Videotaping a New World in the Shell of the Old

Anarchist Video at the Beginning of the 21^st Century

Andrew Hedden

(Updated June 24 2007)

 

The cover of Realizing the Impossible, a 2007 anthology exploring anarchism and art, features a print by artist Erik Ruin illustrating a series of hands, each holding a tool of present-day anti-authoritarian art. There’s a spray-paint can, a magic marker, an exacto knife, and – last but not least – a digital video camera. While all these tools are relatively new to the art world, and even newer to anarchist politics, none is more so than the video camera. In an essay from the book, Dara Greenwald, focuses on video collectives in the United States throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Greenwald makes it clear that anti-authoritarian politics and video share a long history together dating back at least to the birth of the medium.[1] However, it is only within the past decade or so, with the ascendancy of new digital technologies and the latest resurgence of anarchist politics globally, that their union has become undeniable.

Over the course of a month, I sought to survey the video practices of anarchists at present (2007), sending a small series of questions to as many anarchist video producers as I could find. Even given the incredibly narrow confines of my survey – only contacting those who self-identified as anarchists or were clearly (and consciously) influenced by anarchism, and then only those who could in English communicate via e-mail – I managed to e-mail over fifty individuals and groups. If this is how many anarchist video producers I could locate in one month, I can only imagine the many, many I missed.[2]

More than a dozen replies later, what is most clear is that anarchist video production has a growing global reach and an expanding diversity of forms and subjects. From Palestine to the Philippines, Louisiana to Argentina, anarchists are using video as a tool in the fight against media monopolies, State violence, racism, occupation, gender norms, patriarchy, global capitalism – the list goes on, with anarchists highlighting the resistance of everyday people on every front. Video is used for everything from surveying the police to experimental films, from narrative shorts to journalistic broadcasts. Anarchists don’t always agree as to what the best form for the medium is; each has its dangers as well as its benefits. If anarchist video producers have one thing in common, it is a focus on practice and relationships, striving towards a collaborative relationship between video producers themselves, as well as between videos and their viewers.

 

Video Killed the Movie Star

Anarchist film – as in movies on photographic film stock – has always been rather hard to come by. This could be because the anarchist movement was weakest during the years of film’s ascendancy as a medium, roughly from World War II to the end of the century. It could also be due to the relatively prohibitive aspects of filmmaking itself. Film-making requires extensive technical training, and productions can be severely hierarchical, with the producer or director at the top and the rest of the crew at their whim. It is hard enough and expensive enough to get a film made; but once it is made, how then to distribute it?[3]

Digital technology has begun to make visual media-making more available, allowing for greater technical control; cheaper production costs; smaller, more collective creative processes; and easier distribution. Gauging from survey responses, these are the very reasons anarchists are drawn to video. Compared to the burdens of film, notes Ishmahil Blagrove, Jr. of Rice N Peas Films, located in the United Kingdom, digital video is “cheap, quick to edit, more user-friendly, and easier to use in documentary situations where you don’t wish to carry intrusive, large equipment.” Another respondent notes the “otherwise free distribution” offered on the internet and public access television channels. FluxRostrum, an anarchist video producer and blogger, has conceived of a particularly ingenious form of distribution made possible by the new technology: whenever he’s out to shoot an event, he usually carries several DVDs instead of business cards.  The possibilities of on-line video distribution can even be applied back onto film; old Spanish anarchist films once found only in an archive like Madrid’s Filmoteca Espanola are now readily available on the Internet.

However versatile, video is still a piece of manufactured technology; under capitalism, this means it is available to some people and denied to others. “The truth is,” admits California, US-based artist Jessica Lawless, “digital video isn't that affordable. Cameras, computers, and software, not to mention various other equipment and the need for duplication is expensive. One needs access to a university, community space, or trust fund.” A-Films, a video collective of anarchists in the Middle East, relate that “the financial problem is always a pain in the ass. Equipment, even if it’s only the most necessary things, costs a lot, and people in Lebanon and Palestine usually can’t afford the stuff, or don’t have ways to collect that money for themselves.” Meanwhile, anarchists involved in the MIP (a.ka. Mobile Infoshop Project) based in Manila, Phillipines find the attitudes of others to be just as prohibitive. “There are a lot of materials that we love to show to the community, but isn’t accessible to us in the Third World. To be honest, it is not an issue of accessibility at all – there are people that are just plain greedy (capitalistic).”

