André Singer

André Singer interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 22nd April 2015

0:05:07 Born in Edgware, London, in 1945; my name, Singer, comes from my mother, my parents were never married so my father took my mother's name; my mother was a Romanian Jew, born and grew up in Czernowitz, currently part of Ukraine, but when she was a girl it was in Romania; her father was mathematics professor at a local college, and my mother and her brother went to school there and she then went to study in Vienna; this was in the early thirties, and as a result of what was happening in Germany at the time, her family felt it was better for her not to return to Czernowitz but to come to London; she came in the late thirties to stay with a cousin, then war broke out and she didn't see her family after that; my father was from a Catholic family in north-west Germany and he was a Communist - a journalist, an intellectual in Germany, and quite senior in the Marx-Engels Institute in Berlin before the war; he was a publisher of the Communist newspaper from Berlin which was distributed round Germany, and clearly was quite knowledgeable and knew people in the hierarchy as a result; in 1933 he was imprisoned when the Nazis came to power; he was in prison for about a year but because he was senior enough and had contacts he was then sprung from prison by his friends and fled to Prague; from 1934-36 he did the same job that he had done in Berlin, in Prague, running a newspaper for the Communist Party; then when the Nazis moved into Czechoslovakia he fled to London; from here on, information is rather complicated about him because he would never talk about it; from friends and various newspaper articles I have deduced that he was a spy for the British during the war; the only reason one can surmise that is that when he died, his obituary said that he worked for the British Government and was one of the few Germans in London who could travel backwards and forwards, and he went to Lisbon and various other places outside London for the whole period of the war; most of the Germans were interned and he was clearly working during that period; he met my mother in London, and my two sisters and I are the result of that liaison; they lived together but never married, and parted on less than amicable terms when I was a teenager; I was a friend but never a son to my father; he was somebody one would never recommend as a father figure, but he was an engaging and extremely personable, somewhat eccentric man; he died in 1976 as a result of a car accident in Soho, and at that time he was well-enough known to have a Times obituary when he was called Soho's last boulevardier; he was known as that because his circle of friends were the Soho set - Francis Bacon, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde the painters, writers, poets; my father lived in Soho and spent an inordinate amount of time in the pubs there; when I went to see him it was partly to give him some of my university grant so that he could keep himself in drink, but partly being taken around which in hindsight I had realized the significance of; at that time I slightly cringed at places like the Colony Club, where Francis Bacon was; so I saw all these characters in my late teenage days, knew who these people were, but didn't know their significance until much later; my mother, I have to say, was somebody who did not deserve the hardship that she went through as a result of having three children; she was young and rather spoilt, from her background in Romania, and in London she had nobody really, just one or two friends and a distant cousin who could help her, and it was a very hard time for her; she had to work; she cleaned, did secretarial work, anything she could, and she could never break out of that particular bubble; as a result, most of my childhood up to the age of eleven, was in children's homes as she couldn't afford to sustain us as a family; she struggled to earn enough and put enough together to have a flat in Kilburn by the time I was eleven, and then I came with my sisters and we then had a family; from then on we stayed together with our mother in Kilburn; my mother died in 2001

9:36:18 The home I stayed in longest was an educational home in Reading, which was for about four years, and I went to a junior school in Reading called the Battle School; the others were for much shorter periods before, and if I did go to school I don't remember, though I do remember the homes; I do remember the homes with horror, certainly the last one; on the one had it had the advantage of being a home where my sisters were there as well and they were older than me; that was good because I had their protection; but it was a very disciplinarian place, I met some nice people there, one or two I still know, but the home itself I don't have any affection for whatsoever; we are talking about a different time when discipline was regarded differently; things that would happen there to children were things that today would be regarded, not so much as abuse, but excessively harsh in the way children were expected to behave; then it was regarded as normal - you wet your bed, so you have to stand beside it with the sheet over your head, that kind of thing - not physical punishment but demeaning, which I should hope today you would not inflict on a