Hello readers!
I’ve been sitting on this for far too long, but it’s fully-formed and everything else is up in the air, so consider this a gift – it’s about the lovely filmmaker and artist Julia Parks and her residency with Alchemy Film & Arts in 2022 – 2023. Enjoy! Links at the bottom as usual ❤️
I’m introduced to Julia Parks on the day she moves to Hawick. It’s the first day of her residency at Alchemy Film & Arts and the first day of their 12th Film & Moving Image Festival.
Over the year that follows, I see Julia occasionally, hear whispers of what she’s working on, anecdotes and a lot of different subjects. I’ve feel kind of adjacent to her residency, just by being in town. When I find myself sitting in the Heart of Hawick auditorium ready to watch Julia’s four new films, produced in her year-long residency with Alchemy Film & Arts, I only have an inkling of what’s about to happen.
To introduce Julia to town, a programme of her films was shown in 2022, shot on forever-beautiful 16mm, these part-documentaries, part textural and chemical experiments fascinate then delight. Her conversations around the work are wide-ranging, from themes of work, labour, hands and solidarity, to environment, nature and tradition. She’s the kind of gregarious person I like, who knows how to pull out the best part of a story out, find a thread, tease it. She asks direct questions, with a keen curiosity. I chat with her about sheep, and then agree for her to join us on my family’s farm one morning to come and see them. We walk in the spring meadow, and she identifies flowers growing there. Her enthusiasm is catching. Later, in the mid-summer, I join her and intern Bea for a day out. We fuss fluffy cats and listen to birds and play with wool and textiles and natural dyes.
After a whole year has passed, the lights dim, the audience quietens, and the satisfying thump of Alchemy’s festival stinger vibrates through us. The films begin.
Strong hands of men and women, new and from the archive open the film. The liveliness of the cheviot sheep with clean, watchful faces. Radio Borders pulls me into the smell of farmyard and Lanolin.
Then quiet. Green. Birdsong. A spider climbs over a mouldering pile of garment labels. Every image’s beautiful light astonishes, makes me want to live in these short shots just a little longer.
Cut – interior, daytime. Is that how they say it?
Hands leaf through a scrapbook. The producer’s clear voice introduces Ida Hayward and her work and the wool aliens[1]. We’re treated to a close-up of her dog. I like this.
A man in a meadow. Again, hands at work.
He introduces plants, these individual wool aliens, the pirri pirri burr.
Slide back to the sheep. A soft, soft image of raw sheep’s fleece, colours of spray-on markings. It’s like a pastel woolly ice cream.
Clouds of wool float and fall and move like a kind of liquid sinking into bales.
The image and the voice fit together; show, and tell, and show me some more, and just let me reach my hands into this 16mm world too, please.
Burrs. Sheep. Cut back. Forward. Plants. Animals. A sudden open landscape, a hawthorn tree. It is sticky spring again.
A man in a space-suit fights back against the aliens. A long scythe held expertly.
“Just google hogweed injuries”
I can feel the heat of the day, the sound of the bugs, the humidity by the river Tweed.
Machinery. Soap. Fabric falls like water cascades.
“women would use the teasel to brush the fabric by hand”
As we watch the seed heads move one way, the cloth moves another on a hundred-year-old machine.
I’ve seen these mills on screen before, in TV documentaries, in Jaques Perconte’s Ettrick[2], and in person, studying for my seldom-used degree in textiles, in making my own films in an empty mill, in living in the town called Hawick.
Seen through Julia’s eyes, they are renewed in their human movement. Their focus on the embodied work of people, the social history of generations expressed in their voices and countenances, in their hands.
Amateur singers play us out as we float down the Tweed and wash into the next chapter of the programme. A plane flies overhead, breaks the spell and begins another. It seems like it could be sprinkling little spiky burrs from the sky. A woman waves at it, and we laugh with that commonality of gesture and friendship.
“Nature’s Velcro”
There’s something of the incredibly normal in these strange events documented. Something down-to-earth, from the earth.
A man, the man on screen speaks about history and tradition. He stands, legs wide, arms almost like he’s being crucified, as people around him cover him in sheets of burrs.
In the wider shots, he looks like a teddy bear, a Morris dancer, a straw bear.
There’s something about flowers attached to him and nature and masculinity, something subverting my expectations of a man who I don’t know.
Tell Me About the Burryman is a portrait, simultaneously of a real, living man, and a timeless, ageless mythical one. We watch a transformation occur, a pilgrimage completed, and a reversal of states. The ritual of making and unmaking a creature that brings luck or good tidings of sombre rememberings.
The textures and colours on 16mm film bring a kind of living history to the event – this could be today, or sixty years ago, or far in the future. Timeless symbols of tradition within a world that’s forever changing and forever staying the same.
