this is audio visual cultures the podcast Patrick Simons signed an image based cultural production I am the creator and host Paul the bladder and this addition Andre Sheila and I spend the day at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and speak to one quarter of just these plays will see back Montefiore apart the comedy trips shows on tonight also talk about it saying she's an improvised silent movie and the play and taken a nine iron we begin though with some thoughts on our previous friends experience why is it that we are speaking out going to help in the background we're in a very face eight %HESITATION during the French the festival anymore do we just do this thing that inhabits the fringes of the festival but which has basically taken over from the first time the enemies make a this is our third time yeah a third time as a unit I did a bit of stuff for me yeah thank M. A. N. meaning the specific reason that we are here we wanted to just do a little bit of it but this year we don't three day stint before this time we just come out for the day there's a reason why we hate us because we just got back from a bit of traveling elsewhere and the specific reason why we are in this the company in the present time and we're just going across Bristol Scranton a bit to see a show at the gilded balloon TV it is the colonels a friend of mine is of a four person comedy sketch troupe called just please please whose show starts in Hoffman and we just bumped into imagination flaring in the places as people are wants to do for their own shows often have a visitor's register at the front and the somebody else doing it use my people to be firing for money for somebody else but someone with the right people who do the show's firing themselves with fliers that contained images of their interface so it's like just a tiny little celebrity encounters although it doesn't seem trusting coach people to go and see the shows %HESITATION anyway we are here to see his name's we'll see back once and he was a student at Nichols university I never told him so that's why I call my friends rather than well afterwards and then going to see at least two more things but tickets for an in person to see if that thing that we haven't because this free stuff on three different things my currency and then clean as anything with leaping straight about Lexaria onto a train and heading back to Newcastle and X. it up a little bit more this year because normally we head straight for the comedy and so we're going to see later we did see if I'm not here but I want something that we did get fired for and we thought oh sure why not let's give it a go we thought the archery interestingly the name of the pay he doesn't display properly on the ticket because the ticket continental and he with a capital even every possible an Irish so it can take in a marriage I think it's a mixture of mention Irish history right down my alley where for the second out right now %HESITATION so what comes as branching out in our lives he's seeing only mostly comedy or an entirely comedy your Highness next year we might see the Hoff committee last year I did a bit of a write up on my blog about everything well most of the things I think we did last year so if you are interested in reading about our adventures from last year and sent me a flyer dot blogspot dot com or something like that but if you don't know you want to read this blog entry because only name did not there was the real any of the past because last year and I have some videos actually and I put some images of the blog post about changing nightmare live it's really good fun yeah people remember that TV show that right here okay game shows on the fringes really it's still in the early nineties one where they wear a helmet which blinds them and they would direct from a that makes but then after awhile I realized it was a bit silly so they gave the machine within our unit so they could actually sure %HESITATION nice the size because I knew you wouldn't be able to see what was going on in the show that you pay for it was very funny because the people there were four people together volunteering themselves trying to become the chosen one those people were not there and they were to women as well which is disappointing so there was one and he was killed off pretty quickly because they want to defend and all the four people right now and then there was only I think you do medicamento very funny he was very different right okay let me to become a performer and a shirt and didn't get to see the show yeah you were very useful as a colleague on that particular day because you're able to fill me making it one of us are not able to do that zero like India's record signed by my technologies are much diminished the moment Phil Murphy people for the first year we came to the we did the last week last year we date the first weekend this year we're in a day right in the middle of the when we did the most weekends the first year and it would look like it's been through traumatized it was knee deep in people with their exhaust just trying to get from a to B. all the performers were at Monaco after seeing it's a really tough time of year and miss so in coming to advise like bringing rice to the biggest rice market in the world six bringing coals to Newcastle times ten but you know what that means is that one of the performers are being beaten to within an inch of their lives for the situation we are spoilt for choice when it comes to companies like the hustling to get people to go into your show that's so much a part of the performance it's a whole other performances exhausting and then supporting each other trying to see the shows is a manual cortex that does attract which involves lots of singing on the way in which they go out of business is they just come out in costume to sing short songs and public service was one thing that you would be well advised to do if you're gonna do a show in Edinburgh is something where you can just go out and do snippets of it in the street conspicuous so that might be %HESITATION would be conspicuous you know you're singing that carries in the sense of amazing costumes whether six weeks away that kind of thing do something about it on the street and that will get you distinguish McConnell but that means planning is going to be with them only to be thanks for your the business is this is what one must bear in mind if you were quite well see we decided to see the menu castle when they're on their way to London is coming out from underneath this is a very good thing about living in Newcastle it is sent to the other one in new castle because they're just trying stuff rounds on the way out and also for the same reason cheaper because they're going to run this for a fiver at this time did you cancel so yeah richer parents usually gets our undivided attention but when she's not getting any of it this time because this thing happened about a month I understand and you got some anyway assisting the feminists and northern states next month yes we are this is the first time you've told me about you know okay right because this would be a cool and yeah I decided to take you with my other ticket okay do I get the chance to decide whether I want to come with you maybe I'm trying to educate it would be the second time you're on I've been sick because feminists together we can happens to be here on Thursday we make it for one day and get it taken care of coming at the end of August this time for just a day so it didn't really work out anyway yeah we're going to be able to see them in half so it's quite rare that they come out for number so citing a demonstrator recording this and put into a criminal record Newcastle's possibly because opposing offensive these faculties they're gonna be fun it's never not been fun it's always very tiring there's always really good things take away so many good memories please check back in after some may even have an interview with Hans a for the comedy we're about to see it would be nice all right so we will if you're interested in giving regular support for the podcast that aren't too keen on peach tree and I know I have membership options and buy me a coffee dot com forward slash P. eight there where you can get the C. Max Strus as well as some others exclusive buy me a coffee head over to buy me a coffee dot com forward slash P. A. B. L. A. I. R. to price membership options or drop a fiver into this charge thanks and enjoy the rest of the episode where site %HESITATION just please please I was really impressive to me finally it was so well written this is a fantastic thing several different variations on the world in the coming minute costumes on registering the six I'm not gonna tell you who we are and then it will become apparent the company reveals during a sketch about who we are and then everything was expected to become funny so that that was the times that they may need to do with it from just a few small repertoire I did foods of twelve thirteen schedule to get the server roughly three and the rules and really really well written mail had four or five big tanks in the longer ones and the short ones for just a single guy activated inside of a minute even in a concert hall and just please please will Tom Georgie and just these days is the name of the troops and also it seems at the moment the name of the show more contestable with having a show that Scott different titles in the name of your committee contact and I think the name Jesse space X. quite telling because it's quite a polite there is some swearing and some gnarly ness and there but it's a very sweet and very good natured show there's nothing maintenance to suppress it hi he takes that one is really good use of musical acts are and that was when you do it for you sure about this in a tiny room that held about sixty people you get an eighty person who does a very limited lighting setup and a bit of audio but the use because there's really retiring constantly switching to pain points to show that they were between scenes because that's the kind of rearranging the furniture just moving around in order to get from the end once into the beginning of the next with very little going offstage as well so that the lights were switched to say now don't run X. sketch with music in between each sketch was always a preparatory sketch this coming up in seventy nine yes I am able I was really good at doing this I was confident character for delivery they were getting into the account is snoozing really confidently for the area for the tiniest restricted area you'd be tempted to get quite distant from the phone at home is to keep the movement of a room we all have done from school training because they were doing dancing singing some points it wasn't tons of what their characters in the sketch we do hundreds of accents they must access I bet that took ten months to write what you want to go for a different time I think it took a significant amount of time and right here so I need to get it tight and then once you know what the space that is for her saying the transitions while also remaining of the chairs to position them for the next batch coming night stand to get props on and off it takes a lot of practice and knowing high care spaces and because I am a friend with one of the four people with well we are going to try it because going to hospital now we're gonna try to get his own suggestions about what's involved in doing this kind of service Hey we're really super excited to be joining might well come to here I am I saying that correctly the single way and hear from just these plays and we've had a reading in the free time watching on the session if we can just give me a few questions hi would you describe show is twenty five sketches in fifty five minutes from the very fast paced SO of silliness the grown ups that is also quite clever it'll be a very modest yeah I thought it was very clever it's not only to give compliments lightly yeah it's recorded for ever it's a I'd say it's like a classic sketch and we cannot sketch comedy and I love the with the advent of my stand up comedy and character comedy with lots of breaking the fourth wall and trying to the audience which is amazing but it is a group of princes of Maine who do it really well it's like this weird amalgamation standup and sketch but we were just like let's just do sketches just still sketches thirty four if you wouldn't mind because we only remember everybody's first name mine just Rhymin everybody's name yes Philippa Carson Georgie Janice Tom Dixon and myself within Siemens hearing this anytime and so in your own well yes trying to make your way in the world of showbiz thing with day jobs some nine days thirty isn't because yeah so hard to express and getting on the of the the A. B. player graduated from my ear drums because anyone of them who has not got a second job I think that's probably what everyone has of the stuff that I have to do because it's changed so much but that's the compromise you make when you doing something that you love and all the necessary financially stable but it's what you want to do on your own and it killed at the main branch which is probably one of the better known locations venues which might examine how you can convince a lot because it's your first range is a great day this offers them a fringe as a group repeat that just say if you're gonna put the question on is constrained and I we've gotten together billions of because we've been gigging in London just trying stuff out on the fringes always angry because we wanted to do stuff and we found doing things off our own back with anyway tonight on and get his agency in a career that saw that latency and is often not a meritocracy there are so many variables and got you can be the bank like amazing do great job in the state he's too small which is the night it's just about how it works what sentence it wasn't seven that's too small I need of intend to find out is the other thing yeah seventy but we were like we have this thing we work well together we like working together to make something today and if it is in London to indifferent directed you contact people we contacted all the big ones disseminated thousands gathered them under running a bunch of the smaller ones a couple of places offer those places and gilded balloon unpleasantness I came to see us %HESITATION the fall festival because we managed to get into the office today until one night together but after seeing reductions in that package it was on a hiking condition I can understand ten minutes of the show before his run of consecutive minutes I really kind of a still okay and is like awesome stuff but I go to the place off the back of that and so it was a nice balance of work on not getting someone in doing so that was good enough for the people Hey and you and also the kindness of the venue's going oh yeah we're going to take a chance of someone we've never heard of that's how we say so that anyone can do it but it takes a lot of again a lot of and let's be a testament to Hiero day earlier incarnations of the show if they thought well yeah we will give you time yeah I think so I think we'll invested in it because we feel that it was good which I think makes is