top left: David Pelham’s classic design (1972); top right: photography
by Lionel F Williams (Eye) and SOA / Photonica (Cogs) (1996).
bottom left and right: photography by Véronique Rolland (2000 & 2008).

In April this year I wrote about James Pardey’s excellent site devoted to book covers from the Penguin science fiction range. I’m often pointing to various book cover galleries on Flickr and elsewhere but James’s site goes far beyond these, with credits and annotations for every cover on display. He emailed this week to let me know that his site has been considerably expanded, from 160 covers to 250 (!), bringing the timeline closer to the present. In addition the site has improved page layouts which enable you to study the evolution of each title. All design sites should be this good.

And coincidentally, Anne S mentioned in the comments yesterday that she’s been adding some Penguin Classics covers to her Eye Candy for Bibliophiles site. Lots of other worthwhile viewing there, including some of the old Puffin covers for Alan Garner.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Penguin science fiction
• A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score
• Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal
• Penguin Surrealism
• Juice from A Clockwork Orange
• Penguin book covers
• Clockwork Orange bubblegum cards
• Alex in the Chelsea Drug Store

Taking a break from the psychedelic overload today with a return to (what else?) black and white photographs of naked men. The subjects this time are from Mobilario Humano, fanciful suggestions for furniture designs by David Blázquez which use the photographer himself as the subject, collaged into a series of pliable clones. Allen Jones produced similar work with female figures in the 1960s—and Stanley Kubrick borrowed Jones’ idea for A Clockwork Orange—but this is the first time I’ve seen male figures used this way.

Thanks to Carmine for the tip!

Autobahn by Kraftwerk; Vertigo #6360 620.

Colin Buttimer was in touch last week to let me know he’d copied my Barney Bubbles post (with my permission) to his excellent new site, Hard Format, which is devoted to the art of music design. In the intro to that piece he repeats something he’d mentioned to me earlier, namely his belief that Barney Bubbles designed the UK release of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn album in 1974. I thought this unlikely at first but the more I’ve been thinking about it the more possible it seems. So here’s a quick run through the evidence in the hope that someone out there may have more information to either confirm or deny the theory.

The 2004 version from the unreleased The Catalogue.

Firstly it should be noted that the original German sleeve was a painting by the group’s regular designer, Emil Schult, who also helped write the title track. Schult’s painting/collage seems at odds with the group’s later rigorous aesthetic and it’s surprising that the design has persisted alongside the UK design. Something which complicates the theory here is that the German painting and cover design exist in several variations, with a car dashboard visible in the early pressings and—crucially—the German autobahn symbol (similar to the UK motorway symbol on the UK release) superimposed on the painting. I have one of the later vinyl reissues with Schult’s painting on the cover and the motorway bridge printed on both sides of the inner sleeve. But someone in the UK still made the decision to make the appropriated road sign the focus of the design for its first UK outing. The previous Kraftwerk album, the wonderful Ralf & Florian, also has at least two different cover designs while their first two albums—featuring their distinctive traffic cone trademark—were repackaged as a double set by Vertigo in 1972. That design takes their stencil lettering and applies it to an oscilloscope wave. Like the Vertigo Autobahn sleeve the design is uncredited, as were a number of other Vertigo releases.

Kraftwerk on stage in 2005.

So where does Barney Bubbles fit in?

1) He was one of a number of designers working for Vertigo in the early Seventies. Marcus Keef produced many of the covers for the folky/prog side of things while Hipgnosis and Roger Dean were among the other talents given an early start by the label. There are two covers credited to BB under his Teenburger name, the first album by Cressida in 1970 and, more significantly, Gracious! by Gracious, also 1970. The stark simplicity of the latter’s giant italic exclamation mark runs counter to anything else on the label at that time.

2) The Gracious! design is printed on bubble-textured card while the white areas of the Autobahn design are embossed onto the sleeve. Texturing isn’t unique to the Gracious album, however, so this factor is circumstantial. Vertigo’s designers used a number of elaborate effects from die-cut sleeves to packaging which opened out to a much larger size, a trick BB famously used later for his Space Ritual and Armed Forces sleeves. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality album was designed by the Bloomsbury Group and that cover uses a similar embossing.

3) The typography. This is probably the clincher for me. The title design for Autobahn is a very odd variant of a Herbert Beyer Bauhaus-style typeface although ITC didn’t produce their Bauhaus face until 1975. It isn’t the earlier Beyer-derived Blippo either, several of the characters are different shapes and several have also been extended slightly. The Bauhaus reference is a clue for me simply because it fits with Barney’s knowledge of design history and also his sense of humour—Germans! The type layout on the back of the sleeve is even more telling. Typography is often like a signature and BB was very sharp with his use of type; he was also very fond of using Futura and the album credits are indeed set in Futura (another German type design incidentally). After this release Futura became the default Kraftwerk typeface until they began using computer-styled designs. You want more? It’s difficult to tell from a low-res jpeg but the word Gracious! on his earlier sleeve looks to me like it was set in the bold condensed oblique weight of Futura.

The Autobahn titles as reproduced on the UK cassette release.

ITC Bauhaus Heavy designed by Edward Benguiat and Victor Caruso (1975).

Why does this matter? For a start there’s still more of Barney Bubbles’ work to be brought to light, so this can be considered one part of an ongoing investigation. It’s an important piece of graphic design which nonetheless remains uncredited. Peter Saville has frequently mentioned this sleeve design as a formative influence. In #231 of The Wire magazine he said:

Not only did the music have a profound influence on me, the sleeve made a lasting impression—the appropriated road sign symbolising the excitement and romance of travelling through Europe. It was my introduction to semiotics, and inspired a use of visual codes that I would develop later through Factory Records.

The person who introduced Saville to Autobahn was designer Malcolm Garrett who later worked with Barney Bubbles. Both Garrett and Saville acknowledged the importance of Barney’s work in Paul Gorman’s recent book, Reasons to be Cheerful. Saville was later designing sleeves for OMD whose music owes a huge debt to Kraftwerk. It would be surprising if all these disparate threads could be traced back to a single design source.

As always, if anyone has any further information please leave a comment.

• Vertigoswirl.com | A very thorough guide to all the original Vertigo releases.

Update: added the 2004 CD version.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Old music and old technology
• A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

The HAL Project.

January flew by in a blizzard of work so posting here tended to rely more on pictures than words. As usual the things I’ve been designing will be unveiled when they’re closer to being published or released but for now here’s some new or not-so-new items worthy of note.

• The HAL Project screensaver. I’ve never had much time for gaudy screensavers, I prefer something which doesn’t get annoying when I’m otherwise engaged. For a while now I’ve been using the Mac-only Lotsawater which turns your monitor into a vertical water tank with slow motion ripples. I replaced that this week with Joe Mackenzie’s HAL Project screensaver (for Mac and Windows) which throws up random samplings of the HAL 9000 monitor animations from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sounds a bit dull until you see it in action, very crisp and detailed graphics, many of which mimic the animations of those in the film. I’ve belatedly realised how similar these fields of colour and their lines of white type are to the opening titles of A Clockwork Orange, yet another connection between the two films. Now I can sit trying to figure out some of the less obvious 3-letter codes for the spacecraft’s systems; Stanley Kubrick was so thorough you just know they all mean something.

