PROTEST CHILE

premieres on Saturday 3 December 2011 at
Latin America 2011  A d e l a n t e !
Congress House, Great Russell Street, London WC1

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also screening on Saturday 10 December at
Roehampton Human Rights Film Festival
University of Roehampton

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A video by Michael Chanan

No to Profit!

Filmed in November 2011.

An account of the huge student protest movement in Chile including
occupations, marches, demonstrations, street actions and web activism
and its impact on the country’s political life as they demand the return of free public education
in place of the most intensely privatised education system in the world

Essential viewing for anyone concerned with the future of
schools and universities in Britain under the plans enacted
and laid in by the Coalition Government

with generous collaboration by

Filmmakers
Renato Dennis, Rodrigo Tossi, Marcos Salazar

Archive
Señal  La Victoria, Revista Vaso

Interviews
Carlos Ossa, Manuel Antonio Garretón
Marcia Tambutti Allende

ICEI Universidad de Chile,
Tiziana Panizza, Carlos Flores

Available Soon!

(UK 2011) dir. Michael Chanan 90m. Digital.
www.chronicleofprotest-thefilm.co.uk

DVD now on sale exclusively from New Statesman

click here to buy

A video diary about the movement against
government spending cuts in the universities and beyond
with students, activists and citizens of the real big society.

Featuring Terryl Bacon, Terry Eagleton, Mehdi Hasan, Joe Kelleher, Josie Long,
Len McCluskey, Blake Morrison, Paul O’Prey, Nina Power, Michael Rosen,
Lee Salter, Clifford Singer, Sly and Reggie, Mary Warnock and more.

With songs by Banner Theatre.

In collaboration with the New Statesman and Roehampton University.

Premiered Sat 30 April 2011 • East End Film Festival

]]> http://www.mchanan.com/2011/04/05/chronicle-of-protest-the-film/feed/ 0 http://www.mchanan.com/2011/01/28/new-statesman-video-blog-2/ http://www.mchanan.com/2011/01/28/new-statesman-video-blog-2/#comments Fri, 28 Jan 2011 07:34:13 +0000 Michael http://www.mchanan.com/2011/01/28/new-statesman-video-blog-2/ “Last autumn, in response to the coalition’s spending cuts, Britain saw the emergence of the first mass protest movement in a generation. One result has been an outpouring of online video, giving a very different picture to the one presented by the mainstream media, but making it hard sometimes to see the wood for the trees.

To that end, the New Statesman is pleased to announce a collaboration with the documentary film-maker Michael Chanan, who has been filming some of the events fuelling the protest movement. Focusing on the arts, both within and outside academia, he is building up a picture of the movement as it develops.”

Watch these videos here. Read my blog about the project: Video Blogging for the New Statesman: Camera in hand and idea in the head.

click here to go there

‘immensely readable… a thought-provoking perspective… a thoroughly enjoyable workout for the intellect’ Vertigo Magazine – read the full review

