As avid readers of this blog will know I am very much a fan of Bryan Browning - south Lincolnshire's finest, and provincial architect extraordinaire. It is an architecture of power and emotion with roots in the English Baroque school and French Neo-classicism. Anyway here is my latest painting a mixed media effort. It depicts the monumental entrance to the former Grant's Iron Foundry on Wharf Rd in Stamford. Quite the thing.
Here is my latest pen and ink drawing approx 17x8cms. Shape is based on a Neolithic axe-head. Seems to be really unpopular on instagram!
Not that much to say about this pencil-crayon study of an apple, recently completed.
How can I introduce this rather wonderful little film? Where can I start? For in some ways there really isn't anything to it at all. Just a 15 min collage of images of west London shot in the early Seventies from the roof of a dull office block. It wasn't even meant for general release, but it's a little masterpiece, both social document and lyrical cinematography. Unlike the other films made by the BTF there is no agenda - no sales pitch, no desire to either educate or inform. Just 'pure' cinema.
Now for a little explanation as to its production. Melbury House, that dull office block, in Marylebone, was the home to British Transport Films. (It has since been demolished and replaced.) As part of the training given by the BTF trainee cameramen were allowed to hone their skills using the unused ends of film rolls; like, I suppose, an artist might use scraps of paper. These fragments were gathered together and edited by the head of the BTF Edgar Anstey himself, skilfully using Vaughan Williams' 'London' Symphony as the soundtrack, and the result really is something special. Sometimes poignant, sometimes comic. Voyeuristic even as it captured the lives of local residents - a couple kissing, perhaps making-up, on a urine stained balcony; a woman standing naked in her kitchen. One feels that there is an attempt to say something metaphysical in these little collaged-together dramas. I have a rule of cinema (only the one) and that is simply that (repeated) shots of the sky in a film are a signal that the drama unfolding is to be understood as having universal if not cosmological or metaphysical significance. Think 'Ran' by Kurosawa, or 'Star Wars' by George Lucas. Indeed think of two whole genres of mythic film making: Westerns and Sci-fi. This isn't, I should add, a hard-and-fast sort of rule. Anyway this film repeatedly returns to views of the London sky - sunsets and storm clouds that form a poetic stream through the work. An attempt perhaps to capture all of London life and place it within a context of a greater physical and spiritual order.
In atmosphere 'The Scene from Melbury House' is not so far removed from 'A Bigger Splash' by Jack Hassan. Both depict a slightly down at heal, shabby London. A low-rise London I have a sneaking admiration for - I say 'sneaking' because for some residents it was not a good place to be. In places it was quite dreadful. I suppose it was ever thus.
Here is the link to the BFI website.
The Scene from Melbury House
1973
I suppose you could call this an example of British Transport Films heroic approach to documentary film making. Not that it was in anyway as objective as the term 'documentary film' might imply. 'Blue Pullman', 1960, had a job to do: sell a new, fast and luxurious British Rail service that linked the cities of the industrial North and Midlands to London. Questions always arise with a film such as this: what is the balance between reality and fiction? What is real and what is staged? Are they real staff/passengers or actors? However the lack of objectiveness is no barrier, thankfully, when it comes to aesthetics, or nostalgia. It is a film I take a lot of delight in.
There is no spoken narration, the cinematography by David Watkin & Jack West and the score, by Clifton Parker (who also composed the score for that wonderous film 'Elizabethan Express'), do all the work. And an excellent job they do of it. The audience follows the establishment of this new service through from the testing of the first train to that inaugural journey of the 'Midland Pullman' service from the now closed Manchester Central to London St Pancras. A film concerned with materiality (is that a word? - if it is, like heteronormality, it is an awkward, ungainly thing) for we see nothing of the design process. From a mysterious beginning - are we about to find a dead body in the buffet car? Well, the body of an engineer busy at work - we reach a triumphant conclusion in beneath the gothic engine shed at St Pancras. The influence of 'Elizabethan Express' made only six years before is obvious. Though, I suppose, there is only a limited way you can film a train.
It is instructive to see, in all these BTF films, how the aesthetics of totalitarian cinematography got re-used in a liberal, social-democratic-leaning democracy, and there I suppose lies the almost inherent contradiction, for do you convincingly create the heroic out of the mundane life of post-War Britain? Another way, and one I think Blue Pullman attempts, is to employ wartime commonality. All classes pulling together for the good of the whole. That sort of thing. But I can't image that to be an easy thing to do, and eventually it became a narrative, attractive though it is at this distance, that could no long cut it. Society was changing, and the speed of that change was only to increase as the decade continued. That Wartime narrative along with that of progress itself came under increasing criticism and rejection. In the specific case of 'Blue Pullman' the issue, surely, was the gap between the cinematic rhetoric and the daily experience of, say, a commuter in the south-east travelling in over-crowded and dilapidated rolling-stock. The film itself fell victim to this when filming was temporarily abandoned after British Rail postponed the launch date of the new service by a good six months from January 1960 to July following problems with the new rolling stock. Sadly, the Blue Pullman service was not a success. The Midland service was withdrawn in 1966, though the rolling stock continued in use until 1973
(02.03.2025) Independent auteur, David Gladwell, was production assistant. Gladwell is best known, perhaps, for his 1973 film, 'Requiem for a Village'.
Blue Pulman
1960
The first big piece of art I have done in a long while. The House of Correction, Folkingham, Lincolnshire, by that excellent provincial Georgian architect Bryan Browning. A favourite of this blog. Here is the real thing. Perhaps a little more restrained than I would have liked, but maybe that is a reflection of how I'm feeling at present. Usual mixed-media.
Just thought I'd share with you this birthday card I recently made for a family member. My first piece of creativity for months.
