David Bowie’s first screen role was in Michael Armstrong’s 1967 short film The Image.

In The Image Michael Byrne plays a troubled artist haunted by a ghostly young man who appears to step right out of one of his paintings. David Bowie plays the mysterious apparition who is haunting the artist and his unusual good looks and other-worldly appearance are used to great effect here. Bowie was just 20-years-old when he made his acting debut, but he had studied with the avant-garde performance artist and actor Lindsay Kemp who included elements of Mime and Butoh into his teaching. Bowie obviously made use of the skills he developed studying under Kemp for his role in The Image and his wordless performance as an unrelenting spectre is undoubtedly the most memorable element of this short film.”

The Image was shot in just three days and completed in 1967, but it didn’t have its official screen debut until 1969. Due to the violent content of the film it became one of the first shorts to receive an ‘X’ certificate from Britain’s notoriously restrictive film rating’s board.” Cinebeats.

The Image has appeared in the past on Youtube with first three minutes of the film lopped off. Here’s the film in its entirety.
 

 
Director Armstrong went on to direct one of my favorite horror films, the notorious Mark Of The Devil, which also ran afoul of the British censors.

In the following clip, Armstrong talks about working with Bowie.
 

 
When asked how he felt about the fact he’d received £400,000 to make Caravaggio in 1986, and the director of Chariots of Fire, Hugh Hudson had received 4 million to make his film, Derek Jarman replied, ‘Fortunately, I’m one hundred times more intelligent than Hugh Hudson, so it doesn’t matter.’

It certainly didn’t matter as Jarman’s output, during his 20-year career, pisses from a great height on Hudson’s work. What Jarman would have made of this year’s London Olympics, with its recurring reference to Chariots of Fire, would certainly have been interesting. Yet, Jarman was never fooled by his position as an outsider, he was well aware that there ‘is a complicity between the avant-garde and the establishment, it’s symbiotic, they need each other,’ as he explained to Peter Culshaw in the NME, April, 1986.

‘..all avant-garde gestures have been appropriated by just those people they sought to undermine. Dada was conceived as a full-scale assault and now Dada sells for millions. But what people never point out about me is that I’m probably the most conservative film-maker in the country. I’m not talking about Thatcherite-radical conservatives, who are anti-traditional and destructive, and who see progress as heaven, I mean more like the conservatism of groups like the Green Party.’

The artist Caravaggio fascinated Jarman, because ‘he was the most inspired religious painter of the Middle Ages and was also a murderer.’

‘Imagine if Shakespeare had been a murderer - it would completely alter the way we see his plays. [Caravaggio] was particularly taken to heart by the Romans because he painted real people. The girl next door was Mary Magdalen. Or in Death of a Virgin he painted a well-known prostitute as a virgin. It was the equivalent of Christine Keeler being put up over the high altar at Westminster Abbey.’

Jarman felt a tremendous parallel between Caravaggio and his own life, and he believed that ‘the cinema of the product precludes individual voices…’

‘...and I think unless one can put one’s own voice into a film, then there’s an element of dishonesty in it.’

In this short interview Derek Jarman talks about his life and films, Caravaggio, The Last of England and War Requiem,  taken from Spanish TV’s Metropolis from 1989.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

‘Glitterbug’: Derek Jarman’s final film

Photo-spread of Derek Jarman’s ‘Jubilee’, from 1978

 
Bonus interview of Jarman talking about ‘Caravaggio’, after the jump…
 

 
Slogan directed by Pierre Grimblat is primarily notable as being the first collaboration between Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin and the beginning of their real-life romance. The film is a rather shallow, soap operatic affair with the glossy sheen of a long TV commercial, which makes sense considering Grimblat was mainly known for directing commercials for French television.

This is one those movies you enjoy for its look (modish) and the presence of two bigger-than-life pop stars that grab your attention not with their acting but with their infinite coolness.

For English subtitles make sure to click the “caption” button. Enjoy.
 

 
Here’s a groovy animated promo for Leon Russell’s song “Roll Away The Stone,” which appeared on his first solo album in 1970.

The animation is by Brian Zick, a southern California graphic artist known for his striking pop art illustrations.
 

 
Sound artist and designer Yuri Suzuki has produced a radio based on Harry Beck’s iconic London Underground Map. Suzuki’s radio was made as part of the Designers in Residence, and will be on display at the London Design Museum until January 13th, 2013.

Now let’s see, where’s Mornington Crescent?
 

 
More of Suzuki’s radio, after the jump…
 

Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward

The great English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, Noel Coward was one of the most celebrated wits and sophisticates of the 20th century.

But when he wanted to throw down, he could throw down. Coward’s rapid-fire patter and clipped diction in this performance of his “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” could give any of today’s top rappers a run for their money.

Witness:
 

 
Another disused James Bond theme, this time from Pulp. In 1997 the Britpop band submitted “Tomorrow Never Lies,” but the the film was re-titled and their song shelved in favor of a Sheryl Crow number, instead.

“Tomorrow Never Lies” came out as the B-side to “Help the Aged.”

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Thunderball’ opening credits with the theme song that Johnny Cash submitted

Alice Cooper’s unused 1974 James Bond theme
 

 
John Allegro wrote one of the most compelling books about psychedelic mushrooms ever published. The Sacred Mushroom And The Cross argues that Christianity is rooted in an ancient sex-and-mushroom cult and that Jesus was not a man but the psychedelic Amanita Muscaria mushroom.

Allegro’s method is to delve behind the surface meaning and context of biblical words, conjuring instead with their frequently erotic root meaning (“Christian,” he says, is a derivation from the Sumerian meaning “smeared with semen”). These half-forgotten roots, Allegro maintains, link the characters and stories of the Bible to the orgiastic, often outlawed mushroom cults of the Near East.” (from Time magazine, 1970).

Allegro uses etymological arguments to propose that Christianity originated as a hoax in which the rabbi Jesus was invested with the powers and names of the fly agaric (Amanita Muscaria), the true body of Christ. In effect, according the Allegro, Christianity was the exoteric disguise of a secret mushroom cult whose original content was eventually forgotten.”  Roque Nuevo

Come mushroom hunting season in the Rocky Mountains around Boulder, my friends and I used to pick the bountiful Amanita Muscaria and make tea from it. I found it to be a very challenging trip, always riding the fine line between bliss and terror.

Here’s one of the rare filmed interviews Allegro gave in his lifetime. Recorded for and broadcast on Dutch TV in December 1976.
 

Photo credit: Kate Simon
 
Patti Smith Group perform The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” and garage classic “Louie Louie” written by Richard Berry and made famous by The Kingsmen.

Stockholm 1976.
 

 
Canadian recording artist Charlotte Diamond sings “Dicky Dinosaur” from her Diamonds And Dragons album.

No relationship to Lil’ Wayne’s “dinosaur dick.”