Journal articles on the topic 'Guerrilla film'

James Williams considers how and why John Ridley's acclaimed 2017 television series Guerrilla (Sky Atlantic/Showtime) 'reradicalizes' early black British radical cinema, specifically Horace Ové's 1975 film, Pressure, the first feature-length work by a black British director. For Guerrilla's fictional narrative about a Black Power terrorist cell in London in 1972 pursues an option that Pressure, about the gradual radicalization of a young black British teenager in West London, resolutely avoids, namely militant violence. A close comparative study of both works in terms of characterization, cinematic style, the depiction of urban space, and the representation of violence highlights the originality and overlooked significance of Ové's pioneering film. It also suggests that Ridley reinvents the story of Black Power in early 1970s Britain in order to intervene in more contemporary debates taking place in the US about diversity and the function of revolutionary violence to effect social change.

The guerrillero towers over the history of Colombian cinema for their glaring absence. Despite the country's decades-long civil war, the rank-and-file members of the armed militias that have dominated the local cultural imaginary in daily newscasts about massacres, kidnappings, and rural confrontations have been mostly absent from the canon of Colombian film. Using Alejandro Landes's 2019 film, Monos, as his case study, Manuel Betancourt offers a cursory history of the guerrilla film in the Latin American country (and the attendant conversation it's sparked within Colombia's own film critic community), arguing that a new wave of Colombian filmmakers are marrying nonfiction and novelistic techniques to finally grapple with a figure that's long been a punchline at best and a nebulous ‘Other’ at worst.

<p><em>Jenderal Soedirman</em> (2015) is a historical film that reveals the story of General Soedirman during the guerrilla war to maintain the Indonesia’s independence. The film was sponsored directly by the army (Kartika Eka Paksi Foundation and TNI) and involved the army in its making process. Therefore, the historical representation of this film is a history from the army’s point of view. Referring to Gramsci, a film can be seen as a hegemonic apparatus that contributes to the process of negotiating the interests of dominant groups. This study attempted to elaborate such representations of civil-military relationships and masculinity construction contained in<em> Jenderal Soedirman</em>. It used a qualitative approach and employed the encoding/decoding paradigm proposed by Stuart Hall. The results showed that the civil-military relationships in this film were mostly dominated by military roles. Masculinity in this film was formed by combining the concept of “Kiai” (Muslim clerics) and military patriotism wrapped in Islamic expressions.</p>

Randy Moore's horror film Escape from Tomorrow (2013) was shot at Disneyland, Epcot, and Disney World, without either the authorization or knowledge of the Disney corporation. The result is a fascinating example of guerrilla filmmaking that makes use of gothic conventions to craft a new narrative of corporate horror. Both the film and its promotional materials narrate the vicissitudes of countering a mass-culture corporation that has become synonymous with American fantasies and imaginaries. And yet, however revolutionary his methods and overall narrative, Moore relies on long-familiar images of monstrous femininity to convey the circumstances of mass-culture seduction. The end result is less an attack on the institution of Disney itself than a gothic account of the parks' co-option by a dangerous female consumerism that nullifies male resistance or escape.

Abstract Using developments in poetry, music, and cinema as case studies, this article examines the relationship between left-wing politics and cultural production during the long 1960s in Turkey. Intellectual and artistic pursuits flourished alongside trade unionism, student activism, peasant organizing, guerrilla movements. This article explores the convergences between militants and artists, arguing for the centrality of culture in the social movements of the period. It focuses on three revealing debates: between the modernist İkinci Yeni poets and young socialist poets, between left-wing protest rockers and supporters of folk music, and between proponents of radical art film and those of cinematic “social realism”.

Abstract In this article the author builds on the idea of Bangladeshi national cinema as human rights cinema to explore its role in documenting and engendering understanding about women, vulnerability, and agency within a Muktijuddho gender ideology. Drawing from feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins’s conceptualization of a Black gender ideology, the author proposes that in cinematic traditions, an idealized Muktijuddho gender ideology influences and entrenches gendered social norms and reinforces perceptions of masculinity and femininity in war. These perceptions serve to justify patterns of legibility, recognition, and rejection for discursive practices of national inclusion and exclusion. Specifically, the author analyzes Nasiruddin Yousuff’s Guerrilla (2011), an award-winning film featuring the story of Bilqis Banu, a middle-class, Muslim female combatant who takes on at once the national struggle for self-determination and the gender struggle against patriarchal cultural norms. The film opens up new ways of imagining the category birangona and elicits a deeper appreciation of differentiated agency, vulnerability, and humanity.

LaburpenaAzken hamarkadetan, zinema iraganeko dokumentu bihurtu da testu idatzian eta dokumentu ofizialetan jasotako informazioa osatzeko iturri gisa. Baina XX. mendean eztabaida luzeak izan dira gai honen inguruan, zineak eta historiografiak mesfidantzaz begiratzen bait zioten elkarri. Gaur egun, ordea, autore gehienak ados daude zinema iraganeko dokumentua dela esatean. Zentzu horretan, iraganean girotutako film bati ezin zaio exijitu erabat zehatza eta egiazkoa izatea, baizik eta beti egiazkoa izatea. Silencio rotoren bidez, Armendarizek makiaren borroka antifaxista gogoratzen du. Lan honetan aipatutako filmaren eraikuntza narratiboaren hiru elementu nagusiak (pertsonaia, akzioa eta gatazka) identifikatuz eta aztertuz makiaren irudikapena aztertu nahi da. Beste autore batzuek Silencio roto filma aztertu dutela jakinda, lan honek ikuspegi berri batetik heldu nahi dio gaiari, aurreko ikerketen osagarri gisa: zuzendariak 40ko hamarkadako gerrillaren testuinguruan islatu dituen emakume garaituen bizipen basatiak.Gako-hitzak: fikzioa; frankismoa; oroimen historikoa; ikus-entzunezko narratiba; indarkeriaResumenEn las últimas décadas el cine se ha convertido en un documento del pasado como fuente para completar la información contenida en el texto escrito y en los documentos oficiales. No obstante, desde el siglo XX se han producido largas discusiones sobre este tema, ya que el cine y la historiografía se miraban desconfiadamente. En la actualidad, sin embargo, la mayoría de los autores coinciden en que el cine es un documento del pasado. En este sentido, a una película ambientada en el pasado no se le puede pedir que sea absolutamente exacta y veraz, sino que sea siempre sincera. Con Silencio roto, Armendáriz recuerda la lucha antifascista del maqui. En este trabajo se pretende analizar la representación del maqui mediante la identificación y análisis de los tres elementos principales de la construcción narrativa de la película: personajes, acción y conflicto. Sabiendo que otros autores han estudiado dicha película, este trabajo pretende abordar el tema desde una nueva perspectiva como complemento a investigaciones anteriores: las vivencias brutales de las vencidas que el director ha reflejado en el contexto de la guerrilla de los años 40.Palabras-clave: ficción; franquismo; memoria histórica; narrativa audiovisual; violenciaAbstractIn recent decades, cinema has become a document of the past as a source to complete the information contained in the written text and official documents. But since the twentieth century there have been long discussions on this subject, since the cinema and historiography were looked distrustfully. At present, however, most of the authors agree that cinema is a document of the past. In this sense, a film set in the past cannot be asked to be absolutely accurate and truthful, but is always sincere. With Silencio roto, Armendáriz recalls the antifascist struggle of the machine. This paper aims to analyze the representation of the machine by identifying and analyzing the three main elements of the narrative construction of the reference film: characters, action and conflict. Knowing that other authors have studied this film, this paper aims to address the subject from a new perspective, as a complement to previous research. Thus, the director has retaken the question of the guerrilla of the 40's, taking into account the brutal experiences of the defeated.Keywords: fiction; Francoism; historical memory; audiovisual narrative; violence

The artwork of Raphael Montañez Ortiz (b. 1934) represents the broad sweep of new art forms since the 1950s, their imbrication with concurrent intellectual and social movements, and the productive tension between object-based and performance-based art. Starting out as an Abstract Expressionist painter in the late 1950s, Ortiz proceeded to participate in the development of several new modes: recycled film and music, mixed-media sculpture, installation, performance art, guerrilla theater, piano destruction concerts, and computer art. Yet despite his presence and impact, he remains missing from art history. This essay argues that Ortiz’s earliest destructions—recycled films made in 1957 and 1958—challenge the accepted history of US avant-garde film. These films were concurrent with Bruce Conner’s A MOVIE (1958), yet signaled an entirely different direction than the diagnostic and rational modernism of Conner and other avant-garde filmmakers. Ortiz turned to destruction, non-Western ritual, and the unconscious while also engaging film as an object rather than a text, bringing the medium into dialogue with the shifting status of the art object and the colonial underpinnings of modern art. The essay explores Ortiz’s intellectual and artistic development, not toward a psychological profile but rather as one element of a broader historical moment. The text moves between the experiential and the contextual, the individual and the societal, the art object and everything else outside the white cube, exploring the relations between them. In this way, telling the story of Ortiz also tells a constellation of simultaneous histories that overlap around his life. RESUMEN El arte de Raphael Montañez Ortiz (nacido en 1934 en Estados Unidos) representa el amplio abanico de nuevas formas de arte a partir de la década de 1950, su imbricación con movimientos intelectuales y sociales concurrentes, y la tensión productiva entre el arte basado en objetos y el arte basado en performance. Al comenzar como pintor expresionista abstracto a fines de la década de 1950, Ortiz participó en el desarrollo de nuevas formas: cine y música reciclados, escultura de medios mixtos, instalación, performance artístico, teatro de guerrillas, conciertos de destrucción de pianos y arte computacional. A pesar de la presencia e impacto de Ortiz en las artes, sigue siendo un artista poco visible en la historia. Este ensayo sostiene que las primeras destrucciones de Ortiz, las películas recicladas hechas en 1957 y 1958, ponen en cuestión la historia aceptada del cine de vanguardia de los Estados Unidos. Estas películas coinciden con A MOVIE (1958) de Bruce Conner, pero señalan una dirección completamente diferente a la del diagnóstico y el modernismo racional de Conner y otros cineastas de vanguardia. Ortiz recurre a la destrucción, los rituales no occidentales y el inconsciente, al tiempo que estudia el cine como un objeto en lugar de un texto, poniéndolo así en diálogo con el estado cambiante del objeto artístico y los fundamentos coloniales del arte moderno. El ensayo explora el desarrollo intelectual y artístico de Ortiz, no con el fin de realizar un perfil psicológico, sino como elemento de un momento histórico más amplio. El ensayo se mueve entre lo experiencial y lo contextual, lo individual y lo social, el objeto artístico y todo lo demás fuera del cubo blanco, explorando las relaciones entre ellos. De esta manera, contar la historia de Ortiz también es contar una constelación de historias simultáneas que se superponen alrededor de su vida. RESUMO A obra de Raphael Montañez Ortiz (n. 1934, Estados Unidos) representa a ampla variedade de novas formas de arte desde os anos 1950, sua imbricação com movimentos intelectuais e sociais simultâneos e a tensão produtiva entre arte baseada em objeto e performance. Começando como um pintor expressionista abstrato no final dos anos 1950, Ortiz participou do desenvolvimento de novas formas: cinema e música reciclados, escultura de mídia mista, instalação, performance, teatro de guerrilha, concertos de destruição de piano e arte computacional. Apesar da presença e do impacto de Ortiz nas artes, ele continua sendo um artista ausente da história. Este ensaio argumenta que as primeiras destruições de Ortiz, filmes reciclados feitos em 1957 e 1958, desafiam a história aceita do filme de vanguarda dos EUA. Esses filmes são concomitantes com A MOVIE (1958) de Bruce Conner, mas sinalizam uma direção totalmente diferente do diagnóstico e do modernismo racional de Conner e de outros cineastas de vanguarda. Ortiz recorre à destruição, ao ritual não-ocidental e ao inconsciente, ao mesmo tempo em que engaja o filme como um objeto em vez de um texto, colocando o filme em diálogo com o status cambiante do objeto de arte e os alicerces coloniais da arte moderna. O ensaio explora o desenvolvimento intelectual e artístico de Ortiz, não em relação a um perfil psicológico, mas sim como um elemento de um momento histórico mais amplo. O ensaio se move entre experiencial e contextual, individual e social, o objeto de arte e tudo o mais fora do cubo branco, explorando as relações entre eles. Desta forma, contar a história de Ortiz é também contar uma constelação de histórias simultâneas que se sobrepõem em torno de sua vida.

Elia Suleiman, born in Nazareth in 1960, is the first Palestinian filmmaker to be selected for the "official competition" of the Cannes International Film Festival: his Divine Intervention: A Chronicle of Love and Pain was not only one of the twenty-one films out of 939 entries chosen for the fifty-fifth festival in May 2002, it also won the Jury Prize and the Interna tional Critics Prize. Suleiman had already come to the attention of the 2001 Cannes Festival, where his short Cyber Palestine was shown at the "Directors' Fortnight." Though without formal training, Suleiman has been winning prizes since his first film, a short entitled Introduction to the End of an Argument, won the award for best experimental documentary-USA in 1991. This was followed by his 1992 short Homage by Assassination, which won a Rockefeller Prize. By the time he made his first full-length movie, Chronicle of a Disappearance (which won the prize for the best first-feature at the 1996 Venice International Film Festival), his style was already well developed: a progression of sketches——witty, surreal, ironic, often devastating——and a virtual absence of narrative; in the case of Chronicle, a main character (a filmmaker called E.S., played by Suleiman himself) appears in a number of the episodes, most of which shed harsh light on life in Nazareth, but his presence seems more accidental than part of a storyline. Film critic Stanley Kaufman of the New Republic called Chronicle of a Disappearance "a film of the absurd. If Ionesco had been a Palestinian and a filmmaker, he might have made it." While his recent film, Divine Intervention, is still very much an assemblage of vignettes, it does nonetheless have a semblance of narrative: a "central character" (again, a filmmaker named E.S., again played by Suleiman) shuttles between his hometown of Nazareth, where his father, beset by business woes, has a heart attack and lies dying; his apartment in East Jerusalem, where he is working on a screenplay; and a checkpoint between East Jerusalem and Ramallah, where he holds tender but wordless meetings in a parked car with his lover, a Ramallah woman hemmed in by borders and closures. In one of the checkpoint scenes that combines the visual beauty, whimsy, humor, and satire characteristic of the film, the hero inflates a large red balloon bearing the smiling visage of Yasir Arafat and releases it, creating havoc among the soldiers. Taking advantage of the ensuing confusion, the hero and his lover manage to speed through the checkpoint, while the camera follows the balloon as it soars over the landscape toward Jerusalem, floating over the rooftops of the Old City and past the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to a light on the Dome of the Rock. When Divine Intervention won the Jury Prize at Cannes, the New York Times (27 May 2002) called it "a Keatonesque exploration of the large and small absurdities of Palestinian life under occupation." And indeed, despite the humor, moments of tenderness, and laugh-out-loud sight gags, the film presents an all-too-realistic picture, pitiless and meticulous, of the devastating impact of occupation on Palestinian society both in Israel and in the occupied territories. Suleiman is witty and light, but dead serious; allergic to preaching, propaganda , and clichéé, but highly political. The underlying grimness of the film is relieved not only by the humor but by resort to fantasy: the hero, cruising a long a highway, casually tosses an apricot pit out of his car window and a tank blows up; a stunningly beautiful woman (the hero's lover) strides through a checkpoint, mesmerizing the soldiers with her fierce beauty, and a military watchtower collapses. The most elaborate such sequence is the spectacular "Ninja scene," a violently beautiful and stylized choreography wherein the same woman is imagined as a guerrilla fighter who dispatches (seemingly bloodlessly) a whole phalanx of Israeli sharpshooters who have been firing at her effigy in a shooting range. The meaning of the images, whose connectedness one to the next is not always immediately apparent, can leave the spectator temporarily puzzled; the New York Times of 7 October 2002 called them "cinematic riddles and visual puns, delivered in elegant deadpan." The cumulative impact, however, is clear, and the images themselves linger long after the film ends. New York Times critic A. O. Scott, while noting the film's "appearance of randomness," adds that there is "an oblique, elegant sense of structure here" and that "the interlocking series of setups, punch lines and non sequiturs add up to something touching, provocative, and wonderfully strange." Divine Intervention currently is being shown throughout Europe and will be opening in the Middle East and Israel in January 2003. Shown at the New York Film Festival in October 2002, it will open commercially in the United States in January. Suleiman, in Paris for the opening of his film, was interviewed by Linda Butler, associate editor of JPS, on 26 September 2002.

