Category: AYITC: Year 7

Natura Journal is an occasional publication that via themed individual issues explores the natural world and our environment through photography and accompanying text.

Founded by Sophie Goodison, with editorial assistance by  James Hollis, the first issue is handsomely printed and through the use of  an elegant and uncluttered layout provides a stunningly beautiful, meditative and calming journey across a number of landscapes, including the Bavarian Alps, the Lofoten Islands off the coast of Northern Norway and the coastline of Cornwall:

“This volume of Natura explores the theme form… We journey from the high peaks of Southern Germany, across distant lands to Northern Norway and back to the familiar edge of the English coastline. We uncover freedom found in an Arctic breath… discuss land shaped by an ice age… take a walk in the footsteps of Vikings, and journey through some of the oldest rocks on Earth. We voyage through mountains that stretch across eight alpine countries, and embrace the kaleidoscopic colours of wildflowers.”

The photographs at times contain an almost ethereal, otherworldly character but the journal isn’t so much “wyrd rural” but rather could perhaps be filed alongside the likes of the publisher Little Toller, the Ernest Journal and Barbara Bosworth and Margot Anne Kelley’s book The Meadow in terms of providing a subtly alternate view of the landscape and natural world.

Often the photographs capture a sense of the scale and longstanding nature of the landscapes, where change can take millions of years to occur. Highlighting this and the relatively modern arrival of human civilisation, only in two of the photographs do any people appear, although they are merely tiny pinpricks in amongst the natural landscape.

Elsewhere in some of the photographs of the Lofoten Islands traditional red coloured wooden houses appear, the design of which follows a lineage back to Viking times and which are built on stilts. These are positioned somewhat precariously as they overhang the sea on an outcrop of rocky coastline and are again dwarfed by nature, in this instance being set against an imposing and slightly ominous seeming backdrop of a dark coastal mountain range, and have an isolated “edge of the world” character to them.

The photography of rock formations, the light on the sea and so on at times become almost like abstract images and textures, while the accompanying text  which explores the history of areas and the writer’s journey through them has an often poetic, almost lush or balm-like character that envelopes and immerses the reader.

There is a certain refreshing anonymity to the journal in terms of its creator, as though the project and the atmosphere it creates are the overriding concern. In relation to which, to indicate who created the photography, writing etc throughout the journal there is just one small line of text which says  “Created by Sophie Goodison” on the credits page. On the Natura website Goodison is listed as Founder & Creative Director but the photographs and writing are not directly credited to her, and it is only at one remove from the journal and project on her personal portfolio website that she is listed as being responsible for graphic / layout design, writing and photography work on Natura.

 

Elsewhere:

• Natura Journal
• Little Toller
• Ernest Journal
• Barbara Bosworth & Margot Anne Kelley’s The Meadow book at the Radius Books’ site

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• Lisa Bond’s Landscape Phantasms
• Further Natural Calligraphy / Carving The Land / The Story of Land Art
• The Shadow Of Heaven – Further Marks andd Patterns Upon the Land
• Other Views / The Patterns Beneath the Plough, the Pylons and Amongst the Edgelands
• Recording the Layers Upon and Under the Land
• Solargraphy / The Ongoing Moment / Ernest Journal
• Barbara Bosworth & Margot Anne Kelley’s The Meadow – Recordings and Reflections of an Unhurried Space

 

As also recorded by sometimes A Year In Country contributors Lutine… there’s a purity and simplicity to this 1956 version that feels like a moment of peace and calm.

 

Links:

• Stream “Died of Love” at Spotify
• English Folk Songs at Folkways’ site
• The “Audrey Copard – English Folk Songs and dew on the corn…” post at A Year In The Country

 

Footnotes:

1. This period of the mid-1960s to the later 1970s may be chosen as significant for hauntologically-related work for a number of reasons, such as during this time the optimism and, at times, utopian ideals of the immediate post-war years to the 1960s tipped over in Britain into a period of social, political, economic strife and conflict. The later 1970s, and 1979 in particular, when Margaret Thatcher’s right-leaning government was elected, is often considered to be a defining point when society began to move towards a more neoliberal, individualistic and monetarist stance, and so has come to be associated with the yearning for lost post-war progressive futures that are referred to above. Also this period is when many of those creating, or interested in, hauntological work were born, or had their formative years. As such, culture from this era from which hauntological work often draws, has a pre-existing resonance. Aside from its sometimes inherent oddness, such culture may also be seen as being imbued with an antediluvian quality – broadcasts, remnants or echoes from an “other” time and the abovementioned progressive lost futures. Sometimes in hauntological work the early 1980s will also be referenced, which may in part be due to this being a transitional or liminal time in relation to changes in society.
2. Hauntology is a portmanteau or blending of the meanings of two words; “haunt” and “ontology”. Ontology is the philosophical study of “being”, which focuses on abstract questions such as whether there is such a thing as objective reality and what kinds of things or entities exist in the universe. Ontology is sometimes associated with foundationalist thinkers who believe that: “to arrive at truth it is necessary to start with the most fundamental issues – to be sure about the foundations of philosophy – and then work our way up from there to more specific questions.” (Quoted from the philosophyterms.com website.)
3. “Midwichian” is used to imply a sense of a conventional, comfortable, sometimes bucolic places and society where something untoward, quietly unsettling and possibly unexplained has happened or lurks semi-hidden beneath the surface of things. It derives from John Wyndham’s book The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) and the subsequent film adaptation Village of the Damned (1960) in which a pleasant rural village existence is severely disrupted by a preternatural stealthy and surreptitious alien invasion.
4. The word wyrd in this context and elsewhere in the book is used to imply variously an eldritch, uncanny, weird, eerie, unsettling etc sense of rural and folk orientated culture.

Elsewhere:

• Marks Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life
• Simon Reynold’s blissblog
• Simon Reynold’s Retromania blog
• Folk Horror Revival: Urban Wyrd – 1. Spirits of Time
• Rob Young’s Electric Eden site
• Jonny Trunk’s The Music Library book
• Ghost Box Records
• Blank Workshop / Moon Wiring Club
• Scarfolk
• Kristen Gallerneaux’s site

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• Hauntology, places where society goes to dream, the deletion of spectres and the making of an ungenre
• A Lineage of Spectres Part 1 – From Hauntology to Hypnagogic Pop
• A Lineage of Spectres Part 2 – Hauntology, Hypnagogic Pop, Synthwave and the Creation of Mystical Half-Hidden Worlds
• Rouge’s Foam – Hauntology: The Past Inside The Present and an awareness that the ghosts will always win
• 14 tracks – “Hauntology: A peculiar sonic fiction”
• The jump cuts of hauntological antecedents…
• Spectres vs Retro
• Mark Fisher’s Ghosts Of My Life and a very particular mourning and melancholia for a future’s past…

 

The final track on The Fallen by Watchbird conceptual pop project album of “cosmic aquatic folklore”… the soundtrack to a Czech New Wave film from the edges of imagination…

 

Links:

• Stream “Silver Chord” at Spotify
• The Fallen by Watchbird at Jane Weaver’s Bandcamp page
• “The Fallen By Watchbird – Jane Weaver Septième Soeur; the start of a journey through cosmic aquatic folklore, kunstmärche and otherly film fables…” post at A Year In The Country

 

I’ve been wandering over to have a look / listen to See Blue Audio’s releases for a while now over the last couple of years or so.

Founded by Matthew Duffield it’s a record label based in Barcelona in Spain, which on its Bandcamp page describes its output as “Ambient / electronic beatless / cinematic downtempo / eclectic / introspective… Shade rather than light…”

What their output, for myself, brings to mind at times is the kind of work that Mo’Wax might possibly be releasing if it was still an active record label. Or perhaps balearic chill out music subtly refracted through a glass darkly. Another reference point at times might be 1980s Japanese ambient music such as that included on the Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990 compilation album released by Light In The Attic Records. Interconnected with which, if Emerald Web’s late 1970s / 1980s synthesised new age orientated music had tumbled through a time warp and arrived back home infused with later decades’ music technology then it might have sounded like some of the See Blue Audio releases.

