In my dream last night there was a film being shot near from train tracks [...] It wasn't period perfect: the scene was supposed to show prisoners arriving at a concentration camp, and this train was at least thirty years too new. But the director nodded. This train conveyed something of the necessary industrial horror. The lumbering anachronism would add weight.

[...] Some are still lost, just vague structures of image and movement, evoking that line about memory being what is left when something hapens and doesn't completely unhappen. I forget who said it. Hybrid scenes, overlapping plots, snatches of story. I started keeping track of films I had seen, films I wanted to see, and films I wanted to make in a notebook. I wrote it in every day until I filled it, when I transferred everything to a ring binder, so I could add pages whenever I liked. If I could inexpensively make this book look like that one, I would. I consider it to be the true original unexpurgated Fictional Film Club and mourn its loss (in a train carriage between Canterbury and London Bridge, January 2000) more than many deaths.

[...] My reactions to films such as Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (1981) and Hans Wilmots' Die Stadt, La Ville, The City (1985) were, initially at least, based on their spaces. All, in different ways, show a crumbling post-industrial Europe. Stalker's post-nnuclear lost space. Possession's dead-ends, where the Berlin Wall has truncated city streets and tracks, creating a dead zone. Die Stadt's layered city levels that go on and go, like Borges' library of Babel, with balconies you could fall from and continue falling forever. These are all ambivalent areas: not simply barren, or violent, or impossible. All seem familiar somehow, as if a wrong turn in any city could lead you right into them. They are quietly uncanny, not specifically Gothic or distant. They are worlds that contain possibility, that do not seem hemmed in; they exist beyond the frame, and before and after the time-frame of the film. These zones, to borrow Stalker's terminology, are so affecting, I think, because, like Walter Barch's eerily calm civil war canvasses, or the deceptively benign blue planet in Joel Scott's New Hebredaeia film cycle, they appear so ordinary. They are seen in grey daylight. Their otherness is established without the fantastical tropes we recognise from other films. They are like a part of the world where two edges meet, and the volume drops, and nobody quite notices.

So Chocolae Cassette is my favourite film, at least until I see it. I've thought of it as a cool title, a terrible one, a clever one, too clever, dumb. It doesn't matter. Chocolate Cassette is a mantra, a promise. No matter how bad things are, don't worry. One day you will make Chocolate Cassette. The few friends I've told about i task what it is about, or ask if I've got any film equipment, or money for the production. This misses the point. Chocolate Cassette exists. If it was made it might not. It is the eleventh film in the top ten, the empty place at the table for the guest who doesn't show up, the prayer you don't say aloud. It is my all-time favourite film that does not exist, and the best tribute to it is to leave it out of this book.

[...] I could explain my process. I made a document called CONTENTS with a long list from which I would make the final selections. They were ordered chronologically. (By the year of their fictional release, not the order in which I wrote them.) Some of them were just a name with no film attached. I liked looking at the names in different fonts of varying authority. I liked the page that said CONTENTS so much that I added to the document some of my writing about the films I had selected. I put them in the correct order, with suitable fonts. I printed it out. I did no further work that day. The printing felt like enough. I had achieved something I had, on paper, the bulk of my manuscript. Now theoretically I could carry it with me, look at it on the bus, maybe edit it with a red pen in the staff room at work; inspired, I might take bathroom breaks and pull a folded page out of the inside of my shirt and add some notes. I could take it anywhere now, rather than wait until I got home to my computer to work.

