With their celebrated masterpiece The Red Shoes currently showing on the big screen, Mike Pinnington considers the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger…

When I think about the moments of movie magic that have stayed with me well beyond the first viewing of a film, few can compete with the flights of fantasy conjured by filmmaking duo, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Each subsequent viewing of certain of their films (and there have been many) is accompanied with an anticipation of a warm, comforting hug; but, also, and as if for the first time, to be touched in head and heart with something of the ineffable-verging-on-the-miraculous.

The partnership of Englishman Powell and Hungarian émigré Pressburger is one of the most fruitful in British cinema history – they would work together (under the name, The Archers) between 1939 and 1972 on more than 20 features. I feel it is worth noting here that even a relatively minor P&P movie is better than much of what we might see at the multi-plex today, but they truly hit their stride with a phenomenal run during the 1940s in a perfect marriage of creativity and execution; that run produced no less than four masterpieces, beginning with 1943’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

But it was their following trio of phenomenal films that I can’t separate, either in terms of their resounding excellence or, indeed, which I saw first. (Whichever, it would most likely have been on an old black and white TV set during a happy weekend spent at my nan and granddad’s.) Chronologically, it begins in 1946 with A Matter of Life and Death, followed by Black Narcissus (1947) and, rounding out the perfect hattrick, 1948’s The Red Shoes. These were bold, even subversive, experimentations with style, form and more.

If I can’t place them in any kind of hierarchy, what this superlative triumvirate have in common are themes that ran like life blood through the best (and much of the rest) of The Archers’ oeuvre: identity, morality – ‘They aren’t poor, they just haven’t got any money,’ says Roger Livesey’s Torquil in 1945’s I Know Where I’m Going – romantic and platonic love, and the human condition.

Set during the Second World War, P&P delivered A Matter of Life and Death – hardly your typical propaganda film, it focussed not on the indomitable allies, but rather on the indomitable, unpredictable power of love. At its centre is the blossoming romance between David Niven’s seemingly doomed airman and Kim Hunter’s radio operator, with whom he shared what were anticipated by all to be his final moments. But, bailing out of his irreparably damaged aeroplane sans parachute, Niven’s Peter Carter, lost in the fog, somehow – initially at least – escapes the ultimate fate, only to be summoned to the afterlife, where a case must be made to ascertain the life or death of the title.

With scenes of life shot in glorious Technicolor and those in heaven a resolute monochrome (but one of a number of daring and effective aesthetic decisions), here Powell and Pressburger tell us that life, in all its visceral glory, is worth – and for – the living. In a sense hopelessly romantic, at no point during its 104 minutes does it lapse into cheap sentimentalism. The Archers had amassed a skilled team; with cinematographer Jack Cardiff and incredible sets – not least the still-impressive stairway to heaven – from production designer Alfred Junge, the film is a feast for the eyes as well as the soul, and looks as astonishing today as it must have when seen for the first time almost 80 years ago.

In the following year’s Black Narcissus, we find Deborah Kerr’s Sister Clodagh corralling a group of nuns into establishing a Himalayan convent. Trouble emerges in the form of sceptical, antagonistic Mr. Dean, another colonialising Brit abroad played by David Farrar, with whom Kathleen Byron’s psychologically tormented Sister Ruth becomes increasingly, dangerously infatuated. For the mid-twentieth century, having much of your film hinge on an open-shirted male sex object wearing short shorts was not, as you might imagine, an everyday occurrence.

Again, colour plays a significant role, often setting the tone and signalling the real and implied danger to come. When Sister Ruth throws off the habit, swapping it for a red dress and lipstick to match, the effect is almost one of delirium –  in both her and the viewer. A psychosexual tour de force, Black Narcissus continues to stir the senses. Redundantly remade for TV in 2020, it didn’t hold a candle to the original.

The duo arguably reached their apogee with The Red Shoes, an innovative and daring demonstration of filmmakers at the very height of their powers. Using Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale – in which the wearer of enchanted shoes cannot help but dance until death – as the basis for a story about the dynamic between an ambitious young dancer (played by real-life ballerina, Moira Shearer), her composer lover, and a kingmaker impresario, The Red Shoes is a triumph of Powell and Pressburger’s shared belief in the power of art. Powell said of it that “We had been told for 10 years to go out and die for freedom and democracy… Now the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go out and die for art.”

Technically stunning, it is the product of Powell’s reaching for what he termed ‘composed film’, a cinema that could draw you in and hold you, rapt, in a heightened state. A total work of art that brought together choreography, theatre, music, set design, innovation and the performers themselves, it is an unequivocal singular vision.

It is also an emotionally charged study in ambition, love, obsession and the complexity of the human condition. And, of their films that featured in 2022’s Sight and Sound poll of The Greatest Films of All Time, The Red Shoes sits pretty in joint 67th place, an honour it shares with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I. Other films of theirs that make the cut are, in ascending order, A Canterbury Tale; The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp; I Know Where I’m Going!; Black Narcissus; and A Matter of Life and Death.

But, as the duo’s films regularly tell us, all good things must come to an end (they rarely delivered a straightforward, so-called happy ending). While they weren’t finished as a creative force (they would make a further nine films together), by the close of that decade, momentum – and success – began to fall away. After splitting from long term studio, Rank, a relinquishing of The Archers’ name and a catastrophic failure of the subsequent relationship with David O. Selznick (resulting in legal action), Powell and Pressburger would, via some missteps and an inability to ever truly match their golden years’ output, go their separate ways.

The afterlife of The Archers is mixed; by this time, they had been all but written off by a British film industry that they had given so much to. They were mothballed, dismissed as almost anachronistic in the face of the emergent angry young men of kitchen sink dramas such as Look Back in Anger, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. In parallel came Powell’s deeply misunderstood solo outing, Peeping Tom (1960). It has since been largely rehabilitated and is frequently put in conversation with Hitchcock’s Psycho, made the same year, but on release it was met with blanket critical vilification. The ensuing years saw them become marginal figures at best.

It seemed the game was up. That is, until, their rehabilitation and vindication, which came from a surprising source – not from the UK, but the US. A new generation of filmmakers, men who would come to be in the vanguard of the so-called New Hollywood (including Francis Ford Coppola, Brian de Palma and Martin Scorsese) had seen, just as I later would, Powell and Pressburger’s films on TV in the living rooms of their youth, and lionised them. Citing their influence, Coppola would go on to invite Michael Powell – who would marry long-time Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker – to be ‘senior director in residence’ at his Zoetrope Studios.

Powell and Pressburger have since been rediscovered many times over. Subject to various retrospectives (most recently with BFI’s Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger), their films – frequently shown on the big screen – are reaching, and, I expect, thrilling, new audiences all the time.

Contemporary Western Cinema is, sadly, addicted to remakes and the rehashing of old tropes; it could do worse than to take a leaf out of the Powell and Pressburger playbook, filmmakers whose commitment to their art is rightly remembered and celebrated so enthusiastically today.

Mike Pinnington

The Red Shoes screens today @ FACT Liverpool; Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (Martin Scorsese, 2024) is currently available on BBC iPlayer

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Monday – Performance: Ka Baird, Rosie Terry Toogood & Dialect, and Ancient Plastix 7pm @ the Bluecoat, Liverpool – £17.50 

An evening full of innovative and experimental music and dance. The exciting line up features New York-based multi-instrumentalist Ka Baird, a one-off performance from choreographer and dancer Rosie Terry Toogood alongside Liverpool-based sound-collagist and composer Andrew PM Hunt, and a first hometown outing for Paul Rafferty’s ‘music for the nighttime’ pseudonym, Ancient Plastix. This looks to be a great, varied start to a week in culture.

Rope 6.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

Not one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous or celebrated works, this 1948 film is nonetheless dripping with his trademark suspense. Adapted from a 1929 play (and said to have been inspired by a real life case), Rope is a study of murder as supposed intellectual exercise.

Tuesday – Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry 6pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

Georgian director Elene Naveriani’s film of midlife decisions finds stoically and happily independent Etero considering passion, and maybe even love, following a too close for comfort brush with the grim reaper.

