The Summation

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Michael Goldfarb remembers the political and social mise-en-scène films from the 1960s and 1970s, including work by Sam Peckinpah, Sidney Lumet and Derek Jarman. "Mise-en-scène" means the arrangement of the scenery, props, on the set of a film or, more broadly, the social setting or surroundings of an event. The word transgressive is one of the most overused by critics on BBC arts programmes. Jarman was the real deal - a genuinely transgressive genius. A considerable amount of his aesthetic had been formed in New York at the time Michael was driving a cab. They had long conversations about the great NYC avant-garde filmmakers who he knew and whose work he summarised in his films. This is an essay not just about Jarman but also the New York avant-garde scene of the 1970s, when the forms of film-making were multitudinous and the lifestyle of film-makers had more in common with the avant-garde of early 20th-century bohemian Paris than Hollywood.