Films #1 & 2: Les Bicyclettes de Belsize (1968) / The London Nobody Knows (1967)

'Keep off
Mind how you go - oh oh
Don't you know the green grass is not for you
Oh no!

And all the flowers ain't for picking
They're just for standing in line'
(Episode Six, 'Gentlemen of the Park', 1968)

'YEAH – 1892 – lines are still on you – Hilly Fields'
(Nick Nicely, 'Hilly Fields (1892)', 1982)

An irregular series begins with a consideration of a pair of films recently issued on DVD for the first time, which form an eerie prelude to the sort of London psychogeography of Iain Sinclair and Patrick Keiller. I first read about the Cohen film, based on Geoffrey S. Fletcher's book, in Bracewell's England is Mine; I first caught glimpses of it during a 'workshop' computer session for my DTLLS teacher-training course late last year, when a fellow student, ex-Londoner and Art Lecturer watched a clip on You Tube of the Bedford Theatre part (now taken down), and told me how great a film it was.

The thing that strikes you about Cohen's semi-documentary is its sheer distance from the cliches of 1960s London, repeated to obsolescence by the media and associated heritage mongers: as here in the brainless shorthand given by the female presenter here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gg0kC1jNsQ&feature=related (yawn yawn YAWN)

Its companion film on the DVD release, Les Bicyclettes de Belsize (dir. Douglas Hickox, 1968), complements it well; it is a love-poem to Hampstead, presenting a delirious vision of the experiences of those more fortunate in society, those without financial hardship and in love. Even then, there is the sublimely queasy sequence backed by the song 'Gentlemen of the Park' by Episode Six (a forerunner of Deep Purple apparently). Supported by weightless, shimmering Beach Boys bass and harmonies, the singer infers about streamlining and conformity in ominous tones - inferences all the more chilling for how beautifully they are rendered.


The 'men in blue' in the lyric seem to be the authoritarian forces of public order; in the film, they are photographers gathered on Belsize Park - ambiguous, ambivalent, disturbingly impersonal. Packaging and trapping the miraculously gorgeous Judy Huxtable in a way vaguely analogous to Paul Jones in the similarly woozy, but infinitely bleaker Privilege (dir. Peter Watkins, 1968). The sharp editing cuts from her in various costumes, poses and hairdos, refracted infinitely, dizzying, untouchable - Anthony May uncertain, tremulous, on his bike in a quest to find her. The Episode Six song should be highlighted as it is magnificent, up there with the great things being done by the Pink Floyd, the Beatles and Mark Wirtz around this time. The idealised nature of this particular London reminds me of Van Der Graaf Generator's 'Refugees' (1970), wherein Peter Hammill laments the end of his flatsharing in 1968/9 in the West of London with Mike McLean and Susan Penhaligon - an actress who incidentally was in similar types of films to Huxtable:

'West is Mike and Susie,

West is where I love'

Les Bicyclettes de Belsize is one of the more European visions of an English city I have seen; it forms something of a bridge between Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Saint Etienne's Euro-inflected urban aesthetic. The effect is as if filtered through the wildest dreams of a Margo Guryan protagonist and the blurred gauze of her Take a Picture LP of 1968: http://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/margo_guryan/take_a_picture/

The London Nobody Knows forms the bleaker flipside to the bohemian languor of Belsize, showing the grisly Victoriana and war damage that lingered so long. It is an eccentric film, helped immeasurably by James Mason's role as a patrician guide and compere, complete with cap and wielding cane; his occasional interactions with Londoners are bizarrely amusing, and gradually take on a tragic aspect when he mingles with people boarding at a Salvation Army Hostel. These halfway houses to nowhere actually form a modicum of stability and luxury compared with the lives of those who, as Mason says, "can't and won't communicate with their fellow men":

Things reach a rather eerie, harrowing climax when Mason visits the crumbling 29 Hanbury Street in Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets - a Jack the Ripper murder scene - remarking that several residents of the street are old enough to recall those events. The film establishes the reasons that people tend to forget were behind the building of modern social housing: that many of the previous houses were horrific places to live, no more than slums breeding criminality and destitution. Along with Housing Problems (dir. Edgar Anstey & Arthur Elton, 1935), it is the finest indictment I have seen of the Victorian class and housing systems.

