Shooting The Past....1

...a Stephen Poliakoff fan I, from the moment haughty Peggy Ashcroft and self-obsessed Michael Kitchen so marvellously clashed in 'Caught on a Train'.

I, to this day, cannot ask for a railway 'ticket' without attempting the clipped Mittel-European accent and aggressive intonation of Dame Peggy's character. (Quite off-putting that to the average BR - as was - Inspector of Tickets, which of course adds to the innocent fun.)

See it if you haven't, but skip for now along to a much later work 'Shooting the Past'. There you will find the heavenly Lindsay Duncan grappling with the wonderful Timothy Spall, curators of a great and decaying photographic archive, as they both seek to thwart the evil archive-closing American Liam Cunningham. (And, in passing to note, Emilia Fox with more gumption than ever she shows as that drippy little pathologist in latter-day 'Silent Witness'. H and I are at one in wanting to give her a good shake in that show, but not here.)

These three, Poliakoff and photography as recorder and keeper of the past. It really doesn't get much better. The nub of the piece is that hard times having fallen, the archive must go, must be dispersed, to make way for a thrusting new Business School.

Duncan, through Spall, eventually though persuades Cunningham that the archive must be preserved as a unity - not the best creamed off for auction to art or ad houses with rest discarded as so much waste - because they can lead him, by their photographs of ordinary people, from his present to his grandmother's past.

She - following Spall's clues - takes Cunningham on a journey through three generations of his family (a complex, emotionally charged and possibly murderous past) until before his until then doubting eyes he is shown a photograph of himself as a young boy with his mother meeting this magnificent grandmother.

Proof positive. Seeing is indeed believing. All there in black and white. And so forth.

Naturally the archive survives. Though Spall doesn't quite. In making so many connections he has become quite disconnected. A sacrifice. Touch of the Tarkovsky's there, and no worse for that.

Is there though, you ask, a point to this Poliakoff paean other than that in itself? Well yes there is, though this is not it. For today I have 'done a Cunningham' and my past too has been well and truly shot. Oh yes indeed it has.

But do not rush me to these connections or I too, as Spall, shall disconnect. A moment to frame the print before the exhibition....