Echoes… The Stone Tape (1972), BFI, The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men

 

The Stone Tape is a made for TV play broadcast as a Christmas ghost story in 1972 but on the Southbank early in the New Year half a century later it is still viscerally unsettling. Screening as part of Mark Jenkin’s season showing The Cinematic DNA of his new film, Enys Men, it shows men pitting technology against ancient forces, attempting to control and to commercialise that which they barely comprehend, in complete denial about the possibilities that they may have found one of those things undreamt of in their philosophy.

Written by Nigel Kneale who specialised in macabre tales mixing the supernatural with the scientific most famously in the Quatermass series and who also adapted many literary works for cinema including John Osborne's plays Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer for director Tony Richardson, both a far cry from sci-fi horror mash ups and yet which explain his grasp of character which adds so much to The Stone Tape. The human interactions and corporate politics mask the unfolding mystery so that when at last it is truly revealed, we’re all wrong-footed.

Filmed largely in studio and directed with superb timing and economy by Peter Sasdy, it featured some of the leading British actors of the time all of whom act their collective socks off in service to Kneale’s script… you really wouldn’t expect a studio play to be so affecting, you can see the “joins”, the studio floor, the artificiality of the lighting but it magnifies the tension, as you suspend that disbelief, born away by the players and the uncanny expectation.

Jane Asher stands alone

There’s one exception to the masculine rationality and that’s ace computer analyst, Jill Greeley (Jane Asher) who arrives at Ryan Electronics' new research facility “Taskerlands”, an old Victorian property about to be transformed into a research hot-house to help the electronics firm keep pace with the Japanese competition. As she pulls up two Ryan lorries apparently start reversing into Jill’s car… she reverses away in panic into a pile of sand: it’s a foretaste of the ordeal to come.

Shouting down Jill’s intuitions is Peter Brock (Michael Bryant), the head of a research team and a natural leader, if natural leaders are required to be obnoxious, bullying and aggressive,  as well as decisive and competitive, always with an eye for the main chance. He’s married with children (and a horse) but has been having an affair with his computer prodigy… he must have hidden charms.

There’s something very strange about their new base and foreman Roy Collinson (Iain Cuthbertson, who always so good at expressing doubts when following orders), reveals that the builders have refused to work on one room saying that it’s haunted. Naturally Brock dismisses this but Jill is shaken to the core as she sees an apparition of a woman in Victorian dress, screaming in terror… The sightings continue until even Brock is convinced there’s something awry… boldly he decides that this is something worth investigating: “… a mass of data... waiting for a correct interpretation.” He marshals his team and they move their kit and computers into the room to analyse and nail the phenomenon.

Iain Cuthbertson and Michael Bryant

They’re a mix of sceptics covering the full gamut of 70’s TV scientists from rough and ready (Peter Angelis) to bearded and contemplative (Michael Bates).  But, not only do they not believe some, literally, cannot see or hear the apparition… there are other sensitives like Jill who perceive the sound and vision and others who cannot feel anything at all, a mystery with lots of nuance, all designed to suspend our belief as well as motivate the denial on screen.

 

The story is well structured with rationality and investigation boldly pursued by the scientists, the kind of forensic approach that usually explains everything. Then, even after evidence from some locals and some palpable if not recordable, evidence felt by most, Brock decides to pound the issue with pure sound, before deciding that the very stones are a recording mechanism which, naturally could make his company very rich and make him the hero, commercially speaking.

As with any good such tale of this time, authority is generally stupid and brave scientists are often ignored even when, in this case, some should be ignored. Such tropes seem to be commonplace in an era when science was more trusted and supernatural fear was unsettling rather than graphic; a general paranoia and society ill at ease with the chaos of nuclear uncertainty only a couple of decades after such weapons were deployed, not once but twice to conclude the war after the war to end all wars.

Jane Asher is virtually the only woman and carries the mystery with her for long portions of the story, the sensitive human anchor amongst all the testosterone. scientific posturing and macho denial. The men want to control, to follow orders not instinct but she wants to genuinely understand and Brock’s casual in-bred exasperation - “bloody women!” - rebounds emphatically on him in the end.

Encapsulating the creeping disruption throughout is the sizzling static of a score which seems to have been sucked directly from the stones by Desmond Briscoe and The BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The Workshop sound evokes the science mysteries of my youth and their influence of their experimental early synthesisers is long-lasting, informing the sounds of labels such as Ghost Box, Castle in Space, Woodford Halse and many more. These labels feature many an album of imagined scores for films that could have been made around the time of The Stone Tapes… the ghosts of electronica past inhabit the very vinyl of my study… the cardboard and plastic containers and even electrostatic patterns on newly-minted cassettes… we’re living in Brock’s world of endless-storage, nothing is forgotten, all is recorded. Still, we struggle to make sense of it.

All of which leads onto Enys Men and Mark Jenkins’ own score, which resonates with these same mysteries of sound and stone. Which is where we came in.

Details of The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men can be found on the BFI website along with screening information for the film itself. Nigel Keane will be there, spirit infused in the huge concrete walls of the Southbank.

There's a highly-collectable slice of vinyl too...