Shooting The Past, and the future.

It was a great pleasure to be able to screen this in the context of Soft Drive, and to get such a good audience for it.  Thanks to Alastair O'Donnel at the BBC for his support.

The series seems to inspire a similar sense of ownership and of  connection in its audience as do the  photographs in the minds of the curators of Poliakoff's  rambling, threatened Collection.

People dont just  remember the film, they remember what it was like to watch the broadcast on tv, and the conversations they had about it. There is often a ruefullness in thier response to it.

STP is flawed. The sustained use of specially made archive images to make the point about the power of photography to record the marginal almost undermines our belief in the ability of the real things. Poliakoff's images contain too much; they look like single frames from a cinema sequence.  Which in a way is what they are.
As a collection, this one seems unfocussed. Unlike an industrial or municipal collection it is hard to read its purpose, from what we see it is hard to divine the story that it exists to tell. 
it seems instead to exist to demonstrate its own eclectism, and the license required by its curators in their  task of cataloguing the entire modern age.

   In 1999, Shooting The Past seemed to be about resistance, and it seemed to posit a form of resistance rooted in  certain manifestations of Englishness and the relics of an Island mentality. The conflict - dusty independance and autonomy vrs colonising efficiency, - looks familiar. Poliakoff owns up early, allowing a character to own up too. We are Ealing characters  says the tragic Oswald, a man given to grand gestures that might mean something in Passport To Pimlico but which here fall flat when an initially incomprehending enemy comes knocking.

The logic of Oswald's disruptions, gestures and delaying tactics is  followed through  to a tragic consequence. The tragedy throws a light switch ; Oswalds colleagues are revealed to be islands within an Island, who have got by as a result of entrenchment, who communicate through ticks and mannerisms, unaware that those mannerisms  have come to smother the skills now needed to communicate with the outside.

Spoiler alert: Skill wins the day and the collection survives intact. Skillfull coercive storytelling, detective work and  a sense of theatre are deployed against  a gradually comprehending enemy, who becomes a listener willing to be convinced.  The Collections value is demonstrated by means of its ability to reach into peoples lives and histories, to cross borders and roam continents, enabled by imagination and curiosity.
 Oswald survives too, but not intact; a failed suicide leaves him  slower, reduced in influence, damaged.

The play comes from the early years of the first Blair government, and can be bookended by the unlikely arrival of 2 characters into public life. 
  In 1998 another buffoonish, Ealing throwback had made his first appearances on the BBC's Have I Got News for You, setting in progress a willfuly eccentric disruptive charm offensive that resembles a malign version of Oswald's and which has left us, slower, reduced in influence and damaged after an act of self harm. 

 In 1999 Britain seemed on the verge of a new and de-toxified relationship with Europe.  America too seemed sleek and benign under Clinton.
Culture was to be prized and nurtured, its products  would be our calling card, the face we presented to the world.There was a sense that, while the sharpest and spikiest were to be enlisted and placed on the front line of this new expeditionary mission, the likes of Oswald would be valued too.

Who came knocking in 2001, of course, was not Poliakoff's Willing Listener, but Bush.

The qualities and tactics - steel wrapped in tweeds and cardigans, the cosh in the Spotted Dick-  of Poliakoff's curators in Shooting The Past were used on our behalf.  Perhaps it was possible to see how they would eventually be used against us.   How images , artefacts and supposed characteristics of a lost England could be woven into banners to march under, and how the enemy will not need to come knocking , because we will be told - in coercive tones as often as in  tirades -  that they are already here. We are again becoming entrenched and detached. We are shrinking, our influence can only be brought to bear on each other. We are reduced to tics and mannerisms;  island people looking inward for  someone to blame.

Maybe not. Hopefully not. We need our friends.. 

http://www.stephenpoliakoff.com/shooting-the-past-1999