Thursday 25 September 2014

3 Church Walk UK Premiere


3 Church Walk, a film by Emily Richardson 
with words by Jonathan P Watts and sound by Simon Limbrick 

We are very excited to announce that 3 Church Walk will receive its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on Saturday 18th October as part of the Experimenta ‘Haunted Space’ programme selected by William Fowler. 

3 Church Walk is a film about the modernist architect H.T. ‘Jim’ Cadbury Brown’s Suffolk house that he and his wife Betty Dale designed and built in 1962 on a site originally ear marked by the composer Benjamin Britten for the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts’ first opera stage.

Today, Cadbury-Brown is best known for his contribution to the design of the iconic Brutalist development of the Royal College of Art (which, in 1964, the critic Iain Nairn claimed would ‘inspire affection in fifty years time’), and earlier work on pavilions for the Festival of Britain in the summer of 1951. However, 3 Church Walk remains as the most developed articulation of Jim’s and Betty’s ideals as disciples of modernism, so-called ‘flat roof architects’ who spent their formative professional years in Ernö Goldfinger’s office. Indeed, they regarded 3 Church Walk as their equivalent to Goldfinger’s family home, Willow Road, in Hampstead.

The film is a journey through the house in its abandoned state as Jim left it when he died in 2009. In slow disintegration, the house is populated by character pieces he insisted must remain in place, producing a powerful evocation of the architects’ lives. Simon Limbrick’s soundtrack is composed from recordings of the objects, surfaces and materials of the house played as if an instrument, much in the same way Britten played car springs or tea-cups for compositions such as The Burning Fiery Furnace and Noye’s Fludde.

HD Video/ DCP
23 minutes
2014
Dir/Prod: Emily Richardson
Camera/Editor: Emily Richardson
Writer: Jonathan P Watts
Sound composer: Simon Limbrick
Thanks to the Cadbury-Brown Estate
Made with the generous support of Arts Council England and the Arts & Humanities Research Council
To book tickets for the BFI London Film Festival click here
To find out more about the film click here.

Click on the links for more from Emily RichardsonJonathan P Watts and Simon Limbrick