Between 1967 and 1979, Jane Arden and her partner Jack Bond (in various combinations) wrote, directed, and produced three features. The second of these was The Other Side of the Underneath (1972), developed from the critically and financially successful stage production A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets, and Witches (1971). Enjoying runs at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre and London’s The Open Space, the show had been a collaborative production devised by “Holocaust”, the UK’s first all-female theatre group. Included amongst their ranks were the multi-media artist Penny Slinger, Shakespearean actress Sheila Allen, and feminist critic and “underground” theatre practitioner Natasha Morgan.
Despite this success, between 1983 and 2009, the Arden-Bond films were unable to view in Britain. Some even believed them missing, whilst many of those involved in the making of these deeply-personal and often-fraught productions had yet to rediscover a platform or desire to talk about them again. Consequently, the films were neglected in both writing and conversation. Even in the immediate aftermath of their resurfacing and restoration in 2009, discussion of the Arden-Bond films remained sparse. It has only been gradually across the past decade, and predominantly only in the last four years, that more writing has started to emerge on this work, thanks mostly to work of feminist groups such as Another Gaze and Invisible Women, and to PhD candidates invariably connected to these initiatives.
In many ways, it is this sense of unearthing something “forgotten” that has fuelled the revived interest in Jane Arden and her collaborators. Accounts from scholars and programmers often recall their first, tantalising discovery of Arden’s work, and the obsessive connecting of dots that followed. Susan Croft, for instance, recounts her happening upon a scuffed and faded copy of an Arden play text in the now-defunct radical London bookshop, Collet’s, back in 1981. It was to be a ‘significant, joyous’ discovery, that would in no small part inspire her Unfinished Histories project, salvaging and preserving memories from a bygone era of experimentation and rebellion.
My own “origin story”, as it were, bears many parallels with Croft’s. I first encountered Arden by chance, whilst browsing a second-hand bookshop on the Great Western Road in Autumn 2018. Not a complete work, merely a provocative title – “Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven”– listed in a catalogue of plays included in the back pages of another, tangentially related text. It was enough to spark four years of internet rabbit holes, email interviews, and convoluted inter-library loans.
In the limited writing I devoured both in the immediate days that followed and in the subsequent years, as increasingly more became available, I observed two interesting trends. What caught my attention was that, although these two trends could be observed in almost every single response to these films, the two ideas seemed to be in complete opposition to one another.
The first was a frequent tendency to identify the films of Arden and her collaborators as completely unique, as divergent from British Cinema. ‘What do you think of when you think of British film?’ begins an introductory note for Arden and Bond’s final feature. ‘Probably not the 1979 puzzle picture that is Anti-Clock.’ Even Jack Bond himself appears to have adopted this stance when he proposes (somewhat audaciously) that his work with Arden is ‘not in a context.’ The films are positioned as something alternative, outside of history, perhaps even a little dangerous, and they are marketed consequently. After all, isn’t that part of the fun of watching a film at a “Weird Weekend” festival? That sense of stumbling across some hidden, esoteric gold; of entering in to some rare, in-the-know club?
The second trend, equally prevalent, was the desire to make comparisons with filmmakers working before, alongside and after. Contemporaneous reviews of Separation and The Other Side of the Underneath were laced with references to Accident (1967)and Blow-Up (1966), to Bergman and Fellini, whilst more recent writing has considered resonances with Derek Jarman, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Maya Deren. But how could a film be so unlike anything else and yet so similar? How could one critic (here unnamed) claim an Arden film was ‘so unique’ and yet ‘so quintessentially of its time’ in almost the same breath?
It begs the question: just how other is a film like The Other Side of the Underneath? For British Cinema scholar Julian Petley, not that much:
‘the vaunting and valorising of certain British films on account of their “realism” entails as its corollary […] the dismissal and denigration of those deemed un- or non-realist. […] [There’s] another, repressed side of British cinema, a dark, disdained thread weaving its way through the length and breadth of that cinema.’
