Branksome Bespoke China

Seems ceramics are a theme in the 'Somewhere Blogs' at present ... a few weeks ago I visited the Branksome China Factory/Shop/Total experience in the New Forest at Fordingbridge. I'd noticed some of their china in (one) of my friend Claire's collections & she recommended a trip to the factory - I was not disappointed.
To the uninitiated the best of Branksome looks a lot like Poole Pottery but for Gods sake don't mention that once you're on the factory tour, especially not if it's on a Saturday and the guide is the founder's extremely sparky widow "My husband loathed that stuff" Elaine ... I can't go into the full story here but for any ceramics buffs out there I'd recommend the history page of the company website. I'm not sure what I liked more the lady herself or the story: her husband basically after working for Poole and designing utility ware & two tone couplings leaves, invents a china harder than earthenware or bone china and made in a much thinner section, not only does he invent the 'secret' clay recipe and a kiln to fire it at super high temperatures but he makes all the moulds, equipment & designs that they still use 60 years on at the factory.

An image from the early Branksome years - snapped on our factory tour - I'm intruiged to know if this was our now sprightly guide in her earlier years?
Originally uploaded by Nina Pope.

Informing us that he (Ernest) would be 101 if still alive today ("I was quite a bit younger") she rattled us around the most informative and sharply delivered factory tour: making cups, turning out moulds, explaining the incredibly efficient processes, talking us through their designs, and showing their recent mini-museum where they have begun to collect ("have you heard of ebay?") many of their pieces that pre-date their current line which hasn't changed much since the 50's. All of these insights were interspersed with the rather shocking sight of seeing this elderly lady in a twin set smashing (but of course not breaking) a cup, saucer or bowl onto any available surface to repeat demonstrate the true durability of their product!
Other than the lady herself what I really liked about the whole set up was the personalisation of both the product/consummer relationship and the very intimate feel of the factory itself. It was the kind of place in another life I would have loved to work, there was a reassuring familiarity to all of the processes and each had been worked out to a level of timing and physical precision that was truly admirable "whilst the cups harden for X minutes the girls pour the handles into moulds ... whilst the clay sets in the bears for exactly 20 minutes they pour the butterflies etc. etc.)

Branksome Bears
Originally uploaded by Nina Pope.

Their distribution model was fascinating, fed up with the demands of selling to shops and outraged that they continually wanted to change the styles of cups etc. the company basically 'downsized' in order to just sell direct to customers and to be able to supply people who had broken a cup from a set which they had treasured for years to replace it with a new one exactly the same ... "In 1966 at the age of 62 Ernest finally "dismounted his tiger" and moved production to a former workhouse and Regal cinema in Fordingbridge, on the edge of the New Forest. With a small staff, he was finally doing what he'd always dreamt of, producing porcelain of the highest quality for discerning customers who came to the factory, or shop, specifically to buy his wares."

Branksome bespoke cups
Originally uploaded by Nina Pope.

This cup that Elaine pointed out in passing at the end of the tour summed it up for me - where else could you talk directly to the manufacturer of your china for an OAP home, and they would suggest adding an extra handle to the cups for easier handling of those much needed cuppas?

Burden of Dreams

I'm getting really excited about seeing Grizzly Man at the cinema this week - Karen saw it in the videotech at Edinburgh and has been talking about it ever since. With this in mind I took out (in a rush) what I thought was Fitcarraldo this weekend - it turned out to be City of Dreams (the image of Herzog and the boat on the cover was evidently all I looked at in the film shop!) but in a funny sort of way this was almost better than seeing Fitzcarraldo.
Post-Bata-ville and Edinburgh Karen & I have both confessed to getting more out of DVD 'extras' than even actual documentaries. It seems once you've managed to make a film, the blind optimism you must have employed to acheive this disappears to be replaced by a deep felt admiration for anyone who can actually pull off making a film - never mind a feature film - shot over four years, in the Amazon jungle, using native people as most of the cast, and Klaus Kinski as the lead - as was Fitzcarraldo. This amazing and tortuous process is in turn documented in Les Blank's Burden of Dreams.

So if you can easily become obsessed with just the sort of details contained in DVD 'extras', you can loose yourself completely in Burden of Dreams, an entire documentary which on one level just unpicks the process of film making and the somewhat crazed vision of Herzog to re-create the original madness of his lead character based on Fitzgerald an Irishman with a passion to build an opera house in the Amazon. I won't go into detail here about all the set backs faced by Herzog and the ins and outs of the film (well documented in other reviews) but I wanted to mention this film and one other (Etre et avoir)as I can't stop thinking about them.


With both it's not so much the actual films but the film makers relationship to the 'cast' or 'subjects' or 'participants' that I've been thinking about. Actually you can't help but think about Herzog (who it seems I share a birthday with - watch out Karen that 4 year shoot could be on the horizon!) after seeing this, as he is such a bizarre and seductive character - not least because he has the most amazingly compelling voice - in each of the three languages you hear him speaking.
You can not help but be traumatised by his relationship to the people in the film though - to cut a long story short it reaches breaking point when the engineer who's trying to help them literally drag an enormous boat through the jungle quits for fear of loss of life, and Herzog just presses on regardless.

On the surface of it Nicolas Philibert's Etre et Avoir couldn't be less similar to Herzog's epic. Shot in a tiny French school with a small class of children and their charismatic teacher Georges Lopez this low key film's rise to box office success has become documentary legend. It is a lovely film (the quiet scene of two terrapins making their way slowly across the empty classroom carpet was my favorite and serves to show how far from the Amazon jungle we're talking!).

In the DVD extras for this, which I of course avidly consumed, Philibert talks of his method of making a film with rather than about a group of people. I felt some resonance with our own approach in this - but it seems, post block-buster-success, the school teacher did not. Apparently fed up with the huge income the film was generating due (it has to be said) in no small part to his 'performance', it seems he took the producers to court for a share of the profits.

Our own current project at Kentwell will be the first piece where we have made work with a group of people who haven't actively 'signed up' to take part in what we're doing. With all our other projects from Broadcast to Bata-ville we arrived at our group of pilgrims to passengers via an application process and in effect a mutual contract. I have always felt this was significant in the way that the projects developed. It is with some trepidation that we are moving away from this model for the first time with our next film.