Access Restored

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So, Putney Debater is back after my websites got hacked and went offline. A salutary lesson in what happens if you just leave things ticking over instead of constantly upgrading, because one of the blights of IT is that it isn’t stable but constantly ‘improving’ itself, forcing the user to spend their time and money trying to catch up. If you don’t, programs stop working, your online security is compromised, and you have to shell out to get someone to repair the damage. We used to talk about built-in obsolescence as one of the tricks capitalism uses to promote consumerism, but this is even more insidious, because keeping up is not optional, but becomes part of the basic cost of living in our modern hyper-connected world. Rant over.

At least I can now wish my readers a happy new year – if that’s possible.

Unexploded bombs

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On Friday, here on the riverside at Putney, they started setting up the outside broadcast cameras for the Boat Race, the annual jamboree when Putney gets to be briefly seen on screens around the world. A strange object appeared looming up over my house.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A chance encounter with Kiarostami

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In May 2005 I bought a new pocket-sized video camera. The next day I took it with me to try out when I went to visit Kiarostami’s installation, ‘Forest Without Leaves’, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and as I was filming, Kiarostami himself appeared. (After I shut off the camera, another figure appeared – Ken Loach. We chatted and then went all together to look at Kiarostami’s photos in another room.)  I didn’t do anything with the footage, since after all, it was only a test, and I hadn’t yet mastered the camera, but I offer it here in modest homage to this most remarkable of filmmakers. The rare kind who keeps you believing in the power of cinema to refashion our perception of the world that the other kind of cinema blocks out.

 

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/173587645[/vimeo]

 

Politics in Putney

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This is really interesting. Taken from voteforpolicies.org.uk – a really worthwhile website – try it.

Politics in Putney

Remembering Richard Attenborough

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Attenborough shooting OWALW

This is how I remember Richard Attenborough—setting up a shot for Oh! What a Lovely War, in a photo I took myself. He’s the one in the hat. The news of his death takes me back to where I started, because that first film of his as director was also the occasion for my own first effort at filmmaking, and I’m eternally grateful to him for the chance (rare in those days) to have made a film of the filming.

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Jury Service in Digital Times

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It’s only late in life—I’m in my sixties—that I find myself being summoned for jury service. Like all of us, I’ve seen innumerable court room dramas, in films and on television—fiction, docudramas and documentaries—and on three occasions I’ve been in the court room as a witness (I’ll come back to that). But only now, as a member of a jury, do I properly discover for myself that the courtroom is the setting for a very strange form of theatre. Read more

Back from Chile

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Back from my trip a week ago, I buried myself in editing the video I shot in Chile on the student movement, which screens on Saturday 3 December at the Latin American solidarity conference in London and Saturday 10th December at the Roehampton Human Rights Film Festival.  Now it’s done, and I break off briefly to give a quick report on the trip.

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