Interview: William Fowler on Flipside, 60′s cinema, and Highgate vampires

Will Fowler is Curator of Artists’ Moving Image at the BFI National Archive, a trained film archivist, and co-programmes the monthly BFI cult cinema strand The Flipside. He has also produced DVDs of Primitive London, Central Bazaar and The Gold Diggers. He writes for Sight and Sound, Vertigo and BFI Screenonline. We had an informal chat about a recent screening he curated on 60′s underground cinema called ‘Counter-culture’, and talked about Flipside films, Highgate vampires and Soho striptease flicks.

Firstly, how did the Counter-culture night at the BFI come about?

It’s part of a regular strand called Essential Experiments. Flipside is once a month, and Essential Experiments is twice a month. I programme it with someone else from the BFI, Rhidian Davis who works in the educational department and Kingston University partner on it as well. We meet and programme the slot, and work out what we’re going to show. We’ve been working through the years in quite a chronological way, so we started with ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ (1919), which worked really well as an opener and that was just over a year ago. From there we’ve progressed to European surrealist films, and then beatnik cinema. We got to Maya Deren and we did a focus on Kurt Kren, an Austrian filmmaker who started making films in 50s. We were in the ‘50s for a very long time!

I’m very interested and into the 60’s period. Because the London Filmmakers Coop has really dominated the way we see the history of experimental film in this country, particularly in the post-war period. A lot of people focus on that work, and that work has a very particular ideology to it, and that’s focusing on the particularly formal elements of film. I suppose that kicks off in the late ‘60s and I particularly wanted to look at films that maybe had a relationship with that but that also came before that, and had a slightly different sensibility, and show that there’s a variety of different experimental cinemas going on.

It was good to show the Peter Gidal film ‘Room (Double Take)’, which is great. He was one of the key proponents of the Structuralist Materialist movement in the ‘70s, but to show that with the Mark Boyle film ‘Beyond Image’, which is an almost stereotypical psychedelic film with oils and bubbles and music and backwards stuff, very immediately psychedelic, hopefully opens things up a bit more. I’m not sure how often or if ever those films have been shown together, so it’s nice to look at a lot of different stuff from that time and move away from the obvious things which people show. I mean, I’m sure people have done similar showings before, but it’s nice to make links with youth culture as well, rather than always this more purist, more theoretical experimental film.

These films would have been shown at the UFO club in Tottenham Court Road. Did you find it weird presenting it at the BFI? Do you feel these films can be stand-alone films or that they need that kind of environment?

I think they can be stand alone films, but it’s good to have a bit of energy with the films you’re showing. So if you show it at a nightclub or something, then hopefully there’s something going on in the nightclub which mirrors what’s going on in the film. It does feel a bit weird, and I talked about that a little bit during my introduction. It’s that fine line really, because we can’t recreate what it was like in the 1960’s, but at the same time it can feel quite sober showing these films at the BFI sometimes.

It was and it wasn’t. The Latham one I thought worked amazingly. It was so visual and fast-paced that you could just lie back in the seat and let it wash over you. What is it you think about the psychedelic, or the drug elements that work so well on screen?

Gosh. I think they do really work together. Psychedelic experience, I think about as being a full sensual experience, so involving all the senses. Bands were playing, there were projections, as the backdrop for things to be projected onto as part of that experience, and traditionally film is described as the seventh art – it incorporates all the different art forms. You know, you can have spoken word, music, pictures, illustration – there’s a whole list of them. And so there is that kind of parallel. There’s a great Jodorowsky quote that says something like “I look for in film what North Americans look for in psychedelic drugs”. That element of film as a trip, which i definitely got from the Counter-culture night.

Yeah. That kind of other-worldliness and other visions and metaphysical states as well as being something very sensual. So yeah, I do think they work well together.

I also didn’t expect the humour element to be so prevalent. Jeanetta Cochrane and the Gidal one. Is humour something you look for in the films you show? Because on Flipside the humour element seems to be very strong.

