading question. Tone of slight derision. It isn't Australia the country, but something more
elusive. Australia is the name we have for them, and it doesn't suffice. I'll tell him again.
He has the numbers: Domestic violence rose, but he'll say it always had. The divorce rate soared, but then it always had. The curse that had been put on us, the trick they were fooling us with, might have been a gift to a more enlightened people. Instead, we found that seeing images as we climaxed that revealed who our partner had slept with previously only hurt.
Previous lovers in this context were vampires reflected in surfaces.

For that was what they did.

Somehow, they managed to poison us. During sex with another person, we would see, every
time we closed our eyes, all of their previous sexual partners, stacked up, or in a line. There were those that may have been spies, sleeping with groups of friends, entire families. The greys and cool oranges of my city appeared to change. Although the invasion was not to be seen around us- there were no gunposts above bars, checkpoints as the occupying force marshalled space- our vision was suspect. Our eyes were all vichy eyes, lying to themselves. Some ran anywhere, just to get a jump on death, a couple of days.

'Mr Smith, you're ignoring the subject.'

'Sir, this is the subject. Our country has fallen into disrepair. They caused it. A skreeing satellite pixelated our thoughts. One moment we were scraping moondust from our boots, shedding ideas, almost controlling Time, period. But we didn't see that dark was the night, and it was falling. Now, before we know it, we are segregating ourselves. Fence wires are cut and snap back like guitar strings. A black humming in the distance might have given the game away. Church gatherings, street corners. We're burden bearers, licking friends, naming our afflictions to weaken their power. Uncrushed, dreams of blacked victory. Revenge flickers in cities, not coherent enough to rise like a threat. Names of towns haven't changed, but they now seem sad, echoing dully, devoid of Revelators to convey. Talent contests unfinished. TV towers hum, our bluesmen. Trains run as usual, but listlessly. We hold pretty things in our hands, and don't know where to look.'

'Not everyone is killing their girlfriend, Mr Smith.'

'The stories, complexities, were dotted among the news, but no pattern was traced to link them. Hetero concerns remain hidden, colourful ones pastiched into ridicule. It happened to me, one, twice, a hundred times before I linked it to the outside world, the passages in misspelt news
that leapt, the seasoned broadcasters' disdain for nothing much at all. We are a matrix, a clogged artery, a segue upon a segue. The East Coast hummed with this and everything else, a cold electrocuted corpse, over there and out of reach. In camps, some of the homeless rutted endlessly, and every time it hurt, they did it more. And once sex is gone, pleasurelessness will kill us before lack of reproduction does. We don't need children to refresh our cities, but we need stimulae.'

'You murdered her.'

I remember V, late, that middle of the night away from all. Her room was above the street, and even after she no longer worked in the bar below, she stayed. Fried smoke always found its way in. She'd change into a T-shirt, smile from the hall, slow right down to the speed of a record. Do you think I should cut my hair? She lifted it up into a bundle on top of her head, and pouted sideways at me. No. Never.

V, inverse opening, long-legged receptacle, on her back. She'd be below me, but would govern my action. V, a crooked seagull coasting on her own air. Sweat, fogged lenses, happy cheeks. The picture appeared in a cloud of activity, and I lost it in her ear canal: Her other lovers, on the wind, gone. Hundreds, thousands, all caring less than me. We ate cold lasagne while sitting on top of the sheets. She talked about her day, I forgot B momentarily. Christmas lights jumped, it was midnight in March. I knew I couldn't live with her anymore.

She died while wet, cut off from the shore. My withheld knowledge of the tidal situation incriminates me. The day was hot, so we went to the coast. Drove quickly, leaving behind a run of bad luck, frustrated bank accounts, percussive arguments. She proposed the escape, twenty-four hours away, and I agreed quickly. She was a brave swimmer, not a strong one. I wasn't even aware of my plan until it was all over, but by the time her cold lungs had stopped, I realised that my intention all along had been to end it here.

'That's a confession, Mr Smith?'

'I suppose. But I must add something. Her love was palindromic, you could approach her from both sides. Before and after the heat were identical, her smile distant, glances over your shoulder to future interests. Even in our special case, as victims of sabotage, she bore no ill will: She was just as warm as before our romance, and just as cool. But we were a special case. Our love ended at the phantom invasion, when one million homes sank like red herrings, tetchy and confused. I was a victim as much as she. We all were. Are.'

'Anything else?'

'Yes. Some of her hair was left in the bathtub. It suggests a message. But I could not decipher it. Could some of your experts have a look?'

'We'll have a look at the whole house, sir. Don't worry.'

How Australia Took Us Directed by Franck Boston-Tobias Produced by Hobson Tragic, John Boston-Tobias Written by Franck & John Boston-Tobias Starring Isabelle Huppert, Noah Taylor, Melissa George, Nick Cave, Music by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis HBO/Film Four Release Date US/UK: November 2010 Tagline: 'They took nothing but our sex'

LA MORT DE ROBERT REDFORD (THE DEATH OF ROBERT REDFORD) (Jean Rouch, 1974)

Introduction: 'La mort d'une étoile.'
When he went, his edifices were scrawled on by well-wishers. His cheeks were garlanded with red-penned declarations that we would never see his life again. Panic had elapsed, following the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and we had fallen into a frayed acceptance, beyond hysteria. The end seemed but weeks away, and the murder of the totemic Bob seemed to reflect this.

