No Change

Still from ‘Enys Men’

In The Living Stones, her book about Cornwall, the surrealist artist and writer Ithell Colquhoun remarks that ‘the life of a region depends ultimately on its geologic substratum, for this sets up a chain reaction which passes, determining their character, in turn through its streams and wells, its vegetation and the animal life that feeds on this, and finally through the type of human attracted to live there. In a profound sense also the structure of its rocks gives rise to the psychic life of the land: granite, serpentine, slate, sandstone, limestone, chalk and the rest each have their special personality dependant on the age in which they were laid down, each being co-existent with a special phase of the earth-spirit’s manifestation’.

This ancient idea of an ‘earth spirit’ had another burst of life in the 1970s, when it appeared in several British television programmes that were made specifically for young people. ’Children of the Stones’ for instance, is a story about the odd events experienced by an astrophysicist and his teenage son after they arrive in the small village of Milbury, which has been built in the vicinity of a megalithic stone circle and exists in a time warp. In ‘The Changes’, a weird noise in the air compels everyone who hears it to destroy all the machinery and technology around them. The drama begins at teatime in an ordinary English family home; Nicky Gore, an earnest teenager, is completing her homework while her parents watch the news on the television. When the mysterious sound is heard, they shatter the calm and domesticity by attacking the TV, and outside on the streets chaos ensues. Society disintegrates in a few days, and Nicky is forced to escape on her own. When the cause of ‘The Changes’ is finally revealed, it turns out to be the ‘Earth Spirit’, which has been deeply disturbed by the unbalanced state of the world.

Mark Jenkin’s ‘Enys Men’, made in 2021 in Cornwall and inspired by 1970s precedents such as ‘The Wicker Man’ and ‘Don’t Look Now’, is a recent variation on the folk-horror theme. Shot on grainy 16mm film with a modest budget, its joins and seams are sometimes evident, as are occasional anomalies and contradictions, but mood and atmosphere are at its heart. There is almost no plot, little dialogue, and a great deal of repetition; the story, such as it is, is simple. On a deserted island topped by an ancient menhir, a woman, known only as ‘the volunteer’, takes a daily walk to examine a patch of peculiar flowers, and as she goes through her routine, which includes tossing a stone down a mine shaft, she records her observations in a ledger. The purpose of the woman’s activities on the island is never explained, and until her last entry all she writes is ‘No change’. We are shown the sea and its choppy waves, dark cliffs, seagulls, and the heath, as well as old human artefacts such as crumbling buildings, rusting rail tracks, a old-fashioned generator, and ageing things in the cottage kitchen. Nothing much happens.

The volunteer, however, begins to see people and events that seem to be ghosts of the past; there are women in old local costume, grimy miners, a rugged seaman, who may be a past lover, and a girl standing on a roof, who is perhaps a younger version of herself; they appear and disappear with uneasy regularity. The soundtrack contributes to the film’s haunted feeling and helps to create a portentous atmosphere; the sense of menace is realised as the flowers alter and an outlandish lichen begins to grow in implausible places, and it comes to a climax in an other-worldly sequence in which children, clothed in white and holding hawthorn branches, sing outside the woman’s cottage.

‘Enys Men’ shares with some earlier ‘folk-horror’ films an interest in what lies deep in the history of the land, and in the possibility that suppressed connections between humans and natural forces still exert an influence over us. The flowers are the obvious symbolic focus of the film, but the lichen is perhaps of equal importance; as a substance that is not a plant but a composite organism formed of fungus and alga, lichen embodies symbiosis and the dissolution of boundaries. Similarly, as the narrative unfolds, the line between material ‘reality’ and subjective perception is eroded; different planes of time co-exist and bleed into one another. As the volunteer interacts with the apparitions, her sense of self becomes unsteady and blurred, and through her lucid dream, if that is what it is, she experiences the deserted island as a disorientating encounter with multiple dimensions.

In contrast, the volunteer’s down-to-earth bedtime reading is A Blueprint for Survival, which calls for radical environmental. economic, and social renewal; it was first published in 1972 in ‘The Ecologist’ before it became a book. Its topics were timely; Rachel Carson’s bestselling Silent Spring, about the impact of DDT and other pesticides on the environment had been written about a decade earlier, E.F. Schumacher’s influential and readable book on economics, Small is Beautiful, was to appear in 1973, and James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’ hypothesis, also developed in the 1970s, which proposed that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings to form a synergistic and self-regulating complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate life on Earth, was soon to became celebrated.

These issues were causes for concern and widely debated at the time; today, fifty years later, with natural catastrophe perhaps more likely to occur, little seems to have progressed. At the core of mainstream ecological and environmental thinking is the desire to spread and maintain economic prosperity with minimal changes to the ways in which we like to live, an approach which suggests that answers lie outside ourselves, in more efficient management of material resources. One of the most interesting aspects of ‘Enys Men’ is its exploration of the fluidity of boundaries between man and nature, as well as of those between past and present; everything, it suggests, is on a continuum. If that is so, it follows that we will have to change and develop our own aspirations and behaviour as much as the outer world if we are to bring life back into balance - and to appease the ‘Earth Spirit’.