Deep Blue Notes

Tags

hydrophones, nature, podcasts, sound effects, sound recording, sound science, soundscapes

Deep Blue Notes is a three part podcast, by wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson and Professor Tony Myatt a spatial audio sound artist, released through the Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast. It follows them on their quest – at the start of the year – to record Blue Whales in the Sea of Cortez – off Loreto, Mexico – creatures whose sounds have eluded Watson throughout his long career as a wildlife sound recordist. The two of them are collaborating on a sound installation for Oceans 21 – a project on the fascination and endangerment of the oceans – called Seaphony, which premiers in Berlin in May of next year.

The podcast uses their quest for these very specific sounds as a jumping off point to talk to a variety of specialists about a variety of issues around sound and sea-life, from how sound carries through water, through the impact of climate change – both human driven and natural phenomena like El Niño – to how human noise – essentially sound pollution – impacts on sealife. It’s all fascinating stuff, and I always love listening to recordings from hydrophones – I definitely spent part of at least two of the episodes looking at hydrophones online and checking specs to see if a reasonably affordable one would be compatible with my new sound recorder – but it also made me want to introduce Watson and Myatt to the fine folks at the Lighthouse Field Station. I suspect, in these travel limited times, they could probably recommend some good marine life recording spots that are a little closer to home than Mexico.

One of the most interesting aspects of the whole podcast, to me, is that they made a three-part podcast about their quest to record Blue Whale vocalisations, and in the end they didn’t succeed in recording the Whales. They spent time among the whales, sometimes with them being almost in touching distance and the whales just, didn’t sing for them. Of course, that’s the reality of sound recording, especially when you’re recording wildlife. On a trip this summer to record a variety of other sounds, I came across a frog, sitting in the middle of the road. It seemed quite happy for me to crouch down beside it – making no attempt to hop away or otherwise escape – and settle my recorder close by, but while other frogs in the hedgerows nearby croaked away quietly, the one literally at my feet, remained completely silent. It’s one of the great frustrations of sound recording, that so often you’ll hear an interesting sound and the minute you get your recorder out and running, it will stop. So theoretically that’s actually the most likely outcome of any given recording trip, yet narrative documentaries have taught us to expect a final act triumph, and I was definitely expecting one right up until the end. Yet that simple unapologetic acknowledgement that these things happen, that they knew that was a likely outcome, and have learned a lot from the experience so that they’ll do better next time they try, was so very refreshing and dare I say it, quite affirming too.

An Out of Doors Soundscape

Tags

sound art, sound recording, soundscapes

In the early days of lockdown, far enough in that it was obvious this wasn’t going to be a couple of weeks of strangeness but early enough that the novelty hadn’t yet worn off, I started making sound recordings. I think, initially I was intending to contribute them to Cities and Memories lockdown sounds or perhaps make some kind of sound walk installation with them but as time went on and I gradually collected more and more sounds, it became clear that I while I definitely wanted to make some art with them, I needed a bigger canvas for them. I needed a focal point, something to hang a piece on and do the wealth of material justice.

In July, Radio 3 put out a call for proposals for their Slow Radio strand, and one of the producers at work thought of me and my sound recordings and sent it on to me. Between us we put together a pitch – a new experience for me, as for most of the last decade I’ve generally been handed a brief and been expected to fulfil it – and submitted it off to them. This led to some rather entertaining socially distanced location recording adventures – the kind of location sound recording that I normally do is a rather solitary affair which was definitely a contributing factor to why I got so much of it done in lockdown – as my producer had come across some excellent sounds that he thought would add to my soundscape, and we got to re-negotiate how to work together on this sort of thing, within the somewhat safer space of the great outdoors.

Although we were ultimately unsuccessful in our pitching to Radio 3, we did succeed in interesting a Radio Scotland producer – who was also pitching – and so I ended up making a mini version of the programme for Out of Doors. It’s been ages since I made a soundscape that’s needed to stand alone but also told a story rather than being abstract. It was initially intended to have far less voiceover than it ultimately ended up with. I wrote the script to get the story of the piece straight in my head and essentially act as a guide track for me to edit around, but somewhere along the way I rediscovered my radio voice and a surprising amount of voice over made the final cut. Albeit after a fair amount of it had been rewritten and condensed and I definitely had to have a word with myself about killing my darlings. Having mostly worked in news over the last six years, it felt strangely decadent to have the luxury of time to work on a project, leave it to rest for a bit and then make more changes with fresh ears, rather than working against the clock. It was strangely thrilling to hear my own voice on the radio for the first time in years.