Guerrilla marketing is an innovative approach to communicate with customers and to capture their attention essentially due to its inherent creativity, unconventional media, and low cost. Despite the interesting contributions in the literature on this topic, most of what is known about guerrilla marketing is confined to its use and impact on consumers. This study aims to fill a gap identified in the guerrilla marketing literature by conducting an exploratory research study on the propensity of performing guerrilla marketing campaigns in a Business-to-Business (B2B) context. The research objectives of this paper are (i) identifying the perceptions of B2B managers on guerrilla marketing campaigns and (ii) exploring determinants of the adoption of guerrilla marketing campaigns targeted at corporate customers.We present the results of a qualitative research study comprising 12 semi-structured interviews with managers of different business areas. A content analysis was performed using Nvivo software.Participants in this study demonstrated that B2B managers recognize and value the advantages associated with guerrilla communication, which is in many instances seen as useful and viable for the B2B sector. The propensity for adoption is dependent on internal factors such as corporate culture, managers’ and collaborators’ profiles, risk-proneness, market share, and product innovativeness, but also on the sector’s usual practices of innovation and communication. Guerrilla marketing campaigns are more appropriate for attracting new B2B customers and need to be carefully adapted to the targets' profiles and preferences.

Purpose The advent of social media brought a new perspective for guerrilla marketing since it allows ads to reach more people through the internet. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of guerrilla marketing in social media on brand image. Design/methodology/approach A conceptual model was developed based on the information acceptance model (IACM). The research model was validated through structural equation modelling based on the surveys of 385 university students. Findings The results support the proposed model and confirm that guerrilla marketing in social media has a positive effect on both functional and symbolic brand image. Research limitations/implications This study was conducted with university students. This sample was deemed appropriate since the study had to be conducted with people who use social media. However, although the age group of university students constitutes the majority of social media users, they may not fully represent the whole population. Also, this study showed four guerrilla marketing examples to participants before they commenced filling in the questionnaire. Although the authors selected the most generic guerrilla advertisements during the pilot tests and eliminated the ones which were difficult to understand, this can still be considered as limitations of the study. Practical implications This study has both theoretical and managerial implications. First, most of the guerrilla marketing studies focus on consumers and neglect possible impacts on brands. In order to fulfil this gap in the literature, this study investigates the influence of guerrilla marketing in brand image. Besides, this study contributes to IACM by expanding its scope through testing its determinants on “brand image”. It proves that IACM is valid for use in different contexts. On the managerial side, this study provides marketers with a frame of reference to understand the information adoption process of guerrilla marketing on social media. Originality/value Current studies regarding the influence of guerrilla marketing mostly focus on consumers, where the possible impacts on brands have been relatively neglected. This study attempts to fill this gap by focussing on the brand image.

This article seeks to unveil the construction of the discourse of violence in liberation war films. It uses a South African film that deals with the anti-apartheid war launched by Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) guerrillas. Violence is represented by the war. The article borrows from the input of psychologists such as Baumester, Polaschek, Whitehead and King, who have written on violence, with a view to analysing the psychological construction of violence. The article argues that violence does not just command negative readings in the film; rather violence is seen as ambivalent and necessary. The article argues that there is a connection between violence and the idea of nation. It is through violence that nations reinforce notions of heroism, patriotism, villainy, pride and honour. It reveals how violence creates a cohesive element that binds a nation together. The article also analyses the relationship between masculinity and violence with a view to pointing out how masculinity and violence are linked to the nation through the concepts of heroism and sacrifice.

A linguagem da performance dialoga com a publicidade e propaganda, ao passo que essas três vertentes se relacionam com o homem como um fazedor de arte e que existe num tempo/espaço próprio. Através dos fundamentos da arte da performance, da publicidade de guerrilha e dos conceitos da propaganda, a pesquisa expõe os diálogos dessas comunicações provocativas e expressivas no âmbito social e da expressão humana. Percorre-se o sentido dos elementos tomados para observação: a encenação “Arte e Existência: uma performance artaudiana” e a campanha de propaganda de guerrilha do filme “The Dark Knight”, nomeada “Why So Serious?”. O olhar comparativo entre as duas produções é desenvolvido a partir de um diálogo entre as linguagens adotadas e as ideologias na qual as duas se baseiam

In her 2018 documentary Torre das Donzelas (Maidens’ Tower), Susanna Lira explores the experiences of women who were political prisoners during the dictatorship via interviews and a spatial recreation of the women’s cellblock of the Tiradentes prison, known as the Torre das Donzelas. Lira creatively employs set design and sound as discursive elements that complement the women’s testimony and broaden its portrayal of memory and haunting; moreover, as this article argues, the older women (senhoras) who embody past and present political resistance enable the film to contest conventional expectations regarding guerrillas, political prisoners, and the romantic, masculine notion of revolution.

Durante cuatro temporadas, el régimen franquista suspendió todas las importaciones de películas de la productora norteamericana Columbia. Fue una represalia por haber filmado una película sobre la guerrilla antifranquista titulada Behold a Pale Horse (Fred Zinnemann, 1964). La documentación archivística manejada en el artículo demuestra que la decisión la tomó el ministro de Información y Turismo, Manuel Fraga Iribarne. Pese a su política de apertura, debía evitar que un filme, basado en la vida del maquis Francisco Sabaté, desprestigiase al régimen y, muy en especial, a la Guardia Civil. Y más cuando se iba a celebrar una operación propagandística llamada «XXV Años de Paz».

Most of the films about the revolution and the Soviet­Ukrainian war (1917–1921), made by AUPhCA in 1928–1930, proved to be uninteresting and did not gain big success among the audience. These films were made mostly by the methods of propaganda, posters, without much depth into the essence of the phenomenon, the script was built on a certain pattern — a parallel demonstration of good, brave guerrillas and scornful whites, i.e. on the one hand stupid bourgeois, mocking and torturing their class enemies, on the other hand — smart, heroic, friendly representatives of working class. According to some contemporaries, films about the events of the Soviet­Ukrainian war required other forms, a different embodiment. From naked propaganda, from stencil scheme to a more in­depth identification of the moments of class struggle, from a simplified external reflection of events, to a more specific individualization of the participants of the events. However, these films played an important role in the development of adventure cinema.

Este artigo tem como intuito estudar a obra do Total Refusal, coletivo fundado na Áustria em 2018. O grupo tem como base ações de guerrilha midiáticas que exploram estratégias de intervenção artística em jogos de computador contemporâneos e outros dispositivos de realidade virtual, a partir da apropriação e ressignificação de materiais audiovisuais. O objetivo é investigar os aparatos estético-políticos presentes no filme How to Disappear – Deserting Battlefield (2020). A técnica conhecida como machinima é fundamental para o entender os procedimentos adotados pelo coletivo e será apresentada nesta discussão.

AbstractRiḥlah bayna al-jibāl fi maʿāqil al-thāʾirīn was serialized in the Jaffa newspaper Al-Jāmiʿah al-Islāmiyyah towards the end of the 1936 Palestine revolt. Under the guise of a reportage by a Western journalist, the series successfully defied British censorship and published interviews with guerrilla commanders and rank-and-file rebels, and one of Fawzī al-Qāwuqjī’s communiqués. Following the main trend of literary reportage at that time, the author adopted a viewpoint focused on the rebels’ cause and emphasized the ability of the Arabs of Palestine to face the challenges of modernity. The narrator comments on the skills and virtues of rebel leaders and common people, rejecting the dehumanizing image that colonial officials and Western newspapers were making of them, and romantically depicting the nighttime Palestinian landscape. At the same time, the description of the insurgents’ organization projects the picture of an orderly society, equipped with the institutions and symbols that typically define modern states.

Guided by the Framing Theory, this paper presents the final results of a content analysis performed on a group of news from three cases of environmental popular consultations in Colombia, aiming to find the main generic frames on them to understand how the debate was shaped within the Andean country during 2017. The context of those consultations was that they took place on the first year without armed confrontation, after the peace agreement was signed, with former FARC guerrilla and when the national debate shifted from the war itself to social justice issues. Results showed that all of the collected stories had, at least, three frames that were mainly human interest, focused on portraying the human side of actors involved; conflict, displaying the disagreement between pro and con sides as well as proclaiming winners and or losers; and attribution of responsibility, putting responsibility on actors and groups involved, and offering solutions such as relying on congress or the highest courts to fill the legal gap. These findings confirm that environmental conflicts constitute a new form of crisis in the post-conflict Colombia.

Abstract Mistrust between conflict parties after civil war is a major hurdle to sustainable peace. However, existing research focuses on elite interactions and has not examined the trust relationship between government and rank-and-file members of armed groups, despite their importance for postconflict stability. We use the unexpected decision of the Colombian government to extradite top-level former paramilitary leaders to the United States in 2008 to identify how a peace deal reversal influences ex-combatants’ trust in government. In theory, they may lose trust for instrumental reasons, if they suffer personal costs, or for normative reasons, if they think the government is failing its commitments. Using quasi-experimental survey evidence, we find that extradition decreases trust substantially among ex-paramilitaries, but not in a comparison group of ex-guerrillas not part of the same peace deal. Even though paramilitaries are seen as particularly opportunistic, our evidence suggests that normative rather than instrumentalist considerations led to trust erosion.

Este artigo expõe uma pesquisa historiográfica sobre a visita de Pasolini ao Brasil em março de 1970 com a Maria Callas, vindo da apresentação do filme Medea no festival de cinema de Mar-del-Plata, na Argentina. Os raros vestígios desta visita – cinco poemas no livro Trasumanar e Organizzar, de 1971, em que é citado o Brasil, refletem o pensamento latino-americano e estrangeiro de uma geração espelhado no pensamento de Pasolini para o Terceiro Mundo e na sua experiência pessoal. Retomamos alguns trechos dos poemas com o fim de acrescentar elementos à questão historiográfica mais ampla, do olhar estrangeiro cúmplice das guerrilhas de libertação dos países colonizados, na perspectiva pós-colonial, partindo da visita do polêmico intelectual de esquerda ao solo brasileiro em plena ditadura militar.

Contemporary critics argued that counter-insurgency in Malaya represented more than the defeat of militant communism. Britain's campaign against the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) was seen as resulting from British government collaboration with British capitalists to maintain profits at the expense of the legitimate aspirations of Malayan workers. More recently, it has been argued that the declaration of the emergency in June 1948 was a pre-emptive strike intended to ‘resolve the problem of political control’ and prevent the ‘radical nationalist forces organized around the MCP’ from gaining a nation-wide following. According to this view, government strategy was to ‘manage nationalism’ and ‘control’ decolonization so as to preserve the position of British capital in Malaya. For marxists, the emergency is seen as part of the process of establishing ‘neo-colonialism’. Even for less determinist models, the general complicity between British government and British business in colonial counter-insurgency campaigns is apparently clear. In primary-producing territories like Malaya, the harmony of interests between ‘gentlemanly capitalist’ officials and unofficials (centred on the City of London) ensured that after 1945 ‘coercion tended to be the first resort of policy’. The majority of scholarly output on the emergency has focused on official and guerrilla strategies leaving aside the role of business interests. As a result, the relationship between British business and British government has not been explored in depth. The present article seeks to fill this historiographical gap by reassessing official and commercial interaction in politically disturbed Malaya.

The Mojahedin Khalq Organization was formed in 1965 with an organizational and religious approach and was one of the political groups that fought against both the Pahlavi regime and the Islamic Republic. The main purpose of this group was to oppose the government and their armed methods. In 1971, after the execution of the organization's main leaders, members of the organization came to the conclusion that Islam did not meet the organization's goals for guerrilla and armed operations, and that Marxism could replace Islamic ideology, which were divided into Marxist and religious branches. The religious groups of the Mojahedin Khalq Organization joined Imam Khomeini in 1975, but the Marxist branch, led by Rajavi, fought against the revolution with the idea of seeking supremacy. The main question of this research is how the Mojahedin Khalq Organization has changed its ideological positions and approach to Marxism. In response to this question, it is hypothesized that the Marxist course of the members of the organization gradually began from September 1941 onwards and finally this organization took on a Marxist form and content. This article examines the principles of thought of the Mojahedin Khalq Organization, the process of ideological deviation of the organization and the reason for the failure of the organization and the strategy and performance of this organization after the revolution. The present research has been done using the method of interviews, library and documents in an analytical-descriptive method.

Between 1994 and 2015, militarized aerial fumigation was a central component of US-Colombia antidrug policy. Crop duster planes sprayed a concentrated formula of Monsanto’s herbicide, glyphosate, over illicit crops, and also forests, soils, pastures, livestock, watersheds, subsistence food and human bodies. Given that a national peace agreement was signed in 2016 between FARC-EP guerrillas and the state to end Colombia’s over five decades of war, certain government officials are quick to proclaim aerial fumigation of glyphosate an issue of the past. Rural communities, however, file quejas (complaints or grievances) seeking compensation from the state for the ongoing effects of the destruction of their licit agro-forestry. At the interfaces of feminist science and technology studies and anthropology, this article examines how evidentiary claims are mobilized when war deeply politicizes and moralizes technoscientific knowledge production. By ethnographically tracking the grievances filed by small farmers, I reveal the extent to which evidence circulating in zones of war – tree seedlings, subsistence crops, GPS coordinates and bureaucratic documents – retains (or not) the imprints of violence and toxicity. Given the systematic rejection of compensation claims, farmers engage in everyday material practices that attempt to transform chemically degraded ecologies. These everyday actualizations of justice exist both alongside and outside contestation over the geopolitically backed violence of state law. Rather than simply contrasting everyday acts of justice with denunciatory claims made against the state, farmers’ reparative practices produce an evidentiary ecology that holds the state accountable while also ‘ senti-actuando’ (feel-acting) alternative forms of justice.