Wednesday – The Legend of Ned Ludd + Post-Show Discussion from 7.30pm @ Everyman Theatre, Liverpool – £15

We stand on the precipice of AI-inspired automated society. No longer a statement from futurology or science fiction, this timely play asks ‘will we survive when our work, and our worth, are under threat?’ The evening’s ticket price includes a post show discussion in which the audience will hear from experts from the fields of AI, automated work and the performing arts.

Thursday – Exhibition Opening: Michelle Williams Gamaker and Dahong Hongxuan Wang 6pm @ the Bluecoat, Liverpool – FREE   

Part of Bluecoat’s The Lives of Artists strand, this pairing of exhibitions has been on our radar for some time. Using moving image works to explore cinema and retell the stories of cast members’ characters marginalised by colonial narratives, Williams Gamaker celebrates and interrogates the movies she grew up with. Hongxuan Wang – who has played Hollywood’s ‘first Chinese American film star’ Anna May Wong in Williams Gamaker’s works – exhibits Role Model, a film reflecting on and paying homage to the star’s career and afterlife.

Three Minutes to Save the Planet 7pm @ Metal Liverpool – £5

This year’s WoWFest gets underway. Subtitled Fahrenheit 2024, foremost on the literature festival’s agenda this time: climate emergency, culture wars and global conflicts; so this evening’s event is apt. Giving the floor to 10 speakers (with three minutes each), the goal is to produce ‘an idea, a notion, a proposed action, a policy, a something which will help us all to pull clear of the zero-sum game of ecological disaster.’ We have our fingers crossed.

Friday – Jon Ronson: Things Fell Apart 7.30pm @ the Tung Auditorium, Liverpool (via livestream) – £15

Jon Ronson’s latest podcast, Things Fell Apart, looks at the culture wars from the kind of skewed angle few others can. Here (albeit it virtually), as part of WoWFest and hosted by journalist Ben Zand, the award winning writer unpicks and unpacks some of the threads and stories that led us here, to our present day reality of conspiracy and discord. Read our 2015 interview with Jon Ronson

Saturday – Zine Station 1pm @ Metal Liverpool – FREE

The rumours of the death of print are so old and have been repeated so often as to have fallen into cliché. Even in the case of legacy media’s eventual demise (perhaps, on balance, no bad thing), we’re confident that the humble zine – be they niche, subversive, celebratory or a combination of all of those things and more – will endure. Which brings us to this weekend’s Zine Station, showcasing a thriving scene hosted by Liverpool Community Print Station and Prints N Tha.

Exhibition Opening: Municipal 5pm @ 50 MV, Crosby, Liverpool – FREE 

The latest exhibition, and first of 2024, at Crosby’s 50 MV. Municipal showcases work by nine artists including Emily Speed, Brendan Lyons and Emma Bennett, and promises a richly textured, varied experience.

Exhibition Opening: Creatures of the Nile @ Victoria Gallery & Museum, Liverpool – FREE 

Exhibition ‘representing the important role animals played and how their existence shaped’ ancient Egyptian and Sudanese civilisations. Among more than 250 objects, many of which are on display for the first time, highlights include a sheet from the 3,500-year-old Book of the Dead and a bronze statue which once entombed a mummified cat.

Saturday & Sunday – Exhibition Continues: Shuffle X Tobacco Warehouse 12pm-6pm @ Stanley Dock, Liverpool – FREE

The first Shuffle exhibition I saw was in the old Natwest bank in Toxteth. A run of well received shows later has seen them raise their sights higher still, to currently occupy Stanley Dock’s Tobacco Warehouse. Exhibiting artists include Colette Lilley, Gareth Kemp, Max Mallender, Katie Sadler, Megan Sparkes and many more.

Liverpool Sound City @ venues across the city centre – from £34.95

Return of the metropolitan (yay, no camping!) music festival prioritising emerging talent. This year’s line up includes the likes of singer-songwriter Caity Baser, Scottish indie swagger from The Snuts, locals done good, Red Rum Club, and punk rocking throwbacks (in a good way), Yee Loi.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media, from top: Ka Baird poster; trailer for Rope; Michelle Williams Gamaker, Thieves, (behind the scenes), 2022. Photo Ellen Jane Rogers; Jon Ronson. Image courtesy Emli Bendixen; VGM: Creatures of the Nile

Pre-digital, pre-Instagram and the rest, what were you doing when you looked at a photograph? This is a question posed by artist Julie Cassels, whose practice interrogates our relationship with making – and looking at – photographs through the ages…

What are you doing when you look at a photograph? Are you conscious of how you engage physically, for instance? Within living memory, there would have been a more obvious answer, a process; a tangible act of leafing through an album. Even before you got to do that, it would have meant popping to Boots, or Max Spielman, to collect the photos and negatives; only then could you settle down with anticipation, to see how they’d turned out. I still have very clear memories of doing this, right down to the street and shop I’d go to.

But today, these old rituals are increasingly rare; and yet, our love of photography – of taking and looking at photographs – is unbowed. How we do this has changed dramatically; more often than not, it is via a digital, rather than analogue platform. Indeed, whether intended for Instagram, Facebook, myriad other social media (or, frequently, never to be viewed at all), it’s estimated that 1.2 trillion digital photos will be taken worldwide this year. Writing in 1977, Susan Sontag said that “To collect photographs is to collect the world.”[1] “Photographs really are experience captured,” she continued, “and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.”

Even the iconic Sontag couldn’t have foreseen or anticipated so startling a revolution in access, though – or our increasingly voracious appetites. Decades on, the camera(phone) – and its heightened ability to ‘collect the world’ – remains a magical thing. But how has reception changed in that time? As we find ourselves swimming amid an ever-flowing river of images, beyond the numbers, how has our relationship with them changed in the intervening years?

Such questions and this emphasis on the act, on how we consume images, has always fascinated Manchester-based artist Julie Cassels. I visited her last year at Rogue Artists’ Project Space, to discuss her exhibition We View Things Differently Now, when she confessed to an “obsession” with photography. The exhibition’s title, she told me: “has to do with the way in which how we view imagery has changed.” Not so much how we read it socially, culturally, or politically (although these are all factors nonetheless), but “at that physical ‘what were you doing decades ago when you looked at a photograph?’” It is, she continued, “about the performance of viewing, rather than the global ‘what was photography like?’”

In a very literal way, the exhibition set out to capture and foreground processes; a ‘how we used to live’ of photography. The “technological developments, social pressures and economic considerations have changed [habits]”, says Cassels. To illustrate and emphasise these changes, she has gathered together and displayed – among other things – old found slides, images made using the wet plate collodion process, and stereography, including her own work along with historical examples. It makes for some fascinating juxtapositions, and it’s not always easy to tell which is which. As is the case with a set of her cyanotypes hanging on the wall (below) – mining a more-or-less unchanged technique first popularised by botanist and photographer Anna Atkins in the mid-19th Century.

No mere archivist, then, through her own, direct – and deep – engagement with the field, Cassels experiments with and employs photography’s history and its artefacts to demonstrate the interrelationships and materiality of practices through the ages. This acts as a departure point for her own practice, which drills into and pushes at the edges of photography’s possibilities and conventions. She speaks of wanting to find ways of activating the surface of images and asserts that, how photography is presented is, for her, always something to be resolved.

If We View Things Differently Now addresses this question of activating the surface of an image, the exhibition’s title can also be read in a different way, one relating to Aldous Huxley’s experiments with mescaline, recorded in his book The Doors of Perception (1954). In it, Huxley said that mescaline had given him access to the artist’s mind, opening up a new way of seeing. In one passage, he recounts being captivated by the beauty of folds of cloth – in drapery and even his trousers: “Those folds in the trousers – what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the grey flannel – how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous!”

In Huxley, at least in his awareness of textiles (if not the lengths to which he went to form his appreciation), Cassels found a kindred spirit. “When I’m looking at a painting,” she explained, “I’m looking at the textiles.” Everything else, while still there, is less prominent. Peripheral. In her series Seeing Differently, in found books, paintings, and photographs, she has removed all traces of everything other than textiles and clothing. The result can be an eerie one – people are disembodied, reduced to their – often – workaday clothes, in some ways, ghosts of their labour. Afterimages, of sorts, in which Cassels demonstrates her experience of looking, and elevating for the viewer, the haptic power of textiles.

