by Luke Bennett
Rings’ impact has become pervasive, seemingly tendering an unavoidable lens through which the Ness is to be viewed, an effect noted even by the contributors to the recent ‘coffee table’–style book Landscapes of the National Trust with its beautiful ‘fine day’ photographs of militarized landscapes amid more traditional Trust wildernesses, gardens, country estates and so on – who note how ‘(w)riters and artists drawn to such “edgelands”, are following, even if unwittingly, in the tracks of W. G. Sebald’ (Daniels et al. 2015, 279). The inference here is that even those who are unaware of Sebald’s ‘urtext’ still position their gaze in relation to, or following after, it. This has implications for how we see (or fail to see) military landscapes more generally, as Matthew Flintham has noted the momentous effect of Sebald’s few pages of encounter with Orford Ness in Rings, since from this point that site ‘became emblematic of a secret Cold War landscape that still shocks or intrigues but has, ironically, become exposed in a way that other parts of the defence estate have not’ (Flintham 2012). In short, perhaps through Sebald’s lens we only see Orford Ness when we look for the UK’s Cold War’s landscapes.
IN SEBALD’S FOOTSTEPS
Sebald’s book is routinely cited in numerous other well-regarded books and contextualizing writings touching on landscape, ruination, artists’ projects and so on – including Christopher Woodward’s In Ruins (2002); Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places (2008) and more recently Ben Tufnell’s The Secret Landscape: Anya Gallaccio and Orford Ness (2014), the contextualizing text for the artist’s on-site commissioned photo works. Remember though that this recurrent quoting is of a particular, relatively short and vanished moment in time (after the military left and before the National Trust arrived to manage it) – a moment in which the ranks of archaeologists and artists were also yet to touch down. Its persistent referencing is certainly testament to its allusive potency – allowing the pleasure of an affective and passionate response to the site as terrain vague before the arrival of the official heritage captioning and interpretation (although it should be added that the National Trust’s curation of the site has been done in a thoughtful and minimal way).
Grant Gee’s film Patience (after Sebald) made in 2012 (henceforth Patience) is an exploration in filmic collage of Rings. It is largely shot in grainy grey-and-white (16 mm film) to emulate the manipulated imagery (photographs, etchings and documents) that illustrate Sebald’s own text. Extracts are read, and a variety of enthusiasts and friends of the author ardently comment on the enduring relevance and potency of Sebald’s book. Reverential treatments like this clearly act to recharge and underpin the legacy of Sebald’s framing of Orford Ness.
Through such re-encounters references are built on references, threads reverberate and journey further in rhizomatic fashion. Others have then felt compelled to tread the same route, and some writers and filmmakers have even reenacted the Sebaldian walk – ‘to footstep Sebald’ (Gee 2012). However, it is instructive to note that some of those attempts have failed – the Sebaldian referential frame having not quite managed to contain the walkers’ actual experience of a visit to the site. Thus Robert Macfarlane ultimately concludes that he was wrong to try to follow Sebald – having found that when he attempted to do so it wasn’t a grey day, it was bright and he ended up having too much fun (Macfarlane 2016). Likewise Phil Smith visits Orford Ness in his book On Walking, and while playfully portraying his aim as ‘stalking Sebald’, Smith acknowledges that he found himself turned on to Sebald’s melancholic style by his evocative depiction of the AWRE bunkers – seeing in the Sebald’s ‘Isle of the Dead’ (Sebald 1999, 237) and its dread, and analogue to the ‘the preparatory excitement before a walk takes off into something like freedom’ (Smith 2014, 20). Despite (or because of this) Smith’s wandering is more convivial – he takes pleasure in meetings with strangers and in the ‘textures of small things’, alongside doses of Sebaldian melancholy. Approaching Orford Ness, Smith claims that he is not disappointed, but finds the supposed strangeness of the island’s peculiar architectures and malevolent technologies less affecting than Sebald does, as for Smith they are indicative of ‘a strangeness that I find everywhere’ (Smith 2014, 145). It is also perhaps fair to say that they could never be as affecting as Sebald found them, because Sebald’s literary ‘first contact’ with them now gives these bunkers a familiarity (and a representational framing) that they did not have in Sebald’s moment of first encounter – but which (ironically) he forged through the writing of his potent account of his ‘indescribable’ first encounter, as he put into words that which he claimed not to be able to render into writing – a classic rhetorical ploy of the sublime.
Meanwhile, author Mark Fisher is highly critical of Rings describing the book in sour terms as a morose trudge through Suffolk spaces ‘without really looking at them…. The landscape in The Rings of Saturn functions as a thin conceit, the places operating as triggers for a literary ramble which reads less like a travelogue than a librarian’s listless daydream’ (Fisher 2014, 202). Fisher’s criticisms are various – the author/book’s ‘solemn cult’, Sebald’s lack of engagement with the existing Suffolk literary landscape canon; the anachronistic writing; the contrived images and so on (202–203). But meanwhile Gee’s Patience was for him a ‘quietly powerful film’ that re-asserted the Suffolk landscape and also caused him to doubt his own scepticism ‘sending me back to Sebald’s novels, in search of what others had seen, but which had so far eluded me’ (205).
