Digital Literacies

The OCA (Open College of the Arts) has a most wonderful blog with so many videos that are short, moving and good to look at. This one , without trying to, makes some excellent useful points about ethics and photography.

The Dad Project from Open College of the Arts on Vimeo.

I will definitely be using this when I teach my Image Based Research session to the MA Educational Research students this year.

For me, films come and go and I so often only remember them very sketchily a week or so later. However I saw Never Let Me Go more than three weeks ago now and I still think about it most days. Similarly I saw Oranges and Sunshine about a fortnight ago and it it haunts me.
I have not yet read Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel but will do before long. Oranges and Sunshine was not a novel but a social-worker’s account (originally published as Empty Cradles) of how up to 150,000 children were deported from the UK to Australia between the 1940s and 1970s. The children, once in Australia were treated very cruelly – often involved in child labour, and often being lied to that their parents were dead. This all seems pretty incredible and more so that no -one seemed to know about it until the mid 80s. It was one of those things that was whispered about by those involved. Why did no -one blow the whistle? Amazing.
Never Let Me Go, on the other hand, a work of fiction, describes the relationship between three children brought up together in a boarding school for cloned children. Their destiny is to become donors of organs until ‘completion’ (ie till they die). The setting seems to be around the 1970s – 1990s. I think maybe because I was at school in the 1970s this seemed so resonant and so real. In some ways it seemed more real than Oranges and Sunshine. Perhaps it was the way most of the setting of the film is totally credible; set in a very authentic past that stayed true to the era throughout. Mixing in fiction with historical ‘reality’ in this way makes the thing ’stand up’.

So much of this weird scenario rang true, especially looked at beside Oranges and Sunshine – which exemplifies how whole scale mistreatment of people can become condoned by those who may at first object. We very quickly turn away from human rights issues when they seem to happen on a grand scale, thinking that is the way it must be. If some people behave as if there is nothing wrong, then others seem to fall in with that way of behaving; it is normalised.

Strangely, these films were not the best acted, nor the best produced films I have seen lately. But they have really penetrated my thoughts in a disturbing way. Each one is so different, one is based on fiction, one on non-fiction. Both are about children and we often see children as a subset of people, who have not got rights yet; who will become people to take account of when they are adults – kids as ‘people in the making’. . Across the world there are groups of people who seem to be seen as subsets of humanity and we do not recognise their rights in the way we should – often to do with where they are born, or when. These films place human rights squarely in the frame and while one may seem surreal, it has very strong roots in the real world.

I used to love reading this book to my kids (now in their 20s) when they were little.

Let the wild rumpus start

Although the text is quite sparse, the words are quite magical and we read it zillions of times. We used the same copy as I had read to my younger sister (now 35) when she was little. I am not quite sure what it is that gives some children’s books such a timeless appeal; perhaps it is that the fantasy characters and fantasy worlds are not set in a specific era but instead are rooted in a sort of imagined space that is shared by many. A childhood ‘third space’ maybe.

where the wild things are

Although this book was written in 1963, (when I was 5) I do not remember seeing it when I was a kid. Anyhow, I think I will not be the only adult wanting to go and see the new film. Its website is alluring and I am also quite taken by the Build Your Wild Self site and have made my own monster.

I must admit that I cannot quite imagine how the little book can be extended into a proper big film, but suppose they must have added quite a lot of stuff in. I am looking forward to seeing what mechandise goes with it – soft toys I presume and of course dvds … but maybe costumes? That would be fun. Perhaps props to turn your own bedroom into a forest; perhaps people will be able to have wild rumpus parties. Let’s wait and see.