Film: "Little Richard: I Am Everything" (2023)

Like a lot of early rock 'n' rollers, Little Richard's life and career is not something I know about in detail. Before going in to see this my thumbnail summary was Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom and sexual ambiguity. The film is pretty good, in that it certainly tracks through the contours of his strange life in a way that left me considerably more informed, but it had certain annoying features. First of all was the presence of all the ponderous talking heads telling us all how important Little Richard was. I was half expecting Bongo to show up but we were at least spared that, but in general I do not appreciate people appearing in a documentary telling me what I am meant to think about the subject.

The other thing that annoyed me was the continuous claims by people in the film that Little Richard's career had been sabotaged by the rock establishment who had then gone on to write him out of history. That kind of semi-conspiratorial thinking seems to be a staple with discussions of cult figures. It generally doesn't add up, and it particularly does not in this case. As the film's use of archive footage makes clear, Richard seems to have spent most of his life appearing on TV chat shows, which is pretty good going for someone written out of history. And as to his career being sabotaged by the rock establishment, firstly it was a general feature of the early rock 'n' rollers that they didn't really remain relevant that long, not because of a conspiracy but because music moved on and they didn't. But in Little Richard's case, if anyone sabotaged his career that person was Little Richard, whose problematic religious beliefs kept causing him to give up making music (because it meant he thought rock 'n' roll was the music of the Devil).

The Little Richard story is still a fascinating one. I just wish there was a better film about it: one with less annoying talking heads and more analysis of his own conflicted relationship to his sexuality.

image source:

Little Richard, Little Richard (Guardian: "Little Richard: I Am Everything review – irresistible tribute to a rock’n’roll genius")

Film: "In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50" (2022)

More advanced readers will have twigged that this is a documentary about the popular Robert Fripp led band. I am not really that familiar with the music of King Crimson or indeed with their history, so I was watching this to get a sense of what they are about. Directed by Toby Amies, this follows them on tour in 2021. It kind of follows the Spinal Tap rockumentary model, interspersing live footage with interviews. While the film seems to have been made with the permission of King Crimson (i.e. with the permission of Robert Fripp), it does feature some interviews with former members of the band, some of whom are a bit barbed in their comments about the band's interpersonal dynamics and Fripp's dislike of band members who want their artistic ideas treated with respect).

The main thing I took away from this film is that Fripp is as mad as a bag of ferrets. He seems to combine being a bit interpersonally difficult with an extremely obsessive approach to musicianship. It is mentioned at one point that he insists on practising his guitar for six hours every day and feels that his performance suffers if he doesn't put the full block of time in. And then we see him giving out to the filmmaker and threatening to cancel the whole film because all the interviews he has to do are cutting into his practice time and impinging on his ability to perform. He also seems to have spent the history of King Crimson feuding with all the band's other members and is only somewhat happy now that he has recruited a line-up of (brilliant) musicians who are happy not to push back against his every demand. But it was still noticeable that Fripp was far more on edge throughout the film than any of his players (and that includes drummer Bill Rieflin (formerly of the Revolting Cocks), who spends the film being eaten up by colonic cancer, remarking at one point that he is in constant pain from his terminal condition). I was kind of thinking of Fripp as the prog Mark E. Smith, but my sense is that in The Fall MES was pretty chill but everyone else was on edge all the time.

Oddly, you get that sense of "Everyone's replaceable in King Crimson" more with the film's director than with the musicians. The current line-up of musicians know their place and are happy to go along with it, but the director seems to be always a Fripp meltdown away from the project being cancelled. There is one bit where one of the musicians is being interviewed and he says something like "I was years into the band before I stopped feeling like I was still auditioning for my part". Amies comments that he still feels like he is auditioning himself, to which the musician replies "Well you are".

