Celluloid ceiling

I had come to the view that most films released in the US are made by men for men. So I was not surprised to see the data in a new report by the San Diego State University showing that in 2013 only 8% of the top 250 grossing films had women directors. Women are missing in action in other parts of the film chain too. The same report (excluding the foreign films this time), found that women accounted for only 16% of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors.

I don't know why this is.  Does it reflect audience taste, the global market (violence and special effects survive translation), the monopoly habits of the big studios, distributors, guilds and unions, the sheer physicality of film production, the nerdy high tech nature of just about every step in the film workflow, the taste for money raising, or something else?

But it got me thinking about my favorite women directors, Jane Campion (especially The Piano) and Claire Denis (especially White Material) and wondering about how they broke through the celluloid ceiling. They are both refreshingly original directors, maybe operating in more fluid environments. Both explore gender power battles, often in colonial settings where imported and indigenous social codes and laws are breaking down.  

These trailers are ghastly - probably made by men for men - but they give a taste.

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Technology and progress

There is much debate now about the role of technology in amplifying inequality. So it was fascinating to go to a "master class" last week by Godfrey Reggio, director of Koyaanisqatsi (1982), the original arty eco-technology film.

Koyaanisqatsi (this is an American Indian word roughly translated as life out of balance), is a poetic film without human characters or narration. But it's mesmerizing for its time-lapse footage, much imitated over the past 30 years, and its riveting score by Philip Glass, which Reggio describes as "ever ascending but never arriving." 

Reggio talked about his "watermark," the life experiences that frame his films. His early years in "racist" New Orleans, surrounded by this "ordinary evil," taught him to distrust "normality." He left home at 14 and joined a religious order where he became a Christian monk and learned "to look outwards" and "to believe less is more." Watching Luis Bunuel's Los Olvidados tipped him into film.

He is a dazzling speaker of soundbites and its not hard to see why he has a cult following and has been a magnet for other artists - long term collaborators such as Glass, executive producers such as Francis Ford Coppola, and distribution help from Steven Soderbergh. Here are some of the bites from the master class:

“Technology is the environment of life.

We see through the language that we speak – but it doesn’t represent what we see. Language hides things in plain sight.

We are blind to what is present because it is normal. This is the price we pay for technological progress.

We become the environment we live in.

We live in a synthetic order not in nature.

While technology offers comfort and beauty it also is about control.

Freedom as about being able to say no to technology.

In film there is foreground and background. The foreground is the plot and the characters. The background is the context. In my films I take the foreground out.

My locations are the actors so it is critical to have locations that can speak.

I engage the aesthetic triplets: sensation, emotion, perception.

I let the world speak with its own voice.”

The master class marked the US release of Reggio's new film Visitors which I have not seen yet. Thanks to Cinephilia and Beyond plus Indie Wire Playlist, here is a very nice 8 minute video on Reggio, his team, his trio of Qatsi movies and Visitors.

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Bank safety is not sexy

There are many films now about the "bad guys" in the financial crisis - starting with the classic Michael Douglas in Wall Street (1987). But few convey the systemic causes. Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail is about that only one.  It's hard to do - for some of the same reasons it's hard to fix.

Writing about the battle to make the financial system safer, Robert Shiller, Yale economics professor and Nobel Laureate,  nails one of the big incentive issues that thwarts good policy making everywhere, especially solutions to huge long term risks: lack of glamor. Quoting a Fed official, Shiller noted:

“Joseph Tracy of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York... put the problem succinctly: “Firefighting is more glamorous than fire prevention.” Just as most people are more interested in stories about fires than they are in the chemistry of fire retardants, they are more interested in stories about financial crashes than they are in the measures needed to prevent them. That is not a recipe for a happy ending.”

— Robert Shiller, Project Syndicate, January 14, 2014

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The fingerprints of bank fraud

The SEC has a special technology fund that enables it to sniff out suspicious activities in financial markets:

“Among the SEC’s most ambitious undertakings is software that streams real-time trade data. The technology enables the SEC to reconstruct market events, a need that became clear after the 2010 “flash crash” in which the Dow Jones industrial average plunged before bouncing back in minutes. It took the SEC four months to unwind the billions of orders that took place that day and determine what happened. The money for that project came from the $50 million fund, agency officials said. More recently, the agency began using software that scans the financial statements companies file, assesses risk factors and generates a score that identifies outliers within a peer group. The SEC also wants to enhance a system that flags potential insider trading by identifying individuals who trade in unison around certain market events, and another that aims to combat hedge fund fraud by sniffing out unusual fund performance.”

