Communiqué 031: The Atavistic Cinema / May 3, 2024 by Toby Tatum

This instalment of my infrequent art/film communiqués looks at Atavistic Cinema, a cinema which seems to want to return to the place of cinematic origination, taking a path that might lead to the regressive terminus of film and, perhaps, to the place for its creative renewal. I also muse upon cinematic boredom, a terrain that any enthusiast for artists’ films is no doubt familiar with. In other news, writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent is returning to the landscape of his past, revisiting his childhood home town of St Leonards-on-Sea to curate an exhibition which pairs work by some of this area’s artists with work by their international doubles. Finally, I’ve made a couple of recent films of mine available to watch online, one of which seems to contain a bizarre presence, of unknown origin. Approach this otherness below.

Michelangelo Antonioni, *Red Desert*, 1964

Origination

Cinema lives through motion. To work against it, or still its passage, is to subvert the medium itself. Filmmakers and artists have used the still image, or something approaching it, to return us the pre-cinematic stillness that resides in the stationary photograph. In the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni, characters sometimes seem to be about to freeze, suggesting emergent statues rather than protagonists, figures from which the camera disinterestedly drifts. Looming stasis and a growing indifference to plot are key symptoms of the regression toward cinematic atavism. Going further, Chris Marker’s 1962 classic La Jetée, is composed of still images throughout, with one very brief exception when, as if arising from a frozen dream, the film magically flickers into life. Still and moving images fuse in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work, which I had the option to view at length at last year’s retrospective at Hayward Gallery. The photographs in his Theatres series (long exposures taken within the cinema, condensing an entire film into a single image) seem to distill cinema, whilst suggesting its ultimate erasure. Recent works from this series show dilapidated auditorium interiors lit by what might well be the terminal illumination of film. Despite this, I like to see his images as documenting sites of technological visitation, mystical moments of regenesis amid the ruins of an obsolete world.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, *Palace Theater, Gary*, 2015

Reptile Time

In my own work, I approach cinematic devolution through engaging with atavistic imagery, dredged from the somnolent storehouses of ancestral memory. I often make use of the still image, fusing it with an aesthetic of deeply subjective expressionism. To me, there is a sense of tension in the work arising from the odd combination of the excessively Romantic imagery and the somewhat detached presence of the lingering, static camera, which often seems to situate the spectator outside the fantastic world they are invited to peer in at - the screen as a locus for visions as well as a defensive barrier. My films usually present a fixed viewpoint onto a largely unchanging world where, within the atavistic stillness, if you have the patience to attend to it, another order of movement abides. Time in these films unravels at different rhythms, suggestive, perhaps, of the patient biorhythms of reptiles or the deep timescales of planetary undulations.

My two most recent films The Nursery of Worlds and A Spell in Fairyland (both 2022) are further voyages into this expansive terrain. The Nursery of Worlds makes use of low-resolution footage gathered a decade before, with the film emerging as if having been dredged from obsolete slumber. This rediscovered material was reworked into something approximating a seething primordial ocean, where, over the course of the film, hallucinatory forms gradually arise and dissipate. During a single unbroken sequence, the camera languidly drifts over this fertile amorphous space, as if showing a view through some cosmic submersible’s porthole or, perhaps instead, a scene through a microscope, detailing the subcellular life contained within an alien biological sample. Towards the end of the editing of A Spell in Fairyland I noticed something strange in one of the sequences in the film, the suggestion of an uncanny presence that seems to exist underneath the dark, slowly flowing water. After spotting this aqueous presence I had the spooky sense that somebody or something was trapped inside the film, as if held spellbound. This sense of entrapment fits with the themes of the film though, as fairyland is often thought to be an underworld where, once lured to, you might never return from. In some way it is as if the experience of watching these films is reflective of the experience of me making them. In gathering the footage for these projects I would spend countless hours roaming outdoors, without any real plan, sitting by streams, seemingly half awake, waiting for the passage of the sun to partially illuminate a mysterious grotto. During these outings a different sense of time takes hold, a time that now permeates the works themselves.

The Nursery of Worlds and A Spell in Fairyland are now available to watch here and here. If you do decide to encounter these artworks, I’d advise doing so in the dark, when you have a bit of time to spare.

Boredom

Traditional cinema diverts us from boredom, unveiling a torrent of distracting visions that can transport us out of ourselves, projecting us vicariously into another world. Arthouse film and experimental cinema often takes an opposite approach, as if suspicious of the heady intoxication of cinematic spectacle. To me, sometimes this disavowal can seem like the actions of some niche cinematic sect, dedicated to the denial and dissolution of fanciful visions. Perhaps, for this imagined hardcore group, only the stark glare of the projector’s beam would represent true cinematic illumination - the screen’s unmitigated whiteness shorn of the deluding miasma of the filmic phantasmagoria. As somebody who came to life watching weird cult movies on late night television, relishing their lurid colours, their sense of abandon, their transgressive narratives and their potential for imaginative escape, I remain somewhat ambivalent about theoretical critiques of film’s pageant of illusions.

In an attempt to counter the spellbinding hegemony of cinematic immersion, numerous film-makers and artists have opted to occupy a different space in relation to the mechanics of the moving image. One approach to wresting some control over this industrial mirage is to slow things down, allowing the viewer to be more aware of themselves as active participants in the process of a film’s unfolding.

My first encounter with cinematic boredom came at a 35mm screening of Jean Eustache’s 219-minute-long masterpiece La Maman et la Putain (1973). I’d gone in cold, without noticing the digressive runtime. Somewhere amid this ocean of celluloid a protagonist puts on a record and then just listens to it, seemingly aimlessly, whilst the camera keeps rolling. I kept expecting the shot to cut away, but it refused to, the film just kept going. As I watched this dilating sequence endlessly unfold a strange tension seemed to build, a tension arising from the seeming abandonment of hitherto familiar editing protocols, inaugurating a sense of my floating free, becoming unmoored, of entering into some other time-space. As the film kept unspooling I noticed that, as if some sort of threshold had been crossed, I became increasingly drawn into this scene of drifting cinematic life and found myself inwardly urging the shot to continue, perhaps indefinitely… Behind these extended sequences, where the camera is seemingly left to run freely, one begins to sense the gaze of the observing machine, the active presence of the medium itself, and of us out there in the dark, engaging with it as spectators.

Jean Eustache, *La Maman et la Putain*, 1973

Primal Cinema

Tony Conrad’s 1966 film The Flicker, which I encountered recently, screened at the East Sussex Psychedelic Film Club, returns us to cinematic ground zero via the most extreme form of rapid fire editing, triggering an aggressive onslaught of monochromatic psychedelia. Conrad’s 30-minute film is one of considerable formal simplicity. Aside from the credits sequence, the entire film consists of two images - an image of whiteness (for this Conrad filmed a blank sheet of white paper) and an image of darkness (which utilises footage shot whilst the camera’s lens cap was still in place). Conrad switches between these two extremes with excessive rapidity, causing the film to inaugurate a change of consciousness in the viewer. Conrad’s film continually modulates this flicker rate, bringing the audience in and out of various kinds of altered states. Despite the paucity of imagery I found, during the experience of watching the film, that odd images half-formed in front of my eyes, while the transfigured screen seemed to warp and bulge out toward me.

I’ve included a link to a version of the film I found online below, which I include here with the following proviso: Tony Conrad himself recommended that a doctor be present at each screening of the film, to assist with any issues arising from the potentially seizure-inducing flickering effects. If any readers are susceptible to intensely flickering images I would, of course, advise not pressing play. For those willing and able to encounter this barrage I’d recommend doing so in the dark, at the largest scale possible.

Encounter The Flicker here.

St Leonards International

Writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent is staging an exhibition of work by a number of artists based in and around the St Leonards, East Sussex area. Paul has taken the further step of pairing these participants with a parallel group of international artists drawn from the wider world. I’ve been matched with artist Tereza Bušková, who hails originally from Prague. Tereza will be showing her film Little Queens, which will be paired with my film The Garden.

According to Tereza, Little Queens “takes inspiration from the ancient Moravian festival of Královnicky, which is best translated into English as The Little Queens. On the cusp of spring and summer, rural communities used to celebrate their daughters in order to strengthen their own connection with nature and assure a bountiful harvest. Some elements of this ritual have been lost to time, but through a collaborative process the participating communities revisited and restored The Little Queens for a 21st Century audience. Surrounded by their attendants clad in festive raiments, the King and the Queen walked under an ornate canopy and gave blessings to all good people of West Bromwich. The ultimate creation was a richer, more cohesive community, one that can weather the relentless waves of anti-immigration sentiment, misogyny and xenophobia”.

