Review by Gary Tooze

Production:

Disc:

Video:

Audio:

• DVD of Anti-Clock: Jack Bonds re-edit (2005, 87 minutes)

• Vibration (1975, 36:29 in HD!): Arden and Bonds experimental Super-8 video/ film
• Original trailer (3:03 in HD!)
• Fully illustrated booklet with contributions by Jack Bond, Chris Darke, and Penny Slinger: reviews, biographies and credits

Bitrate:

 

Description:

Sebastianne Saville stars as a young fellow who reacts to the modern, atom-dominated society by withdrawing from it. He 'makes peace' with the threat of nuclear holocaust by wandering aimlessly about, refusing to be bound by minutes, hours or days. Originally conceived as a short film by producer Jack Bond and director Jane Arden, ANTI-CLOCK was given the feature length treatment to contain its ambitious subject matter.

 

 

The Film:

***

"Anti-Clock,'' the joint directorial effort of Jane Arden and Jack Bond, would be funny if it were seven minutes long. At full length, its sincerity is suffocating. Miss Arden and Mr. Bond clearly are troubled by the quality of life in this fragmented age and never let a truism, a platitude or a patch of purple prose go unrepeated two or three times. Most of the film is composed of video images, at least half of them close-ups of Joseph Sapha, played by Sebastian Seville, who also plays someone called Professor Zanov, who is trying to straighten out poor Joseph Sapha.

Excerpt from the NY Times located HERE

Image :    NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were ripped directly from the Blu-ray disc.
 

Aside from this film probing the absolute depths of extreme artistic weirdness - the Blu-ray admittedly looks appropriately very rough and real. The single-layered transfer exports an intensely grainy appearance. This was never meant to look pristine - and so, the accurate BFI transfer, doesn't. The video bitrate is about 24 Mbps and I don't think dual-layering or a vast increase in file size would benefit the image quality. This looks as it looks - and now you are aware. Certainly not for the faint of heart when it comes to tight narratives or brilliantly glossy visuals. This is as raw as it gets.

CLICK EACH BLU-RAY CAPTURE TO SEE ALL IMAGES IN FULL 1920X1080 RESOLUTION