In My Network asks the question, what the fuck even is work anymore?
We open and close with a janny coming in to clean. He narrates his own view on social media, one common among the older generation, that he has little to do with it, that he has a Facebook profile to keep in touch with folk some distance away, but has no great attachment to it. He sees the benefit and convenience of being able to buy and sell stuff online, keep up-to-date with what is happening, and make friends, but laments the multiple negative ways in which it is impacting young people.
The film then moves to show various influencers making their content, providing narration of their own experiences. They are singers, makeup reviewers, good vibes cheerleaders, and chat show hosts for other internet personalities, but you’re left asking the question, what even is work?
Now, I’m from the bridging generation, the internet became a thing when I was a teenager, but social media didn’t really take off until I was out of uni. I’m not quite the age of the janny, but I’m older than the influencers. And the changes I’ve seen occur in my lifetime are wild. If I’d gone to the careers officer at school and said I wanted to unbox things for a living, she would have assumed I meant stacking shelves. I still cannot explain the financial model of Twitch, and watching me explain it to my parents is like watching the blind lead the blind. “So, yeah, you play video games and let other people watch and they give you money.” “Why?” “I . . . don’t . . . know.”
As much as we get stuck on the absurdity and hilarity of emerging labour forms, it’s really important to look at this in the context of work. Young people are coming to the job market after living through one of the deepest, longest depressions the world has ever seen. Someone in their teens has never known stability, only the collapse of long-thought-impervious industries, like the banking sector. We have passed the movement of labour from physical industry sectors to the service industry, and are now watching a movement away from the physical of any sort, to an entirely online economy. And what’s being exchanged is becoming more and more intangible.
But the work is real. The time and labour sunk into preparing, making, promoting and distributing the content of influencers is substantial. Beyond the half-hour of a YouTube show or few seconds of an Instagram reel is hours and hours of work, cultivating an audience, building networks, learning to navigate the algorithm. While influencers, and the teens who want to become them, are constantly touted as lazy, wanting to earn millions by sitting around in the house, taking pictures of themselves, for moments’ worth of work, this narrative is a classic attempt to fracture workers’ solidarity.
Far from easy, the work is continuous, as the internet is open 24/7. The toll it takes on some content-providers who struggle to set boundaries on their hours and energy is obvious. Plus, there is no guaranteed remuneration, so you are effectively self-employed, launching a new business and giving out free samples of your product, without ever knowing that you will eventually break even or start earning. That may seem like a huge gamble, but many see it as the only marketplace with the possibility for advancement.
Plus, as an influencer, there is no sick pay, no annual leave, no pension, no nothing. In the dominant social narrative of boomers having done all the real work, and everyone who’s come after being workshy and entitled, there is a deliberate eclipse of the fact that workers’ rights have went backward in time. In the online gig economy, there is absolutely no security, no entitlement to benefits, no hourly rate. And young people aren’t choosing it because it’s easy, they’re choosing it because it seems like the only option.
As the film shows us the various influencers, a recurring motif is the use of deception to keep the content on brand. When the makeup reviewer drops a compact, she refills it with flour before continuing. On the chat show, two internet personalities hint at a possible relationship, which neither of them are remotely interested in. And to be honest, that’s part and parcel of work, selling the sizzle rather than the sausage. But what does that mean if you are your own product, and your workplace is your life?
At the end, we pull back, seeing all the influencers are together in one stage, and the janny comes in to buff the floor. He’s in his uniform, they’re in the dress of their online persona. But he puts on his uniform at a set time and takes it off, goes back to his life. What about the young people? How do they clock off?
One Hundred Steps is a short film set inside two stately homes, Bantry House in Ireland and Musée Grobet-Labadié in France. Within the walls celebrating the great and the good, people play folk music, dance and sing, representing the voices and the cultures of the people who built these houses, worked in these houses, but will never see themselves represented in these houses.
We start in Bantry House, which I knew nothing about before seeing this film, but have since looked up, and it is fascinating. Built in the 18th century, it is the traditional home of the White family. Richard White was awarded the title of Baron for leading British forces against French support for Irish rebels fighting for independence. He eventually graduated to becoming Earl of Bantry, a title handed down to his sons, who sat in the House of Lords as Tories. You don’t need to know any of this to enjoy the movie, I just found it interesting so I thought I’d share. It’s pretty clear who they were when you see the mansion filled with finery and portraits.
