ARTHUR BROWN
$10.00
A successful rally car driver with a penchant for gambling, his model wife and their friend from Tasmania, an eccentric inventor. A split second which changes their lives.
Another in this series of tracts from Ex Film documenting the public eye of tabloid news and the narrative it conveys. Isolated from the surrounding visual noise of the original newspaper presentation, these publications offer a new perspective on strange, historical stories often forgotten by the public media lens.
80 pages
***
A great review from Neil Bramley's Language of the Damned. Subscribe to the substack here...
https://neilbramley.substack.com/p/the-macabre-world-of-arthur-brown
The Macabre World of "Arthur Brown"
True crime, historically relegated to dingy newsagent shelves, has undergone somewhat of a facelift in the decade or so since the podcast Serial. While it would be absurd to bemoan the genre’s gentrification as though it was a virtuous community beforehand, the investigative, polished conceit of Serial somehow “elevated” what is traditionally salacious material to the heights of middlebrow water-cooler discussion.
In Serial’s wake, it seemed like gradually even serial killers began to join their organised crime brethren (already an enduring costume party gimmick) as fodder for the oddly chirpy podcast, the unnervingly sympathetic limited series docudrama and the not-necessarily-ironic-enough “I could fix him” shitpost. In other words, the abstraction from the pain and devastation it explores is still a factor of the true crime genre, just perhaps it’s now different types of people than it used to be relishing in the gory details seeking different ends in this RedBubblification of Ted Bundy and his reprehensible pathetic loser ilk.
Standing outside of this is “Arthur Brown”, the latest in a hopefully enduring series of tracts published by the Naarm cult video label Ex Film chronicling macabre and obscured events as they unfolded in the news. As with the previous editions, the unannounced curator composes the “retelling” entirely of newspaper clippings arranged chronologically.
Once again locating a forgotten event of bygone decades, “Arthur Brown” unravels the tale of a hotel room bomb blast which claimed the life of an Australian rally car driver and maimed his wife. Unfortunately the series is tricky to review without partially robbing the reader of its effect, but stand by for an unsettling conclusion.
At face value, a straightforward assembly of newspaper clippings might seem like a lazy way to go about making a zine (and I would instead classify them as stand-alone tracts), but anyone who has ever researched using primary sources of a certain vintage will understand that it is not easy. This is not reading aloud from Wikipedia in The Podcast Voice; at its simplest, this involves grappling with the NLA’s Trove website, and at its most tedious, endless pissing about with the microfische in the State Library. This is admirable research to tell a story that isn’t finished simply because it is no longer sensational.