Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Monday – Continuing: Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK – FREE

The 13th edition of Liverpool Biennial eases into its first full week across the city and the public realm. There is the usual rich mix of institutional and ‘found’ spaces, with the city-wide arts festival a celebration of discovery as much as anything else. This iteration’s subtitle, BEDROCK, suggests nothing if not a solid foundation from which to build. Curator Marie-Anne McQuay and an array of international artists’ excavations of and responses to the city await. Check individual venues for opening times.

Further Reading: My Life in the Biennial with Ghosts

Continuing: Independents Biennial 2025 – FREE

Running in parallel to BEDROCK is the just-as-well established Independents Biennial which, this year, feels as ambitious as it ever has done. Taking place in an astonishing 120 locations across Liverpool, Wirral, Sefton, Knowsley and St. Helens, it boasts 22 new commissions of its 64 exhibiting artists. From degree show first-timers to the likes of Rebecca Chesney, Johnny Vegas, and Brigitte Jurack, there’s much to look forward to from this year’s showcase of grassroots art and artists. Check individual venues for opening times.

Tuesday – Last Chance to See: Fractured Familiar @ 50MV, Crosby, Liverpool – FREE

Bringing together paintings and sculpture by Roxy Topia & Paddy Gould, Jeffrey Knopf, Jamie Kirk and Luke Skiffington, Fractured Familiar includes: 1970s cgi, medical models, signage, photography and 3D scans. Introducing glitches and uncertainty into such ordinarily typical territory, ‘truth and fiction,’ goes the exhibition blurb, ‘become blurred, forgotten and then reimagined’.

Wednesday – Sink Presents: Ben Vince 7pm @ Lost Art, Liverpool – £10 (no one turned away for lack of funds)

Saxophonist, producer and collaborator with, among others, Mica Levi, Ben Vince rocks up in the Baltic Triangle’s Lost Art, showcasing new works ahead of the release of his latest record. In a packed midweek line-up, Vince is supported by Grey Streak & ELIJAH RIGHT?, Ria Bagley, and Kepla.

Bound 8.10pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

Before The Matrix, siblings Lana and Lilly Wachowski made their directorial debut with this hard-bitten, sexy, 90s updating of the film noir. Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon star as Violet and Corky, who simmer as they plot the former’s escape from her mobster boyfriend, and find love amid a scheme to relieve the mafia of $2million.

Thursday – Exhibition Opening: Caroline Gorick: After Hours 6pm @ The Bridewell Studios & Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

At the intersection of abstraction and figuration, artist Caroline Gorick (above) presents new paintings inspired, she says, by “subjects found in my camera roll.” Part of the Independents Biennial, the exhibition – with themes including fear, memory, and fragility – runs until 18 June.

Friday – Semay Wu & Branton/Kelly 7.30pm @ Metal Liverpool, Edge Hill Station – £7/£5

An evening of atmospheric, innovative composition awaits at Edge Hill train station-based Metal Liverpool this Friday. With electroacoustic composer, improviser and cellist Semay Wu joined by experimentalist duo Nick Branton (reeds) and David Kelly (drums), expect the unexpected.

Friday the 13th 8pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

An absolute no-brainer of programming, check in with Jason et al at Crystal Lake for a stone-cold genre classic, this Friday the 13th…

Saturday – The Lord of the Rings Trilogy: Extended Editions 11am @ FACT Liverpool – £25.85

With a combined running time of 727 minutes, this special screening of Peter Jackson’s TLotR trilogy (the extended versions, no less) practically approaches a durational art happening in its scope. Marking the 20th anniversary of The Return of the King, make a day of it with Mr. Frodo, Gandalf and pals.

From the Archive: Nik Glover takes an in-depth look at on-screen fantasy

Liverpool Biennial Guided Tour – FREE

Don’t know where to start with this year’s Biennial? Each week, guided tours will take place from 2pm. Check the Biennial website for details.

Sunday – The Night of the Hunter 4.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.84

Writing about the film in 2014, George Jepson called Charles Laughton’s 1955 film The Night of the Hunter (starring Robert Mitchum as so-called preacher Harry Powell) “a twisted amalgam of Southern Gothic, a terrifying fairy-tale and vaudevillian slapstick comedy.” Adapted from a 1953 novel of the same name, it follows Mitchum’s psychopathically cruel ex-convict weedling his way into the unfortunate lives of a former cellmate’s family, in the name of hidden loot.

Further reading: Adam Scovell on The Night of the Hunter

Orchestra Baobab 7.30pm @ Liverpool Philharmonic Hall – £31/£26

I had one of those sit up and take notice of what’s on the radio moments recently, when Cerys Matthews played Senegalese dance troupe, Orchestra Baobab, on her 6music show (the song that grabbed my attention was Ray M’bele). Formed in the 1970s, they’re currently touring their winning blend of Afro-Cuban, pop and Griot (a West African oral tradition of music and storytelling) in venues across Europe. This Liverpool date is programmed in partnership with festival supremos, Africa Oyé.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media, from top: The Night of the Hunter still; Independents Biennial, The Old Fire Station; Ben Vince, Don’t Give Your Life; Cast, 2025, by Caroline Gorick: Friday the 13th trailer; Orchestra Baobab poster, Toucan Tango

Adam Scovell’s latest novel, Nettles, tells the tale of a boy – relentlessly bullied at secondary school – who takes refuge in nearby marshland. As with his previous works, Nettles is punctuated and augmented by photographs; here, Scovell talks us through some key images… 

Nettles follows a narrator revisiting his childhood home for the last time. His trip is marked by taking photos of certain locations that possess a personal significance, mostly due to things that happened to him at school twenty years or so earlier. The location is Wallasey on The Wirral, and the visits, at least, are more than a little autobiographical. The photos in question are all Polaroids and I was a little sad that we couldn’t publish them in colour in the book (they’re grainy scans on the page). So, here they are in colour.

School Lane

This is the first Polaroid the reader will encounter, though not the first photo (that’s a fragment of a photo of me in my school uniform the day before my first day of secondary school). This is the alleyway where the main childhood incident occurs involving the nettles of the book’s title. It’s actually quite a nice little path in summer as the vegetation is left to run wild, so lots of buddleia and insects. It still brings back God awful memories of heading to the field behind in the winter to be battered in “Games”. The mud from it used to reek for days afterwards, like it seeped into your skin. It was probably polluted. The field behind is now left for the plants and you can see how wild a place it is today, with the vegetation taller than most walkers.

The M53

The book’s narrator pays three visits with his Polaroid camera to the landscape under the M53. This is where he hid twenty years earlier when escaping the bullies of the school. It’s such an evocative location in hindsight, one that seemed perfectly everyday to me for a long while but gained significance as I realised how much work I liked as an adult had been made around similar places. In part, it’s like a northern version of J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island, but the nearby marsh also strangely reminds of The Zone from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Admittedly, the main constant of the place is the presence of burnt skeletal remains of scooters. It’s like some strange ritual from the north end; nab a Moped, skid it around under the road for a bit and then set fire to it. There has never not been the remains of one there.

