MediaCommons

Monday January 23 , 2012 – Aniko Imre  (University of Southern California) presents: A Lesbian History of Socialism

Tuesday January 24, 2012 – Rachel Raimist (The University of Alabama) presents: Rap Video Remake: Activism (Re)Mixed With Viewer Generated Documentary Footage

Wednesday January 25, 2012 – Fiona Lee (The City University of New York) presents: Reading the Transnational in the Local. Or, How the Local Travels: The Case of Survival Guide Untuk Kampung Radioaktif

Thursday January 26, 2012 – Mary Erickson (University of Oregon) presents: The Teen Girls of Reel Grrls: Producing Media Activism

Friday January 27, 2012 – Sheila Schroeder (University of Denver) presents: Collaborative Audience Engagement: A New Model for Activist Filmmakers

Theme week organized by Phoebe Brown (Unblinking Eye Productions) and Elizabeth Strickler (Georgia State University)

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  A Lesbian History of Socialism by Aniko Imre

 Since 1989, gay and lesbian organizations have tentatively begun to emerge in the postsocialist region. Joining the European Union in the mid-2000s put additional pressure on new member states to extend all citizenship rights to LGBT people. Pink marches, gay pride parades and film festivals have been regularly organized since the 1990s. But this limited visibility has also provoked a significant backlash. Even the most basic advances towards legal equality and moral acceptance are obstructed in a nationalistic climate, where heterosexism is deeply normalized and institutionalized. Given the dreary landscape, it is all the more crucial to underscore breakthrough achievements in visualizing gay and lesbian agency. One such milestone is the recent documentary film Secret Years (Eltitkolt évek, 2009), directed by Mária Takács. As the title implies, the film’s mission is to chronicle, for the first time, the untold, unseen history of a lesbian subculture during socialism as it is remembered by eleven women who lived through the period in Hungary. As the trailer indicates, much of the political power of the film is in its low-key tone, a quiet intimacy between interviewer and her subjects, who do not feel any evident pressure to perform. The political intervention is in rendering lesbians always already visible within national culture. As it transpires from the women’s stories, several of them had lived in happy heterosexual marriages and raised children before they came out. Their very appearance and stories defy the stereotypes of man-hating and self-hating, tragic lesbians. All of them talk about their secret years – decades – in hiding, the pain of loneliness and rejection, the surreptitious joy of finding underground communities and places to meet, and the passage to self-recognition and coming out. They do so without self-pity, in a tone of profound, self-aware humor. In fact, if there is something that sets off this group from the moral majority, it is precisely that they are not afraid. Their fearlessness establishes the majority’s fear of gays and lesbians as irrational and panicked.

One of the merits of the film is that it defamiliarizes the history of the socialist decades, which has been told obsessively, but always from the perspective of a taken-for-granted national community. An alternative history appears here, which progresses from the tentative attempts of individuals to find partners in the 1960s and 70s to the constitution of a robust underground community concentrated in gay bars and other meeting places in and around Budapest by the 1990s. Secret Years grows out of the work of a Budapest-based lesbian activist film collective. It marks the collective’s progression from earlier, playful short films that provided the first images of identification for lesbians in the early 2000s to addressing mainstream society in a way that renders lesbianism something that has always been part of ‘normal’ national societies. The film’s status is also validated by the fact that it was produced by Forum Film, a prestigious documentary film studio, with partial support from the Hungarian Motion Picture Foundation. While these developments are to be applauded as progressive steps towards normalizing homosexuality, the film has still been kept in a glass cage in subtle ways in Hungary. The annual Film Forum, a festival venue that exhibits new Hungarian films, refused to include the film in its regular competition, relegating it to an ‘underground’ status. The film has circulated in art cinemas and special screenings, and has been on a steady festival tour abroad, but has not been able to penetrate commercial venues and reach a wider audience.

