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Bfi Jane Arden And Jack Bond Season: Anti-clock

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Wed 22 July 2009 // 20:00

(Wed 22nd / 8pm / £4/3)
(Jane Arden, Jack Bond / 1979 / UK / 107 minutes)

By the time of her last feature Jane Arden had moved away from mainstream feminism and had become convinced that everyone, not just women, urgently needed to be freed from the tyrannies of the rational mind. Developing ideas from her ‘poetry’ book ‘You Don’t Know What You Want, Do You?’ (1978) Arden wrote and co-directed ‘Anti-Clock’ to the general bewilderment of opening night audiences at the 1979 London Film Festival. Blending film and video, and colour and black and white, the film follows a young man – played by Arden’s son Sebastian Saville - as he tries to de-programme himself from restricting thought-patterns and perceptions. Closer to science-fiction than any other genre ‘Anti-Clock’ was championed by Andy Warhol and is, in many ways, Arden’s most challenging work. Stylistically it points towards the more recent radical Channel Four films – such as ‘Asylum’ (2000) – of Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit.