If you are of a certain age, you’ll probably remember the
terrorising thrill of discovering the lurid covers of many a VHS in a local
video shop. These covers in turns horrifying and exciting, they often presented
a ménage of screaming faces and shining weapons. Or the hero grimacing as
things explode around them and as this was the early 80’s a quasi-medieval
figure on a motorbike smashing through some recognisable (American) landmark in
a post-nuclear landscape.
Or that’s how I remember it.
Of course the imagery that adorned the packets these films
came in often bared no, or little, relation to anything in the film. Though those
airbrushed images influenced a generation of film makers, as much as the films
themselves. The imagery, the tropes of these films (young girls, backwaters, weird
locals etc.) all filtered into the popular imagination. They were even parodied
by one of instigators of the genre, Wes Craven and his Scream series.
All this sort of filters through my mind as I look around
Jamie Shovlin’s Hiker Meat at the Cornerhouse, an exhibition about the
recreation of a film that didn’t or doesn’t exist. On entering the gallery we
enter a false history, an alternative time line detailing the production
history of this thing called ‘Hiker Meat’. It’s very complex featuring as it
does an imaginary band producing a soundtrack for an imaginary film, this level
of fiction is supported by a collection of memorabilia. A kind of meta mythology
of special created props, costumes, posters, video covers and lobby cards, a
very good detail.
It’s all great fun. I lot of attention has gone into this it
reflects that fanboy interest in things like the difference between
international cuts. As a follower of cult films, and having seen the various
cuts of Blade Runner, I see the strange magic where in these pragmatic
alterations become mythologised and fetishized. Where the myth of what wasn’t
made becomes bigger then what existed.
An example of that could be Jodorowsky’s Dune.
This is where the power of this exhibition lies, as I progress
through the exhibition I become less enamoured with the material. The stuff
about the making of the film makes it feel more solid, pricks the mythology
makes it real. I want to have more, or should of stopped at the point where
that spoke more about the production of the myth surrounding a film, how the
fans create a fiction around another fiction.
Throughout my time in Hiker Meat I’ve been thinking about
Boards of Canada last album ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’. I think about this because
the music was influenced by the electronic soundtracks of the era that Hike
Meat is supposed to come from. In essence Tomorrow’s Harvest offered a
narrative and soundtrack for a non-existent film. What Tomorrow’s Harvest
offers that I feel that Hiker Meat doesn’t is an I guess a space to be filled
by the viewer’s imagination.
That may be unfair I’ve spent more time with Tomorrow’s
Harvest then I have with Hiker Meat.
The fictional film at the Hiker Meat is most successful when
it is fictional. When its promise lies within the salacious (and quite
beautiful posters) and within the details the goes into creating the ephemera
that supports the myth. Maybe like the exploitation films that inspired it the
film that is Hiker Meat can’t live up to its promise. Which, maybe
paradoxically, makes its absolutely right.
