What a pleasure to be at tonight's Live Opening Event for Sheffield Doc/Fest!
There's always a buzz on the opening night, but this time it was something really special – a film about the British coastline, using 100 years of BFI archive footage, presented in the Crucible Theatre with British Sea Power giving the first performance of their specially composed score.
As director Penny Woolcock reminded us in her introduction, this is both a social history and a history of film. Beginning with silent black and white footage, some of it from the now familiar Mitchell and Kenyon, it progresses through early colour film where the reds and greens slightly overlap to some carefully composed black and white shots of top film noir quality. When lifeboatmen are pumping the bodies of rescued sailors, we see the shadow of the man winding the fixed camera. Post- Second World War colour film perfectly captures the rich browns of rusting ships, but adds a little too much yellow to the sky, creating a sickly blue. Then follows some black and white footage of ships being loaded, so crisp you can smell the timber. Grainy video reminds us of hovercraft journeys and the building of the Channel Tunnel.
The film is mainly chronological, but sometimes thematic, so we see men running in black and white to lifeboats, then dressing in bright yellow, the boat pushing through a black and white sea, then through deep blue. People from the past, who were thin and wore hats, mix with people who wear teeshirts in rainy Blackpool. Women on cross-Channel shopping trips mix with people who rarely shopped and always looked either too young or too old to be working.
Hard, grinding work is what our coastline was once all about, like the women rapidly, endlessly gutting fish. The live music adds a huge emotional pull to this, with powerful percussion in scenes of manual labour, building to fever pitch as the sea becomes a theatre of war. When the film has a soundtrack, the score melds seamlessly. Sometimes there is silence and just the sounds of the sea itself. Incredibly, the score was written and most of the collaboration took place within just a few months of this year.
The wonderful British Sea Power, and indeed the whole production, received a standing ovation in the Crucible.
If you want to see the film for yourself, it will be available on the Space Website via the internet, smartphones, tablets and smart TV until 31st October. The project aims to inspire people to tell their own stories about their relationship with the coast. For details, see www.sheffdocfest.com/view/thespace.
