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THE CHARM OF THE SWARM - WORLD WIDE WIKIPEDIA

Louis Christie — 2022-03-13T14:09:04Z

The internet giant Wikipedia just turned 20. We take a look at its background and the future of the online encyclopaedia. Louis Christie reviews Maria Teresa Curzio 2021's documentary.

Now in its third decade, Wikipedia faces some complex questions. What role can robots play in writing and regulating articles? Can automated translation help save indigenous languages? What are the implications for an online encyclopaedia when nine in ten contributors are men? In a world where data is the most valuable commodity, how can we stop big tech from cashing in on freely shared knowledge? Do editors endanger the whole project when they're bankrolled by corporate PR firms?

These are pressing and difficult questions, and The Charm of the Swarm does well to flesh them out. The documentary is guided by conceptual issues, and reels out a cast of endearingly camera-shy characters to help address them. Being a Wikipedian costs a huge amount of time and doesn't offer much in return, apart from the expansion of human knowledge. As a result, the people who find their calling in the website share a deep idealism. Their commitment to truth and free dialogue is inspiring, and provides hope that the unlikely and beautiful success story of Wikipedia, a voluntary, democratic knowledge base, might continue beyond the challenges it faces. These challenges, on the other hand, are fundamental. Elwin Huaman, a Quechuan researcher committed to creating a thriving Wikipedia in his native language, comes up against the epistemological limits of the project. There are no citable sources for the kinds of traditional knowledge he wants to document, meaning his articles (e.g. about medicinal uses of certain flowers) are declared invalid and taken down. “If our culture cannot be represented under current Wikipedia rules,” he argues, “it is time to change the rules.”

In choosing to explore a virtual subject (Wikipedia) through the medium of a relatively straightforward talking heads documentary, the film straddles a disjuncture. Sometimes there are animated infographics. These feel most successful when they look like the internet; sections where the screen is filled with code feel dynamic, whereas more generic effects, aimed at bringing variety for its own sake, look out of place. Nevertheless, the film largely holds back from mimicking its virtual subject matter. Some interviewees are given full narratives, and the camera follows them going about their lives in the physical world, as if that's where the action happens. Having a story to hold on to is always welcome. But in some moments – restaged conversations about AI, or interviewees talking to camera about waging fierce editorial battles online – it felt like the documentary was missing out on the real drama. It would have been interesting to see the same rich questions addressed more experimentally, in their own language, the language of the internet.

More info here.

LONDON SHORT FILM FESTIVAL - London Lives 3

Louis Christie — 2020-02-13T14:31:02Z

Thrive (Jamie Di Spirito, 2019)

A sublimely intelligent and sensitive film, which sees a hook-up move into a challenging conversation. A naked man wakes up, lights up a cigarette and smokes out the window – through which the daylight outside illuminates the whole room. This is the only light source in the film, and it's used brilliantly. Grindr buzzes. His date comes over, and they're kissing almost before he's through the door. The orange curtain is drawn, turning the generous daylight into a warm luminescent wall, against which the sex scene unfolds, the two of them simultaneously bristling with hunger and tenderness. When the dialogue finally comes in, it necessarily makes a point of how wordless the film had been until then. Rejecting an invitation to breakfast, the man pulls the curtains back, and suddenly the scene is plunged back into cold daylight. The following conversation hurtles into the crucially underexplored grey area of HIV in the age of antiretroviral drugs, which render the virus undetectable and untransmittable. It delves truthfully into that quality of togetherness unique to gay romance, by which ties of attraction are ties of community. The dynamic between the two characters flickers mercurially; one moment they're lovers, the next moment they're brothers in solidarity. Held up by excellent cinematography and a beautifully understated central performance, the film finds a well of tenderness and complexity in the most ostensibly meaningless of hook-ups. It's a triumph.

3 Sleeps (Christopher Holt, 2019)

3 sleeps short film trailer from Chris holt on Vimeo.

In this gritty short, the trust a mother places in the maturity of her eldest daughter proves more well-founded than she could have guessed. She leaves her, in the opening scene, in charge of her two sisters. It's night and the girl doesn't want her to go; seeing her fear (and hearing the music rise ominously), we get the feeling that there is more to the situation than a child's stubborn attachment to her mum as she tries to go about everyday business. Sure enough, when they wake up she's still gone – for ‘three sleeps', possibly to Spain – and they have to fend for themselves. They spend what little money their mum gave them (with the instruction to not to spend it all on sweets) on sweets. The situation goes from bad to worse for the three sisters, with mum completely unresponsive to their phone calls, and it's almost unwatchable – not because of physical violence, but just because they're so completely helpless. The yellowish strip lighting beautifies nothing, and feels straight out of the more recent offerings from Ken Loach. When the end credits reveal that the film was based on a true story, the horror is accompanied by a strange sense of relief that the stress of seeing it might have somehow been a necessary form of witness-bearing. The film might not do much more than put its audience though a gripping and difficult watch, but in fulfilling that goal it's very successful.

LONDON SHORT FILM FESTIVAL - London Lives 2

Louis Christie — 2020-01-23T17:50:19Z

The Mole, (Yiling Ding, 2018)

This short and enigmatic film is a glimpse into the life of a young masseur in Chinatown. A montage of moments in his working day at family-run Hong Ning Herbal Medicine, with voiceover narration in Chinese, proffers the tip of an iceberg, the scale and complexity of which is only made clear in the final shot. With all the reticence of an Imagist poem, the film leaves you deeply intrigued yet with the impression that it's somehow said everything that needs saying.

