There was always a whir of excitement, whoever was ringing. First you pulled out the red jack from its socket—its windy, stripy cord attached—and plugged it into the socket for that extension. ‘Hello, Contemporary Films, Can I help you?’ Sometimes it was easy: ‘I’d like to speak to Mr Hedges,’ or, ‘Can I talk to Kitty Cooper in International.’ Then you pulled out the black jack and put it in to that person’s extension. There was a switch that you toggled to call that person—trying, as best you could, to emulate the ‘ring, ring’ of a phone—and then, when the person picked up, you’d let them know who was calling and leave them to it. Sometimes it was trickier: ‘How much is it to rent Battleship Potemkin?’ or, ‘We’re from the Kent University Film Club and we want to know when our films will arrive?’ Then we’d have to get Auntie Rose to rescue us. ‘Um…’ we’d mumble to the caller. ‘We’ll just put you on to someone.’ Then we’d pull the jack out, put them on hold, and sheepishly slide the phone over to Auntie Rose: she always knew what to do. There were small rotating tickers on the switchboard exchange that indicated how much the outgoing calls were costing: the faster they went, the more the units of charge. We used to ask Uncle Harry about the most expensive call ever. Apparently, my dad had once called America… for almost an hour. Uncle Harry told us that the ticker was going round like crazy and he was running up and down the stairs trying to get my dad off the phone.
We started ‘helping out’ on the switchboard of our parent’s film distribution company when I was about five years old and Davina, my older sister, was about six, in the early 1970s. The reception was on the ground floor of a tall, narrow building in Soho. At the back of the reception was Uncle Harry’s shop, with his desk and cash register, and walls covered with film projectors, projector lamps, and film cans. My parents used to say that most of the people who came to buy things were from the local Soho sex shops. Uncle Harry never seemed happier than when he sold a projector. That was rare though. Mostly he sold just a few projector lamps or fuses each day, sitting at the back of the shop and looking out onto Greek Street through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
Me, 1972, about six years old
Auntie Rose was warm, loving, cuddly: some of my happiest memories were sitting on her lap on the switchboard. She would often have the latest copy of The Puzzler in her handbag: a magazine full of crosswords, logic puzzles, and other games. Davina and I would do them with her: I liked the join-the-dots and wordsearches best. When we had finished one magazine she would give us 50 pence to go the local newsagents to buy another, and an ice lolly.
‘Auntie Rose’ and ‘Uncle Harry’ weren’t quite my uncle and aunt. Uncle Harry was the older brother of my dad’s first wife, who had died tragically in her 40s. They had three children together: my oldest sister Flo, and then ‘the twins’, Sue and Adi. A few years after his first wife’s death, my dad got re-married to my mother who was over 20 years his junior. When my dad set up his film distribution company in the 1950s, he had asked Uncle Harry to join him, and Uncle Harry ran the shop while my dad ran the rest of the company.
I loved Uncle Harry but he could be quite stern. When I was about eight years old, I started going to the Soho amusement arcades, spending one or two pence on the penny falls or the ‘one-armed bandits’. One morning I lost about ten pence. I felt so bad about it, and so determined to win it back, that I did a terrible thing: I went back to the Office and stole a 50 pence piece from Uncle Harry’s cash register. I rushed back to the arcade and, within 20 minutes or so had managed to lose most of that 50 pence as well. Just as I was desperately shoving the last few coins into the penny falls, Uncle Harry appeared in the arcade and took me back to the Office. I guess my parents worked out I must have been there: I never quite knew how. They were particularly worried because, at least according to them, there had been a shooting at the arcade a few weeks before and they were ‘all run by gangsters’. I’m not sure Uncle Harry ever knew I’d stolen his fifty pence and, in fact, he was really kind when he walked me back.
***
My dad’s office was on the second floor. You got to it through his secretary’s office, with Charles Hedges, their publicity person, opposite. My dad had a black leather swivel chair that was brilliant to sit and spin in; a window with iron frames to look down onto bustling Greek Street; and a long black leather sofa—perfect for jumping on or napping. If we went to my dad’s office he’d offer us coffee then ask his secretary to make it. We’d have coffee and biscuits sat facing him in a low leather chair, peering out over his large, laminated desk.
My parents, 1973
Once, in my twenties, I did a psychodrama exercise where we had to imagine our parents as animals. I imagined my dad as a big friendly bear. He was warm, affectionate, social—already in his late 50s by the time I was born (about the age I am as I write this). He was a schmoozer—not much of a listener. He was also, as my girlfriends have endlessly remarked, very handsome: broad-shouldered with a wide, welcoming face and strong jaw. When I went back to Ukraine, where his parents had escaped the pogroms from in the 1890s, I could see where he got his looks: all the men there, I was amazed to see, seemed to have the same square-shaped frame as my dad… and me.
