Metadata
WORK ID: YFA 1886 (Master Record)
| Title | Year | Date |
| DAVID OF ARABIA AND COOLING TOWERS DEMOLITION | 1979 | 1979-01-01 |
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Details
Original Format: Super 8 Colour: Colour Sound: Sound Duration: 8 mins 20 secs Credits: Horizon Films Leeds Movie Makers Subject: ARTS / CULTURE INDUSTRY SCIENCE / TECHNOLOGY |
| Summary This is two separate films. The first film is a comedy skit based on the film ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ It features an exhausted man struggling across a ‘desert’, and is accompanied by the theme music of that film. The second documents the demolition of the two cooling towers of Kirkstall Power Station. |
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Description
This is two separate films. The first film is a comedy skit based on the film ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ It features an exhausted man struggling across a ‘desert’, and is accompanied by the theme music of that film. The second documents the demolition of the two cooling towers of Kirkstall Power Station.
Horizon Films presents: ‘David of Arabia’
The film opens on a scorching hot day with a young man in torn shirt looking exhausted, walking over sandy terrain, and drinking from a water cask....
This is two separate films. The first film is a comedy skit based on the film ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ It features an exhausted man struggling across a ‘desert’, and is accompanied by the theme music of that film. The second documents the demolition of the two cooling towers of Kirkstall Power Station.
Horizon Films presents: ‘David of Arabia’
The film opens on a scorching hot day with a young man in torn shirt looking exhausted, walking over sandy terrain, and drinking from a water cask. He falls to the ground and looks up to see large, rocky mountains. He continues, crawling over the sand, stops takes off his shirt, and drinks more water. Leaving his shirt and shoes behind, he carries on, collapses with the heat, and takes off his vest. Finding his water casket empty he throws it away. Finally he comes upon a woman in a bikini who hands him an ice lolly with the words, ‘where the hell have you been? It’s very nearly melted!’
With apologies to Peter O’Toole.
The End
The second film begins with a sign for Kirkstall Power Station. The commentator states that it is Good Friday, 13th April, 1979. The two 250 feet cooling towers, standing since 1931, are about to be demolished. The demolition contractors make their final preparations. A crowd of people, many of whom have cameras, looks on from a distance. After an explosion, the towers collapse one after the other, which produce cheering from the watching crowd. The film then surveys the wreckage of the towers before providing a repeat showing of their demolition.
The End.
Context
As well as regularly filming the Lord Mayor's Parade, the prolific cine club, Leeds Movie Makers, made many comedy spoof films throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. An imaginative and accomplished group, they clearly enjoyed making these sorts of films. The first part of this film, ‘David of Arabia’, is an example. In this they were like the other sub-group of Leeds Cine Club, Mercury Movie Makers (MMM), who made 16 mm films, rather than Super 8. Inspired by the energetic and...
As well as regularly filming the Lord Mayor's Parade, the prolific cine club, Leeds Movie Makers, made many comedy spoof films throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. An imaginative and accomplished group, they clearly enjoyed making these sorts of films. The first part of this film, ‘David of Arabia’, is an example. In this they were like the other sub-group of Leeds Cine Club, Mercury Movie Makers (MMM), who made 16 mm films, rather than Super 8. Inspired by the energetic and inventive late Alan Sidi, MMM more often employed special effects; but both groups made films of an ambition rare among amateur cine clubs. For more on Mercury Movie Makers see the Context for A Vision Fulfilled (1982), and Reg White’s History on their website. As with so many other Yorkshire cine clubs, Leeds Movie Makers are still going strong.
The second film, shown here, of the demolition of the cooling towers of Kirkstall Power Station, has no obvious connection with the first (apart from the aptness of the word ‘cooling’) – although it does have its comic moments. What the film does show is the expertise and dedication of the club members: it being hard to conceive of this film being done any better by professional filmmakers. There are many photos of the demolition on the internet, but none capture this event in the way that this film does, including the prelude and aftermath. The old 1931 coal fired power station had a local reputation as a bad pollutant, but the changeover to a new oil fired system came just as the crisis in the Middle East dramatically increased the price of oil. OPEC ordered an embargo on oil in retaliation for the U.S. re-arming Israel in October 1973, leading to a quadrupling of the price of oil over several years. Hence the power station was forced to close in 1976; although the license wasn’t revoked until 1978. The cooling towers themselves – not built until just after the end of the Second World War – were not, of course, responsible for the smoke and dust: a survey by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2007 found that, “more than two-thirds of people in the UK believe, wrongly, that smoke or harmful emissions emerge from cooling towers”. In fact they give out just harmless water vapour. For some, cooling towers have a sentimental, even an aesthetic, value: Christmas cards can be bought picturing the recently demolished Tinsley cooling towers near Rotherham. According to Wikipedia, none of the power station structure now remains, with the majority of the site covered by a caravan storage depot, a golf course, artificial football pitches and with the rest of the site part of the Kirkstall Valley Nature Reserve. Various reasons make it unsuitable for residential development: restricted access, overhead and underground high-voltage cables, subterranean voids and contaminated, unstable land. For some nice photographs of what the cooling towers used to look like, from the railway side, see the excellent David Hey Collection. But plans are afoot to turn the area into a large public park; being promoted by the umbrella organisation Kirkstall Valley Park (KVP). In fact, according to the Kirkstall Ward website, “proposals for a new public park in the Kirkstall Valley date back to the 1960s when the old Leeds County Borough began to systematically acquire land for new public open space along the Kirkstall riverside”. If the plans do come to fruition it will be another step towards reversing our environmental decline. References Leeds Movie Makers Mercury Movie Makers Sarah Horton, The 1973 Oil Crisis Kirkstall Ward website Kirkstall Valley Park David Hey Collection RSC Survey: Myth of cooling towers is symptomatic of global warming information shortage Tinsley Cooling Towers |
