Molly Cutpurse 

Information about Molly's film, Holloway-House Of Correction.

“This four minute film was born from a measureless sense of despair. Having created the novel, A Life Lived, I discovered it was not enough to dispel the coated, smothered, gloomy, eternal, resigned, insistent and oppressed sensations that the execution of Edith Jessie Thompson aroused in me.

Here, I recognised a rare occurrence. Here was a state of affairs which had the potential to advance me spiritually than I had ever before travelled and Edith's plight; this woman who now has no voice, no influence, I felt was, metaphorically speaking, calling out from her grave, egging me forever onwards. She became representative for all those legally murdered. For the thousands upon thousands in so many countries throughout our apparently modernistic world.

The globe to me now took the form of a new and shiny super-car; powered from within by a human treadmill of disposable victims. We are told the world is getting better. Advances, advances, advances everywhere...in every direction yet if one has witnessed the sheer and utter barbarity of a death by stoning in the Middle East or a mass shooting of 'subversives' in Tibet by Chinese forces, and I have witnessed both, then these political and scientific 'progressions' become little more than harmless and inconsequential injections of penicillin.

Invigorated then, my thirst for knowledge became inextinguishable and this short film, Holloway-House Of Correction is the result of an evolutionary process, the consequence of an uncharted amount of time spent in libraries and Record Offices in the UK.

The model is flat and flavourless...and also inaccurate. The prison, first rose from the ground in 1849 and it immediately became plain that it would be impossible to represent it as one unit for parts of it were, especially in its earlier lifetime, extended, pulled down and converted over and over again as policies, politics and semantics of the time changed.

A greater obstacle was the consummate lack of information in the early stages of construction (which was completed in Maxon's, Cinema 4D on an Intel-based iMac). From the diagrams and limited amount of photographs I had collected at the beginning of the project, I assembled the model piece by piece over a three month period but soon found that even the mightiest of home computers (at least of that which I could afford) was not powerful enough to allow me to fully sculpt it with as much detail as I would have liked. Although in truth, part of this difficulty was down to my limited skills with the program.

As the photographs and plans were often undated and extended in time, from what I could surmise, between 1880 and 1970, I was therefore forced into making several project decisions and the finished model is, at best, a compromise. The Victorian man, woman or youth, if he or she were ever to view this film, would not recognise some of the buildings and all those women in immurement in the latter half of the Twentieth century would have to admit to the same.

However, this framework, I decided should be open source and therefore it is available as a free download for any brave and enterprising individual to improve upon should they wish to attempt the task. I will do my best to provide a variety of formats for those who do not possess Cinema 4D so they can work on it using their own favourite 3D modelling program but with even a simple DXF file of it weighing in at 32MB, anybody wishing to play will have to email me first to come to a common arrangement as to how I can best supply it. Cinema's own generic format is 4.6 MB which is not too bad. I have no objection entering into correspondence if the enquirer is serious. Just e-mail Jean. Within the limitations of copyright, I will do my best to supply as much detail as is needed. I am now in possession of about 150 monochromic photographs of the prison taken mostly before it was demolished and these would be of great help in reconstructing the details.

The origination of the soundtrack is a mystery. Partly. Originally I had planned to place Linden Lea, the same piece of music I had used on my first promotional film, A Life Lived, but something did not feel right about pursuing that idea. Possibly because the first was a movie of eventual hope whereupon this was far darker in scope. I left it for days, perhaps a week, not knowing what to do and brooded heavily but then one night I dreamt I was in one of those cells. In B wing. On the 9th of January 1923. The next morning, the experience became my muse and I had my inspiration.

However, creating it became another personal challenge, taking almost as long as the film. I do remember late, late evenings, scrolling through what seemed like meters of sound footage on my screen, extrapolating and cutting levels and dozens and dozens of tracks, adding reverberation, compression, echo, equalization and a minefield of other special effects, mixing them down to the required left and right. And then, oddly, what I created seemed to fit the bland personality of the show. I hope you think so too.

Edith was not the only Thompson to be admitted to Holloway prison that cold autumn. There was Margaret Thompson, a factory worker, admitted on the 11th of September 1922 for hurling insults. She received fifteen days. Another was Lily Thompson, a dressmaker admitted on the 25 of September 1922 for drunkenness. Six days loss of freedom. And one more was Mary Thompson, also on the 25th of September 1922 for prostitution, loitering and indecency. Twenty one days incarceration. I wonder sometimes if any of them had caught sight of Edith or became wrapped up in the gossip about her. Upon their release, I wonder if any of them bragged to their friends that they had seen the ‘Messalina of Ilford’ as the press had dubbed her. Small and secondary people. However, they were the ones who were allowed to leave.”

Molly.