The term ‘Archive’ is often associated with a feeling of comfortableness, the idea that someone is going to say something intelligent or moving and you’re going to see something that illustrates that. That has remained a principle function of archive until recently. What we have witnessed in recent years is every institution, person and company is turning itself into a broadcasting proposition.
As a result, that comfortable safe idea of ‘archive’ conjuring up images of film cans covered in cobwebs has turned into every kid with a mobile phone constantly recording experiences to such an extent that you can’t be clear exactly what archive is anymore. But, if you put the archive with the internet then you have the most extraordinary explosion of possibilities, for good or ill, but an experience absolutely unprecedented in recorded human history.
40 years of Arena has over 600 films, and in recent years we have tried to use and explore the archive in new ways, instinctively just to make something interesting.
It must be said that there are few film broadcast experiences quite so delightful as where someone says something really acute whether it be a memory, an analysis, or answer to a question, and you actually have that piece of archive that so precisely gives a demonstration of that. This leads me to an excerpt from one of my very favourite Arenas, a portrait of Galton and Simpson, the great comedy writers. It’s called ‘Lunch with Galton and Simpson’ because that’s what they do at the advanced age they’ve reached. Here, they talk about Tony Hancock in his most famous role in ‘The Blood Donor’.
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Comedy duo discuss writing for Tony Hancock
Arena: Lunch With Galton and Simpson (2005). Directed by Nigel Williams, Series Editor - Anthony Wall
When I first came to Arena, I soon began to work with Nigel Finch, who is sadly no longer with us. We both had a kind of fascination with light entertainment, it seemed wonderfully mad to us and surreal, because I suppose it deals with aspirational things. So how do you depict it, how do you present it? I had an obsession with the song ‘My Way’ which seemed to me to be the absolute last word in everything to do with light entertainment culture at its most preposterous. It’s almost like a capitalist equivalent to the Internationale, this mad idea that you could do everything your way.
So we began this film, with no clue what we were doing but every time something interesting came up about ‘My Way’, we went and filmed it. The BBC archives were rich in versions of My Way and one all time greats from Shirley Bassey. The surreal quality of light entertainment reaches an apogee in the female power-balladeer, and Shirley is definitely one of those.
We spoke to Professor Wilfrid Mellers, a musicologist who had a wonderfully eccentric televisual character. He gave us a full analysis of ‘My Way’, as if it were a Beethoven Sonata, which along with Bassey’s performance gave use two great pieces of footage. We could have seen Mellers explaining what happens, followed by Shirley singing a section of the song but I Nigel saying we can get more out of this, so the idea was, very simply, to intercut the two.
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Arena investigates the history and influence of iconic track 'My Way'
Arena: My Way (1979). Directed by Anthony Wall and Nigel Finch
When we were doing this, we weren’t sitting there with plans and analysing the whole thing, we were having a laugh. But looking back it’s a sort of mixing, a little like a dry martini, you’ve got gin and vermouth, both of which are fabulous in their own right, and you put them together and some sort of osmosis, something magical happens. From that point onwards we felt we could start to use archive in a way that might not just be simply illustrative.
Those films were not like conventional films with a beginning, a middle and an end in that order. Looking back, they were more like premonitions of the kind of things that are now commonplace on the internet, with people mashing things up and putting things together in a way that may be random to others but not to themselves.
Running an arts strand, you run into the practical considerations of what do you do when there isn’t any archive? For instance, famously there is no sound archive of George Orwell, let alone film archive which people find hard to believe. Another example is a Woody Guthrie piece where he’s singing a ballad on the back of a truck, and he’s being recorded – this happened to get filmed.
The ballad probably has twenty verses in it so when were making Arena: Woody Guthrie I said to the director, why don’t we just use it three times and no one will know because it’ll just sound like he’s singing another verse. So there’s a bit at the beginning, middle and end of the film, and you somehow feel you’ve got a feel for Woody. You can evoke something different through using the same footage in different contexts.
Arena has tended to simply deal with stuff that has happened since the existence of films. But back in 1985 I was making a film about a bizarre place in Nicaragua called Bluefields, the closest place to which I can think is the town of Macondo in A Hundred Days Of Solitude. The village is on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, the locals are of Jamaican heritage, Jamaicans were placed there by the Brits to ister the local Miskito Indian population. I discovered this Nicaraguan group at a Latin American music festival in Cuba, who performed what is known as maypole music. I was told that if I wanted to find out more, I would have to travel to Bluefields to witness it for myself, which I did. There are two kinds of maypole dancing, one is more familiar to the rural English take, with children taking ribbons round a pole, and the second is a turbo charged erotic dance which does not feature very much in garden fairs in Sussex.