unique in that address I think everyone has sex with the but yeah definitely I must've been and still is we find of his tights you know leave a lasting contest I really like that the Joe Klein it was very good shares a lot of it was very in a sense that's quite refreshing in a world where everybody's fighting I don't know why we made that choice I think it's the idea of someone going and if we don't going to see shows you feeling uncomfortable let the people in St John St Thomas after I think was definitely like why things are so common tree which we love but we just want to make it a lot alike this is the way we've done it so it's been a long thing to one group of people can see us out a bit sat by it might be Correa's advises one line which I completely disagree with which is over and the work of a crazed by and the only reason I know users from Newcastle because my car is about coming together and it doing exactly what I'm doing because of my it really keeps me up at night and that was one point in the show to do that I think yeah it's not offensive not offensive but also we would never know you know we just we like people have an ice times put in context even at twelve fifteen so in a roughly sixty seat venue it was in the basement we went up and down a lot of states the area and I think it's on just below the ground yeah every single seat in the everything was taken I would check my journal with several human listen to something seventy six yeah the past five or six days we decided to sell out yes that is ME ten seats empty today there's only about three which I think comes to choose a selloff I don't know that's the thing that's really been my gosh this is remarkable because we struggle to get reviews and stuff but without just word of mouth it's friends family and people saying Hey go and see this and then it's also strange is seventy stand is going to say I'm liking it the full coming of a missile was complete without social media would any fertility people you'll hear the same shows ever ever again things and and that's the only reason I can say that we that's amazing %HESITATION service while the kids think this is such a massive parts of friends I guess even the visual culture transistors because right right please bring her phone background and your last name the things you love goes to circle their sections you know maybe do the right thing and the most really very interesting the communication nearly complete circle for the title anyway so it's the same company the card yeah it's a really formation it's very clear and then on the back of the prior year and now you said that you wear during the show yeah which is the state and the computerized how did you go about defining turning for doing the photo shoot there are a couple of things we knew we had today %HESITATION wanted to do one which is helpful about faces on it because I glance that's what you want young people to recognize the poster on the faces not see what's on stage what we were going to say that's what you're selling we so we want to be ourselves we want to look like on comedy we don't want to be today we're approachable and quite lovely anyone in particular as ideas that you would overseas Kim I've been told he's that might be just because he's a full time solicitor but it was this is skeptical that the John and then an old sketch group two guys who went to John this is John financial planner thing says though not so light aircraft was invading neutral but still threw things away and I think I quite like that it was trying to be grown ups but not ready succeeding some rain AS laboratory choice that we're like okay %HESITATION let's see if it works really well she's an Philips %HESITATION decided to buy some white suits on Amazon I just tried it and then we try them on the ground and let them we've today the post and then you can see what we have to and striking there's an it pleasing formation no we so I think it works yeah it is to the rule of three as well I think he's on the line on the faces and the bottom tanks they logo the idea was like a tea stains come down that is the latest version of our friendly development is a friend of ours who design stuff and we gave him a break we took thousands of pictures we've got a friend take pictures Lawrence and download the different formations but this one just relied on the contract it was a real confetti gun more it's Georgie well no she no I know it so for those from Ireland Georgie has second is Jones but she's a glass behind homes could have been because you're almost a four nation yeah Republic of rather than in the U. K. do you do you must have more from it helps because then it would just an Englishman Irishman and a Scotsman it was a little shocking it seems for a couple of the other members of your home when there was some intakes of breath at this point and that point Tom's playing this movie is the kindest meeting that you buy in the shops and the point was when he put the gun in the mouth and nose with officers maybe it's to show just how willingly we suspend disbelief I think it goes I wasn't holding guns even though I know it's made of plastic and because we have different things and this is the shocking images thing the I do you especially with the joke is that she's appearing she goes on a dog because it used to be spoilers everybody the premises and the PA being sent on the behalf of the boss for catch up yeah so the PA has to do everything the bus as a natural extension of that is the boss gets his he does have to go through it just like a very silly just not to the extension of the job but this is you bring suicide so I think what's changed involvements is Jodie's gonna fire but now has been playing with the likes flexible said one six it gives you when it's time to go okay this will be the darkest sounds doctor and disposing of it let me tell you the full scope is waiting for the big this is where another time sketches sculpture and I want to yeah well I mean they were like all the sketches %HESITATION all four of us have input and change and stuff it's just a natural spot every single catching this has been added these are the schedule to and then if it's not to be here yeah the bark for life sketch this is a conversation with you about how life feels neglected they are very it's just a great we accept being fell apart from we've played in different pots so we try and keep the casting by general so judging I've done it Tom and Jody again at the all the policies of the exchange well known in Edinburgh we've kept it the same just a piece of serving as a good representation of a road safety five hours who was on stage at any one time yeah we try our best to do that if it will worry to some people than on this motion I felt my god given rights will punch lines we spend so much time talking about making sure that it's like because I think this is the greatest thing sometimes again this is not always about persons show to join in and I think we've done I think it's a haunted and one who'd brought what which we used to do some I don't yes what we have been doing this initially when we talk when I had written the both of which I want to do that and they're like yeah great just bust the bank tells us that as a boy it's written from a male perspective and written for ourselves and so working with them well god that's not something that we do being you know open and liberal wealthy people and feminists were like how did that yeah it's really it's just so funny how great is that he says that's missing and stuff like that so but it was like I want to write more sketches just women and I was gonna kill like talking to her and we were like that sounds great J. just extended from NASA's further provided receptacles with it's one of those places where people primes entertainment for this contest was with these problems and then the basic even though I am a person who was wearing a seat something else so you have to blackrock questioning you date the bank the best person I'm assuming as soon I'm gonna buy the head home you have to imagine that I wanted your team to be aware that you can generate yeah I'm gonna change my customers in the from now one must be different yeah I am not like when you were done with the the builder and the because posted on yes the business to be complete I think big adds a bit of noise and also I think if you're not doing it really really well I think what you lose in the transition time because I get to the same quickly jumped from the scratch if we have like a minimum cost on something in to fill out this is why we studying onstage this time was like I ran a scan is all about and if we feel that we have to get a bug Hey welcome to the boat and going as you can guess from from some completely willing to go with okay this is one of the and so that's what I specifically did a lot of information there is that still rules of improv this the time that they use which is ironic detachment they're trying to avoid ironic that option and I think we try very hard to play the sincerity of the conversations we have a life in exile as if it was a real relationship the audience laughing I mean we try to maintain the tension the whole basis of my tongue in cheek Matt this is funny we may not always pulls me out the two men are like well this call may be a factor well I guess there's a pipeline okay there's nothing you can push through there's a question mark this is Nancy disbelief people are willing to just there's a few members Russell what these people are doing in front of us is absurd I'm never find myself going I'm in a room watching some of the things that are doing it every month every day from get okay that was my job today I'm going to go and pretend to be with me and then I. F. and I'm like it's very strange so the frivolous and strange things that it'll make sense within the drummer if each yeah there's a serious man this movie is about to give in to me exactly how to be yeah yeah when when is a collection of the most whimsical see the products you get if you survive to show he can how many thousands of Americans is the I think we had enough to give us a seven session in a recent I put my bags in my pocket monocled Wilson alters things on the phones as well we do have a there was a very neat callbacks within the sketches but you kept them relatively discreet my mom's biggest what I think is the minute he was meeting with we never thought I've got a lot that's one of those really strange things that audiences I need to grab the audience's appointed you they just recognize the audiences on stupid and very small and very brave please keep coming to see us it's all becomes like an in joke for that room of people because it's like if we were that and is this something I think %HESITATION sketches about things that people recognize that because Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton sketch people like with the double right I really appreciated that a lot of the sketch is very conscious of being gender neutral and stumble home and interacting with the server bodies this is nice to have those sorts of things just not be an issue you know the the next meeting %HESITATION yeah yeah it's something that I'm in I think we're all very conscious of his listening to each other in the group in a specific time and I who initiate written most of it the knights like I said it's very much a modernist all four of those yeah this escape is that we don't have anymore they used on the web page in it there's a malpractice and all this bitch and it was a high and %HESITATION very setting and I've written a line of sight and then the Filippos sent chills I I'd done things good words for us to be saying I was like I genuinely don't see the problem but let's go not because I don't understand how bout with you since then we came up with a funny word current board it was but we ended up saying something so inane and childish that actually was funny because it took away the status of the it's just about listening when Thomas that's not right the man and I was trying right from the email because sketches tend to be mutual definitely why not just right as a woman because my natural just right so I could just change that and just imagine George into the big old big old liberal con the box a little but it is just because of the women in my life been aware of that and I think that's important sometimes with comedy it's an excessively it's a novelty you know we're doing sketches you can so that I it's easier to make an actor in a limited relationship because but it is funny to do different things remember if you ask the question but I'm almost yeah one of my team needs me being very embarrassed about sex is very cute it seems like the jobs going to have the from the storm the mayor may not it was just nice it was a rather than I was in the in that case yeah that kind of thing and it's just funny more because this is known as thank you to that's something we just find it funny is people have describes like all for nine days yes an interesting that they chose to male names that do you know what for you guys after the friends apart from months of France but myself unit into the girl professional actors and %HESITATION is this this is also a professional the idea is that this will again it's been a mentor Hey Scott how to plan because it's so based on that will definitely happen as I got home for a little bit and then right and he didn't they were very resilient what do you do yeah depends on the time I don't think I can take this much holiday offer free we will have to work on that but we will it's the thing that we do and we love to do more stuff with it the idea is to just these days to come up big thing that we can make stuff in the bag and then we can make stuff on the top yeah many great bands the first phase fighters the names of the title going to be expected to remember one thing yeah exactly a month to month to come in to read just please come from is and tightened that is a quick question charming until midnight but and may and then radiation and it was that thing just these please when you put something down a shop just these days because you want to be Brian yeah you know what to say these are just these days it's qualifying is on what could be happening the other this is a way of saying please when you sell meetings I want the same time same place recently nothing else I don't want anymore things that those are like the same justice based just the sketches I still doesn't know what it means anymore because that's where it came from but it's just a name that people keep forgetting do you continue to hold the J. T. something we do and we got a lot of the type and I insist on the common between just these in place at the end of our last visit makes is that okay stacking services we've had a really great time so even if this happens yeah well just a space where can we find you on the internet good just please please someone else stole just these days H. J. U. S. T. H. E. S. E. says just the space but with that one U. S. first team and yet just tease please is what has and then we're on just these days dot com if you search just these these into Google you'll find us and we just released a sketch that has like two and a half