From A Series Of 12 Short Films, By Seamus Murphy
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From the album 'Let England Shake'
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Official Website: www.pjharvey.net
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In The Dark Places
Opening the film is west Londoner Ro Allerton, with iconic Trellick Tower out-of -focus in the background. Ro is about the age of the soldier whose lines he recites from the song. Then a montage from Edgeware Road. I like the hipster who goes his own way- exiting frame right - at the end of the sequence. Birds flying in formation is in Holkham, Norfolk, shot from the pinewoods. Nosing around the City of London one Sunday morning I saw a figure mysteriously disappear through the door of a tower. I chased him, up the spiraling steps to the top where he was joining fellow- bell ringers in the belfry of the church of St Magnus the Martyr, London Bridge. The church is mentioned in Dickens's Oliver Twist. They were just about to start ringing, and wanting to film, I explained I was shooting pictures for a musician called PJ Harvey. One of them said: "PJ Harvey's my mate. I did her kitchen". They let me shoot and the carpenter who was indeed an old friend and had done her kitchen joined us a few months later for one of the Troxy shows. Amongst the rest of the imagery is a view of a colour contact sheet through a magnifying loupe of fighters on the plains outside Kabul in Afghanistan. 9/11 had happened 2 months before and this was November 2001, the day before the fall of Kabul to the Northern Alliance, and the ousting of the Taliban regime. This apparently effortless success probably fed the thinking of the invasion of Iraq 2 years later. Dark places. The final shot in the film was taken from above, through a grill looking down on the bells those ringers were pulling that Sunday morning. English poet John Donne wrote in 1624;
"any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
