THE IDEAS IN HIS HEAD WERE FOREVER FERMENTING [249]

Calculator, Industry, Work [copyright Paul Rose]

“How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File” is the brilliant title for a 2013 film by the German video artist Hito Steyerl, and can be viewed here: [link]. Using computerised imagery and voiceover mixed with location shooting and The Three Degrees’ “When Will I See You Again,” this satire of instructional films is also about a serious subject: resolution targets, used by the American military in the times of pre-digital aerial photography for calibration purposes, but now left cracked and obsolete – to truly become invisible, you must enter those cracks, be smaller than a pixel, become a picture, or be a female over fifty years old.

Now try this: Petrochemexxx Solutions Corporation presents “Party Phantoms,” simulated guests ready to fill the spaces at your party or other miscellaneous celebration. They can dance, but you must not dance with them; they can hold conversations, but their opinions might be toxic. Apart from the voiceover, and perhaps the music, the video is constructed from stock footage and photographs, especially of frightening medical dummies. The colour and grain of the picture is of a 16mm film where the yellow layer faded away, captured on video tape too late, dating this film to the early 1970s at most, supported by the fonts used on screen, and the spaced-out synthesised sound effects. It appears to have been archived in a forgotten shed. You then remember this film has only just been made.

Seeing Steyerl’s video at Tate Modern, I realised I want to make videos like this. “How Not to be Seen” is presented as an art installation, but it is entertaining, funny, informative, and not far from your more ambitious YouTube video. However, watching the YouTube channel Digitiser [link] has made me think I could achieve this.

Party Phantoms [copyright Paul Rose]

“Party Phantoms” opens “Mr Biffo’s Lost Footage: Eggs,” posted in April 2020, continuing a series of “found footage” videos begun in 2016. “Mr Biffo” is the trickster god persona of Paul Rose, a creator of children’s TV comedy-dramas like “Dani’s House,” “4 O’Clock Club” and “Almost Never,” screenwriter for the 2014’s “Pudsey The Dog: The Movie,” and the writer of “Wrongs of Praise,” the episode of the sitcom “My Parents are Aliens” that crushed a model of a satellite with a bible, and had said parents, through self-idolatry and obsession with celebrity, raising the stakes by getting ready to burn their family on one as blasphemers – I liked that episode a lot. The “Mr Biffo” name comes from the 1993-2003 Teletext video game magazine that began Rose's writing career - “Digitiser” is remembered for the subversive humour and characters that infiltrated the reviews, the anarchic spirit continuing in the YouTube series that has often threatened to injure both Rose and co-host Paul Gannon (also of the CheapShow podcast, as discussed here: link).

In other words, the Digitiser channel is created, like most YouTube channels, in someone’s spare time, but the imagination and ambition of the videos created in that time eliminates that as a limitation. In a Q&A video also posted in April 2020, Rose stated that, apart from scripting voiceovers or pieces that actors will read to camera, and working with the musician Christopher Jerden-Cooke, entire sketches or passages are conceived in the edit, having gathered the necessary stock footage. The 2017 series “Mr Biffo’s Found Footage” has more original filmed sequences, but are treated in the same way. While these videos may not be, as Rose stated, his life's work, they are his favourite hobby.

Digitiser: "Indoor Fireworks" [copyright Paul Rose]

In comparison, two earlier videos by Steyerl, “Strike” (2010) and “Probability” (2012) – the first portraying the breaking of a TV screen, and the second demonstrating a zero-probability event - may have been filmed at home, as so many YouTube videos are, but like Rose’s videos, Steyerl’s confidence and precision in the imagery created, from framing to lighting to sound, is the cut above that turns “just a video” into cinema. It is possible to create cinema in your spare time.

So far, the videos on my YouTube channel [link] are mostly written articles spoken out loud, with pictures. I always thought that, to achieve television or film standard, I needed to devote more time than my regular job would allow me to give. Having discovered this is not true, it is now up to me to make different choices. For all the film theory and rules that have built up since the Lumière brothers filmed their employees leaving their factory in 1895, all they had to do was work out where to place the camera.

Pie Vendors in the Night [copyright Paul Rose]

The final episode of “Mr Biffo’s Lost Footage” appeared on 21^st June 2020, titled “The End,” this time presenting a through line of life from birth to death, via your first day of school, birds, pie vendors in the night, parental training tapes, calculators, memories of TV, and a slow, beautiful passage of reaching the end, when there is nothing more, piecing together archive voiceover, prog rock music, and the Apollo moon landings – and then you let go. Watching this on a television, I did not see “#Funny” written under the picture, and I laughed a lot before then, while making notes on how different layers of photography moved in the “Pie Vendors in the Night” section, but I was not expecting to be emotionally moved myself, by a video on YouTube.