Scene One: 'Pourquoi tournez-vous, monsieur? C'est la fin, il n'y aura personne quitte pour regarder le film'
As the news broke that Redford was murdered attempting to board a train at the Gard du Nord, Parisians took to the streets. January, 1973. Documentary-maker Jean Rouch took his camera. 'Individuals who were not old enough or brave enough to commit to the riots in 1968 were here. They were attempting to make up for something. They were responsible for most of the damage. Efforts at a greater symbolism rarely can be good if they are so preconceived.'

Scene Two: 'En Amerique la police a des fusils. Mais pas ici.'
Suicide by cop is an early verdict, which brings more riots. A man appears on camera. He is old, ninety perhaps, and has wild grey hair. His eyes are an agitated blue. 'ils l'ont tué! Les bâtards du droit religieux lui ont offert comme un sacrifice! Imbéciles!' Rouch translates: 'He says they killed him... the religious right offered him as a sacrifice.' The old man looks at the camera. In English he shouts: 'bastards! I call them religious bastards! Say what I say!'

Scene Three: 'La discussion du symbolisme de blonds, avec les cigarettes.'
The discussion of the symbolism of blonds, with cigarettes. At one point, a student breaks into English to interrupt. 'This is exactly what the world thinks we do in France! We riot, and then we sit in cafes discussing philosophical concerns.' Rouch spends the rest of the scene prompting the assembled to discover if they agree.


Scene Four: 'Déformation de personnalité.'
He had ideas above his station, perhaps. The fact that this icon had the temerity to be beautiful and a scientist upset the extremes of left and right, as well as capillary demons of the nth eye. His suggestion: That a calendar year of 400 days would suffice our needs. Stretch the year to capacity, leaving 25 year-old wrinkled people wandering the planet. This idea threatened many interested parties. Assassinations can fall into several categories. All contain traces of hero-worship. Gilles Deleuze appears on camera. 'In the death of a famous figure like this, one wonders if the abrubt event in everyone's lives is not some form of personality warp, in which we all are meshed in a non-linear paradigm; a world seen only by a third eye, not our own'.

Scene Five: 'Apocalypse Maintenant'
Psychic mistakes do not appear immediately. They fester and burn, showing up as symptoms on maps of the poorer districts. It is easy for the deniers to derail theories, pass such events off as the quirk and spite of the under-appreciative ethnic castes. Even when a rich blonde or two is afflicted with the tawdry, kipnapped and drugged and thrown insanely from a cliff, say, or being brainwashed into being unwashed and homeless, even then still their probes do not quiver unduly. How many apocalypses must we enjoy? JG Ballard suggests that 'thousands of celebrities could die in the Paris night, and our civilisation would be stronger, not weaker.'

Scene Six: 'Le ligers de Paris'
President Georges Pompidou wonders, on camera, if Redford's last will and testament implies that his safari park will be left to the French people. 'Currently, Paris' rainbow ligers are an illusion, created by a series of holograms placed in front of regular ligers. But a real one would be a great posthumous gift to the city.' Some feel that this is inappropriate. But it does suggest that our leaders have confidence that the world has some future.1

Scene Seven: 'Le hot-dog, en sautant la grenouille, Albuquerque.'

We calm down. The world does not end. Generations later can see Rouch's account of the death of the most famous man in the world, and his account of that account (recorded simultaneously). Humanity continues. In his honour, the Utah Film Festival is renamed 'Sundance'. Redford's last words are recorded as the cryptic 'Hot dog, jumping frog, Albuquerque'.2 Who knows?

La Mort de Robert Redford Directed by Jean Rouch Produced by Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin Fisk Productions/BBC Films Release Date Fra: Oct 1974 US/UK: Jan 1979 Tagline 'J'étais là Quand une Etoile est Morte.'

1. Georges Pompidou died three months after appearing in this documentary. He was 62.

2. These words were the inspiration for the chorus of Prefab Sprout's 1987 hit 'The King of Rock'n'Roll', and also for the title of Stan Brakhage's 1979 short Albuquerque Frog.

TOM THE SCORER (Barry Bishopsfield, 1963)

'...Of course, I wanted to call it Statistical Breakdown, but that seems too punning, too dismissive... but sometimes I do still like it, and go to screenings of Tom... and shout out 'I should have called it Statistical Breakdown!' over the credits.' Barry Bishopsfield

Along with Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson Karel Reisz et al, Barry Bishopsfield was part of the Free Cinema movement of the early sixties. By the time of Tom The Scorer, however, he had moved away from a quasi-realist style and towards something completely his own. For while his visual grammar and subject matter may have had much in common with his peers, Bishopsfield consistently began to breach the Fourth Wall by including himself in his work. Often, his directions to actors can be heard on the finished film, and sometimes scenes are broken by actors forgetting a line, stopping and then beginning the scene from the beginning. So far, so Godard. But Bishopsfield developed idiosyncrasies all of his own: Tom The Scorer is overlaid with an audio track of his own thoughts, weary judgments made in post-production about the shortcomings of his fare. This approach is remarkably similar to the commentaries offered on modern DVDs, in which the director and/or stars of the films will talk over the film. Of course, on the DVD, this is a largely ignored optional extra, and not an integral part of the art; but it came to be central to Bishopsfield's films. And of course, on the DVD, we have a relaxed, wry director making gags and giving us unnecessary technical details; In Tom The Scorer, we hear a panicky Bishopsfield despairing about his vision falling apart before his eyes, and his anger at the confusion in his head being all but impossible to recreate on film ties in with the subject of the film: The titular Tom is a boy who is so obsessed with noting down the goings-on around him that he retreats into a near-autistic inner world of ever-growing data.

