It will doubtless appear somewhat strange to include a previously written essay. Nevertheless, the points raised here are no less valid for my work now than they were over 18 months ago. This also demonstrates my academic writing, to me a natural part of the thinking-through process of a creative project and one which I have sorely missed.
I have a lifelong artistic commitment to exploring and representing geographical space. My first film, Walks of Life (2018), investigated the wellbeing functions of favourite walks and my second, Abridged (2019), investigated and developed my personal connection with the River Exe M5 bridge. I wanted Strands (2019) to combine the interpersonal engagement of the former with the essayistic, fixed-shot style of the latter, to examine Gideon Koppel’s sleep furiously (2008) as exemplary of this intention, and to explore critical frameworks to ground the film’s making in its location. I also wanted to strengthen my use of my camera, the Sony a7iii, doing so early on through a paid-for tutorial at dslrvideoshooter.com(Pike, 2018).
Strands was shot at Lamplighter’s Marsh, a ribbon of land between the Portway arterial road, the River Avon, the M5 Avonmouth Bridge, and Station Road, Shirehampton. The site includes Bristol City Council-owned green space (Lamplighter’s Marsh and The Daisy Field Local Nature Reserve), Avon Sea Cadets, Portway Park and Ride, JP Crane Hire, a Wessex Water-owned tenanted boat yard, private residential housing, privately-owned untended marshland, and the Crown-owned strand, part of a Site of Special Scientific Interest with the second highest tidal variance globally. There are visible traces of post-Blitz landfill and railway sidings, the site is crossed by a rail line and a subterranean fuel pipe supplying Heathrow, and includes water pumping constructions and a gas warning siren which is tested monthly. Another Local Nature Reserve, Pill Foreshore, is directly across the river. The green spaces are well-used and Friends of Lamplighters Marsh (FOLM) are a highly active group who safeguard public access and animal and plant conservation, including a large badger sett and a nationally-unique moss. I first visited to photograph a nature walk as part of the Being Human Festival 2018, made of particular interest due to my connection with the M5. I was warmly welcomed by organisers and local community, and soon wanted to make a film there.
I have previously investigated pro-filmic landscapes using eco-critical theorists such as O’Brien (2018), and documentary relationships with participants using models of voice such as Bakhtin (1984) and Renov (2005). To interrogate my own relationship with landscape as a film-maker, I turned to phenomenological cultural geography, brevity requiring it is heavily-summarised here; I additionally found environmental psychology, which also uses phenomenology (Seamon, 2014), relevant to identifying themes common to my film’s participants.
Wylie (2007) identifies in phenomenological cultural geography a complicated division between self and landscape, where landscape is an always-already physical actuality, pre-existing individual cognition and across which culture is ‘laid’. It can find expression through an artist’s ‘immersion’, which Wylie shows draws on what Heidegger, then Ponty, describe as ‘being-in-the-world’, permitting an embodied view within landscape that intertwines both. Personal meaning is found through a ‘togetherness’, formed by ‘dwelling’ in the landscape through practical activity, rather than cerebral activity – such as imposing a framed view. While a frame-imposing artform, film-making nevertheless has the simultaneous potential for artistic dwelling through immersion and foregrounding its practical and social activities in landscape; film-making thus becomes an embedded technological ‘mediation’ between person and landscape, as described by Tilley (2017), akin to trail biking or model plane flying. Tilley envisions the researcher as material ‘interface’ between inner (personal) and outer (material) landscape, a ‘fellow traveller’ amongst those physically, and emotionally, connected; psychologist Seamon (2014) identifies a similar dialectic and both identify useful dimensions of engagement, such as mediation, ‘conflict’, and ‘creation’, as seen later.
Several phenomenological studies of film draw related conclusions about landscape. Lefebvre (2006) challenges the conventional interpretation of pro-filmic landscape as culturally framed by creating a fluid, subjective division: ‘setting’ (location being subservient to narrative, and viewer experience manipulated), and ‘landscape’ (beyond events, and the viewer having agency to look). Geographer Massey (2011) notes a strategy in Robinson in Ruins (Keiller, 2010), the work of her project collaborator, of complicating landscape rather than ‘smoothing’ it, preferring an ‘entanglement’ of loose ends which lets the viewer piece location together. She also notes that his fixed frames might infrequently carry narrative but are never static, recording landscape in the process of becoming and changing.
