Walking the line: Iain Sinclair (left) surveys London
London’s itinerant seer Iain Sinclair, famed for his documented walks around the city, has set out again to trek around the ‘ginger line’ for a filmed adaptation of his latest book, London Overground.
Directed by John Rogers, the film takes place over the course of the year, rather than a single day. It follows Sinclair as he follows the railway tracks on foot from his home in Haggerston, visiting 33 stations in a 35 mile round trip.
Film-maker Andrew Kötting, who walked him when he first made the 15 hour journey, joins him in Rotherhithe, and they make their way together through Canada Water, Surrey Quays to Queens Road Peckham.
At Willesden Junction he is met by film-maker and author Chris Petit, and in Dalston local campaigner Bill Parry-Davies, who composed some of the film’s score, joins him to survey what has changed as the area has been redeveloped.
Sinclair dubbed the Overground the ‘ginger line’ after he heard the moniker from some costumed art students in New Cross, who make an appearance in the film too.
He describes it as the “spin-drier of capitalism whirling bank notes around the city – a real moment to look at this city of unreal money” where a new city is emerging.
The film offers a “snapshot of the city in transition and a unique insight into the most important chronicler of contemporary London.”
The film will premiere as part of the East End Film Festival. The screening will take place at the Rio Cinema in Dalston on Saturday 2 July and a Q&A with Iain Sinclair and John Rogers will be held afterwards.
Iain Sinclair is no stranger to vast, impossible circuits. At the turn of the century, he conducted a series of walks along the M25 that amounted to its entire length, and drew from the experience an unprecedented document of poetic psychogeographical prose. It was a celebration of pilgrimage, a postmodernist jaunt through time and territory – to nowhere. Now, 15 years on, he’s turned his attention to the tracks of the ‘Ginger Line’ in London Overground.
The Hackney-based writer took inspiration for the project from a group of eccentric students he came across at New Cross Gate, on one of his regular suburban treks. He was headed, like Chaucer’s convoy, in the direction of Canterbury. The friends – “kids from Goldsmiths in fancy dress”, he assumes – had taken to gathering at random locations on the line to party at a moment’s notice.
In conversation with this “boho rabble”, garbed in gypsy skirts and goat masks, Sinclair finds his subject. “When they spilled out into Shoreditch,” he writes, “I realised that I had blundered once again into a version of London about which I knew nothing. And I would have to find some way to investigate. As he passed my window, the goat held up a finger to his lips. A warning I was foolish enough to ignore.”
His investigation takes the form of a day’s tramp around the railway: 35 miles and 33 stops in the company of filmmaker and close friend Andrew Kötting, whose presence is rich with a complex comic energy akin to his unique brand of documentary. Starting at dawn in Haggerston, the pair’s circumnavigation cuts through Wapping, Peckham Rye, Clapham Junction, Imperial Wharf, West Brompton and so on, before arriving back in the dead of night to Hackney.
Along the way, Sinclair interrogates the lay of the land and excavates meaning from forgotten and never-before-told narratives, inspecting the city’s detritus with wry humour and irresistible poetry. His grumbling observations of how the Overground has altered London are barbed and brilliant: “The railway smoothes history into heritage, neutralising the venom. Every Halt absorbs the last, until the necklace achieves a uniform, dull sheen. Faked pearls on a ginger string.”
Beyond the signature politics of development, regeneration and gentrification – climaxing in a fluke meeting with Boris Johnson “in full cry… barking like a seal” at Old Street Roundabout – the journey is an act of cultural archaeology. Sinclair dedicates swathes of razor-sharp prose to the likes of J.G. Ballard, W.G. Sebald and Leon Kossoff, riffing on Chelsea Harbour, manipulated histories and the railway as muse, respectively.
The most impressive of these diversions is given to Angela Carter, whom the author met on numerous occasions prior to her death in 1992. Sinclair’s moving trudge through Clapham inspires an overwhelming urge to read Wise Children and Nights at the Circus. In the same vein, his time in Hampstead impels a trip to the brief London residence of Sigmund Freud, who is described as a fabled force akin to Sherlock Holmes.
Of the house, which is now a ghostly and meticulously-preserved museum, the traveller writes: “Although it existed, and glowed a fiery red in our evening reverie, this blue-plaque address – 20 Maresfield Gardens – was as mythical in the psychogeography of London as the rooms associated with Sherlock Holmes at 22b Baker Street.”
