Doc/Fest Blog
Pilgrims
By Charlie Phillips 15 January, 2010
Seeing the shorts at the LSFF Night of The Living Docs this week got me thinking about some of my favourite shorts of the past few years, especially those that came through Channel 4's 3MW strand.
And it especially drew me back to a week of films from a couple of years ago about disappearing cafes, which came out of Pilgrim Films, the company who produce Saint Etienne's documentaries - or more accurately, Paul Kelly's. Producer Andrew Hinton, along with Kelly, have made some pretty wonderful dreamy films about disappearing London in the last few years. They like the lost places in the hinterlands of London, where there's a strange poetry in scrubland and dumped industrial objects. They like modern things, but they also like it when modern things decay. They made some films about Hackney Wick before the Olympic site came and sat on it, and they took up residency in the Royal Festival Hall to document its regeneration.
Their films are indebted to Humphrey Jennings and the Free Cinema movement, but there's something new and restless about them that a lot of those docs - though I love them - didn't have in them. And though they bear some comparison to the films of Chris Petit (whose new film screens on Sunday at the Curzon Soho, by the way), they're not melancholy. They're just dreamy. Someone like Chris Petit always seems to be looking back, but films like Kelly and Hinton's What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? (which you can watch a bit of on their website) don't feel like an end-point, they feel like the start of something new and ambiguous. They're chaotic, and they carry the message that even if you destroy the entire heritage of an area, the uncontrollable patterns of life of it still seep out. Your house might be bulldozed but you don't lose the sense that this place is home.
I think that films like this are part of a strand of contemporary UK films (docs and fiction too) that aren't celebrated enough for how they tell us who we are. They look back a bit but for me, they're not nostalgic, they're utterly contemporary takes on the homelessness of ultra-modern life.
So to get back to my original point, I like their shorts. And seeing as I was thinking about them, and they're available to watch online, here's one of the cafe docs, about the place where a cup of tea was 50p and I miss a very lot: