Increasingly documentary makers are appreciating that there is an audience out there who love documentaries, who will see your film and enthuse to their friends about it, and are trying to capitalise on it. Kickstarter (and similar sites) has been gaining popularity over the last few years for getting the audience involved in funding documentaries. Word of mouth isn’t always as effective for documentaries because they tend to have shorter cinema runs, a film might only be shown once or twice anywhere near you and having all too often been one of half a dozen people in a screening I can’t say I blame the cinemas either. Now some filmmakers are going so far as to contact their target audience and say ‘do you and your group want to see this film? Let us know and we’ll arrange a screening in you area.’ Activist documentary Just Do It advertised itself towards student environmental groups and screened at universities all over the place. There are of course pros and cons to this method and a real danger of simply preaching to the choir but at least if you screen initially to lots of receptive audiences you’re more likely to speed up the word of mouth process.

I saw some good documentaries this year, documentaries that covered diverse and interesting subjects. Yet having just watched The Arbor I’m reminded that 2010 was, to my mind, a better year for innovation in documentary. Life in a Day was an interesting concept that raises really interesting ideas about directorial authorship versus the idea of the camera as eyewitness but other than that, almost all the documentaries (You Don’t Want the Truth is a whole separate creature due to using large amounts of security camera footage) were stylistically very safe films. I feel like I’ve seen a lot of interesting, and in a couple of cases important, films but I don’t necessarily feel inspired. It’s a difficult thing because the most important aspect of documentary-making is telling the story. However documentary exists in a very competitive market and documentaries that push the boundaries of the medium attract discussion and thus viewers. Perhaps it’s inevitable, we’ve had a couple of really good years of people pushing the boundaries with documentary and now the medium will coast a bit while the innovators do research or search for new subjects or try to convince people to fund them. Perhaps its just that I’ve seen a lot more documentaries this year so I’ve got a wider pool to look at, to try and tie into an over-arching theme. There were a lot of good documentary feature films out this year and that is a very good thing for both the genre and the industry in general, they just weren’t ground-breaking.

This is a film directed by John Woo, so big exciting action set pieces are to be expected and he certainly doesn’t disappoint. Vast armies and complex military manoeuvres are played out on screen in extended and exhilarating sequences that are all the more impressive when you imagine that these are based on historical records so people really have fought using these techniques. With the exception of the last battle at Red Cliff there doesn’t appear to be much CGI used (because flaming death isn’t good for your actors) or if there is then it is subtly used. I’m particularly fond of the ‘borrowing the arrows’ scene.

Also roles for female characters as something other than love interests! Sun Shangxiang initially appears as Sun Quan’s enthusiastic little sister whose desire to join the campaign as a soldier is ridiculed by her brother and his generals but gets to prove her competency early on, leading a group of female warriors to act as a decoy drawing in the enemy army only to prove competent adversaries holding them off until the rest of the allied forces can drop on them. She spends a large part of the film disguised as a man, acting as a spy in Caocao’s stronghold, sending back valuable reconnaissance to Zhuge Liang. In fact, by the time she returns from Caocao’s camp Sun Quan’s outraged response to her actions is portrayed as ridiculous, followed as it is by his allies standing around looking awkward rather than supportive. As though they had long since accepted her skill and important role and are a bit embarrassed that he continues to fail to recognise it. Xiao Qiao on the other hand, as Zhou Yu’s young and innocent wife, is largely drawn as the love interest and although she does get held hostage (a move that the viewer is waiting for throughout the whole film given the brutal death of Lui Bei’s wife in the film’s opening battle) towards the end, she does get to take charge of her own destiny. Accompanying Zhou Yu on the campaign, solidifies her pacifist feelings as she realises what danger will befall their people if they loose. She sets out alone to attempt to convince Caocao that he has won and should accept the alliance’s surrender. Discovering that he is set upon having their humiliation she uses Caocao’s long-standing fondness for her to keep him distracted thus preventing him giving the order to start the battle until the wind has changed giving her husband and his allies the advantage they need. Unusually, Zhou Yu seems willing to trust his wife’s instincts and does not send soldiers to bring her back. When the battle is over, it appears that Zhou Yu has come to understand his wife’s pacifist view, seeing the destruction and loss of life he declares that there have been no victors here.

