Accompanying the book of the same name, Iain Sinclair extends his psychogeographic franchise out to the New World in this lightly dramatised documentary, which traces the 1891 trek of his great-grandfather Arthur Sinclair into the Amazon jungle to set up a coffee plantation for the Peruvian Corporation of London. Kicking off with testimony from the Asháninka people whose land was hijacked, his stated aim is a Conradian voyage upriver – only reversing the “romance” surrounding the colonial plunder of the time and still stinking out certain culture-war circles today.
Sinclair actually made this journey for his book, with his daughter Farne. But in writing the narration for the film version, he opts for an odd distancing affectation: it is in the mordant voice of his longtime nomen à clef Andrew Norton, a “recovering writer” prowling his apartment (played here by Michael Byrne) in St Leonards’ Marine Court. Here, he receives the footage of his daughter’s Andean crossing from Peru, as well as pondering the legacy of empire with various academics over Zoom.
This is probably intended to position him apart from the rigid, patriarchal, logocentric, obsolete perspective that, as he says in the film’s later stages, must be subverted. But this disclaimer doesn’t really work. So dominant is Sinclair’s narrative voice, it overwhelms every other. We have to hack through thickets of his hyper-prolix musings, including riffs about sinister pyramidal monuments and how his ancestor’s wanderings map onto his own psyche (“The A13 to Dagenham became my own Rio Perene”).
Crystalline in expression his ideas might be, they draw too much attention away from both his daughter, who is doing the journalistic legwork in South America, and the Asháninka. The despoiling of the Andes by western miners, the near-extinction of the Asháninka language, ayahuasca tourism and cooperative coffee schemes – you’d like to think that the locals’ opinion on these subjects are worth more than Sinclair’s. But he’s already off on one about “the terroir of the bearded barista” in London. Tracing such distant colonial connections is vital work, but the Peruvian side doesn’t have enough room to breathe. There’s fascinating material here, but Sinclair makes it feel like a first-world problem.
• The Gold Machine is released in cinemas on 2 September.
