Occupy This!
by Steve Dollar 
One thing documentary filmmakers have to be good at is knowing to jump when a story's hot. Occupy Wall Street bubbled under the radar for a while before it became a media lighting rod. On Oct. 1 last year,
Audrey Ewell was hanging out at home in Brooklyn, working on her current film project, with the laptop streaming a live video of the march onto the Brooklyn Bridge that became the first flashpoint in the movement. "Arrests were happening and people were chanting and a giant scene was going on," she recalls, "and the guy who was filming it said his batteries were running out and all of a sudden the screen cut out. At this point I was completely addicted. I switched on the news and there was nothing happening. A black out."
Ewell's last film, the 2008 documentary
Until the Light Takes Us [
listen to our podcast], delved into the Norwegian black metal scene. The Occupy movement was a vastly different cultural eruption, and the filmmaker was far from alone in her compulsion to get as much of committed to video as she could. Within a few days, Ewell had organized a network of shooters across the country that now includes more than 75 participants, all capturing footage at various Occupy Wall Street actions around the country. Tonight, Ewell and co-producer
Aaron Aites and Williams Cole will host a sneak preview of submitted footage via the online exhibitor
Constellation with the modest $3.99 viewing fee going towards the group's already successful
Kickstarter campaign.
Ewell characterizes
99% (The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film) as an "amazing �ber film" whose structure reflects the model of the movement it documents. It's also only the most ambitious of any number of collective and individual efforts to use expanded media resources to occupy cinema. As
Michael Galinsky, whose activist-driven documentary
The Battle for Brooklyn is shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination, puts it, stating what's immediately obvious, the crowded Zuccotti Park encampment attracted "more cameras than people." Along with Galinsky and partner Suki Hawley's Rumur outfit, it's also drawn groups like the
Meerkat Media collective, The Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective and New Left Media, and individual filmmakers such as
Jem Cohen,
Jonathan Demme and
Ken Jacobs, the sagacious avant-garde luminary who has been working on an OWS document shot in 3-D!
Whether the work tilts toward pure advocacy or achieves a more nuanced perspective isn't only a contemporary aesthetic or ethical choice. It's a question that defines the core of the form. "There's often a gap in regards to political movements in terms of the types of documentation that exist," said Cohen, a distinctive filmmaker with a commitment to urban street photography whose
OWS newsreels ran as a series before selected features at the IFC Center last fall. "There's always a predictable pull where you have a situation that needs some immediate advocacy and what you usually get is a kind of agitprop. You'll also have some very long-term projects that may be more in depth. But they also are driven by a sense of advocacy or the social issue documentary tradition, in which there is usually a notion that it's meant to be a tool to change people's minds or a celebration among people who are already in agreement. What I feel is often lacking is a more observational approach, which has to do with another documentary tradition. It's not about claiming objectivity but recognizing that all events are to some degree ambiguous, and that there are positives and negatives. It's more about bringing something to people who are not able to be there and letting them develop their own feelings about it."
Cohen dedicated each of his reels to poetic documentarians like
Dziga Vertov, Joris Ivens and
Chris Marker?at 90, a strong supporter of Occupy movements around the world?whose films were "progressive and very much politically engaged but non-propagandistic." But he emphasizes that it's just his approach. Let a million pixels bloom. "I think the whole point of OWS is encouraging people to reinvent democracy from different angles and from their own terms," he says. "On one hand, it's a very communal project and on the other hand, it's about individuals who are not necessarily in agreement finding ways to see things anew."
Demme, who has filmed extensively in New Orleans charting the city's recovery after the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, began visiting Zuccotti Park in October, and has compiled a series of videos that he posts to his
Clinica Estetico page on Vimeo. The filmmaker remains best known for
The Silence of the Lambs, but also has made a series of documentaries focused variously on rock musicians like
Neil Young and
Robyn Hitchcock as well as themes of
Haitian democracy and other social issues. Yet, he was knocked out by a
YouTube clip of an Oct. 25 "mic-check" at the New York City Department of Education (
Occupy the DOE).
"This is so well-filmed, so well-edited and it's available to see within, what, 36 hours, 48 hours of the event," he says. "How were they able to shoot it so well? My stuff is so raggedy. We shoot it on the fly. We cut it really fast because we want it to be vaguely current. And this thing just looked beautifully filmed." Demme says he started shooting out of sheer enthusiasm, without any long-term project specifically in mind, tracing a link between the young volunteers he met who were rebuilding post-Katrina New Orleans and the core motivators of the Occupy movement. "It makes me feel connected to a movement that I believe very much in. Any filmmakers who are providing alternative information to what we're getting in the more straightforward media are very valuable."
As Occupy moves into its next phase, the flood of media will begin to coalesce into a mosaic, but one that hopefully will have an organic vitality, not simply enliven the greatest-hits reel of the new millennium. For filmmakers like Demme, the footage is an act of engagement as well as a document. "There's a sense of history in the air. Nothing big has to happen. If you have a chance you go down. You experience it. You film. You cut something together. You share it with whoever happens to be interested in seeing what went on that day."
Posted by ahillis at January 7, 2012 10:29 AM
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