million views a new schools which is cool when you order coffee with an Irish name and by financial G. well judging for that that is George's main idea is that this is a difficult yeah George zero and for the rest of us for as well and then we found out together for an incident on a friend I'm trying to get the filming and editing I was online this is just please please thank you would you like to receive updates thanks and special offers straight to your inbox then they said forty visual cultures dot wordpress dot com to sign up to your mailing list yes again thanking you for having been told to go into the thing that I'm going to do it well I wanted to say that one as well before they had a pretty nice and countered with a jaunty chop from my neck of the woods firing poker area something from another area I was the only person to bump into poker you would have been I would have to follow new video converter I should have done was just go way back I have to confess my girlfriend and I would have had it won here calling me a you can keep he's as hairy as possible right the tier three funny men from Northern Ireland here we saw him a couple of years ago may have neglected them for awhile please send me send you counseling and family I think when you see someone firing for sure that they're doing this French and we're definitely not going to see venture for you consider that at some point you become the most forening pessimist possible to be solved and expect nothing but Justin Wallace it was the phone twice entered yes there's a group of I think knowing people pull together KOSPI project the findings will cut off and credits at the end of may %HESITATION name servers a good seven people who doing performance and then there was a guy he was completing the intertitles our favorite topic and writing a sentence and this happened sometimes I could even hear the type I yes it was coach an improvised side in the face of course we have to go through this I couldn't have a have been anybody but Italians because they continue to have probably the most respect for the silent era film if they put even RDMA anybody cinema notes to shame the Italians have reference for it please reference of course because early cinema is dominated by committee I'm a college that and so even though it was supposed to be a drama they were improvising they stopped in those moments of comedy dark comedy having a pair of dark comedy mixed with Anderson Scotty yes it was pretty effective for the wonderful performances particularly there's a couple of people playing what one does find a dog another's pain you can't never particularly for me yeah the visit of gender mixing because there was a woman playing a man very effectively and probably in a calm way both were kind of surprised to getting across the types of characters ever find something we find ourselves observing all the time when you play the six that you're not a customer make up on your side you have to stop and of course the guy playing the woman was coated very much in flux %HESITATION I would say so honoring a faction S. of the performance of the flapper girl and a man in the iron to quite smoking and having a baby gnarly to okay you're on Thomas conventions of the era including lots of poking fun at forms of Damascus and can save twenty five as well a new truck source was used to describe the foreman foreman is coming in and these two guys standing in front of the auditorium completely silent Ali constant acting sit down sign and the bass from the centers and we set the front row and then after I sat down to go notes in the file manager from the room and then they go to any concerts and the principal was someone in the audience had to write down on a slate one of them is holding the touch of a job they did it several times I got the right one so if you wanted to write about whatever was on the site the new one on and then we did a kind of reckoning up between %HESITATION was undertaken and it was the have to find somebody suggested secrets act somebody suggested that with the yeah server there were several that came down to the most lots of hello your clothing so the firm we chose the telephone was the on the take and then they started to improvise this firm I'm aware of that was done where is the screen it was I'd say about three fifteen for a similar scenes behind the pharmacy area such that when it wants on informants area you could barely see the screen written off you could project something on demonstrating what sort of beginning and then the project hello from the lights behind the screen to go on to those lots of surprising Q. seven and then within a performance based performers are coming from either side with a limited number from and I hope and wish to start think they've got a repertoire and they're picking them from that record but then after awhile I started thinking if they're adapting it really really well the principal of one of the characters please stay on undetected because that was a job for Mr they did do comedy along the lines of this character has to pick up this other character and this performance is strong enough to listen to their problems there was a bit more of the onyx detachment that will was saying they didn't do him justice please yeah I'm running for president when one is doing a show about something similar is basically it's because people love off silent films so much even when they're not too even in the dead straight loss because they're so strict please come general happen after the initial while this seems like it's going nowhere was it into pointed type story even if the results of the initially which is the undertakers and started but there's lots of different ways to die service levels darkly comic and people find themselves in buildings and some people falling asleep at the wheel of a car crashing or accidentally knocking somebody off everything just to get you in may for the sorry and then immediately when those are happening deciding right this is the kind of story that we're going to try to do too mature to notice because I was very convincing yeah they call it he said story lines may be there for course to resign and take it up to whatever profession is chosen the three nine right relationship with the person doing the job it shows and then they have the relationship with this person and it breaks down for whatever reason whatever jobs on to the next court hearing that would make sense of one of the scenes in the greater of the things that were specific to take it would have been rougher on the edges of the design process with engine over the course of the trip it seems to have physical not to be they have a specific time today have something called the forty three year I think it was the same person he was playing the woman in the relationship how may I think the name of the character this person it's very we can even get using them thanks for coming to life story told people about paying crews and things like that shorter people are paying out of all of the kind that we often think of it in the film acting is being circulated to contacting you don't it's from Spain it's just a very elementary money combined with other forms of some of the phones that come to mind for us to get us he gets on the phone for anyone landing now doing physical comedy learn some of the ways of using forty used from someone to go I want you to share without blinking but you'll flushing I looks as to how to do that we take hands from the new school year four fingers and promote fire it's great put a new wave your finger check on a man who thinks that yes and I love the way they come and get some youthful liberals believe it turns out and she's showing off the engagement ring on this thing I this is not the shivering after hours but then using the other hand to flash dot something diamonds the timing of course is everything one eccentric define the penis is doing a cracking job because there's both playing music that she's turned and playing notes the sound effects and music and trying to get this is sound effect from this rejection of the long lines if if you just hammering the same note again M. as in court again and again and it's quite a place known as well that tends to come across as %HESITATION that somebody slamming into this is just really insistent music this work to do that unless it is doing very well there was a lot of undertaker characters must be very strong so if he's too strong sometimes and break things tells of door handles over something sign ready have a certain amount of lifting the heavy lifting their assigned if I was doing the metaphorical heavy lifting about that yes which I thought was quite figure just because it was pretend he's lifting their metaphorical heavy lifting about the metaphorical heavy lifting that refers to some user habits that's a matter for instance was clear that they have not just seen a lot of some films but seen some specific phones the idea of a character he just doesn't appreciate how strongly fourteen September is a specific mmhm and it's nice and then cut off the courses taught today yeah for the company from about nineteen or character somehow when was it takes possession or something and I don't think it would be much Linda Phil Mickelson cure for Cavendish and for extra translates as a medicine for strength and he takes his medicine for pain Caledon becomes unnaturally both brave and strong so there's a lot of comedy and people not knowing to expect how strongly also the two rivals for women's affection that's in about every other song from service contemptuous effective at getting back to Poland lots of fun I'm trying to represent a front runner I think so let them into something that I thought was that we could see quite a lot of what was going on on the side to probably figure further back that would have been a bit more of a surprise to us yeah it was very funny but at certain points people who are in the wings not being part of that particular skit no particular scene the heat off of what people were doing the same the fed I think one the woman who is playing the big heavy garden when she was carried off stage which was put down for some reason she found it distracting embarrassed when it's just been done and her face I could just about see if you're desperate times the result from often having done that but this is another instance of a reserve this morning it's the we're gonna put in front of you is not supposed to look like what it represents we are calling upon you to do it again when expressed in disbelief someone from the main on the ticket counter Kevin throws his rifle throws it out the door D. mind throwing one another for McCain on ramps heavy there's a huge fight stuck on the shoulder and lifted her off into the wings for mine the morning interacting with things %HESITATION yeah I mean you can mine being the subject of the actions of things around those willing to put those two together you can have somebody being for someone and again something which works within the scenario is that there's no need to call back somebody pretending to defend every meeting that simply pretending very well to give an impression of I don't know if it was the inventiveness often exploits what was funny at all costs of three coverage even think of selling arms to emulate option but it's not really works because that's very community communicating monitoring and of course they're crossing several language sorry for Sharon's high end that means that they can travel I can do this it doesn't matter but the language they just need somebody within the intertidal second okay and whatever language country houses its dominant language but also it's not language of silence sentiment that so alien and quite car ninety two people might because Sandra hears ago if this was going on did you notice that when the thing looks up at a local footage at the beginning it was the lack of for just fifteen of us universal was formed in nineteen fifteen those are the kind of counter did the music means to determine in nineteen thirty one the universal film company was formed out of a conglomeration of twelve existing from companies it was called universal because the other was already around at that point the film is universal for them to choose from I do no Sir the language because language or style specific characteristics and film doesn't fit this kind of sticks but the universal unknown numbers decrease specific communication means and they were having a damn good government that was like an Italian mostly comedic melodramatic music drama which had been given creative English interface which was a normal time according to some scholars friends of mine are Italian work on Italian cinema I'm trying to take it or so I and I taught in comedy a time companies are really quite dark chopsticks and we're all living above us he showed us some of these Italian comedies that he was looking at the rest of the server British Irish Americans my neighbor family quite distressing thoughts are essential to being about death and the undertaker and not from the edge and the quite dark and tragic despite the settings I do wonder whether there was a bit of manipulation isn't loading this decision making any units we came up with about six different titles yeah it was we would close those down through a process of elimination to to get invited on it was that the guy stopped the process when he had undertaken another one in north he said it was if we had a couple of people which we probably would have been on their minds RT some mystery and what which is about thirty pounds %HESITATION you're free and up is that what you wanted to your investment bank all right I thought you were going to do I don't know I was different RT from historians yeah it's like putting a mirror in front of the mirror just make it really matter after like in the future the address for the starting to be very important for everyone we care very much appreciate Christopher Lambert as it is your right and I think we're seeing is %HESITATION just waiting to see ninety nine yeah so the tech in the bay area so we're not on night of ninety giving him any key to see if we can get and see the skeptics and we're hoping to see the C. K. alley came up off and take any marriage started may and run over so we just didn't make it so that one is over here this was our contingency plan when we can get into this when I get into this so let's see the plane was intense it was probably a bit more intense actual contract everyone sat in the near future brexit has messed everything up toward the north and ardens parts from the apparently there's not very much the same old legacy so if absent fathers stuff that's been done a million times before only this time it's Spain comes over to some women they still are concerned so many ways their father never wanted instead of getting on with their lives on the main character's anti a religious or Catholic the lord's prayer keeps saying number pages Hey she and her other siblings her sister and two brothers their father dies apparently during the contacts they were taken and has children by the reality is Russian Fabian it's apparently situated in west Belfast you seem to be Scottish and had a crack at the accents