The eighth annual event will take place between sunset and sunrise on October 5, 2013 and feature more than 110 contemporary art projects scattered across the city.

The installation by Weiwei, which debuted last year at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, features 1200 interconnected bicycles formed into a spellbinding, three-dimensional pattern.

This new version of the sculpture will be erected in Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square, just a few short blocks from the Art Gallery of Ontario, which will be featuring the exhibit Ai Weiwei: According to What? from August 17 – October 27, 2013.

Related — Weiwei-isms: The Coles Notes of an Infamous Chinese Dissident.

As someone who makes an reasonable effort to make decisions that are good for both my health and that of the planet, my shopping cart is largely filled with whole foods.

I’m certainly no saint — tubs of yoghurt, cans of legumes, bottles of beer and boxes of frozen pizza all involve unnecessary energy inputs and waste.

But each time I pull up to the checkout and dump dozens of fruits and veggies onto the conveyor belt, I find my selections are in stark contrast to most consumers, as piles of processed products roll past the grocery clerks in adjacent aisles, and carts depart with more photos of vegetables than the actual plants themselves.

I can now place my shopping habits into a much wider context thanks to Hungry Planet, a simple yet fascinating book by photographer Peter Menzel and writer Faith D’Aluisio.

In Hungry Planet, Menzel and D’Aluisio offer a photographic study of families across the world. From Mexico to Mongolia, portraits are taken with families surrounded by a week’s worth of the food they consume.

The accompanying text describes their grocery list in detail, including their weekly food budget. Altogether, the book provides a compelling comparative sample of food consumption habits across cultures.

Menzel’s photos also draw attention to the global cultural idiosyncrasies of eating. While in North America consuming unprocessed, healthy food is often thought of, rightly or wrongly, as a privilege of the affluent, it is processed foods that are often out of reach for less flush families in other parts of the world.

Hungry Planet profiles a total of 30 families in 24 countries, only a few of which are depicted below. You can see the others on Menzel’s website, or order the book from your local bookseller or Amazon’s Canadian or US website.

Top image: The Cui family of Weitaiwu village, Beijing Province, China. Hat tip: Demilked.

CANADA: The Melanson family of Nunavut.

UNITED STATES: The Revis family of Raleigh, North Carolina.

JAPAN: The Ukita family of Kodaira City.

MALI: The Natomo family of Kouakourou.

The simple answer is that a solar farm 100 miles long and 100 miles wide would be “more than enough to meet the country’s entire energy demand.”

The far more interesting answer, however, is that this hypothetical solar farm could be contained by a 460-mile line of chalk currently being drawn across Arizona by artist and activist Joseph DeLappe.

Project 929: Mapping the Solar, is both a long-distance bike ride and work of performance art. DeLappe hit the road on May 19 with a customized touring bicycle equipped with GoPro cameras, GPS technology, and an armature that holds the 15-inch pieces of chalk needed to mark up pavement in the desert.

A map showing the 460 mile route Joseph DeLappe will bike during Project 929. (Click to enlarge.)

His circuitous route will roughly trace the perimeter of the US government land that include the Nevada Test Site, Nellis Air Force Range, and the infamous Area 51. Project 929 refers to the 928 nuclear tests that took place on this land between 1951 and 1992.

During the estimated ten days it will take DeLappe to complete the route, he will be streaming a map with his current GPS coordinates using an avatar from Blue Mars, as well as live streaming the view from his handlebars whenever he has a decent mobile data connection.

Over 200 pieces of chalk were made by hand.

An art professor with the University of Nevada, Reno, DeLappe calls his latest project “an ideational and political exercise towards symbolically representing the possible, physically re-imagining geographical space for energy sustainability. To map this desire — become a moving point, line of battle, contour of an idea, an edge, line of communication, measure or guide — is a driving principle.”

Update: Gawker is now trying to raise $200,000 on Indiegogo to buy and publish the video.

“We wanted to convey the message that all sexual minorities should be given rights equally in a beautiful way,” Kim told a news conference in Seoul.

Very few Korean celebrities are openly gay. Actor Hong Seok-cheon was the first to come out in 2000, and found that his work quickly dried up.

Another actor, Kim Ji-hoo, announced he was gay in 2008 on a reality show profiling the lives of LGBTQ Koreans. This led to much public harassment, the cancellation of future TV appearances, and a rejection by his management company. He ultimately hanged himself later that year.

Gay South Korean film director to marry in bid to pry open closet | Reuters

Image: AsianWiki.

His latest work, The Conservative Christ, depicts Jesus with an AK-47 hoisted into their air, clutching tightly to a pot of gold, and sneering derisively at a poor, old man. By illustrating precisely what Jesus would not do, D’Antuono draws attention to the awkward dissonance between Conservative’s sociopolitical beliefs and their supposed adherence to Christian values.

It was in an attempt to understand this conflict that inspired him to create the work.

It seems like the ultimate in sanctimonious hypocrisy to identify yourself with Christ and also with conservative policies. Christ’s teachings of compassion, forgiveness and acceptance just don’t align up with Republican positions on entitlements, healthcare, immigration and marriage equality.

Abortion is the one issue I can see where Jesus might agree with the right and maybe that trumps everything else for them. Even with that, it’s hard to understand dichotomy of how they can be protective of the unborn, but generally hawkish when it comes to creating wars that kill fully realized individuals.

Despite being a lightning rod for Conservative outrage, D’Antuono, who previously worked as an illustrator before severe tendinitis drove him towards oil painting, and his work has been featured regularly on The Blaze, the right-wing TV network and website founded by talk radio host Glenn Beck. D’Antuono believes, however, that his appearance was about more than fanning the flames of Beck’s viewers:

A strong constitutionalist, I think Glenn truly [believes] in defending my first amendment right to exhibit my painting even though he and I differ greatly politically. He’s also a smart businessman. Talking about my painting and trying to sell his piece inspired by it gained him a lot of attention. Also, covering my art gets a large amount of comments from his audience. I have to give him and his organization credit as despite our philosophical differences, they have always represented me fairly.

You can view more of Michael D’Antuono’s art on his website, Art & Response.

Amazing things like literacy projects, art therapy, and independent documentaries were among the steadily highlighted cultural offerings on sites like Indiegogo.com.

Example of the weekly Indiegogo newsletter.

These days I look at my weekly emails from Indiegogo and I see nothing but entrepreneurs trying to raise money to sell stuff right back to us — like the Ridogulous pet collar pictured above.

Of course many have a “socially responsible” element, like giving poor kids socks or donating ten percent of the price of those fancy underwear to charity, but Do-good Capitalism has been around long enough for most of us to know that we can’t buy our way out of the world’s problems, especially inequity.

Indiegogo is but another example of the displacement of independent art and culture by capital. Chantal Mouffe writes that in order to fight the trend of cultural production serving the role of capital valorization, we need to widen the field of artistic intervention, “[B]y intervening directly in a multiplicity of social spaces in order to oppose the program of total social mobilization of capitalism.”

This isn’t about going against people that want to start up businesses on Indiegogo, surely there are bigger fish to fry. It’s about finding ways to intervene in processes of cultural colonization by capital.

So while I dig around for viable alternatives to Indiegogo, or alternately find some way of filtering the business to the back and the art and culture to the front, I recommend supporting these two great campaigns: IMAA is seeking support to launch a new Canadian arts award, and the Howl! Arts Collective is raising money to record a beautiful double CD.

Update: Check out this article from the Guardian on another issue facing crowdfunding for the arts, namely wealthy Hollywood stars like Zach Braff turning down film financing in favour of “panhandling” on crowdfunding sites.

The trademark filing was done in advance of an upcoming animated film release by Disney-owned Pixar based on the cultural celebration in which people gather to remember and honour their ancestors. Dia de los Muertos is a national holiday in Mexico and is also observed in other parts of Latin America and by Mexican communities around the world.

Disney apparently sought ownership over the phrase for merchandising purposes. According to The Guardian, “Disney wanted exclusive domain for goods including ‘fruit-based snack foods’, ‘Christmas-tree ornaments and decorations’, ‘decorative magnets’, ‘non-medicated toiletries’ and ‘frozen meals consisting primarily of pasta or rice’, as well as for education and entertainment purposes.”

Photo by Carmichael Library.

In his liner notes for the song on his later Decade retrospective, Young would call the massacre “probably the biggest lesson ever learned at an American place of learning.” In our current political climate where dissent in increasingly repressed and criminalized, including here in Canada let us make sure we do not forget this lesson.

Photo via Ben Brucato.

The newest agit-POP video from the folks at the Albino Squirrel Vimeo Channel asks Morgan Freeman and CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi to stand with Palestinians and consider cancelling an event set to take place in a few days.

When it’s not subjects doing the saving, it’s the filmmakers themselves who set out to change the world with their film (Rob Stewart’s REVOLUTION comes to mind). If you hang around film festivals long enough, you start to see that this is quite an industry, and one some call a new kind of benevolent colonization: where those who have the wherewithal tell the stories (and sometimes make a living from doing so) of those who do not have the resources nor connections.

This kind of filmmaking—the opposite of David Vaisbord’s hyperlocal approach to documentary—is perhaps best summed up in the paternalistic minority world expression “Giving voice to the voiceless.” Yet too often the principle voice we hear, whether directly or through the artifice of filmmaking, is that of the outsider to a local situation.

Not so with the beautifully shot, edited and directed BLOOD RELATIVE, programmed at this year’s Hot Docs. Nimisha Mukerji’s new documentary is about the struggle of children with Thalassemia, a genetic disease that inhibits development in those afflicted, living in India. The film centres on two individuals who look like they are much, much younger than they are because of the consequences of the disease, and a tireless activist working to provide them with care and support by the name of Vinay Shetty.

While the film comes close to promoting the liberal notion of individuality overcoming the social conditions of many, something often referred to as the hero complex in film and literature, BLOOD RELATIVE thankfully keeps a steady focus on the children and their families who cope with the disease and whose bold fortitude is exemplary.

Shetty is a kind of hero, to be sure, and his non-stop labour to make up for a healthcare system that should be providing for the children but doesn’t, is at times painful to watch, especially when his own resources are threatened. I would had liked to know more about what motivates Shetty, but it may be as simple as the film portrays: he is moved by their condition and situation and cannot stand idly by while they suffer.

BLOOD RELATIVE is a film composed of tragedy and a spirit of resistance that triumphs over tragedy. Gorgeously shot, and compellingly told from a clearly intimate and compassionate perspective, it is a story that bucks the just-parachuted-in trend in so many other documentaries.

Art Threat took a few moments of Mukerji’s (pictured above) busy festival schedule to ask a few questions.

Art Threat: How did you come across this remarkable story?

Nimisha Mukerji: Vinay Shetty is my uncle and we reconnected a few years ago in Mumbai. My family in India kept telling me about all the incredible work he was doing over there to help children get access to medicine. I had never heard of Thalassemia before, and I was surprised to learn that it’s the number one genetic disease in the world.

There are many documentaries that explore negative aspects of contemporary Indian society, from violence, to corruption to poverty. While your film does show the desperate situation for poor people struggling with an under-resourced health care system, it also showcases the heroism of people selflessly making a difference, and as such, offers some hope in an otherwise depressing situation. Can you speak to this dynamic and talk about how you constructed the film to really do both things?

The tagline for our film is India’s heroes aren’t just in Bollywood, and from the beginning I loved the idea of focusing on Indians in the country working to create positive change. I’ve often seen films about foreigners going into third world countries to save the day. But in Vinay I found this remarkable man, born and raised in India, who was tirelessly working to get these children help. I wanted the film to focus on his positivity and hope for the future, as well as the strength that children like Divya and Imran possess.

You have excellent access to your subjects, can you speak about how you met them, the filming process, and also what they think about the film?

When I started filming with Vinay I was introduced to some of the young people who are struggling to get treatment. I was drawn to Imran and Divya’s stories since they were in such different circumstances. For Divya her parents were relying on spiritual healers and prayer and had no understanding of the medicines that are available. They also treated her differently than her brother simply because she’s a girl. For Imran he was working to not only pay for his treatment but also to support his family. The biggest challenge though, was getting access to the government hospitals as well as government officials. We started filming right after the Mumbai terrorist attacks, so walking around with a camera could get you into trouble pretty fast. We had our gear and footage confiscated a number of times, but were always able to get it back. We were persistent and eventually got access to the Health Minister for the state of Maharashtra, which was really a miracle. Through him we got access to the hospitals.

Vinay and Imran were very surprised when they first saw the film. While there is a small documentary community in India few people have actually seen one, and I don’t think they fully realized that we were making an actual film, and that they were the stars of it! They were very surprised by the interviews with their family members. For Vinay it was the moment where his sister Smita gets emotional and for Imran it was seeing his mother get emotional. Divya has yet to see the film, but we are hoping to go to India and screen it for her family.

Everywhere in the world there is a link between health and wealth — those who have more money can always access the best systems, experts, medicine and treatments, while those who are the most marginalized are further oppressed when they suffer from health issues. Can you speak to what people can do to address this ongoing inequity?

I feel like if change is really going to happen in countries like the US and India, it has to come from the government. People have to start caring about the well-being of the community. Children with Thalassemia in Canada, where I currently live, receive treatment for free and go on to lead healthy, productive lives.  The children we filmed in India do not deserve to be abandoned because of their economic status. For me the worst part was that Thalassemia is a treatable and manageable disease, but in India they continue to see fatalities just because there is no access to proper medical care.

There are two things that people can do. One, they can ask to get tested for Thalassemia and find out if they’re a carrier. This is very important since there have been successful prevention programs implemented in countries like Greece, where there are very few children now suffering from the disease. The second way people can get involved is either by donating to Vinay’s cause or supporting the film as a tool for spreading awareness. Vinay will soon be able to accept international donations to Think Foundation, so follow the film on Facebook for updates on how to help!

How can people see this film?

Right now we’re on the festival circuit, which has been amazing! We’ve picked up a number of audience awards and are planning an online release of the film later this year. People can visit our website and follow us on Facebook to get updates soon on how to see the film!

According to the doc, wild salmon are being killed off in alarming numbers and independent studies show the diseases are linked to fish in West Coast farms, who are carrying viruses and pathogens from Norway. I’m particularly disturbed by a former fellow high school student, Don McRae who as an MLA recently introduced Bill 37.

The entirely unconstitutional Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Amendment Act, 2011 would, if passed, make it illegal to report the location of the fish farm that diseased fish samples originated from.

Of the project she says: “Kids are more impressionable than you, but kids can also be less restricted by cultural gender norms than you. Kids are more creative than you, and they’re better at making superheroes than you. This is a mini art project where I draw superheroes based on the costumes worn by little girls.”

It’s practically tragic that there are so few opportunities to play with gender norms the way we did as kids, when we didn’t think of them! (Unless, of course, you do drag!)

In the worldwide box office top 1– grossing films, JURASSIC PARK thrilled with CGI fangs at 1st place, IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER struck a historical political chord at 24th, and SCHINDLER’S LIST didn’t leave a dry eye at 4th place.

As for documentary… hang on, where is documentary on that 1993 list of “top performing” films?

Looking back twenty years ago it may be difficult to find documentaries faring well at the box office yet many notable works were produced, such as the gripping THE WAR ROOM (Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker — more on this film later), the politically punchy THE PANAMA DECEPTION by Barbara Trent and David Kasper (technically 1992 but it won the Academy Award in 93) and the environmental classic, and box office “hit” BARAKA (Ron Fricke).

In Canada, productions included Alanis Obomsawin’s legendary corrective to mainstream media KANEHSATAKE: 270 YEARS OF RESISTANCE (pictured above), festival award-winner BLOCKADE (Nettie Wild), the Gemini-winning doc-series based on Michael Ignatief’s hawkish writings BLOOD AND BELONGING: JOURNEYS INTO THE NEW NATIONALISM, the groundbreaking AIDS advocacy production (and Academy Award-nominated) THE BROADCAST TAPES OF DR. PETER (David Paperny), and Atlantic Canada’s GOD’S DOMINION: SHEPHERD’S TO THE FLOCK (John Walker).

Two important 1992 NFB-involved films of note — Canada’s then top-grossing documentary of all time, MANUFACTURING CONSENT: NOAM CHOMSKY AND THE MEDIA (Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick) and Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman’s FORBIDDEN LOVE: THE UNASHAMED STORIES OF LESBIAN LIVES — continued to promise, play, and provoke.

Peter Steven published his book Brink of Reality: New Canadian Documentary Film and Video, the Canadian government replaced the Railway Act of 1906 with a more documentary-friendly Telecommunications Act, and all hailed the hefty hoisting of documentary on to the mediascape stage.

But, much like today’s situation, viable venues, bums in seats and big budgets were part of a misleading cultural promise of independent, alternative media perspectives and channels that grew smaller (and continue to recede) in the reflection of the 1980s, emblazoned with that culturally-tuned public safety warning, “Objects in mirror are smaller than they appear.”

It’s not that previous epochs conditioned documentary’s salad days (although the 1960s and 1970s ushered in a new robust and public era for docs thanks to the New Left, social movements and bold video artists), but the 1980s really rained on the potential parade, as it were. Recovery was slow, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the global dream of socialism in free-fall capitalism seemed to pull the final tooth in the Grin Without a Cat.

As the postmodern postmortem “art for money” trampled to death the earlier naiveté and joi de vivre spirit of “art for art’s sake,” artists and creative souls leaned hard into the 1990s, and adapted.

Speaking of UK arts school students who became pop musicians in the 1980s, Firth and Horne (quoted in Jane Feuer’s 1995 book on the decade, TV and Reaganism) put it this way: “What this suggests to us is not that we are all now colonized by advertisers’ fantasies, but that the interplay of artifice and authenticity is central to everyone’s lives in consumer capitalism.”

Or Patricia Aufderheide’s take: “Commodity culture [can] use as many revolutions per minute as are fed into the marketing machinery” (quoted in her excellent 2000 volume The Daily Planet: A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat).

With artifice and machinery whirring along, the early 1990s in Canada were one of many flash points in the protracted struggle between capital and culture, with capital advancing drunkenly from its privileged position among the free market stars, having been fortified and bloated over the previous decade off the back of labour, at the expense of taxpayers, and with Hollywood providing the raw materials for the infinite dreams of progress. Can there be any other reasonable explanation for Canada’s celebrated auteur, Deepa Mehta, having directed two episodes of the TV series THE YOUNG INDIANA JONES in 1993 and 1996?

Knowledge Network CEO and veteran commissioning editor Rudy Buttignol recently wrote in the pages of Canada’s foremost documentary publication, POV Magazine, that the early 1990s were indeed culturally and economically tumultuous:

We were undergoing great cultural change as a response to the worldwide advances of technology, deregulation and globalization. Immigrants were arriving in larger numbers from Asia than they were from Europe or the U.K., and Canadians were trying to sort out what kind of society we were in the process of becoming.

As Canadian culturecrats mindfully migrated from a public to private philosophy, and put artifice to practice with regards to the management of newly anointed specialty television channels, documentarians nonetheless remained hopeful for their art and craft, intent that documentary would indeed play an important role in sorting out just what kind of society we were to be.

Out of the eighties’ ashes, a festival is born

And so, three years into the decade and reeling from the commercial putsch of independent culture by ruthless free market seers like Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney, documentary makers gathered their forces to create a new showcase event for a genre that had lived (thrived even, some would say) on television but barely breathed outside of the blue-tinged living rooms across the continent.

