A film built inside a shadow box. Lightning takes the Abbey of Averbode in 1499, and among the very first things the monks pay to replace is the clock — because it did not only tell the hour, it sang it. The score is built on a recording by Matthew Champion and his ensemble.
It is the night of Friday 24 October 1499. Thunder is moving over the Abbey of Averbode in the southern Low Countries, and at eleven o’clock — as the bells toll to wake the brothers for Matins — lightning strikes the abbey church. The fire takes bells, relics, stalls, paintings, the organ, a precious bible.
While the ashes are still warm, the abbey begins to rebuild. And among the very first things it pays for is a new clock. The account books survive, and they are specific: payments to bell-founders who sifted the ashes for salvage metal, and to clockmakers who did the repairs. The same records note what the clock played on its bells — on the hour, Sancti spiritus adsit nobis gratia; on the half hour, a chant in honour of the Virgin.
That is Champion’s argument in one object. Medieval and early modern societies are usually described as timeless. They were nothing of the kind. They organised time, measured it, argued about it and paid for it — and mechanical sounding clocks like Averbode’s spread across Europe, through the reformations, across the Atlantic, and into Asia with the missionaries.
The whole film happens inside a shadow box. Everything in it is physically real — the brass bells on their iron chains, the exposed clock mechanism, the manuscript pages pinned to the walls, the ash on the floor, the single candle. Everything except the people. The monks, the bell-founders and the clockmakers are flat paper cut-outs, drawn after illuminated manuscripts: hand-coloured, ink-outlined, two-dimensional figures standing in a three-dimensional world.
Between scenes the film travels through the mechanism itself, among the escapement wheels and the spring, and never passes the same gear twice.
The film opens on the mechanism itself, floating in the dark with no room around it — iron tracery, architectural columns, enormous wheels turning slowly. It is held long enough to be looked at properly, the way you stand in front of something in a museum that stops you. Then the camera moves forward, between the wheels, and comes out the other side inside the box.
Inside the box: the skeleton clock on the back wall with its gears showing through the dial, bells hanging on iron chains, abbey records and Gregorian notation pinned across the walls. A single flat monk stands at the base with a candle at his feet, looking up. The hands read just before eleven.
Lightning hits while the bells call to Matins. It is the only scene that leaves the box entirely. When the fire stops, silence falls, and the boxes return to the film.
The orange is gone and everything is ash-grey. The manuscript pages are curled at their burnt edges, the bells hang without moving, the candle is out, and a fallen bell lies on its side in ash that keeps falling like snow that will not stop. The clock's hands are frozen at eleven. In this film the figures move only when the mechanism moves — so nobody moves at all.
New figures arrive, and they are not monks. Bell-founders and clockmakers, drawn after manuscripts, doing exactly the work the records describe — one crouched over a crucible where salvaged bell metal is beginning to glow, the first warmth earned back from the fire; another with his hands on the gears. Behind them, fresh pages are pinned up: names, amounts, dates. The records name them and the figures embody them.
When the clock comes back, it does not only tell the time. It sings. This is the moment we hear Matthew Champion and his ensemble singing the very song the clock played on its bells.
The clock comes back to life. Every wheel turns, and the hands return to their proper pace. The monks below lift their painted faces toward it.
The film follows the object outward, and each stop is built as its own box. Here the religious statues are down and the whitewash is up — but the mechanism stayed. The clock simply changed owner: it now belongs to the city rather than the abbey, and the figures below it are burghers rather than monks.
Missionaries carried the technology across the Atlantic and into Asia, and the clock appears at the Ming imperial court: a European clock at the centre of a Chinese picture, with two layers of cut-out figures meeting around it.
Matthew Champion is a musician as well as a historian, and the score is based on a recording of his: the voices in it are Cantus Temporum, the early-music ensemble he founded and leads, and the song is the one the abbey’s clock sang. Our composer, Eitan Shefer, wrote the score around that musical theme. In this film you can see clearly what we mean when we say that both the design and the score are built from the film’s own sources.
Matthew Champion is a historian of premodern temporalities — how people experienced, perceived and shaped time. The Dan David Prize selection committee praised “Champion’s original and imaginative work that demonstrates how time is both given to and shaped by individuals, as well as noting the way he brings his lived experience as a musician to bear on his deep engagement with the sounds of life and the pluralities of time.”
Each year the Foundation chooses, with the laureate, the subject of the film they are honoured for, and we turn it into script, image and motion. The laureate sees it for the first time on the evening of the prize — on the big screen, in a room full of people who have come to honour them. Afterwards the films go out on social media, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, and on the Foundation’s own site, beside the committee’s reasoning and the laureate’s interview, and some laureates carry them into their own classrooms, to show what it is they work on.