2. The Second Heimat. All 13 features in Edgar Reitz’s 1992 German epic about youth, love, and art in the 60s played twice at the Film Center last spring — once over a four-day marathon and a second time over a succession of Thursdays and Sundays — and to follow it either way meant entering into a mesmerizing narrative contract with Reitz that was almost as involving as reading Proust. Not quite as innovative as Satantango (or “Three Colors” or even That’s Entertainment! III), Reitz’s multifaceted chronicle of a generation summed up the best of 60s filmmaking while offering a thoughtful and searching critique of what that filmmaking — and that generation — accomplished and failed to accomplish. Most of the leading characters are classical musicians and filmmakers, and one central part of the film’s pleasure is the musical performances (the work of Nikos Mamangakis, who composed the score, deserves an essay in its own right). Another is Reitz’s handling of extended party scenes, which grow in resonance as one becomes progressively more acquainted with his large and unforgettable cast of characters. Even the film’s absences and ellipses played a crucial role: I’m still trying to figure out why Reinhard commits suicide and why Renate, unlike the other major figures, isn’t accorded a full feature of her own; both of them remain indelibly lodged in my memory.

3. That’s Entertainment! III. This is a delight that effectively came out of nowhere. The two MGM compilations of musical clips that preceded it — three if one counts That’s Dancing! – were routine exercises in self-congratulation dosed with hypocritical piety; for this one the studio not only opened its treasure chest of unseen and unused numbers but offered us a bracing and intelligent critique of studio decision making. The two writers-directors-editors-producers, Bud Friedgen and Michael J. Sheridan, worked as editors on the previous films, which must have afforded them ample opportunity to think about how they could improve on the work of their predecessors, even while adhering to the same basic format of having former MGM stars introduce the clips. One improvement was allowing Lena Horne to expound on the racist policies that curtailed her work at the studio; another was the use of editing and split-screen devices to show us separate versions of the same number side by side or back-to-back, explaining in some cases how the wrong version got picked, or in others how the best version got put together. In addition to a few familiar items, one gets to see excluded footage from Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon, Cabin in the Sky, The Harvey Girls, Easter Parade, the otherwise unseeable Annie Get Your Gun, and even a neglected gem like I Love Melvin. You also get to hear a snatch of the heartbreaking rendition of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” Ava Gardner recorded for Show Boat, which the studio inexplicably chose to dub with another singer’s voice. A fascinating history lesson, this shares some of the limitations of other such compilations, but the overall sharpness of the selections made it for me the most pleasurable Hollywood release of the year. It’s already out on video, and though it inevitably loses part of its impact on the small screen, most of the original wide-screen ratios have been preserved.

4. Blue, White, and Red (“Three Colors“). I preferred Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue to his White and his Red to his Blue when they came out individually. But given the rare achievement of his trilogy as a whole, it would be churlish to include only one or two parts on my list, especially because they work better together than they do separately. Like Pulp Fiction (see below), these films were handled by Miramax, the most sophisticated marketers of independent movies around — as well as the most active in recutting and/ or retitling. Kieslowski’s trilogy and Pulp Fiction are two cases where their interference was minimal; in the case of something like The Advocate, which they both retitled and substantially recut, I refuse to consider eligible for my list — even though I enjoyed it — because I haven’t seen the original.

5. Fly High Run Far. Ever since I caught this briskly paced and gorgeously filmed period epic a little over three years ago in Taipei, I’ve regarded it as the best Korean movie I know. It looked every bit as impressive as I remembered when it turned up at the Film Center in July. Directed by the most famous, most popular, and probably the most prolific Korean director, Im Kwon-taek, who has made over 80 films, and beautifully shot in seasonal colors, it covers the four decades in the late 19th century when the radically humanist and egalitarian religious sect known as Kae Byok flourished. I found both its pageantry and its leading character — Hae-Wol, the sect’s charismatic leader — deeply moving and its sense of economy exemplary.