 

“To fight and bypass:” Video as alternative journalism

For all its material limitations, video has undeniably opened up new avenues for media-making, allowing for greater control over the means of production and greater degrees of self-representation, more so than capitalist channels of mainstream media and information ever have. Video’s origins are in radio and broadcasting, so it should come as no surprise that many anarchists have come to video through journalism. The objective of alternative journalism is to combat capitalist media, hoping to create, in the words of Ishmahil Balgrove, Jr., “an alternative, balanced and more reality reflective media than currently on offer in the mainstream.” Alternative journalism has especially grown with the spread of global Indymedia networks. Survey respondents mentioned working with Indymedia collectives in Atlanta, Chicago, Ireland, Lima, Los Angeles, Manila, New Orleans, Rochester and Washington, DC.

The growth of Indymedia has, of course, been spurred by summit protests, as has the anarchist movement in general. Those surveyed mention protests in Prague, Quebec City, Genoa, and Gleneagles as galvanizing moments for becoming involved in video production projects. One respondent, Eamonn Crudden of Ireland, is currently researching a book “about summit films… and the large ad-hoc collectives that form at these events to make different types of video/film.” White Raven, an anarchist with the Revolt Video Collective, also of Ireland, describes an important part of their work as “reportage regarding current protests that have to be edited and uploaded before the piece becomes stale.” A video collective in Germany was unable to respond to the survey due to urgent media work for the anti-G8 protests in the town of Heiligendamm.

There is some worry that demonstrations and protests are given too much priority in video journalism. For instance, according to Marie Trigona, a member of Grupo Alavio, a radical video collective based in Buenos Aires, during the December 2001 uprisings in Argentina independent video activism blossomed. “However, many filmmakers were only interested in the spectacular happenings [of the uprising] rather than the day-to-day struggle in unemployed worker organizations, land squats, trade union organizations, and recuperated enterprises.”[4] One way Grupo Alavio seeks to remedy this is by offering video workshops and skill-shares. By putting video in the hands of everyday people, the group is able to bypass Argentina’s highly restrictive broadcasting regulations – dictatorship-era laws that remain on the books today. 

The A-Films Collective, an anarchist media group working in Lebanon and Palestine, expressed similar frustration with protests. “We’re getting sick of watching demonstrations against anything. They haven’t helped anything or changed anything so far. We have to change stuff ourselves. Directly.”  Like Grupo Alavio, they offer media workshops to others, and produce the occasional video themselves, distributing them on-line. “Video work of course is very often ‘just’ working to raise consciousness for issues,” they explain. “However, in areas like Palestine it can be direct action.” A-Films describes the objectives of their work in opposition to mainstream media, explaining “media activism is a useful and important tool to fight and bypass mainstream media, especially when it comes to places we’ve been working at, like war zones, occupation, etc. We think that people in the places where they are have much more possibilities and reasons to get their points of view out, and could make more use of what their eyes see on a daily basis.”

Walidah Imarisha, a poet and activist, is director and co-producer of Finding Common Ground in New Orleans, a documentary addressing the social injustices that took place during and after Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast of the United States. While editing her film, Imarisha formulated two objectives, both in conscious opposition to mainstream media accounts of the events in Lousiana. “One [objective],” she says, “was to show people the realities of what was going on, that are so very different than what the media was showing…” Her second objective was “a reframing of the issues,” casting the government as responsible for the broken levies, flooding, and devastation that followed the hurricane. In opposition to corporate interests seeking to rebuild New Orleans “as a sort of McDisney/Mardi Gras land,” Imarisha strived to “show the people down there, mostly black working class folks, not as helpless victims but as folks who did and are organizing themselves for their own survival and growth.” 

 

The Art of Video

While journalism is the most widely distributed of all anarchist video, not all anarchist video producers have come to the medium through journalism. A number of those responding to the survey had first come to the medium as artists, discovering that video could elicit a more powerful reaction from audiences and provide a catalyst for deeper discussions. According to Jessica Lawless, her initial attraction to video was to “make art that can be mobile, that can elicit discussion via a format most people are used to dealing with, viewing, thinking about, interacting with.” Lawless’s first video was Paint it Black, a video essay addressing the relationships between North American media coverage of anarchism and race at global justice protests. She then shifted genres, going on to produce a comedy about five transgender guys and “their relationship to masculinity sans dick of flesh.” She writes that the medium has grown on her. “Now it is about video itself. I like it. I like the immediacy of digital video and I get off on editing.”  Walidah Imarisha writes that while she came to the medium as a poet, she developed an appreciation for video over the course of editing and distributing her documentary feature. “There are times, I have learned, when words fail you, when there is no way to put into expression the pain and the loss that your eyes are taking in. Breath balks at the enormity of the task. This is the beauty of film.”

