GOONER (Peter Harris, 1996)

'Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.' Joyce Carol Oates

'The recurring image, the one that says more than any of his videos or statements, is the Warholian one we now have: bin Laden watching a video of himself, caught in a jihad for fame.' Christopher Hitchens

Some real-life fictions have an immediate impact on Hollywood ones. Nothing stops production, of course, but this month, the death of the world's most wanted man has created a conundrum. Two weeks ago there were two Osama bin Laden films being shot, and both must be hurriedly rewritten. Now, the general public will not abide by Kathryn Bigelow's as-yet untitled film about the fruitless search for the al-Qaeda leader. The ending must now be bloody and final. Word is that Bigelow's liked tale only because it had no 'closure' (a hopelessly modern term that, when used, sounds like it means something, but rarely does); now there must be, imperfect and prosaic. Similarly, Oliver Stone's fever dream With Us Or Against Us, (imagining a predictably bombastic afterlife in which a certain former US President and his nemesis collide with sticks, resulting in mutual destruction) was due in 2012, but now seems an exercise in angry cartoonish bloodlust too far: why put up with such overcooked satire when the wreckage of a real-life lynch-job is ripe for the picking?

Through flickering videotape, one man slipped into an iconography that it seems it didn't need his death to seal. He was already a ghost, turning up in Western dreams since before he was born.

He is there in Vick Kissing's The Phantom (1942), which follows a manhunt through Montana that ends in starvation and freezing to death. The group discuss the whys and wherefores of their eye-for-an-eye existence, but the audience never discovers the extent of the actual murderer's guilt. His size, ethnicity and gun hand are all argued over, and their harried accounts seem to describe a several different men. The fracturing and failure of the group seems inevitable from the outset, leaving the question of whether the killer exists at all (and by existential extention, whether a group hunting a non-existent man can 'exist', not to mention an audience of a film about them). Clint Eastwood,(1) himself existing somewhere between icon and human, remade it as A Horse With No Rider (2004). His last Western, it fit into a Bush narrative all too easily, with a posturing son leaning ever more on the Descartian double-bind: 'We're chasin' him. He must exist!'

1996: The year the Taliban took control in Afghanistan, and Arsene Wenger began introducing a new purist mindset to Arsenal Football Club. Twin narratives, two sets of idealism. Arsenal were hitherto the epitome of English gung-ho: Tony Adams drink-driving, Ray Parlour letting off fire extinguishers in Pizza Hut (and is there a more tawdry metaphor than that?), on a heroic death-charge for the old guard of banal boozers, facing up to their own terms of endangerment in a new world. Footballers in England would now eat pasta and drink soft drinks. They would no longer be seen gurning down the lens on Top of the Pops, arms around each other in a parade of uncool fun, like rictus Astleys.

1996 also saw the filming of Nick Hornby's loveletter to boyish men and Arsenal, Fever Pitch (David Evans, 1997). It also saw the release of a lesser known North London narrative: Gooner (1996) is Peter Harris' account of Osama bin Laden in London in the 1980s, going to see Arsenal play at Highbury. Or is it? Harris took the loose facts, that bin Laden had been known to frequent Gunners matches in the Thatcher years, and spun a tale about how a rich and bored man might be swayed by religious dogma or weekly worship of a sporting kind. This came out before the World Trade Center fell, of course, but after the earlier failed attempt in 1993. Harris' film does not predict the significance of his subject to a worldwide narrative (and it must be said, he has always claimed his character is a fiction, known only by the name 'Al'; Harris he also denied all knowledge of bin Laden until after his film was finished, but this matters little). Alfred Molina (2), that man of a thousand ethnicities, plays Al with no little sympathy. He seems lost and unsure as he buys up Arsenal memorabilia.

This could be the lost British terrorist film, Molina flickering across London like M.Vurloc in Conrad's The Secret Agent, unsure of his sympathies, building his resentments. Harris' denials fit the Osama myth perfectly, erasing a man from his own biography, until he is only a figment of the world's imagination, hiding in a dark cave of the collective mind. There are parallels with Chris Morris' Four Lions (2010), but the action is looser, less dramatic; like Gus van Sant (in Elephant or Last Days mode) if he had been asked to interpret a Hornby novel shorn of women and music, leaving only the football.

Gooner Directed by Peter Harris Written by Peter Harris, Rob Watts Produced by Rich Robbin Starring Alfred Molina, Dexter Fletcher Flickknife/BBC Films 99 mins Release Date UK: Sept 1996/US: N/A Tagline: 'Who Are Ya? Who Are Ya?'

