the slide show as visual method

There was an interesting event in London last weekend, part of the Waste of the World research project, where I found out about a series of slideshows that are part of the project and can be found on YouTube here.  They’re all slightly different in format; the one below, for example, occasionally has a text slide inserted among all the photographs, while others have captions on each image.

 

 

Watching them reminded me of another slideshow, made by Trond Waage, a visual anthropologist at the University of Tromso, called Struggle for a Living – you can see it here.  This slideshow pushes more at what a slideshow can do.  It has a soundtrack – a voice-over and some ambient sound – as well as a few simple zooms into still images.  It also has a very powerful sense of rhythm, as the duration of the still images lengthens or shortens and the pace of the slideshow slows down or speeds up.  This is very effective in conveying a sense of urban everyday spaces – in this case, the town of Ngaoundéré in Cameroon – and Trond says that the process of working with images was also an effective way to negotiate understanding between himself and the protagonist of the slideshow, Bakary.

As well as its visual content, then, it seems that its rhythm, its ability to incorporate text that can be read, and its soundtrack, are the distinctive features of a slideshow – a medium that’s worth more attention than it’s so far received, particularly for those of us who don’t have the time to hone our filmmaking skills but still want something more than the photo-essay format.

The Artist – surely some mistake?

I went to see a movie last weekend, the much hyped The Artist.  It was charming, though not quite the earth-shattering cinematic experience the hype had led to me to believe.  I would like to point out, though, that there’s a mistake in the title.  Shouldn’t it be The Artists, plural, since the film rests in large part on the relationship between two film stars?  And I for one was as much interested in the rising star as the star in decline…  still, at least the film didn’t end with the two of them kissing…

It seems that men are very much centre stage in the bits of visual culture I’ve got to see over the past few weeks.  Some television, a couple more movies, a couple of art exhibitions.  All focussed on men – men as artist, men as genius, men as spectacle (the first two Twilight films, for example, as well as The Artist) – a point made by this piece in The Guardian, about two very popular UK tv shows with male heroes, Dr Who and Sherlock Holmes.  Hmmph.

a new sort of research film?

Since my visit to Queen Mary a few weeks ago, I’ve continued to ponder about the use of films as a social science research strategy.  A conversation with my colleague Bradon Smith provoked the idea that when most of us see a film (anthropologists excepted, perhaps), we watch it comparing it to the films we see elsewhere, on tv or at the cinema.  So we expect it to have high production values; we expect it to be filmed and edited very skilfully; we expect eloquent voice-overs and carefully-chosen music; we expect a beginning, a middle and an end; we expect to watch it concentrating on it and it alone; and we expect it to speak for itself, that is, we expect to ‘get’ it just by watching it.

Clearly, those are exceptionally high standards for your average academic to achieve, if they haven’t gone to film school or studied visual anthropology.  In the age of YouTube, iMovie and smartphones, maybe we should rethink those expectations and in so doing invent a new kind of film genre which fits both the changed contexts in which films can now be made, distributed and viewed.

So here is a list of possibilities for making and watching a new kind of social science film now:

• the film should be very clear what it’s trying to do.  This may involve a long title and probably a voice-over too.
• the film should have been made using a tripod and a videocamera with a decent external microphone, but don’t expect panoramavision with surroundsound.  It will probably have been edited using software from Apple or Microsoft, so again, make allowances.
• the film might well be pretty short, say ten minutes, so it can be uploaded to a video-sharing website and an academic webpage.  But there could be a series of films to be watched.
• online screening means that you can read some stuff about the film too; its paratext could, and perhaps probably will, be be lot more extensive than the posters and reviews that we’re used to.  In fact, I think this is really important for a film that wants to make a social-scientific argument/statement; I think viewers need to be told explicitly what the film is trying to say.
• online distribution will affect the spaces in which it’s seen.  This will probably no longer be the darkened lecture theatre – though it may be – but it might also be screened on a smartphone.  This means its visual scale might be quite crude: simple, uncluttered images work better on small screens.  (I remember after I watched Essential Killing thinking that it would look fine on an iPad: all those shots of one man in various landscapes).
• online distribution could also allow audiences to leave comments, for future viewers to see as part of watching the film.  The commenting would also be part of the film’s paratext.

So, a film in this new genre might well be fairly small, watched in chunks, accompanied by other materials, and a little rough around the edges; and it would include a fair bit of voice, either written or spoken, some of which would be outwith the film text itself.

