ANNIE CRABTREE: a storage space for ideas and research

a storage space for ideas and research

[anniecrabtree-blog]

Brexit Britain: what is it like to be eastern European in the UK’s most Eurosceptic town?

A Lithuanian photographer documents Boston, the town with the highest Leave vote in Britain

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“memory as agent in the present”

“complex relationships between different kinds of memory, active in the present, and how they inform and impact on our capacity to imagine the future...”

landscape meaning different things to different communities / groups of inhabitants. 

“spatiality of memory”

“affective landscape” - physically embodied emotion

viewing from within  - "people who live there do not consider that place to be remote, on the edge... experience of that place is internalised.. not the romantic image of the highland landscape pictured from without...”

http://www.fvu.co.uk/projects/balnakiel

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The thing we call place is the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a fixed location. To write about a place is to acknowledge that phenomena often treated separately - ecology, democracy, culture, storytelling, urban design, urban design, individual life histories and collective endeavors - coexist. They coexist geographically, spatially, in place, and to understand a place is to engage with braided narratives...

Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness, introduction.

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Essayists too face the temptation of a neat ending, that point when you bring the boat to shore and tie it to the dock and give up the wide sea... it's easy to do...sometimes with a sense of betrayal of the complexity of what came before...

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, p. 249

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People describe a feeling they have, as if having lost something. I don't remember ever feeling it to be that. I was seeking, but not for something I had lost. For something that was not there yet. For something I had never had. Something of mine - something that would be mine. And I its, I suppose

Margaret Tait, quotes by Sarah Neely: http://mapmagazine.co.uk/9957/bits-ourselves-we-leave-behind/

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...reverberation of place

Sarah Neely on Tait: http://mapmagazine.co.uk/9957/bits-ourselves-we-leave-behind/

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...work is respected without being glorified, and individual, lived experience balanced with a materialist feminist attentiveness to state systems and economic imperatives.

Catherine Spencer: http://mapmagazine.co.uk/9966/observing-women-work-franki-raffles/

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Women Workers makes space for the women's humorous, confident and combative voices, while each image is composed so that their bodies are framed by their surroundings, but never overwhelmed by them.

Catherine Spencer: http://mapmagazine.co.uk/9966/observing-women-work-franki-raffles/

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ONE PRSON'S STORY BECOMES THE POINT OF ENTRY TO LARGER TERRITORIES

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, p. 194

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We consume each other in a thousand ways, some of them joys, some of them crimes and nightmares.

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, p.205

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“...her practice as a photographer to be the change she so longed for in the world. Empowering, fighting, laughing; for Franki Raffles there was no separation between politics, work and life.” Sarah Munro

“Without the understanding thatI gain from talking to women, I cannot produce good photographs. I want my phonographs to show how women feel, and to do this I have to learn myself.” Franki Raffles

“Her photographs do not frame their subject as ‘other’ or categorise the protagonist as ‘type’. Hers is not the ethnographic eye.” Jenny Brownrigg

“The roles confirmed by work create equality between the person behind and in front of the camera.” Jenny Brownrigg

Emphasising that the single image is not adequate in capturing the complexity and contradictions of life. 

https://jennybrownrigg.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/selection_fressay.pdf

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I always though of this film as if you were walking under gentle rain. After two hours of being exposed to it, you would be wet without having felt the heavy, imposed dramatic effect of it.

Walter Salles on The Motorcycle Diaries, as quoted by Rebecca Solnit in The Faraway Nearby (p.176).

[anniecrabtree-blog]

“hardly any landscape shots”

Up in West Yorkshire, Francis Lee has to call me from the top of the moor, the one place near his home where there is decent reception. Lee explains that he was raised in the Pennines, the son of a sheep farmer, and only recently moved back. “I left Yorkshire at 20 because it felt claustrophobic,” he shouts into the phone. “Moved to London to be an actor. Basically I was running away from everything I now write about.”

His debut feature, God’s Own Country, which charts the romance between an anguished young sheep farmer and a Romanian migrant worker, is a brooding, beautiful drama, as sensitive as chapped skin. At its premiere in Sundance, critics dubbed it “a British Brokeback Mountain”, although that’s not quite what he intended. More than anything, he wanted to show the countryside as he saw it: harsh and unforgiving; framed in chilly close-ups.

“When I was an unemployed actor, I’d sit at home and watch Escape to the Country on TV. But that’s not real, it’s just porn. And then on those few occasions when the countryside is depicted on screen, it’s always big, wide, expansive, bucolic. In my experience, it’s cold, it’s wet. You’ve got your hood up and your head down; you’re not looking around. That’s why there are hardly any landscape shots in this film. It’s all about the mud and the wind.”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/apr/28/countryside-the-levelling-gods-own-country-abandon-inner-city

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a rare breed of new British social-realist dramas that abandon the inner city in favour of muddy forecourts and derelict barns.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/apr/28/countryside-the-levelling-gods-own-country-abandon-inner-city

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Clavel by Shona Main

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Clavel is someone you wouldn’t normally hear about. He’s never made a fortune or won fame for anything. Yet his story and spirit gives heart to a society ill at ease with the idea of getting old. Following him through the sheep year – from lambing to market to the slipping of the ram – this film is a study of a man, his way of life and those around who help him do it.

Shona Main: https://shonamain.wordpress.com/clavel/

[anniecrabtree-blog]

The space between documentarist & subject: the quietly radical ideas & ethics of Jenny Gilbertson. I am interested in the films of Jenny Gilbertson (1902-1990) & the nature, dynamics & ethics of relationships in documentary filmmaking. My practice-led research will consider the core question of how to create & sustain an ethical filmmaking relationship with the people you are filming. Alongside archival investigation & close study of Gilbertson’s films, I will visit the communities she filmed in Shetland & Arctic Canada (scheduled 2018) to visually explore her approach & my own before offering a critically reflective analysis of her legacy & its potential for contemporary documentary practice. Key interests: Women filmmakers; the history of documentary, ethical practice in documentary & realist filmmaking; representations of the people of the Northern Isles & the Arctic.

Shona Main: http://www.sgsah.ac.uk/about/students/ahrcdtpstudentprofiles2016-17/headline_499758_en.html