Good morning everyone,

Happy Friday! How is it going? Great I hope. I have a very abstract theme for today's Fem Fri, which is the idea of attention.

This came to me when I was watching Leave No Trace, which is a tremendous Debra Granik film about a father and daughter, because one thing I really loved about it was how much attention the camera paid to its surroundings. Andrea Arnold, another great film director and woman, does that as well, and I really enjoy in both cases this idea of someone making a film like they live their lives, constantly aware of the flickering at the margins. Here is an interview with Debra Granik where she talks about that:

You see the characters, and you try to conjure the environment. All those descriptions play out and I thought “gosh this is a really textured and rich environment, very dramatic.” There are these dark firs that are so tall, with moss, heavy rain. And a family that lived undetected next to a big city. I was filled with a sense of wonder about how that could be filmed, but I also got the sense that it would be very textured and beautiful.

https://www.filminquiry.com/interview-debra-granik/

Andrea Arnold and her love of creepy-crawlies:

The British director seems to harbor a great fondness for the invertebrate set, cutting away to a close-up of a moth here, a creepy-crawly there. Arnold’s films are marked by involvement with the natural world, but bugs are her favorite, and they show up between and during scenes to evoke moods and characters’ feelings.

https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13057498/andrea-arnold-american-honey-fishtank-wuthering-heights

Both Fishtank and Leave No Trace are great movies to watch tonight if you are planning on staying in.

You also see the idea of attention in this article about the Italian women of library music. If you don't know what library music is, it's basically stock music for hipsters, it came out on vinyl in the 1970s and production companies bought it. Then they started giving it to charity shops and people started collecting it. Allow me to introduce Maria-Teresa Luciani, innovator, and the sounds of her city:

Her truly outstanding (and equally scarce) Sounds Of The City album […] stands up as a rare example of her tape-manipulation music and loop-based song structures, using natural melodies and rhythms in what can only be described as sonic architecture. Utilising theoretical methods (which would later be considered “industrial music”) by taking a portable Uher tape recorder into urban environments, Luciani’s sensitive approach to sound would render an unlikely set of spacious, melodic compositions and dream-like, mechanical, hallucinogenic soundscapes – quite unlike anything outside the realms of Delia Derbyshire and Basil Kirchin’s self-initiated projects – while retaining a strong Italian personality due to the album’s domestic source material.

https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2019/08/italian-female-library-music-composers

Finally, moving from media to history, I love this project that shows what you learn when you pay true attention to a beach:

"I can see people's lives, people's homes amongst this rubble," said Ms Marsh, who is compiling a research project for her degree, at the University of Durham, based on her searches at the beach.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-49926429

Have a lovely weekend, pals. Might be nice to go for a windy walk on a beach, if that's an option for you.

A xx.