Fleapit Article

Film journal One+One have just published their latest issue, the second volume of their special edition focusing on trash, exploitation and cult cinema.  I've written an article for volume two, 'White Walls and Empty Rooms: A Short History of the Fleapit'. This looks at the culture of underground film exhibition and also provides a brief account of the 'Fleapit' screening group I ran between 2003 and 2009.

Fleapit is the topic of Road Movies and this article works as something of a primer for that project.   

Critical Fields

The following text was based on my contribution to Film,Geomancy and the Alchemical Landscape, a film screening and symposium featuring Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013). The event was held at the University of Cambridge on 28^th November. Many thanks to Evie Salmon  for organizing the event and inviting me to speak.

For a film so concerned with space, it’s very hard to place Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013). It’s geographically indistinct and historically ambiguous. The attempt to define a critical position is similarly fraught, mainly because the film offers a very strange combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Horizontally in terms of generic specificity it’s hard to tell where the film might sit. Is it a historical drama? A horror movie? A comedy? Director Wheatley and writer Amy Jump certainly work with each of these registers to construct the film but it carries no dominant generic markers. However, if we look vertically, in terms of a historical and cinematic continuity, A Field in England does seem to fit into a discernible lineage of ‘trip’ cinema. More specifically it seems part of a psychotropic mode that includes films about altered states and / or attempt to induce to altered audience perception. This group includes film like Corman’s The Trip (1967), Kubrick’s 2001 (1968), Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970) and Bass’ Phase IV (1974). We could also insert the film into the retroactive sub-genre of ‘folk-horror’ alongside the likes of Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970) Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973). But again, the connection to these genres, certainly the latter is one of mood or ambiance rather than direct reference, permutation or citation. 

In the light of this difficulty, we could use the intersection of these axes as a mode of categorization and offer the film as an example of ‘uncanny cinema’, insofar as it stands as a film that is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. However, unless we’re prepared to use ‘uncanny’ as a generic signifier rather than an aesthetic marker (which is what it is), we need to be a bit more specific.

Indications as regards the film’s own field, can I think be found in its publicity and promotional material. Here’s the poster  - designed by artists Luke Insect and Kenn Goodall, who work under the moniker The Twins of Evil. As their name (taken from a 1971 Hammer Horror film) suggests, their style is influenced by the hysterical morbidity and residual psychedelia of the late 1960s and early 1970s genre cinema. Insect’s work in particular – largely on account of his involvement in the rave scene – has been called neo-psychedelic. It maintains the day-glo intensity of Nigel Waymouth but is characterized by a certain level of negativity that is at odds with the transcendental optimism of Hapshash and the Coloured Coat

The poster for Field exemplifies this approach. It uses the same silkscreen techniques that we might expect of Waymouth and incorporates a comparable luminosity into its brooding image of the sun / moon. However as this is a black hole or dark eclipse we're not provided with the the orgasmic harmony and elevation that we might associate with the posters for UFO or Middle Earth. It's quite obviously an appropriate symbolic extraction that can be used to encapsulate the bad trip that is the film.

Although these features link Field to neo-psychedelia, another way of viewing the film is suggested by the alternative trailer designed by the artist Julian House.  Here we have a similarly high contrast palette indicative of stereotypical psychedelic imagery. The trailer is shot through with the kind of mescalinized intensity described by Aldous Huxley in Heaven and Hell (1956). However, House adds a number of additional details. Unlike the smooth, HD black and white that embellishes the film, what’s emphasised in the trailer is the grain of decaying film-stock. House emphasises the degraded materiality of celluloid which seems to enhance the paranormality of the of the events in the filed as depicted in the film. The impression is created of spectral emanations momentarily captured on film with distorting results.

This combination of analogue technology, countryside nostalgia and an underlying sense of occult unease is a hallmark of Ghost Box, House’s record label. Whilst Ghost Box owes much to the matter and colour scheme of psychedelia it has been placed under a very different aegis, that of hauntology.   

