Q&A on Secret City
Here’s the video of the Q&A after the DocHouse screening of ‘Secret City’ at the Riverside last May
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/68041329#[/vimeo]
Tales of a Video Blogger ebook
Many thanks to RE.FRAMING ACTIVISM for publishing the ebook ‘Tales of a Video Blogger’, a collection of my recent writing about activist film-making.
Download your copy here:http://
Remembering Stanley Forman
For left film culture in Britain, Stanley Forman, who has died at the age of 91, was the archive man. His company, ETV, held a unique library of left-wing documentaries which amounted to the history of the twentieth century from a socialist perspective. Established in 1950 as Plato Films, the outfit was what would be called in Cold War ideology a front organisation, set up by members of the Communist Party to distribute films from behind the Iron Curtain. There was nothing nefarious about it, however. Read more
Screening at the House of Commons
‘Secret City‘, the film I’ve made with Lee Salter about the City of London Corporation, received a preview screening at the House of Commons on Tuesday evening. This is more or less what Lee and I said to introduce it.
First, our thanks to John McDonnell, MP for Hayes and Harlington, for hosting the event.
We think this film is a model of documentary film production within the academy under the rubric of research as practice. One of the things this means is that it’s been produced on a tiny budget, less than £10,000, which represents real value for money. So we’d also like to acknowledge the support of the University of Roehampton, which provided most of this funding, which mainly covers the costs of clearing rights for archive footage.
Why a film and not a research paper? Because we wanted to reach outside the academy with a piece of work that deals with something very few people know anything about, and a documentary film is a very good way to do this because it breaks out of the limits of any particular discipline and reaches audiences in the wider community. Read more
A Short Film About Money
Won’t solve your money problems, but it might make you think about why you’ve got them. ‘A Short Film About Money’ is a spin-off from a longer film I’ve been making with Lee Salter, ‘Secret City’, which launches soon.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFcoelfewXc&feature=plcp[/youtube]
‘Secret City’ is an investigation into the Corporation of the City of London which governs the famous square mile that serves as joint-HQ with Wall Street for global finance capital. We originally thought we might include a sequence about the illusions of money, but in the end left it out, so instead we fashioned the footage we’d collected into the satirical short you can see here.
A Documentary Festival in Cyprus
A long time, I know, since the last post. That’s because I’ve been hard at work on a new film, to be unveiled soon. Back in August, however, I had a welcome break with a visit to Cyprus for the Lemesos documentary festival, one of the numerous such events that have have flowered in so many places over recent years (Lemesos is seven years old). Demonstrating the existence of real audiences, these festivals give heart to the independent film-maker.
What you get in small festivals like Lemesos is not just the enthusiasm of a local community, who include aspiring film-makers, but also a bunch of invited directors, producers and speakers (here including myself, talking ‘In defence of documentary’) who share the event — with the help of some splendid hospitality. Here is pretty much everyone speaking their bit:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIkwc54TYJM[/youtube]
“I Like Students’
or ‘Me gustan los estudiantes’: Mario Handler at St Andrews
The Uruguayan documentarist Mario Handler came to St Andrews recently for a symposium revisiting New Latin American Cinema of the 60s through the Uruguayan case. The event was able organised by Beatriz Tadeo Fuica, included a prety cogent overview of Documentary and Activism by Leshu Torshin, and a Q&A with Mario Handler by Gustavo San Román. This was my own contribution. Read more
Aspects of the documentary image
After my rather long silence, an uncharacteristically short post.
We gathered, on an unusually warm day for January, at the London College of Communication in Elephant & Castle for the third seminar convened by the Artists’ Moving Image Research Network, with Pratap Rughani and Catherine Elwes as our hosts, to talk about the relations and tensions between documentary, ethnographic film, and artists’ film and video. We ranged across a whole range of topics from the ethics of representation—Pratap spoke about the film-maker’s relation to the subject—to the teasing out of meanings from the archives: Catherine Russell spoke about Los Angeles Plays Itself and The Exiles, and Laura Mulvey talked about Madame Dao. Hito Steyerl showed her video In Free Fall. Rachel Moore talked about Jean Epstein’s concept and practice of photogénie. Stan Frankland provided a trenchant and funny critique of Jean Rouch and a number of other targets, and Sean Cubitt summed up beautifully. What we’ve really been talking about, he suggested, was the problem of what can’t be seen as such, like culture, and the non-identity of the image, which I take to mean the import or sense in any image of what is not directly portrayed within it. Or to put it another way, what Wittgenstein would call the aspect of the image which can shift this way or that, especially according to the way the image is combined with others—and montage, of course, is the privileged mode of the film medium. (This ought to apply to sound as well, which unfortunately on this occasion remained a neglected topic.) Read more
The camera that supposedly changed the world
The recent BBC documentary ‘The Camera That Changed the World’, directed by Mandy Chang, about the birth of direct cinema at the start of the 1960s, was a solidly crafted and conventionally narrated television documentary containing a good deal of fascinating material, especially in the form of the testimony of surviving participants. Unfortunately, however, these were embedded in a narrative that was historically askew—although truth be told, only in the same way as the versions to be found in most film histories that deal with the topic. Read more
Forgotten early Soviet sound films
Three Forgotten Early Soviet Sound Films on the Electrification of the USSR
(This is a revised version of the talk I gave at the BFI Southbank on 1st June 2011 as part of the Soviet season, to introduce Macheret’s Men and Jobs and an extract from Shub’s K.Sh.E. Here I also discuss Dovzhenko’s Ivan.) Read more