The center of the world is constantly shifting, culturally speaking: it was Paris at the fin de siecle, Greenwich Village in the fifties, Seattle for a few lively months in 1991. Herostratus came out in 1967/8, just as Carnaby Street was losing its vibrancy and the cultural omphalos was edging back overseas, possibly to California. It is the only feature film by Australian Don Levy, who apparently left the film industry afterwards in disgust. He was studying Chemistry at Cambridge when he became entangled in the moviemaking world, which led him into the Slade School of Fine Art. In 1962 the British Film Institute gave him a grant and he launched into Herostratus, which took five years to complete and opened in the same week as 2001: A Space Odyssey. He then retired to teach film in the U.S. until his untimely death in 1987.
Herostratus (named for the fellow who set fire to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356 BC in a bid for immortality) is the story of a disillusioned poet who offers to sell his own suicide to an ad agency. They'll make some money; he'll send a final message of disgust; everyone wins. It stars Michael Gothard (a fascinating actor: he was the creepy-sexy exorcist in Ken Russell's the Devils, the stern-faced gaoler who tumbles for Faye Dunaway's charms in Richard Lester's Four Musketeers, and he joined that exclusive club of Bond Villains when he played Locque in For Your Eyes Only), and marks the screen debut of a nubile teenager named Helen Mirren.
Behold the reviews of the day: it was praised as "one of the great films of the year" (La Libre Belgique, 12/30/67), telling its tale "with discipline and astounding impact... in one masterly scene after another..." (Art & Artists Magazine). Molly Plowright in the Glasgow Herald (1/2/68) called it "the most astonishing film of my experience... right on the frontier of the cinema as we so far know it," and adds, "The visuals are more beautiful and the content more terrible than anything else I have seen, and the steady stare in the depths of the human mind makes Godard and Losey look like fumbling side glances." Richard Whitehall in 1972 said, "Distribution problems may have kept Herostratus from general audiences, but its impact on filmmakers, especially in Western Europe, has been profound. Its influence may be seen not only in the revitalized German cinema, but also Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange." Tom Ramage in Boston After Dark said, "Levy is a genius and Herostratus is one of the five or six most significant films of the last decade." The encomia continue... see the Don Levy Project for these references and more.
It, like much swingin' sixties' product, apparently doesn't age well. Londoners were privileged to see a revival showing a few years ago, and TIME OUT called it "Antonioni crossed with Lester... polite, irreverent, inarticulate." It may be that after all these years of longing for it I will be vastly disappointed, as I was when I finally saw Privilege.
If someone would release it on DVD, I could find out.
No comments:
Post a Comment