MICHAEL CHANAN

Tales of a Video Blogger

2012

FOREWORD
EVERY one of the protest movements that have sprung up in recent years in different parts of the world has taken to mobile communication and the web in a big way to organise and express itself. Activists have proved extraordinarily adept in the use of the social media. The convergence of small media, the domestic computer, and dispersed mobile communication has provided a huge stimulus for both new and existing alternative practices outside the marketplace. Messages freely exchanged, not bought and sold, are not commodities. Video especially has played a crucial role, from citizen journalismwhich provides vital evidence of events beyond the reach of the centralised mainstream mediato rap videos and mash-ups. ! This volume looks at video, activism and the art of small media from the perspective of a video blogger who is also seasoned documentary lmmaker and an academic. It includes blogs, videos and essays appearing since April 2010. The writing has been edited mainly in order to avoid excessive repetition. Michael Chanan is a documentarist, writer and Professor of Film & Video at the University of Roehampton. He blogs at www.putneydebater.com and his lms and writing can be found at www.mchanan.com

This ebook is issued under a Creative Commons licence. It may not be reproduced commercially or modied in any way, and must always be attributed to the author. All uses under fair dealing are permitted. 2012 This book is designed to be read in landscape mode

Is a self-authored ibook another form of small media? I'm putting this volume together in order to nd out. Don't expect reworksI'm learning as I'm going.

REFRAME has been granted the permission to publish this book online at:http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/activistmedia/

In Practice

Image from 9 Notes on Digital Cinema by Juan Soto watch it in full here

Video Rising

The photo comes from This citizen journalism app lets you create the news and decide which story matters. The text that follows rst appeared in Frames Cinema Journal, 2012.

I joined the ranks of the video bloggers with a series posted on the New Statesman website in the early months of 2011. Following a few earlier experiments in short Watch them, and my other videos for the web in video diary videos, at Putney Debater. style, I had a clear instinct when I started going out to lm the upsurge in student protests in the UK in December 2010 about what to do and how to do it. I remembered Glauber Rochas formula for Cinema Novo in Brazilto go and make lms with a camera in the hand and an idea in the head. The selection of events was serendipitous. My plans were minimalist and responsive to the events (the movement expanded beyond the student population until half a million people demonstrated in London on March 26, 2011, the last episode of the series). I lmed things that I could get to easily by public transport (except one day in South London when a colleague from the University came along, and drove us around in his car). On more than one occasion other colleagues or students did additional lming. For several months I didnt think about the theory of the thing but got on with the job. Looking back raises various questions. For one thing, I call myself a video blogger but its a term without a precise meaning. The point of calling something a blog is to ag it as the work of an individual, but like written blogs, video blogs cover a huge range of subjects, styles, genres, and purposes. (Moreover, the web produces a highly problematic version of individual identity, an abstracted form of voice which can all too easily be fabricated: corporate blogs are written by professional copy writers; there are companies nowadays that run Facebook pages for their clients.) For myself, I think of the video blog more as a form of documentary than citizen journalism, because of the work of editing each epi4

sode. But in that case, its quite different from conventional television documentary in its mode of production. For one thing, the labour process is quite distinct the blogger doesnt have a budget handed down to them, and doesnt work with a crew (only the help of friends). This is not a topic that gures in academic lm studies, which is not premised on practical knowledge of lm production (and has little appreciation of production practices beyond the Hollywood studio system). The labour process of the individual video blogger contrasts starkly with the conventional mode of documentary production, but it also differs from the more egalitarian collective practices of politicised lm-making thirty or forty years ago (including the workshop movement in the UK in the 80s). Both methods involved small crews and a given, although exible division of labour, combining technical specialism with creative feedback and collaboration. The video blogger, thanks to digital technology, is able effectively to work alone at all jobs at all stages of production. This gets very close to the concept of the camra-stylo introduced in the late 1940s by the French avant-garde lm-maker Alexandre Astruc: the idea of the camera as a tool to write withindeed twice over, rst when you shoot and then when you write the lm on the timeline. But this solitude also becomes a liability, because it deprives you of the creative feedback that goes with the teamwork of a crew. Added to which, when you work alone you also tend to work unsocial hours and to take as long as it needs to do the job without bothering to count the minutes. In short, the regime you work is the epitome of free aesthetic labour. I dont mean the managerialist notion that workers should look good and behave nicely, but the

Marxist concept of creative labour, which is not subject to the external constraints imposed on regular labour by the conditions of employment; of which Marx himself once wrote, Really free labour, the composing of music for example, is at the same time damned serious and demands the greatest effort. The tax authorities call it freelance, but this kind of labour is essentially unquantiable: there is no rule that says how long it should take to write a song or a poem, let alone shoot and edit a video. Indeed the artist who lives from their work knows that theres no determinable relation to the exchange value, if any, eventually earned. The video blogger doesnt even think of earning anything. This is also free labour in a new sense: the donation of those who supply the social media with content, off whose backs, in their hundred of millions, enormous prots are made. Nevertheless, this independence, which the video blogger shares with various other kinds of web videographer, is the basis for the expression of countercultural voices which are either ignored or stereotyped by the mainstream but here acquire the status of free authors. Often these voices are politically unformed, some are subcultural expressions of tribal ideologies. The web tends to multiply and magnify existing tendencies and trends in the body social, and thus becomes a space of implicit ideological confrontation (not to mention narcissistic exhibitionism). Nevertheless, these confrontations, skirmishes, even battles, are carried out in the virtual rst person. Video clips are circulated by individual digital subjects posting their links here and there, often pseudonymously. The effect is (if I can be allowed the word) to personalise the message. What you understand about the video you get to by following a link depends on who sent it to you and how. Its like putting quote marks around it. Irony abounds. But the emphasis on voice may also embolden the
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video blogger, who must work to grab and sustain the viewers atomised and distracted attention. (There is a difference between page loads and completed viewings.) The character of video authorship has a history which reaches back through underground and expanded cinema in the 1960s and 70s to the rise of the workers lm movements between the two world wars, both of them, like the experimental cinema of the 1920s, prime sites of free aesthetic labour. This history was always separate from commercial cinema, whose costliness placed it in the hands of monopolists and the studio system, which imposed formal controls over the labour process (aided and abetted by the trade unions). Here, aesthetic labour was regulated by time sheets and schedules. If directors who imposed themselves in this system came to be identied by young idealistic lm critics in France after the Second World War as auteurs, the true authors of cinema, lm theorists of the next generation would explicate the ways in which authorship might be shared (your have to take into account the cinematographer, the editor, the producer, etc.) or even ascribed to the studio itself. These explications have their counterpart in legal documents (and copyright provisions). As quarrels over credits demonstrate, the labour process that stands behind such authorship is always shared. It precludes the individualised character that on the other hand is privileged by video, because the videographer is now able to engage in the same individual form of aesthetic labour as the writer, the poet, the painter, the composer. In the process, however, a new kind of aesthetic practice emerges, as video reveals a potential for alternative uses outside television and corporate publicity, and is taken up by new kinds of users who evolve their own forms of teamwork. One arena is education,

where anthropologists started to use video for ethnographic documentation, medics for teaching, social workers for health and sex education (not to mention local photographers, who began offering neighbourhood customers videos as well as photos of all the usual family events). But it also became an agent of parallel cultural production in the hands of a new generation of activists, who took it up as a new form of speech in the open spaces of civil society. A Brazilian video activist told an interviewer, in 1992, The social movements appropriated the medium before the professionals. Here, video spreads beyond the exclusive province of professionalism, and begins to become a common competence, like literacy. Or even like riding a bicycle or driving, for which literacy is not necessary. In this way, the well-known formula suggested by Bill Nichols for the classic documentary, I speak to you about them, is transformed into I (or we) speak to you about me (or us), or even We speak to each other about ourselves. There is inevitably a utopian streak in it when this transformation is collective. It would fulll the task envisaged by the Cuban cineaste Julio Garca Espinosa in a key manifesto of 1970, For an Imperfect Cinema (Por un cine imperfecto ), where he spoke of the need to break with both culture as the property of social elites, and popular culture as commodities on the market, and discover instead the conditions which will enable spectators to transform themselves into agents not merely more active spectators, but genuine co-authors.

P UTNEY D EBATER , 25 A PRIL 2010

Election Videos

The politics of video on the web rst captured my attention with the UK General Election of 2010. This blog appeared half way through the election campaign.

