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
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
9 Notes on Digital Cinema
A new online journal from Colombia, Corónica, has posted a short interview with me on video, made by Juan Soto, called ‘9 Notes on Digital Cinema’. It accompanies my film on the students protests in Chile, Three Short Films about Chile.
Here is Juan’s video (in Spanish and English, with subtitles).
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/48867239#[/vimeo]
Soundscapes in Maastricht
Maastricht provided a suitably quiet setting for an international workshop on ‘Soundscapes of the urban past’, which covered the behaviour of audition across different forms — radio, film, theatre, plus new audio phenomena like car stereos and audio museum guides — from a range of perspectives, including social history, history of technology, sociology, music, media and cultural studies, etc. The idea, with Karin Bijsterveld at the helm, was to bring together a group of about a dozen people to discuss the drafts for a volume of essays to be published next year. Read more
Revisiting the theory/practice debate
Interesting discussion going on recently over on Film-Philosophy about that old bugbear, the relation of theory to practice in our teaching and study of film. This debate has a history which, in the UK at least, goes back to the 1970s, when the art colleges taught experimental film making, and the then polytechnics and a few new universities began to include film-making in their undergraduate film courses. Film theory as such was still taking shape, and video was in its earliest stages. In an atmosphere charged with radical intellectual fervour, the theoretical input led to much experimentation in colleges of creative practice—the watchword of the time was deconstruction. The paradigm for the infusion of theory into practice could be found in the work, for example, of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, who established themselves on screen and on page, together and separately, as leading denizens of both. Some of the people emerging from this habitus made the break and went on to successful careers in the mainstream, but independent film-making informed by theoretical critique remained in the margins. Read more
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]
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 general rule that news from the old periphery, as well as the margins and the interstices of society, arrives in the social media before reaching the mainstream media. It was three or four weeks before Occupy Wall Street was picked up by the mainstream, and predictably it only broke through when cameras on the streets caught the first acts of gratuitous police violence and posted them on the web.
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 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