Deep End (1970)

Dir: JERZY SKOLIMOWSKI
Country: UK/WEST GERMANY

I am a firm supporter and collector of the BFI’s Flipside imprint. With a remit to release obscure British cinematic rarities in dual format edition packages, already such wonderful treasures as The Bed Sitting Room (1969), Herostratus (1967), The Party’s Over (1965), and Bronco Bullfrog (1971) have been unearthed for an unsuspecting audience. The BFI’s excellent and important work continued with the issuing of Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s criminally under distributed tale of sexual obsession Deep End. My previous experience with this audacious art film came as an undergraduate, when I was fortunate enough to watch an off air recording on VHS. However as this was recorded off television sometime in the mid 1980’s the delicate textures and symbolic use of colour was all but lost amid the washed out and faded video image. In some strange way though the dilapidated and worn out vision of a London that had done all its swinging a couple of years before was somehow enhanced by the worn out VHS visuals. Although the rundown and decrepit London we see is still very much in evidence on the gorgeous HD transfer, it is the primacy of the colours, and their strikingly figurative role which takes centre stage.

Permissive (1970)

Dir: LINDSEY SHONTEFF
Country: UK

The British Film Institute’s ‘BFI Flipside’ DVD imprint continues to dig out some fascinating and neglected films from the history of British cinema. Each title is presented in both standard and high definition, and offers an absorbing journey into avenues of British cinema that have remained overgrown and mistreated for decades. These titles (most of which I’ve never heard of) now have the opportunity to spring from the soil and enjoy a moment or two in the sunlight. A good number of these releases so far encompass the lusty traditions of British sexploitation, and while Permissive would nominally be categorised as such, it is a far trickier proposition when viewed. The director was Lindsey Shonteff, a Canadian who began making films in Britain in the early 1960’s. For genre fans his most famous film is probably Devil Doll (1964), a lacklustre and dull retread of ’The Ventriloquist’s Dummy’ story from Ealing’s chilling portmanteau film Dead of Night (1945). Although Shonteff’s twenty three directorial efforts were plagued by low budgets and received patchy to non-existent distribution, his films (even the James Bond spoofs) possess an energy and a strange magnetism which make them eminently watchable. Shonteff is a director of some generic savvy and utility, and in many ways Permissive is atypical in his filmography.

Herostratus (1967)

Dir: DON LEVY
Country: UK

This troubling and challenging piece of experimental cinema almost defies a simple explanation. To reduce it to mere plot or narrative mechanics is to perform an injustice of which the film is undeserving. It may on the surface utilise certain conventionalities of mainstream narrative cinema, but this is a film about what lurks underneath such pretence. Like Jean-Luc Godard, Australian filmmaker Don Levy utilises film form itself as part of his strategy of attack. There is a self awareness in this film that to use mainstream methods of representation is in itself a statement of hypocrisy. If one is to challenge social and political institutions and to interrogate questions of history and our failure to learn from it, one must provide a revolutionary framework of representation in which to do it. Godard was aware of this, which was why film form was fore grounded in his cinema, and Don Levy seems fully aware of this too. Levy makes exceptional use of montage, one juxtaposition equates the bloody mechanics of an abattoir with the beauty of the female form. What exactly this signifies and means is unclear, it could possibly be a statement on the commoditisation of the human form - and this reading is in keeping with the films general attitude toward the marketplace and the forces which govern it. But the meaning is less important to me, it is the physicality of the images themselves which linger in the mind. The fast cutting images assault and on some occassions offend the senses, but every frame is part of a very delicate composition. Levy also makes use of newsreel footage and documentary material of concentration camp victims to create a statement about the failure to right the wrongs of the recent past, and too address the underlying issues that led to the attrocities committed in World War Two and Britain’s part in the conflict.