Bradford Street

A short while back Lee emailed me a link to a short film competition. The brief was to make a film not exceeding three minutes that in some way addressed issues of urbanity. We spent a couple of weeks emailing one another films we had seen that we liked as precedence and ideas for films and eventually realised that the shots we both enjoyed involved tracking or panning giving the sense of some sort of journey being undertaken that was being followed by the camera. We planned to make a film of a person walking along some area of Birmingham, perhaps stopping to interact with buildings or other people every now and again. We intended to start the film fairly compact, as though the viewer was wearing blinkers, so the shot might have focused on the feet of the journeyman or their face and wouldn’t reveal much about the city, offering a fairly ubiquitous street scene. Slowly over the course of the film it could get more expansive and reveal the city skyline or a landmark building and the journeyman would reach a destination ie. the film would resolve itself.  

The night before we met up to discuss the plan but got side tracked talking about Sheeler and Becher and Becher. We decided on the basis of that conversation to change the nature of our film. We had always had reservations about how successful our panning/tracking shots could be and so instead of risking getting frustrated at our technical inabilities we decided to use them as the parameters of what we could do. Our film still is about a journey along Bradford Street in Digbeth but now the distraction of the protagonist is removed, the focus is put squarely on the street. The film is just a sequence of shots of buildings along Bradford Street from the same sort of frontal perspective that Becher and Becher used so powerfully in their images. The edits happen at the moment that a vehicle or passer by moves past the camera. This implies the business of Bradford Street as one of the main thorough fairs into the city. The lack of any real human engagement along the street, accentuated by the absence of a protagonist, hints at the atmosphere we felt along the road. It certainly wasn’t intimidating, but neither was it inviting. Nothing actually happened on Bradford Street except for people passing through. The repetitive imagery begins to express the nature of the environment along Bradford Street; images showing rolled down shutter doors that long look out of use, brownfields sites, bus stops, abandoned warehouses and offices. At the end of the film a shot which suddenly jumps to the top of the multi-storey carpark at the top of Bradford Street begins to pan and at last the viewer hopes that the film will find some resolution or that it will reveal the location of the film but the shot turns to black before the pan is completed leaving the end open and ambiguous. Like Bradford Street, the film couldn’t care less whether people knew where it was or what its purpose is.