Jane Arden (a pseudonym possibly drawn from a ‘girl reporter’ comic strip, or a correspondent of Mary Wollstonecraft, or both, or neither) was born in 1927 and left the Welsh town of Pontypool at 16 to join RADA, a drama school in London. There, she met and married fellow student Philip Saville who she would collaborate with on and off for the rest of her life. She was an actor, director and writer for theatre, television and film, and made three feature films with lover and fellow traveller, Jack Bond, between 1968 and 1978. She died suddenly in 1983. Jack Bond is still alive, a West London raconteur, spinning freewheeling recollections of the ‘70s for Vice and the Telegraph, but he seems keen to avoid being pinned down to Arden. Even their exact roles in the films they made are hard to define. Arden is credited by the BFI with having directed The Other Side of Underneath (1972) and Anti-Clock (1979), and while the earlier Separation (1968) is credited to Bond, Arden’s influence as the writer and protagonist is clear. The BFI released DVDs of her films in 2009 with permission from Bond and her sons. A number of articles noted her precocity, the wide range of her ideas and engagements, gave quick précis of her films and let her fade away. Outside of film clubs her work has hardly ever been screened.
1.
Arden began writing for the stage in the fifties. Her first success, The Party, was staged in 1958. The play centres on the family of a schizophrenic man who has left hospital early, in time for his teenage daughter’s birthday party. Henrietta is desperately embarrassed by her father and longs for a model of success and stability, projecting her desires onto the various other men in her life: a quiet, “painfully introverted” lodger and a kind but self-doubting love interest, played by Albert Finney in his first ever role. Throughout the play the characters vary in their sympathy for Henrietta, but are all delighted by her father’s unorthodox behaviour. Henrietta’s rejection of him therefore inspires incomprehension and contempt. These reactions take a more sinister dimension when Henrietta hints (at the time it was difficult for Arden to do more) at a history of child abuse. Her father repeatedly calls her cold and unfeeling, claiming he is intimidated by her and has only ever wanted her approval and affection. Henrietta replies that, “No-one but I knew that you crouched behind your jokes, waiting to grab me… You grew out of the ground wherever I walked”. Even Henrietta’s suitor is co-opted by her looming, jolly father. Although the apparent, Uncle Vanya-style reconciliation between father and daughter that forms the ending of the play is a sop to the censors, it can also be read as a nuanced and disturbing portrait of the love that abused children can still crave from the family who have betrayed them.
In the late ‘60s, Arden left her husband and moved to America. There she met 26-year-old Jack Bond and appeared in Dali in New York (1965), a film which followed Arden and Dali through the streets, galleries and hotels of New York in the week before the opening of a major Dali exhibition at the Hartford Gallery of Modern Art. Arden clashing with the ageing and controlling artist. Together she and Bond made Separation (1968), an experimental portrait of a woman (Arden), who finds herself alone again suddenly in her middle-age and attempts to hold her own against the controlling depredations of men both younger and older. David de Keyser plays the surreally soft-spoken ex-partner, the psychiatrist-husband, constantly probing her mental and emotional state while deftly fending off any reciprocal approaches or hint of responsibility. Arden, who plays a character who is also called Jane, is having an affair with a younger man and mirror versions of this relationship are echoed in background vignettes, repeating images of controlling men, and distraught women. (“Keep your voice down. People are looking at you.”) The surface of the film is calm and easy, New Wave, swinging sixties. Couples smoke and laugh in a West End restaurant, beautifully-styled women lounge around a pool, and a young man in a striped suit climbs down fire escapes. Everything is tension and confusion. A young woman (Joy Bang) wanders through a large department store in an increasingly distracted state, harried by men and frowned at by women. In a cafe another couple’s conversation wanders threateningly: are they arguing about infidelity or is this a manipulative seduction? A young couple flirting at a shooting range suddenly transform into hunter and hunted: the young man points a pistol dispassionately and directly into the camera as the woman retreats pleading. An orgasmic sex scene between Arden and her lover cuts to her scrubbing the kitchen sink with lye. The women in Separation strive for an emotional directness and honesty that paralyses them and leaves them open to the control of the men around them, who criticise them for being too emotional and then for being artificial when they try to control those emotions.
