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Interview: How to Protest - UK Politics, Press and Propaganda
April 2024
Brett Gregory interviews independent Lithuanian scholar, Giedre Kubiliute, about her new publication 'Protests and the Media: A Critical Event Studies Exploration into the Future of Protest' (Routledge, 2024)
April 2024
Brett Gregory interviews independent Lithuanian scholar, Giedre Kubiliute, about her new publication 'Protests and the Media: A Critical Event Studies Exploration into the Future of Protest' (Routledge, 2024)
Interview Transcript
BG: Hi, my name is Brett Gregory and I'm an associate editor with the UK arts, culture and politics website, Culture Matters.
What follows is a wide-ranging interview with the principal author of ‘Protests and the Media: A Critical Event Studies Exploration into the Future of Protest’, an excellent book published in February 2024 which interrogates the interrelationship between protest, politics and propaganda in the UK.
Hi. What is your name, and what are the academic origins behind your publication?
GK: My name is Giedre Kubiliute. My path into research began through my Master's research project while studying at Leeds Beckett University, and that's where I met Dr Ian Lamond, the co-author of the book who was my research supervisor at the time.
Ian's areas of research interests include conceptual foundations of event research, creativity and events of dissent, death, fandom, critical geography, whereas myself, having no previous academic background, my interest in protest and dissent is rooted in my own past growing up in Lithuania in the turbulent 1980s and 1990s, and the significance of dissent throughout my country's history.
BG: And what was the experiential key which helped you to unlock your motivation and determination with regards to completing this project?
GK: The book started as my Master's research project which I was due to start working on during the Covid-19 pandemic. All the events happening at the time, particularly the wave of the Black Lives Matter protests across the world, and Sarah Everard’s murder and the vigil. They were so emotionally charged and emotive, and the unprecedented context of the lockdown and the unknown that they were happening in, it added a whole new level of intensity. So, I personally found myself feeling really moved on some visceral level by all the protests taking place, and I wanted to interrogate that feeling further.
BG: You mentioned your Lithuanian background earlier. In what ways has this characterised your political outlook?
GK: It took me back to my childhood and the events of dissent I was a witness to from The Baltic Way of 1989 – which was a demonstration of close to 2 million people creating a human chain connected Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – to the hundreds of people defending the Lithuanian Parliament and the television tower in Vilnius, and standing up to the Russian tanks on the 13th January 1991 where 14 people lost their lives, to many other events I have seen or have been told about.
So, to me protest events of defiance against oppression first and foremost, and they can bring hope, unite people and change the course of history, and they are tools to achieve societal change and innovation.
BG: And what wider sources have helped to define your own personal understanding of political dissent and protest?
GK: As Matthew Mars has said for innovation and the betterment of the existing situation to happen, there must be a form of so-called ‘creative disruption’. Or, as Henri Lefebvre said, a group of people who designate themselves as innovators must firstly intervene by imprinting a rhythm on an era, and their acts must inscribe themselves on reality.
So, seeing protest from my standpoint, it was very uncomfortable to observe how the media twisted and framed those events. Not only influencing how the public saw those specific events in question, but how the purpose and the driving force for that dissent was at times twisted to meet certain narratives that were perpetuated by certain media outlets or the State; and there was often a certain lack of will from the wider public to interrogate those narratives as well. And once you see it happen over and over again you can't unsee it: it happens everywhere all the time.
BG: Please tell us a little bit more about ‘Critical Event Studies’ as an academic subject, and how it can relate to our everyday lives.
GK: ‘Critical Event Studies’ interrogates the concept of an event. It frames the event as a rupture that can reveal the structures of power that underlie what's holding the daily life routines in place. Different theorists will use different terms which, while the meanings differ, they basically show that it is power or oppression that binds the routines of daily life into the practices of daily life. However, as well as exposing those power relationships, we also open up possibilities for different ways the relationships can be formed, and it's the events ability to open up the multiplicity of alternative formations that enables resistance to existing power relationships.
When we stop seeing an event as something anchored to corporate or commercial constructions of events and project management, that enables us to draw on multiple fields and disciplines whilst seeking to explore their disruptive connections.
BG: Could you give a few specific examples?
GK: I mean there are so many of them from a mainstream event studies perspective. We could look at the reactions to recent sporting mega events such as the Qatar World Cup or the recent iteration of the Olympic Games. We'll look at the debates of how to manage the most recent Eurovision song contest. Outside that narrow frame of reference, in the UK general elections, recent and emerging legislation around the forms protest can take; the huge upsurge in hate crime, particularly associated with sexual orientation and gender identity. None of them are critical events but they are ‘evental landscapes’ that warrant critical interrogation.
BG: Let's now look a little deeper into the mechanics and organics of political dissent and protest. What is the overall purpose, for example?
GK: Public dissent is really about publicly demonstrating counter-narratives. When we increase the level of knowledge and awareness of a topic the general trajectory of public discourse can be slightly nudged. It won't be an overnight solution, it's not a magic bullet kind of thinking. It's just a slight push but it can influence the change: it can draw people into coalitions as well, maybe those who were floating before. Of course, it can push people away too.
One of the people we interviewed for our book Pete, a scientist for Extinction Rebellion and other movements, made a very interesting and important point. There is often a misunderstanding that a movement behind a protest always seeks some sort of approval from the public which is then followed by an argument that more disruptive protest action will turn the public against the movement. And Pete argued that the purpose of a protest is never to make the wider public to like the movement: it's to draw the public's attention to the problem, and that can often be lost in how the events are framed by the media.
BG: And what possible consequences can such actions and events have for wider society?
GK: Roland Bleiker, a Professor of International Relations, suggested that if we push the understanding of democracy beyond an institutionalised framework of processes and procedures, then dissenting protest could be viewed as a new kind of democratic participation that actually makes a meaningful contribution to the theory and practice of global democracy. But, instead, we witness governments refusing to deal with the causes that push people to protest and often those governments won't even attempt to eliminate those reasons but will instead put forward legislation to increase police powers and punishment in an attempt to squash the dissent which will only set the system up for further failure.
BG: So, how do governments, corporations and their media associates manage to keep the public at large in check?
GK: Public relations will often use propaganda and persuasion techniques that make use of emotional triggers instead of rational arguments, and often those are used without any regard for potential underlying ethical issues. Popular media sources and even some academics tend to frame protest by using traditional ‘angry mob’ or ‘mob mentality’ concepts which originate in historic crowd psychology. This cliché has been perpetuated to the extent where just one mention of a protest will evoke an image of an angry crowd in some people's minds.
BG: Can you give us a specific example of this?
GK: In April 2023 Extinction Rebellion organised an event called ‘The Big One’, and this event attracted approximately 100,000 participants and it was run in cooperation with the police. However, I'm pretty sure that hardly anyone has heard about it because we know that there are various reasons why the media will not cover peaceful gatherings.
If you speak to some journalists that have turned to activism I'm sure they'll tell you that disruptive events are partially driven and encouraged by the media itself, so the reporters are not exactly free to report the topics they feel are important as the power structures within their corporations decide what narratives and stories are acceptable. So, sometimes publishing a coverage of events may be the only way to touch on the issues at the heart of the dissent. However, for a journalist to be able to cover the event it has to be of significant scope and cause enough disruption to attract the media attention, so in that way media in itself can act as a catalyst for disruptive action.
BG: And the work of Noam Chomsky has been important in terms of your understanding of, for instance, ‘soft power’ shaping public opinion.
GK: In our book we talk a lot about how Herman and Chomsky’s ‘Propaganda Model’ is still very much alive today and it can be adapted for the new information technologies, and the way the information society operates. This model looks at how the so-called ‘raw information’ or ‘raw news’ gets filtered and manipulated by the factors of who owns the media firms, where their political interests lie, advertising as the primary income source; the reliance of the media on information provided by the government and so-called experts who are funded and approved by those sources and agents of power.
BG: What do you mean by the term ‘priority distortion’ with regards to mainstream mediated communication?
GK: Mainstream media, and particularly those sources specialising in ‘soft news’, they will use what we call ‘priority distortion’ by firstly reporting on some celebrity drama which will be followed by a story about political or social welfare issues, and that creates an absurd contrast in the reader’s mind and it devalues any interest in political engagement. When we spoke to a member of Extinction Rebellion they told us that the right-wing media will sometimes publish articles stating that the scientists are concerned about the climate emergency, but will not explain any details. So that makes such a topic and news too complex for some of the readers to understand or engage with; and, worryingly, as coverage of important social issues can be distorted and controlled by misinformation and omission, the public and some mid-level policy makers will still be basing their decisions on such filtered information.
BG: And ‘perspectivism’?
GK: ‘Perspectivism’, a concept that looks at how we interpret the world around us based on our views and perceptions, and that is a result of the impact, the ideology and material conditions have on news reporting, which in itself is a process of choosing what information to report on and then using that information to carve it into further narratives. Most frequently we can witness the narratives that create a binary between us and them where ‘they’ will be positioned as problematic disruptive outsiders whose actions and nature are always so transparent to us, while they cannot fully appreciate the complexity of the virtuous ‘us’.
BG: Them and Us. Us and Them.
GK: So, there’s binaries are everywhere you can find them in the news reporting, ranging from the local reports about disruptive protesters in the UK, the asylum seekers in Europe, the narratives about gender identity, religion, to ultimately the West against Russia narrative which has been perpetuated by the Russian government over the last couple of years. We also witnessed it again when the right-wing media reacted to Extinction Rebellion's blockade of Murdoch's print works and used character assassinations of individual members of the movement in order to discredit the whole movement.
BG: Misinformation, disinformation, character assassinations … How did they keep getting away with it?
GK: Often the ruling elite will also use the concept of national security and intelligence to control any information leaks that could pose a danger to the ruling classes and corporations; and those who question the corporate political and military powers will be labelled as traitors. In the same way mainstream media can be used to drive the general public away from political debates by conditioning people to support the policies of political elites by claiming that those policies are essential for state security and public safety, although they are really aimed at silencing the voices that could be dangerous to those who are in power.
BG: And what else has your research uncovered?
GK: In our research it was interesting to observe how the media's portrayal of police actions at protests shifted depending on the event. All three events we spoke about in the book took place within about a year of each other during the lockdowns and under the same guidelines lines. However, the media was expecting the police to behave very differently in each of them; and not only that the media can use a protest event as a basis to reinforce certain narratives that lie at the heart of the movement. In our book we explore how both right-leaning and left-leaning media displayed overall similar attitudes and coverage of the events around Sarah Everard’s vigil, but behind that coverage they had very different attitudes and discussions regarding the matter of women’s safety. And there are so many more examples of how public opinions are formed to avoid any interrogation.
BG: For example?
GK: One that really boils my blood is the conversations we are having about gender-neutral toilets. What we have now is an argument that women's safety is put in danger as essentially men posing at trans-women or otherwise can get access to women's spaces. So, the narrative has been turned to position two marginalised groups, women and trans-people, against each other and to put trans-people in a role of the threat when the real and, in my opinion, very obvious situation is that women are worried about their safety because men in disguise or not pose a threat to women's safety, and not only women's: any other marginalised groups really. It's a historical, cultural and societal problem that we are avoiding and we're not talking about.
So, what we do as a society now, we position two marginalised groups against each other as enemies and allow the real perpetrator to walk away unchallenged and unscathed. Those who pose the real danger just so happen to also hold the power in terms of capital, legislation, justice, policing, yet they don't get challenged. Why don't we as a society start having those uncomfortable conversations? Why aren't we challenging our male friends, family members? Why don't we educate our sons and employees and teach them the values they never had to be bothered to learn? Because it's an uncomfortable conversation, and people would rather find an enemy in a marginalised group that holds no power than challenge the real problem. Again, you see this everywhere and I think as a society, and particularly in this country, we will do everything in order to avoid any uncomfortable conversation. So, we will happily reinforce power structures even though they are contributing to the collapse of society, and put people and the planet in danger, just so, God forbid, we don't have to question anyone.
BG: Indeed. Utterly shameful. We are talking about at least 2,000 years of white patriarchy however – fully resourced by seemingly unlimited wealth and power – and which is, sadly, as embedded into our society and collective psyche as the foundations of Hadrian's Wall are embedded into the earth.
I believe it is going to take at least another 200 years of round-the-clock vigilance, education, activism and sacrifice for a truly permanent attitudinal change to be accepted on a national scale.
However, isn't this one of the reasons why we choose to be here right now in 2024: to continue to help bring about progressive and positive change in others in some small but significant way?
And with this in mind, I suppose we should continue and explore how propaganda and persuasion techniques are currently being employed online.
GK: The dominant social media platforms have concentrated ownership and form a very concentrated market. So, while on television and in the printed press the advertisers can target specific audiences, on social media multiple audiences can be targeted at once and this can be done artificially through bots which not only create automated posts, shares, likes and such but can be used as a tool to target and harass journalists and activists to flood them with hate and threads from artificially created accounts.
BG: And, of course, the reaction of the billionaire owners of these platforms is to simply hide away in their high-security ivory towers and count their money. As a consequence, where does that leave the rest of us?
GK: Facebook and Google algorithms are kept as a corporate secret so the owners control them and determine new sources for the general public. So the algorithms selected, exposure and audience fragmentation, they all create a hotbed for radicalisation, deep fake videos, voice cloning, generative text and other artificial intelligence generated content are becoming more and more convincing, and they have been widely used to spread disinformation during the US presidential elections, the Kremlin's attempts to discredit European governments, bots and fake accounts have been widely reported to be used by Russia to create counter-narratives around the war in Ukraine. It's also suspected that the Chinese government used fake news stories in a barrage jamming technique to overwhelm certain hashtags and make the readers see images of cotton fields as opposed to the tweet about the forced labour camps.
One of the people we interviewed for the book shared her horrific experiences when following her public actions trolls created a fake ‘Only Fans’ account where they had her face superimposed and which was shared to her family, and those trolls used and altered photographs of her mother who had passed away to harass this person even further.
BG: It's like a war, an ideological, hyperreal war. Such a daily and nightly barrage of abuse must take its toll on activists and protesters on a personal level?
GK: We gathered from the people we interviewed for the book that a lot of people come to social activism not really knowing what to expect or rather not understanding how hard-hitting and life-changing this choice can be. First of all it's a huge and steep learning curve. An individual may think they might know enough and that they stand firmly on the ground, however joining a movement seems to open a floodgate of information or truth that one was not prepared for. Ultimately, it can create a sense of burden and loss and foster a sense of duty to create a change, and it will likely impact personal life choices going further as well which can have a negative impact on existing relationships, family ties, even professional life. Ultimately, it is likely to have a very significant impact on a person's mental health.
BG: Of course, naturally.
GK: Then again there are other significant aspects. The question of finding one's identity and purpose within a movement; finally seeing that a change can be achieved and advocated for through collective action; network-building, finding like-minded people. So, there is a lot to consider, there is a lot of potential for life-changing happenings. Social movements also need to support activists more. Whether that support will be on a movement by movement basis, or it adopts the lines of something like the Green and Black Cross Group where an independent body of volunteer counsellors are established to support movements.
This is something both Ian and I want to interrogate further. The mediated manipulation of activism and activists has raised profound mental health and well-being issues for social movements, and to neglect working on those can cause high risk to individuals and to the work of the movements for social justice.
BG: Due to the absolute derelict state the UK is in at the moment I'm certain there are many, many conscientious readers and listeners out there who have seriously considered political activism of some sort but then again, on a personal level, is it worth the risk?
GK: There is always a risk but there are a couple of important things to bear in mind. Engaged democratic mobilisation for change that operates through a perspective of care and conviviality is much stronger on the left than it is on the right politically. It is opposed to the neoliberalist stance that promotes the destruction of the social through increased focus on the individual. We mentioned well-being and personal transformations that individuals undergo when they get involved in activism, and that's not to scare or put anyone off, it's to highlight how all-encompassing such transformations can be. And I think it's important for the movements to remember that they are creating lasting networks where peer support and education must be and it must remain one of the priorities and, hopefully, external players being aware of what activism entails. The various aspects and sometimes risks, they can also contribute to the societal change by offering their support and promoting and facilitating the culture of collaboration between different networks and groups.
The political right is far less about conviviality and much more about the spectacle and Donald Trump is an example of this above all others. Late capitalist democracy is very skilled at appropriating the tools of activism and converting them into commodified commercial opportunities, but activism isn't static either. What this means is that as activists we must always be adapting growing and evolving. By assuming the approach we are now adopting that will affect change we will essentially be walking those techniques into the hands of those we are opposing, so only by being agile and creative we can keep ahead.
BG: Many thanks for your time, insights and patience, Giedre.
‘Protests and the Media: A Critical Event Studies Exploration into the Future of Protest’ is available now via the Routledge website.
I've been Brett Gregory, Associate Editor for the UK arts, culture and politics website, Culture Matters.
Cheers.
BG: Hi, my name is Brett Gregory and I'm an associate editor with the UK arts, culture and politics website, Culture Matters.
What follows is a wide-ranging interview with the principal author of ‘Protests and the Media: A Critical Event Studies Exploration into the Future of Protest’, an excellent book published in February 2024 which interrogates the interrelationship between protest, politics and propaganda in the UK.
Hi. What is your name, and what are the academic origins behind your publication?
GK: My name is Giedre Kubiliute. My path into research began through my Master's research project while studying at Leeds Beckett University, and that's where I met Dr Ian Lamond, the co-author of the book who was my research supervisor at the time.
Ian's areas of research interests include conceptual foundations of event research, creativity and events of dissent, death, fandom, critical geography, whereas myself, having no previous academic background, my interest in protest and dissent is rooted in my own past growing up in Lithuania in the turbulent 1980s and 1990s, and the significance of dissent throughout my country's history.
BG: And what was the experiential key which helped you to unlock your motivation and determination with regards to completing this project?
GK: The book started as my Master's research project which I was due to start working on during the Covid-19 pandemic. All the events happening at the time, particularly the wave of the Black Lives Matter protests across the world, and Sarah Everard’s murder and the vigil. They were so emotionally charged and emotive, and the unprecedented context of the lockdown and the unknown that they were happening in, it added a whole new level of intensity. So, I personally found myself feeling really moved on some visceral level by all the protests taking place, and I wanted to interrogate that feeling further.
BG: You mentioned your Lithuanian background earlier. In what ways has this characterised your political outlook?
GK: It took me back to my childhood and the events of dissent I was a witness to from The Baltic Way of 1989 – which was a demonstration of close to 2 million people creating a human chain connected Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – to the hundreds of people defending the Lithuanian Parliament and the television tower in Vilnius, and standing up to the Russian tanks on the 13th January 1991 where 14 people lost their lives, to many other events I have seen or have been told about.
So, to me protest events of defiance against oppression first and foremost, and they can bring hope, unite people and change the course of history, and they are tools to achieve societal change and innovation.
BG: And what wider sources have helped to define your own personal understanding of political dissent and protest?
GK: As Matthew Mars has said for innovation and the betterment of the existing situation to happen, there must be a form of so-called ‘creative disruption’. Or, as Henri Lefebvre said, a group of people who designate themselves as innovators must firstly intervene by imprinting a rhythm on an era, and their acts must inscribe themselves on reality.
So, seeing protest from my standpoint, it was very uncomfortable to observe how the media twisted and framed those events. Not only influencing how the public saw those specific events in question, but how the purpose and the driving force for that dissent was at times twisted to meet certain narratives that were perpetuated by certain media outlets or the State; and there was often a certain lack of will from the wider public to interrogate those narratives as well. And once you see it happen over and over again you can't unsee it: it happens everywhere all the time.
BG: Please tell us a little bit more about ‘Critical Event Studies’ as an academic subject, and how it can relate to our everyday lives.
GK: ‘Critical Event Studies’ interrogates the concept of an event. It frames the event as a rupture that can reveal the structures of power that underlie what's holding the daily life routines in place. Different theorists will use different terms which, while the meanings differ, they basically show that it is power or oppression that binds the routines of daily life into the practices of daily life. However, as well as exposing those power relationships, we also open up possibilities for different ways the relationships can be formed, and it's the events ability to open up the multiplicity of alternative formations that enables resistance to existing power relationships.
When we stop seeing an event as something anchored to corporate or commercial constructions of events and project management, that enables us to draw on multiple fields and disciplines whilst seeking to explore their disruptive connections.
BG: Could you give a few specific examples?
GK: I mean there are so many of them from a mainstream event studies perspective. We could look at the reactions to recent sporting mega events such as the Qatar World Cup or the recent iteration of the Olympic Games. We'll look at the debates of how to manage the most recent Eurovision song contest. Outside that narrow frame of reference, in the UK general elections, recent and emerging legislation around the forms protest can take; the huge upsurge in hate crime, particularly associated with sexual orientation and gender identity. None of them are critical events but they are ‘evental landscapes’ that warrant critical interrogation.
BG: Let's now look a little deeper into the mechanics and organics of political dissent and protest. What is the overall purpose, for example?
GK: Public dissent is really about publicly demonstrating counter-narratives. When we increase the level of knowledge and awareness of a topic the general trajectory of public discourse can be slightly nudged. It won't be an overnight solution, it's not a magic bullet kind of thinking. It's just a slight push but it can influence the change: it can draw people into coalitions as well, maybe those who were floating before. Of course, it can push people away too.
One of the people we interviewed for our book Pete, a scientist for Extinction Rebellion and other movements, made a very interesting and important point. There is often a misunderstanding that a movement behind a protest always seeks some sort of approval from the public which is then followed by an argument that more disruptive protest action will turn the public against the movement. And Pete argued that the purpose of a protest is never to make the wider public to like the movement: it's to draw the public's attention to the problem, and that can often be lost in how the events are framed by the media.
BG: And what possible consequences can such actions and events have for wider society?
GK: Roland Bleiker, a Professor of International Relations, suggested that if we push the understanding of democracy beyond an institutionalised framework of processes and procedures, then dissenting protest could be viewed as a new kind of democratic participation that actually makes a meaningful contribution to the theory and practice of global democracy. But, instead, we witness governments refusing to deal with the causes that push people to protest and often those governments won't even attempt to eliminate those reasons but will instead put forward legislation to increase police powers and punishment in an attempt to squash the dissent which will only set the system up for further failure.
BG: So, how do governments, corporations and their media associates manage to keep the public at large in check?
GK: Public relations will often use propaganda and persuasion techniques that make use of emotional triggers instead of rational arguments, and often those are used without any regard for potential underlying ethical issues. Popular media sources and even some academics tend to frame protest by using traditional ‘angry mob’ or ‘mob mentality’ concepts which originate in historic crowd psychology. This cliché has been perpetuated to the extent where just one mention of a protest will evoke an image of an angry crowd in some people's minds.
BG: Can you give us a specific example of this?
GK: In April 2023 Extinction Rebellion organised an event called ‘The Big One’, and this event attracted approximately 100,000 participants and it was run in cooperation with the police. However, I'm pretty sure that hardly anyone has heard about it because we know that there are various reasons why the media will not cover peaceful gatherings.
If you speak to some journalists that have turned to activism I'm sure they'll tell you that disruptive events are partially driven and encouraged by the media itself, so the reporters are not exactly free to report the topics they feel are important as the power structures within their corporations decide what narratives and stories are acceptable. So, sometimes publishing a coverage of events may be the only way to touch on the issues at the heart of the dissent. However, for a journalist to be able to cover the event it has to be of significant scope and cause enough disruption to attract the media attention, so in that way media in itself can act as a catalyst for disruptive action.
BG: And the work of Noam Chomsky has been important in terms of your understanding of, for instance, ‘soft power’ shaping public opinion.
GK: In our book we talk a lot about how Herman and Chomsky’s ‘Propaganda Model’ is still very much alive today and it can be adapted for the new information technologies, and the way the information society operates. This model looks at how the so-called ‘raw information’ or ‘raw news’ gets filtered and manipulated by the factors of who owns the media firms, where their political interests lie, advertising as the primary income source; the reliance of the media on information provided by the government and so-called experts who are funded and approved by those sources and agents of power.
BG: What do you mean by the term ‘priority distortion’ with regards to mainstream mediated communication?
GK: Mainstream media, and particularly those sources specialising in ‘soft news’, they will use what we call ‘priority distortion’ by firstly reporting on some celebrity drama which will be followed by a story about political or social welfare issues, and that creates an absurd contrast in the reader’s mind and it devalues any interest in political engagement. When we spoke to a member of Extinction Rebellion they told us that the right-wing media will sometimes publish articles stating that the scientists are concerned about the climate emergency, but will not explain any details. So that makes such a topic and news too complex for some of the readers to understand or engage with; and, worryingly, as coverage of important social issues can be distorted and controlled by misinformation and omission, the public and some mid-level policy makers will still be basing their decisions on such filtered information.
BG: And ‘perspectivism’?
GK: ‘Perspectivism’, a concept that looks at how we interpret the world around us based on our views and perceptions, and that is a result of the impact, the ideology and material conditions have on news reporting, which in itself is a process of choosing what information to report on and then using that information to carve it into further narratives. Most frequently we can witness the narratives that create a binary between us and them where ‘they’ will be positioned as problematic disruptive outsiders whose actions and nature are always so transparent to us, while they cannot fully appreciate the complexity of the virtuous ‘us’.
BG: Them and Us. Us and Them.
GK: So, there’s binaries are everywhere you can find them in the news reporting, ranging from the local reports about disruptive protesters in the UK, the asylum seekers in Europe, the narratives about gender identity, religion, to ultimately the West against Russia narrative which has been perpetuated by the Russian government over the last couple of years. We also witnessed it again when the right-wing media reacted to Extinction Rebellion's blockade of Murdoch's print works and used character assassinations of individual members of the movement in order to discredit the whole movement.
BG: Misinformation, disinformation, character assassinations … How did they keep getting away with it?
GK: Often the ruling elite will also use the concept of national security and intelligence to control any information leaks that could pose a danger to the ruling classes and corporations; and those who question the corporate political and military powers will be labelled as traitors. In the same way mainstream media can be used to drive the general public away from political debates by conditioning people to support the policies of political elites by claiming that those policies are essential for state security and public safety, although they are really aimed at silencing the voices that could be dangerous to those who are in power.
BG: And what else has your research uncovered?
GK: In our research it was interesting to observe how the media's portrayal of police actions at protests shifted depending on the event. All three events we spoke about in the book took place within about a year of each other during the lockdowns and under the same guidelines lines. However, the media was expecting the police to behave very differently in each of them; and not only that the media can use a protest event as a basis to reinforce certain narratives that lie at the heart of the movement. In our book we explore how both right-leaning and left-leaning media displayed overall similar attitudes and coverage of the events around Sarah Everard’s vigil, but behind that coverage they had very different attitudes and discussions regarding the matter of women’s safety. And there are so many more examples of how public opinions are formed to avoid any interrogation.
BG: For example?
GK: One that really boils my blood is the conversations we are having about gender-neutral toilets. What we have now is an argument that women's safety is put in danger as essentially men posing at trans-women or otherwise can get access to women's spaces. So, the narrative has been turned to position two marginalised groups, women and trans-people, against each other and to put trans-people in a role of the threat when the real and, in my opinion, very obvious situation is that women are worried about their safety because men in disguise or not pose a threat to women's safety, and not only women's: any other marginalised groups really. It's a historical, cultural and societal problem that we are avoiding and we're not talking about.
So, what we do as a society now, we position two marginalised groups against each other as enemies and allow the real perpetrator to walk away unchallenged and unscathed. Those who pose the real danger just so happen to also hold the power in terms of capital, legislation, justice, policing, yet they don't get challenged. Why don't we as a society start having those uncomfortable conversations? Why aren't we challenging our male friends, family members? Why don't we educate our sons and employees and teach them the values they never had to be bothered to learn? Because it's an uncomfortable conversation, and people would rather find an enemy in a marginalised group that holds no power than challenge the real problem. Again, you see this everywhere and I think as a society, and particularly in this country, we will do everything in order to avoid any uncomfortable conversation. So, we will happily reinforce power structures even though they are contributing to the collapse of society, and put people and the planet in danger, just so, God forbid, we don't have to question anyone.
BG: Indeed. Utterly shameful. We are talking about at least 2,000 years of white patriarchy however – fully resourced by seemingly unlimited wealth and power – and which is, sadly, as embedded into our society and collective psyche as the foundations of Hadrian's Wall are embedded into the earth.
I believe it is going to take at least another 200 years of round-the-clock vigilance, education, activism and sacrifice for a truly permanent attitudinal change to be accepted on a national scale.
However, isn't this one of the reasons why we choose to be here right now in 2024: to continue to help bring about progressive and positive change in others in some small but significant way?
And with this in mind, I suppose we should continue and explore how propaganda and persuasion techniques are currently being employed online.
GK: The dominant social media platforms have concentrated ownership and form a very concentrated market. So, while on television and in the printed press the advertisers can target specific audiences, on social media multiple audiences can be targeted at once and this can be done artificially through bots which not only create automated posts, shares, likes and such but can be used as a tool to target and harass journalists and activists to flood them with hate and threads from artificially created accounts.
BG: And, of course, the reaction of the billionaire owners of these platforms is to simply hide away in their high-security ivory towers and count their money. As a consequence, where does that leave the rest of us?
GK: Facebook and Google algorithms are kept as a corporate secret so the owners control them and determine new sources for the general public. So the algorithms selected, exposure and audience fragmentation, they all create a hotbed for radicalisation, deep fake videos, voice cloning, generative text and other artificial intelligence generated content are becoming more and more convincing, and they have been widely used to spread disinformation during the US presidential elections, the Kremlin's attempts to discredit European governments, bots and fake accounts have been widely reported to be used by Russia to create counter-narratives around the war in Ukraine. It's also suspected that the Chinese government used fake news stories in a barrage jamming technique to overwhelm certain hashtags and make the readers see images of cotton fields as opposed to the tweet about the forced labour camps.
One of the people we interviewed for the book shared her horrific experiences when following her public actions trolls created a fake ‘Only Fans’ account where they had her face superimposed and which was shared to her family, and those trolls used and altered photographs of her mother who had passed away to harass this person even further.
BG: It's like a war, an ideological, hyperreal war. Such a daily and nightly barrage of abuse must take its toll on activists and protesters on a personal level?
GK: We gathered from the people we interviewed for the book that a lot of people come to social activism not really knowing what to expect or rather not understanding how hard-hitting and life-changing this choice can be. First of all it's a huge and steep learning curve. An individual may think they might know enough and that they stand firmly on the ground, however joining a movement seems to open a floodgate of information or truth that one was not prepared for. Ultimately, it can create a sense of burden and loss and foster a sense of duty to create a change, and it will likely impact personal life choices going further as well which can have a negative impact on existing relationships, family ties, even professional life. Ultimately, it is likely to have a very significant impact on a person's mental health.
BG: Of course, naturally.
GK: Then again there are other significant aspects. The question of finding one's identity and purpose within a movement; finally seeing that a change can be achieved and advocated for through collective action; network-building, finding like-minded people. So, there is a lot to consider, there is a lot of potential for life-changing happenings. Social movements also need to support activists more. Whether that support will be on a movement by movement basis, or it adopts the lines of something like the Green and Black Cross Group where an independent body of volunteer counsellors are established to support movements.
This is something both Ian and I want to interrogate further. The mediated manipulation of activism and activists has raised profound mental health and well-being issues for social movements, and to neglect working on those can cause high risk to individuals and to the work of the movements for social justice.
BG: Due to the absolute derelict state the UK is in at the moment I'm certain there are many, many conscientious readers and listeners out there who have seriously considered political activism of some sort but then again, on a personal level, is it worth the risk?
GK: There is always a risk but there are a couple of important things to bear in mind. Engaged democratic mobilisation for change that operates through a perspective of care and conviviality is much stronger on the left than it is on the right politically. It is opposed to the neoliberalist stance that promotes the destruction of the social through increased focus on the individual. We mentioned well-being and personal transformations that individuals undergo when they get involved in activism, and that's not to scare or put anyone off, it's to highlight how all-encompassing such transformations can be. And I think it's important for the movements to remember that they are creating lasting networks where peer support and education must be and it must remain one of the priorities and, hopefully, external players being aware of what activism entails. The various aspects and sometimes risks, they can also contribute to the societal change by offering their support and promoting and facilitating the culture of collaboration between different networks and groups.
The political right is far less about conviviality and much more about the spectacle and Donald Trump is an example of this above all others. Late capitalist democracy is very skilled at appropriating the tools of activism and converting them into commodified commercial opportunities, but activism isn't static either. What this means is that as activists we must always be adapting growing and evolving. By assuming the approach we are now adopting that will affect change we will essentially be walking those techniques into the hands of those we are opposing, so only by being agile and creative we can keep ahead.
BG: Many thanks for your time, insights and patience, Giedre.
‘Protests and the Media: A Critical Event Studies Exploration into the Future of Protest’ is available now via the Routledge website.
I've been Brett Gregory, Associate Editor for the UK arts, culture and politics website, Culture Matters.
Cheers.
Interview: Julian Assange: The Final Appeal
January 2024
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Matthew Alford, Lecturer in Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath (UK).
January 2024
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Matthew Alford, Lecturer in Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath (UK).
Interview Start: 40 minutes 57 seconds
Interview Transcript
BG: Hi, this is the UK Desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory. Antonio Gramsci, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Bertrand Russell, Benazir Bhutto … Just a handful of 20th century citizens who were incarcerated by their respective governments because they dug deep, took a stand and said, ‘No!’ No to injustice, no to fascism, and no to war. This evening I'm joined by Dr. Matthew Alford from the University of Bath in the UK who is here to discuss one of the most important political prisoners of the 21st century. Matt, please tell us more.
MA: Julian Assange is 52 years old. He's Australian, he studied maths and computing and then founded WikiLeaks in 2006. I'd say perhaps the most neutral term for Julian Assange's profession is ‘publisher’. Personally, I prefer to call him a ‘freedom fighter’.
BG: WikiLeaks is a term which is often bandied about by the mainstream media, but how did it actually work?
MA: WikiLeaks was important because it had a specially designed dropbox that allowed whistleblowers to post secret documents without anyone, including WikiLeaks itself, knowing their actual identity. This was designed in order for everyone to be kept safe from prosecution. It was a brilliant invention.
BG: And why is whistleblowing so important?
MA: Whistleblowing is part of democratising any organisation, and it's really, really important, especially for organisations that are as secret as the CIA and NSA.
BG: So, what kind of information did Julian Assange release by way of WikiLeaks?
MA: Julian Assange's revelations implicate powerful government and corporate villains worldwide in things like illegal surveillance and false-flag military attacks. And the charges that are against him are for much of his best and his most famous work, including footage of the US Army when they slowly and deliberately killed 12 innocent people, including several journalists, from the safety of a helicopter gunship. He was instrumental in putting that video out online, to hold the American military to account.
BG: And I'm assuming the consequences for him were extremely dire?
MA: Julian Assange was charged under the US Espionage Act of 1917 back in 2010. He's accused of working with army private, Chelsea Manning, to obtain and disclose classified information.
BG: Tell us a little more about Chelsea Manning, another name which the mainstream media has conveniently forgotten.
MA: Chelsea Manning leaked a lot of material when she was a private in the army, and she did this for moral reasons. She was imprisoned for several years herself. Eventually she was released following a plea bargain with Barack Obama. Chelsea Manning is a real hero for what she did. Personally, I'm unclear on why she has been so silent about Julian Assange's case for quite some time. It might be that she's had to sign some kind of gagging order, I don't know. That would just be speculation on my part.
BG: The plot thickens ...
MA: There's been a huge clampdown on these sorts of leaks from the Obama presidency onwards. One study found that almost all non-government representatives thought that the Espionage Act had been used ‘inappropriately in leak cases that have a public interest component.’ One journalist says that it's almost impossible to mount a defence against charges under the Espionage Act because defendants are not allowed to use the term ‘whistleblower’; they're not allowed to mention the First Amendment, and they're not allowed to explain the reasons for their actions. The US government wants to get Julian Assange using the Espionage Act, but this would be the first time in over a hundred years that that legislation has been used against a publisher.
BG: WikiLeaks is a term which is often bandied about by the mainstream media, but how did it actually work?
MA: WikiLeaks was important because it had a specially designed dropbox that allowed whistleblowers to post secret documents without anyone, including WikiLeaks itself, knowing their actual identity. This was designed in order for everyone to be kept safe from prosecution. It was a brilliant invention.
BG: And why is whistleblowing so important?
MA: Whistleblowing is part of democratising any organisation, and it's really, really important, especially for organisations that are as secret as the CIA and NSA.
BG: So, what kind of information did Julian Assange release by way of WikiLeaks?
MA: Julian Assange's revelations implicate powerful government and corporate villains worldwide in things like illegal surveillance and false-flag military attacks. And the charges that are against him are for much of his best and his most famous work, including footage of the US Army when they slowly and deliberately killed 12 innocent people, including several journalists, from the safety of a helicopter gunship. He was instrumental in putting that video out online, to hold the American military to account.
BG: And I'm assuming the consequences for him were extremely dire?
MA: Julian Assange was charged under the US Espionage Act of 1917 back in 2010. He's accused of working with army private, Chelsea Manning, to obtain and disclose classified information.
BG: Tell us a little more about Chelsea Manning, another name which the mainstream media has conveniently forgotten.
MA: Chelsea Manning leaked a lot of material when she was a private in the army, and she did this for moral reasons. She was imprisoned for several years herself. Eventually she was released following a plea bargain with Barack Obama. Chelsea Manning is a real hero for what she did. Personally, I'm unclear on why she has been so silent about Julian Assange's case for quite some time. It might be that she's had to sign some kind of gagging order, I don't know. That would just be speculation on my part.
BG: The plot thickens ...
MA: There's been a huge clampdown on these sorts of leaks from the Obama presidency onwards. One study found that almost all non-government representatives thought that the Espionage Act had been used ‘inappropriately in leak cases that have a public interest component.’ One journalist says that it's almost impossible to mount a defence against charges under the Espionage Act because defendants are not allowed to use the term ‘whistleblower’; they're not allowed to mention the First Amendment, and they're not allowed to explain the reasons for their actions. The US government wants to get Julian Assange using the Espionage Act, but this would be the first time in over a hundred years that that legislation has been used against a publisher.
BG: A lurid labyrinth of bestial bureaucracy. But Assange managed to escape, didn't he, for a while at least?
MA: In 2012, Julian Assange hid in an embassy in London, and he stayed there for the next seven years. He was forcibly removed in 2019 and, ever since, he's been in Britain's top security prison, Belmarsh. All of Julian Assange's exercise is indoors; he has not seen the sun for five years, and his feet haven't touched free soil in nearly 12 years. Library books, where he currently resides, are deemed a fire hazard. Julian Assange married his brilliant lawyer, Stella, in 2022 while in prison. For their wedding they were not allowed to use the chapel, and his children weren't even allowed to give him a daisy chain that they had made: it was deemed a security risk. The food available in Belmarsh consists of, quote, ‘porridge for breakfast, thin soup for lunch, and not much else for dinner,’ according to his latest visitor.
Julian has been in Belmarsh longer than any other prisoner, apart from one old man. He's actually lost his freedom for longer than Solzhenitsyn did when he was sent to the Soviet gulag. Julian Assange does currently have a radio, but this is only because one of his prominent friends pointed out to the prison warden that even Hezbollah allows their hostages access to radios. The authorities, even up to the top judicial level, formally accept that Julian Assange is a suicide risk. They don't seem to care; in fact, if anything, they seem to be encouraging it. I find it quite heartbreaking that the last photograph of Julian Assange is of him in court while he happens to be having a mini-stroke.
BG: That's a horrific and inhuman timeline, and in the 'Land of Hope and Glory' as well. In 2022 the then UK Home Secretary Priti Patel of the right-wing Conservative Party approved the extradition of Assange to the US in order to face the country's judiciary and penal system. From your descriptions though, can this really be worse than Belmarsh prison? Isn't the United States the land of the free and the home of the brave? Hasn't Julian Assange been brave?
MA: There are all sorts of ways to make his life worse in prison, to make anyone's life worse in prison, and those could well occur if he is deported, if he is extradited to the United States. So, for example, Julian Assange is currently isolated in his cell for 23 hours a day, which is really, really bad. But if he goes to a supermax facility in the United States, it could be even worse.
For example, it's likely that the CIA would prevent him from handling paper. I mean, it's possible; it does happen to several dozen other prisoners who are there on national security grounds. You know, just be shown a letter through a glass screen. In fact, the British prison Belmarsh already did this once a couple of years ago. In the depths of winter, they said, ‘Okay, fill in this form so that you can acquire your clothes,’ but, due to coronavirus regulations, he was not actually permitted to touch the pen and paper to put in that application. So, there are all sorts of grotesque, perverse things that can be done to a human being when they are incarcerated, and that situation could easily get a lot worse for Julian Assange if he goes to the United States, where the prison system is, I think, widely accepted to be more brutal than even the British cases.
BG: Aren't political cases like this explicitly banned under the UK-US Extradition Treaty? Is international law being tampered with here?
MA: Yeah, I mean, the extradition treaty does explicitly ban extradition for political reasons, except for in cases that involve things like murder. But, you know, law can always be stretched, it could be repurposed for political reasons, and when it comes down to it, the national security state in the United States and in the UK despise Julian Assange. It's almost kind of personal. They're prepared to break all laws, they're prepared to break all conventions just to mess him up. I think standard borders, things like sovereign jurisdiction, Australia's rights, Ecuador's rights, don't matter a jot to organisations like the CIA.
BG: What about freedom of speech? What about our right to know how our societies are being governed?
MA: I mean, it's always been standard practice for journalists to receive secret information, and they can use that secret information to hold powerful organisations, particularly the government, to account. If the government is allowed to repurpose current laws to prosecute a publisher, that means that in the future, they'll have set a precedent; they'll be able to do whatever they want in the name of ‘national security’. And it would take a phenomenally brave whistleblower or publisher right now to follow in Julian's footsteps, having seen the price that he's paid.
BG: That's genuinely chilling; it's like we're discussing the Gestapo or the Stasi police or something. Anyway, so from a personal perspective, what does Julian Assange mean to you, Matt?
MA: Julian Assange is a symbol, a symbol of freedom, and a symbol of resistance. But he is also a human being in his own right. Even from this British prison where he currently languishes – Belmarsh in London – he's still sending out regularly, whenever he can, messages of love and hope. I like this quote from him: ‘If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.’
BG: Exactly. We need to keep the faith. So what action can people take? What can they do so they don't feel, you know, useless?
MA: For more information, I'd suggest going to the website stellaassange.com. That's the best place to be active, to support, and to coordinate both online and on the streets. You can also contact me on Facebook if you like: Matt Alford: War, Laughs, and Lies. If you want some more specifics, I'll be doing a running commentary about Julian Assange and other international political events.
I'd just like to add, and this comes from Stella Assange's website: ‘Saving Julian Assange is about saving ourselves. What happens to him cannot be undone. It would be the end of our right to know and the end of our democracies.’ So please gather outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, and in cities around the world, on the 20th to the 21st of February at 8:30 am and demand Julian's freedom.