Tom begins by copying maps. He doesn't trace them, but sketches careful and accurate versions. He notes down pertinent facts: Population, size, relevant dates, languages spoken, currency. Here Bishopsfield interrupts to reflect on how when he was a child he collected coins and had some from India, Canada and Poland that could not be found for this shoot. He feels this is important to state. Tom likes cricket, Bishopsfield does not like cricket, but finds its slowness and statistical possibilities to be perfect for his metaphor, and as Mark Twain said (or perhaps did not, again my sources may not be correct) 'allow the poet his metaphor', but sadly Tom isn't a skilled enough batsman or bowler to turn out for the school side. Instead, Mr Smithson (Roger Livesey, who it must be noted, bears an uncanny resemblance to the games master who beat me thrice weekly at school, and as such bears an uncanny resemblance to the SOUND, SMELL AND VISION OF HADES IN MY HEAD and is thus more perfectly cast than anyone could ever suspect) notes Tom's eye for detail, and taking pity on him, and gives him the important job of being the official scorer for all of the school's matches.

Bishopsfield interrupts again with some statistics:

The film is 73 mins and 32.21 seconds. This is 4412.21 seconds. The film has 490 shots. The longest shot lasts for 12.43 seconds (The whirling pan when Tom is confronted by the big city).

Of the 490 shots, 201 are stationary. The other 289 involve camera movements. Number of people that appear on screen: 164. Number of people that speak: 17. Number of people that tell Tom that he needs to 'stop writing in that bloody book': 7. Number of words Tom speaks: 121. Number of words Tom speaks inside his head: 1207. Most common word: 'I' (heard 97 times). Number of times Tom writes something down in his notebook: 54. Number of minutes Tom is on-screen: 42 mins and 56.21 seconds. Amount of perspiration: immeasurable. Gallons. He found himself wondering. He liked the cinema, but he wondered how many times he had been.

Problems come when Tom's obsessive scoring holds up the game, and the crowd boo him. Bishopsfield's insertions mirror Tom's: Both want the perfect sequence of events recorded perfectly, but both find that their study overwhelms their respective subjects. When the ball is hit in Tom's direction, he hides it, all the better to give himself precious seconds to catch up. Similarly, Bishopsfield begins stopping the film at many points to explain. But this didn't prove to be enough for the director. After the film was released, to mixed reviews and general confusion, Bishopsfield took to turning up at showings of his film, carrying with him a large piece of cardboard with which to cover portions of the screen at particular points. He would also comment on his own commentaries, creating a loop of directorial uncertainty that echoed long after the final credits. Cinema-goers in Morden, Brixton and Wimbledon were especially likely to have their already over-directed fare interrupted by the director himself. In 2001, The Curzon in Soho had a special showing of the film, to which they invited Bishopsfield to recreate some of his interruptions. He sat quietly through the whole film.

It wasn't Mark Twain that said that, as I incorrectly guessed on the soundtrack. Oh no, I cannot attribute it. There is another quote that I can correctly assign to GK Chesterton, however, that goes like this: 'The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.' I disagree of course, and hope to leave nothing inside me by completely expelling all energies, true or false, into the public air.

Tom The Scorer Directed by Barry Bishopsfield Produced by Barry Bishopsfield, Karel Reisz Written by Tom Warne, Barry Bishopsfield Starring Benjamin Tot, Roger Livesey Bryanston Films/ Continental Films 87 mins Release Date UK: June 1963 US: Aug 1964 Tagline:What Is The Score?

ваш фильм (YOURFILM), (Alex Mikhailichenko, 1922)

'Bearing witness to the proud travelogues of others is one thing, but when one can self-document a unique passage in light and colour, does one not hum contentedly? A billion subjective versions, a billion truths, surely ring louder than one.' Gilles Deleuze

What are we viewers if we are not frustrated artists who would love nothing more than to bend the onscreen action to our will? To save a hero from a low-flying blade of a masked villain (or condemn her, should her passions/face/haircut demand it), or step up and throw a piece of small jewellery into a pit so as to better help our half-pint fictional brethren (and so end a painful, long, painfully long journey)?

Such was the conviction of Alex Mikhailichenko, a Ukranian who invented the YOURFILM technology in 1922. His visionary future included the 'destruction of the passive feature film worldwide by 1930', which to his Soviet paymasters meant of course only one thing, the disrobing and slaying of Hollywood demigods. The staggering failure of the technology may disprove something, but certainly not the potency of the idea. If anything it was too good, like Houdini's disappearing elephant trick in 1918, which was received underwhelmingly by an audience who did not understand its potency of the conjurer's greatest illusion.