Hauntology is, (in)famously, a term that appears in Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1993) as a cultural extension of his work on the trace. As has been extensively glossed elsewhere the word is a play on ‘ontology’ that exploits its homophonic overlap in French with hanter (haunt). Derrida uses it to critique ‘metaphysical’ notions that associate ‘being’ to self-presence. ‘Being’, insofar as it can be defined – when not erased or cancelled as an unthinkable aporia – is a state of spectrality: there is no ‘archive’ or starting point but a proliferation of echoes and shades. As Brian Baker has described over at (SF) 365, in around 2006 writers like Simon Reynolds used the idea to describe the sensibility of Ghost Box and similar artists who collectively appeared to express a “nostalgia for the future”: a nostalgia for the future as conceived by post-war community projects and the optimism of public information films. Such a future is seen as subject to nostalgia because it represents a forward trajectory posited in the post-1945 period that was ultimately “foreclosed by late capitalism”. 

Although this use of the term is not without problems, I’m inclined to adjectivally apply it to A Field in England and offer the film as an example of hauntological cinema rather than neo-psychedelic cinema. This is because the latter term threatens to obfuscate the specificity of the film’s events. Despite the obvious resonance of the mushrooms and the temptation to compare the film with Roger Corman’s The Trip – an acknowledged influence on Wheatley – to term it neo-psychedelic veers towards pastiche. That’s to say, it’s easy but unproductive to shorthand the film as a recapitulation of classic drug movies that adds nothing to the form. Similarly, a persistent strain of English psychedelia (early Pink Floyd, Tolkien revivalism, John Michell) valorised the rural as a space of alterity away from the kind of brutalist projects so lamented by John Barr in Derelict Britain (1969).

It’s precisely the decline and virtual disappearance of these projects: new towns, garden cities, comprehensives and polytechnics that’s investigated and valorised in the hauntology of Ghost Box et al. Coupled with a fascination with the mediating productivity of redundant recording technology the idea is that such spaces, equipment and architecture exude a powerful psychogeographic resonance. 

I think it’s very much this kind of territory that Wheatley’s film fits into. Despite its atavism, it offers a perspective on the occultural landscape that’s different to that which we might expect to find in broadly comparable 1960s texts. In the film the filed itself is narratologically foregrounded. It is not, as in Witchfinder General, a backdrop across which acts of violence take place or a screen which, as in the cityscapes of The Trip is seen differently under synthetic stimulation. Instead the field is presented as a deeply affective space. It is an instrument and a cultivated technology of mediation that exerts a powerful influence over its receivers; an influence which, if we are to go along with the trilogy reading of Wheatley’s work, is still active in Kill List (2011) and Sightseers (2012).

  

In this sense, I’d place A Field in England not with Blood on Satan’s Claw but with more directly hauntological texts such as the work of Nigel Kneale, particularly Quatermass and the Pit (1967) and The Stone Tape (1972). In each case the results are the same, it’s just the technology that’s different.  In offering this categorization, I’m using ‘hauntological; as a critical term because in this expanded sense (and such an expansion needs to be kept in mind in order that its specificity for Derrida can be maintained) as is suggested by Reynolds, the flickering status of the spectre represents a riposte to the zombification implicit in the ‘retro’ work. By extension this operates against the underlying essentialism and lamentation active in postmodernism. It points not to the return of that which has been seen before and that which says it again, but to that which seeks to ‘make it new’ via the return of something we never knew existed. 

Film, Geomancy and the Alchemical Landscape

On 28th November, the Cambridge University Counterculture Research Group will be presenting Film, Geomancy and the Alchemical Landscape, a special event and symposium at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge connected to Ben Wheatley's A Field in England (2013). I'll be speaking on the night along with Henry K. Miller, Brendan Gillott and Yvonne Salmon. 

I've previously written about the film for Monolith and since then I've been thinking about its visual links to neo-psychedelia, particularly the work of Luke Insect who designed the poster with Kenn Goodall under the Twins of Evil moniker. Julian House of Ghost Box fame was also involved in the production of an alternative trailer for the film. In my talk on the evening I'll be trying to put my finger on the various strands of aesthetic thinking that tie these artists together. Note: the word 'hauntology' might be used...

