by mega(n) daalder
“Our eyes have grown. / White people see Black people / Hawks see Doves / Poor people see President Nixon / Fat people see hunger / Hungry people see food / Everybody sees Chicago / Soldiers see students / Students see death / Our eyes have grown / America owns more cameras, reaching further and / more / privately, than any other nation. American eyes roam / Everywhere. / And even as our eyes stretch, wretched from confusion and fears, American hatred, American misery, / American / peril and despair have grown and grown into a / breathing / agony. We are among the agonizing and the stupefied. / We / are staggering from spectacle. / The spectacle is life. / The living are those who watch life, sitting down. We are those who watch.”
June Jordan
I’d never watched “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” but the other night I walked in on my roommate watching it. In this episode, one of the Kardashians was brainstorming about “content” ideas for their lifestyle brand. The flatness and ubiquity of approaching media in its myriad forms as “content” struck me. It brings to mind Paolo Freire’s Banking Model of education in the sense that from a media platform point of view, “content” is something you insert into people’s minds without expecting them to critically engage.
With social media graduating to a form of political involvement (according to a Pew research poll about “participation” in the 2020 uprisings), it seems worthwhile to question the privileging of product over process. The increased accessibility of digital media production and dissemination may level the playing field for some, arguably realizing a Third Cinema ideal of widening access, but in the background these media platforms depend on divisiveness and inaction for their profits.
Another foundation of the Third Cinema movement was the involvement of the audience with what they were seeing on screen. This relationship relied on a sense of shared stakes and a sense of agency to build off of whatever came after the last scene. This research looks for examples of media that demonstrate a social process through production and distribution. While making a film for festival distribution according to 1st or 2nd cinema standards can include relationship building, I’m curious what happens when the process is the “content.” I looked for examples in four different contexts that bring people into relationship: the classroom, the workplace, the family, and the neighborhood. I wonder: can projects that build solidarity through their production be resistant to recuperation by a neoliberal hegemony in their distribution?
The Classroom
Critical Race Studies has generated a body of scholarship that challenges the post-race tendencies of multiculturalism through the study of ongoing racial hierarchies that continue to reinforce economic stratification in the US and elsewhere. In Shelleen Greene’s Cinema and Media Studies classroom at UCLA, textual learning is combined with a media production prompt that asks students to produce a piece of media as they grapple with texts by Peggy McIntosh and Richard Dyer in real time.
Greene explains her method in “Talking about Whiteness: Using Digital Pedagogy to Interrogate Racial Privilege” (2015), a contribution to a Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier volume titled “Critical Pedagogies in Neoliberal Times.” Greene explains that initially when introducing certain texts, she was “met by the silences of white students who do not want to be accused of being racist and non-white students of color who do not want to bear the burden of representation.” In alignment with Paolo Freire’s method of externalizing media to further reflection, she set up a simple assignment that broke students out into groups, asked them to record a 90 conversation about the readings, and then collectively produce a video on the topic of whiteness and white privilege.
While the resulting videos are not masterpieces, they provide an opportunity for polyvocal grappling with the many layered and self-implicating process of “denaturalizing” racial constructs. The film techniques that Third Cinema filmmakers celebrated – dissonance between the audio and visual tracks, archival and contemporary image – are invited into this pedagogical exercise. After an in-class critique, the students have an opportunity to re-edit the video. Greene writes “the feedback-editing process speaks to the on-going process of identity formation that students are encouraged to interrogate throughout the course.” The goal is not to create a perfect finished project to post on Instagram, but to gain familiarity with a process of re-thinking identity. Recording, editing, critiquing and re-editing are used to link reflection and action, potentially inviting a Freirian experience of “true communication” and “authentic thinking” into the classroom.
The Workplace
Neoliberalism is implicated again in The Globalization Tapes (2006), an essay/verité film devised, written and produced collectively by members of The Independent Plantation Workers’ Union of Sumatra – Perbbuni, in the plantation villages of Deli-Serdang Regency. The film was commissioned by the IUF (The International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations) who wanted the film to inspire workers to begin their own local research process as a path towards stronger unions. The film would be translated into ten languages and screened for 25 million workers[1]. A lesser known Joshua Oppenheimer was brought on to produce the film with Perbbuni, together with activists from IUF and a Jakarta based film cooperative called Offstream.
