“st bedes amateur footage” results 1-20 of about 450
I play back the video again.
It loads, and the image appears: a lightning-bolt of visual information. The irreversible course of events has made each second of this video a priceless, scopophiliac treasure.
We find ourselves in hilly, grassy countryside. The sun glows in a cloud-flecked sky. There is the faint trickle of birdsong. This is a pleasant, pastoral scene. Quintessentially English. Worthy of Constable, Gainsborough and the rest.
Any sense of tranquillity however is just a passing illusion: we’re actually in the middle of a film location. The camera judders from left to right in a handheld pan, and introduces us to a tableau of buzzing activity. There is a big six-wheeled trailer van parked under a row of beeches, and next to it is a white marquee. Inside are trestle tables, with food laid out in plastic dishes and tea and coffee in metal urns. Dozens of people are stood everywhere in shot.
Two separate, segregated groups are identifiable in the crowd. One is the film crew, standing in an awkward, arbitrary pack. The other group, wearing ecclesiastical costumes and gathered in a forlorn-looking huddle, are the film’s extras. My colleagues. Other people—the grips, gaffers, best boys and the other strangely named members of the tech team—walk busily to and fro, hauling equipment and barking instructions. All activity seems to centre around the building visible in the background…
Tucked snugly behind a verge in the upper left quarter of the image is a church. It’s small, and very old. 11th-century, possibly pre-Norman. Made of ancient Bargate stone that was quarried for centuries from nearby Godalming. Various annexes, such as the redbrick vestry that we can see, have been added throughout the years. (Of course, I only know all this from retrospective research.)
Scaffolding obscures one of the church’s ivy-strewn walls. Enormous, drum-like lights have been rigged up at the top. They blast a 7500-watt tungsten light into the nave windows, painfully bright and glaring even in the radiant sunshine. Crew members are pushing large aluminium boxes on casters in through the porch entrance, disappearing in and out of the interior gloom, up and down the cobbled path between the church’s grave-studded perimeter and the foreground. The church is where principle photography is taking place today.
The camera wobbles, and this recorded world is dizzying for a moment. Then it steadies, and becomes motionless, and it finds the best angle at which to observe everything. If it seems to you that all you see is at a lopsided angle, then that’s because the camera is being held at a discreet, hip-height position. I’d had it under the waterproof folded over my arm (a precaution I always bring to set after getting soaked to the skin on Sweeney Todd.) No-one had noticed it tucked away there.
In the middleground, a man and woman walk into shot, and I detect by the subtle, nervous movements of the crowd close by—movements you only recognise after spending countless hours sitting around on a film set—that they are the principle cast members of the project.
The man is in his early forties: tall, slim, greying hair, handsome after a moment’s appraisal. He’s wearing the rugged brown regalia of a medieval foot-soldier. It stylises, and strangely amplifies his masculinity. He takes a cigarette packet from the pocket of his tunic, and after helping himself, offers the pack to the woman.
She’s much younger than him: twenty-something—actually, I won’t pretend I don’t know that when this video was made, she was a month from her twenty-fourth birthday. Strawberry blonde hair flanks a fair, freckled complexion, marked by sharp pink points of cheekbones. She has bright, almond-shaped eyes—can you see in this footage that they are a green-brown? I think you can. She stands at five foot eight. She’s slender, but not waifish. Her figure, with its unique curves and ratios, seems to say something about her: half-delicate, half-mischievous, or rather oscillating invitingly between the two... Dressed in a shimmering brocaded gown, she looks nothing short of angelic—so far removed from the high-heeled siren we’re now used to seeing in those Chanel ads. She’s a ravishing, anachronistic beauty.
After brief consideration she accepts the cigarette, and in the way her eyes meet his as she takes the pack from him, and allows him to light the cigarette for her, something seems to happen. They stand making idle, pre-shoot conversation that we cannot hear.
The seconds pass, and the camera watches in secret.
What unfolds can be enjoyed in that magical, fertile zone between observation and imagination. We both speculate and invent. He is the seasoned actor: famous, experienced, self-assured. He’s kind and well-mannered as he should be—but all the same he’s beguiled by his young, attractive co-star… She’s the novice: starting out, eager to prove herself, tipped for great things she feels pressured to achieve, anxious to hide her fears. This is her debut film role (again, something I only found out later) and she’s looking for protection and reassurance on this intimidating set…
With the handing holding the cigarette, she thumbs back hair that the wind has blown in her eyes.
He lays one hand to rest on the hilt of the sword at his waist. It’s a silly, ridiculous kind of gesture.
She laughs at something he says. Her pointed little nose crinkles, and her eyes crease. She shows a lot of her teeth as she laughs.
He makes way for someone to push a pallet truck past. It’s his opportunity to stand closer to her.
An encounter between two human beings; no more or less ordinary or extraordinary than any other—it has simply been immortalised, every nuanced interaction burnt to the reel of a DV tape. The only thing that isn’t guesswork is this: In about ten-and-a-half seconds—that is, about half a second after the footage ends—he is going to die. And she isn’t going to die.
