Everyone I talk to declares that the students have radically changed Chile’s political agenda, because it is now no longer possible to escape the fact that the country continues to be subject to the Constitution introduced under the dictatorship in 1980 (with a few minor amendments since). With presidential elections coming up towards the end of the year – after the fortieth anniversary of the coup – people tell me that all the candidates are talking about the need for reform of the education sector, which is heavily privatised, disadvantages large swathes of the population and imposes huge debts on university students. (Sounds familiar? If you want to see the future of the Coalition government’s policies, look to Chile.) The students themselves, including those who have occupied numerous secondary schools – I went to film in one of them last week – are also intensely aware that undoing privatised education is only a first step. Moreover, they have overwhelming public support. According to the leader of the public service union, whom I interviewed on the street just before the march came by, eighty per cent of the population are behind them. And such is the alienation people feel towards the politicians, there is also talk of huge abstentionism, at least in the primaries later this month when the parties settle on their candidates. There is even a campaign for an electoral strike (I interviewed one of its leaders last week).

When the march had gone past, I followed a tip-off from a friend and went to the Casa Central of the University of Chile, the main administrative building which has been under occupation for nigh on two weeks (where I also filmed last week). We met up, went inside, I was given permission by the students to do a little filming in the patio, then my friend, who is well prepared for these things, brought out his gas mask, and we joked about it.

I’d been warned that the real trouble always happened after the main march was over, so at this point I left by the main entrance. Another demonstration, presumably unauthorised, was going on outside, blocking the Alameda, Santiago’s main thoroughfare. Someone said the students were proposing to march on La Moneda, the presidential palace just a couple of blocks away, but pretty soon the carabineros arrived in force. I picked a position in the reservation in the middle of the avenue to see what transpired and continue filming.

It isn’t clear to me exactly what happened inside. Before I left the building, I saw students donning face masks, which I took to be a piece of burlesque against a new law recently introduced which forbids their use. Outside, I was in time to witness the water cannon and tear gas. I thought I was far enough away, until a whiff of gas reached me. It was slight and not very serious, but nonetheless, a pretty unpleasant experience.

The following morning I was told that the special forces were responding to ‘delito flagrante’ (flagrant offence) with students pelting them with stones and throwing molotov cocktails. I could clearly see the former from where I’d been standing, but have no evidence of the latter. What I didn’t know was that the special forces had entered the building and were wreaking havoc. According to my informant – a video activist – whatever provocation may have been directed against the carabineros was unlikely to be the responsibility of the students running the occupation. He suggested two possibilities. One is that it was easy enough for younger students, from secondary school occupations, to enter the building, and these are often less disciplined when it comes to political action, but they’re also very angry, especially those from poorer families who haven’t shared in Chile’s economic bonanza. The other possibility is that those causing trouble are quite likely to be agents provocateurs, whose infiltration was well known to the student movement.

The video that follows was shot by a student activist inside the building after I left.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can the video of the student movement that I shot back in 2011 (with the help of video activists) <here>. It is in no way out of date.

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. Would you say higher education is a commodity, or not?

Absolutely not; and not just higher education, but education at any and every level. Education is a process of human interaction, whose efficacy depends on a variety of subjective factors. Why did I choose this subject? Does the teacher stimulate my interest — or imagination? Do I enjoy teaching, or has it become a chore? None of these things can be quantified (except by means of unscientific questionnaires), and if they can’t be quantified, any price that is put on them is quite arbitrary.

That’s not to say there isn’t a real economics to be considered. Education requires both an infrastructure and a labour force. In formal terms, both Adam Smith and Karl Marx considered the teacher to be providing a service, not a commodity, although in both cases, their arguments were largely misunderstood.

However, the cost of maintaining a modern education system is not determined by the market, but by political and socio-cultural factors. The decision as to whether to provide free education or to charge for it at any level has economic and social implications and is the result of political policies and ideological positions. It is not a simple matter of left or right wing. I’m writing these notes from Argentina, where free and universal public education was first introduced as long ago as 1884 in the interests of nation building.

2. What is it about higher education that makes it a unique good that is not substitutable across different institutions and providers?

I believe what Friedrich Schiller wrote in his “Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man” remains true. To paraphrase: the artisan (or, in more modern terms, the manufacturer) takes possession of their raw materials and inevitably does violence to them to achieve their ends. The artist does the same, but tries to hide the fact, because otherwise it shows through, and destroys the aesthetic illusion. Schiller believed art is not illusion, but the illusion of illusion — a formula which is even truer with the arrival of photography and film.

The situation of the educator — and the politician — is not at all the same, because here the raw material is not inanimate (or a mechanical representation), but both means and end. In other words, if you do violence to the human being who is the subject of your endeavours, then you act against the human nature of your subject; a fundamental reason why politicians are so widely regarded with enormous suspicion.

This also means the individual character of the educational encounter is of great importance. The adolescent pupil doesn’t usually choose the school they go to, but may opt for one subject rather than another because of the teacher’s reputation or demeanour. At the doctoral level, this may become a predominant factor. In between, the choice of university is often the result of social factors as well as economic considerations.

3. Will higher education become a commodity in the future?

The attack on free universal education began under the sign of neoliberalism before the welfare state was thrown into crisis by the economic crash of 2008. Neoliberalism is entirely instrumental, politically antidemocratic and autarchic in its invasion of every last vestige of spirit and imagination, blindly destructive of the common good and the public commons. This is a recipe for social disaster, in the same way that an economic system that destroys its environment can only end up destroying itself, as people are increasingly recognising.

There seems to be little prospect of reversing these trends in the immediate future, despite the growth of popular protest, because the first people neoliberalism has robbed of imagination are the neoliberals themselves. In other words, the one percent, and the political classes who serve their interests, can see no way out of the economic crisis other than more of the same (which is no solution) and, having lost control of the system, they’re mighty scared and ideologically paralysed as a result. They are nevertheless desperate to hold on to power. The education system is one of the means of doing so, but only on condition that education is increasingly instrumentalized.

The first problem here is that it isn’t possible to apply real controls over the labor process in the lecture room in the same way as a factory production line, or even a telephone call centre, precisely for the reasons I’ve mentioned, so they have to apply formal controls instead, hemming the teacher in by managerial means. This is easier to do at school level by defining the curriculum, but more difficult in higher education, with its traditions of autonomy and the fundamental credo of academic freedom.

Instead, the pseudo-commoditisation of education is undertaken through charging fees, whose level is entirely arbitrary, again for the reasons I’ve already mentioned. The student is entitled to take out a loan to pay these fees, which are supposedly to be recuperated from later earnings, but to make it all seem fair, only when these earnings exceed a certain level. The system is deeply flawed because the real economy cannot absorb such large numbers of graduates, and a significant proportion of these loans will never be repaid. In the UK, an independent report suggests a staggering 85 percent of these loans will never be fully repaid before they’re written off; even the government’s figure of 40 percent is clearly unsustainable.

Here is a photograph of two Guevaras. With the death of Alfredo Guevara, the one on the right, at the age of 87, who was no relation to the Guevara on the left, Cuban cinema has lost its great champion. Alfredo was the founder of the Cuban film institute, the ICAIC, which was set up in 1959 just three months after the overthrow of the dictator Batista by the rebels led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. A kind of Cuban John Grierson, Alfredo similarly had no difficulty in combining cinema and political commitment, but he had the advantage over the Scots pioneer of documentary that his backer was not a senior civil servant in a bourgeois democracy, but the leader of a popular revolution who had been his friend since student days. 

