Piers Thompson writes:
REQUIEM FOR NAPOLI?
To the Pop Up Cinema on Friday night to watch Local Hero Julien
Temple introduce his lyrical masterpiece, Requiem For Detroit. It is
my third trip to our very own digital microplex and once more it is
packed. By now, we have all learnt to wrap up warm.
Julien has no equal as an iconographer. He filmed the Pistols’
Jubilee boat party. He made The Great Rock’n’ Roll Swindle
which moulded the Sex Pistols/McLaren mythology. He made
Absolute Beginners, turning Colin MacInnes’ seminal tale of the first
teenagers into a musical, with David Bowie dancing on the keys of a
giant typewriter.
He has flirted with the arts, making movies about Jean Vigo,
Wordsworth and Coleridge, and opera. But it is as the iconographer
of English Rock that he is destined to be remembered. The Filth
And The Fury (Sex Pistols revisited), The Future Is Unwritten (a
hagiography of Joe Strummer), Glastonbury, The Liberty Of Norton
Folgate (a contemporary music hall with Madness and Stomp) and
Oil City Confidential (an award winning account of Dr Feelgood)
have cemented his reputation as the go to guy if you are aiming for
posterity. He is working on The Kinks even as we speak.
Requiem To Detroit is a hymn to the rise and fall of Detroit that
combines a history of the Motor City through archive and the
parallel success of Motown with a very contemporary exploration
of the potential renaissance of the city by the subcultures that
are colonising the devastated ruins. And they are both ruins and
devastated.
as an inspiration for those of us left in MacInnes’ Napoli (that is
Notting Hill to you squares). The vacuum created by our decline as
a creative force allows lots of room for bindweeds like you and I to
prosper.
Requiem? Hallelujah! Amen.
Watch out for RoughlerTV's report from the penultimate night of the Pop Up for the year. Tonight is a special screening of Halloween. He's behind you.
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