My friend Rebecca Marshall’s feature documentary The Forest In Me has its first public UK screening in Lewes on 26th April. It’s a ‘letter to the future’ from Rebecca to her infant son and is told through the interwoven strands of a Siberian hermit woman, a Mars simulation crew in Hawaii, and Rebecca’s son exploring the world.
Faces in the Fire
Family business took me to Oxford at the weekend, so I took the opportunity to check out some bits of the Ashmolean. I was primarily interested in the Pre-Raphaelites (for writing reasons), but in the next room was this lovely canvas. Mid-Victorian and a lot more realist, Frank Holl’s Faces in the Fire shows a young servant girl, transfixed by what she sees in the fire just beyond the frame. It is so diverting that she seems to have forgotten about her duties.
Such simple and effective visual storytelling, helped by the title and the power of subtle suggestion, like the placement of the fire irons in the bottom right of frame and a few little bits of easily-read symbolism like the bird cage that, in combination with her simple clothing, reinforce the idea of her servitude. The muted colour palette and the detail around the hunched shoulders are just fantastic. An understated beauty of a painting.
Turn this man into a coffee shop (or don’t)
I just voted to turn this pensioner into a coffee shop.
My friends Laura and Laurence are Kickstarter funding the postproduction on their Shore Scripts award-winning absurdist comedy He Woke Up to Deflating News. Along with pledging you can also vote on whether to save Michael or uphold the planning permission allowing Bett-a-Boulanger to remodel his insides. Pledge and vote! Or don’t. Your choice.
Swiss embassy: British film retrospective & good cheese
On Monday night I attended a launch event hosted by the Swiss Embassy. Great Expectations, is a retrospective of Postwar British films that will screen at the Locarno film festival later this year. It was particularly interesting to hear curator Ehsan Khoshbakht talk about how he first encountered many of these British films on TV while growing up in post-revolutionary Iran. Apparently during the pre-revolutionary period, when relations with Britain were cordial, a good number of British studio-era pictures were sold to the national broadcaster.
After the revolution, Iranian TV struggled to import new films and they also needed material that would get past the censor – no overt sexuality being a major requirement. British films like It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) struck a delicate balance, alluding to violent crime and dark sexuality without being graphic, and of course there was no need to import them because the physical prints were already in Iranian archives. In some ways the situation is analogous to the way a young Martin Scorsese watched British films on TV in the USA – British films exploited a quirk in the local market (Hollywood studios, with their cinemas in direct competition for audiences with TV, refused to license their films to broadcasters). Given the state of Iran’s international relations and its stance on intellectual property law, it is not clear whether licensing fees were ever paid to British companies for the broadcasting of these films, but what is arguably more important is the role these films played in spreading representations of British society and culture.
There was also a brief appearance from Angela Allen, a legendary script supervisor (but in the immediate Postwar Era her title was “continuity girl”) who worked on a huge number of films from this era, including Carol Reed’s The Third Man (not in the Locarno retrospective for self-imposed curatorial rules: no fantasy, no films set outside mainland UK). I met her briefly in a BECTU event about ten years ago, and it is great to see that she is still as forthright and inspiring today as she was then.
The retrospective features 30+ features and has been compiled with the help of the BFI and the “encyclopaedic knowledge” of Josephine Botting. It will run at the Locarno Film Festival 6-16 August 2025. And the five little Swiss cocktail stick flags I found in my jacket pocket after the event confirm that the Swiss embassy’s cheese offering is as good as you would expect.
Notes on watching a 13 hour film
I spent the majority of my weekend at the ICA watching what seems to be only the third ever screening of Jacques Rivette’s film Out 1 in London since its release 55 years ago in 1970. It is perhaps the least watched of the clutch of films that regularly appear on critics’ “best of” lists. Historically there were a number of obstacles to screening it, not least a run time of just under 13 hours. It is split into eight segments, so it can be viewed with intermissions. Film prints of Out 1 ran at the European standard of 25 frames per second so screenings on North American projectors (which run at 24 frames per second) were half an hour longer still. No subtitled prints of the film were made, so screenings in non-Francophone countries required separate projection of subtitles made by people who were unlikely to have watched the film more than once, and who would have struggled with the frequently overlapping dialogue. Arranging to watch the film with friends, we joked about the provisions we’d need: snacks and water for sure, pillows, iodine tablets, tents, carabiners, as if we were about to climb a mountain of film.
The narrative is made of lightly-edited long-takes of scenes which are mostly improvised. Two different theatre troupes are devising novel approaches to The Seven of Thebes and Prometheus by Aeschylus. The troupes approach their productions almost exclusively through improvisational games and two directors seem to be former romantic partners, now estranged. In parallel to these two ensembles, two ‘outsider’ characters follow solo journeys that occasionally intersect with the actors. A woman seduces men long enough to steal their money until one day she accidentally steals some intriguing and incriminating letters that point towards a conspiracy, and a young man (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) receives cryptic notes that send him on a Quixotic investigation into a secret society called The Thirteen named for an Honoré de Balzac novel. The first three hours are impressionistic and introduce most (but not all) of the principal characters, and the first act break seems to arrive in the fourth hour.
The pacing and length and looseness of the scenes make the viewing experience particpatory – a particular primal grunt, a foot shoved into the mouth of an actor during a physical improvisation, the repetition of a gag to absurdist degrees, all become stimuli for speculation. Just as the actors attempt to collaboratively devise their productions, the viewer becomes a participant in a one-sided game of ‘yes, and…’, that involves picking up the performers’ loose ends and attempting to weave them into a fabric of meaning. This is different from the process of piecing together a more conventional ‘closed’ filmic narrative that seeks to minimize ambiguity because there is no guarantee that the elements of the dialogue and mise-en-scène really do mesh together. The closest the film comes to explaining itself is when two of the more ‘in the know’ characters hypothesize about the thoughts and actions of a third character who has never appeared on screen. The cumulative experience is similar to pareidolia – the attempt to impose a meaningful interpretation on something nebulous, such as looking at a cloud and seeing the shape of an alligator, or seeing mind control chemicals in aeroplane vapour trails.
Rivette used this narrative strategy in other films, such at Le Pont du Nord (1981) and David Lynch draws from a similar well for Twin Peaks, particularly in season three (2017). It is freewheeling, strange, and defiantly uncommercial. The whole thirteen hours of narrative were shot over a similar number of days to a regular 90 minute film, and many of the scenes seem to have been captured in one take. Child extras look down the barrel of the lens in interiors, and during exterior shots everyone stares at Jean-Pierre Léaud, who was one of the most recognisable faces in France at the time. A gaggle of young boys follow him down the street during one of his stranger monologues. Actors make abortive attempts to light cigarettes, fluff their lines or accidentally block narrative motion with a ‘no’ rather than a ‘yes, and…’, sending improvisations into meandering loops. Lighting is frequently rudimentary, boom shadows fall into shot, cuts to black disguise what would otherwise be awkward jump cuts. It is self-indulgent, messy, frequently confusing (two characters go by multiple names, depending on who they are with), and the few bursts of violent action are cheaply and unconvincingly staged. And yet despite these flaws it holds the attention like a hypnotist’s pendulum – the consciousness drifts but remains somewhat anchored.
In a strange way Out 1 predicts the ‘episodic’ storytelling that would come to prominence in the streaming age, in which the individual arc of a single episode is subordinated to the arc of the entire work. In other ways it feels like an initiation, a rite of passage on the path of committed cinephilia. Even the title positions it as a filmmaker’s film. Rivette only ever called the full film Out 1. A four-and-a-half hour cut was made of the same basic narrative, which came to be known as Out 1: Spectre. “Noli me tangere” was a note stuck to the cans containing Rivette’s preferred 13 hour cut. The phrase is latin for “do not touch me,” and it is what Jesus said to Mary Magdalene when she recognised him after his resurrection. And so we have the epic director’s cut as a holy artefact, the ultimate sanctified relic of auteurism. For the casual cinemagoer it’s little more than a pointless diversion, but for the a committed believer in the cinema Out 1 is a pilgrimage.
