This communique, the 25th in my infrequent series, looks unashamedly backwards, returning to my own personal lost world of fantasy role-playing games and cult low-resolution television broadcasts. Also, I muse upon the melancholy poetry of ruins, before retreating finally into the prelapsarian world of childhood.
The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781
Gothic
“It is an age of dreams and nightmares"
"Yes, and we are merely the children of the age”
These lines are exchanged by Julian Sands and Gabriel Byrne, playing laudanum-soused romantics in Ken Russell’s 1986 film Gothic. Gothic restages the real events of June 1816 that unfolded at Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, where the poet Lord Byron resided in exile, accompanied by his physician Dr. John Polidori. This odd pair were joined by the eloping couple of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and the young Mary Godwin, later Mary Shelley. As the sky darkened with unseasonal clouds the group challenged themselves to a ghost story competition, a competition which ultimately brought forth Mary Shelley’s astonishing Frankenstein. Gothic is heady, delirious moviemaking. Russell's camera roves like an intoxicant through the Diodati mansion, a space where the barriers separating dream and reality have seemingly dissolved. In this nocturnal realm, where veiled statues are lit by lightning and snakes adorn suits of armour, a druggy, sexual atmosphere dominates. Shut off from the wider world, its inhabitants throw themselves into an orgiastic series of tumultuous encounters which culminate with the exorcising of an otherworldly demonic entity, an act which takes place in a rat-filled subterranean chamber moist with supernatural slime. Detractors may deride the film as totally unrealistic but I suspect that, in its own strange way, the film might be true in its depictions of the wilder shores of the turbulent romantic imagination.
My ongoing enthusiasm for the sensualistic Gothic is the result of witnessing its screening as part of the BBC2 film series Moviedrome. Movidrome, the creation of producer Nick James, began in 1988, and was presented, in its first few seasons, by the film-maker Alex Cox. Moviedrome beamed forth a series of cult broadcasts, showing films that, in that pre-internet age, would have been otherwise inaccessible to many viewers. After recently unearthing the old BBC Moviedrome Guides, which the BBC issued to accompany the series, I’m again convinced how fortunate I was to have been able to watch so many of these then obscure films during those one-off television broadcasts. Gothic was the 100th film broadcast on Moviedrome, shown on 11/07/93 at 9:55pm. The screening was followed, at 00:05am, by the 101st Moviedrome film, Vincent Ward’s excellent The Navigator.
For more information on Moviedrome I recommend visiting this marvellously comprehensive fan site: https://moviedromer.tumblr.com/
For more information on Gothic visit screenwriter Stephen Volk’s website, where he has a page dedicated to the film: http://www.stephenvolk.net/gothic.html
Production still from Ken Russell's 1986 film Gothic
Dimension Door
This bestiary contains “OVER 350 MONSTERS” promises the back cover of my 1978 edition of the Monster Manual, one of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons core rule books. This book, recently found at the bottom of a drawer at my mother’s house, has reawakened a forgotten legion of slumbering creatures. AD&D, perhaps the best know role-playing game (RPG), was invented by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in the mid-seventies, who grafted fantasy elements onto the wargaming table-top games they loved. At one time playing AD&D was considered suspicious, perhaps even occult or satanic. Looking back, there might be a germ of truth to these outlandish claims – there is something seance-like about how the game is collectively played. AD&D isn’t played on a board, although laboriously painted miniatures do feature (with the physical miniature only acting as a stand-in for the more-real, virtual character). The realm that the game unfolds in is a dream-scape summoned by the players and the games arbitrator and chief conjurer, the Dungeon Master. The Dungeon Master creates and then draws the players into an elaborately constructed fairy-terrain of monster-filled labyrinths, crystalline caverns, enchanted wizards’ towers and vast trackless wastes - trap-filled spaces through which the player’s characters rove in search of experience and treasure. The aesthetic of these strange worlds is usually part Edward Burne-Jones part Conan the Barbarian. The AD&D games I played in the late eighties often went on for months and, on one occasion, years at a time. To access these multi-dimensional realms, players adopt the guise of a