But once I'd printed it out, I couldn't imagine leaving the house without it, and didn't for weeks, during which I did no work on the pages. None. And also, because I'd printed the document, I couldn't work on it on the computer, because then the printout would be wasted, and I'd be carrying an expired version, useless. I had to be carrying the latest version, and I was, as long as I didn't change it. So while having the manuscript in my bag meant that I could edit it on my journey to work, it also meant that I would not. If it is in my bag it is safe, as long as I don't take it out and attempt to improve or finish it. After a while I tried carrying my laptop around with me, so that I could work anywhere. The laptop fit in my bag, but nothing else would. i couldn't take lunch or another book or a notebook with me. The weight of the unfinished book was literal and metaphorical. I pictured the horror and relief of manuscripts lost in two films: at sea in The Second Draft (JOhn Loose, 1999) and floating in the breeze in a parking lot in Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, 2000). I imagined my laptop dropping off the top level of a multi-storey car park and smashing into pieces with some satisfaction.

Picking a favourite film from a selection of films that were never made is tough. What do you leave out? There's so much. [...] My only real disclaimer is that if any of these film are actually real ones, I apologise. I have no way of knowing. [...]

There is a sequence in E.G. Hoch's Mensch Versus Mittwoch in which Eli, played with brilliant care by Emil Jannings, leaves a bar and walks drunkenly down a Berlin alleyway. He is set upon by an unseen assailant, who beats him to a bloody mess. The attack is shown reflected in the eye of a cat, who watches the action before turning away to toy with a dying mouse. It is such an extravagant piece of camera-work, stepping way beyond the usual stark theatricals of the Weimar Expressionists towards something quite new, that it threatens to rip the film almost completely away from its own narrative. [...]

[...] He picked on L. She blushed. She was usually quiet in class. But after some prompting she went on to talk more than I'd ever heard her talk before. Her voice was scratchy and thin, and her sentences would periodically drift into uncertain noises, rather than come to a deliberate end. But her ideas were quite original, and I could have listened to her for much longer. To her, Monday was dark blue, Tuesday was yellow, Wednesday orange, Thursday brown, Friday green, Said black, and Sunday white. An animated discussion ensued, as members of the class volunteers: their own thoughts. One kid disagreed completely with L's version. I put my hand up to say that I agreed with L that Tuesdays were yellow. (While I remember her spectrum well, I don't remember the rest of mine, perhaps because I wasn't as taken with the premise as she; perhaps because I was more taken with her than the premise. I do remember that none of my days were black or white, and that Saturday was, and remains, Ferrari red.) I glanced over. L wasn't looking but Vicki was grinning at me. We agree on Tuesday, I thought. After that, I examined our behaviour more closely than usual on Tuesdays, looking for examples of extra rapport. One Tuesday in cal March, L swung her bag onto her shoulder and it lightly hit my arm. Sorry, she said, and looked at me very briefly. My fault, I said. I began to imagine that our first kiss would be on a Tuesday, but then I realised that any focus on this idea removed six days from the calendar of potential.

Dijonnaise's title has no obvious connection to the subject matter, unless we see it as a clue to what is in the man's bowl. The cut-and-shut combination of the words Dijon mustard and mayonnaise was actually a Friend invention, and he sold the name to Heinz in 1951 for an amount far greater than anything he received for his film. He repeated this trick of collapsing words together to invent a new one in order to title his next film, Brunch (1941), in which we see a woman eating a meal that is neither breakfast nor dinner, but somewhere in between, and with Ham-Fisted (1943), in which we see a man with a ham for a paw attempt, clumsily, to eat himself. The films were screened in basements and bars, or they would be sneaked into studio screening rooms late at night, an audience assembled by word of mouth, the titles being whispered like new words in the language for the first time, because that's what they were.

[...] Perhaps Friend's most lastingly memorable piece was At the Drive-In (1959), a documentary recording of a screening of Rebel Without A Cause at a drive-in theatre in California. After some shots of cars arriving and young couples buying popcorn, the camera finds a spot and doesn't move. Unlike much of the distracted audience, it simply watches the screen for the duration of the film. THe Technicolor melodrama of Rebel seems so distractingly different when seen in greys, and Friend's detached presentation of the excitable youths on camera (and on the screen on camera) articulates the confusion of the generation gap almost as well as Nicholas Ray's masterpiece itself, but from the other side: by this point Friend was well into his fifties.