Made in 2019, my film The Garden is composed of only two extended shots, both showing variations on a manufactured garden of outsized plants and rock formations, which are subject to a prismatic incursion of shimmering lights. The film’s title seems simply descriptive, and it does describe the film - the garden being a bordered, organised outdoors, set apart from the riotous, inhuman sprawl of nature - but it also brings to mind the Biblical garden, the prelapsarian space where the serpent lurked. Perhaps the first of the film’s two gardens might represent some sort of elevated spiritual realm whereas the succeeding space, emerging from the river of serpentine lights, suggests a more sensual realm, perhaps even a fallen world. At the time, I was making The Garden, I considered it representative off what I liked to call Psychedelic Romanticism, with the film being psychedelically Romantic not only in its streams of colours, but also in its emphasising of flowers and plants and in the open-ended, ambient time-space that it occupies.

St Leonards Meets The World features:

Geraldine Swayne + Miho Sato (Japan)
Hermione Allsopp + Blue Curry (Bahamas)
Colin Booth + Koushna Navabi (Iran)
Toby Tatum + Tereza Bušková (Czech Republic)
Joe Packer + Robyn Litchfield (New Zealand)
Alice Walter + Kristian Evju (Norway)

The exhibition runs from the 17th to the 27th of May.
Electro Studios Project Space, Electro Studios, Seaside Road, St Leonards-on-Sea, TN38 0AL, U.K.

Communiqué 031: The Deluge / June 28, 2023 by Toby Tatum

Odilon Redon, *Underwater Vision*, c. 1904

“Swaying mesmerically in the overheated water the immense golden petals of the giant aquatic rose held the drowned landscape spellbound. I’d journeyed far to see this, this monstrous deity blooming at the secret heart of an impossible undersea world. As I gazed into the lush recessive folds of the flower’s central core it emitted a deep-bass drone, the sound pulsing outward through the warm amniotic water, reverberating out across the sunken regions of the now collapsing dream.”

An excerpt from my text The Deep Well, published in issue two of MIA Journal, appearing among a collection of writings by artists united by a shared enthusiasm for nature and landscape. The full piece is online here.

Odilon Redon, *Seahorses on a Underwater Scape*, 1909

Immersion

In this communiqué I have decided to present some of the aquatic imagery that inspires me, rather than writing the usual series of short, thematically linked texts. Nonetheless, I’ve still managed to swell this primarily pictorial instalment with all manner of reflections on my liquid topic. In part, this is due to an attempt to pin down an obscure enthusiasm, one which probably eludes final analysis. In addition, I conclude with an announcement of the premiere of my 2022 film A Spell in Fairyland which, I’m very pleased to say, will be presented by the tireless cineastes at Festival Ecrá, to who thanks are due for facilitating this film’s rise from submerged cine-obscurity into the consciousness of the floating world-mind.

František Kupka, *The Beginning of Life*, 1900

Jean Delville, *Treasures of Satan*, 1895

William Degouve de Nuncques, *Black Swan*, 1893

Mikalojus Konstantikas Čiurlionis, *Sonata of the Sea, Allegro*, 1908

For some time I’ve been fascinated with the idea of attending an exhibition centred on underwater imagery in art. To be clear, I’m not particularly interested in documentary representations of underwater scenes, wonderful as they may be, but instead in presenting imagery that has resulted from artists inspired, in part, by the world underwater: by images, descriptions, or their own experiences of it, allowing these influences to drip-feed their imaginations, before incorporating aspects of them into their art. In lieu of such an exhibition being mounted I’ve taken the liberty of beginning to assemble one of my own, guided only by my aqueous interests and an appreciation of some of the stranger areas within art. The imagery included here represents a beginning, a gathering of initial works. This work mostly springs from 19th and early 20th century culture, the weird worlds of Symbolism and Surrealism, art movements that acknowledged and celebrated the mystery-cloaked regions of the artistic imagination and drew, in part, inspiration from the liquid realm and the denizens that might be lurking there, beneath the surging waters. I imagine that, were this exhibition ever to be mounted, I’d expand its scope chronologically, including earlier works by precursors, as well as later outpourings by more recent artists. As viewers of this watery presentation, I invite you to add your own choices to this introductory selection, whilst imagining yourselves floating through the emerald chambers of this drowned museum.

Far below, in sunless oceanic trenches, strange life stirs. On reflection, I see the imagination as aquatic, a uterine, unfixed region, where thoughts, impressions and ideas intertwine, from which art springs. This concept relates to Shakespeare, to Ariel’s song in The Tempest, which tells of drowned sailors that aren’t merely dead, but transformed by the obscure actions of magical waters, potentially to arise again, transmuted, corallised and quasi-human. John Livingstone Lowes, in his visionary, all-encompassing masterpiece on Coleridge and the poetic imagination The Road to Xanadu, aligns the artistic imagination to a depthless interiorised reservoir, into which everyday material sinks, before arising transfigured in art. I’d like to imagine that both these texts will also feature somehow as part of the show, perhaps quoted in full, in the waterproof multi-volume exhibition catalogue. As this show won’t ever exist, except in the imagination, I might as well throw in Moby-Dick too, a book that I can imagine clutching as I plunge beneath the waves.

“For here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still.”

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ‘The Pacific’

Léon Spilliaert, *On the Seabed with Whales*, 1918

Gustav Klimt, *Jurisprudence*, 1900-1907

Max Ernst, *The Fugitive* from *Natural History,* c. 1925, published 1926

Most likely, my motives for presenting this exhibition are due, in part, to me wanting to be in it, screening a film, perhaps, in some sort of adjacent underwater cinema to an audience of snorkelled spectators. Whilst the context may be impractical it is appropriate, as my films have often utilised watery imagery, from the insistent rain that soaks the scenes I create, to the successive, almost imperceptible layers of slowly moving water that I encourage my imagery to sink beneath. Until now I’ve never really pondered this particular enthusiasm, I suspect I’m both drawn and repelled by the idea of the drowned world, of things dissolving and becoming fluid. A horizontal pond surface, when filmed from above, becomes a vertical wall on the screen, suggesting, to me, an aqueous barrier erected between the world that the viewer inhabits and the regions depicted on screen. The semi-permeable membrane that David Lewis-Williams memorably describes in his neo-shamanic bible The Mind in the Cave, a barrier described as separating this world from the ancestral ghost worlds beyond, becomes, in my case, an aqueous veil. As if, beyond the enchanted undulations of water a strange world exists. Also, I like to think that the ever-present moisture undermines the fixity of the visions presented as well as, perhaps, the solidity of the screen itself. Inspiration from this approach streams, in part, from visits to holy wells and sacred springs, of looking into their tranquil depths, feeling time dissolve, mesmerised by the unrepeatable flow of mystic water; as well an ongoing fascination with half-remembered legends of magic pools, portals into which someone might pass, sinking into another dimension…

Edward Burne-Jones, *The Baleful Head*, 1885

Aubrey Beardsley, *How Sir Bedivere cast the sword Excalibur into the water*, 1893-1894

Jean Delville, *The Death of Orpheus*, 1893

Toby Tatum, *A Spell in Fairyland*, film stills, 2022

Communiqué 030: The Suspended Dissolve / November 16, 2022 by Toby Tatum

In this communiqué I consider time, an essential dimension of film. Cinema is a drifting, phantasmagoric pageant, with every film a passing, flickering dream. Fittingly, given the theme, this communiqué took a while to write, being added to and subtracted from sporadically, as the year steadily crept by. It might take a while to read, too, absorbing units of finite time. Below, I introduce a couple of new films of mine, one of which took a decade to emerge, while another occupied a year or two. These works aim to adjust the viewer’s sense of time’s passage. Alongside these reflections, I take a look at Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, as well as Roadside Picnic, the 1972 source novel written by the brothers Strugatsky. Tarkovsky’s film, like all of his work, determinedly unspools at its own pace, insisting on occupying a time of its own. If you haven’t seen the film already I recommend it, if you can spare the hours…

The companionable black dog in Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film *Stalker*

The Twilight of the Megaliths

Throughout the year I occasionally visited a churchyard at Crowhurst, East Sussex, containing an ancient, gothic yew tree, a tree which far exceeds the nearby church in age, its roots dating back to distant pre-Norman Britain. At least a couple of thousand years old, this tree has grown into something like a living labyrinth, its branches wrapping around itself or coiling, smoke-like into the air, whilst the trunk has emptied out, creating a sinister dark vacuum at its heart. I think, if I peer in too closely, I might be drawn inside, sealed in by creaking wood, perhaps entrapped for millennia or dissolved into sinuous, serpentine wood. This tree is surrounded by a half circle of time-worn graves, the names on which are now totally worn away, the cold stone blanketed by damp moss and lichen. The creeping anonymity of the eroding graves draws those buried beneath into a deeper obscurity, sinking past memory into the lost realms of bygone time.

