Depositions introduction and post-screening discussion with David Pendleton and Luke Fowler.

Transcript

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:00 

December 6, 2015. The Harvard Film Archive screened works by Luke Fowler. This is a recording of the introduction and the Q&A. Participating are David Pendleton, HFA Programmer, and filmmaker Luke Fowler.

David Pendleton  0:13 

[INITIAL AUDIO MISSING] to the presence of William Blake, who's another sort of figure in the film. Thompson was something of a Blake scholar. And of course, a lot of Blake's work was about mourning what he saw as the corruption of the English landscape because of the Industrial Revolution. As we'll see. I think the film mentions a few possible different ways that the current-day landscape might be read. And then to go on to Depositions, which is the first film, the shorter of the two films that we'll be seeing. It's also the more recent one. It's from 2014, from last year, as opposed to Poor Stockinger, which is from 2012.

Depositions is, in one way, a kind of visual anthropology, you might say. I would describe it as an ethnographic film, about documenting some of the sights and sounds of the Highlands of Scotland where the Travellers live. The Travellers, who could be considered a kind of indigenous people in the Scottish Highlands who lead rural, often nomadic lives. But the film is also kind of a meta-documentary, as it involves archival footage. But at the same time, as you'll see as the film goes on, Luke introduces some really intriguing other themes, about, for instance, 20th-century social engineering and sociological experiments, such as public housing, reeducation programs in reform schools, pharmacological treatments of mental illness—which brings in yet another theme, I think, the sort of a subtheme about the relationship between the rational and the irrational, or even the blurring of lines between the rational and the irrational. And it's the interrelation of these three themes, it's treated very cinematically, very visual, very associatively, I would say, as opposed to the kind of logical progression of argument that we would get in a written essay, that I think makes it a remarkable film. That's all I'll say about the films, other than to introduce the filmmaker himself.

We’ll watch the two films back to back. Altogether, they run just about 80, 85 minutes. And then we'll have a conversation with Luke Fowler.

And now, please welcome the man of the hour, Mr. Luke Fowler.

[APPLAUSE]

Luke Fowler  2:45 

Thank you, David, for your very generous introduction. And thank you to Jeremy and Haden and the projectionist, John, and the Film Study Center. And also to Radcliffe Institute, and to my friends from Radcliffe, who generously joined us tonight. I'll be happy to talk a bit more about the films after them. I can just say a few quick words, because I think David beautifully introduced them, so I don't want to say too much. But the first film that you will see, Depositions, is actually two years later than Poor Stockinger. And it was made as a commission for the BBC who started a program where they invited artists in to use their archives. And so I had free reign of archival material from the BBC, but I refused just to use this as a sole source of the film. And as you'll see, I rub the BBC’s archive up against a different archive of a very different nature, which is the archive from the School of Scottish Studies, which is primarily a sound archive, and was started in the 40s by Hamish Henderson, who was a very great Scottish anthropologist and also translator of Gramsci into English. And they had the job of—or the mission, under the rubric of Edinburgh University—of saving oral tradition in Scotland, and in particular, in the Highlands and Islands. So that's stories, songs, and customs. And so, I draw on those, and put those in contrast to the representations of Travelling people, and Highlands and Islanders, as made largely by journalists flown in from London.

[LAUGHTER]

So, yeah, anyway, the second film is called The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite, and, anyway…. [LAUGHS] I won’t say the film title, it's a bit of a mouthful. It is an investigation of E. P. Thompson's work with the Workers' Education Association in the 40s. Workers' Education Association hired many of the great figures from the New Left, including Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. And their job was to provide university level of education to the working classes in Britain. And in a way, it was education as a form of social production. And so I'm using archives also in this film, but largely, they're paper archives. And so I'm drawing on documents from the Workers' Education Association's archives, and also from the Special Collections in Leeds University. And these are class reports by E. P. Thompson. He was obliged to write class reports for all his classes that he taught. And that, in a way, gave me the perfect narrative to create the film with, as he manages, as you can hear, to sort of smuggle in his own frustrations with classes, and delight, also. And then the other text that runs through the film is called "Against University Standards." And this was a tract, a polemic, almost, that Thompson wrote as a internally circulated memo in the WEA. And it was really sort of debating how the classes should be taught, and the purpose of the classes, and really, yeah, trying to prevent them from being a kind of class indoctrination. So without further ado, I'd like to invite you to have a pleasant screening, and speak to you after.

