Separation / The Other Side of the Underneath / Anti-Clock
Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2009 4:32 pm
One of the occasional frustrations of my job is that I'm well aware of what DVD and Blu-ray goodies the BFI has got lining up for the next few months (running well into 2010 in some cases), but I'm contractually barred from spilling the beans in public, no matter how mouthwatering those beans might be.
So I'm delighted to have been given the go-ahead to announce that I spent part of today ensconced in a telecine suite at Ascent Media in Soho, eavesdropping on the ongoing HD transfers of Jane Arden and Jack Bond's features Separation (1967), The Other Side of the Underneath (1972) and Anti-Clock (1979) - which will form the basis of three Blu-ray and DVD releases coming out later this year.
Withdrawn in the wake of Arden's death in 1982, the films have been totally unavailable for nearly three decades - never shown on television, and therefore all but impossible to come by even on the bootleg circuit: you pretty much had to be a personal friend of Bond in order to see them. The new transfers are from the original negatives out of necessity, as none of the surviving prints (and few were made in the first place) was in a usable condition. Fortunately, on the evidence of what I saw today, Anti-Clock at least is in excellent shape - a few tiny visual blemishes will be digitally removed, and shot-by-shot colour grading is being carried out under Bond's personal supervision.
As for extras, little has been formally agreed yet, but they will hopefully be copious: the BFI is fully aware of the need for maximum contextualisation of titles so obscure that virtually all British cinema histories ignore them completely . This will almost certainly include additional short films by Arden and Bond at the very least: I'll let you know more when they're confirmed. (I don't want to tempt fate by mentioning any titles just yet as surviving materials need to be checked for technical viability: for instance, one of the shorts only appears to survive on an ancient NTSC U-matic tape, and this hasn't been examined yet).
And I'm sorry about the lack of concrete information about the actual films: I haven't seen Separation at all, and I've only seen ten-minute chunks of the other two (and on hideous transfers off ropey prints), plus a reel of Anti-Clock shown in homage to Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho as each shot had to be paused for regrading. To make it even less helpful as a guide to what the film's actually like, it was also totally silent: the sound's being laid on tomorrow. Certainly, what I've seen looks wildly imaginative and quite unlike anything else being made in British cinema either at the time or since - but I'll have to reserve judgement until I've had a chance to watch them in full.
In the meantime, Arden has a surprisingly comprehensive Wikipedia entry and even a MySpace fan page - and if anyone out there is better informed about the films than I am (I know there's at least one, and I've PMed him), do please add a comment here. What with this and the Jeff Keen box, the BFI seems determined to delve deeper and deeper into hitherto unexplored British film terrain (I think I can also get away with revealing that the Land of Promise and GPO sets are merely the tip of a very large documentary iceberg), and although I'm obviously biased, I hope you'll agree they should be given every encouragement on principle.
So I'm delighted to have been given the go-ahead to announce that I spent part of today ensconced in a telecine suite at Ascent Media in Soho, eavesdropping on the ongoing HD transfers of Jane Arden and Jack Bond's features Separation (1967), The Other Side of the Underneath (1972) and Anti-Clock (1979) - which will form the basis of three Blu-ray and DVD releases coming out later this year.
Withdrawn in the wake of Arden's death in 1982, the films have been totally unavailable for nearly three decades - never shown on television, and therefore all but impossible to come by even on the bootleg circuit: you pretty much had to be a personal friend of Bond in order to see them. The new transfers are from the original negatives out of necessity, as none of the surviving prints (and few were made in the first place) was in a usable condition. Fortunately, on the evidence of what I saw today, Anti-Clock at least is in excellent shape - a few tiny visual blemishes will be digitally removed, and shot-by-shot colour grading is being carried out under Bond's personal supervision.
As for extras, little has been formally agreed yet, but they will hopefully be copious: the BFI is fully aware of the need for maximum contextualisation of titles so obscure that virtually all British cinema histories ignore them completely . This will almost certainly include additional short films by Arden and Bond at the very least: I'll let you know more when they're confirmed. (I don't want to tempt fate by mentioning any titles just yet as surviving materials need to be checked for technical viability: for instance, one of the shorts only appears to survive on an ancient NTSC U-matic tape, and this hasn't been examined yet).
And I'm sorry about the lack of concrete information about the actual films: I haven't seen Separation at all, and I've only seen ten-minute chunks of the other two (and on hideous transfers off ropey prints), plus a reel of Anti-Clock shown in homage to Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho as each shot had to be paused for regrading. To make it even less helpful as a guide to what the film's actually like, it was also totally silent: the sound's being laid on tomorrow. Certainly, what I've seen looks wildly imaginative and quite unlike anything else being made in British cinema either at the time or since - but I'll have to reserve judgement until I've had a chance to watch them in full.
In the meantime, Arden has a surprisingly comprehensive Wikipedia entry and even a MySpace fan page - and if anyone out there is better informed about the films than I am (I know there's at least one, and I've PMed him), do please add a comment here. What with this and the Jeff Keen box, the BFI seems determined to delve deeper and deeper into hitherto unexplored British film terrain (I think I can also get away with revealing that the Land of Promise and GPO sets are merely the tip of a very large documentary iceberg), and although I'm obviously biased, I hope you'll agree they should be given every encouragement on principle.