Day Trip (In Memory of Mary Butters)

 

Mary Butters stands at a precipice. Angry men hold her over a quarry. A white witch, she has been called upon to heal a sick cow. Now three people are dead. Panicked, she tells the story of a shadow leaping from the fireplace and clubbing the inhabitants of a house to death. Only she has survived... 

The sound mix is oppressive, abrasive, the bleeps, scratches and groans - like fingernails on slate - actively erode the surface of the narrative, even as spidery writing crawls across the screen detailing the story of the Carnmoney Witch. 

Day Trip (In Memory of Mary Butters) is the work of Dawn Richardson, Jonathan Brennan and writer Paul Doran, who was commissioned to write the film specifically for the N I Mental Health Arts Festival. It seeks to look at how myths are created, and how they warp and change alongside the people who remember them.

Steven Rainey's showbiz slick narration contrasts wonderfully with the grainy backdrop of found images, faded like post-cards in a newsagent's display window: pale, blue, foxed. He's visually represented by juddering images of a patrician gentleman, his tightly knotted woollen tie suggesting the early 1960's. The man's brilliantined hair flaps over his ear, stiff and pointed as a horn. He is a demi-Cernunnos, the old horned God of the north, and he is leading us on this wild hunt. 

Dolls are scattered at a ring stone. The symbol of the smiley face filters through these ritual recreations, reminding us of the countryside revels of our more recent past. We meet a Celtic Druid, a Pagan Priestess and a Mummer, as they initiate a magical working. 

The victim had been subject to terrible violence at the hands of a number of people.

The truth elides, memories foment, myths bloom like night-mushrooms. 

This is the story of a ritual act, perhaps a sacrifice, and perhaps a bloody one at that. Three children disappear, while scapegoats are found. Blood meets rock. The Druid, the Priestess and the Mummer are those children, drawn back to the ancient stones, drawn back to ritual, circular actions, the same over and over again, searching for different outcomes. Is this a true story? This is Northern Ireland. It could well be. Terrible things happened here. People are still lost. Never found. 

But the story has the shape of a fairy tale, or a myth. Babes in the woods. Hansel and Gretel. The Green Children of Woolpit. There are echoes also of the alleged ritual killing of Charles Walton, murdered on Valentine's Day 1945, and found in a field with a trouncing hook in his throat, pinned into the earth with a pitchfork. His blood spilled to heal the land. 

Is that what happened in this story? One of the men was never found. 

A man dressed in a bandsman's uniform, perches on a dolmen like a gargoyle. Conflict flares, until he fishes a bottle of Buckfast from a crack in the rocks. 

The Druid, Priestess and Mummer enact a ceremony at a ring-stone round - moon-faced dolls are propped against the stones while a concoction of pins, milk, paper and paint is burned and mixed with a paintbrush, then flicked at the doll's faces and robes. This is Mary Butter's cow curing concoction. The narrator tells us this may be the "hidden line between commemoration and mockery". 

I'm reminded of the writer Alan Moore's worship of sock puppet serpent, Glycon. Is Moore serious about accepting Glycon as an actual God? Yes. And no. Which is an unusually reasonable belief system. The rituals presented here are odd and threadbare and amateurish, but they're also deeply felt. They're a way of tapping into the land, with the past, communing with the dead who, after all, reside in the ancient earth. Ritual ties us to a place, to a memory. We ghost the movements of ghosts. 

The Armagh Rhymers costumes, their huge wicker horse heads, look incredible as they march dolorously to a hilltop oak tree, the footage somber and grainy as an Anton Corbin video. It looks silly and monumental, the precise point where this film - and magical ideas - sit. 

Day Trip is often beautiful, often playful and frequently profound. It is in itself a ritual or magical working, as it layers image on top of image, in haunted rhythmic impasto, finding commonalities, coincidences, strange echoes pushing through. It's often silly, but it's silly on purpose. After all, what could be more silly than pushing back into the past, to meet the ancestors, to feel the chthonic hum of those distant, ill remembered lives? And yet that's what we do. That's what we always do. 

What has been believed will always haunt us. 

I should mention the film contains some absolutely fabulous footage of an elderly chap in horn-rims placing a live bee in his mouth. One of the films used here is called "Cleft Palate Research in Alligators" (1972). Surely a season of these films would be a bloody brilliant idea.