Filmmaker Mark Jenkin likes to keep it surprising – and Cornish. His 2022 psychological horror drama Enys Men focused on a wildlife volunteer living on an island off the coast of Cornwall, whose observations of a rare flower take a dark turn into the strange and metaphysical. And his 2019 feature debut Bait explored the tensions between locals and tourists in a Cornish fishing village.
At the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF), which wrapped on Saturday, Jenkin world premiered a 17-minute film diary short with a title that may make you sit up and rub your eyes for a moment before re-reading it: I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash.
“I love films that foreground the fact that you are watching film,” the KVIFF website quoted Jenkin as saying in a synopsis for the short. “The series of Super 8 shots taken from his travels and the comprehensive voice-overs make for a fascinating mosaic of encounters, observations, formative quotations from cinematic and other works, and also possible fantasies. Here, Jenkin demonstrates his ability to give his films an appealing timeless quality and to connect the familiar with the curiously enigmatic. One hundred and one interesting facts from the filmmaker’s diary.”
At Karlovy Vary, Jenkin talked to THR about his Cornish identity, his creative process, facts and truth in the age of Donald Trump, and his next feature film, Rose of Nevada, starring George MacKay and Callum Turner.
“I was brought up with a sense of being Cornish and that Cornish was a separate ancient nation within Britain,” the filmmaker shared in the interview. “But it isn’t recognized in a lot of people’s eyes. So, you have to be overtly Cornish. If you’re Welsh or Scottish or Irish, it kind of takes care of itself. There’s a built-in separation, and not a separation in a negative way, but a unique identity that marks you out. But with the Cornish, you have to work a little bit harder, and you have to be a little bit more vocal about it.”
Jenkin had to leave to fully realize that. “When I lived in Cornwall, I never thought about being Cornish. And as soon as I left Cornwall, crossed the border and went to college in England, suddenly I was the most Cornish person in the world, and when I moved home, I kept that with me,” he told THR. “Also, I think in the type of work I do, this short film, for instance, is so apparently random and fragmented. So, there needs to be something that anchors the whole thing. And the easiest thing is home.”
How does one best define Cornishness? “You could define it by bloodlines, but then you get into very dangerous territories, and it’s awful, because then where’s anybody really from?” Jenkin pointed out. “So I think it’s a kind of cultural thing. This will be controversial, because some people say you’ve got to be born in Cornwall to be Cornish, or your parents, your grandparents, your great grandparents, everybody’s got to be Cornish for you to be truly Cornish. I don’t believe in that. I think it’s a state of mind. There are people who have chosen to live there and adopted that place as their home, because they’re attracted to it and because they understand it, and because they have this positivity around the history and the culture and the language.”
One key element of this Cornish culture is how the community relates to the rest of the U.K. “There’s a fierce independence,” Jenkin explained. “And paradoxically, there’s a very strong community. There’s a strong identity around the word Cornish. With Cornwall, we’ve got an -ish, like Scottish, like Irish, like English, like Welsh, although the -ish of Welsh is contracted. Overall, I think there’s a healthy disrespect for authority.”
This comes with pros and cons, according to the creative. “That fierce individualism sometimes holds us back. We’ve never had a history of progressive organization, for example, there’s never been a really strong union movement in Cornwall,” Jenkin highlighted. “We’ve gone, historically, from a sort of state of blind acceptance where everybody says, ‘Oh yeah, we don’t need much. We’re fine.’ And we get along. And when we get pushed to a certain point, then it’s riot. And there’s nothing constructive in between.”
Mark Jenkin, courtesy of KVIFF
But there is also much pride. “There’s a real pride in the history of Cornwall and our role in the industrialization of the world, although there are obvious negatives about what happened there,” explained Jenkin. “But Cornwall was the heart of the industrial world for a period of time. So, there’s great pride in that. And I think a lot of it is a reaction against how Cornwall’s perceived now, which is as a holiday resort with nice beaches and coastline, pasties and cream teas and all of that kind of stuff that’s very easy to articulate and to brand and to market to other people. But actually, Cornwall is a much more complex, ancient place than the way it’s promoted now. So I think a lot of what I do in my work is just to try and bring a bit of balance into the picture.”
