1979 Directed by Jane Arden, Jack Bond
A complex and fascinating experimental exploration of time and identity, Anti-Clock is a film of authentic, startling originality. Brilliantly mixing film and video techniques, Arden and Bond's paranoid, psychological surveillance study of a career gambler turned clairvoyant unstuck in time captures onscreen the anxieties that have infiltrated the consciousness of so many in Western society.
UK
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Clock (London Film Festival)
UK
“See this pencil? ✏️ How did it get on this desk? Take it back…right back to when it was a tree. It was a tree. 🌲 But the difference between you and me is…you think it arrived as a pencil.”
Anti-Clock is the most mind-altering, profound, ideologically intense film I’ve seen since that pivotal night in 2003, half my lifetime ago, when I slipped in the DVD of Possession completely unaware as to what I was in for. When this ended I did something I rarely do and immediately hit play again. As I rewatched it, I would replay moments and passages over and over till they embedded themselves into the further recesses of my mind. This is an almost indescribable, impenetrable experience. A…
Anxiety survival broadcast from the year one-nine-seven-nine/trauma as tracking error on the videotape of memory. See this.
When Jack Bond decided to release the three films made in collaboration with Jane Arden, he returned three of the most important independent films to come out of England. "Anti-Clock" was their final collaboration.
Unlike "Separation" and "The Other Side of the Underneath" this film is far less concerned with Feminist Theory. Jane Arden's exploration of self had culminated toward a Humanist standpoint. The central character of this highly experimental "thriller" is a suicidal man played by Arden's son, Sebastian Saville.
Filmed in London during Great Britain's dark economic dystopia and the rise of Punk Rock, this film is interestingly apart from any of that history. Even more interesting, it would be hard to imagine a more "Punk" film. Arden…
Produced three years before her suicide, Anti-Clock expresses Arden’s anxieties over psychiatric measurement and manipulation, placing the viewer into a simulation of digital ventriloquism. Look into the red dot and fade into static, feel yourself reduced to a steady and predictable rhythm of electric impulses, distortions on a faded blue screen. The index of memory becomes universal, an Akashic record for the circuit age, accessible from anywhere but located nowhere in particular, excerpt where the strands of energy cross. The old shock therapy obliviated traumas; the new shock therapy makes them impossible in the first place. And yet the final message here is liberatory, not a reprogramming so much as a deprogramming — of identity, of rational control. “Life force cannot be controlled by your little brain machine.”
I can respect what Jane Arden was going for here. This is the later stage of her fascinating career, which started in mainstream film and theater and fanned out increasingly into the postmodern as a direct challenge to the idea of rationality. And unlike most postmodernists, she had enough of an unwavering and true understanding of that concept that she took it to the logical conclusion in her 1982 suicide. If nothing else, Jane Arden the artist has my attention.
This film, though, as its own separate piece of art, I can't really feature. There are aspects that are interesting. The parading of mind-hacky imagery is a neat exercise, even if it didn't quite succeed in my personal case in…
“i live with my mother. she’s a depressive. she failed to function in a world that admired nothing else. the recommended treatment was shock. you see, it was fashionable in 1954 to recommend insulin for disobedient women. non-conformist ladies were either 'dykes' or 'frigid bitches.’…
you see, my mother wasn't very successful
at placating men. it’s a genetic flaw. it runs in the family. it’s a genetic flaw. it runs in the family…
in the family.
yes, i was married. he was a scientist. a rational thinker. men hate need. he wanted submission...without need. and i was the lunatic
that wouldn't be lobotomized.”
jane arden was one of the most amazing writers i’ve seen. im in awe. her words were so beautiful and unique I wANT TO EAT HER BRAIN.
“This is my anxiety survival broadcast ensuring a past future programming. My brain is recreating a negative repeat pattern.”
It’s deeply upsetting me how overlooked this is in experimental cinema cultures??????? So prescient about today’s anxieties and the bend of technological innovation towards surveillance and hyper reality, its potential to eviscerate our spaciousness and capacities for openness. High concept, something about re-coding personality and memory in the face of coherent prescription. Arden seems to suggest that anxiety is now, because the future is happening now, which means that we are all now and now is all we have.
“And to ‘who am I?’ I reply, ‘I am here.”
Quantum psychotherapy plus feminism? The image clusters she ("they," technically, but I'm trying to stan on Jane Arden here...) uses to illustrate her ideas are wide-ranging and diverse, and I engage with the general idea... but most of it is just a little dry, narrow, austere in its conceptualizing to really take me anywhere. "Victor and Ethel," though, that's comedy gold!
Most obvious influence: Numero Deux, Godard, 1975.
A number of people shower all the love on her The Other Side Of The Underneath; maybe that one will show me more than this did.
Incredibly abstract to the point of being almost entirely disorienting, yet still manages to be quite transfixing due to the formalism and sheer ambition on display. Even for an experimental film, this is entirely on its own wavelength. I think the best comparison I could make is to David Cronenberg if he had made more films in vein of STEREO—though I certainly prefer this—as opposed to everything else he would make since (based on what I’ve seen thus far, at least). Not all of it worked for me as I did feel the music scoring was beyond dated and corny as opposed to atmospheric or ominous like it seemingly was intended to be at times, but still an impressive work overall that I greatly admire. Definitely worth seeking out.
god, wow. cant even write about this at the moment but a new favorite for sure. one of those pieces of art where i resonate with it in a way that i never imagined was possible.