Via the Kubrick obsessives at Coudal.

• A pair of new blogs. Designer Barney Bubbles should need little introduction here but if you require one then read this. Paul Gorman has been in touch to inform me of a new online companion to his BB book, Reasons To Be Cheerful, which already looks like a treat with displays of Bubbles creations that didn’t make the book.

Writer Russ Kick was also in touch this week with news of his books and book culture blog, Books Are People, Too. Russ is the author of several books for Disinformation and his Memory Hole website notoriously caused a headache for the Bush regime when he forced photos of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq onto the front pages of American newspapers.

• Songs of the Black Würm Gism. And speaking of books, the much delayed sequel to DM Mitchell’s landmark Lovecraft anthology, The Starry Wisdom comes shambling into the light of day at last. The Creation Oneiros website describes it thus:

The Black Würm Gism Cult – oceanic insect porn – a vortex of cosmic mayhem stalked by ravening lysergic entities – a post-human psychedelic seizure of Lovecraftian text, art and fragments. SONGS OF THE BLACK WÜRM GISM picks up where the acclaimed anthology THE STARRY WISDOM left off and goes beyond – way beyond! – what H.P. Lovecraft dared to show. Editor D.M. Mitchell presents an illustrated brainstorm of visceral deep-sea dream currents, aberrant trans-species sex visions, and frenzied ophidian entropy.

Contributors include: alan moore (cover illustration), john coulthart (introduction), grant morrison, david britton, ian miller, john beal, david conway, kenji siratori, herzan chimera, james havoc, reza negarestani, & many others

Yes, the rather pompous introduction for this volume is mine and the cover is Alan Moore’s psychedelic arachnoid rendering of the demon Asmodeus, the same picture I used to create my little hidden film on the Mindscape of Alan Moore DVD. The Starry Wisdom roused a vaporous fury among the more staid Lovecraft fans so I look forward to seeing what squeaks of outrage this new book inspires. Publication is set for September 2009 but you can order it now from Amazon and other outlets.

• Ghost Box haunts again. And if anything was going to provide a suitable soundtrack to “aberrant trans-species sex visions, and frenzied ophidian entropy” you could do worse than some of the works of the Ghost Box collective, especially the spooky and abrasive Ouroborindra by Eric Zann. Ritual and Education is a new download-only sampler of Ghost Box tracks and probably an ideal place to start if your curiosity is piqued by my recurrent raves about these releases. From An Ancient Star is the latest CD from Belbury Poly which swaps the Pelican Books graphics of earlier works for a convincing piece of crank lit. cover art which wouldn’t look out of place in the RT Gault archives.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Demon Regent Asmodeus
• The Séance at Hobs Lane
• Ghost Box
• 2001: A Space Odyssey program

Before speech synthesis became a standard feature of home computing there was this crude device for teaching children spelling, now emulated in Flash by Kevin St. Onge. Kraftwerk fans will immediately recognise the tones generated by the top row of buttons which Ralf and Florian used on the track Home Computer for the Computer World album. Speak & Spell voices turned up on many recordings throughout the Eighties and Nineties. Fun as this emulator is I’d much prefer an EMS VCS3 to play with.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Old music and old technology
• A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score
• Aerodynamik by Kraftwerk
• The genius of Kraftwerk

Clearing junk today turned up some obsolete artefacts one of which (the Kraftwerk) has been kept for purely sentimental reasons. It’s been amusing the past few years watching the vinyl disc refuse to crawl onto the scrapheap of history despite its death having been announced many times over by journalists who—as usual—should know better. Several of the CD releases I’ve designed recently have also been brought out in vinyl editions. Meanwhile the audio cassette really is on the way out: “Sales of music cassettes in the U.S. dropped from 442 million in 1990 to about 700,000 in 2006″ says Wikipedia. I certainly won’t mourn its passing; portability aside, I always hated these things. Music sounded shitty unless the tape was chrome or some other high-quality format and whatever the quality they were all subject to mangling by cheap cassette players.

What struck me looking at the Kraftwerk cassette next to the BEF one (below) was the difference in presentation. The Kraftwerk release is a good example of perfunctory jobbing-out—the type inside looks like it was applied using Letraset—and as such is quite representative of the way record companies treated cassette releases. And the small size did nothing for the artwork, of course. I remember being transfixed when I saw the vinyl sleeve of Autobahn in a shop window. This was the first time an album cover struck me as being a good design rather than merely an interesting illustration. Subsequent releases reverted to a variation on the original German sleeve but the band seem recently to have accepted the traffic sign design as the ideal one.

Music for Stowaways (1981) was the first release by BEF (British Electric Foundation), aka Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware, post-Human League and pre-Heaven 17. Marsh & Ware were keen on the audio cassette as a future listening medium, especially in portable cassette players; “stowaway” was apparently a name (which I never heard anyone use) for what Sony called the Walkman. As a result they intended this to be a cassette-only release although it did appear as a vinyl version entitled Music for Listening To.

In a rare reversal of the usual state of affairs, the packaging for the cassette was a considerably better than the vinyl edition. This is still one of the best cassette packages I’ve seen, hence the reason for keeping it. (Click on the images above for larger versions.) The design is credited to BEF with Bob Last.

Printing on the plastic was a more durable solution than paper labels.

This short instrumental album, pitched musically between the Human League’s avant garde electro-pop and Heaven 17’s white funk (Groove Thang was (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang minus vocals), remains a great collection of analogue electronica and, together with Heaven 17’s Temptation, I reckon it’s the best thing Marsh & Ware did. Anyone interested in the more intelligent music of this period should track down the CD which might lack the smart design but which does contain two extra tracks.

For more on the early Human League and Marsh & Ware’s projects, there’s the excellent Blind Youth site.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score
• Aerodynamik by Kraftwerk
• The genius of Kraftwerk

CBS 73059; construction by Karenlee Grant, photo by David Vine (1972).

A1 Timesteps (13:50)
A2 March From A Clockwork Orange (7:00)
B1 Title Music From A Clockwork Orange (2:21)
B2 La Gazza Ladra (5:50)
B3 Theme From A Clockwork Orange (1:44)
B4 Ninth Symphony: Second Movement (4:52)
B5 William Tell Overture (1:17)
B6 Country Lane (4:43)

Viddy well the stuff of obsessions, O my brothers: Kubrick, cover design and electronic music in one convenient 12-inch package. Those of us in Britain who were too young to see A Clockwork Orange during its initial run had to wait a long time for its re-release after Stanley K withdrew the film from circulation. Until bootleg VHS copies started to turn up in the Eighties I knew the film mostly from the MAD Magazine parody and the soundtrack album which was ubiquitous in secondhand record shops. Having become familiar with the score, an extra layer of frustration was added when it became apparent that two soundtrack albums had appeared in the Seventies, the “official” one, which was a mix of the orchestral and electronic music used in the film, and another which contained all the music Walter (later Wendy) Carlos recorded.

