Sounds of the Islands

Tags

nablopomo, sound effects

Back in July, I found myself over on the Isle of Lewis for a week, covering a colleague’s summer holidays. The weather forecast looked promising and the nature of the job meant there would likely be far more time spent on the road around Lewis and Harris than in the office. Naturally, that meant I definitely needed to take my little sound recorder. When I’m out in the field for work my job really only has two modes, furiously busy or standing around waiting for things to happen and on those rare latter occasions, I tend to wish for my little sound recorder.

Obviously on days I was working on a piece there was no time to use my little recorder, so there were no recordings from Harris – a shame because had we been less tight for time I could have got some cracking livestock sounds, along with some old school tractor engines, at an agricultural show! However, I also spent a few afternoons out filming library pictures for future use, and while out doing that I certainly had time to take a tea break and make some recordings.

Being a small (ish) island, Lewis is largely a marine environment, you’re never more than 10 miles from the sea. It’s easy to forget that a lot of the time though, other than being pretty flat and rather short of trees you be forgiven for thinking you were on the mainland a lot of the time. At least until the sea heaves back into sight again. Except for the boats everywhere. The way other places have abandoned or ‘under repair’ cars sitting around in driveways and in corners of fields, Lewis has boats. But really it was the variety of different water sounds that I was able to capture that really took me by surprise. My recordings of the waves crashing on the beach and the gentle gurgling of water in the harbour wall were taken approximately 12 feet apart in Port of Ness. It’s been a long time since I recorded properly open water and even then the English Channel is as nothing to the rage of the Atlantic. Especially not when there’s nothing between you and the Faroe Islands in one direction and Canada in another, you really feel on the edge of Europe there.

My recordings on Lewis tended to come in batches, with a few solo exceptions, I mostly seemed to find a promising location and then make a collection of recordings. Half a dozen from the harbour in Port of Ness, three at Stornoway Airport, another couple from the window of my hotel room of the street below.

One thing I noted more than anything else was that it was never actually quiet. Even wandering the Sabbath quiet streets of Stornoway, the moment I switched on my little recorder the true depth of sound quickly revealed itself. The distant rumble of traffic, and trundle of bikes through the woods at Lews Castle, or the drifting hymns and other voices than were obvious even three floors up from my hotel window.

The theme of the week was not, as I expected from my experience in the Shetlands, wind, wind and more wind. (Which is not to say that it wasn’t breezy, I don’t think I’ve ever been so windswept in my life.) Rather it was: ‘and seagulls’. So many of the recordings I made have audio tags that end ‘and seagulls’ that I can sometimes hear either laughter or frustration in my own voice listening back to them. I did eventually just lean into it, and purposefully recorded a seabird colony while visiting the lighthouse at Butt of Lewis. Appropriately enough there are in fact no seagulls in that recording; black-headed gulls certainly – also gannets, shags, fulmars and a possible kittiwake – but no seagulls.

Cello Full of Bees

Tags

bees, cello, nablopomo, sound science

"My name is Martin and I have a cello full of bees"🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝 pic.twitter.com/KpWph1MGvc

— BBC Radio Nottingham (@BBCNottingham) June 26, 2019

Some days, it can feel like Twitter – and for that matter, the wider internet – has become a garbage pile of algorithm enabled rage and nonsense. However, some days you come across something – a charming animation, a moving short film, a bonne mot of pleasing wit – that reminds you that there is still good in the world, both virtual and out here on terra firma. Some times they will even lead you down the kind of rabbit hole that you’d forgotten were once a major usage of time spent online. You start with a charming viral video about something – for example a cello full of bees – both innocuous and oddly compelling, start looking into it, one click leads to another and before you know it you’re half way through a 17 page article on the Dorso-Ventral Abdominal Vibration signals of Honeybees and you’ve got a burning desire to go visit an art installation at Kew Gardens.