lostpenguin · Lockdown Soundscape

After that success my producer buddy casually suggested that I should translate my script into Gaelic and re-record it so that we could use that to pitch our original idea to Radio Nan Gaidheal. As the original programme proposal focused on my other lockdown project – attempting to upgrade my Gaelic from intermediate level where it has plateaued these last few years – it seemed a fitting way to quantify my progress, with a proper translation and something ‘real’ to work towards. I expected the translation part to be the difficult bit – usually if I’m writing something in Gaelic I’m just, writing it in Gaelic rather than translating from English so I’m leaning more on vocabulary and turns of phrase that I’m familiar with and comfortable using. This was very different; a challenge but a good one, and one that I could easily get help and feedback on from fluent colleagues. The difficult bit was reading it aloud. One of the things about learning a language as an adult is that you don’t learn to read the same way as you would as a child. You learn to read in the sense that you can read words and understand what they mean, but you do very little reading aloud. You read aloud sentences you wrote and get your pronunciation corrected but you don’t start with first principals and phonetics, so you don’t really acquire an instinctive understanding of how sounds fit together in words. Which means that often I can pronounce all the words in an individual sentence perfectly well but stringing them together is a different matter entirely.

The other challenge that I kept running up against is that I don’t have a ‘radio voice’ in Gaelic. I’ve had feedback and tutoring from various colleagues who all say I’m ‘almost there’ both in terms of pronunciation and radio voice – apparently I slip into and out of it as I go, and I know what they mean. I suspect it would be less frustrating if my Gaelic radio voice was further away? If I listened back to recordings and thought it was terrible, or that it had potential but not yet, I could just ask someone else to voice it and that would be that. That state of almost but not quite there is deeply frustrating. (It feels a bit metaphorical for my level of Gaelic fluency too.) I’m trying not to be too hard on myself, as it took months of being a radio trainee, doing two hours a week of talking on the radio to find my voice in English and I definitely don’t get that much solid time speaking Gaelic every week, let alone speaking it into a microphone.

So that’s where that project is at the moment. Hopefully I’ll have a Gaelic version to share reasonably early in the new year but for the moment I’m focusing I can make the soundscape itself reflect the same core truths in a different way.

@AiMfilmfest – Short Film Competition

Tags

africa in motion, african, brazil, egypt, film, nablopomo, namibia, nigeria, short films, south africa, sudan

I keep thinking that one year I’ll actually make it to some screenings at the Africa in Motion film festival in Edinburgh, to attend some screenings and discussion panels in person, rather than catching a film on tour when the films tour the country. (Though to be honest, that is one of my favourite parts of this film festival, that it tours its films round more provincial art cinemas.) I did not expect that in this plague year of ours, I would see more AIM films and events than I normally do by virtue of the film festival having gone entirely virtual. This was my first attempt at attending a virtual film festival and I must confess it took me a while to get the hang of it – films were mostly available for 48 hours after their ‘showing’ time, but keeping track of what was available until when and lining them up with what I was in the mood for on any given day was a bit of an adventure.

This is the thirteenth year that the Africa in Motion festival has a held a short film competition. The short-list this year comprised of 15 films from 12 different countries, from across Africa and further afield throughout the diaspora, whittled down from over 450 entries. There is both a jury prize and an audience award so all the online viewing pages have an option to rate the films.

I was working from home for most of last week, so I took advantage of that to watch a couple of short films each day on my lunch-break.

Ser Feliz No Väo (Happy in the Gap)

This is a documentary about Afro-Brazilian culture, assembled almost entirely from archive footage. It’s got some really nice use of archive to weave together several different themes regarding recent Brazilian history, but while I do feel like I got an insight into something I know very little about, I felt that the film itself needed a stronger narrative through line to hold it all together. It started off strongly but then drifted away a bit and I got lost.

Sun and Moon

A short but sweet little stop motion animation about a man playing chess with himself, alone in an Egyptian coffee shop – an ahwa. After he stares at the board for too long the pieces seem to come to life and enact an epic battle of good versus evil, seemingly playing out some internal conflict of the man’s own. The little plasticine characters we follow seem a little rough and ready, but that quickly becomes part of their charm. It’s a rather enchanting little film all told.

Roger

This one is a dreamy little piece about a jazz musician – Roger Kosa – as he struggles through the frustrations and mundaneness of life to find the transformative escapism of playing the piano. According to the film’s summary there’s a lot of other things going on in this documentary, but honestly I don’t think you would get any of it from just watching the film. Which isn’t to say that the film isn’t any good. It’s a dreamy and enjoyable watch, but it feels like the opening to a much longer documentary – or perhaps the trailer for it, and if it were I would definitely like to see the rest of that documentary.

Kauna Pawa (Invisibles)

This was hands down my favourite film of the shorts available to me – the first competition short that I rated five stars – a magical realist, surrealist fable. The score is excellent, almost doing the work of the absent dialogue, cueing us into the mental and emotional states of our two taciturn leads. It is beautifully shot, the use of colours, the shot composition – all the little perfect details – and the cinematography are just stunning. Doubtless helped along by the stunning dramatic scenery of Namibia – I always forget until I see it on film again how gorgeous those landscapes are, and wonder why more films don’t shoot there – and I loved the visual referencing of Mad Max: Fury Road which did in fact film there. Much like that film this one has an excellent line in show not tell – I don’t think there’s a single line of dialogue in the film – visually taking us on a journey with our protagonists, as they carry their literal and metaphorical baggage through the dessert and find closure together. It’s dreamy and strange and lovely – highly recommended.

