Animal Waste : The second of a set of five cinema-poetic collaborations with the artist-filmmaker Joshua Alexander.
Animal Waste spreads itself over the lands of London which seem to have inspired a re-understanding of the city’s literary and psychological history, from Limehouse to Wapping, Rotherhithe to Ratcliff. Mutely nodding to this profound and now taken for granted reexamination of these once were slums, Animal Waste sets itself against the confident and touristic glean of that history, instead aligning itself with the suffering sediment of the actual past. Shot around Wellclose Sq and Hawksmoor’s St Anne’s, and hiding from the Thames, the film evokes Falk, Swedenborg, Linneaus in all their intelligent menace.
‘Manichean visions revive disputed and despoiled London ground. Poetry in light and stone’ Iain Sinclair
The animal films explore the particular, baffled and morbid character of English attitudes to mortality, along with the specific influence of place and conformity on the quintessentially English deferral of emotion and melodrama. The films aim to capture the ambiguous menace of an often accidentally humorous resolve, manner, apology and understatement so prevalent in the English character.
Supported by the Eurimages TEM grant and Arts Council England via The Enemies Project.
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