ARTISTS ON THE NESS
In recent years, a number of artists have been drawn to the Ness using more singular examinations of the landscape – such as the unique geomorphology and dramatic weather conditions – to throw light on obscure aspects of its 20th-century military history.
Emily Richardson’s Cobra Mist (2008a), a short film (duration 6 minutes and 42 seconds, originally commissioned by Animate, Figure 5.1) seems to act almost as accompanying filmic essay to Rings. It displays a fascination with the strangeness of the Ness – the words ‘brooding’ and ‘menacing’ come to mind. In Cobra Mist the focus is on the play of light over the extant AWRE-era brutalist bunker architecture that punctuates the flat horizon line in remarkable 360-degree panning shots, scanning the horizon, looking for odd structures to announce themselves, radar-fashion. Light fleetingly enlivens shingle and built structures alike. The curious changeability of the weather is heightened by time lapse. It is a Ness I recognize, but the technique used – 16 mm film in anamorphic format with use of time lapse – privileges the long fixed camera shot, but the tiny details, the human scale is visually missing. Instead this is glimpsed in the sparking menacing and granular soundtrack (field recordings by Chris Watson mixed by Benedict Drew). Bird alarm calls on the site announce themselves. It brings to mind Robert Macfarlane’s quip that the Ness’s ‘militarizing influence’ inflects vision so that ‘everything I saw seemed bellicose, mechanized. A hare exploded from a shingle divot’ (Macfarlane 2008, 257). The film’s soundtrack propels and forges the sense of foreboding, and in this Richardson is continuing the work of Creffield – tension is strongly produced here. One is reminded of Richardson’s originating idea – a consideration of the tension between the time it will take for these (official) secrets to come out and the time it will take for these buildings to disintegrate (Richardson 2008b).
Figure 5.1. Cobra Mist (2008, Emily Richardson) (frame capture showing Orford Ness’s ‘pagodas’).
It comes as no surprise that most of the artist chroniclers of the Ness have been most drawn to the iconic and visually striking AWRE bunkers. But the most recent artwork for the Ness – made under the aegis of SNAP 2014 Art at the Aldeburgh Festival – and 14–18 Now (the series of commissions marking the centenary of the First World War) focuses on earlier history, however, and does so via a newfound, close-up attentiveness to the geological materiality of the site itself. It is a deceptively economic and pointed work. Anya Gallaccio focused on a small scorched fractured pebble – from a cache ap
parently given to her over lunch in London by the then executive director of Aldeburgh Music, Jonathan Reekie. This specimen – that she described as ‘traumatised’ by an explosion – was smashed before magnified photographs of it (and others sliced more deliberately with a diamond saw) were taken. The sugar grain–size fragments were magnified 20,000 times under an electron microscope at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where she has friends who are ocean geologists. ‘They have a rock saw, a diamond saw, so they sliced them up, so we could see inside, but most of the pieces I’ve been making photographs of are literally the size of a sugar grain’ (Gallaccio quoted in Battle 2014). These now resembled aerial photographs of desolate landscapes, installed for just one week both on the Ness (as shown in Figure 5.2) and in the more rarefied surroundings of Aldeburgh. ‘I wanted a poor stone that I knew had been through some trauma, that held within itself what had happened in this place – before I chopped it up and caused it even more trauma’ (ibid.), she said. Gallaccio’s pebble was only recently fractured and scarred – found in a hollow dug in the shingle where the National Trust regularly blows up live ordnance for disposal. Gallaccio reminds us that this was where aerial photography was pioneered.
Like Richardson’s work, there is a reinforcing awareness that at Orford Ness, the entire landscape is shifting, many of the buildings are decaying and ‘nothing is fixed here, the whole place is moving and changing’ (ibid.). There’s a subtle – perhaps inadvertent – referencing of Rings. However, this ‘material turn’ at Orford Ness may be less of a departure from the Sebaldian frame than it first appears, for Robert Macfarlane reminds us that this concern with the materiality of the site, and of its contamination or obliteration, is also a theme to be found within Rings, where he notes the substances that recur in the book: ‘dust, ash, spume, cloud, vapour … Sebald has a fascination with comminuted substances, substances that have been reduced down and down, on the borderline of being and nothingness’ (Gee 2012). Whether as a departure from Sebald, or a new form of Sebaldian interrogation of the site, Gallaccio’s fascination with the micro and macro – the erosive and accretionary dynamic processes that happen almost imperceptibly married with those that happen violently – is elegantly realized in her work. The photographs are mute, there is no captioning and this allows them an enigmatic purpose.