Days, Nights: Queer Africa Shorts

These films were not were not in the short film competition but as short films on my lunch break was the order of last week I managed to squeeze in most of these too. These four films could not have been more different in style, tone and genre but they were all excellent little films. (I’d have given them all four stars at least!) From the sci-fi dystopia of 2064, to the London gangster buddies of Mandem, through the Sao Paulo scene kids of Bonde, and onto Ife which navigates the difficulties of being a lesbian in contemporary Nigeria; they all have very different perspectives on what being LGBT in different parts of Africa and the African diaspora means today and might mean in the future.

Serotonin

This one is a straight up art film. That’s not a criticism in the slightest, the film knows exactly what it is and fully commits to it, so while I was at times not really sure where it was taking me, the confidence with which it moved forwards allowed me to relax and just enjoy the ride. It’s beautifully shot, mostly in black and white, but with certain scenes in colour, and it really makes the most of that, to illustrate shifts in tone and mood. There’s also some lovely use of sound in the film, from the opening sound bridge to the recurring motif of the train coming ever closer.

I think it’s about the protagonist’s struggle with his mental health, choosing to pursue and hold onto the small joys in life, and not to be consumed by the struggles and darkness of life. I think. It’s all very metaphorical, but in an appealing way, rather than an irritating way, which given how many shorts I’ve seen that cover the same ground, is considerably harder than you’d think.

How to be at Home

Tags

canadian, films, short films

The other day, purely by chance, I came across a lovely little film about dealing with lockdown and isolation – How to be at Home. It’s a charming little animated film poem from the National Film Board of Canada, tender sweet and relatable. Having watched that it was all too easy to easy to slide gently into the fascinating depths of their website to watch more and more excellent animations. I think the last time I fell down a rabbit hole watching NFB short films, was when I was doing research on John Grierson’s work the best part of a decade ago, but I may have fallen down again since. They have a fair amount of useful resources, so I may have got distracted doing legitimate research – they do have a decent chunk of Norman McLaren’s work – or perhaps I’ve just been sensible enough to put their YouTube page in another tab and promise myself a browse when I was done with the current project and resisted temptation. However, as the only pressing deadline this month is to write a blog post, as many days in the month as I can, there’s really no reason not to head willingly down the rabbit hole.

In order to stop myself getting completely lost down the rabbit hole, I intended to focus on their most recent playlist, a collection of new animated shorts marking International Animation Day – called ‘Get Animated!’ Unfortunately the vagaries of film rights meant that my choices were rather paired down, with almost all the films that caught my fancy turning out to be not available in my location. Though I must give an honorary mention to the film Mamie that was both compelling and beautifully animated – for some reason I kept expecting it to be in French, it felt very French.

My travels have therefore been rather more haphazard. Yet, time and again, I keep coming back to the film that started me off on this journey. I’ve spent time watching lots of Andrea Dorfman’s back catalogue, which have all so far been charming with a clever twist. There is, nonetheless, something special about this particular film. Every time I watch it, I feel like a find another detail that makes me smile or brings a lump to my throat. (Remember how many people it takes to make a story, just to make a picture move.) It feels very much of this moment – how could it exist without this pandemic – but it also feels like a very necessary piece of art in a broader sense. When there is so much talk about the conflicting ways in which the Internet makes us more connected to each other than we’ve ever been and more isolated then we ever were. As though isolation was new, as though the urban isolation and alienation has not been a subject with newspaper columns as long as there have been newspapers – perhaps as long as there have been cities. Perhaps it’s just more visible now, or perhaps it’s just expressing a truth that we need to learn over and again, that we’re all connected and there’s a difference between being alone and being lonely.

How To Be At Home is a sequel to another film that director/animator Andrea Dorfman and poet Tanya Davis made a decade ago, called How to be Alone. You don’t need to have seen the first film to enjoy this one, but having now watched them both it is clear that the second film is very much in dialogue with the first one. As beautiful as the poem that the film is based around is, there are a couple of lines that felt like non-sequiturs in it, but that having seen the first film make perfect sense – they’re not non-sequiturs they’re call backs, little private jokes between the collaborators themselves and between them and their audience.

A really nice part of watching the films in the ‘wrong’ order is that you get to see how much both halves of the collaboration have developed as artists in the intervening years, the animation much smoother and more cleverly executed, the poetry somehow more secure in it’s vulnerability. (It sounds like Tanya Davis has read a lot more of her poetry out loud in the intervening years, that indescribable element of having found ones voice.) As though everything they’ve been trying to say in the intervening years has been distilled down into this one practically perfect piece of art.