Psychoanalysing your dog
I visited the Surréalisme exhibition in the Pompidou centre just before Christmas. It was wonderful seeing some of the massively famous works like Magritte’s L’Empire des lumières (1954) and of course various bits of Dalí. But even better were the surprises – and in particular Dorothea Tanning‘s work, which has an invitingly dark humour about it. Her first major painting, Birthday (1942) stopped me in my tracks. It is a self-portrait, and Tanning’s plaintive look out of the canvas is a big part of the work’s affect.
Since then I’ve discovered that another of her paintings, Tableau Vivant (1954) hangs at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, so obviously I need to pay it a visit. Marcel Duhamel describes it as being “a bit like having psychanalyzed [sic] your dog, then illustrated the phase of ‘transference,’ to use the jargon.” Tanning replied that her dogs were loathe to be psychoanalyzed.
The age of astro-feudalism
I woke up this morning thinking about space. Or rather, the shift in rhetoric about space exploration over the last couple of decades.
My opinions on space exploration used to be a lot more earthly, “why are we messing about up there when we haven’t got down here sorted out properly yet?” The usual. But as I read more sci-fi I became a more sympathetic with the motives: innovation, exploration, and the idea of something to collectively dream for. For example, Kennedy’s rhetoric, and the sheer number of times he said “We” in his 1961 speech to Congress; Apollo 11’s plaque that read “We came in peace for all mankind.” Of course, this isn’t to discount the fact that NASA was engaged in a soft power war with Roscosmos, but the fact that part of this rhetorical conflict was centred around an appeal to a collective ‘we’ is significant. I think what I came to appreciate was the imaginative ambition of the push to do more, go further, in which we were invited to share as a common dream.
Compare this with the current rhetoric and mores of space exploration. NASA has taken a back seat to private companies owned by billionaires. Space exploration is entirely about servicing the needs and prestige of a tiny number of very rich men. Who is talking about the collective any more? We no longer have a collective stake in transcending our physical, earthly limitations. This shift represents a sort of bottleneck in the collective imaginative ambitions of humankind as a whole. 21st century robber barons have stolen even our dreams.
Booked for SeriesMania
After making a quick trip to Lille two weeks ago I’m now booked for the SeriesMania forum in Lille 24-29th March. I’m staying in a cute little place on the Place des Archives in Vieux Lille, right near the Marche de Vieux Lille, so I’ll be a quick stumble from excellent cheese.
I’ll be there with my co-writer Anthony Alleyne, and we’re looking forward to a week of taking the temperature of European TV drama production and meeting up with some lovely folks.
And maybe, just maybe, we’ll be announcing something there.
Perspective
I’ve got a serious backlog of images to share. This one is from October 2024. While in Cape Town to work on a research project I found a morning to climb the India Venster trail (so named because at a certain point there’s a ‘window’ made of rocks) up Table Mountain. It is fairly physically demanding because the route involves a bit of scrambling / mild bouldering but the views are stunning and on a weekday in shoulder season I had the trail almost completely to myself.
This shot is a panorama looking west from the trail, down onto the Camp’s Bay neighbourhood. The trail is the flat rocky bit to the left and right of the image. Spectacular.
If you’d like to read a bit more about the hike, and you have a healthy tolerance for Insta-girl aesthetics, this is as good a place as any to find out more about the hike: https://www.wanderlustmovement.org/india-venster-hike/
Also, this shot is currently my header image on Mastodon (I’ve been lurking there for a year or two) and Bluesky (just joined) because it’s time for us all to ditch Xitter and as many of the Meta products as we can.