character, whose abilities are generated by the throwing of unusual dice. These characters might be fighters, thieves, clerics or magic users, each character complete with their own individual personalities to be adopted by the players in order to experience the game. In the hardcore 1st edition that I loved, AD&D was almost totally impenetrable to outsiders, governed by dense tomes of lore, rules, charts and tables. The sheer will of the imagination required to sustain these games remains, to me, impressive. Shunned by the wider world, we AD&D players seemed to inhabit a secret society, one probably similar to the clandestine world of Prog Rock listeners. I’ve now grown to suspect that the long-banished game still exerts an influence on my own work to this day. With my films I’ve often striven to create immersive other worlds, opening portals through which the viewers can, if they so wish, temporarily disappear. There is a strong element of the fantastical about my films, which tend to avoid any kind of documentary realism, veering instead toward the depiction of imaginary places. My 2011 film The Subterraneans was the first film I made that attempted to recapture this lost realm. In making the film I went into the world looking for locations that suggested the haunts of weird creatures, peering with my camera into the spaces where, given the right conditions, these entities might be encouraged to issue forth from. Also, the niche world of experimental cinema has some parallels with the role-playing games world. Experimental film is an obscure category of cinema that, for the most part, remains unknown to most film enthusiasts but loved by a hardcore collective of devotees. Later, when looking back through some of the other AD&D rule books in my neglected collection, I was pleased to note that a few of the spells listed therein are ones I still frequently attempt to cast. These include: Alter Reality, Charm Plants, Dimension Door, Veil, Minor Creation, Prismatic Wall, and Hallucinatory Terrain.
The listing for Green Slime scanned from my copy of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manuel (2nd edition, May 1978).
Via Appia Immaginaria, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1756
“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etching Via Appia immaginaria (1756) shows an impossible architecture looming over indistinct, minute figures. In this recreation of the Appian Way, Piranesi depicts tier upon tier of improbable buildings and towers of overdecorated cyclopean statuary. Above these teetering columns perch temples and palaces – seemingly impossible to access, except in the imagination. Clearly the imagined builders of this outlandish scene must have been in the grip of hubristic madness. Already the inevitable plunge into collapse seems imminent. The doomed poetry of buildings lost to time is one of Piranesi’s main areas of interest – countless works of his revel in the disorder of collapsed capitals and broken statuary. Already, in this idealised view of imagined glory, decay steadily creeps in and the dusty ground is littered with a jumble of ruinous fragments while vegetation encroaches. The British Museum displayed a series of Piranesi’s works in their show Piranesi Drawings – Visions of Antiquity, which opened on 20/02/20 (and was the last exhibition I visited before entering lockdown). Piranesi’s Via Appia immaginaria was displayed with a large preparatory drawing of the work, allowing for close inspection of the embryonic fantasia. These works were shown alongside numerous other pieces, all focussing on architecture and ornate furnishings, including some examples from his series of depictions of seemingly inescapable imaginary prisons. According to Alethea Hayter in her 1968 study Opium and the Romantic Imagination, these works evoke the nightmarish terrors of opium addiction. Piranesi’s art teems with detail and rewards close inspection - inspection which, for me, prompted reverie. As I pondered the minute subtleties of one exhibit, Shelley’s 1817 poem Ozymandias came to mind – a poem which also evokes a culture brought low by unspecified disaster. This poem muses on the imagined sight of two vast trunkless legs of stone, remains of a formerly grandiose but now shattered statue, adrift in a desert. The image suggests the futility of all human endeavour and evokes limitless expanses of erasing, engulfing time. There is something intoxicating about these works that contemplate the end times, allowing us to consider, or perhaps be thrilled by, the spectacle of destruction from a safe distance. Leaving the Piranesi exhibition I imagined the British Museum itself tumbled to ruin, with the fallen exhibits scattered or heaped chaotically about while bats flitted through the disordered galleries, now emptied of human visitors.