Not to be outdone by the creation of the Hamptons International Film Festival that same year, prescient Canadian Independent Film Caucus (CIFC) members in Toronto — Paul Jay and Debbie Nightingale at the lead along with Barri Cohen, Barry Greenwald and Ali Kazimi — conspired in the summer of 1993 and set in motion a new path for documentary’s role in interpreting and reflecting that very changing society by launching the Hot Docs International Film Festival.

With a small parcel of cash from Kodak (the culture-commerce tango thus continued after the previous decade’s credit-roll), the CIFC (later to become the Documentary Organization of Canada) filmmakers launched one of three hopeful projects to stir up interest in documentary and support those audacious enough to schlep around heavy equipment and capture actuality for a penance. (POV Magazine and a book spearheaded by Peter Raymont made up the other two projects.) The first Hot Docs edition was a modest affair, but still impressive with 290 tickets sold for the gala event in the Jackman Hall at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which was populated by documentary filmmakers, funders, industry folks, and press.

Twenty years on and Hot Docs is now one of the best, largest and most successful top shelf documentary events in the world. Second in size only to IDFA and mostly extricated from the heavy shadow cast by Toronto’s mammoth festival, TIFF (est. 1976), North America’s foremost public platform and private market for documentary is something to behold.

Unsurprisingly, the festival has changed over the course of two decades, and as organizers, staff, volunteers, filmmakers, industry folk, funders, sponsors and audiences prepare to converge in the coming days, I am intrigued by the diversity and intensity of opinion on the festival, notably the antinomy found among festival-goers and filmmakers who seem to either hate to love the festival, or worse yet, love to hate our dear old Hot Docs.

Among the ranks there is a belief that in the sustained (but not sustainable?) struggle between independent culture and the commanding heights of the creative economy, (global) capital is kicking (local) culture’s ass. Sure, Hot Docs is a huge commercial and corporate-friendly cultural event and institution — but what isn’t these days? I mean that anyone has heard of? In this economic and political climate?

Hot Docs serves documentary industry and culture, and as such, we in the doc community should not huddle in grumpy circles pooh-poohing the festival’s mainstream status and rising international star, but should instead cling to the edges of the fast-moving festival and dig in for the long haul. For those of us who love documentary and believe it can have an impact on the world, even intervening in these times of cutbacks and austerity asperity, we need to engage not withdraw.

Twenty years from now I’d love to see a vibrant, strong and Ali-like Hot Docs championing documentary locally and globally. But much like the festival’s many commercial film fest cousins, the current blueprint has imperfections and needs tinkering if it is to continue living up to its fans, answer its critics, and draw in activists, all of whom are angling in a political and cultural climate shaped by a 1980s rampage, a 1990s hangover, a 2000s revival and a 2010s recession.

Hot Docs has shown an aversion to criticism, at least in any meaningful way on the exterior. (I can’t speak for what goes on behind closed doors.) Alternately, much criticism doesn’t reach Hot Docs directly, mostly because the festival has become so fundamental to documentary in Canada, critics tend to bite their own forked tongues for fear of blowback when it comes to programming choices and industry engagements. Such are the trappings of those at the top of the game.

Yet criticism, when it comes from a place of admiration and respect, can be a constructive thing. Further, criticism isn’t always about attack. In the current doc climate we especially can neither afford to wage wars with nor walk away from such a crucial, influential and indispensable player on the non-fiction field, no matter how muscly they’ve become among an anemic doc demographic. (Of course I’m also aware that there is much to celebrate in that brawn — from the two decades of stellar programming to Docs For Schools to the purchase of the Bloor to Doc Ignite, the list is very long.)

So it is in the best spirit of improvement and support that I make the following suggestions for consideration at this exciting two-decade juncture. While these propositions are directed at the festival I love conditionally, they can easily be applied to most large, commercially successful, mainstream film festivals.

I am certainly not so delusional to think that failure is imminent should they ignore, or worse, deride my provocations, but I sincerely hope the festival powers-that-be consider the following five points as thoughtful, supportive and well-researched constructive criticism that is intended to shine light on weak points of an impressively potent giant, so that growth can be directed inward as well as outward as we look to twenty more years of Hot Docs.

1. Slow festival philosophy

Capitalism thrives on inequity, where institutions like banks and big box stores grow prodigious at the expense of community and the working and jobless classes. Culture thrives on diversity, inclusion and local connectivity. Festivals aren’t banks or Wal-Mart franchises, and focusing intently on numbers inevitably threatens quality in favour of quantity. So how big can a cultural institution get and not slip surreptitiously from its roots? How big does it need to get?

The growth of any institution is in direct proportion to the services it offers to the community it serves. The bigger any festival gets, the more compromises must be made in terms of quality interpretative time, inclusive participation, meaningful non-commercial partnerships, and focus on diverse local culture.

I can already hear the response from many in the doc world: “Too big? Then go and start your own festival.”

Toronto has many festivals, and fragmenting the already diminutive documentary audience is not the answer. Eschewing the capitalist framework of growth for growth’s sake, slowing down a little and downsizing outflow just might be the answer. We have the slow food movement, the slow film movement, maybe we need the slow festival movement.

While slowing down can seem anathema to “progress,” the benefits to local culture, community and human relationships are encouraging. Take Norwegian philosopher Guttorm Floistad as he makes the case for slow:

It could however be useful to remind everyone that our basic needs never change. The need to be seen and appreciated! It is the need to belong. The need for nearness and care, and for a little love! This is given only through slowness in human relations. In order to master changes, we have to recover slowness, reflection and togetherness. There we will find real renewal.

A slower festival, or at the very least, a festival not so focused on constant growth, could mean more time for meaningful post-screening dialogues and debates, greater inclusion of civil society groups in the goings-on of the festival, and an established and functioning avenue for critical dialogue between Hot Docs management and the doc community in Canada.

Slowing down the international pace of the festival could redirect energy to local documentary industry and culture at a precarious time for the form. Slowing down the numbers and reining in the exuberance for accounting could mean more time, energy and resources devoted to standing still and developing existing and new internal and local relations, and less energy on emulating other nodes in a global festival network that privileges an ever-shrinking élite.

2. Sundance North

Speaking of the local-global festival crux: It’s the twenty year anniversary of Hot Docs and a massive movement in Canada has recently erupted among the oppressed and marginalized aboriginal populations called Idle No More. The mainstream and corporate media has either reacted viciously to, or misrepresented, this movement, yet it is a hopeful, vibrant and continuing call to action for inclusion, equality and justice.

As a festival, what could be done to mark this occasion? One considers a special program of indigenous documentary or perhaps a screening of a classic work by an indigenous filmmaker, released twenty years ago, the same year Hot Docs came into being. Sadly, these ideas were apparently not as intriguing on the twenty year anniversary as highlighting a film about the American political process — just when you thought Canadians knew enough about our neighbours to the south.

The fact that Hot Docs is screening THE WAR ROOM to mark twenty years of documentary production and the festival’s life, and not a film like KANEHSATAKE: 270 YEARS OF RESISTANCE (I do realize the fest did a focus on Ms. Obomsawin in 2011, but that was that year, not the 20 year anniversary) is indicative of a worrisome trend where global trumps local and global increasingly looks very American. It’s a tendency that has gathered steam with Hot Docs’s relationship with Sundance in the US, whereby Hot Docs risks becoming the “Sundance North” of documentary.

To illustrate, when Hot Docs announced its 28 Special Presentation films for the 20th edition lineup in March, I counted 20 American films, 19 of which had a direct association with the Sundance Festival or the Sundance Institute. That’s a whole lotta Sundance.

Let’s agree for a second that the Americans produce a massive roster of amazing documentaries each year and an important doc fest like Hot Docs can’t ignore that barrage of quality work. Granted, but surely it’s not all coming from the squeaky shiny liberal indy film powerhouse Sundance? Surely there are still some scrappy—starving even—filmmakers in America producing great stuff, marginalized voices and radical filmmakers making outstanding and outspoken docs on small budgets who aren’t connected to the US indy film élite, and whose pilgrimage seeks the elusive audience?

Beyond the Sundance domination of American films, there is a degree of ghettoization of Canadian works that I have written about before. Somewhere between 5 and 12% of submissions to Hot Docs are Canadian. That’s anywhere between 100 and 250 films per year submitted (not acquired independent of submissions mind you). This year the festival selected 51 (26% of total) Canadian films, which seems fine at first glance (62 American films make 31% of the total).

Looking closer however, the content behind the numbers reveals another story. If we remove all shorts and previously screened titles as well as co-productions with the US, where Canada is listed second, there are 32 Canadian films left (16%). Applying the same procedure to US films makes for 52 titles (26%). Further, Canadian films are turned away because of the absolutely arcane festival network policy of premiere status, yet in the program we find international films that have been released on line already, one of which has 1.8 million views on Youtube at time of writing.

Naming just a few, the following fine independent Canadian documentaries were rejected this year: BREAKING THE FRAME (Marielle Nitoslawska’s gorgeous work on Carolee Schneemann would have breathed feminist life into this year’s festival), MAXIMUM TOLERATED DOSE (Karol Orzechowki & Jonathan Eagan’s beguiling film sits firmly in the marginalized art/experimental doc zone), MA VIE RÉELLE (By the late social documentarian Magnus Isacsson, who very recently passed away and was an influential and under-appreciated—at least outside Quebec—figure of documentary, and whose proper tribute will be missed at the 20th anniversary), and JEPPE ON A FRIDAY (Shannon Walsh’s captivating follow-up to her remake of an NFB classic finds a way to uniquely connect the global to the local – through class and place).

It is inevitable that every year there is a list of good films missing from every festival lineup, granted. But in the larger context of aforementioned Sundance sway and American content creep, it is a disquieting aspect of a growing (in size and importance) festival when good local films are omitted from a roster swelling with docs from a shrinking source in a schema that may serve the international doc network gods, but over time and left unchecked, will undermine local documentary culture, and maybe even industry as well.

This isn’t a declaration of nationalism or cultural protectionism: I abhor such reactionary and chauvinistic comportment. This is about local culture, industry and community at a time when documentary in Canada needs all the local love it can muster (and not just in the way of international co-pros and European TV sales, which at any rate have a shrinking austerity affection as well).

Lastly, and moving away from the program, but still considering the local — one searches for the special events honouring the people who started the festival. Where is the public legacy of mavericks, intellectuals and artists who handed the festival off to management at the end of the nineties? The festival’s evolution begins as a local story with local personalities who are still alive and kicking (barely, if they’re still making documentaries). Twenty years on is as good a time as any to not only look forward internationally but look back locally (if such events have yet to be announced, I stand corrected).

3. Ethics & best practices guidelines

Hot Docs is like most commercial festivals in one important regard: it has no official ethics and best practices guidelines. Relatedly, former Hot Docs programmer Sean Farnel has recently made waves with his “pay the fucking filmmakers” take on making festivals more fair. His argument gets at more than just the peculiar economic phenomenon where some filmmakers are paid for screening their work, others aren’t, and some are charged submission fees and others aren’t — it speaks to the problem of a lack of a cohesive set of rules top decision-makers can refer to.

Hot Docs has taken money from the Israeli consulate but would it take money from the Iranian Consulate? Who decides which support is problematic and which support isn’t?These kinds of decisions shouldn’t be made ad hoc by individuals with their own political bones to pick — the Hot Docs Board of Directors should decide on a standard set of practices and objectives that provide ethical and equitable stewardship and touch on the finances, decision-making, sponsorship, programming, partnerships and other aspects of the festival where things can and have gotten ugly and messy.

Coca-cola was once the Environmental Film Sponsor of Hot Docs. I’d like to think that if the festival had such a set of guiding principles, such an ill-conceived partnership facilitating corporate greenwashing could have been avoided.

What if Monsanto approached the festival to sponsor films on agriculture and food? Which document does the Board turn to guide them in their decision-making on a potentially ethical quagmire? Which companies can benefit from Hot Docs affiliation and which ones can’t, given each potential sponsor’s records on human rights and the environment? Which groups would the festival work with and which wouldn’t it?

The answers to these questions remain inconclusive, at least until Hot Docs develops a comprehensive set of ethics and best practices guidelines for the institution. Not only would it bring clarity to the task of management and mitigate interpersonal differences, but crucially, it would make the festival more fair, just, equitable and ethically sound. It would also position the festival as a leader among festivals, hopefully influencing other fests to follow suit.

4. Diversity & the board of directors

Speaking of the Board of Directors, there is room for improvement there too. The BOD is made up of mostly stellar, hardworking and well-minded individuals, to be sure, but as a structure, it lacks the kind of representation needed to serve the documentary community.

Back in the early nineties when DOC made Hot Docs an independent charity (in 1997 it became its own entity) for legal reasons it was decided that 49% of the BOD would be made up of DOC members and 51% non-DOC members. A good idea in principle, but what we have now is a group of filmmakers who are trying to sell and disseminate their films on one side, and a knot of industry folks who buy and distribute films on the other side.

Leaving aside this inherent conflict of interest, the BOD is largely bereft of community leaders, intellectuals, academics, civil society activists and social animators. Why does DOC only elect filmmakers to the BOD and why is there so much commercial interest on the other side? In terms of the white male syndrome endemic (but changing) to documentary industry, it’s encouraging to see that recently the number of women on the Board has increased to eight out of 21 members.

Still, the Board (pictured at left…OK I jest – that’s the crew of wild ones from this year’s LAST OF THE BLACK SEA PIRATES) is almost entirely comprised of finance and commercial film industry executives and filmmakers, save for two members who represent public media institutions (the NFB and the CBC).

Documentary is a diverse form representing a diversity of voices, perspectives and cultures. A documentary institution as necessary and influential as Hot Docs should have a Board of Directors that represents that same diversity and plurality. Non-fiction cinema is more than the buying and selling of films, it is also very concerned with and engaged in politics, culture, community, and the structure of society from every perspective. The highest decision-making body of the most important documentary institution in Canada might do well to honour the genre’s diversity with a top decision-making body that is equally diverse.

Again, this is not a personal attack on the individual members of the Board, many of whom I know and think highly of, but an appraisal of the structure that I feel should be improved through proactive policymaking at the festival.

5. Documentary spectatorship & civic engagement

Documentary has a long entangled history with policy, as the genre has been traditionally recognized as an educational tool and public resource. Documentary is and should remain a public art, building off its roots in public education and social animation.

But viewing, especially in today’s multi-platform, toggle-happy media multiverse, isn’t where the public part of the documentary experience should end. There is a post-screening social context to documentary that can either be stifled in enclosure (as championed by the megaplex) or stimulated by a variegated approach to the audience-citizenship juncture (as practiced in grassroots initiatives). Needless to say, it is difficult to animate inspired audiences who are given a narrow window after screenings for discussion and dialogue because a festival must adhere to a packed, tight schedule.

Hot Docs screenings are often charged with audience energy that is met with the novel presence of the filmmaker after the screening. Yet too many times there is only enough time for a few questions or comments from the audience and artist(s), because the room needs to be cleared for the next projection. This relates back to the point about slowing down and not paying so much attention to numbers, and the corollary need for more attention to the quality of experience.

Doc audiences often want to engage with the filmmakers, whether the film is a social justice exposé or an intimate human interest story, the connection between filmmaker, topic or issue, and audience member can be nurtured by giving ample space for such interactions, rather than rushing the process because of back-to-back screenings.

This is especially crucial when it is an issue doc that has been screened. Unlike the megaplex, audiences at these screenings often anticipate some way to “plug-in” to the issue because their soul has been stirred or a fire has been lit under the keester. But jumping up from a screening only to find a cursory Q&A, then chop-chop and you’re on your way, does not facilitate deep connective tissue required for engagement, action (like the one above, during Hot Docs 2012), community-building, or even the extended extra-textual development of cinephelia.

Further to this point, when a documentary is screened and it does inspire audiences into “joining the conversation” or “getting involved,” there exists no central connecting mechanism at Hot Docs between the film, the audience and civil society. Hot Docs’s stewards maintain that the festival doesn’t do politics and that that part is up to the films. Agreed, that is not the role of the festival, but, surely the role of any documentary festival could include the stimulation of the mostly organic connections between inspired audiences, civil society action and relevant social and issue docs.

At present, there is little to no presence of community and civil society groups present at the festival, at least in any organized, visible way, and this denies a core aspect of documentary as a social animator. Inviting stakeholder community groups and civil society organizations to participate in the festival in meaningful ways, as part of post-screening discussions, on panels, and present in social spaces with their materials, would make for a more rounded, inclusive, and invigorating festival.

We live in an era of information abundance, so to say that documentaries inform is only a sliver of the equation. We’re up to here with information — drowning in it even.

When I watch a powerful doc on an issue that I care about or have been convinced to care about, I want to find out how to get involved locally if possible, to effect change, and I know others do as well. I want to meet passionate committed people who are on the ground doing the hard work that activists and community organizers do.

Those people should be populating the festival along with filmmakers and other industry folks. And if there isn’t enough room for them, we can always ask some of the growing ranks of sales agents to open up some space.

To illustrate the point of facilitating civic engagement, the case of a screening at last year’s Hot Docs comes to mind. A community-focused festival would not have brought an internationally respected filmmaker from India, Anand Patwardhan, to Toronto only to effectively wash their hands of him upon arrival.

When Patwardhan’s socio-political film JAI BHIM COMRADE screened in Montreal some months after the 2012 Hot Docs screening, 500 attended. At the screening in Toronto, a city with teeming activist and South Asian communities, there were a few dozen of us in attendance. This is a sadly missed opportunity and emblematic of a festival doing too much with too little focus on connecting audiences to local community and civil society. Patwardhan’s film presented a rare chance for the festival to bring relevance and meaning from a far-removed international issue to local communities.

Radical filmmakers like Patwardhan, who provide complex structural analysis of society and win awards doing so, and whose films have the potential to involve diverse ethnic and activist populations, should be given a platform overspilling with audiences who would undoubtedly be eager to engage.

Twenty years today

So here we are, twenty years later and some things have changed and others stayed the same. Liberal leaders still work the revolving doors of power in the West, Hollywood still dominates the box office, North Korea is making the news again, and documentary is back, after a short stint as a promising backup hitter, to its cold seat on the bench.

With the Canadian public broadcasting system converted into a corporate shill of its former self, indy theatres all but extinct and massive cuts to the arts not healing any time soon, documentary making, disseminating and reception is at an uncertain crossroads with few wildly successful phenomena combining all three aspects to point to.

In that spirit, I’ve offered five suggestions for improving a documentary festival that probably doesn’t think it needs improving (especially with all those impressive numbers pouring in) but a festival that is undeniably intrinsic to a community, culture and industry that may be wounded and limping, but is nonetheless vibrant, diverse, local and global, responsive, and even some of the time activating some serious change here and there.

Documentary needs Hot Docs and the festival needs documentary – but not just the industry and the ticket sales, it needs the community, the local culture, the rich history, and the activists who make up the whole mise en scène. To really invigorate the relationship between all these components, some slowing down, policymaking, diversification, and attention to the local might be in order.

Agree or disagree? Want to discuss this further? Look for me loitering around screenings of the following excellent docs at this year’s inimitable Hot Docs: THE GHOSTS IN OUR MACHINE (Liz Marshall; see the Art Threat review here), THE LAST OF THE BLACK SEA PIRATES (Svetoslav Stoyanov), BLOOD RELATIVE (Nimisha Mukerji), OCCUPY: THE MOVIE (Corey Ogilvie), I WILL BE MURDERED (Justin Webster), all the Les Blank films, CHOIR BOYS (Magnus Isacsson), all the Peter Mettler films, and LET THE FIRE BURN (Jason Osder).