During the summer I also revisited the weathered stones of Avebury, returning to the circle after years of absence. Walking among these neolithic megaliths at sunset I felt re-tuned to a cosmic time, as if I approaching a zone where the identity of transient individual might merge with the eternal infinite. Unlike Stonehenge, Avebury can’t easily be fenced in and contained, its numerous sites sprawl over a vast sacred landscape, radiating out across the hills from the central circle. Numerous theories regarding purpose and intention float around these immense monuments, scientific assertions vying with Romantic impressions, without fixed conclusion. Part of the appeal of these ancient, pre-Christian sites, surely, is their obscurity, their mute resistance to fixed interpretation. The silence that surrounds them is almost total. Silbury Hill, to take one remarkable location, has the appearance of a burial mound inflated to a gigantic scale, standing at nearly 40 metres in height. Current estimates suggest that it took the labourers who built it 18 million man-hours to construct. Silbury Hill is so large as to seem like a trick of the light, suggesting an apparition, an anomaly that can’t be reconciled into everyday vision - a hallucination that turns out to be real.

The World of Stonehenge, an exhibition at the British Museum that I visited earlier in the year, brought together numerous neolithic treasures, objects arranged together as if in the caverns of a twilit underworld, in a bold display that re-imagined how these artefacts could be displayed. Here the objects were bathed in weird light, sometimes overlaid with ghostly projections, whilst ambient noises chirruped and burbled in the background. One spot-lit, mini-vitrine contained a fallen 4000 year old leaf - a transient moment rescued from time. Elsewhere, the patterns on carved stones from the chambered tomb of Newgrange in Ireland, seemed to suggest flowing undulating ripples of water, the aqueous patterns undermining the solidity of the stone. Elsewhere an antler-adorned headdress was presented, which, according to the show’s curators, was once worn by a revered shaman with a propensity for accessing fringe neurological states. Whilst familiar with many Neolithic monuments, I was stunned to witness the beauty and delicacy of this culture’s finest artefacts. Towards the end of the exhibition an immaculate gold pendant was displayed, dramatically illuminated in the dark. Apparently this marvellous, untarnished treasure, recently unearthed from a Shropshire marsh, was once offered as a sacrifice, ritualistically deposited in the landscape. The exhibition catalogue states that:

“In a moment, 2,800 years ago, a beautiful gold pendant was cast into the sky before it sank into the gloom of an alder and reed-fringed pool dotted with water lilies.”

The Nursery of Worlds

My films require that the viewer makes a slight realignment, departing from the usual expectation of cinematic time, to retune to the slower rhythm, in order for a different sense of time to take hold. In the video editing program’s timeline, where film is assembled from a series of temporal blocks, the film-maker manipulates time, in my case sometimes slowing its passage, or allowing it to run backwards, as if attempting to regain a lost world. My work is assembled over an extended period, the footage accruing like water dripping into a well. Months drift by while the material steadily accumulates. I see the hard drives where this footage slumbers as reservoirs from which, occasionally, a film may emerge. Recently, I completed a film called The Nursery of Worlds, a work entirely composed of footage filmed a decade earlier. This footage, ingested from a stack of unwatched HDV and Mini/DV cassettes, seemed obscure to me, as if it had been filmed by somebody else, and I remain unsure as to what this material actually depicts. The finished film appears to show a detail of some sort of primeval landscape, perhaps the pre-historic amniotic region where creation bubbles and stirs. The film unfolds in a single silent, riverine sequence - a serpentine stream of mediated, transformed time, down through which the viewer is invited to temporarily journey.

Unlikely Treasures

Roadside Picnic, the sci-fi novel by the brothers Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, describes a world’s reactions to an extra-dimensional visit. These extra-dimensional entities do not appear in the book, neither are they properly known to the book’s protagonists. Instead it is their obscure relics which fascinate and appall the book’s characters. Also, in this story, humankind now have to live with the knowledge that they are not alone in the universe, even though the details of these other beings remain almost totally unknown. The sites that these beings temporarily occupied during their brief stay on earth have become zones: eerie, transfigured spaces cordoned off from the rest of the world, places where the laws of physics seem mysteriously altered, a sanctioned area littered with artefacts both incomprehensible and marvellous. One of the book’s characters, a leading physicist, describes the visitation zone as being like the site of a roadside picnic - a picnic by alien visitants who, after their departure, left cosmic detritus littering the ground. There is no message from the skies, just a collection of oddities and mysteries. This zone, too weird to be understood, now guarded and fenced off, is extraordinarily dangerous: some areas are covered in exotic hazards called, in the translation I have, things like witches jelly or mosquito mange, vague substances that can dissolve you outright or kill you at some undefined point in the near future. Nonetheless, a thriving black market economy has sprung around this zone, along with a body of legend. Stalkers, desperate outsiders willing to risk everything for an imagined fortune, illegally enter the zone to smuggle back alien artefacts, enigmatic objects which sell for vast sums. The most fabled of these unlikely treasures is the golden ball - a wish fulfilling orb of extraordinary power, rumoured to exist in the secret heart of the zone. Tarkovsky adapted Roadside Picnic when he made the film Stalker, taking the basic premise and transforming it into something of his own. Tarkovsky’s zone is a poetic landscape of ruins, drained of much of the specifically otherworldly content that fills the Strugatsky’s book, instead allowing a numinous, endlessly suggestive portentousness to gather over the newly emptied landscapes. The idea of ruins, long a pre-occupation of the Romantic arts, finds perfect cinematic expression in Stalker, which unfolds in a saturated, overgrown, collapsing world that seems eerily infused with the mysterious. In the film, two damaged, middle aged men, known by their code names Writer and Scientist, enter the zone for different reasons, journeying from a soiled, monochromatic land, toward an intoxicating realm of colour, which arises after one of the most wonderful journeys in cinema - a lulling train cart ride, where the men, falling silent, seem transfixed by the drifting landscape and the mesmeric sound of the train’s passage along the rails, a sound which merges hypnotically with Eduard Artemyev’s electronic score. Writer, a bored, hedonistic cynic, enters the zone secretly craving renewal. Scientist, Writer’s companion on this journey, arrives with a rucksack containing a smuggled bomb, in a half-baked plan to destroy the zone. Their guide, the stalker, is different to these wayward, lost men. He only wants to live in proximity to something akin to the divine. Perhaps this zone is somehow sentient, like the observant, thinking ocean in Tarkovsky’s 1972 masterpiece Solaris, or filled with invisible, obscure subjectivities. To me, the vague sentience in Stalker is subtly suggested by the camera, the placement of which seems weirdly evocative of something conscious, always watching but unseen. Something sentient, or a presence of sorts, seems implicit in the landscape itself. Perhaps, like in Solaris, it is through its manifestations that the zone might offer contact or communion. The creatures of the zone - the companionable black dog that returns home with Stalker, and Monkey, Stalker’s mute, otherworldly daughter, are perhaps emanations of the zone’s enchantment or, at least, beings influenced by proximity to potent, strange forces. Although unnoticed by Stalker, some of the magic of the zone may have returned with him. Seated at the kitchen table at the end of the film, in colour, Monkey, unseen, telekinetically toys with a few objects on the table, while around her an incongruous blossom softens the air. This scene of everyday domesticity, enlivened by innocent conjuring, suffused with idle magic, suggests that Stalker dwells in a home transfigured by alien visitation.

Natasha Abramova as Monkey in the final scene of Tarkovsky's *Stalker*

Dream Theory

The dissolve, in conventional narrative cinema, is used as a means of transitioning between shots whilst suggesting that an extended period of time is passing. Aside from its particular temporal significance, the dissolve, like super-imposition more broadly, might also be used to represent dissolution, a blurring of boundaries, perhaps indicating that something strange is happening, like a dream unfolding or a super-natural event occurring. There is something magical about the dissolve, allowing for a profusion of metamorphoses. Usually the cinematic dissolve lasts for a few seconds before the standard pattern of clean edits resumes. To me, it seems as though my films have emerged from the dissolve, arising as if from some liminal, aqueous region. When making films, I don’t tend to use the dissolve to transition from one moment to another, instead using it to suspend images in some sort of in-between state, which allows the imagery to persist and flourish in the transitory space that would traditionally exist between moments. It is as if there is no normal world to return back to, the dream world has become the entire world. I initially started layering images together like this to create spaces I hadn’t been able to film before, spaces that corresponded to the inner chambers of my imagination. These conjured places, composed of numerous separate, super-imposed layers, never quite resolved themselves into a totally believable whole. To me, these paradoxical spaces suggest multiple realities converging or numerous perspectives momentarily resolving into unstable, paradoxical union. This approach might be related to my fascination with the fabled Otherworlds of mythology, like the fairy realms that were once thought to border our own, places where a strange temporality may hold sway and where beauty might conceal danger. In Florence Marion McNeill’s The Silver Bough, a volume of Scottish folklore, purchased in a Hawick bookshop some years ago, she writes:

“To our Celtic forefathers the universe consisted of two interpenetrating parts - the visible world, as revealed to mortals through the five senses, and the invisible, which is immanent in and transcends the other, and which they call Fairyland or the Otherworld. Glimpses of the invisible world can occasionally be obtained by those who had that sixth sense we know as second sight.”

