Here’s a piece I wrote on Sara Cwynar’s installation Everything in the Studio (Destroyed) at Foam Gallery, Amsterdam. It’s my first piece for Sleek magazine, a Berlin-based art and fashion magazine. Check them out.
Bernardo With Props (2013). Courtesy Cooper Cole gallery, Toronto. ©Sara-Cwynar
A couple of weeks ago, I found myself at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, for what proved to be a surprisingly fitting location for ‘England’s Dreaming’, a colourful retrospective of British cinema in the 1960′s. Founded in that period by Peter Konlechner and film artist Peter Kubelka, it was in 1989 that the “Invisible Cinema” was installed, an entirely black-on-black screening room based on Kubelka’s concept that the screen should function as a “viewing and listening machine”. As a result, the cinema’s sparse, almost utilitarian style encourages a focus on the films themselves, which in tonight’s double feature, happens to be a selection of British ‘60’s horror: Terence Fisher’s The Devil Rides Out (or The Devil’s Bride in the US, 1968) and Michael Reeves’ The Witchfinder General (1968).
Set in England in the 1920’s, The Devil Rides Out is a glorious Hammer horror tale about a Satanic cult of devil worshippers and Duc De Richleau’s quest to save his friend’s son from their evil snare. Played brilliantly by Christopher Lee, the Duc is a French Count with notable facial hair and more than a passing interest in mysticism and the occult. His interest in the occult is rooted in the Christian purpose of salvation, unlike Mocata (played by a show-stealing Charles Grey), a devil worshipping sorcerer and Silver Fox, who has quickly become my new favourite Hammer villain. A good script and some brilliant set scenes (such as a frantic and orgiastic devil worshipping ceremony in Salisbury plain), are let down – or heightened, depending on your horror tastes, by cheesy, campy special effects. Blood that looks like ketchup, an incredibly unrealistic haunted tarantula – you get the idea.
Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General might seem a heavy offering after slayed goats and satanic rituals, but the Viennese Friday night cinephile crowd seems fairly intense. Witchfinder General is a strange and unusual gem of British horror, a heavy fictionalised retelling of the 17th century witch-huntings of Matthew Hopkins, a lawyer supposedly appointed during the Civil War to seek out sorcerers and witches. What emerges is an almost arthouse, low budget retelling of the witchhunts, which hovers gratuitously and voyeuristically over the abuses of young, attractive ‘witches’ – sometimes, as in the incredible opening credits which show women’s faces contorted in pain, to the point of sexual masochism. Watching children roast potatoes over the ashes of a burnt witch is a particularly memorable moment.
Truffaut’s famous dictum about British cinema (“Isn’t there a certain incompatibility between the terms ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain’?”) which is quoted in the programme notes, is perhaps not disproved in this double feature – there seemed to be a general air of confusion after the screenings that may or may not have been positive. However, the rest of the programme proves what a vibrant and complex era the Sixties was for British cinema, offering up another thorough retrospective from one of Europe’s most extensive cinémathèques.
The cinema is a black and silent room in which there are no noises or other sounds from the outside world. People go there at a certain time and they remain seated doing nothing else for two hours. This situation is the deepest and profoundest opportunity that we have in the whole world to approach the work of somebody in which we are interested. We are forced by circumstances to concentrate completely on one thing. All other media and especially the digital media can work everywhere else, they are part of the environment, they sponsor dissipation, and so the film event is the greatest situation of an encounter with somebody else’s thoughts.
Peter Kubelka
In Decasia, experimental American filmmaker Bill Morrison explored the fragility of film by looking at decomposing celluloid. Here in The Miners’ Hymns, he does something very similar but on a grander scale. By slowing down archive footage of the mining communities in the North-West of England, and pairing them neatly with a melancholic score from Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, he throws some light on the fragility of history, and the importance of its industrial communities. The editing and tone, however, remains morose and plodding, and would have benefited from a lightness of touch that, here missing, rendered the film almost funereal. As the last of the Durham mining pits was closed in 1992, The Miners’ Hymns can be seen as a creative, hypnotic, but ploddingly melancholic film of a funeral.
The film opens with a helicopter shot over a particular part of Britain, captured on film here in its slightly grainy brightness, and focusing in on a giant Asda. We find out that this was once the sight of the Ryhope Colliery, the central area of industry for the region for seventy years. The film continues in a similar vein until it reverts to old footage from the last hundred years, sourced from National Coal Board promotional films and British television news footage of miner’s strikes. Some of the footage is very beautiful, some very jarring. Morrison made it quite clear how vital the coal mining industry was for certain areas of the North-West, and follows its trajectory on film from early grainy shots of fairly hazardous-looking mines to miners strikes in 1984, when Thatcher’s government spelt out the end of the industry. The film lays on the point without focus or direction, but it was the lack of humour which I really felt was missing from the piece. Black humour – such an essential element of the British condition – could have brought this film out from the murky depths of chiaroscuro shots and its melancholy soundtrack, and captured some of the vitality of the communities it was trying to celebrate.
This is not to say that the film wasn’t creative or engaging. The collaboration between Jóhannsson and Morrison was an interesting one, partly because, as we found out in the Q & A afterwards, Jóhannsson wrote the music first, and Morrison edited the film footage around it. The final effect is a moody, darkly sinister orchestral piece, aided by the fact that it was recorded at Durham cathedral. Jóhannsson went on to tell us that he was inspired by “the sacred music of the brass bands” and there is a strongly liturgical feel to the soundtrack’s epic rise and fall. The Icelandic composer has clearly researched the sounds of the area’s traditional colliery bands, and the music is a fitting tribute. The film’s focus on the Durham Miners’ Gala – an annual meeting which occurred from the nineteenth-century to the Thatcher era, and brought together mining communities and union activists – is an interesting focal point, as it focuses the link between the film’s images and its music; the Miners’ Gala was famed for its brass bands and carnival atmosphere. Jóhannsson later describes the style of music in this film as “happy”, which got a chuckle from the audience. It some ways I can see what he means: the film’s crescendo into the track “The Cause of Labour is the Hope of the World” is as uplifting as you’re going to get in these 52 minutes of film.
The Miners’ Hymns is a clearly creative and engaging collaboration with much to say about the values and lifeblood of a bygone industry, which unfortunately loses itself in pomp and solemnity.
This film review appears on the Cinevue website.