As the man steps closer towards the woman, there is a low noise. The limited capabilities of the camera’s mic mean it isn’t much more than an anonymous, digitised rumble; to anyone who didn’t know, just a plane flying overhead or a passing lorry nearby. In fact, it’s what’s known as a sonic boom, sounding from several thousand feet in the air above.
The man, the woman, and everyone else in shot look up at the sky. As one second ticks inevitable into the next—second one, second two, second three—their expressions run the cycle of curiosity, into confusion, into horror. A contagion of screams and gasps erupts.
Second four—without warning, a rash of flame suppurates the image and the camera, unable to immediately adjust for the light levels, whites out. Within the same second come the accompanying explosions that drown out the screams. If you listen closely, you’ll realise it’s just a number of versions of the same noise—a sort of ‘ssss-BOOM’—all overlaid over one another. If you were able to listen closely enough, maybe with the right software or whatever, you would be able to distinguish a whole eighteen separate ‘ssss-BOOMs’ on the video’s soundtrack…
Skip back, and look, if you can, at the young actress in just a few frames of video before the screen whites out—do you see? That transient image of the white-robed damsel staring heavenward to fire and destruction, her gallant knight stood helplessly beside her? This… I swear that this will stay branded in my retinae forever. I can still see the paused freeze-frame flickering as an afterimage when I close my eyes.
But this isn’t just me. As time goes one, I see this image everywhere. Newspaper, magazines, TV documentaries; it multiplies and blooms. Type in her name—type Mette Stensgaard’s name into Google, and see what image crops up the most in the results. Is this even worth mentioning? I’m sure you know the picture I’m talking about. The one you’ve seen so many times already.
This is my icon. My burning Vietnamese girl. My dead Marilyn in the morgue. This picture… I kid you not, if they knew it was me, they’d knock on my door and just hand me the Pulitzer Prize. I guarantee you. My private obsession has caught the world’s imagination.
… Second five—Silence after the explosions. The screams start again. They’re half of what they were. Second six—the camera swiftly compensates—second seven—and reveals a pixelline inferno of flame and smoke, a carnage censored by the camera auto-focussing onto a patina of soil sprayed across the lens. Second eight—there’s a nauseating lurch, as I swing the camera up and forward. Second nine—something large, obscured by the windowpane of dirt, comes spinning 3D movie-style into shot, and engulfs the image. Second ten. The screen goes blank. The sound dies.
Emergency forces were ordered to Surrey yesterday, after nineteen people were killed, dozens more injured, and widespread damage caused by a meteorite fall of freak proportions… In a tragic twist of fate, St Bede’s Church, at the epicentre of the fall, was being used that day as a location by a visiting Danish film company. Award-winning Danish actor Daniel Møller was amongst the casualties… Experts have described the incident as “the most catastrophic impact event in documented history”…
There. The Times’ front-page article on the 22nd July, 2010, the day after the fall, summarises events just as well as I might. The accompanying headline was A FALLING STAR IN SURREY. A strange, surrealist-tinged phrase—perhaps to the point of being a little insensitive, I remember thinking? The Daily Telegraph, by contrast, went with HELLFIRE IN THE HOME COUNTIES, full of an eschatological fervour made appropriate by the picture below of St Bede’s burning ruins attended to by the fire-fighters’ hoses. The Sun, meanwhile, opted for METEOR DEATH STRIKE CHAOS. Blunt, tabloid histrionics. Kind of like Beat poetry.
Newspapers are rarely measured, or subtle, in their response to tragedy, but to me, the headlines and their variety seemed part of it—an integral part to understanding the anatomy of a disaster…
The extras agency had rang me the night before.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, is that David?’ said the Australian voice on the other end of the line.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Hi, this is Simon from Prestige Extras? I was wondering if you’d be available for some work in Surrey tomorrow…?’
I said I was. Not many people can, or will, work at such short notice. But I usually can, which is why I get so much work from the agency.
I had to make my own way to the set. Sometimes the film company will arrange for a coach to drive the extras out from King’s Cross, or Paddington, or similar. Other times, you’ll have to arrange the journey yourself, and the company will reimburse the travel costs later. On this occasion, I caught an early train from Waterloo to Guildford, and then took a taxi the rest of the way to Somercot Magna, where they were filming.
The village of Somercot Magna is as charming and delightful as its Latin-derived name. It’s one of the oldest settlements in the county; you can find the original Saxon parish (Sommecot) in the Domesday Book. Perched on the edge of the Surrey Hills, and a ten-minute drive off the A283, this is a village in which the modern world has wrought very little change. A Londis shopfront might stick out a bit on the cobbled Tudor high street, and on some of the thatched roofs, you might see satellite dishes. Perhaps of an evening, too, there will be a few Porsches and Jags parked by the pub on the green. But for the most part, Somercot Magna does not look like it has changed much since the reign of Elizabeth I. It’s a blissful, chocolate-box slice of Merry England; honestly, you half-expect to see morris dancers and mummers parading round a maypole somewhere. The residents here guard their picturesque community jealously, and have worked hard to preserve it.
