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