by Hazel Anna Rogers for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog
I was speaking with a friend of mine a few days ago about innovations in art, or the lack thereof. He was of the opinion that nothing new was being made, that we, as a collective, were stagnating in our incessant recycling of the old, and in our opulent media wealth. At our fingertips, we have it all, from the birth of recorded music in Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautographic capturing of Au Clair de la Lune to the newest Taylor Swift album, The Tortured Poet’s Department. Type, and you will get. That is how it is now. We are used to it.
I did not disagree with my friend. I feel it too, sometimes. When I am writing a film, when I am playing music, when I am writing my articles…am I simply recycling what came before? Am I, as we all seem to be, caught in the web of ceaseless creation, forever destined to be one step behind. It’s that feeling when you watch a film and you wished that you’d made it, or when you listen to a song that you wished you’d written. It’s the feeling of a seeming inability to see the world in a way that has not been done before, and it appears insurmountable.
It is boring, too, sometimes. There is so much that it is hard to look at, hard to see a thing amidst the digital trees. A smog of screens clouds my own creation and makes me leave projects hanging half complete.
However – I did not agree with my friend either.
I have been frequenting many music venues lately. Small places, with small dancefloors and dimmed lights. The music, here, is small too. Names I’ve never heard, people I’ve never seen. And some of it, sure, is as I mentioned; a desperate harkening to the bygone days of 60s rock, a tepid hippy revolution a la 70s with all its tassles and flowing paisley dresses, or a retelling of the pop idols of the late 2000s. But some of it is new, brilliantly new, wonderfully new – voices I’ve never heard before, melodies that stick around in my mind when I return home to my house beside other houses. Bishopskin, The Wheel 2!, Drive Your Plow – these are bands that have found the means to somehow squeeze themselves into the holes that remain in our musical landscape, and there they are building deep foundations that, they hope, will endure in the years to come.
But, sometimes, when I watch some of these bands writhing about on the stage, shouting about politics and love, throwing themselves off the stage into the audience, it is as though, at times, I can already see their end. Because it’s true, what Noel Galagher says. Streaming has killed music, particularly rock music. It pays artists a pittance of what they would have been paid before through record sales. In other ways, it enables smaller bands to be discoverable more easily, through such platforms as Spotify, giving them a reach that would have been neigh impossible before the advent of streaming. But nonetheless; we are out here, us artists, working tirelessly for ‘nish’. And that is enough for many artists to eventually break and throw in the towel.
But there is hope in it. Some of this music is indeed new, indescribable and incomparable to what I’ve heard before. There have been times where I have been so shocked at the skill and innovation of a band that I’ve found myself standing motionless, mouth agape, in awe of what I am seeing, because what I am seeing feels like a birth of something that, one day, will no longer frequent these small dingy venues. It feels like I am dancing in purgatory with performers that will soon find themselves up in the sky, untouchable at last.
Similarly, in film, when we search a little deeper, we find a clamouring, the clunking resonance of thick-bodied old cameras, and the quiet poise of a director with an eye unlike any other. In film, I find the new over and over again
A little while ago, I discovered the work of Hlynur Pálmason, an Icelandic director, whose heart of ice and snow and shingle and waterfalls bewitched me instantly. The first work I saw of his was Nest (2022), a film created over the course of 18 months which follows three siblings as they build a treehouse. The children building the treehouse are Pálmason’s children, and the film is permeated with the endlessly changing landscape of Iceland. The cold, the wind, the whiteness of the sun, then the orange of the sun and the green of the fine grassland. The film is plotless, in a sense, and yet, as we watch the months pass, and the treehouse being built, we feel the passage of time as something so present, so palpable, that it makes us see it in our own lives, in the passing of our days, our weeks, our months, our years. Nest reminds me of long summer days spent whiling away the hours doing nothing, or of winter mornings, wrapped in sheets while the kettle boils and the fire burns away.
Later, I watched Pálmason’s Godland (Volaða land (Icelandic); Vanskabte Land, (Danish – ‘Malformed Land’) (2023), a film whose terrible, stark beauty and impossibly crisp images stayed with me long after its last frame. Godland is imbued with the insidiousness of colonialism without a word being said about it. It is also a film filled with simple pleasure; the pleasure of sun and warmth after days trudging frozen tundras, the pleasure of an accordion bellowing out over the water as people dance, the pleasure of a hot soup swallowed under a wooden roof.
Pálmason is new. His films are new, his eyes are new. Away from the endless mechanical pumping of the Hollywood machine, we find many like Pálmason. Not like him in vision, but like him in sentiment. Making only art that he feels must be made, not the art that is asked of him, not the art that is made only for money.
Mark Jenkin is another director who has caught me in his grip with his eye and his fishing line. I watched Enys Men (Cornish for ‘Stone Island’) (2022) recently, which follows an ecologist as she goes out to check on some strange flowers growing on a cliff on the Cornish coast. Every day, she goes out, checks the temperature of the soil, drops a rock into a well, then returns home and switches on the generator, pens down her findings, and makes tea. In the evening, she reads by candlelight, because she has turned off the generator. This is a slow film, despite its short running time (1h 30m), and all the better for it. Time is not an anxiety, time merely serves as a tool with which to dwell on the rolling waves, the verdant fields, the darkness of the night in rural Cornwall. The protagonist’s house is away from everything, and so she is alone. And despite the implications of her solitude, I found myself yearning for the simplicity of her existence. London is tiring, at times. It is perhaps because I am here that I am often anxious that I can never create something new, something that touches people as the musicians and directors I have mentioned have touched me, something that excites people and makes them see this strange life a little differently, with wider eyes, like those of a child. I live and breathe in the saturation of a city groaning under the weight of millions of dreams and lives, and it is difficult, at times, to see the light, to see the possibilities that shine through the cracks in the grey paving stones of the streets where I live.
But I have hope.
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Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include Ememem, Shojin Ryori and What Does It Mean To Be Wealthy.
Other Carl Kruse Blogs include the Carl Kruse WordPress Blog and the Carl Kruse Blogspot Blog.
