Bait: The Voices That Will Not Be Drowned
Mark Jenkin’s Bait is a ferocious and primitive elegy that’s as bawdy as a sea shanty. Here we have a haunting movie that’s suffused with the wounded spirit of place and ringing with the echoes of ghostly recriminations. Above all it is alive, incandescent with seething antagonism. But it’s also a haunted work that broods as intensely on its own materiality as it does on the plight of its characters and their environment. Even watching the film on a streaming service (4oD with its obscene ad breaks) felt like an evanescent and site-specific experience, as though it were some found object — something salvaged, perhaps, from the wreckage of the Cornwall it so savagely mourns. It plays like a choked, final gasp of testimony as it sputters and unspools its battered reels. The film stock itself seems on the verge of rotting, of dissolving into sheer spectrality.
Mordant, bracing, and disorienting, it’s also breathtakingly funny. Its every effect is carefully calibrated and stunningly executed. Here we have a filmmaker in control of every aspect of his craft, and leveraging his artistry to realise a project that might seem perversely uncommercial but deserves to find the widest possible audience. Not to begrudge Robert Eggers or Ben Wheatley their successes, this is the film I wanted The Lighthouse and A Field in England to be: a hallucinatory battle of wills, so distorting of character and environment that it blurs the line between psychodrama and mythmaking.
Martin Ward is a fisherman without a boat. The best cottage in the harbour was his father’s before it was sold to Londoners. Now it’s decked out in seaside kitsch, permanently primped for rentiers and their guests: a miniature of what the whole village has become. “Ropes and chains like a sex dungeon,” Martin snarls at his brother. It’s Steven who has left Martin stranded on the shore, who has debased their father’s boat with the freight of stag parties and pleasure cruisers. Martin and Neil, his nephew, lay nets upon the beach to catch sea bass at low tide. These, and the haul from their single lobster pot, they sell to the pubs and cafés patronised by tourists. The strangers in his father’s house claim participation in the local economy, but the only wealth cascading from them to the dispossessed locals is a pitiful trickle.
A perennial plaint and a familiar dramatic set up, but there’s nothing straightforward about how Jenkin pitches his material. A dispute over parking; a stolen lobster pot; a father’s legacy — these are the foundations of conflict in this movie, but even before they’ve snapped into focus we’ve been alerted that their culmination will be violence. The unfolding of the first act is perforated with jagged prolepses. While Neil chats up the girls from out of town a young man lies unconscious and bleeding. As Martin looks askance at their parents a ball is thrown through a window and is somehow also the full moon at its brightest pitch. The effect is elliptical, beguiling — even sensual at points. If we fail to properly read these visual outbursts, its because they’re often scarcely to be distinguished from the skips, stammers, and hiccoughs that characterise the picture’s restive editing. Filmed without sound equipment, the action has been overdubbed with scrupulously-written dialogue which matches Pinteresque menace and demotic poetry to the visuals’ alternating of juddering motion and sometimes soulful repose.
Shot in black and white 16mm on a clockwork Bolex cine camera and hand-processed by the director in his studio in Newlyn, these images evince the raw, crude, and mythic power of the very earliest cinema. The bite of the cut on linear time; the use of parallel montage as sleight of hand; the estranging warmth of wall-to-wall ADR — Jenkin embraces all these devices and more to properly nihilating effect. To take in this film’s message and methods is to realise that these are notes which could not have been sounded in the lingua franca of contemporary visual storytelling. This film is an act of stylistic as much as cultural and political repudiation.
Andrew Kötting’s film collaborations with the writer Iain Sinclair are up to something similarly wilful, if nowhere near as compelling. 2017’s Edith Walks was shot on a Super 8-emulating smartphone app, but the effect is more faux-vintage than properly defamiliarizing. Much more vividly, watching Bait reminded me of Bill Morrison’s 2002 collage movie Decasia, which assembled reels of old film in varying stages of nitrate decomposition. I urge you to seek it out. Like Bait, it’s a film to which your eyes adjust; like any great work, they school their audiences in their own unique poetics. It’s a steep but pleasurable learning curve. In both films, the impurities in the celluloid have such uncanny dramatic timing that you find yourself suspecting human tampering. But no: these are ghosts of the machine, possessed of their own illegible agency and motivations. (“Maybe industrial ghosts are making Spectres redundant,” as the liner notes of The Fall’s Dragnet would have it.) They also have the profounder effect of reifying the concept of the original print and restoring its aura, which is what’s dissipated by mechanical reproduction. By insisting so stridently upon its own means of production, Bait poses as an artefact — a vector of memory and sentiment. Which stories of the land and sea does it carry within it?
