Black jeans and weathered jackets: Time and place and the films of Richard Baylor
HOW GRIM AND DESERTED the streets: shop fronts overlooking an industrial wasteland in which a young man necks wine from a bottle, his company a harsh musical soundtrack. This is Our Own Personal Hell, a short film shot in England in 1990 — Ipswich to be precise, a port town in the borough of Suffolk, eighty miles outside London. Margaret Thatcher still holds a fragile leadership as Prime Minister in a country frayed at the edges, the threat of another recession looming. One news story of recent months concerns the M40 and M42 motorways, additions to which have been completed. Another concerns the end of the Cold War and with it hope of a new dawn. But, like the high speed motorway links, there is no discernible impact on Ipswich, depicted in the films of Richard Baylor as a soul-sucked time and place. His is a butcher-shop art, a form that emerges when creativity has nowhere else to go.
Active on the underground film circuit in the UK in the final decade of the last millennium, Richard Baylor was raised in the American Midwest but, drawn by Ipswich’s music scene, bands like The Adicts and Extreme Noise Terror, he moved to the town to carry out his stint in the US Air Force. His work has been linked to the Cinema of Transgression, the coterie of New York-based filmmakers fronted by Nick Zedd, whose films Baylor had helped to sell and distribute in Britain beneath the radar of the BBFC. But apart from an aesthetic DIY quality — which, back in the 1990s, David Slater equated to wardrobe: dispossessed filmmakers and their actors dressed singularly in black jeans and weathered jackets — the work of these ‘no-budget’ SOV filmmakers feels markedly different.
Another distinction is that Baylor remains relatively obscure. He made a handful of intense films between 1990 and 1993 but hitherto has failed to generate retrospectives or inspire the critical reappraisal enjoyed by his counterparts. Perhaps it is because Baylor’s is a limited canon, and perhaps because he belongs to a British scene that in Britain is yet to be recognised. Following his short films, Baylor fell off the map altogether with the release of his most accomplished work, the feature-length Cirsium Delectus.
Here are synopses of Baylor’s short films as they appear in Headpress in 1992.[i]
Our Own Personal Hell follows the fate of a typical ‘undergrounder’ after he loses his job, his girlfriend, his home, and sees a bottle of cheap wine and suicide as his only redeeming solution.
Sins of the Flesh explores the patriarchal power of the church using a montage of religious/violent images intercut with erections/spires and fellatio on and off screen. [Later renamed Jesus Hates You.]
Dead Love opens with a happy-go-lucky couple wandering round a devasted industrial landscape (a typical underground backdrop). At home a row develops over burnt toast. He becomes dominant and abusive, she is receptive and frail. Of course this is a mere prelude to a role reversal and she finally retaliates with a helping of nocturnal mutilation and murder. The girl, now transformed into a neurotic man-hater, returns to the industrial area and lures another victim to a similar fate.
Thoughts from the White Walls. A motorcyclist lies injured in a bed following an accident in which a baby was killed. He is surrounded by white walls and an image of Jesus. A woman approaches. She is the girl whose child was killed in the crash. She wants vengeance, but first needs to replace the lost baby. She squats over the unconscious guy and fucks him. Seed implanted, she then beats him to death with a steel bar.
Dum Dum involves again the usual black clad, long-haired underground type and a disintegrating relationship. The main character seeks to console himself with a stolen showroom dummy. He takes it home, dresses it in his ex’s clothes. Wines, dines, dances and fucks until his ex returns and spoils it all. The dummy is non[e] too happy about this other woman either and blows his brains out as he takes a bath.
Good Things Happen To Those Who Love the Lord. A bogus preacher pursues and fantasises about a pair of streetwalking ‘whores’. He dreams of bondage and masturbation but his goal is to spread the Word to the unfortunate women. When he eventually confronts them, he is stabbed in the groin and left in the gutter with his Bible. They take his cash and leave.[ii]
Baylor was one of the artists whose work featured in Headpress, elsewhere too, but as co-editor and publisher of that magazine this author can attest to the symbiotic relationship between artists and zines, how they interacted, and consequently how the creative impulse manifested on the underground in the final decade of the millennium; the impulse was boundless and the spark appeared permanent but in truth was only ever fleeting. Twelve issues of Headpress were published through the 1990s, during which time we regularly received material, be it a book, zine, comic, music, or videocassette for review purposes. Packages from any given artist were sporadic, each new work simply turning up, arriving in the mail with a covering letter. There was no press junket, no campaign to build momentum for a film prior to launch — not even a fixed release date in some cases.
The act of mail was itself a creative act, and every day it arrived from all over the world, a tide of correspondence in a time so uncertain there could be no doubt that something was happening; despite the harsh days and boring news, here was evidence to the contrary. The counterculture was and is, in a sense, a frame of mind, one that acts upon the world and its failings, mapping new routes through antipathy.
