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Ian Breakwell, Variety

The interview with Ian Breakwell reproduced below took place in 2002. At the time, Ian was working towards Variety, a show he was curating for the re-opening of the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea. The project placed his own work alongside that of other artists who had addressed some of the themes of vaudeville and the variety stage which were always central to his imagination.

Ian Breakwell died on Friday 14 October 2005, the day Variety finally opened. Extraordinarily productive until the end, Ian will be greatly missed by all those who knew and worked with him. An obituary appeared in The Guardian newspaper and the Variety show was dedicated to him.

You can read more about Ian Breakwell and his work at LUX Online.

Ian Breakwell became a full-time artist in 1967, a year after the formation of the London Filmmakers' Co-op. He attended some of the earliest Co-op screenings and continued to drift in and out of Co-op circles throughout the 1970s, although, unlike many Co-op artists, he was already well established in the gallery world. Many of his films from this period, as well as video works from the 1980s, are in distribution with LUX.

Ian exhibited regularly at Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London, and in 2001-2002 exhibitions which featured Ian's work in a range of media included: Shoot Shoot Shoot at Tate Modern, London; 'Telling Tales' at Tate Liverpool; 'Intimacy' at The Lowry, Salford; 'Votive' at the Adam Gallery, Wellington, and Dunedin Art Gallery, New Zealand. His site specific video and music installation 'The Other Side' ran for ten weeks at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, to great public and critical acclaim in spring 2002.

Ian's film, 'Variety', commissioned by the BFI, premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival in Autumn 2001. LUX distribution manager Mike Sperlinger spoke to him about his latest work and his career as a filmmaker. See Ian's filmography at the end of this interview for more information.

Mike Sperlinger: Maybe you could talk a bit about how Variety started.

Ian Breakwell: In a way, there were two projects, both called Variety, one of which exists as a film. And that is an element within a much larger project called Variety, which is a period of research leading up to a large festival and exhibition in 2004 at what will then be the newly refurbished De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, where they have invited me to curate their opening show - the show being an exhibition in the new gallery they will build there, plus theatre performances, film screenings, outdoor and indoor performances of music, in fact using all parts of the building on the same theme.

It was my intention, originally, when interviewed by the BFI for the Year of the Artist residency, to research that larger project. The larger project's theme is the relationship between the variety tradition, by which I mean the non-scripted play - variety theatre, music hall, fairground, pantomime, magic, illusion, all of those forms of theatre other than the play - and to see how that variety tradition relates to contemporary visual art, music and performance, as it, in my opinion, clearly does. There are many artists who are influenced by that tradition, and others who perhaps not consciously are, or whose work has parallels, perhaps unknowingly, with that tradition. The idea would be that artists from the variety tradition and from contemporary art would be shown side-by-side as equals. The contemporary art show would not have a back-up programme of 'where this stuff has come from', things would be shown equally. So an artist whose work might not normally be seen inside a gallery but who is a famous artist through television or the stage - for instance, Tommy Cooper - would be shown in a gallery, as an artist in his own right, as a great performance artist. And he might well be shown alongside someone working in, say, the medium of video, or it could be painting, or it could be performance - it could be another kind of performance artist from today whose work perhaps is not directly influenced by him but has a particular quality, for instance being based upon magic and illusion or perhaps the use of narrative that goes wrong - so that you can make parallels.

A most obvious example would be to show, say, Gilbert and George performing 'The Singing Sculpture', which is a version of 'Underneath the Arches', alongside actual footage of Flanagan and Allen - find out first of all whether it's appropriate to show together or alongside each other, to say 'these are just difference approaches to the same thing'. Also it would enable one to see some artists' work within a tradition, a way of looking at it that it hadn't been looked at before, because of this association.

