Chris Paul Daniels: ‘Is there anybody there?’ at HOME, Manchester

Jo Manby

Chris Paul Daniels, an artist filmmaker based at Paradise Works Artist Studios in Salford, exhibits ‘Is there anybody there?’ at HOME, Manchester until Sunday 4 June 2023. Daniels trained at the Royal College of Art, exhibits internationally and is a senior lecturer in Filmmaking at the School of Digital Arts, Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). Via a process of writing, researching, orchestration, montaging and editing, this epic study of procession, ceremony and spectacle in British culture spanning 1901 to 1999 is presented as an artist’s film in a solo exhibition. Archive footage collated from seventy different films from the North West Film Archive at MMU becomes a malleable medium narrated over by an ostensibly benign female single voice whose mock-innocent cut-ups of idiomatic phrases take a sinister turn, merged with an original musical score from 808 State’s Graham Massey.

Lord of Misrule, an appointed overseer of drunkenness and wild partying, is an office dating back to Ancient Roman saturnalia and medieval boy bishops. When an ordinary man becomes king for the day and all the subjects go on a pub crawl with the king – wait, didn’t that just actually happen?

At HOME in Manchester, Chris Paul Daniels presents an artist film work, Is there anybody there? which utilises the preexisting caricatures in carnival and procession to form a biting political satire and an ominous social commentary while at the same time celebrating the ‘wildly creative freedom’ of spontaneous community rituals and traditions.

The first half of the film unpicks the assumptions, the signs of bias and the discriminations of twentieth-century British social history, while the second half streams a more unremitting form of socio-political critique. All the while, the found footage keeps on coming. Shot by amateurs on video in their own homes or out on the streets, by local film societies and regional professionals, curated fragments of film detail the elaborate, mainly hand-made costumes depicting figures from popular culture and fiction to politics; sport; parades; pride marches and processions. ‘My Mum taught in a dancing school,’ Daniels explains. ‘So, all those performative moments within the film feel extremely nostalgic to me. I see every stitched sequin and feel the effort of some of those hand-made costumes.’

The film opens with trancelike music and an upfront declaration: ‘This is a message from the other side.’ A giant papier-mâché globe complete with bandaged limbs and a dressing over one cartoon eye, NHS nurse in attendance, rides on a float. A banner reads ‘Preston Dresses the World’s Injuries,’ while the single voice narration (by Alicia Prowse) tells of ‘a manifested warning from history.’ The Michelin Man waves at the crowds lining the streets and a pantomime baker-king with a rolling pin sceptre is monarch of the day for the King’s Flour Company: ‘powerful figures run rampant.’ The fictional commentary, written by Daniels himself, deploys an ambiguous, arch-innocent way with idiom. ‘In retrospect of local legends and regional characters,’ it says. Doesn’t it mean ‘in respect to local legends…,’ or ‘out of respect for local legends…’? Likewise, ‘go away with the fairies / and quicken the pace egg / as the pendulum swings / once in a blue moon...’

Graham Massey’s score illuminates and unifies, pooling our attention while modulating between a lulling and a spangling rhythm, while the narration alternates from facilitative, directive to rhetorical positions. ‘I am really interested in the fantastical elements of the archive,’ Daniels says, ‘and I was interested in finding moments where communities have come together and created something from scratch, not necessarily for a commercial context – and in finding moments of celebration.’

A little further along, a magician makes a man vanish then reappear and the narration refers to ‘the undocumented hidden by the overexposed.’ The audience keys into the way the language of archive and of film and photography is being contextually subverted. Images such as a football pitch filled with white-uniformed children engaged in regimented exercise, parsed as ‘the white ghosts of an Empire …. things that can never be repeated, too harmful to show’ become powerful exemplars of the misdeeds of the political elite.

When I ask Daniels about the potential activist element of his work, he states: ‘my concern is in how I see many unreliable fictions entering reality, some of that may be through political rhetoric but also how many harmful stories accumulate rapidly online. I’m asking the viewer to question some of the strangeness of our own times, and to position themselves within a broader timeline, or ask how our own histories will be viewed from a future archive. I may be offering more questions than answers,’ he continues, ‘but have filtered my own sense of bewilderment into the script and the edit.’

The acerbic double meanings in the narration and in the images ensure that we are aware there are people not being represented. Even if ‘folk’ should be democratic and non-discriminatory, embracing people from all walks of life, it is tainted by nationalism, racism, stigma and misogyny. ‘Who gets to point and shoot?’ the voice asks, while two men in suits engage in a pistol duel. Phrases like ‘creepypasta and unreliable sauces’ could be oblique references to church cover-ups of institutionalised child abuse.

Gradually, around the midpoint of the film, the tone changes to a more sinister critique. ‘Something returns a piercing gaze / a psychic energy frayed around the edges / arcane old powers that take things literally.’ A hippo’s cavernous maw at a regional zoo opens wide in Kodachrome pink and orange as the dark underside of history is summoned, ‘the shibboleth passwords and secret codes.’

In the 1970s, there was a resurgence of interest in folklore, a hangover from The Long 1960s. Bands like Pentangle and Steeleye Span continued the progressive folk rock of Fairport Convention; The Pilton Pop, Blues & Folk Festival became Glastonbury (also the neighbourhood, both then and now, of the ‘weird and wonderful collaboration’ of psychedelic band The Lords of Misrule); and the decade pivoted on the punk response to Woodstock-style beads and flowing fabrics in the fashion world. In current times, this resurgence is being revisited.

