Dear Joe, I’d like to walk with you From Clapton Pond to Stamford Hill And on… – Harold Pinter Harold Pinter liked walking around London. It is easily forgotten how vital walking around the capital was for him when considering how claustrophobic much of his theatre work is. Yet there is still a sense of place in his work, often highlighting many of his characters’ … Continue reading Walking On and On with Harold Pinter
Above is the trailer for the first film project of 2016, The Menhir Motorway. The film has been slightly delayed due to missing virtually all possible deadlines in regards to getting the film developed but it is now well on its way to being finished. Unlike virtually every other landscape short that I’ve made, this is one about an area that is personal to me, … Continue reading Trailer – The Menhir Motorway.
‘When I was not confined to the house, I would spend my days and my nights on the Edge.’ – Alan Garner On a frosty but sunny January morning, I was steadily making my way along the M56 towards Macclesfield. I was on my way to Alderley Edge in Cheshire, the stalking ground of writer Alan Garner. In 2015 I had made this journey in … Continue reading Alan Garner’s Edge
Jean-Luc Godard always had an interest in the relationship between politics and the spaces it influences. The topographies of modernity happened to coincide with his sharp turn towards cinematic political questioning, in films such as Tout Va Bien (1972), La Chinoise (1967), and Week-end (1967), looking in particular at a factory, an inner-city flat/Maoist commune, and a busy roadway. These spaces provided more than a backdrop for Godard’s political arguments: they seemed to actually … Continue reading Libidinal Circuits
Somewhere in this nexus of concrete and structural steel, this elaborately signalled landscape of traffic indicators and feeder roads, status and consumer goods, Vaughan moved like a messenger in his car… – Crash (1973), J.G. Ballard In the dead space before Christmas 2015, I found myself meandering back towards my old secondary school on The Wirral peninsula, one of only two things that I still … Continue reading Wanders: The M53 Cavern (A Northern Concrete Island)
Above is a showreel built from footage I’ve shot over the last twelve months. Compared to last year’s showreel, this one feels far more defined and less haphazard with the visual ideas I want to play with. Gone are the mixtures of stop-motion, digital and film, instead replaced entirely by different stocks of super-8 footage. This year has felt like a much more defined trajectory … Continue reading Showreel 2015.
As I write this, it is just under two weeks to the Spectral Landscapes event in Oxford. Put together between myself and the Oxford University’s Romantic society through Jen Wood, the event is looking at the resurgence of interest in work across all forms of creative media which looks to the landscape in order to find essences of the “eerie”, especially of that in English … Continue reading The “English Eerie” and The Landscape Venn.
A few years back, whilst on holiday in Norfolk, I began exploring some of locations used for the BBC’s famous M.R. James adaptations, specifically for Lawrence Gordon Clark’s adaptation of A Warning To The Curious (1972). Though I had been far from thorough in this escapade (I completely missed the film’s most iconic structure in the church at Happisburgh), on finding myself in Suffolk, I … Continue reading Walking “A Warning To The Curious” (M.R. James).
The work of Richard Long is so indebted to the act of walking into a landscape that it seems a rather obvious aspect to point out. While many of his transient works, especially of the sculptural variety left in various wildernesses, required the act of the artist to walk, it is often the photographic capture of the finished event in question that, in the majority, … Continue reading Journey Within Practice – Richard Long and Chris Marker.
Part 1. Part 2. Herostratus (1967) Expanding upon the ideas of screaming in The Shout, the analysis of Francis Bacon’s influence on counterculture British cinema can conclude with Don Levy’s 1967 film Herostratus. The film and its obsessions with textures and urban landscapes has already been discussed in other articles but Herostratus is full of other forms of terrain; the morphed and emotionally tortured form … Continue reading Cinematic Identity Crises And Francis Bacon – Part 3 (Herostratus).
Celluloid Wicker Man 