Tag Archive for: capitalism

Upcoming Screenings in London

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‘Interrupted Memory’ at Birkbeck
Friday 9 January at 6pm

memory pointing (small)One of the interviewees in Interrupted Memory (Memoria interrumpida) (Michael Chanan, 2013, 116mns) recalls being detained in the 1976 coup in Argentina. She was beaten and raped. She began, defensively, to play a role. ‘Me, I know nothing about politics. I’m just a girl, I’m 17.’ Her captors let her go with a warning, ‘You don’t leave this place twice. Behave properly, don’t say anything.’ She was so traumatized that she went on playing the role of the naïve girl for years. Real life was suspended.

Michael Chanan’s film charts not just the public history of recent political violence in Chile and Argentina, but also the intimate and inner damage it has wreaked.

Free entry. To attend this event please RSVP: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bisr-guilt-screening-tickets-14629456097 or just turn up!

‘Secret City’ at SOAS
Saturday 24 January at 4pm, Khalili Lecture Theatre

Aldermen and judges (small)

16:00  London is Burning (Haim Bresheeth, 2012, 45′)
17:00  Secret City (Michael Chanan, 2012, 72′)
18:30 Panel presentations and discussion:
Chair: Prof. Annabelle Sreberny (SOAS)
Prof. Costas Lapavitsas (SOAS): “Non-Productive Capitalism and its trail of destruction”
Owen Jones (Guardian) TBC
Prof. Doreen Massey (Open U): “The city of London: The invisible demon”

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Higher Education is not a commodity

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The following interview, done by email, originally appeared on EvoLLLution.

1. Would you say higher education is a commodity, or not?

Absolutely not; and not just higher education, but education at any and every level. Education is a process of human interaction, whose efficacy depends on a variety of subjective factors. Why did I choose this subject? Does the teacher stimulate my interest — or imagination? Do I enjoy teaching, or has it become a chore? None of these things can be quantified (except by means of unscientific questionnaires), and if they can’t be quantified, any price that is put on them is quite arbitrary. Read more

Transformations of Consumerism

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In the last few days, three major UK retail chains have gone bankrupt and are shutting up shop: Jessops, HMV and Blockbuster. Photography, music, and film rental. Pundits are saying that it’s inevitable as sales move to the web, and doesn’t mean the market will contract (except for film rental, which is no longer a viable business); there’s also a lot of comment on what Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian calls ‘a recession-backed, online-fuelled evisceration of the high street’. The health of the record market doesn’t interest me here, but what these closures say about the transformation of consumerism as capitalism seeks to adjust to its own crisis. Read more

Screening at the House of Commons

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‘Secret City‘, the film I’ve made with Lee Salter about the City of London Corporation, received a preview screening at the House of Commons on Tuesday evening. This is more or less what Lee and I said to introduce it.

First, our thanks to John McDonnell, MP for Hayes and Harlington, for hosting the event.

We think this film is a model of documentary film production within the academy under the rubric of research as practice. One of the things this means is that it’s been produced on a tiny budget, less than £10,000, which represents real value for money. So we’d also like to acknowledge the support of the University of Roehampton, which provided most of this funding, which mainly covers the costs of clearing rights for archive footage.

Why a film and not a research paper? Because we wanted to reach outside the academy with a piece of work that deals with something very few people know anything about, and a documentary film is a very good way to do this because it breaks out of the limits of any particular discipline and reaches audiences in the wider community. Read more

‘Secret City’

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It’s almost a year since anti-capitalist protestors, intending to set up camp in front of the London Stock Exchange in Paternoster Square under the banner of Occupy LSX, were ejected from the square and parked themselves instead in front of St Paul’s Cathedral. The result was one of the starting points for this film: a highly public debate about capitalism and the Church.

But there was also another power acting in the shadows to eventually eject the Occupiers – the City of London Corporation. An ancient body which dates back before William the Conqueror, before there was a parliament in Westminster, which zealously guards its autonomy and privileges to this day.

This is the subject of Secret City: a state within a state, with deleterious effects on democracy, politics and economics in London, the country, and the world, for the City is joint headquarters with Wall Street of global finance capital. In short, ‘Secret City’ isn’t just a film for Londoners – especially in these times of crisis, the role of the City concerns everyone everywhere.

Here’s the trailer:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HJGLqMAQbk[/youtube]

‘Secret City‘ is a minimal budget film by Michael Chanan and Lee Salter, supported by the University of Roehampton. We tell the story though interviews with politicians, academics, writers, activists and campaigners, counterpointed with unfamiliar archive footage and a musical score by Simon Zagorski-Thomas taken from the nursery rhyme ‘Oranges and Lemons’.

A Short Film About Money

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Won’t solve your money problems, but it might make you think about why you’ve got them. ‘A Short Film About Money’ is a spin-off from a longer film I’ve been making with Lee Salter, ‘Secret City’, which launches soon.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFcoelfewXc&feature=plcp[/youtube]

‘Secret City’ is an investigation into the Corporation of the City of London which governs the famous square mile that serves as joint-HQ with Wall Street for global finance capital. We originally thought we might include a sequence about the illusions of money, but in the end left it out, so instead we fashioned the footage we’d collected into the satirical short you can see here.

Marx at the Movies in Preston and Third Cinema in Oxford

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Events since the near-death experience of finance capital in 2008 have succoured renewed attention not to Marxism as a political creed but to Marx as the urtext of the proper analysis of the capitalist system. On the one hand, old established Marxist scholars like Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton and David Harvey have all published new books, while on the other, numerous articles alluding to Marx’s relevance have appeared in both the capitalist press and independent weeklies, sometimes even on the radio (though never television). On the web, you can find a growing number of videos about capitalism, its discontents and dysfunctions, strongly informed by Marxist ideas, jostling for attention with an explosion of more anarchistic street level video activism. Read more

‘Are they really as stupid as they seem?’

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There are a surprising lack of convincing explanations as to why the capitalist class is pushing through the present unprecedented austerity drive – even at the risk of provoking both mass opposition and a double-dip recession. The following excerpts, from Hillel Ticktin’s recent articles in Critique, do offer an interesting partial explanation:

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Government cuts – ‘Are they really as stupid as they seem’ by Hillel Ticktin

University Struggles

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University Struggles at the End of the Edu-Deal

By George Caffentzis

As students around the world start to take action against national governments’ university spending cuts, George Caffentzis sees a plane of struggle developing; one which acts against the crooked deal of high cost education exchanged for life-long precarity.
We should not ask for the university to be destroyed, nor for it to be preserved. We should not ask for anything. We should ask ourselves and each other to take control of these universities, collectively, so that education can begin.

– From a flyer found in the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts originally written in the University of California

Read more at metamute