Slapton Sands standing in for Dungeness to record voiceover. A bitterly cold day for sound recording in south Devon in December 2020, using a Sennheiser MS stereo pair in a Rycote windshield recording on a Zoom F4.
Spending time at Slapton took me back to a music festival on the beach many years ago with my dear friend Robert Surgey (RIP) travelling there in his mum’s tiny Mini pickup.
It also reminded me of filming underwater along that coast with Laurie Emberson for the BBC. Let’s just say it was a different era in terms of health and safety! I remember being in our small rib off Start Point (which is visible distantly in the first picture) with Laurie trying to restart the outboard for what seemed an age after we had been filming on a small wreck in the afternoon. We drifted out to sea despite my efforts to row towards shore in a thick 6mm drysuit while Laurie pulled on the starter cord. Thankfully the engine eventually fired up.
This audio recording session was an early adventure after the Covid lockdowns in the UK where travel was prohibited beyond some hazy notion of ‘local’.
Inside Close Up Cinema’s projection booth with one of Dorsky’s reels.
“Above all, cinema is a screen, cinema is a rectangle of light, cinema is light sculpted in time” (Dorsky, Devotional Cinema).
The screening of Nathaniel Dorsky’s Arboretum Cycle at the Close Up Centre in London’s Hoxton was a singular experience. The small auditorium was very dark and almost (two free seats) filled to capacity at 7.30 on a Friday night. We arrived slightly late following a taxing 250 mile journey that, due to the vagaries of satellite navigation and road closures, took us through Piccadilly Circus and Theatreland on the way to our less mainstream entertainment in Shoreditch. We were ushered into the pitch darkness by the charming projectionist. The audience was watching images of foliage in silence which were quite dim at times despite the high spec xenon-lamped projector, meaning one could sense the human presence rather than see it.
Dorsky’s presentation guidelines
Dorsky has restricted the availability of his films to analogue screenings. The films are 16mm prints of his silent films which must be projected at the ‘silent speed’ of 18fps. The prints had come from LightCone in Paris accompanied by strict guidelines for the screening which specified the films’ order, the brightness of the cinema, that the leaders must be left intact when the three larger reels were made up by the projectionist etc.
The auditorium was very quiet and unusually dark with the fire escape lights providing the only illumination other than the film projection . The audience was as silent as a group of around 100 people could be, there was no projector sound since it was housed in a proper projection box behind glass – unlike most 16mm screenings where an Elf projector is typically squeezed in to the rear of the seating in the auditorium. Images of the arboretum filled the 4:3 screen which had been blanked off to match the aspect ratio: some shadowy, some bright, an occasional shot of intense green beauty, images pulsing as the sun appeared from behind a cloud.
As the film filled the eyes the dislocated sounds of east London permeated the building. The thrum of a police helicopter overhead merged with shots of Californian sky glimpsed through the canopy of leaves. A washing machine somewhere above us in the building proceeded with its own cycles, strangely complementing the on-screen meditation.
Created over 10-month period, the seven-film Arboretum Cycle (2017) is dedicated to the relationship between light, trees, and plants of the Golden Gate Park Arboretum (Now known as the San Francisco Botantical Garden) in San Francisco, within walking distance of the filmmaker’s home. Dorsky began filming in February 2017 and completed editing at the end of December that year. This cycle of seven sections takes in a complete year in the world of light and plants. Not only do we witness the progression of the seasons but also the development of the filmmaking during this year-long exploration of light as life’s energy (2017).
“Silence in cinema is undoubtedly an acquired taste, but the delicacy and intimacy it reveals has many rich rewards. In film, there are two ways of including human beings. One is depicting them. Another is to create a film form which, in itself, has all the qualities of being human: tenderness, observation, fear, curiosity, the sense of stepping into the world, sudden murky disruptions and undercurrents, expansion, pulling back, contraction, relaxation, sublime revelation.” (Dorsky, 2022)
A number of films in my collection have accompanying audio on formats which changed over the years: audio cassette, a few reels of 1/4″ tape, DAT and solid state recording devices.
When searching for the original audio for the Sea City project recorded on DAT (Digital Audio Tape) I discovered my DAT recorder had expired – it turned on but would not play the tape. I contacted various friends and local organisations to borrow a player but all the machines had problems of one sort or another, seven machines in total!
DA-P1 with non-spinning head drum
A Panasonic SV-3800 DAT machine bought on eBay chewed up a tape
so was returned for a refund. It played a few tapes OK and these were captured via S/PDIF to the laptop.
Eventually I found a repairer in Ireland who fixed my Tascam DA-P1 – expensive!
Having been re-editing Sea Front with the newly-digitised HD footage my mind has moved to audio and whether to revamp the soundtrack. The audio for the larger project Sea City was recorded on DAT and MiniDisc (MD) which are both digital formats but require the recording to be played back in real-time.
As I write this, audio from around 2009 is being ingested over an optical digital cable in to the laptop and I’m hearing the sound of swifts, blackbirds – so a summer recording – and a distant police siren from an MD labelled ‘Garden ambience 28 May 09’. The disc holds 80 minutes of audio and by no means all of it matches the label.
The green line on a map in the 1960s has become a reality on satellite imagery as wildlife has flourished in the Buffer Zone while the manmade structures have fallen into ruin. We had recorded birdsong and the adhan from the Selimiye Mosque with a gun mic in a suspension mount when we attracted some unwanted attention from a group of Greek Cypriot border guards as we were walking back to the flat. They might just have been curious but it’s hard to tell when they’re in army uniform and carrying automatic weapons.
A few turns down the labyrinthine streets and we’d lost them.