They first became friends when they went together to Colombia in 1948 for an international student conference, and found themselves caught up in the riots, known as the Bogotazo, sparked off by the assassination of the popular presidential candidate Jorge Gaitán, whom they were supposed to be meeting. Describing the scene to me many years later, Guevara compared it to another popular uprising which by chance he also witnessed on a foreign visit: May 1968 in Paris: spontaneous and unorganised. At that time, he told me, Fidel was not a communist, and it was Alfredo himself who first introduced him to the writings of Marx.

Born in 1925 (the year before Fidel), the son of a railway engineer who was one of the founders of the railway workers union, Alfredo belonged to an extraordinary generation of filmmakers whose work he enabled, including Santiago Alvarez (1919-1998), Tomas Gutierrez Alea (1928-1996) and Julio Garcia Espinosa (b.1926). All of them were members during the 1950s of a legendary cultural society, Nuestro Tiempo (Our Times), which was close to the Young Communists to which Alfredo belonged (although, like Alvarez, his political roots were anarcho-syndicalist; later he would call himself a ‘libertarian communist’). While Alea and Espinosa had both taken themselves off to study film at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome—the hotbed of neorealism—Guevara entered the urban underground, narrowly escaping with his life, and fled to Mexico, where he learned the trade of the producer with Manuel Barbachano Ponce, including a stint as an assistant on Buñuel’s Nazarín, whose spirit of anti-clericalism he shared. Barbachano also produced a regular ten-minute film magazine in Cuba on which the group served their apprenticeships, sometimes contributing comic sketches. 

When the rebels seized power on 1st January 1959, it was Che Guevara who almost immediately got them started making films on behalf of the Revolution, by setting up a unit in the fortress of La Cabana that until a fortnight earlier was used to hold political prisoners. This was the core group of the film institute created by the Revolutionary Government’s first decree about cultural matters, which started by taking over the film businesses (including a studio) owned by one of Batista’s henchmen who’d fled the country. Later it would acquire the local distributors, being mainly the subsidiaries of the Hollywood majors, and some cinemas.

The whole history was recounted to me in detail by Alfredo himself when I was researching Cuban cinema in the early 80s, and I owe him a deep debt of gratitude for opening the film institute’s doors to me, and for giving me his own account of the political history which gave birth to it. He was one of a small group around Fidel in the early months of the Revolution, who all had the same understanding and met with him regularly with the aim of steering the Revolution towards socialist aims, which Fidel did not openly declare until the eve of the invasion of the Bay of Pigs by US-sponsored mercenaries in 1961. These discussions also set the agenda for the film institute’s production programme, with the eager participation of the young filmmakers. 

Alfredo Guevara struck me as a man of deep political intelligence, a Marxist intellectual who had a strong commitment to the defence of artistic freedom within the Revolution—though of course his detractors saw him as Fidel Castro’s minion, charged with keeping the filmmakers in line. Yet he persuaded Fidel that cinema should be seen as art, not propaganda, and filmmakers should not be denied aesthetic licence—a position Fidel supported in a speech of 1962 known as the ‘Words to the Intellectuals’, with its famous formula, ‘Within the Revolution, everything, against it, nothing’. As it turned out, this would become subject to constant re-negotiation, but in the case of cinema, the argy-bargy went on within the Institute and not between the Institute and the Party Ideological Committee, which always had much more direct control over broadcasting and the press. (The number of Cuban films which didn’t reach the screens is far fewer than those made by the BBC about the Troubles in Northern Ireland which were stopped or shelved.) 

Guevara applied the same principles of aesthetic pluralism to the Institute’s crucial function as state film distributor, steering a course between the attacks of near-hysterical liberals for refusing to exhibit an independent documentary called P.M., and the old Communist Party guard for exhibiting Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. In 1964, when a certain Blas Roca objected to the latter, Guevara was incensed. ‘To men like you,’ he wrote, ‘the public is made up of babies in need of a wet-nurse who will feed them with ideological pap, highly sterilised, and cooked in accordance with the recipes of socialist realism.’ Audiences should not be denied the right to see the work of aesthetically progressive European film-makers because they supposedly dealt in the portrayal of bourgeois decadence. Or as Fidel would tell Khrushchev, ‘The enemy is imperialism, not abstract painting.’ 

The problem the Institute faced was what to put in place of the 266 Hollywood films out of a total of 484 films exhibited in Cuba in 1959, since the supply was cut off by Washington’s declaration of economic blockade. The answer was of course to diversify, with more films from everywhere else. (When Che Guevara visited Tokyo in 1959 in search of new foreign trade agreements, he inquired on his namesake’s behalf about the possibilities for the ICAIC distributing Japanese films as well as purchasing equipment, and reported back to him in a letter full of fascinating detail for a film historian.) The result was that Cuban filmgoers soon became exposed to a wider variety of world cinema than anywhere else in Latin America at the time, and this, in turn, encouraged the exciting effervescence of Cuban cinema in the 60s, when it quickly started garnering prizes at films festival in every continent, precisely because it wasn’t just a reworking of old models. 

In the early 1970s, which were ideologically difficult times in Cuba, with national cultural policy under the control of ideological conformists, the ICAIC served as a relatively safe haven for social non-conformists like the long-haired cantautor Pablo Milanes, and several gay directors. Alfredo himself was gay, and although he never came out publicly—that wasn’t something you could do in Cuba as a Party member at the time—the fact was not lost on his friends, and he spoke to me openly about the late 60s, and the unfortunate episode of gay repression, when ‘social misfits’ were being sent off for some hard labour in the notorious UMAP camps. There were protests by organisations like the film institute and the writers’ union, UNEAC, but he told me that when he first raised the issue with Fidel, the latter hadn’t known that gays were being rounded up just for being gay. Fidel had the UMAPs disbanded in 1967. Nevertheless, it has to be said that it had to await the late 80s before Cuban cinema included gay characters on screen, and not till Alea’s Fresa y chocolate in 1993 as the lead.

Alfredo Guevara remained a controversial figure, as they say, and in 1983, after an internal crisis—too many resources devoted to a single film, Humberto Solás’s Cecilia, which then misfired —he stood down from the presidency of the film institute to become Cuba’s ambassador to UNESCO. (The history of cinema is full of stories of studio bosses who have fallen as a result of some strategic misjudgement of production. In Britain, they are elevated to the House of Lords.) Eight years later he was brought back when the ICAIC was embroiled in another crisis, this time over a scatological satire which offended the Party faithful (Alicia en el pueblo de maravillas by Daniel Díaz Torres). This was 1991, and with an even bigger crisis engulfing the country with the demise of the Soviet Union, it became an uphill struggle just keeping the film institute afloat. Guevara remained in the post till the end of the decade when he handed over to someone new, but stayed in charge of the International Film Festival, which he had launched back in 1979. 

