Film as a Radical Pedagogic Tool

Deirdre O'Neill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351804110
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Emerging from Inside Film, a project that helps prisoners and people on probation make their own films, this book discusses the need for working class people to represent themselves and challenge mainstream stereotypes and assumptions about them. This project gave prisoners and parolees the technical skills necessary to make their own films and tell their own stories in order to counter the ways they have been misrepresented. The author demonstrates that film and television are key means by which socioeconomically marginalized groups are classified according to hegemonic norms, as well as the ways such groups can undermine these misrepresentations through their use of the media. As a theoretical reflection on the Inside Film project and the relationship between filmmaking and education, this book explores what radical pedagogy looks like in action.

1 Introduction

The process of theorizing, the generalizations, the concepts, are not driven by the desire to create an objectifying distance, but to honor the suffering of these people in a way that is adequate to its significance: to do justice to them, to honor their lives.

(Charlesworth 2000:26)

This work is concerned with questions of subjectivity and representation as they relate to the issue of (working) class both in theory and in practice. The research upon which it is based was carried out within the context of series of filmmaking courses adapted to the requirements of both serving and ex-prisoners and those on probation. Considered holistically, it can be regarded an explicitly activist, cultural, and political intervention: the purpose of which is to challenge the generally accepted marginalized positioning, negative (mis)representations, and ignored knowledge (cultural and political) of the working class. The achievement of these goals is dependent on a collective filmmaking praxis that creates the conditions for cognitive, ideological, and subjective shifts that make it possible to articulate the already existing knowledge of the people who participate in the course.

The Inside Film project and the considerations it generates is an attempt to situate theoretical concerns, filmmaking strategies, pedagogic practice, and material impacts within a dialectical relationship not only to each other but also crucially to working-class experience in ways that blur the boundaries between theory and practice. The refusal to draw rigid lines between the theoretical and practical components of this work and to consider the process of filmmaking as a fusing of thought and action is fundamentally an attempt to resist the division between intellectual and manual labor that Marx considered a socialist society would be able to eradicate because it is precisely this division that is constantly and consistently utilized to justify classed divisions of labor and inequality. According to Marx, theory can only be considered relevant if it connected to the practical activity of working-class experience.

All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism, find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice… . The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

(Marx 1970:122–123)

It is for this reason that for Inside Film, learning about film involves the application of a theoretical knowledge of filmmaking as well as the practical ability and skills to make films that engage with the experiences of the working class.

Drawing on a polymorphous group of theorists from various disciplines, the approach to this work is a multidisciplinary one, which, considering the multifaceted nature of what Skeggs has pinpointed as the ‘problem of class’ is the only logical approach to take. Undoubtedly questions of class intersect with all areas of life, and by focusing on the development of an independent and class specific critical engagement with film, education and politics the Inside Film project is able to identify and make explicit the ways in which class is central to the organization and workings of all those aspects of everyday life. In the process of doing this, it becomes possible to expose how class remains obscured by dominant discourses that deny the economic oppression and classed racism that function to reproduce a class conflict rarely named as such (Haylett 2001: 366).

Working alongside the Inside Film students and taking an active role in the filmmaking process highlights the complexities of my own position in relation to this work, the Inside Film project itself, and to the challenges that occur as a direct result of that position. Situated as I am as being part of but not part of academia¹ while at the same time being working class but often accused of no longer belonging to the working class, my position as an hourly paid lecturer means I occupy a hybrid position: as a person produced by the same economic and material conditions as the people who participate in the project, I have never belonged in any meaningful way to the rather privileged, rarefied world of academia, and my relationship to it is different to that of many of the people I work with within the university sector. My life experiences, my attitudes, and my values all mark me as working class, and regardless of any academic ‘achievement’ I still lack the political, cultural, and social capital of those from more privileged backgrounds.

The detailed experiential and contextual knowledge of working-class life and working-class experiences that are methodologically essential to a project such as this is made possible precisely because I was produced by the same socioeconomic environment and material conditions as those of the Inside Film students. Like all people in this country regardless of their gender, religion, race, or sexuality, my sense of who I am has been shaped by a historically and contemporaneously entrenched class system. Precisely because of this, it would be unrealistic in the extreme to think I could simply shake off the experiences that have formed my subjectivity and slip comfortably into an environment traditionally and increasingly closed to people from my background. As a person whose parents were both manual workers, who grew up in a small council flat, who was a single parent on benefits, and who entered higher education as a mature student when none of my contemporaries or family had done so, my identification as working class rests on continuing feelings of my difference from middle-class people, my identification with working-class people, my biographical history, my feelings of alienation, and the conscious choices that I make on a daily basis. Therefore this is a ‘situated’ (Munt 2000:11) work,² and there is no intention, or wish, to represent it as an abstract universality or to suggest that it is a model that could be transposed to other groups.