So. The museums are open, the company has gone bust, the staff are scattered. Reckon it’s probably safe to talk about what I was doing from last Spring until this Summer?

Last February I found myself interning part-time at a production company in Glasgow called 55 degrees. In April that year I became a researcher two days a week dealing with copyright clearance by the time my contract ended at the end of this May – and the company went into liquidation a fortnight later – I was full time and I’d done a bit of pretty much everything going in all departments.

During my time there I worked on a variety of projects from adding sound effects and removing background noise from short films, to freezing under a boom on Glasgow Green and up the Rest and Be Thankful and wrestling with massive archive spreadsheets for the Riverside Museum, to sweet talking copyright holders and discovering that my pet sound project was actually a big sound exhibit for the new Museum of Liverpool. And that’s not even counting subtitling, troubleshooting time-lapse cameras, talking to the Gaelic Arts Agency in Gaelic and spending more time than is entirely wise in costume departments, second hand furniture shops and the biggest vintage clothes shop you’ve ever imagined.

The new Museum of Liverpool is easiest to talk about in sound terms because while I got to do quite a bit of sound work on both Museums the way of these things is that not everything opens at once so not everything is in place yet. As with much sound design work, most of the time if you’re doing it right no one notices you were even there. However, for a couple of the exhibits in the gallery we worked on, sound got to play a starring role. (Please note that exhibit names generally refer to working titles and the actual installed exhibits may not have that name).

Myth and Magic

This one was, I must confess, my baby. It’s probably the one single exhibit in the entire museum that I worked the most on and as such I got quite protective of it. It’s made up of around twenty minutes of assorted oral histories recorded for the Liverpool 800 project. Liverpudlians (and those who have chosen to make Liverpool their home) both famous and ordinary contributed their thoughts, feelings and memories of the city, its culture and what the place meant to them. Interestingly although some people are clearly au fait with talking into microphones and other clearly nervous of them, this wasn’t always a guarantee of the sort of recording you would get to work with. People were recorded in all sorts of places depending on where was available or where the interviewee was comfortable. Acoustics varied hugely, interviewees talked over each other and their interviewer, media professionals got over-excited and banged the table in the middle of a good quote and generally I felt sorry for whoever had to transcribe them all before I even got hold of the recordings. It was certainly a challenge to make them sound like they were all in the vaguely the same place, to make sure they could all be understood, to make sure that I didn’t get so focused on getting rid of the background sound that I distorted people’s voices. It was challenging and frustrating and my perfectionist streak was never satisfied, but it was an education in sound editing and I’ve probably got an utterly skewed view of salvageable audio now. (I learned a lot about Soundtrack Pro doing this project, lots of tips and tricks, though mostly I learned to dislike the software and its tendency to insert random clicks into tracks…) They spoke about their city with love and regret and anger and frustration. With honesty that was sometimes sentimentally affectionate and others brutally unsentimental. They talked about class and race, culture and art, politics and change. I could quote chunks of it off by heart, and was sick of the sound of their voices by the end, but I stood under it and listened to their stories and voices when I visited, and watched people come and go below it, sometimes stopping only for a moment sometime sitting for the whole twenty minutes. It’s still my favourite bit, even if the graphics aren’t up yet.

View Through Time/Mersey View

Is a fun little interactive in one of the museum’s truly giant windows, which provides information on the buildings and landmarks visible from the window. There is information about and images of all of them and some of them have accompanying oral histories. A river swimmer, a cardinal, a politician and a couple of men who works on the river are among the voices you hear. I got to edit them into bite sized relevant chunks.

Tales of the Riverbank

This one is a bit of an odd one for me. The only real involvement we had with this one was providing sound effects for the stories (there’s a Shetland Seagull in there) so I was looking forward to seeing the finished exhibit. I never entirely did or work out how it worked, but as I wandered around that part of the museum I heard the familiar honk of the ferry horn and squawk of the seagull I remembered so clearly other people did…

Talking about the sound side of my involvement with Riverside Museum is harder because there are less things I can physically point at and say they’re mine.  Which is strange given that I spent far more time working on that museum than on Liverpool. I recorded a lot of voice-overs that you’ll hear in inter-actives and in the shops themselves. I’ve written previously about building an impromptu sound booth in the edit suite, out of cladding, plastic coat hooks, an upturned sofa and the considerable patience of my colleagues. I’ve amused the locals recording the sound of the Clockwork Orange (and timing it besides) and worked in languages other than English (sound editing in German; voice-over recording in Gaelic).

