Director: Diana Taylor
Running time: 1hr
One of the great delights of documentary is that with the right format, anything can become intriguing. An engaging narrator – or a charismatic on-screen presenter – coupled with enthusiastic and earnest talking heads could go a long way to making Watching Paint Dry a compelling late-night watch on BBC4. (See: A Brief History of Colour.)
The problem with this – as with any form of art – is that the people who get it right, have a knack for making it look easy. Sometimes, as a result, filmmakers submitting to Indy Film Library seem to have mistakenly drawn from that that, anything can become intriguing, by virtue of being made into a documentary. In their eagerness, they happen to overlook the factors I’ve already mentioned – along with one essential, not-so-secret ingredient: editing.
The montage of any film needs close attention – but that goes double for a documentary, and triple for a documentary which centres heavily on archival content. Bringing old footage – or old still photography – to life for a modern audience requires a thoughtful, well-balanced blend of sound and image. The energy which photographs of times long past can be imbued with; the emphasis of key narrative beats; the pacing required to hold the attention of audiences who aren’t acquainted with the subject matter. All of this is essential for preaching to anyone but the converted – and a lot kinder on the converted you hope to preach to as well.
Catch the Wind St Ives in the 1960’s falls foul of the above from the very outset. Filled with distracting, and at times infuriating choices, its dispassionate edit not only lends itself to an absolute drag of a 60-minute run-time; but squanders many of the riches at the production’s disposal.
Summing this up is the title sequence. An assortment of miscellaneous drone footage of the harbour of St Ives set to plodding and nondescript surf music. The title itself appears in a slanted pre-set font, begging for adequate punctuation (and while this is not the first film I have reviewed which did not get the memo about how to use a colon, Catch the Wind St Ives in the 1960s is one of those which needs breaking up most).
While thoughts of this nature will still be plaguing my fellow pedants, the screen hastily fades to black, and the music to silence. We wait in the void for one beat, before a low-resolution clip of Donovan performing Catch the Wind plays. It is unclear when or where the live performance takes place, and if it is from St Ives then it either needs establishing shots of the venue, or a subtitle informing us. Instead, after a few moments, the footage then gets edited over with some other miscelaneous imagery of a juke box, which has a smaller aspect ratio than the Donovan footage – meaning we can still see the edges of the Scottish folk singer playing in the background.
After this sequence, narrator Graeme Nott monotonously informs us that Donovan had spent time in St Ives, attracted by the seaside town’s emergent status as an “artist’s colony” and counter-cultural haven. During this time, he may have written Catch the Wind.
Frustratingly, these three components could, and should, have been combined into one segment – which would have taken a third of the time, and made proceedings a great deal more watchable. The information about Donovan could have been silent text, which faded away as the first strains of the music played – while imagery of St Ives in the time Donovan was there – including video of his performance – could have been interspersed with footage of the modern town.
This is largely a critique which focuses on style over substance – but if a documentary’s substance is going to win over new audiences, and convince them of its importance, then style is extremely important. And unfortunately, that opening sequence is emblematic of what is to come: long periods of talking heads – modern St Ives residents who remember its glory days as a hippy hub – reciting lengthy stories of their youth, followed by grainy archive footage, or extremely pixelated photographs loosely related to what they have said.
Right off the bat, a good deal of that testimony could have been shortened – if only by taking out meandering non-sequitors or the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ of the subjects, and cutting away to old or new footage to disguise the cuts. But even more of the run-time could have been saved by showing historic images while the heads are talking – a mechanism only used in a precious few merciful moments. Much more of the time we spend in the living room or the café with various witnesses recalling at length what the 1960s were like for them.
Of course, it is important to note that some of the testimony still manages to be interesting. It is just that first, when it comes round, an audience may have already tuned out; and second, it is not exactly clear what it tells us about the modern world.
We learn exhaustively about the ins and outs of the hippy cliques that emerged around St Ives – who was cheating with whose partner, who was or was not “up to no good” when getting involved in the local council of artists, who had a good relationship with the fisherman, and who didn’t. We also get a brief potted history of the politics of the local groups – with noted antagonism between left-wing peace activists and those with openly fascistic tendencies. We are told about certain global events, and how these people remember feeling when they happened.
But at no point does anyone seem concerned with tying this into some kind of grand historical narrative. Writer-director Diana Taylor does not supply a script heavy on detail or consequence for her narrator to deliver, while her final edit does little to contrast the St Ives of the 1960s, which was going through huge demographic and social changes, with the St Ives of today – which is, we are assured, also totally different. And beyond surface level assertions it is just a “theme park” now, the ‘hows’, and ‘whys’, are left to our imaginations, and in the end (how might Brexit have impacted the French fishermen who visited?; how has austerity made it impossible for working people to live there?; how has gentrification pushed the artists away?; etc). That void leaves our wandering minds wondering a number of other whys.
Why, with a whole garden at her disposal, has Taylor shot one talking head with both the sun glaring in his eyes, and a tree’s shadow falling across the rest of his face? Why is the film’s title and opening so centred on Donovan when he is absent from the rest of the edit? Why – Bruce Watson’s embarrassingly tuneless music video implores us before the credits – should we save the hippy? Why does this matter at all?
Taylor’s own edit seems to lose faith in itself on that final front. While it initially attributes so much importance to the local artists and hippy culture from 1960s St Ives, when the final credits roll, it is over some kind of technicolour screensaver, while an infernal piece of electronic stock music twinkles away in the background. In its final abandonment of the sacred source materials it allegedly hoped to foreground, the film seems to admit there was no bigger picture. Anyone wasting their time looking for some deeper meaning here might as well be trying to catch the wind.