Today’s quick lit [& alt.cult] links from around the web:

“I wanted it to be a gag-free book, more like psychological horror really. But then I couldn’t help myself and jokes crept in.” The Skinny interview Dan Rhodes

& Five Chapters are excerpting Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask

& Paul A. Toth on Airplane Novel

& Maud Newton on being intimidated by a favourite writer’s work

& Andrew Gallix on René Girard & Mimetic desire

& Franz Kafka, this month’s featured artist on A Piece of Monologue

& Rhys Tranter on Heidegger & the Nazism debate

& Irish Publishing News on publishing & self-publishing & where things stand in 2010

& book lovers never go to bed alone, a tumblr of bookshelves [via VOl. 1 Brooklyn]

[Image: Josef Schulz's Sign Out, a "commentary on the American dream, unfulfilled"]

Today’s quick lit [& alt.cult] links from around the web:

“[Trout Fishing in America] was our very own Alice in Wonderland. And Brautigan was our Lewis Carroll.” [via @ElectricLit]

& Masters of American literature

& Philip K Dick, part 1 of 2 from a rare French interview [via @MichelleRick]

& The Nervous Breakdown remember J.D. Salinger

& “Mark Twain loved it, Virginia Woolf despised it, Joe Orton [was] once arrested for it.”

& Alberto Manguel on why Bolaño isn’t the saviour of Spanish-language fiction

& Keeping going, Michael Kimball continues his guest lecture series at HTMLGIANT

& Fuck Yeah NYRB Classics, a tumblr set

& How to be a Retronaut [h/t @slovobooks]

& Pink Floyd visual timeline 1960-2000 [via @brainpicker]

[Image: Minimalist Star Wars travel posters / via Drawn!]

she winks at you

                                                 - from fissures by Elena Vladareanu

A nation with a forceful and antagonistic poetic tradition, Romania has produced an admirable cohort of young poets to greet the first decade of the century. At their forefront stands Elena Vladareanu, heralded as one of the most gifted and iconoclastic poets of her generation. Personal, confrontational and fierce, Vladareanu’s verse is as bound to the experience of contemporary Romanian city life as it is to her status as a woman in an often fiercely misogynist society. Greeted with great respect by her peers and scorn by traditional voices in Romanian poetry, she has released four collections, the last of which (privat space - 2009) was launched at the Bucharest bookfair a few months ago. For 3:AM, she speaks to SJ Fowler.

3:AM: The environment of the city seems to be a touching point in your work. Is the urban living environment of a mass populus the place of your poetry or is it rooted elsewhere?

Elena Vladareanu: I can’t imagine myself living, and writing, in a village, in a nice little house with a nice little garden and nice little flowers. Even though I used to say I hated my town, and even though it is true once dreamt of that little house with the little garden in the little village, I confess I am addicted to a dynamic life and to an urban landscape. Everything in the town inspires me. Perhaps for a short time I could live in the country with a very well developed project in my mind. I must say also that Bucharest is not the final destination in my life. I can honestly say I don’t know how my poetry could work in a small town, in Romania or abroad. But I do know, if anything, I would like to live in a bigger city with a bigger artistic community and with the paranoia, the fear, that can come from living in such a vast place.

3:AM: There seems to be a Baudelairian engagement with Bucharest in your poetry at times, almost both a intangible rooted passion for the city next to a revulsion, does your relationship with Bucharest emanate in your work?

EV: It can’t be any other way. Bucharest is everywhere in my work. I can’t write about anything else and I don’t want to turn away from the reality of Bucharest. I don’t believe in escapist literature. Perhaps It’s better to say I don’t believe in escapist poetry as I have a great affection for children’s literature. But visiting Prague for a literature festival, there was a Greek poet who started to read some poems about Greek myths, about Aphrodite and Hermes and for almost an hour I heard only about how brave and unique the Greek people are and so on. Definitively, this kind of poetry is not for me, the illusory is not for me.

3:AM: You seem to expose Bucharest as often grotesque, but revealing as such you are showing great affection. Men too, there appears both the feeling of revulsion and attraction, more than that, a binding to your subject. This contradiction, this tension, of both love and dislike seems to extend into many areas in your work, is it a deliberate genesis point of your poetry?

EV: In the beginning, it was something more instinctual than deliberated. Now, yes, the tension of love-hate feelings is very important for me as a part of my work. In the beginning, I only wanted to talk about me and my self. Nothing more, nothing else. Me and my boring and uninteresting life were the only subjects of my poetry.

3:AM: This is often the case.

EV: Yes, but without artifice, I was only interested in me. Things have changed. For my fourth collection, I tried to leave behind the myopia and to fashion an artificial ego, which is no longer centred on myself, which could be at the same time white and black, superficial and profound. I am not sure if I’ve succeeded.

3:AM: There seems to be a streak of this dissonance, this tension in the work of many Romanian poets, writer and philosophers. Bacovia and Cioran come to mind. Do you think there is something about the experience of being from Romania, or living in Romania which produces such feelings of simultaneous feelings of love and hate?

EV: This is a very difficult question, and I can’t write generalities about Romania and the Romanian people. I am not a philosopher and I can’t form arguments and theories about Romania. But I can try to answer from my point of view. There are moments in my life when I say I can’t live here anymore and I want to go far away from Romania, and from Bucharest. Life is not easy here, everything is very expensive, we work hard for almost nothing – because almost everything goes on rent, and the time for reading and writing is reduced to almost nothing. The town – Bucharest I mean – is not the most beautiful in the world and if you go into the small towns all over the country you won’t be able to escape a deep depress, a depression: everything is so grey, so sad. It is a landscape of general collapse. But, at the same time, I feel secure where I can speak my language and meet my friends and family, I can write my books, as I have done. So, my daily life, as a Romanian, is fundamentally made up of little pieces of despair, little pieces of tiredness and fatigue intermixed times of happiness, brief times of dreaming.

3:AM: You have been known as a part of a number of literary groups, there seems to be a culture of defined poetic movements in the last decade in Romania.

EV: The groups are not anymore. We all took our roads, we hardly meet one each other.

3:AM: I’ve seen mentioned the Caragiale Workshop, Eurydice and Letters 2000. Could you give me a history of these movements then, how they were constituted, supported and received? Were the groups united or opposed stylistically, theoretically or just from geographical proximity of their members?

EV: I don’t know all the groups. For instance, I never was in Caragiale literary group or in Letters literary group moderated by Mircea Cartarescu in the late ’90. But there are a lot of very good writers who started in Mircea Cartarescu’s group, continued with Marius Ianus’s group and maybe passed by Euridice’s group. In fact, the majority of the young poets’ generation passed through at least one literary group. In the beginning of 2000, there was a communal energy, a commune desire of changing things and structures. But this energy and this desire disappeared, the groups don’t exist anymore, Marin Mincu is dead and everything changed.

3:AM: How did you fall in with these movements?

EV: For me, everything was less complicated. I am from a little town next to the Black Sea, Medgidia, a Turkish town in Dobrodgea. There is not a single theatre, not a single movie theatre, not a single book store. I saw my first theatre show when I was 19 and came to study in Bucharest as a student of the Faculty of Letters (University of Bucharest) and I heard about a literary group, named “Cenaclul de la Litere” (“The Letters Literary Group”), moderated by a very good poet, Marius Ianus. I went to the group, read some stupid poems and they didn’t like them at all. I wasn’t even sad and I continued to write, without knowing what I was doing. I went in my own direction.

