DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

“I’ve heard twenty year ago, you could pay to get into the cinema with bullets”

This arcane piece of information epitomizes things you hear in the febrile environment of a war. The words, spoken by PJ Harvey or Polly as I know her, are the first words in A DOG CALLED MONEY. It was something I had heard on my first trip to Afghanistan as a photo journalist in 1994 in the time of a terrible civil war. I must have shared it with her when we were in Kabul together in 2012. When I hear Polly read that line back now, the distance of years, it’s like an old tale being dusted into life from myth.

It was one entry among many in the notebooks she kept while we traveled together in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington DC for our collaborative project. Her notebooks and quotes, doodles and marginalia of immediate, first-hand impressions, as well as directives to herself on how to sing the songs she was conjuring up on the page while on the road.

Polly reading excerpts from her notebooks became the thread I would use to connect the disparate elements of the project, in which we travelled to three different, distinct places to see, hear and record the stories we found there. Eventually these notes became songs for the album she recorded in a basement of Somerset House in London. The recording itself was a five-week long art installation, with the public invited to witness the process of the album’s birth through one-way windows. The provenance of the songs and the journey they take is the arc of the film.

Polly and I decided to collaborate and start a project together. We wanted it to become a book (her poetry, my photography), an album that she would record and a film we would make. We wanted to go to places we were interested in and that held a relevance for us for one reason or another, sharing the experience but working individually. Writing and shooting being very different practices, I would need to return to shoot further work. These were to be reporting trips, a classic writer/photographer combination. We would be journalistic, not journalists.

I had covered the war in Kosovo in the late 1990s, returning again in 2004 and Polly had already written some material around my photographs from there. An invitation to visit Kosovo came out of nowhere. Dokufest, a smart and lively film festival in the southern city of Prizren, invited us to screen my 12 Short Films for Let England Shake.

After the festival, we spent a few days traveling around. From people on different sides we felt dissatisfaction with the present and anger and lament for the past. So, Kosovo kick-started it all and we found we traveled well together and were able to work in each other’s company.

In 2012, I contacted Polly to see if she wanted to join me in Kabul. After a few days of soul-searching - understandable given the destination - she agreed. When she arrived I simply continued going about things the way I always did in Afghanistan. We found situations that inspired and deeply moved us both.
We chose Washington DC, the center of Western power, as our final destination. A city where crucial decisions are made about the fate of countries around the world, like Kosovo and Afghanistan, how does Washington DC behave at home, towards its own citizens? Across the river in South-East DC are places with severe social problems. In 2014 we went to Anacostia, a few Metro stops from The White House and Capitol Hill. We wandered the streets and came across people playing cards on a front porch. A young woman called Paunie, full of confidence and charisma, seemed to be a natural leader. The people and their situation worked their way into songs. I got to know Paunie and her crew over subsequent visits to DC. Over the course of that time, America also elected a new present.

The recording studio in Somerset House was built as a room inside a large room with one-way glass to allow an audience to see and hear the making of the album without the musicians being disturbed. Everyone in the studio wore lapel mics so the audience outside heard every word, every joke and every note.

The idea quickly gripped me that this was a big idea, and one that exposed Polly, the two producers and all the musicians to very public scrutiny. I decided I had to shoot it all. There was a trial-run with an audience and a decision would be taken whether I was too intrusive to the process. It was decided I wasn’t. I was a one-man band and I think I just looked like part of the overall activity.

To get the natural, intimate footage I wanted I had to extricate myself from the process, ideally becoming invisible to the musicians. I urged everyone to forget about me and the camera, to walk or stand in front of the camera and not to feel they were ever spoiling my shot, because that was all part of it. Early on I stopped having lunch with them because the connection made over lunch continues when you get back into the room, and it went from there.

Inside the room you were unaware or undisturbed by an audience, the musicians genuinely going about their business, trying to make the songs work. The songs that had stemmed from a vague premise, survived journeys from another world, and which were now being brought to life in an old palace by the Thames.  

- Seamus Murphy