Phillip Noyce is one of Australia’s most prominent film makers—a successful feature film director with both iconic Australian narratives and many a Hollywood blockbuster under his belt. Still, his beginnings were quite humble and far from his role today when he grew up in the midst of the counterculture of the late sixties. Millions of young people his age joined the various ‘movements’ of the day after experiences that changed their lives—mostly music but also drugs or fashion. The counterculture was a turbulent time in Sydney artistic circles as elsewhere. Everything looked possible, you simply had to “Do It!”—and Noyce did. He dived head-on into these times and with a voracious appetite for its many aspects—film, theatre, rallies, music, art and politics in general. In fact he often was the driving force behind such activities. Noyce described his personal epiphany occurring in 1968: A few months before I was due to graduate from high school, […] I saw a poster on a telegraph pole advertising American 'underground' movies. There was a mesmerising, beautiful blue-coloured drawing on the poster that I later discovered had been designed by an Australian filmmaker called David Perry. The word 'underground' conjured up all sorts of delights to an eighteen-year-old in the late Sixties: in an era of censorship it promised erotica, perhaps; in an era of drug-taking it promised some clandestine place where marijuana, or even something stronger, might be consumed; in an era of confrontation between conservative parents and their affluent post-war baby-boomer children, it promised a place where one could get together with other like-minded youth and plan to undermine the establishment, which at that time seemed to be the aim of just about everyone aged under 30. (Petzke 8) What the poster referred to was a new, highly different type of film. In the US these films were usually called “underground”. This term originates from film critic Manny Farber who used it in his 1957 essay Underground Films. Farber used the label for films whose directors today would be associated with independent and art house feature films. More directly, film historian Lewis Jacobs referred to experimental films when he used the words “film which for most of its life has led an underground existence” (8). The term is used interchangeably with New American Cinema. It was based on a New York group—the Film-Makers’ Co-operative—that started in 1960 with mostly low-budget filmmakers under the guidance of Jonas Mekas. When in 1962 the group was formally organised as a means for new, improved ways of distributing their works, experimental filmmakers were the dominant faction. They were filmmakers working in a more artistic vein, slightly influenced by the European Avant-garde of the 1920s and by attempts in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In film history, this era is also known as the Third Avant-garde. In their First Statement of the New American Cinema Group, the group drew connections to both the British Free Cinema and the French Nouvelle Vague. They also claimed that contemporary cinema was “morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring” (80). An all-encompassing definition of Underground Film never was available. Sheldon Renan lists some of the problems: There are underground films in which there is no movement and films in which there is nothing but movement. There are films about people and films about light. There are short, short underground films and long, long underground films. There are some that have been banned, and there is one that was nominated for an Academy Award. There are sexy films and sexless films, political films and poetical films, film epigrams and film epics … underground film is nothing less than an explosion of cinematic styles, forms and directions. (Renan 17) No wonder that propelled by frequent serious articles in the press—notably Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice—and regular screenings at other venues like the Film-makers’ Cinemathèque and the Gallery of Modern Art in New York, these films proved increasingly popular in the United States and almost immediately spread like bush fires around the world. So in early September 1968 Noyce joined a sold-out crowd at the Union Theatre in Sydney, watching 17 shorts assembled by Ubu Films, the premier experimental and underground film collective in 1960s Australia (Milesago). And on that night his whole attitude to art, his whole attitude to movies—in fact, his whole life—changed. He remembered: I left the cinema that night thinking, "I’m gonna make movies like that. I can do it." Here was a style of cinema that seemed to speak to me. It was immediate, it was direct, it was personal, and it wasn’t industrial. It was executed for personal expression, not for profit; it was individual as opposed to corporate, it was stylistically free; it seemed to require very little expenditure, innovation being the key note. It was a completely un-Hollywood-like aesthetic; it was operating on a visceral level that was often non-linear and was akin to the psychedelic images that were in vogue at the time—whether it was in music, in art or just in the patterns on your multi-coloured shirt. These movies spoke to me. (Petzke 9) Generally speaking, therefore, these films were the equivalent of counterculture in the area of film. Theodore Roszak railed against “technocracy” and underground films were just the opposite, often almost do-it-yourself in production and distribution. They were objecting to middle-class culture and values. And like counterculture they aimed at doing away with repression and to depict a utopian lifestyle feeling at ease with each imaginable form of liberality (Doggett 469). Underground films transgressed any Hollywood rule and convention in content, form and technique. Mobile hand-held cameras, narrow-gauge or outright home movies, shaky and wobbly, rapid cutting, out of focus, non-narrative, disparate continuity—you name it. This type of experimental film was used to express the individual consciousness of the “maker”—no longer calling themselves directors—a cinematic equivalent of the first person in literature. Just as in modern visual art, both the material and the process of making became part of these artworks. Music often was a dominant factor, particularly Eastern influences or the new Beat Music that was virtually non-existent in feature films. Drug experiences were reflected in imagery and structure. Some of the first comings-out of gay men can be found as well as films that were shown at the appropriately named “Wet Dreams Festival” in Amsterdam. Noyce commented: I worked out that the leading lights in this Ubu Films seemed to be three guys — Aggy Read, Albie Thoms and David Perry […They] all had beards and […] seemed to come from the basement of a terrace house in Redfern. Watching those movies that night, picking up all this information, I was immediately seized by three great ambitions. First of all, I wanted to grow a beard; secondly, I wanted to live in a terrace house in the inner city; and thirdly, I wanted to be a filmmaker. (Ubu Films) Noyce soon discovered there were a lot of people like him who wanted to make short films for personal expression, but also as a form of nationalism. They wanted to make Australian movies. Noyce remembered: “Aggy, Albie and David encouraged everyone to go and make a film for themselves” (Petzke 11). This was easy enough to do as these films—not only in Australia—were often made for next to nothing and did not require any prior education or training. And the target audience group existed in a subculture of people willing to pay money even for extreme entertainment as long as it was advertised in an appealing way—which meant: in the way of the rampaging Zeitgeist. Noyce—smitten by the virus—would from then on regularly attend the weekly meetings organised by the young filmmakers. And in line with Jerry Rubin’s contemporary adage “Do it!” he would immediately embark on a string of films with enthusiasm and determination—qualities soon to become his trademark. All his films were experimental in nature, shot on 16mm and were so well received that Albie Thoms was convinced that Noyce had a great career ahead of him as an experimental filmmaker. Truly alternative was Noyce’s way to finally finance Better to Reign in Hell, his first film, made at age 18 and with a total budget of $600. Noyce said on reflection: I had approached some friends and told them that if they invested in my film, they could have an acting role. Unfortunately, the guy whose dad had the most money — he was a doctor’s son — was also maybe the worst actor that was ever put in front of a camera. But he had invested four hundred dollars, so I had to give him the lead. (Petzke 13) The title was taken from Milton’s poem Paradise Lost (“better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”). It was a film very much inspired by the images, montage and narrative techniques of the underground movies watched at Ubu. Essentially the film is about a young man’s obsession with a woman he sees repeatedly in advertising and the hallucinogenic dreams he has about her. Despite its later reputation, the film was relatively mundane. Being shot in black and white, it lacks the typical psychedelic ingredients of the time and is more reminiscent of the surrealistic precursors to underground film. Some contempt for the prevailing consumer society is thrown in for good measure. In the film, “A youth is persecuted by the haunting reappearance of a girl’s image in various commercial outlets. He finds escape from this commercial brainwashing only in his own confused sexual hallucinations” (Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative). But despite this advertising, so convincingly capturing the “hint! hint!” mood of the time, Noyce’s first film isn’t really outstanding even in terms of experimental film. Noyce continued to make short experimental films. There was not even the pretence of a story in any of them. He was just experimenting with his gear and finding his own way to use the techniques of the underground cinema. Megan was made at Sydney University Law School to be projected as part of the law students’ revue. It was a three-minute silent film that featured a woman called Megan, who he had a crush on. Intersection was 2 minutes 44 seconds in length and shot in the middle of a five-way or four-way intersection in North Sydney. The camera was walked into the intersection and spun around in a continuous circle from the beginning of the roll of film to the end. It was an experiment with disorientation and possibly a comment about urban development. Memories was a seven-minute short in colour about childhood and the bush, accompanied by a smell-track created in the cinema by burning eucalyptus leaves. Sun lasted 90 seconds in colour and examined the pulsating winter sun by way of 100 single frame shots. And finally, Home was a one-and-a-half-minute single frame camera exploration of the filmmaker’s home, inside and out, including its inhabitants and pets. As a true experimental filmmaker, Noyce had a deep interest in technical aspects. It was recommended that Sun “be projected through a special five image lens”, Memories and Intersection with “an anamorphic lens” (Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative). The double projection for Better to Reign in Hell and the two screens required for Good Afternoon, as well as the addition of the smell of burning leaves in Memories, were inroads into the subgenre of so-called Expanded Cinema. As filmmaking in those days was not an isolated enterprise but an integral part of the all-encompassing Counterculture, Noyce followed suit and became more and more involved and politiced. He started becoming a driving force of the movement. Besides selling Ubu News, he organised film screenings. He also wrote film articles for both Honi Soit and National U, the Sydney University and Canberra University newspapers—articles more opinionated than sophisticated. He was also involved in Ubu’s Underground Festival held in August and in other activities of the time, particularly anti-war protests. When Ubu Films went out of business after the lack of audience interest in Thoms’s long Marinetti film in 1969, Aggy Read suggested that Ubu be reinvented as a co-operative for tax reasons and because they might benefit from their stock of 250 Australian and foreign films. On 28 May 1970 the reinvention began at the first general meeting of the Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative where Noyce volunteered and was elected their part-time manager. He transferred the 250 prints to his parents’ home in Wahroonga where he was still living he said he “used to sit there day after day just screening those movies for myself” (Petzke 18). The Sydney University Film Society screened feature films to students at lunchtime. Noyce soon discovered they had money nobody was spending and equipment no one was using, which seemed to be made especially for him. In the university cinema he would often screen his own and other shorts from the Co-op’s library. The entry fee was 50 cents. He remembered: “If I handed out the leaflets in the morning, particularly concentrating on the fact that these films were uncensored and a little risqué, then usually there would be 600 people in the cinema […] One or two screenings per semester would usually give me all the pocket money I needed to live” (Petzke 19). Libertine and risqué films were obviously popular as they were hard to come by. Noyce said: We suffered the worst censorship of almost any Western country in the world, even worse than South Africa. Books would be seized by customs officers at the airports and when ships docked. Customs would be looking for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. We were very censored in literature and films and plays, and my film [Better to Reign in Hell] was banned from export. I tried to send it to a film festival in Holland and it was denied an export permit, but because it had been shot in Australia, until someone in the audience complained it could still be screened locally. (Castaway's Choice) No wonder clashes with the law happened frequently and were worn like medals of honour in those days of fighting the system, proving that one was fighting in the front line against the conservative values of law and order. Noyce encountered three brushes with the law. The first occurred when selling Ubu Films’ alternative culture newspaper Ubu News, Australia’s first underground newspaper (Milesago). One of the issues contained an advertisement—a small drawing—for Levi’s jeans, showing a guy trying to put his Levis on his head, so that his penis was showing. That was judged by the police to be obscene. Noyce was found guilty and given a suspended sentence for publishing an indecent publication. There had been another incident including Phil’s Pill, his own publication of six or eight issues. After one day reprinting some erotic poems from The Penguin Collection of Erotic Poetry he was found guilty and released on a good behaviour bond without a conviction being recorded. For the sake of historical truth it should be remembered, though, that provocation was a genuine part of the game. How else could one seriously advertise Better to Reign in Hell as “a sex-fantasy film which includes a daring rape scene”—and be surprised when the police came in after screening this “pornographic film” (Stratton 202) at the Newcastle Law Students Ball? The Newcastle incident also throws light on the fact that Noyce organised screenings wherever possible, constantly driving prints and projectors around in his Mini Minor. Likewise, he is remembered as having been extremely helpful in trying to encourage other people with their own ideas—anyone could make films and could make them about anything they liked. He helped Jan Chapman, a fellow student who became his (first) wife in December 1971, to shoot and edit Just a Little Note, a documentary about a moratorium march and a guerrilla theatre group run by their friend George Shevtsov. Noyce also helped on I Happened to Be a Girl, a documentary about four women, friends of Chapman. There is no denying that being a filmmaker was a hobby, a full-time job and an obsessive religion for Noyce. He was on the organising committee of the First Australian Filmmakers’ Festival in August 1971. He performed in the agit-prop acting troupe run by George Shevtsov (later depicted in Renegades) that featured prominently at one of Sydney’s rock festival that year. In the latter part of 1971 and early 1972 he worked on Good Afternoon, a documentary about the Combined Universities’ Aquarius Arts Festival in Canberra, which arguably was the first major manifestation of counterculture in Australia. For this the Aquarius Foundation—the cultural arm of the Australian Union of Students—had contracted him. This became a two-screen movie à la Woodstock. Together with Thoms, Read and Ian Stocks, in 1972 he participated in cataloguing the complete set of films in distribution by the Co-op (see Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative). As can be seen, Noyce was at home in many manifestations of the Sydney counterculture. His own films had slowly become more politicised and bent towards documentary. He even started a newsreel that he used to screen at the Filmmakers’ Cooperative Cinema with a live commentary. One in 1971, Springboks Protest, was about the demonstrations at the Sydney Cricket Ground against the South African rugby tour. There were more but Noyce doesn’t remember them and no prints seem to have survived. Renegades was a diary film; a combination of poetic images and reportage on the street demonstrations. Noyce’s experimental films had been met with interest in the—limited—audience and among publications. His more political films and particularly Good Afternoon, however, reached out to a much wider audience, now including even the undogmatic left and hard-core documentarists of the times. In exchange, and for the first time, there were opposing reactions—but as always a great discussion at the Filmmakers’ Cinema, the main venue for independent productions. This cinema began with those initial screenings at Sydney University in the union room next to the Union Theatre. But once the Experimental Film Fund started operating in 1970, more and more films were submitted for the screenings and consequently a new venue was needed. Albie Thoms started a forum in the Yellow House in Kings Cross in May 1970. Next came—at least briefly—a restaurant in Glebe before the Co-op took over a space on the top floor of the socialist Third World Bookshop in Goulburn Street that was a firetrap. Bob Gould, the owner, was convinced that by first passing through his bookshop the audience would buy his books on the way upstairs. Sundays for him were otherwise dead from a commercial point of view. Noyce recollected that: The audience at this Filmmakers’ Cinema were mightily enthusiastic about seeing themselves up on the screen. And there was always a great discussion. So, generally the screenings were a huge success, with many full houses. The screenings grew from once a week, to three times on Sunday, to all weekend, and then seven days a week at several locations. One program could play in three different illegal cinemas around the city. (Petzke 26) A filmmakers’ cinema also started in Melbourne and the groups of filmmakers would visit each other and screen their respective films. But especially after the election of the Whitlam Labor government in December 1972 there was a shift in interest from risqué underground films to the concept of Australian Cinema. The audience started coming now for a dose of Australian culture. Funding of all kind was soon freely available and with such a fund the film co-op was able to set up a really good licensed cinema in St. Peters Lane in Darlinghurst, running seven days a week. But, Noyce said, “the move to St. Peters Lane was sort of the end of an era, because initially the cinema was self-funded, but once it became government sponsored everything changed” (Petzke 29). With money now readily available, egotism set in and the prevailing “we”-feeling rather quickly dissipated. But by the time of this move and the resulting developments, everything for Noyce had already changed again. He had been accepted into the first intake of the Interim Australian Film & TV School, another one of the nation-awareness-building projects of the Whitlam government. He was on his “long march through the institutions”—as this was frequently called throughout Europe—that would bring him to documentaries, TV and eventually even Hollywood (and return). Noyce didn’t linger once the alternative scene started fading away. Everything those few, wild years in the counterculture had taught him also put him right on track to become one of the major players in Hollywood. He never looked back—but he remembers fondly…References Castaway’s Choice. Radio broadcast by KCRW. 1990. Doggett, Peter. There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of ’60s Counter-Culture. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007. Farber, Manny. “Underground Films.” Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies. Ed. Manny Farber. New York: Da Capo, 1998. 12–24. Jacobs, Lewis. “Morning for the Experimental Film”. Film Culture 19 (1959): 6–9. Milesago. “Ubu Films”. n.d. 26 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.milesago.com/visual/ubu.htm›. New American Cinema Group. “First Statement of the New American Cinema Group.” Film Culture Reader. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: Praeger, 1970. 73–75. Petzke, Ingo. Phillip Noyce: Backroads to Hollywood. Sydney: Pan McMillan, 2004. Renan, Sheldon. The Underground Film: An Introduction to Its Development in America. London: Studio Vista, 1968. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of Counter Culture. New York: Anchor, 1969. Stratton, David. The Last New Wave: The Australian Film Revival. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1980. Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative. Film Catalogue. Sydney: Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, 1972. Ubu Films. Unreleased five-minute video for the promotion of Mudie, Peter. Ubu Films: Sydney Underground Movies 1965-1970. Sydney: UNSW Press, 1997.