hello one character was Jerry and all the rest of the characters are specific they all signed in for Terry then that every character dates about their very different accents so we will I think my main criticisms are actually they didn't really seem to know much about anything that under certain actors role for him they worked really hard did a good job with I thought that there may be material was very under researched serves very talky there was a lot of stuff provides the disappears can't get mentioned in a very fake way but when details were given there are entire day problems so things like dozens and dozens one seventeen fictional characters at first J. as being world distance not in the upper prominent loyalists that kind of thing never happens it is usually people who are in the house like for national communities usually accused of some kind of forming for being traitors and most of the time it was probably mistaken identity or it was just a sign today the community this is what we will do to you if you do you inform the types even more tense for tap on the actual contract was in many ways one thing was there's a character called a author and it's actually a leader and then union carnation of loyalist paramilitaries McCall there at times what was the right essay our age you read something wasn't terribly and my sister but anyway this character to fight it with quite a lot of compassion which anyway was different from the typical depiction of the loneliness because usually there are stand alone as she was but they're usually so I called back and really enjoyed torturing people they would have just done away with people the way that she does so I don't know if the writer not knowing how it all works for the city because of some of the S. and room to run and take a man's stories of Sophocles and then it's all these religious infractions I wonder if I'll if this may be trying to take on more than they could come to the right team speaking nothing they're just young and starting right I don't know who this person is it's a good attempt and everybody worked really hard C. company hopes anybody for me and all I know is we but as lesbianism thrown in there for good measure of representation is scared but not if it's a shame on them for the crack yeah the traffic citations and that being said one thing I recommend to play for I did make a point of there being a multiplicity of Ireland's somewhat higher than it is everybody is a very individual thing and what it meant to the previous generation the next generation is very different from one of the younger people many of the same they were crumbling under the pressure of trying to keep that up and I just the excess study hard if not how to been explored a bit more and make more effectively probably would've warms more it was I think it just got buried under needless pointless violence all honors very simplistic canceling that didn't really make anything anywhere maybe that was the point but it's just not really reflective of the current time and it's you know in twenty nineteen to twenty this is when there's no sitting assembly the house in order to be referring to women's and eating with the price of well we wish we could get back to that actually it was written after the brexit referendum I just called about his reference often the reference but before the assembly start when their time was for a small window of time time and it was quite a long time ago sales nine along top and had a lot of key thinkers have died have retired so it's very difficult to write something like that to make it relevant because the crying dissecting underneath it so quickly it's a very difficult I read research I just really have been trying lately because everyday something no not somebody else's fire and so hard to keep up with everything to try and do something creative and not something I right reuniting Ireland Austin not really understanding what it is we probably ought to be changed location haptics he was quite large and it seemed like it was going to start quite nano my worried by making a chance without we just tell I haven't changed how to decompress because if you try to do too much and I guess really overwhelming and I think three big things and I was actually quite a good day trying to give some credit to dance again even pretty fearless when serving humans getting into conflicts where that brutalize making it something that's not to say in the real world may have been a mistake maybe it should have been able to set an alternative world read the names of the fractions roommate the countries are made up of my thinking okay I think we're on the same page being a religious who is going to lead to conflict suddenly suffering lying on the being willing to commit violence whole have them turned up to eleven the main character was not a fan practicing I don't really know maybe that is generally known by people the research extensively on willing to be six we ran it does seem there but I think their points we can pick up on other times to explore more taps thanks very much for listening there are links to many of the acts and shows mentions in the expanded show notes which are available to patrons fi a Petri on dot com forward slash P. E. A. prior where we gratefully received funds of any amount to keep the podcast going and improve what we do please help the community grow by liking the audio visual cultures PH on Facebook and emailing audio visual cultures at G. mail dot com I keep a list of ideas for future episodes and requests are very welcome we'll get to the mummy can and we encourage you to join us and discussing your chosen topic thanks again for all your support and catch the next time
Tag: silent cinema
Audiovisual Cultures episode 47 – Assunta Spina and the Badwills
automated transcript
hello I’m Paula Blair and this is audio-visual cultures support Casta explores aspects of an issues around cultural production I’m delighted to present quite a few guest speakers this week who were all involved in a special event at the Tyneside cinema centered around an early silent Italian film Assunta Spina accompanied by a live score by Italian folk band the bad whales the event included short documentaries made by women filmmakers and there’s an emphasis on reclaiming women’s from histories as Francesca Bertini had a large role in the production of Santa Sabina as well as starring in the title role in order of appearance you’re going to hear and Rochelle and I responding to you the whole event and then Rachael Pronger from the programming team at the hindsight cinema Juna Thompson from a kind of singing talking about commissioning the band to perform with the film a bit more chat and the aftermath of the event and then from Alistair Cole who is a researcher and filmmaker talking about being part of the band and making the music but also his research around language and film thanks so much to everybody who’s been engaging on social media and a big thanks to appear tree on members if you want to find out ways of supporting the podcast stick with me till the end and I’ll be back with some details and I really hope you enjoy the discussion
wonderful event the center of which was a colleague of your shoe gonna speak two years old and I’ve already recruited some thoughts fears this is gonna be an interesting one because normally I’m quite Connie about getting a quite linear saying that I can edit this one’s actually gonna be a patch-up job which I could normally avoid doing because that entails work it was even if you just recorded this an equipment linear fashion I just recorded the thing read just went to that would still be a patchwork anyway because we just saw a short film which was a mash-up of a 15 minute documentary about women protesters from the archives to BFI National Archive films one from 1941 to 1952 1953 an instrument southern Italian saber which made the experience of watching a silent narrative film really different from wonderful patchwork anyway one of the most important things for me was the band’s use of silence a couple of other people who regretted have said this and this is something that really struck me during the screening through a couple of moments in the film so the film is how would you describe it it’s a romantic drama put in intense drama there are moments of comedy here and there Alastor in his introduction to some said there’s two love triangles but really it’s a bit like a square I love square yeah but two triangles together the plot of it is remarkably simple there’s initially a situation of jealousy in a man about his lovers relationship with another man and then after the other man cuts the woman in the face yeah and goes to prison for doing that the woman gets with another man gets out early and then there’s a really record moment of yet again more jealousy about her relationship with another man and he kills the other man and that’s it there was a moment when it just suddenly ended and I thought the film just went and do that 1915 I thought I was being too hard to get up and go home something like two or three reels too early no the film it’s over by from work oh the rest your sales was the message there in those two pivotal moments of violence they may be at aftermath of the violence you know the music had reached a crescendo it became really frenetic especially after the murder of essences current lover Frederico Frederico by a former lover Michel a is that right I think it was mixture let me carry it sunny cooking Italian put Michael basically so Freddie and Michael have a great faith and Michael just hands Freddy’s asked to it yeah and then the music this sustains frenetic every single song we heard yeah cross the whole film we heard about 10 different songs they were existing songs Alistair referred to it being from an existing repertoire of southern Italian folk music every single song built and built and built and built and it got louder and louder more energetic and sometimes just actually faster and then there’d be this climactic moments followed by what seems to have impressed you more than me solids from me it amplified the seriousness of what it just happened both times so the first time it happened was when Mikael a heard struck us inter and then the second time was when he had just knifed Frederico it’s interpreted that he’s stabbed him with a purposes which is not easy I’m speaking as if I’ve done that now right imagine the physics of it would be but you just get this moment of gravity from the silence I mean I have I suppose a mild experience tinnitus so it really my ears were ringing it was painful the silence for me very early on in that I thought everyone’s playing into microphones everyone’s got their attached to an amplifier and those amplifiers are set properly oh yeah slightly painful but I did get used to it and I think it was important about it was that that achieve that yeah I need it to push over the edge especially at that end climactic part and then when music creeps and again and it crapped in at the start it was just the drums and they’re very particular types of drum I had a word with Alessandra who was the percussionist and as Alistair said when he did the introduction Alessandro was going to be his work was going to be all he can speak to it was gonna be percussion heavy music and there was that point where the scissor it it just happened in their climax and he sat down in that moment of silence and I could see him trying to slow his breathing yeah has he been standing up holding one of those drums in his hands and beating it so that it is exhausted and we’ve basically been dancing yeah he’s been sitting down for most of the performance and then as the music just suddenly and it was when Assunta and mikela were arguing is not right before he goes I’d and then in the streets stabs meets Federico in the street the instant he comes out of the house yeah the whole scene has been set up as Federico is on his way home he’ll be back in a minute Assunta knows this of you and knows this there’s cross-cutting to show that he’s leaving his work and he’s on his way home this is all very clear so he’s gonna be walking those doors at any minute so clearly our sons needs to say to me Shelly had to shack up with this guy I haven’t had any choice he’s on his way home and we know is gonna be in the door any minute so make Haley just runs out and the instant he goes out the door bumps into him fight in the street and back to a synthesis point of view and then Federico staggers into the room stabbed and Doris underfill well not quite because Assunta claims she did it but she finds a knife and hands it to the police he turn up and she claims that she did it there are problems I mean it’s 1915 it’s Italy there are problems in terms of domestic abuse domestic violence the reason why he’s been away as she shacked up with somebody else is because he violently struck her cuts and scars her fears he’s sealed for that basically instantly forgives him she instantly forgets him she actually lies in court and he gets shield anyway and then pains for him and the only reason he’s still in Naples is because Frederico who was the court Clark I’m trying hard core part yeah but in this world he does and you know she does a bit of a deal with the devil for me Kelly to stay and nipples rather than get shipped off to another part of Italy far away where she can’t visit him she does this and then she has to become Frederico lover and partner because there’s no real sense of anybody ever getting married in this place no it was just interesting and they don’t really ever know that’s going on waves Graciela is that right this is the first guy because it seems like he was a former lover that she spurns possibly in favor of Micheli and he still obsesses her he’s trying to see her he seems to get crush her birthday and Michelle Lake gets really jealous and that’s where he hits her in the first place I want to see the reworked version with race Mike and Fred duking it out it seemed all to be very fast and very frantic but of course the franticness that at least in part came from the music definitely yeah there was moments where I thought I’ve just spent the last 20 30 seconds or so not looking at the screen I’ve been looking or what the band is doing because the band of this is substantial amount of movement at the bottom of my visual field I’d better look back at what’s happening on the screen and nothing had changed so it seemed that if we’re watching that was completely different musical accompaniment we might well have been bored because there was really long seasons really really long takes I know they built tension in some cases but I spoke with Alessandro afterwards because I wanted to talk to him about whether he was in pain hey you think you wouldn’t beaten his hand to a problem and he showed me a callus on his thumb and he said that when they first saw the film they worked quite bored by it and they knew they needed to bring something very live into it and even the film easin even has a score so the print they showed it with is accompanied by of a musical score dude he didn’t say when that comes from but that it is suitable for the film but they wanted to do something that was much more intense more phonetic partially because and I’ve listened to a few of their performances because they’re on the YouTube and the bad rules listen to them and that’s the main characteristic is the repertoire they play is frenetic yeah all-night dance music which apparently is the plebeian popular culture form of southern Italy yeah where the film is set so although only appropriate in that sense and it may seem unorthodox when we’re used to hearing some films accompanied by one person on a piano and I’m gonna say it by one going on a piano usually have seen it was the woman doing it you have where in Belfast with Irish silent films there’s people who specialize in it and it’s American Irish seven films to be specific was it the okay no I think they were more obscure than that remember it was the day of my survivor so really and you’ve done a talk with Stephen horn who’s one of the Jackson Neil Brandon point a classic yes I think always always listen to it all from the beginning he’s bringing better even the saver mic because remember like I was gushing about him because he wasn’t always just playing the keys in piano sometimes he had the piano open when I was playing the strings of the piano so even that was really different and challenging one example of what he does is that if he wants to make the impression that it’s raining yeah they lean inside the piano will flick some of the higher known strings so sound like the clinking of rounds just so gorgeous
