Screening Protest

Visual narratives of dissent across time, space and genre

Alexa Robertson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351702188
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Screening Protest brings together a range of scholarly perspectives on the study of protest mediations on television and in film. Arguing that the screen is a fruitful, if overlooked, analytical focus, the book explores how visual narratives of protest wander across borders – territorial, temporal and generic.

Chapters compare coverage of major protests in recent history by global news channels like Al Jazeera English, BBC World, CNN International and RT. They consider how geopolitical agendas, newsroom culture and the ubiquity of eyewitness footage shape the narration of events such as the 'Umbrella Revolution' in Hong Kong, anti-austerity protests in Greece, pro-EU mobilizations in the Ukraine and clashes in Ferguson. A focus on narrative allows authors to compare such news stories with popular cultural depictions of the protester, in films and television series such as The Hunger Games, Robin Hood and Suffragette. Although focussed on the screen, the scope of the book is broad, given its exploration of images distributed worldwide.

Written with both scholars and students in mind, Screening Protest will interest researchers in political science, sociology, media and film studies, as well as the general reader interested in current affairs.

FIGURE 1.1 Journalist Paul Mason films actors Lara Sawalha and Sirine Saba in Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere, Young Vic Theatre, London, March 2017.

Photo: Tristam Kenton. Credit: Guardian News & Media Ltd 2017.

1

INTRODUCTION

Alexa Robertson

This book is about protest on screen, and particularly television, which is a new medium as well as an old one, and one which privileges the visual. Each chapter opens with an image, and relates to it. The image that opens this chapter, and the book, shows the journalist Paul Mason filming two thespians in a play at the Young Vic theatre in London in March 2017: Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere. It was the same title as that of his bestselling book of 2012, based on his influential blog of 2011 that charted what the journalist called ‘the new global revolutions’ – the wave of protest that was surging across the world’s continents. Both book and performance have been described as the story of a man who

watched as the Occupy Movement took over Wall Street and the City of London, Egyptians came out en masse in Cairo bringing down Mubarak, and the people of Spain and Athens took to the streets as their countries faced bankruptcy.

(Gardner 2017)

From blog to book to stage to screen: the play was broadcast on BBC television in July 2017.

The image is a useful heuristic because it encapsulates the proclivity of visual narratives of protest to wander across borders – territorial, temporal and generic. It is also particularly well suited to the discussion that unfolds in these pages, because of the screen’s centrality (Mason wields a video camera, and what he films is projected on a giant screen behind the actors, together with archived news footage). One purpose of this chapter is to set out why we think the screen is a fruitful, if overlooked, point of entry to the analysis of protest mediations and their societal and political contexts.

Another figure haunts these pages. He has been visible at protests across the globe on a regular basis in the years since the allegorically masked revolutionary was first seen masterminding a mobilization against a fascist British state in V for Vendetta (2005). Like the reflexive photograph (and filming) of Mason, the image of a protester wearing a Guy Fawkes mask is a useful heuristic because it reminds us of the historical roots of contemporary protest, that symbols travel and that contemporary protest is conscious of the camera. It is also often intertextual, with references to popular culture and fiction having become essential features of the repertoires of demonstrators in settings that have become increasingly complex, both when it comes to the political and social situations they address, and to the media technology through which their dissent is disseminated. The symbols, in their simplicity, serve as vessels on which to navigate that turbulent setting.

The protests that regularly meet us when we switch on the television, or visit the websites of news channels, or watch one of their YouTube clips, or an AJ+ ‘explainer video’ shared on Facebook, take place in societies that are struggling with a double-edged problem of representation. Both political elites and professional journalists are challenged by rebellion in politics and a seemingly perpetual revolution in communication technology. The context is a world dependent on screens – from the large and public to the small and hand-held. It is a world in which images are paramount; a world characterized by increasingly fluid borders between political participation and insurrection (yesterday’s protester is today’s armed rebel), between the local and the global, and between news and entertainment. Millions of women marching in cities on every continent following the inauguration of the new US president in January 2017 and Catalonians on the street half a year later; the flourishing of populism in Europe and beyond; rallies welcoming refugees and anti-immigration marches; Black Lives Matter; students on a March for Our Lives; #MeToo. ‘What’s going on?’ asked Mason in the thick of 2011, heralded the ‘Year of the Protester’ by Time magazine. The need to ask what’s going on has not abated seven years on, and the media play a prominent role in any answer. The contributions to this book look for answers in different places. What sets it apart from most recent scholarship on media and protest is that it does not focus on ‘social’ media – the problematic term for what used to be referred to, even more problematically, as ‘new’ media. (What media are not social? And Twitter’s 10th birthday is but a memory, making it almost a legacy medium for millennials.) Instead, it considers the mediation of protest by focusing on screens – be they those that screen films, or those of global television, the site where ‘new’ and ‘old’ media meet. From early 20th-century newsreels to CNN and Al Jazeera, from Hong Kong to Ferguson, and from Spartacus to Robin Hood, the book traverses a broad landscape of dissent.