child; I was not a child who wanted to collect stamps or follow trains; I was brought up with a certain liking for music, not that I was musical, but I liked it; that is something that has stayed with me my whole life, a liking for opera and ballet began at an early age; there was nothing that made me think that one day I might become an anthropologist; on any influence from my mother's Jewish background, there was nothing at all; my mother, like my father, liked to think of herself as Communist; I don't think her political knowledge or understanding was very profound, but more an emotional thing; both my parents were e-religious; my mother had an emotional attachment to Judaism, both her parents were not Orthodox but practising Jews; her younger brother to whom she was very close went to Israel so she had connections there; the final home that I was in was a Jewish home, but I don't even remember going to Synagogue; the two ladies who ran it advertised the fact that it was a Jewish home; I never learnt Hebrew, I never went to a Jewish school, and when I left and we went back to our mother I had no Jewish association; at school, for example, I was neither seen as Jewish or not Jewish, it never came up in the Willesden that I grew up in; I never had a religious affiliation as a child and was never encouraged to; it was only later that I started questioning it; we had a family friend who occasionally on festive days we would go an join them, so I knew a little of what it was about - Passover, or occasional Friday dinner; I think my mother was very ambivalent about Jewishness and saw a split between cultural Judaism and religious Judaism, and never wanted the religious side to be imposed upon us, and never had the opportunity to push the cultural side in our direction; it was left as an unspoken part of our past; I never really had a religious trajectory; I became more interested in it recently when I was making a film about the concentration camps than I had had in my whole life up to that point; I regard myself as an atheist with a tinge of agnosticism; I have never had any religious affiliation; part of my youth I was brought up with friends who were Russian Orthodox, I went to the Russian Orthodox church every week later in my life, but that was a social activity not religious; I was friends with the Russian Orthodox Archbishop at that time - Archbishop Bloom - but I never regarded myself as Russian Orthodox or a Christian; if somebody asked my if I was Jewish I would always hesitate; I would acknowledge that I was because culturally if your mother was Jewish you were a Jew, but I didn't feel I was a member of a Jewish group, so an ambivalent relationship


18:52:09 On the Communist streak in both parents, I think it did influence me; I was a Young Socialist in my late school days and early university, but I think it was more social consciousness rather than upbringing; neither my mother or father, and of course in the period they were together was when I was eleven to fourteen in Kilburn, I only perceived that period as one of antagonism between them and they never really talked politics to us; I don't think it was something I gleaned because of my parentage, but a natural phenomenon of my schooling and general ambiance in that period of time in the early sixties; when I came to Kilburn at eleven I went to a school called Salisbury Road School in Willesden and was in the junior school where I took 11+; I then moved to Willesden County which was then a grammar school; I had a wonderfully anarchic time there; I was not a great pupil; it was co-educational, a pretty rough school at that time, surrounded by even rougher secondary modern schools, so there was a lot of friction and street-ganging behaviour; I had an older sister at the school who was an exemplary student, always top of her class, and I was not; I played truant, had a gang of friends, and scholarship was not my main ambition; I just wanted to have a good time as it was the first period of freedom having left the constraints of Reading, back in London and with no constraints of family, so I was a pretty unruly kid and got into a lot of trouble at that time; I was hopeless at sport; the things I did relatively well at school were chess - I was in the school team - I enjoyed the arts side rather than science, I did not have a very mathematical mind, I was not a great linguist but enjoyed French; I got one or two prizes for different things but nothing that made me stand out; a few years ago I got in touch with a few of my old school friends and each year we get together and talk about school; one of them astonishes me as he remembers the teachers, what people said, remembers things in the corridors and classrooms - I remember none of that; I remember the names and can visualize one or two teachers, but I have no very strong rapport with anybody that I can recall; my extra-curricular side was taken up by the social links to the Russian Orthodox church; it came about because my mother had a friend who was Russian Orthodox and they had sons about my age; there was a camp in Wales every summer where these boys went with a number of other English Russian Orthodox, mainly males, and some French Russian Orthodox, mainly girls from Paris, and it was run by the Archbishop; they were wonderful people and I had some very close friends there