No more fiction: Crystal Gazing with the sound turned up

What did germ-free adolescents watch at the cinema in 1982? Ha ha, yeah, they rushed to their nearest Odeon to see Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's Crystal Gazing film, eager to hear Laura Logic's spindly sax sounds and immerse themselves in the esoteric pleasures of Mulvey & Wollen's theory-heavy film-making. Or not. No, probably not. It's a bit of a journey from the exhilarating pop-punk of X-Ray Spex to a determinedly dour film which begins with a quote by Adorno, features a suicidal academic with a mindboggingly complex PhD on the semiotics of the seventeenth-century French fairytale writer Charles Perrault, and which unfolds against a backdrop of Thatcherite dischord and depression. Yeah, welcome to the funhouse. Anyway, this - in fact - is pretty much bang on as the sort of film I tend to like. Having recently watched Chris Petit's excellent Radio On and also Rachel Amodeo's What About Me, Crystal Gazing looked like it might provide another shot of post-punk filmic diversion. Which it did. Sort of. 

Music in a different kitchen: Laura Logic ('Kim') gets warmed up on the sax 

Anyway, here, fwiw, are a few music-based thoughts on Crystal Gazing, a film now subjected (ahem) to the Niluccio gaze (definitive gaze):

*Music-wise, the film is pretty strong. It features big chunks of Laura Logic's Pedigree Charm album (1982), which sounds great. I must admit I'd never heard this music until I watched the film (shame on me). It's very pleasing oddball jazzed-up pop-funk - roughly Rip Rig + Panic-like - with cool, fluttery vocals from Logic. Back then, I flirted a little with this stuff, buying Rip Rig + Panic's I Am Cold album, but then - rather unfortunately - I drifted away from it, distracted by goth and other more "urgent" post-punk sounds. Anyway, I think tunes like Martian Man, Crystal Gazing, Pedigree Charm and Rat Allé stand up really well (check 'em out). 

*Laura Logic plays a character called Kim who - surprise - is a saxophonist in a quirky post-punk band. The setting is late 1981 (the period is specified at one point) and we see Kim going from busking outside a (closed-down) shop to recording in a studio, playing live and - seemingly - appearing in a music video broadcast on TV. Charles Hayward, Ben Annesley and Philip Legg all appear on stage in what seems to be a bit of filming at a genuine Essential Logic/Laura Logic gig, all darkness and swaying-headed punters.

*We get more 1981-era music atmospherics with a scene set in the scruffy Rough Trade shop in Ladbroke Grove. The polar opposite of HMV's squeaky-clean supermarket stylings, this looks like a hole-in-the-wall operation with dirty carpets and doubtful lighting. In the film we hear the Mighty Diamonds' Pass The Kouchie, a nod to the reggae-saturated Ladbroke Grove location. Kim is shown trying to get a demo tape listened to by the Rough Trade people, and I think the audience is led to assume that this will prove successful and her stuff will be put out by the record label (Pedigree Charm was indeed ROUGH 28). 

*One of the best scenes in the film is perhaps the simplest. It's an extended slow-pan shot of a mural of a tropical (Caribbean?) scene, a faded piece of art which has "Sid Vicious rock n roll suicide" daubed on it. Rock and roll suicide might seem to strike a Bowie-esque rock-romance note, but here it feels much more flat. The depression or introversion of PiL's Metal Box, not the post-Stooges rock barrage of Anarchy In The UK. To me, it's one of the relatively few moments in the film where there's a really successful attention being paid to the visuals.

Punk meets calyspo uptown in Crystal Gazing

And this, more or less, is it, music-wise. But what you also get in Crystal Gazing is a sort of early Peter Greenaway-style mix of the cerebral and shabby-modernity, all delivered in a washed-out, near-blank fashion. We see the kitchen in Kim's London flat with its TV, hi-fi and potted plants. It's like the cover of a Brian Eno record. Cool, considered. At one point Kim is shown playing around with a photo-slide scanner thing while her depressed unemployed boyfriend (Neil) is trying to tell her about the death (by suicide) of his best friend, Julian. The scene seems to be suggesting that technology has blunted Kim's ability to respond emotionally. Meanwhile, the super-intellect of the PhD student Julian (played by Jeff Rawle, looking like a youngish John Hurt) is given several airings in the film, with blasts of full-force Lacanian semiotics that must be almost unique in the history of film-making. A scene showing Julian's PhD viva voce is a mini-masterpiece of obscure academic satire, with Julian shown tying his bewildrered examiners in knots with his hyper-theorising. It's David Lodge, but turned up to 11. On top of this, there's an intermittent voiceover from an aloof-sounding female voice (Maggie Shevlin). This shovels into the mix all sorts of remarks about the characters and their situation in relation to capitalism and "modes of production". Its unsubtle Marxian language is, I can only assume, some kind of parody, but not, in my opinion, a particularly successful one. Compared (say) to the wonderfully lugubrious Paul Schofield commentary in the first two episodes of Patrick Keiller's vaguely similar Robinson trilogy, the Shevlin voiceover misses the mark. It's too dense and distracts from the visuals rather than adding to them. The other big element in Crystal Gazing is the socio-economic malaise of early-eighties Thatcherite Britain. "Three million jobless - and worse to come" is a newpaper headline we see in a scene where the too-intelligent-for-this-world Julian films himself delivering a cryptic suicide message. "They wouldn't even give him an interview", says Neil, before his one-word exclamation, "England!". Neil will repeat this despairing exclamation later in Crystal Gazing, and at some level Mulvey and Wollen's film is clearly a critical assessment of the state of the nation. The film ends with a mid-distance shot of a picket line we're told is outside a watch factory in North Kensington. The final words of the film are a woman's cry of "Support the strike". OK, no problem, I'll do that. But: it's all a bit ... muddled/heavy-handed. Neil is said to have been run over and killed outside the factory after stopping by out of curiosity and then rushing into the road to save a child from the traffic. Er, whatever. This dashed-off plotline at the end of the film works no better than another plotline where Neil is supposedly being despatched to Mexico to hand-deliver a pawn ticket at the request of a shady gentleman-businessman (er, whatever). But overcooked plotlines aside, Crystal Gazing is an engrossingly odd film, full (over-full?) of ideas, and one which sails along very nicely on a breeze of Laura Logic's excellent music. Unsurprisingly, Crystal Gazing reminds me of Lizzie Borden's US no-budget feminist classic Born In Flames, where Logic's unmistakable voice (in Red Krayola's Born In Flames song) more or less anchors this film. As Brandon Ledet points out, there's almost "relentless repetition" of the Born In Flames song as the film's "anthem". Crystal Gazing doesn't quite have an anthem (anthems aren't very post-punk, I suppose) but the refrain "No more fiction, no more fiction / No more fiction, no more fiction" from Logic's Martian Man is a sort of low-key version of one. England ("England!") is a depressing place in Crystal Gazing, and Mulvey and Wollen seem to be suggesting that we need an irruption of the real. Picket-line action on the dank streets of London. Agit-prop in the dance. As the old adage has it, if I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution ...

Laura Logic on stage (in the film)