Another photo by the motorway is actually gifted to the narrator’s father, and is less of the M53’s cavern underneath and more concerned with the marshland next to it. There are some lovely pylons around there and, because it’s such an overgrown place, they just look like part of the land. They could be natural. If you’re getting the train from Liverpool to Wallasey, you’re spoiled for views on either side. On the left you have the Ballardian concrete-scape, on the right you have the marsh with flooded train tracks, marsh and pylons. It’s amazing. It’s also the location roughly where the Labour MP Frank Field suggested building a container village to house “The Families” from the north end – a few families that caused a lot of crime and trouble in the area – when they were out of control in the early 2000s, though it was obviously rejected. I think he also wanted to put them in a concrete bunker under the M53 too, like they were radioactive material with a dangerous half-life.

Loggerheads

I wanted to include a painting in the book actually done in the schooldays, and this is the only one I ever kept. I think my last art teacher, the one that stopped me from being allowed to do art at A level, threw all our work away even before term had ended. This picture was actually done a few years later than the book claims but was still done under the same dictum by the teacher: “Draw somewhere important to you.” It’s meant to be Loggerheads in North Wales, and I remember it being one of the very few drawn in class that wasn’t just Anfield or Everton. But I was always happy with it, even if it was done with watercolour paints used incorrectly. I sadly lost it between moves around London a few years ago when I realised I had left it in the scanner of a previous (unfriendly) flatmate, so I’m glad it can be preserved in this book as I won’t be going back for it.

The Breck

The other main location of the book is The Breck in Wallasey, an eerie ex-sandstone quarry which is now a sort of half-arsed park. At its centre sits Grannies Rock which I’ve often described to people down here in London as a bastard punk cousin of Avebury’s stones. It’s like the black sheep of the standing stone family, just left and ignored, probably because it’s likely just one of the old crane pillars rather than a proper menhir. But it’s still amazing and the urban folklore surrounding it, which has passed between generations, is seriously spooky and played a huge role in the book. It feels perfectly natural that the narrator makes a pact with it to commit murder. The place also has an interesting link with the history of climbing, and a blue plaque is now there to celebrate the climber Alan Rouse. The Breck is a perfect plot of ghost-soil if ever there was one.

Adam Scovell

Catch Adam on 17 May at Blackwell’s Manchester in conversation with fellow author Paul Scraton. Nettles by Adam Scovell is available now, via Influx Press 

All images © Adam Scovell

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from around the North of England and the rest of the UK – and loads of it’s free!

Monday – Scalarama/Venues Nationwide – Prices Vary

The annual, nationwide celebration of cinema continues. Running until the end of this month in venues large, small and often non-traditional, it is inspired by the energy and DIY spirit of the legendary Scala Cinema. Founded in 2011, the festival runs on the dictum of “by everyone, for everyone, everywhere,” foregrounding the passion of exhibitors and audiences above all else. Entering its second week, among tonight’s offerings are The Night of the Hunter, prizewinning Liverpool indie, Some Girls Wander and Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Read Adam Scovell on The Night of the Hunter

Tuesday – Margaret Atwood: Live @ 7.30pm in Cinemas Nationwide

For many it will still sound too good to be true, but today sees the publication of Margaret Atwood’s sequel to her foreboding and prescient ground-breaking 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. Brought to popular attention recently with the TV adaptation, on returning to the story 34 years on, Atwood has said: “Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.” The author will be joined and interviewed by Samira Ahmed to discuss the new book, her career and – no doubt – our dizzying, depressing present day reality.

Wednesday – Exhibition Opening: William Blake @ Tate Britain, London – £18

Quite rightly described as a visionary today, “in his own time,” says Liz Mitchell, “he was an oddity, an outcast whose weird nightmare visions put him beyond the pale of the Academy. And when you actually look — really look — at his work,” Mitchell continues, “it is mighty strange.” Mitchell was responding to Blake’s 2016 Tate Liverpool presentation (in a display alongside Tracey Emin). Now the painter, printmaker and poet is the subject of a solo show at Tate Britain, in an exhibition that will include more than 300 works, which seeks to reposition Blake as “a visual artist for the 21st century”.

Thursday – Season Opening: Anime’s Human Machines @ the Barbican, London

Anime’s Human Machines kicks off at the Barbican today, somewhat counterintuitively perhaps for a season dedicated to animation, with live action body horror Tetsuo, The Iron Man. But, released in 1989 (a year after Akira), it is justifiably considered to be in the vanguard of Japanese cyberpunk. Discussing Tetsuo’s influence pre-screening is season curator Helen McCarthy, joined by a panel of experts including Jasper Sharp, Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere and Rayna Denison.

Friday – For Sama + Q&A 6.30pm @ Picturehouse Central, London – £16.90

Programmed by BFI backed influencer project, Reclaim The Frame (RTF), whose aim is to grow audiences for films told from a female perspective, For Sama has been described as “A love letter from a young mother to her daughter”. But this tells only part of the story. The mother in question is Waad al-Kateab, who filmed her life in rebel-held Aleppo through five years of the Syrian uprising, and For Sama – a document of the challenges faced by women and children – is the result. For more on Reclaim The Frame, read our interview with Mia Bays

Saturday – A Day in Liverpool Film Screening 2pm @ the Bluecoat, Liverpool – £7

Emerging in the 1920s, the city symphony genre – which foregrounded urban spaces, capturing modernity’s hustle and bustle in heaving metropolises such as Berlin – evoked a sense of place and progress in ways few people could. At the end of that decade, Liverpool’s docks, the now defunct overhead railway and tram systems, and construction of the Anglican Cathedral were captured for posterity by writer, director and animator Anson Dyer. See the film this weekend on its 90th anniversary, with a live score performed by composer and songwriter Aidan Smith.

Sunday – Exhibition Closing: Scott Charlesworth @ OUTPUT Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

Guest curated by Open Eye Gallery’s Thomas Dukes, today is your last chance to see The Dirt I’m Made Of, an exhibition of photographs by Scott Charlesworth. The title refers to all the things – small and large – that define us, and our perceptions of where we’re from. For Charlesworth, says Dukes: “It’s staring through the windscreen and viewfinder and wondering about what it means to come from somewhere. The 8 cooling towers of Fiddler’s Ferry Power Station [which] act as beacons during country long journeys, revealing themselves and polluting the sky with smoke, marking the home stretch.”

Mike Pinnington

Images from top: On set still from The Night of the Hunter; Install image from Tracey Emin and William Blake: In Focus at Tate Liverpool (18 September 2016-3 September 2017), courtesy Pete Goodbody; Scott Charlesworth @ OUTPUT Gallery

Adam Scovell’s melancholic debut novel Mothlight is rife with the impressions left by place and circumstance, and the tricks memories play. Here, Mike Pinnington talks to the author about the threads running through the book…   

“…I feel as if I’m letting a ghost speak for me. Curiously, instead of playing myself, without knowing it, I let a ghost ventriloquise my words or play my role…”

– Jacques Derrida, Ghost Dance (1983)

The Double Negative: Ideas and themes coalesce and flow through the book that can be found in different writings of yours elsewhere. Was there one particular inspiration for Mothlight?

Adam Scovell: I’d been quite obsessed with the theories and writings of Jacques Derrida, the French post-structuralist, and I came across a film where he plays himself called Ghost Dance, by Ken McMullen. In the film, he’s really trying to grapple with this constant striving toward becoming yourself. So, there’s a sort of gap between performing as yourself and what’s considered to be your ‘real’ self. And the way he starts to describe it, the descriptions he used were very sort of haunted descriptions, ghostly descriptions, and from there it became, there was clear potential, at least in my eyes, to apply that theory to something a little bit more obviously ghostly, and a bit more spectral.

