John Maybury’s feature length experimental video Remembrance Of Things Fast: True Stories Visual Lies (1993) sees the filmmaker utilizing the video effects and techniques that made his music videos so groundbreaking in the eighties to confront the British media’s complicity in the systemic oppression of homosexuals. Like so many Queer Films of this period, Remembrance Of Things Fast: True Stories Visual Lies is a bold, in-you-face assault on the senses. With wry humor and visual ingenuity, Remembrance Of Things Fast: True Stories Visual Lies is a kind of wake-up call for the post-Thatcher age as the hysteria around AIDs begins to subside.
Taking a cue from the works of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Maybury characterizes technology and the coming cyber age as a threat to the autonomy of the human mind and body. Technology, which enables the creation and broadcasting of ideas, is the root of misinformation regarding queer culture as well as being the fan that stokes the fires of intolerance. Maybury makes this point by disrupting monologues with cuts, creating a disjointed and obscured account of an unnamed disease. Likewise, the human face in Remembrance Of Things Fast: True Stories Visual Lies is often also distorted by overlays and pixelation, suggesting the ways that popular discourse censors and excludes female impersonators and Trans individuals.
Yet, while news broadcasts yammer on incoherently about the Japanese take-over of industry, the faux city scape of London is rendered by Maybury with gigantic dildos. Queer individuals and Queer culture are everywhere in Remembrance Of Things Fast: True Stories Visual Lies just as they are in life. It is the voices and images of these individuals that are compromised either literally (as described above) or by being codified as something other than what they are. Maybury cuts too black and white footage of a bondage scene throughout the piece only for that payoff to come towards the end when a female impersonator describes an encounter with the police where they are asked if they possess any “bondage gear”. Some thought is given, then the reply of “feather boas..a scarf”.
The purpose of Remembrance Of Things Fast: True Stories Visual Lies as a work of political advocacy may seem simple but the aesthetic complex of the film (how sound and image are correlated) is both nuanced and highly intricate. Maybury makes his points again and again, but each time from a slightly altered perspective. Maybury sets out to demonstrate how popular culture works to marginalize Queer culture and largely succeeds.
Remembrance Of Things Fast: True Stories Visual Lies is, unlike the contemporaneous works of Derek Jarman, more deeply rooted in the disposable pop culture of the moment. Where Jarman’s films engage in a highly personal intertextuality with fine art, Maybury wields MTV visuals like blunt instruments. Where Jarman discreetly suggests progressive reforms and articulates modes of oppression with a subtle touch, Maybury blasts his agenda across the screen. The connection between these two queer mavericks is furthered by Tilda Swinton’s appearance in Remembrance Of Things Fast: True Stories Visual Lies. In the end, the differences between Jarman and Maybury come down to the fact that they belong to different generations of gay men.
The fact that John Maybury isn’t more widely known outside of Britain is, in this politically progressive age, astounding. With “inclusivity” and “advocacy” as constant buzz words in popular discourse it seems only natural that Remembrance Of Things Fast: True Stories Visual Lies would be rediscovered and championed by a new generation. One would think that Tilda Swinton and Rupert Everett’s appearance in the film would make any rediscovery more likely, yet that doesn’t seem to be the case. Hopefully, that will change some time soon.
