A new video at the New Statesman. This one’s very short. It’s based on a slide show sent to me by a friend in Argentina, which I’ve translated and visually elaborated. Thanks Patricio!
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/20531687[/vimeo]
Newsnight on student fees on BBC2 last night was a missed opportunity. Neither of the Oxbridge academics challenging David Willets made the crucial point that the fees increase replaces the teaching grant for arts & humanities which was removed in the government’s spending review announced earlier, and that the whole scheme is intended to complete the marketisation of higher education which was started by Blair, including paving the way to private universities. Continue reading
I should like to pay tribute to Oliver Stutchbury, who has died aged 84, and was instrumental back in the early 70s for helping me get started as a film-maker. I first met Oliver when I was a student at Sussex University and he was a part-time philosophy tutor—my first. In fact it was he who was in part responsible for my decision to switch to philosophy as my major. We bonded through a shared love of music—if I remember correctly, it was his father who in the early 30s had introduced John Christie to Fritz Bush, who thus became the first conductor of Christie’s opera house at Glyndebourne in the Sussex downs, which I visited as a student music critic. Continue reading
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/20236904[/vimeo]
At Saturday’s Progressive London conference, I caught up with comedian Josie Long and Mehdi Hasan, the NS’s political editor, and listened to Unite’s Len McKluskey and False Economy‘s Clifford Singer, plus ukuncutactivists take on Barclays Bank and South London celebrates a Carnival Against the Cuts.
Additional filming by Kaveh Abassian and Philippa Daniel. Philippa’s own video of the Carnival Against the Cuts is here.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/20008781[/vimeo]
The repercussions of the cuts in Higher Education are being felt in Bristol, where lecturers at the University of the West of England (UWE) have been forced to take strike action over threats to staffing. Here I report on the strike and find out what students who supported it think about the situation.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/19737016[/vimeo]
Mary Warnock, Blake Morrison and south London residents take action against library closures.
Across the country, 5 February saw read-ins at dozens of libraries threatened with closure. Michael Chanan filmed four of them in south London, along the way encountering Mary Warnock, Lucy Mangan, Blake Morrison, a lot of angry and articulate local residents, the duo Sly & Reggie, and the University of Strategic Optimism.
The arguments advanced by government ministers like David Willetts for the draconian reform of university funding are confused and specious. They would certainly fail any exam in logic. Rather than reason, they depend on various forms of mediatised rhetoric, like Orwell’s newspeak, or doublespeak, or what the writer Steve Poole has called unspeak—although sometimes they amount to simple misrepresentation, derived from hasty and inadequate statistics, or falsehood resulting from denial. Continue reading
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/19471489[/vimeo]
In On Campus, Terry Eagleton speaks at a meeting at the London School of Economics about the contradiction between education for society and education for the economy. South of the river, the Vice Chancellor of Roehampton University, Paul O’Prey, considers the implications of government measures with colleagues.
With Terry Eagleton, Paul O’Prey, Joe Kelleher, Nina Power, Laurie Penny and Ruby Hirsch.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/19161582[/vimeo]
Reprinted from the New Statesman:
Last autumn, in response to the coalition’s spending cuts, Britain saw the emergence of the first mass protest movement in a generation. One result has been an outpouring of online video, giving a very different picture to the one presented by the mainstream media, but making it hard sometimes to see the wood for the trees.
To that end, the New Statesman is pleased to announce a collaboration with the documentary film-maker Michael Chanan, who has been filming some of the events fuelling the protest movement. Focusing on the arts, both within and outside academia, he is building up a picture of the movement as it develops.
Michael, whose previous films include Detroit Ruin of a City and The American Who Electrified Russia, will be posting videos on our Cultural Capital blog every week or two, leading to a feature-length campaign documentary.
Note: This video includes the three previous video blogs listed on the Video Blogs page.
For the last few weeks I’ve been out and about filming moments in the developing protest movement against the unconscionable coalition government and its programme of swingeing cuts in every department of social provision. The result has been a number of short videos posted here on Putney Debater. I’ve now been invited by the New Statesman to become its first video blogger, so from now on, that’s where my videos will be posted first (although I’ll continue to post written blogs here). Here’s the first one, which condenses the videos posted here previously with some additional material.
The idea I have is to build up a picture of the movement as it evolves, so I’m working on the basis that I’ll end up with a documentary record of three or four months of struggle. The method is simple: to return to Glauber Rocha’s formula for Cinema Novo in Brazil—to go and make films with a camera in the hand and an idea in the head. (Too simple for the section on methodology in a grant application, and there’s no time for that anyway, so I’m not making one.)