Marvel at Stranger in the House’s title sequence, the pulsating multi-coloured shapes accompanied by the cheesiest of title themes. It’s not Saul Bass, but it’s effective.
Derek Jarman has always been described as irreverent, but, paradoxically, he is treated today with unreserved and probably excessive reverence. In the church of the avant-garde, and it’s perhaps not completely out of order to suggest that such an institution exists, he has been well and truly sanctified.
Postcards from London is a surprise. You will certainly come away from Steve McLean’s highly stylised film with a new concept of what being an “art lover” can involve, while his subject matter is considerably more specialised, not least in the sexual sense, than its seemingly innocent title might suggest. Mischievously self-conscious in tone, its niche approach to certain established themes – principally gay culture and art history – leavens any pretension with generous humour.
Harris Dickinson plays Jim, an 18-year-old naif (pictured below) who leaves behind the restrictions of his Essex home life – defined equally by parental admonishments and unnaturally confining walls, it’s a literally enclosed world – for the bright lights of the city, Soho in particular. Where he quickly discovers, Whittington-like, that the streets are not paved with gold, though his striking good looks suggest career prospects lie in a familiar direction. But just as Postcards was shot in its entirety in studios rather than on the much-trodden grimy streets of the neighbourhood concerned – Annika Summerson’s cinematography fully relishes the lighting and colouring opportunities that such an approach allows – the experience that Jim comes to offer is rather more aesthetic than sexual.
He becomes a member of high-class escort club The Raconteurs, which specialises in post-coital cultural conversation that involves a different kind of boning up to the usual one. The fact that he looks like a Caravaggio model makes history of art Jim’s natural field, and his beauty is soon conquering Soho, though somewhat parodically: the one encounter we witness involves some high-comedy, practically Carry On bathos, involving an elderly and portly CofE gent with a fixation on ancient history shooting rubber-tipped arrows at Jim, who’s modelling for St Sebastian (the real transgression is their smoking indoors). From that it’s a short skip to his becoming a muse for Max, a Soho artist of a definite vintage who’s a cross between Francis Bacon – for his sexuality; Bacon’s lover George Dyer is liberally referenced – and Lucian Freud, for the almost obsessive demands an artist can make on his sitters.
But Jim’s artistic affinities run still deeper: he’s so sensitive to a good painting that he falls into a swoon when he sees one, becoming literally caught up, via dream sequences, in its creation. That makes for some lovely behind-the-canvas scenes where he's modelling for Caravaggio (main picture), an experience of some risk given the world that painter inhabited; played by Ben Cura, he’s a fiery character, succinctly summed up by Jim as “definitely a nutter”. That’s just the kind of down-to-earth touch that McLean’s script captures winningly: Jim’s specialisation in the Baroque is tartly deflated by his pronouncing it “bar-oak”.
Dickinson's bluff humour resonates with the visual stylistics that surround him
His condition is duly diagnosed as Stendhal syndrome: caused by high-concentration exposure to artistic beauties, that’s drawn from real life too (and rather in the news lately, Florence as its epicentre). A late plot strand sees Jim’s unexpected ability exploited in new ways, given that he can now effectively authenticate a work of art – faced with a fake, he’s left cold. Though that’s nicely mined for some satire at the pretensions of the art world, it’s an element left slightly high-and-dry at the end of a distinctly picaresque narrative line (“plot” would probably be an overstatement).
Nevertheless it articulates a distinction that's at the heart of Postcards from London: between loving art, in an almost old-fashioned sense – as The Raconteurs do, and as Jim does, corporeally, when he’s absorbed into it – and restricting it to the realm of commerce. In that sense, McLean – and his collaborators, Sally King (art direction) and Ollie Tiong (production design), every bit as much – is firmly in the former camp. It’s there in the film’s affectionate homage to the Colony Room world of Bacon and Freud (with a nod there, surely, to John Maybury’s Love Is the Devil), as well as a cinematic line that takes in Fassbinder (hints of Querelle) and a very generous dose of Derek Jarman – the only influence not, I think, mentioned here by name – from Sebastiane through to Caravaggio.