In Someone Else’s Things (above), this is taken further still. Digitally reconstructing rare or obsolete pieces from what she calls ‘remote sources’ – images found online or in textbooks – the artist uses sculptural theory to digitally restore historical objects; here, gloves, clothing and other items are given three-dimensional form. There is something forensic about this line of enquiry. But tactility, and a kind of exhumation is to the fore, too. It’s a form of time travel. What does it mean to reach into the past in this way, to retrieve and revivify, through digital means, what would otherwise have been lost to the ages?

Everywhere you turn, questions present themselves, and from all sorts of angles – be they cultural, historical, or technical. The series Portraits of Fabric (below) puts me in mind, for example, of the way in which director Alfred Hitchcock frequently dwells on the back of his leading ladies’ heads (see especially Vertigo and Rear Window), but also his coded palette (prominent in Marnie). It seems a short leap to Laura Mulvey’s theories around the male gaze, explored in her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Are these works, which invite us to scrutinise the almost biomorphic folds and creases in the cloth inspired somehow by Hitchcock’s cinematic language?

In fact, Cassels tells me, they respond to Jan van Eyck’s 1433 Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?), with the intention to capture and display materiality as you would a still-life. Although any relationship to Hitchcock is obviously one manifested by my own cultural touchstones (and, perhaps, subconscious), these photographs display and celebrate a sensual, luxurious aspect of textiles to which Cassels is particularly attuned.

Staying with Mulvey, though; in a later essay, addressing our evolving relationship to images, she writes that “new technologies have given a new visibility to stillness,”[2] thus serving to highlight the fixity of celluloid. This dichotomy is explored by Cassels in a body of work which brings together still and moving digital imagery. Looking back to Eadweard Muybridge, and the link between stop-frame photography and cinema, shown side-by-side, these works emphasise the active properties of ‘moving pictures’ versus the embalming of a moment in time (and life) implied by still images. The result is one akin to dissonance, and yet also complementary, producing an almost uncanny response in the viewer.

There is something of this quality in each of Cassels’ ongoing series. Taken together, and in the most practical understanding, her practice combines art and photographic history, sculptural form, photographs, and textiles. Distinct, tangentially-related enquiries – about the quality and visibility of textiles, still photography and film, 2D and/or 3D, the onset and impact of digital technologies – produce a coherent whole. There is an indelible investigative through-line, meaning that the work can be approached from a variety of perspectives and entry points. As Cassels continues her inquiries, it will remain one worth following.

A new exhibition of photographs by Stephen Clarke reveals Hollywood’s lingering afterimage on all our psyches, says Mike Pinnington…

A nerve-wracking encounter that sometimes gets forgotten owing to the early crescendo of the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) comes long before we meet Norman and his mother at the imposing Bates Motel. From the moment Janet Leigh’s real estate secretary, Marion Crane, flees town, having opted to steal rather than bank $40,000 of the firm’s money from a property sale, she is looking anxiously over her shoulder. The stolen haul – stowed in a hastily packed suitcase – weighs heavy, burning a hole in her mind. Leaving behind the claustrophobia of the city, having driven through the night, there is fresh dread – a manifestation of the madness and desperation that led her here – when a cop knocks on her window as she sleeps in her car on the roadside.

Looming menacingly large and implacable, intent unreadable behind big, dark aviator shades, his is a presence of studied ambivalence. Tensions – and viewer heart rates – rise as the officer requests Marion’s driver’s license and checks her plates. “He knows, he knows,” she thinks to herself, trying to keep it together; even as Marion is eventually free to drive on, leaving the cop in her wake, she continues to nervously check her rear-view mirror until he takes a turn off. Although this isn’t the last she will see of the cop (suspicious of her skittishness, he later trails her into town), there is, of course, much worse than the long arm of the law to come for Marion. But, for now at least, she is on her way.

Her onward journey includes many signifiers that situate us in mid-twentieth century America – towering telegraph poles; sun-scorched, barely inhabited brushland and a patchwork of largely barren hills in an arid landscape; large, flat expanses, the open road, used car lots. In one of these, the increasingly frantic Marion trades in her car for another, one with California plates. Belated confirmation, if we were in any doubt, that this is unmistakably the visual language of Hollywood. It’s a language that, consciously or otherwise, we are all familiar with and susceptible to.

The artist Cindy Sherman leant heavily on such suppositions with her brilliantly inventive Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980). The series of black-and-white photographs, rich with narrative suggestion, play with and evoke 1950s and 60s female stereotypes, as perpetuated by Hollywood: naïf, city girl, icy blonde, and lonely housewife. Many of them bear a remarkable resemblance to Hitchcockian templates and could easily pass for Marion Crane’s kleptomaniac woman on the run.

“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second,” said French New Wave auteur (and Hitchcock admirer) Jean-Luc Godard. But whose truth are we seeing, exactly? And aren’t those twenty-four frames simply twenty-four opportunities to tell a mediated, more seductive version of events? The director’s preferred reading? So much so has Hollywood shorthand insinuated itself into our lives and psyches that we each now hold in our mind’s eye many working simulacrum of its landscapes, its actors; the setup, the confrontation and the resolution. For a century now, Hollywood has worked its magic so effectively that – whether we’ve seen it with our own eyes or not – we can all picture, and think we know, its highways and byways.

Stephen Clarke’s San Diego photographs invoke such readings, ones that – such is America’s pop culture hegemony – are part of a larger Western consciousness. A young graduate from Lancashire in the 1980s, he spent a year in southern California trying to work out life’s next steps. There, staying in an unglamorous apartment complex, he worked a number of low-income McJobs, hung out with local rock bands and occasionally crossed the border into Tijuana, Mexico. His downtime, though, was spent mainly shooting photographs; they were made entirely without artifice and, yet, are nevertheless ripe for projected narratives.

Like the America that has been relentlessly sold to us down the years, they practically buzz with possibility: untamed edge lands tinged with danger, excitement, risk, and escape. In them we can see the suggestions of David Lynch’s picket fences (behind which darkness inevitably lurks), the remote, sparsely inhabited beachside community of Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty for Me (1971), and the SoCal/Mexico border crossed by unwitting guys out for a good time in Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (1953). Clarke’s photographs, however unintentionally, unavoidably frame San Diego as a film set, one containing memories of movies past and suggestions of those never and yet to be made.

In these pictures we can easily plot potential action. In one (above), a fast-looking car (a Corvette Stingray?) stands out like a sore thumb in a Sears car park. The only covered vehicle – ostensibly from the sun’s rays but also, no doubt, from prying eyes – it awaits a getaway driver in an as yet unwritten heist movie. Elsewhere, a meet-cute for soon-to-be young lovers occurs at a cheap Mexican food joint in a strip mall, when the waitress accidentally-on-purpose spills the contents of a taco in a boy’s lap. In another, a helicopter flies low overhead. Taking in the flat San Diego topography, which stretches out as far as the eye can see, it carries a journalist hot on the heels of a story involving a bank job gone horribly wrong.

All of these stories and more can be found in Clarke’s San Diego photographs. Cultural recall abounds – could that be the actual real estate office where Marion Crane once worked? And, surely, that’s the used car lot she would later pay over the odds for a ride with clean plates? Imagine for a moment Marion hadn’t been forced to stop late at night by the driving rain at the Bates Motel (therefore avoiding Norman’s nefarious attentions). Imagine instead that she’d made it all the way to her divorcé lover Sam Loomis’ house (for whom she’d risked everything to steal that $40,000). In the first photograph that accompanies this essay, let’s say a woman, we’ll call her Marion, habitually peers into her rear-view mirror, knowing that at any minute she could be forced to decide whether to floor it or reach for the sky.

Waiting patiently, but hopelessly frazzled by a dirty cocktail of nights on the road, adrenalin, and fear, she looks again and again into that rear-view mirror. Through it, she stares intently, waiting for Sam to re-emerge with his passport, and a bag containing only the bare essentials. All the while she’s conscious of curtains twitching in the neighbourhood, and the shades-wearing cop who has doggedly trailed her ever since that early fitful sleep on the freeway; even now, many miles down the line, he is surely closing in. She is a fugitive, and this is her life. She’s not gonna stop now… Make your own guess at what comes next; you have the pictures with which to do it.