Lugholes
Back in the late 1980s, maybe the 1990s, back in an era when the NHS was more functionally funded, my father would periodically go to the GP surgery in the village to get his ears syringed. He always looked forward to getting it done, and when he came home he would always tell us how pleasurable it was, as if it was not so much a medical procedure, but more like a massage. As a teenager I was baffled, and also grossed-out by terms like ‘waxy buildup’.
On Christmas Eve 2023 I experienced dizziness so intense I vomited, shook like I had an intense chill, and almost passed out. After a few hours’ bed rest the symptoms subsided. A few days later, as I was driving around a large roundabout I looked over my shoulder to check my blind spot and the dizziness returned with a vengeance. I could no longer tell exactly where I was steering the car, how far I was from the other vehicles, or even precisely which way was up. Panic. It took every ounce of my concentration to manoeuvre the car through the four-lane roundabout and into a bus stop where I waited for the symptoms to subside.
It’s still not clear what caused the issue. I suspect the dizziness was ‘cervical vertigo’ – in this case stress knots from my shoulder muscles putting pressure on the nerves in my cervical spine – because I’d been spending long hours at my desk finishing my PhD alongside teaching two classes and completing writing commissions. My GP didn’t discount that, but she also suspected some sort of ear infection – my left ear was pretty clogged. Remembering my Dad, I asked about ear syringing but the GP wasn’t able to prescribe it. If I wanted that I’d need to go to Boots and pay a small fee. Thanks, austerity politics.
Figuring that I know my body I worked on de-stressing, had a physiotherapist massage/consultation, strengthened the relevant muscles and the problem hasn’t recurred. But the ear issue resurfaced when I went to get fitted for custom in-ear headphone tips. It is an entertaining procedure. The otologist mixes together two different pastes to make a fast-setting compound that she pipes into the ear with a syringe, like jam into a doughnut. It goes pretty deep into the ear canal. Once it is set, a few minutes later, she pulls it out and there you have it: an accurate 3D negative image of the inside of your head.
But of course if this is to be accurate your ears need to be totally clean. I’d prepared by cleaning my ears as best I could at home (drops, syringing with warm water, etc.) but when I got to the audiologist it turned out my best efforts were insufficient. My left ear still had a significant build-up of hard old wax. Looking at the image on her specialist keyhole camera was fascinating and abject at the same time. I apologised for bringing my filthy earholes to the audiologist, but obviously she sees worse than me every day. Unfazed, she reached for a pair of long tweezers and got straight down to business.
It was strangely intimate having a stranger gently insert a metal implement all the way inside my earhole to remove a chunky piece of grossness. And it felt… profoundly inappropriately good. Even now, four days later, I find myself thinking warmly about what exactly came out of my body, how disgusting and yet how incredibly satisfying it was to have it come out, especially all in one contiguous blob. I was tempted to examine said blob (it was impressively large to have occupied such a small crevice), but the audiologist primly tucked it into a fold of tissue paper before I could embarrass myself by asking to see it, which was probably for the best.
Now I know what floated my Dad’s boat all those years ago. I’d repeat the experience again tomorrow, but it takes years for grossness like that to accumulate. In compensation, I can look forward to custom-made headphone tips for blocking out the horrific mechanical grinding noises of the Central Line, or of squalling infants on long-haul flights. In conclusion, ear care: 10/10 would recommend.
The Great British AI sell-out
I just attended an online town-hall meeting organised by the WGGB about the current UK government consultation about the AI industry’s abuse of copyright. Mostly, us writers are concerned about the kind of AI known as Large Language Models, as this is the kind of AI that most directly affects writers. I’ve been avoiding meetings about AI because, well, too much unfocused handwringing and/or naive boosterism. Thankfully this conversation was focused, informed, measured and actually moderately useful.
