Note taking- description-interview

Methods mark II a new what, how, why

sol

what

this is going to be a description of work underway.

and as such it is to a greater extent unknown, but by describing it in miniature i hope to reduce a metastatic mess into some sort of sense, somethings which, by giving to you, i can give to myself.

so, to plunge.

what this is so far is a set of filmed interviews with three people, the widow of a farmer, a farm foreman and a RAF pilot, accompanied by a lot of footage of the area surrounding these peoples homes, footage of the interior of a victor nuclear bomber (converted to fuel tanker) training cockpit and photographs of a military record, declassified in 1993 regarding a fatal crash of an experimental handley paige victor bomber. In March 1962, in a small faming village in Lincolnshire, England, a region notable largely for its low population density and eastern position in England, and as a result of these, a high concentration of military, particularly Air Force bases, just after lunch an experimental Nuclear Bomber crash landed into a farmhouse. In the crash landing the farmer and his wife were blown clear enough to survive, though broken, and their farm foreman dragged them clear of the wreckage. I have so far produced video interviews with these two subject/witnesses and a (slightly later) pilot who flew these jets for the RAF throughout the cold war and the Falkans conflict. The interviews with the witnesses tend to focus largely on their own farming history, the history of their families on the land and sudden breaks into global narratives, such as their farm being staffed during and just after WWII by German prisoners of war. And, of course, the sudden break into the scene of a cold war experimental bomber into their bucolic rural lives.

I have around 6 hours of footage, along with footage in the interior of a Victor Bomber cockpit (the type of plane in question), general landscape footage around the village and photographs and video of the military records, de-classified in the 1990s from the national archives.

The Pilot goes into much greater detail about the spaces of the plane, the position of it within the british defence force and its role during the falcons conflict. The overall sense of this is vague and being worked through. it will structurally form scenarios which wander around the threshold of the particular or local and the global sublime, as their lives are fragmented by a body of the military industrial global machine.

how.

I am looking to establish a structure for these weavings. I have conduced the interviews quite casually, by leaving the camera rolling and allowing the conversation to flow where it will. After contacting the first source, the woman, Mrs Burtt, who survived the crash itself, there has been a steady and serendipitous spread of contacts and sources which took place over a very short period; an old friends father flew these planes, the farm foreman was across the street when i was interviewing the Mrs Burtt, the local air museum had just taken delivery of a cockpit from one of the planes. I’m currently working my way through al the content to establish links of tone, subject and points in the story, to link together the wider context with the particular events and personal story. I am trying to establish an overall structure that these can drop into, or refresh points which will return it to a basic ground, most likely this will be in images from the military investigation.

why

I am interested in working on this for a range of reasons;

as an exercise into documentary form, creating sense and a contextualised story from a set of subjective stories. and in creating something utilising documentary forms and techniques which operates as an exhibitive object. I want to develop my techniques for wandering around the threshold where a much wider meta-narrative, e.g. the cold war, the european wars, mechanisation of the countryside and automation of the military, can be read in the particular. I have a general interest in events as ruptures and in the particular tones of voice characteristic of statements borne of being witness to ones own story. I’m also sorta into creating an archive method for recording these stories which are at the end of their availability, in that the generation who lived it are dying off, and their subjectivity opposing official methods of archiving the history, particularly of cold war era stories of scale and nationality become exclusive purely by persistence.