Mike Pinnington

All images © Stephen Clarke

Alien Resident: San Diego Photographs 1986-1987 was due to open at Contemporary Art Space Chester. Check the gallery’s website for updates

Further Reading: Truth and Memory: Stephen Clarke – San Diego Topographics 

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from around the North of England and the rest of the UK – and loads of it’s free!

Monday – Design Manchester: Made in Manchester 5.30pm @ Manchester Central Library – FREE

Part of the Open To Business festival, this in conversation is one for music heads and graphic design fans both, as Malcolm Garrett sits down with Martyn Walsh. Garrett, now founder and Artistic Director of Design Manchester, made his name in the 1980s, creating album covers for bands such as Buzzcocks and Duran Duran; Walsh, meanwhile, is an erstwhile member of the Inspiral Carpets and currently serves as the Business and Intellectual Property Centre’s Creative Industries Guru in Residence. Expect walks down memory lane and up to the minute advice for creatives.

Tuesday – Opening: Steve McQueen: Year 3 @ Tate Britain, London – FREE

These days better known by many as director of films such as Widows, 12 Years a Slave and Shame, Steve McQueen’s breakthrough into the popular consciousness was as a visual artist. He returns to that milieu this week with a project capturing tens of thousands of Year 3 pupils. Drawn from state primaries, independent schools, faith schools, special schools, pupil referral units and home-educated pupils, McQueen has said: “There’s an urgency to reflect on who we are and our future […] to have a visual reflection on the people who make this city [London] work. I think it’s important and, in some ways, urgent.”

Wednesday – Wings of Desire 5.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

A pair of angels – Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) – invisibly observe, comfort and surreptitiously suggest the presence of something ‘more’ to us, Earth’s mere mortals, in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. The 1987 film, an almost instant classic, gives us cause to appreciate lives lived – the big, medium and small serendipities, miracles and unknowns that inject colour, making them what they are. It was, unwisely, remade a little over a decade later (starring Nic Cage and Meg Ryan). Take this opportunity to see the original as intended, on the big screen.

Exhibition Opening: Over Ground Uneven: Charlie Franklin 5pm @ Vane, Newcastle Upon Tyne – FREE

New works by Charlie Franklin, who many of you may have seen in last year’s John Moores Painting Prize. The exhibition’s title, Over Ground Uneven, refers to the artist’s research and experience of landscape: ‘how structures within it can become anchors to determine our sense of place’. Combining painting and sculpture to produce a kind of blurring of the two, Franklin says “I have spent time reconsidering how my work can act as landmarks or signposts within the territory of the gallery space. By experimenting with new patination techniques and processes, unforeseen impressions are revealed.”

Design Manchester: Stealing Sheep: ‘Big Wows’ Video Series Premiere 6.30pm @ Everyman Cinema, Manchester – £12.80

When Stealing Sheep released their third album, Big Wows, earlier this year, they teamed up with animator Emily Garner (A.K.A Pastel Castle), who created a series of complementary videos, which premieres tonight at Everyman Cinema Manchester. For a bit of insight into what to expect (at least visually), Garner has said: “All of the videos have been built digitally frame-by-frame at my home animation studio in Leeds. I tend to consume a lot of sugar and chocolate while working…” Promising ‘tamagotchi pets, cyber fairies, super heroes and Zelda inspired avatars’, even before you get on to karaoke from the band, this should be nothing if not entertaining.

Thursday – The Female Gaze: An In Conversation with Carolyn Mendelsohn and Casey Orr 11am @ Tate Liverpool – FREE

For many years, the only gaze you heard of was that belonging to the male. Today’s in conversation between photographers Carolyn Mendelsohn and Casey Orr explores its opposite. Each is on hand to discuss their respective long-term portrait projects, Being Inbetween and Saturday Girl, which explore the lives and identities of young women across the country. Interrogating identity, womanhood, hopes and fears, and our relationship to the self, this is a great opp to check out the photography of Mendelsohn and Orr prior to their publication by Bluecoat Press next year.   

Exhibition Opening: Methods of Observing: Saoirse Lewis 6pm @ CASS ART, Manchester – FREE

Earlier this year, we featured Short Supply, a duo intent on making opportunities for themselves and others in the art world post-graduation. Their co-curated show, MADE IT, dangled the carrot of a solo exhibition for a selected artist down the line. They opted for sculptor and Manchester School of Art grad Saoirse Lewis, and have said in their curator notes for Methods of Observing: “[Lewis’] work is playful yet considered, it is concerned with the material properties of objects and media and is decidedly contemporary. More so than this however, her practice shows a dedication to enquiry which prompted our interest in her from the start.”

Friday – Exhibition Opening: JEW. Photographs by John Offenbach @ the Jewish Museum, London – FREE

As the blurb for this exhibition tells us, in November 1938, an exhibition entitled The Eternal Jew opened in Munich promoting the Nazi stereotypes of Jews through photographs. For contemporary photographer John Offenbach, “A large part of the project was to re-own that word – it shouldn’t be seen as an insult.” Inspired in part by the twentieth century project of August Sander, Offenbach has sought to depict individuals that together present a cross section of people – from Spy, to Refuse Collector and Nobel Laureate. “Each sitter is a normal person with a normal face, and I wanted to celebrate this normalcy. The ordinary is extraordinary and deserves our attention”, says Offenbach.

Saturday – Kate Pankhurst: Fantastically Great Women Who Worked Wonders 12pm @ Storyhouse, Chester – £8

If the name sounds familiar, that’s because illustrator and author Kate Pankhurst is a descendant of Suffragette, Emmeline. Fittingly, her book Fantastically Great Women Who Worked Wonders, celebrates the pioneers who today serve as examples and inspirations for those who came in their wake. Including ‘scientists, doctors, athletes, hot-air balloonists and more,’ join Pankhurst as she illuminates the journeys of these trailblazing women. Expect drawing and dressing up.

Sunday – Resist: Stories of Uprising 1pm @ Writeidea Festival, London – FREE

For those unfamiliar with the Comma Press format, the publisher deftly pairs experts in their field with fiction writers, challenging authors to produce stories that could plausibly have happened. In this case, those stories take place in key moments of British protest and have been informed by historians, crowd scientists and activists. Join contributors Luan Goldie, Nikita Lalwani and Uschi Gatward (a former winner of the Writeidea Short Story Prize) who are on hand to discuss this timely publication.

Saboteur 1pm @ Home, Manchester – £7.50

Some may quibble at the inclusion of a film directed by Hitchcock – long considered a misogynist – to be included as part of HOME Manchester’s Celebrating Women in Global Cinema strand. Perhaps worth revisiting on that point alone, this noirish 1942 spy thriller sees aircraft factory worker Barry Kane accused of collaborating with the Nazis after his plant’s firebombing. A relatively low key entry in the Hitch canon, Saboteur is still worth our attention; and while it’ll win few prizes for any obvious feminism, it does feature a strong showing from Priscilla Lane opposite Robert Cummings’ Kane.

Mike Pinnington

Images from top: Stealing Sheep, Big Wows, released by Heavenly Recordings, April 2019. Image © Emily Garner (A.K.A Pastel Castle). In-Between series © Carolyn Mendelsohn. Saoirse Lewis for Short Supply exhibition MADE IT: X Marks the Spot, but for what? 2019. Saboteur, 1942, Alfred Hitchcock

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from around the North of England and the rest of the UK – and loads of it’s free!

Monday – Stephen Malkmus @ Yes, Manchester – £17.50

Now 53, earlier this year ex- (and soon once again) Pavement leader, Stephen Malkmus released Groove Denied – arguably his best solo effort. Meanwhile, Sparkle Hard, last year’s SM and the Jicks release is equally arguably his best post-Pavement record full stop. A good time then to catch the godfather of slacker rock, as he hits Manchester this evening.