They have found a worthy inheritor in McLean, whose command of irony prevents Postcards from taking itself too seriously (arguably, unlike some of those progenitors). It’s certainly a departure for Harris Dickinson after the agonised Brooklyn teenager that he played in 2017’s Beach Rats, and his bluff humour here resonates very nicely with the over-the-top visual stylistics that surround him. Beguiling.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Postcards from London
The Children’s Film Foundation was founded in the early 1950s. Funded by a levy on cinema tickets, its mission was to provide wholesome Saturday morning entertainment, specifically "clean, healthy, intelligent adventure". On a miniscule budget, the CFF produced scores of hour-long features until its demise in the late 1980s.
Jamil Dehlavi is a filmmaker whose work straddles two worlds.
“There’s a lot of weirdness I didn’t want explained,” Paul Schrader reveals at one point in a new director’s commentary to his 1990 film.
Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s It Happened Here surely deserves the acclaim often accorded it as “the most ambitious amateur film ever made”, and the rich supporting extras on this BFI dual-format release make clear why. Best of all is a 65-minute interview with Brownlow, in which he recounts how he set out in 1956, at the age of 18, to make this ambitious “alternative history” of England living under wartime Nazi collaboration.
The development of the film – the 17-year-old Mollo came on board the following year as co-director after Brownlow sought his advice on war-time costuming and design, only to be told squarely that his solo efforts to that point weren’t up to much – is a tale in itself. Working with amateurs and filming at weekends, they took eight years to reach the final version that played at the 1964 London Film Festival.
Crew included future talents such as Peter Suschitzky in his first major cinematographer role, alongside Peter Watkins as an assistant director. Filming started on 16 mm, before backing from Tony Richardson at Woodfall Films enabled a move up to 35 mm “short ends” (film stock unused at the end of a reel) that came partly from Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. It made for an economy of both process and style, one that in no way reflected in the scale of the final film, however.
There was nothing amateur about the film’s central idea either, with its premise that the Germans had invaded England following the British retreat from Dunkirk, driving resistance underground; by 1944, however, the partisans were beginning to resurface, supported by invading American troops, as seen in the film’s final scenes, which are as unflinching a portrayal of the reality of resistance movements as you will find. The Nazi-supporting “Immediate Action” (IA) movement rapidly stepped up to run a British administration that proved very ready to collaborate.
It Happened Here more than stands comparison with last year’s TV adaptation of Len Deighton’s SS-GB, bringing home how the limited resources of the film worked in its favour, its laconism most of all foregrounding psychology. Heroine Pauline is evacuated from partisan territory back to bomb-ravaged London, along whose streets the Nazis strut (pictured above left). Despite trying to escape involvement in anything political, she joins the IA as a nurse, her decision driven by a typical “try to get back to normal” mentality (the non-professional Pauline Murray’s clipped delivery is very much in Brief Encounter spirit). In her exposure to the realities of life within the system – from the blimpish, rabble-rousing speeches to how it treats the weak – as well as by witnessing the fate of some erstwhile friends who had chosen a different direction, Pauline is forced to confront the consequence of her choices, becoming something of an Everyman character in the process.
It looks now like a piece of guerrilla filmmaking ahead of its time (though the period authenticity isn’t something usually associated with that style)
Brownlow and Mollo establish the historical context of the time, as well as the meaning of National Socialism, with a brilliant faux German newsreel “Mirror on the World” which dates the new Anglo-German cooperation back to the famous Christmas truce of WWI. It’s so much more than pastiche (the full 10-minute version comes as another extra here), catching atmosphere outstandingly: like the periodic radio broadcasts through the film, voice work was done by the same BBC announcers and commentators who had worked through the war.
But it’s the scene that follows the newsreel that really unsettles, as some of Pauline’s IA colleagues articulate the essence of their Nazi ideas, ranging from attitudes to the Jews and the “slime of Communism” to eugenics (main picture). The directors had been associating with some of the British Far Right as part of their research, and here they simply sat some of them down and allowed them to express their beliefs in practically documentary style.
