A Year In A Field (2023) – Film Review

A Year In A Field (2023)

Director: Christopher Morris

Cast: Standing Stone, Insects, Leaves, Barley, Weather, Seasons, Anne Summers

Running Time: 1h 25min

UK release 22nd September 2023

BAFTA-winning filmmaker Christopher Morris films the journey of a longstone in A Year In A Field, set in a field near his Cornwall home, between the winter solstices of 2020 and 2021, offering an insightful perspective on the world.

A documentary about a rock in a field over a year. Sounds riveting. Funny that, because it actually is, once you get accustomed to the slow speeds and the myopic, inward-looking style of this strange little movie. Filmed from the winter solstice of 2020 onwards for a year, it certainly is born out of Covid-related reflection (remember we had a pandemic? Good. Because it is never referenced in the film). Director Christopher Morris started to film a standing stone in a field near his Cornish home, called Boscowen Ros; placed over 4000 years ago, a monolith, looking over a field, and the sea, a needle pointing at the sky and, at night, at a glittering, star-speckled eternity.

He calls it a ‘sentinel to passing of time’, standing for millennia, when time slowed down for all of us, relating the stone and its lifetime to the relatively short time we spend on earth; all during Covid, when time had to slow down for all of us. The standing stone, deliberately placed ‘on the edge of the world’ looking out at sea, has seen the Spanish Armada approaching Britain. Now it watches container ships bringing in fast fashion.

But it is incredibly moving: the standing stone offers perspective. Taking the viewpoint of the stone, Morris is able to incisively reflect on the stone and its relationship to its own ecosystem, and then the planetary ecosystem, politics, capitalism, and of course the climate catastrophe. It’s a slow, haunting voice, never nagging, that offers unexpected connections between a stone in a field and Chinese clothing mills, The Spanish Armada and COP26 – dessicating plants in a Cornish field and artificial fabrics in China.

The stillness of the stone, ever watching, is a stark reminder of how fast the world has become: by slowing down, Morris narrates the speed of today’s world calmly, drawing unexpected connections. It’s fun to follow his mind, but it does go to dark places – make no mistake, this is not a nature documentary, this is a protest film, a slow one, but a loud voice. The score is superb, it intensifies the imagery of the passing of time and the monolithic standing stone, interspersed with title cards (we’re in inspirational Instagram quotes territory here, best to not think about them), and haunting folk songs, harking back to times when nature and people were more at one.

At its most powerful, the film offers a reflection on time itself, the contrast between millennia of the standing stone silently being at one with its surroundings, and the speck of a human lifetime of consumption and pollution. And it’s not without humour that a bit of discarded Anne Summers lingerie packaging blows into the field, to let Morris go off on one of his wandering reflections he had on one of his Covid walks (remember the Covid walks).

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All words by Mario Rauter, you can find Mario’s archive here