American Smoke

It was the season of autumn ghosts, a dampness in the soul.  November 2013.  I stopped outside the sea cadets building in Stoke Newington's Church Street, now re-purposed as an exhibition space: 'building-F'.  In the old bricks there were ghost traces of a painted sign: S S OKE.  The roof was an abandoned deck with white railings and a solitary flag pole.  Looking down at the street, a life-size photograph of J. G. Ballard.  In the new front window, a neat stack of Iain Sinclair's American Smoke.  Inside I was hoping to encounter the man himself, having heard that he would be selling off his old books for a limited period.  But there was no sign of him: just framed artwork and a bookcase filled almost entirely with his own publications, signed and annotated, with prices to match. Ridiculous, I now realise, to imagine he would be there in person, presiding over tables stacked with the remnants of his book selling days: paperbacks by overlooked London writers, pulp novelists, underground poets.  I lingered awhile - not buying anything felt like an affront to the couple from Test Centre who politely stood by as I looked at the shelves.  Eventually I left with a book of poems: Firewall.

American Smoke begins in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where Sinclair went to deliver a lecture on Charles Olson, 'poet, scholar and last rector of Black Mountain College'.  There he met Henry Ferrini, whose film on Olson I included in a post here on the Maximus Poems back in 2010.  He visited Dogtown, where Olson came and walked in the woods 'to refine the art of getting creatively lost'.  He even booked a tourist whale-watching cruise (assuring us that 'the excursion was being made for my wife'). Olson's first book, published in 1947, was a study of Moby Dick.  The boat trip cancelled, he headed for the local library, looking for Olson's marginalia in books that had found their way onto the stacks after his death.  He says he found rough notes for a poem in the endpapers of one volume (much harder to decipher than the text Sinclair added to his own books for the pop-up shop in Stoke Newington).  Back in London he was pleased to have 'absorbed some of the weather of the place' but realised in watching Ferrini's film again that Olson can only be experienced in the energy field of his poems.

My landscape interest in American Smoke had been kindled by Sinclair's account of a journey to see Gary Snyder, published initially as an essay in the LRB.  Snyder evaded discussion of poetics but was happy to talk about logging, ecological threats and the day-to-day work needed to maintain the land he bought cheaply in 1966: 'a hundred acres of manzanita thickets, with open stretches of ponderosa pine, black oak, cedar, madrone, Douglas fir, bunchgrass...'

'Taking responsibility for a portion of Sierra ridge, once occupied, river valley to densely forested upper slopes, by Indian tribes, was a major statement of intent from Snyder. ‘We were cash poor and land rich,’ he said. ‘And who needs more second-growth pine and manzanita?’ Alexander Pope, in his upstream exile at Twickenham, laid out garden and grotto as a conceit, an extension of his work into the world, and a powerful attractor for patrons and lesser talents. To fund the Sierra reinhabitation, as Snyder saw it, he took on reading tours and an academic position at UC Davis, fifty miles down the road near the state capital, Sacramento. He called his land Kitkitdizze, after the Wintu Indian name for the aromatic shrub known as bear clover. ...  This Thoreau-inspired wilderness encampment, real as it appears, is underwritten by the requirement to represent itself as a topic for thesis writers, a reluctant paradigm.  A magnet for approved visitors, students, localists, or anyone needing to understand if this thing can be managed: a self-funding, functioning centre that is not a retreat, but a resettlement...'

The whole book is structured around these encounters with writers, living and dead: Corso in New York, Burroughs in Kansas, the grave of Malcolm Lowry in Sussex.  From Vancouver, Sinclair goes to the Burrard Inlet in search of the shack Lowry and his wife constructed from driftwood and sawmill lumber.  It was a kind of idyll - described as such in some beautiful passages in Under the Volcano - and Sinclair visits the spot on a crystalline morning.  He is led along a winding path through resinous woodland, down to the shore.  Lowry had enjoyed the view here, across the water to an oil refinery where the S had fallen from the word SHELL.  Sinclair is tempted to go in - 'I'd like to swim, the water is strobing gold' - but he paddles instead in the cold, sharp-stoned shallows.  There is an old bottle top glinting in the water - not Lowry's, but something to pick up and take away.

Place: Taking the Waters

Reeds at Snape, Sunday morning

As promised last time, here are a few thoughts prompted by a weekend of reflections on water.  First onto the stage at Snape Maltings was Robert Macfarlane, who recalled how reading Roger Deakin's Waterlog had opened up a whole new aspect of the landscape for him, as well as raising wider questions about how to live.  The talk began with a recording of Deakin swimming in his moat and describing his frog's eye view of the water.  Macfarlane recalled his visits to Walnut Tree Farm, seeing Deakin relaxing in an old bath full of water that had been warmed over the course of day by the simple action of sunlight on a hose.  We liked the idea of Deakin raking out a maze from the autumn leaves for Macfarlane's young daughter to play in.  I'm afraid Mrs Plinius got the giggles when the unflattering pair of Speedos Deakin was wearing in one photograph were referred to by Macfarlane as 'a banana hammock.'  Deakin's achievement was to to combine a sense of rootedness with a wide ranging curiosity about the world; for Macfarlane he seemed to have resolved the tension between settling and moving which has troubled other nature writers like Edward Thomas.  He was, Macfarlane said, like a compass, with its base planted in Suffolk and the other point tracing a long sequence of journeys across the watery landscape.

The sea at Aldeburgh, Sunday morning

   
Jules Pretty was on next, describing his walks round the The Luminous Coast of East Anglia.  In this liminal zone, where the position of the coast shifts and changes during the course of the day, he encountered a two mile collective art work in the form of sea wall covered in graffiti, an old tip gradually eroding to reveal the detritus of Victorian London and fishermen's cottages on the North Norfolk coast whose windows all point inland away from the sea.  One ten day walk left him with the vision from one eye faded like an old photograph.  'I felt I was carrying an imprint of the sun holding position somewhere slightly behind my right eye. I had headed east, north, occasionally west inland and east again, and so the light was almost always ahead or off to starboard. It left me with an imbalance, and a sense that the whole world was luminous on one side. As dark clouds raced over the water it turned slate grey and menacing. But when the sun came out again, the water became a shimmering mix of silver and mercury, and I was lit from below as well as above.'

Ken Worpole, Saturday afternoon

Ken Worpole's talk, '350 Miles - the Essex Coast', drew on the short book of that title he wrote with photographer Jason Orton (a collaboration he characterised as a form of parallel play), and on his essay 'East of Eden' for the anthology Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and its Meanings.  The whole PLACE event was partly a continuation of this earlier Re-Enchantment Project (last year, we were in the same hall listening to talks on landscape and W. G. Sebald, including Robert Macfarlane on the wild places of Essex).  In an earlier post I mentioned one of Orton's photographs of a solid brick church with 'an uncanny correspondence between some of these austere church buildings, with their minimal window apertures, and the fortified military buildings in and around the coast.'  In his talk on Saturday, Worpole dwelled on the way the coast has been a key symbolic site for religious belief, from 'Dover Beach' to Don Cupitt's The Sea of Faith.  He showed an interesting photograph of a religious congregation meeting on the beach at Southend, which reminded me of the shore sermons of Gotthard Ludwig Kosegarten and their link to Caspar David Friedrich's painting of a Monk by the Sea.

David Rothenberg playing with Beluga whales

The rest of the afternoon was devoted to the sea itself: David Rothenberg played along to field recordings of waves and whales, Jay Griffiths read from the sea section of Wild, and Olivia Chaney performed some sea-related songs.  We also saw The Forgotten Space, a long film ('agit-prop', not art, according to co-director Noel Burch, who introduced it) about the effects of globalisation on the sea and the people who live and work in the vicinity of the great ports at Los Angeles, Rotterdam and Hong Kong. Watching an interview with an Indonesian sailor in his cabin, I wondered how Gary Snyder (who worked as a seaman in the fifties) would write about these vast container ships.  The 'seafarers' at a sailor's retreat in Hong Kong, built by British Christians in the days of empire, were all croupiers on the local casino ships, moored permanently offshore. There is striking footage of a Piranesi-like tower in Hong Kong, with container lorries circling endlessly upwards through the petrol fumes (ventilation would have been too expensive to install), and scenes of Rotterdam's robot trucks moving the containers around in an unfathomable sequence, with one human operative sitting alone in his tower.  The film explores the consequences of Rotterdam's expansion, from the construction of a freight-only train line through the crowded landscape of the Netherlands, to the alienation of port workers, like the man (not very old) who recalls wistfully how differently it had been when he first started working on his parents' barge.  Meanwhile, Antwerp is being developed as a rival to Rotterdam and we are shown the dilapidated village of Doel, set for demolition, the dike that protected it from the sea no defence against the tide of global capital.

