Utopia and Reality: Documentary, Activism and Imagined Words 9781786835246, 9781786835253

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New Dimensions in Science Fiction

Utopia and Reality

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New Dimensions in Science Fiction

Series Editors Professor Pawel Frelik University of Warsaw Professor Patrick B. Sharp California State University, Los Angeles

Editorial Board Grace Dillon Portland State University Tanya Krzywinska Falmouth University Isiah Lavender III Louisiana State University Roger Luckhurst Birkbeck University of London John Rieder University of Hawai‘i

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Utopia and Reality Documentary, Activism and Imagined Worlds Edited by

Simon Spiegel, Andrea Reiter and Marcy Goldberg

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS 2020

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© The Contributors, 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS. www.uwp.co.uk British Library CIP Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78683-524-6 eISBN 978-1-78683-525-3 The rights of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Typeset by Marie Doherty Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Melksham

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Series Editors’ Preface

Science fiction (SF) is a global storytelling form of techno-scientific modernity which conveys distinct experiences with science, technology and society to a wide range of readers across centuries, continents and cultures. The New Dimensions in Science Fiction series aims to capture the dynamic, worldwide and media-spanning dimensions of SF storytelling and criticism by providing a venue for scholars from multiple disciplines to explore their ideas on the relations of science and society as expressed in SF.

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix Contributors xi Acknowledgements xiii Introduction: Utopian Realities

1

Andrea Reiter and Simon Spiegel

1

Reality and Utopia: A Conversation with Lyman Tower Sargent

17

Lyman Tower Sargent and Simon Spiegel

Part 1: Tracing Utopia 2

Utopia Revisited: Reading Dziga Vertov’s Man with 27 a Movie Camera in the Light of the Utopian Tradition Susanna Layh

3

Neither Fact nor Fiction: Made in Secret as a Utopian Education in Desire

56

Peter Seyferth

4

The Utopia of the Caliphate: Reading ISIS Propaganda Videos as Utopian Texts

85

Simon Spiegel

Part 2: Alternative Documentary Politics 5

Living and Dying with Water: Indigenous Histories and Critical Bioregionalism in The Pearl Button

115

Matthew Holtmeier

6

Prospectivity in Political Documentaries

138

Andrea Reiter

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viii Contents

7

Practising Hope: Ecofeminism, Documentary and Community Engagement

167

Chelsea Wessels

Part 3: New Forms of Documentary Activism 8

Trans-utopia: Documenting Real and Imagined Cities

191

Daniel Schwartz, Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou, Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner

9

Post-utopian Interventions by Students: Interactive Documentary and Micro-revolutions

211

Dale Hudson

10

Documentary Dreams of Activism and the Arab Spring

238

Jane M. Gaines

Index

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259

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Illustrations

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1

3.2 3.3

3.4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4, 4.5 5.1

5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 6.1 6.2 6.3

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Kino-eye (00:14:13) 30 In the viewing hall (01:03:33) 39 The cameraman, creator of the city (00:56:13) 42 The camera monitoring the city (00:27:06) 43 The demolition of the past (01:05:17) 48 Screening party with Muffy LaRue, nerdgirl and 64 J. D. Superstar (screenshot is lightened up for printing purposes; video is much darker) (08:41) Kissing scene with Professor University, Mr Pants 66 and Monster (with camera) (29:46) Discussion scene with nerdgirl, Hugh Jorgen, Muffy 74 LaRue and Professor University (and Mr Pants’s knee) (1:20:43) Manifesto scene with Monster (02:12) 78 Health Services in the Islamic State 94 One of the many charts in The Structure of 97 the Khilafah The title of Return of the Gold Dinar 100 Return of the Gold Dinar mixes different kinds of 101 source material Landscape shots that emphasise the beauty of 119 the Chilean coast and water’s role in shaping the bioregion Supposed stars as they coalesce into waves 124 The archipelago of rain viewed from the troposphere 125 The stomach/bellybutton of one of the painted 133 Selk’nam Speculative rumination on what is ‘unreal’ 135 TV music video clip during the Croatian military 145 offensive UN General Alain Forand recounts the situation 147 Žbanić talks to a Sarajevan resident 152

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x Illustrations

6.4

The street corner as a starting point for socio-political 154 reflections 7.1 Steingraber speaking on the steps of the Capitol 174 building 7.2 Steingraber being interviewed in Bârlad 175 7.3 Cheshire, Ohio and the Gavin Power Plant 179 7.4 Present-day Cheshire, Ohio 181 7.5 Community members attend a meeting with the 185 Ohio EPA 8.1 Torre David in Caracas 202 8.2, 8.3 Inside Torre David 204 8.4 to 8.6 Gran Horizonte 206 9.1 Home page for Lahore Landing, An Interactive 218 Documentary 9.2 Navigation of images and videos in Lahore Landing, 221 An Interactive Documentary 9.3 Home page for The Black Gold – A Web Documentary 225 9.4 Data visualisations in The Black Gold – A Web 230 Documentary

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Contributors

Jane M. Gaines is Professor of film at Columbia University and author of three award-winning books. In 2018 she was given the Distinguished Career Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Marcy Goldberg is a freelance film historian, media consultant, university lecturer and translator based in Zurich. Matthew Holtmeier is Assistant Professor and Co-director of the film studies minor at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of Contemporary Political Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Dale Hudson is Associate Professor in the film and new media programme at New York University Abu Dhabi. Susanna Layh is Senior Lecturer at the Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Augsburg, Germany. Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou is a filmmaker and researcher based in Zurich, where he teaches urban research methods and film-making at ETHZ, and collaborates with the interdisciplinary design studio Urban-Think Tank. Andrea Reiter is a film scholar and documentary filmmaker. Her book Kritik, Aktivismus und Prospektivität, based on her PhD, was published in autumn 2019 with Schüren. Lyman Tower Sargent is Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Missouri-St Louis. He was the founding editor of Utopian Studies and author of Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010) as well as over a hundred articles on various aspects of utopianism.

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xii Contributors

Daniel Schwartz is a filmmaker and artist from Atlanta, currently living in Zurich. His work focuses primarily on urban transformation from social, spatial and political perspectives. Peter Seyferth is a political philosopher from Munich. From 2003 to 2016 he taught political science at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and Technische Universität Munich. He now works for FernUniversität in Hagen. Simon Spiegel is a lecturer at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich and Privatdozent at the University of Bayreuth. He is the author of Bilder einer besseren Welt (Marburg: Schüren, 2019). Chelsea Wessels is Assistant Professor and Co-director of the film studies minor at East Tennessee State University. Her research interests include local cinema history and the archive, global film genres and feminist film.

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Acknowledgements

This volume has its origins in an international conference that took place at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich in the autumn of 2016, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the original publication of Thomas More’s Utopia. This conference, titled Utopia and Reality, grew out of the research project Alternative Worlds: The Political-activist Documentary Film, which was generously funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The national doctoral programme Film, Photography, and Other Visual Media (Swissuniversities) co-funded the event, which brought together international researchers from two fields that normally see little exchange – utopian studies and documentary research. While some of the scholars who presented at the conference are part of this volume, the participants also included Jens Eder, Britta Hartmann, Dina Iordanova, Chris Tedjasukmana, Thomas Tode and Lars Weckbecker. The conference was accompanied by a film programme at the Xenix cinema curated by Thomas Tode. The unusual encounter proved highly stimulating and confirmed our assumption that documentary and utopian studies have a lot to learn from each other. The publication of a collective volume that puts some of the insights from the workshop on record while also expanding on them was the logical next step. For this, we widened the focus and invited additional scholars to complement the original contributions. We would like to thank Margrit Tröhler, professor at the University of Zurich, who led the original research project and without whose support both the conference and the ensuing volume would have remained utopian projects. We would also like to thank Barbara Bitterli for her tireless help in organising the conference, Viola Zimmermann for her beautiful artwork, Jenny Billeter and Reto Bühler from the Xenix cinema for their hospitality and Susie Trenka for her diligent proofreading. Patricia Zimmermann was instrumental in establishing contacts with additional authors who were not part of the original conference and whose articles complement the present volume. Patrick Sharp and Pawel Frelik, editors of the New Dimensions in Science Fiction book series, immediately took an interest in our project

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xiv Acknowledgements

and were of great help throughout the process. Special thanks go to Sarah Lewis of University of Wales Press for shepherding us through all the stages of the publishing process.

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Introduction: Utopian Realities Andrea Reiter and Simon Spiegel

The utopian novel boasts a long and venerable tradition. In 1516, more than 500 years ago, the humanist Thomas More wrote his Utopia, coining the name and establishing the genre.1 Although the idea took some time to catch on, countless authors have since followed More’s lead. From the earliest examples of Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (Civitas Solis, written in Italian in 1602, published in Latin in 1623) and Francis Bacon’s posthumously published fragment New Atlantis (Nova Atlantis, 1627) to Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred (L’An 2440, 1770), which is often considered to be the first utopia set in the future, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land (Altneuland, 1902), there has been a never-ending stream of utopian novels.2 And although there is a widespread impression that only dystopias are being written these days, the production of positive literary utopias – otherwise known as eutopias – has never really ceased.3 What has changed, however, is the reception. In the past, there were many examples of widely read utopias, but the vast majority of contemporary positive utopias simply go unnoticed. The situation looks quite different, though, if we turn to the medium of film. There is a wide consensus among scholars of both media and utopia that films are particularly unsuited for depicting a positive utopia. The reasons for this seem obvious: although the classic utopia in the Morean tradition is a narrative text, its main function is not to engage the reader in an exciting story. Its goal is rather to present a thought-provoking alternative to the current state of affairs, to present the ‘non-existent society … in considerable detail’.4 Therefore its plot is reduced to the bare minimum and only serves as a pretext; in many cases it takes the form of a travelogue in which a visitor from outside is shown around by a ‘utopian guide’ who describes at length the inner workings of the utopian society.

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2 UTOPI A AND RE ALIT Y

Utopian novels, in other words, lack both the proper plot and the dramatic arc that are normally deemed essential for fiction films; additionally, their characters are often bland, without many distinguishing traits. Overall, this is far from a typical Hollywood movie, in which a clearly defined protagonist tries to reach an equally clearly defined goal against all odds. In contrast, dystopias, which depict a society ‘that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived’,5 are much better suited for cinematic storytelling, since they usually feature a hero who rebels against the dystopian order. Indeed, if we look at science fiction cinema, dystopias abound: from early classics like Metropolis (D: Fritz Lang, DE 1927), New Hollywood productions like THX 1138 (D: George Lucas, US 1971) or Soylent Green (D: Richard Fleischer, US 1973), or the more recent young adult dystopias – most prominently among them The Hunger Games series. Even the Star Wars franchise, with its central conflict between the evil empire and the rebels, makes use of dystopian tropes. Some examples are regularly brought up when it comes to the subject of utopian films – Things to Come (D: William Cameron Menzies, UK 1936), Lost Horizon (D: Frank Capra, US 1937) and Born in Flames (D: Lizzie Borden, US 1983), among others – but even those who regard these films as utopias would probably concede that they differ quite fundamentally from a typical literary utopia in their overall structure and feel.6 And while most classics of dystopian literature have been made into films, we are still waiting for cinematic adaptations of More, Campanella, et al. Past scholarship on filmic utopias has focused almost exclusively on fiction film, and especially on the genre of science fiction. In this volume we take a different approach. We argue that much of the existing research on film and utopia is based on the faulty premise that utopias are primarily narrative fiction. However, as explained above, utopias are not fiction proper. We may talk about ‘utopian novels’, but in most instances, the narrative frame is really only just that: a frame. Utopias are not primarily about telling a story, and one might even argue that the imaginary commonwealth at the centre of the Morean utopia is not really the book’s true purpose – at least not in the sense that it should serve as a blueprint for political and social reform. The odd example intended as a political programme by its author certainly exists, but the vast majority of utopias are not, or at least not

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Introduction 3 

primarily, meant to be put into action. Rather, the main function of any utopia is a critique of the status quo, and the supposedly superior state serves first and foremost as a ‘carnival/funfair mirror in reverse’, which helps to bring the current miserable state of affairs into even sharper relief.7 One long-running strain of criticism holds that utopia is a fundamentally totalitarian concept and that utopian states are highly hierarchical entities, in which the individual is reduced to a mere cog in a big machine. This allegation, which was brought forward most prominently by Karl R. Popper in his The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), contains some truth insofar as many of the classic utopias up until the early twentieth century are indeed organised in top-down fashion.8 But Popper is mainly interested in the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century rather than in literature – he never even mentions More, for instance – and thus he misses the fact that there is also an anarchist utopian tradition, which can be traced back at least to Rabelais’s Gargantua (1534), but which only came to fruition in the twentieth century.9 Also, one cannot stress enough that every utopian text must be read against the context in which it was written. From a modern point of view, many of the institutions on the island of Utopia do indeed seem rather problematic. But for a beggar in More’s England who did not know democracy, freedom of speech or the concept of universal human rights, the idea of a six-hour working day or of housing and meals provided by the state certainly would have meant a huge improvement. While Popper’s (mis)understanding of utopia is still quite widespread, especially, though by no means exclusively, in conservative circles,10 there is a general consensus in utopian studies that the genre is not about the promotion of a totalitarian order, but about the questioning of the status quo. There are differences in how the details are understood, but the basic idea is largely undisputed. Whether one calls it ‘a serious intellectual game’, ‘fundamentally a satiric mode’ or ‘the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society’, the general concept remains the same.11 Utopia is not about some far-away or even imaginary place; it is about the here and now, about the deficits of the world we live in and about the possibility of improving it. This is already true for More’s Utopia, which only deals with the island of Utopia in the second volume. The first book, on the other hand, is concerned among other things with social problems in the England

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4 UTOPI A AND RE ALIT Y

of Henry VIII. Here, a first-person narrator called Thomas Morus, his friend Peter Gilles and a Portuguese seafarer called Raphael Hythloday discuss what should be done with small farmers who have lost their livelihood because landlords enclosed land that formerly belonged to the commons for sheep breeding. For Hythloday it is quite obvious that these peasants are virtually being forced into a life of criminality. He not only strongly opposes harsher penalties (which would be ineffective anyway since they do not solve the underlying problem); he ultimately argues that criminal behaviour is not so much a question of disposition, but a result of social and political conditions. His long monologue describing the organisation of the commonwealth on the island of Utopia, which he encountered during his travels in the New World, essentially serves as an illustration that things could be done differently than in early sixteenth-century England. The only thing we can confidently say about More’s Utopia is that it is an extremely complex work, full of wordplay, deliberately ambiguous phrases and ironic twists. And although it has been analysed for decades, we still do not know what More actually intended to achieve with it. However, what we can deduce from the text with some certainty is that he was neither interested in telling a gripping yarn nor in inciting a revolution. Rather, he came up with a combination of precise criticism and imaginative counter-image, that is, a ‘realist front’ and a ‘fanciful’ backside. Utopias are thus hybrids by nature, mixing narrative tropes with political and philosophical considerations that are part sociological analysis and part revolutionary pamphlet. And although they are not normally meant as a direct call for political action, they still want to activate their readers, to make them understand that nothing has to be the way it is. To achieve this, it is important that their diagnosis be convincing. If a utopian text fails to convince its audience that the ills it addresses are indeed real, it will not have any effect. Utopias are then, in a twofold way, intimately connected with reality: they aim to aptly describe the current situation and, at the same time, to try to change it. To put it bluntly, they are much more directly connected to reality than ‘regular fiction’. If we accept this characterisation, it becomes obvious why no utopian feature films exist: because literary utopias are not regular novels to begin with. At the same time, a whole new area for potential research opens up. The focus now moves to forms beyond fiction film, to works

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Introduction 5 

that – analogous to literary utopias – mix fictional and non-fictional elements, but are not – or at least not primarily – about telling a story. In other words, we have to look at non-fiction films. This idea is not completely new. In a survey article on utopian film published in 1993, Peter Fitting already proposed looking beyond regular feature films.12 His appeal provoked little to no reaction, and in the quarter century since then, most studies on utopias in film followed the same line of argument: they all start with the classic utopia as it was established by More and, after discussing the concept, they all come to the conclusion that a utopian film is – for the reasons mentioned above – an impossible thing. Thus, they all turn to dystopias and once again analyse the usual suspects.13 Looking for utopias in non-fiction films might seem counterintuitive at first. It seems unlikely that of all things, documentaries, which give us a glimpse of the real world, would be suited for utopias, which – by definition – talk of a place that does not (yet) exist. But on closer inspection, this seeming paradox proves much less problematic. On the one hand, utopias are, as we argue, at least as much as about the present situation as about the utopian state. On the other hand, nonfiction films are of course never a mere representation of ‘the world out there’, but always a construct, a work that makes use of aesthetic conventions and is intended by the filmmaker to convey something. There is a long debate in documentary studies about how to adequately conceptualise the genre.14 It seems obvious that the salient feature of a documentary film is its higher degree of authenticity, its closer relation to reality, but it is actually quite difficult to pin this relation down on a theoretical level. Is there an indexical link between film and reality, or is this very reality instead presupposed and constructed by the film itself? Moreover, can we really distinguish between fiction and non-fiction film? Do not both document what is happening in front of the camera? On an analytical level, these problems manifest themselves in the question of whether a film’s status as non-fictional can be determined solely by its formal features, or whether it actually depends on the pragmatic context: for example, the information we receive in advance before we watch the film, the TV channel showing a film and so on. The most useful approach is to combine these two perspectives and to understand non-fiction films as a form that – contrary to fiction – is meant as a statement about the world we live in, that we recognise

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6 UTOPI A AND RE ALIT Y

as such because it makes use of certain formal devices and because it is presented as a documentary. In other words, most documentaries clearly mark that they want to be read as documentaries, as a comment on the real world, but whether an individual viewer actually follows these cues also depends on other factors.15 Once the thorny matter of what reality actually is and how it can be truthfully represented by a film is replaced by the question of why a film is read as a document about the world we live in, the idea of non-fictional utopias loses much of its paradoxical quality. Since documentaries are not defined by some exceptional connection to reality, the idea of ‘documenting the non-existent’ also becomes much less problematic. Indeed, documentaries about events that have not yet happened and places that do not exist are not that uncommon. Just think of eco-documentaries like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (D: Davis Guggenheim, US 2006), which make projections about how the Earth’s ecosystem will react to climate change. Or, to name a more drastic example, The War Game (D: Peter Watkins, UK 1965), which depicts the aftermath of a nuclear attack on Great Britain. Peter Watkins’s film shows us something that has not (yet) happened, but that theoretically could happen, and it does so in great detail and very convincingly, by adopting the tropes of documentary reportage. The War Game might not be the most typical documentary – although it won the Academy Award in that category – but it is certainly meant as an urgent statement about the world we live in. While the events they depict are fictitious, films like The War Game are by no means works of fiction, but rather, as Bill Nichols puts it, ‘“preenactments” of what might happen in the event of nuclear attack’.16 An Inconvenient Truth and The War Game are fundamentally different films, but what unites them is that they both take a critical stance on contemporary problems and try to move their viewers, to make them conscious of the issues at hand, to activate them. This is, of course, another trait they have in common with the literary utopia. While an important strand of utopian scholarship focuses on works in the vein of More, there are other traditions that conceptualise utopia more loosely. A crucial author in this regard is the German philosopher Ernst Bloch who, without doubt, is the most important utopian thinker of the past century. In The Principle of Hope, written during his exile in the United States from 1938 to 1947, and first published as Das Prinzip Hoffnung in three volumes between 1954 and 1959, Bloch significantly

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Introduction 7 

widens the scope of utopia.17 For Bloch, utopia is not confined to the portrayal of alternative societies, but rather designates a fundamental human impulse, a yearning for what has not yet been realised, a ‘forward dream’.18 Utopia then becomes humankind’s ability to transcend itself, which can become manifest in almost every human endeavour. Accordingly, Bloch sees utopian traces everywhere: in literature, in music, in fashion, in architecture and in myth. This broad and rather unsystematic understanding of utopia has been criticised, but it has nevertheless been highly influential. It becomes especially visible in the work of Fredric Jameson. Like Bloch, Jameson understands utopia as a desire for something that has not yet come into being, but which – in the age of late capitalism – cannot even be conceptualised anymore. Capitalism has so completely penetrated our world that we are ultimately unable to think of real alternatives. In a move that simultaneously subverts and radicalises both More’s and Bloch’s conceptions, Jameson sees utopia’s main function in reminding us that we are unable to think beyond capitalism, thereby pointing out that something else might exist.19 Whether conceptualised in a narrow way, modelled on More’s Utopia or following the looser Blochian approach, utopia is always about what the present lacks, about ills to be fixed, about the ways in which the world could be improved. This is, of course, the stuff many documentaries are made of. In other words, documentary film-making has been permeated by a utopian impulse from the start, although the focus has varied in terms of perspective as well as in form and content, ranging from societal visions to activist film-making. The contributors to this book each give a partial glimpse into this great variety of utopian documentary film-making in order to inspire discussions about this still under-researched topic of study. One of the goals of this anthology is to start a conversation between documentary studies and utopian scholarship, two disciplines that have seen very little exchange so far. The selection of the chapters reflects this approach: while some authors have a background in utopian studies and normally do not work with films, others are firmly established in research on documentary film-making. In addition, the volume also unites established experts and upcoming researchers, offering a diversity of viewpoints and methods. The book opens with an interview with Lyman Tower Sargent. In this conversation, the eminent authority on utopian studies discusses

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8 UTOPI A AND RE ALIT Y

the fundamental relationship between utopias and reality, including the interdependence between the two. On the one hand, utopias are always triggered by a concrete historical situation, a kind of ‘social dreaming’ specific to a certain moment in time. On the other hand, utopias also tend to exert an influence on that very situation, although Sargent differentiates between effects on a textual and on an authorial level. Sargent’s remarks on literary utopias and their effects in society serve as an introduction to the field of utopia studies, and as a reminder that utopias always also function as texts that document the ills of their respective time and society. The book is subsequently divided into three sections, in which the authors address the question of utopia or the utopian potential in documentaries from different perspectives. The first part of the book, titled ‘Tracing Utopia’, assembles chapters interested in documentaries whose formal and aesthetic strategies have much in common with those of the classical utopia. Anchored in the actual world, and using documentary practices, they focus on some kind of utopia: either one that is obviously fictitious, or at least not yet real – or one that is presented as already more or less realised. Susanna Layh concentrates on Dziga Vertov’s seminal silent film Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-appartom, SU 1929), which she sees as a prime example of the oscillation between factuality and fictionality that is characteristic of many documentaries. Layh proceeds on the assumption that the film creates an alternative world, a vision of a socialist utopia based on Vertov’s very personal notion of technotopia: the idea that man must ultimately become a machine to overcome his deficits. Layh discovers many parallels between Vertov’s approach and More’s literary strategies in his Utopia and ultimately sees Man with a Movie Camera, which is often regarded as a quintessential example of avant-garde film-making, as an adaptation of techniques that More developed more than 500 years ago. Peter Seyferth argues that Made in Secret: The Story of the East Van Porn Collective (CA 2004) – a mockumentary about a collective that makes feminist do-it-yourself porn movies – is primarily meant as a political-activist film that tries to convince its viewers of the feasibility of grassroots democracy and consensus decision-making. The film portrays a fictive process that actually became a reality during its making. According to Seyferth, it is this ‘transgression of reality’ that makes the film utopian. At the same time, the author highlights the

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Introduction 9 

many questions that arise, on an ethical and a political level, if all participants of a documentary production are involved in the film-making process. In this way, a film that oscillates ‘between fact and fiction’ becomes a political proposition of an alternative to hegemonic political structures and ideas – and thus is utopian. In the last text of this section, Simon Spiegel approaches literary utopian strategies in documentary films from the angle of propaganda. He traces utopian visions in films that, at first glance, seem anything but utopian: online videos created by the jihadist terror organisation ISIS. Apart from the gruesome clips of brutal killings on which the media has mainly focused, the militia’s propaganda units have produced many more films, among them documentaries with a utopian bent. Working with a Morean concept of utopia like Layh and Seyferth, Spiegel analyses two main examples, showing how these films present the Islamic State as a smoothly running entity, a realised Islamic utopia. The book’s second part, called ‘Alternative Documentary Politics’, is concerned with documentaries that criticise their historical reality in order to reflect on a better future and alternative realities. These films address the viewers as political subjects, reaching out to their consciousness to activate the imagination of better worlds and, at best, to foster their agency. Matthew Holtmeier concentrates on Patricio Guzmán’s The Pearl Button (El botón de nácar, CL 2015) as a case study, considering the concept of bioregionalism as an important documentary means to think about ecological, cultural and political matters connected with a specific environment, its inhabitants and its history. The author analyses how one of Chile’s key political filmmakers reflects on the role that water played in the past, when indigenous peoples inhabited the region of what now is Chile, as well as in the Spanish colonial era and under the modern dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Holtmeier demonstrates that Guzmán not only envisions the ‘living-in-place’ in these different times, using certain ‘cosmovisual’ film-aesthetic strategies, but also critically examines the displacement of indigenous ­peoples, thus providing unique contributions to the larger discourse on bio­regionalism. In so doing, The Pearl Button overcomes a naive utopianism that might arise from dealing with environmental questions in a unitary way; instead, the film leads towards a critical utopian concept of connecting societal and political developments with a bioregional approach.

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10 UTOPI A AND RE ALIT Y

Andrea Reiter’s article considers politically engaged documentaries produced during the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and the establishment of the new nation states in the region. During this period, numerous documentaries began to question the dominant discourses of the reigning elites and to criticise socio-political conditions. Reiter argues that, by presenting critical views of actuality, these documentaries evoke future-oriented attitudes that are inherently necessary for fomenting social change. Using a broad approach to the concept of utopianism as developed since the early twentieth century, most notably by Ernst Bloch, her analysis focuses on two documentaries that were seen widely within the region. Božidar Knežević’s Storm over Krajina (Oluja Nad Krajinom, HR 2005) reflects on the military recapture of Krajina through a critical, polyphonic narrative, while Jasmila Žbanić’s Images from the Corner (Slike sa ugla, BA/DE 2003) is a subjective, essayistic documentary that explores individual viewpoints to convey historical realities beyond the dominant discourses and established values. By analysing the formal, aesthetic and pragmatic characteristics of these documentaries, Reiter demonstrates how they create a filmic space that stimulates viewers to anticipate a better future and to reflect on their own positions within the world as portrayed in these films. The critique of the societal status quo, the desire to rethink dominant structures and the reflection on ways of creating a more egalitarian world, connected with the ambitions of environmental movements, are the central themes of Chelsea Wessels’s article on ecofeminism. Ecofeminism sees a connection between patriarchal oppression and the destruction of nature for profit and progress, and consequently understands environmentalism and feminism as inextricably linked. For Wessels, this interconnectivity contains a utopian impulse that sharpens the activist notion of environmental documentaries. Concentrating on two very different forms of ecofeminist documentaries – Cheshire, Ohio (D: Eve Morgenstern, US 2016) and Unfractured (D: Chanda Chevannes, US 2017) – the author shows how the fact that these films were produced and distributed by women outside the commercial system brings societal power mechanisms to consciousness in order to foster agency. The third section of the book is entitled ‘New Forms of Documentary Activism’. It comprises three texts that make the case for interweaving critiques of the existing conditions and meditations on utopian visions with the mobilisation of newly assembled groups of people.

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Daniel Schwartz, Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou, Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner of the Urban-Think Tank (U-TT), an interdisciplinary design studio at ETH Zurich, reflect on documentaries that engage in utopian discourses, but approach their theme from another angle. They argue that non-fiction visual storytelling can close the gap between thinking and doing by linking the real (observations) with the imaginary (propositions). In their chapter, they describe their own documentary work, which is always coupled with or comes out of concrete architectural projects. While their work is guided by what can be called a utopian impulse, they always ask whether and how utopia could be built in a different way. Proposing the term ‘trans-utopia’ as a visionary discourse that connects individual utopian perspectives within a many voiced or dialogical filmic position, the authors present their work as a case study of a possible way to create future utopian spaces. Dale Hudson gives insight into the utopian perspective of interactive online documentaries that require specific decisions and actions on the part of the audience. In doing so, they are able to educate their viewers in critical thinking, which can serve as an impulse for later political action. Hudson sees web documentaries as a means to bring new viewpoints into public debates. He concentrates on two examples of projects created by socially engaged student documentarians. He argues that the utopian potential of these interactive films lies in their ability to present huge quantities of relevant data which can stimulate the viewers/users to render it into information, that is, making them ready for analysis. The viewers/users do not only passively consume what is presented to them, but are required to actively reflect on how digital media present and package information for us. Such films – if they can still be called films – are more demanding than established documentary strategies. They are utopian in their open documentary form, as experiments. Jane Gaines is interested in the visualisation of critical-oppositional movements and their media activism. She understands the utopian impulse to be inherent to the documentary genre, manifesting itself in film’s power to ‘bring to life’ as well as to ‘bring about’ social upheaval. Based on this assumption, she interrogates various documentary movements for their ‘dreams of activism’. She asks how to keep alive the theories of the transformative powers of recording machines by juxtaposing two entirely different time periods and media production

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methods: the 1930s’ Workers Film and Photo League, with its documentary Bonus March (US 1932), and the so-called Arab Spring with its viral videos and larger social media strategies. Both examples reveal a belief in the utopian possibilities of mass media at the inception of the technologically new: film in the case of Bonus March, social media in the case of the Arab Spring. While recapitulating the different events, Gaines questions the notion of revolution in either context and the particular perspectives of media theory and the ‘West’, and traces a complex portrait of the media activists’ representations of their ‘hopes and dreams’. Notes 1. Thomas More, The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter (New Haven/ London: Yale University Press, 1965). 2. Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1901); Francis Bacon, New Atlantis: A Work Unfinished, in Francis Bacon, New Atlantis and The Great Instauration, ed. Jerry Weinberger (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), pp. 61–111; Louis Sébastien Mercier, Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred (New York: Garland, 1974); Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000– 1887 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Theodor Herzl, The Old New Land (Princeton: M. Wiener, 2007). 3. More’s neologism ‘utopia’ can be understood as either ‘eu-topos’, which means ‘good place’ or as ‘ou-topos’, meaning ‘no place’. Since the Greek prefixes ou and eu sound the same in English pronunciation, both interpretations are equally valid. This play on words is already a clear indication of the ambivalence contained within the concept of utopia. 4. Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’, Utopian Studies, 5/1 (1994), 1–37, 9. 5. Sargent, ‘The Three Faces’, 9. 6. See on this Simon Spiegel, ‘Some Thoughts on the Utopian Film’, Science Fiction Film & Television, 10/1 (2017), 53–79. 7. Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘In Defense of Utopia’, Diogenes, 53/1 (2006), 11–17, 12. 8. Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 9. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2016); Laurence Davis and Ruth Kinna (eds), Anarchism and Utopianism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014).

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Introduction 13 

10. More than seventy years after the publication of Popper’s book, his understanding of utopia can be found in writers as different as Steven Pinker and John Gray. While the psychologist Pinker sees the history of humankind as an irresistible march towards enlightenment, the philosopher Gray deems the very concept of progress a quasi-religious misbelief. As much as their views differ, they are in agreement in their rejection of utopia, which they see as dangerous ideology. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now. The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018); Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature. The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes (London: Allen Lane, 2011); John Gray, Black Mass. Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London: Allen Lane, 2007). 11. Peter Kuon, Utopischer Entwurf und fiktionale Vermittlung. Studien zum Gattungswandel der literarischen Utopie zwischen Humanismus und Frühaufklärung (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 1986), p. 133; Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. viii; Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method. The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. xi. 12. Peter Fitting, ‘What Is Utopian Film: An Introductory Taxonomy’, Utopian Studies, 4/2 (1993), 1–17. 13. Examples are Chloé Zirnstein, Zwischen Fakt und Fiktion. Die politische Utopie im Film (München: Utz, 2006); André Müller, Film und Utopie. Positionen des fiktionalen Films zwischen Gattungstraditionen und gesellschaftlichen Zukunftsdiskursen (Berlin: Lit, 2010); Heike Endter, Ökonomische Utopien und ihre visuelle Umsetzung in Science-FictionFilmen (Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2011). One of the rare exceptions is an article by Marta Komsta in which she looks at three documentaries dealing with the Polish planned city of Nowa Huta: Marta Komsta, ‘Destination – Eutopia: Nowa Huta in Polish Documentaries’, in Barbara Klonowska, Zofiia Kolbuszewska and Grzegorz Maziarczyk (eds), (Im)perfection Subverted, Reloaded and Networked. Utopian Discourse across Media (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang Edition, 2015), pp. 125–43. See also Spiegel, ‘Some Thoughts’; Simon Spiegel, Bilder einer besseren Welt. Die Utopie im nichtfiktionalen Film (Marburg: Schüren, 2019). 14. See, for example, Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Carl R. Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Noël Carroll, ‘From Real to Reel: Entangled

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15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

in Non-Fiction-Film’, in Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 224–52; Michael Renov (ed.), Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge, 1993). This basic understanding of non-fiction film can be found in the work of various authors, but most succinctly in the semio-pragmatic approach advanced by French theorist Roger Odin: Roger Odin, ‘A Semio-Pragmatic Approach to the Documentary Film’, in Warren Buckland (ed.), The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), pp. 227–35; ‘Reflections on the Family Home Movie as Document: A Semio-Pragmatic Approach’, in Karen I. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann (eds), Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 251–71. While the two differ in detail, Carl Plantinga’s approach widely overlaps with Odin’s thoughts; see Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film; ‘What a Documentary is, After all’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63/2 (2005), 105–17. Bill Nichols, ‘Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject’, Critical Inquiry, 35/1 (2008), 72–89, 83. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986–95). Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p. 144. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2007); An American Utopia. Dual Power and the Universal Army (London: Verso, 2016).

Selected Works Bloch, Ernst, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986–95). Fitting, Peter, ‘What Is Utopian Film: An Introductory Taxonomy’, Utopian Studies, 4/2 (1993), 1–17. Jameson, Fredric, Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2007). More, Thomas, The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter (New Haven/ London: Yale University Press, 1965). Popper, Karl R., The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). Sargent, Lyman Tower, ‘The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’, Utopian Studies, 5/1 (1994), 1–37.

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Introduction 15 

Spiegel, Simon, ‘Some Thoughts on the Utopian Film’, Science Fiction Film & Television, 10/1 (2017), 53–79. Spiegel, Simon, Bilder einer besseren Welt. Die Utopie im nichtfiktionalen Film (Marburg: Schüren, 2019).

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1 ‌

Reality and Utopia: A Conversation with Lyman Tower Sargent Lyman Tower Sargent and Simon Spiegel

In the world of utopian studies, Lyman Tower Sargent is an eminent figure. For anyone studying utopian literature, it is simply impossible not to encounter one of the many books or articles that he has written or edited. It is safe to say that no one has a more comprehensive grasp of the field of utopian literature. To this day, Sargent’s bibliography of British and American utopian literature, which was first published in 1979 and is now available as a free online database, remains an invaluable resource for research.1 The two terms ‘utopia’ and ‘reality’ are normally thought of as distinctly different. Utopia designates a non-place, and thus seems almost by definition to be not of this world, not part of our shared reality. Would you agree that utopia and reality appear to be antithetical? Actually, I disagree. Someone once said that all utopias begin with disappointment: the disappointment with reality. What utopias – or rather utopians – are disappointed with is the world in which they are living. This is, so to speak, the first stage of almost any utopia. The second stage is to get anywhere near the depicted utopia, and to achieve this, reality has to change. So utopia and reality are, in fact, intimately connected. One important aspect is that, while some utopias are very idiosyncratic and feature odd ideas, most people who write utopias are identifying real issues. The connection between utopias and the very reality their creators live in has always been obvious to me. If disappointment is the trigger of any utopia, would you say that criticism is an essential part of utopianism? Most utopias will feature some sort of criticism. This is true if we go back to the very beginning of the genre, to Thomas More’s Utopia (1516).2 People often forget that the description of the island of Utopia only

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constitutes the second book. Large sections of the first book deal with the situation in England; especially with the practices of greedy sheepowning landlords, who are enclosing land that formerly belonged to the commons. The farmers who now have no land are forced into criminality. The character of Hythloday argues that harsher laws will have no effect as long as the farmers’ situation is not improved. The criticism is not always as direct as this, sometimes it is more implicit, but it is always a part of any utopia. You said the second stage is to approach utopia. Are utopias normally meant as a call to action or as a political programme? That depends very much on the individual text or writer. For example, after decades or even centuries of scholarship, we still have no idea what More had in mind when he wrote his Utopia. It is probably fair to say that at least the later More would not have liked to live on the island described in his book. But whether the younger More thought there was any hope for change is something we do not know. You have to remember that in the first book of Utopia, the characters of More and Hythloday discuss whether an educated and knowledgeable person like Hythloday should seek a job as an adviser to a king. Hythloday very forcefully disputes this. He sees no point in doing so, since no king would actually listen to his advice. The real More, on the other hand, took a government job and ultimately became Lord High Chancellor under Henry VIII. But unless something is discovered that has been well hidden until now, no one will ever know whether he thought he could effect change. But on a more general note, most utopians want to have some effect on society. A lot of them do, but I do not want to stress this point too much. For centuries, novelists have written utopias, and they did so for a variety of reasons. We often have no idea what they intended. For example, toward the end of his life, Aldous Huxley, who is most famous for his dystopian novel Brave New World (1932), wrote a utopia called Island (1962).3 Did he think he could bring about change by writing this novel? We simply do not know. I think, historically, many writers hoped that there would be a possibility to induce change. But then you also have the phenomenon of novelists who wrote one utopian story as part of making a living writing novels, and we often have no clue what they had

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in mind. In addition, many writers hesitate when it comes to assigning a clear political message to their work – although there are exceptions. The best modern example of this is probably the science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. He calls himself a utopian, and he explicitly wants his work to have an effect. But Robinson certainly is an outlier in this regard. And he is anything but naive. He does not want his readers to implement the society he describes in the Mars trilogy (1993–1996) or in his novel New York 2140 (2017).4 Are there examples of writers who actually wanted to have their utopias implemented as described? While there certainly is the odd example of this, most utopian authors do not think that people are immediately going to adopt everything they write. They would probably be horrified if that happened. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888) is historically one of the most obvious examples of a utopia that had a direct effect.5 In his novel, Bellamy describes the city of Boston in the year 2000. The principle of competition has been abandoned and the state is the sole owner of industry – a system that Bellamy, who shied away from the term ‘socialism’, called nationalism. The book was a huge success and led to the formation of more than 150 nationalist clubs across the US. But Bellamy himself was completely surprised by the success of his novel, and he later gave different accounts of why he wrote it. And when he did try to put it into effect, he did not follow his descriptions in complete detail. He also reacted to criticism and wrote several short stories where he dealt with specific aspects of his original concept and, finally, the much lesser known novel Equality, in which he revised some of his earlier ideas.6 But even then, he did not expect people to follow him to the last letter. So, Looking Backward would be an example of utopian literature that had a real effect? The most lasting effect in reaction to this form of ‘nationalism’ was the municipalisation of public utilities. It was a way of staving off full nationalisation, by doing it on a municipal level. I think that most of the effects of utopias are of that order. Another example is Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), which focuses on environmental issues.7 The environmental movement did of course start well before that, but Callenbach’s book, together with many other utopias on environmentalism, helped

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to raise the awareness that there are issues we have to deal with. And while there are still many unsolved problems in this area, environmentalism today is so embedded in our culture that we do not think any more of the effect Ecotopia originally had. But it made a big splash when it came out, and it changed some people’s minds. They got involved, started movements, and so on. It was not the one book that caused the movement, but it contributed significantly to it. Obviously, all criticism of capitalism is of the same order. Is this how utopias ideally work – by giving birth to social movements? This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing, because social movements sometimes also give rise to utopias. I do not think that there are many examples where a utopia directly gave rise to a social movement. Ebenezer Howard’s garden city movement would be a rare exception here. Howard was a stenographer in London in the late nineteenth century and published a book called Garden Cities of To-morrow in 1898.8 This book grew out of his reading of Bellamy, among other things, and advocated a new type of city that was meant to serve as an antidote against metropolises like London, which Howard abhorred. Comparatively small cities with big belts of green between different areas would function as more or less autonomous units. Howard’s book was extremely influential. In the course of a few years, the garden city movement turned into a worldwide phenomenon. There are garden cities in the UK, the US and in Australia. And even today, city planners still follow ideas originally developed by Howard. None of these places are ideal, of course; they all have problems. But that does not mean they are not good places to live. In many cases, they are better than the surrounding communities. This is an example of a social movement that can be directly traced back to one utopian text, but this is certainly not the norm. Garden Cities of To-morrow and Looking Backward are two examples of very influential utopias. The latter was even a bestseller. What made these books so successful? I have to confess that I find Looking Backward rather boring. But Bellamy was already an established novelist when he wrote it, and the general reading is that he embedded a sentimental novel in a utopia, and sentimental novels were all the rage at the time. But interestingly enough, the first edition did not sell very well. For the second edition, he made significant revisions, and this was the version that sold.

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Of course, we are unable to tell for sure why one book is successful and another is not, but I think in the case of Looking Backward, one important element is that Bellamy created a real character with his protagonist Julian West. West’s confusion, and the scenes where he thinks back to the old Boston and the time he was still wealthy, did stick with people. And then there is the image of him sitting on a coach with other people pulling it or falling off. This chapter was so popular that it was even made into a separate publication. The image of the coach is a striking symbol for a system in which an elite profits, while everybody else toils for this small group. It is the system Bellamy and his reader lived in. Would it be an exaggeration to say that the depiction of a bad present is actually more important for a utopia to be successful than the proposed alternative? I think this is mostly true for the classic utopias. Here, the starting point is always the author’s reality. And if the readers do not connect to this, if they do not accept that things are bad and should be improved, there is little chance that they will follow the story further. My colleague Raffaela Baccolini has said that dystopias begin in the dystopia, whereas utopias generally begin before the utopia. And this was very true traditionally, until the end of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writers have fairly often started in the utopia. You see this in the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, for example, and more generally in the utopias published since the 1960s. That is the type that Tom Moylan, in his study Demand the Impossible, calls ‘critical utopia’.9 If we look at the history of the genre, we can see a development from the Renaissance utopias in the tradition of More to temporal utopias, where the utopian place is situated in the future instead of a remote location like an island. This is also the point where futuristic inventions, which we associate with science fiction today, come into play. Before that, most utopias featured a thoroughly organised hierarchical state that often tended towards the totalitarian. This only began to change toward the end of the nineteenth century; Bellamy’s Looking Backward is probably the last important example of this classic model. It is then followed by the dystopia, which, at its core, criticises one of the tenets of the classic model: the complete submission of the individual under the dictate of the state. The next stage is then indeed what Moylan

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calls critical utopia. These are novels that have given up on the idea of a completely controllable good place. Instead, they mix elements of positive utopias and dystopias and problematise the very idea of utopia. But they always do this against the background of a larger utopian impulse. They still believe that things can and should be improved. In his book, Moylan looks at four science fiction novels from the 1970s, and I think his concept is useful to describe this stage in the genre’s development. But I am a bit hesitant to use the term ‘critical utopia’, since I feel it has been overused in recent years. Your short description of the development of utopian literature conforms to what can be called the standard history of the genre, which most scholars agree on. Does this mean that the classic utopia is dead and that no texts that follow this model are produced anymore? No. Historians of the genre – of any genre – tend to focus on those examples that play with established tropes and transform them. This is not surprising, since these are often the most interesting texts. But besides the works that move the genre forward, the avant-garde so to speak, there are always many examples that do not adopt the changes, but stick to old, even outdated forms. The same is true for utopias. The classic Morean model is still alive today. Thanks to the revolution in self-publishing, the output may even have increased. But most of them are obscure texts that no one ever reads. No one but me, unfortunately [laughs]. I said earlier that Looking Backward was the last classic utopia. But this is only true in terms of reception, and not when we look at production. Research has focused on books like William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) or H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905), both immediate successors to Bellamy, which modified the classic model in crucial ways.10 Apart from these outstanding books, many classic utopias have been written since then, but no one took notice of them. It seems that utopian writers – in the twentieth century, anyway – tend not to like being called utopians. In many utopian texts we encounter phrases like, ‘This is not a utopia, this is serious’. Robinson has no problem being called a utopian; neither did Le Guin. But in general, utopia does indeed have a bad name. I have always argued that the put-down of utopia comes from the fact that some people will be unhappy with the changes that utopia might bring, so they prefer to damn it. And it turns out that calling it ‘utopian’ is a way

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to do this. Recently though, things seem to have changed. The word has become much more popular, and I get the impression that at least some people understand the concept better than they used to. But of course, many still believe that we will end up in a dystopia. In terms of (fiction) film, a common argument is that positive utopias do not work, and that only dystopias permit exciting storytelling. What do you, as an expert in utopian literature, think about this? Let me first say that during my career in utopian studies, I have very consciously steered clear of writing about film. If a book gets turned into a film, I make a corresponding note in my bibliography, but that is about it. Literature and film are two very different media, and I have always felt that I lacked the proper tools for working with films. I simply do not know how to read them. That said, I do not see why you could not make a utopian film. Many years ago, I was on a panel with the British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, and he said that utopias are boring because they lack an exciting plot, because nothing happens. I answered that this merely showed a lack of imagination on the part of the screenwriter or the director. Telling an eminent writer like Clarke that he was lacking in imagination was, of course, the act of a rather naive young man, but I still consider it to be essentially true. Utopias do not have to be boring, because human life is still going to continue. For example, in News from Nowhere somebody gets killed, and the society has to figure out how to respond. That is not ‘nothing’ happening. It seems to me that the bad rap utopia often receives is what keeps good utopian films from being made. But I fail to see why it should be impossible to make an interesting utopian fiction film. And in the case of non-fiction films, this volume proves that many interesting examples exist, which scholarship has ignored so far. A recent documentary that is often called utopian is the French production Tomorrow (Demain, D: Cyril Dion, Mélanie Laurent, FR 2015). Here, the filmmakers travel the world in search of solutions to environmental problems. They are explicitly not advocating a large-scale revolution, but looking for practical small-scale strategies that have been proven to work. In the course of the film, they investigate urban gardening projects in Detroit, an ecological farm in Normandy, forms of green power in Iceland and so on. In other words, they do not present one overarching vision of utopia, but rather utopian enclaves spread

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all over the world. Would you consider a film like Tomorrow utopian, or does a utopia, by definition, present a unified vision? Unfortunately, I haven’t seen Tomorrow, but the question of whether a utopia must present a unified vision is an interesting one. Ultimately, utopias are always about a unified vision. But I see no problem with a piecemeal reform that has a vision of bettering people’s lives in some serious dimension. I probably would not call them utopias proper, but they are certainly imbued with a utopian impulse. One of the things I like about utopian fiction is that it treats different social institutions in interaction with one another. Your general utopia talks about education, gender relations, politics, law, economics, and it shows how they intersect. The piecemeal approach does not show how it will affect other parts of society, which are of equal importance. But it still has a strong element of what you might quite reasonably call a utopian impulse. Notes 1. Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopian Literature in English: An Annotated Bibliography From 1516 to the Present, https://openpublishing.psu.edu/ utopia/home (accessed 23 November 2018). 2. Thomas More, The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter (New Haven/ London: Yale University Press, 1965). 3. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955); Island (1962; New York: HarperCollins, 2002). 4. Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (New York: Bantam Books, 1993); Green Mars (New York: Bantam Books, 1994); Blue Mars (New York: Bantam Book, 1996); New York 2140 (New York: Robit, 2017). 5. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 6. Edward Bellamy, Equality (1897; New York: AMS Press, 1970). 7. Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia. The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston (Berkeley: Banyan Tree Books, 1975). 8. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (London: Routledge, 2013). 9. Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible. Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (Oxford/Bern/Berlin: Peter Lang, 2014). 10. William Morris, News from Nowhere [1890], in News from Nowhere and Other Writings, ed. Clive Wilmer (London: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 41–228; H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967).

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PART 1

Tracing Utopia

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2

Utopia Revisited: Reading Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera in the Light of the Utopian Tradition Susanna Layh

Introduction Dziga Vertov’s silent documentary film Man with a Movie Camera premiered in Moscow on 9 April 1929.1 It was a product of stimulating times in Soviet Russia: determined by the euphoria of change, the enthusiasm of the revolution and the energy of agitprop. It remains the best known film by the Russian newsreel director and film theorist, and is generally considered the epitome of Vertov’s cinematic art.2 Documenting the actual life and work of the inhabitants of a socialist city structured into one day, while using diverse self-referential filmic strategies, Vertov develops a highly experimental cinematic aesthetics. As an early documentary, Man with a Movie Camera is a prime example of the genre’s oscillation between factuality and fictionality, thereby revealing a decidedly utopian vision. Hence, Vertov’s poetic silent film is read in this article as a utopian documentary, as a filmic expression of utopian concepts in the light of the literary tradition of the genre. Literary and filmic utopias, simply put, are the fictional realisation of utopian visions, of notions of another world and a better society existing either in the present or in the future. Their characteristic feature, therefore, is the positioning of these societal outlines in the imaginary, but with the simultaneous suggestion of their factual existence in the present or their potential facticity in the future.3 This chapter focuses on the interface of Man with a Movie Camera and More’s Utopia by exploring their similarities in creating alternative worlds intended to encourage critical reflection on the part of viewers or readers. Vertov’s documentary film functions in various ways

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comparable to More’s literary utopia, showing structural and thematic analogies with its literary predecessor, and thus transporting a utopian impulse in a similar way.

Vertov’s utopia of a new cinematic language Essentially, Man with a Movie Camera is a manifesto in the form of moving images: both the cinematic expression of Vertov’s theoretical reflections on the film medium and an attempt to realise the radical aims of the so-called kinoks by creating a new form of filmic art.4 The kinoks were a group of Soviet filmmakers active in the early 1920s, who aimed to revolutionise the film medium by exploiting its full potential and using any and all filmic tools of representation. According to them, the new cinema should not be fictional at all, but based solely on documentary images and their montage, which is why Vertov calls his experimental silent film ‘a theoretical manifestation on the screen’.5 The kinoks were headed by the so-called ‘Council of Three’, comprised of Vertov himself, his wife Elizaveta Svilova, a film editor, and his younger brother, the photographer and cameraman Mikhail Kaufman.6 Svilova and Kaufman appear in Man with a Movie Camera as themselves, with Svilova in the editing room and Kaufman as the constantly filming cameraman, thus clearly exposing their respective roles in the film-making process. Man with a Movie Camera opens with one of only two sets of intertitles conveying clear directions for the spectators on how to view and how to understand the film that they are about to watch: FOR VIEWERS’ ATTENTION: THIS FILM PRESENTS AN EXPERIMENT IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION OF VISIBLE EVENTS WITHOUT THE AID OF INTERTITLES (A FILM WITHOUT INTERTITLES) WITHOUT THE AID OF A SCENARIO (A FILM WITHOUT A SCENARIO) WITHOUT THE AID OF THEATER (A FILM WITHOUT SETS, ACTORS, ETC.) THIS EXPERIMENTAL WORK AIMS AT CREATING A TRULY INTERNATIONAL ABSOLUTE LANGUAGE OF CINEMA BASED ON ITS TOTAL SEPARATION FROM THE LANGUAGE OF THEATER AND LITERATURE AUTHOR-SUPERVISOR OF THE EXPERIMENT DZIGA VERTOV7

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Thus, Vertov’s most important objectives are established in the film’s prologue, and the cinematic concept of Man with a Movie Camera precedes the actual film. The autonomy of cinema as an art form is declared here because, as Vertov believes, this ‘complex experiment … frees us, in the first place, from the tutelage of literature and the theatre and brings us face to face with 100 percent cinematography’.8 In ‘We: Variant of a Manifesto’, for instance, Vertov polemically demands cinema’s autonomy from all other arts and their particular modes of operation, categorically rejecting the characteristic means of theatre, literature and particularly fictional film:9 WE proclaim the old films, based on the romance, theatrical films and the like, to be leprous. – Keep away from them! – Keep your eyes of them! – They’re mortally dangerous! – Contagious! WE affirm the future of cinema art by denying its present.10 For Vertov, the entertainment film is part of ‘the old, pre-revolutionary world, ideologically and aesthetically bound to the bourgeois traditions of acting and theatre’.11 Thus, contemporary feature films are despicable, simply ‘the opium of the people’,12 used to legitimise and cement the claim to power of bourgeois society.13 Fiction filmmakers are considered to be enslaved by capitalism and, therefore, Vertov intends to create a ‘FILM-FACTORY OF FACTS’ in opposition to what he calls the ‘film-factory of grimaces’.14 In his manifesto ‘Kino-Eye’ he declares, for instance: Down with the bourgeois fairy-tale script! Long live life as it is! … Film-drama and religion are deadly weapons in the hands of the capitalists! By showing our revolutionary way of life, we will wrest that weapon from the enemy’s hands.15 Consequently, he strives to produce non-fiction films that he calls ‘nonacted film[s]’, since for him, ‘the film is only the sum of the facts recorded on film’.16 These new ‘unstaged films’17 are supposed to affect the revolutionary present, to intervene, to motivate and organise it, and to confront the contemporary Soviet society with its own image in

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a way that transcends its present.18 Vertov’s ultimate aim is to create a new universal and autonomous ‘language of cinema’, by exclusively making use of the specific possibilities of the film medium. Thus, Vertov is in search of a new cinematic alphabet19 that would constitute a new film language, with a grammar20 designed ‘to record and organize the individual characteristics of life’s phenomena into a whole, an essence, a conclusion’.21 According to his utopian vision, this ‘truly international film language’ would be ‘intelligible to all people regardless of national borders because it is capable of constructing “sentences” and “phrases” that convey ideas more powerfully than any other means of communication’.22 Consequently, there are no further intertitles used in Man with a Movie Camera, there are no set decorations, no script, no actors or staged scenes in the film – or so Vertov claims.23 Films should only reveal ‘kinopravda’,24 pure film truth; in other words, the genuine proletarian reality. Vertov wants to show ‘life as it is’,25 which, according to him, cannot be perceived by the imperfect and limited human eye in the way it can be captured by the camera lens, that is, by the ‘kino-eye’:26 ‘This complex experiment … sharply opposes “life

Figure 2.1 • Kino-eye (00:14:13)

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as it is”, seen by the aided eye of the movie camera (kino-eye), to “life as it is”, seen by the imperfected human eye.’27 Thus, in Vertov’s film theory, the depiction of ‘life as it is’ does not mean a naturalistic imitation of reality or the mere reproduction of an objective reality.28 Instead, Vertov aims to grasp ‘visual phenomena’ through the connection of the human eye with the mechanical eye of the camera.29 Au fond, Vertov’s cinematic visions reveal themselves to be a veritable technotopia. He regards the camera as the artistic means to ‘make the invisible visible, the unclear clear, the hidden manifest, the disguised overt, the acted non-acted, untruth truth-kinopravda (i.e. truth obtained by cinematic means)’.30 In Vertov’s utopian cinematic concept, films are intended to sharpen the spectators’ perception of reality and the camera is ‘the instrument an artist could use to penetrate the essence of external reality’.31 In order to participate in the Soviet Revolution and to keep pace with it as an artist, Vertov feels that, first of all, he has to revolutionise his artistic means.32 For him, the camera is the artist’s instrument for transporting the utopian impulse of the revolution. His cinematic utopia is, first and foremost, a technological one, but it also plays an important part in the implementation of the socialist utopia. He is highly conscious of the critical potential of cinematic art in the service of socialism and believes that ‘cinema as a revolutionary force could affect the mass consciousness’.33 With his unorthodox technological and aesthetic experiment he wants ‘to demonstrate the cinema’s exceptional power, which could be used as an educational means to build the new society’.34 Thus, Vertov is not only interested in the filmic representation of factual reality, but also in the creation of a new reality focused on the optimal proletarian society to strive for in the future. He wants to invent a new form of art for a new ideal society, and the educational potential of the film medium should be used to reach that aim by concentrating on the needs of the working classes:35 We admit that in the struggle for the documentary film’s right to develop and flourish we did not use the words – widely employed but differently understood – art and artistic as cover. At the same time we sharply, persistently underlined the inventive, stirringly revolutionary character of the kinoeye documentary films … a kino-eye documentary film is … a revolutionary lighthouse set against the background of world film production’s theatrical clichés.

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We continue to regard the documentary film method as basic to proletarian cinema and the recording of the documents of our socialist offensive, our Five-Year-Plan, as the basic objective of Soviet cinema.36 As will be shown later on, in Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov creates a utopian metropolis that supposedly mirrors the realisation of the Russian Revolution’s ideals. In its combination of documentary elements with the self-referential disclosure of the film-making process in the film itself, Man with a Movie Camera contains a critical impetus that preserves a ‘utopian function’ in the Blochian sense.37 This artistic purport reveals a didactic plea inherent in Man with a Movie Camera, which reflects the critical-appellative impetus that is also common for literary utopias ever since More’s genre-coining progenitor.