It’s odd to walk around the finished (or as near as makes no difference) museums and think, this was a year of my life and its over, but I helped make two museums and as the second paid professional item on my CV, it’s none too shabby.

Seeing that the BBC Radiophonics Workshop was (and continues to be long after its demise, to the extent that whenever I find myself faced with a challenging sound project, Electrical Storm and BBC Radiophonic Music go into heavy rotation) a big influence on my budding sound geek self. I thought this year I’d focus on one of the notable female alumni of the workshop. As enduring as my affection for Delia Derbyshire’s work is, ask people to name a staff member of the Radiophonics Workshop and her name will come up pretty rapidly. So I decided to focus on someone lesser known but no less influential.

Although Daphne Oram was technically a composer, anyone who takes a serious interest in electronic music – especially in the early days – soon finds their work overlapping with technology and mathematics, she was also an inventor. Forsaking a place at the Royal College of Music, she joined the BBC in 1943 as a music balancer and began experimenting with synthetically created sound a few years later. Oram eventually managed to convince the BBC of the importance of electronic music, first establishing a temporary, out of hours studio to produce background music and then helping to secure funding to establish the Radiophonics workshop, where she was the first Studio Manager. She didn’t remain long however, growing frustrated with the Music Department’s unwillingness to take them seriously. She struck out on her own and set up her own studio in Tower Folly in Kent and went freelance. During the early sixties she followed her dream of creating a machine that converted graphical information into sound, by designing and developing a drawn sound technique that bears her name – the original Oramic composition machine is currently on display at the Science Museum in London until the beginning of December. Although digital technology made this increasingly obsolete, she also worked on a creating a digital version of it using early computer technology during the eighties.

Oram was also something of an academic, teaching electronic music classes at Christ Church College, Canterbury during the eighties and writing a book on the philosophical elements of sound.

Daphne Blake Oram, was born in December 1925 and died in Janurary 2003.

Regular readers may recall that when I did my annual review of the previous year’s documentaries back in January, I challenged myself to watch a documentary a month this year. I seem to have been running two behind the target all year, and likewise I’m currently at 7 so far for this year. Though that’s an improvement on last year already. (If you’re interested: Nesvatbov (Matchmaking Mayor), His & Hers, Helvetica, Waste Land, The Great White Silence, Life in a Day and American: The Bill Hicks Story.)  I have already answered the second question I posed in that challenge, whether there were enough feature-length documentaries released in the cinema to manage that. Despite the fact that of the documentaries I’ve watched so far this year, one was on DVD, another was on the iPlayer and another was made in 1924 I can reassure anyone worried that there are definitely enough documentaries being released in cinemas here to manage one a month. Possibly not if you don’t live near a good arts cinema, but if you do then you are, if not exactly spoiled for choice, certainly given a good selection.

At the beginning of last month, I pottered off to the MacBob to see two documentaries in fairly short succession. Despite their being, on the surface, almost as different as you could possibly imagine two documentaries being – having been shot nearly a century apart – seeing them so close together (just over a week apart) made certain similarities really quite noticeable.

The Great White Silence is proper pioneering documentary work. As it was made before the grammar of documentary filmmaking was properly established but still recognisably a documentary to modern eyes. Whereas Life in a Day is arguably an attempt to revitalise/reinvent the genre itself. They have a similar mix of capturing life in action, staged performances for camera and random bits of what are essentially mini nature documentaries. They are both camera operators’ films, telling the story of the world as they see it, showing the audience places they would and probably could never have seen before. Breaking all the ‘rules’ to create something new and interesting.

