Wednesday, August 12, 2009

SWINTON: A Pilgrimage

Glory be, I didn't realize how desperately in need of a SWINTON update we were until my new neighbor John sent me a link to this website. Thank you, SWINTON, once again, for never disappointing us with your bizarre and awesome projects.

In case you are too lazy to visit the website or read the surrounding press, I'll summarize. Dear Swinton has taken it upon herself to physically haul a 33.5-ton portable cinema along with about 40 other cinema enthusiasts (including Mark Cousins) through the Scottish Highlands for about a week, bringing independent film to a different village every night.

As stated on the site by Tilda herself,

Welcome to the state of cinema. We think you’ll like it here. You can be whoever you want to be in this special place. You can lose yourself in great glens, or lie on your belly on heather and peat and dip your lips into crystal clear mountain streams and drink ice-cold water. You might see a stag or eat fairy cakes.

We’re going to be doing something very romantic and passionate here. Because we love this place, its mackerel skies in November and its marmalade bracken, we are going to pull a 37 tonne cinema on wheels across it, from its crashing Atlantic waves to the dolphins of the Moray Firth. We’ll get hot and sweaty, or drenched with rain, and bitten by midges, and we might get blisters on our fingers and toes, but we’ll show flickering, splendid dream movies as we go, in a cockeyed caravan, like clowns or dafties, or kids. Please join our motley crew. Become a mendicant friar with us, in your mind — in Beijing or Vancouver, or Dakar or Tampere or Canterbury — by checking in to this wee site each day between 1st and 9th August 2009 to find out how our blisters are getting on, and by watching some of the movies we are showing.

Better still,
become a Fellow Traveller. Don a kilt and boots and bring a cheese sandwich and a tent, and walk this place of mountain streams and movie dreams in person.

Love from Mark Cousins and Tilda Swinton.
In honor of SWINTON and the fact that I will unfortunately be unable to attend this journey, I am going to try to use more words like 'wee' and 'cockeyed' and 'don' in my day to day conversations. It's really the least I can do.

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