Tom McPhillips speaks to Rozemin Keshvani about his film ‘A Lay in the Dife’

Tom McPhillips at the screening of his film, A Lay in the Dife with students at CSM, November 2017

RK:           Tom, you studied sculpture at St Martin's School of Art in London in the early 1970s and eventually found your way into the rock and roll industry. St Martin's is famed for hosting the Sex Pistols' first gig when they played support for Bazooka Joe in 1975 and was immortalised by the band Pulp in their song ‘Common People’.  It sounds like such a cool place to have studied art. What was the atmosphere like?

TM:        That’s not an easy question to answer.  For a start a lot of the really big cultural shifts had already peaked.  Swinging London had begun around 1963 and probably lasted not much longer than ‘66.  By 1969 the Beatles had already revolved, peppered and whited themselves out. The general music scene was predominantly Blues, and though the Flower Power movement hit the US in 1967, on the West Coast, it didn’t really impact London until 1968, and by 1970 it was almost over.  If you believed the hype, we were all smoking weed and dropping acid.  It was really not like that at all.  That colourful, romantic proliferation in music and fashion was already being replaced by a more political, down to earth consciousness.  Our generation was actually somewhat fearful, having seen our immediate elders go through the Sixties and certainly seen some of their downsides, the breakdowns, the drug overdoses. The kids who had dropped out were now paying the price, and were queuing up for the dole or getting jobs well below their abilities.

RK:         Were you anxious about the future then?

TM:        The youth movement had lost some of its steam and my generation seemed a lot more socially conscious, aware of approaching technologies. The political fallout of the student movement now seems much more of an influence than the crazy psychedelic world that we’d been swept up in a few years before.  I remember at the time I was reading Artaud, Brecht, Theatre of the Absurd, Alfred Jarry and completely under the spell of French New Wave cinema, with Jean Luc Godard  and Robbe-Grillet paramount in that firmament.  

RK:           Yes, European cinema had become an important influence in avant-garde circles, even before the  "Structural film" influence from the US.

TM:        There was a very rigorous, ascetic discipline in the air that we all seemed to be consumed by, evidenced by films in which the camera barely moved, plays from Eastern Europe coming to the Edinburgh Festival that broke the bounds between the audience and the performers yet were very strident, very political, and literally took place in black and white environments - no colour whatsoever, the absence of colour making a political statement, letting the audience know that this was serious business. We were constantly trying to incorporate non-visual concepts into our work, we looked to philosophy, science, especially the science of perception.  We were trying to make our work more random, less intentional, less about form and colour and more about trying to get into the head of an observer and play with their perceptions and thought processes. 

 A Lay in the Dife (film still), clockwise: Gill Etherley, Adam, Gemma Jackson, Barry Cunningham, Baz Hermon

RK:     Ah, that's useful context. You are right, the works that come from that period are more ascetic than simply black and white. They suggest an absence of colour that avoided aestheticization, that seems somehow more political. That absence of colour being particularly iconic of the 1970s. I understand you actually made a few films yourself while at St Martin’s? A film of yours, with the intriguing title, ‘A Lay in the Dife’ will appear in an exhibition at the Lethaby Gallery at Central St Martins (CSM). I know you as a former St Martin's sculpture student in the 'Locked Room' turned rock and roll stage designer. How did you come to make this film, much less find it?

TM:        A few years ago I received an email from an Anthony Davis, who said he was a lecturer at CSM.  He told me that they had found a film that I made when I was at St Martin’s and wanted to know more about it.  I was thrilled to hear that not only had it been found, but that they wanted to know more about it, and could I write a piece about how it had come to be made.  As the conversation progressed, it dawned on me that what had been found didn’t include a soundtrack, which I had always thought was the most successful feature of the work.  “No problem!” I said, I told Anthony that I had a negative and a soundtrack in a can, all we needed to do was make a print, and then they’d have it in its entirety!

RK:         So did you finally track down the sound track?

TM:        No. For the next several weeks, I searched high and low, at home at work, anywhere I could think of, but the film can was nowhere to be found.  It was a total disappointment.  Somewhere between moving to the States twenty-five years ago and the house and office moves since then it had vanished.  The film had languished in its can for years and I’d always had the intention one day of making a print, but I never got around to it, not least because I’ve always had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the thing.  It was supposed to get me into the National Film School, which it didn’t, and though I was somewhat happy with the result, I knew I could have done better had I corralled together more resources, had more talent and more experience.  I sadly reported this loss to Anthony, who said, no matter – what we have is plenty good enough…

RK:         I saw the film last year when it was screened at CSM. I recall it wasn’t quite what you expected. 

