Dr. Sandra Gabriele

Foundations of Communication History

October 22, 2007

Paul Chislett

Emerging Cinema and Emerging Publics

Going to a movie today is largely viewed, by the mass consumer, as an entertainment experience. It is left to film festivals to be places for “serious” film art; that is to say films with a message. Just as the early years of book production, and the gradual development of newspapers allowed individuals and groups to become agents of change, so too has the cinema played a similar role. To explore this fact, two areas are interesting to look at: the first decade of the twentieth century, which saw Edison’s invention rapidly develop into an important industry. And, although it may seem odd to look at the first decade of the twenty-first century as a time of an emerging public, one need only look to Canada’s far north. Digital technology in general and cinema in particular has enabled the Inuit to reclaim their culture and adapt to Southern society on their terms. The Inuit in Nunavut, Canada have become agents of their own destiny through cinema and the media arts in general. Southern society has lived with cinema for over a century, yet cinema is an emerging force in this ancient and resilient culture.

Once Martin Luther nailed his thesis to the door of a church and his ideas were re-printed and sent along to the next town, the possibility of individuals becoming agents of social change became possible. In order to have a chance to participate in public affairs, ideas need to circulate freely to a wide audience. The Catholic Church successfully prevented this from happening for centuries. Eisenstein laments that it is quite difficult “… to describe how access to a greater abundance or variety of written records affected ways of learning, thinking and perceiving [and] we know very little about how access to printed materials affected human behavior” (99). Perhaps we can never know how this access affected people(although Communication Studies examines such questions) but hundreds of years of conflict and social change show that new political ideas led to democracy and that capitalism and socialism still compete over how society should be organized. Without the printing of books and newspapers, no such revolutions could have started. Participating in public affairs began in the bookstores and reading rooms of Europe and while reading itself is a solitary activity, shifting and informal literate groups developed a secular political consciousness (Eisenstein 104). Again from Eisenstein, she points out that “[n]ew forms of group identity began to compete with an older, more localized nexus of loyalties … and while local ties were loosened, links to larger collective units were being forged.” (104). Perhaps the most spectacular example is the rise of class consciousness in the industrial age. As factories formed and workers were alienated from each other and even the things they created, thinkers, through newspapers and books, could help unite workers across cities, regions and oceans. It was into this industrial foment that moving pictures arrived.

The early 20^th century saw films produced which portrayed women as independent risk takers in early Westerns. During research Richard Abel discovered an American film reviewer, Gertrude Price. She focused on female actors while writing for the Des Moines News, part of the Scripps-McRae League newspaper chain. Citing work done by Gerald Baldesty, Abel reported that the Scripps-McRae organization owned newspapers that were generally sympathetic to and even a champion of the working class. The chain was not as dependent on advertisers as others were, notably the Hearst and Pulitzer papers in New York (141). As with the early bookstores and reading rooms, filled with people eagerly looking for “scandal sheets” and “lewd Ballads” (Eisenstein 103), Nickelodeons were “… impossible to regulate, and socially objectionable – to the authorities, if not to the audience.” (Czitrom 191). Early movies were screened in makeshift rooms, in which sanitation and safety rules were non-existent. The never ending search for truth and meaning have always competed with a need for amusement within a mass media. Even the early Westerns which Price wrote about were meant as amusement – the ‘Gee-Whiz’ factor. With print and cinema, someone with an idea – always a dangerous thought for ruling elites, would use the medium to reach out, to persuade, to tell how things could be different. Such ideas would not always be evident and mediators of the message would be able to contextualize the material. In the early bookstores the reading groups themselves may have come to a consensus about ideas. Early moviegoers may well have discussed a deeper meaning of a film, as they do today, and Price was one of the earliest reviewers in a unique time and place with a pulpit. She contextualized the images of independent, risk taking female actors as role models for an emerging independent working woman. The Des Moines News “… gave special attention to women with blue-collar, white-collar, and even professional jobs in the city … [which] included 1,200 women [in factories] [and another] 1,200 as store clerks …” and the like. (Abel 142). The stars Price wrote about are forgotten names such as, Kathlyn Williams, Edna Fisher and Anna Little. Bloodied and suffering broken bones and even pouncing leopards, these women were perfect role models for a movie reviewer in a working class newspaper, writing for a working class audience (Abel 146). Not only were these women athletic, carefree, and “… committed to their work … frank and fearless [they were] nearly all unattached and without children.” (146). According to Abel, Gertrude Price promoted values of female independence by highlighting these particular actors. This is the theoretical realm of Roland Barthes who “…claimed that every ideological sign is the result of two interconnected sign systems. The first system is strictly descriptive – the signifier image and the signified concept combining to produce a denotative sign.” (Griffin 359). The signifier or denotative, according to this concept, is the risk taking, independent women; the signified or connotative is the freedom to meet life on their terms. The sign or meaning that Price would be emphasizing is that women were equal and worthy of independent lives on a par with men. Abel adds that “… for them the desire ‘to go to the movies’ would have been double: not only did the film roles that women played function as sites of fantasy adventure …” (146), the roles mirrored the female audience as “… a new kind of active, attractive worker or professional.” (146); and “Price herself … would have served as no less a role model.”(146). These films and the commentary by Price came at a time of growing agency among women as they gained the vote and took their places in the workforce, earning their own money and gaining a measure of freedom and independence. Cinema, as an emerging communication technology, played a large role.