A Spell in Fairyland

These beliefs inform my most recent film, A Spell in Fairyland. Here, the spell in the title relates to the passage of time as much as it does to the enchantments of magic. The spaces depicted in the film might suggest an after-life realm or a bewitched underworld of sorts. The illumination, such as there is in this twilit realm, radiates out from a full moon that hangs suspended in the film’s opening sequence. This strange, brilliant white moon will, in the cinema, reveal a portion of the screen that supports the film’s illusion, whilst, perhaps, suggesting a portal through which the spectator might imaginatively pass through, into an Otherworld where golden-winged creatures appear, the denizens of the film’s melancholic dream-spaces. A Spell in Fairyland features a beguiling, occasionally sinister score by composer and long-time collaborator Abi Fry, where the odd metallic groans of a brushed gong might evoke a rusted portal creaking open, allowing a viola’s melodies to gradually float across as if from an adjacent world. The score, though beautiful, suggests the presence of an unsettling otherness. To me, this film also seems haunted by a vague sense of loss, perhaps the loss of the long departed, disproved supernatural, which I attempted to summon within the film, or perhaps, by having finished the film and consigning the extended time of its making to the past, a sense of loss arises from no longer being in the process of making the film, of inhabiting the film, of completing it and consigning it to the past.

Communiqué 029: The West of the Nile / April 7, 2022 by Toby Tatum

This communiqué borrows its title, The West of the Nile, from a phrase uttered casually by a friend recently. A phrase which seemed to waft toward me laden with all the fragrant, poetic mystery of far-off places. Following this prompt, I begin with a meditation on Mike Nelson’s exhibition, The Book of Spells, (a speculative fiction), a show redolent with the intoxicating appeal of travel. Also, I reflect on the making of my 2021 film The Visitation, which premieres this April, considering the work as a portal to a cinematic underworld. The text concludes with three cultural recommendations.

Mike Nelson, *The Book of Spells, (a speculative fiction)*, detail, 2022

The Room

I recently travelled up to London from Hastings to visit The Book of Spells, (a speculative fiction), Mike Nelson’s exhibition at Matt’s Gallery. Tickets to this show, while free, are strictly limited, as only one person is permitted to enter at any one time. Given the nature of this exhibition, this is entirely appropriate. Nelson presents a single room, a room as potent for the imagination as Tarkovsky’s room in the 1979 film Stalker - a place, at the centre of a transfigured landscape, where dreams or unconscious desires may become manifest. Nelson’s small room, once entered, seems to expand to encompass the world, enfolding time and space into its obscure dimensions. The work is ostensibly simple, a makeshift bed surround by a library of paperback books, overseen by a globe of light. The makeshift bookshelves are crammed with outdated travel guides, of the Lonely Planet and Rough Guide varieties, which visitors are invited to examine. This bed, curiously constructed out of a time-worn rug and an old, beaten frame, is a cot for dreaming. These travel guides, once perhaps stuffed into the rucksacks of hopeful, intrepid backpackers are all now to some degree outdated. Their obsolete listings brim with references to obscure train stations, affordable hotel rooms, directions to statue-encrusted temples, paths into jungles, belonging to a world now impossible to recapture except by the imagination. The lost world they describe now returns, to be resurrected and enfolded into this work. This room is a way station for solitary adventurers, perhaps one that might be found at the centre of a maze or located at T.S. Elliot’s “still point of the turning world”. This is a chamber that, were it not for its worn-in, broken down quality, might appeal to Jean des Esseintes, the self-isolated dreamer of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel À rebours (1884). A character who, having imagined a journey, felt there was no need to actually undertake it. Of course, in this room, the memory of lockdown returns. I’m reminded of the first UK lockdown especially, a time, for me, when the purest seclusion reigned and meditative stillness descended, where travel became impossible and distant places receded from view. There is a sadness too, a mourning for the lost, an elegy for paths now faded or destroyed by exploitation or overuse. On leaving the exhibition London had never looked so strange, a labyrinth radiating out from this transient, dreaming room.

More information is online here.

Visitors in the 1970s marvel at the cave of Altamira, Spain. Photo sourced here.

Beyond the Screen

Imagine the cinema as a site of mediation between realms, the screen functioning as a point of convergence between the world inhabited by the spectator and the world beyond the screen. In this scenario, the cinema becomes a liminal chamber that offers, to the initiates gathered there, access to an otherworld.

David Lewis-Williams’ widely influential book The Mind in the Cave (2002) pre-figures this idea, claiming that this concept actually emerged alongside the very origination of images. Written from a rational, scientific perspective,The Mind in the Cave has nonetheless become, to some, a hands-on guidebook to the underworld, an underworld accessed either via subterranean caverns or one locatable deep in the cranial chambers of our own minds. Writing about the painted caves of the palaeolithic era, of sacred underground spaces like Lascaux in France, Lewis-Williams suggests that the imagery ranging across the cavern’s undulating rock surfaces (in most cases of animals, although other more ambiguous entities do appear) might represent depictions of beings existing beyond, or through, the cave walls. Here, inside the earth, these underworld entities were seen to arise to press up against the subterranean walls as if from within, the solid rock face imagined as a porous, semi-permeable membrane separating this world and the realm of the spirits. Lewis-Williams aligns these visions to altered states of consciousness, the mental states that radiate off from the mind’s default setting, heading toward deep introspection, hallucination, trance and dream. He sees these cave paintings and the context that houses them as a holistic space where the obscure, mystery-cloaked regions of human consciousness are made manifest and enfolded into an integrated belief system.

To me, art often seems to inaugurate some sort of altered state - be it the heightened thrill of being confronted by great paintings, or the intoxication of being borne away by reading - of being taken into a space where you are both present and absent. Film does this too. As spectators, we’re conscious of ourselves sitting in the cinema but also of being simultaneously elsewhere, of having projected ourselves onto the screen.

Psychic Underworld

My 2021 film The Visitation takes place in what looks like a subterranean cavern or a shadowy, twilit grotto. To me, the grotto is site of powerful resonance, a pagan site of origination, the space from where life emerges. Also, I see the grotto as being linked directly to the underworld, an access point to the ghost realms that extend beyond the wall. Throughout the duration of The Visitation the viewer is invited to examine what is surely a fragile microcosm, a portion of a fragmenting world temporally held together by the swaying strands of a spider’s web. This is a space that seems to be in the process of splitting apart, the cracks in the walls revealing an inferno beyond. The Visitation is comprised of a single sequence which suggests, to me, a stream of uninterrupted reality, albeit a reality far removed from anything familiar - a record of a moment in time relayed from a site of cosmic upheaval. The Visitation also seems suggestive of the limitations of the recording medium, the camera’s faltering ability to register and absorb extreme phenomena, as the screen becomes overwhelmed by a torrent of otherworldly lights. The Visitation’s score, by composer Abi Fry, combines the sound of a viola freighted with anticipation with the immense, foreboding sound of a Chao gong, an instrument that, in this case, seems to herald extinction. Listening closely, attending to the sounds beyond the immediate instrumentation, I also think I can hear a record of indescribable things lurking at the outer reaches of the film’s expansive audio-space. The film’s title alludes to the arrival of the supernatural. Perhaps these mysterious noises are the sounds of other-dimensional presences drawing closer from across the threshold, approaching from the space beyond the screen?

The Visitation has been programmed to premiere at the 2022 Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival. For me, Alchemy is a special site, a temporal zone where the visions of the age make themselves manifest. The festival will take place in Hawick, UK, from 28th April to 2nd May. For more information about this wonderful festival visit: https://alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk/

Jordan Belson, *Untitled*, paper collage and mixed media mounted on board, c. 1970

Cultural Recommendations

Recently I’ve been micro-dosing poems from the Altered States anthology. This collection, featuring the work of writers who were mostly unknown to me before, “explores the varieties of consciousness and revelatory experience”. Rather than simply presenting paeans to intoxication the book’s texts appear to proposes a renewed engagement with different modes of reality and a revised relationship to our natural environment and the various entities that inhabit it. The book, edited by Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers, suggests that the 36 poems contained therein “stand at the thresholds of alterity to propose a new psychedelic style for the 21st Century.”
https://ignota.org/collections/frontpage/products/altered-states

I’ve made two visits to Tate Modern to see the exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders. This vast ten-room survey amounts to a major reappraisal of the Surrealist movement. Among the marvels exhibited, I was particularly drawn to the four small works by Iranian photographer Kaveh Golestan, one of which is pictured below. These tinted miniatures present composite scenes brimming with bizarre hybrid creatures. The exhibition runs until the 29th of August. For more information visit: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/surrealism-beyond-borders

Torn-paper, landscape-themed collages by the experimental filmmaker Jordan Belson are currently showing at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, until 23rd April. Judging by the images of the work online, this show looks enchanting: https://matthewmarks.com/online/jordan-belson

Kaveh Golestan, *Untitled,* from the *Az Div o Dad* series, 1976

Source: https://us13.campaign-archive.com/?u=a7028e9139386c0585805884b&id=71a1796a8d

Communiqué 028: The Enormous Space / November 17, 2021 by Toby Tatum

My last communiqué took the miniature as its theme, looking into the spaces between things in the hope of revealing secret, hidden multitudes. In contrast, this instalment peers in awe at the mammoth, drawing attention to a giant arts project in Bournemouth, on the UK’s south coast. In addition, I reflect on the marvellous podcast How To Enjoy Experimental Film, on which I was honoured to appear as a recent guest, before concluding with three large-scale cultural recommendations, any of which would expand your world.

