From Omeleto.
A musician buries his work.
RECOMPOSING EARTH is used with permission from Christian Cargill. Learn more at https://christiancargill.com.
Erland Cooper is a world-renowned composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist who grew up on the Orkney Islands in Scotland. In 2020, he undertook an intriguing experiment: he composed a violin concerto celebrating local Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, recorded it with a set of accomplished musicians, transferred it to tape, deleted the digital files — and then buried the only existing recording beneath two feet of peaty Orkney soil.
Cooper would let nature and time have their way with the recording. Then he posted clues to its location on his site, letting others discover it — and would discover for himself what would happen to the result of his effort.
Directed by Christian Cargill, this profound and philosophical short documentary would easily reduced to the simple adjectives of "quirky" or "whimsical," based on a simple description of its premise. As some interview subjects say in the film, Cooper’s project sounds "kooky" on paper. But with its own considerable command of cinematic art, the film captures the creative process of an artist and musician intent on work that engages us with nature’s here and now. It does so not just as a camera bystander observing Cooper at work, but with its own exceptional craftsmanship and visual beauty, making for a rich and moving experience.
Cooper’s work is profoundly influenced by the remote islands of Orkney off Scotland’s coast, a unique place full of rugged, almost mystical natural beauty. Captured with great care and attention with sensuous, luminous cinematography, one can almost smell the air of the coastline and feel the moisture on the stones with the film’s frankly gorgeous images. Within this milieu, the doc’s storytelling patiently builds a portrait of a visionary, committed musical artist and his project via interviews and footage, from the initial inspiration to the writing and recording.
Cooper invests considerable thought and passion into his lyrical, transportive work, as do the musicians who play on the recording. After this build-up of time, effort and care, the act of deleting the composition’s digital files and burying the only recording and its sheet music feels shocking. There’s a quickening of intrigue as Cooper eventually publishes clues to his recording’s location and local residents discover the buried recording and music, all of which culminates in the moment when Cooper listens to the weathered recording for the first time. The film remains silent, but when we finally hear it — eventually released as the album CARVE THE RUNES THEN BE CONTENT WITH SILENCE — it’s also an apotheosis that celebrates joy, patience and even wonderment.
Artful, profound and infused with a kind of transcendence, RECOMPOSING EARTH — qualified for the Best Documentary Short as a festival winner — takes a meditative pace, asking viewers accustomed to the speed of broadband to slow down to the pace of the man and the place at the work’s center. We’re invited to soak in a sense of place that seems untouched by modernity’s pressures, and we also come to see nature as a collaborator in shaping our experience. And most of all, we’re asked to consider time, impermanence and memory in art and consciousness — how immediacy is vivid when we know we may not be able to "capture it" for posterity, and how experiences live inside us, cherished, nurtured and burnished by memory, all while being transformed by the passing of time.
