Understanding Through Storytelling

Audiovisual Cultures Podcast Round-up

The guests on the January 2021 episodes got us off to a great start for the coming year with differing topics that at their core hinged upon storytelling.

For 82, I was joined from California by filmmaker Justin McAleece, and in 83, urban planner Mustafa Sherif called in from Sweden. Both conversations involve us talking through some logistics of film, video and podcast production with a common thread of finding ways to facilitate telling an interesting story, whether through music videos, corporate demos, advertising, comedy mockumentary, serious documentary or platforming someone with something to say that the rest of us can learn from. 

As I begin to draft this, it is the 9th of January and in the past few days there have been deeply troubling scenes in the USA resulting from the outgoing president inciting his red-capped supporters to violence against, well, just about anyone upholding the democratic process. As many who have no choice but to look on from afar put their twopenceworth's in on Twitter, it is frustrating to see commentary decrying the widespread lack of training in critical thinking. I wonder if we could coin a term for the collective facepalming of arts and humanities educators the world over. I have been saying into the void for years that there were never more urgent times for media literacy, that people teaching it from all sorts of angles ought to be heeded. But, sure, aren't they just Mickey Mouse subjects? Oh you just watch films all day, poor you. Thon arty farty nonsense isn't going to cure cancer, y'know. No. But it might prevent just so many people from taking arms to release their frustrations because they would have a better understanding of society through empathy for their fellow inhabitants of this planet, as well as a keener bullshit detector, all from learning a few basics about how stories and images are framed and presented in the ways that they are, and what effects different ways of communicating can have. 

I got into this area in some depth with Justin, whose experience across a wide array of moving image production is something other practitioners and analysts alike can learn from. And, as he candidly points out, it takes making mistakes, and having the grace and humility to admit as much, to truly develop and grow in your practice. It is not only the stories we tell, but how we tell them, that can be a catalyst for something else. What that something else is depends on our level and type of activation as consumers.

Using storytelling as a tool for education became an important theme in my conversation with Mustafa. As I mention in the episode, I have a passing interest in the built environment, mainly from growing up in a conflict/post-conflict, post-industrial city, as well as from small acts of activism in writing letters to councils and submitting objections to planning proposals when harmful, soulless developments are on the horizon. The Urbanistica podcast Mustafa makes hands over the mic, not just to urban planners and architects, but to the users of different kinds of environments found in cities. Mustafa presents them as 'this week's storyteller', and they proceed to tell their own story as well as their specific stories in navigating, designing, structuring or using built environments. They are stories about ways of being in space and place. They are human stories, and it is the sharing of human stories that might just save us in the long run.

 Watch episode 83 with auto captions here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

 

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