Jenkin’s new short shares a kaleidoscopic, mosaic-like look at places that he has visited. What went into it? “The film’s made out of about 11 or 12 rolls of Super 8 film. And everything on the rolls is in the film. I don’t take anything out,” he shared about his process. “I have a Super 8 camera that I take everywhere with me, and it’s in the hotel room here in Karlovy Vary right now. I’ve also been filming here. I filmed yesterday, and I’m going to film again this afternoon when the sun goes round over there and goes low, and you have these two hours of evening atmosphere where the light here is amazing and coming through the trees. I’ve been up in the forest, and I got lost up there. As soon as I got here, I put my trainers on and just went for a run, which is always a really good thing to do to explore.”
Each roll of Super 8 film is two and a half minutes long, which is why Jenkin looks around places to see what catches his eye before filming. “I’ll go and film the bits that I like,” he explained his approach to recording and editing. “So I’ve already edited in my head what I want to shoot.” But he doesn’t know until later when and how he will use the footage.
For I Saw the Face of God, he used material he filmed in Dublin in 2000, the Isle of Man in around 2016, three different trips to Brittany over various years, and a couple of rolls from Los Angeles in 2023. “I thought I could make three separate films,” Jenkin recalled. “But then I thought, actually, they’ll be stronger if they’re together and they have a kind of enigmatic framework to them. The idea when I started editing it was a caption at the beginning which said it was three random chapters from my as yet unwritten autobiography. So that’s why you see random chapter [numbers in the short]. So the stuff I’m filming here will probably end up becoming part of another chapter of that book. But where it fits in, I’m not sure.”
In Jenkin’s shorts, it isn’t always clear what is real and what is fictional, and that is also by design. “It might be that the footage I shoot here, I will use and write something that maybe is true, for example about how I came here to the festival, or it may be a fabricated chapter about how I came here on holiday when I was seven years old, even though I’ve never been here before,” he told THR. “Some of it is true, some of it is completely untrue, some of it is exaggeration. Some of it is resurfaced.”
How does this type of cinematic storytelling fit into the post-truth age? “What you record are facts, and after that is truth,” Jenkin offered. “The truth is subjective, and the facts are objective. And I know: facts don’t really count for anything anymore, do they? But I like to hold on to the fact that you can have a subjective truth that maybe contradicts some of the facts, which might sound a bit Trumpian. But the facts are the facts, the truth you can kind of change.”
‘I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash’
His next project’s title has a similar background. “My new feature film that I’ve just delivered is called Rose of Nevada, and that is, again, another free hit because the title doesn’t mean anything,” Jenkin told THR. “It’s the name of a fishing boat. And the film is about a fishing boat. Or the narrative motor is the fishing boat in the film. So when I was thinking about a title for the film, I thought this could be anything, because it just has to be the name of the fishing boat. So I can be as enigmatic as I want it to be. It’s so rare that you can do that. So I do that whenever I get the opportunity.”
How did Jenkin come up with the title I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash? “I was on an airplane flying to Ireland a few years ago, when I was promoting my feature film Bait,” he recalled. yes. “And I was just trying to write a stream of consciousness in a notebook. I was looking out the window, and one of the phrases I came up with was ‘I saw the face of god in the jet wash.’ And I thought, oh, that makes a good title. And I thought if this is a film that is like an unpublished autobiography, it’s a free hit with the title.”
Isn’t there also a boat on the horizon in I Saw the Face of God, and Jenkin as the narrator mentions he was thinking about a possible film? “That part was made up. This footage was shot years before I came up with the idea of Rose of Nevada. I had seen and filmed that shot of a red boat because something had caught my eye, and I zoomed in on it with a slow, kind of ominous zoom,” Jenkin told THR. “But when I was putting this film together, I realized that I’d seen this shore. And when I was looking at the footage, I was thinking: Oh, wow, this is the fact versus truth thing. Maybe the truth is that when I saw that, that’s when I first subconsciously or unconsciously had the idea for Rose of Nevada. But it meant that when I was making I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash, I could just say that this was when I came up with the idea for that film.”
Concluded Jenkin: “I’m out and about with this short before Rose of Nevada. I thought it would be interesting if anybody picked up on it, so I’m glad you did.”
Jenkin won’t share much about Rose of Nevada yet beyond saying that more cast members will be unveiled in the basics: “It’s a ghost boat time travel film,” he told THR. “George and Callum are known cast members, and more cast will be announced soon.”
