Ever since the pandemic hit the UK and lockdown was put in place, it feels as if we have been redefined as individuals and communities. The balance between isolation and inclusion often feels out of whack. Increasingly we communicate using screens. Even using the initials IRL, standing for In Real Life, seems to distance us from what is being described.
Psychoanalyst Neville Symington says in The Analytic Experience: "Jung stressed that in each of us there a collective element and an individual element, and if either overwhelmed the other there would be a deterioration in our mental condition.”
Jung’s thesis is brilliantly explored in Power Station, a documentary directed by the artist Hilary Powell and filmmaker Dan Edelstyn. This joyful and uplifting film is in cinemas now.
Powell and Edelstyn’s story begins in lockdown –peak isolation for so many in the UK and around the world. It’s clear from the opening scenes of domestic chaos that Powell and Edelstyn, a couple with two children living in a multicultural part of East London, are struggling with their mental health. They respond in a much more ambitious way than by offering to do the neighbours’ shopping, or distributing banana bread, instead they invite their neighbours to help them find ways to provide the whole street with its own solar power.
Powell and Edelstyn’s consciousness raising projects go way beyond your average crowdfunding schemes, but despite the kind of imaginative stunts only artists can pull off we witness the fundraising hitting a wall. The answer they decide, which seems reckless madness to most people including their daughter, is to sleep on the roof of their house every night until they reach their £50k target. The decision feels even more foolhardy as the plan is realised (scaffolding, double bed, standing lamps and all) just as the autumn weather turns nasty.
What the film shows us, other than the power of the individual to effect change, is how the couple with admirable and quite staggering grit and determination, make an impact on their local community. The unknown neighbours become friends, co-conspirators and advocates for a sustainable heat source. While waiting for solar power we witness some on lower incomes having to resort to turning off their more conventional heating as prices soar. Local group as well individual creativity is activated.The local primary school, a bit sceptical at first, ends up with solar power and a realistic run at being a Christmas number one with their solar power song.
Becoming catalysts for change in their community isn’t entirely positive for the couple. They attract criticism and clearly feel under almost unbearable pressure to deliver for their community too. The couple’s relationship is put under considerable strain: “You’re the worst documentary maker in the world” snipes Powell at her partner at one very low point. I wondered, frequently, how they managed the give and take in their relationship and felt like offering free therapy if they ever needed it.
Despite the setbacks and some unrealised dreams we are left with a feeling from Power Station that something good has happened and, I felt, it exhorted us to believe we can exert our own agency and the agency of the community in the face of adversity and a default position of uncomfortable but familiar isolation.
I saw the film in a local community cinema in Suffolk. The organisers hosted a Q&A at which someone asked Dan Edelstyn if he had advice for an audience packed rather poignantly with those both hotly advocating for and protesting against the building of a new nuclear power station and solar park. His advice? “When engaging with others in the debate, don’t make statements, ask questions. Be open to finding out more about the other’s position, don’t focus solely on making them hear yours.” It’s a position therapists are used to, and felt like rather a good lesson for us all.
Watch the trailer for Power Station here:
