Documenting Resistance: Big Noise Films
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DOCUMENTING RESISTANCE
By Jacob Eichert
jacobeichert@yahoo.com
Rick Rowley and Big Noise Films finished up a hectic North American tour late last year, promoting films about global resistance.
The New York-based independent media collective has produced the award winning films Zapatista (on the indigenous uprising in Chiapas) and This Is What Democracy Looks Like (on the 1999 WTO protest in Seattle). Their most recent film, The Fourth World War, co-directed by Rowley, weaves footage from the frontlines of human struggles against economic oppression in Argentina, South Africa, Palestine, Korea, New York, and Mexico. The film includes narration by Michael Franti as well as music by Ozomatli and Manu Chao.
Clamor spoke with Rowley last year about Big Noise films and the role of independent media in fostering more effective forms of resistance through inter-movement awareness, connection and cooperation.
Clamor: In your most recent film The Fourth World War an activist says, “We’re going to take our nation back.” My question to you is, did we ever have it?
Rick Rowley: Actually that’s a quote from a Mohawk organizer in Quebec City. By nation he meant the Mohawk Nation, not the United States. It is a problematic concept. The politics of all these movements are not completely consistent and coherent. We’re dealing with movements that come from all kinds of different imaginable political moments. One of the exciting things is that they’re anachronistic. There are movements that are nationalist, movements that are following a kind of twenties style of populist labor organizing, and movements that grew out of the experience of the Zapatistas after 1994. Any notion of collectivity or collective identity is complicated as an organizing principle. But that complication is part of our strength.
C: At the beginning of the movie the narrator asks when WW4 began. The movie alludes to possible answers but doesn’t make a direct conclusion. What’s your answer?
RR: The concept of WW4 for us grew out of the Zapatistas. They said the Fourth World War was the war that came after the Cold War. The Cold War was the Third World War. Some people would disagree but only because they think Asia, Africa and Latin America are not places worth counting. More people died in the Cold War than the Second War World. WW3 is a war that was articulated through the logic of the states. The Fourth World War is different because it is fought through thousands of civil wars. It is not fought along a single frontline or frontier but through a multiplication of internal boundaries and divisions.
An important thing to say is that beginnings and endings are always provisional. It’s not enough to name them and locate them, they have to be fought for. There are many different moments that can be chosen. Each choice is part of a different kind of politics. If you ask someone when the Vietnam War began their choice would be part of their politics. The film bends over backwards to say that there is not one story about struggle in this moment, but there are a whole bunch of different stories. It’s not enough to listen to one voice but we need to hear all these voices together. The film really is a collection of interlocking stories about struggle and conflict in this moment. Each has a different kind of starting point and different trajectory, all of which need to be heard and listened to together to provide an intuition for possible ways forward.
C: You have been hesitant to categorize The Fourth World War as a documentary because of its explicit agenda. Some would call it propaganda. Do you feel propaganda can only be labeled as such when the agenda is hidden?
RR: I think it’s definitely much less coercive to have a film that is clear about where it is standing politically. But it’s also wrong to say this film has an agenda. The reason it’s difficult to call it a documentary is because it’s organized around an argument or organized around a single ideology. It’s not a film that is an essay in the way many documentaries are. It is a film that is trying predominately to open a window to a whole bunch of different cultures and locations, which the corporate media portrays as enemies or as spots seen through the cross hairs of the military machine.
C: Do you feel that mainstream media has a hidden agenda? Do you think a journalistic objectivity is even possible?
RR: I think it is shocking in this day and age that we are still talking of objectivity as if it were anything other than a posture chosen by those in power to disempower us. This posture is calculated to professionalize media in such a way that it closes out unprofessional or deprofessionalized voices. Mainstream media is based on isolation and distance. The posture of objectivity is about removing yourself from any kind of humanity or human contact, trying to escape emotion and the possibility for human connection. It’s less interesting, or less correct, to talk about whether the media or individual reporters have a bias for liberal or conservative ideologies than it is to say that all of corporate media is corporate. Look at where it makes its money, the way it actually functions in political and economic culture.
C: What kind of ground is being gained in this war just by these stories being told?