Its the first time that a General Election in the UK has seen a televised leaders debate, and the unforeseen result has unsettled the political establishment by providing Nick Clegg with a visibility which previously evaded him. The resulting boost for the Liberal Democrats in the opinion polls seems to have sustained itself, and everyone is preparing for a hung parliament. The two big parties are running scared, the hidden establishment are laying in plans to maintain the stability of the pound. The media pundits are enjoying their own bewilderment, outdoing themselves with speculation on what a hung parliament would mean. The last time the media were thrown into this kind of tizz was the crash of 2008. But that was an event of the kind that Jacques Derridaspeaking of the ways we think about the futurecalled unforeseen, as opposed to expectable. Because only the unforeseen brings about changeuntil then, everything remains the same. Elections rarely produce totally unforeseen results. But why did this turn of events take everyone so much by surprise? After all, as Anthony Barnett over on Open Democracy rightly comments: It wasnt the TV debate that propelled Clegg to where he is currently. It was a public looking for a means to deliver an already strongly felt opinion: that the old parties are mendacious and permissive defenders of a rotten status quo. In other words, the debate was just the clincher. Another question. This is also the first time an election in the UK has really encountered Web 2.0, and the intrusion of blogging, interactive amusement, social networking, twitter and
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user-generated content, including videos. How much difference is this making?

*

Everything on the web is intermixed, of course, and the videos mentioned here are found on a variety of sites, including political blogs and aggregator sites, as well as YouTube itself. I omit most of those from official sources, or replays of incidents from new reports, not that theyre unimportant but what interests me is alternative viewpoints. There were one or two early signs of the mood identified by Barnett, including - General Election 2010 (Satire) Leaders Debate (15 Dec 2009) This is a nice example of one of main subgenres of internet video to have developed in the last few yearsan animation music video, which according to the viewing figures helpfully supplied by YouTube had received 13,309 hits as of 25 April at 10.42am. Not a lot. This goes up for new videos once the campaign gets under way. - a satirical Labservative Manifesto (now removed) gets 43K - the animated version of the real Labour Manifesto gets 78K+ - Eddie Izzard does a little better with his Labour Party video, Brilliant Britain, with 83K, and - Cameron losing the plot in a Gay Times interview gets 86K+.

The last started to get around the moment it appeared on 24th March, otherwise diffusion by tweets and posts generally shoots straight up after the first debate, which itself gets a YouTube viewing figure of 218K. Facebook shares for most items are in the mid-hundreds, except for the Gay Times video, around 2K, and Eddie Izzard, 2.7K+. Can figures at this level make a difference? Worryingly, the lists also reveal that a speech in the European Parliament a year ago by the right-wing Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan, The devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government, has been viewed an enormous 2,724,643 times. This is quite frightening, a prime example of virulent dissemination over an extended period. There is no way of measuring whether this is opinion-forming or only symptomatic; Browns huge unpopularity has been well known for a long time, but the Party fudged attempts to replace him and is now paying the price. What seems to be going on here is a kind of swarming behaviour, in which people are using the internet as a novel branch of the public commons where they can share a range of attitudes not always articulated in the mainstreamand be seen to be doing so. Evidently this takes different forms, including the long slow simmering which evades mainstream attention, and the more obviously viral form which quickly reaches boiling point and begins bubbling over. With Twitter this can happen very fast, like suddenly last August, when the lunatic right in the USA were attacking Obamas health care plans and Twitter
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was briefly brought down by the massive number of posts under the tag #welovetheNHS, by Brits defending the NHS after outrageous comments by a Tory MP visiting Washington. Since politicians and the media are not unaware that people are enormously zealous of the NHS, the only unforeseen element here corresponded to the novelty value of the form of protest, which the mainstream press reported briefly with slightly fearful amazement, but the mobile internet is now making this kind of political manifestation expectable, only like volcanos you cant predict when. What the incident demonstrates is the webs capacity to lock into a popular sentiment, and jump it from minority interest to mass attention, although its impossible to say where the transition occurs, what minority and mass mean in this context. In the wider world, the mobilising efficacy of mobile internet communication has been demonstrated several times over, in Burma, Iran, China and elsewhere, in breaking news of political repression and mobilising both local and global solidarity. In the case of Spain after the Madrid rail bombings of 11 March 2004, text messaging was used to summon mass anti-government protests which changed the result of the general election three days later. That was a state of exception, another example of the unforeseen which brings about change. The situation in Britain is not so dramatic (and one hopes nothing will make it so). Here, in the otherwise ordinary expectable day-to-day campaign crawl towards May 6, measured by the rhythm of the daily opinion polls, television remains (along with national radio) the single

most cohesive medium in the public sphere, simply by pulling in the mass audience to the same agenda. With something like 10m viewers for the live transmission of the first debate, the television event became a clincher and provoked the unforeseen (the second debate had around 4m). But its effects cannot be understood in isolation, because they feed back into the internet in a large variety of forms. Some of this feedback is about different ways of reading the agenda, some, but not very much, is about what isnt on it. In other words, this hasnt just been the first televised leaders debate, but the first interactive election campaign. Its impossible to say whether Cleggs impact would have been so great without lots of people tweeting and texting about it. Ten million reported viewers doesnt mean they all watched attentively from start to finish; we dont know how many switched on because someone tweeted or texted them, but there is reason to suppose that parallel peripheral communication produces a multiplier effect. Surveying the videos which have appeared in the wake of the first debate, there is first of all the emergent subgenre of the mash-up, which chops up the full ninety minutes and reduces it to three or four. A few examples (if you only look at one, the first is the most amusing): - UK Leaders Election Debate mashup - Mash-up of the first 2010 Election Leaders Debate - The UK Election TV Debate COMEDY MASH-UP

The general stance of these collage pieces is a plague on all your houses. They are more or less clever, more or less snappy parodies which reduce the politicians carefully-honed discourse to nonsense. A perfectly honourable tradition of political satire. There is another strand which is more partisan, sometimes targeting mainstream politicking and sometimes individuals. They often use computer graphics and found images, and some take the generic form of the music video. Unfortunately the examples given in the original blog are no longer available. Theres also one, from The Independent, which is serious: - The truth behind the UK general election It isnt over yet, of course, so no conclusions should yet be drawn, except that so far whats up there is enjoyable but mostly not very honed, either aesthetically or politically. Which means that internet culture still has a long way to go, at least in the arena of national politics in the UK, before it moves on from reactive political agitation to a more progressive mode of active intervention.

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P UTNEY D EBATER 5 D ECEMBER 2010

New spate of agitational web videos

Independent video has long been supported and encouraged by the trades unions and by community groups. The web has expanded the whole eld.

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THE last few weeks have seen a new spate of agitational web videos, accompanying the amazing upturn of politicking in Britain in response to the brutal, ill-considered and philistine cuts proposed by the coalition government which took ofce last May. Last May, as Putney Debater noted, was the rst time an election in the UK had encountered Web 2.0, and the intrusion of blogging, interactive amusement, social networking, twitter and usergenerated content, including videos. Surveying the trends in those election videos, I found them enjoyable but mostly not very honed, either aesthetically or politically. Which meant that internet culture still has a long way to go, at least in the arena of national politics in the UK, before it moves on from reactive political agitation to a more progressive mode of active intervention. It is now, I think, beginning to move on. There are good selections of current web video at Coalition of Resistance and Counterre. There are several strands to be observed. The rst is video of actions-in-progress, mostly lmed with mobile phones, minimally edited and posted rapidly on the numerous blogs, facebook pages and twitter tags which have sprung up as part of the campaigning. For this is a form of politicking which thrives on social networking, as several journalists have realised. The BBC education correspondent explained how The protests that took place last week werent organised by any conventional political organisation, but they managed to mobilise youngsters in towns and cities from Bournemouth to Edinburgh. Said the BBC man, they were run through social networking websites, with little centralised control, adding the curious comment that This DIY radicalism has its own news channels, on Facebook pages and Twitter accounts and blogs, leaving the traditional news organisations

and political commentators looking in from the outside. Curious, because its a rare admission of what is actually always the case with professional media journalismalways on the outside looking in, usually through tinted spectacles (the kind with blinkers on them). In short, the dynamic of mass protest has been shifted by mobile media and social networking, which now constitute a new extended dimension of politicking. It is not only extra-parliamentary, but also outside of existing associations within civil society, like the National Union of Studentsexcept that they opening up new networks within civil society, or rather, at its fringes. Probably the best description Ive come across of what is happening from inside the movement can be found in a poetically-titled post at Edinburgh University Anti-Cuts Coalition, On our chaotic swarm: The occupations have formed a swarm network. This network is very hard to destroy. For every occupation that is forcibly evicted, ve more have sprung up. We do not rely on leaders or student unions. And in doing so we lack weak links. We can afford to lose connections and nodes in this network, for new ones are continuously forming in their place. As a networked, chaotic group we can act powerfully and unpredictably. We can appear larger than we are. More powerful than we are. From our nodes we can mobilise, organise. Entirely chaotically. We are inspirational. These are not my words. Our movement have been receiving global solidarity, and global coverage. Internationally similar protests are spawning. And they are looking to us for that inspiration. They are looking to us for methodology.