Despite the show’s unambiguous title, the city claims they “weren’t aware there was a specific political agenda or cause associated with the art exhibit,” according to Sharon Purvis, the city’s director with corporate properties and buildings.

While the city is allowing the work — largely comprised of landscapes and nature scenes — to stay up until Wednesday, they have banned exhibition organizers conducting media interviews or speaking about politics to the public.

In an interview with the Globe and Mail, renowned painted Robert Bateman, who contributed artwork to the show, welcomed the hostile reaction.

“I’m sympathetic to the councillors that want to ban it. They’re actually helping the cause of raising the profile of the show, which is OK, because otherwise the show might get ignored.”

More information about the Artists for an Oil-Free Coast, including future tour dates, can be found at the Raincoast website.

Image at top: Eeny, Meeny, Miny by Bill Helin.

According to Wired, Batgirl writer Gail Simone found inspiration for the character after a fan asked why lesbian superheroes outnumber their gay male counterparts.

“I looked out into the audience, saw dozens of faces I knew well — LGBTQ folks, mostly — all avid comics readers and superhero fans and DC supporters,” said Simone. “And it just hit me: Why was this so impossible? Why in the world can we not do a better job of representation of not just humanity, but also our own loyal audience?”

With regards to LGBTQ issues, it’s been an eventful year so far in the DC universe, both on and off the page: Batwoman proposed to her girlfriend, police detective Maggie Sawyer, and DC hired infamous homophobe Orson Scott Card to write an upcoming Superman storyline before coming to their senses and sending him packing.

Images: interior page of Batgirl #19, written by Gail Simone, with art by Daniel Sampere and Vicente Cifuentes.

Despite their demands falling on deaf ears, and the repression doled out by the police, they still held their heads high, knowing that they were fighting the good fight, knowing that no matter how hard the government tried, the people’s spirits would never be subjugated. That spring, the city was filled with hope.

This is the feeling that Stefan Christoff, Brahja Waldman, and Peter Burton capture so elegantly in their EP Temps Libre, which was released by the Howl! arts collective in February. The four tracks, recorded in a single early morning session at La Sala Rossa, take the city’s psyche that spring and summer, distill it to its essence, and present it to us with a delicacy that is refreshing in these days where we must shout so loud to make our voices heard.

By the time Christoff, Waldman, and Burton recorded this album, late in the summer, the Quebec government had passed Bill 78, a draconian law requiring organizers of protests of more than fifty people to submit their route at least eight hours beforehand. The city of Montreal had enacted municipal bylaw P-6, whereby wearing masks at protests became illegal.

Montrealers, whether they were in agreement with the students or not, came out on their balconies in the thousands, pots and pans in hand, their cacophony a tell-tale sign that something was amiss. There were nightly demonstrations — the whole city kept awake by the droning of helicopters overhead and the hopeful voices of the students and their allies who were ready to confront tear-gas, batons, and other weapons of repression for their desire for a just society.

This time was liberating for many. The students who were on strike found themselves with free time. Time which was used to build a movement; time which allowed creativity to flourish. This free time, this temps libre, is exactly what this album embodies. When we band together in solidarity our time becomes collective — it becomes our own, to do with what we will, no longer caged in by our usual confines of productivity. Christoff, who takes the lead role on this record, told me that this notion of free time, when you really feel free, was the inspiration for the tracks on this EP.

This is made clear through Christoff’s playing. The free-form but structured jazz nature of the tracks on this album, coupled with Christoff’s rhythmic hammering of his piano, layered sometimes with Waldman’s saxophone, and sometimes with Burton’s contrabass, forces you to take a step back from whatever it is you are doing. Listening to this EP, I often caught myself staring out the window, watching the sun mark its own time as it travelled across the sky.

The first track on this EP, a duet between Waldman and Christoff, starts with Waldman’s lonesome saxophone. Like the first person arriving at a demonstration, Waldman presents us with a nervous scene: “Will anyone else come? Will I be here alone?” Right before Christoff’s piano comes in, Waldman gets filled with hope, as if he can see a crowd of his comrades off in the distance, about to join him.

The two play off each other, trading lead roles. At times Waldman’s piercing saxophone grabs your attention, and at others Christoff’s atmospheric piano gives you time to reflect. Just like in the street demonstrations of last summer, there are moments of agitation, and moments of repose; there are moments of confrontation, and moments of joy.

The next track, which sees a like relationship between Christoff and Burton, conjures similar images, but the ideas feel less fanciful and idealistic, more anchored in reality as Burton’s contrabass provides a solid foundation for Christoff’s bright piano. As Burton keeps time, Christoff’s embellishments are grounded, as if together the two of them are able to make their idealism a reality.

Burton occasionally gives us a strict marching tempo, and as Christoff dances around this we realize that despite what we thought we knew, it is okay, even beautiful, to march to our own beat. There is something extremely touching about the contrast between the two instruments, as if a wise old person were encouraging someone much younger to keep their hope alive.

The third and fourth tracks of the EP, solo performances by Christoff and Waldman, seem a little empty in comparison to the two preceding songs. The track list builds us up to think that the three musicians will play together, and we are left wanting them to combine their strengths — Waldman’s luminous sax, Christoff’s dreamy piano, and Burton’s earthy contrabass — potentially closing off the EP with a clear call for collective action.

Instead, these songs are more of a call for personal growth, a lesson in the effects a single person has in creating a collective project. Christoff’s solo is melancholy and sparse, a reminder that it is the simple things that are often the most beautiful, while Waldman’s ending is hopeful — that last straggler at the protest who is looking forward to what will come next.

“Jazz music is liberation music,” Christoff told me after the album launch at Casa del Popolo, which is just across the street from La Sala Rossa, where the EP was recorded. “It is rooted in the historical struggles for freedom … We wanted to be inspired by the history of jazz as liberation music and play some tunes that were inspired by that history in our contemporary context in Quebec.”

This album, which is the first in the Saint-Laurent piano project series by Christoff, is presented in a hand silk-screened cardboard sleeve featuring the mechanical guts of an old clock. The mechanism, which was made to keep time, has been removed from its context — it no longer forces hands past seconds, minutes, or hours, instead, it just ticks, freely marking time as it wishes.

Photo: Temps libre launch event at Montreal’s Casa del Popolo. © 2013 David Vilder

Love him, leave him or hate him, Korine has sparked controversy and inspired debate in film and culture circles (and of course with audiences) since he wrote the racy script for Kids (directed by Larry Clark in 1995). To mark the occasion of Korine’s return to the culture-and-politics spotlight we’ve dug out a gem from 1998, inside the the Hays Files, with a short updated intro from the author below.

It’s so funny to see Harmony Korine getting such gushy mainstream attention with his latest film. I found his first feature, Gummo, to be a revelation. I remember a critic at the Gazette who took real offence by this movie. I think that’s what Korine was pretty much aiming for. I still recall that after this cover story ran, I got several frenzied calls from the office of Vice (then based in Montreal). They desperately wanted to know how to track down Korine, they liked what he had to say so much.

It’s difficult to know what to make of a film like Gummo. We learn in the earliest moments that it’s set in a small Ohio town called Xenia, a roach-infested dump of a burg which was devastated by a tornado two decades ago. Throughout the film we are introduced to various townsfolk, and it appears the populace of Xenia never quite recovered from the trauma of the disaster.

Solomon (Jacob Reynolds) and Tummler (Nick Sutton), the characters who crop up most frequently, wander the town shooting stray cats, earning a few extra bucks by selling them to the local Asian restaurant. They use the money to buy glue, which they then sniff as they exchange their observations on the world. They also visit a man who pimps for his sister, a prostitute played by a woman with Down’s syndrome (in what is certainly the film’s most controversial representation).

If it sounds bizarre, consider that this description is merely the tip of the iceberg of Gummo’s cast of white-trash freaks (when the film screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, there was no shortage of walkouts). Some critics were hissing and even yelling out at this abrasive and auspicious directorial debut.

And if it’s difficult to figure out the film, the 23-year-old director and writer behind it is no easier. Harmony Korine is the same man who, at the tender age of 19, wrote the screenplay for Kids, a film which drew loud critical praise while simultaneously horrifying and repulsing audiences.

Kids, which was directed by photographer Larry Clark, shocked in a profoundly simple way: the filmmaker used a straightforward, documentary style and married it with the technique of using unknown non-actors in lead roles. In that case, Clark cast actual teenagers, who brazenly and amorally caroused and screwed their way through the film’s 90 minutes.

With Gummo, Korine employs the same technique, to similar effect. Since the film’s run on the fest circuit (Italian animal rights activists attempted to block the film’s release there after witnessing the depiction of a cat being drowned), Korine has been accused of fascism, exploitation, reckless irresponsibility, immorality and amorality–among many things.

“A critic got in my face in Toronto and I tried to stab him,” Korine recalls of one of the more extreme exchanges to occur after a screening of Gummo. “He came up with his girlfriend after a screening and they were almost crying. She had braces on her teeth and they were chattering, she was so upset. He called me an exploiter, and said what I was doing was unforgivable — he said that I was aestheticizing mental illness. I don’t have any kind of problem with a political debate, but I don’t like people getting in my face, so I had a knife and I went to stab him in the throat. The ushers threw him out, ’cause it was my movie. I was going to stab her, too.”

But the reactions haven’t all been so nasty. Gummo has polarized critics and audiences; it is, by far, the most astounding film of the year, full of wild innovation, contentious images and arguably the ugliest ensemble ever assembled. It has a long list of renowned admirers, including Gus Van Sant (who writes an endorsement of the film included in its press kit) and Werner Herzog.

Though as original as any film could hope to be in the late 20th century, Gummo has led to numerous comparisons by critics: a nihilism that evokes the work of Gregg Araki; performance styles that smack of John Cassavetes; an anti-narrative, collage-like structure which suggests the hallmark of Godard’s oeuvre; and a surrealism which surprises like Fellini.

Korine takes umbrage at the frequent Fellini comparisons (“I’m not really wild about his work”), preferring instead to describe Gummo as “surreal realism.” Korine says that “people think the movie is real, even though it isn’t.” (A charge laid against Kids as well.) “They think there’s no script [but] 75 per cent of the film was scripted. I think film is the ultimate lie, it’s 24 frames of lies, but what you can get is a certain kind of poetry in cinema. That’s more what I’m interested in. Everything I do I try to base on some kind of truth, even if it’s oddly surreal.”

However, Korine does acknowledge a debt to another Euromaster, Godard. “He looks at films in a different way, like a symphony, the way I think films should be made — in layers, with depth. I wanted to experiment, with images coming from all different directions.” Yet Godard has been a strong believer in using self-conscious formalism as a way of furthering political beliefs, while Korine has indicated he has no political bent whatsoever.

“It’s a similar technique, except that I’m not interested in politics. I think of it more like someone like Walter Benjamin, who said the greatest novel of the century would be a book full of someone else’s quotations. I’m really into the idea of a randomness–a sort of just looking at things without being told any kind of message.” (For the record, Korine says he will never vote, but he does comment on the current scandal rocking the White House, saying of the president’s relations with his famous intern: “I’m sure he fucked her.”)

Korine has also been accused of being humourless, as Variety critic Emanuel Levy did last September. But Gummo is infused with a vaudeville sensibility (its ostensibly nonsensical title is in fact derived from the lesser-known Marx Brother). One scene has Tummler getting up on a coffee-table, post-coital tryst with the prostitute with an extra chromosome, and performing a monologue originally performed by Henny Youngman.

“I’ve always been such a big fan of vaudeville, ever since I first saw the Buster Keaton films. I like Jimmy Durante and Al Jolson — I just like the humour. It’s an evil kind of humour, so I adapted and appropriated it for the film.”

Gummo is populated with a cast that finally provides a challenge to Todd Browning’s chilling use of actual circus freaks in his oft-censored landmark 1932 film Freaks. This has understandably led to charges of exploitation, something Korine firmly rejects.

“I don’t even know what that means. As long as the person that you’re filming knows that they’re in a movie, then I don’t understand the idea of exploitation. If people want to call me names because of that, that’s okay. I guess I don’t care because I’m a selfish filmmaker.

“I cast completely, 100 per cent by looks. I never ask people to read or audition. Film is a visual medium and people seem to forget that you’re watching pictures. When I see someone who looks interesting, then I cast them.”

And Korine’s director cameo would give Hitchcock nightmares. In one scene, he plays a drunken gay man who makes a prolonged and highly embarrassing pass at a black dwarf. “I’ve known that guy for a long time,” Korine says of his co-star in the scene. “We went to high school together. I knew that in order to get to that point, I had to get intoxicated. It was the last scene in the movie that we shot, and after it was done I threw my sister through a plate glass window.” =

And why on earth did Korine do that? “I was excited. I thought that was a way of celebrating. She dropped the charges, it was more the line producers who were angry. I have a tendency toward violence, not because I’m saying I’m a tough kid or anything, just because I have a temper.”

Korine’s unrelenting anger appears to stem from an abusive childhood, one in which he was repeatedly hit by his father. (“But he didn’t do it because he hated me, he did it because he thought I needed it.”)

A rather precocious existentialist, Korine still recalls a Grade 5 episode in which he tried to sign out a collection of writings by Kierkegaard from his school library. “The librarian yelled at me, saying I was too young to be reading that book. Right then I knew there was something wrong, that my relationship with adults was not right. The next week she went sky-diving and her parachute didn’t open and she died. So I went to her funeral and danced on her grave. Because that’s when I realized that I was meant to do something else. Something without the help of librarians.”

Korine saves similar disdain for critics who ragged on the first film he directed, and the film company which he says withdrew support for Gummo when the controversies surrounding it became too hot.

“After [New York Times critic] Janet Maslin wrote her review saying that I was a fascist and an exploiter, and that what I had done was unforgivable, and that her narrow vision of cinema didn’t include Gummo, the number of prints being made went from 80 to around 10 or so. I don’t really give a fuck. I knew that was going to happen. There are critics at the end of their careers who are going to die soon and they just don’t understand. I think there will be some kind of shift in aesthetics sometime soon. These people are primed for death.”

While Wilson, a self-described Crypto-anarchist, and his comrades do not articulate a complex nor intellectual counter-narrative to the justified moral panic around the accessibility of firearms in the US, their own philosophy of providing the tools and knowledge to make guns at home is definitely provocative and pushing the debate into new territory.

Wilson makes a lot of empty catch-phrase statements endemic to the digital native generation of privileged entrepreneurs, but his actions are boundary-pushing to be sure. Pushing the technology and diffusion of 3D gun printing in the wake of one of the worst years of gun violence in the US is a cultural and political development that demands attention (of which Wilson has been accused of sponging ferociously) and also measured, critical dialogue that moves beyond empty Manichean antagonism of good and bad.

Wilson hints at these directions when responding to the criticism around the need for semi-automatic and multiple-round firearms when he retorts: “Why do we need two houses? Why earn more than $400,000 per year?” I get where he’s going, but can’t we agree somewhere along the line that material objects designed to make killing more efficient and material objects designed to provide shelter—no matter how similar in excess and hubris the examples—are fundamentally, crucially different?

Wilson doesn’t offer such discursive pathways out of provocative statements, nor does his less-astute nameless associate who, while in the field testing a newly printed lower receiver, says (with regards to mass-shootings like Sandy Hook) that the perpetrators would have found some other way, even without guns. History and the contemporary landscape of the rest of the world proves him very very wrong, despite the giddy enthusiasm. Still, a fascinating and controversial documentary that explores some of the “canaries in the coal mine” of arms dissemination in the US (who, incidentally, have just been granted a Federal Firearms license).

Expecting More — Or Less?

Over the years I recall audience revolts occurring where we had screened shorts and features interrogating the ugly spaces of the non-human animal world’s subjugation to the biped food chain champs, homo erectus. PETA shorts have always inspired the most passionate responses – once an audience member stormed out of “Meet your Meat” to yell at me: “You should know better! We expect more from Cinema Politica! This is totally beneath you and is totally offensive!”

At so many screenings where we have projected images of non-human animal oppression and subjugation we have been met with intense audience backlash. It’s not just strangers either. I remember bringing the film Earthlings to some family members’ home (animal-loving, canine-obsessed family members) to watch together. I gave a very thoughtful introduction to the film that included a stern warning about some of the more graphic images and sounds that we were about to experience.

Not even twenty minutes in, during a particularly disturbing sequence showing puppies being gassed at one of many “puppy mills” (this is where most pet store puppies come from), someone jumped up and said: “Why did you bring this into our house? Turn this off NOW!” Upset, they went outside for some air while I, once again, tried to reconcile the debilitating tension between an audience that seems sympathetic but when confronted with the reality of the issue, recoils and rejects the experience altogether.

There is something to this rejection of animal suffering in documentary, and I think it has a lot to do with the larger (capitalist) liberal framework that documentary operates in and that audiences have become accustomed to. There is a tradition associating movie-watching with entertainment and pleasure, and documentarians, likely in an attempt to move from the margins into the middle, have played into that tradition with feel-good liberal takes on serious and disturbing issues (the current reigning champ of this populist impulse is Davis Guggenheim, director of An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman).

Perhaps when we see a movie we don’t want to be implicated, and when we see a documentary about the systemic oppression of our animal friends at every level (entertainment, food, clothing, etc) how can we not feel complicit? This kind of confrontation challenges our liberal frameworks that have us comfortably “loving” animals selectively: those we have in our homes, those we take our children to pet, and those covered in white fur on snow, looking innocent and picturesque.

There is a corollary to those that are loved, which is those that are excluded: the ones we wear, eat, test on, and more. The sociologist Ernest Becker once said (I’m paraphrasing with poetic license here) that beneath the lofty ascension of humankind is a mountain of animal carcasses so high it may just eclipse our view of progress.

Confronting the Ghosts

So it is perhaps understandable that I approached LIz Marshall’s (pictured above, at right) new documentary, The Ghosts in Our Machine, with trepidation and a programmer’s hint of cynicism. I’ve seen many documentaries tackling animal rights and I’ve seen many sing to the choir while repelling in droves both the apathetic and sympathetic.

Yet Ghosts is a film that offers the hope of attracting those who care and those who don’t, a documentary that will embolden the converted while likely influencing more to join the choir (or at least check out the song book). It is a documentary that refuses to preach, instead opting for a beautifully constructed homage to the rest of our kingdom, spilling over with a unique and thoughtful cordiality that is born out of unmitigable love, respect and understanding.

The documentary is a refreshing departure from its more rational-minded predecessors that throw facts and data at us while barraging audiences with violent sounds and images of slaughter and torture. Ghosts instead confronts with the unforgettable grace of animals many of us so easily shut out from our daily thoughts, as industrial capitalism distantly spins its cogs of exploitation on farms, in labs and factories and abattoirs.

These are the ghosts – the winged, the four-legged and the otherwise objectified and disgraced cousins gasping for life below us on the commodity/food chain.

Marshall doesn’t throw the sixties wrench into the cogs of the machine, screaming from a mantle of righteousness that what we are doing is morally, ethically, ecologically wrong. Instead, she introduces proximal empathy into the abysmal space between consumers and capital with a powerful effect that hits both the mind and heart with an enduring resonance.

Through the various actions and efforts of the very talented and committed photographer Jo-Anne McArthur the film quietly sneaks into the obscured and horrific spaces of mink farms and other places where animals have had their essence as sentient beings barbarically debased into commodity form, lingering just long enough to occlude forgetting.

