Dream Screens

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In July 2010, I was excited to screen Ted V. Mikels’s film The Corpse Grinders (1971) as part of the ‘Flipside’ cinema strand at the BFI Southbank, London, which I co-programme with Vic Pratt. We were screening the very print that film director, distributor and cinema manager Antony Balch had circulated from his Piccadilly flat in 1973. The print was a direct link back to Balch’s tussles with the censors, his independence, his refusal to be categorized and his taste for salacious, playful films.

Balch has come to personify in my mind a very particular type of cinema experience. I romantically imagine the two London movie houses he managed – he really did everything when it came to film – to have been almost all that cinemas should be: spaces where the unusual and the unexpected can happen, where the doors are open to anyone and everyone feels welcome.

Leaving a comment at the website CinemaTreasures.org, a reader by the name of ‘Shamus’ said of Balch’s Times Baker Street cinema: ‘I send my heartfelt thanks to Mr. Antony Balch for providing me and all my friends with the most exciting and bizarre cinema programming in London in the late 1960s. For some special screenings, we used to pile in at around seven in the evening and then pile out again at one in the morning, after watching several [Roman] Polanski films and a few weird shorts. The following week, we’d be treated to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the week after that, it would be some extraordinary film by Luis Buñuel. The strange thing was that we’d see the same people in the audience for all these films. And with the plethora of joints being smoked, you could cut the air with knife! It was at this cinema, in 1968, that I first heard the Beatles’ White Album – it was being played as intro and interval music.’

Balch pushed audiences and toyed with them, whether at his own cinemas or elsewhere. ‘He enjoyed business, he enjoyed eating, he enjoyed sex – he had a very active sex life,’ was how William S. Burroughs remembered him. They met at the legendary Beat Hotel in Paris in the summer of 1960 through artist Brion Gysin. All three were openly gay at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the UK, and their experiments with various forms of media paralleled their unconventional lifestyles. In 1959, Gysin discovered the ‘cut-up’: a radical montage technique that would have a huge effect on Burroughs’s writing and lead to the production of two distinctive experimental films, with Balch credited as ‘director’ in both cases. Towers Open Fire (1963) and The Cut-Ups (1966) were screened in traditional cinemas through contacts at the Jacey cinema chain, and had quite an impact.

Footage of Burroughs and Gysin – pacing the streets, undertaking simple tasks such as packing a suitcase or opening an umbrella, and experimenting with Gysin’s hypnotic ‘dreamachine’ – is edited, layered and repeated in The Cut-Ups – as are short phrases taken from Scientology audit tests. Balch chopped the film sequences into 30-metre lengths and had a technician splice them back together randomly. He also layered the celluloid – placing multiple strips of negative and positive film stock on top of each other – so as to increase the viewer’s sense of proto-psychedelic disorientation. The Cut-Ups is at once baffling, involving, complex and direct – it punches straight for the optic nerve. Ushers frequently found coats, bags and umbrellas left in the auditorium by bewildered patrons after screenings at the Cinephone on Oxford Street where it ran for two weeks in 1966.

Balch’s sense of experimentation extended to all parts of his work and all types of movies. He was ‘fascinated by the impossibility of predicting success in the market, and convinced that the title on the marquee mattered more than the actual content of the film,’ said friend and critic Tony Rayns. He’d once considered buying the uk rights to Robert Bresson’s downbeat, minimal art-house film Au hasard, Balthazar (1966) and re-titling it This Beast Is not for Beating. Bresson, he told Rayns, ‘completely approved’.

The British press enjoyed Balch’s playful attempts at getting audiences into the cinema, whether by re-titling movies in bizarre, salacious ways or implying that films contained things which in reality they didn’t. It wasn’t the same in the us. Filmmaker and Village Voice columnist Jonas Mekas scoffed at Balch’s treatment of Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922/1968). ‘I urge you to see the film despite one unfortunate fact: the version that you will see is the bastardized “English version” prepared by a well meaning but obviously stupid young man, Antony Balch. To a beautiful great film, he added a jazz score and a speaking narration by William Burroughs.’ At one level Balch was thinking commercially, but at another he just wanted people to see unusual, interesting movies. His programme notes for The Most Dangerous Man in the World (1969) read: ‘In Chinese – no subtitles. Contains some amazing footage of the Chinese Hydrogen Bomb tests and the Chinese warriors all dressed up in plastic suits and goggles. In colour. We are showing it because no one else will.’

This love of cinema went back to Balch’s childhood. He made amateur films and rented movies from the age of ten. A pivotal experience came when he met Bela Lugosi during his British Dracula theatre tour of 1951. The very first image in Towers Open Fire is a still of Lugosi: Balch was obsessed. He would ‘cross the whole of Britain to see Bela in a movie, even a crappy one’ he recalled in 1972 and delighted in screening the actor’s films for friends at his flat. Balch projected his favourite, The Devil Bat (1940), for actor Michael Gough, showing him how to play the part of the sinister Doctor Storm in Balch’s magnificently camp and gory Horror Hospital (1973), his second feature film following 1969’s Secrets of Sex. ‘If that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll get,’ responded Gough.

Balch was an experimentalist, a cinéaste and, perhaps above all else, an enthusiast; someone who would take action for the films that he loved, or loved the sound of. He’d buy a film and show it, and if it didn’t already exist, he’d make it – or at least try. (Unfinished projects include an adaptation of Burroughs’s 1959 novel Naked Lunch, starring Mick Jagger.) He loved cinema and thought of it as a social phenomenon, not just something that happened on the screen. Balch was a one man band: ‘I decided long ago that the only way I’d be able to carry this out was to be my own distributor, cinema-exhibitor, businessman and everything else; I hate being turned down and so I’d rather turn myself down.’ ‘An awful lot of people are going to miss all that gusto and kindness and fun’ said fellow distributor Derek Hill when Balch died of cancer in 1980, at the age of 42. He was ‘lively, interesting, engaged, vigorous; he threw a hell of a party,’ remembers Rayns. We need more people like Balch and what he represented: playfulness without cynicism, devoted engagement and an appreciation of the cinema as a place to gather people together.