#documentary producer

[marymccartneyphotos]

Olivia Harrison in Los Angeles, with corn fritters

Photographed by Mary McCartney

[danielleurbansblog]

Review: Elephant Safari

Synopsis: A documentary team hiking through East Africa collides with a gang of deadly poachers, in this gripping adventure by the author of Kidnapped on Safari. Years of filming, extreme dangers, and daring rescues have taken their toll on documentary producer Pero Baltazar and his team. To relax and reconnect with the East African wildlife they love, Pero organizes a walking safari for him,…

[mahoganygold213]

Malala is a producer for “Stranger at the Gate,” one of this year's Academy Award nominees for Best Documentary Short Film.

hit.

[ringosmistress]

[moonshynecybin]

i think part of why marc is so interesting from a rpf/general fandom perspective as a CHARACTER besides like idk, being the drama, is because yeah he’s a PR master and a frequent liar but he’s also like. so pathologically himself. spotty poker face. yapper. bad at little subtle social cues sometimes. intense. and he likes to be seen and known and understood! so even when he IS lying or doing blah blah pr speak, either there’s some layer of truth hidden near or inside the lie, his actions blatantly contradict said lie, or he will just straight up admit that he was lying later ! like he has to be himself he simply has to

[madisonbeersource]

Madison Beer | The Spinnin Tour 2024

[nothingleftforme]

SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT HAMAS. YOURE OUT OF YOUR GODDAMN FUCKING MIND IF YOU THINK ANYTHING HAMAS HAS EVER DONE EVEN COMES CLOSE TO THE ATROCITIES THE STATE OF ISRAEL HAS COMMITTED AGAINST PALESTINIANS AND THE REST OF THE MIDDLE EAST FOR 75 YEARS. FUCK YOU.

[bebop-station]

Shostakovich and Aziraphale

I was thinking (and talking to @balance-of-probability endlessly) about the choice to have Shostakovich's fifth symphony feature so heavily in S2 ep 1, and how it struck me as a little odd as there are a bunch of composers Aziraphale loves mentioned in the book and Shostakovich isn't amongst them.

Backstory: In 1934, Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk premiered to huge popular acclaim, which was very briskly walked back in 1936 after the Stalinist newspaper Pravda published an article denouncing it.

Actually more than denouncing it, condemning it. It wasn’t credited but was authored by a guy called David Zaslavsky who was almost definitely scribing for Stalin himself. Lady Macbeth was banned in the USSR until 1961.

Anyway by 1936 Shostakovich had written his fourth symphony, which he withdrew from public performance until 1961 because it was more of the same thing that had made the Soviet leadership cancel Lady Macbeth – it was unconventional, anti-patriotic, and indicated that Shostakovich was a “bourgeois formalist”.

So he shelved it and started working on Symphony No. 5 which is, on the surface at least, Soviet as fuck. And that’s what we hear Aziraphale listening to in S2E1.

(Sidebar this story is told in Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time which is either a literary wank soup or a masterpiece depending on how cranky you are when you first read it)

So basically what Dmitri Shostakovich did in those years between the fourth and fifth symphonies was something that might be familiar to S2E6 enjoyers/agonisers: he decided to toe the party line.

Kind of.

Listening to the finale of the fifth symphony (and if you want to listen along it’s the recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic, it’ll be called something like Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47; iv. Allegro non troppo) without the context of the rest of the symphony or in fact Shostakovich’s life is like ah yes that’s a bit of a Soviet battle anthem let’s march into Leningrad or whatever.

But it is, as critics have increasingly understood in the years since Shostakovich demurely described it as “a Soviet artist's no-nonsense response to fair criticism”, dripping with irony. This man reviled the Stalinist line on art and life – he takes the Soviet anthem and turns it into a sort of fucked up evil clown march. The whole thing gives me this vibe:

(gif from @goodomensedit)

There’s a lot of stuff about that time in Shostakovich’s life that is extremely hard to verify. There’s a “memoir” which is for sure at least partially fabricated called Testimony in which there’s an alleged quote from our man saying that final movement is a parody, that “it's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, "Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing", and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, "Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing"."

Whether or not Shostakovich said that (some of his friends who outlived him support that reading, including Rostropovich who conducted a bunch of his work) you can definitely hear it in the piece and you can definitely see how it gives us a clue into the decision Aziraphale makes at the end of the season.