1. Eastwood's films frequently deal with the potency of symbolic masculines. Could any other action hero dissect his own mythology so frequently and cuttingly? Compare and contrast with other tough guys as the butt of their own jokes: Vin Diesel, Hulk Hogan, the second half of Sylvester Stallone's career. And don't think that Arnold Schwarzenegger's barrage of limping comedies of the early 90s (think Twins, Cinderfella, Kindergarten Cop, Austrian Thunder and Last Action Hero) display any kind of self-examination, as they are all one-note riffs on the same big-guy slapstick he'd always wrought.

2. There is a rumour that Alfred Molina has appeared in every film made during his lifetime, and even some that preceded it, such is his multi-faceted glory. He is one of those faces that link texts, jumping between them at rapid speed, cementing them as real live artifacts. His startling turn as John O'Neill in He Knows Everything And It Doesn't Even Matter (2006) was as hidden from view as Osama Bin Laden at the time: sporadic video showings, unverified. Peter Bradshaw praised the film, but said that 'it suffers from a huge problem. That John O'Neill's story spins on a real-life irony too implausible for fiction: the FBI's best man on al-Qaeda who, having been forced out of the Bureau for maverick genius, takes up his new job as the head of security at the World Trade Center. He died on his first day at work, on September 11th, 2001, and this is too perfect to ring true, even though ity is true. Truth can be stranger than fiction, but it can also be more truly fictional. Sven Hassel's gutbusting By Their Necks (1965) does not suffer from the same problem, as the musclebound romps through Torah Borah lay no claim to credibility.'

THE ALBATROSS (Remi Ataka, 1982)

'Often, when bored, the sailors of the crew
Trap albatross, the great birds of the seas
Mild travellers escorting the blue
Ships gliding on the ocean's mysteries.'

Charles Baudelaire, The Albatross.

There comes a moment of false in so many Remi Ataka movies- the good (Fraudulent Doctrines, Tapas Dancing, Um Bungo), the great (Singed Songs Saved From The Fire), and the decidedly mediocre (The Singing Menstrual, Trojan Whores II: Roost, Roast, Rest, Repeat) when he reveals The Vortex, the name we have collected and attached to that whirling, writhing face he finds at moments of high conflict.1 Suddenly, he starts the audience with such a display of unhinged anger (be it at the English filmmakers attempting to replace his village with a more 'accurate' fake one in Um Bungo, or when fighting the ghost of his suicide bride at the end of The Singing Menstrual)- a blast of tool-sharp intensity that punctures the screen with it's power. Ataka is more than one of African film's great icons- he is an ambassador of entire human conditions, bringing messages from such foggy bays as Resentment Squared and Revenge Infinity, areas of such extremely disfigured emotions as to be almost comical. Especially to a modern Western audience.

Essentially, Ataka is an actor with one tic up his sleeve, but what a tic. Raised in the Congolese jungle by a traditional family, he was educated in the art of dance and performance in ritualistic situations. 'Everyone of my cousins laughs at my acting. They are all able to perform this war-cry that the newspapers have called 'The Vortex.' Many of them perform it better than me, and find my films to be funny and lacking in depth because of this.'2

The Albatross, which Ataka directed and starred in himself, is not good, great or decidedly mediocre. Its seriousness and fire drags it into another entire realm, where judgements so superficial are disgustingly arbitrary, like price tags on sheep's heads or women's thighs. It came at a point in Ataka's career when, aged 29, he was the most famous man in his home country. The films he had starred in previously were made in Zimbabwe, under the last vestiges of British rule. The Hammer studios had paid for several of them, and Tapas Dancing (1978) and Bushman II: The Whites of Their Thighs (1978) had gained much success in parts of Africa, despite being unreleased in Europe and America. Ataka set out his stall as a serious actor in both films, utilizing method techniques for his roles in all his films, whatever their budget. And the budgets ranged between modest and non-existent.

He headed back to the Congo prodigally, with a slick crew and the biggest budget his home counntry had ever seen. Employing many local non-actors, his film set out to discover the astonished heart of Africa. As such, The Albatross is an inverse-Heart of Darkness, an alterna-Aguirre, with Ataka playing a leader of a a group of tribesmen protecting a religious artefact as colonial soldiers approach. They wait, and as they do so, they think. And think. Heightened anticipation over days and weeks takes a toll: the threat of the advancing men distorts, until they become convinced that the devil's own foot-soldiers are on their way. Visions jump from the trees, the air is a vast echo chamber rebounding whispers into fear. An unbreakable vanguard is destroyed from the inside, by fear bombs. When the white man does arrive, he is not fearless and strong, he is vain and completely ignorant of the artifacts. Sad ironies litter the compound amongst the mad bodies.

