What are you looking at?
http://theanvilreview.org/node/34
A review of The Chicago Conspiracy
by Alex Gorrion
04/22/2010
"We believe that the most honest position we can take is to reject
any notion that a camera presents a detached and passive view of our
world." -- Subversive Action Films
--
In Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, one of the characters, an ex-hippy
revolutionary who has dropped out of the struggle and into the Fed's
witness protection program, reminisces about her radical film
collective in the '60s, that naďvely presumed to use the camera as a
weapon, turning it upon the ugly face of Authority, as though this
ignition of consciousness would be enough to demobilize Power and
encourage rebellion.
In their newly released documentary, The Chicago Conspiracy, the
folks at Subversive Action Films have set themselves the project of
surmounting the resident limitations and illusions of their medium.
The Chicago Conspiracy tells of anticapitalist struggles in Chile in
the years since the dictatorship, focusing on the students, battling
neoliberal educational reforms; the residents of the poblaciones,
struggling for the autonomy of their neighborhoods against the
exclusions of capitalism and the incursions of police; and the
Mapuche, fighting for their land and integrity against the continuing
colonialism of the Chilean state and multinational timber
corporations. The title of the film refers to the Chilean economists
who studied under Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago and
who utilized the brutal Pinochet dictatorship to implement their
neoliberal theories on Chilean society.
With a skillful mixture of personal interviews, archival or media
footage, and shots of riots, protests, festivals, and other events,
the film gives the viewer an emotive and thoughtful impression of
these struggles rather than an informational explanation. The
filmmakers describe the situation through the contradictory words of
students, parents, fugitives, combatants, youth, elders, news
anchors, politicans, and economists, presenting a multifaceted range
of analysis that includes the progressive, the Marxist, the
anarchist, and the neoliberal. It is interesting that in a
documentary that from the very beginning attacks the notion of
objectivity, a narrator figure would be so minor of a character. The
political voice of the film is neither hidden nor explicit. Much of
the analysis is conveyed implicitly, through the juxtaposition of
these interviews.
For example, the Chilean economists who provoke the film's name are
described only minimally, yet scenes of repression and street
fighting are periodically interrupted by shots of a grandfatherly
Milton Friedman, sitting in a comfortable room as an orchestra plays,
using this civilized setting and a patronizing smile to construct a
didactic and simplistic metaphor to justify the heartless mechanics
of the Free Market. His arguments are never directly confronted, but
they do not need to be; the rest of the film shows how the putatively
natural and fair market mechanisms are imposed. The social war does
not need to be justified or explained; it is unarguable. Here the
filmmakers find an instance when filming is revolutionary, when the
camera can illuminate, in the way a burning church illuminates.
Without fetishizing the abandonment of research and reason, we must
still somehow dismiss the debates of Authority with the contempt they
deserve. Friedman's facile words of gifted children inheriting talent
as property do not need to be debated because the words themselves
are not the point; any argument would do. Capitalism expands itself
not on the basis of considered reasons but on the basis of internal
imperatives. The rest of us are meant to contemplate the discourses
Capital's technicians offer us to give an alibi to what already is,
which is the continuous forceful rearrangement of our lives. Thus,
not by picking apart his sophomoric syllogism but by showing the
police forces that stand behind it, the rage provoked by it, do the
filmmakers show that Friedman has a corpse in his mouth.
In The Chicago Conspiracy the filmmakers rarely speak in their own
words, but rather in where they choose to look. Their anti-objective
subjectivity is conveyed not in arguments but in sympathies.
Solidarity spreads, after all, not through agreement but through the
communalization of the lived experiences of struggle. One couldn't
agree, simultaneously, with both the student talking about rights and
better education, and the anarchist talking about subversion, but one
can sympathize with both, sympathize with the struggle, and choose
one's place in it.
