An Unexpected Audience

Yet again, I find it is about a week since I wrote my blog. Looking at the statistics regarding the countries where my blog is being read, I note that Russia has scored highly this month.

This makes me unashamedly wish to speak to those that live in that country, one that I have never visited, though one that has played a constant presence in my life. Perhaps never as a major player, but there in the background nevertheless.

The first time Russia came in to my experience was when I was at university, at University College London. I was reading to a blind Iranian student, simply as a volunteer, and the kind of blindness that she suffered might have been improved by an operation that could have taken place in what was then of course the Soviet Union.

Iran and Russia clearly had closer ties at that time, and I remember making a visit to the Russian Embassy in London, to assist my friend attend a meeting with the Science Attache.

It seems strange to think of it now, but it felt like an extraordinary journey into another world. The thing I have an abiding memory of is the telephones within the embassy, which were smaller than a typical British telephone, and much rounder in shape or design.

This would have been in about 1980, at the height of the Cold War, and may well have been sufficient for me to have been noticed by our own security services as someone with sympathies towards the East.

In my late 20s, I visited Czechoslovakia, in about 1986. The organization for which I worked hosted an East-West workcamp through International Voluntary Service, in which young people from across the Soviet Bloc attended.

Apparently, this was the first time that Russian citizens had been granted permission to attend an IVS workcamp in the United Kingdom, and as well as a group of five members of a Ukrainian Construction Brigade, we had attendees from Poland, Yugoslavia as it was then, East Germany and from Czechoslovakia.

The project I worked for occupied a substantial house and grounds on the edge of Leeds in Yorkshire, part of which included a walled garden extending to about one acre in size.

The workcamp was a means by which we could develop this overgrown garden which we wished to turn into an organic herb garden.

The house could accommodate 40 people for residential weekends and conferences, mainly in shared rooms. We operated as a co-operative, and in fact the origins of the house as a centre for the promotion of co-operative working linked what we were doing directly to the concepts behind communism. But certainly with a peculiarly English slant.

The house had been built in the early 19th century, and was built from wealth generated through the manufacture of fine carriage cloth. In fact, works from the Company that being exhibited at the Great Exhibition in 1851.

The current owner was a direct descendant of those capitalist entrepreneurs, but he was an architect by profession, and certainly not a capitalist in the traditional sense. He was wealthy, no doubt, but he had chosen to make his capital available to the development of employee owned businesses structured as cooperatives.

The original vision for the house that we had use of literally for the payment of a peppercorn each year was that it should be used as a College for the teaching of the skills needed to run such ventures.

The English Parliament had passed in 1976 an Act Of Parliament that gave three years of funding to an organisation called the Industrial Common Ownership Movement, which was concerned with the promotion and development of legal constitutions that could be used as the legal basis for such business ventures.

In effect, this was giving practical meaning to clause 4 of the Labour Party manifesto, which was concerned with the common ownership of the means of production.

This was of course famously removed from the Labour Party manifesto by Tony Blair as part of his modernization of the Labour Party. Some would say his dismantling of it.

So in effect we ran a small but successful co-operative business from premises that had been built from the product of capitalist wealth. The house itself was in immediate grounds of about 15 acres, surrounded by 150 acres of farmland. This was rented permanently to a local farmer.

Thus I lived for almost 10 years as if part of the landed gentry, just on the edge of one of the great industrial towns of England, but to all intents and purposes living in a rural location.

There were about seven of us in our co-operative, not all of whom lived on site. We were all paid the same minimal weekly salary, and in effect shared in the profits of our labour. which were not substantial.

Our customers were exclusively not for profit organisations, most of whom were concerned with positive social issues. In other words, the kind of conferences that we hosted in this fine location were concerned with people rather than making money.

The owner of the property, Tom Lupton, was closely connected through his friends to a peculiarly English brand of Christian Socialism, and in some respects, this made an East-West work camp of particular poignancy to us.

When I travelled to Czechoslovakia, it was to attend a workcamp hosted on a co-operative farm and led by the two Czech doctors that had attended our workcamp. Thus, two years before the major upheavals in that country, I had the opportunity to see for myself how communism had shaped that country.

It was an interesting experience.

