{"id":1289,"date":"2007-04-25T19:00:42","date_gmt":"2007-04-25T18:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/?p=1289"},"modified":"2018-01-25T14:55:20","modified_gmt":"2018-01-25T14:55:20","slug":"swingeing-london-on-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/2007\/04\/25\/swingeing-london-on-tour\/","title":{"rendered":"Swingeing London on Tour"},"content":{"rendered":"

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SWINGEING LONDON: THE SIXTIES UNDERGROUND
\n<\/strong>A Touring Programme from Filmhuis Den Haag<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wednesday 25 April 2007, Utrecht ‘t Hoogt
\nSunday 29 April 2007, Rotterdam Lantaren\/Venster
\nTuesday 8\u2014Wednesday 9 May 2007, Amsterdam Filmmuseum
\nMonday 14 May 2007, Arnhem Filmhuis<\/p>\n

Soon after the Beatles first shook England out of the Dark Ages, it seemed like \u201cSwinging London\u201d was the place to be. The cultural Renaissance that had begun in the late 1950s, with the Free Cinema movement and British Pop Art, exploded across the nation and for a few years it seemed that anything was possible. Under the surface of the mainstream, an underground counterculture challenged the conventions of music, literature, art and filmmaking.<\/p>\n

This programme shows how the influence of American Beat culture prompted British experimentation with media, ranging from the appearance of William Burroughs in Towers Open Fire<\/em> to an unseen psychedelic happening inside the BBC TV studios. The films date from a time when artists created a new language of looking, and include music by Soft Machine, the Beatles and the Troggs.<\/p>\n

Antony Balch & William Burroughs, Towers Open Fire, UK, 1963, 16 min
\nMichael Nyman, Love Love Love, UK, 1967, 5 min
\nBoyle Family, Poem for Hoppy, UK, 1967, 4 min
\nJohn Hopkins \/ TVX, Videospace Reel, UK, 1970, 15 min
\nStephen Dwoskin, Naissant, UK, 1964-67, 14 min
\nJohn Latham, Talk Mr Bard, UK, 1968, 7 min
\nSimon Hartog, Soul in a White Room, UK, 1968, 3 min
\nMalcolm Le Grice, Reign of the Vampire, UK, 1970, 15 min<\/strong><\/p>\n

SWINGEING LONDON is curated by Mark Webber and takes its title from Richard Hamilton\u2019s series of prints depicting Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser on their way to court, where they were convicted for the possession of illegal substances.<\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a>

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SWINGEING LONDON: THE SIXTIES UNDERGROUND
\n<\/strong>A Touring Programme from Filmhuis Den Haag<\/strong><\/p>\n

TOWERS OPEN FIRE
\nAntony Balch & William Burroughs, UK, 1963, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 16 min
\n<\/strong>The remarkable Towers Open Fire<\/em> was conceived by filmmaker and exploitation film distributor Antony Balch and \u201cNaked Lunch\u201d author William Burroughs, and features appearances by their associates Ian Sommerville, Brion Gysin and Alexander Trocchi. Envisioned as a cinematic realisation of Burroughs\u2019 key themes, such as the breakdown in control, the film contains rapid editing, flicker, strobing and extreme jump cuts that interrupt the narrative flow. A brief passage of hand painted colour was applied to each print (during Mikey Portman\u2019s dance sequence), and the film includes footage of the prototype Dreamachine, designed by Gysin to stimulate the brain\u2019s alpha waves and aid hallucination. The British Censor requested removal of some offensive language from the soundtrack but passed (or failed to notice) the shots of Balch masturbating, and of Burroughs shooting up.<\/p>\n

\u201cSociety crumbles as the Stock Exchange crashes, members of the Board are raygun-zapped in their own boardroom, and a commando in the orgasm attack leaps through a window and decimates a family photo collection \u2026\u201d (Tony Rayns, Cinema Rising, 1972)<\/p>\n

LOVE LOVE LOVE
\nMichael Nyman, UK, 1967, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 5 min
\n<\/strong>Hyde Park, 16th July 1967: Thousands attended the Legalise Pot Rally, a love-in to demonstrate the need for a relaxation of England\u2019s strict drug laws. Love Love Love<\/em>, made by composer Michael Nyman, is a pixillated record of the event with an obligatory Beatles soundtrack. The film features poet Allen Ginsberg, playwright Heathcoate Williams and artist David Medalla (leader of performance group The Exploding Galaxy). The peaceful protest was organised by SOMA (Society of Mental Awareness), who, one week later, placed a full page notice to argue their case in the Times newspaper. The advertisement was paid for by Paul McCartney and signed by 65 luminaries from both the underground and the establishment. Widely assumed to be timed in protest against the recent conviction of Jagger and Richards, the advert was more directly prompted by the swingeing sentence passed on John \u2018Hoppy\u2019 Hopkins, who received nine months in prison for possession of a small quantity of pot.<\/p>\n

