Partners
During the course of the development and production of the WORK films, the commissioning partners and artists met regularly - in reality and online - to share progress, thoughts and experience. Vivienne Reiss joined these sessions, and spoke with the artists in between times, to consider how the artists, in their distinct approaches, set about working with the people who feature in and contributed to the making of their films.
Vivienne Reiss is a creative producer working with artists on site-specific commissions and participatory programmes. She has led participation and learning programmes in a number of galleries including Tate, National Portrait Gallery and South London Gallery. As a visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London she developed the visual practice module on the MA in Participatory and Community Art and she has written for and edited a number of publications including Art of Negotiation which explores artist-led participatory initiatives. She currently develops art strategies and managing art commissions in health contexts and the wider public realm.
Introduction
To accompany another person is to walk beside that person; to become a companion; to be present…we are implicitly saying: your life is important. It’s worth my time to talk to you. It may be worth your time to talk to me.
The WORK programme, devised by Animate Projects, in partnership with four other Midlands arts organisations, has at its core the exploration of contemporary working lives through the engagement with workers, places and situation. For the commissioned artists, this quote by Staughton Lynd [1] has resonance with their approach and the way they involved participants in the creation of these films. The line between artist and subject in the traditional documentary sense has been blurred; conversations and getting to know one another have been a fundamental part of the overall process.
During the year in which the projects were developed and made, I joined a series of meet ups with: the artists - Esther Johnson, Jenny Holt, Dryden Goodwin and Adam Lewis-Jacob; representatives from their host organisations - Junction Arts, Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, QUAD and Vivid Projects; and Animate Projects, who devised the programme. My role was to help guide the participatory process and together we shared and discussed work in progress along the way.
We talked about their approaches to working with participants, the notion of authorship, ethical issues and the challenges in some instances of working with vulnerable people, the impact on the artists’ practice and the legacy of the programme. In order to consider and clarify the role of the participants we interrogated terms such as social, participatory, collaborative and dialogic art, and looked to theorists [2] to shed some light on these, and their appropriateness to WORK.
The projects grew through encounters and conversations with people in relation to their experiences of work. Participants moved beyond that of subject, playing an active part in informing the process and the way they are represented. This has been achieved by the artists taking an open and responsive, and working alongside the participants in an empathetic way. They talk about a process of discovery, shadowing, mirroring, familiarity, connection, friendship and exchange. This approach has affected the content and form of the films, which are shaped by the evolving relationships.
The theme, ‘work’ - the connecting point for all the films - is explored through the working lives, or the lack of work, in relation to a range of individuals and communities. Lynd’s quote comes from his interest in the notion of ‘history-from-below’, and similarly, the artists focus on people who may not be celebrated in history books and who have untold stories; they are interested in the narratives of ‘real’ people and in humanity itself.
Each of the projects, in different ways, engages with the minutiae of the personal and the everyday reflecting or revealing social concerns, some giving voice to marginalised people and communities. They address the right to work and workers’ rights, and they raise issues about the nature and value of work, either directly or in more nuanced ways.
A significant aspect of the WORK programme is the recognition that time needs to be taken to develop relationships and build trust between artists, partner organisations and participants. The projects build on local connections and established relationships and these will continue through the partner organisations and the programme comes to an end.
The following texts describe each of the projects, focusing on the participatory process under three headings - context, process and legacy - providing a structure for the narrative. However, building the relationships and the deep connections with participants’ working situations have been created over a period of time and are revealed in more poignant ways through the films themselves.
[1] ‘Oral History from Below’, The Oral History Review, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Spring, 1993). This quote was introduced to the WORK programme by Esther Johnson who referenced Staughton Lynd in her initial proposal.
[2] See Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, Grant H Kester, University of California Press 2004; Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed Claire Bishop, Whitechapel and MIT Press 2006; Art of Negotiation, ed David Butler and Vivienne Reiss, Arts Council England, 2007Don’t Look Now! Art after the Viewer and beyond Participation, Dave Beech, in Searching for Art’s New Publics, intellect 2010, ed Jeni Walwin.
Alongside
It’s about tuning in and being responsive and creating the situation through conversations and the conduit of drawing and video for intimate exchange.
Context
Dryden Goodwin’s proposal was to create an expanded portrait of a local healthcare worker, and Jane Hardstaff, Creative Wellbeing Officer at QUAD, introduced him to Paul Johnstone. Dryden worked primarily with Paul and also with his clients from Community Links, a day centre for adults with disabilities. The focus of the film is Paul’s working day, through the prism of his activities with his clients Jack, David and Rob. Paul Calderwood, Director of Community Links, helped manage the involvement of clients and their families.
Process
Paul J and Paul C were instrumental in acting as intermediaries and communicating with the parents and carers of the clients. Interestingly, both of them have a background in art and Paul J continues to be a practicing artist. This had been a key factor in them being open to the project and their support in the process to make it possible. Dryden talks about there being a huge amount of goodwill extended from everyone involved and Paul J was an integral part of helping to establish the necessary degree of trust and communication to make the work.
Over a six-month period, Dryden spent time with Paul, shadowing him while he worked, observing, filming, and reflecting with him on his working practices and the joys and challenges of working with those he supports professionally. Drawing is a part of Dryden’s practice both as a way of observing and also in creating another space for conversation – he talks about the intimacy of drawing which also echoes the intimacy of relations between Paul and his clients. For both Dryden and Paul how they work is "all in the looking and the observing and building a bigger picture of the person."
Paul spoke at length to Dryden about the power of “mirroring” in his work with his clients. Paul uses speech patterns, a melodic voice, whistling, and repeated turns of phrase, to "mirror" the client’s communications, creating a framework of reassurance, constancy and security for the clients. This way of working also supports communication between them to fulfil their plans for a day. Dryden has taken this notion of “mirroring” into his own approach to the film: “through the in-situ recording of my drawings I have created my own type of reflective surface with the film - with the aim of pursuing a real insight into this type of work.”
Dryden describes Paul as a type of muse for the project. He commented on Paul’s persona, temperament and generosity to open up about his thoughts and feelings in connection to his work. Paul has acted as an on-going inspiration or guiding light in relation to the development of the project. His experience as an artist is explicit within the film; he talks about observation and looking for cues, and there’s sensitivity in relation to his attention and engagement with people.
Qualities such as Paul’s attentive subtlety of intervention, gentle energy, vigilant alertness, enabling but being careful not to disempower the clients - all of these have had an influence on the type of atmosphere that I am endeavouring to communicate in the edit of the film and through a carefully crafted soundtrack.
