Nikon F-301 / Nikon N2000: Beeper and the Motor Drive

In a few days' time The White Stripes' "Fell in Love with a Girl" will be fifteen years old. It wasn't their first single, but it was the first I remember seeing on television. You remember the video. It was made with Lego pieces. Little Lego pieces. Little stop-motion Lego pieces. Little stop-motion Lego pieces, moving and stopping and moving and stopping.

Moving, constantly moving, and constantly stopping. A whirling mass of plastic brought to life by invisible hands. Moving, stopping, moving, and stopping. Little Lego pieces. Today we're going to have a look at the Nikon F-301, a 35mm SLR that was sold in the United States as the Nikon N2000, although nowadays everybody calls it the Nikon F-301, except that no-one calls it anything because no-one remembers it or cares about it. Constantly moving and stopping, moving and stopping.

1985. That's when it came out. 1985. Nikon sold it alongside the F-501 / N2020, which was the same camera but with an autofocus motor. Autofocus was a big thing back then, but there was still room in the market for a manual focus camera. In November 1985 Popular Photography had a look at the F-301 and concluded that it was okay, I guess, although the reviewer basically describes the camera without passing judgement.

Check out the font in that article. It's a good example of a proportional font, e.g. the letter I in NIKON is much narrower than the letter O - but also check out how the letter O actually pushes into the cleft of the K. It's ITC Avant Garde Gothic. That's the name of the font. ITC Avant Garde Gothic.

Notice how the zeroes in N2000 overlap. Technically the official camera sponsor of the 1984 Olympics was Canon, but perhaps Nikon wanted to make people mentally associate Nikon with the Olympic games without saying so explicitly. I don't know. Fonts, eh? You can say a lot with words, a lot with spaces, a lot with the shape of words.

Nikon sold the F-301 as an entry-level beginner's camera, although compared to the later F-50 and F-70 it feels much more substantial. A few years later it would have been mid-range. The top plate is apparently made of plastic, but the chassis is metal, and overall the F-301 is heavier and more solid than I expected. Benoît Pioulard's music is fantastic. He's an ambient-indie musician (technically Benoît Pioulard is a "project" - his real name is Thomas). Pioulard's ambient music mostly sticks to a rigid formula of evolving, distorted drones, but it sounds lovely:

"Sonic sculpture" is a cliche, but in this case it's true, Pioulard's songs are like blocks of sound built to be contemplated at length, or moods that slowly pass through you. Until recently I assumed that ambient music was the entirety of his bag, but he has also made jangly indie pop and even ambient folk. Last year he broke his wrist! Unfortunately this incurred hefty medical costs. If only he had flown across the Atlantic to the UK, where he could have had the surgery for free, except that they won't let you fly if you have a broken wrist, but perhaps he could have hidden it in a big glove.

Nowadays the F-301's design smells of the 1980s. Check out that red stripe. The tasteful thickness of it. In those days it was fashionable to ask Porsche Design or Giorgetto Giugiaro to have a go at designing camera bodies. The F-301 looks like something by Porsche or Giugiaro but apparently it was designed in-house.

F-301s are available on eBay for pennies. They have no real antique value. As with the early Canon EOS cameras the body is slightly more upmarket than it appears. I bought one so I could try out my 28mm f/2.8 AI-S on a period-correct AI-S-enabled Nikon film camera, but also I was curious about this underdog. The F-301 is in the odd position of having a poor reputation - or at least a vague air of failure and pointlessness - entirely because it has no reputation at all. In its day it did nothing wrong, but it was neither a cute old antique or a high-performance modern camera, although it has some modern features.

AI-S, for example. AI-S was Nikon's early-80s attempt to bring multi-program automatic exposure to their film cameras, but instead of using electronic circuits the system used a mechanical coupling. I wrote about it in this post, when I covered the Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AI-S. It was very limited, and only a handful of cameras used it, but the lenses are highly prized today because they were optically very good and built to a higher standard than the early Nikon AF range. The F-301 was one of only four cameras that supported AI-S, although in practice it's only relevant if you use 135mm-or-longer telephoto lenses and want to have a high-speed program mode.

With an AI 20mm f/3.5

Spec-wise the F-301 resembles the Pentax A3, Canon T70 and so forth. It uses Nikon's AI lens mount; it's manual focus only; it has DX film coding and electronic film advance, but manual rewind; it has a non-standard "PPhiAM" exposure wheel, oddly without S; it takes four AAA batteries, or four AA batteries with an optional baseplate.

I have this baseplate, and with four Eneloops the F-301 lasts forever. Which is good, because it's dead weight without batteries. It doesn't have a backup mechanical shutter speed, but even if it did there would be no way to wind the film on. Unlike some motor-equipped cameras it shoots until it detects film tension rather than stopping at exactly 36 frames, so a few of my rolls had 37 exposures. When you insert film it winds on with three quick shots.

The F-301 has a beeper that beeps if the shutter speed is too slow. You can turn it off. The beeper and the motor drive are very loud.

The camera was sold as an entry-level model, but it still has some of Nikon's professional heritage. You need to press a small button before you can twist the exposure dial; ditto rewind. The motor drive runs at an unusually fast 3.5fps.

Beyond the AA baseplate there were no special accessories. No handgrip, no dedicated speedlight (the F-501 had the SB-20), no underwater case etc.

The full caption is "black dudes, you can avoid the rain drops if you smoke".

So the story goes, during the making of The Fifth Element director Luc Besson came up with an imaginary alien language for Milla Jovovich's character, and by the end of filming the pair of them were so proficient in this language that they could have entire conversations. Humanity developed language for sound practical reasons, but to what extent does language shape our consciousness? I have no idea, but the F-301 is something of a bargain on the used market. Historically it was quickly overshadowed by Nikon's new autofocus cameras. In the 1990s and 2000s it was never prized by the cult camera crowd, who instead gravitated towards Nikon's older manual focus SLRs such as the EM and F3.

On a technological level the F-301 is objectively more advanced than the F3, but the F3 has a much better viewfinder. The viewfinder is the F-301's biggest weakness. It feels cramped and I have to jam the camera against my face to see all of it. It's a shame because the other reason I bought an F-301 is because it's one of the newest Nikon cameras with a split-image viewfinder.

It uses centre-weighted metering, with a large circle in the viewfinder illustrating the metering bias. I have to admit that I've only shot negative film with it, so I can't comment on the accuracy of the metering system; it didn't stand out in any way, which I suppose is a good thing.

My F-301 was actually broken when it arrived - the mirror and shutter were jammed - but after a bit of poking it started working again, so top marks to Nikon's early-1980s engineers. It continued to work and as of 2019, when I went through this post to take out some of the swear words, it continues to work. I know this because I've just tried it. In the 1990s Nikon embraced cheapness to an alarming extent but the F-301 was perhaps the last gasp of old-school we-need-to-make-a-cheap-camera-but-we-have-standards Nikon.

If you want to experiment with film photography and old Nikon manual focus lenses the F-301 is an interesting value proposition. It can't depreciate any more, the only issue is liquidity, but you have to ask yourself if you'd rather fulfil a childhood dream and buy an F4 instead. But then again the F-301 has a split-image viewfinder as standard whereas with the F4 split-image was an option. The F-501, FA, and EM are logical alternatives, the EM in particular because it's small and cute, and that's about that for the F-301.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Olympus Pen / Ilford HP5

Off to the cinema, to see Mad Max: Fury Road, in which Tom Hardy plays a shattered wreck of a man trapped in the shattered wreck of a future Australia, although as every review must point out the film was actually shot in Namibia. Fury Road is the fourth Mad Max film; everybody remembers the second film, Mad Max 2, which worked as both a terrific action flick and an academic treatise on the construction of same. Fury Road is half an hour longer than its predecessor and feels thinner and less substantial, and it has a surprisingly weak ending, and Max barely does anything, etc, but on the whole it's great fun. Great, shallow fun.

Great, shallow, visually-stunning fun. About fifteen years ago it became practical for films to be edited with computers, so that by simply moving some sliders the colours could be made to look bright or dark or washed-out or pastel. Fury Road takes this to an extreme - everything is orange or blue - but does so with such forceful panache that I didn't mind. Director George Miller uses his computers for colour grading but otherwise doesn't tax them overmuch for the visual effects, which are for the most part practical. I felt a little sorry for the Namibian desert, because it now has long stretches of broken metal, shredded rubber, and spilled oil, but on the other hand I'm sure the sand will cover it over. On the evidence of Fury Road nobody lives in Namibia anyway. Perhaps Miller and his crew went back with dustpans and brushes and cleaned everything up. I hope they did, because Fury Road is likely to do for Namibia's tourist industry what Peter Jackson's Rings trilogy did for New Zealand.

Fury Road is essentially a High Concept film. Do you remember High Concept? It was big in the early 1990s. It hasn't really gone away, although the idea isn't novel any more. High Concept films are built around a central, immediately engaging idea; either a question or a concept. What if Martin Freeman was actually a tiny person, and not a normal-sized man? What would happen? He would of course try to steal treasure from a dragon. Adventures would ensue. Or what if Robert Downey Jr had a heart condition that forced him to wear a metal suit? He did a lot of drugs when he was young, it's plausible, and the answer is that he would naturally team up with a mutant, a Norse god, a resurrected super-soldier, and a foxy lady, and they would fight another Norse god.