Oscillation between factuality and fictionality Man with a Movie Camera self-referentially celebrates its own medium, intending to present a distinct new film language as an artistic utopia in itself. In order to fulfil this artistic objective, it experiments with diverse cinematic strategies and techniques. Vertov, Kaufman and Svilova employ all the aesthetic means and technical possibilities contemporary film offers. They use fast, slow and reverse motion, jump cuts, freeze frame, split screen and all kinds of special effects to animate objects – for example, the seats in the viewing hall in the film’s exposition or the camera itself. Innovative visual effects are created by pixilation38 and superimposition, and everything imaginable and possible in regard to the camera angle is used: high-angle and lowangle shots, bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye views, circular motions of the camera, alteration of the depth of focus and so on.39 Moreover, the contingency and reality of the film-making process is consistently exposed and thematised throughout the whole film. On the one hand, the literal man with the movie camera is omnipresent, documenting everything in the city in the course of the day. But obviously, the cameraman himself is also watched and filmed in Vertov’s documentary by a second camera operator whilst he is performing the task of recording Soviet reality on celluloid. This is one of the self-referential means the film employs to uncover its own artificiality, thereby forcing the audience

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to constantly reflect on this artistic construction. On the other hand, the process of editing is also displayed in Man with a Movie Camera by occasionally showing Svilova working in the editing room. As a result, the film openly exhibits that the facts collected by the camera operator are visual fragments and sequences of moving images that are connected by means of montage.40 As a consequence of Vertov’s concept of the ‘disruptive-associative montage’, these images comment and complement each other, and in this way, enable the new view of reality postulated by Vertov.41 In one sequence of the film, explicit recordings of the birth of a baby are presented in sharp cross-cutting with images of city life and of the camera operator filming the city. The analogy is evident here, as Vertov’s film literally presents the birth of the new – that is the ‘nonacted’ – film.42 This new non-fiction film with its highly Constructivist character consistently subverts the factual and extends its borders, as the film’s images and their arrangement are ultimately the result of the filmmaker’s selection and, hence, a subjective interpretation in the process of presenting reality. There is no ‘cogent narrative continuity’ in Man with a Movie Camera, but instead permanently new contextualisations of images, provoked by the experimental editing that challenges the spectator.43 Thus, the audience’s critical reaction is generated while they watch the obviously artificial construction of an ideal world resembling utopia throughout the film. Vertov is aware of the staged potential of his way of film-making and consciously plays with it in his cinematic work.44 In so doing, he plays a game with fictionality and factuality that is also commonly found in literary utopias, as will be discussed below. Man with a Movie Camera reveals itself as a documentary experiment that quotes, imitates, but also targets the characteristics of the feature film, intending to unmask and subvert its conventions. Based on this rejection of fiction film, Man with a Movie Camera plays with the suggestion of the fictional, but then – once it is summoned and cited in the film – immediately dissolves it. Thus, after the prologue in the viewing hall, the actual film begins with the glance of the camera-eye through the bedroom window of a beautiful woman who is still asleep. This could be the opening of a romantic or even a tragic fiction film, but this potential impression is only briefly evoked and quickly discarded, as the intimate scene in the bedroom is interrupted by abrupt jump cuts showing images of the sleeping, pre-dawn city.45 Consequently, the film’s ostensible fictionality only lasts a very short moment, and the analogy between the city and the

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sleeping woman is elicited by means of montage. Furthermore, the images of both waking up a few moments later also suggest a parallel to the awakening of the Soviet Revolution. But before that, the images of the sleeping beauty are additionally cross-cut with pictures of the cameraman installing his camera on a railroad track. Here, the montage and the fast change of images suggest that the woman is having a nightmare. She seems to dream of the camera operator being run over by a train, but this potentially dramatic story arising in the spectators’ imagination and the attendant suspense dissipate only moments later in comic relief, when the audience learns that the cameraman is safe and only the camera was run over by the train whilst filming from a hole in the tracks. In this way, a possible fictional quality of the film is playfully constructed and instantly deconstructed in quite a few sequences of Man with a Movie Camera. Because the film constantly recalls its own recording situation and refers self-reflexively to the production process, Man with a Movie Camera emphasises the centrality of cinematic language as a subject of representation, thus provoking the viewers’ urge to decipher its meaning. The spectators’ perception is challenged, the audience is stimulated to reflect and possibly, as a result of these reflections, even to act. These self-referential techniques intended to educate the masses by means of film resemble the narrative strategies often used in literary utopias to stimulate the readers’ critical reflection. The oscillation between factuality and fictionality Vertov accomplishes with cinematic means is also an inherent narrative feature of literary utopias, and in both cases it is employed to create a utopian vision. As early as More’s Utopia, the game of fictionality simulating authenticity is established as a characteristic narrative ploy of the genre.46 The ludic character of the Renaissance novel reveals itself, for instance, in the ironically estranged integration of autobiographical elements in the fictional text as well as in the blending of historical facts and fictional components. Preceding the two – dialogically structured – books of Utopia is a fictitious letter to Peter Gilles, an alias for the Dutch humanist Petrus Aegidius, who was in fact a friend of Thomas More’s.47 In this letter, a fictional alter ego of the author, the first-person narrator of Utopia called Thomas Morus, critically questions his memories of Hythloday’s oral travelogue about his experiences on the island of Utopia.48 The fictional Morus asks his friend Gilles to verify his recollection of some

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details because, according to him, the book called Utopia is the transcript of a previous conversation between the three men. ‘You see, I’m extremely anxious to get my facts right, and, when in doubt, any lies that I tell will be quite unintentional, for I’d much rather be thought honest than clever.’ Inventing a literary alter ego in the guise of the fictitious editor Thomas Morus – who ironically pretends ‘merely to repeat what he [Hythloday] said about the laws and customs of Utopia’ – More repeatedly unmasks the fictional construction of Utopia.49 This reference to the text’s artificiality undermines the plausibility of the narration, while its alleged factuality is repeatedly and strongly emphasised throughout the text. This ambiguous literary game with fact and fiction as a simultaneous oscillation between jocularity and earnestness also manifests itself in Hythloday’s name, which means ‘one who is cunning in nonsense or idle gossip’ and which can be read as an explicit signal openly referring to his fictional construction.50 At the same time, however, Hythloday is introduced as a travel companion of Amerigo Vespucci. On the one hand, the authenticity of his travelogue is asserted because an actual historical expedition is chosen as a starting point for the narration of the alleged discovery of Utopia. But on the other hand, the simulated credibility of the rapporteur is subverted at once by the evident fictional construction implied by his name. Furthermore, the constant overemphasis on the verisimilitude of this report allegedly only documented by the fictitious Thomas Morus merely exposes its fictional status: You knew that in this work I didn’t have the problem of finding my own subject-matter and puzzling out a suitable form – all I had to do was repeat what Raphael told us. There was no need to bother very much about the wording, since his style wasn’t particularly polished – the whole thing was improvised on the spur of the moment … So the closer I could get to his simple, off-hand way of expressing himself, the closer I’d be to the truth, which in this case is all I’m worrying about, and all I ought to worry about.51 This style of narrating, which is rather unusual for the time, probably protected the real author Thomas More, who expresses a radical socio-political critique in Utopia. But apart from that, this literary game

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creates a poetological space for readers to reflect on both the factually real and the potentially desirable. The fascinating play with reality and fiction as a means of conveying the utopian intention immanent in the text epitomises the parallel between More’s literary utopia and Vertov’s utopian documentary. The Soviet filmmaker uses cinematic techniques comparable to More’s literary strategies, enhanced through their filmic visualisation. In Utopia the authenticity of the narration is stressed, only to be perforated in order to release the utopian impulse of the text. When the fictitious Morus repeatedly asserts that nothing in the report of Utopia was invented by him, the readers start to question this claim suspiciously. Similarly, in Man with a Movie Camera the authenticity of the film material is emphasised, as the omnipresent cameraman seems to signal consistently that he is only recording and documenting real life as it is. But as there is obviously a second camera in use and as the editing of the footage is shown, the viewers are frequently made aware of the aesthetic and technical process of film-making. The oscillation between factuality and fictionality provokes critical reflexion on the part of the audience and, thus, acquires a ‘utopian function’ in the sense of Ernst Bloch in The Principle of Hope. The ‘utopian function’ unfolds in the same way in the novel and in the film, that is, between the poles of the factual and the fictional as the ‘object-based premonition of the Not-Yet-Become, in the shape of a Not-Yet-Become-Good’.52

The creation of the utopian vision via structural composition Apart from the obvious play with factuality and fictionality, there are also structural analogies between More’s Utopia and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera that are decisive for the creation of the intended utopian vision. Aside from a number of short paratexts like the aforementioned letter to Peter Gilles at the beginning of the novel, More’s Utopia is structured in two parts.53 The first book consists of a conversation between Gilles, Hythloday and the fictitious Morus, which takes place in Gilles’s garden in Antwerp. The second book contains Hythloday’s report about the ideal social system of the island state called Utopia that is located somewhere in the New World. The satirical debate between the three resembles a Platonic dialogue about the essence

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of just politics and a reasonable political constitution. This dialectically structured debate influences the implicitly addressed, humanistically trained contemporary readers in their perception of the subsequent travel account. The two books of Utopia face each other diametrically – and in this mirror structure, the intended effect of the text as a whole unfolds. Generally, the driving force of utopian thought and, by extension, of literary utopias is the author’s experience of deficiencies of the existing reality. Connected with that is the utopian ‘desire for a better way of being and living’.54 In other words, the anticipatory wish for a better future inspires the literary invention of a non-existent ‘good place’ contrasting with the lived reality of authors and their contemporary readers. Thus, Utopia always contains, as Max Horkheimer defines it, ‘two sides; the criticism of what exists and the depiction of what should be’.55 More’s Utopia criticises the existing European situation in the early modern age. In the first book, Hythloday’s account of a people called the Tallstorians provides a possible alternative to the English system of criminal justice; the examples of Nolandia and Happiland function as criticism of the European rulers’ politics of conquest. Hythloday’s report, in the second book, of the ideal society on the island of Utopia is the most extensive outline of a societal alternative to the living conditions in Europe at the time. After sharply criticising the sovereigns’ leadership for its lack of reason as well as for the inequitable property situation, Hythloday sketches a positive mirror image, describing Utopia as a possible societal option worth striving for. More employs the form of the visitor/guide narrative that is typical of early modern literary utopias. The Portuguese seafarer, who accidentally visited the state of Utopia during his travels, and who was introduced to its social system by the inhabitants, becomes the readers’ imaginary guide in the second book, virtually leading them as visitors through the utopian state in his report. According to his account, the island Utopia is based on the principles of reason, freedom, equality, justice and tolerance. Private property and money have been abolished for the well-being of all. The allusions to the socio-political reality in Europe and the many slightly defamiliarised details suggesting an analogy between England and Utopia were probably recognised by the readers of the time. Amaurotum, Utopia’s capital, and the river Anydrus, for instance, bear a strong resemblance to London and the River Thames.56 These analogies, in combination with the structure of the text, provoke the readers’ intuitive comparison of the factual and

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fictional social systems. In the gap between the readers’ empirical reality and the ideal of the fictional utopian state, the text’s utopian intention reveals itself as a socio-critical comment on the conditions of the world the readers live in. The first-person narrator Morus deliberately evades a clear assessment at the end of the novel, leaving the critical judgement to the readers. They are supposed to reflect on the question of what they prefer: the existing socio-political reality or the fictional system described in Hythloday’s report. Although it may not be apparent on an initial viewing,57 the structure of Man with a Movie Camera,58 its function and its possible effect on the audience are all similar to the narrative principle of Utopia. In Vertov’s film, the documentation of urban life in a Soviet city is framed by scenes located in a movie theatre at the beginning and end. In literary terms, this framework could be called a prologue and an epilogue framing the main part of the film. In essence, the function of these framing scenes in Man with a Movie Camera is comparable to the narrative function of the first book in the overall structure of Utopia. The locus amoenus, where the philosophical debate in Utopia takes place, is transformed in Vertov’s documentary into a movie theatre. At the beginning of the film, the cameraman enters the cinema and delivers the product of his work, the documentary called Man with a Movie Camera. Then the opening scenes present the situation leading up to a typical film screening of the silent era. The seats in the hall are still empty; the projectionist puts the first reel onto the projector; the orchestra and its conductor make their preparations. Then the audience flocks in and eagerly awaits the beginning of the film. Right from the start, Vertov overtly intends to fulfil the promise of the introductory intertitle: he constructs an atmosphere of theatricality for a few seconds, only to deconstruct it by filmic means. The old modes of artistic operation frowned upon by Vertov are invoked just to be negated and opposed to the genuine means of cinema. Thus, many of the film’s subsequent strategies are already evoked in the exposition. The cameraman, for instance, enters the scene and seemingly disappears behind a theatre curtain, which turns out to be the curtain still hiding the cinema screen in the viewing hall. The images of a cord being drawn – fleetingly creating the impression that it is used to open a stage curtain – animates the cinema seats playfully bobbing up and down. The preparations of the orchestra briefly suggest the possibility of an ensuing concert. And the intertitle placed directly

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after these scenes, and displaying only the numeral ‘1’,59 seems to suggest a theatrical form such as a dramatic feature film in five acts. This impression is soon disproved, however; instead, the viewer will realise that this is a self-referential film about film-making, proudly staging itself and openly disclosing its mechanisms from the beginning. Vertov ab initio demonstrates as well as celebrates the proclaimed artistic utopia of an ‘absolute language of cinema’, while simultaneously focusing on the goal of educating the spectators who are about to watch the anticipatory documentation of the perfect anti-capitalist Soviet society of the future. The film begins with its own presentation, and the spectators are immediately confronted by a paradox, namely that the film, which is apparently being prepared to be shown on the projector to the waiting audience, has in fact already started. The spectators must realise that they themselves are right in the middle of the same film. This self-referential method creates a deliberately alienating distance between the viewers and the film that they are watching, simultaneously producing a tension between the spectators’ real life

Figure 2.2 • In the viewing hall (01:03:33)

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and the ostensibly documented factuality of the film. In this small innerfilmic gap between reality and ideality, the film’s critical impulse manifests itself. As a result, the viewers are motivated to reflect on contemporary Soviet reality in comparison with the ideal of a socialist society of that time, as fictionally realised in Man with a Movie Camera. From the start, Vertov presents the movie theatre not only as a place where utopia is discussed and negotiated, but also as a factual topos where utopia literally comes to life. The film’s opening and closing scenes thus establish the proletarian audience as protagonist as well as addressee of the utopia portrayed in Man with a Movie Camera. The above-mentioned visitor/guide mode commonly used in Renaissance utopias is also recognisable in Man with a Movie Camera. In Vertov’s filmic universe, the ubiquitous cameraman adopts the role Hythloday holds in More’s Utopia: he is a visitor to the ideal utopian city who later reports about it to his audience. Just like Hythloday, the cameraman is an artistically constructed figure oscillating between authenticity and fiction. Kaufman, who appears as himself in Man with a Movie Camera – an aspect that reinforces the factual character of the documentary – is nevertheless consistently revealed as a somewhat artificial construct of a cameraman. On the one hand, he is shown as a frantic reporter, a vigilant chronicler and a meticulous archivist of the collected pieces of evidence that he comes across during the course of the day. This is an obvious method for suggesting the unmediated quality of the observations the cameraman records on celluloid, which ostensibly strengthens the authentic character of his footage. On the other hand, however, he himself is constantly filmed by a second camera operator as he is trying to witness, to capture and to show everything just the way it is.60 Thus, the initial impression of authenticity is instantly subverted and the mediated character of the footage – which, in addition, is also shown as being arranged by Svilova – is emphasised. Like the frequently anthropomorphised camera and the city itself, the cameraman is one of the film’s protagonists,61 but, like Hythloday, he is not a fictional character involved in the narrative or cinematic plot. While Hythloday only describes the way of living in Utopia, the cameraman – that is, the one the viewers watch filming in Man with a Movie Camera – only documents life in the ideal city. Without interfering in the events around him, the cameraman always remains just an observer behind the camera lens. But at the same time,

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or so the self-referential elements of the film suggest, he inevitably becomes the commentator and interpreter of the documented urban world. Similar to Hythloday’s narrative function in More’s novel, his role is to act as a correspondent from utopia. And the film as a whole – presented to the viewers in the factual and fictional viewing hall as the edited result of the visual material that the cameraman collected during his chases through the city – assumes the same function as the seafarer’s travelogue in the second book of Utopia. Both serve the same purpose, that is, to animate their audience to critically reflect on their own reality and to meditate on the vision of a possible utopian future presented in both works. Just like Hythloday for the readers, the cameraman becomes a guide for the viewers through Vertov’s filmic utopia set in the Soviet future. However, his role in Man with a Movie Camera exceeds that of a mere visitor or guide to utopia like his literary prototype Hythloday. Vertov not only stages the cameraman as creator of the film within the film Man with a Movie Camera, but also metaphorically elevates him as the impartial constructor of the city, which is the subject of both films. It is the ‘man with the movie camera’ who captures the images of the metropolis on celluloid and who allows the ideal city to be resurrected in plain view of the amazed audience again and again on the cinema screen. In other words, he is employed in a self-referential way not only as demonstrator, but almost as creator of this ideal-typical city of workers in the 1920s. In a short scene near the end of the film, the cameraman observes the metropolis – now the subject and the product of his work – from an elevated position on the city’s rooftops or almost from the sky, so it seems. This is the effect of yet another superimposition, showing the ostensibly oversized cameraman installing his camera somewhere above the city in order to observe every movement on the ground. These images playfully suggest that, in the ideal urban future, the ‘man with the camera’ will be in control, monitoring everything from every possible angle and position. Of course, this is only possible with the support of the camera which – personified here once again – keeps watch over the city from above, making sure that nothing escapes the observation of the kinok. In the context of Vertov’s film theory, the omnipresence of the camera on display here only confirms the self-referential demonstration of its utopian possibilities. Seen today, however, the powerful camera with its phallus-like

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Figure 2.3 • The cameraman, creator of the city (00:56:13)

zoom-lens monitoring the city and every move of its inhabitants also reminds present-day viewers of the disquieting warning ‘Big Brother Is Watching You’ in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), with all its dystopian implications, such as the total surveillance of the individual as well as of society as a whole.62

The utopian city The utopian metropolis created by the cameraman and ultimately staged by Vertov in Man with a Movie Camera stands out due to its fictional ideality rather than its facticity. In essence, Vertov creates a cinematic utopia of the ideal city inhabited by the ideal socialist citizen based on the glorification of the machine. But simultaneously, he indicates by means of disruptive-associative montage that this is a socialist city of the future, a utopia still in the making and yet to come. In a few sequences, the juxtaposition of shots actually reveals the

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Figure 2.4 • The camera monitoring the city (00:27:06)

contrast of the proletarian and bourgeois lifestyles that still existed in Soviet Russia at the time. The ‘parallel editing is intended to provoke the viewers to think about juxtaposed shots and to establish ideological connections between various events’ and people.63 Consequently, the ‘implication subliminally alludes to the social differences between the activities of the bourgeoisie and those of the working class’.64 Thus, Man with a Movie Camera comprises a critique of the existing Soviet reality as well as of its own utopian alternative that can only be deciphered by analysing the metaphorical meaning of the film’s overall structure and of the arrangement of individual shots. This filmic concept resembles the self-reflexive critique that is characteristic of literary utopias. In More’s Utopia, for instance, the utopian alternative is critically questioned by means of the satirical dialogue and the objections of the fictitious editor Thomas Morus. Moreover, Vertov’s filmic delineation of the ideal socialist city of proletarians can be called a utopia in the true sense of More’s wordplay: that is, characterised by spatial as well as temporal displacement.

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Like More’s island of Utopia, Vertov’s cinematic city is a virtual good place – a eu-topia – but also a non-existent place situated neither in time nor in space, a ou-topia. As the kinok Vertov enthusiastically proclaims: ‘free of the limits of time and space, I put together any given points in the universe, no matter where I’ve recorded them’.65 On the one hand, Vertov uses fragments of footage that he recorded over several years66 and thus creates a still non-existent socialist city of the future by combining images of the present and the past. On the other hand, he does not depict a factual city like the one in Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (DE 1927) either. Vertov’s allegedly factual good place is, in truth, a kaleidoscopic montage of urban images recorded in five different Soviet cities – Moscow, Kiev, Donbas, Yalta and Odessa.67 Thus, he fabricates an ‘imaginary, artificial, urban cinematic landscape’, but some of its parts would nevertheless have been recognisable for his contemporary audiences, as was the slightly defamiliarised London for Utopia’s readers.68 In both cases, this artistic device is intended to trigger comparisons to existing reality and, perhaps, a critical reaction on the part of the viewer or reader. Like More in Utopia, Vertov negates contemporary reality in Man with a Movie Camera in order to portray an ideal city-state, with a perfectly functioning socio-political system and inhabited mainly by good and happy people.69 The montage ‘creates a “grand metaphor” about a society free of any capitalist exploitation of workers’. But as Petrić points out: The overall ideological message of the film is meant to work ‘at a distance’, that is, it depends on the viewers’ active mental participation during the screening, on their subsequent thoughts, repetitive viewing and additional research.70 As in the early modern utopias, such as Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619), Tommasso Campanella’s Civitas Solis (1623) or Francis Bacon’s Nova Atlantis (1624/1627), the utopian city in Vertov’s silent film serves as pars pro toto for society as a whole.71 The isolation and the confined urban space of the Renaissance utopias guarantee the controllability and therefore the stability of the desired good place. Similarly, the presentation of an ostensibly factual city proves the perfect playground for Vertov’s cinematic experimentation with

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visions of the future socialist society. Like its utopian predecessors, Man with a Movie Camera has neither ‘developed dramatic characters’ nor a character-based plot, but simply documents urban everyday life instead.72 This filmic approach resembles the static description of socio-political institutions in the literary utopias. Hence, the individual plays no role in either Vertov’s documentary or in the Renaissance utopias, for their focus is on the harmonious community as a whole. The delineation of the utopian state’s functionality characteristic of literary utopias is compressed into the portrayal of urban life during a single day in Man with a Movie Camera. This exemplary portrait of a city from dawn till dusk is, moreover, typical for the so-called modernist ‘city symphonies’,73 Ruttmann’s documentary being a prime example.74 Vertov orchestrates impressions of the socialist way of living in the metropolis, depicting all spheres of human life including birth, wedding, divorce and funeral. But during the day, the camera’s main focus is on the diligent proletarians at work, whereas from the late afternoon on they are observed being collectively busy with recreational activities. In general, utopians despise idleness. And yet, the citizens of Utopia deliberately work just six hours a day and the inhabitants of Campanella’s City of the Sun only four.75 The rest of their time is spent on all kinds of studies and activities. Vertov, however, concentrates on the presentation of the utopian workers pursuing their respective professions, and shows the future socialist as assembly line worker, fireman, tram driver, coal miner, barber and so on. Even the cameraman understands himself as a worker in the service of the revolution, contributing his share to the collective like everybody else. He is one of the ‘intellectual engineers’, as Kaufman calls the kinoks, a perfectly functioning machine producing images of the urban.76 Therefore, by means of skilful montage, the process of film production is shown in quite a few sequences of Man with a Movie Camera as analogous to the different occupations of the other labourers. Images of Svilova working in the editing room, for instance, are paralleled via cross-cuts with pictures of a needlewoman at work and spinners in a factory. Film production is thus established as an essential aspect of collective labour in Vertov’s documentary.77 The emphasis on the importance of proletarian work in Man with a Movie Camera is strongly connected with the film’s obvious glorification of technology and progress in the developing Soviet Union. Besides the presentation of all kinds of moving vehicles – trams, trains,

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fire engines, cars, motorcycles, carriages, ships, etc. – that determine the hectic rhythm and the accelerated pulse of the city, machines themselves are at the centre of Vertov’s attention. The city as a whole is not only shown as a living organism, as is often the case in city novels and films, but also as a well-functioning machine. Technology in contemporary Soviet Russia is viewed as a means of advancement and liberation of human beings, who are not yet as perfect as the machines.78 Therefore, from Vertov’s point of view, in order to further improve society, man has to try to align to the machines’ perfect manner of functioning and to develop into ‘the perfect electric man’.79 The film medium, especially the technique of montage, enables the kinoks, so Vertov claims, to literally create this ideal, artificial new man and woman by combining man and machine:80 I am kino-eye, I create a man more perfect than Adam, I create thousands of different people in accordance with preliminary blue-prints and diagrams of different kinds. I am kino-eye. From one person I take the hands, the strongest and most dexterous; from another I take the legs, the swiftest and most shapely; from a third, the most beautiful and expressive head – and through montage I create a new perfect man.81 In Man with a Movie Camera, these perfect new men and women Vertov intends to bring to filmic life can be seen at work as well as exercising their trained bodies during leisure time. As a mass, they constitute the engine of the vibrant urban organism and, metaphorically, they become the personification of the dream of a new socialist society. But, as stated before, in contemporary Soviet reality the utopian dream of creating a perfect human being according to socialist ideology has not yet been fully realised. Conscious of that fact, Vertov playfully breaks with a one-dimensional presentation of an ideal alternative world once again in one of the last sequences of his celluloid utopia. Here he deploys montage to contrast the shortcomings of the present Soviet society with the prospective ideal conditions, intending to prompt the spectators’ critical reflection. The tension between factual reality and utopian ideality already evoked by the film’s self-referential composition as a whole is now compressed and visually demonstrated in a short sequence of images. The future socialist should get rid of the vices of

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bourgeois society, such as alcohol and feature films, which only serve to dull people’s minds: this seems to be the ideological message here.82 The poster of one of the feature films so despised by Vertov is paralleled in cross-cuts with scenes of people drinking beer in a beer hall.83 Both are expressions of a lifestyle to be abandoned by the utopian proletariat. Their obvious negative effect is explicitly imitated in the derailed cinematography of the cameraman in the following scenes. But metaphorically leading the way for the desired development of the Soviet Union and for the success of the cultural revolution, the cameraman leaves the beer hall, passes the condemned church and enters the workers’ club to join the new men and women.84 In contrast to the people in the temples of vice, the model worker of the future spends his time on useful activities – or so the film suggests. By juxtaposing fragments of the present-day Soviet Union with glimpses of its possible future, the sequence unfolds its critical intention. In a structural sense, these scenes function as mise-en-abîme reflecting the film’s overall composition. Vertov compresses the various utopian concepts summoned in Man with a Movie Camera – the utopian city of tomorrow, the ‘perfect electric man’ and the utopian vision of the prospective socialist society – into a celluloid utopia that is projected on the cinema screen. In the epilogue, the film self-referentially returns to the audience in the movie theatre as it is now confronted with a galvanising cinematic finale. In the film’s final minutes, Vertov ultimately brings his utopia of a new cinematic language into being, demonstrating and celebrating all the previously used techniques and devices at an accelerated pace, using rapid cuts that the human eye is hardly able to follow. He even predicts and visualises the breakdown of Russia’s cultural past and present, symbolised by the feigned demolition of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre through yet another trick of montage. Vertov’s ideological message to his audience is unequivocal in the split-screen view of the Bolshoi Theatre. With Man with a Movie Camera, the new non-fiction film that will ban the demons of the cultural conventions of the past has been born.85 As the last images of the city are cross-cut with reaction shots of the spectators mesmerised by the impressions of the cinema of the future, the discrepancy between the factual life of the viewers and the only allegedly factual documentary of the socialist society is brought to the spectators’ attention once again. In this way, or so Vertov hopes, they can be educated, their

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Figure 2.5 • The demolition of the past (01:05:17)

critical faculties can be stimulated and, perhaps, they can take a first step towards fulfilling what Bloch calls the utopian ‘Real-Possible’.86 Notes 1. Man with a Movie Camera is the most commonly used translation for the original Russian film title, but translations vary and titles such as The Man with the Movie Camera, Living Russia, The Man with a Camera, etc. are also in use; see the list of alternative film titles for Man with a Movie Camera: www.imdb.com/title/tt0019760/releaseinfo#akas (accessed 26 November 2017). The DVD used here, for example, is titled Man with a Movie Camera, but uses The Man with the Movie Camera in the subtitles: Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-appartom, D: Dziga Vertov, SU 1929). 2. For the historical background of Vertov’s cinematic oeuvre and a detailed analysis of Man with a Movie Camera, see Vlada Petrić, Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera. A Cinematic Analysis, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 3. See Susanna Layh, Finstere neue Welten. Gattungsparadigmatische Transformationen der literarischen Utopie und Dystopie (Würzburg:

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4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

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Königshausen & Neumann, 2014), p. 38. This rather simplistic definition of literary utopia derives from the general distinction between diverse manifestations, phenomena and facets of the utopian: that is, the differentiation between utopian thought, political-ideological concepts/ theories, intentional communities and literary outlines and/or fictional conceptions. See also for further reference, Layh, Finstere neue Welten, pp. 33–4. For further reading on the kinoks, see Petrić, Constructivism in Film, pp. 1–5. Dziga Vertov, ‘The Man with a Movie Camera’, in Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 82–5, 83. Dziga Vertov, ‘Kinoks: A Revolution’, in Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 11–21, 12. This is the translation of the original Russian intertitle in Man with a Movie Camera used in the English subtitles with the corresponding capitalisation. Vertov, ‘The Man with a Movie Camera’, p. 84. See Petrić, Constructivism in Film, p. 1. Dziga Vertov, ‘We: Variant of a Manifesto’, in Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 5–9, 7; capitalisation in the original. Eva Hohenberger, ‘Dokumentarfilmtheorie. Ein historischer Überblick über Ansätze und Probleme’, in Eva Hohenberger (ed.), Bilder des Wirklichen. Texte zur Theorie des Dokumentarfilms (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2000), pp. 8–34, 10; my translation. Dziga Vertov, ‘Kino-Eye’, in Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 60–79, 71. See F. T. Meyer, Filme über sich selbst. Strategien der Selbstreflexion im dokumentarischen Film (Bielefeld: transcript, 2005), p. 98. Dziga Vertov, ‘The Factory of Facts’, in Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 58–60, 59; capitalisation in the original. Many critics point out that, of course, Vertov’s cinematic concept has to be regarded in the light of the contemporary Soviet avant-garde movement; see, for instance, Hohenberger,

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15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

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‘Dokumentarfilmtheorie’, p.  10. For further reading, see Petrić, Constructivism in Film, pp. 1–69. Vertov, ‘Kino-Eye’, p. 71. Vertov, ‘The Factory of Facts’, p.  59; Vertov, ‘The Man with a Movie Camera’, p. 84. See Petrić, Constructivism in Film, p. viii. See Hohenberger, ‘Dokumentarfilmtheorie’, p. 10. See Vertov, ‘We: Variant of a Manifesto’, p. 9. See Dan Geva, ‘Reinvisioning Dziga Vertov: Ten Enduring Diktats for Documentary Cinema’, in David LaRocca (ed.), The Philosophy of Documentary Film. Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), pp. 305–24, 310–1. Dziga Vertov, ‘Artistic Drama and Kino-Eye’, in Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 47–9, 47. Dziga Vertov, ‘The Man with a Movie Camera (a Visual Symphony)’, in Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 283–9, 283; Petrić, Constructivism in Film, p. vii. Vertov, ‘The Man with a Movie Camera’, p. 83. See, for example, Dziga Vertov, ‘Kinopravda & Radiopravda’, in Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 52–6. Vertov, ‘The Man with a Movie Camera’, p. 84. Vertov, ‘Kinoks: A Revolution’, pp. 14, 15. Vertov, ‘The Man with a Movie Camera’, pp. 84–5. See Meyer, Filme über sich selbst, p. 77. Vertov, ‘The Man with a Movie Camera (a Visual Symphony)’, p. 283. Dziga Vertov, ‘Kinopravda’, in Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley/Los Angeles/: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 126–32, 131; italics in the original. Petrić, Constructivism in Film, p. vii. See Hohenberger, ‘Dokumentarfilmtheorie’, p. 10. Petrić, Constructivism in Film, p. vii. Petrić, Constructivism in Film, p. viii. See Meyer, Filme über sich selbst, p. 98. Dziga Vertov, ‘Replies to Questions’, in Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley/Los Angeles/

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37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

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London: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 102–6, 103–4; italics in the original. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1986), p. 146. Petrić, Constructivism in Film, p. 168. Petrić, Constructivism in Film, p.  84; Hohenberger, ‘Dokumentar­ filmtheorie’, p. 10. For a more detailed analysis of the film-aesthetic methods, see Petrić, Constructivism in Film, pp. 110–28. For Vertov’s differentiation of different stages of montage in the editing process, see Petrić, Constructivism in Film, p. 72. For further reading on the dialectical principle of Vertov’s concept of the ‘disruptive-associative montage’, see Petrić, Constructivism in Film, pp. 95–107. Vertov, ‘The Factory of Facts’, p. 59. Petrić, Constructivism in Film, p. 79; For a more detailed analysis of the self-referential associations created by the editing process, see Petrić, Constructivism in Film, pp. 82–4. Meyer, Filme über sich selbst, p. 96. Vertov frequently uses the strategy of first suggesting, but then ultimately negating, a narrative, see Petrić, Constructivism in Film, pp. 91–5. For the argumentation in the following paragraph and further references to More’s Utopia, see Layh, Finstere neue Welten, pp. 40–3. Petrus Aegidius (1486–1533) was a Dutch scholar, whom More met in 1515 when he was a member of an English delegation on its way to Bruges. More’s visit in Antwerp can be seen as the historical background for the fictional discussion in Aegidius’s garden depicted in Book One of Utopia. See, for example, Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More (London: Chatto & Windus Random House, 1998), pp. 164–7. While I use the name ‘More’ for the real-life author of Utopia, I refer to the character acting as narrator as ‘Morus’. Thomas More, Utopia (London: Penguin, 1965), pp. 30, 41. Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More, p. 170. The name ‘Hythloday’ is a neologism derived from the Greek. For the different possibilities of translating and deciphering this telling name, see for instance Layh, Finstere neue Welten, p. 42. The one possible translation of Hythloday as ‘one who is cunning in nonsense or idle gossip’ can be interpreted in two ways: either Hythloday is one who rejects ‘nonsense or idle gossip’ and thus always tells the truth, which strengthens his ostensible reliability. Or, he can be seen – as he is experienced with ‘nonsense or idle

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51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

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gossip’ – as a boaster and chatterer who cannot be taken too seriously, which questions his credibility. Both interpretations, however, reveal the telling name as an obvious fictional construction in opposition to the alleged authenticity of his report. More, Utopia, p. 29. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p. 146. For the argumentation in the following paragraph, see Layh, Finstere neue Welten, pp. 43–4. Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (New York: Allan, 1990), p. 7. Max Horkheimer, ‘Die Utopie’, in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 2: Philosophische Frühschriften 1922–1932, ed. Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1987), pp. 237–51, 244; my translation. See, for example, Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More, p. 167. As several critics note, the complexity of the film’s structure can only be grasped when watching Man with a Movie Camera several times and examining its sequences, segments, shots and frames; see, for instance, Petrić, Constructivism in Film, pp. 78–9. For the segmentation of the film’s structure, see Petrić, Constructivism in Film, pp. 72–8. According to Petrić, three additional numerals were included in the original print of the film, see Petrić, Constructivism in Film, p. 76. See Petrić, Constructivism in Film, p. 73. See Petrić, Constructivism in Film, p. 72. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 3. Petrić, Constructivism in Film, p. 84. Petrić, Constructivism in Film, pp. 84–5. Vertov, ‘Kinoks: A Revolution’, p. 18. See John MacKay, Man with a Movie Camera: An Introduction, https:// www.academia.edu/4090580/Man_with_a_Movie_Camera_An_ Introduction_ (accessed 26  November 2017), pp.  15–16; Stavros Alifragkis and François Penz, ‘Man with the Movie Camera – Constructing Visions of Happiness in the Ideal Socialist City of the Future’, in Alexandra Ioannidou and Christian Voß (eds), Spotlights on Russian and Balkan Slavic Cultural History (München/Berlin: Otto Sager, 2009), pp. 165–200, 175. See Alifragkis and Penz, ‘Man with the Movie Camera’, p. 166. Alifragkis and Penz, ‘Man with the Movie Camera’, p. 175.

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69. For the hidden social criticism in Man with a Movie Camera that can only be detected by means of a thorough analysis of the juxtaposition of shots, see Petrić, Constructivism in Film, pp. 107–9. 70. Petrić, Constructivism in Film, p. 80. 71. Johann Valentin Andreae, Christianopolis, in Felix Emil Held, Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis: An Ideal State of the Seventeenth Century (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1914), pp. 129–280; Francis Bacon, New Atlantis: A Work Unfinished, in Francis Bacon, New Atlantis and The Great Instauration, ed. Jerry Weinberger (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), pp. 61–111; Tommasso Campanella, The City of The Sun: A Poetical Dialogue (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1901). 72. Petrić, Constructivism in Film, p. 79. 73. Alifragkis and Penz, ‘Man with the Movie Camera’, p. 167; Manhatta (D: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, US 1921) or Rien Que les Heures (D: Alberto Cavalcanti, FR 1926) are other typical examples of ‘city symphonies’. For the characteristics of the ‘city symphony’, see Chris Dähne, Die Stadtsinfonien der 1920er Jahre. Architektur zwischen Film, Fotografie und Literatur (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013), pp. 164–277. 74. There is a plethora of publications on the delineation of the city in Ruttman’s film. See, for instance, Sabine Hake, ‘Urban Spectacle in Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of the Big City’, in Thomas W. Kniesche and Stephen Brockmann (eds), Dancing on the Volcano. Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic (Columbia: Camden House, 1994), pp.  127–42; Jörg Schweinitz, ‘Maschinen, Rhythmen und Texturen. Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt von Walter Ruttmann. Die filmische Imagination einer Metropole’, in Ute Schneider and Martina Stercken (eds), Urbanität: Formen der Inszenierung in Texten, Karten, Bildern (Wien/Köln/Weimar: Böhlau, 2016), pp.  157–70. In contrast to Man with a Movie Camera, Ruttman’s film ‘lacks genuine avant-garde characteristics’, as Petrić points out (Constructivism in Film, p. 79). Vertov thus rejected comparisons between his film and Ruttman’s; see Dziga Vertov, ‘Letter from Berlin’, in Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 101–2. 75. See More, Utopia, p. 76; Campanella, The City of The Sun, p. 12. 76. Annette Michelson, ‘An Interview with Mikhail Kaufman’, in Klaus Gruber (ed.), Dziga Vertov zum 100. Geburtstag (Wien/Köln/Weimar: Böhlau, 1996), pp. 91–110, 97. 77. See Petrić, Constructivism in Film, pp. 78, 80.

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78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

See Alifragkis and Penz, ‘Man with the Movie Camera’, p. 184. Vertov, ‘We: Variant of a Manifesto’, p. 8. See Vertov, ‘We: Variant of a Manifesto’, p. 8. Vertov, ‘Kinoks: A Revolution’, p. 17. See Petrić, Constructivism in Film, pp. 84–6. For a more detailed analysis of the function of the film posters in Man with a Movie Camera as symbols of the commercially oriented and theatrically staged entertainment films in contrast to Vertov’s cinematic concept, see Petrić, Constructivism in Film, pp. 86–90. 84. For a more detailed analysis of the ‘interaction between montage pace and camera movement’ and its ideological implications, see Petrić, Constructivism in Film, pp. 85–6. 85. See Petrić, Constructivism in Film, p. 85. 86. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p. 146.

Selected works Alifragkis, Stavros and François Penz, ‘Man with the Movie Camera – Constructing Visions of Happiness in the Ideal Socialist City of the Future’, in Alexandra Ioannidou and Christian Voß (eds), Spotlights on Russian and Balkan Slavic Cultural History (München/Berlin: Otto Sager, 2009), pp. 165–200. Ackroyd, Peter, The Life of Thomas More (London: Chatto & Windus Random House, 1998). Bloch, Ernst, The Principle of Hope vol 1. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1986). Geva, Dan, ‘Reinvisioning Dziga Vertov: Ten Enduring Diktats for Documentary Cinema’, in David LaRocca (ed.), The Philosophy of Documentary Film. Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), pp. 305–24. Hake, Sabine, ‘Urban Spectacle in Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of the Big City’, in Thomas W. Kniesche and Stephen Brockmann (eds), Dancing on the Volcano. Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic (Columbia: Camden House, 1994), pp. 127–42. Layh, Susanna, Finstere neue Welten. Gattungsparadigmatische Transformationen der literarischen Utopie und Dystopie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2014). Levitas, Ruth, The Concept of Utopia (New York: Allan, 1990).

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Michelson, Annette, ‘An Interview with Mikhail Kaufman’, in Klaus Gruber (ed.), Dziga Vertov zum 100. Geburtstag (Wien/Köln/Weimar: Böhlau, 1996), pp. 91–110. More, Thomas, Utopia (London: Penguin, 1965). Petrić, Vlada, Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera. A Cinematic Analysis, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Vertov, Dziga, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1984).

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3

Neither Fact Nor Fiction: Made in Secret as a Utopian Education in Desire Peter Seyferth

Maybe everything depends on the DVD viewers’ choice. If they select ‘Play Movie’, they will watch a lie, and if they select ‘Play Movie with Intro’, they will watch a utopia. The first unsuspecting viewers of Made in Secret: The Story of the East Van Porn Collective (D: East Van Porn Collective, CA 2004), who saw it at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival in February 2005, did not have this choice. Instead, they were led to believe that they were being shown a documentary film about the anarcho-feminist East Van Porn Collective (EVPC), a group that produces emancipatory porn movies. Learning only during the discussion with the filmmakers after the screening that Made in Secret was, in fact, planned and produced as a fiction film, some viewers felt betrayed and got angry.1 Thus, for the DVD release, the option to play the movie with an explanatory intro was added. This intro is just four seconds long and consists of a black screen with one sentence in white lettering: ‘The following film is neither fact nor fiction.’ In the ensuing eighty-six minutes of the film, the viewers accompany the documentarian Godfrey, who visits the collective while the members watch their latest porn video. After some discussion, he is allowed to film them planning and shooting the next porn film, BikeSexual. The viewers do not see much naked skin, but rather discussions and interviews about how to come to crucial decisions in the collective. The climax of the film is not exactly an erotic one: it is another discussion round during which the collective almost breaks up over the question of whether their films should be shared with other feminist porn activists. The tension is resolved as Godfrey is accepted as a new member of the collective and Made in Secret is chosen as their first (and only) film to be released. This reference to the film within the

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film is not just an ironic twist, but signals the difficulties the viewers should have when trying to decide whether what they are watching is fact or fiction, or something else. I argue that, instead of being fact or fiction, Made in Secret is a utopian film that transgresses reality as experienced by both filmmakers and spectators. The transgression that is so puzzling about this film is what makes it utopian: it is a propagandistic film that depicts some details (but not the totality) of the anarchist world that the activists of the collective want to see realised. I interpret Made in Secret as a mocku­mentary, although the film balks at generic definitions, which I will discuss at some length below. To theorise the role of spectatorship on and in front of the screen, I use Miriam von Schantz’s ‘moving-image-body’ (or ‘mib’) model. For the function of utopia in radical political activism, I refer to Ruth Levitas’s concept of utopia as the education of desire and to Stephen Duncombe’s reading of spectacle as a possible tool for emancipation. To synthetically merge these perspectives, I rely on my lack of formal training in film studies. This is essential because, to be effective, utopia has to affect not so much the professional audience, but rather the amateurs and activists.

Neither fact nor fiction To come to grips with Made in Secret, I treat it as a mockumentary. The definition of mockumentary is as disputed as the term itself. Scholars not only disagree about its essential features, they also give it different names like ‘mock-documentary’ or ‘fake-documentary’. According to Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, mockumentaries are ‘fictional texts which in some form “look” like documentaries. These texts tend to appropriate certain documentary modes, as well as the full range of documentary codes and conventions.’2 This is certainly a description that fits Made in Secret well, but some additional assumptions of Roscoe and Hight about the mockumentary contradict what Made in Secret is (or is about), as I will discuss below. Other definitions are similar in their focus on mixing ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’. John Parris Springer and Gary D. Rhodes conceptualise the mockumentary as a ‘hybrid’, using a model that differentiates both between form and content, and between the adjectives ‘documentary’ and ‘fictional’. While a documentary combines documentary form

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and documentary content and a fiction film combines fictional form and fictional content, docudramas present documentary content in fictional form while mockumentaries combine fictional content with documentary form.3 This is a handy definition, but the ‘fundamental variations in the generic field of the “mockumentary” suggest that there is much work to be done simply defining basic terms and conventions’.4 Jelle Mast, for example, rejects this approach because it rests on the assumption that there are formal and thematic features that belong solely to either documentary or fiction. Mast prefers to ‘understand mock-documentary as a complex form that projects a (primarily) imaginary world while taking an ambiguous “stance” towards the depicted events’.5 There is both an ‘assertive stance’ (a style asserting that the portrayed events and people actually exist) and a ‘fictive stance’ (a textual and/or extra-textual indicator that the world projected is non-existent).6 Made in Secret is ambiguous about the ‘stance’ because the viewer can actually choose whether to see the intro with its puzzling message that the film is ‘neither fact nor fiction’, or not. Crucially, the film is also ambiguous about the profilmic ‘(primarily) imaginary world’. This imaginary world became real during the shooting of the film: pornography, decision-making and the collective itself were transformed from fictitious entities in a written text into actually existing beings in Vancouver in 2004. That is the reason why I think Made in Secret is more than yet another mockumentary. It is one of the rare utopias with the ambition to change the world (even if only a bit). Roscoe and Hight propose three degrees of ‘mock-docness’: 1. the parody, where ‘documentary aesthetics are appropriated largely for stylistic reasons’, mainly with humorous intentions; 2. the critique of how the documentary form confers legitimacy on its subject and conclusions and therefore supports the status quo; 3. the deconstruction of the documentary – in this case the mockumentary’s ‘real intention is to engage in a sustained critique of the set of assumptions and expectations which support the classic modes of the documentary. The documentary project itself, then, is ultimately their true subject.’7 This taxonomy does not really fit Made in Secret, which is neither a parody nor a joke. It is rather earnest and even boring at times, although it has its funny parts, just like any utopia. Furthermore, it neither criticises nor deconstructs the documentary form, but rather uses it – like a ‘normal’ documentary – to make the audience believe what is shown on screen:

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that feminist DIY porn and consensus decision-making are good and possible. While it is true that Made in Secret does ‘incorporate a specific political critique’ as its protagonists discuss commercial heteronormative pornography, the film’s deeper agenda is the proposition of an alternative to hegemonic political structures and ideas, particularly majority rule and representation.8 It is also true that the filmmakers expected the audience of Made in Secret to be conscious of its fictionality, to ‘get the joke’ and appreciate the intention behind the appropriation of the documentary codes (which is another feature Roscoe and Hight ascribe to the mockumentary9). Yet, it is only partly true that the audience will ‘miss the joke’ if they remain unaware of the film’s true status. If the audience takes Made in Secret as proper documentary, it will still get the message that feminist DIY porn is cool and that decisions should be made through a consensus process. ‘Getting the joke’ adds a further insight: seeing the possibility of making something real that was a mere fantasy beforehand. In other words, to figure out that Made in Secret is a mockumentary means to figure out that utopia is quite possible. Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner stress the fact that the mockumentary ‘is easy to produce, discern, and appreciate even as it evokes extremely complex systems of signification’, which is crucial for independent or avant-garde filmmakers.10 The East Van Porn Collective does not have professional equipment or funding, nor is it interested in the commodity value of its film(s).11 Also, its focus is not really on film (despite the fictitious claim that it is a porn film collective), but on propagating certain political procedures. The mockumentary form is used because it is relatively cheap to pull off, and because it offers layers of subversion that are hardly realisable within ‘pure’ fiction film.12 Complementing Roscoe and Hight’s claim that the mockumentary (first degree) is a parody, Juhasz and Lerner add that it is also a satire. While the parody looks at a text (the documentary), the satire looks at the world: what the documentary is about, the moral, social, political and historical. ‘Fake documentaries do and undo the documentary form, the film’s subject (theme, topic, storyline, characters), and the moral and social orders.’13 I will argue that Made in Secret focuses on the latter: dialectically doing and undoing social orders, thereby transforming (a section of) the world into a utopia. A certain extra-filmic potency is often ascribed to the mockumentary. This hybrid form ‘inherently constructs a degree of latent

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reflexivity towards the genre’14 and therefore ‘creates a further level of engagement’.15 If the mockumentary succeeds, it can be called ‘productive’: A productive fake documentary produces uncertainty and also knowingness about documentary’s codes, assumptions, and processes. The fakery of fake docs mirrors and reveals the sustaining lies of all documentary, both real and fake, producing the possibility for the contesting of history, identity, and truth.16 To become productive in this way, the mockumentary must include ‘this contract set up between producer and audience. It requires the audience to watch as if at a documentary presentation, but in the full knowledge of an actual fictional status.’17 I contend that – leaving the extra-textual aside – Made in Secret does not offer this contract and therefore does not prime the audience ‘to consider not simply fact and influence of form, but its connections to social projects of real weight’.18 It is true that the fictional documentary filmmaker Godfrey is questioned by the fictional pornographic film-making collective at the beginning of the film and included at the end, so that filming is the topic of Made in Secret on two levels, inviting reflections. Thus, ‘the viewer must engage in formal considerations, and … a self-aware analysis of how this suddenly visible documentary form is linked to the questions about social power that it records’.19 However, it is not the level of documentary filming, but the profilmic level of pornographic filming that catches one’s eye. Just like ‘the best and most stimulating fake documentaries’, Made in Secret performs a ‘corrosive action’.20 It just does not primarily corrode the documentary. Instead, it corrodes the fact/fantasy divide of reality and gives an example of how to create situations that can lead to actual transformations of the social order – even if only on a very small scale. For this, it has to offer a different contract to the audience than the conventional mockumentary. From the beginning of mockumentary scholarship, it has been recognised that there is a need for ‘a complex understanding of spectatorship’.21 For this, I find Miriam von Schantz’s attempt to theorise spectatorship ‘as an act of entanglement of screen and spectator’ quite useful.22 Following Deleuze and Guattari, von Schantz postulates that a ‘body’ is ‘a set of relations of forces produced by its connections’, and

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that these relations ‘are produced as a result of a process of actualizing virtuals. Importantly, virtuals, or virtualities, are the non-actualized real.’23 Extending this formula to the situation of a film screening, she asserts: A moving image is an assemblage and a spectator is an assemblage, and when a spectator watches a moving image a new assemblage is created: the mib. The moving-image-body is … an affective unfolding of virtuals into singular actuals.24 Made in Secret allows this unfolding to happen on two levels: in the movie itself – which, among other things, is a movie about making and watching movies – and in front of the screen. In other words, the bodies that were captured by the camera while watching a porn video are transformed from fictional to factual members of the East Van Porn Collective, thus actualising what has been virtual; in a similar vein, the spectator of Made in Secret may also be transformed. It is important to recognise that the agency of the spectator is central to von Schantz’s mib.25 Spectators can refuse to believe the propaganda of the film, but they also can accept it. To grasp how this may be done, von Schantz refers to Lipkin’s, Paget’s and Roscoe’s idea of the ‘spectatorial contract’. A standard mockumentary ‘uses the form of a documentary but fills it with fictitious content’, and the spectator has to know this to understand the mockumentary. This recognition ‘is a contract in which “the praxis of the real” is playfully deconstructed’.26 In a series of ‘persuasive acts’, any film (fiction, documentary, mockumentary) offers a certain spectatorial contract. Interviews, talking heads and direct address invite the viewer to understand a film as documentary; a hint at the fictitious nature of the content is the playful part of the persuasion that the movie is not a documentary proper. ‘When this persuasion is received as such and accepted as legitimate … the mockumentary contract is signed.’27 This contract is only possible under the epistemological assumption that there is a distinction between ‘real’ and ‘false’, ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’. This assumption is criticised by von Schantz: although the deconstruction of the formal qualities of the documentary real in This is Spinal Tap (D: Rob Reiner, US 1984) or Man Bites Dog (C’est arrivé près de chez vous, D: Rémy Belvaux/André Bonzel/Benoît Poelvoorde, BE 1992) could at first be considered a critical practice, through their displaying

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and deconstruction of the discourse of factuality, its reception as such lies in its recognition. That is, it has to be recognised as a fake that is playing with ‘the real’ in order to offer the mock contract. In so doing, paradoxically, the open and rhizomatic potentials of a ‘becoming real’ are organised and stratified.28 The usefulness of von Schantz’s mib results from its applicability to mockumentaries that do not offer a mockumentary contract, but stick to the documentary contract – although later, outside the movie itself (in the paratexts: intro, interviews and/or confessions of the filmmakers), they turn out to be mockumentaries. These are traditionally categorised as a ‘hoax’. Roscoe and Hight’s examples for this mock-subcategory are Alien Abduction (D: Dean Alioto, US 1998) and Forgotten Silver (D: Peter Jackson/Costa Botes, NZ 1995);29 von Schantz mentions Exit Through the Gift Shop (D: Banksy, UK 2010) and then analyses I’m Still Here (D: Casey Affleck, US 2010). But she insists that at least the latter is not exactly a hoax or outright lie but something else: an affective mockumentary.30 Because the body of the spectator (re)acts differently while watching these strange movies than when watching blatant lies, a different mib is created, a mib that can affectively disrupt the real and produce new thought. The contract offered by the movie is unrecognisable, so the spectator has ‘to engage with the film beyond the issue of truth/falsity’.31 A ‘leakage’ emerges that allows potentialities of future realities to enter the spectatorship: ‘the mib created through the affective mockumentary allows for the spectator-screen-body to participate in the production of life, to enter a process of becoming real, as it were’.32 My point here is to show that Made in Secret is a movie with exactly these potentialities, because it offers the contract of the affective mockumentary. This is ‘a contract of disrupting the notion of a stable and external “objective” real altogether, instead performing a space for a new real to come, potentializing a new image of thought’.33 One version of the wording of this contract is printed on the back of the DVD sleeve: So is the resulting film a documentary? A fictional drama? Even the collective doesn’t know anymore. And ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Because the movie isn’t about what happened or what didn’t happen – it’s about what’s possible. And the possibilities are huge, transcending the quest for egalitarian porn

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and touching at the very heart of how we engage with others and with the world around us.34 More interestingly, the affective mockumentary contract is also offered through the assemblage of moving images and several audio tracks. Let’s look at two examples of how Made in Secret transcends reality. 1. After what looks like an old video clip of the founding manifesto of the East Van Porn Collective (EVPC), the movie begins with a discussion among several people about whether they should allow Godfrey to film their group and their activities. This is an obvious signal for a documentary, and it is also a signal for what Made in Secret is actually about: collective decision-making. The apparent theme of the apparent documentary is the EVPC, a group of feminist filmmakers who produce queer DIY porn videos. After the documentary camera is allowed into the house, it captures the collective’s first screening of their most recent porn movie. However, access to EVPC’s porn is restricted to the members, so as to generate the trust and courage necessary for the kind of eroticism the collective strives for: a safe space. That is why the documentary only shows the members’ reactions to the porn video, but not the video itself. Looking at the TV screen – invisible to Made in Secret’s viewers, who merely hear some distant panting and moaning – EVPC members blush, squirm and laugh (see figure 3.1). These are bodily reactions to the viewing experience, which are not easily faked by non-professional actors. Since EVPC’s members are amateurs, their behaviour signals – in the words of von Schantz – ‘the real’ and therefore seems to offer the documentary contract. But in fact, the whole collective and its activities have been invented and written down by Todd (who acts as Professor University) in a short story. In the alternative audio track (‘Collective Commentary’) of the movie on the DVD, it is revealed that Made in Secret is a screen adaptation of Todd’s short story.35 Therefore, the viewer who accepts the proffered documentary contract will be fooled. So how did the protagonists manage to show real emotions? This is revealed in a second alternative audio track (‘DIY Commentary’) of the movie and in the DVD extras. After many attempts to rehearse and stage this scene, the makers realised that only the real looks real, and decided to set up real situations that would spark authentic emotions and thus the desired bodily reactions.36 In the making of, Aaron (who acts as Mr Pants) explains:

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Figure 3.1 • Screening party with Muffy LaRue, nerdgirl and J. D. Superstar (screenshot is lightened up for printing purposes; video is much darker) (08:41)

Our strategy was to try and make things look as real as possible by actually creating real situations, putting ourselves in them, and then documenting those moments, as though we were actually making a documentary. So, like when we show ourselves watching a sexy movie on screen, we actually made a sexy movie and screened it for everybody. We were all watching it for the first time and we were capturing our sincere reactions to that moment. And that became really confusing for us. And really kind of interesting because in the process of trying to make the movie look as real as possible it actually became at least half real.37 This confusing blurring of the real/fake divide can be explained with von Schantz’s theoretical framework: as this group of friends watched the ‘sexy movie’ together, moving-image-bodies were created. Not-too-talented actors transformed themselves into EVPC members, using the moving images some of them had made earlier for exactly this purpose. Thus, Made in Secret is able to offer what looks like the

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documentary contract – but this contract is clearly the affective mockumentary contract, as is repeated time and again in the film’s paratexts (alternative audio tracks, extras, DVD sleeve). 2. Of course, the creation of new identities that transcend earlier realities does not depend entirely on moving images on a screen. The video-watching situation is just one of many possible assemblages that allow something new to emerge. The emergence of the EVPC cannot be reduced to the screening party. There were utopian strategies on many levels: literary (scripts), personal (choice of participants) and social (utilisation of existing relationships). The filmmakers used scripts to create a new reality. As Sarah (who acts as Monster) explains, the scripts were personalised and secret, so that all actors more or less knew their own roles, but not what the others would say or do, thus making real surprises possible. Katie (who acts as J. D. Superstar) amends that some participants had word-for-word scripts, others had just a few lines and some had nothing except a general outline. Things that had to be said were said while leaving enough room for spontaneous behaviour. This is only possible if people can play themselves, so Sarah and Todd looked for people who matched the protagonists of the short story. They constructed an elaborate backstory for the EVPC that was based on the actual friendships between the participants; mostly they changed the names. They even had a big flowchart showing who was dating whom and who had been together previously. The strategic use of real-life relationships between the participants made it possible to stage situations that defy the fact/fiction dichotomy. One example is the kissing scene in the new EVPC porn production BikeSexual, where Professor University and Mr Pants meet at a skatepark and start to smooch. The narrative purpose of this scene is to show how gently the porn collective approaches sex on camera. The male actors feel uncomfortable, and the director gives them the time they need to start: a stark deviation from porn industry reality (see figure 3.2). The key to this scene is the awkwardness of the kiss that has been interpreted as an ambiguous marker for the reality of what is shown in Made in Secret. Also, the awkwardness shows the audience that the depicted people are not professional porn actors playing with DIY aesthetics, but non-professional actors with DIY ethics playing with porn.38 For Made in Secret’s utopian intention, the amateurish awkwardness is crucial, because it is not about improving the decision-making of professionals (politicians) but

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Figure 3.2 • Kissing scene with Professor University, Mr Pants and Monster (with camera) (29:46)

of amateur activists. This focus is typical for anarchists. Despite the fact that the whole scene was scripted, the awkwardness is real because it relies on real-life relationships. Aaron and Todd were roommates, but not used to kissing each other. Additionally, Aaron was Sarah’s boyfriend (she is seen filming the kissing scene), while Todd had been with her previously for about five years and is still legally married to her. So even if it was the script that demanded awkwardness, it was the assemblage of love, hurt and guilty bodies that made the awkwardness real. The non-actualised real (i.e.  the virtual) has been made real, the virtual existence of the East Van Porn Collective has become an actuality. In front of and behind the camera, a cunning construction of situations has turned fictional inventions into factual social relations and accompanying feelings. In the case of the film-screening scene, von Schantz’s mib can explain this entanglement; in the case of the kissing scene, something else – but similar – must have happened. Mr Pants and Professor University were not mibs when kissing and feeling awkward, but it was the situational assemblage of relations and feelings that made real what was just a fiction beforehand. Apparently, the mib is just a subset of assemblages that make the implementation

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of psychological, social and even political models possible. On the level of the spectator of Made in Secret, we can expect a mib and more. The movie is not what it seems at first glance, so the ‘leakage’ that allows the mibs to ‘participate in the production of life’ by making their own DIY amateur porn videos is just one of several possibilities. If the viewer decides to become more than a mere viewer and thusly considers the film’s paratexts, Made in Secret turns out to be a political utopia. As I will show, it presents a model for decision-making in difficult situations and offers an affective mockumentary contract that opens the possibility of changing the viewer not just into a mib, but into an anarchist. The previous examples touch on issues of making porn: how do you simulate – or stimulate – real emotions that are linked to sexuality to make the movie look authentic? For the standard hardcore porno, the answer is: by using markers of true sensations, especially the so-called cum shot. As Linda Williams has observed, this ‘money shot’ symbolises the ‘cinematic will-to-knowledge’ because it is ‘the visual evidence of the mechanical “truth” of bodily pleasure caught in involuntary spasm; the ultimate and uncontrollable – ultimate because uncontrollable – confession of sexual pleasure in the climax of orgasm’.39 Markers of truth are by no means reliable: they just help the viewers to suspend their disbelief and to indulge in their daydreams. Made in Secret does something similar, although it does not show ‘money shots’ and has almost no nudity in it. It is not a porn movie, and it is not even really a movie about making porn. Still, there is much talk about porn in Made in Secret, and it seems to contain a utopian hope for a more feminist sexuality. Of course, the issue of sex has been an important aspect of utopian discourse and emancipatory movements. For instance, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) suggests presenting a bride and groom naked to each other before marriage, so as to ensure reciprocal sexual allure.40 In the twentieth century, the anarchist Emma Goldman (among many others) advocated the liberation of sexuality as a means and/or end of emancipation or even revolution. She criticises the subordination of women and adolescents in patriarchal, capitalist and generally dominating social arrangements that have to be overcome. Goldman’s ideas clearly match the praxis of the EVPC. In the words of Clare Hemmings: In ways that resonate with queer critiques of heteronormative time … Goldman’s account of sexual and gendered revolution

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includes playing with temporality: bringing about new values in the present requires a creative imagination that enacts the future now, and brings forward lost voices.41 This is a dialectical view of time that combines virtuals (not yet actualised possibilities) with actuals (the prefigurative actualisation of possibilities the activists want to see realised in the world). Since Made in Secret is not really a film about porn or about porn-making, I will refrain from a deeper discussion of sexuality and utopia. If Made in Secret is not about porn, what is it about, then? J. D. Superstar reveals this in the only spoken words of the theatrical trailer: ‘It is about everybody having a lot more freedom, a lot more voice and a lot more input into who they are.’ That means the movie is about a central aspect of anarchism: collective decision-making through consensus-oriented deliberation. This is one of the definitional political goals of anarchists, as I will discuss shortly: a praxis that they can and do actualise in the here and now in spite of not yet having won the revolution. A consensus process is a technique that aims at establishing ‘structures of tyrannylessness’ to avoid both tyrannical structures and the notorious ‘tyranny of structurelessness’.42 Consensus process is also what viewers see most of the time on screen, and it is the decision-making procedure that the filmmakers used in order to avoid the hierarchy that is so typical of most film-making. This is also what viewers see most of the time: discussion after discussion. My claim that Made in Secret is a utopian film cannot, therefore, rely on the ‘utopian re-visions’ of sex that certain feminist porn films provide when they ‘point to new forms of interpersonal and subjective relationships which follow from representations of sexual pleasure which are no longer based solely on the male gaze or on male pleasure and ejaculation’.43 Instead, the film indulges in a different kind of what Williams calls the ‘education of desire’.44

Utopia The ‘education of desire’45 has been identified as the central function of utopia, or at least of those utopias that – like William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890)46 and the critical utopias from the 1970s on – do not merely depict a good alternative society, but intradiegetically

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envision social and political changes that extradiegetically try to inspire their readers to engage in emancipatory activism. Generally, a positive utopia or eutopia is ‘a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived’, as Lyman Tower Sargent’s definition asserts.47 Sargent also reminds us that ‘obviously the completeness will vary’, so that restrictions with regard to content are possible.48 The detailed description of a subsystem – such as the decision-making process – still counts as a utopia. There are different kinds of positive utopias. One axis of differentiation is the selfreflexive critical quality. Most (classic) utopias depict harmonious or near-perfect societies. But some others include ‘difficult problems that the described society may or may not be able to solve’, and they are called ‘critical utopias’.49 How the problems can be solved depends on the political system that is depicted. Anarchist polities cannot rely on elites or superheroes, because everyone should have equal power. Consequently, problem-solving in an anarchist utopia means deliberative collective decision-making, using structures that ensure equality. News from Nowhere may be considered a forerunner of these critical utopias. The most famous critical utopias include Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976).50 Another axis of differentiation between different kinds of utopia is the extent of their intentionality. Some (classic) utopias are mere texts, while others are intended to inspire activists to realise the depicted society – or they inspire without intending to do so. Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) did (unintentionally) spark movements and parties that tried to erect the good new order that this novel describes.51 Morris, on the other hand, wanted News from Nowhere to pull socialist activists in a more anti-authoritarian direction, but had less political success than Looking Backward. This is utopia’s crucial role for activists: to find fellow combatants who help to invent and struggle for a better world, while acknowledging that this struggle is a multi-voiced process that never ends.52 Ruth Levitas asserts that The education of desire is part of the process of allowing the abstract elements of utopia to be gradually replaced by the concrete, allowing anticipation to dominate compensation.