To facilitate my journey to Czechoslovakia, I had tried to learn Russian, attending an evening class for six months or so before I travelled.

What I failed to realise was that although in theory Russian was spoken as the second language in Czechoslovakia, it was the language imposed by the oppressor.

So that when I tried to use my limited Russian, I was virtually ignored, and it was not helpful to me at all.

Perhaps I was fortunate in that I became friendly with an English teacher at the workcamp, so in fact for my three weeks in Czechoslovakia, two weeks working on the farm, and a week travelling in the country, I had the services of my own interpreter.

In fact I stayed at the home of my interpreter and her husband, and became good friends with them. I was given a privileged insight into the life they lead, and the impact of communism on them.

This was particularly fascinating because my interpreter was an English teacher in a Czechoslovakian School, but she was also a committed Christian, a fact that she had to keep private as it would have been inconceivable for a teacher in a Czech school to have been a Christian.

In the course of my three-week stay in Czechoslovakia, my interpreter was careful to introduce me to a wide range of people, from Communist officials to small local farmers. my most abiding memory is of the way in which the two young men that were spray-painting the enormous grain silo on the farm to which the workcamp was attached, work which in Czechoslovakia at the time would have been highly paid because it was dangerous manual labour, and they used their experience of mountain climbing and abseiling to move up and down the outside of the anonymous grain silo.

They were undertaking this work so that they could fund a project they were working on, and which they proudly showed me.

They were building a concrete hulled ocean going yacht, the plans for which they had obtained from Australia, and which was at the stage of being fitted out. The most expensive stage.

Czechoslovakia of course is a landlocked country, but they had the confidence that if they completed this project, the authorities could not fail to give them permission to sail it, which would mean permission to leave Czechoslovakia.

Given the events of 1989, I am sure that they managed to achieve their dream.

I was not impressed with the reality of communism in Czechoslovakia.

It placed into high relief the experiment that I had been engaged in for the best part of 10 years of my life. Co-operative development in Britain was simply my youthful zeal for political equality, but one in which few people could have experienced it within a commonest state.

Strangely, my abiding memory of the East-West workcamp was a day trip that we made to Blackpool, which I suppose I had the privilege of organizing. I will always remember how everyone from the workcamp experienced the extraordinary delights of Blackpool, a city in Britain that is perhaps like no other, and that compared to any Communist regime, must have seemed so unlike daily life. As it did to me, even though I was a resident of England.

Thus my abiding fascination with Russia, experienced only at one remove through my contact with a Ukrainian construction brigade. Perhaps I have been fortunate to have lived how I have lived, and to have met the people I have met.

Strangely, it is those experiences of people directly that have done most to make me feel as if I have understood something of the psyche of the eastern European. Films like Dr Zhivago, and the novels of Chekhov or Tolstoy have been my only other opportunity. But I have seen so much more than so many of my generation.

Film Evocation

This afternoon, I have just watched the film Billy Elliot. I haven't watched it for some time, and sometimes, like today, having a break from a film can result in a new appreciation of it. and a reawakening of the power of the film to both move and create deep responses.

I suppose at the moment I am in the fortunate position of seeing my old films in a new light. Part of the reason for this is simply that I have obtained via the Internet a new media player, VLC, which seems to play my DVDs with richer and sharper colours, a complete bonus because the reason why I discovered its existence in the first place was that it has enabled my Intel Macintosh computer to be able to play DVDs from all regions. Instead of having to change the region setting of my DVD player within my computer, which you can only do five times in total, this media player, available free from the Internet, plays DVDs differently. So that the region setting for the DVD is unimportant.

This is pretty helpful, since I have one or two American imports which up until now I have not been able to play on my computer. I have had to use the DVD player in my living room, which I suppose is no big deal since it is part of a surround sound system, which delivers quite amazing sound.

And let's face it, the quality of sound reproduction for a film does make a big difference to one's experience of that film.

Since I have been so technical already, I might as well carry on, and the simple fact is that I have recently purchased a new speaker system for my computer, the one that I can most easily access when I am in bed, that delivers in itself quite phenomenal sound reproduction.

This is Harman Carden Sound Sticks, which have good looks as well as amazing sound reproduction. There is a separate bass speaker, and in each of the clear plastic sound sticks there are four small speakers. The net result is that I have an extraordinary sense of sound quality, making it a joy to watch films old and new all over again.