vanitas that sort of stuff for having a band yeah one thing that I did notice was there was never any choice never any moment where the bad roles went hey what we’ll do here as you create some sort of sound effect to simulate what’s happening in the story space there’s none of that several reasons for that but one is the mood they’re creating is substantial enough anyway and the mood they’re creating is not supposed to be anything like what it would be like to be physically present in the space the mood they’re creating is what it would be like to be a center what it’s like to have the subjective experience of the character when you do that thing when you try and create sound effects to simulate what it’s like to be in the space you lapsing into a different sort of sound well I suppose what you’re doing is you’re trying to use the things you usually use to create non-diegetic sound an incidental soundtrack using those tools to create diegetic sound say his footsteps on the floor for example or as they went know we’re gonna have none of that at all we’re just gonna hit you over the head with what it’s like to be in your centers skin it was trying to find her emotional landscape through the science cape if makes a better sense yeah there was a lot of turmoil and in parts there was some really beautifully romantic parts as hinting so reportedly talking about that earlier because that was just phenomenal because that vivid green I don’t think I’ve ever seen not before yeah I think grain tent but not like that and it was on this beautiful shot of a Center and Mackay Lake and a little rowboat against the sunset and it was just absolutely gorgeous and the music at that point was beautiful I just I was probably the most delicate yeah you know very romantic and beautiful just really pretty it was pretty and it was just trying to be pretty it was such a gorgeous image and the green really works I was talking that’s earlier in this reality but my encounters later in this podcast about how certain tints appear really commonly in films of this period because they they are by convention used to reflect daytime or afternoon ish and be because they’re cheaper than the others and so that green was probably quite effective because it was used really rarely across the film I gather it was one of the more expensive tints to use I suppose what we’re describing is on about six different levels that was an intense experience color just how loud the sound was the abnormality of having a full six person roughly ten instrument band playing at the same time the particular style of music they were using this was a lot more levels than you usually get yes but also is same with it Alistair did point out that that’s rare and that they’ve made a particular decision to use that member of the bad girls who seems almost always to sing when they’re playing even though having a voice as part of one’s music it implies you’re trying to dub an actor’s we’re gonna do this in part because it’s part of the culture tradition or drawing on witches from around the place with the thermos thing but also because it creates that mood which the special reflects what it’s like to be our main female protagonist and given that she was also the co-director of the film was appropriate but their singer was a woman and was but that was important so it was not just Italian but it was the dialect specific to the place I just know a few words in Italian and they picked up glittery things like I would like you know things along those same song begins with those words oh there it is again so it’s about self that should like them so overall we had a bit of a chat with the band afterwards and they’re from various different parts and Italy except for Tim who’s from Cornwall okay because Tim was playing the violin for some other time and that did stand out is being particularly attacked with some of the other band members in this and yeah that makes us a bit of a hybrid band because that sound is not particularly Italian also we were watching a print which as is quite normal silent films was not one that was released in Italy it was you know that all those drinks of the version released in Italy have not survived so that’s normal for its own folks so the one that has survived is from Portugal yes and the restorations had happened in Latin America yes it has been put together out of two separate prints and it seemed although we may have to check this that the entities and although they were also subtitled I mean there were boats that looked Italian but I think I just don’t know what Portuguese looks like very well but I know it’s different enough that I would say probably was I mean it said at the start that they were Portuguese and then we had the English translation that was quite a European medley River just an english subtitle set of Portuguese language yeah intertitles at the time as subtitles for an Italian produced film and they’re clearly speaking Italian then in the film I would love to do a project with lip readers to identify moments where nobody sitting there did you just go to your trailer I’m sick of your nonsense or something like that so how much you being paid for today because I think still the time still quite normal to pay people by the day yeah having a long-term contract a weekly salary do you think it’s the sort of thing where you do as much as you physically can in one day and they don’t they can’t fund or do you think they would have tried to meticulously planet what do you think the Italian film industry was one of the most well established film industries of the world at that time so we can expect them to have developed one of those factory production line systems in which you’ve got perhaps three units working on the film at any one time with this chanita oh we’re talking before even that’s not even a thing so having multiple units working on a film at any one time and having a production schedule for a film where you’ve mapped out how long it’s gonna take in advance and you’ve booked the people for specific scenes on set at specific date that is a rough norm across Europe and particularly in Italy but let’s also remember that this is continent at war at the time and also that some of that stuff not really applicable because as soon – Francesca Bertini she needed to be in almost every shot so the whole outfit had to kind of revolve around her anyway so you probably couldn’t have multiple units shooting at the same time maybe could have a second unit doing a few scenery shots and a few other shots where from the scenes where she’s not involved as very few things but it’s probably only a slightly more efficient version in fact okay we all get together and every day and we film whenever we can and if we get it done we’ll move to the next scene on the next day we’re talking here about a five reel film so what would have been called the feature film at the time but Italian films were inordinately long in this period in film history so that’s hardly unusual in Italian film production to have something that’s five reels long by 1915 I imagine they made this film a mess sleep adult if they would have been so practice that and as Alastair Pinto Francesca Bertini was a already a powerhouse in the industry versus an actress and a producer as well so I imagine this was knocked out in couple of weeks it was already completely normal for film companies to knock out a single real film in one week if they’d have done that with this film we’re talking five weeks to do the entire film well that’s just a tutor of course then there’s already technical work on editing and Tintin but we did also learn about there is a documentary about and just in which we need to note about really I had not even heard of her I know that’s the thing and it’s so exciting to witness part of the work of reviving and recovering these women’s histories a little bit about the John Grierson and his filmmaking sisters I had the great privilege of learning about Ruby and Marion grierson from another show nationally and he is another Scottish from researcher from the ding women film and television history number three I think conference about three years ago now so the first film that was shown Pavlos the ruby career syndrome i had actually seen before she’s meeting us I mean myself a nurse thing or two about they also said yeah so they also serve it’s a war propaganda film during the Second World War there were a lot of these homes some of my Master’s dissertation was by Humphrey Jennings and his war propaganda documentaries so they were quite a lot of filmmakers under Grierson’s gpo you know the general post office unit and we’re starting to learn from this recovery research that actually his sisters were hugely involved in this movement as well but of course have been erased from histories this one by Ruby Gerson was about a heist wife who was basically mum to her whole straight yeah of course it’s fictional but it’s the idea of stirring up the high fives and it’s actually drawing attention to the unseen work of the housewife and how important it is so there’s this very strong implication that her husband was a soldier and managed to survive the first world war I know he’s working night shifts and possibly a munitions factory but a factory of some sort so she’s caring for him her next-door neighbor is a young wife whose husband is a soldier in the currents for the Second World War and she’s doing a lot of looking after them then there’s her daughter is going out to work because this is a time where women finally are needed in the workplace so there’s this workforce that’s never been utilized before I suddenly being utilized and her daughter’s part of that then is it her son there’s a boy who’s been evacuated I think it is her son because it’s the next-door neighbor isn’t it so the husband he Adam this fishing rod is way off fine in the war so he has donated basically his fishing rods to their young son their young son has been lucky it is so they’ve sent it to him to wherever he is in the countryside somewhere I suppose that true free I mean device such a way into this family and it’s his wife organizing everything she’s doing the laundry for her next-door neighbor she’s preparing food for her because she’s out to work all day as well so she’s keeping everything running she is the unseen taking over of everything she is making sure everyone else’s life is bearable during this really difficult time we also watched Joel Craig used to be a woman both of these phones made intense efforts just share of just how much work women already are doing yeah these are women who were working from the moment they wake up until the moment they collapse finally giving it value importantly because the second term from the early 1950s of course post-war and it’s what do you do with these women who’ve become part of the workforce you know in fair fight for equal pay for equal work at this point already having been holding a country up for five six years and Joe Craig II pointed out will head narrator point out that the UK has already signed the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights which includes equal pay for equal work that was a powerful picture still not I mean it’s 2019 and we still need to put this message out there that’s scary seventy years man I’m just an answer the rather not chronological character of this podcast these two films from the BFI National Archive so ruby grace and mice and forties they also serve and Joe Craig is from 1951 to be a woman those were both being presented to us as responses to listen to speak responses that we saw before we saw just been complimented it very well I’d like to actually seen them as responses but I think the team menu that we don’t be to absorb this interest many of us in our and the band are playing and then they news while everybody would want to talk to the band and you know so no I think it was in the right order