Here’s the backstory: rather than asking creatives what they want, the government has presupposed that us writers are cool with complying in advance. Rather than asking if what the LLM creators are doing is legal, ethical or desirable, they’ve skipped to the “let’s just be pragmatic about this” stage and drawn up a set of proposals that place the burden of protecting the creative industry on the people making the work rather than the people seeking to strip-mine it.
The options outlined in the consultation boil down to:
- Leave copyright law as it is, and allow AI companies to continue abusing it (really a non-option, included to give the illusion of greater choice).
- Create an opt-in system which assumes a default position that AI companies cannot scrape works unless express permission has been given by the rights holders*.
- Create an opt-out system that assumes a default position that the AI companies can scrape works UNLESS the rights holders have informed them that consent has been withdrawn.
* not necessarily the writers because not everyone who writes retains their rights
Reading between the lines it seems that the ‘preferred option’ – the one that makes it look like the government is doing something to protect us while actually not placing any responsibility on the AI snake-oil salesmen – is option 3. There is, of course, no detail about what the opt-out system would look like or how it would function. Writing to each different AI company would require constant vigilance from writers/rights holders who need to spend their time doing productive work. If writers can opt-out via a central government website, similar to how we pay our self-assessment tax, that would be nice. But how, then, would that information be acted upon by the AI companies? They aren’t going to manually verify each individual source of scraping.
It seems more likely that there would be some kind of ‘token’ that gets attached to works made available digitally, like the robots.txt file that sits on your website preventing the wrong kind of bots from scraping it. But no-one has outlined what this protocol might look like. It’s almost as if it’s a bad faith argument.
The opt-in is at least easier to administer: the AI companies can only use your work if you expressly provide it to them. Obviously the AI companies aren’t going to go for that. If this does become the way forward they’ll probably find a way to argue that will still scrape the data, but they just won’t use it if it’s tagged properly. In other words, they’ll smoke but they won’t inhale.
And of course, not all rights holders *want* to withhold the works they control from the AI slop-barons. Academic publishers like Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press (who, we should note, don’t pay the writers or editors of their books despite charging university libraries incredibly high prices for the books they publish) have already sold the contents of their catalogues to OpenAI, etc.
The EU approach to AI regulation seems to be more robust, requiring transparency about training model data. It’s also more sceptical about the supposed ‘benefits’ of the technology:
It feels like we ought to refuse to engage on the terms laid out by the government, highlighting that the way the EU manages this is the best benchmark. But the chances of the government listening seem slim, especially because Keir Starmer has just appointed an ex-Amazon exec to head the Competitions and Markets Authority.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/
My take on the mood of the meeting seemed to be that we’re screwed, and that our best hope is that AI is a hype bubble that bursts sooner rather than later. As a creative worker, living and working in mainland Europe has never looked more attractive. (And, of course, this all begs the question: will Northern Ireland be covered by EU law on AI?)
Friends in Print: Paul Gray
My old friend and part-time Kai Lord, Paul Gray, who I first met when selling actual physical books made of paper 20+ years ago (in the late lamented Methven’s bookshop in Canterbury) has just had a short story published in vol. 1 of a Lone Wolf anthology. My recall of the 1980s gamebooks is hazy, so I hope the memories come flooding back when I crack the spine on this collection. Congrats, Paul.
Testosterone Autism
I’m currently reading the English translation of Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, a Polish mystery novel by Olga Tokarczuk. It’s about an older woman who over-winters in a small hamlet, working as a caretaker for the other houses in the village, which are essentially summer homes. She spends her time helping her younger friend (and former pupil) translate William Blake into Polish and doing astrology charts before she finds herself embroiled in a series of mysterious deaths and disappearances. She has a wonderfully off-kilter voice, and peppers her account with homespun philosophy, or Theories (her capitalisation choices are very Blake). This passage is particularly wonderful:
It was hard to have a conversation with Oddball. He was a man of very few words, and it was impossible to talk, one had to keep silent. It’s hard work talking to some people, most often males. I have a Theory about it. With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he’s drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes; testosterone autism disturbs the character’s psychological understanding. I think Oddball was suffering from this Ailment.
