Review

Callum Hill

First published by Art Monthly, April 2019

Crow Trap, LUX, London, 20th February - 30 March

‘Oh stupid England …’ Spoken in a tone of resignation, these words introduced Callum Hill’s Crowtrap, 2018, a short ‘documentary fiction’ film that uncannily expresses the disorienting moods of anger, inefficacy and dread that have stricken the national psyche as the UK’s departure from the European Union has devolved into a political and emotional impasse.

Screened at LUX in London, Hill’s film opened with a historical drift through the galleries of Tate Britain in search of one of JMW Turner’s appropriately ‘unfinished’ landscapes. It’s a brief journey, concluding in a multi-faith contemplation room whose stark walls and fluorescent lighting are hauntingly suggestive of a deportation cell. Contrary to what’s shown on screen, the film’s voice-over (tentatively spoken by the artist) announces a different route of enquiry: the life of suffragette Mary Richardson, who, in 1914, slashed Diego Valázquez’s 1647 painting The Rokeby Venus in protest over the British government’s treatment of Emmeline Pankhurst. Richardson’s activism notoriously included the destruction of property through arson, and yet despite her commitment to the progressive cause of women’s liberation she would later become an active member of the British Union of Fascists. Her appearance in Crowtrap, however, provides only one of many proxies for the film’s ‘real’ poetic antagonist, fire.

‘The initial charm [of fire] is so strong that it still has the power to warp the minds of the clearest thinkers and to keep bringing them back to the poetic fold in which dreams replace thought,’ wrote Gaston Bachelard in 1938, suggesting a strange continuum between reason and reverie. And it is fire’s mercurial quality, its hypnotic physical presence and metaphorical pliancy, that Hill calls on to imply both the transience and transmutational nature of political subjectivity as it might oscillate between the ‘rational’ and dangerous states of delirium. ‘Heat transference, emotional transference,’ she hurriedly intones, ‘fire, destroy, change.’

Fire finds its appropriate hosts in the bodies and biographies of two men who exist on either side of the European divide, and whose differing proximities to combustion allow for very different articulations of historical trauma and their resulting relationships with the land.

Arnd Teiche is the proprietor of a coal yard in Prenzlauer Berg, east Germany, the enclosure of which is constructed from decaying sections of the Berlin Wall. These cast concrete megaliths are forensically scoured by Hill’s camera in an insistence of their material presence, their caked sprayed paint a crumbling palimpsest of once charged slogans. I was reminded of the popular German phrase mauer im kopf, or ‘wall in the head’, implying not only an ideological partitioning of the mind but also the heavy psychological encumbrance that resulted.

In England we see George Thomas, a heather burner living in Yorkshire. Although the film doesn’t tell us explicitly, Thomas witnessed the Piper Alpha catastrophe of 1989 in which a North Sea oil rig explosion claimed 167 lives through industrial negligence. In contrast to the awful spectacle of Piper Alpha’s devastating blaze, Thomas’s current role utilises fire as an agent of renewal, burning heather and gorse to replenish and strengthen the habitat of moor-dwelling species. 

These lives, vaguely told, are intercut with footage of the ‘crowtrap’ from which the film derives its name, a contentious device that employs small birds to trap Corvidae (rooks, ravens, crows, magpies), often resulting in both predator and prey co-existing in a state of indefinite distress. In Hill’s sequences, this structure figures as a tormenting emblem, not only of the political baiting that took place in the lead up to the 2016 Brexit referendum, but also the anxious tribalism of a post-vote UK. ‘This film started from a place of anger,’ she admits, ‘but as time has gone on I recognise it’s from a place of fear.’

A second film, British Summer, 2017, played in the LUX library on a smaller screen. Filmed on midsummer, this short, explicitly polemical work intercut footage of Stonehenge with the charred shell of London’s Grenfell Tower. The film makes a painfully blunt yet necessary point of reiterating the unresolved process of providing legislative and monetary compensation to Grenfell’s victims and survivors, whilst exposing the astronomical conservation fees incurred annually by the prehistoric monument, its soundtrack of construction work bleeding back into Crowtrap.

As such, Hill’s films marked an apposite polarity between the impressionistic and the polemical that felt appropriate to the perceived deadlock of the present, a context in which making art might appear ineffective, even indulgent in the face of rising populisms and state negligence. While Crowtrap made no declarative moral pronouncements or didactic insistences on policy, its sequence of images felt profoundly political as a reorientation of mood considered not simply as symptom, but as a critical vocabulary, its nuances providing texture and complexity to the forthright pragmatism of its companion piece.