Both the photographs and cinematography in the film are stunning, and viewing on a small screen should be avoided – Ghosts is a visual delight, despite the sometimes difficult scenes that unfold. A confident direction shines through in this skilfully shot and tightly edited doc that is also audibly adorned with an awesome score and soundscape. The beauty of the film’s artifice somehow does not aestheticize suffering, nor create Hallmark images of the animals documented – instead the richness of sound and images helps us through tough spaces, punctuating moments we might otherwise wish to shut out or alternately, not have registered as worthy of contemplation.

Yet we do not spend too much time in the most violent of animal oppression spaces, and by focusing on the beauty and individuality of the many animals (who have names and personalities) that McArthur documents, including and crucially the relationships between committed humans and the broken and discarded, Ghosts brings us in close and personal and squeezes tight.

It’s a warm and inviting embrace that the film offers, one that builds empathy for these creatures over its 90 minutes, and it doesn’t relinquish after the closing credits.

I didn’t feel yelled at or schooled, but I do feel implicated and educated. To the benefit of Marshall and others who worked on this film (and by extension, to McArthur) those feelings of implication and elucidation are wrapped in beauty, love and understanding.

If I sound warm and fuzzy it’s because this film’s compassion and sensitivity are comforting sensations that just might be the right mixture needed to deliver a documentary on animal rights that transcends the earlier discussed divide and invites everyone in without compromising its politics, while not shutting out others, in spite of its politics.

Ghosts In Our Machine premieres at Hot Docs 2013, you can find out more about that here, or buy your tickets here. Not in Toronto? Watch this space for other screenings.

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. — Matt Hays

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.

For shitdisturber Michael Moore, that day was the last straw. Sitting down to discuss his latest political opus, Bowling for Columbine, at the Toronto International Film Festival, Moore says he was stunned by the event—the worst of its kind in history—but was also bowled over by the increasing normality of such occurrences in his country.

“Yeah, I’d had it,” he says, the anger showing in his face. “It seemed back then there was, like, a school shooting a week and I thought I’ve got to do something with this.”

And do something with it he has. With Bowling for Columbine, Moore investigates America’s obsession with guns, but uses that point of investigation to launch into myriad different directions. He visits a gun boot camp, where National Rifle Association members exchange their enthusiasm for firearms; he goes to a Michigan bank, where customers are given free guns when they open an account; he takes survivors of the Columbine shooting to K-Mart, where they insist the corporation stop selling ammunition.

These are but a few scenes in a film that demands multiple viewings; Moore has created an epic essay-style film, employing his unique strain of irony and absurdity to skewer a culture of violence. He connects right-wing hypocrisy with racial tension with corporate malfeasance with media alarmism with American foreign policy (see the planes flying into the World Trade Center on the big screen for the first time) while interviewing Dick Clark, Marilyn Manson and South Park creators along the way.

In taking the dive into the gun debate, Moore ends up contradicting many of the theories he’d initially subscribed to. “I started with a typically liberal viewpoint,” he concedes. “I thought that if only we had less guns and better gun control laws we’d have less violence. Then I got into making this film and it was clear that wasn’t the answer.”

“Especially coming to Canada and going into the Office of Statistics in Ottawa, and learning there are seven million registered guns in Canada—even though most of them are shotguns, not handguns or Uzis. But you can get a gun fairly easily in Canada. But you’re not shooting people like we are in America.”

Thus Moore actually ends up agreeing with the NRA’s old mantra about guns not killing people, but rather people killing people, with one caveat: “It’s true: guns don’t kill people, Americans kill people.”

Canada, as it turns out, figures prominently in Bowling for Columbine. Not only is Moore fascinated by our lack-of-violence ways, he also came to Canada for producer backing, seeing as his thesis was just too danged controversial for many U.S. financiers.

But the true north strong and free comes under much self-consciously naïve praise by Moore, who pokes fun at our trusting nature. Canadians are asked if they bother locking their doors at night. Most say no, which contrasts neatly with Americans, who are shown to be in a deep state of panic about what their neighbours might do or be thinking about doing to them.

Isn’t Moore propping up some rather base stereotypes here? “If I were a Canadian I wouldn’t say what I’m saying in this film. I’d make a documentary about racism in Canada, or your treatment of your native population. Or how since Mulroney was prime minister, how the social safety net is being worn away, how Canadians have started to beat up on their poor.”

Moore is quick to point out that the film is selling extremely well in foreign markets, while distributors at home are already talking about refusing to screen Columbine. The film won a special award at Cannes, where it received 10-minute standing ovations.

“I think the reason it’s playing so well in foreign markets is because you in Canada, or Australia, or Europe, you are afraid you’re becoming more like us. Americans in Cannes had the idea that the film was doing so well there because they hate Americans.

“But I watched the film with audiences there, and the truth was, people were feeling like, whatever we do, we have to stop going down this road. We have to start dealing with the race issues in our country, because if we don’t deal with it now, if we don’t deal with our conservative governments, you’re going to start to look like us. This is like a warning siren for other countries.

“Face it, you have a Canadian ethic. Your ethic is that we’re all in the same boat. If someone gets sick, we should all see that person to the hospital and pay the bill. Your ethic is that if someone loses their job we all suffer as a result. Our ethic is every man for himself. You don’t have anything? Fuck you, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Me me me, mine mine mine.

“I’m telling you, having that American mentality, it creates a culture of violence. If you have state-sponsored violence against the poor—and I think packing single mothers on a bus for 80 miles to hold down two minimum-wage jobs instead of watching her kids is violence—it’s no wonder that people in the lower class have so much violence, in many cases directed against themselves. They’re in this horrible cycle of despair.”

A number of American critics have been calling Moore on statements just like this. Why, isn’t that red talk? Could Moore be suggesting that communism or socialism are possible answers? Moore has the perfect response to shut the conservatives up.

“No, I think Americans should be more Christian. What would Jesus do? How do we come off calling ourselves Christian, when the whole message of this guy was ‘Blessed are the poor.’ That was the first thing out of his mouth on that mountain.

“The Pope himself has said that capitalism is a sin. It is an economic system that benefits the few at the expense of many. I don’t know what the solution is, I’m not saying that communism and socialism are the answers. I’ve never read anything by Marx or gone to college, I’m not that smart. I just look smart to you because of the glasses.”

While many of Moore’s targets are easy, like the various gun nuts he interviews, a few of the connections he makes left some in the audience cold. Moore points out, for example, that the Columbine massacre took place on the same day that a record number of bombs were dropped on Kosovo by American forces and their allies. As well, many of the parents of victims of Columbine worked nearby at the largest munitions plant in the country.

“It depends on the audience. I’m not saying there’s an a-to-b connection with any of the things I bring up. I’m not saying that because parents of some of the kids at Columbine work for the largest weapons manufacturer in the country, therefore there was a mass murder there. I’m not that simplistic.

“I’m trying to say that woven into the American fabric is this culture of violence, and it comes in all these different forms, whether it’s massive weapon making or whether it’s kids with guns. We live in the wealthiest country in the world, where we believe so much in our freedoms. Shouldn’t we be treating each other better?

“What about that Globe and Mail poll I just saw? The one that says a majority of Canadians believe we’re partly responsible for 9/11. The rest of the world admires us a lot, but frankly, if we’re this shitty to our own people, the way we beat up on our poor, the way we can’t even get as far as saying that children and old people should have an automatic right to health care. If we would do that to our own people, what would we do to other people?”

Moore also comes out as clearly opposed to the bombing of Kosovo. Doesn’t he feel that in some extreme instances intervention is necessary? “In some instances, yes. But the Serb people were already demonstrating in huge numbers. This thing was moving in the right direction. Why not support them? The American solution is always to bomb. A majority of Serbs wanted Milosevic gone anyway. We ended up bombing Serb hospitals and schools. I’m not saying they did it on purpose, but it happened and I think it was unnecessary.”

Then there’s the film’s signature sequence, its astonishing climax, in which Moore goes head to head with NRA ringleader Charlton Heston. In the film’s final moments, Moore stages what must be his greatest coup yet. He convinces Heston to let him into his Hollywood mansion, where he confronts Heston about gun insanity.

At first, their banter is friendly, until Heston realizes Moore is not on his side. Eventually too pissed off to go on, Heston gets up and walks away from Moore. Moore is now bracing for the fact that since the scene was shot, Heston has revealed he is suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s, the degenerative disease. What once looked like a funny stunt now could quite easily be perceived as a cruel joke on a sick senior.

“He didn’t actually say he had Alzheimer’s, he said he had Alzheimer’s-like symptoms,” Moore corrects. “He also stated that he would not be stepping down from his position at the NRA and that he would be continuing post-production on his latest film.”

Does Moore think the timing is suspect, a mere few weeks prior to the film hitting screens across North America?

“I’ve been asked by MGM/UA [the U.S. distributors of the film] not to comment on that question.”

What? Michael Moore, agreeing to a corporate request not to comment on something?

“I haven’t really thought it through. I hope he’s okay. I would not want anyone to have any disease. I wish him the best.” But do you think the timing was suspect?

“You’re the reporter, I’ll leave that up to you.”

Despite the tête-à-tête with Heston, Bowling for Columbine lacks the capital-b Bad Guy from many of Moore’s previous works. Instead, the film looks at cultural tendencies and attitudes, and their complex relationship to behaviour. With Columbine, it is as though Moore has gone metaphysical.

“That’s exactly how I feel. It was very easy in the past to focus on Roger Smith [the nemesis and corporate CEO namesake of Roger & Me] or an HMO on our show. Here, who’s the antagonist? It’s us, really. What am I gonna do, beat up on the audience for two hours and tell them they’re the enemy? This was a very hard movie to make.

“I cannot allow myself to sink into depression. And that’s why there’s humour in these films, because it’s a release of the pressure of the despair there. If you leave the theatre in despair, you’re going to be paralyzed. I want you to leave angry. I’m trying to push your citizen-action button. This is a democracy. This is not a spectator sport. If the people don’t participate, it doesn’t exist.”

On Matthew Hays (from Concordia University): Matthew Hays is a Montreal-based critic and journalist. He was a film critic for the weekly Montreal Mirror since 1993. His articles have also appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Advocate, The Walrus, CBC Arts Online, Cineaction!, Cineaste, POV, Cinema Scope, Montage, The Toronto Star, The Canadian Theatre Review, This Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter and Xtra. His book, The View From Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers (Arsenal Pulp Press), was cited by Quill & Quire as one of the best books of 2007 and won a 2008 Lambda Literary Award. Hays won the 2007 Concordia Alumni Association’s Award for Teaching Excellence. He is the co-editor (with Concordia professor Thomas Waugh) of the Queer Film Classics book series, which will be published from 2009-2015. Hays served as a programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008 and 2009. He teaches courses in the Cinema, Communication Studies and Journalism departments at Concordia.

Take today’s post about the offensive advert for Ford India showing a Berlusconi lookalike flashing the peace sign as he gets into his Ford Figo with an impressive boot (trunk) large enough to store three bound and gagged scantily clad women (one of whom is crying).

HuffPo’s coverage of the Ford fracas

The advertising firm responsible, WPP, claim this was all an accident and the image wasn’t meant for the public, but the fact that it even exists while people continue to protest in India against a corrupt system that allows rampant rape is unforgivable (as it would be any other context as well).

However, peeling yet another layer of scum from this awful media incident reveals HuffPost’s “You May Also Like” image and text links at the bottom of the story, two of which focus on Britney Spears’s body and nipple slips & other wardrobe malfunctions, respectively. Perhaps the Ford ad isn’t such a wretched anomaly after all, but just another expression of a capitalist-consumption-media complex that thrives off of the objectification of women, even when such objectification is being reported on by “liberal media.”

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

Ai had courted controversy before by being publicly outspoken about the Beijing Olympics, but his response to the Sichuan earthquake brought him into the sharp focus of the Chinese government. Working with a number of locals and other artists, he compiled a list of names of the dead schoolchildren, trying to draw attention to their plight at the hands of the local governments and the lack of oversight in building the schools.

He was beaten by police as a result, then later put under house arrest. In 2011 he was arrested and detained in a secret location for almost three months, until finally being released and charged with tax evasion. He remains under house arrest at his home and studio in Beijing.

Throughout all of this, Ai has remained vocal; he is an avid tweeter and a popular interview subject. No matter what they do, the Chinese government just can’t seem to get him to stop talking.

Long-time friend and collaborator Larry Warsh has organized a number of Ai’s notable statements from Twitter, interviews, blogging and other publications into a little book entitled Weiwei-isms.

Divided thematically, it covers all manner of topics related to Ai — his politics, his philosophy, his artistic practice and more. While there are certainly more in-depth looks at the artist and his output and opinions, this quick little read is like the Coles Notes of Ai Weiwei and offers insights I hadn’t previously considered.

A number of the quotes simply highlight what we already know: Ai is outspoken, he feels the government is too controlling, and the people of China continue to suffer under Communist rule.

While Warsh attempts to place Ai’s thoughts into categories, it is actually kind of frustrating to have them organized in such a way, implying the quote can or should only be considered under one context. A little organization certainly helps to break up a huge slew of quotations, but I wonder if a chronological breakdown would have been more interesting. It would have allowed the reader to see how much stronger (or otherwise) his statements have become and what event in his life might have precipitated what opinion or thought more clearly.

Perhaps my favourite quote in the entire book is this: “I have no sense of why I lost my freedom and if you do not know how you lost something, how can you protect it.” Ai occasionally writes for The Guardian, and this quote is from the very first paragraph of a June 2012 article about his feeling stronger than ever in standing up to the Chinese government.

In the article, that one line seems to get lost. Standing alone, Ai’s vulnerability jumps off the page, and it strikes me that Ai being vulnerable emotionally is not something anyone talks about much. The Chinese can certainly be a proud people, but someone who has gone through what Ai has gone through would have to feel beaten down from time to time. It adds an additional, human layer to someone who’s emotional strength seems almost superhuman at this point.

By far the most prominent topic running through all the categories is the idea of art as a means to freedom.

Ai turned to art because he felt he would be able to speak more freely than in any other possible profession in China, according to a number of provided quotes. For Ai, the call to art is not necessarily about needing to express a deep emotion, but instead about expressing anything at all.

In North America, we take for granted that an artist can produce art questioning, for instance, the stigma of AIDS on homosexual men in the 80s as A.A. Bronson and many others have done. That kind of art is unheard of even in contemporary China — simply asking to be able to say what you want can have you harassed by local police for the rest of your life.

Ai has taken this idea so far that he will never be out of the watchful government eye for as long as he lives. His only saving grace is that he stealthily courted the art world and the international media, making his remaining alive important to the world opinion of China.

The most amazing thing in all he’s done is something we do every day: question the choices of his government over the internet. There would be six billion fewer people in the world if all governments suddenly started treating their people the way China does. Weiwei-isms provides an excellent reminder of just how important Ai’s cause for free speech is, in a surprisingly humanizing manner.

Image: Forever by Ai Wei Wei.

What: Les dormeurs / The Sleepers

Where: Montreal, Quebec, as part of Art SouTerrain (a literally underground city festival of art)

When: Friday, March 1, 2013

Why: The implications of this installation are more than artistic. The Sleepers is a disruption in a process of exhange. To create this piece, Clavijo traded new clothes for used ones belonging to homeless people. The new serve as a reimbursement for the old, while the old are a testimony of the journeys of homeless people in the city. This process of exchange acts as an evolving portrait of our lives in society and creates an atmosphere of doubt through the unsettling uncertainty of presence that disturbs power.

Vimeo staff pick. Shane Koyczan. Collaborative artists animating each 20 seconds of powerful, stirring, anti-oppression spoken words. Enough said.

Assembly by Jenn Strom, National Film Board of Canada

When Tillett Wright began her photographic project, Self Evident Truths, back in 2010 she didn’t expect the groundswell of requests for photographs that she ended up receiving. She originally wanted to shoot 4-5,000 people, but the response has led her to increase her goal to 10,000 people.

“I basically decided to photograph anyone in this country that isn’t 100% straight, which, if you don’t know, is a limitless number of people,” jokes Wright in her TEDx talk posted above.

To date she has photographed around 2,000 people. “This is the civil rights fight of our generation,” says Wright.

Raised in Delta, Sonny first learned about his heritage when he ran home from school to tell his mother about these “cool people that used to exist” that he had learned about — only discover he was a descendant. He ties our western consumer culture to the indigenous past in a way that is simultaneously protest and invitation.

His piece “The Happiest Future” is currently still on display at the Burnaby Art Gallery.

Let’s start with you! Where are you from and how is it that you came to start making art works with a political bend to them?

Well, I’m originally from Vancouver… a grew up as a suburbanite (North Delta) who moved to the city to go to art school.

I think I’ve always had a strong political streak to me. For me, inserting politics into my work became second nature and a way to connect to various issues and to educate people on Canada’s hidden history.

My work started out, and to a point continues to be, very autobiographical. It started out as a way to mix my pop-culture upbringing with my learnt indigenous identity. I think the politics came to play a deeper meaning in my work as I started to uncover all the injustice that my family has faced through colonialism. The Potlatch Ban and the residential school history in my family became pretty sobering. I think the deep political nature of who I am was awakened as I discovered more about my family history.

Many of your pieces speak to the Canadian Indigenous experience – you say in your artist statement that you’re layering this with a look at consumerism, branding, etc. Why is it important for you to highlight these two realities in your work?

Consumerism is part of my identity, it’s a part of all Western peoples’ identity. We have been bred to be consumers, and we brand ourselves with the iconography that speaks to our loyalties to the specific products we buy. Those products create a narrative on how we use branding as “totemic” representation. This idea came from an observation I had on the bus one day. There were two people, sitting next to each other yet ignoring each other, both with their little white earbuds jammed in their ears. They had no relation to each other, but through technology, they were connected to a symbolic consumer based clan structure. Instead of being from the Raven, Bear, Eagle (etc) clan, we now belong to the Nike clan, the iPod clan, the Coke clan.

This is really what Apple wanted to do. They wanted to create harmony between people through their products. However, it ultimately failed because these two people weren’t sitting and sharing, they were transfixed in their own little bubbles, ignoring the world around them.

I get the impression that you have experienced the sadness that comes with the Indigenous community’s loss of language, cultural resources, and the effects of colonization – could you share with us an experience when you first began to realize the impacts of these losses on the indigenous community and perhaps how it influenced your artistic path?

I don’t know if sadness would be the way to explain it. An understanding of the profane loss of culture and identity. I guess I understand that through colonization and my own personal history, I’m missing something.

It’s recently that I’ve started to realize that loss. Recently, in a relative sense I suppose. As my personal story goes, I found out about my heritage at the age of eight. Ironically, I was learning about my people in school, I ran home to tell my mom about these cool people that used to exist, not knowing I was one of them!

I really didn’t start to explore my culture though art until I was in my early twenties. But I think when I entered into my early thirties is when I really started to understand what I had missed and how it began to influence my work and message politically.

I have an understanding of my culture, I know the issues at hand with the First People and colonization… but I don’t know my language. It’s with sadness that I understand why there are only three fluent speakers left in my community.

As for influencing my artistic path, I’m using it as a vehicle to put a human face on the issues of colonization. Most people are so far removed from those issues that they have no idea how to usher in any sort of stereotypical compassion that Canadians are known for. At first, I was using it humorously, drawing relations to sugary breakfast cereals and Saturday morning cartoons. Now, I’m starting to reference stories I’ve heard about my great-great grandfather (Billy and the Chiefs, Silenced: The Burning and Ellipsis). Two new sculptural/ installation works I have on the bubble reference my grandfather and grandmother. I want people to know this is current history. These aren’t issues lost in the ethos… these are issues that are on-going, with ramifications that can be clearly seen.