         It is one of video’s unique qualities to document and convey reality cheaply and efficiently, in powerful ways that other forms of media, such as words or audio, often fail to do. “If I tell you about how the cops jumped me and stole my camera,” explains FluxRostrum, “most people will assume that I was exaggerating and not be very affected by the news. But, if I show you the cops jumping me and stealing my camera… from multiple angles… then there’s opportunity for waking up some people.” This is, of course, the principle behind CopWatch, a program often organized by anarchists that tails the police and documents their behavior, preventing them from committing abuses and catching them in the act when they do. For CopWatch and others, video has legal use as evidence, as battles with the State continue into court rooms. Video “can get people out of trouble in court,” writes White Raven, “and can keep the cops behaving or even capture police brutality and get them into hot water.”

Sometimes such documenting can backfire. White Raven continues, “On a protest that has civil disobedience or property destruction it is always a concern that you could be arrested, your tapes seized and that your footage could get people in trouble.” One story in the United States that has received a great deal of publicity is that of Josh Wolff, an anarchist and journalist based in California, US. Wolff eventually spent seven months in prison for refusing to turn over to authorities a tape of a protest at which a police officer was injured. While the tape turned out not to have any incriminating evidence, his story still illustrates some of the risks video producers take in their work.

Not all the risks of video are between the State and activists; they can also be between video producers and their subjects, or even between activists themselves. While filming Finding Common Ground, Walidah Imarisha “didn’t want to be voyeuristic about people’s tragedy and pain, and stick a camera in someone’s face saying, ‘Tell me about the worst thing that’s probably ever happened to you.’” Voyeurism and disconnection remain constant risks for any activist behind the camera. For Nick Cooper, director of Soma: An Anarchist Therapy, “While video is incredible at bringing it all together to put viewers in the same room with the action, that itself can be a cause that makes interviewees nervous.” Brazilian anarchists in Cooper’s film were hesitant to appear on camera criticizing other anarchists, fearing their comments, captured on tape, could open up anarchism to attacks from communist groups or from the State.

Hoping to expand the quality and scope of video’s unique possibilities, some anarchist video producers are beginning to wonder whether video as journalism – or at least journalism as an aesthetic – has exhausted its purpose. “Most of the work I see posted documenting radical culture is an amateurish (in a bad way) imitation of network journalism,” argues crabbed, an anarchist video producer with several years experience in Indymedia projects. “I think we have reached the end of the road as far as using ‘grassroots citizens journalism’ as an excuse.” To create an avenue for new forms of video production, crabbed has started theMire.org, an online anarchist video resource. Kyle Harris, another long-time anarchist video producer, extends similar criticisms of anarchist video in the essay “Beyond Authenticity: Aesthetic Strategies and Anarchist Media,” part of the collection Realizing the Impossible. Harris suggests that anarchists adopt more traditional narrative techniques such as characters and plotlines, and drop the more alienating and discordant aesthetic – complete with shaky video and incoherent screams and shouting – of the traditional protest video.  

 

To Be, Or Not To Be (Anarchist)

Survey responses show that most anarchist video producers, like Harris, are very conscious of their audiences. True to their anti-authoritarian selves, most anarchist video producers even feel reticent about the use of the actual label “anarchist” in their work, fearing they either might misrepresent their documentary subjects or pigeon-hole themselves if they were to use it. The term “anarchist” certainly brings its own dangers and stigmas; one video producer even had a video screening shut down due to the very use of it. FluxRostrum explains his personal rationale: “While it is important to celebrate your culture from time to time, when the vast majority of people get their information regarding anarchy from biased mainstream news reports that use the word as synonymous with violence and chaos, I feel it is more valuable to drop breadcrumbs in their psyche.” Other video producers prefer the less ideological term “anti-authoritarian,” feeling that any “ism” could ultimately recuperate oppression and inequity.  Jong Pairez, a video artist based in Manila, expresses a common sentiment. “What is important is to use anarchist ideas as a methodology, rather than to be used by anarchist ideas.”