“See yous next year, thank you”
The cast-off prickly skin of the Burryman rests on a wall before the red forth bridge, Julia’s hand reaches from off-screen and picks a burr, for good luck. The burrs are still there, stuck to the headlining in her car, bringing luck everywhere she goes.
Birdsong and soft voices ease us into the third chapter. I find myself taking note of the words spoken, they explain the film better than I can:
“From being a pub to a hub”
“All hands on deck”
“learning together”
The voices from Burnfoot make this film, each person like a new musical note to complement the colours of the vegetables and the flowers.
Small acts of kindness; a bee is scooped up onto a pebble, a child tries to replace the ripped petal of a geranium’s flower, the kindness of sharing knowledge, the kindness of the whole project here.
“It’s all about sharing and working together”
A melon, the melon I’ve seen on beer mats around the festival venues, is cut, shared. In one short, choreographed movement, the hands pull back, and the film closes.
Chapter four begins.
Birdsong. Insects. Those quiet moments in the outdoors. A small flotilla of ducklings follow their mother, branch off. Hands open a box, open a torn piece of card from within, unfold it to reveal a universe of moths. Crows caw and insects speak. A mysterious clicking sound, dark night, shapes flicker, torchlight on trees. Nets and buckets. Are they eels?
At some point I realise there’s no human voices, and I understand how much it focuses me on what I’m looking at.
Machine digs
Childrens’ hands dig
Men in fluorescent clothes supervise
Display of dead bees
One large bull
Badger corpse
A Black horned lamb
The Hawick heron on the Slitrig
Women sing, a drone sustains.
Horses race, slow-motion
This, I realise, slowly, is Hawick. This haunting song. These strong beasts.
When someone asks me later in the evening, which of these four films is my favourite, I think I’m supposed to say The Wool Aliens; it’s big, it’s concise, it’s informative and fun and it’s collaborative. It’s the film that underpins the three shorter ones, everything fits around it.
But for me, All Flesh is Grass strikes in a different way. On personal, physical, psychological and political levels. This film, with its distinct lack of vocal or textual explanations, speaks to the heart of here.
“All Flesh is Grass” appeared to me as a phrase on the banks of the Ettrick River (a tributary of the Tweed) in 2019. The lunchtime walks I took out of my office job’s confines saw me marching along the tarmac path and away into the little areas of woodland on the edges of town. On the ground, in the ground, beside a rusty footbridge is a stone slab, and it speaks the words upwards at the sky with no context other than the mown grass around it, the dandelions, the bees, the dogs. I thought it must relate to the sheep and farming, the physical reality of the connection between plant and animal matter. Profound, it made me wonder at the nature of physical being and of not-being.
Later, I learn that the phrase is biblical. According to the internet, and the nearest bible I can get my hands on (presented to my great uncle Alan in 1942), the phrase is about human fragility and ephemerality in relation to God. I suppose this makes sense. I thought it was more about interconnectedness. Maybe I’m not a very good Christian.
If flesh and grass are the same, and interchangeable, the film ties them into the non-physical. The ghost-calls of the bats and the electronic machine speaking to them, the liquid water between the hands and the fish, the air in a child’s handful of soil. The knowledge of the names of all those bees, the story of the Slitrig heron. The faith and trust and belief that hold the on-screen sacrament of Hawick’s Common Riding. The wind that gives the flag life and wraps it around the Cornet’s head, the air the heron takes flight upon.
The crow calls three times. Two voices sing. Twa Corbies. It’s mournful and beautiful and strange. The horse and the land and the grass change into people, dressed in their best, like a future memory. They know they’re participating in history, while their image is brought into the camera, fixed on the film.
I don’t know The Twa Corbies before the film. It might be ancient; it might not be. Listen carefully; it’s a story of death (of a knight) and dinner (for the twa corbies). The final line says, “The wind sall blaw for evermair” and while the connection to the song and the images is clear, I’m left thinking about Hawick’s Mair and the humans that attend it alongside the plants and the animals.
I think, this film is the first film about the Common Riding that really captures some truth of it, of the physicality of it, the pureness of its original simplicity: secure the boundaries, the border, the ends of the earth – our earth – and the depth of some human need to be connected to the land, in body and spirit, however they might be defined.
[1] Plants not native to the UK that were brought here in the fleeces of sheep, and dispersed along the rivers when they were processed to make knitwear.
[2] Produced with the support of Alchemy back in 2015
Visit Julia’s website and see some images here: https://juliaparks.co.uk
Find out more about Alchemy’s work here: https://alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk
Have an adventure on Jacques Perconte’s website here: http://jacquesperconte.com
Jessie x
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Jessie Growden 