Utilising 'brain pads' which were attached to the heads of the audience, the action in YOURFILM was changed by the emotional reactions of the punters. What happened on screen, after the initial image of two lovers on a battlefield ('Love and War being a solid beginning for all stories', according to Mikhailichenko), depended entirely on how the assembled react. Mikhailichenko himself described the effects upon his arrival in France in 1962, in an interview with Francois Truffaut for Cahiers du Cinema:

'Always, the screen was bubbling, Dali-like in its concept but more like Monet in its colouring and blurring of fantasies. Like melting clouds... one minute our hero was running through a field, before the swaying wheat was sea. The amazing thing was that what I saw and what my neighbour saw was different... we agreed on the principles... or did we? One time a group of drunken sailors turned the story into a tawdry strip show through their bustling brainwaves, and another time, the same story reached a fetid nirvana of absurdities with one crowd of minor geniuses. I wish I could see that version again and again. But it is gone.'

While Mikhailichenko was more interested in the psychedelic uniqueness of each experience, the Soviets saw otherwise. The filmmaker suggested that the technology was the ultimate socialist art, involving as many authors as possible; but they disagreed. When Maxim Gorky returned from Italy to the USSR in the early 1930s, it was such a coup for the Soviets (a rejection of fascism and (re)embrace of communism being the ultimate propaganda boon) that the writer was given the Order of Lenin. When Gorky compared YOURFILM to the 'distracting trinkets of Coney Island', and called it 'another time destroyer, a waste,' YOURFILM's days were numbered. It was seen as an indulgence, with one prominent critic too many.

The sadness, of course, comes in the corruption. Mikhailichenko claims his technology was stolen. Eyewitnesses claim it was distorted by the Soviets and turned into a weapon, with huge disorientating projections thrown across the invading Nazis in Stalingrad. Others suggest it was stolen by the SS, co-opted after 1945 by American agencies, and subsequently seen in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. Rumours among US squadrons in Vietnam were that the North Vietnamese were being tooled with brain-pads to convince themselves that they were seeing huge ten-headed hydras behind them, on the side of Communism.

Mikhailichenko despaired, and fled the USSR in 1961. 'The fact that it had no measurable purpose frightened everybody. They would rather it had a destructive existence than the vague pleasurable one I conceived.'

Subsequent nuanceless audience-decides interfaces have met with narrow success, but they are on-rails narratives that bear little relation to YOURFILM's freewheeling possibilities: The on-running Choose Your Own... series (in which each film stops at various points to allow audience members to vote for whichever pre-recorded scenario they desire) has been resurrected many times since its 1954 debut. It has survived repeated critical barragings to threaten to come back into fashion following kitschbait features by Robert Rodriguez. His Naked, Naked Sex (2004) and Six-Gun Pizza (2005) were internet-only experiments in the hilariously outdated mode, and only highlight how far ahead of his time Mikhailichenko actually was. We still haven't come near his vision, and next to YOURFILM, all simplistic technologies must cower.1

ваш фильм YOURFILM Directed by Alex Mikhailichenko Produced by Alex Mikhailichenko, Written by Alex Mikhailichenko/ The Assembled Debuted in Moscow in November 1922

1. The rather peurile Top Or Bottom? adult spin-offs quickly lost their novelty in the seventies, however, with audience members frequently taking the most savagely deviant option at every opportunity, causing the films to be little more than the same sequence of events each time (like any normal film), only with a dozen intervals of frustrated clicking on keypads. And worse, surely, is the Cliche Program, rumoured to have been used by major Hollywood studios in various films in the 21st Century. This leaves the suggestion, ever lingering, that certain Hollywood stars can no longer perform to the standard required, and that through variations of YOURFILM technologies, audiences are convinced that, say, Mr de Niro still has his chops; because, after all, we still want him to be good; that perhaps what we are seeing is an assisted performance, with our collective memories of his younger danger twisting his infertile present day efforts, changing them like an empathetic autotune. The possibility also hovers that some stars may not be real, but hazy dreams of suicides, eternally out of focus. For who can really say that they have seen Ms Sandra Bullock and truly understand her; and who can identify what genus one Mr Vincent Jones really is?

DREAM JOB (Peter Whitehead, 1986)

'An everything-but-the-kitchen-sink drama, a nightwalk at noon through a parade of distressed Coventries, a suffocating headlock of unmedicated schlock.' Iain Sinclair

Peter Whitehead disowns all praise and all criticisms. He disqualifies even the most strenuously delicate synopsis as wide of the mark. So even the cursory one-line breakdown that follows may be incorrect, but damn it, the author is wrong: Terry Hall does star as a young Midlands teacher, and his dream life interferes with reality. And the film was titled Son of the Speedway in America, and it was titled Grue Trit in France, and Introspection in Canada, and The Substitute in Australia, and Keeping An Eye On Nothing when it appeared on video in the UK. These are facts, supported scrupulously by the many internets that care.

Quoting extensively from the script then:

Continuation of monologue, Scene 5: I walk into the classroom, second floor of a prefabricated hut. The class are in the middle of a test. I take off my hat, coat and cycling gear and when they're done I introduce myself as Mr S, which is the name of one of the teachers that taught me. I decide to start a six-a-side football tournament, so I get some chalk to keep score and a whistle to referee, and call for two teams. They pick their own names. Hillsy's New Sailors win the first game 6-1, the goals initially being sofas (which the goalkeeper for Hunter Toner, Mimi, is very confused by when lying on the sofa full-length doesn't prevent the first two goals), and I referee fairly and well, except for when I place the chalk in my mouth, thinking it is the whistle. I find I may also need an assistant, as each moment the cataloguing of details I need to mark on the board seems to grow- first just the goals, then the goalscorers, then the yelow cards, then the number of fouls, then the number of house points I'l give for good play, then the number I'll give for fair play. All are marked with what is now a small piece of wet, chalky rubble.