(If you’re going to write an academic report about the use of frequency modulation by bees, I feel you’re missing an opportunity if you don’t make at least a few orchestra based puns. Working in harmony, orchestrating hive-wide co-ordination, a symphony of drones. I’m both impressed and a little disappointed in these otherwise worthy academics.)

It feels somehow fitting to discover that it was artist Wolfgang Buttress following a similar rabbit hole that led to his collaboration with Martin Bencsik on the Hive in the first place. Though perhaps given the nature of the work and the way it’s sparked of creative inspiration in all sorts of interesting directions – from sculpture to soundscapes – the correct metaphor is not rabbit hole but rather bee hive. An interconnected network of the strange and the beautiful, each part special in it’s own right but collectively rather more.

Inspiration comes in the strangest ways from the most unlikely connections and collaborations. You never can tell what combination of factors will cause that spark to catch fire, anymore than you can predict which charming video clip will go viral on any given day. I now know – and find adorable – that bees buzz in the key of C and that those bees are living in a C cello! Perhaps that will only ever be an anecdote I tell colleagues when we’re being bothered by insects out in the field, or perhaps one day it will lead me down another stranger pathway to make some art of my own.

I spend a great deal of time working in news these days, and it can be easy to get overwhelmed and terribly cynical in the face of all the unexpectedly terrible and downright petty things that the world has to offer. And yet, it is still possible to be surprised and delighted by how much stranger and more wonderful the world truly is, if you just know where to look and keep an open mind.

As this winter election season kicks off, keep in mind, that somewhere in Nottingham, a cello-full of bees are hibernating, waiting for the spring.

Art in Inverness

Tags

art, art exhibits

One of the best things about many Scottish urban spaces, is the way the surrounding landscape forces its way into the urban skyline at unexpected moments. There are few more breath-taking moments for me in autumn, than rounding a corner, as the light is fading and being surprised by some gap in the skyline revealing the play of light shade on a distant hill. Even in the centre of a city as densely populated and built up as Glasgow, you can still walk down Buchanan Street on a clear day and look up at the right moment to find you can see all the way to the Cathkin Braes. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the Highlands, where the lines between urban and rural are so blurred that it is easy to lose track of where they lie. Indeed, a fair amount of the art I’ve seen since living up here – at least from locally based artists – has explored that mutability to a greater or lesser extent and effect.

Art is everywhere here. When I first moved up to Inverness, despite favourable first impressions, I did wonder how much art – let alone interesting art – I was likely to find on anything like a regular basis. Most of the really interesting art I’d seen in over a decade of living in and around Stirling had been stuff that I’d stumbled on, mostly by accident. And almost all the art that I’d gone actively looking for in that time had been in Glasgow or Edinburgh, cities I already knew to a certain extent. Indeed, at first I only really saw art in the galleries upstairs in the local museum and the local arts centre, but as time passed, I’ve learned to sniff out the clues. It turns out that once you know what to look for, art can be found all over the place here, bursting out all over.

The on-going grind of the recession has left Inverness, like almost every other town in Scotland, with its share of mournful looking empty retail units. However, over at the Victorian Market, they seem to have come up with an idea that feels like it ought to have been an obvious idea. They’re using one of the empty units as an exhibition space. It’s currently displaying art from UHI students, which I hope continues, given that while the college itself is rather a charming piece of architecture, it’s apparently rather lacking in spaces in which to make and display art. We can only hope that this results in rather more innovative and experimental takes on producing and displaying art from the resident art students. In the interim, I’ve certainly been enjoying finding odd bits of art and craft-based sculpture in unexpected corners of the market and in unlikely shop windows.

Social media has been a great boon in my search for new art. I’ve spent a fair amount of time, working on identifying a collection of good local sources that promote art locally and nationally. But its definitely one of those situations where the more you find out, the more you find there is to find. Or often in my case, the more I find I’ve just missed.

