disquieting

The last time the world of music heard from Polly Harvey was more than seven years ago, in the spring of 2016. Brexit had yet to happen, Barack Obama was still president, and the 53-year-old was on a world tour, albeit the kind of tour the late PJ O’Rourke conducted to research his 1988 opus Holidays in Hell, rather than the kind that involves roadies, riders and soundchecks. The Hope Six Demolition Project, Harvey’s ninth studio album, offered a travelogue of ravaged locations around the globe – Afghanistan, Kosovo, the…

As if in a seance or hypnotic trance, Sierra Pettengill conjures the ambient voices of the riot-torn United States in the 1960s, traumatised by the uproar in Watts, Chicago, Newark and Detroit. She curates archive TV discussion show clips and newsreel footage of the times, including some quite extraordinary contemporary reports about the “Riotsville” imitation towns that the US army built to practise anti-riot techniques. These were complete with audience bleachers in which an invited crowd of military brass could…

With his breakthrough feature, Bait, in 2019, Cornish film-maker Mark Jenkin showed himself a bold experimentalist, the creator of a daringly strange expressionist cinema. It was a minimalist piece of work in black and white with the aesthetic of a silent film or even a home movie – shot on 16mm and developed by hand.Now he has refined and developed this unique, stripped-down style for an eerie prose-poem of a movie about loneliness: Enys Men – the last word is pronounced “mane”, and in Cornish means “stone island”. It…