Mason addresses the likely passing of the Bedford Theatre in rather more melancholy terms, as befits a film actor of his theatrical style, yet there is no sentimentality. The theatre is an eerie, dead place; he makes sure we are under no illusions that the people have no use for it anymore. The music-hall entertainment - as detailed in its absolute twilight by John Osborne with The Entertainer - was no longer what people wanted; the theatre could not sustain itself. It had long been a tamed beast, anyway, after the royal patronage it received in 1912 (see my more detailed thoughts on music-hall at my old home, here: http://tom-may.livejournal.com/2004/10/15/). Better to demolish it and build something new than for it to undergo the undignified adaptation for the spurious purposes of 'regeneration', one might argue. An old Marie Lloyd song - with ghostly reverb applied - is played over details of crumbling decoration in close-up and the utter desolation of the entirety in panorama.

Another very old music-hall song is used in the graveyard scene, conveying a bleak gallows humour about death that reminds me of Steptoe and Son - the singer sings about what it is like to be 'blooming well dead!' Whilst music-hall may have been tamed and entombed even, working-class spirit still existed in 1967 - as shown in the remarkable market scenes that Mason mingles within. One has to take both parts of the picture; the vibrancy and the bleakness; today we see vibrancy in our cities generally replaced by blandness and corporate smugness and the bleakness is merely masked, disguised: moved to the outskirts.

Some would roll things back to the Victorian era, by way of the worst excesses of the last 30 years, represented here in unfettered selfishness and sod-the-environment-and-anyone-else consumerism: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/aug/27/tory-borough-barnet-budget-airline

These people must be opposed at every turn, as they are against the limited advances that this country has made. Who do we reckon is likely to suffer from the cutbacks that will ensue if Cameron pursues this on a larger scale? I think we know it won't be hard-done-by Kensington or Beaconsfield 'taxpayers', but those who rely on local authority services. Libraries will be shut, jobs lost, support will not be provided where there is a need. It increasingly seems to me that Hannon, Johnson and these Barnet Tories represent the true face of the party straining at the leash to get going; the Thatcherite attack-dog has always been dominant - there simply aren't many, if any, 'decent' Macmillan / Heath consensus Tories left. Cameron is likely to go along with all this, but simply try and sell it with the typical Carlton Man duplicity.

The London Nobody Knows shows things at a very much more promising moment, at least for the young. In line with Owen Hatherley's Militant Modernism tract, Darren Hayman & The Secondary Modern's contemporaneous album Pram Town*, recent TV documentaries on Park Hill, the new tower blocks are put in context: as necessary to replace what was for most a miserable existence. It was only bad local government and maintenance that necessarily condemned the utopian dream to its apparent failure.

Cohen's film has its moments of futurism; the haunting, Cyril Ornadel-meets-Basil Kirchin strings and brass gives way in this sequence to a startlingly Radiophonic composition - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LOCYTmyYl4&feature=related - indicating the accommodation of locality and futurism that marked this era.

These two late-1960s films are superb, and I strongly urge anyone with an interest at all in London, history, music-hall, modernist architecture, Victoriana, the sixties, James Mason, Judy Huxtable or Jack the Ripper, to buy the DVD - which you can get for an exceptionally generous fiver.