This first chapter is meant to serve as a backdrop to those that follow. It introduces our key concepts (screen and narrative) and analytical focal point (television) and suggests where on the bookshelf this volume might best be placed. Our point of departure is that there is a need to paint the landscape with a broad brush, but also to pay attention to the detail in which the devil resides. In our reading, we have been frustrated by how little the literature has had to offer in this respect, with more theoretically inclined work often too general, and empirical research often too focused on one mobilization or protest event. Just as there has been a preoccupation, in recent scholarship, with ‘social’ media, so too has much of it emphasized the novelty of what ‘kicked off’ in 2011. We argue that the problem of representation can best be understood by examining mediations of political dissent across time, space and narrative genre. For this to be possible, and to ensure the coherence of the conversation we propose to have about our findings, a common focal point is needed. In what follows, a case is made for the utility of the screen as a phenomenon to explore empirically, and as a concept to facilitate theoretical reflection. The work involves operationalizing the concept of screen in the empirical analysis of texts on television – however that medium is now to be conceived. The chapter then offers answers to two questions: why study television, if the key concept is screen(ing), the concern is protest mediation and the context is a digital landscape? And why focus on narrative, in a context dominated by the visual?

The screen

A dictionary definition of ‘screening’ yields several meanings. It refers to the showing of a film. To screen something out means to exclude it, after evaluation – rather like gatekeeping, in news terms. Screening also refers to a methodological investigation to assess the suitability of something for a particular purpose. This book concerns screening in all three senses. First, it focuses on representations of protest on television screens (although others are involved). Second, by comparing coverage in different political and cultural contexts, it documents which protests are screened out by some broadcasters, but made visible by others. Comparing journalistic and popular cultural narratives is another point of access to differential visibility. Contemporary journalism is often found wanting, constrained as it is by economic considerations, objectivity norms and, in some contexts, political pressures, so people turn increasingly to political drama and satire, seen as ‘speaking truth to power’, for understandings of politics. When it comes to screening in the third sense, the study of protest on popular screens helps us reflect on how well television has met the challenge of representing people who feel they lack political representation.

If that is what the verb captures, what thoughts are invested in the noun? Once the preserve of film scholars, the screen has become so ubiquitous that scholarship in a variety of fields needs to relate to it. The way it has changed, with developments in media technology, has arguably had implications for the way the viewer interacts with what the screen reveals. To Italians in the quattrocento, the screen or schermo was a protection against something on the outside, and got in the way of seeing. The screen used by Anglophones in the 16th and 17th centuries was still protective (usually against fire) and could also be a partition. Casetti (2013) dates its advent in the world of entertainment to the early 19th century, when it began to be something that could ‘open our gaze to something hidden’. The Victorians used what they called screens to display private collections of things. In the following century, the screen became the now-familiar large white background, used for the projection of moving film. The television screen made its debut – in the public space of Selfridge’s department store in London – in 1925, and had, by the late 1950s, become a central fixture in living rooms on every continent. The screens of television began to multiply in the 1980s, with the VCR, and, in the next millennium, took people out of their domestic spaces again. In the urban square, giant screens form the backdrop to the sea of small ones, in what Casetti (2013: 22) refers to as a ‘screen explosion’. Through the screens on their devices, writes Sancho (2014: 396),

the audience gets excited and indignant, takes into their own hands the safeguarding of the public square just by looking and extending that visibility; they denounce the arbitrariness of the state by re-Tweeting what’s going on by being vigilant, and therefore by demonstrating as an involved participant.