3:AM: You published your first collection young didn’t you?

EV: I published my first book, which was an unusual and bizarre book and there were some people who said “wow, this is courageous” and other people who said “oh, no, this in not literature, this is not poetry, this is pure pornography”. And that’s how I became a controversial and well known writer… I’m joking of course, but this bad reputation helped me a lot. I was invited to open the Euridice literary group because I played the pornography card. I read some aggressive and erotic texts written especially for this occasion, there were again people who advised me to give up writing. But Euridice’s moderator, Marin Mincu – who was a very important writer and a textuality theoretician – encouraged me to continue with poetry. He published my second book with his publishing house. I was more disobedient, I continued to be so.

3:AM: What is the landscape of contemporary poetry in Romania currently? Are you well supported financially? Are you critically well received?

EV: This is a joke, isn’t it? You know, at the beginning of the 2000s, it was easier to publish poetry then prose. At that time, there weren’t any publishing projects for the Romanian contemporary literature. You couldn’t get a good publishing house. There were only two, maybe three small publishing houses which used to publish new literature and even these publishing houses didn’t have good distribution. The books could be bought only in book fairs, so it was like they weren’t published. Even though, poetry books were published, a lot of young contemporary Romanian writers started then their career without any commercial pressure. Now, the small publishing houses ceased their activity and the poetry can be published only by one big publishing house. The small houses only publish if you pay.

The books must be the same, you must stay in their boundaries. All the covers have the same design, all the books have the same paper, for you as a poet and as an artist it’s almost forbidden to innovate, to come with new ideas and graphics shapes. You don’t get any money, any royalties, maybe 5% from selling, but at least you don’t have to pay to see your book published. A lot of young poets who were much appreciated after their first poetry book switched to prose, because prose offered you bigger visibility. If you’re lucky you get some money and a translation, and the right to read in one of the very few public readings in Romania. In conclusion, there is no support for the poetry.

Is the poetry well received? I can’t say. Even now, after almost 10 years, we are still the pornographic generation, our literature is still considered that un-profound and stupid literature. Or maybe this is only what I feel about the way my poetry has been received. There are only very few critics who used to write about poetry, but even fewer are aware of poetry culture, as it changes. The rest want only classic things, sometimes insist on rhymes & rhythms, they don’t care at all for innovative and linguistic texts.

3:AM: There is a very female, spurned maternity in your work, not ‘feminine’, but indelibly female and confrontational. Do you perceive this to be a specific statement about your gender? Is there a climate of misogyny in which you are responding to?

EV: Of course there is a climate of misogyny. I don’t want to say I was held back as a journalist or as a writer, I never think that way and I don’t want to think that way, but there is something you can’t avoid as a woman. You can’t avoid that pure aggression of being seen and observed and judged, you can’t avoid that obscene words addressed to you when you are in subway, in tram or in the street. Referring to my literature, indeed, it can be read as a statement. Anyway, here it is so degrading to write feminist literature, to be preoccupied about gender studies, to be preoccupied about yourself as a woman. Do you know there is a phrase Romanian’s use to describe a nervous woman – a man can be nervous, mad, whatever, he is just a man – or about a woman who writes about herself as a woman? She is definitively un-fucked.

3:AM: There seems to be a pure streak of humour in your poetry, in its tangents and the way it weaves its subject matter around a satirical narrative, do you seek to use humour within your language of poetic expression?

EV: For me, the humour and the use of humour are and were always the real trouble. When I write prose, I feel it’s easier to construct a comic situation because I can handle more elements than in poetry. More so, in poetry I’m not very comfortable with humour; if there is some humour, I enjoy it, but I don’t want to write comic poetry, I don’t expect poetry to be first of all comic and then… profound. So, for me the humour is not deliberate. But it is there.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:
SJ Fowler is a postgraduate student of philosophy at the University of London and a poet. He is also an employee of the British Museum.

recent history

this is how things stand:
mom will never
leave romania
dad will never
leave romania
if you die you’ll never
leave romania

the shampoos I collect
from the bathrooms of your hotels, europe
all have the same perfume
like the lily-of-the valley eau de cologne
you used to buy in the tobacco shops
can’t you understand that things aren’t so very different there
where you’ll never go?
 
            *
 
history is a piece of the wall
in a city at europe’s center
history is the corner of a photograph

in every street urchin ragged and high
there’s a part of me
in every dog haunted and starved
there’s a part of me
in the men drunk and caked with vomit
the brave men of our people
reeking of urine rot and fear
there I am too and my name
is romania.

my wealth: a few hundred books
a red plastic basin
an old iron
a radio
a tea set
the color of earth
a proud and ruthless soul
a damned termagant skin
a bored God
lust like a lethal guilt

you walk down the streets
of a city at europe’s center
my cowardice and lack of hope

europe. ten funeral songs

europe will swallow me
I’ll become a european daughter
my life will be like
one of your many rivers
my sad europe
I wonder if your sadness
can equal my sadness?
do you have
enough room for my brain
for my carnivorous rats?
(my memory lasts as long
as the air in a 3-mm syringe)
but as for my face
is it more like a man’s than a woman’s?
the little children dead on our streets
or in our bellies poisoned and full of passion
will they have a place where they can string their silent beads
where they can to gnaw on their fingers

where they can to hang their scrawny spines?

fast food

I watch a story on children in north korea
so many things are told about these children
I get informed about how many there are and how poor
in less than a minute I swallow
statistics grams of food per capita per child per month
a few-years-old kid walks barefoot
mud up to his neck
struggles to scoop some water with a plastic bag
don’t drink this, you can’t drink this
the reporter insists
you’ll get sick if you drink this filthy water
15 years ago a young woman in germany or great britain
was watching a story on children in romania
probably waiting as I am now
for the reporter to hand the child a drop of clean water
I wish I cared but I don’t
they’re so far away
they’re so fucking far away
I go round the sun in my erratic
yet aseptic safety
I tell myself I’m being manipulated and I click off the tv

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elena Vladareanu is the second featured poet in 3:AM’s Maintenant series of interviews. She was born in Medgidia, Constanta county, in Romania in 1981. Vladareanu graduated from the Faculty of Letters in Bucharest and has worked as a journalist since 2001. In 2002, she published her first volume The confessions of the distinguished lady m. The collection Pages followed in the same year with fissures being issued by Pontica in 2003. In 2005, Elena Vladareanu was awarded a creative scholarship in Berlin and released europe, ten funeral songs. Her work features in an anthology of Romanian poetry in English translation, No Longer Poetry: New Romanian Poetry, HeavenTree Press, 2007. Her latest collection privat space was issued last year. The poems featured here were translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Adrian Urmanov.

