Airside, p.6
Airside, page 6
Was he wrong to do this? He did not think or frame the word ‘love’, although he knew what it meant, or what it impended. It was all new to him. He never intended her to see any of it.
But then who was it for? She was here for real, often around him and with him, with no need at all to externalize his opinions on paper. He shouldn’t have done it, he shouldn’t even have started it.
‘What on earth were you thinking?’ she said. ‘Is it some kind of weird fantasy that I’m part of? Without me knowing?’
‘No,’ he said miserably.
Eventually she sat down on the side of his bed, and there was a long silence between them. Justin was relieved that at least she was no longer threatening to walk out on him, but he was embarrassed, feeling guilty and defensive. While she was still glowering silently, staring away from him and down at the worn old carpet he had inherited when he moved in, he took the offending notebook and tore out all the pages he had written about her. That made her look up at him.
‘Are you going to tear me up now?’ she said.
‘No – but you can.’ He offered her the pages but she shrugged and turned from him. He put them back on the table where he kept his typewriter.
‘You said you wanted to explain.’
It was slowly becoming calmer between them at last.
‘I don’t want you to think I’m making excuses,’ he said, but feared that anything he said would sound like that. ‘I’m really sorry. You’re right to be angry. I’ll never do anything like it again.’
‘OK. But why did you start? How did it happen?’
He began by telling her about the index of films, how as a child he had learned about the significant creative roles people played in the actual making of a film. Writing them down, the details gradually becoming more complex. Without understanding why he wanted to capture and keep this information. He liked comparing his notes with some of what was published in the collection of books he owned. He began to see connections: certain directors often worked with a particular photographer or editor, for instance.
‘I discovered I liked making a record,’ he said. ‘It started a long time ago, and the longer I do it the more I feel I’m learning about films. Then you came along and I wanted to write about how you seemed to me, how you looked. It probably proves I’m mentally abnormal or something, and you’ve made me realize that. I know it sounds obsessive, and I suppose it is, but it helps me understand and appreciate new films if I keep a record of the past. I think I was trying to do the same with you.’
‘Just old films, then? I’m the same as an old movie?’
‘All films are old once you’ve seen them. You’re not like that. I love new films, and I keep up with as many of the current movies as I can. We both do.’ Impulsively, he then did something that until this evening he thought he never would. He leapt up from where he was sitting and pulled out the wooden drawer where most of his file cards were kept. He thrust it towards her. She rested it on her lap. ‘Have a look,’ he said. ‘Pull one out and read it.’
She used her thumb to tip back the tops of the cards so she could read them. The title was always on the top line. ‘You’ve seen all these films?’
‘Most of them.’
She lifted out a card.
It was for Le Beau Serge , a film made by the director Claude Chabrol, date 1958/1963/1964, principal actors Gérard Blain, Jean-Claude Brialy, Michèle Méritz and Bernadette Lafont, released in France in 1958 but only shown in London in 1963. Justin had seen it three years earlier at the film club, while still at university. It was Chabrol’s first film, it was one of the earliest nouvelle vague films from France, and it had won awards.
Standing beside her he pointed out the difference between the three dates.
Kathy said, ‘There’s a review here. Did you write it?’
‘It’s not really a review. It’s just what I thought of it.’
‘Same thing, isn’t it?’
‘It’s a way of reminding myself.’
She replaced the card and took out another. Then a few more, which she riffled through. She was still in the Bs. She said, ‘ Blow Up ! We saw that together … last week, or the week before. You wrote it up then?’ She read his note on the card. ‘It says here you liked it. That isn’t what you said at the time. I thought we agreed we hadn’t enjoyed it.’
‘We did. But I thought about it afterwards, when I was typing up the card. I still agreed with what you said. It’s pretentious and the plot doesn’t hang together. But I wasn’t sure any more, and I need to see it again. Maybe I missed something.’
‘I thought that too. That’s why I didn’t like it much.’
‘But you know – Antonioni is a great film-maker. I often think maybe a film should be about more than the plot. Blow Up seems to be all about the plot, that’s what is so fascinating. You think it’s going somewhere but in the end nothing comes of it. That was annoying. But it was intriguing, so I was wondering what the film was getting at. And I liked the scene where David Hemmings was enlarging the photographs. We could go back and see it again, if you like. It’s still showing at the Pavilion, isn’t it?’
They talked about the film a while longer, gradually retreating from the sudden and bitter argument. He went over to sit beside her on the bed. They cuddled briefly. The torn out pages were lying on his table next to the typewriter. They were like a rebuke.
It was getting late. Earlier in the day, Justin had been thinking ahead to the prospect of Kathy being here in his room at night. Who knew where that might have led? But the argument had spoiled the evening. After eleven he travelled back on the tube with her to her flat, they kissed outside, then he walked home chastely through the warm and mildly petrol-fumed London air.
Once he was back in his room he tore up the pages. What had he been thinking? Never again, never. He was still kicking himself for the damage and hurt he had caused Kathy, and the disaster of losing her, somehow averted.