Dryden talks about the particular challenges in developing an aesthetic that acknowledged the complexity of representing a person and their relationships with others with vulnerability at the core. He describes the language of the film as being non-intrusive and constructing the imagery through fragments engaging the imagination and thus evoking more than we can see.
Legacy
Alongside has led Dryden to new ways of thinking about drawing and live action in relation to creating an empathetic space and he is planning to extend the project into a new VR work at a later point.
At the heart of the film there’s a questioning about the value and status of healthcare work and Paul talks about being at the “coalface of humanity” and the impact of cuts to the service. In creating a portrait of someone who is a care worker, Peter Bonnell, Senior Curator at QUAD, comments on how an artwork might offer insight into the social care system. The commission follows a yearlong season at QUAD focusing on wellbeing and is part of an on going work and wider debate around creative wellbeing.
The Great Bear
We’re working in this dance of filming, doing, acting, talking and describing.
Context
Situated in Thrapston in rural Northamptonshire, Jenny Holt’s project explores the interface between historical farming culture and the more recent development of the distribution industry, the two dominant economies with parallels in their rootedness in the area’s place identity. She met and consulted with a wide range of individuals and organisations to gain introductions to local workers with support from James Steventon at Fermynwoods and colleagues who come from and live in the area. The film centres around four people - Erin Dorward, Rowan Routley, Joe Wood and Morgana Onofri - and explores the connections and their different working relationships with animals, the environment and produce from the land.
Process
Initially Jenny spent time getting to know people and the place; she describes a process involving “creative research enquiry” and engaging with the different working communities, for example, the Thrapston Young Farmers’ Club. She was able to immerse herself within a local farming community, which involved meeting and chatting to people, observing and taking part in daily working situations. She talks about shadowing the working processes and being responsive to what is going on at times “jumping from filming to being an active part of the work taking place.” Gaining an understanding of each other’s work and sharing related skills, including those of photography and filming making, became part of the conversations with participants. This became a means of gathering knowledge and beginning the collaborative process. Sound and image recording, sketching and writing were all part of the creative research.
This process has made my practice more participatory, and experiential. Filming and recording is not simply about looking and listening: there is a tactile and active materiality to the filming process that is generative and dialogic. It has made me more alive to the fact that each of the participants expresses their character through their working practice.
Jenny talks about building a rapport and asking questions - importantly, knowing what questions to ask. She commented that the participants were intrigued about her interest in their work and it has made them reflect themselves on their working lives. Focusing attention on the everyday and what is often overlooked, throughout the process, Jenny set about making visible their daily work. She shines a spotlight on human gesture and interaction against an expansive backdrop of landscape and industry.
The project had complex production issues, as there was a disparate group of participants in very different working situations. Sometimes communication was tricky, and with farming working times, weather dependent. Meeting people at work in the distribution companies and getting a foot in the door involved lengthy negotiations, over many months, with three different global corporations to negotiate access. Jenny refers to the more “accessible and visible work in the English countryside to the hidden labour of an international work force”. She was taken on tours of distribution centres and was able to take photographs, and in one company she organised a photography workshop as a way of meeting people who worked there. It took a year; however, her perseverance 80sresulted in permission to film in one location.
Jenny describes the form of the film being generated from the dialogue about working practices. There is an echoing of the process of the skills being performed with her own process of filmmaking. A further dimension is created through “to-ing and fro-ing” - and the collaboration with Felix Weldon on the improvisational percussion sound piece.
Everything is this melting pot of producing, directing, editing, music, sounds, being there. It's so reflective of these active working lives of the people that I'm working with.
Legacy
Jenny has begun to work on an international partnership project in Sweden working with people from the agricultural industry. She is planning to develop a methodology based on her approach to her WORK project to explore ideas around food and innovation. She is also developing a proposal for a new project with the Forestry Commission in the Lake District.
There are plans to curate and exhibition of work by Erin and Rowan who have been taking photographs during the project and to show this with the work from the workshop at the distribution company. Jenny is interested in finding a way for the participants to represent themselves through this process. Connections between staff at Fermynwoods and participants have been established and James is exploring opportunities for their longer-term involvement in the work of the organisation.
People Meeting in a Room
Context
Birmingham’s Trade Union Resource Centre (TURC) archive provided the starting point for Adam’s commission. Yasmeen Baig-Clifford, Director of Vivid Projects, talks about the initial brief for the artist as “activating” the archive, creating a contemporary response to workers rights, campaigning and legislation. Vivid has an on going associated programme of residencies and events to make the archive accessible to a range of audiences and Yasmeen and her colleagues have supported the commission by introducing Adam to people linked to the archive, and sharing knowledge and ideas. The participants are people that were involved with TURC as well as curators, artists, activists and artist friends with experience relating to the research themes.
Process
Adam Lewis-Jacob describes people’s contributions in different ways. Marian Hall, Muhammad Idrish, and Ranbir Bains, are all TURC associates, having been involved with the archive in the 80s - Marian more recently as an archivist. Through conversations with them Adam has been able to explore the archive and connection with the WORK themes.
Over a year, Adam built strong relationships with people involved with the TURC archive, which really helped shape and guide the research and development process. He took his cue from their collaborative approach in working with communities, building trust and friendship to convey collective issues. Muhammad Idrish talks about the way they worked in the 1980s, “turning the camera around” and referring to the close relationships between people in front and behind the lens and “a conversation in a room, a gang of friends sitting together and having a chat”, thus inspiring the title of the film.
A series of workshops have been an important way to bring people together to create collaborative re-interpretations of the archive. These included two screening events of films with Muhammad Idrish and Ranbir Bains and a film and sound/dance collaborative performance with artist Susannah Stark. Adam describes this approach in resulting in a more critical, creative and inclusive process of development, with more diverse representations of subject matter.
The involvement of other creative practitioners – animators, cinematographers and performers - extends this collaborative approach. They include Jason Kerley, an animator, who has re-worked the Steve Bell’s original animations in work that he made with the TURC in the 80s. Adam also collaborated with Christane Noelle Charles and Alicia Mathews, who contribute performative elements of the project that were developed through workshops exploring ways of presenting the research and key themes raised by the archive.
This rich tapestry of relationships, creativity and activism across generations has come about through conversations, exchanges, workshops and events. Adam talks about friendship and “people coming together” as key to the project. The film is an embodiment of ideas from the themes from the archive rather than a literal interpretation of workers' rights. Whilst the initial focus was on Trade Union activism in the 80’s, Adam also refers to later content which includes music video, as a means to providing an interpretation of the earlier content.