The Shock of the Future 4pm @ FACT Liverpool – £7.70

“I’m afraid there’s no market for such music in France. Don’t get discouraged, you are beautiful.” Paris, 1978. An ode to female electronic music pioneers such as Wendy Carlos, Suzanne Ciani, Delia Derbyshire and Laurie Spiegel, this is The Shock of the Future, directed by the Nouvelle Vague’s Marc Collin and starring Alma Jodorowsky. It follows Ana who, amid the boys’ club of the music scene and at the height of the new wave, turns to groundbreaking new sounds to cut through the chauvinist pack. From the Archive: C James Fagan on Delia Derbyshire, the Radiophonic Workshop and more: A New Sound: Delia Darlings

Tuesday – Midnight Cowboy (50th Anniversary Release) 6.15pm/8.40pm @ BFI Southbank, London – from £10.20

Directed by John Schlesinger, Midnight Cowboy remains the only X-rated film to win a best picture Oscar. That it also won Schlesinger Best Director and picked up Best Adapted Screenplay (Waldo Salt) tells you it was no fluke. Back in cinemas celebrating its 50th Anniversary, if you’ve never seen it, take this chance. Don’t, however, expect any of the schmaltz often associated with the films Hollywood chooses to recognise during awards season. Gritty and often bleak, it successfully punctures the American Dream – and yet, at its heart, it also manages to paint a touching portrait of friendship amid hard times.

Wednesday – SICK! FESTIVAL | Mats Staub: Death and Birth In My Life @ the Whitworth, Manchester– FREE

Founded in 2013 on the principles of facing up to the complexities of mental and physical health, SICK! Festival gets underway this evening at the Whitworth with Mats Staub’s Death and Birth In My Life. This UK premiere video installation, which presents ‘a series of intimate conversations about the most moving and challenging experiences in life’ was developed with intensive care unit staff. Expect challenging and, hopefully tender moments, from the work partly informed by the 2014 death of Staub’s brother.

Thursday – SixBySix Launch 7pm @ Ropes & Twines, Liverpool – FREE

I recently had the privilege to speak with Don McCullin, and one of the things I wanted to know, was whether he thinks of photography as an artform. “I see it as photography,” he said. “I strictly believe photography is photography, and it doesn’t need to be fancied up – do you know what I mean?” (Read the full interview) Which is a roundabout way of telling you that tonight’s SixBySix launch, which includes Stephen McCoy, Colin McPherson and Stephanie Wynne, will feature a panel discussion on current trends and ideas in photography, intros to the works of SixBySix members, and a focus on Zoe Strauss, who has dedicated a career to exploring “the beauty and struggle of everyday life”.

Friday – Exhibition Opening: Still Undead: Popular Culture in Britain Beyond the Bauhaus 6.30pm @ Nottingham Contemporary – FREE

Amid large scale celebrations to mark the centenary of the Bauhaus and its ongoing legacy in its homeland, and dedicated programming from the BBC, there has (so far) been a less than significant response from UK galleries and museums. Making up for this oversight somewhat, next month sees RIBA’s Beyond Bauhaus – Modernism in Britain 1933–66, while Nottingham Contemporary’s Still Undead reflects on the movement’s international influence. Exploring how the school shaped British pop culture from the 1920s to the 90s, artists, designers and musicians in the exhibition include Leigh Bowery, Kraftwerk, Liliane Lijn, Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, Mary Quant, Peter Saville, Oskar Schlemmer and Soft Cell, to name a few.

Saturday – Holly Hendry: The Dump is Full of Images @ The Weston Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park – FREE

Artist Holly Hendry’s in demand. After last year’s Liverpool Biennial commission, Cenotaph, and a slew of 2019 exhibitions (including touring Cenotaph to the Tetley in Leeds), her latest stop is at YSP’s Weston Gallery, with a new sculpture installation. With a recent practice focussed on excavating and exploring often hidden, overlooked or subterranean worlds relating to the built environment, here (in her first kinetic work) she turns to anatomy, food and detritus. Look out for an interview with Hendry due in these pages soon.

Northern Lights Writers’ Conference from 10.30am @ Waterside, Sale, Greater Manchester – £35/£25

Should you have ever listened to the now sadly defunct podcast End of All Things, or follow developments such as the Northern Fiction Alliance (dedicated to putting ‘the output of Northern indie presses to new audiences and publishers around the world’), you will know that publishing, ever so slowly, is changing. This returning writers’ conference – featuring talks, masterclasses, panel discussions, practical, drop-in advice sessions – looks to further reveal the machinations of the industry for all. With panels on Diversity in Publishing, Support for Writers, and Pathways to Publication, it should prove a helpful and illuminating day.

Sunday – Sounds and Silence Cinema – Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail 7pm @ Phase One, Liverpool – £10

Hitchcock’s 1929 picture, Blackmail, is remarkable for more than its director. Hitch, barely into his thirties at the time, conceived of it as a silent film yet, in the face of the coming talkies, then reshot new and key scenes for sound and dialogue. Arguably the greatest British silent film, ironically, it is also the harbinger of a new era, one that the then up-and-coming hot new thing anticipated and boldly embraced. Presumably showing as the silent version, Blackmail is accompanied by an original live music score.

Mike Pinnington

Images, from top: The Shock of the Future (still); Mats Staub: Death and Birth In My Life; Photograph by Stephen McCoy, From the series Skelmersdale, 1984.  As seen in North: Identity, Photography, Fashion at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, from 6 January–19 March 2017; Holly Hendry, Gut Feelings, 2016, Installation view at Royal College of Art, London, UK. Photo: courtesy Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 

In this essay commissioned by Heart of Glass, Laura Robertson considers what cinema has to teach us about the sinister implications of surveillance in domestic and corporate life. What is our awareness and understanding of surveillance today? And have our attitudes towards it changed at all since the 1950s?

“We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms”, scolds Stella. “What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change. Yes sir. How’s that for a bit of homespun philosophy?” Stella is a visiting home nurse, played by Thelma Ritter in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 thriller Rear Window. She is a brusque, practical character, and a foil to her patient: professional photographer and “Peeping Tom” L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart, pictured, below). Jefferies is wheelchair-bound after breaking his leg and is riddled with boredom; much to Stella’s disapproval, he begins to watch his neighbours for entertainment. Seated in his Greenwich Village apartment, Jefferies is afforded a fabulous courtyard view into the lives of others. Opposite, “Miss Torso” rehearses dance routines in her kitchen; “The Newlyweds” draw the blinds on a steamy honeymoon; “Songwriter” struggles to compose at his piano; “Miss Lonelyhearts” partakes in a disastrous date… and Lars Thorwald’s ill wife goes missing after they have an argument. Has she been murdered?

Stuck in a leg cast, Jeffries is vulnerable; he embodies a universal fear of being caught looking. As we might (we see through Jefferies eyes), he switches off the lights to be better able to see Thorwald, himself unobserved (he hopes). He embarks on a surveillance, or close observation, of Thorwald; enthusiastically recruiting a reluctant Stella, and his high society girlfriend Lisa Freemont, to watch and investigate with him. Three amateur sleuths discuss the what and hows and whens and whys of the imagined murder. Despite being warned off by a disbelieving detective, (spoiler alert) the women eventually break into the suspect’s apartment to search for evidence, watched by an anxious Jeffries, and watched by us. But as Thorwald returns early with Freemont still there, will she be caught out? And by whom: a callous murderer, or an innocent man?

It is a dizzying exchange of looking and being looked at: from our comfortable perspective in the cinema seat, from Hitchcock’s directorial chair, from behind the camera, and from within the film itself: Jefferies spying on Thorwald, and Thorwald’s realisation of being spied upon, and eventually spying right back. Significantly analysed in film theory, Rear Window is a good example of the power of “the gaze”; in the act of looking steadily and intently at another, we can claim power over another — especially when the watched do not know they are being watched. This idea was infamously outlined by philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984), who proposed: “The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates and masters.” Whilst Foucault was talking about the mechanisms of power through the gaze (and its wider implications), it is clear that Hitchcock understood the political and social power of watching. Where we might otherwise have been left with an ethical dilemma – is it morally reprehensible to snoop, even if we suspect a crime? – in Rear Window, our surveillance is ultimately justified. Jefferies proves that Thorwald is guilty, and the murderer is captured by police. The voyeurs are vindicated; we sigh a breath of relief. But what does this film say about our awareness and understanding of surveillance? And have our attitudes towards it changed at all?