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A tad utopian, but Im an old 68-er, so Im not complaining! The presence of video in this chaotic swarming is well represented by the UCL Occupation, which has set up its own channels on Vimeo and YouTube. Examples here include video solidarity messages, addressed to other occupations or delivered by visitors to the UCL occupation. This extends to spots by celebrity guests at the occupations like comedians Mark Thomas and Richard Herring, and the singer Billy Bragg. Longer items include talks by supportive academics and writers, like Michael Sayeau on the power of advertising, or the economist Graham Turner on The Economic Crisis Where are we headed?in other words, examples of what was called in the 60s the teach-in. Occasionally, the scene is shot with a cinematic eye, like this brilliant single-take of the UCL occupation which at the aesthetic level could hardly be bettered. University College London Students Protest and Start Occupation One of the purposes served by these video-posts is to impugn in several respects the coverage of the television news channels (whose choicest bits are of course rapidly posted and tweeted and retweeted, especially when they involve some politician being embarrassed by an interviewers question).For one, they counter the promotion to front-page infamy by the mainstream media of rare moments of protestor violence, by projecting a different image of the demonstrations, especially non-violent street actions. Flash mobs protesting tax-evasion by Vodaphone and TopShop clearly articulates popular anger. They not only focus disaffection with the failure of conventional politics to respond to widespread concerns about tax justice, but announce in symbolic form that there
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is a different way of funding the decit. (Join us at Topshop and make Philip Green pay) Second, videos which provide evidence of the misbehaviour of the police, correcting the spin the police try to put on events. Examples here and here. The general rule, of course, that governs the creation of video for the web is to keep it short, but this is not an unsophisticated audience. Theres a post of 11 seconds showing a policeman punching a demonstrator; an extended version was posted up in response to a viewers request to see the context. Third are videos from inside the occupations, which communicate the enthusiastic atmosphere, cooperative behaviour and positive attitudes which prevail among these protestors. Most of these are made by acionadoswho doubtless include students on the creative practice courses which, because they belong to arts and humanities, will have their public funding cut off. But they also include professional work by independent lm makers like the Guardian team, such as their video of the UCL occupation.This is a piece of professional reportage, sans the unctuous voice of a reporter, which corrects the bias of the meagre television reportage of the events. In short, agit web video serves to re-write the narrative (as in the PR mans lament that we got the narrative wrong). But it isnt just a trendy accompaniment to a chaotic movement. It not only punctures the dominant version of the mainstream media, but enters into its own circuit of positive feedback, both as counterpropaganda and instrument of mass action. Overall, what strikes me is that one can see a range of videos here that are strongly reminiscent of the variety of sub-genres in recent

activist video movements in Latin America, like indigenous video (video indigena) in Brazil and Bolivia etc., and the movement in Argentina which exploded into action nine years ago, known as cine piquetero. Not necessarily the same subgenres, but appropriate ones for the context. Is there something about the short form of agitational video which predisposes this kind of arrangement? There is also a currently lesser trend made up of campaigning videos produced to support the new movement. They are mostly semi-professional, or the political work of multimediamedia professionals, lending their talents to the cause. They turn up within this circuit because they provide points of attachment to the wider oppositional culture to which the student movement as such necessarily belongs. Some of them are video lectures by eminent Marxists. Other examples include: An important message about the artsa simple animated video by artist David Shrigley, which is amusing, but perhaps ideologically a little confused in giving too much emphasis to economic arguments to Save The Arts. Poet Danny Chivers contributes Shop a Scrounger, and perhaps my favourite, a brilliant music video from Captain SKA.

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SECTION 2

Around the globe

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P UTNEY D EBATER , 19 OCTOBER 2011

Chile

What happens when you privatise universities? Now on video from Chile

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THE world represented by the mainstream media is still governed by a division into centre and periphery which has been thrown into doubt by recent eventsnot only the global effects of economic crisis, but the popular protest movements which have sprung up in Europe, the Middle East, and now the USA. It is nowadays the general rule that news from the old periphery, as well as the margins and the interstices of society, arrives in the social media before reaching the mainstream media. It was three or four weeks before Occupy Wall Street was picked up by the mainstream, and predictably it only broke through when cameras on the streets caught the rst acts of gratuitous police violence and posted them on the web. ! Despite the unmistakable symbolic resonance of the place name, the American media professed bewilderment. As Naomi Klein commented, Why are they protesting? ask the bafed pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: What took you so long? Weve been wondering when you were going to show up because this is not an isolated event but part of a huge and momentous upsurge in political consciousness sweeping across the globe in waves of popular non-violent mobilisationespecially among the youngagainst the free rule of nance capital at the expense, in the vocabulary of Occupy Wall Street, of the 99 per cent. ! When October 15th saw 950 protests in over 80 countries, ranging in size from a few hundreds to tens of thousands, this was too big for the mainstream to ignore. However, the social media which make such coordinated mass global participation possible are a very recent phenomenon. Language remains a barrier, and bad old habits persist, so for example, the massive student protests

in Chile, which have been going on for nearly six monthsthis is still hardly covered by the mainstream. Why Chile, which the last we heard, had a hugely popular President basking in the glory of the rescue of the trapped miners? ! If the pundits and reporters nd the target of Occupy Wall Street too diffuse, that of the Chilean students is unambiguous: the social cost and injustice of the most privatised system of higher education in the world. This has particular lessons for us in the UK because this is what happens when a country adopts the kind of neoliberal tenets that are now being imposed on us here. Under measures introduced during Pinochets dictatorshipthe classic account of its origins is in Naomi Kleins Shock Doctrineuniversities are now only ten per cent publicly funded. The rest is down to families or students themselves who, like those in the USA and now here in Britain, are consequently forced into huge debts. Similar privatisation rules the schools, and the demand of the Chilean students is simple: universal free education. ! A few reports of the Chilean protests have appeared in places like Time, the Guardian and Hufngton Post, but not many people I speak toon campus, at meetings or sociallyare more than vaguely aware of whats going on down there. According to the Guardian on 7th October, ! The rst murmurings of the Chilean Winter came in late May with the rst takeover of a public school. Five months later, around 200 state elementary and high schools as well as a dozen universities have now been occupied by students. Weekly protest marches gather between 50,000-100,000 students throughout the nation

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! Its another general rule that grassroots movements like these nowadays engage immediately with digital communication, always including video, and the Chilean students, who are no exception, have proved adept at various different kinds. For an example of how impressive a simple video record of an event can be, heres one of the rstits a single continuous shotdating from last June, when thousands of protestors staged a mass performance of Michael Jacksons Thriller in front of La Moneda (the presidential palace where Salvador Allendes life came to an end in 1973). THRILLER MASIVO POR LA EDUCACIN CHILENA ! The protests havent always been fun, and there are also video testimonies of the repression unleashed by the forces of law and order, like this one, taken on 24th August: Students and CUT union protest in Santiago, Chile ! Hufngton Post reported that the protest dancers explained the mass performance of Thriller as a metaphor of the zombie education system they suffer from. It also signals their citizenship of the global culture of modern youth everywhere. Indeed the Chilean students have instinctively understood what it means to be located simultaneously in the periphery of the underdeveloped world and in the local hub of a globalised economy, and theyve made several very short videos in different languages, addressed to viewers on other continents, explaining what their protests are about. Heres one in English: Why are we ghting? (English) - Free Education in Chile And another in several languages together, called En qu idioma te lo digo?What language shall I tell you in? (with English subtitles):

Educacin en Chile: En qu idioma te lo digo? ! A report in the New York based Indypendant suggests that the younger generation that came of age after the dictatorship, does not have the fear of their parents generation and their actions have reawakened older Chileans who had despaired of ever seeing real change again in their country. The dream of the Allende years of a socially inclusive Chile has not vanished in spite of almost four decades of neoliberal social engineering. ! Another thing these videos tell us about is this connection with struggles of the past, which comes into play through music. A telling comment appears on the Australian site, Green Left: The echo of an updated song from the time of the Pinochet dictatorship sounding through the streets Everyone over the age of 40 told me the same thing # Its like being back in the eighties, referring to the epic street battles against the Pinochet dictatorship between 1982 and 1986. Perhaps the song the writer heard was Violeta Parras Me gustan los estudiantesI Like Students. At any rate, a whole bunch of music videos have appeared which all use this song from the 1960s, either in new or old versions. They include La revolucin de la conciencia: ! Finally, for those with Spanish, you can nd a playlist of videos from Chile here, which includes a delightful video letter to students in Chile from students in Mexico, which has its own history of student struggles. S se puede! Desde Mxico para Chile

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Protest Chile

Protest Chilewas lmed on a visit to the University of Chiles ICEI (Institute for Film and Journalism) in November 2011. It was made with the help a group of students who very generously provided me with footage theyve been shooting for the last few months and looked after my education by taking me around.