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Utopia does not express desire, but enables people to work towards an understanding of what is necessary for human fulfilment, a broadening, deepening and raising of aspirations in terms quite different from those in their everyday life.53 Intentional utopias can be understood – to use von Schantz’s terminology – as virtual entities that try to seduce their recipients to develop similar virtuals into actuals.54 Intentional literary utopias must not be read as blueprints; they are not the virtuals that have to be actualised. Rather they inspire their readers by adding their abstract content into the assemblage that is the reader, if the reader accepts the propaganda. Then a new reader-body emerges that has mixed its previous longings with ideas from the literary utopia into a concrete desire. Now it is possible that the reader-body begins to struggle for the realisation of this desire. That is what we would expect theoretically. Empirically, alas, the critical utopias ‘are the types of books unlikely to spawn largescale activist groups’, as Kenneth Roemer has observed.55 This may be due to their complexity and ambiguity, but also to their discursivity. Complexity and ambiguity deprive the readers of the simplicity of political slogans and manifestos. Discursivity is boring and hints at controversies. In fact, reviewer Rob Howatson of the Globe & Mail calls Made in Secret ‘possibly the most boring film ever made with the word “porn” in the title’.56 But as an affective mockumentary, it has the potential of exciting and activating its viewers. It does not fail in creating activist reader-bodies like the critical utopias; rather, it does succeed in creating moving-image-bodies that try to make real their own versions of the EVPC.57 How does Made in Secret, this complex, ambiguous and discursive critical utopia, affect, move and inspire its viewers? Like any functional work of propaganda, it does not just present the propagandist’s ideal as something good, but does so in a way that the viewers can easily accept, because it mixes the utopian good with the already accepted good of these viewers. Contrary to classical literary utopias, Made in Secret taps into widespread desires that are typically expressed in popular culture. Stephen Duncombe has made the point that ‘re-imagining progressive politics in an age of fantasy’ is best attempted not through the rational discourses (like the classical utopia) but through a kind of dreaming he calls ‘spectacular’.58 He agrees with the situationist Guy Debord that we live

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in a ‘society of the spectacle’ where ‘those who put their trust in Enlightenment principles and empiricism today are doomed to political insignificance’.59 Therefore, he criticises the activists of the left for having failed at presenting their ideals in a way that actually wins over many people: Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which give these fantasies form – a politics that understands desire and speaks to the irrational; a politics that employs symbols and associations; a politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent.60 Such a politics would have to assume the form of entertainment because ‘the function of entertainment [is] to escape the here and now, to imagine something different, something better’.61 In other words: entertainment spectacles have an inherent utopian quality. Duncombe has identified the progressive potential of spectacles like Las Vegas, pro wrestling, video games, advertising and celebrity culture to express ultimately emancipatory dreams of freedom, abundance, diversity and so on. Although these spectacles – to which porn should be added – are not emancipatory in themselves, an ‘ethical spectacle’ can be performed that helps to transform the world into a better one. For instance, an ethical spectacle could point out what is desirable in a McDonald’s ad: the family that has been transformed into a happy one by eating hamburgers. But other than advertising, the ethical spectacle transparently eschews bullshit like magically beatifying hamburgers. It depicts the dream of a happy family and, as an implicit corollary to that, the emancipatory goals of enough spare time and money to eat together in a restaurant.62 It ‘is a dream that we can watch, think about, act within, try on for size, yet necessarily never realise. The ethical spectacle is a means, like the dreams it performs, to imagine new ends.’63 Duncombe’s examples of ethical spectacles are several campaigns of adbusting and billboard liberation, such as Billionaires for Bush, Critical Mass (also briefly mentioned in Made in Secret), Reclaim the Streets and other movements that play with fantasy and power and rely on a tongue-in-cheek ‘as if’ attitude on the part of their participants to make real the dream of honest advertising and lobbying, sustainable urban traffic or people’s sovereignty in the

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streets. The ethical spectacle is therefore – like the mib – one of the assemblages that are intended to turn virtuals into actuals. Made in Secret is an ethical spectacle because it spectacularly plays with sexual fantasies of being a porn star, while explicitly criticising the anti-erotic realities of the heteronormative capitalist porn industry and (at least in the paratext) transparently exposing itself to be not real but a spectacle. All qualities of the ethical spectacle mentioned by Duncombe also apply to this affective mockumentary: Our spectacles will be participatory: dreams the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if people help create them. They will be open‑ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it.64 Of course, the viewers cannot re-edit the film. But the film invites them to change in real life. While the popular desire Made in Secret plays with is being a porn star, the praxis that should be changed is not erotic or filmic, but political. The viewers should fulfil their (perhaps unconscious) utopian desire for political participation and collective power by performing dreary discussions, of all things. Typically, the classic utopian texts from Utopia to Looking Backward are discursive insofar as they discuss the pros and cons of social (political, economic, etc.) arrangements. In the main, they are treatises and belong to the discipline of political philosophy, in spite of their fictional framing narratives. Consequently, they are bad storytelling material and will hardly ever be made into films. This is not to say that discourse is utterly unfilmable. Although lacking bloodshed and explosions, discussions can be thrilling methods of conflict resolution. If it were true that utopias do not know conflict, disputes would not occur in them. While this applies to many classical utopias – the utopian societies portrayed are so harmonious that the only possible dispute seems to be that between the outsider and his guide – other utopias introduce conflict, politics and deliberation. For instance, in Morris’s News from Nowhere, ‘the whole people is our parliament’, so that discussions on

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contentious matters happen, although ‘our differences concern matters of business  … and could not divide men permanently’.65 Thus, the non-utopian notion that ‘political strife was a necessary result of human nature’ is rejected by the utopians, who did not abandon political disputes but found better ways to resolve them.66 In contrast to the highly filmable dystopias, where political discussions are futile, the critical utopias, from the 1970s on, focus on conflict and its possible solutions through political discussions. Therefore, methods of deliberative decision-making can very well be a central theme of utopias. It is the central theme of Made in Secret, which, as I am arguing, is a utopian film. Unlike most literary utopias, this film focuses not on the totality of a better society, but primarily shows how decision-making can become fair, inclusive, egalitarian and effective (if a bit slow), even in tense situations. The deliberative processes depicted here can serve as inspiration for elements of the political structure of a society free of domination. Throughout the film, the East Van Porn Collective struggles with arriving at collectively binding decisions that do not force people to do or suffer things they do not want. The collective is committed to consensus decision-making. Consequently, it cannot shorten discussions by majority vote or leader decision. ‘If we can’t all agree on the decision, it’s not the right decision’, asserts Professor University. The first discussions are about Godfrey’s (the alleged documentarian’s) presence and filming. Should he be allowed to film members of the collective at all? And, more fundamentally: can the collective decide that he may film whilst not all members of the collective are present for the decision-making process? The next big discussion revolves around the planned film BikeSexual: is it queer enough? Will Godfrey be allowed to film the filming, which means that a non-member would see the members’ erotic activities? The final discussion almost destroys the collective and is extremely long, spanning the last quarter of the movie. The members strongly disagree about whether to show BikeSexual at an independent porn film festival or to keep it secret. Again, fundamental questions arise: when can members veto a decision? What is the purpose of the collective? Will the collective split or terminate itself – and if not, who belongs to it, anyway? Understandably, these are very difficult questions that lead to hurt feelings, but also help the collective to understand better what/who it is and what it wants. It is a hard (and endless) path towards a better world where previously hidden social

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evils are being overcome. Utopia has to be understood as a deliberative process, which is typical for critical utopias that eschew perfection and stasis. Although the discussions are made up, scripted and even shot in several takes, their depiction again uses several markers of reality, for instance, the handheld camera that misses some statements and thus signals that its operator doesn’t know in advance who will talk next. Another marker of reality is the play of light and shadow that results from different solar altitudes and thus signals the excruciatingly long time the collective needs to arrive at a decision (see figure 3.3). Like the constructed situations of the screening scene and the kissing scene, the discussion scenes are not purely fake, however. As is revealed in the Collective Commentary, the real-life collective had very similar discussions, following almost the same set of rules, questioning the existence and scope of the collective just as heatedly, and also needing a large amount of time. In the film, the collective always finds solutions that bind Godfrey closer to it; as he is ultimately turned into a member, the collective wins sovereignty over the documentary, making Made in Secret a film not about, but by, the East Van Porn Collective. In reality, the same people used the consensus process and rotation principle

Figure 3.3 • Discussion scene with nerdgirl, Hugh Jorgen, Muffy LaRue and Professor University (and Mr Pants’s knee) (1:20:43)

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for shooting and editing the film. However, in reality there were also deviations from the filmic ideal of filming: after shooting the material, most of the women moved away from Vancouver, so there is some male bias in the editing process. The consensus process sounds very impractical, especially in the film business where the director is typically a little dictator, while the producer serves as the grey eminence. But that impracticality is a feature of business, not of consensus. Corporations and firms, like states and armies, are hierarchies that require the absence of consensus processes for smooth functioning. A boss ceases to be a boss if he or she has to ask all employees for their agreement before commanding what they have to do next. Thus, almost naturally, consensus process is a decision-making technique for those who want to do away with hierarchies. One example would be the so-called ‘anti-globalisation movement’.67 David Graeber identifies this movement as anarchist in aspiration and organisation, and sees the consensus process as the heart of its ideology. It is about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties or corporations; networks based on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus democracy.68 The process he describes is quite similar to the East Van Porn Collective’s decision-making, so it should be safe to declare the EVPC anarchist, despite the absence of this term from the film. Not all anarchists carry (or even tolerate) the name. Similar to Graeber’s promotion of consensus process as anarchist democracy, Made in Secret openly propagates it in the section called ‘What does it mean to be a collective?’ All participants should have a say in decisions that affect them; majority decisions violate this right. The rotation principle for appointments like project coordinator, editor or meeting facilitator staves off power imbalances. Holders of those posts are empowered to facilitate, but decisions are made by the collective. The collective does not strictly follow the principles: Professor University seems to hold the position of facilitator every time, exerting undue influence on the decision-making process. But it is quite clear that the purpose of consensus process is the empowerment of all members, even if that means everyone has to yield to the group while deciding where the

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group is heading. This is a difficult undertaking that transcends the individuals involved and the idea of the independent individual as such. It takes seriously the notion of the person as an assemblage that is produced by its connections. So does Made in Secret function as a propagandistic utopian film that successfully advocates for the consensual decision-making anarchists prefer? I do not have sufficient data to assess its impact on all possible audiences, but my impression as well as my analysis suggest that Made in Secret is successful propaganda. I discovered the film through an anarchist activist who visited me. He knew I was researching egalitarian methods of non-state democracy and deemed the film to be a relevant example for my work. I myself was thrilled about the excellent outcomes of the decision-making processes and the fairly effective rule-following of the collective members.69 But others came to quite different conclusions. The Collective Commentary cites viewers who took the final discussion as proof that the consensus process is inoperative. The contradictory reasons for this judgement revolve around the role of nerdgirl, who vetoes the proposal to show BikeSexual at the festival. On the one hand, some see the ensuing consensus process as a method for bullying nerdgirl into a compromise – and in fact, she is quite alone in her insistence that a festival screening would violate the collective’s principles and its policy of safe-space secrecy. On the other hand, some see nerdgirl as the bully who, through her veto, hijacks the collective and forces her will upon it; in fact, without her insistence, the collective could spread the message of non-exploitative feminist DIY porn to a receptive audience.70 Both readings are valid, but not as knockout arguments that dismiss consensus process as such, leaving decision-making to the bullying by chairpersons, by hidden tyrannies of structurelessness or by majorities. The problematic power and responsibility of veto demonstrated by nerdgirl is an inevitable part of the consensus process, and has to be shown if Made in Secret wants to be a critical utopia, an ethical spectacle, and not an incredible fairy tale of perfect harmony. Duncombe’s ethical spectacles share a crucial characteristic with von Schantz’s moving-image-bodies: spectators can dismiss the propaganda and reject being transformed, but they can also accept it and start to transform reality. That is what Made in Secret is capable of: educating desire for the difficult politics of collective decision-making, provided the spectator chooses to be seduced by this utopian film.

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Conclusion Made in Secret can be interpreted as a utopia because it describes in detail what a better world might look like, while criticising the existing one. But the description is restricted to one central topic: collective decision-making. Unlike the classical utopias from More to Bellamy, Made in Secret tells us nothing of better education, working conditions, infrastructure, architecture, family relations, food, law enforcement, science, religion, etc. If a utopia has to cover all spheres of social relations, Made in Secret fails to be a utopia. But it is debatable whether completeness is a necessary criterion for a utopia. I propose combining the description of at least one aspect of a better society with a different criterion: the cunning play with the fact/fiction dichotomy. This is also typical for classical utopias. More’s Utopia is the best example: its main narration, Hythloday’s monologue about the island of Utopia, is sure of its existence and goodness. But Utopia’s paratext casts doubts on this. While the alphabet and woodcut map at the beginning of the book signal plausibility, letters from More’s humanist circle question the plausibility of Hythloday’s report. There even seem to be several persons named ‘Thomas More’, with differing opinions. A similar pattern structures a later utopia that has parallels with Made in Secret insofar as it attracts recipients with portrayals of non-oppressive sex that women can freely choose in Canada: Baron de Lahontan’s New Voyages to North-America (1703).71 Its first volume is an authentic collection of letters that the real-life baron sent back to his superiors in France, reporting on his duties and impressions as a colonial officer in New France. Its second volume is a semi-authentic travelogue that half-reports, half-invents the customs and social institutions of both existing and fantastic Native American tribes. The third volume is a completely invented utopian dialogue between a fictional ‘Lahontan’ (who is as incredible as the ‘More’ in More’s dialogue) and the Huron chief Adario, who praises several aspects of Huron life, including free love. The slow shift from factual report to the counterfactual construction of an ideal Amerindian society is complemented by an authentic Algonkin dictionary and a preface that casts doubt on the text and the illustrations. The preface even urges the reader to mistrust all authorities ‘till such time as Anarchy be introduc’d amongst us, as well as the Americans, among whom the sorryest fellow thinks himself a better Man, than a Chancellor of France’.72 This transgressive mixture

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of fact and fiction, and the widespread desire for uninhibited erotic lust, has helped to spark a tradition of anarchist utopian writing, starting with a distorted translation of Lahontan’s text that openly called for revolution.73 Like Adario’s repeated appeals to ‘turn Huron’, Made in Secret appeals to its spectators to become porn stars, to do what the EVPC has done.74 The film starts with a manifesto, allegedly read in February 1998 to a radical audience in Vancouver. It juxtaposes contemporary porn reality (‘shot after shot of slot after slot’) with a vision of ‘a homemade grassroots pervert revolution’ that results in ‘movies full of arty cuties making out and enjoying it’. This vision combines the roles of spectator and actor. On the one hand, ‘that is the porn revolution that I want to watch, with one fist in the air and one in my crotch’ (see figure 3.4). On the other hand, one should ‘come with the East Van Porn Collective! You have nothing to lose but your pants.’ The paratexts of Made in Secret cast doubt on both the factuality and fictionality of what we see in the film, while the film itself adopts the form of a documentary. Taken as a whole, it is an affective mockumentary, and it shows us how to make our own affective mockumentaries (or porn films) and self-governing egalitarian affinity groups. It aspires to transgress

Figure 3.4 • Manifesto scene with Monster (02:12)

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reality, and succeeds in this insofar as the spectator accepts the affective mockumentary contract. As von Schantz has stated, ‘the mib created through the affective mockumentary allows for the spectatorscreen-body to participate in the production of life, to enter a process of becoming real, as it were’.75 The DIY commentary is a tool to produce films: the discussions on discussions are a contribution to the discourse on ideal speech situations and consensus processes that are already used in many anarchist activist circles. The confusing factuality/fictionality of the film and, of course, all its paratexts, expand the spectator’s ontological certainties to include possibilities and desires. Show me a utopia that accomplishes more! Notes 1. East Van Porn Collective, Made in Secret: The Story of the East Van Porn Collective (Vancouver: One Tiny Whale, n.d. [2005]), ‘Making of’, 13:46–19:43. At this film festival, the staff wanted to grant the film an award but ‘couldn’t decide in which category to vote for Made in Secret’, so they invented the ‘Ambiguity Appreciation Award’ for it (East Van Porn Collective, Fact Sheet, n.d. [2005], http://onetinywhale.com/presspack. zip (accessed 2 January 2018), p. 4.). 2. Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking it. Mock-documentary and the Subversion of Factuality (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 49. 3. John Parris Springer and Gary D. Rhodes, ‘Introduction’, in Gary D. Rhodes and John Parris Springer (eds), Docufictions. Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking (Jefferson, NC/ London: McFarland, 2006), pp. 1–9, 4. 4. Springer and Rhodes, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. 5. Jelle Mast, ‘New directions in hybrid popular television: a reassessment of television mock-documentary’, Media, Culture & Society, 31/2 (2009), 231–50, 234. 6. Mast, ‘New directions’, 234–5. 7. Roscoe and Hight, Faking it, pp. 68, 70–1, 72. 8. Roscoe and Hight, Faking it, p. 47. 9. Roscoe and Hight, Faking it, p. 52. 10. Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, ‘Introduction. Phony Definitions and Troubling Taxonomies of the Fake Documentary’, in Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner (eds), F is for Phony. Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 1–35, 5.

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11. The porn films are not for sale and do not even exist in reality, perhaps with the exception of one film. The film Made in Secret is offered for sale on the website http://onetinywhale.com. In 2012, I was able to buy the DVD there, but since at least 2015 it seems to be impossible to actually buy it. Just try it! 12. Juhasz and Lerner, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. 13. Juhasz and Lerner, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. 14. Roscoe and Hight, Faking it, p. 50. See also pp. 53, 64. 15. Juhasz and Lerner, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. 16. Juhasz and Lerner, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. See also pp. 4–5. 17. Steven N. Lipkin, Derek Paget and Jane Roscoe, ‘Docudrama and Mock-Documentary: Defining Terms, Proposing Canons’, in Gary D. Rhodes and John Parris Springer (eds), Docufictions. Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking (Jefferson, NC/ London: McFarland & Company), pp. 11–26, 17; original emphasis. 18. Juhasz and Lerner, ‘Introduction’, p. 10. 19. Juhasz and Lerner, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. 20. Juhasz and Lerner, ‘Introduction’, p. 21. 21. Roscoe and Hight, Faking it, p. 53. See also pp. 64–7. 22. Miriam von Schantz, ‘New Materialist Spectatorship: The Moving-ImageBody, the Mockumentary and a New Image of Thought’, Networking Knowledge, 8/5 (2015), 1–20, 4. 23. von Schantz, ‘Spectatorship’, 6; original emphasis. 24. von Schantz, ‘Spectatorship’, 7. 25. In her words: ‘the merit of the mib is that it offers a way to reappraise the agential space that is produced in the spectating event’; von Schantz, ‘Spectatorship’, 7. 26. von Schantz, ‘Spectatorship’, 8; original emphasis. 27. von Schantz, ‘Spectatorship’, 9–10. 28. von Schantz, ‘Spectatorship’, 10–11. 29. Roscoe and Hight, Faking it, pp. 144–55. 30. von Schantz, ‘Spectatorship’, 11–12. 31. von Schantz, ‘Spectatorship’, 12. 32. von Schantz, ‘Spectatorship’, 12. 33. von Schantz, ‘Spectatorship’, 13. 34. EVPC, MiS, DVD sleeve. 35. EVPC, MiS, ‘Collective Commentary’, 05:36–06:41. See also EVPC, MiS, ‘Q&A’, 00:04–00:45.

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36. This includes the lighting situation, which is technically suboptimal in the video-screening scene, but important for the authentic experience of the members. 37. Katie (J. D. Superstar) sees this similarly: ‘So what was left to do was set up situations where we could really get into that. And that’s I guess where it started to get really really confusing.’ 38. The collective discusses this at length in the Collective Commentary. 39. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 100–1; original emphasis. 40. Thomas More, The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter (New Haven/ London: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 188–9. 41. Clare Hemmings, ‘sexual freedom and the promise of revolution: Emma Goldman’s passion’, Feminist Review, 106 (2014), 43–59, 49. 42. For a discussion of decision-making structures and anarchism, see Peter Seyferth, ‘Strukturen der Tyranneilosigkeit gegen die Tyrannei der Strukturlosigkeit. Machtanwendung bei der Findung und Durchsetzung von Entscheidungen’, in Klaus Mathis and Luca Langensand (eds), Anarchie als herrschaftslose Ordnung? (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2019), pp. 121–44. 43. Williams, Hard Core, p. 257; Peter Fitting, ‘What is Utopian Film? An Introductory Taxonomy’, Utopian Studies, 4/2 (1993), 1–17, 9. 44. Williams, Hard Core, p. 264. 45. Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Hemel Hempstead: Syracuse University Press, 1990), p. 122. 46. William Morris, News from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 47. Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’, Utopian Studies, 5/1 (1994), 1–37, 9. 48. Sargent, ‘Three Faces’, 7. 49. Sargent, ‘Three Faces’, 9. 50. Ursula K. Le  Guin, The Dispossessed. An Ambiguous Utopia (New York: HarperCollins 2001); Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Knopf, 1976). For an extended discussion of the critical utopias of the 1970s, see Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible. Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (Oxford/Bern/Berlin: Peter Lang, 2014).

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51. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); see also the discussion in chapter 1. 52. For a discussion of Morris’s use of utopia for political purposes, see Peter Seyferth, ‘William Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890). Die libertäranarchistische Linie als Korrektiv der etatistischen Utopietradition’, in Thomas Schölderle (ed.), Idealstaat oder Gedankenexperiment? Zum Staatsverständnis in den klassischen Utopien (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014), pp. 231–64, 237–51. 53. Levitas, Concept, p. 122. 54. von Schantz, ‘Spectatorship’, 7. 55. Kenneth Roemer, ‘More aliens transforming utopia: the future of reader response and utopian studies’, in Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini (eds), Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 131–58, 149. 56. EVPC, MiS, DVD sleeve. 57. For instance, the Portland indie porn festival that the collective discusses at length was an invention of the filmmakers. But this idea inspired some viewers of Made in Secret, so they first developed their own idea of a festival and then developed this concrete virtual into the actual: they actually organised an indie porn festival in Portland (and elsewhere) that has been held annually since 2005 and follows rules similar to those discussed by the EVPC: the HUMP! Film Festival; see Dan Savage: ‘About HUMP!’, in Dan Savage’s HUMP! Film Festival, https://humpfilmfest. com/#about, n.d. [2018] (accessed 2 January 2018). 58. This is the subtitle of his book: Stephen Duncombe, Dream. Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (New York/London: The New Press, 2007). 59. Duncombe, Dream, pp. 5–6. 60. Duncombe, Dream, p. 9; original emphasis. Of course, to ‘manufacture dissent’ is meant as a strategy that is as functional in its dreampolitik as the realpolitik of the mass media strategy of ‘manufacturing consent’ (as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky have analysed it in their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988)). 61. Duncombe, Dream, p. 13. 62. Duncombe, Dream, pp. 80–4. 63. Duncombe, Dream, p. 174. 64. Duncombe, Dream, p. 17. 65. Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 65.

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66. Morris, News from Nowhere, p. 75. An example for political decisionmaking in several deliberative turns (to avoid the tyranny of the majority) is given in pp. 76–8. 67. David Graeber, ‘The New Anarchists’, New Left Review, 13 (2002), 61–73, 61–2. 68. Graeber, ‘The New Anarchists’, 70. 69. The filmmakers, too, seem to interpret the filmed as well as the applied consensus processes as hopeful, even successful (EVPC, MiS, ‘Collective Commentary’, 1:21:13–1:24:23). 70. EVPC, MiS, ‘Collective Commentary’, 1:19:39–1:20:46. 71. Baron de Lahontan, New Voyages to North-America, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1905). 72. Lahontan, New Voyages to North-America, vol. I, p. 11. 73. For the travelogueish utopias that have often been misinterpreted as ‘noble savage’ tales, see Peter Seyferth, ‘Reisebericht: Reise zur Selbsterkenntnis einer Gesellschaft. Lahontans und Diderots Supplémente politisch gelesen’, in Dirk Lüddecke and Felicia Englmann (eds), Zur Geschichte des politischen Denkens. Denkweisen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart/Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2014), pp. 139–64. 74. Lahontan, New Voyages to North-America, vol. II, p. 554. 75. von Schantz, ‘Spectatorship’, 12.

Selected works Duncombe, Stephen, Dream. Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (New York/London: The New Press, 2007). Juhasz, Alexandra and Jesse Lerner (eds), F is for Phony. Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Levitas, Ruth, The Concept of Utopia (Hemel Hempstead: Syracuse University Press, 1990). Rhodes, Gary D. and John Parris Springer (eds), Docufictions. Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking (Jefferson, NC/London: McFarland, 2006). Roscoe, Jane and Craig Hight, Faking it. Mock-documentary and the subversion of factuality (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2001). Sargent, Lyman Tower, ‘The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’, Utopian Studies, 5/1 (1994), 1–37.

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von Schantz, Miriam, ‘New Materialist Spectatorship: The Moving-Image-Body, the Mockumentary and a New Image of Thought’, Networking Knowledge, 8/5 (2015), 1–20. Williams, Linda, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).

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4

The Utopia of the Caliphate: Reading ISIS Propaganda Videos as Utopian Texts Simon Spiegel

In Western media, the jihadist1 militia known as ISIS2 is notorious for its extremely violent execution videos. What is much less widely known, however, is that these gory depictions of beheadings and other brutal forms of killing only represent a fraction of ISIS’s considerable media output. Equally if not more important are videos that portray the so-called caliphate as a utopian place. In this chapter, I will focus on these films and argue that they represent a unique kind of utopian documentary. First, a few qualifications are necessary, since a research subject like ISIS videos poses several methodological challenges. One problem is the availability of the material. Although ISIS’s propaganda output is considerable, many of its videos are published on dubious and short-lived websites, which often disappear quickly. In addition, I find it ethically problematic to directly refer to extremist websites. So as not to increase their exposure, I refrain from providing the URLs of the videos mentioned and restrict myself to examples that should be easily traceable. My selection is therefore in no way representative. At the time of writing, ISIS’s reign is basically over – at least according to official Western sources. The caliphate as it was proclaimed on 29 June 2014 no longer exists. Still, ISIS is not a closed historical episode; rather, research on it has only just begun. The majority of existing literature consists of newspaper articles and policy papers from various think tanks. More distanced academic studies are still relatively scant at the moment. And while there is already a body of research on propaganda videos and online recruitment of terrorist organisations, most of it does not yet focus on ISIS, since scholars necessarily respond with a certain temporal delay. Furthermore, I am not an expert on extremism

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or political Islam and I do not speak Arabic. I approach the subject as an outsider with a very particular interest: from the perspective of film studies and utopian scholarship. Finally, some remarks on the nature of the films under consideration are in order. The videos produced by ISIS are without any doubt works of propaganda. While not all of them have the same goal – a fact that I will discuss later – they are all produced with the intention of promoting ISIS’s cause and of moving the audience in a certain way. At first glance, propaganda and documentary seem to be completely antithetical concepts: while the former pushes a certain agenda and often deliberately deceives its recipients, the latter supposedly presents the world ‘as it is’. This opposition is, of course, a false one: documentaries never provide a completely objective representation of the world, and propaganda, on the other hand, often makes use of documentary techniques. Among scholars of documentary film, there is some consensus that propaganda and documentary films partly overlap. Carl Plantinga, for example, argues that every non-fiction film at least implicitly takes a position towards the things it shows, which already indicates a discursive and rhetorical closeness to propaganda. Bill Nichols follows a similar line of thought with his concept of the ‘voice’ inherent to every documentary.3 How much the two forms intersect depends on how narrowly we define propaganda. Is it always targeted at a specific enemy or goal or can it also refer to any kind of political communication? Depending on the answer, the size of the respective corpus changes considerably.4 There is no doubt that the films under consideration in this chapter are propaganda. Whether and how they use documentary techniques is something I will discuss later.

The caliphate – a transcendent utopia The mere fact that ISIS actively engages in online propaganda is not particularly remarkable. Since the Internet makes it possible to reach a vast audience at minimal cost, it has for quite some time been the preferred site of fundamentalist groups to distribute their pamphlets, audio messages and, increasingly, video material.5 In this regard, ISIS only continues a well-established tradition. What actually distinguishes

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the militia’s efforts from those of its predecessors is the sheer volume of material that it produces, as well as its quality and the highly systematic way it is distributed. ISIS’s temporary success was not only a military one, but was also based on the fact that the organisation managed to establish itself as a brand with unique selling points. While Western media mainly focus on graphic depictions of beheadings and similar atrocities, ISIS’s propaganda proves to be much more diverse upon examination. On behalf of the British think tank Quilliam Foundation, Charlie Winter did a systematic analysis of all ISIS propaganda material distributed by ‘official’ agencies between 15 July and 17 August 2015.6 Altogether, he collected 1,146 ‘units’ during this period, of which films make up only 7 per cent. The vast majority of Winter’s sample consists of photos (78 per cent); additionally, there are pure text publications (11 per cent) and audio messages (4 per cent). In his corpus, Winter distinguishes between six ‘key narratives’, which inform the Islamic State’s branding: ‘brutality, mercy, belonging, victimhood, war and utopia’.7 Surprisingly, ‘brutality’ is foregrounded in only 2.13 per cent of the analysed material. What is much more common is ‘utopia’, which makes up for 52.57 per cent.8 Of the films in his sample, Winter classifies twenty-seven as utopian. Winter is by no means the first to talk about utopia in connection with ISIS. Many newspaper articles describe the caliphate as an ‘Islamist utopia’. In most cases, this catchy phrase refers to some kind of dream place in a rather unspecific way. Winter himself is somewhat more specific, but still defines ‘utopia’ rather broadly, as any kind of depiction that emphasises the caliphate’s merits as a functioning state and social entity. For the purposes of this chapter, I use an even narrower definition, which goes back to Thomas More. In my view, utopias always consist of two elements: a critical description of the status quo, and a detailed depiction of an alternative that does not yet exist. It is an alternative that may be far in the future, but which all the same is not located in some kind of transcendent ‘far beyond’. Utopia is, in my understanding, always something built by human beings and located in our historical world.9 How does such an understanding of utopia align with the idea of a specifically Islamist brand of utopianism? The question of whether there are non-Western utopian traditions has been a subject of debate among scholars. The fact that almost every culture develops some concept of a golden age, a land of the blessed or the like is beyond

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discussion. But whether the specific variety coined by More – with its combination of social criticism and detailed counter-image – is an equally common phenomenon is a much more contested issue. A number of scholars argue that utopia is an inherently secular concept that could only evolve against the backdrop of the European Enlightenment, and is therefore foreign to other cultures. According to this line of reasoning, utopia distinguishes itself from beliefs in a happy afterlife or the return of a Messiah by positing that the better life can be realised by human beings in the here and now instead of having to be postponed to some transcendent beyond. Consequently, this concept only became possible when Christianity lost its dominance to some degree.10 A purely religious – and thus an Islamic – utopia is therefore a contradiction in itself. While I prefer to limit the concept of utopia to schemes that are situated in the world we live in and therefore exclude notions such as paradise or the hereafter, I think it is nonetheless doubtful whether utopia is so closely tied to a certain cultural background. There certainly are cultures and historical periods that provide a more fertile breeding ground for the genre than others, but this does not mean that it has to be confined to a Western tradition. Indeed, in recent years, various authors have tried to overcome the traditional ethnocentric approach of utopian scholarship and have looked at examples from many different backgrounds. Thus, research is happening in this area, but it is still in its infancy.11 What about the specific case of an Islamist utopia? In a certain sense, Islam itself possesses utopian traits, since Muhammad was not only the founder of a religion but also of a state. In Islam, the golden age against which the present is judged, and which will return one day, is the era of Medina before the conquest of Mecca in ad 630. This period is described as one of peace and unity, during which there was neither discord between God and the people nor between the Muslims themselves. But although Medina serves as an ideal where religious and political goals converge, it ultimately represents a transcendent concept. Hence, a restoration of the Medinan age is not possible in this world: ‘The Medinan regime is the true Golden Age which should only be approximated insofar as it is possible in an imperfect world.’12 We are, in other words, dealing with a salvation-historical model and not with a political programme. And this is probably the reason why Islamic tradition on the whole has not yielded many utopias. Despite the plea

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for opening up the field, research has dug up only a handful of medieval texts so far which not only deal with typical utopian themes, but also feature formal parallels to More’s Utopia.13 Beyond that, however, a noteworthy and discrete tradition of Islamic utopias does not seem to exist. The situation looks quite different once we enter modernity and examine the Islamic fundamentalism of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Lyman Tower Sargent goes so far as to call the various Islamist movements ‘the most utopian Muslims today’;14 the examples he cites are the Islamic revolution in Iran and the Taliban. Aziz Al-Azmeh who, like Sargent, writes before the proclamation of the Islamic State, argues along similar lines. He emphasises the fact that the kind of Islamic fundamentalism we see today is a reaction to colonialism and modernisation, and therefore a relatively new phenomenon, which has no precursor in the history of Islam.15 Here, especially as conceived in the ultra-conservative variety of Salafism,16 the mythical age of Medina ceases to be an abstract ideal that one can, at best, approximate, and turns into a historical reality. It becomes a programme, a concrete utopia that can and must be realised.17 Even in this extreme form, however, this worldly utopia remains inseparably tied to the appearance of the Mahdi, the Messiah, who will come forward at the end of time and establish a new rule of law.18 The idea of the caliphate is, in other words, part of an apocalyptic vision, and its right to exist is closely linked to the alleged imminence of Judgement Day. Accordingly, ISIS propaganda makes this connection time and again: Routinely, the nearing apocalypse is emphasised to increase the sense of urgency. The idea is that, with the rise of Islamic State, the Day of Judgment looms ever nearer; the ‘caliphate’ has been established and, as of August 8 2014, the ‘Crusaders’ are being confronted head on. The message is simple: join now or face an eternity in Hell.19 In the Islamic State, religious promise and political project merge; a combination that is ultimately alien to both utopias and traditional Islam. But according to Winter, who speaks of an ‘apocalyptic utopianism’,20 it is exactly this fusion of two apparently incompatible concepts that sets ISIS apart from other Islamist groups: ‘Unlike its predecessors,

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ISIS did not seek a far-off dream of the caliphate. The caliphate was here and now.’21 As a consequence, ISIS constantly emphasises that the militia is serious about establishing a proper Islamic state. They do not merely talk about it but get down to business and build it: Islamic State’s establishment and implementation of the ‘caliphate’ is the organisation’s unique selling point. Constantly reminding the world – particularly rival jihadist groups and potential recruits – of this is imperative. The more ‘evidence’ that is made available, the more resilient Islamic State becomes to assertions that it is illegitimate.22 Jerry M. Long calls this logic the ‘caliphal syllogism’: That is, ISIS described what the caliphate would look like, were it to be restored (its major premise). It then argued that it possessed all those features (its minor premise). Thus, the ergo follows naturally: ISIS is the caliphate … Moreover, ISIS averred that, were it to refuse to acknowledge the reality of what it is, it would be in grave sin.23 The dominance of the ‘utopia narrative’ in ISIS’s propaganda is a direct consequence of this caliphal syllogism. The caliphate must not look like a rag-tag bunch of guerrillas, but rather should appear as a smoothly running political and social entity, which boasts all the institutions of a legitimate state. Although it is quite unlikely that ISIS’s strategists are consciously imitating the Morean model, they employ the same ‘rhetoric of completeness’ that is so typical for many utopias – albeit with a different purpose. The classic utopia uses extensive descriptions of the utopian state’s various facilities and laws to convince the reader of its feasibility. The utopian order must appear as a viable alternative and not as a pipe dream. ISIS goes one step further: here, the caliphate is already a reality. This strategy can be found in many propaganda films. Propaganda typically does not refer to a point in the distant future, but aims to convince the audience that the regime’s goals – defeating the enemy, rebuilding the economy, restoring national pride, etc. – are imminent and only require one last effort. Accordingly, the films present themselves as documentaries that simply show the current state of things or

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give an outlook of the immediate future. A number of ISIS videos make use of this strategy. The caliphate is presented as a modern state with police, schools, hospitals and various religious institutions. There are, for example, films that show police officers on patrol in modern cars, such as The Islamic Police in the City of Sirt (Al-Hayat Media Center, 2015),24 or hospitals with state-of-the-art equipment, as in Health Services in The Islamic State (Raqqa Province Media Office, 2015). If we ignore the fact that most of the police officers are wearing masks, we get the impression of a functioning community that more or less meets the standards of Western states.

The normality of the Islamic State This impression of normality is put into stark contrast by films that depict the rule of Islamic law in the caliphate – or rather, ISIS’s extreme interpretation of sharia law: thieves get their hands cut off, and other offenders are thrown off rooftops or stoned to death.25 The films I was able to access that show ISIS’s draconian system of justice are only available in Arabic. But even without a full understanding of what is said, a common narrative structure becomes apparent. The brutal punishment is never staged as an isolated event, but is part of a bigger argument. The films usually start with an ISIS fighter who speaks to the community in a public place. He explains to them why the upcoming execution of the sentence is just and according to the law of Allah. The films’ endings illustrate again that the killings and mutilations are not merely senseless cruelties. The films never close with the actual act of violence, but rather show how the wrongdoer becomes part of the community again once the sentence has been carried out. In Judgement of the Creator to Fight against the Crime of Robbery – Wilāyat Nīnawā (Nineveh Province Media Office, 2015) the convict’s wound is immediately taken care of after his hand has been cut off. Once this is done, he clenches his remaining hand and raises it while shouting ‘Allahu akbar’; afterwards, he even embraces and kisses his judges who stand nearby. Within the film’s system of signification, what we have just witnessed is not an inhuman act of cruelty, but the completion of an orderly juristic procedure, and even the convict himself ultimately recognises its higher purpose. The bodies of two homosexual men who have been thrown to their deaths are treated similarly.

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Like the other perpetrators, their faces are blurred, and once they are dead, their remains are not merely disposed of, but carefully washed, wrapped in a blanket and properly buried (But Who is Better Than God in Judgement: Establishing a Limit Upon the People of Lūt – Wilāyat Ḥomṣ (Homs Province Media Office, 2015)). In his analysis, Winter divides the category of the ‘utopian’ into the subcategories of ‘religion, economic activity, social life, justice, governance, expansion and, lastly, nature and landscape’.26 Although this classification does not necessarily fit my own understanding of utopia in all respects, and I was not able to check all the examples Winter cites, his detailed breakdown clearly shows to what extent ISIS’s propaganda sets out to portray life in the caliphate in a positive way. Apart from the examples already mentioned, which tend to foreground ‘hard’ parameters like police, the health system or the rule of law, there are numerous films that celebrate sociability and camaraderie: children playing, friends fishing together, and so on. The intended message is clear: while there may be difficulties from time to time, life in the ‘caliphate’ is joyful, something that needs to be protected and cherished by any and all means.27 In the depiction of happy life in the Islamic State, two aspects stand out. The first thing to mention is the complete absence of women. While there is ISIS propaganda especially targeted at a female audience, the films I had access to feature, with the exception of small girls, no female characters. The caliphate is presented as a purely male society. In addition, the joyous component of some of the films is rather surprising, since other examples are by no means life-affirming. Instead they celebrate war, martyrdom and the coming apocalypse. For example, The Rise of the Khilafah: Return of the Gold Dinar (Al-Hayat Media Center, 2015), which I will analyse in more detail below, ends with a song in English, whose chorus includes a slogan popular among jihadists: ‘We are men that love death just as you love your life.’ This seeming inconsistency is, of course, not an accident, but rather the logical outcome of ISIS’s strategy to address different target groups with specific messages. In each case, the six key narratives identified by Winter are emphasised differently. Judging by its success, this ‘kaleidoscopic’ branding does not seem to dilute the caliphate’s appeal, but rather works quite effectively.28

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Describing ISIS’s beheading videos, Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger talk about a ‘strange but potent new blend of utopianism and appalling carnage’.29 But the way in which the combination of utopia and massacre is actually perceived depends to a great extent on individual viewers and the context in which they view the films. ISIS is aware of this and deliberately targets very different audiences with specifically tailored offerings.30 The language alone greatly limits and regulates a film’s potential viewership. It is certainly no coincidence that The Islamic Police in the City of Sirt, Health Services in the Islamic State as well as Judgment of the Creator to Fight against the Crime of Robbery are all completely in Arabic. In the beheading videos, on the other hand, normally either an ISIS fighter or the hostage addresses the viewers in a Western language, English in most cases. ISIS’s videos are meant to provoke a reaction, but the exact kind of reaction varies greatly depending on the film and the intended audience. The execution videos seem to be primarily targeted at Western viewers and serve both as provocation and intimidation. Here, ISIS shows strength and determination. At the same time, it wants to provoke Western states to retaliate in a massive way, which will then cause further strong reactions from the Muslim population.31 Among the many films produced in Arabic, several varieties can be identified which, again, speak to different potential comrades-inarms. As we have seen, some are meant to show fellow travellers how justice is carried out in the caliphate. Others, which stage ISIS’s war as music videos, are part of a pop-Islam youth culture.32 Even among the examples that can be called recruiting videos in a narrow sense, several varieties targeted at various audience segments can be distinguished: Its [ISIS’s] propaganda is not simply a call to arms, it is also a call for non-combatants, men and women alike, to build a nation-state alongside the warriors, with a role for engineers, doctors, filmmakers, sysadmins, and even traffic cops.33 For example, in Health Services in the Islamic State, an Australian jihadist, who works as a paediatrician in the hospital in Raqqa, implores all his Muslim brothers and sisters with medical training to come and join him. He explicitly states that the hospital does not need equipment, but rather properly trained personnel: ‘It’s not equipment that we’re lacking, it’s truly just the staff.’34

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As diverse as ISIS’s films are in terms of subject matter and mood, what they all have in common, and what distinguishes them from productions made by other Islamist groups, is ‘the increased professionalism at all stages of production – from shooting, to editing, to uploading and distribution’.35 ISIS’s productions are of high quality, both on a purely technical and an aesthetic level. Many videos follow the conventions established by the Western film industry and are therefore very similar to shows made by US or European television stations.36 This imitation normalises and factualises the utopia of the caliphate to some degree. What we see are not amateur videos shared online by some religious crackpots, but ‘news from the caliphate’. In some cases, the assimilation goes quite far: for example, the Islamic State Health Service’s logo is obviously based on the British National Health Service (see figure 4.1).37 Although most of the films are well made, they nevertheless reveal a fundamental contradiction inherent to ISIS and jihadism in general: despite all its anti-Western and anti-modern rhetoric, ISIS has no problem using the newest technology available or the visual codes employed by the enemy. All the examples mentioned thus far are shorter than ten minutes and targeted primarily at an Arabic-speaking audience. The individual films themselves cannot necessarily count as utopian: their main purpose is to document ISIS’s success in (re-)building the Islamic State. But taken together, the films do indeed depict a well-organised

Figure 4.1 • Health Services in the Islamic State

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commonwealth that follows religious guidelines and is also beloved by its people. That some aspects of this commonwealth might seem rather dystopian to most viewers is not surprising, but, in fact, typical of the genre. For the reader of the classic utopia, there is no doubt that the society described by the text is an imaginary one that does not (yet) exist. In this regard, ISIS videos – like many examples of propaganda – work quite differently. Their primary aim is to document the success story of the caliphate; what we see is what actually happens in the Islamic State. At least, that is what the films claim. For the average viewer it is, of course, impossible to tell whether the films actually show real or staged events, whether the Islamic State indeed functions that smoothly or whether it is all a show. The borders between authentic documentation, sugar-coated propaganda and as yet unrealised utopian final state are rather fluid. Again, this is not necessarily a drawback, since the films are targeted at different audiences. The fellow traveller who could potentially join ISIS is meant to get the impression that there is still important work to be done to which he or she can contribute. But often, propaganda also has a very different purpose: not to make people actually do something, but rather to accept that things are already good the way they are, that the regime is taking care of everything. Quite a few ISIS videos are certainly meant to function as this kind of propagandistic self-assurance. They document – for Muslims living in the Islamic State as well as in other countries – that the utopia of the caliphate has already been achieved.

The Structure of the Khilafah For the remainder of this chapter, I will focus on two films that differ from the ones I have discussed so far in several ways. The Structure of the Khilafah (al-Furqan Media, 2016) and Return of the Gold Dinar are both in English – and therefore quite likely targeted at a wider audience – and both try to give a more complete impression of the caliphate. This is especially true in the case of The Structure of the Khilafah. This 15-minute film does exactly what its title – ‘Khilafah’ being the Arabic word for caliphate – suggests: it provides a detailed description of how the Islamic State is organised. In this regard, the video strongly resembles a classic literary utopia.

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The film starts with an excerpt from a speech by Abur Omar al‑Baghdadi, the former ISIS leader who was killed in 2010. At this point, the image is completely black; only al-Baghdadi’s name, in Arabic as well as in Roman script, and English subtitles are visible. In the short audio clip that we hear, al-Baghdadi says that ‘the tragedy’ must never repeat itself and that the fruit cannot be allowed to be lost. Al-Baghdadi is referring here to the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the end of the previous caliphate. This scandalous event must remain a unique incident. Accordingly, the voice declares: ‘INDEED, THE ISLAMIC STATE WILL REMAIN.’ This declaration is followed by images of a modern-day city. Time-lapse shots of city traffic and of a prayer room filling up with men are combined with city impressions at normal speed and images in slow motion that show ISIS fighters – wearing combat uniforms and many of them carrying guns, their faces uncovered – walking through a park and playing with small children. This sequence, with its saturated colours, fast editing and mixture of different speeds, looks a lot like a segment from a run-of-the-mill TV documentary. The only unusual thing, besides the heavily armed men and the black and white ISIS flags, is the music that we hear. Normally, a sequence of this type would be accompanied by some snappy pop tune, but here, a so-called ‘nasheed’ is used. Although there is a rich musical tradition in Islam, it is still a contested issue among conservative Quran scholars whether music, and especially musical instruments, should be tolerated. Nasheeds, which treat religious subject matters and are sung a cappella by men, are accepted by most, though not all, clerics. While nasheeds have a long tradition in Islamic culture, they are used so intensely by jihadist groups that they have become an integral and emblematic part of a specific jihadist culture. In the videos produced by ISIS they are nearly omnipresent.38 Soon, a voice-over commentary can be heard on top of the singsong, recounting how the caliphate came into being thanks to the fighting of determined men, and how it is watered with the blood of martyrs. Subsequently, the commentary talks about the Islamic State’s peculiar worldly religious dual character: Its [the caliphate’s] methodology is the guiding book and the aiding sword. With respect to defending the religion and governing the worldly affairs, Imama [= the caliphate] was legislated in order to follow prophethood in upholding these two matters.

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‘Guiding book and aiding sword’ is a phrase that appears often in ISIS propaganda and which is used interchangeably with the term ‘prophetic methodology’. Both notions combine a systematic and a religious component. By following the example of Muhammad, ISIS is not only on safe ground in terms of religion. In addition, the modern and somewhat technical term ‘methodology’ implies that the wisdom offered by the Quran is by no means outdated, but still highly relevant for this day and age; it even seems to give ISIS a tactical advantage. The purpose of the caliphate is to correct a fundamental deficit: never before was there a time without rule by a caliph. According to the film, the decline of the Ottoman Empire was not due to political developments. Rather, its true cause was the lack of unity among Muslims: ‘so the religion was lost and the lands usurped’. These flowery words are accompanied by images of fighter jets, helicopters and soldiers, probably of US origin. Here, the film points to the problem that the Islamist utopia will correct. Since the Muslims do not show proper unity and faith, they are bullied by the West. But thankfully, every hundred years, Allah sends a man who will restore faith: the caliph. At this point, slow-motion images of a boy carrying an ISIS flag and running through a cornfield are overlaid by an ornamental chart that briefly shows the schematic structure of the caliphate (see figure 4.2) and then morphs into the title of the film.

