Exploring Marginalities:

Making Sense of Affective Knowledge in Home Movies through Collaborative Methods

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2020.15 | Issue 4 | June 2020

Ruxandra Lupu

University of Leeds

Abstract

This work deals with the topic of home movies, usually defined as a form of naïve cinema. Attempting to broaden the scope of analysis possible for the home movie, itself consisting of a form characterised by a lack of rules that render it naïve, my research pays particular attention to characteristics of difference and creativity in the home movie, rather than those aspects rendering it a hard-to-define style. To this aim, I deploy participatory approaches as forms of collaborative ideas-making, and this research statement outlines a workshop held at De Montfort University as part of the Cracking the Established Order conference that explored ways to establish a dialogue with the archive of home movies that at the same time presented new ways to speak about this archive. A core component of this process is the use of creative and imaginative methods such as writing or drawing in combination with philosophical concepts. The knowledge gained through this workshop takes the shape of a multimedia video, representing a sort of artistic statement of the entire working process and its outcome. The multimedia video becomes ultimately an expression of what the home movie means and how it comes about.

Research Statement

As personal or domestic records capturing and preserving fragments of private memory, usually filmed by an amateur (FIAF, 2016), home movies are defined as a form of naïve cinema (Chalfen, 1987). They reveal a peculiar way of looking at the world that is neither filtered by the technical mastery of the medium, nor subject to a linear narrative structure. Its freedom consists in the same lack of rules that render it naïve. In this light, its characteristic film style defies categorical notion, generating the need to move away from a definition of film style as technical knowledge, to a definition that foregrounds the relationship of the moviemaker with the camera, itself typical of non-formalised film practices [1] (Cavallotti, 2019). In doing so, we shift the attention from a problem – that of analysing something devoid of rules or structure – to an opportunity, one that looks at the uniqueness of the movie through its style.

This shift in thinking broadens the scope of analysis possible for the home movie, paying particular attention to characteristics of difference and creativity, rather than those aspects rendering it a hard-to-define style. Yet with the broadening of the home movie’s sphere of analysis emerges a new challenge in terms of the suitability of contemporary methods to deal with new forms of knowledge. Arts-based research can offer an interesting alternative to more traditional methods such as interviews or film analysis, insofar as it tends to resist categorical or binary thinking, pays more attention to contexts, and is therefore able to reflect a multiplicity of visions. Adopting creative methods to analyse the engagement with the archive creates space for the manifestation of the evocative, personal and expressive elements that are hard to capture by traditional methods. According to Eisner, ‘the arts in research promote a form of understanding that is derived or evoked through emphatic experience’ (2008: 7). Creative methods therefore go beyond linguistic knowledge and provide a deep insight into what others are experiencing while engaging with the home movie.

My personal interest in home movies originates in their liminal nature that envisions the use of creative practice as an original investigation method, exploring the archive from ‘within’ and not ‘in relation to’ something else. To this aim, I deploy participatory approaches as forms of collaborative ideas-making that are part of the participatory turn (Milevska, 2018) and enable the creation of ‘new ways to see, think and communicate’ (Leavy, 2019: 3) that ‘lifts inquiry above its narrow personal confines’ (Goethe, 1988: 12). In the frame of my PhD project I experiment with collaborative methods that promote an affective, embodied and tacit reading of the Sicilian home movie archive. Workshops have been organised as a way of reflecting on broader social challenges, using the archive as a mediator of knowledge. But the broader aim of my project’s workshops is to experiment with formats, attempting to use these archives more imaginatively. The aim here is to critically reflect on a reading of these archives as opuses in ‘becoming’ that we perceive each time anew, as we open them.

One of these workshops was conducted in the frame of the Cracking the Established Order (CtEO) conference, taking place at De Montfort University in June 2019. It explored ways to develop experimental participatory practices that establish a dialogue with the archive and are at the same time able to speak about the archive. A core component of this process is the use of creative and imaginative methods such as writing or drawing in combination with philosophical concepts. The scope is to explore how we can construct a theoretically sound yet at the same time looser approach to reading the archive, which is not confined by interpretational frames or builds on easy assumptions.

The workshop deploys the specific notion of affection-images to go beyond linguistic representation. Affection-images are forms of resonance between objects of our perceptions and ourselves. They are neither the sole reflection of our emotions, nor responses to perceptual stimuli but an intertwining of both, modulations of the same matter (Deleuze, 1992), giving rise to the imaginary texture of the real (Merleau-Ponty, 1964). It is through this that we gain a holistic experience of the world, as a layered structure of affective, experiential and embodied knowledge. At the same time, the affection-image enables us to step into other forms of sensible intuition, by acknowledging the fact that there is more in the home movie than that, something which can be represented and expressed through words. Drawing, writing and other forms of creative expression enable us to tap deeper into the home movie as an object of the ‘more-than-sensible realm’. These forms of expression encourage a loosening of conventional meaning-making structures of the archival image that makes space for new intuitions and associations that do not pertain to the field of semiotics.

The eight workshop participants at the De Montfort conference were introduced to this concept and encouraged to engage with a pre-selected home movie scene drawing inspiration from the concept of affection-images. The creative and imaginative methods used to engage with the home movie scene provided a deeper and more holistic insight into perceptual experience. This process resulted in different outputs: visual memes, mood boards, performances, posters, audio pieces, collages and imaginative writing. Although associated with difficulties in terms of accommodating findings within academic conventions (Dunn and Mellor, 2017), these creative and art-based approaches offered an alternative to models of interpretation that rely on film or discursive analysis. They conveyed a concrete form to knowledge that falls outside of the sphere of many concepts by stepping into the pre-linguistic domain [2], operating through introspection as a self-reflexive process that is shaped by the sense of knowing together (Ingold, 2013).

In fact, the emerging engagement models show that while the creative process is predominantly an individual one – participants have chosen to work independently rather than in teams – sharing these formats with the group are not only important in terms of ‘articulating’ experience, but they also form an integral part of the experience itself. For example, the performance required the active participation of the group; the sound-piece called for participants attention; the meme had to be read out aloud for others to grasp its meaning, and so on. Together, these creative formats generated an orchestration of emotions, impressions and thoughts as a perpetual movement of experience and embodied performance that sets the foundations of an archive of the present. Such an archive does not only bring people together around these digitalised materials, but also disrupts categories and easy assumptions concerning the home movie, paving the way for new affinities (Deger, 2017).

Images of the different projects developed in the frame of the CtEO workshop.

The knowledge gained through these projects now takes the shape of a multimedia video, representing a sort of artistic statement of the entire working process and its outcome. As a single-piece element, viewable in full at the start of this Research Statement, it traces the creative journey of the event by assembling participants’ creative outputs, video and audio elements recorded during the working process and elements of post-workshop conversations. Yet the piece is neither a film essay, nor a collage or montage. Instead, it represents the modulation of the co-creative experience of its eight participants and aims to formulate new ways of generating and presenting knowledge surrounding the home movie. I deployed modulation as a way to respond in an embodied and affectionate way to the subtle shifts in the context surrounding the workshop activity, departing from the Deleuzian concept but expanding it into the field of more than sensible intuitions. Through modulation, I am able to capture the entire process in a holistic manner, which gives space to the emergence of affect, associated sensations and moods as key elements that cannot be attributed either to the audience or to the material, but to an intertwining of both. This vision is foregrounded in new materialist theories and in the observation that feelings, emotions and moods are not already present in subjects, but evolve as a flow of energy that is continuously being co-created and negotiated (Barad, 2007). Also relating participants’ projects to further impressions collected during and after the workshop, the piece deploys digital software as a panaesthetic tool, which refers in medicine to the sum of all of a person’s perceptions at a given moment in time. Using Final Cut, layers and effects similar to how a surgeon deploy their instruments, I aimed to reconstruct the skin of the film through which its tacit and affective knowledge emerges through the aesthetic and material registers of the event. The multimedia piece becomes ultimately an expression of what the home movie means and how it comes about.

References

• Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.

• Cavallotti, D. (2019) Labili tracce – per una teoria della pratica videoamatoriale. Mimesis.

• Chalfen, R. (1987) Snapshot Versions of Life. University of Wisconsin Press.

• Czach L. (2014) Home Movies and Amateur Film as National Cinema, in Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

• Deger, J. (2017) ‘Curating Digital Resonance’, in The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography, edited by Larissa Hjorth, Heather Horst, Anne Galloway and Genevieve Bell, 318-328. London: Routledge.

• Deleuze, G. (1992) Postscript on the Societies of Control (October) Vol. 59: 3-7.

• Dunn, V. and Mellor, T. (2017) ‘Creative, Participatory Projects with Young People: Reflections over Five Years’, Research for All 1 (2): 284-99.

• Eisner, E. (2008) ‘Art and Knowledge’, in Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research, edited by J. Gary Knowles and Ardra L. Cole, 3-12. London: Sage.

• Goethe, J.W. von (1988) ‘The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject’ in Goethe: Scientific Studies, edited by Daniel Miller, 11-17. New York: Suhrkamp Publishers. (Original work published 1823).

• Ingold T. (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge.

• Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) ‘Eye and Mind’, in The Primacy of Perception, edited by J. Edy and C. Dallery (Translated by W. Cobb). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. (Originally published as Le Visible et L’invisible. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1964).

• Milevska S. (2018) ‘Participatory Art’, Traces (July 26). http://www.traces.polimi.it/index.html@p=3711.html

• Simoni P. (2015) ‘Eyewitness of History: Italian Amateur Cinema as Cultural Heritage and Source for Audio-visual and Media Production’, View Journal 4(8).

• Zimmerman P. (1995) Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film. Indiana University Press.

Notes

[1] Non-formalised practices are, according to Diego Cavallotti, idiosyncratic practices connected to a non-regulated use of technical objects. In contrast to formalised practices, they are not following the rules and technical indications of professional filming, but follow a looser style belonging to the personal practice of the filmmaker.

[2] Standing at the core of cognitive research about human knowledge, pre-linguistic or direct knowledge is that form of knowledge that is not necessarily associated with any form of linguistic expression. As a result of immediate experience, pre-linguistic knowledge presents things as they are, without having to name them. As a predominantly visual object, the home movie triggers an aesthetic experience and thus works through aesthetic data registers. This way of knowing refers to a direct unmediated engagement with the sensual properties of the home movie, while representing at the same time a tacit form of knowing. Steven Taylor defined the concept of aesthetic muteness as the difficulty to translate aesthetic experience and judgements into verbal, analytical language.

[3] Panaesthesia refers in medicine to the sum of all of a person’s perceptions at a given moment in time.