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SINCE May 2011, university and secondary school students in Chile have been involved in occupations and mass demonstrations calling for the return of free public education. Chile's education system is the most heavily privatised in the world, with the state contributing no more than 15 per cent of the budget of the public universities, forcing students and their families to nance their education by means of debt. Is this the future for education that the Coalition Government in Britain dreams of? But Chile's model neoliberal democracy is beginning to unravel. With huge popular support, the student movement has radically shifted the political agenda by challenging the consensus of both government and opposition parties who both accommodated to the Constitution, still in place, that was imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship in 1980. With interviews lmed in Santiago during November, this video incorporates footage shot mainly by postgraduate lm students over the last few months, portraying the dynamics of the movement and the profound issues it raises about actually existing democracy in Chile. (Originally posted on the New Statesman, 13 December 2011)

The Persistence of Allendes Vision

Putney Debater, 13 December 2011 Earlier this year, after the body of Salvador Allende was exhumed and independent investigators conrmed that he committed suicide during the military coup in 1973, his family were not surprised. Visiting the modest house in Santiago where he lived until his election, I was told by his granddaughter Marcia, who is currently making a lm about him, that they always believed the accounts of close colleagues who were in the presidential palace, La Moneda, at the time, as well as his own statements, public and private, that should the military move against him, he was not prepared to leave La Moneda alive. This is not the only lm about Allende currently in preparation. Veteran director Miguel Littin has a ctionalised version of 11th September 1973, with a mise-en-scne set entirely inside La Moneda, which starts shooting in March. He attributes Allendes place in Chilean history and memory to the fact that he did not, like so many other overthrown presidents in Latin America and elsewhere, abandon his people and y off to some safe haven. Today Allendes photo can be seen displayed on market stalls in popular neighbourhoods alongside posters of lm stars and popular singers, whereas the only images to be seen of General Pinochet are satirical drawings on posters for student protests. The students have been protesting for more than six months, in marches, demonstrations and occupations of schools and universities, against one of the legacies of the neoliberal regime introduced under Pinochet during the 1980s, which since the return to democracy has produced the most heavily privatised education system in the world. Even in the case of public universities, the state pro20

vides only fteen per cent of the funding, and most studentsor their familiesmust pay their own way, which for most of them means taking out crippling debts. Bursaries of various kinds are available for those with high grades, and the present government, in a half-hearted response to the student movement, has just increased the funding available for this purpose in a highly contested education budget. However, most of the 35% increase in the number of higher education scholarships is earmarked for the private universitiesa slight of hand to deceive the poorest in the words of one student leader. It is true that the growth of private universities has led to a massive increase in student numbers, from two hundred thousand twenty years ago to around 1.1m today, but this expansion has been funded by an economic policy of easy credit. Just as in other places, people got caught up in the credit system without realising what they were letting themselves in for, and since the economy was strong, the effects remained for long invisible. The teenagers have been sleeping in their schools, university classes have been suspended because students have gone on strike, websites have been set up, videos posted in the usual places. Demonstrations are peaceful and often involve symbolic actions, like hundreds of students dressed as zombies performing Michael Jacksons Thriller in front of La Moneda, or students running relays round La Moneda for 1,800 hours. But marches have sometimes ended in violent attacks by the police using water cannon and tear gas. According to Leonardo Durn, an activist lm student at the University of Chile, the violence is deliberately provoked by masked inltrators. These clashes have eroded some of the massive popular support which they protests began by enjoying, but not a lot. Amazed at the students boldness, older generations who

remember the brutal repression of protests against the dictatorship in the 1980s, ascribe their readiness to face down the carabineros on the streets to their growing up after the return to democracy. But this years student mobilisations also have a precedent in the protests of 2005 by the school kids known from the design of their uniforms as los penguins (penguins). Back then the protests were short-lived, although they forced the resignation of the education minister and resulted in a few concessions from President Bachelet. Today many of those on the streets are the same generation. They already know the limits of constitutional politics. And now theres a new generation coming up behind them, because this year school kids were again at the forefront of the occupations which began last May. Bachelet was the last in a run of Presidents belonging to the centreleft coalition known as the Concertacin that took ofce in 1990 under the skewed Constitution imposed by Pinochet, which ensures that legislation can be blocked by a right-wing minority. Carlos Ossa of the University of Chile ascribes the election of her successor, the right-wing multimillionaire Sebastian Piera, to the accommodation by the left to the Concertacin, which he describes as a transition from dictatorship not to democracy but to the market, which nally left the Concertacin in a weak position. Piera, whose cabinet is made up of what The Economist recently described as wealthy former businessmen, is a billionaire who sold his stakes in LAN, Chiles leading airline, and Chilevisin, a television broadcaster, early in his term, not to mention a holding company that controls Colo Colo, Chiles most successful football club. But his electoral success was also due to an electoral system that leaves an estimated ve million Chileansmostly the poorest and the youngdisenfranchised, with result that disaffection with the

21

Concertacin by a relatively small sector of the middle classes was enough to swing the vote away from them. Sociologist Manuel Antonio Garretn refutes apologists who argued that although Pinochet was a bloody dictator who violated human rights, he succeeded in modernising the country. In fact, he says, every economic indicator, for employment, ination, growth, income distribution, or what-have-you, was worse after seventeen years of dictatorship than under Allende. Chiles recent economic growth, the highest in Latin America, only came with the Concertacin, along with improved social mobility, educational opportunityand private universities, which found ways around the prohibition on prot-making in education. National prosperity was nanced by increasing foreign investment, private debt and growing inequality, which has now come home to roost. Income differences, Ossa tells me, which in the seventies were in the order of 47 to 1, have now increased to 830 to 1. Only ten per cent of the population earn more than US$5,000, while 60% earn US$600 or less. Some 80% of families have insufcient income to pay their childrens university fees without taking out loans. It is readily assumed in the UK that educational model proposed by the Coalition Government is that of the USA, but we really ought to take note of the Chilean example, because it shows what can happen when you privatise a fully public system, not only reducing students to consumers but also diminishing the role of their teachers, and eliminating disinterested scholarship and intellectual inquiry. Keith Thomas writes in the LRB of our numerous concerns about the future of British universities. They include the transformation of self-governing communities of scholars into megabusinesses, staffed by a highly-paid executive class, who oversee the professors, or middle managers, who in turn rule over an ill22

paid and often temporary or part-time proletariat of junior lecturers and research assistants, coping with an ever worsening staffstudent ratio. In Chile they talk of the blackboard lecturers who provide the backbone of the teaching in the private universities, are paid per class and have no job security. Im also told that private universities (with a few exceptions) offer only a reduced range of low-cost courses and support no research The students remain deant. They dont want to improve the system but change it, which Garretn points out is impossible without a change in the political system. Elections at the University of Chile Student Federation (FECH) have just handed victory to Gabriel Boric, candidate of a new left grouping, Creando Izquierda (Creating Left), while the current President, the charismatic Camila Vallejo, a member of the Communist Party, moves to Vice-President. Boric told a radio interviewer he wanted to disengage the student movement from Chiles political institutions and instead seek to change the institutions themselves. We dont want to answer to the traditional political parties, but rather to create new sectors that represent the discontent of the people who no longer feel represented by the right or by the Concertacin, he said, because the current institutional framework in Chile doesnt have the ability to deliver on the demands of the student movement. In short, even if the students now begin to return to their classes with no resolution of their demands, this doesnt necessarily mean their defeat. The student movement has irrevocably demonstrated the ideological bankruptcy of a reactionary government with no project of its own to offer the country. They have set the agenda for the next electoral battle, and the question is whether the parties of the Concertacin can rise to the challengethe repeal and replacement of Pinochets Constitution.