For anyone unfamiliar with Sinclair’s work, London Overground is an ideal place at which to start. It’s shorter and somewhat lighter than previous publications, but is still crammed with nourishment. It’s another fine addition to the literature of our city.
London Overground: A Day’s Walk Around the Ginger Line is published by Hamish Hamilton ISBN: 978-0241146958. RRP: £16.99
By Our Selves cast, taken using a pin-hole camera. Photograph: Andrew Kotting
History remembers John Clare as a troubled ‘peasant poet’, an obsessive romantic-era wordsmith who penned more than three and a half thousand pieces over 70 years. He wrote, among other things, about the subtle wonders of the natural world and how the land enclosures of his time frustrated his experience thereof.
Born to a labourer in Helpston, Northampton, he was a rambler, a man of the fields. In 1841, after a four-year stint of fairly benevolent internment in a progressive Epping Forest asylum, he trudged 80 miles home – almost four days with no food and not a penny to his name. In the weeks that followed, he wrote a manic prose account of his ‘Journey Out Of Essex’, a document of memory and delusion, loss and longing.
Hackney-based writer and chronic walker Iain Sinclair echoed the poet’s infamous trek for his 2005 book Edge of the Orison. It was an escape from his eternal circuit of the M25 (London Orbital). He recently convinced his artist-filmmaker friend Andrew Kötting to take a camera to the route and make something more of Clare’s terrible journey. The result is By Our Selves, a hazy, Herzogian work in progress starring Toby Jones and his father, Freddie.
Having raised £20,345 through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, the film previewed at Hackney Picturehouse last month and is a welcome addition to a growing field of work in response to Clare’s life.
“I guess in a way the credit for the film should be given to Iain,” says Kötting. “He started badgering me a couple of years ago. He suggested that perhaps we could make a film around his book Edge of the Orison, and I’d read it and in fact it was one of my favourite Sinclair books. It was the first book I’d read of his where he was digging into the autobiographical.”
He explains that on revisiting the text, he was beguiled by an image of a man in a suit holding a rope attached to a straw bear, a ritual that Sinclair sheds light on before the preview.
“Somebody dresses up as a shamanic straw bear,” he says, “and they dance around the pubs of Whittlesey, a brick-making town, and then on the second morning they burn the bear. Andrew suddenly thought that if he performed as the straw bear and he accompanied John Clare on the road it would be really interesting, and from that moment he was right up for it. That defined the film.”
Still from By Our Selves
A feverishly experimental documentary, By Our Selves sees Jones, Kötting and Sinclair ghosting through a middle-English landscape of hedgerows and wind farms, with Sinclair – dark-suited and goat-masked – reading excerpts from Clare’s journal.
Fragments of sound from other films and recordings add to a hallucinatory atmosphere. “John Clare was a minor nature poet who went mad,” flickers throughout.
It’s a stunning piece built on connections, coincidence and déjà vu – an introverted work, with Jones, as the poet, silent, given a voice by his real-life father’s trembling renditions.
Sinclair, whose book details his own significant links to Clare, explains: “The interesting thing was that Toby’s father, Freddie Jones, this terrific actor, had acted John Clare on TV in 1970. Toby was four years old and his father was playing John Clare and his mother Mrs Clare, and of course he goes off into an asylum in the end and Toby was freaked out by this.
“I think out of respect for what his father had done he wanted to take part. So the father and son are haunting each other… There were very strong connections and all these things came into play as we went along the road.”
Kötting elaborates: “We hatched this idea that Toby wouldn’t have to say anything, he would just be with us and he would be ventriloquised by his dad. That only came about because I went and met Freddie with Iain and he was so enthusiastic about the project. We got him to read ‘Journey Out Of Essex’, so we had a voice that could possess a younger John Clare.
“It’s that duality you get throughout the film, you know, the father and son, the heaven and the earth, the human versus the animal – there are lots of dualities at work in the piece.”
Kötting is a rare breed of filmmaker. While he’s an eccentric performer, a larger-than-life, frenetic comedian, the spaces in which his films unfold are, on the surface, quieter and more tranquil – but no less mysterious: the River Thames in Swandown, the Pyrenees in the beautiful This Our Still Life. He cuts a fine balance between contemplative poetry and absurdist hilarity, unearthing a strange energy wherever he goes.
