Leedstown Roller Disco
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Leedstown Roller Disco from Paul Farmer on Vimeo. |
A film with a long gestation: at the 1996 Celtic Film & Televison Festival in Bangor, Cymru, I saw an Irish short called Pothole Terror. This was the story of two farmers who expressed a grinding, long-term indignation against their local authority's road maintenance policies through nocturnal expeditions in which they would outline the many craters in a stretch of tarmac with fluorescent paint. When the sun arose the entire length of highway would glow a demonstration of citizen outrage.
Back in Cornwall, I wanted to emulate the beguiling strangeness of Pothole Terror. One day I was passing through Leedstown, a large village on the high ground between Helston and Hayle, and I saw the signs for a roller disco to be held in the village hall the following Sunday. I shot this in collaboration with George Greene, who conducts the interviews in the film and holds the microphone so artistically just in shot. The camera I used was a domestic Hi8 Sony TR2000, hence the drop outs and strange colours. And then I didn't know what to do with it. Editing in those days involved a transfer to Hi-Band Umatic or Beta format, plus the use of a professional edit suite, with almost no outlets for short-shorts. |
This was the reason this shoot came between two half-hour dramas, with their exhausting demands in terms of organisation and resources and a learning curve so steep you almost inevitably fell off it backwards. So the film sat in the can, or rather on a deteriorating tape in an old leather suitcase.
I finally put the film together in 2009 at the request of the artist Bruce Davies for his Bring Your Own Disco exhibition at The Exchange Gallery, Penzance. Bruce's interest was piqued by the film's featuring of the music of 1996. I dug out the tape and managed to digitise it. As the tape played it disintegrated and this edit uses every single usable second of the footage - the breakup of the picture after the clapper is actually as it happened, and some of the effects are used to cover up degraded parts of the image. Between shooting and edit non-linear editing had come into being and the contexts in which the film was shot and completed were radically different.
And now you can watch it online!
I finally put the film together in 2009 at the request of the artist Bruce Davies for his Bring Your Own Disco exhibition at The Exchange Gallery, Penzance. Bruce's interest was piqued by the film's featuring of the music of 1996. I dug out the tape and managed to digitise it. As the tape played it disintegrated and this edit uses every single usable second of the footage - the breakup of the picture after the clapper is actually as it happened, and some of the effects are used to cover up degraded parts of the image. Between shooting and edit non-linear editing had come into being and the contexts in which the film was shot and completed were radically different.
And now you can watch it online!
