The feature-length experimental film Anti-Clock starts out promising, as the opening credits are filmed off an extremely staticky monitor. There is a strange beauty in that image distortion, something I imagine wasn’t as appreciated in 1979 as it is today, with the current nostalgia for analogue video.
Much of this film by Jane Ardern and Jack Bond seems to be filmed almost as if it foresaw a future nostalgia for what was then the current day. Would this be prescient nostalgia? Is this what The Moody Blues were singing about on Days of Future Passed? Eh, probably not. It is really hard to work “Nights in White Satin” into that narrative.
There’s a lot of footage shot off of monitors, sometimes showing two monitors at once. One shot even has footage of a monitor playing footage of a monitor. And there’s a lot of signal distortion and timecode overlays. Just the low-fi look of it had me wondering if this was going to feel like a combination of Ballard, Burroughs and early Cronenberg.
The best I can tell this is about is time and memory; in particular, the subjectivity of both and the unreliability of the latter. At least, that was my main takeaway from the experience. In all honesty, I’m not entirely sure what was the intention of the filmmakers.
I don’t want to judge this film too harshly but, for me, it combined the more irritating aspects of experimental filmmaking with the tedium of a long lecture.
Some very heady ideas about time and perception are thrown around here, and I confess most of them were above my pay grade. It probably didn’t help most of these highfalutin concepts were dryly delivered in voiceover while images of seemingly little relevance accompanied them. There’s lots of looped footage, which should seem to correspond well to concepts about time. There are even moments where video is freeze-framed while a small portion of audio echoes until it diminishes to silence.
A recurring phrase I like in this is, “This is my anxiety survival broadcast.” From that statement, I started to wonder if this would be the kind of film which somebody had to make just to get it out of their head. So I feel frustrated I couldn’t grasp what that intention was. I’ll admit I eventually had trouble paying attention and was simply waiting for it to end. Maybe I’m just dense.
One thing I failed to notice was one of those directors, Jack Bond, directed the terrible Pet Shop Boys “movie” It Couldn’t Happen Here. If I had noticed that before buying this disc, I probably would have taken a pass.
I honestly didn’t notice similarities between the two films, except how both seem obsessed with imagery and concepts that weren’t clicking for me. That said, now knowing this connection, I shouldn’t have been so surprised at a scene here where dancing dwarves introduce a mind reader in a nightclub act. I also rolled my eyes when the mind reader starts talking about Akashic records, the eternal record of all thoughts. I’m sure Gwyneth Paltrow’s site sells some sort of stone to insert into one or more orifices to access those records.
I don’t think I’ll do the random observations bit this time, as I felt almost everything here was random. Instead, I’ll throw out some of the phrases and concepts I thought were intriguing. Things like: “We are mental snapshots of ourselves.” “The infinite sphere of the universe we present to ourselves is constantly changing.” And how about “our whole life has been structured by naming and defining our preferences and disinclinations”. That last one seems to be analogous to current sentiments regarding labels.
One description I read compared this work to Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, in that both are avant-garde sci-fi films supposedly set in a future which looks uncannily like the present. While I’m not much of a fan of most of Godard’s oeuvre, I am a big fan of that film. Of Arden and Bond’s film, not so much.
Dir: Jane Arden and Jack Bond
Starring Sebastian Saville, Suzan Cameron, Liz Saville
Watched on BFI UK blu-ray (region B)