Of his roving approach to gathering material, Kötting says: “I’ve often felt that it’s such an easy way of doing things and it flies in the face of structures. What I find is, as with Iain’s writing, you turn the page and you could end up in Africa, or contemplating land enclosures, next thing you’re at a funeral, you know, you’ve no idea where you might be from one page to the next.”
Although humour has “infested” much of Kötting’s work, this latest piece, he explains, is perhaps his most emotional and pensive film to date. “I made the decision in the edit suite to try and coax out the spookiness. Ultimately it became a far more tense, melancholic drift of a piece than I imagined it would have done, and a lot of that is given over to trying to enter into the mindset of John Clare. I don’t think he was a happy man – he was always battling his demons.”
That’s not to say there’s no trace of his signature comedy: a conversation between Sinclair and graphic novelist Alan Moore, musing on a Northampton life, is laugh-out-loud hilarious; so, too, is the moment a passer-by on a mobility scooter is told, on enquiring, that they’re filming John Clare. “That’s not John Clare,” he cries, aghast.
Ultimately, though, By Our Selves is a serious and successful film about following the footsteps of an obscure literary figure, confronting madness, the politics of the English countryside and a whole lot more. It’s another curious collaboration between two of the UK’s most interesting artists, forever tramping the ley lines.
Stick ’em up! Eve Hedderick-Turner, Matilda Sturridge and Bonnie Wright star in How (Not) to Rob a Train playing at Hackney Picturehouse on 13 January as part of the London Short Film Festival. Photograph: Claire Pepper
Short films will be in plentiful supply this month with the return of the London Short Film Festival to cinemas in East London.
Hackney Picturehouse and Oval Space are two of the host venues for the 12th edition of the festival, taking place from 9–18 January.
This year’s programme is billed as a snapshot of 21st Century Britain, complete with love stories, horror stories, comedy, documentary, music and low budget gems.
An eclectic itinerary includes themed programmes such as Surreal World and Night of the Living Docs, as well as special screenings and events.
Iain Sinclair and Andrew Kötting will be discussing their new project By Our Selves, a film that traces the journey of Romantic poet John Clare from Epping Forest to Northamptonshire accompanied by a straw bear.
Other highlights include a fashion film programme, a night of queer short film and music, and Fourwalls, a selection of films about housing made by Londoners.
Favouring original voices over mainstream filmmakers, the LSFF has become the most comprehensive showcase of short film in the UK.
Festival director Philip Ilson has spelt out the festival’s mission, saying: “We want to be challenging and questioning; looking behind the curtain to seek out what’s hidden, and expose it to the world.
“It’s an amazing feeling to get wowed by the ground breaking creative work coming through year after year and get that out in front of excited audiences.”
Iain Sinclair at the launch of 70×70. Photograph: Laura Bradley
Something about Iain Sinclair’s latest book screams of a serious author having some serious fun. 70×70 – Unlicensed Preaching: A Life Unpacked In 70 Films is a deliciously poetic documentation of a sprawling curation project that does exactly what it says on the tin, and then some.
In celebration of his 70th birthday – and in response to a suggestion made by King Mob’s Paul Smith – the Hackney wordsmith rummaged through his own back catalogue in search of traces of works he’s hunted, happened upon, made and admired. From it, he pulled a film for every year to date, weaving together a rich sort of cultural autobiography.
Over the next 12 months, Sinclair screened all 70 films in a series of special events across the city, trekking out to obscure parts of town to talk about everything from Douglas Sirk’s wonderful Tarnished Angels to Patricio Guzmán’s jaw-dropping Nostalgia for the Light.
With the mammoth undertaking done and dusted, Unlicensed Preaching represents something of a project journal.
The book is split into two main parts: the first a collection of short passages offering nutritious insight into each of the films concerned, and the second a record of the events held, comprising Sinclair’s intros, transcripts of conversations, and contributions from friends and collaborators, such as Alan Moore, Chris Petit and Andrew Kötting.
The essays in the first section are sure to delight anyone with a modicum of interest in film. Whether or not you’ve seen the material is of minor significance. Reading about Kiefer Sutherland making “a pass at that cryogenic Burroughs voice of world-weary cynicism” opposite Courtney Love’s “emboldened” Joan Vollmer in Beat – and what it is about this bizarre feature that works – is fascinating, regardless of prior knowledge.
