Digital Commons Network^™

The Change In Farming: A Review, Neil Sandell

RadioDoc Review

The protagonist of the CBC documentary, The Change in Farming, is an 89-year-old farmer, called Henry. We learn that his grandson, Adam, has been recording Henry’s reminiscences about farming as a way of preserving his family heritage. The program was produced in 1998 by Adam Goddard, a 25-year-old musician and composer, in collaboration with veteran CBC producer, Steve Wadhams.

Adam is more hunter-gather than farmer. He collects found sound, an artist alert to its musical possibilities. He is composing a work using Henry’s speech. We hear the elder’s reaction. And then, in an indispensable coda, the two of them …

Efter Festen (After The Celebration): A Review, Leslie Rosin

RadioDoc Review

This 2002 feature is a masterpiece of our genre. On one level, the story examines how a young man called Allan told on Danish radio how he confronted his father at his 60^th birthday celebration with the devastating fact that the father had abused him and his twin sister as children. But Allan’s story is also the subject of the successful Danish film The Celebration by Thomas Vinterberg, part of the Dogma Film Group founded by Lars von Trier. The feature’s title, Efter Festen, (After the Celebration) is ambiguous in Danish, the Danish word 'efter' being …

Qui A Connu Lolita: Who Killed Lolita? A Review, Chris Brookes

RadioDoc Review

The brilliant and disturbing work Qui a Connu Lolita? (Who Knew Lolita?), or as it is more provocatively titled in the authors' English translation Who Killed Lolita?, starts with a precis: voices tell us there have been three deaths, of a mother and her two children, the bodies found in their Marseilles apartment two months later.

This is a composition for radio, not a collection of easy evidence for a police dossier. Who did kill Lolita? Who is to blame? The program draws its power from suggestion, like footnotes plucked from a subterranean soundtrack. It poses uncomfortable …

Mighty Beast: A Critical Reflection, Neil Verma

RadioDoc Review

This review-essay considers Mighty Beast, a radio feature by Sean Borodale, Sara Davies and Elizabeth Purnell, exploring how it approaches vernacular speech using poems based on auctioneering, sounds of market places and interviews with farmers and other workers. Listening closely to key passages, I highlight the role of Borodale’s 'in the moment' process and the use of sound editing as a form of writing, while situating the work within a longer history of livestock poetry and auctioneering in the sound arts. In the end, I argue that Mighty Beast is an outstanding piece to help think through larger issues of …

Mighty Beast: Review 1, Mike Ladd

RadioDoc Review

MIGHTY BEAST: written by Sean Borodale, soundscape by Elizabeth Purnell, produced by Sara Davies, performed by Christopher Bianchi. BBC Radio 3, Between the Ears, 2013. 29mins10.

Mighty Beast is a ‘radio poem’ that takes us into the cattle saleyard, and the lives of the auctioneers, animal handlers and farmers that are its denizens. Radio poems operate through feeling as much as intellect, and give scope for different interpretations. They are not so much about imparting information or telling a story, as creating an experience. They are more associative than expository, often proceeding in a non-linear way. Often radio poems …

My Share Of The Sky: Review 2, Alan Hall

RadioDoc Review

This documentary by the celebrated Danish producer Rikke Houd, in collaboration with Iranian journalist Sheida Jahanbin, is a work of art. It is also a powerful piece of documentary journalism that measures the pulse of a young couple’s emigration from Iran and their attempts to settle in Norway. The narration by Sheida Jahanbin, our guide to establishing a new life as an asylum seeker, is lent a profound dimension by being choreographed in a sophisticated ‘hocketing’ with the voiced-over translation, which acts as Sheida’s Norwegian voice. This is an inspired device, which also serves as a metaphor in a story …

My Share Of The Sky: Review 1, Helene Thomas

RadioDoc Review

My Share of the Sky speaks like a poem. A poem of love, of life, and of loss. It is a story of finding refuge and freedom in a foreign land and reconciling with the longing for loved ones back home. Presented as an audio diary, Sheida Jahanbin invites listeners into her world as she and her husband Madyar make a new life for themselves in Oslo, Norway as political refugees from Iran. The program presents a stream of live happening moments which intimately capture Sheida's life as it is unfolding. Juxtaposing the mundane and the terrifying, the ordinary and …