‘News Poems’: A New Way of Manufacturing the News

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2020.01 | Issue 3 | April 2020 Andrew Calcutt University of East London

Abstract

This submission showcases my experimentations with ‘news poems’, a creative practice based on taking the top stories of the day and re-writing them in a form of heightened speech which aims to be poetic. In the context of ‘fake news’ (Pomerantsev, 2019) and ‘post-truth’ (D’Ancona, 2017), a call to the imagination may sound like playing with fire. But nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, the imaginative remake of journalism becomes an essential part of coming closer to truth. Much of the journalism we have known only tells us the half-truths we already know. But when we use our imagination to approach those involved in news stories, together we make room for our common humanity. This is the task for journalism today, and the news poem is our best chance of fulfilling it.

Research Statement

Since 2012, I have been experimenting with ‘news poems.’ That is to say, I have taken the top stories of the day and re-written them in a form of heightened speech which aims to be poetic. In 2018, I wrote a series of news poems commemorating the 51 Londoners aged under-25 who died as a result of knife wounds or gunshot wounds in London that year. Collected under the title ‘Anthem for Lost Youth’, I am submitting these pieces along with this research statement to exemplify my take-up of traditionally fictional methods in the quest for truth – an unending quest for what is necessarily unfinished.

‘Anthem for Lost Youth’ is a solo work but it is also part of a series of Experiments in Creative Journalism which I have devised with colleagues Simon Miles and Rishabh Shrivastav. The series began in 2017 when Simon and I collaborated on ‘Two-Way Street’, a film/text poem addressing the contradiction between increasingly desperate attempts to gain entry into the West (migration), and increasingly violent reactions against the West (terrorism). Latterly Simon and I have been joined by Rishabh, an accomplished film-maker, and two research interns, Francesca Battaglia and Will Vincent. Together we have staged a sequence of mixed media performances entitled Not News At Ten. The first of these took place at The Poetry Society, Covent Garden, in July 2019, followed by our contribution to the Being Human Festival, Autumn 2019. We are all what might be called students of journalism, though some of us have also practiced it for long periods – in my case for more than 40 years. We are all equally insistent that journalism must do better; indeed, we hope to draw attention to the idea of Creative Journalism because we believe that mainstream journalism is suffering from acute failure of the imagination.

In the context of ‘fake news’ (Pomerantsev, 2019) and ‘post-truth’ (D’Ancona, 2017), a call to the imagination may sound like playing with fire. But nothing could be further from the truth. To our way of thinking, the imaginative remake of journalism is an essential part of coming closer to truth. This is because much of the journalism we have known only tells us the half-truths we already know. In any case, is ‘fake news’ really such a threat to journalism and society? Despite mounting anxiety about the corrosive combination of algorithms and social media, surely the 50-year-old Internet, viewed as a whole, has become the biggest fact-checker we have ever known. On the other hand, the considerable array of surveys and research (Allbright, 2018; Digital, Media, Culture and Sport Committee, 2019) which would account for regressive behaviour, e.g. voting for bigots, according to levels of exposure to fake news, seems to echo the spate of ‘effects theory’ studies which peaked in the 1980s in the attempt to show that violent videos caused violent behaviour. Though it was made frequently and vehemently, this case remained stubbornly unproven – not least because the researchers concerned were presenting what was essentially content analysis as if this could provide a satisfactory explanation of human behaviour (Livingstone, 1996). In the fake news discourse, the same sort of category error appears to have re-surfaced.

Perhaps ‘fake news’ has acted more like a moral panic prompted by the realisation that the masses have been using news in the much the same way as the petit bourgeoisie, i.e. as the story which affirms my existence rather than the account which confounds what I thought I knew. Ever since the ‘journalism of attachment’ advocated by Martin Bell (Bell, 1998) and others 20 years ago, the petit bourgeoisie has made a point of selecting some facts and de-selecting others according to their capacity for personal validation. It seems they may have panicked when they saw the masses doing much the same thing.

If the significance of ‘fake news’ has itself been falsified, the real problem is fake democracy. Journalism is heavily implicated in this because politics and journalism were a tight-knit double-act throughout the era of social democracy. Now, by contrast, the end of that era is evident in the characteristic failing common to both politicos and journos – a failure of the imagination. Apart from a small of number of notable exceptions such as John Harris (Harris, 2019), even when they leave the office long enough to speak to people living outside the Westminster Village, most journalists appear unable to envisage them as anything more than the one-dimensional shapes they have already slotted them into: vulnerable/predatory, victim/perpetrator, cynical conspirator/naïve believer. This is the furthest expression of journalism’s disposition towards determinism. It was already discernible in the teleology of the traditional news reporting format known as the inverted pyramid, which starts at the end of the story and folds the rest into a sequence of paragraphs of diminishing importance. Thus, readers have frequently gained the impression that what has happened, simply had to happen – it was always going to end in tears (Calcutt and Hammond, 2011).

Journalism also faces an additional set of problems associated with new technology: Professional journalists can no longer expect to be the first people on the scene with the capacity to record it – such is the spread of smartphones and the digital communications infrastructure. A mechanical version of news reporting can now be operated without the participation of professional journalists – with user-generators to provide the raw material and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to process it (Sharpe, 2016).

Combined with professional journalism’s fatalistic approach towards its own protagonists (as indicated above), it is hardly surprising that ‘news avoidance’ – growing numbers of people admitting to avoiding the news – was the top takeaway from this year’s Digital News Report (Reuters 2019). To regain wider relevance professional journalists must become more humanist and less determinist. Instead of tending towards teleology, they should start by recognising how those in that situation – any situation, could have acted otherwise; while in comparable circumstances we ourselves might have acted likewise.

Similarly, journalists cannot regain credibility without fully acknowledging the contradiction between people as subjects of their own lives and people as the object of pressures beyond their control. This contradiction characterises the human condition: it has shaped all that we are, including journalism itself. At its best, journalism has been able to address this, but in the hands of professional journalists Fact has frequently defaulted to the depiction of people as objects, leaving Comment and its big brother, Politics, to bring the human subject back in post festum.

Never wholly satisfactory, even this combination is no longer viable, largely because the Westminster Village grew accustomed to treating the majority population as its own object, to such an extent that the polity of social democracy has been a ghost town for a generation. In today’s context, in order to remain relevant to the majority population, professional journalism must rise above its reifying side. In the absence of social democracy and its auto-corrective function, as a matter of urgency journalism will have to find its own way of capturing the contradiction inherent in human actions. This does not mean that every factual report needs to begin with a version of Hamlet’s soliloquy. Nonetheless, news reporting needs a new form in complete contrast to the inverted pyramid, the previously predominant format which tended to present its subjects as standardised objects.

Composition is key to such developments, i.e. the more-or-less musical arrangement of words so that their current deployment also resonates with all the nuances of previous usage. Arranged in this way, words themselves become the objective correlate of the human subject as it really is – a field of various possibilities. Accordingly, in order to do justice to its subject-matter – the human subject, while retaining its characteristic sense of urgency, journalism should look to the literary form which offers the largest semantic field in the smallest number of words: the poem.

Loosely defined as heightened speech, the poetic is the mode of expression best able to take today’s top stories and slow them down long enough to draw out the contradictions they contain. Moreover, it can do this without surrendering the newness of news. Whereas the New Journalism of the 1960s re-told ‘the news as a novel’ (Wolfe and Johnson, 1975), with turnaround times to match, a poetic re-telling can be provided in timely fashion and grasped in the instant.

Re-directing the hack pack towards poetry is certain to provoke squeals of incredulity. But journalism must distance itself from the hack, or else face closing time in the last chance saloon. Nor am I advocating this counter-intuitive move for the sake of journalism alone. In a period of fragmentation, creating a shared account of the world we ourselves have made – for and on behalf of ourselves and each other, is a precondition for social renewal.

But such a concerted account cannot be left at the level of the mundane. Again, the requirement is for heightened speech, since this is the mode of expression which raises us to the level of what we have in common. The precedents for this are many and varied. As religious liturgy and public oratory are carefully composed, so they call upon individuals to give up the personal preferences and prejudices which would continue to differentiate them at the conversational level. Journalism today would do well to pay similarly close attention to formal composition. Moreover, at the high table of what we have in common, there is less likelihood of imaginative failure. At this level, where, as Terence the Roman playwright put it, ‘nothing human is alien to me’, we are more likely to envisage other people as other than they already are; more inclined to see them as potentially more than they have been so far. Thus, the form of words in which we would encounter our commonality, is also the composition through which we could recognise the extraordinary in other human beings.

News as we have known it only tells us what we already know. But when we use our imagination to approach those involved in news stories, together we make room for our common humanity. To my mind, this is the task for journalism today, and the news poem is our best chance of fulfilling it. Please read the following news poems – and judge for yourself.

References

• Allbright, J. (2018) ‘The Micro-Propaganda Machine’, https://medium.com/s/the-micro-propaganda-machine accessed 30 October 2019.

• Bell, M. (1998) ‘The Journalism of Attachment’, in M. Kieran (ed) Media Ethics, Abingdon: Routledge.

• Calcutt, A. and P. Hammond (2011) Journalism Studies: a critical introduction, Abingdon: Routledge

• D’Ancona, M. (2017) Post-Truth: the new war on truth and how to fight back, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

• Digital, Media, Culture and Sport Committee (2019) Disinformation and ‘Fake News’: Final Report, London: House of Commons.

• Harris, J. (2019) ‘Anywhere But Westminster: the real fight to take back control’, The Guardian 25 September 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2019/sep/25/anywhere-but-westminster-the-real-fight-to-take-back-control-video, accessed 30 October 2019.

• Livingstone, S. (1996) ‘On The Continuing Problems Of Media Effects Research’ in J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds) Mass Media and Society, 2nd Edition, London: Edward Arnold, pp. 305 – 324.

• Pomerantsev, P. (2019) This Is Not Propaganda: adventures in the war against reality, London: Faber & Faber Reuters Institute For The Study Of Journalism (2019) Digital News Report 2019, Oxford: Reuters Institute For The Study Of Journalism http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/ accessed 30 October 2019.

• Sharpe, R. (2016) ‘Manifesto For Human Journalism’, Proof: reading journalism and society http://proof-reading.org/manifesto-for-human-journalism/ accessed 30 October 2019.

• Wolfe, T. and E.W. Johnson (1975) The New Journalism, London: Picador.

Anthem For Lost Youth

A Full Report Of The Under-25s Shot Or Stabbed To Death In Non-Domestic Incidents In London In 2018

Preface

Anthem For Lost Youth commemorates the young people who were killed on the streets of London in 2018. While looking back at the loss of life, Anthem also anticipates the affirmation of our humanity and the role of reporting in this reiteration. Nearly all the casualties catalogued here were male; most of them were young men from a Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) background. Some would say that the story of their demise belongs to the communities in which they lived; conversely, that no one should presume to tell their story without having lived something like it.