With fewer people, fewer funds, and reduced production, the ICAIC is no longer quite what it was—yet Cuba now has a thriving independent production sector, making features as well as shorts and documentaries, and the Institute no longer has a monopoly. But the fact that the ICAIC still produces maybe half a dozen features a year, often combining considerable artistry and social relevance to their audience, and that it now forms part of a continuing strong and lively screen culture, all this is testimony to a life’s work well done. 

A report in the Miami Herald says that Alfredo Guevara is to be cremated, and his ashes scattered on the steps that lead up to the University of Havana, a protest site for activists in those turbulent decades. I am leaving for a short visit to Cuba in a week. I shall go and walk up those steps and think of him.

There are dangers in the REF that will effect people who probably don’t know much about it, like ‘early career researchers’. It also has particularly disturbing features for areas like creative practice research. As a recent academic blog on the subject puts it, ‘The Funding Council’s overly restrictive ‘physical science’ view of how research influences policy has created an artificial minefield of pointless obstacles.’ Indeed I’m sorely afraid (judging from my experience in producing a case study of my own work as a documentarist) that it’s almost impossible in these circumstances for the individual to write a true and honest account of their work, because then you’ll be saying things that don’t fit the tick-boxes and which the funding councils don’t want to hear.

There is a general danger identified by an another academic blogger at exquisite life:

The introduction of the ‘impact agenda’ into Research Council funding priorities…increases the incorporation of Government objectives into research funding in two ways. First, by making them an increasingly important part of Research Council decision-making (‘excellence with impact’) and, second, by ‘nudging’ academic behaviour into adopting those objectives into their own research proposals.

The blog goes on to discuss a whole lot of technical reasons why all this will disadvantage early career researchers and their employment prospects. If that’s you, read it at your own risk.

One of the problems for arts and humanities is that a great deal of research—scholarly or creative—produces effects that are not easily measurable, for any variety of reasons: the book that is ignored on first publication but turns out ten years later to have been pioneering; the artful video that circulates on the web without leaving an academic footprint (so it can’t be ‘objectively’ evaluated). But anyone producing work in a field like the digital arts, which engages with non-traditional forms of dissemination and reception, will have to deal with the particular problems inherent in web usage metrics, which are at best both fuzzy and evanescent—which means their evidence isn’t ‘robust’. Maybe that’s because you didn’t didn’t do what it now seems you should have done, and do research into your research. But maybe you did. Maybe you asked people to fill in questionnaires about your film, exhibition or performance. Only it turns out that doesn’t count, because it’s merely anecdotal.

The general rubric for ‘impact’ is ‘an effect/change/benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia’. This sounds alright until you try to decode what counts as evidence. Many questions raised by experimental creative practices, for example, cannot be answered by going through a list of  quantifiable criteria, since they’re not that kind of question, because they depend on individual taste and sociological dimensions like Bourdieu’s habitus, where quantitative evaluation is largely irrelevant and liable to be reductive. The type of impact they have—what old-fashioned philosophy called the aesthetic experience—is of an experiential and existential kind that necessarily falls beneath the bureaucratic radar.

For policy-makers with an instrumental approach to higher education, this is a problem to be summarily dismissed, and they end up throwing out the proverbial baby because even in their own terms they don’t understand what they’re dealing with.  You could give them statistics about the value of what they call the ‘creative industries’; it won’t do any good because they’re not actually interested in all the evidence we’re asked to provide. The ruling paradigm is ideological, not ‘evidence based’. They don’t care, for example, that it was a liberal approach to art and design not so very long ago which fed the fashion, design, advertising and publicity industries in their heyday. And as mathematical logic is to computing, so too critical theory to the cultural industries. Advertising even learned a great deal from semiology (as Armand Mattelart argued in a book of his that I once translated, Advertising International). But that’s not the kind of argument that concerns me here.

The crucial point is made in a recent newspaper report by a post-doctoral researcher, in the simple observation that “the value of research is not always something you can predict from the outset – that’s the point of research’. ‘Impact’, says Shahidha Bari, ‘reads like a policy designed to help universities appease governmental demands for justification of expenditure’, but ‘if you’re in the business of producing ideas and culture as you do in arts and humanities research, then you’re not producing tangible, measurable effects’. There may nonetheless be ‘non-tangible effects that are no less important’.

Actually not all scientists are happy with all this either. According to the same report, some academics are ‘hopping mad’ at the weighting given to the impact criterion—an arbitrary 20%—not because they want to sit in ivory towers isolated from the world that pays for what they do, but because, says Prof Andreas Fring, assistant dean for research at City University, the government has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of how high-quality research in certain disciplines takes shape. Mathematics, he says, may bring no economic benefit at all, but it provides the tools. Furthermore, a lot of scientific research is speculation: ‘for instance, string theory is at a state where it is not yet confirmed. Verification might come after 50 years, but that is still not a practical application.’

Science, of course, gets the lion’s share of the funding. But if you want to speculate for very little money about something that doesn’t tick the right boxes, you have to jump through hoops. (This is not a mixed metaphor; only the last phrase is metaphorical.) Even worse if your work is aimed at exploring the potential for digital internet arts. Says an early career researcher quoted in the same report,  Alasdair Pinkerton, ‘It’s yet to be seen how grant-awarding bodies will measure the value of social networking’.

Maybe the findings of the social sciences can sometimes be tracked in the required way, for example when they’re taken up by non-academic bodies in the context of policy debates. It is very rare for works of creative practice to produce a direct and concrete impact on, say, policy making (television documentaries do this very occasionally; feature movies almost never). But they can and do contribute to debate at the level of ‘interest groups’ and communities, both local and virtual. In some cases they link to alternative social initiatives and campaigning, which of course is another problem for the funding bodies, because the government they need to appease is thoroughly  inimicable towards criticism of virtually any kind. As I write, a piece appears on Guardian Education: ‘10 tips for how academics can better communicate their research to policymakers.’ But what if you’re not trying to communicate with policymakers, but ordinary people who speak ordinary English?

There is a fundamental problem in reporting the ‘impact’ of works of creative practice, like documentary films: real impact is diffuse. Especially when the work is disseminated by digital communication, and thus situated by definition at the forefront of testing out new possibilities for reaching what the lingo calls the ‘beneficiaries’. Take the case of Secret City, the film I recently made with Lee Salter, which is a bit like a David and Goliath story. The subject of the film, the Corporation of the City of London, is at the heart of a lobbying network that spends £93m a year on behalf of finance capital, while Secret City started out with a zero budget and was completed with university funding of £7K—and no budget for marketing and publicity at all. It was made by a team of four people, and then launched, unusually, with a screening at the House of Commons. By the time the DVD is being released six months later—you can get it here—it will have been screened some thirty times up and down the country at community, cultural and university venues, always to full houses. This was only possible because of an integrated approach to the use of the social media, and the potential of the web to discover an ‘audience-in-waiting’ that is not served by broadcast media or conventional film distribution. Isn’t this already an indication of impact? Apparently not: according to the formula, it’s only a pathway to impact.

The dissemination of Secret City is pretty small scale, precisely because it’s happened outside the marketplace, an example of a new kind of artesanal cultural production in the age of global cultural monopolies. It’s had a modest success that’s corroborated by the figures on condition that you know how to interpret them. Building on the experience of my previous documentary, Chronicle of Protest, the website home page for Secret City received more than three times the number of individual visitors in less than half the time. But the actual figures (around 8000 in 5 months, while viewing figures for the trailer exceed 10,000) are pretty meaningless without this narrative context (all of it crammed into about 750 words).

