Algunos informes sobre mis actividades en el 35 Festival del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano…

Variedad temática desde la documentalística

El Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano estrena, en su 35 edición, la cinta inglesa Interrupted Memory (Memoria Interrumpida), del director inglés Michael Chanan, quien asume las responsabilidades de la edición y la fotografía, para conseguir un relato colectivo a partir de historias individuales de personas de Chile y Argentina. Chanan escoge personajes de diferentes edades, y los sitúan frente a la cámara para que recuerden pasajes de sus vidas, relacionados con momentos trascendentales de la política y el gobierno en ambas naciones. De esta forma, construye una época en la vida latinoamericana signada por hechos tan trascendentales como el golpe de estado de 1973, en Chile, los cuales, a decir de los especialistas entrevistados en el material, marcarán un punto de giro en la vida de muchas generaciones.

* * *

Y sobre el seminario, ¿Nuevo? ¿Cine? ¿Latinoamericano?…

Tecnología de vanguardia, el reto del nuevo cine

…El celuloide -tal como se lo conoce-, según Michael Chanan, va camino a la extinción y la digitalización favorece múltiples formas de comunicación. Él narró cómo se  crea una nueva mirada documental, a través de cámaras digitales, teléfonos móviles, tabletas, entre otros aparatos electrónicos…

* * *

Nuevo cine latinoamericano en la mira de festival habanero

* * *

from The Student Journals

WRITTEN BY GAH-KAI LEUNG | 02 SEPTEMBER 2011

In his study “Rabelais and His World,” literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin writes of carnival as a “temporary suspension… of hierarchical rank [which creates] a special type of communication impossible in everyday life.” Bahktin’s influential theory of the carnivalesque seems to leave traces all over the very public demonstrations against cuts to government spending, as painstakingly catalogued in this film by Michael Chanan, which took place throughout late 2010 and early 2011. The overturning of the established order and the cry for democracy that spurred these protests, as well as utopian demands for a just society manifested in the realism of ordered chaos inflicted on urban centres, seems to be a replay of the same ideas a Russian thinker was writing about some sixty years ago.

In its own carnivalesque way, “Chronicle of Protest” too eschews some of the expectations of a documentary film. The finished project has no voice-over narrator: instead it is essentially a montage of newsreel, police footage, activist home video and vox-pops, all strung together with words that occasionally flash across the screen. The narrative, at once disjointed and yet unified by the sung refrain of “Society is too big to fail” (a mockingly ironical reworking of the now-clichéd phrase applied to bloated banks), suggests the simultaneous unity and disunity that characterised the protests: all those involved shared a common message, but there were distinct ways of communicating that message. Clips of the few students who tarnished the image of millions of peaceful protestors through their actions, and who yet came to symbolise the apparent degeneracy of the entirety of modern British youth, are an eerie precursor to the much more magnified destruction that would occur in the same city a few months later. Indeed, the vociferous but coolly measured way that the vast majority of the people captured in this film address their concerns is in striking contrast to the relentless annihilation of communities, both socially and physically, this August. One student, who will forever remain anonymous, declaims: “Protest is saying that I disagree with something; resistance is saying that I will not let this happen.” Equally arresting is the colourful multitude of non-violent protest methods: a young woman’s stand-up routine in a Barclays bank; the call-and-response chants of a group on the street; the beating of drums on the civilian warpath.

