This communiqué takes the journey as its theme and considers how voyages to other places can be powerful stimulants for the creative imagination.
Have a pleasant trip.
Toby
Elsewhere
Generally I prefer to stay in. Surrounded by art, music, film and books, I can journey deep into the spaces of my imagination. Making my films has been a way of leaving the house, leading me out of insularity through a series of exploratory journeys into the landscapes adjacent to my immediate surroundings. I’ve found that during these excursions I’ve been able to access a similar mental state to the one I experience when looking at art, this time brought about by engaging with the liminal places where a vision of different reality might be unveiled to me. These filming trips are journeys into different places but also journeys into different states of being. The journey here might be inward, into unsuspected internal regions, or outwards, toward a terrain vague where a true outside might reside. As a film-maker, I’m drawn to representations of these experiences in cinema. Peter Weir’s 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock (adapted from Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel of the same name) and Nicholas Roeg’s 1971 film Walkabout are both key examples of a cinema that approaches the transformative potential abiding in nature. Here nature is shown to be an agent of profound change. These are films where human visitors to wild places seem to brush up against unknowable ancient forces and where immersion in nature offers the potential for release or rebirth. In these works the everyday conventions of time seem to dissolve as new impressions of a vaster temporal cycle are unveiled. In these films characters are transported across the boundaries of the known to access places where obscure presences exert unfathomable influences.
Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir, 1975
Temporal Mirage
When I venture geographically further afield it is usually to attend screenings at experimental film festivals. Preparation for these journeys is often fraught and, despite my enthusiasm for the trip, I can become strangely annoyed at having to leave the house. That said, as soon as the journey commences my life at home falls away, with the sound of the door closing behind me signalling the beginning of something new. The festivals that champion experimental films are movable feasts, places where mirages flicker on the screen for a short but intense period before fading forever. The constellation of people that have come together to witness them then dissipates, each person carrying away the memories of what they’ve seen. Film festivals always have a particularly intense atmosphere, friendships are formed quickly and a heady atmosphere of passionate discussion often surrounds the screenings. Spending days in the cinema watching experimental films realigns your consciousness, which always produces an awkward transition upon arriving home, where a different set of priorities demands attention. Over the last few years I’ve made several pilgrimages to Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival in Scotland and, at every visit, I have come away enlivened by the marvels I’ve seen. Alchemy was founded by film-maker Richard Ashrowan in 2010. The festival takes place in the small Scottish borders town of Hawick which, for one week, gets inundated with experimental film devotees who wander dazed between the screenings and exhibitions that sprawl across the town. The 2019 edition was the first under the new director Michael Pattison, who urged audiences to ‘embrace the strange’, encouraging them to submit to the most uncompromising of cinematic visions. At Alchemy, over a number of fortifying high-cholesterol breakfasts, I enjoyed a series of impromptu early-morning discussions about film, landscape and memory with writer Ben Nicholson (a.k.a Alt/Kino), who had journeyed up from London to report on the festival, as well as explore the wild natural surroundings. At Alchemy Ben seemed to see everything, as the compendious piece he later composed for UK film journal Sight & Sound testifies. His in-depth survey, which includes a mention of my film The Loom, is now online to read here:
Alchemy Festival Director Michael Pattison has also included The Loom in a programme of films he has been invited to curate for CINEMAFORUM in Warsaw, Poland. CINEMAFORUM takes place in early November. For more information visit: https://alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk/cinemaforum/
In July The Loom made the journey to the festival Curtas Vila do Conde in Vila do Conde, Portugal, where the film screened in a programme that also included works by Pedro Bastos, Kevin Jerome Everson, Ben Rivers and Helena Wittmann. Unable to attend the festival myself I was nonetheless proud that the film had been programmed. In the festival catalogue that the organisers thoughtfully posted to me, the curators took the time to reflect on each of the films selected and suggested that The Loom was “a disturbing work that will patiently involve the spectator in its web.”