[APPLAUSE]

John Quackenbush  8:09 

And now David Pendleton.

[APPLAUSE]

David Pendleton  8:13 

Please welcome back Luke Fowler.

[APPLAUSE]

Luke Fowler

Shall we have some water?

David Pendleton  8:35 

We have water, we just don't have glasses. So we'll just

Luke Fowler  8:38 

Okay. Spill it all over ourselves.

David Pendleton  8:43 

Maybe I'll begin. Do you have any introductory remarks that you want to add now, at the end of the screening, before we get into questions?

Luke Fowler  8:56 

I think it's pretty self-explanatory.

[LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton  9:00 

I was actually struck by, this time, watching the two of them together, the difference between the two films. Because it feels like there's a way in which Depositions has this flow to it, an organic flow, and it's actually more complicated than it seems. And on the other hand, The Poor Stockinger is, in a way, this very linear thing that relies a lot on this voice, moving year by year through these... Do you have any thoughts about the variety of structures that you use in these films, or about the way in which perhaps the specific subjects dictated these approaches, in these two cases?

Luke Fowler  9:49 

I mean, I sort of see the films like compositions, and I think any composer has to view their compositional procedures throughout their career. And so, I tend not to stick with one method, one compositional strategy, from one film to the next. I try to change it about, and try things different. And also, the form has to follow the content, right? And a large contributing aspect of this film—I mean, just very obvious, really—is the use of longer takes, which was enabled by the camera work of Peter Hutton and his commitment to longer takes. And, that's something that I've never really done before, and it isn't, it clearly isn't in the other films as much.

David Pendleton  10:56 

Right. Right.

Luke Fowler  10:56 

So I think that does influence the structure of the works and the montage, for sure.

David Pendleton  11:03 

Can you say a little bit of how you came to work with Peter Hutton, or about Peter Hutton as a possible influence on you? Because again, in many of your films, including the ones tonight, there's often sort of a very discursive aspect to them, or there's historical information to be imparted, or an attention to speaking, to language, etc., which is so different from Peter Hutton. And Robert Beavers is another filmmaker who I know has influenced you. Who also, seems to me, is very different in many ways from your project. And so I'm curious about how you see the two of those influence on you?

Luke Fowler  11:44 

Well, I think, you know, I see filmmaking as a sort of continual apprenticeship. And you have to choose your masters wisely. So I have acknowledged the importance of Peter and Robert's work on my own, through contact and friendship with them, and through exchange of ideas and films. And the collaboration with Peter, came about through– This was the first time that I've worked with a production. It was commissioned by a production company called Film and Video Umbrella. And they thought it necessary to have an external camera person. And I said, “Well, if I'm gonna work with anyone, it would have to be someone of my choosing.” I chose Peter.

And Peter had no idea about the history of the industrial areas of West Riding, or E. P. Thompson, or any of this, but was game for it.

David Pendleton  12:57 

And what exactly was in the commission? Was the commission to make a film about E.P. Thompson, about a particular area?

Luke Fowler  13:03 

No, I came up with the concept, and we pitched it, and the film was successful.

David Pendleton  13:14 

Are there questions from the audience? Oh, there's a lot of questions. Good. I’ll shut up then. Let's start with... there's a woman back there on the aisle, and we'll kind of move our way forward and over.

Audience 1  13:26 

So I have a question about the voiceover. I saw in the credits, it’s an amazing delivery by Cerith Wyn Evans. But I'm interested in your choice of his accent, which is so Welsh, and why...

