In 1996, Frank Stapleton released his short film Poorhouse for broadcast on television. The story is set during Ireland’s famine era, in the seven years following 1845. It portrays the relationship between an ageing gravedigger and a young girl who are marginalised by life in a rural workhouse. Stapleton based Poorhouse on a short story by Cavan-born writer Michael Harding. Excluding its 1996 appearance on RTÉ, the film was seldom shown in public. In 2011, filmmaker Michael Higgins excavated a number of Stapleton’s 16mm reels while digging the ground near the Ringsend Peninsula. He reconstructed the decaying film into useable material, sequencing a new work entitled The Poorhouse Revisited. This reimagined film persistently drifts into swathes of cracked emulsion, distended edges and burning smears of luminescent yellow. The years festered on the edges of Stapleton’s reels, and had begun to bore their way into the film’s central scenes. And so, the story opens in a rolling wave of rot.
The Poorhouse begins in one of nineteenth century Ireland’s ‘big houses’, an extravagant plantation belonging to a wealthy landowner. A local doctor arrives to the house, and the owner leads him to a pregnant and half starved servant locked in a broom cupboard. The two send the girl to the nearby workhouse; a short time after arriving, she is raped, beaten, and sent to pile rocks in the men’s yard as a punishment for her pregnancy. At this point, Michael Higgins begins to extract his footage. He focuses on minor incidences, slowly organising the motion of the actors’ original performances, and manipulating ambiguous segments of film until all physical motion becomes next-to-static. A shot of two men turning a lever stretches out for an age, reiterating their passing stares in a permanent moment of suspicion. Nearby, the gravedigger meanders through the yard with his wooden cart, heading towards the field.
In a ten-minute scene, the girl stands beside a washing line. Her legs have frozen, as though each frame of their motion can only pass by melting into the next one. Her hair succumbs to physical degrading in the film, alternating between crisp monochrome greys and deep muddy blacks, polluting the air near her head with a pulsing, bleeding darkness. She is eventually swallowed up by a thick slit in the film’s emulsion. A closing sequence charts her deterioration into a state of catatonic madness. Her agitator goes unseen, but can only have grown from the hollowness of the workhouse, its shredding of the outside world’s ordinary personal dignities. The gravedigger is unable to help her in any meaningful way, and the rotten emulsion has begun to warp its way across the entire reel, like an incandescent species of seaweed. In a yellowed clip, the old man cradles the girl’s shaven head in his arms, and cleans her feet and wrists with a small white rag. She is laid out on his worktable. He washes down her whole corpse, and ties a black ribbon around her neck.