DOCO DISCOVERIES

Time for another one of my documentary recommendation posts. I've 
almost got through all of that Irish "Hands" series which I wrote 
about in my "Crafty Docos" post, and I've found it all absolutely 
facinating, it will be a shame to reach the end. There's certainly 
a lot of history recorded in those films, and I often wonder just 
how much of that traditional skill-set required for many of the 
featured crafts has managed to survive another thirty or fourty 
years into the present day. The lifestyle of many of the Irish 
craftsmen able to still make a living from their craft back then is 
also facinating, particularly to me as there is some overlap with 
my own occupation. Although I focus on the comparatively alien 
technology of electronics, and sell my wares over the internet, 
it's in some ways a similar lifestyle in that I work from home and 
figure out my own private ways of doing things in relation to more 
established techniques without a formal education in them. It's 
curious really how things have gone sort-of full circle for the 
employment of people who physically make things in Western society. 
In the days when these crafts originated, transport and 
communication wasn't good enough for highly centralised 
manufacturing to be efficient for many products, so individuals 
could make a living serving the needs of their local community with 
wares made in their own home. Through the course of 
industrialisation, factories not only concentrated manufacturing, 
but also over time changed the manufactured products themselves, as 
materials and construction techniques were developed which just 
couldn't be realised in a small-scale setting. It fact even 
materials like cardboard that are so easily taken for granted 
today, are revealed in the show to have displaced a whole industry 
of Irish basketmakers once engaged en-mass in the production of 
various carrying products made from reeds.

Now many factories in such countries (although I don't know much 
about the current situation in Ireland) have moved overseas, mainly 
to China, and in the mean time technology has enabled individuals 
working from home to market their wares to the entire 
internet-connected world. To some extent it has shifted the setting 
of western manufacturing back a little towards its roots. Except 
now of course that is only a side-show to the real industry fueled 
by massively large scales, automation, and cheap foreign labour. 
Also the task for a modern craftsman is that much harder, because 
by selling to a global audience he has to compete with the entire 
globe. To be successful he must be making a product that nobody 
else, or at least nobody else with greater resources, is making 
anywhere else. In my case, the security of having a local community 
dependent on your manufactured wares is in some ways enviable, even 
if such a situation is nothing more today than a story from distant 
history.

But the dream of personal security of employment has itself a 
rather tangled history, to say the least. The Russian form of 
Communism, and its collapse under the leadership of the 
recently-deceased president Gorbachev, followed by a unique period 
of economic chaos in the 90s, has facinated me for a long time. 
Specifically that period of chaos following the switch to democracy 
and capitalism, which always seemed poorly covered in western media 
and people's general knowledge. So I've sought out any English 
documentary about that time in Russia's history that I could find. 
Every facit of the story seems extremely interesting to me. There 
has been a frustrating lack of good material on this topic though, 
and much recycling of the same footage. So when I discovered that 
one of my favourite documentary authors, Adam Curtis, already 
behind one program covering elements in the collapse of the USSR as 
part of his Pandora's Box series released in the mid-90s, has 
published a seven-part series on this whole topic, it was like an 
early Christmas present for me. In full it is titled "Russia 
1985 - 1999: TraumaZone: What It Felt Like to Live Through The 
Collapse of Communism and Democracy", and in fact it's built from a 
trove of largely unseen footage from reporters stationed in Russia 
during that time period. In a change from his characteristic style, 
he leaves the footage to tell most of the story by itself, without 
his familiar narration, or any new interviews, but with brief texts 
linking the context of the different scenes. It's a raw style that 
you never see in documentaries constructed entirely from historical 
footage, and it's very powerful. His cheeky touch to storytelling 
is still there though, with major political events often cut 
against conincidental elements of life filmed far away in other 
parts of the massive territory that was the USSR. Such as the 
discovery of an ancient human body frozen in the Siberian 
permafrost, and and old woman filmed visiting her friend in the 
isolated Russian countryside. It's probably quite a true collection 
of the mixed material that was being shot back then, and does 
provide a human touch which is frequently absent from other 
narrowly-focused documentaries about the politics alone. It's also 
nice to see that he's not ashamed to pull in footage from that doco 
he made himself during the 90s.

Curtis has abandoned his blog, so now the only way I know to 
discover when he's released something new (besides reading the 
Guardian, where he's always newsworthy) is to intermittently poll 
his Wikipedia page. So I was a few weeks late to find about about 
its release to BBC iPlayer on the 13th of October 2022. Making 
things harder, the BBC has it region-restricted so without messing 
about with proxies or paying for a VPN, I can't use that from 
Australia, and unlike his other docos it hasn't popped up on the 
thoughtmaybe.com website yet. It's on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLarcePWy1n_nfNe0gTl2nGQ1RQo2hLPm2
But the first episode is cut short (they chopped out the bit about 
Chernobyl! With my other obsession over nuclear technology, I won't 
stand for that!) and the sixth one is age restricted, which means 
YouTube demands I log in to my account (even with me using 
youtube-dl), and as a Google-hater I naturally don't have one. So 
eventually I ended up getting those episodes using P2P, which 
wasn't easy either.

