Old Yorker

  • Swinging Before the Sixties:  Three Portraits of Post-War London

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Various (1955-57)

    The BFI has good reason to be proud of these documentary shorts, which it funded more than half a century ago.   The earliest of them, Momma Don’t Allow, describes Saturday night in a Wood Green jazz club (shot over nine Saturdays in 1954).   The last in the sequence, Nice Time, is a Saturday night too – in Piccadilly Circus, in 1957.  The longest of the trio, and in both senses the centrepiece of this screening, is the prize-winning Every Day Except Christmas, twelve hours or so in the life of the Covent Garden fruit and flower market (also 1957).   All the directors concerned became internationally famous dramatic film-makers:   Momma Don’t Allow is by Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson; Every Day Except Christmas by Lindsay Anderson; Nice Time by the Swiss duo of Claude Goretta (The Lacemaker) and Alain Tanner (Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000).  It might not be quite right to say they all went on to better things:  I much prefer Every Day Except Christmas to Lindsay Anderson’s best-known dramatic features This Sporting Life, If … and O Lucky Man! 

    I don’t think it’s just because of the jazz that I thought Momma Don’t Allow the least impressive of the three films.  The music is played by Chris Barber and his band:  they’re good and the dancing to their music is vigorously enjoyable (the film takes its title from the band’s vibrant climactic number).  It’s fine when Reisz and Richardson point up the social differences of the people at the jazz club  to dramatise the situation but a sequence in which a girl and a boy have a row then make up feels awkwardly staged in this documentary context.   Nice Time, the shortest piece, is more confidently fluid in its montage of people arriving in the West End for an evening’s entertainment of various kinds – cinemas, clubs, pubs – and piling into the underground or lingering on the streets afterwards.   It’s the sounds from these venues, from the national anthem to tube train doors closing, that Goretta and Tanner use for underlining.   The combination of grotesquerie and unforced social comment in Nice Time is appealing.

    Comment becomes commentary in Every Day Except Christmas, the only one of the films with a narrative, spoken by Alun Owen.  His voice is mellifluous and his accent more emphatically Welsh than it might seem if the narrative didn’t keep referring, rather oddly, to England as ‘the whole country’.   The effect is slightly theatrical but Owen’s quietness is well suited to the nocturnal setting of much of the action, as lorries start their journey from rural Sussex to central London and Lindsay Anderson then moves into the market itself, preparing at dead of night for opening in the early hours of the coming day.  The film is consciously designed as a paean to working people but Anderson’s skill in observing them transcends his political intentions – so that the repartee among the porters in the market and the gallery of physical types and faces in the never-closing cafes around Covent Garden is exciting.  They’re unarguably elements in an historical record but also fascinating as individuals (not least because we see most of them so briefly).  There are more men than women in evidence but I think I found the elderly women the most extraordinary people in the film – the flower-sellers who come to pick up their wares from leftovers in Covent Garden a few hours into the market’s working day and, especially, Alice, the only female porter in the place, smartly turned out in her black coat and hat.   The narration explains that she’s been doing the job for thirty-five years and that, when she retires, there will be no more women porters.  It’s a striking reminder of how, in a period when female employment opportunities were so restricted, working-class women were still doing physically back-breaking jobs.

    9 June 2011

  • Swandown

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Andrew Kotting (2012)

    Andrew Kotting’s journey on a pedalo in the shape of a swan from Hastings to Hackney:  the odyssey ends when the craft literally bumps into the London 2012 Olympic site.   Kotting is accompanied most of the way by the writer Iain Sinclair, well known for his devotion to East London and his antagonism towards the Olympics.   There are a few guest appearances in the pedalo en route – the comic book writer Alan Moore, the comedian Stewart Lee, and Dudley Sutton, who gives the proceedings a lift reciting some verse about growing old (‘swollen knees/breath like cheese’) with appalled, incredulous verve.   It’s Lee who says of Sinclair that he ‘doesn’t think anything should be allowed to happen in Hackney without his permission’.  In an interview last week with The Independent, Sinclair described his and Kotting’s voyage, undertaken over four weeks in September and October 2011, as an ‘“absurd and relevant” protest against the Olympics’.  The timing of the film’s release in cinemas (not that Sinclair’s responsible for that) suggests that the commercial tyranny of the Games may be even more extensive than he realised.

    Sinclair is a psychogeographer, interested in the influence of a physical environment on the psychology of its inhabitants, and vice versa.   The waterlands of East Sussex and Kent through which he and Kotting travel towards London are impregnated with ghosts – of actual but anonymous people and fictional but more specific ones, created by the likes of Dickens (and Sinclair himself, who reads from his novel Downriver).  But Kotting, in order to bulk up Swandown, needs to call on a variety of marine, riverine and water-faring poetry which is not particularly linked to these parts of England.  There are references too to the most familiar drownings-by-suicide – Virginia Woolf and Ophelia, played by an actress who doubles up, according to the closing credits, as Leda.   There’s also, not unexpectedly, a fair amount about swan mythology and biology.   I kept thinking part of the music on the soundtrack was going to turn into ‘The Swan of Tuonela’ but it never quite did (only Jem Finer’s original music gets a credit).

    The variety of light and landscape is wonderful; and the look of the film, photographed by Nick Gordon Smith, is always beguiling – even when the camera is showing a shoal of plastic bottles in the water.  Swandown is essentially, though, a pretentious home movie in the sense that it seems to have been made principally for the entertainment of the people who made it.   Kotting is socially selective about who is allowed to be amused by his craft.  It’s OK or even witty if non-posh-sounding onlookers call out remarks about the swan but when the jokes and jeers come from swankier boat owners we seem meant to find them rebarbative.  They are too – but since the whole piece depends heavily on the avian pedalo’s comic improbability it seems a bit much to condemn anyone for having a laugh at it.  Kotting uses old black-and-white public information films about the River Medway etc in a similarly prejudiced way – the visuals are nostalgically haunting, the plummy narration is anachronistically ridiculous.  The swan is remarkable, though.  No matter how often it appears, it’s surreal in its natural surroundings – and it never stops looking like a gigantic bathtime toy rather than a conveyance for the open water.   The craft is called Edith, after King Harold’s bride.  The gender is supposed to be crucial:  Sinclair contrasts the sinuous trajectory of a swan, seen as essentially female, with ‘male plodding forward’.  A fair amount of the humorous conversation between Kotting and Sinclair is irritating (and probably meant to be) but when Kotting asks two elderly men on the riverbank if they can tell whether the swan is male or female, the reply he gets is the best one-liner in Swandown: ‘Oh, I think that one’s unisex’.

    24 July 2012

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