* Capturing the urban civic sentiment of the initial New Town dwellers, this is a rare musical release that one could feasibly compare with Sudden Sway's East Anglian 'soap-opera musical', '76 Kids Forever (1988), with Peterborough's current-day banal provincialism contrasted with the post-war dream in a movingly off-centre manner. Both albums contain a storyline and progression critical of what came from the 50s and 60s optimism. Obviously, the former Hefner singer's work doesn't quite have the musical experimentation or surreal academic wordplay of Sway, yet it forms a valid 'urban folk' counterpoint. Oh, and one cannot deny the glorious 'Compilation Cassette', with its winning, nerdy romanticism, conveyed with the aid of a ukelele, no less.

A meeting point is - not for the first time - the Star and Shadow Cinema in Ouseburn, which showed The London Nobody Knows in early 2008, in the same Saint Etienne-curated season as This is Tomorrow, which I went to see. It also played host to Hayman earlier this year -pictured here looking strangely like George Formby: http://www.starandshadow.org.uk/on/gig/99 - and I am now sad that I didn't go.

33. Michael Moorcock - 'The Spencer Inheritance' (1997)

'Bonuses all round,
says Donny Flair
our golden age PM.
Let's give ourselves
A pat on the back.'

(http://www.theedge.abelgratis.co.uk/spencer.htm)

While this story disappointed a little, inevitably in comparison with 'Theatre of War' (and Ballard has surely covered this territory brilliantly), there is much that is, or was, bracingly relevant. The epigraphs to each chapter or section, quoting Diana or reports regarding the media circus, inform a dystopian view of Britain: e.g. '[...] I wonder how they and all the grey men who put her down feel now? The people have spoken.' - Michael Winner, News of the World, September 7th 1997.

There are astonishing bursts of irrationality like this, from Julie Burchill, conflating patriotism with idolatory of Diana, and defining 'us', the people, against 'them', the foreigners, the Greeks and Germans: '. . . The Royal Family often seem to behave in ways which could actually be called unpatriotic, and their denial of Diana, the world's sweetheart, was the biggest betrayal of all. But then, what can you expect from a bunch of Greeks and Germans . . . Her brave, bright, brash life will forever cast a giant shadow over the sickly bunch of bullies who call themselves our ruling house. We'll always remember her, coming home for the last time to us, free at last - the People's Princess, not the Windsors'. . . .We'll never forget her. And neither will they.' - News of the World, September 7, 1997. Moorcock's scholarly selection of these epigraphs is insightful, but they could be more strongly tied to the narrative at times, which has a loose, freewheeling feel about it, in stark contrast to the concise control of a Ballard.

There are pertinent juxtapositions of Diana's professed views on landmines with her role as a martyred figurehead in the internal conflicts of this parallel Britain; and indeed the civil war is depicted in bloody terms, with plenty of descriptions of para-military and indeed military activities.

In terms of Cornelius, this seems to be an exercise in bathos: Jerry cuts a sickly figure in this story, suffering from 'convulsions' and playing little active part. Maybe this is part of Moorcock's subverting of the hero figure in science fiction? One suspects you need a thorough grasp of the character and what he has previously been (in various novels and shorts) to get a full picture of his portrayal here. That might a criticism of Moorcock in that he presumes a familiarity with these characters - maybe the first of my shorts surveyed which requires this sort of awareness of backstory. It can still be enjoyed, but is a curious, slightly distancing read at times.

Jerry does make a crucial comment - 'Long ago [...] Far away. Obsolete ikons. Failed providers. Lost servers. Scarcely an elegy, Miss Scarlett. Hardly worth blacking up for. Government by lowest common denominator. A true market government. Poets have been mourning this century ever since it began.' - which is close to one of the ruefully defeated reflections by the mysterious academic Robinson in Patrick Keiller's diptych encompassing London and Robinson in Space (1994/7), of which I am sure Moorcock is well aware, being a London writer.