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  Rap Video Remake: Activism (Re)Mixed … by Rachel Raimist

Raptivist  Rapper B. Dolan posted a music video remake of NWA’s “F*ck the Police” on YouTube on December 8, 2011, in connection to occupy movements, a month after alleged violence and media blackout of occupy evictions. In less than three days, “Film the Police” reached over 70,000 views, big numbers for an indie video and homemade grassroots activist documentary alike.

Rhode Island-based Sage Francis kicks off the track as NWA’s Dr. Dre who passes the digital mic to B.Dolan as Ice Cube, then rapper/activist Toki Wright of Minneapolis as MC Ren, and finally to Jasiri X of Pittsburgh, as Eazy E. Filmed performances in each city are intercut with readily available online activist video. Video director Mason Johnson, a Utah-based filmmaker, provides us example of clever collaboration in the digital age. Through form and content, this crew encourages community, collaboration, and CopWatching with iPhones, Blackberrys, flip cameras and even Canon’s hi-definition 7D, over a track produced Buddy Peace, who is from London. Created in the tradition of activist rapper Jasiri X’s remix videos, this videos works in resistance to mainstream media’s (mis)representations through the art of rip and remix.

Here rap, a megaphone for activist themes (anti-police brutality and community organizing), reaches a broad audience. In the tradition of hip-hop’s remix culture (see Copyright Criminals, the documentary on hip-hop’s creative bricolage charged with infringement on corporate profit), YouTubers are simultaneously (potential) contributors and viewers. YouTube as archive for (free) footage and simultaneously the distribution platform, offers possibilities for endless creativity, as long as YouTube exists in unpoliced forms. The other dangers: don’t get arrested or shot while filming, get video play (viewer hits) but as the hip-hop euphemism urges, don’t get played out (as in overplayed, used, tacky, fake, or seemingly disingenuous), and of course, don’t get prosecuted for copyright infringement! Also important here is the video’s affirmative answer to the question, “Are Cameras the New Gun?” Filming the police is well within your legal rights, upheld by a recent Supreme Court ruling. Still, the police continue to confiscate citizen cameras and attempt to prosecute those who film them.

B. Dolan’s belief that music can be a powerful tool in sparking people’s awareness, shows that his carefully crafted lyrics send the timely and powerful message: We the people are the only real media we got.

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  Reading the Transnational in the … by Fiona Lee

When Malaysian filmmaker Tan Chui Mui heard about protests against Lynas Corporation’s construction of a rare earths refinery near her hometown in Gebeng, Pahang, she rallied the film community to produce an online video campaign. Launched in November 2011, Survival Guide Untuk Kampung Radioaktif (Survival Guide for Radioactive Village) comprises short films that complement activists’ efforts in raising awareness about the health and environmental hazards posed by the factory’s radioactive waste, challenging the government’s claim that the Australian company’s foreign direct investment promotes national economic interest.  

With one exception, the films use comedy to raise awareness. Without overt references to Lynas, humor allows the films to broach a politically fraught subject with their target audience. In the Malay language and deploying kampung folklore, such as Yeo Joon Han’s use of orang minyak as an allegorical device, the films appeal primarily to Gebeng’s Malay kampung residents who are directly affected, yet remain disinterested in the protests because of alleged bribery and threats. Furthermore, as parodied by Liew Seng Tat’s pieces, Lynas criticism has been censored in the government controlled Malay press. Explains producer, Foo Fei Ling, protestors have been undermined as protecting ethnic Chinese and political partisan interests, the latter impression further fueled by Opposition MP, Fuziah Salleh’s appearance in Woo Ming Jin’s film. 

Whereas humor engages an alienated audience, Tan’s poignant documentary about a 1980s incident at Mitsubishi’s rare earths plant in neighboring Perak demonstrates the common stakes involved for Gebeng’s residents. Emphasizing a mother’s sacrificial love for her son, born severely disabled due to radioactive waste exposure, the film bridges cultural divides, with subtitles reaching multilingual audiences. 