Meanwhile, the SNAP website (SNAP 2014) offers a contextualizing and oddly melodramatic film made by Dylan Ryan Byrne and Abigail Lane (the latter curated Gallaccio) as a companion piece, which takes us more assuredly back to Sebaldian framing of the Ness. Strangely the opening establishing shot is the same at the start of Richardson’s Cobra Mist (although I acknowledge that there are only a few locations on this otherwise-flat shingle spit that allow an aerial view without becoming airborne). It shows the enigmatic circular foundation (like some iconic Land Art work – potent since its purpose is still unknown). Equally similar to Richardson’s film is the device of a roaming camera/post production to scan the horizon. Whereas Richardson’s is subtle, here the device is wielded more explicitly using the viewfinder of a ship’s telescope – a recent Trust addition to the Ness. Otherwise there are some familiar motifs in the soundscape – airborne sounds, the relentlessness of the wind that animates focus on detail and the radiant matter of the sparkling shingle.
Figure 5.2. Untitled Landscape (2014, Anya Gallaccio).
THE ZONE
Interestingly, in a recent newspaper piece about Untrue Island Robert Macfarlane turns to other literary and cinematic touchstones to evoke the character of the Ness and neglects to mention Sebald at all:
It is without doubt the strangest place I know: a dreamscape co-designed by M.R. James, J.G. Ballard and Andrei Tarkovsky. You reach the Ness – The Zone – by boat, ferried over the River Ore, and that brief crossing takes you through a frontier. ‘The first rule of Orford Ness,’ the ferryman told me once, ‘is never believe anything you’re told about it’. (Macfarlane 2012)
In doing so Macfarlane reminds us that there is another powerful cultural framing underpinning the dystopian feel of Orford Ness: the notion of ‘The Zone’. Interviewed in Patience, theatre director Katie Mitchell – who has gone on to create a theatre work adapted from Rings (Der Ringe de Saturn at Avignon Festival in 2012) – references the concept of The Zone in order to make sense of Orford Ness. And this cinematic reference is a pervasive one. Filmmaker Andrew Kotting in writing about Cobra Mist asks, ‘Where are we and what are those noises? Is that a Richard Long circle or a Tarkovskyan apparition from one of his many Zones?’ (Kotting 2008). The Zone is a narrative device characterized as a rural location in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker (based on the short 1971 novel The Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky). In Stalker, an odd assortment of individuals is lured to a seemingly familiar lush landscape littered with traces of human presence (shot in Estonia) with the promise of entering the ‘Room’ (intriguingly translated at one point in the English language subtitles as ‘Bunker 4’) where all wishes may be realized. The journey to and around The Zone is a fraught one: the characters on this ‘pilgrimage’ encounter danger and deception seemingly produced by the place itself. Tarkovsky’s Zone is portrayed as a capricious place with its own laws of physics in a complicated rapport with human agency: ‘Old traps vanish, new ones take their place; the old safe places become impassable, and the route can either be plain and easy, or impossibly confusing…. But in fact, at any moment it is exactly as we devise it, in our consciousness … everything that happens here depends on us, not on The Zone’ (extract from Stalker, quoted in Dean & Miller 2005, 11).
Meanwhile in Patience, Gee presents the Orford Ness landscape as a magical contaminated landscape that looks ‘innocent and normal and yet you can’t move through it without it somehow ejecting you … and there’s that magical place where you can get what you wish for – which is never what you think you want. Sebald makes Suffolk rather like The Zone’ (Gee 2012). This active sense of agency – the potent creation of the landscape itself – is a feature simultaneously of both the Ness and Tarkovsky’s Zone; as Geoff Dyer (2012, 90) puts it: ‘To be in The Zone is to be part of The Zone…. The feeling that The Zone is an active participant in whatever occurs becomes increasingly tangible’.
Mark Fisher also makes the visual connection between enigmatic properties of The Zone and the ‘demilitarized’ expanses’ of this coast. His first viewing of Stalker – a televisual broadcast on Channel 4 in the early 1980s – immediately reminded him of a Suffolk landscape familiar from childhood holidays: of ‘overgrown pill boxes, the squat Martello towers, the rusting groynes which resembled gravestones: this all added up to a readymade science fiction scene’ (Fisher 2014, 202). Ben Tufnell’s text (on Anya Gallaccio) (Tufnell 2014) provides a clear rationale for the Orford Ness/The Zone coupling, in which The Zone in its everyday appearance and seeping post-industrial ruination functions as a cinematic analogue to landscapes suggested in Rings – with The Zone offering a device, a useful shortcut to swiftly communicate the notion of a despoiled, uncanny and sentient landscape found (and/or imagined or desired) by Sebald and those following in his footsteps at Orford Ness.
Meanwhile the wandering cast of characters in Stalker (the ‘writer’, the ‘professor’, the ‘stalker’ himself) – with their clash of positions and expectations – also offer themselves up as useful agents for fictional viewer identification, and perhaps even to analogues of the diverse communities who pilgrimage to the Ness. Affiliation to The Zone enhances rather than competes with a Sebaldian mode of encounter with the Ness – like the Stalker who leads the motley band of pilgrims who enter The Zone; a Sebaldian guide employs a methodology of walking, gathering of associative stories and literary references to reflect on place and the social and political forces that shape it.