Apart from the question of whether such ‘communities’ really exist, this approach confines these stabbings and shootings to the time and place in which they occurred. It assumes that what began as a violent exchange between specified individuals from designated backgrounds, will stay that way forever. But the killings which took place in 2018 are already writ large across the world city of London – that is, a city which contains the whole world to which it also reaches out. Also, the existence of a worldwide news agenda, and within this the prominent position of London’s knife crime and drive-by shootings, jointly point to a further form of our own existence. Namely, besides being particular individuals, each of us is also an incarnation of the humanity common to us all. In accordance with this, the essential mode of our existence, Anthem is an account of what happened in London in 2018, written from the perspective of what we have in common.

Even before I began to write this account, we were all already affected. But the routine reporting of these events has been sadly lacking. Journalism’s traditional formats could not rise to the occasion because they tend to shrink human actions, simplify contradictions and reduce complex characters to a single, given trait. Moreover, even though it is predicated on commonality, news journalism has fallen into the habit of addressing us as cynics who will always be alienated from each other. In the attempt to face the worst and address the best in us all, I knew I would have to find a new form of journalism capable of going beyond the established routine – just as the events which I’ve tried to do justice to, require us to rise above particular identities and identify instead with the universal.

The best I’ve been able to come up with is the ‘news poem’, combining the lyrical with the factual; the actual crime scene juxtaposed with fleeting thoughts intended to carry readers across space and time. I’ve also included echoes of Homer’s Iliad (any errors in translation are my own), the ‘war music’ of Ancient Greece. The title, Anthem For Lost Youth, is all but lifted from Wilfred Owen’s poem about young men dying during the First World War, ‘Anthem For Doomed Youth’.

To those crying out today for action to stem the flow of blood, anything less than government policy supported by sufficient funding, is seen as superfluous, even self-indulgent. But to this author’s way of thinking, the effects of urgent action are bound to be limited, perhaps even counter-productive, unless complemented by collective imagination. Social structures will fail without a structure of feeling to invoke our human essence. To this end, I commend to you my Anthem For Lost Youth.

Prologue

In this naming of the dead,

We shall say what needs be said.

Not on behalf of family or friends,

This is remembrance for the rest of us,

Lest our days are lived in dread.

Young people act as if they’re indestructible – an illusion which fades with age. Add this to the fact that these youths don’t count for much in the wider world, plus the pressure to gain status by getting attention, and you can see immediately how the fuse lights itself.

What does your world sound like, without that rat-a-tat beat?

What are the right words for you, now you’re beneath our feet?

Kyall

Kyall Parnell (17) was stabbed when an altercation aboard the No 68 bus spilled out onto the streets of Tulse Hill, South London. His heart was punctured and Kyall was pronounced dead almost half an hour before midnight. But it was New Year’s morning before the Metropolitan Police began investigating.

Tearaway, you weren’t meant to Steal Away To Jesus.

Couldn’t wait for the New Year to come in,

Skittering across the street in what became your endgame.

Now the conventions have caught up with you.

Floral tributes taped to litter bins and a tent marks the spot

Pegged to the roadman pose in your profile pic,

And the Soundcloud tracks you posted – yes,

Yours is a short life story rife with knife-crime clichés.

We shan’t shank you with that, Kyall.

Even if it’s true you were seen at the blade’s other end,

Your punishment is the 22 minutes ’tween wounding and dying.

But how to get close to you – if for months before New Year’s, your style had you walled up alive?

Steve

At 2.35 on 1 January police were called to a flat in Bartholomew Court, near Old Street – the scene of a New Year’s party gone badly wrong. They found two men with life-threatening knife wounds. One of them was Steve Narvaez Jara (20), a student of Physics and Aerospace at the University of Hertfordshire. Steve had moved from Ecuador to live with his Spanish-speaking parents and three younger sisters in Belvedere, South-East London. He was pronounced dead at 3.26.

El amor Ecuador: the aspiring pilot might have flown back to his parents’ homeland – some day in the future he no longer has.

Now Steve has ascended elsewhere – every day’s a party there, so they say.

Funds for his funeral raised online by family, friends and perfect strangers, rose far above the asking.

Enough to give the bereaved a bit of a lift.

Harry

Before he was stabbed to death in Shepherd’s Bush, West London, Harry Uzoka (25) had begun to make a name for himself as a fashion model. His killer, George Koh, was already jealous of this success, but relations between the two men went from bad to worse after George claimed to have slept with Harry’s girlfriend. At this, Harry demanded a meeting with George to set him straight. On 11 January George showed up for the showdown with two of his friends; all three were weaponised.

Hurry up, Harry, they’re closing in on you.

Running past the council-built houses – Poundland more than Prada, chased by three youths in puffa jackets, the male model moves out of shot (it’s a Met Police release made from CCTV).

Preceding the police video playing on a London news website, there’s a glossy advert Harry could easily have appeared in.

Just the place where George was keen to be seen.

Jump cut to the three hoodies huddled together in the stairwell: wipe the blade; check the phone.

Hiding the crime; hoping there’s something to show for it?

Later, observe George’s up-tick from drab-land to brand-scape:

Shedding that hot stuff which lipstick only imitates.

Khader

Awaiting sentence for possession of drugs with intent to supply, on 31 January Khader Ahmed Saleh (25) was stabbed to death inside HMP Wormwood Scrubs, West London. Khader had survived conflict in Somalia and the journey to the UK, but not the British prison system. His wife and family have complained bitterly about the system’s failure to protect him.

Prison officers are also asking for protection: staff at the Scrubs said they were attacked 90 times from July to December 2017.

Garlands worn by groom and bride

Pictures of a blessed day, worlds away from life inside.

From what your wife has been saying since, sounds like you knew they were coming for you.

Should she have petitioned the Queen directly? May it please Your Majesty to protect my husband while you are detaining him.

But how much could the screws do for you, Khader, if they’re none too safe themselves?

Kwabena

At 1.30 on 3 February police were called to St Mary’s Close, Tottenham, where Kwabena Nelson (22) had been attacked by a group of men armed with knives. The men alighted from their car – a Honda Civic, and surrounded his – also a Honda Civic. Nothing Civic about what followed. By 3.00 ‘Kobi’ was dead from stab wounds.

Did you get out to stop them banging on the roof?

Or were you dragged out?

Curled up like a baby as the silver flashed in and out of you.

Months later, your mother Serwah said: ‘I take each day as it comes. Sometimes I have to take each hour.’

There were more flashes of silver than hours on a clock face.

Try me if you dare! Men will see the moment when your dark blood flows and gushes in response to my spear.

Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, Book 1, 354-5

Hasan

On 3 February a group of youths on bikes cornered 19-year-old Hasan Oscan in an unlit car park, and stabbed him to death. After a reported assault in 2017, Hasan had moved out of East London to Kent, returning to his parents’ home only at weekends. The fatal attack took place as he was on his way back from a party in Barking. Hasan Oscan was pronounced dead at 22.55.

Quite the character, with your comb over and mutton chop sideburns.

Your father’s is a fish restaurant. Waiting at tables, you seemed to be in your element.

Running out of breath that night, helpless as a fish out of water.

Perhaps your personality consisted of contrasting elements, some submerged so your parents knew nothing of them.

Now your dad is fading to grey, while your mother’s face is coarse with grief.

Promise

On 14 February first in a car and then on foot, four youths chased Lord Promise Nkenda (17) and brought him down in Canning Town.

The Angels knocked you over first – drove at you in a BMW.

Then the chariot chase – well, you were on foot.

When you made it into the alleyway did you think you’d have to remain on Earth full threescore years and ten?

Surely you knew: Angels can run as well as joyride.

The pathologist counted 15 hallelujahs before your soul was ready to rise; 15 knife-swipes that sent you to Heaven.

They must have been Angels because of the name of the place they took you from: Goldwing Close.

Lewis

On 18 February Lewis ‘Dotty’ Blackman (19) came to the party uninvited, arriving at a West London address with nine Camden friends plus the other ‘friends’ some of them were carrying. But the Hackney boys on the guest-list ran the gate-crashers out of the flat, and chased them down the road. Lewis was attacked in Logan Place after he turned to face his pursuers. Caught and stabbed 14 times, he died there in the street.

Don’t dare depart from the script: Kensington address, rented thro’ Airbnb for one night only.

Invites to Hackney-ites, but such sweet danger (everyone knows how it goes) when Camden comes calling with knives. And is that a gun?

Young Montagues, Capulets and the party girl almost young enough for Juliet.

So when does it change from dancing and prancing, pranking and performance? What was it that took it to snuffed-out solemnity?

You stagger; they’re swaggering back indoors.

Do they still not see the fatality?

Sadiq and Abdikarim

At around half-past-eight on 20 February, Sadiq Aadam Mohamad (20) died of knife wounds near Euston station. Five months earlier, Sadiq’s elder brother had died in similar circumstances. Later that evening, Abdikarim Hassan (17) was fatally stabbed in Kentish Town. In the short time between the 20 February killings, the killers drove to East London and back, attacking two more young men en route. But they survived.

Born with barely a year between, now both ended on a knife’s edge; only months apart, you and your brother.

Mother saw you lying there, cordoned off.

Called, and heard your ringtone from inside the crime zone.

Though younger, tonight’s second victim was in some ways your senior.

Arrested and charged in 2017, Abdikarim had been tagged for knife crime long before he was taken to the morgue.

Amir

On 27 February Amir Ellouzi (24) died in hospital of gunshot wounds. A week earlier on Old Pye Street, Westminster, he’d been shot in the neck.

Did anyone come to visit you in hospital?

There’s so little said about your demise.

From not much of this and the lack of that,

Who knows what to surmise?

I’ll strip your clothes off you, Cloak, tunic and the rags round your balls, And whip you bawling butt-naked back to the speedy ships.

Odysseus in Homer’s Iliad Book 2, 306-7

Kelva

Kelva Smith (20) died at the hands of someone he used to hang out with. They argued over a motorbike that Kelva had stolen, which was, in turn, stolen from him. At teatime on 5 March he was fatally stabbed in Albert Road, South Norwood.

Former friends fall out over a nicked bike, neither one the rightful owner.

Whoever gets to keep it, wherever will it take you?

Over the hills and far away? Or funding a few weeks’

PlayStation along with something to smoke?

The life of low-level crime like an old shoe to be slipped into.

Until it snakes up and bites you for stepping on it.

Kelvin

At 00.30 on 8 March a moped mounted the pavement in front of the Vue cinema in Wood Green. The pillion rider fired several rounds through plate glass windows, hitting a man standing in the foyer. Kelvin Odunuyi (19) was taken by ambulance to a central London hospital where he died shortly afterwards of a gunshot wound to the head.

Instead of a roadman’s death, you might have been an oil man, capping the Nigeria connection.

Father has property there. Paid for his boy to go to school in Yorkshire, but £25k p.a.’s still not enough to keep him safe.

They touch you up, your Mum and Dad. She wanted to make it clear they’d already moved out to Harrow; back in Wood Green he had no business being.

But if Kelvin was busy taking care, or just happened to be there, does it even matter?

