Clay & Bone

Saturday 9th November

Tickets £5 / £4 concessions

Dir. Brian McClave, UK, 2021, 79 mins. Narration written and performed by Will Self.

Clay & Bone is a feature length, experimental documentary film that uses the Crossrail Film Archive to illustrate a hypnotic prose poem about London, written and narrated by the writer Will Self.

Here is Will Self’s description of the film:

"The Crossrail project is a new railway for London: 73 miles of track and 13 of tunnels beneath the storied capital. In Clay & Bone this vast new infrastructural project is both shown under construction, and hymned as a human endeavour that reveals us to ourselves even as we burrow beneath London’s infamously sticky clay. Using footage shot throughout the seasons, day, night, and at scores of locations, Clay & Bone fuses this with interludes within which the archaeological remains exposed by the tunnelling are described."

This is a prose poem as much as a documentary film: a poem in which images and words stand proxy for one another. Will Self’s incantatory narration for the film proposes the Crossrail route as a voyage through time as much as space: a journey back to the very origins of the city in the oozing mud of the Thames estuary – and in telling the tale it duets with film sequences that accelerate time then slow it down; provide an encompassing vision of this vast project – then submits its elements to the closest scrutiny.

As much a philosophic meditation as a celebration of ambitious civil engineering, Clay & Bone shows us the skull beneath the shiny skin of 21st century urbanity.

This screening of Clay & Bone is part of the 21st CHAT (Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory) international conference, which is this year hosted in Plymouth. This year's interdisciplinary conference is activateCHAT. We've asked participants to respond to the themes 'ACTIVATE' and 'BUSY' through archaeology, art and heritage practices. For more information about the conference, including registration, please visit https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/whats-on/activatechat

Dates & Times

 Saturday 9th Nov  4:45pm Intro
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