The Man Who Fell to Millom

The Man Who Fell to Millom (2018) is an atmospheric video which uses cut-up and collage techniques to suggest an alternative SF narrative for the Cumbrian coastal town of Millom. The work engages with the notion of a ‘haunted shore’ by examining and then re-framing the postindustrial present of a once thriving community. The Man Who Fell to Millom gathers textures of the Cumbrian landscape, memories of its people and the contradictory sounds of nature and technology, of geology and the digital. Beginning on a calm shoreline, the film tells the absurd tale of a creature—perhaps awakened by iron ore mining works or perhaps deliberately hewn from the stone beneath Millom—and the humanoid that opposes it. The viewer follows in the footsteps of a hooded figure, literally a man who fell to Earth (David Bowie in Nicolas Roeg’s 1975 film), as ‘he’ walks a rocky coastal landscape and navigates a towering slagheap, pursuing the ominous presence which seems to threaten the past inhabitants of Millom.