TM:        Yeah, last year I was in London, working with you on our book project, and by one of those spectacular coincidences that sometimes happen, you, me and Sheila Ross (another former  A Course student) ran into Anthony Davies one evening when we were going out to dinner. He offered to show me what they had found, and also take the opportunity to do a screening for the current students.  I had been expecting to see a complete cut, but within seconds of the presentation it became very obvious exactly what they’d found.  It was in fact a reference cut, the instruction copy to the lab marked up with the cuts, fades and transitions. Moreover it was literally half the shots in the film, with black leader spliced between. This was just an 'A' roll. Once upon a time there had been a corresponding 'B' roll which would have the other shots and black leader where the shots on this copy were.  It was devastating, but at least something had survived.

RK:         Did you make this film as a student in the A Course?

TM:        Not exactly. Film-making wasn’t part of the curriculum. In my third year at St Martin's, I decided that what I wanted next was to get into the National Film School, with the aim of eventually getting a job in the film industry. I harboured dreams of becoming a film director, and started to think about doing something that would at least put me on that path. I decided to come up with something not so arty as the stuff I’d been working on in the A Course, perhaps something more of a documentary that I could offer up to them.  So casting around for ideas I came up with following a day in the life of my fellow art school students.  It wasn’t exactly the most original idea, but in my defence, it had a couple of things going for it. The primary reason for doing it was mainly to learn about the process of shooting and editing a film, it wasn’t going to be about a point of view about its subject matter in any big way, it was more about setting something up and seeing what might emerge.

RK:         It’s a very arty film nonetheless, non-narrative and non-interventionist in its style. At least that’s how it appeared to me viewed without the sound and as you say, being only the ‘A’ roll.

TM:        At the time there were a couple of things that were strong influences on my approach.  The first was a short novel, “Olt” by Kenneth Gangemi. The plot of the novel was conveyed by means of the interludes between the main events of the narrative.  The reader had to look for hints about what was happening that were almost hidden in plain sight among quite static, but jewel-like descriptions of everyday events such as the main character’s visit to the zoo or an afternoon at the library.  The big events like the appendicitis attack, the job loss, and the break-up all happened offstage, yet the fall out and misery of those catastrophes were fully evident nonetheless, referred to, just below the intricately rendered surface of the narrative.  That way of telling a story by purposefully looking away from the action certainly intrigued me.

I was also heavily smitten by the films of Eric Rohmer.  “My Night with Maud” had come out in 1969 and to this day, remains one of my favourite films. It’s a very quiet film that dwells on conversations and everyday routine.  Its focus is not so much about what happens but what doesn’t happen, as the protagonist disappointingly chooses the safe, conventional girl rather than the interesting, challenging one, the Maud of the title, famously using Pascal’s wager as his justification. While I was at St Martin’s, two more of Rohmer’s films - “Clare’s Knee” and “Love in the Afternoon” came out and consolidated my liking for the quiet, conversational approach he took to film making. His films are hardly what you’d call “cinematic”, however they really resonated with me.  In almost every Rohmer film the hero is caught out by a very simple but tricky moral dilemma, which he usually falls on the wrong side of and ends up reassessing his good character - something he’d just taken for granted.

RK:         So how did you come to choose your fellow students as subject matter for your film? I mean in some sense it’s obvious because they are an available resource, but you don’t really use them that way. You seem to follow them around, without forcing structure. Did you actually set the scenes and score what they would do or was it more serendipitous than that? Can you tell us something of your vision as a director?

Film still from A Lay in the Dife, left to right: Baz Hermon, Graham Crowley and John Burke

TM:        I could, but it would be stretching the point a little bit. Let's say that I was choosing something so mundane in order for it to be a kind of “process”, almost a meditation from which a point of view would emerge.  What did emerge was the soundtrack, which is rather ironic since it is the one thing that is completely lost. Because of the obstacles to recording live sound, since in the days before video, audio had to be recorded separately and then synced with the live action, I decided to record the sound as a separate project and then edit the film with the wild track. I separately interviewed many of the people who featured in the film.  Because it was a chronological record of a day in the life, the film had to be edited in the order of the day’s events. Finally I edited the soundtrack to the film trying where possible to match the voices of the interviewees to the places where they appeared in the film.  What happened was that the soundtrack assumed a life of its own, to the point where it was probably a more successful work than the film itself, with the film becoming a vehicle for the soundtrack to exist rather than the other way round.

Shooting the film, mirroring Gangemi’s approach, the idea was to show the day through the times when the students weren’t working,  I concentrated on the moments outside the studio, waking up, arriving to school, tea breaks, lunch, the evening in the pub, setting off for home, I dwelt on the bits in between, not the “real” work of the day. In the interviews, I similarly sought out my friends’ attitudes, their thoughts on life, their stories, some jokes and so on and avoided any talk about work or art in general.  I think what I learnt most from the project was that I became more aware of the craft of editing, learning techniques like cutting to action and so on.  In the process, of course,I realised that if I’d shot it in another way, it would have edited better and that building an aural landscape was as important as what was actually being said.

RK:         This seems very different somehow from the materialist structuralist filmmaking that St Martin’s has become well known for.