Legacy
Throughout the project Adam has also been working with other activists making documentaries for a range of exhibitions and screening events. He has plans to continue working with Muhammad Idrish on a new project that will involve filming in Bangladesh. During the project he received a LUX Scotland/BBC commission to produce a short animation, which involve some of the collaborators from the WORK project, and he presented elements of the project in an exhibition at CCA, Glasgow.
Adam continues to curate a programme of films from the archive. Yasmeen talks about how the project has enabled Vivid to discover more people and stories and connections and engaged wider audiences that they will continue to work with.
a ROLE to PLAY
I believe the filmmaking process is not only a technical and creative process, but is a social and embodied act.
Context
The setting for Esther Johnson’s film is the community of Bolsover, and she was interested in exploring the impact of economic changes brought from post-industrialisation and also the unique landscape, topography and layered history of the area. The Freedom Community Project, which was established in 2008, driven by local need, is central to her project. It acts as a nexus for local residents struggling to find work, or suffering from in-work poverty. The centre is based at Bolsover Methodist Church, and runs a food bank, free café, advice service and classes, including a literacy group. Amy Smith at Junction Arts played a key role in introducing Esther to people at the centre and have been part of developing on-going relationships with centre visitors, staff and volunteers and gathering their stories of work and unemployment across generations.
Process
Esther’s initial exploratory trip took place almost a year before she began filming, and early on in the project she went on walks around Bolsover with various people as a way of finding out the place. She also organised several local trips and a visit to the Houses of Parliament, hosted by Dennis Skinner, previously MP for Bolsover, who also features in the film. She spent a substantial amount of time meeting people at the centre, ‘hanging out’ and having conversations over tea in the café and taking part in events. This established different situations and environments to enable participants to consider and share their stories.
I very much wanted to grow and learn alongside project participants in this project, and for contributors storytelling to be privileged over question answering as in traditional documentary or journalistic interviewing.
Over nine months Esther contributed to the literacy group course, taking on an active role devising creative projects and resources. She talks about this group being key in the development of the project and the importance of having the time to develop relationships and building trust with participants and contributors, and she describes the openness and generosity of the group. It has created a space for people to tell their stories and reflect on the nature of work. Responding to being involved in the WORK programme, one of the participants commented “It made me think about my value and work in a different way.” And another participant who has dedicated much of her life caring for her parents said: “It made me realise that that is work and I am valued for that.”
Esther has developed her own practice through WORK, exploring new methods of documentary and verbatim theatre and developing new ways of story telling based on concepts from theatre for social change. She talks about her “interest in working in partnership with people to tell their stories.” Esther developed a film script from oral testimonies and also written work generated in the literacy group sessions. Some members of the group appear on screen in the film, whilst others remain anonymous but have their stories integrated and woven into its fabric. Responding sensitively to personal disclosure and respecting people’s vulnerabilities have been part of the conversations about the ways in which participants’ stories are portrayed.
The film has been created with a range of participants with multiple roles as collaborators, storytellers and also performers; it features Bolsover residents Stephen Cotton, Adrian Drury, Jeanette Haigh, Serena Hammond and Dennis Skinner.
Legacy
Esther acknowledges the huge amount of support from Amy Smith, Project Coordinator at Junction Arts, and colleagues at the Freedom Centre who have enabled her to explore new territory and “follow her gut” in a looser way than previous projects. She describes the project as “motivating me to challenge my practice and innovate storytelling methods that mix testimony, documentary and reverie.”
Esther is bringing together the many strands of research undertaken throughout the project process with the publication of a newspaper including sections that double as posters that highlight literacy group individuals’ stories and poems of WORK. Amy has commented that the host organisation’s role is to ensure the legacy of the work continues.
Here are the words in the reading bank
He worked on a building site and in a tennis-ball factory before becoming a full time writer in 1981. He has been poet in residence at English National Opera, UK Trade & Investment, Barnsley Football Club and Humberside Police. He presents The Verb, Radio 3’s Cabaret of the Word, performs on his own and with cartoonist Tony Husband and musician Luke Goss, and writes weekly columns for The Yorkshire Post and The Barnsley Chronicle.
Here are the words, stacked high in The Reading Bank; there are shelves full of them, baskets bulging with them. Here’s a tottering pile of words that might fall over if you pull one out clumsily, and here’s a bargain bin of words that are demanding to be used.
We should all have access to The Reading Bank; it’s one of my favourite banks because it never refuses you a loan, you can never be overdrawn, and the bank manager is always keen to tell you stories.
I’m lucky because I’ve had an account at The Reading Bank for years and years and that account has helped me to travel to places I never thought I’d visit, and meet people I never thought I’d get to know, all from the comfort of my settee.
Having an account at The Reading Bank has also helped me to open another account at the bank next door, The Writing Bank; this bank has given me words free of charge to make poems with, and create tales with, and make sense of the world around me with.
Reading leads to writing in the same way that sunset leads to sunrise and Bolsover leads to Poolsbrook.
I want to see a world where we’ve all got accounts in these two banks; where we’re all readers and we’re all writers because our stories, whoever we are, are worth telling and other peoples’ stories, whoever they are, are worth reading.
Welcome to The Reading Bank; welcome to The Writing Bank. Come in, sit down, and let’s all begin to spend the endless currency of words.
Ian McMillan was born, and lives, in Darfield, South Yorkshire. He studied at North Staffordshire Polytechnic.
Adam Pugh is a writer and designer based in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he also runs Projections, the artist programme at Tyneside Cinema.
Do we need work, or does it need us? The changing face of labour in the last few decades - towards automation, atomisation, autonomy - has, as all four of these films uncover, twisted even its own etymology. Here, dancing around between distribution hubs and foreclosed town centres, attentive companionship and relics of resistance is the word fulfilment. Does it describe carrying out a process, or does it entail realisation, contentment, self-actualisation? Perhaps in this word is the kernel of how we think about work, and what it thinks about us.
Here in the Midlands is England’s centre, its towns once central to England’s economic might, its fields of coal and wheat helping to power and feed the nation. How English the Arcadian fields in The Great Bear and a ROLE to PLAY; no lachrymose troubadour more English than John Dowland, a refrain from whose Flow My Tears recurs plaintively in Esther Johnson’s film. And so English, this contradictory country that has both welcomed and spat out its immigrants, flirted with the far right and campaigned for social justice, as People Meeting in a Room describes.
