As I’ve remarked before, this film and its soundtrack can
be seen as part of a wider Hauntology movement and this is no more apparent
than in the sparse electronica director Mark Jenkin uses as the film’s score.
For this special May Day screening of a film based on events on this day, the
writer/director teamed with musician Dion Star as ‘The Cornish Sound Unit’,
their collaborative music project to perform a live score for the film which,
in the grand tradition of silent film accompaniment, combined the airs of musical
uncertainty, audience reaction and the big NFT 1 screen, to create a fresh
experience of film that continues to
hold its mystery.
The duo mixed improvised and composed pieces used tape
machines, analogue synths, feedback and field recordings to provide a new mix perhaps
surprised, as any silent musician will tell you, by the ways in which they
responded musically to a film they’ve seen so many times and yet only played
live to once before at a rehearsal in Poole. This early evening, as the sun
dropped chillingly below the Thames, this was May Day magic… a place of
confused memories, approached with trepidation because of failing recollection
and a connection to the stones and the land in ways that only the neolithic
mind understands. This is Hauntology after all, the scene that haunts itself.
By the end of the performance, I felt that I’d interpreted
this film I’ve seen
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| Monitoring the flowers |
I think on previous viewings I’d been too aware of style
and influence and, maybe after weeks watching mostly the films of Jerzy
Skolimowski – Mr Jenkin having created a short 16mm tribute to the locations of
the Pole’s The Shout – I’m more attuned to non-linear and purely
cinematic expression. Mark and Jerzy, Mary too, leave their explanations all on
the screen and it’s up to the audience to interpret what’s before them, and
these films probably defy spoilers too, you have to experience them to even
have a clue.
As with his previous film, Bait, Jenkin uses
lovely 16mm film stock and films silently with
post-synched sound, although this time he uses colour which not only
provides more period feel but also illuminates numerous plot points in a tale
set on 1st May 1973… ah yes, I remember it, in love with Karen Gough
in the first year of secondary school and just shifting from Slade and Sweet to
Pink Floyd and Bowie. But how much do I really recall, shattered moments and moods,
memories recalled and re-written thousands of times until the actuality is
almost lost beneath layers of my own mythmaking.
This is the feeling of the film, the plain story is
obscured by the efforts to make sense of it and the deceptive regularity of the
Volunteers daily routine, the stylistic resonance of the early 70s and the
distinctively irregular cutting of Jenkin’s rich imagination. He builds up a
sense of place and the sense of that place is not easily interpreted as we rely
almost entirely on the Volunteer with the camera, and creator’s eye, only
occasionally “speaking” to us directly.
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| Dropping the stone by the old mine |
The story is centred on a wildlife volunteer, played
superbly by Mary Woodvine who is uncanny in every sense. The Volunteer works
for the Wildlife Trust and her job it is to monitor a rare flower on an
uninhabited island off the coast of Cornwall. Through her painstaking daily
routines Jenkin slowly detaches the narrative from the linear and the viewer
from their expectations of standard progression. On her daily trips to the
cliff-face, near an abandoned tin mine she checks the soil temperature, the
growth of the plant and as she walks past the old mine, drops a stone down a
shaft to hear is splosh in the deep dark waters. Back in her cottage she writes
down the date and notes anything unusual: every day is just the same “no
change”. All the while there are the abrupt interruptions of the radio, her
daily firing up of the oil-powered generator and the noises heard or imagined
from the old mine.
In addition to this sound collage, we had the sonic
dislocations of The Cornish Sound Unit and I could see them working with
keyboards, computers and even magnetic tape to contribute to the dialogue and
existing found sounds, the wind and rain, the plop of the stone deep down the
well. This is not a score in the traditional sense but a parallel narrative
designed to reflect the sights on screen but also to conflict with them, to
undermine their normative significance and to describe the Volunteer’s state of
mind whilst affecting our own. I know that’s the job of film score but this is
very much a different pallet.
