EDGELAND MUTTER

 

Iain Sinclair - Things were so strange on the pebble shore in front of me that I realised that we were looking at a process of reverse evolution. And why I liked it was like someone had pulled a rug out from under England and everything had slipped down and you couldn’t go any further.

Iain Sinclair - If you looked down on the beach in the morning it was like the potato pickers. There were these people scavenging with metal detectors moving over the stone fields and treating the stones as if they were coins and I thought that was astonishing and attractive

v/o - singing – I want to have sex on the beach .... there’s a party .... sex on the beach

v/o - Nowadays people seem to be continually on the move the picturesque scenery of Britain as a background and absolutely unequalled entertainment and accomodation.

v/o - Let’s take the story and build it up slowly.

Iain Sinclair - Well I got very excited and pleased by this idea of showing the town by way of these postcards that were much better than mere anecdotal memory. They developed a rich narrative of their own and I discovered that Mr Judge, Fred Judge, who’d taken these as his day job, he’d gone round the town and he had picked up moments of fork lightening, he’d picked up waves breaking over the shore front, he’d picked up the diurnal drama and nocturnal dramas of the town in a small domestic way.

v/o - And this is an actual image of our own past which we love to have.

v/o - Roll up roll up out with the old in with the new.

Iain Sinclair - but you fuse the two together and you create a much better hastings a schizophrenic Hastings.

v/o - I have some memories.

v/o - Yea but I’m living in the here and now.

v/o - What was Alisia saying? Hench tonk and fit.

v/o - Hello

v/o - I think that everything in the world will be washed up on Hastings beach one day

Iain Sinclair - You’d see the man who was wrapped like Dracula, a naked man wrapped into his old duvet and apparently he was not without means he was a lawyer that used to go into the wine shop and buy one really good quality bottle every morning. And there was the old woman with the pram who pushed a doll round through the town and you’d meet her three or four times a day and the doll would change. All of those figures were fantastic.

v/o - singing Oh tainted love - tainted love - Now I know I’ve got to run away I’ve got to get away

v/o - It’s called Edgeland Mutter.

 

Iain Sinclair - There’s no better landscape or topography in which to vanish and to cease to be yourself and to become something new and probably amphibian. And finally to just go across the road and disappear into the sea.

Iain Sinclair - The writer shouts. His breath is an empty speech bubble

v/o - That’s what I’m talking about when I speak of life

 

DV Camera Andrew Kötting

16mm Ben Rivers

Edit and Sound Design Andrew Kötting

Words Iain Sinclair/Andrew Kötting

Music Christian Garcia