My mum’s office seemed more a place where work actually happened. It was down on the first floor, with most of the other employees. She was in charge of ‘International’. My mum typed at lightning speed and had one of the first Telex machines, which I loved feeding the strips of tape in to. Like my dad, my mum was very intelligent, but less confident. I always assumed she’d been put in charge of International because of her German roots. It was not something that she would easily talk about. She refused to watch films about the holocaust. I always thought it was because of how upset it would make her—she lost several close relatives in the holocaust, including her favourite cousin, ‘Little Katie’. At one film festival, though, she inadvertently saw a film with scenes about the Shoah and, on exiting, starting screaming at two German associates outside the screening room: ‘You see what you lot have done…’. It was rage, not sadness, that she seemed most afraid of unleashing.
***
When Davina and I weren’t on the switchboard we would be in Despatch with ‘the boys’. These were the young men who would receive, check, and send out the film reels to the various cinemas or societies that would rent the company’s films. I loved ‘splicing’: checking over the films that came in to see if there was any damage and, if so, using a splicing machine to put the undamaged ends together again. Sometimes we would watch films on the large, reel-to-reel machines that they had there for checking; or we would watch them in the small preview cinema on the mezzanine between first and second floors, where one of the boys would set up a film for us. I loved that dark, cosy cinema: sinking in to the plush velvety seats. Even better, sometimes I would be allowed to thread the film through the projector and run it. So many cogs, switches, and loops… each had to be exactly right or the film would get twisted and mangled.
The problem, though, was that there was hardly ever any good films to watch. My dad, being a communist since his 20s, had set up a film company that was one of the leading distributors of progressive and foreign language films. Great if you are a member of the Young Communists, but not if you are a five-year-old wanting some entertainment during the school holidays. There were a few Eastern European short films. But, God, they could really be terrifying. One that my parents used to show me at home, where we also kept a projector, was called The naughty little goat: about this cute little baby goat that runs away from its parents’ into the woods… and is eaten by wolves. I would watch it compulsively, glued to the screen and the crescendo of screeching Slavic violin as the goat broke from its farm and rushed headlong into the woods, never to be seen again. I have no idea why my parents showed it to me. Perhaps they knew I was going to be a psychotherapist and were preparing me for dealing with trauma!
When we were really little, the film that Davina and I wanted to watch over and over again was a short about the dangers of cigarette smoking. My dad also had some Marx Brother’s film (unrelated, as I came to learn, to Karl Marx), and we particularly loved Horsefeathers. Another favourite was called The Little Island. This was a 1958 cartoon about three characters who each prize one value (‘good’, ‘truth’, or ‘beauty’) over all others, and eventually come to blows over it (in the form of a terrifying knife fight escalating to nuclear holocaust). Looking back, it’s striking to me that the message of this film—the dangers of privileging one, monolithic set of values—is exactly what we articulated decades later in our ‘pluralistic’ approach to therapy.
Thanks to Uncle Harry, my parents also had the rights to the English Coal Board’s film archives, so that was another option: long infomercials about the British coal industry. When I got into my teens, my best friend James and I would scour through the dusty film canisters that my parents kept in the basement of our house to see if we could find something with some nudity in it. It was an endless, and always disappointing, search. At one point, we were quite excited to find a film called ‘the body’, but when we threaded it onto the projector it turned out to be a medical documentary.
***
Sometimes, Davina and I would go and play in the dilapidated adventure playground off Wardour Street. My parents didn’t like that much more than the arcades because of all the rusting old iron lying about. One time, I got a nail in my foot. Foyles, just around the corner, was a preferred option for whiling away an afternoon. As the biggest bookshop in the world, it seemed an endless maze of dusty book-lined corridors. The system for buying books was particularly archaic. First you had to line up at a counter to get a ticket for the book you wanted to buy. Then you’d walk over to the cashier with the ticket and pay. Then you’d get another ticket to take back to the first counter where they’d finally give you the book in crisp, white paper wrapping. Davina liked novels, like Narnia. I liked Charlie Brown books. Sometimes, at Oma’s house on Sundays, before the lunch of chicken soup with matzo balls and boiled chicken, we’d act out scenes from Charlie Brown. Davina would be Lucy, and I’d be Snoopy, following around after her on all fours.