Visions of Enchantment

In March 2014 I'll be speaking at Visions of Enchantment: Occultism, Spirituality and Visual Culture, a conference at the University of Cambridge. 

The two day event is "a collaboration between the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge and the Arts University Bournemouth and is organised in association with the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism." It "seeks to investigate the formative role that occultism and spirituality have played in the creation of both Western and non-Western visual and material cultures."

It should be a great conference: a lot of work has gone into the organizing and the committee have booked a particularly strong line-up of keynote speakers.  

I'll be giving a paper linked to The Bad Trip project that will look at Kenneth Anger, Donald Cammell and Performance. Abstract below.  

Pandemonium ‘69: Magick, Performance and the ‘End of the Sixties’

In 1970, Warner Bros. released Performance, a film co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg The film featured Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones and exhibited thematic and structural parallels with the the work of magician and film-maker Kenneth Anger. The film had originally been completed in 1968 but was delayed due to a number of censorship issues regarding its representation of sex and violence. As such, its completion and release bookended another infamous cultural happening featuring The Rolling Stones: their disastrous concert at the Altamont Speedway on December 6^th, 1969. This event involved the death of an audience member, Meredith Hunter, at the hands of the concert’s ‘security’, the Oakland Hells Angels and was also captured on film by the Mayseles Brothers as part of their documentary Gimme Shelter (1970). 

Speaking about Performance at the time of its eventual release, Cammell implicitly read this proximity as an instance of synchronicity, if not active conjuration. Whilst the film was completed “before Altamont”, he stated, the concert “actualized it.”

This oscillating matrix of influence and absorption, event and representation underpins a narrative arc that has come to characterize the cultural representation of the late 1960s. An agglutination of contemporaneous popular culture (film, literature, music, and visual art), conspiratorial thinking and retrospective re-imagining has cast the decade as one that plotted a catastrophic trajectory from youthful optimism to violence, death and “bad craziness”. The ‘End of the Sixties’ has thus come to signify not the conclusion of one period within a wider historical continuum, but the destructive eclipse of a unique and utopian culture.

With reference to the microcosm surrounding the production of Performance and associated examples of contemporary visual culture, my paper will investigate the role of magickal imagery and occult discourses in the creation of this apocalyptic mirco-narrative. From Aquarian revelations to Anger’s Luciferianism, the discussion will focus on the visual representation of the occult in this subculture and the manner in which such strategies were instrumental in establishing the ‘End of the Sixties’ as a trope that has extended far beyond the end of the 1960s.

Keywords: Occulture, Counter-culture, 1960s cinema, apocalypticism, magic, visual culture, popular culture, Kenneth Anger, Donald Cammell, Aleister Crowley. 

Whitehead Digital

See the side bar for information on and a link to the website of Adam Matthew Digital. I recently put together a collection for their digital resource, Rock n Roll, Counterculture, Peace and Protest. This material, 'Selections from the Nohzone Archive: 1965-1969' presents rare production documents detailing the material composition of Whitehead's films, including Wholly Communion, Benefit of the Doubt, Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, Charlie is my Darling and The Fall. There is also a sequence of unseen photographs and an essay that introduces and details the collection. It is a useful research tool that supplements the material compiled for Framework 52.

Invisible Horizons

Information below regarding a film screening and lecture I did this summer at Nottingham Contemporary. Click on the hyperlinks for clips and more information. 

Invisible Horizons and Uncharted Waters

Nottingham Contemporary

13^th – 20^th August 2013.

As part of their Aquatopia exhibition, Nottingham Contemporary will be running a parallel film season: Aquaphobia.