If you visit Somercot Magna now, it’s no less beautiful or scenic—but it’s not the place it was. The news segments and the articles tend to go on about an invisible yet undeniable sense of tragedy and disbelief that lingers over the village. I’m a bit cynical about such things, and besides, I’m far too directly involved to be objective.
One thing is certain however: Somercot Magna is much busier than it used to be. Most of the visitors that the village used to receive were hikers stopping for a pub lunch, or couples minibreaking for the weekend. Now all manner of folk make their way here, and the B&Bs and guesthouses have never done such good business.
You will see coachloads of ashen-faced Danes—relatives and friends of those who were killed—arrive out of nowhere. They’re looking for closure, visiting this little corner of the foreign land where their loved ones died. Hippies, dharma bums, and New Age mystics come in from as far and wide as Glastonbury and San Francisco, presumably drawn here by the quasi-astrological nature of the disaster. There are the Roswell-style conspiracy nuts too. And coming in and out of the strewnfield (the site over which the meteorites fell) are the academics: geologists, astronomers, physicists, astrophysicists, theorists, ballistics experts, and many more besides. Some have been seconded; others come of their own volition to study the most talked about meteorite fall after the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Most of those who come to Somercot Magna, though, are the grey people. You know them. The maudlin men and women. The gawpers. The people who jostled behind the railings at Princess Diana’s funeral. Drip-fed on mail-order child abuse novels, fatted with Z-list upskirt panty-pics, they flock here in their droves, their yawning fucking iBrains full of death and catastrophe, all shrink-wrapped and on a 56-inch plasma screen…
The eighteen meteorites that fell out of the sky and landed on St Bede’s on the morning of the 21st July 2010 were, in fact, eighteen fragments of the same meteorite, which broke up soon after entering the atmosphere. As is scientific tradition, the meteorites were named after the place where they fell, and then individually classified. They were named St Bede’s-a through to St Bede’s-r.
It was St Bede’s-b, the largest of the fragments, which struck the church. Soaring at a velocity of 2500 metres-per-second, and charged with a kinetic energy measurable in megatons, it shot through the vaulted roof, down into the tiled floor of the nave, and effectively turned the church into a live grenade of stone, glass and masonry. The shrapnel and debris went hurtling everywhere in a hundred-metre radius. Before impacting, St Bede’s-b also skimmed the scaffolding rigged with lights, and started an electrical fire that quickly sent flames spreading across the long, dry summer grass. Within minutes, the nearby beeches and willows were ablaze. Little wonder, then, that the experts nicknamed this meteorite ‘Big Bad B.’
St Bede’s-j is my meteorite, at least in my mind: the one that landed the closest to me; whose force sent the shattered body of Daniel Møller flying over my head as I instinctively ducked for cover…
The fall killed a total of twenty-five people; nineteen in the impact, and a subsequent six in the emergency unit set up at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford. The casualties comprised of twenty-one Danes, one Swede, one German, and two Britons. Everyone who died was involved in the film shoot. No-one local to the area was hurt. The residents of Somercot Magna simply watched the disaster unfold, peering through their lace curtains at the burning rocks that traced calligraphic lines in the sky.
This was always to be a dislocated kind of tragedy. The nation was shocked and appalled—but it was never our pain to bear. We’d lost two of our own, but really, it was Denmark’s job to grieve, and so it did: the country went into a state of national mourning, not least of all for one of its most treasured film stars. (Curiously, whilst the fall brought Møller’s career to a sad, abrupt end, it positively birthed that of Mette Stensgaard, the current darling of Hollywood. Very few people deny that surviving the disaster prompted her meteoric—believe me, not my pun—rise to fame.)
The international community, meanwhile, did its best to sympathise for those who died and the dozens more who were injured. But in a world rife with war, genocide, famine and disease, only a certain amount of thought could be spared for what amounted to little more than an ocean-drop of people.
Furthermore, there wasn’t any grudge to bear or retaliatory measure to deliver—we hadn’t suffered at the hands of terrorists, criminals, or forces of our own making, but of a frightening, unfamiliar set of circumstances. Even those who might attribute the meteorites to a vengeful God were baffled; of all things, why would He reduce a church to rubble?
Without rhyme, reason, cause or consequence, all one could do was watch the St Bede’s disaster and all its eccentric horrors. For a week, there was nothing else in the news. Then, it was gone. Images of HD lucidity turn into ambivalent memories. And for me it’s no different, except I happened to have been there, and I happened to have survived. All I can do is watch the video, and endlessly flick back and forth, with visions of Mette Stensgaard recurring in the mind’s eye.
Private Disaster is part of a larger work in progress.
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