P UTNEY D EBATER , 31 OCTOBER 2011

Middle East

Video and rebellion: the Middle East

23

A documentary report has appeared on Al Jazeera (Images of Revolution, dir. Ibrahim Hamdan) presenting the story behind the iconic images of the Arab uprisings as told by those who lmed them. Its a pretty good lm for anyone thinking about the subject, or teaching social media, from whatever angle, for two reasons. First, because it covers many of the questions that people have been asking about the role of the social media in fomenting the revolutions in the Middle East, and of social movements everywhere. And second, because it does so without the unctuous commentary or tendentious presenter that remains obligatory on our own television channels, but entirely in the voices of participants themselves: reporting from Tunisia and Egypt, with a postscript from Libya, Hamdan seeks out people who lmed some of the key mobile phone videos that helped to galvanise the uprisings, and interviews them in the places where they did their lming as they tell us how they did it. We discover, rst of all, who they aremostly educated middle class professionals or students already connected to the internet. We then begin to learn, with the help of local activists and observers, something about the dynamic that the social media brought to the political situation. Why there was no uprising in Tunisia earlierwhere the hated regime regularly meted out bloody repression to protestorsis explained by an academic. Between 2008 and 2010, he says, the number of people with mobile phones and FaceBook accounts doubled, and this expanding ability to communicate had the effect of changing the political conditions. In other words, its a question of critical mass (as Engels would have understood: the point at which a quantitative change becomes a qualitative change).
24

Given the tight control of the media by the regime, FaceBook and YouTube provided a means of dissemination of imagesboth photos and videowhich acquired greater affective power than text. A new media activist asserts that no text can ever affect people in the way that certain images do. The value of an image derives from its particular moment and context. Its a summary of what happened, its the thing that stays in our minds after weve forgotten the details. Others add their opinions. Pictures convey complex messages with great rapidity. Certain images leave a strong impression, but its their repetition and replicationpeople send them on, each to their own network of contactsthat makes them iconic.

Media activists quickly pass them to television stations, especially Al Jazeera itself, who rapidly rebroadcast them. When such an image becomes iconic, it becomes a powerful truth, says another contributor. It also impugns the ofcial image, the only one image and only one narrative that the regime promulgates through tight control over the national mass media. Mobile phone videos are like moving snapshots with sound (which is very important: it gives the image its emotional tone). What we learn from the videographers themselves is that like all snapshots, these videos are often the result of chance and accident. The result of being in the right place at the right moment to get a view of events you can see happening in front of youbut maybe without understanding whats going on, and only realising afterwards when you look at what you lmed.

An English teacher in Tunisia who took the video of a solitary man in the street being shot in cold blood by the military, thinks her video had two powerful elements: First, the man was shot for no reason. And second, as my friends told me, our criesas they react to what theyre seeing. This is a critical factor: the sense of the videographers presence, often on the soundtrack, is part of the power of the message that comes across. This power, in the right circumstances, is enough to move people to action. Individuals have testied that seeing one or other of these images changed their stance and brought them out onto the streets. Mobile phone cameras combined with social media turn people into citizen journalists. The citizen journalist is an ordinary person (maybe a professional but not a professional photographer) whose camera turns them into a witness of a special kind. Their testimony is not locked up in their heads but fully public. Nor is it disinterested, because to publish it is an act of political intent and has direct political effect. These images are used to defend peoples rights. The videographer is often lming events in their own neighbourhood. They generally have better and more direct access to the street than the professionalwho gets there late and always seems like an intruder from another planet. And they are not constrained by professional rules and ideologyall they need is a fairly steady hand. What emerges from this lm is also that a powerful symbiosis now exists between different communication networks, operating at different levels and scales. Because of digital convergence, these networks are all highly interpermeable. The social media become a bridge between different spaces: local, national, regional, global. They plug an immediate physical presence into the remote and vir-

25

tual presence of screens near and far. That is to say, they operate both locally and globally at the same time, in the same instant. The plethora of pictures coming both from scattered locations and points of mass concentration, not only destroy the image the regime has fabricated for itself, but because the internet is borderless, they function like a kind of alternative news agency, dispersed and international in its reach, able to circumvent the local statecontrolled media. The State responds with fear because it feels no longer in control. And it isnt. There are many further questions to be asked about how the messages in these videos are encoded to convey complex information with such great rapidity, and how this encoding functions differently for distant audiences in foreign countries. One of the crucial elements is the very lack of professional sheen, which is often felt as a guarantee of authenticity. (This is nothing new: its like the reality effect of cinma vrit back in the 1960s.) Thus a single piece of footage can win the sympathy of public opinion, while the ow of such images carries people beyond sympathy into active empathy, emboldening masses both at home and abroad. In short, there is no room to doubt that mobile video affects the course of events profoundly, invigorates popular sentiment, and serves to raise the political stakes. But we need to see this in proper perspective. First, historically: the rebellious and subversive use of the modern media goes back to pre-digital times, indeed all the way back to the days when Lenin edited the Communist newspaper Iskra from a room in Clerkenwell a hundred-and-some years ago. Which is to say, it is not the media that make the revolution, but revolutionaries, even if theyre not Lenin or even communists. Second, synchronically, in relation to the powers that rule the

global economy and its intensifying crisis. Because the social media link in to a world overtaken by crisis within the very system that brought us the globalisation that produces the social media to start with. As if the underlying message of the incorporation of social media is that globalisation is coming home to roost just about everywhere. The revolutions that have succeeded in throwing out oppressive regimes will not necessarily succeed in installing the popular democracies they call for, but they continue to inspire successive waves of protest in different continents which may yet rescue globalisation from its bad name, for this is what we can see in the videos which every successive popular movement now inevitably generates.

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SECTION 3

Reflections

Type to enter text

The texts in this section are edited versions of essays appearing in different academic publications.

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CHAPTER 6

On the prehistory of video activism

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On the Prehistory of Video Activism Michael Chanan

1 Every one of the protest movements that have sprung up in the past year or more in different parts of the world has taken to the internet in a big way to organise and express itself. Activists have proved extraordinarily adept in the use of the social media. The famous process of convergence, bringing together the personal computer, small media, and dispersed mobile communication, has provided a huge stimulus for both new and existing cultural practices outside and in opposition to the mainstream media. Video especially has played a crucial role, from citizen journalismwhich provides vital evidence of events beyond the reach of mainstream news gathering, which nevertheless the latter is compelled to include in their reportingto rap videos on video streaming sites that are only reported when they go viral. It is a striking but largely unacknowledged paradox that growing numbers of people are using the products of consumerism to try and combat the power of the same global corporate capitalism that sells them these very tools and instruments of free counter-cultural production in the rst place. ! This paradox has a history, because one of the things about corporate capitalism is that it cannot resist creating new markets by producing consumer versions of the professional tools and instruments of the mass culture industry. Alongside the technologies employed in the mass media there come amateur versions of the

same gear, and in fact the same R&D serves for both. However, ever since the introduction of the rst Kodak camera in the 1880s, with its famous slogan You push the button, we do the rest, the ineluctable tendency to grow amateur markets has unintended consequences, because in addition to their potential democratising effects, new technologies of cultural production always nd alternative, divergent, and oppositional uses. This is why were not speaking the language of technological determinism here. ! Take the history of 16mm (in which Kodak again was centrally involved) which was launched in the 1920s as an amateur format and labelled sub-standard to keep it separate from the professional means of production of movies for the cinema. This distinction is reinforced by a large supporting industry of magazines, competitions and so on, designed to initiate consumers into the aesthetic ideology of home movies. By the 1930s, however, 16mm was being used by the rst wave of militant political lm-makers, like the workers lm movements in countries like Britain, the USA and Japan, and crucially, from the 30s to the 70s, operated as a distribution format, taking lms beyond the cinema into a range of venues across civil society. Again were not talking technological determinism: this happened partly as a result of ofcial support by government departments, especially those concerned with marketing and, during the war, propaganda. However, even documentaries were still generally shot on 35mm, with 16mm being used for distribution. The smaller gauge would only become a professional format with a large industrial infrastructure when it was adopted by television after WWII, because it was more economical, and early television didnt require the extra resolution of the bigger gauge. Its professional adoption was duly accompanied by a new sub-standard amateur format in 8mm (and then Super-8). The hey29

day of 16mm lasted until the 1980s, when it was progressively eclipsed by the appearance of portable professional video, which television adopted rst for news gathering and then in other production departments. But in the 60s and 70s 16mm was the primary format for alternative, independent and oppositional production, especially documentary, and sustained the development of counter-cinema movements around the globe. ! The diffusion of consumer video was a more complex process, rst because it involved battles over formats between the major corporations (which in the case of lm had been fought and won before the WWI), and second, because video became at the same time a publicity medium, a means of documentation, a carrier of content, and an artistic medium. The rst generation of big bulky machines running two-inch tapes at very fast speeds arrived in the television studios in the 1950s. The rst appearance of a low quality mobile format followed in the late 60s, and as the technology improved it was taken up in several different markets. Here I can speak from memory. I had my rst encounter with video in the shape of Sonys half-inch tape open-reel Portapak system in 1973 when we used it for a small community video, about ve years after it was rst introduced. However, the tape we made stayed within the group because there was no way to edit and disseminate it, and for the next project I worked on with the same group, we reverted to 16mm. The Portapak was quickly superseded by the Umatic system, the rst to employ video cassettes and a reasonably mobile camera, but still too cumbersome and costly for the amateur. However, with the introduction of domestic video cassette recorders in the late 70s (the winning format being Sonys VHS), a huge new consumer sector rapidly opened up for video lm hire and off-air time shifting, and the introduction of the sin30