The only thing is, I don’t know any films being made like that.  Does anyone else?

a question for film as a way of analysing social issues

I’ve been invited to an event on Monday 23 May at Queen Mary, University of London.  It’s part of a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust that uses film to create an understanding of the transformations and continuities in how migrants manage their health.  The research participants are from Nigeria, Poland and the Indian diaspora; all now live in south London; some are recently arrived and some have lived there a long while.  The research team are Isabel Dyck and Iliena Ortega-Alcazar at Queen Mary and Marta Rabikowska and Matthew Hawkins from the University of East London.  The team are going to screen a first cut of the film and there’s going to be lots of discussion about health, migration, and using film as a method to explore those issues.

Well, I’ve never been involved in making a film, and health geography is not my field!  But their project reminded me of another film made a long time ago, in Poplar in east London.  I found it when I was doing some research in Tower Hamlets Local History Library in the mid-1980s.  I was trying to find out about Poplar’s local council, several of whom were sent to gaol in 1921 for spending all the local rates on the relief of the local poor rather than sending what they should have done to other local authorities like the London County Council.  The very helpful librarian there brought me a videocassette (remember them?), saying that he thought I might be interested in it – and I was – part of the film had news footage of the councillors parading through enthusiastic crowds on their way to prison in 1921.

Councillor Minnie Lansbury on her way to Holloway Prison in 1921. Note the film cameras in the background.

But I also got very interested in the film itself.  Made around 1973, distributed by an outfit called Liberation Films and called Fly a Flag for Poplar, I never managed to find out very much about who exactly had made it.   But it’s a fascinating film and raises some interesting issues about making films and about the relation between the people who make them and the people who are pictured in them.

Now, there are all sorts of heated debates about the ethics of filmmakers representing other people, particularly poor people living in difficult conditions.  The East End of London in particular has a long history of journalists, photographers, filmmakers and artists all creating sensationalist images of what in the late nineteenth century was often called ‘darkest London’.  What Fly a Flag for Poplar tried to do, though, was to make a film as a call to social activism in what was (and to an extent remains) a very poor area of London.  They wanted to get people in Poplar campaigning for their rights.  Hence they showed that newsreel film of an earlier struggle for social justice in Poplar, as an inspiration for efforts in the early 1970s to improve social conditions in the area.

What the film also showed, though, was the importance of the places that the film showed, and the importance of the place where it was itself shown.  The film pictures its own making; you can see people lugging around bulky video cameras with huge battery packs slung over their shoulder, meeting people, talking and filming as they went.  And the film also filmed its own premiere: in a big church in Poplar, which was packed with a huge and excited crowd watching, listening, commenting, catcalling and at the end of the screening bursting with talk and discussion and planning.

So, while what the film showed and told is important, just as striking to me is the attention it pays to the conditions of its own production (or at least some of them – there are no discussions of the editing process, for example), and the emphasis it places on its screening and its audiencing.

And it’s the last point I think I’ll emphasise on Monday.  A film is not just its images; it’s not just a cultural text.  It’s also a product, that’s made in particular ways, and screened in specific places to particular kinds of audience.  For a film like Fly a Flag, that hopes to provoke social activism, those contexts of production and audiencing are crucial parts of how the film works.  Which raises a question: what sorts of social practice should a film of social analysis incorporate into its screenings?

(A postscript – Fly a Flag for Poplar is now listed on the British Film Institute’s Film and TV database, where the people involved in its production are listed.)

looking at cities

You can hear me talk about visual technologies and cities in the nineteenth century, in a podcast currently on The Open University’s OpenLearn site.

One of the questions I want to use this blog to think about is – if  the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century saw all sorts of visualising technologies used to make cities visible in more-or-less ‘realistic ways’, what’s happening now to how cities are represented and experienced?  If cities like Chicago are inhabited by Batman, and Paris folds up in a film like Inception, and New York regularly gets destroyed by zombies, tidal waves and ice sheets, do we think about cities differently now?  Do we live in them differently?

And what about the proliferation of images of cities now made by tourists and family snappers and bloggers?  How do they shape how cities are lived and understood?  Do they offer different ways of seeing urban spaces?

And finally, it seems to me that domestic sorts of pictures are entering city spaces more and more often.  We carry our family albums on our mobile phones, and we see family snaps displayed on subway walls after acts of violence.  Are domestic ways of seeing infiltrating urban spaces?

How do we see cities now?