The Baader-Meinhof blog. * Thinking and drinking. * The neuroadvertising paradox. * Jenni Fagan’s new site. * The trailer for Marc-Edouard Nabe’s new book. * The music of Friedrich Nietzsche. * John Bulmer’s pictures of the north of England in the 60s and 70s. * Ben Marcus’s website. (Related: me on Notable American Women.) * Jason Mulgrew interviewed by Steve Almond. * Oil City Confidential. * Faber editor woos Morrissey. More here. * Tao Lin’s next book. * The Guardian’s zeitgeist experiment. * The Durutti Column live: “Someone is playing a trumpet and suddenly you are there in the zone, that zone that prime time Miles Davis created with Sketches Of Spain, but dragged backwards through a post punk hedge”. * Sam Jordison on the Lost Booker. * The great divide between writing for children and adults. * Venues the Pistols played in. * Check out the covers of Lee Rourke’s The Canal and Ben Myers’s Richard. * Extracts from Patti Smith’s Just Kids. * Phony young narrators. * Temple Grandin: “[I]f you got rid of all the autism genetics, you wouldn’t have science or art. All you would have is a bunch of social ‘yak yaks’.” * Best London novel. * A musical journey to the centre of Bret Easton Ellis. * The Foundry to be destroyed. * “The Boys Blue appear to have invented punk while people were still listening to Gerry and the Pacemakers.” * Best book blogs. * Big dicks. * The story behind Jah Wobble’s new video. * American Pop Lit. *

What you (may have) missed on 3:AM recently:

Fiction: ‘Fabled Streams’ by Daniel Hales

Reviewed: Max Dunbar on Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

Non-fiction Terry Southern is 3:AM’s Cult Hero, Stewart Home on BFI Flipside series, Will Stone on Elem Klimov’s Come and See:

The ordeal of filming and the difficult subject matter, placed a severe strain on all concerned with it, none more so than its lead actor the virgin performer Alexei Kravchenko, who was only thirteen years when filming began. One of the more notorious stories surrounding the film concerns the fact that Klimov employed methods of hypnosis on his lead actor in order to protect him from the considerable psychological demands of his role. There was a genuine fear that the boy might absorb so much horror he would be left permanently damaged by his experiences. Fortunately this did not happen and Kravchenko, whom Klimov praised for his nerve and composure on set, went on to lead a comparatively normal acting career. Given the scenes witnessed during the film, this is some achievement, especially since Klimov was at pains to make his sets as authentic as possible, even using live ammunition to achieve realism. However, Kravchenko later attested to the fact that in certain harrowing scenes such as the burning of the church he genuinely feared for his sanity.

“Doesn’t the carnival turn a little more sinister each passing block?” she says huskily, smacking her lips on the p and b. It did seem many revelers had begun chanting praises to the glorious Nada, to a sacred shush between all songs.

Please understand, if I am kept, for a time, from my quest by the succubus, it is not because of the perfect, smoky sheen of her skin, no, nor her tightly laced up cleavage. I am disgusted by her riches, her retinue of loyal gnomes, her palace inscribed with arcane symbols. But her spells are strong. Her clairaudience anticipates and disarms each attempt to resist.

From the lowest ramparts we watch the procession. Spiked plumes, sequined masks, whips going taut in slow motion–or do I grow a bit feverish? A French horn tumbles from a float. Is stolen.

A sudden, frenzied percussing with torchpoles on all the manhole covers, from which emerge hundreds of rapiered men. They bow, then perform a grisly, intricate choreography. Each mimes slaying and being slain, till each duelist has impaled every other.

She twines me, whispers “but how can a dead mule marry a school master?” I drift, something about “venture capital” and “fabled streams.” I laugh for some reason–begin to cough, hack, lose my hold on gravity. Does it dissolve the rust, form a fine coat of chrome? I am hit by a mad barrage of flutes in a backwards wind.

I attempt to regain myself, wriggle free to uncork another bottle of Domaine D’Valdeaux. Gaze out over the parapet, address the panorama of mountain ranges in the officious tone reserved for toasting royal patrons: “remain where you are: your milky contours melt exquisitely into the horizon–and what is not more beautiful in the pale, unfinished distance?”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Hales is a writer and musician living in the wilds of western Massachusetts. His poems and flash fictions have appeared recently in Bateau, Conduit, Verse Daily, Upstreet, Slipstream, nth position, Qarrtsiluni, 42 Opus, and elsewhere. His website is here. Songs from his recent album, “Frost Heaves” can be heard here.

Today’s quick lit [& alt.cult] links from around the web:

Simon Crump asks, is it vanity to self-publish? [See The Great Underground Myth & Countering the Myth on 3:AM]

& Joanna Smith Rakoff’s adventures answering J.D. Salinger’s mail

& Is Shoplifting from American Apparel the new Catcher in the Rye? [via @largeheartedboy]

& Brandon Scott Gorrell answers 40 questions

& David Peace’s Book Notes for Occupied City

& Katherine Harris Bradley & Edith Emma Cooper, the Thelma & Louise of poetry

& You suck, and so does your writing, on literary envy [via @nfrankdaniels]

& Filmmaker Julien Temple interviewed

& Art as Manifesto, on the Bauhaus group

& The metamorphosis of Tintin

[Image: Carlo Farneti's illustrations for Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1935)]

Today’s quick lit [& alt.cult] links from around the web:

Tao Lin interviews Zachary German: “Jay McInerney writes a wine column for a famous magazine, but mostly feel aversion towards his career. I feel nothing but attraction towards Bret Easton Ellis’s career.”

& Zak Sally interviewed at Bookmunch

& Hilobrow on George A. Romero

& Postmodern picture books [via @ScottEsposito]

& Brian Eno on looking smart while being good

& Patti Smith reads from Just Kids [via @maudnewton]

& What is the best British novel since the war?

[Image: Editorial headings by Winsor McCay / via things magazine]

Hip godfather to the Beats (along with Gregory Corso he hustled William S. Burroughs‘ Naked Lunch into print) and purveyor of intelligent satire, Terry Southern is heralded as the inventor of New Journalism (both Tom Wolf and Hunter S. Thompson lined up to doff their caps).

When the The Magic Christian was published in 1959, Southern was already a fixture in Parisian literary scene and had appeared in the inaugural issue of George Plimpton’s Paris Review. The novel, about billionaire prankster Guy Grand who believes everyone has a price, is a series of outrageous escapades concocted by Grand to expose human greed, buying people off for his own amusement.

Filmed in 1969, and transposed to swinging London, The Magic Christian starred Peter Sellers and other future stars of British comedy, though it deviated from the book to cast Ringo Starr as Guy Grand’s adopted son. Southern’s brush with Sellers led him to scripting Dr. Strangelove for Kubrick, co-writing Easy Rider with Fonda and Hopper, touring America with the Rolling Stones in 1972 and writing for Saturday Night Live in the 1980s. But it was in the Sixties that Terry Southern’s flame burned brightest, propelled by the reception of The Magic Christian and immortalized on The Beatles‘ Sgt Pepper album cover, stood beside Dylan Thomas, the epitome of cool in his shades.

The Orphanage, a “celebration of the possibilities of recycling”, in which 3:AM’s Alan Kelly lends a hand:

One man’s tat is another man’s treasure. In that spirit, we bring you The Orphanage, a place where concepts like copyright and ownership have no meaning. Far away from the grown up world’s slavish adherence to shiny new products, this Neverland of freebies, object d’art and orphan films is made from 100% recycled materials; the decor is cobbled together from free trade pieces, dustbin contents and clutter from other people’s attics, the movies have been retrieved from darkest recesses. Come join us on our couch for a marathon of foundling films including the Brazilian remake of Star Wars, a Turkish Wizard of Oz, the North Korean Godzilla (made to order for Kim-Il Jong) and Plan 9 From Outer Space retold through the fine medium of Mexican wrestling.

This is an entirely free, interactive and democratic piece. Gawp through the window or take in Badi (the Turkish E.T.) from the comfort of our sofa. Films will screen all day, every day for the duration of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.

