It feels like a life time of preparation when you’re putting on a festival, and then it’s all over, leaving you with an emotional hangover. When you finally return to “real life”, you somehow crave the adrenalin and excitement that has pumped through your veins for the last four days - you even, in a sense, miss the wired (I’ll bypass making any bad under”wired” jokes) buzz that has allowed you to survive on sleepless hours. But then, as the hangover subsides (as it always must), you look back on what happened and a big sleepy smile stretches to the margins of your face. “We did!” you shout (in your head) and you think back - as we most certainly did - and go “that was an awesome few days”.

Clare Pennington, our honoured guest and Film Journalism winner, joined us for our industry day on Saturday and immersed herself in all the word that were filling the air that afternoon. Here, Clare reports from the front line…

Clare Pennington

“It’s not about mechanics but ideas.” These were the words of Kate Taylor who oversaw the proceedings at the Wired Words: Film Criticism Workshop, one of the six sessions Underwire hosted on the final day of the festival. Each was dedicated to discussing, work-shopping and obsessing over the intricacies of film from behind the lens and in front of the notepad.

The Shortwave Cinema was a hub of academic and cultural discussions, a day which kicked off with The Feminist and the Flirt: Performance in Video Art, where we tackled the problems of making feminist art. In trying to take control of our own bodies and images, women are sometimes accused of either acting ‘like men’ or of being narcissistic. For feminist Mary Kelly, to combat this you should avoid depicting the female form at all. But as performance artist Oriana Fox commented, sometimes it’s more practical and affordable to turn the camera on yourself, highlighting some of the challenges of art-making as a woman.

What takes place after filming is over was also dealt with. Who is watching/digesting/ignoring or writing about what they have seen? The Film Criticism Workshop helped us tackle some of these questions. The attendees were divided into discussion groups, each led by one of the speakers to deal with a particular subject matter. Journalist Catherine Bray asked whether it matters that most film-critics are middle-class white men over 40? Well yes, it probably does, but as one attendee was keen to make clear: they may all belong to one demographic but this doesn’t mean they represent one solitary viewpoint, any more than ‘women’ just have one thing to say. The assorted audiences of directors, producers, composers, festival programmers, writers, academics and their pupils, certainly didn’t gather on one side of the fence.

I’d like to use an example from Ladies First: Representations of Women in Music Videos to demonstrate why festivals like Underwire are a brilliant (and much-needed) idea. In the session we examined stereotypical portrayals of women in music videos and celebrated some excellent alternative videos by female artists including Azealia Banks and Fiona Bevan (who was also in the audience!). For Annette Barlow, founder of thegirlsare.com, a worthy response to the question of whether feminism has been ‘achieved’ could be found in Big Sean’s video for A$$ featuring Nicki Minaj, where a host of scantily-clad ladies jiggle around or get spanked on Big Sean’s gold throne. And, as journalist Hannah Patterson argued, this is a reminder that we shouldn’t reserve our criticisms for the most challenging artworks, but should look across the high/low cultural spectrum. So thank God we can all sit, watch and discuss Big Sean together so we can fully celebrate the originality and creativity that goes into crafting the alternative.