6. Little Women. I’ve never read Lousia May Alcott’s 1869 novel, nor do I recall ever seeing the previous screen adaptations directed by George Cukor (1933), Mervyn LeRoy (1949) or David Lowell Rich (1978, for TV). But unlike almost every other example of mainstream, English-language fiction filmmaking that I saw last year, this film was one I could enjoy and admire without feeling I had to make excuses or apologies. Its impeccable craft (including its wonderful cast) is a virtue I’ve come to expect from the Australian writer-director Gillian Armstrong, but her lovely sense of period tied to a fresh and intelligent grasp of the American past is something a good deal rarer nowadays. (The only other commercial movie that showed this sort of flair was also made by a non-American — Alan Parker’s uneven but underrated The Road to Wellville.) If fans of Pulp Fiction (or The Age of Innocence, for that matter), scoff at Little Women‘s genteel subject matter, that’s only because the sentimentality of girls’ pictures has less prestige at the moment than that of boys’ pictures. (For the sentimentality of men’s pictures, see #8 and #9 and for the sentimentality of a women’s picture, see I Like It Like That, listed under #10.) In any case, this movie, surprisingly tough-minded about its characters and what they want, isn’t fairly labeled as a girls’ movie; it also deserves to be seen by grown-ups.

7. Calendar. Atom Egoyan’s most satisfying movie to date is also the only recent movie I’ve seen about tribalism that deserves to be described as such. Using some of his familiar loop strategies, whereby the same material gets compulsively replayed, Egoyan tells a story about a marriage that disintegrates during a trip from North America to Armenia, where an assimilated Canadian-Armenian photographer (Egoyan himself), while shooting a dozen rural churches for a calendar, becomes insanely jealous when his diasporan Armenian wife (Egoyan’s real-life wife Arsinee Khanjian) converses with their guide in Armenian. The film alternates between this painful situation, captured in video and photographic records, and subsequent scenes back in Toronto,where the husband attempts to converse with various other women in English only to find each of these conversations interrupted by the woman making a telephone call and talking to someone else in a foreign language (with the photographer’s finished calendar hanging in the background). Much of this plays as grim comedy, and if the rigorous formalism of Egoyan’s method strikes some viewers as formulaic and overextended–even at 75 minutes–for me it represented an energizing, illuminating, and challenging breakthrough out of the more insulated concerns of Egoyan’s other recent features. For once he has connected his obsessions about sex and media with the ethnic conflicts raging in the world outside, and the advances this leads to in his work are considerable.

8. Highway Patrolman. What ever happened to the anarchic and resourceful Alex Cox, the English-born, American-trained independent who made Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, and Walker? He moved to Mexico and started a second career with this terrific 1992 Spanish-language portrait of a Mexican highway patrolman (Roberto Sosa) that was far and away the best and most believable cop movie to show in Chicago last year. (Its possible competitor, Charles Burnett’s The Glass Shield, is still being back held from release and may not even surface in its brilliant original form.) Working in a virtuoso long-take style (the whole movie has only 187 cuts), Cox mixes comedy with tragedy and social critique with straight-ahead action. Meanwhile, making the most of Mexican landscapes and a talented cast, this movie refuses to either idolize or demonize its three-dimensional hero, much less the morally complex world he moves through. It took two years for this gem to reach Chicago; let’s hope we won’t have to wait too much longer to see Cox’s masterful baroque, black-and-white adaptation of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Death and the Compass,” made in Mexico for the BBC around the same time.

9. The Last Bolshevik. The only video on my list apart from Godard’s Only Cinema (see below), Chris Marker’s moving personal essay about his late friend and mentor Alexander Medvedkin was in many respects also a guarded self-portrait of Marker himself, trying to bear witness to his own communist dreams and what he, Medvedkin, and history itself made — or didn’t make — of them. It got me interested in the Medyedkins (mainly undocumented) career, and it prompted a good many second thoughts about the leftist idealism of this century, which too many people have been all too eager to sweep under the carpet. A couple of leftist friends complained that Marker’s melancholy ruminations were too self-serving and not really probing enough, but for me they started off chains of thought and investigation that are still going on. I suppose a lot depends on whether you regard this movie as a moratorium or a starting point. For me, it was the latter.