and it became my social outlet other than school; from the age of fourteen to my early twenties I went to that camp as my mother couldn't afford holidays; every weekend we would get together in the house of one of them, a family called Behr; it was a fantastic shambolic house in south London where they played guitars, they were all multi-lingual, and I could do none of that; I felt slightly on the outside but loved being part of it; that became a sort of alternative family and the Archbishop became an alternative father figure; in my unruly youth all I remember is that a school friend and I used to sneak up the back of the State Cinema in Kilburn, and in the air vent area you could climb in and watch movies through the grill as we did not have the money to pay; that was my first viewing of films but it was more the illicit thrill of doing wrong rather than the films that we went for; that went on until they caught us and locked that entrance

28:59:07 I lurched through school and managed to just about keep up; I got a reasonable 'O' and 'A' level tally but nothing astonishing that would have automatically got me into university, and from Willesden County at that time not many went to university; but I did come from a background that aspired to a university education and I had various family friends who encouraged me; I had no career thoughts at that time; I applied to various universities and initially didn't get in because my grades weren't high enough and I was told to retake some 'A' levels to raise my grades; I decided that I would teach and got a job in a primary school; I started that job while in the evenings I tried to upgrade my 'A' levels; I started doing Russian and retaking a couple of other subjects at Kilburn Polytechnic; within a couple of weeks of starting teaching which I faced with some trepidation; I had done a lot of holiday jobs but they were manual or working in a factory, but this was my first proper paid job; I had a family friend, a man called Donald Douglas, who invited me to go to the home of an archaeologist near Oxford where they were having a family weekend; while there they opened a newspaper where there was an advert for a new college that was opening at Farringdon, near Oxford, called University Hall, Buckland; this was an experimental college where the teaching would be done by Oxford teachers but doing a London degree, and they were looking for students to help start this college; the archaeologist's house was quite close so we went to look at it; the college had already started so I went a met the Warden who asked me if I played cricket; I said that I had done, at which he asked me what I wanted to study; so I was offered a place and did wonder whether to go on with teaching and sticking to my present plan, but then thought this looked exciting; there were only going to be sixty people in the first year, half male, half female, in a beautiful house outside Oxford, so I gave up my job, got a grant and went there; that was the beginning of my university life; I did economics with one of the papers being anthropology; my tutor at that time was Malcolm McLeod and my tutorials and teaching was the Oxford system even though it was a London degree; I had my tutorials in the Institute of Anthropology at Oxford, though Oxford at that time didn't do undergraduate anthropology; I went in 1963 and graduated in 1966; Malcolm was the Graduate Assistant at Oxford then and has just come back from doing fieldwork in Ghana; I loved anthropology, again I found myself having to catch up in terms of studying because I was not a great scholar; I didn't like economics much but it was the first time I had got to the position of finding a subject that I enjoyed, and followed it through from then on

35:48:18 When I finished at Buckland I was in a state of indecision about what to do; I didn't feel that I was going to go into an academic career; I had done a lot of holiday teaching to sustain myself over the years but didn't really feel that I would make a great teacher; again by chance one of my long-standing friends in life studied with me at Buckland, and he was in literature at the time - this was Brian Street; we were discussing where we were going to go next, and because we knew Oxford quite well having been on the outskirts, thought it would be nice to do something in Oxford; I had had both advice and tuition from Malcolm McCleod and a chap called Mike Heppell who went off to Australia, and having got to know Evans-Pritchard, the Lienhardts and so on, it was suggested that I might at least do the diploma in anthropology which was their transition course; Brian meanwhile had become friendly with Godfrey Lienhardt because of the latter's association with Leavis in Cambridge and his love for literature, and thought that it would be a good thing for Brian Street to do the diploma as well; we both applied and did the diploma, neither of us thinking we would become anthropologists; the acceptance tutor for the diploma that year, who was also the examiner for the London degree course, was Rodney Needham; at the end of that first year, which I enjoyed very much, the same kind of thing, where to go next; the University expedition for that year was going to Iran and wanted anthropologists to join a team of medical students who were studying tics and various other phenomena and illness