If you enjoy this pair of films I’d also like to recommend you Flawed another animation by Andrea Dorfman that is available on the NFB website, though this one is in water-colour storyboard format. It’s really lovely too.

Waterscape @CircusArtspace

Tags

boats, inspiration, inverness, nablopomo, nature, sound art, water

I started writing this art exhibition review, the weekend after I saw it, when the official advice was to avoid pubs, clubs and concerts, anywhere with more than 500 people or that was confined and busy. (The Highlands had yet to have it’s first confirmed case of coronavirus.) An art exhibition, mid-week and off the beaten track seemed an ideal way to spend the afternoon on my day off – there was in fact, just me and the exhibition invigilator for my whole visit. By the Monday everything had changed and it felt weird writing this article. The exhibition itself had been wrapped up early. But part of why I went in the first place was because it might be a while before I could see another art installation and I was correct about that. This exhibition was definitely worth seeing and though circumstances cut it’s already short run down even further, it’s worth remembering.

For obvious reasons, I have fairly high standards when it comes to sound art installations. I get to see them so rarely and the subsequently high expectations mean that I’m all the more disappointed when the art turns out to be disappointing. For a while, a few years back, the best I could often hope for would be that the installation would be so rubbish that I would be so annoyed that I’d be inspired to make my own sound art in grumpy response.

Sometimes though, I come across a sound installation that is so good it inspires me for the opposite reason. Nicola Gear’s contribution to the Waterscape exhibition is definitely in the latter category. It’s an installation in the two parts. The first one Weather is around sixteen minutes long, broken into five movements (glacial melt, storm, shore, garden and pub) played over speakers in the exhibition space. The second part was installed on little portable MP3 players, with headphones so that you could listen just to it or to both pieces at once. The two pieces run in tandem to each other, you can stop and start the one on the player whenever you like and really play around with how the two of them interact with each other, moving yourself around the room, standing up or sitting down – I was alone in the space so I even tried lying on the floor, pretending I was in one of Marco Dessado’s boats on a loch somewhere – to really get the most out of the experience. If all art is changed by it’s interaction with the viewer, then it was true of this exhibit more than most.

If you get the chance, I highly recommend sitting on the floor between the two boats that make up the main part of Marco Dessado’s part of the exhibition, and listening to the headphones on one ear and the speakers with the other ear. The two parts of Gear’s installation interact in new and different ways on each loop. In the low slanting winter light, with the boats hanging close by at head height, you begin to feel almost underwater. Just lovely.

Waterscape ran at Circus Artspace @ Inverness Creative Academy from March 11th to March 18th – it continues, partially, online.

Waterscape Exhibition

Other Films @InvFilmFest

Tags

documentary, france, nablopomo, turkey, usa

I normally like to sort my film reviews for the film festival by the festival’s themes. Documentaries, short films, silent film, new world cinema, and perhaps a country or two in focus. However, no matter how organised I am, my taste is ultimately too eclectic to fit neatly into these categories, so there’s almost always an ‘other films’ section for the films I see and enjoy that don’t quite fit. This year that category applies to nearly half the screenings I attended as I wasn’t seeing enough films in any other given category to gather them together otherwise. There’s something about looking at the schedule for this year’s film festival that is short of like looking through a trick mirror. The scattering of themes, French, Canadian, documentary, like ghost trails of the larger, broader film festival that we might have had in another timeline.

Stray

This was a charming and meditative film, giving a dogs eye view of life in Istanbul. There’s both a warmth and a deep sorrow, to how it depicts the lives of both the dogs and the humans living rough on the streets of the city.

In some ways the film felt like a companion piece to Kedi from a couple of years ago, which focused on the relationship between the residents of the city and it’s stray/feral cat population. Istanbul, the film tells us, has one of the largest populations of stray dogs of any city, and despite various civic attempts to curb the issue, there are in facts laws against the impounding or euthanising of stray dogs – such was the public outcry against previous campaigns. This film is much less of a straight documentary than Kedi, as there are no direct to camera interviews, everything we learn about the human characters we meet is picked up in overheard snatches of conversations and arguments. We see the city and it’s humans much more through the dogs perspective than viewing the dogs through human eyes.

Part of the pleasure of the film for me, was trying to work out how certain sequences were filmed. Some sequences were clearly done with a Go Pro or similar harnessed to one of the central dogs. Other’s only seem possible if the camera operator was wearing the camera – perhaps a body camera at thigh height – and in some scenes the camera moves in ways I associate with drone cameras. But the real mystery is how they filmed it without impacting the reactions of passers by to the dogs. With the homeless kids, you can see that they got acclimated to the film-maker and just ignored them but with general members of the public most people never seem to even clock the camera, and when they do notice they don’t look to the operator the way I would expect. The eye-lines don’t work – I dearly want to know how they did it!

