Thoughts on a strange movie

[mtbc]

Yesterday evening I watched Artemis 81 (1981), the special offspring of what failed to be a British-Danish coproduction. Unusually for me, I think there were crucial holes in exposition: later reading explains connections that my relatively attentive watching missed, leaving my experience more of a sequence of bizarre transitions, elements that appeared to come from nowhere then go nowhere. Perhaps the television movie is a wonderful, profound, artistic contribution. From my perspective it became more of a hilarious misfire, a cautionary tale in unnatural dialog and in something between incoherent plotting and inadequate exposition, the latter perhaps reflecting poor editing. Despite its entertaining absurdity, I don't plan to give it another try.

Perhaps surprisingly, I am glad that Artemis 81 was commissioned. It came from the toward the end of an era in which the BBC made a lot of fiction that would probably never been funded otherwise. It took creative and technical chances. Sure, some fell flat, but the others sure compensated. I fear that the current BBC makes itself irrelevant in its eye toward profitability via BBC Worldwide and similar. It is fine to make popular shows but revenue is a poor guide for public service broadcasters. Not everything worthwhile needs a large budget and the point of a legally mandated license fee is to provide social value in balancing out commercial provision. When I was a child, the BBC seemed to know that, even embrace it, just as I embrace Mark Fisher's, It is the BBC that made and broadcast Artemis 81 which should be recovered and defended, not the institution as it currently functions today.

At one point in Artemis 81, just after the headless horseman, we see a tall, thin tree by a pile of dirt. I think that it may have been some kind of black poplar. In traveling the English countryside I often see such trees planted in rows. For me, they're one of the signs of my homeland. As for the period, it was strange to see the world of my childhood, filled with Morris Marinas and suchlike.

In thinking of the past, I was also reminded of the author, Colin Wilson. Given his glasses and interests, I wonder if the writer-protagonist of Artemis 81 could have been inspired by him. As a teenager, I often drank with Colin. In later life I have gained understanding and confidence that could have helped me to talk with him more about his ideas, perhaps better addressing what Artemis 81 struggled to touch. Colin is another of my life who has passed away, so the possibility is forever lost.