Now, with the contemporary artists, the whole of the twentieth century - well, all of the centuries of art have been influenced by the popular arts, without doubt. But only with the twentieth century do we get performed, ephemeral, durational works recorded for the first time, either on audio tape, film, or video tape and latterly digital. We also have centuries and centuries of paintings, sculptures and prints influenced by the popular arts - not just the commedia dell' arte. As long as there has been art, there has been this popular theatrical tradition as well, which has been reflected in the art which is associated with galleries and museums. But only in the twentieth century has the popular tradition been recorded also - we have only documentation, up to the twentieth century, of great performers. We have to take somebody's word for it in a book that Grimaldi was a great clown - the clowns say he was the greatest of the clowns, but nobody ever saw him who is living today, we have descriptions, we have drawings... There is a whole history of art that is unwritten here because there was no recording medium to record the ephemeral. That is why the whole history of art is so skewed in favour of things made of oil paint and stone, because they last; so that artists who worked in ephemeral ways as well, for instance, like Turner or Gainsborough or De Loutherberg, we have their paintings and we have their drawings - but we only have documentation, verbal usually, of the theatrical and ephemeral and site-specific and durational things that they made as well. So it works both ways: there's no recording of what artists did other than make, up to the twentieth century, and for the performing arts there's no records, there's no evidence of the performance as it looked or sounded, until we get recorded tape and film and so on.

That means that you can't deal with the whole history of art, otherwise this is a lifetime's project, so my decision has been that I will use contemporary artists - by which I mean those alive now, or very recently passed away - whose work we have or can get. So I won't go even into early twentieth century art at all, all the work artists did based upon the fairground, the circus - I won't touch any of that because otherwise it's going to be the biggest show in the world. It will be artists basically working now. But with the variety artists, from the variety tradition - that tradition is not as active as it was, it's obviously been supplanted by television and other forms, so many of those performers are now dead; and the evidence of their performance is either on film or on tape recordings of television shows or radio shows. Therefore the National Film Archive, which has a large amount of documentation of early twentieth century variety material, was an obvious place for me to research that aspect of the project, and that was what I originally went in to do.

Well, what happened was that I did a great deal of research for the big project, and during the course of doing that research I began to get the idea of making a film after all, almost as a way of saying, 'this is what I'm talking about'. So about two thirds of the way through the residency, I suddenly decided to make this film, and I did the whole bloody thing in six weeks, which was a bit ridiculous because - although it may not be apparent - there is a lot of time-consuming editing, almost working as slowly as an animator. But we managed to do it, and that clarified for me, in my own mind, a lot of the ideas about what I meant by 'variety', what this theme was.

It's also a film about film, the physical qualities... It was one day in the archive, watching on a Steenbeck, and I hadn't used a Steenbeck for a long time and I was terrified of breaking this archive film. It was a great big reel of film and somewhere in it there was one minute or less of what it was I was looking for, this performer; and I thought, 'This is the only record of this particular performer ever put onto film', because it was turn of the twentieth century. I thought, 'This is it, this is the moment, this is this person's moment, this is all we have to judge this person by - and I could break it!' And looking through all this film grain at this jerky little bit of footage - which is priceless, you can't put a price on it, it is a unique document - it was the frailty of the medium, the fact that this person is now dead and this is their trace, as it were. So the idea was of making a film which evoked, without using nostalgia, the fragility both of these performers who left no evidence other than their own selves and the fragility of the medium that was invented to record them, so the two things weave together.

The structure of the film is that of a variety performance. Often, with independent avant-garde films, one of the difficulties people used to have is that they don't follow a conventional linear narrative - and the thing is that one mustn't expect them to, it's a different kind of thing; if you're going to see Star Wars - you know, it's horses for course. But I've always felt that if people are happy - or not happy necessarily, comfortable with the format, they don't feel alienated by the format - then you can twist it and get them to watch stuff they would never normally watch. So, for instance, my diaries, they're not like normal diaries at all; but people know what a diary is, or think they know what it is, in the first place, it's not an alien context. And for many many years - now it's not the case - people couldn't handle words in galleries, text on the wall, or sounds, or audio-visual stuff: 'What the hell's this doing here?' Then they go home and watch television, they watch an audio-visual medium; they listen to radio, which is just sound. And people going to play at the National Theatre will expect to see, no matter how experimental it might be, a play with characters and a narrative progression, usually three acts - there's a format, there's a convention. That's what they're happy with, they accept that.

Now, if they go to a variety theatre, you don't expect to see a story that starts at the beginning and ends at the end in a conventional way. Because the variety theatre is split up into a series of disconnected acts, which seem to have no logical connection at all: somebody will come out and do a dramatic monologue, followed by a dancing horse in the next act, followed by four jugglers, followed by a comedian. And nobody expects one section to relate, in terms of consecutive narrative, to the previous section at all - they don't worry about it. It would worry them a lot if they went to the theatre to see a play and that happened. So I thought that would be a very interesting structure for a film: a series of disconnected sections, which somehow hold together in the way that a variety bill does, but you can have totally different things within them. And each of the little things within my film Variety is, to some extent, based upon particular variety acts, or types of acts, even when it doesn't appear to be - and that's it. But there is a kind of narrative within the film, there is a narrative, the ending is not arbitrary, it does move towards an ending; so it has another kind of structure in it.

