Spirits of the World Without Spirit

In amongst the mugging of Mike Leigh's monolith of class schematicism High Hopes there's a scene where the jolly bearded leftie goes to Highgate Cemetery, wherein he and his equally physiognomically curious girlfriend genuflect at the Soviet tomb plonked atop Marx's once rather unobtrusive grave. Today, assembling pictures and general prejudice for a piece on North London in preparation, via a now broken-spined copy of Nairn's London I paid a quick visit myself. The attendant sweetly asked 'here for Marx?' Perhaps I ought not to wear Communist iconography on my lapels, it gives the game away rather.


Southampton Odeon (now very much demolished)

In fact I was after the Egyptian Avenue and the Circle of Lebanon, which Nairn promised would be 'blood-curdling', but in the event this bit was closed, so I made do with Marx (now faced by Paul Foot, his little plinth engraved with a quote from Shelley's Mask of Anarchy: you know,'rise like lions after slumber'..., and with Anthony Shaffer just round the corner, fittingly given the cemetery's frequent use as a Hammer horror set) But what I did find was the grave of William Friese Greene, a Lutyens-designed bit of eccentricity, emblazoned 'INVENTOR OF KINEMATOGRAPHY', a little fragment of the future lying alongside sundry Victorian worthies. A film about Friese-Greene was made as part of the Festival of Britain in 1951, which is a nicely tied knot.


Muswell Hill Odeon (still, amazingly, a cinema)

Film is of course an immanently ghostly medium, which Maxim Gorky recognised over a hundred years ago as the 'kingdom of shadows': a picture site documents a remarkable hauntology* of British film architecture (as well as a more literal bit on Cinema Hauntings), a selection of the palaces made for Gaumont and Odeon in the UK, these receptacles for the dream factory at a time when it was politically crucial (especially if we give credence to the argument that film kept the USA from revolution in the 1930s) - the interwar picture palaces that would, after the war become bingo halls. They fall roughly into two camps, representing two rival dreams: the true picture palaces, made in rococo, Moorish, Egyptian, neo-classical and other forms of proto-postmodernism (without the bad faith): dreams of other lands, colonial dreams, the dreams of D.W Griffth or The Sheik, exotica as transport from suburbia- the other, usually a bastardised version of Erich Mendelsohn's 1926 Kino Universum on the Kufurstendamm, would be the dream of the future, a clear, antiseptic dream, surging irrepressibly forward. The dreams then, of Chaplin, King Vidor, Fritz Lang: 'no rococo palace for Buster Keaton' as Mendelsohn proclaimed.


The very elegant Finchley Gaumont

The multiplex-effected transformation towards Bingo has always baffled me, seeing as film is clearly a more profitable medium than Bingo, even in Morecambe or wherever. But there's something very apt about it, bingo halls being a place where people go when they're clearly on their way out, akin to the suspended animation the film spectator finds themselves in.


Brighton Academy: note appropriately sordid titles

*which term I'm going to insist on using, rather than haintology or h---ology, until everyone stops being so silly. Besides, I might want to write a thing on hauntological pornography before everyone gets bored with the whole thing...