in Western Iran; to finalize their grants they needed anthropologists on the expedition as it was meant to be enhancing their relationship with the local people; Brian and I became the anthropologists on that expedition which goes down in history as the only Oxford University expedition that went into bankruptcy; we went to Western Iran; we motored around and set up camp with the Basseri which was made famous about that time by Fredrik Barth who had written about them; we wrote reports and had a very interesting time at a period where there were not the tensions that there are today with Iran, although it was quite difficult, and came back having done our first mini-fieldwork; when it came to the next step we both felt we would stay on and do more anthropology; I applied to do the B.Lit. being supervised initially by Evans-Pritchard and later by Peter Lienhardt, and Brian went straight into a D.Phil. course doing literature and produced a book at the end called 'The Savage in Literature'; I worked on the tribal peoples of Iran, a two year course, and finished the B.Lit.; it was then suggested that I stay on and do the D.Phil. so becoming the perennial student; doing a D.Phil. one is talking about proper fieldwork; at that stage, although I was in an Africanist department, the only part of the world I really knew anything about was Iran, so I decided I would do fieldwork there; I was going to study in Western Iran following in Barth's footsteps, but there had been a Bakhtiari revolt at that time and the Government were very tense and nervous about fieldwork there; I had a fellowship at that time with the British Institute of Persian Studies so was doing language in Tehran while trying to get my local visas, and I shifted my attention to the east where things were slightly more settled; I ended up doing fieldwork on the Iran-Afghan border sedentarization and Afghan nomads in Iran and the relationships between them and local farmers; I studied in a small semi-nomadic village in Eastern Iran and spent nearly two years doing that; Evans-Pritchard was initially my supervisor because I had been his research assistant during my B.Lit. years and worked on his Azande material; he was getting increasingly frail and when I was in Oxford I found myself in the role of his minder rather than his student; Peter Lienhardt was then the expert in Iran so he took me over; Eric Sunderland was my examiner

44:54:19 Evans-Pritchard was wonderful; I became a sort of surrogate son which was both a privilege and quite difficult because I became a sort of keeper; this was towards the end of his life; I did my fieldwork 1970-71 and he had retired just before that; he had a very large family but he was kind of embattled with them; he has two sons about my age and a younger son, and two daughters; the older daughter had left, he and the sons were not having a good relationship at that time, and the younger ones were still at school and not really able to keep the household; in the end I moved into the house; I spent a lot of time with him, drove him around, and when he took his honorary doctorate at Manchester I was there; he had diabetes and was not supposed to drink so I tried to keep that in moderation and generally look after him, so it was both an honour but quite difficult; the Nuer and Azande fieldwork certainly dominated all of our anthropological education and background and revolutionized what anthropologists were doing at that time; he was never seen as the great teacher as such, it was very much based on those tomes; I worked for a couple of years on the Azande material resulting in a publication on Azande men and women but this was post the impact that it had already had; I remember some kind of celebratory A.S.A. in Oxford and E-P was quite frail and sitting in an armchair in the garden of the Institute; it was kind of the Divine King concept; the great anthropologists from all universities came and paid obeisance to E-P in the corner of the garden - a wonderful scene; I think he was regarded by his peers as the greatest, he was certainly great; that little period was an important part of my life; when I went to do fieldwork I had to give that up; when I came back E-P had another assistant and I had just got engaged to get married so life went on differently; sadly, I was away when he died, on my first film trip

50:38:16 When I came back after finishing my fieldwork and was going to write-up, I started applying for university jobs slightly worried that I was going to fit the university mould; while I was starting to write up I saw an advert in the New Statesman for a film company looking for an anthropologist to advise on films, this was Granada Television starting up the Disappearing World series; I discussed this at Oxford and it was seen as slightly heretical to be involved with television and film at that time - 1973; people didn't know anything about it either; you might watch 'Nanook' at the film society in the evening but that was all, it wasn't really serious anthropology, and Oxford was a relatively conservative department and for one of their own to be going into film...E-P and Godfrey didn't know what to make of it; I applied and was given the job; there were three of us, Melissa Llewelyn-Davies and Angela Burr; it was a kind of eureka moment; I knew nothing about film and had never had