These surreal sequences and the use of voice-over to constantly contradict or question the action on-screen show that Arden is already looking inward in order to explore the phenomenon of women in psychic revolt. In doing so she not only anticipates her later films’ engagement with new psychological constructions of woman’s role in society, but moves back to the Decadent movement’s use of somatic anti-narrative to disrupt simplistic interpretations of their work. In one scene, wearing only a wedding veil, Jane Arden sways naked while artist Mark Boyle’s liquid light show plays across her body. Here we see a moment of pure, exuberant interiority; one of the only moments in the film where the character is not reacting out to or being propelled by a man. The experimental staging of this scene counters the way that Arden’s character has been constructed by the men around her, as timid, crisis-struck and in need of rescuing by confronting the viewer with a psychedelic vision of an unspoilt interior life. The violent incursion of society into this interior life is shown later, as glamorous Italian actress (Malou Pantera) is massaged by a man at the edge of the swimming pool, she talks directly to camera in a stream of consciousness, as if describing sexual encounters to a therapist. Another man, out of shot, reaches down and slaps her across the face. The apparent safety of the moment is ruptured, with the therapist shown to be another invasive agent of control. Though the women in Separation are technically ‘liberated’, in miniskirts and make-up, with birth control and their own money, they are still caught. They are still operating within a reality controlled by and for men. The film is a critique of the sexual revolution and the new language of openness that appeared to allow women a voice but which, according to Arden, was really only a new method of control. Moments of formal experimentation – such as the hallucinogenic liquid light sequence – have a cryptic intensity that recalls Sontag’s call for “works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid” that they can resist the “reactionary, impertinent, cowardly and stifling” interpretative process.1
2.
In 1968 the Theatres Act and the repeal of censorship allowed Arden to engage in a radical experiment at the Arts Lab on Drury Lane. The result was ‘Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven’ (1969). In her introduction to the play, Arden states that “Separating the inner world from the outer is a technique used to wall people into their ‘private neurosis”, and, fittingly, ‘Vagina Rex’ is a violent, fourth-wall breaking piece of theatre with Brechtian songs. The influence of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Fernando Arrabal’s Panic Movement is also clear. Yet in contrast to her male contemporaries – for example, Panic co-founder Alejandro Jodorowsky – Arden does not punish or expose women’s bodies simply as a means to ‘shock’ the audience. The crucifixion of a woman in a bloody menstrual pad that ends The Other Side of Underneath is neither erotic nor performed by men. While Arden draws on the morbid and the macabre, she rejects the sensual exploitation and victimisation of the female body as a legitimate way of attacking patriarchal, bourgeois morality. This puts her in sharp contrast to filmmakers of excess like Jodorowsky or Lars von Trier who violate women’s bodies in order to achieve their ‘art’.2 In ‘Vagina Rex’ the stage is filled by a group of ‘Furies’, homeless hippies and dropouts who, according to cast members, slept in the auditorium after the shows at night. They form a protean menace, morphing from violent restrainers of the Woman (Sheila Allen) to adoring wedding crowds when she is wed by the Man (Victor Spinetti). As he shouts obscenities at her they masturbate, an adulatory crowd to the Man’s sexist stand-up routine. In a 2009 interview with the Unfinished Histories theatre project, Spinetti recalls that Arden wanted the “whining noise male comics use” when using women’s bodies for laughs.3 The routine escalates. The Man shifts without warning into assaulting an imaginary female body, winking at the audience, before finally convulsing and calling for his mother. Projections of the “close-up of vagina” interchange with an “enormous gas oven with open doors”, symbol of domestic servitude and female suicide. The lightning quick changes between aggression and affection reduce the Woman to broken, incoherent pleading. Later, the Man assumes the role of doctor, injecting the Woman and telling her: “I am the third part of the three-handed con trick. There is the softener, the taker and me – the cooler”. She reacts, “Relief floods through me as I allow his contempt – and we agree I’m mentally unstable.”