Behind it all there was a dreadful sort of oppression, that Nicaraguans were being subjected to by the Reagan government and of course, from the point that Christopher Columbus landed on his third voyage in what we now call Nicaragua, the true story of that place was a colonial story. So aside from filming things that were happening at that point, I ran a history through it, and what I really needed was documentary footage of Christopher Columbus arriving in Nicaragua. A 1940s Hollywood blockbuster starring Frereic March came to my rescue.
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A history of the town of Bluefields, Nicaragua
Arena: Maytime on the Mosquito Coast (1986). Directed by Anthony Wall
Broadly speaking I think up to that point archive was used in a straightforward illustrative way with the idea that it has a fixed meaning. As in the case of the Columbus footage, it was shot initially with a fixed meaning, but I don’t think archive is imprisoned in that way anymore. What we can now do with this multiplicity of methods and media is reveal other meanings in archive which could render it dynamic and creative in a way that suggests the future as much as the past.
Obviously there I was subverting the meaning of that particular piece of material quite consciously, with the intention of juxtaposing the colonial image against the maypole dancing of the local inhabitants. This brings me onto questions of authenticity, and more specifically, making archive up. Nigel Finch came in one day and said ‘I’ve just read about an essay that Graham Greene has written and it’s this bloke who’s going round the world pretending to be him who he calls “the other Graham Greene”’.
All by Greene’s , this man would turn up in the same kind of faraway locations that Greene would, say he was Graham Greene and nobody knew the difference because he used to keep his photographs to a minimum so in many parts of the world, and in those days, people would not necessarily know what he looked like. Nigel thought this would be a great thing to make a film about and we ed Greene.
He responded, which was unusual, and they met. Greene was prepared to participate on two conditions; one, that he wouldn’t appear himself and two, that it was not to be a way of making a film about him, it had to be about ‘the other’ as he called him. In the film, everything is fake, but what we have here purports to be someone who believes he met Graham Greene and had some fabulous 8mm film of Greene playing tennis with him.
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Arena investigates the person masquerading as author Graham Greene
Arena: The Other Graham Greene (1989). Directed by Nigel Finch
Well, Monseir Rodel was a friend of Nigel’s and one of the tennis players is the notorious film editor Guy Crossman. Again, what is important to stress here is that we were having fun really, but again looking back, with all the authenticity issues what we were doing was satirising the comfortable idea that somehow using a piece of art can bring some certainty to the occasion. It questions the whole notion of documentary truth which is as evanescent as any other kind of truth.
Nigel got out a phonebook and looked up everyone in South London that was called Graham Greene, wrote to them and filmed them, so the film was full of people that actually were Graham Greene, but they just weren’t the Graham Greene. On the topic of authenticity, I think it’s hard to think of circumstances when making up your own archive and ing it off as real would be a totally commendable thing to do, but the first major example of that was of course Eisenstein in October. He didn’t have any archive of the revolution so he just invented it, presumably with the Soviet army at his disposal to make thousands of people cross the square. So I think it’s very hard to be one hundred percent prescriptive about that.
Cinema verite films are probably the most archive unfriendly, some of which are wonderful like Don’t Look Back or Gimme Shelter. Their view is that there’s no lighting, you don’t make people repeat things etc. When I worked with a sound recordist in New York who had just finished working with Albert Maysles who made Gimme Shelter, he revealed to me that Albert’s average shooting ratio was seventy-seven to one, with an expectation of being in the cutting room for about a year.
So I think the point about those films is that it’s not the verite that’s great about them, it’s the fact that Pennebaker and Maysles are really good filmmakers, and they shoot and edit well, whether they have plenty of time and money with which to do it or not. On Arena, there’s no feeling against these kinds of films but the tendency was often the other way, our heroes were Night Mail, Humphrey Jennings and the Radio Ballads and the now obscure arts series which used to be on Sunday afternoons called Tempo which used to have some really smart films about art subjects. With this in mind, Arena is not simply reportage, it’s an attempt to be creative and increasingly looking at how we incorporate the archive into that endeavor.
The next one I think was another breakthrough, which was Paul Tickell making the definitive film about punk. Looking back, the punks were among the first people to really get into filming their own existence, but they weren’t doing it on mobile phones, they were doing it on 8mm cameras. Of course they shot stuff in the same way that they did anything else, it’s mayhem.
So the issue for Paul was bringing together the stuff that had been shot by the kids themselves with contemporary footage and coverage which was all terror, from fabulously over the top responses from councilors all over the country to the idea that this bus with the Sex Pistols and the Clash was going to invade. And somehow or other, Quartermass came to mind. The film took a long time to make and as far as I can see it was the first time that somebody went further with a feature film and used it in a way that nature never intended whatsoever.
