70 X 70

[London]: King Mob., [2013]. First edition. Signed by Iain Sinclair. Newspaper format (37 x 30cm). 48pp. Profusely illustrated throughout with colour and black and white film-stills. A near fine copy; the rear cover with a minor abrasion to the foot, the contents remaining clean and crisp throughout. Signed by Ian Sinclair in black ink to the foot of the front cover. A programme for the writer and filmmaker, best known his work rooted in London's psychogeography, Iain Sinclair's 70x70 film season at Hackney Picturehouse. Curated to mark his seventieth birthday, Sinclair nominated seventy films (one for each year survived), chosen in conversation with Paul Smith and Chris Petit. He describes the process thus: "We had been playing with the idea of an anti-pantheon, a difficult thing to define. These were films that struck us as having energy, attack, context – but which stood outside the usual registers of excellence, either as achieved works of art or as smartly delivered industrial product. But the anti-pantheon wouldn't be a round-up of camp shockers or patronised dreck. Budd Boetticher's last western, A Time for Dying, would be a good example. Not one of the classics eulogised by Cahiers du Cinema, but a charity-bin endgame, dissolution of genre. A money-laundering exercise revealing all the fault lines of Hollywood process." (The Guardian, 16th July 2013).

The present programme contains lengthy notes by Sinclair on each of the seventy films, as well as a still from each film.