10. Just to prove what a good year for movies the last one was, let me propose a 20-way tie here between Leos Carax’s Bad Blood, Bill Forsyth’s Being Human, Nanni Moretti’s Caro Diario, Wong Kar-wei’s Chunking Express, Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, Rose Troche’s Go Fish, Ousmane Sembene’s Guelwaar, Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert’s Hoop Dreams, Darnell Martin’s I Like It Like That, Nicolas Philibert’s In the Land of the Deaf, Bigas Luna’s Jamon Jamon, Hai Ninh’s The Little Girl of Hanoi (made and released in Vietnam in 1974, but arriving here 20 years later), David Mamet’s Oleanna, Frank Perry’s On the Bridge (a persuasive and upbeat account of his struggle with cancer), Only Cinema (part three of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema), Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Ken Loach’s Raining Stones, Cyril Collard’s Savage Nights, Tran Anh Hung’s The Scent of Green Papaya, and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Thing Called Love (which didn’t make it to most other American cities, but played here thanks to the efforts of the Music Box). I wouldn’t call any of these movies perfect, but they were all awfully good in one way or another, and they’ve all certainly stayed with me.

How did one get from that to this? From smoking after dinner to smoking between courses – the inter-course cigarette – to smoking between bites? From drinking to acquire a manly hangover to drinking to dissolve an inhuman one? From having a cigarette after the act to reaching blindly for one during it? From explaining, Lucky Jim-like, to a hostess that you have burned and soused her sheets to explaining that you have singed her shower-curtain? How did all that happen? Eh? The jammed, thieving fag-machine that I nearly kicked to death long after all the pubs had closed and the last train had gone and the glass looked wide enough to reach through. The hotel mini-bar that I unsmilingly up-ended into my suitcase, dwarf Camparis compris, when about to take a plane to Libya. The pawing through the garbage – through the fridge, actually – in search of the lost cigarette packet. The broad-minded, sneering assault on the cooking sherry when the interviewee says: ‘No, in fact we don’t keep it in the house but perhaps there’s a glass of ...’ Here are the milestones of shame, or a few of them.

Both of these books oscillate between praise and admonition, and come dangerously close at times to suggesting that drinking and smoking are all right in moderation. Victor Kiernan would be incapable of saying anything so trite. But his book is the record of a long farewell to a much-loved addiction, and he has not permitted his change of heart to make him into a fanatical opponent. The population is praised for puffing its way stoically through the shrieking pieties of King James I, whose pamphlet on the matter warned loyal subjects that it was ‘a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs’. The tendency of those in authority to show who’s in charge by issuing no-smoking edicts is detestable to Kiernan, who recoils instinctively from the martinet, the headmaster, the dominie and the bureaucrat. Weaving together an immense collection of quotations (though no Calverley, alas), he has one very heartening story which may be true even though it has Lord Dacre for its authority. After the suicide of the anti-smoking fanatic Adolf Hitler, it seems, all the bunker deputies began to light up: ‘now the headmaster had gone and the boys could break the rules. Under the soothing influence of nicotine’, they could look facts in the face.

Engels is also prayed in aid, as having written that one of the worst privations of the workhouse system was that ‘tobacco is forbidden.’ And Marx reflected gloomily, as many a freelance scribbler has done whose stipend won’t cover his humble snout bill, that ‘Capital will not even pay for the cigars I smoked writing it.’ The political economy of tobacco, on which Kiernan touches, is rather iffy from the radical point of view. Colonial Virginia and Southern Rhodesia rested on forms of peonage if not slavery, and Cuba is probably more disfigured than otherwise by its reliance on a tobacco economy. (Indeed, it would be interesting to study the degeneration of the Cuban revolution as a function of a semi-colonial system that produced only things – sugar, rum and cigars – that are supposed to be bad for you.) Pierre Salinger – or Pierre Schlesinger as I always want to call him – once told me that he was telephoned by President Kennedy and asked to calculate how many Cuban cigars there were in all of Washington. He replied that he didn’t know, but could discover how many cigar stores there were. ‘Well, go to all of them, Pierre, and buy every Havana they’ve got.’ The mystified underling completed his task, and only learned its meaning later that night, when Kennedy announced an embargo on Cuban cigars for everybody else.

Smoking is, in men, a tremendous enhancement of bearing and address and, in women, a consistent set-off to beauty. Who has not observed the sheer loveliness with which the adored one exhales? That man has never truly palpitated. It is the essential languor of the habit which lends it such an excellent tone in this respect, as Oscar Wilde understood so well when he described it as an occupation. Kiernan thrills to his own description of Greta Garbo blowing out a match in The Flesh and the Devil, and vibrates as he recalls Paul Henreid taking a smoke from his own lips and passing it to Bette Davis (Now, Voyager). With approval, he cites the mass meeting of young women at Teheran University; every pouting lip framing a cigarette in protest at a Khomeini fatwah against smoking for females.

