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Sometimes good things just happen, as with the BFI’s recent decision to release Don Levy’s (1932-1987) impossible-to-see classic Herostratus (1967) on dvd, with some of Levy’s most remarkable shorts thrown in as bonus features. Although far less well-known than its American counterpart, the British underground film has a rich and varied history.

Herostratus, which was released in 1967 to very limited audiences, is one of its unsung masterpieces. In fact, the appearance of the film on dvd marks its first commercial release ever, which gives one a fair idea of the film’s obscurity. Herostratus was filmed over an eight-month period from August 1964 through May 1965. Subsequently, it took Levy two years to find funding for and complete the editing of the film. When it was finished, his work was barely seen, except at festival screenings and in exhibitions. However, the film was well received by a generation of young filmmakers who were profoundly influenced by it and took up many of its innovations, substantiating Amnon Buchbinder’s claim (in the booklet accompanying the dvd) that Herostratus must ‘rank among the most influential of unknown films’.

Circles of Entrapment

The plot of Herostratus is deceptively simple. A young man, Max (Michael Gothard), is sick of the feeling of entrapment he experiences in society. He is poor, unemployed and feels inadequate and unnoticed. He decides to kill himself but approaches Farson (Peter Stephens), a successful advertiser, to turn his suicide into a media event. This is an obvious and desperately misguided attempt by Max to make the world take note of his existence, and a striking prefiguration of the current obsession with fame pursued through all kinds of reality-television, where fame is indeed restricted to a very brief Warholian fifteen minutes. The idea of seeking fame at all costs was hardly new in the sixties either. In fact, Herostratus retells the story of the eponymous young man in Ancient Greece who allegedly burnt down the temple of Artemis at Ephesus in an attempt to achieve immortal fame. But the cynics of this world are no fools and are quite impervious to romantic posturing. Farson certainly does not believe Max will go through with the suicide. But he sets up the media circus anyway because any exposure is better than no exposure. Meanwhile he allows Max to spend his last few days in the studio where he films his commercials and organises photo-sessions. During his stay there Max falls in love with Farson’s assistant Clio (Gabriella Licudi) and shares his first sexual experience with her. On the fatal day of his suicide, Max climbs to the top of a building, but his suicide attempt is stopped by a man who happens to be working on the roof. A struggle ensues and the man falls to his death. Max runs away, disappearing again into the jungle of the city from which he emerged.

Herostratus is a film about the desire to escape from the trap of social institutions, especially in a capitalist society. If frustrated, this desire leads to anxiety, neurosis, schizophrenia and, ultimately, suicide. It is made clear right from the start that Max is on the edge of a complete breakdown. The film opens with an extended sequence in which he thrashes his living space and runs off with a tape-player and an axe. Wielding the axe, he runs through London like a madman. By the end of the film, he has not managed to free himself. So, in a sense, the film ends where it started: with Max entrapped. Max’s mounting hysteria and anxiety are translated into the style of the film. Herostratus is edited according to a cyclical pattern: the narrative scenes are regularly punctured by a series of allegorical images that express Max’s malaise and are edited into the film in short flashes of sometimes less than a second. There are several kinds of such images: there is a scene of a female stripper, combined with images from a slaughterhouse where a cow is being disembowelled, but also recurring shots of Max running hysterically through the streets of London and, most remarkably, still shots of Max’s shaking figure in a black space that are direct references to Francis Bacon’s paintings of melting figures in impersonal boxes. Finally, Levy also edits black-and-white documentary footage into his film.

This footage is drawn from two sources. First there is footage of the Holocaust and of the victims of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Since this material is used sparingly, it blends in well enough with the film’s theme of violence against the individual. Secondly, however, Levy has used footage from Peter Whitehead’s documentary Wholly Communion (1965), which documents a public reading by several of the Beat poets in London’s Albert Hall, filmed in June 1965, immediately after filming on Herostratus had finished. These black and white inserts sit rather uncomfortably with the rest of the film because it is not always clear what they are meant to convey and how they relate to the narrative. Stylistically, they do increase the element of collage in the film. They also lend the film an agit-prop feeling that is in line with its use of stylised mise-en-scene to highlight its affiliations with Pop Art (the scenes in Farson’s office especially seem to anticipate the imagery of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, filmed in 1966). Still, the Wholly Communion fragments don’t fit in, especially because Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, read with unnecessary theatricality, has aged badly.

Editing For Effect

By today’s standards the editing of Herostratus might seem rather unremarkable. Nevertheless, the editing of the film is one of its most interesting features. Levy was a PhD student who had started a scientific research programme into the psychological effects of montage. He was conducting his research at University College London, where he studied under Thorold Dickinson, who was himself profoundly influenced by the theories of montage of Eisenstein and Kuleshov. Both Dickinson and Levy felt that the theory of montage had since been neglected and many of Levy’s short films are experiments in this area.