While the connection to Oppenheimer as a total outsider is less than ideal, he aligns himself with a process of learning alongside the plantation workers. Together they would:
“study the economics of globalisation, and use film as a research tool for investigating the workings of globalisation in their community, work place, and industry. I say “together” because we, too, knew little about globalisation, nothing about the economics and history of the industry in question. The film would be a document of this learning process…As such, the film would serve as an example of a model to be repeated by similar unions around the world.” [2]
Oppenhimer had books and films from England translated into Bahasa Indonesia, films which included Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s Hour of the Furnaces (1968), Patricio Guzman’s The Battle of Chile (1976), and Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare (1983). In his PhD thesis paper Oppenheimer writes that the plantation workers identified with Kidlat and that his film was what really inspired them to believe in their own project.
The film experiments with different formal gestures to encourage and document a coming into consciousness. They role-play conversations with financial institutions and narrate their own on-screen actions as a way of articulating and critically reflecting on conditions that plantation owners normalize, including poverty wages, exposure to poisonous chemicals, and inadequate healthcare. Archival footage prompts a late-night taboo-breaking discussion about the massacre of union workers, communists, and others that followed the US backed coup and the start of the Sukarno dictatorship.
By documenting the process of self-reflection and real-time learning, members of Perbbuni modeled their own confidence building, which offered itself as an example for other union members. At the beginning of the film a Perbbuni member says in voiceover:
“This film was made by workers. Everybody who made it, and everybody who appears in it…all are workers. And so if this film is shown to workers around the world, they will be encouraged. They’ll see that workers like us are not ignorant. We can train each other. They will start to think, if my brothers and sisters can do this – Yes, then we can too!”
Perbbuni’s goal was to model how a stronger, more informed union, could be built, by doing it themselves as the cameras rolled. It’s difficult to know what effect this had on other unions, but Perbbuni screened the film covertly for thousands throughout the Sumatran plantation belt.[3] In a 2010 report, there is some discussion of organizing efforts undertaken at various plantation communities, some of which were met with repression.
“To understand globalisation, we began with our own story…the forgotten and forbidden history of indonesian workers. We discovered that our story is the story of globalisation.”
Perbbuni
“After a film’s finished, it’s bullshit…What’s important for me is the process, what I discover.”
Wu Wenguang
The Family
The Folk Memory Project was initiated by Wu Wenguang, who is known as China’s first independent documentary filmmaker. Unlike a prior version of the project, in which Wu gave video cameras to villagers and invited them to tell their own stories [4], the Memory Project re-builds the connection between urbanized young people and their rural hometowns.
The project began as an effort to collect oral histories of family members who had lived through the Great Leap Famine of 1959-1961, a period in Chinese history that has been historically silenced or limited by “official” accounts [5]. It grew into an archive of interviews with over 1,100 elderly villagers, multiple documentaries, performances, and activist projects.
In the spirit of Third Cinema, this living archive is an antidote to official histories, as well as a container for the complexity of “homecoming.” According to Meiling Cheng, oral histories are “wild” – they can not be contained with precision, which is exactly what makes them antagonistic to hegemony [6]. They are also shaped by a process of negotiation – some family members did not want their stories shared with foreigners, in fear of retribution by the state or of being laughed at [7]. From Theater and Performance Studies scholar Jiayun Zhuang’s perspective,“these tensions allow participants to develop an understanding of the past that is dependent on and open to present-time participation and intersubjective exchange,” and often resolve into a form of community reciprocity (Zhuang 137).
Documentary media is just one layer in the process of retrieving and then embodying the flow of memories from generation to generation. Memory Hunger is a public performance developed by eight Memory Project filmmakers. The choreography reinforces the filmmakers’ connection to family members through interviews, which are projected behind them, as well as to one another while they share the stage. Through visceral embodiment, the performances attempt to translate collective memories, as processed by the filmmakers to an audience who have neither lived experience of famine nor direct contact with famine survivors [8
The performances took place in universities, bookstores, art festivals, and other venues in and outside of China.
Jiayun Zhuang writes that the circulation of participatory art projects throughout the larger Memory Project strengthens social bonds that “prevent communities from being subsumed into the instrumentality of capitalist cultural and economic imperatives (Zhuang 135).” She goes on to say that these projects initiate “gun xueqiu (a snowball effect, a term frequently used by team members), triggering other forms of involvement and participation both within the rural communities that are undergoing active memory-retrieval, and in the memory-representing activities conducted in urban areas (Zhuang 136). According to Zhuang these relationships have also led to voluntarily organized self-supporting networks in rural villages. One particularly endearing example is two children who organized a screening among their 8-15 year old peers and helped raise funds for a memorial for the village’s famine victims, a process documented in Zou Xueping’s The Children’s Village.