Lyndon

On 14 March Lyndon Davis aka Lynx was stabbed in Padnall Road, Chadwell Heath. At 20.30 he was found in nearby Nash Road. Chased through his own estate, Lyndon seems to have kept on running even after he was knifed. The 18-year-old rapper was rushed to hospital but pronounced dead at 1.16 the following morning.

Beware the Ides of March!

Did you ever hear the one about Julius Caesar?

Before the start of play that fateful day,

Your destiny already done:

Youth with rueful smile, smiles no more

Little Brutuses later charged with murder.

Joseph

Persons approaching a car parked in Essex Close, Walthamstow. Inside the vehicle, Joseph Williams-Torres (20), former carpentry student at Walthamstow College. Gunshots fired through the car window. Air Ambulance in attendance at 21.30 on 14 March. Joseph pronounced dead on the way to hospital.

Never a joiner now you’re blown apart.

Perhaps too chippie for your own good – ouch!

Poor puns no more absurd than your demise.

Contrasting photos pop the question:

You went down in which guise – clean-cut blazer guy

Or junior Jamiroquai?

Russell

In the early hours of 17 March, Russell Jordan James (23) was with a friend by the row of shops on South Street, Enfield, when he was blasted with a shotgun and both of them were stabbed. Four hooded figures ran away up the alleyway as Russell and his friend slumped down. The friend recovered; Russell was pronounced dead at 1.14.

The two of you attended to in the blue light of the ambulance: one sitting up, blanket wrapped around; the other flat as a pancake.

Giving up shifts in the betting shop to work for a better degree. Couple of weeks away from finishing but this was to be your only result.

Slicked back hair, business attire with a thin gold chain on top. You would have suited The Apprentice.

Except you were fired first.

Beniamin

The group that picked on Beniamin Pieknyi (20), recently arrived from Romania, was as cosmopolitan as London itself. In the old Stratford Centre across the road from the new mall, Westfield, a motley crew ganged up on Beniamin and his companion, goading them and assaulting them until a security guard came over to break it up. The guard was escorting the two Romanians out of the building when Beniamin was rushed into the last shop before the exit. There he was beaten and stabbed through the heart. His time of death was given as 22.30 on 20 March.

Free from work for a night on the town

Fresh-faced and fanciable – how many

Hearts a-flutter at this cherub in a young man’s body?

With your Bieber-ish looks and the light in your eyes,

Did you make them feel like the animals they became?

And you’re the one from Eastern Europe. It’s you

Who’s supposed to be uncouth and horny-handed.

Malachi

At 1.00 on 28 March Malachi Brooks, a 21-year-old carpenter, was walking home along Surrey Lane, Battersea, when he was ambushed by three men wearing hoods and balaclavas. They got out of a Nissan Micra, stabbed him, then got back in and drove off. Police and paramedics rushed to the scene but Malachi died there less than an hour later. Cause of death: stab wound to the chest. The getaway car was subsequently set alight.

Sister and mother appear at the Metropolitan Police press conference. The appeal for witnesses to come forward, is likely to be more effective coming from them. They sit together, both wearing commemorative T-shirts. But only Malachi’s sister has the strength to talk. His mother doesn’t even know where to look, such is the disabling effect of her grief.

Reece

On 29 March someone drove Reece Tshoma (23) to hospital after he was stabbed in the neck in Nathan Way, Thamesmead. But he died later that evening.

Industrial estate, a bus stop, waste ground alongside the railway line. Had to be a stabbing because Gunning Road is on the other side of the tracks.

Different day, one hand inside your trackies for the casual pose.

Nike, nach. Not even tracheotomy will save you now.

Precious little said about your life or death. Were you no one’s precious boy? Someone drove you to the hospital, so you can’t have been friendless.

Since no one’s cut their tongues out, as far as we know, perhaps it is as the cliché would say:

Outside the gang there’s neither life nor loyalty.

Devoy

In the small hours of 1 April Devoy Burton-Stapleton (20) was stabbed to death on his way home from a bar in Wandsworth, South London. He died in a part of Earlsfield dubbed ‘nappy valley’ because of the many prosperous parents who choose to raise children there.

Yours was an upmarket killing – more Waitrose than Iceland.

Flowers that mark the spot mixed with bottles of Bolly in a cocktail of remembrance.

With what are they intoxicated, these friends of the deceased?

Stooping down to leave their tokens of respect,

Who dress so urban in the midst of suburbia.

The spear sliced into his back between the shoulders Chewing up his flesh and poking out through his ribs – he came crashing down and out, his armour ringing aloud.

Agamemnon kills Odius, Homer’s Iliad, Book 5, 45-7

Tanesha

On Easter Monday evening, shots were fired from a moving vehicle at a group of friends hanging out on Chalgrove Road, Tottenham. When Tanesha Melbourne-Blake collapsed, the people she was with thought she was having a panic attack. But the seventeen-year-old had been hit in the chest, and at 22.43 she was pronounced dead.

Couldn’t stay in to watch Lenny Henry rootsing round the Caribbean. No way; out to boyfriend’s instead.

Studying childcare at sixth-form, maybe a social worker; suddenly lifted out of all that – above and beyond.

Her brother’d promised: you’ll be a star someday. Now she’s cover girl for a yearbook of the dead.

Doe eyes and duck face, recycled Instagrams resurrect her. From poses to posies of remembrance, Tanesha lives like never before.

Still, the body on the ground. Sounds like mortality, rhymes with actuality, the something else that’s blown away.

Amaan

Shortly before 22.00 on 2 April, Amaan Shakoor (16) was standing with a friend outside Walthamstow Leisure Centre when they were approached by two hooded youths who fired a gun then fired again, hitting Amaan in the eye. He died in hospital the following day, surrounded by family members.

They knew there was nothing more anyone could do.

Handsome in your kurti, growing a beard because you could.

Suddenly there’s a £10k reward ‘for information leading to….’

What more his father wouldn’t do if only there was something?

The bravest thing, Daddio, telling them to turn off the machine.

Israel

Police officers and an off-duty paramedic tried to save Israel Ogunsola (18) after two youths attacked him in Link Street off Morning Lane, Hackney. They’d got out of their parked car as Israel rode past on his pushbike. At 20.24 on 4 April he was pronounced dead.

Wounded Israel presents himself to police officers for possibly the only time in his life.

Previously an officer was hurt chasing the car he was TWOCing. Convicted of actual bodily harm, he was waiting to be sentenced pending medical reports.

On New Year’s Day they’d found him next to Steve Jara, and he was the one to recover.

But when Easter came round there were no more resurrections. Already knifed in the arm, back and thigh, what ends Israel is a sharp blow to the heart.

Sami

On his way home from the West Ham game Sami Sidhom took a detour to avoid a commotion in the street. Minutes later three youths stabbed and wounded him. He staggered on for a short distance but collapsed in Chestnut Avenue, Forest Gate, only yards from home. Neighbours rushed to assist him but Sami was pronounced dead at 23.27 on 16 April.

Model student, literally: poster boy for Newham Schools 2012.

The family’s made a good go of it here: IT OK since arriving from Sudan.

Now try as he might, his father’s face has a look that says:

The world anew’s beyond me; and now forever shall be.

Kwasi

Police were called to assist a man who had been stabbed in Seven Sisters Road, North London. In addition, on nearby Roth Walk they found Kwasi Anim-Boadu (20), also stabbed. The other man recovered in hospital but at 3.00 on 21 April, Kwasi was pronounced dead at the scene.

When the fight started, life itself spilled out of the house party. No telling where it’d end up or who it would leave behind.

Known as Junior, also known as Lavish, the H&M Moschino mix would have been right up your street. Now you’re lying there instead.

With all the commotion, did you finally feel like a celebrity?

Were you warmed by the attention, or too cold too soon to notice it?

Rhyhiem

Rhyhiem Ainsworth Barton (17) died of gunshot wounds shortly before 19.00 on 5 May. As featured by dj Tim Westwood, Rhyhiem was a member of Moscow 17, the Camberwell rappers reportedly ‘drilling’ against Peckham’s Zone 2.

His mother saw it coming. Tried sending him to Jamaica for a while, away from everything. But it wasn’t long enough.

Who knows when the war of words becomes a river of blood? Even Enoch Powell didn’t foresee them foaming themselves.

Two days later, out on the street in leggings and a Marvel Heroes wraparound, bucket and brush in hand, Pretana Morgan (38) is scrubbing her son’s blood off the pavement.

On top of a waist-high wall she sets out mementos of her lost boy, including the Maternity tag from before he was named.

With cameras locked on to her, she sends a message to the police, calling for a curfew to shut down all this violence. Same goes for the youth themselves, for the sake of the children you don’t have yet.

Is she speaking out of anger, sadness or a sense of public duty? Who can tell how much of each?

Osman

During the evening of 15 May Osman Shidane (20) went into Ruislip town centre to buy cannabis from a youth he’d had dealings with before. This time the deal went wrong. Osman ran off, chased by the youth who caught him and stabbed him three times. He died in hospital three days later.

‘Family man’ his family say

Dry because he’s Muslim

In Sales all day

He went to buy some blow,

Y’know, to each his own.

He couldn’t have known

He’d be the barley mow.

Scythed down by a sixteen-year-old

Who had him in a headlock and knifed him thrice.

Osman fell exactly where Jean Townsend was strangled 64 years before. Jean was a theatrical costumier who worked in the West End. Osman, whose family hails from Somalia, was born in Denmark but had lived in London for 15 years – long enough to become an Arsenal fan and a salesperson for a utilities company.

They are centuries apart, right? There’s a world of difference between them. Yet to dispose of the murder weapon Osman’s killer took a cab to Ruislip Lido. He may have known nothing of mid-century, middle class Metroland, lovingly mocked by the poet John Betjeman. But echoes of that era are audible nonetheless.

Abdulrahman

At 11.30 on 17 May police officers in Barking, East London, attended Abdulrahman Nassor Juma (23), who had been stabbed. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Found in Crows Road, someone’s been pecking at you with knives.

In the photo issued by the Met, you look presentable enough in a dinner jacket and white shirt.

In the attention economy you still don’t count for much. Your eight-syllable name’s nearly as long as news reports of your death.

Now Menelaus, famous for wielding a spear, ran him through between the shoulder blades as he charged forwards, gouging out flesh, piercing through his chest.

Melenaus kills Scamandrius, Homer’s Iliad Book 5, 60-2

Joshua

On 11 June Joshua Boadu (23) was stabbed during ‘an altercation involving a group of males’ outside Helen Taylor House in Lindsey Street, Bermondsey. He took shelter in a property in nearby Lucey Way. From there he was taken to King’s College Hospital where he remained on life support for 11 days.

AKA ‘SJ’, Joshua was a quiet, Christian man who died quietly.

At the same hospital he was born in, as if neatness is next to godliness.

Couldn’t have made any noise ’cos his brainstem had stopped responding days ago. But this stout heart kept beating.

