The Great Ice Cream Robbery (1971) (Excerpt)

After making films with David Hockney, R B Kitaj, and Richard Hamilton, I wanted to make a film about a sculptor. For me, Claes Oldenburg was of great interest because of his roots in performance. His practice was far more confrontational and outwardly dramatic than the previous artists that I had worked with.  In that sense, it was also  closer to the practice of film. Philosophically, I was also interested in Oldenburg’s concern with language and symbolism. His encyclopedic listing and collecting of images and ready-mades, his sketching and the immediacy of his work incorporating found objects, all these aspects were of interest to me.

At the time of making The Great Ice Cream Robbery, I was becoming more involved in social and political issues. This was reflected in my work with the Berwick Street Collective and the film Nightcleaners, which we started filming around the same time that I began editing the Oldenburg film. The end of the sixties leading into the decade of the seventies was a heady time when revolutionary ideas were making their way into the fabric of everyday life much as is happening today. Feminism, civil rights and anti-war protest were replacing the blind optimism of the swinging sixties. I wanted this film to look at art in a more dialectical way, questioning its mode of consumption, as well as its ideology. A big retrospective at the Tate of an iconic American pop artist seemed to be a way to focus on these concerns.

Before I had the ‘green light’ to start the film I decided to go with my cameraman, Adam Barker-Mill, to gather some background footage at the Tate. By pure chance we happened on the event that gave the film its title: the arrest of an ice cream seller, including the bungling tipping over of his cart and the spilling of his ice cream on a busy street just outside the Tate.

Oldenburg arrived that summer in London with his then partner, the artist Hannah Wilke. Hannah, was little known in the UK as an artist in her own right, but was to become the ‘beautiful female lead’ in this story, the perfect complement to the famous American sculptor. For Oldenburg, the trip to London was also a grand adventure; a search for images, such as the tracking down of the famous water cooling towers the inspiration of his knees project. He was aware that his eyes, his vision, was a selling point (Antonioni had paid him to go to Rome to take photographs). This was another strand in my approach.  Oldenburg agreed at the outset to take a small 8mm movie camera that I gave him to make his own, more personal records. And this footage, sometimes optically altered, found its way into the edit and became part of the two-screen collage.

I have often been asked, ‘Why the two screens?’ (sometimes called ‘split-screen’). It was not a new idea. It had been around since the early sixties and was even used in the romantic comedy Indiscreet (1 )in 1958. At this time, I was interested in the various forms of ‘expanded’ cinema and one of the films that I had seen was the split-screen Chelsea Girls(2) by Andy Warhol. For me, the use of two screens was a way of escaping the frightening linearity of film; the beginning, the middle and the inevitable denouement. The freedom found in this lack of linearity felt much like Oldenburg’s own spontaneous happenings and ‘street’ art. It allowed a certain kind of flux in the way that the film was ultimately presented.

It seemed that the whole practice of Oldenburg was very much about flux and chance and impermanence. Soft sculptures would allow a piece to always unfold in an entirely new and different way, such as a giant soft hamburger or an oversized toaster made out of canvas. Squeezing its sides the toast would pop up. In one instance, Claes told us the story of a secretary, who, in looking for a nice cushion, had appropriated the hamburger’s slice of pickle. After an insurance claim and an elaborate replacement, the original was found on her office chair. In the film, Tate curators struggle to make sense of joints of meat made out of plaster on a butchers stand, or become almost lost in the octopus-like grips of a giant vinyl soft fan. All these contradictions for me, playing out on two screens, would leave questions without needing clear and obvious answers. While the museum guards watch warily as the public pays homage, (warned ‘not to touch’), Oldenburg talks about how the mathematics of multiples and editions increase the artist’s income exponentially, then goes on to say his art is actually about death: a subject more taboo than sex.

The finale is the grand opening at the Tate, a sumptuous dinner where the cool icons and celebrities of the day (including the model Jean Shrimpton), assemble to pay their respects. The ‘spectacular’, as in Guy Debord’s brilliant book  ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ (3)  is seen against a cacophony of sound, music, breaking glass and applause. The film ends on the giant water coolers, frozen in time in a park reminiscent of Maryon Park in Antonioni’s film Blow-Up (1966). A lonely discarded place in suburban London.

— James Scott

Notes

1 Indiscreet 1958 Stanley Donen with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman

2 Chelsea Girls 1966 Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol with Brigid Berlin and Randy Borscheidt, Edie Sedgwick and Nico

3 Guy Debord , 1967 The Society of the Spectacle

THE GREAT ICE CREAM ROBBERY
UK - 1971 - colour - 34 + 33 mins

Credits:

Hannah Wilke: Played by herself

Production Company: Maya Film Productions Ltd
Sponsor: Arts Council of Great Britain
Director: James Scott
Producers: Andrew St John, Rodney Wilson (for Arts Council)
Photography: Adam Barker-Mill
8mm Camera: Claes Oldenburg
Sound: Don Warren
Additional Sound: Tony Jackson, James Scott
Dubbing Mixers: Peter Gilpin,J B Smith
Editing: Richard White
Assistants: Gill Smith, Jon Sanders
Music:
Oats Peas and Beans played by Geoff Castle
Toccata by Charles-Marie WidorHawaiian
Orchids byJack Shaindlin
Circus Days by Jack Shaindlin
Corporation Band by Gert Wilde