RR: It is important to always remember that films, books, and other kinds of art don’t change the world. People and movements change the world. Our paintings and our films only have a meaning inside of a movement that can use them. Terry Eagleton said something to the effect that they will hang Picasso on the walls of their banks if our movements don’t tear their banks down. That is what the life of our work is. The film succeeds in winning ground against this system only in as much as the movements that it participates in are capable of doing that. Although, films like The Fourth World War play a very important role as a moment of connection between movements that are isolated around the world. Corporate media creates essentially isolating stories about a terrifying and distant world outside. Our media tries to allow people to feel themselves connected to people and cultures around the world. 4WW shows over and over again what it looks like when fear breaks in Argentina, in Korea, and in Palestine with the children of the refugee camps. That is an incredibly important thing beyond what you can argue or try to convince someone of. Seeing fear break, and more importantly feeling it, is ultimately what the film hopes to do. It does things to you that you can’t immediately explain, recognize, or understand. The film hopes to be part of this circulation and replication of experiences of autonomy, of connections to movements that are actually taking control of their lives and the world around them.
C: The movie states that “all of us will stop the war,” and includes inspirational displays of courage by various peoples struggling around the world. But the protests against the war in Iraq were unsuccessful in the sense that they didn’t bring about a policy change. What do we have on our side that would suggest “victory?”
RR: That moment in the film (February 15th), where the largest demonstration in history fails to stop the US government from going to war, suggests the failure of one paradigm of struggle, of one type of tactic. That is the pressure of public opinion on states. Just before that sequence in the film we see the same thing happen in Mexico. That lesson has taken us as a movement decades to learn. It is not enough to seize the state and make the state wither away while the culture and the economy are transformed. The institutions we are fighting against are not so neatly housed within the state. That’s what we learned from South Africa more than anywhere else. A people’s movement seized the state there but then found that nothing changed. That’s a lesson we are trying to show being learned in this country as well. After that point in the film we see a whole bunch of different kinds of continuing struggles. We see that it’s possible to construct freedom and moments of autonomy in the streets. Through this network of autonomous experiences we can build a different kind of life and world. It is very hard to change the world, to go out there and change the entire traditional framework, the military, the government, the UN, and the WTO. Those are huge institutions where it is very hard to find the levers of power. It is a very difficult thing to do, impossible for one person. But you can make a whole new world tomorrow. The Zapatistas proposed to make a whole bunch of new worlds. So that is an example of hope that I see everywhere. In South Africa they say that it wasn’t elections or the military struggle that defeated the Apartheid State, it was thousands of acts of rebellion and resistance. That is what it is going to take.
C: What is the intent behind the production aesthetic, soundtrack and star power of Big Noise Film’s documentaries? At times it resembles the aesthetics of commodity culture. Do you have any thoughts regarding that?
RR: I think that The Fourth World War and the aesthetic in all our films doesn’t look very much like MTV or consumer culture at all. It does only in so far as it is cut fast and it has music behind it. MTV’s aesthetic is about really clean lines and evacuated frames and all that. Our aesthetic is about bringing texture to a video frame. We are adding layers, density, saturation, and texture. They are paring it down to fewer and fewer lines and making it clean. Each film incorporates a whole bunch of different aesthetic styles. We use what might be called a polyvocal style. There are sections of this film that are vÈritÈ. There is no voice over and nothing discursive happening at all. You see and you hear people in the street for a moment. Then there are sections that are filled with poetry and music and struggle. Then there are sections that are cut in the traditional kind of documentary style. Then there are sections that are mixtures of all of those. We’re not orthodox in our approach to any single filmmaking style, we think that each has its use and each touches a different part of our hearing. We use them all to touch every part of a person’s hearing, to reach them in a whole bunch of different levels: on an intellectual level, on an emotional level, and an aesthetic level.
C: Someone who sacrifices their life for what they believe in is usually regarded as a hero or heroine. We all quote Zapata on occasion: “It’s better to die standing than to live a life on your knees.” Do you feel The Fourth World War plays into romantic and puritanical notions of martyrdom, and glorifies violence?
RR: Oscar Romero said that there were three different kinds of violence. The first kind of violence is the violence of poverty and exploitation, the kind of violence that kills children through diarrhea and malnutrition. It kills as many people as any other kind of violence but it is quiet. The second kind of violence is the violence against people who peacefully rise up and ask for the system to be changed, people who rise up against this first kind of violence. The third kind of violence is the only kind of violence that he considered legitimate, which was the revolutionary violence necessary in order to fight for a world in which everyone is allowed to live. It’s about who’s in control of this process of violence, where it is coming from and whom it is directed against.
Visit Big Noise Films for more information about The Fourth World War and other Big Noise films.