Jigsaw feeling… Rose of Nevada (2025), Out on 24th April

This is the kind of film you need to see in a cinema, it is the kind of film you need to work out for yourself and, it is the kind of film that doesn’t get made that often these days. Based on an idea from Mark Jenkin and his partner Mary Woodvine, Jenkin writes, directs, films, edits and then composes, and plays, the score. It’s the kind of film that could only have come from the mind of Mark Jenkin and builds on his impressive features Bait (2019) and Enys Men (2022).

 

As with those two films Jenkin uses 16mm film and a Bolex clockwork camera which only runs for 27 seconds before it needs rewinding. Jenkins develops the stock himself – surely that’s a new award category?! – and brings out incredibly vivid colours from the stock, almost hyper-real deep green and red-rusty textures, the reddest red since Jack Cardiff spun his camera for The Archers. This being 16mm, there’s a rough edge to this beauty which makes it vibrant and alive with the end of reel “spoiling” sometimes in the mix to blur the edges like a flash of sunlight caught in your eye or something you only thought you saw.

 

Made in Cornwall, silent style with no sound recorded live, Jenkin is able to completely control his sound-world too with the actors re-voicing their entire dialogue during the edit, along with foley and sound effects added along with his bleakly ambient score which reflects the visual in the most “silent” of ways. The texturing is for flavour and doesn’t encroach on the narrative working with the performances and the visuals to create an atmosphere you can not shake, even when it ends and you are typing away on the train home…

 

Jenkin uses repeated images, locations, events to tease out as much meaning as he is willing to present on first viewing. There is tremendous discipline here as the etched message inside the titular fishing vessel or its name plate are all part of the greater linear narrative which plays out whilst characters interact, gut fish, or refuse to give each other their proper names as the fishing village world tosses and turns like the ocean and the only stable environment is the boat itself as the three men go about the laborious and dangerous task of trawling for fish.

George MacKay

Having recently rewatched Jean Epstein’s Finis Terrae (1929), on the Eureka Masters of Cinema Blu-ray, I was also reminded of some of his technique with moments of when Jenkin slows down the action to reinforce the dream-like quality just like the French pioneer. Elsewhere the landscape and seemingly random details are focused on to pull the viewer into the moments and the mystery of the observable World. Its hypnotic and hyper-real… a trip into the surreal that marks our everyday existence.

 

The Rose is the enigma at the film’s start as it reappears at the quayside after being lost for 30 years. Soon this is being taken for granted as the owner, played by Jenkin regular Edward Rowe, and the widow of one of the men who had gone missing all those years ago, Tina (played by Rosalind Eleazar of Slow Horses fame), decide to put her back to sea. A crusty old mariner Murgey, played by Francis Magee, pops up and when asked if the owner knows him only says, you might do… and he might do at that. Names and knowing… it’s a muddle but, as in a dream things have a propulsion all of their own.

 

Edward Rowe, Mary Woodvine and Adrian Rawlins

We see a young father called Nick (George MacKay), collecting food for his elderly neighbours played by Adrian Rawlins and an almost unrecognisable Mary Woodvine who has been aged up to reflect the rigours of the 30-year old tragedy that led to the loss of the Rose’s crew and her son Luke. Her husband has just returned from laying flowers at the cliff where his son had jumped to his death thereby leaving the vessel one crew member down and, eventually doomed. For these two the tragedy has never stopped and the mother seems lost in her grieving time, moving in and out of focus submerged by the enormity of her loss.

 

Nick lives next door with his wife Emily and their child and, as the rain pours down on the village, we see him try to fix the hole in their kitchen roof, which is possibly, to coin a Doctor Who reference, a fixed point in time… and it’s not alone. We meet the others who are related to the lost with the other sailor’s grown-up daughters Jess and Linsey (both played by Yana Penrose) one of whom still wears his hat and, meeting the handsome new arrival Liam (Callum Turner, who is currently engaged to Dua Lipa I believe pop fans?) in the pub, gives it to him on a promise,

 

Callum Turner

A crew is found for the Rose when Nick decides he has to do something to pay for his roof and Liam, in need of money and a roof over his head, joins the team and away they go learning the ropes and the art of gutting a fish as Murgey – the old man from the sea - takes them back onto the waves... “Don’t worry lads, she always returns…” There’s a forensic depiction of the methods of trawl-fishing as they start to fill the Rose’s compact hold with mackerel, bream, bass and hake. The atmosphere is tense as the electronica broods and Nick already begins to sense that something is out of joint – namely time, as an etched warning to “get off the boat, now” disappears during the journey.