Esther Teichmann, Untitled from Fractal Scars, Salt Water and Tears (river backdrop), 2012-2014

Psychedelic Romantiscm

Writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent has curated an exhibition called NatureMax for Giant in Bournemouth. Giant, an almost comically ambitious project by artist Stuart Semple, is the largest contemporary art gallery outside London. NatureMax meditates on our changing relationship to the natural world, a world overshadowed by the dread spectre of climate change. The essay by Paul Carey-Kent, written to accompany the exhibition, begins:

How should we relate to nature? As recently as fifty years ago the anthropocentric way of looking purely through the lens of human outcomes was the mainstream assumption. It is embedded in many religions, as when the bible states that humans are created in the image of God and are to have dominion over all other living creatures. That’s never been a world-wide view: for example, indigenous Australian and American traditions have framed man as working with nature, being part of a system in which they are equals in a web of relationships with flora and fauna. But the growing consensus around the effect of a history of exploiting and abusing nature have altered how the west, too, sees the relationship. The question becomes, as Donna Haraway poses it: ‘What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social?’

NatureMax will include two of my films, The Blue Flower (2021) and The Loom (2018), which screen alongside works by a fascinating array of contemporary artists working across a variety of media. Reading through Paul’s descriptions of the works by these artists I noticed that the word psychedelic pops up more than once, suggesting to me that the show might evoke something akin to the hallucinogenic, transformed worlds vividly described in JG Ballard’s increasingly prophetic early novels and short stories. Perhaps, at NatureMax, we will encounter work by artists who have subsumed and translated rising fears of environmental collapse into depictions of phantasmagoric worlds infused with terror and wonder.

NatureMax also features work by Saelia Aparicio, Rebecca Byrne, Theo Ellison, Tessa Farmer, Andy Harper, Sandra Kantanen, Matt Hale, Julie Maurin, Alan Rankle, Kelly Richardson, Esther Teichmann.

NatureMax's opening celebration is on 20/11/21, from 6-8pm. The exhibition runs until February 2022.

For more information visit: https://www.giant.space/

The cover of the Panther Books 1968 paperback edition of JG Ballard's The Crystal World, featuring Max Ernst's 1943 painting The Eye of Silence

Dimension Door

Finished in early 2021 The Blue Flower is one of my longest, strangest films. For the entirety of its 14 minute running time the film peers attentively at the titular blue flower, never deviating from this fixed perspective. Around this flower (a single specimen of Nigella Damascene, or Love-in-a-Mist) innumerable insects and other, more intangible phenomena swarm. Peering closely, these insects seem to occupy a different region of scale from the flower they fly around, suggesting that, by comparison, the flower is mammoth in its dimensions. Despite the fact that the film features only one extended sequence, The Blue Flower proved one of my trickiest films to make. An early mist-shrouded version of the film, edited in late 2019, was shelved after seemingly months of effort, leaving me haunted by my failure to complete it. Subsequently, pursuing The Blue Flower became an odd, inescapable obsession and I found myself reshooting the film entirely in 2020. Remaking it, I soon found that the new film’s gently pulsating imagery proved incredibly difficult to edit as the intangible material seemed to exude a subtle spellbinding power when peered at over an extended period, drawing me into a mildly altered state of consciousness, as if I had become gradually transfixed by the glimmerings of a magic pool. The film seemed to hold the film’s composer Abi Fry maddeningly spellbound too, with the soundtrack only taking final form after an unusually extended period of meditation, after which she unveiled an eerie, haunting score, where the autonomous song of the Aeolian harp is encircled by the beguiling singing of siren-like voices. Where might these lulling voices be drawing us? Perhaps toward the place beyond the cascade of lights…

Critic Borja Castillejo Calvo, in his review of the film for Cinesinfin (an online survey of shadowy cinematic enchantment), suggests, in a phrase that could become a manifesto, that The Blue Flower “redirects biology towards the dreamlike - reconduce la biología hacia la onírica”. For the curious, Calvo’s review of the film is online here. The text is in Spanish but, like all Calvo’s writing, it is well worth translating.

The Blue Flower, film still, 2021

Worlds Assembled

Earlier this year I appeared as a guest on the marvellous H2EEF podcast, where I was able to reflect on my work in depth. In the interview I go deep into how my work is made, dwelling on both mechanics and atmospherics, before ranging tangentially into stranger terrain. The H2EFF podcast, hosted by film-maker Daniel Adams, typically takes the form of an in-depth 30 minute interview with an invited experimental film-maker. In each episode Daniel looks at their work and enquires where it comes from, what informs it and where to see it, whilst also considering the wider culture of experimental cinema that the work exists in. Daniel also poses to each participant the key question: how to enjoy experimental film? H2EEF isn’t a podcast just for initiates, although it caters to those, instead it proposes the approachability of experimental cinema and provides some guidance on how best to engage with work often mis-labelled as challenging. After participating in the podcast I took the opportunity to begin to explore the growing back-catalogue of other H2EEF episodes (each one strikingly different) and I urge anyone with a passing interest in experimental cinema to do the same.

My interview with H2EFF is online here.

A World Assembled, film still, 2013

Carceri d’Invenzione

Piranesi, the 2020 book by UK author Susanna Clarke, takes its name from the real-life 18th century Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, known for his paradoxical architectural etchings, the most famous being his series of imaginary prisons (previously mentioned in these communiqués here). Piranesi is a slim volume but its contents swell the imagination with the impression of an enormous architectural space of bizarre dimensions. Rising to the self-imposed challenge proposed by the book’s title, Clarke has created an astonishing depiction of the fantastic made manifest in architecture. The book is set among a series of statue-filled halls which surge with the water of strange tides, rich in marine life. Flooding is common in the lower halls. Birds also nest among the crowded statuary, having flown in from the tiers of collapsing, ruined halls above, suggesting an unknown outside. Below these lower halls are the submerged halls, dark water-filled labyrinths that descend far beneath the waves. These halls appear infinite, beyond comprehension, their architect mysterious. The book suggests that a building could be an entire world - one immense, all-encompassing structure constituting creation. The sole human inhabitant of this world is Piranesi, who lives alone, except from the occasional visits by an enigmatic Other…

More information is online here.

The 14th plate of the second edition of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione, 1761

Caverns Measureless to Man

Earlier this year I heard a track from Just Constellations, the 2020 EP by composer Michael Harrison and singers Roomful of Teeth, playing on BBC Radio 3 and ordered a copy on record immediately. A lot of the music I have been listening to over the year or so has been of the ambient or psychedelic varieties, music that opens a portal to other zones, evoking either real-world landscapes or the expansive caverns of mental space. The four compositions that make up Just Constellations were recorded in 2017 in Rangely, Colorado, USA, at the Tank Center for Sonic Arts, a former water treatment facility noted for its extraordinary acoustic resonance. From the grooves of the the vinyl copy I purchased a cavernous audio space unfurled, where voices hover as sustained sonic presences suspended in the deserts of space. Listen with wonder here.

Space station. The Tank Center for Sonic Arts in Rangely, Colorado.

The Enormous Space

This communiqué borrows its title from a 1989 JG Ballard short story. The Enormous Space speculates as to what might happen if a recently divorced professional suburbanite made the inexplicable decision never to leave their house again, beginning a process of withdrawal from consensus reality, discovering in its place, a new terrain of time and space. As the front door closes on the outside world the self-isolating protagonist’s domestic environment seems to swell, transforming his house into an expansive landscape where inner and outer realities merge. Read today, this short story functions as both as how-to guide to any future lockdowns and a warning of their potential hazards.

The Enormous Space is included in JG Ballard’s Complete Short Stories: Volume 2.

