This Hallowe'en the doors open and the veil falls, allowing the mysterious and the magical to enter our world.
FoolishPeople is proud to announce their collaboration with The Cinema Museum London in the theatrical release of their haunted feature film Strange Factories.
A writer, possessed by a terrifying story journeys into unknown and dreamlike places, haunted by the infamous Hum emitted from a strange factory.
FoolishPeople and The Cinema Museum invite you to enter into the heart of English Dreaming and engage in a live cinema encounter like no other. Explore the world of Strange Factories and experience the madness and terror of haunted cinema, as you witness the film unravel inside Stronheim's factory and its characters come to life around you.
The ghosts of the silver screen will join you in a mysterious ritual that will align you with the ancient paths of Die Geisteweige and immerse you in a film filled with magic, obsession and mystery.
Who is the infamous Stronheim? What exactly is the purpose of his hidden factory? And why have four performers fleeing from a burning theatre become enmeshed in the primal struggle of a story giving birth to itself?
Strange Factories draws on ancient theatrical traditions and mystical exploration, to wrench at the heart of what it means to be human.
Will you allow it to show you the wonder behind the moving pictures - the dreams of violent imagination?
Will you permit FoolishPeople to conjure for you, as darkness falls, and the lights go down?
Not everyone can survive the violence of Creation.
To celebrate the announcement, Director John Harrigan and Producer Tereza Kamenicka will be at the London Archive Film Festival tonight at 7:30pm to discuss the project.
“The Cinema Museum is thrilled to be working in partnership with FoolishPeople on the production of Strange Factories and looking forward to the transformation of our exhibition spaces into something new and memorable.” Comments Martin Humphries of The Cinema Museum
"Everyone at FoolishPeople is excited and honoured to be collaborating with The Cinema Museum. It is the perfect location to unveil Strange Factories for its theatrical premiere." Says John Harrigan, Writer and Director of Strange Factories.
26th October - 9th November 2013 The Cinema Museum 2 Dugard Way (off Renfrew Road) London SE11 4TH Nearest tube: Elephant and Castle
The first in a ten part series sharing 101 things I learnt whilst writing, directing and producing my first feature.
Not all ideas are born equal. I completed three screenplays in total before the story of 'Strange Factories' even existed. None of them were right. 'GraveLand' was even set in the same location as 'Strange Factories'. I re-wrote many, many drafts to make 'GraveLand' the one, but it just wasn't. It was tough for me to accept, but I'm glad I suffered the process as the lessons I learnt over those re-drafts are immensely valuable. Don't willingly accept the first idea for a screenplay that comes to mind. You may need to clear some distance to reach the place in your imagination that holds the key to the right story.
It's easier to write a script for an incredible location than it is to find an incredible location for a script that already exists. 'Strange Factories' was written with full knowledge of the environment and location that we would be using. This location inspired and shaped the story.
You never have enough time to rewrite and you can never do enough drafts of your script. Leave time for another draft after your rehearsal period.
Fundraising and crowd funding require more focus, work and attention than any other element of pre-production. They're easily one of the most brutal elements of the filmmaking process. Be willing to get your hands dirty. You'll learn why having a pair of human eyes on your funding page means people are more willing to give money to your campaign, and this will feel like a small victory. If you take it seriously, you'll learn a whole set of skills that will aid you in the future, not only in filmmaking. I recommend picking up a copy of the 'Influential Fundraiser.'
Rehearsals are not only for actors. The more time you spend with your team working out how you'll shoot together, the better.
Your mind and body is as much a resource as your camera and your location. Making a feature film is a marathon. You need to be healthy and fit enough to not only direct, but to carry equipment and props (sometimes for miles and miles up very large hills if you can't afford transport). The entire process of making a feature on a tiny budget will push you to your limits and beyond. Don't underestimate how much you need to prepare and get fit before you start. Not only physically, but mentally too. A daily meditation routine is the reason I'm still here.
Instincts are rarely wrong when it comes to what you feel you need to shoot. There are scenes in 'Strange Factories' that exist only because of mad moments of inspiration. I couldn't always explain why I needed them, but I just knew and some of these scenes have proven crucial to the story I wanted to tell.