My personal ruin odyssey began wholeheartedly in 2017. This took the form of a series of outings to windswept churches and time-worn castles – driving around locations both well known and obscure. These self-initiated missions found me shivering on blasted heaths whilst setting up the tripod to film a lowering sky brooding behind a ruined tower or else becoming entangled by brambles whilst attempting to film a forgotten, partially collapsed, ivy encrusted church. Although most of the material gathered on these excursions remains unused some of the footage did find its way into my 2018 film Blacklands, where it was repurposed to form part of a crumbling dream-architecture. For the curious, Blacklands can be visited here.
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias is online in full here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias
For more information on the British Museum’s Piranesi exhibition visit: https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/piranesi-drawings-visions-antiquit
Night on the Riverbank, Toby Tatum, 2019
The Lost World
My 2019 film Night on the Riverbank will screen later in November as part of the Transient Visions film festival. The 2020 edition of this New York State-based film festival will be presented online. Night on the Riverbank is unique in my oeuvre in that it employs found footage, in this case footage borrowed from a fuzzy VHS recording of a half-forgotten B&W children’s television programme. Night on the Riverbank is my attempt to journey back to the lost landscapes of childhood and is, I think, heavily indebted to one of the most magical of children’s stories, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908). Re-reading this lovely book in later years my favourite chapter remains The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. In this spellbinding chapter the characters Mole and Rat go searching along the riverbank for a missing infant otter named Portly. After setting forth in a canoe, searching along the reeds of the riverbank, the little animals find themselves in unfamiliar waters, lulled by a half-heard song that seems to issue from another world. Later, on an island in the stream, they find the missing tyke, sheltered and protected by the great god Pan, the guardian of all creatures. So as not to disturb their trembling hearts Pan later removes the memory of the sacred encounter from their minds, lest the overwhelming sense of numinous awe should disturb them afterwards, leaving instead only the faintest echo of that strange mystic music. Although there is no explicitly supernatural element in Night on the Riverbank there is, for me, something in the shifting layered images of the aqueous moon that suggests the mysterious workings of subtle enchantments. For me, the riverbank is a symbol of the distant, prelapsarian world of childhood. As a very young child I spent time playing on the riverbanks along the Thames, watching the shimmering water and hearing my own secret song of the reeds. Writing about the Night on the Riverbank for Cinesinfin the critic Borja Castillejo Calvo focused on the enchanting music conjured for the film by composer and Abi Fry which, for Calvo, “transcended attractive contemplation and reached the territory of fantasy and dream”. Fry reflected on the film in the online Q&A conducted by the 2020 Alchemy Film Festival:
“I have quite a specific process when composing for the films of Toby Tatum. My aim is to clear my mind and become a blank canvas whilst I watch the film many times in silence and allow ideas to surface. I try not to impose my own will until I have connected on a subconscious level and allowed the film’s magic to guide me. The first thing that came to me, when considering Night on the Riverbank, was the idea of stretching time and space and I began to experiment with cascading piano motifs to get this across, adding shimmering strings and floating harps to create the feeling of magic in the air.”
Borja Castillejo Calvo’s review of Night on the Riverbank, in Spanish (with translation options available), is online to read here: https://cinesinfin6.wordpress.com/2020/01/27/night-on-the-riverbank/
Transient Visions runs from October 23 to November 19, 2020 (there will be four programs in total, and each program will be available for the duration of one week). Night on the Riverbank streams as part of The Bluest Hour, a programme of films curated by Taylor Dunne. The Bluest Hour will be available to stream worldwide from 06/11/20 to 12/11/20. The programme also includes work by Sarah Lasley, Zachary Epcar, Masha Vlasova, Michael Mersereau, Marina Landia, and Jinyong Kim.
For more information about Transient Visions visit: http://www.transientvisions.org/
The numinous encounter at the heart of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908), illustrated by Paul Bransom