Adam Lewis-Jacob’s detour through community video from the Trade Union Resource Centre archive, overseen by Steve Bell’s anarcho-penguin - now a victim, now a neoliberal fat cat - pinpoints the spectre that hangs over all four films in WORK: that of Margaret Thatcher, and of the ground she prepared for the beginning of the end. But just as the union-busting, profiteering, privatising and short selling presaged by those formative years of deregulation and divestment of public assets is here, so are the demos, the grassroots activism, lone figures standing up and serried ranks resisting.
By contrast, a ROLE to PLAY begins with a read-through, a preparation: the work carried out before the work begins. A play entails producing work; here it’s work about work, and this all seems apposite. For some, work is a world determined as though by a script; for others a constant rehearsal which never reaches the stage. In Bolsover, the show is over and the title of the next production is not yet clear. Between the opulent interiors of the castle and the foreclosed shops and vacant lots of the town centre, this place, built on coal, has its fair share of problems, not least the fact that a majority of its population has opted for self-immolation at the hands of a Tory MP. But perhaps the problem, between the jobs that have gone and those that have mutated, is that for left and right alike to characterise Bolsover, true blue for the first time since the seat was created in 1950, as an ‘ex-mining town’ is missing the point, or rather, preserving it in perpetual decline by describing what it was rather than is. A current warehousing town, a gig economy town; a town with no Beast anymore, but a Conservative who is the ‘grandson of a miner.’
Sometimes it’s relatively simple. All the carer and the cared-for in Dryden Goodwin’s Alongside need, to be as effective as possible - for the carer, this means caring, for the cared-for, safety and independence - is proper resources. The local is enmeshed in the national, and politics affects all. The Englishism of not talking about politics is self-abnegation. In frontline services, in shuttered town centres on the wrong end of a parasitic relationship with US multinationals, everything is political, or should be. And, as Jenny Holt’s The Great Bear hints even in its title, this continues even in its bucolic, fully Barboured rural heart, where mechanisation and global supply chains wrestle the last of nature onto a conveyor belt. Its empty scenes of street-lamp glare on verdant trees, and combine harvester headlamps sweeping twilit fields, conjure a world of work in the semi-rural and extra-urban, these new zones in which crouch the great sheds of distribution and fulfilment.
Thatcher is here. But it isn’t the 1980s anymore, and that decade seems an unlikely source of inspiration for solidarity in the 2020s: unionism was being dismantled already, heavy industry stripped, public services sold off. The 80s were the beginning of the end. Just as the construction of the ‘former mining town’ no longer scans, neither will the resistances of the 80s confront the inequalities of the 20s. Our landscape of food and child poverty, insecure and effectively unregulated housing, and a precarity of employment, more resembles the turn of the last century than its final decades.
There are of course different routes through this. One is to submit and accept our fate; another is to fight - for union recognition, for decent jobs, for proper contracts - and yet another is to reject and refuse.
To force the Amazons and Hermeses into a more just employment is to legitimise them further, and in so doing willingly contribute to the dissolution of labour as we know it and the primacy of and acknowledge the need for fulfilment centres and distribution depots and self-employed couriers. Reform is not in itself a progressive force. Where in the past, it came to schools, workhouses, the legal system, it was to create more equitable public institutions; to improve those systems upon which everyone depended. The problem is, we don’t need Amazon, and we don’t need Monsanto. To get caught in the trap of declaring job creation a virtue, regardless of the nature of the job, is to be ensnared even more effectively in the web of neoliberalism. The third option is the way of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the pale scrivener who answered ‘I prefer not to’. Alternatives abound, not least Universal Basic Income. Whether this path takes us into anti-work or equitable labour isn’t the point, but that what we do prefer - fulfilment as a means to an end, or fulfilment as an end in itself - is up to us to decide.
Helen de Witt is a curator, lecturer and writer specialising in experimental and artists’ film and independent cinema. She is programme advisor for the BFI London Film Festival and a lecturer at Birkbeck University of London and University of the Arts London.
The four WORK films, in very different ways, examine ideas and experiences around work, from the local to the global and how the past is brought to bear on the present.
Jenny Holt’s The Great Bear, shot in rural Northamptonshire, is a big-sky farming film of quotidian working life on the land. Alongside by Dryden Goodwin is a beautifully sensitive series of sketches of the life of a community support carer in Derby. In Meeting in a Room, Adam Lewis Jacob has made an incisive multi-format piece that gives voice to the people of Birmingham ignored by capitalism’s alienating structures of work. Esther Johnson’s A Role to Play is an inclusive tribute to the resilience of a community forced to change after the pit closures of the 1980s.
Taken together, these four very special and relevant films provide a picture of many aspects of working life in the Midlands today. They use a variety of imaginative visual techniques to reveal the political histories of how working life became what it is today. The artists use different filmmaking styles to make moving-image portraits of workers going about their work in a complex network of circumstances.
The idyllic Northamptonshire countryside is the main character in Jenny Holt’s film, The Great Bear. The piece has a timeless feel. Through wide-angle shots, we see the diurnal change in light, the seasonal ripening of crops and the Spring shearing of sheep. The technology may have changed, but this work to feed and clothe the people has gone on forever. The typical image of the rural worker has changed too - a shepherd who is young, and female. Could this be one reason for a greater empathy with the animals, even if we know they are still destined for slaughter? And change in the dramatic transformation in the global food trade, demonstrated by a visit to a huge warehouse where the food comes from all around the world, as do the people who work there.
Dryden Goodwin is known for his beautifully intricate sketches that capture fleeting moments, with details that uncover much about character. His film, Alongside, follows Paul Johnstone, a community care worker in Derby, who looks after people with severe physical disabilities and autism. Paul is kind and conscientious, very aware of his clients’ individual requirements and his responsibility to them. Goodwin’s drawn sketches of him and the clients are intimate and revealing, but his camerawork is more distant and oblique, sometimes even blurred. It’s as if he is saying that the image of a person is never enough to know them, and that an image can also be damaging, leading to judgement and false assumptions, particularly of people who are disadvantaged by decades of systemic exclusion. His film is a plea for adequate social care and a tribute to carers so vital in any humane society.
