Part 5 (1/2)

I think of Ed Wood as a sort of advanced naive artist. He was among the first to make cut-up movies. He achieved this by using props he came across in warehouses and stock footage he discovered in the film vaults of Hollywood cutting rooms, then he built movies around these fragments.

This is the art of collage and sampling. It is art as found object, as coincidence, as accident, as Surrealism, as Dada, as Situationism. All made possible and motivated also by the dynamo of American opportunism, but with great love and inadequacy and tenderness.

Ed Wood was doing, fifty years ago, what the avant garde are only now beginning to do with film.

(This is also very similar to the way rock 'n' roll often manages to parallel or prefigure avant garde concepts, by arriving at them from a totally different direction. Pop is such a virile mongrel it's capable of effortlessly demonstrating, realising, manifesting, absorbing, remaking any sort of academic intellectual concept. It can do this so well, it often makes any parallel or previous version appear weak or even redundant).

An admiration for that sort of visceral, sensual, opportunistic, native intelligence led to an interest in, and respect for, home video and super-8 very low grade domestic ways of making films I suddenly realised there was a whole other world there, one which hadn't been properly discussed, but as real, in fact more real and potentially at least as powerful, as official cinema.

MF: The film collection you refer to in the sleeve notes to Tiny Colour Movies you write about it very beautifully. Are there any plans for those films to be shown in the UK?

JF: Thanks. I'd like to there are some problems with these fragments, because they're so small. They're physically difficult things, and they're unique irreplaceable and very fragile, so you can only ever show digital copies of them. But it would be interesting to do something like that. I'm beginning to look at some possibilities now, working with Mike Barker, who has acc.u.mulated a marvellous archive, and we're discussing this with some film festivals.

MF: I noticed you thanked Paul Auster in the sleeve notes, why was that?

JF: Paul Auster has is very interesting to me, because I wrote this thing called 'The Quiet Man' years ago, in the 80s, in fact I'm still writing it. Then I read the New York Trilogy, and it struck so many chimes. It was as if I'd written it, or it was the book I should have written. I have to be very careful to find my way around it now.

Such occurrences are simultaneously rewarding and terrifying. They ill.u.s.trate the fact that there is something in the air, which is tremendously heartening after working alone for years, yet they scare you because it feels as if someone has published first, and therefore registered their claim to where you discovered gold.

I simply wanted to acknowledge the effect, and the odd sort of encouragement of recognised themes, as well as a continuing parallel interest in the idea of lost movies and fragments MF: There's a certain kind of London affect that's interesting, of stillness, and the city being overgrown, which is sort of recurrent in your work where's that come from do you think?

JF: When I first came to London it seemed a great deal like Lancas.h.i.+re, where I'd come from. But Lancas.h.i.+re had fallen into ruin. The factories had closed, the economy had faltered. We felt like the Incas after the Spaniards had pa.s.sed. Helpless, nostalgic savages adrift in the ruins.

I grew up playing in empty factories, huge places which were overgrown. I remember trees growing out of the buildings. I remember a certain moments of looking at it all and thinking what it would have been like when it was all working. What life might be like, if it were all working still.

All of my family worked in mills and factories and mines. And all this was gently subsiding, spinning away.

Coming to London, I couldn't help but wonder if it might also fall into dissolution. Then I saw a picture a friend had. It was a realistic painting of what appeared to be a view over a jungle from a high place. Gradually you came to realise that it was a view of an overgrown city from a tower, then you realised that this panorama was from a ruined Centre Point and you could see Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Street, Charing Cross road in the undergrowth. It felt like a revelation. It manifested so perfectly this vision I'd had of everything becoming overgrown, an overgrown London. A vision of longing and nostalgia tinged with fear.

I would often experience a feeling of stillness and wonder as I walked through certain parts of London. I often walked through empty buildings and neglected, overlooked places and they would replay that sensation very strongly.

I went to Sh.o.r.editch, in 1982, and made a studio there. When we first went into the studio building it had trees growing out of the windows on the upper stories. It was very like Lancas.h.i.+re, that whole area was derelict, had been abandoned, because that had been the industrial bit of the East End. Now there was no-one there, it was empty. It gave me that calm drifting feeling of recognition.

There was some kind of collective image of overgrown and abandoned cities at that time. Perhaps it's always there. Such images were present in Ballard, Burroughs, Philip K d.i.c.k. In those science fiction authors writing about the near future conducting thought experiments, exploring likely consequences and views of the unrecognised present, which I think is very valuable. They offer perspectives and meditations on our vanity and endeavours. As such they maintain continuity with a long line of imagery, from religious myths and folk stories to science fiction.

MF: It seems to have a real unconscious resonance, this idea of overgrown cities, it's obviously there in surrealist paintings, which seem to be a constant reference, especially in your early work JF: Yes, there's that side of it too. In science fiction films you often get those recurrent images, which I think are very beautiful, of someone walking through an abandoned city.

We have acc.u.mulated a range of such images all along the line, from folk and fairytales, to the actual construction of follies and romantic overgrown gardens, to the truly dislocated, such as Piranesi's ruins and prisons, to Max Ernst's paintings, or Breughel's Tower of Babel, or the background urban locations in Bosch, as well as De Chirico's townscapes and shadows.