 

When they do return to port though the harbour does not look at all as they left it and it soon becomes clear that not only are they no longer in the present but they are being mistaken for the two men who disappeared along with the boat before either man was born. Whilst Liam is greeted by a younger version of Tina and her eldest daughter, there’s some arguing to be done but he styles it out – this is different for him than for Nick. Meanwhile the latter returns to find his family gone and that he is now being seen as the lost Luke by his now much younger neighbours.

 

They are lost in time and circumstances beyond their control and Nick’s hopes that, after every return trip to the sea things will revert to normal begin to look increasingly forlorn… They’re not just trawling fish the film is smuggling meaning and that’s increasingly perplexing as the mood builds and we wait for the moment of clarity…  

Perhaps this is a rumination on the essence of place, the echoes within The Stone Tapes or the ever-present past sensed by the pilgrims in Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale and in Peter Akroyd’s London? It certainly another work of hauntological exploration that plays on the feelings of the obliquely familiar: the walkers over our graves and the sense we can never quite pin down that our experience has always happened and is always happening.

It also has to be noticed that for a one-man-band (almost), Mr Jenkin leads a heck of a team with the performances universally excellent. George MacKay is the centre of most of the action and presents a terrified and unsettled man in the most visceral of ways; he's our conduit into this unreality and we feel his bewilderment at suddenly losing everything. How did it come to this and is this how we all wake up one day to find our lives unrecognisable, our lievlihoods destroyed and events elsewhere driving us to the edge.

There’s an entire Jungian analysis I was about to dive into but best you just go see the film and make your own minds up. It really is that kind of film…

 

Details of screening at the BFI and elsewhere are on their website.

 

British film is alive and weird and taking place with increasing frequency in Cornwall!  

Rosalind Eleazar

Games for May… Enys Men (2022), Live at BFI and on Dual Format, from 8th May

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 twice before in a different way, with the live performance soon melting within the visuals and the hushed audience asking themselves new questions. Even the film’s star, Mary Woodvine, sat directly in front of me and such a defining presence in the film, revealed afterwards that she was noticing new aspects of the film with the music. Like the well next to the abandoned tin mine in the film (West Penwith), the truth and Mary’s performance run deep, and it speaks volumes of her care in creating this character that there are mysteries unconscious to the actor and to us all.

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 1^st 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.

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.

 

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 8^th 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.

 

 

The Cornish Sound Unit get ready to plug in

 

The shock of the old… BFI Film on Film Festival, 8th – 11th June 2023

I must have been 14, fibbing about my age and sneaking with my mates into the Astra Cinema in Maghull, opened in 1930 as the Albany and where The Beatles had played back in 1962, to watch Jaws not once but twice as we hid in our seats for the second showing. Projected, as everything else at the time, on 35mm, the film was a vividly shocking experience with moments of horror I can still remember experiencing for the first time… I even dreamt about the film that night after.

Is it just age that changes our experience of cinema or is there something in the actual technology? I was taken immediately back to the Astra by the snippet shown at the launch of the BFI Film on Film Festival in the NFT 1 today, the same heat hazed expression of fear on Roy Scheider’s face as he scans the water line after the beach has been re-opened; imperfect, not crystal clear but sun-drenched, his anxiety and obscured vision is perfectly captured by the original materials: this is new light shone through chemicals originally affected by the actual light of the scene, not a perfected copy buried under microns of digital artifice. It’s not just the Gen-X and Boomers that treasure the analogue experiences but a whole new age of youngsters fascinated by the distinctiveness of technology abandoned and almost extinct. It’s like vinyl, an analogue experience with media that shows its age and is all the better for it.