Of course, you can hardly use a phrase like ‘modest success’ in a case study, where you have to talk it up, but here I’m simply being honest. The point is (sorry, one of the findings of the research is) that the parallel outlets provided by the web are vital to creating the presence that produces dissemination through the dynamics of social networking. With non-commercial production sans a marketing & publicity budget, the web becomes the crucial means for making links with cultural, community and campaign groups and thereby organising the public screenings through which the film finds a widening audience and enters into dialogue with them around the issues. There are many negative things to be said about the forms of sociality found on the web; this is one of the positives. The box-tickers remain oblivious. But the documentarist who observes the practice of taking the film on the road—and one or both us have attended a Q&A at every screening—knows full well when the film has a real impact on the audience.

A last observation: there is a stipulation in the guidelines for completing an impact case study to be ‘sufficiently explicit, transparent and self-contained that the panel can assess the impact without having to make inferences, gather additional material, rely on members’ knowledge, or follow up numerous references.’ Read that again carefully. It implies that you’re required to address the assessors as if they’re rather stupid. The reason is obvious: the quantity of stuff they’ll have to get through means the time they’re given to spend on each item is extremely limited.  Thank your lucky stars we’re not talking about ATOS, who have a habit of classifying people as fit for work who then drop down dead. But then again, the paymasters would probably prefer that awkward folk who challenge the criteria would do the same, or at least would just go away. Well, I’m off — to Argentina for some European-funded research-as-practice. But I’ll be back…

However, academia is carved up by language barriers, so that most study of Latin American cinemas in the UK goes on in language departments rather than mainstream film studies; and although academic life thrives on small group face-to-face exchange, like this symposium (ably convened by Guy Baron), this fragmentation can still be frustrating, especially when the particular cinema under discussion is also itself marginalised. Yet Cuban cinema has continued, against the odds, to produce striking films that articulate the country’s changing social climate, and independent video production is expanding across the board, from small scale experimental work to feature production, which is no longer concentrated exclusively in the hands of the state film institute, ICAIC.

There is no film studies as such in Cuban universities; the Cuban scholars attending are cultural historians from the University of Havana, along with two filmmakers, Gerardo Chijona, and Juan Carlos Cremata, who belong to the second and third generations of Cuban directors respectively: Chijona, a ten-year-old when the Revolution took place, joined the ICAIC in the 1970s, and followed the institute’s regular pattern of serving an apprenticeship in newsreel and documentary before moving on to features. Cremata is a child of the Revolution, born in 1961, who began his career in theatre and then studied film at the international film school, EICTV, at San Antonio de los Baños.

Both have had to adapt to the new conditions brought on by Cuba’s near economic collapse after the fall of the Soviet Union, in which film directors have been obliged to learn how to leverage foreign funding, and yet make films which the audience at home can still recognise and value as authentically Cuban—too many co-productions suffer from scripts designed to feature an actor from Spain or wherever, or satisfy the co-producer’s requirement for exoticism. It isn’t easy, and setting up a production takes a long time, and neither of these directors has a large output. Both have taken part in script workshops at Sundance, and both brought films to Aberystwyth which are strongly rooted in Cuban society and imagination. But the two films are as different as could be. Chijona’s Boleto el paraíso (Ticket to Paradise, 2011) is a dark and tragic story of Cuban ‘freakies’, or punks, set in 1993, and the ravages of AIDS. Cremona’s Viva Cuba, which took the Cannes Children’s Film Prize in 2005, is a comedy in the shape of a children’s Romeo and Juliet, who run away from home to avoid being separated when the girl’s mother decides to leave Cuba. Both films are miles away from the kinds of subject matter that typified Cuban cinema in its revolutionary heyday.

Boleto el paraíso secured funding from Ibermedia; Viva Cuba had a French co-producer (Cremata recounted wryly how he had to fight with them over the music, when he discovered that they didn’t know the difference between Andean pipes and a Cuban conjunto). Chijona remarked that the destination of the film as far as the coproducer was concerned was invariably television. This is what determines the meagre budgets they offer. It also explains why these films rarely get seen here in the UK: because they don’t get cinema distribution without a television sale, and television here has stopped showing subtitled movies, even late night, almost completely; and without that they’re unlikely to get out on DVD either.

The symposium ranged across contemporary Cuban film culture, covering topics like the character of the national audience, history and memory, digital film-making, different musics, and more. Apologies for not mentioning everyone by name (the abstracts are here) but only speak about the contributions of the Cuban guests. These held special interest as the perspective of historians, looking at the representation on the screen of a history in which they are situated themselves, and for which they have their own construct, reading Cuban films as historical narratives, whether the subject belongs to the past or the contemporary moment—because cinema has this double capacity of on the one hand, bringing history alive, and on the other, historicising the present. Edelberto Leiva Lajara spoke of the problematic of folkloric and religious imagery in a number of key films of historical reconstruction, a subject matter where official attitudes have evolved considerably. Oscar Loyola Vega’s paper, ‘Six Characters in Search of a Director’, noting that the biopic is not a characteristic genre of Cuban cinema, asked about the biographical treatment, or its absence, of a number of key figures in Cuban history. Antonio Álvarez Pitaluga asked a question that was on everybody’s lips — where to situate recent Cuban cinema in the space between historical continuity and rupture.

Cremata spoke of the feeling of living in a state of permanent crisis as the background of everyday life in Cuba for over twenty years (which is now also becoming the common experience in the capitalist metropolis). But the Cuban condition also has another dimension, that of permanent transition, an always unfinished process of unsettling change. The shifting pattern of film and video creation is evidence of the changes that have already taken place, but ever a country of paradox, the expanding video scene is cut off from effective internet access, and they have to find roundabout means to get their work posted on the web. There was an amusing moment, in a session which I shared with the two Cubans, where I was showing on the screen how the web now serves as a crucial tool for an independent documentarist like myself, and to demonstrate, I did searches for both the films of theirs we’d just watched. Up came pages of video clips, trailers, and even complete copies of the films online. For a moment, they were both open-mouthed in surprise at what they saw. Neither had any idea all this stuff was there.

Download your copy here:http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/activistmedia/2013/03/free-e-book-tales-of-a-video-blogger-by-michael-chanan/

It’s been fascinating seeing the response to the death of Hugo Chávez playing out on the web, for it not only confirms his status as a world historical figure, but because of the high symbolism of the event, clearly exposes the fundamental ideological rift of our days—not simply the chasm between the rich and poor countries of the world, but the confrontation between Eros and Thanatos: the love of social justice, represented in the adored figure of the defunct leader, against the destructiveness unto death of the empire of capitalism, with its headquarters four-and-a-quarter hours flying time due north from Caracas (or less than three to Miami, where rich Venezuelans go to do their sumptuary shopping).