Oma, my grandmother, 1960s
Oma, as I discovered when I was about eight years old, wasn’t actually called ‘Oma’—she was ‘Betty’—‘Oma’ was German for ‘grandmother’. Oma and my 7-year-old mother had come over to London as Jewish refugees from Berlin in 1939. When I was very young, I sometimes mixed-up Oma with auntie Rose: both warm, loving, caring. Oma spoke with a thick German accent. But she could also be quite pushy: I remember her shoving commuters as we climbed aboard a London bus. Oma would stare intensely into your face when you ate which I always found disconcerting. When I was about 13, my best friend James and I borrowed £5 from her to go to the arcade. We said that we would mow the lawn at her house in Wood Green in return. She reminded me about that week after week but we never did it. I always felt guilty about that: right up until Oma died in the mid-1980s.
Another thing that still makes me shudder with shame. Mick Jagger came to visit the Office. He was considering a part in a film by the German director Werner Herzog and my parents had some of Herzog’s films, so they were going to show it to him at their mezzanine cinema. Davina, about 12-years-old at the time, said that she wanted to be in charge of showing him around. I was a bit nonplussed about it all until the day of the visit, when I decided that, in fact, I did really want to meet him. I rushed back to the cinema from the arcade and, as cool I could, pulled back the velvet curtain, walked into the cinema, and took a seat. I remember Jagger looking up at me as I entered, an expression of vague disinterest. The film was one of those excruciatingly dull foreign language films that my parents distributed. I remember something about a circus and a market. After what seemed an eternity the film ended, and Jagger stood up to go. My dad stood up and shook Jagger’s hand, then Davina did, then others, then I stood up with my hand outstretched. He walked straight past me and out of the cinema. I felt mortified and thought about chasing after him, down the street, so that he would give me a proper handshake. I still feel a pang of embarrassment every time I see pictures of Jagger or hear music from the Rolling Stones.
***
One of the amazing things about growing up in this world was getting to go to the film festivals. Cannes was an annual event in the Spring. For Davina and myself, that meant swimming, playing in the sand, and lounging beneath the umbrellas of the beach clubs: each club with its own adornment of different coloured stripes. We had ham and cheese toasted sandwiches for lunch. Dinner was in small local restaurants. A special treat was steak tartare: raw minced beef forked together with eggs, ketchup, and herbs, my mum looking nervously on. One year, Davina and I were asked to ‘host’ the stall for my parents’ independent film distributors association. We sat proudly behind a desk in the large festival arena, handing out leaflets. Sometimes we also got to go to the films: mostly of the long, boring subtitled types; but children’s films were also sometimes on the programme. One that Davina and I particularly liked was ‘Stubby’, about a young Swedish boy who is so good at football that he ends up playing for the national team. We loved the film so much—Stubby darting through the legs of the grown-up players—that we convinced our parents to buy its UK distribution rights. It bombed: my parents said that no children wanted to watch a film with subtitles.
One night, when Oma came to Cannes with us, my parents stayed out really late. Davina and I were back at the apartment with Oma looking after us, and I remember growing more and more anxious. Where were they? Why weren’t they back yet? I was convinced something awful had happened to them. Panic: a gnawing emptiness in my stomach, something I couldn’t control. I felt like a hole had opened in the earth and I was falling through, nothing to grip on: accelerating, terrified, down and down. Oma seemed scared too. Eventually, maybe 2am or so, my parents returned. No big deal, just a late party. Silence.
And then there was ‘The Machines’ at Venice: the happy place I would go to many years later if asked to visualise a place of safety and joy. We didn’t go to Venice as often as Cannes, but it was the same time of beaches, swimming, and sun lounging for Davina and myself. And just on the main street of the Lido—the sliver of Venice on which the film festival was held—was an arcade that stretches back beyond my earliest memories. Walking past stalls of fresh coconut, their aroma filling the warm night air, was a utopia of mechanical games, lights, and excitement: table football, penny falls, a mini bowling alley.
Some years ago, I began to recognise a lot of parallels between my parents going to film festivals and my own going to academic conferences: the networking, the schmoozing, the being part of a big community. Bumping into old colleagues and talking about the latest research findings or measures—just like my parents talking about the latest films with fellow distributors, directors, and reviewers. It wasn’t a conscious choice for me to enter this world, but perhaps, at some level, it was a way of doing things that felt safe and familiar. Or perhaps I entered into academic life with a confidence borne of seeing my parents immersed and engaged in their own community.
***
One of the best things about a day at the Office was lunch. My parents’ work day seemed to start late, about 10 o’clock, and by noon or so (with a coffee break in between) we’d be talking about where to eat. Italian was the norm, and I’d gobble up my favourite: spaghetti Bolognese. Chinese was also very popular. Oma would take us some times. Davina and I had a reputation for being badly behaved, though I’m not sure we ever were. I do remember once, though, at the Dumpling Inn Chinese restaurant, breaking set after set of chopsticks as we used them for drumming. Oma said, many times after that, that we’d nearly got thrown out of the restaurant.
