The Cause of Labour is the Hope of the World

We like to call it serendipity, a happy coincidence of our senses, but elevated, you know?  


Okay, so maybe there is a touch of intellectual intent driving the rhythms, orchestrating and controlling the flow that would otherwise be just public frenzy. 


Delayed by the garbage people insist on throwing in my path, I set out this morning to catch up on the accumulated recommendations piling up in the corners of the Computer Turret.  Midway through the sorting process, I came upon this trailer to Bill Morrison's The Miners' Hymns which premiered at this year's Tribeca Film Festival in a new section category, Viewpoints, meant to capture the essence of international independent cinema.


It was directed by TFF veteran Bill Morrison, who also gets a writing credit, along with Jóhann Jóhannsson and David Metcalfe.  


{sniff::sniff}  I smell something plural.


You'd have to know my academic history to understand my happiness at the reviews I called up in my search for this works' background -- but I'll spare you that.  Somewhere out there a dissertation director is reaching for Maalox and cursing the interdisciplinary.


First, I found a review for Jóhannsson's score.  The visual element was clearly considered a handy (and gosh-darned impressive) appendage for the music.


Next up was a review by a veteran film festival go-er that wondered much at the skilled manipulation of archived film, all nicely buttressed by an unobtrusive sound track.  Morrison has produced awesome work from such oddities as damaged film stock (Decasia, 2002), so keep an eye out for new trickery hums the hum. The rogue even resorts to enhancing deterioration, quoi!


Chuckle.  


It's a beautiful conversation.


This is the TFF Guide synopsis:

Filmmaker Bill Morrison is one of the leading international artists working within the genre of found footage filmmaking. In his previous work, like The Highwater Trilogy (TFF '06) and Release (TFF '10), he often uses shots replete with signs of chemical deterioration and decay. He then refashions these images via digital processing techniques into meditations on the fragility of human existence. InThe Miners' Hymns, Morrison shifts his emphasis from decaying footage to stunning black-and-white images that have been preserved in the British National Film Archives. From this raw material, Morrison artfully constructs a story of British coal miners at work below the surface of the earth, together with their vibrant, close-knit community above ground. Morrison intercuts this material with color footage that he himself filmed. These contemporary aerial landscapes of nondescript shopping malls and empty fields of green cover over the now-abandoned collieries situated in Northeast England.  

Morrison's compelling narrative pays tribute, in an emotionally moving and formally elegant fashion, to a vanished era of 20th-century working-class life. An original score by avant-garde Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson enriches this tale with a heartrending, elegiac tone.

While the film may have debuted at Tribeca, the music aired earlier.  With all the baggage of a separate-but-equal world view of the genres, FatCat Records had this to say about Jóhannsson's beautiful work:

Icelandic-born composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s debut album for FatCat’s 130701 imprint, ‘The Miners’ Hymns’ is a brand new film score from a hugely exciting collaborative project based around the weighty subject matter of the ill-fated mining community in North East England. A fine addition to Jóhannsson’s acclaimed release history, the album moves from suitably dark and brooding minimalism to moments of rousing transcendence, and showcases the composer's ability to effortlessly unite the haunting with the beautiful. With the majority of previous 130701 releases based around piano and string recordings, ‘The Miners’ Hymns’ is the first to focus on predominantly brass-based material. 

Originally presented as a live performance at Durham Cathedral over two nights in July 2010, ‘The Miners’ Hymns’ album is the result of a collaboration between Jóhann and highly regarded American experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison, whose stunning 2002 film ‘Decasia’ (composed from damaged film stock) was described by The Village Voice as “the most widely acclaimed American avant-garde film of the fin-de-siecle”. Says Jóhann of Morrison’s work: “I liked his aesthetic. His work reminded me of the kind of footage I use for my concerts, these abstract, blurry super-8 textures. His films deal with decay and memory, which are themes I work with a lot also, so there was a lot of common ground before we started.”

‘The Miners’ Hymns’ project was initially commissioned for Durham County Council’s 'Brass: Durham International Festival,' which incorporated the Durham Miners' Gala into a programme celebrating the culture of mining and the strong regional tradition of brass bands. Once the biggest trade union festival in Europe, attracting up to a quarter of a million people, the annual Gala continues despite the fact that coal is no longer mined in a county that was built on it.

You must forgive me.  I appreciate conversation, the back-and-forth of things;  I absolutely delight in it.
We often refer to collaboration between artists, and consider the result some kind of easy symbiosis.  


It's a work;  It's work, a separate third [fourth fifth sixth] creation, with requirements.


The music, in this case, was written before Morrison began the choice and assemblage of film footage.  He set the images "to" the music and then forwarded these esquisses to the composer who sketched and fiddled with them, and so on, playing the evocative tensions of sight and sound.  Process! Juicy process! 


True enough, far too many collaborations come to nothing more than a substantial sandwich, the process mostly trims and chops, academic draconian measures and sleights of hand.  The assemblage is lent heft and anchored by the insertion of a third bun, say -- the fancified architecture of a Big Mac.  Or the whole is brought to manageable submission by the steady coercive force of a "panini" press. 


It's still a sandwich. 


Trust me. I lived for decades on a subsistence diet of julienned ephemera, frenched histories, and matchsticks of reconstituted discursive crudités. Under the interrogator's prop of a hanging naked light bulb, I *made* those recalcitrant deaf-mute genres talk, God damn it.





The cure for my thick and smarmy goings-on?  The work, itself.  I've lost the reference but someone rightly introduced it as an homage -- not to music about, text on, or film of, but to the miner's of North East England, and to North East England, itself.

So.  Right.  {a::little::embarrassed::half-swallowed::cough::action}


Here's a trailer to The Miners' Hymns, featuring The Cause of Labour is the Hope of the World.