Sand Wars (2015)

     Sand Wars (2015) Our civilisation is built on sand. We have used so much of it that it has become a scarce commodity, worth stealing and smuggling. Almost all land-based sources have been used up. Australia exports huge quantities of it. I don’t know if Canada does, but I wouldn’t be surprised. This documentary shows that removing  sand from beaches and the sea floor is causing unexpected and dangerous consequences. You can find the doc here:
     http://tvo.org/video/documentaries/sand-wars
     Watch it. Sand is an example of how our taking the environment for granted prevents us from seeing what we are doing. “Selective inattention” is the psychological term for this phenomenon. ***

Two Austrian picture books

     Eduard Widmoser & Karl Waggerl, Österreich (1952). Franz Nabl, Österreich (1957). Large format photo-album books intended to feed nostalgia and attract visitors. The photos are very well composed, reproduced in first-class half-tone. The 1952 book emphasises winter sports, the 1957 one the beauty of mountains, forests, and lakes. Neither one presents Austrian city and town life. Both have photos of historical buildings, mostly baroque. Both create the impression of a mostly rural country, although Austria is one of the most highly urbanised countries in the world.
     The texts sketch the history and culture of the country. Both take us up to the breakup of the Hapsburg empire, and stop there.
     Karl Waggerl offers  an impression of the Austrian character, a mix of acute observation and romantic-sentimental claims. He says that Austrians feel that something bad is lurking round the corner, but there’s nothing to be done about it. He claims that Austrians are better able to empathise with and imagine other people’s experience. The essay as a whole has a vagueness, like a horoscope, what he says can be interpreted to apply to anyone. Including people who have not had the fortune of being born and raised Austrian. Widmoser’s overview of Austria’s “situation, history and culture” is workmanlike, sounding like a tourist brochure.
     The Nabl book is one of a series of Blaue Bücher, intended to satisfy popular desire for instruction and entertainment. Nabl yearns for Austria’s past greatness; a large part of his essay is a eulogy to the Hapsburg empire, a federation in which diverse peoples lived in harmony and peace. Like Widmoser, he carefully avoids discussion of what happened after 1918, and there is no hint of 1938 and the Second World War.
     Both these books are fascinating as documents. They show that in the immediate post-war period, Austria was trying to reinvent itself, to bury the political strife of the 1920s and 30s, which prepared for the Anschluss. They show a kind of amnesia; the immediate past is simply not there. A careful look at the pictures suggests that many of them are pre-war. The focus on landscape implies a flight from the city and its commerce and finance, its political and cultural strife, its constant change. The remoter past safe; the immediate past is dangerous. The village and small town imply tradition, and confirm a desire for unchanging values.
     I was taught that Austria was a victim of historical circumstances over which it had little or no control, and specifically, that the Anschluss was an invasion that could not be resisted. These two books express the same stance, as much by what they omit as by what they include. **½

Codebreaker (2011)

     Codebreaker (2011) [D: Clare Beavan and Nic Stacey. Ed Stoppard, Henry Goodman, and contemporaries and family of Turing] Short documentary about Alan Turing, about his work as code breaker at Bletchley Park, his seminal papers on computing, and his conviction for gross indecency and his eventual suicide. He was sentenced to receive stilboestrol, a synthetic oestrogen, which among other things messes up the brain. The title is ambiguous: Turing broke two codes.
     Alternating between voice-over narration of Turing’s life and dramatised sessions with Franz Grünbaum, the psychiatrist who treated Turing (and who became his friend), the film is an effective indictment of the attitudes that destroyed one of the most brilliant minds we’ve been privileged to know. We are somewhat less benighted now, but there are discouraging signs of increasing acceptance of hostility towards those who depart too far from current norms. It’s depressing to watch a story about the destruction of human being.
     The movie reminded me of how the Turing Test has evolved over time. For a while, I participated in a newsgroup about artificial intelligence. We ascribe awareness, self-awareness, personality, etc, because of the  behaviours of our fellow creatures. Sometimes, we go too far: I don’t think a snail is aware of pain, even though it recoils from flame. But it is certainly capable of learning, if by that we mean changes in behaviour that depend on the history of the individual. Since learning is an essential component of intelligence, the snail has some degree of intelligence. And since we see intelligence of varying complexity in many different creatures, it’s no stretch at all to expect that machines will exhibit intelligence. It’s when we conflate intelligence with self-awareness, with consciousness, that we get into trouble. More precisely, “intelligence” as a cognitive trait is far too stretchy a term. For many people, it includes creativity, for example. For many others, it requires not only problem solving, but also awareness that one is solving a problem. And so on.
     Recently, I came across a fact I’d ignored, and a comment that reframes Turing’s Test.
     The fact is that Turing machines are incredibly inefficient compared to brains. We can compute “that’s Uncle Fred, and he’s happy” in a fraction of a second expending a few joules of energy. A machine needs longer and expends many kilojoules of energy to compute that “That’s Uncle Fred”, and it can’t (yet) compute that he’s happy.
     The comment is that the Turing Test is really about humans, not machines. It tests whether the human can be fooled by a machine. And since the program is devised by a human, it really tests whether one human can fool another one. But we already knew that.
     It’s mark of Turing’s gift to us that even as we mourn him, we want to think about the things that mattered to him. ***

