EVERYWHERE - Poseurs: watching the No City Fun Joy Division film

A while back I did a blog about Grant Gee's 2007 Joy Division documentary mentioning that, good as it is (up to a point), Gee's film needed to be more like Charles E Salem's scratchy, scuffed-up 12-minute short on the band and Manchester, No City Fun (1979). I don't think No City Fun was widely available until fairly recently, but it is now (on YouTube as of October 2022). 

Manchester moderne: a shot from No City Fun

So, what's No Fun City like? Well, for me it's like this: 

*It's pretty much the ideal film to "represent" a band and their music. In essence it's like an elongated music video, though quite a lot more abstract and impressionistic than your average music vid. There are no cheesy shots of Joy Division in the street or pretending to play their instruments (they don't appear at all). What we see is Manchester, Manchester, Manchester: the city centre, forlorn-looking housing estates and arterial roads, the Hulme Crescents, car parks, cars, buses, an interior of some kind of anonymous high-rise building  - the old polytechnic building on Oxford Street?. Plus: a telephone attached to a wall, televisions on sale in a shop window ("Watch what you want when you want"), magazines speaking about "International Revolution" or the fact that "More [music] firms go disco", someone typing on an old-fashioned manual typewriter. And as these scenes flash by, we hear four Joy Division songs: Disorder, Day Of The Lords, Candidate and Insight. It's very evocative, especially for anyone with memories of Manchester (and the UK in general) from this period.  

*Everywhere you look in the film there are period details: a big box of Swan Vestas matches, Greater Manchester Transport's distinctive orange-and-white buses with their Helvetica type M (I'm sure Peter Saville was an admirer), the Arndale Centre, an "IRA rule: Brits out" slogan on a wall (17 years later the IRA would rip the frontage off the Arndale with their enormous Corporation Street bombing), "luxurious" indoor shopping, the time-capsule frontages of Virgin Records and Tapes and HMV, tinny-looking Ford Cortinas and Minis and Austin Allegros, some external shots of the Russell Club with half-glimpsed posters for the Gang Of Four and Sir Lord Cas (whoever he was), the exterior of 

Piccadilly Radio ("261"). Most of all there's the Manchester skyline: a mix of 50s, 60s and 70s tower blocks and university outposts, and soot-and-rain-darkened red-black Victorian warehouses and municipal buildings, interspersed by surface car parks in open, desolate-looking locations that appear to be the fringes of the city centre. The city is mundane, messy and unattractive.  

The glamour of shopping in the 1970s

*The cinematography and editing are really good. The camera is repeatedly tilted by 90 or 180 degrees, wrenching the viewer into new, uncomfortable perspectives (a "post-punk" aesthetic?), while there are pleasing city centre street scenes shot from a moving vehicle or aerial pans from the windows of a high-rise building. Best of all, perhaps, is the way that a lot of the Super 8 film stock is distressed and scratchy. It's not clear how much of this was accidental or by design. Either way, it looks good and seems to fit with Joy Division's doom-ridden music.

No future for you or me in Manchester

*Key to the film is the typewritten text we see (in snatches), with someone shown (face never seen) typing it in a bleak room. The typescript is some kind of first-person screed about life in the city. Samples include: "I am frightened because I can't find any real people", "EVERYWHERE -  Poseurs", "I am a punk. I am a girl. I am a boy. I am insane", "EVERYBODY'S HAPPY NOWADAYS", "I think I hate the city. I think it hates me", and "By James Anderton". What does it all mean? I'm assuming the words are from - or somehow connected to - Liz Naylor's (semi-) famous 1979 article about Manchester in the City Fun fanzine. The text's disjointedness and sense of urban malaise work well. The existential angst reflected in a city where "Kendals punks" may be a sign of something negative and even merge into the malignity of James Anderton's notoriously repressive policing of Manchester.

Where were you? Did you see me ...?

Nope, there's not a lot of fun in the city in ... No City Fun. So Salem's film, with its unease and its implied critique of capitalist modernity - the insistent shots of shops, cars, televisions, even of a phone (a phone somehow imbued with a feeling of threat) - is a powerful visual accompaniment to Joy Division's music (or vice versa). It's not really a film about music or a musical scene, or it is only in an oblique way. We glimpse a band apparently setting up on stage - it appears to be Magazine and I assume it's inside the Russell Club - but this is way down in the mix, so to speak. No, No City Fun is much more a film about a particular (ahem) atmosphere. Though it's shot in colour - ranging from bleached semi-grey cityscapes to the chiaruscuro neon-gloom colouring of an indoor shopping centre - the film arguably has quite a bit in common with Chris Petit's moody black-and-white mini-masterpiece, Radio On, also from 1979. For what it's worth, I'd say No City Fun would be an appropriate short to screen ahead of Petit's full-length feature in a unlikely-to-ever-happen cinema pairing. Some kind of lurking dread seems to lie behind all those scenes of moving cars and endless shots of shop signs and billboards ("No future with the Neutron bomb"). Whereas Petit's film is a doom-laden noir road movie to nowhere, Salem's film comes across as a fun-deprived meditation on late-70s consumerism and urban isolation. When the credits creak into view at the end, we see that No City Fun, commissioned by Tony Wilson (who else), is a "Factory Flick" (FAC 9). The "flick" designation feels right. Something done quickly, perhaps very intensely, without worrying about "polish", but capturing the moment better than something more elaborate and "TV-friendly". There are zero talking heads and no voice-overs in No City Fun and it's all the better for their absence. Lights are flashing, cars are crashing / Getting frequent now ...