Herostratus: screencaps (I)

[michael_gothard_archive]

Max (Michael Gothard) arrives at his crummy room in a decrepit boarding house.



He inhabits the space he has created, sometimes depressed, sometimes elated, sometimes bemused.







He calls the people in the streets below ‘sheep.’





He tries to persuade Sandy (Mona Chin), a prostitute who lives in the same house, to come into his room and talk.



She challenges him to ask for what he really wants, but he doesn’t have the nerve, so he just asks her for money.





Back in his room, he is listening to an opera.



When his landlady objects, he takes an axe and – in a spree of wanton but joyous destruction – wrecks his room.







Armed with his axe, he chases her down the stairs. She tells him not to return.





Homeless, and with no prospects, he seems reckless of his own safety.







He wanders into a large office block, and shows what he thinks of the corporate art.





He approaches an advertising company, and tries to persuade the receptionist, Clio (Gabriella Licudi) to let him
meet the owner, Farson (Peter Stephens).







Alternately beguiling and annoying her, and being stabbed in the thigh with a paper-knife for his pains, he
blags his way into an interview.











He makes Farson an offer he can’t refuse – his public suicide, to be used however Farson chooses.





Farson want to know why.







Max eventually tells him it’s because life is meaningless.







Having persuaded Farson to agree, Max seems elated.



He is taken to a studio where he is to stay while arrangements are finalised.



He amuses himself for a time.









Then there is a meeting with market research and hatchet man, Pointer.





Max is not very happy; he doesn’t want to participate in the packaging of his suicide.











Back at the studio, he destroys a TV set.





He disrupts his own interview and walks out.





There follows a bleak street scene where a young girl nurses a mutilated doll.