Figure 4.2 • One of the many charts in The Structure of the Khilafah

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The Structure of the Khilafah has now arrived at its subject proper. In the ten following minutes, we see scores of adorned charts in various shades of blue while the voice-over commentary explains them. In between, brief shots showing what has just been described are intercut. But most of them appear too briefly to serve as more than impressionistic interludes. First, the head of the state, the caliph, is introduced. Two brief shots of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi are followed by a chart listing his duties. After the caliph, the ‘Shura Council’ and the ‘Delegated Committee’ are presented: the latter oversees various ‘Offices and Committees’, ministries (‘Dawawin’) and provinces (‘Wilayat’). I will not expound the structure of the Islamic State in detail here, but will concentrate instead on a few of the film’s striking aspects, including the above-mentioned combination of worldly and religious duties: ‘defending the religion and governing the worldly affairs’. The caliphate features, among other things, departments for the military, finance and education (‘Diwan of Soldiery’, ‘Diwan of Treasury’ and ‘Diwan of Education’), but also a department for proselytisation, for building mosques and for adherence to religious laws (‘Diwan of Da’wah and Masajid’ and ‘Diwan of Hisbah’). After the various institutions have been introduced and the impression of a well-organised regime has been established, the last two minutes of the film come as a shock. To the soundtrack of another nasheed – which is, for the first time, subtitled – we see a montage of war scenes, explosions and executions. Several beheadings and shootings are shown uncut, some even with close-ups of the severed heads, while the lyrics celebrate ISIS’s heroic battle. If we take the sheer detail with which the state is described as a benchmark, The Structure of the Khilafah equals any classic literary utopia. The film explains meticulously which task is carried out by which institution. This is rather dry stuff, the polished look of the charts, the music and the short intercuts notwithstanding. One of the most common reservations against positive utopias is that they make dull reading, and indeed The Structure of the Khilafah becomes boring quite quickly. The ending, with its cascade of violence, serves as an all the more extreme contrast. An article in the online magazine Vice News likens The Structure of the Khilafah to an ‘HR meeting, but with beheadings’39 – a description which, for all its smugness, is quite apt.

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Since The Structure of the Khilafah has an English commentary and even features a subtitled nasheed, it seems to be primarily geared at Western viewers. However, although the voice-over seems to be of North American origin, it uses a lot of Arabic terms. For example, at one point it talks about the ‘Diwan of Da’wah and Masajid’ being among other things responsible for ‘Da’wah to Allah’ and ‘the building and preparing [of] Masajid’. Most non-Muslims will probably have no idea that ‘Da’wah’ means proselytisation and that ‘Masajid’ stands for mosques. Some parts can be inferred from the context, but since the commentary is quite dense and spoken at a rather high speed, viewers without knowledge of Arabic are quickly left behind. ISIS published The Structure of the Khilafah at a moment when the caliphate had already passed its zenith and had to account for severe losses. Although the film seems to address a relatively wide audience, its primary purpose was probably self-assurance. What stands out besides its ‘utopian thoroughness’ is the fact that bureaucratisation is constantly presented as a sign of strength. The quote at the beginning establishes the film’s main theme: that the caliphate will prevail. And since it has already grown to a substantial size, a complex bureaucratic structure has become necessary. From this perspective, the boring description of its various departments and offices and the gory finale are by no means a contradiction; they are just different means by which the Islamic State may show its real strength.

The Rise of the Khilafah: Return of the Gold Dinar Return of the Gold Dinar, which was released in October 2015, works quite differently. Although it is a documentary focusing on economic issues, it looks in part like a work of fiction. The opening and, especially, the design of the title credits, strongly resemble a Hollywood fantasy franchise (see figure 4.3). Still, this film also tries to make the caliphate appear to be a ‘proper state’. While The Structure of the Khilafah gives a rather complete overview, Return of the Gold Dinar focuses on one particular issue: the introduction of its own currency, the Gold Dinar. Minting its own currency obviously has great symbolic value for ISIS. With a running time of fifty-five minutes, Return of the Gold Dinar is not only considerably longer than The Structure of the Khilafah, its production was also clearly more complex and expensive.

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Figure 4.3 • The title of Return of the Gold Dinar

The film features many elements that can also be found in other ISIS videos, such as battle scenes, explosions and stylised shots of sabre-carrying warriors on horseback. Although these are familiar visual tropes, the way they are interwoven in Return of the Gold Dinar is particularly skilful. A case in point is the opening, which features a montage sequence that cleverly mixes authentic shots of contemporary battles with images from the Hollywood blockbuster Kingdom of Heaven (D: Ridley Scott, US/UK/ES 2005), news footage and digital special effects (CGI). Shots of ISIS fighters with machine guns seamlessly turn into archers on the attack (see figures 4.4 and 4.5). The war ISIS is fighting turns out to be an ancient one, and there is no real difference between the riding archers from back then and today’s militia. The only thing that has changed is the enemy. Today, it is the US that must be defeated. Accordingly, we see in rapid succession the World Trade Center, the White House, the Federal Reserve Bank and its former heads Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke. As the commentary informs us, they are the ones responsible for everything evil in the world: In this age, the seeds of corruption were sown by America and cultivated by the Jews. Heading a capitalist financial system of enslavement underpinned by a piece of paper called the Federal Reserve Dollar note which they alone printed and imposed on the rest of the world.

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Figure 4.4 and 4.5 • Return of the Gold Dinar mixes different kinds of source material

But this capitalist system of enslavement is under severe attack. The introduction of the Dinar is the second blow, the first being the attack on the World Trade Center. We see an archer firing an arrow and then a cut to a CGI shot in which the arrow transforms into an airplane. In a quick succession of shots of different origins, we arrive at the familiar images of 9/11. It is thus a medieval archer’s arrow – originating from Kingdom of Heaven – that brought down the Twin Towers. Although ISIS began by breaking away from al-Qaeda, the film still gives credit to Osama bin Laden and shows his image repeatedly. The jihadists fight side by side, and the film’s language links historic battles fought by

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Muslim armies, terror attacks by al-Qaeda and ISIS’s own campaigns. Together, they are responsible for ‘the first blow to their satanic financial system, pulverizing the twin idols of capitalism’. This is followed by the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, which are presented in a few images as disastrous defeats. The temporary climax is the proclamation of the caliphate by al-Baghdadi. What we have seen so far is only just the beginning. The next big step is imminent: And now, the return of the ultimate measure of wealth for the world: gold. As the Khilafah surges into the financial sphere, delivering the second blow to America’s capitalist financial system of enslavement and casting into ruins their fraudulent dollar note. – This is the return of the Gold Dinar. The abolition of money is one of utopian literature’s most common tropes: it can be found from More through Bellamy and beyond. By introducing its own currency, ISIS seems to step out of this tradition. But this is actually only partly true. To legitimise this step, Return of the Gold Dinar engages in a sweeping critique of capitalism. Its main point of attack is the so-called fractional-reserve banking system: the fact that banks are required to hold reserves that equal only a fraction of their deposit liabilities, thus the sums of the loans they give are far higher than the amount of money that they actually hold. Banks are therefore able to create money from nothing, which means that money has no real equivalent in the physical world. Ultimately, currency is just a worthless piece of paper with no intrinsic value. The film argues that this gigantic swindle was set up by the US Federal Reserve – which is dominated by Jews – with the clear goal of ensuring world dominance by the US. In its middle section, when the film explains how fractional-reserve banking works, its discourse is not specifically Islamic. Rather, Return of the Gold Dinar refers to all kinds of conspiracy theories that are particularly popular among libertarians and the far right in the US.40 The film even cites Ron Paul, a former Republican congressman and declared libertarian, as a witness against the Fed. Although it spends quite some time on economic issues, the film’s critique is ultimately motivated by religious principles. As it argues, the true cause of our current problems dates way back: everything

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started when people began to ignore the divine prohibition of interest. According to ISIS, Islam does not merely ban interest, it also only permits the use of currency with intrinsic value, preferably gold. With the introduction of paper money, and particularly since the abolition of the gold standard, this order was breached. In other words, the evil nature of the global financial system is twofold, both politically and on religious grounds. In an attempt to prove this claim, Return of the Gold Dinar takes a considerable historical detour and illustrates, almost in the style of educational television, how money was invented in the first place. This invention is presented as a huge – Arabic – cultural achievement, which reached its culmination when the already existing Byzantian Gold Dinar was adopted as a key currency. The film never gives any exact dates to back up its claims, thereby giving the impression that Muhammad himself was responsible for introducing the new currency. In reality, this happened sixty years after his death.41 But for Return of the Gold Dinar it is important that the era of Medina is also presented as the moment when the Gold Dinar was introduced. For ISIS, the (re-)institution of this divine currency is therefore a further building block in the reconstruction of its prophetic utopia. Everything that has happened since this twofold golden age – the invention of paper money, the abolition of the gold standard and, ultimately, the emergence of a largely digital and completely immaterial financial system – is sin and decline. A decline which, thanks to the caliphate, is now coming to an end. After the film has shown the four different coins minted by ISIS, complete with full specifications such as design, weight and grade of purity, we see a longer sequence in which an ISIS fighter asks people on the street what they think of the new currency. Of course, they are all very excited and soon, the statements segue into a nasheed on the soundtrack, while young and old – but again no women – show their enthusiasm. Return of the Gold Dinar explicitly calls the new currency a weapon: its goal is to crush the corrupt and ailing petrodollar system. Contrary to most classic utopias, ISIS thus does not get rid of money altogether, but replaces foul with divine money. This is a tricky move. Although it sticks to the prohibition of interest dictated by the Quran, ISIS still argues inside the confinements of a capitalist system. To bring the point home that it ultimately works towards a higher purpose, the film ends with an ISIS fighter talking directly to the camera. As he declares quite

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forcefully, ISIS ultimately doesn’t fight for riches or land, but only for Allah and against the infidels. And this fight can only be won through sacrifice, through martyrdom. The film’s epilogue underscores this message. It consists of the usual montage of battle scenes, for once accompanied by a nasheed in English, which contains the familiar line, ‘We are men that love death just as you love your life.’ The importance of this song can be gauged from the fact that the lyrics are superimposed in big fonts. In addition, ISIS has distributed this final sequence as a stand-alone music video.

Conclusion According to Winter’s analysis, utopian motives dominate in ISIS propaganda, while brutality and violence are much less common. I cannot really back up this claim based on my own research. Winter did, without any doubt, rely on a much bigger sample. It is also quite likely that ISIS’s films differ from other propaganda material Winter examined. Among the videos I looked at, there are, in any case, only a few examples that do not feature violent images. Health Services in the Islamic State and The Islamic Police in the City of Sirt concentrate on their respective topics and celebrate the caliphate’s normality, but altogether they are an exception in my corpus. The utopia presented by ISIS’s videos is inherently violent. The depiction of a well-functioning state, of playing children or men enthusiastically talking about life in the caliphate is, with a few exceptions, always framed by images of war. While the utopian tradition is very diverse, decidedly violent plans are extremely rare. One could argue that many literary utopias do not talk about how the utopian order described came into being, and that it must necessarily have included the elimination of maladjusted misfits. Classic utopias can also become rather ruthless when they have to defend themselves. But ultimately, violence is almost always regarded as something negative, which can only be justified by the utopia’s higher goal of everlasting peace. In ISIS’s videos, violence is motivated in quite a different way. As the nasheed at the end of Return of the Gold Dinar tells us, ISIS is ultimately not interested in securing the borders of the Islamic State. The ultimate goal is to die as a martyr in combat. Everything else pales in comparison to this, even the hard-won state with its divine order.

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Can the caliphate as it is presented in ISIS’s videos be called a utopia? The films meticulously depict a better world, which serves as an alternative to the degenerate status quo. Taken together, the films produced by ISIS adhere to the classic Morean model. But there are also important aspects that completely contradict the classic paradigm or that are at least highly unusual. ISIS’s ideology and its celebration of violence belong to the latter category. Though not all utopias are on the left side of the political spectrum or at least progressive, this tradition forms, without any doubt, the genre’s dominant stream. But the mere fact that ISIS advances a reactionary and inhuman ideology is not a strong enough argument for not calling it a utopia.42 Much more important in this regard is the mixture of political and religious goals. Since ISIS’s goals are ultimately aimed towards the afterworld, they run counter to a central utopian principle.43 It is part of the nature of propaganda films that they often present themselves as documentaries. They pretend to show things as they are, while in reality sugar-coating facts or even brazenly lying about them. Thymian Bussemer states that propaganda’s relationship to truth is of an instrumental nature.44 By this he means that propaganda does not necessarily have to lie: quite often, propagandists believe in the claims that they make, at least to some degree. The ultimate goal, however, is not telling the truth but convincing other people. If they have to bend the facts to achieve this, they will not hesitate to do so. For the viewers it is often impossible to tell whether the things shown are actually true. Are the police and the hospitals in the caliphate really working as efficiently as the films claim? We simply have no way to know. The Gold Dinar is a similar case. ISIS announced its introduction quite prominently in November 2014, but according to my sources, the new currency never gained wide traction. By giving the impression that the new coins are already being used across the whole Islamic State, Return of the Gold Dinar actually portrays a utopian state, although it does not do so explicitly. ISIS’s films deliberately blur the boundary between the regime’s promises and its actual achievements. This follows from its caliphal syllogism: the Islamic State is legitimised by the fact that it exists. While this rhetoric is not uncommon for a certain kind of propaganda, it is unusual for utopias. The whole point of any utopia is that it does not (yet) exist. But the films produced by ISIS stress the fact that the Islamic State is here to stay. All these contradictions are a direct result

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of the caliphate’s hybrid nature. ISIS wants to have it both ways: it wants to be a model for a real world state and a salvation historical promise. Only the notion that Judgement Day is imminent authorises ISIS to build a caliphate in the here and now, but by the same token, the institutions and government agencies the films present so proudly also become quite useless. What is the point of establishing a complex bureaucracy with End Times looming? There are no ministries in heaven. Paradoxically, ISIS’s utopia is located in both the present and the afterworld. It is – in a very different way than regular temporal utopias – located in a non-time. This article is based on a chapter in my book Bilder einer besseren Welt. Die Utopie im nichtfiktionalen Film (Marburg: Schüren, 2019). Notes 1. While the exact meaning of the term ‘jihadism’ is contested, most authors differentiate between Islamism, which strives for a society guided by Islamic principles but which can also make use of peaceful means, and jihadism, which theologically sanctions violence against ‘infidels’. The majority of Islamists are therefore not jihadists, but most jihadists are Islamists in the sense that they attempt to bring about political change – change understood as a return to a proper Islamic way of living; see Mark Sedgwick, ‘Jihadism, Narrow and Wide: The Dangers of Loose Use of an Important Term’, Perspectives on Terrorism, 9/2 (2015), 34–41. 2. There is a controversy over what the organisation should be called, and whether designations like ISIS – which stands either for ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’ or ‘Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham’ – give unwanted legitimacy to the so-called caliphate. While these concerns are certainly valid, I am following the majority of authors here in using the acronym ISIS. 3. Carl R. Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 67–93. 4. Another contested issue is whether propaganda is by definition dishonest. On propaganda, see Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda & Persuasion (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2012); Thymian Bussemer, Propaganda: Konzepte und Theorien (Wiesbaden: VS, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2005); Carl Nicholas Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality? (London: Cassell, 1999); Elizabeth

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

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Ellsworth, ‘I Pledge Allegiance: The Politics of Reading and Using Educational Films’, Curriculum Inquiry, 21/1 (1991), 41–64. Stephan Weichert and Andreas Elter, ‘Terrorismus 2.0. Über die Propaganda der Tat im digitalen Zeitalter’, in Thomas Jäger (ed.), Die Welt nach 9/11. Auswirkungen des Terrorismus auf Staatenwelt und Gesellschaft (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2012), pp. 946–67. Charlie Winter, Documenting the Virtual ‘Caliphate’, (2015), http:// www.quilliamfoundation.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/FINA L-documenting-the-virtual-caliphate.pdf (accessed 23 July 2016). The attribute ‘official’ is only half correct, since the bulk of ISIS’s propaganda is not distributed by institutions inside the Islamic State, but rather by external agents (Winter, Documenting, p.  7). ISIS’s communication strategy highly depends on ‘soft-sympathizers either re-tweeting or re-posting content produced and authorized by IS leadership’; cf.  Yannick Veilleux-Lepage, ‘Retweeting the Caliphate. The Role of Soft Sympathizers in the Islamic State’s Social Media Strategy’, Turkish Journal of Security Studies, 18/1 (2016), 53–69, 62. Winter, Documenting, p. 9. Neither the amount of ISIS’s propaganda nor its composition has remained stable over time. In December 2017, more than three-quarters of all distribution points active in 2015 could no longer be accessed. And while the ‘utopia theme’ was dominant in 2015, more than 90 per cent of all statements were about war in 2017. Facing constant defeats, ISIS was no longer able to maintain the impression of a realised utopia; see Charlie Winter, ‘Inside the Collapse of Islamic State’s Propaganda Machine’, Wired, 20 December 2017, http://www.wired.co.uk/article/ isis-islamic-state-propaganda-content-strategy (accessed 9 January 2018); see also Charlie Winter, ‘Apocalypse, Later. A Longitudinal Study of the Islamic State Brand’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 18/1 (2018), 103–21. For a more detailed discussion see Simon Spiegel, ‘Some Thoughts on the Utopian Film’, Science Fiction Film & Television, 10/1 (2017), 53–79. One prominent example of this exclusive approach is the study Utopian Thought in the Western World by Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie Manuel, which states in its very first paragraph that ‘the profusion of Western utopias has not been equaled in any other culture’; Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), p.  1. Similarly, Krishan Kumar notes: ‘But, firstly,

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11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

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utopia is not universal. It appears only in societies with the classical and Christian heritage, that is, only in the West’; Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 19. See Jacqueline Dutton, ‘“Non-Western” Utopian Traditions’, in Gregory Claeys (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 223–58; Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 66–85; Gregory Claeys, Ideale Welten. Die Geschichte der Utopie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2011), pp. 45–57. Aziz Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities (London: Verso, 2009), p. 150. See, for example, Cyrus Masroori, ‘Alexander in the City of the Excellent: A Persian Tradition of Utopia’, Utopian Studies, 24/1 (2013), 52–65; Alireza Omid Bakhsh, ‘The Virtuous City. The Iranian and Islamic Heritage of Utopianism’, Utopian Studies, 24/1 (2013), 41–51; Marco Lauri, ‘Utopias in the Islamic Middle Ages. Ibn Tufayl and Ibn al-Nafīs’, Utopian Studies, 24/1 (2013), 23–40. See also issue 22 of the journal Critical Muslim which is dedicated to Islamic utopias. Sargent, Utopianism, p. 78. Al-Azmeh, Islams; see also Peter R. Neumann, Die neuen Dschihadisten. IS, Europa und die nächste Welle des Terrorismus (Berlin: Econ, 2015), pp. 49–53; Ernst Fürlinger, ‘Die Utopie des lslamismus’, in Ursula Baatz (ed.), Glücksbilder. Die Wirklichkeit der Utopien. Tagungsband 2015 zum 4. Symposion Dürnstein (Krems: Edition Donau-Universität Krems, 2015), pp. 145–53. Modern Salafism is a movement within Sunni Islam, which is characterised by a literal understanding of the Quran and other central religious texts. It developed in the late nineteenth century and is generally understood as a reaction to European imperialism; Amr Osman, ‘Salafī Movements’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics. www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t342/e0409 (accessed 13 September 2018). Maryam El-Shall, ‘Salafi Utopia: The Making of the Islamic State’, Cultural Logic, 9 (2006). William McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse. The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State (New York: St.  Martin’s Press, 2015), pp. 22–9. Charlie Winter, The Virtual ‘Caliphate’. Understanding Islamic State’s Propaganda Strategy (London: Quilliam Foundation, 2015), pp. 29–30.

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20. Winter, The Virtual ‘Caliphate’, p. 28. 21. Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger, ISIS: The State of Terror (London: Collins, 2015), p.  118; cf. also James Fromson and Steven Simon, ‘ISIS: The Dubious Paradise of Apocalypse Now’, Survival, 57/3 (2015), 27–36. 22. Winter, The Virtual ‘Caliphate’, p. 28. 23. Jerry M. Long, ‘ISIS and the Collapse of the “Caliphal Syllogism”’, Special Operations Journal, 4/2 (2018), 129–45, 133. 24. ISIS videos normally do not feature proper credits and have no identifiable director. I therefore just provide the ISIS media outlet that originally distributed the film. Since the films do not have a country of origin in the traditional sense, I completely forgo this part of the credits. 25. ISIS’s system of justice and means of punishment actually closely resemble Saudi Arabia’s. The main difference is that in Saudi Arabia beheadings, amputations and whippings are, out of fear of international reactions, not carried out in public; cf. McCants, ISIS Apocalypse, p. 136. 26. Winter, Documenting, p. 32. 27. Winter, Documenting, p. 34. 28. Vaughan Phillips, ‘The Islamic State’s Strategy: Bureaucratizing the Apocalypse through Strategic Communications’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 40/9 (2017), 731–57,737. 29. Stern and Berger, ISIS: The State of Terror, p. 3. 30. To analyse the various possible readings of a film, Roger Odin’s concept of semio-pragmatics has proved useful. Odin’s approach is based on the idea of a twofold production of film. When we watch a movie, we do not simply passively perceive it, but actively produce it anew. Normally, a film programmes the mode it should be watched in, but whether an audience actually chooses this mode depends on both the individual viewer and the context of reception. See Roger Odin, ‘For a Semio-Pragmatics of Film’, in Warren Buckland (ed.), The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), pp. 213–26; Warren Buckland, The Cognitive Semiotics of Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 77–108; Roger Odin, ‘Reflections on the Family Home Movie as Document: A Semio-Pragmatic Approach’, in Karen I. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann (eds), Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 255–71. 31. How individual viewers actually react, is, of course, beyond the control of the filmmakers. While the execution videos seem to be primarily meant for Western audiences, there are also strong negative reactions from

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32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

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moderate Muslims in the Arabic world. In this case, the actual effect of ISIS’s propaganda is counterproductive. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer and Maytha Alhassen, ‘Muslim Youth Cultures’, in Juliane Hammer and Omid Safi (eds), The Cambridge Companion to American Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 299–311; Julia Gerlach, Zwischen Pop und Dschihad. Muslimische Jugendliche in Deutschland (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2006). Stern and Berger, ISIS: The State of Terror, p. 74. Apart from two passages where doctors speak English (with Arabic subtitles), this film is completely in Arabic. Since the English segments appear relatively late, the film is probably primarily geared towards viewers who speak Arabic. Anne Stenersen, ‘A History of Jihadi Cinematography’, in Thomas Hegghammer (ed.), Jihadi Culture. The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 108–27, 127. Cori E. Dauber and Mark Robinson, ‘ISIS and the Hollywood Visual Style’, Jihadology.net, 6 July 2015, http://jihadology.net/2015/07/06/guestpost-isis-and-the-hollywood-visual-style/ (accessed 26 October 2017). Phillips, ‘Islamic State’s Strategy’, p. 739. On nasheeds and their importance for jihadist groups, see Jonathan J. Lee, ‘The ISIS Aesthetic and the Imagined Islamic State. A Comparative Study between the Anāshīd of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and the Poetry of the Taliban’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Exeter, 2015); Benham T. Said, Hymnen des Jihads. Naschids im Kontext jihadistischer Mobilisierung (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2016); Nelly Lahoud, ‘A Cappella Songs (anashid) in Jihadi Culture’, in Thomas Hegghammer (ed.), Jihadi Culture. The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp.  42–62; Jonathan Pieslak, ‘A Musicological Perspective on Jihadi anashid’, in Thomas Hegghammer (ed.), Jihadi Culture. The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 63–81. Davide Mastracci and Justin Ling, ‘The Islamic State’s New Propaganda Film is Like an HR Meeting, but with Beheadings’, Vice News, 7 July 2016, https: //news.vice.com/article/the-islamic-states-new-propagandafilm-is-like-an-hr-meeting-but-with-beheadings (accessed 26 October 2017). Here, Return of the Gold Dinar also strikingly resembles Zeitgeist: Addendum (D: Peter Joseph, USA 2001), a film that spawned a whole

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41.

42.

43.

44.

social movement and which I consider a paradigmatic example of a utopian non-fiction film, although it is an ugly blend of various conspiracy theories and also covertly anti-Semitic. I do not know whether the producers of Return of the Gold Dinar were aware of Joseph’s work, but their film looks in many ways like a more polished version of Zeitgeist: Addendum; cf. Spiegel, ‘Some Thoughts’. George Carpenter Miles, ‘Dīnār’, in Bernard Lewis, Charles Pellat and Joseph Schacht (eds), Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 2: C–G (Leiden: Brill, 1965), pp. 297–9; Philippe Gignoux and Bates, ‘Dinar’, in Ehsan Yarshater (ed.), Encyclopaedia Iranica (New York: Columbia University Center for Iranian Studies, 2011), http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/dinar (accessed 14 November 2018). On ‘right-wing utopias’, see Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘Capitalist Eutopias in America’, in Kenneth M. Roemer (ed.), America as Utopia. Collected Essays (New York: B. Franklin, 1981), pp. 192–205; Michael Orth, ‘Reefs on the Right. Fascist Politics in Contemporary American Libertarian Utopias’, Extrapolation, 31/4 (1990), 293–316; Peter Fitting, ‘Utopia beyond Our Ideals: The Dilemma of the Right-Wing Utopia’, Utopian Studies, 2/1/2 (1991), 95–109. While ISIS’s violent and apocalyptic attitude is foreign to the Morean tradition, it fits Karl Mannheim’s approach quite well. According to Mannheim’s concept developed in Ideology and Utopia (originally published as Ideologie und Utopie in 1929), a utopia presupposes its own realisation. Only when it has become a historical force can we talk of a utopia proper. For Mannheim there is also no contradiction between utopian and salvation-historical models; see Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. Collected Works Volume One (London/New York: Routledge, 2002); Thomas Schölderle, Utopia und Utopie. Thomas Morus, die Geschichte der Utopie und die Kontroverse um ihren Begriff (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2011), pp. 383–94. Bussemer, Propaganda, p. 31.

Selected works Dauber, Cori E. and Mark Robinson, ‘ISIS and the Hollywood Visual Style’, Jihadology.net, 6 July 2015, http://jihadology.net/2015/07/06/guest -post-isis-and-the-hollywood-visual-style/ (accessed 26 October 2017). McCants, William, The ISIS Apocalypse. The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015).

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Odin, Roger, ‘For a Semio-Pragmatics of Film’, in Warren Buckland (ed.), The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), pp. 213–26. Winter, Charlie, Documenting the Virtual ‘Caliphate’, (2015), http://www. quilliaminternational.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/FINALdocumenting-the-virtual-caliphate.pdf (accessed 23 July 2016).

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PART 2

Alternative Documentary Politics

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5

Living and Dying with Water: Indigenous Histories and Critical Bioregionalism in The Pearl Button Matthew Holtmeier

Patricio Guzmán established himself as a key political filmmaker by documenting the violent overthrow of Salvador Allende in his threepart Battle of Chile (La batalla de Chile, D: Patricio Guzmán, CL, 1975, 1976 and 1979). Like The Hour of the Furnaces (La hora de los hornos, D: Octavio Getino and Fernando E. Solanas, AR 1968), Guzmán’s film follows the larger discourse of Third Cinema by explicating the social forces underlying a tumultuous political moment through found footage of the historical events. Guzmán would continue to explore the history of Chile throughout his career, often returning to Allende and the events of 1973 in order to probe additional aspects of the nation’s past. While retaining his focus on Chile, in 2010 he combined his interest in political histories with a bioregional approach, reflecting on the role of environments within these tumultuous political histories in Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz, D: Patricio Guzmán, CL, 2010). In The Pearl Button (El botón de nácar, D: Patricio Guzmán, CL, 2015), he further developed this approach by ruminating on the role water played both in the way of life of the indigenous peoples who inhabited what is now Chile, and in later political dictatorship and disappearances. Through the ambivalence of the cosmos, which the film establishes via its multi-scalar exploration of non-human ecologies, Guzmán acknowledges that environmental histories are riddled with utopian promises of clean environments, but also with exploitation, displacement and murder. In his turn to the environments of Chile, Guzmán’s later films provide a case study in what might be called a bioregional cinema. Bioregionalism is the practice of ‘living-in-place’, or adapting one’s

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ways of inhabiting the earth to the specific environment in which one resides. Bioregionalism first emerged in the 1970s out of conversations between Allen Van Newkirk in Nova Scotia and Peter Berg in northern California.1 Van Newkirk established an Institute for Bioregional Research on Prince Edward Island in eastern Canada, which has a history of European settlement leading to environmental impact. By trampling the local Marram grass while establishing farms along the island’s coasts, settlers initiated a process that would lead to the destruction of the sand dunes. This became a crisis for the settlers of these coasts, as their farms were threatened by the subsequently encroaching sea. From a bioregional perspective, however, the complicated environmental issues they faced stemmed from their inability to live-in-place and from their misunderstanding of the vital role Marram grass played within the local environment. With ecologist Raymond Dasmann, Berg co-wrote ‘Reinhabiting California’, which brought the concept of bioregionalism to wider attention.2 In their article, Berg and Dasmann explain how bioregions are delineated and stress the significance of such delineations: Nobody would confuse the Mojave desert with the fertile valley of Central California, nor the Great Basin semi-arid land with the California coast. Between the major bioregions the differences are sufficiently marked that people do not usually attempt to practise the Sonoran desert way of life in the Oregonian coastal area.3 Though Berg and Dasmann suggest that ‘people usually do not’ borrow a way of living within one bioregion and apply it to another, the spread of global capitalism has propagated economic and industrial practices that derive not from the characteristics of the place settled, but the needs and practices of the settlers’ place of origin. As in the example on Prince Edward Island above, the transplanted farming techniques affected the indigenous grasses, and neither settlers nor grasses thrived. A tension regarding the histories and influences of indigenous peoples emerges in Berg and Dasmann’s article. On the one hand, the text sustains a critique of an ‘invader society’ associated with the pioneers that colonised North America, as well as ways of life associated with the displacement of Native Americans and the exploitation of natural

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resources. On the other hand, it acknowledges that different urban centres ‘can lead to different approaches to living on the land’:4 for the authors, for instance, the difference between San Francisco and Los Angeles. This tension rests upon the acknowledgement that cultures which displaced indigenous peoples now contribute to building new relationships with the land. In addition, Berg and Dasmann argue that reinhabitation ‘involves becoming native to a place through becoming aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it’.5 What emerges is a politically problematic narrative of a return to nature, acknowledging the influence Native American peoples had on living-in-place, entangled with contemporary culture’s role in shaping socio-ecological practices. Framing Guzmán as a bioregional filmmaker, at least in his later period, suggests ways in which eco-media might provide unique contributions to the larger discourse on bioregionalism. In The Pearl Button, his contribution begins to disentangle the naive utopianism associated with references to a native past in these original articulations. Exploring the role water played in shaping how the Selk’nam inhabited the Tierra del Fuego in Patagonia through ‘cosmovisions’ – a concept I borrow from Joni Adamson, but define in the filmic sense as sequences that extend beyond human perception by exploiting the extra-human potentials of editing, cinematography and sound – Guzmán links the habitation of indigenous peoples to subsequent colonial and political projects. This cosmovisual aesthetic ranges from extreme close-ups to reveal minute details in objects, to aerial shots that articulate the shapes of coasts, and even to telescopic shots depicting planets and nebulae. Working with archival photography and the superimposition of images and sounds, Guzmán creates a pluriverse of peoples and environments, which moves beyond human audiovisual and temporal perception. By ‘Illuminating “things” in the natural world that cannot be seen by the human eye, including multi-scale relationships between species functioning in systems’, the film shows objects and philosophies vital to indigenous worldviews.6 In doing so, it connects water not only to the ways in which the Selk’nam inhabited Chile, but also to Spain’s colonial project in Chile, and to the later dictatorship and political murders under Augusto Pinochet. By illuminating the indigenous presence, The Pearl Button complicates certain notions of bioregionalism that do not critically examine the displacement of indigenous peoples. Thus, it moves the discourse

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surrounding bioregionalism forward from a naive utopianism, centred on the figure of the ‘Ecological Indian’, towards what Tom Moylan calls a ‘critical utopianism’.7 David Landis Barnhill argues: ‘Instead of offering a unitary perspective, [critical utopianism] may be self-reflexive, multi­ vocal, and fragmented’, thereby providing more complicated notions of a bioregion.8 Placing this within the framework of global capital, Daniel Gustav Anderson argues that a critical bioregionalism addresses ‘the vulnerability of all bioregions to certain homogenizing forces that threaten to transform or destroy them and the degree to which any given person or polity may (or may not) be enfranchised to make consequential decisions about their lives-in-place’.9 I follow Barnhill and Anderson, and extend their approaches to include multi-scalar histories in tension through my analysis of what I call filmic cosmovisions in The Pearl Button. A critical utopianism, then, does not just dream of another world, but critically dissects systems of power present in the historical world. Likewise, Guzmán does not present a past or future free from the histories of global capitalism, but instead provides bio­ regional histories in which they are acknowledged and interlinked. In doing so, The Pearl Button illustrates how one might ‘live-in-place’, but also reveals how the environment relates to displacement, genocide and political disappearances, thus acknowledging the diverse and deadly relationships between the human and the non-human.

Cosmovisions: bioregionalism as critical utopianism Before turning to a reading of Guzmán’s film, I will first outline two discourses that converge within the cosmovisions of The Pearl Button. The Pearl Button provides an excellent example of bioregional cinema, in which, as I have argued elsewhere, ‘film form supports our reading of the environment as inseparable from characters and even invites spectators from outside the bioregion of the film to understand this interrelation’.10 Moving between several approaches to the environment of Chile – archival, autobiographical and journalistic – Guzmán examines a multiplicity of ways in which Chile has been inhabited: from several indigenous tribes to colonisers and later governments as well as particular individuals caught up amidst the transitions from one society to another. However, The Pearl Button does not merely illustrate the interrelation between subjectivity and environment.

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Figure 5.1 • Landscape shots that emphasise the beauty of the Chilean coast and water’s role in shaping the bioregion

Rather, it connects this bioregional focus to a critical utopianism by refusing to idealise a particular way of inhabiting Chile, and by constantly compressing and compacting the tragedies of history with the natural beauty of the Chilean coast (see figure 5.1). The cosmovisions, in this equation, remind the viewer of the plural roles water has played throughout Chilean history, and this plurality complicates images and understandings of the landscape that might lead to a naive utopianism. In the introduction to this chapter, I note a tension in the discourse of bioregionalism that might lean towards this naive utopianism, particularly in the phrase ‘becoming native to a place’.11 While Berg and Dasmann may be envisioning a process without recourse to primitivism – they highlight an awareness of place-based ecological complexity, for example, not necessarily a particular historical paradigm – their phrasing invites one to understand bioregionalism through the discourse of the Ecological Indian, or ‘the Native North American as ecologist and conservationist’.12 The figure of the Ecological Indian suggests a utopian desire for pre-modernity in conservationist discourse, implying that indigenous peoples have a more authentic relationship with the land. As Greg Garrard outlines: ‘We’ apparently cannot dwell in working harmony with nature, but perhaps other cultures are able to do so. Since the sixteenth century at least, ‘primitive’ people have been represented as

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dwelling in harmony with nature, sustaining one of the most widespread and seductive myths of the non-European ‘other’. The assumption of indigenous environmental virtue is a foundational belief for deep ecologists and many ecocritics.13 Shepard Krech critiques this concept as he introduces it as a settlerprojection of the Other, albeit a beneficent one. Other authors have developed and added nuance to his critique, while maintaining that such visions of indigenous peoples are ‘exploitative objectification[s] of indigenous people for non-Indian purposes and mostly at Indian expense’.14 In other words, rather than seeking indigenous notions of sustainability, environmental discourses invoking ‘becoming-native’ appropriate an image of indigenous peoples to serve political paradigms that do not come from the indigenous cultures themselves. I raise this typical framing in environmental conversations not to suggest that The Pearl Button develops yet another critique of the Ecological Indian, but rather to argue that The Pearl Button provides an example of how bioregional discourses might acknowledge indigenous histories while avoiding a return to settler-projection. The most striking thing about the form of Guzmán’s film is its integration of non-human perception into telling the history of Chile, through sound design, editing and cinematography that evoke a pluriverse of perception. Working between the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (UDRME)15 and the concept of the ‘seeing instrument’ in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977),16 Joni Adamson extends the concept of ‘cosmovisions’: she uses it to define literary devices that invite readers ‘to gaze beyond the span of a single human life to reaches of time necessary to the survival of functioning ecosystems, and to multinatural worlds that, for indigenous peoples, have never ceased to exist’.17 In The Pearl Button, audiovisual cosmovisions nuance the film’s approach to the bioregion by allowing viewers to consider the environment of Chile and its inhabitants on multiple layers simultaneously, including both human and non-human histories. The concept of cosmovisions shares the investment in the nonhuman with the discourse of object-oriented ontology, but brings to this larger discourse a political practicality that can be applied to contemporary environmental-political formations such as the UDRME. To contextualise cosmovisions in this particular way, Adamson draws upon the etymological approach of anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena

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and philosopher Isabelle Stengers to the concept of cosmopolitanism. Adamson breaks this word down into ‘cosmos’, which ‘refers to the unknown whole constituted by multiple divergent worlds’, and ‘politics’, which refers ‘to the articulation of which [multiple divergent worlds] would eventually be capable’. In other words, there is a utopian promise of cosmopolitanism and, by extension, Adamson’s cosmovisions. This utopian promise does not provide a blueprint, however, but a critical utopianism, to which I will turn shortly. Adamson’s point in drawing upon this etymology here is that ‘a cosmos detached from politics is irrelevant’. She provides the example of the UDRME, which ‘counters this separation by urging all the world’s citizens to become more aware of multiple, divergent worlds and to build a politics that would support the “recovery, revalidation, and strengthening of indigenous cosmovisions”’.18 As a result, for Adamson, cosmovisions are not purely an aesthetic exercise, but always relate to a politics, thereby mitigating distance between the human and the non-human; this distinguishes her approach from that of object-oriented ontology. Crucially for my analysis of The Pearl Button, her approach provides an aesthetic model through which bioregionalism and a critical utopianism can be fused. Tom Moylan develops the concept of the critical utopia in relation to 1960s and 1970s political movements that shared a general rejection of the growth of transnational capitalism, most clearly correlated in The Pearl Button with colonialism and later foreign-orchestrated coups in Chile. He argues that the critical utopia is critical ‘in the Enlightenment sense of critique – that is expressions of oppositional thought, unveiling, debunking, of both the genre itself and the historical situation’, which includes texts that ‘reject utopia as blueprint while preserving it as dream’.19 While Moylan provides case studies of literary science fiction, his consideration of utopianism is far-ranging, from Ernst Bloch’s concept of hope to Fredric Jameson’s critique of power and ideology. While I would not suggest that The Pearl Button is science fiction or even that it provides images of the fantastic – other than one brief shot which I will discuss later – the film’s cosmovisions have a speculative realist function that engage ‘the fantasizing powers of the imagination’.20 Crucial to the critical utopia, such speculative visions or cosmovisions do not provide images of radical perfection, but maintain a focus on imperfection, suggesting the impossibility of a utopian blueprint. Specifically, in The Pearl Button, this is achieved through cosmovisions that acknowledge the role the particular bioregions of

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Chile have played both in providing a home to indigenous peoples and their simultaneous roles in colonialism and genocide. This has several important implications for a move from a critical utopia to a critical bioregionalism, which underscore my argument that The Pearl Button usefully develops the larger discourse surrounding bioregionalism through its cosmovisions. First, it provides a way of acknowledging indigenous histories tied to particular bioregions, without falling back on the trope of the Ecological Indian. The Pearl Button illustrates the naiveté of an approach that would suggest that the Selk’nam could provide a utopian blueprint for a sustainable relationship with the bioregion, when that blueprint is riddled with the history of colonialism. Second, a critical bioregionalism would acknowledge the complicated roles global capitalism plays in relation to the bioregion. While bioregionalism is often leveraged by environmentalists as a response to global capitalism’s tendencies to disregard place-based methods of inhabiting, it runs the risk of dehistoricising the bioregion. For example, while some bioregionalists see secession as a way to move towards more sustainable practices, in most cases the idea of secession vacates the histories of nations that make such a solution untenable. Instead, a critical bioregionalism acknowledges the intertwining of border and capital with the environment. For example, the slowly calving glaciers in The Pearl Button subtly acknowledge rising temperatures and the changing environment, even while telling the sustainable history of Selk’nam inhabitation of the waters surrounding them. While for certain bioregionalists, the Ecological Indian might provide a promise of a more sustainable future, or a yearning for a pre-modern utopia, The Pearl Button unravels a pluriverse through cosmovisions and a speculative realism to illustrate the entangled nature of history, environments and politics. My analysis of the film itself will proceed by distinguishing three ways in which the cosmovisions in The Pearl Button operate. The first use of cosmovisions establishes the bioregion of the Chilean coast and the Tierra del Fuego. The second use of cosmovisions introduces the palimpsest of human settlement, including colonialism and the shifting bureaucratic administration of peoples and lands. The final use is the film’s brief speculative gesture to another world entirely. By moving through these three sections, I will illustrate the ways in which The Pearl Button provides an audiovisual interpretation of Adamson’s literary device, and

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explore the different potentials of such cosmovisions in a general move towards a critical bioregionalism.

An archipelago of rain: establishing the bioregion through cinematic cosmovisions After a quote from Raúl Zurita – ‘We are all streams from one water’ – The Pearl Button opens on the image of a chunk of quartz set against a black backdrop. The camera cuts in on the quartz to show it in more detail, and a dark hand begins to rotate the mineral, showing its various details and imperfections. The camera cuts in once more, and the viewer loses all perspective as the image becomes abstract, only a rocking topography of lines mottled with craters. The sound design gives clues as to its relevance, however: as the quartz tilts back and forth, something inside it shifts, and whispery sounds of water suggest the simultaneous presence of water and quartz. Perceptive viewers might realise that the shifting object within the quartz is an air bubble created by water within the quartz. Eventually, Guzmán’s voice begins to explain the significance of the object: ‘This block of quartz was found in the Atacama desert, in Chile. It is 3,000 years old and contains a drop of water.’ This is the film’s first cosmovision, which ‘summon[s] a plurality into visibility that does not stop at a politicized multiculturalism, but … might more properly be called “multinaturalisms”’.21 In other words, the combination of image and sounds works to create a multi-scalar introduction to Chile’s environment, by moving beyond the limits of human perceptions of time. This is the film’s first step in implicating the importance of water to the history of the bioregion, and its simul­taneous role in providing life and bringing death to the indigenous peoples that inhabit these particular environments. The film proceeds by way of Guzmán’s narration as he tells the history of Chile and its landscape, interviews artists and indigenous peoples, and creates cosmovisions through the superimposition of images, drastically changing scales and speculative images. After his opening meditation on water, he turns to the Atacama Desert itself, one of the driest places on the planet. Because of its altitude and lack of water, the Atacama is one of the best places in the world for observatories oriented towards the stars. This allows Guzmán to link this supposedly dry space to the wealth of water in the cosmos through a

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superimposition. In a long take, he shows the telescopes at work and explains this connection between Chile and celestial bodies of water: From here, astronomers discovered water in almost the entire cosmos. There’s water in the planets. There’s water vapor in some nebula. There’s ice in other celestial bodies. On Earth, and elsewhere, water is essential for life to exist. Each night, a new planet is discovered that might have water. Closing the sequence with this key refrain, the link between water and life, a slow superimposition begins to fade in. Sparkling orbs of light flicker over the image of the observatories. When the fade finishes, it appears as an abstract field of stars dancing in the sky (see figure 5.2). With another fade, a more focused image reveals those orbs to be the unfocused gaze of a camera on the light playing off rippling water. In this cosmovision, the stars become the ocean, and while the narration has already suggested the ubiquity of water, the film’s poesis directly links the cosmos to water, Chile to the stars and the past to the present through the quartz. After setting up the premise through the quartz that the film will explore the nature of water, this sequence explicitly suggests the role of water in relation to creating the potential for life. The Pearl Button is not a universal film, however, but a bioregional one, and it focuses the ways in which people live with water through the specific bioregion of

Figure 5.2 • Supposed stars as they coalesce into waves

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southern Chile, including the Tierra del Fuego, which is a vast grouping of small islands that dot the south-west coast of Chile. The film sets the boundaries of this exploration through another cosmovision, illustrating what Adamson refers to as the ‘multi-scalar’ aspect of cosmovisions, or what I am referring to here as Guzmán’s cosmovisual aesthetic. As Guzmán narrates ‘Water, Chile’s largest border, forms an estuary known as Patagonia’, an aerial shot of Patagonia fades in, slowly moving down the coast of the bioregion. From the film’s vantage, the region looks almost like a map, but one that is close enough to reveal all of the islands, inlets, lakes and rivers that run through the otherwise mountainous region. Snow-topped peaks are clearly visible, as is precipitation in the sky, emphasising the various ways that water runs through the land. ‘Here’, Guzmán illustrates via the outer limits of the troposphere, ‘the Cordillera of the Andes sinks into the water and re-emerges as thousands of islands. It is a timeless place. An archipelago of rain’ (see figure 5.3). While Guzmán’s description of this vision of Patagonia as timeless seems poetic, Adamson points out that this is a key quality of the cosmovision that temporally scales ‘to reaches of time necessary to the survival of functioning ecosystems’.22 As a result, Guzmán’s cosmovision scales in terms of both perceptual distance and time, by reminding the viewer that these life-giving qualities of Patagonia are not only present presences, but also create a temporal bridge to indigenous histories.

Figure 5.3 • The archipelago of rain viewed from the troposphere

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After a montage that illustrates the various states of water in Patagonia – the liquid of the estuaries, vapours in the skies and solids falling in the form of hail and snow – the film begins introducing human histories into the bioregion of southern Chile it has already established. It is worth noting that the aforementioned montage begins to reveal the harsh environments of Patagonia, in the form of wind blowing hail sideways and barren rocks jutting vertically out of the water. This provides foreshadowing and begins to complicate Guzmán’s initial framing of water as the source of life. One image even shows a glacier, with the cracks of calving sounding off: an oblique reference to climate change, suggesting that even large-scale temporalities are not so ‘timeless’ as they are indicative of shifts and environmental change outside human perception. The transition to human histories takes place through artefacts and archival photography, cosmovisions themselves in the context of this film, as they bridge temporalities from the cosmic to the anthropocentric by implicating a time when our species inhabited the land. Guzmán transitions by way of a graphic match, however, in order to obfuscate contemporary, anthropocentric viewing practices. He cuts from a shot that revolves around the perfect sphere of Earth viewed from space to another sphere, this one barren, grey and pockmarked. The relationship between the two spheres suggests that the second is another celestial body, but the accompanying stars and cosmic dust of the first image disappear, and this grey planet is set against a black void. The camera slowly zooms in on it, as if to show its inhabitants, but then cuts to a series of six similar stones with the accompanying narration: Before the white man arrived, the first inhabitants of Patagonia lived in communion with the cosmos. They carved stones to ensure their future. They traveled by water. They lived submerged in water. They ate what the water supplied. The slippage between indigenous carving and planet here exemplifies the Patagonians’ worldview, which Guzmán describes as living ‘in communion with the cosmos’. The film further illustrates this point through archival photography, which functions similarly to the artefacts for Guzmán, but allows him to construct cosmovisions with other cinematic tricks and expand his cosmovisual aesthetic. The Pearl Button introduces indigenous voices to the bioregion through interviews with the living ancestors of individuals depicted

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through archival photography and, more rarely, archival film footage. In a series of images in which Guzmán introduces the indigenous tribes that inhabited the Tierra del Fuego, he provides no narration, but rather lets the archival portraits of indigenous communities speak for themselves – although he cuts in to close-ups of particular features of the images, highlighting the different personalities of the individuals. He then combines this archival photography with the bioregion through editing, as he cuts back to contemporary cinematography of Patagonia to illustrate how the tribes inhabited this particular region, maintaining an emphasis on water through the imagery and narration: They arrived ten thousand years ago. They were water nomads. They lived in clans that moved about through the fjords. They traveled from island to island. Each family kept a fire burning in the middle of their canoe. There were five groups: the Kawésqar, the Selk’nam, the Aoniken, the Hausch, and the Yamana. They all traveled by sea. Through the rhetoric of the narration and the archival imagery, this sequence speaks with the authority of documentary. Its tone is one of reverence that borders on awe of the Ecological Indian. This marks an important transition in the film, however, because, before committing to a utopian reverence for the past, the film abruptly cuts to a close-up of hands brushing a canoe. This abrupt cut rips viewers from the reverie and transports them to the present, where Martín G. Calderón, an indigenous Patagonian, discusses his troubled relationship with water. Calderón tells a personal history, which complicates the bioregion as a source of life, and introduces the ingredients for a critical bioregionalism. In telling his story, Calderón provides a counter-narrative to colonial projects, which illustrates the ways in which habitation of a bioregion shifts once empire arrives on its shores, bringing with it genocide, displacement and bureaucracy.

Complicating the bioregion: Chile’s palimpsest of histories/ visions The cut to Calderón in the present introduces the second premise of the film: if the first implicates the myriad of ways in which water sustains

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life, the second marks the ways water threatens it. As a result, the premise of the Ecological Indian is complicated by a more comprehensive view of colonialism, whereby indigenous peoples were displaced from previous relationships with the land or sea. Calderón explains: I’d like to travel by boat as we used to. But now there are too many restrictions, we are barely allowed in the sea … The navy demands too much for us to be able to use the sea. I have a boat I made myself. Such a small boat scares them. They’re not familiar with boats that travel in this way. That’s why … They claim they’re protecting us, but I don’t think so. Calderón proceeds to explain how, as a child of twelve, he and his father travelled by canoe from Puma Arenas to Cape Horn and back again, a distance of almost 800 km. The film is diverse in its approach to colonialism, but it starts with this simple indictment: the bureaucracy of the present makes the very premise of the Ecological Indian impossible. The transition from indigenous cosmovisions to postcolonial administration is almost shocking in its move from the cosmic to the banal; by banal, I do not mean unimportant, but rather the way in which presentday governments treat indigenous habitation as an afterthought. This juxtaposition lays the groundwork for Guzmán’s critical exploration of water in the rest of the film, which illustrates the ways in which the water of the bioregion is implicated in death. The film conveys the relationship between water and death through two key periods that establish a historical palimpsest of the bioregion. The first is the displacement of indigenous peoples in Chile by its initial European settlers. The second is the later Pinochet regime, which displaced political ideology by way of disappearances, or the strategic jailing and murder of political dissidents. The exploration of the Pinochet regime links The Pearl Button to Guzmán’s earlier work, including The Battle of Chile series, which Peter Rist has described as ‘a dialectical record of the struggles of Allende’s Popular Unity minority government’.23 This dialectical style returns in The Pearl Button through the film’s movement between the life-giving and life-taking roles of water, and through the film’s movement between past and present. Calderón’s story of how he and his father navigated the Tierra del Fuego marks how Guzmán’s film operates dialectically in its transition towards a darker reflection on the bioregion. But he also takes a

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dialectical approach throughout the rest of the film, by moving from history to interviews with indigenous Patagonians, artists, activists and scholars, past to present. The transition to histories of displacement begins in 1883 for Guzmán. While the Spanish Empire originally settled Spain in 1541, Guzmán’s much later date reflects a period in which the government begins to administer indigenous populations, the first instances of what Calderón describes in the present. Guzmán narrates In 1883, the settlers arrived, the gold hunters, the military, the police, the cattle farmers, and the Catholic missionaries. After centuries of living alongside the water and the stars, the indigenous people saw their world collapse. Guzmán lists a series of constituents – similar to the trampling of the Marram grass in the introduction to this article – that form a different relationship with the land than those already present, from European agricultural practices such as corporate cattle farming, to religion separated from the indigenous knowledge of the cosmos. The film reflects on this point with Dawson Island, a recurring site in Guzmán’s palimpsestic vision. As Chilean settlement accelerated, the emerging Chilean government, which had declared independence in 1818, begins to directly disrupt the relationship the indigenous populations had with the land. Guzmán introduces Dawson Island in relation to government interventions into indigenous life: ‘The Chilean government, who supported the colonists, declared that the Indians were corrupt, cattle thieves and barbaric.’ Dawson Island was established with the help of Italian missionaries, with the purpose of relocating and rehabilitating the existing indigenous inhabitants: ‘They took away their beliefs, their language, and their canoes.’ Guzmán relies on extensive archival photography in his introduction to Dawson Island, and even on some early moving images showing native peoples dressed in Western-style clothing, distinct from the preceding images of indigenous peoples in the film. One striking image shows a row of indigenous children in dresses with white collars, standing in front of a row of nuns who hover behind them as if protecting them. Those who were not settled on Dawson Island as part of the re-education programme of the missionaries became prey to what the film refers to as ‘Indian hunters’, who were paid by

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farming corporations to commit systematic genocide. Those on Dawson Island did not fare much better, as they fell sick with European diseases spread in the confined space and clothes of the missionaries. The role water plays in this history may seem oblique, but Guzmán signals its centrality with his recurring exploration of the role canoes played in indigenous life. Calderón, a canoe builder in the present, illustrates the ways in which the present-day government restricts indigenous access to the waterways of the Tierra del Fuego, and thereby indigenous modes of living. Through Dawson Island, Guzmán demonstrates that this strategy of removing indigenous peoples from the water is part of a much larger, more calculated strategy of settlement, rather than just a bureaucratic function of the present. The island is a natural place for the Kawésqar, the Selk’nam, the Aoniken, the Hausch or the Yamana, unless their canoes are taken from them. The island is transformed from temporary respite as they travel the waters, to prison camp; thus, their relationship with the land is fundamentally transformed by their inability to live on the water. Dawson Island returns when the film turns to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, revealing not only the transformation of indigenous relationships with the land, but an alternative settler-colonial relationship with the water entirely. In turning to Pinochet, Guzmán treads familiar ground. The Pinochet dictatorship is the topic of many of his films, which he approaches from a variety of angles. This time, he approaches it by way of the cosmos. He links the fall of the Allende government and the rise of Pinochet’s dictatorship to a supernova, observed during this same historical moment: [the Allende government] was destroyed by a coup d’état financed by the United States. At the same time, the disintegration of a supernova star was seen from a Chilean observatory. It was the first time this had occurred so close to Earth. While Guzmán’s cosmovisual aesthetic usually implicates indigenous relationships with the bioregion, and perhaps the settlers’ separation from it, this time an image of a star going supernova and bursting across the sky represents the fall of a government and its political ideology. It is no secret that Guzmán supported Allende, and he narrates his government’s fall as a star bursts brightly and the ensuing shockwave

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spreads across the frame. This spreading shockwave provides visual representation of Pinochet’s political strategy after assuming power: his forces swept across the land rounding up dissidents and suspected communists, torturing, jailing and murdering them. For this reason, Guzmán returns to Dawson Island, which Pinochet used to house political dissidents, including Allende’s allies and personal friends. Again, Dawson Island becomes a prison with the explicit aim of containing perceived dissidents. The water surrounding this particular island takes on symbolic importance: it serves to isolate these dissident subjects from the rest of Chile. The Pinochet government was even more explicit about its relationship with the water, however. The sea was also the site of political disappearances during Pinochet’s regime. His government used the ocean to hide the results of his political suppression, and instead of a source of life, it became a vast graveyard. Guzmán tells this story through a sequence that lasts approximately ten minutes, and which stands out from the rest of the film in that it does not rely upon cosmovisions. Instead, it re-enacts the process Pinochet’s civil servants went through when disappearing people: administering drugs to kill the victims, wrapping the bodies in plastic and tying them to a rail tie, and finally dropping them from a helicopter into the ocean. As re-enactment, this sequence is frank and ugly, and it illustrates the stark difference between Pinochet’s government and the cosmovisual aesthetic that represented indigenous relationships with the land. By approaching water dialectically, moving between its potential for life and for death throughout the film, The Pearl Button complicates utopian visions of the environment. It provides a historical palimpsest, or a critical utopia through its complication of human inhabitation of the bioregion. In doing so, the film moves towards a critical bioregionalism: a method of bioregionalism that understands human histories in relation to the specific features of the bioregion, rather than a naive utopian understanding of the bioregion in some pure state. In making this turn from the more ecologically oriented first part, the film develops the diverse ways in which colonial projects, as human histories immanent to the bioregion, shape habitation: by extinguishing inhabitation through genocide, as told in the stories of the ‘Indian hunters’; by denying inhabitation through displacement, shown in the history of Dawson Island; and by restricting the ways in which one may inhabit, which Calderón reveals through his personal history with Chilean

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bureaucracy. By exploring various ways in which one might complicate a bioregion by introducing human histories, Guzmán provides a critical utopianism that is ‘self-reflexive, multivocal, and fragmented’, to use Barnhill’s definition.24 I named one more way that Guzmán develops a critical bioregionalism, however: not through dwelling on habitation within the bioregion, but through a speculative gesture that operates as a counterexample.

