Over the last decade of programming political documentary for Cinema Politica I can say with confidence that there are two subjects that have always been decidedly divisive and caused the most vociferous backlash from audience members. One of those subjects is the ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine and the other is animal rights.
Screen
The animals on our screen
A review of The Ghosts in Our Machine
Bowling for Columbine turns ten
A classic review of the Michael Moore classic
Editor’s note: Art Threat has launched a cultural archaeological project that involves digging up previously published but now inaccessible film reviews and cultural musings from Montreal-based writer and teacher Matthew Hays. We’re calling it The Hays Archives, and to get things rolling, we’re republishing a review Hays wrote of Bowling for Columbine when the documentary first shook up the cultural and political scene ten years ago. Each article will be prefaced with a short contemporary intro from Hays. Enjoy!
I won’t ever forget meeting Michael Moore. I had interviewed him by phone but this was the first in-person interview, at the Toronto International Film Festival. It’s hard to put into words just what a sensation Bowling for Columbine was at the time. Everyone had an opinion on it. I had just seen the film at a packed press screening. I was in tears by the end of the film, and there was a standing ovation–something I’ve never seen before or since at a press screening at TIFF.
The images have become etched in our head. The overhead camera, positioned in some live-at-five newsteam’s helicopter, captures a large group of students fleeing a school building. As it turned out, it was Columbine, a name that has now become a famous symbol of epidemic school shootings.
Canadian gov’t approves filming immigration raid, deportation process for reality TV
Petition asks National Geograhic to cancel support for show
The Canadian government has approved what appears to be the crass exploitation of human suffering for entertainment. In a new low, Safety Minister Vic Toews approved the filming of an immigration enforcement raid at an East Vancouver construction site for a reality TV show. In the raid, workers were arrested and some of them face deportation, all part of the narrative grist being assembled for Shaw Media’s program “Border Security”.
It also isn’t clear the degree to which public resources are being diverted to support the program. The Canada Border Security Agency is clearly working in concert with the production – both teams showing up together at sites and intimate levels of access to search and seizure being allowed, and there is also extensive review of video footage carried out by the CBSA before anything goes to air.
If you would like to tell Minister Vic Toews that this is unacceptable, write to him: toewsv1@parl.gc.ca
There is also a petition at change.org asking for the National Geographic Channel to cancel their support for the show: National Geographic Channel: Deportation is Not Entertainment!.
For more information, check out CBC coverage: Reality show filmed immigration raids / Toews approved TV show filming immigration raids
Anti-bully Beauty
Shane Koyczan's spoken word finds grace in multiple animators
Vimeo staff pick. Shane Koyczan. Collaborative artists animating each 20 seconds of powerful, stirring, anti-oppression spoken words. Enough said.
Free Int’l Women’s Day Films at NFB.ca
Friday Film Pick: Assembly
The beaten (by the Canadian Conservative budget cuts) but not down National Film Board of Canada is offering a treasure trove of titles for free streaming today, in celebration and recognition of International Women’s Day. Included in the bunch is the 2012 experimental short by Jenn Strom, below (after the jump), called ASSEMBLY. We’re not talking about a couple of films here, we’re talking dozens of amazing documentaries. The section also features a forward by Ravida Din, Director General of English Program, who discusses the NFB’s herstory with the women’s movement (which as Yasmin Jiwani’s excellent oped in today’s Montreal Gazette reminds us, is nowhere near over).
The Documentary Download Dilemma
A Conversation with Doc-streamers Thought Maybe
Much ink has been spilled and pixels punctuated regarding the ongoing controversial topic around the copyright, downloading, streaming and file sharing of creative content — yet there has been little discussion (outside of organizational listserves and at festival forums) of documentary cinema and file sharing.
This may be in large part due to the fact that public discourse is catching up to a trend that is really less than five years old. Whereas commercial and mainstream fiction cinema has been swapped, downloaded and streamed online since file sharing’s early days, documentary has only recently come into its own online sharing milieu.
