Fear & yearning series

Series of films created with Toby Martinez de las Rivas and Neda Milenova Mirova, and premiered at the Museum of English Rural Life, Reading in June 2024. 
Texts published in Floodmeadow by Toby Martinez de las Rivas  (Faber, 2023)

The sequence of five films are:

• Vloeiweide
  
• Psalm-for-the-sea, Little-sea-psalm
  
• ​Night
  
• Gethsemane
  
• ​Little psalm

​‘Fear and Yearning’ began as an engagement with the photographic archive of Eric Guy (held at the Museum of English Rural Life) by poet Toby Martinez de las Rivas. While many of Guy’s photos deal with work, landscape and leisure in the inter-war and post-war English countryside, Martinez de las Rivas was drawn to his images of horses, often as part of hunts. Their poses seemed to embody a presence in the English landscape that was absent from Guy’s more bucolic images: a sense of something still yet poised for sudden, explosive action; or something old and ominous; or beautiful yet menacing – an otherworldly presence within the landscapes we believe ourselves to be familiar with. 

The project soon moved beyond purely poetic responses to the archive and developed into a series of short films developed by the filmmaker Jane Glennie using both the original Guy images alongside other filmed material, and scored by the sound artist Neda Milenova Mirova using environmental recordings, synthesised sound, fractured voices, cello and accordion. Taken together, these responses explore a notion of the English countryside that verges, in parts, on folk horror as they evoke the beauties, mysteries and darknesses of the English countryside.