Anti-Clock: A Time Stop in the Life of Joseph Sapha
Entry updated 2 February 2026. Tagged: Film.
UK film (1979). Kendon Films, Jack Bond Films, Boyd/Co. Directed by Jane Arden and Jack Bond. Written by Arden. Cast includes Suzan Cameron and Sebastian Saville. 96 minutes. Black-and-white and colour.
Psychologist Professor J D Zonov (Saville) uses experimental techniques and Computer modelling to probe into the mind of Joseph Sapha (also Saville), a young man hovering on the verge of Suicide, who has seemingly been programmed into following conventional behaviour patterns. Zanov uncovers Sapha's attempts to break free from his conditioning, his past, present and possible future, his relations with his family, and his living as a petty criminal and gambler. Other Scientists observe their procedures, hoping this will lead to a breakthrough in human ability to live in more than one present simultaneously.
A largely non-narrative experimental film, Anti-Clock was the last of three features made by Jane Arden (born Norah Patricia Morris, 1927-1982), an important figure in the British avant-garde in the 1960s and 1970s, whose work ranged across Television, radical Theatre, Cinema, Feminist activism and involvement in the anti-psychiatry movement. Very much of its time in its mix of fiction and documentary, new material and archive footage, film and video, along the lines of the pioneering work of Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) and Dušan Makavejev (1932-2019), it is alternately thought-provokingly incisive (the analogies between modern Physics and the chaos of contemporary life) and frustratingly vague (the somewhat shoehorned-in arguments on gender politics). Perhaps most striking today is the then cutting-edge use of video and computer graphics in the service of serious intellectual argument. Arden's frequent collaborator Bond withdrew the film from circulation after her suicide in 1982, and it remained obscure until a BFI restoration and reissue of all her films in 2009 led to a reappraisal of her work. [CWa]
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