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This April, Spectacle is thrilled to present two works by Jack Bond, the renowned British filmmaker whose life and career are as colorful and unconventional as the films he’s made.
Bond got his start in the early 1960s as a trailer editor and trainee producer/director for the BBC, before he was summarily fired for fabricating outraged viewer letters in his own attempt to “liven up” the network’s long-running write-in show, Points of View. Thankfully, this act and the increasingly abstract qualities of his trailer work, caught the attention of both Huw Wheldon— the BBC program controller who also helped shepherd the early careers of Bond’s contemporaries, Ken Russell and John Schlesinger— and producer Melvyn Bragg, who then hired Bond to create documentaries for his arts magazine program, New Release.
It was through this program that Bond was introduced to actor and playwright, Jane Arden, with whom he began a long-standing and prolific creative relationship. Throughout the late-1960s and 70s, the pair collaborated on a number of stage and screen works, including Arden’s groundbreaking multimedia theater piece, Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven, produced and directed by Bond, and the experimental features, SEPARATION (1967), THE OTHER SIDE OF UNDERNEATH (1972) and ANTI-CLOCK (1979), all widely considered to be of the most iconic avant-garde works in the British film canon.
Unfortunately, their prodigious partnership was cut short following Arden’s death by suicide in 1982, which had such a profound effect on Bond that he took it upon himself to store their works away at the National Film Archive under direct orders from him that they never be shown or released again. Bond continued to work in television and music videos for the next few decades, as his and Arden’s features faded further and further into obscurity, until 2009 when he finally contacted the Archive to authorize their re-release— though, in true Bond-ian fashion, not before having to jump through several hoops to verify that he was, in fact, the same “Jack Bond” whose name was plastered all over the film cannisters under the label “NEVER TO BE RELEASED AGAIN BY ORDER OF JACK BOND”.
Since 2009, Bond and Arden have rightfully, if somewhat belatedly, been celebrated for their brilliant contributions to avant-garde cinema and theater. Bond himself has since returned to feature filmmaking, releasing two documentaries in the last decade alone: THE BLUEBLACK HUSSAR (2013) about equally-eccentric British artist, Adam Ant, and AN ARTIST’S EYES (2018) about self-taught painter, Chris Moon.
Spectacle Theater is excited to continue this celebration of the filmmaker once called “the most irresponsible man on the face of God’s earth”* with screenings of SEPARATION and ANTI-CLOCK throughout the month of April, including a remote Q&A session with Jack Bond on Sunday, April 16th.
*After having accidentally let loose a few dozen asylum inmates and a full-grown bear while filming THE OTHER SIDE OF UNDERNEATH.