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"