What did you think, what aspects interested you?

MS: A lot of things. You were saying before that you didn't think it was very bleak, but it's kind of satanic: the 'slow hand' section, the guy with the Jewish mask - and then the mouth section as well. Particularly with the way you've edited them and slowed them down...

IB: I'll talk about some of the editing techniques in a minute. But overall, yes there is a kind of bleakness there, because... People say it's a dead tradition. Well, I thought it maybe was when I went into the archive - because everyone you're looking at is dead, basically, and it's these frail, fragile moments. But as I began to research a lot more, I discovered that, OK, the great stars - the Tommy Coopers, the W.C. Fields, the George Formby Seniors - these people no longer exist, all we have is evidence. The music hall and the variety tradition is considered to have been killed by television.

Well, actually it persisted on television a lot and now, ironically, there is a growing alternative cabaret circuit in which there is the opportunity for speciality acts again. For many many years, during the seventies, eighties and early nineties, if you went to anything called cabaret, 'alternative cabaret', it was one after the other stand-up comedians telling jokes, not even characters. Joke tellers. That's begun to change now, and people are reworking some of these old traditions like ventriloquism, juggling, mentalism, strip-tease. They're doing it in a knowing, I hate the word, but 'post-'... I won't say 'post-modern' - 'post-variety'. And there are some interesting acts I've discovered - young acts, not old stagers who've somehow managed to hang on, but young acts. So it's not dead, it's just not in the places where is was before.

But as regards the overall tone of the piece, my personal preference... I like novelty acts, I like the absurdity of being able to do just one very odd thing. I love that, because they're very close some of them to the absurdity of Dada or Fluxus - and they're mercifully quite short, whereas a lot of performance artists are so fucking serious and take so long! [Laughter] And often aren't funny. But I can think of performance artists now - people like Bruce McLean, the Kipper Kids - who are clearly influenced by this kind of variety, absurd humour. But my personal preference is for a kind of bleak, end-of-the-plank type humour. What really makes me laugh is the deadpan, the seemingly utterly fucking miserable and morose, and somehow or other you start laughing and can't stop. George Formby Sr., the father of the famous ukulele player, is a genius at that: he is world-weary, morose, he's terminally ill with tuberculosis - and he's deadly funny. And it's the bleakness that makes it so funny; the world-weariness of Hancock at his best, things like that fabulous radio programme 'Sunday', which is just the most boring Sunday in the world in suburban London where he can't think of anything to do. Most of the programme is yawning, and sighing, people bored out of their brains, and it's so funny - and so true as well.

I don't like cheerful humour, it doesn't amuse me at all. So therefore, I will unfortunately have to leave out people who are undeniable great artists in variety theatre and I just can't stand them: Max Miller, for instance, is, there's no doubt about it, one of the great variety stars. I just find him, not only totally unfunny but a really unpleasant personality who I really wouldn't want in the same pub or room; he's so bloody cheerful, he's so much the cheeky chappy, that he just doesn't strike a chord with me. Whereas - I'm trying to think of a modern version of that kind of morose, world-weary... I suppose Alan Bennett would be a good example...

MS: That's funny, because I was watching your videos and, particularly The Sermon, bits of it really reminded me of Alan Bennett...

IB: Yes, well people say he used to watch my diary series, but I don't know; I think he's got his own thing going and I admire him a lot - I think he's now becoming a kind of parody of himself, and getting very sentimental as well...

But the exception would be someone who was absolutely manic. I don't like these people who fling themselves about a lot. I remember seeing Lee Evans, for instance, a big star now - I saw him in a talent show and I thought, 'This kid really does have talent'. And he was manic, but it was fresh. But now, he just does manic and there's no logic to it. Whereas somebody like Tommy Cooper, the mania is just underneath and it's his efforts, increasingly more and more desperate, to keep control that make him such a fabulous performer. To be really funny, it has to, for me, have an undercurrent of mania, desperation or melancholy. It's why I find Keaton to be a great artist, on every level: he's a great filmmaker, he's a great performer and a great, great comedian.