— Washington Post, January 17, 2014

The US Congress in the latest budget approved last week has cut the SEC's technology fund in half.

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Post crisis pickings

After the 2008 financial crisis the world's main central banks cut interest rates to soften the impact on jobs and growth.  A newish study by the McKinsey Global Institute assesses the distributional effect of these very low interest rates in the US, the Eurozone and the UK.

“By the end of 2012, governments in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Eurozone had collectively benefited by $1.6 trillion, through both reduced debt service costs and increased profits remitted from central banks. Meanwhile, households in these countries together lost $630 billion in net interest income, with variations in the impact among demographic groups. Younger households that are net borrowers have benefited, while older households with significant interestbearing assets have lost income. Non-financial corporations across these countries benefited by $710 billion through lower debt service costs.”

— QE and ultra-low interest rates: Distributional effects and risks, McKinsey Global Institute Discussion Paper, November 2013

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Technology harvests 1000 years of data

TED has an interesting talk about harvesting data to create a kind of google map of the past. Where better to do this than Venice which apparently has 80 kilometers of government archives documenting a 1000 years of city activity - from boats coming and going to every kind of construction. (Venice was after all was a powerful medieval empire, an early adopter of modern banking, and home to so much lovely art.)

The TED speaker Frederic Kaplan is working on a project to digitize the archives and convert the information into maps of Venice's past. He calls this project a Time Machine. With all that determined data collection by Venetian bureaucrats, it's even sadder that present day Venice has been so slow to save itself from sinking. Let's hope this project helps.

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Bankers born to be dazzled

According to the FT (January 15, 2014) Goldman Sachs received 17,000 applications for its 2014 intake of analysts and recruited 330. The industry is still hugely attractive to new recruits despite the public backlash from the 2008 financial crisis bailouts and the bonus excess.

During filming for my short documentary on the psychology of traders, Jean-Claude Noel, an executive coach at the global business school INSEAD, talked about the "entitlement" culture in finance. He explained this behavior as "projection,"  when bankers and traders face their many wealthy clients day after day they start to believe that they are entitled to the same riches.  He said he sees exactly the same behavior in the art collecting world - though of course the consequences here are not so dangerous for the rest of the economy.

I also talked with Rodolfo Llinas, professor of neuroscience at New York University about this behavior. He said we are hard wired to be dazzled by money, the trappings of wealth, and the association with power. In passing, he brought my attention to this delightful video below from the world of birds: the bower bird building his seduction parlor.

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Black Swans and Fortune Tellers

I'm a big fan of Nassim Taleb's book Black Swan (2007). Taleb says that our "inability to predict outliers [which he calls Black Swans] implies the inability to predict the course of history." But my conviction that "what gets measured, gets managed" draws me to a new book by Walter Friedman, Harvard Business School. The book, called Fortune Tellers, looks at the early history of economic forecasting in the US. In an interview he explains his purpose:

“How do people predict the economic future? How have forecasting methods changed over time? What makes one forecaster more popular than another? I chose to research these questions by focusing on the first generation of economic forecasters—those who founded their agencies in the early twentieth century. Forecasting is such a deeply entrenched and ubiquitous activity today that I thought it would be interesting to see how it got started. How did a world of astrology and “sign-reading” turn to one of econometrics and leading indicators?

Forecasting was a lucrative business for many of the pioneering forecasters. Roger Babson built a business empire around his weekly forecasts—an empire that included his newsletters, syndicated columns, and eventually a radio program. In 1919 he founded Babson College, today a highly respected institution, to provide him with a pool of workers for his forecasting business. Others, like Irving Fisher, were successful as forecasters in the 1920s but lost everything after the 1929 crash—an event he failed to predict. But, more generally, while individual forecasters came and went, some making it rich and others not, the bigger story is that the industry created key resources for society as a whole.

