Category Archives: Humanities and Social Sciences

One Mile Away

This post was contributed by Emma Pearson, a MSc Politics student at Birkbeck. She also writes for dailyinfo.co.uk and blogs at emmalouisepears.wordpress.com.

The first event leading up to Birkbeck’s Surplus: Waste, Wealth, Excess forum in June was a screening of One Mile Away by Penny Woolcock, a documentary at once fascinating, subtly flawed, and an engaging trigger for debate.

It traces the fledgling peace efforts of two warring Birmingham gangs, following in particular two young visionaries for peace, Dylan of the Burger gang and Shabba from the Johnsons. They work tirelessly to recruit fellow gang members and elders to their cause, warn the younger generation away from violence, and soliloquise over the graves of its victims. All this is interspersed with rap performed by their recruits – a tell-tale sign of the theatricality underlying the facts.

Anthony Gunter, lecturer in criminology at UEL and author of “Growing Up Bad: Road Culture, Badness and Black Youth Transitions in an East London Neighbourhood”, led the discussion after the film. It is, he argued, very easy to categorise inner-city violence under ‘gang warfare’ and forget about it. It’s nicely self-contained, outsiders need not trouble themselves with any deeper causality, and David Cameron can label the 2011 riots as “criminality, pure and simple” without too much responsibility coming his way. For the media’s part, gangs are a well-understood drama. It’s Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, tribal war. There is no need for context, and One Mile Away gives very little.

But context should be everything, because the situation facing many young black males in Britiain’s cities today is dire. Lack of education, meagre employment prospects and a broken down relationship with the police mean that many feel – and are treated – like surplus population. The ‘road culture’, far from its roots in the Caribbean drive towards social being and outdoor living in the cradle of the community, has become a thing of chaos – something aptly illustrated by Woolcock’s film. Shootings and stabbings abound in the silences between camera takes, but no one really knows where, or why, or even who. The one time when details are given, it turns out the dispute was about money, not gang membership at all.

So on the part of the young men in the film, perhaps the gang narrative – the regurgitated language of the press – is at least partly a means to impose order. Perhaps the film and the ‘peace process’ were simply something to do, a way to have some purpose when the system seems to deny them everything else. The fact that all the young men were performers, and Dylan possessed of powerful charisma, may indicate that we shouldn’t treat this documentary as an accurate representation of real life.

It is a performance, however, that still has a lot to tell us about the state of Britain today. Because even if this absorbing film is propelled chiefly by the enactment of myth, its flaws as a real-life documentary point us towards the truth of the chaotic situation. We should not use the ‘gang’ label to distance ourselves from inner city violence. Far from being “criminality, pure and simple”, we are all a part of the complex system leading to it.

Victorian Dolls and Material Play

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This post was contributed by Emma Curry, a a PhD student in the Department of English and Humanities, working on Dickens’s representations of objects and body parts.

Birkbeck’s annual Arts Week joined forces with the Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies on Tuesday night to host a fascinating and visually-splendiferous talk by Eugenia Gonzalez, on the thought-provoking theme of ‘Victorian Dolls and Material Play’.

Although Gonzalez opened her paper with a quotation from George Dodd, who wrote in Household Words in 1853, ‘dolls are trifles’, Gonzalez’s subsequent presentation went on to show us that in nineteenth-century culture, they were anything but. She began by uncovering the fascinating relationship between many notable Victorian women and their dolls, discussing the collections of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and even the young Queen Victoria, whose extensive assemblage included a number of dolls that she had made and dressed herself. Gonzalez also highlighted the persistent presence of the doll in adult-authored texts, in which writers frequently attempted to theorize the various benefits a woman could acquire from playing with dolls as a child; from the cultivation of more conservative attributes such as nurture, decoration, and the ‘art of pleasing’, to more progressive ideas such as the development of imagination, and even, as Otto Ernst described in a narrative of his daughter’s doll-play, the ‘godlike’ powers of creation and dominion.