Web platforms like Twitter and Storify produce a fluid form of instant montage.  An editorial in the Dallas Morning Herald, is quite brazen: ‘During his 14 years as president, Chávez fooled Venezuelans into believing he would improve their lives and strengthen their democratic powers. In reality, he accomplished exactly the opposite…Chávez squandered his nation’s vast oil wealth on socialist gimmickry.’ As if in direct response, a tweet points out that ‘Being vilified by the political & media establishment usually signifies you’re a threat to US-corporate world hegemony.’  A wonderful parody of this vilification turns up in a blog entitled ‘Every Hugo Chavez Obituary in the Western Press’.

‘Darth Hugo Destruktor Chávez, the outspoken and inflammatory Venezuelan leader, died yesterday in Caracas when the Invisible Hand of the free market reached down his throat and shook loose his gall bladder. He is survived by his four children and his millions-strong army of terrifying cyborg drones…’

The ‘socialist gimmickry’ in question consists in the redistribution of wealth, in particular by repatriating the country’s huge oil revenues and ploughing them into healthcare, housing, education, food and cash benefits for poor families. To capitalist apologists this is illogical, because revenues exist to be re-invested. ‘That’s right,’ says a blogger on FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), in response to an AP business reporter, ‘Chavez squandered his nation’s oil money on healthcare, education and nutrition when he could have been building the world’s tallest building or his own branch of the Louvre. What kind of monster has priorities like that?’ (The question is not quite rhetorical.) The former diplomat Craig Murray explains on his blog—and he should know—that the politicians, who are controlled by the ‘multinationals’, ensure that the ‘western’ states do everything to stop ‘developing countries’ doing this kind of thing. ‘Chávez faced them down. There are millions of people in Venezuela whose hard lives are a bit better and have hope for the future because of Chávez. There are billionaires in London and New York who have a few hundred million less each because of Chávez.’ We need only add: in order to do this, he also turned the political system upside down, and gave the popular classes a voice—they speak out in all sorts of clips and films now popping up on the web, and channels like Al Jazeera.

Chávez himself, being a great communicator, was a tweeter, so it’s hardly surprising to learn that according to an Argentine data monitoring company, there were more than 800,000 tweets in the 24 hours following his death (27% from Venezuela itself, 9% each from  Colombia, México and Spain, 6% each from Argentina and the USA).  But you don’t need data analysis to discern the opposing camps. What platforms like Twitter present is a fair dose of expectable political malice and stupidity, counterposed by strong contestation of the repetition of long-standing distortions, misinformation, and Orwellian  language:

• ‘Only 11 political prisoners in Venezuela but  Chávez still compared ‏to history’s worst dictators’.
• ‘Chávez has shown the Way: There is an Alternative to Austerity’.
• ‘As @TolpuddleTim noted,  Chávez was divisive. He took the country’s wealth and divided it equally, instead of giving it to his rich mates.’

An English political commentator, Owen Jones blogs: ‘Some of his smug foreign critics suggest Chávez effectively bought the votes of the poor – as though winning elections by delivering social justice is somehow bribery.’ The BBC is reprimanded in several tweets for its  ‘Bogeyman Narrative’; for referring to Chávez ‘as a flamboyant and divisive charismatic leader (short hand for dictator)’; and for stooping ‘to fox-news level: <36 hours after Chávez death, he’s there with Bin Laden, Hussein, Gaddafi & Kim Jong Il’.

None of the disinformation is new. Various items recirculated in the past few days include previously published accounts of media distortion, like this one by Lee Salter and Dave Weltman on the BBC’s Venezuela coverage over a decade. And here’s a video of the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano speaking (in Spanish) at a symposium a few years ago about the ongoing demonisation of Chávez:

Click here to view the embedded video.

‘The baddie used to be Cuba, nowadays not so much. But there always has to be a baddie, otherwise there’s no film.’ So Chávez is cast as a dictator, but he’s a strange kind of dictator who keeps winning elections. And then you turn on Venezuelan television and radio or open the newspapers, and the first thing you see is endless journalists, analysts and oppositionists all saying ‘There is no freedom of expression here’.

Naturally the corporate media are much exercised by this. As Richard Gott wrote in the New Statesman a few weeks ago, ‘Journalistic NGOs and human rights groups complain about what they see as attacks on freedom of the press in Venezuela, usually mentioning in passing the forced closure of a whites-only television channel that would have been shut down much earlier in other parts of the world. Of the huge widening of the media franchise in Venezuela, in the innumerable new community radio stations and alternative TV channels, there is little comment in foreign reports.’)

New tweets appear: ‘Only few hours after Chávez’s death announced, Forbes blogger highlights how this is good for oil company’; ‘Oil prices may suffer if there is much uncertainty or civil unrest surrounding Venezuela’s election of its next president’; ‘Oil prices have risen slightly on news of Chávez’s death, but his passing away had already been priced into the market.’

The neurotic compulsion of the big media to repeat the old shibboleths comes into focus on the day of the funeral. Watching the live stream from Venezuela’s Telesur, a stylish rolling news programme soberly reporting the events with neither hysteria nor exaggeration, produces a curious sensation. This is the satellite channel Chávez created to carry the Bolivarian message of the greater Latin America across the continent, and here it is, called on to make the most of a huge unwanted PR opportunity. (There’s also a live feed from the government television channel appearing on Al Jazeera and news web sites like The Guardian.) The corporate news reports highlight the presence of undesirables like Iran’s Ahmadinejad and Lukashenko of Belarus, but what they really fear is the resolute display of international solidarity demonstrated by the presence of virtually every Latin American and Caribbean head of state, from Cuba’s Raúl Castro to Chile’s Sebastián Piñera, regardless of political and ideological differences, in what amounts to a tacit declaration that the decaying Washington Consensus is well and truly over. If the corporate media comment on this at all, it is to say, cynically, that they’re there to curry favour, so as not to lose out on preferential prices for Venezuela’s oil.

A tweet turns up that calls attention to what is going on in front of the web surfer’s eyes: ‘The man dies and the legend begins, that is inevitable.’ Will the web make a difference to how this happens? What will the future historian of collective memory make of its polymorphous archive?

The form of ceremony itself—held in a military chapel which provides an austere, modern, airy space—is a curious mix of state, religion, music, and television presentation, which gives the impression of an improvised bricolage of ceremonial elements, but it’s clearly designed to emphasise this internationalist projection. The foreign leaders solemnly take turns to mount an honour guard round the coffin. The religious homilies are closer to the theology of liberation than papism—one of them is given by Jesse Jackson, who was not part of the official US presence. The final oration is by Chávez’s nominated successor, Nicolás Maduro,  emotional, hoarse, and rousing. The ceremony is punctuated by a group of soldiers calling out Chavista slogans with the same Bolivarian message:

Click here to view the embedded video.

‘Watch out! The people of Bolivar is on the march in Latin America!’

This is exactly the same cry, with just a few words changed, as the one I filmed on the streets of Managua thirty years ago:

Click here to view the embedded video.

‘Watch out! The guerrilla struggle is on the march in Latin America!’

The change in words is not insignificant—these are new non-violent times—but the sense of defiance is the same, and instils the same fear up north.

