5/8/2023 0 Comments The master juststreamShe walks out into the middle of the field across from her front door, where stands a giant rock in the shape of a pointed spearhead. She then goes to an open well near a round tower and tosses a rock down into the depths, listening for the sound of the splash. She walks to the seaside cliffs to monitor the flowers growing there, startling white flowers with bright scarlet stamens. Some of this is monotonous, but it's monotonous by design. The shots move with alarming suddenness from an extreme closeup to a vast panorama, where you can barely find the woman in the frame, and the effect is dizzying. Jenkin utilizes familiar visual devices, "out of style" now, but extremely effective, placing "Enys Men" in its 1970s environment: long slow zooms in and out, disorienting shot construction (it's hard to get a feel for where things are happening, spatially), and even more disorienting edits. It looks like it was actually shot in 1973. Shot on 16mm, "Enys Men" crackles with grain, giving it an authentic "found object" feel. Supplies come by boat every couple of weeks. Or maybe it's "M'aider." She lies in bed at night, reading by candlelight, reading Edward Goldsmith's influential 1972 ecological warning bell A Blueprint for Survival. Her entries are all for the month of April, leading up to May 1st. May Day. The year is 1973, we know that from the ledger book. Is she a naturalist or a botanist with a grant to study the flora and fauna of this island? There's no real explanation of what she's doing. The woman is alone on the island, living in a small stone house, doing daily tasks, the same tasks in the same order. The surf crashes and seethes against the cliffs, and the landscape is rough, with patches of shifting spongy moss and rock outcroppings in weird shapes. "Enys Men" means "stone island" in Cornish, and the film takes place entirely on a stony island surrounded by a heaving spectacular sea.
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