gle unit handheld VHS camcorder in the 80s now began to encroach on amateur cine (although diehards among experimental lmmakers insisted on sticking with super-8 because of its own special aesthetic qualities). ! Meanwhile, in the mass media, the rst broadcast quality portable video gear was widely taken up by the end of the 1970s. When I lmed in El Salvador for West German television in 1981, we were the only crew out of about half a dozen there at the time who were still shooting on 16mm. The next phase seemed to follow inexorably in the 1990s: the move from analog recording to digital, and integration with the desktop computer. By this stage, long established working practices were beginning to break down as crews got smaller and the production process became more uid. New genres appeared on television, like the video diary at the start of the decade, followed by the rise of the docu-soap, and then the renovation of television journalism through the marriage of rstperson reportage and the informal style of the video diary. By the time that web video comes along, everything is allowable in terms of both content and style. At the same time, its a measure of the technological shift involved that the company that lay at the origins of consumer media culture, the self-same Kodak, has now led for bankruptcy because it failed to keep up with the shift from analogue to digital photography.

2 Eventually the changes in the apparatus of production also affect distinctions between professional and amateur, as outside the domain of television there appears the new gure of the videogra-

pher. The spread of video involved the emergence of a new class of user: the semi-professional, who was often a professional but in another eld, for whom video served as a new instrument for doing their work. A new market category took shape around the Umatic format, that of corporate non-broadcast users, ranging from medical teaching to in-house corporate training to PR for exhibitions and conferences. And in the margins, the rst video activists. ! As happened before in the case of 16mm, video soon found alternative uses. The earliest example I have in my own archive of a political video (that is, a work originated on video as opposed to lm) dates from 1984. I acquired it when I was asked to produce a video for the Chile Solidarity Movement, for screening at the TUC and Labour Party conferences, on the ndings of the rst trades union delegation from Britain to visit Chile after the military coup. Our small production budget covered the hire of equipment and facilities from one of the freelance companies that had grown up to service the sector, and included just three days editing. The delegation brought back with them a clandestine video tape theyd been given to be incorporated into the video which we lmed of their report-back meeting. It was not merely a series of useful shots; I can recall my amazement on rst viewing it to nd a fully edited reportage about the repression and the ght-back taking place on the streets. This was evidently a professional job, which I understood to have been made by people working in television but with the express purpose of sending it out of the country. I have nally, on a recent visit to Chile, been able to identify it. It turns out to be one of the rst videos of an alternative newsreel series funded by foreign NGOs called Teleanlisis, a spin-off from the current affairs magazine Anlisis, which exploited a loophole in the repressive
31

laws of the dictatorship whereby tight control was kept over domestic media but did not apply to production for foreign consumption. [1] These videos, lmed and edited on Umatic, were distributed clandestinely within the country on VHS, to subscribers who would make more copies and pass them on. ! The alternative newsreel format of Teleanlisis is different from the short videos weve been seeing over recent months on the internet of the current wave of student protests in Chile, most of which are produced by young people at the beginning of their professional training. Technological developments create new scenarios but certain aspects are the same. Then and now, these video represent the word on the streets, and at the same time serve to spread the news abroad. The difference today is rstly, not just a much faster and far more efcient way of doing this than ever before, but also that internet dissemination makes it possible to reach domestic and foreign viewers, including migr communities and solidarity groups, by the same means, even under conditions of repression. Activists interviewed in a television documentary speak of the internet as the cradle of collective consciousness, and large numbers of people lming the same events on their mobiles reinforce this effect by producing multiple points of view. [2]

3 If a new generation of video activists has been busy inventing a whole range of genres t for the new struggles, and if they do so with little or no knowledge of their precursors, nevertheless they are recreating in new and expanded conditions a phenomenon which has been seen before, several times over because video

creates a cultural space that answers to real social and political needs. Ten years ago there was cine piquetero in Argentina, a powerful manifestation of grassroots video that appeared in the midst of the countrys breakdown (the Argentinazo of December 2001, when the banks put up shutters, the country got through ve presidents in twelve days, and defaulted on its international debt). Perhaps a few of the video activists knew something of earlier endeavours in political cinema, since Argentina was one of its most active homes. Already before the Argentinazo there were a handful of groups producing political videos. A year later there were as many as forty, working alongside the local assemblies, the workers cooperatives who took control of bankrupt rms, and the womens groups. The term derives from the piquetespicketers who go out to block roads and bridges. This was before internet streaming. The videos were shown at factories, community movement assemblies, local caf and street festivals, and sold on the streets from stalls piled with copies; they were never seen on television or shown in cinemas. They entered a parallel but peripheral and alternative public sphere lying outside the channels and tributaries of parliamentary democracy, but which is rooted instead in the popular movement itself. Sharing the dynamic of popular protest, cine piquetero presented a vivid panorama of the extent and sheer inventiveness of popular action through a wide range of forms, from short reports to music videos, in a style that could be called participant reportage: uid hand-held camera, direct sound, street interviews, often the same ingredients as television reportage but differently put together: sans commentary, cross-cut with found images taken from television and the press, edited with a sense of irony and deconstructive intent, and often backed by the new Argentinean rock music.

! Ten years or so before that, there was the rise of video indigena in Brazil, the indigenous video movement which began in Brazil and soon spread elsewhere in Latin America (there were similar initiatives in native media in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and USA), where the orthodox mode of documentary, which Bill Nichols has characterised as we speak to you about them, becomes we talk to each other about ourselves. [3] Earlier still, in the 60s and 70s, there was the powerful wave of militant lmmaking by student groups and youthful collectives across the globe, which the Argentine lmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, in a manifesto from 1968, dubbed third cinema. [4] Third Cinema is not the same as third world cinema, because the three cinemas they describe comprise a virtual geography of their own. First cinema is the Hollywood model of commercial or industrial lm production which can also be found in places like Bollywood. Second cinemaroughly speaking, auteur and art cinema on the European modelbecame the mode of independent feature production all around the world. Third cinema can also crop up everywhere: it consists in lms that challenge the system and which the system cannot assimilate, and the Argentine lmmakers identied this kind of political lm praxis not only in Latin America but in the work of the US New Left lm group Newsreel, the cinegiornali of the Italian student movement, the lms of the French Etats Gnraux du Cinma, the British and Japanese student movements, not forgetting the experiments carried out by Chris Marker in France giving groups of workers 8mm cameras and basic instruction in their use. ! All these are examples of the liberating potential of the art of small media, and allow us to characterise the idea of small media a little further. Solanas and Getino were quite explicit: third cinema
32

was indifferent to style and means, but informed by an aesthetic of urgency and impecuniousnessas reected in another term current in Latin America at that time, namely, cine pobre, cinema of poverty (todays equivalent: zero budget). These attributes are also close to the spirit of what the Cuban lmmaker Julio Garca Espinosa, writing in 1969, called imperfect cinema. [5] Espinosa was addressing the unique position in which Cuban lm-makers then found themselves, but his argument was taken up more widely. If your aim is to challenge the values of commercial cinema, then you have to resist the temptation of emulating its predilections and prociencies, especially from a position on the periphery. First, because the result in an underdeveloped country would only be a sub-industrial cinema that could never achieve the polish of the real McCoy. And second, it would be self-defeating, because cinema of that kind only induces audience passivity. If you want the active involvement of your audience, its better to be iconoclastic, resist convention and upset orthodox representation. ! These ideas remain pertinent to various experimental tendencies to be found in contemporary video activism on the web. Perhaps digital production techniques erode some of the differences between zero budget and professional production (depending on the skills of the videographer), but the spontaneous rough edges of mobile video brings them back in, along with the deliberate discontinuities of the mash-up. Concentrated into the short forms which web viewing prefers, the activist video uses shock tactics to wrest the viewers attention away from the clichs and stereotypes dominating the mainstream media. But the political conjuncture has shifted. Capitalism is under attack, along with the political classes and the technocrats, but the protest movement is no longer informed by the programmatic demands of party politics. Socialist
33