BG: That's the Royal Courts of Justice in London on February 20th to the 21st from 8:30 am. This has been a very sobering yet very urgent interview, Matt. Many thanks for your time.
BG: Hi, this is the UK Desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory. Antonio Gramsci, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Bertrand Russell, Benazir Bhutto … Just a handful of 20th century citizens who were incarcerated by their respective governments because they dug deep, took a stand and said, ‘No!’ No to injustice, no to fascism, and no to war. This evening I'm joined by Dr. Matthew Alford from the University of Bath in the UK who is here to discuss one of the most important political prisoners of the 21st century. Matt, please tell us more.
MA: Julian Assange is 52 years old. He's Australian, he studied maths and computing and then founded WikiLeaks in 2006. I'd say perhaps the most neutral term for Julian Assange's profession is ‘publisher’. Personally, I prefer to call him a ‘freedom fighter’.
BG: WikiLeaks is a term which is often bandied about by the mainstream media, but how did it actually work?
MA: WikiLeaks was important because it had a specially designed dropbox that allowed whistleblowers to post secret documents without anyone, including WikiLeaks itself, knowing their actual identity. This was designed in order for everyone to be kept safe from prosecution. It was a brilliant invention.
BG: And why is whistleblowing so important?
MA: Whistleblowing is part of democratising any organisation, and it's really, really important, especially for organisations that are as secret as the CIA and NSA.
BG: So, what kind of information did Julian Assange release by way of WikiLeaks?
MA: Julian Assange's revelations implicate powerful government and corporate villains worldwide in things like illegal surveillance and false-flag military attacks. And the charges that are against him are for much of his best and his most famous work, including footage of the US Army when they slowly and deliberately killed 12 innocent people, including several journalists, from the safety of a helicopter gunship. He was instrumental in putting that video out online, to hold the American military to account.
BG: And I'm assuming the consequences for him were extremely dire?
MA: Julian Assange was charged under the US Espionage Act of 1917 back in 2010. He's accused of working with army private, Chelsea Manning, to obtain and disclose classified information.
BG: Tell us a little more about Chelsea Manning, another name which the mainstream media has conveniently forgotten.
MA: Chelsea Manning leaked a lot of material when she was a private in the army, and she did this for moral reasons. She was imprisoned for several years herself. Eventually she was released following a plea bargain with Barack Obama. Chelsea Manning is a real hero for what she did. Personally, I'm unclear on why she has been so silent about Julian Assange's case for quite some time. It might be that she's had to sign some kind of gagging order, I don't know. That would just be speculation on my part.
BG: The plot thickens ...
MA: There's been a huge clampdown on these sorts of leaks from the Obama presidency onwards. One study found that almost all non-government representatives thought that the Espionage Act had been used ‘inappropriately in leak cases that have a public interest component.’ One journalist says that it's almost impossible to mount a defence against charges under the Espionage Act because defendants are not allowed to use the term ‘whistleblower’; they're not allowed to mention the First Amendment, and they're not allowed to explain the reasons for their actions. The US government wants to get Julian Assange using the Espionage Act, but this would be the first time in over a hundred years that that legislation has been used against a publisher.
BG: WikiLeaks is a term which is often bandied about by the mainstream media, but how did it actually work?
MA: WikiLeaks was important because it had a specially designed dropbox that allowed whistleblowers to post secret documents without anyone, including WikiLeaks itself, knowing their actual identity. This was designed in order for everyone to be kept safe from prosecution. It was a brilliant invention.
BG: And why is whistleblowing so important?
MA: Whistleblowing is part of democratising any organisation, and it's really, really important, especially for organisations that are as secret as the CIA and NSA.
BG: So, what kind of information did Julian Assange release by way of WikiLeaks?
MA: Julian Assange's revelations implicate powerful government and corporate villains worldwide in things like illegal surveillance and false-flag military attacks. And the charges that are against him are for much of his best and his most famous work, including footage of the US Army when they slowly and deliberately killed 12 innocent people, including several journalists, from the safety of a helicopter gunship. He was instrumental in putting that video out online, to hold the American military to account.
BG: And I'm assuming the consequences for him were extremely dire?
MA: Julian Assange was charged under the US Espionage Act of 1917 back in 2010. He's accused of working with army private, Chelsea Manning, to obtain and disclose classified information.
BG: Tell us a little more about Chelsea Manning, another name which the mainstream media has conveniently forgotten.
MA: Chelsea Manning leaked a lot of material when she was a private in the army, and she did this for moral reasons. She was imprisoned for several years herself. Eventually she was released following a plea bargain with Barack Obama. Chelsea Manning is a real hero for what she did. Personally, I'm unclear on why she has been so silent about Julian Assange's case for quite some time. It might be that she's had to sign some kind of gagging order, I don't know. That would just be speculation on my part.
BG: The plot thickens ...
MA: There's been a huge clampdown on these sorts of leaks from the Obama presidency onwards. One study found that almost all non-government representatives thought that the Espionage Act had been used ‘inappropriately in leak cases that have a public interest component.’ One journalist says that it's almost impossible to mount a defence against charges under the Espionage Act because defendants are not allowed to use the term ‘whistleblower’; they're not allowed to mention the First Amendment, and they're not allowed to explain the reasons for their actions. The US government wants to get Julian Assange using the Espionage Act, but this would be the first time in over a hundred years that that legislation has been used against a publisher.
BG: A lurid labyrinth of bestial bureaucracy. But Assange managed to escape, didn't he, for a while at least?
MA: In 2012, Julian Assange hid in an embassy in London, and he stayed there for the next seven years. He was forcibly removed in 2019 and, ever since, he's been in Britain's top security prison, Belmarsh. All of Julian Assange's exercise is indoors; he has not seen the sun for five years, and his feet haven't touched free soil in nearly 12 years. Library books, where he currently resides, are deemed a fire hazard. Julian Assange married his brilliant lawyer, Stella, in 2022 while in prison. For their wedding they were not allowed to use the chapel, and his children weren't even allowed to give him a daisy chain that they had made: it was deemed a security risk. The food available in Belmarsh consists of, quote, ‘porridge for breakfast, thin soup for lunch, and not much else for dinner,’ according to his latest visitor.
Julian has been in Belmarsh longer than any other prisoner, apart from one old man. He's actually lost his freedom for longer than Solzhenitsyn did when he was sent to the Soviet gulag. Julian Assange does currently have a radio, but this is only because one of his prominent friends pointed out to the prison warden that even Hezbollah allows their hostages access to radios. The authorities, even up to the top judicial level, formally accept that Julian Assange is a suicide risk. They don't seem to care; in fact, if anything, they seem to be encouraging it. I find it quite heartbreaking that the last photograph of Julian Assange is of him in court while he happens to be having a mini-stroke.
BG: That's a horrific and inhuman timeline, and in the 'Land of Hope and Glory' as well. In 2022 the then UK Home Secretary Priti Patel of the right-wing Conservative Party approved the extradition of Assange to the US in order to face the country's judiciary and penal system. From your descriptions though, can this really be worse than Belmarsh prison? Isn't the United States the land of the free and the home of the brave? Hasn't Julian Assange been brave?
MA: There are all sorts of ways to make his life worse in prison, to make anyone's life worse in prison, and those could well occur if he is deported, if he is extradited to the United States. So, for example, Julian Assange is currently isolated in his cell for 23 hours a day, which is really, really bad. But if he goes to a supermax facility in the United States, it could be even worse.
For example, it's likely that the CIA would prevent him from handling paper. I mean, it's possible; it does happen to several dozen other prisoners who are there on national security grounds. You know, just be shown a letter through a glass screen. In fact, the British prison Belmarsh already did this once a couple of years ago. In the depths of winter, they said, ‘Okay, fill in this form so that you can acquire your clothes,’ but, due to coronavirus regulations, he was not actually permitted to touch the pen and paper to put in that application. So, there are all sorts of grotesque, perverse things that can be done to a human being when they are incarcerated, and that situation could easily get a lot worse for Julian Assange if he goes to the United States, where the prison system is, I think, widely accepted to be more brutal than even the British cases.
BG: Aren't political cases like this explicitly banned under the UK-US Extradition Treaty? Is international law being tampered with here?
MA: Yeah, I mean, the extradition treaty does explicitly ban extradition for political reasons, except for in cases that involve things like murder. But, you know, law can always be stretched, it could be repurposed for political reasons, and when it comes down to it, the national security state in the United States and in the UK despise Julian Assange. It's almost kind of personal. They're prepared to break all laws, they're prepared to break all conventions just to mess him up. I think standard borders, things like sovereign jurisdiction, Australia's rights, Ecuador's rights, don't matter a jot to organisations like the CIA.
BG: What about freedom of speech? What about our right to know how our societies are being governed?
MA: I mean, it's always been standard practice for journalists to receive secret information, and they can use that secret information to hold powerful organisations, particularly the government, to account. If the government is allowed to repurpose current laws to prosecute a publisher, that means that in the future, they'll have set a precedent; they'll be able to do whatever they want in the name of ‘national security’. And it would take a phenomenally brave whistleblower or publisher right now to follow in Julian's footsteps, having seen the price that he's paid.
BG: That's genuinely chilling; it's like we're discussing the Gestapo or the Stasi police or something. Anyway, so from a personal perspective, what does Julian Assange mean to you, Matt?
MA: Julian Assange is a symbol, a symbol of freedom, and a symbol of resistance. But he is also a human being in his own right. Even from this British prison where he currently languishes – Belmarsh in London – he's still sending out regularly, whenever he can, messages of love and hope. I like this quote from him: ‘If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.’
BG: Exactly. We need to keep the faith. So what action can people take? What can they do so they don't feel, you know, useless?
MA: For more information, I'd suggest going to the website stellaassange.com. That's the best place to be active, to support, and to coordinate both online and on the streets. You can also contact me on Facebook if you like: Matt Alford: War, Laughs, and Lies. If you want some more specifics, I'll be doing a running commentary about Julian Assange and other international political events.
I'd just like to add, and this comes from Stella Assange's website: ‘Saving Julian Assange is about saving ourselves. What happens to him cannot be undone. It would be the end of our right to know and the end of our democracies.’ So please gather outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, and in cities around the world, on the 20th to the 21st of February at 8:30 am and demand Julian's freedom.
BG: That's the Royal Courts of Justice in London on February 20th to the 21st from 8:30 am. This has been a very sobering yet very urgent interview, Matt. Many thanks for your time.
Interview: Theaters of War
December 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Matthew Alford, Lecturer in Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath (UK).
December 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Matthew Alford, Lecturer in Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath (UK).
Review Start: 39 minutes 16 seconds
Interview Transcript
BG: Hi, this is the UK Desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory. The French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser, outlines for us how our values, desires, attitudes and tastes are shaped by wider capitalist-consumer society and culture on a daily basis. He calls this network of influence the ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ and it includes the ‘soft power’ of, for instance, the media, education, religion and the family.
In turn, Althusser also identifies how this societal framework of influence is enforced by the ‘Repressive State Apparatus’. That is to say, the ‘hard power’ of, for example, the military, the police, the judiciary and the prison system.
On this evening's show we're going to be discussing a 2022 independent documentary called ‘Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and the CIA took Hollywood’, an incendiary exposé which reveals how Althusser’s ideas have been combined to produce propagandist entertainment products like Paramount Pictures ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, Amazon Prime's ‘Jack Ryan’ series and Activision's ‘Call of Duty’. But first let's listen to the trailer.
MA: Hi, Brett, my name is Matt Alford. I teach at the University of Bath in the UK and I specialise in the politicisation of media, especially film, and particularly as it relates to British and American foreign policies.
BG: Nice one, Matt. So please tell us, as ordinary citizens and consumers, what are we up against?
MA: The United States Department of Defense has got a budget of $800 billion. It's an obscene amount of money to waste and, you know, there have been all these stories for decades about, you know, the Pentagon spending $640 on a toilet seat and a $1,000 on nacho cheese warmer and things like that. It's a hugely wasteful organisation. It’s not that it's just wasteful and splurging money around but actually that it really quite actively and desperately needs to spend a lot of money on PR, and that's not just to attract personnel but, I think, that it needs to con the whole world and the American public of course, most importantly, into thinking that the American national security state is a force for global stability and it isn't, it just isn't; it hardly ever is. The United States is very commonly a destabilising force in many conflicts.
BG: And what would motivate a powerful governmental entity like the Department of Defense to carry out such a sustained PR assault on us? Haven't they got actual wars to fight and real spies to catch?
MA: I think this need for PR was perhaps most clear in the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed, and the whole National Security State started pouring money into PR because at that point there was even less rationale for these heavily state-subsidised taxpayer systems of domination to exist because there was no enemy. It seems a little bit different now because we're in a multipolar world and have been since 2012, maybe 2017, but in the 1990s there was a real opportunity to have developed and forged peaceful alternatives. I mean, there still is but it was extremely clear at that point and I always think it's such a great tragedy and it's, you know, looking at international relations over the past thirty years has just been like watching a slow motion car crash.
BG: And what motivated you personally to pursue this research topic, to co-author your 2017 book ‘National Security Cinema’ with Tom Secker and to co-produce Roger Stahl’s ‘Theaters of War’ documentary?
MA: About twenty years ago I began a lengthy private correspondence with Noam Chomsky, the world's most celebrated anarchist and philosopher, so it was really that experience which drove my research. But that said, there were definitely some politically distinct films around that time, right at the start of my research process.
So, for example, ‘Behind Enemy Lines’ which was set in Bosnia, ‘Munich’ which was about Israel-Palestine and ‘Hotel Rwanda’; and these were all received as moderate, uncontroversial mainstream movies. It was only really when I took a more forensic look at them that I could see that they were actually consistent with much more dubious government policies, and they actually had imperialist ideas quite subtly baked into them.
So, take an example like ‘Three Kings’, this anti-war comedy set in Iraq; it starred Mark Wahlberg, George Clooney, a really good movie. But as good as it was the underlying message of the film was that the United States had been morally inconsistent in the first Gulf War of 1991 and, by implication, this left open the idea that a full-scale American invasion or Allied invasion that advanced all the way to Baghdad would have been better than what they actually did in the real world. And so that meant that when the film's director met George W. Bush in 1999, way before 9/11, and he said to Bush, ‘Look, my film is going to challenge your father's legacy on Iraq’, a young George W. Bush was able to shoot back, ‘Well, I'm going to have to finish the job then aren't I?’
BG: Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 documentary ‘Triumph of the Will’ is often cited as fetishizing Nazism. Is Hollywood fetishizing US imperialism?
MA: In a hundred years’ time I doubt that cultural historians will be discussing ‘Triumph of the Will’ in the same breath as ‘Transformers 12’. I mean, the Nazis were systematically and deliberately glorifying a particular man, a totalitarian system, so I do think there is a bit of a difference there. To be fair though ‘Top Gun 2’ really does have stronger echoes of genuine fascism, I'd say.
In my country the two most well-known film journalists are Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo. Now they talked about ‘Top Gun 2’ and they loved it and, in fact, they scornfully dismissed any political concerns about it. They said ‘it's a fictional country in a fictional story and it doesn't matter. It's a cartoon, it exists in a cartoony world’ and then they put on these sort of silly voices to mock people like me who read the film politically. I think it's legitimate to enjoy a film on its own merits but I don't think it's good to ignore constantly the systematic application of military PR across thousands of film and TV products and also, I think, particularly in the case of ‘Top Gun 2’, I mean State involvement in that film was so in your face I think that it's kind of weird to ignore or dismiss it.
BG: Surely if the military are at it then so also are, for example, the police. I mean people love their crime dramas.
MA: Absolutely, Brett. Yeah, I completely agree. I think it's reasonable to include the FBI and major police forces like the LAPD and the NYPD in our definition of a security state. If we include the police, the numbers of productions supported by the security state does zip up a little bit and it takes us well past 10,000.
BG: Is it just movies and TV shows? What about video games which are played for hours on end by teenagers in the supposed safety and security of their bedrooms?
MA: Yeah, there are other entertainment products targeted and integrated into the national security state. There is reliable evidence to indicate that the US and UK militaries have supported ‘Doom’, for example. ‘America's Army’ was the most downloaded game for a long time in the early 2000s. ‘Rainbow 6’, ‘Homefront’, ‘Call of Duty’, ‘Medal of Honour’.
There was a game called ‘Mercenaries 2: World in Flames’ which requires the gamer to take part in an invasion of Venezuela because this Hugo Chavez socialist-type leader has used nuclear weapons on the Allies. Now the company that made that had previously developed training aids for the US Army, but claims it didn't cooperate with the Government on that particular product. You know, that kind of idea Venezuela nuking someone – even having nuclear weapons – it's just ridiculous and it's actually a plot device that was used in the Amazon Prime show ‘Jack Ryan’, that hugely popular series - it's insane threat inflation.
BG: But isn't it just entertainment? Aren't we all grown adults free to make up our own minds? Or does history tell us different?
MA: Entertainment can really exert a pivotal impact on society. There's a historian called John H. Franklin and he said that without ‘Birth of a Nation’ from 1915 – the explicitly racist movie – he said that without that film the Ku Klux Klan would not have been reborn. If we talk about the US military in particular, I'd say that if these systems weren't in place, I'd say that within a few years I think the US would probably lose all legitimacy and wouldn't be able to use its force overseas. Which is not far off really what happened for a few years in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War.
BG: Surely the US is not the only guilty nation? Surely the UK, for instance, also has its fat fingers stuck in such political pies?
MA: Well, I have looked at other national cinematic systems a little bit and in the UK the Ministry of Defence we now know has worked on hundreds of entertainment productions including films like ‘King’s Men’, ‘KickAss’, various James Bond movies and we are examining the British case now systematically, which is being led by a PhD researcher. What I'd say though is that while it is obviously a good idea to pick apart and generally oppose all propaganda, by any measure – and that's military size, film industry size, foreign policy ambitions, global cultural influence – the United States just dwarfs everybody.
BG: So how can concerned citizens and their families actually watch your documentary ‘Theaters of War’?
MA: Well, contact me on Facebook or on YouTube. I'm on Dr Matt Alford ‘War, Laughs and Lies’. That's if you've got any problems trying to acquire the film, and if you're a student you should be able to find it for free through your library on the system called Kanopy.
BG: Great stuff, Matt. Powerful subject matter. Let's hope people will now think twice about what they pay to entertain themselves.
MA: Thanks very much, Brett. Great talking to you.
BG: This has been the UK desk for Arts Express with Dr. Matthew Alford from the University of Bath, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers.
BG: Hi, this is the UK Desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory. The French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser, outlines for us how our values, desires, attitudes and tastes are shaped by wider capitalist-consumer society and culture on a daily basis. He calls this network of influence the ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ and it includes the ‘soft power’ of, for instance, the media, education, religion and the family.
In turn, Althusser also identifies how this societal framework of influence is enforced by the ‘Repressive State Apparatus’. That is to say, the ‘hard power’ of, for example, the military, the police, the judiciary and the prison system.
On this evening's show we're going to be discussing a 2022 independent documentary called ‘Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and the CIA took Hollywood’, an incendiary exposé which reveals how Althusser’s ideas have been combined to produce propagandist entertainment products like Paramount Pictures ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, Amazon Prime's ‘Jack Ryan’ series and Activision's ‘Call of Duty’. But first let's listen to the trailer.
MA: Hi, Brett, my name is Matt Alford. I teach at the University of Bath in the UK and I specialise in the politicisation of media, especially film, and particularly as it relates to British and American foreign policies.
BG: Nice one, Matt. So please tell us, as ordinary citizens and consumers, what are we up against?
MA: The United States Department of Defense has got a budget of $800 billion. It's an obscene amount of money to waste and, you know, there have been all these stories for decades about, you know, the Pentagon spending $640 on a toilet seat and a $1,000 on nacho cheese warmer and things like that. It's a hugely wasteful organisation. It’s not that it's just wasteful and splurging money around but actually that it really quite actively and desperately needs to spend a lot of money on PR, and that's not just to attract personnel but, I think, that it needs to con the whole world and the American public of course, most importantly, into thinking that the American national security state is a force for global stability and it isn't, it just isn't; it hardly ever is. The United States is very commonly a destabilising force in many conflicts.
BG: And what would motivate a powerful governmental entity like the Department of Defense to carry out such a sustained PR assault on us? Haven't they got actual wars to fight and real spies to catch?
MA: I think this need for PR was perhaps most clear in the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed, and the whole National Security State started pouring money into PR because at that point there was even less rationale for these heavily state-subsidised taxpayer systems of domination to exist because there was no enemy. It seems a little bit different now because we're in a multipolar world and have been since 2012, maybe 2017, but in the 1990s there was a real opportunity to have developed and forged peaceful alternatives. I mean, there still is but it was extremely clear at that point and I always think it's such a great tragedy and it's, you know, looking at international relations over the past thirty years has just been like watching a slow motion car crash.
BG: And what motivated you personally to pursue this research topic, to co-author your 2017 book ‘National Security Cinema’ with Tom Secker and to co-produce Roger Stahl’s ‘Theaters of War’ documentary?
MA: About twenty years ago I began a lengthy private correspondence with Noam Chomsky, the world's most celebrated anarchist and philosopher, so it was really that experience which drove my research. But that said, there were definitely some politically distinct films around that time, right at the start of my research process.
So, for example, ‘Behind Enemy Lines’ which was set in Bosnia, ‘Munich’ which was about Israel-Palestine and ‘Hotel Rwanda’; and these were all received as moderate, uncontroversial mainstream movies. It was only really when I took a more forensic look at them that I could see that they were actually consistent with much more dubious government policies, and they actually had imperialist ideas quite subtly baked into them.
So, take an example like ‘Three Kings’, this anti-war comedy set in Iraq; it starred Mark Wahlberg, George Clooney, a really good movie. But as good as it was the underlying message of the film was that the United States had been morally inconsistent in the first Gulf War of 1991 and, by implication, this left open the idea that a full-scale American invasion or Allied invasion that advanced all the way to Baghdad would have been better than what they actually did in the real world. And so that meant that when the film's director met George W. Bush in 1999, way before 9/11, and he said to Bush, ‘Look, my film is going to challenge your father's legacy on Iraq’, a young George W. Bush was able to shoot back, ‘Well, I'm going to have to finish the job then aren't I?’
BG: Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 documentary ‘Triumph of the Will’ is often cited as fetishizing Nazism. Is Hollywood fetishizing US imperialism?
MA: In a hundred years’ time I doubt that cultural historians will be discussing ‘Triumph of the Will’ in the same breath as ‘Transformers 12’. I mean, the Nazis were systematically and deliberately glorifying a particular man, a totalitarian system, so I do think there is a bit of a difference there. To be fair though ‘Top Gun 2’ really does have stronger echoes of genuine fascism, I'd say.
In my country the two most well-known film journalists are Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo. Now they talked about ‘Top Gun 2’ and they loved it and, in fact, they scornfully dismissed any political concerns about it. They said ‘it's a fictional country in a fictional story and it doesn't matter. It's a cartoon, it exists in a cartoony world’ and then they put on these sort of silly voices to mock people like me who read the film politically. I think it's legitimate to enjoy a film on its own merits but I don't think it's good to ignore constantly the systematic application of military PR across thousands of film and TV products and also, I think, particularly in the case of ‘Top Gun 2’, I mean State involvement in that film was so in your face I think that it's kind of weird to ignore or dismiss it.
BG: Surely if the military are at it then so also are, for example, the police. I mean people love their crime dramas.
MA: Absolutely, Brett. Yeah, I completely agree. I think it's reasonable to include the FBI and major police forces like the LAPD and the NYPD in our definition of a security state. If we include the police, the numbers of productions supported by the security state does zip up a little bit and it takes us well past 10,000.
BG: Is it just movies and TV shows? What about video games which are played for hours on end by teenagers in the supposed safety and security of their bedrooms?
MA: Yeah, there are other entertainment products targeted and integrated into the national security state. There is reliable evidence to indicate that the US and UK militaries have supported ‘Doom’, for example. ‘America's Army’ was the most downloaded game for a long time in the early 2000s. ‘Rainbow 6’, ‘Homefront’, ‘Call of Duty’, ‘Medal of Honour’.
There was a game called ‘Mercenaries 2: World in Flames’ which requires the gamer to take part in an invasion of Venezuela because this Hugo Chavez socialist-type leader has used nuclear weapons on the Allies. Now the company that made that had previously developed training aids for the US Army, but claims it didn't cooperate with the Government on that particular product. You know, that kind of idea Venezuela nuking someone – even having nuclear weapons – it's just ridiculous and it's actually a plot device that was used in the Amazon Prime show ‘Jack Ryan’, that hugely popular series - it's insane threat inflation.
BG: But isn't it just entertainment? Aren't we all grown adults free to make up our own minds? Or does history tell us different?
MA: Entertainment can really exert a pivotal impact on society. There's a historian called John H. Franklin and he said that without ‘Birth of a Nation’ from 1915 – the explicitly racist movie – he said that without that film the Ku Klux Klan would not have been reborn. If we talk about the US military in particular, I'd say that if these systems weren't in place, I'd say that within a few years I think the US would probably lose all legitimacy and wouldn't be able to use its force overseas. Which is not far off really what happened for a few years in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War.
BG: Surely the US is not the only guilty nation? Surely the UK, for instance, also has its fat fingers stuck in such political pies?
MA: Well, I have looked at other national cinematic systems a little bit and in the UK the Ministry of Defence we now know has worked on hundreds of entertainment productions including films like ‘King’s Men’, ‘KickAss’, various James Bond movies and we are examining the British case now systematically, which is being led by a PhD researcher. What I'd say though is that while it is obviously a good idea to pick apart and generally oppose all propaganda, by any measure – and that's military size, film industry size, foreign policy ambitions, global cultural influence – the United States just dwarfs everybody.
BG: So how can concerned citizens and their families actually watch your documentary ‘Theaters of War’?
MA: Well, contact me on Facebook or on YouTube. I'm on Dr Matt Alford ‘War, Laughs and Lies’. That's if you've got any problems trying to acquire the film, and if you're a student you should be able to find it for free through your library on the system called Kanopy.
BG: Great stuff, Matt. Powerful subject matter. Let's hope people will now think twice about what they pay to entertain themselves.
MA: Thanks very much, Brett. Great talking to you.
BG: This has been the UK desk for Arts Express with Dr. Matthew Alford from the University of Bath, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers.
Review Start: 23 minutes 32 seconds
Review Transcript
Cyril Leuthy composes his posthumous portrait of one of cinema’s great enigmas by entwining, with painstaking precision, original and archived interviews, film clips, newsreels, epistolary recitations and scripted voiceovers. The resulting narrative is totally and memorably Godard, running at 24 frames per second with a clear beginning, middle and end, in that order.
The narrator reminds us that the late Jean-Luc Godard produced over 140 feature films, documentaries and shorts in his lifetime as a part of his absolute quest for cinema, to capture its purity, its humanity, its incredulity, and that he sacrificed his psychological, emotional and spiritual wellbeing at the altar of the seventh art as a consequence.
As Godard himself comments ‘As a boy I was already in mourning for myself, my one and only companion’ and, later in life, ‘Does the fact that I make images instead of having children prevent me from being a human being?’
He was born into privilege in Paris in 1930, his father, Paul, was a doctor and his mother, Odile, worked for a bank. The family was ‘fairly intellectual’ but, as his father observes, Jean-Luc ‘always wanted to be apart. He wanted to follow his thought, only his thought’.
In 1946 he went to study at the Lycée Buffon in Paris and, through his family’s connections, mixed with members of the cultural elite. He failed his baccalaureate exam first time around in 1948, but then passed in 1949. He subsequently registered to study anthropology at the prestigious Sorbonne University but, unsurprisingly, never attended.
‘When I was at the Sorbonne,’ Godard explains in Leuthy’s film, ‘little by little I became interested in cinema. I discovered film clubs and the Cinémathèque Française, and I met guys like Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, Chabrol …’
By 1952 he was writing criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma, the famous French film journal which fathered the now infamous auteur theory. Here he praised the gloomy romanticism of North American directors such as Nicolas Ray and Howard Hawks as opposed to the formalistic artfulness of Orson Welles and William Wyler.
His mother then died in an accident in 1954 but his family didn’t wish for him to attend her funeral. As his sister, Veronique, explains, ‘Making films was not considered in the family line, where you study, you become this or that. But he was considered as a so-called artist …’
Godard’s creative response to such an opprobrious body blow was to knock the wind out of everybody else in sight with his debut feature film, ‘Breathless’, in 1960. A cool and casual iconoclastic collage of pop culture, jump cuts and discontinuity, the French New Wave film starred Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, and introduced the subject of Godard’s cinema as cinema itself and, naturally, cinema adored him in return.
‘Will Godard soon be more popular than the Pope,’ opined Francois Truffaut, his friend and fellow director, ‘that is to say just a little less than The Beatles?’
Fame and adoration were simply not enough for the impish Godard, however. ‘I have a taste for paradox and a spirit of contradiction,’ he wrote. ‘The new wave is criticised for only showing people in bed, so I’m going to show people who are in politics and don’t have time to go to bed.’
Thus he shot and released ‘The Little Soldier’, also in 1960. Starring his new wife and onscreen icon of the French New Wave, Anna Karina, the film explored the use of torture during the Algerian War of Independence and, consequently, it was banned in France until 1963.
Although his commercial successes continued with, for instance, ‘Contempt’, starring Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance, a large bright aperture had opened itself up within Godard and through it he could see that his immediate future lay not simply in the aesthetics of moviemaking, but also in its politics: that is to say, in Marxist critiques of the middle class, capitalism, consumerism and, following the invasion of Vietnam in 1965, North American cultural imperialism.
As the actor and historian, Christophe Bourseiller, recalls ‘[Godard] arrived one day with a crate of [Mao Zedong’s] ‘Little Red Book’ which he had picked up from the Chinese Embassy in Paris.’
David Faroult, author of ‘Godard: Inventions of Political Cinema’, continues that the director wished to document the political climate in contemporary France by focusing on the radical ‘Union of Communist, Marxist and Leninist Youth, a new pro-Maoist group very much influenced by the philosopher Louis Althusser.’
The resultant feature film, ‘The Chinese’, loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s novel, ‘Demons’, was released in 1967, wherein an isolated group of politicised students are portrayed as ‘[The Swiss Family Robinson] of Marxism-Leninism’ in Godard’s attempt to ‘confront vague ideas with clear images’ as one social class sets about overthrowing another.
The Chinese Embassy detested the film however, describing it as the work of ‘a reactionary moron’. In turn, they said if they had the power then they would forbid it from even being called ‘The Chinese’. Godard was disappointed of course, but he wasn’t dissuaded.
At the outset of the now legendary student protests and industrial strikes across de Gualle’s France in May 1968, Godard, Truffaut and others famously travelled to the Cannes Film Festival to demand the event be delayed ‘for the film industry to show solidarity … I’m talking about solidarity with the students and workers, and you’re talking to me about tracking shots and close-ups!’
From 1970 to 1971 Godard marched alongside the Dziga Vertov Group, a political filmmaking collective which, ironically, sought to erase the notion and influence of the auteur by way of Marxist content and Brechtian forms.
Godard was involved in a serious motorcycle accident in Paris in June 1971 however and spent a week in a coma. Leuthy’s narrator comments that, not only did this serve as a metaphor for the director’s political failings, but also for his rebirth: he met the famed multimedia artist, Anne-Marie Miéville, in 1973 and they were married in 1978.
The middle-aged director then entered into a period of exile and experimentation, building the Sonimage studio in his house in Grenoble where he explored and invented new filmic approaches with the latest videography equipment to ‘satisfy his fantasy of making movies all by himself.’
As Henri Langlois, one of the original founders of the Cinémathèque Française in 1936, aptly observes: ‘The last person who made cinema language evolve was Godard … With access to video technology, he would become the new Griffith of cinema.’
Of course, there is much more for audiences to uncover, experience and learn for themselves from Cyril Leuthy’s thoughtful and disciplined documentary about one of the key figures in the history of the moving image.
The documentary’s US premiere is at the non-profit Film Forum Cinema in New York on December 15th 2023, and this will be preceded by Jean-Luc Godard’s final film project, ‘Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars’.
In turn, while the digital release of ‘Godard Cinema’ across the US won’t be until February 2024, UK cinephiles can enjoy the documentary now on the BFI Player online. It is highly recommended.
This has been the UK Desk for Arts Express, and I’ve been Brett Gregory.
Cheers.
Cyril Leuthy composes his posthumous portrait of one of cinema’s great enigmas by entwining, with painstaking precision, original and archived interviews, film clips, newsreels, epistolary recitations and scripted voiceovers. The resulting narrative is totally and memorably Godard, running at 24 frames per second with a clear beginning, middle and end, in that order.
The narrator reminds us that the late Jean-Luc Godard produced over 140 feature films, documentaries and shorts in his lifetime as a part of his absolute quest for cinema, to capture its purity, its humanity, its incredulity, and that he sacrificed his psychological, emotional and spiritual wellbeing at the altar of the seventh art as a consequence.
As Godard himself comments ‘As a boy I was already in mourning for myself, my one and only companion’ and, later in life, ‘Does the fact that I make images instead of having children prevent me from being a human being?’
He was born into privilege in Paris in 1930, his father, Paul, was a doctor and his mother, Odile, worked for a bank. The family was ‘fairly intellectual’ but, as his father observes, Jean-Luc ‘always wanted to be apart. He wanted to follow his thought, only his thought’.
In 1946 he went to study at the Lycée Buffon in Paris and, through his family’s connections, mixed with members of the cultural elite. He failed his baccalaureate exam first time around in 1948, but then passed in 1949. He subsequently registered to study anthropology at the prestigious Sorbonne University but, unsurprisingly, never attended.
‘When I was at the Sorbonne,’ Godard explains in Leuthy’s film, ‘little by little I became interested in cinema. I discovered film clubs and the Cinémathèque Française, and I met guys like Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, Chabrol …’
By 1952 he was writing criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma, the famous French film journal which fathered the now infamous auteur theory. Here he praised the gloomy romanticism of North American directors such as Nicolas Ray and Howard Hawks as opposed to the formalistic artfulness of Orson Welles and William Wyler.
His mother then died in an accident in 1954 but his family didn’t wish for him to attend her funeral. As his sister, Veronique, explains, ‘Making films was not considered in the family line, where you study, you become this or that. But he was considered as a so-called artist …’
Godard’s creative response to such an opprobrious body blow was to knock the wind out of everybody else in sight with his debut feature film, ‘Breathless’, in 1960. A cool and casual iconoclastic collage of pop culture, jump cuts and discontinuity, the French New Wave film starred Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, and introduced the subject of Godard’s cinema as cinema itself and, naturally, cinema adored him in return.
‘Will Godard soon be more popular than the Pope,’ opined Francois Truffaut, his friend and fellow director, ‘that is to say just a little less than The Beatles?’
Fame and adoration were simply not enough for the impish Godard, however. ‘I have a taste for paradox and a spirit of contradiction,’ he wrote. ‘The new wave is criticised for only showing people in bed, so I’m going to show people who are in politics and don’t have time to go to bed.’
Thus he shot and released ‘The Little Soldier’, also in 1960. Starring his new wife and onscreen icon of the French New Wave, Anna Karina, the film explored the use of torture during the Algerian War of Independence and, consequently, it was banned in France until 1963.
Although his commercial successes continued with, for instance, ‘Contempt’, starring Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance, a large bright aperture had opened itself up within Godard and through it he could see that his immediate future lay not simply in the aesthetics of moviemaking, but also in its politics: that is to say, in Marxist critiques of the middle class, capitalism, consumerism and, following the invasion of Vietnam in 1965, North American cultural imperialism.
As the actor and historian, Christophe Bourseiller, recalls ‘[Godard] arrived one day with a crate of [Mao Zedong’s] ‘Little Red Book’ which he had picked up from the Chinese Embassy in Paris.’
David Faroult, author of ‘Godard: Inventions of Political Cinema’, continues that the director wished to document the political climate in contemporary France by focusing on the radical ‘Union of Communist, Marxist and Leninist Youth, a new pro-Maoist group very much influenced by the philosopher Louis Althusser.’
The resultant feature film, ‘The Chinese’, loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s novel, ‘Demons’, was released in 1967, wherein an isolated group of politicised students are portrayed as ‘[The Swiss Family Robinson] of Marxism-Leninism’ in Godard’s attempt to ‘confront vague ideas with clear images’ as one social class sets about overthrowing another.
The Chinese Embassy detested the film however, describing it as the work of ‘a reactionary moron’. In turn, they said if they had the power then they would forbid it from even being called ‘The Chinese’. Godard was disappointed of course, but he wasn’t dissuaded.
At the outset of the now legendary student protests and industrial strikes across de Gualle’s France in May 1968, Godard, Truffaut and others famously travelled to the Cannes Film Festival to demand the event be delayed ‘for the film industry to show solidarity … I’m talking about solidarity with the students and workers, and you’re talking to me about tracking shots and close-ups!’
From 1970 to 1971 Godard marched alongside the Dziga Vertov Group, a political filmmaking collective which, ironically, sought to erase the notion and influence of the auteur by way of Marxist content and Brechtian forms.
Godard was involved in a serious motorcycle accident in Paris in June 1971 however and spent a week in a coma. Leuthy’s narrator comments that, not only did this serve as a metaphor for the director’s political failings, but also for his rebirth: he met the famed multimedia artist, Anne-Marie Miéville, in 1973 and they were married in 1978.
The middle-aged director then entered into a period of exile and experimentation, building the Sonimage studio in his house in Grenoble where he explored and invented new filmic approaches with the latest videography equipment to ‘satisfy his fantasy of making movies all by himself.’
As Henri Langlois, one of the original founders of the Cinémathèque Française in 1936, aptly observes: ‘The last person who made cinema language evolve was Godard … With access to video technology, he would become the new Griffith of cinema.’
Of course, there is much more for audiences to uncover, experience and learn for themselves from Cyril Leuthy’s thoughtful and disciplined documentary about one of the key figures in the history of the moving image.
The documentary’s US premiere is at the non-profit Film Forum Cinema in New York on December 15th 2023, and this will be preceded by Jean-Luc Godard’s final film project, ‘Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars’.
In turn, while the digital release of ‘Godard Cinema’ across the US won’t be until February 2024, UK cinephiles can enjoy the documentary now on the BFI Player online. It is highly recommended.
This has been the UK Desk for Arts Express, and I’ve been Brett Gregory.
Cheers.
Interview: Movies So Bad They're Good
December 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and James MacDowell, Assistant Professor of Film (Film and Television Studies) at the University of Warwick (UK).
December 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and James MacDowell, Assistant Professor of Film (Film and Television Studies) at the University of Warwick (UK).
Interview Start: 42 minutes 30 seconds
Interview: Socialism, Scotland, Cinema and Song
December 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and David Archibald, Professor of Political Cinema (Theatre, Film & Television Studies) at the University of Glasgow (UK).
December 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and David Archibald, Professor of Political Cinema (Theatre, Film & Television Studies) at the University of Glasgow (UK).
Interview Start: 39 minutes 09 seconds
Interview Transcript
BG: Hi, this is the UK Desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory. Tonight's guest is an academic, an author, an activist, a filmmaker, and a singer from Glasgow in Scotland.
DA: Hey, my name’s David Archibald, and I teach film studies at the University of Glasgow.
BG: Great voice, David. Anyway, as well as teaching film, what are your wider research interests in the subject?
DA: I'm the editor of the Political Cinema series at Edinburgh University Press, so perhaps that may indicate something of my general research interests.
BG: And what other projects has this led onto, specifically?
DA: I recently completed a book on Ken Loach, which is published in the series. And just now I'm working on a project that attempts to link feminist activists in Cuba, Catalonia and Glasgow through collaborative no-budget filmmaking. And I'm also doing another research project that explores how a music band might be able to make history with a capital H.
BG: So what's your personal perspective on cinema as an art form?
DA: In common with the pioneers of Third Cinema, a radical film movement from what is generally now called the Global South, I take the view that cinema can be utilised as a generator of theory: that we can think and that we can learn through making.
BG: I like that, that's interesting. I reviewed your latest book, 'Tracking Loach,' for Arts Express earlier this year, as well as for the arts and politics website Culture Matters, which is based in the Northeast of the UK. Out of curiosity, what was your rationale behind the book's title?
DA: I called the book 'Tracking Loach' because I've been tracking the British filmmaker, Ken Loach, in different capacities for some decades, as an audience member for many, many years, but also as a journalist including writing articles for the great New York-based journal ‘Cineaste’, and as an academic with various chapters and articles.
When I heard that Loach was coming to Glasgow to film 'The Angels' Share' about 10 years ago, I was contacted and asked if I could look over his shoulder while he was making the film. And I proposed that I would write a book about his celebrated working practices. Thankfully, he said yes, so the book is an account of tracking Loach in many ways over many decades from a political perspective.
BG: What would you say is particularly significant about the films Ken Loach has directed in the first quarter of this century?
DA: What's noticeable about Loach's work is how the films are utilized to force the political discourse beyond the screen. And Loach's work – whether it be 'The Wind That Shakes the Barley' which deals with Britain's role in Ireland in the Irish Civil War, or 'I, Daniel Blake' about the conditions facing unemployed workers in Britain – what's noticeable is the significant way that they shift the discourse away from the one set by the British right-wing media.
BG: And how would you personally assess Ken Loach's impact on, for example, the field of cinema as a whole?
DA: Loach has been a socialist for his entire adult life. His contribution to radical cinema is unmatched in breadth alone on a global scale.
BG: Now, in this cold-hearted corporatized society of ours, what would you identify as a key practical value of independent artistic expression?
DA: I think that artworks help to set agendas for conversations to come into being. I've spent a long time attempting to foster and nurture alternative ways of talking and doing, being and making. There's a parallel perhaps in the invaluable work that alternative media, like your own radio station, do. They’re vital in creating a new set of possibilities for us. That's why I'm delighted to be here, speaking today.
BG: Yeah, it's all about digging deep, excavating the new, the unknown, the hidden, and sharing the wealth. So, Glasgow: a place that’s always brimmed with energy and ideas in the arts, culture and, particularly, grassroots politics. What does this tell us about the city's psyche, its outlook, and its history?
DA: Glasgow is a city haunted by a proletarian ghost. The city is well known for its industrial past and for a radical heritage which goes alongside it. The spirit of collectivism which developed when it was a major industrial centre continues to operate in much of the city's cultural scene. It’s manifest, for instance, through various ways that artists are open to working together. There is a collaborative ethos, and that's connected to the spirit of collectivism which was forged in the shipyards and factories. And I’m interested in exploring and have always been interested in this for a long time, exploring how to converse with that ghost and see what might transpire.
BG: But your passion for and your pursuit of these creative conversations, as you say, has taken you further afield beyond Glasgow, beyond Scotland even?
