Magic Explained

A strange, epistolary and revisionist musical adaptation of Wuthering Heights written by the consumptive brother Branwell Brontë. When Branwell - the ne'er-do-well, tubercular brother of the Brontë sisters - discovered that Emily was writing her first novel, he offered to be her editor. Once he realized that he was the model for the alcoholic Hindley Earnshaw character, he reimagined the story as a musical memoir of his own life with Hindley as the hero. Reconstructed from Branwell's letters to his friend Francis Leyland along with notes, sheet music and damaged film fragments - this 1898 film originally premiered on the 50th anniversary of the consumption deaths of Branwell and Emily Brontë.

Unable to locate the grave of Letine—19th century leader of an acrobatic cycling troupe (buried locally)—I went home and wondered. And then I made this film. Equal parts experimental animation, stylised domestic drama, and autobiography accompanied by reflections on mortality, filmmaking and magic.

Work, film, work, film, work – day to day – week to week. This is a home movie domestic comedy experimental film drama. Autobiography too. It’s also part four of an ever-growing trilogy. Starting in 2003 I decided to make a series of pieces alongside my regular films, a strand that would constitute an ongoing fictional autobiography. But as all creative work is, to some extent, autobiographical, and as I appear in most of my films, and all the people in these films are who they say they are, then what made this different from the rest – or from real life, really – became kind of blurred. Fuzzy even. So this is fuzzy fiction – latest in the line.

A promotional vehicle with lane-changing tendencies, but both hands kept on the wheel at all times.

A newsletter that turned into a film about hands (fast forwarding through slow times).

Super 8 stop motion, south London style. Includes feats with cards and ropes, legerdemain, sleights of camera, a perky river, and rare insights into the activities of a local magician-ventriloquist from the 1930s. A companion piece to ‘Magic Explained’ (which probably means this is part two of a trilogy), and similarly lively.

A newsletter meets home movie, made by an experimental filmmaker who was constructing a papier mâché skeleton but whose leg (the filmmaker’s) suddenly went wrong. It got fixed, but (spoiler alert) that’s just kind of incidental. Possibly a diary but probably not a documentary: this is a play with form, animated with glee, edited with joy.

It's not the bats' fault. Holed up in lockdown, I made a bat-head mask, I made a skeleton. I made a miniature wood by collecting twigs and moss from the local cemetery, scraping it off the gravestones. "Not Yet Out of the Wood" is a phrase that we are going to keep on hearing during our long entanglement with COVID-19. Bats have been around for 50 million years and now their habitats are being destroyed at a terrifying rate. I wanted to give them right of reply.

The director couldn’t have anticipated the coronavirus epidemic, but here is a near-future world in which a middle-class protagonist lives indoors, congratulating himself on the economic virtues of having ingested ‘animal condensed’ – an unexplained substance that seems to merge human and animal – and its benefits to his comfortably alienated life. “It optimises, it abstracts… it made us safe, here at home, with our accelerated portfolios”, he explains. Upstairs, his daughter virtually reconfigures Peppa Pig. Outside, meanwhile, hiding in the forest, is an unnamed, camouflaged fugitive, who explains her escape from a society that seems to have happily abolished the distinction between organic and technological life. An artist who has become a guerrilla fighter, the woman is busy preparing totem-like countermeasures to disrupt those who have become ‘animal expanded’.

The fourth episode of “The Variations,” featuring two more adverts, considerations of the future, a multiple projection spectacular in miniature, a riverine jaunt and—in all honesty—quite a lot more… (This is a special one-off version including a *bonus* get-you-up-to-speed prologue!)