Maps for the Lost by Fragile X was, I think, the label’s ninth release and is a five track EP/mini album:

“Over the five tracks of Maps for the Lost, the listener is taken on an audio journey where the music flows together using field recordings, spoken word samples, beatless soundscapes and sound design techniques. This goes far beyond being a sequence of tracks as this feeling of transportation is an inherent narrative throughout the music…” (Quoted from the Maps for the Lost Bandcamp page.)

That audio journey begins with “Departure from Nowhere” which opens with field recordings of passing traffic that segue into vast sounding darkly hued tones and pattering, passing noises  and creates a sense of entering into some unknown space or world, while second track “Wayfarer” utilises melodic glitches to atmospheric effect and creates a drifting soundscape which contains both a contrasting new age-like ambience and a hinted at unsettling atmosphere:

“Drifting in the audio void. Somewhere between chaos and calm.” (Quoted from the Fragile X Bandcamp page.)

There’s a subtle hauntological intertwined with otherly pastoral atmosphere and aesthetic to Maps for the Lost (and also some of See Blue Audio’s other releases), which is reflected in the release’s title / title track and the title of the fourth track “Passing the Ley Lines” and also in those two tracks’ videos, which are credited to J. Gorecki (aka Fragile X).

In the video for the “Maps for the Lost” title track the viewer is taken on a journey that begins by passing away from the coastline and then over a golden tinged sea and coastline at sunset, before darkened clouds rapidly unfurl and a both ominous and uplifting bass imposes itself on the audio as lightning repeatedly strikes onscreen… the silhouettes of a row of trees appears and are reflected in water at night time as via time lapse filming the stars twirl behind them… we are given a view through tree branches and over a hill formation of the cosmos above (the Milky Way?), with thousands of stars tumbling through the night sky akin to a form of cosmic snowfall, while comets streak briefly… eventually the journey comes to an end as the dawn breaks over forest, plants and the sea.

The video for “Passing the Ley Lines” begins with a wide-open inland waterway and field landscape before natural beauty and man-made infrastructure meld as a pylon strewn field appears with a huge plume of black smoke billowing out over it, the source of which is unclear (although it may be connected to some form of possibly industrial complex off in the distance)… close ups of plants change colour to unnatural hues as time passes… densely forested land passes below… the sun rises over silhouetted trees and cables as unidentified brief streaks of light travel through the air… bucolic landscape and water views appear before the Earth comes into view, a vibrantly hued jewel in the black backdrop of space… and then the sun rises over buildings and telegraph cables before the track, and again a form of journeying, ends.

Both of the tracks “Maps for the Lost” and “Passing the Ley Lines” feature gently arpeggiated electronica which mixes the aesthetics and at times euphoria of dance music with the wash and escape of ambient electronica and create an uplifting sense of space, freedom and renewal.

Maps for the Lost ends with “Full Circle (True North)”, which incorporates field recordings of running water, a simple Eno-esque piano refrain and spoken word samples of somebody describing some kind of otherworldly phenomena or aura that they are enveloped by and it creates an affecting elegiac ending to the release and the journey it takes the listener on.

Elsewhere:

• See Blue Audio’s Bandcamp page
• Fragile X’s Maps for the Lost Bandcamp page

 

The song has a mystical, epic, cinematic folkloric quality and it has lodged in my mind for a few years now after I discovered it via an online mix compiled by The Owl Service called “An Introduction To The Roots Of Psych-Folk”.

 

Links:

• Stream “Orfeo” at Spotify
• Orfeo 2016 reissue by Chariot Records
• The “Archie Fisher & Acid Tracks – An Introduction to the Roots of Psych-Folk: Subculture not from Beneath the Paving Stones but from Under the Plough” post at the A Year In The Country site

 

Leap in the Dark was a paranormal orientated British television anthology series broadcast on the BBC for four seasons in 1973, 1975, 1977 and 1980. There were 24 episodes in total, with the first series being documentary orientated, while seasons two and three mixed documentary footage with dramatisations of real-life cases of paranormal events. Season four featured original dramas themed around the paranormal and included episodes written by, amongst others, renowned writers Fay Weldon and Russell Hoban, alongside Alan Garner and David Rudkin, the latter two of whose work has since come to be associated with “wyrd” rural and folk or otherly pastoral culture.

At the time of writing only seven of the episodes were available to view online in degraded quality form via unofficial distribution. These include the first Pilot episode of season one, none of season two, two episodes of season three and four of season four. It is thought that all other episodes of season one were wiped and those of season two may also be lost. The British Film Institute’s National Archive, which catalogues and provides access to the BBC’s archival recordings, contains videocassette copies of all the episodes in season three and four. Some of these are not currently accessible by the general public as they are marked as “Status pending – Material requires inspection to determine preservation or access status”, which implies that it is not known if they are in viewable condition, or whether their condition may mean that they are too fragile to be played and viewed.

“To Kill a King”, written by Alan Garner, was the final episode of the fourth season of Leap in the Dark and if viewed with knowledge of Garner’s life it is a curiously self-reflective piece of work.

At the beginning of the episode nature, modernity and tradition are shown as being intimately intertwined in the drama’s location and a writer’s life, who is the central character; the opening shot is of a contemporary train rushing by, which segues into the bare trees of branches, that quickly come to foreground some form of large white radar-like dish, before the camera again moves to show a medieval style timber-framed house, which is the writer’s home.

The episode is set in and around this rural home where the writer lives a largely isolated life and shields himself from the outside world, and is suffering from a form of writer’s block and also possibly related mental distress and/or may have wider mental health issues.

There are only four characters seen onscreen: the writer, his agent, his sister and a spectral female presence which appears to be the writer’s elusive muse, and whose voice is only ever heard as a voiceover. Via this spectral muse lines of mystical verse come to the writer in the night, including the titular line “A night to kill a king is this”, but in the morning when he reads what he has written to his agent it is merely gobbledegook. The writer subsequently attempts to follow his spectral muse as she appears and moves through nearby fields, woods and a tunnel but she always remains aloof and elusive, and is apparently able to travel instantaneously across distances so that she is forever out of his reach.

The writer’s sister arrives unexpectedly and henpecks him about day-to-day matters (“Have a bath… the garden’s a mess” and so on) and when he, she and his agent eat together his mind seems to fracture. Following this the episode and the writer’s enclosed world come to resemble a less grand in scale version of Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining, which was released in 1980, the same year that “To Kill a King” was first broadcast. In Kubrick’s film a writer, who is acting as a winter caretaker for an isolated snowbound hotel, and who has just two members of his immediate family for company, finds his mind fracturing in the enclosed world of the hotel; he endlessly types the same proverb on his typewriter and his sanity and world is invaded by hallucinatory preternatural or paranormal phenomena, presences and events. There are a number of similarities between this and Garner’s story: these include a writer who has lost their mental balance, the presence of just two other people closely connected to him, the unsettling use of a typewriter and also rhymes or proverbs, the sense of a fracturing mind and reality in the enclosed world of one building and the intrusion of spectral presences into that reality.

In “To Kill a King” as the writer’s mind and reality begin to fracture the phone rings and when he answers it his sister’s voice recites a child’s rhyme to him (“You are it…!”) Wandering off alone he sees an electric typewriter that begins to type on its own, typing that it could write and help before just repeating the word “help” coupled with a side note asking him what is he going to do about it, perhaps referring to his writer’s block, although this is unclear. Then a lump of coal which he earlier threw in frustration and anger into a pond appears in his hand, after which he becomes squashed against an invisible transparent surface as his mirror image is also trapped behind a television screen.

