Moyle: Times Square (1980)

The first of many films that Allan Moyle would intersect with the music industry, Times Square is about the unlikely bond that ensues when an itinerant punk (Robin Johnson) and politician’s daughter (Trini Alvarado) break out of a psychiatric ward, and attempt to live hand to mouth on the mean streets of 1980s New York. Shot on location and structured episodically, it’s awash with an almost unbelievable abundance of period details and ambience - the same hyperreal, luminiscent minutiae that characterises the most memorable music clips. And, set on the eve of the MTV revolution, it feels like a tentative experiment to think through where music clips might go in the near future. At one level, that makes many of its sequences feel like prototypes for now-classic music clips, or as if they could simply be excerpted to form ready-made music clips. But it also feels as if Moyle is gesturing towards a more organic fusion of music clip and narrative film: it’s very much a manifesto for music cinema rather than music video. In part, that’s evident in his fascination with technologies and devices that blur the boundaries between non-diegetic and diegetic music: there are many moments in the film where a song starts playing as if non-diegetically, only for us to realise that it’s coming from a boombox or other similar device. Not only does that work to bleed us into the cityscape, but it produces an extraordinary wonder at the newfound ability to match actual places and spaces with songs, as the characters create their own musical mise-en-scenes that Moyle just happens to capture (all monitored by an omniscient, panoptic radio presenter, played by Tim Curry, who’s less a video jockey than a cinema jockey, some new weird fusion of DJ and director). And that works to liberate the song itself too, as details and nuances – often bridges, riffs and incidental flourishes – are suddenly freed from their musical context and set loose in a city populated by autonomous montage sequences, shimmering and cascading into a new decade.