The Happiest Future is a series of posters that read “The Happiest Future for the Indian Race Is absorption into the General Population. This is the Policy of our Government.” Where
does this phrase come from? What’s the story behind these posters?

That is a quote from Duncan Campbell Scott, one of Canada’s most assimilative-minded public servants. He was the head of the Indian Affairs department from 1913‒1932 and his mandate was full assimilation of the Indigenous people.

This series is a way to explain the inherent ignorance, racism, and bigotry that some Canadians hold towards the First People. It purports that in some point in Canada’s colonial past, propaganda must have been used to spread the hate. I was taking cues from World War I and II and communist era propaganda imagery to inform this work.

I started to toy around with the idea a couple of years ago, and launched the series in the fall at Gallery Fukai in Vancouver. Months later, the Idle No More movement took hold and gave me a way to counter balance the negative aspects of what I was sharing. As I started to dive into the notion of propaganda, I began to see that it wasn’t just a one sided affair. The “good guys” and the “bad guys” both had messages to share. Idle No More gave me a way to tackle the issues from the side of the “good guys”, providing a balance to the issue of colonialism in Canada.

It’s funny, really… well, not really funny ha-ha, but seeing these words from the past, I can see our current government utilizing them. In a way, the series is aimed at pointing out the injustices in Canadian history, hopefully allowing people to understand the issues and really tugging at the utopian perception that Canadians have of themselves.

These pieces come in multiple colours, and I first saw them at the Burnaby Art Gallery – where else have they been seen?

The Happiest Future was first presented as a solo exhibit at Gallery Fukai in Vancouver. There are 10 different colours in The Happiest Future piece and another from that series called Selective History.

Selective History is based on another DCS quote, where he expressed his desire to remove the “Indian problem” from colonial society. I feel he believed his words to come from a good place, somewhat utopian in a twisted way. But he was pushing the stereotype, fully believing that these people, whom Canada had decimated, were really just lazy. That they could, in fact “stand alone”. What this poster conceptualizes is that there was/is no Indian problem, but it’s simply a selective history problem.

This sentiment is echoed in what our current PM has stated in his speech to the G8/G20 conference in 2009. He told the world that Canada had no history of colonialism… Imma let you sit on that one for a sec! ( NOTE: I did a piece called Chief Speaker, followed by 11 Nations, on my site under Projects/ Happiest Future)

So as much as my work is political, it is also educational. It’s filling in the gaps in the Canadian educational system. We aren’t taught about colonialism in school. We are taught about a people in the past tense. Who the “Indians” used to be, where they used to live and what their culture used to be.

How do these pieces tie into (if at all) the Idle No More movement?
There is another series of images you’ve done that are inspired by the HOPE poster of Obama, what did you first create these for?

The Happiest Future predated the movement by a few months, and like the Idle No More movement, the aim of the work is to educate.

I created “There Is Hope, If We Rise” to inspire action from not only the First People, but from all Canadians. The BAG commissioned me to make these posters, and they printed them to be used at rallies, demonstrations, teach-ins and round dances. All the imagery is the same, but the text reflects various phrases used within the movement. Along the bottom, with the text, are four ovoids that represent the four founding women of the movement.

TIHIWR was inspired by Shepard Fairey’s iconic Hope poster of Barak Obama, where he was utilizing the iconic form of propaganda aesthetics to inspire the American people to see hope in their system.

The media has done its best to swing this as an “Indian” thing, but it is the farthest thing from. The Idle No More movement started as a response to the government’s omnibus budget bill, which contained unilateral changes to the Indian Act. Not to mention sweeping environmental reforms. One of the biggest, for me, is the surrender of reserve lands and private ownership of reserve lands.

The changes to the act around the surrender of land is huge! All the government needs to do now is call a meeting with the Chief and whichever council member is available and ask them to vote on the surrender of lands. This can still be accomplished in the current Indian Act, but all members of the nation must vote. So what’s to stop the government from dangling a few carrots to get what they want? The ramifications are dire, especially when you look at a dirty oil pipe line shooting west from Alberta across un-ceeded, traditional territories.

There have been whispers of a “maple spring”, which could happen, but we as Canadians need to stop the apathy. We can no longer just sit back and say “fuck it, we’ll fix it in four years”. We don’t have four years… we don’t have two years. So, yes, there will be hope, if we rise!

Another series of yours is the (res) series, which reminds me of the red campaign for HIV/AIDS fundraising – what’s the story behind these pieces?

It came from my iDrum series, particularity the (Red)iscovery Series. That work, along with Product (RES), is looking specifically at our compassion consumption. As Canadians, as people of the privileged western world, we pride ourselves on being compassionate to those less fortunate than ourselves. But I’m seeing the hypocrisy in our generosity. Product (RED) was a consumer program that companies like the Gap, Starbucks and Apple jumped on. They preyed on our compassion, by offering pennies of our purchase towards helping those in need, far away from our privileged lives. The hypocrisy is pointed out in this series by questioning how we can have compassion for others, yet have none for our own people?

Frankly, western society will go out of its way to help people in need. Every time I talk about this, I’m reminded of a song called “21st Century Living” by Matthew Good. In part of the song, he talks about our ambition to help those in need. “Around here our ambition throws a non-perishable item in a donation bin at Christmas/ And it pats itself on the fucking back because it thinks it’s done something decent.”

We, as Canadians, are wholly ambitious to help those in need — except in our own back yards. We constantly ignore people in need in our own country. And over the past year, our neglect has been highlighted by the third world conditions in places like Attawapiskat. But we need to be wary of making a martyr out of one community. There are hundreds of indigenous communities in jeopardy all over Canada. Places that lack running water, places that lack the basic infrastructure and necessities that we all take for granted. If anything, we shouldn’t feel guilt over this. We should feel a deep desire to help! We need to question why we have people living in tar-paper shacks, shitting in buckets. Question why, in some remote northern communities, $20 worth of groceries costs $100.

All in all, I believe in the utopia of Canada. I believe that if given the proper education, the proper insight, Canadians will step up, acknowledge and respond.

What do you hope that people take away from viewing your pieces?

Compassion. And understanding. A drive to better themselves. At the very least an appreciation of the aesthetics I’m creating. I want to welcome people into a conversation, I don’t want to belittle anyone for the education they didn’t receive, I want to inspire them to better themselves and challenge how they fit within the stereotype of the Canadian identity.

What do you have coming up on the horizon in terms of shows, etc?

So much! I’m coming up on 1 year of marriage awesomeness with my partner in crime… followed by our daughter’s 1st birthday.

On top of that, I have two solo shows opening up in the beginning of March. One here in Montreal, #neveridle at Art Mur, and another called There Is Hope, If We Rise, at Vertigo Gallery in Vernon, BC. I’m part of Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada this spring; an awesome public art work on the go in Vancouver; a solo at the Urban Shaman in Winnipeg; a group show in Toronto this fall and the continued touring of the Beat Nation exhibition.

Sonny will also be in Scope NYC 2013 opening March 6.

The above video was uploaded a few months ago but started making the rounds in a viral way this weekend. Sunday food for thought.

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.

I had a chance to discuss the issues with the collective who runs the site, and although some responses are decidedly deflective or evasive (notably: repeating an issue is complex and bigger than us, is not at all addressing our own implication in said issue, or bringing us closer to resolution on divergent views), their quick and lengthy replies to my questions are very thoughtful (no maybe there!) and show a commitment to not only dialogue, but to disseminating art they hope will provoke social change (what kind of change, they do not stipulate, but one can surmise they mean progressive social change).

As a caveat, I am not singling out Thought Maybe and ignoring countless other similar “illegal” documentary streaming and sharing sites out of any vindictive nature. This new site has, as pointed out, been the topic of conversation among some members of the documentary community in Canada because of its jejunity in the salad days of doc downloading, and because the mysterious unnamed collective behind the site identify as working within the social change or activist paradigm.

It is precisely documentary’s unique station in the mediascape—a genre that champions alternative voices, perspectives and narratives to the mainstream corporate industrial cinema complex—that makes it an interesting area for discussion around sharing, connecting, support and agitation, especially when that conversation revolves around a sharing site that positions itself as advocate for both the alternative media arts and for social change animation.

Art Threat: I’m wondering how Thought Maybe acquires permission and/or streaming rights to show the documentaries you show and I’m also wondering how you connect with social justice activist communities, if at all, as you mention on the site that you seek to link the films with activism of some sort.

Thought Maybe Collective: It works ad-hoc in many ways. Film makers can approach us and we support their work and the broader political aims directly; for a recent example, the producers of the Just Do It film who approached us as a good example of how such works inspire direct action, in this context in the UK.

Other times films are made available under Creative Commons, or are in the public domain, and other times films are shared in the context of other movements such as the work of John Pilger in the anti-war movement for example, or others dealing with specific campaigns such as ecological movements or permaculture for instance.

In these circumstances support is implied or inferred — not to say this is a catch-all however, and we recognise that it’s not an ideal system, but neither are the outdated notions of copyright and the IP system–which is an underlying component of our project, and indeed what such authors are trying to support along with us trying to challenge.

Such notions are a part of the broader discussion of our intent and our aims, but at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is help spread the message of these films and indeed other localised works in order to provoke tangible action in movements that people find this project valuable for, all around the world.

The topics and movements are many as you can see on our site and indeed, exposure on our site supports film makers as much as the broader political movements that the films are contextualised in — indeed this being the reasons such people are making such films for in the first place–i.e. to generate awareness, share knowledge, ask questions, challenge, inspire and provoke action.

This is demonstrated by the many film makers who embrace our project, share these goals with us and enjoy the mutual aid that goes all ways and indeed inspires other outcomes, some of which we don’t even know yet.

Even in the circumstances where support may be implied or inferred, fundamentally, we all know that old models aren’t working and indeed a lot needs to change, and this is *the* pressing issue. The specific point of copyrights is an ongoing conversation though, and we acknowledge we don’t have many answers — what we are doing though is just giving this project a go, because as we’ve said, a lot needs to change and this is the pressing issue.

IP is indeed a controversial area and can evoke a lot of strong responses for some, so to be clear, we’re not out to impose anything on film makers — on the very rare occasion that film makers don’t want their films seen or cannot share for other reasons, or don’t/can’t support the aims of this project, etc, then fair enough, we’ll take the films down, though not without disappointment on many levels.

Overall, the fundamental premise in which information is presented on Thought Maybe is to inspire, inform and provoke action. We don’t run ads, we don’t make a claim of ownership, we don’t profit or make money. This sets us apart from other sites and we’re clear about all this–that the project is a labour of love, and it’s for a much bigger purpose. We’re broadly supported on these aims, as well as helping to inspire the much-needed political action on problems which compound by the day, where we can…

As for who is behind the site, we’re a small group of film makers, artists and media activists from around the world. We understand the complexity of this conversation during strenuous times. What we are doing though is trying to challenge such notions.

We’ve dedicated our lives at great sacrifice to enacting change on issues that affect our ways of making a living and indeed we struggle for this project (and many others) to keep them alive in such challenging times–and we know that others do too, including all the film makers that support these aims, as well as the broader political movements that reciprocate mutual aid.

We’re all working on these things together. One such thing we collectively recognise is the need to get creative with alternative ways to fund our own projects and we’re not just talking about Thought Maybe here too. It’s strenuous times for all and always has been for artists. We know, we’re artists too! That’s why the discussion of IP is an interesting one, even if we disagree.

But rather than cling to old notions and failed economic models by navigating through their remains, we’re trying to go beyond and institute some real change from the ground up. This is why we’re embracing the opportunities of technology, to get pertinent information out there in the vast noise of screen culture with some amount of clarity and simplicity, by doing it differently — and this is why we’re in-part challenging outdated notions of economics, copyright, and IP; this is why we embrace Creative Commons; this is why we do not support corporate media channels such as YouTube; this is why we do not run any advertising; this is why we don’t rely on government or corporate funding, etc etc etc.

We’re trying to do it all differently, and these are some reasons among many. This project is a massive undertaking and we acknowledge that, and indeed as we’ve said, we know things aren’t perfect but neither are the current systems. We’ve all got a lot of work to do, which is why we’re challenging these hard areas with the bigger picture in mind–what’s more important at the end of the day?

Ok, but it’s still not clear how you obtain permission from filmmakers who do not submit their films or approach you, or whose work is not under Creative Commons share alike licensing. While I agree that old economic models are outmoded and dysfunctional, and I applaud efforts to share work and to challenge capitalism with mutual aid and collaboration schemes, I’m wondering if you can respond to two nagging issues.

The first is that copyright was initially created to protect artists, not large corporations, and as such artists can use copyright to their benefit, by controlling the ways in which their works are used, consumed and experienced, and crucially, can maybe even get paid in the process.

We agree. Yes, copyrights were instigated to protect artists and foster creativity, the point of departure though is that this is largely no longer the case.

Copyright is now used overwhelmingly to protect large corporations and is also overwhelmingly used for censorship–indeed as you say “controlling the ways in which works are used, consumed and experienced”. This is the fundamental difference, as we believe in freedom-of-information — not to say at the detriment or against the wishes of content creators however, but simply that such pertinent information should be made available to everyone, where possible, as much as possible, especially considering the larger issues at hand (i.e. ecological crisis, economic collapse, impacts of globalisation, etc, etc). This is what we mean by: “what’s more important at the end of the day?”

On a basic level though, this whole discussion is well outside the confines of Thought Maybe. One only needs to take a glimpse at the events in the IP industry in this context which have failed — digital rights management, copy protection, etc. We’re not commenting on this specifically, but the point we’re trying to make is that old economic models are outmoded and dysfunctional as you say, and so we’re setting out to embrace the change. Many film makers these days realise the need to get creative to fund their projects in other ways, and with us being artists ourselves, we’re going about doing that, while getting pertinent work out there…

Which leads to the second issue — Thought Maybe, like many projects of this kind, seems to operate on the assumption that documentary filmmakers just “want to get their work out there” and that filmmakers will be pleased just to have their work shared, downloaded, streamed, etc.

While this may be true of some filmmakers, I can tell you from experience in the industry and community that most documentary filmmakers do it for love AND to put food on their tables and clothes on their children. If documentaries were made in order to be shared freely, how would filmmakers earn a living?

Surely the assumption that film makers want their films to be seen is reasonable. Again, the controversy only comes when discussing the outdated notions of copyright and the related failed economic models.

We agree on the point that most film makers do it for love–our work is a labour of love too. Again, this is an issue much larger than TM [Thought Maybe]–indeed, how to make a living off your art in an astringent, pervasive capitalist system?

This is a massive question and is indeed outside the scope of TM. But as we said before, there are many film makers that realise this and have gone about ways to fund their projects in different ways and support us also.

We all recognise the need to get creative and challenge old paradigms–our livelihoods depend on them. As we said above, we’re also speaking from experience here–we’re struggling artists trying to make ends meet too. We work day jobs and struggle for our art, while coupling our political aspirations with the struggle.

Alternative economic models that pay filmmakers for their work such as Cinema Politica (of which I’m a co-founder ) and Good Screenings and others are departures from older economic schemes but aren’t forgetting about the filmmakers in the process. While I am essentially anti-capitalist, I do acknowledge that currently we all need to earn a living somehow. So I’m wondering how Thought Maybe fits into this?

We’re not forgetting about film makers either, we contend that we’re supporting them in many ways, as we’ve said. On the specific point of financing though, we’re aware of your work with Cinema Politica — it’s good work and valued. Indeed the stated aims are quite similar to TM. It says on the about page that “[CP] believe[s] in the power of art to not only entertain but to engage, inform, inspire, and provoke social change.” These are things we obviously hold in common and it’s great to see such interesting departures as you say.

On this specific point of financing though, we do know from direct experience from some film makers that also support Thought Maybe and have also worked with CP, that CP didn’t pay them nearly enough to sustain them as film makers.

This is not to say that TM is any better or worse however — the point we’re making is that, again, this entire discussion–i.e. making a living off your art inside a capitalist system–is much bigger than both of our projects.

Say for example, if TM had government or corporate funding like CP has, sure, we could potentially pay film makers a trickle of funds also. One reason we don’t accept gov/corp funding though is that we feel it its an unwanted force when dealing to challenge political institutions/challenge those structures, etc — this is to say that vetoing and censorship is common in our experience, or indeed other bureaucratic issues get in the way of simply publishing good work.

We obviously reject these things — not in disrespect of film makers, but because we believe there are bigger issues to challenge and that fundamentally, such pertinent work needs to be out there for everyone to access. As we say, we know many film makers are keen on this too, which is why they approach us. Again, we’re not forgetting about film makers either. We perhaps just see the issues differently and have different priorities.

Image from: http://culturalpolicyreform.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/illegal-downloading-in-australia/

To clarify for Thought Maybe members and our readers, Cinema Politica does not accept ANY support from corporations and our government support is specifically from arts councils in Canada and Quebec that is earmarked for the dissemination of independent media artworks by artists in Canada and Quebec. Arts Councils in Canada are quite famously set up at arms length to government and we have never experienced and tampering in our operations, even when our films go against government policy.

While it may be great for CP to make use of such arrangements, we’re not CP and we’re not in Canada or Quebec unfortunately, and even then we have different experience when dealing with such funding, as we’ve said.

As a further explanation, Cinema Politica’s financial structure has been developed from the union model — we collect small membership fees from all our participating screening locals and this provides us with a small operating budget – hardly the picture painted above.

This small budget allows us to have an office, pay some contract and honorarium fees to artists, programmers, designers and organizers. That said, we are principally a volunteer-run organization. Yet having been doing this long enough, we know that being exclusively volunteer-based is difficult to sustain, no matter what the project or the passion.

Again, our situation differs from CP obviously, so we have to make do with the best of that situation. We’re a small group of people, we have no office, no budget, no funding–we’re entirely on our own.

And also, like we say, we know it’s not perfect, but neither are many other projects, and yes, all of this is difficult to sustain, regardless–even as we’re all volunteers too. We don’t get paid.

Fundamentally though, this is the larger point we’re trying to make — most of this conversation to do with financing is outside the realm of Thought Maybe, CP and others–combined.

But we’re all working together — we recognise the value in such projects, it’s all good work, as we said. We hope support is reciprocated. In any event, the issues are complex and broad, but are also part of the bigger challenges and work we want to support, as well as work we’re setting out to do–not only as individuals but as a project too.

Lastly, in terms of paying licensing for the films Cinema Politica screens and that not being enough to sustain the artists, we’re not surprised to hear this. There is not a single option for documentaries that sustains the artists, that’s the whole point of this exchange!
To wit: the more organizations, collectives, projects, groups, etc that pay what they can the more that adds up for a documentary filmmaker and may help to actually sustain them.

Yes, this is true. The more support the better–it’s all needed and valuable. We provide what support we can, where we can, as much as possible and in different ways.

Surely not paying ANYTHING can’t be seen as a better model!

We did not say that not paying anything was a better model. We said: “This is not to say that TM is any better or worse however — the point we’re making is that, again, this entire discussion–i.e. making a living off your art inside a capitalist system–is much bigger than both of our projects.” And indeed it is, as illustrated.

When Cinema Politica and other documentary initiatives pay $150, $250, $500 and more to screen a film, this can and does add up.

It sure can, and indeed we hope our small contributions can help as much as possible too. Again, as we said, if we received funding, we could potentially directly support film makers with a trickle of funds also.