People Meeting in a Room is apt title for a film that takes in many people, in many rooms. Adam Lewis Jacob's dazzling film displays a huge range of visual strategies from animation, to black-and-white still photography to archive Super8. An animated penguin takes us behind the green door to visit people involved in different kinds of work and activism in Birmingham. These range from veteran campaigner Muhammad Idrish, whose views on the Right and the Left of British politics are hard to disagree with, to a community editing class learning about how the media can manipulate reporting. The film contextualizes the precarious and alienating effect of contemporary working conditions as the direct result of 1980s neo-liberal capitalism made possible by the digitisation of the markets. Labour laws were changed, and unions busted to clear a path for what we now know as the gig economy. It is far from a downbeat film, though. From political campaigning, through music video to dance, it is as robust in its tribute to the resilience and resistance of people through collective action, as it is in its condemnation of market economics.
Finally, we visit Bolsover, as the opening sign announces in Esther Johnson’s A Role to Play. In the 1980s the Derbyshire town became more famous for its resistance to pit closures than it had previously been for its imposing 17th Century castle. Using a range of strategies across theatrical performance and documentary, the film engages with local people desperate to develop their lives. It starts and finishes with the story of a young girl from a difficult background who, despite the odds, fulfils her dreams of a place at acting school. There is a trainee tattooist who has at last found his metier, and a retired teacher, who refuses to give up teaching. Most inspiring, though, is Stephen, a young man who, despite setbacks, worked hard to learn to read through the Freedom Centre, now helps others to do so, volunteered - and is now employed - at the foodbank.
The film also serves as an affectionate attribute to Dennis Skinner, called the ‘Beast of Bolsover’ for his stand against the Thatcher government’s deindustrialisation policies. Skinner lost his seat in the December 2019 election after 49 years as Bolsover’s MP. He persuasively tells his story of being a miner who entered politics to make things better for his community. He talks about the way he encouraged new businesses into the area after the pit closures, but how many of those business now operate repressive and restrictive employment practices. Skinner bring the threads of the film together in his advocacy for education and the importance of helping others.
Viewed together, the WORK films offer us an inside picture of working life in the Midlands - from field to factory and from dance studio to tattoo parlour; stories are surely relevant to the whole of Britain. The artists are all generous to their subjects, giving them time to speak for themselves, and allowing us in on their worlds of work. Not always easy, because work rarely is, they are unflinching in their condemnation of discriminatory practices and unfair public policies. With great integrity, they bring into focus a selection of people who, in their own ways, work for equality in the system. And this, as we know, is a job that is never done.
Paul Johnstone
Well, it's what we all do a million times a day, but we don't always take it in, do we? That's the thing, I suppose. It's all in the looking, isn't it? It's all in the observing. It's all in, you know...So you can just build a bigger picture of the person.
Morning. How are you doing?
Yeah, you're always looking out for the person that you're with. You're in somebody's life for that time. You want to try and draw something out of people. Being there with that person, at that moment.
So it's somewhere new to have a look at.
See you later.
See you later.
He doesn't want to see himself as needing words to be bolstered and reinforced, because he understands what you're saying anyway. Don't ever try and press a lift button for him. He wants to be as independent as he possibly can, and he really does fight for that. And rather than thinking you're doing someone a favour, it's like you're disempowering them. "I can do it, so just let me do it," you know?
OK, here we go. Are you ready? Now, what would you like – chips or burger?
Burger.
OK……OK. Here we go Jack…smaller bit…bit of cheese on that piece Sir. A chip there as well? Good man. Great stuff, great stuff. Want a burger?
Yeah.
Great. You're doing well.
All right there? Right, then, ready for a bit of burger? Bit on cheese on, Jack. OK. Thanks, Jack.
There are lots of people with needs out there. Recognisable needs. Maybe it's just the times we live in, but rather than being hidden away in an institution, people are out and about, living their lives.
What do you think? Would you like to do that? When you're ready, you can tell me, OK?
David? David? Shall we go swimming?
Here we go, here we go…Music?
M&S lorry.
M&S lorry.
Sainsbury's lorry.
Sainsbury's lorry.
M&S lorry.
M&S lorry.
Sainsbury's lorry.
Sainsbury's lorry.
We’re following that Sainsbury's lorry.
M&S lorry.
M&S lorry.
You're just trying to find a way to, I suppose, be…be constant for a start, because you kind of need that. It's just you're there...OK, he's there again, he's copying the sounds I'm making. I can only guess. It's some kind of...security. This hasn't changed. I don't have to worry because it's not a scary situation, because I recognise the sounds that we're making between us. I do this, he does that. That's good. It's...it's keeping us grounded. I'm not in unknown, insecure territory, I suppose, you know?
Reminds me of my old man, he could whistle like that.
The way things have gone recently...with the cuts…there's nobody standing saying much for them at all. They really are the first to feel the cuts. They really are, you know? People's disabilities having to be tested – you think, "Jesus, man, is there no better way to run a society?” At the end of the day, all you can do is be in there – being the person that's trying to...make folks have a fulfilled day.
It's easy…It’s only care work. You kick back. All you're doing, you know, it’s cups of tea and biscuits, and all that. And I'm sure that's still there. But you can only do what you do yourself. Vulnerable people's needs…For God's sake, man, you know, it's human beings. You're at the coalface of humanity, really. But I don't know where there's anything easy about that.
It's all about normalisation. Just to try and normalise, you know, stuff that we all take for granted. You think, "OK, we're going to make this goes smoothly.” And so you just have to be...just aware. There's still moments when it becomes fraught, but you try and, um...You're just trying to remain level-headed about it. And it is what it is. We're there, we've got as much right as everyone else to be here. And in general, people are great. In general, people are.
You just try to find ways to....be with them, facilitate what they need. And I don't know, become familiar enough. You can work with somebody a long time, you can get to know their habits, but you might not really know them. People perceive the world differently. How do you start to be involved with that? I can't explain it beyond that, I don't suppose. Well, everybody wants companionship, communication - but do they? Because if you have a different perception of the world, then you might not. You might just be happily going along on your rails too, and if everything, your needs are being met, why would you need anything else?
If security and insecurity are such big factors, and how you're gonna operate during the day, then you've got to be there to reassure the whole time, man. "We're going to walk to the gym, and we're going to have a Coke, and then we're going to go for a bike ride.” And it's there. It's a solid, actual thing. We've got proof of it there – "This is what we're going to do.” And it's another tool for saying, ”Yes." You know, he's chosen that. He's picked the symbols and gone - it’s this, this and this. And you go, "Yeah, that's it.” Lets do it.
And then what are we gonna do after it?
We're gonna go cycle?
What you gonna have?
Hamburger and Coke.
Hamburger and Coke.
