RICHARD HAMILTON
UK | 1969 | black and white, colour | 24 mins
Credits:
Production Company: Maya Film Productions Ltd
Sponsor: Arts Council of Great Britain
Director: James Scott In collaboration with Richard Hamilton
Script: James Scott, Christopher Finch, Richard Hamilton
Cinematographer and editor: Adam Barker-Mill
Additional rostrumwork: Bill Forber
Acknowledgement: John Baragrey, British Board of Film Censors, Ford Motor Company, ITN, Mick Jagger,Edwin Janss Jr, Patricia Knight, Leslie Mitchell, Movietonenews, National GalleryNational Screen Services, Pathe News, Rank Organisation, Universal Pictures, Visnews, Cornel Wilde
Cast:
Miss World: Shanel
Mr Universe: Georges Ferranti
Interview with Richard Hamilton by Christopher Finch
‘I don’t like art films,’ says a voice as the viewer is confronted in the first frames with celluloid leader and intercut fragments of newsreel. Provocative and perverse, this is the opening to James Scott’s sound-and-image collaboration with its ostensible subject, Richard Hamilton. What follows is an exhilarating, oddball and challenging 24-minute reflection on image-making, automobiles, Hollywood, consumerism, sex, the Sixties and more. So different, and so appealing – to quote from the title of Hamilton’s famous 1956 collage that is conventionally seen as the founding work of Pop Art – this is a film that, like Ken Russell’s earlier Pop Goes the Easel, made for BBC’s Monitor series in 1962, is itself a Pop artefact. But where Russell’s celebration of four recent graduates of the Royal College of Art is hedonistic and gloriously naive, Richard Hamilton is deconstructive and modestly dystopian. The two films serve as brilliant bookends to the swinging decade.
Richard Hamilton contributed ‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’ (which makes an animated appearance in the film) to the catalogue for the 1956 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition This is Tomorrow. In an accompanying text he wrote ‘We resist that kind of activity that is primarily concerned with the creation of style… What is needed is not a definition of meaningful imagery but the development of our perceptive potentialities to accept and utilise the continual enrichment of visual material.’ Commercial imagery from consumer advertising was juxtaposed in the show with demonstrations of the ambiguities of perception. Much of the artist’s subsequent work elaborated on this counterpoint, and as a film Richard Hamilton does much the same.
Details of Hamilton’s artworks are combined with film and television fragments and (often non-synchronous) sounds, with magazine pages and moments from movies (including, in an ‘Intermission’, an advertisement for Pepsi-Cola and hot dogs, and the seemingly unedited trailer for The Desert Hawk (1950), with audio of Marilyn Monroe in The River of No Return (1954), hand drawn marks on photographs, and with self-referential elements of media, such as the artist’s mouth filmed in close-up on a television screen. Hamilton offers a voiceover commentary on his practice (drawn from an interview with Christopher Finch) but this too is interrupted by ‘found’ sound that is layered, manipulated and disrupted. From this dense, disorienting and frequently funny patchwork emerges something that is an evocation of Hamilton’s art and a perceptual analysis that has little interest in explicit explanation.
‘The object was to involve the artist as much as possible in the process of making the film,’ James Scott said in an interview in 1973. ‘I didn’t want to stand outside the artist and show him as I saw him but I wanted to use the film to appropriate what he did through painting. And I think the Hamilton film is the closest I came to that. Where I feel the film falls down is that I never really put Hamilton into perspective; he’s treated so subjectively.’
The film was made in the year that the artist showed his ‘Swingeing London 67’ prints, along with beach scene paintings, at the Robert Fraser Gallery. One sequence in the documentary replays and reworks news coverage of the trial of Fraser, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger for the unlawful possession of cannabis. A press photo of Jagger and Fraser handcuffed together in a police van was the source of the ‘Swingeing London’ series, and the cutting-up and colourising of the news coverage parallels Hamilton’s working methods. The absurdity of events is further enhanced by a playful layer of sound using cut-ups of news reports specially recorded by former Movietone News and BBC television announcer Leslie Mitchell.
Hamilton’s fascination with Hollywood is revealed through visual analysis of a scene from the Douglas Sirk film Shockproof (1949), the source for his works ‘Interiors I + II’; at the same time, with the inclusion as the background for the closing titles low-rent impersonations of Mr Universe and Miss World, the artist’s aspirations to make a big-budget movie are parodied. James Scott has recalled that his filmic influences at the time took in American ‘B’ movies as well as the works of Stan Brakhage (referenced perhaps in the very first frames of flickering, abstract colour),John Cassavetes’ Shadows* (1959) and a wide range of French, Italian and Japanese art-house cinema. With these cinematic references laid across Hamilton’s artwork, treated with wit and yet at the same time demonstrating an appropriate respect for the artist’s ideas, Richard Hamilton both extends Hamilton’s work and, to a degree, critiques it. ‘The important thing is to establish the doubt,’ Hamilton’s opening monologue asserts. ‘We can’t make a movie which is going to be perfect, precise, beautiful, a creative work in its own right.’ Nearly fifty years on, this exemplary collaboration is revealed as having achieved being pretty much exactly that. — John Wyver