While the tour guide narrates the official story of Bantry House, the attendees break off into different rooms, and there sing in Irish, dance, and play the pipes. The names and the faces of those who made this house will not be seen or spoken in these halls, their stories will go untold, but for the duration of this film the sounds of their lives are heard, resounding.
From there we travel to Marseille in France. The Musée Grobet-Labadié is another great house of a wealthy family, filled to the brim with artworks and museum pieces. As the tour guide describes the bourgeoise owners’ love for collecting expensive portraits and paintings, again those in attendance wander off into different rooms. There they sing in Occitan and Arabic, play pipes, drums and cymbals, dance. They fill the house with the sounds of the myriad people who lived and worked here, from across France and North Africa. Like in Bantry, their portraits, history, lives and cultures will not be displayed on these walls, but for a moment, the film gives them space to be represented.
In an empty city, at what feels like the end of time, an ancient woman recalls the world past, the world it was promised to be, and what came to be.
Filmmaker Marta Pajek draws on Escher’s impossible objects and marries them to the socio-political ideas that seemed so plausible but were impossible to realise in real life. However, while Escher’s objects were harmless, the molding of people into impossible figures is not so. The world as something half-dreamed, half-remembered, seems now like a graveyard, silent as the failures of our ideas has left us devastated.
Following on from watching Mir, my first thought was of this as metaphor for the fall of the Soviet Union, but I think it’s more open that than. Equally as she wanders round the empty city, absent now of human figures, save the headless mannequins in shop windows, you could say it is a metaphor for how capitalism is leading us all to annihilation, the impossible figure being one who exploits exponential wealth from a finite planet, forever. As the floods pour into the city, it is could also be seen as an ecological message.
Ultimately it is a short animation on our propensity to self-destruction, through our inability to separate what is real from what is imagined. It closes on the old woman’s face, nearly drowning, singing in German ‘Where have all the flowers gone?”, ending as it sinks inevitably downwards,” When will we ever learn?”
This comic-tragic short film opens with a shot of the Euromaidan protestors toppling the statue of Lenin in Ukraine’s capital. In tinging metal or rumbling granite, the remaining statues of Lenin lament to one another, their language of stone and steel translated for us in subtitles. “Another fallen comrade!” they sigh. To honour him, they hold a minute’s silence.
Unfortunately, one statue of Lenin doesn’t get the message, their most northerly brethren, delayed by distance. In Svalbard, a bust of Lenin stares out across the frozen landscape, unaware of having drawn ire for his faux pas. Finally he hears the tinging and scraping of his nearest relative, dismissing him politely and firmly from the ‘High Choir’ of Lenin statues. Initially dismayed to be left in such isolation, the bust rallies in bravado. Who needs them, eh?
Alone at the end of the world, the bust of Lenin boasts he can do anything, he can fly! He stares up into the night, the heavens clear and close in the Arctic sky, and dreams the dreams of travel to the stars. But a dog wanders into town, and in every bark, the bust of Lenin seems to hear reproach for the death of Laika, the dog the Soviets sent into space. No plan was ever made for the dog’s safe return and it died on re-entry. “I had nothing to do with that!” he insists.
From Lenin’s mighty dreams, he is haunted by the sound of the innocent, destroyed in their pursuit. And from a near-global choir, he has become one voice at the edge of the world. In the background faintly plays a Russian folk song, but it is now more widely known as the tune from Tetris. The world moved on without him, and left him standing here, frozen as stone.
Displaced is a short film about two ping-pong coaches who try to keep the sport alive in post-war Kosovo. Ermegan Kazazi and Jeton Mazreku effectively play themselves, depicting their real life struggles only a few years past. The result is a blend of drama and documentary.
As Kosovo struggles to rebuild, its people struggle to rebuild too. Ermegan and Jeton are trying to get the sport of ping-pong back on its feet. The only thing they still have is their table, but no dedicated practice space. Thus they are reduced to training in the back of garages, school halls, and empty wedding venues. They pack their table onto the back of tractors in order to make it to training spaces, being towed in the bitter snow with their only equipment.