Source: https://mailchi.mp/620dde4a32ab/communiqu-028-the-enormous-space

Communiqué 027: The Cinematic Miniature / April 14, 2021 by Toby Tatum

This communique, the 27th in the infrequent series, takes the miniature as its theme and suggests that by peering into a microcosm we might glimpse the universal. Also, this edition ponders origins and looks at the cyclical emergence of new worlds, as well as their inevitable, pre-ordained, dissolution.

The Butterfly, film still, 2020

Lifecycle

My 2020 film The Butterfly is an attempt to depict the origins of a world in miniature. The film begins in a fecund liminal zone where fire and water paradoxically intermingle, a space that suggests both the chaos that precedes creation and the upheaval that, sometime later in the mythic life cycle, returns to violently overwhelm existence. Whilst making the film I also considered that this mysterious space, of uncertain dimension, might represent the undulating insides an overactive internal organ. The film’s second image reveals the new world that has been birthed from this overheated entwining of elements. In a verdant, moisture-saturated grotto a dormant butterfly flutters sluggishly as it attempts to rouse itself into existence. A sense of emergent creation also proliferates in the film’s dense audio-space, where composer Abi Fry’s orchestration combines diverse instrumentation with a profusion of augmented natural sounds, suggesting the urgent pulse of new life. To me, alongside the impressions of a new world being convulsed into being, the improbable spaces in the film also evoke the deepest regions of the imagination where, perhaps, recollections of the oversized atavistic forests of prehistory abide in the deepest trenches of our ancestral memory.

The Butterfly is one of a number of my films that have dwelt on origins, works where I have trained the camera on recreations of pre-human landscapes, the environments that abided on Earth during the aeons prior to our emergence. These also include my 2013 films A World Assembled, where new landscapes also arise from an enchanted aqueous medium, and Monsters, my attempt to revisit the lost ages of the dinosaurs. The ossified dinosaurs in Monsters are glimpsed posed among tangles of foliage, partially enveloped by the petals of gigantic oversized flowers. Monsters was once installed at Horsham Museum next to a vitrine displaying actual dinosaur bones. Between the projected film on the wall and the adjacent time-darkened relics yawned immense, dizzying gulfs of erasing time.

The Primitive World, from C.G.W. Vollmer's Wonder of the Primitive World, 1855

Francis Danby, The Deluge, oil on canvas, 1840

My fascination with emergent worlds is twinned with a fascination for their polar opposites: the terminal worlds. I have a number of films that meditate on post-human, end-times landscapes. These include Lost Gardens, Blacklands and The Loom. In The Loom a sense of foreboding gathers over darkening, abandoned forests. The Loom’s twilight groves might be the lost forests of Romanticism, now forgotten and growing dark. Lost Gardens returns to an Eden long abandoned and now warped into improbable perspectives. In Blacklands we seem to have crossed over into a purgatorial after-life realm, one where a haunted landscape of ruins is guarded by a flaming sentinel and where the passage of a white bird across a chasm offers transcendence. Perhaps a looming sense of ecological disaster also colours these works, a subject not dealt with directly, but one that may well be subtly infusing these slightly unsettling dreamscapes.

For me, some of the most intoxicating imagery found in our culture evokes the mythic twins of creation and destruction. Images of aeon-buried temples discovered entombed by vegetation or photographs of barnacled classical statuary posed for millennia on the sea floor are imaginative super-foods, their consumption triggering deep reverie. Similarly, depictions of the immense tree ferns and armoured saurians of the vastly scaled-up antediluvian world seem to expand the imagination, transporting us closer to our primordial beginnings.

The head of a Ptolomeic king depicted as a pharoah, discovered in the lost city of Canopus. Photograph by Christoph Gerigk.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Permian-Land, gelatin silver print, 1992

El aire que respiraban los dioses…

Critic Borja Castillejo Calvo, in his review for The Butterfly for Cinesinfin, wrote that the film returns us to a mythic terrain, evoking "those islands far from any current place. Where the hand of man has not yet acted, where the pure and beautiful appears in every corner." Calvo goes on to call the film "a piece of hybrid beauty" that appears to conjure "the air that the gods breathed …" I’m very pleased that Calvo took the time to ponder The Butterfly and to so poetically write about the film. Anyone with an interest in the outer reaches of cinema is advised to investigate Cinesinfin and to explore the multifaceted enthusiasms of this passionate, visionary critic. Calvo’s review of The Butterfly is online here. The text is in Spanish but, for non-Spanish speakers, there are translation options available.

Cultural Infusion

The Butterfly has been selected to premiere at the 2021 Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, where it will be streaming throughout the event as part of A Thing That Holds Something Else, Alchemy's exhibitions programme. Like last year, this marvellous festival will beam forth online, allowing moving image devotees to tune-in worldwide whilst hopefully avoiding the latest advances in airborne bio-hazards.

A Thing That Holds Something Else also features new work by Avner Pinchover, Eva Wang, Aminder Virdee, Panteha Abareshi, Ellie Kyungran Heo, Lauren Heckler, Toby Parker Rees, Vardit Goldner, Sweætshops®. A Thing That Holds Something Else is curated by Rachael Disbury, Michael Pattison, Alix Rothnie, Shuge Xing.

The Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival runs from 29th April to 3rd May. For more information about A Thing That Holds Something Else visit: https://alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk/festival-2021-exhibition/

Megaflora

Changing scale changes our relation to the thing observed. The Butterfly peers into a microcosm in the hope that, through doing so, I might arrive at something that approximates the universal. The work I have made since making The Butterfly in 2020 goes deeper into this microscopic terrain. The Blue Flower, a film I’ve recently finished, draws us into the world of one particular flower, one of the many that we could conceivably walk past on a stroll in the park. To me, the magnified flower, shown in extreme close-up in the film, seems like an omnipotent presence. In other moments this huge, gently swaying bio-form seems to recede into the numinous haze that surrounds it, becoming momentarily indistinct as it dissolves into the cascades of light that bloom around it. Microcosmic life teems in this miniature world and around the blue flower flies an aerial host of attendant phenomena, suggesting a profusion of life ungraspable in its totality. To me, The Blue Flower reaches into the small to suggest immense cosmic spaces, new worlds accessible via portals of light.

The Blue Flower, film still, 2021

Source: https://us13.campaign-archive.com/?u=a7028e9139386c0585805884b&id=8eaefd453d

Communiqué 026: The Blank Screen / February 3, 2021 by Toby Tatum

In this communiqué I reflect on cinema closures and consider their blank screens as mute monuments to this odd, dangerous age. Also, I begin by nostalgically revisiting a film screening that seems to epitomise my love for the much-missed collective filmic encounter, a showing of Cronenberg’s chilly, genuinely outrageous Crash (1996). These meditations are coupled with some of my own recent film news, including links to two works of mine from 2019, which are now available to watch online. Until we meet again in the post-apocalyptic screening rooms of the future…

Crash, film still, 1996 — *Crash*, film still, 1996

Car Crash Cinema

The machinery of cinema is engineered to summon our dream’s desires. Cinema shows us the secret longings of the culture, as we submit to films that make manifest the pleasures and terrors of the age.

Whilst a student at art college, I attended a screening of Cronenberg’s notorious Ballard adaptation Crash at a cinema on National Cinema Day (a short-lived UK initiative where all cinemas screened their films for £1.00). The book by J.G. Ballard, upon which the film is based, had been published in 1973 and a lurid paperback edition of it was available in the art college library. Ballard’s novel takes us into the niche world of a group of car crash enthusiasts, for whom the potent energies emanating from traffic accidents are linked to the freeing of a new, emergent sexuality. The cold, forensic style of Ballard’s text, coupled with the sexual imagery, made the book a bizarre, unsettling read. When making the film, Cronenberg assumed that the controversies contained in a book that was then over 20 years old would have long been subsumed into the culture. Something strange seemed to happen though, when the book’s intense, alienating imagery was enlarged and projected onto the screen. The film’s premiere at Cannes in 1996 unleashed volcanic uproar. At its thronging press conference, 300 journalists feasted on the outrage. Ballard, present in the melee along with the cast and crew, defended the film, claiming it was, in fact, better than his original novel, going far further in its explorations of forbidden themes. True to the novel, Cronenberg’s film delved into the dark, subconscious appeal of the motor car, linking these potent machines to submerged sexual drives. The characters in the film might be seen as fringe oddities but, also, they could be seen as the discoverers of an emergent psycho-sexual terrain where human beings and the technologies they increasingly surround themselves with can couple in transcendent, mechanised union. A heady atmosphere hovered at the UK screening I attended, a charged mood impossible to recapture when re-watching the film at home on DVD. Entering the cinema I found that the unusually packed auditorium was crowded with animated, probably drunken, revellers who, as the film began, proceeded to greet the film’s glacial sex scenes rapturously, cheering and encouraging the outrageous action onscreen. The enlivened audience that later staggered deliriously from the screening hadn’t been put off by the ridiculous tabloid hysteria that greeted the film’s initial UK release, indeed, perhaps they had been enticed by it. Looking back on the film from today’s perspective, Crash might be seen to represent the ecstatic, death-embracing climax of the motor car, a genuine love letter to one of the most iconic symbols of the 20th Century. Driverless cars and electric engines will, most likely, end up neutering the potent charge generated by these polluting, often recklessly driven, revved-up machines. We’re probably better off without them but it’ll take a long time before the thrilling roar of the engine and the corrupting stink of their high-octane fuels finally dissipates.

