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Recommended by us on 7th January 2011
...according to our Brian on Fri 07 Jan, 2011.
God this baby is a creepy headfuck. Thanks Baron M, for subjecting us all to possibly the eeriest combination of archive public information clips, passionately merged with your own murky dark industrial ambient nightmarescapes! Now that's what I call a soundtrack! Anyone expecting comforting sepia-tinged nostalgia ala Boards of Canada needs to fast forward to the lush sun-kissed super 8-isms of the standing stones & burial cairns feature. Well Megalithic-ally humbling and thoroughly riveting to watch. Which the vast majority of 'MisinforMation' is you see!! Even the rather horrific & hyper-real segment devoted to solvent abuse; Jam spliced with Shane Meadows meets A Clockwork Orange on a truly terrifying plain. But fear not, later on there is lighter subject matter on offer & the music becomes (slightly) less unsettling in conjunction with such developments. This is a pretty dark collection of clips he's chosen here, ranging from the unforgettable & foreboding, feeding into proto-visual art clips shuffling onto plain baffling curios you'll be thinking about for days. A collaborative effort with the BFI (The Baron basically getting free rein to manipulate/remix this remarkable material, both visually & aurally) yet he stays largely true to the original "visions", maybe hijacking & time-stretching/morphing snatches of dialogue for (good) effect plus I'm positive portions of the footage have been faintly doctored to showcase the most striking colour juxtapositions? Pretty good transfer & neat editing throughout, given the broad range of clips on show. Who will like this? Anyone who grew up in the 70s & 80s, anyone interested in visual art & British archive material. Plus lovers of left-field analogue electronic music! I think this is a brilliant experimental triumph and I feel privileged to have experienced such an interesting slice of retro-weirdness!
MisinforMation is the result of the BFI asking mysterious music makers Mordant Music to re-score an array of 70s and 80s public information films and documentary shorts produced by the Central Office of Information (COI); a serendipitous meeting of sound and image that has produced one of the BFI's most startling and uncategorisable DVD releases.
When the BFI took over management of the COI film collection it inherited hundreds of time-coded VHS compilations of the films. Musty and outmoded the format may be, but these tapes (compiled over the space of ten years) were, and still are, the main source of reference for the vast collection. Now housed in one of the BFI's old nitrate viewing rooms (on floor 5½ at Stephen Street), it was here that Mordant Music's Baron Mordant was brought in to scroll, trawl, stumble, wind and re-wind his way through some of the wonderfully diverse films that now make up this DVD release.
Some of the films are well known - AIDS: Iceberg (1986), Magpies: House (1987) - and some are from the early career of now famous filmmakers, such as Peter Greenaway's Inkjet Printer (Living Tomorrow 245) and The Sea in Their Blood. Others, such as Illusions, a film on solvent abuse (1983) and New Towns in Britain (1974) are here seeing the light of day for the first time since their original distribution.
Baron Mordant explains the process:
'The cordial gentlemen of the BFI led me blindfolded onto the roof at the BFI HQ Stephen Street and left me propped against an obsolete Steenbeck with instructions to sniff my way to the nearest nitrate room, ruMMage through the VHS mountain and not leave until I'd misinformed at least one reel of usable DVD in earnest...in the midst of ruptured telecine transfers and squealing reels a selection of COI films, redolent to my youth, unearthed me and I duly smeared them with my detritus...I imagined sounds & characters leaving one film & cropping up in another and that's the way it eventually spooled...a narrative manifested itself and 'a return to the sea' would appear to be the iMMediate answer for future spores...'
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