What if Angelina Jolie's cheekbones were even more pronounced than they are already? She would become a witch. The most memorable sequence of the first three Mad Max films was the truck chase at the end of Mad Max 2, so what if a whole film was based around that truck chase, extended out for two hours?

And so Fury Road is an unusually focused, almost simplistic film, as if George Miller had set out to strip away absolutely everything that was not a stunt or a fight sequence. Tom Hardy's Max and Charlize Theron's Furiosa meet and bond with a bout of fisticuffs, and spend most of the rest of the film shooting, stamping, and hitting people, but they nonetheless develop a rapport. The film's few attempts to fill in Max's story or give us some light character moments don't work, nobody seems to have cared about them. Fury Road would have worked just as well if all the characters communicated with grunts as in Clan of the Cave Bear.

When we meet him Max is a traumatised wild animal, only capable of violence and threats; he becomes more socialised, but he still remains an empty cipher at the end. Furiosa hints at her life before the great kaboom, but the talk of redemption and fixing that which is broken comes out of nowhere and adds nothing. The spartan dialogue and Namibian landscapes occasionally put me in mind of the ape sequence from 2001, and it's a shame that Miller didn't opt decisively for one approach or the other, or alternatively ask the screenwriters to come up with some really good dialogue, instead of numerous variations of "they're coming" and "over here" and "fix that pipe".

Max himself is a curiously passive fellow who should be a bit like Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken - all growls and scowls - but Tom Hardy plays him more often as a bewildered victim. It's an interesting contrast to his work as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, where he was basically a swaggering, confident Mussolini figure. Here he's Mussolini after the fall of the fascist regime, waiting for the mob to come and beat him to death.

Let's talk about the plot. This will be a short paragraph. Tom Hardy is Max, who is mad, in the mentally disturbed sense, rather than the angry sense. He is instead surprisingly mild. The film is arranged so that whenever Max takes charge, the action moves elsewhere; when he goes to fight off the baddies, they attack one of his companions. In fact the film subverts the notion of Max as the big bad hero, because whenever he tries to takes control by himself it goes wrong. He's a terrible shot, he can't drive Furiosa's truck without her help, he's no good at diplomacy, and although he has a mean right hook he is continually saved by blind luck. On the one occasion he performs a daring feat of ultraviolence, it happens off screen.

Max is captured in the opening minutes, and his iconic V8 car is totalled. The car has a couple of tiny tiny cameos but otherwise the star of the film is a big truck, which is driven by Charlize Theron, a woman. Her character seems to be high-up in the empire of Immortan Joe, a bastard. He resembles Baron Harkonnen from Dune, with pustules and stuff. Joe has a private army of "war boys", who are reckless and so hungered. On the razor's edge they trail, because there's murder by the roadside in a sore, afraid new world. He tries to break his population by withholding water from them; he also has a private stash of women, and in a startling scene we learn that he milks some of them for their, well, for their milk, which is an image that you don't normally see in Hollywood films.

George Miller is Australian, and the Mad Max films are amongst the most internationally-visible Australian films. From a British perspective, Australia is stereotyped as a brash, vulgar, but fundamentally well-meaning nation of good-looking white people; they are chavs, but they are happy chavs rather than the baleful, hate-filled chavs of England. Australian culture has a cheerfully vulgar streak running through it, and there are flashes of this in Mad Max. The sequence in Mad Max 2 where one of the baddies tries to catch a metal boomerang and - slice! - his fingers come off, and he looks upset, is presented as slapstick comedy; the film trod a fine line between genuine shocks and black humour. It had the same tone as Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2, or Peter Jackson's early horror films, and Fury Road has a little bit of that as well. Only a little bit. Glimpses of it, but without the cheeky humour. Mid-way through the film one of the main characters is badly injured. She is in the very late stages of pregnancy, and another filmmaker would have shown either her or the baby recovering, or had their demise happen away from the action. Miller instead opts for a sequence that is both uncomfortable and off-hand, highlighting the brutality of life at the end of the world in a way that doesn't really fit. The rest of the film is too silly for that sequence to work, it's a jarring tonal shift.

Immortan Joe's private stock includes a group of supermodels who he keeps for breeding purposes. They are played by real-life It Girls, although surprisingly Cara Delevigne is not one of them. Perhaps she is being held by one of the other local warlords ("The Bullet Farmer", who has a stockpile of ammunition, or "The People Eater", who is corpulent). Furiosa and the It Girls aren't keen on being the playthings of an extremely powerful, wealthy old man - Fury Road does not take place in our world - so they hatch a plan to hijack one of Joe's convoys and escape. It's not a very good plan, and it seems to rely on divine intervention for it to work, but it does work so there's that. Furiosa and the It Girls would be a good name for a cartoon pop band.

Along the way Max is roped in to help the pursuers, and after an exciting chase through a dust storm he frees himself and latches on to Furiosa's gang. Then there is another long chase which ends with Max and his new friends seemingly free. At this point the cast includes Max, Furiosa, some elderly but surprisingly tough warrior women who are all that is left of a farming community, plus an upbeat chap called Nux. He is a war boy who has fallen out of love with Immortan Joe's propaganda. Nux is played by Nicholas Hoult, who channels the manic energy of Ewen Bremner from Trainspotting. He's the most engaging character in the film, a hapless but enthusiastic loser who is driven to heroism by his single-minded craving for pussy.

The first two Mad Max films were a product of their time; sex, violence, bad language and bloody gore were all the rage in the late 1970s, although with Australia being a relatively conservative culture there was less of the sex than in, say, France. The first two films were products of an era when heroes were motivated by the rape of their loved ones, an era when rape was shown on screen, firstly to demonstrate that the baddies were cads, secondly as an excuse to show some nudity. Fury Road is an exploitation film in the modern style. It reminds me of Christopher Nolan's Batman films, in that it manages to imply a mass of violence and unpleasantness without actually showing very much. The violence in Fury Road is bone-crushing but mostly bloodless, and although we see human bodies smashed and broken they tend to be tiny little specks of people wheeling through the air. There is some blood, but it is cut so quickly that it barely registers, and indeed the death of one of the main characters is hard to follow because of this. Off the top of my head I can't remember any bad language at all, except for some made-up future-speak. There are some queasy make-up effects, but they're mostly incidental details.

Mad Max 2 was unusual in that the covert homoeroticism of contemporary muscle-man action films was brought to the surface; while the likes of Commando and Predator were full of sweaty topless sexless men and sexless, ineffectual women, Mad Max 2 portrayed the villains as explicitly homosexual, with an implication that the unavailability of women had driven them into the ultimate depravity. At the same time they were shown to be competent, tough fighters, although it's a stretch to argue that Mad Max 2 was a great leap forward in the portrayal of gay characters on screen.

In contrast Fury Road has no time for sexual subtext. The "war boys" are anaemic, and there's an implication that Immortan Joe is spiking their drinks with the futuristic equivalent of bromide. Max and Furiosa become platonic friends; the issue of Nux getting it on with one of the It Girls is waved away, presumably so that the film doesn't have to deal with the possibility of their baby being deformed. Which would in turn raise a host of other questions. In a world where everybody is deformed, what's wrong with being deformed? Are the It Girls supposed to be an unironic vision of loveliness, or a subversion of this? They're presented as a precious, angelic hope for the future of humanity, which seems unfair to ugly girls, and it's hard not to notice that they're so, well, so white. Even Zoe Kravitz is white, and she's black.

Fury Road is a boys' film, and in a boy's world girls are either very attractive or invisible, and thus superfluous. And yet Fury Road subverts this during the final chase, in which it becomes apparent that the most effective fighters are a bunch of old women - they are far more effective than Max - but this smacks of impossible expectations. In Fury Road women are either exceptionally attractive or crack shots cattle, there is no middle ground. But isn't this true of us here in the real world? There's a fiction that we are all equal, but in reality we are all - men and women alike - either exceptionally attractive, or very good at something, or we are cattle. In this respect perhaps Fury Road is simply being honest.

Let's wind back to Nux. He has more dialogue than Max and more character development, and in fact the film could easily have been written without Max at all. Nux, Furiosa, and the warrior women do most of the work; this is really their story, and I wonder if Nux was conjured up in case the producers couldn't get the rights to the Mad Max franchise. Perhaps there is a parallel universe in which I have just come back from seeing Nux: Mutant Warrior, or something.

On a racial level Fury Road is a white film crafted for an audience of white people. It's about heavy metal petrol bandits pillaging their way to Valhalla. The villain has a metal soundtrack delivered by a guitarist whose guitar is also a flamethrower. All of the characters are white, and I have to assume that the apocalypse that wiped out civilisation also killed off Australia's Asian population. The most beautiful people in the world are the It Girls, who dress in white, in fact their diaphanous white dresses are explicitly used as a symbol of hope for the future. As with Peter Jackson's Rings films the racial coding is presumably unconscious. The Rings films were shot in New Zealand, where the pool of extras was presumably mostly white; Fury Road was of course shot in Namibia, which... well, I'm guessing that the actors were imported and the locals weren't allowed to be in the film.

I was talking about the plot. Max is captured, and then there's a chase, at the end of which he breaks free, and then there's an inventive fist fight, and then there's a second chase which ends with all of the characters facing a long trek across a salt plain towards probably nothing. So they decide to go back, and so there's a third chase, and then the film ends. That's Fury Road. Three chases punctuated by a fist fight.

