2025
Digital film
14 minutes 6 seconds
Set in Leeds, atop the rows of terraced housing built for workers a century ago, the now-dormant Victorian chimneys play the role of narrators, like sentinels watching over the skyline. They muse on Leeds history, though their dialogue is abstracted and lyrical, their joint voices creating a kind of uncanny ‘song’ for Leeds. The film takes a cyclical journey from the city centre through the outer boroughs of north and south Leeds. Emblazoned onto the rotating sky are medieval-inspired ‘miracles’ and representations of the four Hyppocratic humours: Sanguine, a red monkey; Choleric, a green lion; Melancholic, a black pig; and Phlegmatic, a yellow lamb. The humours were much used in medieval theories in medicine, and linked the body, the soul and the Earth.
Credits: Witten and directed by Jack Pell, illustration & animations by Jack Pell, cast in order of appearance: Mia Mai Symmonds, Benjamin Barra
Install at Musters in Siaraches, FIIK Studios, Leeds, 2025
Photo by Wes Foster
jackpell.com 