What Was Britain Like Before the Apocalypse?

Just about the most hauntological thing I have ever seen, and it was made in 1962!  

This  BBC short film, titled "The Lonely Shore" and produced under the aegis of the program Monitor, imagines a team of researchers visiting the deserted wasteland of the British Isles centuries after an undetermined and civilization-ending devastation, and trying to reconstruct a sense of this lost culture from archeological fragments - furniture, plastic artifacts, appliances, vehicles - to which are often attributed religious significance. 

Keeping it haunty, there's some nice and eerie Radiophonic Workshop and Henk Badings electronics on the score. 

And then there's grave and witheringly supercilious upper class voiceover - mordantly speculating about the spiritual emptiness that rotted out this culture from within, a loss of purpose, vitality, connection to Nature - which has the feeling of a classic Public Information film.

As for the text itself, there are suggestions that the author is familiar with Nietzsche (Uses and Abuses of History, the Last Man - "we can feel only pity for these last men and women", goes the "Lonely Shore" voiceover) and Oswald Spengler (patternwork, Decline of the West). 

There are even a few proto-Retromania touches, which again is pretty good going for 1962. 

The film's beachscape setting, with the Jetsam of Time - the  mystifying and opaque salvage - arrayed in orderly and symmetrical patterns, recalls the Easter Island statues, certain tableaux from Surrealist paintings, and the post-catastrophe vistas of J.G. Ballard eerie early short stories and novels.

I wonder also if whoever wrote it was a fan of Olaf Stapledon, specifically Last and First Men.

There's also a touch too of H.P. Lovecraft and At the Mountains of Madness. 

One of those finds that seem too good to be true somehow but it is via the BBC Archive.

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Informational lowdown from Ian Holloway at Wyrd Britain:

"Written by Jacquetta Hawkes, filmed by Ken Russell and with commentary by Tony Church, this fabulous little film was one of 21 that Russell made for the fortnightly BBC arts programme 'Monitor' between 1959 and 1962.

"The entirely fascinating Hawkes - the first woman to read for the Archeology & Anthropology degree at the University of Cambridge, co-founder of CND, gay rights campaigner & wife of novelist J.B. Priestly - provides a text that is as cutting as it is blunt, that satirises both the language and assumptions of her own disciplines and the cosy absurdities and consumerist excesses of British life in the early 1960s. "  

Hawkes was an archaeologist, among other things, which fits the framing of "The Lonely Shore"

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #41

"Modernity" in the perspective of the metaphor of nourishment and digestion.-

"Sensibility immensely more irritable (-dressed up moralistically: the increase in pity-); the abundance of disparate impressions greater than ever: cosmopolitanism in foods, literatures, newspapers, forms, tastes, even landscapes. The tempo of this influx prestissimo; the impressions erase each other; one instinctively resists taking in anything, taking anything deeply, to "digest" anything; a weakening of the power to digest results from this. A kind of adaptation to this flood of impressions takes place: men unlearn spontaneous action, they merely react to stimuli from outside. They spend their strength partly in assimilating things, partly in defense, partly in opposition. Profound weakening of spontaneity: the historian, critic, analyst, the interpreter, the observer, the collector, the reader-all of them reactive talents -all science!

"Artificial change of one's nature into a "mirror"; interested but, as it were, merely epidermically interested; a coolness on principle, a balance, a fixed low temperature closely underneath the thin surface on which warmth, movement, "tempest," and the play of waves are encountered.

"Opposition of external mobility and a certain deep heaviness and weariness." --Friedrich Nietzche, The Will To Power, (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. Spring-Fall 1888)

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time, #38

(via Found Objects)

(whose Bollops provides the background: in Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, various stages of Humanity have come and gone, now it's the Fifth Men, who've "developed a pseudo-time-travel technique which enables them to experience the past by hitching a ride in the minds of people who lived hundreds, thousands, millions of years ago"):

"The access to the past had, of course, far-reaching effects upon the culture of the Fifth Men. Not only did it give them an incomparably more accurate knowledge of past events, and insight into the motives of historical personages, and into large-scale cultural movements, but also it effected a subtle change in their estimate of the importance of things. Though intellectually they had, of course, realized both the vastness and the richness of the past, now they realized it with an overwhelming vividness. Matters that had been known hitherto only historically, schematically, were now available to be lived through by intimate acquaintance. The only limit to such acquaintance was set by the limitations of the explorer's own brain-capacity. Consequently the remote past came to enter into a man and shape his mind in a manner in which only the recent past, through memory, had shaped him hitherto. Even before the new kind of experience was first acquired, the race had been, as was said, peculiarly under the spell of the past; but now it was infinitely more so. Hitherto the Fifth Men had been like stay-at-home folk who had read minutely of foreign parts, but had never travelled; now they had become travellers experienced in all the continents of human time. The presences that had hitherto been ghostly were now presences of flesh and blood seen in broad daylight. And so the moving instant called the present appeared no longer as the only, and infinitesimal, real, but as the growing surface of an everlasting tree of existence. It was now the past that seemed most real, while the future still seemed void, and the present merely the impalpable becomingness of the indestructible past."

"At all times, in all pursuits, the presence of the tragic past haunted them, poisoning their lives, sapping their strength."

Sounds like Olaf had maybe read Nietzche's On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (from Untimely Meditations) e.g.


"Antiquarian history itself degenerates in that moment when it no longer inspires and fills with enthusiasm the fresh life of the present. Then reverence withers away. The scholarly habit lives on without it and orbits in an egotistical and self-satisfied manner around its own centre. Then we get a glimpse of the wretched drama of a blind mania for collecting, a restless compiling together of everything that ever existed. The man envelops himself in a mouldy smell. With the antiquarian style, he manages to corrupt even a significant talent, a noble need, into an insatiable new lust, a desire for everything really old. Often he sinks so deep that he is finally satisfied with that nourishment and takes pleasure in gobbling up for himself the dust of biographical rubbish" 

"Great men, like great epochs, are explosive material in whom tremendous energy has been accumulated; their prerequisite has always been, historically and physiologically, that a protracted assembling, accumulating, economizing and preserving has preceded them – that there has been no explosion for a long time."--Nietzche, Twilight of Idols 

a hopeful interpretation of retromania? archival and recombinant and consolidatory activity as just a storing-up of energy, the build-up to a future explosion 


let the count-down begin then...