You use a Derrida quote as the book’s epiraph and it chimes really closely to the themes in the book, but was it daunting to open with such a heavyweight?

Academically, I’m used to pulling on the big philosophical names. But the quote itself is a quote from Ghost Dance, so in many ways it felt just like having a film quote in there. It was coming across that quote that initially kick-started the idea specifically for Mothlight, but I’ve been wanting to address some of the other things in the book for a while.

I know you best, perhaps, as a critic and academic. What shifts were there between writing narrative fiction and that background? Was this always the direction you wanted to go in?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, and the thing I’ve been working on the longest is writing fiction, it’s just the case that I’ve never really properly shared it before. My writing tends to be known for criticism and essays and that sort of thing, but actually, the thing I’ve been writing since I was a child is fiction. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve found the faith in the ideas that I’ve been comfortable enough with to share publicly and try and get published, so in many ways it was almost like going back to what I knew. At the same time, it’s not necessarily a straightforward fiction writing style – it’s heavily influenced by academic writing… There’s a lot of bridges there between the two.

Was it always your intention to use photos in the book, or did it fall into place once you’d begun in earnest?

Well, I’ve been wanting to use photographs in text for a while. I’ve been using it in an essay form – I find it incredibly interesting and useful to play around with formatting imagery into text. I think it changes both of those things quite heavily. But it just so happens that the photographs used in this book came to me at roughly the same time as I’d watched Ghost Dance for the first time, and there was a dialogue between what Derrida was saying in the film and having this contained life in a box of photographs. They just seemed to work well together, so it became a case of figuring out how text would marry that idea with the photographs, and the first time round, the first draft – which was actually double the length of the book which was eventually published – I think got it quite wrong in many regards. I didn’t get anywhere with agents, or, the people that read it said it was interesting, but it was quite a hard slog, so it took a long while to find the form, and eventually what it needed was drastically cutting down in length, so it became this sort of espresso shot, if you like – a quick, but strong and rich dose of strange fiction. It did take a while to get the form right, definitely.

The photographs are a lens by which the reader can enter the narrative, while the ephemera gives more of a sense of a life?

It makes it more tangible in some regards… There’s a sense that the photographs, or even the little tickets, or other things that appear could just sort of fall off the page; making use of the fact that the book as an object is a quite powerful thing in itself.

Was there a conversation between the life of the person whose photos you used and the narrative they embellish? 

It was a basic framework to build upon. The things that were built upon it … were completely fictional. It’s mixing things together rather than pulling things directly from real life. But, certainly, the awe and the sense of mystery that Thomas [the book's protagonist] gets is definitely autobiographical.

This book feels of a piece with your wider interests about place and memories. Do you see it as another outlet for you to explore those things?

“I do, and I think it’s probably going to become my dominant one, because I do feel that the way I want to address those interests is being increasingly shrunk by the restrictions put on criticism and theoretical writing on the platforms that I’m writing, at least. With fiction you have so much more freedom to follow an idea through, and even if it goes to a dead end, I find that in itself interesting. Perhaps it’s a kickback as well from having to have justified every single idea and element from a PhD. You go to the polar opposite where in fiction yes, you have to have restraints, so the logic of it all is put together, but you don’t need to footnote every single aspect and idea, so there’s far more freedom with it, and I find that freedom quite addictive and fulfilling after doing a PhD. It’s definitely going to be a more dominant form with what I do in the coming years I think.

What was your PhD?

“Transcendental Aesthetics in Audio-visual form. I find it very difficult to explain what it was about!”

You’ve talked about Thomas as a ‘shadow version’ of yourself – how much of Adam is in there with Thomas, and also, depending on the answer, did it get quite interesting and weird sometimes in the writing for you?

Yeah – it was interesting, because there is a fair chunk of me in Thomas, I suppose. I’m loathe to say what aspects, but I certainly got cathartic release writing through that character, because it did allow me to explore a lot of different things. There are certainly aspects of me in there. I think it is difficult to discuss what, because sometimes there might be things in there that have unconsciously slipped through. Interestingly, for the next novel [How Pale the Winter Has Made Us], I’ve done a similar thing where I’ve actually lived parts of the novel out very deliberately in the city of Strasbourg, in France, to try and gain some real reactions and conversations with people and the narrator of that book is actually a woman – these techniques and these ideas, and what constitutes you and what doesn’t constitute you can be really interesting and really quite fallible at times as well.

So, how did you do that without it feeling quite studied and contrived, or was it just enough to go through the thing that you wanted the real-life response to?

It was more to do with place, really, because a lot of the time, places are at the centre of my writing and it was about engaging with place in a random way and seeing what popped up, and it took a long while of walking around Strasbourg again and again and again, to figure out what would catch the eye of this character, and in the end it produced quite distinct historical connections and lots of little ones in between, just through wandering around and overhearing conversations. It was then a case of editing it into the mindset of the character that that book is now narrated by, not just me. So that process has been quite tricky, and we’re still working on it in the edit.

You’ve said “death changes place as much as it changes people”, which I felt was a good insight into the book and your thinking more generally…

Essentially that’s the theme of the next few books to be honest with you. I think it’s a good mantra, not just for Mothlight, but the next two novels as well, because their perception of place is heavily augmented – not always for the best – by a death. The narrator of the next book is in Strasbourg when she hears of her father’s death and the narrator of the third book revisits Merseyside because of the death of a school bully that he feels guilty for, so that … is probably a good description of my fiction writing at the moment.

Mike Pinnington

Read the companion piece to this interview – Adam Scovell: On Mothlight

Mothlight (Influx Press) by Adam Scovell is available now

Earlier this year, author and academic Adam Scovell’s debut novel Mothlight was published. A “story of grief, memory and the price of obsession”, it is a deep dive into place, identity and the uncanny told through the relationship between the protagonist, Thomas, and Phyllis Ewans, a prominent researcher in his care. Adding to the experience of the reader, the book’s narrative combines text with found photographs left to Scovell, to conjure what he calls the “contained life” and awe captured in the aspic of photography. Here, using excerpts and some of those images interspersed throughout Mothlight, the author provides a glimpse into both his and Thomas’ relationship to the photographs.

What Thomas says: “I decided to take a picture of the room, which was now tidied so that I could sleep in it comfortably. It was taken on an old Polaroid camera of Phyllis Ewans’ rather than my own, which had a handful of photos still left in it. I held the Polaroid photo in my hand, staring at it and comparing it to how the room looked through my eyes. It was still her room, no matter how hard I tried.”

What Adam says: There were so many beautiful Polaroids in the box of Phyllis’ photographs that it took a long time to figure out which would be left out of the book. But there were around three or four that took my breath away and this was one of them. It’s such a banal photo at first but to my eyes it looks nothing less than a room neatly arranged after someone has died; it’s sunny but the curtains have been drawn; it’s tidy but in a really absent way. It’s all so quaintly domestic but there’s something odd in the very action of documenting it. It’s also the only photo in the novel that Thomas takes credit for which is important.

