Mol-tiverse of Madness: The Films of Mol Smith

 I came across the cinematic work of Mol Smith in the best possible way. I was flicking through Amazon Prime, late at night, and I'd had a few glasses of wine. I found Dark Matter, a low budget UK sci fi film, which was perfect for my late night needs. In the morning the memory of what I'd seen came in flashes: the sickly ochre light, the cramped, domestic quality of the film - it seemed to be completely confined to one house. Then there was the odd visualisation of the alien: a tiny, black wraith, whose scales washed off in the shower to reveal she was a visitor from the planet Italia Conti. It was such an unlikely, peculiar film - seemingly hand-made and clearly the product of a private vision, a feverish need. There was no way the script had been anywhere near a committee. This was some auteur shit. I looked up the director and found it was Mol Smith, who had also written the film. And another of his films was available on Prime. Tainted Love. 

This was a game changer. A story of gypsies, curses, lesbianism, angry mobs, apparently set in the same house as Dark Matter, and littered with a Smith trademark: his weird, fetishistic animations, strange, often gynecological fabulations. He has an eye for the ladies, does Mol, and his protagonists are attractive young women in summer dresses his camera pores over. There's a lot of milk-white skin on display, and the story-lines are full of little kinks and twists. 

I could find very little out about Mol. He appears to have been a digital photographer before becoming film-maker relatively late in life. His short film "The Artist" seems to be partly autobiographical, with regular leading man, Kemal Yildirim (a film-maker in his own right), playing an erotic photographer menaced by his own collages. These same works of art also appear in Tainted Love, and would appear to be by Mol's own hand. 

Smith's films are no longer on Amazon Prime. They can't be bought in the shops. I doubt they ever had a cinematic release. They don't seem like the sorts of films that enter competitions or win awards, unless they're very niche awards. I tracked his work down to a website named "On View Cinema" where for £5 a month you can find all of Smith's work, plus a couple of Kemal's. It's a list of over 50 titles, described by the filmmaker as "World Cinema, Art House, Dark Comedy, Horror, Thriller, and Sci Fi", which, I think, covers it.  

Smith has a core of actors he works with again and again, his own repertory company. Kemal, Polly Tregear, Sean Botha, Mel Mills, Tessa McGinn and various members of the Shanks Family Singers, all pile in in various permutations throughout his oeuvre. How he gets people to come back, time and time again, to be in these strange, obsessive films, that nobody will ever see, is surely testament to the man's charisma. There can't be any money in it, and there's less fame: it's a man making films in the same house, with the same people over and over again. This is the thing that fascinates me. He reminds me of Jess Franco, the Spanish director of literally hundreds of films, who seemingly had to make films as a function of existence. It was compulsive and undeniable, like eating or breathing. If Jess wasn't making a film he was dead. He was a film shark. But Franco had an industry about him: he'd fuck off to Madeira with his crew and Lina Romay,  shoot two or three films simultaneously, and be able to sell them all. Franco's films did appear in the cinema. Maybe not the best cinemas, and maybe as a supporting feature, but people saw them and he got paid and he moved on to the next one. As long as there was sex and violence, and an appetite for sex and violence, he had a job. Smith doesn't have that luxury, but he does have the internet. For a fiver his strange worlds can tumble into your laptop. 

His film The Chair To Everywhere, features Sean Botha and Polly Tregear as a father and daughter team of inventors, fiddling with a Heath Robinson teleportation device in a very familiar Oxfordshire home. Because this is a Smith joint, Tregear has to be naked in order to teleport. Oh, and her father has to garrote her on the point of transference for the machine to properly work. Sounds more trouble than it's worth, if I'm honest. Leave that garrote-your-daughter tech alone, Sean. 

He does send her off (after first extracting a filled tooth), but in the other chair a second naked woman arrives. What follows is a strange, misogynist parlour game: in order to get his daughter back, the inventor has to murder a succession of naked strangers in his living room. It's a peculiar, somewhat disturbing film, disquieting for its motives-what is a film whose endlessly repeating motif is the murder of naked women, trying to say? Is it commentary? Satire? Or an excuse to show a lot of tits. It starts with a quotation from Plato's "The Allegory of the Caves", so...

Smith's The Lorelei is the closest he's come to ordinary cinema. It does, approximately, what other films do: there are mysterious, repressed women, there are cops and robbers, there is a mysterious water-creature, played by one of the Shanks sisters, this time Lorie-Lanie. She plays a sad heiress who hires a private investigator to find out who killed her father. She, and everyone else, is in for a big surprise. There are elements of the supernatural here, bristling next to police procedural tropes, and at £37, 000 (according to IMDB) it's pretty big budget for Mol. It's probably the easiest point of entry into the Mol-tiverse. 

Unlike "The Quest for the Quantum Vagina", which genuinely does what it says on the tin. Annie Knox plays a woman falling behind with her rent, who visits a strange doctor in a familiar looking Oxfordshire house. He places what appears to be a silver love egg into her vagina for...reasons. As her housemate (Polly Tregear) is driving her home, she starts bleeding so they return to the doctor who, after investigating, well...discovers the Quantum Vagina. It's not dissimilar to Wolfgang Buld's Penetration Angst, but has the distinct advantage of being much shorter and far less unpleasant.      

