animal drums
on Hotel Magazine, it’s a sad filmmmmm
A beautifully curated page of Animal Drums material on Hotel Magazine, with a small intro to the film, after its first screening at the whitechapel gallery, and a poem from the film, and Iain Sinclair’s poem responding to the film https://partisanhotel.co.uk/Animal-Drums
If you’re fortunate enough to have perceptive friends, whom, deep down, don’t wish you disappointment, then they’ll likely tell you, cautiously, what your work is about. Just as a good friend will tell you, you can’t keep a wild animal in a small London flat and then be surprised when it bites you.
My friend Camille Brooks has been a film projectionist in London cinemas for three decades. He’s seen a lot of films. He told me The Animal Drums is about the uncanny sensation of being in a part of London where you once were for the first time, and realising, in that moment of memory, not that things have changed, for London has never not changed, but whether actually it is the same place. These are different sensations. When you revisit your childhood home, yes, everything is smaller than you remember, and experiences, strangely of course, can lay themselves around you like tracing paper. But in London, to be by the grand union canal out past Willesden Junction, where I first was in the city over a decade ago, and where we shot so much of the film, is to arrive at a place that makes one feel as though one was never there at exactly the same moment of knowing you were.
The film is about development, sure, but not capital. It’s too ludic for that. It’s about people being squeezed, sure, but not because of greed. This is too much like a thing that everyone knows, even the greedy. The film is about the possibility of invisibility in the city. Can we still hide our weird behaviour? Our misdeeds and fetishes, and stupid hobbies like writing strange texts almost no one wants to read? It is about the beauty of a certain geographical space, so densely furrowed that it has no light left for the kind of “clarity” that produces righteousness, the pretence of entirely black and white thinking and morality, and no matter how much small clusters of human animals in London think they are on the ball, just one paper thin wall away, no one gives a shit about what they think or do.
My friend Gareth Evans said The Animal Drums is the first full length film poem he’s seen in the 21st century. He has a tendency to be too generous. But the film inevitably has a kind of abstract linguistic drive as its base. Josh Alexander and I were interested in whether film grammar is a metaphor or might be taken literally. And if it’s a poem somewhat, then it’s also a documentary, quite apparently and it’s also a narrative melodrama with found actors. It’s an attempt to use very specific technical tools, available only to the medium of film, with its manipulation of so many sensory elements, to generate something closer to what I take a poem to be.
Inevitably, watching the film for the first time on a cinema screen at Whitechapel Gallery, I realised it is about finding one’s own self-interest absurd, and how this is inescapable. That any turn to the outside will only reinforce the inside. That the harder the concrete, the softer the brain, the quick the chaos, the deeper the silence. The film pixelates my body, distorts my voice, sits me next to people I’ve met and breaks open our conversations into what they are. It evokes the small marginal shadows that seem so much more cavernous in the past and shows almost nothing in the slips of darkness. It watches wormwood scrubs, Kensal Green cemetery, new Whitechapel, an awkward performance, the India club, the catacombs of some city church you won’t know anyway. It can be such a despondent film, because it’s always sad and funny to realise how ridiculous one is. But it made me and a few other people laugh. This seems fitting, given its subject matter, that the experience of its own makers seeing it, was a slightly flat disturbance in an image no one was watching.
The film was also posted up on the 3am magazine lockdown Buzzwords series https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/3am-in-lockdown-41-joshua-alexander-steven-j-fowler