Closing out the London Short Film Festival 2023, ‘An Fylmow Berr’ is a celebration of the long-threatened arrival of a now-essential voice of the British canon: Mark Jenkin, the essential Cornishman.
It wouldn’t be a huge stretch to say that Mark Jenkin owes the London Short Film Festival quite a bit of credit. Not only did they award him with his first piece of major critical acclaim for Road to Zennor, which took home Best Experimental Film in 2017, but they were also, by Jenkin’s reckoning, the only competition in the world willing to accept the submission of his 44-minute work Bronco’s House (2015). It didn’t win anything that year, but it did turn out to be the genesis for Jenkin’s breakthrough: the Bafta award winning feature length cult hit Bait (2019). With ‘An Fylmow Berr’, Jenkin returns the favour, offering up a gloriously curated chronology of short pieces charting the key milestones—both formal and thematic—that have paved his journey from discarded, digitally produced shorts to the beautifully realised celluloid pieces upon which his name has been made.
Although not technically the first short in the programme (that honour goes to Cape Cornwall, Calling all the White Horses (2013), but I’ll get to that), The Source (2011), a rare digital production, forms a more accurate starting point for this retrospective of the Jenkin canon. Upon its introduction as digitally produced, a chorus of ironic boos ring out from the audience. Jenkin has spent the last decade building his reputation as an unyielding and dogged patron of the analogue format, even penning his own manifesto, Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13, which praises both the practical and aesthetic merits of the medium. The Source is the only piece within this curation that is not codified to the SLDG13 manifesto, and as such it acts as a prologue for ‘An Fylmow Berr’, a call back to a time before Jenkin was Jenkin—as he puts it: “it’s like a different person made it”. Despite its unfamiliar form, the justification for the inclusion of The Source is plain to see. Edited down from over 50 hours of footage, this charged portrait of Cornwall presented through regional community radio marks the beginning of a thematic thread that weaves its way through almost all of Jenkin’s later work: a disquiet towards the marginalisation of his community.
“At times, the curation of ‘An Fylmow Berr’ did some heavy lifting in contextualising some of the more abstract shorts exhibited.”
With David Bowie is Dead (2016), Dear Marianne (2015), and Vertical Shapes in a Horizontal Landscape (2018), we move onto some of Jenkin’s more personal pieces. Along with the standout The Essential Cornishman (2016), these form the real meat and bones of the collection. Punctuated by the shorter and more abstract shorts Road to Zennor (2016), Tomato (2017) and The Lady with the Long Brown Hair (2016), we finally conclude with a personal career high for Jenkin: the music video for The Smile that Thom Yorke twice personally requested he direct, Skrting on the Surface (2020).
At times, the curation of ‘An Fylmow Berr’ did some heavy lifting in contextualising some of the more abstract shorts it exhibited. This was most evident in the inclusion of both Cape Cornwall, Calling all the White Horses and 29 Hour Birthday (2022). Both pieces are composed of beautifully framed, monochromatic Super 8 footage, with the former being his first film shot in the medium. Dubbed over the top of Cape Cornwall, we hear American radio coverage detailing the damage caused by a hurricane, the white horses acting as physically realised ripples of events happening far away in places much more important than Cornwall—a geographical extremity yes, but a political one more so. However, this isn’t the way Jenkin sees it. It is the way in which public policy regards a peripheral community ravaged by the loss of industry and the rampancy of a second-home–catalysed housing market spike. If not for this thematic context provided by Cape Cornwall, 29 Hour Birthday would appear almost no more than a travelogue accompanying a continuous prose diary entry, its intentions never quite clear.
In truth, however, the majority of the shorts included more than do the job of standing up in their own right. Probably the most notable examples of this being Dear Marianne and David Bowie is Dead, two more continuous prose diary entries, this time accompanied by Super 8 footage shot almost a decade prior to their respective releases. Some of the footage from 2016’s David Bowie is Dead was recorded as early as 1993, when a 17-year-old Jenkin made his first trip to London, with the express intent of creating a film called ‘London’, soundtracked by the Smiths song: ‘London’ (“quite literal”, Jenkin quips in the Q&A). As a result, both stand as deeply personal self-portraits, anachronistically straddling decades of life and cramming those snapshots into just two reels (6 minutes) of footage.
A surprising element of what makes these films land so perfectly—surprising, I might add, not for its quality, but for the format within which it finds itself—is the poetry of the script. The Essential Cornishman, positioned centrally in the collection’s 90-minute run time, is where this is employed to best effect. As with the diary entries of Dear Marianne and David Bowie is Dead, a ticking clock is present throughout. Swells of urgency rush us through the scenes, we flit from a neatly composed establishing shot of the quintessential fishing village to an extreme close up of the eternal Cornishman himself. Dubbed over the top, Jenkin narrates:
“he tells me with not-quite-believe-it eyes that this season might be his last […] I ask him what he will do if he cannot fish: “dunno, trees? Building?” The eternal Cornishman, have I just caught him turning with the tide?”
With ‘An Fylmow Berr’, Jenkin captures this moment—alongside countless others—in a way that no one else can. Succinctly bookended and carefully curated, ‘An Fylmow Berr’ stands as a comprehensive representation of the Jenkin canon, charting the development of his signature aesthetic forms and highlighting his thematic beginnings. Mark Jenkin, the Essential Cornishman: have I caught him turning with the tide? No chance: the tide turns with him.
Words by Rory Jamieson
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