Note to future self: watch for signs of testosterone autism.
See here for Fitzcarraldo Editions’ edition (minimalist cover art). Thanks to ABK for the recommendation.
Too early! But…
I’ve already got my festive season listening lined up. Everything this guy touches turns to grooves. There is plenty not to look forward to in 2025, but this will get me through to New Year.
African Penguins
The Imagining the Ordinary City conference appears to have been a success (more on that later). After a day recovering I took a trip about an hour south of Cape Town proper, to Boulders Beach, in the old naval base town of Simon’s Town. Just south of the naval base there is a protected colony of African ‘Jackass’ Penguins, so named because they sometimes bray like donkeys. It’s a bit uncanny hearing such a big sound coming out of such a small bird. Here’s the obligatory penguin walking video.
New work alert: Prim releases 24th October
It’s been an absolute pleasure to direct voices for this utterly charming Edward Gorey-esque / Tim Burton-ish point-and-click adventure by developer Common Colors and publisher Application Systems Heidelberg.
Sarcastic teenager Prim’s world is literally turned upside-down when she has to go and live with her estranged father in the Underworld. She promises herself she will escape and return to live with her best friend Tristan, but when you’re a half-undead teenager things are never quite that simple.
Prim features the vocal talents of Maria Pendolino in the lead role, Adrian Vaughan as Prim’s father, Thanatos, and (in no particular order) Ivy Dupler, Sally Beaumont, Jason Hall, Toby Longworth, Stephanie Cannon, Rhiannon Moushall, Will de Renzy-Martin, Morgan Taylor and Neil Dean.
Wishlist it now on Steam and GOG for PC and Mac. I believe plans are afoot for iPhone, iPad and Nintendo Switch versions, but don’t quote me on that, I’m just the voice director.
A selection of flutes that Andre 3000 blew into at All Points East, 17th August 2024
Andre Benjamin played a meandering set of free-improvisational flute music, ostensibly based on his album New Blue Sun, at All Points East in Victoria Park last week. Here are images of his flutes. That’s it. That’s the post.
See also: Showing Up (2023) in which Andre Benjamin plays a supporting role as a ceramics teacher at a small arts college in Oregon.
Conformism
I had an exchange with a colleague the other day which made it clear to me that even if I’m not using various social media, specifically LinkedIn, other people most definitely are. Said colleague had checked out my profile, which I haven’t touched in about five years. He was still impressed enough to ask me to do a spot of work with him, which is nice. But I realised I could have advertised my wares much better.
And there’s also a professional organisation I ought to have joined long ago which checks people’s LinkedIn profiles to assess whether to admit them or not. It was time to conform and do the thing. Updated profile is here.
Cape Town: Tourist Views
I live in a city (London) which is culturally diverse and has a very unequal distribution of wealth and opportunity, and I’ve had the opportunity to visit a good few ‘high contrast’ cities before. Cities like Jerusalem, Hong Kong, New York are all fascinatingly uneven and contested places, but none of them quite prepared me for Cape Town. The Mother City is the most contrasty, contradictory place I think I’ve been. For the most part, the well-to-do areas on the coast and on the foothills of Table Mountain combine breathtaking natural beauty, developed world opulence and a sensibility that is cued-in to current trends. Further inland, neighbourhoods in the Cape Flats are on a sliding scale that runs from modest homes that are properly hooked up to municipal utilities to self-constructed dwellings with corrugated metal walls and roofs, where running water and reliable electrical supply is not taken for granted.
This disparity is absolutely on show in the image above, where a small cluster of unofficial dwellings cluster in a former quarry just off Chiappini Street on the edge of Bo-Kaap. These houses are two blocks from a tall office building and directly underneath a house with a swimming pool at the top of the hill.