You make your film more than once, some say it's three times: when you write the script, during the shoot and in the edit. I'd say it's more than three times. I'd count the rehearsal process and also how you choose to eventually share your story when you exhibit or unveil the work. You could also include the creation of any transmedia elements if they have depth and truly exist within the story world. The 'Strange Factories' live cinema event will be another chance to create and tell the story that first came to me four years ago.
I've never had much patience, but as a filmmaker I've learnt that patience is a prerequisite on many, many levels. Sometimes there's nothing you can do but wait.
Have faith, because if you don't have faith in your film, who will?.
That's it for part one, part two will be posted in late April.
In 2001 FoolishPeople was re-emerging from the chrysalis, after an extended break of six years (when I attempted to ignore the scream of my own personal truth.) My first son, Finn had just been born and I had a powerful realisation in that I knew I didn't want him to have a father that I didn't even recognise, a man who had become bitter and twisted because he wasn't brave enough to confront the creative fire that was burning him alive internally.
In this year zero I completed 'The Singularity'- FP performed this successfully at 'The Barn Theatre' in Welwyn Garden City and I was attempting to find a venue for FoolishPeople to show this work in London. I sent out a proposal for the project to a number of London Fringe Theatres, and had received an invitation to meet with the Artistic Director of a very well known fringe theatre.
When I was shown into the office of the Artistic Director, I noticed his office looked like a hoarder's flat. He moved a mass of papers, offered me a seat and started leafing through the script to 'The Singularity' which I had sent him. Not saying a word, but just sneering as he reminded himself of the work.
He turned around, got himself a drink, and gulped it down, (offering me a drink wasn't even a consideration), he probably received hundreds of scripts a week, from playwrights all attempting to get him to stage their work at his theatre. I was, to put it bluntly, the shit on the shoe of his day.
He broke the silence by telling me he'd read 'The Singularity' and it had some things he liked and others that he really didn't like. He didn't at all understand the concept of the immersive nature of the theatre I wanted to create- why did I need to use the stairs as well as the black box theatre at his venue? He laid it out in meticulous detail and defined what was expected of my work and my protagonist and why the immersive theatrical nature of 'The Singularity' wouldn't work. He told me that if I would change the work to a traditional play and could pay for the hire of the theatre, there could potentially be a way I could stage 'The Singularity' there.
In that moment I could feel the fear rising and his negativity threatening to extinguish what was a new beginning. It felt like a dangerous moment, where my life and work could turn and travel a path that would take me right back into the heart of despair. I sought out one single reason why he wasn't right, that I shouldn't listen to him and let him banish my ideas and dreams and in turn define the parameters of my art and ritual himself.
In that moment I remembered Les Tucker, who had taught me writing and devising at North Herts College. He'd introduced me to Artaud and encouraged me in the creation of my first written work, when the musical theatre material we were pushed to perform wasn't what he or I were really interested in. Les loved the horses, he always carried a copy of the racing times and he always defined his own path. I can never thank Les Tucker enough for the impact he had on me and the creation of FoolishPeople.
With this in mind, I explained why punk values were so important in FoolishPeople's work and demonstrated by showing him my middle finger.
There was a moment of shock between us both. This wasn't within the parameters of how a meeting between an unknown playwright and a well known fringe Artistic Director should go.
Polite English theatre is a myth, there's nothing polite in English theatre, it's still as bawdy and rude as it ever was. The essence of theatre just got better at hiding its truth, for fear of banishment.
Without permission I had ushered us both onto a new, strange path by my rude gesturing. A new story unfolded where anything could happen.
We got CPT the next week and The Singularity was shepherded into London under the stewardship of Chris Goode, who was the best mentor I could have asked for. Chris as an artist also defined his own parameters and I recognised Chris as another outsider. He completely supported the immersive theatrical ritual that was 'The Singularity' at a time when there was little to no other immersive theatre taking place in London. He recognised the power of these new parameters that were being offered to the audience from their immersion within a story.
Out of all of the auditions I've run for FP, the one I most remember is a lady who took a large knife out of her bag with her right hand and stared at us across the audition room like she was going to kill us all. She then retrieved a lettuce with her left hand from the same bag and hacked it to pieces. That was her audition. She took back the power from the audition process and from me as director. She redefined what was possible and because of that I'll never forget the experience until the day I die. It was truly amazing.
