Famous Monsters of Film

John Mathews: I understand you first started making films with a strong science fiction and horror basis in and around your home town.

Roy Spence: Well it all began in the early sixties working in standard 8mm and 16mm and old audiotapes. Mainly horror, science fiction and turn of the century frock coat films. We liked costume piece stuff because we were influenced by the films we were seeing in the cinemas at the time. Italian stuff, things like ‘Black Sunday’, ‘Crypt of Horror’. We were also influenced by German expressionist film, then we moved up or down, depending on whatever way you want to look at it to the American drive-in movies. The Roger Corman style, which we got enchanted by, the teenage scene of ‘I was a Teenage Werewolf’ and ‘The Blob’. Some of the films we began to make were not so much copies of but tributes to them. We did are own version of ‘The Blob’ called ‘Keep Watching the Skies’, which features a drive in movie sequence filmed locally but supposedly set in America with U.S, left hand drive cars, a big rock and roll dance sequence, a sheriff and his car, teenagers, American style phone booths. The whole thing was based on Americana really.

The Spence Brothers

J.M. That’s an interesting contrast to use Northern Ireland people and locations to try and recreate all these notions of glamour and exotic far away American culture.

Noel Spence: We used local people and actors, anybody who could jive, especially for the rock and roll sequences. We did quite well with that and got number one in a big worldwide competition at the time called ‘The Ten Best’, which was organised by the National Film Theatre in London. It was a big influence to win ‘The Ten Best’ and we won quite a lot of them.

Roy: It was quite prestigious, you had guests like Jimmy Stewart presenting the trophies, Glenda Jackson, Jenny Agiter, Joan Collins, we met all those people in the late 60s and early 70s. It sounds awful boastful but its just a fact, it was a world-wide competition with over 500 entries. We got ten ‘Ten Best’ out of that and three of those were number ones.

J.M. You were working under very tight budgets.

Noel: The one thing that characterises our films is that it’s low budget and if I say we’ve made our name that way, it’s not being pretentious, we had practically no budget at all and you made your film by innovation and making do.

J.M. How did you develop all these special effects in the first place?

Roy: When we were working there were no courses or anything like that, you just had to do it yourself. We made films because we wanted to make them, not because there was any courses, degrees or grants, we just wanted to make films. We experimented, whatever worked we remembered and if it didn’t we forgot about it.

Noel: It’s such a different scene now especially equipment wise because people can just go to a shop and buy a camera which is going to give you perfect pictures and lip sync. When we were shooting films there was no connection between the camera and the tape recorder, so you had to devise all these ingenious methods to try and get the lip movement matching the sound. It was good to have that grounding, film was so expensive back then I would even drive miles to avoid a slice, editing in camera all the time, doing everything that shouldn’t be done. We always found poverty was a great discipline.

J.M. What drew you to making science fiction films in the first place?

Roy: That was always our interest, there was a magazine that came out called ‘Famous Monsters of Film’ in 1958 which was devoted entirely to horror film and that was our bible and we bought it every month, even the photographs were a great inspiration. There wasn’t the same range of T.V programmes back then, they only showed the odd film, no video recorders to tape them, so we used to record the soundtracks and listen to that.

Noel: What had a big effect on us at the time was the Quatermass series on T.V., which got us really interested in sci-fi. You’re talking about amateur films, we prefer to call them independent films but the word amateur is right in so far as nobody is getting paid for it. So you can’t argue or boss them about. Everything is rushed, they wouldn’t be given copies of the script till they got to the location. People get a line to learn and two minutes after learning it they were being filmed delivering the line with only one shot at it.

Roy: Even though now we maybe have more money or equipment we tend to work the same way, we still do everything in a rush, panicking, looking up to see if its going to rain.

Noel: We do workshops in places like the Nerve Centre in Derry and in two days we take a group of people who know nothing about film at all and we introduce them to the basics of film making. We hammer a script together on the first day and on the second we film it. So in two days you end up with a finished ten to fifteen minute film, from complete beginners, which are really good even though we say so ourselves.

Roy: I would go so far as to say that’s where our strength lies, working with actors and getting the best out of them.

J.M. Why did you built your own cinemas?

Noel: Cinema was always in the blood, something we have always wanted. When we were youngsters we had a cinema at home in our bedrooms.