In the process of trying to make reliable forecasts, economists and entrepreneurs developed index numbers, leading indicators, and new economic charts, and even founded important institutions like the National Bureau of Economic Research. The economist Wesley Mitchell, who was deeply engaged with forecasting in the 1910s and 1920s, served as director at NBER for many years. One of his students, Simon Kuznets, developed [a standard way to measure] Gross National Product there in the 1930s. In all these ways, the growth of the forecasting industry spurred efforts to make sense of economic change.”

— Harvard Business School, Working Knowledge, January 9, 2014

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Filmonomics

When I started film school last year I learned that an independent filmmaker is someone with a camera and an empty bank account.

This caricature comes to life in a new study estimating that $3 billion is spent each year to produce independent feature films and that only 2% is ever recouped in box office revenues.

By this production spending yardstick, the indie film industry is as big as the major movie studios (Warner Bros., Disney, Sony/Columbia, Lionsgate, 20th Century Fox, and Paramount), though each of the indie films is laboriously financed one at a time.

For want of a better methodology, the estimates are based on US and international submissions to the Sundance Film Festival. The study authors felt this was a good enough measure of the most viable indie movies produced each year. (They assumed that the average cost for a film is $750K (admitting that $1m+ is probably more realistic, so they are low-balling the total spend) and that around 400,000 people work on these films each year.)

No wonder indie filmmakers are looking to technology for new distribution models.

Thanks to Ted Hope's blog for alerting me to these numbers.

More sun for dark pools denying climate change

A new study sheds some light on the dynamics of funding for campaigns to deny climate change in the US. Writing in the Washington Post, George Zornick says:

“...everyone who follows that debate knows, climate denialists are aggressive and particularly well-funded. A new study from Drexel University has broken down the financial structure of the climate-denial movement, and the findings are essential for plotting out a map to success on combating global warming. It’s the first peer-reviewed analysis of its kind.

The thrust of the study, done by Dr. Robert J. Brulle, is that climate-denial money has largely been driven underground to dark-money sources. About 75 percent of the money backing climate-denial efforts is untraceable, primarily via conservative foundations and shadowy tax-exempt groups that obscure their funding sources.”

— Washington Post, December 27, 2013

The study shows that two of the biggest funders with obvious self interests, ExxonMobil and Koch Industries (owned by David and Charles Koch), have recently cut their traceable funding by an amount that mirrors the increase in untraceable funding. The chart below shows the funding map:

View fullsize

The moral of the story is the need for more sunlight - new efforts to force the funding numbers out into the open.

Thanks to Brad de Long's blog for highlighting the story. For more on the Koch brothers influence on the US political system watch the documentary Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream (2012) and read Jane Mayer's entertaining account of what happened at New York public television, where David Koch sits on the board, when it was first screened. 

Peacebuilders

Two courageous stories appeared on my radar this week - both thanks to the Financial Times.

1. Syria's Trojan women. This is a project conceived by Charlotte Eager and her husband to stage Euripedes' tragedy The Trojan Women with an amateur cast of Syrian refugee women in Jordan.

As Eager notes: "The Trojan Women is about refugees, set at the fall of Troy. All the men are dead and the former Queen Hecuba of Troy, her daughter Cassandra and the rest of the women are waiting in a refugee camp to hear their fate. Euripides wrote the play in 415BC as an anti-war protest against the Athenians’ brutal capture of the neutral island of Melos; they slaughtered all the men and sold the women and children into slavery."

Eager and her husband adapted the play so that the Syrian women could incorporate their own war stories. The pair originally raised money to "spearhead a longer term program of drama therapy workshops and bring bring global attention to the Syrian refugee crisis," in a project that also includes making documentary and feature films. Apparently many women refugees wanted to be in the play. One said: We're getting the chance to to talk about what we are going through. We feel we are doing something important." The first show was a success and now the cast may be on the international theater circuit.