Though anarchist video producers tend to shy away from discussing anarchism openly in their work, survey respondents used the word unabashedly to describe their process and methodology, what Eric Stanley, co-director of the radical queer film Homotopia, describes as an “anarchist ethic of film making that understands the conditions of production as also a political project.” Karl Hardy, a media activist who has produced several short videos for public access television and on-line distribution in the Midwest United States, cites his “behind-the-scence production work” as “explicitly anarchist in the sense of it being a small, collaborative, and consensus-based group effort.”  For the MIP, eight thousand miles away in Manila, the emphasis is strikingly similar. “Our primary ideal is open collaboration. Basically, we are all the same thing (filmmakers, distributors, volunteers)… with one thing in common: to reach people (you know… getting the message across!!).”

In discussing the use of video in their organizing, the MIP extends this concern with collaboration to the relationship between video and spectator. According to the Project, while video materials are increasingly available in the Philippines due to the internet, such accessibility “is constantly steering people from social and participatory events towards a more blank stare meta-environment. In other words, our developing (and Western media colonized) country is slowly (for lack of a better word) mimicking the West on that aspect.” Eric Stanley, co-director of Homotopia, is also wary of turning audiences into mere consumers. “I feel allowing viewers to simply consume my work with no other intervention does little politically. So then I try to pair my work with more theoretical/historical talks linking moving images, colonialism and anti-queer violence.” Together with co-director Chris Vargas, Stanley conducts a program called “queer/violence,” showing their film in conjunction with other films and videos.  

 

Taping, We Ask Questions

As digital video becomes cheaper and more widely available, anarchists are embracing it, but not uncritically. Throughout the thoughts and concerns raised in the above survey responses, an age-old anarchist tenet reveals itself, across continents, across subjects and varying formats of presentation: the ever-present need for corresponding means and ends. “For me,” writes Walidah Imarisha, “anarchism is about a new reality, about building it in the here and now.” Anarchist video producers everywhere appear to agree with her, as they wrestle with questions of how best to use video as a tool in building this new reality. For instance, how to document resistance while escaping scrutiny from State? How to attract new audiences while celebrating a culture of resistance? How to transform video’s spectators into active participants?

“I think the best thing video has done for anarchists is forcing us to consider what a self-portrait of anarchy might actually look like,” writes crabbed, creator of theMire.org. “Which is kind of a scary thing because I think most of us have a kind of negative view about the strength or richness of anarchy as it exists now, and that looking at the fragmented picture we are getting (video is a big part of this, I think) is kind of a scary proposition.” Anarchist video may have a ways to go, as crabbed suggests, but these survey responses show that it is already on the move. As the Zapatista saying goes, “Walking, we ask questions.” Undoubtedly, anarchist video producers ask their questions while walking: there aren’t any big theoretical questions that must be answered before video production can start; these questions can be answered through the very work of video production itself. In other words, if anarchists are building a new world in the shell of the old, as the old Industrial Workers of the World slogan goes, anarchist video producers are surely taping it.

 

 

On the web

A short list of respondents to the survey

 

A-Films

Autonomous anarchist film project currently based in Europe and the Middle East

http://www.youtube.com/afilmspalestine

 

Finding Common Ground

Short documentary that addresses the social injustice that took place during and after the hurricane Katrina disaster through the lens of poet and activist Walidah Imarisha.

http://www.myspace.com/channelzeromedia

 

Fluxview, USA

A portal for Independent News Sources and Conscious Culture

http://fluxview.com/

 

Grupo Alavio

Radical video in Argentina

http://www.revolutionvideo.org/alavio/

 

Homotopia

A Radical Queer Film By Chris Vargas and Eric Stanley

http://www.homotopiafilm.net/

 

The Mire –

Anarchist video resource

http://www.themire.org

 

MIP (A.K.A. Mobile Infoshop Project)

http://mobile-infoshop.co.nr

 

MobFilms

http://mobfilms.allotherplaces.org/

 

Revolt Collective

Video activist collective in Ireland

http://revoltvideo.blogspot.com/

 

Rice N Peas Independent Documentary Films

http://www.ricenpeas.com/index.html

 

Soma – An Anarchist Therapy

http://www.somadocumentary.com/

 

SubMedia

http://www.SubMedia.tv

 

Tulisan TV

Radical video in the Philippines

http://www.youtube.com/tulisanTV