The Wendy Carlos music was the principal attraction for this electronic music obsessive and I fretted for a long while trying to find a copy of her Complete Original Score album which was paraded in all its elusive glory on old CBS vinyl inner sleeves. Half the tracks are present on the official release but the omissions are crucial: Timesteps, the incredible composition which accompanies Alex’s first deprogramming session was edited down from thirteen to five minutes, there was Carlos’s Moog version of Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra (an orchestral version is used in the film) and also an original piece, Country Lane, intended to accompany Alex’s police brutality session at the hands of his former droogs. This score was one of the first projects to successfully incorporate a vocoder into electronic compositions; Carlos’s regular collaborator Rachel Elkind provided the vocalisations. Finally securing a copy was no disappointment, in fact I was overwhelmed. This is still my favourite Wendy Carlos album and one of my top five favourite analogue synth albums. The transcription of La Gazza Ladra is nothing short of miraculous, thundering away with the power of a full orchestra yet created by laboriously recording one note at a time. (Wendy Carlos’s very thorough website goes into detail about the recording process.)

The original Human League, circa 1979.

I wasn’t the only person to take note of this, the album had already made a big impact on Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh in Sheffield, whose early electronic music as The Future, and later The Human League, owed much to the early Carlos Moog albums. Albums such as this were important to the electronic groups that came to prominence later in the decade for the simple reason that there was little music of this quality around. Cross the Wendy Carlos ACO with Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk and The Human League is the result.

The Future were keen to create cut-up lyrics à la David Bowie, who’d been swiping William Burroughs’s writing techniques several years earlier. Rather than chop up notebooks as Bowie was doing, the Marsh and Ware approach was effected using a (no doubt rudimentary) computer system which they named CARLOS: Cyclic And Random Lyric Organisation System. Some specific connections to A Clockwork Orange came following their 1980 split from The Human League when their post-League band, Heaven 17, took its name from Burgess’s novel (the group is also mentioned in the film’s record store scene). A brief post-League incarnation as the British Electric Foundation had them include on their releases a 30-second BEF ident, composed by Malcolm Veal “in the style of Bach and Purcell”. Wendy Carlos’s first synth album was Switched-On Bach, of course, and the title music to A Clockwork Orange is based on Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary.

David Pelham’s classic Penguin cover for the 1972 paperback edition. Kubrick’s film has the droogs wearing white but this cover honours the description of their coloured outfits. The film has come to dominate later representations of Alex and company and the current Penguin edition continues Kubrick’s white-on-white minimalism.

The original 1972 poster and a 1973 paperback edition of Alexander Walker’s Kubrick study.

It’s always gratifying when an album you like a great deal has good sleeve art and the illustration for the Carlos ACO I still rate as one of the most successful designs based on Burgess’s novel, with its focus on the themes rather than Alex’s character. Kubrick’s film and the official soundtrack is still promoted with variations on the original poster art by illustrator Philip Castle (above). I’ve yet to discover who designed the fat Seventies-styled title lettering.

The Carlos cover was the work of Karenlee Grant, a CBS designer and cover artist. Of the other designs of hers that I’ve been able to trace this is easily the best, alluding in its combination of collage and perspex case to the work of American Surrealist Joseph Cornell.

Close scrutiny reveals a wealth of clever detail, not only the obvious juxtaposition of clock parts and an orange slice, but elements such as the eye caught in a vice and the medical drips labelled “yes” and “no” which refer to Alex’s treatment.

This detail below crams a huge amount of reference into a small space, from Ludwig Van’s “thunderbolted litso” in the background, snared by a Helvetica numeral, to the Freudian motifs in the foreground.

Another of Ms Grant’s designs from this period was a self-titled release by the Jeff Beck group, not an especially notable design apart from the curious detail of the orange among the photos. No oranges are mentioned in the songs, as far as I’m aware. Given that the album was released five months after Kubrick’s film, was this a strained attempt to cash-in on the huge publicity the film generated?

Jeff Beck Group by the Jeff Beck Group (1972).

Glenn Gould: Consort of Musicke by William Byrd & Orlando Gibbons (1971); The Hollies’ Greatest Hits (1973).

A couple more Karenlee Grant covers obliquely related to the ACO sleeve, with another constructed object as the focus of one and a collage work for the other. Glenn Gould offered the highest praise to Wendy Carlos’s earlier Bach recordings so I imagine he would have appreciated ACO as well. What Karenlee Grant did after the mid-Seventies is unknown, I can’t find much work mentioned after this period so I’m guessing she left the music business.

Wendy Carlos’s album was reissued on CD in 2000 on the ESD label, a superb edition which added a couple of minor outtakes. My only gripe was that Karenlee Grant’s cover art wasn’t reused for the cover (it’s reproduced in the booklet) but I have to accept it wouldn’t have been the same reduced to CD size; some album sleeves were intended to be seen in their 12-inch glory.

For anyone interested in Wendy Carlos’s oevre, this album is the place to start. For anyone interested in the history of electronic music, this is an essential purchase.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• White Noise: Electric Storms, Radiophonics and the Delian Mode
• Juice from A Clockwork Orange
• Penguin book covers
• Clockwork Orange bubblegum cards
• Alex in the Chelsea Drug Store

Dr. Strangelove titles (1964).

There’s less of his work around than there should be, unfortunately. Saul Bass is justly celebrated for his title sequences and poster designs yet Pablo Ferro—whose titles were equally innovative and memorable—is rarely heard of even though you’ll have seen a lot of his work.

Bullitt titles (1968).

Ferro’s advertising films brought him to the attention of Stanley Kubrick for whom he created titles and trailers for Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange (1971). The hand-drawn quality of the Strangelove titles was revisited for Stop Making Sense (1984) and Men In Black (1997), while the frenetic pace of the Clockwork trailer still seems advanced over thirty years later. This collection lacks his titles for the original Thomas Crown Affair (1968) but you can see a mix of Ferro’s split-screen work (which includes parts of the titles) here.

By Pablo Ferro:
• Dr. Strangelove trailer
• Dr. Strangelove titles
• Bullitt titles
• A Clockwork Orange trailer
• Stop Making Sense titles
• To Die For titles
• LA Confidential titles

• This Is Pablo Ferro

About Pablo Ferro:
• Pablo Ferro documentary clips: I | II

• Quick Cuts, Coarse Letters, Multiple Screens—an article by Steven Heller
• Free Ferro-derived fonts! Pablo Skinny | Major Kong

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Juice from A Clockwork Orange
• Clockwork Orange bubblegum cards
• Alex in the Chelsea Drug Store

Impressions de la Haute Mongolie – Hommage á Raymond Roussel (1974-75).