The film is also surprisingly funny for a documentary about a prog rock band led by a deranged obsessive who takes himself very seriously. At one point Amies is talking to Jakko Jakszyk, vocalist and guitarist in the touring band. He was saying how before he had joined King Crimson he had been playing in 21st Century Schizoid Man, a group formed by former members of the band. He recounts how one day he took a call from Robert Fripp. "He asked me how things were going, and I had to say that they weren't great. And he said to me, 'the thing you have to remember is those guys from the early years of King Crimson are all cunts, and the biggest cunt of all is -' ", and then the film cuts to a separate interview with a former member of the band.

There was also a funny (to me) bit where someone is saying to Jakszyk that, as the only single man in the touring band, he'll be able to go out there and get a load of action for himself from the King Crimson fans, and I thought, "only if you have a fetish for chubby middle-aged men".

The music is pretty good too and did leave me wishing I had seen this tour. The big selling point for me was the band having three drummers. More drummers the better. Now I just need to actually listen to some recorded King Crimson. The tour in the film is reportedly their last ever, so I'll probably never see them live, although one of the musicians commented that Fripp is always saying that he will never tour again and then finding that he has to tour to fund an extension to his house, so one never knows.

One final thing: one thing that really endeared me to this film was that the director comes across very well in it. He never appears on screen (apart from at the very end and then only briefly) but we hear his voice as he talks to the subjects, and he has an appealingly hesitant attitude, the opposite of the in your face arrogance of the guy who made the Ginger Baker film. I may investigate further works by him.

image source:

At home with Robert Fripp (Guardian: "In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50 review – a rollicking workplace comedy")

Dublin area films: North Circular and Ghosts of Baggotonia

You wait years for a black and white film focusing on an area in Dublin and then two come along at once. They are actually very different films, but I am still going to lump them together here.

Directed by Luke McManus, North Circular is a documentary about the North Circular Road, a winding route that runs from Phoenix Park almost all the way to the Five Lamps junction on Amiens Street. The film expands its remit to look at Phoenix Park itself at one end and Sheriff Street on the other, with the latter basically a continuation of the road towards Dublin's docks. Interesting locations near but not on the road feature, with one notable scene taking place in the UN veterans' place at the end of my road; sadly neither Billy Edwards nor the Patriotic Chonker put in an unscheduled appearance. There are also some nice musical sequences in the Cobblestone pub. The tone is pretty heart of the rowl and there is an amusing bit near the beginning where former residents of the now demolished Devaney Gardens flats reminisce about the great community spirit of the place ("At Halloween the chisellers used to burn out cars on the green, it was great crack almighty" etc.). At the other end there are some great sequences with Gemma Dunleavy, local pop star in the making; I was particularly struck with the live sequence that showed her being accompanied by actual harps while doing her R&B/garage/grime influenced stuff.

If I had a criticism of North Circular, it is the extent of its heart of the rowl focus. The film acknowledges that many people live along or near the North Circular who have moved there from elsewhere: other parts of Dublin, other parts of Ireland, even other countries. Some of these people are shown on screen but we almost never hear their voices, which seemed to mark the long meandering street out as a domain where only the true inner city Dub can really feel at home: a local street for local people. But that does not stop the film being a fascinating journey through Dublin's north inner city.

Alan Gilsenan's Ghosts of Baggotonia is a good bit more impressionistic. It begins for some reason with footage of allied bomber planes from the Second World War but then moves on to its true focus, the area around Baggot Street. In the post-war period became a bohemian milieu in which various struggling writers eked out a living from flats and bedsits; some of them are still well known writers, in Ireland at least (I'm thinking in particular of Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh), others less so. The film also uses a collection of street photographs by Neville Johnson to evoke the era (though his photography ranges far beyond the Baggotonia enclave). And it is worth noting that some of the writers covered (e.g. Flann O'Brien) did not actually live near Baggot Street: Baggotonia was a state of mind rather than a place. The film presents an allusive portrait of the time, using archival footage, drone photography and voiceover to hint at an era that seems almost unimaginably ancient for all that it hovers at the edge of living memory. I recommend the film to anyone interested in that cohort of writers or in bohemian life generally.