Roy: When you say cinemas, we had a projector and a white ceiling with curtains on the wall. I suppose when we got our own houses and got married the next step was to build our own cinemas. They weren’t built as a distribution point. We were making films and we had somewhere to show them, one was not dependent on the other.

J.M. What sort of audience would you attract to your venues?

Noel: The cinemas we have built are strictly private, a lot of the shows I do are for people who like old films because there’s no use trying to show contemporary films, if you want to see a contemporary film you go to contemporary setting. We would show films that have a nostalgic value. Our cinemas have a strong 1950s feel to them. I suppose its nice for people to watch 50s films in a 50s style cinema, especially if they saw the film originally.

Roy: Another string to our bow, apart from building our own cinemas, we’ve built cinemas for other people. We get a great buzz out of that, converting an old garage, shed, cellar or roof space and converting it into a plush little cinema

Noel: We have a whole stock of original cinema fittings, red velvet tip up seats and we would tear the seats down, trying to recreate the ambience of a real cinema.

J.M. You mentioned earlier about taking your films to international competitions in London. What were people’s reaction to these strange sci-fi films and horror films made out in the backwoods of Co. Down, a place not normally associated with horror movies?

Roy: Northern Ireland at that time had a very strong reputation, apart from us there was filmmakers from Ballyclare, Belfast, Terry Mc Donald up in Derry, quite a few people from here. One of the theories, which I didn’t subscribe to, was that Northern Ireland didn’t and still doesn’t have its own native film industry: the people hadn’t an outlet for making films so they turned to making their own. That was a popular notion of why so much good stuff came out of N.Ireland.

Noel: The Northern Ireland Film Commission has since been formed and there’s an active film production scene in N. Ireland now. But this was pre N.I.F.C and there simply wasn’t anything, it was all amateur.

Roy: I think there was hardly a year were there wasn’t at least one in the ‘Ten Best’ from N.Ireland. We had a very strong reputation.

Noel: There was a lot of inter club competition from cine and film clubs

J.M. There must be a world of difference with all the funding bodies now, there were none?

Noel: You did it entirely on your own, funded, wrote the script, everything. When I started I did cameraman, lights, sound, wrote the songs, a whole one-man show. I suppose it was a bit of an ego trip in some ways but I didn’t look at it like that, I looked at it like if I didn’t do it, it wouldn’t be done, it was out of sheer necessity. You begged costumes from drama societies and if you happened to know someone who owned a pub you wrote a scene into your film so you could shoot inside it.

Roy: Or somebody who had a big American car, you would work that car into your film, you made use of what you had. When you read now what Ed Wood or Roger Corman did, it had an awful lot of parallels with what we were doing, purely inadvertently. We were begging things and doing all sorts of scams to get stuff, trying to get as much for as little as possible and exploit people as much as we could.

J.M. You seem to have a strong musical influence within your films, trying to incorporate song and dance numbers at some point within them?

Roy: We put a lot of Rock and Roll and Do Wop into it and all the films we make now, we try and incorporate a Do Wop song at the beginning or end or else playing in the background. A trademark almost, if there is a hotel scene, there’s a Do Wop number in the background. The early 50s films we made always had a rock and roll scene in them, teenagers with Jive sequences.

Noel: Some of the teenagers were a bit iffy.

Roy: Some of the teenagers were pushing forty, you disguised them as best you could. In ‘Keep Watching The Skies’ there was a big rock and roll sequence and a lot of them were losing their hair a bit, so the answer to that was I made all these motorcycle hats. If they arrived and were balding a bit they got the cap put on. If they still had hair we gave them two big wacks of bryl cream down the side, the sensitive director would say those with bryl-creamed hair get to the front and those with hats get to the back, it was great fun.

J.M. Do you see yourselves working as outlaw filmmakers working very much outside of the establishment and accepted approaches to filmmaking?

Noel: I suppose we are mavericks in that respect but it really does please us when someone we have worked with starts do well. Enda Hughes is a very good film director, you might remember he did ‘Flying Saucer, Rock and Roll’ which we did the special effects for. Enda has gone on and is now a very promising and successful young director and we would like to think we had some part in setting him on that road. Paul Walsh was another guy who we did a course in Armagh with and he was doing camera work and now he’s a trainee cameraman in London.

