Nicky Coutts

Keep is made entirely from found footage of films made between the two castles of Bamburgh and Lindisfarne on the east coast of England just south of the border with Scotland. A narrative is made indiscriminately from sections of films that make much of the bleak, North Sea shoreline. Keep abides by a continuity of background landscape rather than narrative. This results in, for example, Derek Jarman’s Ariel, from his film version of The Tempest (1979), peering out from coastal seagrasses to witness Roman Polanski’s Lionel Stander arrive at Lindisfarne playing the gruff criminal Dickey in Cul-de-Sac (1966). With few visible signs of contemporary living in view between the two fortified buildings, the area is particularly attractive to period drama and fantasy film directors. Keep is a violent, tense, fractured story of landscape as seen exclusively through culture.

Keep was made during an English Heritage Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship (2007).