When this happens his sister and agent, who now seem to have become smugly taunting dopplegangers of themselves, appear and threaten to switch him off, shrinking him to a dot (as older cathode ray television’s images did when turned off) until he is nothing. In response to this he smashes the television screen and as he shouts in frustration the screen bleaches. There is a sense that he has reached his own personal lowest point and now has begun to recover, and he shaves and makes himself presentable, picks up notebooks, stokes the fire, sits and begins to recite the mystical verse he previously heard said by his spectral muse. His muse is then seen to enter the room and he begins to write again, after which the physical embodiment of his muse is no longer present, he is pictured alone and the episode ends with him focusing on his writing, apparently cured of his writer’s block.

“To Kill a King” appears to be deeply intertwined with Garner’s own life. The timber framed house is most probably actually Garner’s own home, who for a number of decades has lived in a Medieval timber framed home located next to Jodrell Bank radio observatory and the giant Lovell radio telescope, which is the radar-like dish shown in the drama. The house, as depicted in the episode, seems in some ways barely modernised; aside from it’s internal and external Medieval timber frame wall structure there is an open fire in the middle of a room with no obvious chimney and some of the lights are merely candles mounted on the walls.

Further connecting the episode with Garner’s life, he has written and spoken of how he was diagnosed in 1989 with manic depression, which he described as “the best news that I have ever heard” in The Voice that Thunders, a collection of his talks and seminars published in 1997, as it explained years of mania and inertia he had experienced. In an interview with Alison Flood titled “Alan Garner: a life in books”, which was published on theguardian.com on 17th August 2012, it is described how this included two years where for 12 hours per day he merely lay on the settee facing the wall, just waiting for the following 12 hours which he would spend in bed (and during which presumedly he was unable to write or find his “muse”). In the same interview he is also quoted as saying that he “went seemingly mad in less than three months” and sought psychotherapy following the adaptation of The Owl Service for television. With knowledge of such experiences in his life, “To Kill a King” seems very much like a form of creative autobiographical expression, perhaps a form of catharsis where he could explore and expel his own personal demons.

Although possibly merely an accident of the time of year when “To Kill a King” was filmed, the rural landscape in the episode seems to reflect the writer, and therefore also Garner’s at some points in his life, mental state; it is stark, even bleak, the trees are bare, the fields overcast and shrouded. As in David Rudkin’s “The Living Grave” episode of Leap in the Dark, nature’s vitality is further denuded by the degraded quality of the online video, as it both destaturates the imagery and also adds a murky cast to the rural scenes.

Adding to the autobiographical nature of the drama, the medal which the writer briefly looks at, before putting it away when his muse returns, is a Carnegie Medal. Only one of these are given per year as recognition for an outstanding new English language book for children or young adults, and in 1967 Garner was awarded one for The Owl Service.

Garner’s work has often been set in and around Alderley Edge, a village and rural area in the county of Cheshire in the UK:

“Garner grew up in Alderley Edge and can trace his ancestors there back over four centuries. As a child he played on the hill under which local legend says an army of knights sleep, guarded by a wizard until they are needed – a myth that became the basis for [The Weirdstone of Brisingamen – his first novel published in 1960].” (Quoted from “Alan Garner: a life in books”, as above.)

Garner says in the above article that his “background is deep and set in deep time, and in a narrow space, oral traditions going back a long, long time, which I inherited by osmosis”; in his work often it is as though he is attempting to add to this deep and narrow layering of stories and myth by setting it in the landscape he has lived amongst for many decades, while also attempting to ever more deeply embed and entwine himself with both that landscape and its myths.

As part of this layering his fiction and the real world at times quite explicitly entwine. For example aside from the appearance of the Lowell Telescope at Jodrell Bank in “To Kill a King”, in 2012 he published Boneland, the third novel in the “Weirdstone” trilogy, which tells the story of an astrophysicist who works at Jodrell bank, who is searching for his sister in the stars. Then in 2015 there was a series of lectures at Jodrell Bank named after him called The Garner Lectures, which explored the way science interacts with culture, the first of which was given by Garner himself (and that he said would be his last public appearance). As part of the promotion of the event, at the Jodrell Bank website a previously unpublished poem by Garner called House by Jodrell was posted, which both in its title and opening lines of “Across the field astronomers… Name stars. Trains pass” directly connects with both his home’s location and the opening and setting of “To Kill a King”. The episode is also connected with, revisited and returned to in the poem’s final line – “And a night to kill a king is this night” – which is from the mystical verse imparted by the writer’s spectral muse during the drama.

Returning again to both the character of the writer and the possible exploration and expression of Garner’s experiences with mental health issues in “To Kill a King”, the lines in the abovementioned mystical verse can also be seen to explore a related sense of isolation and effectively being removed from the world:

“I see not and I am not seen… Where twilight and the black night move together… in the four cornered castle… In the garth of glass…”

The use of the fairly obscure word “garth” could be seen as being an expression of such isolation, as it can variously be used to refer to a cloister, i.e. an area within a monastery or convent which only the religious are allowed to enter, a place or state of seclusion or to mean being secluded from the world as if in a cloister.

Although at points “To Kill a King”, as with much of the final series of Leap in the Dark, is not always easy viewing, even at times being harrowing, its final scene of the writer once again writing and seemingly having refound his muse and equilibrium, is something of an uplifting and hopeful ending for the series. However, it also has to be said there is still a certain stark unsettling air to the way that, after the image of him fades away, the only sound heard is the fast-paced scratching of his pen on the paper and it is difficult to know if this is an indication of a writer who is satisfyingly absorbed in his work after having rediscovering his muse or an indicator of him being caught up in a whirlwind of manic creation (which is something Garner has publicly discussed experiencing). The slightly unsettling air is accidentally added to due to the video of the episode which can be viewed online continuing to run after the programme has ended and an announcer saying “On BBC One now the late film is Touch of Evil” (!)

Elsewhere:

• The Garner Lectures – Exploring Science and Culture
• ‘House by Jodrell’, a poem by Alan Garner

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• Filming The Owl Service; Tomato Soap and Lonely Stones
• Robin Redbreast, The Ash Tree, Sky, The Changes, Penda’s Fen, Red Shift and The Owl Service – Wanderings Through Spectral Television Landscapes
• The intro to The Owl Service
• The Owl Service: fashion plates and (another) peek behind the curtain
• A wander around Red Shift, layers of history, the miasma / amber of cultural replications and associated reinterpretations / utilitarianisms
• Memories of midnight dreams and other nocturnal flightways and pathways
• She Wants to be Flowers – Filming The Owl Service (Revisiting)

 

A subtly hazy dreamscape take on British New Wave cinema… and I always think “Interpret the rooms” is “Interpret the runes”.

 

Links:

• Stream “Tear in the Typing Pool” at Spotify
• Tender Buttons at Bleep’s site
• The “Broadcast – Recalibration, Constellation and Exploratory Pop” post at the A Year In The Country site

 

An early inspiration and reference point for A Year In The Country… a swirling pastoral “ghost box” of time out of joint.

 

Links:

• Stream “And the Cuckoo Comes” at Spotify
• Mind How You Go at Ghost Box Records’ site
• The “The Advisory Circle and ornithological intrigueries…” post at the A Year In The Country site

 

Gone to Earth was adapted from Mary Webb’s book originally published in 1917 and directed and written by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who also collaborated on a number of other films, has long been something of a favourite around these parts. As I’ve written before, its depiction of the story seems to be straining at the very seams of acceptable cinema mores of the time, and features some wonderful, almost surreally vivid Technicolor views of the British countryside.

Set in the late 19th century amongst the landscape around a small rural town on the border between England and Wales, the plot involves a free-spirited young woman named Hazel Woodus who lives a rural life close to nature that is closely connected with older magical and supernatural beliefs. She marries a kind-hearted parson but, in part due to her husband’s unspoken attempt to create a respectful union between them, which precludes all but the most chaste of physical intimacies until she is “ready to be his wife”, she comes to feel rejected by him. She is driven into the arms of a predatory and manipulative squire, who is somewhat mocking of the parson’s religious beliefs and also something of an almost archetypal cad and bounder, and runs away with him to his home. This leads to conflict and ultimately tragic and deadly confrontations between the protagonists and also the society they live amongst, with regards to belief systems, morals, passions and the nature of their love and fidelity for one another.