my name is Rachel broker I am a programmer at sensing cinema and I’m also the co-founder of a project called invisible women which I co-founded with Camilla buyer in 2017 invisible women is an archive activist project the whole idea of it is that we find exciting and interesting films that have been made by women from the film archive and we screen public audiences and we draw attention to the stories of the women behind the camera and also to the amazing work that does exist in our Moving Image archives and we also ask questions about gender and the archive and politics and why certain films get preserved and certain films don’t and why we know what we see and what it tells about sin a ministry so for the census being a project I chose two films that were kind of response to some of the ideas and themes that come through us in subpoena I was particularly interested in themes around women and labor and also women resistance the first film that I chose is called they also serve which is from 1940 and it’s a short propaganda film that celebrates the silent courage of women during the war the film is directed by Scottish filmmaker Ruby Grayson she’s a sister of a better known filmmaker called John Griffin John Christmas often referred to as the father of documentary and he’s seen as a pivotal figure in the development of the genre in the first half of 20th century but what I find really interesting about John Grierson and what myself and Camilla have really dug into you with with our visit women is that John have not one but two prolific filmmaking sisters Ruby is one of those sisters and the other is Marion Grayson who was also another fantastic filmmaker and write made some really interesting quite experimental documentaries in the 1930s both sisters were really prolific and there’s a lot of evidence that they also worked from credited and a lot of their brothers films as well Ruby in particular was credited after her death with pioneering some of the key documentary innovations that John is widely celebrated for but what is also really interesting is both Marion and Ruby stopped making films quite abruptly around 1940 Marion stopped because she got married and Ruby because she was killed by a torpedo well on her way to film in Canada and for years they’ve been kind of written out of film history and their films have been buried and forgotten well the kind of star of their brother John has only risen and he’s very much in every textbook so it’s really exciting to see their films screened for public audiences and to talk about why those films might even forgotten and why their careers were curtailed and the second film that we chose Oh such a subpoena is called to be a woman and it’s a short compelling documentary from 1951 directed by Jill cranky Craig he was also quite a prolific short filmmaker and in the 1930s in the nineteen forties and she worked as director and a screenwriter and she also made one feature film in her career blue sky which she made in 1949 which is a really empathetic and sensitive socialist drama set in a Welsh mining community which is really worth watching but like the Grace and sisters her career was also quite short to be a woman was the last film she made before quitting directing having become disillusioned by sexism in the industry there’s a really interesting sort of continuity there between Joe Craig anubian Marion and also Francesca Bertini who was uncredited as co-director on a subpoena for most of her likes and was only credited later on in the 1980s and I also think that their stories really resonated today because we still have a situation where lots of amazing female filmmakers have very short careers they have to stop making films at pivotal stages in their career and it really means that we’re losing a lot of incredible potential work so I was hoping that by sort of presenting their stories the stories of these filmmakers we can kind of talk about what the history women in cinema is why it is I think is and why the canon as relatively limited as it is and kind of maybe start addressing those issues that still exist in the present-day film industry as well I’m the founder and curator of a kind of seeing which is all about showing archived films all over Scotland in the UK as well archive and silent film it’s really connecting audiences with place and with some themes that were all gonna be thinking about today as well so there’s quite a long journey to get to here in Newcastle that you’ve been on with the since SP no we take to give us a brief background I’m not sure so it must have been probably roundabout 2010 when I first found out about these films that are made by silent divas in the early Italian cinema and those seven divas is very much a modern phrase for the better these actresses and filmmakers who were really leading the industry and I found them when I was working on the Hippodrome silent film festival as a producer for that and Boris in Scotland they didn’t quite happen at that time as so what happens I really wanted the authentic Italian female voice and I hadn’t really found a musician to go with that and then I met the bad rules our party actually always starts at the party and yeah met Al and then he said well Elena is a singer in the band that was saying we could make something I could maybe give us into a voice and that was perfect and so then in about 2017 the end of 2017 I have approached the Glasgow Film Festival and said as soon as a bigot are you community in class how would you be interested in commissioning this score and they were up for it which is incredible and it was gonna happen at the festival in the March 2018 last year but a beast from the east came in and weather yeah and then we did that me in Glasgow and also an Edinburgh as well and then we go with money from film up Scotland and then ers for music Foundation and also the film up north British Film Institute’s changing times funds and so we finally went on to November last year 2018 and sorry it’s gig later so it’s great after we’ve made this far so you’ve done quite a good sure Ryan Scotland mostly and then the north of england i with the newcastle leg you know and you just managed to take it to the island since that limit i think is really important yeah I mean in Orkney there is a really close connection with Italy as well there’s the Italian Chapel on the islands there and I think people have a connection there we did as well as this show in there we did obviously the screening of the film with the band playing live but also there was new music it was around International Women’s Day so there was actually some new writing by local writers as well that sort of connection I do a lot of work on islands in Scotland and I think a lot of those islands are looking over its in terms of international a lot of live there they’re maybe not from originally and that’s very much embraced in the islands as well so it’s really such a it’s almost like going home sometimes we do a show and like working at the west side sediment strongness the guys they’re incredible and the audience comes and loved it and they loved it dancing as well who showed the film with the band playing live and then there was dancing afterwards and they loved a raffle – there was a Haiti trip for the band oh no the travel was a bit surfers weather in the morning of that day so it was a very quick turnaround big shot a source and engineer Perry Jackson’s star and the screening tonight Bari got already special mention please no mercy the whole time and I was here tonight the sign design of it is really incredible because it’s not just that the instruments are there it’s the way they’re being amplified and the way they’re being used in the space and what gets focused at any time and whatever is happening with Alana’s voice at any time as well yeah just has more of an emotional punch you know so they have searched definitely some engineering going on there absolutely and it’s about the different spaces you completely right we’ve done it in cinemas that are beautifully padded sales office because that’s what they’re meant to do for their Elaine Oh Dolby surround sound systems it is it’s very compared to soar like Strom net stone Hall which is like a big echo chamber basically so that the minister could give a sermon and then you’ve got life art sensory Keith mass which is very much a theatre space it’s a beautiful space in life as well yeah it’s been quite challenge I think a challenge for Barry to see brilliant sound engineer it’s been great knowing that the Sabine is really important for me as a producer like this is that I don’t pretend to know how to do sound as well the technical side of things to sort of work with teams and sound engineer is rolling tambourines are really difficult to amplify and Barry knows stuff as he knows the band it was slick yeah I am NOT a signed expert but it with proper slack there were times when I was getting distracted by just watching the bands and all of them I’m not an old wait I should probably be Watson Feldman’s is listen to them but just what they were all doing together was really incredible yeah sometimes you forget that there’s somebody in the room playing yeah and I always think it’s a moment when just after the big climax at the end to all go silent and the film carries on I love these assignments that the bands have but also saw tonight was the first time I’d seen it that malice and in replace integrity is constantly beating out the rhythm he’s finished in six days just like you can see him physically making it just like the exertions that it’s
he was really the beating heart of it and I thought when it really climaxes towards the end there’s just a crescendo of things happening and he is really driving that you know it’s getting dying for most of the performance and then he stands up and it’s frenetic you know it you can feel the energy he’s putting into the drum thank you so much thanks so much thanks for coming along as well the audience this year so each of them has a codified meaning so if it’s that light brown that’s afternoon if it’s green that’s out in the country if it’s blue that’s in the evening you know really basic stuff like that and what you do is there’s quite a factory process to the entire thickness you create an intermediate positive as distinct from an inter positive but an intermediate positive where you’ve got the film cut on two reels where all of the shots are arranged on reel which is going to be dyed that particular color so you you print your positives then you get them tinted and then you recut it again into your finished version I had a journal which is all about this kind of nerdy business and somebody didn’t article for it recently where they analyzed how a German film studio did it and the whole idea of putting a cut together and then making copies of it and then tinting that cut it’s completely impractical so what you have to do is you have to decide what your cuts going to be then create a cut which is that real is all of this color that reels all of this color that was always come so you make a cut which is completely out of order and then you recut the entire thing for every single positive print of the entire film having done the tinting so it’s quite labor-intensive to create the color version but you can charge more for it as well there were scraps of indications of that because the intertitles had those numbers on those were clearly about okay personally right now has to cut the tinted version into the positive get it into the right order leaders of each of those shots to correspond with was going to come after it I always forget about four years across Europe where somebody just went hey we can use these colors clearly blue is evening right yes believe me he’s moving and everyone just seemed to go yeah okay blues even so yeah after every year that that wobbles that becomes the convention and then expense creates a bit of pressure cuz some of the dyes are more expensive than other dyes so we saw very little green I think that that was one of the more expensive dyes
even though we used to
maybe the crew just flooded the street because I was the only one so many other scenes were actually also seem to have in mind the importance of her public profile because she very rarely had her face turned away from other people looking at her just looking particularly when she’s trying to flee with them Michaela go kill Federico there’s lots of her not actually looking at this bleeding she’s just talking four words burned on the retina of her extremely pale face that’s because she
people referred to things were films vocabulary cinematic actor they wanted to they recognized that it was different from a stage acting so determining what is it’s a bit different from stage acting was proposing of course not posing in the sense that someone’s going to take a photograph so you have to stay still or you’re below the photo book posing in the sense of impersonating someone and for about five or six years that was basically the standard term for film acting
that’s going on
my name’s Alistair Coulomb picture and film practice at Newcastle University I’m a documentary filmmaker and a part-time musician in an academic sort of filmmaking scholar a practice based research if you want and now I’m part of a unit here at Newcastle University will film a culture lab and we’ve got a couple of undergraduate programmes and Steve’s and post grads but really what we’re about is you know exploring the world through documentary filmmaking through knowledge and filmmaking and engaging with cultural studies anthropology Media Studies were housed with the media culture and heritage so we sort of fun bring those links together and really look at practice and specifically film practice and nonfiction practice well maybe come on to your research and your practices research in a moment maybe we can just virtually reflect on how you feel about how your event last night one with the bad whales doesn’t this mean oh yes I mean it was fun it was a project a live school project that we have been working on for almost a couple of years now and this is the last stop in a tour that will be had all around Scotland were you this is just at eight shows on a tour and it’s been quite a big undertaking it’s been a really interesting process as a musician and brought up as a researcher and as a film scholar as well to take a film and to take a commission that was the original project was a commission to write a new score for this film and that was given by the Glasgow Film Festival in 2016 no story 2000 99 2017 there must have been we took that and the the first performance is then and then we took it and repackaged and work with a woman Shona Thompson who is of a kind of singing she was involved in the original commission as well and the idea behind that was really to explore traditional music and additional southern Italian folk music which we played anyway is musicians it’s what we’ve been doing for ten years to see how that might work as a soundtrack it’s done well I mean at last night this is the first show with a sheet n in England not there’s a great difference in audiences between Newcastle and in Scotland but I think we we have a public and Scotland that come to my shows that’s nice so this was interesting because it was also the music itself was finished a lot of people’s ears it wasn’t um you know no and through from the audience so that was quite fun than to be out introduced this genre of music and what we do a little bit to a new audience is nice and yeah we’ve got positive reactions beautiful cinema to play and as a musician it’s great to play in cinemas because they sound amazing the actual the deepness of the sound is great and you have a seated audience they’re not drunk and dancing and they actually just need to use us it’s quite nice just kind of rare for what we do I was it because normally with your bands you were all saying last night you normally played your dance halls and people are dancing and clubs and things and I was the processing of writing music for something as specific as a silent film I mean it was huge it was part of the decision to even do it was that we kind of wanted another challenge and for a long time we you know we’ve been running a successful world music night and in edinburgh we’ve been playing first of all we’re doing bands do but i think a lot of bands would take this opportunity like this because it’s musical it’s creative but it’s really different and it’s a different process of thinking about it so i think for me i was backing to a minnesota took me to we but on the project’s not musically but also just to get us in the frame of mind of how we were going to do it and we had to approach the film specifically with what the film was about and we made a very conscious decision when we started scoring or we sat down and watched it all together we sort of talked a lot about the film and something didn’t like the film some people did like the film and we’ve now seen it probably any time so we’ve learned to love it but it was also the role of the