WINTER storms, festivities in the streets on New Year’s Eve, a model posing in a chilly artist’s studio and the mayor throwing coins to the children on Feast Day – the magic of St Ives throughout the seasons has been captured on film by
David Pearce.

The cameraman has ploughed his life’s savings into Footprints, the epic which he shot on location in St Ives and which conveys the atmosphere of the town’s narrow streets and harbourside and the pounding of the waves on the rocks.

One of the most powerful sequences shows a fishing boat preparing to put out of the harbour as a storm increases in strength.

Another, reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, shows seagulls waiting and watching from every nook and cranny, preparing to pounce on ice-creams and bags of chips.

Visitors of the human kind swarm through the streets and pack the beaches in the height of summer, then, as the year draws on, the same stretches of sand are seen virtually empty except for a lone walker.

For David, now in his 60s, making the film has been a lifetime’s ambition – one that he has nurtured since he visited the town for the first time aged eight, on holiday with his parents from their London home.

Footprints opens with a black and white sequence featuring a boy making that journey by steam train, clutching his camera.

Throughout his career as a cameraman in feature films and commercial television, he dreamed of returning to St Ives to make a film which would capture why it was so special.

David mulled over this idea when he and his family visited the town for holidays, from their home in Hertfordshire.

Meanwhile he was working for Anglia TV, which included shifts filming the royals, including Princess Diana.

He was earning good money and everything was going well.

Then one evening in 1999, his life fell apart when he was knifed in the street as he went to fetch a takeaway in his home town of Harpenden.

His attacker received a year’s jail sentence, but David could not recover mentally from the experience and turned to alcohol for solace.

His marriage broke up, he was unable to work, and his financial worries started snowballing.

“I had no work and I had to give up everything,” says David. “I sold everything in Harpenden and I was given nine months to live because of the alcoholism.”

He moved to St Ives to the small cottage he owned and spent time in the town’s Edward Hain Hospital. The treatment and support that he received there set him back on the road to recovery.

As he started to feel better, he decided to make a start on the film he had always dreamed of shooting – one which would capture on camera the same sense of place that generations of artists have caught on canvas.

He has been particularly inspired by the nineteenth century impressionists Whistler and Turner, who were among the earliest artists to travel to St Ives to paint, attracted by the light and scenery.

He raised £50,000 to buy a top-of-the-range camera by partially remortgaging his cottage, and then got to work. He went out every day, rain or shine, and watched and waited, recording the things that happened around him.

“Every time I looked through the viewfinder, I got these incredible feelings of energy,” he says. “Every day was exciting to go out and I miss it tremendously.”

The film took three years to produce. After compiling a substantial amount of footage, David engaged the services of film editor Charles Davies, with whom he had worked in the 1960s, to skilfully edit hours of camera work into the finished film.

As production work progressed, David ran out of money and had to use his cottage to raise another loan to complete it.

“I mortgaged everything – £200,000, every last brick,” he says. “If you want to do something, you have to do it. It is a piece of art and my whole life is in it.”

He views the film as the most important achievement of his career and is now trying to interest a television network in broadcasting it, so that it can be seen by a wider audience.

It has already been enjoyed by friends and acquaintances in St Ives, some of whom star in the film, at a special launch at the Tate St Ives.

“I’m a completely different person and I couldn’t be happier,” David says.

The DVD of Footprints is available for £16.99 (with delivery) from www.footprints-thefilm.com It can also be bought at the Tate St Ives gallery and the Harbour Bookshop in St Ives.

Posted by Captn

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 12:12 am and is filed under Local, News, Reviews . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.