The Forgotten Space.

From the industrial sublime to the faintly ridiculous: Saturday evening saw a work-in-progress presentation of Swandown, in which Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair 'pursue a suitably English voyage into the heart of place and politics' by 'taking a swan pedalo from Hastings beach to Hackney’s Olympic site via the South Coast, the inland waterways of Kent and the Thames estuary'.  There was a lot of joking around on stage but Iain Sinclair was allowed to be a bit highbrow in introducing the film extracts and duly made a connection between them and those recurring Modernist myths of the Odyssey and the Wasteland.  He talked about a recording of Basil Bunting, reading from Pound's Cantos, which he had lost and then been reunited with.  I thought of the post on Bunting and Pound I wrote here only a few weeks ago; Sinclair's method of making these cultural connections across a landscape or on a journey sometimes feels like a form of hyperlinking.

 Swandown snippets

It is hard to tell what the finished film will be like but there should be some amusing moments: a pedalo encounter with a UKBA motor launch, for instance, and the moment when a real swan attacks their fake one, knocking its head off.  My wife has always found Iain Sinclair "too blokeish" for her taste and didn't think much of a scene in which our heroes peddle their pedalo impassively past a drowned Ophelia, her white dress spreading on the waters like the wings of a swan.  The soundtrack to Swandown promises to be good though - put together by Jem Finer, whose time-lapse film of an ancient beech wood, Still, was installed in an upstairs room for the day.  As the extracts from Swandown were screened, he sat behind his laptop controlling various sound effects, accompanied by photographer Anonymous Bosch, whilst Sinclair, Kötting and singer Kirsten Norrie did their thing on stage.  The other member of the team, Kristin O'Donnell (Ophelia), walked on and lay down silently among the plastic swans.

Reeds at Snape, Sunday morning

PLACE: Taking the Waters resumed on Sunday, the eighteenth anniversary of Derek Jarman's death, with a showing of The Garden (1990) - a film I last saw many years ago at the ICA in London (with a rather different audience).  I can think of river films that might have flowed more readily together with the day's talks - William Raban's Thames Film for example - but it was nonetheless nice to see again Jarman's tinted, sped-up and slowed-down images of the beach and skies at Dungeness.  I had forgotten scenes like the Zéro de conduite style pillow-fight, re-staged on an iron-framed bed in which Jarman seems to be dreaming his own film.  The floating white feathers were a Sinclairesque connection to Swandown and my mind wandered on from this to Jean Vigo's other great film, L'Atalante, set on a working barge long before the coming of the containers.

Derek Jarman's The Garden extract

 

Swans and barges would appear again in the final three talks of the day.  Manu Luksch presented footage from her recent Kayak Libre project, in which she set up a water taxi service on London's canal system and recorded the thoughts of her passengers. One day she saw the body of swan floating by and found then that stories of dead swans kept coming up.  Simon Read showed a painting of the barge that he had brought over from Holland in 1980, at a time when the Dutch government was trying to clear the canals of unnecessary traffic.  He paints large maps of the shifting shorelands and sketches the potential impact of flood water and estuarine development in a style reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci.  Finally, the day's last journey was in another barge: down river to the mouth of the Thames.  Estuary is a film by James Price with texts read by Rachel Lichtenstein, originally shown at a similar arts festival in Southend last year, Shorelines.  These landscape-themed events seem to be becoming increasingly popular, and the hope is that PLACE will become an annual event.

Estuary, filmed by James Price

I think the best way to end this post is with Joseph Conrad's The Mirror of the Sea and a description of the Thames that was mentioned in Ken Worpole's talk and used at the start of Estuary.