Philosophers are fond of fiction and of imaginary examples to fill out their discussions of ethics. As with the stories of Jim and the guerrillas, of down and outs unwisely wandering into transplant hospitals and of railway wagons careering out of control towards philosophically minded points switchers, these examples are inclined to become baroque in their complexity and over-elaboration; any initial force or verisimilitude they may have had in their unadorned state is quickly overlain with a heavy varnish of cleverness and complication.As an antidote to this modern day scholasticism, we could propose the true story of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, recently made into a film in which the two protagonists actually describe (independently) what happened.

After balaclava-clad Zapatistas seized control of a handful of southern Mexican towns on New Year’s Eve, 1993, and soon after became implicated in the first wide-scale use of the Internet in a warlike scenario, it was thought that the age of postmodern Internet warfare had arrived. However, while the centrality of the Internet to the movement’s relative success evokes romantic images of Zapatista rebels uploading communiqués onto the World Wide Web from remote mountain hideaways, these myths are dispelled when the impoverished living conditions of its indigenous Maya constituents are taken into account. Instead, the Zapatistas’ presence on the Internet is mediated by NGOs and other support groups who electronically publish hand-written Zapatista communiqués. While this paper demonstrates the political utility of information-age communication strategies for localised struggles for cultural autonomy, it is shown that, for the Zapatistas, these strategies work with, rather than against, traditional print culture. The Zapatistas, NGOs and the Internet Soon after the Zapatista uprising began, the New York Times, prompted by the movement’s rapid acquirement of an Internet presence, declared that the world’s first “postmodern revolutionary movement” had appeared in the unlikely location of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas (Burbach 116). Other analyses that investigate the significance of the Internet in the uprising define the EZLN as the world’s “first informational guerrilla movement” (Castells 79), and the “first social netwar” (Ronfeldt et al. 1). After such descriptions were assigned to the EZLN, an image of Zapatista rebels typing e-mails on laptops in remote mountain hideaways featured in many initial media reports. These ideas were still dominating much of the media a year after the uprising when the Mexican President ordered a raid on suspected EZLN hideouts in an attempt to capture the movement’s mestizo spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos. Media reports at the time claimed that in some of the raids “they found as many computer disks as bullets”. There were also claims that “if Marcos is equipped with a telephone modem and a cellular phone [he could] hook into the Internet [directly] even while on the run, as he is now” (Knudson 509). However, while the Internet contributed significantly to the advance of the EZLN struggle, this romanticised and mythologised imagery is far removed from the material impoverishment that led to the movement’s uprising and which still characterises the lives of its constituents. Indeed, the Marcos that I saw addressing a crowd in the Mexican city of Puebla during the EZLN’s 2001 March for Indigenous Dignity read his speech from an old-tattered notebook—the old-fashioned printed kind, not one from the Toshiba range. He stumbled over some sections, telling the crowd that it had been smudged by the rain earlier in the day. This may have been a move calculated to enhance the charismatic appeal of the pipe-smoking, poet-guerrilla, but it is also consistent with the impoverished circumstances from which the Zapatistas emanated and within which they continue to struggle. There is a glaring anomaly between descriptions of the Zapatistas as postmodern or as the initiators of informational guerrilla warfare, or netwar, and the movement’s location in the most remote regions of an impoverished state, which has Internet hubs in only two of its towns and “no telephone or electricity at all in most of the rural areas” (Froehling 291). Indeed, the Zapatistas’ relationship with the Internet is mediated via a support network that, most significantly, includes NGOs. For the Zapatista word to reach a national and international audience the movement had to firstly rely on hand-written documents and old-fashioned means of covert communication whereby messages were passed secretly from hand to hand, galloped inside a saddle satchel, hidden in a cyclist’s bag, slipped into a backpack, or perhaps thrust inside a sack of beans, then propped in the back of an open truck, crammed with indigenous villagers who make the hours-long journey to the closest market, or doctor, and our messenger to a contact person with Internet access. (Ponce de León xxiii) The journey of the EZLN’s communiqués from the remote Chiapan highlands to a world-wide audience via its Internet-connected support network has created what Cleaver calls a “Zapatista effect” (1998). This effect demonstrates that by establishing an international electronic web of support, particularly between marginalised groups and NGOs, dominant political, economic and social policies can be effectively opposed and alternatives articulated. The Zapatista uprising marks the first time that the electronic media have been used as a strategy in their own right, producing “an electronic fabric of opposition to much wider policies”, rather than simply facilitating the “traditional work of solidarity” (Cleaver 622). Cleaver claims that this “Zapatista effect” has the potential to permeate and inform social struggles throughout the world and reweave “the fabric of politics” by demonstrating the ability of grassroots movements to form national and international collectives to challenge the power of the nation-state (637). Investigation into the usefulness of new communication technologies in times of war and struggle has also been the focus of studies conducted for the US army, leading to the development of the concept of “netwar” (Ronfeldt et al. iii). Ronfeldt et al. contend that, as a result of what they claim is the increasing dependency of contemporary society on information, “more than ever before, conflicts are about ‘knowledge’—about who knows (or can be kept from knowing) what, when, where, and why” (7-8). The study concludes that the EZLN’s development of an NGO support network that could rapidly disseminate reports on human rights abuses, information about the intolerable living conditions endured by indigenous Chiapans, and the EZLN’s communiqués has been crucial to developing the movement’s support base. However, the movement’s establishment of an electronically wired NGO support network able to circulate information about the EZLN, its struggle and its aims relies on the movement’s ability to convey information to them, the “what, when, where, and why”, before it can appear on the Internet and in other media forms. It is not simply the publication and distribution of figures relating to disease, impoverishment and human rights violations that have contributed to people’s interest in, and support for, the Zapatistas. Rather, the intriguing content and style of their discourse, which is heavily indebted to the charismatic figure of Subcomandante Marcos, has also played a crucial role. The writings of Marcos are rich with poetic imagery, humour, symbols of Mayan mythology and references to Latin American and Spanish literary figures and styles, particularly magic realism. Zapatista Narratives Marcos’ innovative and engaging discursive style is particularly evident in the stories he tells of Don Durito, a beetle named Nebuchadnezzar who has assumed the nom de guerre of Durito, which literally means the little strong or hard one, a reference to his shell, fighting spirit and his status as a ladies’ man (Subcomandante Marcos 9). Don Durito has made the floor of the Southern Mexican Lacandón jungle his home, but in Marcos’s stories he often travels the world as a knight-errant, reminiscent of Cervantes’s delusional do-gooder Don Quijote. Durito also intermittently assumes the role of a detective and that of a political analyst, and it is in this guise that he first meets Marcos. This occurs when Marcos, unable to find tobacco to fill the pipe he is never seen without, notices a trail of the dried black leaves weaving away from his hammock. After following the trail for a few metres Marcos sees, behind a stone, a bespectacled beetle clenching a tiny pipe, sitting at a tiny desk studying, as we soon discover, neoliberalism “and its strategy of domination for Latin America” (Subcomandante Marcos 12). Marcos, unfazed by the discovery of a literate, smoking beetle is taken aback by his investigation of neoliberalism. Durito explains that his scholarly interest is quite pragmatic for it stems from a desire to know how long and how successful the Zapatista struggle will be so as to ascertain “how long us beetles are going to have to be careful that you [Marcos and the other members of the Zapatista army who are based in the jungle] aren’t going to squash us with your big boots” (Subcomandante Marcos 12). In these encounters with Durito the political analyst, Marcos is given lessons in politics and economics from an inhabitant of the jungle floor, from a beetle who recognises that the danger of being squashed by “big boots” in his small patch of land is intimately linked to the global issue of neoliberalism and its much bigger boots. Through these stories, Marcos highlights the detrimental impact that global economic policies have had on the Maya of Chiapas. The character of Durito also enables him to demonstrate the potential for small, seemingly insignificant individuals or groups to radically challenge these policies and articulate alternatives. Conclusion Such entertaining and lyrical prose enables the EZLN to present itself as a new style of social revolutionary movement, far removed from traditional Latin American revolutionary struggles. This has, arguably, broadened the movement’s international support network, a situation facilitated by the circulation and publication of these writings and communiqués on the Internet by the movement’s NGO support network. However, while the use of information-age technology to stimulate the creation of collective transnational support networks presents as a useful strategy for contemporary social struggles, it does not guarantee the procurement of significant political, economic and social change. Indeed, after more than a decade of struggle, the Zapatistas have not precipitated the radical reconstruction of the Mexican political system that they had hoped for. References Burbach, Roger. Globalization and Postmodern Politics: From Zapatistas to High-Tech Robber Barons. London: Pluto Press, 2001. Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Volume II: The Power of Identity. Malden, Ma.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. Cleaver, Harry M. Jr. “The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the Rise of an Alternative Political Fabric.” Journal of International Affairs 51.2 (1998): 621-40. Froehling, Oliver. “The Cyberspace ‘War of Ink and Internet’ in Chiapas, Mexico.” The Geographical Review 87.2 (1997): 291-307. Knudson, Jerry W. “Rebellion in Chiapas: Insurrection by Internet and Public Relations.” Media, Culture and Society 20.3 (1998): 507-18. Ponce de León, Juana. “Editor’s Note: Travelling Back for Tomorrow.” Our Word Is Our Weapon. Ed. Juana Ponce de León. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001. xxiii-xxxi. Ronfeldt, David, et al. The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico. Santa Monica, California: RAND, 1998. Subcomandante Marcos. Don Durito de La Lacandona. San Cristóbal de Las Casas Chiapas: Centro de Información y Análisis de Chiapas, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Turner, Bethaney. "Information-Age Guerrillas: The Communication Strategies of the Zapatistas." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/01-turner.php>. APA Style Turner, B. (Jun. 2005) "Information-Age Guerrillas: The Communication Strategies of the Zapatistas," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/01-turner.php>.

