High Rise, J. G. Ballard, 1975
Brian, film fanatic and explorer of new worlds in this story bearing his name, is an exciting book to continue our posts. Exciting because Brian takes us only a short geographical distance in the space and time of twenty first century London, England, but through the movies he loves we roam from wild western and southern America to mystical Dungeness, Italy, Japan, and other on-screen elsewheres.
Back in London we eat at Il Castelletto, a pocket portion of Italy in the polyglot swirl of Bloomsbury. We join Brian there, savouring pasta and pizza.
Kentish Town is a tight corridor until recently peopled by migrants kept out of the smarter north London villages. Sliced by roads and trains, not quite Camden and really not Highgate, Kentish Town’s highlights are the Owl Bookshop, the Forum, and a ghost tube station.
Kick left off Brian’s Kentish Town Road, up towards the glistening Dominican Priory, and you’re at the Talacre. Just a patch of park, but the planned location of Joan Littlewood’s Interaction Centre - a machine of a space assembled on paper by architect Cedric Price to encourage diverse social groups to mix positively and playfully.
Brian is soon deep in velvet seats, sound-deadening carpet and flickering darkness at the BFI (British Film Institute). We may have met Brian, or asked him for a light, back when the BFI had transformed the south bank vaults of Waterloo Bridge into its own interaction space: drinking, dating, reading, waiting, wanting, gazing, meeting. BFI film programming filled those sooty vaults with faces, skins, languages, lives, loves, and losses more myriad than in the city over the Thames, beyond the bar lights, the ferries, and tables of second-hand books.
For film buffs like Brian the BFI bookshop competed only with the ICA (that’s for another day and post) in its galaxy of new books and DVDs.
Alongside all this, linked by a bridge under the bridge - we think here of Metropolis - a plastic capsule snug between road and riverside once housed MOMI, the Museum of the Moving Image. How anyone thought they could trap a moving image in a museum we still question, but there was Marilyn Monroe over the hot air grating in Bus Stop, and a now-motionless Dalek, enemy of the time travelling Dr Who. Like all good film heroes MOMI died young, just too young for Brian’s BFI and the wider South Bank Centre - including Brian’s cafe at the Royal Festival Hall - to erupt into day and night, world food, promenade and carnival. Now, beyond the hoardings, the former Thames Television Studios which produced so much domestic screen content are eviscerated while a campaign to save Brian’s - and our - places in London protests on.
Heading back to the Northern Line at Embankment, for the tube to Kentish Town, we can look northwards up Villiers Street and Gordon’s Wine Bar, thinking of the start of Charing Cross Road, formerly a run of bookshops almost all the way to the BFI archive near Tottenham Court Road. But instead, as though staying in the dark for an unplanned look at the second half of a double-screening, we ride the Circle Line to Notting Hill Gate, west of West End food and shopping strip, tough as North Kensington but better polished. Here is the Electric Cinema, an inside-out wedding cake enclosing plush and magic complex as Brian’s interior world of delight and yearning. Central line and Northern line to Kentish Town home, we can hover over the city in dreams of Brian’s workaday commutes, and his filmic panoramas. We think too of Brian emerging, frame by frame in his own life and self, navigating his friends by the landmarks of routine and habit, a single moving image flickering somewhere in our city. If you haven’t already bought Fitzcarraldo Edition’s Brian by Jeremy Cooper, click below to find the book and lots of other titles we think you’ll like.