The Orphanage,
18 - 28th February,
Cultivate, Temple Bar, Dublin

“The lamb opened one of the seals
and I heard one of the four beasts
saying ‘Come and see’…”

             - Revelation of St John the Divine - New Testament

There is a scene at the closing stages of the film Come and See (1985) by Russian director Elem Klimov, where a fanatical SS man cornered by the partisans and incensed at the craven grovelling for mercy of his fellow executioners, spells out with the fervent conviction of an Aryan ‘Meister aus Deutschland’, the reason why they have perpetrated their wholesale massacre on the civilian populace of Byelorussia. ‘Some races do not deserve to exist’. ‘Yours is an inferior race and must by exterminated…our mission will be accomplished whether it be today or tomorrow.’ We have heard the rhetoric before, but in Klimov’s hands in this the final dramatic scene of the film it is as if we are hearing these evil pronouncements afresh. The camera then pans to the disgusted yet somehow composed faces of the partisans, relatives of those recently murdered, their guns levelled at the butchers. In this intense exchange, as in so many others throughout the film, Klimov manages to encapsulate the terrifying supremacy of derangement and inconceivable human debasement that mark the Hitlerian adventure in the East. Humanity is here faced with the unpardonable crime of its own nature and proves unable to do anything more in reply than exact a cauterizing revenge in a hail of bullets…

When the Russian director Elem Klimov died in 2003, he left behind a modest but highly respected body of work often imbued with visionary qualities. He only produced five films, enduring protracted periods between them of frustration and deliberation exacerbated by personal tragedy. What turned out to be his final film would be set in the countryside of Byelorussia in 1943, focusing on the traumatic events there in which mass ethnic cleansing by German occupation forces left over six hundred villages razed to the ground, their populaces annihilated, all in accordance with Hitler’s demands for a ‘gloves off’ racial ‘purification’ of the occupied territories. Klimov, son of devout communists and child of the war, who had endured a harrowing passage with his mother across the Volga during the inferno of Stalingrad, was looking for a vehicle in which to depict the inferno he had witnessed first hand. His last film Agony a lavish production which took a staggering nine years to make and ten more to see release, was set in the Romanov period and followed the life of the ‘mad monk’ Rasputin. Though a critical success, Klimov ultimately considered it a failure due to, in his words, having failed to express ‘those extremely complex emotional states’ which were his original intention. This perceived weakness nagged at Klimov, leaving him with a sense of which he needed to resolve. A book by Ales Adamovich on the massacres at Katyn gave Klimov the bedrock he needed and he decided to set the new film in Byelorussia, scene of some of the worst atrocities on civilians of the war. Originally the film was titled Kill Hitler but to mention Hitler by name at all in that period fell foul of the Soviet authorities. Then the passage from the Revelation of St John the Divine was discovered, and the repetition of the words Come and See gave Klimov his title. Another book which Klimov claimed never left his desk during filming I come from the flaming village, provided gruelling accounts by those few who had survived the SS Einsatzgruppen ‘actions’. Klimov, profoundly moved and struggling to mentally accommodate what he had read, was determined that there would be no blurring of the edges in his account, no falsifying, he had to show things as they had really been, though he confessed afterwards that he felt the film was ‘somewhat reserved’ and that if he had shown the unadulterated truth it would have been unwatchable even by those with the strongest nerves. Even so reports of ambulances speeding to Russian cinemas on its release only confirmed its searing impact.

The ordeal of filming and the difficult subject matter, placed a severe strain on all concerned with it, none more so than its lead actor the virgin performer Alexei Kravchenko, who was only thirteen years when filming began. One of the more notorious stories surrounding the film concerns the fact that Klimov employed methods of hypnosis on his lead actor in order to protect him from the considerable psychological demands of his role. There was a genuine fear that the boy might absorb so much horror he would be left permanently damaged by his experiences. Fortunately this did not happen and Kravchenko, whom Klimov praised for his nerve and composure on set, went on to lead a comparatively normal acting career. Given the scenes witnessed during the film, this is some achievement, especially since Klimov was at pains to make his sets as authentic as possible, even using live ammunition to achieve realism. However, Kravchenko later attested to the fact that in certain harrowing scenes such as the burning of the church he genuinely feared for his sanity.

Come and See is continually cited as one of the greatest war films ever made, finding its place on lists alongside the likes of Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Cross of Iron (1977). It is hailed for the visceral power of its images and its entirely plausible scenes of carnage. The setting is easily recognisable, World War II and two opposing sides, the partisans and the German occupiers are locked in a grim conflict that offers little alternative but mutual extermination. But this war film categorization becomes onerous with over simplification when one fully appreciates the striking visionary elements and artistic achievements Klimov attains. In terms of the viewer’s emotional upheaval after watching it, Come and See has little to do with what people consider a conventional war film. It is a film about internecine human atrocity, the sudden and brutal loss of innocence, the impotence of the guileless, the appalling rupture of benign rural communities by technologically enabled destructive forces spewing from a poisonous ideology. It is about how men are capable of committing the most heinous acts at the frayed end of a psychopath’s ideological whip and how the stain of unhinged reasoning spreads into a destructively motivated crowd, but also how the determined victim collective produces an equally powerful will to resist the occupier and bring justice or at least survival to the subjected.

The storyline may be familiar, a young boy joins the partisans filled with anticipation and idealism only to be swallowed up in the mayhem of conflict. However, from the outset one is aware this story is the frame on which to construct a poet filmmaker’s expressive vision. The viewer is transported through a rural landscape intermittently stricken with human-foisted horror, barren, foreboding and unforgiving in places, eerily beautiful and mysterious in others. Klimov favours subdued tones of green, grey and browns throughout, relieved only by the massed red orange of flames and the relentless pallor of the ill-starred participants faces. The film follows the young Florya on his journey through a personal hell to the final overwhelming act of the burning of an entire village and its inhabitants by SS extermination squads in carnivalesque mood. Florya visibly ages as one trauma builds on another and Kravchenko’s face changes from that of a fresh innocent often beaming boy to a prematurely aged feral youth with lip permanently pursed in spasm, his embittered features revealing all he has suffered along the way. Kravenchenko’s ability to present a tortured countenance is exemplary and when his hair is clumsily shorn in the manner of the concentration camp, the suggestion of dehumanisation is even more acute. Along the way he meets Glasha, an enigmatic peasant girl and sometime lover of the Partisan leader. They are thrown together when the partisan camp is attacked and journey on together, their mutual innocence rudely eradicated following a visit to Florya’s village on the heels of the SS.

In the opening scene when young Florya, desperate to join the local partisans and requiring a rifle for admittance, arduously digs a gun out of the sand on a deserted beach, his fate is sealed. This is signalled by the arrival overhead of a German reconnaissance plane and the morbid drone of its engines. Klimov uses this melancholy unsettling sound effect to alert us to the fateful process, we then have a shot from the plane looking down at the boys on the beach, but the image of them is blurred and distorted German martial music plays incoherently in the background. This is the first taste of the countless episodes where a sense of indefinable derangement fuses the film. The same plane appears again throughout Florya’s journey, a familiar omnipotent spectre haunting the foraging civilians, who, like unearthed insects scurry about a wilderness trying to survive. Klimov uses the drone of the plane as soundtrack in certain places, one suddenly notices it creeping in at times of elevating tension and impending peril. Animals also make uncanny appearances in the film and Klimov’s camera lingers on them before and after violent incursions, for example when Florya and Glasha hide up following the attack in the fir forest, a stork wanders about and peers in at them in their makeshift bivouac. The Stork had a walk on prior to this and appears again almost unnoticed at the edge of the well in whose dark perfectly still surface we see Florya’s face reflected, until it is ominously obliterated by the impact of a drop of water. In a later scene, the German commander fondles his pet marmoset while his men prepare to torch the church. Once the massacre gets under way the animal is spared the spectacle when a German helmet is placed over it. The pat by a loving owner’s hand on the helmet completes this fleeting but all too persuasive image. The presence of a cow in one of the most dramatic scenes again shows that animals dumbly wandering into or being lead too close to the darker side of the human condition only deepen the resonance of its destructive capacity.