images:

North Circular still (The Journal: "Lockdown took me on a journey to film life along Dublin's North Circular Road")

Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin arrive at Davy Byrne's on Duke Street after a Bloomsday trip to Sandymount (Irish Times: "Ghosts of Baggotonia: D4 as you have never seen it before")

The last scene: New York in the early 2000s

Meet Me In The Bathroom is documentary based on the book by Lizzy Goldman, which in turn took its title from a song by The Strokes. It is documentary about the New York scene of the early 21st century, focussed on the Strokes themselves and on other bands of that era: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, The Moldy Peaches, etc. When I first saw posters for the film my initial thought was that those bands were not actually good enough to justify a documentary about their scene. Then I though back to how exciting it was when the existence of the New York scene was announced to the world, because scenes are exciting in a way that individual bands are not. Also, having been told all my life that New York is an amazingly cool place, the prospect of there being actually cool music emerging from it was something that was easy to lap up. With the passage of time, my sense was that most of these bands had rather underdelivered, which raised the prospect that a film about them would be a bit of a trudge, leading to more discerning viewers being irritated by an endless parade of mediocre music juxtaposed against a commentary about how great the whole thing was. Nevertheless, I decided to take one for the team and booked myself in to see the film.

And it's actually very enjoyable. It does not necessarily shake me out of my belief that most of these acts were quite good rather than truly great, but it does communicate a sense of how exciting it must have been when the bands all burst onto the scene together. Formally it combines a lot of archival footage of the artists with recordings (possibly for interviews made for the book) of people talking about the scene. It is a very time-bound artefact, looking at a scene that emerged in the period when mobile video technology had become sufficiently cheap that it was possible for there to be loads of footage of the bands playing live and goofing around offstage, but from before the rise of people not paying for music precluded the emergence of such a scene.

The Strokes are the film's main focus, which is fair enough: they were the first of the bands to break big, and they also broke very big indeed, going almost overnight from playing toilet venues in New York to being superstars in the UK. It's easy to see why they were so successful, with catchy tunes and good lucks being a perennially winning combo. I'm still undecided as to how actually good they were, but they are definitely at least quite good, and the film has certainly made me interested in listening to their first album again.

One thing the film definitely did was confirm me in my view that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were the most essential band to emerge from that scene. A lot of that is down to Karen O, but not everything. She is a very charismatic frontwoman, but there is an energy to how Nick Zinner's guitars and Brian Chase's drums play off her yelps that adds to more the sum of its parts. It's also striking that in a scene defined by its good lookers (e.g. The Strokes and Interpol), Karen O is surprisingly plain-looking (controversial), probably not even being the best looker in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (doubly controversial); yet for all, that throw her onstage and she transforms into a super-charismatic rock goddess. The film was also interesting on the pressure heaped on Karen O as the most visible woman in a pretty blokey scene.

My view on the other key band of that scene was also reinforced. The Moldy Peaches may have been a bunch of underachieving wasters who never followed up on their early success (quirky artistic success, not commercial success) but I still feel they had something, and hearing their tunes in the cinema alongside the others did not make me feel that I was wrong. Their underachievement is in some ways kind of surprising. There is a bit in the film where Kimya Dawson of The Moldy Peaches is talking about supporting The Strokes on their first tour of the UK, where the latter were living the rock star dream as they discovered that on our side of the Atlantic they had become superstars. Dawson mentions being a bit older than The Strokes and saying to them, "Dudes, do you maybe not want to get completely wasted all the time so that you will be able to remember all this?" (to which The Strokes collectively responded, "SHUT UP KIMYA AND GIMME THE DRØGS! WHERE ARE THE SEXY GIRLS?").

