Velvet Queen: A Film about Patience, Observation, and also Snow Leopards

Tags

documentary, france, tibet

Velvet Queen: Snow Leopard (Munier/Amiguet, 2021) is a documentary about snow leopards and also very much not about snow leopards. It’s a film about nature photography and about film making, about observing and being observed, about what it means to be a human in a wild landscape, both part of and separate from nature. The snow leopards are kind of a metaphor for a bigger theme about dreams and the modern obsession with ticking off experiences but they’re also very really creatures, beautiful, shy and dangerous. It’s a gorgeously shot, dreamy film, that lulls the viewer into a very meditative state of mind, while at the same time peeling away the glamour of filmmaking to show just how much of nature photography and film-making involves sitting very still and very quietly in one spot for long periods of time, making your peace with the fact that the animal may not show up at all, while at the same time staying alert so you don’t miss it if it does appear.

Probably my favourite part of the film was the way that it gradually revealed increasing amounts of detail as it went along. At the start of the film, the cinematography focused almost entirely on the landscape; all dramatic landscapes and vistas. We know there are humans in the landscape too – the very first scene of the film is an exchange between two of the local Tibetans being mildly concerned these odd Frenchmen are going to get eaten by wolves – and occasionally nomads drive their domestic herds through the valleys below but always from a distance. At first we only see birds of prey soaring over peaks and packs of wolves chasing herds of yak and antelope on distant slopes. Gradually as our protagonists begin to get their eyes in, we start to spot the smaller animals: the pikas, Tibetan foxes and antelopes, Pallas cats and smaller birds of prey. At one point Vincent tells a story of a previous photography trip he’d taken into these mountains, where he hadn’t seen any snow leopards, or rather thought he hadn’t, until looking back at a photo he’d taken of a falcon discovered that there was also a snow leopard in the photo, just peeking over the ridge, almost perfectly camouflaged looking straight at the camera. He hadn’t seen the snow leopard, but it had certainly seen him. As the film progresses Sylvain becomes increasingly adept at spotting the signs of the larger animals, at one point, they explore a large cave, identifying the preferred spots where various predators of varying size have made dens over the years. There’s some particularly lovely shots late in the film of yak charging along the horizon, where the combination of light, movement and distance, gives them a beautiful lack of definition that makes them look like animated cave paintings, as though we’re looking into the past and seeing something both metaphorical and true.

At the same time as the landscape becomes increasingly populated with a whole food chain of different animals and birds, the sheer remoteness of the landscape is undercut, most particularly by a delightful scene where they spot four young Tibetan children out exploring who – despite their careful camouflage – spot the camera crew easily and clamber up to find out what they’re up to. Unsurprising really, if these mountains and valleys are your world, the locations of both play and work, then being able to spot that something is observing you from above can be the difference between life and death. Knowing when to hold your ground and when to run away when it comes to dealing with predators is a recurring theme throughout the film. As is the idea of being unknowingly observed by thousands of birds and animals every day, not just in this remote high landscape, but every day in the rest of the world, even in the places we think are most under human control, the natural world is constantly butting up against and around us.

We don’t actually see the snow leopards themselves until quite late in the film, when both Sylvain and the viewer have almost given up and made our peace with never actually seeing more than a brief glimpse via a trail cam of the central creatures. However, when they do show up, they are well worth the wait and as much as the film is almost the epitome of ‘the journey not the destination’, the confluence of patience and luck that gets us to the destination is pretty satisfying as a viewing experience.

Autumnal Art

Tags

art, art exhibits, lockdown art

As part of my Nablopomo writing, I’d planned to write an overview of some of the art exhibitions that had been running over the Autumn locally. I ran out of time before I could get round to writing them up but that’s no reason not to finish it off and share it even if it no longer counts towards the challenge. 

NOTICE

Over the Summer Circus Artspace ran a project where three artists were assigned to work with three different local organisations to make a piece of art together that would be displayed on billboards throughout Inverness during October. The billboard that loomed largest in my imagination of this exhibition was the collaboration between Frieda Ford and Highland Pride, partly because it was sited on the lawn at Eden Court so I saw it several times a week, whenever I went to see a film, or grab a coffee, or if I took a short cut through their ground on the way home from work. But also because I had a wider sense of it as part of the collaborating organisation’s wider engagement work – there were consultations and surveys flying about on social media, and they had a big in person awareness event to mark the billboard’s launch. (Which makes sense, while the other organisations deal with a fixed and circumscribed community, an organisation like Highland Pride are going to particularly want to engage with the members of the community that they don’t know about for this kind of project.) Even the medium of digital collage feels particularly suited to a collaborative project. The billboard I saw the next most regularly was the one I had the least context for, the collaboration between ¡P/HONK and SNAP (Special Needs Action Project), which I wondered about every time I passed it as walked up or down the Market Brae steps. Their page on the Circus website says that they specialise in getting their audience out of their shells and creating an environment for other people to be themselves and have fun, which seems an ideal outlook for working with young people with additional needs – their billboard feels very much like a facilitation project, of being a conduit for the kids’ artistic expression. My favourite was always going to be Jacqueline Briggs collaboration with HiMRA (Highland Migrant and Refugee Action), which seems unfair to the other artists as I already love her work. For an artist as young as she is, she only graduated from art school in 2016, she already has a quite distinct art style of her own, that I find both really lovely and arresting. So of course that was the one I had to go out of my way to make sure I saw, despite being in arguably the most prominent position just outside the WASP Academy building at Midmills in Crown. This billboard was a product of workshops with the Syrian community in Dingwall – about culture and food and architecture – and it feels very much like a product of translation and interpretation. 

