Millican Dalton: A Sublime Midlife Crisis
The relevance of a 20th century cave-dweller to environmental aesthetics.
Wednesday, 23 December 2020
At the mouth of the cave at Borrowdale, May 2020. Photograph: Lewis Eaton.
On a swelteringly hot day in the North Western Fells of The Lake District, the gaping mouth of a cave offered itself as a refuge and swallowed us mercifully into its cool damp interior. Caves are otherworldly places. This particular cave, set into the hillside of Castle Crag, allows you to peer out at the gently swaying trees and glimmering daylight of the outside world from a viewing point void of light and sound. The daytrip itself had been to seek refuge in The Lakes; an attempt at replacing the stagnancy of a locked-down city summer with a more welcome, less claustrophobic, kind of tranquillity. We spent a few minutes scrambling around on the siltstone, marvelling at the height of the cave walls and exchanging the obligatory comments about feeling small in big spaces. On leaving, I noticed a large, flat stone covered in scrawlings. At the centre in neat, deeply-etched letters read ‘Don’t Waste Words, Jump to Conclusions’ with dozens of smaller sections of writing surrounding this. Each gave names and dates, with many faded with age and dissolving back into the stone’s surface. It was from a frantic Googling during the car ride home that I came to find out we had happened across a sort-of pilgrimage place for hikers: the cave in which a man had lived out his summers for over forty consecutive years.
In 1904, at the age of thirty-six, Millican Dalton gave up his life as an insurance clerk in London in order to dedicate himself to The Great Outdoors. Having spent part of his childhood in Nenthead, the North Pennines, he found life and work in the capital stifling in comparison. From then on Dalton split his year, spending the summer months in the cave under Castle Crag and winters in a canvas hut in Buckinghamshire. Far from your conventional hermit, Dalton was an active and sociable member of the community. He organised camping excursions for the outdoors novice which included teaching hiking, rock climbing, rafting and how to forage for food. What I found extraordinary for the time was that these excursions didn’t exclude women, with one of Dalton’s advertisements for a mountaineering course stating his views bluntly: “Ladies are welcome to the camp. There is nothing new in ladies camping, the custom being at least 10,000 years old.” This rare indiscriminate approach led to Dalton forging a long-lasting friendship with geologist Mabel Barker, who over the years consistently recommended Dalton’s courses to women students and friends.
Dalton and Barker atop a needle, 1913. The Mable Barker Collection.
Screen revıew
Star Power
Mediating individuality and collaboration in ‘Ariana Grande: Excuse Me, I Love You’
by Sara Blad | 4 January 2021
Photo: Kevin Mazur. Credit: Getty Images for Ariana Grande.
How should one film a musical performance? Art historian Heinrich Wölfflin asked a similar question about how to choose the best angle so that a photograph of a sculpture would ‘guide the viewer back to seeking out the view that corresponds with the artist’s conception’. Though one can technically view a sculpture from all sides, Wölfflin argues that some sculptures, specifically those made in the ‘good [old] tradition’, provide one primary view so that the viewer is ‘not driven around it in order to grasp its content, but rather that it informs the viewer about its viewpoint right from the start’. Of course, unlike an inanimate sculpture, a performance incorporates movement, space, and scale. A performance evolves over time, so each moment and angle will provide a different experience of every moment for each viewer. So what is the best angle to capture a live musical performance at any given moment? And which moments and angles should one prioritize?
Ariana Grande’s new concert film entitled ‘Ariana Grande: Excuse Me, I Love You’ on Netflix provides an interesting case study for this thought experiment. The film captures Grande’s vocally- and visually-stunning 2019 ‘Sweetener World Tour’. The set design features a large sphere suspended from the arena’s rafters as a moon-like structure: graphics literally transform it into a moon while Grande performs ‘Tattooed Heart’. Though the moon orbits the earth, theoretically implying that Grande is the earth or at least the show’s grounding presence, it is Grande who orbits the moon as she traverses the stage and its runway extension.
The film’s near-constant cuts reinforce Grande’s own de-centered presence by often directing the viewer’s attention away from Grande’s performance. It often feels as though the director (Paul Dugdale) and editors (Simon Bryant, Benjamin Wainwright-Pearce, and Tony Zajkowski) weren’t sure of the best angle to capture Grande’s presence, so they threw every possible perspective at the viewer. Cuts quickly transition from close-up views of Grande’s profile and views of Grande obscured by something in the foreground (usually either a dancer, a fan’s extended arm holding a phone, or her microphone), to views behind Grande’s as she turns away from the camera and wide-panned views of Grande surrounded by the vast arena. This dizzying succession of different angles make it difficult for the viewer to appreciate the fluidity of Grande’s physical performance. They also overemphasize the director’s and editors’ hands in shaping the film’s presentation, and we soon lose focus of Grande in favour of other components of the performance and the concert.
Photo: Kevin Mazur. Credit: Getty Images for Ariana Grande.
Though every image of Grande feels as though it’s a fleeting one, the camera’s focus on everything around her forces the viewer to acknowledge the tour as a collective effort. Glimpses of her backup dancers, adoring fans, set design, and lighting changes all collaborate with Grande and her voice, recreating the concert’s environment for the Netflix viewer. Grande’s performance relies on all of the colours of the rainbow which saturate the stage and its surrounding area. These colours collapse the hierarchy between Grande and her dancers and fans as they’re drenched in colour, demonstrating their symbiotic relationships with one another. The tour simply could not function without each of these components. The few behind-the-scenes anecdotes of the ease with which Grande interacts with her team emphasizes this sense of equality.
Grande hardly speaks directly to the camera in the film because the movie is primarily devoted to her performance. Yet, the show’s bright colours may also reflect Grande’s state of mind. Though not addressed in the film, Grande told Ebro Darden that her Sweetener album is different from her preceding albums because she felt more present than ever and began to ‘see colours more’; the album is more like her as a person and what she’s been craving to create as an artist. Perhaps that is why the movie is primarily devoted to her performance rather than her speaking directly to a camera and describing her motives: the songs and the performance speak for themselves.
The one constant in the film is Grande’s voice filling every corner of the room and the screen even if we don’t see her. Perhaps the camera’s focus didn’t need to be on her the entire time because every angle of the performance— blanketed in blue, red, purple, and pink tones—reflected parts of who Grande is a person. The amalgamation of those angles reflects the person, and the performance.
Photo: Kevin Mazur. Credit: Getty Images for Ariana Grande.