A Tokyo film and a Berlin slideshow

Due to the amount of stuff I've tended to load onto my plate, it's taken me two years to complete a project that runs to a total of just 21 minutes. I will bring the complete fruits of that project together in another post, but in this one I'm delighted to finally be able to present the last film in the 'Japan Shorts' series.

Above, you can find 'The Crossing', the fourth of the four short films I've been making with footage shot using a Flip Ultra HD camera on my last trip back to Tokyo (in 2010). This film incorporates footage from around Shibuya Crossing, probably the world's busiest pedestrian intersection and a heck of a place for standing and watching the people flow from. All of the films make use of Creative Commons-licensed music for soundtracks, and 'The Crossing' runs with Mario Mattioli's 'Granados: Spanish Dance n.2', sourced from ccMixter. There's also a reading (by me) of a really old Japanese poem (in translation, of course), a first attempt at voiceover in one of my recent films, and a few new editing styles that resulting from upgrading my video editor to a more recent version.

Hit me up in the comments below if you like or loathe the film. This page features the YouTube version, but it's also available to view with larger in-page screen estate on Vimeo. Ahead of the post that features all four, follow the links in the brackets to find posts on the other three shorts ('Makes The World Go Round', 'In Motion' and 'J-Journeys').

This short film really concludes a period of work that has been heavily influenced by my time in Japan. This period included three CD albums, one book, hundreds of photographs, and these four short films. Coming to the end of this period is really exciting as it means that other ideas which have been bubbling under in my mind for a long time are finally going to start having a little more space. However, it's going to be quite a while before I can get going on any more of these new projects. I have another year of my MA to go. I have another film project I'm working on, which is going to be four minutes longer in playing time than 'Japan Shorts' but will need to be finished in about an eighth of the time (it's a wedding movie). There's also, y'know, other life stuff going on too :-)

As I'm not sure when I'll be able to get the next post up on this blog, I thought I'd cheekily combine two posts into one and finish this with the photo gallery of pictures that I took in Berlin earlier this year (hadn't got round to putting them up here yet). A fantastic city with a great vibrancy combined with the deepest, darkest historical shadows - take a look at a few of my grabbed moments below.

An insignificant human being

I suppose this is the end. This book is not a history book, but just the plain tale of an insignificant human being. Countless hosts are to be maimed, killed, wasted, ruined. For what? For Poland? For the Greater Reich? No. These are just the slogans that cover the whole damnable, wicked, crass stupidity. Great God in Heaven, why did you create Man just a little lower than the angels, just a little higher than the beasts?

(extract from diary of Ted Pates, 01/09/39)

Last month, I spent three days in Berlin. The occasion was a family reunion that centred around an uncle’s birthday, and which brought me together with many people I hadn’t seen in several years. I’d passed through Berlin once before, spending a few hours in the place whilst en route from Prague to Amsterdam in the late 90s, but this was my first change to actually soak up any of the ambience of the place.

Berlin is a city that wears its scars on the outside, as a place that has been location for such historically significant events as it has can only do. These days, it also has a great sense of what can be achieved when divisions no longer divide so deeply. Eventually, I’ll put the pictures up here, as I'm sure they will do the city far greater justice than my stumbling words can attempt to achieve.

Many years ago, following on later from the death of my grandfather’s brother Ted, I inherited a sheath of papers from this same uncle whose birthday we had come to celebrate. This set of mercifully-legible dot-matrix printed pages spanned September 1939 to March 1944, and contained Ted’s personal diary from World War II. I’ve always intended to do something with this resource, but haven’t known quite what.

By ending in early ’44, the diaries are also incomplete. Tracing the parallel story of his life with that of the development and conclusion of the war is not possible without the missing parts of the puzzle. To my great surprise during the Berlin trip, I had a conversation with a cousin where I discovered that she actually possessed some of the remaining parts of this journal. I found out today that her copies go up to August 1945, so although there will still be parts of the puzzle missing (Truman officially declared the war over in December 1946, and that leaves Ted’s perspective on a year and a half of aftermath still hidden from view), that is a much more complete picture than I have now.

I mention all this here and now because I am contemplating preparing an abstract to submit to a conference on ‘War and Life-Writing’ at Oxford University in November this year, and Ted’s work seems like a gift horse of a resource for making a contribution to this conference with.

The problem I have (aside from not having the complete diary or even having completely read through the years that I do have) is that I don’t know what to do for it. I’ve spoken at conferences before, but doing so at Oxford’s kind-of taking it to a whole different level. I guess that even getting accepted for speaking at a conference at Oxford is bit of a step up in itself. I’ve also given myself very little headspace recently in which to think up things like this, so I’ve a thing (the diary) and a place (the conference) but I haven’t yet got a ‘what to do’.

In scholarly pursuit, a question always marks a beginning. Possible research questions that this conference seeks to address include:

• How do the genres of life writing (and/or film) mediate the experience of war?
• How does war impact upon the genres of life writing?
• What is the significance of the emerging digital genres of life writing for war representation (i-journalism, Twitter, social networking sites)?
• What are the relationships between gender and life writings about war?
• How can the phenomenon of missing or silent testimonies be theorised?
• How do representations of war in the life-writing genres challenge or support ‘official’, governmental, or archetypal depictions? 

 

One of the interesting facets of Ted’s diaries is that he was a pacifist, as far as I’m aware throughout his life, but certainly during that war. Although British men were no longer court-martialled for refusing to fight by the late thirties as they had been during WWI, pacifism nevertheless remained a socially taboo position to hold, particularly when London’s skies darkened with Luftwaffe and a rising tide of solidarity against an external threat produced certain common positions amongst neighbours.

Would this stance of Ted’s be considered a ‘missing or silent testimony’? How indeed could that be theorised? When today it is possible to give voice to a peaceful opposition to conflict by tweeting live from the war zone, what implications does that have for the silencing of testimonies? What challenges do his representations of the war present for contemporary readings of the period, ‘official’ or otherwise?

I do not know yet how or whether this one will pan out, but it is certainly tempting to try and get something together for the conference. I’ll report back if I manage to put an abstract/proposal together for it, but in the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions for an angle of pursuit, feel free to add in the comments below.

Dropping Knowledge

After leaving them loitering on my desktop for months, I've finally managed to upload a couple of new videos to my YouTube channel.

I came across the Dropping Knowledge (dk) organisation through a filmmaker friend in Tokyo that did some work for them. I'm always on the lookout for ventures that aim to enhance international understanding and am particularly interested in ones that embrace the technology of our age in order to do that, so they were a great find.

The first film lays out their aims of asking questions as a means of encouraging social change, while the second is of one is of dk's activities, the Table of Free Voices. This event, held in 2006, brought together leading thinkers from around the world and posed a series of questions to them set by citizens from across the planet.

The films themselves are issued under the concept of 'copyleft', where a user is 'free to copy, use, modify, publish, broadcast or otherwise redistribute any portion of these films, and (is) actively encourage(d)...to do so.' This is a relatively new concept to me and could be a fantastic means of building a contemporary global cultural commons.

I have always questioned the world around me. What's your question?