When I came across Gideon Koppel’s sleep furiously in 2018, it resonated powerfully. Its pre-occupation with place echoes my own by representing people as located within, rather than dominating their landscapes, in sympathy with a worldview local to the Welsh community of Trefeurig where it was largely filmed (Koppel, 2007). It is unlike my films by doing so in part by absenting talking heads interviews and voiceover, but like Abridged in its reliance on fixed-camera long takes from which people often emerge. sleep furiously is not ‘about’ Trefeurig any more than Abridged is ‘about’ the M5 (Woods, 2014); both films seek to evoke landscape rather than accurately reproduce it (Newland, 2016). The long takes of the film’s mini-narratives – hay-baling, a garden contest – encourage viewer agency, and while each shot is framed with a meticulous aesthetic sense, these provide a ‘stage’ for change in landscape (Banville, 2009), including people connected with it, allowing the oscillation between Lefebvre’s binary division. This is not, however, observational film-making: the film-maker is the participants’ audience (Koppel, 2007), and Koppel has described his film-making as subjective immersion in landscape (Robinson, 2012).
When approaching a documentary subject, I have previously drawn on my social science training, typically, albeit loosely, having a research aim, later constructing footage into a visual ‘argument’. It was in such a spirit that I drew up an interview guide before meeting participants selected for differing relationships to Lamplighter’s: those born locally, the long-term and newly locally-settled, those connected through work, and those travelling in to visit. Finding my questions less compelling than what participants wanted to tell me, this separation quickly felt disingenuous; rather than making a film about Lamplighter’s Marsh, it swiftly became a film at Lamplighter’s Marsh, documenting an immersive encounter. As fellow traveller, I was freed to become materially and emotionally involved in the film, an interface, my presence as filmmaker another situated social interaction, my practical activities joining the dog-walking and conservation work. Thus, Strands is strongly inflected with my own aesthetic interest in lines and textures, and incorporates my explorations of places not referred to by participants, such as the Pill Foreshore.
I explored Lamplighter’s in pre-production seeking to evoke activities and places that seemed key to the participants, and shots of these are integral to the film. To Renee, for example, the railway bridge was important as a ‘portal’ to the marsh, while to Richard, the many gates mark out conflicted ‘borders’, both identified in a foundational environmental psychology study (Altman & Chemers, 1980) as two dimensions by which understanding of ‘place’ is commonly ‘created’ (Seamon 2014). Lamplighter’s is a complex place to get to know, particularly when understanding the interrelationship of the various patches of land. Rather than coming up with a solidified perspective, requiring smoothing, I thought it better to immerse myself in complexity and conflict (another of Tilley’s (2017) key dimensions of landscape connectedness), recording components of Lamplighter’s as I encountered them. I increasingly envisioned the project as a mosaic, each piece – whether biographical, geophysical, economical and so on – distinct, and interrelated as a pattern by proximity rather than commonality. Expressing this intention is echoed in the pun Strands, evoking disparate, incomplete, but entangled threads which, like the landscape, materially pre-exists their organisation both by participants and myself.
I scheduled three shoot days. The first coincided with the gas alarm test and included Renee and her husband’s short walk to ‘the lookout’, and Helen, an artist, looking for driftwood. The weather went from sunshine to drizzle in four hours, the resulting footage seemingly shot on different days. I discarded the radio mics as distracting, opting for my on-camera Røde mic, knowing that most speech would be inaudible. This was disappointing: sound is meticulous in sleep furiously and I wanted to likewise record people conversing with one another. However, not doing so located people within the landscape, speech neither more nor less important than birdsong or road noise; it also helped evoke being there, of straining to hear snippets of conversations, of guessing meaning. Not privileging the viewer with supernatural hearing keeps the view within the world, allowing for what Sobchack (1992) calls the ‘thickness of experience’ rather than striving for an artificial authenticity.