Beyond that we're into first wave also-ran territory: Interpol (good looking, not obviously essential in the music department), Liars (tuneless), TV On The Radio (not sure I've ever heard anything by them), etc. Then the second wave, which is essentially James Murphy & Tim Goldsworthy's DFA Records and the acts associated with it. For the purposes of the film that was basically The Rapture (who were on DFA for a bit but then left because some kind of mysterious prickology was delaying the release of their album) and Murphy's own LCD Soundsystem, a band summoned into existence by the success of the "Losing My Edge" single. Obviously, you know the tune; in fact it is about you (and not because you are one of the kids who is coming up from behind). The situating of the tune in the film was interesting, as it came up in the context of how the rise of Napster and file-sharing was suddenly making everything available to everyone, killing off the cachet that came from having hunted down obscure old records. The film also mentioned how file sharing strangled bands' incomes, playing a large part in the decline of band-based music, which may well mean that the early 2000s New York scene is the last of its kind.

images:

The Strokes (Pitchfork: "Vintage Photos of the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, James Murphy, and More From Meet Me in the Bathroom")

Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Wikipedia)

Film: "Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: a History of Folk Horror" (2021)

This is a documentary by Kier-La Janisse about all that folk horror stuff, starting off with the big three (The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, and Blood on Satan's Claw) before heading on into weirdo TV of the 1970s (typically written by Nigel Kneale) before travelling around the world and on to the present day. Howard Ingham, who wrote the book on folk horror, features as one of the talking heads, possibly being the first voice heard in the film. The guys who set up the Folk Horror Revival group on Facebook also make an appearance.

The film is good but maybe goes on a bit. It loses focus a bit when it starts talking about folk horror from places other than Britain. That section felt a bit "Around the World in 88 Crazy Folk Beliefs", coming close to offering little more than a superficial listing of the films.

My sense of unease with the folk horror around the world section did get me thinking about what this folk horror stuff is all about. I lean towards the idea that is fundamentally a very British thing, based on the country, particularly England, having a continuous history that has rolled on for hundreds and hundreds of years without the disruption of invasion and the like. That sense of long history means there is a lot of past from which things can resurface. And despite the name, there is more to folk horror than horror featuring elements from folk traditions (e.g. leprechauns exist as threatening entities in Irish folk tales but Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood is not folk horror). Some of the non-British folk horror films in Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched did just seem to be taking some monster from folk traditions and having it eat people, which to me is not what true folk horror is about.

I also found myself taking issue with the claim by one of the commentators that folk horror asks "what if the old ways were right?". I don't think any of the great folk horror narratives pose that question. Rather they ask "what if there were nutters who believed the old ways are right?", e.g. people on a Scottish island who think that human sacrifice will guarantee an abundant harvest or East Anglian peasants who think that their neighbours are practising witchcraft and should be executed. Folk horror sometimes presents the followers of the old ways in an almost appealing manner, but you'd have to be a right weirdo to think that their ways are better than the ones science has to offer us.

That's a lot of grumbling and caveats from me, which is unfortunate and might give the wrong impression that I did not enjoy the film. It is a great piece of work and I think it functions well as both an introduction to the genre and something that triggers debate and thought for people who have more engagement with it. I think it is available on some online streaming patterns and possibly also DVD. I encourage people to seek it out. This might actually be a better film to see at home rather than in the cinema, as you may well find yourself wanting to note down films to check out later.

I nominated Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched in the Best Related Work category in this year's Hugo Awards, but it did not make it to the list of finalists, due to biased political voting.

images:

The Unholy Trinity (The Kim Newman Website: "FrightFest review – Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror")

Warwick Davis and friend (Nathan Rabin's Happy Place: "Exploiting the Archives: Control Nathan Rabin: Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood")

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (Rotten Tomatoes)

film: "Matangi/Maya/M.I.A." (2018)