There is also a certain distance between the director and the footage in both cases. Life in a Day is essentially a crowd-sourced film, with people all over the world contributing their footage of their life on a particular day in July of 2010. The director was absent from all of the shooting and has absolutely no control over what was shot and cannot re-shoot. He’s looking at thousands of hours of footage and trying to pick out themes and stories that will somehow tie all this disparate footage together. While the director and camera operator are one and the same on The Great White Silence he also has to contend with a vast amount of footage taken over the best part of a year in hostile conditions in an evolving style, with no way to go back and re-shoot. And as for distance, well the film wasn’t finished until 1924, over a decade after he’d returned from Antarctica, if that doesn’t count as distance I’m not sure what does.

One particular moment of synchronicity between the two films were two entirely different moments of human tragedy that you know are coming but somehow forget about watching the film. The last third of The Great White Silence covers the expedition to the pole itself and over this entire section hangs the audience’s knowledge that they aren’t going to make it back. No matter how determined they are to get back or how heroic the sacrifices that they make are, we know they aren’t going to make it back. (The film came out 12 years after they died, and I was watching it nearly 100 years after their deaths, it must be rare that anyone sees or saw this film without knowing the outcome) It feels oddly voyeuristic viewing as they battle their already known fate. That horrible creeping foreknowledge struck me in one section of Life in a Day too, watching crowds enter a music festival in Germany, early happy crowd shots giving way to carnage and injury. The moment the camera, held aloft in the crowd, takes in that tunnel you know that this Love Parade and that you are about to witness why it isn’t held any more. There’s something weirdly claustrophobic about both these scenes that combines with this voyeuristic feeling that you shouldn’t be watching this and this conflicting feeling that you owe it to the people on screen not to look away, to bear witness to their fate. As though the camera operators in both cases are trying to make sure you remember what they cannot forget.

Happy Together is a beautiful and dreamlike piece of filmmaking; coloured with the mixture of darkness and grace that I’ve come to associate with this director’s films. Much like Kowloon in Chungking Express (1994) the city of Buenos Aires is as much a character in the film as the humans. Although if the earlier film is a loving portrayal of home with all its flaws and comforts, then Happy Together is a more raw experience. A remembrance of somewhere that you were both very happy and utterly heartbroken – a city you fell in love with and stayed in, long after the romance has faded away. This is a portrayal neither of the city the tourists see nor the one the natives know. Both the beauty and the grubby ugly side are portrayed as transient. Nothing can be truly transcendental or truly sordid, because this reality is ultimately temporary, both viewers and characters will eventually go home sooner or later. Fitting given that at its heart it’s a film about starting over and the different things that can mean.

There are continued references to the waterfall depicted on the lamp the couple own, a place they visit only to kick start the end of their relationship. Yet, despite the beautiful romanticised shots of both the falls and the lamp that the film portrays, it doesn’t make me want to visit. Instead it is the Lighthouse ‘at the end of the world’ that Chang is so determined to visit before he goes home to Taiwan that calls out to me, with it’s threat of suicide and present of peace.

According to the back of the box of the copy I watched, it was quite controversial when it was released because the director had convinced two of Hong Kong cinema’s biggest male stars to play a gay couple. And we’re not talking a few chaste kisses, but a passionate, messy love affair with an utterly unashamed (though admittedly tastefully shot) sex scene. Yet ultimately this isn’t a ‘gay’ film, it’s a film about two lovers and their messy broken love affair as it falls apart. The rawness and heartbreak are familiar and the fact that both lovers are male is largely of secondary importance. As Yiu-fai says, turns out that lonely people are all the same.

This is a film for anyone who’s ever fallen in love with someone they shouldn’t have or wished they could throw a friend’s sadness off the end of the world.

For once I’m not looking up. There can be few better views of the city than the one offered from the Lighthouse tower – formerly the water tower of the old Herald building. Looking south from it’s sturdy, though shapely, balcony reveals a landscape of jumbled roofing styles – giant insulated pipes and air conditioning ducts, spindly chimneys and incongruous domes – and reveals the baffling fact that in a city that gets as much rain as this one, new flats are still being built with flat roofs. A faded Woolworths sign marks ‘Boots Corner’ though both shops are long gone and now a Poundland wraps Pizza Hut in a retail embrace below.