Mr S's first name is Terry, just like the actor that plays him. This always creates a frisson of danger, as if events on screen could be real. Other moments that break through the drama include Terry humming along to a song on his walkman that sounds very much like 'Man at C&A' by The Specials.

Continuation of monologue, Scene 9: Halfway through the game, the goals become car boots and the goalkeepers decide to sit inside them, like machine-gunners in bunkers. Every time someone scores, I ask them their name. A girl who slams home a consolation rebound for Hunter Toner looks remarkably like Leslie, a boy I went to school with. Other kids clearly are ones I went to school with, preserved at fourteen: Bunto, Hillsy, Crossy. Bunto wants to play in the second game, despite having an ankle in plaster. He is not changed into his kit, but believes he'll be able to play: He just needs to wear a big boot or motorbike crash helmet over his foot. Wanting to ingratiate myself with him, as I might have done at school, I concede to his request, but I suggest he play in goal. He tells me he'll be fine. Hillsy, now apparently my age, and wearing a great three-piece suit with overcoat, asks me why he still feels like a tramp next to me.

Terry's father was a speedway rider. We know this because of the way he fondles the photograph of a man on a bike. Terry's father is dead. We know this because of the way Terry fondles the photograph of a man on a bike. Speculation: Memories of watching his father become an obsession, initiated by a child who bears a startling resemblance to a young Terry. The more mundane his day, the narrative seems to suggest, the more his memory life interferes.

Meanwhile, the kids are forming into teams for the second game. To my left, there appears to be nine kids, and to my right, many many more. I tell them both that I want only six on each side. The group to my right- three older girls and a gaggle of smaller kids- don't budge, and the older girls cross their arms. I approach one, becoming strangely angry, and wave an imaginary yellow card over her head. Only six, I tell her. She protests, telling me that they all look after each other out of school, and do everything together. I feel lonely, lacking a group. Then Ms Golden turns up, a popular young teacher. I become aware that she is my wife.

Ms Golden (Jenny Seagrove) is not Terry's wife, but he believes so. She is kind and concerned, and takes the approach sympathetically. She tries to help Terry secretly, without bringing attention to his problems. On another occasion, over coffee, Terry tells her about how he has been buying extra lamps for his bedroom because the lighting in his dreams is too dim, too musty, he can't quite see everything and everyone that is there. She indulges him. We hope they will develop a relationship.

She sits down to watch us. I am aware of my lack of patience with this lot, but can't stop. I ask them if they really want to play this game, and if not, then what would they prefer to do? Mr S, I hear a voice behind me say. Ms Golden puts her hand on my shoulder. Why don't you take a break she says. I give her a look, before turning and walking into the gym's main room. I look up and see the bikes, sliding round the corners. There is no noise in the room, just the bikes silently running in an endless circle at full pelt.

Dream Job Directed by Peter Whitehead Written by Peter Whitehead, Sylvie Host Produced by Tom Witness Starring Terry Hall, Jenny Seagrove ITC Entertainment/Samuel Goldwyn Films Release Date UK: Nov 1986 US:N/A Tagline: 'Terry got a Dream Job, but now he's dreaming on the job!'

REMAIN CORDIAL TO THE STICK INCEST (Orson Welles, 1962)

'I'm turning everything full cycle. I want to explode cinema to such an extent that future generations will believe the medium to be a myth; Billy Wilder will seem like Bigfoot, and the Gish sisters a pair of gorgeous Loch Ness monsters, imagined only.' Orson Welles, 1946.

.. and so, finally, we get to Welles, The Great Orsini, the man whose personality and presence almost rubs itself out. Citizen Kane sits near the summit of every list, but Welles' subsequent work hides in its shadow. Much of his real-life substance has the shimmer of the fake about it: When critics dubbed his adaptation of Don Quixote a failure that would never make it to the screen, he responded by borrowing their cheeky name for it: Non Quixote (1947) was a chewed-up, spat out version of the myth, with Welles as both the titular hero and a modern filmmaker making a film about him. And thus a bipolar career opened up. For every impeccable Shakespeare adaptation there was to be shadowed web of cheaply made chunterers: His problems with studios, critics and his own ego led him to conceive a series of films under the title The Foul Papers that would be a spewing of interlinked ideas, filmed quickly so as to not suffer the overburdening of money and expectation, and rarely widely released. They were begun, like so many great things (including the Fictional Film Club itself), with the playful liberation of a joke, but grew into something more steadfast. And funnier.

The rabble of flicks in this broad series seem to fight among themselves, elbowing their way to the door. Heir Removal (1952), a tough runt, holds attention through the sheer volume of its dizzy anti-Roylist satire. Cruel Aprils (1949) is a doomed drunk, an elliptical inversion of Eliot's The Waste Land. Bellerophon (1944) was, Welles suggested, created when he went back in time to plant seeds that would grow into his great epic. Indeed, unknown actor Pearl Stringer was cast in that movie as Bellerophon's unlover Anteia, and she went on to star in many Welles films. Weirdly, no-one remembered her being in the earlier movie until she starred in the latter, her history growing before the world's eyes. Arch-genius invents time-travel, no-one notices. Just as Welles 'started at the top and worked his way down' as he had it, he somehow managed to work backwards from the future. Bellerophon skulks in the corner of the house, undiscovered.

