For lunch we went to a pub in the centre of town. Joan had a vegetable pasty and I had steak and kidney pie, which caused her to tut reprovingly. That evening, it was Graham’s turn to cook. The dish he prepared for us may or may not have had a name: it seemed to consist mainly of lentils and walnuts burned down to a black crust, scraped off the bottom of a large saucepan, and served with a dollop of wholemeal pasta ribbons which had the texture of rubber bands. We ate, for the most part, in absorbed silence.
‘You ought to show Michael some of your work, tomorrow,’ said Joan to Graham at one point. ‘He might have some interesting comments to make.’
‘I should like that,’ I said.
Graham sat me down on his bed and switched on the large, unwieldy television which dominated one corner of his bedroom. It took nearly a minute to warm up.
‘1970s vintage,’ he explained. ‘Pretty much on its last legs.’
Yesterday’s mist had cleared and the morning was turning out bright but muggy. Not that much of the sunshine would come our way: Graham’s room was permanently in shadow, with a tiny, lace-curtained window which looked out over Joan’s back yard and the back yards of other houses in the next street. We were alone in the house, it was half past ten and we were both on to our second cups of strong, sugary tea.
‘Have you got one of these yourself?’ Graham asked, kneeling down to slot a VHS tape into the video machine.
‘Can’t afford it on what I earn,’ I said. ‘I’m waiting for the prices to come down. They say they’re going to tumble.’
‘You don’t think I own this, do you? Nobody’s buying the things — you do it on the rental. Ten quid a month is all this costs me, down at Rumbelows.’
I sipped my tea and said spitefully: ‘When I was a student we used to spend our money on books.’
‘Don’t give me that.’ Graham gestured at the rows of tapes which lined his dresser and window-sill. ‘These are my books. This is the medium of the future, as far as film-making’s concerned. Nearly all our work at college is done on video now. Three hours of tape, there is, on one of these little beauties. Do you know how much three hours’ worth of sixteen mill would cost you?’
‘I see your point.’
‘Not too hot on the practicalities, you literary types, are you? It’s all ivory tower with you.’
I ignored this.
‘Does it have a freeze frame, your video?’
‘Sure. It’s a bit shaky, but it does the job. Why, what do you want one of those for?’
‘Oh, you know — It’s nice to have … all the gadgets.’
The screen flickered into action just as Graham finished closing the curtains and seating himself beside me on the bed.
‘Here we go, then. This is my end-of-year assignment. See what you think.’
It was a less painful experience than I had anticipated. Graham’s film was only about ten minutes long, and proved to be an efficient if unsubtle piece of polemic about the Falklands conflict, called ‘Mrs Thatcher’s War’. The title was double-edged, because he had somehow managed to find a pensioner called Mrs Thatcher who lived in Sheffield, and shots of warships steaming into battle and extracts from the Prime Minister’s speeches were juxtaposed with scenes from the life of her less eminent namesake: making trips to the shops, preparing frugal meals, watching news bulletins on the television and so on. In a disjointed voice-over commentary, the old woman spoke of the difficulties of getting by on her pension and wondered what had become of all the money she had paid in taxes throughout her working life: this was usually the cue for a rapid cut to some brutal and expensive-looking piece of military hardware. The film ended with the Prime Minister’s famous speech to the Scottish Conservative Party, in which she described the war as a battle between good and evil and declared that ‘It must be finished’, followed by a lingering shot of the other Mrs Thatcher carrying a heavy bag of groceries up a steep, forbidding street. Then the screen faded to black and two captions appeared: ‘Mrs Emily Thatcher supports herself on a weekly income of £43.37’; ‘The cost of the Falklands War has already been estimated at £700,000,000.’
Graham turned off the tape.
‘So — what did you think? Come on, your honest opinion.’
‘I liked it. It was good.’
‘Look, just try to forget that Southern middle-class politeness kick for a minute. Give it to me straight.’
‘I told you, it was good. Powerful, and direct, and … truthful. It tells the truth about something.’
‘Ah, but does it, though? You see, film’s such a tightly structured medium, that even in a short piece of work like this, all sorts of decisions have to be made. How long a shot’s going to last, how a shot’s going to be framed, which shots are going to come before it, which ones are going to come after. Now doesn’t that whole process become suspect when you’re dealing with something that advertises itself explicitly as a political film? Doesn’t it make the role of the film-maker himself intensely problematic, prompting the question — not “Is this the truth?” but “Whose truth is it anyway?” ’
‘You’re absolutely right, of course. Do you think you could show me how this freeze frame business works?’
‘Sure.’ Graham picked up the remote control, rewound the tape a few minutes and then pressed Play. ‘So my point is that the whole thing is deeply manipulative, not just of the audience, but of its subject. Mrs Thatcher invaded the Falklands and I invaded this woman’s life — both of us on the same pretext, that we had their best interests at heart.’ He pressed Pause and the old woman froze into jittery stillness, in the act of opening a can of soup. ‘In a way the only really honest thing for me to do would be to expose the mechanics of my involvement: to have the camera pan round and suddenly rest on me, the director, sitting in the room with her. Perhaps that’s what Godard would have done.’
‘Can’t you get rid of those lines across the screen?’ I asked.
‘Sometimes you can. You just have to keep pressing the button and eventually they go away.’
He pressed the pause button some more times.
‘It’s a bit blurred, isn’t it?’
‘The technology’ll improve. Anyway, would it have been anything more than an empty self-referential gesture, that’s what I have to ask myself. Because I know exactly what you’re going to say next: you’re going to say that any attempt to foreground issues of authorship would just be a throwback to formalism, a futile strategy to shift emphasis from the signified to the signifier which can’t do anything to alter the basic fact that, at the end of the day, all truth is ideological.’
‘Do all the machines have this feature,’ I asked, ‘or do you have to go to the more expensive end of the market?’
‘They’ve all got them,’ he said. ‘It’s their main selling point. Quite a radical development, when you think about it: for the first time in history, control over cinematic time is being given to the audience and taken out of the film-maker’s hands. You could argue that it’s the first real move towards the democratization of the viewing process. Though of course’—he switched off the tape and stood up to draw the curtains—‘it’d be naïve to suggest that that’s why people were buying them. At college we call it the WP button.’
‘WP?’
‘Wankers’ paradise. All your favourite movie stars in the buff, you see. No more of those tantalizing scenes when some gorgeous actress drops them for a couple of seconds and then disappears out of the frame: now you can stare at her for as long as you like. For an eternity, in theory. Or at least until the tape wears out.’