Something that I often narrowly miss, are the exhibitions at Upstairs. Between 2pm and 4pm on week day afternoons, an architecture firm on Academy Street opens their doors to art lovers. Small exhibitions by local artists are the order of the day and there’s something delightfully transgressive about the whole experience. Although the gallery has managed the rare trick of being open at precisely the time-frame when I’m least likely to be free to enjoy some art, on those occasions that I’ve managed to make it along to see the art, I’ve both greatly enjoyed the art – the current exhibition of constructed photography by Michael Gallacher is well worth a visit – and the feeling that I’ve snuck in somewhere I’m not supposed to be.

The building itself is a bit of a hidden gem, with a lovely tiled entranceway, and nicely understated glasswork on the stairwell windows. And the advantage of the gallery space being in an Architecture firm, if you’re me anyway, is that even if the art turns out to not be your taste, they’ve got some fascinating little architectural models of their own on display that you can enjoy while you’re there.

This month, even the more conventional location of Inverness Museum and Art Gallery’s upstairs art gallery had rather an eccentric exhibition. A Curious Turn is a visiting exhibition from The Craft Council, on the history and resurgence of automata as both a craft and art form. It’s very rare that I see art exhibitions that feel like they’ve been carefully crafted into a work of art themselves. The exhibition is full of delightful details from the hand-cranked exhibition sign, to the little mule that draws himself, to the odd assortment of cogs, cranks and accoutrements that let younger visitors build their very own automata. (When I visited someone had put together the kind of macabre assemblage that only small children and art students are capable of creating.) My own favourite part of the exhibition was that almost all the automata on display were operable, if their handles were too small and fiddly for general use, they’d been wired up so that you could make them run in their glass cases with a push of a button.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love ‘Bad’ Movies

Tags

luc besson, space opera, the fifth element

The other day there was a meme of sorts going round Twitter, challenging people to: Type one movie in the GIF bar that you watched more than 5 times and still love it today. Without a second thought I typed in The Fifth Element and up popped this most apt of GIFs. It sums up both what I love about that movie and my entire attitude towards other people’s opinions about the movie. It’s a great movie: fight me.

Still one of my favourite movies pic.twitter.com/Uk91G9Znfq

— lostpenguin (@lostpenguin) November 2, 2017

I didn’t go to university intending to be a film student – I went intending to be a journalist and took a swerve along the way – so I didn’t spend my late teens acquiring a connoisseur’s knowledge of Classic and New Hollywood as so many of my compatriots did.

The movies that shaped my film-watching identity growing up were cheesy 80s action adventure movies and those black and white B-movies that Channel 4 used to run on Sunday afternoons. I’ve still never seen John Carpenter’s famous The Thing but I did see the 1951 The Thing from Another World at an impressionable age. I arrived in film class unencumbered by any notion of film snobbery, other than a firm conviction that people who wouldn’t watch a film because it happened to be in either black and white or had subtitles, didn’t know what they were missing. I was in for a surprise.

The ‘serious’ film students that I knew – the ones who’d grown up watching movies obsessively and started making short films as soon as they could get hold of a camera – all had a favourite director. I was much more a fan of genres of films rather than any one director’s oeuvre. But it turned out to be the first thing that non-film students would ask you as soon as they met you, and the further through film class we got the more often classmates would ask that question on introduction and judge you accordingly. They might have a deep, abiding passion for martial arts movies or slasher films but they’d never try to claim they were great films.

So I did what anyone might do in the circumstances. I decided to troll people. I would pick a ridiculous answer and spend an evening claiming that they were my favourite director. I’ve forgotten the many names I used back then, because, one day, at a party, I claimed Luc Besson and it all went a bit pear-shaped.

Back in my first year of university, for our first proper film studies essay, we had to pick a scene from a movie that we knew well and deconstruct it. At home for the weekend, I scoured my shelves and came across, an old taped-off-the-tele copy of The Fifth Element and ended up deconstructing the fight scene between Leeloo and the Mangalores, focusing on the visual parallels created between Leeloo and the Diva. It’s a great scene, visually rich, cleverly constructed and joyful in its execution.

