Surveillance Films Celebrates the Work of Director/Producer Peter Robinson
February 1st, 2010 • Uncategorized • Comments Off 
Some of the films Directed/Produced by Peter Robinson about Dr. R.D. Laing
- “Asylum”
- “R.D. Laing in the USA”
- “Breathing and Running”
- “Psychiatry and Violence”
- “Conversations with R.D. Laing”
- “Approaches Part I: R.D. Laing Talks with “Jane” and Part II: Dr. Harold F. Searles Talks with “Jane””
Spring, 2011
Surveillance Films is thrilled to be involved with a major project which will soon be announced.
December, 2010
Asylum Featured at Mary Barnes Exhibit
Asylum Featured at a Major Exhibition of the Work of Mary Barnes: In 1965 radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing co-founded an experimental therapeutic community at Kingsley Hall in Bow, East London. Presenting herself on the brink of a serious mental breakdown, Mary Barnes (1923-2001) was Kingsley Hall’s first resident. Accompanying the main exhibition will be Abraham Segal’s Coleurs Folie (1986) and Asylum.
Peter Robinson’s film “Asylum” at the Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019
(212) 708-9400
When my late-father’s documentary “Asylum” was first released in 1972, it was chosen by Karen Cooper (LISTEN HERE to her interview on NPR about the event and “Asylum”) to kick-off the first season of Film Forum after she assumed stewardship of that now landmark NY theater.
We are thrilled, touched and honored that Ms. Cooper has just selected “Asylum” to open MoMA’s celebration of her illustrious 40-year tenure as Film Forum’s director – Karen Cooper: Carte Blanche, 40 Years of Documentary Premieres at Film Forum.
– Kenneth Robinson, NYC
(As spam deterrence the following would need to be entered in standard email format: Ken at SurveillanceFilms dot com).
Update: “Asylum’s” gala opening of the festival of 40 years of documentary favorites, and all evenings sold out — thrilling. Karen Cooper’s introduction of the film was so moving. A few nights later I introduced the film at Museum of Modern Art and here is what I read:
My name is Kenneth Robinson, I’m the son of the director and producer of “Asylum”, Peter Robinson. My dad died in 1991. I’m also the godson of the cinematographer and editor of “Asylum”, Richard Adams. I’ve known Dick Adams as family my whole life.
I was 3 years old when my dad and Dick made Asylum, so my recollection of the production of “Asylum” is a little hazy. I hope Dick’s is better. He’ll join us after the film for some Q&A if you’d like to stay.
I just wanted to take a minute – two minutes at most – to express from all of us the deepest appreciation to Laurence Kardish and all of MoMA Film and of course in particular to Karen Cooper. We are all thrilled touched and honored that more than once she chose Asylum to open such important runs — The first season after she assumed stewardship of the now landmark Film Forum in 1972 – and now again the night before last, to open this Karen Cooper: Carte Blanche documentary festival.
When “Asylum” was first released in 1972, it was a small 16mm film – a documentary yet – in search of a theater. Luckily, “Asylum” was offered by Film Forum, and by Karen Cooper. It was this, “Asylum’s” initial run that allowed the film to be seen and recognized by critics, including the NY Times. I sometimes wonder what sort of life it would have had, possibly if any, without Film Forum, without Karen Cooper.
Growing up, I saw in my dad’s documentary-filmmakers circles something many of you know well… that prior to high quality video let alone digitalization (long before dvds and vhs) the funds to properly store celluloid film masters so often simply faded away from lack of light on a small film, especially back then for documentaries. Without the light and attention, without someone giving it a home -- a theater — too many films decayed and faded out for good.
The small films, and the documentaries especially, that survived, owe their lives largely to venues like Film Forum and to people like Karen Cooper.
Today, Film Forum, Karen Cooper and her colleagues raise up necessary works above a wildfire of inane, machine-gun media from Hollywood blockbusters and youtube that have shutdown so many smaller independent theaters leaving behind the scorched earth of strip malls. What’s blasted aside is often whatever just whispers for a closer look, for a sensitive approach, maybe some patience to begin with, (if only to look past its technical modesty compared to the razzle-dazzle bulldozing over it). Anything that just asks for an audience to not just show up as an escape, but to really attend.
“R.D. Laing in the USA”, which dad directed and produced after “Asylum”, included a wonderful scene in which Dr. Laing offers advice to a young student of psychiatry. It’s a point I’ve heard on audio or read that Laing made many times — reminding students that the Latin derivation of the word “therapist” meant first to “attend”, “to be with”, fully present, to listen and observe with care, patience, compassion, without manipulation.