But again, for now, we’re helping in different ways. People we work with donate to film makers when/where possible and help out in other ways such as labour exchanges (say, doing translations for example), others purchase DVDs, pay for screenings, etc, etc — it does all add up.

If a film is screened for free and made available on line for free, ins’t there (a) less incentive for groups to actually pay or have structures to pay when others aren’t; and (b) less incentive for audiences to pay (even if it is by-donation)?

A combination of free and pay-what-can and commercial initiatives may be the perfect storm, but it seems that for documentary at least, the free online streaming is starting to displace and supplant other pay models, which when we’re talking about sustaining artists, is understandably worrisome for those artists working (like yourselves, but those who perhaps do not have supplemental day jobs).

In our experience, there’s much more to it than simply “free=loss of $ and incentives”. Even as TM being a very young project, we’ve had direct experience on the contrary — many viewers have sent us emails over the past year asking where they can purchase old films or get in contact with a film maker to do screenings (especially films that have been revived from VHS), and we’re sure that energy and enthusiasm carries over in other ways such as word of mouth promotion, direct interfacing with grass-roots movements and others that can provide financial support, direct financial support by donations, etc etc.

We’ve had direct experience with this on our own works, separate from TM too, so we’ll have to disagree on this one. None of this is clear cut though, and rather than get off-topic, we’ll say again that underlying this entire conversation–we recognise the need to get creative with funding our stuff in different ways, regardless of what’s going on, as we’ve said.

If you have films on your site that filmmakers have not given permission to stream and they are not getting paid, how does it benefit them? Shouldn’t Thought Maybe only concentrate on works where permission is granted or a CC license is in place?

We contend that exposure on our site, however big or small is helpful to film makers in many ways, even ways that are still coming about, as we’ve said. But again, fundamentally, the issues you raise are much larger than both our projects combined, or indeed a specific focus on film makers in any case.

These issues are effecting everyone. But to take your specific point, we’ll illustrate it by turning it around — that is to say that of all the very few requests to remove content since the site began–in every case the films have been available in their entirety elsewhere on the web such as YouTube, and indeed most still remain available even after we’ve respectfully removed content from our site.

So the question becomes: how does it benefit them by not being on Thought Maybe?

For instance, two case-in-point recent examples of fantastic films sadly removed under the premise of harming revenues were: A Place Called Chiapas and Manufacturing Landscapes.

We respectfully complied with the requests to remove these films, despite the fact that the films are still readily available to this day elsewhere on the web, and one would assume this is also against the wishes of the film makers if they were serious about enforcing their copyrights. Indeed, it does beg the question — so we’ve even kindly asked them about this but have not received any replies.

Perhaps it’s because the point doesn’t hold that TM is impacting the failed revenue streams of copyright and IP when many other sites on the web are still showing the same films.

Further, one could argue that sites like YouTube and others are actually harming by profiting off film makers with ad revenues. In any event, the issue is perplexing, and again, is much bigger than our project. We’re not out to harm film makers, and there’s much respect there. For instance, to illustrate the point using the example with the great films above that were sadly removed, we could’ve just linked to them on YouTube and elsewhere to continue sharing them contrary to the wishes of the film makers — but the point is we didn’t however.

If film makers don’t want their films seen on Thought Maybe, regardless of where they are elsewhere, then so be it, though not without disappointment. The question still remains though, what’s the benefit of doing so?

This philosophy puts the onus on the filmmakers, and not those disseminating their work without permission.

As one filmmaker has told me, and I believe this represents many documentary makers’ contention with the situation of free online docs: “It’s great that they’ve put it on line for more people to see but it’s not cool they don’t even bother contacting me—and I imagine other filmmakers—about putting my work up on line. Further, why don’t they try to directly support filmmakers, instead of their films, by having a “support this artist” link or button on each film?”

Are you referring to a film maker that is talking about their works on TM? If so, we haven’t heard these specific comments and in such a case, it would be good to hear from them directly with such questions or concerns. To answer the question though, we do provide support to film makers in asking for donations and showing links to their site where they want this in their content or to provide a link on the site.

For example, the notice of how/where to make donations on David Miller’s In Guantanamo — http://thoughtmaybe.com/in-guantanamo/; the use of a watermark with a web address (such as Rise of The Machines — http://thoughtmaybe.com/rise-of-the-machines/); or we add links to sites to enable donations (for example, films by Scott Noble like http://thoughtmaybe.com/human-resources/ for instance). These are examples among many.

I can tell you from talking to filmmakers that they don’t just go after Thought Maybe when requesting removal of their material, they request it from every site – - I just think that you guys respond much faster (which is a good thing on your part).

In any event, we contend that Thought Maybe is beneficial to film makers in many ways, as indeed many approach us, love to work with us on these points, share our aims and the enjoy mutual aid and reciprocated support.

We know the issue is complex though, and so the bigger point we’re trying to make here is that such arguments against Thought Maybe are misdirected. Again, we’re not out to harm film makers, we’re approachable and respectful even where we may disagree.

Similarly, as with the above, if Thought Maybe was only to focus on CC, there would be a loss of pertinent content to the same effect. Indeed, having said this, many films on our site are CC or are distributed with larger intent such as the work of Adam Curtis for instance.

Again, at the end of the day, what’s more important? If film makers don’t want to/can’t support this project, it’s up to them and we’ll respect that, though again, not without disappointment.

Doesn’t the collective agree that if we don’t support the artists doing the work—support their actual labour with sustenance—then there won’t be nearly as many great documentaries being made?

Well, yes and no. We think it would be fair to say that great docos will be made regardless and the evidence of this is abound as film makers turn to alternative ways to fund their projects and to continue to make a living during strenuous, changing times.

The point may be true if all film makers were still clinging to the failed notions of copyright, but this isn’t the case. There is overwhelming support to embrace the notions of TM and indeed other projects to collectively work to break paradigms on issues that effect all our ways of living–and again, we’re not just talking about film makers here — this means all of us.

But back to the point of financing film makers specifically, it’s an ongoing conversation, and one that is much larger than TM, CP and others, as we’ve said.

You say that Thought Maybe is new and unique, but I’m wondering how it differs from many other online documentary viewing sites, such as topdocumentaryfilms.com?

Many differences, but notably — No YouTube. No ads. No social media nonsense. A focus on content pertaining to social and political issues, not just anything and everything that’s remotely a ‘doc’ on YouTube or Vimeo, etc. As we say on our about page “There’s already a lot of information on the Internet, so our goal is to cut through the noise and garbage, to present valuable information in a clear way, so it’s accessible, useful and easily digested…”

Speaking of features, one thing to add here is that it might also be an act of good faith (and helpful to both filmmakers and your viewers) to include information on the films, other than synopses — such as director, year, country, link to the actual filmmaker’s or producer’s site, etc. Is there a reason you don’t include this info?

We do provide credit to director/writers, as well as date/country/link for some films where available/possible/relevant/etc. Bringing consistency is something we’ve been working on over the last 5 months.

One of the defining characteristics of alternative and activist media is accountability and transparency — unlike corporate and mainstream counterparts, alt/activist media tend to be upfront about structure, funding, who is behind the organization, etc.

Yet Thought Maybe doesn’t reveal any of this information and rather keeps it quite a mystery, which is highly unusual for a project positioning itself with activist efforts and social movements, especially one that is soliciting donations. Is there a reason for this secrecy? And if there isn’t, can you tell me who is on the collective?

We’re not an organisation. We have no structure, funding, etc. We’re clear about this and other such aims on our site. There’s no secrecy, there’s no mystery — we’re clear on our site that it’s not a project about us (see about page).

The people working on this project are not important — it’s the content and responses that are important. So why make a fuss about who we are? As for donations we’re clear about what these are for and where donations go, there’s no obscurity.

I have to follow up here because I don’t think my initial question was understood. Regardless of how you identify yourselves—organization, initiative, collective—the point is that groups that (a) position themselves as operating within an activist and social change milieu and (b) ask for donations, usually maintain some level of transparency, especially if they want to work with artists and activists.

I’m not asking for you to shift the focus to the individuals behind the project, and by listing the names of members of the collective I don’t think this would shift the focus from the films, but would rather lend legitimacy and transparency to the project.

It’s not a fuss really, it’s a very base request for letting us know who you are. If there is a reason to not be forthcoming, then that’s another story, but so far there isn’t one that I can see.

With all due respect, we’ve clearly stated that this project is not about us and we stand by that. Further, we contend that there is transparency and accountability — as demonstrated by our actions and what we clearly state on our site — whether this is in regards to the way we run it or why, or in the specific case of donations–we’re clear about what these are for.

Lastly, it is still not clear to me how you are connecting audiences to activism or civil society groups or social movements. The films raise issues and awareness, but how do you direct your viewers to specific project or processes to get involved (unless I’m missing this on the site?).

For instance, at cinemapolitica.org we have “Take Action” links, such as here: http://www.cinemapolitica.org/film/status-quo-unfinished-business-feminism-canada,or at Good Screenings, such as here: http://www.goodscreenings.org/MDG/. Does Thought Maybe work with any activist organizations?

It should be obvious that the films do this as well as the framing of the site overall. And as we say on the site, we’re not collectively pedalling any specific responses. From our about page: “We’ve fundamentally built this resource to inform and inspire action — and no, we’re not talking about clicking the stupid ‘Like’ button on Facebook, signing online petitions or letter writing — we mean informing and inspiring real-world action; taking this information away from the computer to rejuvenate the strong networks with the people around you in the real world, to discuss, plan, act.

This is not a symbolic action or clicktivism website, nor is it a simple collection of popular content, like the other websites available. It’s a resource that aims to inform, inspire and provoke action; to generate a multitude of responses and reactions.

This is just some of what is needed to break paradigms, subservience, acquiescence, and to cultivate inspiration to continue work on the plethora of puzzles and problems addressed in the information published here.”

Directly pointing viewers to specific actions in a top-down way like other websites is precisely what we’re trying not to do. It’s about viewers being inspired and empowered to form their own actions. As we say, to “rejuvenate the strong networks with the people around [them] in the real world, to discuss, plan, act.” Again, this is one of the many reasons we don’t have catch-all “Take Action” links, etc.

We assist in supporting movements and vast arrays of political actions. As above, if you’re after specifics, you’re missing the point — we’re not about propping up specific structures for change, or instructing viewers on exactly what they should do, top-down.

We’re trying to break out of these confines. Again, it’s about viewers being empowered to form their own actions, and indeed to inspire a diversity of tactics, methods, responses and reactions.

As we say, “This is just some of what is needed to break paradigms, subservience, acquiescence, and to cultivate inspiration to continue work on the plethora of puzzles and problems addressed in the information published here.”

We’re not sure if we can get any more clearer than this. But to appease with a specific example, it could be the one we mentioned initially — working with producers of Just Do It film and those direct-action movements happening in the UK.

There are also similar examples we could point to in Canada with work against the Tar Sands, or in Australia with anti-uranium mining movements, permaculture groups, etc — all where work on TM has had a tangible impact.

* * * *

What do you think? Are documentaries like books, where Corey Doctorow has fiercely proven that free downloads will not necessarily inhibit commercial sales, but in fact may help in remuneration?

Or are documentaries an already beleaguered alternative media, limping along with no to little structural or dissemination support, and therefore in need of less Thought Maybe projects and more pay schemes?

Or is there a third option? A combination? A new paradigm?

Exhibition Dates: March 13 – April 13^th 2013. Opening March 13th.   Includes a potluck and conversation every Wednesday night for the run of the show. If you would like to participate, please send an email with the following information to : director@g101.ca

(e-mail submissions only): NAME, CONTACT (e-mail, phone number, mailing address & website), ARTIST’S STATEMENT (Max 200 words describing the proposed work.), 3 – 4 PHOTOS of your ARTWORK (jpeg – Max – 550 – 1024 resolution , Title, Dimensions & Medium of Artwork)

CREATE THIS REVOLUTION @ Gallery 101 Ottawa Ontario, Mar 13 – Apr 13^th 2013.

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.

I think perhaps Amy Davidson of the New Yorker wrapped up the sexism of it all best in her piece “Seth Macfarlane and the Oscar’s hostile, ugly, sexist night” – a must read for anyone who needs someone to a) articulate why you probably felt kind of gross about the whole thing or b) demonstrate what was sexist about it.

And for all of us who have had those moments where we think perhaps we’re overreacting, we should reach over and read Margaret Lyon’s piece for Vulture “Why Seth Macfarlane’s misogyny matters.”

At the end of the day it really comes down to this: there is low forms of comedy and sophisticated forms of comedy, and MacFarlane consistently takes the low road rather than taking the classy road, (see: Daniel Day-Lewis’ joke about having vied for the Margaret Thatcher part and wanting to see Meryl Streep play Lincoln, or Grant Heslov’s joke about the three best looking producers in Hollywood). And despite the cacophony of nonsense that the Oscars tends to be, I don’t think many of us were expecting them to stoop to that level… afterall, it’s 2013. Didn’t we just spend years watching Dove love your body commercials and 14,000 “It gets better” videos.

Sadly, audiences over at MSNBC (and I’m sure similar publications) are still finding MacFarlane more “Funny and Edgy” (35%) than “Crass and offensive” (26%). The remainder found him to be a little bit of both. All I can give him is that I was genuinely impressed by his singing skills, but it looks like those of us trying to walk the line between “not being uptight” and “standing up for what is right” will continue to be standing up and giving stressful speeches about how we can do better and the best laugh to get isn’t always the easiest one for a long time to come.

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.

Wafaa Bilal’s The Night of Bush Capturing: A Virtual Jihadi was the most typically video-gamey of the three installations, but the layering of narratives in this installation was significantly more complex than most conventional games. The original game was released in 2003 by Petrilla Entertainment amidst the post-9/11 anti-Muslim hysteria. Originally titled Quest for Saddam, this game has the player shooting her way through Iraqi soldiers to find and kill Saddam Hussein.

Shortly after its release, Al Qaeda hacked the game and created The Night of Bush Capturing, which essentially used the same game structure but with a new skin: now the player was shooting her way through American soldiers to find and kill George Bush. Bilal’s intervention was to hack himself into the Al Quaeda version as a suicide bomber recruited after his brother is killed, thus A Virtual Jihadi. According to Georgia Mathewson, who works at the gallery, at least one patron has played all levels of the game, a feat rewarded with a chance to shoot at George Bush, no doubt a virtually satisfying accomplishment in any era.

Weak – Mohamed Mohsen

According Bilal, Virtual Jihadi was meant to draw attention to the racist generalizations and stereotypes often seen in video games, and acutely seen in the years after 9/11 as American culture shaped by George Bush’s political leadership retrenched into xenophobic paranoia.

Wafaa Bilal is probably best known for his work “Domestic Tension” (2006) in which he lived in a small room at Flatfile Galleries in Chicago for a month under 24-hour webcam surveillance and through which anyone could aim and fire a paintball gun. (Bilal was shot at over 60,000 times and the website had millions of hits; the installation garnered international attention.) Bilal was born in Iraq and lived through the rule of Saddam Hussein, was arrested and tortured for his political artwork before escaping to Kuwait where he was imprisoned again, eventually making his way to the U.S. He is now a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Harun Farocki’s two-channel video installation Serious Games I: Watson is Down is a fascinating glimpse into the use of video gaming by the American military to train soldiers.  In the video, on one screen we see and hear soldiers in a computer lab, each operating a virtual character in a game unfolding in real-time on the other screen.  The soldiers are virtually on patrol in Afghanistan in armed vehicles traveling through a dessert accurately recreated from geographic data.  Their instructor, just like dungeon masters of old, creates obstacles for them as they play – improvised explosive devices by the road and enemy combatants.  A fight ensues and Gunner Watson is killed in the game.

Serious Games I: Watson is Down – Harun Farocki

Serious Games, which was filmed at the Marine Corps Base 29 Palms in California in 2009, draws us into the rarely seen world where real soldiers play fantasy video games in preparation for real war, real injury, real death. The game itself looks just like any you might play, which is of course what makes it so fascinating and creepy.  Farocki has found the virtual interface between the violence of a war game and real war, and offers it up for public viewing.

Harun Farocki is an internationally recognized and award-winning filmmaker born in what is now the Czech Republic. Farocki has made over 90 films, including three feature films, essay films and documentaries.

And finally, there is the sculpture-video-game-installation by Mohammed Mohsen called Weak, perhaps the most enigmatic of the three exhibits. Weak offers, on first encounter, a beautiful sculpture of what looks like black shiny Arborite reminiscent in all the right ways of arcade video games from the 1980s.  This is my era of gaming – Space Invaders, Asteroids, Centipede, Galaxian, Missle Command – apparently what is referred to in the vernacular as the ‘golden age’ of arcade video games.

Mohsen’s overly simplified console with joystick evokes this era perfectly. But what happens when you play is something else altogether.  It isn’t clear at all what is happening, what the rules are, even the degree to which you are in control of your own game destiny.  Sometimes the joystick seems to control movement, often not; and it changes frequently, as do settings and putative game-play goals. It becomes apparent that winning and losing are not on the agenda in Mohsen’s video world, and thus ensues a frustrating and yet delighting process of trying to figure out even how to move with any consistency through the strange and visually evocative screens.

As best I could tell, these game cycles were about exploring new visual worlds and game architecture, rather than accumulating experience or gathering points.  Game play even resists the typical structures of engagement of virtual war games, perhaps a clue to Mohsen’s title for the installation. According to Mathewson at the gallery, part of Mohsen’s strategy is to work against the isolation typical of contemporary game play and to reintroduce video games into social settings – for example, the arcade setting where groups of friends huddled around consoles trying to solve video puzzles as one of them played. A mélange of ‘golden age’ game references informs the beautiful and surrealistic visuals encountered, and an exotic and strangely wonderful soundscape accompanies the experience.

Mohammed Mohsen was born in Palestine and now lives in Toronto. He studied economics and Middle East history and culture at the University of Toronto, and completed a BFA in drawing and painting at the Ontario College of Art and Design University. The Gallery 101 website explains that Weak is a poetic exploration of the pleasure and political anxiety of gaming, a reference to Mohsen’s personal experience in Saudi Arabia of having rare uncensored access to Western media including video games in the 1980s.

Blown Up: Gaming and War is on at Gallery 101 until March 2.

Rumours are circulating that British activist and street artist Banksy has been arrested. Fortunately, they seem to be false.

From a suspiciously unattributed press release (update — the web link seems to be down again. Here is a PDF of the release.):

London Police Chief Wayne Leppard held a press conference to answer questions about how Banksy was finally apprehended. “We had a 24-hour Anti-Graffiti Task Force monitoring different groups known to have associated with Banksy. We received word that around 2am a group of individuals left a flat speculated to be one of Banky’s art studios. This group was followed by agents and once vandalism had occurred, we then arrested the group, 5 men total. These individuals all had ID on them except for one, and that is the one we believed to be Banksy,” Leppard said.

“We then raided the studio where this group was last seen leaving from. Inside we found thousands of dollars of counterfeit money along with future projects of vandalism. We also found a passport and ID of a Paul William Horner who matched the description of the man that we are currently holding.” Leppard continued, “Horner is currently being held without bail on charges of vandalism, conspiracy, racketeering and counterfeiting. We are also holding the other four individuals whose names we are not releasing at this time.”

There is no indication, however, that anyone by the name of Wayne Leppard exists at London’s Metropolitan Police Service. We’ll let you know if we hear any evidence that this rumour is in fact true.

