Banewl (1999)

Shot in a farm in Cornwall, Banewl captures the famous total solar eclipse of 1999 almost in real time. It is raining as I sit in the bottom field, waiting. The weather looks set in. There is a permanent roar from the BBC’s Hercules plane as it films high above the clouds: the eye of the nation seeing above the gloom what we cannot see from below. As the time ticks away to totality, the light still feels remarkably unchanged. The swallows perceive the darkness coming long before us. Suddenly they go crazy, swooping and darting in all directions, and then they disappear. The cows start to lie down one by one across the field. The temperature drops. view image gallery When totality comes, it is rapid: a night darkness. The sun gone. There is a mustard yellow horizon, the light from beyond the furthest edge of this shadow moving above us. And this is what is changing, turning from strange translucent colours to mother of pearl and then imperceptibly back to grey: the grey that is normality; the grey that is today’s weather. There is a cheer from Logan’s Rock. Still in a reverie, seeing the world again, but now in the context of the extraordinary, the silence is eventually broken by the crowing of the cockerel: its blood red throat signalling relief, and the passage from one phase of this phenomenon to the next. Twenty minutes later, and we are well into the ‘anti-climax’ of this event. The sun starts to show through the clouds for the first time. People on Porthcurno Beach are packing up their things and going home. Through filtered glasses the sun has become like a crescent moon. The eclipse is again about waiting and watching until the sun becomes whole again. I cannot quite explain the madness that took hold of me later that night. I wasn’t on my own: Dick, my American friend sat in his armchair, exhausted, giggling hysterically with both delight and disappointment. We began to see the sun in everything: in a brass plate on the wall; in some frieze decoration in the farm’s sitting room; in the bare electric light bulb. Watching the footage from the Hercules on the late night news and reports of the eclipse from around the world, I felt jealous. I couldn’t even tolerate seeing the sun in the sky in some incidental and unconnected report from Australia. It is beyond rational explanation, but for some short time after that day, I really felt like I would never recognise the sun again. But the clouds had given the day a strange intensity. We hadn’t seen the sun’s corona nor the diamond ring effect, and Dick hadn’t found any crescent suns pinholed beneath the trees. What we had was the place: the ground and the sky; the animals and the birds, and Banewl, the farm itself. The eclipse was about waiting for darkness to happen and then equally for the return of a normal sun. The clouds allowed us to experience this coincidence of cosmic time and scale on our terms and in our own human time, measuring it against the movements of animals and the fine detailing of our natural world.