For the past three years, following a friend's example, I've been posting every film I watch in the course of a given year to Facebook, and numbering them. In 2020, I watched 161 films, the last of which was Knives Out; in 2021 I watched 165, the last of which was Peter Greenaway's The Belly of An Architect. This year, so far, I have watched 77 films or so, the most recent of which was the Stewart Lee comedy special Snowflake. I say 'or so', because one of these films is literally a YouTube video, and in lieu of a poster or even a title card, I had to use its thumbnail. But I felt I had to include it, because it's possibly the most interesting film I've seen this year.
The most interesting film I've seen this year is Jackie O-men, the third film in the Escape from London series by Andy Sharp, whose English Heretic project was a big influence on Secrecy's Jurisdiction.
Neither of the previous films in the series, which are much more traditional video essays, prepares you for the droning, nightmarish collage of Jackie O-men. Inspired by Douglas Gordon's multimedia art piece Between Darkness and Light, in which both The Exorcist and The Song of Bernadette were projected onto the same gallery screen, Sharp mashes up shots from The Omen and the more recent biopic Jackie with his own shots of Brookwood War Cemetery. Sharp describes it as 'a melange of political tragedy': I read it as a cinematic equivalent of James Shelby Downard's wild conspiracy screed King-Kill 33, though thankfully without Downard's sometimes hectoring tone. However you read it, it's definitely an outlier in terms of the kind of content to be found on YouTube.
The English Heretic Collection, their anthology of Sharp's work published since 2003 under the EH brand, was at the time kind of an outlier in terms of Repeater Books' output when it was published, though since then intelligent, left-leaning occult material has become one of their strands along with more mundane culture 'n' politics stuff, a welcome development given how little occult literature manages to be either intelligent or left-leaning or indeed both. As someone attempting to mount an occult resistance to Brexit Britain in the aftermath of the 2019 electoral catastrophe, it was obvious that I would find much to draw on in Sharp's subversion of the chintzy world of England's theme park heritage.
As is the way of these things, of course, hardly anything I got from Sharp's book found its way into Secrecy's Jurisdiction, overtly at least. But I got a lot of stuff which added to the milieu I was working in: if I hadn't been reading Sharp's exegeses on Witchfinder General and Blood On Satan's Claw and the bizarre life of would-be royal kidnapper Ian Ball, I may not have come up with the central image of the collection in 'Time is a Flat Cercle'. And, as you might guess from the above, Sharp led me to a lot of amazing films: not just Witchfinder General but its director, Michael Reeves' previous effort, The Sorcerors; not just Blood On Satan's Claw but the creepy photography-as-alchemy horror flick The Asphyx; and, in the formula beloved of compilation album advertisers, many many more: Psychomania, The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, even, from a parenthetical aside, David Rudkin's bizarre Blakean sci-fi follow-up to Penda's Fen, Artemis 81, which is another of the most interesting films I've ever seen that can only be seen today on YouTube, in its case in an absolutely appalling YouTube rip which is somehow missing about four minutes of footage (and even missing that it's still four hours long, and barely even VHS quality, with fuzzy audio, at times quite stilted dialogue, and Sting. Obviously you should watch it immediately.).
In fact, if you read it only as a work of film criticism, you'll be richly rewarded (I actually bought my brother a copy of it as a birthday present with the instruction that he should watch every film Sharp mentions). But engaging with the deeper, weirder stuff that Sharp plunges into, his reflections on Winston Churchill's career as a druid or the wartime death of JFK's older brother (back in Jackie O-men territory again) and the connection between the writings of Kenneth Grant and 1970s Doctor Who, is a profoundly transformative process. It will not come as a surprise to readers that as well as having inspired elements of my last work, this is a book I've returned to in the course of working on the KCACO project: the 'Phantoms of Liberty' section, based on English Heretic's Britain at Occult War commemorations and their satire of this country's obsession with doubleyah-doubleyah-aye-aye have been especially useful in this regard.
It should be obvious from the last couple of entries that they constitute a sub-series, looking at the elements that went into Secrecy's Jurisdiction in the wake of its publication. Not everything I'm going to cover in this series is something I can entirely recommend - The Goblin Universe, which is in some way one of the most interesting books to be discussed, is a pretty prototypical example of the flaws of Fortean publishing of an earlier age, right down to its Colin Wilson introduction - but The English Heretic Collection is something I can recommend to anyone without equivocation. If 2020 hadn't been the year I read Neoreaction: A Basilisk it would have easily been the most interesting book I read that year.
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