The organizers of the symposium »Camcorder Revolution: Video activists, politically committed documentaries and international public« obviously believed that Gil Scott-Heron is wrong, and that the revolution is indeed televised. The course of this Cologne conference, organized by the local SK Cultural Foundation in collaboration with the Stuttgart Documentary Film Centre and the regional Dokumentarfilminitiative im Filmbüro NW, sometimes seemed guided by the expectation that video activism only achieves its destiny on television. The event, which took place from March 3 to March 5, was accordingly opened with a TV documentation that aims to present video activists to a television audience. In Katerina Cizek and Peter Wintonick’s »Seeing Is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights and the News«, the most space is taken up by the work of the New York organization Witness, which provides political activists in the Third World with camcorders and gives training in how to use them. This can lead to a preventive video surveillance from below, such as when Philippine farmers involved in a fight over land »arm« themselves with a camera to check the propensity to violence of bandits paid by big landowners. As co-director Cizek stressed in the talk that followed, the »video advocacy« championed by Witness has now taken on a variety of forms, including not least the documentation of violations of human rights with the primary aim of using it in court. In other cases, however, publicity is sought not only through the »streaming« of video material on the Internet, but also by means of the mass media.
This admittedly stands in stark contrast to the strategies of other video activists, such as those from kanalB, whose characteristic motto is »Replace conventional television«.

As Bärbel Schönafinger explained, this Berlin group made up of five unpaid activists focuses on the time-honoured concept of a counter-public that is to be brought into being by means of self-produced videos and the productions of like-minded people. These works are distributed via the group’s own web site and as a video magazine on VHS.
The German edition of indymedia – probably the best-known multi-media network for independent and alternative media – pursues a similar strategy. It aims to create a counter-public on the Internet by means of the »open posting« of videos (as well as text and audio items), with »moderation collectives« managing the flow of information without intervening in an editorial capacity. The representative of indymedia present at the conference, who introduced himself simply as Sven, provided an example of the degree of interaction this operative use of media can attain in the best – but probably also rarest – case: during the Security Conference in 2003, he held a revealing interview with the press spokesman of the Munich police that was edited and put on the Internet within hours. Here, it met with such an international response that, in reaction to the protest messages arriving via Internet, the Munich authorities freed demonstrators who had been arrested as a preventive measure.

Some people in the audience however criticized the video activists for not even trying to gain the broad audience that television broadcasts may have provided, interpreting this as unproductive self-isolation. In response, Oliver Lerone Schulz from the Berlin group laborB called for the abolition of the dichotomy (rather simplistically described) of counter-public and public. As part of its union work, laborB regularly presents political films and videos (some self-produced),something which is mostly meant to help the local work force in understanding itself as a part of »global labour«. From this perspective, Schulz emphasized the urgency of the unanswered question of how to create the »international public« mentioned in the subtitle of the conference. This has not (yet) been achieved by the Internet, as the Indian filmmaker Rahul Roy reminded participators; the Internet does not represent a distribution channel for him owing to a lack of broad-band infrastructure in India. According to Roy, the revolution that has regularly been proclaimed since the invention of the camcorder twenty years ago should result from the fact that media consumers also become potential producers because of this technology’s relative affordability and easy operation. But, he says, it would only be realized if the majority of the world population also determined the majority of representations both of themselves and of the Western minority.

http://www.laborb.org
http://www.witness.org
http://www.kanalb.org
http://www.de.indymedia.org

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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