With some dialogue, but not very much. How do the characters whisper to each other in the cab of a truck? Let's assume that Fury Road is a kind of live action cartoon. George Miller's last big hit was Happy Feet, a cartoon about some penguins, and Fury Road has the kind of visual inventiveness that characterises the best animated films. We're supposed to call them animated films, aren't we? They aren't cartoons any more. They're "animation". Cartoon illustrators have time and freedom to fill the frame with little details, and live action films directed by cartoonists often work as a parade of still frames, a succession of inventive set-ups - Brazil, Tron, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, John Carter and so forth were all visual feasts. Fury Road's post-kaboom world is a fascinating, post-steampunk mish-mash of Ben Hur, Metropolis, Modern Times, with bits of Lawrence of Arabia and, inevitably, the ramped frame rates and stylised colour palette of 300. The saturated palette puts me in mind of Katy Perry or Nicki Minaj, in the sense that the film looks obviously artificial, but intentionally so; it has a deliberate visual language that is at times gorgeous, and will no doubt sell a lot of 4K televisions.

The plot falls apart at the end, although on further contemplation I'm not sure that any of the plot makes sense. How did Furiosa expect to escape? Her escorts are attacked by bandits, but how did she plan to escape the bandits? If Max is so keen on survival, how come his souped-up V8 can't outrun some dune buggies? Why is a society that seems to have lots of bullets relying on petrol bombs? Why has everybody chosen to live in the middle of the desert? Not even the aborigines bothered with the outback, and the few that did only managed to sustain small settlements. Perhaps the coasts are radioactive, but why not tell us? Max's plan only makes sense if we assume that Immortan Joe sends all of his warriors on the road to stop Max, and that the remaining citizens embrace Furiosa as their new leader, but (a) how come he's the expert on Joe's society all of a sudden (b) obviously some of the warriors stay home (c) it's not clear how much authority Furiosa has (d) she's in bad shape when she gets back, and what's to stop one of Joe's lieutenants from kicking her to the ground and proclaiming himself king? Immortan Joe rules over a load of elderly peasants who should have died years ago, and what for? They don't seem to do any work. Why keep them alive? Etc.

Ultimately Fury Road doesn't work as a conventional narrative. It needed either more exposition or less; and even if Max's plan is sensible, it feels unsatisfying to just rewind the action back to the start. In a post-Game of Thrones era of realistically downbeat fantasy the chances are that Furiosa will become just as big a tyrant as Immortan Joe, because in the real world people are at the mercy of events and are moulded by their environment. Literally so in the case of Joe and his followers, because they're radioactive mutants. How is Furiosa going to cure that? How will she provide them with wives? Will she tell them that their future is just metastasising cancers, excruciating pain, inevitable death, with no hope at all? Hmm? Max himself walks away, perhaps realising that Furiosa has no future.

Let's talk about the Mad Max films. I'm not sure whether Fury Road is supposed to be a fresh start for the series. Max is still haunted by the death of his family, which suggests that it follows directly on from Mad Max. He begins the film with the cool V8 interceptor from Mad Max 2, but wasn't the car destroyed during that film? I don't know. For the purposes of my film reviews I try to read as few contemporary sources as possible, lest I end up simply copying other reviews. The first Mad Max was shot on a budget of twenty Australian dollars. It starred a bunch of cool cars and some nobodies, but such was the appeal of cool cars smashing into things that it became a substantial international hit, at least for a cheap exploitation film. It was so cheap that it made a profit on international sales before it had been released, and for many years it was the most profitable film of all time. It was a kind of pre-apocalyptic biker film, with a dash of "stuntsploitation" thrown in.

Stuntsploitation was a peculiar micro-genre of Australian films that emerged in the mid 1970s. The genre was essentially the brainchild of director Brian Trenchard-Smith, who was at least enthusiastic. His secret weapon was stuntman Grant Page, who was prepared to set himself on fire, leap off cliffs, crash cars etc for our amusement and Trenchard-Smith's financial gain. Page also worked on Mad Max, and performs a memorable stunt near the beginning where he smashes a car through a caravan. Stuntsploitation was fundamentally goofy, whereas Mad Max has a dark edge that sets it apart from the work of Trenchard-Smith; it also has a slick commercial sense that distances it from the artier Australian new wave films of the 1970s.

In the UK Mad Max was released with a X certificate, which at the time was essentially the equivalent of the United States' R, but felt meaner. It reached a wider audience on home video, in which format it was released before formal video certificates had been established (the VHS box has an informal "Cert 18" on the spine). Along with the likes of The Exterminator and Friday the 13th I recall that it was a quasi-video nasty, the kind of thing that your parents would not have been keen on. The BBFC cut about a minute out of one sequence and it always had a mean, evil aura. The film must have disappointed people expecting lashings of ultraviolence, because it's relatively restrained, and quite talky at times. George Miller had never directed a film before - he was a doctor, not a filmmaker - but Mad Max feels very assured. The editing is exciting and the cinematography makes good use of the widescreen format. The cars are always shot from a very low angle that has the effect of making the chases seem faster.

Mel Gibson was a complete unknown at the time. The film introduces him as if he was already a big star - we see his sunglasses, his gloves, we feel his reputation preceding him - and when we first see him striding towards the camera, after having dispatched one of the villains, by golly he is a big star. In terms of global box-office, Gibson took a surprisingly long time to find his feet, and in fact he didn't become a genuine draw until Lethal Weapon, which was released two years after the last of his Mad Max films. Until that point he was one of those famous actors that had an air of stardom about him, without actually being very popular; his films, such as The Bounty or Year of Living Dangerously, also had an air of being major productions, without actually making any money. Part of the problem was that Gibson was born to be middle-aged, and as a young man he looked a bit dorky, in my opinion.

Is Mad Max any good? It's well-made and the chases are exciting, judging by the clips I have just seen on Youtube. I can barely remember the rest of the film. It is set in a future version of our world, in which Max lives in a house with his wife and child. Max is unhinged at the start of the film and becomes more unhinged when he loses everything he ever loved, but Gibson's performance doesn't really reflect this, because he merely goes from being morose to being angry and morose. I remember being disappointed with the film. Max's orgy of revenge is abrupt and seems surprisingly easy. If the world is falling apart, what's so shocking about a cop meting out private justice? It's curious that nobody else can track down a bunch of extremely loud, very conspicuous bikers, and the budget wasn't enough to show a crumbling world, so the film ends up feeling very small.

In contrast Mad Max 2 feels huge. It was released in 1981 and is one of the best action films of the 1980s, vying with Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Terminator, and Die Hard. Like those films it's the kind of thing that might be taught in film school because it's a model of clarity and focus. The plot is almost archetypal, essentially a socialist variation of Yojimbo, in which the roaming samurai finally decides that some people are worth helping after all, even at the cost of his own life. It even has a similar structure - Max observes the situation from afar, introduces himself, there is some action during which he proves his worth, then he is captured and beaten half to death, then he recovers and delivers payback, end. The film is presented as a fable related to us by a character who is just a kid during the events he describes, and so for all we know his story of a band of heroic civilians under siege in an oil refinery by paramilitary bandits might be propaganda, but I'm digressing here.

The second film opens just like the first, with a car chase, but it never lets up; it moves seamlessly from exposition to action and back again without any flab. There's the merest hint of a romantic subplot, but it doesn't involve Max; he begins and ends the film as an acerbic loner, and every line of dialogue exists to set up something later on. The characters are colour-coded for our convenience, with the heroes dressed predominantly in white and the baddies in brown. There are no loose ends.

John Carpenter often points out in interviews that you can edit really quickly with widescreen and it doesn't throw people off, and so when he came to make Assault on Precinct 13 he ensured that he had enough money to shoot in proper 2:35 scope ratio. Mad Max 2 is also 2:35, and it's the kind of film you might watch if you were studying action editing. The editing is just showy enough that you notice it, but not so showy that its gets irritating. There's a sequence during the final chase where Max fires his shotgun at a pursuing vehicle - he hits the driver full in the face, and the editing is perfect. In a series of quick cuts we see the car, Max levelling his shotgun, the impact (with a subliminal exploding head), a reaction shot of the feral kid, the car swerving, Max returning to his seat, in the space of five seconds. In a neat touch it's not clear whether the feral kid is shocked or thrilled by the exploding head.

And it's not just an isolated gag, because the driverless car then crashes into a dune buggy, which sets up one of the most astonishing physical stunts in the film, where a bandit is sent flying through the air. A lesser film would have had a dummy, but we see quite clearly a real living Australian man tossed several metres towards the camera at high speed to certain doom. Australians live short, brutal lives, and Mad Max 2 presumably gave Australia's stuntman community the chance to show off their skills for Hollywood.

On the level of plot and story Mad Max 2 has a clear, logical progression, and the ending chase makes sense in context. In this respect it beats Fury Road; once it becomes apparent that Furiosa's "green land" is a poisoned swamp, Fury Road runs out of plot, whereas every chase in Mad Max 2 has a clear goal. In my opinion if Fury Road had been a straightforward remake of Mad Max 2, with the stunts of Fury Road, it would have been an unqualified success. As it stands Fury Road is technically smart but has a perfunctory, mostly incoherent plot, and although it'll have a long afterlife chopped into bits on Youtube I worry that in years to come I will barely remember it.

How hard is to to write a good action film plot? More to the point, how expensive is it? Fury Road was written by Miller himself, so perhaps he started with the chases first and then ran out of time when it came to giving them meaning, in which case the film reminds me a bit of the computer game DayZ, which has a detailed but mostly empty world devoid of gameplay. There's a co-writing credit for Brendan McCarthy, who usually works as a storyboard artist. He started out on top Brit sci-fi comic 2000AD, where he was one of the artists who flowered during the comic's eccentric, early-90s acid phase. Fury strikes me as the kind of film that has a big thick visual storyboard with the script written on a few Post-It notes.