Some people are heartened and impressed with their efforts, the wedding venue owner offering up his space with the deepest respect. Others are simply incredulous, especially since one of them left a cushy life in Germany to come back home to Kosovo.
When people talk about the dream of sporting success, it’s usually of Olympics and medals. But this is another kind of dream, of carrying the flame through the darkest times, keeping it lit to guide the younger generation, to give them hope of some future that isn’t war.
Surprisingly effecting for a film about ping-pong.
That was fantastically interesting! So good, absolutely excellent.
Where to start with this one? Ppff! Ok, so in a nutshell, All Light, Everywhere is about how photography and therefore film has its roots in scientific analysis, racism, militarism and oppression. Following those lines forward to present day, it focuses on police body cameras and aerial surveillance.
If there is one thing you should take away from this movie, it’s that taking a photograph is not a neutral act. It comes with a huge power imbalance, is crafted based on how the person holding the camera has chosen to take it, and comes with a flawed perception of having captured an ‘objective’ record of events.
It always has been. The history of the camera has been attempt to recreate the eye, sometimes with improvements. But an enormous flaw in our logic has been to act like the eye sees. The eye doesn’t see, the brain sees. And the brain is not a neutral observer.
This is your TLDR bail warning.
When studying for my Human Biology Higher, my teacher told me the eye was like a box brownie (shout out to Mrs. Ogg, the absolute legend). The retina is like the film, and when the eye opens, it captures the world the same was an image appears in a box brownie camera, image inverted and flipped. So why don’t we see the world upside down and back-to-front? Quite simply because our brains flip it back. The optical nerve is plugged into the back of the eye and takes this inverted data to our brains, where the brain goes, “The eye’s a fucking idiot” and puts it to rights. That leaves us with one problem though, raise your hand if you can spot it. We have a massive great big nerve cable plugged directly into our retina, where there’s no retina. So nothing can be seen where the nerve meets the eye, and we are blind there. All eyes have this blind spot, so why don’t we have two huge dods of black floating around our visions at all times? Simple, our brains colours it in. Isn’t that wild? That blew my mind when I learned that. Look out your eyes right now. Part of what you’re seeing isn’t real. It isn’t really there. You’re brain is projecting an assumption of what should be there.
And here we come to our problem. Because what we assume to be there, becomes there, because we assume it. The brain is on a permanent self-reinforcing bias loop.
So also is the history of cameras. Because a camera’s job isn’t to capture a neutral observation. It’s to show us an observation.
All Light, Everywhere begins with the example of the transit of Venus in the 1870s. As Venus comes between the Earth and the sun, to our eye we see a very small black dot cross its face. This pinpoint-sized eclipse was extremely important for making astronomical measurements. If we wanted to learn anything about the size of the solar system or the universe, we needed to measure with exactness the time it took for Venus to cross the face of the sun.
Big problem though, as Venus nears the completion of its transit, an optical distortion occurs, called the black drop effect, where the edge of Venus begins to appear like a teardrop hitting the edge of the sun. This basically led to different folk having different opinions on when exactly Venus had crossed the sun, which led to different proposed measurements which meant we couldn’t use it with any accuracy.
The solution was proposed that a machine could be made to do what the human eye could not – record the transit of Venus accurately. The 19th century was an age of technological wonders, in which scientists didn’t just look for the truth, but had every expectation to find it. So a kind of global competition began to see who could build to the most accurate observation machine. Into the film comes Pierre Janssen, a French astronomer, who builds a ‘photographic revolver’. Based on the design of the gun, the plates would be exposed on an automated rotation of every second or so.
What it doesn’t do is solve the black dot effect. What it does do is produce the world’s first film.
Nice story, where is this going? Well, the photographic revolver was followed by the chronophotographic gun, which became the ancestor of the movie camera. It is considered a pivotal invention in the history of film. Unfortunately film is not its only legacy, as the machine gun draws on its design. British airforce gunners were trained using a variation of it in preparation for the oncoming war for control of the colonies, namely the First World War. Cameras drawing on objects of war, and objects of war drawing on cameras is a long and interwoven history.