He’d been stabbed once before, soon after starting secondary school, so the family moved to Bermondsey from Peckham.

As Josh grew up the area went upmarket. Must have seemed like the right move on all counts.

Worse still, only one day later he would have been flying to Canada for a family wedding.

Jordan

Police were already at the scene when Jordan Douherty (15) was killed. Too many people had turned up to a birthday party at Romford’s Clockhouse Community Centre on 23 June. The party was called off, and officers were trying to disperse a hostile crowd outside. In the middle of this mêlée, Jordan, who performed as Young Valenti for a drill group called C17, was chased by a large group of youths, then circled and attacked by some of them. He was already on the ground – kicked and stamped – when a 17-year-old stabbed him twice. The knife pierced the left ventricle, leading to drastic blood loss which proved fatal. But Jordan managed to rise to his feet and flee the scene – only to be attacked by another group a short distance away.

Cocksure in the police-released photo, you were the youth to be seen to beat.

Beat him, tear him like a side of beef; film it and put it on Snapchat. Already dying when others had to have a second go.

Another driller killed. Even if you’re the perpetrator, not the victim, the detective wants you all to know that ‘life’ means caged, forgotten – until it’s passed you by.

Isn’t that where they think they are already, these boys and their bloody war music?

Ishak

In Cavendish Road, Edmonton, at 18.30 on 27 June, there was a fight between men wielding baseball bats. By the end of it, Enfield’s Ishak Tacine (20) lay dying from multiple stab wounds. He was pronounced dead at 19.20.

With hair swept back and shades on top, we’d take you for an Italian footballer.

With a name like that you’d expect the God of Abraham to take you out from under the knife, replacing you at the last minute with a sacrificial lamb.

But you were the one. And slaughter it was.

The officer bemoans that nowadays the knives go in repeatedly. Not the single point which might have been made five years ago.

An eye-witness observed combatants in a state of frenzy:

One without a shirt, another with a T-shirt over his head, they came running….

Do we compare this to cold-blooded murder – and despair?

Katrina

At 12.30 on 12 July, Katrina Makunova (17) was fatally stabbed at the entrance to a block of flats on Brisbane Road, Camberwell. She died at the scene. Shortly afterwards a man was arrested and charged with manslaughter.

You were just 17 when he saw you standing there…

Wanting to be a beautician and humanitarian: how contrarian.

Contrary as teenagers are bound to be. Even to excess, like your eye make-up.

Latwaan

Early evening, 26 July, Denmark Road, South London. Latwaan Griffiths (18) was riding pillion on a scooter en route to King’s College Hospital when he lost consciousness. The driver stopped, half-pushed, half-lifted Latwaan to the ground, called for passers-by to assist him, and rode off. They did the best they could until an ambulance arrived, but Latwaan died from stab wounds in the early hours of the following day.

Enough gold in your mouth to show you’re not poor.

Another performer, this one drilled with the Harlem Spartans, allied to Moscow 17.

‘Hang on’, the rider shouted. Didn’t want to lose you, couldn’t risk staying with you.

What’s any of this to do with the warriors of Ancient Greece?

Their violence was also a performance, similarly bound by unrelenting codes.

Sidique

Shortly before 19.30 on 1 August, Sidique Kamara (23) was fatally stabbed in Warham Street, South London, close to the spot where Rhyhiem Ainsworth Barton was shot dead in May. They were both members of Moscow 17, the drill group based in Camberwell’s Barton Estate. Neither one made it to hospital.

You performed on screen under the name ‘Incognito’.

Wishing now you were unseen, instead of ‘cheffed up’ on the street?

Corn crows and a brown suit – was that for the days in court? Old Bailey, no less, so you won’t be wearing your Arsenal chain.

Acquitted of murder in January – maybe it made you savour your freedom. Yet you must have heard it said: the postman always rings twice.

Malik

In the early hours of 5 August, Malik Chattun (22) died from a single stab wound after a ‘10-man brawl’ broke out on the Cambridge Gardens Estate in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames.

Another part of London, where housing estates are few and far. But the fast food outlets across the road – pizza, fried chicken – would fill a hole in anyone’s Murder Mile.

Against the low wall, bunches of flowers laid out in a row. Handwritten notes, carefully composed.

Close friends and relatives of ‘Money Mally’ Malik cannot help but address him as if he’s still alive.

Fine and upstanding, his is the tallest picture on the Met Police website.

Shevaun

Shortly before midnight on 25 August, Shevaun Sorrell (22) was involved in an altercation at the corner of Creek Road and Deptford Church Street. He received multiple stab wounds, one of which proved fatal. Shevaun died in hospital about half an hour later.

The spot where you fell is overlooked by a bus stop plastered with an anti-knife crime poster. ‘Knife Free Since 30.8.2015,’ it says, beneath the photo of a happy lad.

If only your attackers had read it and taken the point to heart.

Instead of yours.

Your old man – he’s 70 – can’t get his head around it: arrived from Jamaica 60 years ago, worked on the railways year after year, brought up his children to believe in family values.

You were good with your hands, he says, you knew about computers. You’d soon have moved on from that dead-end job in a pound shop.

Abdi

On 27 August the body of Abdi Ali (17) was found in the loft of a house a few streets away from his family home in Enfield. Abdi died of stab wounds to the chest and blunt force trauma to the head. He’d been dead since December.

Hell knows what eight months’ decomposition did to your fine features. Who knows why there was so little coverage of your disappearance, as reported to the authorities on 31 December?

What, then, of the five-day wait between notification that a body had been found, and formal identification?

Was it that the labs were busy? Were the morticians making the remains as presentable as possible? Could it have been that the boy was brown?

Maybe the police were embarrassed about what hadn’t been done and never would be, until that tip-off came in.

Ismail

Ismail Tanrikulu (22) died of gunshot wounds on 3 September. He was found in Tottenham Cemetery at around 8.00, and declared dead shortly afterwards.

A friend told the Evening Standard: people had called round for him and smashed up his mother’s Merc when he wasn’t at home. Then he got a call to go to the cemetery at 4.30. His cousin drove him, sat in the car, heard the shots.

You had the fringe, the beard and the chain – you could have been an extra in Dogs of Berlin. But at school you were ‘safe hands’ – the rock who played in goal.

By late summer were you all set for the cemetery or similar?

Or come winter could you have become something else?

Ali

On 18 September in Corinne Road, Tufnell Park, North London, Ali Al Har (25) was stabbed in the leg. The blade pierced the femoral artery and blood loss proved fatal.

Neatly bearded with glasses – geeky but fashionable, you look like a newly qualified teacher.

An old soldier tried to save you, says you’d lost about four pints.

Tried to stem the flow but it was ‘everywhere’. Whatever he did, was no use.

Meriones grabbed him fast, tackling him hard and spearing him low down in the right buttock. The point rammed in under the pelvis, jabbing, puncturing the bladder – he fell to his knees, screeching, while death twirled around him.

Meriones kills Phereclus, Homer’s Iliad Book 5, 72-5

Elyon

Elyon Poku (20) was dj-ing at a friend’s eighteenth birthday party when he got into a fight and was stabbed. At 00.45 the music stopped. Neighbours were relieved the party had ended. But there was shouting and screaming and people running away along Wilderton Street, Stamford Hill. Elyon was taken to hospital along with two other partygoers, both of whom recovered from their injuries. Whereas he died of shock and haemorrhage at 4.30 on 22 September.

When Saturday comes you’re already gone.

The marquee still standing in the back garden,

Inside – flotsam and jetsam from any teenage gathering.

Is that how it felt as you lay there – messy, incomplete?

Or was it more intense than anything you ever lived through?

They waved you off in a white coffin drawn by white horses.

Now your father sleeps in your room, he says, so your mother doesn’t get scared of the place.

Guled

Sitting in a car on a Saturday night, Guled Farah (19) was fatally wounded in a drive-by shooting. Friends drove him from the crime scene in Vallentin Road, Walthamstow, to nearby Whipps Cross Hospital, where at 23.38 on 22 September Guled was pronounced dead from a gunshot wound to the chest.

Just got a job in a Green Park restaurant. Up West each day, you’d take the District Line from your East Ham home, crossing over to the Jubilee Line at West Ham.

There the journey begins anew: changing faces, might have changed you. Through Canary Wharf where the money’s made, on to the station nearest the Ritz, where they come to spend it.

Would it have embittered you, working there in a menial role?

Or might it have melded you into the metropolis, this journey that never was?

Hashim

Hashim Abdalla Ali (22) was the passenger in a car which crashed into vehicles parked on Drayton Road, Hayes, West London. He’d been shot a few minutes before in nearby Central Avenue, and the driver was rushing him to hospital. But Hashim was pronounced dead at the scene of the crash at 12.43 on 11 October.

There’s you leaning back next to your bro’, with matching hats and suitably elegant hardface.

Then there’s you with beard – a pious-looking young man, smiling and showing your wonky tooth on a visit, possibly to the family homeland.

You were both of these.

And you were the ex-council estate where you were shot and killed, built 80 years ago when West London was Britain’s dynamic manufacturing region, which you likely knew nothing about.

Moses

Trainee football coach Moses Mayele was stabbed to death on his twenty-third birthday – 12 October. Moses was walking along Manford Way, Hainault, heading home having picked up a takeaway, when he and his companion were set upon by two men wearing balaclavas. His mate survived the attack. But Moses was pronounced dead at 22.20.

What might not have been, if only you’d chosen home delivery? Home where your family was expecting you. Home where your girlfriend is expecting.

How many hours at the gym, building those powerful shoulders? Fit to take on the weight of the world.

Now your fatherhood role is unrequited as your birthday dinner.

Ethan

Ethan Nedd-Bruce (18) was thought to have been stabbed to death but the post-mortem revealed he had been shot. He got into an argument with men on mopeds outside Collins House on the Flamsteed Estate, Greenwich. They rode off while he collapsed and subsequently died, shortly before 21.30 on 22 October.

Your white teeth look even brighter above the grey Nike hoodie. The North Face baseball cap’s better than the bunches you braved some time back!

Just a few days ago you were sitting down with your dad, sorting out what to do with your life.

Jay

Jay Hughes (15) was a schoolboy who fancied fried chicken for his tea. At 17.20 on 1 November he was standing outside Morley’s chicken shop in Randlesdown Road, Bellingham, South London, when someone approached then lunged at him, stabbing him in the chest with a 25cm knife. A customer coming out of the shop saw a slit in Jay’s jacket with blood pouring out of it. He took off his shirt to fill the hole but Jay was bleeding profusely. He died in hospital three hours later.

Far from a grown man; barely a youth, even. From the police-issued pic, you already had the haircut but hadn’t yet learned to keep the innocence out of your face.

He shall not grow bitter and cynical, this forever 15-year-old.

Wanted to be a cartoonist, his aunt observes. Instead the manner of his death cartoons the loss of London’s youth, for all of us to see.