Watching “Asylum”, it’s not hard to imagine why Laing and the residents trusted my dad and Dick Adams. Sensitively, compassionately, without manipulation they showed how things were inside Archway.
When I was younger I complained to my dad that “Asylum” didn’t have more manipulation, at least some more captions — Why are there are no labels as to people’s roles?! – “Dad, are we watching a “crazy person” or a psychiatrist — by the way, a therapist or real psychiatrist – or just a visitor who is or is not crazy? What is their diagnosis?! Why didn’t you have some narration, statistics, footage of the lobotomies in mental hospitals, newfilm from the war overseas and in the streets, all to backdrop their attempts to forge some real peace and understanding inside Archway. Where are the labels to tell me whether to trust who I am looking at?”
No captions, no white coats, no labels. “The doctors have wilder hair than the residents,” someone said to me yesterday. The context changes in some ways and doesn’t in others. The older I get the wiser the film gets. (I read a 1972 press release yesterday in which my dad mentioned that when he brought me, as a three year-old, to visit Archway during production I trusted everyone because they all let me eat spaghetti directly off their plate).
Today so many documentaries give you all sorts of data, probably far too much. Perhaps they’d give you what each resident’s diagnosis might be, all the degrees the talking heads have earned, then an arrow that rolls in to remind you what website to visit afterward for more biographical information. It’s unsettling not to be instructed on people’s roles.
In “Asylum” residents act as caregivers just as much as the therapists, and sometimes anyone can seem it’s them that are standing in the way of care, maybe because it seems they’re too permissive… or maybe not permissive and open enough. No roles, no ideology that doesn’t seem to break down here. Disturbance ebbs and flows. No ready-made wrap ups and revelations.
In Film and in so many other ways, along with my dad, Dick Adams was and is a mentor to me. For many years, as he helped my friend and me on our Super 8 spy films, I loved hearing his stories that when he was our age he spent his teen-age years making 8mm murder mysteries and war movies too.
My father met Dick when they were both working on “To Be Alive” Francis Thompson’s Oscar-winning three-screen film for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. After “Asylum”, Dick’s credits included cinematographer/editor on William Miles’ “Men of Bronze”, about a Harlem regiment in World War One, and Miles’ PBS series “I Remember Harlem”. Dick’s own film “Citizens” is considered one of the best on Poland’s Solidarity movement. Again, if you’d like to stay after the film we’ll be having Q&A with Dick Adams.
Thank you so much for attending.
– Kenneth Robinson, 2010
Karen Cooper: Carte Blanche – 40 Years of Documentary Premieres at Film Forum
Karen Cooper became the director of Film Forum in 1972, two years after its founding as an alternative space for independent cinema on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. For the past twenty years, Film Forum has inhabited a three-screen movie house in the West Village, where it continues to present an array of international films that confront diverse social, political, historical, and cultural realities.
To celebrate Film Forum’s fortieth anniversary and the crucial role Cooper has played in keeping it a vital part of New York’s film culture, MoMA’s Department of Film invited her to curate an exhibition of nonfiction films that premiered at Film Forum. While many of the films are drawn from MoMA’s own collection, some have been loaned by distributors and filmmakers, to whom we are very grateful. Just a glance at the titles she chose gives a sense of the diversity and richness of Film Forum’s offerings through the years. Cooper supplements several of the screenings with complementary short films, a staple of Film Forum’s cutting-edge programming. The following film description is excerpted from materials written by Cooper for Film Forum’s original presentation.
1972. USA. Directed by Peter Robinson. R. D. Laing, Scottish author and therapist, has shaken the foundations of traditional psychiatric therapy by treating the schizophrenic experience as a sane response to an insane environment. Robinson and his crew lived in Laing’s therapeutic community in London for six weeks during the spring of 1971. Here is the first filmed record of Laing explaining his theories and the institution that was born of them. There were between fifteen and eighteen people in the community during filming, and it is a tribute to Mr. Robinson’s sensitivity and discretion that he was able to capture their lives with a minimum of interference. 95 min.
Please become a fan of the film’s Facebook fan club – “Asylum: R.D. Laing” on Facebook.
In 1971, filmmaker Peter Robinson and a small crew entered a world of anarchic madness and healing compassion unlike any other. The resulting film, Asylum, records their seven week stay in radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing’s controversial Archway Community — a London row-house where the inmates literally run the asylum. Laing’s conviction that schizophrenics can only heal their shattered “self” where they’re free and yet are held responsible for their actions, challenged patients, doctors and, in Asylum’s incredible document, the filmmakers, to live communally and peacefully.
