Activist Film Festivals

Description

Film festivals are an ever-growing part of the film industry, but most considerations of them focus almost entirely on their role in the business of filmmaking.

This book breaks new ground by bringing scholars from a range of disciplines together with industry professionals to explore the concept of festivals as spaces through an activist lens, as spaces where the sociopolitical identities of communities and individuals are confronted and shaped. Tracing the growth of activist and human rights-focused films from the 1970s to the present, and using case studies from San Francisco, Brazil, Bristol, and elsewhere, the book addresses such contentious topics as whether activist films can achieve humanitarian aims or simply offer “cinema of suffering.” Ultimately, the contributors attack the question of just how effective festivals are at producing politically engaged spectators?

 

Introduction

Sonia Tascón and Tyson Wils

Section 1: Film Festivals as Platform

Chapter 1: Watching Others’ Troubles: Revisiting “The Film Act” and Spectatorship in Activist Film Festivals

Sonia Tascón

Chapter 2: Off-Screen Activism and the Documentary Film Screening

Lyell Davies

Chapter 3: ITVS (Independent Television Service) Community Cinema: State-Sponsored Documentary Film Festivals, Community Engagement and Pedagogy

Tomás F. Crowder-Taraborrelli and Kristi Wilson

Section 2: Contextual and Institutional Forces

Chapter 4: The Revolution Will Not Be Festivalized: Documentary Film Festivals and Activism

Ezra Winton and Svetla Turnin

Chapter 5: Human Rights Film Festivals: Different Approaches to Change the World

Matthea de Jong and Daan Bronkhorst

Chapter 6: Refusal to Know the Place of Human Rights: Dissensus and the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival

Tyson Wils

Section 3: National and Regional Perspectives

Chapter 7: Bristol Palestine Film Festival: Engaging the Inactive, the Aroused and the Aware

David Owen

Chapter 8: Reframing the Margin: Regional Film Festivals in India, a Case Study of the Cinema of Resistance

Shweta Kishore

Chapter 9: “Its Not Just About the Films”: Activist Film Festivals in Post-New Order Indonesia

Alexandra Crosby

Section 4: Identity Politics

Chapter 10: imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival: Collaborative Criticism through Curatorship

Davinia Thornley

Chapter 11: Disability Film Festivals: Biological Identity(ies) and Heterotopia

Ana Cristina Bohrer Glibert

Chapter 12: “Would You Like Politics with That?” Queer Film Festival Audiences as Political Consumers

Stuart Richards

 

