B. S. Johnson

A man uses the principles of double-entry bookkeeping to settle his accounts with society.

After treatment for a slipped disc in a London hospital, a teacher struggles to convey his thoughts on mortality to his class and fellow staff.

This incredibly strange short film was commissioned by the union ACTT (Association of Cinematograph, Television and allied Technicians, of which the filmmaker and novelist B.S. Johnson was a member) as part of its action against the Industrial Relations Bill passed by parliament in 1971.

Directed by B.S. Johnson.

Directed by Mike Newell.

William Hoyland stars as a nameless protagonist who speaks to the camera in a fabricated language and, though the course of the film, transforms from young and verbose, to old and inarticulate.

In a programme first broadcast in 1969, some of the four million people evacuated as children from British cities during the Second World War look back on their experiences. Amongst the contributors are Michael Aspel and Jonathan Miller.

A poignant short film set to the fourth part of Samuel Beckett's Quatre Poèmes, as narrated by frequent BS Johnson collaborator William Hoyland. The poem is read against a backdrop of associative shots: the head and sholders of a woman, a crumbling Victorian chimney stack, a forlorn row of houses, cobblestones, discarded rubbish, and a final tracking shot of a high wall.

Narrated by celebrated modernist author and filmmaker BS Johnson, March! documents the TUC-instigated protest, on 21 February 1971, against the Industrial Relations Bill, which was subsequently passed by parliament in August of that same year. The film records the assembly of protestors (in Hyde Park) and a march through the streets of Central London to Trafalgar Square.

Made in 1968 at the invitation of the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts), B.S. Johnson's animated take on Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes' (1918) - precursors of 'concrete' or 'visual' poetry - is both a cheeky two-fingered salute to French Modernism, and an irreverent homage to surrealism.

Directed by B.S. Johnson.

A poet of forty wanders about the beach, changes his clothes when he feels like it, reads his poetry, reminisces engagingly, and reflects on life. Looking rather like Max Bygraves gone to seed, he keeps up a patter full of original jokes, interspersed with powerful verse about life and death.

Are tower blocks obsolete? Alison and Peter Smithson are British architects with an international reputation. Currently working on a new development in Poplar, they demonstrate their belief in a practical alternative to tower blocks; a substitute, in their opinion, as new and relevant for London as the first Georgian square.