SOHO
Asset Register Entry: 21-12-15
Fact Sheet
There is no production or completion date for this project but, as it was shot on Team’s Hi-8 camera, I believe it must have been around 1990.
It was never originally intended for any kind of public showing but merely as a record, for Paul Hallam, of the rather extraordinary 1-room flat he lived in for a year, in Rupert Street, Soho. What made the place so highly visual was the contrast between the vast library, found furniture and bric-a-brac Paul surrounded himself with in the flat and the sights visible from the huge plate glass windows: neon, shop and club fronts, dark alleys and sidestreets, people passing or busy inside different spaces.
Paul had been keeping a journal of his experiences and impressions of Soho, with the idea of producing a book, and it was decided that he should be recorded reading from it and that it should be shot at night. The video piece then became, from a kind of gut instinct, a combination of Paul reading and the camera departing from recording him to exploring the room and the streets outside and the sound and picture interplay between them all.
When the SecondRunDVDs of NIGHTHAWKS and STRIP JACK NAKED were released, Mehelli Modi agreed to part-finance edits and post-production of the Soho material, other material I had shot recording the house and district where I grew up (149) and an additional film Paul made with Kate Boyd on the King’s Cross flat he moved to after leaving Soho (KING’S CROSS). What connects SOHO with 149 was that both were shot just immediately prior to their being vacated, but all three were somehow records of very different corners of London.
SOHO has had limited public screenings at Maastricht and at Birkbeck College, London.
Rights
Rights and any profit share were split 50/50 between Nashburgh Ltd. & SecondRunDVD. On closure of Nashburgh Ltd, rights were transferred to RLP Projects Ltd. No accounts for the film were ever produced by SecondRun and the DVD was discontinued after the BFI edition was released.
Assets
Tapes RLP Projects
Box File/Commissions-1
Hi-8
Original rushes
Mini-DV
Copy of the original rushes
DVCAM
Edit Master (without titles)
DVD RLP Projects
Box File/Commissions-1
2 x copies of both rushes & Edit
Master
(for RLP & PH)
+
SecondRunDVD release copy
(x 2)
by Ron Peck