Roy: I tell you what were not good at and that’s paperwork: marketing, chasing grants, chasing money. I’d rather be out there and doing the thing, just enjoy doing it; we can’t be bothered with all that. When you ask are we outside the system, we are because we’re not patient enough to get involved in it. I’d say in our whole careers we’ve never got a grant for anything, we only got a couple of small grants from the Arts Council in the early days.

Noel: The sort of stuff were doing is not the sort of stuff they’re looking for, they’re looking for avant-garde stuff, we like beginnings, middles and ends in our films. What we’re doing is really a scaled-down version of commercial cinema. Without wanting to denigrate anyone, there have been film schemes, which have been around a few years in N. Ireland. Most of the films that have come about as a result of these schemes are a total waste of money, absolute rubbish and they get fairly substantial budgets of £15 – £20,000. More money than we ever thought possible.

J.M. It’s very encouraging and refreshing to see people making films purely out of a desire to just get out there and do it no matter what.

Roy: We went to an exhibition one time in the Golden Thread called the ‘Belfast Independent Film Festival’ run by Verity Peake. Two weeks before Premier ran their awards at the Waterfront with films whose budget was £20,000 each, and the B.I.F.F festival showed films made by people who had £20 or £30, just for the hell of it, no other reason. I know which one I enjoyed more, they handed round slices of pizza and bottles of beer, people had old videos and all sorts of gear to show it on, Hi 8 video, real low budget stuff but really inventive. I came away that night feeling really refreshed. As you say making films just for the sheer fun of doing it, not because were getting a grant.

J.M. You have obviously been involved in film for a number of decades, so what is your opinion of the state of local cinema and films in N. Ireland at the present time?

Roy: People say there’s a great deal of talent here, I don’t know if it’s a generation thing but I don’t see it. It sounds terribly conceited but I think there is more acting talent.

J.M. Apart from your workshops what film work are you engaged in at the moment?

Noel: We’re making a documentary called ‘Comber Bypass’, we do promotion and training stuff. We’re not really, in all honesty, doing fictional films outside of the workshops, simply because nobody wants to watch them now.

Roy: In the early days we could have run a film show in a hall down in Bangor and it would be packed, you try that now and you’d be lucky to get half a dozen. Even if you gave them free tickets and transport, they’d rather have a karaoke night or go to the pub. We thought when video came out and the technology became a lot easier that there’d be an absolute deluge of films but the opposite has happened. When the technology was difficult and making films was hard, people were making stuff; it was part of the challenge almost. When we look at a lot of the films now, you wonder how on earth you did it. We would film at night with electric cable stretched across fields and the rain would come on and lights would blow, we used to kill thousands of moths burning off the lights at night. If the lamps blew, then that was your budget gone, £18 for a new bulb, the whole film cost less than £18. We would build our own sets as well, I had a studio which is the cinema now, we built an American café, an old Irish cottage and we built a whole graveyard in it once, making the gravestones out of polystyrene. You can see this on the training video we made, ‘No Budget Special Effects’.

J.M. So why did you build a cinema each?

Noel: Well, mine’s called the ‘Tudor’, named after a cinema in Bangor when I was at school in the 50s. I saw ‘Beast of Hollow Mountain’, ‘Pharaoh’s Curse’, ‘Return of the Vampire’, I said if I ever had a cinema of my own I’d call it the ‘Tudor’. The ‘Tudor’ in Bangor closed in 1962, when I opened my own cinema in 1974 the first film I showed was ‘Them’, with the big giant ants, it’s a great film. I wanted a cinema as I thought if I was going to watch films I’d show them in the proper location, instead of people watching T.V and carrying cups of tea past you or people putting coal on the fire and all that carry on during a film. It’s a sixty-six seater specializing in B-Movies of the 50s and I’ll let you guess what sort of music plays in the intermission. When we were very young one of the first films we saw was about 1950 and it was ‘Abbot and Costello and Jack and the Beanstalk’. Our mother took us to the Ritz in the city center and it really made a big impact on us. Then the sci-fi and monster movies came along in the mid 50s with ‘Tarantula’, ‘It came from Outerspace’ and ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’. Those films got a hold on you and never let go, the hold they had on us then we still haven’t lost.

