Issue 6: Winter 2010
Mark Nugent
Don O Mahony
This year, Corona Cork Film Festival presented a programme of films and videos by Mark Nugent (1961 - 2009). Experimental Conversations invited the screening's programmer, Don O'Mahony, to share his discovery of this unjustly neglected visionary...
Before this year I had never heard of Mark Nugent so when I came across his obituary in The Guardian my eyes went no further than the photo of a preppilly dressed man at the controls of some hulking piece of machinery. Some months later as I flicked through a back issue of The Wire magazine, the March issue, my eyes alighted on a news section item on his recent passing. The brief item made reference to the videos he produced for Coil and Elliot Sharp's Carbon. "His films," the piece continued, "often shot with trademark Super-8 stock, explored an obsession with consciousness, magic, mysticism and alchemy."
Mark Nugent
I was intrigued. I fed his name into Google and soon found myself examining The Guardian's obituary. There again was the image of Mark and what appears on closer inspection to be an impressive looking IMAX projector. So, who was Mark Nugent?
Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, Mark moved to Canada with his family when he was seven. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in film production from Concordia University, Montreal. He went on to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on a scholarship and obtained a master's in fine arts for film production. Along the way he founded and toured with Roughage, a Montreal-based mixed-media performance group. He also briefly worked for Chicago's H-Gun, producing commercial music videos.
The obituary contained a number of tantalising pieces of information. It spoke of a large number of critically acclaimed hallucinatory films, his ability to process seemingly abstract images and colours, and his fascination with the realms of consciousness, perception, alchemy, mysticism and quantum physics.
Through YouTube and his now dormant MySpace account I came across eleven examples of his work, and for the most part they lived up to their giddy promise. Nugent's work appeared to have a connection with music promos but his work transcended that often superficial idiom as he brought the richness, depth and complexity of a fine artist to the medium. A couple of moments put me in mind of Derek Jarman's film for The Smiths, The Queen Is Dead (1986). Even within the limiting confines of an average sized computer screen the images generated an undeniable frisson. For the most part the films unfurled in an unconscious manner. Accompanied by a largely industrial (as in the genre) soundtrack, the meditative, sometimes disturbing scores provided a perfect backdrop to Nugent's mesmeric technique. There appeared to be little point in pinning down meaning in these films, you just luxuriated in them.
Dark River
As admirable as Nugent's technical gifts and visionary approach were, the most compelling imperative to explore his work was found in the obituary. Jointly penned by his friends Mark Spybey, Meghan Dufresne, John C McDaniel and Zev Asher, it contained the following sentence, which resonated hugely with me: "His art occupied a genre that rarely (and sadly) attracted critical attention from anyone other than his peers."
I felt compelled to redress this. Thankfully, my colleagues at the Corona Cork Film Festival believed that a retrospective screening would be a worthy project, so I pursued the first name on the list, Mark Spybey. A musician with industrial band Download and currently engaged with his project Dead Voices On Air (Lens Records), Spybey had shared many on-the-road adventures with Nugent and the pair had become firm friends. The months were rapidly ticking down towards the Festival but Spybey's enthusiasm for the project was palpable. As someone who knew Nugent's mother his assistance was invaluable, but he also sounded a note of caution. Nugent wasn't the most organised of individuals and a picture was painted for me of someone for whom filing and order were abstract concepts. Aware that there were archiving issues we pressed ahead.
A filmography of Nugent's film and video work found on the internet throws up 17 entries over a period from 1985 to 2003. A few are ‘hired hand' work: cameraman on Canadian director Velcrow Ripper's Are you There? Are you Listening? in 1985; contributing some typically distinctive optical printing and image manipulation on Chicago band I Mother Earth's Rain Will Fall promo while working for H-Gun in 1993; the Sex On Wheelz video for My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult; and opticals and colour consultant on I Married A Munchkin (1994), something I myself have continued to deny...
There were two films on 16mm, which we ruled out purely for logistical reasons. What we were left with were nine films... and what else? Surely there was more out there, I thought. Mark Spybey came back to me with the news that all he could get his hands on were those nine films and that he could only get them on DVD. My fervent wish was that we'd be able to unearth some of the original copies but it wasn't to be. Should we continue then? Why not?! After all, how many in the festival audience would be familiar with the work? And the chance to see it projected on a big screen couldn't be passed up. We had secured the blessing of Mark's mother and brothers, and Mark Spybey and his lovely wife Elaine would be attending. It was going to be a meaningful journey for the Spybeys. It would be special.
The programme reflected two phases of Nugent's work. The first spanned the years 1987 - 1992 and featured work shot on film. The second, from 1996 - 2003 featured his video work, most of it from live visuals projected as part of Download's tour in 1996.
The screening was a late one, 11pm on a Saturday night. Would anyone turn up? Thankfully people did. Propitiously, the Festival, in conjunction with Cork Film Centre, had the experimental filmmaker and distributor Pip Chodorov over as a guest to screen his wonderful documentary on the history of experimental/avant-garde cinema Free Radicals (2010) and to present a programme of such films. I feel his presence whetted an appetite for work of this nature.
