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So at the moment I am editing a piece on oil & empire. At the moment there are too many talking heads, and I'm putting together B-roll to lay over interview/lecture footage of Chomsky, Larry Everest and Tariq Ali. I spent a good part of the last couple of days looking through the Prelinger Archives (Prelinger is friends with Pierce Rafferty, the director of The Atomic Cafe, and his collection of ephemeral films--training videos, PSAs, ads, etc. started out as a collaboration with Rafferty, the master of montage/bricolage) and there is some amazing shit there. Search for oil and you get hours of educational cognitive dissonance that blows your mind, especially if you have a hyperdeveloped sense of the surreal, like I do. Enjoy!
Also since my predicament (w/r/t fieldwork & leaving the country logistics) is such that I can't get arrested at the RNC, I will be getting certified to operate equipment at MNN, so that I can help out with the daily one-hour show during the RNC. Although I'm sure I will end up filming anyway, at least some of the time, officially I'm planning on being part of the production team, rather than the video team.
Oh, and my boss took us to see The Corporation tonight. For my fellow NYC-ers, it's playing at the Film Forum and although it could have used some editing, it's a very well-done film, made by the same people who produced Manufacturing Consent. I was pleased with the level of critique it sustained, which managed to be fairly in-depth despite the broad scope. Although usually I get annoyed by framework gimmicks in films, I thought structuing the narrative of The Corporation as a point-by-point clinical "diagnosis" of the entity of "the corporation" as psychopathic according to a DSM-IV criteria was clever in light of the film's focus on the diabolical evil anthropomorphic coup of "the corporation" gaining legal personhood status. I.e., the fact that corporations finagled the protected status of "persons" under the 14th Amendment (in its original incarnation intended to protect the rights of the newly freed slaves, but out of all the 14th Amendment cases brought before Supreme Court between 1890 and 1910, only 19 dealt with African-Americans, and 288 (!) dealt with corporations) via the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and subsequently snagged protections afforded by the 4th and 5th amendment (search & seizure and double jeopardy) is fucked up and, as David Cobb assesses it, unconstitutional. But hey, if they are defined as persons, they also get to be diagnosed as being psychopathic according to such traits as pathological lying, a lack of empathy for others, no sense of remorse or guilt, conning and manipulative behavior. (It is worth noting that psychopathy is not actually a clinical term in DSM-IV, which uses Antisocial Personality Disorder, and the ICD-10 uses the term sociopathy, which I would have used had I been making this film, but psychopathy is a powerful public definition and this is, at the core, a populist film, so cultural imaginary trumps psychiatric diagnostic categories, which are constellation-based in their heuristic anyways). It's interesting to compare it to F9/11, of course. Both are, essentially, aiming at demystification. The Corporation is a different brand of documentary, of course. It's smarter and more concerned with ontogenesis; at the same time it is less visceral and more distanced from its anger. But since the agendas of the two films are at least on some levels complimentary, strategically, if not tactically, it's interesting to think about their respective discursive practices.
Also since my predicament (w/r/t fieldwork & leaving the country logistics) is such that I can't get arrested at the RNC, I will be getting certified to operate equipment at MNN, so that I can help out with the daily one-hour show during the RNC. Although I'm sure I will end up filming anyway, at least some of the time, officially I'm planning on being part of the production team, rather than the video team.
Oh, and my boss took us to see The Corporation tonight. For my fellow NYC-ers, it's playing at the Film Forum and although it could have used some editing, it's a very well-done film, made by the same people who produced Manufacturing Consent. I was pleased with the level of critique it sustained, which managed to be fairly in-depth despite the broad scope. Although usually I get annoyed by framework gimmicks in films, I thought structuing the narrative of The Corporation as a point-by-point clinical "diagnosis" of the entity of "the corporation" as psychopathic according to a DSM-IV criteria was clever in light of the film's focus on the diabolical evil anthropomorphic coup of "the corporation" gaining legal personhood status. I.e., the fact that corporations finagled the protected status of "persons" under the 14th Amendment (in its original incarnation intended to protect the rights of the newly freed slaves, but out of all the 14th Amendment cases brought before Supreme Court between 1890 and 1910, only 19 dealt with African-Americans, and 288 (!) dealt with corporations) via the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and subsequently snagged protections afforded by the 4th and 5th amendment (search & seizure and double jeopardy) is fucked up and, as David Cobb assesses it, unconstitutional. But hey, if they are defined as persons, they also get to be diagnosed as being psychopathic according to such traits as pathological lying, a lack of empathy for others, no sense of remorse or guilt, conning and manipulative behavior. (It is worth noting that psychopathy is not actually a clinical term in DSM-IV, which uses Antisocial Personality Disorder, and the ICD-10 uses the term sociopathy, which I would have used had I been making this film, but psychopathy is a powerful public definition and this is, at the core, a populist film, so cultural imaginary trumps psychiatric diagnostic categories, which are constellation-based in their heuristic anyways). It's interesting to compare it to F9/11, of course. Both are, essentially, aiming at demystification. The Corporation is a different brand of documentary, of course. It's smarter and more concerned with ontogenesis; at the same time it is less visceral and more distanced from its anger. But since the agendas of the two films are at least on some levels complimentary, strategically, if not tactically, it's interesting to think about their respective discursive practices.
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