at Andrew Black On Clogger Lane, 2023, delves deep into the historic landscape and socio-economic entanglements of the Washburn Valley in the rural heartland of Britain between Otley and Harrogate in Yorkshire. The hour-long film, which was made following the Glasgow-based artist’s winning of the Margaret Tait Award, Scotland’s prestigious moving image prize, delves into the site’s history, exposing how capitalism has posed an unshakable threat to the earth and those who inhabit it. Using interviews and archival footage combined with stunning atmospheric landscape shots steeped in the tradition of 1970s folk horror films, Black examines how the land can and will bear witness to the violence that s is rooted in its ecology.
The film’s main setting is the area around a reservoir, land that was home to hamlets and a church until the 1960s, when the valley was flooded and houses destroyed in order to supply water to the nearby metropolis of Leeds. . Following the tales of the land and those who live there, the film weaves together the stories of witch trials, child labor, farming livestock and shaky careers – all sacrificed to the accumulation of capital.
The work is divided into chapters, with titles appearing in hand-scribbled red script. Each title is a proclamation, perhaps of the reservoir or of the ghosts in its water: IN TRANCE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE TANK OR SHE SAW THE DEVIL AT THE BOTTOM OF THE TANK. In tension with the narratives of the past, another, uncomfortably contemporary, also haunts the film. The area is now home to the Royal Air Force Menwith Hill, a vast communications ground station made up of dozens of satellite dishes covered in giant white domes, known locally as ‘golf balls’, so unnatural and at odds with their environment that they become a break on the horizon. The base seems to amplify a constant underlying vibration in the region’s historic landscape, but Black never lets it dominate – it’s just one element in the valley’s many complexities. Women-led peace groups have staged continuous protests since the base opened. These women hold steadfast to their objection and nurture the stories of this space, and Black makes clear how the stories they tell and their continued refusal to let the prevailing oppressive narrative prevail sustains the memory of the witch trials whose physical evidence has long been under water.
In On Clogger Lane Black shows a painful story of unacknowledged lives and work; of deregistered places; of a land used, consumed and regurgitated by those who now occupy it. At its core, the film is about class, reminding us that capitalism is not an entirely urban phenomenon but that it also proliferates through our rural idylls. As raw, even dangerous, as his themes are, Black exercises restraint and finds nuances. The movie is sometimes romantic, even nostalgic, but there’s always a little shadow, a nagging slight pull, to remind us that we may all be at the bottom of the reservoir one day.