This is a documentary about popular musical artist M.I.A., with the title being her real name, an abbreviation of her real name used by her family, and her stage name. She is something of a documentarist’s dream as before her musical career took off she was interested in pursuing a career in documentary filmmaking and was filming herself obsessively before this was something every young person was doing. She also appears to have grown up in a family that liked recording itself. So there is plenty of “before she was famous” footage and indeed lots of home video footage from after she became famous, such is her interest in self-documentation. The film uses all this footage to good effect, combining it with more standard musical artist footage to present a fairly conventional version of M.I.A.’s musical career and life, from fleeing Sri Lanka as a refugee (partly thanks to anti-Tamil riots, partly thanks to parents’ involvement in the shady Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), growing up in a London council estate, going to art school, becoming a musical sensation and then becoming mired in controversy.

The controversies are both interesting and at times surprisingly funny. M.I.A.’s sense of herself as a Tamil and a refugee seems very important to her and her work often references both a sense of Tamil oppression (and fighting back against that oppression), a more general struggle against oppression, and then the refugee experience. Her lyrical concerns touch on global issues, particularly with reference to the global South, rather than purely with the marginalised First World experience more commonly seen in hip-hop. Her breakthrough in the USA with her second album, Kala, unfortunately coincided with the brutal end of the civil war in Sri Lanka, when the Sri Lankan army crushed the Tamil Tigers but used such levels of indiscriminate violence that non-combatants were killed in enormous numbers. In interviews, videos and social media posts M.I.A. attempted to push back against this and bring the horrific levels of human rights abuses taking place to a wider audience. For this she became something of a hate figure to members of Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese community, both there and in the Sri Lankan diaspora, as they saw her as an apologist for the terrorist Tamil Tigers spreading calumnies about their country. I found that instructive with regard to the elusive nature of truth in civil conflict situations.

What seemed a bit more unsavoury was an interview and long profile piece the New York Times did with M.I.A., where she was dismissed as a faux radical playing with Third World revolutionary slogans from a position of First World privilege (the New York Times made much of the father of her child and then fiancé being the super-rich heir to some big fortune). That seemed unfair, as M.I.A. had been sticking her neck out attempting to raise awareness of the massacres taking place in Sri Lanka, which are actual terrible events and not some kind of yeah-man facile cause célèbre du jour. Yet I can almost see where the New York Times was coming from – although M.I.A. was the child of refugees, grew up in a South London council estate, and had people spitting in her face and killing her a Paki, her self assurance and media savvy make it easy to see her as being in some way inauthentic and mysteriously privileged. That may say more about the New York Times' prejudices, however, as it amounts to thinking that the offspring of real refugees can’t go to art school and are only authentic if they remain picturesquely poor and inarticulate.

Those controversies are downers, but more roffletastic was the one that ensued when she performed with Madonna in the interval of the Superbowl in 2012. At some point she gave the finger to the camera, which then turned into a monumentally big deal because America is full of uptight crazy people. The film presents a montage of television commentators talking about how outraged they are by this terrible occurrence, lending support to the idea that right wing Americans are all butt-hurt man-baby snowflakes (and also dipshits, particularly the guy who started moaning about how Madonna should have picked American musicians to perform with). At one point the NFL was demanding some $15,000,000 from M.I.A. in a lawsuit arising from the incident, later offering to settle for 100% of any further income earned by her should her lifetime earnings ever go over $2,000,000 (her then manager, Mr Jay Z, apparently advised her to accept this). The suit was subsequently settled on terms that have not been revealed but the whole episode was an astonishing exercise in people taking things way too seriously (something that I fear may be America’s national past-time).
My liking for the film is not however without reservation. While I salute M.I.A.’s attempts to raise awareness of human rights abuses perpetrated against Tamils in Sri Lanka, I found her uncritical support for the Tamil Tigers deeply troubling. The Tigers were an unsavoury bunch whose supposed struggle for Tamil rights led them to their own acts of indiscriminate violence against Sinhalese civilians and were led by a sinister figure who constructed a personality cult around himself. I think the film could have interrogated her beliefs in this regard. It should be possible to oppose the widespread large-scale massacres of Tamils that took place in Sri Lanka without falling into the trap of supporting terrorist violence against Sinhalese civilians: I do not think either justifies the other.