In a description of the Inuit of Nunavut, Canada, Soukup quotes Robin Gedalof who wrote that the Inuit ““… are probably the only people in history ever to have made the transition from the Stone Age to the Atomic Age in one generation.””(240). While the jury is still out on the odds of surviving the young Atomic Age, Inuit Shamans “…travel[ed] across time and space to find answers …” to problems for thousands of years (Soukup 239). The Inuit word for “Internet”, and the travels of a Shaman, is ikiaqqivik or “traveling through layers.” (239). Soukup features Paul Apak Angilirq’s Igloolik Isuma Productions, as an “… acclaimed media-art collective…” behind films such as Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner (2001) and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006) (239). These films are important because they “… allow us to see the living traditions of the past and demonstrate through their re-creation in film and video that Inuit are still able to practice them in the present.” (239). The whole point of this production company is to allow the Inuit themselves to become agents of their own destiny. Always portrayed as the “Other” by Southerners, the Inuit still gained political representation with creation of Nunavut and their efforts continue, in the communication front, to present to the world their own point of view (239).

Fleras and Kunz write that “…films as chronicle play the role of civic educator for discussion and enlightenment.” (126). The write that in 1922 Robert Flaherty presented the film Nanook of the North. While possibly enlightening for Southerners, films such as Nanook were efforts to salvage “… depictions of primitive peoples before they vanished in the struggle for survival.” (Fleras and Kunz 126). Today, the Inuit are keen to enlighten us that they have not disappeared, and they are doing so by melding traditional values with electronic media.

The authors ask two important questions that the Inuit have answered: “By what authority does a filmmaker have the right to depict a group? Or can only members of an ethnic group speak with authority about issues that concern that particular group?” (127). The answer for Southerners may be that it depends on how the dominant culture has interacted with the so called ‘Other’. There is a long list of atrocities committed in the name of assimilation against the Inuit and First Nations in general; residential schools and the relocation of communities being the most glaring examples. After thousands of years in the high Arctic, it was only after encounters with Southerners did the Inuit experience starvation. Unlike Nanook of the North, “Isuma’s films and videos are always based on the oral history of the community elders.” (Soukup 242). Soukup quotes Norman Cohn, Secretary-Treasurer of Igloolik Isuma Productions: “… events are interpreted through an Inuit point of view … Like looking at your reflection in the window and seeing through to the other side of the window pane” (242).

