Paradise Lost?
A nine-minute retelling of Milton's Paradise Lost, shot in two days across parts of the Barbican the public never sees, and installed across multiple screens to close the exhibition it was made inside.
Doug Aitken’s Station to Station took over the Barbican for thirty days, with each invited artist challenged to make something born from the building itself. Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard went digging into its history and found John Milton, buried at St Giles’ Cripplegate, deep inside the estate. Their plan was to huge: to resurrect his epic poem. What followed was less grandiose. Two days of shooting. Two weeks of post-production. Acting royalty. And an unmovable premiere date, as the multi screen projected installation of the film closed the exhibition.
Make the constraint inform the method. Twelve books of verse were reduced by writer Kirk Lake to something shootable in a weekend, with Henry Rollins voicing God in Milton's own unaltered words. Three parts: Before the Fall, The Fall, The Fallout, each given a location chosen because the architecture already carried the meaning. Everything rested on the recce. Extensive, unglamorous and meticulous, it was where the film was actually made.
Before the Fall filmed in the Conservatory, the tropical garden hidden at the top of the Centre. The Fall, captured in a closed service corridor where the original architects lined the walls with sample concrete blocks to choose textures for the rest of the estate. Finally, The Fallout filmed in the basement plant rooms, a level never opened to visitors. Two days on Arri Alexa, moving through the building in the heat with Florence Pugh as Eve, Toby Sebastian as Adam and Sean Harris as Satan. Then two weeks to cut and grade with Dirty Looks, against a score by Warren Ellis.
The film premiered on the closing day of Station to Station, shown as a multi-screen installation in the same projection space where its final sequence had been filmed two weeks earlier. It was broadcast on Channel 4 as part of Random Acts and still streams on BFI Player eleven years later. Ellis's score was released as a limited edition of 300 on 12" vinyl by The Vinyl Factory, the sleeve printed on site at the Barbican three days before the premiere.
Paradise Lost?
A nine-minute retelling of Milton's Paradise Lost, shot in two days across parts of the Barbican the public never sees, and installed across multiple screens to close the exhibition it was made inside.
Doug Aitken’s Station to Station took over the Barbican for thirty days, with each invited artist challenged to make something born from the building itself. Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard went digging into its history and found John Milton, buried at St Giles’ Cripplegate, deep inside the estate. Their plan was to huge: to resurrect his epic poem. What followed was less grandiose. Two days of shooting. Two weeks of post-production. Acting royalty. And an unmovable premiere date, as the multi screen projected installation of the film closed the exhibition.
Make the constraint inform the method. Twelve books of verse were reduced by writer Kirk Lake to something shootable in a weekend, with Henry Rollins voicing God in Milton's own unaltered words. Three parts: Before the Fall, The Fall, The Fallout, each given a location chosen because the architecture already carried the meaning. Everything rested on the recce. Extensive, unglamorous and meticulous, it was where the film was actually made.
Before the Fall filmed in the Conservatory, the tropical garden hidden at the top of the Centre. The Fall, captured in a closed service corridor where the original architects lined the walls with sample concrete blocks to choose textures for the rest of the estate. Finally, The Fallout filmed in the basement plant rooms, a level never opened to visitors. Two days on Arri Alexa, moving through the building in the heat with Florence Pugh as Eve, Toby Sebastian as Adam and Sean Harris as Satan. Then two weeks to cut and grade with Dirty Looks, against a score by Warren Ellis.
The film premiered on the closing day of Station to Station, shown as a multi-screen installation in the same projection space where its final sequence had been filmed two weeks earlier. It was broadcast on Channel 4 as part of Random Acts and still streams on BFI Player eleven years later. Ellis's score was released as a limited edition of 300 on 12" vinyl by The Vinyl Factory, the sleeve printed on site at the Barbican three days before the premiere.