Malcolm

When police were called at 16.35 on 2 November, Malcolm Mide-Mariola (17) was lying in the street outside Clapham South tube station, his grey tracksuit bottoms covered in his own blood. There had been an altercation between two groups of youths, some of them from nearby St Xavier College. The commotion came to a sudden stop when Malcolm was stabbed in the stomach. He died in hospital less than an hour later.

“To the family of the young man so tragically taken away on Friday night: we are so sorry for your loss. Please know that you are in our thoughts and prayers, as is your son/brother/cousin. Sending you love and strength, from a family that lives in Clapham South.”

He threw the spear and it split the archer’s nose in between his eyes. Damaging his glistening teeth, the hard metal sliced off his tongue at the roots, crashed his jaw and the point came tearing out under his chin.

Diomedes kills Tydides, Homer’s Iliad Book 5, 321-5

Ayodeji

In the quiet, residential district of Anerley, South-East London, Ayodeji Habeeb Azeez (22) was pursued by four or five assailants who chased him out of Grace Mews and into Samos Road where he collapsed and subsequently died of multiple stab wounds. This was lunchtime – Sunday lunchtime – on 4 November.

Dagenham boy, once you would have been fodder for the Ford’s factory there. Now there are daggers drawn and pushed in to the hilt.

Reaching the main road they must have seen you staggering, because you went one way and they went the other.

Like a scene from the Keystone Cops. But the punchline is:

he dies.

John

After Nando’s at a neighbour’s, John Ogunjobi (16) was walking home alone along Greenleaf Close, Tulse Hill, when he was attacked and stabbed. He died there at 23.41 on 5 November.

‘God save my boy,’ your Mum was heard to cry. But which son was it that needed Our Father’s protection?

There’s blue-suited John, having to re-take his GCSEs but he’ll be an engineer someday.

And there’s AKA JaySav, reportedly drilling with Tulse Hill versus Kennington’s Spartans.

Every night’s fright night in this performance art. Masks and poses sufficient to scare the public. Meanwhile for friends and enemies alike, the artists enact their own indifference.

Aron

During the evening of 8 December Aron Warren died in his flat in Topham House, Prior Street, Greenwich. He had been stabbed in the chest. Paramedics attended but Aron was pronounced dead at the scene.

Four syllables to his name and only one report of his death, apparently. Seven lines on the BBC website beneath a red-eye photo with sticky-out ears and a prominent Adam’s apple.

Thankfully the Beeb got his name wrong (gave it as Walker instead of Warren), and there’s plenty of correctly titled coverage elsewhere.

If you think that’s something to be thankful for.

Jay

After 21.00 on 11 December there was an altercation in Alwold Crescent, Eltham, involving a large group of people. Two youths were hospitalised as a result of stab wounds. One of them recovered, the other was Jay Sewell (18), who was pronounced dead at 22.40.

Family films posted on YouTube suggest puppy fat prior to puberty – always a winning smile, though.

Sharpened up at 14, putting your parents through the ice bucket challenge – yikes!

At 18 or shortly before, you’re a ringer for David Bowie, Young Americans era.

Too sad the word that goes so readily with ‘ringer’. So let us say you’re Blankety-Blank.

Richard

Richard Odunze-Dim (20) was inside a property in St Joseph’s Road, Edmonton, when he was shot. Richard was found in the street outside at 21.15, and pronounced dead at 22.10 on 18 December. The post-mortem confirmed that death was caused by a gunshot wound.

Class clown and a bright spark: aged 20 he’d already finished his degree.

Looked forward to Christmas more than his birthday – family, the tree and all that.

Now his lights have been switched off early.

Holed by my spear you’ll add to my glory, Now your life belongs to the Horseman of Apocalypse!

Sarpedon calls out Tlepolemus, Homer’s Iliad, Book 5, 751-2

Wilhem

In Albert Way, Tottenham, shortly before 1.20 on 22 December, Wilhem Mendes (25) was robbed and stabbed. He was taken to hospital in East London but pronounced dead from knife wounds at 2.10.

Amateur boxer, but that wasn’t enough to stave off youths with knives.

Came to Britain from Portugal in 2015, but police had to issue an appeal before you could be identified.

Three years here and no one missed you enough to raise the alarm.

The final fatality before the Xmas break, tragic and tawdry at the same time.

With another New Year pending, they’re still carrying knives. Is it to save their lives from pointlessness?

BluesoftheWorld

Journalism+Lyricism

Creating the Griersonian Character and Breaking the ‘Yahoo’ Tradition

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2020.02 | Issue 3 | April 2020

Catherine Gough-Brady

RMIT University, Melbourne

Abstract

In the 1920s and 1930s, John Grierson railed against the use of the individual heroic character in documentaries. He felt that the individual character was an outmoded ‘yahoo’ idea that promoted anarchy. He was interested in revealing the mass nature of society, and suggested using a ‘co-operative’ character. I argue that a co-operative character is one that shares a common goal with other characters in the film and where they work together towards that goal. I examine the co-operative characters found in Grierson’s Drifters (1929) and uncover archival material in which he discusses his creative process. Through this, and the creation of my own co-operative character film, Expect Delays (2018), I find that the co-operative character often lacks an expression of inner-self and therefore no guide for how to view the world contained in the narrative. Just as characters provide a guide for how the audience should interpret the world of the narrative, I found that they also provide a guide for the documentarian’s choices in the edit. Finally, I explore whether we still make documentaries with co-operative characters, or if the co-operative character is a solution to the story-driven documentary that is no longer used.

Introduction

As you read this article, imagine that the ‘characters’ of John Grierson (who created the word ‘documentary’ and to some extent the form itself) and Murray Smith (a scriptwriting academic known for his work on character) are in the same room arguing with each other. This creative method is used to contextualise debates about the use of character. I am interested in exploring forms of academic discourse that can be used to both argue and embody the subject matter of the documentary character. I debate this central theme through reference to the process of creating my own film, Expect Delays (2018) [1].

Expect Delays (2018) is a film that experiments with John Grierson’s idea of ‘co-operative characters’: the idea that no one character is central to the story. In the film, humans and machines work together to destroy, rest, and then create our world. Expect Delays, available to watch in full here, is directed by Catherine Gough-Brady, with sound design by Mitchell Waters and Kyle Barbour-Hoffman.

The Opening

I was at the after party for a documentary film festival. In the corner I noticed John Grierson and Murray Smith. They were arguing about the role of character in documentaries. I grabbed a glass of the passible red and made a beeline for them. After all, they are both larger than life characters in the film world, and to have them in the same room arguing together was not an experience to be missed.

Murray Smith looked exactly as you imagine a British academic should look: lean and tall, with short greying hair, a grey jacket, and no tie. He was mid-flight, ‘Our propensity to respond emotionally to fictional characters is a key aspect of our experience and enjoyment of narrative films’ (2004: 1).

John Grierson responded, ‘individualism is a yahoo tradition largely responsible for our present anarchy, deny at once both the hero of decent heroics (Flaherty) and the hero of indecent ones (studio). In this case, you will feel that you want your drama in terms of some cross-section of reality which will reveal…’. He paused, and took a sip of his drink, ‘… which will reveal the essential co-operative or mass nature of society: leaving the individual to find his honours in the swoop of creative social forces’ (1946: 82).

Unimpressed by Grierson’s dismissal of the central character, Murray was quick to reply, ‘Geertz's study of Balinese notions of personhood suggests that even within a culture…’.

Grierson interrupted, ‘Joris told me…’, but Murray continued, ‘… which, unlike ours, emphasizes the shared traits and responsibilities of members of various kinship structures a basic notion of individual, personal agency persists and finds some cultural expression’ (2004: 23).

As I listened to them arguing about the value of a central character, my mind drifted away and began to think, what would a contemporary film with Grierson’s co-operative characters look like? As a practitioner who has created documentaries for television and radio, I see documentaries as the artefact that results from a series of relationships, including between the documentarian, the recorded person, the theme and the audience [2]. I had not previously focused exclusively on the relationship between the characters, except to use it to reveal aspects of the main character. Grierson was proposing that characters within the film become a part of a ‘swoop of creative social forces’ and he was highlighting the importance of a sympathetic social relationship between multiple characters. I was interested in what effect this would have on the type of character, or narrative, I could create.

Murray Smith’s energy drew my attention back to the discussion, ‘I do not wish to dispute that the cinema, as a technology, emerged from a bourgeois and patriarchal society – but I do argue that the potential uses and effects of a technology may outstrip its origins, and that this is certainly the case with the ideological effects of cinema’ (2004: 9). I agreed with Murray Smith that cinema contains ideology: from the methods of production through to the message of the film. But I was unconvinced cinema could ‘outstrip’ ideology; instead I feel it reflects current ideologies, shifting as they shift.

So, I joined the conversation with a provocation, ‘I think the films we make reflect our current attitudes. Current successful documentaries have complex central characters that, in many ways, act as avatars for our growing interest (and dismay) in individuality over social cohesion. Think of the con artist Frederic Bourdin in The Imposter (2012): a central character whose identity is fluid, changing to increase his personal gain. Or the films in which the individual is in opposition to social cohesion, like Steven Avery in Making a Murderer (2015). We don’t make Griersonian films anymore, where multiple characters get along and work together.’

At that point Grierson challenged me to create a contemporary film containing co-operative characters. ‘You photograph the natural life, but you also, by your juxtaposition of detail, create an interpretation of it’ (1946: 81-2). He thought it was possible to work against the current trends and that my creative treatment of actuality could embrace the co-operative character [3]. Murray Smith smiled at the idea of it.

On the drive home that night I was slowed down by some roadworks. As I crawled along, I saw mostly male workers and machines at work under volumetric (and flashing) lights. I realised that this world is visually fascinating and I could use night roadworks to explore the co-operative characters found in Drifters (1929) and Night Mail (1936). As Michael Renov wrote, documentary had ‘from its inception, been tied up with modernism’ (2004: 131). And, here was a modernist setting: the combination of workers, machinery, dust, and lights in the destruction and re-surfacing of a straight flat road.

Attempting to create a contemporary example of the co-operative character also interested me because it would force me to avoid being a ‘yahoo’ who uses a central character as a key narrative device. I had a feeling that filming the roadworks would reveal as much to me about the function of a central character as it would about Grierson’s co-operative character. Sometimes the best way to understand a thing, like a central character, is to see what happens when it is removed from the equation.

Drifters

Grierson directed and edited Drifters (1929), using Basil Emmott as the cinematographer. A reviewer at the time wrote, ‘this subject might, in the wrong hands, easily have proved a disastrous one, but Mr Grierson … has tackled it in such a way as to give it tremendous dramatic power’ (‘The John Grierson Archive G2-24-7’).

