or ‘Me gustan los estudiantes’: Mario Handler at St Andrews
The Uruguayan documentarist Mario Handler came to St Andrews recently for a symposium revisiting New Latin American Cinema of the 60s through the Uruguayan case. The event was able organised by Beatriz Tadeo Fuica, included a prety cogent overview of Documentary and Activism by Leshu Torshin, and a Q&A with Mario Handler by Gustavo San Román. This was my own contribution. Read more
Being written for presentation at ‘Marx at the Movies’, these notes address the topic from an angle which is rarely treated in film and video scholarship, that of the peculiar labour process and mode of production involved. Read more
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/33123752[/vimeo]
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 whatever angle, for two reasons. First, because it covers many of the questions that people have been asking about the role of the social media in fomenting the revolutions in the Middle East, and of social movements everywhere. And second, because it does so without the unctuous commentary or tendentious presenter that remains obligatory on our own television channels, but entirely in the voices of participants themselves: reporting from Tunisia and Egypt, with a postscript from Libya, Hamdan seeks out people who filmed some of the key mobile phone videos that helped to galvanise the uprisings, and interviews them in the places where they did their filming as they tell us how they did it.
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.
The following appears in ThreeD, Newsletter of the MeCCSA, No.16
In the view of Terry Eagleton, speaking recently to a protest meeting at LSE, ‘There are two incompatible and contradictory versions of education which are now fighting it out: the right wing version is education for the economy, the left wing version is education for society.’ (LSE, 18 January 2011; see On Campus at the New Statesman) Eagleton takes a long term view. When the humanities as we know them first emerged, he explains, they did so at exactly the same time as early industrial capitalism. Academia served as a space in which creative, imaginative and critical values expelled from early industrial capitalist society could take shelter, find nurture and flourish. Read more
What the mainstream media didn’t show you on Saturday.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/21673355[/vimeo]
On Saturday I saw and filmed two demonstrations: the official march called by the TUC, culminating with a rally in Hyde Park, and the unofficial alternative, which spread out across the West End, comprising multiple autonomous groups and blocs. Read more
Banner Theatre’s 1 May Band perform a number from their new show, Cabaret Against the Cuts, on a visit to Chelmsford TUC.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/20821923[/vimeo]
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/20236904[/vimeo]
At Saturday’s Progressive London conference, I caught up with comedian Josie Long and Mehdi Hasan, the NS’s political editor, and listened to Unite’s Len McKluskey and False Economy‘s Clifford Singer, plus ukuncutactivists take on Barclays Bank and South London celebrates a Carnival Against the Cuts.
Additional filming by Kaveh Abassian and Philippa Daniel. Philippa’s own video of the Carnival Against the Cuts is here.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/20008781[/vimeo]
The repercussions of the cuts in Higher Education are being felt in Bristol, where lecturers at the University of the West of England (UWE) have been forced to take strike action over threats to staffing. Here I report on the strike and find out what students who supported it think about the situation.