In both the introduction and conclusion to the play Arden is in dialogue with the Anti-Psychiatry movement, which claimed carceral psychiatry punished rather than helped the patient. Popular, counter-cultural constructions saw the family as both a structure of control and the site of debilitating mental illness, and these tended to go further than the actual writings by prominent Anti-Psychiatrists such as R.D. Laing and David Cooper. Texts like The Politics of Experience (1967) were exploited for their revolutionary potential in ways that they themselves shied away from. Formed in 1970 in Heidelberg, The Socialist Patients Collective denounced ‘Health’ as “a bio-fascist figment of the imagination” and called on people to “turn illness into a weapon”.4 Laing’s conception of schizophrenia as “ontological insecurity” had obvious appeal for Arden and is evident in Vagina Rex, The Other Side of Underneath and Anti-Clock. Laing theorised that a ‘double-bind’5, or a continuous stream of contradictory messaging, was responsible for inducing schizophrenia and that women were particularly exposed to it. This ‘double bind’ is explicitly evoked in the dual assaults upon the Woman in ‘Vagina Rex’ and by the controlling, softly-spoken husband in Separation, both women caught in a blizzard of incompatible demands. Arden’s rejection of an authoritarian definition of ‘health’ also recalls the writing of Arthur Symmons who called Decadence “a new and beautiful and interesting disease”, pushing against the notions of ‘healthy’ writing evangelised by theorists like Lombroso and Nordau.6 “Decadents are decadent not because they depict illness and decay but because they do not recognize the existence of health,” writes Barbara Spackman in Decadent Geneologies (1989). Arden refused both the condition of madness as pathologised by society and the malign attempts of society to correct it. Her ritualising of the psychotic break and her liturgising of schizophrenic speech both celebrate and mourn the role which she sees women as having been thrust into. As the Woman states in the opening monologue of ‘Vagina Rex’:
At fifteen, the alternatives presented themselves – fight – submit- or go mad. I made a compromise – a dance contracted between these three would keep me occupied for the next twenty years.
Working at the intersection of Anti-Psychiatry and experimental, decadent filmmaking, Arden explores female madness as more than an extension of or location for male neurosis. Like Artaud, she identifies the pathologising and manipulative structures imposed by authoritarian institutions and searches for imaginative and eloquent solutions. Unlike Arrabal, she utilises both anti-psychiatric theory and modes of avant-garde alienation while critiquing both for the entrenched patriarchal attitudes that they failed to dismantle.
Arden’s journey to the interior in Separation led to her later preoccupation with the failure of therapy and film as an exorcising ritual in and of itself. Her next film was shot in Wales, a direct confrontation with her “somber, suppressed” childhood in Pontypool.7 The Other Side of Underneath (1972) is a difficult film. In her introduction to the BFI release, Amy Simmons notes that it “smacks of voyeurism and exploitation”. It takes place in remote Wales, filmed over four weeks with participants staying in character as schizophrenic asylum inmates. If ‘Vagina Rex’ was an assault on the audience then here the assault is turned on the actors who take part in the film. Arden’s mysterious off-camera psychiatrist mother figure exerts an intense pressure on the ‘inmates’ and their reactions become increasingly extreme. A scene where one actress swings an axe at another, shell-shocked, and splattered with gore, is difficult to watch even without the live band playing in full swing behind them. In a chaotic set piece made with the residents of a nearby home for the mentally ill, members of a local Traveller community, and street drinkers bussed in from Cardiff, half-naked actresses are grabbed repeatedly by extras, who scream in turn, frightened or distressed, while two adolescent boys beat each other bloody. The camera wheels through the party. The footage is beautiful but disturbing and uncomfortable. Who is Arden accusing and who is she punishing? The cruelty often seems unjustified, directed at the young women, actresses and drifters who had been picked up at the Arts Lab in London. She pushes them to performances of female psychic pain so extreme as to have lasting consequences. “We were all on acid and Jane was dead drunk”, stated one of the actresses when interviewed for the 2009 release. She, like the others who gave interviews, say that this was the end of their collaboration with Arden.
During a lengthy and graphic sex scene with Arden’s lover, Jack Bond, actress (and artist and filmmaker in her own right) Penny Slinger hides her face in the crook of her elbow from the camera throughout. The scene is ambiguous in its intention and both participants seem self-conscious and uncomfortable. Slinger gives her reasons for agreeing to it in an interview but still seems ill at ease decades later. The Other Side of Underneath can be viewed as an attempt to deliberately engineer a sort of collective psychosis in order to achieve a collective rebirth. The dangers of doing this outside of a controlled, clinically supervised environment like Kingsley Hall are plain from the terror of the actresses. In the interviews that emerged following the release of the film, one of them claimed that Arden kept a live bear on set during filming.8 While we never see it we completely believe her. Arden’s attempt to use madness’s liberating and revolutionary effect had failed.
3.
