> Will you start by explaining how the documentary/feature department is
structured within the Danish Radio sytem?
At the Danish Radio we have three departments, covering the variety of
documentary expression. First there’s the Montage, which specialises in
intimate personal storytelling, told with the use of classical dramatic
narrative. Secondly we have the Feature department, which digs into more
political/investigative subject matters and current affairs, but also uses
sound and dramatic editing as in the Montage. Last but not the least
there’s Ultralyd,
(Ultrasound) which deals with all kind of stories through more of a sound art
approach, and tries to test the borders of where the documentary genre can go.
The founder of Ultralyd, Peter Kristiansen, one of the most gifted
adventurous minds at the Danish Radio, sadly died a week ago.
> And which department do you work for?
I was trained at the Montage department that back in 2000 had a
fantastic schooling for young radio producers, but soon after made my way over
to the more experimental department Ultralyd where I have worked for
the last 4 years.
> Where did the idea for Leaps and Dunes originate?
I had been reading a book, I think Cocteau, describing this happening:
A trick performance was held, where a kid from the audience gets into a
suitcase, the suitcase is opened, the kid is gone. The audience gasps, the
suitcase is closed again and after the magician whispers a magic sentence
– the suitcase is opened once more and the kid comes back out. The
audience applauds wildly – but as it is said “no one could see that
it wasn’t the same kid anymore.”
This passage made me somehow think of my yearly summer camp as a kid, with my
parents waving, wishing me luck on the way out and myself waving back with a
nervous beating heart, thinking how it would be without them. I then returned
home to the same scenery only two weeks later – to the same happy waving
hands but suddenly I felt miles away from them – I’d become
something of my own. This feeling is what I wanted to grasp in the story, so my
colleague Rikke Houd and I sat down and brainstormed memories from that special
time.
> Did you attend camp as a child? If so, does the feature speak to some
of your own memories?
I did several times from ages 7-14, so its basically, with experience
from playing with jellyfish in the sea to kissing a boy for the first time.
It’s therefore really a life journey away from parents, alone or secretly
with others in the warm dunes. There is a scene which was in the longer
version, where the little boy says that he feels he has become 80 years old but
actually only turned 8. ..I think that describes the camp experience well.
> How many hours did you spend at this camp, recording?
Rikke and I rented a mobile home and placed it in the sand outside the
camp, where we stayed from the beginning to the end, over a period of 2 weeks.
Another of our colleagues, Lisbeth Koerner, came for a couple of days and
helped recording some of the bigger scenes.
> How did you identify the campers who you followed over the course of
the camp session?
There were about 40 kids so we spend the first four days or so only
“casting” to find the right ones who seemed emotional enough to be
expressing that particular journey - older ones growing younger again and
smaller ones growing older.
> How much of the storyline was scripted before you collected tape?
We had written a script consisting of scenes scripted from our own
memories of camp, like the cheek dance, packages and letters after meals
conjuring homesickness, night trouble etc - and were pleased to find that it
was all still there. But we were of course open for any surprises, and found
one in the kid (Johannes) who became our narrator of the piece. We quickly
found that he had a very special way of talking and decided to place him
metaphorically on “Mt. Olympus” as the one looking down on the
human behaviour repeating itself all over again. The fun thing about him is of
course that he isn’t a god, and you can sense his own, very human
experiences and emotions - ike describing the night trouble with the small ones
adapting the older ones’ power-hungry patterns. For his interviews, Rikke
asked Johannes to close his eyes and talk in present time but he would slip
into his own world, like in a trance, and from our simple questions he would
answer in great detail about the sea and patterns and life at the camp.
> Was it challenging to win the campers’ trust and get them to
open up to you?
Not when they knew we where on "their" side. We also invited
them for coffee in the camper which they thought was very exciting and grown
up!
Also, we made a deal beforehand with the adults working at the camp, that we
set out to make a truthful portrait of the camp, and so wouldn’t be
reporting to anybody when the rules were broken (like when the girls were
drinking champagne and smoking cigarettes in their room near the end.)
> Why do you think the campers DID trust you and Rikke?
I imagine because we worked hard to stay involved and never look down
on them as just "kids" - we took where they were at emotionally, very
seriously. Recording the little boy crying on the phone to his dad made me so
uneasy at first, feeling like I was exploiting this private moment AND that it
would be really good tape! But luckily it took the more funny turn and he came
out in a better mood all together so that made it easier to go through with.
> Technically, how did you capture some of the most intimate moments,
like the boys sneaking around other cabins, ready to draw on unsuspecting
sleepers?
