Thursday, November 5, 2009

Les Battersby and the Yorkshire Ripper.

This has to be one of the strangest pieces of cultural text i've found in a while -


Les Battersby (from Coronation Street) being interviewed by Piers Morgan (from hell) about his discovery of Jean Jordan's (victim of the Yorkshire ripper) mutilated and disemboweled corpse. A very strange dialogue between real and unreal, natural and synthetic. It makes me want to hurl the computer across the room, watching Morgan's flat, aborted lifeless excuse for a face - just mutedly absorbing the horrors drifting out of Bruce Jones's mouth - as he lethargically deems the details of this poor man's terrifying story as at best perhaps - 'gripping and fascinating'. Wow, thanks Piers. You are a true journalistic luminary.
Buried horror and cultural truth just crashing - limply and without affect - into the unfeeling, unreal contours of Piers Morgan's head.
And so at the end of it we are given a truly bizarre intertextual landscape of image - of Les Battersby discovering an icy pale, murdered body dumped and concealed on a piece of manchester waste ground - a portion of hell found concealed somewhere at the back of Granada studios. And then we are in front of the court. Staring out through the overlit, barreled tunnel vision of Piers Morgan's X factor eyes - glinting in front of the camera.
Fictions and truths colliding in psychosis.
And this all happens to be occurring the same year that David Peace begins to seep into Britain's unconscious via a smug channel four drama.

"Everybody knows - everybody knows - everybody knows -" - David Peace - Nineteen Eighty Three

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Haunted Heathrow

When i first started to film at Heathrow i had no idea of what i was getting myself into. The dangers and difficulties of traversing and recording such an altogether strange, often menacing space, never really occurred to me. I just wanted to document it.
The film was born of a feeling. A desire to tap into something that played about my daydreams and then later fueled my fiction. To pinpoint and capture an absence that seemed to me important.
Personally I had a vague idea that Heathrow might be haunted but didn't really know what i meant by that at the time, although now I'm convinced. If ever a place was haunted it's Heathrow. Ghosts and specters hang in the air like hyper fog, pressing in on you from every direction. They are in the gaps between terminals and lounges, in the miles of interconnecting corridors so seldom used by passengers. They are in the eerie bends of hidden walkways that no-one ever sees. They flit past you in the ether glow of the news screens that bathe all one's postures in a flickering blue light.
I now of course realise that the airport is not meant for people at all but merely for their movement. Stand still for long enough and you will be pounced upon. Heathrow from one angle, amounts simply to a vast gushing network of channeled directional flows and they do not invite contemplation. It is only when one lurks in the corners and observes from a point of stasis that the gaps begin to reveal themselves. When one is swimming upstream. Only then do the ghosts come out.
It is a strange thing to go to the airport without a purpose and i would encourage you to try it but be prepared to be questioned. Be prepared to be treated as a de facto killer and then probably detained indefinitely.
Be prepared to lose a sense of yourself and then hopefully form an obsession.
Through the coming weeks I'm going to share some records of the obstacles i encountered in the process of my filmmaking, both practical and mental, and hopefully you'll find it of interest.
Anyway, more to follow.


Sunday, October 11, 2009

Start

Fiction, film and thought upcoming.