MS: And more so than Chaplin...

IB: More so than Chaplin, who I admire, I respect, but he doesn't strike the chord with me. I do not like that pathos. Because although Keaton is rooted in the deadpan, the stoical, the melancholic, he is never ever sentimental, ever - it's hard humour. But it's also very human as well. I don't like that tugging at the heart-strings that Chaplin does. That's just me - obviously, millions of people thought Chaplin was a genius. But for me, Keaton is clearly a genius - and Fields, in a different way, is. So yes, there is that tone of end-of-the-plank stuff. But although some reviewers have seen it as being a bleak look at a moribund tradition, I don't really see it like that. When it seems to be at its most desperate is, in a strange kind of way, when it's, in the true sense of the word, at its most comic - I don't necessarily mean funny there, but comic.

The other thing I decided with the film very early on was that I couldn't have anybody who was well-known in it. If you put Tommy Cooper in it, then it becomes a different thing. It should be about the film, rather than the characters in it. In the section, for instance, where there's a shopkeeper hamming it up: he was quite a well-known comedian of his day, I've forgotten his name, he made quite a lot of short films for northern film companies. He's completely forgotten now, except by theatre buffs, and he's not very funny, he's all right - but the film itself is not funny. He just has this opening scene where he's acting being very upset, he's silent, he's sobbing; and it's somehow so absurd - especially as he's got a big tin on his counter saying 'rat poison' on it, completely unexplained... Well, that's from a film called The Lard Song, and actually the rat poison, which appears to be the point of the scene, is not - it's got nothing to do with the film at all. On top of the tin of rat poison is a large white lump, which is actually a block of lard, and that becomes a feature of the subsequent film. [Laughter] So sometimes something would just catch my attention and I couldn't quite say why.

What I did with that section was I slowed it right down, vignetted it, and played it backwards. So all his physical actions are backwards, because in the real film it starts off with him with his head in his hands and then he comes to life, as it were. Well, I get him to sink back down, and I play the soundtrack backwards, which is this peculiar warbling singer in the background over his sobbing, and then right at the end I turn it round so you hear the last line of what she's singing, which is actually 'Coming Through the Rye', played the right way round.

So there's a lot of things like that, slowing stuff right down and saying, 'Let's look at this'- and taking things out of context of the film. The 'slow hand' section is one shot, it only lasts twenty seconds in the original film, called The Gay Shoe Clerk. It's really early, 1901 or something like that, and it's a little sitcom - which, again, is not very funny, apart from the title. But it's certainly one of the first cinema close-ups, and therefore I was thinking, 'This is the first time anybody saw an isolated part of the human body, if it's the first close-up' - you see a hand and you see a foot disembodied. That must have been incredible at the time, to see that. And so it almost becomes like a fetishised thing, and I slow it right down and loop it, so that it becomes a lingering look. And so on, with a lot of the film.

Then I put some things of my own in there, newly created stuff like the thermal imaging head and then the monologue over the gray screen - which is actually made out of film grain, sampled from old films, so that it's a gray screen but it's animated all the time if you look closely. Those are made in the tradition, as it were. And then the final section, 'last vent', uses my narration to tell a little short story, but uses found footage to fit in with it and I reworked that footage a lot in the editing.

MS: The other interesting thing about the film for me is that, your work's very varied, it's very hard to categorise, but this seems a very direct link suddenly back to things like Nine Jokes and Repertory. Repertory particularly - but even in Nine Jokes there's a section called 'Gulp' [one section of Variety is called 'swallow']...

IB: I'd forgotten that completely... Yes, Nine Jokes, that's a good example, because that's completely disconnected things - daft little things. And, although I hadn't thought of it at the time, that also is a series of gags, if you like, one-liners, and they're all titled - yes, it's very similar...

MS: But Repertory too: the idea of interplay between actual acts and ones you're imagining, hypothetical acts and acts that don't quite happen - like the 'He's coming', 'He's here', 'He's gone' in Variety. Events and non-events in a theatrical environment, and importance of the environment itself, like the empty theatre in Repertory and in 'last vent' the focus on the audience. I know you edited that book Seeing in the Dark and you're very interested in the conditions of viewing...

