The audience is small. Disappointingly so, having contacted
virtually every organisation with any connection to Britain in the city,
including the man from the British Council. He doesn’t make an appearance, and
it seems as though Morris might be too much of a niche market for this neck of
the woods.
But we’re there, the four of us and a young couple turn up
and so does Brian. Brian is a bearded, red-headed Uruguayan with an Irish
surname. Brian once spent a year living in a lighthouse, making artwork about
the weather. In the bar afterwards he tells me that he makes post-digital art,
which involves selling antique laptops with unreadable scripts to museums
around the world. Brian has that Borgesian, Rio Platense mind, which can take
an idea and turn it into another idea which hints at another and looks like yet
another. And might be none of the above.
Claudia has spent weeks labouring over the subtitles.
Baldricks and pigs bladders. Shinbells and Hooky. All rendered into Spanish,
all appearing at the precise moment of their inception within the script. Vejiga de cerdo and cascabeles. A labour of love.
The film screens. I’ve seen it before. I don’t know how many
times. I’ve helped with the subtitling process. I know the ‘script’ inside out.
I don’t know what to expect. I don’t know what the small but perfectly formed
audience will make of it.
England appears, like magic. English light. English dreams.
English tongue. English music. English memories. I am lost in it all, all that
doth seem lost. Because it’s a long way away, this England of mine, which is
not just the England of fields and beer. It’s also the England of my friends’
sensibilities, that thing we share, that way of looking at the world. A way that
flies so far under the radar, at times, that the country fails to really see,
or value it. Which may be why I am here, sitting in a remote cinema in
Montevideo, now.
The film is also a paean to the maker’s roots. His father
appears in the film, as does his uncle, and his gran. I feel a nostalgia for my
own roots, processed through the filmmaker’s examination. I can trace the
England that was lost in the first “great” war, the England of the seventies,
an era that’s now, in the flicker-flicker of the super-8 footage, as remote as
the Victorians, and the England of today, my England. I feel the loss of all
these countries, all of them absent in different ways. The image of the
filmmaker as a child feels almost as distant as the image of the filmmaker as
the adult I know, the ties that bind stretching, taut, across an
ocean. Flickering on the screen.
Behind his image, for he is the star of the show, I see
other faces, all the friends and nights and places we have shared.
The film ends. That brief moment of nostalgia I experienced
has passed. I’m in the present again.
The audience applauds. And to a man or a woman exclaims: Que bien pelicula! (What a wonderful film!)
We head to the bar and drink beer and eat chivitos and
pizza and talk about England and Billy Bragg and poetry and playwriting and
language and Berbers and Aztecs, who also wore shinbells. The sunlit film has entered
into the steely Uruguayan winter and claimed its small share.
And for a moment everything makes
a strange kind of post-digital sense. All the ley lines converge. My Montevideo has become another locus within time and space, where the Morris men can dance:
“A
way of helping, in some small way, to keep steady the World, as it spins heavy
on its axis.”
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