We were shown a new short film made by Mark Jenkin, A Dog Called Discord (2022), which explained his fascination with film and not just the creation of narrative but also the process of development and projection, the entire mechanics. He is often handed old Super 8 and home movie footage and used one of these reels – best before 1960 – as an example of the content that can surprise; it’s a bout capturing moments and, restoring memories and feelings, a proper emotional gem that has to be seen to be understood. On celluloid of course.

Everyone in the room had their own connection to the material of film not least Robin Baker, Head Curator of the BFI National Archive who took us through an overview of the new festival’s aims and content. Whilst accepting digital strengths, there are also weaknesses, or at least differences… “A print can feel more… unpredictable. Like us it will change over time, its ‘imperfections’ helping to convey the life it has lived…” There are even films that play with the mutability of celluloid such as Charlie Shackleton’s The Afterlight (2021) which exists as only a single 35mm print which will be getting it’s 50^th spin around on 10^th June in the festival. Then there’s Morgan Fisher’s Screening Room (1968/73) 16mm’s and shot in NFT2 and, under the director’s instruction, only to be screened there and nowhere else.

The BFI is one of only 50-odd cinemas in the UK which is still set up to screen film and it’s not so much the technology as the expertise of projectionists. Then as BFI’s Head of Technical Services, Dominic Simmons, explained, it’s about the only one built specifically to screen the notoriously flammable nitrate film with a projection booth built in the early fifties with steel walls sandwiching asbestos to prevent the spread of fire. The projectors used for nitrate also have built in fire suppression with gas released to extinguish any fire, we will, almost certainly, be perfectly safe.

That said, who wouldn’t be willing to take some level of risk in order to see Rita Hayworth in 35mm in Rouben Mamoulian’s Blood and Sand (1941), Sidney Poitier in Joseph L. Mankiewicz No Way Out (1950) and Benita Hulme and Lesley Howard in Alexander Korda’s Service for Ladies (1932). These films are going to dazzle and take our breath away on 11^th June. Perhaps the greatest impact will come from Joan Crawford and the 35mm nitrate screening of Mildred Pierce (1945) on 8^th… I already have ticket anxiety having, to my knowledge never seen nitrate projected, I’m not that old! 

Joan Crawford: explosive?

On the silent front there will be the most welcome return of Miles Mander’s The First Born (1928) featuring my Grandad Bill’s favourite, Madeleine Carroll in one of this country’s finest films of the period. There will also be Stephen Horne to accompany with his music being so memorably associated with the film’s restoration screenings ten years ago. There are also two comedies directed by Manning Haynes from WW Jacobs’s wonderful short stories: Sam’s Boy (1922) and The Boatswain’s Mate (1924). Both could only have been made in this country and will have accompaniment from Neil Brand, one of the UK’s leading special effects.

Talking of such things, there’ll also be time to turn off, relax and float downstream with 3D spectacles to revisit the early fifties craze: the great outdoors with John Wayne in Hondo (1953), Grace Kelly almost within touching distance in Dial M for Murder (1954) and the blood-curdling dislocation of House of Wax (1953). See this film as it was meant to be seen along with dozens of Telekinema shorts commissioned as part of the Festival of Britain from when the Southbank complex was born.

There’s a hugely diverse offering over the festival’s four days with every possible screen in the former National Film Theatre being used to cram in every last drop of celluloid. Personally, I’ll be looking to catch Jon Pertwee in Doctor Who: Spearhead from Space, a new print of Dorothy Arsener’s Working Girls (1931) and Sight and Image: The Visual Documentary, dialogue-free films with newly commissioned live musical score. There's also the chance to tune in and turn on to Experimenta Mixtape 16mm Happening with live music by The Begotten... until the early hours on 10th June.

The First Born (1928)

For the real hardcore Gothamite, there’s a 70mm all-night treat at the BFI IMAX, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy… the teen who lied about his age to watch Jaws would have had his mind blown by this one.

Whatever the cut of your cape, you’ll find something to love in this feast of around 200,000 feet of film: 39 features, 69 shorts and 8 television works, screening from 38 16mm prints, 58 35mm prints, four 70mm prints and 16 Super 8 prints.

Checkout the full programme online now and prepare for booking which starts in the first week of May.

