SAINT ETIENNE Presents Finisterre: A Film About London
Directed by Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans
(Plexifilm)
Village Voice, November 30th, 2005
“Finisterre”, the title track of Saint Etienne’s 2002 album, was an aesthetic manifesto that among other things imagined leaping straight from the Regency Era
to Bauhaus-style modernism, in the process skipping almost the entire 19th Century. In a way, that’s what this DVD-- an enchanting meander through London that’s less a documentary than a visual poem--does too. You get little sense of the city as Dickens would have understood it: the hustle-bustle of a place somewhere people work and produce. Finisterre’s first images are a suburban train heading into London at the crack of dawn, before the commuter crush, and the only sense of commotion and congestion come much later with footage shot at various gigs and bars.
There’s a sense in which the city could only be made beautiful by minimizing the presence of its inhabitants, who are either absent or typically appear on the edge of shot. Directors Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans strip away the hubbub to reveal a secret city of silence and stillness, reverie rather than revelry. The film is literally composed largely of stills--buildings, graffiti, faded posters, half-deserted cafes, store fronts. People, when they appear, are rarely in motion. The gaze of this flaneur-camera aestheticizes everything: a homeless man becomes a compositional figure (mmmm, look at the curvature of spine) and a neglected playground generates attractive patterns of rust-mottled metal and stained brickwork.
It would have been heavy-handed to use such images as signifiers of urban decay and dysfunction, but a teensy dose of Ken Loach wouldn’t have gone amiss. A different Ken (Livingstone, the Mayor of London) gives his thumbs-up in the DVD booklet, and no wonder: it’ll trigger a tourism micro-boom by luring Saint Etienne’s already Anglophile fanbase abroad. Watching Finisterre made this London-born expatriate yearn to hop on the next flight home, too. But I suspect this is actually the last word in a certain way of looking at, and living with, a city that’s unmanageably vast and often pretty grim. File it next to Iain Sinclair’s psychogeographic walking tours or the greasy spoon memory-work of Adrian Maddox’s Classic Cafes-- forms of mourning for a city that’s always dying. Finisterre is a beautiful film about London. But beauty is only half the story, because cities are always rebirthing themselves too, and birth ain’t a pretty sight.
SIMON REYNOLDS
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
IAIN SINCLAIR, Lights Out For The Territory
MARC ATKINS and IAIN SINCLAIR, Liquid City
Village Voice, August 18 - 24, 1999
Lights Out For The Territory invites comparison with Patrick Keiller's brilliant documentary London--literally invites the comparison, since Iain Sinclair discusses at some length Keiller's "ethnographic home-movie".
When novelist/film-maker Sinclair proposes an urban "cinema of vagrancy" based on "arcane pilgrimages", or describes the way Keiller "stares at London with autistic steadiness... freezes still lifes", he is really exalting his
own methodology in Lights Out. As its subtitle explains, the book is based
on "9 Excursions In The Secret History of London": purposeful meanders
through some of the city's least glamorous areas, with Sinclair's eye primed for mundane epiphanies and strange visions. The nod to Greil Marcus's concept of "secret history" as outlined in his punk treatise Lipstick Traces clues the reader to another big influence on Sinclair's project, the Situationist praxis of psychogeography (the French anarcho-surrealists would drift through Paris in search of its "zones of feeling.")
Lights Out teems with striking insights and mind's eye grabbing images. Sinclair imagines the City of London as a termite colony seething with bowler-hatted drones serving a monetarist queen (Maggie Thatcher). The funeral of legendary East End hoodlum Ronnie Kray forms the centrepiece of a meditation on the English working class's twin sentimentalities--loveable but lethal dogs like the pitbull terrier, and gangsters who savaged only their own kind and kept the streets safe for little old ladies. Throughout, Sinclair maintains a delicate poise between his prose-poet's on-rush of sense impressions and his acerbic political consciousness; he is sharply alert to the centuries-thick silt deposits left by the flows of population, money and power. And as a former employee of a second-hand bookseller, Sinclair's brain is stacked with hermetic knowledge, encompassing obscure delights such as the work of 19th Century meteorologist/cloud-classifier Luke Howard.