It takes its title from a fox hunting cry used to indicate when a fox has “gone to earth” in a burrow, and most of the film was shot on location around the town and parish of Much Wenlock in the English county of Shropshire, and made use of many local people as extras, choir members etc.

The film had a troubled release as, although he was apparently involved throughout the filming, the executive producer David O. Selznick disliked the finished version. Although the exact reasons for this are difficult to fully discover, it has been reported that he accused the filmmakers of sticking too closely to the novel and not making the film as originally planned. Accompanying this, it has been said that his dislike of the film was also because he considered it over concentrated on the beauty of the English countryside and did not showcase his wife Jennifer Jones, who played Hazel, to the degree and in the manner he wanted it to.

Also both Selznick and Powell and Pressburger tended to create their films in an auteur-like manner and were not used to outside interference in terms of their vision for their work, and therefore there may have been a resulting clash of wills. Alongside which, viewed now Powell and Pressburger’s various film collaborations can be seen as a precursor to more left of centre arthouse cinema, albeit generally produced and couched in a manner which placed it amongst mainstream cinema. In contrast to this Selznick came from a much more overtly mainstream cinematic background, and was best known for the high profile, award winning and hugely commercially successful epic historical romance film Gone with the Wind (1939), and so their may have been a clash of aesthetics between him and Powell and Pressburger.

Selznick took The Archers, Powell and Pressburger’s production company, to court, in order to be allowed to change Gone to Earth and have the film’s European co-financier Alexander Korda fund reshoots. Although Selznick lost the case, he discovered that he had the right to alter it for the American release but would need to pay for any reshoots himself. He reassembled the principal actors, had some extra scenes shot in Hollywood and edited the film from 110 minutes down to 82 minutes, leaving around two-thirds of the original film intact. It was subsequently released during 1952 in the US as The Wild Heart.

I wrote about the film in A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields (2018) but at the time I had only been able to see the original Powell and Pressburger version, and to my knowledge The Wild Heart version was not still available for home viewing. It had been released on video cassette, more than once I think, in the US at some point in previous decades but copies of those (or even information about them) was difficult to find. All the various UK and elsewhere in the world home releases were always of Gone to Earth and for a long time I thought I would never get to see The Wild Heart version of the film. In fact I was not sure if it even still existed.

As I wrote in the last year of A Year In The Country, several years after first watching Gone to Earth I was browsing through the titles of upcoming films to be broadcast on archival television channel Talking Pictures TV, when all of a sudden I saw the title The Wild Heart. I thought “No, surely not”, but yes, it was indeed that The Wild Heart.

With seeing The Wild Heart there, I knew that it was available in the world, and discovered that in June 2019 it had been released on Blu-ray and DVD in the US by Kino Lorber, in single disc editions which contained both Gone to Earth and The Wild Heart. The Blu-ray and DVD are locked to Region A or 1, respectively, meaning that standard British Blu-ray and DVD players will not play them but because of, gawd bless ’em, multi-region Blu-ray players, I would finally be able to both watch and own it.

As referred to at the start of the post, Gone to Earth was filmed in Technicolor, which as I discuss in A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields (2018), gives it a distinctive non-realist character:

“[The film has a] Wizard of Oz-esque, Hollywood coating of beauty, glamour and quiet surreality which in part is created by the vibrant, rich colours of the Technicolor film process that it shares with that 1939 film… Often cinematic views of the British landscape are quite realist, possibly dour or even bleak in terms of atmosphere and their visual appearance and so Gone to Earth with its high end Hollywood razzle-dazzle which is contained in its imagery is a precious breath of fresh air… The film’s elements of older folkloric ways and its visual aspects combine to create a subtle magic realism in the film and the world and lives it shows, conjures and presents.”

In respect to this, there is a considerable difference in the colours and vibrancy of the transfers of the two versions on the Blu-ray. The Wild Heart’s transfer is much more vivid and seemingly also more in keeping with the original Technicolor production of the film, and this helps to create the abovementioned sense of magic realism. The transfer of Gone to Earth has a more muted quality, which seems to also slightly mute its depiction of a magic imbued landscape and story, and adds a more realist tone to it. The way this subtly changes the nature of the story serves to emphasise the way in which the visual nature of the film is inherently interconnected with and an important part of how it creates its almost otherworldly story.

Often in reviews etc of the two versions of the film The Wild Heart version is described as being inferior to Powell and Pressburger’s original Gone to Earth version but both have their merits. Gone to Earth has a more sedate, reflective pace that possibly grounds it more in previous decade’s cinema, and it also leaves more to the viewers imagination through not as directly explaining plot points etc. The Wild Heart’s story is more overtly signposted and made obvious, at times literally such as when a deadly open mineshaft has a warning sign that describes it as such. Accompanying this it has a certain rhythm and pace that draws the viewer in and makes the film feel more “modern” or nearer to contemporary film aesthetics, without having the sometimes almost frantic pace that some more recent film does.

Both versions of the film largely follow the same story arc, with the differences between the two and their running times being mostly due to a number of small incremental changes to how they are edited. One of the more major differences between the two versions of the film is that The Wild Heart includes an opening voiceover monologue that provides a background for Hazel’s story, and which has a Twilight Zone meets wyrd rural quality (and is also slightly dismissive of Hazel’s background and beliefs):

“The tale of pagan cruelty hangs in a mist of legend over the Earth’s far away places. This is one of them. The Shropshire border between Wales and England. Haunted like all borderlands. Here is a strange country of Roman ruins, crumbling heathen altars and a fearful ghost from whom the living still flee. It is the Black Huntsman, who rides the night wind with his phantom pack over God’s Little Mountain. And those of gypsy blood still whisper that to look upon the Huntsman, to hear his hunting horn and the angry baying of his hounds means… death. This is the story of Hazel Woodus, whose gypsy mother left her with a fear of the Black Huntsman’s godless cruelty. Fear born of ignorance. Ignorance that rejects salvation. It was the weak, the helpless and the untamed with whom this half gypsy girl found her only kinship. And this even as with the fox she loved, Hazel faced the Huntsman helpless and alone.”

Gone to Earth’s ending and its depiction of Hazel’s almost inevitable seeming, but still horribly shocking, doom seems harsher, bleaker and more sudden, and once it has happened the film ends very abruptly, which adds to its abrupt impact. This is slightly softened in The Wild Heart as the squire’s attempts to save her are slightly extended, and rather than ending suddenly on an image of what has caused her demise, this is followed by an image of a gnarled old leafless and subtly ominous seeming branch that was seen earlier in the film, a somewhat heartbreaking shot of Hazel’s shawl blowing in the wind atop the stone where she carried out a folkloric magical ritual in order to decide whether to run away to the squire’s and then an image of a subtly desolate seeming empty landscape.

One of the film’s main underlying themes is the clash between older beliefs rooted in nature, as represented by Hazel, and more “civilised” newer Christian beliefs, as represented by the parson and his parishioners. Hazel is torn between the two: she still places great store in her more magical beliefs and wants to bond with nature but also wishes to be part of, connect with and be accepted by the modern world. To a degree Hazel giving in to her physical passion for the squire can be seen to represent her being drawn to a less “civilised” pre-Christian way of being and a connection with nature but the squire seems to be a corrupted, darkened depiction of such things. His often untamed and unrepressed desires and behaviour are not an expression of a positive connection with nature, that Hazel herself has and is drawn to return to, but rather a form of self-centred aristocratic hedonism and self-serving pleasure seeking.

(Although in The Wild Heart, he is possibly depicted as less of a cad, as when the parson arrives at the squire’s home in order to take Hazel home and reclaim her as his wife, it is revealed that Hazel is pregnant with the squire’s child, and he wants to stand by her and asks the parson to divorce her so that they can be married. Hazel is not said to be pregnant in Gone to Earth and, although it is apparent that the squire has genuine feelings for her, he maintains a more brusquely dismissive attitude with regards to the true nature of them. Conversely, in Gone to Earth in this sequence, the parson is considerably harsher and more dismissive in his interactions with Hazel.)

