The Dionysians of West Lancs
‘The Dionysians of West Lancs’ is an essay film that weaves through age-old tensions - Acts of Enclosure, defence of the Commons, freedom of association and assembly. The narrative is geographically played out around tracts of land running up the coastline of West Lancashire. In its entirety, the film is collaged from a number of diverse threads. The text derives from factual sources; on-line ‘rave forums’, passages from an 18th Century act of Parliament and a topographical survey from 1907 titled ‘A history of the County of Lancaster’ which recounts the controls feudal landowners attempted to exert upon the area tracing back to medieval times. A musical accompaniment for the film comes in the form of an Algorhithmic trance piece by sound artist Norah Lorway. Preceded by a jam session recorded in 1929 by a travelling British gramophone engineer in Casablanca, accessed on-line via the Free Music Archive. The visual elements were culled from youtube clips of a rave on Southport beach from 1991, animated volvelles (moveable wheel charts / 'search engines') from Pieter Apian’s ‘Cosmographia’ published in 1524 and a ‘Phantom ride’ along the Southport Coast Road shot on GoPro from a car dashboard. |