Protesters converged on the City of London today as the G20 met.
What is the dress code for a demonstration?
First of all, don’t look like the sort of people the demonstrators are protesting against. Police have been advising city workers who usually wear suits to dress down for the day.
But what many bankers think is casual dress is very different from the younger, more counter-cultural crowd filling up the streets today. It’s pretty easy to guess who’s management and who’s not. (Different degrees of blending in illustrated above).
This is a classic example of how a generally understood term (casual dress) is interpreted in very culturally specific ways. Obvious? But how often are other, extremely wide terms such as ‘aspirational’, ‘cool’ or ‘desireable’ get used as a matter of course in briefs without properly clarifying what that actually means for the intended audience? Understanding the aesthetics and cultural reference points of your audience is key and getting orientated takes a rich, visual medium like film as well as culturally sensitive interpretation and recording. Missing this information means you strike the wrong note with your audience, like wearing a rugby shirt with clean shoes amongst trainers and hoodies.
Full disclosure here: we may be called Honest Films but that doesn’t mean we don’t understand how images can be seen as being ‘real’ when they, and the meaning imposed on them, can actually be very much constructed and misconstrued.
As the video illustrates, meaning is not intrinsic to an image but rather constructed through the production and interpretation of an image. The basic material (kittens) remains intact but the meaning “We’re wine bottles!” is clearly one the reader’s unique perspective has constructed - the kittens are not wine bottles nor are they trying to be wine bottles. The idiosyncratic interpretation here provides entertainment but becomes problematic when a film is meant to be representing a culture, a ritual, a person’s life.
This means labelling, context and production are crucial in creating visual documents that not only represent the subject accurately and without prejudice as is possible but also is supported and presented in a way that guides the appropriate interpretation. For us that means that we present the films we make as part of a wider debrief and discussion of our fieldwork, all done by the researchers themselves. We also involve participants in the production of the films and will always take into account, what is happening off camera, on camera and behind the camera in our process.
Yes, the contrast between the homes and the fans’ costumes is comedy gold but it’s the stories implied, the personalities that come through because and in spite of the costumes, the familiar situation simultaneously celebrated and subverted that makes this series so good for me. This is just the sort of thing we look for in our films too, to visit the familiar and average with a fresh perspective that renews the topic.
Do please have a look at the full series, it’s genius.
Parents of freshmen sleep on mats on the floor of a gymnasium, inside a university campus in Wuhan, China, from Our World Now.
Our World Now, a collection of photographs from Reuters (Thames and Hudson) is out now and it’s a good resource for planners interested in global markets - a gallery of issues, lifestyles and the human condition to draw inspiration from.
Manufactured Landscapes is a fascinating film, following Edward Burtynsky as he photographs the industrial landscapes of China and Bangladesh. His monumental photographs of open cast mines, slag heaps, wrecking yards and factories are deliberately free of judgement, leaving us to decide if we are seeing a new form of beauty or the devastation of nature. As a planner or researcher interested in China his pictures also challenge us to think about the personal behind the industrial. In both the pictures and the documentary the workers look back at us, making the audience complicit in the scene - what does that make us feel as manufacturers, advertisers, researchers? How do the workers view their situation? Is this a good job in a safe factory that they are pleased to have or a inescapable drudge job? In one sequence, we see the action on the ground as Burtynsky sets up to take this photo:
Edward Burtynsky’s Manufacturing #18 (Cankun Factory, Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, China)
The workers filmed up close look bored, uncomfortable, vacant as their section head berates them for mistakes and slow work. What exactly are they thinking?
I think this is exactly how we see our work fitting in with traditional research on China. The statistics on China are startling, awe inspiring and belittling, just like Burtynky’s work but we, like the documentary makers in Manufactured Landscapes, try to put some human context and meaning into the picture.
a still from the documentary Up the Yangtse, by Yung Chang
The Human Rights Watch Film Festival is on in London at the moment and coming to NYC soon. There’s a great selection of films, animation and documentaries from around the world including Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtse, a documentary about a tourist cruise on the Yangtse River. The cruise becomes a metaphor for modern China, its economic struggle and successes, social pressures and Westernisation, all played out in the pleasure boat’s microcosm.
Chun Jie, the Spring festival or as we know it in the West, Chinese New Year, is on its way. Chun Jie means returning home for big family reunion dinners, gifts of money and food and doing all you can to ensure a lucky new year (including as you see here pasting up traditional lucky wishes). Chun Jie represents a huge sales spike and last year 100 million people traveled by train over the Chun Jie period. In one day alone, the last day of the main festival period, 53.6 million people traveled in cars, buses, trains and planes. (Xinhua).
Getting your Chun Jie strategy right is crucial for sales but what Chun Jie is changing in China. We’re currently filming two families over the festival - one rural and one urban, to document what Chun Jie means to these two different families, how it’s changing and why. The final film will be for sale so to sit down for a real reunion dinner please get in touch.
A still from ‘Mr and Mrs Iyer’, an independent Indian film by Aparna Sen
Bollywood, the nickname for films made in Bombay’s factory-like studios, is now known around the world. The big musical pieces, beautiful stars, grand settings and unashamed escapism are its trade marks and they’ve come to dominate the image of Indian cinema in the West. Radio 4’s two part series Films for a New India offers an alternative, exploring instead India’s independent film industry. It’s a great introduction to all sorts of themes; the world-wide Indian diaspora and its impact on culture in India, the Hindu/Muslim religious divide as the last great film taboo, Westernisation v Indian pluralism and the cultural dynamics of the Indian middle class.
Born into Brothels, the Oscar winning documentary by Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski, documents the lives of the children of prostitute families in Calcutta. Growing up in the city’s infamous Red Light district is simultaneously grim and mundane. For the girls in particular it’s only a short time before they join their mothers, sisters and aunts ‘in line’, becoming prostitutes themselves.
The film actually started as a photography project by Zana Briski documenting the lives of the women in the district. She got to know the children of the sex workers and began teaching them photography, encouraging them to document their own lives. The children take the pictures you would expect, photos of friends, family, neighbours and the streets around them but with an immediacy that is startling and beautiful (you can see and buy the photos here).
The children are all keen to go to school to better themselves and escape the life that otherwise awaits them but their family background means local schools won’t take them. In the end, foreign-run religious schools enrol them but the some of the families sabotage the children’s chances, taking them back out of school. The sale of the children’s photos help pay for their education, including some now studying at university overseas.
This is a great film but especially good for anyone interested in Asia - it’s a reminder just how people on the fringes can be dismissed and underestimated but also how it’s not just society that holds them back, it can also be their own peers and families.