Una Persson is a more attractive and proactive figure in the narrative; this chic revolutionary (or terrorist) wouldn't be out of place in a Luke Haines song, being introduced thus: 'Una Persson, stylish as ever in her military coat and dark, divided pants, straddled the fire, warming her hands. Her pale oval face, framed by a brunette pageboy, brooded into the middle distance. 'Don't buy any of that cheap American crap,' she told Major Nye. 'Their tanks fall apart as soon as their own crappy guns start firing. Get a French one, if you can.' '

She is a European anarchist, fashioned from the 60s and 70s, but timeless in herself; she has indeed appeared in several of Moorcock's different books and series': Elizabethan alt-history Gloriana, the Unfulfill'd Queen (1978), the Jerry Cornelius quadrilogy (1968-77), The Dancers at the End of Time (1974-76) , The Nomad of the Time Streams (1971-81), etc. The last of these series fascinatingly is centred around and narrated by Oswald Bastable, one of the Treasure Seekers of Edith Nesbit's 1899 children's novel, and finds roles for Churchill, Enoch Powell and Mick Jagger... a must-read, now that I have finished Donald Barthelme's excellent novel The King (1991), with its depiction of Arthurian myth transplanted to WW2. [finished as of: 17/05/09]

Una is a kind of refraction of that sphere of British music that runs from Roxy Music to the Human League, where things European and avant-garde were utilised. In terms of who might be the ideal Una in a film, Moorcock comments on his Multiverse website's forum, 'There might be one or two suitable actresses, but mine are associated either with US film noir or French nouvelle vague (or thereabouts). Or Beatles Berlin...' Anna Karina, perhaps? Or Jenny Runacre if British? She is clearly portrayed as aware of feminism, reading Meredith's Diana of the Crossways (1885) - Moorcock conveying his love of the forgotten and arcane in literature, as well as liberated, anarchistic women.


Overall, it is a rather ramshackle, freely associating narrative, written in a style that is somehow difficult for me to get used to; definitely an original voice, who I will pursue at longer length - the Nomad series? Critical to understanding it is Jerry's comment: 'But I have a feeling it won't go down too well in the provinces. I'm beginning to think this has been a poor career move. Market forces abhor the unique.'


'Murdering the opposition:
It is a last resort.
He came up that morning
He said
From Scunthorpe or was it Skegness.
You know, don't you?
The last resort.'


7/10

19. Wolf Mankowitz - 'Expresso Bongo' (1960)

'The gold on Bongo was no more real than the white beard on the Father Christmas at Selfridges, yet look how that show runs year after year.'

(Wolf Mankowitz, Make Me An Offer, Expresso Bongo and other stories, Hutchinson Educational / Unicorn, 1961, p.85)

There are interesting contrasts to be drawn with the Sitwell; this is focused on the urban scene that is used as marker of oddity against which people in staid Newborough are judged. The style is hard-boiled, rather than florid; clearly the cosmopolitan Mankowitz draws influences from all over - Damon Runyon, for example - rather than the aristocratic Sitwell, rooted in English culture. As with Sitwell and his criticisms made of society as it was, Mankowitz is well-qualified to cast an acidic eye on life in the metropole, being very much part of it himself.

The concern with money is universal in the delocalised world; everything is a show, in a way closer to the modern free-market than to the drowning Victorian age depicted by Sitwell. Mankowitz writes from a Jewish and London perspective entirely new to this blog; perhaps tangentially related to Harold Pinter, though clearly leaning more towards depicting the actuality of the characters' activity in The Dumb Waiter than capturing menace. He has an interest in low-life types and a keen perception of how urban life and pop culture was developing, placing them in the same lineage as musical theatre and Hollywood - with the depiction of a has-been mogul important at the end. Judy Garland is a motif, and high culture is seen inextricably linked to the popular; the dyspeptic talent impressario Mr Mayer professes to be an opera fan, who hates the new-fangled sounds - yet he knows where the money is and invests in Bongo: 'Yet from this disc lunacy I make money.' (p.77) The mogul's films, clearly of the Cecil B. deMille variety, are reappraised by the young: 'He was so dead that the long-haired cineastes (who hate live film makers) put three of his pre-accountancy-era movies into a National Film Theatre series.' (p.92)