In 1978, Arden published a short book with Polytantric Press entitled, You Don’t Know What You Want Do You? Now out of print, it is described by film professor Claire Monk as “part-manifesto, part self-deprogramming manual”.9 In it, Arden lays out the methods by which the rational mind (RAT) controls our behaviour and self-propagates through our language. It is not nearly as humourless as it sounds, containing a series of “anti-RAT games” through which the reader is invited to examine and counteract their programming. The centre of RAT’s world is the “puzzle-picture” and the RAT’s principle activity is trying to fit the relentless flow of personal and international information into the “puzzle-picture” in order to feel that “the picture is both meaningful and thrilling to others.” RAT language controls both the self and others through games such as ‘In My Opinion’, which is “best played with detached self-righteousness or deep concern”. Arden advises,
If you are ever a victim of IN MY OPINION
summon your last ounce of energy – quite
difficult because IN MY OPINION is a great
energy-sucker – and shout
HOO HOO HOO
Rats should scatter immediately.
Radio station ANTICLOCK is evoked as a counterpoint of the Control Tower (central stronghold of the RAT), a frequency that can be tuned into in order to negate RAT control mechanisms and live in the present.
Arden’s next and last film builds directly from this text. Anti-Clock is focused on a young man, Joseph Sapha (played by Arden’s son Sebastian Saville), assailed by psychiatrists and battling suicidal urges. The film is largely shot on CCTV, Jack Bond having persuaded electronics retailer Dixons to give the production 50 Sony cameras. The visual effect, while familiar today, is another of Arden’s uncanny presciences. CCTV would not be trialled as the ubiquitous method of social surveillance it is today until 1987. Anti-Clock represents visually (in ways literal and abstract) the controlling mechanisms Arden perceived around her and offers meditative, trance-like sequences to help the viewer break free. Four years previously she and Bond had made a short, ‘Vibration’, in Morocco, an experimental meditative exploration of Sufism with rhythmic visual sequences and distorted images that she would use again in Anti-Clock. Arden also includes the live ventriloquist’s dummy sequence from ‘Vagina Rex’ alongside a familiar, controlling psychiatrist figure, Professor J.D. Zanof (also played by Sebastian Saville) and footage of war, female masturbation and breakdown that recalls The Other Side of Underneath. A new theme is the exploration of parapsychology. Three enigmatic women explain the concepts of ‘energy structures’ and precognition on wavering blue CCTV. However, when Sapha plays poker with four men, his mind-reading and para-sensitivity bring no renewal or revitalisation. He wins the game, that’s all. Jaded, he notes without much interest that one man who has lost everything is about to hang himself. His newfound sensitivity and understanding seem to deaden empathy and engagement rather than enhance them. Sapha sees through the net of our reality but finds nothing behind it.
“I am forever a half a second too late”, says his voiceover as Sapha walks through blue, distorted CCTV footage, answering or completing the refrain of the nameless protagonist – “Too early, I am always too early” – in Separation. As Sapha struggles to distinguish himself from the processes that trap him, his dialogue becomes unsettlingly suggestive of a renunciation not just of society but of life.
If I ever believed I had a will this illusion has been taken from me… My past actions a perpetual labyrinth, a web.
we have penetrated an equation that must move us towards the infinite.
Anti-Clock rejects many of the solutions explored by Arden in earlier works. Systems of control cannot be escaped through love or confrontation or madness. Even the possibilities of escape offered by earlier films are now placed in the mouth of that Arden bogeyman, the psychiatrist, and Sapha is unmoved by them. The calm surrender to predestination is mirrored and amplified by the total surveillance that Sapha is under, the hypnotic distortions and soundtrack undermine the deprogramming intent of the language. Though Sapha has seen through the ‘puzzle-picture’ of his subjectivity this has not led to rejuvenation or re-engagement with the world. The film ends with him still filmed on CCTV, alone, examining one of the CCTV monitors. The mind is free of its constraints, the individual is free of external controls and structures. But what is left?
Joe Brace is a founding editor at Ghoul Magazine.
1. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Penguin Modern Classics, 1966, p. 7 2. Jodorowsky in particular explicitly associates the act of artistic creation with the act of rape in the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune (Frank Pavich, 2013) 3. These can be heard here 4. SPK Manifesto – Turn Illness Into A Weapon, 1987 5. The ‘double bind’ was first described by Gregory Bateson in Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia (1956), Behavioral Science, vol.1, 1956, 251–264 6. Harper’s Magazine, 1983 7. Interview with Arden (1967), Separation DVD notes 8. Interview for Natasha Morgan The Other Side of Underneath DVD extras 9. Claire Monk, Sight & Sound, Volume 19, Issue 8, Aug 2009
This essay appears in Another Gaze 03. You can buy the issue here.
