Double Tide
27th of July - 2nd of August
Double Tide (Sharon Lockhart, 2009)
She trawls behind her what looks like the pan of a wheelbarrow, pulling it through the thick mud. She withdraws a receptacle from the barrow and begins to dig for clams. As she pierces the mud with her hands we document a litany of sounds; Deep guttural noises of the earth; vacuum like sucking; water trickling into these fissures. The camera remains stationary, the landscape is lost in mist but for the outline of a bank of trees to the left of the image; quickly these too are ensconced. We follow the digger’s imprints in the mud; At first venturing out five metres or so before doubling back, drawing an oval shape as she does. Her footsteps cause dark ruptures in the otherwise white void. She continues on. Occasionally she will double back to the large pan, heaving it away from us, perhaps so as not to lose sight of it. As the woman gets further from us she too starts to become indistinct in the fog. As the specificity of her figure disappears, so does her place in the definite present, instead becoming an allegory of a repeated practice. All of a sudden, just as it seems the woman will become lost to us, the mist recedes as she pushes against it. We can see the dark pines clearer than before, yet the gestures of the woman, that were recognisable in their humanity, are now communicated only through the pivot of her white hoodie against the black trousers. Occasionally we can hear alien noises in the distance; birdsong, a booming horn ahead of us, behind us, a barking dog, delineating our strange position between land and sea. We are in a liminal space, soon to be reclaimed by water; just as day is reclaiming the sky. All of sudden we notice a burning fire, emerging from the bottom of the trees. We are wrested away before it arrives.
Now the evening, we see what has been hidden from us. The sea stretching away till it is bordered by trees; towering walls which lunge periodically into the left side of the water. The tide drawing out for the second time today, the mud now a dust covered mirror, offering an incomplete version of what is ahead of us like fractures of stained glass. Just as the fog seemed to recede at dawn, now we watch the water retreat as the woman pushes against its boundary; the reflection ever more muddied as it falls back. The footprints now become lost, they merely distort the mirror further. The image now reveals more to distract us - the shifting water, a luminous sky, the wading bird that takes up residence at the edge of the water - we struggle to follow her exact route around the mud flat. Once again, we watch her work uninterrupted; until finally, the sun setting, she returns toward the camera and uses what pockets of water remain on the flats to wash her bucket, her boots, her hands.
My favourite archaeology lecturer at university - a skeptic of darwinism who said anyone who hadn’t decided on a philosophy of history yet was an idiot - burned in to me that rituals are inextricably liminal spaces; I’m always inclined to invert this and look for the ritual in the liminal and the connection here is not a tenuous one, it’s easy to find ritualism in man’s relationship to the moon, the sea and their tides. The double tide being a rare, significant occurrence; in this small location we are witness to a phenomenon which is the result of motions occurring across the Atlantic and through space, localised in these two static views presented to us; forces changing the environment around us, bringing in a natural bounty on these flats. It’s easy, especially given current circumstances, to find this an idyllic scene - the morning mist, sea air, undulating colours in the evening sky - and yet it is a film about labour. Hard, physical labour. It is a disquieting tension, this is often marginalised, cruelly low paid work that has always struck me as especially mournful; a feeling that I can trace back to listening to the news report about the Morecambe Bay deaths on a drive home from school. Where wilful exploitation resulted in the murder of twenty-one undocumented Chinese labourers when the changing tide left them cut off from shore.
In Double Tide we don’t ever see the product of the woman’s labour; we don’t see any exchange. Moreover, the parts of life that are not economic labour, which are profoundly effected by this time spent labouring, go unseen. The hours between sunrise and sunset are lost to us; yet in the evening the physical toll of the work is increasingly apparent. The woman groans at the strain of bending over; reaching down. She is struck by a couple of coughing fits. At times she pauses, is she admiring the view or merely resting her back. I imagine both. The often, invisible, encroachment of work into the other spaces of life is more intently captured in two other films by Lockhart. Both of which investigate the liminal spaces and experiences between work and ‘not work’; Exit (2008) updates Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895), presenting realtime long-takes of finishing time at a Maine iron works, over the course of one week; inverting the perspective of the Lumière brothers, so that the workers are moving away from the camera, down a long stretch of factory land. That we can never really make out the exact point of exit from the factory wryly questions whether we can ever really can escape the shadow of work. The same iron works features in Lunch Break (2008); consisting entirely of one tracking shot down a factory corridor, where workers eat, talk, nap or just sit in the alcoves left between a dense network of cables, gauges and machinery. The footage slowed to a glacial pace, its somewhat excruciating duration reinforces the incongruity of the space and alienation of the workers from each-other, while, perhaps, approximating a worker’s desire to stretch out their break as long as possible or, for me, the slow, tedium of watching the minute hand move on the job; only too aware of the hours to go before you can leave. At a running time of 83 minutes, it’s a work, I imagine, best viewed in an installation setting, but consider my full viewing on a Friday night a gift to you, valued reader.
