Above is the trailer for the next short film, Heavy Water. This is to be the longest film this year and the most ambitious in terms of scope in spite of future projects containing narratives and actors. Heavy Water ‘s difficulty is the connection of its two main themes represented by adjacent places on the Suffolk coast; the strange, liminal landscape surrounding Sizewell nuclear power … Continue reading Trailer – Heavy Water.
“My mother lives in the windy Orkney Islands. It’s certainly a wonderful place to be brought up in.” In making a short film about her mother, Scottish experimental filmmaker Margaret Tait also explored the interesting relationship between place and youth. In A Portrait of Ga (1952), a 4 minute short film shot on 16mm with a voice-over by the filmmaker, a fragment of biography becomes … Continue reading Place and Youth in Margaret Tait’s A Portrait Of Ga (1952)
Mike Hodges’ debut feature film, Get Carter (1971), was one of the key shifts in British cinema of the period. With its total lack of hope, an earnest presence of violence and a hugely detailed topography, the film is one of the definitive shifts to the more gritty, unremitting cinema produced in the early Heath years alongside the likes of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange … Continue reading Interview: Mike Hodges on Get Carter (1971).
“The contours of the Sizewell power plant, its Magnox block a glowering mausoleum, begin to loom upon an island far out in the pallid waters where one believes the Dogger Bank to be, where once shoals of herring spawned and earlier still, a long, long time ago, the delta of the Rhine flowed out into the sea and where green forests grew from silting sands.” … Continue reading A Last Glimpse of the Land
Andy Goldsworthy’s work has a transience running through its core. Such quiet transience is perhaps best expressed in his use of ice within sculpture. Though almost everything the artist does has a brief lifespan as a finished object, there are few that seem so precarious as his ice works, specifically the various ice arches that he laboured on throughout the 1980s. For this article, the … Continue reading Responses: Andy Goldsworthy’s Ice Arch (1982)
My walk around Harold Pinter’s old haunts in the east end of London has produced a number of written accounts now that, with the film that sparked of the whole venture being finally public, I’m not quite sure what else to say about it. The idea for the walk came about when I saw the, since frustratingly taken down, Harold Pinter Arena documentary which spent a … Continue reading Short Film – A Walk By Waiting (Harold Pinter, Iain Sinclair).
In the 1980’s introduction to the repeated BBC Ian Nairn series, Nairn Across Britain (1972), Jonathan Meades suggests that the series still managed to capture Nairn’s sense of poetics and character in spite of “the filming techniques seeming a bit dated, as nothing dates quite like the recent past”. Though Meades is right in his effusing about Nairn’s character – an endlessly watchable, impassioned, melancholic … Continue reading Poetics of Visual Space in Ian Nairn’s “Nairn Across Britain” (1972).
London, with its eternal agitations, the ceaseless ebb and flow of its “mighty heart” – De Quincey (1823). After one of the most hectic days of the year so far, I had some hours to kill in London before meeting a friend for an exhibition at the Royal Academy. The day had been frantic, with large amounts of strangely powerful coffees being downed around New … Continue reading Wanders: Thomas De Quincey’s Soho.
On a day where an unusually hazy rain persisted in a constant downfall, I took refuge in the redbrick building of the Victoria Museum and Gallery that lies at the top of Brownlow Hill. The building sits in sharp contrast to the more medicinal university buildings which surround it, one being brutalist in its strange edges and institute sensibility, the other being passive-aggressive in its … Continue reading Responses: John James Audubon’s Animals And Birds.
Above is the trailer for a very short fragment of film made in collaboration with the writer, Iain Sinclair. Though I had been thinking about doing something with the poems of Harold Pinter for the some time, I had left it to stew away rather than properly organise it as with other, simpler films. With initially failing to get in touch with Iain, I had … Continue reading Trailer – A Walk By Waiting (Pinter/Sinclair).
Celluloid Wicker Man 