Pea Arts About

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...

Part 1 Part 2   Part 3   Part 4 Part 5 Part 6   Part 7   Culture as Threat The type of punk memories re/enacted in Good Vibrations were recorded at the time by filmmaker John T. Davis in Shellshock Rock (1979). The documentary was famously banned at the now much more liberal Cork Film Festival for its ‘poor quality’, that is, its energetic lo-fi presentations of bands’ live performances – an aesthetic now long standard in music videos – and the anarchic punks’ unsavoury behaviour (including instances of mooning), which, again, are tame by today’s standards. Davis’s film indicates that Good Vibrations is an accurate portrayal of twenty-first-century nostalgia for punk and the hopeful message in official peacetime invoked by the notion of Northern Irish punk having more in common with hippy values than the anger and style of punk’s branches in Britain, Ireland and North America. Good Vibrations also had to become a saleable product, and so appeal to the nostalgia ...

Marianne Hirsch opens chapter 9 of her book The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust by outlining Hal Foster’s identification of an ‘archival impulse’ in contemporary art around the turn of the millennium. For Foster, it is an impulse in contemporary artists to connect the unconnected and redress failures in cultural memory through creating imaginary pasts and futures. Hirsch, however, applies the notion to readings of postmemory, aftermath work that seeks to ‘reclaim historical specificity and context’ (pp. 227–8). A similar turn, or at least something in between the two, can be drawn from the sort of work I studied for my PhD on visual culture in contemporary, post-Agreement Northern Ireland. But that’s if you look at the more widely known names in art and film there. Beyond them, something else has been going on, but a lack of regular critical engagement and analysis – itself lacking appropriate platforms and resources – means the e...