People Pebble

The walkers and workers on the slag heaps of northern France and the chalk cliffs of England cross a crumbling landscape. The 16mm black-and-white and the sound work navigate playfully between social memories, fantasy and abstraction.

A pneumatic drill, someone whistling, the noise of a locomotive, birds, wind… In this audiovisual music score, we enjoy trying to identify what we are seeing or hearing, sometimes by guesswork – for instance, the children romping on the beach seem to be making snowballs. Man’s many activities in the landscape are restored to the grain and noise of what constitutes it: matter. With no forewarning, the film brings together two landscapes on either side of the Channel: the black slag heaps of northern France, leftovers from a now abandoned mining industry, and the chalk cliffs of south-west England, vanishing for other reasons. “There, there were three cottages, here, a big house…” The editing shuffles together the cards of these two territories, playing on the contrast between forms and textures in black-and-white – a wise choice that is enhanced by the 16mm grain. The temptation of poetic landscape photography is confounded by the playful aspect of what “people” do to matter, which in itself is always potentially hybrid – sand, land, salt, rocks. The film conveys, with a joy tinged with melancholy, the overall frailty and instability of what in nature seemed to be rock-solid. An ode to impermanence, at a stone’s throw. (Charlotte Garson)