As Mark, Elaine and I left the screening we reflected on how the larger scale projection, and indeed, the passing of time, had not been kind to Nugent's video works. Generated on an Amiga, they were revealing their age. By the late ‘90s Nugent had turned away from film and became absorbed in this new thing we call the internet. Creating countless digital images, he felt the internet would allow him to sell this work to a mass audience. Sadly, that never transpired. His quest for funding from official bodies was equally fruitless. The final film on the programme, Alchemical Conversations (2003), ends with the assurance that The Canada Council supported it, but this was a sour joke on Nugent's part.
Manual Labour
Spybey mused on the fortunes of some of Nugent's peers. Somehow they were able to play the game and acquire funding. Nugent was never able to get it together to do that.
Alchemical Conversations is an incoherent piece of work but witnessing his early pieces on the big screen one cannot escape the dispiriting feeling that had he possessed the necessary discipline and perhaps the ambition, his name would be more celebrated. It was something I was aware of anyway: how much I would have preferred to be introducing Mark Nugent to present his own work.
If the video works reflected the technology of the time, the film works were timeless. Music was very important to Nugent and sounds and rhythms are a tangible presence in the films. Some are aptly described as music films. No less physical are his collage-based films. Fiercely proud of his work, Nugent explains on his website that these early works were made entirely through film-based optical printing. "No computers were used," he stresses. You can appreciate why he needed to emphasise this. An audience immersed in digital manipulation and trickery would assume these images were realised at the press of a return key but there can be no denying how physical, and human, they actually are.
Nugent made Manual Labour (1987) as a student in Concordia. Not that it betrays the work of a novice in any way. Described as an exploration of LSD and the politics of pharmaceuticals, it is a dense, multi-layered piece that displays a panoply of techniques and effects. It's an awesome monument to a prodigious talent and even features shots of Nugent creating templates for some of the scenes. Described as a "funny satirical film," Carrousel (to Hell) (1987) brings a dizzying energy to these techniques. Commissioned by Elliot Sharp of Carbon, Inverse Proportions (1989) is a collaboration between Nugent and New York film artist Leah Singer but it is Nugent's fingerprints which are most prominent. He had recently been to Morocco with the Canadian band Fat, an eventful period by all accounts, and collected an amount of Super-8 footage which features prominently in Inverse Proportions. With its relentless percussion and bassoons pitched to an insistent level, the film achieves a shamanic intensity. Mr Sullivan (1992), a music video for the band Nimrod, is another amusing delight, but the work I turn to most now is the film he matched to post-industrial godheads Coil. Since being invited to write this the remaining member of Coil, Peter Christopherson, passed away in Thailand.
Both a member of the influential band Throbbing Gristle and a designer and filmmaker for the revered design house Hipgnosis, Christopherson wrote a touching and wise eulogy for Nugent, which was delivered at his grave. As a band that exerted a strong fascination over their fan base, Coil used to receive a lot of tributes. Nugent's stood out, and Christopherson regarded his response to their song Dark River (1992) so highly he intimated that it would be included in an anthology of the band that he was working on. Whither that now?
Combining the Morocco footage as well as Super-8 footage shot in the vast open spaces of Wyoming, Nugent's Dark River is at once mystical and anthropological. Languidly paced to match the eerie melancholy of the source music, it achieves total symbiosis with song through Nugent's inclusion of ‘wild' sound. Clanking chains, ghostly wind and the sickening swish of a reaper scything corn deeply enhance what Coil were already expressing.
A message I gleaned from Chodorov's documentary was that the avant-garde is personal. In all the great films from Richter, Mekas, Brakhage, Jacobs, etc, there was nothing wilfully ‘difficult', something which the term 'avant-garde' might suggest. These films were in fact very personal and poetic statements. Mark Nugent's work is no different.
While working on this project I insisted to myself that surely there had to be more of Nugent's work out there, unaccounted for. It had been reported that a friend of Nugent's gave Mark's films to his old alma maters, Concordia University in Montreal and the Chicago Film School. It is also believed that the owners of the aforementioned Imax projector, friends of Nugent who allowed him to use their equipment, had some of Nugent's work in their possession. And what of the original film footage? Then there are the two 16mm films in his filmography, Grain Films (1985) and On Air (1986). Where are they now? Maybe somewhere buried in a box after his apartment was cleared out following his death...
Now I can only darkly conclude that there is no other work. I hope I am proved wrong. These films deserve to be seen in all their glory on film.
I am grateful to Max Le Cain for his invitation to contribute this article and I reflect on Nugent's last email to Mark Spybey, which Spybey quoted from in his introduction to the screening, where he talks of the "persistence of possibility." Spybey since reminds me that he also asserted "persistence is futile." Maybe so, but there's always the possibility.
"Let us wish Mark well on his latest journey, not only for him but for ourselves. In this moment of sadness let us choose to feel better." (Peter Christopherson, December 21st 2009)
Mark Nugent
As well as being a programmer for the Cork Film Festival, Don O'Mahony is a freelance writer, broadcaster and imaginary blogger.