Q&A on Secret City
Here’s the video of the Q&A after the DocHouse screening of ‘Secret City’ at the Riverside last May
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/68041329#[/vimeo]
Higher Education is not a commodity
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
Mourning Chávez on the Web
It’s been fascinating seeing the response to the death of Hugo Chávez playing out on the web, for it not only confirms his status as a world historical figure, but because of the high symbolism of the event, clearly exposes the fundamental ideological rift of our days—not simply the chasm between the rich and poor countries of the world, but the confrontation between Eros and Thanatos: the love of social justice, represented in the adored figure of the defunct leader, against the destructiveness unto death of the empire of capitalism, with its headquarters four-and-a-quarter hours flying time due north from Caracas (or less than three to Miami, where rich Venezuelans go to do their sumptuary shopping). Read more
Transformations of Consumerism
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
‘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’
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
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.
The academic writer’s strike
The Thesis Whisperer 22/02/2012
Academic publishing is presented as a universal good, without regard to how the publishing system operates. While publications are an essential addition to the CV in today’s competitive job market, the ethics of publishing need to be considered too. Some big publishers are making boatloads of money – in the order of millions of dollars – out of labour we academics willingly give them. This profit largely goes into the pockets of shareholders, not the researchers or universities. Essentially this is public money which becomes ‘privatized’. It works a bit like this.
The Kodak Shift
It’s one of those symbolic moments: a couple of weeks ago, Kodak filed for bankruptcy because it has failed to keep up with the shift from analogue to digital photography. This is the company that launched the consumer market for amateur photography in 1888, with its famous box camera. A dozen years later, by inventing a process of continuous casting of the celluloid film strip, they created the first monopoly in the new film industry. For decades the company remained at the cutting age of communications technology, from aerial surveillance to microelectronics, but it’s finally been outpaced by digitisation.
I’ve been reminded that I wrote an article back in 1978 called ‘The Kodak Shift’, analysing Kodak’s key position in the culture industry. Here it is: The Kodak Shift
The Persistence of Allende’s Vision
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/33123752[/vimeo]