When I wrote a short reminiscence about Impressions de la Haute Mongolie last March I really didn’t expect I’d be watching it again just over a year later having waited thirty years for the opportunity. But now we can all see José Montes-Baquer’s collaboration with Salvador Dalí, thanks to the indispensable Ubuweb. The copy there doesn’t have English subtitles, unfortunately, but the visuals are still beguiling and not too difficult to follow if you can understand some French and Spanish. It was a curious experience seeing this again, some parts I remembered very well, others I’d completely forgotten about. Most surprising was the soundtrack of electronic music, much of it taken from recordings by Wendy Carlos, including a part of her ambient Sonic Seasonings suite and portions of her complete score for A Clockwork Orange. There’s more about this deeply strange film in Tate Etc.

And speaking of surreal landscapes, it’s worth mentioning that I’ve spent the past few weeks working on a new piece of Lovecraft-themed artwork for an exhibition at Maison d’Ailleurs, the Museum of science fiction, utopia and extraordinary journeys in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. The exhibition of newly-commissioned work based on themes from HP Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book will be launched in October 2007. More details about the event, and my contribution, closer to that date. In the meantime, the European edition of TIME magazine has a short feature about the gallery and its ethos.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dalí and Film
• Ballard on Dalí
• Fantastic art from Pan Books
• Penguin Surrealism
• The Surrealist Revolution
• The persistence of DNA
• Salvador Dalí’s apocalyptic happening
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch
• Dalí Atomicus
• Las Pozas and Edward James
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie

Lindsay Anderson’s masterpiece, If…., is finally given a DVD release in the UK in June. Anderson’s film—about the dramatic resistance to authority of three boys at an unnamed British school—was made in 1968 but I didn’t get to see it until (as I recall) 1977. I was 15 at the time and feeling increasingly desperate and hidebound by school-life so this film was explosive in its psychological impact as well as its story (that grenade on the poster was very apt). Given my age and the year, I’m supposed to have cult yearnings toward the wretched Star Wars but it was If…. that made the lasting impression.

Poster for the 2002 re-release.

If…. was important for a number of reasons, not all of them obvious during that first viewing. I didn’t go to an all-boys public school (note for Americans: “public school” in Britain actually means an expensive, private establishment) but my grammar school had been an all-boys place a few years before I arrived. Some teachers wore gowns at assembly and many of the older teachers there were of a rigid, brutalist mindset exactly like the ones in Anderson’s film. Bullying was endemic, uniform rules were enforced to a degree that would make an army colonel proud and you stood out from the crowd at your peril; I had friends there but I hated every minute. So here comes young Malcolm McDowell on the television screen, effortlessly charismatic and insouciant in his first film role, portraying the ultimate Luciferan rebel, one who (as Anderson writes in the screenplay preface below) says “No” in the face of overwhelming odds. Reader, I identified so very much…. The famous ending (borrowed from Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite) where Mick and the other “Crusaders” fire guns and throw grenades at the rest of the school was headily wish-fulfilling. (And given recent events, you’ll also see below that Anderson and screenwriter David Sherwin regarded that ending as metaphorical, not literal.)

That was the immediate reaction. Later I came to recognise the quality of the film’s production: Miroslav Ondricek’s photography, the great cast and music, the careful pacing and sequential structure (the film is in eight parts, all numbered and titled), and the occasional moments of unexplained strangeness. Then there’s the line that can be traced from If…. to that other film of youthful rebellion, A Clockwork Orange, since Stanley Kubrick said it was McDowell’s performance in If…. that gave him the role in the later film. I’ve indicated earlier how Kubrick slyly acknowledged this during the scene in A Clockwork Orange when Alex goes to buy a record and we can briefly glimpse the sleeve of the Missa Luba album by Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin. The ‘Sanctus’ track from that album is heard at several key moments throughout If….

Finally, I have to note that If…. included this moment, listed as Shot 541 in the published screenplay:

*Shot 541. (Black and white stock, sepia tint.) Dissolve to the Junior Dormitory. It is dark. Boys are asleep in their beds. Camera pans slowly along the line – MARKLAND, MACKIN, ending on a high angle close-up of a bed in which BOBBY PHILLIPS is lying, WALLACE’S arm around him, very peaceful.

Two boys in bed together, and no one bats an eyelid. If…. was not only the first film to show the frequently homosexual character of all-boys schools but it did so in a completely matter-of-fact manner; there were even “bad” gay characters (the whips) as well as “good” ones. Shot 541 arrived for me at a time when I was becoming increasingly aware of my own proclivities. I would have caught on sooner but at our dreadful school being gay was the worst thing you could possibly be, so any thoughts along those lines were deeply repressed. In the Seventies the only gay people on television were invariably outrageously camp (and middle-aged) comedians that I wasn’t ever going to identify with. Shot 541 was a small message from the future that delivered a shock of recognition although I didn’t articulate it as such, it only made me “feel funny inside”. I thought about that shot for a very long time afterwards but somehow managed to avoid wondering what it meant.

If…., shot 541.

Lindsay Anderson was gay, which is partly why the film is so even-handed and ahead of its time. At the end of the film we see that Mick and his new unnamed girlfriend have teamed up to fight authority and so too have Wallace and Bobby. Malcolm McDowell says that Anderson never really came to terms with his sexuality but this isn’t so surprising when gay sex had only been partially decriminalised the year before they made the film. For men of Anderson’s generation being honest to yourself or to others wasn’t always an option but in his art at least he managed to be true to his feelings.

So…now one has to ask when we get the sequel, O Lucky Man!, on DVD?

See also:
• Mark Sinker’s BFI Film Classics book
• A detailed fan site
• The man who gave me a slap in the face: “Ten years after Lindsay Anderson’s death, Malcolm McDowell explains why he can’t let go of the director who changed his life.”
• ‘Lindsay could be cruel. He was like an avuncular martinet’: “Many of the small players on Lindsay Anderson’s If…. became big shots in the movie industry. As the 1968 classic is reissued, Daniel Rosenthal talks to them about the director who became their mentor.”
• Anarchy in the UK: “Lindsay Anderson’s If…. encapsulated the radical spirit of 1968. But it was only the start of a trilogy that anatomised a faltering nation.”

Notes for a Preface by Lindsay Anderson

Although both David Sherwin and I went to (different) English Public Schools, If…. is not to be taken as an autobiographical film, at least not in a narrow or a literal sense. Of course, there are autobiographical elements in the script. For my part, I well remember Fryer, the tall, distinguished College prefect of Cheltondale in winter term 1936, standing at the door before house prayers and shouting at Hughes Hallett beside me: ‘Hallett damn you, stop talking!’ And the Reverend SoandSo certainly had those nasty habits of smacking you suddenly on the back of the head, and twisting your nipples, if you were unfortunate enough to land in his Maths set.