Two weeks later Kathy told Rick Deptford about her friend who was obsessed with film and wrote a review of everything he saw. Rick was an editor on the magazine where Kathy worked, and had been trying to find someone to take on regular film reviewing. He contacted Justin and asked to see a few samples of what he had done.
Justin’s first three reviews were published at the end of the month, and for the next four years he wrote the film column in the magazine. It was his first professional job and the beginning of his career.
8
Once the shock of his close-up look at the wreckage of the crashed Viscount began to fade, Justin felt a persisting interest in the event. He was still in his early teens, but he was taking what seemed to him to be a grown-up approach to his own experiences. After reading several newspaper articles about the accident, he shared the sense of disbelief expressed by many journalists and commentators that the layout of the airport and its runways could have been so perilously close to populated areas. In particular, to the primary school.
Why had no one ever seen the danger? No one would think of building a school on the end of an existing airport runway, so presumably the runway had been extended towards the building, without any serious thought given to the potential for disaster. It had been a local school since the previous century. How was the runway extension allowed to happen? Did no one think the school would be at risk? He had been there, and his six-year-old self stood in the playground and looked up at aircraft descending just above him. But could that possibly be true? Had his memory betrayed him, building up his fears after his visit to the scene of the crash and supplanting his real experiences?
Justin sometimes detoured on his way home from the grammar school, riding his bike across to the vicinity of the airport. The position of the school, now abandoned, was still exactly as he remembered it.
His visits therefore enabled him to witness the slow, deliberate efforts by the authorities to repair the damage caused by the accident, clear away all signs of what had happened, rebuild the houses, replant trees. The work took several months, with the damaged houses rebuilt last of all. They could not help but look more recently constructed than the otherwise identical ones around them. They remained vacant: Justin never saw signs of new occupiers moving in.
He carried his camera on most visits, but he took only one or two more shots of the accident zone. There was nothing much of interest to see, except in the context of knowing what had happened. The rolls of film were expensive, as was the cost of processing and printing. Ingeniously, the Comet camera had been designed to allow twice the number of exposures on a 127 film, but even so the expense was usually beyond his pocket. In years to come he would learn the economies of darkroom skills, but not then.
Planes coming in to land continued to fly low over the zone, the engines roaring, the bulky undercarriage assemblies seeming to skim the roofs of the houses slightly further away. Sometimes, fancifully, Justin would stare up along their descending flight path and imagine them as ground-attack aircraft, a slow but sustained offensive against those who stayed on the surface. However, the real military aircraft, the RAF jets, were no longer operating from Ringway. All flights now were civil: passenger or cargo.
As a veneer of normality around the streets was quickly restored, and the reconstruction became a work site, Justin took a greater interest in what was happening further down the road, at the airport itself.
At this time, in the mid and late 1950s, security measures against the threat of terrorism were more or less non-existent. Almost every part of the Ringway airport complex was open to casual visitors. One could wander around the whole area. There was an inexpensive self-service café that local people liked to visit, sitting by the picture windows with slices of cake and a cup of tea. They would watch the aircraft land and take off, or see them as they taxied across the apron to disgorge or take on board the passengers. Some said you would occasionally see film stars or famous footballers arriving on the planes from London and Europe. There was also an extensive aircraft viewing platform on one of the roofs: this allowed people a close view of all activities, sometimes only a few yards from the aircraft as they refuelled or loaded.
It was during this period Justin first started feeling the almost indefinable sense of transience, dread and excitement in an airport terminal. It was nothing he could positively identify, because consciously he liked and felt at home in the place. It thrilled him to think of travel, flying away from the humdrum existence of schooldays and living at home with his parents. Ringway offered him this temporary illusion of escape. He liked the sleek appearance of the aircraft, built for speed and lift and distance, and when he saw one of the bigger passenger aircraft accelerating down the runway and taking off he felt a tremor of jealousy, a wish that he too could be on board.
But whenever he left the airport, pedalling home on his bicycle, he almost invariably experienced a sense of relief, a returning of certainty, a solidity and assuredness.
The airport itself was constantly in a state of shifting stasis, always being changed or expanded or replaced while remaining the same. The differences were mostly superficial, and unexplained. Signage was often amended: areas where passengers were allowed to go, or more often not to go, places where cars were not permitted to drive or park, doors marked No Entry while others were permanently open. Temporary partitions were in use everywhere.
Everyone who worked there seemed to operate from day to day, minute to minute. There was no sense of memory or continuity. No one had any idea of how the airport would be in the future – sometimes Justin would notice building work going on, and the one time he asked what was happening he could not get a reply.
Whenever he looked around the public areas he gained the impression that there had been changes since his last visit, that when he returned next time there would be more changes. One day, the place where he normally propped up his bike while he was walking around was fenced off, and he had to pay to leave it in a special rack instead.