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A history of punk through the eyes of a small group of people who originated the species
Arena: Punk and the Pistols (1995). Directed by Paul Tickell, Series Editor - Anthony Wall
That was a technique that I think we’ve all seen many times since. It also illustrates an important point, that Arena is that it’s in essence a Strand that respects the director, and so there’s a general sensibility which allows that voice to come through.
All of the clips so far have basically been to do with juxtaposition so it’s like Miles Davis said, there’s no such thing as a bad note it depends which note you put before it and which note you put after it, so that I think is the basic bedrock technique of how you can alter and expand the potential of a piece of archive from what its ostensible original from was.
This brings me to a film called Masters of The Canvas which was made around the same time by the director Mary Dickinson and it was another bizarre idea. A Northern Irish TV producer called Paul Yates got in touch with Peter Blake, who, like himself, was obsessed with masked wrestler Kendo Nagasaki. Yates believed Kendo had some kind of access to deep spiritual truth. And so it became a peculiar triangular construct which looked towards who is the real Kendo Nagasaki?, who famously would never take his mask off and other wrestlers were forever trying to rip it off him.
This scene is towards the end of the film and it’s archive of a match between Kendo and Giant Haystacks, who for those of you are unfamiliar with wrestling, was literally about six foot ten and weighed about sixty stone. In fact, he once guested on the Kenny Everett show and Everett looked up at him and gestured and somebody brought out a ladder, which he was then able to pull up against Giant Haystacks, climb it and slap his face.
What Mary did was buried it on the television as it would have originally been experienced and filmed it off the television so you’ve got film against video, going deeper and deeper into it so that the image deconstructs and you’re realizing a whole load of things, you’re not watching an image you’re watching a collection of electronic impulses.
It takes it away from the initial instinct that you’re just seeing a piece of wrestling and it’s funny and skillful or whatever, there’s no irony in this, no juxtaposition, it’s just going right into that archive. You’re not dealing with someone you’ve interviewed or talked to, or filming in a verite way, it’s an object that you can start to examine. The effect is very aesthetic and I think peculiarly unsettling.
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Paul Yates and Peter Blake on their fascination with masked wrestler Kendo Nagasaki
Arena: Masters Of The Canvas (1992). Directed by Mary Dickinson, Series Editor - Anthony Wall
So this uses what would otherwise have been an arresting but fundamentally straightforward piece of archive to intimate other sorts of issues to deal with what it is to be alive and what film can do, which I think is the essence of everything we might be saying about these matters. Film or television is not really much of an instrument for conveying information, you could get what is in an average factual documentary from a few sides of A4, but what it is completely brilliant at is narrative and atmosphere and attitude.
So to find that in something, to actually look at a piece of archive and think we can get something out of that debris, was a real advance in of feeling a respect for it and also an excitement about how much you could do with it. In 2007 I worked with the film editor Emma Matthews on a film to deal with the 30th anniversary of Bob Marley’s album Exodus, which was his most successful record. 1977 was a strange year, there were all sorts of predictions about apocalyptic things that were going to happen to the world, and I began to think about how the world was in 1977, how Marley would have seen it, and he would have seen it like the rest of us – through the news.
So there were twelve songs on the re-release of the record and we took one a month and the principal texture of the film was simply taking news archive from that month and using a particular track and certain voices to build up a picture of what Marley was trying to say in that album and what they year was like. For the Rasta, as I understood it, things are one, everything is one whether it be a flood in Somerset or a film of a nuclear missile in Georgia, everything was connected. From that, I said just put the shots together and if it feels right leave it and don’t think about it.
This was a very interesting place for me. We were doing this with footage from thirty years ago and material we’d shot at a ceremony that was commemorating Marley in 2007, and there was this sense of a certain type of time travel. Of course, it’s thirty years of archive and since then there’s been a lot of it, but in 1977 there wasn’t a great deal of material – there was film and some television but not a huge amount. I think it’s fair to say that television starts with the Coronation in the UK, 1953, so 77’ was sort of like a pathway between the two periods.
Then you start to see the possibility of time travelling your mind through images that were familiar and unfamiliar, juxtaposed in ways that weren’t originally intended. There was a very simple example that we had – a classic news shot from 1977, extremely well shot because cameramen were properly trained in those days and it’s the Queen in an open top Diamler or something with a third world leader.
They’re going through the crowd who are all waving flags and over the top there’s a plummy voice saying how absolutely fabulous all of this is. But the shot is quite serene, it moves towards the car. If you take that voiceover off, and put some sinister music over the top you see there’s an altogether different set of meanings there. But you are also looking at this with all of the conditions that are in your head, the things that you’ve known about since that footage was shot.
It’s very difficult to get a real handle on this which I find very exciting because I think you definitely do your best work when you don’t quite know what you’re doing, because if you know what you’re doing, why bother? So we talked a lot about these ideas and around that time the technology was really advancing. I was absolutely and still am no expert in this but I am fascinated by what you can do with it.