aspirations to be a film-maker until I got that job; I had not finished my thesis by then but I left Oxford - I did go back and finish it later; I worked for a very happy ten years at Granada, first with Brian Moser who was heading the series - later I took over from him and ran it myself - alongside Melissa, Chris Curling and Brian; the timing was perfect for us because we were fortunate in having a very forward-looking, experimental, and interesting head of television at that time, Sir Denis Forman; he did 'Brideshead Revisited' and other great films, he was an extraordinary man; Denis saw the potential for allowing Brian and the rest of us to create a niche in television, something that he personally saw as important - I think it is a misnomer as it turned out - but the cultural disappearance of peoples round the world; Brian as a geologist had come back from South America and had more of a current affairs approach to it than the rest of us, but that was its motif at the beginning; there were threats, whether it was roads or missionaries, whatever, societies were going to implode in some way or other and here we have a chance to find out about it on film and show it to the public; these films were not made for anthropologists but they had the prescience to have anthropologists both on board and to never make a film without an anthropologist in the field; television at that time - four channels only - so you had big viewing figures wherever you went; so whereas you are lucky to get a million people watching a programme today, then we regularly had ten million; in the factual side of television it was dominated by programmes like Survival which had a major animal series that came out of Anglia Television but nobody was tackling anthropology; I think Denis saw that if we cornered that market at Granada then we let natural history have one independent channel and we would do the other; the BBC did a bit of everything; Granada did current affairs with World in Action and anthropology with Disappearing World; they were shown at peak times to huge audiences, and all successful, for several years; its a phenomenon as it has never since been able to do that; although the BBC made some very good anthropological films they were part of a mishmash; they had a series World About Us, and one week it would be climbing mountains and another week it would be an anthropological film, so there was no consistency; I think as a director, the film that I am most attached to for historical reasons and because I always wanted to do it is the film I made on E-P's work on a film on Witchcraft among the Azande; it was made in difficult circumstances, more in Zaire than Sudan, but still answering some of those questions on film which E-P had asked in books; the film that I think was more challenging and watched today with interest even though it is out of date is the film I made in China on the Kazakhs; it was made in 1982 and was the first time that a Western crew were allowed to film tribal people in China; it was a fascinating look at how a traditional Kazakh nomadic group had adapted to an enforced commune system in the Tian Shan mountains north-west of Urumqi; the constraints on the tribal people in the 80s were much harsher than they have subsequently become; at that time the Kazakhs tried to maintain their traditions under a system that didn't really want them to; they changed their costume to adapt, and the Khan of the group that we made the film amongst, called himself the Secretary of the Commune, but in effect it was a fascinating look at how people did maintain their own beliefs in a system that they really paid lip-service to; I enjoyed the complexity of trying to get that across to an audience; when I was running the series after Brian had left we were still making very successful films; competition was much greater with more channels coming up and there were various union difficulties; on the final three films that I commissioned, of which the Kazakh film was one and the other two were made on a commune by Lesley Woodhead called 'Living with the Revolution', also in China; I was going to make another film in Yunnan at that time and getting access and permissions at that time was incredibly difficult; we had got permission but had to take a very limited crew; there was a dispute at that time within the union about taking production assistants along on a trip; we didn't have the budget or the need, and we didn't have the permissions from the Chinese; the union insisted that we had to take a P.A. and it became a union battle inside Granada; the then Managing Director of Granada, David Plowright, took a combative position and decided to withdraw the money from the series; we were allowed to make two films and the third film was dropped and the series was also dropped because of that dispute; after I had finished I was going to do various other World in Action films but decided I did not want to do other genres and wanted to do more anthropology; I was offered the chance to make a series by the independent sector called Strangers Abroad about different anthropologists, was a two-year project; so I left Granada at that time with the series having been axed, then a couple of years later they brought it back but not as a proper series, just for occasional films; David Wason took it over and helped run it over the next few years until it just faded away through competition and loss of momentum