But such facile tags as ‘the Private Hell of the Public Schools’ (Sunday Graphic) or ‘Hatchet job on the Public School system’ (Sight & Sound), are misleading. Essentially the Public School milieu of the film provides material for a metaphor. Even the coincidence of its making and release with the worldwide phenomenon of student revolt was fortuitous. The basic tensions, between hierarchy and anarchy, independence and tradition, liberty and law, are always with us. That is why we scrupulously avoided contemporary references (on a journalistic level) which would date the picture; and why it is completely unimportant whether its slang, its manners, or its details of organisation are true to the schools of this year or that. And this is why the film has been understood recognised by so many people, of so many ages, and so many countries.

*

We specially saw Zéro de Conduite again, before writing started, to give us courage. And we constantly thought of Brecht, and his definition of the ‘epic’ style. David referred to Kleist from time to time. John Ford (’old father, old artificer’) and Humphrey Jennings (romantic-ironic conservative) were in the bloodstream.

I have been asked very often about the use of colour in the film or rather the use of monochrome. When Shelagh Delaney and I were working on the script of The White Bus, which was also a poetic film, moving freely between naturalism and fantasy, I remember suggesting that it would be nice to have shots here and there, or short sequences, in colour (it was otherwise a black and white film). The idea also appealed to Miroslav Ondricek, and we did it. Almost no one has seen The White Bus, but I like the film very much, and I think the idea was successful.

It was this precedent that gave me the assurance when Mirek said that with our budget (for lamps) and our schedule he could not guarantee consistency of colour for the chapel scenes in If…. to say, ‘Well, let’s shoot them in black and white.’ In other words it was not (of course) just a matter of saving time and/or money. The problem of the script seemed to be to arrive at a poetic conclusion, from a naturalistic start. (Like any fairy-story or folk-tale). We felt that variation in the visual surface of the film would help create the necessary atmosphere of poetic license, while preserving a ’straight’, quite classic shooting style, without tricks or finger-pointing.

I also think that, in a film dedicated to ‘understanding’, the jog to consciousness provided by such colour change may well work a kind of healthy Verfremdungseffect, an incitement to thought, which was part of our aim.

And finally: Why not? Doesn’t colour become more expressive, more remarked if drawn attention to in this way? The important thing to realise is that there is no symbolism involved in the choice of sequences filmed in black and white, nothing expressionist or schematic. Only such factors as intuition, pattern and convenience.

*

This script, as printed here, represents the definitive version of If…. Unfortunately there is no guarantee that readers will have seen or will be able to see exactly the film we made. It depends where you live. Various versions, differing in various ways from the original, are now circulating through the world. The cuts and modifications demanded by national censorships would indeed provide an interesting footnote to a social history of 1969. In Britain the Board of Film Censors broke precedent by permitting the glimpse of Mrs. Kemp’s pubic hair as she wanders naked down the dormitory corridor; but as compensation they demanded the substitution at the start of the shower scene, of an alternative take in which the discreet use of towels prevented an equivalently frank look at the boys. Needless to say the film was forbidden to anyone under the age of sixteen.

The American Board of Censors also gave the film an ‘X’ certificate, but passed it unmutilated. The distributors, however, were not prepared to accept the X-rating outside New York, and cut the picture (again Mrs. Kemp and the showers) for an ‘A’ rating. Having read about this by chance in Variety, we insisted that alternative takes (the same shower scene and a shot of Mrs. Kemp from the rear) be substituted.

Plainly, in this third quarter of the twentieth century since Christ, the naked figure is still the object of deepest alarm. Plainly, also, social reaction, puritanism and philistinism are closely linked. Australia cut the film even for its premiere performance at the Sydney festival and Italy refused to allow it to close the festival at Taormina. (The Italian ban was later rescinded as a result of vigorous protests by the Press.)

Eire was alarmed over various sexual references in the scene in Johnny’s study; and South African citizens are not allowed to watch Wallace licking his pinup, or to hear Mick dreaming of walking naked into the sea with her, making love once, and then dying.

The only instance of purely political censorship so far reported (apart from Portugal, where the film cannot be shown at all) seems to be from the Colonels’ Athens, where, as far as we can make out, the film has been showing with its final sequence completely excised.

Many people contribute to the making of a film. Many of them get mentioned on no list of credits. For If…. I would like to record my thanks to Seth Holt who first introduced me to David Sherwin, John Howlett and Crusaders; to our patrons, Albert Finney of Memorial and Charles Bluhdorn of Paramount; to Marvin Birdt who stuck his neck out and recommended the script; to my friend Daphne Hunter who suggested the title; people like Peter King and Gerry Lewis, and Mort Hoch who committed themselves to the picture and helped us to get it on the screen; and, of course, David Ashcroft, Headmaster of Cheltenham College, whose liberal understanding and generous help in the creation of a work of art give the lie to facile criticisms of the system of education he believes in. Floruit, Floret, Floreat!

I remember also, most gratefully, Pat Moore, for his efficient and effective explosions; Peter Brayham for his fight choreography; Sergeant Instructor Rushforth for his beautiful performance on the bar, and Michael White and Malcolm Miles who helped us out so well on their motor-bikes on the Cheltenham-Tewkesbury road.

*

Essentially the heroes of If…. are, without knowing it, old-fashioned boys. They are not anti-heroes, or drop-outs, or Marxist-Leninists or Maoists or readers of Marcuse. Their revolt is inevitable, not because of what they think, but because of what they are. Mick plays a little at being an intellectual (’Violence and revolution are the only pure acts’, etc.), but when he acts it is instinctively, because of his outraged dignity, his frustrated passion, his vital energy, his sense of fair play if you like. If his story can be said to be ‘about’ anything, it is about freedom.

In this sense Mick and Johnny and Wallace, and Bobby Phillips and the Girl are traditionalists. It is they, not their conformist elders nor their conformist contemporaries who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spoke (’We must be free or die’). ‘England Awake,’ Johnny cries in the gym. And Mick: ‘We are not cotton-spinners all: Some love England and her honour yet! ‘ and Wallace, as he lunges, ‘Death to tyrants! ‘ They are very, I suppose fatally, romantic. Theirs is still: ‘The homely beauty of the good old cause.’

Far indeed from filling me with dread, I find the last sequence of the film exhilarating, funny (its violence is so plainly metaphorical), a bit shocking, magnificent (when the Headmaster is shot between the eyes), and finally sad. It doesn’t look to me as though Mick can win. The world rallies as it always will, and brings its overwhelming firepower to bear on the man who says ‘No.’

Charge once more then, and be dumb;
Let the victors when they come,
When the Forts of Folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall!

LINDSAY ANDERSON
November 1969

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Juice from A Clockwork Orange
• Alex in the Chelsea Drug Store

Philip Castle’s poster design. Castle also created the artwork for Full Metal Jacket.

Searching through old magazines whilst researching the epic Barney Bubbles post turned up this, a short reaction by Anthony Burgess to the success of Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange. Burgess became increasingly ambivalent about the attention brought about by Kubrick’s adaptation, not least because of the way it dominated the rest of his career; some of that ambivalence is already in evidence here.

