By filming from the low freeboard of a small boat, William Raban attempts to capture the point of view of the river Thames, tracing the 50 mile journey from the heart of London to the open sea. Interspersed with images from Brueghel the Elder’s painting The Triumph of Death and T.S. Eliot reading Four Quartets, this contemporary view is set in an historical context through use of archival footage and the words of the travel writer Thomas Pennant, who followed exactly the same route in 1787.
“This is a vision of the dark Thames, of ‘Old Father Thames’ as an awful god of power akin to William Blake’s Nobodaddy; and, in Blake’s poem, Jerusalem, ‘Thames is drunk with blood’. In this film there is something fearful about the river, something monstrous, recalling Conrad’s line in Heart of Darkness that ‘... this also has been one of the dark places of the earth’. Walking along the banks of the Thames, down river, approaching the estuary, it is possible to feel great fear. One of the possible derivations of the word Thames itself is tamasa meaning ‘dark river’; the word is pre-Celtic in origin, so we have the vision of an ancient, almost primeval, time. And yet there is beauty and sublimity in terror. Raban has learned something from the great artists of the river, such as Turner and Whistler, and portrayed the Thames as clothed in wonder.” (Peter Ackroyd)