The narrative structure of Drifters contains the cycle of one fishing trip. The men walk over hill and dale to the port and to the ship. The ship is hybrid machine-human powered; we see the machines at work alongside the men. We also see the fish swimming free, and then captured. The fishermen’s work is not completely safe, the sea battles against the ship, but they return intact to port with their catch, which is then sold to wholesalers, and in turn to retailers. As Jamie Sexton wrote about the fishermen, ‘they are posited as protagonists in a drama between nature, man and machine’ (2002: 46).

The underlying filming premise of Drifters, though not the editing style, is remarkably similar to mid 20th century observational documentaries. Grierson called it ‘Natural Cinema’: ‘The life of Natural cinema is in this massing of detail, in this massing of all the rhythmic energies that contribute to the blazing fact of the matter’ (‘The John Grierson Archive G7A5-04’). ‘Kinoman’, a reviewer at the time, commented, ‘We are taken down to the sea to the herring shoals. The salt spray bites into our cheeks, and the waves toss our vessel about like a cork. We strain at the nets’ (‘The John Grierson Archive G2-24-18’). The reviewer writes about the experience of watching the film as if he was there, as if he was one of the fishermen. The characters are observed as they complete their daily tasks on the fishing trip and these fishermen exist in the present, they do not reflect on past events. The fishermen are not telling the story, they are living it. The camera is not a stranger, it is one of them. Compare this with the way observational filmmaker DA Pennebaker talks about his process:

I could put [the camera] on my shoulder and have eye contact with people. I could join groups and hear what they were saying, and know that I was getting it. The wide-angle lens became the finishing lens for a film. It’s where the filmmaker joins all the people he's filming, and becomes one of them (Cunningham, 2014: 95).

The present tense of Grierson’s co-operative characters corresponds to the methods used by observational filmmakers like Pennebaker.

Grierson edited Drifters using Russian ideas of montage, and he was proud of what he achieved with his use of rhythm and tempo: ‘I believe they outdid the technical example of [Battleship] Potemkin’ (1946: 86). Grierson modified Russian montage ideas to suit his own needs and cultural context: ‘English production might easily add to the Russian intensity something of the English sense of moderation’ (Sexton, 2002: 46). Jamie Sexton noted this ‘moderation’ resulted in ‘the absence of a sense of the working classes as a force for revolutionary action’ (49). For Grierson, the difference between his and ‘Sergei’s montage’ was that ‘I was not concerned with the ideological situation’ (‘The John Grierson Archive G7a-5-4’ 13). Clearly Grierson had an ideological position, but it differed from Eisenstein’s: the characters Grierson created from the fishermen do not bring about radical change, they are living a life that is moderately moving towards modernity without losing a sense of tradition or nature. Grierson wrote that the characters ‘had something of the noble savage’ surrounded by ‘steam and smoke’ (85). The characters reflect his admiration of co-operation and his slightly patronising belief in the nobility of labour. The characters in Drifters co-operate and all work together towards a goal, whereas the same could not be said of Eisenstein’s characters. The ‘collision of independent shots’ (Eisenstein, 1949: 49) binds rather than separates the human, animal and machine characters in Drifters. Grierson’s modification of Russian montage can be seen as aligning with his ideal of co-operative characters.

Grierson was also keenly aware of the need for dramatic tension: ‘The westerns give you some notion of the energies. The Russians give you the energies and the intimacies both. And Flaherty is a poet.’ He went on, ‘The net effect of this cinematic upbringing was to make me want a storm: a real storm, an intimate storm, and if possible a rather noble storm’ (‘The John Grierson Archive G2-9-4’ 11). Co-operation between characters somewhat excludes drama being created by conflict between them. Grierson found his dramatic tension elsewhere, he waited at the port for a storm to brew and used the weather as an antagonist. Having said this, it is important to note that the film is not a ‘man against nature’ narrative, because while the fishermen have to contend with the sea, there is also a sense that they are used to working with it. As one reviewer at the time wrote, implying the relationship was a tempestuous romance, ‘The sea reluctantly gives way, and the nets appear laden with shining fish’ (‘The John Grierson Archive G2-24-18’). The result is that dramatic tension in Drifters is mostly found in the doing of the work in the environment, not in the relationship between the characters.

Co-operative characters as a narrative device

Grierson’s co-operative characters correspond to Murray Smith’s claim that ‘imaginative engagement with fictional narratives’ requires ‘a basic notion or human agency or ‘personhood’, which is a fundamental element of both our ordinary social interactions and of our imaginative activities’ (2004: 17). As a viewer, I may not ‘know’ these fishermen, but I can recognise them as fellow humans, who have varying degrees of agency. Essentially, I can recognise the broad notions of the social structures they work within. As Murray Smith wrote: ‘characters depend not only on a general conception of human agency but also on conceptions of social roles specific to cultures’ (2004: 21) [4]. Grierson’s co-operative characters emphasise the shared links between the characters. I have a sense of the relationships between the fishermen, an inkling of different work/social roles: from the sleepy teenager to the man at the helm overseeing the action. But the fishermen fall short of claiming full character status: I do not know their names, I do not know what they think about being a fisherman, I am not sure if I would like any of them, or if they like each other. I am not aware of what Craig Batty calls their ‘inner character’ (2012: 62).

Drifters has no sync sound for the fishermen to speak their minds, but in the silent film era inner character could be revealed by interstitials. In Nanook of the North (1922), for example, Flaherty created an interstitial that reads ‘Nanook proudly displays his young ‘huskies,’ the finest dog flesh in all the country round’ (11: 31). This interstitial is designed to indicate Nanook’s feelings (pride) and that huskies are valuable within the social group. It gives us an understanding of Nanook’s inner character, and how we should look at what we see [5]. Interstitials are not used in Drifters in this way, and that means we do not have insight into the fishermen’s inner character. The interstitial that introduces the storm in Drifters is ‘Dawn breaks with heavy swell over land and sea.’ This gives the viewer little indication of how the fisherman perceive the storm: is this a worrisome storm, or just a bit of an annoying squall? The inner character does not just tell us about the person, it tells us about their world.

Murray Smith argued ‘that our entry into narrative structures is mediated by character. … Characters form salient nodes of narrative structures, but they do not stand outside them’ (2004: 18). It is hard to claim that the fishermen in Drifters are ‘nodes’ in the narrative structure, or even expressions of the various Jungian archetypes popularised by Christopher Vogler in The Writer’s Journey (2007). For the fishermen to move beyond recognised ‘personhood’ into nodal importance, we would need to be able to explore their individual selves within the social context. By exploring the individuals, the consequences of their actions would become clearer, and they would become protagonists whose actions are central to the narrative. In Drifters we are unable to see nodal points because we do not understand enough about the individual fishermen within their social context to understand which actions and interactions form nodes. For instance, what were the consequences of the sleepy teenager being late to his post? If he were a central character, this moment would have formed a nodal point in the narrative, and the consequences of his actions would have driven the story in a certain direction. This was not the case in Drifters, a co-operative character film is one in which an individual character does not determine the narrative arc and, in the case of Drifters, does not tell the viewer how to understand the world in the narrative.

Contemporary co-operative characters

In my search to understand more about how Grierson’s co-operative characters might exist in contemporary times, I viewed the work of Heddy Honigmann. She creates documentary works in which there is no central character. Honigmann’s films contain what can be seen at a basic level as vox pops encounters with strangers, a type of documentary equivalent to street photography. The characters are nearly all strangers that reveal some part of themselves to Honigmann. Once a character has had their say, we might never encounter them again. Just as Grierson’s co-operative characters are bound together by a boat or a train, her characters are bound together by a location (Forever (2006b)) or a book of poetry (O Amor Natural (1996)). While Honigmann is an off-screen presence throughout her films, she never fulfils character status: we do not see her, we do not know her.

There are significant differences between Grierson’s and Honigmann’s characters. Honigmann’s sit down and chat, they do not know each other or work together towards progress, they are not often ‘observed’, more often they are interviewed, or as Honigmann calls it ‘interrupted’ (2006a, 8: 30). While the method of filming and editing the characters is quite different the outcome of a feeling of the ‘mass nature of society’ (1946: 82) is remarkably similar. Honigmann has, as Grierson requested of those rejecting individual heroes, abandoned ‘the story form, and seek like the modern exponent of poetry and painting and prose, a matter and method more satisfactory’ (1946: 82). The massing together of Honigmann’s interactions with various characters who reflect on the key theme of the film gives the sense that we are all wonderfully unique and important, but at the same time insignificant as individuals. There is more intimacy in Honigmann’s characters than Grierson’s, despite the fact she has spent much less time with each of them than Grierson did with the fishermen. This comes from the characters reflecting on their own lives and experiences, from which their inner characters are revealed. Honigmann’s characters are not strictly speaking co-operative characters, but they are characters that work against the idea of the heroic central character. Her means of arriving at Grierson’s outcome is different, but her characters accomplish what Grierson sought.

Once I realised that Honigmann’s work could be seen as a modern exponent of what Grierson was proposing, it occurred to me that characters do not need to be in the same scene, or even know each other, or be observed, that they do not need to be a Griersonian co-operative character to avoid the ‘yahoo tradition’. Many contemporary documentaries, known in the industry as ‘talking head documentaries’, tell the story via a number of different characters, and sometimes none of them are central characters. Possibly Grierson had not lost the argument with Murray Smith after all, because the documentary form, while it has a lot in common with the feature film, also has its own set of rules about characters. Expression of character that would be seen as experimental in fiction, such as a group of characters who never meet each other, who never even stand up and move about, are seen as normal in documentary. If the co-operative character was separated from the observational form, and allowed to exist in the talking head form, then it was very possibly alive and well. Think of Morgan Neville’s 20 Feet from Stardom (2013) and Ava DuVernay’s 13th DuVernay (2016), or Daryl Dellora’s Conspiracy (1994).

Daryl Dellora says about his documentary work, ‘Characters are incredibly important as they are in any kind of filmmaking’; he went on to qualify this by saying, ‘but the way those characters are placed within the context of the story, particular story that you are telling, might be more important in some films than others’ (Gough-Brady, 2019: 6:24). As with the co-operative characters, Dellora’s characters rarely determine the story arc or form Murray’s ‘nodes’.