soundtrack in there what was that gonna do what was the actual nature of this and we were given a very open slate by the Glasgow Film Festival and show no and I always said it was what we wanted to do was you to try and fit this traditional repertoire and we had to write a lot of pieces to make but it was more than perspective that was interesting and we had to decide as a man at the start what we wanted to do and we sort of somewhat collectively decided that it was about getting inside the hunters head and we were gonna be here voice we were gonna be here so it’s quite a complex film anyway and there’s a lot of different understanding people types where there’s a lot of different readings of that film depending on who the audience is and it has been historically as well and elderly as well people read it very different ways so we were partly to give the voice because we were going to use some traditional songs as well we wanted it to be her voice and we wanted to be her heartbeat and here we were going to be inside her brain and we had to go run with her as much as we could to the film which is a good restriction because suddenly you then you’re kind of restricting and what you’re doing and how you’re doing the score otherwise you can really follow the film itself and you can imitate the film like it may be a score but normally or you can be a soundtrack and actually do the sounds of the film if you want but we consciously stayed away from there and just tried to get into Assunta and you were innocent through hopefully four nights 70 minutes and that was the idea like it all of it was the idea for us could ask his well about their decision to use silence because that was something that had a big impact on me especially watching it there’s these two moments in the film that are crucial and something quite massive happens and the impact of the music suddenly you know very abruptly just stopping for a moment and it’s quite an unusual you know I think a lot of sign tracks don’t necessarily value silence enough yeah I think it was we sort of were feeling our way through this a lot and we talked a lot about them we wanted to do that we didn’t always know when and we knew that was easy this kind of two dramatic moments I think we just felt right and it was also about how you as what’s before and after the silent as well and both livid very intense pieces of music for them and then to re-enter or so again that’s sort of where we thought Assunta was at that point as well those moments of silence were sort of like when everything went black for her in some ways as well you know and everything had collapsed around her and that was a bit you know like nothing good sound designers do it as well and in a way like a penance they put you inside the head of someone or good cinematographer as well and so while we did it with music it relates back to their respective thing I think him it was conscious and I think it gets exasperated when you suddenly have six musicians bashing away your eardrums for 20 minutes and they suddenly stop and they like god that’s right there’s the room sound going on here but it was repeating we total up with this I mean there’s been some instances where it has to be really silent and there’s been the odd audiences that have kind of laughed because it’s a very you know it’s a classic silent film with is a lot of overacting to explain things and some audiences thought it’s hysterical and I would just laugh at this and it kind of screws it all that but in a way that’s like like I said people take different ways but we had this incredible show in Edinburgh you know a really grateful house there’s a scene where like in the middle of film we’re at Sony brew dramatic happens and explain it cuz I son just wounded and rushed in and everything drops silently but at their moment in the outside of the venue there’s a siren a police siren we passed and it was the most perfectly time siren you could imagine because it was the police would have been arriving at that time like it was hysterical and everyone burst into laughter it was still he was struggling to play because it was but then you kind of have to keep going because they re in truth needs to be really dramatic but you also lose the audience if you don’t have this island tour in the bang-on so last night was nice because it was a cinema and it was closed when you’re at some of the venues who played it and there is outside noise there silencers need to be silent or they’re not as opposed to the laughter or Strayed police sirens really straight off just ask about yourself what’s your dual life like as an academic filmmaker and then a musician as well and how do they do they flow into each other I mean my life is a documentary mic it kind of came from music a little bit I studied music and my undergrad I was playing and I studied a lot of ethnomusicology and from there ended up in dead kind of decided that I would keep music on the side keep playing but from Anthropologie was always he’s working in films and working sounded films originally because I knew enough about my ex that I can do it on their own I was fascinated by the documentary world and really came at Anthropologie through via thermal musicology and working sound and films and then started making my own films so they’ve always kind of lived in parallel since then but then this opportunity for this project came up and it was it’s actually the context of Newcastle University squad interesting the way of a school of arts and culture that within there is music film and heritage as well in this project it suddenly fell into all three of these cases which is rare especially for you know I like to cross three areas you might get the odd soundtrack project and film but this one was a genuine piece of you know like an opportunity to explore the minute and it to be fear it’s a bit off piste for me in some ways for what I do I’d normally would make my own films I explore a lot around language subjects around within linguistic anthropology but exploring them through film and I write a lot about subtitling and translation so that’s kind of been my main area but this was an opportunity to something else out to also explore practice-based research through performance because it was a live project we’re going to record at and we’re going the studio next month to record it but actually the perogative was always this live experience and it was about live cinema and the impact there and the audience response of that and playing it live so well I don’t know what we’ll do with the recording but it’s these live with these 10 or 15 shows order we’ve done other kind of hard on the practice if you want and we have a written score for them for our thing but it’s really about these performances and that gives you a bit more to grab onto I think when you’re reflecting on it and so yeah my practice itself is broadening which is nice and the research kind of I mentioned about the film the kind of goals but the researchers is very much about exploring the capacity of the traditional repertoire I am thalipeeth secured to be as neutral to work in surgery my visit but there’s a filmmaker at work the room closes a lot but I have actually scored my own films in the past as well with some of the musicians here but I’ve worked with composers and you know like normally you have a remit and it’s very much from scratch you’ve got a blank canvas for a composer but it’s not actually what we wanted to do we wanted to see if they were below clear this was a very true this was a film that had its roots and traditional Neapolitan opera and traditional Neapolitan music anyway the story of spinner is in some ways quite traditional in that cutting over face that happens is unfortunately a you know very sit with a Neapolitan culture installed today you can go to Napoli and you can see especially older ladies with cigars and we’ve had Neapolitans come to the performances and be in tears also because of their because we extracted a little the music but also the film does really relate to life there so we thought it was quite no an important thing to not just go with the blank canvas and to relate this to the music the riveter that we knew well but we also wanted to explore more it worked and i think there’s been some great soundtrack projects out of scotland and like if you think of like scotland with love which was done back in korea so sit in the front condition but original music he took bits and pieces but really to restrict us to say this is we’re gonna just use this repertoire we’re gonna dig and they can take us behind the songs at work we’re gonna rearrange them and twist them and push them and prod them and every which way we can to make it work was fun then the men that became a collective research project about digging through the archive digging through traditional songs as well and going and just sitting finding old records and recordings and singing Eleanor is any she had studied a lot with you Vanna Marini who’s a quite an amazing singer in Rome and the music school took lead to start and she’s a collector as well a song collector you know they have these amazing corpses of books and songs that have been collected in villages and once you can start cracking over those repositories of music you can really find links musically but also opted of the words and the themes of the songs that were the air so there was often songs there and that soundtrack that the themes of the songs even if we weren’t singing them that were chosen because of the nature of that traditional song had a relation to what was going on for a century at the time and his very few people that could watch that performance there’s a couple there last night which was nice Sicilian in the ippolit and speakers and they know the songs and they also know why we chose him and they understood the words in relation and it was nice but it’s very few and far between anyone can be in an audience and understand the words but that’s fine for a lot of people was nice they don’t understand they get a sense of the drama through it but there is a very strong link between them and so it became this great research project for a whole winter basically we did that and I got to hear dig through a lot of our cards running these pieces and set with the guys and set keep working piece by piece and section by section and going through it until we had something that we thought worked so it was research on their level and then to reflect on this ability of a female work was on a silent film which is taking a lot of initiative but rocket of like it’s not really right to give your voice is it your trash to the soundtrack you know we can do it because we’ve got a blank slate for this project but the normal composer wouldn’t do that you know not in the middle of a film a normal filmmaker probably wouldn’t give the composer the chance to do it so we were taking a lot of liberties I think but we always thought as long as we stayed with the Sunter and stayed in their head in the words we were using because we wouldn’t rewriting the words we were taking them from traditional songs we were taking soon reverses all the technical minds and it’s having specific ones that fit it then it was about relating it back to this bigger culture of southern Italian folk music folk cinema folk storytelling in this wider cultural document that is the film and to link it all together so yeah a lot of that is just interesting and funded there was a research you know and I think hopefully we can have this recording and people can look at it as a bit of an example that it it did work I think we got great feedback and we think that the moments of the voice to add something to that from new contemporary audience or an audience that would never have seen that film otherwise it would never have seen nineteen fifty Napoli and when the heard of Francesca Bertini and that’s also the beautiful other thing about this project is that it explores this invisible history of these amazing female filmmakers and actresses and producers and they were rock stars you know they were absolute stars really and Francesca patina up to the 80s and 90s was written out of these credits but it is even more value to doing all this and it even more value to taking the position of Venus and Asada’s here in pushing her stories of protagonist and the film story I’m just thinking maybe the liveness of the project is very integral to it but do you ever think there’d be an opportunity to do a recording for a DVD release we would I mean so we’re doing it we’re gonna do a stupid it’s at this stage we’re doing it because we as a band want to make sure we do it we’ve got live recordings of it we’ve got a couple of very good live recordings from a couple of the shows that we have fully tracked out and we can mix them that we did those live recordings thinking we could pull off something that would capture the lightness of things but then me and we listen to them whenever we should get it a good recording the interesting thing is if you could then listen to the soundtrack without the film which you know if you produce it as a band where there’ll be you saw we think it would be interesting listening for someone but to be able to release it with that version of the film Oh chilly tickety B’Elanna who restored the film who are amazing organization and their DVD releases from the early 90s there has a soundtrack that they commissioned then so that’s 20 years old they know about this project as far as we know no one’s done a school for this film there’s been two or three schools done so you’re more potentially I don’t know have touched on Tanzania Napolitano which is another genre of Neapolitan song but more modern and not really what we’re doing but this as far as engaging with somebody after the in talent talent Pete Seeger we don’t know it’s done so it would be an original release and that since and we would love people to see it we would love people to be able to watch it whether it has the same effect I’ve no idea