That is little more than a quibble, and I would still say to see this film, particularly if you can see it in a cinema. The music in it is great (obv.), not just the M.I.A. music but also some storming footage of Elastica that appears early on (in the Britpop era M.I.A. somehow fell in with Justine Frischmann and was at one stage shooting footage of Elastica for a possible documentary about them; in the film M.I.A. talks about how this was a miserable time for her as Frischmann’s bandmates all hated her). The other great thing about the film is that M.I.A. looks amazing, by which I do not just mean that she is rowr (of course she is, she’s M.I.A.) but that that she oozes charisma and is always wearing cool clothes. Her moves are great too and if you want big M.I.A. moves you need to see this on the big screen.

More M.I.A. action.



image sources:

M.I.A. (Irish Times review of film)

M.I.A.'s middle finger (The Globe and Mail)

Still from Born Free video (jenesaispop: El mensaje de M.I.A. en ‘Born Free’)

FILM: "Gimme Danger" (2016)

And now a review of a film from some time ago. Directed by Jim Jarmusch, this one deals with popular band The Stooges. It tells the story of their relatively short career through a combination of interviews and archival footage. Iggy Pop, their lead singer, proves to be a particularly engaging interviewee. The film takes an interesting approach, focussing more on the music than on the more colourful aspects of the band's behaviour (i.e. Mr Pop's tendency to pop out his lad on stage is barely mentioned, Ron Asheton's habit of wearing an SS uniform on stage is covered almost in passing and the band members' prodigious drøg habits receive scant attention). Some have criticised this, accusing the film of missing the point by adopting a reverential approach to the band. Perhaps so but the more garish aspects of The Stooges are so well known that focussing on them would have meant the film dwelled overly on material with which there is broad familiarity.

I suspect many readers know a lot more about the Stooges than I do, but I was surprised to learn that Mr Pop had a pre-Stooges musical career as a drummer, playing with various local blue bands and filling in onstage in other outfits. He says that one reason why he gave up drumming was that he got fed up of looking at singer's arses (though once said arse was that of Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las, which he admits was not so bad). I was also struck by how his family background appeared to be relatively functional, while modest, and not the boo-hoo poor me broken home background of many other larger than life rock stars. Generally though his thoughtfulness and erudition was very striking, a world away from the cartoonish image he may have built for himself and acted out in his wilder years. He was also strikingly generous with regard to the contribution to the Stooges' success of the other band members and also other bands, notably the MC5, though he was dismissive of much of the music of the late 1960s, which he saw as bullshit attempts by The Man to co-opt youth culture and head off revolt (political and aesthetic), with Crosby, Stills and Nash particular offenders here.

Some odd features of the film were its decision to merely hint at some big issues in the Stooges history, such as the reshuffle on the third album that saw Ron Asheton moved to bass and James Williamson recruited to play guitar. Iggy Pop just describes this baldly as having happened with no explanation, though I understand from my colleague Mr W— that there were Issues behind this change. The film also hints without stating directly that said third album, Raw Power, is the duff one. I cannot judge this myself, not having heard it, but I think its being credited to Iggy and the Stooges rather than The Stooges is a warning sign, as its tendency to appear in new remastered and remixed editions every couple of years. [People have since claimed to me that actually Raw Power is the best Stooges album, but they would say that.]

I was also interested by the detail that it was the film Velvet Goldmine that provided the impetus for the reformation of the Stooges back whenever they reformed. Mike Watt put together a band to play Stooges songs in the film, which featured Ewan McGregor as an analogue of Iggy Pop, and this somehow morphed into a touring band for Iggy Pop with Mike Watt then encouraging the reformation of what was left of the original Stooges. Fascinating. That James Williamson (now a retired Silicon Valley executive) was recruited once more to replace Ron Asheton when the latter died was both an amusing and poignantly ironic twist of fate.