For a while Hazel is able to intertwine her older magical nature based beliefs and ways of life with the modern world and more modern Christian beliefs, albeit with varying degrees of problems and even dysfunction. Despite marrying a parson and attempting to assimilate herself into the Christian faith and the modern world, often when Hazel has problems she turns to the book of spells and charms her gypsy mother left her; she also continues to keep a beloved pet fox, who she calls Foxy, which can be seen as a symbol of her connection with nature and a related belief in older magical ways. However it seems as though she will not be allowed to continue living with the old and new intertwined, and because of her protection of Foxy (and therefore, it is implied, her refusal to relinquish the old ways), both she and the fox are ultimately doomed: in the final scene Hazel attempts to defend Foxy from the dogs in a hunt that the squire is taking part in, and after scooping up Foxy she attempts to outrun them, which leads to tragic consequences.

Accompanying this there is a sense that Hazel’s personal transgressions and becoming untethered from her natural roots have an effect on and are similarly intertwined with the wider world. This unethering and its effects is unstatedly implied when she begins her affair with the squire at his home and leaves her pet fox behind at the parson’s rather than continuing her direct personal care and protection of it, and they are made overt when she is distraught by the squire’s servant killing blackbirds with a shotgun in order to stop them eating his fruit harvest, causing her to cry “It is as though I’ve killed them, coming here.”

Interconnecting with this response, Hazel is avowedly opposed to fox hunting and she is deeply concerned with protecting wildlife, and so her becoming involved with the squire, who is active in and relishes such hunting, further indicates how she has become untethered. This is heightened as one of Hazel’s main supernatural folklore inspired fears is that of the night wind riding “Black Huntsman”, as described in The Wild Heart’s opening monologue, and to a degree for her the squire is the human embodiment, or at least earthly representative, of this deadly wraith-like hunter.

(As an aside, some of the few overt expressions of the supernatural in the film involve the Black Huntsman, with the horses’ hooves of his disembodied pack sometimes mysteriously appearing on the soundtrack but remaining unseen to the viewer.)

It is not just through Hazel that the old ways and beliefs and more modern Christian beliefs are seen to intertwine and still exist: when the parson talks to God about how he will respect and protect Hazel if he marries her, he seems to be looking up at a large tree silhouetted against the night, as though his God still resides in nature, as did the old gods. Also when he gives a public prayer it is in front of a maypole, which are thought to have their origins in pagan Medieval cultures, and that in this scene has just been used as part of a folkloric ritual dance that takes place during a Christian church organised celebration. Although in the case of the maypole, any pre-Christian pagan meaning is likely to have been reduced to a mere shadow or echo as, while surviving Christianisation, by the time of the late 19th century when the film is set, it is likely they had lost their original meaning for those involved in the dance, as tended to happen in Britain as the centuries passed. With this in mind, rather than being a pagan totem, the presence of the maypole during the celebration can be seen as a more purely general celebratory symbol that acted to bring communities together.

To my knowledge there were two different film tie-in editions of Mary Webb’s novel that, as discussed at the start of the post, Gone to Earth and The Wild Heart were adaptations of. These included a British and an American edition, published in 1959 and 1953 respectively which, as often tended to be the case during the time of their release, have illustrated rather than photographic cover designs.

In contrast with later film tie-ins, where that it is the book of the film tends to be emblazoned quite clearly on the cover, it is not immediately obvious that they are film tie-ins. The US edition has “Jennifer Jones stars in the motion picture” printed in small text on the cover, while the British edition does not mention any connection to the film on the cover, but on the first page inside there is some, also small text, that says “The cover is from the Powell-Pressburger film, distributed by British Lion.”

I assume due to legal obligations in regards to Mary Webb’s book, the US edition of the novel tie-in, which was published the year after the film had been released as The Wild Heart, still has the original title of Gone to Earth, which I expect may have confused some readers and buyers.

The US edition has a map of the story’s setting on the back, that is emblazoned with the text “The haunted region of ‘Wild Wales’ where primitive passions flame in ‘Gone to Earth'”, which connects with The Wild Heart’s opening monologue description of events taking place amongst haunted borderlands. This mention of a “haunted” landscape, some of the semi-magical rural folklore of the film, along with the Harps in Heaven song sequence, which is sung by Hazel atop a hill to the harp accompaniment of her father, and has an enchanting otherworldly quality not dissimilar to acid folk of the late 1960s and 1970s, seem to presage the current interest in all things “wyrd” or “otherly” folk and pastoral. Or, as I say in A Year in the Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields:

“As a film it… appears to be a forebear of later culture which would travel amongst the layered, hidden histories of the land and folklore, showing a world where faiths old and new are part of and/or mingle amongst folkloric beliefs and practices… In some ways the air of not-quite-real-ness that can be found in Gone to Earth makes it seem like a forerunner to the more adult fairy tale side of the Czech New Wave (especially Valerie and her Week of Wonders from 1970 and possibly Malá Morská Víla/The Little Mermaid from 1976) and also of the style, character and imagery of a younger Kate Bush, of a free spirit cast out upon and amongst the moors.”

Connected to this sense of cultural forebearing, Samm Deighan, a writer and one of the editors of the horror film, literature and art magazine Diabolique, provides a commentary for Gone to Earth on its Blu-ray released by Kino Lorber, in which she talks of how the film can be seen as a precursor to what have come to be known as folk horror films (such as The Wicker Man released in 1973 etc). She suggests that Gone to Earth is not quite fantasy but edges on it, in part via, as in some folk horror film, the central character of Hazel having a near supernatural connection with the Earth and nature, one expression of which is her almost witch’s familiar-like pet fox who, as suggested previously, she seems incomplete and out of balance without.

Alongside which, and providing a line of connection between the two, The Wicker Man’s depiction of a pagan nature based belief system that openly embraces sexuality in conflict with a pious representative of Christian beliefs who denies his sexual desires can be seen to have been prefigured in Hazel’s struggles in Gone to Earth, and her, the parson and the squire’s conflicting beliefs and desires. And as in The Wicker Man, the characters and beliefs in Gone to Earth and The Wild Heart are depicted somewhat ambiguously; nobody, nor their beliefs, are depicted in a clear cut unambiguous manner. Rather there is more of a continuum of good and bad, right and wrong and so on. Considering this, one of Gone to Earth’s dominant underlying themes could be considered to be a depiction of the challenges and complexities of beliefs, both personal and systemic, and that none are “right” or “wrong”.

During her Blu-ray commentary for Gone to Earth, Deighan also discusses academic Tyson Pew’s comments on Powell and Pressburger’s somewhat odd and unsettling pastorally themed A Canterbury Tale (1944), with her saying that Gone to Earth can be seen as a form of sequel to it, and that Pew’s comments on it can also be applied to Gone To Earth. She discusses Pew describing the way in which A Canterbury Tale “exposes pastoralism’s inherent perversity”, quoting him as saying:

“The sexuality unleashed throughout its storyline projects England as both idyllic and menacing. The crux of A Canterbury Tale rises in its melancholic longing for a pastoral past that never existed and in this manner melancholia fractures national fantasies of historical and contemporary identity. In its vision of an edenic world of relaxed labour and bucolic virtue, the pastoral is as fantastic a genre as fairy tale or science fiction because this vision depends on the unobtainability of, indeed the impossibility of, this past in the present.”

This connects with the intertwining of a hauntological “yearning or nostalgia for a post-war utopian, progressive, modernist future that was never quite reached” with an otherly pastoral, wyrd folk etc related “yearning for lost Arcadian idylls”. Gone to Earth seems to be deeply threaded throughout with a related sense of yearning for the seemingly unobtainable, which finds its strongest expression in Hazel’s desire to find a way in which she can be allowed to connect with the modern world and her husband’s form of spirituality, while still being able to maintain and express her belief in the old, magical nature based ways and beliefs.