IB: Yes, and a lot of my paintings and drawings have been of audiences, of those blurred faces coming out of the darkness. And it's certainly true that in the best kind of variety or music hall - occasionally you see it in cabaret or in jazz clubs - you get an empathy between the audience and the performer, whereby the audience become half the performance when it's working right. It's totally opposite to the concert hall presentation of classical music, for instance, where you hold back the cough till they stop playing, and also you never applaud during the playing.

MS: So what happens when a variety act goes onto TV? What happens, do you think, to that singer in 'the wayward leaf' [another section of Variety, in which a singer gets a leaf caught in her cleavage but carries on regardless] - there's almost an awkward silence when you're watching, because you feel the audience should be laughing at that leaf...

IB: Yes, well that's quite interesting historically because that woman came from some kind of stage background, but she would never normally have got a TV series. But she became Jack Hilton's mistress - he was the great theatre impresario and also had a contract with Associated-Rediffusion in the early days of commercial television to be in charge of variety - so he used to do all these programmes called 'Jack Hilton Presents...' So 'Jack Hilton Presents... The Crazy Gang', for instance, and the first Hancock series was made as part of that - quite well-known comedians and people who are now forgotten. But Rosalina Neri got this series and nobody could understand why this awful... There's something endearingly dreadful about her. She obviously had the mockers on Hilton and eventually, having made this series, she milked him dry of all his money and went off to Italy, her home country, and never came back. She subsequently worked in light opera or something like that, but she was not really a career pro...

But what's interesting is, I watched all her programmes. All her other programmes came in on 35mm and then that one I had difficulty getting a viewing copy of. And the reason was, that the original was on 1” tape. So that peculiar little variety series is a historic moment in television: it's the switch from film to tape. And what you're watching is live, there's no edits there, it's in camera that it's done - and they don't take out the mistakes. I mean, the falling leaf... It's just the way that she then ploughs remorselessly on, but you can't take your eyes off the leaf - if you ever spot it, some people don't. I did put a little star-burst filter and a little audio ping on it, just to point it up just in case people didn't spot it. But she makes several other mistakes: she trips over something, she makes a move back to another piece of scenery and the lighting technician forgets to put the light on and it comes on about ten seconds after it should, her shoulder strap slips off... I find that very, very funny, but it's not funny in the way of these awful things on television like Auntie's Bloomers and It'll Be Alright on the Night, because they then all crack up laughing and say, 'Oh, look what I've done, we better do another take'. It's the fact that this is live and she just ploughs on, that's what makes it funny.

And also the fact that I'm convinced that she doesn't know what she's singing. I think she's singing phonetically. If you, as I have done, slow it down and listen to some of the words, they're not the words of the song at all, they're a kind of phonetic equivalent, and they don't make sense at all as a sentence. So she's singing in a foreign language phonetically, I think, and that's got that quality of absurdity that I like - and also, it's not a kind of sneery thing: I admire her, I really do. She's there, she's doing it. It's not just, 'Look how awful this person is', they're not - they're funny and they're endearing at the same time...

Some of the sections of the film Variety are as much to with the physical nature of film, the fragility of film, personified by the fragility of these performers from the past. When I was at the National Film Archive at Berkhamsted and they had restored this film, a nitrate, they were transferring onto modern stock; and I sat in to watch several reels of one they were restoring and I was astonished by the visual quality, it was just gorgeous. The radiance, just because there's so much silver in the original stock, even in the transfer to the new material it comes off, it's just the most gorgeous looking stuff and it has a clarity and sharpness of focus and a depth of field that you just cannot get with video. Most video is slightly blurred compared to 35mm studio production movie-making of the old school. The only trouble was, this film was incredibly boring! It was a dreadful Ruritanian light opera thing, absolute crap, and I thought, 'What are we actually archiving here?'

It's obvious from some of the stuff that I found, and used, that some of this stuff had not been thought of, at the time, as being worth preserving properly, because it was in such appalling condition - nitrate cell damage on it. And so the cell damage becomes almost like an organic thing in its own right, and sometimes a quite mediocre bit of film could have an extraordinary quality just by what a fucking awful state it was in...

MS: Bill Morrison, the American artist, has just assembled a film called Decasia from found footage with no link at all, except that it's deteriorated film - all he's interested in is the particular quality that film that's deteriorated has. I was really reminded of it by that section of Variety called 'swallow', where you've got the uncanny sensation of the camera going down this guy's gullet but, at the same time, you've also got the sensation of moving closer to the surface of the film itself because the grain increases...

