I’m deranged…
The Enlightenment section of the October edition of
‘The Image’ is a fourteen minute short about an artist (Michael Byrne) who is haunted by ‘The Boy’ (played by Bowie), who is also the subject of the artist’s painting…even if the actual painting does look more like Iggy Pop than David Bowie. Judge for yourself…the painting was used on the cover of the aforementioned ‘The Pitt Report’, below.
The dialogue-less story revolves around the artist trying to despatch the boy by clumping him around the skull with a statuette, giving him a sound beating, and stabbing him. The hapless painter obviously considers the young man a bit of a nuisance, particularly as the boy bounces back from each attempt on his life in the best tradition of later Hollywood films such as ‘Fatal Attraction’.
Filmed during September 1967, in a derelict house near London’s Paddington, the film required David to stand on a window ledge while buckets of water were thrown over him to simulate rain. Fred Dellar points out that the young actor received the princely fee of £30, “plus an extra fiver because the deluge ruined his shirt and shoes.”
While ‘The Image’ may not be remembered as making a particularly important contribution to the world of cinema, it is a great document of a very handsome young David Bowie as evidenced at the start of this piece.
If BowieNetters such as SusanS have not seen the film before, they should be warned that they could find some scenes distressing, as David does get handled rather roughly!
On a completely tenuous note…while searching for a decent grab to use for this piece I noticed a striking similarity between one particular shot and one of my very favourite self-portraits of David, ‘D Head V’. See the animation below for my easy comparison, but please be patient as it’s a big file. Are you experiencing a bit of déjàvu here?
“What is Blammo on? We don’t look anything like each other!”