Jeremy Deller’s BBC film for All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
Artist Jeremy Deller was commissioned to make a film by the BBC to coincide with the opening of his exhibition All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, a peroration on the consequences for Britain of the advent and aftermath of the Industrial Revolution.
The film underlines Deller’s deft application of juxtaposition. Eight year old primary school pupils read 19th century transcripts of workhouse children of the same age and former pop stars Jarvis Cocker and Noddy Holder and actress Maxine Peake intone from passages of contemporary Victorian reports on social conditions in their native locales (respectively Sheffield, the Black Country and Manchester).
Particularly touching are singer Jennifer Reid’s rendition of Nineteen Hundred And Seventy Three, a satirical imagining of the future written in 1873, and zero hours worker Vicky Lauder-Shortman detailing a similarly oppressive scenario experienced by her 19th century counterparts.
Deller’s foregrounding of music and mass culture peaks in the section where acid house blares over archive footage of cotton loom production and then blends into scenes of Summer Of Love ravers soundtracked to the original recordings of the clanging rhythms of the mills.
View Deller’s film on BBC’s iPlayer here.
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is a touring exhibition which opens at Manchester Art Gallery tomorrow (October 12). Details here.