Cuba in Aberystwyth

by michaelc Posted on 23 March 2013

Welsh hills covered in snow as the train snakes across country on the way back from Aberystwyth. Went there for a symposium on Cuban cinema, with scholars and filmmakers over from Havana, and other participants mainly based in UK universities; although these were not necessarily Brits, because after all, the academic world is thoroughly international. Indeed our intellectual culture (such as it is) benefits enormously from the attraction that Britain seems to have for scholars from all over the world (which becomes a problem when a Government starts playing political games with student visas). Continue reading →

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Tales of a Video Blogger ebook

by michaelc Posted on 14 March 2013


Many thanks to RE.FRAMING ACTIVISM for publishing the ebook ‘Tales of a Video Blogger’, a collection of my recent writing about activist film-making.

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

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Mourning Chávez on the Web

by michaelc Posted on 10 March 2013

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). Continue reading →

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Remembering Stanley Forman

by michaelc Posted on 9 February 2013

For left film culture in Britain, Stanley Forman, who has died at the age of 91, was the archive man. His company, ETV, held a unique library of  left-wing documentaries which amounted to the history of the twentieth century from a socialist perspective. Established in 1950 as Plato Films, the outfit was what would be called in Cold War ideology a front organisation, set up by members of the Communist Party to distribute films from behind the Iron Curtain. There was nothing nefarious about it, however. Continue reading →

Posted in Cultural Politics, Documentary, Film matters | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Jury Service in Digital Times

by michaelc Posted on 6 February 2013

It’s only late in life—I’m in my sixties—that I find myself being summoned for jury service. Like all of us, I’ve seen innumerable court room dramas, in films and on television—fiction, docudramas and documentaries—and on three occasions I’ve been in the court room as a witness (I’ll come back to that). But only now, as a member of a jury, do I properly discover for myself that the courtroom is the setting for a very strange form of theatre. Continue reading →

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Transformations of Consumerism

by michaelc Posted on 18 January 2013

In the last few days, three major UK retail chains have gone bankrupt and are shutting up shop: Jessops, HMV and Blockbuster. Photography, music, and film rental. Pundits are saying that it’s inevitable as sales move to the web, and doesn’t mean the market will contract (except for film rental, which is no longer a viable business); there’s also a lot of comment on what Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian calls ‘a recession-backed, online-fuelled evisceration of the high street’. The health of the record market doesn’t interest me here, but what these closures say about the transformation of consumerism as capitalism seeks to adjust to its own crisis. Continue reading →

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Against ‘Impact’

by michaelc Posted on 10 November 2012

The other day we interviewed a couple of PhD scholarship candidates. Good applicants, with interesting and unusual research proposals. However, I was saddened when one of them started talking about ‘impact’. So, she’d found out about the institutional regime of evaluation that now governs research and learned the lingo, but is this the game that applicants ought to be playing? Continue reading →

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Transnational in Brussels

by michaelc Posted on 29 October 2012

We convened in Brussels, for a colloquium on transnationalism in Hispanic cinema, on the eve of the latest European summit. The juxtaposition was ironic and not irrelevant. On one side of town, the leaders of European transnationalism grappling with the crisis of the day. On the other, a small gathering of scholars from several European countries and the Americas, north and south, interrogating the transnationalism of Spanish-speaking cinema. Different takes on the same process of globalisation that shapes the modern world twenty years after the end of the Cold War

Continue reading →

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Screening at the House of Commons

by michaelc Posted on 16 October 2012

‘Secret City‘, the film I’ve made with Lee Salter about the City of London Corporation, received a preview screening at the House of Commons on Tuesday evening. This is more or less what Lee and I said to introduce it.

First, our thanks to John McDonnell, MP for Hayes and Harlington, for hosting the event.

We think this film is a model of documentary film production within the academy under the rubric of research as practice. One of the things this means is that it’s been produced on a tiny budget, less than £10,000, which represents real value for money. So we’d also like to acknowledge the support of the University of Roehampton, which provided most of this funding, which mainly covers the costs of clearing rights for archive footage.

Why a film and not a research paper? Because we wanted to reach outside the academy with a piece of work that deals with something very few people know anything about, and a documentary film is a very good way to do this because it breaks out of the limits of any particular discipline and reaches audiences in the wider community. Continue reading →

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