What Thomas says: “One of the few directions she left after her death was regarding the photographs to be used in any pamphlets or handouts for her funeral. The first she chose was a picture of her when she was much younger, a picture I remember her describing to me with a rare sense of pride. ‘Don’t you think I look like a scientist,’ she had said to me one day, many years earlier. I concurred, and considered that I had not seen any photos of people that looked more scientific.”

What Adam says: I love this photograph of Phyl. She was always old in my eyes as she was in her seventies when I first met her so any photo of her when younger plays with the limits of my own perception. It’s such a simple portrait and yet there’s so much character in there. Knowing the person she was later on, living in a virtual labyrinth of books, it seems a fittingly bookish photograph and I especially adore her bow tie. I think she was actually working in accounts for a company at this point.

What Thomas says: “After the death of Miss Ewans, I was searching through her photographs when I came upon a Polaroid. It showed a slightly descending green hill, littered with black-headed gulls. At the end of the hill there sat a lake, rippling in the breeze with a handful of boats sitting on the water. I could not explain why a vision of this place had appeared before me in the forest whilst chasing the copper blue, but I knew that it would plague me if I did not at least try and figure out the whereabouts of this vision and what it meant. Miss Ewans had clearly taken the photograph. It conformed to her typical compositional eye for bisecting the photo with strong lines of land, water and sky. But, I questioned whilst sat in her living room holding the photograph, whose hand had held mine?”

What Adam says: Again, I love the ordinary nature of so many of the photos that Phyl took and wanted to find a way in which to make them seem a little stranger. In this case, Thomas actually ends up having a vision of this photograph early on in life. The trip it was supposed to have been taken on is really the event that haunts the novel from Phyl’s point of view too. The colours of those 1970s Polaroids are endlessly glorious and I like the idea of a brighter haunting rather than a moodier one.

What Thomas says: “She pulled out one photograph from a drawer and showed it to me, the nostalgia coming full circle as it fixed the memory with a warm visual. ‘This was the last photograph I took of the house before I moved here,’ she said, almost with pride. It was of the hallway of the house on a sunny day, spring edging its way in. The light shone beautifully.”

What Adam says: This for me is the best photograph in the novel for a number of reasons besides it’s obviously beautiful aesthetic. It certainly reminds of the way that Andrei Tarkovsky used light in some of his Polaroids but the doorway was the one that I came to know when I knew Phyl and so it’s one of the few photos that properly connects to my own experience of knowing her. I can still feel the sunlight drifting down onto that carpet and see the dust that it lit up in the air. I also felt on revisiting it later in life that it reminded of the doorway from the opening of Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) which is still a favourite of mine.

What Thomas says: “Billie looks pale but happy in the picture, typically glamorous as she arranges a huge vase of flowers. It would have made for a better funeral photo. Her hair is surprisingly darker than the platinum blond in all other photographs of her. I suspected briefly that it was the flowers that had led to the photograph being saved rather than as a memento of a sibling, but the absence of Billie from all other aspects of the London house showed it to be otherwise. Perhaps, so I thought at the time, it was quiet evidence that Phyllis Ewans thought of her sister with more than simply the malice I had seen her fall back into during reminiscences.”

What Adam says: The photographs of Billie are mostly in the first chapter and I wanted to make sure there were plenty as she was so polar to Phyl as a person, in the book and in real life. Certainly her character was more true to reality than Phyl’s in the book and she was always glamorous, rather like the character from one of the 1960s Robert Aldrich films. I can image a late Joan Crawford playing her with aplomb. The light in this particular photo is beautifully strange too, not quite colour yet doused in a rather camp purple which I really like.

What Thomas says: “The photograph was just as vibrant as the fragment, suggesting that the pictures had been taken in the same period. It was an incredibly blue picture showing a small harbour, undoubtedly constructed for pleasure boating rather than business, by some lakeside that I guessed was probably in Wales, the same place I had seen in an earlier photo and in my teenage vision in the forest. I could hear the gulls again, feeling the occasional spray of water on my face, becoming momentarily held within the photograph as if it was my own or, more accurately, as if I was at that moment in the act of taking it.”

What Adam says: I love the pairings of photos from this trip that are so pivotal to the latter two chapters of the book. They seemed ripe to use in the narrative. I’m pretty certain that it’s Lake Bala and the landscapes are beautifully rendered in the colourful grain. I also really like the subtle markers that this isn’t the present; the coat, the boat, the small 70s looking dinghy. Whenever I take my own Polaroids I’m always conscious of how the analogue grain is constantly battling with the garish, glistening elements of modern life and design. So these photos have a purity of image which I think is virtually impossible to recreate without great effort even though they’re essentially just holiday snaps.

As told to Mike Pinnington

Read our interview with Adam.

Catch the author in conversation at Spike Island, Bristol: Novel Writers: Adam Scovell, Mothlight

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from around the North of England and the rest of the UK – and loads of it’s free!

Monday – A Private War and Satellite Q&A with Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan 7pm @ FACT, Liverpool – £14.40/£13.40

“She was specifically targeted because of her profession, for the purpose of silencing those reporting on the growing opposition movement in the country.”  This was the verdict of Judge Amy Berman Jackson regarding the death in 2012 of correspondent Marie Colvin, while reporting from the Syrian enclave of Baba Amr. Starring Rosamund Pike, A Private War tells the story of Colvin’s fearless journalism and the events leading up to her death.

Operation Legacy screening and panel discussion 7pm @ Khalili Lecture Theatre, London – FREE

In 2009, Kenyan war veterans sued the British government for the truth following the extreme lengths taken – including mass detention, torture, rape and murder – to quell a local uprising by a group collectively known as the Mau Mau. Operation Legacy tells that story. The screening will be followed by discussion, with speakers Dr Chege Githiora, Gikuyu translator during the Mau Mau case, British-Iraqi Hip Hop artist and campaigner Lowkey, journalist James Mbaluto and Olivia Windham Stewart, co-founder of the Museum of British Colonialism and labour rights specialist.

Tuesday – Artist Talk: Sean Edwards 6pm @ Tŷ Pawb, Wrexham – FREE

In May, Cardiff-based artist Sean Edwards will represent Wales at the Venice Biennale, with the work promising to be “a poetic enquiry into place, politics and class intertwined with personal histories”. Tonight, Edwards shows his 2011 film Maelfa, named after the shopping centre in the Llanedeyrn estate where he grew up, followed by a discussion of his key themes.

Wednesday – The Liquid Club #1: Exchanging Perspectives by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro 6.30pm @ the Bluecoat, Liverpool – FREE

This new monthly reading group from the Biennial “invites collective thinking” of the participants to drive development of the festival’s 2020 iteration. With reading material for the group shared in advance of each meeting, the first discussion – “rethinking the body beyond its concrete physical boundaries” – draws on Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s writings.

Thursday – Ecstatic Material: Beatrice Dillon & Keith Harrison 7.30pm @ KARST, Plymouth – £5

Experimental and interdisciplinary, the Outlands network brings together musician and producer Beatrice Dillon and artist Keith Harrison. The fruits of the collaboration, says Dillon, involve “a sense of a physical, tactile presence through sound, one that bumps into and spills over into Keith’s sculptures”. Playing different venues through February, the idea is that the duo will explore and respond to the constraints of each site in turn. As Harrison puts it: “We have an overall structure but have factored in a capacity to react to what’s happening each night and change as the tour progresses.”