Mankowitz is good in capturing talk, if hardly a Pinter; he captures the bravado very nicely, and the whole effect is as much to satirise as to mythologise the pop life: 'you are great with the teen-age public just so long as you're one of them.' (p.88) He creates the sense of this important new consumer group, the teenagers, who would not have been existed a decade before; the dress-sense in the Italian coffee bar is all string-ties and velvet-collared coats and pony-tails for the girls. (p.76) Coffee and pizza are clearly relatively new imports too, enjoyed by the band and their initial fanbase - also, the manager enjoys one of London's Chinese restaurants. It is very much the same sort of picture as that conveyed in the Daniel Farson-helmed TV documentary of 1960, Living for Kicks, with the Brighton youth constrained, envious, looking to America for the answers. Indeed, Mankowitz uses a similar TV documentary, Teen-age Rebellion, as a means of showing how Bongo Herbert becomes popular: 'The shots of him beating the life out of Mother and Hoxton in the shape of a pair of midget drums had real power.' (p.82) The same page describes how the documentary featured, along with other 'delinquent types', 'a magistrate, a psychiatrist and the governor of a Boys' Remand Home.' (pp.81-2) I cannot recall whether the Farson programme counterpoints the views of the young with the old or not...
http://www.transdiffusion.org/emc/tvheroes/daniel_farson.php

But, those views are perceived as as irrelevant as the treasures uncovered by those combing the sands in 'Low Tide': 'The older generation, with a belly full of wars and post-wars, was too tired from jumping over rising costs and crises to see the worry behind its children's gaiety.' (p.86) Mankowitz is very perceptive on how the older generation - perhaps anyone who did national service and older? - are excluded from this new world. The provinces too, are secondary; reputations are made in 'the Smoke', the capital; 'According to them [booking agents], in the provinces the public didn't watch television or read the newspapers. But the fact of no bookings apart, maybe to let Bongo get lost up North for a few months would be bad business wise.' (p.83) Restrictions are still in place, though, even in London; the 'small-time nude revue off Brewer Street' that the manager attends has a 'tableau vivant' in which, rather absurdly, neither the female artiste nor the horse is permitted to move - by law. The Lord Chamberlain's veto on theatres and other such moves on censorship were still in effect. Ironic perhaps that Cliff Richard stars in the film of Expresso Bongo (1959) - which portrays a cynicism towards censorship as much as towards the pop phenomenon - when ten years later he would be a close ally of Mary Whitehouse in her 'Festival of Light' campaign against filth on television, the stage and in popular culture generally.

The somewhat hypocritical nature of the fanbase is made clear; these are easily manipulated, by a fan-mag which absurdly portrays Bongo as 'giving Mum big play for her golden heart and undying faith' - she is actually more concerned in him becoming a standard breadwinner. Perhaps this is merely intended as a reassurance for the older generation; the teenagers clearly revel in how rebellious Bongo is in the early throes of his success.

I have not yet seen the film of this, but would imagine it would at least be interesting; Val Guest is one of the more durable veterans of British cinema, involved in everything from The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), to The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961; an apparently fine science-fiction film), to Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) and surely a nadir in British cinema and culture, Cannon and Ball's The Boys in Blue (1982). Fascinatingly, in view of both how Crompton's series developed into the 1960s, he actually directed a 1947 film entitled Just William's Luck, which I had never heard of before: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040503/ This does not appear to be available on DVD, and I can never recall it having been screened on TV in the last ten years.

The book which contains EB is part of a series of 'Unicorn' hardbacks, with a fairly abstract uniform cover design, with a unicorn at its centre. Being Hutchinson Educational, they are clearly intended for fairly intelligent schoolgoers; other Unicorns included The Red Badge of Courage, Huck Finn, The Day of the Triffids, Doctor Syn and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre - which certainly reflect a culture in the early-60s that encouraged the questioning of authority, tying into what was going on in pop culture. My parents' edition is ex-library, with due-to-return dates of 26 SEP 1967 and 23 FEB 1972; it is from Bramhall County Grammar School, I gather in or around Stockport, where my parents lived and taught from about 1974-8 (though not at this school). Paul Morley went to a very similar grammar-school, Stockport GS itself (?), around this time; interesting to consider whether he might have read this in the late sixties - I need to read his superb memoir Nothing again soon.

