Finisterre
Occasionally my job as Motion Graphics Designer/Animator means there's some cross-over with my musical interests as dramatised here at WOEBOT. Very recently I made live visuals for an event for Kieran Evans, who along with Paul Kelly, made the celebrated "Finisterre" film with St Etienne.
I'd been wanting to see this for ages and repeatedly hassled the dozy in-house runner for a copy of the film. In the end I dug around their server, found it and burnt a copy myself. Finisterre (2003) is a documentary about London set to the music of St. Etienne. Its emphasis is on presenting the side of London familiar to Londoners (if not tourists) and in discovering the eternal in the banal. This translates to designerly-composed stills thick with grime of the improbable and fleeting. The static, impassive lens works beautifully in capturing London's breathless rush, bringing to mind the photograph on the rear of Nick Drake's "Bryter Later", Nick watching the traffic on the Westway speed in and out the lights. Much of the cinematography is ravishing; some of the images bordering on the iconic.
The voiceover by Michael Jayston is immaculate, immediately conjuring up the fusty odor of the past. Phillip Ellsmore's narration on Mordant Music's "Dead Air" had the same effect of plunging one into the nether-world of half-lit memory, of the dog-eared and unseemly. Complimenting this are interviews from amongst others Julian Opie, Vic Godard, Vashti Bunyan and Julian Opie which are refreshing not only for their informality but also because we never get to see the interviewee, the body in question is London.
There are things about the film that don't work: the series of uncomfortable living portraits of kids who, even though their discomfort is fore-grounded, look out-of-place and unfortunately the music of St Etienne themselves. To someone who, though a big fan of Bob Stanley's curatorial work, has never really embraced the band this came over as a series of slightly soul-less, music-by-numbers genre studies. However in all the film is a richly inscribed time-capsule conveying and inspiring an affection for this city which I think I ceased "seeing" years ago.
It's funny to reflect that Jim Clarke was planning on making "Heronbone-The Movie" with our kid Luke Davis what must have been a very long-time ago now. Paul Kelly went on to make "What have you done today, Mervyn Day?" a bid to "capture the mood and look of the lower lea valley area before it is transformed forever". Yeah boys, you missed a trick there.....