The political and pedagogic objectives of the Inside Film project and the work it carries out cannot be described as ‘neutral’: methods and objectives are not, and cannot be neutral; neither can they be applied to all people in the same way. The methodological intentions of this project rest upon the knowledge that working-class life is defined externally to the people who experience it and that any transformation of this state of affairs is dependent on a critique that is generated internally.

What little documentation there is on working-class culture has been written ‘from the outside in, ’ by middle class writers and researchers. Inevitably, many working class customs tend to escape middle-class attention and working class people have failed to document the networks, language and customs central to their lives. In this sense working class culture is neither fully understood by those outside it, nor properly documented to encourage understanding.

(O’Neill 1992: 27)

This has led to a situation where the current systems of representation of working-class people within what is generally referred to as the mainstream media often presuppose experiences and attitudes that have been worked into instantaneously recognizable visual stereotypes shared across different platforms. Inevitably these representations fail to contextualize lives exposed to and defined by numerous situations of exploitation, oppression, and hardships or the extent to which responses to exploitation and oppression are linked to the social and political framework within which they occur.

The relentlessly mediated conditions of public life under neo liberalism where spectatorship and spectacle have replaced engagement (Fisher 2009:5, Sanbonmatsu 2004:197) has created the conditions (and necessity) for a project such as Inside Film that makes it possible to highlight the part the visual plays in fragmenting any sense of the whole. These conditions exist because the participants involved in the project have direct experience of the instabilities, contradictions, and myriad lies that are required in order to sustain a neoliberal society that treats their lives as economically justifiable collateral damage. The cognitive dissonance created as a result of their engagement with the demands of neoliberalism is expressed in the short, questioning, and angry films they produce. Unlike most films with working-class life as their subject matter, the films made by the Inside Film students are not filtered through the perspective of middle-class graduates of film schools and unpaid internships for whom the designation radical is a branded product to advertise themselves in the marketplace, while the lives they film are nothing more than another subject to document before they move onto the next subject.

The Inside Film project works on the assumption that as long as working-class life is organized in order to increase the profit margins of a small powerful elite, there will exist the potential to transform the relations of production and to replace them with a fairer more equal political and economic system. Marx claimed that capitalism was its own gravedigger (Marx and Engels 1967:94). The challenge faced by political radicals and critical educators is the creation of a new paradigm, an oppositional hegemony that will equip us with the tools we need to dig that grave.

It is fair to say the work of the Inside Film project is in a constant state of negotiation between established fields of perception that generally function in direct contradiction to each other, the conscious and the unconscious, the theoretical and the practical, the prison and the university, opposition and incorporation. As Paul Willemen has argued, occupying this kind of ‘in-between position’ brings with it a ‘sense of non-belonging, non identity within the culture that one inhabits’ and brings into play a ‘social intelligibility’ (1989:28) able to provide a perspective that encompasses not only the work itself but crucially the context in which the work takes shape. What this theoretically paradoxical positioning allows in practice is the ability to understand (feel) how people are shaped by the harsh conditions that have formed them while at the same time realizing that academic discourses, no matter how well intentioned, potentially create a distance that renders the research unintelligible to the very people it is involved with. Therefore, this work is not only concerned with prisoners and ex-prisoners but also with how working-class academics who are no longer determined by economic necessity but who still share the outlooks, values and attitudes, as well as the life experiences of the people they are collaborating with produce research that is recognizable to the people involved. This means that the usual academic orthodoxies of distance and detachment are not only inappropriate but are impossible and that the project needs to be understood as being rooted not solely in academic enquiry but in the need to share experiences of anger, despair, and alienation.

Both the theoretical and practical aspects of the course run by Inside Film have, like all critical movements, the same objective—to illuminate the hidden structures of power or what (Balibar 2002:46) has referred to as ‘a determinate economic policy’ and to reveal how those structures are part of a whole that both influences the way in which lives are lived and the choices open to the people who live them. This stands in direct opposition to the mainstream media narratives of working-class life which concentrate on narrating individual stories framed within already existing conditions while ignoring opportunities to explore systemic structures. It is important to realize and to acknowledge the often negative perceptions and repeated stereotypes of working-class people and the representation of working-class lives we witness within mainstream culture are based on end results and not on the processes that create those results.

