September 11, 2006
Iain Sinclair on Primitive London
Iain Sinclair, a favorite writer-psychogeographer, in the Guardian:
Reporters don't come more detached than that salaried sleepwalker, Marcello Mastroianni, in La Dolce Vita. Fellini's 1960 portrait of Rome—loving tribute masquerading as exposé—was unpunctuated, informal. But the melancholy Italian matinee idol didn't translate into London, looking - when brought to Notting Hill for John Boorman's Leo the Last in 1969—jet-lagged, traumatised. Absent. Like the shabby stucco of the alien territory he was visiting. A performance phoned in from another country.Rome was old, queeny, a museum insulted by traffic. The Paris of Jean-Luc Godard was a newsreel, with accidental poetry, captured by that dynamic camera-sniper, the Indo-China veteran Raoul Coutard. Los Angeles showed its underbelly, its toxic spread, in a mix of documentary and polemic fiction known as The Savage Eye, shot by Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers and Joseph Strick in 1959.
But film in London was always a difficulty . . .