'In the widening of the shores sinking low in the gray, smoky distances the greatness of the sea receives the mercantile fleet of good ships that London sends out upon the turn of every tide. They follow each other, going very close by the Essex shore. Such as the beads of a rosary told by business-like shipowners for the greater profit of the world they slip one by one into the open: while in the offing the inward-bound ships come up singly and in bunches from under the sea horizon closing the mouth of the river between Orfordness and North Foreland. They all converge upon the Nore, the warm speck of red upon the tones of drab and gray, with the distant shores running together towards the west, low and flat, like the sides of an enormous canal. The sea-reach of the Thames is straight, and, once Sheerness is left behind, its banks seem very uninhabited, except for the cluster of houses which is Southend, or here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the oil-storage tanks, low and round with slightly-domed roofs, peep over the edge of the fore-shore, as it were a village of Central African huts imitated in iron.  Bordered by the black and shining mud-flats, the level marsh extends for miles.  Away in the far background the land rises, closing the view with a continuous wooded slope, forming in the distance an interminable rampart overgrown with bushes.'

Scarp

I have been tipped off (thanks Hayden) to the rather surprising appearance on Thursday's Newsnight of a piece about Nick Papadimitriou and the deep topography of London's Edgelands.  You can watch it here until Thursday 24 February. You can also see it on the blog dedicated to John Rogers’ film The London Perambulator, which appears to have inspired the Newsnight feature. The London Perambulator 'looks at the city we deny and the future city that awaits us. Leading London writers and cultural commentators Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Russell Brand explore the importance of the liminal spaces at the city’s fringe, its Edgelands, through the work of enigmatic and downright eccentric writer and researcher Nick Papadimitriou - a man whose life is dedicated to exploring and archiving areas beyond the permitted territories of the high street, the retail park, the suburban walkways.'

Yes, Russell Brand (who now gets his second mention on this blog) is an admirer of the way Papadimitriou  'sees magic in everything'.  He says 'it takes an interesting mind to look at, like, sort of say, oh I saw this power station in Middlesex and, like, thinks it's Kubla Khan.' Some further insights are provided by Iain Sinclair, who puts Papadimitriou in the 'very British tradition' of topographical literature, engaging 'in a really heavy duty way with a single piece of landscape and digging into it'.  Sinclair goes on to say that this kind of writing 'doesn't come with French philosophical baggage' - cue footage of the Situationists, which leads on to some discussion of J.G. Ballard and then Richard Mabey, interviewed saying that terms like 'psychogeography' and 'deep topography' are merely confusing verbal jargon.  We get to see Mabey both as he is now and in the documentary based on his 1973 book The Unofficial Countryside.  Looking through binoculars at the overlooked wild nature in outer London's industrial landscape, he looks like a long-haired version of Robert Macfarlane in The Wild Places of Essex (see my previous post).  It would be great to see this programme re-broadcast; The Unofficial Countryside itself has been republished recently with a new foreword by Iain Sinclair.  In a re-reading of it for The Guardian, Sinclair refers to Nick Papadimitriou as 'a solid invisible, tramping and haunting Mabey's familiar turf, the Colne valley: the canals, reservoirs and sewage farms of the Watford-to-Heathrow corridor.'

Scarp from fugueur on Vimeo.

The Newsnight feature mentions a 'lucrative contract' for Nick Papadimitriou's forthcoming book, Scarp.  This will be an investigation of the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire Escarpment, which he says has been overlooked in landscape literature compared to the more famous escarpments of the Downs and Chilterns.  This book also features in Episode 3 of Ventures and Adventures in Topography, a series of broadcasts John Rogers and Nick Papadimitriou have been making for Resonance FM which looks 'at the rich tradition of early 20^th century topographical walking guides to London and the South East and explores what use they might be to us today. Each episode takes a trip through the pages of a different book as if we are embarking on a wayward topographical ramble, and includes contemporary field reports from walks in the areas described in these classic texts.'  You can download these as podcasts (and while you're at it, you might also be interested in Resonance FM's  Edible Landscape field recording podcasts.) Their walks take them to Brent Cross Shopping Centre (prompting a reading from The Arcades Project), the buried and forgotten Philly Brook in Leytonstone, the lost pleasure gardens of Finsbury and Pentonville and the Southern Outfall Sewer: 'guided by The Lure and Lore of London’s River by A.G. Linney (1920′s) they perambulate the raised path that follows the final journey of south London’s sewage to its terminus at the sewage colony at Cross Ness Point, ‘the place where all things end’'.

