The original 'Vertical Features' was a landscape film made by me in the district
around Buryglaze, while I was working for Session Three of the State Landscape Programme.
That film (if, indeed, it was ever completed) is lost, although various photographs, notes, diagrams and strips of duped negative survive. 'Vertical Features
Remake' comprises the Institute of Reclamation and Restoration's four attempts to reconstruct the original film from these
fragments, interspersed with gossip, speculation and accounts of the criticisms that
greeted each attempt when it was first screened. It gradually emerges that my personal
interest in the relationship between musical and mathematical structures coincided
with an equally personal conviction that landscape should not be 'structured' but
allowed to develop and change of its own accord. In other words, I was a closet
dissident in the employ of Session Three. It is doubtless coincidental that the IRR's
valiant attempts to reconstruct the missing film bear some passing resemblance to
the genre of 'structural' landscape films that enjoyed a brief vogue in Arts Council film
circles in the 1970s.
This film invents so much fiction about my person that it belongs in the 'Romance' section of the BFI's film catalogue.