11 January 2017
31 August 2012
Reflections on Public Water
Reflections on Public Water (pdf) was published in the «solo-show» zine.
«solo-show»
curated by Sam Watson with Kate Liston
Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland
23 April — 17 May
2012
21 May 2012
The Antipodes of Propaganda
*This post expands on some notes written for a screening of Waters of Time and The Hungry Miles as part of Solo Show at Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland,
23 April — 17 May.*
 |
| left: Waters of Time right: The Hungry Miles |
Waters
of Time and The Hungry Miles as more or less
contemporaneous documentary films, share an attempt at the illusion of truth in
their portrayal of aspects of docklands and their work. In both these are
clearly spaces and practices produced by Capital and Empire, however the two
films occupy markedly different political and aesthetic positions in relation
to waterside spaces and industry.
Norma Disher, Keith Gow, and Jock Levy made The Hungry Miles for the Australian
Waterside Workers’ Federation Film Unit in 1955. As befits the concerns of a
trades union the film foregrounds the workers, the hazardous nature of their
work, their importance for trade and industry, dramatizing their struggles for fair
employment conditions, countering negative perceptions of the wharf-side
workers and the doubtful reputation that they enjoyed, parodying the greed of
the ruling classes, while celebrating the sentimental resonance of the concept
of ‘mateship’ - the Australian male bonding that had sustained historical
workers’ struggles such as the ‘Eureka Stockade’, considered to be the
birth of Australian democracy – and the ultimate success of the Union in the
face of shipping company neglect and the continual struggle for reform.
The Waterside Workers’ Federation Film Unit is
credited with crossing “the two intentions of ‘art’ and ‘message’… harnessing
the formal innovations of the new documentary, [speaking] …for a group not
otherwise represented in the mainstream media, engaging in cinema as a form of
direct action mirroring the industrial and political campaigns which provided
the content of some of their films.” [1]
The Film Unit had earlier, in 1946, worked with Dutch
documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens to make Indonesia
Calling in Australia, which documented the refusal of Sydney dockside
workers to allow arms and ammunition to be sent for the Dutch colonial
government’s suppression of Indonesia’s independence movement. Ivens arrived in Australia as The
Netherlands’ East Indies (NEI) Film Commissioner. The NEI government was
resident in Australia at this time due to the occupation of the Dutch colony by
the Japanese. Ivens’s job was to make a
series of films documenting and supporting what the NEI government anticipated
would be their reoccupation of the colony (now know as Indonesia) following the
defeat of the Japanese, and to establish a nation building educational film
agency. However, following a mutiny by Indonesian seamen government office
workers’ and dockworkers’ refusal to load Dutch ships was supported by
Australian trade unions, demonstrations, petitions and actions to stall the
Dutch were organised, and seamen refused to man the ships. Ivens also walked
off and resigning his commission joined the anti-colonial movement, and started
to document the events unfolding on the wharves.[2]
Bill Launder and Basil Wright made Waters of Time for the Port of London Authority (PLA) in 1951. It
begins rather portentously with a quote from Tagus Farewell written by Thomas Wyatt, a 16th-century English lyrical
poet and ambassador in the service of Henry VIII, credited with introducing
the sonnet form into English.
“…with spur and sail for I go seek the Thames,Gainward the sun that show'th her wealthy pride,And to the town which Brutus sought by dreams,Like bended moon doth lend her lusty side…”
Ostensibly following the passage of a ship from the
sea to the docks as orchestral music sooths and stirs, the film’s prose poetic
voice-over rhapsodizes in the clipped 1950s Received Pronunciation intonation
favoured as representative of the reassuring voice of authority. Here with Romantic allusion and simile we are
in negotiation with nature: the sea is made by God, the docks by man. The sea has
given up “her own”; the ‘landlubbers’ will swarm over the ship like ants,
taking the spoils from the lands of exotic far-off Empire back to their
anthills. A list of the names of port workers’ jobs (those ‘ants’) is a breathless
rhythmic mechanical prose poem, and like ants in the nest the workers are the cogs in the machine of this great industry, the list is read with an
obvious relish that belies the workers’ perilous labour and exploitation.
In this mercantile centre of Empire the shipping
companies are benign engines of industry compared to the greedy and criminally neglectful
shipping companies and their owners described in The Hungry Miles, all part of a teleological continuity moving on
the tick-tock of the waters of time. Nothing in the film, not even goods
brought in, escapes the over-weening lyricism of both the language and the
roaming camera “…from grape to barrel, from barrel to hold, from hold to deck
and from deck to dock… tick-tock, tick-tock…” …and the ships set sail back out
to sea to their cycle of inevitability.
