John Maybury: Remembrance Of Things Fast
This interview, previously unpublished, was conducted via email on the occasion of the screening exhibition John Maybury: Remembrance Of Things Fast at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Oct-Nov 2019. John Maybury (b. 1958, London) is an English filmmaker and artist whose directorial credits include the feature films Love Is The Devil: Study For A Portrait of Francis Bacon and The Jacket, and award-winning music videos such as Sinéad O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U and the Pet Shop Boys’ West End Girls. In 2005 he was named as one of the 100 most influential gay and lesbian people in Britain.
Maybury’s hour-long video Remembrance of Things Fast: True Stories Visual Lies (1994) is a landmark work of experimental queer cinema, making use of high-end post-production techniques and visual f/x to construct an imaginary, complex and thoroughly queer virtual landscape — one which extravagantly references the tropes and visual language of broadcast television, underground film, gay porn, drag & club culture, activist détournement, and music videos, while fluidly slipping between the boundaries separating those mediums.
SEAN CAPONE: Remembrance is described online as “the culmination of Maybury’s work in video, which has developed alongside the technology itself”. Can you share the back-story of your inspirations & motivations that led to the production of this work? How did you make this particular fragmented style of storytelling vignettes, rapid cut-up sequences, dreamy atmospheres, graphic sex, and campy skits all flow together so well?
JOHN MAYBURY: I began working as it is an experimental filmmaker in the late ‘70s. While still an art student, I’d seen the work of Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage, as well as works by Warhol and John Cocteau, in the program presented by my tutor Dave Parsons, a structural filmmaker who was my main source of information regarding the world of experimental cinema. Working first in Super8 and gradually absorbing video I developed a language which was simultaneously dreamlike and confrontational. A pivotal moment for me was meeting Derek Jarman. At 19 Derek asked me to work on his film Jubilee, making punk sets, props and costumes. About a year after Jubilee was completed, I moved into Dereks loft space with him and his boyfriend. This will be 1978-79. While living there Derek showed me many of his Super8 experiments that he had at that time sidelined for his feature film production.
These short reels opened up a whole other language of dream-diary and self invented mythology. By the early ‘80s I had had exhibitions of my film work at various venues around Europe, including several at the ICA London. The 1984 one-man show Circus Logic in particular lead to a review in the London Times, which in turn got me invited by Olympus cameras to visit their new video studio. After this visit I was given an Olympus video camera which changed the direction of my work considerably. Circus Logic comprised four half-hour video films which can be shown individually or as a two hour sequence.
Prior to this a short 10-minute film shot on Super8, then combined with found video footage, titled Pagan Idolatry had been edited on video. This violent expressive film set the standard for the bulk of my future work. It is widely available as my section of the film The Dream Machine, a collaboration with Derek, Michael Costiff and Cerith Evans.
Each of these video pieces expand a combination of ideas drawing on William Burroughs’ cut-up techniques transposed to images, homoerotic imagery, gratuitous video violence and a romantic lyricism. All of my work at this time was responding to the barrage of imagery, TV, film, magazines, of mainstream media filtered through the queer experience of my daily life and rendered in a self-consciously aggressive and artistic way. This collage technique mixing Super8 and video would form the core of my practice for the next several years.
It was also around this time that I began to receive commissions for music videos, mostly from friends. But working in this area I suddenly had access to a far higher level of postproduction facilities. While the money I was paid for this work began to finance my experimental practice. Also, while working in the commercial sector, I struck up relationships with editors and production houses who would come to be allies when working on my underground work. Because I was bringing work and money to these places they were happy to give me downtime at night to work on my own projects. As a consequence I suddenly had access to much more sophisticated technology.
SC: I encountered this video shortly after it came out, when I was a young video art student in America, following an intense period of ‘culture wars’ marked by AIDS activism, a growing visibly gay presence in popular culture, and in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. At the same time, high-quality video production technology had become widely affordable and accessible to artists and activists, creating an ‘alternative media’ art movement driven by identity politics and cultural critique. Was ‘Remembrance’ developed in response to these historical moments, or were there other forces at play in your life & environment that led to its creation?
JM: By the early 90s I had become dissatisfied working on music videos. I'd won some MTV awards and worked with fantastic music artists. I had also made long-form music videos and fashion films. But the commercial aspect of this work was less and less.
A large number of my friends had already begun to get sick and die from AIDS. So I refocused my work as an artist on queer identity. Absurd and Premonition of Absurd Perversion in Sexual Personae Part One were my first attempts to address these far darker issues.
A commission from London weekend television collaged fragments from various film and video works from the 80s into a retrospective portrait of that decade. At that time the most important artists currently working were ACT-UP, initially in the States but eventually worldwide. It was impossible not to join in through my work with this crusade. Premonition still retains some of my previous work’s lyricism but I now felt the need to confront the situation more directly and aggressively.
In ‘92 Tilda Swinton had asked me to direct Man To Man, an adaptation of the stage play she had performed in London the previous year. This allowed me to overlay my image making techniques onto a narrative, in a highly stylised and impressionistic way while simultaneously confronting one strand of gender issues and sexual politics.