In the second part of her talk, Gonzalez moved on to Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, discussing the prominence Dickens gives in this novel to the character of Jenny Wren, the dolls’ dressmaker. Gonzalez highlighted here the connection between doll-play and writerly-play, linking Jenny’s powers to fashion form and imaginatively construct narrative for her dolls with Dickens’s own creative processes, in which characters are similarly constructed materially and experienced as if they are real: indeed, Dickens’s description of having to go and ‘extricate’ Mr and Mrs Boffin from the carriage after the Staplehurst rail crash was a particularly fascinating and pertinent addition here. Through such a focus on Jenny’s imaginative and interpretive power, Gonzalez suggested a reading of the novel as one concerned with materiality, manipulation, and (self-)fashioning, which I found wonderfully revealing and convincing.

The talk was followed by some lively discussion and a very wide-ranging selection of questions, testament to the fascinating and far-reaching nature of the topic. I’ll certainly be returning to Our Mutual Friend with fresh eyes now, and I definitely won’t look at my old Barbie doll collection in the same way again! I’d like to thank Eugenia for providing us with such fascinating and stimulating subject matter, and look forward to reading the completed project!

Moving Images: Mark Lewis and David Campany in Conversation

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This post was contributed by Carrie Mcalinden and Meg Hanna, both students on Birkbeck’s MA Film, Television and Screen Media.

It is only recently that Mark Lewis has begun to embrace the label of filmmaker. The screening of three of his works in the Birkbeck Cinema last week provided a seemingly appropriate context for his discussion with David Campany, writer and curator, though we were quickly instructed to “imagine what this would be like in a picture gallery.”

As the intended exhibition space for Lewis’s films, the gallery is referenced directly by both Black Mirror at the National Gallery (2011) and Outside the National Gallery (2011). Both films exhibit the defining characteristics of most of his work – the long shot and silence – and for Lewis it is these elements of the ‘pictorial’ that deem the gallery a fitting environment for this display of his moving images.

However, now that he has come into the title of ‘filmmaker,’ he seems to be more open to letting the spectator experience his work as films and not as pictures. He used to say when installing his work in a gallery, “we should pretend that they’re not films,” and now he is setting up benches and encouraging a more relaxed environment. Still opposed to the rigidness of the cinema, he would rather his films be experienced in something more akin to the avant-garde’s dream of the ‘smokers cinema.’

In his early work, Lewis relied on the four minute film reel to make the choice of duration and has carried on this limitation into his current digital work. Keeping the context of the gallery as well the spectator in mind, he is not interested in projects of endurance, and keeps each of his current films under eight minutes. Such explanations are emblematic of Lewis’s attempts to distance/efface himself from his work. Outside the National Gallery in particular suggests the absence of the filmmaker, despite his assertion that what looks like one long take is actually several takes edited together. As such, his films evoke the actuality films of the Lumiere brothers, yet also embrace elements of artifice in the tradition of Melies.

This distancing of the filmmaker from his work brought up questions of the ‘location of consciousness’ in his films. In the third film screened, Beirut (2011), the camera, on a crane, moves up and over buildings, slowly investigating the world and embodying a ghost-like perspective. Here we see illustrated one of many examples of the “consciousness of the camera” – an idea explored in much of Lewis’ work. Given its limitations, “what would a camera do if it had consciousness?”, he asks.

But perhaps he puts too much emphasis on the camera doing all of the work and not enough on his own ingenuity. “Anyone can make a film,” he proclaimed, provoking a prompt objection from the programmer of the evening, Laura Mulvey. Speaking directly to the ambitious mechanical engineering that went into the filming of both Beirut and Black Mirror at the National Gallery, Mulvey pointed out that “some of Mark’s films are completely crazy.” He is not in fact just some guy with a camera, but rather often finds himself doing something which is “excessive and makes no sense and is irrational, but actually seems to work.”