Looking Westward the architecture is more grandiose, the elegant tower of the Central Hotel, distracting from the functional yet epic beauty of Central station below. I could talk for hours of the architecture – Art Novo, ‘Greek’, Georgian or Gothic – and what it says about the development of the city but to be honest there’s an exhibition in the arts centre below that says it better. Instead imagine the colours, the tarnished copper domes, the thousand different shades of reds and browns and greys that delineate the different building materials from grubby sandstone to steel and glass.

Northwards and close at hand, fences, low walls and planters delineate the roofs. Outhouses and garden huts are dotted around and two soggy looking deckchairs tell their own stories. I wonder if the pleasures of a roof garden on sunny days compensates for the leaks when it rains.

The mix of styles and periods speaks of a city always moving forward yet unafraid to embrace and repurpose the past. The ugly and the beautiful stand side by side and no two people looking out over them would entirely on all the examples, of which is which. Too many people dismiss it as a city with its feet in the gutter, but while this is true it shouldn’t be forgotten that it’s also a city looking firmly at the stars.

(Further away, on the hills beyond, wind turbines continue to drive the city into the future.)

The first time I saw her as an adult she was walking down the Old Town road. In her wake a dozen crows wheeled through the air or gathered on the arms of the streetlights. It was the crows I noticed first, they were silent, creating none of the usual cacophony that accompanies a large group of their kind. Crows did not gather in flocks I remembered, but in ‘murders’, I’d shuddered at the thought, though not unpleasantly. Then I spotted her, unchanged the twenty years since I’d last laid eyes on her, and shuddered in earnest. She hadn’t seen me yet so I followed her, along the road and past the crows like silent sentinels.

She still wore the guise of an eight-year-old girl. Logic would argue that she must be the daughter of the girl I’d met when I myself was that age but I read in the responses of the other townsfolk that my feeling was right. A few children straggling behind the way to school crossed the road to avoid her and when one looked back his friend dragged him away, muttering dire warnings. Most adults did not appear to see her, except a few who hurried past, gazes averted. Only once I saw someone meet her eyes – an old lady I later heard was seriously ill – she came away looking utterly serene; I wondered what comfort or certainty she saw there.

On the bridge over the railway I stopped and watched. Down on the platform the girl was walking towards the no entry sign, down the slope that led to the tracks. The station attendant called after her crossly, causing her to pause and turn to look at him. Even under his thick beard and the ruddiness of cold weather, he paled significantly before disappearing back into his office. He re-emerged in luminous jacket, with a shovel over his shoulder. As he reached the girl she offered him her hand, and together they walked away down the line. Ahead of them the signal changed from green to red with a gentle but carrying thunk.

I stood on the bridge watching for their return for most of an hour. However, when the attendant returned it was without his companion and he was carrying a large bundle. The drivers and conductors, who had gathered on the platform in his absence, crowded round him. Soon it became apparent that his burden was a body, frozen in the night. Whether some drunken reveller who had missed the last train and tried to follow the tracks home; or some benighted soul seeking an express train to permanently resolve their problems, I never discovered. The people of this town are vociferous in their ability for gossip and speculation about every subject except that of death.

Looking up I thought I saw the girl watching from far down the tracks but when I blinked there was no one there. She’ll be back though. One day I might even learn her name, or why she let me go.

Above the crows circled slowly in the air, making not a sound.

Although there certainly wasn’t an African cinema course or unit run when I was attending it, my local university library has a decent selection of books on African cinema – I presume from this that there is now a unit run as the number of books on this topic is vastly increased since I was a student. Most focusing on general topics like post-colonialism or gender issues, but a few focusing on the outputs of individual countries like Nigeria, Morocco and South African, though the major focus is definitely Francophone Africa and at that Sub-Saharan. (In fact I found a couple of books on the subject in French on today’s visit)

All this really boils down to being able to get a bit of background of the filmic and narrative traditions the film operates within, along with a bit of insight into the director’s mindset. As one book featured an interview with Abderrahane Sissako and another devoted a short chapter to examining his work. Though unfortunately it came out the same year as Bamako so doesn’t talk about that film – but considering the difficulty I sometime have finding more than a passing reference in a book or a wikipedia stub about the directors of some of the films I’ve reviewed, it’s positively glorious. However, the discussion of Heremakono/Waiting for Happiness did help to relieve some of the confusion I had surrounding the narrative, or apparent lack thereof in the film.