Dégueulasse is French slang for “disgusting,” derived in 1867 from the French verb dégueuler, to vomit. Despite its vulgar status, it is frequently used by almost every French speaker, including foreigners and students. It is also a term that has often been employed to describe the 1973 cult film, La Grande bouffe [Blow Out], by Marco Ferreri, which recounts in grotesque detail the gastronomic suicide of four male protagonists. This R-rated French-Italian production was booed, and the director spat on, at the 26th Cannes Film Festival—the Jury President, Ingrid Bergman, said it was the most “sordid” film she’d ever seen, and is even reported to have vomited after watching it (Télérama). Ferreri nevertheless walked away with the Prix FIPRESCI, awarded by the Federation of International Critics, and it is apparently the largest grossing release in the history of Paris with more than 700,000 entries in Paris and almost 3 million in France overall. Scandal sells, and this was especially seemingly so 1970s, when this film was avidly consumed as part of an unholy trinity alongside Bernardo Bertolucci’s Le Dernier Tango à Paris [Last Tango in Paris] (1972) and Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain [The Mother and the Whore] (1973). Fast forward forty years, though, and at the very moment when La Grande bouffe was being commemorated with a special screening on the 2013 Cannes Film Festival programme, a handful of University of Melbourne French students in a subject called “Matters of Taste” were boycotting the film as an unacceptable assault to their sensibilities. Over the decade that I have been showing the film to undergraduate students, this has never happened before. In this article, I want to examine critically the questions of taste that underpin this particular predicament. Analysing firstly the intradiegetic portrayal of taste in the film, through both gustatory and aesthetic signifiers, then the choice of the film as a key element in a University subject corpus, I will finally question the (dis)taste displayed by certain students, contextualising it as part of an ongoing socio-cultural commentary on food, sex, life, and death. Framed by a brief foray into Bourdieusian theories of taste, I will attempt to draw some conclusions on the continual renegotiation of gustatory and aesthetic tastes in relation to La Grande bouffe, and thereby deepen understanding of why it has become the incarnation of dégueulasse today. Theories of Taste In the 1970s, the parameters of “good” and “bad” taste imploded in the West, following political challenges to the power of the bourgeoisie that also undermined their status as the contemporary arbiters of taste. This revolution of manners was particularly shattering in France, fuelled by the initial success of the May 68 student, worker, and women’s rights movements (Ross). The democratization of taste served to legitimize desires different from those previously dictated by bourgeois norms, enabling greater diversity in representing taste across a broad spectrum. It was reflected in the cultural products of the 1970s, including cinema, which had already broken with tradition during the New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and became a vector for political ideologies as well as radical aesthetic choices (Smith). Commonly regarded as “the decade that taste forgot,” the 1970s were also a time for re-assessing the sociology of taste, with the magisterial publication of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979, English trans. 1984). As Bourdieu refuted Kant’s differentiation between the legitimate aesthetic, so defined by its “disinterestedness,” and the common aesthetic, derived from sensory pleasures and ordinary meanings, he also attempted to abolish the opposition between the “taste of reflection” (pure pleasure) and the “taste of sense” (facile pleasure) (Bourdieu 7). In so doing, he laid the foundations of a new paradigm for understanding the apparently incommensurable choices that are not the innate expression of our unique personalities, but rather the product of our class, education, family experiences—our habitus. Where Bourdieu’s theories align most closely with the relationship between taste and revulsion is in the realm of aesthetic disposition and its desire to differentiate: “good” taste is almost always predicated on the distaste of the tastes of others. Tastes (i.e. manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes. In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation; and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (“sick-making”) of the tastes of others. “De gustibus non est disputandum”: not because “tous les goûts sont dans la nature,” but because each taste feels itself to be natural—and so it almost is, being a habitus—which amounts to rejecting others as unnatural and therefore vicious. Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. Aversion to different life-styles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes (Bourdieu). Although today’s “Gen Y” Melbourne University students are a long way from 1970s French working class/bourgeois culture clashes, these observations on taste as the corollary of distaste are still salient tools of interpretation of their attitudes towards La Grande bouffe. And, just as Bourdieu effectively deconstructed Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the 18th “century of taste” notions of universality and morality in aesthetics (Dickie, Gadamer, Allison) in his groundbreaking study of distinction, his own theories have in turn been subject to revision in an age of omnivorous consumption and eclectic globalisation, with various cultural practices further destabilising the hierarchies that formerly monopolized legitimate taste (Sciences Humaines, etc). Bourdieu’s theories are still, however, useful for analysing La Grande bouffe given the contemporaneous production of these texts, as they provide a frame for understanding (dis)taste both within the filmic narrative and in the wider context of its reception. Taste and Distaste in La Grande bouffe To go to the cinema is like to eat or shit, it’s a physiological act, it’s urban guerrilla […] Enough with feelings, I want to make a physiological film (Celluloid Liberation Front). Marco Ferreri’s statements about his motivations for La Grande bouffe coincide here with Bourdieu’s explanation of taste: clearly the director wished to depart from psychological cinema favoured by contemporary critics and audiences and demonstrated his distaste for their preference. There were, however, psychological impulses underpinning his subject matter, as according to film academic Maurizio Viano, Ferrari had a self-destructive, compulsive relation to food, having been forced to spend a few weeks in a Swiss clinic specialising in eating disorders in 1972–1973 (Viano). Food issues abound in his biography. In an interview with Tullio Masoni, the director declared: “I was fat as a child”; his composer Phillipe Sarde recalls the grand Italian-style dinners that he would organise in Paris during the film; and, two of the film’s stars, Marcello Mastroianni and Ugo Tognazzi, actually credit the conception of La Grande bouffe to a Rabelaisian feast prepared by Tognazzi, during which Ferreri exclaimed “hey guys, we are killing ourselves!” (Viano 197–8). Evidently, there were psychological factors behind this film, but it was nevertheless the physiological aspects that Ferreri chose to foreground in his creation. The resulting film does indeed privilege the physiological, as the protagonists fornicate, fart, vomit, defecate, and—of course—eat, to wild excess. The opening scenes do not betray such sordid sequences; the four bourgeois men are introduced one by one so as to establish their class credentials as well as display their different tastes. We first encounter Ugo (Tognazzi), an Italian chef of humble peasant origins, as he leaves his elegant restaurant “Le Biscuit à soupe” and his bourgeois French wife, to take his knives and recipes away with him for the weekend. Then Michel (Piccoli), a TV host who has pre-taped his shows, gives his apartment keys to his 1970s-styled baba-cool daughter as he bids her farewell, and packs up his cleaning products and rubber gloves to take with him. Marcello (Mastroianni) emerges from a cockpit in his aviator sunglasses and smart pilot’s uniform, ordering his sexy airhostesses to carry his cheese and wine for him as he takes a last longing look around his plane. Finally, the judge and owner of the property where the action will unfold, Philippe (Noiret), is awoken by an elderly woman, Nicole, who feeds him tea and brioche, pestering him for details of his whereabouts for the weekend, until he demonstrates his free will and authority, joking about his serious life, and lying to her about attending a legal conference in London. Having given over power of attorney to Nicole, he hints at the finality of his departure, but is trying to wrest back his independence as his nanny exhorts him not to go off with whores. She would rather continue to “sacrifice herself for him” and “keep it in the family,” as she discreetly pleasures him in this scene. Scholars have identified each protagonist as an ideological signifier. For some, they represent power—Philippe is justice—and three products of that ideology: Michel is spectacle, Ugo is food, and Marcello is adventure (Celluloid Liberation Front). For others, these characters are the perfect incarnations of the first four Freudian stages of sexual development: Philippe is Oedipal, Michel is indifferent, Ugo is oral, and Marcello is impotent (Tury & Peter); or even the four temperaments of Hippocratic humouralism: Philippe the phlegmatic, Michel the melancholic, Ugo the sanguine, and Marcello the choleric (Calvesi, Viano). I would like to offer another dimension to these categories, positing that it is each protagonist’s taste that prescribes his participation in this gastronomic suicide as well as the means by which he eventually dies. Before I develop this hypothesis, I will first describe the main thrust of the narrative. The four men arrive at the villa at 68 rue Boileau where they intend to end their days (although this is not yet revealed). All is prepared for the most sophisticated and decadent feasting imaginable, with a delivery of the best meats and poultry unfurling like a surrealist painting. Surrounded by elegant artworks and demonstrating their cultural capital by reciting Shakespeare, Brillat-Savarin, and other classics, the men embark on a race to their death, beginning with a competition to eat the most oysters while watching a vintage pornographic slideshow. There is a strong thread of masculine athletic engagement in this film, as has been studied in detail by James R. Keller in “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism,” and this is exacerbated by the arrival of a young but matronly schoolmistress Andréa (Ferréol) with her students who want to see the garden. She accepts the men’s invitation to stay on in the house to become another object of competitive desire, and fully embraces all the sexual and gustatory indulgence around her. Marcello goes further by inviting three prostitutes to join them and Ugo prepares a banquet fit for a funeral. The excessive eating makes Michel flatulent and Marcello impotent; when Marcello kicks the toilet in frustration, it explodes in the famous fecal fountain scene that apparently so disgusted his then partner Catherine Deneuve, that she did not speak to him for a week (Ebert). The prostitutes flee the revolting madness, but Andréa stays like an Angel of Death, helping the men meet their end and, in surviving, perhaps symbolically marking an end to the masculinist bourgeoisie they represent.To return to the role of taste in defining the rise and demise of the protagonists, let me begin with Marcello, as he is the first to die. Despite his bourgeois attitudes, he is a modern man, associated with machines and mobility, such as the planes and the beautiful Bugatti, which he strokes with greater sensuality than the women he hoists onto it. His taste is for the functioning mechanical body, fast and competitive, much like himself when he is gorging on oysters. But his own body betrays him when his “masculine mechanics” stop functioning, and it is the fact that the Bugatti has broken down that actually causes his death—he is found frozen in driver’s seat after trying to escape in the Bugatti during the night. Marcello’s taste for the mechanical leads therefore to his eventual demise. Michel is the next victim of his own taste, which privileges aesthetic beauty, elegance, the arts, and fashion, and euphemises the less attractive or impolite, the scatological, boorish side of life. His feminized attire—pink polo-neck and flowing caftan—cannot distract from what is happening in his body. The bourgeois manners that bind him to beauty mean that breaking wind traumatises him. His elegant gestures at the dance barre encourage rather than disguise his flatulence; his loud piano playing cannot cover the sound of his loud farts, much to the mirth of Philippe and Andréa. In a final effort to conceal his painful bowel obstruction, he slips outside to die in obscene and noisy agony, balanced in an improbably balletic pose on the balcony balustrade. His desire for elegance and euphemism heralds his death. Neither Marcello nor Michel go willingly to their ends. Their tastes are thwarted, and their deaths are disgusting to them. Their cadavers are placed in the freezer room as silent witnesses to the orgy that accelerates towards its fatal goal. Ugo’s taste is more earthy and inherently linked to the aims of the adventure. He is the one who states explicitly: “If you don’t eat, you won’t die.” He wants to cook for others and be appreciated for his talents, as well as eat and have sex, preferably at the same time. It is a combination of these desires that kills him as he force-feeds himself the monumental creation of pâté in the shape of the Cathedral of Saint-Peter that has been rejected as too dry by Philippe, and too rich by Andréa. The pride that makes him attempt to finish eating his masterpiece while Andréa masturbates him on the dining table leads to a heart-stopping finale for Ugo. As for Philippe, his taste is transgressive. In spite of his upstanding career as a judge, he lies and flouts convention in his unorthodox relationship with nanny Nicole. Andréa represents another maternal figure to whom he is attracted and, while he wishes to marry her, thereby conforming to bourgeois norms, he also has sex with her, and her promiscuous nature is clearly signalled. Given his status as a judge, he reasons that he can not bring Marcello’s frozen body inside because concealing a cadaver is a crime, yet he promotes collective suicide on his premises. Philippe’s final transgression of the rules combines diabetic disobedience with Oedipal complex—Andréa serves him a sugary pink jelly dessert in the form of a woman’s breasts, complete with cherries, which he consumes knowingly and mournfully, causing his death. Unlike Marcello and Michel, Ugo and Philippe choose their demise by indulging their tastes for ingestion and transgression. Following Ferreri’s motivations and this analysis of the four male protagonists, taste is clearly a cornerstone of La Grande bouffe’s conception and narrative structure. It is equally evident that these tastes are contrary to bourgeois norms, provoking distaste and even revulsion in spectators. The film’s reception at the time of its release and ever since have confirmed this tendency in both critical reviews and popular feedback as André Habib’s article on Salo and La Grande bouffe (2001) meticulously demonstrates. With such a violent reaction, one might wonder why La Grande bouffe is found on so many cinema studies curricula and is considered to be a must-see film (The Guardian). Corpus and Corporeality in Food Film Studies I chose La Grande bouffe as the first film in the “Matters of Taste” subject, alongside Luis Bunuel’s Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, and Laurent Bénégui’s Au Petit Marguery, as all are considered classic films depicting French eating cultures. Certainly any French cinema student would know La Grande bouffe and most cinephiles around the world have seen it. It is essential background knowledge for students studying French eating cultures and features as a key reference in much scholarly research and popular culture on the subject. After explaining the canonical status of La Grande bouffe and thus validating its inclusion in the course, I warned students about the explicit nature of the film. We studied it for one week out of the 12 weeks of semester, focusing on questions of taste in the film and the socio-cultural representations of food. Although the almost ubiquitous response was: “C’est dégueulasse!,” there was no serious resistance until the final exam when a few students declared that they would boycott any questions on La Grande bouffe. I had not actually included any such questions in the exam. The student evaluations at the end of semester indicated that several students questioned the inclusion of this “disgusting pornography” in the corpus. There is undoubtedly less nudity, violence, gore, or sex in this film than in the Game of Thrones TV series. What, then, repulses these Gen Y students? Is it as Pasolini suggests, the neorealistic dialogue and décor that disturbs, given the ontologically challenging subject of suicide? (Viano). Or is it the fact that there is no reason given for the desire to end their lives, which privileges the physiological over the psychological? Is the scatological more confronting than the pornographic? Interestingly, “food porn” is now a widely accepted term to describe a glamourized and sometimes sexualized presentation of food, with Nigella Lawson as its star, and hundreds of blog sites reinforcing its popularity. Yet as Andrew Chan points out in his article “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography,” this film is where it all began: “the genealogy reaches further back, as brilliantly visualized in Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film La Grande bouffe, in which four men eat, screw and fart themselves to death” (47). Is it the overt corporeality depicted in the film that shocks cerebral students into revulsion and rebellion? Conclusion In the guise of a conclusion, I suggest that my Gen Y students’ taste may reveal a Bourdieusian distaste for the taste of others, in a third degree reaction to the 1970s distaste for bourgeois taste. First degree: Ferreri and his entourage reject the psychological for the physiological in order to condemn bourgeois values, provoking scandal in the 1970s, but providing compelling cinema on a socio-political scale. Second degree: in spite of the outcry, high audience numbers demonstrate their taste for scandal, and La Grande bouffe becomes a must-see canonical film, encouraging my choice to include it in the “Matters of Taste” corpus. Third degree: my Gen Y students’ taste expresses a distaste for the academic norms that I have embraced in showing them the film, a distaste that may be more aesthetic than political. Oui, c’est dégueulasse, mais … Bibliography Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1984. Calvesi, M. “Dipingere all moviola” (Painting at the Moviola). Corriere della Sera, 10 Oct. 1976. Reprint. “Arti figurative e il cinema” (Cinema and the Visual Arts). Avanguardia di massa. Ed. M. Calvesi. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. 243–46. Celluloid Liberation Front. “Consumerist Ultimate Indigestion: La Grande Bouffe's Deadly Physiological Pleasures.” Bright Lights Film Journal 60 (2008). 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://brightlightsfilm.com/60/60lagrandebouffe.php#.Utd6gs1-es5›. Chan, Andrew. “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 3.4 (2003): 47–53. Dickie, George. The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Ebert, Roger, “La Grande bouffe.” 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/la-grande-bouffe-1973›. Ferreri, Marco. La Grande bouffe. Italy-France, 1973. Freedman, Paul H. Food: The History of Taste. U of California P, 2007. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Winsheimer and Donald C. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1999. Habib, André. “Remarques sur une ‘réception impossible’: Salo and La Grande bouffe.” Hors champ (cinéma), 4 Jan. 2001. 11 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/cinema/030101/salo-bouffe.html›. Keller, James R. “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism.” Food, Film and Culture: A Genre Study. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 2006: 49–59. Masoni, Tullio. Marco Ferreri. Gremese, 1998. Pasolini, P.P. “Le ambigue forme della ritualita narrativa.” Cinema Nuovo 231 (1974): 342–46. Ross, Kristin. May 68 and its Afterlives. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Smith, Alison. French Cinema in the 1970s: The Echoes of May. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. Télérama: “La Grande bouffe: l’un des derniers grands scandales du Festival de Cannes. 19 May 2013. 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.telerama.fr/festival-de-cannes/2013/la-grande-bouffe-l-un-des-derniers-grands-scandales-du-festival-de-cannes,97615.php›. The Guardian: 1000 films to see before you die. 2007. 17 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/film/series/1000-films-to-see-before-you-die› Tury, F., and O. Peter. “Food, Life, and Death: The Film La Grande bouffe of Marco Ferreri in an Art Psychological Point of View.” European Psychiatry 22.1 (2007): S214. Viano, Maurizio. “La Grande Abbuffata/La Grande bouffe.” The Cinema of Italy. Ed. Giorgio Bertellini. London: Wallflower Press, 2004: 193–202.

