You might or might not like Jarman’s style of working, and I couldn’t make it all the way through Jubilee (1978), but he was patently a film-maker. Many people will have chosen to see the film ALL DIVIDED SELVES because it concerns Ronnie Laing, not because the director, Luke Fowler, is a candidate for The Turner Prize.

At Cambridge Film Festival last night, ALL DIVIDED SELVES and the demeanour of its director, Luke Fowler, gave a very different impression from that made by Jarman. The film did not seem much like a film, and the artist – as all artists tend to do – tried, although his language kept tripping him up*, to distance himself from the idea that his work said something or had a message.

The message in ALL DIVIDED SELVES consisted almost entirely of Laing talking, often enough with visuals, about psychiatric conditions and his personal and cultural background; plus some others talking with or about him, his theories and about psychiatry in general. It is not difficult to pull quotations out of Laing’s works, let alone footage, which say something pertinent to us. There may be no great merit in having done so, even if you have embellished the enterprise with bits and pieces that you have shot.

Laing we saw at many ages, and in varying style of dress, but we always knew that it was he. As to anyone else in the film and who they were, nothing told us, and only original captions – apart from what seemed a new inter-title regarding Esterson – told us two or three times what community we were being shown, so we might have had Thomas Szasz on the screen and not have known it.

So, yes, we hear Laing talking and being interviewed, but what the film offered as a polemic, as Fowler called it, might have been better achieved by a reading of select passages from Laing’s publications, or by reading Adrian Laing’s biography of his father. Plus there’s Mike Moran’s one-man play about Ronnie…

Conclusion : Would I prefer to have the chance to see Tacita Dean’s FILM 2011 from Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall again and have it substitute for my memory of Fowler’s film? Yes!

* He seemed not to want to say ‘illustrative’, but nonetheless kept saying it, so drawing atention to a word that he purported to eschew.

Visit guest writer Anthony Davis’ website here.