Regardless of the conditions in which they live, the vast majority of people were warm, frank and engaging. While I attempt to get my head around the experience of the last two weeks, here are some stills I shot from the rooftop terrace of the hotel bar. These are the arm’s length touristy shots that are the opposite end of the spectrum of filming I went there to do.
Cape Town Bowl is the central business district, and has a lot of International-Style tall buildings interspersed with colonial Dutch and British architecture, and a good bit of Deco concrete, which looks great on bright, clear days.
Looking southwest towards the V&A Waterfront, a quasi-public space which is the most touristy part of town. It has a gentrified docklands feel to it, and is clearly designed to be a place where many of the more problematic aspects of Cape Town are kept at arm’s length by exclusionary urban design strategies and policing. Despite this, it is not a total Disneyland, which is a testament to the enduring spirit of the city.
Table Mountain is ever-present, no matter which neighbourhood you’re in.
Lion’s Head in the background. Bo-Kaap is the brightly painted neighbourhood in the middle ground.
With the Everyday Journeys documentaries I shot in Cape Town over the past fortnight, I have delved into the city at street-level and through the eyes of the people who live there. As I edit the footage I’m really looking forward to moving from a strategic overview of the city into a close-up lived experience of the people and place.
Protected: Family snaps from PhD Graduation
Sneak Preview: Cape Town Everyday Journeys
Rushes from the tiny action camera are pretty successful, and the doggycam was surprisingly fun. In this video the camera is operated by Emma, a border collie. She expertly captures the moment when her human, Judy-Ann and I get caught out by a big wave on Sea Point Promenade, Cape Town. Emma is a very good girl.
Preparing for Cape Town
A few minutes after I hit ‘publish’ on this blog post I am getting on the Crossrail Elizabeth Line train to Heathrow and flying to Cape Town to shoot a series of short documentaries for the Imagining the Ordinary City project, on which I’m the filmmaking research assistant. It will be my first time in Cape Town and my first time in South Africa. My main focus is to make a series of documentaries about “Everyday Journeys” – regular Cape Town people moving through the city living their ordinary lives. We’ll pair up those journeys with those of South African emigrants living in London, which I’ll shoot later this year.
Much of what I’m planning to achieve artistically is affected by what I can reasonably expect to do with the resources at my disposal. I’ll be working with one assistant, but they’re primarily a research assistant, not a trained film crew member; we need to stay discreet and light on our feet particularly so we don’t attract petty theft (unfortunately, rather common in Cape Town); and I need to fit my kit into one bag that will go in the overhead bin on my BA flight.
I know some people out there get quite excited by kit and packing, so here is an image of what I reasonably expected to take with me.
On the left is a tiny action camera and some grip equipment to help me mount it in various places, including on people’s dogs (because, yes, I am planning some Laurie Anderson style doggy-cam shots). The most important thing is that the action camera is tiny and can be discreetly mounted on people’s chests, just outside their clothing.
Moving right, the next column comprises two Fujifilm mirrorless X series camera bodies. I’ll be shooting primarily with the Fuji X-T3 because it shoots in Fuji F-Log, which makes grading a lot more do-able. The X-T20 is my backup just in case. It’s my pocketable travel camera and it’ll have a pancake 27mm lens on it most of the time. Hopefully I won’t need to use it to shoot any of the actual documentary.
Then in the top middle are 2x2TB external HDDs, which I hope will be big enough for the rushes. We’ll see!
And the rest of the kit is mostly sound: two Sony wireless lapel mics and a dinky Rode wireless lapel/vlogger mic, and then my trusty Sennheiser ME66 and a Zoom H4N. None of this stuff is new or fancy, but it gets the job done.
And then I have a lightweight collapsible carbon fibre travel tripod, which has been worth every penny of the £100 it cost about five years ago. And of course, a first aid kit which normally goes hiking.