I suppose you're looking for cues the whole time. I mean, his reaction is all you've kinda got to go on, cos he's not going to tell you outright, "Yeah, I like this, I like that.” So, it's lots of observation, and just seeing what…if you get a response at all, sometimes. And it can just be a slight nod of the head, be a small, short sound. It's difficult, because it would be fantastic to try new stuff. But new stuff is a different environment. You’re trying to find a line between, you know, giving people more experience…and confirming what we're doing next. Repeating what it is we're doing now. So you're keeping it going the whole time – to the next, to the next, to the next. And Mum says he's like that at home as well. That's been achieved - next, next, next, keep going.
And I suppose because we all have…we pick up signals all the time. Our brain's processing the way other people are looking at you, reading facial expressions and stuff like that. Some of the folks I work with, they don't...they can't process the signals that we can as quickly as we can. They can be at a disadvantage from the very start. You can fall behind with that. That's got to be a hellish place to be in, when everybody else is...we can be eloquent, and we all can just get on moving and working our way through our lives.
The world's a scary enough place. When you put yourself in the position of a son or a daughter who's more vulnerable, I can't imagine the pressure that that must be. So to be able to be that person that can take some of that pressure for parts of the day. An awful lot of trust. People stay with you, because it's people's lives.
We're all here at this moment, and you do whatever you can do. You know, just trying to help people enjoy the ride to a degree, you know. Like I'm trying to enjoy it myself.
The Great Bear
Jenny Holt
English Oak
Sessile Oak
Pedunculate Oak
Japonica
Leyland Cypress
Red Cedar
Western Hemlock
Silver Birch
Poplar
Red kites, buzzards, kestrels, sparrow hawks. They’re our birds of prey. And then we have cuckoos and jays and everything that bomb about you, as well as all the little songbirds.
Trees grow nice and slow and steady, and the kind of work that revolves around them can be as well.
Dotty
Princess
Buttercup
Felicity
Pixie
Pluto
Maisy
Panda
Crazy Eyes
Ponda
Smiler
Choppy
Patch
I do get upset when my animals go. I do cry. But the day that I stop getting upset when I take my animals for slaughter is the day that I’ll quit, because that’s the day I won’t care anymore.
My family moved up here in 1820, so I’m seventh generation. Always been on this same farm from then really.
Ever since I could walk and talk I suppose I’ve wanted to farm.
Pink Ladies
Bramleys
British Cox Apple
Royal Gala
Braeburn
Smitten Apple
Granny Smith
Plum punnets, and peaches, and Russia pears.
Indonesia
Timor
Malaysia
Portugal
Poland
Lithaunia
India
Pakistan
Muhammad Idrish
What was brought home is that it was us doing it - in front of the camera and behind the camera. We had two frames, so it was a kind of conversation between people who trusted each other. The reason they could actually express themselves so easily and frankly is because it was done by somebody who they knew. It is, you know, like, Adam, you are sitting there and asking me a question. I can easily turn the camera around and ask you the same question. It is was like videoing a conversation in a room. It’s a gang of friends sitting together having a chat.
Marian Hall
The fact that you’re using video and you’re seeing how the editing works, you never look at a television programme in the same way, you never look particularly at a news report in the same way. It became immediately obvious how you can bias a report, how you can snip out the thing that somebody really, really wanted to say and make them say things that they never intended to say in the first place. So, you were empowering people, you know, they were choosing how they wanted to be represented.
Ranbir Bains
I think what was important with these projects was the demystifying. The media isn’t about somebody else controlling it and expressing your lifestyles, that you can actually take it. It’s not some mystical skill that can only be held by few. And it was a great opportunity to start discussing who presents what.
Marian Hall
Like Geraldine was saying this morning, I was thinking about it afterwards. You know, it’s like it’s all been downhill since the ‘80s, and when I start talking about the ‘80s, I get that kind of excitement and optimism back, but if I look long-term at what’s happened in this country, it’s all been - from a trade unionist point of view - it’s all been downhill, and there are so many repressive laws now that you don’t even think about.
Cathy Wade
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about ruins and the fact that when you were growing up, when you were living in the 1980s, you were living in a landscape in which this looks like a new space, and looking back at the archives, you’ve suddenly got these amazing moments of environments that just look like they’ve been through a form catastrophe, and you think, “what sorts of environments have we got now?”
Ian Sergeant
We’re in this moment of almost too much information; where we find it difficult to find the truth and the realities in all of this, and that’s why it’s important to go back to a period like the ‘80s. The demonisation of the unions; there was a conscious decision: to break up the unity of the workers, because you needed to introduce this new system of operation, and, by getting rid of the unions, and breaking them, and, obliterating them, literally beating them into the ground, and then introducing this new way of individualism.
Cathy Wade
People meeting in a room is the most transformative thing, just full stop. I think it’s that sense where you can hear the tonality of somebody’s voice, you can hear where they’re at with something, you can actually have that meeting point that is real.
That sensibility of what can be achieved when human beings do meet is phenomenal.
Ian Sergeant
There’s got to be, there’s got to be. There’s got to be more to life than people just existing, and that’s what we’re doing right now. And I think we have lost our way. And it’s important for us to try and retrace back to where and why that happened, and, if we can, start to pave a way forward for ourselves and say, “Actually, we are greater as a collective of people.”
The next generation will always hold the previous generation to account, and I think we are, we’re being held to account. You’re of the next generation, you’re holding this microphone in front of me now, you’re holding me to account, and account for your times. And I think that we are responsible for a lot of the things that are happening now. We need hold our hands up and say, “We’ve let you down,” and we need to do things to repair that. And I don’t know how we’re going to be able to do it; in this current political moment, I don’t think we’re anywhere near close. This needs to play itself out, and I don’t know how it’s going to play itself out, but we’re in a really dangerous time.
Muhammad Idrish
If you are a politically conscious person in England, you know there are two different Englands. There is an England of the capitalists, the England of the racists, the England of the Brexiteers, the England of the extreme right, and the other England is the fighting England, the trade unionist England, the left England, the socialist England.
You know, they might not run the government, but you’ve got that quiet fraternity in my England, the people who fight for justice, the people who fight against racism, the people who fight for social justice, the people who fight for equality, and that’s the England I know, and that’s the England I love.
Jeanette
My dad was awful.
We went through all sorts of traumas with him. And we had a wicked stepmother as well.
All very ‘Cinderella’. I had to get a job as soon as I could. I had to earn money to keep him in beer and fags.
He had a pub and lost everything. He eventually went off to South Wales to escape his debts. So I was on my own living in a bedsit at 16. I went to youth employment and they said we’ve got nursing, the army, or a job at the local public library.