solutions have been displaced by a resurgence of anarchist instincts, and for very good reason because with capitalism in crisis and the socialist state a ruined project of the past, parliamentary democracy itself is now in question. There is a profound sense that the whole world is running out of control. Not only are debts unpayable, but the environment is suffering irreparable damage. ! Capitalism produces overconsumption. The idea behind imperfect cinema was that lmmakers in underdeveloped countries shouldnt try to match the production values of the big commercial movie, not only because they couldnt afford it nancially but because it was a waste of resources. But this isnt just a problem with cinema. In 1982, I had the opportunity to ask Espinosa to explain his ideas on camera. His visionary response is even more pertinent today, with the contradictions of rampant global capitalism intensifying, threatening the collapse of whole economies, and the attendant growth of human misery and suffering. Espinosa spoke of how the societies of the great metropolis are marked by an economy of waste, and to this economy of waste there corresponds a culture of waste. A diabolical system induces people to think that to make the most of their lives they have to be wasteful of things. Even in the underdeveloped world, he said. suffering so much scarcity, people still often think than they have to achieve the same levels of consumption as the developed countries, and thats a lie. We cannotthe world cannotaspire to such levels of consumption. [6] ! This imperative is part of problematic of video activism in the second decade of the 21st century. The ironic paradox is that the domain of video activism is submerged within the culture of waste in which consumer video, mobile communications, etc. is fully em-

bedded. The wager we have to make is that what the chaotic digital swarming of citizen journalism, video activism and the rest of it represents, in its very evanescence, its over-abundance of ephemeral images, is an authentic desire for real democracy in the face of either its absence, or of the actually existing kind, which has long been bought off by the banks and investors who are now in such deep trouble. What is certain is that technological convergence has provided a huge potential for counter-hegemonic discourseas well as a lot of symptomatic reactionary babbleand a huge stimulus for creative oppositional expression which aligns the street and the parallel public sphere of the internet.

6! Julio Garca Espinosa speaking in Michael Chanan, dir., Cinema of the Humble, 1983; available as New Cinema Latin at www.artlms.com.au/Detail.aspx?ItemID=1522

Notes 1! Germn Liero Arend, Apuntes Para Una Historia Del Video En Chile, Santiago (Chile): Ocho Libros, 2010, p.59ff; and personal communication from Rodrigo Moreno, a member of the Teleanlisis team. 2 ! How Facebook Changed the World: The Arab Spring, BBC2, 5.09.11, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b014grsr and www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnPR90dJ3Gk. 3! See Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 13f. 4! Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Towards a Third Cinema, in Michael Chanan, ed., Twenty-ve Years of the New Latin American Cinema (London: BFI and Channel Four, 1983) 5! Julio Garca Espinosa, For an Imperfect Cinema, in ibid.

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CHAPTER 7

Video, Activism, and the Art of Small Media

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Video, Activism, and the Art of Small Media

1 As the contradictions of rampant global capitalism intensify, the dominant culture of the corporate media presents us with a world whose perception of it is hindered by the dominant culture itself. A different perception, emanating from the margins and interstices can be found in the uncontrolled swarming for which the internet now provides an unprecedented parallel public space. The mainstream media, in reporting this, can only see it askew. As their control of the eld of information is challenged, they project onto the social media their hidden belief in their own powers of persuasion, and all too easily purvey the notion that the social media are somehow instrumental in creating these movements. But unable to think beyond the conventional wisdom they themselves have sustained, they fail to perceive the relationship between media and social activism as symbiotic and dialectical, and nor do they see it in historical perspective. What is certain is that the convergence of the personal computer, mobile communication and small media has provided a huge potential for counter-hegemonic discourseas well as a lot of symptomatic reactionary babbleand a huge stimulus for creative oppositional expression in the parallel public sphere of the internet. The wager we have to make is that what this chaotic digital swarming represents, in its very evanescence, its over-abundance of ephemeral images, is an authentic desire for real democracy in the face of either its absence, or of the actually existing kind, which has long been bought off by the banks and in36

vestors who are now, following the nancial collapse of 2008, in deep trouble. Indeed, because of this conjuncture, what these images also signify is a paradoxthat growing numbers of people are using the products of consumerism to try and combat the power of the same global corporate capitalism that sells them the instruments of digital social communication to begin with. ! Something must be said about the terms of discussion. Social media is not very satisfactory, since it can be said that all media are by denition social, only in different ways. For example, the telephone, invented in the 1870s, connects two people in two-way conversationuntil conference calls came along; radio was introduced for ship-to-shore communication, but broadcast radio, introduced after WWI, goes only one way, from a central broadcaster to a mass audience. (Later, bringing the two together, what you get is phone-in programmes, which are wrapped up in a manner that renders them innocuous.) Brecht once spoke of the potential for radio to overcome the one-to-many form of transmission, and instead develop the inherent capabilities of the medium for the exchange of communications. If these capabilities were developed, he said, radio would become the nest possible communications apparatus in public life, a vast system of channels of communication between those who govern and those who are governed. If you think this is a utopian idea, he added, then ask yourself why its utopian. (Brecht, 2000, p.43.) Brecht would have approved of the internet. ! Or take a mobile phone, add text messaging, and you have a means of rapid dissemination of short messages to a dynamically expanding number of people. This is what happened in Spain on 13 March 2004, two days after the Madrid bombings, when SMS

was used to mobilise mass demonstrations against government disinformationaccusing ETA when it quickly emerged that it was Al Qaedawhich resulted in a surprise electoral victory for the Socialist Party in the general election the following day. This was before Facebook, which launched only in the same year, and Twitter, two years later. ! The other term I've used, small media, is a general one, which overlaps with alternative media, participatory media, social movement media, etc. There is no need to dene it closely, because its an open category, which is relative and relational, and conditioned by technological options. It therefore means different things in different technical and historical contexts. For migr Russian revolutionaries a hundred and a few years ago, a newspaper was essential (one of the original editors of Iskra was Lenin; the paper had an international circulation of 8000). The Cuban revolutionaries in the late 1950s had their own radio station. In the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the preferred means were leaets and audio cassettes. In the 1990s, the Zapatistas were already using the internet. ! Theres a crucial proviso: small media, which ourish in the margins and the interstices of the public sphere, are widely opposed to the big media which represent power and authority, but big and small media do not form two separate and disconnected spheresthey impinge and encroach upon each other in complex and dynamic ways. Indeed ever more so because they now populate the same virtual public sphere of the internet, where everything can be linked and liked.

! And a second proviso: communications technology as such is indifferent to the political colour of the messages it disseminates, be they left or right, progressive or reactionary. One of the crucial capacities of small media is their ability to escape censorship. The internet has enhanced this function through a multiplier effect across the whole political spectrum, from far left to far rightand extreme centre too. The result is that in exploiting the capability of rapid response, the social media effectively magnify existing, nascent or incipient social opinion, as well as all sorts of private and individualist proclivities. In extremis, authoritarian regimes (Burma, China, Iran, Mubaraks Egypt) will try to shut the networks down, and others try to keep tight control. But this is precisely because of their subversive potential, and a historical example like Madrid 13-M-04 suggests that this potential is at it greatest when it comes into direct articulation with the street. But Madrid was also exceptional in being truly spontaneous: the rst SMS to call people to the streets only went out in the early hours of the same day. (Sampedro Blanco, 2005) However, the general rule is that social media campaigning depends for its full force on existing political forms of organisation in the real world. Its efcacy lies in its capacity to create bonds between people in different social spheres, and thus extend solidarity. Its measure is still the number of real bodies on the streets, because this is what forces and provokes authority into showing its hand. Nevertheless, social media activism has also proved capable of generating new horizontal forms of organisation and action that engage precisely those sectors that lie outside existing political organisations, the prime example in the UK probably being UKUncut (www.ukuncut.org.uk), a grassroots campaign group created in 2010 to protest tax avoidance through non-violent direct action.

