I’ve been fighting myself to discover the reason for the breakdown in writing. I think I came up with it, walking back from the library where I’d taken out Solti’s Gotterdammerung and a Count Basie Album — there are two types of writer. The Programmatic and the Instructive. I am of the latter and it would be best for me just to wing it rather than trying to work out why and wherefore1.
Went to see the Kenneth Anger Retrospective at the Glasgow Film Theatre. It started at 5 and I left before the end. It was two programs consecutively — the prints not having arrived correctly for the first program when it was meant to have been shown. Indigestible in this quantity. My concentration broke after a few hours. There were some wonderful moments, none of them in Anger’s films.
‘All My Life’ by Bruce Baillie was interesting, a three minute tracking shot, out of focus, of a fence, accompanied by Ella Fitzgerald [with Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra].
‘A Trip to the Moon’ (or whatever it was) by George Méliès 1902 was absolutely wonderful, a pure look at Victorian Inventionism. The sets used were like etchings, most of the objects including the spaceship-cum-submarine were one dimensional —cardboard cuts-outs.
The extract from Max Reinhardt’s 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream was incredible. I’d much rather have seen the whole of this than Anger’s thirty minutes of plotless trip-fodder.
Anger played Puck, with great comprehension of the lines, and looked like a young Mickey Rooney. I enjoyed the extract from Jarman’s The Last of England which I haven’t seen in its entirety. It included some beautiful single images — the woman dancing in front of a fire and a sunset in her broken wedding gown,
— but I think, without the rest of the film, they were too knowingly beautiful, beautiful only for beauty’s sake, no kinesis. Like 4AD album covers.
Finally, Ivan the Terrible by Eisenstein was great.
I’ve never seen anything else by Eisenstein except a short extract from Potemkin, illustrative of montage, of engines, ships, whistles, celebrating tars.
I can see, especially in the main set-up [of Ivan the Terrible] — looking down on a large throne room — that Olivier had this in mind for Richard III. Also the shadowplay.
Anger’s films, in attempting a gay inconography, have some social-historical interest, the V-shaped-torso tucked into jeans has now been hijacked by every other Athena postcard. They were just so fey, so tedious these films2. And nothing is going to make me sit through half an hour of E.L.O.3 No way.
Young-Toby seems to be struggling toward the distinction between Planners and Pantsers.
So patronising, this. I wonder what I’d think of them now.
The soundtrack to a 1978 cut of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome uses Electric Light Orchestra’s ‘Eldorado’.