Though intimately concerned with atrocity, Come and See also contains scenes of rare tenderness and beauty, whose enigmatic quality has been somewhat obscured by the more obvious primary carnage. The scene already cited of Florya and Glasha in their fir forest hideaway immediately cuts to the rapturous episode of these momentary babes in the wood deliriously shaking the trunks of sunlit trees to make rain fall, so they can refresh themselves. Florya lashes his bare chest vigorously with foliage to enliven his flesh, recalling Max Von Sydow’s character in Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. Glasha dances happily on a log for her new companion. In her clinging rain-soaked bottle green dress she blooms with the reckless vitality of youth and seems in that instant impervious to horror. Here in the bucolic forest glade that has somehow repulsed the earlier intrusion of bombs, something is forged through light, sound and visual effects resulting in an emotively engaged visionary force which defies rationality. Another moving moment easily overlooked comes earlier in the film when Florya, obliged to strip and climb into the cooking pot at the camp to scrub it with fir fronds is approached by Glasha who holds a posy of simple woodland flowers. The naked boy, trapped in his lowly position crouches embarrassed, helpless. She laughs and casts the flowers over him. Klimov rests his lens a while on the child Florya pathetically anointed with blooms like some sacrificial lamb seasoned for the inferno to come.

One of the most notorious scenes in the film concerns the return of Florya and Glasha to the boy’s now ominously deserted village in expectation of a warm homecoming. As the two sit in the rustic kitchen sipping soup that was still simmering on the hob and strangely plagued by flies, an unsettling whining sound begins to invade and the sense of all not being well despite Florya’s protestations becomes intolerable. Glasha suddenly vomits, the boy stands abruptly and we see a shot of primitive rag dolls lying pathetically abandoned on the floor. Here, what could be a clumsy death symbolism is perfectly handled by Klimov. As Florya runs off shouting that he knows where they are hiding, Glasha follows him, but as they pass the back of the house, she looks behind and to her horror ‘sees’ the truth behind the villagers disappearance and the fate of Florya’s family. Klimov permits us a brief bearably distant shot of half-stripped bodies heaped against the cabin wall, but as Glasha is running, her words almost incoherent with shock, we see through her eyes, this unevenness creating an effect even more bludgeoning. We too have ‘seen’ but Florya racing on ahead has not because he did not happen to turn around. As Glasha catches up with him, breathless with her terrible secret there is no time to dispense it as they are now wading waist deep across a mud-encrusted bog to an island refuge. Klimov gives the viewer no time to take in the scale of the previous scene. The epic struggle through the clinging mud and slime is relentless; the camera lingers on their agonised mud streaked faces, the futility of their effort known in advance. Florya uses the rifle rendered useless by the swamp waters to carve his way through, this weapon which he has never fired and will only fire at the close of the film into an image not a living person. Once on the island an enraged Florya learns the fate of his family from Glasha and appears to suffer a complete mental breakdown. As he is nursed by Glasha amongst the throng of zombie-like peasant survivors, his face palpably changes from one of ‘health’ to ‘sickness’, leaving him irrevocably scarred with the staring eyed, ravaged look of the permanently-alerted imbecile.

Another scene liable to infect the imagination comes when Florya joins other partisan remnants to search for food and a cow is herded across a pasture in the moonlight. Suddenly a flare mounts the sky and a fierce fire fight breaks out around them. Real bullets were used in such scenes for authenticity and the images of tracer rounds shooting across the sky is both beautiful and cataclysmic. The scene is lent a further surreal quality by the presence of the cow, which stands nonchalantly grazing amidst the mayhem. Then the cow is inevitably struck along with Florya’s companion. Now the boy is alone for the first time. As the firing subsides he sleeps, the cow’s bloated belly his pillow. When morning comes we have another element which encourages a sense of disorientation and mounting insecurity, fog. After desultory attempts to shift the cow or hack off a haunch for the meat, unproductive actions providing further metaphors for his impotence, Florya wanders about the field unknowingly into the commencement of the final German assault on the still sleeping village of Perekhody. Naturally one tends to focus on the actual church burning scenes themselves, the inconceivable violence and insanity of that twisted carnival, but it is in the build up where Klimov’s sensitive handling is most apparent. As Florya is hurried away by a farmer and quickly awarded a new identity as his nephew, natural precautions which we will find out are utterly futile, the German units calmly and systematically launch their dawn assault on the village. Rarely can a sense of the helplessness of a community, one of hundreds that shared the same fate, been more chillingly illustrated as through Klimov’s approach. Seen from the rear, a lone motorcycle with sidecar weaves along the unmade road in a dense brownish fog, sprawled upon it lies the bullet sewn corpse of a man who carries a placard in his stiffened hands stating ‘I insulted a German soldier’. From the nearby fields trucks unload the obscure shapes of soldiers. They peel off symmetrically from the fog bound vehicle in a silence loaded with menacing intent. Then, as Florya races about the shacks and outhouses like a cornered rat, they close in across the folds, their gradual appearance through the fog all the more intimidating. As the sun rises and the fog clears, the whole body of German troops arrives in the village heading for the main square where the forlorn wooden church at its centre is soon surrounded.