In spite of the misogyny of certain styles of smoking (pipes, of course, and Rudyard Kipling’s hearty attitude towards cigars – ‘a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke’) and Thackeray (‘both knew that the soothing plant of Cuba is sweeter to the philosopher than the prattle of all the women in the world’), there is also a definite intimacy in the lighting ritual and in the mutual bowing over the flame. Nor, though it can catch you in the wind a bit, does smoking impair relations with the opposite sex in the way drinking has been known to do. (‘No honey, we don’t have a few drinks. We get drunk!’ – Days of Wine and Roses; or: ‘My god, my leg! I can’t feel it! I can’t move it!’ ‘It’s my leg, you bloody fool.’ I speak from experience.)

Kiernan’s sweetest note is struck when he contemplates the wondrous effect of tobacco on the creative juices. Having reviewed the emancipating influence of a good smoke on the writing capacities of Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, George Orwell and Compton Mackenzie, he poses the large question whether ‘with abstainers multiplying, we may soon have to ask whether literature is going to become impossible – or has already begun to be impossible.’ It’s increasingly obvious, as one reviews new books fallen dead-born from the modem, that the meretricious blink of the word-processor has replaced, for many ‘writers’, the steady glow of the cigarette-end and the honest reflection of the cut-glass decanter. You used to be able to tell, with some authors, when the stimulant had kicked in. Kingsley Amis could gauge the intake of Paul Scott page by page – a stroke of magnificent intuition which is confirmed by the Spurting biography, incidentally; and the same holds with writers like Koestler and Orwell, depending on whether or not they had a proper supply of shag.

Kiernan suggests that both Marx and Tolstoy may have suffered irretrievable damage as writers from having sworn off smoking in late middle age; he has no difficulty in showing that Pavese also experienced great challenges to his concentration from trying to give up, and that poor old Charles Lamb (who took up smoking while trying to give up drinking) was stuck miserably, like the poor cat in the adage, between temptation and abstinence, to the detriment of his powers.

If I was to update Calverley I would include a stanza or two on the splendour of cigarettes as levellers and ice-breakers while travelling. Auden may have coupled ‘the shared cigarette’ with ‘the fumbled unsatisfactory embrace before hurting’, but if you are stuck with a language barrier and a high cultural hurdle there is no gesture more instantly requited than the extended packet and the shared match. This partly explains the popularity of the gasper among journalists, explorers and reporters. Now that most newsrooms ban the blue haze (and, in the case of the anal-sadist Murdoch, the agreeable fumes of booze as well), the atmosphere of most newspaper bureaux is like that of some sodding law firm. And, in the written outcome, it sodding well shows.

Searching unnecessarily for a socially-conscious peroration with which to close his literate, broad-minded and considered guide to the history of a grand subject, Kiernan turns faintly censorious at the last. He says sternly that ‘it is the poorer classes and countries that go on smoking,’ and mentions tobacco in the same breath and sentence as Aldous Huxley’s ‘Soma’. This allows him some boilerplate about the danger of drugs being ‘utilised by dictators to manage public opinion’, and a cry that ‘mankind should throw physic of this kind to the dogs, and cure itself instead by radical reform of the worm-eaten social fabric, the moral slum we all inhabit today.’ Och aye, or yeah, yeah if you prefer. One of the sterling qualities of tobacco leaf is its support for privacy and introspection; its reliability in solitary confinement and the dugout; its integrity. A long, slow expression of fragrant smoke into the face of the ranter and the bully has been the sound, demotic response since the days of King James the bad, and should be our continued prop and stay in these fraught and ‘judgmental’ times.

The hard stuff, of course, is a different matter. Uncollected in the Faber anthology is a moment in Michael Wharton’s ‘Peter Simple’ memoir when one of the more heroic Fleet Street pub-performers kept a long-postponed appointment with his doctor. After tapping and humming away, the quack inquired mildly; ‘D’you drink at all?’ Well-primed for the routine, and knowing that doctors tend to double mentally the intake that you specify, our hero merely said that he did take a dram here and there. ‘Well,’ said the physician, ‘if I were you I’d cut out that second sherry before dinner.’ So intoxicated was the patient by this counsel that he went straight back to the boozer, bought sextuples all round on the strength of the story, and had to go home in about five taxis.

