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AT THE SHARP END OF THE KNIFE Barbara Orton interviewed by Jon Dovey
The production of At the Sharp End of the Knife in the current TV climate is remarkable. Finance took two years and Barbara finished up retaining a major share of the rights through a balancing act involving NGO cash, pre-sales including one from RVU, the educational broadcaster in the Netherlands who have a slot specialising in development issues, and a crucial agreement with BBC World who were the only UK based broadcaster to see the point of the film. Scottish Lottery supplied the remaining 50% with back end funds coming from a South African licensing agreement with E TV the new commercial broadcaster and EU distribution money. The film is being distributed initially by Barbara through True TV for broadcast and cinema screenings and is currently negotiating for an NGO to handle educational, non-broadcast distribution. Jon Dovey: True TV ? That's quite a name for a production company in this day and age, tell me about you and the company - what is that you're trying to do ? Barbara Orton: Well it's a name that suits me and what I'm trying to do as a company. It's ironic (of course), but aspirational at the same time. I have a background in community work and coming out of that was conciousness that there were many voices not being heard on television or being fairly represented. To me, for such a powerful medium of communication as television, that is profoundly un-democratic. In these dumbing down days of Tabloid TV agendas, it is difficult to hold onto the Stuart Hall type of idea of TV as the public space where we can all talk to each other. I still do, but it is a difficult game to play. Also the notion of 'popular TV' as a 'of the people TV' is important to me. Perhaps it doesn't need to be said but that's not to confuse it with the broadcasters notion of 'popular' as in big audience figures, although even though I want to make films on more serious subjects I want to keep close to the ability of the film to entertain, attract and engage its audience. So from that base, True TV is concerned with exploring social issues and finding ways of looking at them through popular cultural forms, like I did with In Cuba They're Still Dancing, a previous documentary that followed an older woman, an ex communist in this case, from Glasgow to Cuba to find the roots of the rumba. JD: How do you see At the Sharp End of the Knife in relation to the mainstream of actual TV now? BO: The big fashion in UK television, as you know is for 'reality TV'. Of course we tried to jump on this band -wagon but with something different. British TV's new legitimisation of 'ordinary people' in docu-soaps doesn't give people 'real TV', you could say that's one definition, but what the audience is getting is on the level of trivia and gossip. The more difficult area of social problems or analysis have to date never been the territory of docu-soaps or ironically 'reality TV'. Why? In case they bore us, or what? Of course broadcasters are under pressure to achieve high audience share (not withstanding the BBC's public service role), but if you hold onto the notion of a democractic TV, that kind of dumbing down attitude is throwing the baby out with the bath water... and doing a disservice to all of us as 'citizens'. JD: Don't you feel that leaves you in a very traditional agit-doc kind of position in which you are trying to 'insert' left messages into the mainstream? BO: I'm ditching all those film-maker 'oppositional culture' stances. Any position that takes the moral high ground as a starting point has always seemed a bit dodgy to me. That ideological polarisation really was '70s', and I've had enough of it. It's a stance that is often associated with people taking defensive positions and I don't like that kind of negativity. We wanted to stay away from that, to make a positive film about people going forward, and looking at what brings them together rather than divides them. While opposition is important, it's an art to get it constructive, not destructive, and to authentically progress rather than close down. JD: OK, let's try and be more specific. I want to know how your ideas about the 'popular', as against the conventions of primetime factual programming, actually structured your film? BO: I'm keen on the 'telling stories' aspect of documentary film-making, and finding the visual vocabulary to go with the subject. It's been said that the new role of TV is to make people feel not think - I hope I'm doing both, but I don't want to make the television equivalent of conceptual art. People like a good story, I don't care how naff that sounds. We were trying to tell a story with Cathy in South Africa - it is an 'ordinary person' story, with Cathy McCormack as 'star', but in this more difficult territory. She is exploring poverty and democracy in her journey to South Africa, by going to see how ordinary people in communities are building the 'new' South Africa. In the Townships she meets fellow activists, and makes parallels with them and her own life in Easterhouse. Easterhouse is a suburb of Glasgow built in the 60s that gained a reputation as one of the most violent of the 'out of town' perifery housing projects in Scotland and hasn't really lost it. Even though there have been attempts at 'face lifts', as Cathy calls them, there is still the 'poverty behind closed doors' as symptoms get treated and not the causes. But