PRESERVATION
PRESERVATION is an experimental short film and VR experience currently in development.
In the context of creeping ecological collapse, a pair of researchers embark on a conservation project to create a digital simulacrum of a tied island off the coast of England which will soon be made inaccessible by road. As they scan the environment and interview residents, uncanny digital glitches reveal hidden currents within the land, community and their personal histories, challenging their understanding of memory and preservation and the boundaries between the physical and the digital.
RESEARCH BACKGROUND / CONTEXT
Ethnography as a term was re-defined 1839 on a perceived need to describe the physical and cultural characteristics of ‘fast disappearing races’. Though officially undertaken in the interests of scientific documentation and posterity, this practice, termed salvage ethnography, is deeply entangled with a romanticism that conflates authenticity with the pastoral and traditional, a reactionary ideal against the ‘loss of the real’ in the context of industrialisation and modernisation.
The earliest experiments in cinema were scientific curiosities, meditations on motion and archiving. Likewise, anthropologists considered the camera as a valuable tool in an ongoing quest for greater objectivity and evidence, such as the work of Alfred Haddon’s photographic and cinematographic documentations of the Torres Straights islanders (1898), the first instance of the technology being used in ethnographic fieldwork.
However, controversy over the truthfulness of these images and practices has existed from the start; many of Haddon’s images and cinemagraphes were actually staged performances, an example of ‘primitive cinema’, a practice that would be taken up by ethnographers many times over, and most famously by Robert Flaherty in the production of his first film Nanook of the North (1922) and later, Man of Aran (1934), which follows a family carving out noble survival in a harsh yet striking landscape.
Despite being presented as a documentary, these are works of fiction, as Flaherty had paid locals to act out performances and traditions, many of which he fabricated entirely. Film thus promised the possibility of an archive of cultural documents that never truly existed, a practice that preserved the "authentic" as imaginary, always already lost to a world where cinema itself signified the inevitable spread of industrialisation.
We explore these histories and questions by invoking the salvage ethnography of a place in the context of the Anthropocene and the fabrication of the digital copy through the most cutting edge modern technology, the contested role of the ethnographer and the fate of ‘lost’ communities, both in the context of ecological collapse, economic destitution and population drainage, using the landscape of the Isle of Portland’s limestone quarries and eroding cliffside.
Director’s Statement
We are Georgie Ryan and Anna Dobos (Somewhere Films, Hero Films), creative collaborators trained in visual anthropology, working in video, audio, and experimental media. Georgie is a sonic ethnographer with a focus on field recording. Having grown up on the Isle of Portland, she has recently returned and is exploring the landscapes, histories, and communities that have shaped the island through a practice of mindful walking and visual research. Though based in London, Anna also grew up on an island, albeit one much farther away (Hawaii), and shares a keen interest in island life, ecosystems, and cultures, particularly in the context of geological upheaval; the eruption of a volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii in 2018 had destroyed a heritage beach and caused the evacuation of an entire subdivision near her home.
We came about this idea while discussing the phenomenon of ‘ghosts’ caught by Google Street View; lost relatives and loved ones, accidentally captured and forever fossilised in a digital landscape, something experienced by Georgie personally. Both hailing from families that embrace the mystical, we also have many questions regarding different modes of seeing and sensing, especially as real-world practices of digital preservation through Lidar technology become ever more common and at times contested.
Mindful of the histories entangled with ethnography, islands, and film and likewise self reflexive about our own roles and positionally as researchers and filmmakers, we aim to explore and confront the potentially voyeuristic gaze a camera can imply and are interested in the ways that image capture and other methods of recording space and place can essentialise and fossilise but also form relationships; between land and community, between individuals, the present, past and future, whatever that may bring.
The Isle of Portland, off the South Coast of Dorset, will be the primary shooting location. The island in the film will be inspired by it but will ultimately be an imagined place.
In Museums Without Walls, Jonathan Meades declares that "Portland is a bulky chunk of geological, social, topographical and demographic weirdness. It is the obverse of a beauty spot. 'Beauty' in this construction implies the picturesque. Portland is gloriously bereft of this quality. It is awesome. There is nothing pretty about it."
‘Kimberlin’, in the local dialect, refers to a person living on Portland who does not descend from a lineage of at least two generations. It can also refer to a person from Weymouth, or by extension, a stranger, outsider or foreigner.
Portland limestone is used across the UK, very prominently in London, such as Waterloo Bridge and St. Paul’s Cathedral. There is a local superstition about never saying ‘rabbit’ aloud due to the mining work; burrowing from rabbits have caused landslips in quarries. The sheer and crumbling cliffs are also a popular destination for climbers, whose continual usage has contributed to the erosion of the landscape over time.