 Fêted by Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol, described as "the most irresponsible man on God's earth" after a bear and assorted mental patients escaped from the set of The Other Side of the Underneath (d. Jane Arden, 1972), Jack Bond has had a distinctly colourful career. It offers many parallels with that of Ken Russell, not least because Bond's wildly imaginative feature films grew out of a background in television arts documentaries, which proved a useful refuge when funding such adventurous work proved increasingly difficult. After a stint as an ITV transmission controller, Bond enrolled with the BBC in 1962 as a trainee producer/director, but was fired for inventing outraged viewers' letters in an attempt to liven up Points of View (1961-). However, Programme Controller Huw Wheldon (who had previously talent-spotted Russell and John Schlesinger) relented and commissioned The Pity of War (tx. 4/8/1964), about Wilfrid Owen's poetry. Broadcast on the fiftieth anniversary of the start of World War I, its reception secured Bond a job on Melvyn Bragg's arts magazine programme New Release (BBC, 1965-66), for which he made short documentaries on, amongst others, Eduardo Paolozzi, Joan Littlewood, George Orwell and Salvador Dalí. The latter project introduced him to Jane Arden, who interviewed Dalí in New York. Arden and Bond became lovers and long-term creative collaborators, starting with the experimental BBC drama Exit 19 (tx. 8/8/1966), written and directed by Arden's husband Philip Saville, in which Bond played a film editor and Arden a supporting role. Bond then secured financing for his debut feature Separation (1967), written by and starring Arden. A genuinely independent production, it failed to follow festival acclaim with commercial success, and the next Arden/Bond production, feminist multimedia extravaganza Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven (1969), was conceived for the stage. Bond also produced its successor, A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches (1971), initially on stage and then as Arden's solo film directorial debut, The Other Side of the Underneath (1972), which Bond insisted she shoot on 16mm once he realised that her plans to film extended therapy sessions would jeopardise the budget. To recover from the arduous filming, Bond and Arden went to Morocco for several months, where they shot the Super 8 footage that formed the basis of Vibration (1975), their first video experiment. Their second, the feature Anti-Clock (1979), became a cult cause célèbre in the US, but a series of low financial offers from distributors led Bond to veto its release in Britain: until a 2009 revival it was publicly shown just twice in the UK. After three years living a self-described playboy existence (including sailing his boat, Moonsaga), Bond contacted his former boss Melvyn Bragg asking for work, and was hired to shoot a semi-dramatised South Bank Show portrait of the suspense novelist Patricia Highsmith, broadcast the month before Arden's suicide. Bond would spend the next two decades shooting numerous South Bank Shows, directing Pet Shop Boys pop promos, and devising the same music duo's memorably weird feature film, It Couldn't Happen Here (1987). Michael Brooke
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FILM & TV CREDITS