So I went for the library.
And my old school teachers, they gave up their lunch breaks to help me study for A levels at the same time. That’s how I did it.
Some things are in you from the start aren't they? I’ve always had a love of books. They’re old friends. And I loved reading and wanted to teach kids to read.
I met Bernard at the library. We were friends for two years before we went to a Communist dance in Bingley. I mean, I’m a raving Socialist but the Communist’s were rubbish dancers. However, the food was good.
I had five jobs at one time.
I had to have a timetable on the wall.
Work meant exhaustion.
Dark rings down to my boots.
But I loved it because you could do something.
In any mining place,
there was no work for women really.
I mean if you've got no washing machine and cold running water, and you’ve got all the pit clothes to wash.
Well, you’re not gonna have time are you.
And the tension...this awful job down the pits. Working all those hours. Danger every minute.
Stephen
I lived in my bedroom a lot. I didn’t like going downstairs.
I were about 11. My dad stopped my pocket money. So I got a job at the market.
I then worked in kitchens.
One day somebody didn’t turn up and I got sent out doing Silver service – peas and carrots.
Jobs have come and gone. I’ve just got on with it. One job, I had to sort trays out of millions of screws.
All day just doing that.
That was the most boring job.
But the hardest thing is getting the job in the first place.
The hardest job I’ve ever done is being a dad. Not being able to read to my kids. That hurt but I can do that now. I’m joining the Labour party. Everyone complains, but at least I’ll know I’m trying.
I were a janitor.
I could clean for more than 12 hours.
Either acid, bleach, chemicals, general cleaning or hoovering.
They gave me a list I memorised.
I learned the warning signs and a guy helped me if I got stuck with the reading. I was my own boss and didn’t need to be in a set place at one time.
It got me out of the house. I stayed until I had health problems.
I went into the pub one week and someone said,
“What you doing in here, you don’t work? How can you come in here?”
I’ve been volunteering for 6 years. He said that isn’t work. “You’re scrounging.”
But I work 10 hours now.
I went back in with my first wage and this guy said the same thing.
I said I am working, and volunteering, so you’ve got no need to pull me down. Everyone needs to start somewhere.
Dennis
The family across the street where I lived tried to tell me the Royal Family had blue blood. I said don’t be so bloody daft.
Nobody’s got blue blood.
We’ve all got red blood.
Even the bloody Royal Family’s got red blood.
I remember telling the whole family that.
They were bloody convinced they’ve got blue blood.
I put them right.
So I went into politics when I were 4.
When I was a union man I had a job in the pit.
I weren’t skiving on the pit tar.
Even when I was president of the Derbyshire NUM I worked in the pit.
1970. I got elected, and six o’clock the day after I went to work. I didn’t have two ha’pennies to rub together.
I hadn’t got a bank account.
I hadn’t got a car. We hadn't any money. I went to work because I didn’t know when I was going to get paid in Parliament. Nobody sent me a letter saying turn up on such and such a day. I just had to keep looking in the papers to see when swearing in started. So I kept going to the pit.
I worked in an industry where everybody’s life depended on everybody’s else. If you didn’t go to work you didn’t get paid.
So I’ve adopted that technique in Parliament.
I went with a set of ideas.
I’m in there before eight o’clock before the doors open. There’s about 16 drinking places in Parliament and I’ve never been in any of them It’s not because I’m puritanical, but if you smelled of beer at the pit head you where turned away.
And rightly so.
Adi
I could always get a hands on job.
I’ve worked at McDonalds, I’ve worked on building sites, I’ve been a spray painter, a gardener, a tattooist,
a Slaughterhouse man, and a warehouse assistant. There are jobs but conditions are poor.
12 hour shifts, four on, four off, then nothing.
I’d seen the warehouse going up.
I went for a 12 week job with a nought contract.
They said I might get a full time contract at the end of it.
I was designated three aisles to work.
The machine I worked were 12 metres up in air.
High as two houses.
Picking a ton-weight.
Take this pallet from A1 to D5.
All day long picking pallets off a shelf and putting others on another shelf.
Up in the air, people look this small.
I wondered what my lass was doing.
She was always in my mind. I had photos of all three kids on my vehicle so they were always watching me.
When you’ve got a family, a home, you’ve got overheads, and you haven’t got enough money coming in to go out, that’s when it starts getting really, really, really bad. And when we were there, there was definitely no trust in the place, and no unions. I suppose, if I was in a union I would never had been laid off for two weeks and then not given my job back.
Serena
I’d been a carer for my mum since the age of 14.
But I had helped her before then.
I needed a change. Fed up of being in the shadows, the thought persisted.
Would anybody support me? Would anybody offer to help me? Would anybody even care?
I saw no way into such a closed world. My grades weren’t good. But I’d made my decision that same night, I wanted to try and get into the college. I want people to know who I am.
I want them to see me as me. I want this to happen.
Dryden Goodwin
March 2020
I’m interested in how you capture a sense of someone, of other people, and how you try to understand someone. How you try to articulate an idea of what seems to motivate them, the way they navigate the world, and also to try to get insight into how they see things.
That’s happened in different ways. It might be people that are known to me, it might be strangers that I meet, it might be people who I build relationships with through the actual making of a piece of work. Then, thinking about ways you record, the ways you capture, and also ways you translate and decode some of that through how you draw and through the way you use a camera and sound recordings.
*
I’ve always been really intrigued by the idea of portraiture but also had quite an uneasy relationship with it as a categorisation. At the heart of it for me, it’s not just about making a rendering of someone, but it’s about questioning how and what you can learn by looking at others. A desire to try and reveal aspects of the world by looking at others and where and who you are, in relation to them.
There’s this inevitable exchange between yourself and the people that you’re looking at, and this sense that you’re accompanying someone on part of the journey. That might be for a fraction of a moment, or it might be more sustained.
There’s always this balance between something which is like the idea of ’measurement' - but then there’s this idea of just being immersed, absorbed, intuitive and responsive.
*
Paul said very specific things about his work as a care worker, such as, at the beginning of the film, ”It’s all in the looking, isn’t it? It’s all in the observing, you know, so you can just build a bigger picture of the person.”
This became the key to the film. This building in little details, small fragments. Then a bigger picture of someone takes shape. That’s a description of what Paul’s doing in his work, and that’s what I’m doing in mine. That becomes really important, the incremental. In the film itself it’s as much about what isn’t there, as what is, so there’s spaces for the imagination to leap across the gaps, like you would in a drawing. I didn’t want to reveal the whole picture at any point, I filmed from oblique angles or from behind, or made both swift diagrammatic as well as more worked tonal drawings, I kept switching between what I was seeing and what I was feeling.