There then follows another brief, seemingly innocuous scene whose significance could be lost in the gathering storm. The detail in the early arrival of the German soldiers almost exudes a documentary quality. The village elder and certain families are gathered in one of the houses along with a terrified Florya. The table is set and laid with food in preparation. In steps a weary dust-caked German officer, who after a rapid survey of the situation, meets the wary elder with a falsely pleasant and most chilling exchange of ‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch?’ The villager smiles hopefully as the SS man sits himself down at the table to dine. The peasants close in to fuss over him. He is the new master, this much they know. They think if they treat him well they will be safe. That was the old way, how it used to be done, but little do they realise this modern ideological predator will not let life carry on as before but has a different purpose in mind, for he is a hygienist, an exterminator, who, after he has had his fill will offer perhaps a curt nod in appreciation at the repast, then prepare to systematically butcher the whole family who have served him his refreshment. Klimov manages to capture this monstrous reality in one simple domestic scene. Other soldiers then appear, they look for partisans under the table, make jokes, one smashes a window, the tension rises. Then, the whole pace changes and another shift occurs in the dramatic energy which Klimov employs so effectively throughout the film. Now the people are herded towards the square by a motley crew of SS and local fascist militia. Demented music from loud speakers plays along as the violence issues forth. People are summoned with ridiculous promises that they will be travelling to Germany, ‘A civilised country.’ A metallic voice reminds with grotesque irony ‘Don’t forget your toothbrush!’ Gradually the people are in position to be forced with rifle butts into the crude wooden church so exposed in the middle of the square, somehow already signalling the inferno it will become. The bestial scene inside the packed church is one of unimaginable terror and pandemonium. Kravchenko recalled later that it was the moment when he felt he might finally lose himself to madness. This scene has echoes of a similar one in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, when barbarian hordes sack a church, massacring the innocents inside. But here the action is far more ferocious and the violence systematic, a psychotic free for all, yet still based on an orchestrated but by now well-thumbed process. By an absurd chance of fate, Florya manages to escape via a window and is cast down alongside the baying soldiers as they casually toss hand grenades into the church and then torch it, incinerating the mass of people inside. As if this were not enough, the depraved rabble then commence to hose the building with bullets. As the flames devour the structure they clap as if at a variety performance and the schnapps is handed round, a job well done, another day’s labour completed. Souvenir snapshots are taken, one with a pistol next to the head of the devastated figure of Florya and then the entourage leave after burning anything left standing with flamethrowers. Here it must be said Klimov uses fire to great effect, determined to show the inferno as it must have been, not just a few tongues of polite flame licking around the eaves, but great gobbets of petroleum from flamethrowers spilling over the dusty tracks, the farmsteads casting a glow somehow reminiscent of the hellish backdrops to Brueghel’s painting The Triumph of Death. The killers departing with their plunder cringe past walls of flame behind which nothing could survive. Florya, ignored even by the executioners, has survived in the physical sense, but that is all. The final scene when in cold fury he shoots Hitler’s portrait back to his childhood via manic newsreel footage in reverse, seems a statement of release, the estranged moment when there is no other answer than to fire at will himself. But symbolically he still stops short of shooting the last bullet into the image of Hitler as a babe in his mothers arms. In this moment of wavering he retains his humanity, even if to have shot the child would be to prevent all he and his community has endured. The film closes with Florya rejoining his partisan unit which marches purposefully into the forest to the strains of Mozart’s Requiem. Here, one witnesses yet another inspired directorial moment when Klimov’s camera, which seems like us, to be struggling to keep up with the marching men, suddenly darts off into the dense fir trees to capture them in a flanking movement.

After the considerable personal ordeal of bringing Come and See to fruition, Elem Klimov proved unable to see another film through to completion. The unpredicted success of Come and See around the world brought him renewed respect, American money and the prospect of further challenging projects. A number of these were at various stages of development in the years immediately after Come and See. A version of the Bulgakov novel The Master and Margharita seemed an ideal prospect, whilst another strong contender was a version of Dostoyevsky’s The Devils. But ultimately nothing came of these plans, in large part due to the paralysing internal politics within the Russian film industry, but also because essentially Klimov sensed he had delivered in as uncompromising a fashion as possible those emotional states he had wished to give full expression to. Klimov, by his own admission in an interview shortly before his death, confessed now he had ‘seen’, he had said all he wished to say.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Will Stone, born 1966, is a poet living in Suffolk. In November 2008 his first collection Glaciation, published by Salt, won the international Glen Dimplex Award for poetry. His published translations include To The Silenced - selected poems of Georg Trakl (Arc Publications, 2005). Arc will also publish two further collections of translations of long neglected Belgian poets Emile Verhaeren and Georges Rodenbach in 2010. A first English translation of Stefan Zweig’s travel writings will also appear in 2010 from Hesperus Press.

Tom McCarthy took part in a debate on Christian Boltanski’s links to OuLiPo at the Grand Palais in Paris on 29 January.

McCarthy has also published an essay on Jean-Philippe Toussaint in the latest issue of the London Review of Books. At times, it reads like a manifesto:

“For any serious French writer who has come of age during the last 30 years, one question imposes itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon et compagnie redrew the map of what fiction might offer and aspire to, what its ground rules should be — so much so that some have found their legacy stifling. …Other legatees, such as Jean Echenoz, Christian Oster and Olivier Rolin, have come up with more considered answers, ones that, at the very least, acknowledge an indebtedness – enough for their collective corpus to be occasionally tagged with the label ‘nouveau nouveau roman’. Foremost among this group, and bearing that quintessentially French distinction of being Belgian, is Jean-Philippe Toussaint.

Born in 1957, Toussaint was out of the blocks quickly: by the age of 35 he’d published four novels. It’s the last of these, the so far untranslated La Réticence, which most blatantly betrays his generation’s haunting by its predecessor. …

…He’d made the addition of an element that Robbe-Grillet and Simon’s work, for all its greatness, almost entirely lacks: humour. The protagonists (all nameless) of the first three novels are essentially slapstick heroes in the Keaton-Chaplin mould. They amble through the modern urban landscape, amusing themselves by triggering and retriggering an automatic doorbell, flirting with a pretty secretary, or failing to observe the etiquette of a posh tennis club or dinner with the girlfriend’s parents, or to master the workings of cars or the rules of the Highway Code. The affect, here, stems from the naive individual’s skewed encounter with systems larger than himself, an encounter which, reprised again and again, plays out Bergson’s first rule of comedy: that life should be reshaped into a self-repeating mechanism (it’s no coincidence that so much slapstick involves cars: in Bergson’s terms, automobiles are automatically funny).

What this aesthetic shares with its uncomic nouveau roman forebears is an anti-naturalist, anti-humanist bent: we’re being given access not to a fully rounded, self-sufficient character’s intimate thoughts and feelings as he travels through a naturalistic world, emoting, developing and so on — but rather to an encounter with structure. In a wonderful sequence in Camera, Toussaint sets up a scene of dialogue in a restaurant and, having placed a bowl of olives on the table (as a naturalist writer would do to provide background verisimilitude), suppresses the scene’s dialogue entirely, and describes exclusively the movement of hands as they reach towards the bowl, the trajectory of fruit from hand to mouth, the ergonomics of pit-transfers from mouth to tablecloth and, most striking of all, the regularly spaced imprints made by the back of a fork’s tines across the skin of the lone olive the narrator toys with before stabbing it. We don’t want plot, depth or content: we want angles, arcs and intervals; we want pattern. Structure is content, geometry is everything.

In The Bathroom, this logic frames the entire book, which — prefaced by Pythagoras’ rule about the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle being equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides — assumes a triangular form, its three sections entitled ‘Paris’, ‘Hypotenuse’, ‘Paris’. When the hero, in a willed narrative refusal to go out into the world and make something happen, takes to his bathroom and decides to stay there, he luxuriates in the tub’s parallel sides and in the patterns formed by the towel-rails, as though space itself was like the olive, embossed with evenly spread lines. Watching his lover move round their flat, he discerns the ‘curves and spirals’ described by her arms. We exist and assume subjectivity to the extent that we occupy a spot on or traverse the grid: an implicit assertion that’s part Descartes, part Deleuze. Geometry is not just an aesthetic: it is, to borrow a term from Deleuze, our ‘habitus’. When the narrator finally leaves the bathroom and the flat whose passages he’s ‘stalked’ (shoes intercepting shafts of light, half-open doors on each side providing symmetry and rhythm), he travels in the cube of a train compartment to a Venetian hotel, there to install himself in a new bathroom, to stalk new hallways, all of which he describes in careful detail. His lover, joining him, tries to entice him out to see Renaissance works of art, but he’s not interested. Pictures can’t be inhabited, unlike the neutral, unanimated surfaces and planes of corridors and door-frames.

