Abstract

Praxis is the organic and necessary integration of theory (thinking) and practice (doing) if one’s aims are political (changing). Since cinema’s invention, artists committed to social transformation have engaged in a media praxis: the using and theorizing of film (and its later-coming, sister forms, video, the telelvisual, and the digital), towards world- and self-changing. MEDIA PRAXIS is a web-site that continues and honors this tradition by making the most of today’s digital technologies. Its backbone is thirty theoretical texts, spanning close to 100 years of media history, and written by mediamakers who were active in social change. Then, 12 essays will be written for the page by specialists as entry-way essays. But the posting of all this media theory and history is not for mere contemplation, the celebration of words on a screen. Rather, the page creates possibilities to read and write about, as well as make media, as a mediated step towards action and interaction.

MEDIA PRAXIS brings the inspiring words and images of past media revolutions to the attention of contemporary audiences; puts ideas into action through pedagogic exercises, connections, and conversations that make both media theory and media making available to non-artists and non-academics; and links the political projects of contemporary media artists, activists, and intellectuals into collaborative dialogues and activities. MEDIA PRAXIS enacts the very tradition under scrutiny by using digital media to promote the circulation, archiving, and creation of a living media praxis.

Full Proposal

MEDIA PRAXIS:
A Radical Web-Site Integrating Theory, Practice & Politics

A Proposal to MediaCommons

By
Alexandra Juhasz
November 19, 2006

Table of Contents

What is MEDIA PRAXIS? 3
MEDIA PRAXIS: Theoretical Content 4
Site Structure for MEDIA PRAXIS: The Three Fixed (sort of) Parts 5
MEDIA PRAXIS: Practical Content. The four interactive elements 7

THE SLOGAN: 80 years of media theory about media practice 8
A Speculative Table of Contents Including Works to Choose From 10
Notes towards the first entry essay 14

What is MEDIA PRAXIS?
Praxis is the organic and necessary integration of theory (thinking) and practice (doing) if one’s aims are political (changing). We must think, understand and communicate in the robust place of ideas; we must touch, play and engage with the sensuous material of the world; we must link our theories and practices together and to the good work of making lived existence more just, humane, and complex. Since cinema’s invention, artists committed to social transformation have engaged in just such a media praxis: the using and theorizing of film (and its later-coming, sister forms, video, the telelvisual, and the digital), towards world- and self-changing. MEDIA PRAXIS is a web-site that continues and honors this tradition by making the most of today’s digital technologies. Its backbone is thirty theoretical texts, spanning close to 100 years of media history, and written by mediamakers who were active in social change. But their posting is not for mere contemplation, the celebration of words and images on a screen. Rather, we read and write about, as well as make media, as a mediated step towards action and interaction.
MEDIA PRAXIS brings the inspiring words and images of past media revolutions to the attention of contemporary audiences; puts ideas into action through pedagogic exercises, connections, and conversations that make both media theory and media making available to non-artists and non-academics; and links the political projects of contemporary media artists, activists, and intellectuals into collaborative dialogues and activities. MEDIA PRAXIS enacts the very tradition under scrutiny by using digital media to promote the circulation, archiving, and creation of a living media praxis.
MEDIA PRAXIS: Theoretical Content
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways;
the point is to change it.
Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

In Feurbach, Marx calls for “sensuous human activity” as well as contemplation, “changing of circumstances” and “self-changing”—production in the real world that links to alterations in consciousness and lived conditions. Feuerbach, and the theoretical legacy it produced, fosters the hopeful position that some human activity might not simply reproduce but could transform social existence in society. The legacy of a philosophy of praxis has emboldened artists to include media work as revolutionary practice within larger struggles for social transformation. While all of the arts have seen great works produced through an integrated practice and theory—praxis—the hundred-year history of the media arts has most neatly paralleled the political, technological and economic demands of modern and postmodern revolution. In this web-site, for the first time, 30 theoretical essays penned by politicized filmmakers from diverse times and cultures will be considered as one school of writing: that which emerges from an engagement in cultural politics within the media. A picture of cinema, and cinema history emerges that is optimistic, anti-corporate, agitational, intelligent, Marxist, and as often as not gendered female and multi-cultural. And a history of modernism and postmodernism emerges that is politically, as well as aesthetically motivated. This recasting of film theory, history, and studies through the on-line words of its engaged practitioners, rethinks film, film theory, media education, and field formation and begs activity and interactivity through media.