I think I do naturally. I’m sort of drawn to that. I’m doing a project now on an artist and filmmaker called Bruce Lacey, who in a way we could have profiled in that film programme. Well, I kind of feel like there were different types of counter-culture activity going on in the ‘60s. We had the counter-culture club scene, the psychedelic scene, and we did a Pop Art programme of screenings which was interesting because it was the same period of films that we showed in the Counterculture screenings, but it had a different emphasis. There was also a more satirical wing of the Counter-culture that was influenced by The Goons. And leading towards Monty Python, with references to the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah band. Which again has links to psychedelia, but is also more playful. So Bruce Lacey is more part of that. But he’s also the same generation as Jeff Keen. People don’t take humour seriously – because it does have an immediate impact, people don’t look at it in any depth. But I do think there’s a generation – the National Service generation – who saw action in the Second World War, who had these very extreme, very visceral experiences, and there’s a lot of artists working in the ‘60s who drew that into their work, like a darkness or a bleakness. But as a sort of counterpoint to that, often a sense of humour as well.

That’s a very British thing, as well!

Yes absolutely! With Jeff Keen’s work, it’s not comedy, but there’s a sort of playful element. Peter Gidal’s not known for his humour. No disrespect to him of course..

I’m a big fan of 60’s cinema, and often surprised by the amount of criticism directed towards it. A lot of p people claim that British cinema stopped in the ‘60s. There’s a great quote by Alan Parker that goes: “Whatever the Swinging Sixties are going to be remembered for, it won’t be films. The moment you saw a Red London bus go through the shot, you knew you were in for a rotten time”!

Oh my god!

Obviously you don’t agree. But what is it about 60s British cinema that causes such a response?

I was talking to someone else about this earlier. In the 60s, you get this idea of serious film criticism developing, and the European auteur idea developing. And I don’t know if there were serious film critics and directors who wanted to turn film into a ‘serious’ art form, because they enjoyed seeing films, but their way of doing that was to look abroad, because foreign films had a more novel quality, because it was less about the everyday life that they saw around them. So art was something that happened abroad. And maybe that’s part of the British sensibility – playing yourself down. So I think there’s a lot of snobbery about British cinema, and it would be very interesting to try and look into that precise moment when that shift happened, and people started denigrating cinema in this country. A lot of cinema in the 60s has a popular culture element that appeals to the masses in some way. But that doesn’t mean that it’s in any way less interesting or less rich or made with any less integrity. And there are so many films that aren’t really very well known, which is part of the reason behind the Flipside project: to try and dig that stuff up.

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What do you look for in a Flipside film?

Well, you know we have the monthly Flipside screenings at the BFI, and then the Flipside DVD. And they have slightly different identities. So the Flipside DVD is very much looking at films from the 60s and 70s that have slipped through the cracks. British filmmaking that is interesting and overlooked. Whilst we do that in the cinema strand, we also look at foreign work and television as well, and all different periods. It’s anything that hasn’t really been taken seriously before. But I suppose we’re also saying that cinema is a fun experience but we can also take it seriously as well. That’s the remit of the Flipside cinema shows. And then we do the Q & As with people and try and tease some of those things out. But it’s quite a strange assortment of different things. Defining the exact criteria is kind of tricky, but I feel like people understand what it is.

What’s next for Flipside?

In January, we’re doing an Andy Milligan night. Andy Milligan was a gay underground film-maker, who came from what gets called the Off, Off Broadway theatre scene, so very underground cafes, quite theatrical, quite transgressive, almost violent theatre, really pushing the boundaries. So he got into making films, with the people he worked with in the theatre. He made his own costumes for the films. And I think he showed films on the same line-up as Kenneth Anger but then at some point he got into making horror films and was showing stuff on the grindhouse circuit, and not really making much money, but just doing stuff all the time, and doing everything himself, in a very primitive style. And then in the late ‘60s, he came over to London, I think almost to get away from the New York Scene and William Mishkin, his producer, who I don’t think he really liked working with, but no-one would ever give him money, so he always had to work with this guy and it drove him crazy. So he came over here to have a break, and then shot four films over here, I think.

