Urban Wandering. Now there is a subject. Interesting article from the £2.70 Observer:
Urban Wandering: Film and the London Landscape
Barbican, London
A season of films about London reveals how fog, rain and gloom of all kinds add to the mystique of the capital
I've been told that London's reputation for fog is not only due to the fact that it used to be foggy. It was also because cash-strapped postwar film-makers found it convenient to shroud their scenes in mist because they wouldn't have to build so much of the set – just one or two house fronts instead of a street. If this story is an urban myth, no matter, as it tells a truth about London on film. The city's greatest gift to the movie camera is its atmospherics, its fog, rain and darkness.
In ordinary daylight it is obstinately factual. If cinema likes to make cities into dream versions of themselves, London doesn't join in. The brick terraces, the railings, pavements, bollards and postboxes remain themselves. They won't soar like Manhattan or perform like Rome, and you can't imagine Marilyn doing her blown-up skirt thing on London's streets. They reject fantasy. But they permit mystery, the sense that there is something hidden around the corner, which is where the atmospherics come in.
Next week, the Barbican is starting an intensive mini-season of films about London, opening with Robert Hamer's It Always Rains on Sunday, of 1947, in which a woman tries to hide an escaped convict (who is also her ex-lover) in the tiny terraced house she shares with her husband, stepdaughters and son. Its structure is roughly Shakespearean, with a central tragedy underscored by subplots, while its setting is a prototype EastEnders, a Bethnal Green of crowded markets and beaten-up streets.
It's claustrophobic, its tight geographic boundaries only opening up with a concluding night-time chase through docks and railway yards. Other worlds are hoped-for or remembered, but the residents of the movie are imprisoned by poverty and bad weather. The rain of the title is a jailer, but along with the darkness at the end it also brings a kind of transcendence, without which there would be nothing but the ordinary.
The screening of It Always Rains on Sunday will be accompanied by a talk by the Londonophile writer Iain Sinclair, who is also the presiding spirit of the Urban Wandering season. Where Flann O'Brien imagined a policeman who rode his bike so much that he exchanged atoms with it, it may be that Sinclair's feet are by now half-pavement, so extensively has he tramped the capital.
Many of the films share Sinclair's interest in psychogeography, a concept or approach whereby the physical, the personal, the mythic and the historic are knotted together in unravellable skeins. The knotting is done mostly through walking, with the Munros of suburbia doggedly scaled. Its enemies are commodification, the translation of pieces of city into sales tools for estate agents and tourism, and optimistic Olympo-babble. The greatest of such films is Patrick Keiller's simply titled London, an extended wander nourished with literary references and a narration with the measured tread of a long-distance walk.
The Barbican's season also tries hard to recognise the versions of London experienced by immigrants and minorities, as described by the voices of interviewees in Twilight City and The Stuart Hall Project. It's also showing Julien Temple's London: The Modern Babylon, an archival compilation that aims to reveal the city's subcultures but ends up as a too-predicable trawl through the 20th century: cockneys, the Blitz, immigration, punks.
John Landis's American Werewolf in London. Reading this on a mobile? Click here
For light relief, there is John Landis's An American Werewolf in London (1981), which wields a familiar arsenal of landmarks, such as Trafalgar Square and Tower Bridge, and has a hard-up nurse living in Kensington, which was improbable even before the Thatcher property boom. It redeems itself by making Tottenham Court Road tube station into a nightmare of endless subways, and with a masterful scene in a blue movie theatre near Piccadilly Circus, where the moans of the porn actors blend indistinguishably with the groans of the werewolf's victims.
As in It Always Rains on Sunday, the programme shows a persistent fascination with poverty and the East End. Even Werewolf features a group of rough drinkers in what is now a desirable part of Wapping. Mike Leigh, in Naked, savours as always the worn hardness of London spaces. In other films, kebab shops and minicab offices light up the night. Sometimes, poverty becomes a bit like fog – too much so – a way of making complacent house fronts more fascinating.
One of the season's more fascinating curios is The Smithsons on Housing of 1970, whose producer, BS Johnson, was also a fine novelist of London's half-buried miseries. In this film the architects Alison and Peter Smithson face the camera, speaking with a methodical glumness quite like Sinclair's and Keiller's, with the difference that, as architects, they are supposed to be proposing a better world. They talk of making "pleasure-leisure places" and "a new Venice" in London's docks, but it doesn't make them smile, and they seem to know already that their Robin Hood Gardens estate, then under construction, would succumb to vandalism and neglect and would be scheduled for early demolition. As it has. "If the culture of cities was a criterion for joining the Common Market," says Alison Smithson miserably, "then any African state would have as good a chance as London's."
Urban Wandering, then, represents a powerful theme in films about London: the feeling that, beneath smug architecture, and wrapped in fog, rain or dark, there is something more compelling and complex, if not always nice. It might be a werewolf on the tube, or a secret from a housewife's past, or the fact (revealed by Keiller) that Verlaine and Rimbaud once shared a home on the site where the phallic BT Tower now stands, as an inadvertent monument to their love. Titles in the season restate the theme repeatedly: Underground, Hidden City, Under Night Streets, The London Nobody Knows.
Gloss and glamour are frowned on and at times it can get too much. Why can't the sun shine? Why can't these people smile? Is it their blisters from all that walking? Until that is, you chance upon a DVD of a Richard Curtis film, Love Actually or Notting Hill, in which everything looks like a Christmas card even when there's no snow. Then you become immensely grateful for a bit of complexity and gloom.
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