browseMai (1974)
Amber Films (Producer)
30 mins, 16mm
Colour/optical
Documentary
Available as VHS
An obsessive collector, Mai Finglass’ house in Elgin Avenue was filled with her treasures to the point where the doors were permanently jammed. She herself lived in a rented house in Shepherds Bush. As students at Regents Street Polytechnic, Murray Martin and Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen both had lodgings in Shepherds Bush with Mai, along with Richard Pratt, a member of the wider group out of which Amber arose, and his girlfriend.
Born in India around 1890 from Irish-Persian parents, Mai Finglass taught as a young woman in the Himalayas, influenced by such radical educationalists as Annie Bessant, Madame Blavatsky, Madame Montessouri and Gandhi, whom she met. She educated her three children at home, walked out of her two marriages, and in her eighties took a job cleaning shops in London’s Portobello Road as a way of supplementing her state pension and in order to be near her beloved antique dolls, which she was buying on HP.
Mai is affectionate film portrait of an irrepressible eccentric who makes you question the sanity of conformity. A lapsed Catholic and eventually a committed Anarchist, Mai combined her contradictions as easily as her collections. Invaluable Victorian china dolls shared her affection with cheap plastic ones. Stuffed Pekinese dogs and ivory miniatures piled up with bits of string and yellowing newspapers in perfect, if bizarre harmony. Cleanliness to Mai meant stringent adherence to washing milk bottles before opening, and oranges before peeling, whilst a mountain of decaying rubbish swallowed up her sink, and somewhere in the kitchen a family of hedgehogs lived happily. ‘What is dirt?’ she asks in the film. ‘Dirt is matter in the wrong place. Curry on the plate is food. On the tablecloth it is dirt:’ Feminist by her strong, independent lifestyle and convictions, Mai nevertheless maintained her Victorian shynesses, and only allowed a woman to witness and film her nightly ritual of brushing her waist long grey hair.
The film was not made until the group had moved to Newcastle. Beset with technical problems, it took a year to shoot, and, for financial reasons, another three to edit. It was eventually cut into an impressionistic collage of moments and thoughts in brief cameo scenes. This was partly because Mai’s quixotic lifestyle didn’t lend itself to film continuity, but also because stylistically it best reflects her multifarious personality, vitality and eclectic philosophy of life.
AMBER FILMS
Made with financial assistance from Northern Arts.