The Genius Within (2009)

      The Genius Within (2009) A bio of Gould that pays homage to his music, but focuses on his love life. He fell in love with Cornelia Foss, and she with him, so she moved her children to Toronto, and for a while it seemed they might marry. But Gould became increasingly dependent on his anti-depressant meds, and eventually she returned to her husband. Gould died of a series of strokes in 1982 at the age of 50. His death hit the children especially hard.
     An above average documentary, with reminiscences by Cornelia, the children, Lorne Tulk (the sound engineer on Gould’s recordings), and other friends and acquaintances. The biographer speaks a few times, and confesses that there’s a mystery he was not able to penetrate. This remark is echoed by other people. In the end, what remains is Gould’s music, and  the impression of a life that was perhaps less fulfilling emotionally than it might have been.
     Does the genius of Gould’s interpretations of Bach match the cost of his and others’ emotional pain? Perhaps. Everybody must balance the costs and gains of his life. Gould came to accept the cost, enjoying his time at the family cottage, and in playful impersonations of imaginary figures, recorded in photographs. Hearing his second recordings of the Goldberg Variations, I imagined scenes from a movie, of figures in a cityscape at night, together but alone, wandering in and out of lights and shadows, while some unknown hunters close in on them with dispassionate intensity, preparing for the kill. ***

In Search of Beethoven (2009)

     In Search of Beethoven (2009) 3-part version of the bio-documentary, with lots of talking heads, photos and engravings of places and people, and performance snippets by many of the best interpreters of Beethoven. Well done, with much information new to people like me, who like classical music but haven’t learned much about the composers.
     Beethoven was a much more complicated man than the stereotypical bust suggests. He knew he was a pretty good composer, and felt he was competing with Haydn and Mozart, “our three great composers” according to contemporary music critics. Mozart was near the end of his life and Haydn was dead. Beethoven also had strong opinions, and believed that human beings were capable of much more than the slummy world of politics and commerce and social striving. He was furious when his hero Napoleon revealed himself to be just another power-grubbing arriviste, and erased Napoleon’s name from the dedication on the score of the Eroica so angrily that he left holes in the paper.
     We hear enough music to understand why so many people think of Beethoven as the greatest composer ever, and also why other prefer to give that prize to Mozart or Bach. There’s no question, I think, that Beethoven showed what music could be in ways that no one else ever did. His last compositions sound like late 19th or early 20th century works, with their broken chords, their fractured rhythms, and their searching and inconclusive melodic lines.
     One of the last comments was that Beethoven had so little lasting influence on later composers because no one could exceed him. There’s some truth to that, I think. “Serious” composers nowadays have to a large extent been reduced to experiments with new tonalities and abstract structures. Popular music has become the truly innovative source of new sound. Considering that well into the 19th century what we think of as classical music was actually contemporary pop, this is not surprising. Music endlessly reinvents itself. We rediscover old music in every generation, every generation recognises great work from all eras and every generation adopts and adapts the work of the old masters. This documentary demonstrated why Beethoven will last. The details of his personal life, and how his beliefs and feelings informed his music is interesting for anyone, but especially for the Beethoven fan. But in the end, the work itself is what matters. I don’t think that how it affects the listener depends on knowledge of biography.
     I think that Beethoven’s violin concerto in D Major is the most sublime piece of music ever written. Among my favourite versions are those by Itzhak Perlman, Yehudi Menuhin, and David Oistrakh.
     Good documentary. I wouldn’t have minded a longer version with more music. ***

Rupture: living with a broken brain (Documentary, 2012)

     Rupture: living with a broken brain (2012) Maryam d’Abo and her husband made this documentary intending it to be the story of her recovery. There’s some of that, but mostly it’s interviews with other people who have suffered strokes.

