For a black-and-white film, MOVIEMAKERS has plenty of colour. It seems clichéd to describe a film set in the sixties as trippy, but there is no better word to describe this ethereal 70-minute experience.

In the introduction we learn that director John Pearse, was a skilled Savile Row tailor who took a brief career break to make three films before returning to his trade. His background was clear from the way MOVIEMAKERS was sewn together, from disparate pieces of footage varying in fabric and texture. This was to the point that you never quite knew what was coming next – a naked midget crouched in the eaves of a roof before shimmying down a rope, a spaced-out Scotland Yard police officer coming onto a witness before being injected with drugs by her protective boyfriend, and the brazen theft of a Mini Cooper at relatively security-lax Heathrow arrivals. MOVIEMAKERS is a feast for the eyes and right brain.

… promiscuous, decadent and lacking even an inch of integrity, he bumbles from caper to caper.

The struggling film director lead is the perfect anti-hero for this jaunt: promiscuous, decadent and lacking even an inch of integrity, he bumbles from caper to caper.  He perfectly sums up the mood of the times, literally swinging himself through life, laughing off a fatal stabbing he inadvertently catches on camera and talking his way into more than one women’s bed with reckless abandon. We are, however, given insight into the source of his wanton ways, in a sequence where his mother knocks back pills with hard liquor. Completely lacking in self-awareness, she proclaims that as she has now got her life together and on the straight and narrow, her son now needs to cop on too.

The film director’s brother, who for the majority of the MOVIMAKERS is perched  in a state of meditation cross-legged and nude atop a roof, brings vital respite from the kaleidoscopic circus that is the rest of the film. The camera moves out of focus at times, although one feels that this is an intentional readjustment to give the audience a jolt and a chance to refocus: as the film wanders, so does the mind of the audience. At times, the acting is a touch wooden and overplayed, and the upper class plum with which some of the actors speak conflict with the casual Bohemia of the characters they played, but these aspects add to the hyper-theatrical flavour of the film.

The plot certainly gets lost somewhere along the way. There shouldn’t be any doubt,  though, that the disconnected madcap form of MOVIEMAKERS provides a credible taste of life in the sixties Big Smoke; and what a enjoyable and spirited skip it was up the King’s Road. To exit this land of hard-to-believe in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce at the end of the film seems oddly conservative closure, given what has gone before. For its time capsule qualities, MOVIEMAKERS has certainly earned its place in the British Film Institute archives.