The Boros Collection

See also David Sokol, 'Bunker Chic,' Metropolis Magazine, Oct 17, 2007.

World War I Pillbox with Office

© Copyright Keith Evans and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Pillbox IoE 466394. World War I Pillbox, Haddiscoe, Norfolk. Built of concrete with steel doors c.1916. A mid C20 weather-boarded office building was built on top. This pillbox guarded St Olave's bridge.

ROC Post Winterton, Norfolk

SubBrit ROC Database Brief history and a database of all ROC posts in the UK

23 Post Skelmorlie Restored ROC post in Ayrshire, Scotland

ROC Post Internal Diagram circa 1962

ROC Remembered

The Infinitesmal and the Infinite

'What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world?'

Peter Kennard

Peter Kennard, Haywain with Cruise Missiles (1980).

Kennard's photomontages are blunt instruments but this one has a humour and absurdity about it that sets it apart from the skulls and mushroom clouds that characterise his more Heartfield-like compositions.

Thom Andersen, Fred Halsted, Floyd Mutrux

The title of Andersen's film-essay Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) is borrowed from Fred Halsted's gay porn classic L.A. Plays Itself (1972).



Andersen is also, unsurprisingly, a fan of Floyd Mutrux's Dusty and Sweets McGee (1971), which, like Demy's Model Shop (see below), has some remarkable street photography. Mutrux did some great work in the 70s, both as director -- Aloha Bobby and Rose (1975), American Hot Wax (1978) -- and as writer on Two Lane Blacktop (1971) and The Christian Licorice Store (1971).

Kent Mackenzie, The Exiles (1961)

Amazingly, now on DVD.

D.J. Waldie

Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi

Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers at SculptureCenter

Matthew Coolidge discussing the CLUI

You Are Here- Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) from bree edwards on Vimeo.

From the 'You Are Here'  conference held in Houston,Texas, November 30 and December 1, 2007.

Cynthia Hooper

MEXIMPERIALI from Cynthia Hooper on Vimeo.

The Salton Sea

William Klein

Buckminster Fuller

Chris Marker, La Jetée (1963)

Michael Snow

Harun Farocki, War at a Distance [samples]

war at a distance samples from Gianni Wise on Vimeo.

Living in a Fallout Shelter

Chosen Survivors

Happy Days: 'Be The First on Your Block'

Howard does civil defense. The Fonz doesn't.

The Twilight Zone: 'The Shelter'

Many bunker narratives take on the attributes of the siege or prison drama because entering the bunker is in the end a mode of self-incarceration. In this respect the bunker narrative works as a means of playing out broader anxieties about the ways in which everyday life, at least since World War II, has been commandeered by the militarized state. The continuation of life in these narratives is predicated upon access to a technologically-mediated environment that is itself an outgrowth of a militarized society. Being inside the bunker brings no relief from the terrors produced by it and the deceptions generated by a withdrawal from the outside world’s continuities of time and space instead cause a disorientation that is recognizable not as the exceptional condition of emergency but as an intensification of the conditions of control that the very idea of a bunker makes possible. Even as it offers a tentative promise of protection from assault, the bunker violently interrupts and destabilizes the state of security it is supposed to preserve.

This sense of the bunker as a weapon is evident in a 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone called ‘One More Pallbearer,’ where the wealthy Paul Radin invites three people from his past to the bomb shelter he has built in the basement of a New York skyscraper. Radin’s objective is to terrify the three, against whom he holds a grudge, into begging his forgiveness by simulating a nuclear attack. An apology wins a place in the bunker while a refusal is certain death. All three refuse and leave, preferring an honorable death; Radin has evidently always been rotten. The elaborate ruse, however, turns out to have anticipated real events as a bomb blast shakes the shelter and Radin discovers that war really has occurred. In a further twist, however, the wreckage Radin wanders through above ground turns out to be all in his mind; the world has not ended and he has gone mad.

While the bunker seemingly gives Radin power over life and death, conventional values of right and wrong neutralise the grip he believes he has over those who have allegedly persecuted him. The imagined apocalypse clearly marks Radin as mad but the single-mindedness with which he has used his wealth to construct an environment of terror and coercion suggests that he -- and by extension, a culture that deploys civil defence a means of social control -- is a genuine threat.

The Twilight Zone: 'One More Pallbearer'

The Twlight Zone: 'Shelter Skelter'

The Omega Man

Electra Glide in Blue

Agnès Varda and Susan Sontag

Sontag/Varda from Metrograph Pictures on Vimeo.

While we're on the subject of Varda and Demy in America, it's definitely worth including Varda's Black Panthers film here too: go to the Internet Archive.

Model Shop

Unlike Hopper's cowboy pastiche of Euro arthouse, this is a real French new wave film shot on Los Angeles. Jacques Demy's Model Shop (1969) does a great job on the city; there's no quest narrative here, only endless loops and circuits. Meanwhile, his wife Agnes Varda was busy shooting Black Panthers (1968) and one of the ultimate late-60s Hollywood oddities, Lions Love (1969). None of the films made much of a mark in the US and the pair soon returned to Paris. Together, Model Shop and Lions Love offer an idiosyncratic, oblique, and refreshingly underexposed outsider's perspective of an overdetermined moment.

Orford Ness

Reyner Banham Loves LA