“Every practical accident became aesthetic necessity”.
A project currently ongoing and developing – organically, in typical Earthwaves fashion! – is a narrative based around two characters living in the time of Stonehenge, around 3000 BCE. The story is feeding into and fed by Mike and Lance’s fascination with pagan, druid and Neolithic culture, the era of stone circles and other megalithic creations which have been puzzled over for centuries. More of that to come…
More specifically, the partnership has been exploring how such a narrative may be communicated visually. Mike has been slaving over a hot sewing machine, investigating costume making (again, more of that later!) while Lance has been glued to the Mac, probing the possibilities of the Final Cut Pro application, which offers all manner of wonderful compositing and editing opportunities.
It was agreed early on that the resulting work – in whatever form it took – would be expressionistic, an exploration of ideas rather than a single A to B narrative. As a starting point and for inspiration, Mike and Lance turned to the works of one of the great visual artists of their generation; Derek Jarman.
Having previously watched The Garden (1990) and been impressed by the film’s fragmentary approach to nature, religion and homophobia, it was an earlier Jarman film that would more directly influence the current project – 1985’s The Angelic Conversation.
In what could possibly be Jarman’s most opaque and personal films, very little actually happens; yet it is the overall magical effect of the piece that impresses. Young men wander, swim and embrace in various locations, their actions slowed by Super 8 and early video projected half-speed, the grainy textures almost obliterating their features at times. The soundtrack is comprised of Shakespeare’s sonnets (addressed to his “sweet boy”) beautifully read by Judi Dench, accompanied by an appropriately expressionistic score by Coil and a section of the Sea Overtures from Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes.
The viewing was an almost hypnotic experience, projected against the wall in Lance’s garage (now dubbed The Earthwaves Cinema cum Earthwaves Studio), and stirred much enthusiastic discussion afterwards. It became all the more apparent that a limited budget could produce some of the most innovative and magical results – something more relevant than ever in these times of spiralling cost of living.
In the spirit of Jarman’s film, some video tests were undertaken, using Lance’s projected imagery from other projects and Mike’s druid-inspired costume (see image above). After applying some of the filters in Final Cut Pro, the results were – well, dare one say – Jarmanesque. As said before, more of that in future posts…
To be clear, Earthwaves intention is not to directly copy the style of the great man but to use his approach as a touchstone and inspiration for our own ideas, making the limitations work for us, communicating ideas through innovative ways. The quote above is taken from the liner notes by Colin MacCabe for the BFI DVD of The Angelic Conversation, where everything, whether planned or not, was used to its advantage. It’s a maxim that Earthwaves readily embraces.