As we start to trace that thread and connect those dots, it becomes clear that, without diminishing the astonishing power or achievement of The Other Side of the Underneath, this film was not born in a vacuum. Rather, the work of Jane Arden and all her collaborators emerged from and fed back into a vibrant network of people, institutions, and ideas. As Penny Slinger – a member of Holocaust and “Visual Consultant” on The Other Side of the Underneath – would be the first to remind us, collaboration is an essential component of art, and ‘no woman is an island.’
Although The Other Side of the Underneath may have gone unseen for almost thirty years, this does not mean that those involved in its making were obscure figures. By the late-1960s, Jane Arden was already pretty notorious: infamous in London’s “Underground” scene, and recognisable to many due to her outspoken appearances on television on panel shows such as Not So Much A Programme, More A Way Of Life. Certainly, her reputation was such that Jim Haynes felt her a safe (or should that be a profitably “unsafe”) pair of hands to commission a play he hoped would bring audiences in their droves to raise funds for the iconic, if financially unviable, Drury Lane Arts Lab. The result was the much-lauded Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven (1969), co-directed by Jack Bond.
Anecdotally, Arden was even a subject of gossip in certain circles, with her husband Philip Saville’s affair with the artist Pauline Boty rumoured to have inspired the multiple-Academy Award-winning film Darling (1965), starring Julie Christie.
Similarly, artist and actress Penny Slinger was gaining a public platform by the end of sixties, and across the seventies could be seen on talk shows and cultural programming. Both Slinger and Arden were interviewed and invited to write in a range of mainstream and “underground” publications, including Cosmopolitan, The Observer, Spare Rib, and International Times [IT]. As well as helping their ideas to reach large readerships, these newspapers and magazines also often featured commissioned or reproduced pieces of poetry and visual art.
When the Holocaust group held their first meeting in 1970, not only did these women already have a platform, but they were incredibly focused and organised when it came to their mission. They even released a manifesto, as the British “Free Cinema” movement had done before them in 1956 (although a radical feminist desire to ‘explode’ the language of the patriarchy means its content often tends towards oblique poetics).
To understand the contexts from which The Other Side of the Underneath emerged, we must also explore the crucial role played by the “Underground” venues in which Arden and Holocaust’s work was staged, such as the Drury Lane Arts Lab (1967-69) – subsequently the Robert Street Arts Lab (1969-71) after closure of the original – and The Open Space on Tottenham Court Road (1968-1976). These were spaces where one could expect to run into such legendary figures as David Bowie, John and Yoko, and William S Burroughs. More crucially, these were also spaces where artists like Holocaust’s members could share their work, network with other artists, and keep a finger on the pulse. In a recent account, David Curtis elaborates that we cannot underestimate ‘the vital role played by the Labs in the development of [their visitors’] chosen art forms, as artists came together around a common vision.’
The venues not only had an impact on the ideological development of the work that emerged from them, but also influenced their aesthetic development. Early productions, such as Jeff Nuttall’s no.14 – The Cage Show (1967), were described as ‘characteristic of much that followed on the Lab’s stage in their mix of aggression, physical performance and improvisation.’ There is the suggestion of a distinctive Arts Lab aesthetic, an idea developed in a description of Portable Theatre’s Inside Out (1968) from the following year, which was ‘cinematic, in the sense that it consisted of a number of short scenes with blackouts.’ This, Tony Bicât writes, ‘became the house style.’
These characteristics can be observed in Arden’s work across mediums. Improvisation, aggression, and physicality all converge in the “group therapy” sequences of The Other Side of the Underneath, where (under the influence of LSD), Holocaust members were invited to delve into repressed trauma in extended sequences which often climax in overwhelming outbursts of pain and emotion. We can also observe an affinity with the ‘cinematic […] short scenes’ common in Arts Labs shows in The Other Side of the Underneath’s attention to montage and episodic vignettes.