Mad Max 2 was very influential. It looked expensive despite its tiny budget. From the point of view of rival film producers, all that was required to replicate its success was a truck, some off-roaders, a lot of leather fetish gear plus some porn actors to wear it, and some rugged countryside. California has plenty of those things. The film was released a year before Conan the Barbarian, which sparked off a wave of similarly frugal swords and sorcery films that had similar ingredients, minus the truck and the off-roaders, but inevitably the imitations were naff. Poorly-written, with uninteresting actors and boring direction. The likes of Metalstorm, Steel Dawn, The Highwayman (a TV show from 1987), Spacehunter and so forth helped kill off interest in any more Mad Max films. The waste-punk look of the Max generation directly inspired mid-80s glam rockers Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and it strikes me suddenly that most of these cultural echoes date from a good five or so years after Mad Max 2 came out. My hunch is that although it made a profit at the cinema and was extremely successful for an Australian action film, it was nonetheless only a very modest hit in objective terms. In the United States it was released five months late, and wasn't among the thirty highest-grossing films of 1982. Conan, for example, outgrossed it by quite a way. As with the original Mad Max the sequel was a bigger hit on the home video market, where it took longer to become iconic.

Earlier up the page I mentioned Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was released in the middle of 1981. The timing is such that George Miller was probably aware of Raiders during the production of Mad Max 2, and I wonder if Miller was trying to one-up the Nazi truck chase in Spielberg's film. The two chases are the action high-points of their respective films, with an array of clever practical stunts and lots of brutal violence. Nowadays their measured pace feels a bit staid, but it's still possible to appreciate the derring-do of the stunt work. Raiders was marketed as a family-friendly blockbuster with some scary moments, but it's a surprisingly brutal film, barely less violent than Mad Max 2, with a higher body count. Mad Max 2 has a man nearly decapitated with a boomerang, but Raiders has rotting corpses, exploding Nazis, and Pat Roach sliced into ribbons by a propellor. We don't see it, but it's still nasty. During the truck chase Indiana Jones tosses a man into the windscreen of a jeep, bashes a man's head repeatedly against the dashboard, and then runs him over! The truck even bounces into the air! It's hilarious, but also not the kind of thing you'd see in a family film nowadays. Have we advanced, or regressed? That's really the topic of a separate essay, I'll stop now.

There was a third Mad Max film. Beyond Thunderdome. George Miller set out to make an expensive mainstream action fantasy blockbuster, with mixed results. It smoothed off most of the hard, brutal edges of the first two films, and although it often looks wonderful it still feels like watered-down Mad Max. Fury Road resembles it at times. The two films take place after the apocalypse, during the early stages of reconstruction. There is a strong female lead. Max spends a lot of time held captive in both films, and ends up having to rescue a group of people he initially doesn't care much for. I'm just listing things, aren't I? That's called padding. The problem is that the Mad Max franchise is essentially Mad Max 2, because the first film was a cop revenge drama and the third was a generic 1980s fantasy film. Miller himself barely remembers making Thunderdome. His heart wasn't in it because his great friend, producer Byron Kennedy, had recently died in an aviation accident. Kennedy produced the first two Mad Max films, and I suppose we will never know what influence he might have had on Thunderdome. It at least has a coherent plot that builds to a logical conclusion; my recollection is that it was nice, which felt wrong.

Roger Ebert, in a rare lapse, wrote that Thunderdome was "not only the best of the three Mad Max movies, but one of the best films of 1985". I disagree with the first part, but given that 1985 was also the year of A View to a Kill, National Lampoon's European Vacation, Police Academy 2, Spies Like Us, The Jewel of the Nile, Rocky IV, Rambo: First Blood Part II, and Out of Africa - all of which made more money than Thunderdome - I'm willing to go along with the second.

Back to Fury Road. It has all kinds of connections with the other films. There's a little music box, like the one from Mad Max 2, and the main villain is played by Hugh Keays-Byrne from Mad Max, although he's obviously not the same character. Instead, he feels like a variation of Mad Max 2's Lord Humungous, with his quasi-military bearing and medals, although Humungous appeared to have earned his medals legitimately, whereas Joe's are fabricated from circuit boards and junk. 70-year-old George Miller returns to the director's chair and demonstrates that he can still get it up, action film-wise; Mel Gibson does not return, for reasons which I will not go into. I'm starting to list things again, which is a sure sign that I'm running out of things to say.

What else? At one point Max is confronted with a group of semi-naked women and a truck; he jumps in the truck and drives off, leaving the women behind, in a sequence that made me immediately think of the end of Dumb and Dumber ("What were we thinking? The town is back THAT way!"). It's supposed to make him seem like a single-minded, tormented loner, but it comes across as silly; Max's mental trauma isn't compatible with a film that has a group of semi-naked supermodels hosing each other down in the desert. Those two concepts cannot co-exist in the same framework and a part of me wished that a younger Quentin Tarantino had been asked to give Fury Road the once-over. Everybody hates Tarantino but, in my opinion, he's a natural for the Mad Max franchise.

Ultimately Fury Road is a triumph of action filmmaking, a visually stunning masterclass in editing and worldbuilding. The performances are all uniformly solid, albeit that Tom Hardy is given very little to do. The It Girls are feisty, Charlize Theron is both tough and vulnerable, in fact she's slightly better than the film deserves. The elderly warrior women - the "Vuvalini" - steal every scene in which they appear, and make me wonder if the film's abundance of tough female characters is an apology for killing off the warrior woman in Mad Max 2. Nicholas Hault appears to have had a tonne of fun playing what amounts to a living cartoon. It's one of those films in which every character has a certain look, and it must have taken ages to do the casting.

And it's a testament to George Miller's skill that a film which consists of the same basic car chase repeated three times never feels boring or repetitive. The problem is that without a coherent plot it all comes across as a meaningless exercise in style, and I worry that it won't have legs. Like the recent Godzilla reboot, or the various attempts to get Superman to carry a film by himself, I worry that Fury Road will make a fair amount of money and then fade away.

And yet it's infinitely better than Michael Bay's Transformers movies, which are longer and louder and have far more plot than Fury Road, except that it's meaningless wheel-churning gears-grinding film-padding plot in which people run back and forth but nothing happens. Fury Road just needed a bit more work, a blood transfusion from Mad Max 2. That would have done the trick.

No, tell a lie. There is one good line. "Straight through the medulla".

V1

Vienna 2

Off to Vienna, with a Yashica Mat and a bag of Fuji Superia (above) and Fuji Velvia (Duran Sandwiches, below). Vienna is a popular day trip on the train from Budapest or Bratislava. They all lie on the Danube, and a river cruise is a cost-effective way of ticking several countries off your list. I'm going to visit Wales and Scotland last, because they're easiest.

After spending five hours in Vienna I now feel that I can look Central Europe in the eye, as an equal; me a human being, Central Europe a mass of countries where young men debate politics in coffee houses and women dress in big skirts and they have horse-drawn carriages etc. I learn this from Project Gutenberg's With the World's Great Travellers, a compendium of travel writing from the 19th Century.

On the day I visited Vienna the horse-drawn carriages and early photographers and men with large moustaches and anarchists had been packed away; in their place there was a large shopping mall attached to a smaller museum area that was also a shopping mall, with a low-key style. We are all heading in the same direction, driven by the same fears and desires. With the World's Etc has a lengthy excerpt from John Russell's A Tour in Germany, published in the mid-1820s. Of Vienna I learn that:

"The proper city is of nearly a circular form, and cannot be more than three miles in circumference, for I have often walked quite around the ramparts in less than an hour. The style of building does not pretend to much ornament, but is massive and imposing; the streets are generally narrow, and the houses lofty, rising to four or five floors, which are all entered by a common stair. ... Some individual masses of building, in the very heart of the city, are as populous as large villages."

Which suggests that Vienna circa 1820 must have seemed like Judge Dredd's Mega-City One to John Russell. Little did he know what the future had in store. New York of the 1820s was a modest port, and Europe was still the centre, the future, the pinnacle of the world.

Elsewhere in the book American traveller Bayard Taylor, writing in the mid-century, is "...lost in astonishment at the perfection of art attained by the Greeks and Romans. ... I should almost despair of such another blaze of glory on the world were it not for my devout belief that what has been done may be done again, and had I not faith that the dawn in which we live will bring another day equally glorious."

After all, "why should not America with the experience and added wisdom which three thousand years have slowly yielded to the old world, joined to the giant energy of her youth and freedom, re-bestow on the world the divine creations of art?" And only one hundred short years later Jeff Koons was born.

I find it hard to think about Vienna without thinking about Hitler. Perhaps that's because I'm British, or perhaps it's because I'm a closet Nazi. Not thinking about Hitler is like not thinking about an elephant, it's difficult to do it consciously. (tries) And now I'm thinking about a Nazi elephant, wearing a stahlhelm, and did you know the Germans had a tank called the Elefant? It was actually a tank destroyer, basically an anti-tank gun in an armoured chassis. They were awesome! But German industry could only make a few dozen of them and so sadly the Nazis... and so the Nazis lost the war. Which is a good thing.

