Omnishambles at the BBC

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March 11th 2023 was Omnishambles Friday at the BBC, a day of multiple trouble. The redoubtable David Attenborough has a new series on British wildlife and there was consternation that the final episode, apparently dealing with its dramatic decline and what has caused it, is not being transmitted but will be seen only on iPlayer. Another of their top stars, Gary Lineker, was suspended from presenting Match of the Day for a tweet criticising the government’s new asylum policy, and his co-hosts promptly withdraw from the programme in solidarity. As a side show, following complaints from listeners, the BBC issues an apology for allowing former culture secretary Nadine Dorries to make false claims about Sue Gray and Keir Starmer on a radio show, and Question Time presenter Fiona Bruce was accused of trivialising domestic abuse in an exchange with Stanley Johnson. All these incidents revolve around household names, as so much of the news does. A few days earlier, the broadcaster was under attack from another direction, after announcing a review of its classical music provision, including 20% job cuts in its three English orchestras, and disbanding the BBC Singers, whose origins go back even further than the orchestras, to 1924, a twenty-strong choir of top flight voices capable of singing anything, and a jewel in the BBC’s musical crown. Read more

Artificial Writing: a first evaluation

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LIKE every other domain of everyday life, education at all levels has been battered by digital technology even in places where it isn’t called for. Now the alarm has been raised about a new AI program, ChatGPT, which can be used, it is said, to write academic essays. A free trial version of the program was launched at the end of 2022, and gained a million subscribers in the first month. You give it a prompt in natural language and it returns a coherent and apparently cogent text. Before coming to a judgement about it, one should of course try it out, and my first impression is that its essay writing skills are stilted but it looks like it might make a useful research tool. Its great advantage, after trying it out with a few queries (called prompts), would appear to be its speed, which is much faster than using Google, and where Google delivers you a list of results which you then have to trawl through, here you get an immediate answer in formal, polite, and completely impersonal prose.  Read more

Funeral Music

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Windsor 19/9/22
A Sideways Glance at The Funeral

Monday morning. Impossible to escape the demise of the old lady who resided in the castle up the road from where I live. The Long Walk, which the cortège will pass along in a few hours, is just two minutes away, it’s where I take my daily constitutional. I haven’t been out there for the last few days – they’ve put up barriers to control the crowds they expect to come and watch, and the grass is pockmarked with outside broadcast vans. The press began to descend on the town the very first day, along with the throngs laying flowers, who they duly interviewed – the first tv crews were already there the first evening when I returned from London after seeing a friend off on the Eurostar. I couldn’t avoid going into town a couple of times over the next few days. There are always groups of tourists in the town centre, but the people now swarming around the castle weren’t your usual culprits, and they were a little subdued as they made their way to the castle gates. 

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Kiss Channel 4 Goodbye?

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The prospective privatisation of Channel Four induces in me a state of cognitive dissonance. Part of me is appalled at this wanton repetition of what the patrician Harold Macmillan way back called ‘selling off the family silver’, and another part of me answers back, but what is there worth saving? I remember, you see, what Channel Four was really like when it started, before it adopted a populist agenda in the 1990s, and I’m speaking not just as a viewer but as one of the numerous independent filmmakers who was commissioned by them. Over its first decade, C4 was truly novel, adopting unconventional and groundbreaking programme formats and bringing a whole new generation into production, in fulfilment of its public service remit, to be innovative, to inspire change, to nurture talent and to offer a platform for alternative views.  Read more

Archival Values: A report on losing a documentary archive

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Almost thirty years ago, I attended an international seminar at the Babelsberg film school in Berlin, the first time that teachers of documentary from west and east Europe met together to compare notes on pedagogical methods and values. On the second day, Klaus Stanjek, the seminar’s convenor, disappeared and returned later in the day with a van full of film cans. ‘Someone called from the other side of the city,’ he explained, ‘they said people at the old East German film school were about to junk their archive, so I just had to go and rescue what I could before it was too late’, and then he rushed off to get some more. I am put in mind of the episode because I now find myself forced to oversee the loss of an archive that I have myself built up over several decades and which then expanded considerably after I moved to the University of Roehampton in 2007. 

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Open Letter to the Vice-Chancellor Sheffield Hallam University about Shahd Abusalama

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Dear Professor Husbands,

I wish to add my voice in protest against your ill-advised treatment of Ms. Shahd Abusalama, a young Palestinian academic whom you have suspended from teaching, apparently on grounds of spurious accusations of antisemitism.

