Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (Mark Leckey) from Anon. on Vimeo.

Fragments of “found” video footage from British nightclubs are spliced together, repeated and slowed down, while a perfectly edited collage of ambient sounds – snatches of rave tracks, crowd noise, men bellowing across provincial shopping precincts – filters in and out. There’s a loose chronology – northern soul, soul weekenders, casuals, acid house – but the two defining themes of the film are timeless.This year sees the 10th anniversary of Mark Leckey’s short film, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. Leckey is best known for his exhibition Industrial Light & Magic, which won the 2008 Turner prize.

Firstly, what deeply strange places nightclubs are; hundreds of strangers, all as high as kites, crammed together in a deliberately disorientating space. And secondly, how much poignancy there is in something ostensibly celebratory; the idea that “the best days of your lives” will be wiped away by a change in fashion. Leckey captures this beautifully in the occasional sound of tolling bells, the endless headlong rush of the video timecodes, the snippets of empty rooms and the suddenly frozen images of young, apprehensive faces.

Article by Justin Quirk