I coincided the second shoot with the monthly FOLM work day so I could film practical activity and the landscape in the process of change; several participants had described Lamplighter’s in social and practical, rather than aesthetic, terms and this decisively changed my course from the more aesthetically-motivated Abridged. I also recorded traces of those who use Lamplighter’s for subcultural activity like drug-taking and bike-racing, hence shots of a woodland desire path and the remains of a riverside barbecue; doing so indicates alternative, conflicting forms of dwelling beyond the world of Strands and its participants, giving these voice and underlining the film project as an incomplete view of a slightly unknowable landscape.
My final shoot coincided with the Nomads walking group. I have filmed walkers before, but this time made them part of the landscape, especially where filing into Lamplighter’s in their segment’s opening shot, a minute portion of the screen. I also filmed Richard and his dog; Richard is a contentious figure who lives at the boat yard, the only participant born locally, who some dislike, and for who Richard has a certain amount of contempt. Doubtless, some would rather he not appear in this film, but while Strands demonstrates conflict, I chose not to take sides; doing so would be smoothing. Lastly, from across the Avon at Pill Foreshore, I filmed Pippa walking her dogs along the strand at Lamplighter’s. Pippa, my first contact with Lamplighter’s, dislikes being filmed, and this extreme long shot was a suitable alternative. The penultimate shot of the film, it is alone in visually referencing sleep furiously – Pip’s walk to and from her husband’s grave, shot from across a valley. I wanted to show Lamplighter’s from afar (a landscape within a larger landscape, like Sobchack’s (1992) Russian doll analogy), and to provide a human sense of scale. I was ambiguous about the results; Pippa and her dogs are tiny in the frame, and the wind meant removing the Røde mic to avoid it shaking the camera too much. However, I believe this final shot inverts setting/landscape such that the mini-narrative of the dog walk emerges out of the non-narrative of landscape. The viewer is freed to piece together the mosaic of locations shown earlier and to observe ‘movement’ (Tilley, 2017); I hope that the longer the frame persists, the more its cerebral ordering function is handed over as a stage for change. I kept the loud in-camera mic wind noise as I believe it evokes the tactile experience of standing beneath the bridge; it would have been easy to source a better sound track, but I believe the distortion provides ‘thickness of experience’. Doing so, especially at the end of the film, additionally emphasises film-making as a practical activity, and the camera as mediating my connection with the landscape.
Many post-production choices were thus grounded in technical circumstances and mishaps, something not uncommon for documentary. Just as with sleep furiously (Newland, 2016), the uncontrollable soundscape of air and road traffic, bird song, the rattling bridge was explored during editing and has been adapted for its capacity to evoke and contrast elements of infrastructure and biodiversity unavailable visually. The weather, another uncontrollable element, with its attendant variability in wind noise, contrast and white balance, suggested that sequences be composed of shots filmed at the same time. The film’s structure was thus composed of 11 of these, most following the route of a walk which suggests myself, and thus the film, as moving through landscape, emphasising it as an embodied, material view within Lamplighter’s. An argument could be made for allowing jarring juxtapositions, but I felt this would emphasize the cerebral rather than practical process of film-making, and reduce the film’s capacity to evoke.
Experiencing the rapid and dramatic hourly changes in tidal level, a theme all participants mentioned, can be disorientating. I had considered ways of recording the tide – such as shooting from the same location between tides – but this was impractical. However, while I wanted to evoke Lamplighter’s as slightly unknowable, just as Trefeurig is slightly unknowable (Koppel, 2007), there is a major difference between a film that is meant to be disorientating and a film that is simply disorientating, and I felt any confusion would be worsened by what could be experienced as the film’s seemingly unstructured passage through the landscape. Carroll (2003) argues that the terms of documentary truth, to be assessed, need to be signalled, either inside or outside a documentary. I thus created the colour tiles primarily to signal a step away from narrative authenticity and towards abstraction, but also to divide up the sequences; both hopefully make the film easier to read. I have borrowed this in part from sleep furiously (the colours of its opening tiles mirror the town crier’s costume just as mine mirror leaden skies, gorse, the bus lane, tidal mud and so on), but through being stretched throughout the film, my tiles also function differently by describing film, landscape and my experience as a mosaic. The tiles do not form a regular pattern, but they are nevertheless comprehensible as one, describing Lamplighter’s as unknowable and abstract, pre-existing any attempts to impose order, but at the same time a lived, personal, physical thing, both inside and outside of the people who dwell in it. Reducing visual stimulus also gives viewers a chance for focussed listening.