Because the filmmakers choose less to inform and more to invoke, or
so it seems to me, they evade some of the illusive traps that pervade
the medium of film, especially in leftist usages thereof. They
recognize that what we need to hold up to power is, to paraphrase
Brecht, not a mirror, but a hammer. But is the tool itself adequate?
Some would argue that film itself is inherently spectacular. While I
personally could not conceive of being in a riot and choosing to
occupy my hands with a camera, I also acknowledge that in calmer
moments I love to watch footage of social tempests occurring elsewhere.
It seems that a sort of wordplay has come to be the current
interpretation of the spectacle; that any activity which includes the
role of spectators is in and of itself spectacular, a manifestation
of the spectacle. Before dismissing this hypersensitivity towards
ever being a spectator of anything, I want to mention that the
filmmakers frequently use narrative interruptions to subvert the
narcotic effect of film and repeatedly resituate both themselves and
the audience in the act of making and viewing the documentary, so
that The Chicago Conspiracy functions as a sort of meeting rather
than another displacement. They accomplish this by starting the film
with the words "What are you looking at?" and a scene of a clash
between a corporate photographer and their own subversive film crew;
by calling attention, via interruptions at the beginning of each of
the film's three chapters, to the borders of the medium; by framing
shots so that the shadows of the camera person and interviewer often
appear on the ground next to the interviewee.
But clever tricks aside, is film inherently spectacular? While I
disagree with Debord's, and all other Marxists', belief in the
totality of their own ideas, and I would argue that the totality is
in fact incomplete, I find it worthwhile to come back to the first
chapter of Society of the Spectacle: the spectacle is "a means of
unification [...] the unification it achieves is nothing but an
official language of universal separation [...] The spectacle is not
a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that
is mediated by images [...] The spectacle cannot be understood as a
mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies."
When social conflict reaches a level that is undeniable, it is the
function of the media to turn their cameras there, in order to unify
the rupture with the common stream of the spectacle. How are these
cameras different from the cameras of the activists and combatants?
Often, as we have too often seen, they are not. But to argue that the
problem lies in the camera itself seems akin to the perplexing
argument that the master's tools cannot be used to dismantle the
master's house, a turn of phrase so sloppy that it does not even make
sense in its metaphorical clothes. By bringing weapons to a riot, are
anarchists performing the same job as the police, who also bring
weapons to riots? Be gone, pacifists, clinging to the cupboards of
our mind like cobwebs!
The camera in the hands of a combatant can attack the spectacle if it
is a means of separation that achieves a subversive language of
unification. What does this mean, if I am not simply playing at
opposite day? It means using juxtaposition as detournement, placing
the narrative of the spectacle next to the images of its ruptures,
its exclusions. It means using their words of social peace to explain
our world of social war. In the spectacle, images of rupture are
fragmented from their emotional reality and tailored into a unified
narrative of senselessness and fear which calls for more order, more
of the same thing that lies behind the rupture.
Attacking the spectacle with images means exposing social relations
as they exist and moving towards social relations of solidarity and
mutual aid, towards communalization. This documentary clearly comes
out of relationships of solidarity developed between anarchists and
filmmakers in Chile and the US, and audibly calls on the viewer to
sympathize with those in struggle in Chile and to include them in our
community of insurrection. It is a first step towards widening our
struggle by becoming aware of other manifestations of that struggle.
Awareness and sympathyconsciousness and emotional tiesare
prerequisites for solidarity.
The film itself accomplishes nothing unless those who view it get up
from their seats afterwards and build those relationships of
solidarity. Whereas the spectacle is "the result and the project of
the dominant mode of production," a radical documentary is not a
completed object but an invitation, whose project lies outside of
itself, in the streets to which it beckons us. The effect of a film,
the question of whether we are locked in permanent contemplation, it
turns out, will be decided by us. The Chicago Conspiracy is well made
not only as a film but also as a framing of exactly this choice. It
seems most fitting that in the end we turn our critique not on the
film, but on what we do with it.
.
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