Synopsis

Based on the memoirs of Arthur "Freddy" Palmer, Terry Flaxton’s docu-fiction examines the potentials and the flaws of autobiography as a form of history through a syncopated double narrative – that of Palmer and that of his great-great granddaughter, who compares the 1980s London she lives in compared to that of her ancestor's 19th-century one. We begin in an attic, as the young woman sifts through her grandmother’s belongings, which she remarks are "the only evidence of a life’s work".

At a desk, she begins to read Freddy's letters and diaries, before venturing into the City to explore the old haunts of his youth with a polaroid camera in hand, wandering around London Bridge, Tower Bridge, Cheapside, St. Pauls and all the spots where he first worked delivering shipping mercantile paper. The narratives switch between the young woman’s own voiceover about her life –– her break-up, her eviction, her daughter –– against Freddy’s: he worked as a sailor, got married and divorced, lost two children early on, before taking his two daughters to America.

Then, the young woman’s grandmother joins her in the attic, and elucidates that Freddy is only telling one side of the story, as she interjects with her own, describing how her mother ran away from Freddy in America to live with her mother in England. The final shot ends on a black-and-white staged photo of a woman burning her own diaries.

"The newly forming Triple Vision (because there were three of us) were approached by a person who'd found the diaries of their great great grandfather, a vegetarian Piano tuner called Arthur Frederick Palmer and asked us to create a documentary on the subject. But it struck us that dramatising the story would be a better way to go (we had after all studied Communication Design and our skill was supposed to be take a bbrief anf utilse the best form for the message - this is all pre-digital. We made the work with a new actress - her first screen role - Gina McKee. Then this work won an award for innovation. At that time you could not create more than one dissolve if you had three machines or two dissolves if you had 4 machines. We managed to create dissolve after dissolve for the entire 20 minutes by cleverly organising our material - if we got it wrong we went back to the beginning and started again - in fact we did this in the late afternoon of the first screening at the BFI, Southbank.|" – Terry Flaxton