this phenomena I don’t think I would ever quite the same effect because you’re in a cinema you’ve got to be you know and with silent film anyway you need to be quite focused yeah you don’t we used to a world of film and cinema repair you know animal sounds and transformers rushing any screens you know like how can you I mean there’s a hundred and five years ago it’s a different way of doing so you need to be quite focused so you would need to a big word I then watch it we would hope that if we didn’t release it or did we something would have been the score itself would attract people to have a go at watching the film at home we would love to keep performing and a thing but it’s hard logistically we’ve had some offers from Italy to go and play there so we that it’d be nice if it happens and potentially a few more shows in England but at this stage that’s the end of the tour and it’s there it’s written we can get us off together and play again but the next stage is to test the waters of on recording and and see it’s any as you said see if it does stand up I mean if you could release it online the films out there and the wider world anyway because it’s out of copyright I believe so it’s feasible that we could even put it out there I think I actually don’t know do you think you could have your recording and people be able to synchronize it at they sir I mean you could yeah there’s something you do I mean you can potentially get permission to do it you know yeah a lot of these things that a certain date they become valuable for an organization the attorney ticker or US or to release this is actually the other interest thing about doing it as an academic project you know we obviously get performed fees in the band get looked after and we’ve been really lucky with be if I had a firm hand but this isn’t a commercial project and there since we’ve all got other jobs and things and it means that you can produce a sort of thing in a negative context you know produce a cultural document and not have the commercial imperative to make money on it and some it means potentially it can get out there and be used and be seen without the need to someone to be earning off it so be nice that’s a bit of watch of the space I think over the next few months hopefully but September we’ll know we’ll have it recorded and mastered and better put it out there and it would be lovely for a especially I think for people to see it and to get feedback because it’s such a great conversation for us to have both have the film scholars with other filmmakers with other musicians with other folk musicians but really with southern Italians from any corner they speak the dialect that know their history their well probably a lot of them haven’t seen us under subpoena because it’s been disappeared for 80 years and maybe they know the kind of story it’s engaging with but for them to see it and then to just tell us what they thought of the decisions we made you know because we had to make very specific decisions around the songs we chose to interpret good or bad you know like it’s these are great conversations to have with people about what worked and what didn’t do you think it’s something you and the bands would ever do again succour another film and you do something like that with it or you have you met that challenge and you’re gonna move on there’s something else I think we would be fun to hook him because you would be a lot faster at thinking this because we didn’t know I mean I think part of it was a challenge and we genuinely didn’t know where to start there’s a lot of bands that have done this and there’s a great Bank wouldn’t Mauritius bagel in Scotland is it a beautiful document you consult with Atlanta and they really said a few years ago and we head over to a few they’ve about the process of it but you’ve got to figure it out yourself as a band of how you even start mapping that out the 70 minute piece of music would have all that you need to be able to play on cues of the films we were looking at used for the film when the dawn came on-screen and we knew what we had to do next we the screen in front of us will reclaim and that took ages to figure out us as the band how we were gonna do that and you know we probably it’s been an extra two months doing at this time just figuring out the process of that for us in the how it works but yeah I wouldn’t mind doing anything because I think it would be a lot I’ll back to the documentary because I think there’s a different role for music sometimes in documentary and it’s obviously my territory as a filmmaker but I also like working with composers for my own films because you to caught up as a filmmaker and other things and the conversations you have so to do it to existing archive projects we may look at then I maybe I talk to Shona don’t send us and if not yeah the band we could do other things yeah probably a year I think in the future at some point it’s also a good one because your families you can bring kids to the cinema to watch these things you know you can’t bring kids to a dancehall at midnight that helps I’m just wondering as a documentarian and for so many examples of early cinema there’s so much unplanned there’s so much contingency in an early film honestly one of the reasons why got really into it I mean I remember talking to Andrew childish I was here Newcastle about this film when we first got the opportunity and I was like do you know anything about Deva cinema and 19 teens in lead it’s like you kind of let’s talk and he gave me a brief rundown and I you know it really wasn’t my territory but as soon as I saw it and I suddenly did a bit of research and started looking in the background and realizing it was this precursor to neo-realism or and they were standing on the street with cameras watching it then the documentary value has been credible and it really does act as a scene and they’re cleaning up but the background is spontaneous half the time people are just walking around and they’re so then you have this amazing window and what any good documentary does it provides you a window into a world in that film is a piece of a crime as there as absolutely as valuable as any documentary at that time and I think that’s part of the attraction of the whole project was that once I sort of got my head round a few things about the film and how and why it was made and what it did and even its role I think as a documentary filmmaker was interested in our films why I’m interested in our films received at the impact of him timeless was a big film you know some spin it was a mess of box office success and Italy and and at the time it made Franchesca pertaining one of the highest-paid Boethius people in cinema in 1915 but they don’t got forgotten pretty quickly after that that cultural significance of it it’s been remade in Italy in the seventies I think and so it’s got a place with an especially a Napoli in Italy Italian cinema history as a story and think that side of it as well as the great Explorer unticking involved with them it’s always about in some ways for me and what we’re doing the relationships with today in the society and the real if you want and you can find that in a lot of places you can find them in any cinema if you want to go down that path you know the cultural significance of a piece of cinema is still super fascinating do you want to say anything about your research more generally and your films more generally yeah it’s interesting to think about the links of this and also the language like I’ve always been really interested in language and linguistic anthropology and that was as much the country in musicology into anthropology I particularly started to explore them subjects around linguistic anthropology and language and society and this project like I mentioned was about reversing giving voice in this role of female voice I mean it was a fairly tangential but it does link to my other work my previous film feature film which is out now school colors of the alphabet and that was a observational documentary film shot in Africa over the course of a year we were exploring mother tongue education but there was a sense that it was about silencing a voice as well and silencing a language and I write a lot about there my research and about the ideologies around language choice and the ideologies tied up with the multilingualism in the film’s explore there but through the lives of three grade one students going to the first year at school maybe more in reflection I see the lengths of these interests and it is like any academic you go down past that interest you but their work and my previous work you know it has a specific impact we released the film colors they offered me last year and languages across Africa and there was part of a ESRC impact project that we translated the film alongside over this tribute Accord every Doc’s who have a broadcast channel across America but because the film was about language into our multilingualism we wanted the film to also function in a way that was reaching linguistic communities but also saying listen media can be produced in indigenous languages we were making an argument in the film about the importance of indigenous language education let’s make the film function for that as well we rolled this project and involved training 50 indigenous African language speakers from across Africa yeah we had trained them in translation and subtitling skills and we created a workshop and gave them the job when they completed the qualification and they was a paid job to work on the film and there became the first critter and as a result of that we’re launching an African film translation Network the translators from their project that forming the basis of but it’s a place that filmmakers can go to they’re releasing a film across Africa and find ways to get your film in to you and Yong Zhao and Devine burro and Shana and languages that are spoken by millions of people in them and so this is a big language is this why helium and Zulu and these languages people know but actually millions about the can that we hit for the 30 languages we did covered 418 million speakers and there’s a massive distribution network online now on phones you know this is why I fight out there you know there’s a lot of ways people can consume media in Washington and be available in their language and you know we did it out of the 30 languages we did YouTube had capacity for eight of them at the moment and they wouldn’t gonna bunched and resting ly we had to hard-code them and for a release that was done a lot it was locked down Derek it was free across all of Africa but we had to hard-code in subtitles in because they were options so there was even a point where we were advertising in these languages and we were getting blocked from advertising because they didn’t believe it was language areia until you ever I mean this is the point where you’ve got you know people are really cut out of in world but the language communities over there we’ve did a big social media campaign on Facebook and we managed to tap into a lot of these communities and obviously the comments and everything was going wild and in Shona and pull out something and language I have no idea what’s going on by it great people working with us that could respond and engage and it is tough for this language communities but I think is a real Anglophone of it’s happened with media and I think film has it brought a play in there and why not work to be also pragmatically as a producer if you want people to see your work then get it and languages and produce multilingual versions and look outside of Europe and realize there’s 500 million speakers of way more than that across Africa sorry and there were just the languages we chose so that’s been great that’s launching next month and it’s a continuation of exploring these themes of language and translation and exploring ways of getting films my own film in this case but also in the future other people’s films can get in front of audiences that’s the idea that’s the idea of the network so there’s the website subtitling effort of all it’ll go live next month we’re advertising it in the film industry and the documentary industry is specifically but across the board is these people we train make them do the job you’ve kind of got no excuse in a way all your kind of matter if you don’t as a distributor or producer especially an independent producer if you could find funding for her and it’s about accessibility which a big key words for these funders but credit to the funders they wore actually being a bit of support accessibility and be a blind or incitive audiences or multilingual audiences but it’s often you know we’re subtitling and a lot of these things often comes down to the producers the film’s to do it it’s the capacity out there and so hopefully this project will provide a bit of a bridge there that there are some value in it and commercially that someone gets viewers and they can reach new audiences or um for accessibility reasons they can get their projects and to language communities feels like a quite a powerful resistance actually to angle census ISM which is at a very interesting time for that the reality is the massive change in online distribution and these things have opened this after some reality it’s not impossible anymore and there’s no reason and it has helped me this is the thing that’s happening on a lot of mediums we work with a great organization called Amara who have built a really brilliant subtitling platform you know they have these incredible communities of subtitlers across and the very few and efforts still but across other parts of the world that are doing all the TED talks they’re doing although you know the content on YouTube is there some films but not but they’re producing them for the human reason they’ve engaged in subtitling but there’s also the question around quality assurances are making shorts done well as well it’s not just the thing at the end of a production line that you know I should off to some student that talks to languages it’s about recognizing translation for film and subtitling is a very specific art that needs to be trained it’s very difficult and as much as poetry translation is damn hard subtitling is as well and to do a write and media is full of they love stories about when people make big mistakes and films but that’s because it’s tough you know and they call it the naked profession and translation because we very exposed the subtitle that we know if anyone speaks the two languages that are on screen they can call that a subtitle for this the decisions or mistakes if you want they made but it’s very easy to do because if you’re not well-trained and if you’re not you know engaging it as a profession and being paid as a professional and been supported so it’s two sides of it it’s yes using the technology that’s there and you’re skating it but doing a well and making sure people are aware and embracing it as an art form it’s not just has been two languages that make this happen so it’s an interesting time it opens up to things like audio description which is again really interesting that’s starting to happen a lot more with film releases and finding mechanisms to have people that need audio description or subtitles to view whenever they want wherever they want not just in the cinema at 10 o’clock on a Monday morning or something you know I like to find opportunities and it’s the exhibitors and things to figure this out as well but technology’s there people are there very soona shouldn’t be a conversation we keep happening about more and more inclusion should get included all you’ve been listening to audio-visual culture with me Paula Blair and huge thanks to Andrey she’ll rachel Pronger Shona Thompson and Alastair cold this episode was recorded and edited by Paula Blair and the music is common grind by air tone licensed under creative commons attribution 3.0 if you like the show please help cover production and distribution costs by donating to paypal taught me /pe a and libera PACOM /pe I Blair please read share and subscribe on your chosen listening platform as this helps others find the show for more information visit audio-visual cultures dot wordpress calm and follow AV cultures on Twitter and Facebook we’ve also got an email address which is audio-visual cultures at gmail.com thanks for listening and catch you next time
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