The I on the wall

Finding ancestors in Auntie’s attic

In search of something to watch while the rest of the Editorial Board was in the bath, most particularly something of bath length, I watched Ken Russell’s 1960 film for the BBC ‘A House in Bayswater’, as recommended by the ever reliable Luke Honey in his Weekend Flicks Substack.

‘A House in Bayswater’ is a batty little half hour, profiling the tenants of a single house London townhouse: artists and photographers, ageing ballerinas, retired lady’s companions and a landlady insistently determined to come across as a ‘character’.

The next bath night, I discovered a 1976 episode of the long running arts show Omnibus, ‘New York, New York’. For all our complaining about current BBC commissioning, we can at least revel in their past glories by using their contemporary glory: the iPlayer.

‘New York, New York’ is really two separate films, about two New Yorks appropriately enough. The first is a portrait of a single summer Saturday in Soho, New York, in 1976. It features enough annoying art twerps and self-involved hipsters to fill a Bethnal Green bar and feels astonishingly early ‘70s, all homespun and hippy hair.

It's hard to believe, as you watch some terrifying earnest singer songwriter singing a terrifyingly earnest song about being a good citizen, that somewhere only a few doors away, Talking Heads are quite possibly rehearsing ‘Psycho Killer’. That somewhere only a few blocks away someone is finalising the set list for that night’s illegal disco. That someone a couple of boroughs away is inventing hip-hop. That a whole new cultural revolution is about to start, but it ain’t starting from here.

I’m being slightly unfair, not least because it does feature a brief sequence of artist Chuck Close painting a giant photo-realistic head, but it is thrown into stark relief by the second half. This is a cracking portrait of the nascent graffiti culture, focussing particularly on the tagging of subway trains.

What ties all three of these documentary films together is that none of them have a narrator. There is no celebrity up front claiming they’ve always been fascinated by the Manhattan of the period and doing little pieces to camera in front of the graffiti of the Statue of Liberty in a sombrero on Thompson Street with some artfully placed trash around their feet. ‘I’ve always loved ‘70s movies like ‘The French Connection’ but now I’m going to make a connection of my own, not with France or heroin, but with ‘70s New York. So, yes, actually, a bit with heroin, I suppose.’

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This is not to say that these shows don’t have a voice. In the case of Ken Russell’s film they have a very determined and idiosyncratic voice, in fact, but it’s a voice articulated through direction and editing, not through voiceover.

The first half of ‘New York, New York’ has almost no speech in it at all, apart from a choreographer berating her dancers and overheard snippets in passing. It’s mostly music and atmospherics as the camera cuts between musicians, artists and the summer streets outside. The second half is all vox pops from graffiti artists and members of the public, collaged with news reports and official pronouncements, all laid over footage of decaying ‘70s New York.

Not hosted, but definitely helmed, these are documentaries carefully collaged together to build their point from their material, without explicitly stating it. It’s a style which continued well into the ‘90s, you can see it in BBC shows from From A to B, but now is in danger of coming across as terribly arch and somewhat alienating and has hence largely disappeared.

Or has it? After all, what is Ken Russell’s film, other than ‘structured reality’? Or, actually, ‘scripted reality’, as he’s definitely set up several scenes deliberately in order to build his portrait of this loopy little bohemia. Films like these are distant ancestors of contemporary reality TV, the Neanderthals and Denisovans to the Homo Sapiens of ‘The Apprentice’ (not sure any Homo Sapiens are involved there, but you know what I mean). These are the individuals who broke the paths into new continents and who now only survive as strands of foundational DNA in the dominant species.

They certainly share the same interests: other people. But where reality TV mostly seems aimed at creating parasocial relationships with the featured characters, films like these are aiming to create a wider experience. They aim to capture a place, a scene, a gestalt image of a moment, in culture and history. Unlike the mediation of the hosted documentary, they attempt to give a visceral, aesthetic sense of being there, that for half an hour, you can feel some of the reality of ‘50s Bayswater or ‘70s Soho, even if you do have to put up with all the posers you find there.

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Here’s our piece on the splendidly ‘90s documentary series about people and their cars: From A to B