Paul Wright (2017)

‘What an experience we’re going to have!’

[Young woman taking her seat in NFT1 for BFI screening of Arcadia]

‘Bound to be, in some way or other … Possibly undesirable, but bound to be an experience of some sort’.

[Gudrun Brangwen in Women in Love by D H Lawrence]

This is unkind to the unnamed young woman, who was awed by NFT1 (it seemed to be her first time there) as much as keenly anticipating Paul Wright’s Arcadia.  Gudrun is talking about marriage rather than moviegoing.  But I went to Arcadia straight after watching Hereditary at Curzon Bloomsbury:  Ari Aster’s film is such a flagrant example of ‘experience cinema’ – of giving the audience an (inexplicably) ‘amazing’ time – that it made me more than usually sensitive to remarks like the one that I overheard.

Save for its framing device, Paul Wright’s film is a documentary, a collection of found footage from various sources, including the BFI archive.  The BFI website describes it as:

‘… an exhilarating study of the British people’s shifting — and contradictory — relationship to the land.  The film goes on a sensory, visceral journey through the contrasting seasons, taking in folk carnivals and fetes, masked parades, water divining and harvesting.  Set to a grand, expressive new score from Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Will Gregory (Goldfrapp) alongside folk music from the likes of Anne Briggs, Wright’s captivating film essay captures the beauty and brutality, and the magic and madness of rural Britain.’

Trevor Johnston, in his balanced Sight & Sound (July 2018) review of Arcadia, thinks ‘we never know quite what’s coming next’.  This is literally true yet the film is increasingly unsurprising.  Although Arcadia relies primarily on images, secondarily on voices and music, the writing is on the wall quite soon.  You admire the research effort and judgment that Wright and his team must have put into selecting and organising material.  There are many absorbing things to look at.  But the ‘old, weird Britain’ aspect is welded, through the juxtaposition and sometimes the repetition of sights and sounds, with right-on political attitudes.  The authorial point of view that emerges is pro-nature (given how much footage of naked cavorters is included, almost pro-naturist).  We shouldn’t rape the land but should share its fruits equally among us.  Christianity isn’t much cop though paganism is pretty cool.  Fox-hunting is bad because toffs do it.  The few bits of urban footage imply that the town has adopted, in modified form, what were originally country rituals, and that urbanisation has cut us off from our rustic roots.  You don’t have to disagree with these sentiments to find them trite.

The narrative framing involves a fair maiden in the heart of England who doesn’t feel she fits in:  everywhere she goes, she seems to be accompanied by a great darkness, until a voice whispers to her that ‘The secret is in the soil’ (and something else I didn’t quite hear).  Wright’s section titles include ‘Amnesia’, ‘Utopias’, ‘Folk’, ‘In a Dark Wood’, ‘The Winter Solstice’, ‘The Turning’ and ‘Oblivion’ (and more) yet the images they comprise make the chapters largely interchangeable.  Arcadia runs only seventy-nine minutes but it feels long.  I don’t think this is just because of its style although Adam Mars-Jones makes a good case in his TLS review that ‘sustained montage’ has been used to best effect by directors who understand it as being ‘closer to a special effect, to be judiciously rationed for maximum impact, than a practical way of constructing an experience of feature length’.  There’s that word again.  Gudrun Brangwen was right.

5 July 2018