(The Foul Papers series is not to be confused with Welles' other eternally unfinished run of overlapping stories, titled NOTES, that he claimed 'pull together every arc of myth, philosophy and truth into a rainbow of religious noise'.1)

Remain Cordial To The Stick Incest (1962) is a crescendo, of sorts. It is as if the filmmaker took everything that was left and threw it in the pot. Welles took kernels from all of his previous efforts, and wrapped them up in a construct half-inched from Flann O'Brien's modernist nonsense novel At Swim Two Birds. Various characters from Welles' films litter the scenes, confused and desperate to escape; they plot to kill their creator, the author Shag Lipton (Welles himself). Lipton, for his part, discovers a way in which he can in literature and literally, give birth to fully-formed adults. He explains, '...the benefits are obvious. No turgid backstory is required, no slow-moving exposition of tedious childhoods. Instead, we have sons who can be breadwinners from the womb, or daughters who are sprung out as attractive marriage propositions, or further, we can lay pensioners onto the operating table who are old and crippled enough to claim compensations from the state: parenthood is both a joy and an immediate economic advantage'.

Lipton's wife Sara (Jean Simmons) gives birth to Flashey (William Holden), a forty year-old gambler, shagger and boozer who immediately causes problems in the household with his advances towards his own mother. Lipton insists on a bed in a separate room rather than a crib in the main room, causing distress in proud mother Sara. Society begins to shun the Liptons at parties. Their son, older than they, is a public disaster, smashing glass and hearts unevenly all over the community of ex-pat American and British wives in Madrid.

Lipton assaults them from his window, describing them as '... bona-fide Marthas, lipsticked frigidaires and dried-out harpies of spastic alacrity, tense victims of a benign sisterhood, owned by thick vikings of the market, who climb over one another's gowns, splitting seams to reach an imaginary head table.'

... and meanwhile, the walking carcasses of Lipton/Welles' past creations fill the house, vengeful and waiting for the moment the creator averts his eye. He does. They put an ice-pick through his skull and escape to another film entirely, Decadent Midwife (1965) where they spawn and split up, leaving the ludic environs of philosophical parlour amusements for a life, one assumes, off- celluloid.

Harry Lime, Charles Foster Kane, Hank Quinlan and Macbeth bubble in a pool of blood, pasts both celebrated and shed. Welles implodes. 'There are no more waters in these Welles' cries Hollywood Reporter, but the big man turns his back.

Remain Cordial To The Stick Incest Directed by Orson Welles Produced by Orson Welles Written by Orson Welles, the cast Starring Orson Welles, Jean Simmons, William Holden, Rosebud Productions/United Artists Release Date US: Oct 1962 Tagline 'Gotta Get Outta This Movie!'

1. I mentioned NOTES in a previous entry regarding Walter Friend's Dijonnaise in FFC, January 2009.

MAN, DEAD AT 42 (Alfred Sitzl, Hans Mottel, 1972)

'It is impossible that I will die. Impossible. Without me, this world will cease to exist.' Alfred Sitzl

Set adrift in a technicolor effluenza, the extraordinary career of Alfred Sitzl might been worthy of many biopics even without this implausible final act. Concerned with the afterlife, he aborted his final film Legacy (later unreleased unfinished in 1975) in which he interviewed himself about how he felt he would be remembered, to arrange this. With Man, Dead At 42, he all but set-up his own obituary. In his will he left a script, including complex instructions for the staging, lighting and filming of his own funeral. His partner Hans Mottel executed his late lover's wishes, completing the final acts of Sitzl's 'final masterpiece'.

Sitzl's early works, the fierce, avant-jazz Seizmic Caricatures (1944) and the balmy horror The Eunuch With Electric Forearms (1947) were made in America, where he spent the last three-quarters of his life, thirty-one years and six months exactly. He is most famous, perhaps, for an interview on the late night cable show It's A Kerrazy Midnite Alright! during which he responded to a mock assault by ventriloquist John Jonjon and his puppet Cyrus by pulling a gun and threatening to 'shoot your pee-pee, Mr John'. This spawned a cult T-shirt with an image of Sitzl and these words sloganned beneath; in the late sixties, this became an iconic counter-cultural garment, despite most not being familiar with the work of Sitzl.

In 1970, Sitzl was diagnosed with terminal life and was given just months to live. He had just received rave reviews for his subversive cabaret tributes to certain golden dames of Hollywood ...And We Would Let Joan Bennett Excrete Freely (1968), Invictus Pickford (1969), Joan Crawfish (1969) and Joan Fontaine, Sexy Caller (1969) and was seemingly on a career high. Death could have been an interruption. But no matter: Sitzl sensed an opportunity. Hans Mottel was instructed to film Sitzl during his last few months of his life. 'He told me not to scrimp on the death' said Mottel, in his own documentary about the experience Late Lover (1981). 'I had misgivings of course. But Al was convinced that watching a man slowly die, and for that man to be the director of the film, was the most extreme aspect cinema could approach. None of the gigglers in Tinseltown could beat this... It was his final wish. To have the footage edited together in a precise way. And for the funeral to be a particular way. Lights here. Camera here. Flowers there. Close-up of his wife there. For five seconds. She'd better be sobbing.'

