Robert Mapson: Lamaload
Things we know to be true:
1) The past is not a foreign country. It is a palimpsest of emotions and actions.
2) Lamaload is a reservoir in the Peak District National Park. According to Wikipedia, "The reservoir is 0.93 km x 0.53 km, with a capacity of 1,909,000 m3, impounded by a multiple-arch, round-headed buttress dam in concrete, whose design was innovative at the time. It was built by Richard Costain Ltd in 1959-63 to serve Macclesfield, which lies to its west, and officially opened in 1965."
3) Lamaload is a 1979 short film by Alan Garner (many sites on the internet, including IMDB, give the date as 1981, but this is incorrect - the film is copyrighted 1979, and Neil Philips also confirms this date), included in a series with the overarching title of A Sense of Place.
4) Lamaload is not considered among Garner's best work. Rupert Loydell, in an interview with Garner, stated "The film Lamaload, about the drowned village, I thought was awful." Garner's response was that "It was part of a series trying to make place as important as characters. I think you have to realise television doesn't always have to be profound, it can tell anecdotes." Neil Philip in A Fine Anger considers Lamaload "slight", "somewhat laboured" and "trivial" if nonetheless "beautifully shot", and "interesting" since the Tom and Jan roles from Red Shift are reversed here. On the other hand, Lamaload is "a production ripe for rediscovery" in the words of Mark Cunliffe.
5) Lamaload continues to resonate. In 2016 Dr Mark Pilkington created an acousmatic composition based on found and natural sounds around Lamaload, which echoes (pun intended) Garner's use of time and geography in the medium of acoustics and found sound. Dr Pilkington explains "Acoustic Ecology investigates soundscapes as complex sounding systems that change in space and time, and shape our understanding of the surrounding world. Soundscapes present analytical challenges relating to perception".
Garner's two hander (a three hander if you consider the landscape as another character, and it is certainly just as important as the humans) Lamaload begins with Jane (Virginia Moore) and David (Stewart Bevan) in their open top sports car driving along a main road (in a scene that echoes the motorway in the opening of Red Shift) for a small side road that, tellingly, forces them to change direction totally.
Their first on-screen words are "I love you" to which Jane replies "And I love you" though both statements are delivered in an almost emotionless tone, like actions that have been repeated so often they have become meaningless, like a ritual call and response, and this sense of a ritual permeates Lamaload with its hieratic phrases and sense of inevitability, and its often short sentences or single words. We sense this is a relationship under strain. As the couple walk across the countryside towards Lamaload, thunder sounds.
The repeated word "Lamaload" becomes an invocation, a "promise" (in Jane's words) and something that David is "taking on" in his relationship with Jane who has not been back to Lamaload since she was 11. When she left she hid her "Jane doll" in a stone wall, a sort of tutelary spirit. Not just any doll, but one that bears Jane's name, a sort of alter ego that remained behind when she left.
As Jane leads David further into Lamaload, along with her pleasant recollections, a shot of barbed wire, and the sound of thunder again, presages that all is not well, and the land is not as welcoming as Jane thinks.
But the valley has been dammed and flooded since Jane's departure, the field where she hid her doll is now under water, and her first sight of it is accompanied by the grating sound of scraped strings (the soundtrack is minimalist but eerily effective: strings and flute) and David and Jane's openly religious responses: "Jesus!" "Christ! Christ! [...] Oh God!"
The couple explore the farmhouse where Jane spent her childhood, now long abandoned and decrepit. As they wander through the ruins, David discovers a single woman's shoe, a throwaway scene if it were not echoed by Garner's later Thursbitch and John Turner's memorial stone in the Goyt Valley with its inscription "THE PRINT OF A WOMANS SHOE WAS FOUND BY HIS SIDE WERE HE LAY DEAD". Lamaload is mentioned once in Thursbitch, in the first chapter: "The back end of Pike Low down to Blue Boar was the sharpest in all the hills, however the storm should go. If it was behind, it came round Billinge or out of Rainow hole. North, it came over Sponds. East, it mounted on Windgather. And south it upped past Shuttlingslow and along Lamaload. There was no getting from it.".
Jane tries to convince the two of them that Lamaload is better as a reservoir, but the ghosts of the past won't let go, and her psychic frailty crumbles. "Never, never go back." For Jane it is too much as the valley (or is it the Jane doll?) seems to draw her to attempt suicide, only to be saved by David who must comfort her and hold her and bring her back from her trauma (as Jan does for Tom in Red Shift).
The film is beautifully photographed by Arthur Smith and directed by Matthew Robinson, often with scenes of Jane and David spatially distant, indicating the fragility of their relationship within the spirit of Lamaload valley, or framed by elements of the landscape as if captured and held by the valley. Lamaload may be "slight", though it is hard to imagine anything else in a 30 minute film, but it is an interesting exercise in mood and a performative way of telling a story. It is also significant as a pendant to Red Shift and Thursbitch, and long overdue for a DVD release.
It's the things that we know to be true that betray us.
Links: Mark Cunliffe: Mark Cunliffe's review published on Letterboxd (https://letterboxd.com/man_out_of_time/film/lamaload/) Garner, Alan: Red Shift (Collins, 1973) Garner, Alan: Thursbitch (The Harvill Press, 2003) Rupert Loydell: Rupert Loydell talks to Alan Garner (rl.html) Neil Philip: A Fine Anger (Philomel Books, 1981) Dr Mark Pilkington: Lamaload (https://markpilkington.org.uk/?project=lamaload-2016) The John Tuner Stone (https://www.goyt-valley.org.uk/john-turner-stone/) Wikipedia: Lamaload Reservoir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamaload_Reservoir)