By Dov Kornits
“I’ve always loved the visual beauty of neon, and the glow particularly,” Lawrence Johnston tells FilmInk. That love now finds full bloom – or perhaps more appropriately, full electrification – in the director’s new documentary, Neon. Artfully composed and deeply informative, the film traces how neon lights have moved beyond being mere tools of advertising and signage to find traction as things of beauty and romance, and now standing as a delightfully kitsch fixture and feature of the twentieth century world. “I was interested in the story of neon, and whether there was something substantial in it to make a film about,” Johnston explains. “I got caught up in the invention of it, and the origins, and then obviously the dynamic of it being spread across the world, especially through North America.”
Beginning in 1920s Paris, Neon charts how the neon boom took hold of America, and how the obsession for the new form of light changed the nightscapes of cities like New York and Los Angeles, and created the brash, lurid metropolis of Las Vegas, which rightfully became famed as “The Neon Capital Of The World”, and is now home to the famous Neon Boneyard, a museum filled with vividly coloured artefacts. Interviewing self-confessed neon-geeks (and revealing his own neon fascination), Johnston celebrates the art and science of one of the most environmentally friendly forms of lighting ever made, and one that is steadily becoming endangered. “I grew up in Brisbane, and sometimes we’d go to Surfers Paradise, and there’s always been neon either in the valley in Brisbane or Surfers, so I guess it was always tied up with entertainment or nightlife,” Johnston tells FilmInk. “It was something exotic. And that’s always been the way that it’s been used. The most attractive examples are obviously the more spectacular ones: newsreels filmed around the old Times Square in New York, and particularly Las Vegas, where it’s associated with casino culture.”
The film turned out to be something of a spectral odyssey for neon lover, Johnston. “I went off and researched it,” he says. “I went to America, basically to the places that are in the film, particularly The Neon Boneyard in Las Vegas, and New York and Los Angeles. With our budget, we weren’t able to go everywhere, but they were the main hotspots. From that, I wrote a six-page script or treatment which documented the neon story. There had never been a film about neon of this length. There had been shorter films, but the ambition was to not only cover the invention and introduction to commercial signage making, but also to popular culture and the movies; and at one stage, even literature and other things, but that got cut out during development. It covers that, but also how LED is threatening it now.”
If you’re expecting a dry history lesson, think again. Like Johnston’s previous docos – Fallout (about Nevil Shute’s On The Beach), Night, Once A Queen, and Eternity – Neon is almost an art piece in itself. “I try to make something more solid and more of a crafted film,” Johnston offers. “You’re meant to consider what you’re watching, rather than just placing it on TV and classifying it as variety. The documentary landscape has changed over the last ten years. A lot of things are called documentary that are just crappy fly-on-the-wall observational things. They’re on all sorts of kooky subjects, and it’s like anything can be a documentary nowadays. I strive for a certain degree of quality. My films are made here and now, but they can be watched later, and they stand up. With a lot of television documentary that is made now, you inhale once, and that’s it. I never wanted to make something like [the TV series] American Pickers. It’s just the opposite of that. I wanted to make something where you actually learnt where it came from, and where you saw the beauty of it. I wanted to show 1920s Paris and early neon; I want the viewer to learn a little bit about how it got degraded and abused. My role is to show how it’s technically made, but we don’t dwell on that; we dwell on the more beautiful aspects of it, and seeing how it was utilised in the landscape. It’s a very romantic film in that it’s about something that is handmade, and that has always been handmade, apart from some generic beer signs. That’s the beauty of the craft, and also people’s appreciation of it as signage in the commercial world – it’s an art form.”
Neon opens at Cinema Nova in Melbourne on June 2, and will screen for one night only as part of FilmInk Presents on Monday June 6, 6:30pm, at The Ritz Cinema, Randwick, Sydney. For all information, click here.