You put a mark down on a piece of paper to make a drawing, and it becomes this series of relationships between these different points, in your process of trying to translate and decipher whose in front of you. In a way the whole film is like this. These fragmentary marks, that might accumulatively find an incomplete cohesion at a certain point. The blank page is of course as important as the marks themselves.
I think that Paul is making those imaginative leaps all the time in the way that he works, in terms of building a picture of the people he works with. For some of the people, he can’t ask them how they feel in a conventional way, he has to be inventive in decoding their motivations and anxieties, to find a way to connect.
*
Initially my proposal for the WORK project was to make a film about a health care worker in a very different context: day visits, looking at their rhythms, both the contact with people in their homes, but also the spaces and the times of the journeys in between, how that would form the structure of the film.
The opportunity to work with Paul opened the process up in ways I hadn’t anticipated: the hyper vulnerability of the people that he works with, and the essential element of trust. Trust is central to the work Paul does, and it’s also important in the filmmaking process, when you’re asking to be invited alongside finely balanced relationships and delicate situations.
The initial conversations between Paul and I, via Skype were very important before meeting. Then when I went to Derby for the first time, we sat and were in conversation for many hours, but, importantly, I’d be drawing him at the same time, which meant I began to accrue further layers to a multi-dimensional sense of him.
After hours spent in Paul’s kitchen and a local coffee shop, the next day we then went to Community Links in the throng of the energy, the activities and the people he was working with. The oscillation between drawing and working with the camera was really important, in the way I needed to negotiate being pulled in and pushed out of a situation in different ways.
*
When collecting material you’ve got to be calm, collected and receptive; the attraction of it is also to be completely enveloped and inundated within all the sensory dynamics of the exchange.
I think there’s a parallel with Paul’s work in how it mirrors this in someway – the relationship between what he’s doing and the state he’s in when he’s working, balancing precision and tenderness. He needs to be completely on it, but also in tune, in a very empathetic and understanding way. It’s a professional relationship, but it’s also about the world of feelings, in the way that he relates to each person individually.
To me there’s something really exciting in looking into that. Another aspect of what drew me to the WORK project is that artists have a very complex relationship to the idea of work! So there’s this reflexive space that opens up when you start to look at the world of other people’s work, that’s implicit in the film and exchange.
*
In watching and listening to Paul, it’s about what he’s doing, but also about how he reflects on what he’s doing - the drive behind how he relates, also through what he says, how we can interpret the values of a society by how it supports its most vulnerable. Throughout the whole film there are ideas of observing and perception. There’s his, there’s mine, but also the young men that he works with, and how Paul understands how they might read people, and interact.
For some of the young men, that’s complicated, because of the extremes of their neuro-diversity, they struggle to read body language and the world around them.
I think that relationships to perception, and observing, and how it’s possible to understand others, is a core theme that came out in the making of the film.
*
What was impossible to anticipate was what would happen throughout the day. Paul would spend each day dedicated to one person and constantly adjust, dependant on the needs of the person he was with. I realised that I just had to be completely prepared with my small kit of pencils, paper, camera, and another camera on my chest, so that I could record the drawings as I was making them, and to be completely open and responsive to the logic of the day and how it panned out, a need for fluidity and adaptability. As Paul was alongside each young man, I was alongside him.
The way Paul works was another key, as was the notion of patience, which I think is critical, as was slowing – slowing right down. That the world is a hard place to negotiate. Patience became a profound aspect of the whole experience. How anxiety can quickly come to the surface for the young men he was working with, the need for him to be a ’constant’, an ever supporting navigator.
The sense of each pairing, venturing from the day care centre for a period of the day; either Paul with Jack, David or Rob, into the city centre, exploring and supporting each man to access the world - next to the river, at the swimming pool, cycling through the city, at the gym, or in different restaurants - a changing ’figure-ground’ relationship. We’re in Derby, but it also seemed somehow abstracted to epitomise a sense of the expanse of the world beyond the shelter of the day care centre - Paul and each young man, integrally linked for that period of time.
*
There’s something very engrossing about listening to six or seven hours of recorded conversation then editing and honing it down. The intertwining of the structure of each of Paul’s days with the sequencing of the phrases and ideas he spoke, becoming the spine of the film.
Paul is a musician and an artist when he’s not working as a care worker. At a certain point I thought, maybe, I’d feature that in the film – those parts of his life beyond work – but then I realised that those sensibilities were in everything he did, every interaction. The inflection in his voice when he spoke gave a sense of musicality: how he uses melody, whistling, how he breaks into short phrases of song, how this creates a space, a reassuring containment, a kind of holding pattern. This in turn influenced the soundtrack I made, I picked up on little details of the tone of his voice, also the rhythms of his interactions such as the accompanying walk next to Jack in his wheel chair through the shopping centre; the careful pace with David as they approach the swimming pool, or the adrenalised abundance of energy released in Rob’s bike ride. I wanted to reflect in sound what seemed just beneath the surface, the interlocking of the sensory and the felt, between Paul and who he was with.
There is something about the quality of Paul’s voice; a calmness, but also a precision in what he was saying, shifting and giving way momentarily to frustration and indignation when he spoke about the wider political backdrop and the lack of support and funding.
*
Jo’s role as the Producer was really important. She listened with me to the recordings of the conversations I had with Paul. Whereas I highlight phrases in the timeline and excavate from there, her approach is different to mine, she writes the words down, she maps what’s said differently. Our editorial exchange opened up space to thinking about the words differently, myself as someone who was there, Jo who was not.
Then, once a selection is made I test the phases and ideas more, by whittling them down. Stripping out words that seemed extraneous, honing down to try and get to essential ingredients of what Paul’s saying. Then those phrases become part of the material of the film. You internalise them in some way, their shape. The process begins by responding to what’s said, then it almost feels like writing, how you set one idea against another, to try to make sure that there’s space around what Paul has said, in the shape of the film and how this influences the edit of the images and creation of musical elements.
*
When I was with Paul in the situations he was in, it’s hard to describe, but it felt strongly collaborative. In terms of a conventional collaboration with Paul it wasn't that, but, because of the intensity and the nature of the exchange, the need to be open to each other’s process had an influence on the film that was made.
I’ve made work before where I’m involved in the worlds of different people over a sustained period of time, but I haven’t made a work before which has at its centre, just one person.