One of the ways in which we attempt to reframe the existing perceptual filters through which working-class life is viewed is the breaking down of the conceptual (and false) distinction between theory and practice. The pedagogic methodology and the films produced by the Inside Film students are not just examples of filmic practice or even simply the result of a pedagogic model: they are the conjunctural reimagining of critical pedagogy, working-class politics, and ethical interaction filtered through working-class experience. The films produced by the Inside Film students are not waiting to have theory ‘done to them’;

they are not illustrations of theory but theoretical essays in their own right. The works themselves have developed a sophisticated argument for how cinema can represent embodied experience and why it should do so.

(Marks 2000:xiv, author emphasis)

The films represent the ‘embodied experience’ of the working class whether that involves blurring the boundaries between right and wrong as The Interview does, or considering how social and economic inequalities are embedded within the geographical spaces of London as in Bare Inequality, or the economic and political exploitation involved in justifications of the death penalty as Death Watch does. All of these films deal with working-class life, working-class resentments and anger, and the current consequences of being working class.

According to Marx and Engels, any transformation of society is dependent upon the working class emancipating themselves

it is as well to remember why Marx ascribes a determinative primacy to class struggle. It is not because class is the only form of oppression or even the most frequent, consistent, or violent source of social conflict, but rather because its terrain is the social organization of production, which creates the material conditions of existence itself.

(Meiksins Wood 1995:108)

The recognition of the primacy of class is the crucial factor in the implementation of the work done by Inside Film. We have never found this concentration on class to pose a problem for the work we are engaged in; rather, it offers a defensive opportunity to challenge the postmodern rejection of stable identities and paradigmatic bodies of knowledge. The insistence on class as a stable identity and Capitalism as a paradigmatic system could, it does indeed need to be acknowledged, lead to accusations of ‘essentialism’ or of adherence to a kind of intransigent Marxism. These are accusations that I am happy to accept, insisting as I do upon the importance of exploring from a working-class perspective the complexities inherent in the interplay of the structural determinants of social relations, the formation of subjectivities, and the institutional restrictions that reproduce classed determined ways of being, and as Zavarzadeh has argued

hegemonic rhetoric conceals the underlying logic of exploitation that traverses all seemingly heterogeneous social practices. There is of course nothing more ‘essentialising’ to say once and for all that under all historical circumstances, ‘essentialising’ is a ‘bad ‘argument … under certain historical conditions, ‘essentialisation’ might be the only mode of (revolutionary) intervention in the dominant social arrangements.

(Zavarzadeh 1991:41)

It will, I trust, become clear that the Inside Film project is not simplistically demanding reconfigured visual representation for the working class, or equal access to dominant cultural institutions; rather, it is linking representation to class consciousness and action and demanding active participation in a public sphere from which the working class have been strategically and increasingly excluded. Furthermore, it is claiming working-class perspectives are not simply marginalized perspectives that need to be considered as one perspective amongst many; on the contrary, I am arguing that working-class experience and the knowledge embedded within those experiences holds the potential to construct a very different worldview.

The Inside Film project does not distinguish between culture and politics; on the contrary, it insists on their integration and mutual dependency, as Javier Pérez de Cuellar affirmed in the Unesco Report Our Creative Diversity in 1995: ‘Economic and political rights cannot be realized separately from social and cultural rights.’

The project aims to articulate and to bring into focus what should be glaringly obvious: it is working-class people who have the unique ability to talk about what it means to be working class. Although there are, of course, differences of race, gender, religion, age, etc. all of which often function within unequal power relationships resulting in oppressive situations and creating fractured subjectivities—there is also, as I argue in Chapter 2, a case to make for treating the working class as a homogenous group (Charlesworth 2000:7). People of different genders, ‘races, ’ and sexualities can be granted equality because their assimilation into the state reinforces the legitimacy of that state as pluralistic and inclusive, but this can never be true of the working class. As Helen Meiksins Wood (1995:258) has claimed:

the ‘politics of identity’ reveals its limitations, both theoretical and political, the moment we try to situate class differences within its democratic vision. Is it possible to imagine class differences without exploitation and domination? The ‘difference’ that constitutes class as an ‘identity’ is by definition a relationship of inequality and power, in a way that sexual or cultural difference need not be. A truly democratic society can celebrate diversities of life styles, culture or sexual preference: but in what sense would it be ‘democratic’ to celebrate class differences?

From this perspective, class represents not an identity but a structural relationship that exposes the way in which identity politics derives its legitimacy from its deflection of class politics onto non-economic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Radical Pedagogy, Prison, and Film
• 3 Working-Class Subjectivity and Representation
• 4 Broadening the Referential Framework: Prison as an Event
• 5 Hegemony and the Culture of the Working Class
• 6 Radical Cinematic Practices
• 7 The Foodbank Film
• Conclusion
• References
• Index