Hitchcock’s superbly tense murder mystery frequently tops critics’ film lists, and was an astute choice for a week-long immersive event about watching and being watched by Heart of Glass and Abandon Normal Devices Festival. In November 2016, The Invisible City: The Cinema of Surveillance devised a number of film screenings and performances in a place where watching was actively encouraged: the former Pilkington Glass Headquarters in St Helens. What better place to talk about surveillance than at the site of a glass factory? Now owned by a management company, Pilkington HQ is a quiet, concrete maze of grey buildings and car parks designed around a huge landscaped lake and green space. In its heyday, we would have witnessed a bustling 25,000 employees in the business of making glass for use in buildings and vehicles. Now, and especially at night, it is an eerie, silent zone of former commerce. Wood-panelled corridors that used to ferry thousands of workers into offices and onto factory floors now echo with the solitary footsteps of the occasional (watching) security guard. Windows look out onto the still lake. It is the perfect stage on which to imagine thrilling stories of espionage and Big Brother. The evening screenings, of which Rear Window was the main feature, were projected onto the walls of a four-storey courtyard – what else? – with audience members seated in parked cars and an old canteen. The viewer became the voyeur; physically simulating Jefferies’ actions, we sat watching in the dark. We could see, but could not be seen. Pilkington’s courtyard became Greenwich Village; silhouettes appeared behind windows watering plants, arguing, packing suitcases. Some viewers, as Jefferies did with his zoom lens, used binoculars to get a better look.

The memory that predominantly lingered after The Invisible City: The Cinema of Surveillance was Stella’s accusation of being a race of Peeping Toms; and more crucially, how this one line of dialogue prompted thoughts of how we’ve become better at it and more complicit. Rather than being ashamed about the ethics of snooping 60 years after Hitchcock’s influential work – or later, more critical films about watching, like The Conversation (1974), Red Road (2006), or 1971 (2014) – our methods of and addiction to observation have become terrifyingly effective, precise and wide-ranging, within the corporate and personal realms. Amid the exposure of mass surveillance at government and military level rather belatedly becoming part of public discussion, so too is our active participation in everyday surveillance. We are slap-bang in the middle of Foucault’s age of “infinite examination”. Reticence has turned into enthusiasm. Ready to donate our private information in exchange for a life online – openly sharing vital stats, constantly updated location, relationship status, innermost feelings, failures and triumphs – we have become addicted to other people’s lives, and exposing our own.

This is, of course, thanks to huge developments in technology. Imagine a 2017 version of Rear Window, which would more than likely utilise widely-available and affordable recording and surveillance equipment. In the 2007 remake Disturbia, protagonist and juvenile criminal Kale Brecht (Shia LaBeouf) has his movements restricted not with a leg cast, but under a house arrest; wearing an ankle monitor that connects to a proximity sensor. In the final scenes, he is filmed talking about his escapade with the serial killer next door, the results of which will be posted on YouTube. Ten years on, the technology is more extensive. Jefferies would undoubtedly take photos of Thorwald in real-time on his smartphone and send them to Stella on Snapchat. He might check when Thorwald’s wife had last logged into Facebook; would be more able to predict the timings of the suspect’s comings and goings with Google Maps. Lisa might live-stream her break-in with Periscope.

In Foucault’s 1975 book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, he discussed politicised technologies: “Total surveillance is increasingly the general condition of society as a whole.” If so, then Rear Window’s natural cinematic successor would embrace technology and perhaps showcase a shrewder cast. They would be familiar with the constant possibility of being watched. They would be more ready to resist and subvert it. Taking control of their environment – and their omnipresent corporate observers – are the protagonists of Where The City Can’t See (2016), which premiered at The Invisible City: The Cinema of Surveillance. Directed by speculative architect Liam Young from a screenplay by author Tim Maughan, it depicts an imagined near-future where a factory town, not dissimilar to St Helens, is entirely managed by robots, whose surveillance footage is observed from afar by foreign investors. It may not be Foucault’s Panopticon prison – in which one guard is able to observe all inmates at any time – but this nightmare city employs the same threat: its inhabitants are less likely to break the rules if they believe they are being recorded, even if they are not.

Dedicated to making cars for their employers by day, the young factory workers in Where The City Can’t See hack the systems by night. Avoiding facial recognition tech by wearing camouflaged masks and cloaks, they run riot through “the spaces the city can’t see”. They hack taxis so their destinations can’t be monitored. They host illegal raves in presumably out-of-bounds areas of green space; edgelands that creep up against buildings and roads, tapering off into deep forest. In doing so, our protagonists avoid some of the oppressive monitoring systems utilised by their employers, gaining a temporary freedom from surveillance.

Startlingly, Where The City Can’t See has been filmed entirely with the scanning technologies used in autonomous cars. Like the archetypal Ghost in the Machine (referring specifically to the way in which philosopher Gilbert Ryle‘s description of consciousness theory has been depicted in popular culture, as in Arthur C. Clarke‘s malevolent computer HAL 9000 in his 1968 novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Stanley Kubrick’s film of the same year), we watch through the eyes of (possibly conscious) machines. As the world’s first narrative fiction film to be shot with LiDAR scanning technology, the aesthetic is exquisitely glitchy. The camera shots are in high definition; the movements might have been directed from a remote satellite. Pixelated street scenes are coloured with an artificial palette of concrete greys, greens and hot pinks, inspiring thoughts of roadside weeds and graffiti.

Whereas Rear Window’s concerns are more domestic, the overall concerns of The Invisible City: The Cinema of Surveillance were industrial, and heavily referencing its venue. The corporate spy in Where The City Can’t See is real; we are reminded that 21^st century factories apply similar methods. Last year, Time Magazine reported that retail giant Amazon “shows clips of workers stealing various objects on giant TV screens” to discourage theft; they also flash the words “’terminated’ or ‘arrested’ on the screen to show each worker’s fate.” Likewise, The Guardian has compared the employees of Sports Direct to “Georgian-era factory workers”:

“The wall [of the very first factory] was to prevent people seeing in. The clock was to remind workers that their body clocks would be over-ridden by machine rhythms. And the cannon was there to prevent the local population storming the premises and tearing it to pieces. Today’s equivalents needn’t be so crude. Instead of the cannon and the clock, you have the camera in the cab of the truck driver; the GPS transmitter on the arm of the warehouse worker, tracking their speed and movement as they shift parcels; the barcode a home-care worker has to scan as she enters and leaves a client’s home in strictly timed 15-minute slots.”

Factories and their workers have been a focus of surveillance since the earliest film cameras were tested. Leaving Messrs Pilkington Bros Works, St Helens (BFI/1901) — a choice for the short film programme that preceded Rear Window and Where The City Can’t See — we watch a steady stream of men and boys in identical wool suits pour out of a doorway. The film is silent, but one can imagine that the factory whistle has just blown, ringing out across town; an important indicator of the working day’s end. Some spot the camera and stop and stare, entranced. Women and girls, with fraying shawls covering their heads, laugh and skip out of the door. One young woman in a hat stops still, directly in front of the camera’s gaze and faces it head on, neither defiant or excited. Could she, or her employers, imagine the implications of CCTV and GPS in today’s factory? Would they care? Would they protest these new tools of surveillance, with their profound consequences on the worker?

In his 2013 essay for Time and Motion: Redefining Working Life, FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) director Mike Stubbs states: “As our future world of work involves hybrids of network, database and communication skills, traditional roles such as clerical and office work become further vulnerable. As manufacturing represents only one in ten jobs in the USA and is increasingly automated with industrial robots, this starts to show a trend that productivity continues to grow while employment diminishes.” With this in mind during The Invisible City: The Cinema of Surveillance, it was performance artist Michelle Browne who was tasked to give some context. She used her skills as a storyteller to weave together the complex threads of surveillance, working life, and social responsibility. Browne devised a quasi-fictional tour of Pilkington Headquarters (pictured, below), and in painting a picture of what it was like to work there, she powerfully and movingly chronicled the human impact of employment evolution since the 1700s to the present day. Not from the industrialists’ point of view, but uniquely from the people who experienced the harshest end of the stick.

