enys men (w&d mark jenkin)

When I first watched Bait, the filmmaker was an unknown phenomenon, a man making film out of ingenuity, will power and an imagistic imagination to die for. Now I am only one step removed from the same director, knowing several of the luminaries in the credits. His story is inspirational, with Enys Men premiering in Cannes and breaking out of the low-fi bubble. As Mr P observed, there are posters for the film in Oxford Circus tube station. Given all this there is the nagging fear that the film will underwhelm, that it will have lost the marriage of DIY aesthetic and stop motion narrative that made Bait one of the most remarkable films of the British century. I should not have feared. Enys Men takes a gothic turn, but retains all the wonder of its predecessor. It has elements of folk horror, but it also has elements of early Buñuel. The marriage in cinema between object as both aesthetic and semiotic signifier is once again beautifully explored and constructed. The word is secondary, far more so than in Bait, and the language is constructed from image, allowing the film to hover between dream and the perceived reality of its unnamed heroine. Cornwall’s burnished tones are interrupted by a gallo scarlet, and the effect is hypnotic and delirious. 

bait (w&d mark jenkin)

I had no pre-expectations about Bait. I thought it was going to be a gritty documentary about the fishing industry. It’s not. it’s a sly, poetic examination of gentrification and social tensions. Set in a Cornish fishing village. Which is the kind of subject matter which could readily veer towards melodrama. Noble fisherman confronts arriviste townies who buy his family house and turn it into a BnB, whilst he struggles to make a living selling fish caught without a boat. However, the director/ DOP/ editor of bait is interested in aesthetics as much as politics. The film is shot on grainy Super-16. Each shot is carefully composed and delineated, an exercise in cinematic composition, like watching Vigo crossed with Eisenstein. In the opening minutes, one starts to wonder if there isn’t something overcooked about the edit, but as the viewer settles into the rhythm, you realise that it is actually beautifully crafted. The aesthetics take the burn off the politics, allowing the narrative to rumble along beside it, offering an acute portrayal of the current state of Britain. A land where urban wealth can displace rural industry and tradition; where accent is as significant as it was in the time of Hardy; a country which is more than happy to sell off its heritage to a seasonal tourism industry, leaving the traditional fishing industry to fend for itself against insurmountable odds. If this was one of those review pages that people read, I would urge my public to go and enjoy one of the finest British films of the decade. As it is not, I urge the reader, should they come across these words, to seek out a film of remarkable artistry, even if it’s destined to be no more than a footnote in British cinema history. A film which harks back to the origins of cinematic narrative, whilst looking the present squarely in the eye.