Metadata
WORK ID: NEFA 20947 (Master Record)
| Title | Year | Date |
| DOUBLE VISION | 1960s | 1960-01-01 |
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Details
Original Format: 16mm Colour: Black & White Sound: Sound Duration: 18 mins 47 secs Credits: Bede College Individuals: John Sansick, Dick Juneman, Alison Court, Michelle De Villez, Alan Ellison, Chris Fletcher, Ray Alderson, Duncan Brown, John Ford, Bob Truemann, Pat Stevenson, Christopher Mann Genre: Student Film Subject: Women Fashions Architecture |
| Summary This amateur student film was made by the Bede College Film & TV Department of Durham University in the late 60s. It is a fantasy film based on a boy meets girl story. A younger and older photographer meet in Durham for a press job. The two symbolise one man, as his younger self, and as the older, more experienced man he will become. |
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Description
This amateur student film was made by the Bede College Film & TV Department of Durham University in the late 60s. It is a fantasy film based on a boy meets girl story. A younger and older photographer meet in Durham for a press job. The two symbolise one man, as his younger self, and as the older, more experienced man he will become.
The film opens with an overhead close-up of a young woman reading a magazine. She’s sitting waiting in a doctor’s surgery. She flicks through the pages. The...
This amateur student film was made by the Bede College Film & TV Department of Durham University in the late 60s. It is a fantasy film based on a boy meets girl story. A younger and older photographer meet in Durham for a press job. The two symbolise one man, as his younger self, and as the older, more experienced man he will become.
The film opens with an overhead close-up of a young woman reading a magazine. She’s sitting waiting in a doctor’s surgery. She flicks through the pages. The magazine is a copy of the photo magazine ‘Life’, a special issue titled ‘Portrait of Durham’. A voice shouts ‘Miss Pollard’ and she gets up from the chair.
Title: Bede College Film & TV Department Presents
Title: Double Vision
The opening of this section shows the townscape of Durham City, especially the castle and cathedral.
In the foreground a bearded man, assembles a camera from parts placed on the roof of his Morris Mini car. A notice on the windscreen reads ‘Press’
He puts a long lens on his camera. He places it on the roof of the car then checks his watch. He lights a cigarette. A loud car horn sounds and a Mini van drives into the area where he’s parked. The Mini skids around, the man flags the driver down. The van drives over the tip of his shoe. He shouts at the driver, ‘You’ve gone over my bloody foot!’
The driver looks at the man apologetically. The driver, a younger more trendy-looking man, gets out of the car. The older man gives him two rolls of camera film and says: ‘Take this 50 and you’d better take a 200 just in case’.
They continue with their discussion and the younger man talks about meeting a new girlfriend. The younger man clumsily drops a lens he’s been trying to fix to his camera, his mind not on the job. He picks it up and then gets instructions from his partner as to which section of the city he should concentrate on photographing.
The film cuts to a tribute to Durham City set in stone on one of the city’s bridges. A voice reads the text.
The film follows the two photographers. The older man takes pictures of a fashionable girl as she poses next to trees along a riverside footpath. The younger man waits in a doorway in the city centre hoping for a photo opportunity.
A general view shows Durham’s National Provincial Bank building and the small kiosk in the centre of the market square which was used by police to help direct city traffic. The young man looks in the kiosk window, which shows one of the close circuit TV monitors showing local traffic flow. The film cuts to one of the TV cameras mounted on a pole.
A young woman is smoking a cigarette somewhere else in the city, spotted by the young photographer through his lens. He runs up the street towards the woman, carrying a box of matches. He puts the matches away disappointed as the woman’s cigarette is already lit.
The young photographer points back up the street. The film cuts to another part of the city where the couple walk together. He asks the woman for a date, and they arrange a meeting time.
He leaves the woman and walks along a riverside path. He meets the older photographer coming from the opposite direction. They both stop suddenly, and approach each other cautiously, in the style of an old fashioned western as though they were about draw guns. They both start taking photos of each other. Eachof them falls to the ground feigning bullet wounds as the soundtrack provides gunshot sounds.They get up, and walk off.
The younger man is now buying drinks in a pub for the young woman he's just met. He talks to her about his work, and how he likes Durham. He offers his girlfriend a cigarette.
She says there’s a good party to go to and they both leave the pub.
In a small living room, couples dance close together during a slow piece of music, including the photographer and his girlfriend.