Reading about directors you are more likely to have preconceptions of – like Godard, Sirk, Welles and Hitchcock – is an education, but perhaps most interesting are the commentaries on Sinclair’s own work and that of his friends. An extended piece on his collaboration with Petit and Susan Stenger on Marine Court Rendezvous – “where the silenced dead catch up with their fugitive souls” – is simply marvellous. And the same goes for his thoughts on Kötting’s stunning This Our Still Life.
The second section expands on the reasoning behind his choices and furthers the intrigue. We learn about things like the “collaging and bricolage of sounds”, the spillage as “projects leak into each other”, and much more. He loosely situates each film within both a personal and wider cultural landscape, with key figures and ideas popping up over and again.
This unclassifiable book knits a complex tapestry of history, memory, documentary and fiction in a way that those familiar with Sinclair’s writing will surely recognise. His sentences are often dense and always thrilling to roll your tongue around. But his ideas on the past, present and future of cinema are what remain, steadfast and long after reading.
70×70: Unlicensed Preaching: A Life Unpacked in 70 Films is published by Volcano Publishing. ISBN: 9780992643454. RRP: £25
Iain Sinclair at London Review of Books bookshop launch of 70×70. Photograph: Laura Bradley
Hackney-based author and filmmaker Iain Sinclair launched his new book, 70×70: Unlicensed Preaching, in an event at the London Review Bookshop last month.
Tagged as A Life Unpacked In 70 Films, the work chronicles Sinclair’s 70th-birthday project, for which he chose 70 films – important to him in some way – to be screened in locations across the capital over the course of a year. Friends and collaborators Chris Petit and Susan Stenger joined the writer in a discussion chaired by film curator Gareth Evans, during which they touched on the changing nature of how we engage with cinema – a key aspect of 70×70.
“This is essentially a curation of memory and of a particular period of life where cinema was important,” Sinclair says, explaining how our experience of catching a film has lost something vital over the years.
“This evening is absolute because it’s now, it can’t be repeated. That’s what we’ve lost in a sense with cinema. What was great in the early days was that we went out and made journeys,” he says.
“Buñuel was on one night only, if you didn’t go there you missed it, you may not see it again for another four years. Now that everything’s available and broken down and atomized, everything’s changed.”
The films written about in the book range from Hitchcock’s Psycho and Godard’s British Sounds to John Mackenzie’s Docklands masterpiece The Long Good Friday, with plenty of obscure gems scattered in between.
For the last year, Hackney author and filmmaker Iain Sinclair has been involved in a work of Odyssean proportions. In celebration of his seventieth birthday last June, he was asked to curate a personal project entitled 70×70, choosing 70 films for a series of special screenings and discussions across the capital. The task has taken him on a voyage into his own past, through a history of independent film and deep into the cinematic consciousness of London.
Speaking on a Saturday morning – stealing an hour before he must set off for a showing at the Elephant and Castle of three obscure features I’d not heard of – he gives me a brief overview of the experience.
“When I took it on I had no idea quite what it would involve. It seems like one of those ideas you get sitting down in a pub or having a late breakfast somewhere off Broadway Market and someone says ‘would you like to pick 70 films?’” It was a notion proposed to him by Paul Smith of King Mob, a spoken-word label that released CDs by Sinclair in the 90s.
“It sounds like a great sort of birthday present,” he continues. “And one way of looking back at the part films have played in my life, but in actuality it involved writing descriptions of all of these 70 films and then travelling out night after night to funny parts of the town.”
The films chosen have been a peculiar and intriguing bunch. The list includes the likes of Herzog, Fassbinder, Godard, Hitchcock and Hopper, not to mention a vast catalogue of directors you’ll never have come across. It’s a gold mine for film-lovers looking to fill their pockets with rare and forgotten gems.
“It’s kind of an act of archaeology and rescue and salvage and scavenging in lots of ways, in the same process as people comb through car boot sales or markets and pick up strange lost videos and DVDs and so on.”
The process of picking such a large number of films might sound difficult, but while the physical side of 70×70 has taken its toll, Sinclair explains that selection itself was not so much of a challenge.
