LIGHTLY COVERED WITH BUTTONED CLOTH
“I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.” Virginia Woolf
Between 2012 and 2014, I collaborated with filmmaker Poppie Sköld (and around 50 other brilliant folk) to create the Light Covered with Buttoned Cloth trilogy of films: Our Life Together (2012), Envoi (2013) and The Present Day (2014) each share themes and ideas to create a cumulatively coherent world. Exploring togetherness, loneliness and community in turn, they are an exploration and celebration of relationship in the widest and most radical sense. Moments of revelation and recognition among everyday action point not to a common humanity, but more to the vital differences between people and how as human beings we negotiate them. The films are constructed out of a radical kindness – holding off the violence of narrative and action, allowing moments of being as much as moments of doing.
“Ben’s writing in these films build simple scene upon simple scene, until the complexity and terror inherent to being alive is revealed. Dreams, unspoken histories, habits, routines, desires and the relentlessness of time and longing, all of this takes the place of incident and action, creating narratives where love (and its lack) is gently but persistently pushed from the peripheral to the centre. Empty rooms, glances, plastic bags, watching TV, making a bed, eating food... All of this stuff matters. Ben asks us to see the shape of love in all of this. It’s all here. The ambition of this work is staggering and it makes the brevity of the texts such a brave act as a writer and simultaneously such a generous invitation to his collaborators. The film’s London of white, middleclass living, with its undercurrent of anxiety, this is unmistakably a post-capitalist world. A world that is a husk of its own dreams but which does not yet know it is time to wake. Like Wile E. Coyote, the characters have all run off the cliff but have yet to acknowledge there is a void beneath their feet… Ben and Poppie find a way to gaze on this world and its hurting people with love and compassion. All the countless, tiny, pointless things humans do over and over to try and make sense of the senseless disorder of it all, instead of embracing the disorder and then daring to ask ‘So, now what?’. This work meets all of our frailty with an overwhelming tenderness and somehow, I’m not sure how, but somehow, really, joy! It is this determination to abide with these characters that creates the power of these films. The revolution will be kind and will acknowledge human frailty or it will not happen at all. For me, that is what the combined force of this work calls its audience to think and feel and know in their bones. Rare work indeed.” Emma Adams
“I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.” Virginia Woolf
Between 2012 and 2014, I collaborated with filmmaker Poppie Sköld (and around 50 other brilliant folk) to create the Light Covered with Buttoned Cloth trilogy of films: Our Life Together (2012), Envoi (2013) and The Present Day (2014) each share themes and ideas to create a cumulatively coherent world. Exploring togetherness, loneliness and community in turn, they are an exploration and celebration of relationship in the widest and most radical sense. Moments of revelation and recognition among everyday action point not to a common humanity, but more to the vital differences between people and how as human beings we negotiate them. The films are constructed out of a radical kindness – holding off the violence of narrative and action, allowing moments of being as much as moments of doing.
“Ben’s writing in these films build simple scene upon simple scene, until the complexity and terror inherent to being alive is revealed. Dreams, unspoken histories, habits, routines, desires and the relentlessness of time and longing, all of this takes the place of incident and action, creating narratives where love (and its lack) is gently but persistently pushed from the peripheral to the centre. Empty rooms, glances, plastic bags, watching TV, making a bed, eating food... All of this stuff matters. Ben asks us to see the shape of love in all of this. It’s all here. The ambition of this work is staggering and it makes the brevity of the texts such a brave act as a writer and simultaneously such a generous invitation to his collaborators. The film’s London of white, middleclass living, with its undercurrent of anxiety, this is unmistakably a post-capitalist world. A world that is a husk of its own dreams but which does not yet know it is time to wake. Like Wile E. Coyote, the characters have all run off the cliff but have yet to acknowledge there is a void beneath their feet… Ben and Poppie find a way to gaze on this world and its hurting people with love and compassion. All the countless, tiny, pointless things humans do over and over to try and make sense of the senseless disorder of it all, instead of embracing the disorder and then daring to ask ‘So, now what?’. This work meets all of our frailty with an overwhelming tenderness and somehow, I’m not sure how, but somehow, really, joy! It is this determination to abide with these characters that creates the power of these films. The revolution will be kind and will acknowledge human frailty or it will not happen at all. For me, that is what the combined force of this work calls its audience to think and feel and know in their bones. Rare work indeed.” Emma Adams
Remember how it felt...