Image: from a Russian magazine called Torgmarket, which has blacklisted Australia.
The fight to sustain an independent critical and essay culture in Australia is pretty vicious, because the number of outlets has always been so low, ABC RN is so often squeezed, and we don’t valorise debate. The net made a tremendous difference with the arrival of blogs, still beloved of some online communities. But they are word based, and video is much slower to create.
Enter the podcast, which combines cultural debate, storytelling, humour and conversation. They are also much more spontaneous, and engage directly with the personalities being interviewed. Unlike traditional radio interviews they can be spontaneous and anarchic, and work for small communities of interest.
They have taken off in screen circles, where educated outsider communities and generations circle the tiny opportunities for paid work and do it anyway. They make it very hard for mainstream radio people to argue that they are better than their unpaid and feral competition.
Paul Harris, who ran Film Buff’s Forecast on 3RRR for 36 years, was eventually irritated so much by demands to change the time and format that he took wing into the unknown. At the end of August he had been tempted from the skies by the use of the Cinema 9 Studio at Yarraville’s Sun Theatre, which is a tiny preview theatrette. He is still on Triple RRR early on Saturday morning, where he does the weather.
Now he is doing a weekly podcast, which is nicely smooth with the freedom to vary the length. It is embryonic, with a proper launch when the approach will have stabilised. ‘I have complete creative independence’, he said, ‘and the emphasis is on discussion, commentary and interviews’. However, he doesn’t have the automatic promotional muscle of Triple R, with its phone-ins and immediate contact with the audience. There is a certain unanchored feeling as he doesn’t really know where his listeners are coming from. However, he said, ‘Notionally we can get audiences from all over the world, and we are getting responses from London and LA. But the identity is so Melbourne oriented that once you look outside Melbourne people don’t know the program.’
So he is thinking nationally. ‘We are working on that and I am trying to get regulars from other states to be on the program.’
Meanwhile, the redoubtable Senses of Cinema website has been trying to embrace the finer arts of intellectual performance. It remains committed to the idea of four editions a year, even though it is online, and wanted to go audio to provide some action in the long gaps. So it too has gone into podcasts. The first one is about Bladerunner 2049, and has some pretty unusual points of view which are elegantly defended.
This made us ask around to find the podcasts which film tragics regard as gems. Rochelle Siemienowicz immediately responded with Hell is for Hyphenates, because she is the newish co-host along with Lee Zachariah. Described as The Film Lover’s Podcast, it too fits my model of cultural revenge. Siemienowicz is a novelist/journalist/reviewer with a fine, light style; Zachariah is a gadabout comedy and serious writer and one half of The Bazura Project which was picked up by the ABC from community TV and then dumped after a single season.
She admits to the guilty pleasure of The Final Cut, which is a reversioning of Jason Di Rosso’s radio show on RN. She is a fan of The Rereaders, which is a fortnightly literary and cultural podcast. They are Mel Campbell and Dion Kagan, produced by Areej Nur. They work with Kill Your Darlings, a cultural magazine started by Rebecca Starford and Hannah Kent in 2010, which went fully online this year. It too runs a podcast of its own, which ‘celebrates writers who speak out, on more than just the page.’ It can be happily international.
Rochelle is also a fan of the newish film podcast Cultural Capital, run by Eloise Ross, Andy Hazel and Anders Furze. Again, the latest episode focuses on Blade Runner 2049. They were unstoppable on MIFF 2017.
Karin Altmann, the writer, policy wonk, script editor, assessor and project developer weighed in with one word – Moth. The Moth is a US program of live storytelling which grew into a radio program now carried on the ABC. There are Moth programs in Sydney and Melbourne. And there is the podcast, which is a fine way of delving into the archive to keep great stories live.
Overseas..
This is Pandora’s Box. Julie Marlow, producer, consultant, writer and cultural bureaucrat, added Fighting in the War Room, which comes ‘(Usually) With Joanna Robinson from Vanity Fair, Dave Gonzales of Thrillist.com, and Neil Miller from Film School Rejects!’ It is described as a film and pop culture discussion podcast.
Aisha Harris through Slate runs Represent, which is ‘a space for discussion, highlighting movies, TV, and online shows created by and/or about women, people of color, people with disabilities, and those in the LGBTQ community’ and is very prolific. She did the fallout from Harvey Weinstein six days ago.
Indiefilmhustle has a strong education and knowledge-sharing edge. It also has a wonderful ep of its own on the TOP TEN CINEMATOGRAPHY PODCASTS.
The Documentary Life is what it says on the tin, and is made by a self-described filmmaker and radio geek, Chris G. Parkhurst, who is one half of Barang Films which focuses on South-East Asia. New York and Hertfordshire are in its origins.
Filmwax Radio is up to edition 434, hosted by Adam Schartoff. He has managed to snare Michel Gondry, Wong Kar-wai, Liv Ullmann, Ken Burns, & Jason Schwartzman, to quote his own list. He is an American film curator, and festival coordinator .
The Business with Kim Masters is pretty close to the core interests of ScreenHub. Masters works for Hollywood Reporter; the show is produced by KCRW from Santa Monica College. It is described as ‘Southern California’s flagship NPR affiliate’ which makes it a radio station, but it also does events, videos, podcasts and a web presence.
Rochelle Siemienowicz added You Must Remember This, which she described as ‘all about Old Hollywood. Really gossipy and well researched and enthusiastically narrated.’
Mark Freeman, the editor of Senses of Cinema and the co-host of its new podcast added an enormous list of his own. Besides corroborating the recommendations already mentioned, he added
He added these non-film specific but culturally interesting podcasts –
Senses of Cinema has been run voluntarily since1999, and the battle to finance it has been continuous. It has now joined the Patreon platform, which is a way of garnering voluntary subscriptions. The site is looking for $1500/month to run the digital bits, while an extra $2500/month will pay for an upgrade and a part-time development manager. Then it can start to pay writers, which they reckon will cost $3000/month.
There is a twist to podcasts which is not so obvious. Paul Harris decided to keep the signature theme as the head and tail of the podcast, but they are no longer covered by the bulk AMCOSS deal of 3Triple R. So he has to pay them $1250/year for the license and pay individually for extra pieces of music. It takes about a day a week to do the work to prepare the show. Other presenters don’t create podcasts from existing radio work because they have to re-edit the music, which is time consuming and fiddly, and adds copyright fees to shows.
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Have we left you out? Do you know others that you love? Let us know on [email protected] and we will add them to the list.