IB: Yes, some sections of Variety are what I would call - in Duchamp's terms - 'assisted ready-mades', as it were, and that's a good example of it. Because that's a film in its own right, it's not a variety act at all: it's a very, very early film called The Big Swallow. It was recently shown at the Tate Modern, alongside contemporary stuff, as part of 'Thresholds of the Frame'. In its original form, it's very short and very fast - not only has it got the early movie jerkiness to it, it was shot real fast. The guy is in the distance, walking along with the cane, and he spots the camera, comes striding towards it really quickly, trying to tell the camera to get out of the way; and then it comes right into his mouth, and in the actual film, the camera and the cameraman go down his mouth - it's a trick film.

I thought, 'Amazing! This is 1901, and the actual nature of filming and seeing is being examined conceptually'. Except, of course, that it's bloody wrong, it's blown it - because it's too fast, it doesn't build up tension, you don't get to see the face really looming up for any length of time; and also, it's totally wrong to see the camera and the cameraman go down his mouth, it's conceptually blown it at the point. So what I did was, I took all that stuff out: I took all the long-shot out and started him on a midshot, from the moment when he looks into the camera. I noticed time and time again, looking at very early films, that they don't look into camera; the whole technique of performing to a single point had not got sophisticated yet, people were still casting everything around, as if they were in the theatre - and this guy is, he's playing to an audience all around him, the guy walking towards the camera. The whole point of the film, to me, is the point at which he starts to look directly at you, who are looking directly at him, and in between is the film screen.

So I take him from when he makes eye-contact with the camera and I not only slow it down, I put it into stop-frame, so that it gets a certain kind of rhythm, which is totally opposite to the rhythm of the original film. Then I got David Cunningham to compose sound to that rhythm, or rather he set up a counter-rhythm to it. I take out the stuff with the cameraman going down his mouth, and what I do is sample the film grain from the rest of the film and then create the inside of his mouth out of that - hours and hours of building that up in layers. When you go down his mouth in the original film, firstly you don't notice it because it's so quick, and secondly there's not so much grain there. This is like going into a forest, as if you've gone into a close-up with the film material itself - you've gone into the visual close-up with his mouth, but you're also physically this close to the scratches. You don't see anything except grain, so it implies that he hasn't swallowed the camera, he hasn't swallowed the cameraman: he's just swallowed the lens. That's the idea of that, trying to integrate the physical quality of the film.

Somebody said jokingly to me at the Lux Centre when it was shown, someone associated with the Co-op: 'I always knew you were a structural filmmaker Ian'. And I took it as a compliment, actually, because I knew what they were saying; because a lot of the stuff that was done then, which is often considered to be the absolute opposite of me, all the structuralist stuff about the material of the medium, I was interested in it but I just didn't approach it in the same way. I was always interested in a kind of narrative and storytelling as well. But certainly, working at the archive I became absolutely fascinated by the physical qualities of the film, and all the different formats as well. There's an incredible tactile, textural, sensual richness of this stuff, and the fact that it's, in conventional terms, deteriorated makes it something else, years later... You can even see it in the early tape stuff.

But I've noticed visiting art colleges that I'm increasingly being asked to do tutorials with specific students, who I don't know before I get there; and it's getting quite common that there's one or two in each art college - never any more - who start the tutorial by saying, 'I want to know about 8mm film', or, 'I want to know, where can I get 16mm film processing?' I think some of that interest definitely stems from those 'Live in Your Head' projections. But there's certainly students - these are not in film schools, these are in fine art departments - I've asked them did you see 'Live in Your Head' and they say, 'No'. So the interest has come anyway. What they're interested in - it's not that they're 'retro' or anything like that, they're all computer literate; but they know that there's another element that they can't get at, and that is the physical quality of the moving image material. They can't get at it with video - you can't handle it, and you can't handle digital material, physically. And so they're interested in it for using senses other than the retinal. These people will probably then not go on to be film buffs or anything like that, but they want the full range of the paintbox, as it were - and they know that that includes the whole history of cinema, and pre-cinema, which consistently now art students are very interested in. They're interested in all that early trick-film stuff, the Mutoscopes, the panoramas, the dioramas - more and more they want to know about it.

