Flipside 002-003: London in the Raw / Primitive London

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MichaelB
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Re: Flipside 2 & 3: London in the Raw & Primitive London

#26 Post by MichaelB » Wed Jul 15, 2009 11:03 am

DVD Active on London in the Raw and Primitive London.

Here's a sample:
The image is—in a word—amazing. There are too many reviews which praise to reconstructive work when it only comes out as merely ‘OK’. The BFI have given teeth back to the word ‘restoration’ with London in the Raw. There is more natural grain than you could ever hope for, and a film-like image, which is saturated with detail, and will stand up to any superlative you can throw at it. Print damage is minimal. Derived from the 35mm negatives, the 1.33:1 1080p image is more vivid than you could possibly imagine. The colours are so sharp that they are in danger of drawing blood, and they really pop at times. There is undeniably an amount of grain to this release, but we have no problems with that whatsoever, as it was inherent in the original elements—it's supposed to have grain and all we can say is that the restoration people at the BFI have decided not to employ the dreaded DVNR. The freshness of the image truly makes it look as though it was shot yesterday and surely that is the most you can ask when watching documentary footage of a bygone era?

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Re: Flipside 2 & 3: London in the Raw & Primitive London

#27 Post by cdnchris » Sun Jul 26, 2009 2:08 pm

London in the Raw
Primitive London

I loved the films (I have a soft spot for exploitive cinema, though.) The transfers are shockingingly good. Films like these two really should not look this good, looking almost brand new.

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Re: Flipside 2 & 3: London in the Raw & Primitive London

#28 Post by MichaelB » Wed Sep 28, 2011 8:59 am

These will be reissued as Dual Format editions on October 24 - details here.

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Re: Flipside 2 & 3: London in the Raw & Primitive London

#29 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Feb 23, 2012 10:56 am

Just a heads up, Odeon Films have released two earlier 'nudist colony and naturism' films directed by Arnold Miller onto DVD - Nudes of the World from 1961 and Take Off Your Clothes and Live from 1963 (the latter in 2.35:1 format). Apparently neither of which have been released on home video before.

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Re: Flipside 2 & 3: London in the Raw & Primitive London

#30 Post by antnield » Tue Feb 28, 2012 5:24 pm

colinr0380 wrote:Just a heads up, Odeon Films have released two earlier 'nudist colony and naturism' films directed by Arnold Miller onto DVD - Nudes of the World from 1961 and Take Off Your Clothes and Live from 1963 (the latter in 2.35:1 format). Apparently neither of which have been released on home video before.
It's easy to see why, the surviving materials aren't in the best of shape. Take Your Clothes Off had to be sourced from what appears to be videotape - though the OAR is maintained - whilst Nudes of the World makes use of Stanley A. Long's own print which had become faded, gathered scratches and lost frames over the years. Review here.

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Re: Flipside 002-003: London in the Raw / Primitive London

#31 Post by MichaelB » Sat Sep 15, 2012 8:49 am

RIP Stanley Long, cinematographer and significant driving force on these films.

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Re: Flipside 002-003: London in the Raw / Primitive London

#32 Post by annoyingmouse » Thu Jan 17, 2013 6:48 pm

I just bought the dual format version of Primitive London from play.com and I've unsealed it only to discover that it is missing the booklet. Normally it probably wouldn't bother me too much but it was the last flipside I had to get (all 24 now at last!!) and the quality of the books is part of what has made the series so good. Unfortunately, play don't have any more stock and given the rakuten marketplace route they are taking I doubt they'll get anymore in so I was wondering if anyone here knew of a contact email I could use to see if I can get a copy of the booklet from the bfi? Tried searching the bfi site but couldn't find one. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Re: Flipside 002-003: London in the Raw / Primitive London

#33 Post by McCrutchy » Fri Jan 18, 2013 2:45 am

I should think filmstore@bfi.org.uk would be the place to start. Just make sure you tell them where you purchased it from and offer to send a copy of the electronic invoice.

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Re: Flipside 002-003: London in the Raw / Primitive London

#34 Post by MichaelB » Fri Jan 18, 2013 5:46 am

McCrutchy wrote:I should think filmstore@bfi.org.uk would be the place to start. Just make sure you tell them where you purchased it from and offer to send a copy of the electronic invoice.
I've directly alerted BFI DVD Publishing on his behalf, and have sent him a PM.

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Re: Flipside 002-003: London in the Raw / Primitive London

#35 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Nov 08, 2013 3:33 pm

I've finally begun to get through some of these Flipside releases with London In The Raw. It's not what could be called really a good film in the sense that it just seems like a context-less trawl through London nightlife of the time with lots of acts that would seem to have greater impact if the audience is drunk, but a very valuable one when combined with the Stewart Home essay which describes the sordid underworld gangster history of some of the clubs.

