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Rolling Stones Video Rewind: Child of the Moon video

On May 11 1968, the Stones filmed a promotional film clip for Child of the Moon in the Surrey countryside, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, and then a second one for Jumpin’ Jack Flash at Olympic Sound Studios.

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From the Brian Jones Timeline blog:
Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg
Photographs by Peter Shillingford

On the making of the video:
The next day (after the Jumping Jack Flash promo clips), the Stones and Eileen Atkins, then a young actress, got together to finish filming footage for ‘Child of the Moon’.
“We went into the country for the shoot,” says Lindsay-Hogg. “In addition to Eileen, we also had a child, and Mick and Keith were to appear on horseback at one point.”
“It was filmed in Epping Forest,” Eileen Atkins recalls.
“I was paid fifty quid for an afternoon’s work, and it was all rather glamorous to be working with the Rolling Stones. I was impressed with Mick that day, and I do recall that I did my first take very badly indeed. Michael gently said, ‘I don’t think we want it quite like that. Let’s do it again,’ and Mick never gave the slightest clue that he thought I’d just been terrible. He was very charming, and I came to the conclusion that he did have a brain after all.”When filming ended it was minus one scene.
“Brian was to have been filmed in a tree,” says Lindsay-Hogg, but when the time came, we couldn’t find him. He had wandered off and got lost.”
The atmosphere between Jagger and Jones was noticeable to the director who admits, “I don’t want to use the word ostracized, but Brian annoyed Mick, that’s for sure.”
It had gone beyond annoyance. Lately, a few guitarists, including Eric Clapton, had been brought in to the studio to contribute, which Jones took as an insult. He had cleaned up and regained enough confidence to confront Jagger about it.
Jagger began to develop his own ambitions. There had often been talk of a Stones film, which never had been realized, but Jagger had a real desire to act and at this point almost got his first part.
“Michael Lindsay-Hogg was a friend of mine,” says Eileen Atkins, and at the time I took part in the ‘Child of the Moon” clip, he and I were about to do Elecktra on TV. I said with Michael that it might be a fresh idea to work with people not normally associated with this kind of thing. I suggested we ask Mick Jagger to play Orestes, and Michael was all for it. But then over the next couple of weeks we had second thoughts. Mick was great as a Rolling Stone, but we just couldn’t see him handling Greek tragedy.” (Ref. child of the moon video)

About the shooting of The Rolling Stones ‘Child of the Moon’ video (from Mojo magazine)

An early semi-narrative work by the British director Michael Lindsay-Hogg – who graduated from Ready Steady Go! to direct The Rolling Stones Rock And Roll Circus, Let It Be, and Brideshead Revisited, and is the biological son of Orson Welles – Child Of The Moon plays like a British sci-fi/horror short, seemingly referencing Italian giallo, Village Of The Damned and J. Lee Thompson’s 1966 pagan horror (and Wicker Man forerunner) Eye Of The Devil.
The film possesses the dusk-light glow of a peaking acid trip, magic-hour euphoria tinged with a chilly unease, yet also tunes into the darker subtext of the Stones occult dalliances. “The film possesses the dusk-light glow of a peaking acid trip.”

This is a music promo in which a lone woman – her face dirty and smeared with tears – stumbles out of a dark wood only to encounter a gang of five frowning men blocking her path. The most grim and obvious interpretation is that this group are potential sexual aggressors. Another reading, and one perhaps more in keeping with the song’s more mystical qualities, is that Jagger et al are auguries of excess. Even so, the woman, styled similarly to Lynn Redgrave’s naive innocent Georgy Girl is being warned to go no further. This is your future? Maybe. Or perhaps, simply, this is not for you, dear. Either way, turn back now.

Whether wholly intentional or not, Child Of The Moon stands as one of the most disturbing and powerful representations of The Rolling Stones’ fiendish late ’60s mythology, what the writer and musician Gary Valentine referred to in MOJO 70 as “the latent violence of the love generation”. (Ref. child of the moon video)