As Kingfishers Catch Fire
Edward Platt
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From the publisher
One of John Boorman's least known and rarely screened works — and yet the title that secured him the Best Director Prize at Cannes in 1970 — Leo the Last is a cult film in waiting, a genuinely radical, anti-authoritarian counter-cultural satire of hierarchy, property, class, and gentrification avant la lettre. It stars Marcello Mastroianni as a keen ornithologist and a deposed heir to an imaginary European throne returning to his late father's grand house among the then-rundown Notting Hill terraces.
Deeply melancholic and reclusive, he observes his poorer neighbours through a telescope. They are immigrants from the Caribbean – idealists, laundry-factory workers, street preachers, pimps, young prostitutes – and, amidst the grot and the grind, in spite of the poverty and strife they face, he is steadily drawn into solidarity. To the point, eventually, of revolutionary struggle. A great and wildly unstable London film, its soundtrack a mesh of human barking, proto rap and art-calypso, its inflammatory closing scenes were shot in a street later demolished to make way for an estate that included Grenfell Tower, the 24-storey block (described by some locals as “little Africa”) destroyed in a 2017 fire that killed 72 people.
As Kingfishers Catch Fire: The Making of John Boorman’s Leo the Last in Notting Dale, written by Edward Platt (author of Leadville, an award-winning history of the A40), is an eerie, troubled exploration of this extraordinary film, the scorned streets it maps, the lonely Londoners to whom it's drawn, its pre-histories and its unexpected future echoes.
Designed by Rob Carmichael, SEEN, and printed by Musheto Fernandez at Sunday's Print Service, Glasgow.
Risograph publication. Edition of 225 signed copies.
5.7" x 8.25"; 44 pages.