A special screening pairing Glasgow-based artist Margaret Salmon’s beautiful film Cladach, made in Ullapool, with Colin Low’s observation of the windswept Fogo Island in Newfoundland. Each unites community and geography in interesting and often unexpected ways — not least Margaret Salmon’s sudden departure from the coast into the sea itself.
Margaret Salmon joins us to talk about Cladach, and to situate it in the context of her wider practice.
Cladach
Dir. Margaret Salmon UK 2018 40’
16mm transferred to digital video | In English
Cladach revolves around a single community, in Ullapool, existing along the shoreline of the Wester Ross Marine Protected Area in North West Scotland. Town life and activities filmed provide an entrance into the rhythm of the local, and a space to allow different attitudes and ideas around costal life to emerge.
Engaging with different aspects of the everyday in Ullapool – international visitors, local fisherman, ferry passengers, charity shops and pub restaurants Cladach also documents a family ceilidh, featuring musical performances by local children. As we leave Ullapool and enter a nearby shoreline, underwater footage of a maerl bed, jellyfish, sea grass begins an aquatic study of common indigenous species of Northwest Scotland – cup corals, anemones, serpulid worms, and others.
The Winds of Fogo Island
Dir. Colin Low Canada 1969 20’
16mm transferred to digital video | In English
Fogo is a windswept island off the coast of Newfoundland where the inhabitants for generations have lived by, on and from the sea. In this film William Wells, fisherman, and his two sons take a day off from the nets for a journey to the gannet colony on the Funk Islands, fifty miles farther out to sea. There are exceptional close-up views of enormous flocks of seabirds swarming on the cliffs and in the sky.
Margaret Salmon (b. 1975, Suffern, New York) lives and works in Glasgow, where she creates filmic portraits that weave together poetry and ethnography. Focusing on individuals in their everyday activities, her films capture the minutiae of daily life and infuse them with gentle grandeur, touching upon universal human themes. Adapting techniques drawn from various cinematic movements, such as Cinema Vérité, the European Avant Garde and Italian Neo-Realism, Salmon’s orchestrations of sound and image introduce a formal abstraction into the tradition of realist film.
Margaret Salmon won the first Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2006. Her work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and the Berlin Biennale in 2010 and was featured in individual exhibitions at Witte de With in Rotterdam and Whitechapel Gallery in London among others.
Level 1 Cinema
Doors open 18:00; Film starts 18:30. Pop-up cinema bar open from 18:00 for drinks.
Part of Sea Season, a programme of films exploring the sea, coast and marine ecology supported by Schmidt Ocean Institute. Baltic Cinema is supported by Film Hub North.
