Arbitrary automated censorship at Edublogs

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This term, I’m running a class blog for a module about Music on the Screen – not film music, but the representation of music making in different forms of film and video. Because the blog tools on the University’s digital learning platform (we use Moodle) aren’t very good, I’ve been using an external platform called Edublogs, which is basically a version of WordPress set up for ease of use in educational environments.

So far, so good. Until now. Read more

Cuba in Nottingham

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A short note on the Cuba Research Forum conference which has just taken place at Nottingham, which suggests that international research on Cuba is in good health. Under the as-ever cheerful helm of Tony Kapcia, we heard from speakers of various nationalities, either based in the UK or abroad, and several Cubans, ditto, including, from Havana, the redoubtable Fernando Martínez Heredia, who spoke about the diverse origins of Cuban socialism. We also enjoyed a special lecture delivered with great verve by the distinguished Cuban-American historian, Louis Pérez, outlining his current work on the nineteenth century Cuban middle class and the figure of the coquette, a suggestive rethinking of cultural history. As always the forum was multidisciplinary and covered an impressively wide range of topics: Read more

Loneliness of the Long Distance Propagandist

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A remarkable discussion has taken place on Meccsa, an academic mailing list for media, communications and cultural studies, sparked off by my previous blog, Behind the News from Gaza. With more than 150 messages in three days, very little of it had anything to do with what I actually wrote, and I’ve no complaint about that—it’s just one of the dynamics at work on the internet, and that’s what made it so interesting. The discussion was kicked off almost immediately by a doubting response from a list member in Israel, which gave me the feeling that she hadn’t read the full blog on Putney Debater but reacted impulsively to the snippet which appeared on the list. Thirty-six messages later, a correspondent posted the information that Elina Bardach-Yalov is listed on Linked In as a former Political Communications advisor for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Read more

Thinking Creative Practice on Campus

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The symposium on audiovisual creative practice held at Roehampton University on June 14th, ‘Image Movement Story’, threw up an issue that reflects the incoherence of the research policies that fund our activities. On the one hand, judging from the wide range of projects under discussion, including work by supervisors of creative practice PhDs as well as their students, the sector is in rude health.  On the other, as Eric Knudson pointed out in his keynote, the research council is now disbursing more money to fewer projects than it used to. Why is this a problem? Because what the sector is now achieving is in good part the result of years of nurturing it through a range of small research grants, which have largely disappeared with the new emphasis on large scale collaborative projects with the potential for something called ‘impact’ (which I’ve written about before). This leaves open the question of support for smaller projects, early career researchers, etc.—and the perennial problem of doctoral funding. Read more

Latin America in Tübingen

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In the world of film studies, Germany is a country not much associated with the investigation of Latin American cinema, but here we were, gathering in the small university town of Tübingen for a Spanish-speaking symposium on ‘Encuadrando La Dictadura en el Cine Latinoamericano’—’Framing Dictatorship in Latin American Cinema’.  It’s an odd sensation, going some place where you don’t speak the native language for a gathering that’s conducted in another language altogether. You end up addressing the waitress in the restaurant in Spanish—who then replies in Spanish, and you’re no longer quite sure where you are!

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Convened by Sebastian Thies and intended as the founding event of a new (and peripatetic) Forum for Iberamerican Audiovisual Studies, the range of papers was impressive, with sessions on feminine militancy, testimonial, discourses of exile, violence on the screen, propaganda and power, memory and the archive, and the commodification of memory. Read more

No small beer at Cuba’s Film School

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This is a revised version, incorporating feedback received.

At the beginning of July, the EICTV, Cuba’s world renowned film school at San Antonio de los Baños was hit by a bombshell when the current director, the Guatemalan Rafael Rosal, announced his resignation, following revelations about corruption involving illicit sales of beer.  Three members of the school’s workforce were arrested, but there’s no evidence that Rosal personally benefitted. According to Rosal himself, speaking to me in Havana before leaving for England with his English wife and children, he had been obliged to resign as a scapegoat for a practice that had been going on for at least fifteen years, and which had reached the point where it was heavily subsidising the school’s operation, which costs US$1.4m a year. No small beer. He didn’t mention to me that he was asked to resign by the student body.

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University of Chile attacked with Tear Gas and Water Cannon

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It doesn’t only happen in Turkey. Yesterday, while filming in Santiago, I had my first experience of tear gas. I went to film the latest student protest march against the heavily privatised education system which is a heritage of the neoliberal policies of the Pinochet dictatorship. I filmed far more than I needed, because it was huge and very impressive (it took 75 minutes to pass the National Library where I was stationed) with all the expectable banners, drumming, bands, and dancing, and perfectly peaceful, following the pattern established a couple of years ago when the protest movement began. Read more

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

Pointless Obstacles

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If the death of one Margaret Thatcher has served to remind us that the present crisis has its roots back in the 80s on her watch, one of things that Thatcherism was responsible for was the corruption of the value of words. It may seem trivial compared to her other feats, but replacing terms like ‘passenger’ with ‘customer’, or calling Vice-Chancellors ‘Chief Executives’, was an important part of the conquest of the public sphere by neoliberal ideology. I’m reminded of this by having to grapple again with something I’ve written about before: the REF—on which the next round of university research funding depends and for which submissions are being busily prepared—and especially the new ‘impact’ agenda. The very word ‘impact’ has now become an odious one, emptied of its former richness of meaning, reduced to a code word with arcane referents. Read more

Cuba in Aberystwyth

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Welsh hills covered in snow as the train snakes across country on the way back from Aberystwyth. Went there for a symposium on Cuban cinema, with scholars and filmmakers over from Havana, and other participants mainly based in UK universities; although these were not necessarily Brits, because after all, the academic world is thoroughly international. Indeed our intellectual culture (such as it is) benefits enormously from the attraction that Britain seems to have for scholars from all over the world (which becomes a problem when a Government starts playing political games with student visas). Read more