I'm not suggesting that in every exchange you should set out to redefine what is possible or expected but I think it's vital for art to exist within new parameters, outside the confines of what is safe and acceptable and this is one of the reasons why I think FoolishPeople's work still after twenty years remains outside of larger recognition. Society has mechanisms in place to reject that which is both very new and very old, whilst reinforcing the terrible nature of now, always now and never tomorrow or yesterday.
With each day that passes new parameters are emerging for artists. The tools exist today for you to develop, produce, shoot and distribute your own feature film yourself. Artists no longer need to rely on galleries to exhibit their work, there are empty spaces everywhere, offered up by the failure of the parameters of Capitalism. There's no one way, no simple solution on how to develop your ideas. Only you know the parameters and it's up to you to communicate and act as an advocate for your work and your own personal truth. You just need the will and tenacity to complete each stage of the process and do all the work necessary to manifest your art.
This is of course the very essence of the Fool archetype.
Like the Fool, there has never been a more dangerous, exciting or rewarding time to define your own parameters.
Before I started work on the Strange Factories script, I knew I wanted to explore nostalgia and the stories that affected me so profoundly as a child. Their themes and the content of the dreams they instigated were so wondrous and deeply creepy.
Children's television for those of us born in the seventies in Britain, who grew of age in the eighties was deeply strange. For lots of reasons. It seems the layers between the truth of the fairytale and the power of the myths that haunt these isles were still close to the surface, calling to us from stone tapes and faces hidden in the wall.
The strongest current within children's television programming of this period for me as a young boy was the infusion of disquiet and unease amplified by the loss of my father, grandad and nan in quick succession.
I spent a great deal of time alone with only my imagination and gravestones for company. This overlapping nature of this architectural uncanniness helped open doorways that have never shut.
The loss permeated the stories I watched, it was already there waiting for me.
As a child I was scared of everything, my mother was deeply religious and after losing my father she retreated to the safety of various forms of religion. The children's television of my childhood offered no safety. The characters never told me things would be ok or alright in the end, they showed me that only the weirdest had the skills to survive the onslaught of apparitions and shifting realities, that bathed a generation in the odd irradiance, creating tomorrow's people.
These threads showed us the day after, awful futures we didn't want to live in, fictional narratives that threatened to obliterate the real.
These stories sent my friends and I to bed with true horror in hearts, many a playtime was spent dissecting the apparent doom that grew closer every day, reaching out to us from the television screens. Nuclear Armageddon was such a real and profound fear, its poison seeped deep into the reservoirs of dreams our imaginations held, causing tides of toxic dreams.
Saphire and Steel is a programme that fills me full of dreadful wonder even today. It relentlessly refused to open its world completely to its audience, it treated us as equals, expecting you to interpret and investigate the cases just as its two agents.
No easy answers, no simple solutions. This journey must be endured, for it is in the experience of the geography of these narratives that we learn the shape of our own imaginations, reflected deep in the landscapes of their characters and worlds.
Televison of the 70's and 80's arrived wrapped in nostalgia, even as you watched it for the first time you felt a deep longing, that turned young eyes into old and vice versa.
Bagpuss, probably one of the most fondly remembered British children's television programmes was about forgotten and lost toys, left to experience fleeting moments of what once was.
Strange Factories, is born of a type of nostalgia. A longing that you can't verbalise, that connects the marrow in your bones to worlds that only exist when you dream of them.
Have you ever missed a phone call? Had the icon stare at you accusingly? It's even worse if it comes from an Unknown or Witheld number, because there's a chance it was important.
We've all been there, haven't we?
Maybe it's a new adventure, or someone getting back in touch from long ago. Maybe it's something life-changing, this communication from the unknown - and you wouldn't know, because there is no message.
It bears repeating:
You might have lost your chance at a once-in-a-lifetime connection with someone or something vitally important, and you'd never know!
Art is a calling, and storytelling is too. Both bring people together, to share experience, to reconnect you with the strange and wonderful nature of life, to remind you of who you are. Whether it be the analogue crackle of the voice down the telephone line, or the digital clarity of high definition, we all enjoy communication which enables us to be heard; we enjoy feeling whole and respected, maybe even loved.