Chanan’s real achievement in this film, though, is to situate these students’ era of discontent within wider contexts, both past and present. Another literary academic, Terry Eagleton, draws parallels to the unrest in the 1960s when “the academia became the catalyst for a much wider social movement,” while other connections are made to the credit crisis, Egypt, Bahrain and Bristol, and from the rather triumphantly named University of Strategic Optimism to an ordinary library on the fringes of London. Through a collection of interviews, you get the sense that right-wing politics as symbolised in this country by the Conservative Party is increasingly being associated with “ignorance of the reality of the situation [the electorate] is in,” and that the Liberal Democrat contingent, far from being a moderating force, have simply accepted the new status quo: students who voted Lib Dem in the last election constantly speak of being “betrayed” by the party. One older woman complains about the “dishonesty” of the government’s commissioned research into people’s happiness when “the sort of things that make people happy [are merely] being able to go to your library and get some books and CDs.” Though ostensibly Chanan tries to include a variety of voices, I did notice when I watched the film that most of the interviewees were white: besides some black singers, only the impassioned Mehdi Hasan stands out as an important commentator of ethnic origin. Hasan, to his credit, shows thought and restraint for a man whose unnecessarily violent assault on Michael Heseltine on the BBC’s ‘Question Time’ infuriated this viewer.

From a technical standpoint, the soundtrack is a bit iffy at times, and the lack of subtitles is occasionally frustrating. But judging the film alone, as a catalogue of the various schemes that took place to combat the threats to higher education in the coming decades, it largely works. Where it fails, however, is to say anything really new or challenging: Chanan does not develop his thesis to include meaningful debate around its implications. How can we really reconcile the threat of sovereign debt default and the need to balance our budgets with the imperative to preserve a system of higher education that is equitable, accessible and – above all – adequately fulfilling? Have the demonstrations – in the context of a wider post-credit crunch culture where economics has become a political football – achieved anything at all? Maybe I’m expecting too much from a “chronicle of protest,” not an “essay on protest.”

Regardless, the ultimate power of “Chronicle of Protest” lies at its climax, when the images of millions of chanting, waving, placard-holding citizens that throng the capital resemble a gigantic literal carnival. The mostly silent crowd come to speak for themselves, so much so that you really do want to stand up and join them. Unfettered by narrative intrusion, the film perfectly captures the zeitgeist of its period. At that ‘Question Time’ debate shortly after the new coalition government was elected, Michael Heseltine warned the incumbent administration would be “deeply unpopular”. Chanan’s timely work reaffirms how wrong I wish he could have been.

East End Film Festival
London, UK
May 2011
Frances Morgan

Emma-Louise Williams’ Under the Cranes, which premiered to a capacity audience at Dalston’s Rio Cinema, featured the work of [a] long-time resident, Michael Rosen, whose documentary play Hackney Voices steered this engaging, gentle, slightly dreamlike documentary… Rosen also appears in Michael Chanan’s Chronicle of Protest, extolling the revolutionary potential of Shakespeare. Co-produced by the New Statesman and Roehampton University, Chronicle of Protest’s freshness and urgency – the most recent footage, of the 26 March TUC demo, is only a month old – is perhaps a necessary counterweight to the archival feel in evidence elsewhere. Activist video, news footage and interviews are edited into chapters including December 2010’s student occupations, campaigns against library closures and the actions of UK Uncut; commendably, Chanan gives space not only to London protest footage but also to a lecturers’ strike in Bristol.

The recent wave of protest at government policy has sometimes been couched in simplistic terms of the young versus the old, but this intelligent and highly watchable film suggests a continuum of protest, as veterans like Terry Eagleton appear alongside a new generation of technology-savvy activists. Its screening in the East End, an area that has harboured chartists, suffragettes, anti-racist campaigners and many other oppositional groups, strikes a challenging note.

full review here

Activist video is providing a corrective to the mainstream media – but nothing beats the power of a cinema screen.

One of the qualities I love about cinema is its assertiveness: it’s so much harder to overrule or ignore a film when it’s on a cinema screen, whether that screen is in the Grand Palais in Cannes or the Slough Cineworld, than when it’s on television, laptop or iPod. I was impressed when I watchedChronicle of Protest, the omnibus edition of Michael Chanan’s attentivevideo blogs for the NS, on DVD this week. But its real power will become apparent, I suspect, only when it is screened in a cinema, as it will be this Saturday as part of the East End Film Festival.

Chanan’s blogs have already contributed to the democratising of the media by drawing heavily on amateur videos, shot by activists on the various protests and sit-ins which have engulfed and energised the country since the coalition government came to power. Moving that material to a cinema screen provides a kind of ratification that is pleasantly at odds with the film’s urgent, snapshot feel.