Financial Times, January 4, 2014

2. A profile piece (Financial Times, November 13, 2013) on Kate Fearon, who helped the peace process in Northern Ireland, and put these skills to work in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Sudan. I read her book City of Soldiers (2012) about a year in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, which shed a fascinating light on aspects of peace building (as well as thoughtful, brave Afghans trying to rebuild their communities). I really admired her courage working in such bare, remote, often violent conditions. Her job was to bring the rule of law to life - mostly drawing on the informal justice system. She explains: "Because the formal system was viewed as corrupt, expensive and sluggish, people usually turned to the informal system run by elders. This system was generally founded on repairing damaged relationships in the community." A quote from one of the local governors caught my eye:

"Because of thirty years of war we have lost everything. Right now we are obeying no law - not European law, not Afghan law, not Pashtun law, not the Elders, not Islamic law. It's all very confused and mixed up."

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Tragedy of the bees

Apple and pear farmers in Szechuan, China now use paint brushes to pollinate each flower - intensive farming and pesticides have destroyed the bees. Similar stories are coming from Brazil. Is the US next? According to biologist Dave Goulson:

“Biologists for years have been predicting that we might be facing a pollination crisis, where there are not enough bees and other flower-visiting insects to go around. If this happens yields on crops requiring insect pollination will drop and food prices will rise. About three-quarters of all crops depend to some extent on pollinators... As a specialist in studying wild bees and their conservation, I am embarrassed to admit that we don’t know how many pollinators we have, nor how their abundance has changed over time. Nobody does. There is no monitoring of numbers. We also do not know how many we need to ensure good crop yields...Bees may be the canaries in the coal mine, warning us that we must find ways to produce food without destroying the environment upon which we depend.”

— Financial Times, November 8, 2013

When common resources are not measured, and no-one is accountable they are not managed.

Models explained

In my first short documentary film, The Banking Brain, I tried to communicate two factors that influenced risky decisions by investment bankers during the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis:

1. believing that they make decisions based on rational analysis, they are unaware just how much they are influenced by their emotions,
2. needing to feel certainty, traders mistake their financial and economic models for reality.

These are abstract points in a discipline that has become more and more mathematical and I struggled to find images to present them. Economist Diana Coyle has a nice way of bringing the role of economic models to life:

“Economists put models at the heart of their methodology. A model is an attempt to make sense of the world by including only relevant detail. A good model is a powerful tool for analysis and prediction.

One well-known example of a good model is the map of the London underground, originally designed by Harry Beck. It’s sometimes a flawed guide, for example, taking tourists down two deep escalators to wait on a platform and travel 260 metres on a train, and then up a lift, if they want to travel from Leicester Square to Covent Garden....Its combination of reasonably accurate analysis, parsimonious representation, and sheer elegance make it a model for economic models. However, many economic models fall short of the Tube map standard. Most often their failure is one of inaccuracy by oversimplification. Economists value logic, parsimony and elegance - and then believe the model. It’s a kind of cargo cult mentality. ”

— Diana Coyle, The Economist as Outsider, Pro Bono Economics Lecture, 24 June 2013

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Making music for films

Earlier this year I had my first experience of working with a composer, Patricia Lee Stotter, on a film score. Since then I've become fascinated by the use of music scores and sound effects, and even took an intro course to the powerful but complex Protools software that sound mixers use, so I could communicate with them more intelligently.

My sound teachers have talked about how big budget films work with an orchestra once the score has been finalized and locked to picture, and thanks to nofilmschool blog I came across some of this in action for the latest Hobbit movie (which I have not seen, Lord of the Rings was enough). Since it's fun AND set in my one of my many home towns, here it is:

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The value of big data

A few days ago I wrote about gaps in GDP as a measure of progress  -  in that case, under-measurement of the value of the digital economy. Here's another example of the value in big data built up by LinkedIn (and not measured in GDP), with news that the company plans to use the data it has amassed from more than 250m curricula vitae to help companies improve their hiring.  According to the FT, a senior LinkedIn VP said:

“LinkedIn would develop algorithms akin to those Google has created for its search engine, using its large database to find the right candidates with the aim of transforming the “incredibly inefficient” world of recruiting and charting careers.

“We are due a complete increase in the sophistication of the talent marketplace like we saw in the financial marketplace 50 years ago,” he said. “[Using this data] governments will invest in education to fill skills gaps in the economy and companies will make workforce plans figuring out how to invest in their own people and put facilities in the right locations.””

— Financial Times, December 23, 2013

No question that the labor market and search/hiring could be SO much more efficient, but let's hope the data are largely real and up to date. (I think mine is.)

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