The Vacuum – Issue 18 – Waste

Unlike body functions defecation is considered very lowly. As a result very few scholars have documented the toilet habits of our predecessors. The Nobel Prize winner for Medicine (1913) Charles Richet attributed this silence to the disgust that arises from noxiousness and the lack of usefulness of human waste. Others point out that as sex organs are the same or nearer to the organs of defecation, those who dared to write on toiletry habits were dubbed either as erotic or as vulgar and, thus, despised in academic and social circles. This was true, for example, of Urdu poets in India, English poets in Britain and French poets in France. However, as the need to defecate is irrepressible, so were some writers who despite social stigma wrote on the subject and gave us at least an idea in regard to the toiletry habits of human beings. Based on this rudimentary information, one can say that development in civilisation and sanitation have been co-terminus. The more developed was the society, the more sanitised it became and vice versa.
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In my own country India, how can anyone ignore the subject of the toilet when society is faced with human excretions of the order of 900 million litres of urine and 135 million kilogrammes of faecal matter per day, with a totally inadequate system for its collection and disposal. The society faces a constant threat of health hazards and epidemics. Sewerage facilities are available to no more than 30 per cent of the population in urban areas and only 3 per cent of the rural population has access to pour flush latrines.
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As long as man did not have an established abode, he did not have a toilet. He excreted wherever he felt like doing so. When he learnt to have a fixed house, he moved his toilet to the courtyard and then within his home. Once this was done, it became a challenge to deal with the smell and maintain cleanliness. Man tried various ways to do so such as chamber pots, which were cleaned manually by the servants or slaves; having toilets protruding out of the top floor of the house or the castle over the river below, or common toilets with holes over a flowing river or stream underneath. While the rich used luxurious toilet chairs or close stools, the poor defecated on the roads, in the jungle or straight into the river.
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It was only in the 16th century that a technological breakthrough came about and helped human beings to have clean toilets in houses.
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Historical Evolution
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The perusal of literature brings home the fact that we have only fragmentary information on the subject of the toilet as a private, secluded place to help the body relieve its waste. Sitting type toilets appeared quite early. In the remains of Harappa civilisation in India, at a place called Lothal (62 Kilometers from the city of Ahmedabad in Western India) and in the year 2500 BC, the people had water borne toilets in each house linked by drains covered with burnt clay bricks. To facilitate maintenance they had man-hole covers, chambers etc. It was the finest form of sanitary engineering. But with the decline of Indus valley civilisation, the science of sanitary engineering disappeared from India.
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The archaeological excavations confirm existence of sitting type toilets in Egypt (2100 BC), in Rome, public bath-cum-toilets were also well developed. There were holes in the floor and beneath was flowing water. When the Romans travelled they constructed toilets for their use. Historical evidence exists that Greeks relieved themselves outside. There was no shyness in toilet use. It was common at dinner parties in Rome to see slaves bringing in silver urine pots for important people to use while they celebrated.
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At this period it was also common to emphasise the medicinal values of human waste. Urine was supposed to have many therapeutic values. Some quacks even claimed that through the study of urine they could confidently say whether a young girl was virgin or not. Hiroshi Umino(1) reports that a Pharaoh cured his eye by use of a woman’s urine; he later married her. It was also widely believed that the dung of a donkey mixed with nightsoil removed black pustules or that the urine of a eunuch could help make women fertile. In the Indian scriptures there are stories about the strength of wrestlers. If a wrestler defecates too much, he is relatively weak because he cannot digest all that he eats. Similarly, a perfect saint has no need to defecate, for he eats no more than he can digest.(2) So not to defecate was considered saintly while in other societies not to defecate was considered manly.
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The period 500 to 1500 AD was a dark age from the point of view of human hygiene. It was an era of cess pools and human excreta all round. It was also an era of ‘liberty to pee’ French poet Claude le Petit described Paris as ‘Ridiculous Paris’ in the following words :
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My shoes my stockings, my overcoat My collar, my glove, my hat Have all been soiled by the same substance I would mistake myself rubbish
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There was lot of jest and humour relating to toilet habits and toilet appurtenances. Ballets were performed with dancers dressed in toilet themed costumes moving around to toilet sounds. The characters were known as Etronice (night soil) the Sultan Prime of Foirince (i.e. diarrhoea) etc. There are stories given by Guerrand(3) which depict the mood of Europe at that time. A lady of noble birth requested a young man to hold her hand. The young man suddenly feels the urge to urinate. Forgetting that he is holding the hand of a lady of noble birth he relieves himself. When he is finished he says ‘excuse me Madam, there was lot of urine in my body and was causing great inconvenience’. Joseph Pujol (hero extraordinaire of French scatology) in his shows could demonstrate many different types of farts i.e. young girl, mother-in-law, bride. He could even extinguish a candle 30 centimeters away through his farting.
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Public Habits and Attitude
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In the absence of proper toilet facilities, people perforce had to defecate and urinate wherever they could. While the authorities were encouraging people to have private places for defecating in practice there was total disorder. Squalor and filth abounded in cities. Social reformers advised people where to defecate, how to defecate in privacy and the need to control themselves when in company. Children were taught not to touch human waste.
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Laws however, could not prevent people defecating in the open. A delegation in France led by a master weaver protested against these laws: ‘our fathers have defecated in this place, We have defecated here and now our children will defecate here’.