I find the whole concept of using billboards as an art sharing platform particularly interesting, using a medium of commerce and mass media to disseminate public art to an audience that might otherwise never engage with it. (I like the idea of using the now ubiquitous nature of QR code to provide context for those whose curiosity has been piqued, though I’d be interested in seeing what the engagement levels were for the different billboards.) I do think though that whatever the individual artist strengths of the three billboards, they work more effectively seen together, comparing and contrasting their approaches and methods of collaboration. 

Highland Threads

I stumbled across this online exhibition completely by chance – ironically when checking the opening hours for the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery – and clicked through expecting a small exhibition. However this was clearly not a quick and dirty, ‘let’s put something together quickly during lockdown so we can say we did something online’ effort.  

Apparently this launched back in April, which makes sense, it’s a lovely companion piece to the actual museums, a tempting teaser to lure visitors back out to museums once they open again. It feels as though someone had an in person exhibition all planned out and then put real care and effort into how they could go about making it an online exhibition, and more than that have it really benefit from being online rather than in person.

The exhibition features fourteen objects, one each from fourteen different Highland museums, each one acting as a flag ship for it’s home museum. Each item’s homepage features a short but informative description of the item and it’s historical and geographical context, along with a slide show of still images, some archive audio recordings and a little film of the item of clothing, displayed in it’s best light. The films in particular are worth a watch in fullscreen, for although they’re really just a catwalk spin of the items of clothing in question, they allow for a close up examination of all the little details and embellishments of the item. A close up that you could never get of an item in a glass case or pinned to a display board. For example the Ullapool museum’s item is a yachting jumper, it’s navy blue with an obscure combination of letters embroidered neatly on the chest. It looks like a thousand other sturdy, mass machine knitted jumpers of its era worn by thousands of men of my parent’s and grandparents generation in jobs requiring manual labour. (The predecessor of the now ubiquitous polyester sweatshirt.) I’d likely have walked right past it in a physical exhibit, but here, it’s given a real chance to shine, placed in it’s historical context, with fascinating photographs, interviews and other historical documents that tell the intriguing role played by the men of Lochbroom in crewing the racing yachts of the interwar period. Up close and lovingly lit to it’s best advantage, the apparently plain navy reveals itself to have waves woven into the pattern, a little detail like the names of the yachts embroidered on them, that indicates that this was work wear that the crew could be proud to wear. The unassuming jumper reveals an insight into the importance of this work to the local economy and to the racing yacht culture. Allowing it to hold it’s own among the rather fancier items on display from other museums. 

The Printed Line

This is the current exhibition at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, it’s a selection of printed line art works from the Arts Council Collection from across the 20th Century that’s been on a somewhat extended tour of the UK – I was amused that it had just two stops in Scotland one in the museum closest to me, and the other in the local museum of my childhood – as coronavirus caused a bunch of it’s expected displays to be cancelled or rescheduled. The exhibition looks at how various artists have used varying printing techniques to exploit the potential of the printed line. 

There are some lovely examples of how just a few straight lines, carefully chosen and positioned, can become really effective studies in perspective, that sometimes seem to change with the position of the viewer. However, my favourite part was the accompanying video from the Arts Council illustrating the various techniques used to produce the different works on show, wood cuts, etching, dry point, screen printing, lithography. (There’s an artist I follow on social media whose working videos of her linocut technique I find very soothing, but I’d never really linked it in my head to ‘wood cuts’ that people talked about in old books, that they might exist on a ) It was particularly interesting to see how the different techniques impacted on the styles of the artists using them – the way lithography opened up the opportunity to artists who normally worked in charcoal or wax crayons to make multiple identical copies of their work without having to give up their preferred artistic medium. 

The screen printing demonstration stirred up fond memories of designing and printing t-shirts with a silk screen in second year art. I’d all but forgotten the unit until I saw the video, paging through books of fonts and magazines, cutting and tracing until I had a template that I was satisfied with and then printing a two colour t-shirt. It was such a fun project, since then I’ve preferred collage and stencils to freehand drawing, finding it easier to get what I see in my mind’s eye down on paper that way. Perhaps that’s why I prefer sound design – with all it’s assembling, cutting and amending of found or collected elements – to composition which feels much more as if it needs to come from whole cloth.

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

Keeping the Tradition Alive

Tags

nablopomo

For many people, myself included, time has become a little bit unstuck in this pandemic year of ours. Our internal clocks are out of sync in a way that not even the seasonal clock change can correct. Time has slid about sometimes dragging, sometimes speeding past – so that while March felt about six months long, the six months seem to have disappeared in a suspicious puff of smoke. Which is perhaps why November 1st feels like it has sneaked up on me this year. I suppose that this year of all years I could get away with not taking part in Nablopomo but it’s become such a tradition in my life that I honestly think I’d feel a bit lost without it. Even a cursory cast about for ideas of things to write about produced a list of ten ideas, which is as good a sign as any that it’s worthwhile giving it a go!

For new readers, the forgetful, or the merely curious NaBloPoMo is a sibling challenge to Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) where instead of writing a novel during the month of November, bloggers post every day for the month of November.

Last year was my most successful attempt at the challenge yet, having successfully posted blog articles on 21 out of 30 days and reaching a total of 15,117 words. I do not expect to do anything like that well this year, but then the first time I attempted the challenge I managed three posts and the second time it was six so I’ll call anything more than that a victory in this strangest of years. Who knows, I might even surprise myself!

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.