His girlfriend invites him home for coffee. They walk to her front door and let themselves in, the woman anxious they should not wake her parents.
They sit on the sofa together. The film cuts to water being poured from a kettle into coffee cups. They drink their coffee. The woman tries to undo the young man’s shirt, and then talks about removing her clothes. He reacts by almost choking on his coffee.
He looks somewhat taken aback, as she begins to remove her sweater. He starts to remove his shirt. The film cuts to him sitting beside his girlfriend who lies on the floor, he says he’s sorry.
Back in Durham city centre, a bus passes the traffic control kiosk.
The young man walks disconsolately along a rain soaked pavement. The girl runs out of a shop and catches up with him. She then walks off ahead while he follows some distance behind. They cross Elvet Bridge, with the young man still walking behind. He catches up with her then they walk on hand in hand.
At a bookstall in a market, a close-up shows a copy of the Kama Sutra along with other guides to sex. The boyfriend is dragged away by the young woman, but she then points at some necklaces and jewellery for sale on another counter. On the soundtrack, the words ‘I’m Sorry’ echo in the background. They look at other items on sale, and the words resound again.
They walk off through the market. It's still raining. General views of the river follow, through very dull rainy weather. The film shows the very modern Kingsgate Bridge across the Wear leading to Dunelm House.
The film cuts to the photographer and his girlfriend speeding along the road in his Mini van. He is driving recklessly, frightening his girlfriend. They are travelling somewhere for a photo shoot out of Durham city. The young woman suggests they stay at a hotel somewhere as they won’t get back to Durham until late. The car passes a road sign for Bedburn. More views follow of the car speeding along the road through open countryside.
The car eventually arrives at a country hotel. They enter a bedroom, the girl lies on the bed. She then combs her hair while the boyfriend checks his camera, and changes the lens. The girl poses for photographs, and then starts undressing.
The film cuts to both of them in bed, talking to each other. They start to kiss and the view moves to the left to where the young man’s camera rests, lens upright, on a bedside cabinet.
The two lovers both lay together asleep.
Back to the place where the two cars were parked at the beginning of the film. The film ends as the young man gets into the Mini his older partner was originally driving, and drives off.
Credits: Photographer as a young man – Dick Junemann
Credits: Photographer as a man – John Sansick
Credits: Girl – Michele De Villez – Stand In – Christine Lee
Credits: Model – Alison Court
Credits: Actor’s Photographic Equipment Loaned By Finningham’s of Durham
Credits: Technical Assistants – Alan Ellison, Chris Fletcher, Ray Alderson, Duncan Brown, John Forrest, Bob Truemann
Credits: Production Assistant – Pat Stevenson
Credits: Script, Photography, Editing, Sound, Direction – Christopher Mann
Context
Double Vision is a thoroughly 60s student production by Christopher Mann who graduated from Bede College, Durham University, in 1969 with a Certificate of Education in Film & TV. He later worked as a film editor with the BBC’s Natural History Unit, and as a producer on children’s TV, documentaries, ancient history programming and with the BBC’s long-running religious series, Songs of Praise into the 1990s. In 2020 Mann was still operating as a freelancer in media production and training...
Double Vision is a thoroughly 60s student production by Christopher Mann who graduated from Bede College, Durham University, in 1969 with a Certificate of Education in Film & TV. He later worked as a film editor with the BBC’s Natural History Unit, and as a producer on children’s TV, documentaries, ancient history programming and with the BBC’s long-running religious series, Songs of Praise into the 1990s. In 2020 Mann was still operating as a freelancer in media production and training with his company Manmade Productions.
