A first-time collaboration between the renowned American filmmaker Bill Morrison and the acclaimed Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, The Miners’ Hymns is a transporting and unashamedly lyrical portal onto Britain’s industrial past, and a requiem for the proud and resourceful communities that owed their existence to the raw materials beneath their feet.

 

Morrison and Jóhannsson both have an interest in obsolence and decay - Morrison in moving images and Jóhannsson in music - and both are past masters at harnessing the expressive potential of memory and longing without lapsing into sentimentality. Now the two outsiders have come together to fashion an uplifting tribute to the coal mining history of north east England, which cuts back and forth across time and touches on issues of social, political and environmental significance.

 

Bill Morrison is a filmmaker who raids archives all over the world searching out inspiration for new stories and new movies. His best-known project Decasia, a feature-length collage of decaying film stock, is a poetic reflection on the world of early films. For The Miners’ Hymns Morrison visited the vaults of organisations like the British Film Institute and Northern Region Film and Television Archive, looking for things that remained consistent across a century of mining in the Durham and Northumberland Coalfield.

 

Starting with the very earliest Mitchell and Kenyon footage of the factory exit at Pendlebury colliery in 1900, The Miners’ Hymns contains clips from almost every decade of the last century, and the film brings to life figures from the past in dramatic and compelling ways. ‘A lot of my interest in archival films is in the ghosts,’ explains Morrison. ‘These are recordings of people who a lot of the time are no longer with us or the reason why they assembled is no longer with us. What’s happened to the perspective of a piece of footage since it was first recorded? What’s happened to the footage and what’s happened to our attitude towards it?’

 

‘The mining community didn’t essentially change very much over the twentieth century,’ he continues, ‘and the same sorts of things were interesting to filmmakers who were recording the lives of the miners: the political rallies, the miners’ galas, a day in the life of the miner, recreation, those sort of things. For me it became a game of collecting different types of shots over the decades and comparing them.’

 

What distinguishes The Miners’ Hymns from documentaries like those produced by the National Coal Board Film Unit, excerpts of which appear in the film, is its emotional reach. Freed from the need to train or recruit, Morrison has given himself permission to diverge from a proscriptively linear narrative in the quest for more basic truths, chipping away at his sources in pursuit of something gleaming and darkly precious.

 

Looking at the fragments of film with Morrison as our visionary guide, you begin to wonder whether some of the scenes welling up in front of us didn’t happen in another dimension. Many of the images seem almost as old as the rock itself, and just as recalcitrant, and there are times when none of it seems quite real.

 

The Miners’ Hymns opens with a six-minute aerial shot of the current landscape of north east England in colour. To the poignant accompaniment of organ, brass, percussion and electronica, the camera sweeps across the sea and over the spectacular cliffs of the Durham heritage coast to reveal the former sites of Ryhope and Silksworth collieries (now occupied by a supermarket and a dry ski slope). Thereafter, the film switches to black-and-white and we find ourselves scanning seas of faces at assorted miners’ gatherings from the first half of the twentieth century, and then joining those selfsame miners as they set off to work and descend underground in pursuit of their hard-won prize.

 

Following skillfully edited passages devoted to manual and mechanical extraction, seacoalers, children playing on spoil heaps and homecomings, the film turns its attention to the devastating 1984 miners’ strike. It goes back to colour temporarily to show us the sites of the former Hylton and Monkwearmouth colleries (now occupied by a business park and a football stadium) before culminating in the Durham Miners’ Gala and the climactic entry of the massed ranks of miners into Durham Cathedral for the annual service and blessing of the trade union banners. All the while the music ebbs and flows in a succession of plaintive fugues and stirring fanfares.

 

The Miners’ Hymns began life as a performance in Durham Cathedral in July 2010 as part of BRASS Durham International Festival. There Morrison cued film sequences live to Jóhannsson’s score, which was performed by a specially assembled group of classically trained brass musicians, members of the NASUWT Riverside Band and the celebrated organist Robert Houssart. That the performance and finished film are such a triumph is a testimony to the creative acumen of Forma, the arts commissioning agency that brought Morrison and Jóhannsson together and managed all aspects of the production.

 

The project draws freely on the region’s vibrant and symbolically important brass music heritage stretching back almost two hundred years. The elegiac texture of brass is perfectly suited to the dream-like footage that Morrison has assembled – the soundtrack for the finished film was recorded in Durham Cathedral to ensure a close fit with the experience of the performance – and Jóhannsson’s finely balanced composition evokes the resonant hymns that feature in the repertoires of colliery bands. In point of fact, the film is titled after ‘Gresford’, which was written to commemorate one of Britain's worst coal mining accidents. The song was subsequently adopted by the National Union of Mineworkers as ‘The Miner’s Hymn’, and it crops up time and again in the programme of the Durham Miners’ Gala.

 

An editorial in the Guardian last spring argued that few sounds are as suggestive of a place and time in British life as a colliery brass band: ‘By turns magnificent and melancholy, a miners' band sings even now of a way of life in which the disciplines of some of the hardest physical work ever devised by humankind coexisted with the very different disciplines of creating something beautiful and haunting … Anyone who can remember the conflicted emotions of 3 March 1985, when the defeated miners marched back to work behind their brass bands after their year-long strike, is likely to retain the rich memory that, while the pit embodied life as it actually was, the brass band sang for life as it might be. A quarter of a century on, few of the pits now remain. Yet remarkably – and appropriately – several of the bands play on.’

 

Any modern-day attempt to deal with mining on film immediately calls to mind comparisons with The Battle of Orgreave. Jeremy Deller’s live re-enactment in 2001 of the most notorious episode of the 1984 strike was filmed by director Mike Figgis, and Figgis’s record of the event intercuts contemporaneous photographic stills and eyewitness accounts with footage of the dramatised clashes. The Miners’ Hymns contains no such devices and is far more sprawling in its compass, but Morrison is aware of its peculiarities. ‘It’s so specific to a time and a region and a topic,’ he says, ‘but I hope it translates into something more universal. Across the world we are seeing people rise up right now … We are hopeful that we can take stock of the choices that were made [by the miners] back then in 1984 and where we’ve gotten to today. This is just another page in that [story].’

 

Like Morrison’s images and Jóhannsson’s music, the collective memory of organised labour refuses to fade away. As the Billy Elliot playwright Lee Hall confirms: ‘To hymn the miners is to see that the struggle, far from being over, is still going on, whether we want to admit it or not.’

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