Sissako himself has said that, “what interests me in people is their present state, the moment when I’m face to face with someone.” He doesn’t feel the need to provide context for his characters and Bamako is at once overflowing with context and utterly lacking in it. The story of Melé and Chaka does not so much as intertwine with the court case it reflects as it does fit around it. Much like his previous film the narrative is fluid and elusive. Much of his earlier work featured a voice-over and I found that I missed the presence of a narrator here. Not that I think it would necessarily be a better film with a narrator – it’s a good film without it – but that I felt the absence of one, as the conventional signposts of narrative cinema are absent and I was definitely having difficulties navigating. So I suppose the best advice I could give if you are considering whether to watch this film or not is: if you’re only accustomed to Western cinema prepare to be in a completely different narrative tradition. It’s not a film that will hold your hand along the way, you get all the necessary information and it expects you to figure the rest out yourself. I know that I struggled with that part of the film but I think that was more of a failing on my part than that of the film.

The film involves several different people singing songs in Bambara, but the copy of the film I was watching did not have subtitles for the song lyrics so I couldn’t help but feel that there was an important element of the film I was missing out on and perhaps that they would have cast more light on some of the metaphors that remained a bit of a mystery to me.

On a completely shallow note, I have to say: unexpected Danny Glover! There’s a whole sequence where the audience watch the same film – a Western – as a group of children in the film called Death in Timbuktu. I’m not entirely sure what it’s significance to the rest of the narrative was, but I must confess, I would probably have watched the rest of it had it been a real film. Danny Glover as a sort of ‘Man with No Name’ character is unexpectedly compelling, who’d have thought?

It constantly blurs the lines of fiction and reality from the self-referential asides to the use of character names that are the same as those who portray them. I read a review of the film, after seeing it, that commented that the film had lots of references aimed at people on the film festival circuit and while I didn’t get/notice those references, I do sort of understand what they were getting at. It was certainly a film aimed at an audience that was largely outside of Iran. It was as though the director had accepted the vast majority of people who saw the film wouldn’t be Iranian or if they were would be (mostly) Iranians living outside Iran. The film is openly telling the international audience, ‘you don’t know as much as you think you do about Iranian life and culture’, but there are little things that suggest the film is also telling Iranians they don’t know as much as they think they do about Iranian culture. Which is interesting, I’m not sure what to do with that thought now that its lodged itself in my brain but its interesting.

The shooting style veers from well-shot documentary to outright music videos at one point. Some of the musicians even occasionally given the camera a half-coy, half-embarrassed glance as though they are re-enacting conversations they have had, events they’ve lived through, gigs they’ve attended. It almost feels like they should have been making a documentary but knew they’d never get away with it. I note that the IMDB page for this film makes much of the way the film is shot, with several people wondering how they got away with shooting it the way they did. Which seems either a really patronising attitude to have or one that didn’t know very much about film making. Bahman Ghobadi is not an inexperienced film director, several of his films have been documentaries and (as far as I’m aware) all of them have been made in Iran. He’s going to be used to making films under awkward circumstances. He’s a talented director, working in difficult circumstances, you either get good at working round that and with that or you don’t make films.

I suppose, if you wanted to, you could ignore the underlying political background and just enjoy it as a guided tour of the underground music scene of Tehran. The film is, after all, not political with a capital P. It doesn’t come across as preaching a message. It’s a film that says – this is the way things are here, this is how people deal with them. Early on in the film one of the characters asks Negar what’s she’s rebelling against and she responds that she’s not rebelling against anything, she just wants to be able to play music. While some of the bands featured have undeniably politicised lyrics, others don’t. Some play what seems to both to the audience and to Negar and Ashkan as they watch the gigs, like quite traditional, uncontroversial music but still can’t get permits to play. What it is however, is a slice of life, an insight into the petty oppressions and brutalities of life in Tehran. Perhaps, also an insight into the sort of grind that makes a political movement expand from the minority of committed agitators into a mass movement.

And, always important in any film about music, the soundtrack is excellent.