IntroductionThe 2009 American film Trash Humpers, directed by Harmony Korine, was released at a time when the hipster had become a ubiquitous concept, entering into the common vernacular of numerous cultures throughout the world, and gaining significant press, social media and academic attention (see Žižek; Arsel and Thompson; Greif et al.; Stahl; Ouellette; Reeve; Schiermer; Maly and Varis). Trash Humpers emerged soon after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis triggered Occupy movements in numerous cities, aided by social media platforms, reported on by blogs such as Gawker, and stylized by multi-national youth-subculture brands such as Vice, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters and a plethora of localised variants.Korine’s film, which is made to resemble found VHS footage of old-aged vandals, epitomises the ironic, retro stylizations and “counterculture-meets-kitsch” aesthetics so familiar to hipster culture. As a creative stereotype from 1940s and ‘50s jazz and beatnik subcultures, the hipster re-emerged in the twenty-first century as a negative embodiment of alternative culture in the age of the Internet. As well as plumbing the recent past for things not yet incorporated into contemporary marketing mechanisms, the hipster also signifies the blurring of irony and authenticity. Such “outsiderness as insiderness” postures can be regarded as a continuation of the marginality-from-the-centre logic of cool capitalism that emerged after World War Two. Particularly between 2007 and 2015, the post-postmodern concept of the hipster was a resonant cultural trope in Western and non-Western cultures alike, coinciding with the normalisation of the new digital terrain and the establishment of mobile social media as an integral aspect of many people’s daily lives. While Korine’s 79-minute feature could be thought of as following in the schlocky footsteps of the likes of Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (2006), it is decidedly more arthouse, and more attuned to the influence of contemporary alternative media brands and independent film history alike – as if the love child of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and Vice Video, the latter having been labelled as “devil-may-care hipsterism” (Carr). Upon release, Trash Humpers was described by Gene McHugh as “a mildly hip take on Jackass”; by Mike D’Angelo as “an empty hipster pose”; and by Aaron Hillis as either “the work of an insincere hipster or an eccentric provocateur”. Lacking any semblance of a conventional plot, Trash Humpers essentially revolves around four elderly-looking protagonists – three men and a woman – who document themselves with a low-quality video camera as they go about behaving badly in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, where Korine still lives. They cackle eerily to themselves as they try to stave off boredom, masturbating frantically on rubbish bins, defecating and drinking alcohol in public, fellating foliage, smashing televisions, playing ten-pin bowling, lighting firecrackers and telling gay “hate” jokes to camera with no punchlines. In one purposefully undramatic scene half-way through the film, the humpers are shown in the aftermath of an attack on a man wearing a French maid’s outfit; he lies dead in a pool of blood on their kitchen floor with a hammer at his feet. The humpers are consummate “bad” performers in every sense of the term, and they are joined by a range of other, apparently lower-class, misfits with whom they stage tap dance routines and repetitively sing nursery-rhyme-styled raps such as: “make it, make it, don’t break it; make it, make it, don’t fake it; make it, make it, don’t take it”, which acts as a surrogate theme song for the film. Korine sometimes depicts his main characters on crutches or in a wheelchair, and a baby doll is never too far away from the action, as a silent and Surrealist witness to their weird, sinister and sometimes very funny exploits. The film cuts from scene to scene as if edited on a video recorder, utilising in-house VHS titling sequences, audio glitches and video static to create the sense that one is engaging voyeuristically with a found video document rather than a scripted movie. Mainstream AlternativesAs a viewer of Trash Humpers, one has to try hard to suspend disbelief if one is to see the humpers as genuine geriatric peeping Toms rather than as hipsters in old-man masks trying to be rebellious. However, as Korine’s earlier films such as Gummo (1997) attest, he clearly delights in blurring the line between failure and transcendence, or, in this case, between pretentious art-school bravado and authentic redneck ennui. As noted in a review by Jeannette Catsoulis, writing for the New York Times: “Much of this is just so much juvenile posturing, but every so often the screen freezes into something approximating beauty: a blurry, spaced-out, yellow-green landscape, as alien as an ancient photograph”. Korine has made a career out of generating this wavering uncertainty in his work, polarising audiences with a mix of critical, cinema-verité styles and cynical exploitations. His work has consistently revelled in ethical ambiguities, creating environments where teenagers take Ritalin for kicks, kill cats, wage war with their families and engage in acts of sexual deviancy – all of which are depicted with a photographer’s eye for the uncanny.The elusive and contradictory aspects of Korine’s work – at once ugly and beautiful, abstract and commercial, pessimistic and nostalgic – are evident not just in films such as Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy (1999) and Mister Lonely (2007) but also in his screenplay for Kids (1995), his performance-like appearances on The Tonight Show with David Letterman (1993-2015) and in publications such as A Crackup at the Race Riots (1998) and Pass the Bitch Chicken (2001). As well as these outputs, Korine is also a painter who is represented by Gagosian Gallery – one of the world’s leading art galleries – and he has directed numerous music videos, documentaries and commercials throughout his career. More than just update of the traditional figure of the auteur, Korine, instead, resembles a contemporary media artist whose avant-garde and grotesque treatments of Americana permeate almost everything he does. Korine wrote the screenplay for Kids when he was just 19, and subsequently built his reputation on the paradoxical mainstreaming of alternative culture in the 1990s. This is exemplified by the establishment of music and film genres such “alternative” and “independent”; the popularity of the slacker ethos attributed to Generation X; the increased visibility of alternative press zines; the birth of grunge in fashion and music; and the coining of “cool hunting” – a bottom-up market research phenomenon that aimed to discover new trends in urban subcultures for the purpose of mass marketing. Key to “alternative culture”, and its related categories such as “indie” and “arthouse”, is the idea of evoking artistic authenticity while covertly maintaining a parasitic relationship with the mainstream. As Holly Kruse notes in her account of the indie music scenes of the 1990s, which gained tremendous popularity in the wake of grunge bands such as Nirvana: without dominant, mainstream musics against which to react, independent music cannot be independent. Its existence depends upon dominant music structures and practices against which to define itself. Indie music has therefore been continually engaged in an economic and ideological struggle in which its ‘outsider’ status is re-examined, re-defined, and re-articulated to sets of musical practices. (Kruse 149)Alternative culture follows a similar, highly contentious, logic, appearing as a nebulous, authentic and artistic “other” whose exponents risk being entirely defined by the mainstream markets they profess to oppose. Kids was directed by the artist cum indie-director Larry Clark, who discovered Korine riding his skateboard with a group of friends in New York’s Washington Square in the early 1990s, before commissioning him to write a script. The then subcultural community of skating – which gained prominence in the 1990s amidst the increased visibility of “alternative sports” – provides an important backdrop to the film, which documents a group of disaffected New York teenagers at a time of the Aids crisis in America. Korine has been active in promoting the DIY ethos, creativity and anti-authoritarian branding of skate culture since this time – an industry that, in its attempts to maintain a non-mainstream profile while also being highly branded, has become emblematic of the category of “alternative culture”. Korine has undertaken commercial projects with an array skate-wear brands, but he is particularly associated with Supreme, a so-called “guerrilla fashion” label originating in 1994 that credits Clark and other 1990s indie darlings, and Korine cohorts, Chloë Sevigny and Terry Richardson, as former models and collaborators (Williams). The company is well known for its designer skateboard decks, its collaborations with prominent contemporary visual artists, its hip-hop branding and “inscrutable” web videos. It is also well known for its limited runs of new clothing lines, which help to stoke demand through one-offs – blending street-wear accessibility with the restricted-market and anti-authoritarian sensibility of avant-garde art.Of course, “alternative culture” poses a notorious conundrum for analysis, involving highly subjective demarcations of “mainstream” from “subversive” culture, not to mention “genuine subversion” from mere “corporate alternatives”. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, the roots of alternative culture lie in the Western tradition of the avant-garde and the “aesthetic gaze” that developed in the nineteenth century (Field 36). In analysing the modernist notion of advanced cultural practice – where art is presented as an alternative to bourgeois academic taste and to the common realm of cultural commodities – Bourdieu proposed a distinction between two types of “fields”, or logics of cultural production. Alternative culture follows what Bourdieu called “the field of restricted production”, which adheres to “art for art’s sake” ideals, where audiences are targeted as if like-minded peers (Field 50). In contrast, the “field of large-scale production” reflects the commercial imperatives of mainstream culture, in which goods are produced for the general public at large. The latter field of large-scale production tends to service pre-established markets, operating in response to public demand. Furthermore, whereas success in the field of restricted production is often indirect, and latent – involving artists who create niche markets without making any concessions to those markets – success in the field of large-scale production is typically more immediate and quantifiable (Field 39). Here we can see that central to the branding of “alternative culture” is the perceived refusal to conform to popular taste and the logic of capitalism more generally is. As Supreme founder James Jebbia stated about his brand in a rare interview: “The less known the better” (Williams). On this, Bourdieu states that, in the field of restricted production, the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies are inversed to create a “loser wins” scenario (Field 39). Profit and cultural esteem become detrimental attributes in this context, potentially tainting the integrity and marginalisation on which alternative products depend. As one ironic hipster t-shirt puts it: “Nothing is any good if other people like it” (Diesel Sweeties).Trash HipstersIn abandoning linear narrative for rough assemblages of vignettes – or “moments” – recorded with an unsteady handheld camera, Trash Humpers positions itself in ironic opposition to mainstream filmmaking, refusing the narrative arcs and unwritten rules of Hollywood film, save for its opening and closing credits. Given Korine’s much publicized appreciation of cinema pioneers, we can understand Trash Humpers as paying homage to independent and DIY film history, including Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton (1973), Andy Warhol’s and Paul Morrissey’s Lonesome Cowboys (1967) and Trash (1970), and John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), all of which jubilantly embraced the “bad” aesthetic of home movies. Posed as fantasized substitutions for mainstream movie-making, such works were also underwritten by the legitimacy of camp as a form of counter-culture critique, blurring parody and documentary to give voice to an array of non-mainstream and counter-cultural identities. The employment of camp in postmodern culture became known not merely as an aesthetic subversion of cultural mores but also as “a gesture of self-legitimation” (Derrida 290), its “failed seriousness” regarded as a critical response to the specific historical problem of being a “culturally over-saturated” subject (Sontag 288).The significant difference between Korine’s film and those of his 1970s-era forbears is precisely the attention he pays to the formal aspects of his medium, revelling in analogue editing glitches to the point of fetishism, in some cases lasting as long as the scenes themselves. Consciously working out-of-step with the media of his day, Trash Humpers in imbued with nostalgia from its very beginning. Whereas Smith, Eggleston, Warhol, Morrissey and Waters blurred fantasy and documentary in ways that raised the social and political identities of their subjects, Korine seems much more interested in “trash” as an aesthetic trope. In following this interest, he rightfully pays homage to the tropes of queer cinema, however, he conveniently leaves behind their underlying commentaries about (hetero-) normative culture. A sequence where the trash humpers visit a whorehouse and amuse themselves by smoking cigars and slapping the ample bottoms of prostitutes in G-strings confirms the heterosexual tenor of the film, which is reiterated throughout by numerous deadpan gay jokes and slurs.Trash Humpers can be understood precisely in terms of Korine’s desire to maintain the aesthetic imperatives of alternative culture, where formal experimentation and the subverting of mainstream genres can provide a certain amount of freedom from explicated meaning, and, in particular, from socio-political commentary. Bourdieu rightly points out how the pleasures of the aesthetic gaze often manifest themselves curiously as form of “deferred pleasure” (353) or “pleasure without enjoyment” (495), which corresponds to Immanuel Kant’s notion of the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgement. Aesthetic dispositions posed in the negative – as in the avant-garde artists who mined primitive and ugly cultural stereotypes – typically use as reference points “facile” or “vulgar” (393) working-class tropes that refer negatively to sensuous pleasure as their major criterion of judgment. For Bourdieu, the pleasures provided by the aesthetic gaze in such instances are not sensual pleasures so much as the pleasures of social distinction – signifying the author’s distance from taste as a form of gratification. Here, it is easy to see how the orgiastic central characters in Trash Humpers might be employed by Korine for a similar end-result. As noted by Jeremiah Kipp in a review of the film: “You don't ‘like’ a movie like Trash Humpers, but I’m very happy such films exist”. Propelled by aesthetic, rather than by social, questions of value, those that “get” the obscure works of alternative culture have a tendency to legitimize them on the basis of the high-degree of formal analysis skills they require. For Bourdieu, this obscures the fact that one’s aesthetic “‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education” – a privileged mode of looking, estranged from those unfamiliar with the internal logic of decoding presupposed by the very notion of “aesthetic enjoyment” (2).The rhetorical priority of alternative culture is, in Bourdieu’s terms, the “autonomous” perfection of the form rather than the “heteronomous” attempt to monopolise on it (Field 40). However, such distinctions are, in actuality, more nuanced than Bourdieu sometimes assumed. This is especially true in the context of global digital culture, which makes explicit how the same cultural signs can have vastly different meanings and motivations across different social contexts. This has arguably resulted in the destabilisation of prescriptive analyses of cultural taste, and has contributed to recent “post-critical” advances, in which academics such as Bruno Latour and Rita Felski advocate for cultural analyses and practices that promote relationality and attachment rather than suspicious (critical) dispositions towards marginal and popular subjects alike. Latour’s call for a move away from the “sledge hammer” of critique applies as much to cultural practice as it does to written analysis. Rather than maintaining hierarchical oppositions between authentic versus inauthentic taste, Latour understands culture – and the material world more generally – as having agency alongside, and with, that of the social world.Hipsters with No AlternativeIf, as Karl Spracklen suggests, alternativism is thought of “as a political project of resistance to capitalism, with communicative oppositionality as its defining feature” (254), it is clear that there has been a progressive waning in relevance of the category of “alternative culture” in the age of the Internet, which coincides with the triumph of so-called “neoliberal individualism” (258). To this end, Korine has lost some of his artistic credibility over the course of the 2000s. If viewed negatively, icons of 1990s alternative culture such as Korine can be seen as merely exploiting Dada-like techniques of mimetic exacerbation and symbolic détournement for the purpose of alternative, “arty” branding rather than pertaining to a counter-hegemonic cultural movement (Foster 31). It is within this context of heightened scepticism surrounding alternative culture that the hipster stereotype emerged in cultures throughout the world, as if a contested symbol of the aesthetic gaze in an era of neoliberal identity politics. Whatever the psychological motivations underpinning one’s use of the term, to call someone a hipster is typically to point out that their distinctive alternative or “arty” status appears overstated; their creative decisions considered as if a type of bathos. For detractors of alternative cultural producers such as Korine, he is trying too hard to be different, using the stylised codes of “alternative” to conceal what is essentially his cultural and political immaturity. The hipster – who is rarely ever self-identified – re-emerged in the 2000s to operate as a scapegoat for inauthentic markers of alternative culture, associated with men and women who appear to embrace Realpolitik, sincerity and authentic expressions of identity while remaining tethered to irony, autonomous aesthetics and self-design. Perhaps the real irony of the hipster is the pervasiveness of irony in contemporary culture. R. J Magill Jnr. has argued that “a certain cultural bitterness legitimated through trenchant disbelief” (xi) has come to define the dominant mode of political engagement in many societies since the early 2000s, in response to mass digital information, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and the climate of suspicion produced by information about terrorism threats. He analyses the prominence of political irony in American TV shows including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Simpsons, South Park, The Chappelle Show and The Colbert Report but he also notes its pervasiveness as a twenty-first-century worldview – a distancing that “paradoxically and secretly preserves the ideals of sincerity, honesty and authenticity by momentarily belying its own appearance” (x). Crucially, then, the utterance “hipster” has come to signify instances when irony and aesthetic distance are perceived to have been taken too far, generating the most disdain from those for whom irony, aesthetic discernment and cultural connoisseurship still provide much-needed moments of disconnection from capitalist cultures drowning in commercial hyperbole and grave news hype. Korine himself has acknowledged that Spring Breakers (2013) – his follow-up feature film to Trash Humpers – was created in response to the notion that “alternative culture”, once a legitimate challenge to mainstream taste, had lost its oppositional power with the decentralization of digital culture. He states that he made Spring Breakers at a moment “when there’s no such thing as high or low, it’s all been exploded. There is no underground or above-ground, there’s nothing that’s alternative. We’re at a point of post-everything, so it’s all about finding the spirit inside, and the logic, and making your own connections” (Hawker). In this context, we can understand Trash Humpers as the last of the Korine films to be branded with the authenticity of alternative culture. In Spring Breakers Korine moved from the gritty low-fi sensibility of his previous films and adopted a more digital, light-filled and pastel-coloured palette. Focussing more conventionally on plot than ever before, Spring Breakers follows four college girls who hold up a restaurant in order to fund their spring break vacation. Critic Michael Chaiken noted that the film marks a shift in Korine’s career, from the alternative stylings of the pre-Internet generation to “the cultural heirs [of] the doomed protagonists of Kids: nineties babies, who grew up with the Internet, whose sensibilities have been shaped by the sweeping technological changes that have taken place in the interval between the Clinton and Obama eras” (33).By the end of the 2000s, an entire generation came of age having not experienced a time when the obscure films, music or art of the past took more effort to track down. Having been a key participant in the branding of alternative culture, Korine is in a good position to recall a different, pre-YouTube time – when cultural discernment was still caught up in the authenticity of artistic identity, and when one’s cultural tastes could still operate with a certain amount of freedom from sociological scrutiny. Such ideas seem a long way away from today’s cultural environments, which have been shaped not only by digital media’s promotion of cultural interconnection and mass information, but also by social media’s emphasis on mobilization and ethical awareness. ConclusionI should reiterate here that is not Korine’s lack of seriousness, or irony, alone that marks Trash Humpers as a response to the scepticism surrounding alternative culture symbolised by the figure of the hipster. It is, rather, that Korine’s mock-documentary about juvenile geriatrics works too hard to obscure its implicit social commentary, appearing driven to condemn contemporary capitalism’s exploitations of youthfulness only to divert such “uncool” critical commentaries through unsubtle formal distractions, visual poetics and “bad boy” avant-garde signifiers of authenticity. Before being bludgeoned to death, the unnamed man in the French maid’s outfit recites a poem on a bridge amidst a barrage of fire crackers let off by a nearby humper in a wheelchair. Although easily overlooked, it could, in fact, be a pivotal scene in the film. Spoken with mock high-art pretentions, the final lines of the poem are: So what? Why, I ask, why? Why castigate these creatures whose angelic features are bumping and grinding on trash? Are they not spawned by our greed? Are they not our true seed? Are they not what we’ve bought for our cash? We’ve created this lot, of the ooze and the rot, deliberately and unabashed. Whose orgiastic elation and one mission in creation is to savagely fornicate TRASH!Here, the character’s warning of capitalist overabundance is drowned out by the (aesthetic) shocks of the fire crackers, just as the stereotypical hipster’s ethical ideals are drowned out by their aesthetic excess. The scene also functions as a metaphor for the humpers themselves, whose elderly masks – embodiments of nostalgia – temporarily suspend their real socio-political identities for the sake of role-play. It is in this sense that Trash Humpers is too enamoured with its own artifices – including its anonymous “boys club” mentality – to suggest anything other than the aesthetic distance that has come to mark the failings of the “alternative culture” category. In such instances, alternative taste appears as a rhetorical posture, with Korine asking us to gawk knowingly at the hedonistic and destructive pleasures pursued by the humpers while factoring in, and accepting, our likely disapproval.ReferencesArsel, Zeynep, and Craig J. Thompson. “Demythologizing Consumption Practices: How Consumers Protect Their Field-Dependent Identity Investments from Devaluing Marketplace Myths.” Journal of Consumer Research 37.5 (2011): 791-806.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by Randal Johnson. London: Polity Press, 1993.Carr, David. “Its Edge Intact, Vice Is Chasing Hard News.” New York Times 24 Aug. 2014. 12 Nov. 2016 <https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/business/media/its-edge-intact-vice-is-chasing-hard-news-.html>.Catsoulis, Jeannette. “Geriatric Delinquents, Rampaging through Suburbia.” New York Times 6 May 2010. 1` Nov. 2016 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/movies/07trash.html>.Chaiken, Michael. “The Dream Life.” Film Comment (Mar./Apr. 2013): 30-33.D’Angelo, Mike. “Trash Humpers.” Not Coming 18 Sep. 2009. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/trashhumpers>.Derrida, Jacques. Positions. London: Athlone, 1981.Diesel Sweeties. 1 Nov. 2016 <https://store.dieselsweeties.com/products/nothing-is-any-good-if-other-people-like-it-shirt>.Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.Greif, Mark. What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation. New York: n+1 Foundation, 2010.Hawker, Philippa. “Telling Tales Out of School.” Sydney Morning Herald 4 May 2013. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/telling-tales-out-of-school-20130503-2ixc3.html>.Hillis, Aaron. “Harmony Korine on Trash Humpers.” IFC 6 May 2009. 12 Nov. 2016 <http://www.ifc.com/2010/05/harmony-korine-2>.Jay Magill Jr., R. Chic Ironic Bitterness. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.Kipp, Jeremiah. “Clean Off the Dirt, Scrape Off the Blood: An Interview with Trash Humpers Director Harmony Korine.” Slant Magazine 18 Mar. 2011. 1 Nov. 2016 <http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/article/clean-off-the-dirt-scrape-off-the-blood-an-interview-with-trash-humpers-director-harmony-korine>.Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225-248.Maly, Ico, and Varis, Piia. “The 21st-Century Hipster: On Micro-Populations in Times of Superdiversity.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 19.6 (2016): 637–653.McHugh, Gene. “Monday May 10th 2010.” Post Internet. New York: Lulu Press, 2010.Ouellette, Marc. “‘I Know It When I See It’: Style, Simulation and the ‘Short-Circuit Sign’.” Semiotic Review 3 (2013): 1–15.Reeve, Michael. “The Hipster as the Postmodern Dandy: Towards an Extensive Study.” 2013. 12 Nov. 2016. <http://www.academia.edu/3589528/The_hipster_as_the_postmodern_dandy_towards_an_extensive_study>.Schiermer, Bjørn. “Late-Modern Hipsters: New Tendencies in Popular Culture.” Acta Sociologica 57.2 (2014): 167–181.Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Against Interpretation. New York: Octagon, 1964/1982. 275-92. Stahl, Geoff. “Mile-End Hipsters and the Unmasking of Montreal’s Proletaroid Intelligentsia; Or How a Bohemia Becomes BOHO.” Adam Art Gallery, Apr. 2010. 12 May 2015 <http://www.adamartgallery.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/adamartgallery_vuwsalecture_geoffstahl.pdf>.Williams, Alex. “Guerrilla Fashion: The Story of Supreme.” New York Times 21 Nov. 2012. 1 Nov. 2016 <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/fashion/guerrilla-fashion-the-story-of-supreme.html>.Žižek, Slavoj. “L’Etat d’Hipster.” Rhinocerotique. Trans. Henry Brulard. Sep. 2009. 3-10.

