Jane Arden
Acting
Biography
Jane Arden (29 October 1927 – 20 December 1982) was a Welsh film director, actress, screenwriter, playwright, songwriter, and poet. Arden was born Norah Patricia Morris at 47 Twmpath Road, Pontypool, Monmouthshire.[1] She studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, England, and began her career in the late 1940s on television and in the cinema. She appeared in a television production of Romeo and Juliet in the late 1940s, and then starred in two British crime films: Black Memory (1947) directed by Oswald Mitchell – which provided South African-born actor Sid James with his first screen credit (billed as Sydney James) – and Richard M. Grey's A Gunman Has Escaped (1948). There are copies of both films in the BFI National Archive, but the copy of A Gunman Has Escaped is incomplete.
Known For
An anthology series of television plays which aired on BBC1 from October 1964 to May 1970. The plays were usually written for television, although adaptations from other sources also featured.
The Wednesday Play
A dramatization of two generations of the Viennese Strauss family, whose dance music and operettas dominated much of Europe and beyond for most of the 19th century.
The Strauss Dynasty
Armchair Theatre is a British television drama anthology series of single plays that ran on the ITV network from 1956 to 1974. It was originally produced by Associated British Corporation, and later by Thames Television from mid-1968.
Armchair Theatre
A therapist looks into the mind of a woman diagnosed as schizophrenic and finds, not madness, but tortured sexual guilt created by the taboos of society.
The Other Side of the Underneath
Filmmaker Jack Bond and Salvador Dali got together at Christmas 1965 to make Dali in New York, a highly entertaining film. Dali devoted two weeks of his life to creating extraordinary scenes for the film, performing "manifestations" with a plaster cast. A thousand ants and one million dollars in cash. When he confronts the feminist writer, Jane Arden, sparks fly. "You are my Slave! I am not your slave. Everybody is my slave." Dali recalls his meeting with Freud, "The last human relationship ever" About his wife, 'But for Gala I would be lying in a gutter somewhere covered with lice" Jim Desmond's dazzling cinematography captures the great artist painting as Flamenco virtuoso Manitas de Plata performs. Dali in New York is a rare treat for anyone who loves film and the living theatre of Dali's surreal universe.
Dali In New York
Separation concerns the inner life of a woman during a period of breakdown – marital, and possibly mental. Her past and (possible?) future are revealed through a fragmented but brilliantly achieved and often humorous narrative, in which dreams and desires are as real as the ‘swinging’ London (complete with Procul Harum music and Mark Boyle light show) of the film’s setting.
Separation
In this crime drama, three gem thieves must get out of London after they kill a man. Friction between the men increases as they hide out on a farm and then get back on the road. Trouble ensues when one of the three begins suspecting the others of treachery.
A Gunman Has Escaped
Cockney Danny Cruff is the son of a man wrongly accused of murder. Danny decides to solve the mystery himself by hobnobbing with London's underworld. To do this, he poses as a juvenile delinquent.
Black Memory
A complex and fascinating experimental exploration of time and identity, Anti-Clock is a film of authentic, startling originality. Brilliantly mixing film and video techniques, Arden and Bond's paranoid, psychological surveillance study of a career gambler turned clairvoyant unstuck in time captures onscreen the anxieties that have infiltrated the consciousness of so many in Western society.
Anti-Clock
Uses two young western people as the mediators between the new gestalt initiated by Jung, Reich and Frederick Perles, and the magnetic chain of a Sufic master, finding that the East and the West, the scientific and the mystical, begin to hold together in a truly organic way.
Vibration
An interior decorator takes a millionaire's wife on a guided tour of her new home.
The Interior Decorator
A frank dialogue on sexual likes and dislikes that place between a man and his mistress in bed together.
Exit 19
A 1964 BBC adaptation of Sartre's "No Exit."
In Camera
The private entertainment of a married couple, springing from and interwoven with the pattern of their daily life.