Radio Commons^™

Skywriting – Making Radio Waves By Robyn Ravlich: Book Review, Mike Ladd

RadioDoc Review

Robyn Ravlich’s Skywriting - making radio waves is partly an extended dissertation on feature-making and radio art, and partly an autobiography of this acclaimed Australian audio feature maker from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It is reviewed by Mike Ladd, poet, audio producer and an erstwhile ABC colleague.

Failure As Liberation: A Critical Analysis Of Rilo Chmielorz’ Artistic Feature “Scheitern Ist. Eine Bestandsaufnahme” (Failure Is. An Inventory), Ania Mauruschat

RadioDoc Review

This essay is a critical analysis, interpretation and assessment of the feature “Scheitern ist. Eine Bestandsaufnahme”(2016), by the German artist Rilo Chmielorz,which explores failure as a taboo subject in neoliberal societies that worship the ideology of success and progress.

This study deconstructs this unique feature to its various parts and looks at the feature as a whole in terms of the concept of “polyphonic narration” that the Russian literature and art scholar and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) derived from the poetics of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881). It shows how the level of content (life stories of failure, experts …

Moving, Belonging, And Sorrow In ‘A Very Different Time’ By Phil Smith, Silvia Viñas

RadioDoc Review

Phil Smith’s A Very Different Time weaves poetry, music, ambience and snapshots of stories in an audio piece about movement, nostalgia, change and sorrow. It includes the voices of people he met while living in Berlin: a West African refugee; a musician and academic from the United States; a Syrian refugee escaping war; an academic of Italian/German citizenship; and a German musician who moved from a small town to the city. To this stream of voices, Smith adds layers of music, different beats, street sounds, distortion, the ambience that recall the words – valleys, mountains, water and islands –and a …

Intimate Moments: Dispelling The Cancer Myth With Real Life - Summer Rain By Nanna Hauge Kristensen., Sophie Townsend

RadioDoc Review

Nanna Hauge Kristensen’s Summer Rain is a small piece in length and in scope. It is intimate, almost fragmentary. It is simply a story of a woman, who is a mother, and a daughter, and who has cancer; a woman undergoing treatment, and raising her child, and dealing with the ramifications of what cancer treatment means. An anthropologist by training, Kristensen’s observational, almost distanced approach style, allows us to glimpse her life, but also to feel it. There is something very empirical about what she’s doing in this piece, and she allows us no room to pretend that her cancer …

“Qualia”: The Subjective Qualities Of Sound As Experience Of The Self, Vanessa Ribeiro Rodrigues

RadioDoc Review

How do we construct the perception of the world and Others through sounds? How are we able to express the myriad of feelings inside ourselves into an intelligible structure in order to be understood? What is the amount of interference in the way we express those [translated] feelings? These are some of the subtle questions raised by “Qualia”, a five-episode radio feature by Spanish artist and performer Charo Calvo, aired in 2016 by ABC Radio National’s Soundproof show in Australia.

The name “Qualia” evokes the philosophical theory of an internal and subjective component of sense and mental perceptions, which are …

La Revolte Des Prostituées/The Sex Workers Revolt: A Dual Analysis, Sean Prpick, Maud Beaulieu

RadioDoc Review

This documentary chronicles how hundreds of French sex workers went on strike in 1975 and occupied five Catholic churches to protest against police abuse and government closure of their workplace. Forty years on, Australian producer, academic and sex worker rights researcher Eurydice Aroney revisits the Lyon cathedral occupied by the women with the full blessing of its cleric, Père Blanc, now ninety years old. Interviews with Blanc and some of the original sex worker protesters are interwoven with archival material to make a compelling audio story, selected as a finalist for the UK In The Dark award (2015).

This work …

Balancing Personal Trauma, Storytelling And Journalistic Ethics: A Critical Analysis Of Kirsti Melville's The Storm, Mia Lindgren

RadioDoc Review

When Kirsti Melville’s documentary The Storm about the life-long impact of child sexual abuse was broadcast in 2014, it contributed to a public debate about sexual abuse. Hundreds of listeners commented on the ABC Radio National website and Facebook pages, expressing how deeply moved they were, praising both the subject of the story Erik and the journalist Kirsti for their bravery and honesty in making the documentary, and remarked that Erik’s personal story helped them understand the issue better. Kirsti Melville won three national awards for her program, which also documented her personal story as Erik’s former partner.

