PUTNEY DEBATER
A personal blog
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
The history of our movement against cuts (so far)
by Patrick Ward
Sometimes it’s easy to forget just how much has gone on over the past eight months.
This documentary is a celebration of the anti-cuts movement in Britain. It charts the movement from the student protests of late last year through to the huge 26 March TUC demonstration.
Director Michael Chanan uses footage from video blogs, TV news and activist media to paint a picture of the breadth of resistance to the cuts, and reflects some of the debates within the movement on how to resist and what alternatives are on offer.
The film tries to do a lot. We see everything from the media’s manipulation of the student protests, to the BBC’s Paul Mason giving a crash course in the financial crisis. We also get a look at the occupation of libraries and the arrival of the Arab uprisings which fed inspiration into the movement.
The likes of Michael Rosen, Terry Eagleton, Josie Long and Nina Power also offer their take on the struggle.
Having taken such a wide ranging subject matter, it’s inevitable some things get left out. But it would have been good to see some more of how the big protests came about. Grassroots campaigns such as Education Activist Network don’t really get a mention, while the organisational power of Twitter gets too much attention.
And I’m not sure it really reflects the young, working class dynamism which was so apparent on the demos. Lots of white, middle aged academics are interviewed at length. The soundtrack also seems to miss the mood—it would have been nice to see some of the dubstep and hip-hop, which for me was far more symbolic of the creativity thrown up by the campaigns.
But otherwise this is a useful record of the story so far, and what we can hope is only the beginning of our campaign of resistance.
Blinded by science?
There’s an interesting new piece of research about the perceptual process of watching films which I can’t get out of my head without writing a blog about it. This research is not just of theoretical interest, but touches on pedagogic concerns. Part of learning to watch films critically is to understand how editing works, and this means learning to see every cut. This is an acquired ability (especially well developed among film editors). Thanks to this research we now know for certain what the film teacher has always known—that the untutored film viewer, and any of us some of the time, simply doesn’t notice a lot of the cuts. Two experimental psychologists investigating the topic, Tim Smith and John Henderson, call this ‘edit blindness’. Read more