In recent “real” Banksy news, an original work of his entitled Wrong War has been recovered by police who were investigating a suspected fraud.

Image: Wrong War was found by London’s Metropolitan Police during a search of a property as part of a fraud investigation.

In riffing on this form with his debut novel London Triptych (Arsenal Pulp, 2013), Jonathan Kemp is playing with fire. Mirroring its namesake, Triptych sweeps across the centuries, tracing the lives of three different men in three historically distinct Londons; men tied to one another by their shared experiences of queer desire and by their participation in libidinal economies of queer touch and feeling that, despite the best efforts of hetereosexual society, refuse to exhaust themselves.

Kemp begins in the mid-1950s with Colin, an advert illustrator-turned-career artist, hopelessly ensnared in mute circuits of self-loathing, anxiety, and shame. Set on the rack by rumors of bathhouse and pub raids and assailed daily by salacious headlines that recount the arrests of suspected homosexuals, Colin retreats into his home studio. Terrified by his own desires and taunted by a youth wasted to propriety, he spends his days alone, fixated on the weathered form of his aging body. However, when a peculiar relationship begins to develop with a stunning young life-drawing model named Gore, Colin’s tightly spun sense of place begins to unravel.

Colin’s chronic guilt, wrought by Kemp in a stately, quietly tumultuous prose, stands stark against the roughshod, working class vernacular spouted by Jack. A sprightly, beautiful young man with a resilience of spirit matched only by his indulgence in profanity, Jack appears by Kemp’s hand in 1894, when a charge of “gross indecency” could easily lead a man to the gallows. In an effort to elude the abusive rule of his alcoholic father, Jack flees his home in Manchester and takes up residence as a rent boy in London, serving some of the city’s most powerful priests, legislators and cultural figures — even, a bit predictably, Oscar Wilde himself.

Completing the trio is David, Jack’s 20th century contemporary. Desperate to escape the hemmed-in monotony of his parents’ quiet morality, David begins at a young age to experiment with sex work, drugs, and the thrill of anonymity. Soon, he has left his suburban home and settled into a life of “whoring” in 1990s London, where time is marked against pills taken, parties attended, and clients turned over. And like the police in Jack’s era and the tabloid press in Colin’s, there is a specter that hangs heavy over David’s endless sexual encounters, even if it does go unnamed until the book’s closing pages: the trailing edge of the AIDS crisis.

Kemp cuts rapidly between the three protagonists, rarely offering more than a short monologue or vignette, each one narrated entirely in the first person. Colin, for example, recounts in methodical, sometimes ponderous detail, the hesitant unfolding of his relationship with Gore in the style of an extended diary entry. He speaks as if to no one, compounding the sting of his isolation. David’s tale, similarly, is rather speedily set up as a letter to an ex-lover, written from a jail cell. Yet, like the disease that drifts silently over his anonymous hookups, that lover goes nameless for almost the entire text. In turn, the “you” that David names maps neatly and immediately onto the reader.

This frenetic crosscutting and narrative intimacy enlivens the text, rescuing it from the worst excesses of the “intersecting lives” trope. Where so many similar texts struggle to even keep pace with the maze of relationships that they create, Kemp’s urgent oscillations across space, time, and the body ensure that the prose is energetic. More importantly, by keeping these three lives in such close quarters, Kemp manages to dredge up the compelling thematic resonances between them, connecting them not so much narratively as harmonically, locating those brief moments in which the three frequencies come into accord.

In particular, Kemp’s formal choices draw attention the historical persistence of those institutions and practices that would exterminate queer lives or deem them less than lives. Whether it is the corporeal punishment that Jack experiences at the hands of the police, the internalized shame that binds Colin to a life of enforced celibacy, or the endlessly accelerating cycles of sexual commodification and consumption that finally leave David abjected, barely able to trace the contours of his own body, the threats of disappearance, of incarceration, and of erasure haunt all three lives, drawing dreary but meaningful links between them.

Yet this gloom does not dominate. Kemp astutely chooses to explore these threats against the backdrop of dramatic shifts in the organization of European and global capitalism, lending to the text a caustic critical edge, turned squarely against to the broader historical and material forces that work to suppress queer lives.

Jack, for instance, enters sex work to both escape and provide for a family clearly exploited and dispossessed by England’s great march toward industrial modernity. This exploitation is duplicated in the practice of sex work itself, in the casual selling and consumption of his body by the very same politico-economic elites who marginalized him in the first place. It’s fitting, then, that Kemp codes Jack’s turn to sex work as a bombastic Faustian bargain, wedding the commodified exploitation of his sexuality to that literary figure so classically identified with the brutal excesses and broken promises of capitalist modernity.

In a different moment, Colin grapples with the demands of a post-war and increasingly “post-industrial” economy that valorized the swift organization of men and women into (re)productive family units, wherein the former was to take suitably-paying professional work while the latter attended to the social economy of the home. It is this deeply gendered division of labour and its many social iterations that both undergird and overwrite Colin’s life of stifled desire.

Finally, Kemp delivers us David, more a child of Thatcher than his own flesh and blood parents — the natural product of a world intentionally dismantled and remade in the image of the commodity by the architects of English neoliberalism. He is constantly awash in dizzying erotic economies, at times held together by little more than the clothes on his back and the powder he puts up his nose.

Often, he rehearses his own feelings of non-identity, of nowhereness, of being utterly inscrutable except in those moments where money is changing hands. Is there any more perfect articulation of Thatcher’s non-society? A subject unmoored from the state, from traditional family ties, and even from the conventional resources of selfhood, but finally re-anchored — ontologically, symbolically, biologically, erotically — in the commodity process and the accumulation of individual surplus.

Grim as it may seem, though, this stinging critique also carries with it a more hopeful valence. For if the suppression of queer desire persists across centuries, so must queer desire itself. Though faced variably with police brutality, with discipline and shame, and with the corrosive force of the commodity, queer ways of feeling and the bodies that they inhabit, survive. Against all odds, Kemp’s narration suggests that the black-market exchange of queer desire eludes and transgresses in all centuries, in any body that knows where to look.

But while Triptych deftly navigates these intriguing conceptual terrains by virtue of Kemp’s formal choices, it also struggles with some very practical narrative missteps. At just under 270 pages, this is a slim text. Once these pages are divided into three distinct eras and played out by three distinct leads, each supported by a swath of extras and background figures, there is little space left for delay.

Yet unfortunately, much of the book’s first half reads as little more than exposition; well-written exposition, but exposition all the same. As a result, the brief chapters and rapid shifts in voice end up feeling like an overlong series of character sketches that offer little in the way of narrative development. What interpersonal plot there is to be had is unfortunately truncated and at times seems incomplete, tacked on, and at odds with the book’s finely detailed prose.

This impression is exacerbated by Kemp’s curious decision to include an explanatory afterword, which heavy-handedly lays out how and why certain characters were developed, how their interactions were strategized, and importantly, how the decision to finally cross their stories had come rather late in the writing process. Instead of adding dimension to Triptych’s closing pages, though, these stage directions mostly confirmed that its long-delayed developments had been, in some measure, afterthoughts, apparently disconnected from the kind of anticipatory narrative structure that might have given them the emotional gravity they deserved.

Even the force of the book’s central conceit, the triptych, suffers as a result. After all, as an art form, the triptych draws its power from its unique ability to preserve the conceptual specificity of each canvas, even while relating them in such a way that the content of each is elevated by the articulation of some more or less coherent argument. The structural imbalance in Kemp’s narrative throws this scheme off-kilter. When all is said and done, it feels that perhaps too much time is devoted to what is within the frame, and too little to the relations that meaningfully exceed it.

These troubles aside, though, London Triptych remains a promising and engaging debut. In its gamble with an increasingly reviled genre, it comes up a qualified success. Kemp’s commitment to formal experimentation, coupled with his often elegant voice, offers the reader a tantalizing and nuanced text that, in its best moments, points toward a world beyond itself, a world given texture by the complicated knots that take shape when our bodies intersect the movement of history and the circulation of desire.

Image: cover detail from the Myriad Editions UK version of London Triptych.

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).

From The Nation: In this video, exclusive to TheNation.com, Alvin describes his experience of the stop, and working NYPD officers come forward to explain the damage stop-and-frisk has done to their profession and their relationship to the communities they serve.

The emphasis on racking up stops has also hindered what many officers consider to be the real work they should be doing on the streets. The video sheds unprecedented light on a practice, cheered on by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, that has put the city’s young people of color in the department’s crosshairs.

From Women Make Movies: Following 26-year-old Madison during a crucial three years of her transition from male to female, GIRL INSIDE is a beautiful film that tracks her emotional, intellectual and spiritual journey of self-discovery that is as important as — if not more than — the physical journey of hormones and surgery.

Sharing the spotlight is Vivien, Madison’s glamorous 80-year-old grandmother, who has taken on the job of advising her on all things feminine. While Vivien’s attempts to school Madison in old-fashioned codes of fashion and behavior are often hilarious, the juxtaposition of two vastly different experiences of womanhood, from very different generations, raises profound issues about the nature of gender, femininity and sexuality.

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!

Occasionally films come out in the mainstream that give a glimpse of hope that perhaps the world of film is changing and becoming more adept at telling stories that don’t rely on sexist stereotypes – last summer the Hunger Games gave a promise of a heroine who could fend for herself, or Brave, which managed to not only establish that women can be self sufficient, but also built on a storyline of mother-daughter relationships and avoiding romance all together (bravo!) . But there’s more than a long way to go, particularly if you submit most films to the Bechdel test.

The test asks three questions: 1) are there at least two women in the story? 2) Do they talk to one another?, and 3) If they do talk to eachother, is it about something besides a man?

The Athena Film Festival is on this weekend, providing us the opportunity to see the diversity of women’s leadership both in real life and in the fictional world. Now in its third year, it began on Feb 7, and continues through tomorrow, Feb 10. So if you happen to be in New York City, you’ve just figured out your plans for this evening.

But, for those of us who aren’t in New York, trailers will have to do until we can get our girl-power paws on these puppies. For the full list, visit the Athena Film Festival page, but below I’ve pulled out the most political of the bunch for some Saturday trailer-surfing.

Future Weather
A teenaged girl becomes obsessed with ecological disaster, forcing her to rethink her future. Inspired by a New Yorker article on global warming.

Hanna Arendt
Based on a true story
Hannah Arendt is a portrait of the genius that shook the world with her discovery of “the banality of evil.” After she attends the Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, Arendt dares to write about the Holocaust in terms no one has ever heard before. Her work instantly provokes a furious scandal, and Arendt stands strong as she is attacked by friends and foes alike. But as the German-Jewish émigré also struggles to suppress her own painful associations with the past, the film exposes her beguiling blend of arrogance and vulnerability — revealing a soul defined and derailed by exile.

The Invisible War
Documentary
The Invisible War is a groundbreaking investigative documentary about one of America’s most shameful and best kept secrets: the epidemic of rape within the U.S. Military.

La Rafle
A story of the infamous Val’ d’Hiv roundup in 1942 when French police carried out an etensive raid on Jews in greater Paris, resultin gin the arrest of more than 13,000 people, including 4,000 children. Told from the prespectie of the children and the nurse who cared for them.

Putin’s Kiss
Contemporary life in Russia is shown through teh story of Masha, a 19-year-old girl who is a member of Nashi, a political youth organization connected with the Kremlin. Masha begins to question her involvement after a journalist friend of hers is attacked.

Women Aren’t Funny
Comedienne Bonnie McFarlane sets out to find out once and for all if women are funny and report her unbiased findings.

Wonder Women! The untold story of American Superheroines
Tracing the fascinating evolution and legacy of Wonder Woman and superheroines in film from the birth of the comic book superheroine in the 1940s to today, Wonder Women! examines how popular representations of women reflect society’s anxieties about womens power and liberation.

And as it is with American democracy in practice, large sums of money are at stake — $100,000 in cash prizes will go to “the most fresh and creative submissions.”

Looking@Democracy is a national competition offering a total of $100,000 in prize money for short, provocative media submissions designed to spark a national conversation about why government is important to our lives, or how individuals and communities can come together to strengthen American democracy. Launching today, February 4, 2013, the challenge will award $25,000 for First Place along with significant prizes for 2nd and 3rd place as well as categories and awards for People’s Choice and Emerging Artists.

Examples of welcome submissions would be addressing a critical topic that is absent from the national debate, looking at data and exploring the stories behind them, or highlighting an aspect about democracy taking place on a local level. By making submissions in any digital format welcome, the challenge hopes to engage with independent media makers, investigative reporters, students, graphic designers and artists – anyone with creative ideas to help engage Americans and shift the political discussion in a fresh and engaging way.

Via the MacArthur Foundation.

The Manifesto for a Vibrant, Strong, and Independent NSCAD, which can be read in its entirety on a student-run website, outlines demands that NSCAD commit to being accessible, affordable, and dedicated to “critical thought and quality education in the production of art and culture.”

NSCAD is roughly $20 million in debt, $9 million of which is still owed from the construction of a new campus on Halifax’s waterfront. The government, meanwhile, is offering no solutions other than pressure to further cut cost and increase fees to students.

Meanwhile on the west coast, Vancouver’s Emily Carr University will benefit from $113 million in provincial funding to construct a new campus.

Perhaps Emily Carr can share their good fortune and offer their older sibling a hand, lest they soon find themselves home to hundreds of art school refugees.

Image: Several NSCAD Board of Governors leave the boardroom as students read the NSCAD Manifesto. (Handout photo.)

“History isn’t the lies of the victors … I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.” – The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

On the last Sunday in the year, the Parisian bourgeoisie were out in force. The queue for the Impressionism and Fashion exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay moved in sudden leaps but still took over an hour to get to the security checks. For the Dali exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, those with pre-booked tickets queued for an hour, those without considerably longer

Meanwhile, across the Alma Bridge from the Eiffel Tower, all was quiet outside the Palais de Tokyo and the Musee de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Inside, the galleries hummed with an apprehensive curiosity as the patrons moved in physical comfort around exhibits that were anything but comfortable, couched as they were in the context of the annees noires of the Nazi occupation. L’Art en Guerre, France 1938 to 1947 was an opportunity for Parisians to confront a difficult past that lay within the memory of many of them.

In the pamphlet accompanying the exhibition the curators make a number of bold claims, few of which are sustainable in the light of recent, revisionist histories on political and cultural events in France in the inter-war period and during the German occupation from 1940 to 1944. Whilst the claim that this is the first exhibition to explore in detail the artistic achievements of the occupation is doubtless accurate, it is not true that the period has “hitherto remained in the shadows of history”; that the artistic community in France waged “war on the war” through their art and in the face of “total violence inflicted on the innocent”; nor that the artists were “more politicized than their average contemporaries”.

Douanier Rousseau, La Guerre, 1893-1894 (© RMN - Musée d'Orsay)

The Yale historian, Frederik Spotts, brought the period out of the shadows with his 2009 work The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Occupation. Nazi bureaucrats pursued a generally benevolent and lenient approach towards the artistic community, viewing the encouragement of a vibrant cultural environment as a palliative to occupation, and, anyway, cultural freedom would merely testify to French degeneracy.

In Picasso’s view “to create is to resist” and on that basis he was most energetic in his pursuit of the artists’ “war on the war”, though just how 1500 mainly still lifes and portraits of his mistresses contributed to the war effort is not easy to quantify. Artists, too, were rarely particularly politicised. Anouilh avoided political comment whilst most adopted “le système D” and focussed on getting-by. After all, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, “il fallait bien vivre”, one had to survive.

Many were far from being innocents. Sartre sought out Nazi approval for his plays. His defence that “a subtle poison corroded even our best intentions” is not persuasive. Derain, Vlaminck and van Dongen accepted invitations to visit Weimar on a propaganda tour; Cocteau attended German embassy parties and Matisse and Braque, “the artful dodgers” (Spotts) navigated an ambiguous path through the period, as did a youthful Francois Mitterand who, though not an artist, represented that dominant part of the French professional and intellectual class whose approach to the Nazi occupation made collaboration acceptable, even the norm.

This sense of wholesale class betrayal emerges clearly in Suite Francaise, the novel written by Irene Nemirovsky, a “stateless person of Jewish descent” living in Paris at the start of the occupation. The novel was completed in 1941, just a year before her death at Auschwitz. It is full of the rampaging selfishness of the Parisian establishment whose sole response to what was euphemistically referred to as the armistice, was relief that they could now return to the normality of their lives in Paris.

Joseph Steib, Le Conquérant, 1942 (© Joseph Steib)

This sentiment was echoed in an article in the Times newspaper, in June 1940, which reported apparent French resignation, even indifference, to the six week military collapse and the subsequent abject surrender. Little seemed to have changed, in terms of allied attitudes to the French by the time of the invasion of Normandy in 1944. It was felt necessary to issue a pamphlet to D-Day troops warning against “a fairly widespread belief that the French are a gay, frivolous people with no morals and few convictions” (quoted in D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, by Antony Beevor).

The appearance of Marcel Ophuls’ documentary The Sorrow and the Pity in 1969, though not shown on French TV until 1981, provided convincing evidence of the extent of French compliance, exposing France’s collective secret that Vichy had embraced the Nazis with vigour and exploding the myth of a member of the Maquis in every barn. Ophuls’ film made clear how France might be seen to have aided the Nazi war effort. Vichy, backed by organisations such as Action Francaise, that had threatened class warfare in the thirties, made occupation easy, provided willing backing for Nazi ant-semitic policies (with the zealous deportation of 75,000 Jews), a labour force for the production of war materials and 7,000 troops to fight in the uniform of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front.

Ophuls’ damning documentary included an interview with Anthony Eden, Britain’s Foreign Secretary during the war. ”One who has not suffered the horrors of an occupation has no right to judge a nation that has”, Eden said. In similar vein, Beevor quotes Jock Colville, Churchill’s Private Secretary, on witnessing in Bayeux the “ugly carnival” of the epuration sauvage, in which, throughout France, 14,000 alleged collaborators, one third of whom were women, were killed: “While disgusted at this cruelty, I reflected that we British had known no invasion or occupation for some 900 years, so we were not the best judges”.

Indeed, as a swathe of counterfactual, historical novels have suggested, there was a ready-made cast of characters more than happy to play the roles of Anglo-Saxon equivalents to Petain, Laval and the rest; Edward and Mrs Simpson, Halifax and Lloyd George, the press barons, Rothermere and Beaverbrook, the Cliveden set and cultural giants like Shaw and Eliot. The latest offering in the genre, CJ Sansom’s Dominion, makes for uncomfortable reading in its suggestion that the British might well have been no less susceptible to Hitler’s psychotic leadership and Nazi policies of racism. From Isherwood, in Goodbye to Berlin, via I am a Camera and Cabaret, we may well have become only too familiar with the refrain “Suppose you are unafraid and wise … What would you do?”

Pablo Picasso, Nature morte à la tête de mort, poireaux pot devant la fenêtre, 1945 (© Succession Picasso 2012)

However, this rather misses the point. There remains in France an unwillingness fully to accept the truth about the past. Not everyone was either in the Maquis or the Milice (Vichy secret police) but the former is celebrated to a much greater extent than the latter is condemned. Neither the egocentric patriot De Gaulle, whose history of the French army contains no reference to the Battle of Waterloo, nor the trimmer Mitterand, decorated by both the Vichy Regime and the resistance, was up to the task of acknowledging the extent of French ambiguities and criminal failings. More worrying still is the fact that Nicholas Sarkozy, when President of France, stated in 2008, “The true France was not at Vichy and never collaborated”. Whatever his qualities as a politician he is certainly no historian and the exhibition L’Art en Guerre is hardly a sufficient corrective.