Very well done, not your average medical doc, this movie tries to express the emotional impact of stroke on both the sufferer and the family and friends. It succeeds, because it doesn’t try to be literal. It focusses on the tiny minority (about 3-5% of all stroke victims) who recover a reasonable facsimile of their former more or less normal life. But all of them report that their sense of self, the world, and the people around them has changed. (This is a significant data point for the answering the puzzle of self-awareness.) Life for them has become more purposeful, but not more planned. The purpose is joy; plans often prevent that. Worth watching more than once. ***

Royalty Close Up (2013)

     Royalty Close Up (2013) On TVO. About Kent Gavin, who learned photography by working at it when he was hired by The Mirror, which was always a tabloid, but back then was still a family tabloid. He became photographer of the Royals more or less by accident, and many of the most memorable images of them were his. He also photographed war, sports, and “general news”, and excelled in all genres. Why? Because he loved to take pictures of people, and because he learned how to see the picture through the lens. He mastered his craft before digital, when film, even for a daily paper, was expensive. He developed a knack for waiting for the right moment.
     His relationship with the Royals was complex and oddly personal. Not that he was ever an intimate friend, but they came to rely on him for “good” photos that told the story they wanted to tell. His remarks on the Royal’s awareness of the power of photography and publicity generally display an acute intelligence and deep understanding of how public images are created and propagated. He knows that ultimately a good photo depends on the relationship between photographer and subject, not between subject and camera; a good subject is one who likes the person wielding the camera. Even Diana, who liked being photographed, is better in Gant’s photos than in other peoples’, at least to my eyes.
     Gavin clearly wanted to tell a good story about the Royals and just as clearly wanted to the story to be the truth, even if it wasn’t the whole truth. That’s why we now expect candid photos that display the Royals’ (and other celebrities’) reactions to the events they witness. Unlike the paparazzi, Gavin did not want to trap or trick his subjects into revealing those aspects of themselves that none of us want to be made public.
     The film is sectioned into chapters about the Queen, Diana, Charles, etc. It’s worth watching, more as a seminar on how to take pictures than for still more revelations about the Royals. The music is cliched and therefore feels obtrusive to me. The photos are wonderful; I would have liked to have more screen time with them. **½

Citizen Black (2004)

 Conrad Black in 2013

      Citizen Black (2004) [D: Debbie Melnyk] Documentary that serendipitously follows Conrad Black from the time just before the unravelling of his life up to the first trial for financial misdoings.
     Melnyk seems to have won Black’s confidence; at a book signing for his biography of FDR, he jokes with her, at other times he answers her questions courteously. She gives us a sketch of his life and career, along with lots of opinions and reminiscences by people who knew him (but not a word from Barbara Amiel). There is more than one instance of a slapdown that the speakers would not have dared when Black was at the peak of his economic and social power.
      Black comes across as a man too full of his own importance, and confident that he will be acquitted. There’s no doubt that he engineered excessive non-compete payments by selling newspapers to himself. It was this that brought him down, but he was convicted of mail fraud and obstruction of justice. His yearning for the cachet of a nebulous nobility, his hobnobbing with the great and glittery, his contempt for the people who made his money for him, his skill with words, and the charm that made so many people blind to his faults, all these are plainly shown. What we don’t see, and perhaps will never know, is what drove his ambitions.
      His career since his release from prison has been spotty. He doesn’t have much money left compared to what he used to have. He has a gig on Zoomer on Vision TV, but his first set, a poorly done interview with Rob Ford, received a lot of bad PR. He’s living in Toronto, and has suggested he may want to regain Canadian citizenship. He blogs for the Huffington Post. The Ontario Securities Commission is still investigating his case (very slowly). His lawyer claims that Black is a victim of the Hollinger affair, not its perpetrator. His Order of Canada has been withdrawn. And so on.
     I have never had much sympathy for him, but this documentary arouses some pity. It’s not pleasant to watch a man delude himself. The film has been overtaken by events. Search on his name. The story ain’t over yet. **½

