The gothic is an unkillable vampire. The pointy, buttressed architectural style of great medieval cathedrals was named after the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, ancient Germanic peoples who migrated into the Roman empire. That style in turn was revived in the 18th century: the aesthete Horace Walpole built himself one of the first gothic revival houses, Strawberry Hill in London, which inspired him to write the first horror novel, The Castle of Otranto. It was then revived far more thoroughly by spectacular Victorian architects including Augustus Pugin and George Gilbert Scott.
And then there was Bauhaus. The pioneering goth band came together in Northampton in 1978, taking its name from Weimar Germany’s famous art and design school where Klee and Kandinsky worked. There wasn’t anything “gothic” at all about the Bauhaus school, but presumably the German term for “house of building” sounded spookily central European to the band members. Their 1979 single Bela Lugosi’s Dead hits the horror mainline, its rhythmic dirge a mesmerising tribute to the Hungarian-born star of Dracula.
In David Panos’s film Gothic Revival, a Northampton pub band rehearse and perform Bauhaus’s sepulchral classic. It’s another kind of revival: goth re-enactment. Raven Rust, who describe themselves as dedicated to “gothic and dark rock” are seen playing at the town’s Black Prince pub (don’t you dare call Northampton a city – it’s been a chartered town since 1189). Neither the band nor the balding blokes in their audience look young or cadaverous. The constant montage of deftly edited closeups reveals black nail varnish on wrinkly fingers. This is Nosferatu with a beer belly.
Meanwhile, in the town’s All Saints’ Church, a young choir rehearse Christian hymns. Panos’s camera discovers the church’s archive of choral music and lingers on 17th and 18th-century monuments. The voice of Father Oliver Cross tells the story of Northampton through this church, originally constructed by the Normans before being rebuilt after the town’s Great Fire of 1675 – another gothic revival, of course.
The restless, intoxicating, intercutting of contrasting images even different worlds within the same town, between church and pub, choristers and goths, is emphasised by the two-channel presentation on adjacent screens. Panos also works in spectral digital images of the town’s Victorian gothic architecture, including the graceful decorated windows of Northampton Guildhall. These monochrome glimpses turn eerie as they are montaged with night-time scenes and the band’s soundcheck starts to cohere into the sinister bassline of Bela Lugosi’s Dead.
The film starts to seem spookily dualistic with the split screen like a medieval gothic diptych representing realms of bliss and suffering. Good and evil, the Church and Satan, are displayed as a stark choice. And this choice – as we all know – is played out everywhere, in every town and city, in this case in the two opposing venues of a church and a pub.
Panos though is on the devil’s side and knows it. The true faithful are the goths, loyal to the weird freedom of dismal music and liberated minds. Meanwhile the choristers look nervous, unhappy, confined in their cassocks. That may not be fair to All Saints’ Church but it’s how the artwork is edited.
So why does the gothic always get revived? Because it licenses melancholy musings and ritualises madness. Even in the middle ages, the soaring spiritual aspirations of cathedrals climbing towards heaven were contaminated by gargoyles and other grotesques carved on choir stalls, the irrational and infernal finding a place in the church. Sunlight makes the interior of All Saints’ Church look calm and dignified, but Panos prefers Northampton by night, his camera seeking out the shadows.
Perhaps the gothic remains undead and always reborn because there is something perversely vital about it. In a pure world of light we would all be robots, or angels. Human life is not pure, but damaged and damaging, rawly energetic, like a crude bass note that goes on and on.
You emerge blinking out of the darkened gallery to find Northampton looking far from scary. And I get a hard-hat tour of Northampton’s expansive new contemporary art venue that opens next year. This is a taster NN Contemporary Art have commissioned as they count down to opening. It’s very promising. And it shows enormous discipline to have made an entire artwork about Northampton and the gothic without mentioning the town’s famous resident Alan Moore, perhaps the most gothic person alive. More discipline than I can manage anyway.