For the uninitiated, the orgasmic trailer for Cronenberg’s Crash is online here.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Regency, San Francisco, 1992 — Hiroshi Sugimoto, *Regency, San Francisco*, 1992

The Void

As the above text hopefully testifies, I love attending the cinema. No amount of home streaming can really compete for the totality of its vision and the sense of occasion engendered by watching films as part of an enraptured audience. That said, the symbol of the now empty cinema holds, for me, a peculiar, apocalyptic appeal. Ordinarily the screens of the world’s now shuttered cinemas would be housing a constant parade of shimmering, fleeting visions on their surfaces. These vast, dormant screens, hanging in their silent auditoriums, have now grown dusty, long emptied of imagery. Do these pale, unused screens retain traces of the innumerable films that have flowed across them? Might some vestige of the dreams of the age still linger on the vacant fabric? To me, the blank cinema screen might represent the sum of everything, or the depiction of a mystery that can’t be represented. Although we’ve had screen gods and goddesses before, perhaps it is this empty screen itself that is most suggestive of divinity? Hiroshi Sugimoto’s cinema photographs seem to address these ideas and to anticipate our era’s blank screens. In this series of works, begun in 1978, Sugimoto photographs the entirety of a film on a medium format camera using a long exposure, allowing the unspooling film’s images to run together to form a blinding white light, which, in turn, radiates back out from the screen, illuminating the seemingly empty cinema (his process of long exposure photography also eerily erases the spectators). These photographs seem like the sum of cinema, or perhaps they represent its moment of apocalyptic erasure. To me, Sugimoto’s cinema images also highlight a vacancy that was present in cinema all the time, hiding beneath, or in between, the flickering frames of restless, onrushing imagery. As a film-maker I’ve often pondered the nature of my temporal, elusive art. Film conjures a fleeting pageant of images as airy and insubstantial as a dream. This intangibility can be unsettling, though. It is a medium easily dispelled by bright lights, devoid, in its digital form, of physical properties. The nature of the digital medium itself, with its frantic reinventions, seems inherently unstable. In gloomy moments I imagine my entire output becoming unwatchable after an unfortunate upgrade. This ephemerality is key to cinema though, and seemingly to life in general, where everything, no matter how solid or seemingly permanent, will ultimately be erased. We needn’t worry though, I’m sure that if we wait patiently enough the next screening is bound to start soon…

Lost Gardens, film still, 2017 — *Lost Gardens*, film still, 2017

Now Showing

Responding to the ongoing cinema closures, most festivals and moving image exhibitions have now gravitated onto the sprawling dreamscapes of the internet. Whilst this is a sign of the adaptable resistance of culture, I worry that some of the cinemas I’ve loved attending might not be there when we all re-emerge. My 2017 film Lost Gardens features as part of a programme of films that would have formed part of a planned series of UK cinema screenings, had the pandemic not intervened. This programme of works is entitled The World With And Without Us and is programmed by the tireless cineastes at Moving Image Artists. I’m very grateful to the programmers for persevering with this project and for now making these works available to watch worldwide. The World With and Without Us also features moving image works by Peter Treherne, Daniel & Clara, Amy Cutler, Katie McFadden, Edwin Rostron, Susu Laroche, and Scott Barley. The works, framed by a thoughtful essay by the project’s curators, are online here.

I’ve recently made my two works from 2019, Night on the Riverbank and The Garden available to watch online. The Garden is probably my most formally radical work to date. The film, at 15 minutes in duration, is also my longest, inviting the spectator to fully immerse themselves in a shimmering, drowned world. During the film one paradoxical garden transitions, under the cover of weird night, into another, even stranger garden, where the rocks and flowers subtly glow with supernatural fire. If you’d like to visit The Garden you can journey beyond the liminal here. Please bear in mind that if you do decide to take the trip, I’d sincerely recommend submitting to the aqueous flow of images in the dark.

Night on the Riverbank is another seemingly uncharacteristic work, this time derived from found images, borrowed from a half-forgotten black & white children’s programme. The film is notable for its marvellous original soundtrack by my frequent collaborator Abi Fry, who has created music that is intoxicatingly romantic. See and hear for yourself here.

Tatum International

Paris-based film distributor Collectif Jeune Cinéma has added several of my recent films to its collection, making Lost Gardens (2017), Blacklands (2018) and The Loom (2018), available for screenings in perpetuity. I’m proud to add these works to the cooperative’s burgeoning collection. For me, growing up in the UK suburbs, Paris represented the unattainable heights of art and sophistication, a cliched view, no doubt, but one that has never been fully dispelled. In adding my works into the collection I feel that I’m connecting a part of myself to the vast dream-fabric of this wonderful city. I’ll be in good company: Collectif Jeune Cinéma’s new acquisitions list includes work by some of my favourite film-makers, including fellow Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival alumni Jacques Perconte and the late, great, Robert Todd. Collectif Jeune Cinéma is planning a series of events in 2021 to mark its 50th anniversary, with a film from each of its associated film-makers screening as part of the celebration.

The world of Collectif Jeune Cinéma can be explored here.

Source: https://mailchi.mp/6f3b255c7796/communique-026-the-blank-screen

Communiqué 025: Unearthed Arcana / October 20, 2020 by Toby Tatum

This communique, the 25th in my infrequent series, looks unashamedly backwards, returning to my own personal lost world of fantasy role-playing games and cult low-resolution television broadcasts. Also, I muse upon the melancholy poetry of ruins, before retreating finally into the prelapsarian world of childhood.

The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781

Gothic

“It is an age of dreams and nightmares"
"Yes, and we are merely the children of the age”

These lines are exchanged by Julian Sands and Gabriel Byrne, playing laudanum-soused romantics in Ken Russell’s 1986 film Gothic. Gothic restages the real events of June 1816 that unfolded at Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, where the poet Lord Byron resided in exile, accompanied by his physician Dr. John Polidori. This odd pair were joined by the eloping couple of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and the young Mary Godwin, later Mary Shelley. As the sky darkened with unseasonal clouds the group challenged themselves to a ghost story competition, a competition which ultimately brought forth Mary Shelley’s astonishing Frankenstein. Gothic is heady, delirious moviemaking. Russell's camera roves like an intoxicant through the Diodati mansion, a space where the barriers separating dream and reality have seemingly dissolved. In this nocturnal realm, where veiled statues are lit by lightning and snakes adorn suits of armour, a druggy, sexual atmosphere dominates. Shut off from the wider world, its inhabitants throw themselves into an orgiastic series of tumultuous encounters which culminate with the exorcising of an otherworldly demonic entity, an act which takes place in a rat-filled subterranean chamber moist with supernatural slime. Detractors may deride the film as totally unrealistic but I suspect that, in its own strange way, the film might be true in its depictions of the wilder shores of the turbulent romantic imagination.

My ongoing enthusiasm for the sensualistic Gothic is the result of witnessing its screening as part of the BBC2 film series Moviedrome. Movidrome, the creation of producer Nick James, began in 1988, and was presented, in its first few seasons, by the film-maker Alex Cox. Moviedrome beamed forth a series of cult broadcasts, showing films that, in that pre-internet age, would have been otherwise inaccessible to many viewers. After recently unearthing the old BBC Moviedrome Guides, which the BBC issued to accompany the series, I’m again convinced how fortunate I was to have been able to watch so many of these then obscure films during those one-off television broadcasts. Gothic was the 100th film broadcast on Moviedrome, shown on 11/07/93 at 9:55pm. The screening was followed, at 00:05am, by the 101st Moviedrome film, Vincent Ward’s excellent The Navigator.

