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REVIVAL
Claire Monk welcomes the return of three 'lost' films by Jane Arden and Jack Bond
In this era of proliferating film scholarship and DVD ubiquity, the three feature films made between 1967 and 1979 by creative and personal partners Jane Arden and Jack Bond - Separation (1967), The Other Side of the Underneath (1972) and Anti-Clock(ig7g) - are that rarest of things, genuinely 'lost' films. Last screened in public in 1983 at a NFT tribute following Arden's suicide in December 1982 at the age of 55, the films are unacknowledged in 99 per cent of the historiography of British film and 100 per cent of the literature on women's cinema. Their erasure from cultural memory is odd, even suspicious, given that they form one of the most provocative and unclassifiable bodies of work in post-war British cinema.
A few years ago, a Bristol-based teacher, Sean Kaye-Smith, made it his task to restore awareness of Arden's extraordinary career via articles in Vertigo magazine and elsewhere. An Arden page appeared on MySpace, headed by a quote from Jacques Derrida drawn from Ken McMullen's film Ghost Dance (1983): "Cinema is the art of ghosts... the art of allowing ghosts to come back." Pert black-and-white, late-i940s publicity shots from Arden's early years as a RADA-trained starlet jostled against her most uncompromising statements, made at the cusp of the post- 1 968 counterculture and the nascent women's movement: "If it were possible at this moment for women to take their masochism and radicalise it, there would be the bloodiest revolution ever." All this against a pink backdrop of what many will find the most shocking image of many to choose from in The Other Side of the Underneath: a shot of the agonised face and bare breasts of a woman being crucified.
This month, all three films are released on DVD and Blu-ray, accompanied by contributions from Bond (on Anti-Clock) and three of The Other Side's surviving participants: actress Sheila Allen, esoteric/erotic multimedia artist Penny Slinger and feminist theatre practitioner-tumedpsychotherapist Natasha Morgan. It is no exaggeration to say that key passages in the histories of post-war British film culture and women's cinema will need to be rewritten. The three films are very different in style. Each, bewilderingly,...