The Left-To-Die Boat: Review 2, Peter Mares

RadioDoc Review

In March 2011 an inflatable boat carrying 72 asylum seekers from sub-Saharan Africa set out from the coast of Libya hoping to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa. As one Italian official commented, sailing from Libya towards Italy should have been ‘a bit like doing a slalom between military ships’. Yet as, out of fuel, supplies of food and water dwindled to nothing and the people on board began to get sick and die, the boat continued to drift and no help came. Eventually it floated all the way back to the Libyan coast. Of the 50 men, 20 women …

A Different Kind Of Justice: Review 2, Claudia Taranto

RadioDoc Review

A Different Kind of Justice tells the story of two people who met across a table in a restorative justice (RJ) conference, facilitated by Karl James, an RJ professional. Margaret’s home is robbed; Ian, a burglar and heroin addict, took a few small items, including a laptop with all her family photos. Margaret reveals that her daughter Jessica died in a car accident a few months after the burglary and the missing photos now mean so much more to the family.

The program is essentially interviews with the two characters, intercut, as they each tell their version of their shared …

A Different Kind Of Justice: A Critical Reflection, Cassandra Sharp Dr

RadioDoc Review

Despite the accepted success of many restorative justice programs with youth and Indigenous offenders, debate still proliferates about the utility of adult restorative justice programs within the criminal justice system. Many important questions are raised about the efficacy and impact of such programs including: ‘What can restorative justice offer adult offenders and victims of crime? What are some of the challenges of using restorative justice in this context? And what can we learn from emerging developments in practice?’ (Bolitho et al, 2012). As will be discussed in this review, Russell Finch’s BBC Radio 4 production of A Different Kind of …

Will Kate Survive Kate: Review 2, Kate Montague

RadioDoc Review

Masako Fukui’s radio documentary Will Kate Survive Kate is a tender portrait of a young woman’s battle with an eating disorder. The use of conventional interviews, recorded conversations, audio diaries, and fly-on-the-wall style observational recordings, contribute to a rich and layered documentary work. The anonymity of radio provided Kate the opportunity to articulate her experience without the distraction of her visual representation. And the use of intimate audio diary recordings, and script from written diaries, allowed Kate a degree of co-authorship in the documentary. Fukui’s compassionate approach is reflected in the deeply personal quality of the storytelling that is shared. …

Will Kate Survive Kate? Review 1, Laura Starecheski

RadioDoc Review

To craft a narrative with a dramatic arc out of an onerous battle with illness, when no sure recovery is in sight: this was the task facing Will Kate Survive Kate? producer Masako Fukui when she set out to document a year in the life of 'Kate'—a 29-year-old Australian woman battling—and at times tightly holding on to—anorexia nervosa. Kate’s family wants her to eat—to triumph over her illness—and for complicated and frustrating reasons, she can’t bring herself to do it. For Kate, this is a matter of life and death. At the heart of Kate’s story is the acknowledgment that …

Tim Key And Gogol's Overcoat: Review 2, Kari Hesthamar

RadioDoc Review

The documentary Tim Key and Gogol’s Overcoat is based on the short story The Overcoat by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol. The Ukrainian-born Russian was one of the major authors of the 19th century, who tried to demonstrate what Tsarist Russia entailed. The Overcoat, published in 1842, is a satire of the civil service and petty officialdom. It is about how an external object transforms a person's self-esteem and others' opinions of a man of low rank.

