Tales of a Video Blogger ebook
Many thanks to RE.FRAMING ACTIVISM for publishing the ebook ‘Tales of a Video Blogger’, a collection of my recent writing about activist film-making.
Download your copy here:http://
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
Remembering Stanley Forman
For left film culture in Britain, Stanley Forman, who has died at the age of 91, was the archive man. His company, ETV, held a unique library of left-wing documentaries which amounted to the history of the twentieth century from a socialist perspective. Established in 1950 as Plato Films, the outfit was what would be called in Cold War ideology a front organisation, set up by members of the Communist Party to distribute films from behind the Iron Curtain. There was nothing nefarious about it, however. 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
Against ‘Impact’
The other day we interviewed a couple of PhD scholarship candidates. Good applicants, with interesting and unusual research proposals. However, I was saddened when one of them started talking about ‘impact’. So, she’d found out about the institutional regime of evaluation that now governs research and learned the lingo, but is this the game that applicants ought to be playing? Read more
Transnational in Brussels
We convened in Brussels, for a colloquium on transnationalism in Hispanic cinema, on the eve of the latest European summit. The juxtaposition was ironic and not irrelevant. On one side of town, the leaders of European transnationalism grappling with the crisis of the day. On the other, a small gathering of scholars from several European countries and the Americas, north and south, interrogating the transnationalism of Spanish-speaking cinema. Different takes on the same process of globalisation that shapes the modern world twenty years after the end of the Cold War
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
A double loss
The death in Buenos Aires of Argentine filmmaker and theorist Octavio Getino was reported on the same day as that of the historian Eric Hobsbawm in London. Worlds apart and different spheres of activity, perhaps, but both contributed in major ways to the broad current of independent and international critical culture that grew up after 1968, even though Hobsbawm remained a Communist and Getino was always a Peronist.
For myself, I was lucky to have interviewed both of them on camera, Getino in 1982, and Hobsbawm more recently, in 2007. Hobsbawm was generous in contributing to a film I made about a relative of mine, whom he’d known (The American Who Electrified Russia)—which makes it difficult to extract. Getino we filmed in Mexico, for a documentary on the New Latin American Cinema for Channel Four (in its early days, when it was really innovatory and progressive). He explained for us the concept of Third Cinema, which he launched with Fernando Solanas in 1969, in an essay based on their experience making the extraordinary piece of political cinema that goes under the name La hora de los hornos – Hour of the Furnaces. Here by way of tribute is that interview.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVohdIUNuGk[/youtube]
‘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’.