DA: I'm currently working with Núria Araüna Baró, an academic from the Public University of Tarragona, and with four groups of feminist activists in Havana and Glasgow, cities which are twinned, and Vilanova i la Geltrú in Catalonia, the city in which Núria resides and Matanzas in Cuba; these two cities are also twin. It's a project that tries to connect these activists through dialogical filmmaking, building trans-local connections. And we have an event at the Havana Film Festival in December next month, at which women from all the four cities will meet for the first time. It's a beautiful project, and I feel very lucky to be part of it. So although I create work that is deeply rooted in the city, always interesting to build international connections and alliances beyond them.
BG: Admirable stuff, man. Your students at Glasgow University are lucky to have you. Right, your band, The Tenementals. Tell us more.
DA: The Tenementals is a wild research project and a lot of fun. It attempts to recount the history of Glasgow in song and asks what might history look, sound and feel like if it was created by a group of musicians. It also asks not whether artworks or songs can be history but whether history with a capital H can be artworks or songs. It's wild because it refuses the strictures often imposed on conventional academic research and finds its own path within the artistic community. It runs to its own beat, untethered by authority or control. That's really the only way it can be alive. It has to do whatever it has to do, and the history that it constructs is a history of fragments. It's a radical history of a radical city told in a radical way.
BG: And your latest song – which we’ll be actually playing out with – has got a compelling radical history all of its own.
DA: Although we set out to record a history of Glasgow in song, we're certainly not parochial, far from it: our outlook is international. In January we played a support gig for striking workers and we wanted to do a cover. We were thinking through options, and I was speaking with a filmmaker and academic friend of mine, Holger Mohaupt. And we were talking about German songs popular during the Spanish Civil War. And he mentioned 'Die Moorsoldaten' or ‘Peat Bog Soldiers' in English. It was first performed 90 years ago this year, 1933, in a concentration camp for leftist political prisoners. And although it's been covered in English by a number of quite famous singers like Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, it's not particularly well known in Britain. We asked Holger's daughter, Lily, to sing it because I'd heard her very, very beautiful but delicate voice on some films that Holger had made previously. The first time I heard her singing in the recording studio or in the rehearsal studio, I knew instantly that we had to record it.
BG: And the release is a bit different?
DA: We've just brought out two versions, one in German and English with a new translation, and one the rarely performed six-verse German version. We hope to introduce an old song to new audiences in a new way. It's a song about opposition in the most difficult and darkest of times, and I think that that has resonance.
BG: Yeah, the darkest of times pretty much sums a lot of things up at the moment. What are your thoughts on the future? Do you see hope?
DA: You know, when I was a teenager, people often used to tell me that I'd grow out of the radical socialist ideas which I held. Socialists are often presented as dreamers and fantasists, but if we look at the catastrophe which capitalism has created in terms of global climate change, the true fantasists are surely those who would have you believe that it can be resolved under capitalism. It cannot. Socialism, for me at least, remains the hope of the future. And while some academics often talk very vaguely about living differently or about being differently or working in a post-capitalist world, I suppose we're not afraid to name our object of desire: a democratic socialism in which workers have control over their own lives, and where human beings live in harmony with the world, rather than ruthlessly exploiting it in the interests of the ruling class.
BG: That's very honest and rousing, David. The struggle often feels lonely for many, myself included, but thanks to you, not today. It's been brilliant having you on the show. I'm really happy to have finally met you.
DA: Thank you, Brett. It's been great to talk with you, and good luck with all your great work.
BG: Cheers, man. This has been the UK desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. And, as promised, here are The Tenementals with their latest single, the haunting and historical ‘Peat Bog Soldiers’ which is available now via Strength In Numbers Records on Bandcamp.
BG: Hi, this is the UK Desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory. Tonight's guest is an academic, an author, an activist, a filmmaker, and a singer from Glasgow in Scotland.
DA: Hey, my name’s David Archibald, and I teach film studies at the University of Glasgow.
BG: Great voice, David. Anyway, as well as teaching film, what are your wider research interests in the subject?
DA: I'm the editor of the Political Cinema series at Edinburgh University Press, so perhaps that may indicate something of my general research interests.
BG: And what other projects has this led onto, specifically?
DA: I recently completed a book on Ken Loach, which is published in the series. And just now I'm working on a project that attempts to link feminist activists in Cuba, Catalonia and Glasgow through collaborative no-budget filmmaking. And I'm also doing another research project that explores how a music band might be able to make history with a capital H.
BG: So what's your personal perspective on cinema as an art form?
DA: In common with the pioneers of Third Cinema, a radical film movement from what is generally now called the Global South, I take the view that cinema can be utilised as a generator of theory: that we can think and that we can learn through making.
BG: I like that, that's interesting. I reviewed your latest book, 'Tracking Loach,' for Arts Express earlier this year, as well as for the arts and politics website Culture Matters, which is based in the Northeast of the UK. Out of curiosity, what was your rationale behind the book's title?
DA: I called the book 'Tracking Loach' because I've been tracking the British filmmaker, Ken Loach, in different capacities for some decades, as an audience member for many, many years, but also as a journalist including writing articles for the great New York-based journal ‘Cineaste’, and as an academic with various chapters and articles.
When I heard that Loach was coming to Glasgow to film 'The Angels' Share' about 10 years ago, I was contacted and asked if I could look over his shoulder while he was making the film. And I proposed that I would write a book about his celebrated working practices. Thankfully, he said yes, so the book is an account of tracking Loach in many ways over many decades from a political perspective.
BG: What would you say is particularly significant about the films Ken Loach has directed in the first quarter of this century?
DA: What's noticeable about Loach's work is how the films are utilized to force the political discourse beyond the screen. And Loach's work – whether it be 'The Wind That Shakes the Barley' which deals with Britain's role in Ireland in the Irish Civil War, or 'I, Daniel Blake' about the conditions facing unemployed workers in Britain – what's noticeable is the significant way that they shift the discourse away from the one set by the British right-wing media.
BG: And how would you personally assess Ken Loach's impact on, for example, the field of cinema as a whole?
DA: Loach has been a socialist for his entire adult life. His contribution to radical cinema is unmatched in breadth alone on a global scale.
BG: Now, in this cold-hearted corporatized society of ours, what would you identify as a key practical value of independent artistic expression?
DA: I think that artworks help to set agendas for conversations to come into being. I've spent a long time attempting to foster and nurture alternative ways of talking and doing, being and making. There's a parallel perhaps in the invaluable work that alternative media, like your own radio station, do. They’re vital in creating a new set of possibilities for us. That's why I'm delighted to be here, speaking today.
BG: Yeah, it's all about digging deep, excavating the new, the unknown, the hidden, and sharing the wealth. So, Glasgow: a place that’s always brimmed with energy and ideas in the arts, culture and, particularly, grassroots politics. What does this tell us about the city's psyche, its outlook, and its history?
DA: Glasgow is a city haunted by a proletarian ghost. The city is well known for its industrial past and for a radical heritage which goes alongside it. The spirit of collectivism which developed when it was a major industrial centre continues to operate in much of the city's cultural scene. It’s manifest, for instance, through various ways that artists are open to working together. There is a collaborative ethos, and that's connected to the spirit of collectivism which was forged in the shipyards and factories. And I’m interested in exploring and have always been interested in this for a long time, exploring how to converse with that ghost and see what might transpire.
BG: But your passion for and your pursuit of these creative conversations, as you say, has taken you further afield beyond Glasgow, beyond Scotland even?
DA: I'm currently working with Núria Araüna Baró, an academic from the Public University of Tarragona, and with four groups of feminist activists in Havana and Glasgow, cities which are twinned, and Vilanova i la Geltrú in Catalonia, the city in which Núria resides and Matanzas in Cuba; these two cities are also twin. It's a project that tries to connect these activists through dialogical filmmaking, building trans-local connections. And we have an event at the Havana Film Festival in December next month, at which women from all the four cities will meet for the first time. It's a beautiful project, and I feel very lucky to be part of it. So although I create work that is deeply rooted in the city, always interesting to build international connections and alliances beyond them.
BG: Admirable stuff, man. Your students at Glasgow University are lucky to have you. Right, your band, The Tenementals. Tell us more.
DA: The Tenementals is a wild research project and a lot of fun. It attempts to recount the history of Glasgow in song and asks what might history look, sound and feel like if it was created by a group of musicians. It also asks not whether artworks or songs can be history but whether history with a capital H can be artworks or songs. It's wild because it refuses the strictures often imposed on conventional academic research and finds its own path within the artistic community. It runs to its own beat, untethered by authority or control. That's really the only way it can be alive. It has to do whatever it has to do, and the history that it constructs is a history of fragments. It's a radical history of a radical city told in a radical way.
BG: And your latest song – which we’ll be actually playing out with – has got a compelling radical history all of its own.
DA: Although we set out to record a history of Glasgow in song, we're certainly not parochial, far from it: our outlook is international. In January we played a support gig for striking workers and we wanted to do a cover. We were thinking through options, and I was speaking with a filmmaker and academic friend of mine, Holger Mohaupt. And we were talking about German songs popular during the Spanish Civil War. And he mentioned 'Die Moorsoldaten' or ‘Peat Bog Soldiers' in English. It was first performed 90 years ago this year, 1933, in a concentration camp for leftist political prisoners. And although it's been covered in English by a number of quite famous singers like Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, it's not particularly well known in Britain. We asked Holger's daughter, Lily, to sing it because I'd heard her very, very beautiful but delicate voice on some films that Holger had made previously. The first time I heard her singing in the recording studio or in the rehearsal studio, I knew instantly that we had to record it.
BG: And the release is a bit different?
DA: We've just brought out two versions, one in German and English with a new translation, and one the rarely performed six-verse German version. We hope to introduce an old song to new audiences in a new way. It's a song about opposition in the most difficult and darkest of times, and I think that that has resonance.
BG: Yeah, the darkest of times pretty much sums a lot of things up at the moment. What are your thoughts on the future? Do you see hope?
DA: You know, when I was a teenager, people often used to tell me that I'd grow out of the radical socialist ideas which I held. Socialists are often presented as dreamers and fantasists, but if we look at the catastrophe which capitalism has created in terms of global climate change, the true fantasists are surely those who would have you believe that it can be resolved under capitalism. It cannot. Socialism, for me at least, remains the hope of the future. And while some academics often talk very vaguely about living differently or about being differently or working in a post-capitalist world, I suppose we're not afraid to name our object of desire: a democratic socialism in which workers have control over their own lives, and where human beings live in harmony with the world, rather than ruthlessly exploiting it in the interests of the ruling class.
BG: That's very honest and rousing, David. The struggle often feels lonely for many, myself included, but thanks to you, not today. It's been brilliant having you on the show. I'm really happy to have finally met you.
DA: Thank you, Brett. It's been great to talk with you, and good luck with all your great work.
BG: Cheers, man. This has been the UK desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. And, as promised, here are The Tenementals with their latest single, the haunting and historical ‘Peat Bog Soldiers’ which is available now via Strength In Numbers Records on Bandcamp.
DOCUMENTARY REVIEW
Thomas von Steinaecker 'Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer' (Shout! Studios, 2023)
By Brett Gregory
November 2023
Thomas von Steinaecker 'Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer' (Shout! Studios, 2023)
By Brett Gregory
November 2023
Review Start: 41 minutes 52 seconds
Review Transcript
Hi, this is the UK Desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory.
Over the past sixty years Werner Herzog’s extensive and elaborate filmography has explored both the grand and garish extremes of human experience, astonishing audiences all over the world with his breath-taking insight, innovation and industriousness.
Suitably then, Thomas von Steinaecker’s latest documentary, ‘Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer’, is an intimate, informative and involving tribute to an auteur of the highest order, an individual who transcended his origins in the New German Cinema Movement in the 1960s to become the internationally recognised director, screenwriter, documentarian, author, actor and cultural icon that he is today.
Indeed, as Wim Wenders, the esteemed German director of such classics as The American Friend, Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, observes: ‘Herzog is a mythological character. A lonesome rider’.
Both his fictional and factual works frequently pursue protagonists who are driven by destiny, whatever the cost to themselves or to those around them, often along an uncertain or even irrational timeline, as well as almost always against a backdrop of Nature’s savage indifference.
His overarching narrative mission as a storyteller is not necessarily to reach a specific goal or resolution however; rather it is to witness and capture images along the way which human beings like you and me may never have encountered before. In turn, over the duration of a film or maybe even over the duration of a lifetime, these visions will eventually cohere with our perceptions, reflections and imaginations to form an unforgettable ecstasy of illumination.
The trail of conquistadors and tribal slaves snaking down a Peruvian mountainside at the beginning of Aguirre, Wrath of God from 1972; the 320 ton steamboat literally being dragged across dry land by way of primitive levers and pulleys during the production of Fitzcarraldo in 1981; the solitary penguin who is compelled to abandon its colony in Antarctica and wander 5000 miles to certain death in Encounters at the End of The Worldfrom 2007.
As the late US film critic, Roger Ebert, reminded us, Werner Herzog ‘has never created a single film that is compromised … or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular’.
While von Steinaecker’s documentary is peppered with A-list personalities such as Christian Bale, Nicole Kidman and Robert Pattinson proffering their praises, accompanied by various clips from previous documentaries such as Burden of Dreams from 1982 and My Best Fiend from 1999 to provide historical context, it is the up close and personal biographical contributions which make you lean forward. Original interviews with Herzog himself as well as with his brothers, Tilbert and Lucki, together with his former wife, Martje Grohmann, and his current wife, Lena, are fresh, genuine and quite thrilling cinephilic moments.
Abandoned by their father, we learn of the Bavarian village of Sachrang where Herzog and his brothers grew up in poverty during the 1950s and early 60s, their highly educated mother only able to afford a single loaf of bread between the four of them each week.
In turn, we follow them as they eventually move to find employment opportunities in the city of Munich and here, Tilbert tell us, Herzog first worked as a welder at a steel factory, investing his wages in producing short films such as Last Words and Precautions Against Fanatics.
Winning 10,000 German marks in a screenplay competition however was what truly set Herzog on his way since, in 1968, it provided him at the age of 25 with the financial means to write, direct and release his first feature, Signs of Life.
The film, shot by his long-standing cinematographer, Thomas Mauch, centres on three German soldiers who lose their minds on the Greek island of Kos during World War II. It caught the attention of the influential German film historian, Lotte Eisner, who, after informing her close friend, Fritz Lang, of its significance, introduced it to an array of prominent film critics in France. As a result, Signs of Life went on to win the Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize at the 18th Berlin International Film Festival.
Arguably, Werner Herzog’s subsequent fictional work enjoyed its vertex over the 1970s and 80s with a succession of five films which forced Hollywood, and the international cultural intelligentsia at large, to critically countenance previously unthinkable levels of moviemaking which were altogether historic, operatic, raw and real. Furthermore, such a death-defying approach to cinema’s mechanics and aesthetics was also illumined incredibly, as well as overshadowed deeply, by Herzog’s singular collaboration with the incendiary German film and theatre actor, Klaus Kinski.
The star of Aguirre, Wrath of God, Woyzeck, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde was diagnosed with an anti-social personality disorder in 1950, and he attempted suicide twice in 1955. It is of little surprise then that, during lengthy soul-sapping shoots in the punishing jungles of Peru, Ghana, Brazil and Columbia, Kinski would often explode with preternatural fury, physically destroying set designs, verbally abusing crew members, threatening their livelihoods while also promising, in the same breath, to murder his director.
As Thomas Mauch comments, Kinski, who died of a sudden heart attack in 1991 at the age of 65, ‘was only interested in himself. He only cared about creating as much turmoil as he could. He did that to make every gesture seem god-like.’
Herzog finally turned his back on Germany in 1996 and moved to Los Angeles. His brother, Lucki, who is also his producer, informs us that this was because not only were his sibling’s films no longer being funded but ‘he was done with the whole system, with all the bureaucracy behind it, with all the smug narrow-mindedness.’
Fortunately, taking flight in such a manner carried the filmmaker to a continent which coursed with creativity, collaboration and conviction and, as a result, his filmmaking career became revitalised as his work ethic and productivity increased at a staggering rate.
That is to say, over the last 27 years Werner Herzog has directed eight original feature films, including Rescue Dawn with Christian Bale and Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage; seventeen documentary features, such as Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams; an eight episode mini-series about Death Row; and, if this wasn’t enough, he has also acted in a number of high-profile feature films and television shows like Harmony Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy, Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher, The Simpsons and, more recently, The Mandalorian.
And, let us not forget, that he has magically found the time, energy, focus and finance to direct nineteen operas as well.
Ultimately, Werner Herzog is a polymathic phenomenon, a quasi-religious visionary borne out of the 20th century who sings and sweats cinema, literature, theatre and opera and who, at 81 years of age, is still showing no signs of stopping. Consequently, the only real criticism one can direct towards von Steinaecker’s superbly orchestrated documentary is that, with a running time of 90 minutes, it simply isn’t long enough.
This has been the UK Desk for Arts Express, and I’ve been Brett Gregory.
Cheers.
Hi, this is the UK Desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory.
Over the past sixty years Werner Herzog’s extensive and elaborate filmography has explored both the grand and garish extremes of human experience, astonishing audiences all over the world with his breath-taking insight, innovation and industriousness.
Suitably then, Thomas von Steinaecker’s latest documentary, ‘Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer’, is an intimate, informative and involving tribute to an auteur of the highest order, an individual who transcended his origins in the New German Cinema Movement in the 1960s to become the internationally recognised director, screenwriter, documentarian, author, actor and cultural icon that he is today.
Indeed, as Wim Wenders, the esteemed German director of such classics as The American Friend, Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, observes: ‘Herzog is a mythological character. A lonesome rider’.
Both his fictional and factual works frequently pursue protagonists who are driven by destiny, whatever the cost to themselves or to those around them, often along an uncertain or even irrational timeline, as well as almost always against a backdrop of Nature’s savage indifference.
His overarching narrative mission as a storyteller is not necessarily to reach a specific goal or resolution however; rather it is to witness and capture images along the way which human beings like you and me may never have encountered before. In turn, over the duration of a film or maybe even over the duration of a lifetime, these visions will eventually cohere with our perceptions, reflections and imaginations to form an unforgettable ecstasy of illumination.
The trail of conquistadors and tribal slaves snaking down a Peruvian mountainside at the beginning of Aguirre, Wrath of God from 1972; the 320 ton steamboat literally being dragged across dry land by way of primitive levers and pulleys during the production of Fitzcarraldo in 1981; the solitary penguin who is compelled to abandon its colony in Antarctica and wander 5000 miles to certain death in Encounters at the End of The Worldfrom 2007.
As the late US film critic, Roger Ebert, reminded us, Werner Herzog ‘has never created a single film that is compromised … or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular’.
While von Steinaecker’s documentary is peppered with A-list personalities such as Christian Bale, Nicole Kidman and Robert Pattinson proffering their praises, accompanied by various clips from previous documentaries such as Burden of Dreams from 1982 and My Best Fiend from 1999 to provide historical context, it is the up close and personal biographical contributions which make you lean forward. Original interviews with Herzog himself as well as with his brothers, Tilbert and Lucki, together with his former wife, Martje Grohmann, and his current wife, Lena, are fresh, genuine and quite thrilling cinephilic moments.
Abandoned by their father, we learn of the Bavarian village of Sachrang where Herzog and his brothers grew up in poverty during the 1950s and early 60s, their highly educated mother only able to afford a single loaf of bread between the four of them each week.
In turn, we follow them as they eventually move to find employment opportunities in the city of Munich and here, Tilbert tell us, Herzog first worked as a welder at a steel factory, investing his wages in producing short films such as Last Words and Precautions Against Fanatics.
Winning 10,000 German marks in a screenplay competition however was what truly set Herzog on his way since, in 1968, it provided him at the age of 25 with the financial means to write, direct and release his first feature, Signs of Life.
The film, shot by his long-standing cinematographer, Thomas Mauch, centres on three German soldiers who lose their minds on the Greek island of Kos during World War II. It caught the attention of the influential German film historian, Lotte Eisner, who, after informing her close friend, Fritz Lang, of its significance, introduced it to an array of prominent film critics in France. As a result, Signs of Life went on to win the Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize at the 18th Berlin International Film Festival.
Arguably, Werner Herzog’s subsequent fictional work enjoyed its vertex over the 1970s and 80s with a succession of five films which forced Hollywood, and the international cultural intelligentsia at large, to critically countenance previously unthinkable levels of moviemaking which were altogether historic, operatic, raw and real. Furthermore, such a death-defying approach to cinema’s mechanics and aesthetics was also illumined incredibly, as well as overshadowed deeply, by Herzog’s singular collaboration with the incendiary German film and theatre actor, Klaus Kinski.
The star of Aguirre, Wrath of God, Woyzeck, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde was diagnosed with an anti-social personality disorder in 1950, and he attempted suicide twice in 1955. It is of little surprise then that, during lengthy soul-sapping shoots in the punishing jungles of Peru, Ghana, Brazil and Columbia, Kinski would often explode with preternatural fury, physically destroying set designs, verbally abusing crew members, threatening their livelihoods while also promising, in the same breath, to murder his director.
As Thomas Mauch comments, Kinski, who died of a sudden heart attack in 1991 at the age of 65, ‘was only interested in himself. He only cared about creating as much turmoil as he could. He did that to make every gesture seem god-like.’
Herzog finally turned his back on Germany in 1996 and moved to Los Angeles. His brother, Lucki, who is also his producer, informs us that this was because not only were his sibling’s films no longer being funded but ‘he was done with the whole system, with all the bureaucracy behind it, with all the smug narrow-mindedness.’
Fortunately, taking flight in such a manner carried the filmmaker to a continent which coursed with creativity, collaboration and conviction and, as a result, his filmmaking career became revitalised as his work ethic and productivity increased at a staggering rate.
That is to say, over the last 27 years Werner Herzog has directed eight original feature films, including Rescue Dawn with Christian Bale and Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage; seventeen documentary features, such as Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams; an eight episode mini-series about Death Row; and, if this wasn’t enough, he has also acted in a number of high-profile feature films and television shows like Harmony Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy, Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher, The Simpsons and, more recently, The Mandalorian.
And, let us not forget, that he has magically found the time, energy, focus and finance to direct nineteen operas as well.
Ultimately, Werner Herzog is a polymathic phenomenon, a quasi-religious visionary borne out of the 20th century who sings and sweats cinema, literature, theatre and opera and who, at 81 years of age, is still showing no signs of stopping. Consequently, the only real criticism one can direct towards von Steinaecker’s superbly orchestrated documentary is that, with a running time of 90 minutes, it simply isn’t long enough.
This has been the UK Desk for Arts Express, and I’ve been Brett Gregory.
Cheers.
SHORT FILM REVIEW
Steven Ascher's 'Looking Forward' (West City Films, 2023)
By Brett Gregory
November 2023
Steven Ascher's 'Looking Forward' (West City Films, 2023)
By Brett Gregory
November 2023
Review Start: 44 minutes 09 seconds
Review Transcript
Hi, this is the UK Desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory.
What follows is my review of Steven Ascher’s new 12 minute video essay, ‘Looking Forward’, whose world premiere will be screening at the Village East by Angelika cinema in New York on Thursday, November 16th 2023, as a part of DOC NYC Fest, the largest documentary festival in the US.
Ascher’s feature, ‘Troublesome Creek’, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1996, and many of his productions since then have performed very well on the North American film festival circuit. He was educated at Harvard University, and he is also the author (with Ed Pincus) of the bestselling ‘Filmmaker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for the Digital Age’.
‘Looking Forward’ can be described as a conversational meditation on, and mediation of, the filmmaker’s personal understanding of optimism and pessimism, underpinned by a linear, cause-and-effect perspective on the past, present and future.
The narrative is explicitly divided into seven segments and his voice-over is primarily illustrated by a series of black-and-white AI-generated still images of unintentionally disfigured humanoids in various environments, such as children in a living room on Christmas Day, a group of women posing on a New York sidewalk, villagers with baskets of cucumbers in Ukraine and so on.
This aesthetic approach visually contrasts the comforting familiarity of the mortal past with the unpleasant strangeness of the technological present, the aim of which is to introduce and reassert our supposed shared sense of existential anxiety with regards to the shape of things to come.
This is not a particularly original filmic conceit however since, over the past two years, millions of social media flâneurs will have encountered the stupid, the surreal and sometimes the sublime output of the freely available DALL-E text-to-image software which Ascher appears to be using here and, moreover, they would have also experimented with it themselves.
From a self-proclaimed optimistic standpoint the narrator proceeds to idealise the goal of surrounding oneself with a close family, loyal friends and a stable career in an effort to achieve prosperity. In turn, he assumes that his audience naturally adopts a similar position, overlooking the ten of millions of us who, for one reason or another, have no hope of holding on to, or even briefly experiencing, such earthly pleasures.
In turn, he disapproves of pessimists who tend to catastrophize negative situations, suggesting that the only desire of such doomsayers is to walk the earth alone. However, by doing so he seems to be normalising a certain kind of first world conservatism: that of an educated, urban, middle-class family man who attends to, and is concerned by, prominent news headlines while being professionally and financially secure.
On the contrary, citizens in many European countries, suffering from centuries of autocracy, conflict and cruelty, have historically nurtured and celebrated a culture of pessimism because they have found it to be reassuring, encouraging and even enriching. Moreover, we Europeans take great pride in the fact that such a cultural tendency has over the years produced epic and eloquent catastrophists like Franz Kafka in the Czech Republic, Samuel Beckett in Ireland and Virginia Woolf in England.
Indeed, the US itself has had its fair share of literary catastrophists as well who have illuminated their readers and motivated them to live long in order to delve deeper into the darkness of the human condition, often accompanied by sardonic laughter to be shared with their fellow miserablists. Edgar Allan Poe, Dorothy Parker and Charles Bukowski to name but a famous few.
Onwards and Ascher’s film ruminates on the perceived dangers of AI in the workplace: employees’ labour, purpose and prospects being superseded by software systems and hardware packages that are far more productive, precise and durable than present state human beings could ever be. It is solemnly expressed that there is no turning back from such technological change, but surely this has always been the case? Surely human history itself is actually defined by such advancements, however terrifying and world-ending they appeared to have been at the time?
For instance, the Luddites destroying power looms in early 19th century England spring to mind; the invention of the motor car replacing horse-drawn carriages in Germany later in that century; as well as the discovery of fossil fuels eradicating the whaling industry along the East Coast of the United States in the early 20th century.
The issue however is not really the technology itself but the ideological motivations behind the people who pay for it and produce it, who install it and impose it. For these people are very much a part of a very long tradition of individuals and institutions who have overseen the wanton destruction of this planet’s life, learning and liberty with whatever tools that have been to hand, bestowing upon us, as a result, wars, genocide, poverty and pollution.
As a storyteller Ascher is on much firmer ground when he reflects upon his own family origins and history, and the extent of his emotional relationship with his relatives is effectively represented by the replacement of AI still imagery with personal photographs and newspaper cuttings.
We learn that his Jewish great grandparents fled persecution and the pogroms in Nizhyn in Ukraine at the turn of the 20th century; that their son, his grandfather, established a clothing business which employed refugees in New York; and, finally, that his family purchased their own home in New Jersey. Ascher observes that his family survived by paying attention, by being vigilant and by taking action and, in turn, they thrived under the optimism proffered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s.
The film concludes by suggesting life is a fleeting series of snapshots balanced between fortune and misfortune, and the future is ultimately indifferent to our wants, needs, hopes or fears. Consequently, with the somewhat mawkish tone of a spiritual self-help DVD, we are advised to live our lives to the fullest while we can.
‘Looking Forward’ appears to be aimed at a middle-class audience who are so busy working at maintaining their middle-classness they haven’t really had the time to read the news or reflect upon it, or upon themselves or their futures: the rise of ‘hate’ in mainstream politics, the proliferation of military conflicts, the spectre of climate change, the dissemination of misinformation, the invasiveness of AI technology.
In some ways then Steven Ascher’s short film is reminiscent of Woody Allen’s anxiety monologues from the 1970s, self-absorbed and bourgeois, but without the personal insight, self-deprecation or wit.
This has been the UK Desk for Arts Express, and I’ve been Brett Gregory.
Cheers.
Hi, this is the UK Desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory.
What follows is my review of Steven Ascher’s new 12 minute video essay, ‘Looking Forward’, whose world premiere will be screening at the Village East by Angelika cinema in New York on Thursday, November 16th 2023, as a part of DOC NYC Fest, the largest documentary festival in the US.
Ascher’s feature, ‘Troublesome Creek’, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1996, and many of his productions since then have performed very well on the North American film festival circuit. He was educated at Harvard University, and he is also the author (with Ed Pincus) of the bestselling ‘Filmmaker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for the Digital Age’.
‘Looking Forward’ can be described as a conversational meditation on, and mediation of, the filmmaker’s personal understanding of optimism and pessimism, underpinned by a linear, cause-and-effect perspective on the past, present and future.
The narrative is explicitly divided into seven segments and his voice-over is primarily illustrated by a series of black-and-white AI-generated still images of unintentionally disfigured humanoids in various environments, such as children in a living room on Christmas Day, a group of women posing on a New York sidewalk, villagers with baskets of cucumbers in Ukraine and so on.
This aesthetic approach visually contrasts the comforting familiarity of the mortal past with the unpleasant strangeness of the technological present, the aim of which is to introduce and reassert our supposed shared sense of existential anxiety with regards to the shape of things to come.
This is not a particularly original filmic conceit however since, over the past two years, millions of social media flâneurs will have encountered the stupid, the surreal and sometimes the sublime output of the freely available DALL-E text-to-image software which Ascher appears to be using here and, moreover, they would have also experimented with it themselves.
From a self-proclaimed optimistic standpoint the narrator proceeds to idealise the goal of surrounding oneself with a close family, loyal friends and a stable career in an effort to achieve prosperity. In turn, he assumes that his audience naturally adopts a similar position, overlooking the ten of millions of us who, for one reason or another, have no hope of holding on to, or even briefly experiencing, such earthly pleasures.
In turn, he disapproves of pessimists who tend to catastrophize negative situations, suggesting that the only desire of such doomsayers is to walk the earth alone. However, by doing so he seems to be normalising a certain kind of first world conservatism: that of an educated, urban, middle-class family man who attends to, and is concerned by, prominent news headlines while being professionally and financially secure.
On the contrary, citizens in many European countries, suffering from centuries of autocracy, conflict and cruelty, have historically nurtured and celebrated a culture of pessimism because they have found it to be reassuring, encouraging and even enriching. Moreover, we Europeans take great pride in the fact that such a cultural tendency has over the years produced epic and eloquent catastrophists like Franz Kafka in the Czech Republic, Samuel Beckett in Ireland and Virginia Woolf in England.
Indeed, the US itself has had its fair share of literary catastrophists as well who have illuminated their readers and motivated them to live long in order to delve deeper into the darkness of the human condition, often accompanied by sardonic laughter to be shared with their fellow miserablists. Edgar Allan Poe, Dorothy Parker and Charles Bukowski to name but a famous few.
Onwards and Ascher’s film ruminates on the perceived dangers of AI in the workplace: employees’ labour, purpose and prospects being superseded by software systems and hardware packages that are far more productive, precise and durable than present state human beings could ever be. It is solemnly expressed that there is no turning back from such technological change, but surely this has always been the case? Surely human history itself is actually defined by such advancements, however terrifying and world-ending they appeared to have been at the time?
For instance, the Luddites destroying power looms in early 19th century England spring to mind; the invention of the motor car replacing horse-drawn carriages in Germany later in that century; as well as the discovery of fossil fuels eradicating the whaling industry along the East Coast of the United States in the early 20th century.
The issue however is not really the technology itself but the ideological motivations behind the people who pay for it and produce it, who install it and impose it. For these people are very much a part of a very long tradition of individuals and institutions who have overseen the wanton destruction of this planet’s life, learning and liberty with whatever tools that have been to hand, bestowing upon us, as a result, wars, genocide, poverty and pollution.
As a storyteller Ascher is on much firmer ground when he reflects upon his own family origins and history, and the extent of his emotional relationship with his relatives is effectively represented by the replacement of AI still imagery with personal photographs and newspaper cuttings.
We learn that his Jewish great grandparents fled persecution and the pogroms in Nizhyn in Ukraine at the turn of the 20th century; that their son, his grandfather, established a clothing business which employed refugees in New York; and, finally, that his family purchased their own home in New Jersey. Ascher observes that his family survived by paying attention, by being vigilant and by taking action and, in turn, they thrived under the optimism proffered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s.
The film concludes by suggesting life is a fleeting series of snapshots balanced between fortune and misfortune, and the future is ultimately indifferent to our wants, needs, hopes or fears. Consequently, with the somewhat mawkish tone of a spiritual self-help DVD, we are advised to live our lives to the fullest while we can.
‘Looking Forward’ appears to be aimed at a middle-class audience who are so busy working at maintaining their middle-classness they haven’t really had the time to read the news or reflect upon it, or upon themselves or their futures: the rise of ‘hate’ in mainstream politics, the proliferation of military conflicts, the spectre of climate change, the dissemination of misinformation, the invasiveness of AI technology.
In some ways then Steven Ascher’s short film is reminiscent of Woody Allen’s anxiety monologues from the 1970s, self-absorbed and bourgeois, but without the personal insight, self-deprecation or wit.
This has been the UK Desk for Arts Express, and I’ve been Brett Gregory.
Cheers.
DOCUMENTARY REVIEW
Nick Broomfield's ‘The Stones and Brian Jones' (BBC/Magnolia, 2023)
By Brett Gregory
October 2023
Nick Broomfield's ‘The Stones and Brian Jones' (BBC/Magnolia, 2023)
By Brett Gregory
October 2023
Review Start: 42 minutes 49 seconds
Review Transcript
Hi, this is the UK Desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory.
What follows is my review of ‘The Stones and Brian Jones’, the latest film from Nick Broomfield, acclaimed director of turn-of-the-century classic documentaries such as 'Kurt and Courtney', 'Biggie and Tupac' and 'Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer'.
Brian Jones founded The Rolling Stones, one of the most commercially successful and influential rock bands of all time, by placing a small advertisement in ‘Jazz News’ in Soho, London, in 1962. Moreover, he himself derived the name of this group, his group, from the great Muddy Water’s track, ‘Rollin’ Stone Blues’.
By 1963 Jones, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts had finally converged to become The Rolling Stones and, regardless of anything else which may be written or said about him, true or otherwise, this was, and always will be, an enormous cultural contribution for a 20 year old young man to have made.
However, there is a sequence in this documentary that begins just after the fifteen minute mark which, for me, personifies Jones as a prisoner of his own making, pacing around and around the exercise yard inside his mind, mumbling over and over to himself, until finally he collapses and dies from exhaustion.
‘Unlove, Dishonour, Abandon,’ the prisoner mumbles. ‘Unlove, Dishonour, Abandon.’
A former girlfriend, Pat Andrews, and mother of his third child, Julian, describes in voice-over that Jones’ own mother, a piano teacher, was a ‘very rigid’ woman, devoid of ‘fun’ or ‘laughter’, who ‘didn’t know how’ to love her son. Over the opening of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ we then hear the voice of his engineer father, Lewis Jones, lamenting his son’s increasing ‘fanaticism’ with jazz and his attendant undisciplined behaviour. He eventually kicks his son out of the family’s middle-class home in 1960.
Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ then introduces us to some hazy home video footage of drunken patrons dancing deliriously at Filby’s Jazz Club in leafy Cheltenham in England. Jones, aged 16, worked the door of this club and it is here where he met his first girlfriend, Valerie Corbett, who, within a year, became the mother of his first child. This nameless baby was given up for adoption by the time Jones reached 18 years of age; he then promptly deserted Valerie, and his memory of her, by busking around Europe.
When his drug-related death arrived in 1969 at the age of 27, drowning in the swimming pool at his farmhouse mansion in Sussex, England, Brian Jones had fathered at least five children with five different women. As detailed by wider verifiable sources, he had also been physically abusive towards all of them. In order to maintain the time-honoured tale of the ‘tortured artist’ however this documentary chooses not to delve too deeply into such baleful behaviour.
This said, Nick Broomfield does narrate solemnly: [QUOTE] ‘Brian’s self-loathing came out in the way he treated other people.’
In turn, we also learn that in 1965 Jones began a relationship with the Italian-German model and actress, Anita Pallenberg, and, to outsiders, their famously raucous two year relationship was riddled with passion, provocation, performativity and purple haze. However, Volker Schlöndorff, who directed Pallenberg in the movie ‘Degree of Murder’ in 1967 to a soundtrack composed by Jones, comments here: [QUOTE] ‘So I guess they got a lot of sexual or erotic excitement out of these fights. I mean, it certainly wasn’t a tender relationship.’
Indeed, after Pallenberg died in 2017, aged 73, Rob Sheffield’s obituary in the aptly titled Rolling Stone magazine reminds us that: [QUOTE] ‘As Brian grew more abusive and jealous, eventually breaking his hand on her face, she left him for Keith [Richards] during a … trip to Morocco.’
As an adjunct to this somewhat pitiable pop star portrait, the BBC archive interview with the aforementioned Pat Andrews from 1965 continues to illuminate: [QUOTE] ‘I feel quite sorry for Brian in a way because, the kind of person he is, he can never be happy, could never have true friends … He’s got no feelings for anybody.’
‘Unlove, Dishonour, Abandon,’ the prisoner mumbles. ‘Unlove, Dishonour, Abandon.’
Inevitably, Brian Jones also brimmed and burned with musical talent which, in numerous ways, helped to lay down the foundations and future direction of The Rolling Stones. This fact is intimately revealed to us by their former bass player, Bill Wyman, who is now in his 80s, when he fondly recollects in a fatherly tone how Jones’ unique creative contributions to classic tracks like ‘Little Red Rooster’ and ‘Ruby Tuesday’ still resonate 56 years later.
Yet, sadly and also inevitably, his band mates were not exempt from Jones’ churlishness or cruelty either. As Wyman comments: [QUOTE] ‘If he didn’t get his way he kind of used to get very aggressive … [Stubbing] a cigarette out on the back of your hand in the car.’ And it is at this moment when we uncomfortably recall, earlier on in the narrative, Jones flicking cigarette ash into Wyman’s hair during a live press conference without him knowing.
Amidst all this doom and gloom however Broomfield’s documentary still meticulously vivifies The Rolling Stones’ cyclone of success during the mid-1960s through a blend of black-and-white newsreels, amateur concert footage, still photographs, music recordings and voice-overs. As the band take charge of Planet Earth by introducing black R&B to an entire generation of white teenagers, post-pubescent pandemonium is naturally in hot pursuit. Thus, we are thrilled as stages are stormed, airports are attacked and Mick Jagger’s hair is ripped out from its roots by the grasping hands of gasping female fans.
Clearly though, this wasn’t Brian Jones’ band anymore. Jagger and Richards had been anointed in his stead and, due to their growing desire for greater album sales and greater stardom, they didn’t play his beloved R&B as often as they used to.
Out of shape and out of time, a slave to sedatives, scotch and coke, Jones was told by Jagger, Richards and Watts on 8th June 1969 that he was no longer a Rolling Stone.
One month later he was dead.
Nick Broomfield’s ‘The Stones and Brian Jones’ explores the dark origins of one of the world’s most successful rock bands and, as a consequence, it is compulsory viewing not only for die-hard fans of The Rolling Stones, but also for connoisseurs of music culture in general.
It will be available in theatres across the US this November.
Meanwhile, for our listeners in the UK, you can watch it right now on BBC iPlayer.
This has been the UK Desk for Arts Express, and I’ve been Brett Gregory.
Cheers.
Hi, this is the UK Desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory.
What follows is my review of ‘The Stones and Brian Jones’, the latest film from Nick Broomfield, acclaimed director of turn-of-the-century classic documentaries such as 'Kurt and Courtney', 'Biggie and Tupac' and 'Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer'.
Brian Jones founded The Rolling Stones, one of the most commercially successful and influential rock bands of all time, by placing a small advertisement in ‘Jazz News’ in Soho, London, in 1962. Moreover, he himself derived the name of this group, his group, from the great Muddy Water’s track, ‘Rollin’ Stone Blues’.
By 1963 Jones, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts had finally converged to become The Rolling Stones and, regardless of anything else which may be written or said about him, true or otherwise, this was, and always will be, an enormous cultural contribution for a 20 year old young man to have made.
However, there is a sequence in this documentary that begins just after the fifteen minute mark which, for me, personifies Jones as a prisoner of his own making, pacing around and around the exercise yard inside his mind, mumbling over and over to himself, until finally he collapses and dies from exhaustion.
‘Unlove, Dishonour, Abandon,’ the prisoner mumbles. ‘Unlove, Dishonour, Abandon.’
A former girlfriend, Pat Andrews, and mother of his third child, Julian, describes in voice-over that Jones’ own mother, a piano teacher, was a ‘very rigid’ woman, devoid of ‘fun’ or ‘laughter’, who ‘didn’t know how’ to love her son. Over the opening of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ we then hear the voice of his engineer father, Lewis Jones, lamenting his son’s increasing ‘fanaticism’ with jazz and his attendant undisciplined behaviour. He eventually kicks his son out of the family’s middle-class home in 1960.
Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ then introduces us to some hazy home video footage of drunken patrons dancing deliriously at Filby’s Jazz Club in leafy Cheltenham in England. Jones, aged 16, worked the door of this club and it is here where he met his first girlfriend, Valerie Corbett, who, within a year, became the mother of his first child. This nameless baby was given up for adoption by the time Jones reached 18 years of age; he then promptly deserted Valerie, and his memory of her, by busking around Europe.
When his drug-related death arrived in 1969 at the age of 27, drowning in the swimming pool at his farmhouse mansion in Sussex, England, Brian Jones had fathered at least five children with five different women. As detailed by wider verifiable sources, he had also been physically abusive towards all of them. In order to maintain the time-honoured tale of the ‘tortured artist’ however this documentary chooses not to delve too deeply into such baleful behaviour.
This said, Nick Broomfield does narrate solemnly: [QUOTE] ‘Brian’s self-loathing came out in the way he treated other people.’
In turn, we also learn that in 1965 Jones began a relationship with the Italian-German model and actress, Anita Pallenberg, and, to outsiders, their famously raucous two year relationship was riddled with passion, provocation, performativity and purple haze. However, Volker Schlöndorff, who directed Pallenberg in the movie ‘Degree of Murder’ in 1967 to a soundtrack composed by Jones, comments here: [QUOTE] ‘So I guess they got a lot of sexual or erotic excitement out of these fights. I mean, it certainly wasn’t a tender relationship.’
Indeed, after Pallenberg died in 2017, aged 73, Rob Sheffield’s obituary in the aptly titled Rolling Stone magazine reminds us that: [QUOTE] ‘As Brian grew more abusive and jealous, eventually breaking his hand on her face, she left him for Keith [Richards] during a … trip to Morocco.’
As an adjunct to this somewhat pitiable pop star portrait, the BBC archive interview with the aforementioned Pat Andrews from 1965 continues to illuminate: [QUOTE] ‘I feel quite sorry for Brian in a way because, the kind of person he is, he can never be happy, could never have true friends … He’s got no feelings for anybody.’
