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Jack Bond, a British film-maker who worked on a string of avant garde films in the 1960s and 70s with Jane Arden, and went on to collaborate with the Pet Shop Boys and Adam Ant, has died aged 87. Bond’s family told the Guardian that he died on 21 December at a nursing home in Twickenham.
The Pet Shop Boys, with whom he collaborated in the 1980s, said in a statement: “[Jack] was a warm and funny man who we very much enjoyed working with and we send our love and condolences to his family and those close to him.”
Bond’s varied career gained its initial impetus from his partnership with Arden, whom he met in the early 1960s. Bond had served his apprenticeship as a trainee at the BBC, and made his mark with a documentary about Wilfred Owen, The Pity of War, in 1964. In 1965 he and Arden made Dalí in New York, a film about the artist which was broadcast the following year.
Bond described Arden, already an established actor and writer, as “a most beautiful and wonderful woman”, and was happy to follow her lead as she delved into the radical ideas of the time. In 1968 Bond directed Separation, a cut-up, experimental story written by Arden about a woman in a failing marriage tormented by her lover, with a soundtrack by Procol Harum. The pair then worked on The Other Side of the Underneath, directed by Arden and produced by Bond, derived from Arden’s 1971 play A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches for her Holocaust theatre company, a chaotic, disturbing film influenced by the 70s anti-psychiatry movement; it examined a young woman’s schizophrenia and reputedly involved copious drug-taking on set. The pair were then credited as co-directors for the dreamlike science-fiction parable Anti-Clock, which starred Sebastian Saville, Arden’s son from her marriage to TV director Philip Saville, and which opened the London film festival in 1979.
However, after Arden killed herself in 1982, Bond refused to show the films following a tribute to Arden in 1983, saying later: “I did consciously suppress them, along with a lot of thoughts and feelings.” They remained almost entirely unseen for a quarter of a century, until they were restored and released on the BFI Flipside label in 2009.
Bond returned to TV in the early 80s, producing and directing numerous episodes of The South Bank Show, about subjects including Werner Herzog, Patricia Highsmith and the Nederlands Dans Theater. One particular episode about Roald Dahl caught the attention of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe of the Pet Shop Boys, who were looking for a director to make a longform film collating their hit songs. Bond described the resulting film, It Couldn’t Happen Here, as “a saucy seaside postcard come to life and gone mad”. It fared poorly at the box office when it was released in 1988, but an excerpt from the film forms the video for the Pet Shop Boys’ 1987 hit Always on My Mind. Bond also directed the promo for the band’s single Heart, featuring Ian McKellen as a vampire in a Slovenian castle.
In 2013 Bond returned to cinemas with The Blueblack Hussar, a documentary chronicling Adam Ant’s return to music-making after the musician’s mental health crisis. He followed it up in 2018 with An Artist’s Eyes, about painter Chris Moon.
Bond is survived by his wife Moira, whom he married in 1984 and from whom he was separated, and three children, Tom, Caite and Oliver Bond. (A fourth child, Rebecca, died in 2018.) In 1999 he met his partner Mary-Rose Storey, who subsequently worked on The Blueblack Hussar and An Artist’s Eyes as a cinematographer. She survives him, along with her daughter Lily Marlene von Kalbach.
English (US) ·