Back then, the general recommendation was don’t do anything for the internet that’s longer than three minutes because people can’t cope with it, the technology can’t cope with it, etc. So I was walking down the street and I don’t know how many we’d done at that point, I’d say about four or five hundred films, and I thought if you watch one a week it would take you ten years, and I found this the most depressing thought.
Even if you watch one a day it would take you nearly two years so with this three minute idea, we thought would it be possible to get the whole lot into three minutes? We had a crack at it and there are various techniques that are required to be employed in this because obviously it relied on speed and very interesting questions about how much you can actually apprehend and so we managed to get the first two hundred into six minutes.
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The first 200 Arena's in 5 minutes
Arena Mash: The First 200 in Five Minutes
Now that’s never been out, but it was really a sort of exercise, to start putting a feeler out to what might go with an internet presentation alongside the films. In fact, I would now regard the films as much a necessary thing to feed the archive as just simply the primary proposition. So we did a number of other Mashes that were a bit shorter and they were themed, the first one was called Fancy A Drink?
We just went through and found every scene in which someone had an alcoholic drink in Arena and put them together. We also did Cup of Tea and a Fag, Animal Crackers, Beside the Sea and On The Road, and the idea was to see whether we could come up with a little confection that would be like an audiovisual equivalent of a pop song, like a three minute record. I’m not suggesting everything needs to be as extreme as this, but at the same time, in of the aesthetic as an exercise, television is such a conservative medium in the way that it’s run.
These cut-ups, Picasso was doing this a hundred years ago, along with composers, rap artists, William Burroughs, so it was really trying to find our own version of those kinds of techniques. The films are intact, that’s the Ark of the Covenant, and certainly there’s no way that I would over my dead body let the films be butchered. They exist, this is an archive in and of itself, therein most essential that the films exist, and that’s their true form. However, they are also treasure troves of all sorts of other stuff and as we’ve gone through just the Arena archive, I’m amazed at how well it responds to this kind of thinking.
We just came up with ever more preposterous ideas for the sort of three minute mashes, I thought of one called Armed and Extremely Dangerous and I thought well certainly there’s not going to be much of that, there are about eighty Arenas were people wield a weapon of some sort, often in anger, which wouldn’t even have occurred to me.
I’m going to finish with the most advanced thing we’ve managed to do, thanks to Tony Ageh and Bill Thompson and The Space. It was an Arts Council initiative which the BBC were involved with to provide online platforms for artists to express themselves. When Emma and I were talking about how we could use the archive in these kind of ways, we thought about how you might ideally turn it into an experience where people can go online and really get into it and what kind of construct it would be.
Emma said ‘what about a Hotel?’ and I could see it immediately, we could turn the archive into a hotel with a lift going up and down, where the doors open and there would be Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, whoever. It took a while to do this, and Alex Jones designed the hotel based on the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel mixed with the back lifts of Broadcasting House. It was a way of randomising the archive but with a kind of acute organising principle, not to mention everything about hotel culture is intrinsically funny.
Eventually I would like to turn the Arena Hotel into a global leisure and entertainment complex but at the moment it exists fairly modestly, but I think phase one has been completed. When you enter the Hotel you are greeted by Noel Coward, who gives you a guide around what the Hotel has to offer. The lift takes you to any of the ten different floors, each with its own hotel theme – the Health Spa, the Chapel, the Restaurant, the Bar etc.
Upon reaching a floor, you have the choice of three objects to click on which lead you into a clip related the specific theme. For example, when you enter the Ballroom, there are a choice of three clips. The first is a wonderful scene of Robben Island where they talk about how they used to silently ballroom dance at night to give them some kind of relief from their imprisonment. The second is of the George Formby appreciation society, where over a hundred Formby enthusiasts are all performing A Little Stick of Blackpool Rock in a ballroom. And the third is Jerry Jeff Walker, the author of Mr Bojangles in a Texas ballroom.
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Demonstration of the Arena Hotel
In an ideal world, you would be able to see the whole film if you wanted but we haven’t got there yet. The project is ongoing and we are in the process of formulating what the next phase will look like, but it is a truly exciting proposition. I’d like to conclude with a clip from the Hotel Nightclub, which I think in one cut encapsulates what I’m trying to get at. It’s from two films, one featuring Pete Doherty playing live in a club and the other of Poly Styrene playing in a club twenty eight years earlier. The point this makes is that we had to wait thirty years to make that clip.
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Pete Doherty and Poly Styrene perform 30 years apart
Arena: Pete Doherty (2005), Directed by Ashtar Alkhirsan and Arena: Who Is Poly Styrene? (1979) Directed by Ted Clisby, Series Editor - Anthony Wall