O documentário Osvaldão (2014) retrata a trajetória de Osvaldo Orlando da Costa, um dos mais conhecidos personagens da Guerrilha do Araguaia (1972”“1974). O longa tem sua produção vinculada à Fundação Maurício Grabois, ligada ao Partido Comunista do Brasil (PC do B), ao qual pertenciam os militantes que atuaram no Araguaia. Negro e comunista, Osvaldão perdeu a vida na Amazônia oriental brasileira, onde efetuou um trabalho militante durante cerca de oito anos. No artigo, busca-se problematizar as representações que o filme constrói em relação à história de vida do guerrilheiro e como as relações raciais foram retratadas. Procurou-se compreender as escolhas feitas pelos realizadores quanto aos enquadramentos dados à trajetória do biografado, a partir de disputas pela memória vigentes no Brasil naqueles anos iniciais da década de 2010. Notadamente, os embates sobre a memória da ditadura e a sub-representação dos negros nas narrativas que versam sobre a história nacional.

O documentário narra a trajetória do jornalista argentino Jorge Ricardo Masetti, que foi um dos primeiros a entrevistar Fidel Castro e Che Guevara na guerrilha da Sierra Maestra, em 1958, e depois se tornou, ele mesmo, um revolucionário. Com eles, fundou da agência de notícias Prensa Latina, planejada para informar o continente e os países do Terceiro Mundo por uma perspectiva pós-colonial, contra o viés das grandes agências globais. Participou também da resistência à invasão da Baía dos Porcos, em 1961, e depois partiu de Cuba para lutar na guerra de independência da Argélia, em 1963, e montar um foco guerrilheiro na selva de Salta, na Argentina, onde desapareceu no ano seguinte. O filme traz depoimentos de jornalistas, ex-combatentes, amigos e outros personagens que conviveram com Masetti, e propõe uma reflexão sobre o papel da informação contra-hegemônica e da luta na comunicação internacional.

The Mau-Mau war of independence in Kenya was fought after the returnees of the First and Second World Wars (1919–1945), who were mainly Christians, succeeded in politicising the black majority in the then Kenyan colony (1920–1963) to demand justice across the colour divides, as a religio-ritual duty which climaxed in oaths. The first stage of the war was seen in the change of contents in the African ritualistic dances that young men and women had gotten used to. In time, the love songs became political and/or patriotic songs that prepared people for a major war that was in the offing. The second stage was the secretive binding oaths. The third stage was the repositioning of the rebels in terms of forest fighters, the combatants, who were to engage the British government in guerrilla warfare. The third stage also saw some rebels positioned as spies, oath administrators, resource mobilisers, food suppliers to the forest fighters, among other offices. In all these duty allocations within the rank-and-file of society, it is critically important to ask: Were these ritualistic oaths a poor imitation and/or mockery of ecclesiastical Eucharist? Were men and women fighters acting from a just war theory? What role did women play in this all-important war that inspired other liberation movements in Africa and beyond? In Kirinyaga County of Kenya, were there women combatants and/or supporters of Mau-Mau rebellion (1952–1960)? The materials in this article are primarily gathered through archival sources and through interviewing some of the participants.

The call for papers for this volume of M/C Journal provoked an impressive number of responses. The bulk of those responses took issue with the implication within the call for papers that print culture is in some way under threat, or is in danger of being superseded by digital forms. It is axiomatic that the advent of any new technology is accompanied by obituary notices for an older, pre-existing technology. The radio was seen as a threat to books and literacy in the 1920s, and, similarly, in the 1950s the popularity of television in the home was expected to mean the end of cinemas and the movie business. These same debates were rehearsed in the 1980s, when it was the VCR’s turn to try to kill off the cinema, but twenty years later, the cinema still survives and makes more money than ever. The VCR did not kill the cinema, but it is apparent that the DVD will kill the VCR. Is print destined to be supplanted by digital technology? The essays in this volume suggest not, although for different reasons. The dominant theme to come through this collection is that print and print culture are undergoing a process of change. Part of this process of change is attributable to the rise of digitisation, but this is not the whole reason. Some of the contributors here took issue with the meaning of the word print itself. Robert Watson, for instance, discusses the history of the word print and the different contexts in which it is used, such as the means by which knowledges are ‘imprinted’ in animal brains. Watson’s discussion then turns to the artifact of the cinema print of Muriel’s Wedding in the ways in which the various forms of print manifest themselves in the experience of watching that film. The feature article for this issue, Bethany Turner’s analysis of the communication strategies of the Zapatistas, demonstrates the marriage of the romanticised vision of the Zapatistas as Internet guerrillas, holed up in inaccessible regions with no more than a laptop and a mobile phone, spreading their message of revolution in a ‘netwar’ against the Mexican regime. Turner argues, however, that underpinning this romantic notion is an old, narrative-based tradition, of story, allegory, and magic realism. Certainly, the Zapatistas’ communiqués do appear in digital form, but not before they have been transmitted through traditional oral and printed networks. The digital realm here is a supplement to the printed form, not its usurper. Steven Maras investigates Waler Ong’s work on Ramus, specifically Ong’s thesis that the Ramus dialectic reconfigured the world (and thought itself) in terms of that which can be apprehended by sight in a set of spatial and geometric figures. Maras shows that Ramus remains with us in the format of the printed page, but at the same time never before has the technology to manipulate that page been so complex, yet paradoxically, so accessible. Pedagogy still inhabits Ramusian space, viewing the realm beyond the borders of the printed text as a “no-go” area, a forbidden zone into which only the boldest would venture. Vicky Liu’s paper on Seal Culture tackles the question of authenticity in electronic commerce. Written signatures are, as Derrida demonstrates, at once unique and infinitely reproducible. Traditional seals derive their authenticity from the imprint of the sealer; the challenge for electronic commerce is to devise a similar system to validate digital information. Using the Chinese seal culture as an example, Liu describes the visualised digital signature scheme that simulates the physical form of the seal in electronic environments. This again is an instance of how the non-print world borrows from and adapts physical objects of print culture. The nation of the unique producer of printed work is also a feature of Dougal Phillips and Oliver Watts’s paper on copyright. “Copyright” has its origins in interdictions against a work being re-printed without the approval of (and payment to) the author. Phillips and Watts contend that the current system of copyright operates within an inherently capitalist discourse, in which notions of ownership are tied to remuneration for intellection property. They argue that current efforts to protect copyright are motivated by the interests of large corporations that have vested interests in preventing file-sharing and hacking of the encryption codes on DVDs. What, they ask, would it mean to return to gift economy for cultural products that pre-dates copyright, one in which the author’s remuneration comes only in the form of celebrity or reputation for innovation? Those last-ditch defenders of print culture are the subject of Juri Joensuu’s “Intimate Technology”. Joensuu examines the tropes that are used when defending print culture, particularly how reading is figured rhetorically. Joensuu rightly points out that cultural shifts are not discrete, but tend to overlap: oral culture is still with after 500 years of moveable type; print and digital forms currently exist side-by-side. Joensuu highlights the way in which the physicality of reading is an underlying feature of arguments that defend print culture: the book is a sensual object in a way that the digital object can never be; digital print draws attention to its means of its production in a manner that only the most elaborate, poorly produced, or eccentric books do. The final two articles look forward to what Scott Lukas calls the ‘newprint’ era. Phillip Roe’s “Dimensions of Print” points out that the human subject is constructed as being “in front of” the object of study, whether that object is a physical book or a computer screen. Both are technologies for the reproduction of print. Roe speculates on the arrival of the post-print, a shift in the construction of human subjectivity that will pose difficulties for the print subject it will replace. Finally, Scott Lukas reads contemporary print culture through his formulation of “newprint”. This formulation hearkens back to Phillips and Watts’s article, in that Lukas sees newprint as extending the state’s propaganda industry by changing the written word into what he calls “artifice”. Lukas argues that newprint can lead to the diluting of the voice of the writer as well as, on a wider level, the fracturing of community. He illustrates how communicative acts are changing with a personal example of his own, an example that is increasingly common, yet still surprising. We hope that you will enjoy this issue of M/C Journal, and find much to consider within its articles. Like Scott Lukas, we are delighted to welcome you to (new) print! Glen Thomas & Jaz Choi ‘print’ issue editors Citation reference for this article MLA Style Thomas, Glen, and Jaz Choi. "Print." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/00-editorial.php>. APA Style Thomas, G., and J. Choi. (Jun. 2005) "Print," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/00-editorial.php>.