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2 Within the manifold of digital communicative practices, video has come to play an exemplary role in purveying alternative versions of contemporary reality that belie ofcial discourse. One of the crucial contributions of video is to challenge television with a new form of audio-visual immediacy, whose paradigmatic mode has been dubbed citizen journalismtypically shot on the streets with a mobile phone in the heat of the moment and rapidly posted on YouTube, providing vital evidence of events beyond the reach of the centralised mainstream media. In Britain the term came into mass media use after the 7/7 London Underground bombings in 2005, when passengers captured the scenes inside the blown-up tube trains. If more recent disasters, like the Japanese earthquake of March 2011, have produced some extraordinary images, this kind of citizen reportage is most remarkable not for its technical or aesthetic prociency but its sense of participation in the immediate. Especially in the case of the popular protest movements that the mass media outside the country involved, given the poverty of their own sources, become compelled to include in their mode of reportage.

rassed by an interviewers question.For one thing, they counter the promotion to front-page infamy by the mainstream media of inevitable moments of street violence by projecting a different image of the demonstrations, especially non-violent civil disobedience. Videos from inside the occupations communicate the enthusiastic atmosphere, cooperative behaviour and positive attitudes which prevail within the movement. Most of these are made by acionadoswho doubtless include students on the creative practice courses which, because they belong to arts and humanities, will have their public funding cut offbut there is also professional work by independent lm makers like The Guardian team, such as their video of the UCL occupation.This is a piece of professional reportage, sans the unctuous voice of a reporter, which corrects the bias of the meagre television reportage of the events. Here perhaps I can locate my own work, which appeared as a series of video blogs for the New Statesman. ! As clashes with the police became more frequent, there was a particularly important role for videos providing evidence of police misbehaviour, with added pressure to get them posted quickly in order to correct the spin the police tried to put on events. But if the general rule that governs the utility of web video is to keep it short, this is not to say that the audience is unsophisticated. There was a post of 11 seconds showing a policeman punching a demonstrator; an extended version was posted up in response to a viewers request to see the context. ! In short, agitational web video serves to re-write the narrativeas in the PR mans lament that we got the narrative wrong. But this isnt just a trendy accompaniment to a chaotic movement. It not only punctures the dominant version of the mainstream me-

3 The presence of video in this chaotic swarming serves to impugn in several respects the coverage of the television news channelswhose choicest bits are of course rapidly posted and tweeted, especially when they involve some politician being embar-

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dia, but enters into its own feedback circuit, both as counterpropaganda and persuasion towards mass action.

4 Despite the global nature of the phenomenon, the world represented by the mainstream media is still governed by a division into core and periphery which has been thrown into doubt by recent events. The global effects of the crash of 2008 include a seismic shift in the economic balance between different countries and regions, but despite their contrasting political and economic features, social movements have sprung up in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and now the USA. It is nowadays the general rule that news from the old periphery, as well as the margins and the interstices of every society, arrives in the social media before reaching the mainstream mediaif you know where to nd it. It was three or four weeks before Occupy Wall Street was picked up by the mainstream, and predictably it only broke through when cameras on the streets caught the rst acts of gratuitous police violence and posted them on the web. Despite the unmistakable symbolic resonance of the place name, the American media professed bewilderment. As Naomi Klein commented, Why are they protesting? ask the bafed pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: What took you so long? Weve been wondering when you were going to show up. (Klein) When October 15 saw 950 protests in over 80 countries, ranging in size from a few hundreds to tens of thousands, this was too big for the English-language mainstream to ignore.

! The truth is, however, the social media which make such coordinated mass global participation possible are a very recent phenomenon, language remains a barrier, and bad old habits persist. So for example, the massive student protests in Chile which began in May 2011 were hardly covered by the mainstream. But why Chile, which the last we heard, had a hugely popular President basking in the glory of the rescue of the trapped miners? If the pundits and reporters found the target of Occupy Wall Street too diffuse, that of the Chilean students was unambiguous: the social cost and inequity of the most privatised system of higher education in the world. Their demand is simple but far-reaching, because it challenges the whole political system imposed by Pinochets Constitution of 1980: a return to free public education. A few reports appeared in places like Time, Hufngton Post, and The Guardian, which reported on 7 October that The rst murmurings of the Chilean Winter came in late May with the rst takeover of a public school. Five months later, around 200 state elementary and high schools as well as a dozen universities have now been occupied by students. Weekly protest marches gather between 50,000-100,000 students throughout the nation. ! The Chilean students are no exception to the trends identied here, and have proved adept at various different kinds of web video. But perhaps this shouldnt come as a surprise. On the contrary, in the 1960s, Chile was one of the leading countries in the radical lm movement known as el nuevo cine latinoamericano, New Latin American Cinemaindeed the term was introduced when lm-makers from across the continent met in the Chilean seaside resort of Via Del Mar in 1967. The coup of 1973 brutally cut this activity off, forcing the lmmakers into exile, but a recent study by Germn Liero Arend reveals that it was only a few years
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before a new generation became pioneers in alternative video production (Liero Arend, 2010). Testimonio 1, dating from 1978, produced with support from the Catholic Church, began the task of documenting testimony of torture. Liero notes the irony that the application of neoliberal economic policy provided a small window of opportunity for the cautious emergence of an opposition press, and one of these magazines, Analysis, was instrumental in the creation of a regular alternative video newsreel, TeleAnalysis, initiated with NGO support from abroad, in 1984. Allowable under regulations which did not censor foreign news reporting, VHS copies of Umatic masters were secretly circulated to domestic subscribers (who of course would make further copies). These old format machines can still be found at the community television channel Seal 3 in La Victoria, a shanty town in the south of Santiago which inscribes itself in history as the rst land seizure for urban development in Latin America, back in 1957the channel dates back to 1979, and with generous support from NGOs abroad, is now equipped with digital cameras and Apple computers, and also provides a free intranet to inhabitants; although it remains technically illegal, like many similar community television stations which can now be found across the country. Meanwhile, the last few years have seen ofcial acknowledgement by the centre-left government known as the Concertacin of the existence of the video archives and the practices and events they document so effectively, and the social movement in Chile today needs little persuasion of the value of small media. ! Certain features stand out, including observational skill. For an example of how impressive a simple video record of an event can be, one of the rst to appear was a single continuous shot of a demonstration in June, when thousands of protestors staged a
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mass performance of Michael Jacksons Thriller in front of La Moneda (the presidential palace where Salvador Allendes life came to an end in 1973). As reported on Hufngton Post, the protest dancers explained it as a metaphor of the zombie education system they suffer from. But it also signals their citizenship of the global culture of modern youth everywhere. Indeed the Chilean students have instinctively understood what it means to be located simultaneously in the periphery of the old third world and in the local hub of a globalised economy, and have put out several very short videos in different languages, addressed to viewers on other continents, explaining what their protests are about. ! Another thing these videos tell us about is the connection with struggles of the past, which comes into play especially through music. A telling comment appears on the Australian site, Green Left, speaking of: the echo of an updated song from the time of the Pinochet dictatorship sounding through the streets [] Everyone over the age of 40 told me the same thing#Its like being back in the eighties, referring to the epic street battles against the Pinochet dictatorship between 1982 and 1986. (Wright, 2011) Perhaps the song the writer heard was Violeta Parras Me gustan los estudiantesI Like Students. (The maverick mother of modern Chilean folk song, Parra is celebrated in a new biopic by Andrs Wood, Violeta se fue a los cielos [Violeta Went to Heaven].) At any rate, a whole bunch of music videos have appeared which all use this song from the 1960s, either in new or old versions.

5 What emerges is that web video is a motley medium capable of invigorating popular sentiment, of raising the political stakes and even affecting the course of events. But we need to see this in proper perspective. First, historically: For one thing, the rebellious and subversive use of the modern media goes back well into predigital times, and examples like Iskrawhich is to say, it is not the media that make the revolution, but revolutionaries, even if they're not Lenin or even communists. Again, there is a history of militant lmmaking which goes back to the 1930s, and in the 1960s produced the concept and practice of third cinema. (Solanas & Getino, 1983; Chanan, 1997, p. 2) There is also a more recent history of video activism, and web video is strongly reminiscent of the variety of sub-genres to be found, for example in Latin America, like indigenous video in countries like Brazil and Bolivia which dates back twenty years or more, or the movement in Argentina which exploded into action ten years ago known as cine piquetero, a term borrowed from the pickets who mounted road blocks in protest at the government's economic mismanagement. These are not necessarily the same subgenres, but appropriate ones for the context. Is there something about the short form of agitational video which predisposes this kind of arrangement? ! We must also see the phenomenon synchronically, in relation to the powers that rule the global economy and its intensifying crisis. The social media link into a world overtaken by crisis within the very system that brought us the globalisation that produces the social media to start with. It is as if the underlying message of the incorporation of social media is that globalisation is coming home to roost just about everywhere. To the slogan think global, act lo-

cal we need only add post it, because the internet is now a vital link between the two.

References Brecht, B. (2000). The Radio as a Communication Apparatus. In M. Silberman (Ed.), Brecht on Film and Radio (pp. 42-3). London: Methuen. Chanan, M. (1997). The Changing Geography of Third Cinema. Screen, 38 (4) pp.372-388. Klein, N. (n.d.). Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now. Retrieved from http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/07-0 Liero Arend, G. (2010). Apuntes para una historia del video en Chile. Santiago, Chile: Ocho Libros Editores. Sampedro Blanco, V. F. (2005). 13-M Multitudes on line. Madrid: Catarata. Solanas , F., & Getino, O. (1983). Towards a Third Cinema. In M. Chanan (Ed.), Twenty Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema. BFI/Channel Four, pp.17-27. Wright, A. (2011, August 14). Chile Shaken by Student Revolt. Retrieved from Green Left: www.greenleft.org.au/node/48526

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