“I think it’s possible to get lost here,” offers one of the uneasy medical volunteers plunged into Archway’s tribal society. Fiercely intellectual David demands attention by engaging anyone and everyone in an unending and increasingly menacing illogical discourse. Consumed by the emotional need that has claimed her sanity, beautiful, lost Julia regresses to infancy. In one astonishing scene, a patient’s father blithely explains that he has hired a girl to date his nearly catatonic son. As Archway’s residents are pushed to the point of confrontation by David’s belligerence, these and other vivid real life characters are “explored but not exploited by this enterprising but humanly decent film.” (The New York Times)
A documentary treasure built from truthful moments of astonishing tension and grace, Asylum takes on a gripping narrative strength usually only seen in fiction. Hailed as “beautifully done” by The Village Voice at the time of its 1972 release, Asylum has since become “a model of cinema verité.” (The New York Times).
More than any psychoanalyst of the past 50 years, R.D. Laing disrupted the subject-object paradigm that had shaped clinical theory from Freud on. Laing insisted on a practice based on identifications, not on objectifications. The authority of interpretation was to be grounded in either a momentary or prolonged participation in the other’s “condition”.
Donald Moss, M.D.
Faculty , New York University Psychoanalytic Institute
Clinical Assoc. Professor of Psychiatry, State University of New York
(For more on Dr. Laing, visiting this Wikipedia page is not a bad place to start).
Critical Acclaim for “Asylum”:
“Almost terrifyingly direct and involving… A film can’t compete with print when it comes to examining the complexity of ideas, but it would be hard for any journalist writing about Laing or Kingsley Hall to match the impact made by Asylum. Directed by Peter Robinson, Asylum is a model of cinema verite. […] Although the dialogue in Asylum is bizarre as it is painful, truly tragicomic in a way that Beckett and Pinter would be stretched to equal, the characters can’t be kept at an emotional distance. Asylum takes the key away from the audience - and makes excitingly dangerous connections.” - Martin Knelman, Toronto Globe and Mail, 1974
“Peter Robinson’s Asylum, artless and unpretentious, is really a communiqué from some other, unexplored subcontinent of the soul. […]….sucks one in totally with its eloquence, giving, in the manner of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, form, sound, and substance to individual anguish.” - John Wykert, Psychiatric News, 1974
“Asylum is a fascinating documentary—both as a period piece and for its theater-of-the-absurd pathos.”
- J. Hoberman, Village Voice, 2003
“Robinson is clearly sympathetic to Laing, but the director wisely feels no compulsion to squelch the thorny questions that arise. Should people with such diverse problems be treated together? Is adequate supervision possible in a relaxed communal environment? What is the proper distance between doctors and patients? While Archway - and Robinson - can’t offer ideal answers, anyone familiar with the systemic abuses of power that Wiseman catalogued knows that just provoking these queries was a sign of progress.” - Darren D’Addario, Time Out, 2003
“Unavoidably there are some tense moments, and they are explored but not exploited by this enterprising but humanly decent film […] And as a film it passes the fairly basic test - again, unlike so many documentaries - of letting its subject essentially define and express itself. [… ] …suggests just enough about the world at large to make “Asylum” seem a not unreasonable place to be.” – Roger Greenspun, The New York Times, 1972
“[Asylum] The only thing we have in film that shows what we think works for – well, for people who feel that society is destroying them.”
- R. D. Laing
Today’s featured “Asylum” review…
by Kim Morgan
For the direct link to Ms. Morgan’s review, see Sunset Gun . Her reviews are widely read both here and at many other venues and publications including MSN.
“David…will you please stop talking. Please David. Please be quiet David…”
These are the urgings of beautiful, disturbed Julia, one inmate or rather, tenant in Peter Robinson’s 1972 documentary Asylum — a movie that should be re-discovered as one the greats of documentary filmmaking. A superlative example of late ’60s, 1970’s cinema verite, direct-cinema, Robinson’s picture shares much in common with The Maysles Brother’s Grey Gardens, Frederick Wiseman’s High School and Errol Morris’ Vernon, Florida. Without standard voice-over narration and nary an introductory statement (there is short scroll at picture start) the filmmaker shunts us into this world — one that’s frequently funny, terribly sad and continually fascinating. Once you settle into the place, you don’t want the movie to end. After recently receiving a lovely, heartfelt email from the film’s cameraman/editor and in effect co-director, Richard Adams, (whom I will post an interview with soon) I wanted to watch the picture, yet again, and run (now) an even longer piece on this fascinating document every cinephile must watch.
