Talking Tides: Where Words Flow

This paper concerns the authors’ research focused on the post-industrial landscape of the River Plym estuary to the north east of Plymouth Sound, the UK’s first National Marine Park. Their essay film reveals the accumulation of hidden labour that has produced this waterway over centuries: silting up due to run-off from tin-streaming on Dartmoor from the medieval period, its embankment for capitalist commerce and land-stewardship in the 19th Century, and reclamation during the modern era to reconstitute these environmentally impaired resources for productive uses.

The unseen labour of Moore and Parker’s embodied engagement and intra-actions with the material specificities of this place through their repeated explorations of this tidal waterway by kayak are embodied in the filmic outcomes and emphasise the agency of the more-than-human in shaping human experiences. Using an innovative method of ‘speaking in place’, developed in their essay film, Father-land (2018), they return to the estuarine filming locations to record unrehearsed dialogic exchanges that draw on their memories of this place and its materialities, and interactions with the human and other entities of this watery environment.

Grounded in the scholarship of Laura Rascaroli and Nora Alter, the presentation draws attention to the hybridic and transgressive form of the essay film. It explores correspondences between this unruly documentary form and the shifting boundaries of the estuary and finds correspondences between the creative labour of the essay film and the confluence of salt and fresh water flows as the estuary’s tidal rhythms reveal and conceal what is below the surface.

Paper delivered in the Essay Film and Labour: Issues in the Making of the Essayistic as Independent Filmmakers panel convened by the BAFTSS Essay Film Special Interest Group, with Dr Romana Turina (University of the Arts Bournemouth) and Dr Ming-Yu Lee (University of Taiwan).