The Magic of Radio [Greta Snider, 2001]

This film is something of a farewell letter to amateur analogue radio. It features a guerrilla bicycle-broadcaster from Portland, two pirate radio DJ’s in Austin, and a ham operator from Northern California with possibly the most enormous civilian antenna, who bounces signals off of the moon. There is an earthy, material quality to radio that makes it easy to appreciate how much our world is governed by unseen forces. This film includes treasured bits of analogue artifact, including “numbers channels,“ Navajo broadcasting, and the lovely real human who used to do the coastal weather conditions before being replaced by a robot. (Secret bonus narration in Morse code.)