Kent Academic Repository Full text document (pdf) Citation for published version Freeman, Adam Ludford (2020) ESSAYING PLACE: TIME AND LANDSCAPE IN THE ESSAY FILM. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, University of Kent,. DOI Link to record in KAR https://kar.kent.ac.uk/82613/ Document Version UNSPECIFIED Copyright & reuse Content in the Kent Academic Repository is made available for research purposes. Unless otherwise stated all content is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. Versions of research The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record. Enquiries For any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: [email protected] If you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html ESSAYING PLACE: TIME AND LANDSCAPE IN THE ESSAY FILM Adam Freeman School of Arts University of Kent PhD Practice Based Thesis in Film June 2020 Word Count: 49,998 212 Pages ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to Maurizio Cinquegrani for his continued guidance and support, Richard Misek, Tamar Jeffers McDonald and Virginia Pitts for their supervision and The School of Arts, University of Kent, for the opportunity to undertake this research. I would like to thank The Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England for their financial support. 2 ABSTRACT This practice as research thesis explores the representation of place in the essay film. Place and landscape are frequent subjects of the essay film, films that often form through, and in response to, encounters with the spaces of the world. This thesis seeks to shed light onto the essayistic representation of place through exploring the structures, make-up and experience of places and landscapes and through the application of theory from the field of geography. I establish what I call an essaying of place in order to describe the processes and outcomes of an approach to cities and landscapes through the essay film, one in which the complexities and multiplicities of place come to the fore. Central to the thesis is a focus on temporality in a consideration of place and in developing an understanding of the relationship between place and the essay film. I produced two film works that both take an essayistic form in an approach to representing place and landscape, embodying the theoretical research and expanding this research through creative production. My practice approaches the spaces of England through the essay film, where travelling acts as a film production device, as a research tool and as a method of putting into practice an essaying of place. The process oriented nature of a practice as research project positions filmmaking as a key element in understanding my work as a practitioner alongside the wider research into the essay form. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION - Place, Landscape and the Essay Film 5 PRACTICE SUBMISSION - Island Stories (59 minutes) and The Fifth Continent (23 minutes) DVD and digital file 29 CHAPTER ONE - Practice, Research and the Process of Essaying Place in The Fifth Continent and Island Stories 30 CHAPTER TWO - The Temporality of the Landscape in an Essaying of Place 54 CHAPTER THREE - The Fifth Continent and Island Stories: Place and Essayistic Film Practice 87 CONCLUSION 125 BIBLIOGRAPHY 131 FILMOGRAPHY 138 APPENDICES – Figures 141 Film script: The Fifth Continent 185 Film treatment: Island Stories 190 Film script: Island Stories 194 4 INTRODUCTION Place, Landscape and the Essay Film Three blond-haired children in woollen jumpers walk across a grassy hilltop, wind blowing gently, looking tentatively into the camera. A voice-over narrates, “The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland in 1965”. Filmed on location on the Icelandic island of Heimaey, this is the opening shot of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), an image which, accompanied by that line of dialogue, provides the specific spatial and temporal coordinates of travelling cameraman Sandor Krasna, establishing at the film’s opening the centrality of place. From Iceland to Guinea-Bissau to San Francisco, there is a wealth of place in the film, but it is Tokyo that is perhaps most richly explored. Through a cacophony of images, sounds, narratives and commentary, Tokyo is constructed as a dense web of the material city and its cultures, histories and stories, its rhythms and people; a seemingly infinite converging of angles and avenues. Marker’s voice-over takes the viewer from subject to subject, place to place, knotting a web around geography that diverges along tangents and disparate strands, grounded in the spaces of the film. Sans Soleil is arguably the best-known essay film and it is here that the relationship between place as subject and the essay as form perhaps reaches its zenith. It is also of unquestionable importance as an influence throughout the wider field of essayistic film production, on my own practice and in forming the research questions at the heart of this thesis. Sans Soleil then offers an appropriate opening from which to build an exploration of place and the essay film. My thesis employs a practice as research methodology in order to explore the relationship between the essay film and the representation of place. In 2015, as this research process was in its initial stages, I made a short film called The Fifth Continent (2015). This Super 8mm black and white film took the landscapes of Romney Marsh as subject matter. Following this, in the summer months of 2016, I undertook three significant periods of film production, each governed by a journey through England. The first of these excursions stretched from Margate on the far southeast tip of England, along the coast to Hastings, the town where I live. The second trip took me from Hastings to Cornwall. On the third journey, I travelled north from Hastings to a point just over the border with Scotland at the most 5 northeasterly tip of England. Intermittently, I gathered other film images through excursions to a variety of locations such as London and on a fourth journey to Lowestoft on the Suffolk coast at the easternmost point of England, and further images filmed around Hastings over time. The resulting images recorded during this time became the film Island Stories (2018). These two films form the practice components of this thesis. Both films were conceived as essay films from the onset, where the subject would be places and landscapes, films that would themselves emerge out of these landscape encounters. Through the production of the two films, my practice employed the essay film as a spatial tool, a form with which to research, represent and capture place through filmmaking. In this thesis, alongside an in depth exploration of my own essayistic process and practice and place in my films, I will contextualize my practice through a broader discussion of essay films concerned with place and landscape to understand the workings and functions of the essay form as it approaches spatial subjects. Essay films often express a rich articulation of place, which can be evocative, complex, dense and poetic. They often elicit an image of place that is multifaceted, multilayered and fragmentary, encompassing a wealth of information, comments, thoughts and ideas, where a densely woven representation of place emerges. Essay films engage with manifold narratives, with a myriad of lived experiences, with the material form of places as well as their ambience and atmosphere, along with the subjectivity of the film essayist and their own experience of places. They encompass documentary elements, observations, the facts and figures of places, as well as their more abstract, imaginative, fantastical and intangible aspects. I aim to show that within essay films, a unique image of place emerges, one attuned to the complexities, experiential qualities and atmospheric conditions of places, capturing the genius loci or “sense of place”, as well as forming a representation dense with the many facets of places and the structures of landscape. Within this investigation, time emerges as a central preoccupation in the essayistic representation of place, where to approach place essayistically is necessarily to engage with the inherent temporality of place and landscape. The importance of time manifests itself as an exploration of history in the landscape and of the pasts of place in juxtaposition with the continued unfolding time of everyday life in the present within essay films. Tentacular in form, the essay can pull in a breadth of information, narratives, references and subjects, unifying them within the physical spaces and 6 topographies of the film. This approach of the essay form to spatial subjects can be thought of as an “essaying of place”, a term I will use throughout this thesis. To essay is to “attempt” or “try”, a way of capturing and documenting thought as it unfolds around a subject. The essay film then can be considered in terms of a thought process articulated through the moving image. Positioning the representation of place specifically within the essay film as a central preoccupation offers a route into a relatively unexplored avenue of film scholarship. As I hope to demonstrate, the employment of a film practice in an approach to place and an exploration of the filmmaking and research processes, can offer a novel insight into the essay form and spatial content. This insight is gleaned through creative practice, where attention to all aspects from conception, through the research process and film production, to script writing and editing allows for an analysis of the essay form and the filmic image of place made possible through this form.