Aquatic cinema is an ocean as vast as the Atlantic. Within this expanse, the language of horror works as a primary tool of navigation: Earth’s liquid territories are an inner space to be feared. From sea monsters to swamp things, from cephalopods to giant crocodilians, cinema teaches us that the surface of the water covers an entire world of danger and hostility. Although we humans might have come from the sea, it’s never safe to go back in…

I've been asked to program two slots as part of this four week season. I've suggested two events: a screening of Warlords of Atlantis as well as double bill of Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came From Beneath the Sea. The Warlords event will involve a talk on film, occulture and Atlantean myth and I'll also be providing a set of film notes to accompany each of the screenings. In addition, I've also put together a You Tube channel to work as a supplement to the talk and to the Aquaphobia season. 

Click on the title links below for clips and more information relating to times, venues and booking details.

13^th August

Talk and Film Screening

Invisible Horizons: Hollywood’s Voyage into Uncharted Waters

Taking its cue from Vincent Gaddis’ classic work of Forteana, Invisible Horizons: True Mysteries of the Sea (1965), this illustrated talk looks at American aquatic horror and science fiction films of the 50s, 60s and 70s. It will consider the influence of esoteric and ‘occultural’ thinking on the development of the sub-genre.

At the start of Invisible Horizons, Gaddis describes himself as a writer "who specializes in exploring the borderlands where fact emerges from myth and legend". This talk is interested in the inverse territory: it seeks to explore the transformative borderland where fact becomes myth and legend. Speaking about the work of Ken Hollings, Erik Davis described his area of interest as "the Zone", the "fluid and unmapped" area of post-1945 history in which technology, popular culture and fringe science blurred in an associational symbolic network. The myth of Atlantis, particularly in its post-60s incarnation, formed a similar 'Zone' or, more specifically, a Triangle: a nodal point at which film, ufology and speculative archaeology converged to create a strange cultural mirage.

Judging by films like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), City Under the Sea (1965) and Warlords of Atlantis (1978), Hollywood seems to have dealt with more than ‘just’ the military industrial complex during this period. In contrast to the more familiar narratives of aliens, space and body snatchers, these films deal with older ideas: the amniotic past, the murk of the unconscious and archetypal history.

Followed by

Warlords of Atlantis (Kevin Connor, 1978)

Originally titled Seven Cities to Atlantis, Warlords was the fourth collaboration between director Kevin Connor and star Doug McClure. This psychotronic Scorsese and De Niro had previously made The Land That Time Forgot (1975), At the Earth’s Core (1976) and The People that Time Forgot (1977), three films based on the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Warlords carries the spirit of these films but not the source material. It was written by Brian Hayles who is best known for his work on Dr. Who, particularly the 1967 serial The Ice Warriors.

In 'The Thinking Behind Atlantis', his preface to Paul Victor's novelization of the film, Hayles describes how the myth of the lost city has been used to posit the notion that humankind developed from a singular and tremendously advanced civilization. He explains how this trope has been extensively discussed and appropriated by writers promoting a dizzying array of paradigms. From the trance predictions of Edgar Cayce to the cosmology of Carl Sagan, from the 'ancient spaceman' hypothesis of Erich von Daniken to the ufology of Charles Berlitz, the essential invisibility and obscurity of Atlantis has allowed the myth to persist via a constant process of modification.

Although Warlords clearly does its job as a creature feature and works, in the words of Hayles, 'simply as a science fiction adventure', it's also not afraid to draw upon these pseudo-scientific ideas in its presentation of the extra-terrestrial Atlanteans. In contrast to the positioning of the city in the ancient past in George Pal's Atlantis: The Lost Continent (1961), Hayles offers the 'lost' city as a submerged but parallel force that secretly controls mankind's evolution. It's this mix of high-adventure and fringe-thinking that makes Warlords the unacknowledged gem of the Connor / McClure quartet. 

20^th August

Double Bill: Uncharted Waters

Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954)

“Out of the murk and mystery of a hundred million years ago, up from the depths of unknown waters comes a creature to confound science!”