Speculative images in The Pearl Button: towards a critical bioregionalism Occasionally, Guzmán makes use of speculative images. Unlike a cosmovisual aesthetic that moves between various scales – aural, visual, temporal – to represent the actual bioregion, or historical artefacts and photography, such speculative images do not attempt to represent observable phenomena. Instead, they gesture towards a potential reality. In this regard, I distinguish the fantastic from beliefs held by indigenous communities, which might be represented by cosmovisions. The rare use of fantastic images serves to ground Guzmán’s critical bioregionalism by signalling what a utopia might look like in relation to his cosmovisual aesthetic embodied in the historical world. It thus serves as an illustrative counterexample. This strategy contextualises what might otherwise seem fantastic to viewers, such as the sequence showing how the Selk’nam created themselves in the image of the cosmos through body paint and costume. Ruminating on the fact that the Selk’nam did not erect towns or monuments, Guzmán notes that they created images by painting on their own bodies. Rather than creating images of themselves, however, they created images of stars and constellations out of their own bodies, implicating their worldview in relation to the cosmos. Guzmán provides a set of examples, pausing on one such image to slowly fade to a starscape. In this fade, the Selk’nam merge organically as the stars painted on their own bodies align with the stars of the telescopic image. ‘After death’, he narrates, ‘they believed they would become stars. In their mythology, they evoke the constellation of Orion, and the Southern Cross.’ In this brief narration, he cuts to different telescopic photography, showing Orion and the Southern Cross, but he continues to cut, showing constellation after constellation. Four images into

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this sequence, the quality of the images changes subtly. Eventually, the viewer realises that Guzmán has been exploring archival footage in the way described earlier, by cutting in and out of the images, and he cuts out to reveal that he has almost imperceptibly transitioned from telescopic shots of the stars to close-ups of archival photography, revealing the careful constellations painted on the bodies of the Selk’nam (see figure 5.4). Again, Guzmán uses graphic matches to create multi-scalar relationships. This example is particularly striking because he moves from the extreme distance of the observatory to the extreme close-up on body paint, while mitigating their distance through the graphic match. Like Adamson’s ‘seeing instrument’, editing becomes a way for Guzmán to articulate indigenous cosmovisions, which situate their bioregional relationship with the land. While the cosmos in its entirety is not bioregionally situated, the Selk’nam’s perspective of Orion and the Southern Cross marks out a location from which they view the stars, and it gives bioregional significance to Guzmán’s earlier linking of Chile to the stars. Within the context of The Pearl Button, however, the striking images of the Selk’nam adorned with the stars must be read in relation to the archival photography that shows them in Western clothing. This emphasises Guzmán’s critical bioregionalism, which acknowledges the history of colonialism with regard to different relationships with the land and cosmos. In other words, these indigenous cosmovisions are not speculative, but historically situated in relation to both the

Figure 5.4 • The stomach/bellybutton of one of the painted Selk’nam

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environ­ment and colonialism’s role in promoting the flow of global capital. As Anderson argues, it is neoliberalism and the global flow of capital that place ways of living-in-place in tension with ‘homogenizing forces’ engineered to promote the free flow of capital, usually from periphery to centre, as Spain displaced indigenous presences in order to export its natural resources.25 While Guzmán’s narration is poetic throughout the film, it becomes whimsical only at one point. After describing the work of the aforementioned Indian hunters, he muses: I ask myself a question: has the same thing happened on other planets? Have the strongest people always dominated, everywhere? One of the planets of the Gliese star, discovered in Chile, may have a vast ocean. Might it be inhabited by living beings? Might it have trees to make large canoes? Might this planet have been a refuge where the Indians could live in peace? Having these thoughts is unreal. But I dare to have them, because I’d love for these water people not to have disappeared. While he asks these questions, he repeats his strategy of slow superimposition. A ghostly image of a canoe with two paddlers slowly fades into an image of the ocean, his imagination seemingly bringing them into being. Eventually a clearer image fades in, showing the two paddlers gliding along a calm sea, with mountains like those of the Tierra del Fuego in the background. In the sky, however, a nearby star, this planet’s sun, is set next to two nearby planets that loom on the skyline (see figure 5.5). Presumably this is the view from the planet next to the Gliese star, a speculative image that Guzmán acknowledges is ‘unreal’. Guzmán sets this speculative image within the context of a series of historical cosmovisions and explicitly situates it as speculative, in order to emphasise the actual histories of southern Chile. This rhetorical move accentuates what I have called a critical bioregionalism here, by illustrating the difference between whimsical utopianism and the intersection of environment, inhabitation and history. While art, especially literature and poetry, has played a key role in developing bioregional imaginaries,26 The Pearl Button provides an example of how art might avoid utopian pastoralism in developing the idea of a bio­region, and thereby move towards a more critical and immediately

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Figure 5.5 • Speculative rumination on what is ‘unreal’

useful understanding of place for environmental activists and inhabitants. The film ends on a montage that moves from archival photography of the Selk’nam painted with the stars to images of the ocean, brief shots of the indigenous Patagonians that were interviewed, the Atacama Desert, a quasar, a close-up of melting ice and finally a canoer paddling across the water. This final simple montage reminds the viewer of the poet Raúl Zurita’s parting words, which exemplify the approach of a critical bioregionalism: ‘These lands, both marvelous and in some ways blood-soaked.’ The film’s title, The Pearl Button, highlights this palimpsest of life and death: it refers to a pearl shirt button found encrusted in a rail tie recovered from the coast along Chile. The pearl button reminds the viewer of the indigenous Fuegian, Jemmy Button, abducted by an English captain, who was ‘paid for’ with a pearl button. The rail tie reminds the viewer of the disappearances conducted under the Pinochet regime. Both objects are interlaced with violent histories and sunk below the water that defines the way in which Chile is bordered and has been inhabited as a bioregion. Notes 1. Doug Aberley, ‘Interpreting Bioregionalism: A Story from Many Voices’, in Michael Vincent McGinnis (ed.), Bioregionalism (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), pp. 13–42. 2. Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann, ‘Reinhabiting California’, The Ecologist, 7/10 (1977), 399–401.

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3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

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Berg and Dasmann, ‘Reinhabiting California’, 399. Berg and Dasmann, ‘Reinhabiting California’, 400. Berg and Dasmann, ‘Reinhabiting California’, 399. Joni Adamson, ‘Cosmovisions: Environmental Justice, Transnational American Studies, and Indigenous Literature’, in Greg Garrard (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 181. Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: Norton and Company, 1999); Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), p. 10. David Landis Barnhill, ‘Critical Utopianism and Bioregional Ecocriticism’, in Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty and Karla Armbruster (eds), The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), pp. 212–25, 214. Daniel Gustav Anderson, ‘Critical Bioregionalist Method in Dune: A Position Paper’, in Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster (eds), The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), pp. 226–42, 227. Matthew Holtmeier, ‘Communicating Cascadia: Reichardt’s Three Ecologies as Bioregional Medium’, Screen, 58/4 (2017), 447–96, 483. Berg and Dasmann, ‘Reinhabiting California’, 399. Krech III, The Ecological Indian, p. 16. Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 129. Larry Nesper and James H. Schlender, ‘The Politics of Cultural Revitaliza­ tion and Intertribal Resource Management’, in Michael E. Harkin and David Rich Lewis (eds), Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2007), pp. 277–303, 302. The UDRME was developed at the 2010 World People’s Conference on Climate Change in Bolivia. Through a set of principles it frames the rights of Mother Earth, and defines Mother Earth as the complex human and non-human ecology of which humanity is a part. The Earth Law Center uses the UDRME as one of its framing principles in its goal of shaping legal policies to protect the Earth’s environments. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Penguin, 1977). Joni Adamson, ‘Cosmovisions: Environmental Justice, Transnational American Studies, and Indigenous Literature’, in Greg Garrard (ed.),

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 172–87, 182. Adamson, ‘Cosmovisions’, p. 182. Moylan, Demand the Impossible, p. 10. Moylan, Demand the Impossible, p. 1. Adamson, ‘Cosmovisions’, p. 182. Adamson, ‘Cosmovisions’, p. 182. Peter H. Rist, Historical Dictionary of South American Cinema (Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), p. 303. Barnhill, ‘Critical Utopianism’, p. 214. Anderson, ‘Critical Bioregionalist’, p. 227. Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty and Karla Armbruster, ‘Introduction’, in Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty and Karla Armbruster (eds), The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), pp. 1–29, 2.

Selected works Aberley, Doug, ‘Interpreting Bioregionalism: A Story from Many Voices’, in Michael Vincent McGinnis (ed.), Bioregionalism (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), pp. 13–42. Garrard, Greg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Lynch, Tom, Cheryll Glotfelty and Karla Armbruster (eds), The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). Moylan, Tom, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York: Peter Lang, 1986).

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6

Prospectivity in Political Documentaries Andrea Reiter

[B]eyond merely representing, reflecting, or helping to comprehend what exists, documentary can produce reality and thus influence beliefs, actions, events, and politics.1 Documentaries perform a variety of rhetorical and aesthetic functions.2 One of their aims is to raise awareness of the current state of society and thus to change perceptions of it. When documentaries critically address social and political issues, I argue, this critique animates viewers to think about the potentials and mechanisms of the social change proposed by the film, as well as about their own agency in effecting change. These types of documentaries have the distinction of calling attention to the future instead of only referencing the past and present. They evoke a future reality, which must be seen as in the process of being shaped, along with visions of a future society and better living conditions. In this chapter, I examine the efforts of documentary films to interweave criticism of current affairs with a forward-looking perspective based on social ideals and values. I will describe this forward-looking positive factor using critical documentaries from post-Yugoslavia that deal with the violent conflicts during the break-up of the socialist state. In many critical documentaries from the region, filmmakers struggle to thoughtfully address the complex reasons – and the often one-sided representations – behind the breakdown of Yugoslavia, with its wars and the hate fuelled between the various ethnic and religious communities. These films clearly demonstrate an intention to inspire viewers to consider the conditions and possibilities of a better future. I will focus here on Božidar Knežević’s Storm over Krajina (Oluja Nad Krajinom, HR 2001) and Jasmila Žbanić’s Images from the Corner (Slike sa ugla, BA, DE 2003).

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The utopian potential of political documentaries I use the term ‘utopian potential’ to refer to a film’s potential to act upon the audience’s imagination and, ideally, to inspire political action. My arguments are based on a notion of utopia that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century as a philosophical current of thought. In this context, utopia is seen as a ‘sort of form of awareness with an impact on historical processes of transformation’.3 In this ‘intentional concept of utopia’4 as outlined by Gustav Landauer, Karl Mannheim and Ernst Bloch, utopia is perceived as a futureoriented way of thinking.5 The authors conceive of utopia as rooted in ‘individual motivation for action’,6 which ‘essentially [concerns] a forward-looking motivation’.7 Detached from the ideological-socialist context of its origins, this notion of intentional utopia has gained significance in recent philosophical debates.8 Cultural theorist Klaus Kufeld, for instance, sees in its linking of utopian and critical aspects an ability to prove itself as ‘present- and action-oriented’.9 Therefore, Kufeld suggests, the utopian is increasingly employed in reflections on shaping the future.10 The utopian potential is also increasingly at issue in the analysis of cultural and cinematic works. The work of the literary and cultural critic Fredric Jameson has proven especially influential in this respect.11 In his analyses of pop-cultural works as well as of religious and nationalist trends, Jameson primarily draws on Bloch, whose philosophical approach is also my focus.12 In Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson writes about the potential of the Blochian principle: Bloch posits a Utopian impulse governing everything futureoriented in life and culture; and encompassing everything from games to patent medicines, from myths to mass entertainment, from iconography to technology, from architecture to eros, from tourism to jokes and the unconscious.13 Most particularly in The Principle of Hope (1995, first published 1954–9), Bloch pairs human creativity and thought with hopes for a society that is changing for the better. Hope serves as a stimulus for improving human living conditions in cases where they are perceived as insufficient.14 In the concept of a ‘concrete utopia’, the author links

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the subjective utopian imagination with objective, real tendencies; that is, he applies hope, as a vision of the future, to real possibilities.15 The ‘Real-Possible’ contrasts with what is scientifically predictable and therefore ‘objectively possible’ in that it is ‘everything whose conditions in the sphere of the object itself are not yet fully assembled; whether because they are still maturing, or above all because new conditions – though mediated with the existing ones – arise for the entry of a new Real’.16 In this really possible, the concrete utopia is equally connected to both potential forms of reality and to the human ability to imagine a better future. According to Bloch, the human potential to free ourselves from our passivity towards the course of the world and to contribute to the future is grounded in a prospective view and the anticipation of a possible reality.17 This is not something that accidentally befalls humans, but rather something that they need to actively work on in order to translate hope, as manifested for instance in daydreams or artistic works, into thought and, ideally, into action. Accordingly, the act of hoping contains an activating factor.18 For my analysis, I adopt Bloch’s view that artistic works – including committed documentaries – can offer a utopian perspective in which the really possible of future worlds is anticipated, though not specified. Accordingly, these works convey hope, while aiming at an open future. In this way, they shape the recipients’ views and inspire them to think about future possibilities. With respect to political documentaries, I use the term ‘prospectivity’ to designate this utopian potential: this neologism expresses the ability of rhetorical and aesthetic strategies in film (but also in other works of art) to present a hopeful perspective and thus to initiate future-oriented thinking about positive social change. In addition to examining prospectivity as a functional filmic impulse, I will also look at its impact. With reference to two documentaries, I will analyse the ‘prospective horizon’, showing how the interplay of content and context sets into motion independent thinking and an awareness of potential social and political change.19 The films I analyse here manage to preserve a belief in human adaptability even in times of social collapse, while simultaneously conveying moral values and an ethical stance. I will use them to exemplify the ‘utopian consciousness’ described by Bloch as a basis for artistic creation that is necessarily pervaded by ‘hope, with its positive correlate’.20

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Political activation To examine the impact of documentaries, it is important to focus on the contexts in which the films were made and received, as much as on their content. The distribution and screening situations in which spectators interpret the films’ language and positions must also be taken into account. Further, one should note that, while the production aims for a specific reading, a film’s meaning only emerges in the situation of reception, in connection with the viewers’ personal knowledge and individual attitudes. In my analysis of these factors, I draw on the semio-pragmatic approach developed by Roger Odin starting in the 1980s.21 In Odin’s view, the production of meaning in film is a dual process that occurs in multiple spaces: first, in the space of production, and then again in the space of reception.22 For Odin, there are thus several options for reading a film based on conventionalised filmic strategies. Essentially, he introduces the notion of a ‘documentarising reading’ in contrast to a ‘fictionalising reading’.23 Odin assumes that the former is mainly applied to documentary film, whereas the latter is mainly applied to fiction film. The only imperative for applying a ‘documentary reading’ is that viewers assume a textual authority whose utterances ‘refer to the real world and function with regard to their truth content’.24 In other words, if spectators view a film as a documentary, they assume an imagined authority that belongs to their world and whose utterances refer to reality.25 However, Odin designed his semio-pragmatic model without considering the spectator as a political subject – an aspect that Julia Zutavern addresses in detail.26 Drawing on the political philosophy and aesthetics of Jacques Rancière, she suggests three distinct political modes of reading films: the metapolitical, the parapolitical and the political mode.27 Based on her arguments, I speak of a ‘politically activating mode’, which combines the meta- and parapolitical modes. The argumentative and contextual conditions of this combination guide and shape the viewers’ political understanding at various levels. The politically activating mode acts upon the viewers’ political consciousness, thus shaping the production of meaning in complex ways.28 When political documentaries negotiate abstract terms such as enlightenment, justice, equality, solidarity or reconciliation, their prospective character inspires a utopian perspective and thus a politically activating reading. The films’ utopian impulses rarely aim at clearly

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specified criteria for a better future. Rather, they mostly offer allusions and nuanced references to political and social contexts, which are amplified through distribution via television, cinema or other channels. The mobilising strategies used to raise the viewers’ political awareness and inspire them to their own reflection can be deliberately casual. Much like Frank Kessler uses a ‘hypothetical construction’ to examine specific historic spectators, my analysis includes historic sources and all available evidence to hypothetically (re)construct the reception situation and draw conclusions from it.29 From my external point of view, these conclusions are subject to cultural and historical differences.30 In what follows, I will outline how two specific documentaries, Storm over Krajina and Images from the Corner, challenged viewers’ perceptions, thus raising their awareness of the mutability of the social order and fostering their consciousness as political subjects.

Committed documentary in post-Yugoslavia The dissolution of Yugoslavia – which became irreversible in June 1991, when the republics of Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence after many years of struggle at the government level – was accompanied by political animosity and nationalist propaganda.31 Recent research suggests that the various political elites before and during the breakup of the socialist state aimed to emphasise the ethnic, cultural and religious identities of the different Southeast-Slavic communities in order to justify the privileges and claims of the individual republics. The protection of various power interests was propagated as a preventive measure – with no alternative – for the (alleged) discrimination against and oppression of each state. A majority of the population bowed to this discursive dominance, that is, to the naturalisation of the dominant discourses, thus reinforcing them.32 During the war from 1991 to 1995, as well as in the post-war years, the new nation states for the most part placed their own ethnic and religious communities above the ‘others’. In the main countries involved in the war – Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina – public media coverage served mainly as a cooperative vehicle of political interest groups promoting hate and division, instead of providing objective, analytical observation.33 At

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the same time, numerous critical-political films were made in all the post-Yugoslav states: films that countered their countries’ dominant (nationalist) discourses and explored the possibilities for social change through a variety of themes. These films constitute an element of counter-movements that attempted to critically question the national ideologies and received mainstream opinions. This ‘counter-discourse’ – as Richard Terdiman calls it34 – must be distinguished from the problematic conceptual duo of propaganda/counter-propaganda. Drawing on Thymian Bussemer, I see propaganda – as well as counter-propaganda – as a ‘special form of systematically planned mass communication, which aims not to inform and reason, but to persuade and convince’.35 Even though documentaries such as the ones I examine were sometimes denounced as counter-propaganda by the post-Yugoslav power elites, they are not to be seen as propaganda in Bussemer’s sense, mentioned above. They use textual as well as contextual means to avoid a propagandistic manipulation of the viewers, as I will show on the basis of my examples. The counter-discourses, whose ideological critique is guided by the respective norms, values and rights of a society, aim at destabilising the hegemonic order and, beyond that, exposing the discursive practices themselves. However, the more thoroughly the dominant systems of persuasion pervade social thought, the fewer opportunities for attack remain for the antagonists. Nevertheless, Terdiman acknowledges the central role of counter-discourses in social and cultural developments: [I]n intimate connection with the power of such an apparatus, discourses of resistance ceaselessly interrupt what would otherwise be the seamless serenity of the dominant, its obliviousness to any contestation. For every level at which the discourse of power determines dominant forms of speech and thinking, counter-dominant strains challenge and subvert the appearance of inevitability[,] which is ideology’s primary mechanism for sustaining its own self-reproduction.36 The drive behind the counter-discourses is thus the constant attempt to reveal and contradict what the adversary seeks to hide. The production of counter-discourses, of new, subversive or critical positions, is the basis of all social change: ‘reality can neither exist nor change without them’.37

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In the first decade after the break-up of Yugoslavia, however, it was extremely difficult to make documentaries showing facts in their full complexity and to make one’s voice heard with critiques of hegemonic rhetoric. For one thing, the production framework collapsed virtually overnight after 1991, affecting all of documentary film-making in terms of financing, production and distribution. But what weighed more heavily on directors of committed documentaries were the statecontrolled restrictions against any kind of dissent. Nevertheless, even in these early years, filmmakers managed to produce critical works, thanks to their resourcefulness, and partly with support from abroad.38 Sometimes only shown to marginal groups of people, in secret circles, at inconspicuous locations, privately distributed on VHS or screened at festivals abroad, these documentaries reveal the range of cinematic activism.39 In Serbia and Croatia, the situation changed around the turn of the millennium.40 In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the role of the media started to improve before that, with the Dayton Agreement of 1995, when legal regulations gradually led to more transparency.41

Clarifying facts and breaking taboos Many post-Yugoslav documentary filmmakers use an investigative, educational style to address the wars, among them Božidar Knežević with Storm over Krajina. He made his documentary in collaboration with the production company Factum, whose founder Nenad Puhovski has been dedicated to a critical, humanist and self-reflexive documentary cinema in Croatia since establishing the company in 1997 and producing many unconventional, controversial films.42 Storm over Krajina was the first documentary to explicitly question Croatia’s acts of war from a Croatian perspective, and the film had an exceptional screening history. I will outline the film’s prospective lines of argument and utopian ramifications, as well as the ‘illumination of the preconditions and especially the functionality of taboos’, which Anton Pelinka considers a ‘fundamental democratic virtue’.43 Knežević’s documentary is dedicated to uncovering statesanctioned war crimes by the Croatian army during and especially after the recapture of the Serbian-occupied territories in the Croatian region of Krajina in August 1995, an offensive that would come to be known as Operation Storm (Operacija Oluja). The film shows how

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Croatian soldiers, with the state’s approval, abused and displaced the remaining Serbian civilians and committed numerous murders. The director makes use of official propagandistic TV broadcasts from the time of the war and the Krajina offensive (figure 6.1). He thus manages to address various politically sensitive issues by juxtaposing the footage with his own material, as well as with interviews and recordings compiled by UN representatives. Storm over Krajina reflects the involvement of Croatian politics in war crimes, which appear as politically controlled campaigns rather than tragic isolated cases. In addition, the film addresses the deliberate cover-up of the facts of the offensive as part of a political strategy to bolster national identity by creating a myth of victimhood. Further, the documentary discusses the cynicism with which the displacements and crimes during the military intervention were denied and whitewashed. All the aspects of the film’s critique revolve around the taboo of questioning one’s own nation and the ideology of national infallibility. At the same time, the work shines a light on the controlling and manipulative practices of the state and the media.

Figure 6.1 • TV music video clip during the Croatian military offensive

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Beginning with the opening sequence, the film alludes to the mechanisms of creating taboos. In a brief clip from a parliamentary debate from 18 May 2000, the Croatian minister for reconstruction and development addresses the issue of war guilt, to which representatives of the opposition party HDZ object vociferously.44 A member of the opposition emphasises that they will not tolerate – and will retaliate against – any transgression of the unofficial doctrine according to which Croatia fought a ‘just and legitimate war of defence’ and was ‘never an aggressor in Bosnia-Herzegovina’.45 The outrage reveals how the attack on the taboo shakes its social and regulating functions.46 In turn, both the critical parliamentarian’s statement and the use of the sequence at the film’s opening demonstrate that the breaking of a taboo can be ‘a liberation, a heroic act’, as Torsten Junge emphasises.47 In the film, the sequence becomes a contentious symbol for the documentary work itself.48 After this introduction, which sets the tone, Storm over Krajina uses archival material from state television to show how political and cultural elites and the media incited the population to wage war in Serbia as well as in Croatia. The clips demonstrate how politicians practised disinformation, drawing on the rhetoric of the Second World War in their public appearances. They invoked old concepts of the enemy and the conflicts and war crimes of the former warring parties, which ‘finally’ had to be addressed and ‘avenged’ after decades of Tito’s ideological maxim of fraternisation.49 Paired with video clips of mobilisation and war from the years 1991 to 1995, this review portrays similar mechanisms of propagandistic agitation on the Serbian and Croatian sides. The juxtaposition of the two opposing perspectives reveals how a climate of ethnic hate and destabilisation was fuelled between demographic groups that had previously lived together peacefully. The following core of the film is a visualisation and critique of Operation Storm, the recapturing of the occupied Croatian territories. The film reconstructs the events with official Croatian news broadcasts, in addition to footage by Knežević and from UN sources. It shows what is subsequently confirmed both by political philosopher Žarko Puhovski, a member of the Croatian Helsinki Committee,50 and by footage from an interview with UN general Alain Forand, recorded shortly after the beginning of Operation Storm: the military operation itself took place without costly battles and major destruction (it is now generally assumed that there was an agreement between Tuđman and Milošević) (figure  6.2). The following weeks, however, brought an apparently

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Figure 6.2 • UN General Alain Forand recounts the situation

orchestrated campaign of human rights violations against the Serb population, which continued well into September of the same year.51

Documentary strategies of activation Storm over Krajina makes it a point to uncover Croatian war crimes, break the taboo surrounding them, examine the manipulative mechanisms of propaganda and make public the results of this investigation. In essence, the documentary shows that the war crimes could not have happened without the Croatian government’s active leadership and, moreover, that the government did everything in its power to suppress any evidence, reports or investigation of the events. It is the first explicit and fact-based discussion of how the criminal actions and human rights violations were not simply lapses by individual marauding units, but a targeted politics of ‘ethnic cleansing’ dictated by the political and military leadership.52 Thus, the film made the political and social admission of guilt, and the mandatory prosecution of those involved in war crimes, part of the public debate.

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The archival TV footage – which would have been familiar to domestic audiences – is recontextualised through unusual selection and arrangement, evoking meanings that depart from the well-known ideological connotations of the ‘nation as victim’ and the ‘victorious patriotic battle’. The film’s rhetorical and aesthetic strategy confronts the dominant discourse with a counter-discourse: by contrasting the messages conveyed by the national TV stations with other perspectives and interpretations, the film exposes the political framing of the official news footage, including all its taboos and omissions, while also disclosing its own position. In this way, it plainly shows how Croatia’s information policy – and its omissions – structured the perception of reality, thereby controlling and limiting the viewers’ interpretive framework. Judith Butler speaks of the ‘issue of framing’, that is, of frames that have to be conceived as ‘operations of power’ in this context.53 She postulates certain frames that ‘allocate the recognizability of certain figures of the human’ that are ‘themselves linked with broader norms that determine what will and will not be a grievable life’.54 Interpretive frames – for instance the nationalist discourses that emerged during the break-up of Yugoslavia – thus determine how human lives are to be valued, while simultaneously showing that different standards can be applied. Butler is interested in ‘the way in which suffering is presented to us, and how that presentation affects our responsiveness’.55 Her premise is ‘that a political background is being explicitly formulated and renewed through and by the frame, that the frame functions not only as a boundary to the image, but as structuring the image itself’.56 Accordingly, she concludes: ‘If the image in turn structures how we register reality, then it is bound up with the interpretive scene in which we operate.’57 The frame guiding the recipients’ perception thus limits the conceptual space in which they reflect and analyse issues. Even if, in specific cases, viewers in Croatia and Serbia were aware that manipulative reports guided their perception, their reading was still influenced by them. Even independent national and international reports that might have been available to the Croatian population were ‘framed’ and at times biased or contradictory.58 Storm over Krajina confronts this framing with a different one: the film subverts viewing patterns, asking how and by whom truths are constructed and how they are governed by powerful discourses. In this way, the film directs the viewers’ gaze at the mechanisms that politics

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and the media use to shape contents and their interpretation. At the same time, it points to the framing of the film’s structure, which exposes and questions political manipulations. By connecting divergent discourses, Storm over Krajina allows viewers to experience what Hito Steyerl calls the ‘politics of truth’.59 Steyerl coins the term ‘documentality’ to designate the state’s influence on the official production of truth, which she describes as the ‘pervasion of a specific documentary politics of truth with overriding political, social and epistemological formations’. In other words, it is a conflation of documentary argumentation with political operations of power.60 However, the primary aim of Storm over Krajina is not to uncover a new or different ‘truth’. Rather, the point is to make visible and transparent the role of ‘documentality’ as a tool of political influencing, and thus to programme a politically activating mode of reading. The film’s narration, which questions the construction of political truths – that is, of documentality – also prompts viewers to become aware of their own relation to the incompatible discourses in the film and thus to reconsider their own ethical interpretations and to accept social accountability.

Filmic impact Storm over Krajina premiered at the 10th Croatian Film Festival (Dani hrvatskog filma) in March 2001. The premiere marked the beginning of fierce debates about how to deal with the recent past, and with guilt, morality and national responsibility in politics and society.61 In his volume Storm over Croatia (2003), author and journalist Boris Rašeta conducts a media analysis chronicling the events surrounding the film’s public screenings and reception.62 The analysis shows the extreme pro and contra positions that faced each other, even in parliament.63 Despite the media’s interest, and numerous voices calling for the film to be broadcast on the Croatian television channel HTV, it remained unclear for a long time whether this would happen. Rašeta sees the main reason for the delay in the hesitation of HTV’s management to broadcast the film, whose explosive potential was evident.64 However, due to public attention and the station’s financial support of the film’s production, which obligated it to show the work, not showing it at all was no longer an option – especially since even president

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Stipe Mesić spoke out in favour of broadcasting the documentary on Croatian TV.65 To refrain from showing the film would have constituted censorship. Thus, HTV decided to broadcast it, followed by a panel discussion. In addition to the vice president of the former government party HDZ, the panel included two journalists, two lawyers and director Knežević,66 all of whom contentiously debated the pros and cons of the documentary’s content, narrative style and attitude. At the end, the panellists at least agreed that possible war crimes should be brought to light and punished.67 The broadcast obtained a rating of 47.95 per cent that evening, which was remarkable for a documentary film.68 In parallel to the broadcast of the film and the debate, a phone survey was conducted: 75 per cent of respondents found it legitimate and appropriate to bring to court and sentence war criminals regardless of which side they belonged to.69 After additional opinion polls, it became clear that the majority of the Croatian population was willing to accept change and reforms as well as to address the recent past, and that it supported lawsuits against alleged Croatian perpetrators – unlike what the political parties had hitherto assumed.70 In other words, the film succeeded in bringing to light the population’s critical consciousness and thus to sharpen the audience’s awareness of a future life together. These developments, however, did not lead to a change of direction at the political level or in the media. Instead, the political and cultural elites deepened social divisions. The controversies and actions ignited by the documentary, which continued for many months, can be described as a ‘condensed moment of a social disposition’ in Margrit Tröhler’s words.71 Two irreconcilable opinions were facing each other: on the one hand, the nationalist view that war crimes had not occurred or that they had to be accepted as inevitable ‘side effects’; on the other hand, the position advocating for an unconditional investigation of domestic war crimes and human rights violations. The relentless attacks on the film and its supporters show how much its account threatened the dominant discourse of the political public sphere. According to producer Puhovski, the complexity of the debate and the sustained aggression in reactions to the film were ‘paradigmatic of the reality in present-day Croatia’.72 At the same time, the wide-ranging support for the film demonstrated the Croatian population’s awareness of the necessity to come to terms with the past.

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In terms of its social impact, Storm over Krajina is an exception. No other documentary before or after received such extensive and sustained attention. Nevertheless, this example illustrates the potential of films to intervene in political discourse and raise public awareness. Aleksandar Perović notes that documentary filmmakers in all post-Yugoslav countries inevitably entered a ‘field of conflict of antagonistic interpretations and political interests’ with their ‘look back at war events’, and that a ‘scandalisation’ was virtually pre-programmed.73 By critically reflecting on politics and society, they positioned themselves as part of a counter-discourse, thus challenging the political authorities. With film projects such as Storm over Krajina, the difficulty lay in the overlapping of ‘legal and political components’, which led to politicians and the media pushing the filmmakers into the role of traitors, denigrators and denunciators of their country – provided that they managed to complete and publicly show their films in the first place.74 While it became easier to show critical content on public television in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina after the year 2000, it remained difficult in Croatia even after Tuđman’s death. For the most part, the documentaries produced by Factum that addressed Croatia’s recent past have not been shown on public television to this day.75

First-person documentary and self-reflexive techniques In contrast to the investigative style of Storm over Krajina, my second example is a documentary that uses subjective perspectives, personal life moments and fragmentary memories to reflect on the complex relationship between individual experience and socio-political developments. The film’s personal approach targets the constructedness of documentary reality, encouraging viewers to become aware of their own relation to the past and, based on that, to turn towards the future. Here, too, I will examine the utopian core of documentary film-making in its politically activating form. In Images from the Corner, Jasmila Žbanić deals with painful and traumatic experiences that continue to operate in the unconscious years after the war, surfacing suddenly when triggered by random images or events. The filmmaker spent her youth in Bosnia-Herzegovina’s capital city Sarajevo, which was under siege by Bosnian-Serbian paramilitary units for four years.76 She lives in Sarajevo to this day. Based on her

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personal life during and after the war, Žbanić pursues numerous associative and narrative threads that revolve around visualising trauma and suffering, image ethics and individual and social survival after the incisive experience of spending years under daily enemy fire. She explores how the civilian population dealt with the war, but she is not concerned with judging the war events or with drawing ethnic and religious distinctions between perpetrators and victims. The war experience, which is deeply embedded in social consciousness, still resonates and influences everyday life from the filmmaker’s perspective, yet it is missing from official historiography, as she explains at the beginning of the film: The war ended eight years ago, but in a way, I still live in it or with it. Even though I want to liberate myself from it, every day, there is a scene, a face, a sound that reminds me of the bombardment, the snipers, the wounded and dead.77 For the director, who is present through word and image, an individual look at the historical context is the basis of her filmic essay (figure 6.3). Her voice-over commentary structures the film, offering a subjective

Figure 6.3 • Žbanić talks to a Sarajevan resident

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narration presented as fragmentary and disputable. Žbanić focuses on the memories of her own experience that appear erratically. They form the basis for the ‘securing of evidence’ of a ‘history beyond representability’, as Michaela Schäuble explains in her article about three (auto) biographical documentaries from the former Yugoslavia.78 In this way, Žbanić’s film deliberately abandons the dominant discourses of categorisation and judgement. Images from the Corner thus also explores filmic strategies for countering the official ‘framing’ with boundarydefying representations, in order to create a conceptual space for the viewers’ own reflection. In the opening sequence, Žbanić uses the re-enactment of a circus visit to portray the immediacy with which memories of war events can suddenly overwhelm her at any time. During the performance, the ‘most painful and difficult image from the war’, as she says, reappeared before her eyes, stirring up a series of thoughts:79 a horse trainer made the director think of her classmate Biljana, who was the first among her acquaintances to be seriously injured by a grenade attack near her home early in the war, in the year 1992.80 A photograph is at the centre of Žbanić’s exploration of how to continue living and overcome traumatic memories. A French war photographer who happened to pass by the site of the attack captured Biljana’s maimed appearance. He attracted international attention with this picture, which later won the World Press Photo Award. The filmmaker had heard of the photograph but never seen it. Now she undertakes a series of investigations about her classmate, who was flown out of the country for treatment shortly after being injured, after which the two lost touch. As she searches for Biljana’s traces and tries to cinematically represent life in post-war society with its memories of the war, the director meets with Biljana’s former neighbours and with mutual friends. She also talks to numerous strangers and roams the city with the camera to visit important sites where the past is present, looking for inspiration from accidental discoveries. Not everyone shares her views; many are sceptical about the purpose of stirring up the past. The emerging mosaic of opinions is mirrored in the film’s form: to explore the state of society, Žbanić works with staged scenes, re-enactments, visualised fantasies and observational images from post-war Sarajevo, all of which she interweaves in an associative and disparate manner with her biographical and historical remarks and political considerations. Her aim with all of this is to confront the painful inner images with

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new ones, to tap into ‘memory traces’ and thus to bring to life for the viewers her experiences during the siege of Sarajevo and her imaginations of violence, death and pain.81 As she explores the visual representation of suffering and an ethics of the image, the filmmaker repeatedly zeroes in on a motif that she presents from varying perspectives: the site where the press photographer took over ninety pictures of the girl covered in blood, holding her dead dog in her arms. Žbanić approaches this monstrous act by setting up her camera at the same – now unremarkable – street corner (see figure 6.4). The film shows the corner, while on the soundtrack, we hear the sound of a photo camera’s shutter release as it clicks through three rolls of film. The recipients thus physically experience the whole duration of the act of photographing and rolling back and exchanging the film – an act that the filmmaker considers a shameless frenzy on the part of the photographer. The photographic portrait itself, which acquires an imaginary presence for the viewers through Žbanić’s narration, remains a blank space in Images from the Corner. Based on this absent picture, the director ponders questions of duration, time, suffering and responsibility, with reference to the various results of her

Figure 6.4 • The street corner as a starting point for socio-political reflections

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search. She addresses the inadequacy of photographic documents, which point to a reality beyond visual representation but are unable to ‘reproduce’ it. She contemplates the ethics of war photography between documentation and failure to assist. And she talks about the treatment of Sarajevo’s population as ‘photographic objects’ during the siege: she claims that people found this offensive after a while, but were unable to do much against this feeling of ‘anger, humiliation and insult’ during the war.82 The kaleidoscope of intertwined narrative threads that characterise Žbanić’s tentative, searching approach is visually enhanced by sudden close-ups and disjointed cuts. Žbanić reconstructs Biljana’s life story in fragments: among other things, the audience learns that Biljana lost her arm during the attack, that she has been living in Paris since her evacuation from the besieged city and that she works in the film industry, like Žbanić.

Into the future via the past By deviating from conventions of documentary storytelling, the fragmentary, incomplete account points to the constructedness of the narrative representation and structuring of reality. By questioning the dominant discourses about the recent past as well as the social practices of the post-war society by way of personal, autobiographical narratives, Žbanić offers individual – and thus new and unexpected – insight. This entails a specific form of address that differs from classic forms of historiography in that it includes the subjective understanding of social contexts and events, reflecting personal experiences in political and historic contexts.83 This engenders the potential of documentary film to influence and push the viewers’ thinking in new directions, thus appealing to their agency, as Balsom and Peleg emphasise.84 By linking a fictionalised author-narrator with artistic visualisations and political commentary, the film creates a complex narrative that conjures up the viewers’ own issues of survival, raises their political awareness and prompts them to question the official positions on dealing with the past. With its reflections on a previous era and its critique of the present, Images from the Corner offers its viewers a utopian perspective by making them aware of the necessity of thinking and talking about the past in order to look ahead and consider actively shaping a desirable

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future. The film thus encourages its audience to confront the often suppressed but crucial issues of the war and the ensuing war crimes, as well as the political future and life in an ethnically, religiously and culturally diverse state. It does so both from the inside perspective of those who lived through the war, and from the outside perspective of the ‘international community’ that was not involved in the war, but observed it. Žbanić’s film was co-produced by the German public broadcaster ZDF as part of a series of films about the wars in Yugoslavia by young filmmakers from the region, and it was aimed at local as well as international audiences. The prospectivity in Images from the Corner demonstrates how an artistic view of traumatic experiences can serve as an inspiration to think about the conditions of a post-war society – in the sense of coming-to-rest and of active participation.

Conclusion As I have explained in my analyses, the two films look closely into the political circumstances to develop their – very different – individual styles and structures. The challenging and prospective character of each encourages viewers – especially local viewers, but also international audiences – to reflect and take a political position. With multi-perspectival narratives, discontinuities, irritations and carefully crafted aesthetics, they inspire viewers to critically address the current political situation and to think about how the films’ themes resonate with their own lives. They stimulate thought processes and opinionforming, and perhaps even prompt people to raise their own voices. Storm over Krajina defies common taboos. It links the Yugoslav past with the post-Yugoslav present in order to contextualise and criticise political developments and fundamental social values, as well as the nationalist ideologies and inhuman events of the wars. Images from the Corner experiments with a transparently subjective view of reality, using a first-person narrator to make apparent the similarities and differences between the filmmaker’s and the audience’s thinking, thus prompting spectators to think about their future life together in a society divided by war. Both films also employ their respective formal and aesthetic strategies to scrutinise their own standpoint. The discourses in Images from the Corner and Storm over Krajina do not produce alternative truths and they avoid ideological positioning.

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Their filmic approaches indicate an anti-authoritarian way of thinking, especially in light of the still authoritarian contexts of their production. As they contrast the dominant discourses with their own views, they present differing perspectives side by side, without attempting to position themselves as superior or omniscient. They also refrain from passing judgement on the causes behind the country’s breakup and the wars. Instead, they present their observations, hypotheses and facts in thoughtful and multifaceted ways, offering a picture that can serve as a starting point for further in-depth examination and for society to come to terms with the recent past. From a reception perspective, this documentary approach initiates a politically activating mode that creates awareness for measuring the currently dominant systems of persuasion against culturally rooted and fundamentally humanist values, such as equality, freedom of expression and justice. The utopian core of the films consists in their vision of democratic social change, offering audiences the certainty that prevalent opinions can be questioned and even opposed. Both films deal with marginal positions and critique contemporary issues, while opposing the dominant rhetoric. They thus offer a specifically filmic experience, enabling viewers to compare social norms with current situations and practices, and to perceive this process as a starting point for exploring their own agency. Philosopher Julian Nida-Rümelin puts it as follows: where thought turns against the ‘inhuman’ of a given order, there is a close connection ‘between humanist thought and utopian thought’, whose drive is ‘the vision of a genuinely human society’.85 In my view, this prospectivity in the reading, which inspires viewers to address the future, is specific to the politically activating mode. In different ways, Storm over Krajina and Images from the Corner create prospectivity, that is, the potential to inspire reflection on future developments, thus prompting viewers to deal with questions of survival and reconciliation. The films manifest the desire to convey the incomplete and the changeable – the constantly changing and the constantly expanding possible reality – of social practices, and thus to subvert the supposedly universal dominant discourse. The films’ rhetoric reveals prospectivity as hope in the sense of Ernst Bloch’s term: it aims at the ‘Real-Possible’ and views the filmic food for thought as potentially activating for society. Herein lies the first step of the viewers’ self-empowerment as political subjects.

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The politically activating documentary is thus a part of social movements dedicated to making visible and overcoming oppression and injustice. This kind of film supports social processes of modernisation and change by conveying knowledge and background information about social, cultural and political contexts, and by inspiring political reflection. It transports experiences that affect audiences emotionally and cognitively, while simultaneously addressing the movement. The filmic positions and the conditions of reception – in cinemas, on TV, in alternative spaces or at semi-private and private screenings – sharpen the viewers’ awareness of a movement’s positions and arguments in contrast to the dominant discourses. Viewers are addressed as political subjects and thus activated to become aware and make use of their political agency. This article is based on a chapter in my book Kritik, Aktivismus und Prospektivität. Politische Strategien im postjugoslawischen Dokumentarfilm (Marburg: Schüren, 2019). Translated from German by Susie Trenka. Notes 1. Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg, ‘Introduction: The Documentary Attitude’, in Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg (eds), Documentary Across Disciplines (Cambridge, MA/Berlin: MIT/HKW, 2016), pp. 10–19, 13. 2. Michael Renov defines four basic functions of documentary film: ‘1. to record, reveal, or preserve; 2. to persuade or promote; 3. to analyse or interrogate; 4.  to express’ (Michael Renov, ‘Toward a Poetics of Documentary’, in Michael Renov (ed.), Theorizing Documentary (New York/London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 12–36, 21). 3. Thomas Schölderle, Utopia und Utopie: Thomas Morus, die Geschichte der Utopie und die Kontroverse um ihren Begriff (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2011), p. 29. All translations of German references in this text are by the author. 4. Andreas Heyer, Sozialutopien der Neuzeit: Bibliographisches Handbuch. Band 1: Bibliographie der Forschungsliteratur (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2008), p. 55. 5. Cf. Gustav Landauer, ‘Revolution’, in Gustav Landauer, Revolution and Other Writings. A Political Reader (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010), pp.  110–85; Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. Collected Works Volume One (London/New York: Routledge, 2002); Ernst Bloch, The

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

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Spirit of Utopia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000) and The Principle of Hope, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986–95). Richard Saage, ‘Wie zukunftsfähig ist der klassische Utopiebegriff?’, UTOPIE kreativ, 165/166 (2004), www.rosa-luxemburg-club.de/fileadmin/ rls_uploads/pdfs/165_166-saage.pdf (accessed 8  November 2018), pp. 617–36, 618. Richard Saage, Vermessungen des Nirgendwo: Begriffe, Wirkungsgeschichte und Lernprozesse der neuzeitlichen Utopien (Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1995), p.  4. The intentional notion of utopia is just one of many philosophical and scholarly lines of thought that originated with Thomas More, The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1965). Cf. Burghart Schmidt, ‘Engagement für Utopie als Denk- und Vorstellensweise’, Erwägen Wissen Ethik, 16/3 (2005), 331–3; Julian Nida-Rümelin and Klaus Kufeld (eds), Die Gegenwart der Utopie: Zeitkritik und Denkwende (Freiburg i. B.: Karl Alber, 2011); Johannes Rohbeck, Zukunft der Geschichte: Geschichtsphilosophie und Zukunftsethik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013). Klaus Kufeld, ‘Zeit für Utopie’, in Julian Nida-Rümelin and Klaus Kufeld (eds), Die Gegenwart der Utopie: Zeitkritik und Denkwende (Freiburg i. B.: Karl Alber, 2011), pp. 9–24, 15. Cf. Kufeld, ‘Zeit für Utopie’, p. 16. For other examples, see Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000); Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstruction of Society (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Paolo Magagnoli, Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Documentary (London/New York: Wallflower Press, 2015). Cf. e.g.  Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London/New York: Verso, 2005). Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 2. Cf. Bloch, Principle of Hope, p. 6. Cf. Bloch, Principle of Hope, p. 17. Bloch, Principle of Hope, pp. 196–97. Cf. Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan (eds), Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch (London/New York: Verso, 1997).

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

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Cf. Bloch, Principle of Hope, p. 3. Cf. Bloch, Principle of Hope, p. 3. Bloch, Principle of Hope, p. 223. Bloch, Principle of Hope, pp. 12, 6. Cf. Roger Odin, De la fiction (Brüssel: De  Boeck 2000); Roger Odin, Les espaces de communication. Introduction à la sémio-pragmatique (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2011). See Roger Odin, ‘For a Semio-Pragmatics of Film’, in Warren Buckland (ed.), The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), pp. 213–26. Roger Odin, ‘Dokumentarischer Film – dokumentarisierende Lektüre’, in Christa Blümlinger (ed.), Sprung im Spiegel: Filmisches Wahrnehmen zwischen Fiktion und Wirklichkeit (Wien: Sonderzahl, 1990), pp. 125–46, 126. Roger Odin, ‘Wirkungsbedingungen des Dokumentarfilms. Zur Semiopragmatik am Beispiel Notre Planète la Terre (1947)’, in Manfred Hattendorf (ed.), Perspektiven des Dokumentarfilms (München: Diskurs-Film-Verlag, 1995), pp. 85–96, 89. Cf. Odin, De la fiction, p. 54. Thus, a documentarising reading can also be applied to a fiction film, which is then read as a document of a specific era, of an innovation in film technology or of a specific actor’s art; in turn, a documentary can also be read as fiction (see Odin, De la fiction, pp. 134–6). Cf. Julia Zutavern, Politik des Bewegungsfilms (Marburg: Schüren, 2015), pp. 14–15. On various political ways of reading, see also Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Media Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies (London: Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 128–38. Cf. Zutavern, Politik des Bewegungsfilms, pp. 68–74. Cf. Zutavern, Politik des Bewegungsfilms, p. 74. Frank Kessler, ‘Viewing Pleasures, Pleasuring Views: Forms of Spectatorship in Early Cinema’, in Irmbert Schenk, Margrit Tröhler and Yvonne Zimmermann (eds), Film – Cinema – Spectator: Film Reception (Marburg: Schüren, 2010), pp. 61–73, 64. Cf. Kessler, ‘Viewing Pleasures’, p. 62. See Sabrina P. Ramet, ‘War in the Balkans’, Foreign Affairs, 71/4 (1992), 79–98. On the breakup of Yugoslavia, see for instance Robert M. Hayden, From Yugoslavia to the Western Balkans. Studies of a European Disunion, 1991–2011 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013). See Dina Iordanova, Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media (London: BFI, 2001), pp.  161–3. Based on Arjun Appadurai’s

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33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

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reflections in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), Iordanova has developed a model to explain the mechanisms of propaganda and the use of violence that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia. The state’s influence on the media left little room for critical reporting; see Mark Thompson, Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1999), pp. 51–109, 135–89, 209–59. Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-century France (Ithaca/ London: Cornell University Press, 1985). Thymian Bussemer, Propaganda. Konzepte und Theorien (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008), p.  13. Regarding the notion of propaganda, see also Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda & Persuasion (1986; Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2012), pp. 1–50. Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse, pp. 39–40. Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse, p. 19. See Iordanova, Cinema of Flames, pp. 247–55, 266–9; Boris Trbic, ‘Taboo Serbia: An Interview with Janko Baljak’, Senses of Cinema, 11 (2000), http://sensesofcinema.com/2000/eastern-european-cinema/baljak/ (accessed 28 April 2016); Rada Šešić, ‘Once Upon A Time’, Online Platform SeeDox – South Eastern European Documentaries 2007, http://archiv. filmfestival-goeast.de/index.php?article_id=192&clang=1 (accessed 29  July 2018); Diana Nenadić, ‘The New Croatian Documentary: Between the Political and the Personal’, in Aida Vidan and Gordana P. Crnković (eds), In Contrast: Croatian Film Today (Zagreb: Croatian Film Association, 2012), pp. 59–75. Depending on the political situation, the politically activating documentary as counter-discourse begins with the films’ mere testimony of what happened, as Chuck Kleinhans notes (cf. Chuck Kleinhans, ‘Forms, Politics, Makers, and Contexts: Basic Issues for a Theory of Radical Political Documentary’, in Thomas Waugh (ed.), ‘Show Us Life’: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary (Metuchen, NJ/ London: The Scarecrow Press, 1984), pp. 318–42, 320). The removal of Slobodan Milošević on 5  October 2000 marked the beginning of the media’s reorientation in Serbia. In Croatia, President Franjo Tuđman, who had been in power since 1990, died on 10 December 1999. On the (still complex) situation after 2000 and 1999, respectively, see Larisa Ranković, ‘Serbia – Media Landscape’, Medialandscapes

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41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

47. 48.

49.

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(2018),https://medialandscapes.org/country/pdf/serbia (accessed 1  November 2018); Marin Bukvić, ‘Media Situation in Croatia’, in Balkanmedia (2018), www.kas.de/web/balkanmedia/media-situation3 (accessed 1 November 2018). See Kemal Kurspahic, Prime Time Crime: Balkan Media in War and Peace (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2003), pp. 195–8. Cf. Saša Vojković, ‘Factum Documentary Films: Searching for the Present’, Cinéaste, 32/3 (2007), 41–4. Anton Pelinka, ‘Tabus in der Politik: Zur politischen Funktion von Tabuisierung und Enttabuisierung’, in Peter Bettelheim and Robert Streibel (eds), Tabu und Geschichte: Zur Kultur des kollektiven Erinnerns (Wien: Picus, 1994), pp. 21–8, 27. The Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica (Croation Democratic Union) was founded by Franjo Tuđman in 1989; after his death, it lost the majority in the Croatian parliament. On the state’s dogma, which was legally codified in October of the same year as the ‘Declaration on the Patriotic War’, see Gordana Pervan, ‘Die Bedeutung des Haager Tribunals für den Prozess der Vergan­ genheitsbewältigung in Kroatien’, in Julian Pänke et al. (eds), Gegenwart der Vergangenheit: Die politische Aktualität historischer Erinnerung in Mitteleuropa (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2007), pp. 169–75, 171. Cf. Torsten Junge, ‘Todestabuisierungen – Zur Gouvernementalität des Lebensendes’, in Ingrid Streble, Amélie Sandoval and Daniel Mirsky (eds), Verboten, verschwiegen, ungehörig? Ein Blick auf Tabus und Tabubrüche (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2008), pp. 153–68, 153. Cf. Junge, ‘Todestabuisierungen’, p. 153. The fact that the minister addressed the Croatian war crimes was part of a political reorientation due to an agreement between Croatia and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (cf. Aleksandar Perović, ‘Last der Vergangenheit: Die jugoslawischen Nachfolgekriege im Dokumentarfilm’, unpublished manuscript of the presentation ‘Ikonografie und “Nation (Re-)Building”/Filmdokumente aus der Ex-Jugoslawischen Region’, given during a symposium at the 8th goEast Film Festival in Wiesbaden, 9–15 April 2008, 1–14, 5). Croatia’s media, politics and many cultural officials had been telling the population that the Serbs were unilaterally responsible for the war in Croatia and thus had to be punished.

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50. The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights is a non-government organisation active in many countries and dedicated to observing the preservation and restoration of human rights. 51. On the scope of violence, see Human Rights Watch, ‘Croatia: Impunity for Abuses Committed During “Operation Storm” and the Denial of the Right of Refugees to Return to the Krajina’, Human Rights Watch, 8/13 (1996), www.hrw.org/reports/1996/Croatia.htm (accessed 12 July 2018). 52. Cf. Perović, ‘Last der Vergangenheit’, 7. 53. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London/New York: Verso, 2009), p. 1. 54. Butler, Frames of War, p. 64; original emphasis. 55. Butler, Frames of War, p. 63. 56. Butler, Frames of War, p. 71. 57. Butler, Frames of War, p. 71. 58. This is reminiscent of Odin, whose semio-pragmatic approach is also based on a reading framed by contextual and institutional parameters (see above). 59. Hito Steyerl, ‘Dokumentarismus als Politik der Wahrheit’, in Gerald Raunig (ed.), Bildräume und Raumbilder: Repräsentationskritik in Film und Aktivismus (Wien: Turia + Kant, 2004), pp. 165–74, 167. 60. Steyerl, ‘Dokumentarismus als Politik der Wahrheit’, p. 166. 61. Cf. Boris Rašeta, ‘The Sound and The Fury – The “Storm” Case’, in Boris Rašeta (ed.), Storm over Croatia (Zagreb/Belgrad: Factum/Centar Za Dramsku Umjetnost/Samizdat B92, 2003), pp. 9–14, 9. 62. See Boris Rašeta (ed.), Storm over Croatia (Zagreb/Belgrad: Factum/ Centar Za Dramsku Umjetnost/Samizdat B92, 2003). 63. The film had been produced in a phase of political change with financial support from Croatia’s ministry of culture; this led to a debate about whether and how criticism of state politics should be financed with public funds (cf. Rašeta (ed.), Storm over Croatia, pp. 90–2). 64. Cf. Rašeta, ‘The Sound and The Fury’, pp. 9–10. 65. Cf. Rašeta, ‘The Sound and The Fury’, p. 10. 66. The invited representatives of the Croatian army and of the ministry of defence had cancelled at short notice; see the Croatian newspaper Večernji List from 28 September 2001, quoted in Rašeta (ed.), Storm over Croatia, p. 47. 67. Cf. Rašeta, ‘The Sound and The Fury’, p. 12. 68. Cf. Rašeta, ‘The Sound and The Fury’, p. 13.

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69. Cf. Rašeta (ed.), Storm over Croatia, pp. 53–5. 70. Cf. Nenad Puhovski, ‘A Word to Begin With’, in Boris Rašeta (ed.), Storm over Croatia (Zagreb/Belgrad: Factum/Centar Za Dramsku Umjetnost/ Samizdat B92, 2003), pp. 7–8, 8. 71. Margrit Tröhler, ‘Filme, die (etwas) bewegen: Die Öffentlichkeit des Films’, in Irmbert Schenk, Margrit Tröhler and Yvonne Zimmermann (eds), Film – Cinema – Spectator: Film Reception (Marburg: Schüren, 2010), pp. 117–34, 120. 72. Puhovski, ‘A Word to Begin With’, p. 7. 73. Perović, ‘Last der Vergangenheit’, 4. 74. Perović, ‘Last der Vergangenheit’, 4. 75. Cf. Vojković, ‘Factum Documentary Films’, p. 42. 76. The siege lasted 1,425  days, from 5  April 1992 to 29  February 1996. Although the war was formally ended when the Dayton Agreement came into effect on 21 November 1995, Sarajevo remained surrounded by enemy forces till February 1996 (cf. United Nations Security Council, ‘Final Report of the Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992)’, in United Nations | International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia 1994, www.icty.org/x/file/ About/OTP/un_commission_of_experts_report1994_en.pdf (accessed 7 August 2018), p. 44). 77. Quote from Images from the Corner. 78. Michaela Schäuble, ‘Spurensicherungen. (Auto-)biographische Erzählformen in Dokumentarfilmen über den Krieg im ehemaligen Jugoslawien’, in Davor Beganović and Peter Braun (eds), Krieg sichten: Zur medialen Darstellung der Kriege in Jugoslawien (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), pp. 171–202, 175. 79. See Images From the Corner. 80. Her father, who was walking a few steps ahead of her, died in the attack, and was lying near Biljana. 81. Schäuble, ‘Spurensicherungen’, p. 174. 82. Quoted from Images from the Corner. 83. See Bettina Dausien, ‘Differenz und Selbst-Verortung – Die soziale Konstruktion von Geschlecht in Biographien als Forschungskonzept’, in Brigitte Aulenbacher and Birgit Riegraf (eds), Erkenntnis und Methode: Geschlechterforschung in Zeiten des Umbruchs (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2012), pp. 157–77, 162. 84. Cf. Balsom and Peleg, ‘Introduction’, p. 13.

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85. Julian Nida-Rümelin, ‘Utopie zwischen Rationalismus und Pragmatismus’, in Julian Nida-Rümelin and Klaus Kufeld (eds), Die Gegenwart der Utopie: Zeitkritik und Denkwende (Freiburg i. B.: Karl Alber, 2011), pp. 26–45, 33.

Selected works Bloch, Ernst, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986–95). Iordanova, Dina, Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media (London: BFI, 2001). Jowett, Garth S. and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda & Persuasion (1986; Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2012). Kurspahic, Kemal, Prime Time Crime: Balkan Media in War and Peace (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2003). Nenadić, Diana, ‘The New Croatian Documentary: Between the Political and the Personal’, in Aida Vidan and Gordana P. Crnković (eds), In Contrast: Croatian Film Today (Zagreb: Croatian Film Association, 2012), pp. 59–75. Odin, Roger, ‘For a Semio-Pragmatics of Film’, in Warren Buckland (ed), The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), pp. 213–26. Perović, Aleksandar, ‘Last der Vergangenheit: Die jugoslawischen Nachfolgekriege im Dokumentarfilm’, unpublished manuscript of the presentation ‘Ikonografie und “Nation (Re)Building”/ Filmdokumente aus der Ex-Jugoslawischen Region’, given during a symposium at the 8th goEast Film Festival in Wiesbaden, 9–15 April 2008, 1–14. Šešić, Rada, ‘Once Upon A Time’, Online Platform SeeDox – South Eastern European Documentaries 2007, http://archiv.filmfestival-goeast.de/ index.php?article_id=192&clang=1 (accessed 29 July 2018). Terdiman, Richard, Discourse/Counter-discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-century France (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1985). Thompson, Mark, Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1999). Trbic, Boris, ‘Taboo Serbia: An Interview with Janko Baljak’, Senses of Cinema, 11 (2000), http://sensesofcinema.com/2000/ eastern-european-cinema/baljak/ (accessed 28 April 2016).

