“No one ever knows what we do.” Ever wonder where those captions on your TV come from? Do you know what a court reporter is? Both utilise the invisible art of stenography – “the act or process of writing in shorthand by hand or machine” – a tradition that dates back to the time of Cicero, who developed a shorthand system so that his slave could record his orations. It is also sometimes a competitive sport, with an official Guinness World Record holder. Oh, and it’s totally awesome.
At least the people in this documentary think so. They are proud of the work they do, primarily ensuring the fairness and effectiveness of the courts and creating real-time accessibility for the deaf. They are proud of the skill, one person compares it to playing an arpeggio or doing a chromatic scale. The fastest stenographer in the world, Mark ‘The Wonder’ Kislingbury, can type 360 words per minute at 95% accuracy. For the Record partially follows his attempt to break that record while competing against a few other hopefuls, one of whom practices on her machine while having her mouth inspected on a dentist’s chair.
For the most part though, the documentary focuses on the everyday and not-everyday challenges of being employed as a stenographer, which is a good choice. The world record race, a few camera- angles of about five people typing on a stage, could have been far more cinematic. If we were looking through their eyes, could see how far behind they are to what is being said, see every error, every pause and every ramble, we might sense what an adrenaline rush a job like this must be. I guess the visual ingenuity of something like The King of Kong (2007) is quite expensive.
Be it budget constraints or otherwise, this is very much the work of a first-time filmmaker. The tone is inconsistent, the visuals pedestrian. The score is woefully generic, with the same-old jaunty, whimsical pieces making the quirkiness feel forced, and the sadder, slower pieces giving the captioning-9/11 scene an unpalatable sogginess.
The director, Marc Greenberg, is himself a stenographer, which is possibly why this sometimes felt like a recruiting video. You get the sense that he knows these people. Maybe that helped them to be candid, but also may have led to compassion in the editing room.
Still, the subjects seem genuine, likable, stranger-than-fiction, or all of the above. Each one working in, as they say, a thankless job with a front-seat to civilisation and history. Perhaps this film is less celebration than they deserve, though surely more than they expected to get.
Review Score: THREE STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Running Time: 67 minutes
For The Record screened as part of the SxSW Film Festival.
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