'Imitation is the sincerest form of flattening,' said Kip Lowry of Fox when his company embarked on a series of remakes of foreign films in the early 1980s. 'The only way we can destroy competition in the territories is to give them shinier versions of their own stories.' Ataka, offered a join-us-or-be-forgotten ultimatum, chose not to be a part of Fox's damply polite remake of The Albatross, which forgetably starred Michael Douglas and Laurence Fishburne in 1984. He did however reprise his role of Femi in the fish-out-of-fish-sauce drama Lucid Intern. The original, made on a budget in 1980 by Ataka's uncle Jean-Luc, followed Femi as he moved from the country to a job at a law firm in Cape Town. The remake throws him to the liars by inevitably sending him to New Yotk City, Hollywood's ultimate city as a character.

'Hollywood swallowed me', said Ataka in 2000.3 Roles in such mediocre fare as Crocodile Dundee III: Crocodile Rock Star (1995) and the later Trojan Whores films left him examining the wreckage of his career on the world stage. He did star in Timid with Jennifer Jason-Leigh as late as 1998, but nobody saw that, and he had a subsequent recurring role in CSI:Voyager to a little acclaim. All of these roles have required him to pull out his old moves, weak parodies of The Vortex, but with less and less success: Hollywood, more than any other place, is subject to the law of diminishing re-runs. Ataka finally realised this, leaving America in 2003. Since then he has kept radio silence, emerging only in 2007 to announce he would be commencing work on a Congolese film version of Wagner's opera Parsifal.

But then nothing. Ataka has always had a cult following of fans in Europe, but he may well already be spinning in his grave disposition at his champions. 'He wanted to be Brando, or Eastwood. But now the only people in the West who know him are the the kind of world music clapping, tofu-munching, miso-horny types he always felt patronised by.'4


The Albatross Directed by Remi Ataka, Produced by Remi Ataka, Jean-Luc Ataka, Lomana Lomana, Written by Joseph Smith, Remi Ataka Starring Remi Ataka, Jean-Luc Ataka, Lorolei Samuel, Tresor Pasquale Vision Pictures/Afrika Films 203 mins Release Date: UK/US: N/A, Africa: April-December 1982, Tagline: 'The Ghost Stalks'

1. Perhaps author Will Self has given the best description of 'The Vortex': 'It is as if his face collapses, becoming a cavemouth that surely leads to Hell, or some kind of purgatorial punishment at least'.

2. New York Times interview, March 2002.

3. Rolling Stone interview, March 2000.

4. Will Self, The Independent, April 2008

DOZENS OF JESUSES: THE BIGGER, TRUER LIFE OF LEXINGTON SAFFRON-DIGARD (Bob Williams, 1995)

'I said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. Lexxie reckons he is Jesus. Dozens of Jesuses' John Lennon, 1975.

We find secondary evidence everywhere; we see it there, on the screen, the famous Beatle talking, in that famous voice, and saying things, but where are we? When are we? And most pertinently, Who? Appearances deceive; for, if you were to watch this document to Lexington Saffron-Digard, you might believe him to be one of the most notorious artists of his day; you would believe him to be, if you trusted the producers (and do we not, always), an enfant terrible who died only weeks after his difficult memory was pieced together here; he apparently expired of a coma overdose in 1995, but don't look through the archives of obituary fame and infamy: He is not there, and the latter part of this documentary, in contrary design, confronts us with a proposition as to why this is (besides the more probable: the people forgot; they grew bored; he didn't compel us to remeber, et cetera, et cetera): We are expected to hang our disbelief from the ceiling as fanciful decoration, and instead swallow a claim so big that, we must surely believe it, heartburn and all.

But first: if we take the narrative at face value, then, and this happens:

Saffron-Digard was 62 when he died, so the story goes, and left behind him a trail of carnage that perhaps might have made him a household name, had his fitful creativity matched it. Born John Saffron in Marseille in 1933, John's mother, (famed?) English starlet of stage and screen Joan Saffron, gave up her career to be a mother and raise her boy overseas. John never knew his father, but was soon taken with his stepfather, anarchist painter Jean Digard. At the outbreak of war in 1939, the celebrity family moved to New York, where young John went to art school with other rich refugees. We see interviews with many of the people whose bodies were subsequently touched by Digard, and are offered a compendium of quotes, a veritable billboard of taglines. 'His life and art swung from the deliciously peurile to the fabulously bland', says Andy Warhol, seen here in a genuine talking head appearance, whereas William Burroughs (appearing sideways, bust-like) describes him as 'a morality vacuum, sucking lizard-like the freshness from stony-broke sonnofabitches'.

