His directorial career almost ended before it began. Hired on a BBC trainee scheme in 1962, Bond faced the sack after inventing outraged viewer responses during an early dry spell on Points of View (1961-present). He was only spared by controller Huw Wheldon, possibly sensing creative gifts that would be better deployed elsewhere.
Commissioned to mark the 50th anniversary of WWI’s outbreak, The Pity of War (1964) soon returned Bond to his employers’ good graces. He followed it with the career-making Dalí in New York, an hour-long study of the artist in residence at the St. Regis Hotel, fashioned at the point the Spanish surrealist was transforming his body into a canvas for performance art and his name into a saleable brand.
The Dalí that Bond filmed was equal parts exasperating (demanding his handlers source five thousand black ants for a performance piece) and fond. If it wasn’t for his wife, the artist admitted, “I would be lying in a gutter somewhere covered in lice.” Bond was both amused and charmed: “[He] always knew exactly what he wanted, and he got it… He was grand in the real meaning of the word.”
Seen calling Dalí’s chauvinism out was the Welsh-born polymath Jane Arden, Bond’s then-lover and collaborator on three intense, experimentally inclined features: Separation (1968), which Arden wrote and starred in, and Bond directed; the trippy The Other Side of Underneath (1972), which Bond produced for Arden to direct; and Anti-Clock (1979), a Godard-adjacent surveillance saga, co-directed by Bond and Arden, which became a minor US hit upon attracting Andy Warhol’s patronage.
After Arden took her own life over Christmas 1982, a wounded Bond suppressed these films (“along with a lot of thoughts and feelings”) and lived a self-described playboy existence, sailing his boat Moonsaga around Europe. He was eventually tempted back to dry land to contribute to Melvyn Bragg’s The South Bank Show, and “Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum”, Bond’s imaginative Roald Dahl profile of 1986, led to an offer to direct It Couldn’t Happen Here.
Initially conceived as a Pet Shop Boys video album, the project developed under Bond’s eye into an idiosyncratic, Clacton-shot theatrical feature, with the band’s Tennant/Lowe double-act being menaced in passing by Joss Ackland as a serial killer whose end-of-the-pier puns echoed Bond’s own back catalogue: “I’ve just been fishing with Salvador Dalí. He used a dotted line.”
Jack Cameron Bond was born in London on December 10, 1937, to insurance agent Frank Bond and postal worker Pat (née King). As a child, he was caught up in the Blitz: “We went to a beautiful house in the country. Very quickly we got bored, so we came back and spent the rest of the time being bombed.” The war, he said, turned him into “a fighter”. Leaving home at fifteen to move in with a barmaid who’d caught his eye, he subsequently trained in the Royal Army Educational Corps; his teaching plans were abandoned, however, after discovering the low rates of pay.
In later life, Bond completed several independently produced documentaries. The Blueblack Hussar (2013) was a revealing study of former pop pin-up Adam Ant on his comeback from mental health issues, wearing his bruises and battlescars as he once did warpaint; An Artist’s Eyes (2018) followed the instinctive young painter Chris Moon, poised on the verge of a commercial breakthrough that never quite follows.
The new century, however, brought plentiful appreciation of Bond’s own work. Dalí in New York went on permanent show at Florida’s Dalí Museum, earning its director a medal from the Raymond Roussel Society in 2023; while his collaborations with Arden were issued on DVD by the BFI, as was It Couldn’t Happen Here, complete with the promo for festive chart-topper “Always On My Mind” and Bond’s wry audio commentary: “Were we ever examined by doctors to see if we were sane?”
Bond is survived by his partner Mary Rose Storey, stepdaughter Lily Marlene von Kalbach, and three of his four children by his first wife Moira Tulley; his daughter Rebecca died in 2018.
Jack Bond, born December 10, 1937, died December 21, 2024.
No comments:
Post a Comment