Lights Out For the Territory is not flawless. Alternately telegraphic and
rippling, Sinclair's prose occasionally grinds to a near-halt in snarl-ups of elliptical opacity. Like Don DeLillo in The Names, he's over-fond of sentences with no verbs--a stylistic ploy that fits his rapture-of-the-gaze p.o.v.. His arcane erudition sometimes dissipates the narrative momentum, while the density of allusions and local reference points can tax even an ex-Londoner like myself.
Liquid City, an addendum to Lights Out, will be an easier entry point for all but the most rugged readers, if only because the text takes a back seat to the photographry of Marc Atkins (Sinclair's rambling companion for most of the Lights Out journeys). Atkins's pictures and Sinclair's short bursts of text (mostly character-sketches of the marginal literati, eccentric academics and obscure film makers that are his friends and/or heroes) operate independently of each other, only rarely serving as illustration/caption to each other. But the deep affinity between the pair leaps off the page. The lustrous darkness of Atkins's high-contrast black-and-white photographs brings out what Sinclair describes as the city's "articulate shadows", the haunted-ness of urban space that the writer conjures in both his novels and non-fiction.
SIMON REYNOLDS
MARC ATKINS and IAIN SINCLAIR, Liquid City
Village Voice, August 18 - 24, 1999
Lights Out For The Territory invites comparison with Patrick Keiller's brilliant documentary London--literally invites the comparison, since Iain Sinclair discusses at some length Keiller's "ethnographic home-movie".
When novelist/film-maker Sinclair proposes an urban "cinema of vagrancy" based on "arcane pilgrimages", or describes the way Keiller "stares at London with autistic steadiness... freezes still lifes", he is really exalting his
own methodology in Lights Out. As its subtitle explains, the book is based
on "9 Excursions In The Secret History of London": purposeful meanders
through some of the city's least glamorous areas, with Sinclair's eye primed for mundane epiphanies and strange visions. The nod to Greil Marcus's concept of "secret history" as outlined in his punk treatise Lipstick Traces clues the reader to another big influence on Sinclair's project, the Situationist praxis of psychogeography (the French anarcho-surrealists would drift through Paris in search of its "zones of feeling.")
Lights Out teems with striking insights and mind's eye grabbing images. Sinclair imagines the City of London as a termite colony seething with bowler-hatted drones serving a monetarist queen (Maggie Thatcher). The funeral of legendary East End hoodlum Ronnie Kray forms the centrepiece of a meditation on the English working class's twin sentimentalities--loveable but lethal dogs like the pitbull terrier, and gangsters who savaged only their own kind and kept the streets safe for little old ladies. Throughout, Sinclair maintains a delicate poise between his prose-poet's on-rush of sense impressions and his acerbic political consciousness; he is sharply alert to the centuries-thick silt deposits left by the flows of population, money and power. And as a former employee of a second-hand bookseller, Sinclair's brain is stacked with hermetic knowledge, encompassing obscure delights such as the work of 19th Century meteorologist/cloud-classifier Luke Howard.
Lights Out For the Territory is not flawless. Alternately telegraphic and
rippling, Sinclair's prose occasionally grinds to a near-halt in snarl-ups of elliptical opacity. Like Don DeLillo in The Names, he's over-fond of sentences with no verbs--a stylistic ploy that fits his rapture-of-the-gaze p.o.v.. His arcane erudition sometimes dissipates the narrative momentum, while the density of allusions and local reference points can tax even an ex-Londoner like myself.
Liquid City, an addendum to Lights Out, will be an easier entry point for all but the most rugged readers, if only because the text takes a back seat to the photographry of Marc Atkins (Sinclair's rambling companion for most of the Lights Out journeys). Atkins's pictures and Sinclair's short bursts of text (mostly character-sketches of the marginal literati, eccentric academics and obscure film makers that are his friends and/or heroes) operate independently of each other, only rarely serving as illustration/caption to each other. But the deep affinity between the pair leaps off the page. The lustrous darkness of Atkins's high-contrast black-and-white photographs brings out what Sinclair describes as the city's "articulate shadows", the haunted-ness of urban space that the writer conjures in both his novels and non-fiction.