1:04:18:20 After making Strangers Abroad I was recruited by the BBC and had an extremely interesting time; the BBC had The World About Us as its very successful series which had been running for many years and they were looking for somebody to run it; I was interviewed as a potential head of that series and I was still finishing Strangers Abroad and had other commitments at the time, but said that when I had finished them I would join the BBC as an executive commissioning of other programmes rather than as a film-maker; it was a time that I had a family and was spending too much time travelling; I accepted the job but by the time I went to take it up other decisions had been taken within the BBC and they had axed World About Us, so I joined the BBC as the commissioning editor for a series that didn't exist; there was embarrassment in the BBC and I didn't know what to do; they offered my a choice of roles; one was to represent the BBC on the programmes that were being made by independents, so I would be the commissioner and executive producer on independent productions that the BBC was commissioning; they also said that they would let me run my own series; that was a wonderful opportunity and I created a series called Fine Cut which were independent feature length documentaries from round the world; I was given a budget, allowed a free hand to commission, and on the one hand, while I was looking after popular programmes like Michael Palin Pole to Pole, on the other hand I was commissioning, buying or co-producing with any film maker that I wanted; it was a slot on a Saturday night where they weren't expecting high ratings; so I was allowed to commission a very large number of mainly anthropological films - David McDougall, Melissa Llewelyn-Davies, Jean Rouch, and so on; that was where I first got to know Werner Herzog who I have worked with ever since, Fred Wiseman, and other great independent film makers from round the world; it was a huge filmic privilege to do that; I didn't make any of these films but was the editorial BBC representative and financed part of it, but I worked with them on their films and learnt a huge amount, and had a fantastic three years doing that

1:08:16:12 Of all the people I have worked with, Werner Herzog is the one whom I enjoy working with most as I have made fifteen or sixteen films with him; the first film was a real eye-opener for me, a film called 'Lessons of Darkness' which was a film about Iraq and the oil fires; I observed the edit and discussed it with him, and it was the first time in terms of concept of film that I could appreciate moving away from a rather important but rigid system where documentary was observational film, you were a kind of all-seeing objective eye and what you were bringing home and presenting to the public was as close to the truth as you could get it on film; that was the ambition of most film-makers of that era, what Colin Young taught at the film school and what film-makers believed documentary was all about; here I came across an extraordinary man who is wired differently to everybody else; he liked to think of film as what he termed, the static truth; his truth was what was in his head and what he was putting across to the audience, and how he put it across was what he would think of as an artist, as a creative figure; he wasn't after objective truth because he felt you could never find that, so he would be quite happy to use imagery in any way possible as long as as a viewer you understood what he was trying to tell you in his film; that was quite an extraordinary redirection of my thoughts at that time; I think that is very hard to do with anthropology because you would be doing a disservice to the people you are filming, but in film terms and in film language it was a very important lesson; so 'Lessons of Darkness' is the film I would choose from that point of view

1:11:12:00 I think you only have to look at the arguments that have raged ever since film-makers like Tim Asch on the Yanomami films; I think that experiment where you showed the films in different forms and you could see as an audience suddenly how different the material could be depending on how it was edited, how it was presented to you, I think showed the dilemma that anthropologists and film-makers, and the combination of both, face; it is that perennial question that you can never be objective, however hard you work at it you can never do that as it depends on circumstance, time, relationships, 101 factors come into it; the ethics question is always one about how honest I think you are being to yourself in putting the material across; you have to hope that your style and your method is being correctly interpreted by the people who are viewing it; again there is that barrier between you as a film-maker and your audience; Jean Rouch is one of those exceptional characters who claim to make film for the people he is filming in the first place, for himself secondly, and his audience was only an afterthought; it is an interesting perspective as you realize that each of the parts of that triangle will look at the same material through different eyes in any case, and there can never be one single right way of doing it; as an anthropologist you want to do well and be honourable