On the other hand the narration is squarely in the Mondo-film tradition of heavy handed off-kilter moralising with just a hint of whimsical introspection about the sorry state of the world today! (Particularly that final comparison of London to a diamond: "flashing facets like a flawed jewel"!) I really enjoyed the first section of the film in which the narration was much more present before it gets quietened down in the second half by all of the 'ethnographic' footage of musical numbers and stage acts. Also a very Mondo-film trait was the strange feeling of disembodiment to the film, only adding to the faked-seeming nature of what was occurring as the film cut around to show people laughing or singing that was out of synch with the soundtrack.

There were quite a few amusing moments such the cockney prostitute intoning "Oooh...'ow interesting. Cost you three pounds" to her shifty German client! Or the belly dancing scene with the older chap hilariously transfixed directly on the woman's wobbling bosom! Or the weirdly introspective voiceover from the Liverpudlian nude model sitting in the middle of a restaurant (I'm sure that the filmmakers threw in the clichéd artist with the easel, goatee and beret in there!). Or the catfood eating beatniks years before Jane Fonda in Klute (though I'm suspicious that some of them chickened out and were eating from a tin of Baked Beans instead!)

The variety acts themselves dragged a little and it was no surprise that both they and the incongruous hair transplant scene were cut down in the 47 minute version of the feature included as an extra. A shame that the shorter film dropped the scene of the vagrants drinking Methylated spirits backed by a woozy electronic score though!

On that note, did that bizarre hair (and skin plug) transplant method actually work at all? It just seems a way of creating two bald patches instead of one! And I don't really think combing the remaining hair over the new surgically created bald patch was really necessary!

One thing that I particularly liked was that final jaunty Adam and Eve nightclub song, segueing into a fast-cut horror music-scored montage of all of the footage from the rest of the film, followed by a whiplashing return to the jaunty nightclub song over the end credits!

As to the three short films included, Pub was OK and Chelsea Bridge Boys was excellent (I really like films which follow people doing hobbies they enjoy and which they feel defines them, and it was interesting to hear the filmmakers questioning them about the wider world too. Though I was a little distracted by the idea that all of these 20-something spotty bikers are coming up to their 70s by now!)

Strip was also great, filling in a lot of backstage details that London In The Raw was ignoring and reminding me a little of Killing Of A Chinese Bookie's backstage scenes at times! (Either that or an anti-Une Femme est une Femme!) The scene of the thuggish manager going through the takings in the dressing room and threatening the girls with fines if at least one of them didn't make themselves available to perform 'spots' was a bit of raw reality that isn't present in the main feature. Nice to know that bosses are the same all over!

And Strip also elaborated on that section of the shorter version of London In The Raw that talked about the women having to take up presentational poses for their audience without being allowed to move, or else they would be breaking the law, with a curtain regularly closing and opening again to show them in a new pose!

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Re: Flipside 002-003: London in the Raw / Primitive London

#36 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Jan 03, 2014 10:15 am

I like Primitive London better than London In The Raw, which gets a bit sidetracked in its final moments by all of its music-hall stuff. Yet Primitive London is perhaps even more bizarre in its ethnographic bipolar veering from the tackily kitsch to the horrifically mundane! I'll just transcribe the notes I took during my viewing, with apologies for all of the exclamation marks (though it is a film that calls out for them!):

And we're off, into the clouds in an airplane sequence that was obviously meant to evoke that wonderful sequence in L'Eclisse...or perhaps they just had access to a plane for an afternoon and thought it would look good in the title sequence?

A baby is born, with the doctor almost trying to pull its head off as he wrenches it out of the birth canal. Then the doctor and nurse take it in turns to rough him up and slap him about a bit before chucking him absent mindedly onto a towel!

The 'youth of today' sequence shows teenagers even back then had a terrible taste in clothes! One chap actually has a Jean-Paul Belmondo-look going on and even chooses a nicely cut trenchcoat to seeming accentuate the cool look. Only problem is it is eye-searingly gaudy hunting red coloured, which is never a good look especially in combination with tan trousers and trilby!

The beatnik section of singing in a pub (incongruous songs about being a "workin' man wielding a hammer in Louisiana") features one chap doing a very impressive feat of exhaling smoke and inhaling a glass of beer in one smooth movement!

After smugly laughing about the narrator's over-egged description of the mods, rockers and beatniks, I had a horrible moment of terrifying existential self-realisation during the speech about pinball players:
...there are others, belonging to no group, because they are unaware of themselves as members of any society. They dissipate their identity in complete passivity. They become reduced to human adjuncts of a machine, and the machine's flashing lights lends an air of action - of doing something. A sedative to cover an attitude of cynical indifference.
Oh, narrator of Primitive London, sometimes your moralising commentary cuts too deep! Although perhaps the people on display were just wanting a brief game of pinball?