But what it meant, above all, was that when I claimed that Luc Besson was my favourite director and that The Fifth Element was his greatest film, was that I’d done the reading, and could in fact argue convincingly on the subject. Friends who were in on the joke would find me DVDs of obscure films he’d directed or produced – the less said about Kiss of the Dragon or the Taxi films the better to be honest – for me to watch as research and I picked up a second hand copy of a BFI directors book on him. Somewhere along the line, it stopped being a joke. I’d watched a ridiculous number of his films, and most of them I really liked. I had accidentally become a genuine fan of his work beyond my teenage passion for The Fifth Element. Perhaps it should have been embarrassing, but I was in too deep now for it to get a look in. And yet, there remained something delightfully amusing in watching that moment when the person I was talking to realised that I was serious in claiming Besson as my favourite director, that my love for The Fifth Element was entirely without irony. Even now, almost a decade and a half on from that fateful Christmas party, I still occasionally get asked and get to enjoy that moment once again.

(I have two kinds of film geek friends. The kind who are appalled when I suggest that Alien Resurrection is better and more true to the first two films than Alien3 and the kind who present me with obscure 80s Japanese films with the explanation: it’s got a giant animatronic centipede.)

My quest to watch his entire back catalogue, led me on an adventure first into the films of Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet and through them down parallel paths to nouvelle vague and film noir, and into the gory glories of horror movies. To find myself enthusiastically bonding with my to-be lecturer at my Masters course interview about the joys of Eric Serra’s scores and the wonderful use of sound in Le Dernier Combat. For a while I even found myself having somehow become the go to person to write a serious academic film review of an obscure Hammer Horror film.

I love silent film and film noir, weird Japanese movies and films from Francophone West Africa, serious documentaries and whimsical European films about the meaning of life. But most of all, I love ridiculous sci-fi space operas, with big action sequences and even bigger hearts.

And that, ladies and gentlepeople, is the story of how Luc Besson became my favourite film director. He’s not the best director in the world, and not a director without flaws or failings, but nonetheless my favourite. I’ve never seen a film by him that I haven’t enjoyed and I still seek out his new films in the cinema whenever I can. Because what his films taught me was to embrace the things in cinema that I loved ironically, with genuine enthusiasm. That there is a place for both the silly and the serious in film – sometimes even within the same film.

Some things are indeed worth saving.

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.

November Approaches

Tags

writing

November is almost upon us and as such, Nablopomo has rolled around again. I started last year’s challenge, late but with good intentions, but only managed four posts in the end. As I’ve not been writing very much over the last six months, it would be great if this challenge got me back into writing regularly, but honestly as long as I write more than four posts this month I’ll consider it a victory. To make things hopefully go better, I’ll be dividing my posts for the challenge between here and my food blog. The idea being that when I don’t want to make posts about films I’ll write about food and visa versa.

It feels oddly appropriate to be writing this today as, while I was poking around getting ready to post this, WordPress wished me happy anniversary. I started this blog 8 years ago. (Happy Birthday, little blog.) Over the years its morphed from somewhere to collect my freelance writing efforts immediately post graduation from uni, through music and short film blog to chronicalling my adventures in sound art and documentaries.

I am slightly more confident about my chances of success this year, due to having actually made a plan this year. Last year I just had some vague ideas of some themes that might work but this year, I’ve made a list of the posts I’ve been thinking about writing lately with titles and wee descriptions. (15 of them! That’s half the days accounted for.) So my real target will be to get them all written by the end of the month. Anything more than that will be a bonus.

I’ve got a plan: let’s do this.

Revolution No 7

Tags

gaelic, revolutions not resolutions, writing

Well it’s the New Year, and all the blogs I follow are full of people either making resolutions for the year ahead or swearing off resolutions for good. Personally I like making resolutions, I love a good to-do list, for the accountability it brings and also the perspective on how priorities have changed in the previous 12 months. It’s easy to get bogged down in the everyday minutia and forget what we’ve achieved.