Exhibition Opening: Mark Leckey: We Are Untitled 6pm @ Output Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

Output’s almost scarily quick turnaround of shows means that, with February barely upon us, the gallery – which presents the work of artists from or living in Merseyside – opens its third exhibition of 2019. This time sees Turner Prize-winning Mark Leckey present 2001 film We Are Untitled. Featuring footage of a party in Leckey’s flat, the result is “part-music video, part-time capsule”, serving as a document by which he, and we, can access his own nostalgia.

Friday – Book Launch: Eerie Imaginings  6.30pm @ The Photographers’ Gallery, London – £8/£5 concs

Eerie Imaginings is the title for an evening of films, readings and photography looking at “the weird and the eerie”. On the occasion of Adam Scovell’s new novel, Mothlight (out this week via Influx Press), host and fellow author Gary Budden, is joined by Scovell, photographer and visual artist Ellen Rogers and writer and performer Soma Ghosh to explore this still-burgeoning area of creative enquiry.

Exhibition Opening: Simeon Barclay – Life Room @ The Holden Gallery, Manchester – FREE

Life Room, the first Manchester solo survey of artist Simeon Barclay, presents existing work, alongside new works responding to the historic collections at Manchester School of Art. Barclay, who “operates at the intersection of contemporary art, fashion, music and popular culture”, draws on an ongoing interest in sense of self, culture and tradition, personal experience and identity.

Saturday – Alien Sound: Ambient Music and the Limits of the Human 10.30am @ Tate Liverpool – £5/£3

What is disturbing ambience? This symposium aims to explore developments in ambient music (a genre typically associated with relaxation), and asks how can we hear ambience differently? How can it make us strange to ourselves again?  How can this “alien sound” generate alternative ways of experiencing space, time and world? Guest artists taking on this “unsettling art, crossing boundaries between noise and music”, include Marie Thompson, Paul Reket, Dhanveer Singh Brar, Larne Abse Gogarty, Steve Davismoon, Rachael Rosen, Jon Davies, Annalaura Alifuoco and Silvia Battista.

Horror is no Place for a Lady (seminar/screening) 4pm @ Constellations, Liverpool – £8/£6

Horror, long considered a genre in which women occupy one of just four roles – psycho, virgin, victim or whore – is also one in which the last character standing is almost invariably female. This seminar (convened by Liverpool Horror Club) debates this odd, inescapable dichotomy. Part of a month of events celebrating women in horror, the evening ends with a screening of director Mary Harron’s adaptation of American Psycho.

Emotion Wave: The Aleph, Kuyokuyo, Germanager, La French 8pm @ Drop The Dumbulls, Liverpool – £4 OTD

The focus of our latest playlist, Emotion Wave have been hosting experimental electronic nights in the city since 2015, when frustrating experiences at traditional gigs and club nights led to Neil Grant taking matters into his own hands. The first EW of 2019 puts The Aleph, Kuyokuyo, Germanager and La French front and centre.

Sunday – Queen Zee Album Launch Party 3pm @ Jacaranda Records Phase One, Liverpool – FREE

The wait is almost over for fans of self-described “local punk weirdos”, Queen Zee, with the release of their self-titled debut album. The record signing and in-store performance, they promise, will be the “greatest, glam-est, most disgusting launch parti this city has seen since the Hope and Glory Festival toilets”. You’ve been warned!

Mike Pinnington

Media/images, from top: A Private War Trailer; Sean Edwards’ Maelfa installation shot (Spike Island); Keith Harrison; Adam Scovell’s Mothlight; Alien Sound; Emotion Wave

Adam Scovell discusses English Eerie and Folk Horror fiction, the “messiness of modern nature”, and subterranean worlds with collaborator, academic and bestselling author, Robert Macfarlane…

Robert Macfarlane has been one of a number of key figures at the forefront of the millennium’s return to interest in landscape within the arts.  From numerous books, collaborative multimedia projects and essays, including the Samuel Johnson Prize-nominated The Old Ways (2012) and Landmarks (2015), Macfarlane began a vast cultural, aesthetic and political reassessment of our relationship with the world around us, especially within literature, that he is still continuing to explore today.

There is a continual process and essence of rediscovery within Macfarlane’s work, most commonly (though not uniquely) of older works of landscape literature now commonly known under the term of Nature Writing, and he has arguably played a large part in the rise of interest in work by the likes of Nan Shepherd, Edward Thomas and J. A. Baker. With recent work in more multimedia-based forms, including collaborations and work with Stanley Donwood, Frank Turner and Johnny Flynn, I spoke to Macfarlane about all things landscape, the reasoning behind the resurgence in such work and the darker context in which it is both situated and a reaction to.

The Double Negative: The first thing to ask about is the resurgence of emphasis upon landscape in a whole range of the arts, but literature is probably the best place to start.  What in particular do you attribute to the general rise in what people are calling nature writing, but also landscape in other media as well?

Robert Macfarlane: I was in Germany recently and someone said: “Geo-poetry” — pronounced with a hard G — “it’s all about forms of geo-poetry”.  And I quite like this idea of a “geo-poetic” turn in contemporary culture. Certainly, whatever is happening, we need a term for it that’s much more capacious and stranger than nature writing, not least because, as you imply, this landscape turn is happening across media, and is often collaborative in its nature and multi-media in its textures, and because “nature” is an idea it seeks to put under pressure. But yes, whatever we call it, something’s happened over the past 15 years or so, in Britain and Ireland and beyond, and shows no sign of not intensifying further. It’s been exciting to be part of it.

So, why has it happened?  There’s a dozen genealogies I can suggest but I guess one clear context is the “Anthropocene“ as we are increasingly calling the contemporary epoch. Planetary-scale environmental crisis and damage, combined with a keen sense of loss and peril, and with questions of complicity and culpability complicatedly folded in, have been one reason for the re-politicisation of the broad field of “landscape” and gave it a dynamism and an urgency that had perhaps been drained to some degree. 2016 is the year, in fact, as you know, when the Anthropocene Working Party of the ISC will recommend whether or not the Anthropocene should be adopted as a formal new epoch of the Earth. At such a moment, it seems to me that we are — or should be — spirallingly conscious of the complexity and messiness of modern nature, and the complicity of our involvement with the Earth. This seems to have unsettled, in all sorts of ways, old thinking about landscape. And out of that unsettlement has arisen many of these “new-old” forms of cultural work.

A: So, with “new-old” work, do you think this recent emphasis on landscape augmentation is allowing us to read older work in a new light?  Obviously with the “English Eerie” we can think of M. R. James, but also of older post-apocalyptic work, like Richard Jeffries’ After London and J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World.  Do you think that works such as those are becoming again more popular because of this?

R: That’s a good way of thinking about it; of two broad responses happening concurrently. First, there’s a whole new body of work emerging across media and multimedia, the Holloway film that you and I made with Stanley Donwood and Richard Skelton being just one example of that. These new projects are often collaborative in form, which is in keeping with a sense of what we might call — after Latour and Deleuze — assemblage-thinking; which is to say about the ways ecologies are formed, not hierarchically, not with single humans or makers at their summit, but in which we are networked with all sorts of other agents that might not have previously been thought of as agents; stone, creatures, atmospheres and so forth.

