In a cinematic landscape increasingly defined by the frictionless capture of digital data, Mark Jenkin's work serves as a stubborn reminder of the medium's physical roots. The Cornish filmmaker, whose features Bait (2019) and Enys Men (2022) earned critical attention for their grainy, hand-processed aesthetic, builds his practice around a set of deliberate constraints. He shoots on 16mm with hand-cranked Bolex cameras, develops the film stock himself, and edits on a flatbed rather than a timeline. In an era when a smartphone can record cinema-grade footage, Jenkin's methodology reads less as nostalgia than as a philosophical proposition: that the mechanical effort required to make an image is inseparable from the image's meaning.
Using a hand-cranked camera, Jenkin does not merely record a scene; he performs it, his body governing the speed at which celluloid passes through the gate. Each turn of the crank determines the frame rate, which means exposure, motion blur, and temporal rhythm are all products of a physical gesture rather than an electronic setting. The filmmaker has described listening to the ticking of the mechanism to maintain consistency — a form of embodied timekeeping that binds the operator to the footage at the moment of its creation.
Time as Material
This engagement with time extends well beyond the shoot and into the darkroom. For Jenkin, film is less a sequence of images than a series of chemical and thermal variables. Developer temperature, agitation pattern, the precise duration of light exposure — each factor leaves a visible trace on the emulsion. Processing the celluloid by hand transforms the abstract concept of a "moment" into something tangible: a material that can be felt, shaped, and occasionally ruined.
The approach has deep roots in experimental and structuralist filmmaking. Practitioners from Stan Brakhage to Peter Hutton treated the photochemical process as a creative act in its own right, not merely a technical step between shooting and screening. What distinguishes Jenkin's position is that he applies these methods to narrative features with recognizable characters, dialogue, and dramatic arcs. The grain and flicker are not overlays applied for atmosphere; they are consequences of a production method that refuses to separate storytelling from the labor of its own manufacture.
By controlling every stage of development, Jenkin treats the edit not as a software-driven arrangement but as a physical sculpting of duration. Cuts are made by hand on celluloid strips. Splices are literal joints. The result is a texture that digital sensors and post-production filters cannot replicate — a visual language born from friction between the artist and his tools.
Analog Practice in a Post-Analog Industry
Jenkin's commitment raises practical questions that extend beyond aesthetics. The infrastructure for photochemical filmmaking has contracted sharply over the past two decades. Labs have closed, film stock manufacturers have narrowed their product lines, and the pool of technicians trained in analog workflows has thinned. Working in this mode now requires not only artistic conviction but logistical resourcefulness — sourcing materials, maintaining aging equipment, and accepting longer turnaround times that sit uneasily with modern production schedules.
Yet the persistence of analog practice, however marginal, points to a tension that digital cinema has never fully resolved. The ease of digital capture — virtually unlimited recording time, instant playback, algorithmic color correction — removes many of the constraints that once forced filmmakers into deliberate choices. For some practitioners, that removal is liberation. For others, it represents a loss of the resistance that gives creative decisions their weight. Jenkin's work sits squarely on the latter side of that divide, treating limitation not as an obstacle but as the generative core of the process.
Whether this constitutes a viable counter-tradition or an increasingly isolated craft practice depends on factors largely outside any single filmmaker's control: the survival of film stock production, the willingness of distributors to accommodate non-standard formats, and the appetite of audiences for images that wear their own making on their surface. What remains clear is that Jenkin's method reframes a question the industry rarely pauses to ask — not what a camera can capture, but what it costs, in time and effort, to capture anything at all.
With reporting from London Review of Books.
Source · London Review of Books