Experimenta Mixtape 16mm Happening with live music by The Begotten...

There's more than one way to time travel, Jon...

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...

The ghost box goes west… Enys Men (2022), On nationwide release 13th January 2023

This is a film unlike any you’ve seen and yet, something so familiar as well, from the grains on the colour film to the period setting, 1973, and Mark Jenkin’s haunting electronic score, this is perhaps the apex of the scene that haunts itself and has done since the likes of Ghost Box started released the sound of future passed a decade ago. On that most insubstantial of channels, BBC Radio 6, Stuart Maconie recently devoted an entire programme to the sounds of principles of “Hauntology” featuring contributions from the record labels, musicians and writers who contribute to this loose alliance of textures and moods.

As someone who grew up in the seventies, I can understand the nostalgic pull of revisiting the then futuristic but artists such as Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan (aka Gordon Chapman Fox), are much younger than me and are attracted to the style and the optimism of a time when we were on an irresistible path of, sometimes mis-judged, progress. Mark Jenkin is of this younger generation and here he not only provides his own electronic score, much in the style of  Warrington/Gordon’s stablemates on Castles in Space or Ghost Box artists, another label finding new grooves in the electronica trailblazed by Delia Derbyshire/BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Terry Riley and Stockhausen, then Morton Subotnick, the "Berlin School" of early Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, as well as Brits like Brian Eno and Francis Monkman. 

The detail is in the detail

This is but the subtext for his vision which recreates the feel of early seventies Folk Horror and other experimentations. The BFI have just released a set of Ghost Stories for Christmas including MR James’ enduringly creepy, Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968) directed by Jonathan Miller and featuring a magnificently terrified turn from Michael Hordern. There’s something of the same existential dread in Enys Men and, as with Whistle, the ending wrongfoots the viewer in quite startling ways. But, every foot of Jenkin’s film is full of steps to this moment, each one sampling not just the sound but also the diverse source imagery of public information films, children’s horror serials such as The Owl Service, Children of the Stones, as well as the more psychological folk horrors, The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Symptoms (1974), even later fare such as The Anchoress (1993).

You can have fun guessing inspirations and, realising exactly what we’re like, the BFI has kindly arranged a season, The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men, programmed by Mark Jenkin, will run at BFI Southbank and on BFI Player throughout January 2023. Including features, documentaries, TV programmes and shorts, the season will give context to Enys Men and the inspirations behind it, also giving audiences the opportunity to enjoy some rich and rarely seen content.

As with his previous film, Bait, Jenkin on grainy 16mm film stock and with his trademark post-synched sound, although this time he uses colour which not only provides more period feel but also illuminates numerous plot points.

The story is centred on a wildlife volunteer, played superbly by Mary Woodvine (also in Bait) whose 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 expectation of standard progression. On her daily trips to the cliff-face, near an abandoned tin mine (West Penwith), 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: everyday is just the same “no change”.

Every day she starts the oil power generator outside cottage to provide light and power, closing the gate before switching on the over to make tea and update her minimalistic log, there’s a two-way radio that crackles occasionally into life and a medium wave transistor set that plays whatever signal can reach this lonely place. 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. This film will not be providing its audience with any easy answers and I can’t wait to watch it again to see what else I pick up.

People start to pop up, a young woman (Flo Crowe) who may be the Volunteer’s daughter or someone else entirely. 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 (the legend that is John Woodvine!), a collection of lifeboatmen, drowned in 1897, a group of women in traditional dress and dirt encrusted miners. All may be or may be not…

Then the landscape itself starts to intrude 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?

Mary Woodvine is extraordinary and is in almost every scene of the film, 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 you have to think of silent film and technique when assessing Jenkin’s work. This is bold and absolutely to be seen in cinema where you can give it your full attention and be completely lost in the details the director and cast provide.

 

Enys Men, opens on 13 January 2023 at BFI Southbank and in cinemas UK-wide and there’s a preview/director Q&A tour with Mark Jenkin in Cornwall and other key cities from 2 January 2023. Mary Woodvine at some of the dates.

The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men on BFI Southbank/BFI Player from 1-31 January 2023.

Further details are on the BFI website, one of the films of the year and it’s yours to watch in January!