This ‘International Realist’ production describes a
romantic vision of a vanished world and industry without which Capital and
Empire could not have been sustained, glossing them in the name of progress and
the consolidation of London as a modern world city.
Waters
of Time is literally and
figuratively shot from the god’s eye view of the Ruling Class and Empire, its
clerks and managers are benign officiators, it gives itself the ability to
imagine Docklands from the point of view of a gull in flight. The Hungry Miles presents the view from
the Working Class, echoing the bawdy humour of the music hall, the sharp tongue
of political satirical, and the militant collectivity in the grime of the
dockside. Waters of Time is the
propaganda of a ruler that has nothing to loose, The Hungry Miles that of the exploited with everything to fight
for.
Without the ability to traverse the oceans, without
the might and the will to dominate and exploit the colonies that it had
established, often, as in Australia, by subjugating the indigenous population,
Empire had little chance of survival into the Twentieth Century. The docks are
significant in this relationship, as places of arrival and departure for the
colonizer, whether deportee, émigré,
or government, and for the dispatch and receipt of goods for the enrichment of
the imperial homeland. The colonial
relationship of Britain to Australia could be thought of as characterized by
the differing approaches of these films, their thematic and their formal and
aesthetic approaches.
Basil Wright started his career with John Grierson, who
is often credited with the invention of documentary (at least as a term) and
with a particular intent to represent ‘reality’ as a corrective to the damage
done by fiction and as a means for social reform. Where The
Hungry Miles’s call for social justice in the form of waterside workers’
rights is militant, perhaps revolutionary, there is no evidence of 'corrective' concerns
in Waters of Time, which speaks with the assurance of a
position that all is right with the world, progress truly is benign and workers
willingly participate in the colonial machine.
To accuse Modernism of an aestheticism that tends to
the hermetic and apolitical has become something of a cliché, and while Wright et al may have been bringing a new
formally inventive approach to the documentary form, as a promo for what is
effectively a QANGO it is no surprise that Waters
of Time is a lyrical romantic meander with good reason to avoid overt class
politics.
To read the film contrapuntally,
as Edward Said might have had it[3],
is complicated by the fact that it is already intentionally propagandist, its
pernicious idealism consists precisely in the fact that the pictorial and
lyrically poetic are used as aestheticized political tools by a dominant ruler
quietly convinced of its superiority in the class struggle. It is just as
propagandist as the more strident, in-your-face militancy of the The Hungry Miles.
In considering these two films together it is possible
to think of an ‘antipodean’ relationship, which is not to simply characterize
geographical, class, or colonial binaries in historical connection between
Britain and Australasia - in this alone we have already identified three
binaries, or six points of reference immediately upping the complexity ante. In
this the ‘antipodean’ describes a line that links two different, but crucially not opposite,
points, characterizing the symbiotic relationship of Empire to that which is
exploited to sustain it, a line once borne on the trade winds, traced
across water.
[1]Ansara,
M & Milner, L 1999, ‘The Waterside Workers Federation Film Unit: the
forgotten frontier of the fifties’, Metro
Magazine vol. 119, pp. 28-39.
[2] ‘Indonesia Calling: Joris Ivens in Australia’ Senses of Cinema, 2009 http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/51/indonesia-calling/
[3] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1993.
23 April 2012
Waters of Time dataset
Waters of Time as described by the City of Future Documentary Films which would appear to be an subset of orphaned data from vads.ahds.ac.uk - which is the now defunct AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service)
�Highland Princess' unloads, reloads at King George Dock. Measured from end of cert. (U). Still in �London on Film� [� Museum of London in Docklands]. Reel 1: 'The Port of London Authority presents'; 'A film of LONDON RIVER'; 'Produced for INTERNATIONAL REALIST by BASIL WRIGHT'; ph. Reg Hughes, camera asst. Cyril Moorhead, sound recording Ken Cameron; words Paul Dehn, spoken by James McKechnie, Paul Dehn, Felix Felton, John Slater, music Alan Rawsthorne, conducted by Muir Matheson, script direction and editing by Basil Wright and Bill Launder; 'WATERS of TIME'; 91ft, fade up on quote; 141ft, picture opens < > on water, bow wave, passing Middle Blyth buoy; gulls, tug etc., oil refinery, 'Bruce', 'Lake Winnipeg', Asia' (ships). Sun Tugs Office (Gravesend): man puts telescope to hole in window, man with hat; 'Highland Princess', Sun XVI, Sun XVII; King George Dock Office; 'Highland Princess', big 2 funnel ship (registered in Belfast); Galleon's Reach, power station; 3 tugs haul