Leading us past dusty blinds and over dappled blue carpets, Browne embodied a female worker who didn’t age: “I’ve worked here, in one form or another, for a long time. At the beginning, I was on the factory floor. I cleaned, I packed, I did what I could; I did what I was allowed to do as a woman.” The Pilkington Brothers brought in “big machines” in the 1800s “that could do all sorts of things. It was really incredible; it seemed like they had a mind of their own.” But the machines weren’t the only things to change. People had to re-train to operate them; there were pensions to think about, distant bosses, longer hours, fewer holidays, redundancies (“Redundant was to become a word that was all too familiar over the years”). Employers demanded proof of “core competencies”. Efficiency was improved by outsourcing. “Go-getters” were rewarded. Some employees were tasked to collect data on their colleagues; there was a surveillance of phone calls and emails. “You’re being watched”, said Browne, “but you’re also watching.” As she is faced with her own brother’s redundancy – instructed to sort and post notices of termination – the wheels metaphorically come off. Browne’s character is angry and resistant. “I, like my brothers before me, would like to be the architect of change; whereby people can control their own lives.”

Browne presented us with an envelope, and therefore a dilemma. In a boardroom, we opened our post to find a form entitled Test For Personal Entrepreneurial Competencies: we were to rate a series of statements about our workplace skills and abilities. A jolly promotional film, Glass Research Aka Pilkington Glass Works (1959), played on a television in the background. We were now part of the Pilkington workforce; all attempts at passive participation were unacceptable. Would we fill in the form, or rebel against our imagined employers? Lulled into a state of obedience, some of the audience hesitated. Some turned the page over to find black lines in the shape of an arrow – instructions on how to make a paper aeroplane. And thus, the moment of rebellion came; an internal decision manifested in a flurry of paper planes and laughter. We chose to step out of the job, and therefore, temporarily out of the system. It was easy for us, as we weren’t really being made redundant. But there had been real employees faced with the same decision, and an uncertain future.

But is any form of rebellion against the omnipotent Peeping Tom futile? Are we so thoroughly dominated by Foucault’s dominant, all-seeing eye that we can’t escape it? After Browne’s tour, we stepped back out into the world, and the public spaces of surveillance. Although not as sophisticated as the futuristic streets of Where the City Can’t See, the streets of Britain in 2017 are nevertheless interspersed with CCTV. Inside and outside of the contemporary factory, we are exposed to the scrutiny of the authorities and of others. This is a pessimistic outlook. Perhaps what The Invisible City: The Cinema of Surveillance was most proficient at doing was highlighting the internal anxieties associated with surveillance, and questioning what – if anything – we might do about it. In an industrial setting echoing with the real lives and experiences of thousands of local people, we were afforded the time to reflect. Watching Rear Window in the dark, we put ourselves in a position to query the defining principles of right and wrong – and experienced the thrill of being caught looking. During Where The City Can’t See, we interrogated the ethics of mass monitoring, and sought to subvert its reach. Side-by-side with Browne, we could choose to participate in a surveillance culture that was disempowering to others, or to momentarily resist it; and we knew the implications of our choices. In essence, we got outside of our own houses and looked in for a change.

Laura Robertson

This essay has been commissioned by Heart of Glass: an agency for collaborative and social arts practice based in St Helens

Laura saw The Invisible City: The Cinema of Surveillance at Alexandra Park, formerly Pilkington HQ, 7–12 November 2016. Watch the documentary film here (3:04)

Where The City Can’t See (2016) is commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices and Heart of Glass & University of Salford Art Collection. Produced by Liam Young and Abandon Normal Devices, with support from Forestry Commission England’s Forest Art Works and funding from Arts Council England

What’s hot this week? Our pick of the arts, design, film and music listings from around Liverpool and the rest of the UK… 

Monday – Talk: Marina Abramović On Walk Through Walls 7.30pm @ Royal Festival Hall, London — £20/15/12.50

One of the most famous performance artists in the world talks about her controversial new memoir, Walk Through Walls, tonight. Expect insight into her most provocative work – which has included being threatened with guns and knives, and brushing gore off cow bones for hundreds of hours — plus her collaborations with Ulay (who has recently sued her), Lady Gaga, Jay Z, and more.

PICK OF THE WEEK: Tuesday – The Invisible City: The Cinema Of Surveillance @ Pilkington Glass HQ, St Helens — FREE

A special week of surveillance-themed cinema from Heart of Glass and collaborator Abandon Normal Devices Festival, expect a theatrical exploration of espionage at this former glass factory. See creepy CCTV thriller Red Road (tonight), plus Johanna Hamilton’s heist documentary 1971 (Wednesday) and Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid classic The Conversation (Thursday); and on Saturday, Alfred Hitchcock’s urban murder mystery Rear Window will be screened in a surprising new way (hint: binoculars) with a new short film by artist Liam Young, plus “quasi-fictional” tours of the factory with artist Michelle Browne.

Symposium – Policy Change Through The Counterpublic? 1—6pm @ Castlefield Gallery, Manchester — FREE

Rebecca de Mynn presents the findings from a year of ethnographic research on artist development this afternoon, via discussions and ideas sharing for and by artists, industry professionals, researchers, and policymakers. Refreshments included…

Thursday – Exhibition Opening: The Radical Eye 10am—4.30pm @ Tate Modern, London — £16.50

See Sir Elton John’s (yes, THAT Elton John) private collection of Modernist photographic portraits and prints, displayed in all its glory at Tate Modern. Expect Man Ray, Brassai, Imogen Cunningham, André Kertész, Dorothea Lange, Tina Modotti, and Aleksandr Rodchenko and more. Exhibition continues until 7 May 2017.

Exhibition Opening: No Such Thing As Gravity 11am—8pm @ FACT, Liverpool – FREE/£10

What do Will Self, 3D portraits, CERN, and tarot reading have in common? They’re all part of a whole day of events celebrating FACT’s new exhibition, which questions the relationship between art and science. Have your face scanned and 3D printed at Face Lab, to add to Gina Czarnecki’s artwork, Heirloom; hear artist and magician Nahum Mantra talk about hypnosis; and end the day with the Roy Stringer 2016 Memorial Lecture by Will Self, followed by a Q&A and drinks. Exhibition continues until 5 Feb 2017.

Exhibition Opening: The Cat Show 6—9pm @ Paper Gallery, Manchester — FREE

Meow! Featuring feline-themed artwork by artists Tilo Baumgärtel, Mike Chavez-Dawson, Ilona Kiss, Cathy Lomax (pictured, below, with It woke him up because it was hungry (The Long Goodbye) (2016)), Rui Matsunaga, Narbi Price, The Royal Art Lodge, and Miho Sato, who ask: are Internet cats the new opiate of the masses? You decide. Until 17 Dec.

Revolution – New Art For A New World 7pm @ VUE Cheshire Oaks, Ellesmere Port — £11.49

In a (very) limited release across the UK – including for one night only at VUE Cheshire Oaks – don’t miss this intriguing documentary (trailer, top) about Russia’s most iconic Avant-Garde artists, and their stories of censored masterpieces, banned for decades, and rarely seen outside Moscow. Cinema times in link above, and more info on the film here.

Friday – Peaches 8pm—2am @ Invisible Wind Factory, Liverpool — £17.60

Described by the Guardian as “joyous, gender-mashing cabaret”, expect Peaches (pictured, below) to bring a raucous mix of penis-shaped windsocks, yoga-poses, and big, electronica-shaped tracks from new album Rub, her first in six years. Supported by local superwomen (and Dazed approved) FAUX QUEENS.

Saturday – Unique Editions 12—6pm @ Rogue Project Space, Manchester — FREE

Did you know that Rogue Artists’ Studios is having to leave Crusader Mill, making way for residential apartments? They also share their building with textile businesses, such as Unique Knitwear, and in an interesting and timely collaboration, artist Sam Meech has linked-up the neighbours by experimenting with and sharing ideas about digital art and knitwear production. Expect an exhibition of his results — Internet-age Christmas jumpers, binary scarves, knitted punchbags and portraits – giving an amusing and poignant insight into factory life and manufacturing processes old and new. Until 13 Nov.

Laura Robertson, Editor

David L. Rattigan enjoys a sense of unearthly dread thanks to Liverpool’s Everyman & Playhouse — currently hosting the warped, winding corridors of Hill House…

While you might leave behind one or two of the wordier scenes and the occasionally convoluted machinations of the plot, the warped, surreal benightedness of The Haunting Of Hill House – a new commission for the stage from Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse — will almost certainly follow you out of the theatre.