When the effects of drink are not extremely funny, they do have a tendency to be a bit grim. For every cheerful fallabout drunk there is a lugubrious toper or melancholy soak, draining the flask for no better reason than to become more repetitive or dogmatic. But there’s a deep, attractive connection between the Italian for flask – fiasco – and the nerve of humour. When Peter Lawford or Dean Martin observed that it must be wretched being a non-drinker, because when you woke in the morning that was the best you were going to feel all day, they brushed that nerve. So did the porter in Macbeth. There are, of course, some who stand there pissed and weeping and give the porter an argument, to the effect that the male ego is actually rendered stouter and sturdier by drink, or at least by a hangover. Those who have found this are going to need K. Amis’s terse but limpid chapter on the distinction between metaphysical and physical hangover. Bear in mind, first, as he says, that ‘if you do not feel bloody awful after a hefty night then you are still drunk, and must sober up in a waking state before the hangover dawns.’ Two keen reinforcements of this insight are included in the anthology. One is Adrian Henri’s ‘He got more and more drunk as the afternoon wore off.’ The other is James Fenton on, if not in, ‘The Skip’:

And then ... you know how if you’ve had a few
You’ll wake at dawn, all healthy, like sea breezes,
Raring to go, and thinking; ‘Clever you!
You’ve got away with it.’ And then, oh Jesus ...

These are the men who have been out and done the hard thinking for all of us. At all events, K. Amis compresses all the dos and don’ts of hung-over venery in a skilled manner which makes one bawl like a pub bore: ‘Cheers mate! You said it!’ (Those interested in cross-referencing the subjects of this review will need to note what he says about the nicotine ingredient in the modern hangover – something that was beyond the reach even of Jeeves’s celebrated pick-me-ups.)

Smokers are in no real position to engage in denial, though I suppose there can be closet smoking, while drinkers can persuade themselves of practically anything between, as it were, cup and lip. It is amazing to read Byron’s bemused speculations (‘was it the cockles, or what I took to correct them?’) about his insurgent interior, when ‘what he took to correct them’, after a heavy dinner of shellfish and wine, was ‘three or four glasses of spirits, which men (the vendors) call brandy, rum or Hollands’. Of course, it could have been the cockles, couldn’t it? And then there are always old saws, like my father’s sapient favourite ‘Don’t mix the grape and the grain.’ I never understood this until it was too late, by which time it translated absurdly as keeping Scotch and wine in separate compartments of the inner bloke. Stuff and nonsense! Still, you do get people whining on about this, like Sebastian’s friend in Brideshead after he (Sebastian, not the temptation, you fool) had vomited copiously through Charles Ryder’s window:

His explanations were repetitive and, towards the end, tearful. ‘The wines were too various,’ he said, ‘it was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault.’ It was the mixture. Grasp that and you have the root of the matter. To understand all is to forgive all.

Arguably. The best variant of this excuse comes from Billy Connolly, in his impersonation of a lurching Glaswegian gaping down at what is known in that city as ‘a pavement bolognese’. At length he concludes: ‘It’s no’ the Guinness that does it. It’s those diced carrots.’

I once saw the following manoeuvre actually performed, on the morrow of a Tory Party Conference in Blackpool, though the article employed was a necktie:

O’Neill would prop himself against the bar and order his shot. The bartender knew him, and would place the glass in front of him, toss a towel across the bar, as though absentmindedly forgetting it, and move away. Arranging the towel around his neck, O’Neill would grasp the glass of whiskey and an end of the towel in one hand and clutch the other end of the towel with his other hand. Using the towel as a pulley, he would laboriously hoist the glass to his lips.

Arthur and Barbara Gelb. O’Neill

There’s a very good ‘Rock Bottom’ section in this collection, designed for those who know what it’s like to spill more than most people drink. Charles Jackson’s maxim from The Lost Weekend, ‘Never put off till tomorrow what you can drink today,’ might serve as a representative extract for much longer and more elaborate babblings, such as the full text of John Berryman’s ‘Step One’, prelude to the general confession he made for Alcoholics Anonymous, wherein the sufferer relates all the harm he has done himself and others. If the day ever comes when I pin that document above my typewriter, it will be because the funny side just isn’t enough. Extracts, for the flavour:

Passes at women drunk, often successful ... Lost when blacked-out the most important professional letter I have ever received ... Made homosexual advances drunk, 4 or 5 times ... Gave a public lecture drunk ... Defecated uncontrollably in a university corridor, got home unnoticed ...