This critique …

From The Limbo Zone Of Transmissions: Gregory Whitehead’S "On The Shore Dimly Seen", Virginia Madsen

RadioDoc Review

In this review-essay, Virginia Madsen enters the polyphonous 'limbo zone of transmissions' created by Gregory Whitehead's most recent 'performed documentary' and radio provocation, "On the shore dimly seen". This composed voicing, drawn from verbatim texts courtesy of WikiLeaks and the dysfunctionality of America's Guantanamo Bay, is heard as a fortuitous chance encounter with a medium – and as an increasingly rare listening 'detour' while Madsen is on the road. This essay is thus both a reflection upon the nature of the radio offered here, the chance listening experience to work of this kind, and upon the distinctive body of work …

The Hacker Syndrome: Review, Martin Johnson

RadioDoc Review

The Hacker Syndrome tells the story of Stephan Ubach, a man who is slowly revealed as an activist and a hero to those involved in the Arab Spring. A man who, as the story unfolds, forgets his own needs - and breaks down. This is also a story of distance - physical and mental. A story of the importance that information plays in people’s lives and how some people are willing to risk their lives for the world to know what is going on. Radio documentaries and features usually require an emotional attachment to the character, while computers, and often …

Senza Parole: A Review, Robyn Ravlich

RadioDoc Review

This is a charming radio feature of modest length in the form of a travel memoir. Its author-producer is Katharina Smets, a radio maker with a background in philosophy, theatre and philology with experience in teaching radio documentary at the Royal Conservatory in Antwerp, Belgium and as a reporter and feature maker for Radio 1, KLARA (VRT in Belgium) and Holland Doc Radio (VPRO in The Netherlands). Originally produced in Dutch, her English language version of Senza Parole has attracted attention at both the Third Coast International Audio Festival (2014), USA and the Sheffield Doc/Fest (2014) in Britain.

In Senza …

Still Glowing Strong: Review 2 (Australia), Maree Delofski

RadioDoc Review

Still Glowing Strong is an elegant and poetic documentary about a dreamer. Harald Brobakkan has an obsessive desire to create an everlasting battery. From the outset, the minimalist music and Leganger’s beautifully written narration set up the tone of the documentary – gentle, respectful, restrained, occasionally melancholic yet never maudlin. Program maker Sindre Leganger very successfully conveys Harald’s story together with rich observations about the universe, science and its treatment of ‘outsiders’, life - and the nature of a very long relationship.

Still Glowing Strong: Review (Denmark), Anna Elisabeth Jessen

RadioDoc Review

Still Glowing Strong is Norwegian Sindre Leganger’s tender story of an old man, Harald, who thinks he has invented an everlasting battery that could save the world. The problem is that no one has the time to look at it – his wife in particular. But as Leganger and the old man’s grandson take an interest, this short but remarkable feature reveals much about our finite lives and the eternal starry sky above us, about being stubborn, being optimistic and about hope. Leganger illustrates Zola’s dictum, that “art is a corner of reality seen through a temperament”. He plays three …

Editorial Overview, Volume 2, Issue 1, Siobhan A. Mchugh

RadioDoc Review

Overview of the nine audio features critiqued by Guest Reviewers, who are themselves eminent producers and curators of audio features. The works reviewed are from the US, UK, Canada, France, Poland and Denmark.

Golden Boy - Zĺoty Chĺopak: A Review, Anna Sekudewicz

RadioDoc Review

This feature is a story woven from the lives of two people: Abraham, the son of a tailor from Łódź, and Kasia Michalak, who’s also from Łódź and whose grandfather was a tailor. How do you present Abraham Tuszyński without pigeon-holing his story as yet another tragic Holocaust narrative – particularly since the programme-maker wanted to avoid making a strictly historical feature? Where and how to find excitement, tension, heat and feelings in material that is by nature informational, objective, cold and factual? Despite posing a huge risk, the collision of the two stories, or realities, creates a new perspective, …

Everything, Nothing, Harvey Keitel: A Review, Sarah Geis

RadioDoc Review

Although producer Pejk Malinowski is originally from Denmark, and Everything, Nothing, Harvey Keitel is a project of London-based Falling Tree Productions, its premise seems cringingly American: our narrator goes to a self-help class, has an encounter with a celebrity. Which is to say, the risk of self-indulgence is high. To make it worse: the documentary takes place almost entirely within Malinovski’s mind. But these factors make it only more astonishing to hear how – through his singular voice, playful sense of humour, and impeccable sound design – Malinovski tells a story that makes the listener laugh, feel, and consider …

Nothing But Bones (Rien Que Les Os): A Review, Irène Omélianenko

RadioDoc Review

This documentary by the French artist Floy Krouchi in collaboration with Nathalie Battus and Bruno Mourlan from Radio France is a hybrid piece that lies between music and poetic creation. It attempts to make a radiophonic connection between the mythic memory of the indigenous peoples of India and what remains today in certain pieces of music, in (people’s) memory, in singing and translation. The project began five years ago (2010) in Southern India where Floy Krouchi was then travelling. There she heard a short piece of music taken from a very ancient tradition that struck her as so strange and …

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 …