The Miners' Hymns

For this elegy in both film and music about the history of coal mining around Durham, England, renowned filmmaker Bill Morrison (worked with famous Icelandic musician and composer Jóhann Jóhannson. The soundtrack is based on the brass music culture from this northeastern region of the country. Bill Morrison specializes in found footage documentaries and has often used the chemical decay of photographs in his works, which can be viewed as meditations on the brittleness of human existence. For , Morrison doesn't use any weathered material, but rather beautiful black-and-white footage of mineworkers that was preserved in the BFI National Film Archive and is shown here in hypnotizing slow motion. Morrison intercuts this material with color footage he filmed himself. These are recent aerial shots of landscapes packed to the brim with indeterminate parking lots, malls and empty fields, once the sites of coalmines such as Ryhope Colliery (1857-1966) and Silksworth Colliery (1869-1971). Back in the day, there was a lively, tight-knit community of miners aboveground as well, and the annual celebration of the Miners' Association used to be all pomp and circumstance. The closing of the mines was met with fierce protest, even if the working conditions were miserable - a fact that is apparent in archive footage of dark, dank spaces filled with falling chunks of rock.