SCREENING FOR MERCY!

SCREENING FOR MERCY!

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

Cynthia Rose

With the ritual switching-on of Christmas lights in Regent Street, the growing winter gloom seems officialized: “winter” meaning the damp chill that’s begun to sneak up every sleeve and down each collar, plus the sinking feeling that sets in when it’s dark by four o’clock. In these circumstances, rock culture moves quick—often indoors and often onto film.

Big hit in the capital, for instance, has ® National Film Theatre’s London u m ^estival (open to the public as well as e Press) ; because of its new focus on music culture.” Bets are being taken that Channel 4—still our White Hope on the tube can make at least the two excellent jazz features (Chflck France’s Jazz In Exile and Art Pepper: Notes From A Jazz Survivor by Don Glynn) showcased by the Fest available to the rest of the UK.

Hopes are even higher that Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens can get distribution here, as in Manhattan. Just like Cannes, Smithereens was the surprise hit of the proceedings. Originally shot in Super-8 and later blown up, it wears its heart on both sleeves yet because of that very fact manages to achieve more low profile cool than so many other films attempting to “treat the punk era.” Not the least of its pluses in this respect is Richard Hell, who plays the role of Eric—a new wave personality whose world revolves around hirpself. Into Eric’s orbit wanders the film’s naive heroine Wren (Susan Berman), during a quest for hipnitude and what’s happening.

In an animated discussion after the film, director Seidelman defended Hell’s portrayal: “He’s not rea//y playing himself; all the actors are non-professionals, so I had to cast slightly according to aspects of their personalities which I knew existed.” In fact, she revealed, Hell was not even her first choice for “Eric”; back in 1980 when filming started, another actor was playing the role, only he dropped Berman down a fire escape and.broke her ankle. Shooting was delayed three months and Seidelman’s female star expressed a distinct reluctance to “continue working with the guy in question.”

Its director maintains that Smithereens “is not a punk film; it’s just a movie about the kind of people I’ve known after fiving in the East Village for eight years. It’s also a character study of the kind of girl—young, impressionable, never listening to anyone else until the last frame—who’s' always been around. It’s only got two themes, really—the effect of pop culture on people” (there’s a hilarious faked horror film clip starring Manhattan underground star Cookie Mueller) and the disconnectedness, the fragmented quality of modern living.” But—aside from being the perfect vehicle of that particular rock charisma, Richard Hell has never lost (the scrqpn loves him)— Smithereens’ simple love story of love-and-expedience a trois actually does say a lot about why young folks get attracted to rock’s poses, hollow or not. Hopefully, Seidelman’s pop cultural consciousness will also carry over into her current project: a female gangster movie set on Staten Island!

Playing right now on regular public screens in London is Ten Years In An Open-Necked Shirt: Londoner Nick May’s unusually delicious assessment of John Cooper Clarke’s career as a poet and semisinging performer—inspiration for the recent explosion of dub poets, ranters, political chanters and feminist “punl$” poets. May’s feature (which contains Linton Kwesi Johnson, Michele Roberts, Seething Wells, and Attila the Stockbroker as well as JCC) was funded by the Arts Council in tandem with Channel 4. But May made his reputation for rock visuals via his inventive promo videos for 3 Kliks, which feature artists from Iggy Pop to the Scars.

May feels that “rock holds a very special position in British culture—because o* continual regeneration—but that importance reflects the distortion of our culture as a whole. Here the rituals of gigs and of the record market are inadequate with regard to the special role music plays; we’re continually deluded into accepting styles in the place of politics and products in the place of action.”

. May says he has learned that “rock certainly has a real value and a subversive potential; cinema is really using music as a path back to a popular audience. It’s also proven that British culture can be exported successfully, but with the exception of The Great Rock And Roll Swindle, the result so far has mostly been both poor cinema and false representation.”

By contrast, May’s Cooper Clarke film— which does more than reassert its subject’s stature as Godfather of today’s punk eventniks—offers an excellent portrait of the British social scene today, seen through the perspective of the youthful punter. Clips of the poets being interviewed and photographed, as well as filmed snippets of performance and backstage action, allow the viewer to see image building before his very eyes.

There are also some stunning evocations of'the content behind Cooper Clarke and the other performer’s grittier observations of the world around them. Besides all this it is (despite the “five million now unemployed” headlines in today’s Guardian) a beautifully colorful and generally optimistic film...something you’ll hopefuBy see one day in the States, perhaps via the magic budgets of cable.

Attendin^the auant garden, as ever, is English expatriate Brian Eno—babk in town to install his video series at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. “All but one of the videos,” says el Eno, “were filmed from the windows of various apartments where I’ve lived; and as they’re continuous long shots of the Manhattan skyline, what movement occurs in them— clouds, rain, smoke, shadows, birds—is random.” The shortest of these arty efforts (they’re Eno’s own North By Northwest, as that’s the only set of directions in which the lens was pointed) is three minutes long; the longest nearly 13 minutes. All are accompanied by music in Eno’s preferred ambient mode.

He’s called the package Mistaken Memories Of A Medieval Manhattan (“because what emerged was this weird sense of an entire other city—quiet and almost nostalgic”). Accompanying Eno’s installation is another Art Game—this one cutely dubbed “MU/ZE/UM” and was put together by Eno’s friend, English illustrator Russell Mills along with B.C% Gilbert and G. Lewis, once of punk combo Wire. Since ’80, when the Wire snapped, they’ve been involved in the “atmospheric” and “experimental” as Dome (who’ve produced three LPs) and their rare live events have been created with the assistance of artist Mills.

As in the last of these—another gallery piece entitled “MZUI” which was later immortalized on vinyl and cassette— “MU/ZE/UM” sets a scene where visitors become participants anid their contributions are taped, to be mixed later. You and I TURN TO PAGE 64 might call the results a souvenir (or perhaps a bootleg), but tp these earnest fellows it constitutes an artifact.

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As space dwindles I hear you cry—But what about the live scene??—and, despite inclement weather, and very ! palpable poverty, it manages to stumble along. Very welcome in the capital was last weeks’s opening of The Garage, “London’s grottiest club;” which accomodates 150 to 175 persons in its relaxed Briton premises. The Garage has begun by favoring trash bands (the kind we Yanks like to call “thrash bands”) like the Stingrays, Cannibals, and Chang Lings—as well as the Milkshakes and the Gruff Men from Medway, Kent.

But evert this venue can’t resist the attraction of vision to sound: three days ago Swedish and Norwegian telly set up there to film the Cannibals live, “plus the audience in a natural state, ,so punters can give us Europeans their own views on the British music scene.” Just so—and what did they say? Not much in favor of that week’s edition of the still-novel Tube on Channel 4, which spent most of its time on a roundup of the Scottish scene (main points:new Island signing Set The Tone, Glasgow’s Hellfire premises, and the comments of pop’s Princess Di, Clare Grogan).

Someone spoke up for Croydon’s very own Supremes—the three Mason sisters, known to the world on their sublime single as Sylvia and the Sapphires. But most were keenly anticipating Chiswick’s trash band compilation, due in January. Just wait for the video! ^