At one point The Bathroom’s hero even buys himself a dartboard, ‘sober-looking’ and ‘concentric’, and, drawing on a round table columns representing various countries, plays out a darts ‘world cup’ — alone, of course. There are echoes here of Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, who abandons the countries of the world in favour of their simulacra. But Toussaint’s is a next generation decadent: where Des Esseintes’s creations convey the smells, sounds and colours of the landscapes they replace, Toussaint’s narrator has excised all mimesis. His world-in-absentia has been reduced to a shorthand cartography, the dartboard’s intersections and the circular chart: abstract globes made up of characterless vectors. And it’s here that The Bathroom’s single genuine ‘event’ takes place: as his lover stands beside the board nagging him once more to get up off his arse and visit Venice, the narrator, quite deliberately, throws a dart into her forehead, piercing it as though it were an olive’s skin. This, perhaps, is the nouveau roman’s greatest legacy: an understanding of what renders space meaningful. It’s an understanding that Greek tragedy (with its houses, cities and whole states founded on primal murders) also displays — and one which illustrates why Houellebecq is so wrong about Robbe-Grillet’s writing. In The Bathroom, as in The Voyeur, space is brought into its own, made present in the only true way possible: through acts of violence.…

…Another way in which the Eastern novels differ from their predecessors is in the priority they give to that bugbear of all things even vaguely avant-garde: relationships. For all their narrative refusal and machine-like logic, Toussaint’s first three novels also involved emotional encounters between men and women. They could even be seen as playful renditions of quite conventional romantic situations, but only if re-engineered through a certain kind of reading, much as some student guides to Ulysses try to persuade us that what’s ‘really’ going on in such and such a scene is Bloom pining for Molly, for example (‘No,’ I always want to shout out when I read accounts like these, ‘what’s really going on is tramlines vibrating, soap singing and language rioting, just like it says!’). But Making Love and Running Away are unabashedly ‘about’ the troubled love between the hero and his girlfriend. …

…Is this a crypto-reactionary step backwards towards humanism, sentimentalism, positivism and the whole gamut of bad isms that the vanguard 20th-century novel expended so much effort overcoming — and, moreover, a step backwards enabled by some of that vanguard’s own techniques? It’s hard to say. In La Patinoire (‘The Ice Rink’), a film Toussaint scripted and directed, the French director-character (it’s a film about the making of a film) tries to explain to his American star that he hides love stories behind elaborate formal exercises. Is that an inverse way of saying that, in order to get away with formal exercises, he uses love stories as a sweetener, a Trojan horse? Either way, the star, who doesn’t speak French, smiles back and says, ‘I don’t understand’; then, as the ice melts beneath the spotlights, and the geometrically scored skate-marks disappear, he goes off and screws the leading lady the director covets. It’s a brilliantly comic moment — and one that (again) replays, or becomes a snapshot, en abîme, of the complex cultural legacy Toussaint has inherited, and its relation to a dumb mainstream culture in a corner of whose soil it must somehow take root and grow. …”

[Pix by Andrew Gallix.]

Today’s quick lit [& alt.cult] links from around the web:

Why Leadbelly was as great a poet as Whitman, Dickinson or Blake [via Vol. 1 Brooklyn]

& Great moments in jazz: Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan’s pianoless quartet

& American Psycho, the musical [via @flavorpill]

& The secret key to becoming a good writer? A lousy spouse [via @litdrift]

& The literary pursuit of happiness [via @JanuaryMagazine]

& The most adapted pulp author of all time [via @maudnewton]

[Image: Women, Snakes & Stalkers, a gallery of South Asian book covers]

Today’s quick lit [& alt.cult] links from around the web:

Bob Dylan has written a children’s book

& Bill Watterson speaks! [via @drawn]

& The Broad Set Writing Collective interview Shane Jones

& In search of Stieg Larsson

& Ten books about drink

& Catherine Gregg on Le Corbusier’s printed works

& Notable Novelists of the 20th Century card game [& illustrator Andy Ward's sketches for them / via @largeheartedboy]

& A Is For Atom, vintage atomic film [via @MichaelKaiser]

[Image: Coming soon: Picture Book Report / via @nyrbclassics]

Stewart Home joins Iain Sinclair later this month at the ICA for London, Restless City, a talk on “London as an ever-changing environment.”

They will be exploring the architecture and cultural make-up of our capital in relation to a city that is essentially restless and continually evolving. Sinclair’s writing has often focused on London; his latest book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, is a personal record of the area he has lived in for the past 40 years.

Institute of Contemporary Arts,
Thursday 18 February
[Note: Event Sold Out, returns only]

The BFI Flipside series consists of reissues on disc (DVD and Blu-Ray) of forgotten Brit films, and each and every one is proving crucial viewing for anyone with even the slightest interest in the history of British cinema. Many of the flicks are simultaneously incredible documents of the emergence of swinging London and the subsequent come-downs from that high.

The oldest movie in the latest round of Flipside releases is That Kind Of Girl (dir. Gerry O’Hara, 1963). It’s the tale of a swinging Austrian au pair called Eva (Margaret Rose Keil), who catches the clap from seedy middle-age advertising executive Elliot Collier (Peter Burton) and passes it on to two younger men. Obviously the scenes of sex kitten Eva getting her dose of syphilis and spreading it around prove more fun than later episodes covering her cure at the Special Clinic. Nonetheless, fast-paced editing keeps the film moving and not even the educational sections will bore you. Indeed, the sight of a doctor quoting 1963 UK syphilis infection rates to a Special Clinic nurse as if she didn’t already know them might make you laugh: “14,000 new cases a year - and most of them young people.”

Eva’s first boyfriend is working class autodidact Max (Frank Jarvis) who picks her up at the El Sombrero coffee shop. By the 1970s (and probably also in the 1960s) this was a concession beneath The Sombrero Restaurant in High Street Kensington. Right at the start of That Kind Of Girl, we see Eva getting off a 31 bus and walking along a stretch of High Street Kensington before going into the entrance of The Sombrero. This sequence was shot in the early Sixties at a time when the 31 bus ran between Notting Hill and Chelsea, the route was changed on 29 May 1999. In That Kind Of Girl, we cut from Eva going into The Sombrero to her appearance in the El Sombrero coffee shop. I assume this would have entailed going down a flight of stairs but that isn’t shown. When my swinging mother Julia Callan-Thompson, who was part of the Beatnik scene that Max also represents, arrived in London at the start of the 1960s, El Sombrero was one of the places she hung out. Barry Miles provides a description of the place from a later era in his new book London Calling: A Countercultural History of London Since 1945 (Grove Atlantic, pages 319-320):

“El Sombrero, in the basement below the Sombrero restaurant, distinguished by its Mexican hat neon sign, at 142 Kensington High Street, was a popular hangout in the late seventies. For a time Derek Jarman, Ossie Clarke, Angie and David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Bianca, Long John Baldry and Dusty Springfield could be found there every week, and even Francis Bacon sometimes peeped in. It was the first disco in London to have coloured underfloor neon lighting beneath its flashing, star-shaped, glass dance floor. There was a raised section overlooking the dance floor which could be reserved by ordering champagne. To comply with licensing laws, everyone was given a paper plate with a thin slice of pork pie and a smear of coleslaw. That way you could dance until 2 a.m. for a couple of shillings. The patron was Amadeo, known to all as Armadillo, who sat at the bottom of the steep staircase, counting the pound notes. The waiters Jose and Manuel balanced glasses on trays held high above their heads as they weaved their perilous way through the crowds. It was mostly a gay club and later changed its name to Yours or Mine?”