Luke Fowler  13:44 

Ah, okay. Well, I can answer that.

David Pendleton  13:49 

Did everyone hear the question, more or less? Okay. Basically just asked him to talk about the voiceover, and particularly the use of this person with the Welsh accent, Cerith Wyn Evans, whose name I can't pronounce.

Luke Fowler  14:02 

Cerith Wyn Evans.

David Pendleton  14:04 

John, if you could turn up the audience mics, or at least that one that we just used, that would be helpful.

Luke Fowler  14:08 

For those that don't know, Cerith was a protege of Derek Jarman's and made some very important works under the badge of the New Romantic Cinema in the early 80s. He also was a Super 8 filmmaker, and actually shot some films for Jarman, including The Last of England. So he was taught by Peter Gidal. And yeah, when I was doing this apprenticeship with LUX called LUX Associate Artists, they paid for a mentor. And I chose Cerith and Lis Rhodes as my mentors. So it seemed sort of suitable. It seemed rather, you know, like I had this personal relationship with him. And it seemed quite an interesting way of defamiliarizing people from Thompson's voice, which is clearly stated throughout the film. Yeah, I had a personal empathy and accord. Plus, I just think his accent is so beautiful.

David Pendleton  15:44 

But the performance itself is at times eccentric, in interesting ways.

Luke Fowler  15:48 

Yeah, he, I mean, I think he underlies and reinforces many of the themes of the film. You know, he can't be the objective narrator, the impartial narrator, throughout the film. He can't remove his subjectivity from the film. And, he does so, and we refused to edit that out as a political statement. A sort of artistic statement. But yeah, he gives a lively interpretation of Thompson.

David Pendleton  16:25 

Other questions? Yes, there’s the woman...

Luke Fowler  16:27 

Not to everyone's taste.

David Pendleton  16:29 

There's a woman with her hand up.

Luke Fowler

Hiya.

David Pendleton

Just wait for the mic. Thank you.

Luke Fowler

Hi Marianne.

Audience 2  16:33 

Why did you include shots of yourself behind the camera?

Luke Fowler  16:39 

Similar to the reasons why I included Cerith's remarks. Because I don't believe that the filmmaker is a deracinated subject, that as a subject that, you know, that I could remove my own class or social upbringing from the film and present some... and I wouldn't care to, either. And so it's important that if you don't hear my interpretation, you at least see me making a film. In the same way that historians include prefaces and footnotes.

David Pendleton  17:23 

Some questions on this side as well. Okay. Well, this gentleman and then that gentlemen.

Audience 3  17:30 

One of the difficulties working on Edward Thompson is that the family has kept his papers closed till the year 2043.

Luke Fowler  17:40 

That's true.

Audience 3  17:41 

And you know, for us, it was somewhat ironic, because Edward was always angry at the British government for keeping papers closed. I know, particularly regarding his brother, when his brother was executed in Bulgaria. He brought that up a lot of times. So I wanted to hear from you a little bit about, was there follow-up work you wanted to do, or something you wanted to see from his personal papers that would have maybe helped with the project?

Luke Fowler  18:12 

I would love to have had access to that. But I also feel that those class notes are gems of knowledge and information. And they also sort of act as kind of a biography of him, in a way. So yeah, I mean, of course, it would be great to see the papers. But until that day comes, we have to make use of what we have. Read between the lines.

David Pendleton  18:49 

There's a question over here, to your other side.

Audience 4  18:54 

Thank you. Yeah, I really hated that narrator. I just have to say. I mean, this kind of bourgeois lassitude cuts against everything that Thompson represented, especially as an orator. I understand what you're saying about the defamiliarising, because it certainly worked, in that way. But I actually had a question about Travellers, which I think is a brilliant film. And I'm wondering if–

David Pendleton  19:21 

Deposition.