As the program unfolds, the boundaries between fact and fiction become more blurred, and the weave between St Petersburg and London, between Akaky Akakievich (protagonist …

Tim Key And Gogol's Overcoat: Review 1, Michelle Rayner

RadioDoc Review

This finely wrought fusion of fiction and realism is an illuminating, enchanting, listening experience. On one level it can be heard as a playful riff on absurdism, on art, by a clever comedian (Tim Key) who harbours an obsession with one book and its author: Gogol’s The Overcoat. And yet on another level it offers a wry and gentle insight into, among other things, the nature of the human condition. Key's tone is intimate and confessional as he attempts to deconstruct the meaning (or meaninglessness) of Gogol’s story. The program wears its structural architecture lightly, combining the element of …

Children Of Sodom And Gomorrah: A Critical Reflection, Virginia Madsen

RadioDoc Review

This essay is an exploration and critical sounding of the multi-award winning radio feature Children of Sodom and Gomorrah: why young Africans flee to Europe (ARD 2009/ABC 2011) by the Berlin radio author/journalist and director Jens Jarisch. The reviewer, Virginia Madsen, finds something close to a dialectic approach in this unforgettable and searing ‘radio film’, but also the resonances of what she explores as ‘allegorical thinking’. Jarisch, even if unconsciously, appears to have dug down deep into the modern-day ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, a ‘no place’ in Accra, Ghana where children eke out a living, forfeiting their childhoods and …

Children Of Sodom And Gomorrah: Review 1, Alan Hall

RadioDoc Review

Nothing in Children of Sodom and Gomorrah happens by accident. It is an exquisite – if, from the opening montage, uncomfortable – sound experience. The production – both Jarisch’s own origination in German and Sharon Davis’ re-versioning – is impeccable. It is thoroughly wrought. An artefact to admire. The famous scene in the manager’s office unveils a damning denouement with the flourish of a radio master: surreptitious recording, an artful ‘echo’ voice that draws attention to key statements and carefully scripted narration mesh tellingly to deliver the reporter’s verdict. The same care in production is evident throughout the program: beautiful …

Norman Corwin's The Lonesome Train (Decca Recording) 1944, David K. Dunaway

RadioDoc Review

The Lonesome Train, the cantata for radio with words by Millard Lampell, music by Earl Robinson, and directed by Norman Corwin, probably originated in a dilapidated brownstone on lower Sixth Avenue in Manhattan: The Almanac House, a radical commune for music organisers in Greenwich Village, including Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Corwin is widely regarded as a guru of thoughtful radio producers, a poet-laureate of radio. From 1936, when he helped create WQXR-FM in New York City (later, voice of the New York Times) to his death 75 years later, Norman Corwin managed to be simultaneously commercial, popular, …

Norman Corwin's The Lonesome Train (Live Broadcast) Cbs 1944: A Critical Reflection, Tim Crook

RadioDoc Review

The Lonesome Train was a commercial half-hour ‘ballad opera’ or folk cantata, transmitted in 1944, about the funeral train bearing President Abraham Lincoln’s body home after his assassination in the Ford Theatre of Washington D.C. in 1865. This became culturally resonant in 1945 on the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, when the Decca recording of the show became a sort of ‘media requiem’, played over and over again on US radio stations. The live production, directed by Norman Corwin, is a hybrid between drama and documentary, but goes further with its use of music and poetry… perhaps a musical …

Poetry, Texas: A Critical Reflection, Kyla Brettle

RadioDoc Review

Poetry, Texas is a lyrical work in which an ensemble of voices, snatches of actuality and compelling narration is woven into a meditation on a fading way of life and beauty within the ordinary. It's a piece in which style and substance figure as enamoured equals engaged in a delightful dance. Malinovski's journey into the heart of the Texan town of Poetry is the central narrative frame of this work. An ensemble cast of fourteen characters including a cowboy called Rooster, Don Strictland, the undeclared mayor of Poetry, schoolchildren, various religious leaders and the local historian gives voice to the …

Poetry, Texas: Review 1, Seán Street

RadioDoc Review

Documentaries and features are about stories, but although they share much common ground, they often occupy very different worlds. In many radio cultures a documentary is a journalistic framework for seeking answers to questions, whereas a feature may often be an impressionistic hybrid that can contain drama, music and poetry, moving often towards not necessarily answers, but more questions. A documentary CAN be a feature, when it documents the maker's journey as they seek a way through their subject, asking questions of themselves as much as their chosen story, often through evocation rather than exposition. Poetry, Texas is just such …