One of the films he made was called ‘The Body Beneath’, which he shot in and around Highgate, and partly in Highgate cemetery. It’s about this vampire who’s pretending to be the local rector or reverend, and who tries to re-establish his bloodline, and has this big vampire party to celebrate. It’s funny because at the time Milligan was shooting this, there was a flap about the Highgate vampire in the press. I think he must have read about that and then shot the film, but it was happening at almost exactly the same time. So we’re showing ‘The Body Beneath’ and then this BBC news item about the Highgate vampire.

What Flipside are you proudest of?

I’m quite clear about the DVDs: Deep End, which I first saw a long time ago. It has the music by Can, the great acting, the scenes of Swinging London, it’s quite artistically shot and it’s very much a comment on early ‘70s Britain. I saw it in 1996? 1997? At this club called Little Stabs of Happiness, and I always wanted to show it again. Again, that was a case of having to sort out all the rights, over two years. It was very complicated. But that felt like a genuine rediscovery. We showed that in the cinema too, and that felt really special, and to have Jane Asher come and John Moulder-Brown. Some people know that film and are surprised that it hasn’t been screened more. And then there’s a film called ‘Moon Over the Alley’ which is included in the ‘Duffer’ DVD. It’s shot on black and white 16mm, I guess is kind of cheap looking, but all shot in and around Notting Hill and in this big house where all these different people live. There’s songs in it and the guys that wrote the songs wrote the music for ‘Hair’. It starts off as this very light-hearted drama, with a multi-racial cast, going around the house and meeting other people; everything’s quite nice and jolly. And then in the second day, it all turns to shit; it’s like an apocalypse, people get killed and there’s muggings. The two days completely contrast with each other.

And there’s another one – ‘Primitive London’, the mondo-style documentary. When I came here [to the BFI] I realised that we had the negatives for it and we even had a digibeta of it. And Vic Pratt, who also presents the Flipside with me, also wanted to see it. Then there was an opportunity to present something in the ‘Projecting the Archive’ strand.

And then when we put it on, Ian Sinclair wrote a whole page about it in The Guardian. We were hip for a moment! Loads of people came to the NFT and it was a really big deal! And then, following that, people asked us to start a regular cult strand, and we came up with the Flipside. It’s definitely one of the special ones.

One of my favourites is ‘Carousella’. There is this weird dichotomy – where its sleazy but they’re selling the striptease kind of well. Of course, burlesque now is very middle-class and trendy, but in the ‘60s, it wasn’t. It’s kind of mind-boggling. There’s this middle class mother with two kids, who seems so gentle and unlikely, and then, bang, next scene, she’s wiggling around on stage.

Have you seen ‘Strip’? Because it’s slightly more grimy, though also a documentary about strippers in Soho. You see them eating baked beans out of a tin before they get ready. In ‘Strip’, there’s sequences where people are about to go out, and you see a guy backstage setting up a film projector, and you have films being shown inbetween the strip shows. It’s kind of like the people filming it are a bit shy but they’re also showing a lot of what goes on and what it’s like. There are a whole load of films that tap into that. Have you seen ‘The Small World of Sammy Lee’? That’s a really great film, which Network put out as part of a box-set of films about London, along with ‘The London that Nobody Knows’. It’s an Anthony Newley film where he plays a spiv-type comedian who does very short, stand-up routines in between strip acts in Soho, and then he gets into debt, and he has to work out how he’s going to get the money. Then this woman who he met on holiday appears, and she ends up getting a job as a stripper. It’s this intense drama set in Soho; a lot of it shot on location. There’s a book I just bought called ‘Skin Deep in Soho’, which I think may have been written by a guy who worked on ‘Carousella’. It’s more than just about strippers in Soho, though.

The Flipside: Body Beneath + 24 Hours: Highgate Vampire is on the 26th January 2012 at the BFI Southbank, 8.45pm