Haunted is Smith at his most unapologetically leering. The camera is low, gutter-press low. The first time we meet Stacey Alford, our protagonist, (the only person in this film) she alights a car in a mini-skirt, flashing her stocking-tops. Another director might have cut to an establishing shot, a tight close up of her face, establishing mood. Not Mol. As she removes her Lidl shop from the car, he keeps the camera low, waiting for a glimpse of gusset. We don't see Stacey's face for the first minute twenty of the film. The camera spends more time on her cat-flap!* The film is called "Haunted", but if there is a clammily, spectral presence in this film, it's the viewer. We follow Stacey, unacknowledged, as she goes about her day, breathing down her neck, too close, the camera too intimately positioned to fully take her in. It flits about her, woozy, drunk on intimacy. It's like a home video by the Invisible Man. If Stacey is spooked by anything here it's the male gaze, or the Mol gaze. At one point the naked Stacey holds out a pair of knickers in her hand and they spontaneously combust. Oh, that Mol. 

In Non Compliance, a beautiful woman wakes up in a bin surrounded by Bodingtons cans. We cut to two other women driving around in a car (our POV is from the back seat). One of the women places a hand on the other one's knee. The rubbish tip girl - her small outfit perforated and stained - is wandering about Oxford. Mol keeps the camera low again, at one point having her walk over the camera so he can film up her skirt. Oh, that Mol. The woman breaks into a house. She seemingly has no memory and is surprised to find her photo there (though if she has no memory, is it clear that she knows the photo is her? No. No it is not). By now it will not surprise you that then gets in the bath for a protracted scrub. While in the bath she starts to have a fit, clambering out and onto the bathroom floor, the soundtrack wild with herky-jerky static electricity noises, like someone rubbing their hair with a balloon. In fact, at times it sounds exactly like a long, low protracted fart. I'm just imagining the howls of laughter emanating from the edit suite as Mol put this sequence together.     

I won't spoil the ending for you. It's a film in which a stained woman wakes up in Drayton Recycling Centre, and Mol continues in this vein for the entire film. He's committed to his concept and prudence and good taste better not get in his way - he'll steamroller those two impostors. 

In Which Witch, strong title, Polly Tregear and Annie Knox are back, and this time they're witches, two witches each, in fact. So that's four witches, then. These four witches must do battle to see which witch will snatch victory in a Wiccan Battle Royale. It's a simple plot: Annie appears in a small copse as a red witch in red lingerie, while her sister is a blue witch in blue lingerie. Polly is a black witch and a white witch, both with appropriate pants. They then do magical battle, in their underwear in the woods. And that's sort of it. At one point Annie goes to the loo, as Mol is quite into girls going to the loo in his films (it happens a lot).       

Polly's back for The Artist, though you need to put thoughts of Jean DuJardin jazz dancing far from your mind. This artist is a digital one from 2001 photographing Polly in the nip, so he can add digital Valkyrie Armour to her at a later date. As she's putting her pants on he stops her - he's had a great idea for a new photo, and we see the fruits of his inspiration, as a poorly animated dragon appears from between her legs. Polly is unaccountably taken with his photos of teenage girls dressed as dolls with their legs cut off. Even odder is the fact that, though she's a model, she's staying overnight in the photographer's house. While there, she hears a strange knocking noise and goes off to investigate...and once again, no spoilers here. But what I will say this is another film peppered with Mol's weird fixations: dismembered teenage girls, the weird animations, Kemal once again as a Mol-manque. He has an odd collection of tics and tells that trail through all of his work, weird sticky fingerprints on every frame, fat smears of Mol's DNA. 

I don't wan't you to think I'm slagging off the films of Mol Smith. (And I've only scratched the surface here) I mean, I have been a bit. They're a strange collection of neuroses and peculiar projections. But no one makes films like this. No one. And certainly not this many. Maybe, the elderly and dissipated Ken Russell made films comparable to these in his back garden.

 Mol makes his films with the same skeleton crew, the same actors, and I assume that's his house, and he just keeps having wild ideas he wants to imprint in the collective unconscious. His mad flights of sci-fi fancy, his peculiar femme fatales, his parables and homilies. I don't know how he can afford to do this, and I don't know what drives him - he's an indie-film Ahab, nailing a silver dollar to Polly Tregear's bare bum. 

As he says on the web-site: "We don't advertise. We rely on word of mouth. Our films are cult. Totally different from mainstream movies. They have a unique style, the fingerprint of writer/creator Mol Smith."      

He's not wrong. Mol Smith is a genuine outsider artist. A purveyor of nightmares in the heart of Oxford's dreaming spires. Seek him out. He's hard to find but worth finding. And like Disco Stu, he don't advertise. 

*It's an actual cat-flap. It's not a euphemism.