‘Unlove, Dishonour, Abandon,’ the prisoner mumbles. ‘Unlove, Dishonour, Abandon.’
Inevitably, Brian Jones also brimmed and burned with musical talent which, in numerous ways, helped to lay down the foundations and future direction of The Rolling Stones. This fact is intimately revealed to us by their former bass player, Bill Wyman, who is now in his 80s, when he fondly recollects in a fatherly tone how Jones’ unique creative contributions to classic tracks like ‘Little Red Rooster’ and ‘Ruby Tuesday’ still resonate 56 years later.
Yet, sadly and also inevitably, his band mates were not exempt from Jones’ churlishness or cruelty either. As Wyman comments: [QUOTE] ‘If he didn’t get his way he kind of used to get very aggressive … [Stubbing] a cigarette out on the back of your hand in the car.’ And it is at this moment when we uncomfortably recall, earlier on in the narrative, Jones flicking cigarette ash into Wyman’s hair during a live press conference without him knowing.
Amidst all this doom and gloom however Broomfield’s documentary still meticulously vivifies The Rolling Stones’ cyclone of success during the mid-1960s through a blend of black-and-white newsreels, amateur concert footage, still photographs, music recordings and voice-overs. As the band take charge of Planet Earth by introducing black R&B to an entire generation of white teenagers, post-pubescent pandemonium is naturally in hot pursuit. Thus, we are thrilled as stages are stormed, airports are attacked and Mick Jagger’s hair is ripped out from its roots by the grasping hands of gasping female fans.
Clearly though, this wasn’t Brian Jones’ band anymore. Jagger and Richards had been anointed in his stead and, due to their growing desire for greater album sales and greater stardom, they didn’t play his beloved R&B as often as they used to.
Out of shape and out of time, a slave to sedatives, scotch and coke, Jones was told by Jagger, Richards and Watts on 8th June 1969 that he was no longer a Rolling Stone.
One month later he was dead.
Nick Broomfield’s ‘The Stones and Brian Jones’ explores the dark origins of one of the world’s most successful rock bands and, as a consequence, it is compulsory viewing not only for die-hard fans of The Rolling Stones, but also for connoisseurs of music culture in general.
It will be available in theatres across the US this November.
Meanwhile, for our listeners in the UK, you can watch it right now on BBC iPlayer.
This has been the UK Desk for Arts Express, and I’ve been Brett Gregory.
Cheers.
BOOK REVIEW
Norman Finkelstein’s 'I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom' (Sublation Press, 2023)
By Brett Gregory
October 2023
Norman Finkelstein’s 'I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom' (Sublation Press, 2023)
By Brett Gregory
October 2023
Review Start: 16 minutes 22 seconds
REVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Hi, this is the UK Desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory.
What follows is my review of Norman Finkelstein’s latest book, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, published by Sublation Press in 2023.
Finkelstein was born in Brooklyn in 1953 and both his mother and father were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the concentration camps in Majdanek and Auschwitz. The rest of his family were wiped out completely.
Educated at Princeton University, his subsequent academic work, publications and political activism generated from the 1970s onwards, appear to have been intensely and inevitably informed by this woebegotten wellspring of human horror.
While his mother’s recollections of enduring the Holocaust burned into his psyche as a boy growing up, her post-war pacifism impressed itself upon his mindset as a man. In the 2009 documentary, ‘American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein’, available on YouTube, he even jokingly describes himself as [QUOTE] ‘Finkelstein’s Monster’.
He has written many books on the Israel-Palestine conflict but, in 2005, he wrote Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History where he disparages in detail the 2003 book, A Case for Israel, written by the influential and affluent US lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, primarily for containing false information and for academic plagiarism. He later repeated these attributions in person to Amy Goodman here on WBAI’s Democracy Now! show.
Following these charges Dershowitz accused Finkelstein of being a ‘Jew Hater’ and a ‘Holocaust Denier’, and persistently threatened him with libel action over the next four years. He even approached the then Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to prevent Beyond Chutzpah from being published by the University of California. When this request was rejected he proceeded to exert his considerable power to successfully lobby professors, alumni and administrators to oppose Finkelstein’s 2007 bid for tenure at DePaul University in Chicago.
Ultimately, Norman Finkelstein, feted alongside Edward Said and Noam Chomsky as one of the most prominent US defenders of the Palestinian people, described by South African Professor of Law, John Dugard, as [QUOTE] ‘probably the most serious scholar on the conflict in the Middle East’, was made unemployable in both the US and Europe for the next seven years until, finally, he secured a long-distance lecturing position at Sakarya University in Turkey in 2014.
In today’s parlance, he was cancelled.
I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!!! contends, amongst many other things, that the spontaneous, illogical, unresearched and regressive practice of wokeness, identity politics and cancel culture is being systematically exploited by the established elite and their media outlets in order to distract, divide, disenfranchise and dominate the political agency of citizens throughout the socio-cultural sphere.
Finkelstein acknowledges that Western society’s attitudes toward sexual, racial and ethnic minorities are [QUOTE] ‘a civilizational advance, a cultural tectonic shift’ which we should all take pride in.
This said, he also argues that at the core of identity politics there is a battle within a group about who represents them most legitimately and effectively in wider society until one faction’s version prevails. Yet there is still no single valid definition of what race is, what ethnicity is, what gender is or what sexuality is.
Furthermore, Finkelstein queries why somebody would want to be defined by their own birth and personhood anyway, or have it superficially valorised by wider popular culture, instead of being recognised for one’s own agency, actions and achievements. Why would one not wish to transcend this imposition, this burden?
For instance, why does an engineer have to be identified and co-opted as a black engineer, a female engineer or a gay engineer? Why can’t an engineer be identified as an engineer due to their intelligence, industriousness and insight? Why single out their ethnicity, gender or sexuality, something which they have had no choice about?
To reinforce his point Finkelstein cites Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech from 1963 wherein the late minister hopes that [QUOTE] ‘my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.’
He then heatedly illustrates this point by charting the mainstream corporate media’s ongoing lionisation of Barack and Michelle Obama’s ‘wokeness’ as the couple proceed to spend $12 million dollars on an estate in Martha’s Vineyard and $8 million on a property in Washington, D.C., as well as accrue $65 million from a joint book deal with Random House and negotiate an unspecified high amount with Netflix. Crucially however, he also targets Jeff Bezos’ recent $100 million donation to the Obama Foundation, stating [QUOTE] ‘it’s not hard to guess which side Obama will be on if and when Amazon workers strike.’
Indeed, as neoliberalist tech-feudalism rapidly engulfs people’s everyday lives and, in reaction, class-based politics once again attempts to keep everyone’s heads above water, it is no surprise that, along with the cult of mediated narcissism, [QUOTE] ‘the ruling elites across the political spectrum have embraced identity politics to deflect from the class struggle’.
Finkelstein continues by reminding us that [QUOTE] ‘Professor Noam Chomsky popularised the phrase ‘manufacturing consent’ to denote the mechanisms by which incongruous facts and opinions are filtered out in an ostensibly democratic society’.
And, in essence, this is what cancel culture is all about: the suppression of ideas, language and people as a method of social control, as a means for a self-appointed ruling body to maintain and increase its power in a relationship, in a group, in an institution and/or across culture in general.
Usefully, Finkelstein advances four key semantic areas wherein cancel culture erroneously operates.
Firstly, that speech is suppressed or cancelled because it is deemed to be ‘false’. However, since human beings are fallible, how do we know who is right or wrong? For example, a 98-year-old Ukrainian war veteran was recently hailed as a ‘hero’ and received two standing ovations in the Canadian Parliament. It was later discovered however that he had in fact been a member of the SS 14th Waffen Division under the command of the Nazis.
Secondly, the person articulating this speech is ‘evil’. Be that as it may, this doesn’t discount that what is being said is not true. For example, the early 20th century US serial killer, Albert Fish, is widely quoted as declaring, ‘none of us are saints’.
Thirdly, what is being said is ‘offensive’. However, as individuals, aren’t we always offended by something, somewhere, at any time? A stupid comment overheard at a bus stop, an idiotic post on social media, a mawkish line of dialogue delivered by some movie star, a poorly written review on a radio show? So what should happen? Ban all communication, all opinion, all difference? [QUOTE] ‘[as] Justice Holmes famously rejoined: ‘Every idea is an incitement.’
Finally, there is speech which is suppressed or cancelled because it is considered regressive, underdeveloped or backward. Times change however. For example, [QUOTE] ‘in the first half of the 20th century, eugenics was all the rage … in progressive circles,’ and notable names such as Theodore Roosevelt and H.G. Wells were in favour of improving the human race by way of scientific breeding. Fortunately, the legality of state-enforced sterilisation came before the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell in 1927 wherein it was argued that feeble-minded Carrie Buck, and her feeble-minded mother and daughter, should be made infertile because [QUOTE] ‘three generations of imbeciles are enough.’ Justice Butler was a devout Catholic however, and he dismissed the case on the grounds that all human life is sacred. Thus, as the Nazi concentration camps would later prove, the scientific ‘progressives’ here were wrong while the religious ‘regressives’ were right.
I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!!! is broad in scope, brash in style, bristling with morality and bulging with uncomfortable truths.
It is highly recommended.
This has been the UK Desk for Arts Express, and I’ve been Brett Gregory.
Cheers.
Hi, this is the UK Desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory.
What follows is my review of Norman Finkelstein’s latest book, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, published by Sublation Press in 2023.
Finkelstein was born in Brooklyn in 1953 and both his mother and father were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the concentration camps in Majdanek and Auschwitz. The rest of his family were wiped out completely.
Educated at Princeton University, his subsequent academic work, publications and political activism generated from the 1970s onwards, appear to have been intensely and inevitably informed by this woebegotten wellspring of human horror.
While his mother’s recollections of enduring the Holocaust burned into his psyche as a boy growing up, her post-war pacifism impressed itself upon his mindset as a man. In the 2009 documentary, ‘American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein’, available on YouTube, he even jokingly describes himself as [QUOTE] ‘Finkelstein’s Monster’.
He has written many books on the Israel-Palestine conflict but, in 2005, he wrote Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History where he disparages in detail the 2003 book, A Case for Israel, written by the influential and affluent US lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, primarily for containing false information and for academic plagiarism. He later repeated these attributions in person to Amy Goodman here on WBAI’s Democracy Now! show.
Following these charges Dershowitz accused Finkelstein of being a ‘Jew Hater’ and a ‘Holocaust Denier’, and persistently threatened him with libel action over the next four years. He even approached the then Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to prevent Beyond Chutzpah from being published by the University of California. When this request was rejected he proceeded to exert his considerable power to successfully lobby professors, alumni and administrators to oppose Finkelstein’s 2007 bid for tenure at DePaul University in Chicago.
Ultimately, Norman Finkelstein, feted alongside Edward Said and Noam Chomsky as one of the most prominent US defenders of the Palestinian people, described by South African Professor of Law, John Dugard, as [QUOTE] ‘probably the most serious scholar on the conflict in the Middle East’, was made unemployable in both the US and Europe for the next seven years until, finally, he secured a long-distance lecturing position at Sakarya University in Turkey in 2014.
In today’s parlance, he was cancelled.
I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!!! contends, amongst many other things, that the spontaneous, illogical, unresearched and regressive practice of wokeness, identity politics and cancel culture is being systematically exploited by the established elite and their media outlets in order to distract, divide, disenfranchise and dominate the political agency of citizens throughout the socio-cultural sphere.
Finkelstein acknowledges that Western society’s attitudes toward sexual, racial and ethnic minorities are [QUOTE] ‘a civilizational advance, a cultural tectonic shift’ which we should all take pride in.
This said, he also argues that at the core of identity politics there is a battle within a group about who represents them most legitimately and effectively in wider society until one faction’s version prevails. Yet there is still no single valid definition of what race is, what ethnicity is, what gender is or what sexuality is.
Furthermore, Finkelstein queries why somebody would want to be defined by their own birth and personhood anyway, or have it superficially valorised by wider popular culture, instead of being recognised for one’s own agency, actions and achievements. Why would one not wish to transcend this imposition, this burden?
For instance, why does an engineer have to be identified and co-opted as a black engineer, a female engineer or a gay engineer? Why can’t an engineer be identified as an engineer due to their intelligence, industriousness and insight? Why single out their ethnicity, gender or sexuality, something which they have had no choice about?
To reinforce his point Finkelstein cites Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech from 1963 wherein the late minister hopes that [QUOTE] ‘my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.’
He then heatedly illustrates this point by charting the mainstream corporate media’s ongoing lionisation of Barack and Michelle Obama’s ‘wokeness’ as the couple proceed to spend $12 million dollars on an estate in Martha’s Vineyard and $8 million on a property in Washington, D.C., as well as accrue $65 million from a joint book deal with Random House and negotiate an unspecified high amount with Netflix. Crucially however, he also targets Jeff Bezos’ recent $100 million donation to the Obama Foundation, stating [QUOTE] ‘it’s not hard to guess which side Obama will be on if and when Amazon workers strike.’
Indeed, as neoliberalist tech-feudalism rapidly engulfs people’s everyday lives and, in reaction, class-based politics once again attempts to keep everyone’s heads above water, it is no surprise that, along with the cult of mediated narcissism, [QUOTE] ‘the ruling elites across the political spectrum have embraced identity politics to deflect from the class struggle’.
Finkelstein continues by reminding us that [QUOTE] ‘Professor Noam Chomsky popularised the phrase ‘manufacturing consent’ to denote the mechanisms by which incongruous facts and opinions are filtered out in an ostensibly democratic society’.
And, in essence, this is what cancel culture is all about: the suppression of ideas, language and people as a method of social control, as a means for a self-appointed ruling body to maintain and increase its power in a relationship, in a group, in an institution and/or across culture in general.
Usefully, Finkelstein advances four key semantic areas wherein cancel culture erroneously operates.
Firstly, that speech is suppressed or cancelled because it is deemed to be ‘false’. However, since human beings are fallible, how do we know who is right or wrong? For example, a 98-year-old Ukrainian war veteran was recently hailed as a ‘hero’ and received two standing ovations in the Canadian Parliament. It was later discovered however that he had in fact been a member of the SS 14th Waffen Division under the command of the Nazis.
Secondly, the person articulating this speech is ‘evil’. Be that as it may, this doesn’t discount that what is being said is not true. For example, the early 20th century US serial killer, Albert Fish, is widely quoted as declaring, ‘none of us are saints’.
Thirdly, what is being said is ‘offensive’. However, as individuals, aren’t we always offended by something, somewhere, at any time? A stupid comment overheard at a bus stop, an idiotic post on social media, a mawkish line of dialogue delivered by some movie star, a poorly written review on a radio show? So what should happen? Ban all communication, all opinion, all difference? [QUOTE] ‘[as] Justice Holmes famously rejoined: ‘Every idea is an incitement.’
Finally, there is speech which is suppressed or cancelled because it is considered regressive, underdeveloped or backward. Times change however. For example, [QUOTE] ‘in the first half of the 20th century, eugenics was all the rage … in progressive circles,’ and notable names such as Theodore Roosevelt and H.G. Wells were in favour of improving the human race by way of scientific breeding. Fortunately, the legality of state-enforced sterilisation came before the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell in 1927 wherein it was argued that feeble-minded Carrie Buck, and her feeble-minded mother and daughter, should be made infertile because [QUOTE] ‘three generations of imbeciles are enough.’ Justice Butler was a devout Catholic however, and he dismissed the case on the grounds that all human life is sacred. Thus, as the Nazi concentration camps would later prove, the scientific ‘progressives’ here were wrong while the religious ‘regressives’ were right.
I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!!! is broad in scope, brash in style, bristling with morality and bulging with uncomfortable truths.
It is highly recommended.
This has been the UK Desk for Arts Express, and I’ve been Brett Gregory.
Cheers.
Interview: Hollywood Politics and Oliver Stone
October 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Ian Scott, Professor in American Film and History at the University of Manchester (UK).
October 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Ian Scott, Professor in American Film and History at the University of Manchester (UK).
Interview Start: 26 minutes 32 seconds
Interview Transcript
BG: Hi, this is the UK Desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory.
This evening we're going to explore Hollywood's up and down relationship with party politics over the years while also focusing on one of the industry's great creative firebrands, Oliver Stone.
IS: Hello, my name is Ian Scott and I'm Professor of American Film and History at Manchester University in the UK. My research specialisms are in Hollywood movies, the relationship between cinema and American political culture more widely, and the social, cultural and political history of California.
BG: So what was the catalyst that got you first into Hollywood and politics?
IS: The relationship of politics to movies has always intrigued me, and my own taste had gravitated towards what were broadly termed political films a long while ago. Movies like ‘Mr Smith Goes to Washington’, ‘All the President's Men’ and ‘JFK’. But really it all came together when I was a grad student studying California politics; I was interested in why people who'd never stood for office before would try to win election races at a very high level first time out, principally getting elected to congress in other words.
The political scientist David Canon wrote a really influential book for me and for my research at the time, and it was called ‘Actors, Athletes and Astronauts’, and in it Canon claimed there was mounting evidence that these were the routes to high office. In other words, people from the entertainment industry, sports stars or people who'd done heroic acts of derring-do. I applied Canon's theory to my own research looking at candidates in California during the 1970s, 80s and early 90s who wanted to run for the House of Representatives, the federal House of Representatives, and before I knew it I was implicitly predicting the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger to the governorship of California.
BG: And this relationship between party politics and Hollywood, when did it first take hold really?
IS: I suppose I'd make the claim that politics and the movies have always been inextricably linked, but really it was the 1930s, The Depression, that put that relationship into sharp relief. The Hollywood studios, as they were growing in stature and influence through the 20s, were always perceived as conservative at least at the top among the moguls, and those moguls who came west were interested in developing an archetypal American persona.
So, many were Republicans and they imposed a pretty rigid conservative line in the studios, and remember at this time studio workers were beginning to unionize as we start to get into the 1930s. The moguls thought these were all going to make Hollywood a hotbed of left-wing politics and agitation, and that did happen: it's often forgotten that the 30s really were a period of deep unrest in and around the film industry; quite a lot of strikes, quite a lot of agitation going on and, to some degree, it made the moguls even more conservative.
The difference really was the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. That began to change things. First of all, Roosevelt was a Democrat and there hadn't been one of those in the White House for 12 years, so really that was going back to the beginning of Hollywood's infancy really, so they weren't quite the force on the national stage they were by the early 1930s. And second, FDR understood that from the off if he wanted to communicate his new deal policies to the wider population he had to be both a broadcasting star himself – so he created his famous fireside chats, as you know, his weekly radio broadcast to the nation – and he needed to cultivate a relationship with Hollywood that would sell, however implicitly, the idea of economic and social regeneration in America.
BG: And how did World War II affect Hollywood's output?
IS: The war maintained that political connection and, of course, Hollywood was deeply involved in propaganda for the military by way of organizations like the Office of War Information. After the war the Cold War provided impetus for topics and at the same time the prevalence of film noir as a genre provided an aesthetic base for Hollywood to continue to make films with a social and cultural agenda to them, if not an outright political ideology.
So you've got post-war movies like ‘The Best Years Of Our Lives’ that contemplated the nation's priorities after the war; films like Frank Capra's largely underrated ‘State of the Union’ with Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn; Robert Rossen’s ‘All the King's Men’; and then a little bit later ‘A Face in the Crowd’ directed by Elia Kazan. All of these made an impression in the late 40s and at the turn of the 50s but, of course, the coming and growing anti-communist force during that era distracted Hollywood as well, and it scared off filmmakers and the studios from much further inquiry and investigation.
BG: Fascinating. And what followed in the 60s and 70s?
IS: So by the time we get to the 1960s and 1970s you have a different kind of force at work, different kind of agenda is emerging. Conspiracy and paranoia thrillers like the classic ‘Manchurian Candidate’ from 1962 and then in the later decade ‘The Parallax View’ with Warren Beatty and ‘Three Days of the Condor’ with Robert Redford all suggested an American political landscape dominated by shady cabals and big corporations unaccountable to anyone. And these films began to tap into the mood of disillusionment with politics that had finally come to fruition with the Watergate scandal in the midst of the Nixon administration in the early 1970s.
BG: Indeed. I literally forced Jack Clark, who I work with, who's 25, to watch ‘All The President's Men’ last night so he was aware of 70's paranoia. Anyway, please continue.
IS: Hollywood generally was always suspicious enough of someone like Ronald Reagan – who was an insider, of course – not to trust him entirely. Reagan had previously been a New Deal Democrat who turned over to the Republican party and became governor of California in the 1960s before he became President.
The Clinton era followed a pattern established by John F. Kennedy that Hollywood was to be cultivated and money should be sought, endorsements gathered, that kind of thing, and it was very successful for Clinton during the 1990s.
By the time of the George Bush administration in the 2000s, Bush largely eschewed Hollywood: he didn't feel it was the kind of community that was very sympathetic, probably rightly, to some of his politics. Although in the immediate post-9/11 era there was an unlikely alliance between the administration and the Hollywood studios and some of the unions like the Screenwriters’ Guild that tacitly supported The War On Terror in the backdrop to 9/11.
The Obama years brought in endorsements even from those who resisted political involvement. So big celebrities, musical stars like Bruce Springsteen who'd been very loathe to support and come out publicly for candidates in the past, came forward for somebody like Obama, who it was thought was really going to change not just American politics but really the whole of American life, American society at that time.
The Trump years followed, of course, and that was quite some reaction as you know, and in many ways the Trump years have been a masterclass in someone saying how much their personally loved and how they're admired only for such communities – and Hollywood has been most particularly vocal in this – only for communities to refute that claim entirely about Trump in many ways.
BG: And in what ways have films affected government policy rather than a vice versa?
IS: The wider political landscape has seen the exposure of things like American nuclear policy, for example, in a movie like ‘The China Syndrome’ in the late 1970s starring Jane Fonda, a film that appeared around the time at the near nuclear meltdown disaster a 3 Mile Island in Pennsylvania.
But perhaps one of the most obvious examples of influence is, of course, Oliver Stone's ‘JFK’ from 1991. A film that had such traction beyond the pages of review sections of the magazines and newspapers that it eventually resulted in the U.S Congress passing what is known as the Assassination Records Collection Act which set up a review board that over the past 30 years or so has released millions of pages of previously redacted material. JFK caused such a storm over the official story of Kennedy's assassination in 1963 that the American Congress quietly realised it was actually the custodian of a history that frankly few accepted anymore, if they ever had; and Stone, who gave testimony to Congress himself, was well aware of the impact that his film was having and the influence it was having over people's public perception that the Warren Commission Report of 1964, intimating that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin who had killed Kennedy, was simply not believed by the wider American populace.
BG: And you interviewed Oliver Stone. That must have been something?
IS: I did find Stone absolutely fascinating to interview, and subsequently I began to learn a lot more about what motivated him, and understand the years after I'd interviewed him – which was around about 2012/2013 – I began to understand a great deal more about what it was he was telling me at the time, particularly when I reviewed his first book of memoirs a couple of years ago, ‘Chasing The Light’.
In a way Stone encapsulates some of those contradictory impulses in Hollywood. He very much wanted to tell his own stories when he came to Hollywood and it just so happened that those stories and the history that he was a part of, and growing up in, during the 1960s and 1970s was really a time of fraction and disjuncture and a very kind of conflictual time for the United States and for American history more generally.
Stone understood the great opportunities and principles that are at the heart of the American ideal, but he also understood well the terrible costs that were paid for some of those principles. Notably in Vietnam where Stone served with distinction and then made later three very different films about the conflict. But at the same time you know he's kind of an establishment figure: he understands Hollywood's an industry and he works within its confines for good and for ill … I'll tell you when I asked who he most admired in American cinema – thinking that I had a list in my head of the kind of names he would go to – he straightaway said Steven Spielberg, not the filmmaker you might automatically assume to be somebody Stone would think of as a real inspiration. But the point was that Stone admired Spielberg's freedom within the system, the ability to make films on his terms. Stone might not have made a film like ‘Lincoln’ the way Spielberg did, or ‘The Post’, or ‘Bridge of Spies’ or more subject matter you could see Stone being attracted to, but I think he just admires Spielberg's craft and his determination not to be swayed by fads and taste to do what he wants. That, for so many for so many political filmmakers indeed, is an enormous attraction: the freedom to be able to dictate your own projects and mould them to your vision, however collaborative that vision might seem. So I think Stone would tell you he managed longevity and he managed to kind of mould his political vision because he made films on time and to budget, and certainly he delivered a run of movies from ‘Salvador’ in the mid-1980s, all the way he's through to probably ‘Natural Born Killers’ a decade later, that were commercial but were also critically challenging movies that audiences wanted to see, and which in Stone's case tapped into a zeitgeist that few filmmakers can ever achieve. But with movies like ‘Platoon’, ‘Born on the Fourth of July’, ‘The Doors’, ‘JFK’ and even ‘Nixon’, as well as ‘Natural Born Killers’, Stone had a run of films that did all of that and more. He understood about maintaining relations with the studios – even though he didn't always agree with them by any means – but that's why he's managed to mould such a long-standing career for himself.
BG: A compelling character indeed. Many thanks for your time, Ian. It's been great.
IS: Thanks very much for having me. Thank you.
BG: This has been the UK Desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers.
BG: Hi, this is the UK Desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory.
This evening we're going to explore Hollywood's up and down relationship with party politics over the years while also focusing on one of the industry's great creative firebrands, Oliver Stone.
IS: Hello, my name is Ian Scott and I'm Professor of American Film and History at Manchester University in the UK. My research specialisms are in Hollywood movies, the relationship between cinema and American political culture more widely, and the social, cultural and political history of California.
BG: So what was the catalyst that got you first into Hollywood and politics?
IS: The relationship of politics to movies has always intrigued me, and my own taste had gravitated towards what were broadly termed political films a long while ago. Movies like ‘Mr Smith Goes to Washington’, ‘All the President's Men’ and ‘JFK’. But really it all came together when I was a grad student studying California politics; I was interested in why people who'd never stood for office before would try to win election races at a very high level first time out, principally getting elected to congress in other words.
The political scientist David Canon wrote a really influential book for me and for my research at the time, and it was called ‘Actors, Athletes and Astronauts’, and in it Canon claimed there was mounting evidence that these were the routes to high office. In other words, people from the entertainment industry, sports stars or people who'd done heroic acts of derring-do. I applied Canon's theory to my own research looking at candidates in California during the 1970s, 80s and early 90s who wanted to run for the House of Representatives, the federal House of Representatives, and before I knew it I was implicitly predicting the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger to the governorship of California.
BG: And this relationship between party politics and Hollywood, when did it first take hold really?
IS: I suppose I'd make the claim that politics and the movies have always been inextricably linked, but really it was the 1930s, The Depression, that put that relationship into sharp relief. The Hollywood studios, as they were growing in stature and influence through the 20s, were always perceived as conservative at least at the top among the moguls, and those moguls who came west were interested in developing an archetypal American persona.
So, many were Republicans and they imposed a pretty rigid conservative line in the studios, and remember at this time studio workers were beginning to unionize as we start to get into the 1930s. The moguls thought these were all going to make Hollywood a hotbed of left-wing politics and agitation, and that did happen: it's often forgotten that the 30s really were a period of deep unrest in and around the film industry; quite a lot of strikes, quite a lot of agitation going on and, to some degree, it made the moguls even more conservative.
The difference really was the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. That began to change things. First of all, Roosevelt was a Democrat and there hadn't been one of those in the White House for 12 years, so really that was going back to the beginning of Hollywood's infancy really, so they weren't quite the force on the national stage they were by the early 1930s. And second, FDR understood that from the off if he wanted to communicate his new deal policies to the wider population he had to be both a broadcasting star himself – so he created his famous fireside chats, as you know, his weekly radio broadcast to the nation – and he needed to cultivate a relationship with Hollywood that would sell, however implicitly, the idea of economic and social regeneration in America.
BG: And how did World War II affect Hollywood's output?
IS: The war maintained that political connection and, of course, Hollywood was deeply involved in propaganda for the military by way of organizations like the Office of War Information. After the war the Cold War provided impetus for topics and at the same time the prevalence of film noir as a genre provided an aesthetic base for Hollywood to continue to make films with a social and cultural agenda to them, if not an outright political ideology.
So you've got post-war movies like ‘The Best Years Of Our Lives’ that contemplated the nation's priorities after the war; films like Frank Capra's largely underrated ‘State of the Union’ with Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn; Robert Rossen’s ‘All the King's Men’; and then a little bit later ‘A Face in the Crowd’ directed by Elia Kazan. All of these made an impression in the late 40s and at the turn of the 50s but, of course, the coming and growing anti-communist force during that era distracted Hollywood as well, and it scared off filmmakers and the studios from much further inquiry and investigation.
BG: Fascinating. And what followed in the 60s and 70s?
IS: So by the time we get to the 1960s and 1970s you have a different kind of force at work, different kind of agenda is emerging. Conspiracy and paranoia thrillers like the classic ‘Manchurian Candidate’ from 1962 and then in the later decade ‘The Parallax View’ with Warren Beatty and ‘Three Days of the Condor’ with Robert Redford all suggested an American political landscape dominated by shady cabals and big corporations unaccountable to anyone. And these films began to tap into the mood of disillusionment with politics that had finally come to fruition with the Watergate scandal in the midst of the Nixon administration in the early 1970s.
BG: Indeed. I literally forced Jack Clark, who I work with, who's 25, to watch ‘All The President's Men’ last night so he was aware of 70's paranoia. Anyway, please continue.
IS: Hollywood generally was always suspicious enough of someone like Ronald Reagan – who was an insider, of course – not to trust him entirely. Reagan had previously been a New Deal Democrat who turned over to the Republican party and became governor of California in the 1960s before he became President.
The Clinton era followed a pattern established by John F. Kennedy that Hollywood was to be cultivated and money should be sought, endorsements gathered, that kind of thing, and it was very successful for Clinton during the 1990s.
By the time of the George Bush administration in the 2000s, Bush largely eschewed Hollywood: he didn't feel it was the kind of community that was very sympathetic, probably rightly, to some of his politics. Although in the immediate post-9/11 era there was an unlikely alliance between the administration and the Hollywood studios and some of the unions like the Screenwriters’ Guild that tacitly supported The War On Terror in the backdrop to 9/11.
The Obama years brought in endorsements even from those who resisted political involvement. So big celebrities, musical stars like Bruce Springsteen who'd been very loathe to support and come out publicly for candidates in the past, came forward for somebody like Obama, who it was thought was really going to change not just American politics but really the whole of American life, American society at that time.
The Trump years followed, of course, and that was quite some reaction as you know, and in many ways the Trump years have been a masterclass in someone saying how much their personally loved and how they're admired only for such communities – and Hollywood has been most particularly vocal in this – only for communities to refute that claim entirely about Trump in many ways.
BG: And in what ways have films affected government policy rather than a vice versa?
IS: The wider political landscape has seen the exposure of things like American nuclear policy, for example, in a movie like ‘The China Syndrome’ in the late 1970s starring Jane Fonda, a film that appeared around the time at the near nuclear meltdown disaster a 3 Mile Island in Pennsylvania.
But perhaps one of the most obvious examples of influence is, of course, Oliver Stone's ‘JFK’ from 1991. A film that had such traction beyond the pages of review sections of the magazines and newspapers that it eventually resulted in the U.S Congress passing what is known as the Assassination Records Collection Act which set up a review board that over the past 30 years or so has released millions of pages of previously redacted material. JFK caused such a storm over the official story of Kennedy's assassination in 1963 that the American Congress quietly realised it was actually the custodian of a history that frankly few accepted anymore, if they ever had; and Stone, who gave testimony to Congress himself, was well aware of the impact that his film was having and the influence it was having over people's public perception that the Warren Commission Report of 1964, intimating that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin who had killed Kennedy, was simply not believed by the wider American populace.
BG: And you interviewed Oliver Stone. That must have been something?
IS: I did find Stone absolutely fascinating to interview, and subsequently I began to learn a lot more about what motivated him, and understand the years after I'd interviewed him – which was around about 2012/2013 – I began to understand a great deal more about what it was he was telling me at the time, particularly when I reviewed his first book of memoirs a couple of years ago, ‘Chasing The Light’.
In a way Stone encapsulates some of those contradictory impulses in Hollywood. He very much wanted to tell his own stories when he came to Hollywood and it just so happened that those stories and the history that he was a part of, and growing up in, during the 1960s and 1970s was really a time of fraction and disjuncture and a very kind of conflictual time for the United States and for American history more generally.
Stone understood the great opportunities and principles that are at the heart of the American ideal, but he also understood well the terrible costs that were paid for some of those principles. Notably in Vietnam where Stone served with distinction and then made later three very different films about the conflict. But at the same time you know he's kind of an establishment figure: he understands Hollywood's an industry and he works within its confines for good and for ill … I'll tell you when I asked who he most admired in American cinema – thinking that I had a list in my head of the kind of names he would go to – he straightaway said Steven Spielberg, not the filmmaker you might automatically assume to be somebody Stone would think of as a real inspiration. But the point was that Stone admired Spielberg's freedom within the system, the ability to make films on his terms. Stone might not have made a film like ‘Lincoln’ the way Spielberg did, or ‘The Post’, or ‘Bridge of Spies’ or more subject matter you could see Stone being attracted to, but I think he just admires Spielberg's craft and his determination not to be swayed by fads and taste to do what he wants. That, for so many for so many political filmmakers indeed, is an enormous attraction: the freedom to be able to dictate your own projects and mould them to your vision, however collaborative that vision might seem. So I think Stone would tell you he managed longevity and he managed to kind of mould his political vision because he made films on time and to budget, and certainly he delivered a run of movies from ‘Salvador’ in the mid-1980s, all the way he's through to probably ‘Natural Born Killers’ a decade later, that were commercial but were also critically challenging movies that audiences wanted to see, and which in Stone's case tapped into a zeitgeist that few filmmakers can ever achieve. But with movies like ‘Platoon’, ‘Born on the Fourth of July’, ‘The Doors’, ‘JFK’ and even ‘Nixon’, as well as ‘Natural Born Killers’, Stone had a run of films that did all of that and more. He understood about maintaining relations with the studios – even though he didn't always agree with them by any means – but that's why he's managed to mould such a long-standing career for himself.
BG: A compelling character indeed. Many thanks for your time, Ian. It's been great.
IS: Thanks very much for having me. Thank you.
BG: This has been the UK Desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers.
Interview: The Drive-In: Outdoor Cinema in 1950s America and the Popular Imagination.
September 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Guy Barefoot, Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of Leicester (UK).
September 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Guy Barefoot, Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of Leicester (UK).
Interview Start: 33 minutes 36 seconds
Interview Transcript
BG: Hi, this is the UK desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory. This evening we're going to be travelling back in time to explore the origins and development of a special place which lies at the very heart of vintage Americana—the drive-in cinema. Our guide on this unique journey will be an honorary visiting fellow from the University of Leicester in the UK and author of a new book called ‘The Drive-In: Outdoor Cinema in 1950s America and the Popular Imagination.’
GB: Hi, my name is Guy Barefoot. I'm a historian of American cinema, mainly of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and that has increasingly meant looking at the film program, where films were shown, who watched them, and sometimes what else audiences did at the cinema.
BG: What originally attracted you to the subject of the drive-in cinema?
GB: I started the search for my book, which should be out in December, around five years ago. I was initially interested in the origin of the drive-in's reputation as a passion pit. What soon became clear was that there were two dominant, occasionally overlapping but largely contradictory views of the drive-in. For some, drive-ins and drive-in movies meant audiences in their teens or just after and exploitation films—that is films with sensationalist material or marketing. In the 1950s, from the recollection of fans to overviews of film exhibition associated with family visits to the cinema, and tended to say less about the films than that. For instance, there were drive-ins where people got their laundry done while the movie played.
BG: Their laundry? I can't think of a more rebellious act.
GB: Interesting though that was, I wanted to know more about where these cinemas were in relation to urban centres, who went to them, what films they showed, or whether it was true that, as the most substantial book on the topic claimed, no one in the '50s or '60s went to the drive-in to see the movie.
BG: I can imagine. So, when did the first drive-in open in North America, and who were the enterprising architects behind it?
GB: The generally accepted starting date of the drive-in was June 6th, 1933, when Richard Hollingshead Junior opened his drive-in just outside Camden, New Jersey. There had been outdoor screenings before that date, notably what were called ‘Air domes.’ There were even occasions when people may have watched films while sitting in their cars. But Hollingshead and his business partner, Willie Warren Spez, were distinctive in taking out a patent for showing films outdoors in front of a series of ramps designed to give the occupants of parked cars an unobstructed view of the screen. Hollingshead argued that that turned the car into a private theatre box, allowing people to talk, eat, smoke, or bring on their noisy children without disrupting others, and that it brought films to people who might not go to an indoor cinema.
BG: Genius. What could possibly go wrong?
GB: Drive-ins, at least those from the 1950s or earlier, tend to be associated with films that were old, shown in poor-quality prints, low budget, or not from the Hollywood major studios.
BG: Oh.
GB: The films that they did show were not screened or heard in the best conditions. Sound was a particular problem and only partly improved after the Second World War when drive-ins introduced individual speakers attached to car windows. Surrounding lights in the sky or neighbouring buildings did not help the clarity of the screen image. It didn't help either if it was raining, and mosquitoes were another problem.
BG: Mosquitoes, I see. And what else?
GB: Drive-ins were limited by the fact that they could not show films while it was daylight and, outside the South, by the fact that for much of the year, it was too cold to show films at all. The growth in the number of drive-ins in the late 1940s and the 1950s meant that there were summer periods when more people in the US were watching films outdoors and indoors. While some treated the drive-in business as a gimmick before the Second World War, it became too big to be dismissed as that after the war.
BG: The resilience of popular culture, and the tickets must have been much cheaper than those for indoor cinemas.
GB: The admission charge did tend to be relatively low, and many drive-ins let children in for free to the annoyance of distributors who made their money from taking a percentage of the box office take. In comparison with indoor cinemas, a higher proportion of drive-in takings tended to come from food and drink sales. In the 1950s, most drive-ins also had a children's playground, sometimes elaborate facilities with, for example, a miniature train. In effect, some drive-ins were amusement parks.
BG: Fascinating. And what were the types of films screened at these drive-ins in the 1950s?
GB: The drive-in experience, looked at from the 1950s, tended to have programs that were similar to neighbouring indoor cinemas. That is, they showed a lot of Westerns and a lot of action films, but also films that had won the Oscars that year—Disney films, other Hollywood films, and non-Hollywood films with exploitation potential, including the occasional film from overseas. My examination of 1958 box office records for three drive-ins in Little Rock, Arkansas, revealed that the Brigitte Bardot film ‘And God Created Woman’ took the most money, narrowly beating the biblical epic ‘The Ten Commandments.’ However, Hollinshead's drive-in tended to show films from poverty row studios, that is studios that specialised in low-budget drama films and the odd British film. In some areas, there were drive-ins that showed Spanish-language films. The overall point is that the drive-in program was broader than has generally been assumed, and while they did not compete with downtown first-run cinemas, overtime more drive-ins showed films at the same time as other cinemas.
BG: Interesting. Do you have a specific example?
GB: One of the drive-ins I looked at in Phoenix, Arizona, started out in 1951 as the Twin Open Air, with one screen showing Westerns and other action films and what they called a variety program on the other screen. It was then split into two drive-ins. One was renamed ‘Acres of Fun,’ and by the end of the 1950s, it was screening double bills, such as ‘I Was a Teenage Werewolf’ and ‘Invasion of the Saucer Men,’ as well as films from ‘Bambi’ to ‘Some Like It Hot.’ The other was renamed "The Peso," and it showed Spanish-language films, mainly Mexican films.
BG: Were there any complaints from local people when these drive-in cinemas suddenly started springing up in their area?
GB: The relationship between drive-ins and local communities also varied. If you look at local newspapers, you will certainly come across reports of objections to a proposed drive-in and complaints about the behaviour at the drive-in or what was being shown at the drive-in. Exhibitors, however, often did their best to integrate their business into the local community, whether by organising children's events or becoming involved in the community in other ways.
BG: These days, most people associate 1950s drive-in cinemas with rude and rowdy teenagers, but in historical terms, this isn't strictly true, is it?
GB: Throughout the 1950s, exhibitors insisted that their main audience was the family, which generally meant couples with young children. Overall, at least before the 1960s, teenagers formed a minority of the cinema audience and did not necessarily prefer outdoor to indoor moviegoing. However, they were going into a significant minority, and exhibitors who emphasised the family audience were, in part, attempting to downplay the reputation the drive-in had from the beginning as a dating venue or passion pit. So yes, teenagers who had access to a car did go to the drive-in, and in the second half of the 1950s, films aimed at teenagers were shown at drive-ins as well as indoor cinemas, though they made up a relatively small part of the program.
BG: And what other types of audience did the exhibitors accommodate?
GB: As well as emphasising the family audience, some exhibitors and commentators wrote about the drive-in as a place where different generations and income groups could mix. Even the drive-ins were more welcoming to black audiences than other cinemas, if that was true in some places, it was not elsewhere. Into the 1960s, there were drive-ins that segregated black and white audiences, others that excluded black audiences, and a small number of drive-ins for black audiences. There were ways in which drive-ins were different, but they were part of a nation in which segregation was widespread, to the extent that it did not generally need to be explicitly stated.
BG: Sobering thoughts. Anyway, what about the representation of drive-in cinemas in wider culture, particularly on screen?
GB: The drive-in has played a role in Hollywood films ever since the 1949 film ‘White Heat,’ when James Cagney's Cody Jarrett evaded the law by turning into Burbank's Sunvale Drive-in. It's also evoked in numerous song lyrics, various novels, and photographs, from Robert Frank's mid-1950s drive-in movie ‘Detroit’ to later images of abandoned drive-ins. What's fascinating about these is their differences. Almost from the start, drive-ins had a disruptive or, at least, disreputable reputation. They've increasingly been viewed with nostalgia, but even that nostalgia has different sides. It can be for an imagined 1950s innocence. Drive-in scenes in films such as ‘The Lords of Flatbush‘ and ‘Grease’ were part of a 1970s trend that looked back to the 1950s teenagers in different ways, and in the 1970s and 1980s, the drive-in was also becoming increasingly associated with horror and other forms of exploitation cinema. As others noted, the subsequent circulation of such films as driving movies on DVD or other formats has itself been a form of nostalgia. Drive-in films set in the past also lend themselves to coming-of-age narratives, whether that means children in the 1996 film ‘Frankenstein and Me’ sneaking into a driving screening of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ or teenagers meeting at a Cape Cod drive-in in the summer of 1991 in the 2017 film ‘Hot Summer Nights.’ Drive-ins also feature on-screen as part of contemporary Roadside America, the sort of place a car might drive in 1949 in ‘White Heat’ or in, say, ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’ in 1974.
BG: ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’ is a great film. I thoroughly enjoyed that when I was a kid.
