by Diane Lenertz
After watching Mosquita y Mari, I became interested in the methodologies that director Aurora Guerrero employed in making the film. To fund the film, Guerrero raised $115,000 in individual donations on Kickstarter. She then developed an internship program to create the film, involving the youth and community members of Huntington Park, LA, where the film is set. Each head of department mentored young interns, whose labor and expertise on the neighborhood was instrumental in creating the film.
I hadn’t heard about this model of filmmaking before, and it struck me as a production model that could embody Third Cinema today. It was a film not just about, but by a community. But still, authorship of the film still belonged squarely to Guerrero as the writer and director of the film. This made me wonder what other current projects use similar methods of production, and how communal authorship could be. This line of inquiry led me to research Participatory Video as a methodology. As I researched more, however, I realized that Mosquita y Mari is not an example of Participatory Video.
Participatory Video (PV) is a model of media creation in which a community is trained on video production and then creates their own film, often about social issues that they specifically face. The roots of PV are traced to a 1967 project by the National Film Board of Canada. Donald Snowden and filmmaker Colin Low went to Fogo Island, a remote island in Newfoundland, Canada to film the ten separate communities of fisherman speak about the issues they faced: need for organization, anger at the government for making decisions that affected them with no community input, resentment toward the idea of resettlement.
Snowden and Low then screened these interviews all over Fogo Island to other residents. Residents who had not been talking about these issues face to face were then able to listen to each other, find a common cause, and begin to organize with each other. Snowden realized that these screenings were an integral part of the process of consciousness raising. These films were used both to connect isolated residents of Fogo Island and express concerns to those in power.
Wendy Quarry details the perceived impact of the project in The Fogo Process: An Experiment in Participatory Communication:
“There was controversy back at the university about what the political consequences for the institution would be because of the blatant criticisms of the government that occurred in the films. After some discussion, it was decided that the Premier and his cabinet should view the films. This was phenomenal since it allowed fishermen to talk to cabinet ministers. It was also successful: the Minister of Fisheries, Aiden Maloney, asked to be able to respond to the commentaries. The government point-of-view was filmed through him and shown back to the communities. This brought about a two-way flow of knowledge between community members and decision makers. From this point things began to happen on their own. The films simply helped contribute to an island-wide sense of community and assisted people in looking for alternatives to resettlement.”
This version of events emphasizes the power of a film project to incite community organizing that brings about a better outcome for members of the community. The methodologies of PV have been taken forward into the modern age with the intention of consciousness raising and organizing.
According to Insights into Participatory Video, a Handbook for the Field by Nick and Chris Lunch, Participatory Video is the following process:
- Participants (men, women and youth) rapidly learn how to use video equipment through games and exercises.
- Facilitators help groups to identify and analyse important issues in their community by adapting a range of Participatory Rural Apraisal (PRA)-type tools with participatory video techniques (for example, social mapping, action search, prioritising, etc. See ‘Chambers’ in Appendix 7, References).
- Short videos and messages are directed and filmed by the participants.
- Footage is shown to the wider community at daily screenings.
- A dynamic process of community-led learning, sharing and exchange is set in motion.
- Completed films can be used to promote awareness and exchange between various different target groups. InsightShare has worked with pastoralists, farmers, marginalised communities and youth in rural and urban settings, street children, refugees and asylum seekers, people with mental health problems, learning difficulties and physical disabilities (see Part Five, Case Studies).
- Participatory video films or video messages can be used to strengthen both horizontal communication (e.g. communicating with other communities) and vertical communication (e.g. communicating with decision-makers).
As I researched more, with some optimism about Participatory Video as a means of resistance and social change, I saw many articles about PV on international NGO websites, with case studies, how-tos, glossy photos, and claims about “empowerment.” It started to smell of saviorism and neoliberalism, and I began to look into the critiques of PV. I saw that Participatory Video as it is today is almost always a top down, aid or research based methodology, with a filmmaker going to a community that is not their own to help. It is not, as I originally presumed, truly community led or radical in nature.
In Critiquing the politics of participatory video and the dangerous romance of liberalism (2016), Shannon Walsh puts forward the argument that PV often employs a short-term, individualistic approach that suggests individuals are the key to changing their own conditions. She says PV as a methodology does not recognize the systemic oppression that has created the issues being faced. She calls into question if PV can ever really challenge power structures.
Walsh says:
“…there is a hopeful naivety,or a ‘cruel optimism’ as Lauren Berlant (2011) puts it, around the possibilities offered by participatory video. It seems an almost patronising denial of the harsh realities of everyday life when we fantasise that lack of confidence is at the root of the problem. It is also a dangerous, if optimistic, denial of reality to believe that by telling stories of injustice,
justice will be served. Convincing marginalised people to take this ’empowered voice’ approach can also inhibit or preclude the development o fother strategies of resistance and survival. While some types of concerns can effectively be addressed through a better understanding of issues at hand, for example identifying safety conditions in schools (Mitchell 2011), larger structural inequalities must be tackled through a range of tactics and strategies.
…The emphasis on those without visual literacy, who must be given the tools to ‘speak’, and who need an intermediary to do so, all harken back to the conditions of a colonial encounter.”
I believe that there must be examples of grassroots, collective, participatory models of filmmaking that represent Third Cinema today. After my research, I don’t see Participatory Video, at least as it is widely practiced, as an example of Third Cinema today. It is not a guerrilla cinema, it is production mediated still by neocolonial power structures
Sources:
https://socialfilms.org/home-2/participatory-video/
https://aspect.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/6.-Part-fil-Andrew-Irving-A4-Guide.pdf
https://www.npr.org/2012/03/07/147586107/in-mosquita-y-mari-a-tale-of-self-and-community
https://www.popmatters.com/164954-interview-with-aurora-guerrero-2495801265.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_video
https://www.nfb.ca/film/vtr_st_jacques/
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1B8fjDo3hXtEZb67PfdiaQ2Aqpv2WCRSG
https://www.scribe.org/wetell/we-tell-fifty-years-participatory-community-media
https://web.archive.org/web/20011104141440/http://www.uoguelph.ca/~snowden/fogo.htm
https://cnxus.org/resource/how-to-make-a-participatory-video-in-11-simple-steps/
https://www-jstor-org.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/stable/44131869