In this context, a film like Billy Elliot which has a fabulous soundtrack including T-Rex and The Clash comes across brilliantly.

Add to this the emotional journey of such a redemptive film, and it is an explosive experience.

Nostalgia plays its part as well, in that in the final scene of the film, Billy Elliot as an adult dancer plays one of the principal parts in the ballet performed by Adventures In Motion Pictures, Swan Lake. This is extraordinary because of the way in which the entire ballet is performed by men, even the whole of the chorus.

The fact that I have seen this production live is one thing, but I have had the privilege as well when I was working of having worked closely with the Dance Company, when they worked closely in partnership with the orchestra that I worked for. I remember meeting one of their senior managers backstage in Edinburgh at some point, and of course I have also seen them perform alongside Opera North when they created a unique production of The Nutcracker.

So my afternoon has been indulgent in every sense, I have seen a good film in good circumstances and been reminded of the professional life I once led before I became disabled with multiple cirrhosis.

It is a reminder, if one were needed, that I have plenty of reasons to go back through my large collection of DVDs, many of which have been recorded from films broadcast on television. I have been fortunate to be able to edit out the advertisements. So that I can see films as they were intended to be seen.

Anyway, one down, and just several hundred more to go. And that's before I go back to the DVDs I have purchased, which in themselves one might expect to have better quality of reproduction to them.

The simple fact is that film can be a transformative experience, especially with the benefits of modern technology at your disposal.

The World Of Film

It's been a little while since I posted a new blog, and I suppose as I sit in front of my computer to write a new one, I can't help but think about some of the things that have been important to me over the last week or so.

That's the thing about writing a blog, it is somehow different to writing a diary, in that I don't feel compelled to write a daily account of what is happening for me.

And the fact that it is a very public means of collecting my thoughts is another difference between this and a diary. None of the self indulgent diary writing that I have engaged in over the years, and in fact I still have a collection of notebooks which capture those attempts at keeping a diary.

I suppose since I consider myself to be a writer these days, I have progressed significantly from the introspective stuff of my teenage years. As indeed my poetry has progressed significantly, and I would like to think matured somewhat.

Now that we have almost reached double figures in February, I am reminded that my film will be exhibited in Canada at the International Festival, the first showing taking place on Valentine's Day. At least I won't forget.

I consider myself to be a filmmaker as well as a poet, and I would dearly like to increase traffic on my YouTube channel, worthingsp, which I tend to add films to fairly regularly. Mainly short films these days, my most recent called Good King Wenceslas. The reason will be obvious if you can be bothered to have a look.

I am especially stimulated these days in my short film making by what I see in movies, and this latest film came about because I watched In Which We Serve in which there are two moments in which this carol is performed. Once by sailors on board ship, and once by children on shore.

I have combined this with an extract from Love Actually, and with something I found showing Tom Jones during his Christmas show in 1975. He looks so young.

It's fascinating to see the way in which there are recurring links between films, in different periods perhaps, but elements which reflect something of the culture in which we live. The environment in which our lives take their meaning.

I have a collection of about 1000 films recorded to DVD, and so I suppose I am an armchair observer of the culture expressed through film, which is a fascinating subject. And one about which I could write a regular blog in itself.

I'd like to think that my use of extracts from films could be justified under the umbrella of fair use, which is the only excuse for copyright infringement. And I certainly would never try to make money from the work of other people, and always respect the integrity of it.

What next, I wonder. my film viewing has tended to be somewhat rooted in the past, in the sense that most of my film collection is based on films broadcast on TV. That makes most of them eight or ten years since they were released.

Recently, however, I have recently been given a free VIP membership to LoveFilm, which means I am suddenly being exposed to more recent films. This in itself is fascinating, and makes me feel as if I am a timetraveller.

Add to this, that I have just discovered a way in which I can view films free of region restriction on my Macintosh, by virtue of a new media viewer. Which means that I can watch American imports directly on the machine that I have over my bed, and suddenly my viewing experience has been enormously enhanced.

Strange to think that there is such a difference between films released in America and released over here in the UK, but there does seem to be. And of course, DVDs can be purchased so cheaply these days via Amazon, even imports.