Not only did he like the thing a lot, he said, but he couldn’t recall anything even remotely like it since he was an undergraduate studying Fine Art, some 20-odd years ago.
We then spent the next half-hour or so musing on the implications of the fact that Asylum hadn’t been made on a budget of tuppence for the benefit of a dozen semi-employed weirdos and a stray dog in some obscure arts centre, but had been commissioned and was to be broadcast (albeit late-night) by a major terrestrial broadcaster, Channel 4. We agreed, with mutual regret, that you don’t often see weirdly innovative stuff like this on NBC or CBS nowadays. On the other hand, I suppose that folks in the Mid-West don’t have to put up with Something for the Weekend being piped into their homes, either.Still – as Stouffer the blue cat would put it – respect due to C4 for having the vision and guts to sponsor a film as unorthodox and wayward, as Asylum. For every viewer as fascinated by the programme as my mate from Oklahoma, there may possibly be 10 who will regard it as incomprehensible tosh, so it’s not likely to help C4 much in the ratings department. What it does do is prove that there are still areas of British television in which people who don’t want to play by the usual rules – whether the dull, respectable kind or the Denise van Outen variety – can operate with comparative freedom, and from which non-conforming voices can still be heard.Asylum itself is, in part, about these very issues.
It begins as a cod-melodramatic science-fiction yarn about a “post-viral” future. A numbed female narrator informs us that: “The virus was terrible. It created itself in the protein soup of bad television with the sole aim of devouring its own memory – the last cultural traces.” The rest of the film purports to be an assembly of partially recovered film and audio documents that have survived from a mysterious endeavour referred to as “The Perimeter Fence” or, less poetically, simply as “The Project”.The contents of these files turn out to be suspiciously reminiscent of the sort of thing you might encounter in one of Iain Sinclair’s novels. There are visits to some of his favourite extra-canonical writers, including the SF maestro Michael Moorcock, a West Londoner exiled in darkest Texas, and the major American poet Ed Dorn, who, alas, died of cancer while the film was in production. There are tantalising shards of a conspiratorial plot about secret agents and mysterious disappearances, in which the film’s own makers play mythologised or fancifully exaggerated versions of themselves. There are rants, conjectures, hypotheses, insinuations, in-jokes and blatant lies…I could go on, but it’s probably best to say that if you think you might like that sort of thing, Asylum is quite definitely the sort of thing you’ll like. I will just add a quick note about the film’s extraordinary visual qualities, which are due not only to the Sinclair-Petit axis but to comic-strip artist Dave McKean, who has added greatly to the piece’s density by overlaying it with all manner of computer-generated words and images.If you stumbled across Asylum while channel-hopping, you might reasonably assume that it was entirely sui generis, a freak that simply dropped from the skies like a Fortean rain of frogs.
In reality, it’s the third part of a continuing series of collaborations between Sinclair and Petit which began more than a decade ago. Their paths originally crossed when Petit, at an impasse in his career as a features director (Radio On, Chinese Boxes and so on) was researching a non-fiction book about Soho.This soon made him a regular customer of Sinclair, who at the time was earning a fair part of his living as a dealer in second-hand books. Each man recognised similarities of taste and preoccupation in the other, and before long their creative activities were cross-fertilising, notably in a film about the weather which Petit directed for the BBC. It wasn’t until 1992, however, that they collaborated in earnest: The Cardinal and the Corpse, shot in five days on a budget of well under 30 grand, an eccentric pseudo-documentary about the seedier fringes of the book-dealing milieu in which they had originally met.The film was not exactly an overnight success. Its commissioners, allegedly disappointed – nay, revolted – by what they had been given, shoved it out unceremoniously in the Without Walls slot, and that was that.
It took another six years – by which time, Iain Sinclair’s stock had risen dramatically with the novel Downriver and the wonderful essays eventually gathered in Lights Out for the Territory – before they had a chance at a sequel, and a somewhat more generous budget.Originally entitled The Perimeter Fence (funny, that sounds familiar), it was meant to examine a number of figures who had been discarded or forgotten by the official culture.But, as Sinclair recalls: “By accident, one of the first people we saw was this Peter Whitehead character, who grandstanded himself in such a way that you realised that he’d have to be at the centre of the project – particularly because he arranged a massive heart attack early on, and rang from the hospital saying, ‘You’ve got to get in here, I’m on my way out, I want the cameras here this afternoon…’”A straightforward account of Whitehead’s career would have been wild enough – film-making during the Summer of Love, falconry in the Middle East, Egyptology, other exotica – but Petit and Sinclair pushed the material several notches further into the twilight zone. The Falconer dealt in black magic, incest, murder, drugs, egg smuggling and foul play in high places; The Independent’s legal advisers would have kittens if I spelt out the details, so curious readers will just have to beg for a pirated copy or bully some distributor into putting it out on video.The phrase “it met with a mixed response” is often a euphemism for “the whole thing was a hideous disaster”, but The Falconer genuinely did meet with a mixed response. On the negative side, it was denounced as a snuff movie, and there were threats that Sinclair and Petit would be charged for conducting a Satanic ritual on National Trust property. On the positive side, it obtained a major festival prize, a handful of rave reviews – some from unexpected quarters – and the approval of Channel 4’s controller, Michael Jackson.Despite this, the duo were sufficiently pessimistic about their future that they gave Asylum its mournful sub-title The Last Commission Happily, their gloom was misplaced. The internal buzz about Asylum at C4 is, it seems, good, and Sinclair and Petit have now been given the green light for their next collaboration – a film inspired by Sinclair’s book-in-progress, a circumnavigation of the M25.
When I phoned him to check the details for this article, Sinclair emphasised that it was going to be very different from the book. Here’s a little bet: it’s also going to be very different, period.’Asylum’, C4, tonight 11.40pm. The BBC governors have strongly criticised BBC1, saying it is failing to win public support, lacks consistency and quality and needs to improve. The BBC governors have strongly criticised BBC1, saying it is failing to win public support, lacks consistency and quality and needs to improve.
This is the second successive year the BBC1 channel has received a bad end-of-year report from the corporation’s regulatory body.