Sobbing she was. Indeed the whole exercise can be seen as a series of trapdoors and stunt mirrors to tease Sitzl's ex-wife Ronnie Barbeaux. In one scene we see Mottel watch with great difficulty as Barbeaux reads aloud from Sitzl's diary, as per his final instructions. The camera moves gently from face to face as Barbeaux discovers for the first time the extent of Sitzl's homosexual encounters before, during and after their marriage, culminating in the revelations that Mottel has been left the greater portion of Sitzl's modest estate. Barbeaux simmers, Mottel clings to the camera for dear life.

A grand feast was executed as per Sitzl's wishes, and the elaborate food display, including whisky fountains, a maple syrup luge and a forest of broccoli, are filmed lovingly. This scene in particular is famous for being the source for the nomenclature of a grubby sub-genre of cinema,

'torture porn' being a misheard translation and a comical echo of the French 'tours de pain' which Barbeaux can be heard to exclaim repeatedly at the funeral 'Tours de pain! Tours du pain! Qu'imbecile veut des tours de pain a leurs funerailles?'1. Mottel's camera lingers on the offending baguette skyscrapers, returning to Barbeaux as his directions from the grave insist he must. The sight of the dead man's ex-wife suffering inelegantly at the deceased's cosmic practical jokes and his tightly planned posthumous humour is certainly a pre-echo of the late-Capitalist bourgois-sadism of Saw (James Wan, 2004).

Sitzl died. But somehow, he lives on as a gremlin in the ink, a smudged graffito on our wall. This obnoxious double Vs at the shore of the Styx, this delicious gob in the direction of his future host (and no less, to those left behind), somehow stands as a gesture of great humanity at it's most defiant, petty and brave.

Man, Dead at 42 Directed by Alfred Sitzl, Hans Mottel, Produced by Hans Mottel, Victor Grue, Written by Alfred Sitzl Tarakan Pictures Release Date Fra: June 1972, UK/US: Jan 1973 Tagline: 'Sitzl Is Dead! Long Live Sitzl!'

1. 'Towers of bread! Towers of bread! What kind of fool wants towers of bread at their funeral?

ROCK'N'ROLL PARTS 1,2&3 (Eli Reiner, Dancla Flakier, Dominick Stenz, Gorse Badier, Calgary Kurt, Phil Spector, Todd Sameth, 1978, 1987, 2006)

'Chekhov said you put a gun in act one, it goes off in the end. Well I am the gun, and I've been going off since I was born' Phil Spector

Myth explodes. Fact expires. Familiar stepping stones are used or ignored. Pacino as Spector delivers a eulogy at Lenny Bruce's funeral; Spector as Spector delivers the same speech, word for word, at Jack Nitzsche's funeral. Diabetic stammering is blended into a one-chord gauze. Spector as Spector hosts late night birthday parties every Sunday at Jack's Bowl in suburban Pasadena. Sonics bleed together. Laurence Fishburne as Ike Turner didn't get as far as he did without knowing his way around a gun. We succeed, we fail, we make sure we're paid.

Elliot Gould as Leonard Cohen is drunkenly amused, always.

The World slights him at every turn; he is wronged, he doesn't need to explain himself, he says, but he does. Spector as Spector imagines Cruise as Spector delivers a didactic sermon on a Christmas record; Spector as Spector repeats it, word for word, at the funeral of Rudolf Nureyev. Pacino as Spector riffs and cribs and paraphrases from it all, half-cut like Lenny Bruce, on a recording for the soundtrack for Rudolf Nuryev's futuristic folly Beautiful Disco (1980). Spector as Spector imagines Cruise as Spector pitching a film to Peter Coyote as Robert Evans: Louis Cypher: Guitar Legend. No dice.

Spector as Spector imagines Cruise as Spector arguing with a gang in a late night diner. Pacino as Spector bends and drills one hundred musicians and thirty thousand dollars into the million-weight edifice You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling. The scene starts with soggy bum notes and inane repetition, running the gamut of self-doubt as Wallace Shawn as Don Kirchner threatens to pull the plug on genius. Tepid applause; Spector as Spector lectures the screen, dismantles the camera, eats the crowd.

Julian Lennon invokes his Dad in name only. Spector as Spector imagines Cruise as Spector strangling Lennon in London, drunkenly. Still, Cruise doesn't answer the phone, has no interest in playing Phil. Spector as Spector waves a handgun at the screen, threateningly.

Spector as Spector appears to explain: His life, originally, was to be split in three, a triptych of success-against-the-odds, parts one, two and three; but life refused to bow to a triumphant narrative. Four directors helmed the first part, three worked on the second. The third was completed without Spector, as he awaited trial in prison.

But he can't stop interfering. Pacino left the set of Part One, nostrils flaring like the hungry barrels of the shotgun Spector had on set; no matter, Part Two repeats many of the scenes of Part One, mythologising the already mythologised, with Spector as Spector imagining Cruise as Spector impersonating Pacino as Spector delivering bad jokes in the studio, the magic that punctuates the magic. Until inevitably, Spector as Spector appears, explaining, untangling, deciphering; but really, he mystifies even more, sabotaging the story of his life as surely as he sabotaged his life.