The fluid relationship between media creation, performance, and small scale activist projects strengthens relationships between family members, villagers, and those outside the intimate set of relations and negotiations in the rural communities.
The Neighborhood
Detroit Narrative Agency (DNA) is an emerging production company for Detroit born and based filmmakers that emerged out of the Allied Media Conference (AMC) in 2015.
The founders of DNA, many of whom concurrently run their own community organizations within Detroit, credit their approach to many years of involvement with the AMC, which revolves around the idea of “media based organizing.” Over the years, AMC has articulated nine traits of media-based organizing which include deep listening, honoring complexity, iteration, and facilitative leadership[9].
DNA’s first step as a media production company was to form an advisory team that sought input from Detroiters about their narrative priorities. They also performed an “audit” of media representations of Detroit, which they found were mostly authored by white filmmakers from outside Detroit [10]. Then DNA asked Detroiters to submit proposals for film projects, 8-15 of which would be funded with a 5,000$ grant. The selected films include titles like Femme Queen Chronicles, Take Me Home, Sidelots, Dangerous Times: Rebellious Responses, and Riding With Aunt D. Dot. Synopses can be seen here.
DNA and Allied Media Projects could be seen as an extension of what Thomas Allen Harris pointed out to the authors of an MIT funded field study on Co-creation:
“A focus of many of my mentors—William Greaves, St. Clair Bourne, Pearl Bowser, Marlon Riggs, Camille Billips—was critiquing dominant modes of representation that served to disenfranchise their communities while simultaneously empowering these communities by providing access to tools, a voice as well as modalities of storytelling that communities could use for self-representation. This process, and the community building it engendered, was considered in some cases just as important as the final film.”
Though they are more closely linked to industry and non-profits than other examples from this research, perhaps more than any other, DNA and the AMC offer models of production and distribution that build out of and rely on long-term coherence within communities.
Post Research Reflection
While these projects don’t all produce sustained relationships or introduce economically viable distribution models, they subvert status quo assumptions about what media can do.
In Third Cinema Updated, Teshome Gabriel writes:
Third Cinema is a relational art in that it also allows the spectator to create new relations, open new horizons, new possibilities of engagement with the work in whatever format it may be between filmmakers and film viewers…(the early Third Cinema filmmakers) wanted the social context of their work to be included within it.
In many ways, the goal of Third Cinema filmmakers is/was to produce the communities they sought to represent because, in a Fanonian sense, resistance would necessarily produce an entirely new kind of person, forged in the process of extinguishing the colonized paradigm.
A culture of individualism and the liberal message of reconciliation have created a model of documentary filmmaking that demands individual protagonists who triumph against the odds through the strength of their character.
I chose to highlight projects that document the process of building solidarity, projects that challenge those in front of and behind cameras to share stakes. As opposed to highly directed advocacy campaigns, these projects contain clues about how creativity and media can be valued for their capacity to forge relationships on a very basic, human level. In this sense, media becomes a glue, a reason to look and listen carefully, and to assume this state of heightened attention is shared.
While these projects may not engage with policy change, they are building relationships which can be aligned with future political projects. Projects like these may provide clues for how to lay the groundwork of resistance within a slippery neoliberal world order…
Footnotes
[1][2]
[3]Oppenheimer’s PhD thesis at the University of the Arts London
[4] In 2005, Wu gave DV cameras to 10 villagers and supported them in making films about their own lives. Wu was an outsider to these villages, and the complications and suspicion that arises as a result are well documented in Wu’s own film about the project called “Bare Your Stuff.” Wu says he failed to connect the process of filmmaking with the civic responsibility that was the priority of the villagers.
[5] Jiayun Zhauang citing Manning and Wemheuer 2011:10–11 (Zhuang 123)
[6] Meiling Cheng “insists upon the power of yeshi (unofficial his- tory; literally, “wild” histories comprised of folklore, personal memories, eyewitness accounts, and a miscellaneous collection of opinions, hearsay and gossip), Meiling Cheng suggests that we define unofficial history as amassing “those accounts of putative happenings and alleged reminiscences that are untamed and largely untamable by the powers that be” (2012:45).” (Zhuang 128)
[7][8] Jiayun Zhaung, “Remembering and Reenacting Hunger: Caochangdi Workstation’s Minjian Memory Project”
[9] https://alliedmedia.org/media-based-organizing
[10] https://wip.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/collective-wisdom-part-3/release/1#in-conversation-dna-if-youre-not-at-the-table-youre-on-the-menu