Hitler was of course born in Austria. There was nothing particularly unusual about Hitler's early life. His dad was an authoritarian bureaucrat who was a big fish in a small pond; Hitler seems to have consciously rebelled against his father whilst simultaneously and unconsciously becoming a copy of him, incapable of admitting error and prone to outbursts of anger whenever people failed to heed his instructions. As with Adventure Time's Earl of Lemongrab he found himself continually butting against a world that was unacceptable! but also bigger than him, but rather than learn to fit his environment he decided to change the world instead. Some people try to change the world constructively, by inventing a more efficient vacuum cleaner or curing Hepatitis; Hitler had no time for that.

After finishing school Hitler essentially became a pretentious hipster, and it's fascinating to draw parallels between him and the modern world. Hitler's dad died when he was young, and so he spent his teenage years lazing about whilst his mother did the housework. At the risk of offending single parents worldwide, I maintain that it's easier for two people to raise children than a single person by themselves, if only on a purely practical level, and that the socialist alternative - for the state to raise children so that everybody has seven billion parents - is unworkable and open to abuse, beside which it's just mean.

Like all teenagers, Hitler was an arrogant sod who learned about the human world from books first and from first-hand experience second, so that he began with a vastly over-inflated sense of his own importance and knowledge. His modern heirs spend their days on Reddit; my generation grew up with Wired magazine and No Logo, and my ancestors presumably grew up with The Downwave and Omni, pre-packaged facts with all the little details and boring working-out removed. As an autodidact Hitler was free to ignore anything he didn't agree with or have the time to think about, and throughout his life he seems to have surrounded himself with a mixture of fawning sycophants and strong people who saw in him a useful shield.

He set himself the task of becoming a great artist, and failed, and from that point onwards he blamed his failure on those around him. Meanwhile his mother died and he found himself essentially a piece of human flotsam in Vienna, where he was an insignificant dot, a tiny particle of radioactive fallout. Like fallout he continued to burn. The Great War fashioned his generation into a bomb, and during the 1920s and 1930s he finally achieved critical mass, touching off a runaway chain reaction that engulfed the world in another one of its periodic orgies of bloodletting.

It's just "Duran Sandwiches". Named after Vladimir Duran, who founded the place.

The New Romantics had a thing for Europe, in homage to David Bowie's Berlin period, and the retro-futurism of mid-70s Kraftwerk. They had a thing for a kind of fantasy mitteleuropa that linked the Weimar republic with the modern day, skipping over the Nazi regime. There was Bauhaus, Spandau Ballet, "Vienna". Future historians of culture will wonder why a bunch of London clubgoers decided to draw inspiration from half a century ago and far away.

And yet the human race keeps going. The two World Wars demonstrated that individual human life was insignificant; but in terms of mass death the wars were just a blip, because the Earth's population more than tripled during the twentieth century. A few months ago it was theorised that a new world war would have almost no effect on global population. Over the coming century the human population will increase even if a catastrophic event kills two billion people, assuming that this event does not make the planet uninhabitable.

The average human being weighs 62kg. Two billion corpses would weigh one hundred and twenty four million metric tonnes of flesh bone and blood. If my calculations are correct that would equal the world's tonnage of chicken meat production for one year in the mid-2030s. For human beings the deaths of two billion people would be a horrendous event that would hopefully cause us to turn away from violence forever, although in practice we would get used to it and carry on as before; for chickens, the deaths of two billion chickens is the United States' chicken consumption for four months.

It would take the elimination of over four billion of us to cut the human population down, so the next time you complain that the roads are too crowded, or that you have to sit next to fat people on the plane, bear in mind that the alternative is far worse.

"And it was the buildings themselves that were always the principal attraction for me."

A Film Compendium: Death in the Sea

I only met them towards the end of their lives, after they had used up their bag of tricks.

Over the last couple of years I've shot a lot of film, and there comes a time when a man who shoots a lot of film decides to photograph his stash of film. It's a way of showing off, like photographing your car or taking nude selfies or blogging about your kids. The message is "look, I'm really good at raising kids, unlike other people (but not you, you are alright)".

And you, dear reader, you are alright. There was a time when the only people likely to read an article on the internet were nerds, and I mention this because I am reading a book called Virtual Worlds, which was published in 1992 and is about the coming virtual reality revolution.

Here is a photograph of the sole, solitary paragraph about "internet", which in 1992 was just a boring computer network of no special importance:

To be fair, the book is otherwise level-headed - author Benjamin Woolley generally dismisses VR in the first chapter as a lot of hype put out by a clique of backslappers. The book is thenceforth a primer on emerging issues in the computer landscape circa the early 1990s, touching on post-modernism, artificial intelligence, the future of the written word, fractals, simulation and imitation, EuroDisney, Fly Fishing by J R Hartley - a fictional book by a fictional author created for an advertising campaign, that became "real" when the advertising agency hired an author to ghost-write Fly Fishing albeit that you can't ghost-write a... but it was a literal ghost, a literal literary ghost almost a literal ghost because he wasn't dead because HE WAS NEVER ALIVE he was never alive

Be hol never alive. He was n . the book appears to be loosely spun-off from "Signs of Life", an episode of the BBC2 documentary series Horizon. Back when Horizon was hardcore, difficult to follow and full of wonder. Virtual Worlds is at heart a philosophical exploration of post-modernism and the nature of reality, with a bit of VR running through it. It's a breathless read and I wish the author would go back and edit it, extend it out a bit, slow it down. I imagine that readers in 1992 were disappointed that it didn't have more coverage of teledilonics, or an accompanying CD-ROM with some tiny video clips of Japanese noise musicians or Californian techno-nomads.

There has always been a huge strand of commercialism running through the world of computing, driving it along, but in the early 1990s the money seemed to take a back seat, if only temporarily, to dreams about how the emerging new mediums of hypertext and non-linear navigation might reshape human thought. We were on the cusp of a hyperrealistic paradigm that would usher in the third and final millennium. But human thought tends to route around disruption and revert back to a fixation on fighting and drinking and studying women's bottoms thus the internet as we know it today. The irony is that most people who tried hard to make money out of the internet in the 1990s ended up no better off than the theorists; and many of those who made a personal fortune only made a small fortune, and they had better look after it because it was their one and only trick.

I was alive and conscious in 1992. Just like everybody else I remember thinking that the buzz surrounding VR was out of all proportion to its reality and to its expected prospects. A few years later mobile phones suddenly became ubiquitous in the UK, not because they were featured in Horizon as the hot new thing, but because people wanted them. Nokia did not need to sell the benefits of mobile communication or convince us that we might want a phone. We craved, desired, needed mobile phones, and in the space of what seemed like a few weeks everybody in Britain suddenly had a Nokia 6110. If people had wanted VR, it would have taken off. Instead it was a market-led phenomenon that struggled to find a niche. A 3D simulation of the real world is a surprisingly inappropriate interface for most things that people do with computers today.

The VR pioneers of Virtual Worlds wanted to apply a 3D interface to everything, because in their opinion it was the future. Hence the stereotype of the virtual reality 3D shopping mall, where the customer is represented by a 3D hand that he had to move along 3D shelves, putting 3D items into a 3D basket. Because people were used to real-life malls, and it would be cool to replicate that in 3D. Because it would be in 3D. Notwithstanding that it would take ages to do anything, and require a monster PC. The idea of a 3D shopping mall was superficially attractive but made no sense on further reflection. Why not simply click department - computer - USB sticks - order? It takes a few seconds, and is the model Amazon and other shops use nowadays.

Interfaces that evolved in the physical world do not map effectively to a flat computer screen, because they have evolved to solve fundamentally different problems. In a way, the VR pioneers were retrograde, because they were trying to apply the paradigms of the old, physical world to the new world of instant everything and travelling without moving.

Or travelling without travelling, because the future of human endeavour is not travel. Not travelling to the video store, not travelling to the supermarket. Not travelling to the travel agent or the cinema, and perhaps one day not travelling to work. The future will be a fundamental paradigm shift; not the transformation of travel, but its elimination.

But I digress. I like to think that postmodernism has given way to a pragmatic modernist revival - pragmodernism, if you will. But put your trousers back on and have a look at my current stash of film:

A mixture of "speedy green", "K", "spangle", "top white" and "electric knockers" as the youth of today call them. Just one of those packets is enough to stun a horse, so imagine what it could do to your daughter. Do you know where she was last night? It wasn't choir practice, I'll tell you that for sure. She's a groupie, and you're not the only man she calls daddy.

You know, sometimes writing a blog post is a bit like having sex. It goes wrong, you bite off more than you can chew, and you have to make a decision whether to give up and try something else, or press on and chalk it up to experience. I will press on. What use is all this film if I don't use it? And bearing in mind the absence of a scientific method, what is this film like? More importantly, how does it feel? Do I like it?

Kodak Portra
None good good yes yes in that order. Kodak Portra is still available, in both 160 and 400-speed versions. It has a subdued palette aimed squarely at portrait and wedding photographers, and is often overlooked by modern hobbyists because of this because it's boring. The most dramatic, exciting films tend to have high contrast and a saturated palette, which is no good for human skin. Unless you happen to be Lupita Nyong'o, and I'm not mentioning her as clickbait; she has a fascinating skull. Skulls and mountains and buildings and planets are basically shapes, collections of shapes, they appeal to the same part of the brain that responds to shapes.

