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[The Velvet Lantern series:The Velvet Lantern | Ceremony | Tricolour - The Passion of Joan of Arc | Manuscript - In Slower Motion | Before the Fall | An essay on Michelangelo Antonioni's 'Blow Up' | Blow Up Cardiff | Sunlight and Dirt | Winter Scatters Berries on Brittle Snow | Black Narcissus]
[Fork I: Barricade | Fork II: The Tower of Destruction | Fork III: Vanishing Point | Aside: Eight Voices in Darkness]
ON MY FIRST ENCOUNTER
I SLEPT
ON MY SECOND
I SLEPT
MY ONLY HOPE
TO SCROLL THROUGH
THE POETICS OF TECHNICOLOR
OF SOME 144,000 FRAMES
TO FIND THE NEEDED HANDFUL
SCROLL THROUGH
SUMPTUOUS COLOURS
ILLUMINATING ROMANTIC TIMES
TO BE SUPPLANTED
BY PROSAIC EASTMAN COLOUR
THROUGH
THE BRONZED SKINS
THE CHILDISH JEAN SIMMONS
BLACKED UP TO LOOK ALL ASIAN
WITH BELLS ON ANKLES
A CARTOONISH NATIVE
RESIDING IN THE HOME COUNTIES
AND WITH PUNGENCY
OF BLACK NARCISSUS
PERVERTING PIETY
TOWARDS SALACITY
SUCH DYSFUNCTIONAL FILMS
A CANTERBURY TALE
A STUMBLING MESS OF A FILM
DEFYING EXPECTATIONS
COVERING MORE GROUND
THAN IS NECESSARY
MOMENT BY MOMENT
AN UNNECESSARY YARN
CLEANSING CHAUCER'S BAWDINESS
TESTING PROFESSIONALS
AGAINST AMATEURS
OR SIMPLY BAD ACTORS
A FILM MADE BY A COMMUNITY COUNCIL
BY THE COMMITTEE OF A SUMMER FETE
IN AN IMAGINARY VILLAGE
IN THE HOME COUNTIES
WHERE CARTOON ASIANS
DRINK DARJEELING FROM CHINA CUPS
IN ENGLISH TEA ROOMS
DURING A BREAK IN THE SCHEDULE
AT A TIME WHEN ENGLISHNESS
HAD MUTATED INTO BRITISHNESS
UNDER A RAIN OF BOMBS
BUT BLACK NARCISSUS
WIPES ME OUT
LEAVING ME TO WAKE
TO THE TASK OF SEARCHING
DURING DARK MORNINGS
FOR THE DEFINING MOMENT
OF THE FILM
THE HINGE
THE WHITE HOT CORE
AND THEN A FRIEND DIES
AND A PURPOSE CONGEALS
INTO A TALE OF RINGING BELLS
AND A FROZEN MOMENT
...EXPLOSANTE FIXE...
TRAPPED IN AN INSTANT
BETWEEN LIFE AND A LAKE OF BLUE FIRE
RESEARCHING THE NOVEL
WHICH LANDS OPEN
LIKE A SPLIT BAG OF TRASH
SO I RUMMAGE THROUGH
THIS IMPOVERISHED NOVEL
BETWEEN BOUTS OF SLEEP
TO AT LEAST GET TO KNOW
WHAT THE FILM CONTAINED
WAS THAT MOMENT
WHEN STRIKE THE BELL
A NUN GOES AWOL
UNVEILING SEXUAL FRUSTRATION
BENEATH TOUSLED HAIR
TO THE TASK OF MURDER
AN ATTEMPT AT LEAST
A MURDER DONE WITH HANDS
AND SWEATING BROW
NOT BOMBS
HER GRAPPLING
WET HAND ON SHOULDER
BELL JERKED
ITS RESONANT ALARM
RANG OUT THE ANGELUS
HAIL MARY
FULL OF GRACE
SHE RANG AND RANG
THE RINGING SHALL NEVER STOP
I WAKE STARTLED
BREATHLESS
GASPING
AS IF BY SMELLING SALTS
OVERPOWERING THE BLACK NARCISSUS
REACHING OUT TO GRASP CLOTH
AND BREAK THE LOOP
COULD NOT BE BROKEN
AND IT PLAYS ON
IN THE CHAPEL
IN MEMORIAM
Black Narcissus took shape in the opposite direction to my other Velvet Lantern works. I started out without any thought of cinema until the sonic materials presented a clear move towards a scene in the eponymous movie where Deborah Kerr is feverishly ringing the chapel bell for prayer. I had bells, I had a chapel.
The bells are virtual. From the outset I envisioned the bare loudspeakers as bells. Before the piece had formed itself fully I was insistent on a range of bell timbres. I like the use of controlled randomness to vary the material thoughout. I applied it to a number of parameters - the pitch of the source recording; the audio spectrum of each of five shadow bells; the timing of the echoes; the segments of a vocal track; the video playback; the flickering of a light. These - sometimes subtle - changes all conspire to retain our interest despite everything being 'the same but different.' A visitor to the work on one day would experience broadly the same work as on another day, but it would not actually be the same. This self-similarity is important in its function as an installation. If I were writing it as music I would, most likely, adopt a teleological approach.
The bell is actually a recording of a copper bowl. I used this bowl physically in a piece long ago called In Memoriam RB (being my initials). (Strange how the memorial idea occurs again with the same object). It really does produce a clean sound, so it was ideally suited to being varied electronically. I use a technique called ring modulation where the spectrum - the various pitches that coalesce to form the one perceivable sound - is stretched so that the timbre is transformed into something more bell-like. Most bells are characterised by an inharmonic quality where the perceived pitch is often elusive and dissonant. I have, in effect, corrupted the purity of the original sound.
In the film Black Narcissus, based on the novel by Rumer Godden, the crisis point comes when Sister Ruth - a nun who has entered the erotic life - makes a failed attempt to push her superior from the bell tower to her death. This - for me at least - is the film's kernel as if the other 143,000 frames serve this moment. Therefore, in my work the bells, the look, the vulnerability are trapped in a state of eternal recurrence (if I may invoke Nietzsche's famous thought experiment here). Yet the micro variations within each event's iteration and in their mobile relation to each other encourages a reflection on cosmological notions: the multiverse, for example. I hope that's not too fanciful. One might suggest that Nietzsche did not go far enough - he stressed the exactitutde of the recurrent experience, not the idea that it might essentially be the same but with an infinity of tiny variations. I thus like to entertain the idea that my work illustrates that possibility and is sufficiently interesting to hold the viewer.
The nuns - in the person of Sister Clodagh - learn a lesson about colonialist attitudes. They had come with a mission to transform the beliefs of natives of Darjeeling in the Himalayas through a programme of Western Christian education. Apart from the nuns, the one connection to the West was the cynical Mr. Dean who had learned to adapt to local customs and beliefs to his own benefit. The film was believed to be timely in being released close to the date of the withdrawal of British rule. All this is, of course, being expressed in British colonialist language. But it is not enough to see it in purely geopolitical terms. It is also about the perils of denying the erotic in favour of an ascetic life. In my work Sister Ruth - in a state of having been spurned by Dean - jerkily attempts to move toward Sister Clodagh to carry out her revenge. Clodagh is protected from her as long as she keeps ringing that bell.
With the support of Penarth Town Council.