Planet of the Apes has one of the most shocking and resonant the end of original movie, where we see the Statue of Liberty tilted in the sand. A real jolt, the first time you see it. A modern take on Sh.e.l.ley's Ozymandias.

The radiance I sometimes refer to occupies this sort of area. I often see people as if in a frozen moment and they seem to have an internal glow inside them. Their skin seems translucent and they carry their own time. I feel calm and distant and warm from this. It can happen in an instant. In very mundane urban situations. You realise you are not looking at a single person, but at a sort of stream or cascade.

It happened yesterday in a supermarket. I happened to glance at a young woman who looked like a transfigured hidden Madonna. She wore jeans and a tees.h.i.+rt, an ordinary woman. But equally, she was a continuity, a lovely genetic physical thread to other times, both previous and ahead and still unformed. She simply glowed. Quietly and unknowingly luminous. The Eternal Woman.

MF: The sort of feelings you deal with are more abstract; it's like you go to those states without reference to the way they've traditionally been coded, really. You often use the word 'angelic', or 'angel'...

JF: Yes, very perilous territory, especially since these terms have since been co-opted by New Agers. I'll put on the grey suit to dispel all that.

Many of these spring from what I think of as 'thought experiments' things I employ all the time, as a tool to get at half buried or emerging realisations. If you're at all interested, I'll try to outline a few.

Firstly, the idea interested me still does of parallel evolutions imagine something that may have evolved alongside us, something we're not quite aware of yet, that we haven't yet discovered.

That may include things which exist in other planes or by other means, or things which resemble human beings so well that we a.s.sume them to be human, but they may not be. Yet they live among us undetected the possibility that other forms of life may have evolved alongside us, but invisible because of their proximity.

'Hiding in plain sight' is a great idea, something that's very interesting in itself on one level connected with sleight of hand and parlour tricks and conmen, but on the other hand, very subtle, intuition led perceptions. It could give rise to situations that are tremendously moving, fragile, tender. Metaphorically very resonant.

Another one I'm also very interested in the concept of a singularity. An event that only happens once, or once every thousand or million years.

There may be rhythms which extend over tens of millions of years and are therefore unrecognisable to us, except as single unconnectable and unexplainable events.

But the fact that we have no context to fit them into doesn't mean they don't happen.

Yet another thought experiments posits the concept of Angels as a connection between things. An ent.i.ty that only exists between. A sort of web or connection. They arise purely as an intrinsic, invisible and unsuspected component of the evolution of the ecology that supports whatever they exist between. They cannot exist on their own.

Many of us have these little incidents everything from coincidences onward things that we can't explain using the references we commonly employ.

I'm very interested in those things, always have been. Through those odd things, we glimpse something that's outside the way we usually look at the world, and realise there might be another way of looking at it, an alternate perception to the one we have, and I think that's a very valuable possibility to keep hold of. The awareness that maybe there are gaps in our perception that we aren't able to fill yet.

MF: Yes, because I think one of the most powerful things which comes out in Tiny Colour Movies but in retrospect has always been there is that you're able to deal with positive, affirmatory feelings that are eerie and uncanny, and possess a certain kind of calm serenity.

JF: Good, somehow that's always been a vital component of that sort of experience, for me. A sensation of utter calm and stillness. Miles away from any agitation. It seems deeply positive.

It's an opposite to the excitement you get from, say, rock and roll...I think in general we like to stir ourselves up in various ways, using art or using media or whatever, and I think it's just as valid to move against the norm, and the norm at the moment is to speed everything up.

I mean, that's what we're trying to attain, aren't we, through media? That awful maximisation of time and efficient transmission of 'information'. Some of this is economic time equals money and some is simply done because it can be done, and has become an unquestioned convention.

If you could time-jump to show the average TV ad of today to someone 20 or 30 years ago, they wouldn't understand it. The ad would depend on the viewer's perception speed and also on a series of recent references. Our parents simply weren't fast enough, they hadn't been accelerated as we have been by media and the pace of modern life, and they also don't have the inculcated, busy reference chain.

Acceleration is also kind of exciting and interesting, I mean I really enjoy it, sometimes but it equally leads you to think 'what happens if you do the opposite?'it might be just as pleasurable and just as valid to do that.

So, one of the things I want to try to do is work on the other end of this spectrum see what happens when you slow things down.

I was surprised when I was doing the first music for Cathedral Oceans, using echoes that were 30 seconds long, so the rhythms were 30 seconds between the beats.

It was very interesting slowing down enough to work with that intuitively. You had to do it, you had to synchronise with the track in order to be able to work with it. And it's very interesting what kind of state you get into intense, yet calm and tranquil. A sort of trance state.

MF: I think it's particularly on the LPs with Harold Budd, where you get that sort of aching plateau, where you slow down so much that any peturbation has a ma.s.sive effect really.

Harold was one of the first people who got that right, I think. One of the very first to have sufficient courage to leave enough s.p.a.ce in the music and not fill s.p.a.ces unnecessarily. Not decorate. Takes an awful lot of quiet courage to do that.