It wasn’t lost on me: the contradiction between the privilege that we had, and the communism that my parents—and I—espoused. Kids at school would sometimes tease me: if your parents are communists why do you live in a big house in Highgate (a posh London suburb)? One time, there was almost a revolution at my parents’ company. I found out because, driving to work one day, I could hear them talking about an employee—someone close to them—who was stirring up trouble. I was worried it was Auntie Rose and asked. They said ‘No’. It turned out it was the boyfriend of one of my older sisters, who had been working for my parents for about a year or so. He was a bright, ambitious young man, with a pointy beard that made him look like Guy Fawkes. My parents said he was an anarchist. This boyfriend had been steadily promoted, but was now asking that awkward question: if the company was advocating socialism, why was it owned by three bosses (my parents and Uncle Harry) and not a workers’ collective? Worse, he was actually trying to collectivise it. Around half or so of the employees rallied behind him, and for some time my parents were genuinely worried that they might lose control of the company, but eventually the boyfriend left and things returned to normal.
***
By the time I got to my mid-teens, going to the Office meant getting the tube in to Tottenham Court Road with James, badgering my dad for ‘Luncheon Vouchers’, then going off to McDonalds for Big Macs, fries, and milkshakes before spending the afternoon in the arcades. By that time, I was quite seriously addicted to fruit machines—something I only really kicked in my early 20s. Sometimes I took money from my parents. Worse was asking my parents for money to buy clothes, getting the cheapest possible, then spending the rest in the arcades. I think my own kids have been surprised that, when they’ve taken money from me without asking, I’ve never got that angry. But how could I when I did that even worse.
When I was around 18, my parents felt that they couldn’t afford the rents in Soho any more and moved their offices to our house in Highgate. My dad had his own office, my mum shared with a few other staff that moved with them (including, later, Eric Liknaitzky). But my dad was increasingly losing heart, and the realities of the film business at that time meant increasingly big financial risks, which my parents were never really willing to take. The fall of the Soviet empire—and the dissolution of the British Communist Party that followed—also really hit my dad: his life’s meaning had been fundamentally scythed and he never really recovered from that. Nevertheless, my dad continued to work well into his 80s, though by that time it was more sitting in his swivel chair, pushing around a few bits of paper, and speaking into his dictaphone. He talked of making a film about his grandfather Moishe who was kidnapped into the Czar’s army as a young Jewish boy, and actually wrote up a script. Almost 40 years later, my daughter, Maya, would turn that into a short film.
***
Ironically, the films I adore now are exactly the sort that my parents’ distributed, and which I despised as a kid. Sometimes, I’ll see a really good film and, when I tell my mum about it, she’ll say, ‘Oh, that was one of ours’. I tease my kids—products of a TikTok era where nothing last longer than 10 seconds—that they should join me to watch seven hour epics about communal farms in Slovakia. ‘There’s a scene in it’, I tell them, ‘which goes on for an hour and consists of watching a doctor get drunk in real time.’
‘Daaaad….!’
‘And then there’s an opening shot of 20 minutes of cows walking across a field’. ‘Or we could watch the three hour one about the dad and his daughter in a hut eating potatoes’.
‘Daaad….!’
‘You know what happens?’
‘Whatttt?’
‘Their horse dies.’
***
As therapists, the focus of our work is often on how the past informs the present; and we know how complex this relationship is. Somehow, through these experiences of growing up around cinema—and through thousands of other experiences—I emerged: not created by these experiences; but touched and swayed and nudged. Something complex, rich, ethereal mingled with me, enticed me, helped me develop form. I shaped myself against this world: these people, this community, these machines. When I see myself as a whole, I am also the boy jumping on his dad’s sofa, and getting dragged out of the arcade, and answering the phone on his Auntie Rose’s lap; and all the traces of those experiences as they wove their way through my life. There’s no cause-and-effect here. No simple x made me y. But through that love, that culture, those experiences of joy and shame—through all that multifaceted, intermingled complexity—my own complex and multifaceted way of being and being-in-relation evolved.
Further information about my father and Contemporary Films:
Obituary (Charles Cooper), The Guardian. (4th Dec 2001)
Dickinson, R. (1999) Rogue reels: Oppositional film in Britain, 1945-1990. BFI.
Hogenkamp, B. (2000) Film, television and the left, 1950-1970. Lawrence & Wishart. [Including a photo of my dad, looking dapper in a tie, on the cover]
Contemporary Films website.