Wouldn't it be great if you could recognise that call from the unknown, and relish it? What if you were able to recognise the potential that it presents, and thus never miss that call again? If you knew when it was calling, knew its voice intimately, how much better might you be, after seeing yourself in a new way?
Of course, it'd be easier if you knew what to look for. Fortunately for you, there's FoolishPeople, and we can deliver you and guide you - we can direct your call with story, theatre and film. We'll conduct you through the static, through the hum, with ritual and film, so that you can recognise your very own self in that silver moon-mirror when the time comes.
Tune in to NTSLive today at 1pm to hear FoolishPeople's Artistic Director John Harrigan being interviewed by artist Rebecca Strickson about the sounds and music that inspire him.
This article forms part of the series Rapture & Decay: The New Eschatological Cinema. Read the previous article here.
Afternoon skull examination by Benedictine monks at Einsiedeln Abbey, Switzerland.
But the game's worth all the candles, since now they're burning at both ends, and that's fine: the chips are down. -Alain Jouffroy
Tens of millions of people worldwide practice theologies which contain an overt element of the eschatological. Such "Armageddon theologians" have even made it into the White House. It is not a requirement of such views that one is religious but fear not, I've quoted Zizek once in this series already, I'm not going to do it again. According to Norman Cohn, eschatological beliefs and mythologies are not exclusive to our time; such beliefs have reared their heads repeatedly throughout history, particularly in times of mass disorientation or anxiety. (Is there any other kind of time?) Across two volumes on the subject, Cohn poses the question as to how and where such expectations of annihilation and consummation developed. As his groundbreaking study unfolds, it dawns on him what a bunch of suckers we all are and have been for quite some time, since Zoroaster, in fact. What's more, the end (of this idea) is not nigh, for as he proclaims, "who can tell what fantasies, religious or secular, it [the eschatological tradition] may generate in the forseeable future?"
So let's rattle through the history lesson. Cohn argues that until around 1500 BC Egyptians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Indo-Iranians, Canaanites and pre-exilic Israelites were more or less united in their world view; that in the beginning the world had been organised and delivered from chaos by one or more gods. To displease a god would be to risk the divinely ordained order of things, for the opposite of order was primordial chaos, a dangerous force which seeped into the earthly realm under the guise of plague, famine and invasion. The Egyptians knew this divine principle of order as ma'at ('base'), the social and political embodiment of which was the Egyptian state, or rather, the Egyptian monarchy, which comprised human heirs to the throne previously believed to have been occupied by the sun-God Ra himself. Periodic regeneration and rejuvenation through upholding ma'at on the personal, social and political planes was key to understanding the Egyptian ideal. The best any pharaoh could do would be to restore the feted order of the past, re-establishing the ultimate conditions experienced under the rule of Ra, 'in the beginning'. This continual reaffirmation of ma'at, this endless return to 'the first occasion', the notion that order is always teetering on the brink of chaos, which must surely be reigned in and always is, leads Cohn to describe the Egyptian world view as "static yet anxious".
According to Cohn, sometime between 1500 and 1200 BC such ideas were turned inside out by the Iranian prophet Zarathustra, better known as Zoroaster, who espoused the controversial idea that all existence was "the gradual realisation of a divine plan". He proposed a dualistic cosmology of the spirit of good, Ohrmazd, and evil, Ahriman, between whom man is free to choose. Cohn argues that Zoroaster's prophesy was inspired by the Iranian version of traditional combat myths, whereby a young hero, blessed by the Gods, keeps chaos at bay by winning a great battle against an embodiment of evil, most likely a form of the feared 'chaos monster', and is rewarded by being appointed ruler of his kingdom. By adopting such a mythology, Zoroaster provided his followers with a view of the world which was forward-thinking and vitally comforting in its optimism. He foretold of a final battle, in which the supreme god and his supernatural allies would defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and destroy them absolutely, leaving the divine order to reign without conflict or obstruction for all eternity. Mental and physical distress would be banished forever in a world which basks in total security and peace, unchallenged by chaos or evil. History would effectively cease. This was to be known as 'the making wonderful'. And for Zoroaster, it was going to happen very soon.