Papers of my mother’s that survived her death in 1979 indicate that in the late Fifties and early Sixties El Sombrero was run by Harry Laubscher. The venue must have been revamped between then and the late seventies because the interior in That Kind Of Girl looks quite different to 1970s descriptions of it as a gay disco. While I’ve come across other references to The Sombrero and El Sombrero in this latter period (for example in Bertie Marshall’s biography Berlin Bromley), That Kind Of Girl provides the first reference I’ve found to its earlier Beatnik incarnation from a source other than my mother’s papers.

Returning to the character Max as played by Frank Jarvis, like many British Beatniks he is a ‘ban the bomb’ activist and so he takes Eva along to the annual Aldermaston March. During this sequence, the film cuts between real footage of this staple of early Sixties activism and fictional material featuring actors. Eva’s other lover, Keith Murray (David Weston), is a posh student drip with a flash sports car - and the most exciting thing they do together is strip down to their underwear to go swimming at a party in Weybridge held on the banks of the Thames. Nonetheless, we do see all Eva’s men dancing with her at an unnamed but hip-looking Bayswater cellar club where the musical accent is very much on modern jazz.

Dirty old man Elliot Collier proves a lot more interesting than over-privileged young toe-rag Keith Murray. He takes Eva to what he calls ‘a proper nightclub’, which turns out to be The Latin Quarter. This is one of the notorious London ‘cabaret’ clubs that gets frequent name checks in the biographies and autobiographies of 1960s entertainers and criminals. It is also a club that I don’t recall having seen on film before. At The Latin Quarter, Eva and Elliot enjoy a silver service supper together, but no doubt for men who turned up alone ‘hostesses’ were available to keep them company as they ate and drank the night away. We see some of the cabaret on film, but presumably far more flesh would have been visible off camera than is shown in the That Kind Of Girl.

Janie Jones, a name synonymous with the salacious side of the swinging Sixties, was one of those who performed in The Latin Quarter cabaret and her career is not untypical of the girls the place attracted. Arriving in London in the late Fifties and living initially in Ladbroke Grove, Jones made her entertainment industry debut by working as a show girl at The Windmill Theatre and got her first proper taste of the limelight after being arrested as she arrived (un)clad in a topless gown for the West End film premier of London In The Raw. At the time she was consolidating her career in the glamour business with appearances at hostess, stripping, cabaret and drinking clubs including The Latin Quarter, The Gargoyle, The Astor, The Stork, Quaglino’s, Le Prince, The Pigalle, The Georgian, The Don Juan Casanova and The Establishment. At The Don Juan Casanova, Jones worked as a hostess for an exclusive clientele alongside the likes of Christine Keeler and this infamous colleague even roomed with her for a few weeks. At The Gargoyle, the waitresses were dressed in cat outfits. The Astor had a reputation for attracting both television personalities such as Bruce Forsyth and Max Bygraves, and criminal celebrities like the Kray Twins.

Le Prince, which became Revolution, was located in Bruton Place, Mayfair. The show biz clientele attracted to this club included pop singers such as Tom Jones but also took in scriptwriters and film producers. Revolution was run by Jim Carter-Fea who also owned an after hours rock club aimed mainly at musicians called The Speakeasy. Somewhat more respectable was The Establishment, where the likes of David Frost and Peter Cook could be found making personal appearances. In her autobiography, The Devil and Miss Jones, Janie Jones reveals that through these clubs she came into contact with a large number of rich men who enjoyed sado-masochistic sex with those hostesses who would accept payment for services that ranged from whippings through to defecating on a glass plate that one polymorphously perverse former public school boy would place on his face. Among the many hostess club clients she met, Jones claims she came to know the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis particularly well. Onassis, it seems, would fork out the readies for Jones to be released from her work at The Don Juan Casanova, so that he could take her to Churchill’s.

These clubs played a key role in winning 1960s London the appellation ’swinging’, and the Flipside series does a very good job of documenting them. Aside from the intriguing footage of The Latin Quarter included in That Kind Of Girl, Churchill’s and many other cabaret clubs are featured in the older Flipside reissues of London In The Raw and Primitive London. There is also footage of Revolution in the 1969 short Tomorrow Night In London included as an extra on another disc in this series, Kim Newman’s Guide To The Flipside Of British Cinema.

Moving on to our next Flipside reissue, many people will be familiar with Privilege (Peter Watkins, 1967) by reputation at least. It’s a movie that I first saw on British TV back in the days when I was still a teenager. Privilege is a faux documentary set in the near future with a fascistic British establishment exploiting pop singer Steven Shorter (Paul Jones) to manipulate public opinion and behaviour. Johnny Speight who created the original story seems to have taken Bernard Kops’ novel Awake For Mourning (1958) as his starting point. In his full-length fictional debut, Kops depicts teddy boys being manipulated by a fascistic youth party fronted by a pop singer. Privilege takes this idea but really runs with it. The Watkins film is an immediate precursor to The Monkees auto-critique of themselves as plastic pop icons in their countercultural film Head (dir. Bob Rafelson, 1968). The use of Shorter to promote Christianity and national unity at revivalist rallies in Privilege also looks like it influenced, among many other things, the adulation accorded to the Pinball Wizard in the cinematic realisation of Pete Townshend’s rock opera Tommy (dir. Ken Russell, 1975), and some of the musical choices in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978). Since the leading lady in Privilege is none other than top Sixties model Jean Shrimpton in her only fully-fledged film role, this could still prove essential viewing even to those who have no interest in the history of cinema or youth culture.

Lesser known, but every bit as good as Privilege is Permissive (dir. Lindsay Shonteff, 1970). In Permissive many of the actors are emotionally mute, and there is a lot of straight documentary footage of real life performances by the progressive rock bands Forever More and Titus Groan, as well as a soundtrack and cameos by acid folk heroes Comus. Maggie Stride (playing Suzi) takes the lead as a bed-hopping groupie who over the course of the film makes it with every member of Forever More, and finally displaces her best friend Fiona (Gay Singleton) in the affections of singer Lee (Allan Corrie, later of The Average White Band, playing a thinly fictionalised version of himself). The world of jobbing rock bands is portrayed as grim, and the hierarchy among their groupies as a vicious struggle to make it with the top men. While the individual scenes within Permissive often appear numb and cold, they slowly build into a switch-back ride through an over-amplified rock ‘n’ roll low-life of madness, sex, drugs and suicide. The overall effect is infinitely greater than the sum of the parts.

As I’ve already said, the Flipside series offers an incredible overview of both emerging youth cultures and London as a world centre of libidinal energy during the 1960s and 1970s. Better yet, alongside the main features there is some equally wonderful bonus material. Permissive has the whole of Stanley Long’s countercultural sexploitation feature Bread (1971) as an extra, and this boasts some footage of the Isle of Wight festival alongside rare Juicy Lucy and Crazy Mable live performances. Among the supplementary attractions offered by That Kind Of Girl are A Sunday In September (James Hill, 1961), a stunning TV documentary about a day of anti-nuclear weapons protests in London on 17 September 1961. For anyone interested in London or the counterculture, Flipside provides a wonderful opportunity to view material that has been next to impossible to see for a very long time. If you only rent or buy one movie this year, make sure it is one of these Flipside reissues!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stewart Home’s archive at 3:AM can be found here, while his web presence is here.