March 19, 2009
Topology
In addition to the previously pictured haircut, the wonderfully springy weekend also included such delightful activities as bookstore wandering and Kensington Gardens parrot-spotting with Alastair and Davide; and lunch and ambling with Matthew. During the latter amble's detour through HMV I was surprised and delighted to chance on a copy of one of the most formative BBC productions of my youth, David Rudkin's weirdo teleplay Artemis 81.
It's one of the joys and also trials of our digital age that one's past becomes ever more available, but I swear I've googled this one time and again over the years and found only a few offhand and inaccurate references on dodgy cult TV sites. The last time must have been a while back, though: apparently the DVD has been out a year and a half. I bought it without hesitation and watched the same night.
I was 14 when I first saw Artemis 81, and it is very, very difficult to try to unpick the film itself from my memories of it and how it affected and influenced me at the time. I can't pretend to know what anyone else might make of it. Certainly it looks a bit dated now -- though perhaps not as much as you'd expect -- and is arch and artificial and sometimes clunkily pretentious. But even so it's an amazing piece of work, unashamedly strange and difficult, with some unforgettable images that managed to seem newly minted even while they exactly matched my nearly three-decade-old memories. Unusually for such a revisitation, I wasn't disappointed in the least.
The thing that struck me in particular, though, is how firmly this fits into the same narrative class as a number of other pieces I especially cherish: an almost-genre we might call mindfuck fiction, whose twitchy, twisting diegesis is apt to lurch suddenly into something completely different -- but intimately connected -- at any moment. David Lynch is an obvious exemplar of this form, especially in Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway; as is Steve Erickson, whose Arc d'X strikes me as perhaps its definitive expression. Artemis 81 is not as fully-realised as those, but it is very much in the same mode -- I'd like to call it a tradition, but that would be to impute to the whole endeavour a level of community it clearly does not possess.
Artemis may not have been the first piece of this kind I experienced -- though I can't just now summon up another that would have preceded it -- but it certainly predated by quite a few years my recognition that such a category existed, and until Sunday night I hadn't managed to make the connection. Seeing it again after all this time was not only a pleasure in itself, but allowed me at least a small increase in understanding of the things that appeal to me -- and perhaps the sort of things I'd like to create, if I ever get around to writing anything other than science and humdrum bloggery again.
Posted by matt at March 19, 2009 10:06 PM