Random Acts: Film Fear

Tags

art films, channel 4, nablopomo, random acts, short films

The Random Acts strand on Channel 4 comes from the notion that in order to find a new/more vibrant approach to arts programming, you need not only television about artists, but also television by artists. The strand started in 2011 and has had six series so far. They incorporate visual art, music, dance, animation and spoken word performance. They feel exactly the kind of short film you’d stumble across by accident at some unearthly hour of the morning on Channel 4. (They are, as we say, ‘on brand’ in this sense.) I first came across this strand by accident while looking for horror movies to watch around Halloween, as it was the strange mini horror films that drew me in, it seems only fair to consider them first. All three films were showing as part of the Film Fear season on Film Four.

Stilts

In which a young man is trapped in an oppressive dystopia where everyone must wear huge metal stilts.

This is a deeply surreal film where I presume the stilts are intended to be a metaphor for something, but I’ve not the faintest idea what that might be. (Class or caste presumably, because the summary may say that everyone must wear stilts, but evidentially not everyone does. There’s clearly a class of people who don’t and are able to pick and choose who gets to join them.) Nonetheless it’s a beautifully realised dystopia, where everything is sized for people without stilts so all the stilted people are forced into the space between too high table and chairs and too low ceilings. It does a good job of creating an atmosphere of claustrophobia along with the arbitrary and restricted nature of life in a closed society. What does lie down that too short corridor to the outside world?

Satanic Panic ‘87

A short and gory comic horror that involves a satanic aerobics video that encourage two young heavy metal fans to open a portal into hell. I really liked that the hellish aerobic video was fronted by a demonically possessed perky blonde who despite the glowing white eyes really did look like she’d stepped out of an 80s aerobics video. Despite the lashings of blood in this film, it’s not actually that gory, and the decision to shoot through the ajar kitchen door allows the ‘sacrifice’ scene to be played for dark humorous effect. Our grisly duo frantically flapping tea-towels under the beeping smoke alarm as their sacrifice immolates noisily gives the whole thing a delightfully surreal tone.

Sweep Away Hungry Ghosts

Is a ghost story about Chinese filial piety and cross-dressing.

A young Chinese man is clearing out his late father’s house and keeping vigil at his alter through the longest watches of the night. He’s clearly conflicted in his feelings around the task, and struggling to reconcile the outer image his father showed to the world and the other version he has discovered through clearing out all the accoutrements of his cross-dressing. Despite, or perhaps because of, his attempts to burn the evidence, in the night he is visited by the ghost of his father – in genderbent form – and although at first he attempts to banish the ghost, he eventually accepts that he must take care of the ghost and array it as his father would have wished to be, only then can both he and the ghost move on.

(I don’t know a great deal about Chinese funeral traditions, so I’m not entirely sure, given the solidity of the ghost, if he’s supposed to be the ghost of the young man’s father or if he’s some form of walking dead, who objected to being arrayed incorrectly in death?)

It’s a haunting but lovely little film.

Feeling Invisible on Ada Lovelace Day

Tags

ada lovelace day, sound, women in STEM, work

Ada Lovelace Day rolled around again last month and I was, honestly, too busy doing STEM related stuff to blog about it. I had to content myself with a couple of social media posts on the subject and a few regretful thoughts about the times when the day would have prompted a veritable essay on the subject.

It did, however, make me want to write about it for the first time in ages.

Initially I tweeted about the tiny robots I’d spent the previous weekend building. Which are rather charming and deserve their own post about my adventures in electronics.

But I also tweeted about my office that week.

It turns out that I have feelings about the way we talk about STEM.

I’ve always considered myself to be a woman working in STEM. (Regardless of whether or not I happen to be getting paid for it at any particular moment.) My primary professional identity since I qualified, has been Sound Designer, but when I have to explain what I do to people not in the industry, I fall back on the first title I was given at 15 working on a school musical. Sound Tech. It covers a multitude of sins. (Sound Designer, Sound Mixer, Sound Recordist, Boom Operator, Dialogue Editor, Foley Artist, Sound Artist, Documentary Maker, Radio Production Person, Radio DJ, Radio OA/PA, Technical Operator.) I’m a tech: I work in Technology. My STEM heroes that I’ve written about for Ada Lovelace days past have all been women working at the intersection of sound and technology. I’ve never seen the contradiction in that. Yet, every year as I read through the posts and tweets that abound on the day, it occurs that for most people the Technology in STEM means Information Technology and Computing and that’s it. The rest of us become invisible.

Film and television have a very firm divide between ‘creatives’ and ‘techs’ – which is a little ridiculous when you consider that most techs in the industry have to be pretty creative to find solutions to the practical problems of transforming script into ‘reality’ – just look at the different way the awards for ‘creative’ aspects of film are treated compared to those for ‘technical’ or ‘craft’ roles.