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The rich used wool or hemp for ablution while the poor used grass, stone or sand or water depending upon the country and weather conditions or social customs. Use of newspaper was also common. In 1857, Joseph Cayetty invented toilet paper in the USA. In India it is very common to use water for ablution. However, the hand one uses varies in various parts of India. While in South India, people use the right hand for eating food, it is considered disgusting to use the same hand for ablution with water, so the left hand is used for sanitary purposes. In most parts of the North India, however, no such sharp distinction exists.
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According to Hiroshi Umino, European culture blossomed after Crusaders had contact with the East. Washing hands before food for example became popular. There were no separate toilets for men and women until a restaurant in Paris put up Male and Female at a party in 1739 AD. It is also around this time that the urinal pot was introduced to enable men to relieve themselves more conveniently. The facilities for women were niggardly and they were taught the virtues of control.
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Public Toilets and People
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In every society from time to time the government has felt the need to provide public toilet facilities to those who could not afford to have their own. Public toilets have a long history in a number of countries, mostly constructed and managed by municipalities. They have consistently caused disgust with their poor maintenance, vandalism and lack of basic facilities. The Mughal King Jehangir built a public toilet at Alwar, 120 kms away from Delhi for use of 100 families in 1556AD. Not much documentary evidence exists on the quality of its maintenance but with rudimentary technology it was probably in very unsatisfactory condition.
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It was in 1872 that local government in France asked private companies to manage public toilets for a lease period of 20 years. The private companies were also offering fees to government as they felt confident of recovering the same through user charges. Ground floor owners were also being requested to construct latrines for use of the passersby. At the Palais Royal Hotel in Paris, the owners started charging monthly fees from diners. Incidentally condoms were also sold as part of the facilities.
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In 1970 in a small village in Patna I founded Sulabh International, people laughed at me when I proposed the introduction of pay-and-use toilets. But my approach has succeeded and today 10 million people use Sulabh facilities every day. Most public toilets are being given to us to construct and maintain on a 30 years basis at no charge to the State. At the beginning of the 20th century most public toilets in Europe had gone underground, but in India these are still overground. Much more attention is being given to the construction of these toilets on a pay and use basis in slum areas. Men pay half a rupee per use, women and children avail of these facilities free. The facilities available include a toilet, bathing or washing of clothes and changing rooms. We are also setting up primary health care centres at these places. However, a lot of effort is required to get people’s participation in the efficient operation and maintenance of public toilets. This remains a big challenge to be met by NGOs. Based on my experience of the last 25 years, I am also convinced that only cooperation between Government and NGOs can make the sanitation programme a success. Neither the NGOs nor the government can create an impact if they work in isolation.
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Law and Citizens
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In order to improve sanitary conditions, governments in various countries have resorted to legal measures. In 1519 the provincial government of Normandy in France made provision of toilets compulsory in each house. The French government also passed a parliamentary decree to make cesspools in each house compulsory. Again a similar attempt was made in 1539. In Bordeaux the government made construction of cesspools compulsory. It was tried again in 1668 when the Lieutenant of Police made construction of toilets compulsory. In England the first sanitation law was passed in 1848. In India the first sanitation bill was introduced in 1878. It tried to make construction of toilets compulsory even in huts of Calcutta the capital of India at that time. The Bill even proposed construction of public toilets at the cost of neighbouring houses. The government of India enacted another Sanitation Act in 1993. Under this Act construction of a dry latrine and its manual cleaning was made an offence. But despite these enactments open defecation is rampant, proving that unless adequate social awareness is created in a developing country where instruments of state are weak and family income is low, it is a hard task to make significant progress in this area.
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Toilet Technologies
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The eighteenth century was a century of toilets. Despite the invention of the water closet by John Harrington in 1596 which cost only 6 shillings and 8 pence this was not adopted on a large scale for 182 years. During this period people used earth closets, chamber pots, close stools; open defecation remained. Meanwhile Harrington’s toilet under the name Angrez was being used in France, though not introduced on a large scale in England. In 1738 JF Brondel introduced the valve type flush toilet. Alexander Cummings further improved the technology and gave us a better device in 1775. In Cumming’s design water remained in the toilet so it suppressed odours. Still the working of the valve needed further improvements. In 1870, S.S. Helior invented the flush type toilet.
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From 1880 onwards, however, the emphasis has been more on aesthetics to make cisterns and bowls decorative. The bowls were so colourful that some suggested using them as soup bowls. It was in 1880 that toilet curtains made their appearance. During 1890 we had the first cantilever type of toilet. Since then the world has not witnessed any significant technical change except some changes in the shape of toilets and reductions in the quantity of water per use.
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Unlike in the past when latrines were tucked away in attics to keep them away from the noses and eyes of the family and society the twentieth century has given pride of place to the toilet in the home. These are now more opulent, more spacious than at any time in the past. While the provision of toilets in the house solved household problems of cleanliness the challenge remained as to how to dispose of human waste at city level. This was also solved when the sewerage system was introduced. Haussmann, the mayor of Paris in 1858, described it: ‘the underground galleries which are the organs of the big city will work in the same way as organs of the body, without being revealed.’ Around the same time the sewerage system was introduced at Calcutta capital of colonial India. However its extension into the country was, and remains, slow as it is capital intensive and beyond the resource capacity of the economy, even today.
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Though the challenges to provide toilet facilities have been totally overcome in rich countries, it has still to be met in developing countries like India. The journey of toilet has ended in Europe and North America but continues in the developing countries.