Elsewhere:

• The Wild Heart / Gone to Earth Kino Lorber Blu-ray release
• Talking Pictures TV
• The Harps in Heaven song section from Gone to Earth

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• Gone to Earth / The Wild Heart, the Haunted Region of Wild Wales and a Sidestep into Talking Pictures TV’s Broadcasts of the Overlooked, Shadowed Archives of Cinema and Television
• Harps in Heaven, curious exoticisms, pathways and flickerings back through the days and years…
• Gone To Earth – “What A Queen Of Fools You Be”, Something Of A Return Wandering And A Landscape Set Free
• Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth and Forebears of the Layers Beneath the Land
• Gone to Earth – Earlier Traces of an Otherly Albion
• Zardoz, Gone to Earth, The Owl Service, The Village of the Damned, The Prisoner, Quatermass, The Wicker Man, The Touchables, Sapphire and Steel, The Nightmare Man, Phase IV and The Tomorrow People – A Gathering of a Cathode Ray Library and Rounding the Circle

 

To quote myself on Radio 4’s Late Junction “[The Duke of Burgundy] seems to exist outside of time, almost in an imaginary never never European hinterland… and the track… has an [accompanying] hazy, dreamlike, almost half-remembered sense of being a semi-lost pop treasure from a time you can’t quite place.”

 

Links:

• • • • Stream “The Duke of Burgundy” at Spotify
      • The “Katalin Varga, Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy – Arthouse Evolution and Crossing the Thresholds of the Hinterland Worlds of Peter Strickland” post at the A Year In The Country site

 

Keith Seatman’s Time to Dream but Never Seen released by Castles in Space in 2019 is a loosely themed concept album based around a hauntological refraction of the British seaside and mayday fairs in times gone by, and as with much hauntologically inclined work it draws from and utilises contradictory atmospheres and memories to create an atemporal parallel world. On the album warm and comforting nostalgia nestles alongside the sinister and threatening, a trip down memory lane that threatens to leave the listener caught forever in a maze of fairground mirrors; this is a seaside jaunt via the time trap mysteries of Sapphire & Steel, electronica as viewed through a quietly lysergic kaleidoscope.

Jim Jupp of Ghost Box Records sleeve notes for  the album discuss how:

“The British seaside was an eighteenth-century invention later refined by the Victorians who transplanted the village fair and pre-industrial holy days into the coastal resorts of the Georgians. This created liminal zones poised between land and sea, between city and nature… where contradictions became the order of the day; health and hedonism, licentiousness and civilisation, nostalgia and science.”

Connected to which, the album can be viewed as being part of a cultural liminal zone of “ghost box but not Ghost Box” releases that also include: the Seatman and Powell Broken Folk EP released in 2018 by Keith Seatman’s label K.S. Audio in association with Ghost Box adjunct label Belbury Music, which featured Keith Seatman, Douglas Powell and Jim Jupp working as Belbury Poly and intersected the rural wyrd with hauntological electronica…

…the woozily dreamlike album Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witchcults of the Radio Age released in 2009 by Warp Records, on which Ghost Box Records co-founder and designer Julian House and Broadcast collaborated…

…the also Warp released Children of Alice album from 2017, a collaboration between James Cargill and Roj Stevens of Broadcast and again Julian House, which included folk ritual inspired tracks originally produced for Folklore Tapes…

…and Spaceship UK: The Untold Story of the British Space Programme released in 2010 by Sound and Music, featuring recordings by Jim Jupp and BBC Radiophonic Workshop co-founder Daphne Oram, design by Julian House and writing by Ken Hollings which interlinks a number of recurring hauntological touchstones and tropes including Quatermass, spectres of the past and electronic music experimentation.

Elsewhere:

• Time to Dream but Never Seen at Keith Seatman’s Bandcamp page
• Time to Dream but Never Seen at Keith Seatman’s Test Transmissions site
• Castles In Space’s Bandcamp page
• Time to Dream but Never Seen’s design at/by Nick Taylor / Spectral Studio
• Children of Alice’s digital whirlygig site
• Spaceship UK: The Untold Story of the British Space Programme at Discogs
• The Broken Folk EP at Ghost Box Records’ site
• Ken Hollings’ essay for Spaceship UK archived at archive.org
• Ken Hollings’ site

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• Broken Folk, Is it Clearer? and Akiha Den Den – Audio Undercurrents Part 2
• The Untold Story Of The British Space Programme and explorations by / courtesy of Misters Jupp, Hollings, Seatman and Mrs Oram
• The Viewing Portals of Children Of Alice
• Broadcast and The Focus Group’s #1: Witch Cults and #2: I See, So I See So
• Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age and the recalibrations of past cathode ray stories
• Broadcast and The Focus Group #2: I See, So I See So
• Broadcast and The Focus Group #1: Witch Cults
• Folklore Tapes and the Wyrd Britannia Festival – Journeying to Hidden Corners of the Land / the Ferrous Reels and Explorations of an Arcane Research Project
• Keith Seatman – all hold hands and off we go / boxes with rhythms in
• Ghost Box Records – Parallel Worlds, Conjuring Spectral Memories, Magic Old and New and Slipstream Trips to the Panda Pops Disco
• Belbury Poly’s Geography and Gateways to Far-Off Neverland Dream Memories
• Seatman and Powell’s Broken Folk EP is also featured in the A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways book
• Sapphire and Steel; a haunting by the haunting and a denial of tales of stopping the waves of history…
• Sapphire & Steel, various ghosts in the machine and a revisiting of broken circuits…
• Sapphire & Steel and Ghosts in the Machine – Nowhere, Forever and Lost Spaces within Cultural Circuitry

 

It seems rather appropriate to begin this yearly cycle of Songs for A Year In The Country with a visit to Summerisle via this song which conjures a sense of a timeless and atemporal world…

 

Links:

• Stream “Gently Johnny” at Spotify
• The soundtrack on CD at Silva Screen’s site
• “The Wicker Man Soundtrack and a Summer Isle Mini-Industry” post at the A Year In The Country site

 

Notes on Songs for A Year In The Country:

This is the first of 26 songs for A Year In The Country, which is a sort of Desert Island Discs but with 26 songs rather than eight, so effectively one posted per fortnight throughout this year.

The selection will include some of the songs that I find myself repeatedly returning to, ones that I’d “save from the waves” or bundle up to take into the storm shelter if a Wizard of Oz-esque twister appeared on the horizon.

Some “rules”:

1. No songs by or featuring myself or any of the other contributors to the A Year In The Country albums (more on those another time perhaps…)
2. No TV intro sequence theme tunes etc that haven’t been commercially released on record, CD, streaming services etc.
3. One song per artist.
4. Only one version of a song and only one appearance by each performer.
5. All songs must be available to listen on the various mainstream streaming and download services (Spotify in particular but hopefully they’ll also be available at Apple Music, Deezer etc).
6. One image per song, which will be the relevant cover art.
7. Reflecting the cycle/weeks of the year, each post will include no more than 52 words on each song.

For ease and simplicity I will post the links to stream the tracks on Spotify. However, as “they” say, other streaming services are available…

 

The John Boorman directed film Excalibur (1981) draws from Arthurian myth and legend, taking in its complete story cycle from the conception of the “once and future” King Arthur until his death (or slumber across the ages).

King Arthur is said to have been a British leader who lead the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the late 5th and early 6th centuries. The stories that are associated with Arthur are mainly drawn from folklore and literary invention, with modern historians debating and disputing these and also Arthur’s existence. Excalibur includes iconic and archetypal stories and characters connected with Arthur such as the wizard Merlin, Arthur pulling the mystical sword Excalibur from a stone, the forming of The Knights of the Round table and their quest for the Grail and the love triangle between the king, his wife Guinevere and his greatest knight Lancelot. Boorman co-wrote the screenplay with Rospo Pallenberg and it is based in part on Le Morte d’Arthur, written by Thomas Mallory and first published in 1485, which reworked existing stories and folklore about King Arthur and has since become one of the best known works of Arthurian literature.