Mama Weed/La Daronne

This is a utterly charming and extremely French crime thriller comedy. Perhaps it’s just that most of the contemporary French films I’ve seen over the last few years have either been serious and realist or utterly ridiculous comedies that really didn’t work for me, but I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a French film this much in years. It had exactly the right balance of charm, ridiculousness and real threat to work as both a thriller and a comedy. It feels a little as if the director watched all those ridiculous Luc Besson crime/comedies of the late 90s, early 00s and thought, yes but what if we did it properly rather than as a trashy B movie? (No shade to Luc Besson, I’m a fan of his work, but he has made some terrible movies – to the extent that sometimes I think he’s doing it on purpose – he’s good at action but comedy…less so.) But honestly Pedro Almodovar feels like the main influence on this film, and that’s definitely not a bad thing.

Isabelle Huppert, who learned Arabic for the role, is really convincing in the role, both as someone out of her depth just trying to help someone she feels she owes, and as having an utterly ruthless streak buried under all that frailty. The film is full of layers, it takes a lot of digs at the French establishment, the underlying assumptions about police violence and assumptions about immigrants and crime that it both sends up and uses to it’s advantage. (The moments of solidarity between Pauline and her Chinese neighbour Colette are all entirely based on a shared realisation for both women that they are alike, that the only way they can thrive as immigrants is one grift or another, that whether they’re honest or not the state will fail them.)

Nomadland

I think this might actually be the only time, in the five years I’ve been attending the Inverness Film Festival that I’ve actually attended a ‘Closing Film’. I tend to avoid them, as they’re usually films that are already feted and likely to do well on the awards circuit, and frankly there’s usually something else on at the same time that I’d rather see and that is less likely to return. But there was something about Nomadland that just appealed to me, so I snaffled a ticket and I’m glad I did. There was definitely something rather thrilling about seeing a film months before it’s official theatrical release, knowing that the only other audiences to have seen it were those at other film festivals – even if the presence of an actual security guard with night vision goggles on looking out for film pirates was initially a little off putting! This film also had the special feature of an introduction from Paul the programmer, who was doubling up as projectionist for the evening, and has hopefully now seen the film!

The film is a fascinating insight into a hidden part of American culture – that exists just under the surface of the one that most people see. The cast of the film is largely populated by actual nomads, people who live the life portrayed in it, and who make the film possible by their participation. It feels like the film is as much about them as it is about Fern, that it memorialises their griefs and valorises their strength, and that the fiction element simply provides a distance that allows for a more honest and less exploitive experience than a documentary might have provided. (It’s almost the opposite of The Florida Project from a few years ago and everything that annoyed me about that film.) I have to take a moment to just appreciate Frances McDormand’s acting here. It’s very, I guess egoless is the best way I can describe it, she’s method acting I suppose, really living and breathing that character, who seems lost and vulnerable but ultimately resilient. It’s the opposite of a scene stealing performance, more of a self-effacing one, where she makes the other characters she shares the scene with shine instead.

Someone asked me at the start of the week, does the festival have a theme this year, and I blithely told them no, it’s not generally a themed festival. However, looking back on the week’s films, they do feel as though they all share – or at least all the ones I saw – not quite a theme but certainly a common thread. All the features that I saw deal, to a greater or lesser extent, with the idea of what it means to be free. The line between freedom and insecurity; people trapped by debt, poverty, health issues, trauma, addiction or just circumstances outwith their control. (I keep coming back to that Beatles lyric: oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go. The double meaning that lurks within that phrase: both terror and joy.) I wasn’t looking for it, and I don’t know if it was intentional but nonetheless it felt very fitting for these strange times that we’re living through.

Canadian Films @InvFilmFest

Tags

canadian, iff, inuit, nablopomo, quebecois

Today is the last day of the annual Inverness Film Festival so it’s high time I got some more film reviews up. First up, we have the Canadian films thread, which at first seemed rather unconnected in theme, tone and content, but on closer examination are perhaps more closely linked than I initially realised. I’m sure that in another year this would have been a rather chunkier film festival thread – and themes would have either been more obvious or revealed themselves more quickly as I watched – but as it was, it condensed down into the essence of a Canadian film theme, a comedy film in English, an art house film in Québécois and a film about indigenous issues. I only managed to see two out of three, but I think I saw the best of them.

And The Birds Rained Down

I think this might have been my favourite film of the festival, in fact, I think this might have been one of the best films I’ve seen all year. In a way it feels like the quintessential film festival film. A meditative film, in Québécois, about life, death, freedom and grief. However, the film has much deeper, darker themes, dealing in its own tender way with different kinds of trauma, the importance of intimacy and companionship and the vital issue of what choice and control mean in old age, both in life and death. It’s an oddly romantic film, though not really a romanticised one, more it’s a film that lives in the space where dreams – of freedom and independence, of travel and adventure, of lost love – meet reality, in the shape of social services, health issues and the way the modern world makes it increasingly hard for people to disappear when they need to.