The grey sea turns in its sleep

To the South Bank Centre last night for the launch of a new anthology of prose and poetry about landscape and place - the second manifestation of The Re-Enchantment project.  I am also planning to be at their next event in January, the premiere of Grant Gee's film Patience (After Sebald), inspired by The Rings of Saturn.  The first Re-Enchantment project, England Revisited, has just come to an end - the return of Simon English to each of the sites he marked with a St. George's flag when making his All England Sculpture in 1971.  Back then he 'mapped and graphically marked out the word ENGLAND physically, precisely and equally down the length of a Bartholomew’s ordnance survey map of the country, dividing the word into 75 component points, thus converting the place into the word' (see above). The new work reflects the changes time has brought to these locations and there is a website where you can select a point and compare the landscape in 1971 and 2010.  There are also videoclips of the artist - I've included an example below.

Anyway, back to last night and the anthology: Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and its Meanings. The launch featured three poets: Elisabeth Bletsoe, Robin Robertson and Kathleen Jamie.  Elisabeth Bletsoe went first, prefacing her own work with a poem on the Sussex Downs by a key influence, Brighton poet Lee Harwood.  She then moved on to her 'Here Hare Here' (which initially set me thinking about Withnail and I) and some bird poetry inspired by The Sherborne Missal.  Her poem for the Re-Enchantment collection fuses the topography of Dorset and the story of St Wite, also known as St Candida, traditionally held to have been a Saxon woman killed by the Vikings, whose medieval shrine can still be seen at Whitchurch Canonicorum.

"I'm Robin Robertson and I'm from Aberdeen" announced the evening's second poet, and he proceeded to read 'Aberdeen', a poem that begins and ends with the lines: 'The grey sea turns in its sleep / disturbing seagulls from the green rock.'  His contribution to the anthology, 'Tillydrone Motte', is also set in Aberdeen, describing the highest point of Seaton Park - a mound he played on as a child, when it was thought to be the remains of an old castle.  Now the poet is older, no longer able to climb the trees or ford the river, and the motte has been found to be a Bronze Age burial cairn.  Robertson is a mesmerising performer, as you may be able to see from the clip I've embedded below, and everyone seemed engrossed as he read out his poems. 

The evening concluded with Kathleen Jamie's, 'On Rona', a prose account of a trip she made to an island 'far over the horizon, out in the north Atlantic', forty miles from the coast of Scotland - 'one last green hill rising from the waves.'  Like the landscapes in her book Findings, this was a location freshly observed with close attention and warm humour.  Her encounters with birds - the rare Leach's petrels with their secret nests dotted over the island - echoed some of the evening's earlier readings.  She closed the event with a Norman MacCaig poem, read partly in tribute to a writer whose centenary is this month.  There is a lot more to say about these poets and I will try to write more about them in future posts.  Indeed there is rich landscape material throughout the Re-Enchantment book - essays by Ken Worpole, Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane for example, along with a piece by Iain Sinclair on one of our local parks which concludes with an encounter with Stoke Newington's own Chinese landscape poet, Yang Lian.

Robinson in Ruins

On Friday I got to see extracts from Patrick Keiller's forthcoming film, Robinson in Ruins, at the AHRC's 'Art and Environment' conference at Tate Britain.  Keiller has been making it as part of an interdisciplinary project for the Landscape and Environment programme.  With him to present and talk about the film were an all-star panel - Patrick Wright, Doreen Massey, Matthew Flintham and Iain Sinclair.  Each of these, apart from Sinclair, was involved in the project, but working in parallel rather than contributing directly to the film itself.  Robinson in Ruins looks similar to Robinson in Space, filmed this time around Oxfordshire and focusing on the financial crisis unfolding through 2008.  Vanessa Redgrave takes over from Paul Scofield as the narrator. The film documents sites of political or historical significance, like the woodland where Professor David Kelly committed suicide, interleaved with recurrent images - letter boxes, wind blown flowers, lichen growing on traffic signs.  