Chronologically, then, if we are to follow this string... continuing with how, when at art school he grew disillusioned with the limitations of his mediums, and became obsessed with inventing a new primary color. He was vindicated when the Federation of American Gradings included his new tone 'Vari' alongside Red, Yellow and Blue in their Annual Completist Encyclopedia (the collated data of 'everything', the eighty-sixth edition of which in 1966 ran to twenty five thousand volumes, and by 2001 had hungrily expanded to almost twice that). The invention of a new primary colour hugely infected the fashion industry, and a loving montage of late sixties mods in various Vari outfits (including the timeless Vari-toned vest that Clint Eastwood wore in One Fun Gun (Segio Leone, 1968) acts as a triumphant pivot in the middle of the film.

After Vari, things grew harder for Saffron-Digard. His ambitions caused his subsequent life to be an unsatisfying one, and his dreams only grew larger. Dozens of Jesuses doesn't disappoint, lingering on never before seen video of Saffron-Digard in action during these times. We see the derring-do of the time he covered Manhattan Island in red paint thrown from five hundred Red Baron style biplanes in his 'live art show' Paint The Town Red (1969), a stunt which granted infamy, and we also witness the building and firing of an oversized handgun for Shoot The Moon (1972). The pistol, three hundred feet high, managed to down an orbiting satellite, to the delight of a roaring audience and the consternation of NASA.

Subsequent art shows were increasingly extreme, but got him less attention: His carving of his initials into the sun using laser technology in LSD (1973) was deemed a failure when no-one noticed, and it wasn't until his retooled muse came up with Invisible (1985) a show at the Museum of Modern Art, that he regained some credibility in critical circles. The show featured three walls of a room, containing a chair, a table and a TV. Digard sat in the chair, in a shirt that was the same colour as the walls. He stayed there, completely still, for months, until he grew faint and vague to the eye, for the minor camouflage combined with the lack of movement rendered him almost unseeable. 'I didn't become like a stick insect, or a chameleon. There was no magic, just a performance of the concept that we are visible through our actions. If we are inactive, we disappear, forgotten' said Digard himself, on leaving the room.

And so we get to the final, thrusting claim of the film, the twist which casts doubts over the entire enterprise: that this fidgeting prankster, in an age of impossible visibility, performed the greatest vanish of all: He not only disappeared from view, but he managed to eradicate all memory of his life from the collective consciousness. No mean feat: even the most minor of artists leaves a bloody tooth or a layer of skin in someone's basement. But Saffron-Digard managed it: To erase himself. The last scene of the documentary involves Williams himself explaining how a strange man came to him one day, saying that he was Saffron-Digard, and that this meant nothing to anybody on the planet, due to a 'humungous sleight of hand'.

'He was sickly. Ill. He knocked on my door in New York. He told me he was dying, and that he wanted someone to document his life. He gave me a scrapbook and a reel of film, and left.'

The reel contained the period footage that appears in this film: The filmed interviews with Warhol, Lennon, Burroughs and Onassis that provide the testimonies about Saffron-Digard's character. But they were the only evidence that Williams found about the artist's existence. Says Williams in the film: 'I realised then that this documentary was not to be a recap of a minor artist life, but the single proof of his existence. Somehow, he had managed to make us forget all of his stunts, with some kind of cosmic will. Obscurity is one thing. But to make us believe he never existed.... that's quite something else.'

Williams had several phone conversations with the artist, including one in which Saffron-Digard, when asked by Williams why he wanted a film made, said 'It ain't a good trick if the audience don't clap'. As Williams pieced together footage, he heard more and more from his subject, right up until his death. 'Part of we wonders if his death was just another evasion' Williams says. He only man at Saffron-Digard's funeral. His headstone bears the Baudelaire line, oft plagiarised: 'My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil's best trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist'. And so, things come to pass.

What of the artefact, the testimony? The film has since been treated with suspicion: some see it as a grand prank, an invention of a fake hero; others as a work of wondrous fiction. But there are those who suspect that there may be a certain integrity in the work- individuals have come forward claiming to remember the day Manhattan was painted red, bemused that no-one else remembers, or neighbours who knew Digard, models who claim a child was fathered by him. A small band of Digardians claim his stunt as the biggest in the history of performance, and priase his act of wiping himself from history, rendering his own biography fictional, something which was later unproved to be false, over and over.1

But ultimately, we ask ourselves: Was Saffron-Digard's best trick that he convinced the world that he existed in order to convince them that he didn't exist, in order to then convince them that he did? Or not?

Who knows.

Dozens of Jesuses: The Bigger, Truer Life of Lexington Saffron Digard Directed by Bob Williams Produced by David Lynch Music by David Boeddinghaus Sony Pictures Release Date US: March 1995, UK: March 1995 Tagline: 'The Man That Time Forgot'

1. One extreme group of Digardians, calling themselves 'Anonymiads', have even started eliminating all evidence of their own existence: Deleting Social Security numbers, social networking profiles, burning photographs, and are believed to be so widespread that entire towns are threatened with disappearing from the map.