Marie, as she styles herself, is the emotional heart of the film. Her whole life up to the start of the film has been subject to forces outwith her control – even her involvement in the events of the film is the result of her sister-in-law discovering letters from her in her late husbands papers and deciding to invite her to the funeral – and she starts the film, as a mostly a traumatised shell of a person, but slowly through the film she begins to regain control of her life and her destiny. It’s a fantasy of course, but anyone who’s had much contact with old mental health institutions knows that there are Marie’s everywhere, that they won’t get a second chance at their stolen lives and that even if they did most of them would be too institutionalised to cope with the world outside. But it’s a beautiful dream, and that more than anything else sums up the feeling of this film.

A Day In The Life of Noah Piugattuk

This film came via the efforts of the Isuma TV who are an online portal for Indigenous films and also apparently the only Inuit owned film production company. Interestingly when it was shown at the Vienna Bienelle, it was the first time an Inuit artist had featured in Canada’s pavilion there. More interestingly for me, was watching the credits and seeing the role call of Inuit surnames, not just a few key names, or just the on-screen faces, but across almost all areas and departments of the production.
The film is very much one about communication and what does or does not get lost in translation, so the use of subtitles to let the audience see that process is really effective. The other thing about the use of subtitles, is that the decision of what to subtitle and what to leave untranslated, especially when it comes to minority languages remains a very political decision. Ningiuq who acts as translator between Noah and the rest of his band and Boss the face of the white Canadian government, keeps insisting that he’s taking no side in this, merely translating what is said, and yet we see the things he omits – sometimes they seem like misunderstandings of his own, others deliberate attempts at diplomacy and defusing tension.

It’s also a film about standing on the edge of a great historical shift, of trying to make the best choices one can, for yourself, for your family, for your wider community and about whether you really have any choice in the matter at all. One of the interesting points that Boss makes a couple of times – and which isn’t really translated either time – is that he’d much rather be out here hunting and making his own rules too but that the world is changing, and they are all of them subject to forces outwith their control.

Come to think of it, while these two films seem like they couldn’t be more different if they tried, they do deal with a lot of the same issues, right down to the role that anthropological oral histories play in both films.

Keeping Sounds Safe on #TapeboxTuesday

Tags

archives, old media, sound, sound effects

Is it even a Nablopomo November if I don’t end up writing at least one post about an obscure audio topic? I suspect not.

Apparently, the 27th of October was World Day for Audiovisual Heritage so it feels a particularly appropriate time to write about the continuing efforts of the Save Our Sounds campaign. Unlocking Our Sound Heritage – to give the project it’s full name – is a British Library project to preserve, catalogue and give access to rare and unique sound recordings, in partnership with various arts bodies across the UK.

In these troubled times it can be hard to remember that once upon a time twitter was full of nerds – both political and technical – getting over-enthusiastic about their respective, and occasionally overlapping passions. Much as youtube doesn’t belong entirely to the conspiracy theorists and the alt-right, but also to the DIYers and the live music streamers, if you know where to look, twitter still contains silos of folks who really care about niche areas of technology and craft. I find audio preservation twitter to be a particularly soothing place to browse. Reading and listening to audio engineers and archivists being meticulously competent, is both charming and satisfying especially when everything else seems to be screaming along at 100 miles an hour, trailing insults.

Lately, I’ve been particularly enjoying the efforts of the Keep Sounds team – based at The Keep Archives in Brighton – and their excellent blog. Covering a variety of topics from the practical like, how to repair a cassette tape with a broken reel or how best to digitize an old tape, to collating and sharing some gems from the archive they’ve been digitising, through creative uses of tape, to musings on the vital role of oral histories in preserving otherwise unheard voices.

(If your archival interests are more broad spectrum – or just specific in a different area – may I recommend the #ArchiveZ tag, where a wide variety of the archives have been sharing the A to Z of gems from their own collections.)

No, this isn't a showstopper for 80s week on tonight's Bake Off…this group of sticky cassettes needed to be baked at a low heat for several hours before they could be played properly and digitised. Did you know that a food dehydrator works perfectly for this? #SaveOurSounds pic.twitter.com/qrLmS8Qrx1