The other thing I learned about the Stooge more from people talking about the film than the film itself is that ladies love Iggy Pop. I mean, I had always had the idea that he had more muffs than I've had hot dinners (and I've had a lot of hot dinners) but I reckoned that was in the general sense that music performers often find that their musical prowess opens romantic doors. But no, it seems that women really like Iggy Pop, with it apparently being quite common for ladies to dress up when going to see this film in the cinema, on the basis that you need to look your best for Iggy. God bless him.


image source (Guardian: Gimme Danger review – Jim Jarmusch plugs into Iggy Pop's raw power)

[film] "Containment" [2015]

Do not destroy these markers. These standing stones mark an area used to bury radioactive wastes. Do not drill here. Do not dig here. The rock and water in this area may not look, feel, or smell unusual but may be poisoned by radioactive wastes. When radioactive matter decays, it gives off invisible energy that can destroy or damage people, animals, and plants.

I saw the film Containment in an exhibition in the Project Arts Centre called Riddle of the Burial Grounds. The film is a documentary by Peter Galison & Robb Moss. It is about the containment of nuclear waste, in particular the spent fuel of nuclear reactors. Much of the film is about WIPP, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. This was set up as a secure storage site in which nuclear waste could be dumped and forgotten about.

A problem with nuclear waste is that it will remain dangerously radioactive for a very long time, longer in fact than the entire span of human history so far. It was decided by US federal authorities that WIPP would have to be marked in such a way that in the far future people would be deterred from digging there and inadvertently releasing the radiation. This is a bit difficult as the people who must be warned away may have no memory of our culture and have no language in common with us. An interdisciplinary team of scientists, linguists, science fiction writers, and various other types (sadly no First World War bloggers) were recruited to try and come up with something that stood a convincing chance of warning off the people of the future. You get the sense that at the end of their efforts they are not really that convinced that they have anything will definitely or even probably work, but still they feel that they owe it to future generations to try.

The film is not just about WIPP, it also looks at where nuclear waste is currently stored. Typically the highly radioactive spent fuel of nuclear reactors is stored at the nuclear sites themselves, cooled in tanks of water to stop them catching fire and spreading fallout all over their surrounding areas. If a typical one of these sites were to lose its cooling waters then the spent fuel would probably render a vast area around the site uninhabitable. The film looks at one site where this almost happened, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The power plant there was severely damaged in the 2011 tsunami and did release radiation; the film shows a farmer whose irradiated cattle cannot be eaten and also looks at trees whose wood is too contaminated to be used in construction. However, the spent fuel rods in Fukushima did not lose their coolant, though at one stage it looked as though the water would boil off and expose the rods. The prime minister of Japan at the time of the tsunami is interviewed in the film; he says that if the coolant had boiled off and the rods had ignited then they would have released so much radiation that an area of Japan in which some 20 to 40 million people live would have become uninhabitable. He likened that outcome as being akin to losing a major war and said that it would have brought an end to Japan as an independent state.

The film also looks at some nuclear sites in the US, in particular the Savannah River Site, a huge complex of reactors and temporary storage sites in South Carolina. This lies on the Savannah river in an area of fascinating swampy wilderness. There is a lovely scene in the film with a camera panning along the lush tree-lined border of the river before a nuclear plant rears up through the vegetation. It is a fascinating juxtaposition of nature and a human construct of destruction.

The Savannah River Site seems to be a bit leaky. The film has a nice sequence showing a place where they keep wild turtles that have absorbed too much radioactive and so have to be taken away from people who might catch and eat them. There were also a couple of radioactive alligators swimming around. One of the locals interviewed bemoans the fact that the signs on the river tell people not to fish but do not say why, so people just assume it is some kind of proprietorial thing and catch the radioactive fish anyway. A thoughtful local clergyman bemoans the presence of the SRS on his doorstep but is powerless to do anything about it.