Not only are Inuit filmmakers re-educating Southerners with feature films, they may also be transforming the nature of film and cinema. Broadband Internet access was rolled out across Nunavut in 2005. (Soukup 243). The technology we think of as ‘ours’ enabling the streaming of audio and video is a departure “… from text-based Web interaction.” (243). This is especially appropriate for the Inuit because theirs was originally an oral culture. Using Broadband “… Isuma’s goal is to find a way for Inuit artists to return to a thoroughly contemporary nomadism [while] remaining on the land, living a traditional life of hunting and gathering … [and] being in contact with the rest of the twenty-first century through the Internet.” (243). Zacharias Kunuk, President of Igloolik Isuma Productions, who considers himself a hunter before being a filmmaker (244), describes this melding of ancient and new as being able to work in a remote media lab on his family’s ancestral land, and while editing a movie and taking email “… if you see a seal in the bay, you drop everything and go out after it.”(244).

Kickasola writes that Ferdinand Saussure “… pointed out … [that] our very language thrives on difference; we need the dichotomy of subject and object, the sense of the other …” [italics are mine] (308). Kickasola continues to say that “[t]he bitter irony, inherent in our current fascination with control, power, and personal initiative is that we may be losing some of our sense of self and identity…” (30 This is exactly why it is necessary to pay attention to the struggles of women and minorities as they regain(ed) a sense of self and identity; the idea of self and identity is being stripped from all of us in this competitive consumer ‘paradise’.

The depiction of independent women and modern Inuit through film were and are revolutionary images. Minorities such as women and Aboriginals have borne the brunt of capitalist expansion. A media lab in the high Arctic, suddenly abandoned for a seal hunt is counter to the whole Protestant work ethic hoisted on us all. The revolutionary aspect of minority publics using and interpreting film in order to advance their interests is something we need to be involved with. After all, where has the Protestant work ethic brought us to?

Works Cited

Abel, Richard. “Fan Discourse in the Heartland: The Early 1910s.” Film History 18.2 (2006): 140-53. Leddy Library. University of Windsor. Accessed: 16 Oct, 2007 <http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=3&hid=9&sid=47f33b5b-1763-430c-bcad-19912fac8fe0%40sessionmgr8>

Czitrom, Daniel. “Early Motion Pictures.” Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. Ed. David Crowley and Paul Heyer. Toronto: Pearson Education. 2003. 186-194.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth. “The Rise of the Reading Public.” Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. Ed. David Crowley and Paul Heyer. Toronto: Pearson Education. 2003. 97-105.

Fleras, Augie, and Jean Lock Kunz. Media and Minorities: Representing Diversity in a Multicultural Canada. Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing Inc., 2001.

Griffin, Em. “Semiotics of Roland Barthes.” A First Look at Communication Theory. New York: McGraw-Hill. 2003. 355-365.

Kickasola, J. “Contemporary Media and the Evolving Notion of Immediacy.” Quarterly

Review of Film and Video 23.4 (2006): 299-310. Communication Abstracts.

ProQuest. University of Windsor, Leddy Library, Windsor. 16 Oct.

2007 <http://www.proquest.com/>

Soukup, Katarina. “Report: Travelling Through Layers: Inuit Artists Appropriate New

Technologies.” Canadian Journal of Communication. 31.1 (2006): 239-246. Leddy

Library, University of Windsor. Accessed 16 Oct. 2007

<http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=3&hid=16&sid=d6cf23c2-decc-43bd-

a41c-1bd2e4cf9ca5%40sessionmgr9>.