GB: I guess the fact that they've been part of the actual landscape of roadside America and part of the experience of growing up for many people explains their screen presence, though that can vary from the opening shot of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ which shows the blank screen of an almost empty Texas drive-in in daylight, to the crane shot of the neon-lit drive-in sign in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.’
BG: I fear the beginning of the end is about to arrive.
GB: Published figures suggest that drive-in capacity and takings fluctuated but overall were increasing into the 1970s, even though the number of drive-ins had decreased. Drive-ins closed more rapidly in the 1980s. In part, that was because owners of drive-ins built out of town on what were, in the 1940s, or the late 1940s, or the 1950s, relatively low-cost land could get a quicker return from selling to a late 20th-century property developer. Particularly when urban expansion meant that the surrounding area was no longer open country. Beyond that, an increasing emphasis on, in some instance, X-rated films was accompanied by a decline in family audiences. While, over time, indoor multiplexes and different video formats for home viewing attracted more of the youth market. It may also be that there were more potential dating venues after the 1950s. While smaller cars with bucket seats did not help those who wanted the drive-in to live up to its passion pit reputation.
BG: Such a shame, the rise of capitalism at the expense of the community. Anyway, thank you so much, Guy, for taking us on such an enlightening journey into the past. I'm sure you've conjured up a lot of strong cinematic memories for many of our listeners.
GB: Thank you.
BG: And good luck with your book, ‘The Drive-In: Outdoor Cinema in 1950s America and the Popular Imagination.’ published by Bloomsbury, it says here in December 2023. This has been the UK desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers!
BG: Hi, this is the UK desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory. This evening we're going to be travelling back in time to explore the origins and development of a special place which lies at the very heart of vintage Americana—the drive-in cinema. Our guide on this unique journey will be an honorary visiting fellow from the University of Leicester in the UK and author of a new book called ‘The Drive-In: Outdoor Cinema in 1950s America and the Popular Imagination.’
GB: Hi, my name is Guy Barefoot. I'm a historian of American cinema, mainly of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and that has increasingly meant looking at the film program, where films were shown, who watched them, and sometimes what else audiences did at the cinema.
BG: What originally attracted you to the subject of the drive-in cinema?
GB: I started the search for my book, which should be out in December, around five years ago. I was initially interested in the origin of the drive-in's reputation as a passion pit. What soon became clear was that there were two dominant, occasionally overlapping but largely contradictory views of the drive-in. For some, drive-ins and drive-in movies meant audiences in their teens or just after and exploitation films—that is films with sensationalist material or marketing. In the 1950s, from the recollection of fans to overviews of film exhibition associated with family visits to the cinema, and tended to say less about the films than that. For instance, there were drive-ins where people got their laundry done while the movie played.
BG: Their laundry? I can't think of a more rebellious act.
GB: Interesting though that was, I wanted to know more about where these cinemas were in relation to urban centres, who went to them, what films they showed, or whether it was true that, as the most substantial book on the topic claimed, no one in the '50s or '60s went to the drive-in to see the movie.
BG: I can imagine. So, when did the first drive-in open in North America, and who were the enterprising architects behind it?
GB: The generally accepted starting date of the drive-in was June 6th, 1933, when Richard Hollingshead Junior opened his drive-in just outside Camden, New Jersey. There had been outdoor screenings before that date, notably what were called ‘Air domes.’ There were even occasions when people may have watched films while sitting in their cars. But Hollingshead and his business partner, Willie Warren Spez, were distinctive in taking out a patent for showing films outdoors in front of a series of ramps designed to give the occupants of parked cars an unobstructed view of the screen. Hollingshead argued that that turned the car into a private theatre box, allowing people to talk, eat, smoke, or bring on their noisy children without disrupting others, and that it brought films to people who might not go to an indoor cinema.
BG: Genius. What could possibly go wrong?
GB: Drive-ins, at least those from the 1950s or earlier, tend to be associated with films that were old, shown in poor-quality prints, low budget, or not from the Hollywood major studios.
BG: Oh.
GB: The films that they did show were not screened or heard in the best conditions. Sound was a particular problem and only partly improved after the Second World War when drive-ins introduced individual speakers attached to car windows. Surrounding lights in the sky or neighbouring buildings did not help the clarity of the screen image. It didn't help either if it was raining, and mosquitoes were another problem.
BG: Mosquitoes, I see. And what else?
GB: Drive-ins were limited by the fact that they could not show films while it was daylight and, outside the South, by the fact that for much of the year, it was too cold to show films at all. The growth in the number of drive-ins in the late 1940s and the 1950s meant that there were summer periods when more people in the US were watching films outdoors and indoors. While some treated the drive-in business as a gimmick before the Second World War, it became too big to be dismissed as that after the war.
BG: The resilience of popular culture, and the tickets must have been much cheaper than those for indoor cinemas.
GB: The admission charge did tend to be relatively low, and many drive-ins let children in for free to the annoyance of distributors who made their money from taking a percentage of the box office take. In comparison with indoor cinemas, a higher proportion of drive-in takings tended to come from food and drink sales. In the 1950s, most drive-ins also had a children's playground, sometimes elaborate facilities with, for example, a miniature train. In effect, some drive-ins were amusement parks.
BG: Fascinating. And what were the types of films screened at these drive-ins in the 1950s?
GB: The drive-in experience, looked at from the 1950s, tended to have programs that were similar to neighbouring indoor cinemas. That is, they showed a lot of Westerns and a lot of action films, but also films that had won the Oscars that year—Disney films, other Hollywood films, and non-Hollywood films with exploitation potential, including the occasional film from overseas. My examination of 1958 box office records for three drive-ins in Little Rock, Arkansas, revealed that the Brigitte Bardot film ‘And God Created Woman’ took the most money, narrowly beating the biblical epic ‘The Ten Commandments.’ However, Hollinshead's drive-in tended to show films from poverty row studios, that is studios that specialised in low-budget drama films and the odd British film. In some areas, there were drive-ins that showed Spanish-language films. The overall point is that the drive-in program was broader than has generally been assumed, and while they did not compete with downtown first-run cinemas, overtime more drive-ins showed films at the same time as other cinemas.
BG: Interesting. Do you have a specific example?
GB: One of the drive-ins I looked at in Phoenix, Arizona, started out in 1951 as the Twin Open Air, with one screen showing Westerns and other action films and what they called a variety program on the other screen. It was then split into two drive-ins. One was renamed ‘Acres of Fun,’ and by the end of the 1950s, it was screening double bills, such as ‘I Was a Teenage Werewolf’ and ‘Invasion of the Saucer Men,’ as well as films from ‘Bambi’ to ‘Some Like It Hot.’ The other was renamed "The Peso," and it showed Spanish-language films, mainly Mexican films.
BG: Were there any complaints from local people when these drive-in cinemas suddenly started springing up in their area?
GB: The relationship between drive-ins and local communities also varied. If you look at local newspapers, you will certainly come across reports of objections to a proposed drive-in and complaints about the behaviour at the drive-in or what was being shown at the drive-in. Exhibitors, however, often did their best to integrate their business into the local community, whether by organising children's events or becoming involved in the community in other ways.
BG: These days, most people associate 1950s drive-in cinemas with rude and rowdy teenagers, but in historical terms, this isn't strictly true, is it?
GB: Throughout the 1950s, exhibitors insisted that their main audience was the family, which generally meant couples with young children. Overall, at least before the 1960s, teenagers formed a minority of the cinema audience and did not necessarily prefer outdoor to indoor moviegoing. However, they were going into a significant minority, and exhibitors who emphasised the family audience were, in part, attempting to downplay the reputation the drive-in had from the beginning as a dating venue or passion pit. So yes, teenagers who had access to a car did go to the drive-in, and in the second half of the 1950s, films aimed at teenagers were shown at drive-ins as well as indoor cinemas, though they made up a relatively small part of the program.
BG: And what other types of audience did the exhibitors accommodate?
GB: As well as emphasising the family audience, some exhibitors and commentators wrote about the drive-in as a place where different generations and income groups could mix. Even the drive-ins were more welcoming to black audiences than other cinemas, if that was true in some places, it was not elsewhere. Into the 1960s, there were drive-ins that segregated black and white audiences, others that excluded black audiences, and a small number of drive-ins for black audiences. There were ways in which drive-ins were different, but they were part of a nation in which segregation was widespread, to the extent that it did not generally need to be explicitly stated.
BG: Sobering thoughts. Anyway, what about the representation of drive-in cinemas in wider culture, particularly on screen?
GB: The drive-in has played a role in Hollywood films ever since the 1949 film ‘White Heat,’ when James Cagney's Cody Jarrett evaded the law by turning into Burbank's Sunvale Drive-in. It's also evoked in numerous song lyrics, various novels, and photographs, from Robert Frank's mid-1950s drive-in movie ‘Detroit’ to later images of abandoned drive-ins. What's fascinating about these is their differences. Almost from the start, drive-ins had a disruptive or, at least, disreputable reputation. They've increasingly been viewed with nostalgia, but even that nostalgia has different sides. It can be for an imagined 1950s innocence. Drive-in scenes in films such as ‘The Lords of Flatbush‘ and ‘Grease’ were part of a 1970s trend that looked back to the 1950s teenagers in different ways, and in the 1970s and 1980s, the drive-in was also becoming increasingly associated with horror and other forms of exploitation cinema. As others noted, the subsequent circulation of such films as driving movies on DVD or other formats has itself been a form of nostalgia. Drive-in films set in the past also lend themselves to coming-of-age narratives, whether that means children in the 1996 film ‘Frankenstein and Me’ sneaking into a driving screening of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ or teenagers meeting at a Cape Cod drive-in in the summer of 1991 in the 2017 film ‘Hot Summer Nights.’ Drive-ins also feature on-screen as part of contemporary Roadside America, the sort of place a car might drive in 1949 in ‘White Heat’ or in, say, ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’ in 1974.
BG: ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’ is a great film. I thoroughly enjoyed that when I was a kid.
GB: I guess the fact that they've been part of the actual landscape of roadside America and part of the experience of growing up for many people explains their screen presence, though that can vary from the opening shot of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ which shows the blank screen of an almost empty Texas drive-in in daylight, to the crane shot of the neon-lit drive-in sign in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.’
BG: I fear the beginning of the end is about to arrive.
GB: Published figures suggest that drive-in capacity and takings fluctuated but overall were increasing into the 1970s, even though the number of drive-ins had decreased. Drive-ins closed more rapidly in the 1980s. In part, that was because owners of drive-ins built out of town on what were, in the 1940s, or the late 1940s, or the 1950s, relatively low-cost land could get a quicker return from selling to a late 20th-century property developer. Particularly when urban expansion meant that the surrounding area was no longer open country. Beyond that, an increasing emphasis on, in some instance, X-rated films was accompanied by a decline in family audiences. While, over time, indoor multiplexes and different video formats for home viewing attracted more of the youth market. It may also be that there were more potential dating venues after the 1950s. While smaller cars with bucket seats did not help those who wanted the drive-in to live up to its passion pit reputation.
BG: Such a shame, the rise of capitalism at the expense of the community. Anyway, thank you so much, Guy, for taking us on such an enlightening journey into the past. I'm sure you've conjured up a lot of strong cinematic memories for many of our listeners.
GB: Thank you.
BG: And good luck with your book, ‘The Drive-In: Outdoor Cinema in 1950s America and the Popular Imagination.’ published by Bloomsbury, it says here in December 2023. This has been the UK desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers!
Interview: Queer Horror, Marxism and Hollywood
September 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Darren Elliot-Smith, Senior Lecturer in Film and Gender at the University of Stirling (UK).
September 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Darren Elliot-Smith, Senior Lecturer in Film and Gender at the University of Stirling (UK).
Interview Start: 40 minutes 33 seconds
Interview Transcript
BG: Hi, this is the UK desk for Arts Express, and my name's Brett Gregory. Over recent weeks, we've been exploring cinema, not only as a playground for entertainment, escapism, and egos but also as an economic, political, and ideological battleground for social class, gender, ethnicity, technology, and, as we're going to discover in this evening's episode, sexuality.
DES: Hi, my name is Darren Elliott-Smith. I'm a senior lecturer in film and gender, and I teach at the University of Stirling in Scotland in the UK. My research specialisms are in the representation of LGBTQ people in the horror genre, and I'm arguing that it's more recently that this has moved out from the shadowy realms of implicit and symbolic representation of yesteryear.
BG: So how are we to understand queer theory as a critical approach to cinema and its relationship to, say, Marxism?
DES: I suppose it depends on your understanding of queer as a theory and how the term and the ideology have altered in recent years. For me, it's often kind of obvious that there are at least two strands to queer theory. One being around identity politics and attempting to offer what Harry Benchoff describes as an oxymoronic community of difference. So this is a kind of paradox, I suppose, in itself that captures the problematic existence within queer culture and queer theory. But queer, as a word and as an ideology, in my understanding, also still disturbs some people, depending on your social persuasion, or your generation or background, in lots of different ways. And in terms of where this fits with Marxism, queer activism all drew upon socialist rhetoric that called for change, a change whereby the queer collective were being marginalised, crushed, and effectively killed by capitalist, imperialist, middle-class, white CIS hetero patriarchy. And Pride, though far removed from the activist origins of Pride marches in the 1970s, 1980s, still retains some of that need for change to look after the collective and therefore the individual as they exist within the mass, free from the oppression of that ruling elite.
BG: And how does this inform a queer understanding of the horror genre in particular?
DES: Interestingly, many of the works of early horror film theorists in the 1970s, particularly the definitive work of queer film scholar Robin Wood, utilised both a lesbian and gay approach with a socialist and Marxist approach as well. So he argued that, using a little bit of psychoanalysis merged with Marxism, that those ideals and energies that don't fit the bourgeois capitalist, imperialist, and white patriarchal culture of production and reproduction are cast out as other across this imaginary border, which then sets up the binary of us versus them. The problem is that actually within horror and within a lot of Gothic narratives, the ‘them’ or ‘they’ sometimes come back. The fact that they always come back, repression and oppression eventually is shown to fail in the horror narrative, causing this monster, creature, killer, or infection, whatever it is, to come back and threaten that pure individual that's meant to represent the US.
BG: Can you give us a specific film example where the ‘us’ and ‘them’ binary becomes blurred?
DES: in kind of focusing on this theory. He collapsed the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ binary, and we see this most critically skewered in films like George Romero's ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ whereby the undead, the zombie, the returned, kind of reanimated corpse who once was human, once was us, become a ‘them’ figure, and then they return to assimilate everybody else into this undead horde, where children eat parents, and the Soul Survivor, which in this case is Ben, black male, is gunned down by white vigilantes at the end of the film, who stake him for one of them, even though he's not zombified; he's actually still human and very much alive. And Romero's point is that the gun-toting white male doesn't see any difference; actually, all exist in an othered state.
BG: So what is the scope of horror films and television shows which is under consideration here?
DES: Queer horror, although I'd argue that all horror is queer in that it seems to represent the odd, the strange, the non-normative, and as a genre, it seeks to distress, to upset and to challenge, and to scare. It's for me a set of films and TV shows that are made, normally by LGBTQ creatives, that foreground queerness as an element of representation in some way, but this subgenre also includes historical considerations as influences upon these newer out contemporary horror films and shows. So, in order to do that, we have to look at what a lot of academics and myself call closeted texts like, Interview With a Vampire, The Hunger, Psycho, Bride of Frankenstein, all these films that kind of clearly have LGBTQ themes running through them but never really explicitly kind of outwardly state that they are. So they involve some kind of symbolic interpretation or reading.
BG: From a historical perspective. The Hays Code, which was introduced in the 1930s, clearly had a resounding effect on cinema's representations, narratives, and themes. Could you tell us a little bit more about this?
DES: So, the Hays Code was set up after a series of scandals rocked Hollywood, and people were worried about the deplored world of filmmaking as one that might infect supposedly decent heteronormative family life. One particular case that's often cited is the star Fatty Arbuckle being accused of raping a young starlet in the early 1920s. So, Will Hays set up a production code that would monitor the content of all film productions and those that were released in US cinemas, preventing certain elements and themes and narratives that they deemed would seek to poison US ideology. It's Vito Russo's documentary and book ‘The Celluloid Closet’ outlines this really well in terms of the impact on LGBTQ+ folks. The rule that existed within the Hays Code strictly prohibited any depiction of what was called "sex perversion," impacting any explicit representation of any non-normative sexuality or romance. So, Some films had to get around this by using symbolism, inference, suggestion so as to ensure that their true audience were being represented in and seen in films. Some directors, queer-affiliated directors, were kind of doing this deliberately, coding their films in a way.
BG: For example?
DES: The Universal franchise of horror films from the '30s and the '40s were actually playing with the limitations of the code as well. It's been kind of recently introduced so the suggestion here becomes quite pointed at times, and there's a practice of rebellion in a small way, and this was more pushed, I suppose, by the makers of these films. So if we can kind of go to certain auteurs, film directors like Todd Browning, whose sexuality was often kind of questioned but never fully defined, he made the pre-code film ‘Freaks,’ which is problematic but also really interesting kind of queer film in its representation of non-normative body types. There's also James Whale, who is a gay British director who ramped up the suggestion in his version of ‘Frankenstein,’ that he directed and even more so in the kind of more comedic and kind of almost parodic ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ where we have this homo-erotic triangle literally exploding off the screen between Frankenstein the creature and Dr Pretorius as well.
BG: And once again Social Class is at play in such horror films as well isn’t it?
DES: Class definitely comes into it again, drawing on those early Marxist readings from Franco Moretti on the nature of the capitalist blood-sucking vampire configured more recently as a corporate CEO or landed gentry or an aristocrat versus the underclass working class proletariat of the zombie or a mindless slave. And we see a kind of a literal version of this in the depiction of Haitian voodoo in early RKO texts like ‘I Walk with a Zombie.’ But the queerness present in the upper classes, something I suppose that's reflected on as a consideration of effete queer men, idiosyncratic in their taste, often overindulged with an emphasis on the pursuit of overwhelmed senses, and that kind of stereotypical depiction of upper-class queerness is existent in early Gothic texts like ‘Jekyll and Hyde' and ‘Dorian Gray,’ where the upper classes are seen to wallow in debauchery that's propped up by generations of wealth, them having the time, the money, the power to indulge in seemingly perverse desires.
BG: And queer horror is still disrupting and destabilising popular conservative sensibility today as well, isn't it?
DES: Well, the recent remake of Hellraiser wasn't received so well by so-called purist horror fans. Um, they took against this more explicit queer content and they rejected in particular the idea of trans actor Jamie Clayton as the new Pinhead. I mean, not realizing that this film was written by a gay male author, directed by the same man, Clive Barker, and inspired by his experiences of BDSM queer practices that he saw in Berlin nightclubs. And it's quite clear that it's queer from the get-go.
BG: And your academic work presents is exploring the relationship between queer horror, trauma, and mental health, is that correct?
DES: So my recent work looks at the impact of neoconservative, neoliberal ideologies upon LGBTQ individuals' mental health and how horror and Gothic are often the go-to genre for the representation of this. So recently, we've seen a few films that foreground this, utilising horror tropes. ‘Hypochondriac’ from 2022 focuses on this young man who fears that he's inherited his mother's mental illness but sees himself split into two versions of himself: one is a wolf man, the other is this kind of non-normative, seemingly kind of normal queer individual. Other films like ‘Thelma’ from 2018, which is a Swedish supernatural film about a girl with Carrie-like powers who comes to terms with her own lesbianism that has been repressed by her staunch religious parents. And even the recent series of ‘American Horror Story: NYC’ tends to come to terms with personal and cultural trauma that's affected the queer community and also across the world, but particularly in New York. Via various, albeit from my perspective, they're quite clunky allegories and explicit narratives around the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
BG: And we must never forget that with the current rise in right-wing attitudes in both the US and the UK, there are real lives at stake here.
DES: So it seems that in the past few years, things have become even more obvious that being different, being LGBTQ in today's world can be scary. Our rights are being taken away one by one, these hard-won equalities that have been rolled back, and our existence as legally equal is increasingly becoming very precarious. So it's a really interesting time, I think, for theorists to And also from filmmakers to kind of think about the ways in which we can start to kind of think about how cultural theory that once oppressed and stigmatised queer people is now being reinterpreted, re expressed, and represented to allow queer filmmakers and theorists to take up that mode of address that can offer critiques of the establishment and of also our own subcultures and of those that still oppress us.
BG: Fantastic Darren, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Your cinematic observations have been both illuminating and important. This has been the UK desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers!
BG: Hi, this is the UK desk for Arts Express, and my name's Brett Gregory. Over recent weeks, we've been exploring cinema, not only as a playground for entertainment, escapism, and egos but also as an economic, political, and ideological battleground for social class, gender, ethnicity, technology, and, as we're going to discover in this evening's episode, sexuality.
DES: Hi, my name is Darren Elliott-Smith. I'm a senior lecturer in film and gender, and I teach at the University of Stirling in Scotland in the UK. My research specialisms are in the representation of LGBTQ people in the horror genre, and I'm arguing that it's more recently that this has moved out from the shadowy realms of implicit and symbolic representation of yesteryear.
BG: So how are we to understand queer theory as a critical approach to cinema and its relationship to, say, Marxism?
DES: I suppose it depends on your understanding of queer as a theory and how the term and the ideology have altered in recent years. For me, it's often kind of obvious that there are at least two strands to queer theory. One being around identity politics and attempting to offer what Harry Benchoff describes as an oxymoronic community of difference. So this is a kind of paradox, I suppose, in itself that captures the problematic existence within queer culture and queer theory. But queer, as a word and as an ideology, in my understanding, also still disturbs some people, depending on your social persuasion, or your generation or background, in lots of different ways. And in terms of where this fits with Marxism, queer activism all drew upon socialist rhetoric that called for change, a change whereby the queer collective were being marginalised, crushed, and effectively killed by capitalist, imperialist, middle-class, white CIS hetero patriarchy. And Pride, though far removed from the activist origins of Pride marches in the 1970s, 1980s, still retains some of that need for change to look after the collective and therefore the individual as they exist within the mass, free from the oppression of that ruling elite.
BG: And how does this inform a queer understanding of the horror genre in particular?
DES: Interestingly, many of the works of early horror film theorists in the 1970s, particularly the definitive work of queer film scholar Robin Wood, utilised both a lesbian and gay approach with a socialist and Marxist approach as well. So he argued that, using a little bit of psychoanalysis merged with Marxism, that those ideals and energies that don't fit the bourgeois capitalist, imperialist, and white patriarchal culture of production and reproduction are cast out as other across this imaginary border, which then sets up the binary of us versus them. The problem is that actually within horror and within a lot of Gothic narratives, the ‘them’ or ‘they’ sometimes come back. The fact that they always come back, repression and oppression eventually is shown to fail in the horror narrative, causing this monster, creature, killer, or infection, whatever it is, to come back and threaten that pure individual that's meant to represent the US.
BG: Can you give us a specific film example where the ‘us’ and ‘them’ binary becomes blurred?
DES: in kind of focusing on this theory. He collapsed the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ binary, and we see this most critically skewered in films like George Romero's ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ whereby the undead, the zombie, the returned, kind of reanimated corpse who once was human, once was us, become a ‘them’ figure, and then they return to assimilate everybody else into this undead horde, where children eat parents, and the Soul Survivor, which in this case is Ben, black male, is gunned down by white vigilantes at the end of the film, who stake him for one of them, even though he's not zombified; he's actually still human and very much alive. And Romero's point is that the gun-toting white male doesn't see any difference; actually, all exist in an othered state.
BG: So what is the scope of horror films and television shows which is under consideration here?
DES: Queer horror, although I'd argue that all horror is queer in that it seems to represent the odd, the strange, the non-normative, and as a genre, it seeks to distress, to upset and to challenge, and to scare. It's for me a set of films and TV shows that are made, normally by LGBTQ creatives, that foreground queerness as an element of representation in some way, but this subgenre also includes historical considerations as influences upon these newer out contemporary horror films and shows. So, in order to do that, we have to look at what a lot of academics and myself call closeted texts like, Interview With a Vampire, The Hunger, Psycho, Bride of Frankenstein, all these films that kind of clearly have LGBTQ themes running through them but never really explicitly kind of outwardly state that they are. So they involve some kind of symbolic interpretation or reading.
BG: From a historical perspective. The Hays Code, which was introduced in the 1930s, clearly had a resounding effect on cinema's representations, narratives, and themes. Could you tell us a little bit more about this?
DES: So, the Hays Code was set up after a series of scandals rocked Hollywood, and people were worried about the deplored world of filmmaking as one that might infect supposedly decent heteronormative family life. One particular case that's often cited is the star Fatty Arbuckle being accused of raping a young starlet in the early 1920s. So, Will Hays set up a production code that would monitor the content of all film productions and those that were released in US cinemas, preventing certain elements and themes and narratives that they deemed would seek to poison US ideology. It's Vito Russo's documentary and book ‘The Celluloid Closet’ outlines this really well in terms of the impact on LGBTQ+ folks. The rule that existed within the Hays Code strictly prohibited any depiction of what was called "sex perversion," impacting any explicit representation of any non-normative sexuality or romance. So, Some films had to get around this by using symbolism, inference, suggestion so as to ensure that their true audience were being represented in and seen in films. Some directors, queer-affiliated directors, were kind of doing this deliberately, coding their films in a way.
BG: For example?
DES: The Universal franchise of horror films from the '30s and the '40s were actually playing with the limitations of the code as well. It's been kind of recently introduced so the suggestion here becomes quite pointed at times, and there's a practice of rebellion in a small way, and this was more pushed, I suppose, by the makers of these films. So if we can kind of go to certain auteurs, film directors like Todd Browning, whose sexuality was often kind of questioned but never fully defined, he made the pre-code film ‘Freaks,’ which is problematic but also really interesting kind of queer film in its representation of non-normative body types. There's also James Whale, who is a gay British director who ramped up the suggestion in his version of ‘Frankenstein,’ that he directed and even more so in the kind of more comedic and kind of almost parodic ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ where we have this homo-erotic triangle literally exploding off the screen between Frankenstein the creature and Dr Pretorius as well.
BG: And once again Social Class is at play in such horror films as well isn’t it?
DES: Class definitely comes into it again, drawing on those early Marxist readings from Franco Moretti on the nature of the capitalist blood-sucking vampire configured more recently as a corporate CEO or landed gentry or an aristocrat versus the underclass working class proletariat of the zombie or a mindless slave. And we see a kind of a literal version of this in the depiction of Haitian voodoo in early RKO texts like ‘I Walk with a Zombie.’ But the queerness present in the upper classes, something I suppose that's reflected on as a consideration of effete queer men, idiosyncratic in their taste, often overindulged with an emphasis on the pursuit of overwhelmed senses, and that kind of stereotypical depiction of upper-class queerness is existent in early Gothic texts like ‘Jekyll and Hyde' and ‘Dorian Gray,’ where the upper classes are seen to wallow in debauchery that's propped up by generations of wealth, them having the time, the money, the power to indulge in seemingly perverse desires.
BG: And queer horror is still disrupting and destabilising popular conservative sensibility today as well, isn't it?
DES: Well, the recent remake of Hellraiser wasn't received so well by so-called purist horror fans. Um, they took against this more explicit queer content and they rejected in particular the idea of trans actor Jamie Clayton as the new Pinhead. I mean, not realizing that this film was written by a gay male author, directed by the same man, Clive Barker, and inspired by his experiences of BDSM queer practices that he saw in Berlin nightclubs. And it's quite clear that it's queer from the get-go.
BG: And your academic work presents is exploring the relationship between queer horror, trauma, and mental health, is that correct?
DES: So my recent work looks at the impact of neoconservative, neoliberal ideologies upon LGBTQ individuals' mental health and how horror and Gothic are often the go-to genre for the representation of this. So recently, we've seen a few films that foreground this, utilising horror tropes. ‘Hypochondriac’ from 2022 focuses on this young man who fears that he's inherited his mother's mental illness but sees himself split into two versions of himself: one is a wolf man, the other is this kind of non-normative, seemingly kind of normal queer individual. Other films like ‘Thelma’ from 2018, which is a Swedish supernatural film about a girl with Carrie-like powers who comes to terms with her own lesbianism that has been repressed by her staunch religious parents. And even the recent series of ‘American Horror Story: NYC’ tends to come to terms with personal and cultural trauma that's affected the queer community and also across the world, but particularly in New York. Via various, albeit from my perspective, they're quite clunky allegories and explicit narratives around the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
BG: And we must never forget that with the current rise in right-wing attitudes in both the US and the UK, there are real lives at stake here.
DES: So it seems that in the past few years, things have become even more obvious that being different, being LGBTQ in today's world can be scary. Our rights are being taken away one by one, these hard-won equalities that have been rolled back, and our existence as legally equal is increasingly becoming very precarious. So it's a really interesting time, I think, for theorists to And also from filmmakers to kind of think about the ways in which we can start to kind of think about how cultural theory that once oppressed and stigmatised queer people is now being reinterpreted, re expressed, and represented to allow queer filmmakers and theorists to take up that mode of address that can offer critiques of the establishment and of also our own subcultures and of those that still oppress us.
BG: Fantastic Darren, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Your cinematic observations have been both illuminating and important. This has been the UK desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers!
Interview: AI, Hollywood and the SAG-AFTRA strikes
August 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Dominic Lees, Associate Professor of Film at the University of Reading (UK)
August 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Dominic Lees, Associate Professor of Film at the University of Reading (UK)
Interview Start: 35 minutes 57 seconds
Interview Transcript
BG: Hi, this is the UK desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory. The SAG-AFTRA strike has been raging now since July 14th, 2023. As my special guest this evening explains, however, those on the picket lines right now are not simply fighting for fair labour contracts and streaming residuals; they are fighting for the very future of cinema itself.
DL: Hi, Brett. My name is Dominic Lees, and I'm an associate professor in filmmaking at the University of Reading, which is in the southeast of the UK. My research and my work are all about how artificial intelligence is impacting the film and television industries. Now, before I entered academia, I was a director of television drama for many years, producing a large amount of TV drama for the BBC, Channel 4, and independent television in the UK.
BG: Excellent, Dominic. You're precisely the man we need. So, tell us a little bit more about AI.
DL: So, if we think very broadly about what artificial intelligence is, the key thing is that it's not human or animal intelligence; it's machine-based intelligence.
BG: And what's the point? What are the goals?
DL: The goals of AI research have always been to get computers to perform recognizable human mental processes. To try and get a computer to reason, to look for things, to learn, to perceive - these have become key goals of artificial intelligence.
BG: I'm starting to get visions of HAL from ‘2001’. Anyway, when did all this start gaining traction?
DL: So, back in 2017, there was a breakthrough of deepfakes, and that was a key development of synthetic media. What the developers proved is that you could get a computer to learn about a subject's face and then learn about a target face. It could then replace one face in the movie image with another. This is a process of feeding hundreds of thousands of images of a subject into the computer. On that basis, the computer will learn about that face and then do the same for the target. For example, you could feed in thousands of images of Gal Gadot, and the computer will understand how her face is moving, how her expressions develop as she speaks, and it will use that knowledge when you come to the next task, which is to replace her face with another actor.
BG: I remember this story in the news. It doesn't turn out well.
DL: The really unpleasant thing that happened back in 2017 is that the reverse was going on. The first developers of this form of synthetic media used deepfakes to take out the faces of porn stars and replace them with actresses such as Gal Gadot. So, it became an extremely offensive and destructive use of women's images and the appropriation, non-consensually, of women's faces into adult movies. Deepfakes got an extremely bad reputation.
BG: Indeed. So, where do we go from here?
DL: I believe we're in a really difficult interim stage. Right now, If you see a video online and you think it might be a deepfake, there's no way you can tell unless you know how to identify the little glitches. But sometimes, defects are beautifully made and may be completely convincing. We don't have any processes, mechanisms, or good practices that media producers have to abide by. But those processes are just beginning. Watermarking of videos is coming in; these will be invisible ways in which you can tell whether or not a piece of video has been manipulated. The Content Authenticity Initiative is a great thing, which means that you'll be able to click on a picture and see through the metadata exactly when this was first produced and how this picture has been manipulated in its history before it reaches you.
BG: Hmm, still sounds a bit like the Wild West. How is the industry responding?
DL: In terms of film and television, I think we're going to agree on shared standards of disclosure. We found that audiences really care about whether or not a filmmaker tells them that they've been using synthetic media. The documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville made a film about Anthony Bourdain called 'Roadrunner,' and in it, he used voice cloning, an artificial intelligence process, in order to make it seem like Anthony Bourdain was reading his own email. But Morgan Neville didn't tell his audience that this is what he did, and when it came to light, he found that a really significant part of his audience was really angry that they hadn't been told that this fake artificial intelligence process had been used.
BG: And rightly so. But there is the Chechnya story, though, isn't it?
DL: David France, when he was making his film 'Welcome to Chechnya,' which was about the genocide of lesbian and gay people in Chechnya, used face replacement technology to protect the identities of the subjects of his film. David France gained huge respect for how he protected his subjects and also how he made sure that his audience was always aware of the artifice of the face replacement. It was always obvious to us while we were watching it that the faces were not those of the original people.
BG: See, conscientious and ethical practice in the media is possible. Please go on.
DL: So, filmmakers are making up, as they go along, different ethical approaches to how they use artificial intelligence and how they communicate with their audiences about the use of that artificial intelligence. When common standards have been established across the film and television industries, what will happen is we’ll move out of this rather confusing interim period where people really don't know how to use artificial intelligence. Audiences don't know whether artificial intelligence has been used in the material that they're watching, and what enters appears where everything is much more clear.
BG: So, basically a rule book. What are your thoughts on fictional filmmaking, you know, the movies?
DL: In terms of the film industry, we have to see this development of AI alongside what was already existing, which is the visual effects industry. We are very familiar with CGI (computer-generated imagery), being able to create extraordinary scenes, especially in action films. We've seen thousands of orcs charging down the mountainside, all created through visual effects means. And you can use visual effects to replace the faces of actors who've been recorded in a digital film.
BG: Now we're getting somewhere. The uncanny. Tell the Star Wars story.
DL: More than 20 years before director Gareth Edwards made the Star Wars film 'Rogue One,' Peter Cushing, the actor who played Grand Moff Tarkin, had died. Gareth Edwards wanted him resurrected in his film. So, he shot the scenes for Grand Moff Tarkin with the British actor Guy Henry and then used visual effects processes to replace Guy Henry's face with that of Peter Cushing. Now, that's a tremendously expensive process, as you know from watching the credits on blockbuster films; the number of visual effects supervisors credited can be in the hundreds. What artificial intelligence offers the movie industry is quicker, cheaper, and perhaps better quality ways of doing the same processes.
BG: Baudrillard and hyperreality, that's what I'm thinking right now.
DL: In the industrial revolution, manufacturers found ways to replace people with machines for labour, and that was cheaper, so done deal, that's what happened. But in the movies, do we want to replace human images? Do we want to replace actors with synthetic thespians? If we do that, would audiences want to see those synthetic characters on screen? Can we emotionally respond to synthetic movie characters? These are questions that are still out there.
BG: The owners of the means of reproduction searching for, paradoxically, authenticity.
DL: I think you're totally right. I think human authenticity is what we look for in most films. Films that lack that human authenticity are the ones that may suffer in the future. In the same way, there's an insignificant portion of the film audience that's sick to death of Hollywood tentpole movies and action sequences and seeks out independent films with more meaningful content relevant to our lives today. We may well find the same in the future, where we have some movies that are very driven by artificial intelligence-generated images, and a lot of the audience will turn their back on that and look for indie fare.
BG: Fingers crossed. So, what do you think is going to happen next?
DL: What I think is going to happen is that creative producers in the film industry are going to carefully evaluate artificial intelligence and think about exactly what kind of role they want it to play within movie making. There will be trials and failures. Sometimes it might look like a complete gimmick. Sometimes audiences might really relish it. We have to remember that gimmicks in the movie industry don't last. Look at the experience of 3D film, which has had two surges in the history of filmmaking, both of which fizzled out really quite quickly.
BG: Yeah, ‘Jaws 3-D’ was rubbish.
DL: More recently, if you look at Ang Lee's film 'Gemini Man,' in which Will Smith played himself and ended up fighting against a younger version of himself, that film failed and cost upwards of $200 million to the studios that produced it. There may have been several other reasons why the film wasn't a success, but the producers clearly thought that Will Smith against Will Smith, using technology to achieve that, would be a really attractive thing for audiences. And they were wrong.
BG: That's a shame. I really like Ang Lee as well. Anyway, let's get back to the industry, let's get back to industrial relations.
DL: Now, 2022, 2023 is the time when everything seems to have changed for artificial intelligence in the film industry. Remember that synthetic media means not just image but text. And last November, ChatGPT became publicly available, and we've all been playing with that chatbot to generate text. You can generate film scripts with that, as well as treatments or concepts for movies. And this has meant that artificial intelligence plays an absolutely central role in the disputes between the Writers Guild of America and the producers and studios.
BG: See, this is where it all goes dark.
DL: What the SAG-AFTRA strike is bringing up is the future of the industry. Imagine what it looks like if you're a young actor currently in drama school looking forward to your career. If the prospect for you is that when you go on set for your first movie, you're asked to go into a booth and your image and performance are completely captured for future use. What kind of career could you ever have?
BG: Hmm, exactly.
DL: Let's be really accurate, though, about what's going on in the strike. The Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers are talking about background actors. You know how small the image of a background actor is in the frame now. Artificial intelligence doesn't have much of a problem in replacing a small part of the frame, which is why producers know that the first screen performers they can replace are the background artists. So, leading actors right now are not so threatened by the technology for face replacement. But it's been terrific to see during the strike how most leading actors have been really supportive of defending the rights of background artists. And they certainly know that the technology isn't going to stop here. It may well develop to a state where it can start replacing leading actors on screen.
BG: Hmm, come on, Dominic, give us some good news.
DL: I'm really optimistic at the collective action of SAG-AFTRA and the WGA around artificial intelligence begins to make me think that creative freelance professionals in the film and television industries will be able to say no to producers when particular demands are made on them around artificial intelligence. There's really terrible levels of financial distress for creative professionals involved. But I think what they're doing is they're creating the building blocks for a future in which artificial intelligence in the movie industry will be used in a more responsible way.
BG: That's the spirit. They may take our dignity, but they'll never take our freedom. Nice one, Dominic. You've been great and given us loads of food for thought about this ongoing war between humans and robots. Take care. This has been the UK desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers.
BG: Hi, this is the UK desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory. The SAG-AFTRA strike has been raging now since July 14th, 2023. As my special guest this evening explains, however, those on the picket lines right now are not simply fighting for fair labour contracts and streaming residuals; they are fighting for the very future of cinema itself.
DL: Hi, Brett. My name is Dominic Lees, and I'm an associate professor in filmmaking at the University of Reading, which is in the southeast of the UK. My research and my work are all about how artificial intelligence is impacting the film and television industries. Now, before I entered academia, I was a director of television drama for many years, producing a large amount of TV drama for the BBC, Channel 4, and independent television in the UK.
BG: Excellent, Dominic. You're precisely the man we need. So, tell us a little bit more about AI.
DL: So, if we think very broadly about what artificial intelligence is, the key thing is that it's not human or animal intelligence; it's machine-based intelligence.
BG: And what's the point? What are the goals?
DL: The goals of AI research have always been to get computers to perform recognizable human mental processes. To try and get a computer to reason, to look for things, to learn, to perceive - these have become key goals of artificial intelligence.
BG: I'm starting to get visions of HAL from ‘2001’. Anyway, when did all this start gaining traction?
DL: So, back in 2017, there was a breakthrough of deepfakes, and that was a key development of synthetic media. What the developers proved is that you could get a computer to learn about a subject's face and then learn about a target face. It could then replace one face in the movie image with another. This is a process of feeding hundreds of thousands of images of a subject into the computer. On that basis, the computer will learn about that face and then do the same for the target. For example, you could feed in thousands of images of Gal Gadot, and the computer will understand how her face is moving, how her expressions develop as she speaks, and it will use that knowledge when you come to the next task, which is to replace her face with another actor.
BG: I remember this story in the news. It doesn't turn out well.
DL: The really unpleasant thing that happened back in 2017 is that the reverse was going on. The first developers of this form of synthetic media used deepfakes to take out the faces of porn stars and replace them with actresses such as Gal Gadot. So, it became an extremely offensive and destructive use of women's images and the appropriation, non-consensually, of women's faces into adult movies. Deepfakes got an extremely bad reputation.
BG: Indeed. So, where do we go from here?
DL: I believe we're in a really difficult interim stage. Right now, If you see a video online and you think it might be a deepfake, there's no way you can tell unless you know how to identify the little glitches. But sometimes, defects are beautifully made and may be completely convincing. We don't have any processes, mechanisms, or good practices that media producers have to abide by. But those processes are just beginning. Watermarking of videos is coming in; these will be invisible ways in which you can tell whether or not a piece of video has been manipulated. The Content Authenticity Initiative is a great thing, which means that you'll be able to click on a picture and see through the metadata exactly when this was first produced and how this picture has been manipulated in its history before it reaches you.
BG: Hmm, still sounds a bit like the Wild West. How is the industry responding?
DL: In terms of film and television, I think we're going to agree on shared standards of disclosure. We found that audiences really care about whether or not a filmmaker tells them that they've been using synthetic media. The documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville made a film about Anthony Bourdain called 'Roadrunner,' and in it, he used voice cloning, an artificial intelligence process, in order to make it seem like Anthony Bourdain was reading his own email. But Morgan Neville didn't tell his audience that this is what he did, and when it came to light, he found that a really significant part of his audience was really angry that they hadn't been told that this fake artificial intelligence process had been used.
BG: And rightly so. But there is the Chechnya story, though, isn't it?
DL: David France, when he was making his film 'Welcome to Chechnya,' which was about the genocide of lesbian and gay people in Chechnya, used face replacement technology to protect the identities of the subjects of his film. David France gained huge respect for how he protected his subjects and also how he made sure that his audience was always aware of the artifice of the face replacement. It was always obvious to us while we were watching it that the faces were not those of the original people.
BG: See, conscientious and ethical practice in the media is possible. Please go on.
DL: So, filmmakers are making up, as they go along, different ethical approaches to how they use artificial intelligence and how they communicate with their audiences about the use of that artificial intelligence. When common standards have been established across the film and television industries, what will happen is we’ll move out of this rather confusing interim period where people really don't know how to use artificial intelligence. Audiences don't know whether artificial intelligence has been used in the material that they're watching, and what enters appears where everything is much more clear.
BG: So, basically a rule book. What are your thoughts on fictional filmmaking, you know, the movies?
DL: In terms of the film industry, we have to see this development of AI alongside what was already existing, which is the visual effects industry. We are very familiar with CGI (computer-generated imagery), being able to create extraordinary scenes, especially in action films. We've seen thousands of orcs charging down the mountainside, all created through visual effects means. And you can use visual effects to replace the faces of actors who've been recorded in a digital film.
BG: Now we're getting somewhere. The uncanny. Tell the Star Wars story.