Originally published in 1959, Shirley Jackson’s classic novel on which the play is based tells of four characters gathering at a New England mansion at the behest of a paranormal researcher to observe alleged ghostly activity. It was memorably made into a film — The Haunting — in 1963, directed by Robert Wise — whose eclectic resumé also included The Curse of the Cat People, The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story and The Sound of Music — and again in 1999, in a version by Jan de Bont (featuring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Liam Neeson) best consigned to the vaults. Now it is on stage for the first time ever, in an adaptation co-produced by Hammer; the company most famous for the Gothic horror films it produced from the ‘50s through to the ‘70s.

Emily Bevan (The Casual Vacancy, In the Flesh) plays Eleanor – Nell — a New England woman tormented by the memory of her late mother. She is the first true star of this adaptation, taking an even more central role than did Julie Harris in the brilliantly executed film version. We experience almost everything through her, being moved at times to amusement at her foibles; sympathy with, perhaps pity at, her neuroses; and unearthly dread as she finds herself increasingly terrorised by Hill House, a place that both tortures her and fulfils her dreams. Like her, Hill House does not appear to have escaped its past. Bevan’s is a strong performance that carries the show alongside the second real star — Hill House itself.

The effects, mostly a combination of gauzes, projections, lighting, shadows and sounds, will creep up on your imagination long after the play has ended. They take us deep into Nell’s mind and into the winding corridors of Hill House. Its chambers and hallways literally swirl around our antihero as she explores it with a mixture of fear and childlike excitement. There’s a handful of jump scares, but the most chilling elements of this production slither towards us.

One other performance worth noting is that of Chipo Chung as Theodora. She is assured in a role that draws out some of Nell’s suppressed instincts, promising her the freedoms she — through circumstances and her own psychological inadequacies — has been denied. As Dr Montague, the academic behind the paranormal experiment, Martin Turner is adequate but lacks gravitas; and yet, while a more charismatic presence might have added another layer to the story, the exhilarating atmosphere and two strong central performances make up for this shortcoming. Of the rest of the cast, Joseph May clearly enjoys himself as the wisecracking reporter whose scepticism is challenged by events.

There are some obvious flaws, including an episode of what my companion described as “a bit school-drama class,” and one or two effects that don’t quite work, or at least only truly work from certain vantage points in the theatre. But again, they seem immaterial in view of the whole.

Perhaps it is telling that the play’s opening sequence, in the form of a monologue over scenes of Nell driving to her appointment at Hill House, is strongly reminiscent of Marion Crane’s flight from Phoenix in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). For as I sit to write this review, I’m captivated all over again in the way I find myself haunted by another Hitchcock film, Vertigo (1958). Like Vertigo, The Haunting Of Hill House is about being pursued by memories, enticed into a place that offers both promise and discomfort, freedom and fear; this theme is conveyed not merely cerebrally, but by exerting a cinematic quality that mesmerises all the senses.

Recalling the crazed journey through Nell’s mind and through the Gothic contours of Hill House makes me want to return. Some theatrical experiences hit you hard but are soon forgotten; the ghostly presence of Hill House, however, will remain with you long after you stumble out the front door and into the light.

David L. Rattigan

See The Haunting Of Hill House at the Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool, until Saturday 16 January 2016 — £14-25

What’s hot this week? Our pick of the arts — and Halloween — listings from around Liverpool and the rest of the UK…

Monday – Made You Look (2015) + Q&A 6pm @ FACT Liverpool — £10

With panelists — including design studio WellMade, illustrator Craig Robson and LJMU head of graphic arts Ian Mitchell — on hand to lead a discussion afterwards, tonight’s screening of documentary Made You Look promises a serious insight into the evolution of commercial arts. With so much of our lives now spent in the virtual, digital realm, what will become of the tactile objects we hold so dear?

Visible Award: Shortlisted Projects 10am-5pm @ Tate Liverpool Foyer– FREE

A European prize for socially-engaged artistic practice that’s been running since 2011, the Visible Award comes to Liverpool this year; celebrating some excellent international art projects. See nine shortlisted projects before the winner is chosen via open jury at Liverpool Town Hall (Saturday 31 Oct 2015); including Conflict Kitchen by Dawn Weleski and Jon Rubin, a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict.

Tuesday — FACTLab Hack Nights: APIs (Tumblr With Processing) 6-8pm @ FACT Liverpool — FREE

What are Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and how do you use them?! Find out tonight in this practical demonstration: bring your laptop, beginners welcome (although some processing or programming experience is preferred).

Jane Wenham: The Witch Of Walkern 7.30pm @ Everyman Theatre, Liverpool — £12-20

Inspired by events in a Hertfordshire village — and making all the women in the audience very thankful indeed that those days are over — Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s new play follows Walkern ‘witch’ Jane Wenham as she is blamed, and tried, for a tragic death. Until 31 Oct 2015.

Wednesday — North-West Writers Meet & Greet 5.30-8.30pm @ Harris Museum, Preston — FREE

We’ve long been of the mindset that there’s strength in numbers. So we’re hosting another writers’ social, this time with Blaze Arts Festival and the Harris Museum and Art Gallery! As always, it’s totally informal and open to all, whether you already write for magazines, journals, newspapers or blogs, or are just thinking about it. Come along, have a glass of wine, and talk about your writing with editors and like-minded creative practitioners.

Artist Talk: Emma Hart 6.30-8.30pm @ Grand Union, Birmingham — FREE

Clay hair in scrunchies and clay fists throwing punches, ‘a bum with knickers wedged up its crack’… these are Emma Hart’s glossy and irreverent ceramic sculptures, currently on show as big MOUTH at Grand Union. Hear from the artist live tonight with Harun Morrison (co-artistic director of Fierce Festival) and Kim McAleese (Grand Union programme director).

Thursday — Cheap Thrills Presents Trick ‘r Treat (2007) 7.30-9.15pm @ A Small Cinema, Liverpool — £5

A couple finds out what happens when they blow a jack o’ lantern out before midnight… A group of teenagers take a prank too far… Following five interwoven stories that occur on the same residential block, on the same night, enjoy this under-appreciated horror comedy tonight alongside Cheap Thrills’ uproarious themed trailers and drive-in adverts.

Friday — Psycho (1960) With Live Orchestra 7.30pm @ Liverpool Philharmonic Hall — £40-14

‘Psycho massages and strangles the ID of Anglo-American cinema out into the open where it can lie in its ugliness and pleasure for all to see’: so said our film critic Adam Scovell on Hitchcock’s infamous psychological thriller (read here). See it tonight as you’ve never seen it before: fifty years on from its release, in a big-screen presentation accompanied by a live performance of Bernard Herrmann’s brilliant, skin-prickling score.

PICK OF THE WEEK: Homotopia: International LGBT Festival @ Venues Across Liverpool — FREE

A bumper offer this year from a consistently ambitious and surprising arts festival. Yet how to pick highlights from such an extensive programme? The unveiling of Alien Sex Club is a must (artist’s talk tonight 6pm at The Bluecoat and full exhibition across Camp and Furnace and the Walker) which explores the relationship between visual culture and HIV; “England’s first lady of the double entendre” and Carry On legend Fenella Fielding introduces a madcap evening of duck apples, fangs and 1935 horror The Bride Of Frankenstein (Saturday, A Small Cinema); and who wouldn’t love a night of song and opera from Nigerian operatic diva and Homotopia favourite Le Gateau Chocolat (13 Nov, St Helens World of Glass). Festival continues until 1 Dec 2015.

Saturday — Exhibition Opening: Kawaii: Crafting The Japanese Culture Of Cute 10am-4pm @ James Hockey & Foyer Galleries, UCA Farnham, Surrey — FREE

Contemporary Japanese artists responding to the phenomenon of ‘cute’, or Kawaii, via traditional craft skills, expect a fascinating segue from princess fixations to the exploitative nature of sexual politics. Look out for the full-colour catalogue, plus seminars, lectures, workshops and exhibition tours. Until 12 Dec 2015.

Sunday — Build Your Own Camera With Rachel Brewster 11am-5pm @ The Bluecoat, Liverpool — £50

This is for all the photography fans out there who want to extend their creativity into their kit: learn how to build (and use) your very own working Konstruktor camera in a day. Plus, you get to take it home with you at the end of the workshop!

Laura Robertson