But secondly, as you suggest, there’s absolutely a cultural return-of-the-repressed, whereby older works suddenly are gaining new, sharp traction upon us. M.R. James’s fiction is full of revenants, as we know, and that is also an emblem of the status of his work; it can never quite be settled or put away — it keeps coming back to us in new guises, whispering new messages. That’s happening with Jeffries, yes, and with J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, about which I’ve written and spoken about a lot over the years. The Peregrine, astonishingly, turns 50 next year and yet its relevance seems keener than ever; in terms of its preoccupations with pesticide overuse, with species shame, with legacy, with death from the air. It feels like it was written yesterday — or rather, it feels like it was written tomorrow.

So there’s this double energy emerging. New works being created and old works returning to us with new powers. I mean, you’re deeply involved in that yourself — in re-reading traditions of Folk Horror, of blood pastoral, and seeing the talon-grip that such forms have upon the imagination still. Periods of history in particular like the Civil War and the Enclosures are further examples of this; the return of radical episodes in the English past just keep coming back at us, nagging us to consider them again.

A: That’s recognisable in cinema to me as it seems, in the last five years especially, Kevin Brownlow’s and Andrew Mollo’s Winstanley (1975) (about Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers movement) has come hugely into focus again, not just as a masterpiece of British film, but as a masterpiece of radical landscape politics in a medium that, at least until that period, had shied away from it.

R: Exactly, that’s an excellent example. It is unsurprising to me that in a period of (especially English) politics in which the privatisation of land, both urban and rural, and its allocation into fewer and fewer hands, by means of shadowy shell-companies and ruthless offshoring, is proceeding at a staggering pace, we should be looking back to episodes of history in which dissent with structures of land-ownership took fierce form.

As Joe Kennedy put in a superb 2013 essay, there’s a timeliness at work: “It seems that now, more than at any time in living memory, what lies beyond the city is up for grabs, in a cultural and political conflict with increasingly high stakes. To insist on the historical complexity of the rural, by highlighting the often grim activities which occur beneath the sightlines afforded by postcards, is to query its tidying up into a set of easily consumable images and, lest we forget, tastes.”

A: Moving on from that, how do you think technology plays a roles in this? For the first question, the initial aspect that sprung to mind for me was Tacita Dean speaking in Grant Gee’s 2012 film about W. G. Sebald (Patience (After Sebald)), where one of the reasons walking in particular, and landscapes, has become more popular again is because of an effect of mediation through modern digital and social technology. I wondered what your thoughts were on technology’s role in the resurgence of getting out, or perhaps going in again?

R: My first response is that the antagonist here is not necessarily “mediation” as much as “bureaucratisation”. By which I mean that what might be being got-around, as it were, by this turn back to walking and other forms of contact, is the extreme management of expectations by means of economic and materialist contexts: a disenchanted landscape, subdued by cultural simplification and economic conversion. Back to Kennedy’s call for an insistence on the “historical complexity of the rural”. To pry out complexity requires patience, improvisation, and forms of return.  For this reason, it seems to me, so many contemporary landscape practitioners will often haunt a particular place and return to it again and again (like the poet Rod Mengham on Dartmoor’s Grimspound, say), trying to take it by surprise or be taken surprised by it. So what’s being got-around isn’t so much technology, but simplification or premeditation, and the interposition of interpretation.

A: This reminds of how certain points surrounding the English Eerie chime in your work and how certain popular examples have required sites like YouTube to be the initiators in their cultural revival.  It’s probably a good point to ask about the term itself. I first came across it when we first started talking a while back about Algernon Blackwood, but where did this term actually thematically germinate?

R: Well a lot of my thinking in this area, about an anti-tradition or a necessary skew to the picturesque and to the pastoral, is articulated in two essays published recently in the Tate and the Guardian. Certainly, I don’t claim a patent on the term English Eerie, though I guess I’ve become somewhat associated with it. But a lot of people have been thinking and working around these questions of unsettlement and dis-ease, if you like, for years. Joe Kennedy and Nick Groom, to mention only two, have written brilliantly on this area.

I guess, yes, I wanted to find a term that might account for the complex counter tradition that has existed almost as a sub-surface rhizome to the much more visible flowerings of the pastoral as a cultural tradition, especially in a British context and even more particularly in an English context. The pastoral is what we’re weaned on, in terms of the image-repertoire of common culture, from the Haywain to Cameron’s “Green Toryism”.

I’m increasingly more interested in its disputatious dark twin, of the eerie, or whatever you will, the preoccupations of which are exile, indeterminacy and ownership, rather than dwelling, belonging and consolation. If you look at a film like Patrick Keiller’s Robinson In Ruins [2010] for instance, it’s explicitly a film not about belonging to a landscape, but about the questions of to whom that landscape belongs.

A:  I think that’s the best recent cinematic example that I could think of along those lines. I think it’s the stasis in his films that creates that sort of questioning. It’s such a political stasis and that’s refreshing as a lot of modern British film is very energetic, in exciting ways of course, but all of a sudden you’ll see a Keiller film, whether it’s London or the other Robinson films, and that stasis just hits you, the silence of its landscapes is powerfully overwhelming.

R: And those long holds, well I mean the whole film is run through fixed-frame shots. You’ll get a long hold over an above-ground gas pipeline marker, and the voice-over will slowly tell you that the gas that’s passing through the invisible pipeline — we’re back with the subterranean rhizome again [laughs] — is 30% owned by a Canadian investment company and that company itself represents the pension holdings of secondary school teachers in the province of Ontario. Keiller flenses out this amazing vision of a dispersed ownership structure that controls this invisible underground network of buried, owned resource.  So it seems to me to make perfect sense that the eerie, which is about not-knowings, not-ownings, not-seeings, and a kind of troubled dissent, should be making a minor comeback right now.

A: I suppose, as you’ve mentioned a number of subterranean elements, the final project to ask about is the current work undertaken on your Underland book.

R: As you can hear, my entire cortex is structured in terms of subterranean metaphors at the moment [laughs].  I’ve just been working and walking with a mycorrhizal fungal specialist who works on the invisible, subterranean networks and third-party connections that exist in forests, whereby fungal networks join the root systems of trees, to create a mesh of interspecies mutualities that is colloquially known as the “wood-wide web” or the myco-net; and here we are back again with technology. By means of the myco-net system, trees share resources, they share vulnerability, they trade carbon in the form of glucose with the fungi and they even seem to send electrical pulses along it. Mindblowing!

This whole research field — below-ground ecology as it’s known — is completely rethinking the nature of community in the contexts of woodland and forest, and, by means of that, is beginning to ask vast questions about long-held ideas of species, of community, of ecology, of relation as a concept. It’s just another example, to me, of how the underground holds secrets that we’re only beginning to guess at because we’re only beginning to discover the technologies that will render them visible to us. So yes, I’m deep into a huge seven-year book on invisibility, knowledge, burial and seeing-in-the-dark.

