SCFZ

The boy Smut is an evocation of myself in childhood in the nineteen-fifties. Living a private life of games and a fascination for the celebration of dead things which should always be noted and memorialized, with a passion for cricket, playing-cards and insect collecting, and a particular sense of place in mind – a genius loci – the Norfolk and Suffolk coastal landscape as prophetically close to the flat lands of Holland where I now live.

My father was obsessed with that section of the South-East English coast-line – plenty of sea water and fresh water intermingled, forever changing places. Big open skies. Bogs, marshes. Loads of birds. It was ideal for my father’s bird-watching fascinations. As near as possible to the Dutch flat-lands without crossing the English Channel. Three thousand years of back-history into pre-history. Traditional Roman Catholic pilgrimage lands full of ruined and almost forgotten castles and hundreds of moulding unvisited parish churches, priests’ holes, ghost stories, shameful atrocities, moonless nights, nightingales and glow-worms. Fairly reachable from London – though it took a day to get there via small country roads in my father’s battered car that broke down every fifty miles. As children (I have a younger brother) we spent summer holidays in caravans and tents and summer-houses and rented cottages and small hotels in and around Southwold and Walberswick in Suffolk, or further north in Bacton and Holkham and North Walsham. Later, as a young married man with two small children – I bought a very small 18th century loam and horse-hair and plaster-stucco-walled timber-frame cottage in the strange-sounding village of Diss with a stamping ground of another curiously-sounding village of Eye. Diss and Eye were full of ghosts. The cottage and its garden with its walnut tree – where banging your head on the ceiling and burying your shit in the blackberry-patch was mandatory, was bought from the proceeds of selling my SteenBeck – a four-plate, flat-bed 16mm film-editing machine, when I decided to burn my bridges and cease being a film editor with no way back and taking up the risk of becoming a professional film director with an uncertain future.

For this fourth feature-film I wanted to revisit all these places of my youth. The centre of our operational locations was a farm on a tidal estuary creek a few miles inland from Southwold – you can recognize the Southwold lighthouse flashing across the fields– erected to warn locals of Napoleon’s expected invasion – country-lanes, swimming pools, beaches, nettles, woods, forests. A sort of wet, flat ancient Garden of Paradise idyll – my second idyllic Garden of Paradise. My first idyllic Garden of Paradise was in Wiltshire between Salisbury and Shaftesbury at a tucked-away place called Wardour which sounds Tolkienesque and was where I made most of my early short films – the landscape of William Beckford who wrote Vathek, the first Gothic novel and built a folly with a tower higher than the spire of Salisbury Cathedral.

Lencho of the Apes wrote: ↑Mon Feb 01, 2021 8:05 pm Ay, so many that I wasn't able to get to! And I regret it so deeply!

rischka wrote: ↑Sun Jan 31, 2021 2:06 am numbers game

thoxans wrote: ↑Mon Feb 01, 2021 10:50 pm no worries

Lencho of the Apes wrote: ↑Mon Feb 01, 2021 10:59 pmyou're in

cinesmith wrote: ↑Tue Feb 02, 2021 8:06 pm individual titles

kanafani wrote: ↑Mon Jan 11, 2021 12:20 am

SAD_SCROOGE wrote: ↑Sun Jan 10, 2021 10:01 pm Watched TALKING TO STRANGERS. good shit
. Gang shit, will make my list

Lots of dialogue one could sample in the outro of a rap song there

Now that would be a deep cut