Sujets

• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Film
• ART
• General
• Impérialisme (jeu vidéo)
• Anthropology
• Activism
• Documentary film
• Imperialism
• Video
• General officer
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• LGBTQ+ Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783206360
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2017 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2017 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Katie Evans
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-634-6
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-635-3
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-636-0
Printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, UK
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Introduction
Sonia Tascón and Tyson Wils
Section 1: Film Festivals as Platform
Chapter 1: Watching Others’ Troubles: Revisiting “The Film Act” 21 and Spectatorship in Activist Film Festivals
Sonia Tascón
Chapter 2: Off-Screen Activism and the Documentary Film Screening
Lyell Davies
Chapter 3: ITVS (Independent Television Service) Community Cinema: 59 State-Sponsored Documentary Film Festivals, Community Engagement and Pedagogy
Tomás F. Crowder-Taraborrelli and Kristi Wilson
Section 2: Contextual and Institutional Forces
Chapter 4: The Revolution Will Not Be Festivalized: Documentary 81 Film Festivals and Activism
Ezra Winton and Svetla Turnin
Chapter 5: Human Rights Film Festivals: Different Approaches 105 to Change the World
Matthea de Jong and Daan Bronkhorst
Chapter 6: Refusal to Know the Place of Human Rights: Dissensus 121 and the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival
Tyson Wils
Section 3: National and Regional Perspectives
Chapter 7: Bristol Palestine Film Festival: Engaging the Inactive, 141 the Aroused and the Aware
David Owen
Chapter 8: Reframing the Margin: Regional Film Festivals in India,159 a Case Study of the Cinema of Resistance
Shweta Kishore
Chapter 9: “Its Not Just About the Films”: Activist Film Festivals 181 in Post-New Order Indonesia
Alexandra Crosby
Section 4: Identity Politics
Chapter 10: imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival: Collaborative 199 Criticism through Curatorship
Davinia Thornley
Chapter 11: Disability Film Festivals: Biological Identity(ies) and Heterotopia
Ana Cristina Bohrer Glibert
Chapter 12: “Would You Like Politics with That?” Queer Film Festival 229 Audiences as Political Consumers
Stuart Richards
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Sonia Tascón and Tyson Wils
Opening thoughts (Sonia Tascón)
This book was born of the hypothesis that different platforms for political activism may produce different audiences and that film festivals explicitly intended to help further social change, or those defined as having an activist orientation, need to be considered more closely as they “envelop” a spectator differently. The difference mentioned has to do with much of the ways that the scholarship surrounding activism and visual media has configured an ethical and political spectator as a problematic figure whose embodiment of geopolitical power disparities infect the viewing to such a degree that they (we) cannot help but reinforce these inequalities. These disseminations often also take into account the visual media involved and how their very production is implicated in the disparities, but then go on to make generalizations about the spectator who views others’ suffering as always already invested in a system of viewing deeply riven with power (Sontag 2003; Hesford 2011; Chouliaraki 2006, 2012; Torchin 2012a; Boltanski 1999). This power makes of some people objects (victims) and others vested with (fuller) human agency, the latter manifesting in the impulse to “save” the victims. In this current work, we have asked contributors to consider more closely the idea that the site where the activism takes place makes a difference to the ways in which the individuals are engaging with this system of power. That is, the context of the consumption of the filmic image may be conducive to a deeper/reduced engagement with the questions of power and the relationships of power inherent in the production of images, their exhibition and their spectators. In this regard, this book wants to explore the idea that the context of the exhibition of films has something significant to say to that relationship of power in which the filmic images, its producers, its exhibitors and its spectators are inextricably entwined.
Films and film festivals have been some of the oldest of the modern forms of visual activism (de Valck 2007), and yet activist film festivals have received little attention in the academic literature. In Latin America, the birth-home of one of the editors, film festivals were being used in the 1960s and 1970s to disseminate revolutionary ideas both for converting the social world, and for the production of new types of films that would encourage participation in that transformation (Solanas 1969). Some work has begun to appear that considers the role of film festivals in activism, particularly a 2012 text, edited by Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin entitled Film Festival Yearbook 4: Film Festivals and Activism . Much of the work of that book considers the specific ways in which activist film festivals create a distinct network of flows, and some attention is given to their audiences, although to a much lesser extent. Some mention is made of “the testimonial encounter” (Torchin 2012: 2), and that the intended aim of these sorts of festivals is to mobilize audiences towards creating social change (Iordanova 2012; Blažević 2012). In this current edited volume, we sought to expand on this work and asked our contributors to consider this scholarship, but also others who have engaged more precisely with visual activism and spectatorship. Contributors have participated in this volume from a wide variety of backgrounds, some of which we will describe more closely below. But at this point it may be worthwhile to disseminate the visual activism and spectatorship field more widely, beginning with a discussion of what is meant by visual activism and activist spectatorship. It will necessarily be a brief dissemination as it is intended to only give a broad overview of the field within which this book is situated.
Visual activism and activist spectators
In bringing the field of visual activism and spectatorship together, we cannot escape the fact that of all the terms used to describe the relationship between the image and a spectator whose viewing is intended to produce heightened awareness and eventual activity for social change, that of “witnessing” “suffering strangers” are the most common. Luc Boltanski’s 1999 seminal text Distant Suffering is possibly the most indicative of this trend in considering these images as constructed for, and appealing to, a particular audience. Susan Sontag’s 2004 treatise on war photography, entitled Regarding the Pain of Others , continues in this trend. Both of these texts remain two of the most influential, conceptually, in the reading of humanitarian visual texts. But many others have followed in this discursive fashion (Chouliaraki 2006, 2012; Torchin 2012; Bornstein 2009; Hesford 2011; Tascón 2012). In all of these analyses, a particular spectatorial position is assumed: that the viewing stance of those who are given access to the troubled situations of others must necessarily be unequal, more privileged in some way, from those who are the film subjects; and that often the inequality is reinforced through such viewing and the eventual actions they motivate in the viewer. These analyses correctly assume that watching others’ troubles is not a neutral activity; it is subsumed within an economy of local and global power that can construct bodies as having agency or as failing to have it – whether this is manifest in the image or in the daily lives of people. But this is heightened in the case of images, as these have the capacity for transgressing communication borders and cultural filters by flowing with ready ease via films, videos and now the Internet. The Joseph Kony campaign of 2012, its success and subsequent critiques show this well.
Current conceptualizations of humanitarian “ways of seeing” (Gaines 1986) are largely critiques of well-meaning naivety at best, or as the justification for military interventions at worst. In recent research conducted by one of the editors (Tascón 2015), studying human rights film festivals, I developed the idea of “the humanitarian gaze” to attempt to capture some of the geopolitical dimensions with which the above scholars have been grappling, but also consider that many of their explanations arose from spectatorship of a particular kind, largely that which takes place in the watching of television news. Some of that discussion takes place in my own chapter in this tome. Much of the criticism of the Kony phenomenon featured elements of the politics of viewing with which those scholars have grappled. A question that emerges from these critiques, however, is whether these analyses, or critiques, end up reproducing the political and cultural economies from whence these images emerge because, in seeking to overturn these relationships the analyses themselves continue to stamp their power by failing to see other possibilities. That is, by continually reifying the relationship of image consumption from an assumed binary of power – victim/saviour for example – even while attempting to interrupt and make salient its features, it continues to assume and support “the logic of a global morality market that privileges Westerners as world citizens” (Chouliaraki 2012: 9). For the purposes of this book, we can change “citizens” for “spectator” and the argument remains the same. In this book, we wished to begin fro