Bird Songs 9 has been compiled by Stephen Cracknell, singer, songwriter and all round good bloke. Along with his band, The Memory Band, Stephen is very much involved in an evening of ‘Folk on Film’ that is taking place at King’s Place, London on Friday, 27th Jan. Programme details and ticket information can be found in the following press release:

Listen To Britain: Folk On Film is a mixture of film and live music, celebrating folk music and culture on the big screen, featuring excerpts from such classic films as Far From The Madding Crowd, The Innocents, Barry Lyndon and The Wicker Man.

We are delighted to welcome special guest Lisa Knapp, returning to work with The Memory Band once more and bringing her amazing folk singing and fiddle playing. You can check out more about Lisa’s own work at her website.

Also joining us for the first time and our musical arranger for the evening is F-IRE Collective member and pianist Fred Thomas, fresh from composing his own musical version of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.

our very own Lizzie Stutters will be showing off her recorder skills and the wonderful Jason Garth Steel, whose second album is soon to be released on Rif Mountain will also be singing with us.

The evening will open with a short set of traditional songs by myself and I shall be joined by Hannah and Caughlin and Jess Roberts for a few numbers. Then we will venture on to the main event.

Tickets and full details are available at the King’s Place website.

Tickets are considerably cheaper bought in advance.

We’re extremely excited about this show and would love to see you there!

Stephen

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“The image speaks. Sound amplifies and comments”
Lindsay Anderson

Listen To Britain:Folk on Film is a programme of film and live music by The Memory Band, with a special guest appearance by folk-singer Lisa Knapp and new arrangements by F-ire Collective member and pianist Fred Thomas. The show celebrates pivotal pioints where modern approaches to both cinema and folk music in post-war Britain coincided to indelibly define so much of our visual perceptions of our musical past, our culture and it’s place in our landscape, whilst navigating the tension between realism and fantasy..

Although the Free Cinema movement was better known for it’s use of jazz and classical music, the occasions when those who emerged from it did employ folk music have had a far reaching effect. One of the most stunning uses was the song “O Willow Waly” which permeates the 1961 classic film The Innocents. The song was sung by Isla Cameron who was a highly regarded folk singer who had collaborated with Ewan MacColl and featured in broadcats by folklorist Peter Kennedy, responsible for forming Garland Films, the film division of the EFDSS.

O Willow Waly dominates the film right from the opening credits and it’s haunting, disturbingly seductive refrain is presages those of later films such as Rosemary’s Baby and Nightmare On Elm St. and creates a near-perfect template of spooky-folk:

In the early days Britsih cinema most folk songs in films were mostly the odd sea shanty in adventure films or as unrealsitic as those in Powell & Pressburgers I Know Where i’m Going like the over-theatrical studio based films they came from, they were rejected by a new generation which wanted location filming and music and acting which rang with authenticity.

Cameron also played a significant role in the majestic score to John Schlesinger’s 1967 version of Far From The Madding Crowd, which mixed Richard Rodney Bennett incrdibly lyrical yet modern score with songs collected by the likes of Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams. It also featured Dave Swarbrick as the fiddler and a young Trevor Lucas ghosting for Terence stamp, both of whom would go on play a part on the Fairport Convention story. But once again it is Cameron’s voice which dominates, no better than in this rendition of The Bold Grenadier so wonderfully amplifying the stunning photography of Nicholas Roeg.

But Far From The Madding Crowd wasn’t just realism, it’s sense of bigger budgets and a “heightened realism” was taken to a further extreme by Stanley Kubrick in Barry Lyndon, perhaps his most British of all of his films, which painstakingly recreated famous paintings of the time and allied it with a detailed period score which included contributions from The Chieftains.

This tension between realism and high-art would go on to define the debate on cinema in the 70s and like folk music would lead artists along a multitude of paths. The amateur cast assembled by Kevin Brownlow for Winstanley sing folk-songs in the Digger’s camp and Peter Hall in the wonderful Akenfield, augment a similar amatuer cast drawn from a handful of Suffolk Villages with song from respected folk singers Dave and Toni Arthur.

