PUTNEY DEBATER
A personal blog
Nice for swans
Very high six metre tide at 5pm this afternoon outside my front door and round the corner on Putney Embankment.
¡Documentary Now! Again
Very difficult, when you’re running a conference, to properly take it in when the moment arrives, so these notes on the third ¡Documentary Now! are not your normal conference report. ¡Documentary Now! was initiated in 2007 by Mike Wayne, of Brunel University. The following year, while Mike was away on research in Venezuela, Alisa Lebow (also of Brunel) and myself, now at Roehampton, decided we should try and keep it going, and succeeded in raising funds from our respective institutions for the second edition. Following Mike’s initiative, we wanted to keep it free and centrally located, and thanks to Ian Christie, we were able to hold it in the splendid new cinema in Birkbeck’s Gordon Square building. For this third edition we managed to repeat the funding trick, and also received generous assistance from Brian Winston, the Lincoln Chair of Communications. We shifted from November to January, and benefited from the best of conference assistants, Holly Giesman, a PhD candidate in documentary at Roehampton. Many thanks to one and all! And thus we gathered last Friday afternoon, the snow and ice and slush of the preceding week finally gone, and although very wet and no sign of the sun, at least a wee bit warmer. Read more
Cuba in Paris
From Buenos Aires to Paris, for a conference on culture in Cuba. Unfortunately the organisers invited Cuban speakers from both Havana and outside, without realising that those from Havana would not attend, not out of individual choice but because it’s policy — the Cuban government operates a ban on allowing its artists and intellectuals to appear in public alongside those who have opted to leave the country and call themselves exiles. Since the final session is given over to a couple of the latter, Abilio Estévez and Zoé Valdés (although Estévez, who now has Spanish citizenship, goes back on visits), the conference ends on a downer. It’s certainly instructive to hear what they have to say, but it’s impossible to enter into dialogue with them, because they tend to have a rather fixed perspective. Read more