Apparently the best role to fill in society is that of a voiceover announcer, coming complete with a variety of racist accents! (And, wait a minute, is that a very young Barry Cryer in one of the voiceover announcer scenes?!)

Some terrible cabaret music is on display here, as the girls are schooled by what I can only describe as a 1960s version of Louis Spence!

Apparently [women] "Capitalise on a pair of good legs and a well built body", while men pump up their bodies for nothing! The film turns into a World of Wrestling special at this point as a pair of chaps throw themselves around a ring to a 'tweety bird' woozy soundtrack! And screeching out of tune violin cutting in as one wrestler violently wedgies another!

Why does the narrator fade out a couple of times only to be replaced by a couple of bickering New York accented gangster toughs moaning about what they are seeing on screen (as in asking why they have to watch lots of overweight guys wandering around and getting massages in the Turkish Bath sequence, and begging the film to "bring on the gals!!")

Here comes a parade of girls in swimsuits in front of judges who all look amazing from the front but on turning around and walking away from the camera unfortunately show a lot of 'excess buttock' bulging out from the sides of their swimsuit! Ironically the film then goes into a sequence of the girls in their dressing room removing their extra judge-pleasing padding from their costumes!

A depressing scene wandering about a car junkyard (the film with this sequence and all the musical numbers is strangely melting together with Nashville in my mind!) about the grim statistics of road deaths seques into an utterly demented scene recreating a prostitute being killed by Jack The Ripper! Are the producers of this film trying to outdo Hammer Films here with a bit of lurid stabbing accompanied by a plinky-plonk piano trill on each stab? They could at least have let the prostitute try to run away rather than sticking the actress on a treadmill! This is all followed by a disturbing montage restaging the discovery of murdered prostitutes in various London locations (Visit London and discover all the dead prostitutes in back alleys!)

Here's Billy J. Kramer as a new teen idol getting attacked by a group of screaming teenage girls in a record shop in a scene that seems to prefigure Romero's zombie films, as a now ignored past-generation of teen idol (Terry Dene) looks on with perhaps a tinge of sadness but with an obvious expression of relief!

A sequence about Judo and Kendo, very sniffy about its application to the real world ("only worth learning if you are going to become a samurai") and puritanical about the idea that children are being taught it. Of course this film was very prescient about the wave of Kendo violence that swept across Britain in the later decades as these children, taught violence as youngsters, put their nefarious skills into practice on innocent bystanders! :roll:

Tattoos for women showing their mental illness? Perhaps having a breast tattoo done by a chap with a Hitler moustache is better than running around from strip club to strip club doing an eleven hour a day shift!

Aaargggh! Just when I thought I could relax here comes the animal violence section! Battery hens getting processed by being hung, their throats cut and plucked until they reach the slightly bored housewife in the supermarket (another example suggests the narration of London-dwellers denying their essential animality)

Here's a goldfish being given anaesthetic for an operation! Because that happens!

Key parties! God, that looks a depressing soiree ("The Jaguar! Who is it?")! Lots of moralising narration here. Love the strangely inevitable moment of the husband taking his new partner back to his semi-detached bungalow and briefly looking in on his sleeping child! The husband is suggested throughout this sequence to have more of a sense of shame about the whole key party thing, unlike the floozy of a wife! (The film seems to not like women very much, with this sequence and the one with the women going to the hairdressers that inspires the comment that if women went bald scientists would be working on a cure around the clock!) But it still doesn't stop him jumping into bed with his new partner anyway after checking his kid's asleep!

An up-close corn removal scene. Because everyone wanted to see that. :-&

Tut-tutting at the new wave of uncouth comedians. How dare they make fun of Harold Wilson! [-(

"There is one certainty in all this...the hangover lasts longer than the state of intoxication" - Hey Primitive London, I'm supposed to be doing the commenting on the film here! That must be one of the best semi-self-aware lines of any film though!

Compared to London In The Raw trying to show a variety of different cultural goings on in the capital, this whole film seems a lot more American-influenced than London In The Raw did. From the beatniks singing Deep South working men songs through to the flapper girl final musical number, it has a weird, cut-price trans-Atlantic feel!

...which ties in well with that sequence in the short 'documentary' film Carousella included on the disc, which features what might be one of the most depressing riffs of On The Town ever filmed, as one of the strippers talks about how much she loves Americans and takes a couple of sailor suited chaps on a tour of a grey and dank Cambridge before one of the bleakest and least romantic paddle boat rides I have ever seen! (There is also what I can only imagine to be a homage to The Birds in the final shot too!)

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