The music was provided by what is perhaps the most surprising success of Venezuela’s social experiment, the world famous Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, under its star conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, looking slightly bemused. Greg Grandin, writing in The Nation, noted that it’s not just the right who bracketed Chávez with ‘the worst mass murderers and dictators in history. New Yorker [music] critic Alex Ross, in an essay published a few years back celebrating the wunderkind Venezuelan conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel, fretted about enjoying the fruits of Venezuela’s much-lauded government-funded system of music training: “Stalin, too, was a great believer in music for the people.” ’ Ross is this season’s celebrity classical music expert on London’s South Bank, but despite a special study of twentieth century music, seems to have very little political intelligence.

The day after the funeral, the BBC’s cultural station, Radio 3, had an item about the prospects for the music education system the orchestra belongs to, known simply as El Sistema, which has become a major source of national pride at home, and enormous admiration abroad: a grand network of regional music schools and youth orchestras where underprivileged children turn into classical musicians with all the benefits of the socialisation that music encourages (it gets them out of street gangs and off drugs). A success which has inspired musical educators around the world, the paradox of El Sistema is not just that an underdeveloped Latin American country should produce a world class symphony orchestra. The system was created long before Chávez came to power by José Antonio Abreu, a musical politician who served in the neoliberal government of  Carlos Andrés Pérez, but it only prospered when a sceptical Chávez, who once described classical music as ‘the music of the oppressor’, was persuaded to give it his support. Presumably because despite his suspicion of Abreu’s politics, he recognised the argument that music (and the discipline required by the classical tradition) succours a social spirit. Politicians back here in the UK have been repeatedly  presented with evidence for the hugely positive social effects of musical education, to which they occasionally pay lip service but otherwise ignore.

According to the English musicologist Geoff Baker, ‘Abreu did a deal: unquestioning public support for Chávez, including the use of El Sistema’s young musicians in pro-government ceremonies, in return for unlimited government support for Abreu’s project.’ The opposition complain that El Sistema has been politicised, and this, says Baker, is inevitable. But perhaps what fazes them is that their cultural as well as their material capital has been redistributed through an act of social inclusion outside the confines of the market. For me, this is a good enough symbol of what Chavismo represents.

Of course Chávez made mistakes, though not as many as alleged. An independent North American journalist tweets: ‘I criticized Chávez for being anti-semitic…turns out that was based on a quote manufactured by the rightwing media.’ Among the left in the metropolis not all are prepared to succumb to adulation. One complains ‘Yes, his gvt instituted important reforms but it was also a state-capitalist gvt that repressed independent workers’ mvts.’ (@therubykid); and another that ‘Chávez was democratically elected & helped the poor. But a demagogue who mismanaged economy & colluded with tyrants like Putin & Mugabe’ (@PeterTatchell). Since parts of the left stand guard against all forms of patriarchal authoritarianism, these are also expectable, if crabby responses, and they should not be discounted. But more interesting, because more surprising, is a paragraph on Huffington Post about China, where there was no immediate official comment, ‘but the Internet, the freest court of public opinion in China, crackled with praise for Chavez for standing up to the U.S. and for his socialist policies’. One academic wrote on his feed that

‘Chávez and the “21st century socialism” he advocated was a big bright spot after drastic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe sunk the world socialist movement in a low ebb’.

Whoever doesn’t agree is not on the side of Eros.

I first met Stanley in the mid-1970s, through solidarity work with Chile. Three years after the military coup, I found myself curating a season of films from and about Chile at the old NFT, and some of them came from Stanley. We hit it off together, and he asked me to direct a documentary he was producing for Chile Solidarity—we even started, but I had to pass the film on to someone else when I had a car crash which put me out of action for three months. The warm friendship we struck up came in part from cultural affinity—and a shared sense of humour.  Stanley was born to a Jewish immigrant family in the East End of London in 1921, he was politicised in his teens by the turbulent 30s, and joined the Young Communist League at the age of 15. In short, he exemplified the secular Yiddish radicalism of my parents’ generation, and our conversation was often punctuated ironically by Yiddish words and phrases. But if Stanley was proud to be Jewish, he also once told me of the problems this entailed soon after the war, when he was supposed to go on a trip to Moscow for the first time, and was refused a visa. Ever cheerful, he never shied away from talking about the most difficult questions, including the inevitable ‘But why did you never leave the Party?’ To which his simple answer was, how could he? ‘The Party becomes your family.’

For many years, Stanley distributed documentaries on all sorts of subjects—scientific, instructional and cultural as well as the more obviously political—to groups such as the British-Soviet Friendship Society, schools, the peace movement and even sometimes the army. There’s a rich font of research for someone’s PhD in the records that were kept of feedback from the people who booked the films, and indeed the history of Plato/ETV all told includes revealing episodes. In 1958, a film by the now forgotten East German documentary team of Andrew and Annelie Thorndike, called Operation Teutonic Sword, caused an international rumpus by revealing the Nazi past of the then commander of NATO ground forces in Europe, one General Speidel. Speidel sued Plato for libel. The case took three years to go through the courts and reached the House of Lords on a legal point. Eventually Speidel settled out of court, renouncing financial claims in return for the film’s withdrawal from circulation. Stanley said ‘We never lost, we never won.’ But he took the precaution of shutting down Plato and setting up a new company called ETV.

The legal issue concerned is an interesting one from a theoretical perspective. The problem, in a nutshell, was that British law would not accept proof made up of photocopies of documents discovered by East German spies in Bonn. Perhaps you can’t blame them, but the affair revealed the blinkered view of legalistic judgment over the nature of documentary film evidence, simply because the judges had to allow the possibility that something seen on the screen might have been faked, regardless of the context.

Plato/ETV’s operation was possible because it didn’t have to pay for the films. They arrived through the channels of the international friendship societies, that’s to say, shipped in through the diplomatic bag—the embassy in question would then call up and send them over. (This meant that Stanley didn’t always know exactly what films he held.) With the switch from film to video for educational and cultural distribution, ETV managed to survive because the passage of time had another effect: it turns a film library into an archive, a resource for filmmakers producing a growing number of historical documentaries, who used it well enough to keep the company going, as well as others, like film historians. Fully aware of the riches stored in his offices in Islington (and in his loft at home), he gave open access to students, and generously allowed me to take digital copies of a few films I wanted to use for a documentary I later made about a relative of mine who was closely involved in the electrification of the Soviet Union. I could not have made this film otherwise. Archives are places where things get lost and then rediscovered, and it was in Stanley’s archive that I found crucial footage: a wonderful forgotten film made by Esther Shub in 1932 called КЩЕ, or ‘KShE’ (Komsomol, Patron of Electrification), which I’ve written about elsewhere.

Saddened to hear the news of Stanley’s death, I soon found myself smiling at many fond memories. In the Q&A after a film screening, voicing exactly my own criticism of the film we’d just seen but with devastating politeness. In the music room of a mutual friend who lived down the road from him, a musician who’d invited us all to come and celebrate a Schubert anniversary with a real live Schubertiade. But one of these memories is particularly wistful today. I see him in his office in Islington, telling me about speaking at the funeral of a comrade the day before, the second or third such occasion in a row, and saying, ‘I’m thinking of putting a small ad in the Morning Star: Stanley Forman, specialist in Communist Funerals.’ He now goes to join his comrades in history, leaving us, in the archive he curated, with a history to ponder over.

* The archive is now held by the BFI; some of the films can be viewed through the JISC Media Hub (jiscmediahub.ac.uk).