Straight from the Epson V500, the ISO 160 version is downright pale, especially when shot in overcast conditions, but it buffs up nicely with Photoshop. Outside the context of shooting people in sunlight it feels a bit unspectacular. Portra 400 shot at ISO 200 in sunshine apparently has a lovely subtle pastely look, but I haven't shot any yet so I can't comment. I have some rolls of it, I will have to take notes.

One of the good things about print film, and Portra in particular, is that it retains highlights without blowing them out. Viz the shot above, which isn't much cop as a picture but illustrates Portra's dynamic range well (a digital sensor would have captured the glowing light as a 255, 255, 255 white circle).

Kodak Ektar 100
Ektar was introduced in 2009 and essentially replaces Kodak's slide films, although it's actually a print film. It has a punchy look with a distinctive colour palette - magenta shadows, with foliage turning straw-coloured - and can be used all the time. For portraits it's apparently too saturated without Photoshop alteration, but it was designed with Photoshop in mind, so that's okay. If this was a magazine, the following few paragraphs would be in a box separated from the main text. Imagine that they are.

BOXOUT: That's the Look, That's the Look, That's the Look (of Film)
At the risk of repeating myself, when people talk about the look of film they're probably talking about the look of faded prints, or faded slides. When the photographs were first taken they didn't have the popular Instagram look; our memories of film are actually of film plus twenty years of poor storage.

Without having access to the negatives it's difficult to form an opinion on the look of old film from looking at classic photographs on the internet, because they were often edited at some point, if only to burn in the sky or paint over some of the imperfections. The famous shots of landing craft hitting the beach at D-Day, for example, were all shot with film, but the reproductions we see are actually scans of edited prints.

Contemplate the following. In both cases I've put the image that, in my opinion, looks most like the original negative at the top, with the edits beneath them:

You can see where someone has burned in the sky to make the print look more dramatic. In the "Jaws of Death" image the top of the ramp's support struts have been burned in as well. These edits have become the new standard, and are repeated in newspapers and websites, displacing the originals. Historians in the future will write about how the sky at Normandy was "black, as if the sun itself had died... the sky was blackened with the ashes of the Third Reich... as they stormed the beach, the soldiers had to contend with a deathly pall etc" because they will base their opinion on edited prints. They won't realise that it wasn't like that in real life. How much of our history is wrong?

In the past it was common to make a big print and then run over the spots and scars and so forth with an airbrush, which was especially easy with high-contrast black and white. The Soviet Union famously airbrushed entire people out of the historical record, so that the audience of the future, forming its opinion from photographs, would remember a constructed reality. This was Winston Smith's job in 1984, albeit that he was altering newspapers rather than pictures. No doubt in recent years there was a man at the BBC whose job it was to flag up any media featuring former top DJ and sex predator Jimmy Saville, whether it was video clips of Top of the Pops, archived webpages, recordings of Radio One, articles about the London Marathon etc. Perhaps the BBC has a full-time historical multimedia sanitiser who does this every day, as people fall out of favour.
 
Our memories of the past outside our small circle of direct experience, and from before we were born, are formed from secondary sources, and ultimately our memories are not of the past at all, they are of the secondary sources. We remember the record, not the reality. It is often opined that history is written by the winners, that there is no fate but what we make. The USSR was shrewd enough to recognise that it had to construct a fake present, because the real present wasn't working. The USSR was prepared to let its citizens starve rather than admit it was wrong, and although that kind of resolve is admirable - and sustainable, if there are enough citizens - it falls apart in the presence of external competition.

A part of me wonders if they were all misguided, all the future-constructors, the historical spinners. They assumed that people in the future would care about the past, and that if you could own the historical record you would own the future. Historians believe in the power of history - their jobs would be meaningless otherwise - but in reality people blunder into the future without thinking about the past. What is the point of owning the historical record if no-one looks at it?

But, film. The only readily available high-resolution scans on the internet of technically excellent photography from the 1950s and 1960s are of Playboy centrefolds, which were shot by skilled photographers using large-format cameras. To my eyes Playboy's centrefolds don't look particularly film-y - they look large format-y - because Playboy had high standards, and both digital and analogue photographic workflows have been designed to approach a common standard of colour reproduction and tonality.

I mention Playboy in particular because I have the impression they scanned their image library at a very high resolution in the late 1990s, on the assumption that it would be a valuable asset in the then-new internet economy, and that the files available today are essentially those available in the late 1990s, and that they were relatively untouched from the originals when they were scanned. Of course the originals were probably edited via analogue means, but I assume this was more for unsightly details rather than the general look.

The images in this article that you're reading now - something about Kodak Ektar, remember? - were scanned with an Epson V500, an unexceptional but versatile desktop scanner that scans medium format and 35mm. I used Epson's own scanning software, running under Photoshop. For the most part I set the black point and then played with the levels until they resembled my memory of reality; the V500 doesn't have colour profiles for different film stocks, and I'm not prepared to carry a grey card around with me.

~

Ektar is technically a professional film although it could easily become Kodak's only consumer print film, if there was a 400-speed version for dim light. I've shot it a lot but never really warmed to it. The colours go a bit odd, yellowy and saturated, if the exposure is off, which serves you right for using the wrong settings but is irritating with print film. ISO 100 is limiting indoors.

Kodak sold another Ektar film in the 1980s, which occasionally pops up on eBay although it expired long ago. I have no idea what the old Ektar was like; it was available in an odd range of speeds (ISO 25, 100, 125, and 1000(!)).

Kodak Ektachrome 160T
This is a tungsten-balanced film which looks blue under daylight, although Photoshop will correct it:

It's therefore a viable choice for everyday shooting if you find some cheaply on eBay, doubly so if you have a yellow filter. Shooting 160T through a yellow filter will, as far as I can tell, transform the film into an equivalent of plain daylight-balanced Ektachrome 100. Tungsten film was a niche even in the heyday of film, and fell out of use in the 2000s; Ektachrome itself was discontinued a few years ago, indeed all of Kodak's slide films are now gone.

Plain Ektachrome was available in several different flavours. Over time, Kodak increased the saturation, especially after the launch of Fuji's Velvia in 1990. Like all slide films it makes you feel like a God, because the negatives look awesome, especially if you shoot medium format.

The older Ektachrome

Ektachrome 100VS, the latter-day vivid saturation version, shot on a sunny day with a polarising filter

Kodak Black and White
I'm wary of opining on black and white film, because I develop my own, to my own unexacting standards. There are too many variables. I've only ever shot Tri-X at ISO 400, for example, generally in dim light, which tends to involve lots of point light sources and patches of blackness; photojournalists usually push-processed it, which boosted the contrast. My emotional impression is that Kodak Tri-X is black, and resembles old textbooks and newspapers from the 1970s. The shadows tend to be black. Whereas TMax is grey, and resembles colour film that has been desaturated; but with Photoshop the difference is just a few clicks away.

Tri-X

Tmax

Ilford HP5 and Fuji Acros
The other most-popular black and white print films. To my eye they resemble TMax, in the sense that they don't inherently stand out, although HP5 feels grainier and Acros has some of Tri-Xs clipped blacks.

Ilford has a wide range of black and white films, but I have only shot the odd roll or two of them. FP4 is a low-grain cousin of HP5, Pan F is a low-grain, slow-speed film, Delta is apparently a low-grain analogue of TMax, and I suspect that Ilford could slim its range down without anybody complaining. Ilford also sells a range of photo papers and developers, and my hunch is that these films work best with a certain Ilford-specific workflow - film, developer, paper - that I have not tried. I develop film and then scan it, I don't make analogue prints.

There is also Ilford XP2, a chromogenic film that shoots black and white but can be processed with colour chemicals, in a standard colour minilab. Kodak has a similar film called BWC400N, which I have not used. I shot a lot of XP2 about fifteen years ago, when I first became interested enough in photography to spend money on it. My recollection is that the results were muddy. This is a common opinion on the internet (a quick google for "ilford XP2 muddy" throws up half a dozen people who have the same impression), and can apparently be alleviated by dialling the ISO down and shooting for the shadows.

XP2 can be processed in standard black and white chemicals, but I imagine the results would be very flat. In fact, colour films in general can be processed as if they were black and white, for example the following image, which was shot with a roll of Fuji 400N that became mixed in with a bunch of black and white rolls I processed in Rodinal:

My other recollection of XP2 is that, although its raison d'etre was standard minilab processing, most minilabs wouldn't take it, and insisted on posting it off to be developed as black and white. Now that I develop my own film it doesn't make much sense for me, so I never use it. It would actually cost me more to develop than regular black and white.

Chromogenic film was launched at the dawn of the 1980s, and according to an article in the Feb 1981 Pop Sci its original selling point was that it used less silver than conventional black and white film, which was important because silver prices had climbed sharply in the late 1970s. The Hunt Brothers were trying to dominate the world silver market by buying all the silver they could get hold of, which had the knock-on effect of causing film prices to rise, because photographic film needs silver. The article mentions Ilford XP1 and Agfa Vario-XL as the pioneers. The writer is keen on XP1, unimpressed with Vario-XL, but concludes that conventional Panatomic-X beats them both.

I have the impression that chromogenic films went nowhere until the 1990s, at which point the cost and awkwardicity of black and white development gave the concept a second wind.

Ilford HP5

Fuji Acros

Fuji Velvia and Velvia and Provia
During the 1980s and 1990s one of the big photographic rivalries was between Japanese upstarts Fuji and big American V8 muscle car titans Kodak. Fuji had long been number two, and like Avis the company tried very hard during the 1980s to build up its market share. Fuji eventually became the official photographic sponsor of the 1984 Olympics, and although Kodak managed to effectively fight back (by outspending Fuji's advertising department) it must have irritated Kodak's management. The rivalry broke out into a full-scale price war by the late 1990s, by which time it was becoming generally accepted that Kodak was relying too much on its size and past glories.

