SHIFT
I suppose, in the overused parlance of the time, this should be an occasion to "celebrate" California Newsreel and its 30th anniversary. Age, however, disposes me towards more sober and sobering reflections. Newsreel has over the past three decades certainly succeeded beyond our not terribly wild dreams in distributing an enormous number of videocassettes on social change topics. But I want to explain here why I'm less sanguine that these cassettes - and social change media generally - have had much palpable or positive impact on social change.
Unlike filmmakers and their funders, a distributor is on the front lines between illusion and reality. We confront on a daily basis, 10,000 days in our case, the radical disparity between the films we distribute and the urgent media needs of the audiences they purport to serve. The immediate cause is obvious: filmmakers and the foundations who fund them have been unable (or unwilling) to assess with any rigor the actual media needs of communities and to evaluate the efficacy of different filmmaking strategies so they can then produce appropriate films.
In Newsreel's case, the discontinuity between films and audiences, between text and context, can be traced back to a fairly specific historical moment. As its name implies, Newsreel originated as the news service and agit-prop wing of that amorphous efflorescence of social change known as The Movement. As prospects for radical social change in this country dimmed and our movement constituency dwindled, Newsreel faced a choice. We could have abandoned our political dogmatism and engaged in a more searching interrogation of American life. Instead, we, like the New Left of which we were so much a creature, embarked on an era of "revolutionary tourism". Our films saw the future and it worked, first in Viet Nam, then Cuba, the China of the Cultural Revolution, Kim II Sung's North Korea and the guerilla camps of Guinea Bissau, Palestine and Mozambique; eventually, even phlegmatic Swedish social democracy was pressed into service. These films may have offered our viewers a not so cheap catharsis, sharing, however vicariously, in the Mancichean contest between good and evil, but they could be taken too seriously. I remember one San Francisco "community-based organization" used our Cuban political travelogues to recruit for its own "socialist" paradise in the tropics, Jonestown.
One by one this most disillusioning of centuries despoiled these ideological refuges and Newsreel had no alternative but to look towards the less vulnerable realms of history, myth and culture, for its utopias. Our releases now discovered inspiring social alternatives for post-industrial America in such improbable locations as Pharonic Egypt, the Sea Islands of South Carolina, the Communist party of the '30s, traditional Cameroonian village society, even the rusted milltowns of the Monongahela Valley. Although these films were often just romanticized, ahistorical, thinly disguised rebukes of the status quo, they have offered their viewers and makers a frisson of otherness, an escape, or better, a brief vacation from the political icepack of the past twenty years.
In retrospect, one can see in our infatuation with multi-culturalism a less ambitious and more benign continuation of our original, thoroughly discredited, Guevarist foco strategy -- revolution from the periphery to the center. We looked for a future in the past or in marginalized cultures because we lacked the social vision to imagine a viable alternative to the increasingly hegemonic global capitalist, consumer society of the present. While it may be true that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, it is a certainty for those who only remember it.
In reviewing our collections over the past thirty years - and the films which continue to be submitted to us for distribution - I find many well-made, carefully researched, valuable contributions to film literature. But I am struck that Newsreel's, independent producers and their funders have virtually ceded to the mainstream media discussion of such crucial and dynamic areas of contemporary social life as the economy, psychology, media and technology. Where are the films exploring the decay of key social institutions from work to the family and the new social roles which will be needed to reinvent daily life? Where are the films deploring diversity - in income, education, parenting and health care? Where are the films addressing the values vacuum in a social system which reduces human nature simply to material greed? And where are the visions of a 21st century in any significant way different from the present one?
These 30 years of political tourism, geographic and temporal, reveal a profound confusion between the social change content of a film and its efficacy in the actual arenas of social change. They suggest the need for a radical shift in our understanding of how social change media works, a shift from a film or text-centered paradigm to an audience or context-centered paradigm. We need to redirect the focus of social change documentary onto the audience itself, back into real time; documentary needs to learn how to speak in the present tense. In particular, social change film needs to make visible the "master narratives" of this society enveloping the viewer so they can begin to be discussed and changed. In this perspective, the long sought grail of "audience development" does not consist of developing audiences for our films but developing audiences' capacities for participation in social change.
In this audience-centered paradigm, film and video will necessarily assume a more modest role. Social change media may, in fact, be said to succeed by how self-effacingly it contributes to the emergence or growth of new or existing discursive communities. There can be little justification (at least in terms of social change) for the current spawn of self-aggrandizing, Brobdingnagian documentaries whose intended audience is really the Sundance Film Festival. Can we invent instead, a social change media which moves away from closed forms towards more open, conversational ones; inexpensive improvisations, concise comments, and targeted discussion starters rather than feature length epics? Can we imagine films designed to create frameworks and to make strategic interventions into larger social discussions? As film distribution becomes embedded in a multi-dimensional, interactive internet environment, media will, or at least could, be more easily and intimately integrated into the ongoing life of social change organizations and communities.
This shift in focus from text to context demands that the standard distribution model - production> distribution> exhibition - needs to be reversed. The current foundation fad about "outreach" strategies tacitly admits this. But it is preposterous, not to say a waste of foundations' funds and activists' energy, to organize people to view films, when they should be making films which can organize people. In a logical distribution paradigm, Newsreel would not just distribute films to audiences, we would also "distribute" audience priorities to filmmakers and funders. While some independent producers might denounce this as a capitulation to market forces, I would remind them that the value of their independence is, indeed, their independence from commercial motivations, not from a hard-headed, accountable assessment of community media needs.
The challenges of Newsreel's next 30 years are no different than they were 30 years ago; I only hope we now see them more clearly. Bluntly stated, social change film needs to put the social change before the film. Confusing the two has merely resulted in films which are bad art, puerile politics and negligible community service. Newsreel needs to shift from a representational to a transformational film production and distribution model. We already know that films cannot represent the world, other people or even the filmmaker, simply because there is no there to represent. A transformational, future-oriented media, in contrast, would help audiences explore new more inclusive social visions in place of the divisive narcissisms of the past and build new communities and values to replace the increasingly dysfunctional institutions of the present. Thirty years ago it was said that the revolution would not be televised. It remains to be seen what role, if any, the media can play in changing the present into the future.
Larry Daressa is Co-Director of California Newsreel.
© 1997 National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. All Rights Reserved.