What Shostakovich had to decide back in the 1930s was whether he would a) flee to somewhere like the US, where many other artists targeted by Stalin went; b) stay and become a public nuisance, leading almost definitely to an off-the-books execution; or c) become a party-approved Soviet Artist and hope for change. Even nudge it along in a subtle way. Even get on the inside and work to bring it down. We don’t know how true that was for old mate Dmitri and we don’t yet know exactly what Aziraphale has planned. But yeah:

tl;dr: Shostakovich 🤝 Aziraphale

          Staying inside a rancid and destructive militarised culture in the hope that it can change

[kingrosalani]

My short film I’ve been working on for my One Iowa class will be released on YouTube on October 11th!

I spent the month of August interviewing some local drag performers for different perspectives on the queer community and how they all feel on living in a state like Iowa in its current political climate. Currently in the last stages of editing but here’s a poster I’ve made for y’all

GARDEN OF DES MOINES

[transvampireboyfriend]

while I do appreciate survivors owning their stories when exposing the abuse that takes place in cults, I really wish the mainstream media around it spent more time focusing on how they got out and how they found light and love in the outside world and how it was hard as fuck too. I wish they spent less time rehashing the abuse and more time in the repercussions of that abuse and how they live with trauma.

[lock-my-feelings-in-a-jar]

Written by Russ Ballard

[shadowland]

out of all people, thanks chris robinson for getting me into judee sill

[filmcourage]

Starting A Production Company From Nothing

Watch the video on Youtube here.

[the-busy-ghost]

Alright uninformed rant time. It kind of bugs me that, when studying the Middle Ages, specifically in western Europe, it doesn’t seem to be a pre-requisite that you have to take some kind of “Basics of Mediaeval Catholic Doctrine in Everyday Practise” class. 

Obviously you can’t cover everything- we don’t necessarily need to understand the ins and outs of obscure theological arguments (just as your average mediaeval churchgoer probably didn’t need to), or the inner workings of the Great Schism(s), nor how apparently simple theological disputes could be influenced by political and social factors, and of course the Official Line From The Vatican has changed over the centuries (which is why I’ve seen even modern Catholics getting mixed up about something that happened eight centuries ago). And naturally there are going to be misconceptions no matter how much you try to clarify things for people, and regional/class/temporal variations on how people’s actual everyday beliefs were influenced by the church’s rules. 

But it would help if historians studying the Middle Ages, especially western Christendom, were all given a broadly similar training in a) what the official doctrine was at various points on certain important issues and b) how this might translate to what the average layman believed. Because it feels like you’re supposed to pick that up as you go along and even where there are books on the subject they’re not always entirely reliable either (for example, people citing books about how things worked specifically in England to apply to the whole of Europe) and you can’t ask a book a question if you’re confused about any particular point. 

I mean I don’t expect to be spoonfed but somehow I don’t think that I’m supposed to accumulate a half-assed religious education from, say, a 15th century nobleman who was probably more interested in translating chivalric romances and rebelling against the Crown than religion; an angry 16th century Protestant; a 12th century nun from some forgotten valley in the Alps; some footnotes spread out over half a dozen modern political histories of Scotland; and an episode of ‘In Our Time’ from 2009. 

But equally if you’re not a specialist in church history or theology, I’m not sure that it’s necessary to probe the murky depths of every minor theological point ever, and once you’ve started where does it end? 

Anyway this entirely uninformed rant brought to you by my encounter with a sixteenth century bishop who was supposedly writing a completely orthodox book to re-evangelise his flock and tempt them away from Protestantism, but who described the baptismal rite in a way that sounds decidedly sketchy, if not heretical. And rather than being able to engage with the text properly and get what I needed from it, I was instead left sitting there like:

And frankly I didn’t have the time to go down the rabbit hole that would inevitably open up if I tried to find out

[littlequeenies]

November 23, 1971 - May Pang at the audience of The Dick Cavett Show.

Former Beatle George Harrison was the main guest of the program.

Screencaps from The Lost Weekend: A Love Story (2022).

[lavoixhumaine]

Angela Bassett behind the scenes as executive producer and narrator for the National Geographic groundbreaking series Queens premiering on March 4 and streaming the day after on Disney+

(ohmygod she is so regal and adorable at the same time how?!)

🎥 natgeowild