Adam Scovell

See Robert Macfarlane respond to the Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms exhibition in a special LJMU’s Writers’ Workshop at Tate Liverpool, 7.30-9pm, 16 June 2016 — £12/ Concessions £10 (price includes a complementary glass of wine)

Read more about Adam and Robert’s film Holloway here

Read Bacon, Lassnig & Kruglyanskaya: Tate Liverpool’s Summer Season — Reviewed

Further reading: The Eeriness of the English Countryside, the Guardian

Images: 35mm photography by Adam Scovell, from his past, present and future (ongoing) English Eerie projects

What’s hot this week? Our pick of the arts — and Halloween — listings from around Liverpool and the rest of the UK…

Monday – Made You Look (2015) + Q&A 6pm @ FACT Liverpool — £10

With panelists — including design studio WellMade, illustrator Craig Robson and LJMU head of graphic arts Ian Mitchell — on hand to lead a discussion afterwards, tonight’s screening of documentary Made You Look promises a serious insight into the evolution of commercial arts. With so much of our lives now spent in the virtual, digital realm, what will become of the tactile objects we hold so dear?

Visible Award: Shortlisted Projects 10am-5pm @ Tate Liverpool Foyer– FREE

A European prize for socially-engaged artistic practice that’s been running since 2011, the Visible Award comes to Liverpool this year; celebrating some excellent international art projects. See nine shortlisted projects before the winner is chosen via open jury at Liverpool Town Hall (Saturday 31 Oct 2015); including Conflict Kitchen by Dawn Weleski and Jon Rubin, a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict.

Tuesday — FACTLab Hack Nights: APIs (Tumblr With Processing) 6-8pm @ FACT Liverpool — FREE

What are Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and how do you use them?! Find out tonight in this practical demonstration: bring your laptop, beginners welcome (although some processing or programming experience is preferred).

Jane Wenham: The Witch Of Walkern 7.30pm @ Everyman Theatre, Liverpool — £12-20

Inspired by events in a Hertfordshire village — and making all the women in the audience very thankful indeed that those days are over — Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s new play follows Walkern ‘witch’ Jane Wenham as she is blamed, and tried, for a tragic death. Until 31 Oct 2015.

Wednesday — North-West Writers Meet & Greet 5.30-8.30pm @ Harris Museum, Preston — FREE

We’ve long been of the mindset that there’s strength in numbers. So we’re hosting another writers’ social, this time with Blaze Arts Festival and the Harris Museum and Art Gallery! As always, it’s totally informal and open to all, whether you already write for magazines, journals, newspapers or blogs, or are just thinking about it. Come along, have a glass of wine, and talk about your writing with editors and like-minded creative practitioners.

Artist Talk: Emma Hart 6.30-8.30pm @ Grand Union, Birmingham — FREE

Clay hair in scrunchies and clay fists throwing punches, ‘a bum with knickers wedged up its crack’… these are Emma Hart’s glossy and irreverent ceramic sculptures, currently on show as big MOUTH at Grand Union. Hear from the artist live tonight with Harun Morrison (co-artistic director of Fierce Festival) and Kim McAleese (Grand Union programme director).

Thursday — Cheap Thrills Presents Trick ‘r Treat (2007) 7.30-9.15pm @ A Small Cinema, Liverpool — £5

A couple finds out what happens when they blow a jack o’ lantern out before midnight… A group of teenagers take a prank too far… Following five interwoven stories that occur on the same residential block, on the same night, enjoy this under-appreciated horror comedy tonight alongside Cheap Thrills’ uproarious themed trailers and drive-in adverts.

Friday — Psycho (1960) With Live Orchestra 7.30pm @ Liverpool Philharmonic Hall — £40-14

‘Psycho massages and strangles the ID of Anglo-American cinema out into the open where it can lie in its ugliness and pleasure for all to see’: so said our film critic Adam Scovell on Hitchcock’s infamous psychological thriller (read here). See it tonight as you’ve never seen it before: fifty years on from its release, in a big-screen presentation accompanied by a live performance of Bernard Herrmann’s brilliant, skin-prickling score.

PICK OF THE WEEK: Homotopia: International LGBT Festival @ Venues Across Liverpool — FREE

A bumper offer this year from a consistently ambitious and surprising arts festival. Yet how to pick highlights from such an extensive programme? The unveiling of Alien Sex Club is a must (artist’s talk tonight 6pm at The Bluecoat and full exhibition across Camp and Furnace and the Walker) which explores the relationship between visual culture and HIV; “England’s first lady of the double entendre” and Carry On legend Fenella Fielding introduces a madcap evening of duck apples, fangs and 1935 horror The Bride Of Frankenstein (Saturday, A Small Cinema); and who wouldn’t love a night of song and opera from Nigerian operatic diva and Homotopia favourite Le Gateau Chocolat (13 Nov, St Helens World of Glass). Festival continues until 1 Dec 2015.

Saturday — Exhibition Opening: Kawaii: Crafting The Japanese Culture Of Cute 10am-4pm @ James Hockey & Foyer Galleries, UCA Farnham, Surrey — FREE

Contemporary Japanese artists responding to the phenomenon of ‘cute’, or Kawaii, via traditional craft skills, expect a fascinating segue from princess fixations to the exploitative nature of sexual politics. Look out for the full-colour catalogue, plus seminars, lectures, workshops and exhibition tours. Until 12 Dec 2015.

Sunday — Build Your Own Camera With Rachel Brewster 11am-5pm @ The Bluecoat, Liverpool — £50

This is for all the photography fans out there who want to extend their creativity into their kit: learn how to build (and use) your very own working Konstruktor camera in a day. Plus, you get to take it home with you at the end of the workshop!

Laura Robertson

Screening tomorrow, and with echoes of the recent Ferguson riots, Adam Scovell considers an anti-apartheid docu-drama that sits tragedy against great warmth and humour…

Reality is a difficult concept to discuss when applied to cinema. The authenticity of a created reality is already a contradiction to begin with, so the best of filmmakers move around and ignore this concept in its aesthetic guise.

However, when faced with making documentary cinema, the idea of playing loose with reality in order to heighten the meaning and intent of real-world situations can moralistically undermine and raise questions of legitimate potency. In spite of this, and with an emphasis on using construction as a means of finding an uncomfortable and repressed truth, Lionel Rogosin‘s 1959 film, Come Back, Africa, suggests that the end spotlight result is very much worth braving a constructed tight-rope.

Although listed as a documentary, Come Back, Africa is a partly dramatised and set-up narrative surrounding the plight of Zachariah, a struggling man in South Africa who is trying to find a consistent job in order to support his family. Rogosin is clear, however, that the mixture of documentary technique (shooting genuine footage of cities, places and people) and fictionalised accounts create a truth that would be difficult to film ad hoc; the man’s struggle was no doubt a common and universal occurrence. Adding to this is the fact that all of the performers are non-professionals and play themselves to a degree, using their own names and even allowing some filming within their homes.

Rogosin’s previous film, On The Bowery (1956), had used similar techniques to highlight the lives of homeless Americans facing comparable struggles in finding sustainable work. Come Back, Africa has the added element of apartheid to question, making it a far more complex and, at times, deeply emotional film. Zachariah is a name derived with the Hebrew for ‘God Has Remembered’, and it is a name of contrasts for the world that the man faces; in many ways, the society he is trying to survive in desperately wants to forget that he exists entirely.

After finding out that signing on at a gold mine means he’ll get sent straight back to Johannesburg after finishing the low-paid, arduous work, he becomes a ‘house boy’ for a horrendous colonial couple. Rogosin clearly wants to highlight the rattling mentality of apartheid supporters and his characters do so with an uncomfortable, zealous ease. Zachariah accidently throws a bowl of soup away whilst working in the kitchen and is called “a savage”; that nasty, incomparable word that simply drips with colonial privilege and affluence. The film is clearly a tragedy in many regards (its ending is powerful in its raw emotional outpouring) but there’s also great warmth and humour besides.