It proved too much for distributor United Artists, however: despite critical controversy, It Happened Here was released in May 1966 with that crucial scene cut. It’s restored here, of course, and Brownlow’s commentary gives the full story behind that. It wasn’t the directors' only disappointment: they never saw “a brass farthing” back from release, despite a degree of box-office success (made on a budget of around £7,000 in the money of the time, it took more than three times that sum in the UK alone). Branded “uncommercial”, they took another decade to make their second film, the English Civil War drama Winstanley.
Brownlow has since had an illustrious concurrent career as a film historian, whose work with silent film, including the full restoration of Abel Gance’s Napoléon, speaks for itself. This new 2K remaster from original camera negative marks his 80th birthday, and It Happened Here looks now like a piece of guerrilla filmmaking ahead of its time (though the remarkable period authenticity that was so crucial for Mollo isn’t something usually associated with that style). But the relevance of its commentary on human nature and society living through times of national upheaval has never gone away. Chilling.
Overleaf: watch the original trailer for It Happened Here
Arcadia is the latest and the best of a series of films which draw on the archives of the BFI and the BBC, collages of often forgotten footage, designed to make the riches held by those venerable institutions come alive.
Folllowing in the footsteps of Kim Longinotto’s Love Is All (2014) and Penny Woolcock’s From the Sea and Land Beyond (2012), good films in their own right, Paul Wright’s documentary, a poetic essay that explores the myths and realities connected with the British countryside, goes that little bit further, driven by a willingness to take creative risks with immensely varied material. These mostly pay off and produce a work of extraordinary strangeness and almost magical appeal.
The territory is familiar: Britain is characterised by a romantic and at times sentimental attachment to the countryside. This is almost part of our island’s cultural DNA, sweet nostalgia, tinged with a sense of awe and mystery. Wright’s film plays with multiple expressions of this imagined world – imaginaire, as the French might say – with daring and deftness, from the cosy commentary-led documentaries about rural life from the 1950s through to footage from 1990s raves; from obscure horror films or a delightful silent version of Alice in Wonderland to Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s classic political tract Winstanley (1975). The film manages to shift perspective from objective to subjective, from a kind of reality principle to something more dream-like, helped by a multi-faceted score by Adrian Utley and Will Goldfrapp, who have established themselves, notably with their imaginative soundtrack for Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, as masters of the genre.
Wright uses repetition and flash-frames to produce a kind of anti-narrative, a labyrinth of images through which the individual viewer can pick her or his own way. This isn’t a film with a thesis but it inevitably suffers perhaps, as a work of poetry rather than classic documentary, from a lack of contextualisation. There are some clear pointers, though – not least the realities of social and economic inequality that have dominated rural living for centuries, the stark contrast between our Beatrix Potter-flavoured anthropomorphic appropriation of the animal world and the savage and mainly aristocratic blood lust of the fox hunt.
Most of all, this is a delirious pagan poem, celebrating the mystery of plant growth, the quaintly British abandon of naturist round dances, the dark secrets of the woods, and the supernatural beings that dwell there. The film – a good 10 minutes too long – sometimes feels a little as if possessed by the forces of Pan and Dionysos, excessive in its celebration of the strangeness of nature and the rituals through which we connect to it. It is easy to conjure otherworldliness with music, and Wright falls prey at times to a soundtrack’s power to manipulate the audience. But the film is saved by almost Pythonesque moments of humour, surprising juxtapositions and ironic twists that prevent the film from being just the immersive dream-fest-cum-horror-spiel that it could so easily have become.
The extras include some classic silent shorts, from as early as 1904; Colin Gregg’s Peter and Ruby, a remarkable portrait of two traditional Dartmoor farmers from 1973; and an illuminating Q&A with Paul Wright, Adrian Utley and Will Goldfrapp.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Arcadia
Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête had been planned as a slice of wartime escapism, a distraction from the privations of war. The film was also a chance for Cocteau to give his male lead Jean Marais a less overtly sexy role than his fans were used to, though there’s still a lot of smouldering going on, some of it literal.