Stuart Moore

Sunlight dancing on the trunk of a tree in Plymbridge Woods, used in our film Project. I remember the filming day well, but I’m not sure whether this was shot with my Canon or the underwater Eumig Super 8 camera. There is lovely footage filmed just under the surface of the River Plym and the memory of the icy water on my bare feet is as clear as if it was yesterday.

The weather vane on top of Charles Church in Plymouth, filmed from the now-demolished multi-storey carpark adjacent to the also-demolished Drake’s Circus shopping centre. There are only a few shots – a couple like this and a tilt up the spire. All these years later I can feel the smooth, solid concrete of the wall I leaned on to set up the tripod.

The filming was for my SWA-funded ‘Film About Plymouth’. I’d never noticed the vane before starting this project, the old ruin had just faded into the background through familiarity.

I drove to the top of the spiral car park and set up a tripod beside the thick concrete wall, facing the roundabout which has surrounded the church for decades. The sun caught the weathervane as it turned with the wind. The traffic circulated below, marooning the church on an island in a stream of traffic.

The church – fire-bombed in WW2 – was preserved as a ruined memorial to all those Plymothians who lost their lives in the conflict. Almost everything else in its immediate vicinity has been demolished at least once, with just some alms houses to the north-east side and part of a listed post-war garage to the south-west. When Abercrombie’s Plan for Plymouth relaid the roads, the church’s graveyard was dug up to create the roundabout. To the south-east corner the traffic passes just a few feet from the ancient walls.

It’s amazing that this shot of the weather vane gives no clue to the ruin below, nor the brutalist car park (now demolished) from which it was filmed. Dylan Trigg describes how ruins bear witness to trauma, different to the more usual oral histories. The church is in a state of ‘suspended ruination’ – windowless and with no roof excepting the spire. The interior area is grassed where the congregation sat, and closed off with a locked iron gate.

Our electrician Bill Dawe told me how he had been taken as a young child to the church by his mother a few days after it burned. The heat was so intense it had destroyed the roof. Bill and him mum collected the copper nails from rubble of the slates – with the vicar’s permission, he noted – loaded them into the pram and sold them to a scrap metal dealer.

June, our near-neighbour in Beaumont Avenue, just up the hill from the church, described how her nearby childhood neighbourhood had been flattened after the war. For her, the church was a memorial to this loss as well as the trauma of war.

The car park had an exciting helter-skelter tight spiralling exit ‘road’ at its centre.

2019 – the four ‘pineapples’ at the tower’s corners below the spire have been replaced with newly carved replicas as the originals were unsafe. Cost is £100,000.

https://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/news/plymouth-news/four-giant-pineapples-charles-church-313111

Prospect Cottage filmed by Kayla from the passenger seat as we drove away from Dungeness in 2009. We had left Plymouth early that morning to film an epic phantom-ride in a Marjon Ford Mondeo estate car. Tapeless video cameras were relatively new technology which I used to film the long drive. This pilgrimage recreated the journey I had made in 1989 with a local TV crewing company to film Dungeness B power station for a promo. Now such filming is beyond easy as dash cams record endless miles every day before automatically deleting the footage.

Jay Appleton proposed a ‘Prospect-Refuge’ theory – we look for opportunities to receive visual information, to explore, and find opportunities (prospect); we search for shelter, protection, and places to hide (refuge). Appleton also talks also about hazard as: ‘the proximity of something which threatens, menaces, or disturbs our equilibrium.’ Appleton’s book is The Experience of Landscape (1995??) So at Dungeness – views, prospect. Cottage, refuge. Power station, hazard? The trip echoes Appleton’s P-R – looking out from the car there’s a sense of prospect, with an illusory sense of refuge in the cocoon of the car with the ever-present hazards of the journey.

In Perestroika, Sarah Turner (or her alter-ego) is aghast when her sense of safety (refuge) in the train carriage – looking out into the passing landscape (prospect)– is shattered when a train pulls alongside allowing others to look in (hazard).

It’s strange how looking back some times feel like a golden age. At the time I of the Dungeness trips I could borrow a car from my university to make research trips to the other end of the country, visit film festivals in Norwich or conferences in Falmouth and not even have to pay for fuel. A few years later and things would change dramatically for the worse.

Filmed during a strange trip with Annette Kemp to Windsor Safari Park and its sea-life attraction. There were seals, dolphins and at least one orca in pretty small pools. Annette was strongly embedded in a dolphin-consciousness community in Penzance and had arranged a visit to the park which was closed, either for the winter or for good. She almost stripped-off and jumped into the orca’s pool – not sure whether I dissuaded her or she independently changed her mind. The one member of staff who took us to the dolphins explained how they balanced the cost of heating the water against the amount of food the unfortunate incarcerated mammals needed to survive – colder water, more food.

Annette Kemp was a force of nature, chosen to lead the third iteration of the film and video workshop in 1987. I was appointed senior technician using the skills I’d learned in the first year-long project. I was excluded from the second year after the leader did a dirty on all the workers and abandoned our plans to continue as a cooperative. He restarted with a new intake as it was a government job creation scheme – the Community Programme.

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.