Category: PhD

Macro shots during a visit to Magpie Bridge on the way to Tavistock. Kayla had her sketchbook and I filmed a crow flying that ended up in a looped video on Instagram maybe 30 years later.

One of those strange bits of film which have attached memories that aren’t on celluloid: sharply turning off the busy main road to Tavistock having spotted the sign at the last moment, navigating some awkward parking, walking over a grassy bank into the woods for the first time, heading towards the river. None of that is on film. I remember seeing the small red fruiting bodies on the lichen and the feel of the bark as I steadied the camera with its macro setting engaged. Tracking the flight of a crow through the trees in a shot which ended on Instagram decades later.

Is it too much of a stretch to think of the filmed scenes and the attendant memories as symbiotic like the algae living among filaments of fungi in lichens?

Some lovely footage of an unlovely submarine in Plymouth Sound, filmed by standing half-in half-out of the bedroom window in Beaumont Avenue. In the foreground is washing hung out to dry by June from a few doors down. June would defend her territory – her husband’s parking space in front of their house – using buckets and mops.

One of the towels is a giant American Express card which felt quite poignant – a symbol of US economic power owned by a poor family, foregrounding a NATO symbol of covert power. June told me about her childhood in a neighbourhood, a warren of terraces which were demolished after WW2, and how she collected scrap metal from a local bombed church with her mother.

Light thing through a leafy canopy – classic Super 8. Filmed on a group visit to Mount Edgcumbe with the Film Project. We had the enormously heavy video equipment of that era: tripod, camera and U-matic recorder with several batteries, but unfortunately no camera cable! I had my Super 8 camera with me.

There is a Japanese word for the coruscating light through woodland canopy – komorebi.

Fun filming on Plymouth Hoe as the lido, more often just called the Hoe Pool, took a battering by a winter storm. Kayla had her Bolex along for the filming. One guy was playing dare with the waves wearing a huge shoe-gazer overcoat. He’d have been a goner if he’d fallen in.

A highlight of my teenage years at a grammar school in Plymouth was swimming on The Hoe with friends at lunchtimes. The midday break was 75 minutes so we’d run to one of the local corner shops, buy a pasty then run to the sea about a mile away, swim for half an hour then run back to school. The school was pretty strict so being back late wasn’t an option!

Starling coming home to roost in West Hoe Park in the 90s. There was a huge roost in some tall leylandii at the end of the park. We knew the area as Kayla had rented a studio above Sandford & Down’s dive shop from film editor Lefkos Greco. We came back the next day and recorded sound with a gun mic on a Sony Professional Walkman cassette recorder.

A younger me around 1990 in the garden of Beaumont Avenue filmed by Kayla. One of the few times I appear in the archive.

One of the holed stones at Carn Kenidjack in Cornwall. A long filming expedition to the far west on the moors of West Penwith in 1997.

A closed railway bridge over the river Plym. Filmed in 2006 during the World Cup, the area was deserted as people were glued to the TV or barbecuing during the beautiful weather. The bridge has since been reopened as a foot and cycle bridge.

The confluence of the Tory Brook – with its china clay runoff from Dartmoor – and the River Plym near marsh Mills.

Mark Cosgrove sliding down a rubble bank on the South Downs during a trip out from Brighton where we were spending the weekend.