Audience 4  19:22 

I'm sorry, Deposition, right, Depositions. If you could talk about your theoretical influences. Because I mean, both films are very intellectual and philosophical, I felt. And the first one, in particular, struck me as being very much about—I mean maybe it's obvious, but—rationalization, and a juxtaposition of worlds. A kind of critique of positivism and the administration of things, or people as things. So I’m just wondering kind of about your own intellectual background. And also, relatedly, choosing E. P. Thompson. Maybe, it's more obvious, someone from the UK. But he's certainly more and more an overlooked figure, except among specialists, perhaps. But you know, it's a dreary, dreary situation for the left humanist tradition that Thompson is more and more forgotten.

Luke Fowler  20:26 

What was the last word?

Audience 4  20:27 

That Thompson is more and more forgotten. So I'm just wondering, like how you came to that subject?

Luke Fowler  20:35 

I'm not going to give you my reading list. [LAUGHS] But yeah, Thompson has been forgotten, perhaps. Or certainly hasn't been taught as widely now as he was in the 70s and 80s. And I think Thatcher and the shift in higher education, the battle for higher education, is certainly a reason for that. And that was one of the reasons why I included that extract from the Gould Report. Because that seemed like a very prescient event that was foretelling the fall of the left from the university system.

David Pendleton  21:31 

When was the Gould Report?

Luke Fowler  21:33 

I think it's 1971, or 1970, or is it? Yeah, it says in the credits.

David Pendleton  21:41 

Ah, I missed that part.

Luke Fowler  21:45 

And that was Stuart Hall, replying to Gould, if you didn't recognize his voice. Who also taught adult education in the WEA. So they all did, you know? Doing their bit.

David Pendleton  22:01 

And who was recently the subject of a sort of experimental documentary, which we showed here, by John Akomfrah, actually.

Luke Fowler

Yeah.

David Pendleton

It's fascinating the differences between the two films, actually. But to go back to the–

Luke Fowler  22:13 

I'm a big fan of Black Audio Film Collective. Yeah.

David Pendleton  22:18 

To go back to the question about Depositions. I mean, the question was about your intellectual influences. But I'm curious about the ways in which you chose this film that goes from looking at the Highlands and the Travellers to precisely this question of rationalism and the irrational. Because it's an interesting reading on the place of the Travellers, and of the Highlands, and of Scotland, within the United Kingdom.

Luke Fowler  22:47 

You know, it was like, at the time when there was a lot of like, jingoism about Scottish patriotism, with the rise of the independence movement, and the vote was coming up whilst I was making the film. So there was a lot of representations of Scotland and a struggle for Scottish identity. And I've felt that the voice of the Travellers is something that's been, again, marginalized from history, erased from history. And, those people had so much to give. And, and now, it was just like, I trawled the BBC archives for evidence of that, and all you got was a bit of like, you know, Sheila Stewart singing. You know that, it tended to be like, the Gaelic psalms. It was a very musical...

David Pendleton  23:45 

Folkloric, I mean, a sort of a folkloric approach.

Luke Fowler  23:47 

Yeah. Yeah. Appreciation of Highland and Island culture, without really, you know. And also, as you heard, quite condescending, at times. You know, [?ass in a nettie?]. Not a word that you hear on the BBC, these days.

David Pendleton  24:08 

[LAUGHS] What do you think about thinking about the film in relationship to ethnography? Or anthropology?

Luke Fowler  24:16 

Well, yeah, that's right. Because the other archive that I used. And you know, they were field workers that were writing and collecting those tapes. And so, what we went to do was film a lot of the plant lore, and customs, and ideas about animism and superstition that we found in the index cards, or the recordings of the Travellers in the archive. So when we weren't actually using the voices, we were using that as a field study to collect the film notes. So everything you see is relating somehow to a custom that's found in the Highlands. And that sounds really arch. I'm sure there's some moments that are just in there for the hell of it. [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  25:25 

Other questions? Okay, there's, yeah, there's a question there in the middle, and then I see you in the back, too. We'll come back to you after we go to the middle.