Photos from ‘It’s a wonderful life’ (Martin Smith, 1994)

I arrive with an expectation that is quickly borne out—that being on a jury, the sense of performing a civic duty, of taking on such a responsibility, puts people into a civil frame of mind. Everyone entering the building passes through the same security gate and then goes their separate ways through doors that open off the large hallway. Jurors get taken up to the sizeable jury assembly room, with its anonymous decor (but at least it’s light and airy). This is a big modern building with a dozen court rooms. On the first morning, when juries are being selected, it’s crowded, but people hardly talk, not knowing each other, or do so very quietly. You have to pay attention to the periodic announcements, answering ‘yes’ when your name is called. The ushers who do the calling speak in friendly tones, as they do battle with a dodgy P.A. system. The selection process can take a long time, especially if there’s a long trial due, from which many jurors will have to be excused.

Here in the jury space, people feel equal and respectful of each other. There’s plenty of room to sit, in rows of airport-lounge seats facing each other, and a canteen with round tables, although the grub is abysmal—the worst institutional food I think I’ve ever encountered. (It’s run as a franchise, of course, which probably means, because the clientele is transient, that they can ignore the complaints; the court ushers discreetly invite you to bring your own packed lunch.) People check their smartphones, a few read real or electronic books, two or three are working on their laptops (but the wi-fi isn’t free). All perfectly normal. There are racks of magazines, and most curiously, a couple of tables, one at either end of the hall, where large jigsaw puzzles are laid out in various stages of completion. This is what I shall most remember about the scene, and most regret not being able to photograph. Whoever thought of putting out jigsaw puzzles is a minor genius. First you think, oh, that’s nice, what a relaxing and calming way to pass the time while waiting. Then you walk past later and someone else is sitting there with the puzzle a bit more advanced, and again the next time, and it becomes doubly symbolic: an icon of the nature of the truth that the jury establishes in reaching its verdict, and a metaphor for the task of the jury as a collective endeavour. But there’s a catch: the evidence the jury will hear may well have pieces missing. Indeed it’s probably inevitable. Witnesses may or may not tell the truth and nothing but the truth, but nobody tells the whole truth. There is always an excess, always stuff left over. The whole truth is impossible. How much this matters in practice, however, must surely depend on the kind of case being heard, and whether the missing pieces are essential to make sense of the picture as a whole, or of a significant detail.

The jury is an ideal social form, simultaneously an abstraction, and the instantiation of the idea of collective intelligence. What the juror is required to do is apply their individual judgement (which explicitly includes, in the judge’s words, their ‘life experience’) only to sink their ego into the anonymity of the group. If who-knows-what prejudices come into play in this process, the juror will still be absolved of the danger of making the wrong call. Miscarriages of justice are always possible, a liability of the system, because the truth is never knowable for absolute certain. The jury is sensibly instructed not to convict if they have doubts about the veracity of the evidence, they must be sure the prosecution case has been made, but the events you hear about all happened in the past, and the stories staged before the jury in the courtroom are all recounted in flashback. While the drama of the staging unfolds in the immediate present, like Rashomon or The Thin Blue Line (only not so elegantly).

To get from the jury assembly room to the courtroom you have to be guided through a rabbit warren of passages, doors with security locks and stairways, the bare walls alleviated slightly by pastel paintings of rural scenes of the kind you can buy on street stalls and usually find in cheap B&Bs. The usher tells you there’s another set of rabbit warrens just like this one on the other side. In other words, this is a building which is designed to funnel people through the imposing entrance and quickly divide them into different streams circulating through the building completely separate from each other and only meeting up in the courtrooms. This requires from the architects a special model of flow and control of passage which is similar to airports, including numerous internal thresholds which require a security code to pass through. The modern courthouse is the same kind of arrested space, or non-space, with the peculiarity that it removes you from the everyday world only to let the outside world back in through carefully controlled channels. The control is not just physical. The courtroom is a space which licences only certain forms of speech, which correspond to the required decorum.

The courtroom imposes this decorum partly through its spatial organisation and the fixed furniture which defines the spaces occupied by different people. This means that witnessing a trial as a participant is quite different from the way it is invariably constructed on film or television, because unlike their multiple camera positions and lenses, you can see it only from one fixed point of view. The courtroom where I find myself sitting is a simple modern design dominated by a calming shade of wood (although the acoustics could be improved considerably); all the court officers are equipped with computers (not to mention the Counsel’s ipad). At the start of the trial, the judge reminds the jury (apologising for her headmistressy tone) that we are forbidden to have recourse to the internet to research or discuss the trial in any way whatsoever. The second day abruptly brings back the forbidden, when mobile phone logs and email messages are presented as exhibits, and the following day, evidence is given from abroad by video link. I promptly wonder how many cases nowadays involve such things being presented in evidence, or what kinds of case might not do so. How many crimes are prosecuted nowadays without some kind of digital evidence, ranging from video surveillance to tweets? If I understand correctly, these are all presented under the rubric of legal documents, but this obscures their individually distinctive features. They are not quite the kind of primary evidence implied by labelling them with an exhibit number. The thing about the contents transmitted by digital media channels is precisely that they are mediated, but differently, depending on the platform through which they’re delivered. Each has its own form of packaging and its own ecology, and it’s dangerous to generalise.

As it happens, I have personal experience as a witness who once presented film footage in a court of law as evidence for the defence. We came away from filming the big Lewisham Anti-Nazi League demonstration of 13 August 1977 with shots, among other things, of arrests being made, and showed our footage to the Defence Committee. One shot clearly showed a policeman rushing towards a line of demonstrators standing their ground shouting, who then grabbed one of them by his frizzy hair, pulling him some distance to the open door of a police van, where he was bundled inside; the shot was a continuous pan back and forth, and the defendant was clearly not, as alleged, resisting arrest. We ended up in court showing the film in his defence. The only requirement was to show the footage unedited, and the only question I was asked was to confirm this. But it required a special projector (the double-headed kind usually only found in dubbing theatres, capable of running the separate sound track in synchronisation with the picture). I borrowed one from the college where I was then teaching. In the courtroom, the mise en scène was beautifully ironic—the only place where we could put the projector so that everyone could see the screen was by placing it in the witness box itself, while I stood to one side and reached over to turn it on. The film was taken as unimpeachable evidence of the arrest, with which the testimony of the arresting officer simply didn’t tally, and the result was a happy one. Since I hardly needed to watch the footage, I turned the projector on and looked at the policeman in question, who went white as a sheet. As soon as the projection came to an end, the magistrate looked round the courtroom and pronounced ‘Case dismissed’.

What counted here was only the ostensive or indexical content of the footage, not its aesthetic or iconic aspects. Certainly not the evidence it gave of, let’s say, excessive zeal on the part of the police. Only the particular and individual case in hand. The picture being clear, it was taken to be transparent. In this case I was happy to agree, but it isn’t always so. The assumption of transparency is nowadays widely regarded as erroneous, and not only by critical theorists within academia. Even as the media try to keep a tight lid on their selective partiality, society is imbued with a feeling that appearances are deceptive and the empirical isn’t what it used to be; the loss is part of the crisis of democracy, the democratic deficit. Does this not mean that the faith of a court of law in the objectivity of filmic evidence is naive? Is it the result of a certain disposition to believe so deeply ingrained that it’s taken for granted, and thereby escapes interrogation? What are the mechanisms by which the multiple nature of truth—literal, cultural, social, psychological, legal, consensual—is pinned down and fixed? These are issues that are all sharpened by the new digital media, which run the gamut from the immediacy of citizen journalist video, to that of the thin texts loaded with innuendo that characterise both texting and the tweet.

