What of place, nowadays? What of the history of land, of territory and ownership? We tend to think of urban spaces as legislated public sites - a choreography of colliding bodies in their intricate trajectories, bathed in the shadows of a concrete landscape. Yet we think of nature all-together differently. Here, layers of history are present in traces and tracks, ruins and celebrations; there is a different scenography at play, one that challenges the urban identity politics in a more nuanced and candid way. Robert Pacitti’s On Landguard Point is, in part, a response to this.

This part of coastal land becomes a site of transformation, underpinned by an original soundtrack by Michael Nyman. The film enters a territory and considers its rhythms, people and layers in a playful rejection of the ethnographic in documentaries. Capitalising on mass participation, process and performance, On Landguard Point is a cinematic examination of the poetics of landscape and home. Set in the East of England and the result of a series of public outdoor events staged with local communities and embedded in the film’s own narrative, On Landguard Point seeks to make visible the “contours of a flat land”, as Pacitti himself states.

Built through fragments, staged events, maps, historical recountings and poetic iterations narrated by Pacitti, On Landguard Point positions itself at cross-roads. It is cinema; but it is also a performance of process, very much grounded in the register of the live and the tropes of communities, complicating the question of home-land with a subtle, nuanced politics. The events at the core of the film took place between 2011 and 2012, and included a participatory architectural dig and an exhibition of collated stories, memories and artefacts, A People’s Peculiar that resulted in 205 symbols representing individual memories and stories.

The aim was to include a visual and symbolic taxonomy that would provide the cinematic language for the film; contrasted with a return to excavation as a cinematic and performative strategy, and the recurrence of images of Felixstowe port, On Landguard Point attests to a politics of the cinematic image. Its metaphors are also modes of critique. From a naked trombone player walking out of the sea to Dominic Johnson’s strip of dripping blood in the ruins of Languard Fort, exposing its own passage of time, the film constructs situations where place and body are inextricably inter-connected. The body becomes a place of mapping and place itself a shape-shifting site. Thus the collective interventions that are staged and presented throughout the film deliberately lose any narrative qualities; they become a mode of excavation and enquiry, and a way to return a place to its inhabitants without the pretence of speaking on their behalf.

Alongside the centrality of the body, which is so particular to a work of cinema that engages with tropes of performance by colliding history, site and narrative into one, On Landguard Point also speaks of access, both in its form and content. On the one hand, this is present in the narratives of trade underpinned by the film’s own excavation of history; we return to the port, consider questions of trade and explore the ways in which landmarks are constructed and re-constructed.  On the other, the very process of staging these participatory events provides a particular authorial challenge. Who are we as viewers in relation to marching bands, to clowns, to Elvis impersonators and these recurring images of soil whose meaning keeps shifting?

Perhaps there is an element of On Landguard Point that remains incomplete in its fragmentation. Yet at the same time, its unique visual dramaturgy and approach to the question of home is nuanced, poetic and evocative. It provides questions without legislating them, and returns a certain power of image whilst infecting this visual landscape with echoes and presences of the performative, the live. In that sense, landscape is recontextualised here, rather than abstracted. We move from metaphor to symbol to question, and return to the body and history in an elegant and subtle meditation on home and land.

To find out about forthcoming screenings of On Landguard Point, visit
pacitticompany.com

On Landguard Point Teaser from Pacitti Company on Vimeo.