Site Structure for MEDIA PRAXIS. In three parts with 4 interactive elements (Note: ideas for the architecture of the site will improve if taken on by MediaCommons)

I. The site is broken into ten sections each featuring the writing of three maker/theorists.
1. Newly Soviet Russia, 1918-1925: Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov
2. The Popular Front: United States, France, Spain, 1930s: Joris Ivans, Jean Renoir, Bertolt Brecht
3. The New American Cinema, United States, 1940-65: Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas
4. Third Cinema in Latin America: 1960-70s: Fernando Solanas and Octavio
Getino, Julio Garcia Espinosa, Tomas Gutierrez Alea
5. 1968, France, and its Aftermath: Jean Luc Godard, Peter Wollen, Harun Faroki and Kaja Silverman, Jean-Luc Comoli and Jean Narboni
6. Ethnographic Film in the Decolonizing Third World, 1970-80s: Jean Rouch, David MacDougall, Trinh T. Minh-ha
7. Feminist Film: The UK and Americas, 1970-80s: Barbara Halpern-Martineau, Laura Mulvey, Pratibha Parmar, Trinh T. Minh-ha
8. Transatlantic Black Popular Culture, U.K. and U.S. 1980-90s: Isaac Julien, Marlon Riggs, Haile Gerima
9. AIDS Activist Video: The UK and Americas mid-80s-1990: John Greyson, Gregg Bordowitz, Alexandra Juhasz
10. Cyberspace: The internet, 1990-2000s: Brenda Laurel, David Blair, Allucquere Roseanne Stone

II. Ten artist/activist/intellectuals, chosen for their scholarly and political expertise, will be asked to write introductory essays to these ten periods. Their essays will set the historical, cultural, social, and intellectual context for the essays above. They may also contribute further bibliographic suggestions (and links). Authors under consideration are:
1. Newly Soviet Russia, Lev Manovich
2. The Popular Front: Tom Waugh
3. The New American Cinema, Paul Arthur/Bill Nichols
4. Third Cinema in Latin America: Coco Fusco
5. 1968, France, and its Aftermath: Peter Wollen/Chris Marker/Berenice Reynaud
6. Ethnographic Film in the Decolonizing Third World, Fatimah Tobing Rony/David MacDougall
7. Feminist Film: Laura Mulvey/ Trinh T. Minh-ha/Julia Lesage
8. Transatlantic Black Popular Culture, Isaac Julien
9. AIDS Activist Video: Alexandra Juhasz
10. Cyberspace: Kathleen Fitzpatrick
III. Alexandra Juhasz will write two, entry-way essays for the electronic-publication: one will set the theoretical framework, the other will instruct about practical and political possibilities. The first essay will create a disciplinary, theoretical, and intellectual framework for the site. Here, Juhasz will establish that an explicit linking of art, culture, revolution and philosophy has inspired a great many of the seminal works and theories of cinema history (see notes towards this essay beginning on p. 14). She will also demonstrate that a pursuit of revolutionary practice within the media has been an ongoing experiment and inspiration responsible for many of the decisive ideas and works of film history; and thus, her intention is also to challenge and refocus Cinema Studies’ theoretical canon. To do so, she will rely greatly on the 30 featured authors who have built this argument, as well as the 10 invited eassayists. Her essay will be constructed around thirty “slogans” (which will also serve as links) culled from the highlighted writing (see examples, pp 8-9).
The second article will also be organized around 30 slogans, these focused upon practical and political considerations: the working with stuff in and for the world. Here, Juhasz will rely upon fifteen years of teaching and her own committed media practice dedicated to the linking of theory, practice and politics: she will give nuts and bolts examples about how to teach media practice to non-artists; she will explain her college’s unique media arts education, organized around the course Media Arts for Social Justice that gets students into community-based non-profits; and she will provide the interactive and collective resources, detailed below.
MEDIA PRAXIS: Practical Content. The four interactive elements.

