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Throughout the book we find a similar blend of vivid immediacy with oblique storylines and meanings. ‘Duct’ concludes with thoughts on the sexual stimulation of film as a medium, its protagonist wondering; “who would ever have imagined that an evening at the pictures could be so risky?” ‘Angel’, meanwhile, delves into clothes, from the artificial allure of a man dancing in female attire (“the plastic emerald that glints in the navel…his demureness is gone once the dancing starts”) to the awkward first steps in another gender of a “fair young soldier with long slim limbs…tentatively holding out the skirts and whispering, ‘It feels very odd, very odd, very strange…’”.
Clothes, fabrics and theatricality recur throughout the series, as does a sense of continually slipping sexual and gender identity. We pass through morgues, exotic locations, ordinary middle class homes; ride through city streets on Lambretta scooters, encounter, in ‘Turf’, “rows of houses across the valley like furrows turned by the blade of a plough” and “a woman [lying] flat on an iron bedstead, hair on the pillow in shining waves”. In other words, these fictions define themselves against the stock imagery of film, from Fellini and Free Cinema to the lavish costume epic and the Technicolor weepie, moving from genre to genre, but always undermining and toying with the expectations their conventions raise.
In some respects, My Life In Films harks back to the 1960s French nouvelle roman of authors like Alain Robbe-Grillet (appropriately enough, a noted contributor to the history of film himself) or plays a similar – though less formalised - set of variations as certain novels by OULIPO members such as Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec. Perhaps the key is to approach these stories less as a literary exercise, however, than a suite of ‘entertainments’ in some older fashioned sense, and reading the book from cover to cover is not too far removed, as an experience, from watching one of those archival early cinema DVDs (like the BFI’s Primitives and Pioneers) that veers from static cameras observing everyday scenes to manic slapstick, melodrama and adapted music hall turns, the apparent, and sometimes real, randomness nonetheless cohering into something greater than the sum of the parts.
Copyright © Wayne Burrows 2008
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