Swanvale Halt Film Club: A Dog Called Money (2019)

It’s taken a long time for the third and final stage of PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy’s project to reach the public. The Hollow of the Hand, the book of photographs and poetry, came out in 2015; the album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, in 2016; and only at the very end of last year were most of us able to view the film, A Dog Called Money. I’ve finally watched it!

Over ninety minutes, the documentary follows the composition of Hope Six, picking out the experiences which influenced the way the songs developed – though not all of them, and not exhaustively, and not all the songs featured actually ended up on the album (we get versions of the junked ‘Homo Sappy Blues’ and ‘Age of the Dollar’, the latter jettisoned due to John Parish’s disapproval even though everyone else liked it (‘I wish just for once she wouldn’t listen to what he says’, commented one fan on thegardenforum.org). Episodes from Murphy and Harvey’s travels are interspersed with scenes from the studio at Somerset House, and visitors watching the musicians through the one-way glass. Harvey reads excerpts from her notebooks and just occasionally someone else says something – an Artangel employee taking visitors through the passageways of Somerset House, or Paunie, the lesbian gang leader Harvey and Murphy met in Anacostia. A few elements aren’t from their joint travels, but from trips Murphy made separately: an anti-Assad demonstration in Syria, a Trump campaign rally in the US, refugees on the Greek border with Macedonia.

There are lots of fantastic vignettes. Harvey meets an instrument-maker in an upstairs shop in a Kabul backstreet and gives up trying to explain to him where Dorset is. She goes to a museum of mines, also in Afghanistan, and reels off some of the terrible exhibits. She sits attentive at a raucous church service in Anacostia and looks a bit fazed at a very different one in Kosovo, though listening enough to quote the words of Fr Sava Janjic: ‘If you don’t have to break the branch, don’t do it. If you don’t have to kill the animal, don’t do it.’ A young woman is baptised at Union Temple Baptist Church; little girls learn Arabic at an Afghan maktab (at least, that’s my interpretation of what’s happening); tourists mill around the Washington Monument while a chap wees behind a tree to right of shot. Everywhere are mountains, traffic jams, birds in and out of cages, rivers, ruins, children, dust.

The trouble is, it’s all vignettes. Determined, like the book and the album, that observation, witnessing, should be the keynote of the project, the film presents images without context or comment. That this is the point is stressed by the very first shot, a little Afghan boy with his nose pressed against glass, and it’s echoed by Harvey’s wanderings, Murphy’s camera lens, and the faces of the visitors to the recording sessions. Having taken that decision, the film has no choice but to leave us in the same position, without helping us make the connections that would turn the succession of moments into a story. The US observation blimps hover with intent in the Afghan sky, but even the anger and sense of conflict which is shot through the album is absent here, any very political feeling dispersed by the amiable banter of the musicians back in London. It’s like much of Harvey’s poetry, so quiet and spare it’s easy to miss the significance of what she describes.

The reticence means there’s a lot that doesn’t get mentioned. ‘I’m the only woman here,’ Harvey points out at an Albanian village ceremony in Kosovo, leaving us wondering how it was arranged. That’s surprising enough, but surprise is hardly an adequate response to seeing her watching an ecstatic Sufi prayer-session at an Afghan mosque – how did she get to be the only woman there, a place where no woman would ever normally be? What did they say to make that happen? We have the familiar footage of the Union Temple Baptist choir singing lines from ‘The Community of Hope’, but not a word about the church’s own unhappiness at the political firestorm the song raised when it was released early in 2016. This isn’t really ‘the story of the album’ except in a very minimal way.

Of course it’s all delightful for Pollywatchers, but what about anyone else? It seems to me that you have to be signed up for the project: without reading the book and listening to the finished songs, it’s hard to fathom the film, and (notwithstanding a single introductory caption) if you don’t know who PJ Harvey is and who the old codgers playing instruments in the studio are, you may well be left adrift. One viewer on the MUBI website, where you can see the movie, commented concisely and brutally (as others have for twenty years or more), ‘get your head out of your ass’. That’s a nasty dismissal of one of the least self-regarding artists in the world, and Harvey does explicitly acknowledge the ambiguities of her position as observer: crunching through the debris of an abandoned house in Kosovo, she notes ‘a handmade rotting wooden ladder, a corn store. These were country people. And I’m stepping on their things in my expensive leather sandals’. Yet you can still wonder whether the project’s achievements have matched its ambitions. There is only one abiding message: the unity-in-variety of human experience, and human dignity against the emptiness of ideological (especially national) rhetoric. In the silence is the point. And you either take that, or leave it.