I. The 30 theory readings. Readers of the site should be able to add suggestions about and links to further theoretical readings written by engaged media practitioners that compliment those highlighted on the site. This would become a growing bibliography and/or database of primary theoretical documents.
II. The ten author pages. These authors will be able to alter and grow their contributions. There will be room on these pages for postings from or discussion between readers, creating a place for lively dialogue about the histor(ies) of media praxis.
Readers will be invited to write introductory essays to other movements in film/social revolution that are not currently represented. After veting of some sort, new strands in media history, with their associated theoretical texts, could be added to the page. Readers can also add background information, or bibliographic or media resources, about the ten periods highlighted on the page.
III. The entry essays. The second essay on teaching production through reading media theory will have room for conversation about pedagogy as well as a repository for syllabi. Students and activists making work from the theoretical essays and/or dialogue included in the site will be able to up-load short videos.
IV. Linking. The page will link, and promote dialogue, with contemporary social movements and media organizations.
The two introductory essays will be built upon slogans by the highlighted authors which will also serve as a link to their writing and images. Some slogans follow:
THE SLOGAN across 80 years of media theory about political media practice
It will be the art of the direct cinema of a slogan. Of communication that is just as unobstructed and immediate as the communication of an idea through a qualified word.
The epoch of the direct materialization of a slogan takes over
from the epoch of a slogan about material…
Sergei Eisentstein

Sergei Eisenstein
In The Strike we have the first instance of revolutionary art where the form has turned out to be more revolutionary than the content.

Dziga Vertov
Kino-eye as the possibility of making the invisible visible, the unclear clear, the hidden manifest, the disguised overt, the acted non-acted; making falsehood into truth.

Joris Ivens
You couldn’t stay neutral in Madrid.

We never forgot that we were in a hurry.

Jean Luc Godard
Art is a Special gun. Q: How do you explain the camera as a gun? A: Well, ideas are guns. A lot of people are dying from ideas and dying for ideas. A gun is a practical idea. And an idea is a theoretical gun.

Jonas Mekas
What was missing from my footage was myself: my attitude, my thoughts, my feelings in the moment I was looking at the reality that I was filming.

Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni
Cinema is the language through which the world communicates with itself.

Peter Woolen
The cinema cannot show the truth or reveal it because the truth is not out there in the real world waiting to be photographed.

Laura Mulvey
The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without simply rejecting it, transcending outdated or oppressive forms, and daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.

Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas
The cinema of revolution is at the same time one of destruction and construction: destruction of the image that neo-colonialization has created of itself and us, and construction of a throbbing, living reality which recaptures truth in its expression.

David MacDougall
No ethnographic film is merely a record of another society; it is always a record of the meeting between a filmmaker and that society.

The real crime of representation is representation itself.

Trinh T. Minh-ha
Difference as uniqueness or special identity is both limiting and deceiving.

Pratibha Parmar
As Asian women we have to place ourselves in the role of subjects creatively engaging in constructing our own images based both in our material and social conditions and in our visions and imaginations.

Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer
What is in question is not the expression of some lost origin or some uncontaminated essence in black film-language but the adoption of a critical voice that promotes consciousness of the collision of cultures and histories that constitute our very conditions of existence.

John Greyson
Intentionality is commonly a discredited concept in media criticism yet for any video artist making social change media it is a central issues.

Allucquere Rosanne Stone
The boundaries between the subject, if not the body, and the “rest of the world” are undergoing a radical refiguration, brought about in part through the mediation of technology.

