Guest Blogger

My producing partner Simon Field, hearing that I was contemplating writing a blog for FilmInFocus, sent an email to me from the bottom of the ocean whilst studying exotic fish. He said that he had been reading Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book, which unfolds in alternative chapters, the fictional commentary columns of a journalist. Following up on this, Pamuk has a nice essay in praise of the (now dying, of course) tradition of Turkish newspaper columnists who were celebrated for writing columns about everything from doorknobs to politics. I would like to think that these blogs might have a similar motivation, which whilst weaving through a number of dark alleys, muse on the current "state of things".

I will be mainly writing staring out of the window of my beach side residence in the small town of Deal facing the coast of France. The great nineteenth century blogger William Cobbett wrote of my little town in 1823 that it is a most villainous place.It is full of filthy-looking people. Great desolation of abomination has been going on here; tremendous barracks, partly pulled down and partly tumbling down, and partly occupied by soldiers. Everything seems upon the perish. I was glad to hurry along through it, and to leave its inns and public-houses to be occupied by the tarred, and trowsered, and blue-and-buff crew whose very vicinage I always detest. It is with some amusement to me that the natives of Deal still refer to this quiet, quaint and eccentric place as Sin City.

This tradition of literary bloggers is part of the British landscape and Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe is perhaps the most colourful writer ever to have saddled a horse and taken to the British byways. His Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain is a record of 17 "Circuits or Journeys" undertaken to reveal "whatever is curious and worth observation" about his country. It is still the most spirited guidebook to Britain. I am reminded of this in particular by the sad news of the death of the remarkably genial English actor Paul Scofield aged 86, which was hardly remarked upon, being in the wake of the untimely death of Anthony Minghella. I only had the privilege to work with Scofield twice — recording his laconic "rusty" voiced narration of Patrick Keiller's unique and daring fictional/documentary essay films London and Robinson in Space, which are themselves extraordinary travels across city and country, in the footsteps of an unseen romantic bohemian character named, of course, as Robinson.

John Frankenheimer cast Scofield in The Train (1964), as a committed German officer intent on stealing a trainload of art treasures and he was the perfect foil to Burt Lancaster. Probably his most famous role was as Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons (1966). His performance in Robert Redford's Quiz Show (1994), as the acerbic father to a fraudulent game-show contestant, gained him an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor. The eloquent actor Simon Callow in the Guardian newspaper, humorously recalled rehearsing with Scofield: "One day, Peter Hall (who was directing), Peter Shaffer, Scofield and I gathered round the piano, while the other actors sat chatting and having tea, well out of earshot. Hall said: "Paul, Peter has a small rewrite which — " He never finished the sentence. In a voice that was barely audible but of unimaginable intensity, Scofield said: "I'm not. Learning. Another. Line." Suddenly, the whole room fell silent." Scofield's death has finally robbed the stage and screen of one of its most distinguished masters.

London is a meandering diary of the metropolis in 1992, and Keiller with an impeccable camera-eye reveals an underbelly to the city — "a journey to the end of the world" — a pedestrian space, politically, economically and culturally sick. London opens with a shot of the famous Tower Bridge across the River Thames, a shot that also opens Jules Dassin's paranoid Night and the City, which has recently been released on DVD in the UK. In this movie the craggy faced Richard Widmark delivers a hypnotic performance as Harry Fabian a small time nightclub tout deviously trying to manoeuvre his wiry frame through the crooked underworld of post-war London's club owners. Its black and white, deep shadowed noir style photography reveals a mythic Soho where even through an impenetrable smog of cigarette smoke, the nicotined smile of Widmark could melt any racketeer and their long suffering sultry girl friend to a smouldering ice cube in a glass of whisky. So news of Widmark's death at 93 last week, was yet another blow to those of us who still treasure memories of the increasingly lost seedy side of London's "heritage", one where sawdust caked the floor of the Soho pubs and a visiting James Shamus would have found it hard to find an even vaguely edible meal.

Before exiling myself to Sin City on-sea, I had my office in this corrupt seedy Soho for many years and have regretted the inevitable swift gentrification of this area, as well as the once bombed and semi-derelict riverside warehouses. The lost magic and menacing riverside East End is well represented in the highly underrated 1962 Basil Dearden film All Night Long, a "hip" reworking of Shakespeare's Othello. Here the cool, cult actor Patrick McGoohan stars as jazz drummer Johnny Cousin (Iago), gathering at a private gig in a riverside warehouse owned by a rich patron, Richard Attenborough. The film features rare appearances of jazz legends Dave Brubeck, Johnny Dankworth and Charlie Mingus performing together and tantalising the demi-monde with a memorable score. This warehouse location, where the clink of glasses and a steamy undercurrent of jealous passions bubble, has probably been "refurbished" and is now the home of a somewhat anxious City trader.

Such gentrification is of course not just the privilege of Londoners and I remember filming an interview in 1987 with Ken Jacobs for a documentary we were making called New York Framed, where he spoke eloquently in defense of the hidden corners, and museums of decay in New York City, regretting the results of "when all the dentists move in and make things nice and make things new". (Incidentally I presented this film at The Donnell Media Center/NY Public Library in 1988 or '89, when a young and hungry producer called James Schamus was in the audience and grabbed my coat afterwards for a "chat".) Indeed all "dentists" are a major danger to our film cultures, as they seek to clean our stained teeth and fill in all the interesting cavities. In fact, I think that Putin's Dentists are alive and well working for the state body responsible for the film industry here, known as the UK Film Council. As an institution, they seem pathologically obsessed into transforming the veritable London Film Festival, with its programme stuffed with small secret corners of unfashionable and minority treasures, into a more gentrified "red carpet" affair. This red carpet threatens to not only suffocate the lost Soho of London and Night and the City but also bury along with it any "uncomfortable pleasures" that might dare to breed in the cracks of the pavements.

The late Michael Relph, the long time producing partner of Basil Dearden and producer of the film All Night Long, was also Chairman of the now lost British Film Institute Production Board, where I myself once worked. He was a staunch supporter of the "independence" of the BFI's Production Board and fought long and hard to retain some distance from either Government or Institutional interference in its funding of innovative and distinctive films. Anthony Minghella, as Chairman of the British Film Institute, was also a vocal supporter of the London Film Festival and its creative programming team. One can only hope that their inspirational heritage might still keep the interfering dentists at an arms length.