Next I received a commission from the arts Council UK and Channel-4 to make a film with a relatively tiny budget. I decided to make Remembrance, asking various friends then suffering From HIV/AIDS to join other actors in creating a dystopic vision of the world in which we were currently living. Thus besides the monologues actors delivered to camera, concerning queer bashing, child abuse, gender politics and other personal experiences, I tried to represent media cliche, news broadcast misinformation (what we now call fake news) as well as global terrorism, the recent Gulf War, and cut-up this wide range of subject matter into an imaginary nightmare broadcast … naturally queer sex and homoeroticism had to be included too. It's worth noting that many of the drag queens who speak in the film were HIV at the time and in two instances were in hospital receiving treatment for full blown AIDS and came to be filmed directly from there, going back straight after the shoot. Two were dead by the time the film was shown, and sadly now most are. That they were able to perform with such humour and strength, I hope is a testament to their memory.
SC: The work is quite technologically sophisticated for an ‘underground’ film, even by today’s standards (relatively speaking). How did you access the resources needed to create the many different styles of visual f/x and audiovisual design? I feel that it’s not mere gimmickry — the content and the special effects are unified quite naturally in a kind of visual/aural/conceptual feedback loop. Did you enter into production knowing how you wanted it to look and flow, or did playing around with the technology create new ways of ’seeing’, filming and thinking?
JM: The film was made possible by £25,000 grant. With this money I apportioned approximately one third to shooting, one third to the postproduction, and the rest to a complex sound design. I had learnt on Man To Man that sophisticated sound design could place images on screen that were not actually present. This was something Derek Jarman took to its logical conclusion in his masterpiece Blue.
It was always my intention to create a cyberpunk extravaganza. I wanted the film to shun the arty patina that most experimental film and video had. It had to compete with mainstream imagery whether MTV, CNN, or any other broadcast media at that time. I was also interested in the burgeoning world of video games and internet language in its early and cruder forms.
I had used green screen extensively since the mid 80s and combined with the latest digital postproduction I was able to fulfill my technical ambitions. I had always preferred the brazen, crass visual violence of cable TV to the pseudo poetics of experimental film and video then extant. Much of Remembrance shows the cutting edge of what was available technologically at that time. This was only possible because I was working in professional facilities overnight In the downtime available when real programs and commercials were not being made. Of course, now, most of these effects are available as apps on people’s phones in their pockets, LOL.
SC: I feel that LGBT filmmakers haven’t really embraced the opportunity that ‘Remembrance’ offered, in terms of using animation, digital f/x and virtual reality to explore different types of bodies, fantasies and representations. Perhaps gay identity is being explored more effectively in the ‘real world’ now? Do you see the work as having an influence since its inception?
JM: The reaction to Remembrance was strange. It won several awards internationally, including the teddy bear at the Berlin Film Festival. It was screened on national television to much media condemnation, receiving more complaints from the public than any other broadcast until that point — including one which said rather poetically that “the director should burn in a lake of fire” — but quite often at queer film festivals the reaction was very hostile. People seem to be afraid of its very sophistication. I remember some people saying it was simply a postproduction show reel, ignoring the deep emotional content of many of the monologues. My contemporaries at that time, Derek Jarman, Tom Kalin, David Wojnarowicz, Todd Haynes were all working in their different ways to try and address queer life and its representation in cinema and the art world. Some, like Derek and David were simultaneously dealing with their diagnoses, while the rest of us were simply in the midst of the queer Holocaust which was part of our daily lives.
In many ways the film sits alone, it remains an anomaly, maybe because the technology involved quickly became so commonplace as to be of no interest whatsoever. Because I have never pursued gallery representation or even asked for acknowledgement as an experimental filmmaker my work is now very little seen. I don't want this to be a sob story. in many ways this situation is a result of my own dysfunction and mental health issues. Combined with the fact that from 1998, after Love Is The Devil, my experimental film work has been sporadic. Instead I have made two other feature films and worked with HBO, Showtime and Netflix on TV projects with varying success. In the 90s and beyond, I've continued to make experimental film and video as well as making occasional music videos, gallery installations, as well as collaborating with friends like the late Leigh Bowery, the late Alexander McQueen, the artist Francesco Vezzoli, as well as continuing to paint photograph and write. With occasional exhibitions as an artist.
SC: What do you think of the current state of independent LGBTQ film & art? How would you compare the sensibilities you were exploring in the 80s/90s to today’s culture of YouTube, social media glut, ‘fake news’, rightwing populism, and the mainstreaming of LGBTQ culture?
JM: It's interesting to me looking at the landscape now of queer identity in the film, media and the art world. From RuPaul's Drag Race to streaming services and even Hollywood, the queer audience appears to be catered to. LGBTQ and BAME issues seem to be boxes which are ticked. The pinking of brands for Pride Week and the referencing of gender struggles are simply aspects of social/media marketing. This may seem cynical, but as I watch the de-queering of Instagram and other social media platforms I feel the transgressive and subversive aspects of queer life are being suppressed by conservative forces which prefer a more acceptable face of the homo. There are exceptions, like the brilliant @theaidsmemorial on Instagram, possibly the most important use of that dysfunctional platform.
I can't say I'm completely up to speed with the work of the many many young artists working today. Things come to my attention by various means and some are fantastic and some are not. But it does seem as if we need new outlets beyond the corporate techno giants whose fingers reach into every crevice of our lives.