The picture begins with R.D. Laing, the controversial Scottish psychiatrist who, in the ’60s started the anti-psychiatry movement, an idea based on the theory that insanity was less disease and more social construction. Instead of placing the mentally ill (largely schizophrenics) in white-walled, overly-medicated hospitals, Laing’s “patients” lived communally in “safe houses” where they had free reign to subsist as they please. Laing believed that autonomy and understanding were necessary to aid mental health and that self reliance would make a person stronger and a successful part of the community. To Laing, there’s no reason these people must be outcasts.
Robinson’s study consisted of a seven week stay in 1971 at the Archway Community safe house in London, a row house on a residential East End street that harbors a dog, a cat, a bird, and a bunch of schizophrenics. But of course, the patients (some looking like modern day hipsters) are more than their disease as the film so starkly and often, eloquently reveals. We see them discuss feelings of terror in a very rational manner or ramble on conspiracy-theory-like about computers and various notions that range from gibberish to somewhat profound declarations. We see patients comfort each other with words like “don’t listen to them, they’re only voices” to rubbing heads together in physical bonds of empathy. We also see them ignore one another, cry out and fight — and by film end, fight a lot — particularly with one inmate – David, who becomes such a nuisance to the others that they engage in serious discussion to eject him.
David — a handsome, startlingly blue-eyed man in his 40’s or early 50’s, talks with an almost Richard Burton lilt — but blathers incessantly and demands attention wearing dramatic scarves and, in one scene, a string of woman’s beads. He’s as mad as a hatter, but you also get the sense that he knows partially, some of the trouble he’s starting and is remaining obstinate to change (which isn’t so crazy when you think of people in the “sane” world). Nevertheless, he hits people, screams, scares Julia — an angel faced girl who bears an uncanny resemblance to Gwyneth Paltrow (only lovelier) — and continually utters “People in glass houses should not throw stones!”
As we see in drama worthy of Shakespeare’s crazy/lovely Ophelia, mental illness is certainly not reserved for the ugly. Julia (as well as a few other women in the house) looks more like a Roman Polanski heroine, crawling about a la Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, a blonde beauty quaking with fear but giving in to the sporadic joke. As she rocks back and forth with internal horror and eventually reverts to an infantile state, we later learn that she believes she had let off the atom bomb and “made the air bad.” Her family takes her out of the house for a spell (they are distrustful of the experiment) but return the beauty when others beckon her back. She sits in bed and tells the filmmakers of the stay, showing them a hair tie, and how her family wanted her to look pretty and presentable. You can only imagine what Julia’s parents think when they behold their beautiful daughter lost in a maze of madness.
But I couldn’t help but think that had Julia discovered some Swinging London or New York scene or kept the company of an Edie Sedgwick, she might not have seemed so nuts. You get the feeling Syd Barrett could have walked into the place (she does talk delicately of having a guitar and singing) and swept her out of there (I want to see Julia, like Emily, play). But then I remember how Edie and Syd ended up. But then, for their short brilliant, trailblazing moments, they lived. And created. Is Julia better off? Is she really experiencing life? A life that might become “normal?” And should she ever even have to live a “normal” life? Why should she? Since we tend to mythologize crazy people, especially from the late ’60s early ’70s counter-culture, it’s a good question. But looking at our current overly medicated society, in which people pop Prozac and Lexapro and Wellbutrin or whatever is readily available instead of simply enduring some hardship and perhaps, learning from them, or even fueling creativity from it, I champion these people. These people endure real mental illness. Mental illness is hard. And it’s tough, if not impossible to find your way out of that Shining-esque topiary maze. But that beautifully scary place can somtimes provide insight. And maybe you need a human hand, even a “crazy” hand, to guide you through, at least some kind of understanding – or remain lost forever.
Which leads me to another compelling, heartbreaking moment — when a young tenant’s father arrives to fetch him for indefinite time away. Talking to the film’s resident therapist and rent collector, he admits to hiring his son a girlfriend (not a very pretty one, he points out) with the hope that she’ll give him the extra confidence to “hold his chin up” and feel like a man. Fearing his son will go the other way without some female companionship and clearly, failing to understand the depth of his son’s problems, we watch the suited-up son leave after he’s shyly informed others his desire to stay. He’s too afraid to tell his father.