The Loom, Toby Tatum, 2018
Night on the Riverbank, Toby Tatum, 2019
Night on the Riverbank
My 2019 film Night on the Riverbank has been selected to premiere at the 17th edition of the London Short Film Festival. The festival, which the Guardian called “the best short film festival in the world,” takes place at various venues across London in January 2020. Night on the Riverbank was created through reworking footage from a forgotten B&W children’s programme. The film takes us into the nocturnal world of the little creatures that live on the riverbank, shown emerging from their hiding places to bask in the glow of an immense enchanting moon. The activities of these spellbound animals is soundtracked by a magical new score by composer Abi Fry. A review of Night on the Riverbank has been recently posted on the Italian film blog L’emergere del Possibile, where the film is considered alongside my other recent works. The article proposes that the film was conjured via invocation, issuing forth from beyond the grave: Night on the Riverbank “è un film che sembra provenire direttamente dall'oltretomba”.
The L’emergere del Possibile article is online to read here: https://tinyurl.com/y5p7nyv9
Night on the Riverbank, Toby Tatum, 2019
El bosque es la imagen, y la imagen es el cine
“The forest is the image, and the image is the cinema” so begins the in-depth survey of my films posted recently on the Cinesinfin blog. The writer, Borja Castillejo Calvo, having fully immersed himself in my work, emerged to lucidly articulate the nature of the dream that he was subject to. Reading Borja’s text I was pleased to discover that his article isn’t a piece of detached critical analysis, rather an evocation of the subterranean depths, a record of his journey into the shimmering realms beyond the screen.
The full text, in Spanish, is available to read here.
The Secluded Grove, Toby Tatum, 2012
Dead Beauty
Last winter I wandered deliberately lost in Venice, threading through networks of flooded passageways, where rats peeped from crevices in the moist, mouldering brickwork. I’d set forth at night, taking turns at random, wading through a sluggish slop of stagnant water, intoxicated by the mystery of this maze. These secret walkways, with their innumerable bridges spanning viscous green water suddenly opened up onto vast squares filled with sinking churches where, inside, sensual Renaissance masterpieces encrusted the ancient stonework. Venice is an intoxicating dream-city, like a place imagined by an opium addict and then actually built. As I walked past one apartment building the door suddenly swung open to reveal a frescoed hallway where a chandelier illuminated the flooded room. Inside a couple of nonchalant residents pushed a perambulator through the knee-deep water before ascending to the drier floors above. Venice offers a preview of geological collapse and there one can easily imagine a flooded world, where hubristic cities are slowly engulfed by tides of relentless rising water, like the potent vision of a sinking London J.G. Ballard memorably evokes in his increasingly prophetic 1962 novel The Drowned World. In wandering the labyrinth of alleys I felt like I had entered the supernatural world of Nicolas Roeg’s Venice-set film Don’t Look Now (1973), where a lost, bereaved couple tragically sink into horror. As a fan of Roeg’s marvellous films I was sad to learn about his death whilst I was in Venice. Re-watching Don’t Look Now before departure I imagined that the Venice I would be visiting would be much changed from the one Roeg filmed. I was thrilled that the somewhat sinister atmosphere Roeg had masterfully captured was still very much present, still lingering over the opaque green canals, decaying palazzos and disorientating labyrinthine alleys. As the streets began to disappear beneath a tide of rising water I took a boat out to the funeral island of San Michele, where the Venetian dead are laid to rest. On approach San Michele brought to mind the Isle Of The Dead, a painting by the Swiss Symbolist Arnold Böcklin, where a Charon figure, the silent boatman, is shown delivering a soul to the great beyond. Whilst I was wandering among the damp tombs that clutter the island the sky suddenly cleared and the black rain clouds moved off, unveiling a fresh blue sky. Below, under the mournful cypress trees it remained strangely dark and from their dense branches fell a steady drip of deathly water onto the time-worn graves. This odd conjunction of light and dark brought to mind another painting, Magritte’s masterpiece The Empire of Light, with its paradoxical combination of both day and night, which was on display at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection on the Grand Canal. As I toured San Michele a funeral procession emerged from one of the chapels, the coffin borne by black-clad mourners. As the mourners processed past along the avenue of sentinel-like cypress trees a bell started tolling, which was answered by another chiming from the city across the water. Soon bells seemed to be ringing over Venice, the sounds radiating out from the painted churches, reverberating through the secret alleys before rolling across vast stretches of water, heading out toward the sea.
