MeCCSA 2019 - University of Stirling

What’s happening to the public sphere?

The idea and ideal of a public sphere has long been key to debate and investigation in the field of political communication broadly understood. But in what terms is it still viable?  Largely developed in the context of the democratisation of national political spaces bounded by states, public sphere thinking has also been extended to supra- and sub-state levels. Shaped by the era of mass communication, how is it faring in a digital world marked by ‘post-truth’, exclusionary nationalisms, profound socio-economic divisions, global cyber warfare, conflict over the uses of data, the transformative impact of social media, and regulatory overstretch?

Cinema of Constraints: Continuity and Change in Contemporary Filmmaking from and about the Arab World and Iran

This paper is work-in-progress for the book I am currently writing on freedom of expression and contemporary cinema from and about Iran and the Arab world. The last decade in particular has been very turbulent for the region which has experienced numerous crises that, nonetheless, appear to have inspired a creative outpouring not only in cinema but across the arts. This paper, and the forthcoming book, explores the dynamic between crisis, creativity and constraint in an attempt to understand what forms cinematic creativity takes in independent documentary and fiction filmmaking from and about the region. In so doing it offsets the idea that crisis offers opportunities for change and creativity with an emphasis on the effects of limitations on freedom of expression.

In international news, the Middle East is frequently portrayed as a crisis ‘hotspot’. Filmmakers frequently attempt to go beyond standard news images and narratives of crisis, often having to overcome numerous constraints and personal risks to tell their stories. Unlike most discussions of freedom of expression in the cinema, which focus exclusively on censorship, this paper explores an array of different risks and limitations confronted by filmmakers, and the changing creative strategies they are using to respond to, or work within, these constraints. I try to forge a more nuanced understanding of the challenges filmmakers face, one that does not reduce free expression to the presence or lack of censorship, by discussing the range of freedom of expression, that is the multiple possibilities and limitations which vary geographically and change under different political circumstances. 

Drawing on Jon Elster’s work on the artistic use of constraints and Mette Hjort’s writings on the phenomenon of risk in filmmaking, as well as interviews conducted with a number of filmmakers, I argue that every film is a product of its constraints. I expand and modify Elster’s typology of constraints to show the kinds of constraints that face filmmakers making films in or about the Middle East, including external constraints that are political, economic, technological, cultural, religious, linguistic, security-related, spatial and temporal, and stylistic constraints, which can be externally imposed, chosen or invented. Some of these constraints will be recognizable to independent filmmakers everywhere, but others illuminate a regionally-specific relationship between crisis, creativity and constraint.

Furthermore, the constraints leave material traces on the creative strategies that filmmakers adopt, such as directing via Skype in the Syrian warzone in the documentary Little Gandhi (2016), using animation as a substitute for live-action re-enactment in The Green Wave (2010) (a documentary about the Green Movement in Iran) and re-creating West Bank locations through CGI in the science fiction film Nation Estate (2013) to avoid risks of on-location shooting, including confiscation of footage and equipment by Israeli security. While filmmakers continue to find creative ways around constraints by tackling topics indirectly, I will argue that, dependent on the permissible range of freedom of expression and the possibilities afforded by digital technologies, their creative strategies have also become increasingly direct and less allegorical.

Genre and Geopolitics: Economies of Fact, Finance, and the Body

The financial crises of 2008, the austerity measures that followed, and the global protests that arose in their wake have pushed economic justice to the fore in recent years. This is not a newly emergent phenomenon, but one enabled by prior decades of protest and a shift in the discourse that pushed poverty and its symptoms into the realm of politics. Documentaries have played a crucial role in this shift.  They combat the ‘media amnesia’ in financial reportage, which Laura Basu argues rewrites the crises to support the conditions that gave rise to them. In addition, they produce a framework for seeing injustice, rendering visible the invisible flows of capital, and making perceptible the violations wrought by an ostensibly neutral system. This is no simple process as economic violence does not fit the victim perpetrator paradigm, and the documentary’s own pretence to neutrality, rationality, and objectivity risks mimicking the sober discourses of capital and economics. But, as this paper argues, hybrid documentaries (for instance, John and Jane, Cleveland versus Wall Street, and Come to Me Paradise) negotiate these challenges by seizing and destabilising the authority of the mode whilst placing its subjects at the centre of a changing formal landscape thus performing the effects of coercive systemic forces on the human caught within.

The Media and Informed Citizenship: Examining the Nordic Model 

The common ideal of democracy rests on the notion of informed and active citizenship. It is further assumed that the major source of the information needed for democratic participation and decision-making is the media in their various forms. From this it follows that those societies with the most informed and active citizens are also the most democratic societies if measured by equality, wellbeing and security. In most, if not all, international rankings based on these indicators, the Nordic countries are among the top performers. This ranking also includes their media systems (sometimes called the Nordic welfare media or democratic corporatist model).

However, as in most other European countries, inequality and social polarization are on the rise in Nordic societies. Xenophobia and ethnic discrimination are openly displayed. Budget cuts in education, science, social services and healthcare most profoundly affect the most vulnerable members of society.

How can we explain the incongruity that the world’s best-informed people, who are also supposed to be the most democratic, are acting against the values – equality, wellbeing and security – for which they are famous all over the world? What seems to be the problem?

If we assume that the media system is the mainspring of informed and active citizenship, there are two possibilities: (1) The Nordic media systems function well, and the citizens are well informed. This means that people make discriminatory choices voluntarily and consciously on the basis of the best information. We don’t like this option, however, as we like to believe that informed citizens make only good and right choices. Alternatively, (2) the Nordic media systems don’t function well, and the citizens are not well informed. This means that people make discriminatory choices without full knowledge of their consequences (i.e., unconsciously).

In my presentation, I will follow the latter path of inquiry. I will critically discuss our understanding of the relationship between the media and democracy. I claim that, as media scholars, we are biased toward an outdated normative concept of the media that needs to be updated, a project for which I intend to offer some conceptual tools.