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Tröhler, Margrit, ‘Filme, die (etwas) bewegen: Die Öffentlichkeit des Films’, in Irmbert Schenk, Margrit Tröhler and Yvonne Zimmermann (eds), Film – Cinema – Spectator: Film Reception (Marburg: Schüren, 2010), pp. 117–34. Zutavern, Julia, Politik des Bewegungsfilms (Marburg: Schüren, 2015).

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7

Practising Hope: Ecofeminism, Documentary and Community Engagement Chelsea Wessels

An award-winning biologist and writer in New York and an 83-year-old devout churchgoer in rural Ohio who proudly shows off her guns might seem like very different women, yet both are the focus of environmental documentaries released in 2016 and 2017. When viewed through an ecofeminist lens, the use of the female subject in documentary film ‘turns outward’, to quote Ariel Salleh, towards igniting future political action.1 In her foreword to the second edition of Ecofeminism, Salleh argues that ecofeminism’s ‘first premise is that the “material” resourcing of women and of nature are structurally interconnected in the capitalist patriarchal system’.2 In other words, capitalism and patriarchy are both destructive to women and the environment, and ecofeminism seeks to combat this by aligning feminism with environmental concerns. Ecofeminism is itself utopian in that it relies on the hope that with activism a better world is possible; I will return to this claim later. In film, ecofeminist aesthetics resonate with independent production when directors emphasise relationships with environments and people over typical neoliberal concerns of production, such as cost and infrastructure. Cheshire, Ohio (D: Eve Morgenstern, US 2016) and Unfractured (D: Chanda Chevannes, US 2017) provide two very different case studies of the production of films by women outside commercial systems, using limited budgets and small crews to make deeply personal films about environmental issues. While Unfractured focuses on a single subject, using conventional narrative strategies to link an individual story to a global issue, Cheshire, Ohio takes a collage approach to emphasise the impact of the coal industry on an entire community. The differing conventions of the two films impact their

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efficacy as environmental documentaries inviting activism, particularly when considered through the lens of ecofeminism: a view invited by the strong feminist and environmental aspects of both films and their directors, and the implications of community engagement invoked in the films and their distribution and reception. Unfractured depicts its central female subject, Sandra Steingraber, in the mode of revolutionary romanticism: focusing on her individual political journey as representative of a larger movement. As Annette Kuhn writes in Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema: The central characters of socialist realist texts frequently embody heroic traits, a quality which has its origins in the influence of revolutionary romanticism on socialist realism. In revolutionary romanticism, art offers a vision of the future which is optimistic, but also aims to be grounded rather than utopian.3 This strategy of using an individual to signify a broader social situation brings Unfractured more in line with realism in terms of narrative resolution and closure. While classical realism and the Hollywood narrative form, with its triad structure focusing on order-disorder-order restored, is at odds with utopia,4 the non-fiction form of the film invites a different engagement with the viewer through interpolation. This is one way in which ecofeminist documentaries such as Unfractured might offer a response to utopias: by ending with hope, even if the resolution is grounded in a continuing struggle. This chapter will examine both the production contexts and the form of Cheshire, Ohio and Unfractured from an ecofeminist lens, arguing that the industrial and textual aspects of the films cannot be separated, and that they mutually inform the depictions of women and the environment through film-making by women as well as the distribution and reception of the films. In turning from revolutionary romanticism, the representations of activists are recuperated from traditional notions of condensation to an emphasis on connection, which is critical to the philosophy of ecofeminism. This is portrayed formally in the way that Cheshire, Ohio uses collage to avoid focusing on just one individual, opening up the potential for viewer engagement with a range of subjects and perspectives. Ultimately, I argue that these aspects – driven by ecofeminist politics – do not create a move towards

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a utopian non-fiction text but rather engage with utopian goals by inviting the viewer into activism. The ecofeminist documentary does not depict utopia, but by offering models of resistance and collaboration in its production, formal features and distribution, the films suggest that a better world is possible.

Ecofeminism and utopia At its core, ecofeminism is driven by both a critique of existing structures and a desire to rethink these structures and ways of being in pursuit of creating a more egalitarian and environmentally conscious world, which means that feminism and environmentalism must be linked together along with utopia. Ecofeminism is based on the idea that there is a connection between patriarchal oppression and the destruction of nature for profit and progress. In this way, the interests of environmental movements and those invested in the liberation of women (and other oppressed people) are closely aligned. As Rosemary Radford Ruether wrote in 1975: Women must see that there can be no liberation for them and no solution to the ecological crisis within a society whose fundamental model of relationships continues to be one of domination. They must unite the demands of the women’s movement with those of the ecological movement to envision a radical reshaping of the basic socioeconomic relations and the underlying values of this [modern industrial] society.5 The connections between feminism and the environment exist on multiple levels, from the historical to the experiential and the political.6 For the purposes of this chapter, I would like to focus mostly on the political, as the term ‘ecofeminism’ was used by Françoise d’Eubonne in 1974 specifically to ‘bring attention to women’s potential for bringing about an ecological revolution’.7 In the way that both Cheshire, Ohio and Unfractured focus on the fight against big corporations, the films topically return to the connection between the fight against destructive policies and oppression. Historically, these concerns can be traced through ecofeminism in multiple ways that I would like to briefly outline here. Although many

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of these aspects are obvious, it seems worth tracing them, in order to delineate the context for cultural ecofeminism before turning to its critique. First, a major concern is the devaluation of women’s labour, which is the result of viewing work that is stereotypically and historically done by women – caring for families and communities – as less valuable in the market economy. Secondly, this deepening economic vulnerability of women makes them more susceptible to violence and the depletion of resources. Essentially, ‘the economic model shaped by capitalist patriarchy is based on the commodification of everything, including women’.8 In response to this culture of commodification, ecofeminists such as Salleh have called for a focus on social reform, social justice and equality. This response is different from that of the cultural ecofeminists, who focus more on the elevation of women, specifically, in a reversal of the current hierarchal system. As Eric C. Otto writes: Cultural ecofeminism breaks from the liberal feminist endeavour to achieve equal rights and representation for women using the methods of already existing socio-political institutions and instead seeks change by contrasting the modern history of women’s oppression with an ancient history, allegedly permeated with prepatriarchal ideals such as kinship, egalitarianism, and nurturance.9 The difference between using ‘existing’ structures and ‘revaluing’ women through a return to ‘prepatriarchal’ values suggests a way to transition to considering utopias in relation to ecofeminism. One of the main critiques of cultural ecofeminism is that it is ‘caught up in idealism’, suggesting a utopian desire, if one that is oriented towards the past rather than the future (as we might see in science fiction utopias, for example).10 In fact, this returns to ecofeminism’s dual drive to be deconstructive and reconstructive – critical and idealistic. As Simon Spiegel has argued, ‘utopias are not so much about the depicted utopian state, but a reflection of the deficits of the present’.11 In considering how these two films work in relation to ecofeminism and utopia, I first want to look at the way the non-fiction films use traits of the narrative fiction film to create performative frameworks through their formal constructions, with different degrees of efficacy. I will subsequently turn to the

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production, distribution and reception of the films and their engagement with the viewer as documentaries, to instead argue that the formal constructions of collage, combined with an open ending and community partnerships in distributions, enable films like Cheshire, Ohio to ‘turn outward’ in their depiction of, and participation in, organising ecofeminist politics.

Constructing the hero(ine) in Unfractured Unfractured, directed by Chanda Chevannes, follows biologist and activist Sandra Steingraber as she fights oil and gas companies pursuing fracking opportunities in upstate New York. Along the way, she deals with her husband’s health issues, cares for her two children and takes an eye-opening trip to Romania. There, she witnesses first-hand the effects of fracking on a local community, and is moved to escalate her speaking and organising efforts to include obstructive approaches of protest, which lead to her arrest. Ultimately, Steingraber and her allies help secure a state-wide ban on fracking, thus ending the film on a hopeful note. Through the use of editing, the film mobilises melodramatic elements to follow a year of Steingraber’s journey as an activist. The film has drawn some criticism for its close focus on Steingraber as the central figure of the anti-fracking movement, but what I want to focus on here is the way Chevannes cinematically constructs Steingraber as a heroic, ecofeminist figure by closely linking her personal struggles, her individual activist efforts and the larger movement. This works through the use of a form of typage, or typification, to draw on socialist realist characterisations as well as the way that editing and framing underscore the connections between different aspects of Sandra’s personal life and the environmental struggle. In particular, the narrative aspects of the film also draw on melodramatic generic constructions to emphasise a Manichean divide between Sandra, her fellow activists by extension, and the corporations. While I am not arguing that the film espouses socialist realism, I do want to think through the influence of revolutionary romanticism on the construction of a heroic figure in socialist realism, as opposed to the character-driven, narrative-based identification in Hollywood realism. A key difference here is in the narrative arc: in a classical Hollywood narrative, the drive is order-disorder-order restored, whereas the

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specific arc of socialist realist film usually focuses on the move towards political consciousness. This narrative trajectory sets up a different, optimistic journey for the hero: She or he is represented as a personality having individual qualities, positive and negative, with which the reader may identify. At the same time, the movement of the narrative involves a personal or political development  … [as well as overcoming] difficulties and obstacles which are both specific – pertaining, that is, to the fictional individual’s personal situation – and general – signifying a broader social/historical situation.12 There are two key points here: first, that there is a narrative arc that emphasises personal or political development; secondly, that the individual journey of the hero is specific to the character but also resonates with a broader situation. In Unfractured, this applies to the way that the film focuses on Steingraber’s individual journey as an activist as well as her personal struggles, and the way her story is clearly positioned against the backdrop of a larger movement of anti-fracking activism both locally, in upstate New York, and globally, through her trip to Romania. Through editing, framing and sound bridges, Steingraber is continually portrayed in a way that emphasises the connections between personal and political, local and global, and the individual and the movement. Throughout the film, shots or sound bridges transition between Sandra in the private space of the home and in her public role as an activist. The editing and framing emphasise that these two roles are linked. This can be seen in the two scenes I would like to look at more closely: the opening of the film, and a scene where Steingraber brings her son along on her trip to Romania. The opening of the film is significant not only for the way it sets up the persona and political aspects of Steingraber as a character, but also for the way it composes the set-up of the film along melodramatic schemas. Shannon Davies Mancus argues that climate change narratives, such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (D: Davis Guggenheim, US, 2006), often mobilise melodramatic elements – including Manichean divides between good and evil, suffering as a marker of virtue and a dialectic between pathos and action – to communicate their messages

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and invite viewer response through a performative framework.13 At the start of Unfractured, these threads are set up through the editing of sound and image to transition from Steingraber’s personal life to her public advocacy, the framing of fracking in New York and the way the film sets up pathos and public action through the opening rally. The film opens without sound, and with the following white text on a black background: It is June 2013. A wealth of natural gas lies in the bedrock of New York State. It can only be extracted by fracking, a drilling process that shatters the shale using water and toxic chemicals. Emerging scientific evidence shows that fracking contaminates water, air, and soil. The text continues, explaining that there is a temporary moratorium in place, and introduces Steingraber as one of the activists working on a permanent ban on fracking in New York. As this information scrolls, the sound of chanting at a rally fades in as a woman’s voice begins to introduce Steingraber as the next speaker taking the stage. As her credentials – ‘internationally acclaimed biologist, author, environmental health expert, as well as the co-founder of New Yorkers Against Fracking’ – are read aloud, the image fades in to a long shot of a rally on the steps of the Capitol building in Albany, New York. These first few shots of the film, and the information that they provide, set up the two sides of the core conflict in the film: on the one hand environmental activists, like Steingraber, and on the other hand the corporations willing to destroy the earth to extract natural gas. This Manichean divide is a critical element of the melodramatic framework, which is important for the viewers’ move from ‘spectators to interpolated members of the story’, as it enables them to recognise the righteousness of one side and wrongdoing of the other.14 As Steingraber begins to speak, her personal struggle, which will constantly be present in the background throughout the film, is immediately referenced. ‘Happily he lives’, she tells the crowd after explaining her husband has recently suffered a massive stroke. ‘I have left his side for the first time since that day because I know … that the work we must do together to ban fracking is bigger than any one of our individual tragedies.’ While she speaks, the film cuts between images

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Figure 7.1 • Steingraber speaking on the steps of the Capitol building

of the crowd, showing the supporters and their signs in medium long shots, and close-ups of Steingraber speaking. The construction of sound and image here works to emphasise two things relevant to the dialectic of pathos and action that Mancus outlines: first, it sets up Steingraber as a suffering hero, marking her virtue in continuing to take on this public advocacy even as she faces her husband’s health crisis. As Mancus argues, ‘suffering in melodrama is central to moral legibility – authentic suffering is how we know a character is good’.15 Secondly, the viewer is able to see Steingraber in relation to the larger community of public supporters. While the close-ups emphasise her position as the central figure for identification, it is clear that she is one of many activists concerned about this issue, which affirms the strains of revolutionary romanticism and socialist realism in the construction of the hero. At this point, the film is clearly using narrative strategies drawn from melodrama to set up the characters and conflict. This is not uncommon in the documentary mode, but I have taken the time to outline it because these melodramatic strategies are important in terms of considering the engagement of the spectator. Thinking about the way the film uses filmic cues to build pathos in the spectator, I want to consider one other example, which emphasises both aspects outlined above as well as the global nature of the issue of fracking. About a third of the way into the film, Steingraber decides to go to Romania to meet with activists fighting Chevron’s fracking operations

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abroad. This sequence begins with a shot of Steingraber’s home in Trumansburg, New York: a familiar establishing shot throughout the film used to situate the viewer back in the domestic space. As the cut moves the film inside, her son announces, ‘today is one year since Daddy’s stroke’, as Steingraber moves through the house gathering her things for the trip. Saying goodbye to her husband and daughter on the front porch in a series of medium close-up shots, Steingraber is framed among her family as her voice-over recalls that her daughter was the one who was with her husband during his initial stroke, so leaving him in her hands feels ‘okay’. These shots set up the close familial bonds, and also remind viewers of the family’s personal struggles, which are present throughout the film. Upon her arrival in Bârlad, Steingraber attends a small protest and meets some of the people involved with the movement. First, there is a series of establishing shots of the town, emphasising the global shift in location from New York as Steingraber’s voice-over describes her motivation for the trip and her interest in meeting these people, as well as her hopes for how she might take inspiration back home. Steingraber’s perceived link between the situations in Romania and New York is clear, and the echoes of her personal motivations are underscored by a shot of a mother and her children playing by a fountain in the city, as well as later shots showing her son observing the protest. As Steingraber arrives at the protest, the shots clearly frame her as an individual heroic figure as she greets people and speaks to the press. After a hand-held

Figure 7.2 • Steingraber being interviewed in Bârlad

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tracking shot follows her as she is introduced to and greets several individuals, there is a cut to her speaking with reporters, where the framing of the shot centres her between microphones, cameras and the reporters. Here, the film emphasises her public power as an activist, while building on the connections between the situation here and back home in New York. These two sequences are representative of a larger pattern in the film, focused on the construction of Steingraber as a central figure who is representative of the broader struggle between corporations and environmental activists. First, the film immediately establishes the clear divide in terms of good and evil, both with its opening information and the first scene at the rally. This is repeated throughout, as Steingraber and her fellow activists tackle town hall and community meetings, protest at a local plant and eventually go to jail. Secondly, Steingraber is given virtue through her suffering and her private life in that the film consistently returns to both her husband’s health struggles and her family as a backdrop for her activism. Finally, the personal and private is connected to both the public and the global as Chevannes includes footage of Steingraber’s trip to Romania. This trip is especially significant in its framing as an awakening for her in terms of pushing her work beyond speaking. After Steingraber returns from Romania, the film focuses on increasingly aggressive protest strategies that eventually lead to her arrest and jailing. It is here that we can see the narrative around Steingraber as imbued with revolutionary romanticism: she is always politically aware, but her political consciousness and willingness to take action grow throughout the filming. When combined with the emphasis on her personal suffering, which builds pathos, the film invites the viewer into a performative framework as outlined by Mancus through its close focus on Steingraber as the central figure. I will return to this point to consider the ways in which the melodramatic structures invite viewer engagement but perhaps not direct activism. Before moving on to Cheshire, Ohio, I briefly want to address the ending of Unfractured to set up a point of comparison between the two films. Despite the ongoing attention to the issue of fracking globally, the film ends on a victorious, hopeful note, with fracking banned indefinitely in New York state. Through a series of close-ups, the film cuts between Steingraber listening to the news on her phone and footage of the final governmental hearings. This keeps the viewer anchored with Steingraber, her emotional reaction foregrounded as the other

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activists respond to the news nearby, chanting, ‘Sandra, Sandra!’ in the background. After she celebrates the good news, two final sequences underscore the patterns outlined previously, as Steingraber talks about how this victory was so important to her as a mother, after sacrificing and being away from her family so much in her activist years, and then receives an award for her service, her family at her side. This ultimately aligns the film with the closure of classical narrative cinema, even if the film has not followed the typical triad structure previously. In wrapping up both the environmental struggle as well as providing closure to her personal struggle of balancing her family life with her activism, the film emphasises again the centrality of Steingraber as a heroic figure and her personal activism as the central thread of the film. To bring this back out to considering ecofeminism and utopia, the film repeatedly denies utopia in its use of fictional character constructions and the reliance on melodramatic tropes to build the narrative. So while the film clearly presents the environmental issues as tied to Steingraber’s personal struggles of balancing activism with being a wife and mother, which suggests ecofeminism, albeit perhaps a bit problematically, it fails to offer a utopian vision. At the same time, the film uses the performative framework of the melodrama, coupled with the heroic depiction of Steingraber, to engage viewers beyond a narrative fiction film. In this sense, while the form and content deny utopian aspects, the specific interpolation of the audience through the documentary mode sets up the potential for not just a critical view of the present, but an impetus for future political action. I will return to this point later, but first, I turn to the way that Cheshire, Ohio emphasises community, rather than an individual hero.

Documentary form and community in Cheshire, Ohio Filmed over a decade, Cheshire, Ohio tells the story of the titular town, examining how the community responded and adapted to the presence of two coal plants and the town’s eventual purchase as part of a deal with American Electric Power (AEP). Using a combination of archival footage and interviews with current and former residents, Morgenstern’s film weaves together several threads: the impact of the coal industry on the environment, the health of residents and those who worked at the plant and the impact of the buyout on the

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community. I would like to examine three aspects of the film here: the use of the group, the return to certain melodramatic structures and the open ending. Unlike Unfractured, with its clear focus on Steingraber as the central hero, Cheshire, Ohio emphasises the community as it moves between the stories of individual residents and the larger struggle against AEP. However, this film too relies on a clear divide between good and evil, setting up a ‘David and Goliath’ structure in the struggle between the community and the corporation. At the same time, the open ending denies the closure of the three-act structure in narrative film, setting up the interpolative structure for the viewer in a different way. The film uses a non-linear structure to integrate the different perspectives of current and former residents of Cheshire. The first shots layer Gladys Rife talking about the changes in the town while images of the smokestacks and archival footage are interspersed with footage of her sitting on her front porch swing. (Later, the conclusion will reveal that Gladys passed away before the film’s release.) The film then cuts to 2013, leaving behind the ‘present’ of Gladys and the archival footage, momentarily. Here, an interview with the town’s unofficial caretaker standing in an empty field describes where different family homes used to be located. Bringing together these different strands of footage – Gladys, the town in 2013, the caretaker and archival footage – clearly signals the different time periods and history of the town. In particular, the archival footage showing happy families in grainy black and white is juxtaposed with the empty field and the looming smokestacks. Meanwhile, the voice-overs set up the devastating consequences of the buyout: the town of Cheshire, with its picket fences and smiling families, no longer exists. The first few minutes of the film set up the community at the heart of the story: the history of developing the town, the impact of the coal plant and the ultimate dissolution of Cheshire. This opening also clearly outlines the film along good and evil lines: the community of Cheshire versus the corporation of AEP. Post credits, the film cuts to eleven years earlier, with the drums of a marching band over a flag team practice. Shots of typical small-town America – quiet neighbourhood streets and a baseball game – reveal the ever-present ominous smokestacks and coal barges surrounding the community. Gladys has already stated that AEP ‘scared everybody out’ and ‘you can’t fight them big companies’ – so the jump back in time signals that now we, as viewers, will find out how this happened, while also aligning

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Figure 7.3 • Cheshire, Ohio and the Gavin Power Plant

us with the perspective of the townspeople. That these sequences include conventionally idyllic scenes – such as children playing outside in the summer, or driving down Main Street, disrupted by smokestacks puffing in the background – gives the community a face and keeps the corporation anonymous. The use of different types of footage, voice-overs and interviews with various townspeople also sets up the emphasis on the community. Unlike in Unfractured, there is no central figure who is a stand-in for the larger struggle. Cheshire, Ohio instead emphasises the different impacts the power plant and buyout have had on various residents: from Gladys reflecting on how the town had changed in her lifetime to interviews with another resident, Boots Hern, an elderly woman who refused to sell her house and remained one of the very few residents after the town was vacated. The sequences featuring Hern serve as yet another reminder of the changes in the community, as she describes living in a virtual ghost town. As with Gladys, her death is revealed in the closing of the film, a poignant reminder that she lived out her final years devoid of neighbours and community. This group structure, and the clear lines of good and evil, are further complicated in the third act, which follows a lawsuit brought by former AEP employees after a number of people have died of various forms of cancer. About an hour into the film, Iva Sisson, a former secretary at the Gavin landfill, is introduced speaking about the benefits of the coal plant as a place of employment. Immediately, she emphasises

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the positive aspects of her job, saying that ‘we just did things together – we worked as a team. It was just really special.’ Archival photos from 2007 show the various employees standing together, emphasising the camaraderie that Sisson speaks of in her interview. Wilbur Robinson, also a former Gavin employee, echoes her sentiments in his interview. He describes the difficulty of getting a union job close to home and explains that the plant offered dependable work for which he was ‘grateful’ and which allowed him to retire. Returning to Roy Taylor, who was previously introduced attending EPA feedback sessions, the content shifts from discussing how wonderful the job was to how many people have gotten sick and died from working so close to toxic waste. This is underscored by Sisson describing her stage 4 ovarian cancer diagnosis, and by a conversation with Sisson and Robinson about their friend Carlos’s rapid decline after his own diagnosis. Eventually, the lawsuit is introduced through Dave Duffield, one of the attorneys, who brings the various stories together: ‘They couldn’t tell because they were dying of cancer, but different forms of cancer.’ The cross-cutting between the different perspectives and stories about working at the plant, combined with the sound bridges that link the images between interviews, again emphasises the community, while it also builds complexity into the Manichean structure. Mancus argues that melodrama as a discourse works for climate change narratives not only in how it allows the viewers to ‘align our moral compasses’ but also for its interpolative power, inviting viewers to ‘become part of the narrative’.16 While Unfractured used a hopeful ending, the successful blocking of fracking in New York, to demonstrate an appropriate response to an environmental crisis, its reliance on closure might also not quite go far enough in inviting viewers to become part of the narrative of environmental change. In other words, closure offers hope, which might diminish the returns of engagement: fracking is presented as a closed issue, at least in New York. Cheshire, Ohio, on the other hand, offers closure to many of the individual stories in the film – the deaths of Gladys Rife and Boots Hern, for example – but its message is not hopeful. The final frame before the credits begin is an image of a large house with the smokestacks rising up behind it, set against a black background. The title below the image reads: ‘The General James Gavin plant in Cheshire continues to pump out over 15 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.’ This signals that the problem here is ongoing; it has not been solved

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by efforts to bring a lawsuit (still in the discovery phase, as noted earlier in this sequence), and AEP continues to do business as usual. Coming directly after follow-ups on where some of the residents have ended up, including a couple that lost their new home purchased after the buyout to foreclosure and is now forced to rent, the influence of coal energy is clear. The film has emphasised the ways it impacts the livelihood, health, environment and homes of the community (and surrounding area), but the ending reveals how little has changed for AEP over the past eleven years. This open ending works in terms of drawing on the positioning of AEP as the villain. In the climate change narrative, ‘we must admit that we are all responsible for the suffering of the earth in various ways’, which Cheshire, Ohio sets up through the complexities of acknowledging the ‘good jobs’ available at the plant and the ways in which everyone relies on coal energy in some way.17 Yet through the constant return to AEP as the villain, there is a tangible force responsible for the suffering of the residents of Cheshire and nearby communities. This is a key part of leaving the three-act structure of the melodrama unfinished: AEP has not been brought to justice, coal energy is still being used and it is clear that these problems still exist, which perhaps has a greater efficacy than the closure and hope offered by Unfractured. By demonstrating that the issue is ongoing, the film elicits a particular response from viewers in terms of inviting change in their actions – such as rethinking the reliance on coal after seeing its impact on a

Figure 7.4 • Present-day Cheshire, Ohio

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community, working with one of the organisations mentioned in the film on environmental activism or hosting a screening of the film. It is these actions that come after the film, and the ways the film’s production and distribution participate in the performative framework beyond the form of the film, to which I would like to turn next.

Turning outward: ecofeminism and utopia Returning to ecofeminism helps provide context for why the narrative and formal structures of these two films work to set up a particular response in the viewer, one that invites activism and engagement. Salleh offers the provocation ‘only connect’, arguing that ‘[with] ecofeminism, the political focus turns outwards’.18 Through connecting with others and with the environment, change is possible. Ecofeminism is important for the way it both critiques current structures and offers hope for a better future, and activism is critical to linking these two aspects. While both films under discussion here are directed by women, the ecofeminist approach also stems from the way they foreground women’s engagement with the environment, albeit in different ways. In this section, I would like to build on how the ‘micro’ stories presented in the two films depict larger issues, arguing that the form of the films impacts the viewers’ engagement. In the case of Unfractured, the revolutionary romanticism, clear narrative resolution and close focus on Steingraber as the hero all serve to narrow the investment of the audience, whereas the collage form, open ending and community focus of Cheshire, Ohio effectively mobilise audiences beyond the smaller community depicted in the film. In examining the reception of the films, via production, distribution and reception, I argue that the differing aspects listed above impact the utopian potential of the films when they reach wider audiences. Unfractured is the second collaboration between Chevannes and Steingraber, as Chevannes had previously adapted Steingraber’s book Living Downstream in 2010.19 In 2013, Chevannes approached Steingraber about making another film to more specifically ‘rally the public’ around Steingraber’s environmental work. For Chevannes, ‘the process of making the film reflects the process that Sandra was going through in her life … we weren’t [initially] sure what the message would be’.20 With funding from the Canadian Council for the Arts,

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the Ceres Trust and The People’s Motion Picture Company, Chevannes commuted from Toronto to New York to follow Steingraber for about a year, including her trip to Romania, which happened to lead up to the state-wide ban, providing a clear ending for the film. Unfractured premiered at Toronto’s Planet in Focus International Environmental Film Festival in October 2017. Since then, the film has been shown mainly at environmental film festivals and university screenings, with both Chevannes and Steingraber frequently either attending the screenings or participating in discussions via Skype. Morgenstern, on the other hand, did not have an existing relationship with the residents of Cheshire when she set out to make the film. After reading a story about the buyout in the New York Times, Morgenstern was intrigued and went out to visit the town. After meeting some of the townspeople and seeing the devastating effects of the AEP plant first-hand, she was ‘moved by the way this intimate story could so powerfully illustrate the multiple layers of devastation caused by the coal industry’.21 Filming over eleven years, Morgenstern struggled to find an ending for the film, but increasingly felt that the story was too relevant to abandon, and completed editing for release in 2017.22 Produced by RAINLAKE and Chicken & Egg Pictures, the film drew on funding from a variety of sources, from the New York State Council for the Arts to the Playboy Foundation. Its core team was also comprised of women: Morgenstern, editor Kim Connell and director of photography Katherine Patterson. In addition to film festivals, mostly with an environmental focus, Cheshire, Ohio has screened in a number of community and university events focused on the Appalachian region. There are a number of shared aspects within the production of the two films, such as collaboration, community outreach and alternative methods of distribution. For example, Unfractured offers free screenings to volunteer-run grassroots organisations and Cheshire, Ohio has done multiple screenings in local communities, often in partnership with environmental organisations.23 As David Whiteman argues: A film’s development, production, and distribution create extensive opportunities for interaction among producers, participants, activists, decision makers, and citizens, and thus all the stages of a film can affect its impact.24

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For Whiteman, considering the impact of a political documentary involves thinking beyond the ‘finished film within the dominant public discourse and individual citizens’ to consider the wider discourses and context surrounding it, from production to exhibition, particularly in ‘discourses outside the mainstream’.25 The community screenings and advocacy partnerships undertaken by both films, stemming from the focus on local examples of global environmental issues, offer an example of alternative exhibition spaces beyond the cinema and film, where the films might connect with audiences and create change. However, the reception of the two films demonstrates how the formal features I discussed previously influence the potential impact on audiences, even in specific community screenings. Unfractured, for example, has been subject to protests for its singular focus on Steingraber, rather than the larger group she was involved with, We Are Seneca Lake. Several reviews of the film also address the revolutionary romanticism in the veneration of Steingraber as the central hero and the problems this creates in terms of the film’s message. For example, Garrett Faulkner writes: In reducing Steingraber’s advocacy to precious, emotive arguments, Chevannes cheapens her real contributions to the field, and worse, affirms the energy industry’s worst caricatures of the environmentalist movement: as reductive, facile agitators, given to both self-congratulation and mythologizing.26 While this is certainly a harsh example, it does suggest that the narrow focus of the film on a single figure through a more conventional structure might close down the potential impact. In other words, the performative framework of the film is limited in its interpolative potential because of the singular focus on Steingraber as the ‘hero’. On the other hand, the collage of community voices in Cheshire, Ohio broadens the appeal of the film for different audiences. In particular, the formal approach of the film is what connects it most clearly to an ecofeminist approach, as the film’s movement between different individual stories within the community emphasises the ‘social and ecological interrelations that ecofeminism reminds us of and holds us accountable’.27 Crucially, an ecofeminist approach emphasises power relations, which Cheshire, Ohio is able to reveal precisely through its collage approach. For example, early in the shooting, Morgenstern

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Figure 7.5 • Community members attend a meeting with the Ohio EPA

was able to visit the Gavin plant and speak with a representative of AEP – access that was later withdrawn as the lawsuit went forward. Morgenstern has also noted that many of her subjects did not necessarily consider themselves environmentalists, or had never been involved with organisations like the Sierra Club prior to facing the buyout.28 This turn to activism, instigated by the situation with AEP and then documented in the film, is another aspect of the film that connects it to ecofeminism. At the core of ecofeminism is political activism, which helps link, as Stephanie Lahar writes, the ‘critical frameworks’ to its ‘utopian visions’.29 Beyond the activism portrayed on screen, in both Cheshire, Ohio and Unfractured, the form of the films is a turning point to both ecofeminism and utopia. In this case, the open ending of Cheshire, Ohio – the lawsuit is still in progress, some of the subjects have died, but many are still working through the after-effects of the buyout – suggests reconstructive potential actions that might be taken up by the viewer. It is this link between the deconstructive critical frameworks of ecofeminism as a theory, and the reconstructive (utopian) potential of ecofeminism as activism, that suggests the efficacy of a documentary like Cheshire, Ohio. Lahar argues that for ecofeminism to ‘fulfill a reconstructive potential’, it must work as a social philosophy, extending ‘social critique and utopian vision into imperatives for action’.30 While Unfractured features a critique of fracking and corporate practices, the singular focus on Steingraber through the lens of revolutionary

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romanticism and the closure offered by the ending do not complete the performative framework and interpolate the viewer into activism. Rather, the viewer glimpses the hardships of activism for Steingraber but also her victory, closing down the need for further action in many ways. The open ending of Cheshire, Ohio, on the other hand, while seemingly less hopeful about the particular issue – the Gavin plant is still running, AEP is fighting the lawsuit – offers a clear imperative for activism to work towards a vision for a better future. Ynestra King frames ecofeminism as ‘the practice of hope’, which anticipates the future rather than focusing on vindication for the past, where ‘hope … is to believe that [the] future can be created by intentional human beings who now take responsibility [for it]’.31 In connecting this notion to Cheshire, Ohio and Unfractured – films made by women with a feminist approach – it becomes clear that both the critical frameworks and utopian ideals of ecofeminism can work within the environmental documentary. However, in order to build on the viewer’s engagement and encourage a turn to activism, the core of ecofeminism, the formal features of the film crucially must move away from conventional narrative structures. By weaving community stories and archival history together through a collage form, as well as leaving the ending of the film open, Cheshire, Ohio might broaden the interpolative framework for viewers and thus invite action beyond the viewing experience. Film festivals, community screenings and community partnerships are also key to building activism beyond the film, increasing the potential for smaller films, such as Unfractured and Cheshire, Ohio, to have a greater impact on audiences beyond commercial circuits. The independent, ecofeminist documentary thus might offer utopian potential through the way it suggests further action: inviting the viewer to practice hope through activism. Notes 1. Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism (London/New York: Zed Books, 2014), p. xi. 2. Salleh, Ecofeminism, p. xi. 3. Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 141. 4. Simon Spiegel, ‘Some thoughts on the utopian film’, Science Fiction Film & Television, 10/1 (2017), 53–79. 5. Rosemary Radford Ruether, New Woman/New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), p. 204.

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6. For a full discussion of these connections, see Karen J. Warren, ‘Ecological Feminist Philosophies: An Overview of the Issues’, in Karen J. Warren (ed.), Ecological Feminist Philosophies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. ix–xxvi. 7. Warren, Ecological Feminist Philosophies, p. xvi. 8. Salleh, Ecofeminism, p. xvi. 9. Eric C. Otto, Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2012), pp. 78–9. 10. Otto, Green Speculations, p. 79. 11. Spiegel, ‘Some thoughts on the utopian film’, 56. 12. Kuhn, Women’s Pictures, pp. 141–2. 13. Shannon Davies Mancus, ‘Mother Earth Tied to the Train Tracks: The Scriptive Implications of Melodrama in Climate Change Discourse’, Performing Ethos, 5/1+2 (2014), 87–99. 14. Mancus, ‘Mother Earth Tied to the Train Tracks’, 92. 15. Mancus, ‘Mother Earth Tied to the Train Tracks’, 92. 16. Mancus, ‘Mother Earth Tied to the Train Tracks’, 96. 17. Mancus, ‘Mother Earth Tied to the Train Tracks’, 97. 18. Salleh, Ecofeminism, p. xi. 19. Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1997). 20. Alexandra Coburn, ‘Interview: Chanda Chevannes, Director of Unfractured’, www.ithaca.edu/fleff/blogs/fleff_intern_voices/interview:_chanda_chevannes,_director_of_unfractur/ (accessed 15  May 2018). 21. Eve Morgenstern, ‘Director Statement’, e-mail correspondence, 17 April 2018. 22. Eve Morgenstern, Post-screening discussion. Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, 14 April 2018. 23. Michael Burke, ‘Clean Power Coalition to Air Documentary’, The Journal Times, 30 October 2017, https://journaltimes.com/business/local/cleanpower-coalition-to-air-documentary/article_7da45041-19f4-5190-94c 5-c98dfdfbbec1.html (accessed 15 May 2018). 24. David Whiteman, ‘The Impact of The Uprising of ’34: A Coalition Model of Production and Distribution’, Jump Cut, 45 (2002), www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc45.2002/whiteman/index.html (accessed 15  June 2018). 25. Whiteman, ‘The Impact of The Uprising of ’34’.

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26. Garrett Faulkner, ‘Review: Unfractured, A Documentary’, Terrain.org: A Journal of Built + Natural Environments, 11 November 2017, www.terrain.org/2017/reviews-reads/unfractured/ (accessed 1 March 2018). 27. Stephanie Lahar, ‘Ecofeminist Theory and Grassroots Politics’, Hypatia, 6/1 (1991), 28–45. 28. Eve Morgenstern, Personal interview, 13 April 2018. 29. Lahar, ‘Ecofeminist Theory and Grassroots Politics’, 42. 30. Lahar, ‘Ecofeminist Theory and Grassroots Politics’, 35. 31. King cited in Lahar, ‘Ecofeminist Theory and Grassroots Politics’, 32.

Selected works Kuhn, Annette, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982). Lahar, Stephanie, ‘Ecofeminist Theory and Grassroots Politics’, Hypatia, 6/1 (1991), 28–45. Mancus, Shannon Davies, ‘Mother Earth Tied to the Train Tracks: The Scriptive Implications of Melodrama in Climate Change Discourse’, Performing Ethos, 5/1+2 (2014), 87–99. Ruether, Rosemary Radford, New Woman/New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975). Salleh, Ariel, Ecofeminism (London/New York: Zed Books, 2014). Steingraber, Sandra, Living Downstream (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1997). Warren, Karen J., Ecological Feminist Philosophies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

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PART 3

New Forms of Documentary Activism

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8

Trans-utopia: Documenting Real and Imagined Cities Daniel Schwartz, Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou, Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner

We are not living in utopian times, and to hold a camera to this world in order to depict utopian spaces and stories can appear not just futile, but reactionary. As we near the end of the second decade of the twentyfirst century, the framework of utopia and dystopia seems like an outdated binary, prone to lead to reductionist descriptions and blunt prescriptions in a world where geopolitical, computational and ideological acceleration has brought about new paradigms. As Benjamin Bratton has argued, ‘the messianic effervescence of [utopia] and apocalyptic panic of the [dystopia] are part of the problem’.1 Yet we have been influenced deeply by utopian discourses and dystopian narratives, seeing in both cultural threads a utility for critiquing various forms of violence and imagining less violent potentials. How, then, may utopian discourses be preserved in the twenty-first century? Rather than responding to this challenge ex nihilo, our argument begins by first examining what utopian discourses purport to reflect – contemporary visions and definitions of reality – in order to ask: what tools and practices are available for us to use, in order to understand this reality? With this question, we signal a focus on processes rather than phenomena; on techno-cultural tools for constructing imagined worlds begging for a new practice of humanity’s imaginative propensity, rather than on singular definitions made by individuals. Today, the digitised and democratised camera, microphone and editing software bring forth a new mode of expressive communication that rival Thomas More’s pen. They combine the psychological power of images and soundscapes with the democratising possibility of co-authorship, bringing together actors in the construction of ideas and their distribution at a massive and rapid scale.2 As an interdisciplinary design collective, we are familiar with a variety of intellectual traditions that engage in utopian discourses,

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and therefore define our contemporaneousness in contrast to these predecessors. In particular, we wish to juxtapose our thinking with the grand-scale narratives and methods of previous schools of thought within the humanities and social sciences – the gatekeepers of traditional utopian discourses. The ubiquitous totalising and competitive habit, particularly apparent in much of Western Marxist thought, generally trains its attention at superstructures and conceptual antagonisms, while brushing over detailed empiricism and avoiding a comradely sharing of knowledge and metaphors.3 Such discourses run into the same problems of categorical obfuscation of culture and nature, inevitably leading to a neo-colonial mode of theorising. As with the immemorial generations of utopian thinking, they replace old binaries with new ones, shifting only the scale or language. So we must ask a proletarian question: whose globe do people speak of when they speak about globalisation? Whose cosmopolis do people speak of when they speak about cosmopolitanism? And of course, whose utopia are people talking about when they talk about utopianism? This question of ownership will inevitably provoke the question, ‘How could utopia be constructed differently?’ As visual creators, both in terms of built environments and filmic representations, we have the opportunity to craft utopian discourses that are critical, propositional and process-driven. We wish to describe some of our work we do as the collective Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) as a case study. Our point of departure will not be the discussion of objects – in our case, buildings or films – but again, the processes of creation. And while objects inevitably result from our work, we hope that in analysing our working processes (and, crucially, who they involve), we might contribute to a discourse that gives added value to our creations. In doing this, we propose a new term, trans-utopia, emerging from our praxis of film-making, as a contemporary and robust utopian discourse concerned not with the objectification of singular notions of reality, but rather with shared and co-created visions of reality that continuously emerge among individuals.

Zeitgeist We cannot begin discussing our approach without first understanding the historical moment, at the beginning of the twenty-first century,

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in which we find ourselves. Certain writers identify this moment by speaking of a fourth industrial revolution.4 Yet, while we are neither economists nor historians, it is important for us to note that what is novel may not necessarily be new. One need only think of the experiences of those who, a century ago, boarded an automobile or airplane for the first time, to sympathise with our own feelings of awe when we read about commercial space mining, advanced genome editing and new labour systems that supplant the human with machines, conjuring fundamentally different socio-economic relations. In this sense, one might say that ‘progress’ has no anchor; that it is instead a perpetually shifting goalpost. It is with the same principles that we also consider other types of ‘revolutions’ and ‘revolutionary moments’. We might therefore say that ‘history is repeating itself’ much in the same way that utopian imaginations are also repeating themselves. And yet, for all the cycles we may broadly identify to draw this rudimentary historical map, the orbits do shift. Although we may experience the same awe as our predecessors while confronted with changes, each advancement results in paradigmatic shifts.5 The patterns, we might say, are to be found on a tapestry whose shape constantly changes. And it is here that we find the space to discursively innovate on utopian thinking; the current shift of our zeitgeist is one marked by the recognition of a complexity hitherto unseen or unrecognised. The presence of multiple, empowered voices in our societies, underlined by technological advancements in communications and transport, and marked by dissatisfaction with singular narratives, demand a new logic. Multiple singular narratives – ‘identity politics’ come to mind – fall into the same line. Our zeitgeist is therefore defined by a desire for a hybridising turn, or as Donna Haraway might phrase it, recognition of our status as cyborgs constructed from a melange of cultural, biologic and nonhuman influences.6 Contemporary utopian thinking must reflect this. We are no longer satisfied by the monocultural imaginations and clean subject/object world views of individuality. Indeed, as soon as singular and human-centric utopias are defined, they tend to lose their power, subject to the ever-contorting forces of history and nature. And in contrast to Michel Foucault’s heterotopia, we believe that imaginaries are not separate-but-equal, but rather always in formation.7 Thus, we propose a new term that may, ironically, help stabilise a conception that is inherently unstable: ‘trans-utopia’.

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We will return to this term later, but first we must recount its exposition. As urban filmmakers, we are fortunate to have a demarked space in which to discuss how such a conception may take shape: the city. As the farm turned into the town, the town into the city and today, as the city turns into the mega-city, the new codes and problems that reflect our historical moment can all be found within the urban realm.

Utopia as process The genesis of our practice at U-TT responded accordingly to its zeitgeist: at the outset, we were an interdisciplinary group of architects, urbanists and artists determined to understand and improve cities devastated by inequality. The beginning of our thinking regarding utopia would be determined by this challenge, setting us on the path towards audiovisual experimentation in documenting social, economic and political hardships in various cities. A short description of our trajectory will shine a light on the processes and events that ultimately resulted in the desire to update utopian discourses, but also – and crucially – to present ourselves as interlocutors in the creation of hybrid understandings of ideas. U-TT was founded in 1998 as a non-profit organisation in Caracas, Venezuela. This was during a momentous decade in Venezuela’s political-economic history, as Hugo Chávez came to power and the ostensibly petro-capitalist society reoriented itself into a petrosocialist arrangement. In many regards, the ideology of Chavismo was never coherently formulated or put into material organisation, and as the current state of economic and political affairs in Venezuela can attest to, corruption, wealth inequality and political polarisation have become the rule rather than the exception. Starting in the late 1990s, however, the state began to allocate more resources towards large-scale urban works and ambitious social housing projects. Both development efforts have had extremely mixed results. As a group of professionally trained architects and designers, we were moved to better understand the massive inequality in Venezuelan society and develop both conceptual and practical proposals to address the fact that a majority of our fellow city dwellers did not have access to decent housing or social services. Our projects started small, as research and cultural outreach initiatives in various informal communities that had grown outside the

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purview of trained architects, planners or real estate developers. We soon transformed our non-profit organisation into a company, in order to make and finance architectural and infrastructural projects. Our stakeholders and clients were strategically diverse, ranging from slum dwellers to city mayors to church priests to Marxist urban planners. Because of this diverse clientele, many of whom were motivated by competing utopian visions, we began to self-consciously promote our role as communication experts. We saw communication as an ongoing and non-linear process of fostering a common understanding or shared value system. Venezuela’s fractured society was mirrored in its fractured urban landscapes, and by collectivising agency over the built environment, we hoped to change civic culture. The rapid urbanisation of South America during the late 1990s, rendering it the world’s most urbanised continent (at approximately 70 per cent), meant that our immediate environment would also be a global test bed for our imaginations of ‘what could be’. In 2001, we began a series of lectures in Venezuela and at various international architecture conferences under the broad title ‘Blade Runner in the Tropics’, which reflected on visionary urban thinking in the South American context.8 The title was referential, pointing to the hyper-density of Caracas’s Petare barrio, the endless skyscraper landscape of São Paulo and the simmering violence of Bogota’s streets. These were not just aesthetic analogues for Ridley Scott’s futuristic dystopia, but were real, complicated places demanding critical attention and material transformation. As the continent with some of the most intense commitments to utopian promises of modernism (such as Brasilia), South America also bore some of modernism’s most intense failures. Our investigations of utopian thinking therefore began as a deconstruction of the binary of utopia and dystopia through this science fiction lens. Blade Runner (D: Ridley Scott, US 1982), which A. O. Scott has deemed one of the first postmodern films to reach mass audiences, depicts an urban future voided of a totalising modernist humanism.9 The film showed a future Los Angeles rendered with tense grandeur, imbued with neon-tinted smog, enslaved cyborgs, exploited humans and awe-inducing ruins. True to its dystopian science fiction genre, the story provoked critical speculation about its contemporary moment: is civilisation headed towards an existential malaise, mirrored both in its bio-politics and its urban spaces? Loss abounds in the film: the loss of memory, identity and a grand narrative of progress.

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In our lectures, we compared Caracas to the speculative world pictured in Blade Runner, hoping to provoke reflection on the dystopian situations that existed not just in Hollywood’s imagination, but in the daily reality of our fellow Caraqueños. Dystopia, we declared, was not a place, but a time, and the time was now. Our architectural colleagues needed to interrogate their role in maintaining an untenable status quo, or at least admit how deep their heads were in the sand. To expand on such a clarion call, and find a different or larger audience than architectural experts, we turned to video. The medium was an intuitive choice, informed by our love of cinema, but also the video art movement that had percolated around us while we were studying in the late 1980s and early 1990s in New York City. With almost no budget, we used consumer camcorders to record Caracas’s urban failures and point out their resemblance to cinematic nightmares. The resulting video essays, like Dialecticas Urbanas (D: Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, VE 2002), were not postmodern experiments in pastiche, but rather attempts to dissect the latent design in our urban environments, a design informed by the human drive for survival, structural economic exclusion and layers of cultural hybridisation. Our filming and editing styles were low-budget but high-concept. We often started videos with footage filmed from helicopters before transitioning to hand-held footage from long walks and interviews with urban residents. By avoiding abstracted maps, satellite images and static photographs that too easily become iconography, the video essays were a combination of both documentary phenomenology and artistic expression. The essayistic tone, in particular, allowed us to address multiple audiences simultaneously, and we screened many of our videos in self-organised exhibitions, community gatherings, classrooms and client meetings across Caracas. The nature of our approach to film-making pointed to new communication processes taking hold in the design field and provided a crucial pillar for our future work. It led to new conversations amongst our professional colleagues, fellow university teachers, students at Caracas’s two architectural faculties and, most importantly, the subjects of our films. Videos became a fundamental part of our work process and communication strategy. Working with these tools, we built various types of projects, ranging from a small orphanage under a motorway to large-scale transportation infrastructure that stitched together isolated communities with the city centre.

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Starting in 2010, we incorporated U-TT into the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. We operate as a hybridised collective, inhabiting both an academic position, with its attendant educational and knowledge-production logic, and a design practice that seeks to build. This unique position – as professionals in one of the world’s richest institutions operating alongside an ever-expanding global network of urban activists – has been crucial in allowing us to continue developing our audiovisual methodologies. As the number of our collaborators increases and geographic engagement globalises, we have taken to speaking of utopia not as a design object, but as a design process. Architects and designers assume a role as communicative connectors amongst the web of material and imaginative phenomena that shape cities. As such, the utility of video to construct and reconstruct imagined realities, using the images and sounds of material phenomena, is a crucial aspect of our work. Indeed, contemporary architects have an arsenal of new and powerful tools at their disposal, but the legacy of antiquated ideologies or practices weighs heavily upon their individual imaginations. We see too many of the same tired architectural forms masquerading as content, decorating cities (and urban-oriented films) rather than transforming them for social benefit. Likewise, video has become a default promotional tool for architects of all stripes and the capitalist real estate industry that most depend upon. Thus, in understanding our position within the context of the architecture profession, we must trace its history of utopian thinking.

Engaging the profession While the development of ideal spatial configurations in architecture has always involved elements of utopian thinking, we wish to focus on a specific and relatively recent movement: modernist architecture in the twentieth century. It interests us because of its neat architectural analogue to the ‘grand narratives’ of globalisation and cosmopolitanism discussed in the introduction, focusing on a singular ‘modern person’. This position is most famously and influentially expressed in modern architecture’s chief theologian, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier. His 1923 book Vers une architecture became

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a bible for a new cosmology amongst designers seeking to build; it was aimed at a modern person who is efficient, organised and satisfied by needs understood from afar.10 The result is well known: the attempt to separate work and play, prizing the automobile as a champion of mobility and individuality, and the proliferation of housing blocks – often in the form of the characteristic béton brut – throughout many parts of the planet. And yet, architecture is distinct from other theoretical disciplines in that its primary aim – shaping the built environment – can lead to an almost immediate manifestation of its ideas in the material world. The palpable recognition of the shortcomings of utopian thinking thus came earlier for modernist architects than for many of their counterparts in other disciplines. In the 1970s, theoreticians like Charles Jencks and Manfredo Tafuri pushed back on modernist utopianism, accusing it of giving rise to architectural excess, elitism, colonialism, authoritarianism and collaboration with the evils of totalitarianism and capitalism.11 For the subsequent two decades, as postmodernism gave rise to various branches of theoretical and practised design, utopia became ‘the dirty secret of architecture’, as Rem Koolhaas wrote in 2003.12 The notion of utopia through architecture resurfaced near the turn of the millennium, spurred on the one hand by a sense of informationage techno-optimism, exemplified by the smart cities movement, along with dystopian fears exemplified in reactions to anthropocenic threats like climate change and its resultant discourses of sustainability. Some romantics wish to turn backwards, as if the genie could be put back into the lamp, and work toward anti-techno-scientific utopias. Renewed interest in the anti-urban kibbutzim movement, and cabin architecture, are stark examples of this latter trend.13 On the other hand, designers are increasingly fetishising infrastructural and digital engineering as a salvo, looking to harness natural systems as somehow separate from humanity, but controllable for our survival and enjoyment. In one shape or another, utopian discourses have returned to architecture. Although this resurgence might be more akin to yet another version of immemorial utopias than to a paradigmatic shift, we at U-TT sense, alongside it, the emergence of other new and divergent voices. Searching for a new utopian vocabulary, it is no surprise to find in these voices common forbears in the profession: the radical avant-garde

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of the 1950s and 1960s, exemplified by groups like Archigram, Yona Friedman and Superstudio. Their projects, diverse and by no means all rooted in identical theoretical or cultural frameworks, share common terrain in that they generally operated within hypothetical and propositional realms. We think of Archigram’s 1964 Plug-in-City, which proposed an urban design without permanent buildings, but rather a mega three-dimensional latticework in which people could construct rooms and spaces as needed.14 Reaching for the impossible, largely through drawings, models and textual publications, these designers were written off as architectural hacks or sci-fi artists rather than serious designers. To borrow an observation from the writer Darran Anderson, it is as if the discipline has trouble accepting avant-garde architecture unless there is an obvious profit motive.15 The work of these utopian architect-artists taught us that shaping the built environment is cultural work dependent on creating comradely dialogue across disciplines. We believe we are living in an epoch when professional architects may better serve the historical moment by participating in conversations spanning scientific divides and ideologies: what McKenzie Wark refers to as the creation of ‘low theory’ rather than ‘high theory’.16 Practically, this means that the architect must resist imposing one singular, pat vision on a given site, community or project, and instead play a long game of fitting into a dynamic system in ‘intra-activity’. It is not that we categorically find technological or aesthetic aspects of individual architects to be unimportant or uninteresting – although they often are. It is rather a tacit admission that spatially designing cities cannot be divorced from the organisational frames of the political, economic, ecological and social, along with their attendant ethical imperatives.

Film-making The camera and microphone are indispensable instruments in carrying out this ethical position. With them, we not only depict, but also co‑­ create depictions of space with the people around us. We believe that this approach ultimately brings us closer to the notion of a trans-utopia: a communicative process that constantly hybridises ideas, perceptions and attitudes.

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Radically democratic, and constructed by shifting ideo-material surroundings, trans-utopias unfold inevitably as we dialogue with the ‘Other’. As trans-utopias are concerned with notions of utility, a link is forged between our multi-disciplinary, ‘trans-utopian’ practice and the Arte Útil movement, initiated by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. The attitude of this contemporary art movement is based on the argument that artists must work against romantic escapism or single viewpoints, often embodied in the white cube of the gallery. Bruguera’s famous declaration that it is time to take Duchamp’s urinal out of the museum and return it back to the city is a poignant metaphor, summarising the need to shift creative practices to where their value is greatest and most needed.17 This definition begs the question: how, then, do we depict constantly unfolding trans-utopias? In answering this question we focus on new audiovisual vocabularies afforded by technological and democratising advancements in cinematic tools on the one hand, and the discursive evolution of audiovisual representation on the other. Since the early days of our video experimentation, we have not shied away from, but rather embraced the possibilities created by the ‘fictionalisation’ inevitably inherent to documentary media. Our approach often shares principles with the modern tradition of urban ethnography, pioneered by activist-researchers like W. E. B. DuBois,18 who integrated observational, participatory and qualitative methodologies into social-scientific studies. In addition, we strive to include imaginative proposals within the descriptive and analytical documents that we produce. Such a practice, now rooted in audiovisual communications, overlaps with the interplay between showing versus constructing reality within the cinéma vérité tradition,19 or the principle of ‘ecstatic truth’ heralded by filmmakers like Werner Herzog, who suggests that ‘to tell the truth, you have to tell a lie’.20 We begin with the recognition that not all of what we and our camera see is reality. In fact, we are interested in documentary not for its claims to objectivity, but rather for how it inspires debates about perspective, framing and authorial intention. Particularly when it comes to urban processes – because the complexity of the material-ideological processes at work are beyond neat representation – we return to reality by signalling the insufficiency of our tools in properly representing it. We then go beyond this conceit by openly sharing authorship that follows awareness of the filter that it inevitably applies to a text.

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Our filmic texts are the result of our attempt to understand the people around us through observation, conversation and intervention. Beyond the actual filmic text, the production process and its accompanying attitude of openness towards the ‘Other’ allow for our interlocutors to incorporate ideas that we could not ourselves imagine. In this sense, we draw from what the Colombian philosopher Armando Silva calls the urban imaginaries: the mental ideals that urban dwellers have in their heads.21 Our practice has taken us across dozens of cities around the world, and we carefully document our experiences in these diverse locations. Of the works that have emerged from these multifarious excursions, we wish to discuss two, which have influenced the development of a new trans-utopian vocabulary. These are Torre David: The World’s Tallest Squat (D: Markus Kneer and Daniel Schwartz, VE 2012) and Gran Horizonte: Around the Day in 80 Worlds (D: Daniel Schwartz and Martin Andersson, multiple countries 2013).