And so it goes: Part Three is just a remake of parts one and two, but the gun goes off, fatally. The series of directors, anonymous, grows longer. Scorcese wouldn't do it, and appears as himself to say as much. And so three films, all released at separate times, all blur together, because each part of Spector's life is the same story, ad infinitum.

Cruise's phone keeps ringing, unanswered.

The strings swell; Spector's own score is an amalgam of his best bits, Tina Turner shakes in nude silhouette, Darlene Love shimmers, Ronnie Spector disappears from view. Spector as Spector spends weeks trying to get a jukebox into an Oakland McDonald's. Nobody recognises him at any turn. Time drifts; the story has an explosive beginning, hit after hit after hit, before drifting through the decades, fuelled by tragicomic interludes. Spector as Spector talks to the camera, sometime in the early 21st Century:

'Sometimes, I feel like a story with no end. There's got to be one last shot, one last explosion, before this little Jewish firework goes out.'

Bang.

Rock'n'Roll Parts 1,2 & 3 Directed by Eli Reiner, Dancla Flakier, Dominick Stenz, Gorse Badier, Calgary Kurt, Phil Spector, Todd Sameth Starring Al Pacino, Phil Spector, Elliot Gould, Larry Fishburne, Tina Turner, Wallace Shawn, Sheila Ferguson, Scott Glenn, Julian Lennon Produced by Phil Spector, Robert Evans, Todd Sameth, David Geffen Written by Phil Spector, Mick Brown UA/Warner Bros/Fox Release Date US: Nov 1978, Dec 1987, Feb 2006 Tagline: 'He's A Rebel'

ROOMS (Svenoslav Kartosky, 1967)

'Kartosky is a cartographer of fear, but be finds the absurdity of existence both compelling and comforting' Christian Metz

The weather chased her here, the wind at the wings of the plane, the sea blocking easy paths, the lightning that took down trees in her way, forcing her to turn left then right.

There is a large out-of-town supermarket. The entrance, through double-doors, is at the right hand-side of the front edge of the building. Buffeted by the wind, she decides to take shelter inside. The first room is small and dark. The impression is felt that the building is not too deep, but instead spreads away to the left. The visitor expects, of course, a cavernous space filled with strip lighting, but this option is not offered. Instead, there seems to be a series of small rooms connected to one another. When making her way through the first few series of rooms, the visitor is reminded sometimes of a fallow old teacher from primary school, or fleetingly remembers a game of dominoes with a dead relative. This is not unusual of course, for any visitor to any place will find themselves bedevilled by a waking thought of someone or some song for no reason that offers itself, but somehow the heavy flavours of the half-memories here are strong.

She feels a sense of huge spaces beyond her view. She feels lost, completely displaced. This configuration is illogical. But somehow she is comforted, in a way that makes little sense. It is as if up until this point she had some kind of thesis to defend, but now she is liberated from the chore. She tilts drunkenly. A light seems to flicker somewhere, but she doesn't see it so much as feel it.

She can hear the wind, far away, but it cannot reach her now. When did she leave the plane?

The visitor ducks behind a heavy curtain, sidesteps a pile of chairs and clims a set of three stairs. Then a shred of daylight, a coldness, stone floors. To her right are two identical cubicles, that remind her of the bathroom at her parents' grocery shop from when she was a child. She hasn't seen it for years, but remembers sitting on the cold seat and reading every comic in the shop. And here it is, not only doubled from her memory, but twinned again in front of her eyes, gloomy and cool.

And from here it is not too much of a step for her to begin recognizing other rooms- one ordinary door opens into an exact replica of her grandfather's shed, and the smell of honeyed wood brings involuntary tears to her face. The next room is vaguer, dimmer, and it is a while before she places it as a college friend's bedroom, pink, white and empty. She begins to rush through the rooms, desperate for certain places from her past, certain places that lack importance to everybody else except herself, were only significant enough to serve as obscured backdrops in family photos at Christmases and birthdays, and never appearing as the focus themselves. These vessels, stuck together in arbitrary fashion, seemed to make up a labyrinth of her past, minus people and context.

...and then for a second, the voice of her father, clear as a strong bell, rises into her eardrum. Lena, The Awful Truth is on TV. Irene Dunne. Cary Grant. Leo McCarey. Nineteen-Thirty-Seven. Lena! It's a good one, Lena.

She pushes through a stickered door and into her own bedroom, the one she had between the ages of six and sixteen. A man is sitting on the bed. He is dressed in a brown robe and has a kind, pink face.

Why Are You in my room?

Why are you in your room? Perhaps this is the real question.

Where Are We?

Sit down. There's something I need to tell you.

Who are you?

Don't you recognise me? I'm your brother. I'm here to tell you something. All the rooms you see here are rooms you have visited before during your life. They are here to provide a familiarity to the background. This is so that when you faint from news of your death, you do so in the apparent comfort of memories.

What are you talking about?

The configuration of all of these rooms together is absurd I know. This makes everything seem more like a dream. We find that if you think death is something like a confusing nightmare, then this helps you accept the news.

I'm dead?

Just think of it as a new year. A new decade, even. Walk boldly.

Rooms Directed by Svenoslav Kartosky Written by Svenoslav Kartosky, Mikel Kartosky Produced by Victor Garda Starring Joelie Michoz, Guus Speck Release Date: UK/US: N/A Cze/Fra: July 1967 32mins Tagline:Which ten-thousand rooms are you?