|
Arthur Johns' 10-minute experimental film is a personal essay on colour
effects, set to a hypnotic soundtrack by Robert Wyatt. Although his initial art
training was in painting, Johns quickly realised that his favourite medium was
film. He made Solar Flares in the early 1970s, shortly after graduating from
London's Royal College of Art, where he had already made a number of
award-winning experimental shorts.
The film was made on equipment rented cheaply from the college (including an
Oxberry process camera for the special effects), and the production process was
largely organic, as Johns remembers: "the film made itself.... I didn't know it
was going to be a film about landscapes until it was finished." The film doesn't
follow a linear narrative, consisting instead of four distinct sections whose
material has highly personal connotations for the filmmaker: "Solar Flares was
about landscape, but there were two landscapes in me. And as much as I grew up
in a village in Cornwall, when I made a film, I was working in Soho.... I was
the village boy but I was also the film-maker. And so Solar Flares is the
portrayal of both those inner landscapes". The successive scenes include a
strange street mime involving a paper bird in Islington's Camden Passage;
crowded streets around Piccadilly; a domestic scene (printed stop-frame) in
which the filmmaker is seen rolling a joint in his bedroom and haunting shots of
Cornish moorland clay-pits and the surrounding natural landscapes. In this
striking psychedelic finale, the film develops complex superimpositions of
negatives and positives of similar tracking shots, while creating unique colour
effects through the use of primary colour filters in a variety of
combinations.
Ex-Soft Machine musician Robert Wyatt was involved at an early stage, so that
the music became an integral part of the project. Recorded at the home studio of
Pink Floyd's Nick Mason in Spring 1973, this multi-instrumental experiment sits
between Wyatt's solo debut, End Of An Ear, and his seminal Rock Bottom, with its
distinctive use of toy organ. The music itself would reappear, in a more
'digestible' form, on his 1975 album Ruth Is Stranger than Richard.
Solar Flares was completed in 1973 thanks to a small grant from the BFI
Production Board, and was Johns' calling card into the film industry. He
subsequently specialised in special effects and went on to work on films like
the Superman series.
Christophe Dupin
*This film can also be viewed via the BFI's YouTube channel.
|
Complete film (8:26)
