Pet Shop Boys, freaks and witches: the strange genius of Jack Bond and Jane Arden

Bond, who died in December, made some of the most original films in British cinema history – particularly the unsettling films he and Arden made together in the 1960s and 70sThe death of Jack Bond in December last year brought an end to one of the most remarkable, and remarkably undervalued, chapters in British cinema. Bond is perhaps best known for the Pet Shop Boys movie It Couldn’t Happen Here, released in 1988; but that was just one pitstop in an unusually shaped career that took the form of, if not two halves, two distinct sections that in retrospect appear subtly intertwined.Bond’s commission from the Pet Shop Boys stemmed from earlier work on The South Bank Show, particularly an episode about Roald Dahl in which the author encounters characters from his books – and in fact much of Bond’s career was occupied by what are essentially arts documentaries, albeit highly unconventional ones. He started off at the BBC in the early 1960s, with programmes about the first world war poets and George Orwell, culminating in a still-impressive film in 1965 about Salvador Dalí, called Dalí in New York, which investigated the constructed nature of Dalí’s artist personality by using, among others, “meta” shots of Bond himself discussing the filming process. Continue reading...

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