Unnoticed by whom? Of course, as this proves, and as the meeting of the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association in the Pickwick Papers also illustrates, it’s a sign of alcoholism to make rules about how much you drink.

There’s a fatal attraction at work here (or don’t you find that?) and it’s to be found as much in the literature of dossing as in the pathetic fallacy which, as Waugh says, resounds in our praise of fine wine. Listen to the beauty of Peter Reading, (who also found the beauty of Perduta Gente), in his poem ‘Fuel’:

Melted-down boot polish, eau de Cologne, meths,
 surgical spirit,
kerosene, car diesel, derv ...

This touches on a problem which, to a more refined plane, is understood even by merely social drinkers such as myself – namely, Where’s the next one coming from? In one of its few klutzy decisions, this volume reprints the whole of Auden’s ‘1 September 1939’, presumably for no better reason than that its set in a bar, and omits his poem ‘On the Circuit’, where he confronts a problem that’s increasingly urgent in today’s America, especially for those of us who fly and drone for a living:

Then the worst of all, the anxious thought,
Each time my plane begins to sink
And the No Smoking sign comes on:
What will there be to drink?
Is this a milieu when I must
How grahamgreeneish! How infra dig!
Snatch from the bottle in my bag
An analeptic swig?

Or, and updating only slightly from 1963, dash off to the gents for a smoke? Experiences like this and reflections like these teach one that only a fool expects smoking and drinking to bring happiness, just as only a dolt expects money to do so. Like money, booze and fags are happiness, and people cannot be expected to pursue happiness in moderation. This distillation of ancient wisdom requires constant reassertion as the bores and prohibitionists and workhouse masters close in.

Or, as Tincknell put it: ‘Battersea has iconic authenticity, industrial heritage oozes from every brick.’ He went on to explain that the power station presented an ‘iconic image on London’s skyline’, and that this was why ‘iconic brands’ – such as Red Bull, the Batman movie franchise and, gulp, the Conservative Party (Cameron launched his 2010 election manifesto in its brick gulch) – chose to be associated with it.

I suppose I should have let Tincknell rattle on like this – he seemed happy enough. But the problem is that Battersea power station and I have form: I live less than a mile away, and its upside-down table leg chimneys have dominated my immediate skyline for almost twenty years: I clock them when I walk the dog in the local park, or if I go to the post office on the Wandsworth Road. On my way into town over Vauxhall Bridge I see them looming over the Thames littoral, while when I cycle home, late at night, across Chelsea Bridge, the sight of a late train emerging from the silhouette of the power station to head over the railway bridge towards Victoria always summons De Chirico’s canvases to my mind’s eye: the juxtaposition of colonnades, trains and arbitrary hunks – human musculature or masonry – evokes urban alienation by perspectival overdetermination. Anything fundamental happening to the power station – which has been slowly mouldering away through my entire adult life – will be the architectural equivalent of a ‘domestic’.

But again, to be fair to Tincknell, he’s not the only one who’s convinced of Battersea’s iconic status; he told me that 14,000 people had turned up for the public consultation meeting to consider his development plan – for any less emotive building numbers would have been paltry. Indeed, so many local people felt they had something to contribute that the meeting was held in the power station itself: a nice circularity, as if Battersea had been built solely as a venue for consideration of its own renovation. Still, I probably shouldn’t have chimed up with ‘Iconic of what, exactly, Rob?’ because Tincknell, dropped out of his script, was so flummoxed that after thirty seconds or so I had to rescue him: ‘You mean iconic of Britain’s great industrial past, don’t you?’ A pabulum he seized on, and which allowed him to continue spieling; at one point he got a slide up on the PowerPoint that juxtaposed equally vacuous ascriptions – Authentic/Exclusive, Industrial/Inclusive, Ours/But-It’s-Yours – and then told me that the great thing about the Battersea development would be its dissolution of these vaporous alternatives. The brand (he used the term shamelessly) would be both safe and exciting, both exclusive and – yes – inclusive. Rob is much preoccupied by what makes ‘a great place’, but worryingly – considering he aims to make Battersea an autonomous ‘city centre’ with its own arts scene – he doesn’t think the Barbican qualifies.