Although I am happy with Strands, there are still technical skills for further development. Several shots of participants are marginally out of focus and while I can build a philosophical argument for this akin to that of indistinct speech, I think the film would have benefitted had this not been so. Similarly, although I have worked around not using radio mics, I will use a sound recordist for my dissertation project, to which speech is more important. I also feel I am now working at the limits of the a7iii in an outdoor setting; while using a small film crew would significantly change the experience of film-making, and thus the terms of engagement with subject, I would consider doing so carefully in future for the sake of a richer sensory range.
Following Heidegger, Tilley (2017) briefly evaluates landscape as a ‘gathering’ of diverse elements such as “geologies…biographies…monuments…academic disciplines” (p.20) and this idea was especially useful in immersing myself in and then evoking Lamplighter’s Marsh. Doing so required a move away from narrative documentary and towards more experimental forms I had not anticipated. Likewise, it required I took a more spontaneous, looser approach to film-making. I will carry these invaluable experiences forward into future projects.
Works cited.
Altman, I., & Chemers, M. 1980. Culture and Environment. Belmont, California: Wadsworth, Inc.
Bakhtin, M. M. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Banville, J. 2009. sleep furiously: The hills are alive. Sight and Sound [online] June. Available at: http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/4958. [Accessed 13th May 2019].
Carroll, N. 2003. Engaging The Moving Image. Yale University Press. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Koppel, G. 2007. Documentary – the evocation of a world. Journal of Media Practice, 8. pp. 305-323.
Lefebvre, M. 2006. Between setting and landscape in the cinema. In Lefebvre (ed.) Landscape and Film. pp. 19-60
Massey, D. 2011. Landscape/space/politics: an essay. The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image [online] April.
Available at: https://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com/landscapespacepolitics-an-essay/ [Accessed 13th May 2019].
Newland, P. 2016. sleep furiously: interview with Gideon Koppel. In Newland (ed.) British Rural Landscapes on Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press. pp. 180-189.
O’Brien. 2018. Film and the Natural Environment: Elements and Atmospheres. London: Wallflower.
Pike, Cabel. 2018. Sony A7III Video Guide. [online]. Available at: https://academy.dslrvideoshooter.com/courses/sony-a73-video-guide. [Accessed 13th May 2019].
Renov, M. 2005. Towards a Poetics of Documentary. In M. Renov (ed.) Theorizing Documentary. New York: Routledge. pp. 12-36.
Robinson, G. 2012. ‘Belonging To The Land’. The New York Jewish Week [online] 7 March. Available at: https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/belonging-to-the-land/ [Accessed 13th May 2019].
Seamon, D. 2014. Place Attachment and Phenomenology: The Synergistic Dynamism of Place. In Manzo & Devine-Wright (eds.) Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications. London: Routledge. pp. 11-22.
Sobchack, V. 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tilley, C & Cameron, K. 2017. An Anthropology of Landscape: The Extraordinary in the Ordinary. London: UCL Press.
Wood, J. 2014. Gideon Koppel. In Wood (ed.) Last Words: Considering Contemporary Cinema. New York: Wallflower Press. pp. 60-65.
Wylie, J. Landscape. 2007. London: Routledge.
Audiovisual works.
Abridged. [short film] Dir. Andy Thatcher. UK. 2019. 9 mins.
Robinson in Ruins. [feature film] Dir. Patrick Keiller. 2010. BFI. UK. 101 mins.
sleep furiously. [feature film] Dir. Gideon Koppel. Bard Entertainments, Van Films. UK. 2009. 94 mins.
Strands. [short film]. Dir. Andy Thatcher. UK. 2019. 20 mins.
Walks of Life. [short film]. Dir. Andy Thatcher. UK. 2018. 4 mins.
out of the picture 
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