Juice from A Clockwork Orange
by Anthony Burgess

Rolling Stone, June 8th, 1972

WHEN IT WAS first proposed about eight years ago, that a film be made of A Clockwork Orange, it was the Rolling Stones who were intended to appear in it, with Mick Jagger playing the role that Malcolm McDowell eventually filled. Indeed, it was somebody with the physical appearance and mercurial temperament of Jagger that I had in mind when writing the book, although pop groups as we know them had not yet come on the scene. The book was written in 1961, when England was full of skiffle. If I’d thought of giving Alex, the hero, a surname at all (Kubrick gives him two, one of them mine), Jagger would have been as good a name as any: it means “hunter,” a person who goes on jags, a person who doesn’t keep in line, a person who inflicts jagged rips on the face of society. I did use the name eventually, but it was in a very different novel—Tremor of Intent—and meant solely a hunter, and a rather holy one.

I’ve no doubt that a lot of people will want to read the story because they’ve seen the movie—far more than the other way around—and I can say at once that the story and the movie are very like each other. Indeed, I can think of only one other film which keeps as painfully close to the book it’s based on—Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. The plot of the film is that of the book, and so is the language, although naturally there’s both more language and more plot in the book than in the film. The language used by Alex, my delinquent hero, is called Nadsat—the Russian suffix used in making words like fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—and a lot of the terms he employs are derived from Russian. As these words are filtered through an English-speaking mind, they take on meanings and associations unknown to Russians. Thus, Alex uses the word horrorshow to designate anything good—the Russian root for good is horosh—and “fine, splendid, all right then” is the neuter form we ought really to spell as chorosho (the ch is guttural, as in Bach). But good to Alex is tied up with performing horrors, and when he is made what the State calls good it is through the witnessing of violent films—genuine horror shows. The Russian golova—meaning head—is domesticated into gulliver, which reminds the reader he is taking in a piece of social satire, like Gulliver’s Travels. The fact that Russian doesn’t distinguish between foot and leg (noga for both) and arm and hand (ruka) serves—by suggesting a mechanical doll—to emphasise the clockwork-view of life that Alex has: first he is self-geared to be bad, next he is state-geared to be good.

The title of the book comes from an old London expression, which I first heard from a very old Cockney in 1945: “He’s as queer as a clockwork orange” (queer meaning mad, not faggish). I liked the phrase because of its yoking of tradition and surrealism, and I determined some day to use it. It has rather specialised meanings for me. I worked in Malaya, where orang means a human being, and this connotation is attached to the word, as well as more obvious anagrams, like organ and organise (an orange is, a man is, but the State wants the living organ to be turned into a mechanical emanation of itself). Alex uses some Cockney expressions, also Lancashire ones (like snuff it, meaning to die), as well as Elizabethan locutions but his language is essentially Slav-based. It was essential for me to invent a slang of the future, and it seemed best to come from combining the two major political languages of the world—irony here, since Alex is very far from being a political animal. The American paperback edition of A Clockwork Orange has a glossary of Nadsat terms, but this was no idea of mine. As the novel is about brainwashing, so it is also a little device of brainwashing in itself or at least a carefully programmed series of lessons on the Russian language. You learn the words without noticing, and a glossary is unnecessary. More—because it’s there, you tend to use it, and this gets in the way of the programming.

As the novel was written over ten years ago (and planned nearly 30 years ago), and the age of violence and scientific conditioning it depicts is already here, some people have been tempted to see it as a work of prophecy. But the work merely describes certain tendencies I observed in Anglo-American society in 1961 (and even earlier). True, there was not much drug-taking then, and my novel presents a milk-bar where you can freely ingest hallucinogens and stimulants, but I had only, just come back from living in the Far East, where I smoked opium regularly (and without apparent ill effects), and drug-taking was so much part of my scene that it automatically went into the book. Alex is very unmodern in rejecting “synthemesc”: his aim is to strengthen the will to violence, not enervate it. I think he is ahead of his time in preferring Beethoven to “teeny pop veshches,” but Kubrick’s film shows a way (especially in the record-store scene) to bridging the gap between rock music and “the glorious Ninth”—it is a clockwork way, the way of the Moog synthesizer.

* * *

Apart from being gratified that my book has been filmed by one of the best living English-speaking producer-directors, instead of by some pornhound or pighead or other camera-carrying cretin, I cannot say that my life has been changed in any way by Stanley Kubrick’s success. I seem to have less rather than more money, but I have always seemed to have less. I get odd letters from cranks, accusing me of sin against the Holy Ghost; invariably, I should think, masturbators, who, having seen the film, have discovered the book, used it as a domestic instrument of auto-erotic release, and then fastened their post-coital guilt onto me. Generally I am filled with a vague displeasure that the gap between a literary impact and a cinematic one should be so great, not only a temporal gap (book published 1962, film released ten years after) but an aesthetic one. Man’s greatest achievement is language, and the greatest linguistic achievement is to be found in the dramatic poems or other fictional work in which language is a live, creative, infinitely suggestive force. But such works are invariably ignored by all but a few. Spell a thing to the eye, that most crass and obvious of organs, and behold—a revelation.

I fear, like any writer in my position, that the film may supersede the novel. This is not fair since the film is only a brilliant transference of an essentially literary experience to the screen. Writers like Mailer and Gore Vidal—who have seen novels of theirs turned into abominable pieces of film craft—are not in this position. But I can console myself by saying that A Clockwork Orange is not my favourite book, and that the works of mine that I like best are so essentially literary that no film could be made out of them.

As Kubrick’s next film is to be about Napoleon, I find myself now writing a novel about Napoleon. God knows why I am doing this; there is no guarantee that he will use it, or even that the book will be published. Just the fascination of what’s difficult, or an expression of masochism that lies in all authors, or a certain pride in attacking the impossible. My Napoleon novel will be very brief, and to write a brief novel on Napoleon is far more difficult than to write War and Peace. But you can take this present labour as a product of the Orange film, and by God it is a labour.

Otherwise, my life is unchanged. What really enrages me is two minor dimensions—it is people referring to both film and book as THE Clockwork Orange. Can’t the bastards read? No, they can’t, and that’s what all the trouble is about.

* * *

All works of art are dangerous. My little son tried to fly after seeing Disney’s Peter Pan. I grabbed his legs just as he was about to take off from a fourth story window. A man in New York State sacrificed 67 infants to the God of Jacob; he just loved the Old Testament. A boy in Oklahoma stabbed his mother’s second husband after seeing Hamlet. A man in Kansas City copulated with his wife after reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover. After seeing A Clockwork Orange, a lot of boys will take up rape and pillage and even murder—The point is, I suppose, that human beings are good and innocent before they come into contact with works of art. Therefore all art should he banned. Hitler would never have dreamed of world conquest if he hadn’t read Nietzsche in the Reader’s Digest. The excesses of Robespierre stemmed from reading Rousseau. Even music is dangerous. The works of Delius have led more than one adolescent to suicide. Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde used to promote crafty masturbation in the opera house. And look what Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony does to Alex in A Clockwork Orange. If I were President of the United States, I should at once enact a total prohibition of films, plays, books and music. My book intended to be a delicious dream, not a nightmare of terror, beauty and concupiscence. Burn films—they make marvellous bonfires. Burn books. Burn this issue of ROLLING STONE.

