Favourites #1

Introducing your new favourite photographer. You probably know her already. Jocelyn Bain Hogg. She slays all in her path. Bolshier than bolsh. Music video directors trying to squeeze out sleaze and sex cower and quail in her gaze. Boys who make gangster films but are scared to walk the streets at night tremble in the face of her shock and awe campaign. Documentary makers trying to capture life in all it's messy authenticity hand in their retirement papers. Mary Ellen Mark and Sylvia Plachy wannabes turn to handicrafts and blogging. And Jocelyn Bain Hogg just keeps shooting and shooting and shooting...

from her series British Youth:






from her series The Firm:





from her series Idols + Believers:






from her series Pleasure Island:






from her series Muse:




All the photos above are the property of Jocelyn Bain Hogg. Apologies for theft and repurposing but I can justify it in the name of love and admiration. You want to use them for something else, go here.

Lock Off

4 years and two weeks to the day after the first performance of 'murundak', we've finally locked off the feature documentary about the songs and artists of the Black Arm Band 'murundak' tour.

Several hundred hours of live performances, observational footage, interviews and archives.

Twenty something terrabytes of anxiously created backups.

Dozens of sleepless nights imagining, fearing, fretting over the possibility of lost footage, crummy filmmaking, disappointed subjects, furious investors.

Several major network fails and dozens of rebuilds, restores and reconnections.

An intricate web of artists and subjects involved in the film.

Three deaths.

A handful of births.

Countless messy, drunken nights and crazed encounters during filming.

Even more chaotic nights of drunkenness, love and war during the edit.

81 mins, 59 seconds and 24 frames in the final analysis. (Being a bit freaky, we had to add a single frame of black within the title sequence so that the final duration could be 82mins, 0secs and 0 frames.)

A handful of the greatest folks who stuck through it all with us.

A launch date of January 27 and a broadcast date of February 13.

And, really, after all of this, we're fucking proud and fucking pleased and we're humbled to have been able to do it all in the first place. Black Arm Band. I love you.

Modern Film Journalism

“As soon as you finish a film, people want you to talk about it. And… the film is the talking. The film is the thing. So you go see the film. That’s the thing. It’s a whole thing. It is there. And that is it.”

David Lynch

Memo from Bresson #4

"Economy. Racine (to his son Louis): "Je connais assez votre ècriture sans que vous soyez obligé de mettre votre nom." [I know your handwriting well enough, without your having to sign your name]"

The Truth about Film

In Herzog's journals from the making of Fitzcarraldo - published as 'Conquest of the Useless', there is a short passage that reveals the uneasy truth about what can often exist beneath the relationship between filmmakers and those who get caught up in the process:

"As we arrived in Orellana, the young men were playing soccer, among them the teacher. Today the village is known once more by its Indian name, Wawaim. Apparently rumours are swirling around to the effect that we are planning to dig a canal from the Rio Cenepa to the Rio Marañón, and that that will dry up the fields. A fairly young, intelligent-looking man with long hair asked me whether filming or being filmed could do harm, whether it could destroy a person. In my heart, the answer was yes, but I said no."