A tormented and possibly demented fisherman, on a collision course with the community (not his own) that’s slowly closing ranks around him. They wait for their chance; they bide their time. They needle him with gossip, innuendo, and petty rancour. They know that he will oblige them with the violence they require to justify his extirpation. And for all that the great sea encompasses, drives on, and bewilders this human drama, these are vicissitudes of the land.
I have just described the plot of Peter Grimes, the 1945 opera by Benjamin Britten. It is one of the great stage works of the Twentieth Century — one of several, in fact, that Bait nails to its gnarled family tree. This is Borges’s argument: that a strong work writes the chronicle of its own heredity by making us see the resemblances between its sources of influence. In this sense an achieved work of art lives up to Kierkegaard’s maxim that “He who is willing to labour gives birth to his own father.” Denied the chance to work his hardest, Martin is haunted by the ghost of his father: a baleful and plangent figure, presented without a hint of sentimentality or phantasmagoria. At first we read him as another of the movie’s visual glitches, as the interpolation of montage: frames of the past shuffled into the present, an analeptic correlate of the future violence that we’ve been promised. But Billy Ward is no living presence. His power is death and absence — only through these does the reproach of his spectral voice hold such a grip on the son, compelling him to action that can have no happy ending. This wry and taciturn apparition bespeaks a profound dislocation — not only within his son, but around him.
This deadpan non-naturalism scans like something out of Dennis Potter. Or perhaps Edward Bond, whose Marxist theatre charts the clash between myth and reality, between superstitious men and the autonomous world — “the world we prove real by dying in it.” While Jenkin’s deep cinematic literacy has been noted by critics, less has been written about his saturation in England’s rich traditions of television, theatre, and literature. Even its poetry:
Cold nervous tremblings shook his sturdy frame,
And strange disease — he couldn’t say the name;
Wild were his dreams, and oft he rose in fright,
Waked by his view of horrors in the night, —
Horrors that would the sternest minds amaze,
Horrors that demons might be proud to raise:
And though he felt forsaken, grieved at heart,
To think he lived from all mankind apart;
Yet, if a man approach’d, in terrors he would start.
A winter pass’d since Peter saw the town,
And summer-lodgers were again come down;
These, idly curious, with their glasses spied
The ships in bay as anchor’d for the tide, —
The river’s craft, — the bustle of the quay, —
And sea-port views, which landmen love to see.
These two stanzas are from Britten’s inspiration: The Borough, George Crabbe’s poems of Aldeburgh. Notice how even these neoclassical couplets, first published in 1810, register the disturbances wrought upon space by tourism. Already during the lifetime of Crabbe’s friends William and Dorothy Wordsworth, legends of the Lake Poets had unleashed hordes of holidaymakers upon Cumbria. It was to Crabbe’s Suffolk coast that Britten moved in 1942, and there that Maggi Hambling (no stranger to controversy) erected her much derided and frequently defaced Scallop in memory of the composer. It’s inscribed with a line from the libretto of Peter Grimes, one which gets at the heart of not only Britten’s but also Jenkin’s art:
I hear those voices that will not be drowned.
For Jenkin the voices are the maimed spirits of place, manifest in the form of Martin’s father. Ghosts are a malaise not only of time but of place, which inheres in the word “haunt.” The apparition of the old man stands for more than his own death: he’s a reminder of the scandal of the dying of generations, of the commemorations foreclosed by liberalism’s alienation of space. The deracinated outsiders haven’t just taken Martin’s place but destroyed it. This is what the movie mourns: something never to be fully put back. Something never to be made right. We get the feeling that the old fisherman is doubly dead, because he asserts his power only in death. He demands restitution that cannot be gained in this life; the sea’s rising up engulfing all is more easily imagined than the restoration of what was lost. “The silent dissolution of the sea,” as W.H. Auden wrote:
Which misuses nothing because it values nothing;
Whereas man overvalues everything
Yet, when he learns the price is pegged to his valuation,
Complains bitterly he is being ruined which, of course, he is.
Like something dreamt up by Mark Smith, Bait is a ghost story about the return of the dispossessed, come to reclaim their property, their voices, and their land. It’s a work of deep hauntology: a glimpse into the collective unconscious of a culture trying to identify its own present — and also a faded snapshot of its failure to do so. By so aggressively defamiliarizing the present it allows us the distance of historical perspective. This movie harks back to and draws its armature of formal devices from a time when the cinema was believed to have revolutionary potential. This was a time, incidentally, when the nascent artform took its avant-garde cues from literature.
These events have passed and so has time, rendering them ineluctable. Only through art can the past be restored, which must be cold comfort to a man like Martin Ward.