L’Art en Guerre is, on the other hand, an effective survey of the creative output of the period, set convincingly in the wider context of the occupation. There is much for the student of art history or political history to learn from the exhibits and much to chill those whose relationship with the period is more personal. It has much to say, too, at least by implication, about Franco-German relations and the importance of the European Union for peace in Europe in the Twenty-first Century.

The exhibition is museological in content and organisation, the artefacts on show representing an anthropological rather than a high art definition of culture, whilst the photographic record cover the period comprehensively, from the Nazis jackbooting down the Champs Elysees to the photos of Lee Miller, following American troops through France after D-Day. Rooms devoted to the French Camps, in which 600,000 “undesirables” and “enemy forces” were interned, display unique, irreplaceable works, often the last creative acts of often unknown prisoners, soon to be deported to the death camps.

One surprising aspect of the paintings on show is the large number of leading artists represented, including Braque, Delauney, Motherwell, Matisse, Dubuffet, Rouault, Bonnard, Derain, Picasso, Giacometti, though rarely does the art reflect any kind of political message and is sometimes the product of artists whose association with France and the occupation is at best fleetingly tenuous. Giacometti’s tiny signature figures were made in 1942 before he left on a visit to his home in Geneva. He did nor return to Paris until after the liberation. Picasso is a dominating figure throughout the exhibition and Guernica is referenced, though his anti-war masterpiece was painted in 1937, left France in 1938, went on to New York via the Whitechapel Gallery in London’s East End, and never returned.

L’art en guerre can be seen at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris until February 17, 2013.

While his work is often shown along with other surrealist artists gaining notoriety in the west coast pop-surrealism art scene, they carry a completely different message. His peers often site old fashioned cartoons as their inspiration, where Josh has been moved by ecological plights. Ever since first seeing his work in an issue of Hi-Fructose Magazine, I’ve been itching for an excuse to interview him. Luckily for us, this year he has some new shows coming up, and a book signing in February. I managed to catch him by email for an interview.

Amanda: For people who are unfamiliar with your work, how would you describe it? What’s the medium and how large do you usually work?

Josh: The term eco surrealism seems to be the most suitable term to describe my work and imagery.

At first glance, they might appear to be some diagram taken from a science textbook. In most cases, the imagery consists of an animal or urban scene, taking place on a cross-section of earth that often include urban elements such as street signs and mailboxes. What sets this imagery apart from the illustrations you might find in a science textbook are the peculiar arrangement and their unnatural behavior.

The intention is to create a discord between the factual, objective, scientific vision, and insert fantastic and surreal elements. Much of the work does comment on environmental issues while others play on the imaginary, evoking personifications of mood and temperament.

Some of the more powerful pieces have come from dreams, and sudden inspiration. The majority of my paintings are 30”x40” and 18”x24’. I paint on birch panels, and use Golden acrylic paint.

You’ve said in previous interviews that the intent of your paintings is to “ask questions about the implications of urban sprawl and its impact on the environment”, which I think is readily apparent in your works. Do you remember the triggering event that got you working in that direction?

Two distinct memories come to my mind. The first being a paper mill that was polluting Puget Sound waters.

That first one was in the late 1970’s, I was quite young, and I remember walking along the Ruston Way beach in Tacoma, Washington and seeing along the shore, thick frothy foam with many dead fish. Our family joined a group of neighbors who were also concerned about the safety of the water and organized to enforce more regulations on the industrial plants in the area. Over time they achieved success and the Tacoma waterway is now a public attraction.

The experience took me from a feeling of grief and helplessness to one of empowerment, that people when organized could make a difference.

The other memory I have is again one when I was very young. I was flying from Seattle to New York, and remember spending the majority of the flight looking out the window. I imagined the small cities and towns as ant colonies, the roads were lines of ants or even arteries. I had watched a special on Nova about over population and it described what would happen to a community of rats who overpopulated, I won’t go into the details, but the result was quite gruesome. I tried to imagine what the earth would look like in 50-100 years if we just kept growing and consuming as a species. I kept thinking of a virus or the way mold spreads on a piece of decomposing fruit.

Both of these experiences helped lead me to discover and explore dystopian themes in my work.

Was there perhaps a first painting that inspired the style you are currently best known for?

The first painting that incorporated the style and dystopic theme was a piece called Pioneer. It was a play on the human species as a large fat blob that was moving across a chunk of earth, spouting random gibberish and factoids — I suppose today it would be tweeting.

Since then I’ve abandoned the humanoid form but embraced the natural elements in this piece. The overall format and composition has remained to the day.

The pieces you paint are reminiscent of still life sculptures, like little moments of chaos captured — was that intentional?

I don’t know if it was intentional, it may just have been out of habit and what I was accustomed to doing. I had spent many years prior to this painting surreal and moody still lifes. They were sort of a combination of Giorgio de Chirico and Vermeer. I tend to use the animals and other elements much as I would if I were composing a still life. I am conscious of composition, dynamic moments, balance, and most of all a sense of observational or contemplative distance.

Why do you paint animals instead of people?

In my world, it is a time when humans have left the scene, perhaps a toxic virus leaked from a research laboratory, maybe they migrated to a more hospitable area, or maybe they have left Earth to find a new planet to colonize. I do incorporate statues and monuments as a stand in for the human form and condition, they are ghosts of humanity.

What are some of the oddest / most interesting reactions you’ve had to your art from viewers?

I have received comments related to a person’s loss of both family member and also pet, how they found the work both sad and also liberating and a source of rejuvenation. The butterflies and birds in my work have special and personal meaning for me, but I am always interested to hear what people’s interpretations of them are.

I often incorporate elements from the photos I take of street signs and other objects. I have some people who do Google earth searches for certain street signs or intersections; they look for perhaps hidden meaning in the specific location I chose.

If people could see your art and walk away with one resolution, what would you hope it would be?

Like a fragment of a dream you remember after waking, I invite the viewer to engage their imagination and fill in the blank.

I use my work the same way people use a mantra, only these are visual. Each painting is for me a meditation on a psychological or metaphysical subject. When I look at them, each has its own collection of ideas and emotive resonance. They are meant to be reflective objects.

Anything else you’d like to add about your views on our possible dystopian future, the environment, and/or how cool animals are?

Animals are definitely cool; I am in the thick of developing some new ideas but am using some familiar animals to move these ideas forward.

I have both fear and sadness for the future and I also have optimism. The sadness is the immense turmoil of the human condition and the tragedy the human family is doing and has done to itself for ages. I don’t see an end to that.

In terms of our war on nature, today I saw a video of a dolphin that had been both injured and trapped in a polluted New York waterway. It was one of the most depressing things I have ever seen. It would be powerful subject matter for a painting, but I don’t have the heart to paint it.

I think things will get quite bad before we establish and exercise a different course of action, one that will help preserve the natural balance. Like a loved one with cancer, there will be loss and pain before the treatment begins to work, if it’s not already too late.

You have a show opening in Oakland on February 3, tell us more about it!

It’s actually not a show but a book signing! Here are some details from Hi-Fructose:

“Join Hi-Fructose, Last Gasp, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as we celebrate the release of the Hi-Fructose 3 Box Set with a signing by Scott Hove, Junko Mizuno, Skinner and cover artist Josh Keyes, who is flying in from Portland for the signing! Fortuitously scheduled on February 5th at 5:30 the First Tuesday of February — free day at the YBCA. Cap off a day at the museum with drinks, music, and a stunning new art book signed by Hi-Fructose featured new contemporary artists. With a DJ set by Swiftumz. This limited edition collection includes items not available anywhere else.”

I do have a show in Fall 2013, The Far Side of the World: New Paintings and Drawings.

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” -Walter Benjamin

Kathryn Bigelow’s film Zero Dark Thirty was met with both large audiences and waves of criticism for how the film depicted, and seemingly endorsed, the use of torture. While it’s not surprising that a film about the War on Terror and the assassination of Osama Bin Laden has provoked controversy, what is rather troubling is that the majority of critics have chosen to focus their critique on the film’s questionable suggestion that information obtained through torture lead to finding Bin Laden, precluding any substantial ethical debate about the practice of torture itself.

The ideological force of the film takes hold in the way that it frames the debates surrounding torture within the language of efficacy and utility. When critics come to make ethical claims that solely rely on the values of efficacy and utility, or on how well specific means produce desired ends, they’ve already ceded great amounts of discursive territory and failed to question torture in ways beyond whether it is “effective” or “useful”. In this modality of critique, efficacy comes to be the dominant ethical register and largely determines the positions one can assume in the spaces of ethical contestation.

Efficacy becomes deeply ideological in this sense, in establishing a singular frame for thinking about torture and in obfuscating the plurality of ways a debate about torture could potentially take place. The questions of efficacy and utility always already contain assumed values and ideal outcomes, and suppress more fundamental formations of critique. This approach greatly impoverishes our ability to think about whether these practices are ethical in necessarily more complex and nuanced ways, and fixes their presence as a normative practice in our political landscape.

Since the U.S.’ War on Terror began a little over a decade ago, torture has transited from being politically unthinkable to being the modus operandi. It is no longer a question of if we should torture, but rather under what circumstances and with what techniques. This is illustrative of a significant historical shift in that way we think about what constitutes the ethical treatment of human bodies that has largely escaped analysis, and is representative of how the ethical frameworks produced by the War of Terror have thoroughly permeated our ways of thinking.

September 11th, 2001 marked the beginning of a rapid historical process of ethical and political decoding in which our collective worldviews cascaded into cycles of distortion and rearticulation. The radical expansion of the state’s power to indefinitely detain, torture and assassinate individuals under Bush’s presidency was shocking at the time for its unprecedented disregard of international human rights and its willingness to bypass constitutional protections. This dramatic movement operated to essentially shift the territories of ethical and legal thought and legibility.

These measures, that at the time appeared radical and only justifiable within the logic of a state of exception, have in many ways restratified into a new stable political reality during Obama’s presidency. Obama’s policies have reterritorialized and recoded these ethical and legal shifts into a new normative political present through the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), renewal of the Patriot Act, continued operation of the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities, as well as other measures.

In this process, we’ve eclipsed the questions of whether the practices of torture, targeted assassinations, and indefinite detention should be an accepted part of our political life, and instead are left with the inadequate questions of efficacy and utility which already assume these practices’ ongoing place in history.

The arguments in favor of the increasing use of drone strikes often rely on similar logics of efficacy and utility, claiming that the bombings are more precise, put fewer U.S. pilots at risk, and cost taxpayers less, while failing to question whether the strikes should be happening in the first place. In these discursive shifts, we can no longer interrogate with “why”, but instead are left circumscribed to the details of “how”.

The frames of efficacy and utility are often helpful in ethical discussions because they reveal the way certain decisions have the capacity to generate different kinds of material consequences. In combination with other approaches, utilitarian modes of analysis are capable of helping us make more ethical choices in our political lives. The problem arises when the lens of efficacy supersedes all others, as they have done in the conversations about torture in Zero Dark Thirty. Here, the questions of calculability and numerability come to displace broader historical and social approaches of constructing ethical frameworks that are not legible in the registers of efficacy or utility.

Ethical arguments in support of torture most often fall back upon fantasies of “ticking time bomb” scenarios, in which torture becomes the necessary evil required to spare innocent lives from impending terroristic violence. The problem with the frames of thought engendered by “ticking time bomb” style justifications is that when one looks to legitimize their actions on the basis of speculative dystopian (or utopian) outcomes, one finds that every means is permissible in response to these unverifiable ends.

The “ticking time bomb” framework is similarly ideological to the critiques of the representation of torture in Zero Dark Thirty in that it takes one of many potentialities and asserts it as an ongoing certainty, curtailing our ability to think outside of questions of utility. Ideology manifests precisely when we mistake something that is political for something that is natural, or posit something that we are capable of changing as something that is immutable.

As philosopher Brian Massumi has aptly made clear, a politics of potentiality that assumes a discrete “knowability” or “objective measurability” always function to produce the very conditions it wishes to repress, and as a result always confirms its own hypotheses, thus retroactively justifying whatever measures were taken.

In this way, torture can be historicized as preventing any given number of unknown atrocities, appealing to the Rumsfeldian “unknown unknowns” that constantly threaten but are never present. In this instance, since the threat is always already assumed to be present, every response is already figured as maximally efficient: either the act of torture prevented the terroristic violence from occurring, or it failed to stop the terrorist act and we simply needed more torture to prevent it. In both scenarios, torture was justified, efficient and useful.

The “ticking time bomb” imaginary and Zero Dark Thirty produce bodies that are simultaneously one-dimensional (without subjectivity or history) and in need of torture. In the presence of such terrifying and omnipotent bodies that are perpetually setting our existential destruction in motion, torture emerges as the only sensible response. Being situated in this sensibility, the singular question that remains is how we are to respond, producing the context in which only torture is legible as ethical.

Because the imagined terrorist both holds the promise of our destruction and the capacity to save us, it ceases to be a body and instead becomes a container of utility, an object of fantasy that exists solely for the enactment of various strategies of violence. This is how we ideologically arrive at being preoccupied with the efficacy of torture techniques, instead of about the complex ethical dimensions of torture itself.

In rearticulating a body with agency and subjectivity as simply a container for utilitarian decision-making, we evade all of the necessary ethical questions demanded of us. The fact of being alive in a finite world, and sharing that world with other ineradicably different living beings, requires that we recognize others in all of their own distinct histories, complexities and embodiments. An ideology of efficacy abstracts the lives and bodies of others into simply being the variables of assorted calculations, and allows us to enact violences sprouted from these ideological fantasies onto these abstracted but still material bodies.

The “ticking time bomb” frame and Zero Dark Thirty also obfuscate the way in which torture is now a pervasive and common practice, and is by no means a “last resort” tactic used only in the most extreme of cases. As Ramzi Kassem’s writing on Zero Dark Thirty has made clear, the film’s excusatory framing of torture as an abhorrent, but ultimately necessary tactic that was required in the search for Bin Laden masks the way in which the practice of torture continues in many U.S.-run prisons around the world in the contemporary moment.

In the end, whether or not torture is an effective means of gathering intelligence doesn’t meaningfully enrich our critical capacities nor quell the ethical objections one could levy against the practice of torture. Even if information gleaned from torture had definitively led to the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, this would not constitute an ethical justification for torture or assassination. While something that resembles “efficacy” must of course be a part of our ethical considerations, it must not come to foreclose other equally necessary approaches to our complex and nuanced political present.

In acknowledging the deeply ideological position that “utility” and “efficacy” have come to occupy in our ways of thinking and acting in the world, there is an opportunity to radically defamiliarize our ethical approaches and make the practice of torture the object of revitalized critique. Just because the practice of torture has become normative and largely inflected by the ideology of efficacy, this does not mean that we cannot act to uproot these assumptions and galvanize our cultural and political movements to rearticulate meaning and critique in relation to these practices.

The struggle against torture must undoubtedly start in challenging the framing of ethics as singularly being a question of efficacy or utility, and in asserting the constellations of ethical frames that are necessary in the imagining of and the fight for a more ethical world.

“It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.” –Walter Benjamin

Ian Alan Paul is an artist and theorist living in the Bay Area of California. Ian’s current research focuses on queer-feminist critiques of human rights discourses. He received his MFA and MA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2011 and is in the process of completing his PhD in UC Santa Cruz’s Film and Digital Media Studies program. He can be found on twitter at @ianalanpaul and his work is online at www.ianalanpaul.com.

The South American country has announced that it planned to give workers a 50 real ($25) monthly stipend to be used on cultural expenses. Recipients could use the funds to visit a museum, buy a book or attend a play, for example.

“In all developed countries, culture plays a key role in the economy,” Culture Minister Marta Suplicy explained in a television interview. “Now we are creating food for the soul; Why would the poor not be able to access culture?”

Anyone who earns up to five times the minimum wage is eligible to receive the stipend, which, according to Suplicy, could result in an additional $3.5 billion being spend in the cultural sector.

Via Art Daily.

You can check out all eight tweaked titles at War On Idiocy, who have also posted this fine little cultural jamming gem.

Via Kottke.

In the United Kingdom, music retailer HMV is on life support. Although HMV Canada’s parent company is mounting a rescue attempt, the brand responsible for 35% of the CD market in Britain may soon collapse, in large part due to the shift towards purchasing music online. While many consumers would rather buy their music from Apple or Amazon, software freedom activist Richard Stallman argues that there are serious repercussions to buying music online instead of in record stores.

Danny Kelly says good riddance to HMV because it was sickly for some years before it died. I suggest however that the fact it took time to die does not make its loss (and that of its high street competitors) any less regrettable. What replaced them is a disaster for freedom.

I miss stores like HMV because I could go there with cash, buy records (usually CDs), and take them home as mine. These large stores had a wide range of music, and I could listen to records in-store (mostly music I had never heard of) to find what I liked. Once I had bought the records, I was free to give or lend them to friends. Under copyright law, I could even copy them, to audio tapes in the old days, and give those to my friends. All this without the state’s knowing anything about it.

You can’t buy music that way on the internet. You are forced to identify yourself to the seller (and to Big Brother, watching over his shoulder) — and if it’s not a CD, you have to sign a restrictive contract which denies you the rights we all enjoyed. I say “you” because I won’t go there.

For those who love both music and freedom, today’s form of internet sales is out of the question, which leaves ever fewer opportunities for us to buy music. Aside from disks sold by musicians, and a few surviving large record stores such as Amoeba in San Francisco, the only way a self-respecting person should get copies of music is through digital sharing.

The superficial convenience of internet music sales is the bait; in the UK, the Digital Economy Act is the jaws. And HMV was the safe and ethical road to music, which a society focused on the short term has not kept open.

Copyright 2013 Richard Stallman. Released under Creative Commons Attribution Nonderivatives 3.0. Photo by Todd Lappin.

From their website:

The third exhibition in a trilogy focusing on socially conscious posters, Graphic Advocacy features 120 works from 32 countries including Bolivia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Israel, Kuwait, Russia, and Singapore. As a medium for social change, posters record our struggles for peace, social justice, environmental defense, and liberation from oppression.

From the confrontational and political, to the promotional, persuasive and educational, the poster in all its forms has persisted as a vehicle for the public dissemination of ideas, information, and opinion. Ready access to broadband and mobile communications and to digital production technologies has expanded the poster’s role beyond the printed surface, creating a contemporary tool for support and protest that is still a cornerstone of 21st century advocacy.

Here’s a small sample of the works on display. More can be seen at Graphic Art News, while an official website of the exhibition, as well as a printed book, are currently in production.

ABCNT Lioness: Free Political Prisoners

Zhgun: Egor Catcher

Li Haiping: Victory

Lemel Yossi: Fukushima, Mon Amour

Antonio Castro: Migrant Workers

Michelle Brook: Bleed Out, Katrina

Rich Black: Direct Action

Top image: Gazdov Ivan: Silhouette.

A Russian court has turned down an appeal by jailed Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina, who has requested to serve the remainder of her prison sentence in the future when her 5-year-old son turns 14. She had argued that their separation has damaging his development.

Amnesty International criticized the ruling. “We are clearly deeply disappointed with the decision because basically it’s a further travesty of justice in this case,” Natalia Prilutskaya, a campaigner for Amnesty campaigner Natalia Prilutskaya told Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. “We think that the three girls shouldn’t have been arrested, first of all, and they shouldn’t have been prosecuted in a criminal procedure.”

Via RFL/RL.