In the sixth century BC Zoroastrianism became the religion of the first Iranian empire.
Of course, in order to function as the primary religion of a successful, well-established empire, it was essential that Zoroastrian eschatology be modified to suit the needs of such an empire. Unsurprisingly, immediate and total transformation of the world was not necessarily an imperative when times were good, riches were abound and new temples were being erected. Therefore the 'making wonderful' was postponed, officially, to a remote future, thousands of years away.
Whilst numerous empires withered and collapsed, Zoroaster's proclamation lived on. In particular his notion of the great cosmic war to come had a deep influence on certain Jewish groups, particularly the Jesus sect. Whilst the particular political situations which prompted Zoroaster's proclamations faded into history, the ideas seeded in his prophesies lived, taking the form of a convenient social myth which had the ability to both console and fortify those with uncertain futures. Through its own malleability, Zoroaster's eschatology was reformed, regurgitated and adapted, surviving many attempts to kill it off for good.
'The Last Judgement', Rogier van der Weyden, (1445-1450 )
Even when quashed or driven underground by the regimes of the time, the idea would rise once again, years later, in distant and disparate areas where overpopulation and social change, war, drought, plague and famine assured that the cosmic war, in the form of (in the case of Protestant millenarians, for example) the coming of the Antichrist , was tensely awaited. A great deal of fraternity was to be found in such beliefs throughout the centuries, from the early Jews and members of the Jesus sect, to Protestant millenarians and even today's evangelical Christians.
One Big Happy Apocalypse? I think not.
Whilst dreams of revelation and collapse foretold are doubtlessly comforting, Cohn reveals over the course of his study that they are ultimately nothing more than a social construct, an illusion. Whilst Cohn pursued his conclusion out of fear, fear of the extremities of action justified by such eschatological yearnings, his understanding of the readiness of people to adopt such social myths is great. But perhaps we would do better to free ourselves of such myths or at the very least, to consider a few exciting alternatives.
Richard Lester's absurdist comedy The Bed Sitting Room (1969), scripted by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus, goes beyond the apocalypse in search of meaning, envisioning life after the collapse of civilisation, post- the lifting of the veil. As in Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), there's an awful lot of rubbish lying around. And nothing makes much sense. In fact not an awful lot has changed since the End Times were over, prompting the question, what if, as Evan Calder Williams claims, the apocalypse just wasn't apocalyptic enough? As Calder Williams explains, "you aren't post-apocalyptic because the apocalypse happened, the film stresses. You become post-apocalyptic when you learn to do something better, or at least more morbidly fun, with the apocalyptic remains of the day."
To be apocalyptic is to be in waiting. You might as well be one of the undead. To be post-apocalyptic is to be alive, by the skin of your teeth. Ok, so there's a lot of rubbish piling up everywhere but isn't it high time we stopped fantasising about pearly gates and great consummations due to take place on some date unknown but possibly long after we're dead, and started making the most of the remains of the day? There's a lot to be learned from decay, rubble, ruins, dirge and toil. Earlier in this series I linked the hyperreality thesis to the omnipresent fear of death ("those fantasies of death and apocalypse harboured in every bedroom across the world...) and the un-therapeutic unveiling of atrocities by filmmakers such as Noe and von Trier. Neither filmmaker is fearful of bombarding us with disease, decomposition and other images traditionally greeted by us with disgust. If disease is as inevitable as death then why shy away from it? Why turn from what you MOST NEED TO KNOW? To turn from death and disease is to shy away from life itself:
"Healthy people flee contact with the diseased. This rule applies to almost everyone...The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healty people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man's sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too, the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air". (Roberto Bolano, 2666)
To survive modern life is, to adopt Calder Williams' thesis, to become a "salvagepunk". Part of what we are salvaging is our right to death. As contemporary society grows ever more riddled with incurable diseases and cancers, Western life expectancy remains mystically high. On this planet, nobody is allowed to die. Our fear of death has contorted life itself, our contemporaries and elders rot in hospital corridors, their lives strung out by the latest life-saving technology. As in The Bed Sitting Room, there's a lot of junk lying around. Our bodies are no longer our own. And if we don't own our own bodies then we certainly can't lay claim to our own deaths. And if we don't own our deaths then how can we possibly assert the rights to our own lives? With the licensing of every new cutting-edge cure, death is pushed yet further away and our sicknesses and maladies only increase in their virulence. Meanwhile, Eugene Thacker points out that yet another zombie movie has stormed the box office...
