'Cynically indifferent eroticism' (Primitive London (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Primitive London (DVD)
Date:	05/10/09 (57 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some interesting and strange old footage

Disadvantages: Not very coherent, often very dull

This BFI DVD costs about £12 on amazon. A blu-ray is also available for a bit more.

In the early 60s a new style of documentary appeared, usually referred to as the mondo film (named after the Italian film Mondo Cane). Exploitative and prurient, they existed as a way of getting the most lurid, gratuitous and titillating material possible past the censors. A pompous, mock-philosophical voiceover would add a bit of 'educational' gravitas, while a slushy soundtrack would add a maudlin element. Mostly the films involved going to Africa, filming animals being killed, and (the main attraction) getting some National Geographic shots of brown ladies wobbling their boobs at the camera. They were the first documentaries that made no pretence at objectivity, and are the grandfathers of those modern freakshow documentaries you see on downscale TV channels nowadays.

I'm not too interested in mondo documentaries on the whole. You've seen one, you've seen them all. But there are a few set in London, which are a lot more interesting. Primitive London might not be the best, but it's certainly the most lurid. A follow-up to London In The Raw (also released by the BFI), Primitive London was made in 1965, financed by the top exploitation double act of Tony Tenser and Michael Klinger. It's difficult to recommend this on its own merits - it's pretentious and occasionally dull - but as a peculiar snapshot of the margins of 60s London it's a real treat.

We see a whole lot of stuff - erotic, gruesome, unusual or mind-numbingly banal - while a rather pompous narrator tries to pretend there's a point to all this, a pattern to the things we see. There isn't - a lot of it has nothing to do with London at all (the martial arts demonstrations, for instance) and an awful lot of it is obviously staged.

There are four strands to the film. First there's the gruesome stuff. We begin with a filmed childbirth, although it carefully keeps the camera away from the business end of things. We also get unpleasant scenes from a factory for killing chickens, and some slightly queasy footage of an operation to remove someone's corns. I'm not sure who this was aimed at, but probably an American market. This may be why we see quite a few black medical professionals (a nurse in the birth sequence, and the chiropodist). This would probably still have shocked some American audiences.

Also falling into the gruesome category is a laughable recreation of one of Jack the Ripper's crimes (included purely to get the film an 'X' rating). I could list at least two dozen things wrong with this sequence, but will limit myself to just the one: Martha Turner, the victim we are shown, was most likely murdered by someone else. It follows this with a rather lurid piece on the then-active serial killer Jack the Stripper.

The second strand is supposedly funny weird stuff. Wrestlers, fat men in a steam bath, a scene at a hairdresser etc. This is all pointless to modern eyes, as none of it will have any residual shock or novelty value. An interminable skit about the recording of an advertising voiceover (starring a very young Barry Cryer) is one of the most tediously unfunny things I've ever witnessed. Occasionally the narrator is drowned out by the sound of - supposedly - the director and editor arguing about whether to put more girls in the film. This is a strange, self-aware vein of humour, but isn't funny in the slightest.

The third strand is probably the most interesting, as it examines youth culture. We see teenage girls mobbing a pop star (Billy J Kramer). There's a short piece about mods (they 'like sprightly coloured clothes'). The best bits are lengthy scenes in a beatnik pub and a rocker cafe. They present good contrasts, with the beatniks being as pretentious as you'd expect, while the rockers are a little more, ah, aware of their limitations. ('Do you read much?' 'No.') I heartily dislike beatniks, and the wanky collection of trustafarian wannabe poets on display here - the Nathan Barleys of their day - does nothing to shake that. I do like the (unseen) interviewer, though, and his hilariously biased line of questioning ('Tell me, Michael, do you believe in free love?').

The fourth strand, inevitably, is the sexy stuff, mostly represented by really lame striptease and burlesque footage. (There is, charmingly, a 'car keys in the punch bowl' swingers party, which is obviously not real.) The strip shows, most of which are taking place at an adult cabaret called Churchills, are rubbish - terrible song and dance routines featuring girls who look like a slightly raunchier version of Pan's People. None of them get properly naked. Some of the dancers look bored or distracted, as if they're trying to remember if they left the gas on, and there's a robotic quality to the whole thing that makes it completely unerotic.

Which of course makes it a lot more interesting. You get the feeling that this down-at-heel version of London - cheap, cheesy strippers; fading novelty; second rate youth movements - probably reflects the reality of the city in the mid-60s better than, say, A Hard Day's Night or Blow Up. This is obviously not on the film-makers' minds - you don't get the feeling that they realise just how unimpressive the strip show is, and Billy J Kramer probably seemed like a real coup at the time - but if it was self-consciously trying to be tawdry it wouldn't be as fascinating as it is. What we see tells us a lot about the film-makers, their audience, and Soho in the 60s; it just doesn't tell us what it thinks it's telling us.

It's in colour and generally looks good, having an authentically murky look to it. The music, by ambient pioneer Basil Kirchin, is unusual and slightly sardonic. I especially liked the fluffy piano music and birdsong that accompanied the wrestling sequence. The narration ladles on the cheap philosophy, coming out with a string of fortune cookie platitudes like 'the child defines the limits the adult will observe'. I can't really claim that this is good exactly; it is fascinating, though.

The extras are good too. There's a 25-minute documentary, Carousella, a black and white film about three Soho strippers - it follows each of them around for a while, then shows us their act. This is far more interesting than the strip bits in Primitive London, as we get to know the dancers as people before we're encouraged to look at them as sex objects. The effect, probably not intended, is that they're a lot sexier than the showgirls in the other film. Their dancing is also more appealing. It's all shot in a nice black and white verité style, and features brief footage of The Who playing.

There are also three 70s interviews with people involved in the nightclub or stripping business, which are quite interesting, even if the camera operator likes to zoom a bit much. The stripper interviewed is monosyllabic and looks like she might be on drugs. The DVD comes with an impressive booklet of little essays about the films on the disk, the best being by Iain Sinclair.

It's great to see an oddity like this released on DVD. As with other BFI DVDs, it's a little on the pricey side. But it's certainly worth seeking out if you're into old London footage. This is an engaging glimpse at the periphery of Swinging London, although you'll figure out more from what you don't see than what you do. If that makes sense. If it doesn't, just marvel at the efficiency of the chicken-killing process.

Summary: A mondo documentary set in a 60s London that doesn't really swing