A film by PAUL BUSH
BABELDOM
Starring: Youla Boudali and Mark Caven
An ICO Films Release
Running Time: 80 mins, Cert: TBC, In cinemas: 8th March 2013
Official Selection – 41st Rotterdam International Film Festival
Official Selection – Sao Paulo International Film Festival
For further information, screening details and all interview requests please
contact: Independent Cinema Office_ T: 020 7636 7120
catharine@independentcinemaoffice.org.uk
Images available to download
http://www.independentcinemaoffice.org.uk/films/babeldom
SHORT SYNOPSIS
In ancient times they talked of a city in which you could meet yourself at birth and on your
deathbed. If a city ever existed in which the past and the future were united with the
present, it would exist now, and forever...
INTRODUCTION
Babeldom is a city so massive and growing at such a speed that soon, it is said, light itself will
not escape its gravitational pull. How can two lovers communicate, one from inside the city
and one outside?
As the archeologist says at the beginning of the film: 'The past is here, under our feet, we
can't retrieve it, but we walk over it every day of our lives, until we die and become a part of
other people's past.' In his debut feature film, award winning British experimental animator
and filmmaker Paul Bush presents an elegy to urban life. Against the backdrop of a city of
the future, a portrait is assembled from film shot in modern cities all around the world and
collected from the most recent research in science, technology and architecture.
Incorporated into the film is animated data visualisation from recent science that show the
latest results in the research of nanotechnology which offer a unique counterpoint to the
poetic representation of the city, both ancient and future.
Referencing the Tower of Babel, the film uses images from some of the largest cities in the
world, eg London, Dubai, Berlin, Shanghai, Barcelona and Osaka, to build up a conceptual
idea of the modern metropolis, a poetic elegy which is rooted in its almost mythological
beginnings.
DIRECTOR – PAUL BUSH
Babeldom is Paul Bush’s first feature film although he has had a distinguished career as the
creator of short films which challenge the boundaries that separate fiction, documentary
and animation. His background in Fine Art is an influence on all his work and this is reflected
in its inclusion in art collections and exhibitions as well as cinema distribution and television
broadcast. During the 1980's he wrote and directed several short and medium length films
that were critically acclaimed but it was not until the 1990's that his films became widely
distributed and he was able to concentrate all his attention on film-making. During the 90's
his films were commissioned by all the major broadcasters, won numerous awards and were
shown in cinemas, exhibitions and television all round the world. During this period he usually
used single frame techniques often involving live action elements. In 1999 he was polled in
second place in Creation's list of top directors of animation. In 1996 he set up his company
Ancient Mariner Productions to produce his own films and he also directs commercials and
his clients have included Panasonic and Philips. In 2003 he was awarded a Nesta fellowship
to develop feature films. His first feature Babeldom was completed in 2012.
Bush was born in 1956 and studied Fine Art at Central School and Goldsmiths College,
London. He taught himself how to make films while a member of the London Film-makers Coop and Chapter Film Workshop in Cardiff. From 1981 to 1993 he taught film-making,
establishing a film workshop in South London and supervising a wide variety of courses and
the production of numerous student films. between 1995 and 2001 he taught on the visual
arts course at Goldsmiths. He has lectured, run workshops and tutored at numerous art and
film courses around the world including the Media Academy of Cologne, National Film Board
of Canada, The Netherlands Institute of Animation Films, CalArts, Centro Sperimentale di
Cinematografia, Turin, St Lukas in Brussels, KASK in Ghent, Anadolou University in Turkey, HGK
Lucerne, and the Royal College of Arts, Duncan of Jordanstone and the National Film and
Television School in Britain.
'Paul Bush is part scavenger, part inventor. Nothing is out of bounds and everything is worth
trying. This is what makes Bush's work so welcoming; you never know what you are in for but
you know it will be smart, funny, provocative and unique.' Chris Robinson
'Let nobody forget the sheer pleasure of watching this work, for its technical achievement,
for its verve and ambition,its pace and constant surprise, for its beauty.' Gareth Evans
'Bush has demonstrated a fascination with artistic techniques of the past, particularly those
that have endowed us with works whose great and enduring beauty tend to eclipse the
extraordinary degree of devoted labour involved in creating them.' Chris Darke
'The secret preoccupation of these films, finally, is beauty. It may be the case that the filmmaker, in focusing so relentlessly on issues of time, narrative, history, the intersection of the
graphic and the cinematic, and the question of clarity of presentation, doesn't himself see it
but the viewer does. As if beauty were a necessary by-product of these investigations,
beyond the intention of the artist, yet an inevitable result of his rigorous control and
passionate pursuit of meaning.' Leslie Dick
Paul Bush has two children and lives in London.