DL: More than 20 years before director Gareth Edwards made the Star Wars film 'Rogue One,' Peter Cushing, the actor who played Grand Moff Tarkin, had died. Gareth Edwards wanted him resurrected in his film. So, he shot the scenes for Grand Moff Tarkin with the British actor Guy Henry and then used visual effects processes to replace Guy Henry's face with that of Peter Cushing. Now, that's a tremendously expensive process, as you know from watching the credits on blockbuster films; the number of visual effects supervisors credited can be in the hundreds. What artificial intelligence offers the movie industry is quicker, cheaper, and perhaps better quality ways of doing the same processes.
BG: Baudrillard and hyperreality, that's what I'm thinking right now.
DL: In the industrial revolution, manufacturers found ways to replace people with machines for labour, and that was cheaper, so done deal, that's what happened. But in the movies, do we want to replace human images? Do we want to replace actors with synthetic thespians? If we do that, would audiences want to see those synthetic characters on screen? Can we emotionally respond to synthetic movie characters? These are questions that are still out there.
BG: The owners of the means of reproduction searching for, paradoxically, authenticity.
DL: I think you're totally right. I think human authenticity is what we look for in most films. Films that lack that human authenticity are the ones that may suffer in the future. In the same way, there's an insignificant portion of the film audience that's sick to death of Hollywood tentpole movies and action sequences and seeks out independent films with more meaningful content relevant to our lives today. We may well find the same in the future, where we have some movies that are very driven by artificial intelligence-generated images, and a lot of the audience will turn their back on that and look for indie fare.
BG: Fingers crossed. So, what do you think is going to happen next?
DL: What I think is going to happen is that creative producers in the film industry are going to carefully evaluate artificial intelligence and think about exactly what kind of role they want it to play within movie making. There will be trials and failures. Sometimes it might look like a complete gimmick. Sometimes audiences might really relish it. We have to remember that gimmicks in the movie industry don't last. Look at the experience of 3D film, which has had two surges in the history of filmmaking, both of which fizzled out really quite quickly.
BG: Yeah, ‘Jaws 3-D’ was rubbish.
DL: More recently, if you look at Ang Lee's film 'Gemini Man,' in which Will Smith played himself and ended up fighting against a younger version of himself, that film failed and cost upwards of $200 million to the studios that produced it. There may have been several other reasons why the film wasn't a success, but the producers clearly thought that Will Smith against Will Smith, using technology to achieve that, would be a really attractive thing for audiences. And they were wrong.
BG: That's a shame. I really like Ang Lee as well. Anyway, let's get back to the industry, let's get back to industrial relations.
DL: Now, 2022, 2023 is the time when everything seems to have changed for artificial intelligence in the film industry. Remember that synthetic media means not just image but text. And last November, ChatGPT became publicly available, and we've all been playing with that chatbot to generate text. You can generate film scripts with that, as well as treatments or concepts for movies. And this has meant that artificial intelligence plays an absolutely central role in the disputes between the Writers Guild of America and the producers and studios.
BG: See, this is where it all goes dark.
DL: What the SAG-AFTRA strike is bringing up is the future of the industry. Imagine what it looks like if you're a young actor currently in drama school looking forward to your career. If the prospect for you is that when you go on set for your first movie, you're asked to go into a booth and your image and performance are completely captured for future use. What kind of career could you ever have?
BG: Hmm, exactly.
DL: Let's be really accurate, though, about what's going on in the strike. The Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers are talking about background actors. You know how small the image of a background actor is in the frame now. Artificial intelligence doesn't have much of a problem in replacing a small part of the frame, which is why producers know that the first screen performers they can replace are the background artists. So, leading actors right now are not so threatened by the technology for face replacement. But it's been terrific to see during the strike how most leading actors have been really supportive of defending the rights of background artists. And they certainly know that the technology isn't going to stop here. It may well develop to a state where it can start replacing leading actors on screen.
BG: Hmm, come on, Dominic, give us some good news.
DL: I'm really optimistic at the collective action of SAG-AFTRA and the WGA around artificial intelligence begins to make me think that creative freelance professionals in the film and television industries will be able to say no to producers when particular demands are made on them around artificial intelligence. There's really terrible levels of financial distress for creative professionals involved. But I think what they're doing is they're creating the building blocks for a future in which artificial intelligence in the movie industry will be used in a more responsible way.
BG: That's the spirit. They may take our dignity, but they'll never take our freedom. Nice one, Dominic. You've been great and given us loads of food for thought about this ongoing war between humans and robots. Take care. This has been the UK desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers.
Interview: The Hollywood Renaissance and The Blacklist
August 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Andy Willis, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Salford (UK)
August 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Andy Willis, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Salford (UK)
Interview Start: 8 minutes 30 seconds
Interview Transcript
BG: Hi, this is the UK desk for Arts Express, and I'm Brett Gregory. My guest this evening is the curator of a unique season of controversial yet compelling Hollywood movies from the 1960s and seventies. In collaboration with National Film Festival organisers Cinema Rediscovered, global distribution company Park Circus, and the esteemed British Film Institute, will be touring cinemas in the UK and the Republic of Ireland over the next two weeks.
AW: Hi Brett, thanks for having me on the show. My name is Andy Willis. I'm a professor of film studies at the University of Salford in the UK. Alongside that, I'm also a senior visiting curator for film at HOME, which is a multi-arts centre in the middle of Manchester in the North West of England.
BG: And what is this curated film program, this creative project, about exactly?
AW: So, this project is on the Hollywood blacklist, but particularly on how those people who were involved in the Hollywood blacklist ended up going back into the American film industry in the 1960s. It's particularly focused on those who contributed in the broader sense to what's now known as the Hollywood Renaissance. It went really from the early stirrings of the Hollywood blacklist, which began at the end of the Second World War. In the trade papers within the film industry, such as the Hollywood Reporter, articles began to appear accusing people who worked in the Hollywood film industry of having communist sympathies. This is quite ironic, seeing as when the Soviet Union was an ally, many people were encouraged to make pro-Soviet films. But after the war, when they were now the enemy, suddenly those films were held against people when they were accused of being communists or communist sympathisers. This came to a peak in October 1947 when The House Committee on Un-American Activities Committee, often known as HUAC, subpoenaed 19 people to appear before them to be questioned about their loyalty and communist sympathies.
BG: Reds under the bed. So initially, you say 19?
AW: They actually called only 11 people, and one of those people was the playwright Bertolt Brecht, who did talk to the committee. But then, realising that the writing was on the wall, very soon after, he got a plane to East Germany and had one of the most legendary careers in European theatre. The 10 who were left were all held in contempt of the committee and were eventually sent to prison for a year. They became known as the Hollywood 10, which included mostly writers, but also a couple of directors and writer-producers. I think that reflects how influential and important writers were seen at the time within the Hollywood film industry. It was the writers who could put ideas within the films.
BG: And then what happened?
AW: Things got worse just after that. In 1947, there was a statement made by key people in the Hollywood film industry, known as the Waldorf Statement. They met at the Waldorf Hotel. People like Louis B. Mayer from Metro Golden Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Harry Cohn from Columbia Pictures were in attendance. They all came together and said that if they had anyone working for them under contract who was seen to be a communist sympathiser or a Communist Party member and didn't renounce that, then they would terminate their contract. That started the Hollywood blacklist.
BG: All very sinister. And there was some sort of in-your-face propaganda campaign going on as well, wasn't there?
AW: Very shortly afterwards, in June 1950, there was the publication of a pamphlet by Counterattack called 'Red Channels.' 'Red Channels' really stuck the boot in even more to progressive practitioners within the Hollywood film industry. It named 151 actors, writers, musicians, as well as broadcast journalists and other people working in the media. After they were named, they were effectively blacklisted and unable to work.
BG: And how long did this reign of terror go on for?
AW: It lasted for a good 10 to 15, for some people coming up to 20 years, where they were unable to work. They were unable to have their names on films or television programs they wrote. It's a very dark period for Hollywood and caused great rifts that lasted for decades after, with people not being happy with those who had named names. One of the things people may know is that as part of the HUAC trials, people would be invited to name names of Hollywood's communists or communist sympathisers. Famous people like Elia Kazan, the theatre and film director, did name names, which caused great disruption in their working relationships. For example, Kazan worked a lot with Arthur Miller, and after he named names, Miller refused to work with Kazan again. When Elia Kazan was given a lifetime achievement Oscar, people like Ed Harris and Nick Nolte were sitting on their hands, not clapping and looking stony-faced. Outside, people like Abraham Polonsky, the writer-director, and Walter Bernstein, the writer, were protesting about giving a lifetime achievement Oscar to someone who had named names and destroyed the careers of many of their friends and work associates.
BG: Yeah, I watched that ceremony with Ed Harris and Nick Nolte on YouTube years ago. Totally awkward. Anyway, let's move on to the films you selected for the program.
AW: One of the key films we chose for the season was 'Serpico' from 1973. It's directed by Sidney Lumet, with a stellar performance by Al Pacino. But what people may not know is that the first early drafts of the screenplay were written by Waldo Salt, who had been blacklisted. Another film we selected was 'Midnight Cowboy' from 1969. It's really the film that brought Waldo Salt back into focus. He had made a couple of other films after his blacklist, notably 'Taurus Bulba' from 1962. But he was unhappy with those kinds of adventure films and wanted to do something more weighty. When John Schlesinger and Jerome Hellman were looking for someone to adapt the novel, it was Waldo Salt who found a way to do that.
BG: Midnight Cowboy is a great film, but why is it a key film for this program?
AW: It is still the first X-rated film to win the Best Film Oscar. Waldo Salt was also rewarded with an Oscar for his work on the film. This seemed to be an important film, emblematic of the new Hollywood and its challenging ideas. I wanted to highlight that Waldo Salt, who suffered from the blacklist era, was able to contribute to the progressive politics of a film like 'Midnight Cowboy.'
BG: Tell us more about the movie 'Uptight.' I've never heard of it.
AW: 'Uptight' is an interesting example among the films in the season. It's much lesser known than 'Serpico' or 'Midnight Cowboy.' It's directed by Jules Dassin, who was also blacklisted in the early 1950s. He moved to Europe and rebuilt his career there, known for 'Rififi.' 'Uptight' was the first film he made back in America. It's an adaptation of the same novel that John Ford adapted for 'The Informer' in the 1930s. Jules Dassin, who suffered from the blacklist, I think was interested in this idea of the guilt at the core of this film.
BG: And there were political shenanigans going on behind the scenes, is that right?
AW: It's a fascinating film, but the making of the film is also really interesting. Shot in Cleveland, there was so much tension among the extras that they had to take the production back to Los Angeles. The FBI reportedly tried to get people working on the film to inform them about the politics of the film. Jules Dassin takes the setting from Ireland and the IRA of the original novel and places it into the Black Power movement in Cleveland in the late 1960s. It's a fascinating film.
BG: Black Power, the IRA. What else do you have lined up?
AW: Yes, another film that focused on the Black experience in America and had a contribution from someone blacklisted is 'Claudine.' It's a much smaller, quieter film set in Harlem around a single mother played by Diahann Carroll. She meets a well-meaning garbage man played by James Earl Jones, and they try to make a go of things in 1974. The film is directed by John Berry, who had been blacklisted and went on to work on this film. It's an important historical film, I think, and has been a little forgotten.
BG: A film that hasn't been forgotten, though, is Robert Altman's 'M*A*S*H.'
AW: 'M*A*S*H' is another familiar film in the season. It's remembered for breaking Robert Altman and introducing his filmmaking style, with sound and image combining in a unique way. For this season, 'Look Who's Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist,' I wanted to focus on the screenwriter of 'M*A*S*H,’ Ring Lardner Jr. He had been one of the Hollywood 10, one of the first victims of the blacklist.
BG: Why is Ring Lardner Jr.'s work on 'M*A*S*H’ so important?
AW: Ring Lardner Jr.'s contribution was vital to 'M*A*S*H.’ He brings progressive politics and attempts to portray the horrors of war. It also looks forward to the cynicism of the 1970s. 'M*A*S*H’ is one of the great anti-war movies. America was still in the thrall of Vietnam in 1970, and I don't think anybody needed any pushing to relate the film to the Vietnam reality that many Americans were experiencing.
BG: And you focus on a particular female actor in your program as well, don't you?
AW: Yes, I didn't want to focus only on writers. I included Hal Ashby's 1975 film 'Shampoo,' which is set in the late 1960s and is about the excesses and vanity of America during that period. It features a standout performance by Lee Grant, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Lee Grant had been an actor who, in the 1950s, was on the cusp of real fame but was blacklisted. She reappeared in the 1960s in films like 'The Heat of the Night' and was nominated for an Oscar for 'The Landlord.' Lee Grant is a great example of how an actor can come back from the blacklist and reestablish themselves at the centre of the Hollywood film industry during the Hollywood Renaissance.
BG: Hollywood, the dream factory with nightmare working conditions.
AW: The Hollywood film industry sees itself as the dream factory, offering a particular version of society as the aspirational one we should seek out. The Hollywood blacklist era shows that when people were writing other versions of potential future societies or contemporary societies that weren't supported by the capitalist studios, they were quick to act and marginalise those people. Let's hope there are writers, directors, actors, and musicians willing to offer alternatives and challenge the status quo.
BG: Great stuff, Andy. It's always healthy to end with a clenched fist in the air. It's been a pleasure having you on the show, and I wish you the best of luck with 'Look Who's Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist.' This has been the UK desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers.
BG: Hi, this is the UK desk for Arts Express, and I'm Brett Gregory. My guest this evening is the curator of a unique season of controversial yet compelling Hollywood movies from the 1960s and seventies. In collaboration with National Film Festival organisers Cinema Rediscovered, global distribution company Park Circus, and the esteemed British Film Institute, will be touring cinemas in the UK and the Republic of Ireland over the next two weeks.
AW: Hi Brett, thanks for having me on the show. My name is Andy Willis. I'm a professor of film studies at the University of Salford in the UK. Alongside that, I'm also a senior visiting curator for film at HOME, which is a multi-arts centre in the middle of Manchester in the North West of England.
BG: And what is this curated film program, this creative project, about exactly?
AW: So, this project is on the Hollywood blacklist, but particularly on how those people who were involved in the Hollywood blacklist ended up going back into the American film industry in the 1960s. It's particularly focused on those who contributed in the broader sense to what's now known as the Hollywood Renaissance. It went really from the early stirrings of the Hollywood blacklist, which began at the end of the Second World War. In the trade papers within the film industry, such as the Hollywood Reporter, articles began to appear accusing people who worked in the Hollywood film industry of having communist sympathies. This is quite ironic, seeing as when the Soviet Union was an ally, many people were encouraged to make pro-Soviet films. But after the war, when they were now the enemy, suddenly those films were held against people when they were accused of being communists or communist sympathisers. This came to a peak in October 1947 when The House Committee on Un-American Activities Committee, often known as HUAC, subpoenaed 19 people to appear before them to be questioned about their loyalty and communist sympathies.
BG: Reds under the bed. So initially, you say 19?
AW: They actually called only 11 people, and one of those people was the playwright Bertolt Brecht, who did talk to the committee. But then, realising that the writing was on the wall, very soon after, he got a plane to East Germany and had one of the most legendary careers in European theatre. The 10 who were left were all held in contempt of the committee and were eventually sent to prison for a year. They became known as the Hollywood 10, which included mostly writers, but also a couple of directors and writer-producers. I think that reflects how influential and important writers were seen at the time within the Hollywood film industry. It was the writers who could put ideas within the films.
BG: And then what happened?
AW: Things got worse just after that. In 1947, there was a statement made by key people in the Hollywood film industry, known as the Waldorf Statement. They met at the Waldorf Hotel. People like Louis B. Mayer from Metro Golden Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Harry Cohn from Columbia Pictures were in attendance. They all came together and said that if they had anyone working for them under contract who was seen to be a communist sympathiser or a Communist Party member and didn't renounce that, then they would terminate their contract. That started the Hollywood blacklist.
BG: All very sinister. And there was some sort of in-your-face propaganda campaign going on as well, wasn't there?
AW: Very shortly afterwards, in June 1950, there was the publication of a pamphlet by Counterattack called 'Red Channels.' 'Red Channels' really stuck the boot in even more to progressive practitioners within the Hollywood film industry. It named 151 actors, writers, musicians, as well as broadcast journalists and other people working in the media. After they were named, they were effectively blacklisted and unable to work.
BG: And how long did this reign of terror go on for?
AW: It lasted for a good 10 to 15, for some people coming up to 20 years, where they were unable to work. They were unable to have their names on films or television programs they wrote. It's a very dark period for Hollywood and caused great rifts that lasted for decades after, with people not being happy with those who had named names. One of the things people may know is that as part of the HUAC trials, people would be invited to name names of Hollywood's communists or communist sympathisers. Famous people like Elia Kazan, the theatre and film director, did name names, which caused great disruption in their working relationships. For example, Kazan worked a lot with Arthur Miller, and after he named names, Miller refused to work with Kazan again. When Elia Kazan was given a lifetime achievement Oscar, people like Ed Harris and Nick Nolte were sitting on their hands, not clapping and looking stony-faced. Outside, people like Abraham Polonsky, the writer-director, and Walter Bernstein, the writer, were protesting about giving a lifetime achievement Oscar to someone who had named names and destroyed the careers of many of their friends and work associates.
BG: Yeah, I watched that ceremony with Ed Harris and Nick Nolte on YouTube years ago. Totally awkward. Anyway, let's move on to the films you selected for the program.
AW: One of the key films we chose for the season was 'Serpico' from 1973. It's directed by Sidney Lumet, with a stellar performance by Al Pacino. But what people may not know is that the first early drafts of the screenplay were written by Waldo Salt, who had been blacklisted. Another film we selected was 'Midnight Cowboy' from 1969. It's really the film that brought Waldo Salt back into focus. He had made a couple of other films after his blacklist, notably 'Taurus Bulba' from 1962. But he was unhappy with those kinds of adventure films and wanted to do something more weighty. When John Schlesinger and Jerome Hellman were looking for someone to adapt the novel, it was Waldo Salt who found a way to do that.
BG: Midnight Cowboy is a great film, but why is it a key film for this program?
AW: It is still the first X-rated film to win the Best Film Oscar. Waldo Salt was also rewarded with an Oscar for his work on the film. This seemed to be an important film, emblematic of the new Hollywood and its challenging ideas. I wanted to highlight that Waldo Salt, who suffered from the blacklist era, was able to contribute to the progressive politics of a film like 'Midnight Cowboy.'
BG: Tell us more about the movie 'Uptight.' I've never heard of it.
AW: 'Uptight' is an interesting example among the films in the season. It's much lesser known than 'Serpico' or 'Midnight Cowboy.' It's directed by Jules Dassin, who was also blacklisted in the early 1950s. He moved to Europe and rebuilt his career there, known for 'Rififi.' 'Uptight' was the first film he made back in America. It's an adaptation of the same novel that John Ford adapted for 'The Informer' in the 1930s. Jules Dassin, who suffered from the blacklist, I think was interested in this idea of the guilt at the core of this film.
BG: And there were political shenanigans going on behind the scenes, is that right?
AW: It's a fascinating film, but the making of the film is also really interesting. Shot in Cleveland, there was so much tension among the extras that they had to take the production back to Los Angeles. The FBI reportedly tried to get people working on the film to inform them about the politics of the film. Jules Dassin takes the setting from Ireland and the IRA of the original novel and places it into the Black Power movement in Cleveland in the late 1960s. It's a fascinating film.
BG: Black Power, the IRA. What else do you have lined up?
AW: Yes, another film that focused on the Black experience in America and had a contribution from someone blacklisted is 'Claudine.' It's a much smaller, quieter film set in Harlem around a single mother played by Diahann Carroll. She meets a well-meaning garbage man played by James Earl Jones, and they try to make a go of things in 1974. The film is directed by John Berry, who had been blacklisted and went on to work on this film. It's an important historical film, I think, and has been a little forgotten.
BG: A film that hasn't been forgotten, though, is Robert Altman's 'M*A*S*H.'
AW: 'M*A*S*H' is another familiar film in the season. It's remembered for breaking Robert Altman and introducing his filmmaking style, with sound and image combining in a unique way. For this season, 'Look Who's Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist,' I wanted to focus on the screenwriter of 'M*A*S*H,’ Ring Lardner Jr. He had been one of the Hollywood 10, one of the first victims of the blacklist.
BG: Why is Ring Lardner Jr.'s work on 'M*A*S*H’ so important?
AW: Ring Lardner Jr.'s contribution was vital to 'M*A*S*H.’ He brings progressive politics and attempts to portray the horrors of war. It also looks forward to the cynicism of the 1970s. 'M*A*S*H’ is one of the great anti-war movies. America was still in the thrall of Vietnam in 1970, and I don't think anybody needed any pushing to relate the film to the Vietnam reality that many Americans were experiencing.
BG: And you focus on a particular female actor in your program as well, don't you?
AW: Yes, I didn't want to focus only on writers. I included Hal Ashby's 1975 film 'Shampoo,' which is set in the late 1960s and is about the excesses and vanity of America during that period. It features a standout performance by Lee Grant, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Lee Grant had been an actor who, in the 1950s, was on the cusp of real fame but was blacklisted. She reappeared in the 1960s in films like 'The Heat of the Night' and was nominated for an Oscar for 'The Landlord.' Lee Grant is a great example of how an actor can come back from the blacklist and reestablish themselves at the centre of the Hollywood film industry during the Hollywood Renaissance.
BG: Hollywood, the dream factory with nightmare working conditions.
AW: The Hollywood film industry sees itself as the dream factory, offering a particular version of society as the aspirational one we should seek out. The Hollywood blacklist era shows that when people were writing other versions of potential future societies or contemporary societies that weren't supported by the capitalist studios, they were quick to act and marginalise those people. Let's hope there are writers, directors, actors, and musicians willing to offer alternatives and challenge the status quo.
BG: Great stuff, Andy. It's always healthy to end with a clenched fist in the air. It's been a pleasure having you on the show, and I wish you the best of luck with 'Look Who's Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist.' This has been the UK desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers.
BOOK REVIEW
John White’s ‘British Cinema and a Divided Nation’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
By Brett Gregory
August 2023
John White’s ‘British Cinema and a Divided Nation’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
By Brett Gregory
August 2023
Review Start: 38 minutes 48 seconds
REVIEW TRANSCRIPT
One of the joys of this academic monograph is that it reminds us that the field of cinema studies, through the macro lens of research, theory and perspective, can introduce us to narratives of knowledge, understanding and experience which stretch far beyond the edges of the screen.
Here John White unfurls an ambitious tapestry of five hundred years of history, politics, economics and culture as related to us by a selection of 21st century British feature films. Moreover, interweaving itself through their tall and terrible tales of wealth, poverty, love and war is a myth which millions of us still believe in today; a quaint oxymoron which tens of thousands are still prepared to die for.
The United Kingdom is ‘two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy’ wrote Disraeli about the ruling class and the working class in his novel Sybil in 1845.
One hundred years later, between 1945 and the late 1970s, Professor Pat Thane argues that, following three successful decades of the Welfare State and its free provision of healthcare, education, housing, living allowances and state pensions, the chasm of quality and quantity of life between the rich and poor actually began to narrow.
This truly egalitarian post-war relationship between the nation and its citizens – a social contract intrinsically binding one another to a shared sense of security, belonging and liberty – turned out to be, tragically, just a fleeting dalliance however when in 1979 Margaret Thatcher came to power, a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s, The Constitution of Liberty, tucked away in her handbag.
Most memorably, under the direction of her Conservative government, the British state –the police, the judiciary and the right-wing press – launched a vicious, vindictive and ultimately victorious assault upon what they perceived to be their biggest obstacle to socio-economic progress: the democratic entitlements of the National Union of Mineworkers during the Miners’ Strike in 1984-85. In turn, by way of the newly formulated Trade Union Act in 1984, every member of every other trade union up and down the country shuddered.
This once-in-a-lifetime lightning war left mining communities decimated across the North of England in particular. Furthermore, the fuse of ‘fast-burn capitalism’ had been lit and an unceasing bonfire of workers’ rights and protections began to rage. As cherished public services such as British Gas and British Telecom were packaged and privatised throughout the 1980s, the neoliberalist deforestation of the British way of life commenced.
Now in the first quarter of the 21st century the UK workforce, unable to hear itself speak above the incessant beat of global competitiveness, productivity, efficiency and convenience, has been gifted one of the postmodern wonders of the world: the gig economy.
As White explores in Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You from 2019, Orwellian cyber-Squealers would have us believe that this new-fangled way of working is going to make entrepreneurs of us all, liberating us from silly distractions such as time-keeping, lunch breaks and rest, as well as stupid administrative chores like sick pay, holiday pay, redundancy pay and a pension. Moreover, we are reassured that it isn’t just delivery drivers, warehouse operatives and online strippers who can benefit from this cornucopia of late stage capitalism: lecturers, journalists and registered nurses, to name but a few, are all invited to the party as well.
These days many Britons, particularly the young adults I used to teach, reluctantly accept that we no longer live in a society at all but instead precariously function, hand-to-mouth, on the outskirts of a network of simulated marketplaces where absolutely everything is a commodity to buy or sell, manage or service: our labour, our time, our bodies, our dreams. According to the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, what we are experiencing here is called ‘the direct commodification of experience itself’.
While the mainstream British media continues to gawk at the peacocking of North American bazillionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, as if their vanity, gluttony and hubris are something to aspire to, White cites Shoshana Zuboff’s solemn observation that around the world there are ‘concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history’.
Indeed, according to the International Monetary Fund, the United Kingdom is the 5th richest nation in the world with $2.6 trillion in its coffers, but if this ranking is accurate then why in 2014 did Oxfam declare the five richest families in the country to be wealthier than the bottom 20 per cent of the entire population, i.e. 12.6 million people? Furthermore, why in 2020 was it reported by Health Equity in England that in some regions more than one child in two is growing up in poverty? Crucially, the academic broadcasters Lansley and Mack ask: why is Great Britain ‘one of the most unequal and socially fragile countries in the world today?’
Believe it or not, the official rationale behind these stark socio-economic inequalities was actually submitted to the British public on May 6th 2023 in the form of a £100 million multi-venue theatre production called ‘The Coronation of King Charles III’. The mise-en-scene for this historic live performance featured the full artillery of ancient and modern regalia, including the Diamond Jubilee State Coach at £3.2 million, St. Edward’s Crown at £45 million and, famously, the Sword of State at £500,000. In turn, an original signature soundtrack was composed by Lord Lloyd-Webber, a commemorative poem was scripted by the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage CBE, and coronation costumes were designed by Bruce Oldfield OBE. Moreover, as good fortune would have it, the entire British Establishment was able to make itself available to serve as the supporting cast: prince and princesses, lords and ladies, political leaders, military leaders, religious leaders, all proudly draped in the nation’s traditional liveries of hereditary, exceptionalism and pomposity.
As stated in the title of John White’s rigorous and thought-provoking book, it is deep-seated divisions reinforced by institutions like the Royal Family which have defined the United Kingdom’s psyche, character, outlook and actions throughout the ages. Whether it is in terms of wealth, power or nationalism, social class, regionalism or education, gender, ethnicity or sexuality, there has always been an obsessive and oppressive belief in binary oppositions: ‘Here and There’, ‘Then and Now’, ‘Us and Them’, ‘Self and Other’.
Mike Leigh’s Peterloo from 2018 dramatises one of the most despicable events in the country’s political history. In 1819 over 60,000 working men, women and children gathered in Manchester at midday to demand parliamentary reform and an extension of voting rights. By 2pm however they had been ruthlessly cut down by the sabres of the mounted 15th Hussars at the behest of wealthy landowner, factory owner and magistrate, William Hulton. 18 protestors were slain and 700 were maimed.
In the immediate aftermath of this massacre the British government, haunted by the ideological alternatives thrown up by the French Revolution 25 years earlier, was quick to enforce its sovereignty and suppress any further political dissent from the public. Draconian Acts of Parliament were hurried through in a manner which would cause our current Home Secretary and Tory ultra, Suella Braverman, to positively swoon. Attendance numbers at parish political meetings, for instance, were restricted; the judicial powers of magistrates trying the cases of reformers were expanded; and the taxes imposed on newspapers were increased so they became too expensive for ordinary people to buy.
Significantly however, strategies for surveillance and espionage were also endorsed by the authorities and pursued by a network of spies, informants and agent provocateurs in an effort to deny, or at least to undermine, the ability of the country’s citizenry to express, discuss or even understand their freedom to protest.
This may seem like some dusty cloak-and-dagger yarn from the distant past but, in order to illustrate how little the British State has evolved as a democratic entity over the last 200 years, White draws our attention to the ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry which began in 2015. That is, quite incredibly, it has been revealed that serving Metropolitan police officers such as Mark Kennedy (also known as Mark Stone and/or Mark Flash) were instructed by their superiors between 2003 and 2010 to pose as political activists in order to infiltrate and surveil environmental campaign networks such as Climate Camp. In turn, with their superiors’ knowledge, a number of these police officers entered sexual relationships with female activists as a part of their undercover duties, even fathering children with them, before suddenly skulking back into the shadowy system from whence they came.
As Mike Leigh himself writes in the foreword to Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre in 2018: ‘Despite the spread of universal suffrage across larger parts of the globe poverty, inequality, suppression of press freedom, indiscriminate surveillance and attacks on legitimate protest by brutal regimes are all on the rise.’
The scope of John White’s meticulous research and diligent critical application can only be lightly brushed by the fingertips of this overeager review.
For example, in the 16th century we are led along the schism between women and men under patriarchy and Protestantism in Mary Queen of Scots (Rourke, 2018). In the 20th century we revisit the genocide which defined the partitioning of India and Pakistan under Mountbatten’s rule in Viceroy’s House (Chadha, 2017). And, in the 21st century, we are urged to heed the ‘dark, satanic mills’ of globalised industrial farming that churn up our country’s ‘green and pleasant land’ in The Levelling (Leach, 2017) and Dark River (Barnard, 2017).
In conclusion, the United Kingdom can be seen to be a nation which stands divided upon an historical legacy of conflict, violence and oppression, fuelled by a fear of the masses, of the ‘Other’, of what they might think and of what they could do.
Following 13 years of Tory-led austerity cuts, the bigotry and bloodshed of Brexit, the crimes committed in the name of COVID and the current crippling cost-of-living crisis, thoughts about political reform and even revolt have begun to creep into the minds of ordinary, exhausted citizens, especially those who work in the public sector. It is hoped, at the very least, and in this particular context, that the commercialised conservatism which generally characterises the British film industry can be circumvented so more original feature films are able to harness and frame the real world hopes and fears of the country.
John White’s ‘British Cinema and a Divided Nation’ makes you feel strangely patriotic, that through passion, persistence and protest there is still something worth fighting for. As a result, it is highly recommended.
One of the joys of this academic monograph is that it reminds us that the field of cinema studies, through the macro lens of research, theory and perspective, can introduce us to narratives of knowledge, understanding and experience which stretch far beyond the edges of the screen.
Here John White unfurls an ambitious tapestry of five hundred years of history, politics, economics and culture as related to us by a selection of 21st century British feature films. Moreover, interweaving itself through their tall and terrible tales of wealth, poverty, love and war is a myth which millions of us still believe in today; a quaint oxymoron which tens of thousands are still prepared to die for.
The United Kingdom is ‘two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy’ wrote Disraeli about the ruling class and the working class in his novel Sybil in 1845.
One hundred years later, between 1945 and the late 1970s, Professor Pat Thane argues that, following three successful decades of the Welfare State and its free provision of healthcare, education, housing, living allowances and state pensions, the chasm of quality and quantity of life between the rich and poor actually began to narrow.
This truly egalitarian post-war relationship between the nation and its citizens – a social contract intrinsically binding one another to a shared sense of security, belonging and liberty – turned out to be, tragically, just a fleeting dalliance however when in 1979 Margaret Thatcher came to power, a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s, The Constitution of Liberty, tucked away in her handbag.
Most memorably, under the direction of her Conservative government, the British state –the police, the judiciary and the right-wing press – launched a vicious, vindictive and ultimately victorious assault upon what they perceived to be their biggest obstacle to socio-economic progress: the democratic entitlements of the National Union of Mineworkers during the Miners’ Strike in 1984-85. In turn, by way of the newly formulated Trade Union Act in 1984, every member of every other trade union up and down the country shuddered.
This once-in-a-lifetime lightning war left mining communities decimated across the North of England in particular. Furthermore, the fuse of ‘fast-burn capitalism’ had been lit and an unceasing bonfire of workers’ rights and protections began to rage. As cherished public services such as British Gas and British Telecom were packaged and privatised throughout the 1980s, the neoliberalist deforestation of the British way of life commenced.
Now in the first quarter of the 21st century the UK workforce, unable to hear itself speak above the incessant beat of global competitiveness, productivity, efficiency and convenience, has been gifted one of the postmodern wonders of the world: the gig economy.
As White explores in Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You from 2019, Orwellian cyber-Squealers would have us believe that this new-fangled way of working is going to make entrepreneurs of us all, liberating us from silly distractions such as time-keeping, lunch breaks and rest, as well as stupid administrative chores like sick pay, holiday pay, redundancy pay and a pension. Moreover, we are reassured that it isn’t just delivery drivers, warehouse operatives and online strippers who can benefit from this cornucopia of late stage capitalism: lecturers, journalists and registered nurses, to name but a few, are all invited to the party as well.
These days many Britons, particularly the young adults I used to teach, reluctantly accept that we no longer live in a society at all but instead precariously function, hand-to-mouth, on the outskirts of a network of simulated marketplaces where absolutely everything is a commodity to buy or sell, manage or service: our labour, our time, our bodies, our dreams. According to the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, what we are experiencing here is called ‘the direct commodification of experience itself’.
While the mainstream British media continues to gawk at the peacocking of North American bazillionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, as if their vanity, gluttony and hubris are something to aspire to, White cites Shoshana Zuboff’s solemn observation that around the world there are ‘concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history’.
Indeed, according to the International Monetary Fund, the United Kingdom is the 5th richest nation in the world with $2.6 trillion in its coffers, but if this ranking is accurate then why in 2014 did Oxfam declare the five richest families in the country to be wealthier than the bottom 20 per cent of the entire population, i.e. 12.6 million people? Furthermore, why in 2020 was it reported by Health Equity in England that in some regions more than one child in two is growing up in poverty? Crucially, the academic broadcasters Lansley and Mack ask: why is Great Britain ‘one of the most unequal and socially fragile countries in the world today?’
Believe it or not, the official rationale behind these stark socio-economic inequalities was actually submitted to the British public on May 6th 2023 in the form of a £100 million multi-venue theatre production called ‘The Coronation of King Charles III’. The mise-en-scene for this historic live performance featured the full artillery of ancient and modern regalia, including the Diamond Jubilee State Coach at £3.2 million, St. Edward’s Crown at £45 million and, famously, the Sword of State at £500,000. In turn, an original signature soundtrack was composed by Lord Lloyd-Webber, a commemorative poem was scripted by the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage CBE, and coronation costumes were designed by Bruce Oldfield OBE. Moreover, as good fortune would have it, the entire British Establishment was able to make itself available to serve as the supporting cast: prince and princesses, lords and ladies, political leaders, military leaders, religious leaders, all proudly draped in the nation’s traditional liveries of hereditary, exceptionalism and pomposity.
As stated in the title of John White’s rigorous and thought-provoking book, it is deep-seated divisions reinforced by institutions like the Royal Family which have defined the United Kingdom’s psyche, character, outlook and actions throughout the ages. Whether it is in terms of wealth, power or nationalism, social class, regionalism or education, gender, ethnicity or sexuality, there has always been an obsessive and oppressive belief in binary oppositions: ‘Here and There’, ‘Then and Now’, ‘Us and Them’, ‘Self and Other’.
Mike Leigh’s Peterloo from 2018 dramatises one of the most despicable events in the country’s political history. In 1819 over 60,000 working men, women and children gathered in Manchester at midday to demand parliamentary reform and an extension of voting rights. By 2pm however they had been ruthlessly cut down by the sabres of the mounted 15th Hussars at the behest of wealthy landowner, factory owner and magistrate, William Hulton. 18 protestors were slain and 700 were maimed.
In the immediate aftermath of this massacre the British government, haunted by the ideological alternatives thrown up by the French Revolution 25 years earlier, was quick to enforce its sovereignty and suppress any further political dissent from the public. Draconian Acts of Parliament were hurried through in a manner which would cause our current Home Secretary and Tory ultra, Suella Braverman, to positively swoon. Attendance numbers at parish political meetings, for instance, were restricted; the judicial powers of magistrates trying the cases of reformers were expanded; and the taxes imposed on newspapers were increased so they became too expensive for ordinary people to buy.
Significantly however, strategies for surveillance and espionage were also endorsed by the authorities and pursued by a network of spies, informants and agent provocateurs in an effort to deny, or at least to undermine, the ability of the country’s citizenry to express, discuss or even understand their freedom to protest.
This may seem like some dusty cloak-and-dagger yarn from the distant past but, in order to illustrate how little the British State has evolved as a democratic entity over the last 200 years, White draws our attention to the ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry which began in 2015. That is, quite incredibly, it has been revealed that serving Metropolitan police officers such as Mark Kennedy (also known as Mark Stone and/or Mark Flash) were instructed by their superiors between 2003 and 2010 to pose as political activists in order to infiltrate and surveil environmental campaign networks such as Climate Camp. In turn, with their superiors’ knowledge, a number of these police officers entered sexual relationships with female activists as a part of their undercover duties, even fathering children with them, before suddenly skulking back into the shadowy system from whence they came.
As Mike Leigh himself writes in the foreword to Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre in 2018: ‘Despite the spread of universal suffrage across larger parts of the globe poverty, inequality, suppression of press freedom, indiscriminate surveillance and attacks on legitimate protest by brutal regimes are all on the rise.’
The scope of John White’s meticulous research and diligent critical application can only be lightly brushed by the fingertips of this overeager review.
For example, in the 16th century we are led along the schism between women and men under patriarchy and Protestantism in Mary Queen of Scots (Rourke, 2018). In the 20th century we revisit the genocide which defined the partitioning of India and Pakistan under Mountbatten’s rule in Viceroy’s House (Chadha, 2017). And, in the 21st century, we are urged to heed the ‘dark, satanic mills’ of globalised industrial farming that churn up our country’s ‘green and pleasant land’ in The Levelling (Leach, 2017) and Dark River (Barnard, 2017).
In conclusion, the United Kingdom can be seen to be a nation which stands divided upon an historical legacy of conflict, violence and oppression, fuelled by a fear of the masses, of the ‘Other’, of what they might think and of what they could do.
Following 13 years of Tory-led austerity cuts, the bigotry and bloodshed of Brexit, the crimes committed in the name of COVID and the current crippling cost-of-living crisis, thoughts about political reform and even revolt have begun to creep into the minds of ordinary, exhausted citizens, especially those who work in the public sector. It is hoped, at the very least, and in this particular context, that the commercialised conservatism which generally characterises the British film industry can be circumvented so more original feature films are able to harness and frame the real world hopes and fears of the country.
John White’s ‘British Cinema and a Divided Nation’ makes you feel strangely patriotic, that through passion, persistence and protest there is still something worth fighting for. As a result, it is highly recommended.
This review originally appeared in Counterfire in August 2023.
BOOK REVIEW
Jeremy Carr's 'Kubrick and Control’ (Liverpool University Press, 2023)
By Brett Gregory
July 2023
Jeremy Carr's 'Kubrick and Control’ (Liverpool University Press, 2023)
By Brett Gregory
July 2023
Interview Start: 36 minutes 50 seconds
REVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Like many eager teenagers who found themselves sleepless and cinephilic during the Gilded Age of VHS in the 1980s, you genuinely felt the presence of the director of The Shining at your shoulder as you sat alone in the living room and watched his vision of the unfamiliar, the unnerving and the uncanny ominously unfold.
The absolute exactness of everything on screen, in concert with the hypnotic electronic orchestration by Wendy Carlos, drenched with such doom and dread, overwhelmed and compelled you to return to its psychopathy again and again until, without knowing it, you had soon learned the dialogue verbatim as if it was a lyric from some obscure prog-rock album entitled ‘Grand Guignol’.
Jeremy Carr’s comprehensive hagiography of Stanley Kubrick’s career of creative compulsions and authorial control conjures up many, many youthful memories such as this and, as a consequence, it is a must-read for anyone who pines for the serious aesthetics of mainstream cinema to return.
Kubrick first began to learn to ‘direct his subjects, to control light and shade, to understand lenses, composition, exposure, and balance within the frame’ as a precocious 17 year old staff photographer working for Look magazine in New York between 1946 and 1950. According to Dr James Fenwick, ‘[he] seems to have wanted to push the limits of the creative freedom he was offered at the magazine … [attempting] to broaden his autonomy … [and] invest his own personality into his work.’
Onwards and this competitive attitude and approach to producing cinema with distinct authority was helped and honed throughout the 1950s by way of the chess matches he played against the regulars in Washington Square in the shade or under street lamps; a meticulous métier which he would introduce to the cast and crew on the movie sets he was later to govern. As the director himself explains in John Baxter’s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (1998), if chess had any relationship to filmmaking ‘it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.’
Day of the Fight became Kubrick’s first motion picture at the age of 23, a 16 minute black-and-white documentary which follows Irish-American middleweight boxer, Walter Cartier, as he prepares to fight Bobby James on April 17, 1950. Here, in between the staging and the spit, the uppercuts and the close-ups, Carr identifies the shadow of a leitmotif which would eventually loom over the director’s entire oeuvre: the driven man.
In The Killing in 1956, for instance, his first proper studio picture for United Artists, veteran ex-con, Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), strides across the screen as he confidently describes to his fiancée the herd of hoodlums he is about to corral with the sole purpose of pulling off a daring $2 million robbery at the racetrack.
In turn, in 1957 Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) can be seen in Paths of Glory to be a character cut from the same thick cloth, single-minded in his lofty and loquacious attempts to hold the French military command to account as he defends three soldiers who have been arbitrarily accused of cowardice during World War I.
Crucially, this incipient interpretation of the masculine desire to confront, combat and conquer – against the odds, against authority, against nature, against destiny – famously evolved into Kirk Douglas’ portrayal of the titular militant messiah in Universal Pictures’ Spartacus in 1960. This sword and sandal saga about a humble gladiator rising up to lead the largest ever slave revolt against the imperious Roman Republic was the most expensive and prestigious film production Kubrick had helmed. Furthermore, its subsequent commercial and cultural success helped to solidify his own personal and professional ambitions to be recognised as a leading figure within the industry, a true American auteur.
As Carr explains:
He was at the mercy of an egotistical group of actors (heavyweights Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton bickering with each other and questioning the authority of this young filmmaker), an equally obsessive producer/lead performer (Kirk Douglas), and the constraints dictated by a film of this size and scope.
This said, as Peter Kramer continues:
[Spartacus] established him as an important player in Hollywood … [enabling] him to negotiate with financiers and distributors from a position of strength so that from then on he could produce medium- to big-budget films … yet made without much interference from them.