For more information on Moviedrome I recommend visiting this marvellously comprehensive fan site: https://moviedromer.tumblr.com/

For more information on Gothic visit screenwriter Stephen Volk’s website, where he has a page dedicated to the film: http://www.stephenvolk.net/gothic.html

Production still from Ken Russell's 1986 film Gothic

Dimension Door

This bestiary contains “OVER 350 MONSTERS” promises the back cover of my 1978 edition of the Monster Manual, one of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons core rule books. This book, recently found at the bottom of a drawer at my mother’s house, has reawakened a forgotten legion of slumbering creatures. AD&D, perhaps the best know role-playing game (RPG), was invented by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in the mid-seventies, who grafted fantasy elements onto the wargaming table-top games they loved. At one time playing AD&D was considered suspicious, perhaps even occult or satanic. Looking back, there might be a germ of truth to these outlandish claims – there is something seance-like about how the game is collectively played. AD&D isn’t played on a board, although laboriously painted miniatures do feature (with the physical miniature only acting as a stand-in for the more-real, virtual character). The realm that the game unfolds in is a dream-scape summoned by the players and the games arbitrator and chief conjurer, the Dungeon Master. The Dungeon Master creates and then draws the players into an elaborately constructed fairy-terrain of monster-filled labyrinths, crystalline caverns, enchanted wizards’ towers and vast trackless wastes - trap-filled spaces through which the player’s characters rove in search of experience and treasure. The aesthetic of these strange worlds is usually part Edward Burne-Jones part Conan the Barbarian. The AD&D games I played in the late eighties often went on for months and, on one occasion, years at a time. To access these multi-dimensional realms, players adopt the guise of a character, whose abilities are generated by the throwing of unusual dice. These characters might be fighters, thieves, clerics or magic users, each character complete with their own individual personalities to be adopted by the players in order to experience the game. In the hardcore 1st edition that I loved, AD&D was almost totally impenetrable to outsiders, governed by dense tomes of lore, rules, charts and tables. The sheer will of the imagination required to sustain these games remains, to me, impressive. Shunned by the wider world, we AD&D players seemed to inhabit a secret society, one probably similar to the clandestine world of Prog Rock listeners. I’ve now grown to suspect that the long-banished game still exerts an influence on my own work to this day. With my films I’ve often striven to create immersive other worlds, opening portals through which the viewers can, if they so wish, temporarily disappear. There is a strong element of the fantastical about my films, which tend to avoid any kind of documentary realism, veering instead toward the depiction of imaginary places. My 2011 film The Subterraneans was the first film I made that attempted to recapture this lost realm. In making the film I went into the world looking for locations that suggested the haunts of weird creatures, peering with my camera into the spaces where, given the right conditions, these entities might be encouraged to issue forth from. Also, the niche world of experimental cinema has some parallels with the role-playing games world. Experimental film is an obscure category of cinema that, for the most part, remains unknown to most film enthusiasts but loved by a hardcore collective of devotees. Later, when looking back through some of the other AD&D rule books in my neglected collection, I was pleased to note that a few of the spells listed therein are ones I still frequently attempt to cast. These include: Alter Reality, Charm Plants, Dimension Door, Veil, Minor Creation, Prismatic Wall, and Hallucinatory Terrain.

The listing for Green Slime scanned from my copy of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manuel (2nd edition, May 1978).

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, %22Via Appia immaginaria%22, 1756.jpg

Via Appia Immaginaria, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1756

“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etching Via Appia immaginaria (1756) shows an impossible architecture looming over indistinct, minute figures. In this recreation of the Appian Way, Piranesi depicts tier upon tier of improbable buildings and towers of overdecorated cyclopean statuary. Above these teetering columns perch temples and palaces – seemingly impossible to access, except in the imagination. Clearly the imagined builders of this outlandish scene must have been in the grip of hubristic madness. Already the inevitable plunge into collapse seems imminent. The doomed poetry of buildings lost to time is one of Piranesi’s main areas of interest – countless works of his revel in the disorder of collapsed capitals and broken statuary. Already, in this idealised view of imagined glory, decay steadily creeps in and the dusty ground is littered with a jumble of ruinous fragments while vegetation encroaches. The British Museum displayed a series of Piranesi’s works in their show Piranesi Drawings – Visions of Antiquity, which opened on 20/02/20 (and was the last exhibition I visited before entering lockdown). Piranesi’s Via Appia immaginaria was displayed with a large preparatory drawing of the work, allowing for close inspection of the embryonic fantasia. These works were shown alongside numerous other pieces, all focussing on architecture and ornate furnishings, including some examples from his series of depictions of seemingly inescapable imaginary prisons. According to Alethea Hayter in her 1968 study Opium and the Romantic Imagination, these works evoke the nightmarish terrors of opium addiction. Piranesi’s art teems with detail and rewards close inspection - inspection which, for me, prompted reverie. As I pondered the minute subtleties of one exhibit, Shelley’s 1817 poem Ozymandias came to mind – a poem which also evokes a culture brought low by unspecified disaster. This poem muses on the imagined sight of two vast trunkless legs of stone, remains of a formerly grandiose but now shattered statue, adrift in a desert. The image suggests the futility of all human endeavour and evokes limitless expanses of erasing, engulfing time. There is something intoxicating about these works that contemplate the end times, allowing us to consider, or perhaps be thrilled by, the spectacle of destruction from a safe distance. Leaving the Piranesi exhibition I imagined the British Museum itself tumbled to ruin, with the fallen exhibits scattered or heaped chaotically about while bats flitted through the disordered galleries, now emptied of human visitors.

My personal ruin odyssey began wholeheartedly in 2017. This took the form of a series of outings to windswept churches and time-worn castles – driving around locations both well known and obscure. These self-initiated missions found me shivering on blasted heaths whilst setting up the tripod to film a lowering sky brooding behind a ruined tower or else becoming entangled by brambles whilst attempting to film a forgotten, partially collapsed, ivy encrusted church. Although most of the material gathered on these excursions remains unused some of the footage did find its way into my 2018 film Blacklands, where it was repurposed to form part of a crumbling dream-architecture. For the curious, Blacklands can be visited here.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias is online in full here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias

For more information on the British Museum’s Piranesi exhibition visit: https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/piranesi-drawings-visions-antiquit

Night on the Riverbank_Film Still_003.jpg

Night on the Riverbank, Toby Tatum, 2019

The Lost World

My 2019 film Night on the Riverbank will screen later in November as part of the Transient Visions film festival. The 2020 edition of this New York State-based film festival will be presented online. Night on the Riverbank is unique in my oeuvre in that it employs found footage, in this case footage borrowed from a fuzzy VHS recording of a half-forgotten B&W children’s television programme. Night on the Riverbank is my attempt to journey back to the lost landscapes of childhood and is, I think, heavily indebted to one of the most magical of children’s stories, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908). Re-reading this lovely book in later years my favourite chapter remains The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. In this spellbinding chapter the characters Mole and Rat go searching along the riverbank for a missing infant otter named Portly. After setting forth in a canoe, searching along the reeds of the riverbank, the little animals find themselves in unfamiliar waters, lulled by a half-heard song that seems to issue from another world. Later, on an island in the stream, they find the missing tyke, sheltered and protected by the great god Pan, the guardian of all creatures. So as not to disturb their trembling hearts Pan later removes the memory of the sacred encounter from their minds, lest the overwhelming sense of numinous awe should disturb them afterwards, leaving instead only the faintest echo of that strange mystic music. Although there is no explicitly supernatural element in Night on the Riverbank there is, for me, something in the shifting layered images of the aqueous moon that suggests the mysterious workings of subtle enchantments. For me, the riverbank is a symbol of the distant, prelapsarian world of childhood. As a very young child I spent time playing on the riverbanks along the Thames, watching the shimmering water and hearing my own secret song of the reeds. Writing about the Night on the Riverbank for Cinesinfin the critic Borja Castillejo Calvo focused on the enchanting music conjured for the film by composer and Abi Fry which, for Calvo, “transcended attractive contemplation and reached the territory of fantasy and dream”. Fry reflected on the film in the online Q&A conducted by the 2020 Alchemy Film Festival:

“I have quite a specific process when composing for the films of Toby Tatum. My aim is to clear my mind and become a blank canvas whilst I watch the film many times in silence and allow ideas to surface. I try not to impose my own will until I have connected on a subconscious level and allowed the film’s magic to guide me. The first thing that came to me, when considering Night on the Riverbank, was the idea of stretching time and space and I began to experiment with cascading piano motifs to get this across, adding shimmering strings and floating harps to create the feeling of magic in the air.”

Borja Castillejo Calvo’s review of Night on the Riverbank, in Spanish (with translation options available), is online to read here: https://cinesinfin6.wordpress.com/2020/01/27/night-on-the-riverbank/

Transient Visions runs from October 23 to November 19, 2020 (there will be four programs in total, and each program will be available for the duration of one week). Night on the Riverbank streams as part of The Bluest Hour, a programme of films curated by Taylor Dunne. The Bluest Hour will be available to stream worldwide from 06/11/20 to 12/11/20. The programme also includes work by Sarah Lasley, Zachary Epcar, Masha Vlasova, Michael Mersereau, Marina Landia, and Jinyong Kim.

For more information about Transient Visions visit: http://www.transientvisions.org/

The numinous encounter at the heart of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908), illustrated by Paul Bransom

Source: https://mailchi.mp/ae5855802b48/communique-025-unearthed-arcana