Reporting...

Private Report is now complete. Or, rather, I'm doing no more work on it and putting it out to screen. That is: either it's finished or I am.

It's a noisy, stifling piece of work.

It's probably, in some combination:

>An anthropophagic homage to Joseph Lewis' criminally underrated The Invisible Ghost

>A bemused rumination on the male gaze

>An even more bemused rumination on the whole business of perceiving reality

>A skeptically nostalgic seance

>A Bela Lugosi vehicle

Also finished, some weeks ago, a 40-minute piece called This Video is Still Here, a visually intense loop that repeats with variations and plays to an extremely minimal soundtrack. Its source material is VHS footage I shot for a narrative in the late '90s. It expands upon ideas explored in the Everywhere Trilogy.

Anyone inclined to get a neat, one-stop overview of all this mania can now find an up-to-date videography here. Details of running times, formats and the like will be added shortly.

In the Time of Nick

The following are two extracts from an essay by David Cairns on Ray's We Can't Go Home Again:

'Ray was too smart, too interested in the process of drama, too sensitive and too internally conflicted to commit himself anymore to a single choice. All avenues had to be explored...'

'Perhaps it could never have been finished, and perhaps that's inherent in its form. It's not a comfortable film to watch. It goes beyond a mere head-fuck. It's a head-cluster-fuck. The multiple images suggest the POV of a dying fly with a migraine, its life flashing before its eyes. Coming after the immaculate imagery of Rebel Without a Cause or The Savage Innocents, it's enough to induce heartache and depression, but at the same time there's a wild optimism in the desperate clutching at some new form, new dramatic language, a transcendent rebirth of cinema, something that can't be articulated by the artist or even suggested by the raw footage unspooling before us, except as a dream that is visibly striving to come true.'