— Keep Sounds (@KeepSounds) November 3, 2020

Perhaps it’s because I was on early radio shift last week – though doubtless writing part of this entry with a soundtrack of Na Dùrachdan contributed – but I’ve been thinking the archives that Radio Nan Gaidheal holds and what that archive means for the listenership. Since the pandemic first arrived on these shores, I’ve been spending much less time filming out in the field and much more time behind a sound desk in the studio. As a side effect of that, I’ve got to know a particular section of the output considerably better. Like most radio stations the majority of the musical output is in digital format, however unlike the vast majority they still have a decent amount of analogue music. Having largely cut my radio teeth in hospital radio, I was quite surprised how little vinyl we have on hand, but instead we have lots – and lots, three cupboards full – of old reel to reel tapes. Recordings from Mods, from ceilidhs on sundry islands, concerts and live studio sessions. Mostly singing – often unaccompanied – but some instrumental works alongside poetry and few story-tellers. In many cases the only recordings ever made of a notable singer or poet, now long dead. These are not dusty forgotten tapes. Many of them come out on a regular basis, not as novelty items but often as requests – the listeners know that they’re there and they request them. In their way they represent the memories of a generation in magnetic tape, artifacts of a changing way of life, decaying gently but no less treasured for it. The people captured on those tapes, are the parents, the siblings, the friends of the listeners – sometimes a request will come dedicated to the person who wrote it, or to celebrate the significant anniversary of a wedding the song was written to commemorate. They matter, very much, to the audience.

But the tapes are decaying, slowly but surely, in the way of all magnetic tape. A few weeks ago, a discussion about tape speeds – it hadn’t previously occurred to me that tapes like vinyl records might need different speeds to play correctly – led to my spotting, just in time that the adhesive had given up the ghost and the leader tape on the track we were about to play had come free. Emergency repairs were made and the listener got their request after all but I suspect this will start to happen more and more. Even our solid, reliable tape decks are aging out of service, the ‘spare’ deck kept as much for spare parts as it is for actual use.

What happens when they go? The ‘popular’ ones have been digitised, but what of the rest? They represent the memories of a generation, and also the dreams of another, one that thought these things were worth saving. The folklorists, historians, archivists and field recordists who saw shift in both generation and culture coming, and took advantage of the then new technology to preserve them. I don’t have an easy answer to this, or any answer at all really; it’s just that every time I use these tapes I’m reminded that these questions need to be asked – and soon.

lostpenguin · Tape FX

Glasgow Short Film Fest @InvFilmFest

Tags

animation, eden court, iff, short films

The Inverness Film Festival has returned! In a much reduced and socially distanced fashion, but it is happening in this year when so much else has been cancelled or moved online and that in itself is a cause for celebration. I think the weirdest bit is not the no voting slips, or printed blurbs on the short films, or even the virtual Q&A sessions or socially distant layouts. It’s the absence of each film having an intro from Paul the film programmer, I didn’t realise how much I’ve come to consider having his brief intros to the films – why they stood out to him, what makes them important, even just whether he thinks they’ll get a full release – an essential part of the film festival experience for this festival, but more than anything else the fact that it isn’t safe to have him do that really made the difference feel real to me.

However, it wouldn’t really be the film festival if I didn’t go to see some short films. This year’s shorts came courtesy of the Glasgow Short Film Festival and while I often find those to be a bit hit or miss – I either really love them or really hate them, this was definitely a highlights real. All very different, but pretty much universally enjoyable.

Betty

So this film turns on the concept of being it’s own directors commentary/making of film. It’s very high concept, and a bit too clever for it’s own good. I suspect your enjoyment of the film may be entirely dependent on whether you find the director character sympathetic or just pathetic? Personally, I wanted to know more about Betty herself and how she felt about the whole messy situation.

Once Upon a Time in Easterhouse

I think this was my favourite film of the collection, I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to like it, I thought it was going in a different direction to the one it ultimately did. It’s very much a coming of age story, there’s teenage gossip, friendship, figuring out who you are and who you want to be, football, photography and underneath it all, a lot of unspoken grief. It’s tender and clumsy but ultimately good-hearted, much like the boys and men at the heart of it. The final joke got a bigger laugh than it might otherwise have, purely, I suspect because it broke the tension and allowed the audience to express their relief that the film had gone in the direction that it did, rather than the way we feared it would.

Saturnalia

Was the shortest film of the lot, a sweet semi-documentary about space, scientists and different potential ways of being human in the future.

An Acceptable Face

This was a very raw little documentary, cleverly combining animation with snippets of different interviews with very different people about what it means to be visibly or invisibly LGBTQ in these modern times. Tender and confronting but ultimately very relatable.

The Motorist

Is a pitch black, but incredibly well made gothic horror. It owes a lot to the Wickerman, and those 70s horror films where something ancient and awful lurks in the countryside. It centres around a motorist involved in a hit and run accident, stopped but refusing to get out of his car, so I guess that makes it a very modern – or perhaps post-apocalyptic – take on that kind of film? There’s not a wasted moment in the film, even the quiet moments are carefully calibrated to crank up the tension. The woman’s soft warnings to the motorist, that there’s still a way out, that he can still save himself if he wants to, make a tender counterpoint to the rest of the character’s grim cynicism about human nature. Strange and creepy and quietly horrifying.

The Fabric of You

My second favourite of the films, and only knocked into second place by it’s sad ending. This is a beautifully made animated film, about a tailor mouse and his love affair with a customer. The attention to detail in the film is incredible, the puppets in particular are so amazing, the subtle nuance of emotion in their faces, the way their fur and clothes move and are put together. (The detail in their suits.) The tenderness of the relationship and it’s tragic conclusion.