His own wish list when it comes to cultural capital seems oddly abbreviated. He told me he’s asked the Theatre 503 Company to consider moving to the renovated power station from their current venue above a pub up the road called the Latchmere, and referred a little gnomically to something that might be done with the Royal College of Art. There was also talk of the Chelsea Fringe Festival, and later, when he was driving me round the site in his big boxy black Range Rover, he showed me the pop-up park he’s had erected in which pride of place is given to the boat in which Ben Fogle rowed the Atlantic. A pub theatre company and a TV adventurer’s rowboat seem more Bilbo Baggins than Bilbao.

I don’t say any of this to be mean to Rob Tincknell; in fact, I liked him from the onset, and liked him still more when we got away from the PowerPoint icons of the iconic power station and began scaling the real thing. There was no gainsaying his enthusiasm for the building, and while his plan to create an internal sixty-metre atrium – so that those inside will look up at the chimneys soaring priapically over their heads – seems either nutty or embarrassing, there’s no disputing that it’s the sort of masonry magniloquence the global rentier elite revel in. Because, saving Rob’s green and tender egalitarian feelings, there’s absolutely no question that the new Battersea is all about catering to these folk – if not in person, then in the persons of those they buy and let to.

The first significant stretch of Preminger’s career was 1944 to 1952 — from Laura to Angel Face, with four other wonderful noirs in between (Fallen Angel, Whirlpool, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and The Thirteenth Letter). The second was roughly the first decade of his independence. There are interesting connections between these two periods — Bonjour Tristesse can be seen as a remake of Angel Face (my favorite Preminger noir), and Anatomy of a Murder, probably his best film altogether, refines some of the virtues of Laura. But the differences between Preminger as a contract director (mainly at Fox) and as an independent are equally striking. Liberated from the noirs and the (mainly Lubitsch-style) costume pictures of his stint at Fox, he gravitated more and more toward all-star blockbuster adaptations of best-sellers that became increasingly bloated. At their best they were grand and thoughtful entertainments; at their worst, the ambiguity typical of Preminger gave way to a sort of demographic calculation that bordered on Hollywood doublethink.

Sometime around the mid-60s, Preminger began to lose his rapport with the public, and he never fully regained it. Sadly, he suffered a major legal defeat around the same time that reversed his fortunes as a pioneering independent: after winning his battles with the Production Code over “risque” language in The Moon Is Blue and the taboo subject of heroin addiction in The Man With the Golden Arm, he tried unsuccessfully to sue Columbia Pictures and its TV subsidiary, Screen Gems, for granting him no control over the cuts and commercial interruptions made in TV showings of Anatomy of a Murder. (If he’d won, and thereby set a legal precedent, the last 30 years of American film history would have been markedly different.)

By the mid-60s his films had become even more personal, but the garish side of his earlier work tended to take over, with fascinating but often alienating results. The grotesque liberal pieties of Hurry Sundown and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon and the ugly extravagances of Skidoo (his hippie musical) and Such Good Friends were certainly distinctive and expressive, making these films prime cult material. But the general audience mainly stayed away, leaving it to hard-core enthusiasts (including me) to enthuse over such factoids as that Jackie Gleason’s LSD experience in Skidoo closely approximated Preminger’s own acid trip, for which Andy Warhol served as guide. [2011 afterword: This factoid, which I most likely encountered in the underground press during this period, apparently isn’t true;  from more reliable sources, it appears that Timothy Leary was Preminger’s initial guide, although he chose to spend the latter part of his trip alone.]  Then Rosebud, probably the nadir of his career, discouraged even us fans; and the touching sincerity of The Human Factor, his last film, which he financed with great difficulty, counted for virtually nothing.

A favorite among auteurists, Preminger has never registered as a meaningful stylist with the general public, even when his movies were popular, largely because he never stuck to the same kinds of pictures and always discussed social issues in his interviews rather than style or technique. Pauline Kael argued in 1963 that his very diversity was a flaw: “If Preminger shows stylistic consistency with subject matter as varied as Carmen Jones, Anatomy of a Murder, and Advise and Consent, then by any rational standards he should be attacked rather than elevated.” From the standpoint of conventional aesthetics, Kael has a point. But arguably Preminger, an investigator eager to pry into all sorts of material, changes some of the conventional rules by which we define success and failure, at least if we can join in the spirit of the search…