there are equivalent places to Easterhouse on the outskirts of urban centres all over the 'developed' world and generally on television 'the poor' are not portrayed as analysers of their situations or authors of solutions, they are often presented as either victims or on the receiving end of a situation they have no power over. In general, a view is purveyed that in the face of the bigger picture we are all made powerless, but this film seeks to be different, and present a view of the bigger picture that inspires more than overwhelms, and empowers, by example. The intention was to allow an access into the processes of 'citizen empowerment', by gaining insight into what motivates and gives people strength to struggle against the odds. Perhaps this is a little bit different to the 'access' that 'traditional' television usually gets excited about? UK television, for example has done a lot of programmes on 'access' into institutions that wield power (eg the fly-on-the-wall documentaries 'inside' the UN, the ministry, or the English National Opera House). In these sort of programmes, they may succeed in showing absurdity and unfairness in decision making in these places, and the audience may even laugh, but there is an argument to say that these kind of glimpses result in profoundly dis-empowering television, the viewer generally left with a feeling of being a victim of it all. We aimed to do the opposite. Another example that was an important reference point for us was that awful Channel 4 season on 'Battered Britain' - and its (albeit) sympathetic portrayal of 'the poor'. After hearing the terrible stories from 'the poor', when it was time for the 'but what can be done bit', Will Hutton, the Observer journalist was wheeled on to give his macro-economic solution. We hoped to show in the film the social and phsycological complexities in the 'solutions to poverty' discourse. As far as I'm concerned Cathy's analysis points the way towards the real solutions to the eradication of poverty. JD: I'm interested in how your film works with some of the current conventions of 'People TV'- As you've said it centres on the journey of Cathy MacCormack - a community activist from Glasgow . Television today is full of so called 'ordinary people' telling their stories - or confessing - but we don't learn much about Cathy in the film. What's her role in the film, why did you choose her and how did you decide what about her was relevant, what was private and what was public? BO: I'd known Cathy for some time and always wanted to work with her, try and present or represent some of her insights and the things she had to say about her own situation living in Easterhouse and the situation of people like her. When Lynne Brown, a fellow activist visited her in Easterhouse, and invited her to South Africa, it seemed we had the beginnings of a good story. Lynne, a coloured woman in Cape Town, soon after became one of the new ANC MP's. The story we were telling was centered on Cathy's frustration (among many other fustrations!) in getting her own community to understand poverty as a global phenomena, as she did, and that it wasn't just about individual failure as many believed. So, Cathy is an ordinary but special women who can articulate and act on the communities' behalf, being one of them. She not only 'gives witness' to situations of poverty but makes the links between local and international poverty and its causes, that allows people insight into their own lives and real potential to act. Meeting other people in similar situations actually inspires Cathy as she says she feels part of a wider movement of Global resistance, and not just isolated in her own locality thinking she has 'failed'. So for us, out goes the journalistic 'observation' mode and in comes equal exchanges between Cathy, and the people she meets. In meeting activists in a range of situations and making connections with her own life, in her own language, given people can understand a Glaswegian accent (a serious concern for an international audience) we knew Cathy would be opening the door for 'ordinary people' (just like her), to make their own connections. Judging by the audience reaction on the night of the local premier of the film this was quite profoundly evident. The 'don't you dare compare us to a third world country' was changing into 'but they are just like us!' The scales were literally falling away. The film was trying to find a fresh way of looking at our own poverty too, it was not about Cathy's life alone, although her life was an important part of telling the story. Do you think there wasn't enough of Cathy in the documentary to do this? JD: No it wasn't that, more that I was very aware of how different your treatment of Cathy is to most other kinds of documentary practice on TV right now - there was a complete absence of the kind of personal and private details that form the substance of most 'people TV'. It was very muched based in the 'public' version of Cathy. I guess what I'm trying to get at is something that lots of documentary is failing to do at the moment, how you take an individual and try to give them an emblematic voice, so that their particular experience makes sense in a wider context. Were there any moments where you were conscious of negotiating this problem? BO: You did see her traditionally washing the dishes! But no, it was particularly difficult at the start of the programme. We wanted to establish who she was, what she'd done and