A Speculative Table of Contents Including Many Great Works to Choose From
I. Introduction One, Alexandra Juhasz
II. Introduction Two, Alexandra Juhasz
III. 10 Commissioned Articles of Introduction to
IV. 30 theoretical contributions from the Archive
1. Newly Soviet Russia
Dziga Vertov: “We: Varient of a Manifesto”
“Kinoks: A Revolution”
“On the Organization of a Film Experiment Station”
“Birth of Kino-Eye”
“Kinopravda”
Sergei Eisenstein: “The Problem of the Materialist Approach to Form”
“Constanta (Whither The Battleship Potemkin)”
“Eisenstein on Eisenstein, the Director of Potemkin”
“Our October, Beyond the Played and the Non-Played”
“The Dramaturgy of Film Form (The Dialectical Approach to Film Form”
Lev Kuleshov: “The Tasks of the Artist in Cinema”
“The Art of Cinema”
“’Art’ Cinema”
“Cinema as the Fixing of Theatrical Action”
“Art, Contemporary Life and Cinema”
2. The Popular Front
Joris Ivans, selections from The Camera and I, 1969
Jean Renoir, selections from Ma Vie et Mes Films, 1974
Bertolt Brecht, selections from Brecht on Film and Radio, ed., Marc Silberman; and
“The Film, the Novel and Epic Theatre”
“The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication”
3. The New American Cinema
Maya Deren: “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film”
“Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality”
Stan Brakhage, selections from Essential Brakhage, 2001
Jonas Mekas: “Notes on the New American Cinema”
“The Diary Film”
4. Third Cinema in Latin America
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema”
Julio Garcia Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema”
Tomas Gutierrez Alea, The Viewer’s Dialectic”
Fernando Birri, “Cinema and Underdevelopment”
5. 1968, France, and its Aftermath:
Jean Luc Godard, selected texts from Kinopraxis, ed. Jack Flash, 1971
Peter Wollen, “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent D’Est”
Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism”
Harun Faroki and Kaja Silverman, “I Speak, Therefore I’m Not”
6. Ethnographic Film in the Decolonizing Third World
Jean Rouch, selections from Cine-Ethnography, 2003
David MacDougall, selections from Transcultural Cinema, 1998
Trinh. T. Minh-ha, “Difference: A Special Third World Issue” 1989
Coco Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance”
7. Feminist Film
Barbara Halpern-Martineau, “Talking About Our Lives and Experiences”
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
Pratibha Parmar, “Hateful Contraries: Media Images of Asian Women”
Trinh T. Minh-ha, selections from When the Moon Waxes Red, 1991
8. Transatlantic Black Popular Culture
Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, “De Margin and De Center”
“Black Is, Black Aint: Notes on De-Essentializing Black Identities”
Marlon Riggs, “Unleash the Queen”
Haile Gerima, “Triangular Cinema, Breaking Toys, and Diknesh vs Lucy”
Laleen Jayamanne, “Speaking of ‘Ceylon’ A Clash of Cultures”
Pratibha Parmar, “That Moment of Emergence”
9. AIDS Activist Video
John Greyson, “Strategic Compromises: AIDS and Alternative Video Practices”
Catherine Saalfield, “Not Just Black and White”
“On the Make: Activist Video Collectives”
Ray Navarro, “Eso, me esta pasanado”
Alexandra Juhasz
Jean Carlomusto, “Do It! Safer Sex Prom for Girls and Boys Comes of Age”
10. Cyberspace: The internet, 1990-2000
David Blair, “Metavirtue and Subreality”
Michael Benedikt, “Cyberspace: The First Steps”
Allucquere Roseanne Stone, “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?”
Brenda Laurel, “Utopian Entrepreneur”