For the majority of my career I’ve worked freelance and currently, due to geography and fortunate circumstances, roughly 50% of the time I’m a Technical Operator for a major broadcaster in their Newsroom. It’s a regional outpost, so the technical staff is small and multi-skilled. We work across television and radio, shooting news pieces for journalists, editing footage, operating satellite trucks and sound desks, vision mixing news bulletins, crawling under desks trying to figure out if that clicking noise is just a loose connection or the sound desk slowly dying… It’s varied and interesting. It’s also a majority male job. Not that I’m the only woman on the job, I have a fair number of female colleagues both in our office and in other branches throughout the country. Enough that I’ve never felt like an oddity in the role. That, by and large, tech colleagues I meet presume I’m competent on first meeting and treat any gaps they find in my knowledge as an opportunity to wax lyrical about their specialist subject, rather than to patronisingly dismiss me. Over the years I’ve made friends and found mentors amongst my colleagues and had supervisors of both genders that had my back and supported my professional development. Such an ordinary, normal experience but one that I know that many other women in STEM don’t get to have.

Whatever limitations the recession has inflicted on my career development over the years, I’m only too aware that I’ve been lucky. It’s been nearly a decade since the last time I sat in a job interview and watched my interviewer struggle to find an appropriate way to ask a question that was essentially ‘why would a girl want to do this job?’ (Protip: There isn’t one. If you do ask then the answer is ‘if you have to ask then I don’t want to work here.’) Women were an oddity in the field 50 years ago, by now we’re an accepted minority. If anyone still thinks there shouldn’t be women in the job, they’re smart enough to keep their mouth shut. If I’m being discriminated against, it’s subtle enough that I don’t notice.

So in my experience its not other techs who question what I’m doing in the job. It’s people in other jobs. From ‘creatives’ who presume I’m just using it as a stepping stone into their side of things – well, I’m certainly hoping it’ll be a stepping stone to a permanent job – to the sundry people, of all ages and genders, that I’ve worked with in other jobs over the years who, with varying levels of tact and diplomacy, asked why on earth I wanted to do a ‘boy’ job – it’s a job? That I enjoy and I’m good at?

Even people who are otherwise pro getting more women in STEM careers seem to overlook the T. Perhaps its not glamorous enough or not cerebral enough. Our discoveries and triumphs are unlikely to change the world. Most of the time we’re invisible backroom girls, and many of us prefer it that way, but do us a favour and don’t erase us further.

A Little Wanderlust, Courtesy of BBC Four

Tags

documentaries, germanophile, indian hill railways, railways, steam trains, tv

I don’t normally write about television on this blog, but seeing as this year seems to have involved a lot of breaking of tradition here on the blog I’ll make an exception. I’m not a big television watcher but with holiday knitting looming large some escapist television is deemed necessary. Of course one person’s escapist television is not the next person’s. Not for me the period dramas, rom-coms or ‘holiday movies’. No, while I attempt to get everything I should have done over the previous six weeks done in the space of six days, my televisual distraction of choice takes the form of gentle BBC Four factual shows. Two particular series have caught my imagination lately, being Indian Hill Railways and Julia Bradbury’s German Wanderlust.

The first series is not yet finished but so far has been excellent so I highly recommend having a wee search through the schedules for it (there are three episodes up on the iPlayer at the moment too). The series focuses on various narrow-gauge railways in the mountains across India, built by the British Raj to service their hill-stations at the end of the 19^th Century. The first two programmes focus on Darjeeling and Nilgiri which both still run steam trains and there was something decidedly surreal about watching workers making the spare parts for the engines when I’ve previously only seen that in scratchy old archive footage. (Having spent a lot of time at my day job in recent months communing with a lot of archive about Glasgow Built locomotives, I feel the need to note that Loco 788 had just been restored and was still puttering about Darjeeling in active service when this documentary was made.) With each episode focusing on a different line and its community over the course, the viewer is introduced not only to the characters and subculture that surrounds the railway, but also to that of their diverse communities. At some stations the trains are a source of commerce at others the big water tanks for the steam engines are a vital resource for local communities that are otherwise always short of water. There’s something oddly intriguing about seeing the way in which the regulations and rituals that the British left behind have been maintained in some ways and subverted in others to suit the needs of the communities the trains serve.

And no doubt railway enthusiasts the length of the British Isles are watching this series, shaking their fists at the screen and cursing Beeching.

Not being a regular TV watcher, my knowledge of Julia Bradbury can be summed up as ‘that lassie who walks around the Lake District reading bits out of a book’ – a technique I approve of in principal but suspect I would fall over if I tried it myself – but these days she appears to be enough of a name to get a series named after her. Actually I nearly didn’t watch this series as I tend to avoid programmes of the ‘so and so’s such and such’ format, which is probably an unfair generalisation but I’ve seen too many boring star vehicles and life’s too short to watch bad television. However, my abiding love for Germany is up there with my love of railway journeys, so I focused instead on the words ‘wanderlust’ and ‘Bavaria’ and I’m very glad that I did. Julia Bradbury turns out to be a rather personable presenter, with a genuine enthusiasm for the walking and puts the background factual information across to the viewer in a knowledgeable manner. Which is pretty much what I look for in a tour guide, to be honest.

I enjoyed the format of picking a subject related to the walk and learning about it along the way as a counterpoint to the frankly stunning views. A little bit of history, a little bit of geology, a little of bit of art, a few local experts and eccentrics enthusing about their specialist subject, it might be decidedly gentle television but it was engaging and oddly compulsive viewing. I was quite sad when I reached the end of the fourth episode and found that there was no more to watch.

I don’t actually feel like I know a great deal more about the Romanticism movement in Germany during the 1800s but I now have some nice anecdotes about very beautiful bits of Germany and have spent a very pleasant couple of hours in good company. Also, I really want to go on holiday to Germany now.