The problems of interpretation differ according to the form. With visual images the emphasis is still generally on the content. At any rate, the live video link, where you see and hear the witness in real time, is relatively unproblematic. Recorded video would need a date-and-time stamp. On the other hand, with a phone log which has date-and-time stamps but is stripped of verbal or texted content, the evidence provided is minimal (although I can imagine cases where it might be crucial). But as soon as you have a text to consider, either a text message or an email, attention is turned on the author. And then, with the minimal forms characteristic of digital writing, the problem becomes its opacity.

The issues raised by platforms like Twitter and Facebook are about a peculiar new form of public speech, which I leave aside here. Email, on the other hand, presents itself as individual and personal, but with certain peculiarities that make it quite different from old style postal correspondence. Digital duplication makes it an extensible form of interpersonal communication that allows for several types of message, from private correspondence, to round robins, discussion groups, publicity notices, and the personalisation of standard letters, including various infamous examples of spam. All of this occurs in the moment of transmission, but it also means that as a package of digital data, email is an inherently leaky medium, and the sender can never be certain where it might end up. (Not to mention sender errors: accidentally sending something to the wrong recipient is often the cause of much embarrassment, and sometimes worse.) Emails sent through institutional accounts often carry disclaimers or confidentiality notices. But email always has a source which ought to be traceable (except when deliberately evaded) because in order to send a digital message it has to have a digital label.

Nevertheless, emails are largely written in a somewhat informal style. Many people are careless about spelling (but then my aunt used to write long chatty letters home with practically no punctuation).  First name address is common, even between people who haven’t met. In texting, names get dropped altogether. In both forms, people often write things that wouldn’t previously be included in formal correspondence, from trivialities to indiscretions, as various politicians know to the cost of their reputations—or worse.  As a stripped down form of personal communication, email implies but hides the character of the relationship between writer and recipient (texting even more so). Personal emails where the sender and recipient know each other adopt a form of address that takes its cue from their real-world relationship (for example, close friends, colleagues and family members might drop the use of salutations and sign off in minimal ways). They may also be written, especially among the youth, in the new form of orthography evolved through texting which their elders may find difficult to read; and jurors who have regular contact with youth may well catch the subtexts better than the Counsel who reads them out. But an email is not, of course, meant to be spoken aloud, and what always remains elusive is on the one hand the voice of the writer, and on the other, the voice that the recipient hears in their head upon reading it. It may be obvious to the recipient that a message is meant ironically, for example, but not to an unintended reader.

The personal email is part of an extended dialogue of which this message is but a tiny fragment, a dialogue that is not only carried on textually or electronically. Meaning becomes fluid, references and allusions are made in jargon, or using shorthand known only to the correspondents. Other traits appear. Especially this, that as a textual form operating at a distance, people may well write things they wouldn’t or couldn’t say face to face even if they thought it. A film producer once said to me, ‘Michael, don’t expect me to say what I think just because you know I think it.’ But maybe someone struggling to break off a relationship uses a textual message to make an offensive remark they know will wound too deeply. If this possibility has always been true of letter writing, the immediacy and speed of email greatly multiplies this liability, including the risk of emotion going unchecked. As people say, never send off an email in anger.

In short, email introduces strange new kinds of polysemy and ambiguity. The problem for a jury is what is and isn’t obvious, and what new kinds of non-transparency are brought into play. The problem for Counsel is rather different: how to limit the meaning of the digital text to just the interpretation they want to fix on.

A jury is supposed to only concern itself with the facts of the case, and not speculate about the missing pieces of the puzzle. You are supposed to keep an open mind and not jump to conclusions before hearing all the evidence and the closing statements. This isn’t always easy. If the form of the trial is an unfolding drama, the structure of the narrative is made up of parallel and intersecting story lines. But narratives carry expectations, and raise active questions as they proceed, and we are culturally trained to respond to the prompts. (Not just culturally trained, of course. Also predisposed to certain notions by, let’s call it, our station in life.) We are prone to home in on a certain repertoire of plots comprising the generic forms of theatre, literature, opera, etc., filtered by the propensities of a century and more of mass culture, proclivities which have a dangerously normative effect, because reality is always much more messy. The format of the trial, being adversarial, begins by offering two competing master plots. Then it enacts these through the examination and cross-examination of witnesses, etc., which has the potential to expose holes and lapses in the best laid plots, but in the end is supposed to destabilise just one of them.

What if it doesn’t? The Scottish legal system makes provision for a third verdict: not proven, which is used where a jury is unconvinced that the defendant is innocent but the evidence of guilt is insufficient. This often happens, for example, in cases of rape, where the jury is inclined to believe the victim’s testimony, but other evidence is lacking. The defendant is legally innocent and walks free, but is often seen as morally guilty. This kind of verdict can solve a jury’s problem, where an English jury in such cases is obliged to return a verdict of Not Guilty, but it remains controversial.

The story telling doesn’t stop when the evidence is complete. You’re hearing a succession of stories which are supposed to all add up but quite possibly don’t. When the evidence is concluded you get three more tellings of the story in counsels’ final statements and the judge’s summing up. Then the jury retires, and everyone starts re-telling different bits of the stories they’ve been hearing. A small ritual is enacted when the judge sends the jury to deliberate. Up till then, every time you’re taken up to the courtroom, the usher simply instructs you to turn off your mobile phone. When you enter the deliberation room, you are required to surrender it, and any other electronic device you may have. The room itself is small and stark, and gets hot and stuffy quite rapidly. An inexplicable sign tells you that for health and safety reasons, the windows may not be opened.

Before starting jury service, I had a number conversations about the prospect with friends or relatives. Several, now too old, were all relieved they had never been summoned. Everyone expressed reluctance at the idea. A couple of people told me they had found a reason to be excused, one person even did so by responding to the summons saying that she wouldn’t under any circumstances want to send someone to prison. These are attitudes I broadly share, but I decided I didn’t want to get out of it (I just didn’t want to get stuck there for months, and went armed with a letter from the University saying I couldn’t be spared for longer than the minimum fortnight). I think I had two reasons. First, one can thoroughly disapprove of the political regime under which we live, and even understand The Law as an ideological state apparatus, but are you entitled to opt out of your civil obligations? Because The Law isn’t just an ideological apparatus, it also answers to a real social need for the administration of justice. Individual justice without social justice often isn’t justice, but the reverse is also true.

Second, out of intense curiosity. Dare I say the curiosity of the documentarist who wants to know what actually happens in such a place? Even if I could only run the camera in my head, I also arrived that morning in the expectation that whatever kind of case I was selected to hear, the experience would be enormously instructive. And so it was, but of course one is not allowed to say anything at all about the case itself. Nor anything of what went on among us in the deliberation room. I permit myself only to comment that here too my first expectation was again borne out, and everyone’s behaviour was a model of civility. It’s a relief to find that it’s possible in this fucked-up country.