Mandatory Training

Mandatory Training (16mm to digital transfer, 10 mins - 2021) - Title The permeable border between sense and nonsense - Author's name Patrick Tarrant - Affiliation (university, independent, practitioner, etc.) London South Bank University - Contact details tarrantp@lsbu.ac.uk +447590257987 103 Borough Road, Southwark, SE1 0AA, London, UK - Abstract (max. 300 words) The whiteness and gender normativity of Bolex promotional brochures and magazines from decades past is brought face to face with audio taken from contemporary mandatory training modules on Equality, Diversity & Inclusion and Health & Safety such that the two become fused in a glitch-strewn perversion. If the former medium is a record of unconscious bias and the latter seeks to redress this bias, nonetheless when jammed together one gets the distinct sense that they are more complexly imbricated than we might like to think. After recording the audio from the e-learning modules I needed a transcription of that text. Using an online application to do this transcription resulted in an error rate of about 10% such that Equality, Diversity and Inclusion became Equality, Diversity and Illusion, an unintended but pithy puncturing of institutional performance targets and governmental control over Higher Education. In this film it is what’s wrong with one medium that highlights what’s wrong with the other, and it is the remediation of static images in a moving image context that animates the continuity between old and new ideological formations. - 5 Keywords Glitch, The Aspirational Image, Normativity, Remediation. - Short bio (max 150 words) detailing your research activity, publications, and/or screenwriting practice. Patrick Tarrant (Melbourne, 1969) is Associate Professor in filmmaking at London South Bank University who has written journal articles on feature-length portrait films such as Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, Two Years At Sea and Manakamana. Patrick has made video portraits and observational city films, while developing a hybrid filmmaking method that brings digital video and a 16mm film projector together in: The Take-Up, The Trembling Giant, Another Self Portrait and How To Microwave a Cauliflower (in 3 easy steps). Patrick has had films screened at the Hong Kong, Cork and Melbourne International Film Festivals, and was nominated for Best Short Film at the 2016 London Film Festival.

Year

2021

Director

Patrick Tarrant

Duration

10 min

Country

United Kingdom

Language

English