A fourth film of Lockhart’s I watched this week, Podwórka (2009), is on its surface a somewhat oppositional piece; its focus being on play rather than work — featuring six long takes in which children play with balls, toy cars, and mud in the courtyards of Łódź, Poland. In each of these shots the active, constant movement and imagination of the children contrasts with the still grey walls and overgrown ruins around them; All framed with an astonishing care and attention for how the small bodies and bright colours move within and between the architecture. The children are left, almost entirely, to themselves; the only reproductive labour performed by a grandmother; who we briefly observe teaching a boy how to ride a bike and, towards the end of the sequence, comforting him after a fall. This absence of parental care due to economic necessity, casts a pall in much the same way as the rising residential blocks lifelessly enclose the children; as with Double Tide Lockhart lucidly communicates the weight of the ‘unseen’ that predicates the image.
Writing about First Cow two weeks ago I suggested that Kelly Reichardt was brushing against the corruption of something pre-capitalistic. Double Tide clarified my feelings, in a deep and, frankly, overwhelming sensation. It is an essentially Straub-ian work, arguing the value in searching the ancient for something vital and lost, while consistently rooted in a critique of the modern social relations which encourage a distorted romanticisation of the past only to entrench the capitalistic structures of the present. That Straub’s latest work also looks out to water in questioning our paths forward from capitalism, should be noted. As it becomes ever more pressing that we move to a method of consumption that is radically less production intensive, more localised, and that understands and engages with seasonality — how do we bridge the divide between the necessity of finding a healthier relationship to the world around us, while recognising and separating ourselves from a reactionary fetishisation of perceived ‘agrarian’ activities, that ignores and enables capitalist exploitation. I’m not sure how we ultimately achieve this but I think Double Tide finds worth in suggesting a more ritualistic attitude to such acts. One that acknowledges a transformational effect, no matter how small, on both the environment and labourer, and the significance in carrying out the activity according to the vagaries of the world around us. I turned to a collection of Margaret Tait’s writings, not for an answer but merely to deepen the sensation of this relationship, and came across an extended poem titled Cave Drawing of the Water of the Earth and Sea; and, in particular, these lines, that capture its practicality; its mystery:
I drink the ocean
And have met the fish
Which never reach the surface
Song and Solitude (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2007) - As with the other Dorsky films I’ve seen, a poetic beauty infinitely difficult to express. Small moments - the light on branches; the shaded crease down the back of a jacket; an arm - that are nonetheless complex in perspective and hugely dynamic in colour and motion. I’m inclined to use the word kaleidoscopic but even that feels reductive; failing to capture the overwhelming emotional response these image progressions produce. The man himself approximated the experience better than I could during last Thursday’s hour long live talk between Dorsky and Constance Lewallen:
“I try to take images that can’t be instantly replaced by a verbal idea or word... to very gently force people to have a more direct sense of vision…”
Organised by The Brooklyn Rail, the talk will hopefully go up on their youtube sometime soon.
another weird week, but i imagine these will continue for sometime. i have a little more assurance about the near future - essentially, i’m back on the job hunt, but, thankfully, will still have an income for the next few months.
many are less lucky and if you care at all about the future of arts and culture in london, and about cultural organisations showing a serious commitment to anti-racism and diversity, i would kindly ask that you read, and hopefully sign, the following open letter concerning the savage redundancies that have been announced by the southbank centre:
i hope you have a good week
james
xx