Although tailored to a specific demographic, the films have traveled widely, hinting at the medium’s potential in reframing a local issue into a transnational one. At community screenings elsewhere in the country, they have prompted conversations about local environmental concerns, although subtitles posed a barrier to audiences unused to reading while watching. The films are also available on Tudou.com, the Youtube equivalent of China, the world’s biggest rare earths manufacturer, and will be screened at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Ironically, the films have yet to reach its target audience, who have limited Internet access, although plans are afoot to distribute DVDs to them, packaged as free entertainment.

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  The Teen Girls of Reel Grrls: … by Mary Erickson

Reel Grrls is a Seattle-based organization that teaches digital media production skills and media justice and empowerment to teenage girls. The students participate in workshops to produce short videos, becoming equipped with the vocabulary and technical skills to speak about representations of gender, race, and sexuality in the media, media concentration, and other issues. Additionally, the girls have the potential, through digital (primarily online) distribution, to reach audiences. Their content is not produced in a vacuum. What’s more – and just as important – Reel Grrls provides a space for girls to learn digital technology in an all-female environment, a shift from the typically male-dominated production that mixed-gender classes tend to foster.

One of the defining moments in Reel Grrls’ history came in May 2011, when the organization tweeted, “OMG! @FCC Commissioner Baker voted 2 approve Comcast/NBC merger & is now lving FCC for A JOB AT COMCAST?!?” The organization had been receiving corporate sponsorship from Comcast for its flagship summer program but, when a Comcast executive heard about the tweet, the company pulled its funding. Although Comcast backpedaled and reinstated the funding, Reel Grrls received over 500 unsolicited donations, resulting in $24,000, and broke funding ties with the cable company.

Reel Grrls founder Malory Graham reflected that this situation allowed Reel Grrls to “walk the walk” with regards to the organization’s promotion of media justice. This debacle demonstrated to the girls that, despite the magnitude and influence of Comcast as a media corporation, a small organization and, by extension, its students, could uphold the principles that drive their work. Many of the students’ media projects in the summer of 2011 used this incident as a jumping-off point to produce critiques of big media.  Comcast agreed to air these shorts on Comcast On Demand (a move that opens up a whole other line of discussion for another time).

In the media production environment that tends to privilege white male adult voices, it is encouraging to see spaces in which teen girls from a range of racial, ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds learn the tools necessary to upend and challenge dominant media messages.

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  Collaborative Audience Engagement: A … by Sheila E. Schroeder

At a University Film and Video Association (UFVA) conference two years ago, I organized a panel around what was then a newish trend in documentary filmmaking, Audience Engagement, the process of moving a film’s audience from passive viewing to active involvement. The first question asked by a colleague started with a deep, penetrating sigh that belied his exhaustion: “So, what you’re telling me is that in addition to all the work I go through to make my film, I now have to build an audience, encourage them to take action, convince organizations working on similar issues to squeeze my film into their priorities, and design a tool to assess all this? Oh, and I still have a full-time job as a college professor.” And then he sighed again.

I feel his fatigue. It’s not easy being an activist filmmaker and, and, and….

So, when I was invited to contribute SoleJourney, a film I co-directed with Kate Burns to a first-of-its-kind collaborative audience engagement effort spearheaded by Working Films, I jumped at the opportunity. Their campaign, Reel Equality, is unique in that it provides six different films to North Carolinians to use in their effort to defeat a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. Working Films is collaborating with Equality North Carolina and Human Rights Campaign, tapping into existing constituencies (churches, community groups and schools) and making it easy to conduct a screening. (See their Tool Kit).

This model, of grouping similarly themed films to address sociocultural concerns, poses interesting possibilities especially for film activists who may not have the skill set, time or energy to take the next steps with their film. Furthermore, it’s often a hard sell to write up audience engagement as “productivity” for more traditional tenure and promotion committees.

Certainly there are questions to consider in using outside providers to conduct audience engagement campaigns, just as we question third-party distributors. DIY audience engagement for those of us scrambling to make our films can stand for “Do It? Yikes!” Nevertheless, knowing there might be additional ways to use your film to enact social change and that there are experts available to help, well, this makes me want to sigh…with relief.

Please see other the other 6 film clips here.