Take the story as a kind of moral parable, and you won’t go far wrong. Alex is a very nasty, young man, and he deserves to he punished, but to rid him of the capacity of choosing between good and evil is the sin against the Holy Ghost, for which—so we’re told—there’s no forgiveness. And although he’s nasty, he’s also very human. In other words, he’s ourselves, but a bit more so. He has the three main human attributes—love of aggression, love of language, love of beauty. But he’s young and has not yet learned the true importance of the free will he so violently delights in. In a sense he’s in Eden, and only when he falls (as he does: from a window) does he become capable of being a full human being. In the American edition of the book—the one you have here—we leave Alex dreaming up new acts of violence. We ought to feel pleased about this, since he’s now exhibiting a renewal of the capacity for free choice which the State took away from him. The fact that he’s not yet chosen to be good is neither here not there. But in the final chapter of the British edition, Alex is already growing up. He has a new gang, but he’s tired of leading it; what he really wants is to have a son of his own—the libido is being tamed and turned social—and the first thing he now has to do is to find a mate, which means sexual love, not just the old in-out in-out. Here, for a bonus, is how that very British ending ends:

That’s what it’s going to be then, brothers, as I come to the like end of this tale. You have been everywhere with your little droog Alex, suffering with him, and you have viddied some of the most grahzny bratchnies old Bog ever made, all on to your old droog Alex. And all it was was that I was young. But now as I end this story, brothers, I am not young, not no longer, oh no. Alex like groweth up, oh yes.

But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is like all sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there and your old droog Alex all on his oddy knocky seeking like a mate. And all that cal. A terrible grahzny vonny world really, O my brothers. And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip-music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex what was. Amen. And all that cal.

America prefers the other, more violent, ending. Who am I to say America is wrong? It’s all a matter of choice.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Further back and faster
• Penguin book covers
• Clockwork Orange bubblegum cards
• Alex in the Chelsea Drug Store

Subterranean Cinema has the El Topo screenplay online, taken from the Douglas Book edition from 1971 (above is the cover of my John Calder UK reprint of the same). As well as a screenplay with annotations by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the second half of the book featured a lengthy, fascinating and at times bizarre and hilarious interview with the director. The site also includes a 1973 Penthouse interview with Jodorowsky, the soundtrack album, and elsewhere on the site there are further gems such as the Mad magazine parody of A Clockwork Orange, something I’d not seen for years.

(Thanks Jay!)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Clockwork Orange bubblegum cards
• Alex in the Chelsea Drug Store

Nice collection of old covers for Penguin Books on Joe Kral’s Flickr pages. Looking over these, many of which are very familiar even though I’ve never owned them, makes me aware of how many hours of my life must have been spent in secondhand bookshops. The David Pelham cover for A Clockwork Orange has always been a favourite Penguin design. Pelham did a number of great covers for Penguin’s SF titles in the 1970s but the Burgess volume proved the most durable, unusually for a cover design surviving many reprintings. Via Boing Boing.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

ONE OF THE MORE notable things about the obituaries following Stanley Kubrick’s death in March this year was the lack of consensus with regard to his achievements. All were agreed that the man had made great films, but which films those might be varied widely, the choices spanning his entire career: Dr Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Paths of Glory, even The Killing was mentioned. A lack of accord would seem inevitable given such a varied career. Critic David Thomson has always chosen The Shining, citing its fairy tale qualities and a perceived autobiographical subtext about artistic crisis (”Why does Jack Nicholson look and dress like Kubrick?” he asks). In France the often vilified Barry Lyndon and A Clockwork Orange (L’Orange Mecanique) still receive cult veneration.

After the death of Orson Welles in 1985, Kubrick became (arguably, of course) the greatest living filmmaker, the dubious status of “living legend” having been achieved a decade earlier. (In Sight & Sound’s 1992 Critics Top 10 2001 crept into tenth place, the only film listed by a living director.) The international acclaim, his presence on English soil and a refusal to barter with hacks was, no doubt, one cause of the extraordinary level of carping in the March notices. Another would be due to a common syndrome, that of intelligence and popular culture being seen as mutually exclusive. Where cinema is concerned we live in times which, as Robin Wood once said, “regards Heaven’s Gate as ‘a disaster’ and Return of the Jedi as ‘a triumph’”. Orson Welles himself is rarely mentioned without reference to sherry commercials and, in other quarters, James Joyce is routinely described as ‘unreadable’ (this, from people who buy Nick Hornby books). In an atmosphere of elevated mediocrity, Kubrick’s powerful intellect and artistry, combined with an understandable reluctance to talk to people who think Ossessione is a brand of perfume, formed unavoidable provocations. The media landscape has changed enormously since the days when Kubrick would still appear at the premier of Lolita; it’s hard to imagine John Ford or Sam Peckinpah tolerating an interrogation from Jamie Theakston or Magenta DeVine. The voracious appetites of style mags and entertainment TV demand a constant drip-feed of interviews, talk show appearances and promo tours (backed by massive PR budgets). Anyone who doesn’t play the game is regarded as insane or as some kind of traitor. To be a name director working with ’stars’ verges on the suicidal. Those two great elusive Thomases, Pynchon and Harris, both also taking years between works, escape censure by being mere writers. No one cares about Pynchon (he’s in Joyce’s ‘unreadable’ camp) while Harris has film gossip and a miscast Anthony Hopkins to deflect attention.

Nearly all the post mortem articles managed to repeat the standard litany of Kubrick complaints which have dogged him like the sherry ads dogged Welles. One of the worst, repeated in a recent biography, was that he was the bane of actors. If so, then Sterling Hayden, Timothy Carey, Joe Turkel, Peter Sellers, Leonard Rossiter, Margaret Tyzack, Patrick Magee, Godfrey Quigley and Steven Berkoff et al, were gluttons for punishment, having come back for more when asked. Philip Stone, presumably bidding for a BFI endurance award, appeared in A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon and The Shining. Leon Vitali, who played the elder Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon, had such a terrible time of it he left acting completely to join Kubrick’s permanent production staff. It seems significant that most complaints about Kubrick from the acting side came from those with prodigious egos: Kirk Douglas (who described him as “a talented shit”), Malcom McDowell (”inhuman”) and, on One Eyed Jacks, that paragon of flexibility Marlon Brando. No one who was as difficult as is so often claimed would have had talents such as Ken Adam and John Alcott returning constantly to work on his films, nor inspired such loyalty in those around him (see Anthony Frewin’s remarks in the current issue).

