By Berlinda Recacho
When we were in art school in the mid-Nineties, my brother got his hands on a used Super-8 camera. It was a charmed time, at the end of one analog technology, before the immersion of the next digital wave. Of course, the only way to see if the camera worked was to get film (not cheap) and try it out, though we also had the added (agonizing) wait time of sending the film to be developed (also not cheap). That's the edgy danger of film: no matter what you're capturing, it has to be processed, and it might not turn out. Whether test footage or an actual narrative, nothing is throwaway because it's the document of a time and place that will never happen again. We didn't think about this much back then. We were avid watchers of "The Real World" on MTV, and because we were students and connoisseurs of film and video art, we liked Sadie Benning's A Place Called Lovely, Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, Hal Hartley's Long Island Trilogy, and Spike Jonze's music videos. We documented ourselves accordingly, mostly on videotape, though Super-8 footage is rarer and cooler. I'm glad we did; what was just a record of our daily lives back then now stands as an artifact of our youth.
At that time I was less into shoegaze, and more a fan of Lush themselves; the band were a defining part of the musical taste of my twenties, and remain a touchstone to this day. What immediately struck me about the film, Lush: A Far from Home Movie, now playing exclusively on The Criterion Channel in the U.S., is that it is as much about absence as it is about presence. These wordless scenes, made up of Super-8 footage shot and assembled by former bassist Phil King and edited by Brian Gatesset, show the quartet -- Miki Berenyi, Emma Anderson, King, and Chris Acland -- as they tour their then current album. On closer inspection, it's a document of the fractious bonds that hold a group together, with clues and signs about how they might unravel.
The film opens with "Lovelife", an bright upbeat tune cloaking lyrics full of unsettled fervor, sung by Berenyi and Anderson in balanced melody/harmony:
"We blow around like tiny leaves in a big storm
Finding there's nothing left to breathe or to keep warm
You ebb and flow and your rhythm beats my head
Leave me alone while you swallow up your dead"
While the scenes are less slick, this sequence is still the most like a traditional music video, merrily chasing the band through a London travelogue as they pose in front of a car festooned with typography and imagery (lemons and luggage wheels), parked at The Great Pagoda at Kew Gardens, and then drive it through strangely bright streets to the ruins of an emptied indoor swimming pool where they pose and bounce, run and slide through a photo shoot, and finally back outside at the iconic Tower Bridge. The tour begins, taking off into the air, looking down through airplane windows at towering thunderheads to "Undertow (Spooky Remix)", an ethereal mix of instruments and vocals as a wall of sound. They visit attractions like the futuristic Space Needle in Seattle and the St. Louis Arch. They are tourists, but also a part of the landscape.
There is a street-photography, shoot-from-the hip sensibility to King's eye, a naturalism to the capturing of subjects without archness or self-consciousness. He films the band and their friends, lounging by the hotel pool, then on a boat tour to Alcatraz, watching San Francisco fog swirling under the Golden Gate Bridge. In New York, he looks out from the observation deck at the Empire State Building. The Twin Towers still stand, as tourists peer through viewfinders taking photos with actual cameras. In Japan, they study patterns of fallen Ginkgo leaves outside a shrine as teenagers dance in the streets, costumed in poodle skirts and leather-jackets. Anderson stares wearily into the distance on the tour bus, then later smiles directly at the camera, all shadows gone. On a tropical beach, Berenyi turns a cartwheel and runs into the surf, spangled with blinding reflections of the sun on the sea. King pictures himself fragmented in mirrored tile, then shows his face, full and whole, grinning into the lens.
Towards the last half of the film, King's images become more abstract: The austere branches of trees, houses made menacing, solarization peeking through windows, glowing chandeliers, rotating strobes, scudding clouds, the whirling pulsing lights of carnival rides. The music foreshadows an approaching darkness as the band returns to Europe and the camera becomes more focused on Acland. "Never-Never" laments, "I am sunken in biology/I cannot control that part of me." While "Light from a Dead Star" mourns a loss of self: "And now it's just too late/to wish me back again." But the most direct and foreboding lines are found in "When I Die":
"Healthy in my dreams
Is what you are
Is what it seems
What does it all mean?
You’re only hiding behind a screen"
In a particularly arresting composition, Acland sits outside a mausoleum, hands at his temples, shaking his head. In another shot, he is hunched over a chess board, then crouched like a gargoyle on a wall, then peering out a car window at the viewer. Often, he is laughing, mugging for the camera, dancing, posing. We see him playing pinball, then sitting in a graveyard. The band pose in a series of funhouse mirrors, stretching and warping their forms, while Acland goes through a more blatant transformation, made up like a werewolf, prowling and skulking joyously around a yard. At the line "I'll see you again", the lens closes on his peacefully sleeping eye. The only dialogue in the whole film comes in the last scene, where Acland, on his last birthday in 1996, is serenaded onstage by a pair of young and old Elvis impersonators.
To be in a band seems like the greatest of dichotomies: the highest of highs when everyone is getting along in a flow state, and then the lowest of lows when you realize that you can't maintain that equilibrium indefinitely and that disappointment tears you apart. Touring seems like a thankless compulsion as you go to far-flung places, meet people who love your music, perform for them, amd then rinse and repeat and do it again the next night, and the next night, and so on. You're expected to be on top of your game, regardless of the stress, travel, homesickness, and exhaustion. This grainy black-and-white Super-8 aesthetic reveals all this and more. The lack of fine detail puts the present immediately behind the filter of the past. As an auteur, King invites us in, showing us what it was like to be part of Lush, defining their brief, shining moment. It is a stark reminder that Chris Acland, so present in these images, is no longer with us. The film is dedicated to him.
Lush: A Far from Home Move is now playing on The Criterion Channel in the United States.