We had had many theoretical ideas before we started, about trying to record
radio with the use of some of the same techniques used in film - like using a
microphone held at different distances to shape a scene, one of the reasons why
we sometimes were three “on set”. I am not sure if we
succeeded, but we did get to bring a lot of extra equipment than on a
normal radio documentary production – including some sets of wireless,
lapel mics.
We knew the boys would be going on the nightly
escapades and schemed with them to come to our caravan before the act. Then we
placed a lapel mic on each one of them and then followed the scene from our
station. The boys came proud and giggling back to us afterward, to make
the report which we then used to intercut with the rest of the radio story.
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> Now to switch gears...we've heard about some recent, big changes at
the national Danish Radio organization (DR) concerning the documentary/feature
department. Can you explain what happened?
It’s all pretty sad and pointless so I’ll make it short: A
new building for TV and Radio departments, plus an expensive concert hall went
several billion over budget, which no one revealed until after the fact. This
happens often with state building and normally the government would find a
solution. We live in a rich country so it shouldn’t really be a problem
but unfortunately our current government is not interested in supporting DR
since it is basically more interested in commercial radio and market shares
than the concept of public service. So instead decided t to cut 70 million
dollars of DR´s yearly budget. The entire radio documentary department
(The 3 subdivisions described above), being the most expensive and time
consuming of all the genres, was unfortunately the first to go in a long run of
both TV and radio. The documentary department costs one million dollars a year
– but in comparison to television and the bigger budget projects this is
only like a drop in the ocean, considering how many hours of quality radio are
produced.
But it was also the will – or lack thereof - from our radio director, who
is ruled by looking at the day to day listening measurement numbers. He has
decided that even though the documentary department was attracting an
increasing number of listeners, it still wasn’t as high as with the talk
shows and music channels and therefore he didn’t see its worth as a
public media. But he forgot to count that whereas a talk show is listened to
maybe once, a radio documentary continuously over the years – some of the
old programmes from the 50’s are now the most downloaded on podcast.
> Did producers there have any sense this might happen, or was it a
complete surprise?
It was a COMPLETE surprise. For instance the Montage department has
existed for over 60 years - made history and has won prizes all over the world.
It was seen as the flagship of Danish Radio and students at the universities
study the genre and its makers over and over. It has been like an archive of
national history in oral story telling and therefore as use for writers and
scientist as well. Now the collection has stopped and no one had ever thought
such a violent act could happen to Danish culture.
> How will this affect you and your colleagues?
One thing is that a lot of radio makers will be out of work from the end of this
year, amongst them people who has dedicated their entire life to this genre and
never worked with anything else. Another is the great loss of knowledge that
will be gone forever and the way of bringing it on from one generation to the
next through one of the older mentor/producers.
Even though I am now the holder of an education in a nonexistent genre, I feel
very fortunate to have been one of the last to receive those tools and will do
my best to keep them alive in hope of a new government taking seat and a
radio director with a bit more cultural understanding and visionary mind
stepping in.
> Has there been a lot of anger/protest against this decision? Do you
have any recourse?
There is a lot being said and written these days, both from the artistic elite
of filmmakers and writers but also ordinary working people with a general love
for well produced radio and then of course the political opposition. The
society of the blinds claimed they had lost THEIR cinema, which I think is
maybe the nicest compliment. And there will be a hearing in Government this
coming Wednesday to discuss the concept of Public Radio and what’s
left….cause we are now the only other country besides Russia without a
radio documentary department.
> Do you (and your colleagues) have alternate plans for what to do next?
I am slowly trying to move into documentary film instead, because I have worked
in films as well and would be sad never to be able to tell stories again. And
then my colleague from Leaps and Dunes – Rikke Houd - has
started an organisation called Polar Radio, founded with the goal of offering
the inhabitants of remote polar areas the tools, knowledge and measures to
produce creative sound stories/features of high artistic and professional
quality. The aim of Polar Radio, is to produce programmes with far-reaching
appeal, thus giving inhabitants of remote areas a national or even
international voice.
Last year we did a workshop in Greenland with a group of kids who neither could
read, nor write but simply produced a beautiful radio piece with the old people
of their village. The programme “Piteraq” was last October, short
listed amongst the ten best at the Prix Europa. It has also been re-versioned
and broadcast in Finland, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and Greenland.
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Sabine Hviid lives in Copenhagen, Denmark and learned all about radio in the
Danish Radio Montage department. Since 2000 Hviid has produced a number of
features for DR Montage and DR Ultralyd (Ultrasound) but has also
produced work outside Denmark, including for BBC Radio 4 and WNYC's The Next
Big Thing. In 2005 Hviid graduated as a Screen Designer from The
National Film and Television School (UK) and has since worked in both fiction
and documentary; she regularly brings the sense of cinema to her radio
productions.