The editing of Herostratus became time-consuming because Levy was apparently very precise about the length of individual shots, sometimes making them almost subliminal for maximum psychological effect. This makes his film an interesting addition to Eisenstein’s theory of the ‘cinema of attractions’, where psychological effects are created through montage. Because of this theoretical aspect, it is surely one of the joys of the BFI’s release that it includes some of Levy’s most remarkable short films of the period. It is especially interesting to watch Ten Thousand Talents (1960), a send-up of the travelogue genre made at Cambridge, and Five Films (1967) in conjunction with Herostratus, which was made in-between. The first film finds Levy first experimenting with montage to achieve dynamic effects, especially in the ‘finale’ that shows ‘a trip up the Cam at 200 miles an hour’. The second, which consists of five short experiments, uses montage to create a fluid visual poetry that is quite exquisite. Stand-out segments are the first film: Punulse, which combines images of bodies in motion in a pure play of forms, and Malaise, which combines a fragment from a Nathalie Sarraute novel with images made on a trip to Northern Africa.

Some of the footage used in Five Films was appropriated from Time Is (1964), which is easily Levy’s most remarkable short feature included in this collection. On the strength of his work at the university Levy, along with some of his colleagues (such as Peter Whitehead), was invited to create a series of scientific documentaries under the auspices of the Nuffield Foundation, which sponsored an educational multimedia project titled The Ancestry of Science that sought to combine books with film. The project was supervised by Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield. Although the films for this project were commissioned works, they share many concerns with Levy’s more personal work. This is especially obvious in the case of Time Is, which is a classroom film about philosophical and scientific questions on the nature of time. This is relevant to the cyclical structure of Herostratus, where the characters not only seem to be trapped in an existential time-loop, ending up where they started, but where the expressive explosion of short collages of violent imagery is contrasted with the almost palpable felt time of real-time dialogue scenes, thus constantly stretching and contracting the experience of time for the viewer.

On a formal level, however, Time Is reads like a veritable catalogue of experimental filming and editing techniques used in the sixties. Levy uses negative printing, stroboscopic editing reminiscent of Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1966), fast- and slow-motion, reverse printing, lush romantic editing lifted straight out of Stan Brakhage, double exposures, single frame images and even abstract images that anticipate computer-generated graphic films. The resulting film is alternately funny, romantic and mysterious, and always stunningly original. Wonderful images are found to express abstract ideas, as when electrons, positrons and photons are acted out by an actor, an actress and a couple of cars. For a commissioned work, Time Is is a profoundly personal statement and an exquisitely crafted work of art.

Aftermath

If Herostratus is a film about the attempt to escape entrapment by society, then neither Levy nor the film’s star, Michael Gothard, seem to have managed to escape. Herostratus would remain Levy’s only feature film. He continued to make experimental and commissioned shorts, but as time progressed, more of his projects lingered uncompleted. In the seventies he took up a teaching job at the California Institute of the Arts, where he was much beloved of his students. Nevertheless, for reasons that remain unclear, he took his own life in 1987. Gothard for his part, born in 1939, was a troubled and neurotic man who found it difficult to function in the film industry. He put in a remarkable performance as the Inquisitor in Ken Russell’s stunning film poem The Devils (1971) and was subsequently featured in several interesting features. In the eighties, his career slowly ground to a halt and Gothard also committed suicide in 1992, making for a rather grim postscript to Herostratus.

Still, at least one person got away from the film with a career. The film has very few secondary roles, and most are restricted to one scene. One such segment shows the filming of a rather kinky commercial in Farson’s studio. It involves a young girl performing a striptease while telling the spectator that if they want her, they have to buy her. But it turns out they do not have to buy her, they have to buy her something: a set of rubber gloves to do the dishes. The sequence is a brilliant piece of Pop poetry and is performed by a very young (and suitably buxom) Helen Mirren, barely twenty, who had just started her career at the National Youth Theatre in 1965 (and was making her film debut in Herostratus). Obviously, Mirren was nobody at the time, and despite the fact that she would continue to appear in challenging independent films and even in underground fare such as Celestino Coronado’s nude and campy Hamlet (1976), her appearance in Herostratus is usually simply listed without comment in her filmography. In her memoir In the Frame (2007) the actress seems to have no memories of the film to share. And in all likelihood her scene only amounted to a day’s worth of filming. Still, it’s nice to know that not everyone involved in this film suffered the cruel irony of lingering in the obscurity that befell its director after making a film all about the quest for fame and recognition in a capitalist world.