to lock, where to put it?; open lock gates, directed by whistle; lock fills, ship rises (high), raise bridge, open inner gates; ship into dock, bridge closes; tugs move ship to berth (2 cameras? - 1 on tug, 1 on distant dockside - or perhaps different days); tugs let go; insert on cargo, places of origin; ships: 'Ashanti Palm', Liverpool; 'Loch Ryan'; 'waiting . . . morning', fade (~1332ft). Tower Bridge, Richmond (top of tide), 'slack water'; Westminster; 'God looks down on the waiting river' etc.; 'man wakes with them . . .'' end of reel (1577ft inc end leader). Reel 2: PLA mobile canteen, dockers etc. come to work, very long list of trades etc.; Police (Great Western Railway Company office behind); Scammell truck; shunting, PLA train; bales of cotton, carcasses of meat (Highland Princess cargo); ships: 'Corfu', London; 'Chindwara', London; 'Eva Peron', Buenos Aires; 'Troilus', Liverpool; 'Daghestan', Newcastle on Tyne; 'Kracujevac', Rijeka; 'only one of hundreds'; sacks, hooks; dry dock; label: 'Ford - vehicle for EXPORT Casablanca. Exported on Drawback' (van); pallets of canned fruit, fork lift; 'hatchie' guides crane; 'Beaverdell' leaves; camera in crane; camera on rolls of paper lowered by crane; in hold; camera flying over dock; PLA building, interior, chronometer; Orient Wharf, Morocco Wharf (smells etc.); barrels from Spain and Portugal (Port), batswing fungus above 'the roof of an ogre's mouth the morning after'; 'we leave on the ebb'; Highland Princess departs; Middle Blyth buoy again; dock � river � estuary � sea; THE END, AN INTERNATIONAL REALIST PRODUCTION' (~1648ft).
10 April 2012
Journey Down Under
Super 8 film of the sea journey from the UK to Melbourne in 1964. From the Immigration Museum Melbourne's exhibition Station Pier: Gateway to a New Life
08 July 2011
05 July 2011
Waters of Sound
Isolated elements from Waters of Time (Bill Launder, Basil Wright for Port of London Authority, UK, 1951) soundtrack:
music (by Alan Rawsthorne) 9:15 mp3
21 June 2011
"A gull could fly for eleven miles up river, on the back of a sea wind, and never leave Dockland…"
Extract from Waters of Time (Bill Launder, Basil Wright for Port of London Authority, UK, 1951).
09 May 2011
The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up 1838 by J. M. W. Turner
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| The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up painted by J. M. W. Turner, Bermondsey, 1838 |
Surrey Docks to London Bridge from We Was All One 1972
There must be a hell of a lot from Rotherhithe, that's the Surrey Docks, right the way down to London Bridge, a lot of jobs lost there wasn't there, yeah right the way down, and how many worked in the Surrey Docks at one time…
10 January 2011
London, Limehouse Cut to River Lee Navigation, 9 January 2011
captured on iPhone on an afternoon walk
21 November 2010
London, Southbank, River Thames, 15 October 2010
A sketch of plans for night-time reflection captured on iPhone between 18:05 and 18:15, inverted, shuffled and layered. The superimposition of different sequences may be structurally symbolic of a conception of place as containing multiple temporalities.
01 November 2010
Muybridge Mirror Lake
 | ||
| Eadward Muybridge, Rekootoyen (Water Asleep) Mirror Lake from the Western Bank, 1867 - inverted. Thanks to Some Landscapes |
04 October 2010
29 September 2010
Reflecting Pools
Recently it was the ninth anniversary of the collapse of the Twin Towers of the New York World Trade Centre. There were reports of relatives of the victims gathering at a 'reflecting pool' at the former site of the towers. What is a 'reflecting pool'? The answer that Wikipedia gives is that it "is a structure often used in memorials. It generally consists of a shallow pool of water, usually quite calm. A design with edges being slightly deeper than the center of the pool is often used to suppress wave formation." It seems that there are a number of such things in various places around the world. We are told that there is one at the Taj Mahal reflecting an image of the mausoleum and at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, US where "behind the basilica sits the famous, yet intimate Grotto - a Marian place of prayer and reflection. It is a replica of the grotto at Lourdes, France where Mary appeared to St. Bernadette in 1858."
Robert Osborn promises to 'deconstruct' the Lincoln Memorial, but does little to illuminate the intended purpose, meaning or significance of the reflecting pool that reflects both the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.
We are also promised that the National September 11 Memorial and Museum will have two reflecting pools on the location where the Twin Towers stood. If the architect Daniel Libeskind is a 'deconstructivist' as stated and holds to the postmodernist idea of architecture as a language capable of transmitting meaning, his Master Plan would suggest that there is indeed a meaning, a symbolic nature and a purpose to the reflecting pools.
The reflecting pool currently at Ground Zero, however, is provisional and really quite small; on Saturday 11 September 2010 was filled with flowers and, one would imagine, did very little reflecting.
