Tag Archives: archive

A carpenter doesn‘t sit on his shavings

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Watching Ian Cheney’s The Arc of Oblivion for New Scientist, 28 February 2024

“Humans don’t like forgetting,” says an archivist from the Al Ahmed Mahmoud library in Chinguetti. Located on an old pilgrim route to Mecca, Chinguetti in Mauretania is now disappearing under the spreading Sahara. And not for the first time: there have been two previous cities on this site, the first built in 777 AD, and both have vanished beneath the dunes.

Ian Cheney, a documentary maker from Maine in the US, visits the Arabo-Berber libraries of Chinguetti towards the end of a film that’s been all about what we try to preserve and hang on to, born as we are into a universe that seems willfully determined to forget and erase our fragile leavings.

You can understand why Cheney becomes anxious around issues of longevity and preservation: as a 21st-century film-maker, he’s having to commit his life’s work to digital media that are less durable and more prone to obsolescence than the media of yesteryear: celluloid, or paper, or ceramic.

Nonetheless, having opened his film with the question “What from this world is worth saving?”, Cheney ends up asking a quite different question: “Are we insane to imagine anything can last?”

“Humans don’t like forgetting” may, in the end, be the best reason we can offer for why we frantically attempt hold time and decay at bay.

This film is built on a pun. We see Cheney and various neighbours and family friends building an ark-shaped barn in his parents’ woodland, and made from his parents’ lumber. It’s big enough, he calculates that if all human knowledge were reduced to test-tubes of encoded DNA, he could just about close the barn doors on it all.

(The ability to store information as DNA is one of the wilder detours in a film that delights in leaping down intellectual and poetic rabbit holes. The friability of memory, music and memory, ghost stories, floods and hurricanes — the list of subjects is long but, to Cheney’s credit, it never feels long).

Alongside that Ark in the woods, there is also an arc — the “arc of oblivion” that gives this film its title, and carrying the viewer away from anxiety, and into a more contemplative and accepting relationship with time. Perhaps it is enough, in this life, for us to be simply passing through, and taking in the scenery.

Executive producer Werner Herzog, a veteran filmmaker, appears towards the end of the movie. Asked why he destroys all the preparatory materials generated by his many projects, he replies “The carpenter doesn‘t sit on his shavings, either.”

This is good philosophy, and sensible practice for an artist — but it’s rather cold comfort for the rest of us. At least while we’re saving things we might be able to forget, for a moment, about oblivion.

If human happiness is what you want, then the trick may be to collect for the pure pleasure of collecting. Even as it struggles to preserve Arabo-Berber texts that date back to the time of the Prophet, the Al Ahmed Mahmoud library finds time to accept and catalogue books of all kinds donated by people who are simply passing through. We also meet speliologist Bogdan Onuc, who traces the histories of Majorcan caves by studying their layered deposits of bat guano (and all the while the caves’ unique interiors are being melted away by the carbonic acid generated by visitors’ breaths…) But Onuc still finds time to collect ornamental hedgehogs and owls.

Cheney’s cast of friends and acquaintances is long, and the film’s discursive, matesy approach to their experiences — losing photographs, burying artworks, singing to remember, singing to forget — teeters at times towards the mawkish. The Arc of Oblivion remains, nonetheless, an enjoyable and often moving meditation on the pleasures and perils of the archive.

 

 

Who’s left in the glen?

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Watching Emily Munro’s Living Proof: A climate story for New Scientist, 6 October 2021

Most environmental documentaries concentrate, on the environment. Most films about the climate crisis focus on people who are addressing the crisis.

Assembled and edited by Emily Munro, a curator of the moving image at the National Library of Scotland, Living Proof is different. It’s a film about demobbed soldiers and gamekeepers, architects and miners and American ex-pats. It’s about working people and their employers, about people whose day-to-day actions have contributed to the industrialisation of Scotland, its export of materials and methods (particularly in the field of off-shore oil and gas), and its not coincidental environmental footprint.

Only towards the end of Munro’s film do we meet protestors of any sort. They’re deploring the construction of a nuclear power plant at Torness, 33 miles east of Edinburgh. Even here, Munro is less interested in the protest itself, than in one impassioned, closely argued speech which, in the context of the film, completes an argument begun in Munro first reel (via a public information film from the mid-1940s) about the country’s political economy.

Assembled from propaganda and public information films, promotional videos and industrial reports, Living Proof is an archival history of what Scotland has told itself about itself, and how those stories, ambitions and visions have shaped the landscape, and effected the global environment.

Munro is in thrall to the changing Scottish industrial landscape, from its herring fisheries to its dams, from its slums and derelict mine-heads to the high modernism of its motorways and strip mills. Her vision is compelling and seductive. Living Proof is also — and this is more important — a film which respects its subjects’ changing aspirations. It tells the story of a poor, relatively undeveloped nation waking up to itself and trying to do right by its people.

It will come as no surprise, as Glasgow prepares to host the COP26 global climate conference, to hear that the consequences of those efforts have been anything but an unalloyed good. Powered by offshore oil and gas, home to Polaris nuclear missiles, and a redundancy-haunted grave for a dozen heavy industries (from coal-mining to ship-building to steel manufacture), Scotland is no-one’s idea of a green nation.

As Munro’s film shows, however, the environment was always a central plank of whatever argument campaigners, governments and developers made at the time. The idea that the Scots (and the rest of us) have only now “woken up to the environment” is a pernicious nonsense.

It’s simply that our idea of the environment has evolved.

In the 1940s, the spread of bog water, as the Highlands depopulated, was considered a looming environmental disaster, taking good land out of use. In the 1950s automation promised to pull working people out of poverty, disease and pollution. In the 1960s rapid communications were to serve an industrial culture that would tread ever more lightly over the mine-ravaged earth.

It’s with the advent of nuclear power, and that powerful speech on the beach at Torness, that the chickens come home to roost. That new nuclear plant is only going to employ around 500 people! What will happen to the region then?

This, of course, is where we came in: to a vision of a nation that, if cannot afford its own people, will go to rack and ruin, with (to quote that 1943 information film) “only the old people and a few children left in the glen”.

Living Proof critiques an economic system that, whatever its promises, can cannot help but denude the earth of its resources, and pauperise its people. It’s all the more powerful for being articulated through real things: schools and roads and pharmaceuticals, earth movers and oil rigs, washing machines and gas boilers.

Reasonable aspirations have done unreasonable harm to the planet. That’s the real crisis elucidated by Living Proof. It’s a point too easily lost in all the shouting. And it’s rarely been made so well.