When finding a bottle of whiskey hidden under some clothes, he takes a few drams and dances innocently to some music on the radio, all the while mooching about in the scarf of his employer. It not only marks Zachariah out as a far more interesting character, but his movements throughout the film show him as a nervous mouse which provides humour against the backdrop of economic and racial brutality. Though it ultimately gets him the sack, it is the small moments of humour like this that provide the vision of Come Back, Africa with a greater sense of completeness.

Rogosin seems to be pioneering social cinematic comment through dramatic intention in the same way that Ken Loach would experiment with a few years later. Whilst he cites the documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty as a chief influence, there is a sense that Rogosin took the manufactured element of documentary filmmaking and turned it into something completely new. On the flip-side, there’s a stark resemblance between the eerie high-rise blocks and industrial zones of Johannesburg that Rogosin shoots and the blank high-rise spaces that fill Pedro Costa’s stunning Colossal Youth (2006); Costa also seems to have adapted Rogosin’s mixed form technique. Both films create that sense of the individual being pressured by a surrounding environment.

In Liverpool, Come Back, Africa is being programmed by Elsewhere Cinema and their reasoning behind the choice is suggestive: “We watched the film for the first time during the Ferguson riots and it made us feel that nothing had changed, really. We thought the political statements it was making are as relevant now as they were then.” Nevertheless centred heavily on economic plight, Come Back, Africa succeeds in showing the massive racial inequalities of the place and time, and the scars of colonialism that can slowly haemorrhage drama.

Zachariah is said to be from Zululand; that heavily fought-over area that eventually landed into British hands before the Second Boer War was even to begin. The place is now one of South Africa’s zoned provinces, the KwaZulu-Natal, having joined the Natal region post-apartheid in 1994. As Zachariah, so named of remembrance, struggles to find a place of his own, and a position in town that won’t get him into trouble with the racist forces that dominate the city, we can’t help but feel sorry for him. The complexities of place lead to the complexities of the man; fragmented, owned, abused, run down.

Adam Scovell

Come Back, Africa is showing at A Small Cinema Liverpool, Thursday 21 May 2015, 7.30-9pm, £3 entry — all info here

Featured in the Guardian and working alongside one of Britain’s finest authors, The Double Negative writer and freelance filmmaker Adam Scovell channels a very English kind of terror in his new short film, Holloway…

Did you read the Guardian article, published a couple of weeks ago, entitled The Eeriness of The English Countryside, by academic and bestselling travel writer Robert Macfarlane? In it, he name-checks masters of that particular kind of horror, the English Eerie: that is, the unease and uncanny forces felt when wandering our ancient fields and coastlines.

People like M.R. James are discussed (whose ghost stories, Macfarlane confesses, have “caused me to wake myself with my own screaming”), in addition to more contemporary eerie offerings from PJ Harvey, in albums White Chalk (2007) and Let England Shake (2011), and Ben Wheatley’s “brilliant” A Field in England. And then someone more familiar crops up.

“Over the last year”, Macfarlane writes, “I have been working with a young writer and filmmaker, Adam Scovell, to adapt a co-written book called Holloway into a nine-minute Super-8 short…” — Hang on, we cry! That’s Adam! – ”… inspired in part by Derek Jarman’s early silent film Journey to Avebury (1971).”

It did indeed turn out to be one of our most regular film critics — Scovell has written about everyone from Jen-Luc Godard to Ken Russell for us since 2012, as well as pursuing a PhD and freelance filmmaking.

Recognising Scovell’s talents after stumbling upon his popular blog, Celluloid Wicker Man, Robert Macfarlane emailed Scovell out of the blue to discuss his work and, in particular, a common interest in the English Eerie. As their conversation developed, a short adaptation of Macfarlane’s 2013 bestseller, Holloway (featured on both the Observer and Sunday Telegraph’s Books of The Year) was agreed upon and things moved swiftly from there on in, including gaining permission to use the work of English artist Stanley Donwood, aka Dan Rickwood: responsible for all of Radiohead’s album and poster art since 1994.

Did Scovell feel like he was dreaming? ”I was exploring in Switzerland and getting away from a lot of stress when he first emailed. It felt more of a surreal life-line than dreaming. I’d had a lot of knock-backs from local musicians in regards to visual collaborations, a lot of writing knock-backs and some tough criticism for my PhD applications at the time.

“So, to have this huge, successful figure come in and tell you the complete opposite to what everyone else seemed to be saying about what I was doing at the time was overwhelming.”

Filming in the overgrown ‘Holloways’ — naturally occurring tunnels of plant-life growing along sunken lanes — of Dorset’s Jurassic coast (read Scovell’s accounts of the difficult filming process here), and narrated and written by Macfarlane, the short is “about time-loops and unexplained occurrences … among its histories is the hanging at Dorchester in 1594 of four Catholic recusants.”

Filming in the dead of winter, Scovell encountered that particle type of dread, which Macfarlane describes as a “swarming in the stomach’s pit, the tell-tale prickle of the skin”.

“As a place built largely on summer season tourism,” Scovells recounts, “the Jurassic coast in particular is desolate in the brisk January days; upon my trip out to film with my trusty super 8 camera, I came across not a single soul treading upon the pathways. Whilst Holloway is not to be a film about ghosts or the more horrific elements to be found within our landscape, it could easily have descended into such areas.”

Filming alone, without a crew and seeing hardly any passers by for three days, was a much harder prospect than originally expected. He even got stuck for hours in a muddy Holloway with no way out other than through thicket, equipment and all.

Looking through the stills taken at the film location recently (and showing us some angry bramble scars) Scovell pointed out a dark shape at the end of the Holloways that he swore wasn’t there whilst filming. Or he didn’t think so, anyway (he laughs). It’s a weird echo of Scovell’s entertaining (and autobiographical?) film The Coastal Path, which follows a young filmmaker who accidentally captures a ghost on Super 8. This English Eerie, we found out, is insidious. We’re still feeling that “tell-tale prickle of the skin”.

What reaction, we wonder, does Scovell expect from the release of the full film, due at some point this year? ”I just hope people who liked the book and Robert’s writing in general will find something of interest in the film, even though they are very different forms. I do know that if people come to it expecting some sort of Countryfile episode on Dorset Holloways, they’re going to be extremely bewildered.

“Nature writing is in a real boom period at the moment but the modern film equivalents seem few and far between. Hopefully that will change in coming years as more fragments like this are made, especially as I’m determined to continue making them within narrative film forms as well as in more experimental styles, like Holloway.”

What is so fascinating, so gripping about the notion of the English Eerie is that it turns everyday, surrounding spaces into ones of creeping fear and danger. Nowhere is safe, no matter how alluring. It is seeing, as Macfarlane puts it, the “English countryside not only as a place of beauty, calm and succour, but also as a green and deeply unpleasant land.” And in the form of Holloway, we can’t wait to see the results.

Laura Robertson (TDN Editor)

See more of Adam Scovell’s films on YouTube

Read Scovell’s TDN articles here

Scovell’s film season at A Small Cinema Liverpool includes avant-garde folk horror Requiem For A Village (1975), Thursday 7 May 2015 — see full programme here