This film was found in the collections of David Williams, born in Leicester in 1933, a child who witnessed World War Two bombing of Coventry, and, from 1964, a senior lecturer in the pioneering film and television department at the College of St Hild and St Bede, Durham University. He was a film historian and expert on early cinema exhibition, and passionate about everything to do with the silver screen. Williams also instigated the first Young People’s Video Festival and chaired its operation for 20 years, was made a Fellow of the Royal Television Society in 2000 and awarded an MBE for services to media studies in the North East in the 2011 New Year’s Honours. He was still active as a lecturer at local history societies in the Durham area until his death in 2013. As one of Williams’ undergraduate students with access to a wide range of films screened at the Bede film Society, founded in 1962, Mann’s very capable rom-com Double Vision displays the influence of various films of the period that reflected a more permissive British society, film censorship as dictated by the British Board of Film Censors itself moving toward reform mid-decade in tune with the sweeping social changes and more liberal public attitudes in the Sixties. With the emergence of the so-called ‘British New Wave’ of authors, their books adapted swiftly on film by directors such as Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, a more genuine, less stereotypical, representation of working class characters also appeared on screen as the British class system itself began to bend a little, post-war. More complex sexual and class relationships were depicted in dramas such as Room at the Top, adapted by director Jack Clayton from John Braine’s novel of the same name. These films rarely played out from a woman’s perspective, however. The love interest in Double Vision is portrayed as a confident young woman, a shop assistant, relaxed and in charge of her own sexuality. In her reversal of conventional gender roles on a night out, she surprises the cocky, fumbling photographer, previously bragging about his ‘conquests’ to his mature alter ego. It would also be worth interrogating the opening scene of the film, which disrupts a sequential timeline telling of the film’s story. A fashionable young woman in a waiting room (the ‘girl’) browses through a Life magazine featuring photographs in ‘A Portrait of Durham’ article before called to an appointment, feasibly at a doctor’s or a Family Planning Association (FPA) clinic. Is this the downside of female sexual freedom? The contraceptive pill, long associated with the 60s era of free love and (more arguably) women’s liberation, was available from FPA clinics to married women with health issues from 1961, and the 1967 Family Planning Act widened availability to those at risk economically. Single women were only issued with ‘the pill’ (legally) from 1974, and it was still deemed controversial. The 1967 Abortion Act (sponsored by MP David Steel) also came into effect from 27 April 1968, legalising abortion under certain conditions. Released in 1966, Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s thriller Blow-Up is staged in the youth subculture and modish fashion world of London’s swinging 60s, featuring a live performance by mod group The Yardbirds, super model Verushka, and media personality and fashion aficionado Janet Street-Porter, then a student at The Architectural Association School of Architecture, dancing at a party. The film stars actor David Hemmings as a hedonistic young fashion photographer, a role said to be based on well-known photographer David Bailey, who hailed from a working class background, worked for Vogue magazine, and had a reputation as a playboy who seduced many of his female models. Bailey’s contemporary, Terence Donovan, was also a reference point. Whilst Double Vision might be read as something of a homage to Blow Up, its use of the double entendre in sight gags, which play upon the inexperienced young photographer’s paranoia at having ‘under-performed’ in bed on a first date, is closer to the bawdy humour of the populist Carry On comedies. There is even a link to the phallic physical nature of the camera lens and fetishist or masculinist metaphors related to the lens, also invoked in the photographer’s driving and voyeurism. And what of the doubling implied in the title of the comedy? In addition to the depiction of the photographer as both the immature youth (looking a little like a young Mick Jagger), and the more responsible man he will become in his chosen profession, the character navigates romantic and sexual love through representation. His first encounter with the ’girl’ is a glimpse on a television screen monitoring traffic, installed in Durham’s landmark police box in Market Square ( ‘a hazardous hub of city traffic’) in December 1957. This was believed to be the first CCTV-controlled traffic system in the country. It was finally removed in 1975 when Durham gained two new bridges and a relief road. The film portrays both historic and contemporary Durham. The past is recalled in the Walter Scott inscription carved in stone on Prebends Bridge, completed in 1778: Grey towers of Durham Yet well I love thy mixed and massive piles Half Church of God, half castle 'gainst the Scot And long to roam these venerable aisles With records stored of deeds long since forgot The young photographer understandably stops to take a picture of the city’s newest bridge, opened in 1966: the striking, modern concrete footbridge across the River Wear gorge was designed by Ove Arup, one of the great twentieth century structural engineers. The bridge connects Bow Lane in the historic centre to the Brutalist Dunelm House (its construction supervised by Arup and currently the centre of a preservation battle), which rises boldly in the landscape on New Elvet, housing Durham University’s Students Union. On his death in 1988, Ove Arup’s ashes were scattered from the bridge, which he considered to be his finest architectural achievement. References: ‘The 1960s’ bbfc https://www.bbfc.co.uk/education-resources/student-guide/bbfc-history/1960s Lloyd, Chris, “Pictures: The market square police box - one of Durham's most loved former landmarks”. The Northern Echo https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/history/16035450.pictures-the-market-square-police-box-one-of-durhams-most-loved-former-landmarks/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/summonedbyfells/10572112175 https://www.britannica.com/biography/David-Bailey |
