Mary Lattimore - Silver Ladders (Visual Score)

Directed by Rachael Pony Cassells
http://rachael-cassells.squarespace.com/

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A word from filmmaker Rachael Pony Cassells:

I have always revered Mary as a great transmuter of pain to beauty. I think both the gift and curse of many artists is a sensitivity so heightened that it gives an access to not only certain beauty and depths of feeling, but also currents and things in motion that are not apparent yet to conscious realms. In the same way animals are sensitive to subtleties when it comes to earthquakes, fires and cyclones, there are some very chilling examples of artistic premonition (One that comes to mind often, is Isadora Duncan dancing a premonition of unimaginable grief that shook her accompanying pianist to their core, shortly before the accidental tragic deaths of her children).

As Mary was recording Silver Ladders in mid-January 2020, in Cornwall near a beach where the ocean had taken many surfers lives, catastrophic fires were burning in Australia and although COVID was not yet of global public concern - it was just beginning to invisibly arrive on our shores. When I first listened to Silver Ladders, I was struck that for me it seemed to dive down into many layers of such deep grief - from the micro to the macro. That perhaps Mary had tapped into the currents of the many waves of grief that would overwhelm us all in 2020. It also made me think of teenage angst, so often cynically disregarded by adults, but what I see as a very authentic and natural reaction to the transition from childhood to awakening to realise the true horrors of the world - the way we treat the earth and one another.

In creating the visual score, I wanted to allow Mary’s music its rightful place to lead and to support, but not overwhelm with visual narrative. The images and edit were created very intuitively. Mary and I were an isolation pod, and this was I think for both of us our first times leaving LA and the confines of our homes for many months. This score will always be a document of this very isolated and strange moment in time. Mary and I journeyed up and down the California coastline finding echoes of Cornwall in the landscape and symbols
of grief and mourning we had discussed already present and washing up on the Maverick's beach shoreline. I am in awe of this album, it’s an absolute masterpiece and I was so honored to collaborate with Mary in this way, the highlight of my quarantine!