Audience 5  25:34 

I was originally gonna ask about the voiceover. But I have another question.

Luke Fowler  25:39 

Yeah. That chap's gone now. I don't know why he thought Cerith's bourgeois.

Audience 5  25:45 

Yeah. He's actually still here! [LAUGHS]

Luke Fowler

Ah! Yeah, oh, someone else walked...

Audience 5

But my question, actually–

Luke Fowler  25:53 

Cerith's a working-class artist!

Audience 5  25:54 

Actually, I’m wondering, The Poor Stockinger was brilliant. And I mean, among the many things that I really loved about it was the juxtaposition of the modern-day shots and the voiceover. And you're forced, as you're watching that, to think about what has happened since he was teaching that, in so many different ways. I mean, in terms of what's happened to the Workers’ Education, which is, I suppose, defunct. What's happened to those industrial societies where you're in these buildings, most of which, or some of which, seem to be disused, and others used for new purposes. So I wondered if you could just talk more about those spaces?

Luke Fowler  26:50 

Well so they didn't want to have the classes in universities.

Audience 5  26:57 

Right.

Luke Fowler  26:58 

So I don't know if it's clear, but there was a joint committee that was between the universities' extramural departments and the WEA, which was a working class organization. It was a radical organization that had a sort of socialist mission to it. And so they didn't want to put the classes in workingmen's clubs, on one hand.

Audience 5  27:26 

Right.

Luke Fowler  27:27 

You know, in partisan spaces. But they also didn't want to put them in the universities either. So they had to find sort of neutral spaces. And those were like, schools. And, quite often, they were like primary schools. So they all had to sit on–

Audience 5  27:45 

Little chairs

Luke Fowler  27:45 

–seats for children and things like that. And Thompson, you know, I don't know if it's clear, but he had to travel sometimes 50 miles from one class to the next, if not on an evening, but on a cold winter's night, without any heating in your car, like that's a pretty brutal, brutal job.

David Pendleton  28:10 

Well, it seems like each year, he's in a different place.

Luke Fowler  28:12 

Yeah. Yeah. Well, the classes went on for, you know, three, four years. And, so each class overlaps, you know. But you cover the whole of the industrial north of the West Riding, the former West Riding of Yorkshire, which is not called that anymore. So, yeah.

David Pendleton  28:41 

Thank you.

Luke Fowler  28:42 

Thanks for your question.

David Pendleton  28:43 

And then raise your hand again, sir, and we'll bring you the mic.

Audience 6  28:48 

Thank you very much for both films. As you were talking about self-reflexivity in the second film, my reading of the first was very much about that. Like a lot of contemporary art works that use the archive and do this sort of recuperative model unknowingly come off like kind of messianic NGOs, no matter how progressive they are. And what I loved about the refusal of a long take in the beginning, was that you weren't saying that now you're telling the correct story, or you're telling the real story, you're doing this for these people. You were also saying, this is a series of collage and incomplete vestiges of these histories. And you will not have a right to see this whole history, and neither can I, or want to give you that. I really loved that element of it.

Luke Fowler  29:31 

Ah, thank you. Can I write that down

[LAUGHTER]

Audience 6  29:35 

Yeah, it's fine.

David Pendleton  29:36 

I was taking notes, plus we have it recorded. Yeah, it's I think it's a nice little précis of one way of reading your use of editing, in a way, in relation to the archival footage, which is much more fragmented than, yeah, what we usually see. In fact, it's almost more like collage than montage, in some ways.

Luke Fowler  29:58 

Yeah. It's a big subject I don't have the answer to.

David Pendleton  30:05 

Are there other... We have time for maybe one or two more questions.

Luke Fowler  30:09 

Final question? One last question.

David Pendleton  30:11 

We have one last question.

Luke Fowler  30:13 

From the Welsh speaker in the audience.

David Pendleton  30:16 

We can discuss–

Audience 1  30:16 

Sorry, am I allowed to ask another?

Luke Fowler  30:18 

Only in Welsh.

