AUTOPSIES: THE AFTERLIFE OF DEAD OBJECTS

Image above: Rover 100 (1960)

Modernity has brought with it cars which can reasonably be expected to start and stop upon demand and can be owned and operated by the non-mechanically minded. One of the developments which made this possible was the widespread introduction in the 1970s of electronic ignition which now provides the ‘spark’ to internal combustion engines in all modern cars. Prior to this, engines were fired by a ‘distributor’, which was the means of routing high-voltage from the ignition to the sparking-plugs in the right firing order.

At the heart of the distributor is the ‘dead-object’ which has focused my attention this month: the Lucas 45D Distributor Rotor Arm [see image below]. It is a small cylindrical moulding about the size of a wine-cork and made of plastic and brass. During the 1960s, a rotor arm could be obtained new for about 5 shillings (25 pence). They are now available from specialist dealers to owners of old cars for £5 to £10. Although technically obsolescent, this tiny component is essential to keep an old car running.

The manufacturer of the rotor arm was the Lucas Electrical Company, founded by Joseph Lucas in Birmingham in 1872, the same year that the petrol engine was first patented and a decade or more before the introduction of the first motor-car. In spite of its dominant market-share for over a century in electrical components for motor vehicles, the Lucas company had a poor reputation for the reliability of their light bulbs and other electrical car accessories. For this reason, the company was known among British motorists as ‘The Prince of Darkness’ and spawned a host of rueful jokes among customers about the dependability of their products. (Sample: ‘Lucas, the inventor of the intermittent windscreen wiper’).

‘My’ dead-object (the Lucas 45D rotor arm) qualified incontrovertibly as deceased on a recent visit to France in my 1960 Rover 100. It failed on a country road not far from Alençon as dusk was falling one Sunday evening last month. In Lucas tradition, the rotor arm gave no hint of impending failure. It just stopped sending current to the sparking-plugs and the engine died instantly. Trying to trace the fault was vexing and unproductive as night fell and dinner in Bayeux looked increasingly unlikely. It is now that the Deus ex machina intervenes. A French registered Jaguar E-Type Coupé c. 1964 pulled up beside our stricken Rover. The owner transpired to be British and, within minutes, had not only diagnosed the fault but produced from his tool-kit a spare 1960s Lucas 45D rotor arm which was fitted and fired the engine into life immediately. As I write this, it still seems to me to be a very improbable story that a fifty-year old obsolete British electrical component should find its way to a roadside in rural France on a Sunday evening at the precise moment that it was needed.

All of this set me thinking about the role played by Jaguar E-Types in films. They are invariably driven by heroes who save situations or put wrongs to right. Cool operators including Sean Connery in Thunderball (1965) and Michael Caine in The Italian Job (1969) drive E-Types. The car makes an appearance in The Big Sleep (1978), The Odessa File (1974) as well as featuring in contemporary episodes of The Saint and The Avengers TV series. An E-type Jaguar is also one of the stars of Just Jaecken’s Emmanuelle (1974). [Source: Internet Movie Cars Database]

Rover 100 cars play a very different role, often as background vehicles in street-scenes to evoke the 1960s period, as in Quadrophenia (1979) where ‘Sting’, who plays a bell-boy at a Brighton hotel, unloads luggage from a Rover 100 driven by a dapper hotel guest [see IMCDb]. The Rover represents professional, middle-class, well-heeled middle Britain in the 1960s [see Rover P4 videos] and was driven typically by doctors, solicitors and bank managers [1]  It epitomised a set of values and a way of life which may be said to have disappeared in the years following the events of May 1968 in Paris and their international repercussions. Film appearances include The League of Gentlemen (1959) and The Spy who came in from the Cold (1965) as well as providing the authentic period back-drop for recent films (An Education, 2009) and for the TV series Agatha Christie’s Marple.

So there they were by the side of a French country road. The E-Type Jaguar driven by the hero who solved all our problems and vanished into the night, and the Rover 100, with its stately image and erratic British electrics. And deep in the heart of the broken-down Rover was a dead-object: a Lucas 45D rotor arm manufactured in Birmingham England 50 years ago by ‘The Prince of Darkness’.


Simon Rothon

A bout de souffle (dir. Jean-Luc Godard) first came out in cinemas in France on 16 March 1960. Members of the Autopsies Group will no doubt be turning to their copy with fresh eyes on the lookout for objects now absent from everyday life (Patricia's vinyl collection, the many tools of the trades of journalists and photographers, the operator controlled telephone system, etc. etc.) In the meantime, this clip from a French television programme broadcast on 25 March 1960 shows an interview with jazz pianist Martial Solal who performed the original music for the film. Solal explains he discovered jazz aged 15 when American troops arrived in Algiers in 1943, and jazz records began to be played on the radio, introducing the music of Art Tatum, Kenny Wilson and Benny Goodman. Inspired by the editing techniques of Godard's film, Solal says he found it easy to come up with the refrains to 'punctuate' the sequences.


Fifty years on, A bout de souffle looks, and sounds, a fresh as ever. 

To put you in the mood for the upcoming Found Footage Film Night, hosted by the Autopsies group on 9 December, don't miss Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (L'Enfer), currently showing in selected cinemas.

Began in 1964, l'Enfer had an unlimited budget, an all star cast, and Clouzot as a director obsessed with creating a new visual language for cinema. After scores of screen tests and three weeks of location shooting the film was never completed, and the 185 reels of film produced were left abandoned for decades. The present release is a documentary that tells the story of the film that never was, and mixes interviews with the original crew with a montage of Clouzot's 35mm rushes.

The story line of the intended is film was never going to change the course of cinema history, but the visual treatment may have, as the quite extraordinary sequence of experiments with colour and sound shows. The documentary's reconstruction of the film, occasionally adding sound to the rushes, and recreating key dialogue with actors reading the original script, is subtle and well judged, leaving the shimmering found film footage to take centre stage.

Further information from BFI Southbank: http://bit.ly/8MbTef

Jacob Paskins