I like this time of year for that reason, taking stock, celebrating what we’ve done well and resolving to do better at other things. Now is the time to get back on the horse with things that make our lives better and ditch the things that don’t work for us. (Now is the time to acknowledge you’re not going to finish Wuthering Heights however many times you try to read it, and hand it in to a charity shop rather than glowering at it guiltily every time you spot it on the shelf. Or maybe that’s just me…) Another year another revolution of the planet, time to dust ourselves off and start again.

Last year I actually did a lot of sound work, but I rarely wrote about it, I’d just got out of the habit of it. So this year’s resolution is to write a post every month on here about what sound projects I’m working on at the moment – big or little – the problems I’m encountering and the cool new things I’ve learned. And about sound things that are inspiring me or that I’m just enjoying. Yesterday for example I inhaled the entirety of Radio 4’s adaptation of Neverwhere and I’m dying to talk about how excellent Dirk Maggs sound design was, I need to make a post rather than just flailing about it briefly on twitter. I like twitter, it does provide a useful medium to get excited about sound stuff when I don’t have time to write a sensible/full length post, and I used to use it as a bookmark system for short films and sound projects that I wanted to write about but didn’t have time right now to do so, I should get back to that. And so we revolve again.

I did actually have a good reason for writing less last year. For the last few years I’ve been learning Gaelic, but in the last 18 months I’ve kicked up a gear by taking a Certificate of Higher Education in Gaelic through the UHI. It’s been challenging, and time consuming, but increasingly I understand more and more, so I think, worth it. However, it’s meant that any spare moment has been spent squeezing in extra vocabulary practice and grammar revision rather than writing here. Maybe I should combine the two and write about Sound Design in Gaelic? Now that would be truly specialised vocabulary… But, the course ends in April so hopefully normal service will resume then.

Docs of 2011: Good but not Groundbreaking

Tags

documentaries, films

So this time last year I set myself the task of watching a documentary a month to see how practical that was in terms of documentary release. Well, I successfully watched twelve documentaries last year though not actually one a month, sometimes none one month and two the next. However, what I can say is that there are in fact enough documentaries released in cinemas to see one each month, though due to the nature of the arts cinema that I frequent they’re not always recent releases (they often do themed runs so for example, October/November was all political documentaries). Despite having managed to up my documentary viewing to a level that pleases me I still didn’t see some of this year’s ‘big’ releases. I was quite disappointed to miss Senna, Pina and for that matter Jig when they were on and neither Project Nim nor Bobby Fischer Against the World moved me to want to track them down. (I’m looking forward to seeing Dreams of a Life but that hasn’t reached here yet.) I did see a variety of documentaries which I did feel was equally if not more important in this process. I saw a nature film and two environmental ones, two silent documentaries from the very dawn of the genre, saw Bill Hicks at his worst and his best, a fly on the wall Czech television film about a Slovakian village, an Irish documentary about women talking about men, a year in the life of a newspaper and a day in the life of the world, an intensely political documentary about Guantamo Bay and a film about the history of a font. The variety of documentaries that are being made out there is vast, not all of them are brilliant, many of them aren’t to my taste but they’re getting made and they are, just as importantly, getting screened.

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.

Constructed Reality: Docs of 2010

Tags

documentaries

Apparently it’s the start of a new year. It sort of sneaked up on me, so I’m a little late with my annual review of the year’s documentary films. I managed to see five feature documentaries this year, an improvement by one on last year, though only four were actually in the cinema. There were a few interesting looking documentaries showing at my local art cinema towards the end of the year, but I missed them due to about a foot and a half of snow falling on us and making getting to and from work in one piece an adventure of epic proportions. Perhaps my new years resolution should be to try and watch a documentary film every month this year, it might be a good way to judge whether there are enough documentaries released in cinemas in the year to manage that. It also might make me finally get round to watching Taxi to the Dark Side, which I bought just after I did this for the first time at the end of 2008.