Yet it was 1973′s The Wicker Man a film made in the French form of cine-fantastique which was to sneak up on the outside and speak to a younger generation, eager once more for new perspectives. The Wicker Man tossed realism aside and it’s score by Paul Giovanni, aided by the playwright Peter Schaffer merrily mixed up sources and cultures, to make a hybrid which has also stood the test of time.

This restored masterpiece was premiered at the National Film Theatre last year, along with a live performance of the soundtrack by composer Simon Fisher Turner and The Elysian Quartet. Caught by the River contributor Andy Childs went along and reviewed it for us at the time. That review can be found HERE and the DVD, along with other titles from the BFI collection can be found in our shop HERE.

As the list of DVD titles from the BFI grows ever more interesting we decided we should be stocking them in our shop and a good place to start is with this, the recently released ‘folk film’, Requiem For A Village. It’s a strange and wonderful thing for which Electric Eden author Rob Young has provided an essay in the accompanying booklet. The BFI have kindly allowed us to print an extract:

Requiem for a Village: Cinema of the Anti-Scrape:

Requiem can be seen as a summation of a string of disconnected films made in the first half of the 1970s, all in various ways concerned with the precarious status of rural and community life in England. Its closest parallel is Akenfield (Peter Brook, 1974), filmed at Charsfield in Suffolk, a short distance from Requiem’s Witnesham. Like Requiem, Akenfield is an essay on the relationship of the country and city couched in a trans-generational fiction, using non-professional local participants, and which revels in the textures, sounds and colour palette of the Suffolk countryside. Penda’s Fen (Alan Clarke, 1974), a BBC Play for Today, is a meditation on the English condition, and contains another sequence featuring a figure from the past – in this case, the pagan king Penda of Mercia – bursting out of the earth to bring guidance to would-be radicals of the modern age. In the same period, John Betjeman was making a series of films nostalgic for forgotten corners of landscapes and villages, and hymning ancient institutions and rural branchlines, such as Metroland (1973), A Passion for Churches (1974) and Summoned by Bells (1976). It’s also instructive to view Gladwell’s film in the light of the Suffolk Horse Fairs, held annually at villages such as Barsham in the early 1970s, recreating the flavour of medieval pageants and Victorian steam fairs with jousting, hog roasts, folk theatre and military re-enactments – portals to the imagined golden age of ‘Merrie England’. Gladwell’s signature slow-motion footage intensifies the sense of the past made strange, lending an enchanted, supernatural air to the shoeing of a horse or the casting of a cartwheel. Peter Kennedy’s anthropological film of the Padstow May Day festivities, Oss Oss Wee Oss (1953), coolly gazes upon mysterious Cornish customs and traditions, emphasising the weirdness of folkloric survivals. Irrupting into the silent, mesmeric activity ride the Triumph-riding Hell’s Angels of death, who rip through the country lanes and vibrate the air with noise in an audio-visual allusion to the biker gang led by Oliver Reed in Joseph Losey’s The Damned (1961).

Rob Young is The Wire magazine’s editor-at-large and contributes to various publications including Uncut and Sight & Sound. His latest book, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, was published in 2010.

Requiem For A Village, is on sale from the Caught by the River shop, priced £19.99

A film of Dartmoor by Chris Chapman and Kate King (three minute extract from the sixty minute film)

In July 2007 photographer and film maker Chris Chapman and film maker Kate King set up The Dartmoor Film Project to produce an independent film about Dartmoor.
The result of this two-year collaboration is the film Wild River, Cold Stone which charts the history of the moor and its people. A beautiful mixture of music, poetry, stories of life and landscape, it captures the true spirit of Dartmoor.
Chris Chapman’s stunning camera-work, often the result of hours of patient waiting in all weathers, paints an evocative picture of Dartmoor in all its glory whilst acknowledging the adversities of life on the moor.
Avoiding the convention of a narrator, the story of the land and its people is told, without sentimentality, through the voices of archaeologists, historians, a geologist and those whose families have worked the land for generations.

Music

Extracts from “Dartmoor Symphony”, “Requiem — Well of Souls”, “Dartmoor Journey” and specially composed music by Nigel Shaw.
“Kitty Jay” and “Cape Clear” by kind permission of Seth Lakeman.