The male drive to succeed however is not enough in itself. Such a raw and potentially ruinous emotion needs discipline, direction and order if it is to achieve its aims effectively, reach its destination intact and claim its prize. As a consequence, iconographic tropes such as maps, plans and/or schematics, either handmade or technological, often feature prominently in Kubrick’s mise-en-scène as a visual connotation of the characters’ need for organisation, method and control.
In his first production shot in colour, for example, the 30 minute promotional documentary The Seafarers from 1953, he explores how the Seafarers International Union in Maryland recruits and regulates its mariners, fishermen and boatmen before they work the oceans. To illustrate the scope and influence of this huge endeavour Kubrick pans across a large world map as the narrator asserts: ‘Antwerp, Cape Town, London, Marseilles, Singapore … You name it: picking his destination is the right of every Seafarer.’
More memorably of course is the mesmeric overhead push-in on the scale model of the hedge maze in The Shining in 1980. Restless in the reception hall of the Overlook Hotel Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) leans over and into it like a disturbed divisional general surveying his battle plans for the next day as his wife and son appear superimposed like mere insects, happily oblivious that they are wandering through a metaphor for their patriarch’s decaying mind.
Indeed, Carr reiterates this recurring Kubrickian conceit in his epilogue when he cites the screenplay for Napoleon, the unrealised biographical epic which many critics agree would have proved to have been the director’s raison d'être, the totality of his cinematic aesthetic:
Scene 31: INT—NAPOLEON’S PARIS HQ—DAY
Pencil between his teeth, dividers in one hand, [Napoleon] creeps around on hands and knees on top of a very large map of Italy, laid out from wall to wall. Other large maps cover the table, the couch and any other available space.
In line with his increased production budgets, abilities and aspirations Kubrick advanced his ruminations on order, control and power considerably with Dr. Strangelove in 1964, 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and A Clockwork Orange in 1971. On the one hand these three films can be seen to mirror the theoretical work carried out by one of his 1960s contemporaries, Marshall McLuhan, in terms of technology serving as an extension of man: his physicality, his consciousness, his ethics and his will. And, on the other, it could be argued that they also echo Karl Marx’s position in the 19th century with regards to technological determinism and the hegemonic role this plays in the socio-economic relations and cultural practices of wider society.
For example, the cockpit of the B-52 in Dr. Strangelove is heaving with ‘a smorgasbord of lights, switches, maps, gauges, radars, and guides’ as it transports a hydrogen bomb to its intended Soviet target. The message from the military to the body politic is very loud and clear: Everything is under control. We have the technology. God bless America.
With the incomparable 2001: A Space Odyssey the audience, and cinema itself, are invited to take a giant leap forwards as Kubrick propels us from the prehistoric broken bones of homicidal Hominids and into the nervous system of the spacecraft Discovery: its intricate network of hibernation pods and plasma pipes, scanners and closed-circuit cameras all interconnected and centralised within the mainframe brain of HAL, the supercomputer whose sole duty is to transport the crew to Jupiter to investigate an alien radio signal. We can only assume that, hypothetically, if this fully-funded, interplanetary mission is successful then it would surely herald the expansion of American political, economic and cultural imperialism out of this world and throughout the cosmos.
Returning to earth with A Clockwork Orange Kubrick explicitly intertwines technology and hegemony by way of the Ludovico Technique, a state-sponsored behavioural aversion procedure which is tested on one desperate experimental subject: the untamed, ultra-violent rapist droog, Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell). Here scientific research, knowledge and needles are employed by the British Ministry of the Interior to physically inculcate self-control and conclusively cure him of his own destructive free will. The treatment leaves working-class Alex meek and defenceless and, against our better judgement, we are encouraged to feel sympathy for him. Prof. Philip Kuberski argues however that the film’s narrative should not be regarded as a defence of free will at all but instead as a reminder to the audience that we are also ‘conditioned in some way or another’ and the day-to-day freedoms we think we enjoy are just an ‘illusion’.
With this in mind we can thus posit that Kubrick’s driven men, whether they know it or not, are also suffering from a similar existential crisis. That is, their desire to confront, combat and conquer is just that, a desire, and not a logical decision which they are able to make. As a result, their attempts to control and direct their impulses with plans, maps or technology are ultimately unsustainable due to the impermanence and vicissitudes of the wider world, the people within it and the forces in between. Thus, their turbulent and tragic character arcs can only lead their sense of purpose, and their sense of self, to overexposure, disorder and defeat.
In Lolita in 1962, for instance, the upstanding university lecturer Humbert Humbert (James Mason) is ultimately undone by his illicit infatuation with the 14 year old Dolores Haze, deliriously dissolving into ‘a mere shell of himself, totally out of control and forcibly subdued by … hospital staff’.
Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal), the self-serving 18th century Irish scoundrel and gambler in Barry Lyndon in 1975, swears that he will never ‘fall from the rank of a gentleman’ but, inevitably, he comes tumbling down the social ladder following a messy duel against his stepson where he loses his leg and is banished from England forever.
Then there is Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) who, in Full Metal Jacket in 1986, humiliates and belittles his squad of new recruits, stripping them, one by one, of their egos and their dignity in order to transform them into marines, into killing machines who are ‘ready to eat their own guts and ask for seconds’. It is ironic that this brutal training regime proves to be more successful than anyone could of imagined when, during one sleepy evening, the maligned and malfunctioning Private Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio) executes Hartman, his nemesis, with a bullet to the chest.
As can be seen nearly all of the male protagonists mentioned are leaders and/or patriarchs who, while memorably constructed and beautifully performed, are also narcissistic, naïve, deluded and alone. Consequently, one critical lesson we can learn from Stanley Kubrick’s exceptional oeuvre, as well as from Jeremy Carr’s fine book, it is that as audience members and as mindful citizens we should always be extremely careful about the kind of men we choose to bestow authority, control and power upon in political, corporate and cultural life.
Brett Gregory is an independent screenwriter, director and producer based in Manchester (UK). His critically acclaimed debut feature film, ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’ is currently available in the US and UK on Amazon Prime.
Email: brett@seriousfeather.com
Like many eager teenagers who found themselves sleepless and cinephilic during the Gilded Age of VHS in the 1980s, you genuinely felt the presence of the director of The Shining at your shoulder as you sat alone in the living room and watched his vision of the unfamiliar, the unnerving and the uncanny ominously unfold.
The absolute exactness of everything on screen, in concert with the hypnotic electronic orchestration by Wendy Carlos, drenched with such doom and dread, overwhelmed and compelled you to return to its psychopathy again and again until, without knowing it, you had soon learned the dialogue verbatim as if it was a lyric from some obscure prog-rock album entitled ‘Grand Guignol’.
Jeremy Carr’s comprehensive hagiography of Stanley Kubrick’s career of creative compulsions and authorial control conjures up many, many youthful memories such as this and, as a consequence, it is a must-read for anyone who pines for the serious aesthetics of mainstream cinema to return.
Kubrick first began to learn to ‘direct his subjects, to control light and shade, to understand lenses, composition, exposure, and balance within the frame’ as a precocious 17 year old staff photographer working for Look magazine in New York between 1946 and 1950. According to Dr James Fenwick, ‘[he] seems to have wanted to push the limits of the creative freedom he was offered at the magazine … [attempting] to broaden his autonomy … [and] invest his own personality into his work.’
Onwards and this competitive attitude and approach to producing cinema with distinct authority was helped and honed throughout the 1950s by way of the chess matches he played against the regulars in Washington Square in the shade or under street lamps; a meticulous métier which he would introduce to the cast and crew on the movie sets he was later to govern. As the director himself explains in John Baxter’s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (1998), if chess had any relationship to filmmaking ‘it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.’
Day of the Fight became Kubrick’s first motion picture at the age of 23, a 16 minute black-and-white documentary which follows Irish-American middleweight boxer, Walter Cartier, as he prepares to fight Bobby James on April 17, 1950. Here, in between the staging and the spit, the uppercuts and the close-ups, Carr identifies the shadow of a leitmotif which would eventually loom over the director’s entire oeuvre: the driven man.
In The Killing in 1956, for instance, his first proper studio picture for United Artists, veteran ex-con, Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), strides across the screen as he confidently describes to his fiancée the herd of hoodlums he is about to corral with the sole purpose of pulling off a daring $2 million robbery at the racetrack.
In turn, in 1957 Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) can be seen in Paths of Glory to be a character cut from the same thick cloth, single-minded in his lofty and loquacious attempts to hold the French military command to account as he defends three soldiers who have been arbitrarily accused of cowardice during World War I.
Crucially, this incipient interpretation of the masculine desire to confront, combat and conquer – against the odds, against authority, against nature, against destiny – famously evolved into Kirk Douglas’ portrayal of the titular militant messiah in Universal Pictures’ Spartacus in 1960. This sword and sandal saga about a humble gladiator rising up to lead the largest ever slave revolt against the imperious Roman Republic was the most expensive and prestigious film production Kubrick had helmed. Furthermore, its subsequent commercial and cultural success helped to solidify his own personal and professional ambitions to be recognised as a leading figure within the industry, a true American auteur.
As Carr explains:
He was at the mercy of an egotistical group of actors (heavyweights Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton bickering with each other and questioning the authority of this young filmmaker), an equally obsessive producer/lead performer (Kirk Douglas), and the constraints dictated by a film of this size and scope.
This said, as Peter Kramer continues:
[Spartacus] established him as an important player in Hollywood … [enabling] him to negotiate with financiers and distributors from a position of strength so that from then on he could produce medium- to big-budget films … yet made without much interference from them.
The male drive to succeed however is not enough in itself. Such a raw and potentially ruinous emotion needs discipline, direction and order if it is to achieve its aims effectively, reach its destination intact and claim its prize. As a consequence, iconographic tropes such as maps, plans and/or schematics, either handmade or technological, often feature prominently in Kubrick’s mise-en-scène as a visual connotation of the characters’ need for organisation, method and control.
In his first production shot in colour, for example, the 30 minute promotional documentary The Seafarers from 1953, he explores how the Seafarers International Union in Maryland recruits and regulates its mariners, fishermen and boatmen before they work the oceans. To illustrate the scope and influence of this huge endeavour Kubrick pans across a large world map as the narrator asserts: ‘Antwerp, Cape Town, London, Marseilles, Singapore … You name it: picking his destination is the right of every Seafarer.’
More memorably of course is the mesmeric overhead push-in on the scale model of the hedge maze in The Shining in 1980. Restless in the reception hall of the Overlook Hotel Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) leans over and into it like a disturbed divisional general surveying his battle plans for the next day as his wife and son appear superimposed like mere insects, happily oblivious that they are wandering through a metaphor for their patriarch’s decaying mind.
Indeed, Carr reiterates this recurring Kubrickian conceit in his epilogue when he cites the screenplay for Napoleon, the unrealised biographical epic which many critics agree would have proved to have been the director’s raison d'être, the totality of his cinematic aesthetic:
Scene 31: INT—NAPOLEON’S PARIS HQ—DAY
Pencil between his teeth, dividers in one hand, [Napoleon] creeps around on hands and knees on top of a very large map of Italy, laid out from wall to wall. Other large maps cover the table, the couch and any other available space.
In line with his increased production budgets, abilities and aspirations Kubrick advanced his ruminations on order, control and power considerably with Dr. Strangelove in 1964, 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and A Clockwork Orange in 1971. On the one hand these three films can be seen to mirror the theoretical work carried out by one of his 1960s contemporaries, Marshall McLuhan, in terms of technology serving as an extension of man: his physicality, his consciousness, his ethics and his will. And, on the other, it could be argued that they also echo Karl Marx’s position in the 19th century with regards to technological determinism and the hegemonic role this plays in the socio-economic relations and cultural practices of wider society.
For example, the cockpit of the B-52 in Dr. Strangelove is heaving with ‘a smorgasbord of lights, switches, maps, gauges, radars, and guides’ as it transports a hydrogen bomb to its intended Soviet target. The message from the military to the body politic is very loud and clear: Everything is under control. We have the technology. God bless America.
With the incomparable 2001: A Space Odyssey the audience, and cinema itself, are invited to take a giant leap forwards as Kubrick propels us from the prehistoric broken bones of homicidal Hominids and into the nervous system of the spacecraft Discovery: its intricate network of hibernation pods and plasma pipes, scanners and closed-circuit cameras all interconnected and centralised within the mainframe brain of HAL, the supercomputer whose sole duty is to transport the crew to Jupiter to investigate an alien radio signal. We can only assume that, hypothetically, if this fully-funded, interplanetary mission is successful then it would surely herald the expansion of American political, economic and cultural imperialism out of this world and throughout the cosmos.
Returning to earth with A Clockwork Orange Kubrick explicitly intertwines technology and hegemony by way of the Ludovico Technique, a state-sponsored behavioural aversion procedure which is tested on one desperate experimental subject: the untamed, ultra-violent rapist droog, Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell). Here scientific research, knowledge and needles are employed by the British Ministry of the Interior to physically inculcate self-control and conclusively cure him of his own destructive free will. The treatment leaves working-class Alex meek and defenceless and, against our better judgement, we are encouraged to feel sympathy for him. Prof. Philip Kuberski argues however that the film’s narrative should not be regarded as a defence of free will at all but instead as a reminder to the audience that we are also ‘conditioned in some way or another’ and the day-to-day freedoms we think we enjoy are just an ‘illusion’.
With this in mind we can thus posit that Kubrick’s driven men, whether they know it or not, are also suffering from a similar existential crisis. That is, their desire to confront, combat and conquer is just that, a desire, and not a logical decision which they are able to make. As a result, their attempts to control and direct their impulses with plans, maps or technology are ultimately unsustainable due to the impermanence and vicissitudes of the wider world, the people within it and the forces in between. Thus, their turbulent and tragic character arcs can only lead their sense of purpose, and their sense of self, to overexposure, disorder and defeat.
In Lolita in 1962, for instance, the upstanding university lecturer Humbert Humbert (James Mason) is ultimately undone by his illicit infatuation with the 14 year old Dolores Haze, deliriously dissolving into ‘a mere shell of himself, totally out of control and forcibly subdued by … hospital staff’.
Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal), the self-serving 18th century Irish scoundrel and gambler in Barry Lyndon in 1975, swears that he will never ‘fall from the rank of a gentleman’ but, inevitably, he comes tumbling down the social ladder following a messy duel against his stepson where he loses his leg and is banished from England forever.
Then there is Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) who, in Full Metal Jacket in 1986, humiliates and belittles his squad of new recruits, stripping them, one by one, of their egos and their dignity in order to transform them into marines, into killing machines who are ‘ready to eat their own guts and ask for seconds’. It is ironic that this brutal training regime proves to be more successful than anyone could of imagined when, during one sleepy evening, the maligned and malfunctioning Private Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio) executes Hartman, his nemesis, with a bullet to the chest.
As can be seen nearly all of the male protagonists mentioned are leaders and/or patriarchs who, while memorably constructed and beautifully performed, are also narcissistic, naïve, deluded and alone. Consequently, one critical lesson we can learn from Stanley Kubrick’s exceptional oeuvre, as well as from Jeremy Carr’s fine book, it is that as audience members and as mindful citizens we should always be extremely careful about the kind of men we choose to bestow authority, control and power upon in political, corporate and cultural life.
Brett Gregory is an independent screenwriter, director and producer based in Manchester (UK). His critically acclaimed debut feature film, ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’ is currently available in the US and UK on Amazon Prime.
Email: brett@seriousfeather.com
Interview: Wickermania
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Chris Nunn, Associate Professor of Film at the University of Birmingham (UK)
July 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Chris Nunn, Associate Professor of Film at the University of Birmingham (UK)
July 2023
Interview Start: 2 minutes 34 seconds
Interview Transcript
The Wicker Man, starring Edward Woodwood, Christopher Lee and Britt Ekland, was released in 1973. It was directed by Robin Hardy, written by Anthony Shaffer and produced by Peter Snell. A seemingly simple story about a police officer searching for a missing schoolgirl on a remote island off the coast of Scotland, it is one of the most important films in the history of British cinema. A mystical, multi-layered microcosm of Britishness itself: its past, its present and its people; its conservatism, its paganism and its radicalism; its habits, its hopes and its horrors.
BG: My name’s Brett Gregory, and here at the UK desk for Arts Express we have a very special guest with us this evening who is currently working on a project which, incredibly, is about to add another layer of meaning to this stone-cold classic film, another perspective and another dimension.
CN: So, my name is Chris Nunn. I am an assistant professor of film at the University of Birmingham, and I am the producer of an upcoming feature documentary currently called Wickermania. It follows two half-brothers who are the sons of the original director of The Wicker Man, Robin Hardy. So we follow Justin and Dominic as they try to understand their father – who they both had a slightly problematic relationship with – through his cult film and actually end up, perhaps, finding each other instead.
BG: That's a totally unique angle. So why now?
CN: The 50th anniversary of The Wicker Man is why we started this project. It's taken on its own characteristics and has moved quite organically in the direction that it has, but it's still very much tied to the fact that we're still talking about this film 50 years later.
BG: In your role as producer on this particular project, what's your approach?
CN: My main duties in that role are quite interesting, really, in this context, because I keep calling myself a sort of creative producer as opposed to the producer who sort of finds money and schedules everything. I have found some money, which has been mildly useful, but I have not really done schedules and, you know, spreadsheets and other things. It's been much more about having an overview of what the film is; an overview of how it might come to fruition, etc., etc.
BG: And it's still a work in progress at the moment. What's the footage like?
CN: The film is working best when the brothers are literally standing where their father stood. We have some wonderful footage in Scotland of the brothers at this at the remaining stumps of the Wicker Man, and footage of Robin Hardy in the same place, and it resonates.
BG: So the production is starting to take its own course?
CN: Originally, when we started the project, I would have said that it was targeted at people who are fans of The Wicker Man. The longer we go on the more I think it's actually a very personal documentary, an almost therapy film, which is for anyone, really, who has a family.
BG: Related to that, what's this I hear about family heirlooms being hidden in the attic?
CN: We are using some newly discovered original sources, which are papers from Robin Hardy's study during the production of The Wicker Man, and the years preceding it and about a year afterwards. So, letters, photographs … and they tell a very interesting story. They tell the story from Hardy's perspective, which I don't think we've particularly had. Alan Brown's book on The Wicker Man sort of seemed to privilege Anthony Shaffer, the screenwriter's perspective. So, it's quite nice, really, to be looking through these documents and going, ‘Ah, right, so there were all these people saying Hardy was a terrible director, but what were his experiences?’ And there are a few letters in there that give us a sort of insight into that.
BG: So history is being rewritten? Sounds like there's much more to this, though.
CN: From my best understanding, unfortunately, when The Wicker Man bombed at the box office, Robin Hardy left his family, which is a key moment in our film, and left his then-wife Caroline, Justin's mother, with a huge amount of debts, in excess we think of kind of £600,000 in today's money. So, they had to sell their house. They moved, and I think it's the house they moved to, is where the materials were just put in the loft and clearly left in the loft and had sat there fairly authentically for about the last 50 years until someone wrote to Justin saying, I found all the stuff. Do you want it, or shall I burn it?’ [LAUGHS] And as Justin recounts every time we do an interview about this, he very nearly said, ‘Well, burn it. I don't want anything to do with this.’ And, indeed, when you see the film you will start to understand why.
BG: Total drama. You gotta tell us a bit more, Chris.
CN: So they don't know each other very well as brothers, I guess. They didn't grow up together, and they've come together to be academics again. Justin is a lecturer at University College, London, and Dominic is at the University of Quebec, Montreal, as a professor of Art History. And, of course, I'm an academic too, so this is a very academic lead film, which is appreciating the value of having new primary sources to base a narrative around and, I suppose, the brothers have discovered through those primary sources just what an impact The Wicker Man had on their family, on Robin Hardy's health, on Robin Hardy's finances, but really by extension on the finances of the Hardy household, and particularly Justin's mother, Caroline. And I would be lying if I said that hasn't been a very painful process for them. That again, I suppose my role on this film is to be as objective as possible, given the subjectivity that arises when the brothers interact with each other and get talking. So there are some emotional, very emotional moments in the film.
BG: Sounds like it. Pretty heavy. So what role is the University of Birmingham playing in all this?
CN: Justin and I had worked originally together at the University of Greenwich in London, and when I moved to the University of Birmingham, there was a sense that we could – as many universities can these days – actually pull together a feature doc using the resources that we have, using, you know, whatever kit that the university possesses and, indeed, whatever talent the university possesses. And this is how we've been able to put this film together on a very small amount of money. Again, down the track, we hope to sell it, make some money, and indeed pay all the fabulous people who've worked with us.
BG: Is that the end goal, or is there more?
CN: The end goal is tricky, really, it's bigger than the film. The film feels like a catalyst for further discussions, part of which is the legacy of The Wicker Man, but part of which is also looking at that kind of independent filmmaking landscape. You know, kind of appreciating The Wicker Man as a radical text, Robin Hardy, in his cult film here, as a radical first-time feature director. At the time when The Wicker Man was reviewed in 1973 it was really well-received by critics, saying this is what British film needs to be, and here we are 50 years later wondering if we need to be having more creative conversations about what British film can be. Moreover, Justin and I have long-term ambitions, we're both academics, we're both in education, we have long-term ambitions to set up some kind of film education, filmmaking education school up in the area where The Wicker Man was shot. We might call it the ‘Cult Film School’ or something, a space for young emerging filmmakers who want to come and want to workshop ideas that are gonna push boundaries. That is what we're really hoping we're able to achieve from this.
BG: That's a fantastic idea, and essential.
CN: This is a sort of low to no-budget film. We don't really have any resources. We did just have a successful Kickstarter, which was fantastic, but we're keeping that money aside to clear archive, particularly The Wicker Man footage.
BG: So you need investment?
CN: We're more than happy to have conversations with anyone who's happy to invest, noting, of course, here in the UK, particularly at the moment, there is a cost of living crisis, so we don't really expect people to be able to bankroll quirky documentaries. But if anyone's listening and they are thinking, ‘Yes, actually, I could bankroll your quirky documentary,’ then we would love to hear from you. You can find us on social media, on Twitter @Wickermania, on Instagram @Wicker_mania, any contact through there will come straight to me, and we hope to share this film with you later in the year.
BG: Amazing, Chris, sounds like you're on a proper filmmaking journey. It's a fantastic project and deserves support. Anyway, nice one.
CN: Thanks very much again for having me.
The Wicker Man, starring Edward Woodwood, Christopher Lee and Britt Ekland, was released in 1973. It was directed by Robin Hardy, written by Anthony Shaffer and produced by Peter Snell. A seemingly simple story about a police officer searching for a missing schoolgirl on a remote island off the coast of Scotland, it is one of the most important films in the history of British cinema. A mystical, multi-layered microcosm of Britishness itself: its past, its present and its people; its conservatism, its paganism and its radicalism; its habits, its hopes and its horrors.
BG: My name’s Brett Gregory, and here at the UK desk for Arts Express we have a very special guest with us this evening who is currently working on a project which, incredibly, is about to add another layer of meaning to this stone-cold classic film, another perspective and another dimension.
CN: So, my name is Chris Nunn. I am an assistant professor of film at the University of Birmingham, and I am the producer of an upcoming feature documentary currently called Wickermania. It follows two half-brothers who are the sons of the original director of The Wicker Man, Robin Hardy. So we follow Justin and Dominic as they try to understand their father – who they both had a slightly problematic relationship with – through his cult film and actually end up, perhaps, finding each other instead.
BG: That's a totally unique angle. So why now?
CN: The 50th anniversary of The Wicker Man is why we started this project. It's taken on its own characteristics and has moved quite organically in the direction that it has, but it's still very much tied to the fact that we're still talking about this film 50 years later.
BG: In your role as producer on this particular project, what's your approach?
CN: My main duties in that role are quite interesting, really, in this context, because I keep calling myself a sort of creative producer as opposed to the producer who sort of finds money and schedules everything. I have found some money, which has been mildly useful, but I have not really done schedules and, you know, spreadsheets and other things. It's been much more about having an overview of what the film is; an overview of how it might come to fruition, etc., etc.
BG: And it's still a work in progress at the moment. What's the footage like?
CN: The film is working best when the brothers are literally standing where their father stood. We have some wonderful footage in Scotland of the brothers at this at the remaining stumps of the Wicker Man, and footage of Robin Hardy in the same place, and it resonates.
BG: So the production is starting to take its own course?
CN: Originally, when we started the project, I would have said that it was targeted at people who are fans of The Wicker Man. The longer we go on the more I think it's actually a very personal documentary, an almost therapy film, which is for anyone, really, who has a family.
BG: Related to that, what's this I hear about family heirlooms being hidden in the attic?
CN: We are using some newly discovered original sources, which are papers from Robin Hardy's study during the production of The Wicker Man, and the years preceding it and about a year afterwards. So, letters, photographs … and they tell a very interesting story. They tell the story from Hardy's perspective, which I don't think we've particularly had. Alan Brown's book on The Wicker Man sort of seemed to privilege Anthony Shaffer, the screenwriter's perspective. So, it's quite nice, really, to be looking through these documents and going, ‘Ah, right, so there were all these people saying Hardy was a terrible director, but what were his experiences?’ And there are a few letters in there that give us a sort of insight into that.
BG: So history is being rewritten? Sounds like there's much more to this, though.
CN: From my best understanding, unfortunately, when The Wicker Man bombed at the box office, Robin Hardy left his family, which is a key moment in our film, and left his then-wife Caroline, Justin's mother, with a huge amount of debts, in excess we think of kind of £600,000 in today's money. So, they had to sell their house. They moved, and I think it's the house they moved to, is where the materials were just put in the loft and clearly left in the loft and had sat there fairly authentically for about the last 50 years until someone wrote to Justin saying, I found all the stuff. Do you want it, or shall I burn it?’ [LAUGHS] And as Justin recounts every time we do an interview about this, he very nearly said, ‘Well, burn it. I don't want anything to do with this.’ And, indeed, when you see the film you will start to understand why.
BG: Total drama. You gotta tell us a bit more, Chris.
CN: So they don't know each other very well as brothers, I guess. They didn't grow up together, and they've come together to be academics again. Justin is a lecturer at University College, London, and Dominic is at the University of Quebec, Montreal, as a professor of Art History. And, of course, I'm an academic too, so this is a very academic lead film, which is appreciating the value of having new primary sources to base a narrative around and, I suppose, the brothers have discovered through those primary sources just what an impact The Wicker Man had on their family, on Robin Hardy's health, on Robin Hardy's finances, but really by extension on the finances of the Hardy household, and particularly Justin's mother, Caroline. And I would be lying if I said that hasn't been a very painful process for them. That again, I suppose my role on this film is to be as objective as possible, given the subjectivity that arises when the brothers interact with each other and get talking. So there are some emotional, very emotional moments in the film.
BG: Sounds like it. Pretty heavy. So what role is the University of Birmingham playing in all this?
CN: Justin and I had worked originally together at the University of Greenwich in London, and when I moved to the University of Birmingham, there was a sense that we could – as many universities can these days – actually pull together a feature doc using the resources that we have, using, you know, whatever kit that the university possesses and, indeed, whatever talent the university possesses. And this is how we've been able to put this film together on a very small amount of money. Again, down the track, we hope to sell it, make some money, and indeed pay all the fabulous people who've worked with us.
BG: Is that the end goal, or is there more?
CN: The end goal is tricky, really, it's bigger than the film. The film feels like a catalyst for further discussions, part of which is the legacy of The Wicker Man, but part of which is also looking at that kind of independent filmmaking landscape. You know, kind of appreciating The Wicker Man as a radical text, Robin Hardy, in his cult film here, as a radical first-time feature director. At the time when The Wicker Man was reviewed in 1973 it was really well-received by critics, saying this is what British film needs to be, and here we are 50 years later wondering if we need to be having more creative conversations about what British film can be. Moreover, Justin and I have long-term ambitions, we're both academics, we're both in education, we have long-term ambitions to set up some kind of film education, filmmaking education school up in the area where The Wicker Man was shot. We might call it the ‘Cult Film School’ or something, a space for young emerging filmmakers who want to come and want to workshop ideas that are gonna push boundaries. That is what we're really hoping we're able to achieve from this.
BG: That's a fantastic idea, and essential.
CN: This is a sort of low to no-budget film. We don't really have any resources. We did just have a successful Kickstarter, which was fantastic, but we're keeping that money aside to clear archive, particularly The Wicker Man footage.
BG: So you need investment?
CN: We're more than happy to have conversations with anyone who's happy to invest, noting, of course, here in the UK, particularly at the moment, there is a cost of living crisis, so we don't really expect people to be able to bankroll quirky documentaries. But if anyone's listening and they are thinking, ‘Yes, actually, I could bankroll your quirky documentary,’ then we would love to hear from you. You can find us on social media, on Twitter @Wickermania, on Instagram @Wicker_mania, any contact through there will come straight to me, and we hope to share this film with you later in the year.
BG: Amazing, Chris, sounds like you're on a proper filmmaking journey. It's a fantastic project and deserves support. Anyway, nice one.
CN: Thanks very much again for having me.
GUEST BLOG: ‘How to be angry, how to tell stories …’ Brett Gregory on his influences and origins
June 2023
June 2023
Although I was born on an RAF base in Buckinghamshire I was raised on a run-down council estate in a Nottinghamshire mining town from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s.
After my alcoholic stepdad was arrested for assault for the umpteenth time, my mum became a single parent on benefits with three children. We had no money: we ate salad cream sandwiches, we used the local newspaper as toilet roll and I could only afford to go to the cinema once over this period of time, and that was to watch ‘Tron’ at the ABC Cinema in 1982 for my 11th birthday.
Every other movie I watched was either on a black and white portable television in my bedroom or on pirated VHS tapes on the colour television in the living room downstairs.
As a result, I have no spiritual affinity with cinema-going or any of its mystical rituals like many other filmmakers claim to have. With television however it’s a different story.
For example, in 1982 I also grew aware of the power of the British State by following Newsnight reports about the Falklands Conflict throughout the spring. This was far removed from reading about World War I or World War II in history books; this was seemingly happening in the present tense right before my very eyes.
It was around this time as well when I became fascinated by a puzzle book called ‘Masquerade’. The author, Kit Williams, had buried a bejewelled golden pendant in the shape of a hare somewhere in England, and in the book – which told the story of Jack Hare – he’d hidden textual and pictorial clues in order to pinpoint the pendant’s exact location. I never solved the puzzle, and the treasure was discovered by way of fraud in 1988. The 2009 BBC documentary ‘The Man Behind The Masquerade’ tells the story.
In 1984 the Miner’s Strike broke out and, as hundreds of working-class communities were torn apart across the Midlands and the North, I then became aware that the British State would attack its own citizens just as readily as it would foreign entities. Watch video footage of ‘The Battle of Orgreave’ online and you’ll see what I mean.
Such familicidal tendencies were further demonstrated in the mid-1980s when Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government launched a completely unhinged and homophobic public health campaign using the slogan: ‘AIDS: Don't Die of Ignorance’ which infected an entire generation of adolescents with paranoia, distrust and self-doubt. The original leaflet is archived by the Wellcome Trust.
Surrounded by all this new knowledge and real life horror, it’s no surprise that by this point I’d started to read Stephen King novels and Clive Barker’s ‘Books of Blood’. In turn, I’d also begun to take the family’s Jack Russell, Shandy, on three hour long walks across farmers’ fields and to a nearby forest, as faraway from civilisation as possible.
Obviously I wasn’t a monk however, and would lead a double life by hanging around the front of the shops on the estate with older teenage lads in the evening: learning how to smoke, how to spit, how to swear, how to be angry and how to tell stories ‘that had better be fucking funny!’
When everyone eventually wandered home I’d then return to my bedroom and switch on the Acorn Electron personal computer which my mum had bought on hire purchase to keep me quiet.
Interestingly, if you wanted to play ‘free’ DIY games like ‘Tomb Hunter’ or ‘Spy Raider’ on a personal computer you had to type in hundreds of lines of BASIC code which were published in magazines like ‘Electron User’. However, if you made one single error – missed out a number or a letter, or typed a colon instead of a semi-colon – then the game wouldn’t work.
Little did I know at the time but this painstaking transcription process taught me extremely close reading skills and these would later prove very useful when I studied literary theory and literary criticism as a part of my BA and MA degrees in English Literature in the 1990s and, in turn, when I began to write, direct and edit short films in the 2000s.
In 1988, while writing a crappy ‘Twilight Zone’-style short story on a second-hand Olivetti typewriter in the kitchen, I noticed that Thatcher’s Tory government had now begun to mute all television broadcasts that featured representatives of Sinn Féin, a practice that would only end in 1994. It was at this very moment when it was confirmed for me that I didn’t live in a free society, and I probably never had.
Why was I was being denied access to this information? Why was I being denied the opportunity to make up my own mind about things, or gauge how I felt about such things? Or consider how I should or should not react to them? Or even learn from them? Furthermore, what other information was being withheld from me? What else didn’t I know? And why?
Naturally, as a young man desperate for answers which he was never going to receive, I grew frustrated and started searching out alternatives to the mainstream like I was on some sort of survival mission. I began to read the work of ‘troublemakers’ like George Orwell, Edgar Allen Poe, Jack Kerouac and Oscar Wilde, as well as whatever biographies I could lay my hands on at the local library in town.
In turn, I also started watching Moviedrome on BBC 2. A late night television series which started in 1988, it was basically film school for poor people. Subversive film director Alex Cox (‘Repo Man’, ‘Sid and Nancy’) was the presenter. He would enthusiastically discuss the origin, production, style and themes of films which I’d never heard of. These films would then be screened and I’d suddenly feel my imagination expand, feeling a little less insane and a little less alone. Science fiction classics like ‘X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes’, ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’ or ‘The Fly’ (with Vincent Price), and newer experimental fare like ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’. Rugged 1970s films like ‘Five Easy Pieces’, ‘Point Blank’, ‘Badlands’ and ‘The Parallax View’.
What this four year study programme of ‘cult’ films taught me, as well as the literary books I was now rifling through on a regular basis, was that it wasn’t simply what you thought that mattered but, if you desired to feel vaguely like yourself on your own terms, then how you thought was just as necessary.
After finishing my BA and MA about eight years later I started claiming housing benefit for this damp, solitary bedsit I was confined to while I worked part-time at the library at the University of Derby for the next six years. The main reason for this was so I could have free access to all the books which I’d never had the opportunity to read while in formal education. I gorged myself on Jorge Luis Borges, Dante Alighieri, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Bukowski, Gustav Meyrink, Jean Genet, Umberto Eco, James Joyce, Knut Hamsun, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Primo Levi, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alasdair Gray and Franz Kafka.
After watching the attacks on the World Trade Centre on television on September 11, 2001, I realised that the human race and its leaders were never going to improve during my lifetime, and so I decided I might as well study to be a teacher, sharing what I’d learned, before it was too late. In 2003 I then managed to secure a job teaching A Level Film Studies and A Level Cultural Studies at a college in Manchester.
These recollections of my early personal and cultural life form the basis of my aesthetic approach in ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’. For example, as well as the myth of Sisyphus and Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, the narrative structure is loosely based on Virginia Woolf’s ‘To The Lighthouse’, and the Lacanian phallocentric ‘I’ - which is associated with this novel’s subtext. In the film, Young Jack even points to the Stoodley Pike monument at one stage and exclaims, “And that big tower looks like a lighthouse, dunnit?”
In turn, different types of storytelling are addressed in an effort to try and understand how and why these represent, and even help to construct, who we think we are. For example, there are numerous ‘storytellers’ present throughout, but who is telling the truth? What about gossip, rumour, poor memory or falsehoods? Who should we trust? The dominant third-person narrator; the newsreaders on the mobile phone; Boris Johnson; the Granny’s voicemails; the female interviewees’ recollections; the protagonist as a boy, as a youth or as a man; Brett Gregory the screenwriter or Brett Gregory the director?
A copy of Kit Williams’ ‘Masquerade’ appears in one of the opening scenes as an intertextual prompt. The characters Young Jack, Jack and Old Jack each tell the audience that they’re looking for their missing dog, Shandy, who keeps getting lost while chasing rabbits. So all three ‘Jacks’ are chasing an invisible ‘Jack’ Russell who, in turn, is chasing the fictional ‘Jack’ Hare from ‘Masquerade’ in the hope that this will ultimately lead to… what? Treasure? The Truth? The Prelapsarian Past? This idea of losing oneself within oneself is also flagged up in the opening Borges’ quote from ‘Labyrinths’, and reiterated in the print of M.C. Escher’s ‘Relativity’ which appears on one of the doors in the protagonist’s flat.
The monologues delivered throughout were written to function as the characters’ streams-of-consciousness, rather than spoken words, since what they’re saying and how they’re saying it is far too complicated to be deemed to be a part of the social realist genre.
In these ways then the film is structured like a working-class modernist novella and, I suppose, this is why a general audience finds it difficult to understand. If my name was David Lynch and/or the film had been distributed and marketed by A24 I presume people would be inclined to put more effort in.
This said, I have great faith that the film will find a wider audience over time. Co-producer, Jack Clarke, who’s around twenty-five years younger than me, has promised to make sure the film is still available to audiences long after I’m gone.
After my alcoholic stepdad was arrested for assault for the umpteenth time, my mum became a single parent on benefits with three children. We had no money: we ate salad cream sandwiches, we used the local newspaper as toilet roll and I could only afford to go to the cinema once over this period of time, and that was to watch ‘Tron’ at the ABC Cinema in 1982 for my 11th birthday.
Every other movie I watched was either on a black and white portable television in my bedroom or on pirated VHS tapes on the colour television in the living room downstairs.
As a result, I have no spiritual affinity with cinema-going or any of its mystical rituals like many other filmmakers claim to have. With television however it’s a different story.
For example, in 1982 I also grew aware of the power of the British State by following Newsnight reports about the Falklands Conflict throughout the spring. This was far removed from reading about World War I or World War II in history books; this was seemingly happening in the present tense right before my very eyes.
It was around this time as well when I became fascinated by a puzzle book called ‘Masquerade’. The author, Kit Williams, had buried a bejewelled golden pendant in the shape of a hare somewhere in England, and in the book – which told the story of Jack Hare – he’d hidden textual and pictorial clues in order to pinpoint the pendant’s exact location. I never solved the puzzle, and the treasure was discovered by way of fraud in 1988. The 2009 BBC documentary ‘The Man Behind The Masquerade’ tells the story.
In 1984 the Miner’s Strike broke out and, as hundreds of working-class communities were torn apart across the Midlands and the North, I then became aware that the British State would attack its own citizens just as readily as it would foreign entities. Watch video footage of ‘The Battle of Orgreave’ online and you’ll see what I mean.
Such familicidal tendencies were further demonstrated in the mid-1980s when Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government launched a completely unhinged and homophobic public health campaign using the slogan: ‘AIDS: Don't Die of Ignorance’ which infected an entire generation of adolescents with paranoia, distrust and self-doubt. The original leaflet is archived by the Wellcome Trust.
Surrounded by all this new knowledge and real life horror, it’s no surprise that by this point I’d started to read Stephen King novels and Clive Barker’s ‘Books of Blood’. In turn, I’d also begun to take the family’s Jack Russell, Shandy, on three hour long walks across farmers’ fields and to a nearby forest, as faraway from civilisation as possible.
Obviously I wasn’t a monk however, and would lead a double life by hanging around the front of the shops on the estate with older teenage lads in the evening: learning how to smoke, how to spit, how to swear, how to be angry and how to tell stories ‘that had better be fucking funny!’
When everyone eventually wandered home I’d then return to my bedroom and switch on the Acorn Electron personal computer which my mum had bought on hire purchase to keep me quiet.
Interestingly, if you wanted to play ‘free’ DIY games like ‘Tomb Hunter’ or ‘Spy Raider’ on a personal computer you had to type in hundreds of lines of BASIC code which were published in magazines like ‘Electron User’. However, if you made one single error – missed out a number or a letter, or typed a colon instead of a semi-colon – then the game wouldn’t work.
Little did I know at the time but this painstaking transcription process taught me extremely close reading skills and these would later prove very useful when I studied literary theory and literary criticism as a part of my BA and MA degrees in English Literature in the 1990s and, in turn, when I began to write, direct and edit short films in the 2000s.
In 1988, while writing a crappy ‘Twilight Zone’-style short story on a second-hand Olivetti typewriter in the kitchen, I noticed that Thatcher’s Tory government had now begun to mute all television broadcasts that featured representatives of Sinn Féin, a practice that would only end in 1994. It was at this very moment when it was confirmed for me that I didn’t live in a free society, and I probably never had.
Why was I was being denied access to this information? Why was I being denied the opportunity to make up my own mind about things, or gauge how I felt about such things? Or consider how I should or should not react to them? Or even learn from them? Furthermore, what other information was being withheld from me? What else didn’t I know? And why?
Naturally, as a young man desperate for answers which he was never going to receive, I grew frustrated and started searching out alternatives to the mainstream like I was on some sort of survival mission. I began to read the work of ‘troublemakers’ like George Orwell, Edgar Allen Poe, Jack Kerouac and Oscar Wilde, as well as whatever biographies I could lay my hands on at the local library in town.
In turn, I also started watching Moviedrome on BBC 2. A late night television series which started in 1988, it was basically film school for poor people. Subversive film director Alex Cox (‘Repo Man’, ‘Sid and Nancy’) was the presenter. He would enthusiastically discuss the origin, production, style and themes of films which I’d never heard of. These films would then be screened and I’d suddenly feel my imagination expand, feeling a little less insane and a little less alone. Science fiction classics like ‘X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes’, ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’ or ‘The Fly’ (with Vincent Price), and newer experimental fare like ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’. Rugged 1970s films like ‘Five Easy Pieces’, ‘Point Blank’, ‘Badlands’ and ‘The Parallax View’.
What this four year study programme of ‘cult’ films taught me, as well as the literary books I was now rifling through on a regular basis, was that it wasn’t simply what you thought that mattered but, if you desired to feel vaguely like yourself on your own terms, then how you thought was just as necessary.
After finishing my BA and MA about eight years later I started claiming housing benefit for this damp, solitary bedsit I was confined to while I worked part-time at the library at the University of Derby for the next six years. The main reason for this was so I could have free access to all the books which I’d never had the opportunity to read while in formal education. I gorged myself on Jorge Luis Borges, Dante Alighieri, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Bukowski, Gustav Meyrink, Jean Genet, Umberto Eco, James Joyce, Knut Hamsun, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Primo Levi, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alasdair Gray and Franz Kafka.
After watching the attacks on the World Trade Centre on television on September 11, 2001, I realised that the human race and its leaders were never going to improve during my lifetime, and so I decided I might as well study to be a teacher, sharing what I’d learned, before it was too late. In 2003 I then managed to secure a job teaching A Level Film Studies and A Level Cultural Studies at a college in Manchester.