TM:        The kind of film work I’d been doing before this was mostly about film as a purely visual medium, very abstract, experimenting with split screens for example, where part of the image was panning in one direction and other parts were panning in the opposite direction.  I had ideas but I was frustrated by not really being proficient at what I was doing, or feeling that I didn’t have the tools to make what I imagined might work.  I felt I needed to ground myself, to just produce something simple but well executed. What I didn’t realize I was doing was making a social document, which now nearly fifty years later seems pretty obvious.  In fact it wasn’t until a few months ago when I sat in a room at Central St Martins, surrounded by the current crop of sculpture students that it finally occurred to me that what had survived was essentially just that.

RK:         Apart from being disappointed that only half the film survived, how did you feel about the film’s role as social documentation? Do you see a value in that?

TM:        It was really interesting to respond to the students who came to the film’s screening last November. Their questions about squats, their imagined ideas of the gritted and gilded age of counter culture and agit-prop we had apparently been through, all that was pretty amusing. In truth we were all that, but conservatively so, yet I realised that the world we had grown up in and had taken for granted was quite different to theirs.  Perhaps because everyone was a lot less wealthy in 1970, we didn’t worry so much about having to make money at a job after art school, we kind of thought things would take care of themselves, possibly because the bar wasn’t set so high.  Flats were cheaper, we didn’t expect the standard of facilities we do today, transport was reasonably inexpensive and our cost of living didn’t have to have as many boxes ticked as kids have to deal with today, for example there were no cell phones to have to afford!  They thought of us the way we thought of the London artists who played hard like Francis Bacon and poets who all drank themselves silly like Dylan Thomas that in their turn went before us. Those crazy anti-establishment  bohemians who partied after hours in Soho drinking clubs and who were ruthlessly nihilistic and annihilistic to friends, enemies and lovers alike.  Plus ca change!

Screening A Lay in the Dife at CSM, November 2017

RK:         The title of your film is intriguing. How did this arise and is it related in some way to how you viewed what was really going on at St Martin’s. That somehow the interstices were more significant than the apparent action?

TM:        So why did I call it “A Lay in the Dife”?  Well mostly because I didn’t want to call it 'A Day in the Life', and I liked the word “Lay”, which also had the meaning of “a song, a melody, a simple narrative poem, or a ballad.”  There was something medieval about the word.  Now that I google it there is a word “dife” that exists in Haitian Creole meaning “fire”, but what I also found, which is rather serendipitously wonderful is that DIFE as an acronym often refers to an Institute of Further Education, where the D would stand for the name of a place, Drogheda Institute of Further Education is an example – and Drogheda happens to be pretty close to where my mother grew up in Ireland – so there you have it!  Perhaps subconsciously I was thinking “a story about a delightful institution of further education!”  Mostly I was just paying homage to Mr Spooner and more especially to John Lennon, whose “In His Own Write” was a big favourite of mine at the time, I loved the way he played around with words…

In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t been influenced as much by Gangemi and Rohmer as I was. I was trying to do the “turn on the camera see what happens” thing. I wasn’t making the film more dynamically visual, I wasn’t being a creative cameraman and trying to get a shot that was more arresting, I wasn’t good enough yet to think about lighting, I was observing not interacting. I could have been so much more pretentious!  Perhaps that I wasn’t is a sort of blessing, but it wasn’t the kind of work that would get me noticed, it was made well enough, it turned out OK but I admit it was rather pedestrian. Still as a social document it would have been nice to have come across my original copy and show it as it was intended. Just to hear those voices from so long ago would have been the greatest thrill. What’s left is a bit disappointing, but at least there’s something left!

RK:         Wow, that’s a bit hugely self-critical. The film is intensely suggestive and intriguing in its current state. Some of your thoughts about Gangemi and Rohmer echo the concerns of Cartier-Bresson in photography; you know the idea of candid photography that serendipitously catches the moment. The fact that parts of the film itself are missing seems to speak beautifully to ideas of memory, loss, and the impossibility of capturing the past and the inherent problems with documentation, while also linking your thoughts about ‘intervening space’ with the now missing pieces of the film and the lost sound track. It all comes together really and I for one am looking forward to seeing it again.

TM:        Yes, actually I’m hugely grateful to Anthony Davis, who rescued what’s left of the film from total obscurity and to Daniel the technician at CSM who actually discovered the footage in the trash, and also to Steven Ball who is showing a restored version at the Temporalities exhibit which is being mounted at the Lethaby Gallery until March 24^th.

 A Lay in the Dife is currently screening at the London Fashion and Textile Museum in  
Swinging London: A Lifestyle Revolution / Terence Conran – Mary Quant

Exhibition Dates: 8 February – 2 June 2019 | Book Online

Tom McPhillips is managing director of Atomic Design. His film A Lay in the Dife featured in Temporalities, Lethaby Gallery (20 February – 24 March 2018) co-curated by Steven Ball, British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection and the CSM Museum with the Fine Art programme at CSM.