Carol Morley's The Madness of the Dance (2006)

 

Carol Morley's The Madness of the Dance is a history of mass hysteria from the Middle Ages through to today, and includes nuns miaowing and biting like cats; dancing mania in Germany; people dancing to cure themselves of tarantula bites; students in Louisiana with a twitching leg supposedly infected by the water; an outbreak of contagious laughter in Tanzania; fainting fits in Blackburn, Lancashire; in China, mania caused by people believing that their genitalia were disappearing; in Belgium, people experienced nausea on consuming a fizzy drink. This is told by Maxine Peake acting as a professor, but the message is that madness is contagious and can be experienced by perfectly, er, 'normal' people.

Carol Morley's The Fear of Trilogy (2006)

 

The Fear of Trilogy is (perhaps) a deliberately pretentious title for a film, particularly as it's only three minutes long. It inevitably comes across as mock-documentary, especially as the po-faced Maxine Peake tells us what she knows of the dangers of birds (Hitchcock had to get in there), things that can fall on your head (best to wear a crash helmet), and sleep-walking into a bar, or even into a cock.

Carol Morley's Stalin My Neighbour (2004)

 

Carol Morley's Stalin My Neighbour is, perhaps needless to say, about trauma, although this is fictional. Annie (Alicya Eyo) is obviously traumatised: whatever the interviewer asks her in this east London environment, Annie (suffering from a kind of dissociation illness) is only prepared to talk about the general local history of the area, about Ghandi, Stalin and (significantly) the anti-psychiatrist R. D. Laing: anything but the death of her younger sister, for which she feels guilty. Death, trauma, disappearance, all haunt Carol Morley's films.

Carol Morley's Return Trip (2001)

 

This twenty-four minute short is a reconstruction of a trip to India which the teenage Carol Morley made with her friend Catherine Corcoran (or 'Corky').  There are a great number of impressionistic shots here – including a very irritating sequence when the ping-pong background 'music' almost drowns the comment – although the film soon settles into the real subject of the film: trauma. During the original visit Corky had fallen into a well-like structure, had to receive hospital treatment, and in fact almost died.  Both mothers comment on the event, and Corky reveals that she still hasn't completely recovered after all the years, but Morley is obviously trying to put an old ghost to sleep.

Carol Morley's Everyday Something (2001)

 

From Carol Morley's collection of newspaper cuttings of unusual events comes this film reconstructing often obsessive forms of behaviour: a man makes hooting sounds and thinks an owl is returning calls, although it's just his neighbour playing games; a man is hit by a double-decker bus while stepping into the road eating a pastie; a man 'saved' from drowning is annoyed because he was attempting suicide; a shopper is punched and kicked in a supermarket; a woman stabs her husband six times (but not fatally) because he obsessively made her take exercises because she was overweight; a man is granted a divorce after 38 years of living with his wife who can't stop herself moving furniture around the house; after four unsuccessful attempts at repairing her washing machine, a woman holds the fifth man prisoner for three hours; a man obsessed with the model Claudia Schiffer forces his parents to answer questions about her and hits them if they give the wrong answers; a woman hides her mother in the kitchen for three years after she died of natural causes.

A very strange fifteen-minute short.

Carol Morley's The Week Elvis Died (1997)

 

Elvis Presley died the year this film was released, although this film is nothing to do with him: even the opening song 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?', well-known as a Presley one, is sung by Russell Churney. No, The Week Elvis Died really refers not to the singer, but to the name of the beloved pet rabbit of Karen (Jennifer Williams).

Karen lives in a working-class world where the Elvis-figure father seems to be missing, where the rest of her family seem not to understand her, and of course they don't realise that she is being bullied by three awful girls who are obviously jealous of her academic achievements, particularly that she has been chosen to represent the school in the musical group and is to have the privilege of speaking to Tony Blackburn, DJ.

But Elvis dies, and it appears that her school enemies are responsible. On the night of the radio programme, the great occasion when she meets her DJ hero, she answers that her favourite book is the Wombles, but when Blackburn asks her if she has any friends she freezes, and continues to freeze through the following questions, which include if she has a pet: in the end she grabs the mike and lets out a huge scream of horror, all across the airwaves.

Carol Morley's I'm Not Here (1984)

The title of this short from Carol Morley comes from a shameful ranting letter by Alex Guinness which was published in The Times in January 1970, in which he complained about the lack of attention shop assistants paid to customers: it's 'I'm Not Here' that was chosen as the title. Morley collects news items, and the initial mention in this of Linda Sheridan ('Miss London Stores 1970) was found in the nineties in a scrapbook found in a skip in Finsbury Park.

Edith here mentions the film 'Full Metal Jacket' as a criticism of the fascist behaviour of the management, although I particulary note the obvious influence of Jean-Luc Godard's Tout va bien, with its long tracking shot of supermarket counters, as a tribute to the great director. This is so glaringly a political film, no matter what the original intention.

Carol Morley's Secondhand Daylight (1983)

 

Secondhand Daylight is Carol Morley's second graduation film, and is set in a fastfood restaurant. Against a backdrop of the restaurant's wares, young people (normally in the bottom right corner of the screen) talk about their problems, mainly their problems in (or out of) relationships. We are only party to some of what is said by the interviewees, it is clear that there is some confusion in their minds, although nothing specific is mentioned: as so frequently with Morley's films, something is missing.

Carol Morley's Girl (1983)

 

Girl is one of two of Carol Morley's graduation shorts, and is about loss. Through suicide. Suicide is devastating because it's not a natural occurrence through illness or age, but something very often inexplicable, even if there's a death note: narrators are very often unreliable even in reality. If suicide itself is caused by truama, it in itself causes trauma to those living, and this trauma can last for the rest of the lives of the people concerned. My first cousin Charles Pembleton killed himself in 1990 at about the age of forty, by carbon monoxide poisoning. I was told that he left no death note, just a brief collection of self-published poems under the title Living in a Timewarp from sixteen years before. I occasionally read a few of these poems, and although the meaning in these often opaque abstractions eludes the reader, the obvious existential anguish is written large, and the suggestion of suicide as an end can't be written off.

Suicide haunts the Manchester Morley family, and did so long before the journalist Paul Morley wrote a book about his father who killed himself by carbon monoxide poisoning: Nothing (2000). The first short of two of Paul's younger sister Carol's graduation films was released as Girl in 1993, lasts just seven minutes and reconstructs the relationship she had with her father, the initial mystery of his death to her, and attempts to relive the time in memory.

This reconstruction is done in shots of her father taking her to school, shots of the staircase, and the bizarre background sound of a sketch from television's 'The Morecombe and Wise Show', involving the 'singing' of 'Boom Oo Yata-Ta-Ta' to 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?': this partly serves as a background to part of the film, and the viewer understands the memory of the young girl too. Interestingly, the shots often reveal only a partial shot of the whole object, as if to underline that this is only a partial memory, and memory can only ever be partial. Significantly, 'Are you Lonesome Tognight' – a song of yearning and loss – is the opening song to another short by Morley: 'The Week Elvis Died'.

A good start.