Excalibur is far removed from being a straightforward mainstream piece of cinema, despite having had an at the time relatively high budget of approximately £30 million, if adjusted for inflation, being the number one film during its opening weekend in the United States and listed at 18th in the 1981 US box office takings.

Excalibur also forbears and stands apart from the trend for more purely escapist swords and sorcery and fantasy films in the 1980s, being nearer to an arthouse film cloaked in the trappings of blockbuster spectacle. It is a uniquely distinctive take on Arthurian myth that is unflinchingly full of sweat, stench, mud, blood, lust and primal desires but is far from being a realist, gritty or conventional depiction of King Arthur’s story:

[On its release] the film was a hit, but its reputation feels more cult-like, perhaps thanks to Boorman’s commitment to creating [its] otherworldly, mythic reality: it’s strange, lavish, and dream-like.” (Quoted from “A dream to some, a nightmare to others: sex, magic and myth on the set of Excalibur”, Tom Fordy, telegraph.co.uk, 18th Feb 2019.)

Mainly taking place in forest, castle and rural landscape and waterside locations, Excalibur is set in an unnamed British isles and what is described as the Dark Ages, and creates a form of Medieval never-never land that incorporates elements from around the 6th to 12th centuries.

Throughout the story there is a sense that Arthur’s reign is becoming a myth even while he is still alive and he says at one point “I was not born to live a man’s life but to be the stuff of future memory.” Alongside this, and underlying the entire story, is a warning of the doom that lies in wait when mankind, or an individual, loses touch with nature, or breaks natural laws and cycles, as was the cause of Arthur’s enfeeblement. Related to this, as discussed by John Boorman in his first autobiography, the film can be seen as a metaphor for the stages of mankind’s development:

“[While developing Excalibur] I began to formulate the idea that the Grail cycle was a metaphor for the past, present and future of humanity. In the early chapters, the Uther Pendragon period, man is emerging. He still has an unconscious magical connection with nature, both its violence and its harmony. That could be said to represent the deep past. [Merlin’s summoning of Excalibur from the lake focuses] the chaotic unconscious that lie beneath the surface. [After Uther abuses Excalibur’s power, violence and anarchy reign and so Merlin arranges that the sword passes to Uther’s son, Arthur] and its power allows him to impose his rule and make peace. As law and order are imposed, Arthur gradually forfeits his connection with nature. Camelot is established, a place of learning and science and order. Man becomes the master of the world. He pillages the earth. He cuts down the sacred forest. He loses his way… [Which] feels like our present. What of the future? What was once profusion becomes a wasteland. The King is sick from a wound that will not heal. The only way to cure the King and save the land is to find the Grail, the feminine symbol of wholeness and harmony, to find again a oneness with nature.” (Quoted from Adventures of a Suburban Boy, John Boorman, 2003.)

While in Excalibur Arthur builds the gleaming silver Camelot with good intentions, as suggested in the above quote, its construction has a potentially darker portentous flipside. It is the cause and expression of Arthur’s detachment from nature and the land and it could possibly also be seen as an attempt to tame not just nature but also an early stage in clearing away more problematic, less easily governable woodland etc settlements and their beliefs in the old nature based gods. Alongside which, when viewed today, Morgana’s use of magic to defy the natural process of ageing, and the way this brings about her demise, seems like a prescient comment on a contemporary expression of breaking natural cycles, that of plastic surgery and related attempts to prevent (but actually merely semi-hide or obscure) the physical signs of ageing.

Similar, at times Arthurian, themes of the corrupting effects of trying to break the cycle of ageing and problematic issues around creating a “civilised” elite haven which sequesters its inhabitants from the natural world are explored in Boorman’s dystopian science fiction film Zardoz (1974). In that an elite, who live in an impenetrable dome that separates and protects them from the wastelands and suffering in the wider world, have broken the cycle of nature through the scientific attaining of immortality and everlasting youth. However due to this immortality they have become effete and the men impotent, and their lives are filled with an overprivileged ennui, which sometimes finds a literal physical expression in that some of their number fall into a permanent catatonic state. They and their world are eventually destroyed by one of the enforcers the elite relies on to control and exploit the resources of the wastelands, who infiltrates the dome and brings about their destruction. The birth of this enforcer has similarities with the transgressive creation of Arthur and Morgana’s illegitimate son Mordred and him therefore being a bringer of destruction due to his birth breaking natural laws; the enforcer was genetically engineered through a selective breeding process by one of the elite, in order that he would bring about the destruction of their enclosed world and end mankind’s stagnation.

Although Boorman continued to make films after Excalibur, there is a sense in the 2013 documentary Behind the Sword in the Stone (aka Excalibur: Behind the Movie) that after making this film he felt that his work in general was done having, as is said in the documentary’s introduction, turned “a legend into a light for all to see”:

“It had been a lifelong ambition of mine to make this film, and when I saw [the final scene’s] shot of Arthur in the ship going out into the horizon, I felt that I’d completed my work.” (Quoted from Behind the Sword in the Stone, as above)

As with Zardoz, a number of Boorman’s other films have contained elements of, or that have parallels with, Arthurian legend and questing, the mythology of which he has been drawn to since an early age:

“Boorman, as he often mentions in interviews, has been gripped by myth and legend from early childhood, and mythic elements have found their way into virtually all his films… [many of his films prior to Excalibur] are premonitions, or half-submerged echoes, of the central myth that has obsessed him: the cycle of Arthurian legends… that he finally brought to the screen in Excalibur.” (Quoted from “Gone to Earth”, Philip Kemp, Sight and Sound, January 2001.)

Read today the above article on Excalibur is an early gathering together and linking of a number of the themes, films, television dramas etc which have become part of, and points of reference for, contemporary wyrd rural or otherly pastoral and folk horror orientated culture. To a degree the article presages, by almost a decade, the growth of interest in such culture that began to gather pace from approximately 2010 onwards, and through its discussion of related work it places Excalibur in a loosely interconnected lineage of post-war British mythic rural orientated cinema and television:

“In the 1940s and 50s the lush romanticism of such films as Canterbury Tale and Gone to Earth, [were] rooted in loving depictions of rural landscapes and a deeply felt quasi-pagan notion of Englishness… Nigel Kneale explored the interface between folk-myth and science fiction in his Quatermass cycle, as did (mainly for television) the playwright David Rudkin, whose Penda’s Fen… combines visions of such legendary figures as King Penda, the last pagan ruler of England, with a quasi-mystical view of the English landscape… Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man… gleefully pitted puritanism against paganism in the Scottish isles…” (Quoted from “Gone to Earth”, as above.)

The article comments on how Excalibur is something of an exception in “the realism-obsessed canon of British cinema” in its exploration of the “kind of myth and legend “that have haunted the British imagination in both art and literature for generations”but that “it tends to be left to children’s movies… to put us back in touch with the magical”. Similar could be said for children or young adult orientated British television, particularly in the decade or so that preceded Excalibur’s production, when, for example, Arthurian related myth and magic was more likely to be explored in the likes of the young adult television drama series such as The Changes (1975), Raven (1977), Moon Stallion (1978) and some episodes of the anthology series Shadows (1975-1978), rather than adult orientated dramas.

As with Excalibur, these are productions which seem to stand aside from an almost stereotypical British reserve and embarrassment in the country’s national adult orientated cinema and television, particularly in less genre orientated work, in relation to magical and mythical themes. That such young adult orientated television drama from previous decades as that listed above, and its often surprisingly left of centre and multilayered mystical themes, has become of cultural interest to adults drawn to wyrd rural, hauntological etc culture is perhaps, in part, a reflection of adult orientated television work often not providing all that much space in which mythical and magical themes are explored, or if they are, it is often in a fairly conventional or genre friendly manner. This may also be one of the factors which explain the ongoing and growing interest in the likes of The Wicker Man (1973) and its decidedly adult, heavily layered and research underpinned exploration of mythical folklore.

