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.
Paul Nash, Silbury Hill, 1938
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.”
Shropshire sun pendant, 1000-800 BC
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.
The Nursery of Worlds, film still, 2022
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, film still, 2022
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.
A Spell in Fairyland, film still, 2022