Most of this stuff packed into my camera backpack, which then went inside my Easyjet size carry-on wheelie duffel, along with items that were awkward/too big for the backpack. Somehow everything you see above went into this:
So now, with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, it’s time to wheel my luggage out of the door and into a new adventure.
Achievement unlocked: PhD
On the morning of Wednesday 24th August I was hooded by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Kent along with eight other PhD graduands and a host of BA, MA, and PGDip recipients. The title of the thesis, which was read in full just before I received my degree is Mythical Middle England: Illuminating the Aesthetic Potential of English Non-Places Through Narrative Cinema. It has been a long process, and one which has changed the way I think about my topic of study, the way I approach my work and my sense of self. I don’t feel like recounting much about the thesis itself in this post right now, but I do want to cite the acknowledgements publicly here.
I have many people to thank for helping me reach this stage in the PhD, and my continuing artistic voyage into deepest Middle England: firstly Lavinia Brydon for her unflagging guidance and support throughout bewildering changes in global and personal circumstances, Frances Kamm and Murray Smith for stepping in towards the end of the process to help me over the line, Richard Misek and Mattias Frey for their guidance at key points in the earlier stages, Lawrence Jackson for film folklore tips, and Angela Whiffen for interpreting university administrative liturgy into vernacular speech. The time you have all given me is precious.
Resources are also useful, especially for PAR projects, and I would like to thank the School of Arts and the University of Kent for the Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarship award for the financial support.
Also within the field of academia, I would like to thank Dr. Jane Adams for our conversations about healing with water and Dr. Catherine Robson for encouraging my academic and teaching career more generally.
Outside the university, a great many people have given their time and their skills to make the creative output of this project possible. I acknowledge that contributions of cast, crew, and documentary subjects in the credits of the films but I cannot thank cinematographer Alexandru Grigoras, editor Svitlana Topor, and script editor Margaret Glover enough times for their contributions to the films, and for being the kind of collaborators who save me from bad filmmaking decisions.
The cartographical parts of this study would have been impossible without the help of Beth Manghi, whose GIS coding helped me plot the settings of British films.
This written thesis and the two films are all dedicated to the memory of Dr. John Harcup, who was my grandfather’s GP, and who later became my documentary subject, historical adviser to the short film Water Cure, a supporter, and a friend. It is rare to meet someone who blends a natural authority and the power to make things happen with curiosity and good humoured humility. He is missed.
Immediate family have also been crucial. David and Leonie Creighton for helping with outlandish requests, storage, and places to sleep, Duncan Graham and my sisters Caitlin and Rhianon Graham for keeping me moving both physically and psychically, and of course Courtney Hopf for more than twenty years of shared growth, enduring the demands of my muse, constant notes and reassurance and, yes, proofreading.
Brighton action cam test
In preparation for a series of short documentaries I’m going to shoot in Cape Town in August I have been doing some test shoots with a tiny (40g) action camera that attaches magnetically to a pendant worn under your clothes. My intention is that it is small enough not to draw attention like an actual camera but big enough that it isn’t as unnerving as cameras hidden in your glasses.
One of the benefits of mounting a camera on your chest rather than on your head is that the image points in the direction of overall bodily motion, ie. when I pause look left and right when crossing the road the camera doesn’t look left and right too. I think this is both calmer and more suited to my intentions.
Image stabilisation is achieved by shooting wide angle and at 2.7k (or 4k) and using postproduction software that crops and rotates the image to remove much of the jiggle introduced by walking before outputting at a lower resolution (in this case 1080p). It doesn’t completely remove the bob of walking, but the result is much more watchable than unstabilised footage.
Despite my mild anxiety about wearing a camera, at the games expo I saw about three people wearing the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, so now I’m wondering if I backed Betamax instead of VHS in the inconspicuous camera stakes.