Boorman has spoken of how he did not set out to create an historically accurate tale but rather intended to set Excalibur in a more imaginary world:

“If there was ever an Arthur… he’s sited in about the sixth century. But the date is the least important thing really. I think of the story, the history, as a myth. The film has to do with mythical truth, not historical truth… So [when making the film] the first trap to avoid is to start worrying about when or whether Arthur existed… [I set] it in a world, a period, of the imagination… trying to suggest a kind of Middle Earth, in Tolkien terms. It’s a contiguous world; it’s like ours but different.” (Quoted from “Excalibur: John Boorman – In Interview”, as above.)

In the above interview, and as also quoted earlier, Boorman says Excalibur’s story is about “man taking over the world on his own terms for the first time”. It is set on the cusp of when the old ways, magic, nature based belief systems, druids etc were receding, when Christianity became dominant and mankind becomes ever more reliant on technology. As Merlin says in the film:

“The days of our kind [i.e. wizards] are numbered. The one God comes to drive out the many gods. The spirit of wood and stream grows silent. It’s the way of things. Yes. It’s a time for men and their ways.”

Bearing this in mind, when famine and pestilence ravage the land in Excalibur it may seem slightly unexpected that it is not to agricultural etc techniques and technology that Arthur turns (although admittedly these would not have been all that advanced in the periods the film draws from) but rather he sends his Knights on a quest for the Grail. However, there is a sense at the end of the film, when he is mortally wounded and undertakes his mystical sea journey, that this quest was the last “hurrah” and reliance on magic, and his departure marks the completion of a changeover into the new ways and beliefs.

At the beginning of this post I described how Excalibur was commercially successful but far removedfrom conventional mainstream blockbuster cinema and had an otherworldly quality. Part of this is its use of mythical and magical themes and tropes but also due to its visual character, which, as also referred to earlier, give it a lavish, unreal, dreamlike quality:

“Excalibur still looks incredible – all sparkling emerald greens and shimmering silver armour. The Excalibur sword itself glows… Boorman and his cinematographer Alex Thomson achieved the effect with green filters over the lighting and even shone [green] lights onto moss to give the film ‘a kind of luminosity… so it felt like a myth rather than a reality,’ Boorman [says in documentary] Excalibur: Behind the Movie. ‘That’s what we were consciously trying to achieve, a kind of mystery magical feeling about it that it was another world.’ (Quoted from “A dream to some, a nightmare to others: sex, magic and myth on the set of Excalibur”, as above.)

As also commented on by Boorman in Excalibur: Behind the Movie, the unreal nature created by the extensive use of coloured lighting was added to by the on location weather during the film’s shoot; it rained almost every day of filming and this meant that there was constant moisture in the air, which refracted the light and gave it a kind of softness. The resulting imagery in the film often creates a sense that you are viewing events through the subtle haze of a dream.

Accompanying these light related characteristics, there is an almost magical sense of the passing of time. At one point Morgana kisses her young son and as their heads part you see that a decade or so has passed and Mordred is now a young man; when Uther thrusts Excalibur into the stone and dies the film cuts straight to the same scene but almost two decades later, the season has changed from winter to spring and the trees have their leaves, and as the camera pans it reveals that a settlement has sprung up around the sword and stone.

Related to the sense of Excalibur creating and exploring an unreal and mystical world, is the previously discussed way in which the film stands apart from the tendency towards realism in adult orientated British cinema through its exploration of myth and magic. Connected to this, the film also stands at a remove from much of British cinema in the abovementioned use of non-realist lighting, the ambitious nature of its costume and set design and the general epic scale of the film and its story. In relation to some aspects of this, its creation of a mythical, dream-like world in the British landscape shares some similarities with Powell and Pressburger’s film Gone to Earth (1950), which was referred to in a previous quote about a loosely interconnected mythic rural strand in British cinema and television:

“[Gone to Earth] has a Wizard of Oz-esque, Hollywood coating of beauty, glamour and quiet surreality which in part is created by the vibrant, rich colours of the Technicolor film process that it shares with that 1939 film… Often cinematic views of the British landscape are quite realist, possibly dour or even bleak in terms of atmosphere and their visual appearance and so Gone to Earth with its high end Hollywood razzle-dazzle which is contained in its imagery is a precious breath of fresh air.” (Quoted from A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields.)

There is a further intertwining of Gone to Earth and Excalibur in their depiction of worlds where the old ways, beliefs and magic still exist but are being removed from view by new beliefs etc, as Gone to Earth centres around a free spirited young woman who is still very much steeped in older rural ways of life and folkloric spells and charms.

The epic scale and sense of a heightened or imaginary reality in Excalibur’s story and the world it creates is added to by the film’s use of music. The soundtrack includes

multiple instances of composer Richard Wagner’s often highly dramatic music, whose vast four opera Ring cycle, written from 1848-1874, Boorman says in his Adventures of a Suburban Boy biography that he went to see as part of his preparations for making Excalibur:

“[The Ring cycle’s] Germanic myth has many elements in common with the Grail legend. Wagner’s music… inspired my writing and eventually insinuated its way into the movie.” (Quoted from Adventures of a Suburban Boy, as above.)

The soundtrack also includes Carl Orff’s distinctive and both ominous and darkly uplifting choral work “O Fortuna” from his cantata Carmina Burana, which he composed in 1935-1936. This particular piece is based on a collection of 24 medieval poems, and in a possibly serendipitous manner with Excalibur’s story, the lyrics are a complaint about Fortuna, the goddess of fortune and personification of luck in Roman and Greek mythology, and the inexorable fate that rules both gods and mortals.

“O Fortuna” was first used in cinema on Excalibur’s soundtrack and has since gone on to be widely known after being used in dozen’s of films, television programmes, video games etc, alongside being extensively sampled. In Excalibur it rousingly soundtrack’s the revitalised Arthur and his Knights on horse back as they ride over Camelot’s drawbridge and then through a surreally heavily white blossomed corridor of trees on the way towards Arthur’s final battle with his son Mordred’s army.

Elsewhere:

• Excalibur HMV Blu-ray Premium Collection edition
• Excalibur trailer
• “O Fortuna” sequence in Excalibur
• Excalibur memorabilia that you’ll need to break open a fair few piggy banks for at the Prop Store…
• Further Excalibur memorabilia at the London Film Museum

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• John Boorman, Excalibur And Celluloid Myths / Realism
• Zardoz, Phase IV and Beyond the Black Rainbow – Seeking the Future in Secret Rooms from the Past and Psychedelic Cinematic Corners
• Zardoz, Space 1999 And Psychedelic Strands In 1970s Science Fiction
• Zardoz Ephemera / A Revisiting Of Fading Vessellings
• Zardoz and ways out of the maze
• Zardoz… in this secret room from the past, I seek the future…
• The Changes / The Disruption – Notes on a Flipside of the Pastoral Conversation
• The Changes, Threads, the bad wires and the ghosts of transmissions
• Gone to Earth / The Wild Heart, the Haunted Region of Wild Wales and a Sidestep into Talking Pictures TV’s Broadcasts of the Overlooked, Shadowed Archives of Cinema and Television
• Harps in Heaven, curious exoticisms, pathways and flickerings back through the days and years…
• Gone To Earth – “What A Queen Of Fools You Be”, Something Of A Return Wandering And A Landscape Set Free
• Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth and Forebears of the Layers Beneath the Land
• Gone to Earth – Earlier Traces of an Otherly Albion
• Zardoz, Gone to Earth, The Owl Service, The Village of the Damned, The Prisoner, Quatermass, The Wicker Man, The Touchables, Sapphire and Steel, The Nightmare Man, Phase IV and The Tomorrow People – A Gathering of a Cathode Ray Library and Rounding the Circle
• Gone to Earth and The Wild Heart – Revisiting Stories from the Haunted Region of Wild Wales