Introduction The research from which this piece derives explores political remix video (PRV), a genre in which remixers critique dominant discourses and power structures through guerrilla remixing of copyrighted footage (“What Is Political Remix Video?”). Specifically, I examined the works of political video remixer Elisa Kreisinger, whose queer remixes of shows such as Sex and the City and Mad Men received considerable attention between 2010 and the present. As a rhetoric scholar, I am attracted not only to the ways that remix functions discursively but also the ways in which remixers are constrained in their ability to argue, and what recourse they have in these situations of legal and technological constraint. Ultimately, many of these struggles play out on YouTube. This is unsurprising: many studies of YouTube and other user-generated content (UGC) platforms focus on the fact that commercial sites cannot constitute utopian, democratic, or free environments (Hilderbrand; Hess; Van Dijck). However, I find that, contrary to popular belief, YouTube’s commercial interests are not the primary factor limiting remixer agency. Rather, United States copyright law as enacted on YouTube has the most potential to inhibit remixers. This has led to many remixers becoming advocates for fair use, the provision in the Copyright Act of 1976 that allows for limited use of copyrighted content. With this in mind, I decided to delve more deeply into the framing of fair use by remixers and other advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Social Media. In studying discourses of fair use as they play out in the remix community, I find that the framing of fair use bears a striking similarity to what rhetoric scholars have termed vernacular discourse—a discourse emanating from a small segment of the larger civic community (Ono and Sloop 23). The vernacular is often framed as that which integrates the institutional or mainstream while simultaneously asserting its difference through appropriation and subversion. A video qualifies as fair use if it juxtaposes source material in a new way for the purposes of critique. In turn, a vernacular text asserts its “vernacularity” by taking up parts of pre-existing dominant institutional discourses in a way that resonates with a smaller community. My argument is that this tension between institutional and vernacular gives political remix video a multivalent argument—one that presents itself both in the text of the video itself as well as in the video’s status as a fair use of copyrighted material. Just as fair use represents the assertion of creator agency against unfair copyright law, vernacular discourse represents the assertion of a localised community within a world dominated by institutional discourses. In this way, remixers engage rights holders and other institutions in a pleasurable game of cat and mouse, a struggle to expose the boundaries of draconian copyright law. YouTube’s Commercial InterestsYouTube’s commercial interests operate at a level potentially invisible to the casual user. While users provide YouTube with content, they also provide the site with data—both metadata culled from their navigations of the site (page views, IP addresses) as well as member-provided data (such as real name and e-mail address). YouTube mines this data for a number of purposes—anything from interface optimisation to targeted advertising via Google’s AdSense. Users also perform a certain degree of labour to keep the site running smoothly, such as reporting videos that violate the Terms of Service, giving videos the thumbs up or thumbs down, and reporting spam comments. As such, users involved in YouTube’s participatory culture are also necessarily involved in the site’s commercial interests. While there are legitimate concerns regarding the privacy of personal information, especially after Google introduced policies in 2012 to facilitate a greater flow of information across all of their subsidiaries, it does not seem that this has diminished YouTube’s popularity (“Google: Privacy Policy”).Despite this, some make the argument that users provide the true benefit of UGC platforms like YouTube, yet reap few rewards, creating an exploitative dynamic (Van Dijck, 46). Two assumptions seem to underpin this argument: the first is that users do not desire to help these platforms prosper, the second is that users expect to profit from their efforts on the website. In response to these arguments, it’s worth calling attention to scholars who have used alternative economic models to account for user-platform coexistence. This is something that Henry Jenkins addresses in his recent book Spreadable Media, largely by focusing on assigning alternate sorts of value to user and fan labour—either the cultural worth of the gift, or the satisfaction of a job well done common to pre-industrial craftsmanship (61). However, there are still questions of how to account for participatory spaces in which labours of love coexist with massively profitable products. In service of this point, Jenkins calls up Lessig, who posits that many online networks operate as hybrid economies, which combine commercial and sharing economies. In a commercial economy, profit is the primary consideration, while a sharing economy is composed of participants who are there because they enjoy doing the work without any expectation of compensation (176). The strict separation between the two economies is, in Lessig’s estimation, essential to the hybrid economy’s success. While it would be difficult to incorporate these two economies together once each had been established, platforms like YouTube have always operated under the hybrid principle. YouTube’s users provide the site with its true value (through their uploading of content, provision of metadata, and use of the site), yet users do not come to YouTube with these tasks in mind—they come to YouTube because it provides an easy-to-use platform by which to share amateur creativity, and a community with whom to interact. Additionally, YouTube serves as the primary venue where remixers can achieve visibility and viral status—something Elisa Kreisinger acknowledged in our interviews (2012). However, users who are not concerned with broad visibility as much as with speaking to particular viewers may leave YouTube if they feel that the venue does not suit their content. Some feminist fan vidders, for instance, have withdrawn from YouTube due to what they perceived as a community who didn’t understand their work (Kreisinger, 2012). Additionally, Kreisinger ended up garnering many more views of her Queer Men remix on Vimeo due simply to the fact that the remix’s initial upload was blocked via YouTube’s Content ID feature. By the time Kreisinger had argued her case with YouTube, the Vimeo link had become the first stop for those viewing and sharing the remix, which received 72,000 views to date (“Queer Men”). Fair Use, Copyright, and Content IDThis instance points to the challenge that remixers face when dealing with copyright on YouTube, a site whose processes are not designed to accommodate fair use. Specifically, Title II, Section 512 of the DMCA (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998) states that certain websites may qualify as “safe harbours” for copyright infringement if users upload the majority of the content to the site, or if the site is an information location service. These sites are insulated from copyright liability as long as they cooperate to some extent with rights holders. A common objection to Section 512 is that it requires media rights holders to police safe harbours in search of infringing content, rather than placing the onus on the platform provider (Meyers 939). In order to cooperate with Section 512 and rights holders, YouTube initiated the Content ID system in 2007. This system offers rights holders the ability to find and manage their content on the site by creating archives of footage against which user uploads are checked, allowing rights holders to automatically block, track, or monetise uses of their content (it is also worth noting that rights holders can make these responses country-specific) (“How Content ID Works”). At the current time, YouTube has over 15 million reference files against which it checks uploads (“Statistics - YouTube”). Thus, it’s fairly common for uploaded work to get flagged as a violation, especially when that work is a remix of popular institutional footage. If an upload is flagged by the Content ID system, the user can dispute the match, at which point the rights holder has the opportunity to either allow the video through, or to issue a DMCA takedown notice. They can also sue at any point during this process (“A Guide to YouTube Removals”). Content ID matches are relatively easy to dispute and do not generally require legal intervention. However, disputing these automatic takedowns requires users to be aware of their rights to fair use, and requires rights holders to acknowledge a fair use (“YouTube Removals”). This is only compounded by the fact that fair use is not a clearly defined right, but rather a vague provision relying on a balance between four factors: the purpose of the use, character of the work, the amount used, and the effect on the market value of the original (“US Copyright Office–Fair Use”). As Aufderheide and Jaszi observed in 2008, the rejection of videos for Content ID matches combined with the vagaries of fair use has a chilling effect on user-generated content. Rights Holders versus RemixersRights holders’ objections to Section 512 illustrate the ruling power dynamic in current intellectual property disputes: power rests with institutional rights-holding bodies (the RIAA, the MPAA) who assert their dominance over DMCA safe harbours such as YouTube (who must cooperate to stay in business) who, in turn, exert power over remixers (the lowest on the food chain, so to speak). Beyond the observed chilling effect of Content ID, remix on YouTube is shot through with discursive struggle between these rights-holding bodies and remixers attempting to express themselves and reach new communities. However, this has led political video remixers to become especially vocal when arguing for their uses of content. For instance, in the spring of 2009, Elisa Kreisinger curated a show entitled “REMOVED: The Politics of Remix Culture” in which blocked remixes screened alongside the remixers’ correspondence with YouTube. Kreisinger writes that each of these exchanges illustrate the dynamic between rights holders and remixers: “Your video is no longer available because FOX [or another rights-holding body] has chosen to block it (“Remixed/Removed”). Additionally, as Jenkins notes, even Content ID on YouTube is only made available to the largest rights holders—smaller companies must still go through an official DMCA takedown process to report infringement (Spreadable 51). In sum, though recent technological developments may give the appearance of democratising access to content, when it comes to policing UGC, technology has made it easier for the largest rights holders to stifle the creation of content.Additionally, it has been established that rights holders do occasionally use takedowns abusively, and recent court cases—specifically Lenz v. Universal Music Corp.—have established the need for rights holders to assess fair use in order to make a “good faith” assertion that users intend to infringe copyright prior to issuing a takedown notice. However, as Joseph M. Miller notes, the ruling fails to rebalance the burdens and incentives between rights holders and users (1723). This means that while rights holders are supposed to take fair use into account prior to issuing takedowns, there is no process in place that either effectively punishes rights holders who abuse copyright, or allows users to defend themselves without the possibility of massive financial loss (1726). As such, the system currently in place does not disallow or discourage features like Content ID, though cases like Lenz v. Universal indicate a push towards rebalancing the burden of determining fair use. In an effort to turn the tables, many have begun arguing for users’ rights and attempting to parse fair use for the layperson. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), for instance, has espoused an “environmental rhetoric” of fair use, casting intellectual property as a resource for users (Postigo 1020). Additionally, they have created practical guidelines for UGC creators dealing with DMCA takedowns and Content ID matches on YouTube. The Center for Social Media has also produced a number of fair use guides tailored to different use cases, one of which targeted online video producers. All of these efforts have a common goal: to educate content creators about the fair use of copyrighted content, and then to assert their use as fair in opposition to large rights-holding institutions (though they caution users against unfair uses of content or making risky legal moves that could lead to lawsuits). In relation to remix specifically, this means that remixers must differentiate themselves from institutional, commercial content producers, standing up both for the argument contained in their remix as well as their fair use of copyrighted content.In their “Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video,” the Center for Social Media note that an online video qualifies as a fair use if (among other things) it critiques copyrighted material and if it “recombines elements to make a new work that depends for its meaning on (often unlikely) relationships between the elements” (8). These two qualities are also two of the defining qualities of political remix video. For instance, they write that work meets the second criteria if it creates “new meaning by juxtaposition,” noting that in these cases “the recombinant new work has a cultural identity of its own and addresses an audience different from those for which its components were intended” (9). Remixes that use elements of familiar sources in unlikely combinations, such as those made by Elisa Kreisinger, generally seek to reach an audience who are familiar with the source content, but also object to it. Sex and the City, for instance, while it initially seemed willing to take on previously “taboo” topics in its exploration of dating in Manhattan, ended with each of the heterosexual characters paired with an opposite sex partner, and forays from this heteronormative narrative were contained either within in one-off episodes or tokenised gay characters. For this reason, Kreisinger noted that the intended audience for Queer Carrie were the queer and feminist viewers of Sex and the City who felt that the show was overly normative and exclusionary (Kreisinger, Art:21). As a result, the target audience of these remixes is different from the target audience of the source material—though the full nuance of the argument is best understood by those familiar with the source. Thus, the remix affirms the segment of the viewing community who saw only tokenised representations of their identity in the source text, and in so doing offers a critique of the original’s heteronormative focus.Fair Use and the VernacularVernacular discourse, as broadly defined by Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, refers to discourses that “emerge from discussions between members of self-identified smaller communities within the larger civic community.” It operates partially through appropriating dominant discourses in ways better suited to the vernacular community, through practices of pastiche and cultural syncretism (23). In an effort to better describe the intricacies of this type of discourse, Robert Glenn Howard theorised a hybrid “dialectical vernacular” that oscillates between institutional and vernacular discourse. This hybridity arises from the fact that the institutional and the vernacular are fundamentally inseparable, the vernacular establishing its meaning by asserting itself against the institutional (Howard, Toward 331). When put into use online, this notion of a “dialectical vernacular” is particularly interesting as it refers not only to the content of vernacular messages but also to their means of production. Howard notes that discourse embodying the dialectical vernacular is by nature secondary to institutional discourse, that the institutional must be clearly “structurally prior” (Howard, Vernacular 499). With this in mind it is unsurprising that political remix video—which asserts its secondary nature by calling upon pre-existing copyrighted content while simultaneously reaching out to smaller segments of the civic community—would qualify as a vernacular discourse.The notion of an institutional source’s structural prevalence also echoes throughout work on remix, both in practical guides such as the Center for Social Media’s “Best Practices” as well as in more theoretical takes on remix, like Eduardo Navas’ essay “Turbulence: Remixes + Bonus Beats,” in which he writes that:In brief, the remix when extended as a cultural practice is a second mix of something pre-existent; the material that is mixed for a second time must be recognized, otherwise it could be misunderstood as something new, and it would become plagiarism […] Without a history, the remix cannot be Remix. An elegant theoretical concept, this becomes muddier when considered in light of copyright law. If the history of remix is what gives it its meaning—the source text from which it is derived—then it is this same history that makes a fair use remix vulnerable to DMCA takedowns and other forms of discipline on YouTube. However, as per the criteria outlined by the Center for Social Media, it is also from this ironic juxtaposition of institutional sources that the remix object establishes its meaning, and thus its vernacularity. In this sense, the force of a political remix video’s argument is in many ways dependent on its status as an object in peril: vulnerable to the force of a law that has not yet swung in its favor, yet subversive nonetheless.With this in mind, YouTube and other UGC platforms represent a fraught layer of mediation between institutional and vernacular. As a site for the sharing of amateur video, YouTube has the potential to affirm small communities as users share similar videos, follow one particular channel together, or comment on videos posted by people in their networks. However, YouTube’s interface (rife with advertisements, constantly reminding users of its affiliation with Google) and cooperation with rights holders establish it as an institutional space. As such, remixes on the site are already imbued with the characteristic hybridity of the dialectical vernacular. This is especially true when the remixers (as in the case of PRV) have made the conscious choice to advocate for fair use at the same time that they distribute remixes dealing with other themes and resonating with other communities. ConclusionPolitical remix video sits at a fruitful juncture with regard to copyright as well as vernacularity. Like almost all remix, it makes its meaning through juxtaposing sources in a unique way, calling upon viewers to think about familiar texts in a new light. This creation invokes a new audience—a quality that makes it both vernacular and also a fair use of content. Given that PRV is defined by the “guerrilla” use of copyrighted footage, it has the potential to stand as a political statement outside of the thematic content of the remix simply due to the nature of its composition. This gives PRV tremendous potential for multivalent argument, as a video can simultaneously represent a marginalised community while advocating for copyright reform. This is only reinforced by the fact that many political video remixers have become vocal in advocating for fair use, asserting the strength of their community and their common goal.In addition to this argumentative richness, PRV’s relation to fair use and vernacularity exposes the complexity of the remix form: it continually oscillates between institutional affiliations and smaller vernacular communities. However, the hybridity of these remixes produces tension, much of which manifests on YouTube, where videos are easily responded to and challenged by both institutuional and vernacular authorities. In addition, a tension exists in the remix text itself between the source and the new, remixed message. Further research should attend to these areas of tension, while also exploring the tenacity of the remix community and their ability to advocate for themselves while circumventing copyright law.References“About Political Remix Video.” Political Remix Video. 15 Feb. 2012. ‹http://www.politicalremixvideo.com/what-is-political-remix/›.Aufderheide, Patricia, and Peter Jaszi. Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Kindle.“Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video.” The Center For Social Media, 2008. Van Dijck, José. “Users like You? 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