Isle of the Dead, Arnold Böcklin, 1880
Empire of Light, Réne Magritte, 1953-54
Tabula Rasa
For me Venice represented end times, a gilded city sundered by decadence and plagues, now a drowning monument to dead beauty. In comparison the frozen mid-winter Iceland I visited early this year seemed like a potential new beginning, a purged zone of frozen redemptive blankness. To me Iceland was a tabula rasa, an enchanted white space, perhaps the white screen on which the future might be projected. Whilst Iceland’s expanses of whiteness seemed imbued with new possibilities, they also suggested frightening erasure. Whiteness can be terrifying, as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick testifies. Moby Dick, among its innumerable digressions, features a memorable passage focusing on the horrors of diabolic whiteness. The artist John Stezaker has created a body of work entitled Tabula Rasa, produced by excising precisely cut portions from found imagery. These works show people confronted by sharply delineated voids and startling white apparitions. In the first work in the series an unnaturally pristine white rhomboid weirdly manifests in a park, stopping strollers in their tracks. Might this be a portal to another dimension or an alien presence? Stezaker’s creations are all the more marvellous because they are seemingly accomplished with the simplest of gestures and interventions, suggesting to me that there is some powerful transformative magic at work in their creation. I had travelled to Iceland through a quirk of fate, a friend having spare plane ticket which was available at a day’s notice. We arrived intoxicated with thoughts of the far north. I took with me a copy of Peter Davidson’s 2004 book The Idea of North, which explores the numerous myths, tales and legends that various peoples have told about the north. One of the book’s fantastic chapters focuses on the far north as a magical threshold, a place where the veil between one world and another is thin, where the next world can be glimpsed through the multi-coloured aurora that dances over the frozen remains of dead explorers. Davidson writes memorably about how the north is a place for shamans and enchanters, a magical zone where a unicorn horn might be found washed up on an inaccessible beach. Part of my fascination with the mid-winter north stemmed from the idea of a zone off limits to humans. The appeal of this frozen world was similar to the imaginative pull exerted by places like the fathomless oceanic trenches where phosphorescent fish inhabit barnacled shipwrecks or the remorseless deserts where the broken statuary of forgotten civilizations lays buried under burning sand. Journeying north I’d taken my camera with me on the chance that I could film something but found the sub-zero conditions impossible, my hands instantly freezing as I fumbled with the equipment. One morning we took a drive before sunrise, travelling toward an immense waterfall. Heading out of Reykjavik as the sun slowly rose we found ourselves traversing an impossibly beautiful snow-bound world. The sun, a potent orb of brilliant deep orange, rose with an intensity I’ve never before seen. Its light, reflecting off the whiteness around us, revealed mist-wreathed distant mountains, sites of sublime inaccessibility, which merged seamlessly with the low hanging clouds. Fields of ice stretched out all around us over which flew streams of wraith-like forms, rushing shapes formed of wind-blown snow. Around us the ground bubbled and smouldered, heated by hidden furnaces of subterranean fire, giving off a potent sulphurous smell. Elsewhere geysers blasted streams of water into the sky. Iceland was an unparalleled land of miracles, but also one of terrors. A few moments of standing outside in the harshest of winds was enough to convince us how easy it would be to freeze to death out here. Dangers lurked on the frozen roads where a monument of crashed cars had been erected to warn incautious drivers. In the National Gallery in Reykjavik a series of black and white photographs showed tourist buses subsiding into lakes and giant SUVs engulfed by snow drifts. In the evening the aurora surged in the freezing sky. Initially appearing as a greenish tint on the horizon it unexpectedly blossomed into a shimmering multicoloured maelstrom, its fingers flashing excitedly across the sky. Seeing this immense spectacle you could easily believe you were looking up into a portal through which another world could be glimpsed. Arriving home, still stunned by the experience, I made several attempts to create my own aurora by filming light refracting through combinations of water, glass and iridescent reflective material. Some of these experiments have made it into a forthcoming film, where my own-brand aurora now flickers over a secret grotto of moss-bearded rocks and glowing magic flowers.
Tabula Rasa I, John Stezaker, 1978-79