Diane A. Rodgers, senior lecturer in media and cofounder of the Centre for Contemporary Legend at Sheffield Hallam University, writes about ‘Folk Horror, Ostension and Robin Redbreast’ for www.revenantjournal.com in an essay that examines the relatively new subgenre of folk horror, encompassing narratives from popular culture (primarily here, film and TV) featuring folkloric elements of pagan ritual, witchcraft, stone circles and the paranormal, usually set in remote rural communities. Before going on to dissect folk horror classic, Robin Redbreast, broadcast as BBC1 Play for Today on 10 December 1970 and written by John Bowen, Rodgers discusses the concept of ostension. This refers to the ‘nonverbal communication’ used when people ‘substitute action for words.’ First coined by semiotician Umberto Eco, Rodgers gives the example of raising a finger to the lips to signal a need for silence.

In ‘Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi’s original appropriation of the notion of ostension in their seminal article ‘Does the Word “Dog” Bite? Ostensive Action: A Means of Legend-Telling’ (1983),’ Rodgers writes, by extension, ostensive action describes behaviour based on or influenced by folklore and legend. While lore and legend may not be true, they ‘possess the possibility for truth,’ just as in Daniels’ found film footage, we are looking at fiction reanimated into a day-to-day reality via costumed performance.

Ostensive action can perpetuate folklore or legend. ‘The tale, presented in action, becomes reality, because action and belief affect and influence one another.’ Ostensive action, Rodgers continues, ‘is to behave in a certain way or alter one’s actions as a consequence of belief in folk myth or legend.’ Not walking under a ladder is an ostensive action. Whether the paint bucket on top of it will fall on your head is less significant than that you are acting on a belief or superstition. In regard to the TV film Robin Redbreast, Rodgers cites Koven (2008): ‘narrative dramatization of a legend’, or ‘the presentation of folklore within onscreen action’ is a ‘kind of ostension itself.’

I asked Daniels about this. ‘I love Robin Redbreast,’ he says, ‘and the aesthetics of what gets described as folk horror and/or hauntology – I am a big fan of Mark Jenkin, or Andrew Kötting for instance. The Wicker Man might be an obvious reference, but the bigger influences on me will always be how utterly traumatised [I was] by the 1992 BBC broadcast ‘Ghostwatch’ (where a malignant presence possessed the broadcast itself) or Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now for how the editing is a crucial element of the plot. However, I think my interests are more reflexive about film itself – and how it can be manipulated.’

HOME’s organisational ambition is ‘to push the boundaries of form and technology, to experiment, have fun, take risks and share great new art with the widest possible audience.’ In the artificial shade of its occluded gallery space, Daniels’ film begins to toll with the darkening bells of British history past and present after around its midpoint, to reveal ‘a great deception designed for a small circle,’ ‘or the shadows of doubt cast by superstitions / imaginary puppet masters and invisible threads.’

There is the idea, in this exhibition, of a subtext of social control whereby the populus is kept in check by an unremitting flow of compulsive newsfeeds, an opiate cocktail of cat videos and miniseries, medicinal and recreational drugs, coerced into a constant state of hypervigilance and made to look the other way by smokescreens that conceal the promulgation of divisive and socially deconstructive policy.

Footage of child-operated dragons and military reenactments are narrated as ‘battling made-up enemies for cult status / rush bearing towards incomplete strangers / impossible culture wars forced into reality.’ Global and local economic inequalities may share the same source, referred to implicitly as British culture’s historic infringements. Is there anybody there? alludes to the gullibility of the mass population as well as the immorality of the privileged elite who hold them in a precarious sway. It empowers the audience to think critically about the society we live in and encourages us to shift our thinking and hopefully initiate positive social change: ‘a system update may need a total shutdown / save the date from the new paranormal / cut after cut leaves a skeleton service / your true cost of living is on whose expense? / it is time to pay the reality cheque.’

Towards the end of the film, the single voice narrative becomes as blank and depersonalised as a SatNav or a text-to-speech app: ‘Something went wrong / please try again / you are out of memory / left to your old devices / the links that hold us together keep disconnecting.’ Having worked with Alicia Prowse on single voice commentary more than once (he has a similar backstory of collaboration with Graham Massey), Daniels says that he likes ‘the distance or confusion that having Alicia’s very straight delivery causes, and how this can be used to comment or question our present day… I’ve been focusing on manipulating language in my work over several years now – I am really trying to question how words can be weaponised, be that in an institutional, corporate or political/rhetorical way. I’ve reacted very strongly in the past where I’ve been told to ‘upword’ my language to fit an institutional or corporate ideal.’

The viewer of Is there anybody there? is left with the feeling that real history and fictitious myth and legend have become fused into a parallel reality. ‘I was interested in the parade as something unstuck from chronology, if the films could offer insight to imaginary figures shared across time, and speak to our present,’ Daniels says. However, he also adds: ‘I think there are clear moments of joy in there, many of the processions seem hopeful despite the difficult times I assume people in the films will have lived through – it makes me value the arts as a way of people coming together, which are the more hopeful elements of the film to me.’

The film may have come to an end, but its transgressive tricks and fantastical pageantry linger in our imaginations, vivid as a green chimera on a football pitch.

HOME’s spring gallery programme is curated by Clarissa Corfe. The exhibition ‘Chris Paul Daniels: Is there anybody there?’ runs until Sunday 4 June 2023

This review is supported by HOME