We are now surrounded by screens, and have them perpetually at our fingertips. It is not just a technological fact, Casetti claims, but also a matter of conceptual transformation: ‘it is the very idea of a screen that is changing’. Significantly – not least for the larger concerns of the work reported in this book – the transformation of the screen, in Casetti’s view, ‘is actually the symptom of a more general media transformation’ (2013: 17).

Transformation is also the essence of a concept that specifically connects the screen with protest: the ‘public screen’ (DeLuca & Peeples 2002; DeLuca, Sun & Peeples 2011). The sort of changes in technology and culture addressed by Benkler and other theorists have, according to DeLuca and Peeples (2002: 127), ‘transformed the rules and roles of participatory democracy’. In media-saturated environments, attention, rather than information, is a strategic resource. Where sceptics such as Putnam and Habermas see the predominance of television (and other) screens in political settings as threats to engagement, DeLuca and Peeples argue that the most, ‘and the most important, public discussions take place via screens’. Building on medium theorists such as Innis, McLuhan and Meyrowitz, they argue that new technologies result in new ‘modes of perception’. In striking contrast to the rational argument on which the Habermasian public sphere is founded, the mode of perception enabled by the public screen is one of ‘distraction’. This does not signify a lack of attention, but rather a ceaseless circulation of images and words that creates a new space for visual political discourse – for spectacle in a positive sense (DeLuca & Peeples 2002: 127). Key to their argument is the claim that political discourse has become largely visual, and that images create as much as they represent reality. They are ‘where collective social action, individual identity and symbolic activity meet – the nexus between culture and politics’.

The screen has a number of metaphors in its biography. Once something that stood protectively in the way, it became a ‘window’ providing an opening in the barrier that stands in the way of reality. According to this understanding, the screen enables contact with the world to be re-established. The metaphor of the ‘frame’, on the other hand, signals that the screen affords a representation of reality, rather than reality itself. In a way, it shows us more than the window, because the frame makes it possible to see the dynamics and construction of reality. The metaphor of the ‘mirror’ includes the spectator. According to this way of thinking about the screen, it reflects the world to us, and allows us to see our place in it. Those who watch ‘see a world to which they yield themselves, but they also see a point of view regarding this world with which they associate themselves’ (Casetti 2013: 19). Television inherited all of these metaphors.

Why study television?

There are many reasons for studying television, if the aim is to study representations of protest in order to explore change in the intersecting realms of media and politics. Television is perhaps the most democratic of media, with a low threshold of accessibility, and – unlike devices reliant on internet connections – requires neither literacy nor particular competencies (Meyrowitz 2009). As set out above, it serves as a ‘window on the world’, changing our experience of space. It offers a site for mutual visibility and recognition (which must certainly matter to people making claims). And it is cinematic as well as televisual, combining the glance and the gaze.

Television is more than a version of the screen. It is a medium that has stayed put in (or recently returned to) the living room, despite other devices having moved into the home. It is content (what we refer to when we speak of ‘watching television’) that can be accessed on that living room set, but also online, on YouTube and on the phone. Television journalists are on Twitter as often as they are on camera. Television drama awards now go to series made and distributed by streaming services like Netflix and Amazon. Television, in other words, is both ‘old’ and ‘new’ media. Television is also an institution (especially when it is public service) and a business (when it is a commercial operator); it is an organization embedded in other social and political environments (Katz 2009: 6–7). Television, finally, is a site – ‘the place where public sphering gets done’, as Dahlgren (1995) nicely put it.

Dayan (2009) understands television in a way that resonates with DeLuca and Peeples’ ideas about the public screen, in that he considers it to be an instrument that connects centres to peripheries by organizing and managing collective attention. It has learned to coexist with newer technologies of communication by redefining its role: the situation he described a decade ago was ‘perhaps less the story of a dethroned television faced with a new dominant medium than that of a gradual accommodation’ (Dayan 2009: 20; see also Gurevitch et al. 2009: 167). In the old days of national, central television, it was unproblematic to assert that it fo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Screening Protest
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Protest on Global Television
• Part II Protest on Popular Screens
• Afterword
• Index