- Venue
- Aurora Festival
- Location
- East England
Aurora – a festival of animation, artist’s films, installations and live performance – takes place mainly in the centre of Norwich, clustered around Cinema City and the Art School. To find Emily Richardson’s film installation Cobra Mist we had to journey north. It was only a ten minute walk, but crossing a decaying 60’s shopping centre and then into some industrial units, we’d left the festival buzz far behind. There was no poster or other pointer to Richardson’s work outside the venue. Inside, blackout curtains created a sort of false rear wall to the space. Pushing through the curtains we found a projector, switched off. We persevered, and poking around in a kitchen behind the screen we disturbed an invigilator who agreed to start the film running.
This sense of distance from the world was entirely appropriate and formed a potent prelude to our experience of the film. Its subject matter is the defunct Atomic Weapons Research Establishment on Orford Ness, a huge shingle spit on the Suffolk coast. The Ministry of Defence acquired the site in 1913 and military research continued until 1971. The research was mostly connected with aerial warfare and included the development or improvement of parachutes, machine gun sights, radar, and after World War Two, the ballistics and aerodynamics of atomic bombs, all of which has built up a sense of menace and mystique around Orford Ness. (‘Cobra Mist’ was the name of a multi-million pound Anglo-American project to develop radar that could look over the horizon.) Access is less restricted now, and the site is in fact a National Trust reserve, but it is still not easy to get to. The only way in is via a National Trust ferry across the estuary, and that only runs on certain days, and not at all in the winter.
The film is in 16 mm anamorphic format. The letterbox dimensions of the projection suggest the view from a concrete pillbox and also recall Tacita Dean’s film of a lighthouse Disappearance at Sea (1996). The first shot through this pillbox is of shingle with a lighthouse and misty sea beyond. A low circular structure is superimposed on the shingle ridges. The absence of familiar objects or any human figure makes it hard to tell the scale of the circle: a metre? Ten metres? Light moves on the sea in the background. Only later it becomes apparent that this is a time-lapse effect.
This ghostly view is followed by other fixed-camera shots, mostly using time-lapse, and showing the strange and distinctive buildings, in particular the ‘pagodas’ whose thick concrete roofs were designed to redirect a bomb blast from the trench beneath. All of the buildings and landscapes are uninhabited. (There is no sign of the ‘tractor-drawn trailer tours operating first Sat of the month, July – Sept, booking essential’ which are advertised on the National Trust website).
The particular quality of the daylight is the dominant feature of each shot, and bright or overcast, it always looks somehow wrong, skewed, altered. This sense of pervasive menace from the sky is also constructed by the soundtrack, composed by Benedict Drew from sound recordings made on Orford Ness by Chris Watson. The soundtrack has a grainy interrupted quality, with uncertain repeated figures, hisses, clicks, scratches, subtle variations. At first images and sound appear to be pursuing parallel but separate lines. Then a few minutes in there is a shot from inside a roofless building. The time lapse creates blocks of light sliding across the walls, fading briefly as clouds pass over. The soundtrack at this point is a dense gritty scrape, like a large block of concrete being shunted over a rough surface. These sounds fall into synch with the pulse and decay of the light on the walls. Sunlight starts to feel like something invasive and dangerous, evoking the way military research has perverted the nuclear fusion reactions observed in the sun, turning them to destructive means on earth.
The film introduces new shots, different decaying buildings and changing weather, while very effectively maintaining the brooding atmosphere. The length and structure of the film, with a storm drenching the camera lens about 4 or 5 minutes in, allows the intensity to build without any forced narrative being overlaid. The final shot, – a huge tent-shaped building half obscured by mist – feels incredibly desolate.
Cobra Mist is a powerful and gripping piece. It joins a growing body of work about Orford Ness: Jane and Louis Wilson’s A Record of Fear (2005) Max Sebald’s book Rings of Saturn (1995), and Matthew Robert’s Pagoda Project (2005). These works all draw on the accumulated psychic atmosphere from seven decades’ experimentation in destruction and portray Orford Ness as some combination of brooding, eerie, forsaken, distressed. Richardson’s piece adds to the growing composite portrait of a place at the end of a particular historical period, but doesn’t redirect that portrait into a new form or tone.