The Cinematheque

“Fragmented narration underlines Helen Cammock’s videos, performances, and installations—quoting, singing, ventriloquising, a procession of voices that successively inhabit the artist.”

Chris Fite-Wassilak, Art Monthly

The opening line of Helen Cammock’s essay film slices neatly through a soundscape of waves breaking on the windward side of Barbados, evoking the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade: ​“A sea eagle screams from the rock, and my race began like the osprey, with that cry, that terrible vowel, that I.” Travelling inland from the shore, the narrator—always speaking in the first person, whether as herself or as the embodiment of other voices (from writers to emigrants)—searches for the last vestiges of a colonial project in freefall. Twilight City, a Black Audio Film Collective production broadcast two years into Margaret Thatcher’s third term, is composed of archival material, interviews with a diverse group of academics and activists (including Vancouver’s former city planner Andy Coupland), dream sequences, and footage of contemporary London captured by a fictional journalist who describes what she sees in a letter to her long-absent mother.

There’s a Hole in the Sky Part I
United Kingdom 2016
Helen Cammock
19 min. DCP

Twilight City
United Kingdom 1989
Reece Auguiste
52 min. DCP

“[Twilight City] roves restlessly through the streets, casting a harsh gaze on crumbling public estates and growing corporate monstrosities. The interviewees become the voice of the city itself, crying out in indignation as its character and colour are purged for the sake of an unstable market.”

Dan Schindel, Hyperallergic