On one of his later visits the friendly café overlooking the arrivals apron was closed and boarded up. The next time Justin went a chain restaurant had opened in its place. It was now selling snacks and fast food in plastic packs. There were no windows overlooking the tarmac any more, merely large panels with brightly lighted advertisements.
The shabby-looking former huts and hangars from the wartime days were still in use to some extent, but they were no longer central to the operation of the airport. Newer ones, built of concrete and glass, were being thrown up. Around the time Justin and his family moved to the London area some of the old buildings were demolished to make spaces where people could park their cars. Large areas of ground around the perimeter were cleared of trees, replaced by wire fences. And the main runway was extended, this time at the far end, away from the site of the school.
It was as if the airport had an inner sense of life, a need to grow. That life was restless, stretching and spreading out across what had been the green Cheshire countryside.
During the early months of 1958 there was a long spell of wintry weather all over Europe, and every day after school Justin rode straight home on his bike to get out of the cold. He had no direct experience of what was to occur at the beginning of February, although like thousands of people in the Manchester area he felt indirectly involved.
On February 6th 1958, G-ALZU , a British European Airways twin-engined Airspeed Ambassador, returning to Manchester Ringway Airport from Belgrade, stopped in Munich for refuelling. When the plane attempted to take off again in a heavy snowstorm an accumulation of slush on the runway prevented it from reaching flying speed. It crashed in rough ground at the end of the runway and burst into flames. On board was the whole of the Manchester United football team, as well as staff members, officials and several journalists. Twenty-three people died in the accident, including eight of the leading players. Two of the surviving footballers were injured so seriously that they were never able to play again.
It was a national tragedy – most of the players were young and widely recognized as rising stars in the game. In Manchester there was a particular wave of shock and sadness, not only because of loyalty to the team but because many of the footballers were local lads.
A few weeks after the accident a commemoration service was announced. It would be held at Ringway Airport. Justin at first resolved to be there, but as the day came closer he was less sure. He was not especially interested in soccer, but that was not the main reason.
The nature of the disaster was appalling in human terms, but the destination of the flight seemed to Justin to be a matter that connected the crash to him. How was the airport involved? He spent much time brooding on this, remained uncertain about how he related to it, but when the day came he decided to stay away.
Later, with the same sort of misgivings, he recorded the accident in his aviation notebook, just the facts as he knew them.
9
La Jetée in Retrospect
by Justin Farmer
The screen is black. The first sound you hear is the whine of jet turbine engines, a plane taxiing at an airport. The opening visual image appears: this is la jetée itself, the long public viewing platform on the roof of one of the terminal piers at Orly Airport, outside Paris. The picture is a still photograph, a crisp monochrome. The sound of the engines gradually mixes with soaring liturgical music. The image zooms out to reveal the full length of the pier and the film credits briefly appear.
Jet airliners are waiting by the terminal to disgorge arriving passengers, or to take on new ones. Above them, the viewing platform is almost deserted. A few people stand in isolated groups of two or three in different parts of the long expanse. Depersonalized by distance and immobilized by the capture of the still photograph they are reminiscent of the guests in the grounds of the hotel in Alain Resnais’s L’Année derniere à Marienbad .
This is the opening of a remarkable film by the French director Chris Marker. The title is La Jetée , and it was made in 1962. We had to wait three years for it to be shown in the UK for the first time. Its running time is just under half an hour, so presumably no exhibitor felt it worthy of a solo appearance. It therefore came to Britain as the support feature to Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville , briefly screened in London and a few other cities at the end of 1965. It has also been shown at film festivals. It is no longer being screened anywhere. La Jetée is without question one of the most hauntingly beautiful, original and memorable films ever made, but its short duration ensures its audience is at least for now a restricted one.
The time is the present, or more accurately the period described in the film as ‘some time before the outbreak of World War 3’. A contemporary audience will of course be aware that this image must be a few years in the past, in our past, when the photograph was taken, but there are few signs of datedness. Most of the aircraft we can see are the same sort of commercial passenger jets in use now. The pier and the terminal are part of a modern-looking construction, presumably still there today in the real Orly Airport. The viewing platform is not crowded. There is a glimpse of a parking lot, not full. The slip road leading to the front of the terminal is not a crush of cars and taxis. The pier stands as an icon of a generic airport, recent but timeless.
All this is seen in the opening image of the film. Nothing can move in the stationary ambience of the photograph. Even the usual scenes of activity around waiting aircraft are missing: there is no sign of passenger movement, baggage handlers, ground staff, fuel bowsers. A quality of timelessness permeates the whole film. Every scene in the film, bar one short fragment, was photographed as a still black-and-white image, a tableau vivant, a moment glimpsed and fixed into immobility.
On that quiet pre-WW3 day, ‘lit by a frozen sun’, a boy visiting the viewing area of the airport with his parents notices a young woman (played by Hélène Chatelain) standing alone at the far end of the pier. We assume she and the boy’s family are among those unmoving distant figures we saw in the opening scene. The boy sees her face and stares transfixed by her beauty.