Audience 1  30:21 

Who's gonna understand that? [LAUGHS]

Luke Fowler  30:24 

[LAUGHS] Cerith

Audience 1  30:26 

So, I'm intrigued by the modern-day shots of places like Huddersfield, or Leeds, or Bradford, because the times that I visited those places, they felt more busy. And they've also felt more multicultural. But your shots that coincide with the voiceover seem very particular, very empty. Not just the ones when you're looking in the old teaching spaces, but the streets don't have that many people on them. And, I'm wondering if you could talk a little about that.

Luke Fowler  30:58 

Well, I think that is partly down to Peter's sort of predilection towards having the panoramic view. And really, that was something that I took the lead from him on. I don't know if you noticed, but you know, because you have this problem of—if you want to call it a problem—Cerith doing both texts; he does the University Standards text and also the class reports, so how to demarcate those different textual spaces in the film. And the way of doing that, for me was to have these long panoramic shots of the city or the region that you're looking at. And that also is accompanied by Ben Vida's falling sound tones. So that electronic music only ever occurs underneath the University Standards, and Peter's panoramic view. But Peter, I mean, it was just really, really fascinating to watch, you know, the artist at work. It kind of was like, watching like Michelangelo painting and so. You know, the way that his patience... and searching for the correct viewpoint of the city and the correct time of day to record it. He's not as shoddy as I am.

David Pendleton  32:44 

He wasn't as what?

Luke Fowler  32:46 

Shoddy and sort of...

David Pendleton  32:47 

Oh, oh, oh, oh.

Luke Fowler  32:50 

–practical.

David Pendleton  32:51 

Oh, you're not so shoddy yourself. But it's interesting, because that reminds me, there's a moment where we hear a voice talking about landscapes, or the tradition of representing landscapes, often from this prospect, which precisely wants to try and empty the life out of it, in order to have a more aesthetic view.

Luke Fowler  33:13 

Yeah, we kept on playing that tape to Peter over and over again, to see whether it would, like, penetrate. But no.

[LAUGHTER]

Luke Fowler  33:19 

Still wanted to do his prospect shot.

David Pendleton  33:21 

Well that's right. I mean, the work itself is dialogic, the film itself. Because we have that voice that is dissenting not only from the Peter Hutton kind of landscape, but also from Blake's idea of this sort of, you know, sort of prelapsarian, bucolic British landscape before the Industrial Revolution happened.

Luke Fowler  33:41 

Sure. And, just like picking up on that, I think, you know, I think the film does invite other artists to try and work across the generations to do that. I think it's really interesting that he is a cinematic voice that has an ideological position that is different from this film, you know?

David Pendleton

Um hmm. Um hmm.

Luke Fowler

And so we're seeing him being challenged, but also, perhaps affording a new way of thinking about his own work.

David Pendleton  34:14 

Right. Well it seems like you're sort of the bridge that brings these things together, in some ways. Your authorial presence.

Luke Fowler  34:20 

Facilitator.

David Pendleton  34:22 

There's a way in which your use of spaces, or landscapes, the ways that it reminds one of Beavers, but which is also again, very different, because there's a whole level of collage or montage.

Luke Fowler  34:37 

Oh, yeah, Beavers would never use archival footage. Or a voice, really.

David Pendleton  34:40 

Well, no, no, but I'm talking about the footage that you shoot. No, no, exactly, exactly. So the fact that you're able to find something useful in what Beavers does, and then recombine it with all these other things, is fascinating. Alright. You're welcome.

Luke Fowler  34:55 

And thanks for your attention, again, for this quite strenuous, demanding program.

David Pendleton  35:00 

This was a difficult show, and you guys hung in there. So thank you. Wednesday morning, in this room, at 10 a.m., you'll have a chance to hear more and see more from Luke Fowler. But in the meantime, thanks to all of you for coming. And thank you, Luke.

[APPLAUSE]

Luke Fowler  35:14 

Thank you.

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