The Golden Apples of the Sun

Beautiful short film.

Excerpts from detailed article by writer and filmmaker Adam Scovell to be found over at Celluloid Wicker Man

Out of all of Derek Jarman’s pre-feature length film work, his short capture of a 1971 walking trip, A Journey To Avebury, is perhaps his most interesting and subtly complex piece of short film work.  These were the early days of Jarman’s experimentation when his work as a painter and even a set designer still seemed to dominate over his purely cinematic interests.

Yet A Journey To Avebury is not a simple home movie.  Its format belies such readings as it was, after all, the format most popular for home recordings and documenting holiday trips in the 1970s.  But in the hands of Jarman, the film becomes something else; it is a document of landscape and a critique of its perception with the potential of its weird past to bleach through into the chemicals of the celluloid.

The stones not only appear to resist movement but also appear to give rise to a psychical power upon the people surrounding them. This was an aspect also used in the series, Children Of The Stones (1977), which goes so far as to even mention the story of the crushed barber and insert him into the narrative.  It could be said that the stones possess some form of “inner” which also explains why the music of Coil works so well in the film.  The soundtrack is electronic and almost ritual like its repetition but also contrasts the natural with the human.  By using such music (recorded at a later date), the film taps into this potential “inner” of the stones Jarman is capturing which are already defying reality thanks to the director and their own special physical form.