Something to watch out for in 2010: Brèves de trottoirs is a new web-documentary project lead by journalist Olivier Lambert and photographer Thomas Salva. The objective is to bring together a collection of short documentaries focused on personalities met on the streets of Paris.
Their first subject was Elie, the famous “Papy Dance” who dances outside the Italie 2 shopping centre in the 13th arrondissement. His performances have made him an internet star, but his life story is far more poignant… (this video is subtitled in English)
Also recently released is the next short film, an interview with Violette, a florist on Place Monge in the 5th arrondissement.
Brèves de Trottoirs provides an interesting example of how journalism, film-making and internet are coming together to create new modes story-telling. It’ll be fascinating to watch the project develop during the year. You can follow their Twitter feed or their blog.
Arte continues to throw up some amazing documentaries. Last night it was the Dutch-produced film Autour du monde à bord du Zeppelin – Le journal de Lady Hay. It compiled footage of the August 1929 circumnavigation of the globe by the airship Graf Zeppelin, with narration based on the journals and letters of the sole woman on board, Lady Grace Drummond-Hay.
The round-the-world trip was in part sponsored by William Randolph Hearst, who negotiated exclusive newspaper rights for the trip for English-speaking countries. The journey left from Lakehurst, NJ, passing through Friedrichshafen, over Berlin, Russia and Siberia to Tokyo, and then onwards over the Pacific to Los Angeles before flying eastwards via Chicago back to Lakehurst.
It was a grand and risky adventure: supplied with erroneous maps, the airship had to dump tonnes of ballast to climb over the Stanavoy Mountains in Siberia. Encountering a storm over the Pacific, the zeppelin lost radio contact for two days. Newspapers around the world reported that the ship had crashed.
Lady Drummond-Hay’s on-board companions are equally colourful. The Soviet representative is enraged when the captain Hugo Eckener abandons plans to overfly Moscow due to adverse weather. A stowaway is discovered: a young man trying to fly to Hollywood to become a movie star. And she constantly records the awkward relationship with her erstwhile boyfried, the journalist Karl von Wiegand.
However what is most remarkable about the film is its vision of the planet midway between two World Wars. As the airship flew over Berlin, the passengers witnessed violent scenes in the streets below: Germans protesting war reparations. The Berlin flyover was intended to celebrate German engineering prowess, but instead, Lady Drummond-Hay records her shock at the political violence. A few years later Germany turned to fascism, and swastikas were painted on the Graf Zeppelin‘s tail.
Retrospectively, this voyage marked the end of an era, a grand gesture summing up the excess and progress of the 1920s. Six weeks after the Graf Zeppelin triumphantly circled Manhattan at the end of its circumnavigation, the Wall Street stockmarket crashed. The world entered an economic depression that was really only resolved by a second World War.
Lady Grace Drummond-Hay is largely forgotten today, but in the 1920s and 1930s was something of a celebrity: a journalist and the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by air.
As war correspondents in the Philippines in 1942, Drummond-Hay and von Wiegand were captured by Japanese troops and spent three years in a prison camp. Returning to New York, Drummond-Hay died in 1946 of health complications arising from her captivity. A movie could certainly be made of her life: this documentary is a fascinating starting point.
Marianne Chaud has previously made films about India and wrote her doctorate on popular theatre in the Himalayan Ladakh region. La Terre des Femmes is essentially a work of ethnography, made in 2007 during her long stay in the remote village of Sking in Zanskar valley at 4000m, a region of Kashmir where the culture is predominantly Tibetan.
Barley fields in Zanskar (Image: Paul A. Fagan, Creative Commons)
The film follows a summer in the lives of the villagers. The men have left for the season to find work in distant towns like Leh and Manali, and the women and children remain to herd the yaks, harvest barley and collect grass for animal feed in the coming winter.
Chaud is not just a bystander but an active participant in the film, and grows particularly fond of a 13 year-old sheperdess, who lives on her own with a herd of yaks. In the absence of men, the women speak openly of their life histories, their hopes and fears.
Farmhouse in Zanskar, with winter feed piled on the roof
(Image: bobwitlox, Creative Commons)
What develops is a compelling portrait of a people who live largely isolated from the modern world, and rely on centuries-old transhumance practices to live in such a harsh environment. The nearest town is 4 days walk away. Everyone, from 5 years old to 80 years old, works in the fields every day.
The only intrusion from beyond the valley is the occasional sound of an aircraft high overhead. The sheperdess asks Marianne, “Inside an aeroplane, how many carpets are there?” “Why carpets?“, responds Marianne. “So you can sit down of course!” laughs the sheperdess. In Zanskar, there are no chairs, because there are no trees, and no timber. The shepherdess has never seen furniture, let alone been in an aeroplane.
The Himalayas as filmed by Marianne Chaud are a long way from the “Lonely Planet” images of picturesque monasteries and prayer-wheels we’ve grown accustomed to. La Terre des Femmes is a gentle, human and intelligent film that ranks among the most beautiful things I’ve seen on television for a very long time.
A short post is often a good post. Here’s some rather extraordinary footage of Charles Mingus playing with his daughter and being interviewed in the 1960s. The next day he was evicted by the police from his apartment:
Growing up in Auckland in the early and mid-1990s, it seemed that most of my friends had pictures of Kurt Cobain on their bedroom walls. An interest in ‘artistic tragedy’ and a fascination with death seemed to go hand in hand with our suburban adolesence. For earlier generations, it might have been Jim Morrison or Ian Curtis on those bedroom posters. But for teenagers of our vintage, Kurt Cobain was the musician-who-died who most fully embodied the angst and anger of growing up.
What goes around comes around. Alongside continuing economic slowdown, it seems safe to bet that the next couple of years will see a revival of interest in the late 80s-early 90s Seattle scene of which Cobain and Nirvana were the spearhead. Before long the kids’ll be wearing plaid shirts again. Just watch.
The signs are there… just in time for Christmas is launched Charles R. Cross’s new book Kurt Cobain Unseen (produced with the cooperation of the Cobain estate) featuring images and objects drawn from Cobain’s short life.
Possibly more evocative and accessible for the non-obsessive is AJ Schnack’s documentary Kurt Cobain: About a Son, which is based on 25 hours of taped interviews with journalist Michael Azerrad, recorded in late 1992 and early 1993. The documentary weaves together excerpts from the conversations with images filmed around the towns Washington state that feature in Cobain’s life: Aberdeen, Olympia and Seattle.
Just as the documentary does not feature Cobain’s face (a deliberate directorial decision), the soundtrack avoids using any Nirvana material. Cobain was a constant champion of relatively obscure rock acts like The Vaselines, Meat Puppets and Butthole Surfers, and the soundtrack reflects this taste.
I remember a conversation I had years ago with a musician friend about how Kurt Cobain was, essentially, a writer of pop songs – one of the reasons that the Nevermind album succeeds is that it’s unrelentingly catchy. It’s all hooks and simple song-forms, like Thriller but with angst and a fuzzbox.
At one point in the documentary, when describing his love for Glasgow band The Vaselines, Cobain talks of his desire to write pop songs. Listening to the Vaselines again (Nirvana recorded three of their songs during their career), you can hear that pop music soul coming through.
Thanks to the realities of media and merchandising, Kurt Cobain has become a legend cruelly divorced from his real life story. His music will always be stained with the knowledge of his untimely death. But hopefully a film like About a Son will help remind us that people like Kurt Cobain are just ordinary people with ordinary stories. The only difference between them and us is the heat of the spotlight.
