Seat in Shadow

The Bedfords tells the story of Sir Edwin Landseer, a famed artist and favourite portrait painter of Queen Victoria. The film opens on Landseer as he travels from his studio in London to the Highlands of Scotland to visit The Bedford family whose portrait he has been commissioned to paint. After the long coach journey north Landseer awakes and makes a sleepy entrance to the Highland home of The Bedfords. The domineering Duke of Bedford welcomes Landseer as the family gather in the drawing room to meet this famous London artist, a celebrity of his day.

An elderly retired Modernist Architect called Clive, In his attic, Clive builds a model of a modernist Utopian City.

Laddy and the Lady follows an out-of-control golden retriever, owned by a Lady, on a pheasant shoot. Scenes of the shoot are intercut with flashbacks to Laddy’s troubled past as a puppy, wrenched from his mother’s side. On the shoot, Laddy is subjected to forms of physical and verbal abuse associated with gun dog handling. His inability to behave and retrieve the dead birds results in relentless punishment. Laddy becomes a receiver – a golden receiver- of abuse.

The title of Coombes’ new film refers to the name given to a particular Pictish symbol that has been interpreted as a representation of life and death; the here-and-now and the otherworld. The film presents two main sets: the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh and a mountainous landscape somewhere in the Highlands. The first serves as the stage for the wanderings of a wolf, while the second hosts a caveman sculptor played by Coombes, along with a cavewoman who entombs his body in plaster. In both scenarios, things seem out of place: a savage creature in a museum and a self-conscious artist in the Iron Age. “Love is tender to impression at the surface, like a rock with deep moss upon it, but there is too much mass of love for it ever to be moved.” – Coombes’ sub-personality as the Pictish Man.