The Five Sisters - shale bings admired by John Latham

Source: Wikimedia Commons

It was great to talk yesterday to some readers of this blog and enjoy a post-conference dinner in the sunlit landscape of St James Park with Kathryn and Jen (Kathryn Yusoff contributed a talk in the afternoon about the relationship between weather and climate).  Here, as promised, are a few quick impressions of the rest of the conference, which focused mainly on art and and had quite a lot to say about land art.  Richard Long's A Ten Mile Walk (1968), for example, was discussed by Nicholas Alfrey, who uncovered the historical landscape of Exmoor that the artist had traversed.  Craig Richardson talked about John Latham's involvement with the earthwork-like shale bings of West Lothian.  Ben Tufnell described Cai Guo Qiang's encounters with Spiral Jetty and Double Negative, and a trip to the Nevada testing site where the artist and his team managed to cause panic by detonating a small mushroom cloud.
  
The theme of artistic pilgrimage came up several times in different sessions.  Joy Sleeman described her trip to see Spiral Jetty and Sun Tunnels, finding there the idea of a pristine landscape (as described by Nancy Holt) belied by the evidence of some spent gun cartridges on the ground.  Brian Dillon re-told the story of his pilgrimage to Robert Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic and discussed examples of other recent artistic encounters with the ruins of modernism.  Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui talked about regularly re-visiting her own special site, A Wasteland in Rotterdam Harbour, 2003-2018.  Of course there is nothing new about footstepping earlier artists and Richard Wrigley began his presentation on the climate of the Roman Campagna with Corot's La promenade de Poussin.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, La promenade de Poussin, c1826

The landscapes imagined by Ballard, Tarkovsky, Sebald remain key influences - Matthew Gandy mentioned all of these in his talk (he included a bizarre photograph of a Ballardian luxury development in Argentina that has been inspired by the writings of Borges).  Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker, which imagines a post-apocalypse 'Inland' on the present landscape of Kent, is the source for a new work described yesterday by artist Heather Morison - a puppet show to be staged in Tasmania.  Heather and Ivan Morison travel the world making art but are based in Wales, where they own a wood and are creating an arboretum.  They also have a studio in Brighton where they are 'developing an atelier'.  Their approach somehow put me in mind of those glossy food/garden/design programmes on TV.  At one point we were shown a slide of the artists cooking for the locals in the manner of Hugh Fearnley-Wittenstall - the Morisons had designed their own burger and named it a 'J.G.' in honour of Ballard (I didn't manage to note down the ingredients).   

More interesting to me was Katie Paterson, whose work was discussed in a session on the Sublime. She described a work completed only last week, Inside this desert lies the tiniest grain of sand, which had involved returning to the Sahara desert a grain of sand that had been chiseled to 0.00005mm using the techniques of nanotechnology.  At extreme magnification the grain of sand resembled a planet and presumably the chiseling process could have created some nano-land art - a microscopic Spiral Jetty or near invisible Double Negative.  The point was made (by Brian Dillon) that she brings a necessary sense of humour to art that deals with cosmic scales of space and time.  This idea was reinforced near the end of the conference when Simon Faithfull showed his film of a domestic chair lifted to the edge of space by a weather balloon (see below). He also showed extracts from 0°00 Navigation, a Keaton-esque journey from the Channel to the North Sea along the Greenwich Meridian.  The clip below shows a section of this epic journey starting with the artist climbing undaunted through the back gardens of East Grinstead. Watching this it was hard not to think back to Richard Long, negotiating the obstacles of Exmoor, climbing doggedly over fences and sticking rigidly to the straight line on his Ordinance Survey Map. 

Simon Faithfull, Escape Vehicle No. 6, 2004

Simon Faithfull, 0°00 Navigation extract, 2009

The Olympic Park

A few weeks ago, at The Printed Path event, I heard Iain Sinclair describing his walk to the 2012 Olympics site in the company of writer Robert Macfarlane. Sinclair spoke amusingly of Macfarlane's youthful enthusiasm and described his attempt to climb the sculpture of Alfred Hitchcock at Gainsborough Studios, thwarted by security, noting that climbing seems to be the way Macfarlane 'gets to grips' with a landscape. I have thought of going up with my camera to take a look at the Olympic site myself - I once did a Sinclair-influenced walk up the Lea Valley, before the Olympics came to town - but my opportunities for psychogeographical wandering are limited these days. I imagine it's quite a popular destination at the moment... Sinclair said that he and Macfarlane had encountered at least one photographer with 'art pretensions'...

In his talk, Iain Sinclair praised Stephen Gill's photographs of the Olympic Park site, and in today's Guardian, Robert Macfarlane discusses these, as well as giving his own account of the walk with Sinclair. When they reach the construction site Sinclair says "Are you ready for the zone? From here on in it's pure Tarkovsky." But beyond the 'light-industrial spaces, car-wrecker's yards, square-windowed studios, haulage depots' there is the perimeter fence 'designed to exclude not only access, but also vision. There are no viewing windows built into it, no portholes for the curious stakeholder. To see inside the zone, you must ascend a Stratford towerblock, hire a helicopter, or - the desideratum - visit the ODA's website, which provides stills of the construction process and mocked-up futuramas of the park.' Images of the future like this one really do have an eerie quality...

Robert Macfarlane refers to the The Manor Gardens Allotments, a green oasis and vital part of the area's history, which has now been demolished despite the efforts of a strong campaign. A lot of people will be reading about the allotments in Moro East, the latest cookbook from Moro restaurant (you can see a clip here). But sadly they will never now be able to see the allotments that have inspired the cooks at Moro and so many other local people over the years.

Red Desert

Well it seems only right that after a posting on Ingmar Bergman I now do one on Michelangelo Antonioni, who also died this week. I’ve mentioned here before Antonioni’s use of a rocky island landscape in L’avenntura – a rather different kind of island to the ones in Bergman’s films, but no less important to the film. When I saw L’avenntura it was in a double bill with Red Desert – a film as memorable for its strange colours and industrial landscapes as for its disturbing portrayal of mental illness (through Monica Vitti’s character Giuliana). As Michael Gandy says in an essay ‘Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert’, the modern landscape in this film becomes ‘a source of profound mental anguish as if every feature has become transmuted into a threatening presence within Giuliana’s fragile psyche.’


Michael Gandy quotes a 1964 Sight and Sound article in which Michele Manceaux describes Antonioni’s choice of Ravenna ‘for its smoky factories, its oil derricks, its steel pylons. After the war, the pinewoods stretched down to the sea and the town had thirty thousand inhabitants. Today the silos and oil refineries have killed off the trees. Oil has been found here, artificial islands have been built; and there are a hundred and forty thousand inhabitants.’ Manceaux interviewed Antonioni, who said ‘I don’t say that there ought to be a return to nature, that industrialization is wrong. I even find something very beautiful in this mastery of man over matter. To me, these pipes and girders seem just as moving as the trees. Of course it’s horrifying to think that birds which fly through these fumes are going to fall dead, that the gas makes it impossible to grow anything for miles around. But every age, after all, has called for its sacrifices, and it’s out of these that something else has grown.’

Gandy situates Red Desert within a history of Italian cinema’s engagement with landscape. This began with an interest in the ‘authentic’ Italian landscape during the fascist period. ‘The development of neo-realism in the 1940s ... marked a political reappropriation of the cultural depiction of landscape that displaced the nationalist sentiments of the fascist era with a neo-Marxian emphasis on landscape as a focus of social and political struggle... Yet, in the cinema of Antonioni, the depiction of landscape moves beyond the physicality of space as a locus for action towards an engagement with the aesthetic effects of landscape on the psychological state of his protagonists. The cinematic landscape becomes the dramatic setting for an exploration of the experience of modernity.’
 

Red Desert is an interesting film but I’d agree with Gary Morris that there are downsides: ‘the pacing is indeed murderous, with scenes allowed to linger past their dramatic point (which no doubt is the point). For some, Giuliana’s constant state of existential despair and wild ramblings will grate rather than elicit sympathy. There’s a diverting "orgy sequence," but only Antonioni could shoot an orgy in which nobody has sex.’ Red Desert is not a film I want to go back and re-watch, unlike Antonioni’s next film, Blow-Up (1966), which has so many great scenes. In Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory he describes visiting Maryon Park, location for the possible murder in Blow-Up. The park ‘plays directly into the film, into the very specific sound of wind in the trees.’ ‘You can still find the flakes of dark green paint with which the production designer Assheton Gordon "dressed" the wooden fence. He recomposed the setting so that it could look more like itself.’ I don’t think I actually believe you can still find paint (this sounds like the Patrick Heron story about finding traces of Matisse’s paint) but one day I’m sure I’ll make the pilgrimage to Woolwich just to check.