Mahon Chorizo Avocado (Edward Smyth, 2019)

If The Mole held back on providing information, Mahon Chorizo Avocado amply made up for it. Whimsical, self-aware, steeped in the visual language of digital communication and internet culture, the film is a postironic bombardment of content. We whizz through text messages, montages of bumblefoot-afflicted pigeons and of the filmmaker ranting in French, then an instagram account (‘niche temp today') which posts the temperature of random objects, and of course the sandwich filling which gives the film its title (and which has now been changed Mahon Hummus Avocado, as both the filmmaker who invented it and the café which serves it have gone veggie). It's hard, if tempting, to accuse the film of being style over substance, because its seems to take style as its subject, offering itself as a study in, or demonstration of, the overload of digitised information that dominates our lives.

Situated among the other shorts, this feels like a pertinent subject to be making films about. It's notable, watching through the selection, how increasingly difficult it is to tell stories about London on screen without engaging with digital communication, when so much human interaction – so much story – now takes place in that arena. Three of the eight shorts have segments in phone video layout, and even those that don't are forced, in moments, to resort to showing phone screens. The Grindr messages are the only dull shot in Thrive, the naturalism of which is such that a more stylised way of showing text would have felt gimmicky and out of place. The 3 Sleeps solution was to make the girls reliant on their landline, and Talk to Leon had to push back to 1977 to frame an adventure which Google maps would have made less exciting. In any case, it's a conundrum which will only grow; it will be interesting to see how films deal with it in the coming years.

More info on the director's website.

Serious Tingz (Abdou Cisse, 2019)

Setting visuals to a spoken word poem, this film is succinct and brilliantly effective. It opens in black and white: a black man sits on the bonnet of a car, which rolls slowly towards the camera. His grimacing face edges into sharp focus. This (the grimace) is ‘screwface', self-defence through facial expression, which is the code of conduct for the young black men in the film. They are shown in gracefully cinematic shots intercut with phone footage; messing around in cars, then arranged in a beautiful triangular composition in the stairwell of a council block. The visual language switches between mundane and momentous; as we discover, norms of facial expression resonate on as many levels. When the sequences of screwface give way to smiles and laughs, it seems as if the film was just moving towards this lift in tone, but the smiles are undercut by the poem's powerful closing lines.

Serious Tingz from Abdou Cisse on Vimeo.

More to come...

LONDON SHORT FILM FESTIVAL - London Lives 1

Louis Christie — 2020-01-22T15:59:01Z

Telling a friend where I was going on Wednesday, I had hesitated over the title – was it ‘London Lives, as in ‘many lives', or could it be lives, as in ‘she lives'? After taking in these eight juxtaposed stories, I felt sure it was the former – the lives were multiple, intersecting but leading to completely distinct worlds, rather than coming together to form a unified and living whole. Their placement alongside each other felt more like counterpoint than synthesis. The films, curated from open submissions to the LSFF (of which there were 5,500), all navigate the paradox of living in a city so massive, where the heightened physical proximity of nine million residents often seems only to make the distances between them all the more unbreachably vast. Where this distance defines the way we interact, the intimacy of film becomes all the more valuable. Sitting in an audience of Londoners, all watching the city in ways we'd not done before, felt a strangely rare privilege.

Nobody's Darling (Sophia Carr-Gomm, 2019)

The loneliness of the distance-in-proximity dynamic is addressed head on by this witty opening short, which follows a young woman in the days over the new year, navigating warm but not entirely harmonious relationships with her friends and flatmates. The film opens with old black and white footage of lovers kissing against the London cityscape. Cut to her waking up in bed alone, and farting. The rest of the film continues in this doggedly unromantic vein – unromantic about friendship as well as romance – which it achieves with a deadpan knowingness. Blank conversations are had in comic yoga positions and through unmanageable mouthfuls of spaghetti; one shot at the New Year's Eve party shows her flatmate looking around searchingly while an out-of-focus couple snog so enthusiastically in the background that his glasses are knocked off. It's not sexy. A highlight is the pastiche moonlit DMC between the protagonist and the guy she's about to pull, where he keeps interrupting her to continue telling her about how much he hates when people interrupt, and how his mum raised him to respect women. There are moments where the irony feels slightly effortful – is it natural for their dialogue to be quite that severely muffled by so average-sized a mouthful of spaghetti? – but these don't detract too much from the dry writing's overall effect, which is very pleasing.

Nobody's Darling - Trailer from Ruby Richardson on Vimeo.

Talk to Leon (Murat Gökmen, 2019)

We're in Camden Town, one evening in 1977. A group of kids call a helpline to ask directions to Hyde Park. They get Leon on the other end, who obligingly tells them which buses to catch. Camilla, who at thirteen is the most senior of the crew, goes home; the rest set off across the city, calling an increasingly exasperated Leon from the nearest phone box at regular intervals. They finally make it to Hyde Park for sunrise. Period design on a budget is hard, and this film pulls it off pretty well; the bus interior is particularly convincing. A few things do give it away, though, notably the contemporary lexicon (“butters” and “pussy” crop up a few times), which is a little jarring. But the kids are sweet, and their world of early teenage anxieties (“I'd like to reach second base by the time I'm thirteen”) is endearing enough that the film remains engaging despite the slight feeling that it was pushing towards something profound without ever really landing there.

Talk To Leon (2019) | Trailer from Murat Gökmen on Vimeo.