I think that's because we're possibly in a post-cinema situation. Being after something makes you think, 'Well, what was before?' Never mind the middle! The further back you go, you find more and more references to what's going on now - a lot of the installation stuff you see now is much less influenced by recent things than by very, very old things, like dioramas, magic lantern shows, those kind of things. I'm interested that there's a young generation of people who are investigating the physical history of these mediums which they're using, because an art student is someone who'll use anything and they know that there's more to make in art than just the retinal... Also, they don't have any purism, which is good. There was this kid who was laying 16mm along railway tracks and letting the trains go over it, and then peeling it off and projecting it and seeing what he'd got. Then he might start working on it by hand. But then he'd import it onto disk and work on it in the computer; and then he might take the film stock back again and do another session. So, at the end of the day, he might come up with a DVD or something, but he's able to work physically as well as digitally - because 'digitally' implies you're using your hands, but it's just a mouse and a keyboard. That discussion came down to me saying, 'Yeah, but you better be bloody careful, you shouldn't do this in wet weather, it's like leaves on the line - you don't want to derail a 125!' [Laughter] But the reason such a student would want to talk to me is because they'd feel at ease, because I wouldn't say to them, 'What the hell do you want to be doing that for?' I don't mind what people do, if they get the results...

I think technology is moving so fast now, so we're told, that I don't know whether we're going to notice the changes the way we noticed the changes with film. But what I discovered in the archive is that the story of film, of film stock, is much, much more complex than I'd thought. I knew it was more complicated than, 'Then they invented 35mm film and that was it until they invented video'. But there's tonnes of different film gauges, film stocks: stuff with no sprocket holes, stuff with sprocket holes individually riveted, stuff that's only projected on one side of the film, colour film before the start of the twentieth century... And they talk about 'black and white' before there was colour - there was loads and loads of colour! Thousands and thousands of colour films before the invention of colour film stock, just done by different methods - not just hand-tinting either, all kinds of saturation, dyes, all kinds of things. And I think that there'll be an equivalent physical history of video as well, and eventually digital stuff.

There's various video formats have gone now. I mean in 1975, when they had the first video show in the UK in a gallery, called 'The Video Show', the Arts Council and the Serpentine insisted that, rather than have to handle lots of different formats, all the artists that showed put their material, whatever it was on, onto the video medium of the future, which was Betamax - which disappeared without a trace in a couple of years. Early Umatic stuff has gone, the oxide's gone. There's things happening, just as they did with film - but it doesn't seem to improve it, as it often does with film, where it can become this wonderfully organic thing where you occasionally glimpse a human being. It tends to just degrade. I'm sure that everything is being transferred to digital now, and talking to technicians in the archive they say, 'Yeah, you go with what is the best at the moment, but anyone who thinks it's a foolproof medium's a fool'. The golden rule is never save in one medium.

MS: So how do feel about Shoot Shoot Shoot and everything that comes with it, the re-mastering of all that material and the fact that it's being shown together in Tate Modern as a historical programme - does it excite you?

IB: Yes, it does. I think it's obviously historically important. For reasons that I was talking about earlier, many of these people were not associated with galleries - with the exception of myself, John Latham, a few people in the States. It's no coincidence that Warhol's films are better known than a lot of people who only showed stuff at the New York Film Co-op, because he's known for other things. And I think with so much projected imagery now in galleries, I think it makes sense to see these things again, which never went through the gallery system and didn't go through the conventional cinema system either. Similarly with a lot of the video stuff, it never went through TV distribution either. So there's a lot of stuff that will be worth seeing again; some of it, I think, will only be worth seeing as a historical document, but you can never tell. I mean, the hunger that there is for seeing stuff is very noticeable at the moment.
It would be very different if you were seeing a multi-screen projection from DVD or video. Video is very discrete, you're not conscious of the projector, whereas the film going through the gate... But a lot of that early stuff, it doesn't matter what format it's shown on - I mean, I don't personally care myself with my own stuff. Certainly with a film like Repertory it matters that it's shot on film. Film deteriorates, but you can clean it up digitally a bit, you can definitely sharpen it, and it doesn't depend on hearing the projector or watching it go through.

In the early days of what would now be called performance art, working with Mike Leggett, we used a lot of film projection in the performances I used to do. And one thing was running a film to destruction, so it wiped itself out during long performances over a period of about a year - that wasn't the only thing going on, but it was an element in it. There was no intention of preserving that film - in fact, it was a film of an aero engine being run to destruction, so we decided to run the image to destruction. That obviously you couldn't do on video. Annabel Nicolson sewing a film while it's travelling through the projector - it's a sculpture basically, it's a kind of sculptural installation.

