The Pleasures Capital

De Chirico in Legoland, perhaps. This film was part of the programme of a ‘happening’ on the same surrealist theme staged one night in the barns and grounds of a Suffolk farm. It seemed just right to conjure up the marvellous of the metropolis in the back of a rural beyond. Some of the opening shots are borrowed from Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film. The textual passages in the voice-over come from Giorgio de Chirico’s 1929 ‘novel’, Hebdomeros. In 1976, my first child was six years old and mad on Lego. There was lots of it about the house and it was only a short step to using the white bricks to construct miniature versions of the master of melancholy’s towers, squares and arcades. And another short step to imagining a cluster of suspect scenarios acted out within these metaphysical spaces. In retrospect, I don’t think the sequence near the end with live actors fits in very well with the rest ; but these were friends – and they had big parts to play in the rest of that ‘happening’ – so it’s always seemed to me that it would be dishonest and ungrateful to drop their bit on the cutting-room floor.