The inventor of the chronophotographic gun, Etienne-Jules Marey, along with English photographer Eadweard Muybridge, became the fathers of chronophotography, filming movement for scientific measurement and analysis. This included horses running, birds flying, and eventually human subjects. Just like with animals, in studying human movement, there is an attempt to understand, extrapolate and codify the human. As white Europeans, most of their subjects were white Europeans. This neutral observation to decide what is and isn’t how a human being looks, moves, and behaves is decided by white men from the more privileged echelons of society.
The last person we’re gonna meet from the past is Sir Francis Galton, a genius polymath and racist dick. When his cousin Charles Darwin published Origin of the Species, Galton became obsessed with the idea of hereditary, and began the collation of biometric data for research. He believed that huge amounts of human behaviours and characteristics were hereditary, and he invented the term eugenics to outline his theories. In searching for commonalities among those of shared behaviour, Galton invented composite portraiture, where he photographed numerous subjects of the same ‘type’ and amalgamated their appearance to given an average. How close or far you deviated from the average, could then be equated to how likely you were to commit such behaviour.
He presented composite portraitures of ‘healthy’ types, unhealthy ‘tubercular’ types, the ‘Jew’ type, and the ‘criminal’ type. By overlaying hundreds of pictures of criminals, Galton produced the average appearance of a criminal. The intention would be that it would make likely criminals more identifiable. As the film says, he produced a portrait which was of someone of his own invention, someone who did not themselves actually exist, but who nonetheless, were guilty of a crime.
Where am I going with all this? What has all this got to do with modern policing and body cameras?
Each of these three examples from photography’s early history were attempting make an a recordable objective truth. Each were ultimately undone by an inability to grasp their own bias, their own influence in the manufacture of the image, and their own subjectivity in its observation. Each drew on and left a legacy to the forces of violence, oppression, and racism.
“From what history, does the future dream?” asks the film.
Body cameras are used by the police to be an objective record of an incident. They are accepted in court as evidence, and even many campaigners for police accountability promote body cameras as a solution.
The film visits the Axon headquarters where most of the US’s police body cameras are manufactured, alongside tasers and drones. It also sits in on a Baltimore police training course in the use of body cameras.
Can I just break right here from the throughline of the film’s thesis to say how banal evil is. For those on the sharp end of the stick, it’s easy to imagine the forces of oppression as . . . well, impressive. You get to Axon headquarters where they are manufacturing weapons and surveillance and you are greeted by the hilariously sunny executive, who is just super jazzed to show you around this thriving enterprise. As rows of workers sit poking the electronic guts into their plastic packs, he gestures to the motivational signs hanging from the ceiling like a 1984 parody. “Go for the win” and “Be obsessed” hang above rows of uniformed process line workers making the same repetitive tests on weapons for the state. In the police training, the instructor has the same mix of tedious and perky of training instructors the world over. Folk roll their eyes at his enthusiasm for acronyms and belabouring of obvious points. Towards the end of the day, you recognise with total familiarity the look of people who’ve spent a day in a training course and just want to get home for their tea.
Back to the point. Body cameras are items manufactured by private companies for profit, and used by police to support their purposes. A body camera is designed to be as much like a human eye as possible. It’s not there to show with greater accuracy that you weren’t holding a weapon, it’s there to prove that the police officer, with their human eye, thought you were holding a weapon. Body cameras are set to a wide lens to give the maximum field of capture, as this is helpful to the police when used as evidence, but also exaggerate movement and can make objects appear closer that they are, which can distort interactions with other to make them look more frenetic and intimidating. Body cameras exclude the police themselves from the image produced, they are not a record of what the police did, but what was done to them. They are not a record of events, but a record of how the police chose to show them.
The film also visits the offices of PSS, an aerial surveillance company. Again, the CEO is a lovely man, who wants to emphasise as much as he can that his technology cannot identify people in the street. A person only appears the size of a pixel, a tiny black dot. “The only reason we know it’s not a bush is it’s moving,” he tells us. “The only reason we know it’s not a dog is because it tends to get in a car and drive away.” The notion of obscuring the humanity from your image is, in his mind, a selling point of the benignity of this type of surveillance.
You may remember hearing stories about PSS from its pilot project with Baltimore PD. The police commissioned Persistent Surveillance Systems to fly over the city with a bunch of cameras attached to it during the BLM street protests following the murder of Freddie Gray by the police. No one knew about it, not even the mayor. Needless to say, shit hit the fan when it was discovered and the project was grounded.
