Tag Archive for: Recession

Going Viral: A Coronavirus Diary

/in , , , , , , /by

Coronavirus brings globalisation into focus by forcing attention onto the different layers of interconnectedness in our twenty-first century world. As the virus spreads around the planet in waves, the pandemic impinges on different social and economic sectors each according to its own rhythm, throwing them out of joint one by one. The synchronisation which normally keeps the whole system running harmoniously breaks down. It is precisely at the moment the system breaks down that we realise how interconnected it is. What is normally hidden because, as we used to say, it functions like clockwork, is exposed. We discover that while our clocks are nowadays calibrated atomically, public time is not at all uniform but constituted by the superposition of many different tempos.

Free Associations 78, 2020

Read it here:

Chanan 334-1265-1-PB

 

The next chapter: Argentina

/in , , , , /by

The next chapter: Argentina, or, What happens when a country can’t pay its debts?

During the six month stand-off between Athens and Brussels, which we documented in Greece on the Edge?, while European intransigence was driving Greece ever closer to default on its massive debt – a step which would inevitably entail exiting the euro – various commentators began asking whether Greece might have anything to learn, one way or the other, from the case of Argentina,* where the currency collapsed in December 2001,  the banks put up shutters, the country got through five presidents in twelve days, and ended up (when the IMF withdrew its support) in a spectacular default.

There are big differences between the two countries, of course, but there are also strong  similarities in the economic dilemma facing them. Read more

Greece, Europe, Undemocracy

/in , , , , , /by

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/136378322[/vimeo]

This film is a chapter from the forthcoming feature documentary, Money Puzzles, a film about money, debt and the fight against austerity. Money Puzzles is conceived as a follow up to the filmmakers’ award winning film, Secret City. Whereas Secret City investigated a crucial institutional structure that was invisible to most and shrouded in secrecy, Money Puzzles focuses on an everyday commodity the reality of which is hidden in plain sight.

Nowhere is the reality of debt money more evident than in Greece right now. The tussles over the so-called bailout shone a light upon the institutional structures that underpin money and its relations. Yet that light seems to have blinded journalists from the mainstream media and their political counterparts.

Read more

Greece on the Edge? The Film

/in , , , , , , /by

The mood in Athens as Greece approaches the crunch.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/128743275[/vimeo]

Greece is being punished by the obstinate, pig-headed, anti-democratic plutocracy of the EU and the IMF for the crime of electing the wrong government, a government that opposes austerity as a misconceived and unworkable policy that creates unpayable debts and has indefensible consequences for the mass of the people. In May 2015, I went to Athens with the #DebtAction Group organised by Johnna Montgomerie of the Political Economic Research Centre (PERC) at Goldsmiths College, to meet activists, trade unionists, journalists and academics and gauge the mood at ground level as Greece approaches the crunch. The resulting film looks at the effects of five years of austerity on household debt, and visits the CommonsFest, a forum for alternative politics, while economist and Syriza MP Costas Lapavitsas explains why the euro has been such a disaster for Greece.

Read more

Upcoming Screenings in London

/in , , /by

‘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”

Read more

Screening at the House of Commons

/2 Comments/in , , , /by

‘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’

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

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

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

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.

Urban riots: the imagery of cognitive dissonance

/0 Comments/in , , /by

The riots which started in North London, and astonished everyone by spreading so quickly through the city and round the country, have produced massive cognitive dissonance throughout the media—mainstream and social—for which they provide a new and highly polysemic symbol for accumulating fears of social disintegration. The flood of photos and videos join a gallery of images of social breakdown from disparate causes, some natural, some social—from hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis to solitary deranged gunmen on the rampage—which have this in common, that they all suggest appalling consequences in store for a world spinning out of control—without the fantasised redemptive ending of the disaster movie. Read more