When you remember that “cinema” describes the space as well as the art form, does an art work create the space, or do you just hope it does by putting it there? Maybe some videos just need to be seen on as big a screen as possible.

Because Paul Rose does it, and because Hito Steyerl has done it, I hope I can create cinema in my spare time.

Beanus Likes Beans:
Digitiser co-host Paul Gannon with spirit animal
[copyright Paul Rose]

WHAT’S SO FUNNY ‘BOUT PEACE, LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING? [40]

[John Birt, with Mick Jagger, for "World in Action"]

Once upon a time, in a United Kingdom riven with economic and social problems, and questions over our future relationship with Europe, people began looking at how the news was not informing us in the way we needed, to help us understand and solve our problems.

I could be talking about Brexit, “fake news” and “alternative facts,” but the year is actually 1975, marked in Britain by high inflation, social unrest and voting to remain in the Common Market. Like now, it was people within the news companies themselves talking about how to properly reflect what was happening.

The key arguments were published in a series of articles in “The Times” in 1975-76, co-written by its Economics Editor, Peter Jay, with John Birt, the Head of Current Affairs for London Weekend Television. Birt was also responsible for LWT’s political discussion show “Weekend World,” which was presented by Jay. If you can find these articles, you will be rewarded with passionate polemic sent out by two people who must have loved working out what they would propose, as manifestoes come about when there is a moment to be seized.

The extremely short version of their findings was that television journalism, an uneasy mix of newspaper-style reporting and film-style documentary storytelling, had a “bias against understanding,” caused by providing too little time in news bulletins to provide enough context and focus to events happening on the surface, not providing enough of a link to what they highlight and the wider issue it illustrated, and focussing too much on stories, rather than issues. Failing to inform the public could even be considered as anti-social.

Their solution would be to create one central news unit, encompassing numerous disparate news and current affairs programme teams, in order to work together. The main focus would be one hour-long programme every night, covering the main five or six stories of the day in great detail, not unlike later shows like “Newsnight” or “Channel 4 News,” complemented by weekly reviews, monthly investigations of the main issues of the times, and feature programmes that answered questions as they came up.

If this proposal sounded like fewer people would watch, the argument was that the public reaction to the new style of stories would be more “oh, I see,” than “oh, my god!” Likewise, mixing of fact and comment already happens, as choosing what to include in a report is already making a value judgement. Any concerns on integrating teams into a big bureaucracy would be countered by the opportunities provided by working together.

Did anything ever come of this? What didn’t help is that 1970s television was slower in general, the first news bulletins of any type not appearing until lunchtime, making an end-of-day wrap-up easier to implement. However, as 24-hour news cycles were replaced by constant streams, from the introduction of CNN in 1980, through to online sites and social media, it is too easy to be simply be given all available information, then to make of it what you will, all by yourself, or with those that agree with you.

While “Newsnight” and “Channel 4 News” have more time to go into detail, did John Birt and Peter Jay get the chance to make their proposals work? After writing the articles, Jay had a term as UK Ambassador to the United States, and Birt produced David Frost’s interviews with Richard Nixon, in which the former president ultimately admitted to letting the American people down. Jay would then be asked by Frost to become chairman of breakfast television station TV-am, where its “mission to explain” stuck to the “Times” articles closely, but petered out after a few weeks, due to a lack of viewers, infighting at the station that resulted in Jay leaving, and the simple fact that heavyweight analysis doesn’t work at six o’clock in the bloody morning.

At the BBC, John Birt, who was hired as Deputy Director-General, before getting the top job, enacted the proposals as far as he could. News and current affairs departments, based in different parts of London, were merged into one, and “Editors” were employed to inject context straight into bulletins – Peter Jay became Economics Editor in 1990.

If there is a moment to be seized, you have to make a persuasive argument. If it has been made before, then it has to be clear why it is worth making the case again. Change never came easy, as Birt and Jay made clear:

“There is no easy path to understanding. The conscientious journalist, having climbed the mountain, should of course make it easier for those who follow. But we should be suspicious of those who offer a low and painless road to the top. For it seldom, if ever, exists.”