The UFO Club was another popular hotspot of the ’60s “Underground”, whose personnel overlapped with the founders and administrators of The Arts Labs. The UFO also facilitated an exchange of talent and wielded an aesthetic influence on Arden’s work. The liquid light projections of Mark Boyle, for instance, which regularly featured at both The UFO and The Labs, are also to be found in Arden and Bond’s Separation (1967), where they provide integral structural and artistic meaning to the film. Even following her collaboration with Boyle, his influence remains in Arden work. In The Other Side of the Underneath,we see lights projected on top of the performers as a means of visualising the subject matters (hetero-patriarchal authoritarianism, for example) which have oppressed the characters/actors.
Furthermore, a visit to The UFO or The Arts Labs was often an overwhelmingly embodied, multi-sensory experience. One could expect a raucous live band (such as the one we encounter in The Other Side) playing alongside projections of Mark Boyle’s lights, whilst simultaneously some experimental Andy Warhol films and recorded sitar music competed for attentions. When Jack Henry Moore, a ‘key countercultural figure involved in London’s psychedelic UFO club’, co-directed Vagina Rex, it was little surprise that the production ‘overwhelmed the audience’s senses.’ All this perhaps informed Arden’s penchant for rapid cutting and montage; for her combinations of various film stocks and tapes (most evident in Anti-Clock); for her particular attention to the expressive potentials of synchronous and asynchronous soundscapes; as well as a tendency to feature screens, and projections, within screens.
The label “Underground” that became attached to these venues and artists is also perhaps misleading. By 1970, the success of the Labs had inspired a mushrooming of similar hubs across Britain, which Richard Neville argued helped to further spread and popularise their aesthetic styles: ‘it is by interlacing the country with such outposts of cultural revolution that the Underground has consolidated itself.’ Indeed, sites like The Labs, The Open Space, and UFO contributed to a slackening of boundaries between what was considered dominant and what was considered “counter-” culture. As theatre historian and Channel 4 executive Peter Ansorge notes, ‘between 1968 and 1973 [The Arts Labs] played as vital a part in the life of our subsidised theatre as the Royal Court, National or Royal Shakespeare Company.’
Peter Brook, then co-director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, was often known to pop a head in and stand at the back for performances at The Arts Labs, and was rumoured to have attended a performance of Vagina Rex. As Sheila Allen recalled, ‘that’s where [Brook] went most weeks to find out what was new,’ and it is fascinating to note the various ways in which Brook and Arden’s works appear to influence one another, with their shared interests in cruelty, in Brechtian songs, and in placing large demands on their audiences.
Furthermore, many of the key figures working in these venues and alongside the Holocaust group hailed from institutions that could hardly be described as “underground”. In fact, quite the opposite, with many being educated and first meeting in prestigious cultural institutions such as the University of Cambridge and the Slade College of Art. The Chelsea College of Art alone provided three members to the Holocaust group: Liz Danciger, Susanka Fraey, and Penny Slinger.
We might speculate that it was in one of the arts schools that Sally Potter could have first encountered the Holocaust group, as she was regularly performing in their spaces with the “Group Events” collective in the late-60s. Perhaps Potter attended a performance of Vagina Rex whilst involved with the early days of the London Filmmakers Co-operative, then housed at the Drury Lane Arts Lab at the same time as Arden’s play was being performed. Is it conceivable that the vision of the all-women crew on The Gold Diggers (1983) might have taken its cue from the Holocaust project?
In resisting the desire to single out The Other Side of the Underneath as an isolated, anomalous film, we instead insist upon its firm place in the British cinematic and cultural canon. Hailing from a period which is often conceptualised as a series of ‘success waves: anger, satire, Swinging London, hippiedom, Hollywood-led cosmopolitanism…’ perhaps we might consider the achievement of these women as belonging to, if not a fully-fledged movement, then perhaps an additional moment, with a thread of influences and influencees that mark the film as both urgent and important.
Matthew Gray
The Other Side of the Underneath screens at Weird Weekend III, 12:30 on Saturday 29.10.22 at Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, part of the House of Psychotic Women strand. Matthew Gray will join us to introduce the film. Get your tickets here.
Matthew is somehow making a living doing their dream job of reading scripts and supporting emerging screenwriters. They also love to write about and programme films, with a particular interest in those mavericks and outliers that don’t quite conform to our dominant narratives of British Cinema history.