MS: How do you feel about your own works from that period, like Repertory and Nine Jokes?

IB: Nine Jokes I'd like to put onto DVD. It hasn't been seen for a long time, and it could certainly be brightened up. The fact that sections of it are rather bleached out is not deliberate. With a film like Sheet, the film stock that Mike Leggett found in the bin - he found a whole dustbin of it outside the BBC where he was working, and usually it would be found footage - but in this case it was unused film stock and it was out of date, by quite a long way. He did a test print and it was consistently grainy and bleached out looking. I remember saying to Mike, 'Is this your camera?', and he said no, it was the stock. We said, 'We could make a film here couldn't we, we've got enough stock - what kind of film shall we make?' I remember saying, 'Well, obviously we've got to make a bleached out and grainy film'. So that is deliberate, but in something like Nine Jokes, that's really no-budget filmmaking, often using available light or maybe one lamp, that's not an aesthetic quality that's deliberate, and there's no reason at all for not brightening it up, altering the contrast, doing a bit of doctoring digitally. The fact that it wasn't on film wouldn't bother me.

MS: If you were showing older work now, are those the works that you'd be happiest putting next to Variety or work you're doing now?

IB: Well, I remember a few years ago some young artists who'd just finished their MA at Goldsmith's put a thing together - this was before 'Live in Your Head' - and they were interested in, 'Where's the art of now in England coming from?' And so they put on this show with the likes of me and Gustav Metzger and John Latham and Cosi Fani-Tuti and various others, they got a very young audience - it was called 'From Wilson to Callaghan'. I showed Repertory in a public screening for the first time in about 20 years - and people loved it. I had no idea how people would react, and they loved it.

The longer films, like The Journey - that I don't think is a film for now. People are starting to enquire now about The Institution; I think that's because there's an interest in filmed performance. But it's these minimal things, like Repertory and Nine Jokes - I don't know how Sheet's going to go down at all...

You wouldn't think that Sheet has any relationship to Variety, but in a funny kind of way it does. Nine Jokes, as you've pointed out and as I'd forgotten, has a clear structural relation to Variety - and also, it's based on a series of gags. Sheet is essentially an absurd film, in my opinion, because the central idea is so daft, that it 'stars' a large bed-sheet - the most abstract, boring thing that you could think of - and it's just used as a marker. The sheet's irrelevant, basically; we just put the sheet there, turn the camera on and it allows people's attention to wander around the screen.

The way this film was made was totally opposite to how you normally make film. With Variety, I got six weeks, a deadline, finished my research, booked the edit suite, simultaneously set in motion clearance on the footage - and before even finishing the film book its premiere date. Sheet was made in an opposite way to that: firstly, we just found the stock - we didn't have any production money, we didn't apply for a grant, we didn't do any of the conventional things; and when Mike and I simultaneously had a spare day, Mike would literally ring me up and say, 'It's a nice day today, you doing anything? Shall we go and do some filming?' And I'd say, 'Yeah, OK - I'll bring the sheet'. [Laughter] He described it very well as like looking out the window in the morning and deciding to go fishing with your pal. And that's the way we made the film - we had no deadlines, no schedule, nothing. It's totally self-indulgent, but we weren't wasting anybody's money, there was no money involved, it was just us - and we had no idea who it was for. Ironically, it was subsequently sold to Belgian TV...

But then a weird thing happened: this woman who'd seen the film wrote me a letter, and she analysed the whole film as being all about death - it was a shroud. I knew it was a bed-sheet, because it was one of the old ones off my bed, but she didn't see it as a bed-sheet, she saw it immediately as a shroud. She saw the empty locations as being to do with absence. I remember showing the letter to Mike, and we sat there scratching our heads. But the funny thing is, the sheet eventually at end of the film does go away: it goes up a hill in stages and then disappears into the firmament. And that interests me very much: do you really know what you're making, at the time?

Copyright © LUX, April 2002

Filmography:

Films

1969 Growth
1970 Sheet (with Mike Leggett) [distributed by LUX]
1971 9 Jokes [LUX]
1973 Repertory [LUX]
1975 The Journey [LUX]
1978 The Institution (with Kevin Coyne) [LUX]
1997 The Hinge (with Ron Geesin)
2001 Variety [BFI]

Videos