Leeds and John Smith's The Black Tower

John Smith is a British filmmaker known for utilizing language and the act of withholding information to great effect, his structuralist masterpiece 'The Black Tower' (1987) is a prime example. The short film is narrated by an anonymous man who begins witnessing a black tower in various locations. The tower is so black and indecipherable that it could only be described as either a silhouette or a hole in the sky. This tower appears to only be visible to our narrator, and he quickly recognises the impossible geography of the tower as it appears and disappears in a number of locations distant from one another. The tower gradually forces our narrator into seclusion as he begins to lose touch with reality, until one day he is admitted to a hospital. Once discharged he feels recovered and no longer fearful of the tower, he escapes to the countryside for a break until he is again confronted with the tower. Though now he laughs at the sheer absurdity of the tower and decides to approach it. He discovers the tower is propped on top of a much older and decaying building resembling a factory or mill of some sort. Now, fuelled by curiosity, he steps inside, and the film cuts to black. It's only at this abrupt cut, when we're introduced to a female narrator accounting a vision of an identical black tower, that we discover that is not a mere hallucination.

I felt an impulse to rewatch and write about this short film as I myself had experienced a similar black tower. The Henry Price accommodation is a long rectangle building owned by the University of Leeds. It was designed and built in the sixties and seventies by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon as part of the Brutalist complex which stands as a significant portion of the University of Leeds campus. On one end of the Henry Price building is a separate staircase structure resembling the separate access tower on Erno Goldfinger's Brutalist icon Trellick Tower. The staircase is accessible from both St George's Field and Clarendon Road. At the top of this staircase structure, is a large cubic form topped with a pitch-black roof. The structure gives zero clues to what is within the cubic form, nor what job it plays. Thankfully, unlike the black tower in Smith's film, this one does not move. But I'm nonetheless often struck by it on my walk through Woodhouse Moor. Early on in The Black Tower, the narrator guesses that the tower must be "some kind of water tower". I believe that the tower on the Henry Price building is most likely just that: a water tower. Regardless of its actual explanation, this odd structure captivates me because of a quality that Smith captures so well: what if architecture could exist beyond human understanding, what if a structure existed that had no known use, and what if that structure could actually instil dread or anxiety. It's this instilling of dread evoked by Smith's use of language that personifies the tower, for example, when the narrator is confronted by the tower for the last time he states "it looked so absurd peering at me through the trees". It leaves you wondering if the very landscape itself is alive?

I could reach out to the University archive and learn precisely what the tower is, but like Smith's Black Tower, I'd almost rather be left not knowing.