The British Film Institute (Disclaimer: This Post Gets Kinda Pretentious Here and There.)

All of Oxford's crooked lanes and meandering alleyways have started to settle into a comfortable familiarity in my brain and I am finding it harder and harder to get lost in town. So I decided it was time to venture out and do some exploring. I took a bus into London with a plan to wander around parts of the city I had missed when I was there a few years ago. One thing I neglected during that last trip and which has been nagging me ever since, was my desire to visit the British Film Institute. So I indulged my self.

The BFI is in central London on the South bank of the Thames. Somehow in the intervening space between Oxford and London, the muddy, aggrandized stream that flows behind my flat...

turns into this crowded, tidal water way.


The Film Institute itself is shares space with the National Theater and some other museums in an imposing, angular complex of concrete.

I don't know how I feel about the architecture.


Inside the BFI, the first stop I made was to the gallery where there is currently a Pierre Bismuth and Michel Gondry installation called 'The All-Seeing Eye (The Hardcore Techno Version).' It is essentially a dark room with slept-upon pillows piled about the center. A projector, slowly rotating 360 degrees, projects a film of a furniture filled room on the sections of the gallery's blank wall, creating a kind of partial phantom room in the gallery.

At times, a person feels like they can walk right into it. As the projector continually repeats the circuit, the contents of the filmed room almost imperceptibly begin to disappear. Eventually when the filmed room is totally vanished, the projector's function itself transformed from chimerical to luminous, no longer filling the room with images but illuminating its emptiness. I laid on the pillows for the ten minutes or so that it took for the piece to run its course. It was magical. I know this will be the second time that Marcel Proust has been mentioned in this blog--which is pretty embarrassing-- but I wonder if Bismuth and Gondry weren't inspired by the narrator of 'Swann's Way' and his recollection of the walls and furnishings in his bedroom swirling around him in the moments between sleep and wakefulness. I might just think that because I always thought that the way Gondry discomposed the places and objects in his characters' environments according to their changing memory in 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' was very Proustian. I smell a paper! And who knows, maybe if I keep rereading 'Swann's Way' I can eventually stop feeling guilty for never finishing 'In Search of Lost Time." Here's the link, you shouldn't have to read too far. Also, I'm trying to upload the video I took of the installation but it's a big file and my internet connection is lousy here. For the nonce, here is a link to the complete version of the film from Youtube. You'll have to imagine the gallery it is projected in.

After the gallery I wanted to see a movie,which was great because since I've been living with so many people I have had too few opportunities to really indulge in some good, old-fashioned solitary anti-social behavior. Even better, they were playing 'Don't Look Now,' which is my favorite Nicholas Roeg movie and tied for #1 with Polanski's 'The Tenant' on my 'Unduly Neglected Horror Movies' list. The print was a little crap, but for a ghost story about ineluctable decay and death amid the canals of Venice it kinda worked in the movie's favor.

Both 'Don't Look Now' and 'The All-Seeing Eye' were at the BFI as a part of their "Time Machine" program, a retrospective looking at the Cinema as a "time obsessed" medium. I think both were great choice, especially for thinking about time as it relates to memory and place. Here's a link to the BFI's synopsis of the program. I salivate when I look at it.

I also stopped into their bookstore, which by the way, has just about every book on film theory that I have spent long hours pining for on Amazon, so I spent a good deal of time there laying hands on all the treasures. Too bad these books are expensive in the States to begin with, making them doubly so here. I did get some stuff and spent a little too much money, but what the hell. One book, Barthes's 'Camera Lucida' is something I need for school next term anyway. The other, 'Lacan Reframed,' claims to go back to "go back to the basics" of Lacanian thought to explain why it is essential to film theory. Surprise, surprise, it's a very slim volume. I thought I'd give him one last shot before definitively answering my long standing question: "Is it just me, or does this crap not really mean anything?" The neatest part about the bookstore was their filpbook section. They have taken a bunch of short films (or snippets thereof) and turned them into little pocket-sized treats. I bought three. How could I not? Any body who could watch these dead images sputter to life and not feel a sparkle of wonder is dead inside. The smallest filpbook I got is called "Taking off a Hat," one of Muybridge's human locomotion studies, another is from the very first animated film "Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed," and the last is the filpbook version of my all-time favorite educational film "The Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero." That's pretty self-evident right? Basically, its the biggest zoom shot in history, moving from beyond the outer limits of the galaxy to within a single proton of a carbon atom in the hand of a man having a nap on a lawn next to Lake Shore Drive. Here's a video of one of the books:



In addition to making me homesick for Chicago, the powers of ten book fortuitously reminded me of something I read in a Shimer course two years ago that I think I could use as a text in the History of Vision tutorial I'm trying to get off the ground. In Lucretius's poem "On the Nature of the Universe" not only his he among the first to suggest the atomistic view of the world we get in "Powers of Ten," but if I understand him correctly I think he also describes (perhaps for the first time) the very process by which a filpbook or movie work. In book IV he writes

"It haps an image this is seen to do;
In sooth, when perishes the former image,
And other is gendered of another pose,
That former seemeth to have changed its gestures. "

Persistence of Vision! And it only took about 2000 years from the time Lucretius figured this out until the time Muybridge could use it to reanimate images of a running horse (or a man with a hat, in the case of my new toy.)

I had conceived of my trip to London as one which would included the BFI as but one stop among many others-- then I found their Mediatheque. They have done a really superb job of digitizing a huge part of their film archives and making them avail able to the public. I went in, cozied up to a nice viewing station and spent the next four hours (and the rest of the evening) reveling in their collection. I almost panic in situations like these, where there is so much to see I almost hurts to watch anything, knowing that watching X inevitably means not watching Y. Still, I managed to gorge my eyes on quite a bit. I watched a lot of early silent entomological films. Here's one of my favorite. I also watched a lot of cool psychedelia from the 60's

and a bunch of Edwardian street scenes from the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection.
I think my favorite viewing, however, was an early Technicolor promotional piece for a British Paint manufacture called Halcyon Paint. I love how super saturated and vivid all the colors achieved from that process are and seeing all the ribbons of flowing liquid paint in Halcyon's factory was like stuffing a candy store into my eyeballs. I can't find it on Youtube,
you'll just have to come to London.