Proximity to the ruins of our existence, then, can be the only prescription.
In August 2012 FoolishPeople performed John Harrigan'sVirulent Experience, a thirty nine cycle ritual at Conway Hall in London which took fear of death as the basis for a work which also functioned on the levels of both contemporary political satire and gnostic exploration. On an even more personal level it was, for me as a performer, a means by which to transform personal experiences of cancer and loss into the form of a mythical narrative which would enable me to reach a new understanding of myself, my life and the world which I inhabit through repeated catharsis; three eschatons a night, for thirteen nights.
FoolishPeople's work in theatre and film runs parallel to the hyperreal projects of Noe and von Trier, drawing upon ideas inherent to both the cinema of attractions and the theoretical work of theatre practitioners such as Artaud. The purpose of such work is always to confront ourselves with ourselves, to reveal the ways in which reality can be as illusory and abstract as hyperreality. Or unreality. To question whether such a thing as the 'self' even exists. As a means by which to redefine freedom through a direct attack upon all oppressive structures, institutions, habits and chiefly thoughts, the work of FoolishPeople lies firmly and proudly in the surrealist tradition, of which Andre Breton wrote,
"Everything leads me to believe that there exists a certain point, a state of mind in which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. It would be useless to seek in Surrealist activity any impulse other than the hope of determining this point".
The 'certain point' which Breton refers to is the personal apocalypse, or eschaton, which can take place hourly, daily, over and over again, should you so wish. This is the work of life. Human beings are highly succeptible to mythologies, Cohn has revealed that much. The project of FoolishPeople is to explore such mythologies, to live them and to smash them, to build new ones, better ones, worse ones, real ones, fictitious ones. Life and death, past and future, fact and fiction. The manifestation of whatever is necessary, whenever it is necessary. Minute by minute. Nothing is certain except death. Once you've faced that, the rest is up for grabs.
"The human being who identifies him/herself with the objectively existing world comes to construct a personality, a sense of self, that is, at base, fully dependent upon the ever-changing structures of temporal existence. The resulting lack of any sense of permanance, of autonomy, leads such an individual to experience anxieties of all kinds, and eventually to shun the mysterious and collectively meaningful patterns of human existence in favour of a private and stifling subjective context, in the confines of which life plays itself out in the absence of any greater plan or scheme."
- Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
Image: Anatomical Flipbook (1885), L.W. Yaggy & James J. West
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A writer, possessed by a terrifying fiction hunts for the heart of his story in a pagan landscape, haunted by the infamous hum emitted by a Strange Factory.
Strange Factories is the first feature film produced by FoolishPeople.
1957- Seascale, the North of England. Cirxus; an old English circus lost in the shadows of the smoke stacks of Calder Hall, the world's first commercial nuclear power station.
Athalia the ballerina waits in the ring for Loudon the clown to return with directions to the Black Pool, the mythic site of the Home Sweet Home, the final show of the season. Join her as she begins a bizarre and wondrous search for Loudon through the irradiated secrets of Cirxus, where she must face the macabre atomic menagerie, haunted by circus animals and navigate her way through the maze of strange, hallucinogenic sideshows to the other side of time.
Cirxus defies genre and form and offers a literary experience like no other. A combination of hallucinogenic novel and blueprint to a physical experience.
A rowdy gang of Tracey Emins wrestle half a dozen dazed Andy Warhols to the ground. IT IS THE FUTURE AND ALL FORMS OF ART ARE FREE. Perfect replicas exist of every masterpiece ever created, artworks and ideas are stolen from the mind before they’re even created.
Copyright or ownership is meaningless. FLESH-WORTH is all that matters. Arm yourself with weaponised art and explore the notions of open-source myth. What are intellectual rights worth in a decomposing culture?
Featuring full archival material from FoolishPeople’s performance run of Dead Language at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
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