SIMON REYNOLDS
DAVID TOOP, Ocean of Sound : Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds
(Serpent's Tail)
Mojo, 1995
If Ocean of Sound has an argument, it's that ambient isn't a genre so much as a "way of listening". Almost any music can be used as meditational backdrop or
everyday aural decor, if you turn the volume to a whisper; conversely, almost any
music can become immersive, a medium in which the listener is suspended and
wombed, if it's cranked out through a massive sound system. Ambient, David Toop
notes, has become "one of those polysemous glue words which stick wherever they
land". Hence the proliferation in recent years of all manner of hybrid genres,
ranging from the likely (ambient dub, ambient techno) to seeming contradictions-in-terms like ambient jungle (soothing New Age synths over frenetic, jolting beats) and ambient grunge (the Sabbath-meets-Eno instrumental band Earth).
Ocean of Sound doesn't really proceed by argument, however, but by unfurling filaments of observations, anecdotes, quotations and insights. Each chapter traces one of the cat's cradle of historical threads that have converged to
constitute 'ambient' as we now know it. Toop looks at the fantasies of a subaquatic utopia that links Javanese gamelan, Debussy, Jimi Hendrix, whalesong recorder Roger Payne and avant-disco producer Arthur Russell; he explores the dream of a "One World" music pursued by Stockhausen, Miles Davis, Can and Jon Hassell; he considers the magical effects of echo, from prehistoric caves and Medieval cathedrals to dub reggae and Pauline Oliveros's "resonant music". Along the way, topics like shamanism, chaos theory, the studio-as-instrument and mass-media culture as an "information ocean" are probed; the Aphex Twin and Mick Harris of Scorn can be heard enthusing about the inspiration they gleant from the hum of power stations, fridges and radiators; lost innovators like Richard Maxfield, Basil Kirchin and Phill Niblock are plucked from history's dustbin.
A soundscape-creator himself, Toop shares the musician's distate for categories, bombastic judgements and over-weaning theories. In the spirit of his diffuse subject, Toop lets inferences and implications spread out in ever-widening ripples. Even individual sentences often proceed likewise, as a chain of supplementary clauses (freefloating ideas, imagistic metaphors etc) that gradually recedes into the horizon. Some may find the lack of narrative thrust or polemical punch slightly frustrating. But if you let yourself go with the flow, you'll find Ocean of Sound a scintillating read.
SIMON REYNOLDS
(Serpent's Tail)
Mojo, 1995
If Ocean of Sound has an argument, it's that ambient isn't a genre so much as a "way of listening". Almost any music can be used as meditational backdrop or
everyday aural decor, if you turn the volume to a whisper; conversely, almost any
music can become immersive, a medium in which the listener is suspended and
wombed, if it's cranked out through a massive sound system. Ambient, David Toop
notes, has become "one of those polysemous glue words which stick wherever they
land". Hence the proliferation in recent years of all manner of hybrid genres,
ranging from the likely (ambient dub, ambient techno) to seeming contradictions-in-terms like ambient jungle (soothing New Age synths over frenetic, jolting beats) and ambient grunge (the Sabbath-meets-Eno instrumental band Earth).
Ocean of Sound doesn't really proceed by argument, however, but by unfurling filaments of observations, anecdotes, quotations and insights. Each chapter traces one of the cat's cradle of historical threads that have converged to
constitute 'ambient' as we now know it. Toop looks at the fantasies of a subaquatic utopia that links Javanese gamelan, Debussy, Jimi Hendrix, whalesong recorder Roger Payne and avant-disco producer Arthur Russell; he explores the dream of a "One World" music pursued by Stockhausen, Miles Davis, Can and Jon Hassell; he considers the magical effects of echo, from prehistoric caves and Medieval cathedrals to dub reggae and Pauline Oliveros's "resonant music". Along the way, topics like shamanism, chaos theory, the studio-as-instrument and mass-media culture as an "information ocean" are probed; the Aphex Twin and Mick Harris of Scorn can be heard enthusing about the inspiration they gleant from the hum of power stations, fridges and radiators; lost innovators like Richard Maxfield, Basil Kirchin and Phill Niblock are plucked from history's dustbin.
A soundscape-creator himself, Toop shares the musician's distate for categories, bombastic judgements and over-weaning theories. In the spirit of his diffuse subject, Toop lets inferences and implications spread out in ever-widening ripples. Even individual sentences often proceed likewise, as a chain of supplementary clauses (freefloating ideas, imagistic metaphors etc) that gradually recedes into the horizon. Some may find the lack of narrative thrust or polemical punch slightly frustrating. But if you let yourself go with the flow, you'll find Ocean of Sound a scintillating read.
SIMON REYNOLDS
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