The faces of certain performers - Jack Warner, Jimmy Hanley, Alfie Bass, Sydney Tafler - are ever present, sometimes villains, sometimes regular family men. A pre-forgotten literature of urban working lives, by such as James Curtis, Robert Westerby and Gerald Kersh, slips unmolested into cinematic adaptations. The catalogue of past and future filmic representations of London's badlands flicker in rose-red light, a slideshow carousel of deleted potentialities.īefore going back to the postwar period when Sir Patrick Abercrombie and his planners and architects worked in parallel with commercial film producers to revive and replenish a devastated city, it has to be recognised that London cinema is a force that defies its apparent boundaries, leaking from screen into street and back again. Tilda Swinton's mesmeric dervish dance, at the conclusion of Jarman's film, a wild froth of constricting bridal satin and naked legs, activates a vortex in which time is seen as properly plural. Docks have been left in limbo, between the bomb damage of the Blitz and the grand project regeneration floated by Bob Hoskins as a sawn-off Kray Xerox in The Long Good Friday (1979). Jarman was canny enough to recognise that location is everything: the fire on the waste lot, mounds of rubble from which earlier working lives can be deduced. A major act of terrorism is the only justification for budget in a climate of reckless financial meltdown.
The Last of England challenges the coming age of computer-generated fictions and steady-stare CCTV surveillance, when no single moment is more significant than any other and editing is redundant - until the crime which these systems are built to anticipate (and incubate) has been enacted. He acknowledged his good fortune in working at a period when cumbersome video technology was being overtaken by machines that did it all for you, that set the agenda. Jarman, interviewed near the end of his life, spoke of the process of film-making as a party laid on to entertain his chums, the art gang. Millennium Mills, the decommissioned flour factory in Silvertown that looked as if it had been christened by William Blake and delivered by Albert Speer, was the perfect symbol for a cinematic endgame.
#Hue and cry anderson ca movie#
Citizens decamp from the threatened inner city, only for their children to return, armed with digital cameras, to squat in trashed theatres and condemned Lower Lea Valley warehouses.Ī pivotal moment arrived when Derek Jarman, in The Last of England (1987), violated memory by overlaying "innocent" home movie footage of his own RAF-sponsored childhood with a downriver apocalypse of bare-chested punks, culture deviants, and Kenneth Anger satanists with flaming torches ritually cleansing the ground for Thatcherite development. Essex has advanced and retreated like an estuary tide, a neurotic square dancer. Hackney at certain epochs has given itself suburban airs and graces, before being slapped down and consigned once more to the dump bin of aborted ambition. The East End, as a concept, is as slippery to define as the cinema derived from its values and locations.
0 kommentar(er)