At WIPP, on the other hand, the locals appear to be quite excited about the prospect of the nation's nuclear waste stored nearby. Simple economics explains this: there is not really much going on in the area and until WIPP opened the local community was in steep decline. People further afield in New Mexico, through whose areas the waste would have to be transported, are a bit less keen on the project, but you can't make an omelet without setting off a chain reaction.

The problem with trying to communicate the warning to people in the future is a difficult one. Think of something like the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the walls of an Egyptian temple: but for the chance discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 they would be completely incomprehensible to us. It is quite possible that in the future there will be no cultural continuity with our civilisation, so any kind of warning based on writing is potentially unreliable. Warnings based on pictures may also fail as different cultural norms would leave them open to misinterpretation. Another fear is that by marking the site and saying "Do not dig here" they run the risk of creating a gold rush as people rush to find whatever amazing stuff the ancient ones have buried. The suggested marking of the site with structures designed to conjure up unease also looked like they could backfire, as to me they looked like they would be fun places to explore. One proposal in particular may have been modelled on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Berlin, a structure whose design invites people in for inappropriate games of hide and seek or chasing, so that might not be so good for the land above WIPP.

The project involved some people involved in one of humanity's few other attempts to communicate with those lacking any cultural points of similarity with ourselves: the images and sounds of Earth contained on the Voyager probes. I think the Voyager probes are unlikely ever to be found by alien life, but if they are it will be so far in the future that humanity will in all likelihood no longer exist. The Voyager golden records will be all that is left of our civilisation and culture. It is appropriate therefore that they attempt to present a good face of us to whoever or whatever finds them. As one of the people in the film says, the markers at WIPP are more to do with something shameful and shortsighted of our species: the production of nuclear waste with no thought for the danger it would pose to the future. Yet the project is still a noble one, as the team tries to create something that will protect people living so far in the future that they may no longer be human in the way that we are.

I have talked more of the content of this film than the form. The film features plenty of talking heads but also atmospheric shots of the desert landscape above the WIPP site. We also have the swampy wildness of the Savannah River Site and the irradiated landscape around Fukushima. In the latter we see the abandoned towns and houses of humans but again more fascinating is the countryside, a landscape that is beautiful and peaceful in appearance but so contaminated that people are not allowed stay overnight within the zone.

Although the film covers a serious subject, it has a light tone. I particularly liked the animations illustrating scenarios the futurology people came up with for likely future incursions into WIPP, with a succession of jaunty looking people or robots realising too late that they have released the radioactive death contained at the site. I also liked the animation of a suggested attempt to create cultural awareness of the WIPP site through a proposed cartoon character called Nicky Nuke, who would have an associated theme park (Nukeland or something like that), which reminded me of the Mickey Eye Park in the comic Seaguy, in that it was clearly a deranged rip-off of Disneyland.

All in all the film leaves the viewer with a sense that something will have to be done with nuclear waste and that the waste already produced cannot be expected to remain in water cooled tanks for the hundred thousand or more years it will take it to become harmless. That something is probably burying it somewhere like WIPP, in a remote and geologically stable location. Warning future generations not to excavate the site is difficult or impossible to do effectively, but there is no real option but to attempt it.

I also left the film thinking that if the USA has all that waste and is having problems working out what to do with it and how to store it safely in the meantime, what about more ramshackle countries that have also decided to go down the nuclear road. I'm thinking of Pakistan in particular here, but you would also have to worry about the long term safety of nuclear waste in the likes of Kazakhstan, Russia and Iran. And when you are talking of stuff that takes over a hundred thousand years to become safe you do have to think of the very long term.

Containment Trailer 1 from Robb Moss & Peter Galison on Vimeo.

image sources:

Spikes (Containment film website)

nuclear power plants map (Maps on the Web)

Voyager Golden Disc (Wikipedia)

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Wikipedia)