Poetry

Extract from “Dart” by Alice Oswald
For an order form – please visit: www.chrischapmanphotography.co.uk and click on the ‘Film’ section of the website.

Eastern Rises: Trailer from Mountainfilm in Telluride on Vimeo.

Dear Caught by the River folks,

A very belated thanks for sending me the Collins New Naturalist calendar that I won in you competition before Christmas. It has pride of place in my office and makes going to work almost bearable.

By way of thanks I thought I should draw your attention to the movie Eastern Rises, the film that won first prize at the Banff Mountain Film festival last year. A collection of the winning films recently did a tour of the UK and even the 20 minute version of Eastern Rises was highly enjoyable.

You might also be interested in my own fishing recollections and haiku that can be found here: www.mordenhaikupoetry.blogspot.com/

Best wishes and keep up the good work,

Matt

Spiral: Series 3. Episode 1
Saturday 2nd April. BBC4 21:00hrs.

by John Andrews:
For all those left without purpose in their lives on a Saturday evening since last week’s screening on BBC 4 of the final episode of ‘The Killing’, take heart for ‘Spiral’ returns in the same slot this coming weekend for a third series entitled ‘The Butcher of La Villette’. Similarly to ‘The Killing’, ‘Spiral’, based in Paris, tells the story of a crime from the perspective of the investigation with its main character being Police Captain Laure Berthaud who leads her dysfunctional squad down a disused railway line towards the dead body of a young woman and on into the ‘Spiral’ of the title, a psychological and physical whirlpool of intrigue, corruption and terror. Like ‘The Killing’ this is European television at its absolute best, if you have not seen the previous two series you will be addicted by midnight on Saturday and if you have you will already be counting down the hours.

Andrews of Arcadia scrapbook.

Spiral series 1 & 2 DVD box set on sale in the Caught by the river shop, priced £21.00

Review by Mathew Clayton.

Made in 1971 the Moon and the Sledgehammer is an extraordinary documentary about a family that live in a Sussex wood – change the vegetation and you could be watching a hillbilly family from the American deep south. Cut off from the modern world the father and his two grown-up sons spend their time tinkering with old machinery, constantly dripping shiny black oil onto rusty bits of metal. The adult daughter childishly pretends to drive a derelict old bus and plays a clapped out piano that has been left outside to rot. The soundtrack is a constant chirp of birdsong, the supporting cast a motley crew of insects, forever buzzing round heads or grimly getting stuck in the rivulets of oil, twitching furiously before they die. Everything is surrounded by leaves, hemmed in by them. Sunlight barely trickling through the walls of dark green.

Their tin roofed home looks unfit fit for human habitation, inside it resembles a run down bric-a-brac shop. Everything is ancient, collapsing, covered in dust, but with the promise that something unlikely and magical will be unearthed if you just dug around. One wall of the sitting room is taken up by a huge fairground organ on which the father inexpertly plays children’s songs.

Nothing much happens. The family are other wordly, one son talks about his belief in steam power, the father mugs it up for the camera performing fragments of old music hall routines. Dressed in old suits, unshaven and with roll up stubs hanging off their lips the men look unkempt but fantastic (if you like an old suit). The film is bucolic and tranquil but also unsettling. The family are constantly bickering. They may be at one with nature but they not at one with each other. The absent mother is never mentioned, and the viewer can’t help but wonder what secrets lie in the wood.

The Moon & The Sledgehammer gets a rare public showing at the ‘Caught by the River presents Grasscut’ event in London on Wednesday 20 April. Click here to buy tickets.

While making our movie The Lost World of Mr Hardy, a major theme was how the classic chalk streams of England had changed over the 135 years that the Hardy’s had been dominating fly fishing. Problem was we could not fit this into the film’s main storyline, so it will re-appear in a future project. However while filming interviews with riverkeeper Donny Donovan and the legendary Vic Foot, Donny took us out fishing on the ‘aquarium pool’ of his beat on the lower River Test and this is what happened.

Salmon fishing on the River Test – The Lost World of Mr Hardy extra from Trufflepig Films on Vimeo.

Click here to read Jon Berry’s original article and watch the trailer.
Trufflepig Films website.