Creature from the Black Lagoon is one of the all-time great Universal creature-features. A scientific expedition to the Amazon discovers evidence of a highly evolved amphibious humanoid whose existence is tied to a legendary tributary on the river. Originally filmed in 3-D, Creature was much imitated following its release (The Monster of Piedras Blancas [1959], Attack of the Giant Leeches [1959]) and although it features some stereotypical trappings of the period, the film is distinguished by its use of excellent underwater photography courtesy of Bruce Mozert. In particular, the sequences in which the creature stalks Julia Adams as she swims rival Jaws in their suggestion of a subaquatic sense of menace.

The real star of the show, however, is the creature itself. The iconic design was developed and sculpted by Milicent Patrick, Bud Westmore, Jack Kavan and Chris Mueller. As a figure of horror, The Gil-Man is still effective 58 years later. Both recognizable and utterly alien, it perfectly encapsulates the mixture of fascination and fear that is associated with the concept ‘underwater’.

Creature spawned two sequels, Revenge of the Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956). Although less effective, arguably due to the loss of the 'Black Lagoon' location itself, these films plot an interesting line of continuation in which the creature is briefly assimilated into the terran world. The final shot of Among Us showing the creature returning to water brings things full circle: the pull of the aquatic domain is inexorable. Dangerous but also life giving, a space of origin and of final refuge, water is the substance that connects the human to earlier and hitherto unknown stages of evolution.

It Came From Beneath the Sea (Robert Gordon, 1955)

Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013) is best known for his stop-motion animation work on Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and Clash of the Titans (1981). Prior to these spectacular takes on ancient myths, Harryhausen worked with producer Charles H. Schneer on a series of ground-breaking science-fiction and monster movies designed specifically as special-effects showcases. It Came from Beneath the Sea was the first of these collaborations and features a giant octopus attacking San Francisco.

At least it was meant to be an octopus. Look carefully: you’ll only ever see 6 arms on screen because the budget didn't stretch to the full 8. Other budget restraints resulted in an interesting level of realism in the film. Director Robert Gordon shot hand-held scenes in submarines at the San Francisco Naval Shipyard and coaxed a number of navy officers into serving as extras.

Prior to working with Schneer, Harryhausen made The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) with director Eugene Lourie. Based on 'The Fog Horn' (1951), a short-story by Ray Bradbury, Beast concerns a pre-historic Rhedosaurus that is released from hibernation due to a nuclear explosion. Its subsequent rampage around New York set the standard for giant monster movies, a formula developed and perfected by the Godzilla series. What all these films have in common is the idea of a revived monster, something from the deep past that is brought into the 'now' due to the crisis of the present: radiation, atomic energy, experimental weapons testing. The appearance of these 'Old Ones' is a manifestation of humankind's self-destruction and in It Came from Beneath the Sea, the 'octopus' seems to be more of a terrible conjuration than an atomic mutation. The climactic scene in which it attacks the Golden Gate Bridge is positively Lovecraftian in its visualization of a tentacled apocalypse.

Area 51

Here's a picture of Ray Goudey, "the dashing, daring, Lockheed test pilot" who "flew the U-2 spy plane's legendary 'Ship One' at Area 51, starting in 1955". In the photo he's preparing for a flight whilst reading More Adventures in Time and Space (1955), a science fiction anthology edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas. The book is the 'sequel' to Adventures in Time and Space, (1946) a massive 900+ page book of "non-fiction stories of the future world of atomic power, rockets etc". The first volume contained stories by Robert A. Heinlein, Alfred Bester and Issac Asimov whilst in the second, Goudey would have encountered all these and more. 

I came across this image when researching a short article for Monolith on the recent declassification of information relating to Area 51. It appears in the documentary Area 51: I Was There which has links to Annie Jacobsen's book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base (2011). Goudey plays a key role in both and the image as well as the above description appears on Jacobson's website.  