While messing around trying to find a P2P download link/method that 
actually worked (I don't do much of that, usually I can find these 
things on YouTube, Dailymotion, or the Internet Archive) I also 
happened upon another doco that actually fits in well after Curtis' 
TraumaZone. "Gorbachev Heaven" was released with English subtitles 
by the BBC this year (presumably after Gorbachev's death), but it's 
actually a Russian production consisting of interviews with the 
USSR's last president, filmed in 2019 when he was already in very 
ill-health. Watching it after TraumaZone, the style is actually 
quite complementary with Custis' work, showing Gorbachev alone in 
the grand but dated surrounds of his state-provided home, lent to 
him for life by the Yeltsin government after it effectively kicked 
him out of his job. The house and Gorbachev both seem to be stuck 
in the same period of Russian history, with the Soviet Union's last 
leader still reluctant to confront exactly how his decisions caused 
the collapse of the USSR and laid the foundations for the Russian 
government of today. He seems to have managed to be at odds with 
both those who love his legacy of opening Russia up to Democracy, 
and those who loath it. His attitudes towards Putin are also 
somewhat conflicted, having apparantly become more sceptical of 
Russia's current leader over time, and as he lost what was left of 
his own political influence. The film ends at a 2020 New Year's 
party, where there's a great scene of him talking at the dining 
table in his friend's modest appartment while Putin gives a New 
Year's address over his shoulder on a TV in the background.


The Soviet Union's electronics industry is also quite facinating. 
Did you know that the first company called Tesla was actually a 
soviet semiconductor manufacturer? Anyway this is all a poor 
attempt to link to another documentary that I found in the P2P 
documentary universe (yes I may have been converted to the dark 
side now), again by the BBC but this time made back in 1978. "Now 
The Chips are Down" was an episode of the long-running Horizon 
series, about the emergence of microprocessor chips. It's actually 
not very optimistic, or at least hightly sceptical of how society 
would function with the availability of cheap computers predicted 
to enable to the mass elimination of many low-skilled jobs. Yet 
even from the perspective of "know thine enemy", it offers a 
detailed tour of the chip manufacturing process that I've never 
seen in any other documentary. Usually these "how chips are made" 
type films just show a few vague shots of wafers being moved 
between machines in a clean room, without any decent explaination 
of what's going on, or much of a close-up look at anything. This 
film is an exception to that: the steps are each described in the 
narration and very clearly shot (which often must have taken the 
camera crew quite a bit of set-up work). It's a facinating insight 
into chip manufacturing at a time when microprocessors were still 
new, and following the die testing process highlights just how 
hit-and-miss things were at the cutting-edge back then. I've been 
looking for a good tour of chip manufacturing for a long time, so 
that alone is a great find. But beyond that the doco also supplies 
an overview of semiconductor theory, demonstrates some applications 
such as an automated warehouse (a technology that still gets 
labelled as futuristic today), and as noted points out exactly how 
it's all about to cost you your job.

As it happened I suspect that many in Britain would have eventually 
preferred that their manufacturing firms had been able to cut costs 
through advanced automation, if only as an alternative to the 
reality of them closing down or moving overseas entirely over the 
following decades. Except for a vague hint at email technology 
while discussing the use of word processors by publishers, the 
documentary did miss the coming of the internet, which as I noted 
earlier has provided something of an alternative route for small 
scale manufacturing to survive in western society even in 
industries where large manufacturers have all long since gone both 
automated and abroad. Nevertheless given the scale of the change I 
do wonder exactly how the problems proposed there in the 70s have 
largely been avoided. I wonder how much surplus labour has been 
absorbed into inefficient government departments and contractors, 
for the purposes of politicians who relentlessly chant promises to 
create more and more jobs with their own projects, and whether this 
is really sustainable in the long term, especially as the money 
earnt from modern manufacturing techniques is largely concentrated 
well away from the grip of the tax man.

Ironically one place where it's easy to see how automation has 
indeed replaced manual workers is actually in the chip fabs 
themselves. Here is a 2019 tour of a modern chip fab run by Texas 
Instruments, where 99% of chip wafer movement is claimed to be 
fully automated, and humans seem mainly engaged in the task of 
poking at touch screen controls and checking equipment. 
Unfortunately it's the typical glossy video where all the specific 
processes are willfully glossed over, but the role of robots 
contrasts starkly with the rows of staff workstations at the 70s 
chip fab.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFjPl6EhlIM

This site has info and some P2P links for the docos not on YouTube.
https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Russia_1985-1999:_TraumaZone
https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Gorbachev_Heaven
https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Now_the_chips_are_down

And for the sake of some Australian content, here's a light-hearted 
Aussie travel documentary showing the USSR's tourist spots in 1990, 
not all of which would remain advisable travel destinations for 
long.
https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Across_the_Soviet_Union

 - The Free Thinker