We featured some stills from Emily Richardson’s film, Cobra Mist, a few issues back, alongside an interview with Chris Petit, who was to discuss the East Anglian landscape with Richardson at the Aurora Festival in Norwich.
Cobra Mist is a beautiful film, not least because of its sound design - the sound was recorded by Chris Watson and composed from those recordings by Benedict Drew, and is at once natural and full of foreboding and intent. The film’s subject matter is equally concerned with a relationship between landscape and technology, as it captures the former military site of Orford Ness - now deserted, and a nature reserve. Bird calls echo around industrial structures as Richardson’s camera circles the East Anglian moonscape, once used for atomic testing, where banks of shingle suck up to crumbling concrete. At first, it appears calm, meditative, with the “poignancy” rather quaintly described on the National Trust website but there’s a thrumming tension to the editing of both sound and vision, and disconcerting jerks of perspective as we suddenly, without warning, enter one of the abandoned buildings.
You can watch the film here, but London-based readers can also go see it tomorrow at Cafe Oto in Dalston, which is showing it with a live soundtrack performed by Watson and Drew.