The Vacuum – Issue 17 – Fashion

I once heard Ulick O’Connor say that the British government had allowed Irish hunger strikers to die rather than allow them ‘to wear their own jackets.’ By momentarily reducing the political struggle to a contest over sartorial self-determination, O’Connor voiced a central truth about society as we know it. Prescribed dress brings into question our individuality, our worth, the self-centeredness or communality of our purpose. While there are certainly some who love a man or woman in uniform, others avoid dress codes at all costs. There’s something deeply disconcerting about clothing that we are forced to wear. This statement applies abundantly to penal situations but also covers religious, educational, military, and dance costumes.

Every uniform implies a measure of acquiescence. Often, what may begin as an assertion of community (we need to express our solidarity by dressing the same) comes to be seen as arbitrary or arcane or both (why are those people dressed like that?). While prescribed dress baffles and frustrates the outsider, it also challenges the creative individual who chooses to wear it. And yet the very concept of the uniform severely limits the number and extent of personal improvisations. Too many changes, and the person is no longer in conformity. At the same time, any move toward de-identification from one group may look unavoidably like alliance with the opposition. A tangle of misinterpretation blossoms around uniforms and their insistent regularities.

Where the assumptions of spectators hold sway, there is always misreading. Take as an example the West’s dismal failure to understand Muslim clothing. In post-9/11 discourse, otherwise intelligent individuals have worked overtime to demonize the head scarf, to cast suspicion on all forms of traditional Islamic garb. This phenomenon has drawn forth commentary both from Muslims who wear hijab and from those who do not. Identifiably Muslim women in the U.S. have not only been subject to religiously-motivated violence since 9/11, they have also endured the effrontery of Oprah’s audience holding forth whys and wherefores of the veil. What, if anything, does costume prove about identity? In a recent article in the L.A. Times (20 January 2002), Laila Al-Marayati and Semeen Issa say, ‘A few years ago, someone from the Feminist Majority Foundation called the Muslim Women’s League to ask if she could ‘borrow a burka’ for a photo shoot the organization was doing to draw attention to the plight of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban. When we told her that we didn’t have one, and that none of our Afghan friends did either, she expressed surprise, as if she’d assumed that all Muslim women keep burkas in their closet in case a militant Islamist comes to dinner.