Watching the personalities emerge as they work chores, prepare food or…write on the walls creates the film’s “characters” within its loose structure. Omitting any opinion concerning Laing’s procedures, the film demands that you study it yourself, deciding if you think this kind of living is actually helping these people.
With my modern entertainment mind thinking toward banal Reality TV, I couldn’t help but consider how much more interesting these people were than the generic faced dolts on shows like Big Brother and wished the picture were an actual series. As the people of Archway are “crazy” they are not constantly acting up to the camera and often appear oblivious to the two-man crew. If focused on, they appear to be talking as they probably always do and often give the impression of bemusement. With that, there’s never a feeling of exploitation — if they don’t want to talk to the cameras, they simply walk on by. They’re not seeking their 15 minutes. You certainly won’t see that on Reality TV.
And sticking in the thoughts of Reality television, there’s even a Survivor-like moment when the group has a meeting to, essentially, vote David off. But unlike the tricks of television, there’s no closure and David stays (maybe) with an end discussion of his past jobs in computers and the military. Speaking, for once, in a lucid manner, you’ll mull over the truth of his statements and, suddenly he doesn’t seem so crazy anymore. In fact, after this mind expanding experience, the world seems crazy and sane all at once.
An important, affecting and masterful document, Asylum is a re-discovered treasure that demands viewing. Direct and powerful yet obtuse and mystifying, the film and its people remain etched in your mind. You’ll watch them again, hoping to glean more and only to become frustrated when you cannot. Fittingly, the film’s so good that it becomes…maddening.
THE VILLAGE VOICE
IN SEARCH FOR SAFE HAVENS: SOUND AND FURY
By J. Hoberman (excerpt, omitting first half on Spider)
For the late psychiatrist (and student of existentialism) R.D. Laing, madness was a form of self-creation or role-playing. It was Laing’s radical contention that schizophrenics were driven mad, usually by their families, and sought protection by adopting the mask of a “false self.” Conventional treatment only exacerbated the condition. In lieu of hospitalization, Laing advocated safe asylums, therapeutic communities where patients lucky enough to afford them might freak freely amid kindred spirits and doctors living as their equals.
A charismatic counterculture oracle on the order of fellow academics Marshall McLuhan, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman Brown, Laing reached the peak of his fashion 30 years ago. In 1972, the same year that Ken Loach doggedly dramatized Laingian therapy in Wednesday’s Child, Canadian filmmaker Peter Robinson made an official documentary of the Archway Community, an experimental treatment center founded by Laing in the mid 1960s. It’s a place where the only rule, we’re told, is that the rent must be paid—in advance—every Monday.
Set in a London row house not unlike Spider’s, albeit far more cheerful and pleasantly situated, the Archway is populated by a gaggle of mainly young and generally well turned out Anglo-Americans. The women all have long hair; most of the men have beards. There always seems to be a healthy mess of macrobiotic nourishment simmering on the stove, and, as in a permissive kindergarten, the writing is on the walls: “Leon Has a Good Brain.”
The Archway’s ambience is at once laid-back and chaotic—with just a bit of Titicut Follies lunacy to keep the spectator alert. It’s unclear how much the filmmaking process contributed to the overall theatricality. The filmmakers did, however, take care to insure that their movie had its stars. In nearly the very first scene, an ethereal blond named Julia makes an indelible impression, hysterically complaining that “Uncle” David’s continual ranting about fascists and nuclear installations has become intolerable. One of the older patients, David demands attention with his sustained babble, bare chest, and glittering eye. Julia’s scene-stealing strategy is one of total regression—apparently to the age of six months.
Other patients are heard from throughout, as are their relatives. A lordly gentleman comes to Archway to visit his son—explaining at length, while the cab waits outside, his strategy for building the boy’s confidence. The idea of this omnipotent parent paying a girl to date his near catatonic son amply fulfills Laing’s worst sense of family relations. But David soon reoccupies center stage. Asylum ends with an all-house meeting called to discuss his obnoxious behavior—gratuitously striking the other inmates. Julia can’t stand the pressure and starts bawling; David gesticulates and acts “crazy” until the group leader manages to contact the extravagant madman’s inner “little boy.” A haunting postscript has David returned to himself—calmer, sadder, and, in the absence of his madness, unmistakably diminished.
Asylum is a fascinating documentary—both as a period piece and for its theater-of-the-absurd pathos. It would be illuminating to see a psychologically annotated version. Without overview, it plays like the inadvertent inspiration for Lars von Trier’s transcendentally snarky vision of a therapeutic commune, The Idiots.