Notes towards the first entry essay by Alexandra Juhasz
MEDIA PRAXIS differs from others because its media theory is written by film, video and digital producers. Furthermore, to qualify for its web-pages, a theorizing-maker must be engaged in understanding the media’s unique capacities for world and self-changing. Its thirty authors have contributed to an ongoing project, as old as cinema itself, that links culture, theory and politics, in the 20th century, through mediation technologies and indebted to Marxist theories. While I name this a radical web-site in that it directly refers to what Marx, in Theses on Feuerbach calls “revolutionary practice,” a project of interpreting and changing the world, this site will be equally radical in that it makes a demand on the discipline of media studies, and perhaps others as well, to account for the theoretical and political consequences of the boundaries it continues to raise even as it often promotes its own radicality. Media studies, like women’s or race studies, was founded in a 1960s challenge to established structures and hierarchies—openly contesting who might make a proper academic, what she might properly study, and what questions she might properly ask—however, there are some structures and hierarchies that have remained improper to breach. It is my contention that Media Studies maintains the boundaries between theory, practice, and politics with real consequences about what and how we can know. In my highly inter-disciplinary and even perhaps radical field, we have all but disavowed praxis.
In 1922, Lenin informed his minister of culture that “you must remember that of all the arts for us the most important is the cinema.” It is the goal of this project to demonstrate that early Soviet cinema is not the exception, even as it is the most heralded of such convergences; rather, the explicit linking of art, culture, revolution and philosophy has inspired a great many of the seminal works and theories of cinema history.
I organize the web-site into ten chronological moments where media is theorized, by someone who is making it, and as a vital component of political struggle. The site highlights theoretical writing from ten periods, commencing with the years surrounding the Russian revolution, then moving to the Popular Front in France, Germany and the US in the 1930s, to the beatniks and underground denizens of American bohemia in the New American Cinema of the 40s and 50s, and then to the cinema connected to the decolonization of the third world in the 60s, and in France and the UK in and after 1968, then to feminism and the black Atlantic of the 70s and 80s, AIDS and ethnographic film in the 1980s and 90s, and concluding with media organizing that occurs in and about cyberspace in our time. Most of what can be read here has already been canonized in textbooks—from Sergei Eisenstein to Laura Mulvey, Isaac Julien to Trinh T. Minh-ha—but these seminal theoretical productions have been considered in isolation from each other: as either the hallowed words of a great artist or as part of a national or genre tradition. In the web-sites’ pages, these theorizing voices speak amongst and to other politicized filmmakers. By making clear the theoretical affinities that occur across such vast political, global and chronological landscapes, a picture of cinema, and cinema history emerges that is anti-corporate, agitational, intelligent, Marxist, and as often as not gendered female and non-white.
MEDIA PRAXIS demonstrates a filmmakers’ ontology of film: what filmmakers know and learn about the medium they shoot, edit, and project because they engage in its sensuous activity. Unlike most collections of writing by filmmakers, the web-site relies upon neither interviews nor memoirs. This challenges the distinction typically drawn between those capable of and qualified to make systematic claims about the media (its theorists) and those whose ruminations are about the particular, daily, and technical (its producers). I am not the first to note that this bifurcation, in and of itself, leads to a “theoretical crisis.” The founding of Media, Cultural and Minority Studies in the 1960s and 70s were rooted in an energizing political and theoretical investment in practice, daily activity, the personal and the political. “Now I think the true crisis in cultural theory, in our time, is between this view of the work of art as object and the alternative of art as a practice,” writes Raymond Williams in his 1950s “Marxist Cultural Studies.” He continues: “What this can show us here about the practice of analysis is that we have to break from the common procedure of isolating the object and then discovering its components. On the contrary we have to discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions.”
The theory that makes up the backbone of this web-site, written by those who discover the nature of a practice by practicing, seeks less to understand the isolated object, the aesthetics and formal structures of film, as it does the nature of its practice and its conditions: what happens when it is made, seen, and used, how it is financed, who gets to see it, and what happens after the screening. In these web=pages, the film object is often over-shadowed by attempts to theorize the extra-textual, such as collective production and radical reception. When makers theorize, political-economic considerations regarding access to both authorship and media education are also definitive. Furthermore, unlike what defines typical anthologies of cinema theory which might focus upon cinema aesthetics or narrative, analyses of realism, documentary, and truth are primary. Thus, most theory-writing producers attempt to prove that realist or documentary cinema is the ideal medium for this work and that the artist/intellectual is the worker best suited for this labor towards the struggle. The collected articles theorize praxis itself: how do ideas exist in action, and how is this related to the project of radical pedagogy? Over this 100-year theoretical tradition, there are notable changes. While the film movements from the first half of the century are rooted in local, often national struggles for change, a noteworthy adjustment occurs in the sixties, where cross-cultural, global, or identity-based politics of representation and personal liberation take dominance.
