POSTPONED – Film Screening at Allan Bank: No Flaming House by Associate Artist Philip Speakman

To celebrate the opening of Allan Bank‘s newly restored ornamental chapel of 1836 and the private view of Hideyuki Sobue’s large scale mural commission, A Letter to the Earth from Beatrix, Philip Speakman’s Grizedale Arts commission film, No Flaming House will be screened.

Developed through workshops with local teenagers, No Flaming House, employs Lakeland philosopher R G Collingwood’s idea of ‘historical imagination’ to reconstruct the events around a rumoured plan to burn down a manor house in the English Lake District in the 1990’s.

Employing documentary methods to mine what truths a society expresses in its rumours, No Flaming House was devised, filmed and performed by local young people through workshops with the artist Philip Speakman with assistance from Jess Heritage as part of a young persons summer film school at Grizedale Art’s The Farmers Arms.

The film explores themes of national heritage and cultural identity, youth rebellion, rumour and romanticism, and filmmaking’s capacity as a tool for investigations at the boundary of the historical and the romantic imaginary. The work was filmed on location at Allan Bank, a property now managed by the National Trust which was once home to Romantics poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, before becoming a film set for Ken Russell and a hippy commune in the 70’s, histories the film wilfully entwines itself within in.