In 1990, Fuji shook things up with Fuji Velvia, a new slide film that had a distinctive and very attractive look that made Kodak's Ektachrome seem staid. If you ever saw a magazine advert in the 1990s, you saw Velvia. National Geographic fell in love with it. It makes the sky look purple and flatters greens and reds. In the UK it is particularly handy because it makes overcast light look good. It is not the same as turning up Photoshop's "vibrance" slider.

My experience of scanning it is that Velvia 50 often looks and feels very dense; some photographers shoot it at ISO 40 or 32 so that the shadows don't block up. I mentally imagine the scanner trying hard to push light through it.

Velvia was originally available in a super-saturated ISO 50 version called Fujichrome Velvia RVP, which was discontinued and replaced with a less-saturated ISO 100 version called Velvia 100F, which was joined by a new ISO 50 Velvia called Velvia 50 that was supposed to resemble the original, and then there was a new ISO 100 version called Velvia 100 (no F) that was also supposed to resemble the original, but faster. And 100F was discontinued because nobody liked it.

Got that? I have mostly shot the ISO 50 versions. The medium format images above and below were taken with the new Velvia 50, the half-frame images were shot with some expired Fujichrome RVP. When faced with the choice, why not shoot the real thing? Albeit that it's not really the real thing, unless you buy expired, preserved rolls of the original Velvia. NB All of the slide films in this article can still be processed at any self-respecting photo developer, although smaller outfits will probably have to send it off somewhere. Tick the box marked E6. I've left out Kodachrome because the process has been discontinued and there's no reason to shoot it any more.

Fuji Provia
Provia is Fuji's regular slide film. It doesn't grab me. It appeals to landscape photographers who want something subtler than Velvia, but for my needs why not shoot Velvia 100F, or use print film instead? Fuji also sells Astia, a slide film analogue of Kodak Portra, with a subdued colour palette. I have never used it.

For a while the ISO 400 version of Provia, 400X, was the only fast slide film on the market, but sadly it was discontinued last year. As far as I can tell this leaves Velvia 50, Velvia 100, and Provia 100F as the only remaining slide films that you can buy new from anyone anywhere. Fuji won the war. Kodak was not too big to fail after all. "But those who had so longed for it were not there to see it, and they never knew it. Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him."

Slide film itself is probably not going to be around for much longer. Which is sad, but sad. Slide film looks fantastic when you hold it up to the light, as if you were peering through little glass windows into another world. It tends to have less obvious grain than print film and has a smooth look that resembles digital photographs, which is one of the reasons why it died out in the professional marketplace; once digital cameras could output sufficient resolution, slide film was pushed into ever-smaller niches.

Slide film is awkward to use, too. Photoshop helps the old problem of balancing colour, but overexposed slide film defies correction. Clouds in particular look awful if you try to burn the sky. The next and next-but-one images (the camels and the boat) are overexposed, and will never look natural. I was not prepared to stand around until sunset with a tripod and a bunch of graduated filters, which is what separates me from Mr National Geographic. Not prepared because I was not being paid.

I ended up with some Provia hanging around, so I had it cross-processed, in which case it came out a little green but otherwise much the same:

Fuji Pro 400H
400H is Fuji's professional general-purpose print film. It has wide latitude and I usually shoot it at ISO 200, in which case it develops a subdued, somewhat pastel appearance that would remind me of Kodak Portra 400 if I had shot any Portra 400 to remind me of.

The lovely Nikita Sablier

Demonstrating that men are programmed to respond to shape, not size, and that good packaging is sexy

Fuji 400H, run through Photoshop

Fuji 400H not run through Photoshop

There is a 160-speed version, which I have only shot a few times. It reminds me a lot of Kodak's Portra 160 but less stark, warmer, a bit yellower.

Shot with a Holga on an overcast day, so the exposure is probably all over the place

Fuji Superia
This is Fuji's consumer film. I like it a lot. It has punchy greens and reds and is available in two speeds - 200 and 400 - although I tend to shoot both at ISO 200, and they may well indeed be the exact same film. Kodak's equivalent is Kodak Gold, which I rarely see in the shops any more, and I haven't used for years. This is I assume a legacy of the price war mentioned above; Fuji got their films into more shops than Kodak.

I haven't mentioned pound shop film, which here in the UK used to be Ferrania Solaris, but now seems to be Agfa something or other. My memory of Solaris was that it was perfectly okay but a bit grainy, and I haven't tried Agfa something or other.

Superia has a thing for green, which I've exaggerated in the following image. It makes things look a bit like The Matrix, which is a reference that will go over the heads of younger readers. It's tempting to pretend that the sequels didn't happen, but they were watchable and intermittently clever.

And The Second Renaissance was... cheap, but if there was one franchise that would have benefited from prequels, The Matrix was it. There was no satisfactory way to continue the storyline of The Matrix beyond the first film. The computers had won, the Earth was ruined. The future was a needle penetrating the human skull forever. The Star Wars universe is open-ended, The Matrix was a dead end.

Kodak Colorplus
Colorplus is Kodak's dirt-cheap poor person film. I find that it has a dull, uninteresting colour palette that tends to go purple in the shadows, and I only use it because I bought a bunch of the stuff at a knock-down price.

On the other hand, it's probably the most archetypal colour print film of all the choices presented in this article. When families went on holiday in the 20th century, or bought a few rolls to photograph their grandmother's birthday, they bought the cheapest film they could find. Kodak Colorplus was that film, if not Colorplus itself then whatever cheap film Kodak made in bulk in those days, Kodacolor something or other. Sometimes they bought Kodakchrome, but only if they were a bit flush. They didn't buy Fuji Velvia or Kodak Portra, they bought Kodak Colorplus that had been sitting in the stockroom for six months and on the shelf in the warm for a further month.

The Novelty Black and White Films
These appear on eBay and the nether regions of the internet, and vanish and then re-appear. They are fetishised by god-awful process people for whom the act of taking pictures with film is the entire point of shooting with film; the images are superfluous. Not like you; you are alright. I mean them. Judging by Flickr and Photo.net, photography is a visual art form that magnetically attracts people who do not have a visual sense and are uninterested in art. They are the public face of photography, but they are not photography at all. They are sad old men hanging around the local pub. People who have reached the end, who were never on the right track, who have nothing left.

Wind back to Virtual Worlds. It was supposed to be better than this. Take the whole world and give it a voice and the means to show off and this is the result? What happened to the good people? Where did they go? Did we offend them?

But perhaps the world is better. Looking through old issues of Popular Photography from the 1980s with Google Books, the standard is obviously much higher than the typical Flickr group, even with thirty years of technical progress. And the classic photographs of the distant past that have survived to the present still have power, albeit that some of that power comes from the novelty of age. The internet has thrown up a lot of fads but not much of lasting worth, but was the same true of analogue photography, fifteen years after its birth? It's unfair to compare Pop Photo and the entire Twentieth Century with a faddish image hosting website, but the widespread availability of images and general collapse of copyright enforcement has produced an environment where photography is essentially devalued. It's just filler now. Flickr has shown that hundreds of thousands of people uploading millions of images, some of which were supposed to be good, can still have a zero per cent strike rate. It is possible for millions upon millions of people to be wrong. For a day's worth of the whole world's uploads to have absolutely nothing of worth.

Are photographs a means to an end, or an end in themselves? I suppose they are, like all art, a means to an end. Art illustrates and illuminates. But there is no reason why the journey should be unpleasant.

Polypan F 50

Some photographers have a knack for producing arresting images with black and white film. Most don't, but why did they persist? The world of awful internet photography is full of people who shoot with black and white film because Henri Cartier-Bresson shot black and white, and they want to be like him, so they copy his gear.

But Henri Cartier-Bresson shot black and white for solid practical reasons. Film was, for him, the paper on which his art was drawn. If you want to become Cartier-Bresson you have to copy the things that inspired him, otherwise you're only imitating a surface. You are Gary Numan to Cartier-Bresson's David Bowie. And you have to accept that the things he was inspired by might not be relevant any more. Cartier-Bresson is as much Paris and the lives and times he passed amongst as he is black and white film, and Paris isn't coming back.

Much as I am suspicious of the Lomo people, there is something to be said for photography as an extension of a life lived. Put the best camera in the hands of a boring person and you get nothing; give a thinker or feeler or life-liver a cheap point-and-shoot and he or she will bring back something, from a world of dreams and life.

For Cartier-Bresson photography was not the process of photographing things with black and white film, it was the act of capturing the emotional truth of a scene, or the act of generating a new sensation with an image, or perhaps he was simply paying the rent with some grab-shots of cute Parisians. Arty girly touchy-feely stuff, practical business stuff. Internet photographers never talk about that. They're not photographers at all, they're gear enthusiasts. They aren't fighters in the arena. Their faces are untouched by dust and sweat and blood.

Neither is mine. There's a point when every DJ realises he is just a DJ, and that no matter who hard he can rock a party he is still playing records made by other people. Photographers are, for the most part, DJs whose records are the stuff of human life. Eddie Adams watched as another man's brains were blown out, he did not pull the trigger. He watched as real life happened in front of him.

"You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion!"