“consistently asks probing questions about the turbulent intersections of nonfiction film, cultural theory, and global politics” Cineaste

~~~~~~~~~~~

When the film‐maker Morgan Spurlock told an American festival audience ‘we live in a world where independent documentary film has truly become the last bastion of free speech’ he won a round of applause from the packed house. Michael Chanan’s wide‐ ranging and illuminating study of international documentary film‐making re‐ reads its complex history and present flourishing from the perspective of this fundamentally democratic aim.

This book traces the history of the documentary from the first Lumière films to Grierson and his contemporaries, through to Free Cinema, Cinema Vérité and Direct Cinema, up to the current resurgence documentary with high profile films such as those of Michael Moore.

The book’s thematic approach takes in topics such as the documentary before documentary how documentary film language works, the veracity of the image, the construction of the soundtrack; the migration of documentary to television, political documentary, censorship, first‐ person film‐making, and the relation of the archives to history and memory. Drawing on examples of documentary cinema in Japan, Iran and Latin America as well as Europe and the USA, Chanan argues that documentary provides a crucial public space in which ideas are debated, opinion is formed and those in authority are held to account.

Vertigo, vol.3 no. 7, Autumn 2007, p.16

The Politics of Documentary Michael Chanan’s argument considered Reviewed by Martin Carter

Trying to define the documentary film is by any measurement an uphill task. Is documentary a genre? Does it have a greater claim to ‘truth’ (whatever that might mean) than a fictional feature or short? Quite simply, what is it? Just trying to answer such basic questions about the form immediately opens up cans of worms by the shelf‐load. Therefore in his attempt to construct an understanding of documentary Michael Chanan certainly has his work cut out.

It is a pleasure then to report that his latest book, disguised by a rather dry title, is an extensive Historical, conceptual and yes, political review of the documentary film that is immensely readable whilst always remaining challenging and erudite. Chanan provides us with a selective history of the form that, whilst including such usual suspects as Vertov, Jennings and the Free Cinema movement, introduces us to overlooked filmmakers such as Japan’s Kamei Fumio and Akira Iwasaki. His chapter dealing with documentary in 1930s Japan is an alarming reminder of how narrow our knowledge and experience of such filmmaking is in the West.

The politics of the book’s title are tackled in a subtle manner with refreshingly little space given to the more obvious filmmakers with an overtly political stance (Leni Riefenstahl and Michael Moore barely get a mention). Instead Chanan chooses to explore the underlying influences of politics on documentary filmmaking. It is these forces which are shown to be crucial to the production, reception and consumption of documentary films and he vividly demonstrates how that they are capable of being transformed and translated in different ways through techniques such as montage and voice over, and more pervasively, by an ever changing historical perspective.

Chanan also attempts to answer some of the basic questions about the form (such as those raised above). One of his most persuasive lines is his attempt to construct a description of what documentary film is. Borrowing from Wittgenstein he posits documentary as being a ‘family’ of film forms inked by a common gene pool that like family resemblances can be identical, similar or totally different. This approach, in itself, proves an elegant way to bring together the menagerie of films gathered under the umbrella term documentary; from Emile de Antonio to Patrick Keiller, Jean Rouch to Nick Broomfield, and Agnes Varda to Errol Morris, to name only a few.

This book will be invaluable to exponents and students of documentary filmmaking, giving a fresh perspective on its history and techniques. For those who may want better to understand the history and codes of the form, it provides a thought‐provoking perspective that takes in not just those who have made the films but also the ideas of such figures as Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, making this volume a thoroughly enjoyable workout for the intellect.

See my review of the new DVD release of Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes in Sight & Sound here

Click here to view the embedded video.

Turner Prize Teach-In
Tate Britain, 6 December 2010 ‧ original version

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Buzz in Buenos Aires
Student occupations September 2010
(also see Putney Debater)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Follas Novas
Portrait of a bookshop in Santiago de Compostela (3mns)

Click here to view the embedded video.

O Wonderful Photo
Video diary of a workshop in phototherapy in Lucca, Italy, in March 2010, led by Carmine Parrella

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dates: Friday 28 January and Saturday 29 January 2011

Conference Location: Westminster University, 309 Regent Street

¡Documentary Now! brings together scholars, filmmakers, students, and interested members of the public to discuss current trends in documentary film, from the return of documentary as a theatrical box office phenomenon, to broadcast television, the web, and beyond. It explores questions of industry, audiences, aesthetics, political engagement, documentary’s relationship to the mainstream media and other many other issues. What’s new in documentary? Where is documentary headed?

Keynote speakers to include:
John Akomfrah (subject to confirmation)

The next edition will include a focus on music and sound in the documentary.
Other possible themes will be:

• Sound and Voice
• Genre and Documentary
• Soundtrack, Affect
• Noise and Silence
• Image/Sound relations
• The Overheard, the Unseen
• Place, Space and Locative Media
• Still/Moving Images
• The City (Symphony)
• Migration and Globalisation
• Co-productions
• Documentary Festivals
• Animation and Documentary

If you would like to give a 20 minute paper at the conference OR send proposals for themed panels of 3-4 people, please send proposals (including 500 word abstracts of papers) to: Michael Chanan (m.chanan(at)roehampton.ac.uk) AND Alisa Lebow (asl36(at)earthlink.net)

The deadline for proposals is Friday, 15 October 2009.

There is no fee for attendance but registration is required. A charge will be
made for lunch on Saturday (optional).

¡Documentary Now! is supported by Roehampton University, Brunel University, and the Lincoln Chair of Communications

‘An extraordinary study of the cultural/ideological “site” of cinema at the moment of its birth.’ Encylclopaedia Britanica

‘It confronts – head on – the most basic questions of the aesthetics, economics, technology and ideology of cinema.’ Wide Angle

‘Not only is the book a careful study of early British cinema but it is equally an important exploration of what it means to write film history.’ Cine Tracts

“Implanted in our awareness to the point of transparency, the mechanical reproduction of sound has increasingly conditioned 20th-century artistic experience, yet has done so in ways we take for granted. Michael Chanan dredges up its story from our collective experience. More than that, in Repeated Takes he draws conclusions and comes up with come pretty credible analyses and explanations. Like Henry Petroski in The Evolution of Useful Things, Chanan dispels the myth that things are invented through the pure force of genius in due season…The final chapters on new technology and its effect on copyright make fascinating reading for anyone connected with the music industry.” Nicholas Williams, New Statesman and Society, 7.7.9

“No strangers to the studio craft of overdubbing and effects, on Kid A/Amnesiac Radiohead finally and utterly abandoned the performance model of rock recording and went fully into concocting sonic fictions using the mixing desk as instrument. Answering a fan’s query on Radiohead’s Web forum, Greenwood talked about being obsessed with “the whole artifice of recording. I see it like this: a voice into a microphone onto a tape, onto your CD, through your speakers is all as illusory and fake as any synthesizer–it doesn’t put Thom in your front room. But one is perceived as ‘real’, the other somehow ‘unreal’… It’s the same with guitars versus samplers. It was just freeing to discard the notion of acoustic sounds being truer.” Speaking on the phone, Greenwood says the idea was influenced by reading Michael Chanan’s 1995 meditation on recording, Repeated Takes. “The more concerts we do, the more dissatisfied we get with trying to reproduce the live sound on a record. In a way it can’t be done, and that’s a relief really, when you accept that, and recording just becomes a different thing.” The Wire, 2001