where she lived as economically as possible, without switching the British and International audience off. She is bearing witness, giving a personal expression and a different analysis to the norm experienced by many. In Britain 10 million people are statistically living in poverty - Cathy in the language of the 'ordinary person' is articulating a reality they can identify with. Crudely, Cathy is saying this is who we are, this is our definition, we are not as you (the Establishment etc) may say we are. This is what Vaclev Havel called the 'power of the powerless' and claims these concepts and thinking formed the very foundations of the Velvet Revolution. It's inspired me for a long time and this is why I wanted to work with Cathy because she seemed to me the very embodiment of this in her ability to construct and give expression to an alternative view of herself and of poverty - that and her sense of humour. I love her quote 'It's bad enough living in Poverty without having to get the blame for it.' JD: You said earlier that you thought your film offered a politics of the head as well as the heart and I just want to come back to that. When confronted by the massive social difficulties of the South African townships, gang violence, bad housing, poverty and so on, the film seemed to me to offer a very intuitive politics of feeling - is that enough? BO: It's more than a politics of feeling. There is an acute recognition of the social and psychological damage that has been done to people and unless that is recognised and acknowledged, in the way Craig Arendse, (the conflict mediator she meets), does in the film, and then integrated into a strategy, no micro or macro economic anti-poverty strategies are going to be as effective as they could. That is what they are saying, that is what they know. By the end of the film Cathy has gained an insight for herself on the nature of the common bond she feels with them. She talks about a common humanity, re, the people she meets in their various ways who are all 'trying to put their broken down humanity back together again' . That is a powerful thing to share across race, colour, creed. She brings together what she shares with the activitst, the understanding that poverty is global and structural, and this common understanding inspired her. For example in a Thatcherite Britain many people believed they were poor because it was their own fault. Popular education can interrogate this myth in an accessible, participatory way for people. Unless they have gone through a process like this, unless people begin to see themselves in a different way to 'worthless' or 'failures', no 'politics', not even a socialist politics, is going to have any meaning or going to 'work'. These ideas and actions are all over Paulo Friere's work on popular education. The processes of how it works is explored in the theatre sequence with Bongani Linda in the Alexandra township outside of Johannesburg. This education leads to a politics of the heart and mind. As Cathy says, people have to understand what put them in the shit in the first place, they have to understand what's happened to them, before anything can really change. For example, Cathy is choked as she says how she's moved by their theatre piece, and he jumps back at her 'We don't want you to be moved and stay there - we want you to think about how you can act to the benefit of yourself and your community'. JD: Yes I liked those moments where the South African participants challenged Cathy in some way - that sort of brings me to what I think is the most difficult aspect of your film - which is around the problems of yet another white view of Black South Africa. I felt uncomfortable with the idea that there was an equivalence between post apartheid townships and post industrial Easterhouse. At the end of the film Cathy argues that 'We're all fighting the same thing' - doesn't this, coming from a white person looking at South Africa, crucially overlook issues of difference that the left has been trying to integrate into a critical analysis? BO: She is talking about the global market more than the race issue here, if that's what you mean. What Cathy says at the end of the documentary is that when comparing Easterhouse to the townships in South Africa, materially there is no contest. But poverty is not just about living in shacks - the feelings of oppression are the very same. Police corruption is police corruption everywhere and oppressive for anyone who experiences injustice. Political betrayal is the same feeling everywhere. She should know, she lives it every day. She also talks about disabling labels like 'black', 'white', in South Africa, and 'single parent', 'scrounger' in the UK, and makes a point about different kinds of apartheid at work. Do we get anywhere arguing one may be worse than the other? In terms of change she argues 'whites' are disabled as much as 'blacks' and 'coloureds' in South Africa, just as the middle class are disabled by their prejudices about working class people in Britain. I think that is interesting. Our question to them was in the 'new' South Africa how do you get beyond 'disabling' labels of black and white? JD: I think this may be exactly my problem with the film's analysis, because those labels seem to me very real and I find fudging that just as disabling as implying that the globalised economy is all powerful and cannot be resisted. Solidarity has always been an emotive, feelgood message - but beyond that there