Face to Face with Derek Jarman

Derek Jarman is never far from my thoughts these days, the forthcoming BFI box will surely be, for me at least, the home cinema event of 2018. The BFI box has been delayed by a week so I’ve been trawling thru youtube for Derek Jarman related videos, and found the excellent BBC Face to Face interview Jarman recorded in 1993 before his death in February the following year. The 40min interview feels very much like a last will and testament, and sees Jarman looking back over his life in his usual erudite, and indeed honest fashion – interviewer Jeremy Issacs is perhaps a tad too preoccupied with Jarman’s sexuality at times, but Jarman discusses it and other related matters (being HIV+) with typical good cheer…

In related matters... I've been revisiting the 1995 Eno/Wobble collaboration Spinner this morning, and while it's one of Eno's better albums from an era which saw him slide increasingly into mediocrity. Despite Jah Wobble's fine contributions to the album I can't help but think of it as the poor cousin of Eno's magnificent soundtrack for Derek Jarman's final film Glitterbug, which Spinner is salvaged from (I use the word salvaged because Eno has expressed a certain indifference for the soundtrack). In fact the best stuff from Spinner is when Jah Wobble leaves the Glitterbug music alone (as in the gorgeous Garden Recalled). I'm hoping Glitterbug will be included in the BFI's second Jarman box (Artificial Eye's 2007 DVD of Blue/Glitterbug has gone OOP  clearing the way for the BFI), and it would be nice to see an optional subtitle where the various Super8 footage is annotated, similar to the original Arena screening back in 1994. I mention this because I shared a few comments recently on Facebook with the team lead on the Jarman-BFI box and requested this. One can hope !

Audiodrome

"Max, I would like you to try this on for size"... Listening this morning to Howard Shore's soundtrack for Videodrome, and quite an extraordinary 30-odd minutes of New Flesh it is too. The soundtrack contains all the music from Videodrome but augmented with additional electronic effects and processing. One might even call it an early example of remixing and reconstruction, which seems very appropriate to Videodrome's theme of mutation and "reprogramming". It's a surprisingly abrasive suite of music too, with torrents of electronic noise sometimes overwhelming Shore's central Videodrome theme music, and anticipates glitch music by a good decade - the opening few minutes of the soundtrack could easily be mistaken for an Autechre track as layers of sound squelch, squiggle and ricochet off one another to dizzying effect. Meshing with the cold, mechanical textures are Shores's beautiful use of strings, which remind me of Goreki's Symphony No. 3, as they soar into the upper register (and put to excellent use in the film's final sequence when Max Renn embraces "total transformation"). Incidentally, the album sleeve credits Alan Howarth for engineering duties, forging a link between Videodrome and the great electronic soundtracks of Escape From New York, Halloween II, Halloween III: Season of the Witch...

Celebrating the Greater Sex

I'm marking International Women's Day today in the company of four extraordinary, inspirational woman from my record collection...

Rattus Italiano

Some Bruno Mattei borrowed with thanks.... I've just polished off James Herbert's 1974 debut novel The Rats, and while there's no explicit association between Mattei's post-apocalyptic thriller and Herbert's novel, I very much approached the book as if it were an early 80's Italian splatter movie. I don't wish to belittle Herbert's skills as a writer, but imagining the film as an over the top Italian import acclimatized me to some of the more ludicrous parts of the novels - an infant torn to shreds in its cot, a nymphomaniac alcoholic stripped to the bone, and in one of the book's biggest set pieces, a London Underground station besieged by hordes of flesh-hungry rats. Mattei would need a considerably bigger conveyor belt for that sequence but the films of Mattei and his contemporaries are the perfect foil for Herbert's novel - neither of them apologetic about being in the Horror business.

Thinking about it now, The Rats could have easily ran as a series in those early issues of 2000AD, perhaps Invasion, with rats replacing Volgans, the hard-as-nails anti-establishment Bill Savage the only thing standing in the way of the UK being reduced to a vermin-infested wasteland... Lair is next...

Criterion of the Living Dead

I watched Criterion edition last night and was very pleased with the presentation - to beat a cliche of the HD era - the film looks so fresh it could well have been shot yesterday. Along with along with Thundercrack!, the Criterion Night of the Living Dead is perhaps my most eagerly awaited title - I first heard speculation that Criterion were putting it out some years ago so this edition seems like a long time coming. The addition of the Criterion Blu brings an inevitable touch of sadness as it spells the retirement of my cherished Elite DVD, which has seen active duty for nearly 16 years, and a disc that still looked very impressive when I saw the film again last year. Now, I can almost hear the Criterion disc bellow: "Now get the hell down in the cellar. You can be the boss down there, but I'm boss up here!". Wonderful too, that the film with its coveted Criterion spine-number will introduce the film to viewers who may have previously shrugged off the film as B-movie trash, and its place in the Criterion collection will do much to banish memories of the shoddy treatment of previous home video versions, namely the horrendous colorized edition and the abomination that was the so-called 30th Anniversary with its added scenes - "anal-raped" as Todd Doogan memorably described this assault on Romero's film when writing about the various editions DVD editions of the film for The Digital Bits. So, all good ? Well not quite. The transfer may be outstanding but I'm less enthused about Criterion's packaging. I remain lukewarm about Sean Phillips' artwork (and in fairness, it's no easy task to come up with an original piece of artwork for this the umpteenth video release), but shame on Criterion for putting out the film in a thoroughly flimsy digipak sleeve, with the two discs stacked on top of one another. It's fortunate at least that it comes in a protective slipcase because, this one goes up pretty easy....

Karloff's Heart of Darkness

"He's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct"... Boris Karloff goes native as Kurtz in the 1958 Playhouse 90 adaptation of Heart of Darkness. Another one of those mind-boggling rarities that turns up on youtube, this one is decidedly lo-fi but worthy of investigation. I've only watched a few moments of it here and there and it looks bizarre indeed. I'm coming at this from an Apocalypse Now angle (rather than Conrad), and it's worth noting that this adaptation was written by Stewart Stern who was the screenwriter for Rebel Without a Cause and The Last Movie, both of which involved Dennis Hopper, and a further connection to Coppola's film. Interesting to imagine what Apocalypse Now might have been like had Martin Sheen's long journey up to the Nung River led to an aging, depleted Boris Karloff (who would have been closer to Conrad's vision of Kurtz than Coppola's) and I do enjoy pondering an alternatively cast Apocalypse Now. Recently, I was hotly debating with some friends, the idea of Steve McQueen playing Willard, and while they flatly disagreed, I think McQueen would have been a better choice than Harvey Keitel or Al Pacino. But I digress... The Playhouse 90 Heart of Darkness can be viewed here: here