Our minds may begin to wonder as the Volunteer’s begins
to wander and gradually, we’re presented with faces and events that may be
real, imagined past or present.
Jenkins’ camera is relentless in its focus on minutia,
odd-shaped rocks, an old, rusted rail from the mine, birds and plants, the
volunteer’s walking boots on the crumbling steps… it’s hypnotic and riveting as
any or all may be providing clues. There’s a pace that reminds you of Peter
Greenaway (who made a few public information films in his time) as well as
Derek Jarman certainly around the time of The Garden.
People start to appear, a young woman (Flo Crowe) who may
be the Volunteer’s daughter or someone else entirely; maybe even herself. She’s
with her, or is she? A visiting Boatman (Edward Rowe, also in Bait) asks her
how it is being so alone and she replies that she isn’t, a reference by that
point not just to the girl but to an old man/priest played by the legend that
is John Woodvine who, I’ve only just realised, is Mary’s father and someone I
recall from the period of the film and always enjoy watching in film or on
stage. There’s also a collection of lifeboatmen, drowned in 1897, a group of
women in traditional dress and dirt encrusted miners. All may be or may not be…
are we inside Mary’s view or is she in someone/something else’s memory and just
who is the man who has just used her toilet?
The landscape itself intrudes on the Volunteer’s thoughts
and her physicality… is her solitude getting to her or is there something
entirely more metaphysical at work? Does she burn her hands on the oven, how
widely does the lichen grow, are events even happening in the right order? Why
does she drop stones down the well every day… you’ll have to make up your own
mind.
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| Mary Woodvine |
Mary Woodvine is indeed extraordinary and being in almost
every scene of the film, carries its meaning and its mystery, engaging and yet
lost in her character’s own world, as she, almost entirely wordlessly, guides
us through the story. There are innumerable close-ups and, once again I think
of silent film and technique when assessing Jenkin’s work. This is such a bold film
and one that pays so much respect to its audience with its poetic refusal to be
specific in anything other than beauty, imagination and wonder.
And, ultimately, as Mary said to me at the end, it’s up to us to make of it what we will.
Luckily the BFI dual format set arrives on 8th
May and will enable us to pore over this film at our leisure. Presented in High
Definition and Standard Definition there are some outstanding special features
on the set:
- Film Sounds (2023, 86 mins): Mark Jenkin and filmmaker Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio, Flux Gourmet) discuss the subtleties of sound in film and this is one of the unmissable highlights of this set, as they look back at the history of unsettling sound, not just score but fear-inducing foley, found sounds and others in and out of context… you could probably make a series out of this subject!
- Audio commentary by director Mark Jenkin and film critic Mark Kermode (2023) which is guaranteed not to
- Mark Jenkin and Mary Woodvine in conversation with Mark Kermode (2022, 29 mins): the film’s director and its star discuss the making of Enys Men in an onstage Q&A filmed at BFI Southbank
- Recording the Score (2022, 6 mins): Mark Jenkin at work on the film’s soundtrack
- Mark Jenkin’s audio diaries (2022, 90 mins): the director charts his filmmaking process.
- Image gallery, a newly created audio description track and theatrical trailer.
Bonus films:
Haunters of the Deep (1984, 61 mins): a Children’s Film Foundation adventure that shares many West Cornwall locations with Enys Men, and made quite an impression on Mark Jenkin
The Duchy of Cornwall (1938, 15 mins): the strange beauty of Cornwall resonates through this iconic film from the vaults of the BFI National Archive
The first pressing only includes another deal-making
illustrated booklet with a Director’s Statement; essays by Tara Judah, Rob
Young, William Fowler and Jason Wood; together with credits and notes on the
special features.
You can pre-order the set now on the BFI shop; it’ll be a
different experience from a live screening but it will be as beguiling
as it is with every viewing.
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| The Cornish Sound Unit get ready to plug in |
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