 

 

 Conrad Black Mugshot

Silence at the Heart of Things (2009)

Silence at the Heart of Things (2009) [Documentary by E. Thalenberg, by Stormy Nights Productions]
     Oliver Schroer died in 2008, one month after his last concert, which he devised and performed while waiting for his death from cancer. I knew nothing about this remarkable man until we saw the last few minutes of this film last summer on TVO. This time, we saw the whole movie. As a documentary, it’s very well done, intercutting archival footage, interviews, and the concert. The filmmakers have a good sense of how to stitch together the bits and pieces of other people’s relationships with Schroer and his own words (and music) to give us a portrait of a great human being.
     And it’s that human being, Oliver Schroer, that stays with us. He touched many lives, I think because he never hid himself from other people, he didn’t put on the masks that most of us use to protect ourselves from intimate contact. He understood that music is more than entertainment, it’s a means of creating community, and a path into one’s self.
     At one point he talks about music as a sacrament. Yes, it can be, and Schroer shows us why. Listening to his long flowing explorations of melodic lines, I felt that the music was familiar, that it took me to places that I recognised, but could not reach any other way. Susanne Langer in her Philosophy in a New Key (1942) quotes a musician: Music sounds the way feelings feel. Yes, and music can reveal ways of feeling that we didn’t know we were capable of. Feelings are the essence of what we think of as our personal experience; they make the world we live in. Schroer says that music grows out of the silence at the heart of things. His gift was to share his music so that we can follow him into that silence, where grief and joy are reconciled.
     You can find several videos on YouTube and Vimeo. ****

Forgotten Genius: Percy Lavon Julian (2007)

     Forgotten Genius Percy Lavon Julian (1899-1975), grandson of a slave, became one of the most accomplished chemists in the USA at a time when black people were barred both legally and socially from career paths that whites took for granted. This NOVA film traces his life using dramatisation, the sadly small amount of archival material, and personal reminiscences of people who knew him. It’s depressing and inspiring, as well as educational (the film makers manage to teach a good deal of chemistry along the way). It’s one of those biographies that make you wish you had known the man himself.
     It’s easy to forget how many barriers to education black children faced, and how thoroughly their spirits were broken. Julian was an exception in part because of his father and mother, both of whom were teachers who pushed him to develop his talents; and partly because of his determination. He was a man who wouldn’t give up. It’s depressing to recall the history of racism. Canadian racism was rarely as overt and violent as in the USA, but it was (and is) bad enough. In many ways the polite racism of this country is worse: it hides the fact.
    Interesting trivia: Julian’s work at Glidden Paints  helped the company to expand into many other product lines, but for some reason Glidden decided to withdraw from them and focus on its “core business.” An opportunity missed from a stockholder’s POV, I think. Julian should be better known. Wikipedia here.  You can watch Forgotten Genius on YouTube.
     As good a biography as the available material allowed, I think. ***

Shock and Awe (TV)

Shock and Awe (2010) [TVO] A BBC series about the discovery, exploitation, and eventual understanding of electricity. Well done, with many re-creations of crucial experiments. One comes away with a renewed respect for the scientists and engineers who worked out the way electricity does its many things, and an appreciation for the fact that we don’t really know anything else about electricity except just that: how it works. The equations describe what happens, and thereby enable us to control what happens, and that’s all.
     Those who want to know what electricity “really is” will be disappointed. But to ask what a thing “really is” is to ask for more than we can know of it. Reality is what we can know and understand. There may be more, but since we cannot know or understand it, it’s pointless to ask what it is. It is of course not pointless ask whether we can know more than we know now, but that’s not a paradox. We each of us have limitations, and we each have the ability (albeit limited) to transcend those limitations when we share what we know. Conversation is a liberator.
     One thing that’s missing from these series is the dead ends of mistaken theories and false starts. Science progresses as much from discovering what ain’t so as from discovering what is. As with all documentaries, some prior knowledge will provide the personal context needed for understanding and pleasure. In this case, a middle or high school knowledge of electricity is enough. ***