There are types of photography that use composition and stylisation to create something new, that do not simply record reality. My own photography is along these lines. I do not just record my tiny part of the world, I am trying to create something with natural materials, like the artists who create sculptures by balancing rocks that they found on the beach. My photographs are individual pebbles balanced on top of each other, collectively a three-dimensional doodle intended to interfere with the order of the universe. By shifting stones on the beach I am mocking chaos, mocking gravity and physics, raising my fists to the shape of creation and challenging it to do better.

I shoot in colour because the world is in colour, and also because I can get hold of cheap colour film. I shoot black and white because some things look better in black and white, but not many; and often I shoot black and white because I can get hold of cheap black and white film, no other reason. A scene has height and width and depth and colour, why remove one of those things? But it has emotion as well, and feelings are subtle things. If the audience associates black and white with classic images of the past, with brutal bleak truth... but to what extent should an artist shape the world around him, or instead flatter it?

Internet photographers don't think about this. They don't think. Their photographs aren't compositions, they're just aide-memoires. Tourist snapshots. Bad photographers take crappy photos of the Grand Canyon or a naked woman or some anonymous nobodies in the street and present them as great art because, at the time, the photographer felt that he was making great art. When he looked at his photographs later on he didn't see the image, he saw his memories of the Grand Canyon, the naked woman, the boring stranger, and that's all he saw. He saw his own feelings, not the image. He didn't see the flat lighting and the discarded crisp packet on the floor behind the model, or the washing machine tag in her underwear, because he wasn't looking.

Still, I digress. Must calm down. I have always assumed that the novelty black and white films were repackaged motion picture film, or repacked surveillance film, or perhaps someone found a million feet of film in a warehouse in the Czech Republic and repackaged that. Of the types I have used, Polypan F has the same kind of grey look of TMax and Delta and so forth. I liked it although sadly I have run out. Much is made on the internet of Polypan's distinctive "glow". In reality the glow is very very mild and seems to exist mostly in the minds of the aforementioned process people.

That's enough Polypan. Of the other novelty black and white films I have used, Rollei ATO is a high-contrast orthochromatic film that renders skin darkly (as if shooting through a blue filter) and shadows pitch black. It is difficult to work with.

Notice the line running along the bottom of the image. I have no idea what caused it. The same line appears in this blog post by a chap who lives in Portugal, who I have never met or interacted with. Perhaps we bought our film from the same source. Being on the internet is a bit like being in a submarine, you're navigating alone in the dark and occasionally you detect traces of other submarines in the distance. In the words of the song, you can't have two killers living in the same pad.

I briefly used Adox CHS, which was very fragile and slow. It had extended red sensitivity. My recollection is of spending ages despotting it.

When I started using film in earnest there were two cheap options, Lucky and Shanghai, both from China or Hong Kong. These seem to have been used up and I rarely see them on eBay any more. I never had a chance to use Lucky. Some people have had perfectly cromulent results with Shanghai, but such was its reputation as a poor-quality, flaky film that I only used it a couple of times before putting it back into the lovely paper packet in which it came.

A click panorama taken with a Holga using Shanghai GP3

Ditto Fomapan, which I only ever used whilst learning to develop film. Don't have any more.

Messing with Film
When I was a kid I had an Atari 2600 games console, and I found out that if I flicked the machine on and off the games would go haywire, and it was funny. It was just like being on LSD, although I didn't know that yet because I was too young to take LSD. Kids don't need to take LSD, their imaginations are active enough without chemical stimulation.

It's fun to mess with things until they go haywire. Cars, space launch vehicles, people's hearts - metaphorical hearts and actual physical hearts - there is no shortage of things in this world that go haywire when you mess with them. Mr T, for example. He went haywire when people messed with him. You would be a fool to mess with Mr T, and yet there was no shortage of fools in the 1980s, and every week on television they messed with him, and he pitied them.

But still they messed with him. I wonder if he was annoyed by the gold price crash of last year. He used to wear gold chains, which seemed very shrewd throughout the 2000s, because the price of gold more than tripled throughout that decade. He stopped wearing chains in 2005 so as not to offend the victims of Hurricane Katrina, although presumably he didn't throw them away, he just kept them on his pet alligator. Mr T probably has a pet alligator.

And then in late 2013 the price of gold dropped by a quarter, which is still a gain over the last decade, but he could have gained more by investing in property, albeit that you can't wear a house around your neck, and you can't eat a house, unless it's a gingerbread house, and

I find Mr T fascinating in the context of meaning and reality. Somewhere underneath his mohawk and gold chains there was once a man called Laurence Tureaud, who grew up tough in tough surroundings. He spent some time in the army and then gravitated to work in security as a bouncer, and latterly as a bodyguard. He decided that it was not enough to be an ordinary man, he had to be extraordinary, and thus the character of Mr T was born. Mr T was essentially Tureaud with a scowl and a uniform, but he was nonetheless not Laurence Tureaud. He was to Laurence Tureaud as MC Ride is to Stefan Burnett. One a monster; the other just a man.

And there is the symbolism of the T. The headless cross, which represented pure faith untainted by the poison of doubt. Mr T was a pure elemental force of nature. If life is a barbecue, Mr T was a superheated sizzle that shot from the griddle, searing a scar on society's soul. In Rocky III he was The Upsetter, the Elephant in the Room, the gunman let loose on Sesame Street. In the context of a cosy fictional boxing soap opera he was cold hard reality, a brutal punching machine who seemed to have come from an altogether more performant universe.

And there was the letter T. The first letter of THE, one of the most fundamental components of English language and of Western thought. By adopting the letter T, Mr T aligned himself with AND, and I, and IT, and IS, he aligned himself with the structure of language itself, he sought to own the framework of the argument. To occupy the grains that run through us.

Tureaud put some thought into Mr T's appearance. The gold chains were a practical means of looking after jewellery that had been lost by clubgoers, as well as a show of wealth and power. The mohawk was a statement of black identity, and perhaps a reference to his days in the army. Mister because nobody called him Larry any more and he wanted people to be polite when they talked to him. He did not simply put on the clothes because they looked good, or because he wanted to fit in. He didn't want to fit in, he wanted to stand out.

For my generation Mr T was also The A-Team's B. A. Baracus, who was a dab hand with a welding torch, and was unimpressed with jibber-jabber. Baracus was a character performed by a character performed by Laurence Tureaud, albeit that Mr T had long since smothered Laurence Tureaud. Nowadays Mr T exists as a reference to himself, a set of catchphrases and memories in the shape of a man. Tureaud evaporated; Mr T is no longer real, in an objective sense, instead he exists inside our own minds, he only has meaning insofar as we remember B. A. Baracus and "I pity the fool" from Rocky III and the Mr T craze of the mid-1980s. For a generation born after the 1980s he is a reference to a memory of a cultural force that existed before they were born. Mr T is as unreal to the current generation as John Wayne was to mine, and when my generation is dead and gone Mr T Will Not Exist.

Mr T is now the human equivalent of a distributed storage network. He exists as part of the great cloud of shared human consciousness, he exists in the minds of others more than he exists in real life. In a way, we are all like Mr T, like miniature versions of Mr T. We all exist in the minds of others. You dear reader have never met me, but you have seen my work and have a mental image of what I must be like, and thus I live inside your mind. Think of all the minds you live within, imagine them living on after you are dead. Life is Schrodinger's cat experiment in reverse, the waveform is collapsed when we are alive and becomes unknowable after we die.

Photographers have been messing with film since the beginning of film. It began as a mess. Top dead Vogue photographer Erwin Blumenfeld spent an absolute age messing with film - freezing it, heating it up, double-exposing it, briefly subjecting it to light during development, subjecting it to naked women - and I've had a go myself. There's a thing called pre-flashing, a legitimately useful photographic technique that involves exposing the negative to a small quantity of white light before taking the exposure. It has the effect of shifting the left side of the histogram to the right, boosting the shadows a bit. I decided to do with coloured light, with interesting effects.

I simply pulled the film out of the canister in a dark room and popped off a flash at a low setting through a gel. I found that preflashing with colour had the effect of selectively desaturating that colour - in the images above I used a red light, in the images below I used blue. Time passes at a different rate when you're on drugs. The question is, what is the correct perception of time? Is there an objective speed of time? Human beings evolved in a hazardous environment and thus had to perceive time at a quick pace, so as to spot and react to tigers and so forth. And we need to eat, but only a few times a day.

In the absence of external threats, would we instead perceive days as weeks, weeks as years, a year as forever? We cannot speak of being adrift from time if there is no objective speed of time, if there is no definite connection between the mind's clock and that of the universe.

Blumenfeld had the resources of Vogue and Harper's at his disposal, sadly I do not, so this is not something I'm likely to do very often. Even in professional hands pre-flashing can be difficult; it was famously used on Robert Altman's gorgeously 70s-looking McCabe and Mrs Miller and Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, in both cases out of desperate necessity with no guarantee in advance that it would work properly.

Try doing that with a memory card. But perhaps you could write an application that reads in the contents of a RAW file, jiggers around with it - or it reads in the entire contents of a memory card, and randomly messes with it - and you'd end up with glitchy images a la the nightmarish results of poor motion compensation in video streams, or broken gifs.

There is a long tradition of bored people glitching things up until they go haywire = funny and by extension terrifying, because there are few things more terrifying than comedy. The art of forcing people to blurt snot from their noses even though they don't want to. That is what photography boils down to. Bored people capturing things from another world and messing with them.