More than any other form of art, except possibly architecture, filmmaking, the film-maker’s life work, is about what might have been.
With different actors, or with more money, or at a different time, or with a different promotional campaign, we might have been looking at something other than what we see. This is not what most audiences speculate on, although occasionally critics do, but it is a large preoccupation for the film-maker, before, during and after the making of a film. Steven Paul Davies’ book on and with Mike Hodges is almost as much about what didn’t happen as what did. It could have adopted as a subtitle the title of his 1983 TV film, Missing Pieces.
Few film-makers today are inclined to admit to discontinuity in their work. It would hint at confusion and failure. Samuel Beckett’s axiom “Fail again. Fail better,” is not the ideal motto for contemporary celebrity-success. But uncertainty is ever the sleeping partner of ambition.
The narrative here is resolutely chronological. It cannot and will not paper over the life cracks or plane out the art warps. Oddly, the effect of reading the whole book is like hearing a journal of the frustrations and elevations that alternate in the making of a single film. Mike’s voice-over throughout makes everything untidily life-like rather than formally art-like. It’s more of a character piece than a plot.
It poses the interesting question of how far a man’s long-time work reflects his personality and behaviour, especially in such a social form as film where he is not alone. In a glasshouse society where friendship is illusory and agendas are hidden there will inevitably be a preponderance of villains over heroes. Film-life is a devious affair and engenders personal prejudice as a defence. But then what are our prejudices if not the illegitimate children of our convictions?
Mike’s best films, The Terminal Man and Black Rainbow, both commercial failures, are about manipulation. But they are not, as films, manipulative. None of their characters invites easy identification. Thank God. They are decidedly other people. An only child myself, I recognise in Mike a similar unsentimental sensibility. A couple of detached sibling-free voyeurs observing what the world does to its unfortunate inhabitants. People like us. A world as Le Corbusier observed, about the nature and purpose of a house, is “a machine for living in”.
It’s unlikely that this book would have been published without the recent success of Croupier. From being written off, Mike is now being written up. And at the age of three score years and ten. Ainsi va le monde. The number 70 reminds me of an occasion when Mike and I were lunching with a sympathetic critic who described Croupier as somehow coming from the Seventies, in which decade he thought it might have fared better. This was a year or more before the US release. It was therefore an unexpected delight that American audiences were completely unaware they were applauding a 30-year-old movie as if it were new: what might not have been, as it were.
PAUL MAYERSBERG
Cannes, June 2002