Entries by Michael

Nostalgia for the Light

Patricio Guzmán’s latest film finally reaches London at a DocHouse screening on 2nd February. The Atacama desert in the north of Chile—the location for Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light)—is one the driest places on earth, where astronomers have located optical and radio telescopes to take advantage of the extraordinarily clear […]

Aspects of the documentary image

After my rather long silence, an uncharacteristically short post. We gathered, on an unusually warm day for January, at the London College of Communication in Elephant & Castle for the third seminar convened by the Artists’ Moving Image Research Network, with Pratap Rughani and Catherine Elwes as our hosts, to talk about the relations and […]

On Copyright and Capital

24 January 2012 | history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.com On Copyright and Capital Well I was going to join today’s ‘internet strike’ and close down the site for the day in solidarity with the movement against SOPA  – the proposed US Stop Online Piracy Act with its repressive measures against file sharing. Maybe I would even leave a cool message like this […]

Back from Chile

Back from my trip a week ago, I buried myself in editing the video I shot in Chile on the student movement, which screens on Saturday 3 December at the Latin American solidarity conference in London and Saturday 10th December at the Roehampton Human Rights Film Festival.  Now it’s done, and I break off briefly to give […]

¡Protest Chile!

What happens when you privatise a public education system? 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 ~ also screening on Saturday 10 December at Roehampton Human Rights Film Festival University of Roehampton ~ A […]

Video and rebellion: the Middle East

Continuing the theme of my penultimate post, 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 filmed them’. It’s a pretty good film for anyone thinking about the subject, or teaching social media, from […]

What happens when you privatise universities: now on video from Chile

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 events—not 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 […]

The Carnival of Protest

from The Student Journals WRITTEN BY GAH-KAI LEUNG | 02 SEPTEMBER 2011 In his study “Rabelais and His World,” literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin writes of carnival as a “temporary suspension… of hierarchical rank [which creates] a special type of communication impossible in everyday life.” Bahktin’s influential theory of the carnivalesque seems to leave traces all over the very public […]

Urban riots: the imagery of cognitive dissonance

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 […]