Views from Sunk Island
“Michael C Coldwell’s photographic exploration of the East Riding coast is a fascinating investigation of a haunted margin between shore and sea, and of obsolescent concrete monuments to war, swept away by the erosion of both memory and land. Can we divine our future in this ruin of our collective amnesia?” - Official selection, Leeds International Film Festival 2022
“A running thread about a mysterious, possibly occult-related disappearance on the island may be an elliptical reference to a real-life case, or it may be something Coldwell has made up out of whole cloth. Neither possibility diminishes the effectiveness of this remarkable, eerie film.” Letterboxd
Best Experimental Short Film - Pennine Film Festival 2023
The Phantomatic Coast
Coldwell’s soundtrack to the film was released on vinyl by Subexotic Records in 2022.
The East Coast of England is a land living on borrowed time. Time we borrowed from the North Sea, reclaimed a thousand years ago. But now it seems that sea has come to claim it all back. Michael C Coldwell spent three years travelling up and down this rapidly disappearing shoreline, collecting ghost stories, photographing the roads to nowhere, the monumental sound mirrors and pillboxes teetering on the edges of cliffs, making field recordings of the waves and fog signals, and writing mournful electronic music from static caravans. This hauntological project finally culminated in a short essay film entitled Views from Sunk Island - and this new Conflux Coldwell album.
More than just a film score, The Phantomatic Coast stretches beyond the original aims of the documentary, to evoke something deeper about our troubled relationship with the sea – the many towns and ships lost beneath the waves, and ancient forgotten lands lying out beyond the windfarms like some Yorkshire Atlantis. Memory and mythology became obvious themes in the work, as did the ruins and remains of the world wars, now slipping beneath shifting sands forever.
https://confluxcoldwell.bandcamp.com/album/the-phantomatic-coast
"Views from Sunk Island” captures a fading coastline with the click of a slide projector. While elsewhere field recordings of waves foghorns and the shriek of seabirds make this hauntological seaside excursion captivatingly moody"
Electronic Sound Magazine
"The sound pieces balance subtle tension with fleeting melody; the ghostly synths drenched in sea spray perfectly capturing the past in the present"
9/10
The Letter
Return to the Battery
It took several years to make Views from Sunk Island, and the photography series that preceded it (The Disappearing Coast). Over that time I noticed substantial changes to the eroding coastline.
One location in particular I decided to revisit and rephotograph, to try and capture the surprising rate of destruction I encountered. All of the above photographs were taken between 2019 and 2022
Godwin Battery, near Spurn Point, has been almost completed destroyed by coastal erosion. Built in 1915 to defend the Humber estuary, these substantial fortifications played a defensive role in both world wars before falling into disuse.