to the people you are representing, that is a kind of duty more than anything else; most important you have to be honest to yourself and what you are trying to achieve with your material; Disappearing World was one of those things where you are trying to balance between a television audience and a strong narrative which you are creating because it is the narrative that matters, so you weren't being completely honourable to the people you were filming; the purpose was not to help them per se, it was to entertain your audience, so the structure of the film always deviated and if you were an activist you would make a different kind of film; there is a balancing act going on in the mind and the person who is making the film has to satisfy them self that they are doing the right thing; I have never been happy with anything that I have presented in any circumstance at all

1:15:12:12 I don't think that film is really a tool for presenting abstract ideas; you can analyse from film but film itself is not an analytical tool in the same way as a pen can be; I come from a tradition where I am either making film for television or the cinema, I am not making film as an ethnographic tool or as a didactic framework to carry on research after the event; there are anthropologists that do that but they are looking at a different audience and a different use of film; always for the film I am doing I need a strong theme and a good narrative that a non-anthropologist can understand and grasp, but that's a much simpler framework than if I was doing a text on those people where I'd need many more references and much more background; I think they are just totally separate disciplines; I think one has to know what one is going into film-making for as an anthropologist; I have been lucky enough to have been in different areas of media in that I have done current affairs, history films, entertainment, Stephen Fry around the world type of material, so I have dabbled in a lot of different areas; if I was a purist in terms of anthropology and thought I was only an anthropological film-maker I would have found it almost impossible to survive in the world of popular media; it is deeply competitive and you have to be prepared to be much more general, so the label anthropological film-maker would make me quite nervous today as there is limited scope for that whereas if I am a film-maker that wants to use anthropological sensitivities in my film-making, and where possible work in anthropology then the world is your oyster; you have to do subject matter that you may not be interested in as stepping stones to subject matter that you are interested in; I am very much of the positive, optimistic view in terms of media and film; it is an extraordinary world we are living in; a disaster happens somewhere in the world and you know it is on film now whereas five years ago you wouldn't; people pull out their phones or ipads and film it; there are outlets on YouTube and the Web that we had no concept of in the past, which enable people to have a career, to put their material across and find new forms; I think it is an exciting time for that rather than negative; I talk about it being tough; you just have to think laterally and find other ways of tackling it; China is an exciting area; I did this film not long ago about concentration camps; it was shown in cinemas and on television and I had a lot of international question and answer and discussions that I had to do for different broadcasters around the world; I was asked if I would do an interview for China and I hadn't even known the film was being shown there; a Chinese journalist in London came to interview me and it was for a Chinese web site and she said it was the biggest in China; they were not showing the film on the web site but were showing stories about films; just before she left I asked if it would be shown widely and was told they had an audience of about 500,000,000; this is something that doesn't cross your mind normally and this is about a subject that the Chinese know nothing really, and you think suddenly there are vast new audiences, vast new ways of presenting the material, that is fantastic; I think the area that I have been the most attracted to recently, and the area that I find fascinating, is probably the opposite end of what I have been talking about in relation to web sites and so on; it is the use of cinema for film; we kind of talk today as if cinema is dead because the laptop, iphone and so on are taking over; ironically I think that in terms of the kind of documentary that appeal to me cinema is actually increasing in importance; I am now working on a film, also with Werner Herzog, about man's relationship with a volcano; this will be done for a long form film for big screens on cinema and a forty minute IMAX film for education; where you have got visual material and strong human narrative there is nothing to compare with the large screen and cinema; I find it ironic that late in my career I am moving more in a Luddite direction towards the big screen whereas the excitement for the new generation is in the opposite direction, small segmentary material on a small screen; I think that as long as those two can coexist, I am most proud of being linked to the cinema documentary, feature documentary, the long form documentary, than I am to anything else.