Refusing one item, donning another, adhering to this sartorial injunction but resisting that bit: such actions quite literally bind us into the social sphere in which our bodies take on social meaning. Choosing a wardrobe instantly poses a wide array of philosophical issues. The clothing that we might wear the totality of possible costumes charts the nature of the world into which we are thrown. From the sum of all available vestments, the outfits that we assemble are less signs than they are activities gestures of rejection, declarations of connection, assertions of individuality amidst varieties of conformity. For all of the professional writing lavished on the fashion industry, it is astonishing how rarely commentators address the central role played in all of our lives by how ordinary individuals put themselves together for public display and manage the interplay of costume and personality. Whether the clothes we call our own are purchased at the priciest boutiques or pieced together from thrift shops, whether we devour Elle and GQ or profess an untutored simplicity of self-styling, our relationship to bits of fabric variously sewn together is emotionally in dialogue with the expectations of the groups that seek both to confer our identities and to constrain them.

Anyone exploring the vast literature on Northern Ireland from 1969 onwards will notice that in terms of globally recognized styles of dress, republicans have soundly trounced loyalists. The reason is simple and material: for the world at large, from the 1970s onwards Sinn Fein created a steady stream of visual materials (books, calendars, newspapers, videos) and saw to it that supportive organizations could immerse their followers in a highly stylized and readily recognizable aesthetic. Like an IGC marketing campaign, Sinn Fein aimed to communicate an attitude and a sense of purpose in which uniforms played key roles. In contrast, loyalist culture long adhered to Protestant strictures against visual display, at least for as far as outsiders to NI were concerned. Outside of Ireland, loyalist culture was mostly invisible until the 90s: even bowler hats and sashes fail to secure universal recognition: the images just weren’t out there. As a consequence, many more people around the world are familiar with terrorist chic, IRA style. The look has been communicated liberally through journalism and scholarship on the iconography of sectarian murals, paramilitary funerals, and annual parades. Scanning this wealth of material, one-sided as it is, allows us to consider the uniform as a staged form of visual aggression. We can also discover in these images moments in which individuality trumps collectivity, in which personality exceeds the bounds of paraded sameness. However serried the ranks, rarely is individual expression entirely squelched.

Part of personalized performance depends on the fact that uniforms do not simply materialize full-cloth; they have a history, and they change over time, a point made by John Darby in his study of political cartoons called Dressed to Kill (1983). Darby reminds us that IRA costumes evolved dramatically between the 1920s and the present. Somewhere in the recesses of the media’s folk memory of Irish violence lay the image of the Irish Republican Army. So closely linked were the two in the popular imagination that the IRA began to invade cartoons even before the Provisionals were formed in 1970. To fix the image of the newcomers, cartoonists simply picked it up where it had been left at the time of partition in 1921. Trench coats, slouch hats and Tommy guns were dusted off and called into service again, at least until new cues could be established. The transformation of this outmoded stereotype was gradual and somewhat confusing. Black berets and dark glasses ap-peared, and even the trench coats eventually gave way to combat jackets.

The passive voice speaks volumes here. Darby leaves us wondering precisely who set the look and how that instruction was transmitted to adherents. (Darby reprints a Punch cartoon in which a man in a striped suit is greeted by a trench-coated volunteer: ‘Jasus Sean! You can’t go out to murder people dressed like that!’) To what extent did fiction, film, journalism, and television prompt changes in clothing and accessorizing that mutated into the norm? And what aspects of popular fashion have accounted for even subtle differences in paramilitary style? To some extent, responses to these questions can be found in Neil Jarman’s Material Conflicts: Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland (1997), which admirably aims for even-handed ethnography of loyalist and nationalist culture from 1690 onwards. But Jarman’s account comes up short when facing the photographs his own that liberally punctuate his work. These images reveal, without authorial commentary, the mixture of earnestness and fecklessness, solemnity and comedy that marks the typical contemporary parade. With tight enough framing, any march can take on the patina of absolute concentration and lockstep orchestration. Take a wider purview, and the whole event is revealed in all of its makeshift glory – decentered, even downright messy.