The idea behind the commission, if I understand it correctly, was to provide a coherent picture of the mood of protest. Mainstream media can only fragment and dissipate such a groundswell, filtering each separate demonstration through its own agenda. (One example highlighted by some of the film’s interviewees is the bizarre way in which the unhappy travel experiences of two members of the Royal Family became the focal point of the protest against the hoisting of tuition fees.) Chronicle of Protest goes some way toward being a corrective to this.

Through some nifty editing and lucid rhetoric, the connections between the actions of the coalition and the hardships imposed on communities become transparent. A level-headedness emerges in the judicious cutting of scenes which another documentary might have played straight; I especially liked the way Chanan cuts back and forth between the temperate oratory of Terry Eagleton and the incendiary scenes of protestors storming Jeremy Hunt’s appearance at the LSE. Laurie Penny of the NS reflects that the government is rather like a spider, in that it is more scared of us than we are of it, and Chanan helpfully replays in slow-motion close-up a shot of Hunt looking mortified as the room is besieged.

I also liked the material showing another of this magazine’s writers, Mehdi Hasan, imagining at the podium what he would do to attack the government if he were Ed Miliband. I express no favouritism to Mehdi, whom I have met only once (I believed we discussed Terminator-related matters), when I say that his address gives the film an extra jolt of fiery energy. (Later, Chanan films an interview with him from a suspiciously low angle, as though Mehdi is being stung in a Panorama exposé, perhaps on a cash-for-guest-editorships scandal.)

One thing I didn’t like about this otherwise involving film was its framing device of performances by the First of May Band, whose compositions (“Hey there, Mr Banker Man/ You don’t look so great/ Someone ought to tell you/ You’re past your sell-by date”) seem too simplistic to provide more than a cosmetic reflection of the woes documented on screen.

This is a film that the ruling order will regard (I hope) as a bit dangerous, because it wholeheartedly celebrates the protest movement against government-imposed austerity. It presents the discussion, debate and arguments which have come together in open dialogue within the movement, without preferring one position over another, but trying to make sense of the collective clamour, in opposition to the disinformation of the mainstream media.

In this sense, ‘Chronicle of Protest’ fulfils the task of documentary to report on (a segment of) the world, not objectively, which is hardly possible, but without guile. For unlike television reportage, it doesn’t pretend to some mythical notion of balanced truth, but fully acknowledges the subjective positioning of the film-maker within the great We of which it speaks—the real big society, not David Cameron’s fairy tale version.

The film follows the chronology of events over five months, from November 2010 to the end of March 2011, interspersed with songs by Banner Theatre’s First of May Band, filmed at a performance of their show, Cabaret Against the Cuts. It also borrows footage from various sources, since this is current affairs, which nowadays passes not only on television but also on the web. The purpose of these borrowings is not to give a ‘balanced’ picture but a dynamic one, which reminds us of the give-and-take of the public sphere around the issues of the day.

The mainstream media come under criticism from the start, exposed by the new flux of the internet’s social media, which have become a parallel domain of communication through which the politically unorganised can discover each other, communicate, and organise with great rapidity. This film belongs to this alternative circuit, since it takes the form of a reworking of a series of video blogs originally posted on the New Statesman web site. As the Brazilian film critic José Carlos Avellar put it another context, the camera is an actor within the reality which it films, and that reality is the co-author of the film.

One of the things it inevitably shows in consequence is the reclamation of public space through occupations, street protests, marches and rallies, as the proper place for the expression of popular political demands, precisely because the popular voice is never heard in the mediated public sphere directly but always filtered by the editorial stance. In this film, by contrast, the aim is to hand the word over to the range of individual and collective voices which are now ringing in the politicians’ ears at every turn, clamouring for social justice.

My main hope? That it proves useful in expressing and strengthening the spirit of popular resistance to the democratic deficit of Britain under the Cameron-Clegg Coalition.