“It was literally about going back, using my books that I’ve published, looking at what films were referenced in each of these books, making an initial list and then including some films that I’ve been involved with to give a fuller sense of a life in London that was largely hung around the presence of certain films.”
To borrow a phrase from his excellent book about the Beat poets, American Smoke, the project seems to have been like a raid on his own past. He describes the act of editing as similar to piecing together a kind of autobiographical documentary. However, not simply a linear map of films he’s watched along the way, the project explores the medium in a geographical sense, retracing the changing environment of film viewing and almost resurrecting a pre-internet sort of cinema experience.
Born in Maesteg in South Wales, Sinclair was living and studying in Brixton when he first “chased a film” to what’s now the Rio cinema in Dalston. This element of travel – an almost topographical approach – was an essential aspect of the work.
“It was my first visit to the East End,” he explains. “In a sense the geography of London was involved with where I saw certain films and that went on for a number of years. Obviously now the whole way of looking at films is very different with DVDs and the way that films can be found that once upon a time involved terrific geographical chases to track them down.”
The idea of simply finding a film on the web is still a foreign one to him; perhaps he sees it as a lazy, even defeatist mode of viewing that detracts from the fun of the hunt and the pilgrimage he so values.
“There’s something very magical still about seeing them actually in the community of the cinema, this building which goes back so deep into the culture of London – a bunch of people staring at this huge screen on which this rather wonderful and exotic product that’s come from somewhere is being shown just for that day, for that week. It was very special.
“Now the whole sense of it is very different. Obviously you can just type in a name and something comes up on your small screen and you think you’ve sampled it, but you haven’t had that complete sensory experience that also involves the journey and the community that you’re watching it with.”
It’s an invigorating message and one that lends itself to a wider understanding of Sinclair’s approach to his own work. Research seems to come hand in hand with experience and almost always involves a trip, an exploration – in the fullest sense of the word.
For his acclaimed book London Orbital he traversed the 120-mile length of the M25; for Swandown – a delightfully bizarre poetic documentary made with friend and collaborator Andrew Kötting – he pedalled a plastic swan from Hastings to East London via the back rivers of Kent; and more recently he walked the entire London Overground in a single day for a new book about the railway’s effect on the urban landscape and life therein.
Over the years, Sinclair’s literary output has established him a reputation as a pioneer of British psychogeography, a discipline he might not have been able to skirt entirely for 70×70 but one that is largely absent from his chosen films. When I first heard of the project, I half expected a compilation of documentary essays by Patrick Keiller, Julien Temple, Paul Kelly and the like, but, as he suggests when I put this to him, I may have been guilty of a kind of cultural branding.
“That’s very strongly why they’re not on my list. I didn’t want to go down that particular route because essentially I’d written it,” he says. “If I was just picking films I liked, Patrick Keiller would very probably have come into it, but it was a bit tautologist to do that in this particular context because it’s already such an academic industry. I felt I didn’t need to do that.”
With the series nearing its end, Sinclair looks back on the first event in July last year with particular fondness. Two films were screened at the Hackney Picturehouse – a building he made good use of years ago when it was public library – that mean a lot to him: The Sorcerers, a 1967 piece by his friend Mike Reeves, and The Cardinal and the Corpse, an early 90s collaboration between himself and Chris Petit for Channel 4. “Everything about it felt good,” he says. “I thought that was a rather magic occasion and there’s been many others since.”
The ambitious undertaking of 70×70 is set to finish at the Barbican on 7 and 8 June, with an event that will include an intimate programme of films Sinclair has been directly involved with. He will be joined in conversation by Kötting, Petit and Robert Macfarlane, among others.
“I could easily sit down and do it again with a totally different 70 but I don’t want to,” he laughs, describing the end as a kind of watershed. “I’ve actually recovered a different sense of what film is in London at this moment by doing this project. And hopefully we finish up at the Barbican at the end of it all with a couple of days worth of films that are really personal to me.”
A few days after our interview, I send him an email in search of some extra information and ask how the screening at the Elephant and Castle went. Three films were shown that apparently hadn’t found a niche elsewhere: Too Hot to Handle, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie; it was attended by just four people, three of whom were a part of the project and the other a lone outsider.
“It was like a wake for a certain kind of cinema,” he writes back, in typically brilliant fashion.
