Herostratus

In its time this movie must have been a mind-blowing experience. It's still worth seeing for its overall bravura and the performances of Michael Gothard and (in a lesser role) Mona Hammond. But in 2022 it has little we haven't seen many times over. The experimental style, the critique of capitalist exploitation, the existential dread, the failures of history...you know the drill. It's all as true as it ever was, of course, but there are subtler and less pretentious ways of telling the story now. The film is also frighteningly sexist, in a way that was acceptable in the late 1960s but no longer. And dare I say it, the protagonist's emotional story arc was hackneyed even then. I'll admit, though, that the ending was a genuine surprise, the most thoughtful part of the film for me.

A surreal exploration of the potential endgame of the cynical capitalism behind Swinging London - and a vague play on the Faustian legend. A young man sells his suicide to an advertising agency in return for a month of luxury. The agency will market his suicide to advertisers, filming his jump from a high building past their posters in the windows. The price gets higher the nearer the ground. As a film it illustrated the hard edge to those loose days; I saw it in 1968 at the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead. Several people fled during some highly graphic abbatoir close-ups. Some of the acted images have never left me, particularly the hero walking into the agency director's office carrying an axe and sinking it into his desk. What a way to get attention! 35 years later I would really like to see this film again but for some reason it seems to have disappeared without trace ... Don Levy - you out there?

A somewhat avant-garde and confusing - in the best possible way - drama that has proved itself to be remarkably prescient and another fantastic gem in the BFI's series of British rediscoveries.

Combining satire and tragedy, and starring the brilliant Michael Gothard, this is a blazing account of how acts of genuine rebellion are ultimately destined to be commodified and sanitised and deserves to be appreciated by a wider audience looking for drama presented in an offbeat manner.

A struggling, psychologically unbalanced poet decides to commit suicide and convinces a top marketing expert to promote it to the general public via the media. The title references this destructive behaviour in that Herostratus was a character from ancient Greek mythology who destroyed one of the Seven Wonders of the World in order to achieve fame.

This British underground film was unseen for close to forty years before it was resurrected by the BFI. It is a very odd film indeed, pretty much fully an avant-garde piece. The story-line is essentially quite basic and not a huge amount of plot really happens, which for a 142min film is unusual. For me, by far the most interesting thing about this one was its visual ideas. It's a film which is relentlessly experimental in approach with elements of surrealism. The memorable visuals are often achieved by way of very bold editing techniques used throughout, where contrasting images are juxtaposed with each other. There is recurring imagery used extensively, including a mysterious black clad woman wandering the backstreets of London, an exotic dancer interspersed with images from a slaughterhouse, old newsreels and many billboard advertisements. There is a hell of a lot more than this as well but this is a film which throws a lot at you and it can be hard recalling precisely everything that occurs. There is a mixture between very long single takes and fast edits, the former are used for dramatic intensity. Michael Gothard is the lead here and he is an actor associated with intense performances, so he is a good fit it has to be said. The film overall is certainly a fascinating watch but it is slow in places and there are patches where it does get a bit tedious. The narrative was semi-interesting but the visual invention is really what it's worth seeing for and it is for sure a film that should be seen by those drawn towards experimental cinema. Look out too for an appearance of a very young Helen Mirren.

HEROSTRATUS was, sadly, the only feature-length narrative project realized by the remarkable scientist, visual artist, and filmmaker Don Levy. Though little-known and seldom screened, its influence has been greater than one might think and may be visible in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, PERFORMANCE, and perhaps in the early films of Werner Herzog.

The film is remarkable not only for its very high visual quality (often on the level of the best of Antonioni and Tarkovsky) and for its sometimes innovative relations of sound and image, but also for the attitude and working method of the director: a highly personal and historically deeply rooted concept of surrealism, linked to the scientific method, that shapes the stream of consciousness woven into the narrative into something close to visual music.

I had the opportunity to see this film twice in the 1970's, and thirty years later, images are still vividly present. I'll mention just two: first, the black-clad woman (Ines Levy) lighted from behind, face painted white, carrying a black parasol, seen either slowly stalking out of an alley towards the viewer, or standing on a rooftop, viewed from below, recalling for me drawings by Hans Bellmer. Second, the lengthy hyper-violent sequence in which the protagonist demolishes his paraphernalia-packed apartment. A swaying suspended doll stands out within the jagged rhythms of the editing and will much later in the film be flashed into another key sequence: one example for the rich network of associations that go far beyond story-telling structures. On the soundtrack during the demolition: one of the virulent fugues from Beethoven's MISSA SOLEMNIS.

The film's female lead is named Clio, and CLIO is, in Greek mythology, the muse of history.

HEROSTRATUS does have some flaws, but is by any applicable standards a work of depth and integrity. Had it received more extensive distribution, it might have turned out to be a key film of the late 1960's. It's to be hoped that current plans for a commercial DVD release will soon bear fruit and that this film will receive the (belated) recognition that it richly deserves.