The Black Tower (1987) by British experimental filmmaker John Smith, is a short film (<23 mins) following the spoken word story of an unnamed man who notices a tower with a black top on his morning walk. following this encounter the man begins to think more and more about the tower, he then starts noticing the tower from other directions and in different areas of London. The man then begins to obsess with the tower, namely over what it is. He tries to ask others around him about the tower only to receive vacant stares and no answers. The tower begins to manifest itself within the mans mind and he shuts himself away to avoid encountering the tower, this leads to the man becoming ill and he is admitted to hospital, within the grounds of which lies a black tower. After leaving the capitol for some recovery in the countryside, he begins to see the tower once again, this time he confronts the tower, getting up close to it and even finding a door into the tower. The man enters the tower at which point the narration changes to a woman’s voice and the narrative switches to her perspective about the first time she encountered the tower, after tending the man’s grave.
The parallels within this film to my own deep rooted fascination with brutalist structures and towers meant this text was extremely interesting to me and my project. The idea of these large buildings having such a strong and profound effect on their beholders to the point where they manifest themselves as sentient beings, surrounding our lives, passively staring out, waiting to be acknowledged. The way the towers present themselves, tall, silent, commanding. This film is a very good visual representation of the power and atmosphere that I am working to capturing in my photos, to imbue that sense of form, that sense of becoming that radiates from these constructions at such strength that it can become all encompassing.
I felt these very same feelings on a shoot in London, I came across a large, concrete cube sitting within the site of the National Theatre. It was very large and perfectly cubed, with no windows, no vents, nothing. Just concrete. The sense of power and ambience was palpable, merely standing before the cube you could feel something radiating from it, unknown and unbending in its will to dominate.
This was something I knew had to be captured and whilst not immediately visible on the negative, with some post-production corrections, I was able to create my own Black Tower atmosphere, a strong, solid black shape cutting into the swirling iron sky, a void that stares back at you with unrelenting imperiousnes. The Black Cube
The Black Cube
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