Film Festivals and Counter‐Hegemony Radical Screening Practices in the Neoliberal City

Film Festivals and Counter‐hegemony Radical Screening Practices in the Neoliberal City Edge Hill University Anthony Killick This thesis is submitted to the Department of Media, Edge Hill University, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August, 2017 Abstract This research focuses on the counter‐hegemonic spatial and cultural reproduction of film festivals. Specifically, it investigates the extent to which film festivals produce spaces of resistance to neoliberalism‐ the current formation of capitalism‐ while operating within the spatial, temporal and ideological boundaries of the contemporary neoliberal city. Using a critical framework that combines the public sphere and colonisation theories of Jürgen Habermas with David Harvey’s analysis of neoliberal urbanisation, this research examines three film festivals in different localities throughout the western hemisphere: the Workers Unite Film Festival, New York; the Liverpool Radical Film Festival, UK; and the Subversive Film Festival in Zagreb, Croatia. Emerging in the wake of the 2007/8 financial crash, these festivals comprise a diverse range of localised practices that have sought to bring attention to some of the social, spatial, political and cultural problems arising from neoliberalism as such. The practices they have developed are in many ways forged through a relation with an unsympathetic, if not totally oppositional, urban environment that is increasingly profit‐oriented and privatised. Thus the research investigates the possibility of film festivals as sites of resistance, and aims to map these spheres onto neoliberal modernity. The purpose is not simply to provide a critique of neoliberalism or the film festivals under analysis, but to offer some insight on these forms of local assembly‐ wherein neoliberalism and capitalism are not a given necessity‐ in the hope of contributing to a praxis that facilitates their transgression. KEYWORDS: Film Festivals, activism, neoliberalism, social movements, hegemony, political economy, urban development, anti‐capitalism. 1 For My parents Peter Killick and Patricia Killick And for Sally, Beryl, Catherine, Michael and John 2 Whether the twenty‐first century will be the most radical of times or the most reactionary‐or will simply lapse into a grey area of dismal mediocrity‐will depend overwhelmingly upon the kind of social movement and program that social radicals create out of the theoretical, organisational and material wealth that has accumulated during the past two centuries of the revolutionary era. (Bookchin, 2015: 1) 3 Contents 1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………………5 2. Critical Framework Film Festivals and Counter‐hegemony……………………………………………………………………..12 3. Literature Review The Public Sphere and Counter‐publics…………………………………………………………………….35 Neoliberalism and Colonisation…………………………………………………………………………………47 Capital, Habitus and Festival Space……………………………………………………………………………75 Case Studies 4. Workers Unite Film Festival……………………………………………………………………………………….83 5. Liverpool Radical Film Festival…………………………………………………………………………………..108 6. Subversive Film Festival…………………………………………………………………………………………….131 7. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………160 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….164 Filmography……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..175 Appendix………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..178 4 Introduction This research focuses on the counter‐hegemonic spatial and cultural reproduction of film festivals. Specifically, it investigates the extent to which film festivals produce spaces of resistance to neoliberalism‐ the current formation of capitalism‐ while operating within the spatial, temporal and ideological boundaries of the contemporary neoliberal city. As such, it understands the city and its institutions as increasingly marketised spaces that exist in a tension vis‐a‐vis forms of cultural activity that resist subsumption by systems whose primary motivation is to make a profit. Over the past forty years, institutions have been subjected to a process of what Jürgen Habermas calls colonisation by market forces (1984). This has been part of a new and on‐going phase of global urbanisation that is characterised primarily by uneven geographical development, that is, the implementation of a relatively standardised, neoliberal form of globalisation across a range of specific and diverse localities, resulting in differential outcomes and effects. The most thorough examination of neoliberal urban development can be found in the work of David Harvey, who points to a global process of urbanisation through which existing power relations are etched into the landscape of cities, while “local and cultural developments and traditions have become absorbed within the calculi of political economy” (Harvey, 2013: 100). Thus the reproduction of space under neoliberalism is carried out with the specific aim of consolidating and solidifying existing forms of power while subsuming all cultural activity within the sphere of the market. These two processes (colonisation and neoliberal urbanisation) are the cornerstones of the theoretical framework that guides this research. The relation between neo‐liberalism and colonisation is, primarily, that the former (indeed, capitalism as such) must necessarily carry out the latter in order to sustain itself via continued growth. As Harvey (2013) notes, this form of expansion is one of three urgent and potentially fatal contradictions of capital. The economic requirement for endless growth is bolstered by western liberal democracy and a system of social relations based on instrumentalism, and the development of subjects as objects (Adorno, Horkheimer, 1995). This particularly urban form of consciousness has an influence on the structuring of the lived environment. The works of Habermas and Harvey provide a framework through which we can better understand, and practically work through, problems of spatial reproduction, colonisation, and resistance. One of the advantages of this framework, for example, lies in Habermas’ modernist understanding of public space as created and sustained by the reflective effort of individuals who evaluate the validity of existing norms through practical discourse. Insofar as this is carried out‐ among, for example, a film festival audience‐ public spaces become sites in which norms built on an established societal rationale are transgressed, discrete perspectives are made public, and the dialogical voice of autonomous spheres counters the 5 monological voice of neoliberal capital. Thus Habermas’ understanding of public space precedes his theory of colonisation, foregrounding the role of urban city dwellers in countering hegemony through their interrelated sites of cultural production and their respective practices. The conditions under which film production and exhibition take place are also subject to colonisation. Yet the history of film as a mode of resistance is well documented (Solanas, Getino, 1969, Dickinson, 1999, Eshun and Gray 2011, Presence, 2013). Where film festival scholarship is concerned, however, little has been done to address the fact of colonisation or the relationship between film festivals and resistance to neoliberalism. Using a mixed methods approach that combines interviews and archival research with political economy, the research aims to develop an understanding of the relations between total systems and the localised nuances of organising practice. The first chapter outlines a critical framework wherein film festivals are positioned in terms of their local and/or globally oriented forms of spatial and cultural reproduction. It explains how the festivals that are analysed in this research have been chosen for two reasons. First, their geographical position across three separate regions in the western hemisphere reflects the movement and development of neoliberalism‐ from its inception in New York in the 1970s, to de‐ industrialisation and “regeneration” in the UK since the 1980s, to “globalisation” and the push of capital into the Balkan region from the 1990s onwards. Second, because the forms of resistance to neoliberalism they enact differ from each other to the extent that they represent a discernible local/global spectrum between what Harvey has referred to as “tangible solidarities understood as patterns of social life” and “more abstract conceptions that would have universal purchase” therefore allowing them to move beyond specific geographical localities (Harvey, 1994: 33). The research therefore acknowledges the distinction between a “vision of the world as a sphere which encompasses us, or as a globe upon which we can gaze” (Harvey, 1994: 37). It does not pretend that film festivals can be strictly delineated into the categories of locally tangible or globally abstracted forms of resistance. It does, however, posit a critique wherein these two positions constitute a dissoluble binary. For example, a totalised concern with locally directed, dwelt‐in, practical forms of resistance negates a world that lies beyond direct local experience, and suggests a global patchwork of hermetically sealed, individualised struggles with no discernible common cause – in other words, no understanding of neoliberalism as global phenomena, and the risk of developing into a reactionary parochialism (Bookchin, 2015). Conversely, the same focus on globally directed, detached and observational forms of resistance negates the locally specific effects of neoliberalism,

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