Each image in the history of Irish terrorist chic tells both an ideological tale and a story about the individuals modeling the look. For example, in Tom Collins’ The Centre Cannot Hold (1983) a photograph of a 1978 republican march is interesting not simply because it displays the dress uniform of the era beret with insignia, black turtleneck, wide-bottom dark pants, and either wool or leather sports jacket but rather because each person in the photo, to a man, sports hair of a suitably seventies’ over-the-ear length. To me, the effect is as startling as that of the 1989 Gerry Adams interview in Playboy, where the words and images of Northern Ireland’s distress jostle with ‘Girls of the Big East’ for attention.

Indeed, the Provos have never shied away from a good photo op. One of the images in Collins’ book documents a power fashion show: a volunteer in paint-spotted, shapeless beige jacket, full-face balaclava, and black cotton gloves holds an ‘accessorizing’ AK-47. The caption reads, ‘Member of the Provisional IRA exhibiting sub-machine gun during a kind of military fashion show at Casement Park, Belfast, at end of Provisional parade on 12 August 1979’. A loosely draped cloth provides the photographic backdrop. This occasion drew many photographers, and we’re lucky to have an alternate record of the model. In the catalogue of Ireland’s first photographic exhibit, held in the early eighties, we are treated to the same incident from another angle of vision. In a photo by Eamonn O’Dwyer, the point of view captures the backcloth, the posing paramilitary, and a cluster of cameras clicking away. The sheer staginess of the event overshadows the intended menace. Reflexivity reveals the material effort involved in looking fierce for the camera.

Yet another instance: on the cover of the 1988 Sinn Fein calendar for County Derry and Southwest Antrim, posed field maneuvers depict a woman in the foreground, her mid-length red hair emerging from her beret, wearing a dark drab hooded army jacket and a wool scarf over the bottom half of her face. The arresting part of this photo is not her femaleness, although foregrounding her gender seems to be the intention, but the condition of her gun, which is old, chipped, and rusty. That this photograph is a posed bit of propaganda finds emphasis in the Republican Resistance Calendar for 1990, on the cover of which we find two men helping each other with what looks like a mini-missile launcher, a machine gun, and a two-way radio. Looking stalwartly toward the viewer is the same red-haired model, now holding a more impressive ma-chine gun. All three wear half-masks, and the hole on the side of one man’s facial covering suggests that the short mask is produced by folding down the full balaclava. Add sunglasses, and you’re in like Flint. In the Sinn Fein calendar for 1987 a whole unit in drab, one woman wearing a skirt instead of pants stands at attention in a cemetery, while above them pike-headed flagstaffs pierce the air and around them press photographers with huge lenses angle in for the best view of the proceedings. The clothing is as theatrical as it gets, the overall effect mildly risible.

The marching season has traditionally offered the public an opportunity to inspect sectarian uniforms of a non- or semi-military kind. We can see firsthand, for instance, that marching bands for children often include boys and girls who are unable to keep their ties on straight or hair properly tucked under a cap. Innocence and dishevelment go hand in hand when you’re eight years old and rather bored. The same can go for adult band members whose ebullience of spirit, exhaustion, or carelessness result in loosened ties, crooked hats, lost instruments, or other egregious failures of decorum.

Considerable calculation can go into the improvement of a stodgy band uniform. I recall watching a meticulously turned-out women’s accordion band where much costume tweaking could be observed. The women all wore the de rigeur black beret, but they also wore very short and very tight black skirts, sheer black hose, and decidedly beach-worthy sunglasses. Indeed, the band leader wore a feather in her beret (charmingly unorthodox in its length and flourish), impressive chandelier earrings, and three-inch heels. Never mind that these instrumentalists were going to walk for blocks down the Falls Road. Never mind that it was threatening to rain and that at any moment a political march might dissolve into turmoil. And never mind that a ‘regulation’ uniform was obviously the way to go for a parade. Regardless of the circumstances, the band actively claimed and personalized a look rendered pi-quant by their insistence on a stylish and even provocative presence in contested public space.

In the aura of tense ideology that tends to mark the marching season, there remains a modicum of improvisational possibility. The subcultural fabric, continuously reweaving its collectivity around fashions of the past, slowly evolving new styles, gradually accommodates the construction of difference through dialogue with dress codes as well as prevailing fashion. The costumes worn at parades by marching bands supporting one political group or another constitute a fashion that has been inscribed over time with value. But that value isn’t fixed and it isn’t uniform. Individual performance always brings personal style into the mix serious, sexy, amused, disruptive being human exceeding the restrictions of dress codes.