Neville

This is a lovely, funny, heartbreaking look at childhood grief and imagination. It felt a very real portrayal, as though it came from first hand experience of watching/helping a child work through their grief. Unlike many portrayal of children in short films, young Angus felt like a real child, as charming and discomfiting as actual children often are, and his relationship with Neville is utterly believable, as this odd mixture of standard imaginary friend, idealised version of his dad, and punch bag to process his grief through.

It also led me to discover that it’s really awkward to cry in a mask, especially if you also wear glasses. I’ve mostly got the hang of the glasses plus mask combo – and the film festival is teaching me to master takeaway coffee plus mask – but there’s no easy way to subtly juggle mask plus glasses plus crying, without ending up steamed up or clammy-faced. This film, however, was well worth getting in a fankle over, even if I think that if I know ahead of time that a film is likely to be a tear-jerker, I’ll be wearing a scarf instead!

Lasts and Firsts @EdenCourt

Tags

documentaries, eden court, music, nablopomo, sudan, uk

Last week, amidst a news agenda full of grim and saddening stories, a moment of lightness and joy reached me. Eden Court was re-opening. It might sound trite but it’s nonetheless true, having an excellent wee – actually fairly big as these things go – arts centre practically on my doorstop has been high on my list of reasons to counter the puzzled questions as to what possessed me to move to the Highlands and more than that, to have stayed.

So obviously the first thing I did when I read the official re-opening announcement, was book myself in for a pre-work morning documentary screening and lunch afterwards. I was amused to discover that pretty much the entire audience of the screening I was in remained in their seats throughout the credits, until the lights came up fully, as though we were collectively soaking up the previously under-appreciated joy of seeing a film, in the cinema, with an audience.

In a moment as delightful symmetry I discovered that not only was the first film I saw in Eden Court since it re-opened a documentary, but the last film I saw there before it closed was also a documentary. They were also both films made last year that have proved to very much of this year’s moment.

The last film that I saw before Eden Court closed for the duration, was a Sudanese documentary called Talking About Trees. It’s a film about loving film, more about loving cinema, of sharing the collective magic of a film screening. In the documentary four aging cineastes run a small film club, screening classic films for small passionate audiences, so far so average film club story. The difference is that Sudan has no mainstream cinema-going culture to contrast it against. After a coup some thirty years before, almost all the cinemas closed and the film industry collapsed, for nearly two generations, the cinema going that we take for granted – or did take for granted – has been non-existent. The film follows these four as they set out a deceptively simple task, to hold a proper cinema night in an actual cinema. The face all kinds of challenges, from the dilapidated nature of the abandoned cinema they’ve got permission to use, getting the correct permits to put on the screening in the first place – not an easy task between government corruption, religious inspired censorship, and sheer grinding administrative indifference – to the purely logistical difficulty of getting a profession cinema screen and projector delivered to Sudan. Each individual challenge enough to put most people off, but not these four, these are men accustomed to disappointment, and not accustomed to giving into it. All this is interspersed with their day to day lives, running the film club, making their own films – one of the four holds the honour of both having had films screened at international film festivals, and having had most of his films banned by various Sudanese governments over the years – and reminiscing about their memories of the past and dreams of the future for their country. And do they succeed, you may ask? Well that would be telling.

The first film I saw after the cinema re-opened, the morning it re-opened in fact, was White Riot, a film about the Rock Against Racism movement and a film as in your face as Talking About Trees is meditative and contemplative. Though I suppose in it’s own way it’s quite an elegiac film. It’s a film about a particular time and place, about young people coming together because of a shared love of music and hatred of racism. The decision to make the most of the copious archive material by using the visual language of the zines around which the movement came together, is a great one, and really well executed. It really gives a sense of how raw and confronting those original materials were while incorporating lots more archive material than you otherwise could have fit into the film, in a way that keeps it vibrant and interesting instead of dusty and dull. The subject wasn’t exactly new to me, having been a teenage alternative music fan in the early 00s, and part of the induction into being a ‘proper’ punk fan was learning about the politics and Rock Against Racism – or Love Music Hate Racism as they became – was an important part of that. However, it was really good to see a thoughtful, well-made film that both treated it’s subject seriously and as something worth remembering. (The film has also got some cracking tunes, and gave me a bunch of new old punk and ska bands to check out.) The film is partly an arty little documentary about music subcultures in the late 70s, and partly it’s a damning indictment of the evils of the abuse of power, media propaganda and systemic racism. It also draws a whole bunch of unspoken parallels with today’s issues around racial justice and immigration, it doesn’t hit you over the head with them, just lays out the facts and leaves the viewer to draw their own conclusions. This is definitely a film that says: sure things used to be much worse and these folks helped make it better, but there’s still a lot of work to do. But I imagine that message felt a lot subtler and less urgent when the film was made last year than it does in this present moment.