Skip to main content

Fancy Pictures – Mark Neville

Mount Stuart, Isle Of Bute, until September 30th 2008
4 stars
A man sits at his living room table, a pet pug and its pups at his feet. An elderly couple walk through the countryside, posing for the camera, stiff-backed and proud. The slides that follow, occasionally punctuated by east European sounding accordion and plaintive female singing, looks like pictorial records of some agricultural pogrom occupied by model workers basking in some rough-cast pan-generational Soviet idyll.

The sense of place that pervades throughout Mark Neville’s photographs in ‘Tula Fancies’, however, is deceptive. These are not leftover remnants from some long forgotten five-year plan, but are actually 21st century Bute in living, breathing colour. Neville modelled his studies on 1920s Soviet portraiture, name-checking the Russian Tula region as he commissioned the school captains of Rothesay academy to compose the accompanying score.

The result is a 14 minute documentary photo essay of a community at work, rest and play, from still lifes of work-benches and cattle in the living room, to Highland show ceilidhs and after-hours reverie. The hinterland between wild-life and domestic pets becomes blurred, a counterpoint that becomes even more marked in the 18 minute film, ‘Fancy Pictures,’ a blurred slow-motion 16mm close-up shot in the splendid grounds f Mount Stuart itself.

What initially looks like home movies pans out to resemble a more choreographed and impressionistic take on wild-life documentaries, whereby a pensive-looking sheep stands before a 19th century portrait of a regally poised spaniel. Such a backdrop is crucial as the camera concentrates on a group of frolicking cygnets protected by their own family even as they are at odds with their plush environment.

This is as far removed from David Attenborough as you can imagine, the film’s lack of soundtrack or voice-over lending a stark melancholy to a skewed depiction of domestic bliss. In the big house itself, the quartet of pictures that form ‘Photographs For The House’ suggest deeper connections still. It’s a feeling of another country, be it past, present or future, that’s conveyed best by the solitary school assembly piano that the ‘Tula Fancies’ slideshow ends with.

The List, July 2008

ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...