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Dr. William A. Martin

Foundation of Communication Theory

November 26, 2007

Paul Chislett

 Interpellation and Resistance

          Buzz Hargrove’s recent defence of a no-strike clause in the union certification at Magna[1] could have been predicted as coming sooner or later. However, few would have guessed such a capitulation would occur with the Canadian Autoworkers Workers Union.(CAW) Hargrove is usually front and centre in the media and because he is outspoken and charismatic, he has come to personify the Canadian union movement - for good and bad. In reality he has become a capitalist appeaser in the ongoing efforts of capitalist elites to blunt and destroy any semblance of a ‘social movement’ the working class once had. Hargrove is “…at the forefront of working class desperation and defeat.”[2][3] then Hargrove is delivering the means to do this. However if enough working class people knew their history, we would realize we were once called to something far more exciting and relevant: the displacement of capitalism with socialism.  The aim of this paper is to explore, or as McLuhan expressed, probe, working class reality through the lens of Althusser’s definition of “interpellation”, Gramsci’s “hegemony” and Engel’s “false consciousness”.  This paper contains some relevant personal points of view since the writer spent 30 years in the workforce, was involved in the union movement (Communication, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada) and NDP politics. For many years the writer interpellated himself as a telephone repair technician. On a personal level, the writer struggled to - in effect - find a relevant and meaningful personal relationship with the world in general, with some kind of spiritual connection and with working class culture. The jury is still out as to whether this journey will end in a rubber room or to some kind of new career. Hargrove has helped capitalists erase the line between business unionism and social unionism. If all working class people truly want are wages good enough to “buy shit we don’t need”,

          Louis Althusser’s outline of our perceived freedom to act in society, when in fact we may be living in an illusion, or rather, by a social contract with faded origins, (that is the quasi social democracy in the Post WW II years, which is presently being dismantled) made a lasting impression on this writer. That the CAW could move in so obviously wrong a direction (wrong in the sense of ignoring the roots of struggle in the early labour movement) can be explained by our lack of the true understanding of the word ideology. In general use it tends to stand as a simple binary opposite between ‘left’ wing as pro labour; anti business and ‘right’ wing as pro business; anti labour. By keeping our thinking only in terms of this black and white ‘reality’, capitalist elites control the discourse of society through the school system, the church and financial and business organizations. Most significantly, it is through the media that the working class is constantly exposed to messages which extol the virtues of easy credit, cheap goods (they no longer make) and the benefits of a capitalist system; a system seemed designed to placate workers with an imaginary ideology of working hard so we can buy what we deserve, in order to be contented and fulfilled. Can ideology become the real relationship of individuals to their imaginary conditions of existence?[4] That is, if the consumer ideology is false, while consumers derive meaning from that role, can the working class be roused to resume the work of regaining true agency - to create their reality? Can the working class become self/re-interpellated through a reinvigorated labour movement? Can a sense of solidarity be created with other like minded groups around the world, as opposed to solidarity of subjugated human beings under a corporate hegemony?  In other words, is the working class happy being subjectified as mere cogs in a huge machine?  Can the working class - that vast body of men and women who believe themselves part of the lower/upper middle class - that undulating sea of sometimes mean, back-biting and shameless bitchiness that exhausts a person as surely as 12 hours behind a Tim Horton’s kiosk - can they possibly become swept up in the concept of agency leading to radical social reform?

           Stuart Hall wrote:     

The problem of ideology, therefore, concerns the ways in which ideas of different kinds grip the minds of masses, and thereby become a “material force” In this, more politicized, perspective, the theory of ideology helps us to analyze how a particular set of ideas comes to dominate the social thinking of a historical bloc, in Gramsci’s sense; and, thus, helps to unite such a bloc from the inside, and maintain its dominance and leadership over society as a whole. It has especially to do with the concepts and the languages of practical thought which stabilize a particular form of power and domination; or which reconcile and accommodate the mass of the people to their subordinate place in the social formation. It has also to do with the processes by which new forms of consciousness, new conceptions of the world, arise, which move the masses of the people into historical action against the prevailing system. These questions are at stake in a range of social struggles.[5] (Emphasis added)

The struggle is to transcend the drudgery of a 12 hour day to unite the whole working class through a new language of thought based on the actual experiences of working class people. Howard Zinn accomplished this with his book; A People’s History of the United States. Perhaps at no other time has Engel’s term “false consciousness” been more relevant than our times today. Hall ponders the dilemma when he asks the question:  “[i]s the worker who lives his or her relation to the circuits of capitalist production exclusively through the categories of a”fair price” and a”fair wage” in”false consciousness?”"[6][7] Labour organizations such as the Ontario Federation Labour denounce this and spend considerable time and effort to raise awareness[8] in an effort to get people to act and change this situation. The media covered this issue and since public pressure felt by the government was negligible, little was accomplished. Social and union movements seem to constantly seek som