Baylor was interviewed in Headpress on the back of Cirsium Delectus, a 1993 film based on a true crime case that had been the subject of an article in the magazine. Douglas D. Clark and Carol Bundy were convicted in 1980 for multiple murders in California. Known as the Sunset Strip Killers, Bundy made a plea bargain and received a life sentence, while Clark, facing the death sentence, maintained that Bundy had orchestrated the killings and that he was manipulated. The film, again shot in Ipswich, makes no specific mention of the case, but the connection is evident and Baylor never pretended otherwise. (The film’s cryptic title, Cirsium Delectus, happens to carry the same initials if ‘Douglas Clark’ was reversed.)
Cirsium Delectus may be considered a logical extension of Our Own Personal Hell, Baylor’s debut short. The central character is another alternative-looking young man, floundering in a world he doesn’t understand, the difference being that in Cirsium Delectus he is even less in control. The film — shot not so much in black and white as shades of grey — starts with the wanderer hitchhiking to a new city where, minutes after arriving, he is victim to a con. He is conned again later, by a second seemingly good Samaritan, a woman who gives him food and shelter, only this time the outcome is more serious.
No one expected this to be Baylor’s final film, but then no one chased artists about the possibility of a forthcoming release, asking what the next project might be; instead, putting each issue of Headpress together, we simply expected the mail to come, another transmission in due course. But years pass, as they did with Richard Baylor.
Co-owner and creator of Saturn’s Core Audio & Video is Ross Snyder; he considers Cirsium Delectus a warm-up to something special, something that may have been ‘completely earth shattering [and] possibly even springboard Richard’s name into the more mainstream critical circles’.[iii] It wasn’t to be but now at least, thanks to Saturn’s Core, a US-based company, we can appreciate some of the reasons why. Our World Is Drowning and Going to Hell: The Underground Films of Richard Baylor is a region-free Blu-ray that collects together all Baylor’s films for the first time. A comprehensive package, a salvage operation, the films are accompanied by a variety of commentary tracks, no less an edifying oral history of the British counterculture by writer and publisher David Flint, a new documentary, Staring into the Abyss, that includes interviews with Baylor, his wife Sophie, members of the band Whiteslug, Jason Whittaker and Richard Munn, and other collaborators, plus a twenty-eight page booklet containing new and archive essays (alas not the Headpress one).
Time, Tennessee Williams wrote, is the longest distance between two places. It had been many years since I watched or even thought about the films of Richard Baylor prior to this collection, the old VHS tapes long gone, yet the films unfold again with a crystalline certainty, as if I last watched them yesterday. This isn’t the most accomplished filmmaking (and fortunately Saturn’s Core hasn’t gone overboard in cleaning them up), but it captures the spirit of time and place with a rawness not sanitised by arts funding or indeed formal training. Baylor, in the documentary contained on the disc, confesses that filmmaking for him began with a camcorder he gifted to his wife one Christmas, which, by his own admission, was a gift to himself. There is a religious undercurrent to much of his work, indicative of Baylor’s Methodist church upbringing and years spent in tent revival religious groups. The films are bearing witness for Baylor, and they bear witness for others too, those observers back on the poop deck of the 1990s, for instance, when nothing was on the horizon but endless sea. The brooding Cirsium Delectus epitomises the impudence of now, the tonality of the era from which it emerged and yet within it a big adventure that might have been.
Notes
[i] David Slater, ‘…If We Die Without Jesus In Our Hearts We Will Go To Hell… The Films of Rick Baylor’ in Headpress 4 (1992, pp.7-12).
[ii] Most of the shorts were packaged and released together as trilogies: You Made Your Bed… Now Die In It (1991) and The Holy Trinity (1992). Curiously My Funny Valentine isn’t among the films mentioned in Headpress 4. Baylor’s shortest film, My Funny Valentine, was built around the song of that name by Frank Sinatra, which plays in its entirety on the soundtrack. Avoiding copyright issues, this song has been removed for the film’s reissue on the 2024 Saturn’s Core Blu-ray.
[iii] Ross Snyder, ‘Profane Transgressions’, article in Sins of the Flesh, booklet included with Our World Is Drowning and Going to Hell: The Underground Films of Richard Baylor, (2024), p.14.
- Reviews: Film
- 1990s, Carol Bundy, Cinema of Transgression, Cirsium Delectus, David Flint, David Kerekes, David Slater, Dead Love, Douglas D. Clark, Dum Dum, Extreme Noise Terror, Good Things Happen To Those Who Love the Lord, Ipswich, Jason Whittaker, Jesus Hates You, Margaret Thatcher, Nick Zedd, Our Own Personal Hell, Our World Is Drowning and Going to Hell: The Underground Films of Richard Baylor, Richard Baylor, Richard Munn, Ross Snyder, Saturn’s Core Audio & Video, Staring into the Abyss, Sunset Strip Killers, Tennessee Williams, The Adicts, Thoughts from the White Walls, Whiteslug
David Kerekes
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