Who, we might ask, is better qualified to theorize the nature of a practice than its practitioners? And why is this most obvious truism such a bitter pill? Perhaps for the majority of scholars whose ideas come from their heads alone, there is the fear that their theories will be proven inadequate. But Marx cautions us in Feuerbach: “The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.” Perhaps for the discipline, one that moved so quickly from margin to center, its legacy of both partisan politics and hands-on practice must be closeted like so much Marxist dirty linen. Serious academic disciplines must claim a theoretical, not a political lineage at their core. My web-site challenges Media Studies’ tautological advancement towards theory abstracted from politics and practice.
For dreams of political and social change (of the world and academia) were fundamental to the field’s formation in the 1960s, not just the films and writings it considers. Leftists, feminists, anti-racists and others engaged in and emboldened by a Marxist, post-structuralist critique of education, the arts, and culture created new fields that challenged what could be studied, by whom, and for what ends. In one of a series of anthologized essays in Reinventing Film Studies, a collection dedicated to remembering and rethinking the formation of the field, Tessa Perkins points to a crisis caused by the repression of these messy beginnings. “In this crisis both the contributions of theory and the place of politics have played a significant role—to the extent that some wish, to all intents and purposes, to abandon both and others are determined that the former should cleanse itself of all contamination by the latter, fantasizing, perhaps, that a pseudo-scientific objectivity will emerge from the funeral pyre.” Now, as Cinema and Media Studies enters its maturity, perhaps we must admit that the crisis has been contained. The proper places of theory, practice and politics have been settled. Cinema and Media Studies are first scholarly, in that they apply pseudo-scientific theories to texts; then political, in that a relation between text and culture is foundational to the field; and are only nominally practical, in that media scholars might consider the work of making media (by its producer) as itself related to texts under scrutiny, while any practical component to the critic’s own work would be, of course, taboo.
For a discipline that formed itself around the breakdown of more traditional disciplinary boundaries, objects, and methods of study, there is a remarkable clarity in the production and maintenance of our disciplinary education (Media Studies upstairs, Film Production below; scholars at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, makers at the University Film and Video Association). Fears abound: about vocational training, soft thinking, creativity. Even as our materialist forefathers fought for a link to everyday activity, our bosses in the academy, even the feminist ones, want work created in the traditional, removed ways. But who among us doesn’t recognize the contradiction here? In another essay from Reinventing Film Studies, Gill Branston explains the stakes of such academic politics by looking to “ the histories of Western academic theorizing…(which echo) the gendered and classed language with which ‘theory’ is often justified: said to possess ‘rigor,’ ‘proper distance/objectivity’ as opposed to the ‘emotion’ and ‘instinct’ of raw encounters with the object of study.”
Just as women’s colleges maintain the most thoroughly functional closet in academia (you think we have too many lesbians here, well, actually, you’re right, so we’re all going to live and work painfully maintaining we don’t, that we aren’t, at great cost to us, individually, but to benefit the institution we love), my discipline flaunts its theoretical muscle to overcompensate for the feelings, passion, and commitment just below the surface. But of course, while the field may have wanted to closet me, and perhaps you as well, it is has also supported me in my idiosyncratic career of making, thinking about and teaching committed media. This contradiction, as well, seems important. Needless to say, I chose my graduate education in Cinema, drawn to the promise and history of a young discipline that claimed to be “representing the point at which theory, politics and the academy intersect.” In the 1980s, I was a graduate student at NYU and an AIDS activist videomaker. I was supported to write my dissertation about a media movement in which I was an active participant. In that work, AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video and in later projects where I made and theorized feminist or queer film as part of those political movements, I also marked myself as a participant in the very tradition of media praxis I map in the web-site with the same name. I name my role in this history not to mark my prowess, but quite the opposite, for MEDIA PRAXIS focuses upon what we theorize and learn about the media when commitment and engagement are more valued than artistic or intellectual genius. I make video, along with teaching, scholarly writing, and organizing—to speak with different audiences, in multiple settings, using a range of tactics, so as to address real-world conditions that matter to me. This web-site continues the dialogue in another medium.
But perhaps not surprisingly in these post-feminist, neo-conservative times, we shirk, as does our culture, and the institutions of higher education that support us, from activities involving our bodies and passions that are undertaken in the world, a messy place connected to but much bigger than any of our philosophies about it can ever be. But while much of our field’s theory, like many of its films, were made to be used, touched, and played with through intense engagements with the people around us, I am afraid that this part of our Marxist and feminist legacy is quick to be named but much less often practiced in the flesh.
Thus, MEDIA PRAXIS simply prompts us to know film theory, history, and studies not as something written on paper, the mark of some other’s formidable mind, but as a thing that was made to be used and re-made by us, in our world, towards what matters most. I want the theorizing that has been born from sensuous human engagement with the medium and the world to be granted the central place it deserves in the history and current shape of our discipline. This because I want to pass and together chew on and make use of the theoretical legacy of “revolutionary practice,” a 100 year old project of interpreting and changing the world with film, this so that present-day theorist/makers can learn from and expand upon these magnificent and flawed ideas to contribute to the real world changes that we all know must happen here, and soon, in this radically media-saturated world in great need of a counter, intelligent, angry, and artful media praxis.

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