If this year’s cinematic documentary offerings had a theme it was blurring the lines. There was a great deal of playing with – and down right manipulating in a few cases – audience perceptions, constructed realities and general blurring of the lines between fact and fiction. Even mockumentaries didn’t seem certain about exactly what they were. Most notably I’m Still Here – which regardless of what one thinks about the film itself, shows a remarkable willingness by Joaquin Phoenix to go to extremes for a role – and the still mysterious Catfish which at the time of writing the film-makers are still insisting is a genuine documentary and the media in general are still getting worked up about. Chinese documentary 24 City, mixed oral history contributors with actors, personal memories with stories, in a way that became more or less obvious to the audience depending on how familiar they were with Chinese cinema. It is arguably a good year for documentary experimentation when the most conventional documentaries I saw this year were the two films by Julian Temple that were screened at the Shetland Film Festival back in September.

There seems to be a great deal of moral indignation among film critics around these issues but the alternative view point – that some at least of these film-makers seem to be cognizant of and may actually be the underlying point – is that all documentary is constructed to a great or lesser degree. Making a documentary is always about telling a story, constructing an image of reality, from the choices of interviewees to the quotes used, every decision in the editing room is naturally subjective. Documentary makers, like journalists and historians are subject to bias, they have their own agendas, however much they might like to think they don’t. We all do. Some documentary makers may claim to be seekers after the truth but not all do or are, and either way truth can be a pretty subjective thing itself. The fact that some documentaries have chosen to play with the conventions of documentary, to question or at least to foreground the necessarily constructed nature of the genre can actually be seen as a good thing. Especially if it makes viewers question what they see; we shouldn’t accept unquestioningly what we are told. It speaks to me of a genre/form that is alive and vibrant, changing and developing, questioning itself: a healthy medium. I find that quite a hopeful thought.

12 Films Project (Part 2)

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12 films, films

So a fortnight ago I did my twelfth and final film for this challenge, it took me much longer than a year but that was mostly because I didn’t actually watch a lot of films. Because it was taking me so much longer to do the challenge than I’d expected it made me count how many films I’d never seen before that I was watching in general terms and the answer was very few. Since January this year I’ve watched twelve films I hadn’t seen previously, eight of those were for this challenge. (If nothing else this challenge has made me watch a lot of films that would otherwise have continued to lurk on my ‘to watch’ list and introduced my mum to the pleasures of Mira Nair’s films.) It’s somewhat challenged my perceptions of my own film watching, I’d always thought of my film watching as being fairly diverse, not as diverse as I’d like (obviously, I’d hardly be doing this challenge if I thought it was) but more diverse than a lot of people I know certainly. And while yes, the latter part remains true, my film watching is a lot less diverse than I would like to think and I really need to work to change that on a longer term basis. I watched quite a lot of films from places I’d never seen films from before but my non-European film-watching remains centred almost entirely on Asia, just shifted further west across the continent with Bollywood films (which due to where I now work is an industry I could easily do the entire challenge in) fast becoming my safety net where Japanese martial-arts films were before. Obviously I need to push out of the comfort zone, so I’m going to make an effort to see more Indian cinema from outside the Bollywood system, I’ve had some really interesting recommendations of Tamil cinema for a start. Other than that I’m keen to watch more cinema in indigenous/minority languages, because those are my pet loves outside this challenge too.

I think I really need to start at the beginning again, I’ve got a bunch of films from various parts of Africa that I intended to watch and never got round to for a start…   Recommendations appreciated as always.

1. Samson and Delilah

2. Bed of Flowers

3. 7 Khoon Maaf/7 Sins Forgiven

4. Halaw/Ways of the Sea

5. Nobody Knows About Persian Cats/Kasi-az-gorbehaye-irani-khabar-nadareh

6. Bamako

7. Happy Together/Chun Gwong Cha Sit

8. Red Cliff/Chi Bi

9. Mesnak/Turtle

10. Abouna

11. Daratt

12. Rouge Parole