are real political choices and priorities to be made that do involve labelling certain groups powerful and others powerless and attacking those inequalities. How do you think your film tries to square this circle of on the one hand an intuitive solidarity and on the other the recognition of structural and embodied inequalities ? BO: In relation to labels - it's a question to do with 'purpose'. Labels that define and clarify for political purposes are necessary but are different from labels that disable for racist or denigrating purposes. In relation to intuitive solidarity, it's not only about being emotionally connected, it's a combination of feelings linked into an analysis of the global market economy that needs to be understood at a local level. They are all in its disabling grip. In the light of these understandings, Cathy knows and they know that if they start getting into 'who is the more oppressed' discussions, based on colour, they are lost and will not progress. JD: Though that is a thread running through the film in some way - there's a level of bemusement on the part of some of the South African characters as to what this woman from Glasgow is up to. One of the most interesting points in the film for me is when the theatre director is talking to Cathy and he asks 'But is there anything like a poor community in Britain ?' and you cut before an answer is given - why was that? BO: Yes, it was great. Bongani is being disengenious here, he knows about the reality of this 'common bond', he knows the politics. He has toured in Northern Ireland and in Liverpool in England. But the way he expressed it up-front like that, because he knew that's what people would be thinking, was at that point in the film, a genuine challenge to Cathy (and she knew it too),on her own pre-conceptions about poverty and how you talk about it. This contributes to her feelings of being overwhelmed at that point of the journey. But the cut was actually practical as well, she stumbled over an answer about housing and not being able to buy fresh cheap food in her area and it all took too long compared to a similar challenge on the taxi ride to Soweto. Cathy was taken aback and trying to come to terms with what she was seeing. This was real, this was reality TV, seeing someone struggling for understanding... and this is complex stuff. In the commentary she talks about being overwhelmed with the scale of material poverty there. JD: Maybe there's another important point here, that your version of 'reality TV' has space for ambivalence and confusion, its not all wrapped up in journalistic narrative coherence. This kind of space seems to me to leave important work for an audience to do. Or does it function here as just the low point on Cathy's narrative of enlightenment? BO: Yes, this is all about an audience thinking - it's challenging for them too. The film obviously doesn't offer any easy solutions. But that's part of how it can work with an audience. We are interested in screening this film with discussion too and parts of it will be used in popular education workshops and courses. JD: Yes I was going to ask that, where is the film getting seen? BO: It had its local premier, it will have its international cinema premier probably at the International Edinburgh Film Festival. We are also doing a preview screening here in Glasgow for a targeted audience of people and agencies involved in development, anti-poverty agencies and in popular education, as a way of building the audience for public cinema screenings and screenings on the alternative circuits. It has already been on BBC World, who actually got the idea of the local/global story, and it will be seen on E TV in South Africa. It has yet to be seen on British terrestrial television. JD: Doesn't the fact that you can't get a UK network slot rather challenge some of what you hoped the film might achieve? BO: Of course, and we're still working with the terrestrial broadcasters here, but we know that there is an audience for this (that TV at present isn't serving very well) so we're also working at the alternative circuits, at non broadcast, non mainstream distribution, at the educational networks, the internet, and simple videocassette distribution, that bypass the mass media institutions. We're looking for help on that one too, if there is anyone out there? JD: So what's your next project? BO: I'm going to do something on HipHop as a global phenomena, the place where real stories about what it's like to be growing up now in shanties/ghettos/ housing schemes. It was inspired by what Prophets of Da City were getting up to in Cape Town. I'm also looking to develop a series rooted in our 'battered' communities, that isn't Neighbours from Hell (UK reality programme). JD: How do you think these projects fit into the True TV idea? It's the disenfranchised voices again, isn't it? That, and the dancing... Jonathan Dovey is a Writer, Producer and Lecturer in the School of Cultural Studies at the University of the West of England. His new book Freakshows-First Person Media and Factual TV will be published by Pluto Press in Spring 2000. Barbara Orton has just set up TRUE TV in Glasgow. Previously, as a community arts worker in Pilton, Edinburgh, she was part of the community video workshop 'Video in Pilton'. Her first film on leaving was for BBC Scotland, the popular BAFTA award winning In Cuba They're Still Dancing which has been broadcast internationally and screened world-wide in festivals. |