These recollections of my early personal and cultural life form the basis of my aesthetic approach in ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’. For example, as well as the myth of Sisyphus and Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, the narrative structure is loosely based on Virginia Woolf’s ‘To The Lighthouse’, and the Lacanian phallocentric ‘I’ - which is associated with this novel’s subtext. In the film, Young Jack even points to the Stoodley Pike monument at one stage and exclaims, “And that big tower looks like a lighthouse, dunnit?”
In turn, different types of storytelling are addressed in an effort to try and understand how and why these represent, and even help to construct, who we think we are. For example, there are numerous ‘storytellers’ present throughout, but who is telling the truth? What about gossip, rumour, poor memory or falsehoods? Who should we trust? The dominant third-person narrator; the newsreaders on the mobile phone; Boris Johnson; the Granny’s voicemails; the female interviewees’ recollections; the protagonist as a boy, as a youth or as a man; Brett Gregory the screenwriter or Brett Gregory the director?
A copy of Kit Williams’ ‘Masquerade’ appears in one of the opening scenes as an intertextual prompt. The characters Young Jack, Jack and Old Jack each tell the audience that they’re looking for their missing dog, Shandy, who keeps getting lost while chasing rabbits. So all three ‘Jacks’ are chasing an invisible ‘Jack’ Russell who, in turn, is chasing the fictional ‘Jack’ Hare from ‘Masquerade’ in the hope that this will ultimately lead to… what? Treasure? The Truth? The Prelapsarian Past? This idea of losing oneself within oneself is also flagged up in the opening Borges’ quote from ‘Labyrinths’, and reiterated in the print of M.C. Escher’s ‘Relativity’ which appears on one of the doors in the protagonist’s flat.
The monologues delivered throughout were written to function as the characters’ streams-of-consciousness, rather than spoken words, since what they’re saying and how they’re saying it is far too complicated to be deemed to be a part of the social realist genre.
In these ways then the film is structured like a working-class modernist novella and, I suppose, this is why a general audience finds it difficult to understand. If my name was David Lynch and/or the film had been distributed and marketed by A24 I presume people would be inclined to put more effort in.
This said, I have great faith that the film will find a wider audience over time. Co-producer, Jack Clarke, who’s around twenty-five years younger than me, has promised to make sure the film is still available to audiences long after I’m gone.
This article originally appeared in Strange Exiles in June 2023.
BOOK REVIEW
David Archibald, ‘Tracking Loach’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
by Brett Gregory
April 2023
David Archibald, ‘Tracking Loach’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
by Brett Gregory
April 2023
Review Start: 38 minutes 48 seconds
REVIEW TRANSCRIPT
David Archibald’s book, ‘Tracking Loach’, is an academic celebration of Ken Loach’s 60 year career in socialist filmmaking and political activism.
It is also an extremely timely publication in that Loach’s latest film, ‘The Old Oak’, will be receiving its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival 2023.
The author’s unique approach is to prioritise the contextual mechanics of film production studies over the theoretical speculation of critical screen studies, arguing that the reflective observation of the methodologies and logistics involved in preparing, shooting and exhibiting a feature film should elicit a complementary understanding of a filmmaker’s aesthetic.
This reminds me of a television interview with David Niven from the 1970s where he asks something along the lines of: ‘How can a critic write a decent review if he’s never actually made a movie himself?’
During Archibald’s ethnographic pursuit of Loach’s poetic and political process his primary sources of data are the annotations, interviews, shooting documents, digital footage and photographs he accrues while being physically present during the production and exhibition of Loach’s working-class comedy-drama set in Glasgow, ‘The Angel’s Share’ (2012).
It should be noted that to be granted access to such a complex and sensitive creative environment and its extremely busy and anxious workforce – its technicians and performers – and, in turn, to enjoy the company and trust of its leaders who have the weight of a major production bearing down on them – Ken Loach (Director), Paul Laverty (Screenwriter) and Rebecca O’Brien (Producer) – is a memorable achievement in itself.
To accompany him on his journey the author also draws on a wide variety of historical and theoretical secondary sources, including the BFI’s Ken Loach Archive, and I personally found a number of his scholarly citations to be just as illuminating as his on set observations.
For example, when working alongside his early screenwriting partner, Jim Allen, Archibald highlights that Loach’s television productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s were influenced by the political ideas of Leon Trotsky in that the UK’s established democratic system was seen to be inadequate with regards to the economic interests of the proletariat.
Following on from this it is argued that Loach’s films generally aim to reveal to the audience, either explicitly or implicitly, the harsh realities, exploitation and despair of working-class experience and, in turn, that capitalism is not a natural, normal or inevitable way of ordering or governing society.
With this in mind the socialist concerns of Loach’s oeuvre have generally transitioned from addressing issues such as organised labour in ‘The Big Flame’ (1969) and ‘The Rank and File’ (1971), to unorganised labour in ‘Riff Raff’ (1991) and ‘The Navigators’ (2001), and then on to unemployed labour in ‘Sweet Sixteen’ (2002) and ‘I, Daniel Blake’ (2016).
While such films could be viewed as a war artist’s mournful depiction of socio-economic casualties lying strewn across a neoliberalist battlefield, Archibald posits with reference to the Italian historian, Enzo Traverso, that they can also be understood as evidential ‘open wounds’ which the Left need to nurse so the embers of possibility can once again be reignited.
Aware of Raymond Williams’ contention that ‘to be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing’, the author proceeds to cite Newland and Hoyle’s view that in some ways Loach’s creative output in the 21st century has begun to move away from the wholly melancholic art cinema of, say, ‘My Name Is Joe’ (1998), and on towards the Ealing comedy tradition with films like ‘Looking for Eric’ (2009) and ‘The Angel’s Share’ (2012).
Indeed, as Loach himself states in a footnote, ‘not every film has to end with a fist clenched in the air.’
Loach is a social realist director with the eye of a sympathetic documentarian, influenced by, amongst other things, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, the Free Cinema Movement and the 20th century current affairs programme, ‘World in Action’.
Moreover, similar to the generic conventions exhibited in films from the Italian neo-realist movement such as ‘Rome, Open City’ (1945) and ‘Bicycle Thieves’ (1948), Archibald frequently underscores Loach’s overarching quest to, paradoxically, recreate spontaneity, authenticity and ‘truth’ in his fictional work by employing predominantly naturalistic filmmaking techniques.
By shooting on a ‘real’ location instead of within an ‘artificial’ studio Loach’s objective is to not only encourage the actors to respond to their surrounding environment like recognisable, everyday human beings, but to also display the historical power relations which are inscribed into, for example, the municipal buildings which overshadow them.
Echoing John Grierson’s principle of ‘actuality’, Loach tends to shoot static medium long shots with the filming apparatus and its crew as far away from the ‘action’ as possible, a tactical attempt to motivate the audience to decide what is important and what to focus on, as if they themselves are simply observing matters from across the street.
In turn, this sense of things ‘really happening’ is often reinforced by natural lighting during a shoot via the sky for exteriors or windows for interiors, and by way of continuity editing in post-production so as not to ‘interfere’ with the actors’ on screen performances and the linear story they are striving to tell.
Of course, to achieve ‘the illusion of the first time’ casting is crucial, and Loach’s production team frequently enlist non-professional or amateur actors as a consequence. David Bradley as Billy Casper in ‘Kes’ (1969), Crissy Rock as Maggie Conlan in ‘Ladybird, Ladybird’ (1994) and Martin Compston as Liam in ‘Sweet Sixteen’ (2002) are just three notable examples.
As well as providing a real world opportunity for a filmmaker to collaborate, explore and develop a character more or less from scratch, Jennifer Beth Spiegel points out that casting non-professional or amateur actors is also good for marketing in that it draws the attention of the popular press by way of the presumption that these ordinary individuals are pure and unsullied by the elbow grease of the film industry and the ego of show business.
An important factor in this process is, unlike most other independent British production companies, Ken Loach and Rebecca O’Brien’s ‘Sixteen Films’ has become well financed and self-sufficient over the decades and so, as a result, they have the time to carry out lengthy scouting missions in order to locate and secure the right actor for the right role.
That is, to achieve a sense of verisimilitude on screen and in the minds of the audience, Loach et al seek out and cast performers who, besides their physical appearance, not only share similar personality traits with the characters they are pencilled in to play, but who also originate from similar socio-economic backgrounds or circumstances.
This approach is exemplified by the casting of Paul Brannigan as Gareth O’Connor in ‘The Angel’s Share’ in that the film’s screenwriter, Paul Laverty, first encountered him while conducting research at Strathclyde Police’s Violence Reduction Unit. As Archibald relates, in line with his on screen character, Brannigan, born in Glasgow’s East End, had been imprisoned for violent crimes and gangland feuding, but was also ‘attempting to go straight’.
Of course, critics will argue that the casting of non-professional actors undermines the history and craft of acting, the experience involved, the knowledge accumulated, the techniques learned, the talent nurtured. For example, in an interview with the author, the actor Roger Allam points out that amateur actors ‘would be at a loss in a Molière play’.
While this may be true, a reasonable response would be: what other practical routes are there available in the UK for the working-class to climb up on to the silver screen and represent their identities, communities and histories fairly?
In an industry predominantly based in London and owned, run and populated by the middle class and their superiors, the costs involved to train as an actor are astronomical to an ordinary person and the distance to travel, particularly for those in the North, preposterous.
Indeed, the few British working-class actors who are lucky enough to enjoy a public platform have consistently highlighted this socio-cultural system of privilege, prejudice and exclusion over recent years.
While Christopher Eccleston asserts that the ‘working-class … are not wanted in the arts anymore’, James McAvoy argues that the dominance of privately educated British actors in the 21st century is ‘damaging for society’. In turn, Gary Oldman has stated that he is unable to direct a follow-up to his incendiary ‘Nil by Mouth’ (1997) because ‘They don’t want another one. They want ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’’.
In light of these socio-economic and ideological realities, Loach’s casting of non-professional and amateur actors – together with the working-class stories he tells and the working-class worlds he creates – should be regarded not simply as an aesthetic choice or even socialist posturing. That is, under the stifling, reductive right-wing administration we are all currently enduring in the UK, enabled on a day-to-day basis by numerous obsequious and self-serving cultural institutions and organisations, it could be reasonably argued that such an approach is, in truth, a revolutionary act.
In his epilogue Archibald includes an apposite quote from the Spanish filmmaker, Luis Buñuel:
‘A writer or painter cannot change the world but they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts.’
In ‘Tracking Loach’ there is so much more to discover and learn from its unique, rigorous and genuinely heartfelt exploration of one of the maestros of modern British cinema and modern British politics, Ken Loach.
It is highly recommended.
David Archibald’s book, ‘Tracking Loach’, is an academic celebration of Ken Loach’s 60 year career in socialist filmmaking and political activism.
It is also an extremely timely publication in that Loach’s latest film, ‘The Old Oak’, will be receiving its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival 2023.
The author’s unique approach is to prioritise the contextual mechanics of film production studies over the theoretical speculation of critical screen studies, arguing that the reflective observation of the methodologies and logistics involved in preparing, shooting and exhibiting a feature film should elicit a complementary understanding of a filmmaker’s aesthetic.
This reminds me of a television interview with David Niven from the 1970s where he asks something along the lines of: ‘How can a critic write a decent review if he’s never actually made a movie himself?’
During Archibald’s ethnographic pursuit of Loach’s poetic and political process his primary sources of data are the annotations, interviews, shooting documents, digital footage and photographs he accrues while being physically present during the production and exhibition of Loach’s working-class comedy-drama set in Glasgow, ‘The Angel’s Share’ (2012).
It should be noted that to be granted access to such a complex and sensitive creative environment and its extremely busy and anxious workforce – its technicians and performers – and, in turn, to enjoy the company and trust of its leaders who have the weight of a major production bearing down on them – Ken Loach (Director), Paul Laverty (Screenwriter) and Rebecca O’Brien (Producer) – is a memorable achievement in itself.
To accompany him on his journey the author also draws on a wide variety of historical and theoretical secondary sources, including the BFI’s Ken Loach Archive, and I personally found a number of his scholarly citations to be just as illuminating as his on set observations.
For example, when working alongside his early screenwriting partner, Jim Allen, Archibald highlights that Loach’s television productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s were influenced by the political ideas of Leon Trotsky in that the UK’s established democratic system was seen to be inadequate with regards to the economic interests of the proletariat.
Following on from this it is argued that Loach’s films generally aim to reveal to the audience, either explicitly or implicitly, the harsh realities, exploitation and despair of working-class experience and, in turn, that capitalism is not a natural, normal or inevitable way of ordering or governing society.
With this in mind the socialist concerns of Loach’s oeuvre have generally transitioned from addressing issues such as organised labour in ‘The Big Flame’ (1969) and ‘The Rank and File’ (1971), to unorganised labour in ‘Riff Raff’ (1991) and ‘The Navigators’ (2001), and then on to unemployed labour in ‘Sweet Sixteen’ (2002) and ‘I, Daniel Blake’ (2016).
While such films could be viewed as a war artist’s mournful depiction of socio-economic casualties lying strewn across a neoliberalist battlefield, Archibald posits with reference to the Italian historian, Enzo Traverso, that they can also be understood as evidential ‘open wounds’ which the Left need to nurse so the embers of possibility can once again be reignited.
Aware of Raymond Williams’ contention that ‘to be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing’, the author proceeds to cite Newland and Hoyle’s view that in some ways Loach’s creative output in the 21st century has begun to move away from the wholly melancholic art cinema of, say, ‘My Name Is Joe’ (1998), and on towards the Ealing comedy tradition with films like ‘Looking for Eric’ (2009) and ‘The Angel’s Share’ (2012).
Indeed, as Loach himself states in a footnote, ‘not every film has to end with a fist clenched in the air.’
Loach is a social realist director with the eye of a sympathetic documentarian, influenced by, amongst other things, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, the Free Cinema Movement and the 20th century current affairs programme, ‘World in Action’.
Moreover, similar to the generic conventions exhibited in films from the Italian neo-realist movement such as ‘Rome, Open City’ (1945) and ‘Bicycle Thieves’ (1948), Archibald frequently underscores Loach’s overarching quest to, paradoxically, recreate spontaneity, authenticity and ‘truth’ in his fictional work by employing predominantly naturalistic filmmaking techniques.
By shooting on a ‘real’ location instead of within an ‘artificial’ studio Loach’s objective is to not only encourage the actors to respond to their surrounding environment like recognisable, everyday human beings, but to also display the historical power relations which are inscribed into, for example, the municipal buildings which overshadow them.
Echoing John Grierson’s principle of ‘actuality’, Loach tends to shoot static medium long shots with the filming apparatus and its crew as far away from the ‘action’ as possible, a tactical attempt to motivate the audience to decide what is important and what to focus on, as if they themselves are simply observing matters from across the street.
In turn, this sense of things ‘really happening’ is often reinforced by natural lighting during a shoot via the sky for exteriors or windows for interiors, and by way of continuity editing in post-production so as not to ‘interfere’ with the actors’ on screen performances and the linear story they are striving to tell.
Of course, to achieve ‘the illusion of the first time’ casting is crucial, and Loach’s production team frequently enlist non-professional or amateur actors as a consequence. David Bradley as Billy Casper in ‘Kes’ (1969), Crissy Rock as Maggie Conlan in ‘Ladybird, Ladybird’ (1994) and Martin Compston as Liam in ‘Sweet Sixteen’ (2002) are just three notable examples.
As well as providing a real world opportunity for a filmmaker to collaborate, explore and develop a character more or less from scratch, Jennifer Beth Spiegel points out that casting non-professional or amateur actors is also good for marketing in that it draws the attention of the popular press by way of the presumption that these ordinary individuals are pure and unsullied by the elbow grease of the film industry and the ego of show business.
An important factor in this process is, unlike most other independent British production companies, Ken Loach and Rebecca O’Brien’s ‘Sixteen Films’ has become well financed and self-sufficient over the decades and so, as a result, they have the time to carry out lengthy scouting missions in order to locate and secure the right actor for the right role.
That is, to achieve a sense of verisimilitude on screen and in the minds of the audience, Loach et al seek out and cast performers who, besides their physical appearance, not only share similar personality traits with the characters they are pencilled in to play, but who also originate from similar socio-economic backgrounds or circumstances.
This approach is exemplified by the casting of Paul Brannigan as Gareth O’Connor in ‘The Angel’s Share’ in that the film’s screenwriter, Paul Laverty, first encountered him while conducting research at Strathclyde Police’s Violence Reduction Unit. As Archibald relates, in line with his on screen character, Brannigan, born in Glasgow’s East End, had been imprisoned for violent crimes and gangland feuding, but was also ‘attempting to go straight’.
Of course, critics will argue that the casting of non-professional actors undermines the history and craft of acting, the experience involved, the knowledge accumulated, the techniques learned, the talent nurtured. For example, in an interview with the author, the actor Roger Allam points out that amateur actors ‘would be at a loss in a Molière play’.
While this may be true, a reasonable response would be: what other practical routes are there available in the UK for the working-class to climb up on to the silver screen and represent their identities, communities and histories fairly?
In an industry predominantly based in London and owned, run and populated by the middle class and their superiors, the costs involved to train as an actor are astronomical to an ordinary person and the distance to travel, particularly for those in the North, preposterous.
Indeed, the few British working-class actors who are lucky enough to enjoy a public platform have consistently highlighted this socio-cultural system of privilege, prejudice and exclusion over recent years.
While Christopher Eccleston asserts that the ‘working-class … are not wanted in the arts anymore’, James McAvoy argues that the dominance of privately educated British actors in the 21st century is ‘damaging for society’. In turn, Gary Oldman has stated that he is unable to direct a follow-up to his incendiary ‘Nil by Mouth’ (1997) because ‘They don’t want another one. They want ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’’.
In light of these socio-economic and ideological realities, Loach’s casting of non-professional and amateur actors – together with the working-class stories he tells and the working-class worlds he creates – should be regarded not simply as an aesthetic choice or even socialist posturing. That is, under the stifling, reductive right-wing administration we are all currently enduring in the UK, enabled on a day-to-day basis by numerous obsequious and self-serving cultural institutions and organisations, it could be reasonably argued that such an approach is, in truth, a revolutionary act.
In his epilogue Archibald includes an apposite quote from the Spanish filmmaker, Luis Buñuel:
‘A writer or painter cannot change the world but they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts.’
In ‘Tracking Loach’ there is so much more to discover and learn from its unique, rigorous and genuinely heartfelt exploration of one of the maestros of modern British cinema and modern British politics, Ken Loach.
It is highly recommended.
This book review originally appeared in Culture Matters in April 2023 and in The Morning Star in May 2023.
Arts Express interviews Brett Gregory about 'Nobody Loves You ...' and British Politics for WBAI 99.5FM in New York
December 2023
December 2023
INTERVIEW:: Mike Quille, editor of Culture Matters, interviews Brett Gregory about his debut feature film and the role of social class in British Cinema
December 2022
December 2022
Q: Can you tell us a bit about the background to making the film?
My best friend and cinematographer died from Sudden Adult Death Syndrome in 2013. He was 26 years old.
In turn, following decades of absence and estrangement, I was abandoned by my mother’s working class family in Nottinghamshire and my long-lost father’s middle class family in Oxfordshire in 2014.
They just didn’t want to know.
Moreover, following the UK government’s unprecedented £141bn bail out of the corrupt British banking system in 2008, austerity cuts finally sank their teeth into the education sector in 2015.
As a consequence, after 11 years of service, I was made redundant from my position as a lecturer in A Level Film and Cultural Studies.
This tragic succession of events, which literally left me with no one to turn to, ultimately coalesced into an intense period of angst, depression and sense of utter worthlessness.
In turn, with the stench of Brexit in the air, I slowly began to realise that I didn’t understand my country anymore; I didn’t understand its people; and I didn’t understand myself.
I had lost my focus and I had lost my faith.
With my redundancy money I spent months and months reading and writing and, now and again, glancing over at the large print of Hieronymus Bosch’s, ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, that hung on the living room wall in my rented flat in Manchester.
It then finally dawned on me, after yet another drunken stupor, that my only way out of this existential nightmare was to expel a full-throated, blood-curdling ‘Wilhelm Scream’: a semi-autobiographical screenplay based on Bosch’s 15th century painting in relation to the tragedy, trauma and truth of Broken Britain, i.e. the 1980s under Thatcher, the 1990s under Major and the 2000s under Cameron and Johnson.
Q. What’s the film about? What are its main themes?
In terms of plot we find Old Jack in his gloomy flat in Hulme in 2020 under Boris Johnson’s rule as he appears to awake from a fever dream about sex and murder in Manchester, overshadowed by the city’s Gothic architecture, civic statues and towering skyscrapers.
Still half-asleep and hung-over in bed he then reads an old text from the wife of a good friend who informs him that her husband is on a ventilator with COVID and that she is struggling to breathe herself.
In turn, in the mausoleum which is his study, Old Jack discovers that he has an unwelcome voicemail on his phone from his long-lost grandmother in Oxford who wishes to secretly meet up with him after four decades before she dies.
All of this proves too much for him however, and he takes a fistful of anti-depressants and washes them down with a mug of vodka.
Thus begins his descent into his own private rabbit-hole wherein he meets himself as a young boy in 1984, living on an abusive council estate under Margaret Thatcher during the Miners’ Strike, and fantasising about escaping into a world of fiction and illusion.
He is then later confronted by himself as a university student in 1992 during John Major’s tenure, riddled with Class A drugs, alienated from his peers and his studies, and questioning his purpose and sanity in violent messianic outbursts.
Moreover, these arduous, psychotic visitations are intercut with imagined interviews with a number of women from Old Jack’s past who seem to appear not only as witnesses, but also as judge and jury: his half-sister, his old English teacher, his former college manager, his ex-girlfriend’s Christian mother, and his nervous next door neighbour.
Overcome by the weight of his own history in a country where he doesn’t believe he belongs, Old Jack finally embarks on a pilgrimage to the historical Stoodley Pike monument in West Yorkshire, on the outskirts of society, to find some sort of answer which will put an end to his existential misery.
In terms of themes the film can primarily be understood to be about morality and ethics, about how those in power treat us and about how we treat each other.
In turn, it is also about abandonment, loneliness, mental health and a breakdown in communication between the working and middle classes.
Furthermore, the film’s narrative focuses on the socio-political cost of the North/South divide: how this is continually reinforced by right wing ideological forces in order to distract and weaken any serious collective opposition to the systematic asset stripping of what remains of the United Kingdom.
Q. What were you aiming for with the film, and how did those aims change in the making of the film?
A crucial aim of the film was to represent the Northern working class on screen, externally and internally, with intelligence, authenticity and dignity in direct opposition to the demeaning stereotypes and caricatures which are regularly churned out by the corporate mainstream media based in London.
Such a genuine independent creative decision directly challenges the popular status quo currently being maintained by the ideological state apparatus and so, understandably, we received no funding or investment or support from any public or private organisation at all.
As a result, what changed was not only the timescale of the production from one year to six and half years, but also my personal finances.
Even though every one of the cast and crew members committed their time and talents for free – a testament to the ongoing industriousness and inventiveness of Greater Manchester by the way – the production still left me around £56,000 in debt by way of personal loans, two credit cards and two overdrafts.
Q. Can you tell us a bit about reactions to the film from critics and from working-class people?
Since its release on Amazon Prime in May 2022 we have won over 50 international film festival awards and nominations, and received over 100 informed and passionate reviews on IMDb, Letterboxd and various arts and culture websites.
In the main these reviews praise the film’s anger, insight and originality, its production values, its performances and its soundtrack, comparing it to the works of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Alan Clarke and even Theodor Dreyer.
Standout quotes such as ‘A Searing Portrait of Modern Britain’ are incredibly validating and prove that a large international audience – who are also going through their own individual horrors under this self-serving global capitalist system – need authentic stories like this to remind them that they’re not alone and they’re not going mad.
We hosted a free screening of the film on a working class Manchester housing estate in Moston, for instance, and while a number of attendees still strongly believed that cinema should be ‘entertaining’ and ‘escapist’, many others recognised the role poverty, alcoholism, drug use and domestic abuse has played in their day-to-day lives.
Q. What do you think of British cinema, the kind of films that get made and the roles these play in our society?
In my personal experience, due to the deeply embedded hierarchical character of the United Kingdom’s social system, and the real world advantages and disadvantages this creates for different social groups in different parts of the country, the history of British cinema can primarily be understood in terms of the presence, or absence, of class and class division.
Many of us alive today first learned of the existence and influence of the rules and rewards of social class as children while watching, for instance, David Lean’s ‘Great Expectations’ (1946), Carol Reed’s ‘Oliver!’ (1968) or Richard Fleischer’s ‘The Prince and The Pauper’ (1977).
Repeated screenings of these movies usually took place in a school assembly or in the family living room over the Christmas period and, I would argue, such public exhibitions contributed to a cultural normalisation of social prejudice, inequality and exclusion by disguising these conditions as simply an inevitable part of British history and tradition.
While the 1960s’ new wave ‘Angry Young Man’ arrived and blew a plume of cigarette smoke in the face of authority, articulating alternative expectations and aspirations for white working class British males, such insubordination was given short shrift.
Despite dynamic and memorable performances from Richard Burton in ‘Look Back in Anger’ (1959), Albert Finney in ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ (1960) and Richard Harris in ‘This Sporting Life’ (1963), it is telling that their character arcs always concluded with them being either abandoned or emasculated as punishment for not knowing their place.
Against the childish backdrop of the ‘Carry On’ franchise and its production line of pathetic proletariats, the trajectory of Michael Caine’s filmography throughout the 1970s provides an interesting counterpoint in that his commercial success rested largely upon the re-appropriation of his Cockney origins, persona and on-screen roles.
For example, only five or so years after the incendiary, anti-establishment release of ‘Get Carter’ (1971), he was suddenly battling on behalf of Queen and Country in ‘The Eagle Has Landed’ (1975) and ‘A Bridge Too Far’ (1976).
In turn, it is no surprise that, when he left to further pursue the capitalist dream of Hollywood fame and fortune later in the decade, he was more or less deified by the country’s mainstream media.
Of course, everything exploded when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 and cultural war was openly declared on the men and women of the labour movement and their representation across Britain’s sterling silver screens.
In the blue corner were David Puttnam, Richard Attenborough and Merchant-Ivory, and in the red corner were Mike Leigh, Dennis Potter and Alan Clarke.
Noticeably, state school kids were far too busy reciting profanities in the playground from ‘Scum’ (1979) and ‘Made in Britain’ (1982) to give a toss about the posh swag bag of Academy Awards accrued by state-supported nostalgia narratives such as ‘Chariots of Fire’ (1981) or ‘Ghandi’ (1982).
I should note here that Michael Caine did go some way to redeem himself in this decade by supporting Julie Walters’ wonderful working class lead in Willy Russell’s intellectually aspirational ‘Educating Rita’ in 1983.
Under the tenures of John Major and Tony Blair in the 1990s the changing of the guard necessarily took place, and Richard Curtis and Kenneth Branagh dutifully took up their well-financed positions with ‘Four Weddings and A Funeral’ (1994) and ‘Notting Hill’ (1999), ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ (1993) and ‘Hamlet’ (1996).
Meanwhile, as a reflection of the ongoing embourgeoisement of mainstream British culture and society, authentic working class cinema not only had to search for its roots and values in the iconography of the underclass, it had to also search for its funding abroad.
Films such as Mike Leigh’s ‘Naked’ (1993), Danny Boyle’s ‘Trainspotting’ (1996), Gary Oldman’s ‘Nil by Mouth’ (1997) and Ken Loach’s ‘My Name is Joe’ (1998) highlighted that the remnants of working class togetherness and community could now only subsist on the margins by way of the narrative ritualisation of petty crime, drugs or alcohol.
Indeed, during the 21st century, as the British Empire suffers its death throes and the country’s post-Elizabethan standing on the world stage rapidly dwindles away, the Establishment has reacted accordingly in its attempt to remain in power by re-asserting outmoded notions of cinematic representation that are increasingly reductive, intolerant and undemocratic.
While commercially successful film franchises like ‘Harry Potter’, ‘James Bond’, ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘The Crown’ continue to suffocate the growing diversity and demands of our shared culture, the mediated elevation of privately educated white male screen actors such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddy Redmayne and Tom Hiddleston has seemingly transported us back to the post-war performances of Lawrence Olivier, Alec Guinness and David Niven.
To end, it is no coincidence that the working class white male protagonist in my self-funded ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’ (2022) has no community at all: he sleeps alone, he drinks alone and he weeps alone.
In turn, during the film’s climax, and in response to a wider right-wing society that continues to disrespect, mock and ignore working people’s invaluable economic and cultural contributions to the nation, it is somewhat inevitable that he finally disappears.
Q. How could trade unions and their activists get involved with ‘Nobody Loves You …’?
A first step would be for trade unions to show active support for ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’ by directly recommending it to their members, their friends and their families.
The film explicitly explores in detail the human consequences of redundancy, unemployment and the debilitating process of claiming Universal Credit, for example.
Of course we have no marketing budget whatsoever, and so if there are any trade union activists out there who genuinely believe in the film and wish to help spread the word across social media, via email and beyond, then please contact me at brett@seriousfeather.com and hopefully we can sort something out.
Co-producer Jack Clarke and I have been doing exactly this for over 8 months now and, I can assure you, it is a very frustrating and mind-numbing process.
Moreover, if there are activists who have access to screening facilities, I’ll be more than happy to send them a free copy of the film for exhibition if they discuss with me the details, promote the event positively and, ideally, provide photographs and audience feedback which can then be shared with our cast, crew and online followers via the Serious Feather website and our social media channels.
In relation to this, if anyone is in the Greater Manchester region in January, we are holding an exclusive free screening at the Leigh Film Factory in Wigan on the 20th from 7pm onwards.
Book your seats here on Eventbrite and come along to see what all these film fans abroad are buzzing about, and what the frightfully conservative UK is blatantly ignoring.
In turn, if people are situated further afield, they can always watch the film right now on Amazon Prime for about 5 quid.
As mentioned above, I have debts to pay.
Such a public display of support and solidarity from the trade unions and their activists would of course alert other filmmakers and documentarians up and down the country that there exists a real-world alternative to the ‘colour-by-numbers’ period dramas, CGI extravaganzas and quirky lifestyle stories plopped out by the BBC, Sky, Channel 4 and the British Film Institute.
It will inspire them to work together in creating challenging and humane narratives from a non-corporate perspective so the effects of, say, austerity cuts, COVID corruption, the cost-of-living crisis and industrial strike action etc. can be faithfully and memorably dramatised as we continue to suffer under this nice and shiny neo-liberalist kleptocracy of ours.
Just look at the ruckus RMT leader, Mick Lynch, has been causing on a weekly basis on inane television programmes like ITV’s ‘This Morning’ or ‘BBC Breakfast’, and the real hope this has inspired within everyday people who are sitting at home right now, worrying about switching their heating on.
Just think about what else we could do?
Just think about how much further we could go to bring back honour, dignity, fairness and intelligence back to the British Isles?
My best friend and cinematographer died from Sudden Adult Death Syndrome in 2013. He was 26 years old.
In turn, following decades of absence and estrangement, I was abandoned by my mother’s working class family in Nottinghamshire and my long-lost father’s middle class family in Oxfordshire in 2014.
They just didn’t want to know.
Moreover, following the UK government’s unprecedented £141bn bail out of the corrupt British banking system in 2008, austerity cuts finally sank their teeth into the education sector in 2015.
As a consequence, after 11 years of service, I was made redundant from my position as a lecturer in A Level Film and Cultural Studies.
This tragic succession of events, which literally left me with no one to turn to, ultimately coalesced into an intense period of angst, depression and sense of utter worthlessness.
In turn, with the stench of Brexit in the air, I slowly began to realise that I didn’t understand my country anymore; I didn’t understand its people; and I didn’t understand myself.
I had lost my focus and I had lost my faith.
With my redundancy money I spent months and months reading and writing and, now and again, glancing over at the large print of Hieronymus Bosch’s, ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, that hung on the living room wall in my rented flat in Manchester.
It then finally dawned on me, after yet another drunken stupor, that my only way out of this existential nightmare was to expel a full-throated, blood-curdling ‘Wilhelm Scream’: a semi-autobiographical screenplay based on Bosch’s 15th century painting in relation to the tragedy, trauma and truth of Broken Britain, i.e. the 1980s under Thatcher, the 1990s under Major and the 2000s under Cameron and Johnson.
Q. What’s the film about? What are its main themes?
In terms of plot we find Old Jack in his gloomy flat in Hulme in 2020 under Boris Johnson’s rule as he appears to awake from a fever dream about sex and murder in Manchester, overshadowed by the city’s Gothic architecture, civic statues and towering skyscrapers.
Still half-asleep and hung-over in bed he then reads an old text from the wife of a good friend who informs him that her husband is on a ventilator with COVID and that she is struggling to breathe herself.
In turn, in the mausoleum which is his study, Old Jack discovers that he has an unwelcome voicemail on his phone from his long-lost grandmother in Oxford who wishes to secretly meet up with him after four decades before she dies.
All of this proves too much for him however, and he takes a fistful of anti-depressants and washes them down with a mug of vodka.
Thus begins his descent into his own private rabbit-hole wherein he meets himself as a young boy in 1984, living on an abusive council estate under Margaret Thatcher during the Miners’ Strike, and fantasising about escaping into a world of fiction and illusion.
He is then later confronted by himself as a university student in 1992 during John Major’s tenure, riddled with Class A drugs, alienated from his peers and his studies, and questioning his purpose and sanity in violent messianic outbursts.
Moreover, these arduous, psychotic visitations are intercut with imagined interviews with a number of women from Old Jack’s past who seem to appear not only as witnesses, but also as judge and jury: his half-sister, his old English teacher, his former college manager, his ex-girlfriend’s Christian mother, and his nervous next door neighbour.
Overcome by the weight of his own history in a country where he doesn’t believe he belongs, Old Jack finally embarks on a pilgrimage to the historical Stoodley Pike monument in West Yorkshire, on the outskirts of society, to find some sort of answer which will put an end to his existential misery.
In terms of themes the film can primarily be understood to be about morality and ethics, about how those in power treat us and about how we treat each other.
In turn, it is also about abandonment, loneliness, mental health and a breakdown in communication between the working and middle classes.
Furthermore, the film’s narrative focuses on the socio-political cost of the North/South divide: how this is continually reinforced by right wing ideological forces in order to distract and weaken any serious collective opposition to the systematic asset stripping of what remains of the United Kingdom.
Q. What were you aiming for with the film, and how did those aims change in the making of the film?
A crucial aim of the film was to represent the Northern working class on screen, externally and internally, with intelligence, authenticity and dignity in direct opposition to the demeaning stereotypes and caricatures which are regularly churned out by the corporate mainstream media based in London.
Such a genuine independent creative decision directly challenges the popular status quo currently being maintained by the ideological state apparatus and so, understandably, we received no funding or investment or support from any public or private organisation at all.
As a result, what changed was not only the timescale of the production from one year to six and half years, but also my personal finances.
Even though every one of the cast and crew members committed their time and talents for free – a testament to the ongoing industriousness and inventiveness of Greater Manchester by the way – the production still left me around £56,000 in debt by way of personal loans, two credit cards and two overdrafts.
Q. Can you tell us a bit about reactions to the film from critics and from working-class people?
Since its release on Amazon Prime in May 2022 we have won over 50 international film festival awards and nominations, and received over 100 informed and passionate reviews on IMDb, Letterboxd and various arts and culture websites.
In the main these reviews praise the film’s anger, insight and originality, its production values, its performances and its soundtrack, comparing it to the works of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Alan Clarke and even Theodor Dreyer.
Standout quotes such as ‘A Searing Portrait of Modern Britain’ are incredibly validating and prove that a large international audience – who are also going through their own individual horrors under this self-serving global capitalist system – need authentic stories like this to remind them that they’re not alone and they’re not going mad.
We hosted a free screening of the film on a working class Manchester housing estate in Moston, for instance, and while a number of attendees still strongly believed that cinema should be ‘entertaining’ and ‘escapist’, many others recognised the role poverty, alcoholism, drug use and domestic abuse has played in their day-to-day lives.
Q. What do you think of British cinema, the kind of films that get made and the roles these play in our society?
In my personal experience, due to the deeply embedded hierarchical character of the United Kingdom’s social system, and the real world advantages and disadvantages this creates for different social groups in different parts of the country, the history of British cinema can primarily be understood in terms of the presence, or absence, of class and class division.
Many of us alive today first learned of the existence and influence of the rules and rewards of social class as children while watching, for instance, David Lean’s ‘Great Expectations’ (1946), Carol Reed’s ‘Oliver!’ (1968) or Richard Fleischer’s ‘The Prince and The Pauper’ (1977).
Repeated screenings of these movies usually took place in a school assembly or in the family living room over the Christmas period and, I would argue, such public exhibitions contributed to a cultural normalisation of social prejudice, inequality and exclusion by disguising these conditions as simply an inevitable part of British history and tradition.
While the 1960s’ new wave ‘Angry Young Man’ arrived and blew a plume of cigarette smoke in the face of authority, articulating alternative expectations and aspirations for white working class British males, such insubordination was given short shrift.
Despite dynamic and memorable performances from Richard Burton in ‘Look Back in Anger’ (1959), Albert Finney in ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ (1960) and Richard Harris in ‘This Sporting Life’ (1963), it is telling that their character arcs always concluded with them being either abandoned or emasculated as punishment for not knowing their place.
Against the childish backdrop of the ‘Carry On’ franchise and its production line of pathetic proletariats, the trajectory of Michael Caine’s filmography throughout the 1970s provides an interesting counterpoint in that his commercial success rested largely upon the re-appropriation of his Cockney origins, persona and on-screen roles.
For example, only five or so years after the incendiary, anti-establishment release of ‘Get Carter’ (1971), he was suddenly battling on behalf of Queen and Country in ‘The Eagle Has Landed’ (1975) and ‘A Bridge Too Far’ (1976).
In turn, it is no surprise that, when he left to further pursue the capitalist dream of Hollywood fame and fortune later in the decade, he was more or less deified by the country’s mainstream media.
Of course, everything exploded when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 and cultural war was openly declared on the men and women of the labour movement and their representation across Britain’s sterling silver screens.
In the blue corner were David Puttnam, Richard Attenborough and Merchant-Ivory, and in the red corner were Mike Leigh, Dennis Potter and Alan Clarke.
Noticeably, state school kids were far too busy reciting profanities in the playground from ‘Scum’ (1979) and ‘Made in Britain’ (1982) to give a toss about the posh swag bag of Academy Awards accrued by state-supported nostalgia narratives such as ‘Chariots of Fire’ (1981) or ‘Ghandi’ (1982).
I should note here that Michael Caine did go some way to redeem himself in this decade by supporting Julie Walters’ wonderful working class lead in Willy Russell’s intellectually aspirational ‘Educating Rita’ in 1983.
Under the tenures of John Major and Tony Blair in the 1990s the changing of the guard necessarily took place, and Richard Curtis and Kenneth Branagh dutifully took up their well-financed positions with ‘Four Weddings and A Funeral’ (1994) and ‘Notting Hill’ (1999), ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ (1993) and ‘Hamlet’ (1996).
Meanwhile, as a reflection of the ongoing embourgeoisement of mainstream British culture and society, authentic working class cinema not only had to search for its roots and values in the iconography of the underclass, it had to also search for its funding abroad.
Films such as Mike Leigh’s ‘Naked’ (1993), Danny Boyle’s ‘Trainspotting’ (1996), Gary Oldman’s ‘Nil by Mouth’ (1997) and Ken Loach’s ‘My Name is Joe’ (1998) highlighted that the remnants of working class togetherness and community could now only subsist on the margins by way of the narrative ritualisation of petty crime, drugs or alcohol.
Indeed, during the 21st century, as the British Empire suffers its death throes and the country’s post-Elizabethan standing on the world stage rapidly dwindles away, the Establishment has reacted accordingly in its attempt to remain in power by re-asserting outmoded notions of cinematic representation that are increasingly reductive, intolerant and undemocratic.
While commercially successful film franchises like ‘Harry Potter’, ‘James Bond’, ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘The Crown’ continue to suffocate the growing diversity and demands of our shared culture, the mediated elevation of privately educated white male screen actors such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddy Redmayne and Tom Hiddleston has seemingly transported us back to the post-war performances of Lawrence Olivier, Alec Guinness and David Niven.
To end, it is no coincidence that the working class white male protagonist in my self-funded ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’ (2022) has no community at all: he sleeps alone, he drinks alone and he weeps alone.
In turn, during the film’s climax, and in response to a wider right-wing society that continues to disrespect, mock and ignore working people’s invaluable economic and cultural contributions to the nation, it is somewhat inevitable that he finally disappears.
Q. How could trade unions and their activists get involved with ‘Nobody Loves You …’?
A first step would be for trade unions to show active support for ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’ by directly recommending it to their members, their friends and their families.
The film explicitly explores in detail the human consequences of redundancy, unemployment and the debilitating process of claiming Universal Credit, for example.
Of course we have no marketing budget whatsoever, and so if there are any trade union activists out there who genuinely believe in the film and wish to help spread the word across social media, via email and beyond, then please contact me at brett@seriousfeather.com and hopefully we can sort something out.
Co-producer Jack Clarke and I have been doing exactly this for over 8 months now and, I can assure you, it is a very frustrating and mind-numbing process.
Moreover, if there are activists who have access to screening facilities, I’ll be more than happy to send them a free copy of the film for exhibition if they discuss with me the details, promote the event positively and, ideally, provide photographs and audience feedback which can then be shared with our cast, crew and online followers via the Serious Feather website and our social media channels.
In relation to this, if anyone is in the Greater Manchester region in January, we are holding an exclusive free screening at the Leigh Film Factory in Wigan on the 20th from 7pm onwards.
Book your seats here on Eventbrite and come along to see what all these film fans abroad are buzzing about, and what the frightfully conservative UK is blatantly ignoring.
In turn, if people are situated further afield, they can always watch the film right now on Amazon Prime for about 5 quid.
As mentioned above, I have debts to pay.
Such a public display of support and solidarity from the trade unions and their activists would of course alert other filmmakers and documentarians up and down the country that there exists a real-world alternative to the ‘colour-by-numbers’ period dramas, CGI extravaganzas and quirky lifestyle stories plopped out by the BBC, Sky, Channel 4 and the British Film Institute.
It will inspire them to work together in creating challenging and humane narratives from a non-corporate perspective so the effects of, say, austerity cuts, COVID corruption, the cost-of-living crisis and industrial strike action etc. can be faithfully and memorably dramatised as we continue to suffer under this nice and shiny neo-liberalist kleptocracy of ours.
Just look at the ruckus RMT leader, Mick Lynch, has been causing on a weekly basis on inane television programmes like ITV’s ‘This Morning’ or ‘BBC Breakfast’, and the real hope this has inspired within everyday people who are sitting at home right now, worrying about switching their heating on.
Just think about what else we could do?
Just think about how much further we could go to bring back honour, dignity, fairness and intelligence back to the British Isles?