This photograph pretty much crystallizes the nature of my interest in ufology, conspiracy theory and the grey room that is the history and culture of the post-1945 period. I'm not a UFO investigator, Ufologist or for that matter a UFO debunker. Instead, I'm interested in ufology as a cultural discourse that assumes a particular form at a particular time. More specifically, I'm interested in the way in which ufology intersects and establishes a generative feedback loop with such parallel spheres as popular culture, cinema and science fiction. In this respect, whilst I work with texts by Morris K. Jessup, Charles Berlitz and John Keel, I find the methodologies and analysis of Philip K. Dick, Craig Baldwin and Ken Hollings to be a more productive approach to the topic. 

This is the interstitial and intertextual territory I was trying to map in the Invisible Horizons talk at Nottingham. Using the title of Vincent Gaddis’ 1965 book Invisible Horizons: Strange Mysteries of the Sea I was interested in how he described himself as a “freelance writer who specializes in exploring the borderlands where fact emerges from myth and legend”. Arguing that Atlantis represents a "triangle formed out of the extreme edges of folklore, oceanography and archaeology" I suggested that it occupies an inverse borderland to that which Gaddis posits, a borderland where fact becomes myth and legend. 

Goudey’s photograph is one such borderland. It neatly presents the sedimentary overlap that forms the imaginative economy of the UFO phenomenon: aviation, science fiction paperbacks and recontextualized photography. It also works as a signpost marking out the complex of narratives and interlocking reference points that constellate around the idea of Area 51.

Case in point is Jacobsen’s book. It was initially praised for the detail of its research but a wave of negative criticism greeted a number of its later ‘revelations’. The source of the most vociferous criticism was the claim of an unnamed informant that Area 51 played host to the remains of the 1947 Roswell crash. This is not in and of itself extraordinary. What is odd is the twist Jacobsen reports as part of the ‘real’ stories that make up the book.  Here’s how Earl Swift of Popular Mechanics tells it:

"The bottom line of the traditional Roswell story is that the purported extraterrestrial UFO wreckage was taken to Area 51 and subsequently became the object of a massive government coverup. Relying on the testimony of a single unnamed source, Jacobsen's book repeats the claim that some sort of UFO crashed at Roswell. But in her telling, the craft wasn't of alien origin. Instead, it was a saucer built by the Soviets using technology they'd obtained from German engineers at the end of World War II. And there's more. According to her unnamed source, the craft was manned by human teenagers who had been medically altered to look like aliens, with giant heads and eyes like wraparound Oakleys. 

Who would do such a thing to children? Why, notorious Nazi death camp doctor Josef Mengele, Jacobsen writes, quoting her source quoting another source or sources, also unnamed. Seems that Mengele was working for Soviet boss Josef Stalin, who needed the mutants for a special project: scaring the daylights out of America with a fake alien visitation. Yes, it was all a hoax; the most lavish prank in history."

Swift goes onto interrogate this story by trying to locate Jacobsen's source. What's more interesting to me is the peripheral criticisms he offers. He argues that this well-worn vision of small grey aliens is an anachronistic appropriation of imagery from Close Encounters, somewhat at odds with the popular Wellsian vision of extra-terrestrials that would have been in circulation in 1947 (thanks in no small part to to Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds) Similarly, he also raises the example of James Blish's short story 'Tomb Tapper', from the July 1956 edition of Astounding Science Fiction In Blish's story a flying saucer crash lands and is suspected to be of Soviet origin. When the craft is opened it is found to have been piloted by a female child. 

These references do more than merely debunk Jacobsen's text. Whatever the level of truth value she attaches to her source, the criticisms point to the intermingling of cultural artifacts and historical accounts. More precisely Area 51 reiterates how the the archetype of the UFO is a hybrid of imaginary, symbolic and 'objective' evidence that has the effect of producing a retro-chronal phantasy. Contemporaneous references to and representations of the UFO phenomenon underscore the foundation of the myth by being re-projected as points of origin. This is not a revisionist perspective so much as an attempt to delineate the synchronous loop that has revolved at each stage of UFO history. Astounding Science Fiction, we might remind ourselves, was the main source for the material that made up More Adventures in Time and Space.   

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