It is perhaps appropriate that in order to deconstruct the idea of the reflecting pool, I have to work from reflection, from deduction based on referents, because I can find little specific or explicit reference stating what the intended purpose of such structures might be. Libeskind himself offers that the memorial site will be "...a quiet, meditative and spiritual space" and "a space of reflection, of meditation", and in the 'Site Program' I found reference to a "Memorial--Reflecting Absence", so there is the idea of both literal and metaphorical reflection embodied in this site of meditation along with the symbolism of the reflection of absence.
The concerns with meditation and reflection sound Buddhist and sure enough we find in the teaching of Dogen Zenji the idea of the reflecting pool representing the duality of form, being and non-being, and used metaphorically as a place for meditation.
Is Bill Viola's The Reflecting Pool linked to Buddhism? Ida Panicelli certainly thinks so: "Bill Viola's video The Reflecting Pool, 1977-79 perfectly summarizes some of the fundamental steps of Buddhist experience: self-inquiry, the negation of the individual ego, the interrelatedness of all human beings and nature... Viola conveys the radical transformation of mind that occurs in the practice of meditation, when the individual ego is purified until it disappears, the aesthetic and the ethical merge, and the void gives rise to innocent and spontaneous action." While Cate Elwes (in Video Art, A Guided Tour) takes the more formal interpretation that it is "reflecting the pictorial landscape painting that employed deep-space perspective anchored to a monocular viewing position." The figure is from another religious fable,"a modern day Adam" in "primal nakedness", while the "compression of different time-frames" producing this "illusory rural view", reveal both the video apparatus and the"artist's subjectivity", and finally at last the metaphysical payoff as the result of all this is to "suggest a harmonious, even spiritual relationship between humanity and nature". Maria Luis Syring is quite clear about it being "a parable of mystic experience... He has trodden another sphere, a secret strange world of which we, as yet, know nothing". (Bill Viola, Unseen Images, Whitechapel Gallery, 1994) Wow. None of this is terribly surprising, Viola is renowned for his work being variously symbolic, metaphysical, metaphorical and concerned with mysticism.
The cultural construction and resonance of the concept of reflecting pools are then linked to the metaphysical, in art and religion as in symbolic architecture, as memorials they embrace both the deep thought of reflection and the non-thought of meditation. But who or what is reflected?
The idea of the reflection as memorial is reminiscent of Jean Baudrillard's writing in Simulations about the "precession of simulacra" and the "desert of the real" perfectly describing a landscape in which the mirage preceded the image. In Google images of reflecting pools many mirror buildings or monuments: the image, the reflection, but not the thing in itself, it is the simulacra that is the subject of reflection. Perhaps this is the key to its significance, the simultaneous existence of the notions of surface and depth, the simulation and the real, the reflection of absence, a duality of form, being and non-being, the narcissism of reflection, architecture and the memorial.
And so we return to 9/11. Jarek Kupsc directed and played the lead role in a film about 9/11, The Reflecting Pool, a drama made as a vehicle for raising questions about what actually happened, positing the theory that the Government was responsible and the alleged terrorists were patsies. The film is actually a rather pedestrian affair, presenting its theories via an investigation of the events by a Russian-American journalist and a father of a 9/11 victim implicates the US government in the attacks and reclaims the revelation of its truths as an act of patriotism, to demonstrate "what they're doing to our country". Its central theory is that the WTC7 building was rigged for demolition in advance, and by extension so were the Twin Towers, the evidence being the trademark characteristic of sophisticated demolition planning is that the towers fell straight down into their own footprints. What is interesting is that the filmmakers decided to make a fictionalised account rather than a documentary: perhaps to distance the project from the plethora of YouTube 'conspiracy theory' videos and the lack of credibility inspired by their sometimes hysterical hectoring, they opted for a restrained but somewhat cliched dramatic approach. The commentary on the DVD version is full of details of the extensive research that underpins the film, careful to cite real world sources, reports, technical details and so on, describing where dramatised interviews are composites of transcripts of actual interviews, and so on, all to reinforce the veracity of the story. The WTC reflecting pool is never referred to in the film apart from a brief graphic in the title sequence. Perhaps the intention is for The Reflecting Pool to be considered to present a reflection of the facts, however in this case whatever 'truth' there is, is more likely to be found out of direct sight, under the surface, and on the DVD commentary.
21 September 2010
London, Victoria Embankment, River Thames, 14 September 2010
Last week, while reading about reflecting pools - those static waters of literal and metaphorical reflection [of which more notes imminent] - the reality of the weather in London made the Thames anything but reflective, instead I could only use a polarising filter to shift between its murky churned up mud and the steely monotone of the reflected light from the grey cloud dominated sky.
07 September 2010
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