I remember doc-makers quietly excited to see websites like documentariesonline.com pop up like fresh tulips in fields of well-trodden, yellowing, commercial-fiction grass. “It’s not directly helping me, but it’s great that documentaries have reached a point where people want to pirate and share them,” went the measured reflection in those early days of doc download dribbles.
Yet some years later that dribble is forming its own alternative torrent and sharing sites have proliferated, not to mention the squeaking in of docs on that corporate compendium of banal and alluring audio-visual culture, YouTube.
Exactly like their more popular fiction cousins, documentaries are increasingly ripped from DVD and Blu-Ray, compressed, uploaded to torrent and video hosting sites and shared faster than you can say ‘an inconvenient truth.’ Some prescient doc-makers saw this coming, and from the get-go played with ‘em instead of against ‘em, such as the makers of The Corporation, who released a by-donation torrent of the film as a parallel option to the “illegal” counterparts.
And while many doc-makers are “glad to get it out there,” as the adage goes, they are also “glad to eat and pay rent.” As someone who knows scores of independent documentary makers who have self-financed their films or gone into debiliating debt during production, I would also add that many are also “Glad to hopefully break even.”
So how do documentary file sharing and streaming sites that do not remunerate the makers fit into this proverbial squeeze between getting it out there and eking out some kind of living in the media arts?
This question has come up recently in a discussion with documentary filmmakers around a new site called Thought Maybe.
To this day the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do in my career was stand in front of a group of 300 university students in my role as president of an student newspaper organization – my peers at the time – and explain to them that they needed to rise above sexist (or racist, or homophobic) jokes. My hands have never been so damp and my heart beat so fast I thought I might faint. The incident had been triggered by a joke newspaper distributed at a student journalism conference – innocent enough. Except that throughout the day several concerned young women came to me to complain about its underlying content.
The easiest move would have been to decide that perhaps they were over reacting, after all, everyone knows who Pussy Galore is, right? (she was credited for one of the pieces). But at closer examination it needed to be addressed.
By now, all of you who read Art Threat have surely had your own discussions about Seth MacFarlane’s misogynistic Oscars. Layer on that some thinly veiled racism and homophobia (not to mention inappropriate comments about an under aged girl and general rudeness overall) and that whole stressful moment from above was brought back to the front of my mind.
Blown Up: Gaming and War
Artists exploring the medium of video games: Works by Wafaa Bilal, Mohammed Mohsen and Harun Farocki
Let’s face it: shooting stuff is fun – in video, that is; but it can also be ethically complicated. Gallery 101’s current exhibition Blown Up: Gaming and War, brings to the conventions of video gaming the complexities of art, activism and critical commentary. I am not exactly a typical gamer (don’t own a console), but virtually re-connecting with my inner warrior and social critic at the same time, as I did last week at Gallery 101, was something of a treat.
Video games have come a long way from the simple pleasures of the arcade, and especially in the world of art. The structures of commitment and involvement created by games offer fertile ground for artists exploring kinds of human experience well beyond the zero-sum shoot-em-ups of most commercial game play. The installations in this show are fun. They’re weird. They’re confounding. And they leave burrs in the imagination as readily as the gratifications of conventional games wash mindlessly away.
Identity, Oppression, Resistance
Two very different docs for Friday Film Pick
For this week’s Friday Film Pick I’m choosing two very different, seemingly unrelated docs that are available for online viewing. Girl Inside is an intimate portrayal of a male transitioning to female, and because the film is available for streaming from Canada’s TVO broadcaster, it is likely unavailable to non-Canadian residents.
With that in mind, I’ve also selected a great little short about racial profiling by police in New York city (which appears first below). Both are compelling works showcasing the intersection of identity, oppression and the subjective resistance to oppression through identity. Enjoy (videos after the jump).
Pirate Bay documentary debuts online
Film on Swedish sharing site available for free
The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard documentary, which tells the story behind the embattled Swedish Pirate Bay project, is now available on YouTube. The film just premiered in Europe and was simultaneously launched on line at Youtube and for download on…Pirate Bay.
Following the TPB founders, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm, the doc is of interest to anyone concerned with or about copyright in an age of information saturation and increasing surveillance and digital commons. Enjoy!
