Northern Lights

Northern Lights, 2018, Super8 and 16mm digital HD scan, 13:37mins Co-Commissioned by Grundy Art Gallery and ICA as part of the Art and Screen network. An inquisitive voice from the far future, or ‘visitor from another place’, interrogates the traditions of the Illuminations, an annual light festival in the coastal town of Blackpool in the North West of England, established in 1879. The disembodied voice seeks to understand, but often confuses, Northern English vernacular and traditions against the current shifting political lexicon surrounding Britain’s future. Known as a historic centre of working class seaside tourism, Blackpool’s unique fantastical fairground imagery can be universally identified as totemic remnants of a former era that still trades on a collective sense of nostalgia. Daniels presents his own contemporary 16mm and super-8 film observations as a found archive, and a script littered with the same word-play commonly embedded in the landscape of seaside end-of-the-pier resorts; to try and decipher England’s current questions around nationalism, Brexit parochialism, and collective anxieties surrounding what the future holds. (Available without English subtitles here: https://vimeo.com/256920667 password - northernlights )

Year

2018

Director

Chris Paul Daniels

Duration

13 min

Country

United Kingdom

Language

English