FILMOGRAPHY
Babeldom (2012)
Short Films include Lay Bare (2012), Central Swiss (2006), While Darwin Sleeps (2004), Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde (2001), Furniture Poetry (1999), The Albatross (1998), The Rumour of True Things
(1996), His Comedy (1994) and The Cow’s Drama (1984)).
DIRECTOR’S NOTES
‘It’s easy enough to take cameras into the future - I’ve got a collection of old ones in my
cupboard. The problem is that it’s very difficult to get the film back. How then to make a
documentary of the future? Babeldom is a collage of images filmed in the most modern of
cities edited together with moving images from the most recent research in science and
technology collected from universities all over the world.
Carrying a small digital camera on my travels for five years, I was drawn in particular to film
those places in which the function of architecture seemed to have become removed from
the requirements of everyday life, for instance in fantastical hotels, the over-whelming
edifices of dominant financial institutions or the pragmatic tunnels of nuclear shelters. At the
same time I began to contact scientists and ask for images of their most recent research, as I
had done with my film The Rumour of True Things twelve years before, and for a similar
reason: for the oblique and curious view they show of our society. Here I became drawn to
some areas of research in particular: the modelling of crowd behaviour and fluid dynamics,
nanotechnology and astrophysics. Above all else I was fascinated by the increasingly
successful modelling of the chaotic, the indeterminate, the apparently spontaneous now for
the first time yielding up its pattern to maths. From these, together with a few specially
animated sequences using off-the-shelf digital models, grew the visual texture of the city of
the future, Babeldom.
The result is a portrait of a city which has grown so vast it has encompassed places as distant
and diverse as London and Dubai, Berlin and Shanghai, Barcelona and Osaka. But
Babeldom is not merely a conglomeration of buildings assembled randomly; the city has
evolved over millennia, building on the foundations of previous cities. At the lower levels of
the city the past is buried – ‘we walk over it every day of our lives, until we die and then we
become part of other peoples past’. Although compressed and deep below us, the past is
accessible for those who search, and so is the future could one climb high enough, fast
enough. But the city is growing at such a speed it is impossible ever to reach its topmost
boundaries and only rumours and the sound of falling waste brings messages from the future.
In this city lives a kind of urban explorer who searches deep underground for traces of the
past. The woman he communicates with is an archaeologist specialising in the ancient
classical world. By chance he finds a relic of hers, a hair clip, deep at the bottom of the city
and this is the moment that he begins to tell her his story, the story of Babeldom. Their
correspondence come from two different episodes of history, the future and the present,
separated by the enormous architectural structure of Babeldom, a mass so great that time is
centuries different at one end of the city to the other. Their stories, together with two
interventions by voices from the future, one describing the (fictional) Ubermath, the other the
(historical) Solresol language, make up the narration of the film.
The central metaphor of Babeldom is that all of time is present at the same moment,
captured in different layers of the city. The prehistoric lies beneath the Roman, the Roman
below the Medieval. We too are buried below countless centuries in which the city has built
upwards like a futuristic Tower of Babel. As in Boethius’s vision, all of time can be seen at
once if only one could view the city from outside, but each of us is destined to live our lives in
one small layer of the city, unable to move lower or higher more than a few levels.
The Polish writer Stanislav Lem, author of Solaris, regretted that science fiction followed only
one of the many paths suggested by the writing of H G Wells. He pointed out another
direction, one followed by authors such as Borges, Calvino and Lem himself. Babeldom
attempts to take science fiction cinema in that direction. It is a documentary of a future city,
narrated by one of its citizens. It is an elegy of city life, written and directed by a Londoner,
born and bred, who is not unaware of the secret pleasures, dreams, and fantasies such a city
holds for its inhabitants.
It is the strange fortune of unlucky circumstance that I have made my first feature at the
point where in the UK there is no money left for film, but have made a film that probably
would never have been commissioned even at the most enlightened periods of UK film
funding. My thanks to all the scientists, many in difficult financial circumstances themselves,
who generously allowed me to use their research in this film.’
For more information and details on screening dates;
www.independentcinemaoffice.org.uk/films/babeldom
www.babeldom.com
www.paulbushfilms.com