I have read the series of tweets she wrote in December last year in response to an incident in which a first-year student made a poster with the slogan “Stop the Palestinian Holocaust” and was accused (by another, Jewish student) of antisemitism for using the word Holocaust. Her comments, spelled out in less than 400 words, are a lucid deconstruction of the use of the word ‘holocaust’, and a model of responsible academic engagement with social media. I am also cognisant of her response on Facebook three years ago to attacks on her by various Zionist organisations for her cultural activities, in which she criticised her younger self and, far from being antisemitic, aligned her position with Jewish anti-Zionists like Jews for Peace, etc. All this can be discovered in a few clicks. Read more

Raúl Pérez Ureta

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Saddened by the news this morning of the death of the great Cuban cinematographer Raúl Pérez Ureta. Raulito, as we knew him, was the cameraman on Havana Report, the film I made in 1985 with Holly Aylett on the Havana Film Festival for Channel 4. The film was the result of an invitation from Julio García Espinosa, then President of the Cuban film institute, the ICAIC, which ran the festival, and it gave us the chance to work with a Cuban film crew instead of bringing a crew from home, as I’d previously done. From the very first shot, Raúl inspired confidence, taking on board immediately the challenge of working with a pair of directors who themselves were working together for the first time amid the hurly-burly of the festival. I cannot remember it without thinking of a line from a Paul Simon song, ‘it’s four in the morning and the plans have changed’, because we never ended the evening knowing quite what we were going to film the next day. Raúl took it all completely in his stride, of course, having spent almost twenty years as a newsreel cameraman. His renown as a cinematographer would come later when, the year after Havana Report, he turned to fiction, where he began develop a distinctive visual style exemplified in Papeles secundarios (Orlando Rojas, 1989), which became the hallmark of a number of films he then made with Fernando Pérez.  An exquisite sense of composition which never falls into aestheticism, always respects the mise-en-scène, and perhaps above all, his masterly control over the notorious difficulties of photographing in the Cuban light, all of which come together above all in Pérez’s extraordinary documentary, Suite Habana (2003).

In this photo of the crew of Havana Report, Raúl is on the extreme left. In the centre, with Holly and me on either side, is Fernando Birri. The photo was taken by Chuck Kleinhans, who had tagged along with us, immediately after we wrapped the shoot after a final interview with Fernando. Raúl now joins Chuck and Fernando in the photo-album of my memory, where they all still live and breathe.

Waiting Game

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This is a time for sitting quietly, waiting (for the winter to unfold, and your turn for the vaccine), watching (remotely, because the action is all going on somewhere else), listening. To the pain which comes across in brief snatches in the television news from health workers and smitten families, lives interrupted and lost. Listening carefully to what the scientists say. Sceptically to pundits. And as for politicians, these should be heard with active mistrust, because they constantly tell lies, and if by chance they utter something half-true, it’s always the wrong half.

How long should we expect to wait? What actually are we waiting for?  Read more

‘High-profile figures criticise university’s plans for large cuts to arts and humanities…’

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As one of those referred to in this report by Times Higher Education (20.11.20) on cuts at Roehampton as having already taken voluntary redundancy, this new round of cuts (and more voluntary redundancies – I already know of some) is deeply disturbing. You might say I made a timely decision, but it was a personal one and I didn’t think I was leaving a sinking ship. Any university that shoots itself in the foot in this way will go on hobbling for a very long time.  Read more

Paul Leduc In Memoriam

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[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/474388099[/vimeo]

Latin American cinema has lost one of the foundational figures of the radical film movement which flourished fifty years ago, when the two avant-gardes, the aesthetic and the political – were conjoined. Paul Leduc, who died in Mexico City on October 21st at the age of 78, was the most maverick of filmmakers, in a continent that’s full of them. His public persona was reserved but in private he was far from austere, always an engaging conversationalist with an irreverent sense of humour. I shall miss our periodic meetings, sometimes over a meal in Mexico City, but I cannot now mourn his passing on a personal level without also lamenting his neglect in English-speaking circles. Even his great masterpiece, Frida, Naturaleza Viva (1984), is little known amongst us, and instead of Ofelia Medina’s magical personation of the painter, the screen image of Frida Kahlo is that of Salma Hayek in Julie Taymor’s far inferior biopic of nearly twenty years later.  Read more