Conspiracy examines the Hilton bombing in Australia in 1978 and explores various theories about who placed the bomb and why. For Dellora, a policeman injured by the bomb forms a central character in the film, but the policeman’s personal story does not drive the narrative of the film, instead it becomes a part of a wider narrative. Dellora says about the injured policeman, Terry Griffiths:

His sequences in the film are actually very moving character moments where you get to understand the damage that’s been done to an individual person on a very intimate sort of level. However, I wouldn’t say that was the most important thing about that film at all. I’d say that was a secondary thing in the film because the film raises so many very important issues about Australia at that time, which are far more important, and in many respects more engaging, than Terry’s personal story (Gough-Brady, 2019: 6:46)

A character such as Terry Griffiths moves beyond ‘personhood’ and reveals an inner self. As a viewer, I know what I think about him, and what he thinks about the world. In fact, I would go as far as to say Terry Griffiths‘s raw inner self makes him one of the most interesting talking head characters ever to be filmed. But his character does not form a node in the documentary, his actions only occasionally drive the story forward. As Producer Sue Maslin said about Terry’s role in Conspiracy, ‘His story is a through line in a sense, but it’s not a character documentary’ (Gough-Brady, 2019: 8:49). Maslin recognises that each character has a storyline that is woven together, with other characters, to form the fabric of the film. The narrative formed from this weave can become more important than individual elements. The ‘issue’ raised by the film, in this case the Hilton bombing, is like Grierson’s fishing trawler, or Honigmann’s book of poetry. It becomes the common goal binding the characters. It could be said that in story terms this is similar to Grierson’s ‘leaving the individual to find his honours in the swoop of creative social forces’ (1946" 82). As with Honigmann’s films, Dellora’s characters are not ‘authentic’ co-operative characters, but the resulting film, with no central heroic character driving the action, achieves what Grierson was after.

Expect Delays

When I filmed the roadworks for my co-operative character challenge, I did not pack my radio lapel mics that help me to home in on the individual; in fact, I packed no mics at all. Without a microphone, I was not going to encourage the conversation that would inevitably begin, and fall into the trap of turning that person into a central character. Implied in this choice is the assumption that a central character in a documentary requires dialogue. It had not occurred to me at the time this could be achieved via interstitials.

Once I edited the footage down to nine minutes, what I noticed is that without the audio, without a central character, there were no pair of eyes, no person, no voice, to provide the interpretation. Not only did the viewer have no guide about how to interpret the scenes, as the filmmaker I also had no guide for editing them. Craig Batty suggested about drama scriptwriting that ‘It’s through character that we see everything else – the world, action, dialogue, theme’ (2012: 59). Without the character sharing their point of view, the viewer falls back on stereotypes or fantasy to understand who that character is and what they are doing. Without a person revealing inner character, I fell back on chronology and diurnal structure when I was editing. In my attempt to eradicate the central character I had essentially eradicated all character and ended up with a symphonic film.

By focusing on the co-operation between the characters, I had not developed an understanding of any of them as individuals. Honigmann’s characters reveal inner self, and while they are not in control of the narrative of the film, they inform the scene in which they exist. Some of Dellora’s characters reveal inner self and he uses this to lead the viewer into a story where other characters will take over. None of the people I filmed were ‘talking’ to me in my edit, telling me what is important, and what does not matter. As much as the documentarian shapes the filmed person into the documentary character, that character in turn shapes the narrative around them. Grierson wrote about his experience editing that ‘the shots were massed together, not for description and tempo, but for commentary on it’ (1946: 86). I was not used to having that much control over what happened in my timeline and my narrative structure.

In an earlier experimental work I created, funded by the Australia Council, Suleiman’s Journey (2012), I realised that in a narrative, characters claim time, and make it their own. Their emotional experience distorts time so that some events are given more screen time, and others passed over quickly, or even hit the cutting room floor. Narrative time is linked to the character. It was not until the last couple of days in post-production that I was forced to revert to ‘yahoo traditions’ and create a main character in Expect Delays (2018). There was a section of the audio design which never worked. The problem was solved when I sat down with the sound designers and we realised that the big machine ripping up the road, had to become the main character for the first act of the film. Even if it was in the background of the shot, it needed to be in the foreground of the sound design. Choosing a main character shaped the choices in the sound design. Because the humans in the film revealed so little inner character, the main character could easily become a machine. Without realising it, I had created an example of non-representational methodology: machines and humans had equal status in the relationships, the everyday interaction was being foregrounded as human voices were silenced. As Vannini wrote, ‘non-representational work puts a premium on the corporeal rituals and entanglements embedded in embodied action rather than talk or cognitive attitudes’ (2015: 13).

Awards Night Party

Around a year later, I was in the line for a documentary awards ceremony and I ran into the writer and television presenter Tess Brady and we began chatting about the modernist underpinnings of Expect Delays. The film had been nominated as a finalist in the experimental films category. She said about the film, ‘It made me think that this is how it is, humans and machines do co-exist and that co-existence forms a synergy’ (personal communication).

I said, ‘This is the thing, isn’t it? The Greirsonian co-operative characters in Expect Delays lead us into focusing on a harmonious relationship between the characters, rather than the inner self of a particular character. This means the machines are as much characters as the people.’

Liz Burke and Liz Baulch had moved forward in the queue to be with us. Liz Burke suggested, ‘Because of the use of wide shots, and the lack of close-ups, there was no-one I really identified with. I also think this is because they're all wearing hi-vis jackets. They all look the same to me’ (personal communication).

I responded, ‘It’s true, I didn’t film close ups of the people. Grierson filmed close ups in Drifters, and yet I found that the close up was not enough to reveal inner self.’

Tess nodded, and said about Expect Delays, ‘Was there character? Not for me’ (personal communication).

Liz Baulch didn’t entirely agree, ‘I wondered what the guy’s story was who was in white sitting down with his head in his hands’ (personal communication).

Filmmaker Christine Rogers added, ‘When the guy with the weird hair chucks stuff on the ground. He’s one character I potentially identify with – the stoner hairdo and the oh so tight pants!’ (personal communication).

I thought about this as we entered the awards venue. Character identification was not easy in a co-operative character film where inner character is not revealed, but it was not entirely impossible. It was more likely when a person looked different, wore a different colour, sported a different hairstyle, possibly because this became an expression of inner self. The rest the viewer had to fill in for themselves. And people will do that. In Expect Delays I had created a work without central characters, and as much as I love creating documentaries that include clearly defined characters that express their inner self, I realised that by not doing that I was leaving much more up to the viewer, and their interpretation. I had, at least, fulfilled Grierson’s desire that I move into a different way of creating the narrative.

Strictly speaking, Grierson’s co-operative character is an observed character living in the present. The dramatic tension is mostly found in the doing of the work in the environment, not in the relationship between the characters. Introducing a common goal for co-operative characters means they become defined by that goal and we do not learn about their thoughts and feelings outside of that common goal. When I created a modern version, the co-operation between the machines and the humans was brought to fore, as both had equal levels of inner self revealed.

There are contemporary documentaries that do not use a central character, and while they do not necessarily use a Griersonian ‘co-operative character’ they do fulfil Grierson desire for ‘the individual to find … honours in the swoop of creative social forces’ (1946: 82). So while his character type may not be in use, the underlying aim of telling the story via multiple characters still has currency.

As a result of this analysis I realised that the inner character does not just tell us about the person, it also tells both the spectator and the documentarian about the world of the narrative. Key characters help the documentarian to edit the documentary because characters claim narrative time and influence how the narrative is shaped. Without them, the audience resorts to speculation, and documentarian resorts to linear and diurnal structures.

Trouble is, the film won the prize [6], and I was left wondering, how could a film with no central (or really any) characters win a prize? Are characters less valuable than I thought? Have the non-representational theorists got it right and a human-centric narrative is not necessary? It seemed so unlikely that I decided to press on with my examination of character, rather than drop the idea.

Acknowledgement

This article was first presented at the 2018 Australian Screen Production, Education & Research Association (ASPERA) conference, Melbourne, 27-29 June.

References

• Batty, Craig. 2012. Screenplays: How to write & sell them. Harpenden: Kamera Books.

• Batty, Craig, and Susan Kerrigan. 2018. Screen Production Research: Creative Practice as a Mode of Enquiry. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Cunningham, Megan. 2014. The Art of Documentary. 2nd ed. USA: New Riders.

• Dellora, Daryl. 1994. Conspiracy.

• DuVernay, Ava. 2016. 13th.

• Eisenstein, Sergei. 1949. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory New York: Harcourt.

• FitzSimons, Trish, Pat Laughren, and Dugald Williamson. 2011. Australian Documentary: History, Practices and Genres Melbourne: Cambridge University Press

• Flaherty, Robert J. 1922. Nanook of the North.

• Gough-Brady, Catherine. 2012. Suleiman’s Journey.

• Gough-Brady, Catherine. 2018. Expect Delays.

• Gough-Brady, Catherine. 2019. Empathy with the Masses.

• Grierson, John. 1929. Drifters.

• Grierson, John. 1946. "First Principles of Documentary." In Grierson on Documentary, edited by Forsyth Hardy, 78-89. London: Collins.

• Honigmann, Heddy. 1996. O Amor Natural

• Honigmann, Heddy. 2006a. A Conversation with John Anderson.

• Honigmann, Heddy. 2006b. Forever.

• Kerrigan, Susan, and Phillip McIntyre. 2010. "The ‘creative treatment of actuality’: Rationalizing and reconceptualizing the notion of creativity for documentary practice." Journal of Media Practice 11 (2):111-130. doi: 10.1386/jmpr.11.2.111_1.

• Layton, Bart. 2012. The Imposter.

• Neville, Morgan. 2013. 20 Feet from Stardom

• Renov, Michael. 2004. The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

• Ricciardi, Laura, and Moira Demos. 2015. Making a Murderer.

• Sexton, Jamie. 2002. "GRIERSON'S MACHINES: Drifters, the Documentary Film Movement and the Negotiation of Modernity." Canadian Journal of Film Studies Spring 2002; 11 (1):40-59.

• Smith, Murray. 2004. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: OUP.

• Vannini, Phillip. 2015. Non-Representational Methodologies : Re-Envisioning Research, Routledge Advances in Research Methods. New York: Routledge. Book.

• Vogler, Christopher. 2007. The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. 3rd ed. Studio City: Michael Wiese.

• Watt, Harry, and Basil Wright. 1936. Night Mail.

Notes

[1] The combination of fiction and non-fiction is inspired by Leo Berkley’s chapter in Screen Production Research (Batty and Kerrigan 2018, 29-46).

[2] It is interesting to note that a similar view of documentary is found in the introduction to Australian Documentary: History, Practices and Genres (FitzSimons, Laughren, and Williamson 2011) where they explore ‘how representational modes and conventions are used in historical relationships of practice, through which documentaries find their purpose and form’ (8).

[3] For further discussion on the ‘creative treatment of actuality’ see Kerrigan and McIntyre’s article “‘Creative Treatment of Actuality”: Rationalizing and reconceptualizing the notion of creativity for documentary practice’ (2010).

[4] To be clear, ‘agency’ in this context is not the ability of the filmed person to control the filming or editing of the film, as it is sometimes used in discussions on documentary ethics. This idea of ‘agency’ is one bound by culture and is akin to the way in that cultural theorists like Chris Barker use the term (237).

[5] Obviously Nanook’s inner character is strongly mediated by Flaherty’s point of view, but nevertheless there is an inner character to guide us. The argument about how much it is Nanook, and how much it is Flaherty, is for another article.

[6] SAE ATOM award for Best Tertiary Experimental Film.