Towers and grand horizons Part of our documentary approach involves selecting ethically precarious subjects and then eschewing a simple or blatant ethical position towards them. This is not creating provocation for the sake of attention or exploitative emotional responses. Rather, this practice seeks to avoid over-determined authorial positions and work within the pluralistic relations that emerge when co-developing imaginaries. Our short film Torre David: The World’s Tallest Squat exemplifies this approach and its potential impact. The film was produced as part of a multi-year research and design project that U-TT initiated and lead. Torre David is a colloquial name given to the Centro Financiero Confinanzas in downtown Caracas: a financial centre planned around a forty-fivestory glass and concrete skyscraper that, after the structure topped out, stalled in an economic downturn. The unfinished building sat mostly empty until a decade later when, in 2007, an organised group of squatters, coming from various informal settlements across the city, took over the building (see figure 8.1). When we had earned the trust of residents sufficiently to gain access to the tower, we found approximately 750 families living in selfbuilt homes and an impressive (if tenuous) neighbourhood system with

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Figure 8.1 • Torre David in Caracas

shops, sport facilities, utilities infrastructure, community meetings and a co-op style of property management. The architectural sum of their efforts simultaneously resembled both informal slums and the consummation of avant-garde Dutch architect John Habraken’s 1960s ideal of an open building.22 By the time the residents were evicted in 2014, two years after our film was released, city officials had decided that Torre David had turned into a dystopian symbol of the city’s crime rates, poverty and housing shortage. They offered the residents a typical modernist slum clearance deal: either move to some new social housing blocks 80 km outside the city, or go back to the informal settlements. Most residents took the government’s option, and while they gained free housing, many also lost access to the jobs, schools and social networks that had made Torre David such a potent force for social mobility in the first place. Prior to their eviction, however, we worked with residents to map, draw, photograph, film and write about the tower. We eventually brought a team of building engineers from ETH Zurich into the collaborative process, and developed a new vision of architectural typologies based on the skyscraper-turned-squat that could provide lessons relevant not just to Caracas, but to similarly situated structures around the world. We published these design and engineering proposals along

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with a series of texts on the historical, political and social context of Torre David in a book released in 2012.23 We also presented much of this work in an exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Architecture where, to our surprise, the project won both praise and vociferous critique. We had waded into hotly contested territory and faced a tangible competition of ideological positions about Torre David, none of which seemed to accurately describe the reality that we were observing and documenting. It was with this in mind that we had made a creative decision at the outset of our filming in 2011: the building and its inhabitants could not be reduced to either a symbol of property crime and economic violence, nor of a romantic, proletarian triumph. A restrained cinematic language would be necessary to avoid the semblance of overt polemicisation or objectification. While filming and editing our 21-minute short film on Torre David, we found new metaphors to speak about utopia – in imagining and re-imagining the tower in new and different ways during each of our shooting sessions with its dwellers. Over time, our conception of what is possible in so-called dystopian contexts grew in as many directions as there were people with whom we spoke. The film that resulted from this accumulation thus functioned as an attempt to redress the binary into which the tower was thrown by the Venezuelan government, creating a text that showed neither a utopia, nor a dystopia, but rather a messy collection of experiments in precarious, yet highly innovative living solutions. The finished movie combined a variety of formal techniques, including observational scenes, staged sequences, interviews, archival photo sequences and music-heavy montages. Stylistic considerations were made only after the initial weeks of shooting, and we intentionally withheld a significant amount of historical and political exposition, aiming for the film to cover different communicative territory from the book and exhibitions that we made in tandem (see figures 8.2 and 8.3). This experience encouraged us to seek new methods of depicting complex realities, leading us to work with decentralised narratives. Embodying this effort is our project Gran Horizonte: Around the Day in 80 Worlds, made the following year in 2013. Commissioned by the Coal Mine Photography Gallery in Winterthur, Gran Horizonte was a three-channel, 30-minute film edited from hundreds of hours of video from previous documentary shoots in cities around the world. It is a film that synthesises, rather than isolates, in arriving at a shared, shifting

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Figures 8.2 and 8.3 • Inside Torre David

reality. A text wherein utopia is to be found not in any specific images, but between them, in the dialectical space of juxtapositions, where film-maker and viewer are closest. Ironically, one of the main inspirations for this piece was the genre of city symphonies, of which Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony

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of a Metropolis (DE 1927) is a canonical example. Like our work, Berlin depicts urban dwellers moving, living and working in a bustling metropolis. It is easy to overlay political interpretations on this film, particularly with the historical reading of a city on the verge of massive transformation and enormous geopolitical influence throughout the rest of the century. But keeping such historical perspective in abeyance, one can draw important lessons from this film and the city symphony genre as a whole. Ruttmann claimed not to be operating with the tenets of surrealism in mind, but rather formalistically experimenting with Russian montage theory, musical collaborators and the intermingling of pop-culture tropes. There was no polemical message imparted, and according to accounts of the film’s initial reception, none received. Indeed, this archetype of the city symphony speaks to an audience not activated, but passively revelling in the kinaesthetics of cinema’s medium and the urbanised world that it could represent.24 In contrast, Gran Horizonte is a fundamentally different type of film. It takes people, and specifically people exercising spatial agency, as its primary focus. This emphasis on activity arises from a situationistinspired ethos, the words of Henri Lefebvre echoing in our editing room that we must ‘Change Life! Change Society!’25 The film simultaneously speaks to its audience while denying the assertion of a fixed narrator or character on which to pin a singular editorial voice. The visual torrent of images is at times intense, bombarding the viewer with a dizzying array of geographies, spatial forms, economic conditions and forms of human work and play. The film also shifts between different tempos, slowing down to dwell on beauty, poverty, human faces and material flows. Gran Horizonte is an expansive and open-ended work in which every viewer sees something different – quite literally. The format gave us the unique opportunity to experiment with physical constraints as a means towards dialoguing with viewers: the three screens force viewers to ‘edit’ the piece themselves by virtue of choosing which screen to focus on at any given moment. This formalistic fragmentation mirrors the unfinished urban spaces documented throughout much of the work. It is a piece that resists stable readings or totalising meanings, and refines our new imaginational vocabulary. In the case of Gran Horizonte, the trans-utopian vision is created and re-created with every viewing (see figures 8.4 to 8.6).

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Figures 8.4 to 8.6 • Gran Horizonte

Trans-utopia As our journey towards new modes of imagining utopia continues, we come across kindred approaches and visions. Edward Soja, in describing his conception of a ‘Thirdspace’, brings our attention to ‘an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of spatiality-historicality-sociality’.26 While acknowledging the persistence of duality, Soja also brings polar opposites together in Thirdspace, where everything comes together  … subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history.27 This discursive space allows not only for a new vocabulary of utopian thinking to flourish, but also integrates the utility of immemorial utopian thinking. After all, we do not wish to cancel the ideas of the past,

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but rather non-nostalgically select from and combine them within a new imaginational framework. As Richard Sennett says: ‘Utopias can be cruel, consoling or both at the same time.’28 The world is filled with competing imaginaries and ideals, many of which can manifest themselves with varying degrees of violence or comfort. Our ideas about how to design better cities must always be respectfully tested and modified in local contexts through a dialogical and inclusive process. ‘Think global, act local.’ Think like an activist, film like an anthropologist. Thus, at U-TT, we understand that to operate in this context is to be beholden, to be aware of how the recording and communication of reality can change a city, a neighbourhood, a community, an individual. Images themselves are not inherently moral; they are tools that retain meaning only by virtue of how they are seen, distributed and used. If we accept that architecture is consumed and traded by way of this system of imagery, then it becomes something that architects with social goals can and must utilise. Just as Guy Debord noted more than a halfcentury ago and Fredric Jameson more recently, the image-oriented spectacle of capitalism and aestheticisation of reality is omnipresent.29 To ignore this fact is to be subsumed by it. We can just as simply create images that will help people as ones that harm them. And our ability to do so is increasingly expansive, as Marshall McLuhan’s conception of a global village makes clear, when he prophetically wrote in Understanding Media that we are not just living in a world made small by media, but experiencing ‘a sudden implosion [that] has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree’.30 Our documentary works take such techno-cultural responsibilities seriously. Paradoxically, this concern liberates our thinking and activities, as architects, urban designers and filmmakers, towards a knotty but rich path of investigation. Or, to put it in another way, towards a pursuit of working with collaborators in the construction of utopias perpetually established and re-established. The development of the language of trans-utopia is an attempt to break the dominance of rigid conceptions of reality. Though immemorial utopian thinking will continue to flourish, the paradigmatic shifts of our zeitgeist have created a countercultural space in which anticolonial and truly cosmopolitan attitudes can also grow. As architects and filmmakers, we see it as an opportunity to develop modes of working that connect visions not just from top-down to bottom-up. With the

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language of film, we hope to challenge some of the orthodoxies of our profession and discipline, if not with our own texts and outputs, then by the indirect shifts of imagination and material flows that result from documentary processes. Notes 1. Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack – On Software and Sovereignty (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2016), p. xxvii. 2. Marshall McLuhan, Bruce R. Powers, Claus-Peter Leonhardt and Dieter Baacke, The Global Village. Der Weg der Mediengesellschaft in das 21. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Junfermann, 1995). 3. McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red (New York: Verso, 2016), pp. 217–8. 4. Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017). 5. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 6. Donna Jeanne Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 7. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ [1967], in Neil Leach, Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 330–6. 8. Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, ‘Blade Runner in the Tropics’, lecture given at the Architectural Symposium Pontresina, 12 September 2001; see also Hubertus Adam, ‘Blade Runner in the Tropics’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 18 September 2001, 68. 9. A. O. Scott, ‘In Blade Runner 2049, Hunting Replicants amid Strangeness’, The New York Times, 10 October 2017. 10. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 2014). 11. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991). 12. Rem Koolhaas, ‘Utopia Station’, in Rem Koolhaas and Brendan McGetrick (eds), Content. Triumph of Realization (Cologne: Taschen, 2003), p. 393. 13. Zach Klein, Steven Leckart and Noah Kalina, Cabin Porn (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015). 14. Peter Cook, The City, Seen as a Garden of Ideas (New York: Monacelli Press, 2003).

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15. Darran Anderson, ‘The Prophetic Side of Archigram’, CityLab, 15 November 2017, https://www.citylab.com/design/2017/11/the-prophetic-sideof-archigram/545759/ (accessed 30 August 2018). 16. Wark, Molecular Red, p. 218. 17. Tania Bruguera, ‘Introduction on Useful Art’, Tania Bruguera, 23 April 2011, http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/528-0-Introduction+on+Us eful+Art.htm (accessed 30 August 2018). 18. Robin Patric Clair, Expressions of Ethnography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). 19. Barbara Bruni, ‘Jean Rouch: Cinéma-vérité, Chronicle of a Summer and The Human Pyramid’, Senses of Cinema, 3/19 (2002), http://sensesof cinema.com/2002/feature-articles/rouch/ (accessed 30 August 2018). 20. Roger Ebert, ‘Herzog’s Minnesota Declaration: Defining “Ecstatic Truth”’, Rogerebert.com, 1999, www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/herzogsminnesota-declaration-defining-ecstatic-truth (accessed 30 August 2018). 21. Armando Silva Téllez and Vincent Martin, Urban imaginaries from Latin America, Documenta 11 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2003). 22. John Habraken, The Structure of the Ordinary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 23. Urban-Think Tank and Iwan Baan, Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities (Bade: Lars Müller Publishers, 2017). 24. Keith Beattie, ‘From City Symphony to Global City Film: Documentary Display and the Corporeal’, Screening the Past, 20, 27  November 2006, www.screeningthepast.com/2014/12/from-city-symphony-toglobal-city-film-documentary-display-and-the-corporeal/ (accessed 30 August 2018). 25. Donald Nicholson-Smith, The Production of Space (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), p. 58. 26. Edward Soja, Thirdspace (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), p. 57. 27. Soja, Thirdspace, p. 57. 28. Richard Sennett, at LSE Cities Literary Festival Discussion ‘The Future City: Cruel or Consoling Utopia?’, 27 February 2016. Podcast: http:// www.lse.ac.uk/Events/LiteraryFestival/2016/Saturday-27-February/ The-Future-City (accessed 30 August 2018). 29. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 2010); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 30. McLuhan et al., The Global Village.

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Selected works Beattie, Keith, ‘From City Symphony to Global City Film: Documentary Display and the Corporeal’, Screening the Past, 20, 27 November 2006, www.screeningthepast.com/2014/12/from-city-symphonyto-global-city-film-documentary-display-and-the-corporeal/ (accessed 30 August 2018). Clair, Robin Patric, Expressions of Ethnography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). Cook, Peter, The City, Seen as a Garden of Ideas (New York: Monacelli Press, 2003). Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 2010). Foucault, Michel, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ [1967], in Neil Leach, Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 330–36. Habraken, John, The Structure of the Ordinary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). Jencks, Charles, The Language of Post-modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991). Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 2014). Nicholson-Smith, Donald, The Production of Space (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1991). Schwab, Klaus, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017). Wark, McKenzie, Molecular Red (New York: Verso, 2016).

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9

Post-utopian Interventions by Students: Interactive Documentary and Micro-revolutions Dale Hudson

While classical fiction film has often foregrounded speculation about potential dystopian consequences within utopian aspirations, classical documentary film has often focused on utopian applications of modern science towards efficiency and equality. It has historically used prescriptive and universalising strategies. Model citizens were ‘hailed’, whereas others were ignored in ‘heroic’ nationalist documentaries like Night Mail (D: Harry Watt and Basil Wright, UK, 1936) and The River (D: Pare Lorentz, US, 1937) or ‘heroic’ colonial films like West Africa Calling (P: H. Bruce Woolfe, UK, 1927) and Land of Promise (D: Juda Leman, Mandatory Palestine, 1935). If the European Enlightenment advocated for a highly selective equality (‘universal rights’) whilst enabling imperialism’s vast inequalities and exploitations (‘civilising missions’), then utopian thinking is anchored in its historical context. Indeed, scholars situate Thomas More’s 1516 novel Utopia with imperialism, especially settler colonialism.1 Part of the problem with utopian documentary has been an under-examined faith in analogue technologies to document reality, coupled with limiting theorisations of mediation, including self-reflexive and interventionist modes that prioritise visual and auditory representation. Technologies premised on indexicality might be part of the problem, as much as they can be part of the solution. By acknowledging the cultural biases of modernist and realist modes of representation, post-utopian thinking might begin – not with resolute images but with mixed feelings. Reconsidering media’s relationship to utopia, Arvind Rajagopal argues that ‘utopian thought shaped horizons of expectation’, such that, ‘if critique sought to overturn power, utopias imagined themselves as beyond power’s reach’.2 Potential abuses of power are thus

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structured into utopian thinking. Efforts to redeem utopian thinking distinguish between classical and critical conceptions of utopia. For Tom Moylan, ‘critical utopia is the awareness of the limitations of the utopian tradition’ in order to ‘reject utopia as blueprint while preserving it as dream’.3 He locates this critical stance with counter-movements of the 1960s that challenged ‘the totalizing systems of Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, and the corporate United States’.4 Totalising meaning can be unwittingly reinforced through technologies that reproduce culturally specific ways of seeing. In documentary practice, direct cinema epitomises voyeurism, presenting itself as empathetic, non-judgemental and minimally mediated by indexical technologies, thus distracting audiences from the pro-filmic work of selecting a subject, framing it through a particular representational strategy and so forth.5 Voyeurism’s power begins with the design of the camera lens and conventions for its use – all of which have been theorised as though no alternatives were possible. Having survived fascism in Europe – and not having been adversely affected by European colonialism and imperialism – André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer imagined analogue film’s indexicality capable of redeeming the world. Their assumptions about film’s forms, modes, contents, contexts, purposes and locations were universalised from an incredibly narrow scope of Western, realist, narrative film. They excluded more than they included to position white men like themselves as ‘universal signifiers’ for all human experiences and perspectives. Comparably, documentary’s history is sometimes told as a succession of generations of white men, harnessing cinematographic and sound technologies to reveal social problems and possible solutions. It reads like a classical Hollywood adventure story, starring Robert Flaherty, Dziga Vertov and John Grierson, then Robert Drew, Richard Leacock and Frederick Wiseman, then Jean Rouch, Errol Morris and Michael Moore. Many spoke on behalf of others, rather than alongside them. It is ‘received’ history, as Brian Winston suggests – one based on myths of technical determinism.6 In digital studies, scholars challenge technological determinism by underscoring the ‘unbearable whiteness’ in theorisations of the digital.7 Documentary studies have been slower to understand digital media, focusing disproportionately on images captured by digital cameras programmed to simulate analogue ones. Loosely defined as documentaries that run on web browsers or mobile apps that require

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users to activate particular files, interactive documentaries are sometimes promoted as ‘premised on co-creation, engagement, immersion, gamification, personalization, automation, and discoverability’ without substantive consideration for content or context.8 Pat Aufderheide refocuses scholarship by examining navigation and design in interactive documentaries with a social purpose. ‘Because there is as yet no tradition of or beaten path to these forms’, she finds, ‘They all exist, deliberately, as experiments.’9 Technical determinism, then, is at the forefront of experimenting to avoid technological solutions. Adding a post to utopian evokes a critical distance. It does not negate utopian; instead, it signals a mode of thinking that acknowledges its existence as a historically bound concept and its limitations. Democracy, for example, functions differently in states that define their own borders than in states whose borders were designed by a former coloniser. Post-utopian documentary unsettles some certainties of analogue documentary. Rejecting the potential narcissism of essay films, digital video essays disrupt analogue film’s faith in indexicality and force authorship to recede. Swiss video essayist and theorist Ursula Biemann describes her role as organising complexities and preparing them for analysis rather than merely putting her subjective perspectives on offer to the viewer.10 She exploits digital video’s imperfect images. She does not offer an interpretation as much as she educates on how to develop multiple interpretations – different iterations for different contexts. Comparably, Rita Raley argues that the ‘grand, sweeping revolutionary event’ has ‘removed itself from the street and become nomadic’, engaging in ‘a micropolitics of disruption, intervention, and education’.11 She advocates for tactical media designed for particular audiences rather than an imaginary universal one. If ‘grand revolutions’ are no longer possible – and ‘grand theory’ no longer tenable – then perhaps minor acts of resilience and ingenuity might be contemporary documentary’s most useful lesson. Its approach might adjust more like activist media – that is, more tactically – reshaping itself for ever-changing context and content. Students took to the streets in 1968 to protest abuses of power, but students today adopt other strategies, including uses of digital video and computational technologies to organise, analyse and debate. Jeremy Ho’s Lahore Landing, An Interactive Documentary (SG, 2015) and Nicole Defranc and Katrine Skipper’s The Black Gold – A Web Documentary (EC/DK/NO, 2017) navigate the assumptions and

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concerns of a generation accustomed to transnational flows of capital that undermine the ability of the state to protect its citizens. Both interactive documentaries recognise that the unified problem-solving of the analogue era is insufficient today. The former examines Pakistan, often considered a dystopian ‘failing’ state; the latter looks at Norway, often considered a utopian ‘model’ state. They focus on educating users in critical thinking through digital media: critical thinking that might later be applied to political action. They do not replace onsite activism with online slacktivism. By thinking through digital media, these studentdocumentarians make projects that offer multiple ways to sort and render data into information. Their content and context partly consist in teaching users to think through digital media rather than persuading them what to think.12

Digital post-utopias? Although the Internet was often promoted in radically democratic terms when it was first accessible to non-military users, it is increasingly recognised as unequivocally non-democratic. Early scholarship considered the ‘digital divide’ that left communities without Internet access.13 On maps of a wired world, unwired places were visualised like the ‘dark spots’ on colonial maps in past centuries. Later scholarship examined the ‘racial ravine’ in places with racially inequitable access, notably in public schools in the United States.14 Other non-democratic elements were less visible in much of this early scholarship. The Internet’s design makes it easy for states and corporations to control usage and access.15 The ‘Great Firewall of China’ determines which websites can be accessed inside the People’s Republic of China. Biometric scanning of fingerprints and facial recognition software are calibrated to prefer lighter skin tones.16 These technologies are designed to sustain white and light privilege, allowing ease of mobility to the privileged. Techno-utopian fantasies are increasingly being forgotten by the rising ‘millennial’ or ‘born digital’ generation of mediamakers, who never really knew a world without the Internet. For them, the Internet has almost always been a realm of the uninhibited exhibitionism of selfie culture and the mass surveillance of big data, particularly for those living under authoritarian regimes or foreign occupation.

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Activists and socially engaged documentarians engage the Internet’s post-utopian potential to bring new perspectives and urgencies into public debates. Most are aware of the inherent dangers of making images, testimonies and identifying data available online where this material can be located by repressive authorities or hate groups. Today, even the most socially, economically and politically privileged Internet users are aware that surveillance is structured into protocols that allow connections across the planet. Nominally free services, such as Instagram and Gmail, are ‘paid for’ by personal data that users ‘gift’ to corporations, which then sell data sets to advertising and marketing companies.17 Interaction is surveillance in that every user’s use of web and mobile apps contributes data to their digital profile. Interacting by commenting on YouTube videos or articles posted on Facebook provides data for analysis. More worrisome, clicking on user agreements can transform free trivia games or free filters for profile photos into permission to harvest data from user accounts. Integrating software studies into documentary studies, Craig Hight stresses that code is never neutral but agentive and reflects the biases of its programmers.18 Code reflects and enacts particular ideas about purpose and agenda, much like analogue media’s camera lenses and colour technologies.19 Code can nevertheless be hacked for unintended purposes. The Internet is neither utopian nor dystopian. As scholars have always noted, its democratising potential has no politics. Its protocols discipline relationships between humans and corporations, yet relationships between humans can operate in undisciplined ways. The Internet allows conservative and progressive media to occupy the same media ecosystem, as Patricia Zimmermann notes.20 It is simultaneously radical and reactionary. As such, its utopian potential needs to be frequently contextualised. Brian Winston, Gail Vanstone and Wang Chi characterise innovation driven by technological developments ‘as much, or perhaps more, formal than substantive’, noting that ‘voices are as likely drowned out as amplified’.21 Digital technologies, however, can facilitate different configurations of knowledge, which can in turn produce different definitions of activism. Indeed, Winston et al. describe the ‘hegemony’ of Western documentary practice as dependent upon a ‘scientism of objectivity and the evidential integrity of the photographic image; the eurocentrism of its production modes and exhibition infrastructures; and the patriarchal cast of its dominant tone and narrative voice’ – all of which are ‘potentially deeply undercut by

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the digital’.22 The popularisation of the Internet and mobile devices allows new configurations of post-utopian aspirations within systems of potentially authoritarian control. Basic digital literacy is nonetheless required from users. Much as classical Hollywood prided itself on its invisible style that hid all traces of its modes of production from audiences, so too does digital technology hide its technological operations. The graphical user interface (GUI) of icons in digital editing programmes, for example, does not require any knowledge of how code works; whereas flatbed editing tables did require some basic knowledge of cutting and splicing celluloid. Haptic and kinaesthetic technologies’ interfaces of touch screens and motion detectors seem like magic to many users. Possibilities for educating via such operations of digital media might contribute towards understanding how knowledge is produced. Data visualisation software, for example, allows users to select different criteria and modes of representation to interpret data. Visualised data constitutes the images as an interpretative representation, not as an indexical representation. Unlike analogue media’s relatively limited ability to show images as evidence of social problems or solutions, digital media allows users to manipulate data in different ways, and thus to understand how knowledge is produced by engaging in aspects of this production. Even the simple hyperlink allows the user to conduct further research, supplementing and sometimes contradicting the work of the documentarian. Digital technologies require layers of metadata – code serves as instructions for the rendering of sounds and images – that are invisible to anyone who is digitally illiterate. Digital media can retrospectively focus attention on the invisible power structures in analogue media for anyone illiterate in the chemistry, mathematics and physics that determined how emulsion registered images on film, how lenses bent light to define volumes, textures and colours. Artists, activists and students navigate this power in different ways, ranging from productive to destructive. Depending on perceptions of their own privilege and safety, some disrupt, some hack, some pirate. They work from inside the system rather than attempting to position themselves outside it. Such strategies do not replace occupying the streets, as was evident in the pivotal role of word-of-mouth communication during the Arab Spring of 2011. Activism cannot be reduced to Twitter or Facebook revolutions. Very little took place on social media. Moreover, Egyptians, Tunisians, Syrians, Yemenis and

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Bahrainis were well aware of the potential of social media platforms to facilitate surveillance and abuses of power – something that social media users in North America and Europe are only beginning to recognise. The results of these uprisings, awakenings or revolutions have been debatable, suggesting that grand revolutions might not be viable as an option when global capitalism appears to have infiltrated the planet. Micro-revolutions might be more tactically effective, not for ‘raising awareness’ but for educating micro-audiences to think critically about technologies as other structures of power and discipline. Interactive documentaries can engage digital media’s computational and non-indexical qualities to foreground agency in interpretation via re-combinations of data into different localised iterations of information. They can bring insights from activist and tactical media into documentary practice. They focus on understanding complexities and contingencies rather than indexical representation.

Lahore Landing Exhibited at the prestigious International Festival of Documentary Amsterdam (IDFA) in the Netherlands, Lahore Landing, An Interactive Documentary was Jeremy Ho’s senior project at Nanyang Technological University (NTU).23 The idea emerged when his friend Taahira Ayoob conveyed experiences of underground indie rock concerts and alfresco BBQ nights during an internship in Karachi. Noticing how they contradicted the depiction of Pakistan in international news headlines, Ho, Ayoob and two other NTU students, Jemimah Seow and Andre He, went to Lahore from 26 November 2014 to 23 January 2015. In the middle of their visit, Pakistan made international headlines with the Taliban (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan) attacks in Peshawar (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) on 16  December 2014, killing 148  people, including 132 children. The massacre reinforced perceptions of Pakistan as a ‘failing’ state, yet communities rose to prove otherwise. Lahore Landing explores the aspirations of Pakistanis who refuse to abandon the idea of Pakistan. Their resilience and innovation draw upon Lahore’s cultural diversity and its divisive history. Pakistan is historically entwined with India and Bangladesh, but its conception as a modern state is very different from theirs. ‘Pakistan is, and remains, different because of the ideology that is its raison d’être:

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Figure 9.1 • Home page for Lahore Landing, An Interactive Documentary

Islam and, to a lesser extent, the Urdu language’, explains Tahir Kamran; ‘Pakistan is the first of only two modern states to be created in the name of religion. The second, Israel.’24 Religion is mobilised by both states to permit racism. Pakistan restricts access to the rights of citizenship available to Christian, Ahmedi, Hindu, Sikh and Parsee minorities. Access is also determined by social and economic class. Pakistani history includes military coups and assassination attempts on leaders when rights were limited. From 1978 to 1988, General Muhammad Zia ul Haq ruled Pakistan under a dictatorship that entrenched ethnic and sectarian divisions. Military rule followed again from 1999 to 2008 under General Pervez Musharraf. Taliban violence increased as he aligned with the United States in its military operations in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda. Lahore Landing focuses on the complicated work of training users to notice history and rethink assumptions. The introductory video conveys the concerns of young Lahoris about the possibility of a Pakistani Dream in a world dominated by the American Dream. In Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (US/UK/QA, 2013), Pakistani British actor Riz Ahmed plays Changez Khan, who asks a similar question. Unlike his namesake, Genghis Khan – an embodiment of ‘oriental evil’ in Hollywood and European films as the founder of a Mongol Empire that reached as far westward as the Balkans – Changez comes to the United States, not to conquer it, but to imitate it. He aspires to lose himself in a model minority performance. He does everything that is

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expected of him. He infiltrates the elitist institutions of Ivy League universities and Wall Street corporations. After 9/11, he realises that he can never assimilate into a white supremacist culture. He returns to Lahore, where he teaches at a college. He asks his students to consider why they do not think in terms of a Pakistani Dream that does not involve emigration. Lahore Landing asks similar questions. Users can access Lahore Landing on any laptop, but full-screen format with headphones is suggested as a preferred way for users to immerse themselves in the project. Much like the way sound design and shot composition for theatrically exhibited or broadcast documentaries shape meaning, so too do sound design for headphones and shot composition for a computer screen shape meaning. The documentary also includes text that requires users to scroll, images that can be enlarged and videos that play only when the cursor is placed over them. The design reflects an approach of extended interaction with its subject to chisel away at naive preconceptions. A page titled ‘Lahore for the First Time’ frames this documentary practice: It was my first time in Lahore. Terrorism, instability, unrest – these were words that came to mind when I decided to go to Pakistan. But on the streets of Lahore, I felt safe, calm, and most of all, welcome. I found a world where modernity coexisted with the history of Mughals, Sikhs and British Raj empires. A rich and diverse city, that 5 million people call home. The brief impression evokes reductive foreign impressions. Interactions with Pakistanis opened the young Singaporeans’ thinking to new insights, which are in turn made available to users through the documentary’s web interface – ‘simulacra of our learning process’, as it is described. This practice departs from the self-promotion of ‘white saviour’ documentaries, such as Born into Brothels (D: Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski, US, 2004), which also documents art as an intervention into social inequities and conflicts in contemporary South Asia, though without any historical context. Although made by foreigners, Lahore Landing embraces its interactive potential by inviting Pakistanis to post images and offer statements about why they stay in Pakistan rather than emigrate. It also interfaces with Instagram and other social media platforms.

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Lahore sits inside the Pakistani state of Punjab, which borders the Indian state of Punjab. The two nations are divided by a geopolitical border that resulted from the notorious Radcliffe Line. Independence was undercut by Partition, resulting in sectarian violence, mass displacements, dispossessions and deaths. Previously, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Christians lived together. Many poets and singers, as well as actors and directors, moved to Bombay (today Mumbai) to work in the commercial Hindi film industry. Lahore has been a vibrant hub for trade and the arts for centuries, but Pakistan is often conceived as a ‘failed state’, thus, a threat to ‘global security’. Political scientists argue that concepts of ‘failed’, ‘failing’, ‘fragile’, ‘stressed’ and ‘troubled’ states are ‘largely useless and should be abandoned’.25 Political problems have been articulated in cultural terms. The system is flawed, not the people it purportedly represents. The 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan was followed by the 1971 war for independence of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. Communities that had lived together for centuries were suddenly positioned to think of themselves as enemies. It is against the historical context of cultural riches and divisive politics that Lahore Landing makes its intervention. By foregrounding aspects of Lahore before the mid-1980s, when, as in Karachi and other cities, hipsters and hippies lived alongside Marxists and intellectuals, Lahore Landing cuts through the unconscious biases and market-driven criteria of media, both inside Pakistan and outside, that tend to reduce Pakistan to violence, disorder and poverty. The home page includes the old Lahori saying, ‘He who has not seen Lahore has not seen the world’, over images of mosques and markets, cats and cricket. Like Youssef Chahine’s El Kahera Menawara be Ahlaha/Cairo as Told by Chahine (literally, ‘Cairo illuminated by its people’) (EG/FR, 1991), a short narrative about an Egyptian filmmaker’s impossible task of reducing the complexities of Cairo into a documentary that would translate to French audiences. Lahore Landing also refuses to privilege foreign perspectives, but demands that foreigners do the work of educating themselves. Divided into chapters, users navigate through joyous and tragic events by learning how Lahoris describe them. Scrolling across images reveals a multitude of stories, embedded between traces of former empires, visible in architecture and urban design from the Shalimar Gardens to Badshabi Mosque. These, in turn, intersect with modern life in a postcolonial state, notably educational institutions, such as the prestigious

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Figure 9.2 • Navigation of images and videos in Lahore Landing, An Interactive Documentary

Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and the progressive National College of Arts. By pulling the scroll bar at the bottom of the screen, the page fills with images in different sizes along with simple black outlines of architecture and birds. By hovering the cursor over images, short videos play. They do not open in a separate window, but play within the context of other images. They describe the lives of a rickshaw driver, dhabas (small restaurants, often found on the roadside in Punjab) and a street barber. Users can ‘sample’ videos in a sense, moving freely over them for different intervals. They can make connections and notice discrepancies. Each video has its own soundtrack of ambient sounds, and there is also a separate music track that can be muted or played. The documentary forces the user to think about choices whilst navigating through content and layering meaning. The documentary’s tagline – ‘enter the heart of Pakistan’ – is less about claiming Lahori culture as Pakistani culture than it is about foregrounding community over division. The word ‘heart’ suggests both an organ that allows life and a symbol of love. Clicking on the tagline on the home page opens the documentary’s first video. An image of a street filled with people on foot, bicycles, motorbikes, auto-rickshaws, automobiles and a horse-drawn cart begins to accelerate with them, as though a traffic signal has just turned from red to green. Behind the movement of people and machines are buildings whose elements of Mughal design establish the location. Signage in Urdu and English

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promotes consumer goods. Men wear khadi kurtas or Western-style clothing – or a combination. Some wear helmets to protect their heads in case of accidents; others wrap their faces in scarves to protect their lungs from pollution. The music intensifies as the first voice speaks. ‘What does it mean to be Pakistani?’ asks a male voice, who answers: ‘It means getting up in the morning even though the previous night you went to bed thinking: I can’t take this anymore.’ The second voice is a woman’s. She explains that being Pakistani means ‘staying here and fighting your ass off to make it a better place’. Another male voice explains, ‘I am not a terrorist’, as images of men praying outside a mosque appear, followed by hijabi girls outside a secondary school. He continues: ‘I am not an extremist. I am a progressive liberal.’ As the images move further outside the city, a freestanding McDonald’s restaurant is shown, along with a wedding. ‘We are the change’, conveys one of the voices, as three portraits of the speakers – Mohammad Murtaza, ‘the modern pilgrim’, Dr Taimur Rahman, ‘the revolutionary bard’ and Risham Waseem, ‘the activist kid’ – appear, shot frontally and symmetrically, followed by a montage of other Lahoris in a variety of contexts. Significantly, the texts offer information on how Ho met and developed relationships with them. The interactive documentary invites users to dig deeper into its structure as an archaeology of knowledge. The subjects are aware of how identities are not fixed but contingent. Murtaza speaks of his experiences in Europe and China: ‘When I am abroad, I am more Muslim. When I am abroad, I am more Pakistani.’ Identity is shaped by context and self-awareness, thus shattering the illusions of fixed and essentialised ones. Murtaza created Turr Lahore (literally, ‘tour Lahore’) as an initiative to bring foreign tourists and local Lahoris into the (old) walled city and ‘interacting with all the different ideas that are present in the city and indulging in its rich cultural, religious, ethnic, linguistic diversity’. He self-defines as ‘just an average student’ at LUMS, where Rahman teaches. Inspired by canonical figures in political philosophy and psychology, including Marx, Engels, Kant, Freud, Sartre and Jinnah, he is also inspired by popular musicians, from Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd and Tracy Chapman to Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Habib Jalib. Popular music is a mode of surviving military dictatorships and ‘religious’ fundamentalism until democracy can return. LUMS is ‘people from across the country, from all shades of opinion, and there’s a very strong culture of debate and discourse … one of the

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few places in Pakistan where you can have the security for open discourse’, as Murtaza explains. A film student at the National College of Arts, Waseem wants to make a film on sexual harassment for an NGO, while her teachers want something less political and useful. She looks to the radical theatrical practice of Augusto Boal. Much like Murtaza, Rahman and Waseem navigate the city in their own way, users follow different trajectories through the material. Chapters offer different pathways into understanding Lahore. In ‘Chapter Two: Dream Worlds’, for example, videos include musical performances, classes in a public school and artists carving. Along with still photographs, the videos offer glimpses into a much more complex social context that a time-based documentary could not ordinarily include as b-roll, since they would appear too disruptive of the film’s narrative or argument. Moreover, the text in the centre of this page changes after a few images and videos have been enlarged or played. The glimpses are described as ones into spaces where people ‘were free to learn and be creative’, yet ‘around these spaces were tall barbed wires, security gates, and high concrete walls’. In other words, somewhat utopian ‘dream worlds’ coexist with threatening realities and militarised securities. The following chapter considers Taliban attacks in Peshawar. It is represented in audio testimonies. Despite the distance between Lahore and Peshawar, the attacks affected everyone since they did not target a particular religious or ethnic group. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks as revenge for Pakistan’s Operation Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan, near the border with Afghanistan, that summer. The voices recount where subjects were and what they were doing when they learned of the attack. The next section examines the following day, when Lahoris entered the streets to demonstrate unity. One man holds a sign that reads, ‘the smallest coffins are the heaviest’, suggesting that the violence was incomprehensible – despite statements by the Taliban that schools were targeted because Pakistani military attacks killed its children. Murtaza dismisses domestic and foreign notions that Islam somehow allows terrorism and suggests that Islam, specifically reading the Quran, might help fight it. Rahman understands the attacks on schools because they are the institutions that will make ‘religious extremism’ less possible. Lahore’s five million residents infuse their city with a contagious ‘zinda dilli’ (zest for life) despite the hardships that befall them. The final segment is where Pakistanis can post what makes Pakistan home

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and why they stay. The documentary embodies a kind of transnational millennial ethos of affecting change through interventions on a modest scale in localised iterations. Murtaza, Rahman and Waseem bring advocacy and activism through practices that engage culture and art through tourism, music and film-making. They address gaps in state and local policies: gaps that are evident when looking back to the heroic analogue documentaries of the twentieth century that imagined equality among diverse citizens according to inequitable and unjust systems. These young Pakistanis do not seek to replace ideas of state or nation, nor necessarily to supplement them, but rather to work within them. As Waseem explains in one of the interview sections that needs to be read, ‘You don’t need to change the world, you just need to make it better.’ She collaborates with schoolmates on an anti-terrorism workshop. While it is easy to belittle such non-universalising approaches, they might offer a more viable and sustainable way of addressing many social problems. They are not the same as slacktivist and politically uncommitted approaches. They mobilise resilience and ingenuity that might be more useful than centralised planning based on scientific theories. Waseem focuses on strategies to encourage inclusivity towards minoritised groups; in other words, she focuses on Pakistani society, hoping to challenge any possible appeal of groups like the Taliban. She later expanded to work on citizen journalism in neighbouring Baluchistan, in collaboration with a group of Hazaras, an ethnic (Baluchi) and religious (Shia) minority often persecuted on behalf of a Punjabi Sunni majority that includes most Lahoris. Waseem trains them to make their own media, a minor part of what Imran Rahat describes as a decentralised emergence of activist documentary in Pakistan that demands a ‘cinema of accountability’ in response to a ‘cinema of terror’.26 Her approaches are not the ones that the Pakistani state might take, much like Lahore Landing is not likely a form of documentary that either Pakistan or Singapore (or any other state apart, perhaps, from Australia or Canada) would likely commission. These post-utopian grassroots approaches might achieve what top-down utopian social engineering cannot.

The Black Gold Nicole Defranc and Katrine Skipper’s The Black Gold – A Web Documentary requires users to access content by navigating the project

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and thinking through comparative analysis.27 The documentary presents different narratives: official state, party and NGO ones. It also presents data visualisations and analyses. It allows users to investigate how Norway might continue to maintain its economic wealth based on oil, without sacrificing its environmental future. Like Lahore Landing, it is a collaborative project by students, who are not citizens or permanent residents of the place that they document. Born in Ecuador, Nicole Defranc graduated from the University of Łódź in Poland and was pursuing an MA at Høgskolen i Volda (Volda University College) in Norway, where she met fellow MA student Katrine Skipper, who graduated from VIA University College in Denmark. They navigate cultural differences with each other and with their subject. Like the NTU students, they made their documentary in English. In Singapore and Pakistan, English is both a legacy of a colonial past and part of a postcolonial present and future. In Norway, English is widely taught in schools, since it is considered useful as a so-called global business language and relatively easy to learn. English and Norwegian are both Germanic languages, and English-language film and television are plentiful. Nonetheless, the documentary links to large amounts of information available only in Norwegian. If dystopian fears of the early Internet concerned its predominantly English content, then this English-language documentary foregrounds that the language is hardly universal. More importantly, it challenges assumptions that all Norwegians agree about definitions of the nation – any more than all Pakistanis disagree on such definitions.

Figure 9.3 • Home page for The Black Gold – A Web Documentary

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The Black Gold offers an online platform for users to investigate the history and politics of Norway’s oil industry, which contributed to its wealth, and imagine ways to maintain Norway’s economic stability while safeguarding the environment. Discovered in 1969, oil from the Nordic Sea accounted for 52 per cent of Norway’s exports in 2012. It is the eighth largest oil producer in the world, and third largest natural gas producer. The official story of oil in Norway begins with the state’s reluctance to explore the Norwegian continental shelf, even after the discovery of oil in the North Sea by the Netherlands.28 It was not until 1962 that Phillips Petroleum was licensed to survey for oil. Prime minister and Labour Party (Arbeidarpartiet) leader Einar Gerhardsen declared state sovereignty over oil reserves the following year. In 1985, Statoil was partly privatised. The national oil fund has been valued at 5 billion Norwegian kroner (more than 600 million US dollars or euros), which calculates to more than a million kroner per citizen. Despite what commercial narrative film and television encourage audiences to believe, oil wealth is not confined to media stereotypes of Arabs, Nigerians, Texans and Venezuelans. Despite petroleum producers’ attempts to convince consumers through marketing and promotion, oil extraction does destroy the planet, as do oil refining and use. They are categorically non-ecological. While it might be possible to rationalise the use of oil for emerging economies, it is less easy to make such rationalisations in established ones. For places with relatively progressive social programmes like Norway, oil and gas production can seem compromising to democratic policy. ‘Fossil fuels create both the possibility for modern democracy and its limits’, argues Timothy Mitchell; Democracy is based on a model, an original idea, that can be copied from one place to the next. If it fails, as it seems to in many oil states, the reason must be that some part of the model is missing or malfunctioning.29 He focuses on the threat of US imperial power in the Middle East. Domestic and international politics are entwined, and the United States was not the only imperial power in the Cold War and is not the only one today. In fact, speculations on Norway’s oil industry and its proximity to the centre of the former Soviet empire, Russia, is the focus of the popular television series Okkupert/Occupied (NO/SE, 2015–17; creators:

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Karianne Lund, Jo Nesbø and Erik Skjoldbjærg).30 In the series, the Norwegian prime minister and Green Party leader announces that Norway will cease oil and gas production due to the effects of climate change, triggering a series of events in which politics and environmentalism converge. The Black Gold’s home page offers a timeline of significant dates in the history of Norwegian oil, including the 2000 offering of Statoil stock on the market. It also includes an interview (both audio file and transcript) with Erik Means on Upstream, an online newspaper that describes itself as ‘the global oil and gas news source’. Means explains his position that Norwegian oil production is expensive, especially after the 2008 global recession, when Saudi Arabia refused to inflate prices by limiting production and the United States enhanced its shale extraction. Beneath the interview is a link to the documentary’s Greenpeace page, which includes an interview that Defranc and Skipper conducted with Greenpeace Norge’s Truls Gulowsen, who conveys a very different message. In contrast to Means’s description of oil production in competitive market abstractions – ‘huge leap down’, ‘climb upwards’ – Gulowsen adopts an analytical frame of environmentalism rather than neoliberalism. He argues, for example: ‘new investment in more operations, drilling, platforms, plant infrastructure, is a bet against global warming limitations’. Means and Gulowsen have very different views on environmentally protected areas. The documentary prepares data for analysis. Gulowsen cites the examples of Norway’s neighbours, Denmark and Sweden, which have well-functioning societies without oil. He also notes Norway’s position as a leader in electrical transportation that does not harness this knowledge to develop an eco-friendlier industry. Defranc and Skipper also interviewed Erik Haaland of Statoil, who conveys the company’s goals and aspirations of ending oil dependency and transitioning to renewable energies that protect the environment for future generations. His position moves between the other two. Statoil’s decisions are made in relation to profitability, since the company accounts for a large portion of Norway’s economy, but the company assumes a greater ethical responsibility than most oil companies. In fact, it was ranked number one on the Global 100 Index of the world’s most sustainable energy companies in 2014. Yoking oil and environmentalism firmly places Norway within the realm of the post-utopian. Oil cannot be equated with utopia.

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The documentary makes available the documents of original reports, such as Statoil’s 2015 sustainability report, which users can download and read. In other words, they can conduct their own research, identifying information that might not be highlighted in infographics. In addition to these qualitative modes of analysis, the documentary includes quantitative information in the form of interactive charts and graphs. By looking at investment categories, percentages of renewables in gross electricity generation and consumption, and other factors, the documentary provides a complex analysis that proves useful when considering the environmental policies of two of Norway’s seven ‘mainstream’ political parties: Miljøpartiet de Grønne (MDG or Green Party) and Høyre (Conservative Party). De Grønne won its first parliamentary seat in 2013. Fay Madeleine Farstad argues that other political parties, such as ‘the Socialist Left Party (Sosialistisk Venstreparti) and the Liberal Party (Venstre) have particularly strong issue-ownership of the environment’, but party affiliations among voters has been affected by a ‘rise in electoral volatility and issue-based and individualised voting (with voters less dependent on cues from collectives such as families or unions)’.31 In some regard, Norway suggests a healthier democratic system. The Black Gold links to the official websites of the political parties in order to make additional research into stated positions accessible. Key differences between the parties are flagged in the titles to web pages on environmental policy: Høyre’s ‘Energi og miljø’ (energy and environment) privileges political economics in comparison with De Grønne’s ‘Klima og miljø’ (climate and environment), which privileges environmentalism. Høyre’s energy and environmental positions convey a commitment to preserving the ‘earth’s nature and ecosystems’ as ‘natural resources’ for descendants through energy and climate policy whilst also reducing the ‘consequences of man-made climate change’.32 De Grønne recognises these concerns, but it puts policy on climate change into action in much more concrete ways, with a much more aggressive plan of action that includes ending new exploration of oil and gas and a ‘gradual and planned phasing out of petroleum activities over a 15-year period’ and various taxes.33 It mentions the Paris Climate Agreement, which is ‘not only good for the planet but also good for Norway’. The party claims a special obligation by Norway due to its oil production; moreover, it expresses a commitment to reducing other factors in CO2 emission, such as ‘meat consumption, cement

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production, and deforestation’. The party rejects the framing of nonhuman life as mere natural resources. It aligns itself with ‘green parties around the world’ towards a ‘global community for radical transformation of the economy’. The Black Gold includes a page on Greenpeace, the international environmental organisation that operates in fifty-five countries, including Norway, and on Statoil, the Norwegian-based multinational petroleum company. One aspect of the documentary that is immediately obvious to users is the amount of text on each page. It is not a project that can be consumed in a quick visit, but instead requires a different kind of work from users. It asks them to think through how data is translated into information through visualisations or testimonies. By scrolling down the Greenpeace page, users find an interactive map that indicates countries around the world where Greenpeace operates. Other data visualisations include a pie chart with a breakdown of CO2 emissions by sector in Norwegian society. Users can play interviews. They can also stream Greenpeace videos, such as ‘We Are Taking Arctic Oil to Court’, for a sense of how the media convey different political positions. The video ends with the appeal to be ‘a part of the generation that ends oil’ in reference to the Norwegian constitution’s guarantee of rights to a healthy environment for its citizens and future generations. The national budget for 2017 can be downloaded as a PDF from the documentary website. Indexical photography is virtually absent from this documentary. The Data Analysis page includes data visualisations of various indicators that can be analysed by comparison. The index for the price of oil per barrel on the world market shows a remarkable increase from USD1.63 in 1960 to USD60.40 in 2007 and USD90.41 in 2008, along with a sharp drop by 35 per cent in 2009 as a result of the 2008 bankruptcy of Lehmann Brothers in the United States, as indicated in the notes to the visualisation (see figure 9.4). Other notes also supplement this data with context, such as the increase in US production with ‘new technologies’. Although not specified, these technologies are ‘hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling’, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in North Dakota, Texas and New Mexico.34 They are part of a larger movement in the United States towards ‘energy independence’, conflating ecological devastation with patriotism, thus providing a counterpoint to debates in Norway. US policies are not only environmentally destructive, they are also ethically

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Figure 9.4 • Data visualisations in The Black Gold – A Web Documentary

questionable. Commonly known as ‘fracking’, hydraulic fracturing is also a public health hazard, as described in feature-length documentaries such as Josh Fox’s dystopian Gasland (US, 2010). Gasland marks a very different relationship between documentarian and oil industry than Robert Flaherty’s utopian Louisiana Story (US, 1948), which combined ethnography with marketing – as did his notorious Nanook of the North (US, 1922) made decades earlier. Designed to transport oil from the Bakken shale oil fields in North Dakota, the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) was proposed in 2014. It made headlines during 2016 when indigenous nations in the Standing Rock Indian Reservation protested with allies against the pipeline’s construction on sacred burial grounds, in addition to its destruction of water supplies for agriculture, livestock and human use. The pipeline’s path had actually been moved when white families in the city of Bismarck raised concerns, thus exposing the ongoing colonisation of indigenous lands through dispossession and genocide.35 Norway, by contrast, has moved more towards renewable energies that offer both ‘energy independence’ and more ecologically sustainable resources. Other data visualisations on the documentary’s page reveal, however, that renewable energies account for less than a third of energy use in Norway – and only for a very small fraction of transportation. More than an analogue documentary that conveys information produced by the documentarian’s research, The Black Gold is a platform for users to launch their own research into the ongoing developments

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of the oil and gas industry in Norway. The interactive documentary is a platform for data aggregation. It compiles documents and organises them for analysis. As a progressive northern European state with financial wealth that allows even its conservative party to engage with environmentalism, Norway might serve as a model for other wealthy oil and gas states as they transition to renewables – and also a model for other states pursuing renewable energy industries that have less democratic political systems. The interactive documentary could not be more different from the romantic view of the oil industry in Louisiana Story by Flaherty, who showcased the bayou as ostensibly unaffected. As in a Hollywood adventure film, Flaherty lulled audiences into believing in a self-destructive utopia of petroleum culture, something made all the more apparent after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. By contrast, The Black Gold adopts a more critical stance. It understands democracy not as a utopian goal, but as an aspirational responsibility – moreover, one that requires consideration of current and future generations, including non-human ones.

Revitalising documentary Forms of interactive documentary might propose new ways of documenting that are not bound to faith in an indexical relationship between reality and audiovisual representation. They tap into larger media ecologies, including pre-cinematic forms of documentary (poetry, theatre) and post-cinematic forms (digital video, machinima, interactive media). Thinking through interactive documentaries involves recognising the limited usefulness of terms, including documentary. Trinh T. Minh-Ha famously commented: ‘There is no such thing as documentary – whether the term designates a category of material, a genre, an approach, or a set of techniques.’36 She locates her assertion in ‘the antagonism between names and reality’ that erupted within the crisis of the documentary tradition in the late 1980s. It might be more productive to prioritise political concerns over formal preoccupations, including those concerning the relationship of content to representation. That is, it might be more useful to think about utopian or other political positions across and between the so-called genres, modes and purposes prescribed by past generations with regard to media. Lahore Landing and The Black Gold are

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structured as databases rather than linear narratives like conventional analogue film and television. As I argued some time ago, the database structure of online documentaries – whether interactive, web or some other term – offers an opportunity to rethink assumptions and expectations about documentary as practice. Since digital technologies structure meaning around recombinations and recontextualisations more than linear exposition or recorded observation, a database structure in documentaries offers a ‘potential to challenge the historical legacies that have deployed such technologies as they have intersected with colonialism, racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, class oppression, homophobia, religious fundamentalism and war’.37 Although some critics misunderstood my argument as ‘hyperbolic enthusiasm for the political potential of technology’, they did so by largely ignoring my point about thinking through the properties of digital media to unsettle categories of knowledge: that is, to focus attention on unmarked and unremarked processes of articulating and naturalising such categories within analogue documentary studies.38 Interactive documentaries have limitations. They can be censored by blocking networks more easily than all prints of an analogue documentary can be confiscated and destroyed. Digitality facilitates surveillance and its application in profiling. The epistemological, however, is political in much the same sense that feminism taught us that the personal is political rather than trivial. Patricia Zimmermann and Helen De Michiel propose ‘open space documentary’ to stress issues as irreducible and irresolvable – and to underscore documentary’s responsibility to adopt multiple iterations. They reject the totalising utopia of analogue documentary film to jolt ‘historical explanations away from causality, linearity, and unity’ because they are ‘often linked to hegemonic power that minimizes difference’.39 Such documentaries require users to spend time exploring and comparing. They resist the consumerist model of delivering allegedly unbiased content. They function more like the self-reflexive devices in analogue documentary films and videos of the 1970s and 1980s – and like the long-take analogue and digital documentary films of the 1990s. They recalibrate interactivity from corporate ‘engagement’ into political education in ways that reject the utopian possibility of a universal audience and acknowledge post-utopian demands for a constant re-evaluation and recalibration of approaches. Interactive

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documentaries require physical actions by users, suggesting a potential to make education not just an audiovisual experience, but also a haptic one. They might facilitate epistemological micro-revolutions with students leading the way. Acknowledgements This article benefitted from constructive feedback from Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Jane Banks, Marcy Goldberg, Claudia Peterson, Andrea Reiter, Simon Spiegel and Patricia Zimmermann. Notes 1. Susan Bruce, ‘Utopian Justifications: More’s Utopia, Settler Colonialism, and Contemporary Ecocritical Concerns’, College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, 42/1 (2015), 23–45, 25. In Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), Krishan Kumar argues that ‘the modern utopia that was invented in Europe in the sixteenth century’ cannot be universalised since ‘it appears only in societies with the classical and Christian heritages, that is, only in the West’ (p. 19). Other scholars argue that utopia can be dissociated from Christianity. 2. Arvind Rajagopal, ‘Introduction’, in Arvind Rajagopal and Anupama Rao (eds), Media and Utopia: History, Imagination and Technology (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 1–16, 2. 3. Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), p. 10. 4. Moylan, Demand the Impossible, p. 7. 5. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 32–68. 6. Brian Winston, ‘Introduction: The Documentary Film’, in Brian Winston (ed.), The Documentary Film Book (London: British Film Institute, 2015), pp. 1–29, 2. 7. Tara McPherson, ‘Self, Other, and Electronic Media’, in Dan Harries (ed.), The New Media Book (London: British Film Institute, 2002), pp. 183–94. 8. Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi and Mandy Rose, ‘Introduction’, in Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose (eds), i-docs: The Evolving Practice of Interactive Documentary (London: Wallflower, 2017), pp. 1–3. 9. Pat Aufderheide, ‘Interactive Documentaries: Navigation and Design’, Journal of Film and Video, 67/3–4 (2015), 69–78, 77. 10. Ursula Biemann, Stuff It: The Video Essay in the Digital Age (Zürich: Edition Voldemeer, 2003).

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11. Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 1. 12. I develop these ideas from Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann, Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 13. Pippa Norris, Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 14. Jonathan Sterne, ‘The Computer Race Goes to Class: How Computers in Schools Helped Shape the Racial Topography of the Internet’, in Beth Kolko, Lisa Nakamura and Gilbert Rodman (eds), Race in Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 191–212. 15. Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004); Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 16. Kelly A. Gates, Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Shoshana Amielle Magnet, When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 17. Mark Andrejevic, iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2007). 18. Craig Hight, ‘Software as co-creator in interactive documentary’, in Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi and Mandy Rose (eds), i-docs: The Evolving Practice of Interactive Documentary (London: Wallflower, 2017), pp. 82–96. 19. Martin Jay, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), pp. 3–23, 10; Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (1994; New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 186. 20. Patricia R. Zimmermann, States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 21. Brian Winston, Gail Vanstone and Wang Chi, The Act of Documenting: Documentary Film in the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 7. 22. Winston et al., The Act of Documenting, pp. 8–9. 23. https://vimeo.com/lahorelanding (accessed 15  September 2015), http://www.lahorelanding.com (accessed 15 September 2015). 24. Tahir Kamran, ‘Pakistan: A Failed State? Seventy Years on from its Creation, Crisis-ridden Pakistan is a Very Different Country from the One

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25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

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Envisioned by its Founder, Muhammad Ali Jinna’, History Today, 67/9 (2017), 26–35, 26. Charles Call, as cited in Natasha Ezrow and Erica Frantz, ‘Revisiting the Concept of the Failed State: Bringing the State Back In’, Third World Quarterly, 34/8 (2013), 1323–38, 1324. Imran Rahat, Activist Documentary Film in Pakistan: The Emergence of a Cinema of Accountability (New York: Routledge, 2016), p. xvi. http://theblackgoldwebdoc.weebly.com/home.html (accessed 21 January 2017). ‘Norway’s Oil History in 5 Minutes’, Government.no (updated: 9 October 2013), https://www.regjeringen.no/en/topics/energy/oil-and-gas/norwaysoil-history-in-5-minutes/id440538/ (accessed 25 September 2018). Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011), pp. 1–2. I thank Nilanjana Bhattacharjya for introducing me to this series. Fay Madeleine Farstad, ‘The Norwegian Greens: Coming in from the Cold?’, Environmental Politics, 23/6 (2014), 1096–100, 1096. ‘Energi og miljø’, Høyre official website, https://hoyre.no/politikk/ temaer/energi-og-miljo/ (accessed 27 September 2018). In-text citations are translated from Norwegian. ‘Klima og miljø’, Miljøpartiet de Grønne official website, https://mdg. no/politikk/politikk-fra-a-a/klima-og-miljo/ (accessed 27 September 2018). In-text citations are translated from Norwegian. Tom Doggett (principal contributor), ‘U.S. Oil Production Growth in 2014 was Largest in More Than 100 Years’, U.S. Energy Information Administration (updated 30 March 2015), https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20572 (accessed 25 September 2018). For an annotated map of the pipeline’s various routes, see Gregor Aisch and K. K. Rebecca Lai, ‘The Conflicts Along 1,172 Miles of the Dakota Access Pipeline’, The New York Times (20 March 2017), https://www. nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/23/us/dakota-access-pipelineprotest-map.html (accessed 25 September 2018). Trinh T. Minh-Ha, ‘Documentary Is/Not a Name’, October, 52 (1990), 76–98, 76. Dale Hudson, ‘Undisclosed Recipients: Database Documentaries and the Internet’, an essay in dialogue with Sharon Lin Tay, ‘Undisclosed Recipients: Documentary in an Era of Digital Convergence’, Studies in Documentary Film, 2/1 (2008), 79–98.

