How The Earth Must See Itself (A Thirling)
Moving image / S16mm film / 2019
13 minutes 5 seconds
Collaboration with Simone Kenyon
Commissioned by National Theatre of Scotland
Funded by Creative Scotland
Nominated for The Scottish Short Film Award, 2020.How The Earth Must See Itself (A Thirling) is a response to a choreographic project by Simone Kenyon; a meditation on landscape, and a celebration of the words of Scots poet and writer Nan Shepherd (1893–1981).
Nan lived her whole life in the Cairngorm district of Scotland which is the UK’s only subarctic mountain range. She described herself as ‘thirled’ (tied) to the mountains which she walked from childhood to old age. The Living Mountain, her gorgeously uncategorizable book, attempts to describe her long relationship with them.
The film brings together elements of choreography, fragments of Shepherd's text and a polyvocal score by Hanna Tuulikki. Filmed on S16mm film, the film itself is both the medium and also mediator of our experience of the landscape gently requiring us to cultivate attention and to work with minimal means.
Extract from an essay about the film by writer, David Williams
‘…From its opening blurred pan across the dormant body-like folds of the Cairngorms, set against a misty skyline, one might perhaps conceive of the film itself as a soft, porous ‘awakening’ into an attuned, uninsulated receptivity in an immersive, quasi-animist present. “No-one knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it. As one slips over into sleep, the mind grows limpid. The body melts. Perception alone remains. One neither thinks nor desires nor remembers. There is nothing between me and the earth and sky”. And the mountain itself seems to stir into flickering life – a sprig of heather dancing softly in the breeze, a scurrying beetle, the astonishing feel-stretch of a caterpillar exploring a budding twig, the play of light on a spider’s web. The film’s closing fade-to-black, set alongside the sounds of a women’s choir and bird song, returns us to the darkness of (a different) sleep.’
Credits
Director: Lucy Cash / Lead Artist and Choreographer: Simone Kenyon / Performers: Jo Hellier, Claricia Parinussa, Caroline Reagh, Keren Smail and Petra Söör / Voice Over: Shirley Henderson / Choir: Alison Bell, Frances Davis, Beatrice Fettes, Anna Filipek, Caroline Gatt, Sarah Hobbs, Norma Hunter, Julie Lawson, Lisa Lawson, Sandy Leahy, Rebecca Livesay-Wright, Margaret Moore, Adele Napier, Angela Patterson, Sheila Pettitt, Sandra Robertson, Catherine Rose, Hannah May, Sheila Waterhouse, Ailsa Williams, Victoria Woodcock / Choir Leader and Vocalist: Lucy Duncombe / Choir Coordinator - Rebecca Grant / Composer: Hanna Tuulikki / Cinematographer: Peter Emery / Focus Puller: Jason Walker / Sound Recordist and Design: Pete Smith / Additional Sound Mixer: Ali Murray