It is very much a moot point whether Mankowitz glamourises his first-person narrator, who is an archetypal pop svengali - though more a manager than a producer. There is an offhand moment of Spector unpleasantness, dished out to his female secretary with singing aspirations which is not editorially commented upon. However, perhaps his fate, outwitted by a Bongo who is clearly intent upon donning the lucrative, though less vital, mantle of the 'all-round entertainer', ending up with nothing is seen as just desserts in his world. What lingers perhaps more in the mind is how he promotes the first record in terms bound to capture a voracious youth: 'Hate him or hug him, Bongo has something that's new, a swaying calypso beat woven around a rock foundatio. Here it is, kids. Bongo, you beasts.' (p.79)

'In profit.
I love those words.'
(p.78)

Mankowitz touches on how important this was becoming; however restrained capitalism was in comparison to the last thirty years we have witnessed, the old drives, suppressed for so long, were returning.* The essential vitality offered by the narrator and by Bongo would clearly have been difficult to resist for the young. The Tom-Tom club's 'yokels from Elephant and Castle', and Bongo with his 'hoarse Hoxton voice' are a deft portrait of young Londoners who have simply had enough of the very limited world offered by the older generation at this stage. Yes, one will get more depth in terms of interpreting language, mores and behaviour by reading the contemporaneous works of Harold Pinter or Angus Wilson, but this is a very prescient early development of the pop narrative - admittedly one that has since been tiresomely overused in films and literature over the last fifty years. Whilst the utter vitality and necessity of pop culture must be stressed, most would acknowledge that it held greater power when in opposition to an established order with values, rather than in league with a capitalism without values - as has been the case since 1984 and the crucial victories of Thatcherism.**


* Martin J. Wiener, in English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1981) records the gradual retreat of the British from the sort of urban capitalism, industry and enterprise that had led to Empire and the growth of cities. He fixes upon this as the high watermark of commerce: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Exhibition - and the retreat, whether into ruralist, religious or socialist values is more marked from this point. He uses examples from Dickens and Hardy, as well as the more expected examples of Chesterton, Wilde and Morris, to show how the culture recoiled from what it had done.
Wiener's was an important book in the establishment of Thatcher's monetarist reforms, providing ballast for the case to be made on changing the culture; a copy was distributed to every cabinet member when it was published.

** The articulate cellist Zoe Martlew made the point on Newsnight Review last night (17/04/09) that from 1950-75 we had a funding of classical music youth orchestras which actually compared with the rest of the world - our Local Authority Music Services. This meant free access to tuition and instruments. The Education Reforms of the Tories They were discussing the excellent Venezuelan policy of giving all children (including the poor) a music instrument and subsidising lessons, bringing them into orchestras - resulting in the Sounds Venezuela concerts under review. Portillo, generally making fatuous points on the other topics, made the obvious but pertinent observation that it is 'culturally impossible' for people to be raised in this country by classical music. The urgency, enthusiasm, the training to listen could not be achieved in our current culture, where, as he said, disadvantaged people have no belief in bettering themselves through an artistic education. This is a human right in Socialist Venezuela, and should be everywhere, including Britain. As it stands, classical music is branded as elite; the politicians and educationalists will have nothing to do with it. It is left as the preserve of the pushy, well-to-do middle-classes, who can afford to pay for private tuition; yet one more aspect of our class divided society. Like Martlew, Goldie knows what should be done; like with the youth centres, subsidise; people won't be raised in any other way. And popular music itself will be richer for the interaction and antagonism with the classical. We know it works, it has before.



7/10