POEM FOR HOPPY
\nBoyle Family, UK, 1967, 16mm, colour, sound, 4 min <\/strong>(shown on video)
\nAn improvised performance, by Soft Machine and the Sensual Laboratory, in protest against John Hopkins\u2019 conviction for marijuana possession.<\/p>\n

\u201cMark Boyle and Joan Hills lived in and around Ladbroke Grove in the middle 1960s, organising events and making sculptures that attempted to present reality as it is. The events included various projection pieces presenting physical and chemical change: boiling water, burning slides and bodily fluids that led to them being asked by Hoppy to do a presentation at the first night of the UFO club, where their liquid light of exploding colours became the main visual accompaniment to the bands that performed there. Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Jimi Hendrix, the underground scene and psychedelic lightshows exploded out of UFO, across London and around the world.\u201d (Portobello Film Festival)<\/p>\n

VIDEOSPACE REEL
\nJohn Hopkins \/ TVX, UK, 1970, 16mm, colour, sound, 15 min <\/strong>(shown on video)
\nThis recently rediscovered reel of early video image processing by John Hopkins and the TVX collective begins with a music \u201cvisualisation\u201d made for the BBC to accompany the track \u201cScotland\u201d by Area Code 615. The remaining footage is an excerpt from the Videospace<\/em> happening which took place inside a BBC TV studio: an un-broadcast optical dub session which incorporated music, tape, film and feedback loops, lightshows, dancing, inflatables and live video mixing.<\/p>\n

NAISSANT
\nStephen Dwoskin, UK, 1964-67, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 14 min
\n<\/strong>Dwoskin\u2019s early films were heavily influenced by Warhol, in both the visual content and extended duration. They typically consisted of long takes from a fixed or hand-held camera, with an attractive young woman as the only protagonist. Composer Gavin Bryars provided the soundtrack to Naissant<\/em> and several others.<\/p>\n

\u201cObjective location: a bed; subjective location: in thoughts. Being with thoughts and the child to be born. Camera from three sides of the bed with three lenses working from bed level and standing level. Filmed in New York in 1964, completed in London 1967. Naissant<\/em> presents being alone with one\u2019s thoughts. Time and her inner thoughts are found out only by spending time with her in the film.\u201d (Stephen Dwoskin)<\/p>\n

TALK MR BARD
\nJohn Latham, UK, 1968, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min
\n<\/strong>Talk Mr Bard<\/em> consists of the crude and rapid animation of a seemingly endless succession of coloured paper discs. The homemade soundtrack is a chaotic college of radio fragments and interference. A tutor at Saint Martins School of Art, Latham organised the protest Still and Chew <\/em>in August 1966, for which he invited friends to chew pages from Clement Greenberg\u2019s book \u201cArt and Culture\u201d, which had been borrowed from the college library. The soggy paper was spat out and fermented in a mixture of sulphuric acid, sodium bicarbonate and yeast. When he eventually received an overdue notice from the library months later, Latham encased the remaining liquid in a glass teardrop, which he labelled \u201cEssence of Greenberg\u201d and returned. He lost his job, but had the last laugh some years later by selling the residue of the event to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.<\/p>\n

SOUL IN A WHITE ROOM
\nSimon Hartog, UK, 1968, 16mm, colour, sound, 3 min
\n<\/strong>LFMC founder member Simon Hartog was one of the most politically aware filmmakers of the period. This early short film is an amusing piece of social commentary on mixed race relationships, which were hardly commonplace in the UK at that time, and has a soundtrack by The Troggs. The male character played by Omar Dop-Blondin, a Sengelese student fresh from the Paris 68 protests, and an associate of the London Black Panthers.<\/p>\n

REIGN OF THE VAMPIRE
\nMalcolm Le Grice, UK, 1970, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 15 min
\n<\/strong>Le Grice\u2019s work developed through direct processing, printing and projection, gaining an understanding of the material and exploring duration while touching on aspects of spectacle and narrative, and using early computer imagery. Reign of the Vampire<\/em> addresses contemporary paranoia about the military-industrial complex, the Vietnam War, and the suspected influence of American government\u2019s intelligence agency in countercultural activities. It was the last of a group of works shown together under the collective title \u201cHow to Screw the CIA, or How<\/em> to Screw the CIA ?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis film could be considered as a synthesis of the series. It is formally based on the permutative loop structure, superimposing a series of three pairs of image loops of different lengths with each other. The images include elements from all the previous parts of the series. The film sequences that make up the loops are chosen for their combination of semantic relationships, and abstract factors of movement. The soundtrack is constructed for the film, but independently, and has a similar loop structure.\u201d (Malcolm Le Grice)<\/p>\n

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Alina Rudnitskaya\u2019s humanistic approach to documentary filmmaking often brings out the humour in her chosen subjects. As an introduction to her work, this programme depicts three diverse groups of contemporary Russian women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-swingeing-london"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1289\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}