Invariably these kind of ill-informed comments say more about the critic than about Kubrick or, more importantly, his films. A metropolitan media that measures artistic success by the quantities of cocaine snorted in a Dean Street bar has few terms of reference for dealing with someone who chooses to sit at home for most of their life. Hence the recurrent headlines: “Kubrick the recluse”, “Kubrick the secretive, paranoid control-freak”.

Focus on Kubrick’s eccentricities often ignored the accuracy of his artistic choices. What is still seen as perversity in making a Vietnam film in the ruins of Beckton gasworks is, when the equivalent scenes are compared with Gustav Hasford’s novel, a stroke of brilliance which improves on the original by taking it out of its over-familiar jungle locale and into an area of potent metaphor. The entire last quarter of Full Metal Jacket has an nightmare quality as the film spirals through multiple deaths into darkness (with a Rolling Stones’ coda of ‘Paint It Black’). The flaming ruins seem to reach to infinity; where a jungle setting would connect only with Vietnam, the rubbled streets are the theatre of all present and future warfare, corresponding to Berlin, Beirut, Sarajevo and wherever the apocalypse is scheduled to visit next. And what other director anywhere, having shown his matchless ability to choose the perfect classical selection, would have the audacity and consummate good taste to pick out ‘Surfin’ Bird’ by The Trashmen?

This ability to crystalise ideas and metaphors in unforgettable images (the bone to spacecraft transformation in 2001) set Kubrick apart from his contemporaries, and his concentration on ideas as well as story makes him seem increasingly unique. Even acknowledged admirers like Michael Mann and Ridley Scott are unwilling or unable to compete on this level. Fortunately we have a final film left to see (setting aside the troubling presence of Tom Cruise; Ryan O’Neal was also pretty wooden during his Seventies’ heyday). Eyes Wide Shut seems to bring Kubrick’s career to a fitting close, based as it is on Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle. Schnitzler also wrote the play La Ronde which was filmed in 1950 by Max Ophüls, virtually the only director Kubrick ever referred to in interviews as a subject of admiration (by coincidence, Nicole Kidman was acting in The Blue Room, Howard Brenton’s version of La Ronde, shortly after completing her duties on the film). Eyes Wide Shut has already caused a stir in the US by having to be altered to secure an ‘R’ rating (as A Clockwork Orange was before it).

To be controversial to the last is the least one can expect of any artistic maverick. Kubrick, king of the Hollywood Mavericks, was always more than that.

John Coulthart, 1999. First published in The Edge.

Oh, if only…

From Bubblegumfink who specialises in creations like these. Via Boing Boing.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alex in the Chelsea Drugstore

The Rolling Stones, You Can’t always Get What You Want, 1969

How much Stanley Kubrick trivia can you stand? One of the delights of DVD over VHS tape is the ability to step frame by perfect frame through any given film sequence without the picture being disturbed by noise. This reveals a lot more detail should you wish to scrutinise a favourite scene like the single dolly shot in A Clockwork Orange where Malcolm McDowell makes a circuit of the “disc-bootick” before chatting up a couple of devotchkas.

The location as it is today, rendered safe and banal courtesy of McDonald’s.

The scene was filmed in the then very trendy Chelsea Drug Store on the corner of Royal Avenue and the King’s Road, London SW3. Since the whole film was shot using the same approach as Jean-Luc Godard in Alphaville, with selective views of the contemporary world standing for a fictional future, there’s no attempt made in this scene to disguise any of the cultural products of 1971.

Throughout the Eighties and Nineties A Clockwork Orange was unavailable on video or TV in Britain due to a bizarre embargo by the director. This means that Kubrick fans like myself who were too young to have seen the film in the cinema had to rely on bootleg videos of depressingly variable quality that did no justice to John Alcott’s superb photography or to the great soundtrack. Especially frustrating was spotting Tim Buckley’s Lorca album on one of the shelves in the record shop scene but not being able to make out what else might be there. This might seem like a rather fatuous complaint but there aren’t many places you get such a pristine snapshot of a British record emporium in the early Seventies. More to the point, you have a chance here to enjoy some sly Kubrick humour. So what does the DVD reveal?

Before Alex appears we can see two albums in the racks, Livin’ the Blues by Canned Heat and The Time is Near… by the Keef Hartley Band.

When Alex wanders in he passes a large rack of albums, some of which elude my occasionally sketchy knowledge of Seventies’ rock. I can recognise these: 1) U by The Incredible String Band, 2) Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd, 3) As Your Mind Flies By by Rare Bird, 4) Get Ready by Rare Earth and 5), the one that started it all, Lorca by Tim Buckley.

Alex passes a booth stacked with magazines and newspapers. The one at the lower right is a popular film magazine of the time, Films and Filming.

As he passes the other side of the magazine booth he picks up a magazine and leafs through it as he walks. I’d never paid much attention to this before until I was stepping through the scene again and recognised the cover as a copy of Cinema X (The International Guide for Adult Audiences), a rather scurrilous title that existed solely to show people stills of nude scenes in any films currently doing the rounds. This is Kubrick’s first joke since Cinema X is exactly the kind of magazine that would attract Alex’s attention (even though he discards it a few moments later). The only reason I recognise the magazine logo is because I have a single copy, volume 4, no. 6, which has as its main feature……. A Clockwork Orange.

Alex leafs through the mag and passes a poster for Ned Kelly, a film starring Mick Jagger who’d sung about the Chelsea Drug Store only a couple of years before. No idea how I recognised this, it was a lucky guess.

Two more Kubrick jokes and a possible appearance from the man himself. On the left there’s a copy of the soundtrack to SK’s earlier film 2001: A Space Odyssey at the front of the album racks. On the right there’s a gentleman who looks remarkably like the director did at the time, browsing what appear to be classical records since there’s a Deutsche Grammophon cover visible lower down on the rack. I’ve not read a refutation anywhere that this isn’t the director so I’ll continue to consider it so, not least because right by his face there’s another joke, the sleeve of the Missa Luba album by Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin. This is an album of gospel songs sung by an African school choir that was released in 1959. The reason it’s there? The ‘Sanctus’ song from side two was played throughout Lindsay Anderson’s brilliant film If…. which featured Malcolm McDowell in his first major role playing another figure of rebellion. It was that role that landed him the lead in A Clockwork Orange so we can see Kubrick giving a nod to the earlier film here.

Alex ditches his Cinema X and passes a copy of the first album by Stray.

Arriving at the record booth we can see a number of albums on display. On the upper shelves there are copies of Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles and another copy of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother. In the racks at the front there’s a more prominently displayed copy of the 2001 soundtrack (in a different sleeve) next to John Fahey’s “fake” blues album, The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death.

Lastly, that big graphic swirl above the booth is the label from Vertigo records.

Places like the Chelsea Drug Store were the magical homes of music before the corporations moved in and turned high street stores into warehouses flogging albums in bulk. In some ways A Clockwork Orange serves less now as a warning of the future and more as a window on a world that’s disappeared.