The CEO still believes in the work, and wants to get it back up and running. To this end he holds town hall meetings in predominantly Black areas, to explain exactly what the surveillance does do and what it doesn’t do. The communities there are understandably intensely concerned about the high murder rates, and are willing to listen to a proposed solution. The place it falls down is, as one participant puts it, “you need to turn the camera around”. The camera is always pointing into these communities of colour, and excluding what is behind the image, which is the rest of the city, profiting from the status quo. These “God’s eye” planes won’t see any crime inside the skyscrapers of the financial district. They won’t see it in leafy suburbia, where the streets are obscured with trees. It will only see it in the bare, stripped down streets of poor inner-city neighbourhoods. The film shares a quotation, which runs along the lines, the eye only sees what it looks for, and looking for it, already has an idea of what to find.
Like our blind spot, our minds have already formed an idea of what we expect to see, and in looking for it, we find it as we expected.
All Light, Everywhere runs the gamut from being a documentary about modern policing, a history of photography, and a philosophical meditation on how we know, or think we know. Being American, I usually expect anything of that sort to be heavy-handed and obvious, or self-fellatingly pretentious. But this is actually fascinating, providing an interweaving of points much more deftly and densely than I’ve relayed here. It is an insistence on the camera as a tool of power, a weapon, and by its nature incapable of objectivity. While many will persist that it captures the truth, the question remains, whose truth?
Constrain is a short film envisioning police oppression as theatre. We are all players in this piece of theatre, just without our consent, never knowing when we are stepping on stage. I know that synopsis makes it sound pretentious, but it is actually very powerful and very effective.
As shown in the initial shot, the images in the film are created through motion capture on a green screen. We are presented with blueprints of a cityscape becoming a 3D model. A neighbourhood reduced to road markings, box buildings, and edges. This is the field of play. This is the theatre of engagement.
In this theatre only you are a player. Only you act. The human figure injected into this world runs, crouches, lies face down, holds its hands up. It is dragged, kicked, hit, choked. What is doing this is absent in the image. Only the player is responsible for its actions.
It reminds me of the innumerable murdered victims of police violence. Who killed all those people? 41 bullets were shot at Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man on his own doorstep. All those believed responsible for his murder were acquitted. So who murdered him? No one. Philando Castille was shot 5 times in the chest at close range, with his murder livestreamed on Facebook for all to see. The person we all watch kill him was acquitted. No one is held accountable for his death. Eric Garner gasped out, “I can’t breathe” as he was strangled to death in the street among a crowd of witnesses and on film. No one was ever charged with his murder. All these men, they all died from nothing.
In Constrain, the figure is deliberately neutral. It has the shape of a face, a body, but these are featureless, erased of gender or race. As the figure acts out its part, runs, is beaten, is cuffed. As we see it imprisoned, attempt to evade capture, run off rooftops, we know exactly who we are seeing. The film chooses to make the area and the figure as generic as possible. In doing so, the more it obscures the more obvious it is.
The big question is who is this theatre for? Us. We are both audience and actor. The more we see how this will play out, the more we know how to act.
In ten short minutes, a powerful representation of what is missing, and why it is missing, when we describe the violence of the police.
Glaswegian comic short film about a couple who accidentally kill a drug dealer while trying to raise the funds for a deposit on a house. Made by a bunch of pals on a budget of £2.50. Nice to see the city on screen.
A hand-drawn animation about a man having an existential crisis about his job. He is supposed to check for leaks in the water system by running taps, but must assign any findings over to plumbers to fix. The impotence and frustration of his job gets to him. A short film about the atomisation and alienation of labour.
Unbelievably sweet short film about two guys making friends.
Frank is a clueless American tourist who has brought a rolling suitcase to go camping in the snowy forest around Oslo. Luckily Thorir is on hand to point out to him that he’s trying to set up camp in the centre of a lake, which might not end well. The Icelandic guy is a big Bruce Springsteen fan so takes an interest in the American.
Thorir comes off in that slightly eccentric Scandi way, while Frank has that typically sunny and chill American vibe. Together they hang out, talk shit, throw snowballs, and eventually find a decent place to camp.
