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Rising 5th

Emily Richardson

2013 00:05:30 United KingdomColorStereo16:9HD video
Tags:
Landscape, Nature, Remake, Sound

Description

Rising 5th (Re-staging of a test for an unrealised memorial to Benjamin Britten) is a video work and sound installation that re-stages the story of the architect H. T. ‘Jim’ Cadbury-Brown’s unrealised memorial to Benjamin Britten. The memorial was to be a huge hulk of wood standing on Aldeburgh beach with two holes in the top designed to sound two signature notes from Britten’s opera, Peter Grimes, when the wind blew fiercely. Like some great wind instrument playing to the residents of Aldeburgh, it would remind them of the darkness that lies beyond the horizon, out at sea.

During the design process for this memorial Cadbury-Brown needed to determine what size holes would be drilled in the wood to create the right notes. To do this he strapped two organ pipes to a car and drove it up and down the Aldeburgh–Thorpeness Road.

The film is a re-staging of this experiment. The memorial was never constructed but the story surrounding it is intriguing, if absurd. Britten used sound ‘as found’ in his compositions alongside traditional orchestration so perhaps would have seen this as a fitting tribute.

The sound installation re-imagined the sounding of the memorial in a storm, and was made for the South Lookout tower on Aldeburgh beach to accompany the video piece.

About Emily Richardson

Emily Richardson is a filmmaker and researcher examining the trace of human presence on particular landscapes and environments on the cusp of change.

Richardson’s films document sites of power and corporate interest at particular moments in time uncovering layers of narrative embedded in these contested landscapes, whether East London prior to the Olympics, abandoned military architecture of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment of Orford Ness, the oil industry on the Scottish coastline, the contentious expansion of Sizewell nuclear power station, or the exploitation of the Far North.

Richardson’s work sits within a lineage of filmmakers addressing ideas about our relationship to and impact on natural and constructed landscapes and environments through a reflexive observational approach to making work using a cross-disciplinary methodology that includes walking, photography, filmmaking, sound recording, historical and archive research, interviews, books and podcasts.

Richardson's films have been shown in galleries, museums and festivals internationally including Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London, Pompidou Centre, Paris, Barbican Cinema, London; Anthology Film Archives, New York and Venice, Edinburgh, BFI London, Rotterdam and New York Film Festivals.