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38. In ‘“This Great Mapping of Ourselves”: New Documentary Forms Online’, in The Documentary Film Book, Jon Dovey and Mandy Rose characterised my arguments about ‘polyvocality and relationality’ as such (pp. 366–75, 369). I had meant to be more suggestive than prescriptive in my use of the word ‘potential’. While I agree my argument might seem too enthusiastic in proposing a potential challenge, it is for reasons that they do not mention, namely the built-in prejudices of technology. Databases are tools of power. 39. Patricia R. Zimmermann and Helen De Michiel, Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2018), p. 59.

Selected works Aston, Judith, Gaudenzi, Sandra and Mandy Rose (eds), i-docs: The Evolving Practice of Interactive Documentary (London: Wallflower, 2017). Aufderheide, Pat, ‘Interactive Documentaries: Navigation and Design’, Journal of Film and Video, 67/3–4 (2015), 69–78. Biemann, Ursula, Stuff It: The Video Essay in the Digital Age (Zürich: Edition Voldemeer, 2003). Galloway, Alexander R., Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004). Gates, Kelly A., Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance (New York: New York University Press, 2011). Hudson, Dale and Patricia R. Zimmermann, Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Magnet, Shoshana Amielle, When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). Minh-Ha, Trinh T., ‘Documentary Is/Not a Name’, October, 52 (1990), 76–98. Moylan, Tom, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014). Rahat, Imran, Activist Documentary Film in Pakistan: The Emergence of a Cinema of Accountability (New York: Routledge, 2016). Rajagopal, Arvind, ‘Introduction’, in Arvind Rajagopal and Anupama Rao (eds), Media and Utopia: History, Imagination and Technology (New York: Routledge, 2016).

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Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (1994; New York: Routledge, 2014). Winston, Brian, Gail Vanstone and Wang Chi, The Act of Documenting: Documentary Film in the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Zimmermann, Patricia R. and Helen De Michiel, Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2018).

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Documentary Dreams of Activism and the Arab Spring Jane M. Gaines

Twenty-first-century political movements arrived dreaming dreams of network-assisted activism, of miracles of connection attached to hopes for change. As in the century before, technological expectations have been high. Movement organisers anticipate the boost that the technologically new will give to events on the ground. So my title references the ‘hopes and dreams’ of those engaged in protest or outright revolt against state violence and repression. In some camps there is reticence to use of the term ‘revolution’. Some try out the term for the first time; others ask, after the ‘fall of communism’: ‘Can we even speak of revolutionary consciousness today?’1 And what do we mean by the term ‘utopian’ today, especially in alliance with the ‘revolutionary’? The term ‘utopian’ does not appear in my title, an intentional circumvention of contemporary ‘techno-utopianism’. Here I ask how to keep alive theories of the transformative powers of recording machines, that legacy of twentieth-century activists who lugged cameras to sites of labour strife and hauled projection equipment to workers’ meetings. Think perhaps of the early reception of motion pictures as what Ernst Bloch called an ‘incomparable mimic power’.2 Recall as well that for Bloch, hope meant an ‘exact emotion … capable of sharpening’, and even a remarkably ‘militant emotion’.3 Now add to the militancy of hope the transformative powers of the documentary camera. Edgar Morin gets at this power in an offhand remark that ‘it is perhaps in documentaries that cinema utilizes its gifts to the maximum and manifests its most profound “‘magical powers”’. But documentary as magical? Morin’s fascination with the ‘magical’, as we know, is rooted in the anthropological. Yet to associate ‘magic’ with legendary documentary makers Dziga Vertov and Joris Ivens seems strange.4 Why? Because documentary, with its emphasis on rationality and truth-telling, is considered the antithesis of dreams and magic.

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Morin’s ‘magical’ reference, however, encapsulates a legacy: the almost-beyond-belief powers of twentieth-century recording technologies, powers not only to ‘bring to life’, but to ‘bring about’ social upheaval. Here, thinking of the Soviet experiments, is the social engine tied to the strategy that deploys the technological magnification and dissemination of protest images in hopes of achieving, but also maintaining, miraculous change. But we should add a caveat to the magnification thesis and that is this: motion-photographic technologies held this promise especially at their inception.5 That is, they promised the most when they were relatively new, before they were tested, and before cameras and screenings became integral to labour struggles. This legacy of documentary as political weapon is often traced to Borinage (Misère au Borinage, D: Joris Ivens and Henri Storck, BE 1933), the portrayal of labour strife in the poor Belgian mining region.6 However, a broader view reveals the documentary’s Russian revolutionary credentials. That view includes the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe or the Workers’ International Relief (WIR), the umbrella organisation that links Joris Ivens with other WIR-sponsored groups worldwide in Berlin, London and Paris, including the Workers Film and Photo League, which operated from 1930 to 1935 in New York City. The film and photo leaguers are known for having shot footage of hunger marches, and my point of contrast is the nearly forgotten Bonus March (US 1932). This June 1932 document of the First World War veterans’ march on Washington DC is contrasted with the twenty-first-century Arab Spring, my centrepiece. Yet so much is not the same. The January 2011 Arab Spring uprising in Cairo’s Tahrir Square previews pressing theoretical problems that we face in documentary studies: issues circling around access, ‘real time’, delivery, data collection, evidentiary proof and surveillance. Then there is a feature quite unanticipated to which I will finally turn: the future of ‘the revolution’ kept alive online with images and testimony. First, as I said, the ‘dream’ in my title is meant to loosely encompass the utopianism associated with the technologically new. But the earlier utopianism aligned with socialism, although there in the 1920s and 1930s, has been downplayed in current documentary film and media theory. Accordingly, utopianism has not been explicit in documentary theory allied with leftist causes but rather quietly implied in the term ‘change’.7 Recent theory has focused on people’s struggles relative to real historical events, while acknowledging a theoretical conundrum,

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which is this: there may be a so-called ‘reality’ of the world before the camera, but the image of that world offers no ‘guaranteed’ access to events as they unfold. The image offers no ‘guarantee’ of correspondence with events, no ‘proof = truth’. Yet the ‘truth’ equation is harnessed to the politics of social change and upheaval, since both political activism and the documentary mode claim a special relation to the historical world. The Arab Spring complicates the old correspondence question relative to access to ‘the real’ as event and world-before-thecamera. For Internet activism in 2011 posed the question of two worlds – the ‘real’ and the so-called ‘virtual’ one.8 Many in the Middle East worried that the Tahrir Square momentum had been taken to be only an Internet phenomenon, addressed by one Egyptian artist in a painting inscribed, ‘This is a street, and this is Facebook and not a street.’9 Or, as we learn from Asaad Al-Saleh, participation in this ‘revolution’ could not be tied to only one type of technology, since Egyptians were also watching television, and Al Jazeera’s round-the-clock broadcast was as important as Facebook in organising ‘opposition events’.10 We would not, however, want to make the argument that the ‘real’ struggle took place in the street and that online organising was, in contrast, not exactly ‘real’. Yet the ‘two worlds’ metaphor persisted in the English-language literature of that moment. Why? For one thing, consider the ideological function of the idea of ‘two worlds’ as it encouraged an idea of ‘two revolutions’. If, following Western media, there were ‘two revolutions’, Egyptians would be constantly called upon to choose between the two; in effect, they would have to reject the technological boost at the same time that they credited it. They would need to invest in a kind of technological hope fostered by social media use while remaining sceptics. We should be suspicious, since an idea of ‘two worlds’ enabled the West to claim the Arab Spring at first as a ‘social media revolution’.11 Focus on the Arab Spring as ‘taking place’ on social media downplayed the very street activism that the new communications technologies were documenting in ‘real time’. In retrospect, however, the ambiguity of the ‘two revolutions’, either separate or the one enabling the other, may have helped to keep a dream alive. Unlocatability helps both the idea that the ‘revolution’ is not over and the position that there never had been one in the first place.12 Arguing that the ‘revolution’ is ‘not over’, Egyptian journalist Hadeer Elmahdawy even describes how after the Arab Spring, a ‘culture of protest’ spread through the region and even on to Europe and the US.13

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Two media activist moments eighty years apart The revolutionary bona fides of the US Workers Film and Photo League are not in dispute. As a chapter of the Workers’ International Relief (WIR), they were part of the Communist International’s cultural movement.14 Although the Bonus March on Washington DC was not directly communist-led, it provided a chance for communists to recruit among the Workers Ex-Servicemen’s League.15 Unemployed First World War servicemen and their families marched to urge payment of the bonus for which Congress had voted. By June 1932, 20,000 were encamped and intractable. The US cavalry pushed the veterans out using tear gas, starting fires that burned the camp. I would like to stress two aspects of this shoot: camera style and the political participation of the filmmakers. Bonus March cameraman Sam Brody later recalled how he and Leo Seltzer liked to work with small hand cameras that allowed ‘unrestricted mobility’, a flexibility that helped them to show the ‘fiendish brutality of the police towards the marchers’.16 Further, they ‘shot the march not as “disinterested” news-gatherers but as … participants in the march itself’.17 Film historian Russell Campbell has credited the style of shooting, speculating that while today we might be ‘immune to cinéma vérité, at the time, images of clashes in the street, shot ‘handheld’ at ‘close-range’, as he says, ‘must have struck spectators with great novelty and force’.18 In the Arab Spring case, the question of ‘novelty’ and ‘force’ may pertain more to social media ‘immediacy’ in which activists sent and posted to one another online than to the imagery of police beating protesters in Tahrir Square. Yet, video footage of Egyptians, bloodied but persistent, gathering and throwing rocks at military blockades, has come not only to define that moment but to effectively produce the uprising as ongoing. A case in point is the website ‘Join 18 Days in Egypt in documenting Egypt’s ongoing revolution’, which invites participants to upload videos, photos or tweets to the site.19 Thus, to the phenomenon of ‘immediacy’ we would add that of ever-availability. Similar riot footage was also part of the more traditional documentary Tahrir: Liberation Square (D: Stefano Savona, FR 2014). Assembled from what footage Savona was able to grab with the digital camera that he happened to have, Tahrir is marked by its on-the-ground point of view, its ‘immediacy’ revived at every screening. This argument follows Elizabeth Cowie’s theory of documentary as re-enactment. If, as she

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says, documentary is by definition a re-enactment of events, then the crucial eighteen days may be enacted again and again, online as well as at public screenings.20 Of course, protest footage is not so novel to viewers in the West – either in content or in form. We watch it quite oblivious to the miseries that lead ordinary people to confront the military or the police. The shaky, hand-held cinéma vérité style, now completely conventionalised, and signifying ‘trouble’ more than ‘struggle’, is the draw. Indeed, images of police action against protesters is so ubiquitous that this kind of footage functions as ‘riot porn’ for Internet watchers, as Chuck Kleinhans tells us.21 Watching from the West, ‘our’ relation to this footage is one thing; Egyptians’ relation to Tahrir Square protest imagery from January 2011, then and even some years later, is quite another.22 Let us not forget the other relevant point of comparison between the scene of Bonus March from 1932 and the January 2011 Tahrir Square footage: deteriorating social conditions in desperate times. We know that it was Depression-era unemployment that led First World War veterans to bring their hungry families with them to Washington DC, to demand their bonus pay. In 2011, Egyptian unemployment was at 30 per cent and a large number of citizens were living in abject poverty.23 This is the background to the footage of protesters attacked by state military with tanks and tear gas in the capital city, that footage itself deployed as a weapon against the government. Add to this deployment the new technological claims of mobility, spontaneity and response. But again, in what sense do we want to claim ‘revolution’ and ‘revolutionary’ for either historical moments or technologies?

Theories of history and revolution I began by registering uncertainty about the term ‘revolution’ as applied to the Arab Spring political moment, although many in the Middle East used the term at the time and continue to use it. Today there may be somewhat less ambiguity as to which ‘revolution’ – the political or the technological – especially if some in the Middle East reject the claim that the Arab Spring was only a social media phenomenon. Yet, in the spirit of this inquiry into the connection between documentary and hopes for social change, in raising questions about the term ‘revolution’, we cannot deny the uses of the newest imaging technologies to

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claim, to stir and to recruit. But given the especially loose recourse to the term ‘revolution’ in the Middle Eastern case, let us pause to consider which theoretical and historical standard we might use as a gauge. Thus, to bring Marx’s utopianism into the equation, remember how he saw convulsive events as linked to ‘the permanence of the revolution’, such upheaval tied to futurity and expectation.24 Thinking the ‘whole of history’ – past, present and future – together, Marx expected the social revolution to create its solution out of the ‘anticipation of the future’. For our times, however, the hopeful interpretation of Marx’s ‘permanence of the revolution’ is Jacques Rancière’s. For in Rancière, although the revolution never seems to arrive, it is always expected. As he says: ‘The analysis of class struggle that was Marx’s paradoxical glory is rather the theatrical distribution of the shapes that may be taken by the conjunction of the not yet and the one more time.’ Of the elusive present Rancière says: ‘It must thus be regained over the past and the future, established by the incessant critique of the past that repeats itself out of season and of the unduly anticipated future.’25 But even this exercise in political theory should give us pause. For of what help is European political thought? So let’s try another angle on events in the Middle East.

‘That Google guy’: Wael Ghonim The question of whether this was or was not a ‘revolution’ converges both outside in the West and inside in the educated Egyptian community in the figure of Wael Ghonim. The head of Middle East marketing for Google, Ghonim was a key point of entry for the West. Even President Obama referred to him as the ‘Google guy’, betting on him in the outcome of Egypt’s fate.26 Ghonim’s memoir, Revolution 2.0, follows his transition from a cautious Egyptian living in Dubai to a highly invested activist whose radicalisation appears as the product of online connection with others whom he has never met. He writes that his political transformation at the keyboard came when: I found myself unable to resist the word revolution. Although it took no more than a few keyboard strikes and a single mouseclick to change the event’s name to ‘January 25: Revolution Against Torture, Poverty, Corruption, and Unemployment,’ my mindset changed drastically immediately after I did so.27

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Ghonim, our reluctant revolutionary, is quite alone and obsessed with the need to conceal his online identity. He finally takes off ‘personal days’ from work and returns to Egypt before the 25 January 2011 mass protest that he called for on the Facebook page that he administered. Ghonim navigates the system with technological savvy, protecting his anonymity with proxies and strategically swapping passwords, but his perplexing account of events resists explanation by means of established leftist wisdom. Here is a Google employee who ‘played hooky’ from work in a gamble to jumpstart a national uprising. This he began as early as 8 June 2010, with the Facebook page ‘Kullena Khaled Said’ (‘We Are All Khaled Said’), mounting a protest on behalf of the 28-year-old Egyptian tortured to death in Alexandria by state police, his jaw broken and his face bloodied. Eight months later, Ghonim called for the Tahrir Square protest. On the night before 25 January 2011, he uploaded to Google Docs the question ‘Why Protest?’ The answer: 48 million poor citizens, 12 million with no shelter; Egypt’s ranking on the Corruption Perceptions Index – 115 of 139 – as well as the highest rate of newborn deaths in the world, the number of anaemic children, citizens infected with hepatitis C, and deaths from cancer due to water pollution.28 Clearly, we are challenged to locate Wael Ghonim. Is he or is he not the ‘e-mobilisation’ organiser of the future?29 Still ‘wearing his Google hat’, as he says, he believes that they could ‘make the leap from the virtual world to the real one’, insisting: ‘It was going to happen someday, somehow.’30 But what exactly does he mean would happen some day: the ‘leap’ from the ‘virtual’ to the ‘real’ world or the mass revolt? Is the one ‘revolution’ contingent upon the other for him? Or is one of the two ‘revolutions’ more important? In an American television interview after the Tahrir Square protests he repeated: ‘This is not an Internet revolution. It would have happened anyway.’31 So with Ghonim, our ‘two worlds’ question comes back. Is ‘the revolutionary’ in the potentialities of new technological instantaneity and networked connection, or in the moment of fomenting political change? Do we want to argue for two ‘revolutions’? And following from the ‘two worlds’ metaphor is the inevitable issue of the relocation of the action, that fresh question for documentary theories of activism.32 What is it that has historically changed about social change media? We might better ask how theories of new media have been changing, because ever-newer media require constant theoretical updating by newer media theory.33 Constant

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updating, however, does not necessarily guarantee that this theory will not lapse into common-sense wisdom or that it will not rely on media industry buzzwords and concepts, such as ‘connectivity’ or ‘two worlds at once’.34

Real world/virtual world Mark B. N. Hansen sees twenty-first-century media as undergoing a ‘microcomputational revolution’, a ‘machine-machine as well as a people-people connection’.35 But for Hansen, the transformational shift is perceptual. Since so much online is ‘modulated’ under or ‘beneath’ human sensibility, what is effected, he thinks, is a massive ‘disenfranchisement of perception’. Eerily, the ‘disenfranchisement of perception’ describes Wael Ghonim, our Egyptian avatar. Sitting at his computer in Dubai, he is not exactly in control of events, and as an online activist he is in a perceptual bind. As Hansen says, ‘we simply cannot have direct operational or “real-time” access to the data milieus of cultural products.’ However, we find ourselves faced with the imperative to respond – to take deliberate action and to make conscious decisions – in situations where deliberation is no longer the relevant mode of response and where consciousness is no longer the relevant level of experience.36 The online activity Ghonim describes in Revolution 2.0 is agonisingly slow-moving. As he describes it, it is almost as though that activity is taking place underwater and, although he tries, he can never rise to the surface to make a perceptual assessment of the situation. He cannot assess, yet he must always act fast, must take ‘deliberate action’ – although deliberation based on full knowledge of the situation is impossible. He is frantic and sleepless, constantly updating his page, worrying that he cannot keep his online anonymity and panicking when he accidentally forgets to use his proxy. Facebook temporarily shuts him down, increasing his paranoia that he will be discovered. But let us take a minute to remind ourselves of what Facebook wants Wael Ghonim to do. Of course, Facebook wants him to ‘be counted’, although he is also using Facebook to ‘count’ potential protesters. And

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yet, he counts and recounts to no avail. With no ‘real-time’ access to either data milieus or events, his announcement of a 25 January protest event is a gamble. Although Ghonim’s sites had 500,000 followers and 27,000 had confirmed attendance, these numbers were no guarantee that people would actually show up.37 As we now know, however, Egyptian citizens did show up in numbers estimated in the millions, not only in Cairo, but also in Alexandria, making Ghonim’s efforts an organising feat. Wael Ghonim’s case then would seem to confirm another ‘two revolutions’ interpretation, in which the one could not have happened without the other, and thus encourages a worldwide tendency towards utopian investment in social media. And yet, Ghonim’s case also cautions us about the future of online activism, given the hidden powers of state surveillance and corporate data collection.38 Two days after the 25 January surprise turnout, the worst happened to Ghonim. On 27 January 2011, Egyptian state security picked him up in the street and imprisoned him for twelve days, most of which he spent in solitary confinement. Revolution 2.0 is then rather oddly the memoir of an activist who was imprisoned for twelve days of the eighteen-day revolt that he had ignited. During the crucial days when millions crowded Cairo streets, Ghonim is held in isolation, blindfolded. That is, he is both perceptually handicapped and unable to act in the most literal sense, exemplifying Hansen’s theory. Ghonim, imprisoned, has been perceptually ‘cut off’, first in one and now the other world, literalising our theoretical problem. But Hansen’s theorisation of the ‘inscrutability’ of microprocesses describes not only our avatar’s experience, but that of the Egyptian Internet monitors themselves. With all of their resources, they did not know that in arresting Ghonim, they had actually caught the instigator himself. The two-sided ‘inscrutability’ or unreadability of processes is thus dramatised: neither side is able to accurately assess the other. Online activists guessed and hoped, and Egyptian state power, unable to access, first allowed Internet activity and then abruptly cut off all communications. Here was the famous shutdown that backfired on Mubarak state security, driving thousands more into the street on 28 January 2011.39 State security with all of its capacity to monitor, even to access the e-mails of other activists through his computer if Ghonim was tortured, was, paradoxically, as cut off as Ghonim himself, unable as they were to perceptually access online activity. How, then, do we locate the action? For Hansen, ‘The real action’, is not ‘elsewhere’ but always

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‘elsewhen’. It occurs ‘in the microtemporal, and massively researched, details of our sensory-material solicitation’.40 Or, Facebook wants us to aggregate, not congregate. Another source of insight into the online ‘world’ of Facebook/ Google is the US think-tank point of view on the Arab Spring. In the 2012 report published in Peaceworks, the organ of the US governmentsupported Institute of Peace (USIP), political scientists concluded that the Arab Spring media ‘revolution’ was not a new media phenomenon inside the region. Tabulating the amount of information ‘consumed’ via social media and comparing total clicks in the context of four 2011 protests – Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Bahrain – US political science researchers concluded that more information was spread outside the Arab world than inside. The study notes that the high volume of information around the Tahrir Square moment in Cairo on 25 January 2011 circulated as #jan25.41 But researchers found that Twitter could not be conclusively linked to the action because the percentage of users inside the region was just too small.42 In other words, US governmentsponsored researchers did not find the data on media usage that they had hoped to find. The authors of the Peaceworks report confirm what we should have suspected all along: that beginning in January 201l, it was the enormity of outside audiences following real-time YouTube video on Facebook pages and Twitter feeds that gave rise to the idea of new media activism picked up by Western media reporters.43 In other words, there was no new media revolution in Tunisia or Egypt or Libya or Bahrain because social media use did not spike inside the region. Peaceworks concludes that the Arab Spring media ‘revolution’ wasn’t ‘real’ or ‘didn’t really happen’ because the empirical data did not confirm it. But note the ideological recruitment of data: the Middle Eastern ‘revolution’ was a ‘revolution’ only if it delivered the victory to Western social media.44 The Peaceworks report has yet another, quite different, significance for us, the second building on the first. To the issue of how much data let us add the function of data as empirical evidence. The report urges that ‘Claims about the causal role of new media, no matter how intuitively plausible, need to be supported with compelling empirical data.’45 Peaceworks thus confirms the corporate prerequisites for a ‘data revolution’.46 As we are increasingly aware, the Facebook/Google economic model is based on the accumulation of user data, and this should tip us off to something else.47 Where persons ‘count’ for Western

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policy is at the computational infrastructural level. Peaceworks researchers discounted the Arab Spring as a ‘revolution’ because it did not deliver enough data for policy decisions to be made by extrapolating from the totals. Users in Middle Eastern nations in turmoil did not generate enough clicks for political scientists to plug into empirical models designed for democratic election prediction.48 And yet, in so many later testimonies, young Egyptians associate their participation with YouTube videos and Facebook pages.49 Western political scientists’ empirical data ‘count’, in contrast, was used to ‘discount’ the way that networked communications had been effectively seized and used to disseminate documentary video in the region as evidence of state violence.

The critique of realism and the crisis of historicism I began by saying that documentary needs to shore up a theory of technological hope – by which I mean the ‘hopes and dreams’ of activists on behalf of a future transformed. This is implied by the capacity of the technological, ‘as never before’, that arrives wrapped in expectations of social transformation, as Arab Spring online activists attest. But there is another directional pull that we must acknowledge. Let us call it new ‘technological representations of reality’, easily attached to a representationalism that has been part of the documentary legacy, but a legacy taken to task by the ‘critique of realism’, beginning in the 1970s.50 A discredited representationalism returns today, although we might not recognise it, invested now in another kind of empiricism: the promise that data will provide a more total picture and a more reliable store of knowledge. Here, we face again that problem of historical knowing that pre-dates twentieth-century documentary activism. And here is how. Traditional history is implicated in the investment in ‘really knowing’, whether knowing by means of recording, or now by counting and collecting. Relevant here is how the fate of documentary film was held in balance for a time in the 1970s as a consequence of philosophical debates about representational realism. Although in 1970s film theory circles, these debates were distilled into a ‘critique of realism’, their larger context involves issues that transformed the European academy after the Second World War. In raising the question as ‘theories’ of history, I am using a form of shorthand that aligns

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me with a long list of sceptics who have attacked the representations of traditional historiography, that method that adheres to a ‘correspondence theory of truth’.51 By this I mean the old idea of faithful representation that at times has been so dangerously close to the rationale for documentary work. It is the familiar idea that the ideal documentarian, the empirical historian, can definitively know as well as bring back ‘the past’, an approach summarised in Leopold von Ranke’s eighteenth-century phrase, ‘as it really was’.52 More important for us, however, is the over-reaction to the Rankian historicists, the extreme reaction that came to be known as anti-historicism. And it would be this anti-historicism that, as carried over into the ‘critique of realism’, decreed that a documentary stance towards the real world could never be used to revolutionary ends, complicit as its world view was in the ideology of the visible or ‘what you see is what you get’.

1917 Now, thinking of Marx’s concept of the ‘whole of history’ – in which the future is extrapolated from the past – I want to end with a key year. In the spirit of the Rancièrian ‘incessant critique of the past’, both the future ‘not yet’ and the revolving ‘one more time’, let me return to the date bolded as the title to the prologue montage sequence from Bonus March: 1917. That title is followed by an Eisensteinian montage of First World War trenches and dead lying on the battlefield.53 Let us say that the year 1917 reminds us of the human desecration that was the First World War.54 How could these millions of casualties not disturb a world view? Not surprisingly, on the occasion of the centennial, some are calling the First World War ‘holocaustal’ in the scope of human toll. Yes, the one hundred years in retrospect link the First World War and the 1917 Soviet Revolution but also mark the very end of the upbeat ‘historical narrative of progress and optimism’, the European trajectory before 1914. To quote historian Charles Bambach, ‘faith in both the meaning and coherence of history had been shattered’, contributing to, although not completely accounting for historicism’s ‘crisis’.55 If we grant that the ‘crisis of historicism’ was more than just a reaction to historical events, we can still grasp the import of massive philosophical disillusionment. If nothing else, this links the German anti-historicists, Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, to the French Louis Althusser,

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Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, three post-structuralists aligned with anti-historicism. Similarly situated, the 1970s film theory that rejected all realisms including documentary begins to look different when we think the ‘critique of realism’ from this other vantage: as a rejection of the discipline of history as it purports to be an empirical science. But that is not quite all of it. Fredric Jameson, revisiting German philosophy, thinks that one way of reconsidering Martin Heidegger’s elaboration of ‘representation’ is to see that ‘the real’ performs another function: ‘nothing less’, Jameson says, than the ‘construction of certainty’. The ‘certain construction of the real’, he continues, does not yield ‘the real’, and, after all, the ‘critique of realism’ has already pointed out the ideological underpinnings of evidentiary claims.56 So it is not ‘the real’, really, but a ‘certainty’ that we still should be wary of, wherever we find it: whether in big data collection, or empirical historiography or documentary ‘proof = truth’; and wherever we find the promise of a certainty-to-end-all-uncertainties. So do we want ‘certainty’ to be a defining aspect of documentary work or not? But no, some will say, we cannot give up certainty because it is requisite to witnessing. They will say that what was effective about the Tahrir Square protest videos uploaded into the void, and most explosive about the photographic image of Khaled Said tortured to death, was that these images were sent as well as received as new certainties. Here was ‘proof’ that Egyptian State Security tortured and murdered citizens on the street! Yes, but, I would reply. The power of moving images and incendiary words in revolutionary situations might begin with the ‘proof = truth’ status of the document. But there is a second necessary step and that is this: it is in the deployment of images as rhetoric: ‘Look at this! The regime does this to its citizens!’ Further, while as hyperbolic rhetoric moving images may be coded in the documentary mode, they have their effectivity in an apparently antithetical mode – as melodrama. Elsewhere I have made the case that Marx drew on nineteenth-century Victorian melodrama, especially as he characterised warring economic forces in Capital, and I do not mean this negatively.57 In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 he describes man as passionate, sensuous, suffering and objective. Where Marx speaks to the Egyptian moment is where he says: ‘To recognize suffering by recognizing the cause of suffering is thus part of the revolutionary cause.’58

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This is where technological hope as linked to people’s dreams of a better world enters again, the legacy of nearly a century of political activism. And here is where the Arab Spring previews pressing problems in media theory. Consider the new problem framed by the familiar one: whether in posing a ‘real world’ versus a ‘virtual world’, the ‘really was’ of objective history returns again to documentary theory – even as we, as media theorists, cultivate a more nuanced understanding of ‘virtuality’ as another kind of ‘reality’. Empiricism and scientificity return in other forms. Some forms are easier to contest, as, for instance, Google’s corporate dreams of a ‘data revolution’ in parts of the world like Egypt where a large percentage of the population remains illiterate.59 Other forms, like data visualisation and other ‘technological representations’ that promise to deliver irrefutable evidence of actual conditions prefigure the site of tougher battles to come. However, as to the most difficult question, that of the future possibilities for activist uses of the miracle of digital immediacy, I would say this: the effectivity of online activism remains open and unresolved.60 To quote Henry Jenkins, respected monitor of media user power, the ‘jury is still out’. At this juncture, the capacity for bottom-up action, he thinks, ‘remains undecided and contentious’.61 To which I would add that we need to stay on the side of uncertainty.

Epilogue When I ended the earlier version of this article with the word ‘uncertainty’, I could not have anticipated that ‘uncertain’ would be the term other commentators would use to sum up the Egyptian political situation in the years after the 2011 uprising. It is well known that after Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi was elected, he was overthrown in a military coup on 3 July 2013.62 At this juncture, the outcome for Egyptians is unpredictable. My use of the term ‘uncertainty’, however, was neither a reference to national politics nor events. Rather, ‘uncertainty’ counters ‘certainty’, my preferred reading of the problem of investment in ‘the real’. Many would say that the Arab Spring spread expectations. By means of technological connection, documentary video and testimony helped put an image of ‘revolution’ into world circulation. We can now ask if this online activity helped to restore the ‘utopian’ hope for a better

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future to theories of the revolutionary. For the ‘not over’ position on the Arab Spring carries over into other struggles. As Étienne Balibar has responded to the events of recent years: Why, in fact, should we suppose that the day of revolutions is over? As long as we do not attach the word ‘revolution’ to a unique model, predetermined forms of political organization, ideological mobilization, tactics for the seizure of power or counter-power, and so on, but only (only!) to the idea of a collective political movement intent on transforming structures of domination that will not disappear spontaneously, or, again, to a movement intent on changing change, I see no reason to exclude this historical perspective.63 This article appeared in an earlier form as ‘Rêves documentaires de militantisme et “printemps arabe”’, in Aline Caillet and Frédéric Pouillaud (eds), Un art documentaire: Enjeux esthétiques, politiques et éthiques/ Documentary Art: aesthetic, political, and ethical issues (Rennes: University of Rennes Press, 2017). Notes 1. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 164. 2. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 406. 3. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p. 112. 4. Edgar Morin, Cinema, or the Imaginary Man (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 75. 5. Tom Gunning, ‘Re-newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn-of-the-century’, in David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds), Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 39–59, 56, argues that ‘Every technology has a utopian dimension that imagines a future radically transformed by the implications of the device of practice.’ However, in the same article he also argues that this dimension is short-lived because users will become habituated to the technology. 6. Thomas Waugh, The Conscience of Cinema: The Films of Joris Ivens: 1912–1989 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), pp. 172–93.

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7. Brian Winston, Gail Vanstone and Wang Chi, The Act of Documenting: Documentary Film in the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 1, quote an anonymous Britdoc source: ‘The power of [documentary] film to change the world has become impossible to ignore.’ 8. Pierre Lévy, Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age (New York/ London: Plenum Trade, 1998), p. 23, maintains that ‘the virtual’ is not the opposite of ‘the real’ and that the relevant philosophical legacy begins with ‘potential existence that tends toward actualization’. 9. As quoted in Wael Ghonim, Revolution 2.0: A Memoir (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), p. 153. 10. Asaad Al-Saleh, ‘Introduction’, in Asaad Al-Saleh (ed.), Voices of the Arab Spring (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 1–18, 17. 11. Miriyam Aouragh and Anne Alexander, ‘The Egyptian Experience: Sense and Nonsense of the Internet Revolution’, International Journal of Communication, 5 (2011), 1344–1358, 1355, analyse Western journalists’ mistake in calling the Middle Eastern uprising a ‘social media revolution’ as a case of their having extrapolated from their own experience of Internet use, but also of their inability to grasp subtleties in the Arabic language. 12. Jenna Krajeski, ‘Art and Revolution in Cairo’, The Nation, 31 (March 2014), 28–34. Alisa Lebow, ‘Filming the Revolution’, talk, Center for Media and Culture, New York University, 16 December 2015, framed the online project ‘filmingtherevolution’, as an answer to the problem of ‘narrating the revolution that’s not over’. See http://filmingtherevolution. org (accessed 17 December 2015). 13. Youness Belghazi and Hadeer Elmahdawy, ‘Arab Spring is Not Over, but Continues in a Different Way’, in Peter Weibel (ed.), Global Activism: Art and Conflict in the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), pp. 271–8, 272. 14. Russell Campbell, ‘Radical Documentary in the United States, 1930– 1942’, in Thomas Waugh (ed.), Show Us Life: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984), pp. 68–79. 15. Campbell, ‘Radical Documentary’, p. 74. 16. Campbell, ‘Radical Documentary’, p. 76. 17. Campbell, ‘Radical Documentary’, p. 75. 18. Campbell, ‘Radical Documentary’, p. 74. 19. http://beta.18daysinegypt.com (accessed 30 November 2017). 20. Elizabeth Cowie, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 21.

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21. Chuck Kleinhans, ‘Subversive Media: When, Why, and Where’, Jump Cut, 56 (2014), https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc56.2014-2015/ KleinhansSubversiveMedia/index.html (accessed 30  November 2017). 22. Egyptians and Tunisians who attended the screening of Tahrir: Liberation Square, 11 October 2017, as part of the series ‘Resistance’, at Columbia University, described how they had been riveted to their televisions in the eighteen days of protest. 23. Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, p. 165. 24. Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France 1848–1950 (New York: International Publishers, 1964), p. 126. 25. Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p.  31; original emphasis. 26. Paul Danahar, The New Middle East: The World after the Arab Spring (New York/London: Bloomsbury Press, 2013), p.  85, quotes Obama: ‘What I want is for the kids on the street to win and for the Google guy to become president.’ 27. Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, p. 136. 28. Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, p. 165. 29. Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport, ‘Introduction’, in Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport (eds), Digitally Enabled Social Change. Activism in the Internet Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), pp. 3–20, 5, explain Web activism as ‘e-mobilization’ when online tools draw participants into ‘face-to-face’ street protest. 30. Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, p. 68. 31. As quoted in Sean Aday, Henry Farrell, Marc Lynch, John Sides and Deen Freelon, ‘Introduction’, Peaceworks, 80 (2012), 5, www.usip.org/sites/ default/files/PW80.pdf (accessed 15 May 2015). 32. Earl and Kimport, Digitally Enabled Social Change, pp. 23–8, argue that online organising requires scholars to update theories of activism, further noting the explosion of literature in this area. 33. Equally important is the connection between social media activism and anarchism as well as conservativism. See Chris Robé, ‘Anarchist Aesthetics and U.S. Video Activism’, Jump Cut, 56 (fall 2014), https:// www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc56.2014-2015/RobeAnarchists/index. html (accessed 15 May 2015). Jen Schradie, The Revolution that Wasn’t. How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), in her study of US right-wing Tea Party groups

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34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

44.

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shows how everyday practice reveals a connection between social media activism and hierarchical structures. See Eric Schmit and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives (New York: Vintage Books, 2014), two highly placed Google executives, predict not only a future of life in ‘two worlds at once’, but one in which ‘virtual identities’ will take precedence over physical ones (p. 6). In chapter 4, ‘The Future of Revolution’, they predict that, although new communications technologies will facilitate more ‘revolutionary moments’ in the near future, these will not be ‘fully realized revolutions’ (p. 121). Mark B. N. Hansen, Feed-forward: On the Future of Twenty-first Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 39. Hansen, Feed-forward, p. 59; original emphasis. Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, p. 143. Revolution 2.0 is the strange memoir of a twenty-first-century activist who locates his organising activities largely online. He gives us no account of strategy meetings, telephone calls or even public appearances, although he appears on screen in Tahrir: Liberation Square, shot from behind, his back to the camera. Revolution 2.0 is remarkable for the dramatic moments it does not narrate, such as the most public moment of Ghonim’s involvement when, during a television interview with Mona El-Shazly on the Egyptian Dream TV channel, 11  February 2011, he broke down and rushed off the television set, a moment accessible via a YouTube segment. Ghonim, Revolution 2.0, p. 212. Schmidt and Cohen, The New Digital Age, pp. 138–41, analysing the Egyptian shutdown, predict the advantage a ‘data revolution’ will give states who will have increased access to citizen information. Hansen, Feed-forward, pp. 58–9. To summarise Aday, et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 3: ‘New media – in the form of bit.ly linkages – did not play a significant role in either in-country collective action or regional diffusion during this period’. Aday, et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 11. On Twitter, the most used hashtag worldwide in 2011 was #Egypt. See ‘#YearInReview: Hot Topics and Top Hashtags of 2011, 4 December, 2011’, http://blog.twitter.com/2011/12/yearinreview-hot-topics-and-top.html (accessed 1 November 2017). Danahar, The New Middle East, pp. 22–3, confirms the regional analysis: ‘The West projected its own wishful thinking onto the revolutions.’

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45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

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Aday, et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 4. Schmidt and Cohen, The New Digital Age, p. 141. Hansen, Feed-forward, p. 253. Aday, et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 6. Mona Eltahawy, ‘The Facebook Generation Kickstarts a Seismic Change’, in Toby Manhire (ed.), The Arab Spring: Rebellion, Revolution, and A New World Order (London: Guardian Books, 2012), pp. 273–5, credits youth with starting a revolt that was then picked up by an older generation, and testifies that ‘I know that each Arab watching the Egyptian protesters take on Mubarak’s regime does so with the hope that Egypt will mean something again. Thirty years of Mubarak rule have shrivelled the country that once led the Arab world.’ Jane M. Gaines, ‘Introduction. The Real Returns’, in Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (eds), Collecting Visible Evidence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 1–18, 2. See Alun Munslow, The New History (Harlow/London: Pearson Longman, 2003), pp. 45–60, for a comprehensive overview of this concept and its relevance to documentary form as well as a more nuanced approach to Ranke. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations. Essays and Reflections (London: Fontana/Collins, 1970), pp. 255–66, 255. For years, although 16mm film prints of Bonus March could be rented from the Museum of Modern Art, the film was not available on DVD. Bonus March is now available as a bonus on the Milestone DVD Strange Victory (Leo Hurwitz, 1947) and on YouTube. Russell Campbell, ‘Film and Photo League: Radical Cinema in the 30s’, Jump Cut, 14 [1977] (2004), www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC14folder/FilmPhotoIntro. html (accessed 15 May 2015) lists thirty-eight sections in the 1917 battlefield montage, but the MoMA print, source of the YouTube copy, is missing footage in the montage. One of the best analyses of the everyday impact on the First World War trench war soldier remains Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London/New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Charles Bambach, ‘Weimar Philosophy and the Crisis of Historical Thinking’, in Peter E. Gordon and John P. McCormick (eds), Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 133–49, 133.

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56. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), p. 47; original emphasis. 57. Jane M. Gaines, ‘The Melos in Marxist Theory’, in David E. James and Rick Berg (eds), The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 56–71. 58. Marx, Class Struggles in France 1848–1950, p. 182. 59. Schmit and Cohen, The New Digital Age, p. 141. 60. Alexander R. Galloway, ‘Networks’, in W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (eds), Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 280–296. 61. Henry Jenkins, ‘Fandom 2.0: An Interview’, in David J. Gunkel and Ted Gournelos (eds), Transgression 2.0: Media, Culture, and the Politics of a Digital Age (New York: Continuum, 2012), p. 212. 62. Political scientist Marc Lynch, ‘Introduction’, in Marc Lynch (ed.), The Arab Uprisings Explained: New Contentious Politics in the Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. 1–28, 2, argues that the original response to the 2011 uprisings ‘probably overstated their novelty and scope’, concluding that the connection between ‘contentious political action’ and real political change ‘remains highly uncertain’. Alisa Lebow, ‘Filming the Revolution: Approaches to Programming the “Arab Spring”, in Dina Iordanova and Stefanie Van de Peer (eds), Film Festival Yearbook 6: Film Festivals and the Middle East (St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2014), pp. 61–73, 67, asks ‘Is it enough to create heroic narratives of struggle, or is it possible to convey the ambivalence, ambiguity, uncertainty, that inevitably accompanies the elation of the moment?’ 63. Étienne Balibar, Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 103.

Selected works Ahmed, Sara, The Promise of Happiness (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2010). Al-Saleh, A. (ed.), Voices of the Arab Spring (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Balibar, É., Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Bloch, Ernst, The Principle of Hope, vol. I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).

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Cowie, Elizabeth, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Danahar, Paul, The New Middle East: The World After the Arab Spring (New York/London: Bloomsbury Press, 2013). Earl, Jennifer and Katrina Kimport, Digitally Enabled Social Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). Gaines, Jane M., ‘Introduction. The Real Returns’, in Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (eds), Collecting Visible Evidence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 1–18. Ghonim, Wael, Revolution 2.0: A Memoir (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). Hansen, Mark B. N., Feed-forward: On the Future of Twenty-first Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Jenkins, Henry, ‘Fandom 2.0: An Interview’, in David J. Gunkel and Ted Gournelos (eds), Transgression 2.0: Media, Culture, and the Politics of a Digital Age (New York: Continuum, 2012), pp. 212–22. Kleinhans, C., ‘Subversive Media: When, Why, and Where’, Jump Cut, 56 (fall 2014), https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc56.2014-2015/ KleinhansSubversiveMedia/index.html (accessed 15 May 2015). Lebow, Alisa, ‘Filming the Revolution: Approaches to Programming the “Arab Spring”’, in Dina Iordanova and Stefanie Van de Peer (eds), Film Festival Yearbook 6: Film Festivals and the Middle East (St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2014), pp. 61–73. Lynch, Marc (ed.), The Arab Uprisings Explained: New Contentious Politics in the Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Robé, Chris, ‘Anarchist Aesthetics and U.S. Video Activism’, Jump Cut, 56 (fall 2014), https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc56.2014-2015/ RobeAnarchists/index.html (accessed 15 May 2015). Schradie, Jen, The Revolution that Wasn’t. How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). Weibel, Peter (ed.), Global Activism: Art and Conflict in the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).

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Index 9/11 101, 219

A Adamson, Joni 117, 120–2, 125, 133 AEP see American Electric Power Affleck, Casey 62 Ahmed, Riz 218 Al-Azmeh, Aziz 89 al-Baghdadi, Abur Omar 96, 102 al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr 98 al-Qaeda 101, 102, 218 Al-Saleh, Asaad 240 Alien Abduction 62 Alioto, Dean 62 Allende, Salvador 115, 128, 130, 131 Althusser, Louis 249 Altneuland see The Old New Land American Electric Power 177–9, 181, 183, 185, 186 L’An 2440 see Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred Anderson, Darran 199 Andreae, Johann Valentin 44 Arab Spring 12, 216, 239–52 Archaeologies of the Future 139 Archigram 199 Arte Útil 200 Aufderheide, Pat 213 Ayoob, Taahira 217

B Baccolin, Raffaela 21 Bacon, Francis 1, 44

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Balibar, Étienne 252 Balsom, Erika 155 Bambach, Charles 249 Banksy 62 Barnhill, David Landis 118 Barthes, Roland 250 batalla de Chile, La see Battle of Chile Battle of Chile 115 Bazin, André 212 Bellamy, Edward 1, 19, 21, 22, 69, 102 Belvaux, Rémy 61 Benjamin, Walter 249 Berg, Peter 116, 117, 119 Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis 44, 53n, 204, 205 Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Großstadt see Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis Bernanke, Ben 100 Biemann, Ursula 213 bin Laden, Osama 101 bioregionalism 115, 116 Blade Runner 195, 196 Black Gold – A Web Documentary, The 213, 224–31 Bloch, Ernst 6, 7, 10, 32, 36, 48, 121, 139, 140, 157, 238 Bolshoi Theatre 47 Bonus March 12, 239, 241, 242, 249, 256n Bonzel, André 61 Borden, Lizzie 2 Borinage 239 Born in Flames 2 Born into Brothels 219

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260 INDE X

Botes, Costa 62 Botón de nácar, El see The Pearl Button Bratton, Benjamin 191 Brave New World 18 Briski, Zana 219 British National Health Service 94 Brody, Sam 241 Bruguera, Tania 200 Bussemer, Thymian 105, 143 But Who is Better Than God in Judgement: Establishing a Limit Upon the People of Lūt – Wilāyat Ḥomṣ 93 Butler, Judith 148

C Cairo as Told by Chahine see El Kahera Menawara be Ahlaha Callenbach, Ernest 19 Campanella, Tommaso, 1, 2, 44, 45 Campbell, Russell 241 Capital 250 Capra, Frank 2 C’est arrivé près de chez vous see Man Bites Dog Ceremony 120 Chahine, Youssef 220 Chapman, Tracy 222 Chávez, Hugo 194 Chelovek s kino-appartom see Man with a Movie Camera Cheshire, Ohio: A Question of Power 10, 167–9, 171, 176–86 Chevannes, Chanda 10, 167, 171, 176, 182–4 Chi, Wang 215 Christianopolis 44 City of the Sun, The 1, 44

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Civitas Solis see City of the Sun Clarke, Arthur C. 23 cosmovision 9, 117–26, 130–4, 136, 137 Cowie, Elizabeth 241 Critical Utopia 21, 22, 118

D Daesh see ISIS Dasman, Raymond 116, 117, 119 Dayton Agreement 144, 164n d’Eubonne, Françoise 169 de la Cadena, Marisol 120 de Lahontan, Baron 77, 78 De Michiel, Helen 232 Debord, Guy 70, 207 Defranc, Nicole 213, 224, 225, 227 Deleuze, Gilles 60 Demain see Tomorrow Demand the Impossible 21 Dialecticas Urbanas 196 Dion, Cyril 23 Dispossessed, The 69 Drew, Robert 212 Du Bois, W. E. B. 200 Duchamp, Marcel 200 Duncombe, Stephen 57, 70–2, 76

E East Van Porn Collective 56, 59, 61, 63–6, 67, 70, 73–5, 78 ecofeminism 10, 167–88 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 250 Ecotopia 19, 20 Eisenstein, Sergei 249 El Kahera Menawara be Ahlaha 220 Engels 222 Equality 19

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Documentary Dreams of Activism and the Arab Spring 261 

ETH Zurich 197, 202 EVPC see East Van Porn Collective Exit Through the Gift Shop 62

F Facebook 215, 216, 240, 244, 245, 247, 248 Faiz, Faiz Ahmed 222 Faulkner, Garrett 184 Federal Reserve Bank 100, 102 Film and Photo League 12 Fitting, Peter 5 Fleischer, Richard 2 Flaherty, Rober 212, 230, 231 Forand, Alain 146, 147 Forgotten Silver 62 Foucault, Michel 193, 250 Fox, Josh 230 Freud, Sigmund 222 Friedman, Yona 199

G Garden Cities of To-morrow 20 Gargantua 3 Garrard, Greg 119 Gasland 230 Gerhardsen, Einar 226 Getino, Octavio 115 Ghonim, Wael 243–6 Globe & Mail 70 Goldman, Emma 67 Google 243, 244, 247, 251, 255n Gore, Al 6, 172 Graeber, David 75 Gran Horizonte: Around the Day in 80 Worlds 201, 203, 205, 206 Gray, John 13 Greenpeace 227, 229 Greenspan, Alan 100

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Grierson, John 212 Guattari, Félix 60 Guggenheim, Davis 6 Guzmán, Patricio 9, 115, 117, 118, 120, 123, 125–34

H Habraken, John 202 Hansen, Mark B. N. 245–7 Haraway, Donna 193 Health Services in The Islamic State 91, 93, 94, 104 Heidegger, Martin 249, 250 Helsinki Committee 146, 163n Hemmings, Clare 67 Henry VIII 4, 18 Herzl, Theodor 1 heterotopia 193 Hight, Craig 57–9, 62, 215 Ho, Jeremy 213, 217 hora de los hornos, La see The Hour of the Furnaces Horkheimer, Max 37 Hour of the Furnaces, The 115 Howard, Ebenezer 20 Howatson, Rob Hunger Games, The 2 Huxley, Aldous 18

I I’m Still Here 62 Ideology and Utopia 111 Ideology und Utopia see Ideology and Utopia Images from the Corner 10, 138, 142, 151–7 Inconvenient Truth, An 6, 172 Institute for Bioregional Research 116 IS see ISIS

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262 INDE X

Islamic Police in the City of Sirt, The 91, 93, 104 Islamic State see ISIS Islamic State Health Service 94 Island 18 ISIL see ISIS ISIS 9, 85–112 Ivens, Joris 238, 239

J Jackson, Peter 62 Jalib, Habib 222 Jameson, Fredric 7, 121, 139, 207, 250 Jeanneret-Gris, Charles-Édouard see Le Corbusier Jencks, Charles 198 Jenkins, Henry 251 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali 222 Joseph, Peter 110n, 111n Judgement of the Creator to Fight against the Crime of Robbery – Wilāyat Nīnawā 91 Juhasz, Alexandra 59 Junge, Torsren 146

K Kamran, Tahir 218 Kant, Immanuel 222 Kaufman, Mikhail 28, 32, 40, 45 Kauffman, Ross 219 Kessler, Frank 142 King, Ynestra 186 Kingdom of Heaven 100, 101 Kinoks, 28, 41, 44–6 Kleinhans, Chuck 161n, 242 Knežević, Božidar 10, 138, 144, 146, 150 Koolhaas, Rem 198

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Kracauer, Siegfried 212 Krech, Shepard 120 Kufeld, Klaus 139 Kuhn, Annette 168

L Lahar, Stephanie 185 Lahore Landing, An Interactive Documentary 213, 217–25, 231 Lahore University of Management Sciences 221, 222 Landauer, Gustav 139 Land of Promise 211 Lang, Fritz 2 Laurent, Mélanie 23 Le Corbusier 197 Le Guin, Ursula K. 21, 22, 69 Leacock, Richard 212 Leman, Juda 211 Lerner, Jesse 59 Levitas, Ruth 57, 69, 72 Long, Jerry M. 90 Looking Backward: 2000–1887 1, 19–22, 69 Lorentz, Pare 211 Lost Horizon 2 Louisiana Story 230, 231 Lucas, George 2 LUMS see Lahore University of Management Sciences Lund, Karianne 227

M Made in Secret: The Story of the East Van Porn Collective 8, 56–84 Man with a Movie Camera, 8, 27–55 Man Bites Dog 61

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Documentary Dreams of Activism and the Arab Spring 263 

Mancus, Shannon Davies 172, 174, 176, 180 Mannheim, Karl 111, 139 Manuel, Franke E. 107 Manuel, Fritzie 107 Mars Trilogy, The 19 Marx, Karl 222, 243, 249, 250 McLuhan, Marshall 207 Means, Erik 227 Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred 1 Menzies, William Cameron 2 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien 1 Mesić, Stipe 150 Metropolis 2 Milošević, Slobodan 146, 161n Minh-ha, Trinh T. 231 Misère au Borinage see Borinage Mitchell, Timothy 226 mockumentary 58–60 Modern Utopia, A 22 More, Thomas 1–5, 7–9, 12, 17, 18, 21, 22, 27, 28, 32, 34–7, 40, 41, 43, 44, 51n, 67, 77, 87–90, 102, 105, 191, 211 Morgenstern, Eve 10, 167, 177, 183–5 Morin, Edgar 238, 239 Morris, Errol 212 Morris, William 22, 68, 69, 72, 82n Morsi, Mohamed 251 Moore, Michael 212 Moylan, Tom 21, 22, 118, 121, 212 Mubarak, Hosni 256n Musharraf, Pervez 218 Muslim Brotherhood 251

N Nair, Mira 218 Nanook of the North 230 Nesbø, Jo 227

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New Atlantis 1, 44 New Voyages to North-America 77 New York 2140 19 New Yorkers Against Fracking 173 News from Nowhere 22, 23, 68, 69, 72 Nichols, Bill 6, 86 Nida-Rümelin, Julian 157 Night Mail 211 Nineteen Eighty-Four 42 Nostalgia de la luz see Nostalgia for the Light Nostalgia for the Light 115 Nova Atlantis see New Atlantis Nowa Huta 13

O Obama, Barak 254n Occupied 226 Odin, Roger 14, 109, 141, 163n Okkupert see Occupied Old New Land, The 1 Open Society and Its Enemies, The 3 Oluja Nad Krajinom see Storm over Krajina Orwell, George 42 Otto, Eric C. 170

P Paris Climate Agreement 228 Paul, Ron 102 Pearl Button, The 9, 115–37 Peleg, Hila 155 Perović Aleksandar, 151 Petrus Aegidius 34, 51n Philips Petroleum 226 Piercy, Marge 69 Pink Floyd 222

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264 INDE X

Pinker, Steven 13 Pinochet, Augusto 9, 117, 128, 130, 131, 135 Plantinga, Carl 86 Poelvoorde, Benoît 61 Popper, Karl R. 3, 13 Principle of Hope, The 6, 36, 139 Prinzip Hoffnung, Das see The Principle of Hope Puhovski, Nenad 144, 150 Puhovski, Žarko 146

Q Quilliam Foundation 87

R Rabelais, François 3 Radcliffe Line 220 Rajagopal, Arvind 211 Raley, Rita 213 Rancière, Jacques 141, 243 Reiner, Rob, 61 Reluctant Fundamentalist, The 218 Return of the Gold Dinar see The Rise of the Khilafah: Return of the Gold Dinar Revolution 2.0 243, 245, 246, 255n Rhodes, Gary D. 57 Rise of the Khilafah: Return of the Gold Dinar, The 99–105, 110n, 111 River, The 211 Robinson, Kim Stanley 19, 22 Roemer, Kenneth 70 Roscoe, Jane 57–9, 61, 62 Rouch, Jean 212 Ruether, Rosemary Radford 169 Ruttmann, Walther 44, 45, 53n, 204, 205

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S Said, Khaled 244, 250 Salafism 89, 108 Salleh, Ariel 167, 170, 182 Sargent, Lyman Tower 69, 89 Savona, Stefano 241 Scott, A. O. 195 Scott, Ridley 100, 195 Schäuble, Michaela 153 Selk’nam people 117, 122, 127, 130, 132, 133, 135 Seltzer, Leo 241 Sennett, Richard 207 Silko, Leslie Marmon 120 Silva, Armando 201 Skjoldbjærg, Erik 227 Skipper, Katrine 213, 224, 225, 227 Slike sa ugla see Images from the Corner Soja, Edward 206 Solanas, Fernando E. 115 Soviet Revolution 31, 34, 249 Soylent Green 2 Spiegel, Simon 170 Springer, John Parris 57 Springsteen, Bruce 222 Star Wars 2 Statoil 226–229 Steingraber, Sandra 168, 171–8, 182–8 Stengers, Isabelle 121 Steyerl, Hito 149 Storck, Henri 239 Storm over Krajina 10, 138, 142, 144–51, 156, 157, Structure of the Khilafah, The 95–9 Sunni Islam 108 Superstudio 199 Svilova, Elizaveta 28, 32, 33, 40, 45

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Documentary Dreams of Activism and the Arab Spring 265 

T Tafuri, Manfredo 198 Tahrir: Liberation Square 241, 254n, 255n Taliban 89, 217, 218, 223, 224 Terdmian, Richard 143 Things to Come 2 Third Cinema 115 This is Spinal Tap 61 THX 1138 2 Tomorrow 23, 24 Torre David: The World’s Tallest Squat 201–5 Tröhler, Margrit 150 Tuđman, Franjo 146, 151, 161n, 162n Turr Lahore 222 Twitter 216, 247, 255n

U U-TT see Urban-Think Tank UDRME see Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth Understanding Media 207 Unfractured 10, 167–9, 171–3, 176–86 Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth 120, 121, 136 Upstream 227 Urban-Think Tank 11, 191–210 Utopia 1, 3, 4, 7, 17, 18 27, 34–8, 40, 41, 43, 44, 51n, 67, 77, 89, 211

V Van Newkirk, Allen 116 Vanstone, Gail 215 Vers une architecture 197

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Vertov, Dziga 8, 27–55, 212, 238 Vespucci, Amerigo 35 Vice News 98 von Schantz, Miriam 57, 60–4, 66, 70, 76, 79

W War Game, The 6 Wark, McKenzie 199 Watkins, Peter 6 Watt, Harry 211 Wells, H. G. 22 West Africa Calling 211 Whiteman, David 183, 184 Williams, Linda 67 Winston, Brian 212, 215 Winter, Charlie 87, 89, 92, 104 WIR see Workers’ International Relief Wiseman, Frederick 212 Woman on the Edge of Time 69 Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema 168 Woolfe, Bruce 211 Workers’ International Relief 239, 241 World Press Photo Award 153 Wright, Basil 211

Y YouTube 215, 247, 248

Z Žbanić, Jasmila 10, 138, 151–6 Zeitgeist: Addendum 110n, 111n Zia ul Haq, Muhammad 218 Zimmermann, Patricia 215, 232 Zurita, Raúl 123, 135 Zutavern, Julia 131

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