v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Piracy and Streaming, Expanding the Reach of Arthouse

 

From Sense of Cinema, an Australian cinema newsletter, a provocative issue that you must read:

What do piracy and new technologies mean for cinema? With the decline of movie theatres and the emergence of new digital media over the past few decades, concerns over the death of cinema and cinephilia have been shared by many intellectuals and cinephiles. This concern finds its roots in Susan Sontag’s renown essay The Decay of Cinema (1996) in which she believes the essence of cinephilia is fundamentally tied to the experience of “going to the cinema” and being captivated in the dark movie theatre, ¹ and more recently, in David Bordwell’s apprehension that “films have become files.”² These viewpoints have sparked debates between older and younger generations of cinephiles from Western and non-Western countries regarding whether the postmodern digital and internet media could ultimately jeopardise the ontology and originality of cinema, or they herald a new era characterised by more diversified breed of cinematic practices. This dossier responds to the debate from the latter perspective by foregrounding the properties of piracy and the consequent development of new cinematic practices within a global decolonial frame. 

With the development of new technologies and operations (from videotapes, VCDs, DVDs, to more recently, the internet) over the past 40 years, piracy has played a crucial role in expanding the reach of underground, independent, and arthouse films to a wider audience. It has been instrumental in overcoming limitations imposed by local cinema infrastructure, including censorship, transnational boundaries, and financial constraints. If we move beyond the ethical, legal and economic considerations surrounding intellectual property rights and copyright infringement, in what context are pirated films circulated? What are the new horizons that piracy opens out? And to what extent does piracy transform our relationship with cinema? To this end, this dossier is dedicated to the heterogeneous piracy practices that are integral to an alternative film culture. This film culture, propelled by piracy, foregrounds on-demand film spectatorship and small-screen consumption, thereby challenging the prevailing cultural hegemony enforced by not only the local monolingual power but also global capitalist structures. 

In this dossier, the contributors outline diverse forms of film distribution and consumption associated with piracy across different geo-political contexts. All the contributions provide a critical perspective on power, capital and ownership. 

One of the main arguments presented in this dossier is the progressive democratic potential of piracy as a means to challenge pre-existing power dynamics. Amanda Robusti analyses how a pirate streaming service, Videoteca di Classe, becomes an anti-fascist force by circulating leftist films and bypassing the official distribution channels controlled by the far-right Italian government. In my article, I provide an overview of the way in which piracy has facilitated new filmmaking practices, grassroots cinephile culture, and public engagement in China, opening up new distribution and exhibition avenues “independent” from the official ideological discourse imposed by the Chinese Communist Party. Similarly, drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of “transgression”, Imran Firdaus pinpoints that film piracy in Bangladesh plays a radical role in democratising the distribution and exhibition of national culture, resulting in the emergence of a new cinephilia and the growth of independent filmmaking practices. 

Apart from transgressing the oppressive political forces, piracy as part of a postmodern flux cuts across national and cultural boundaries and fosters the hybridity of culture and commerce. In their empirical research of piratas (piracy vendors) in Colombia, Juana Suárez and Luisa González provide insight into the operation of the alternative distribution and consumption ecosystems in the country. These vendors break cultural and class barriers in disseminating films to metropolitan and regional audiences and filmmakers from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, thus expanding access beyond the intellectual elite circle and narrow economic circuits. 

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Great Podcast on Architecture: On Buildings & Cities

Some Recent Photographs

Photos from recent events. Porch concert, Flower Mart, and walks in nature.

The Party of Mirage

 

David Frum writes in The Atlantic and shows that the Republican's never need proof to whine and holler:

Specialists in the law and practice of counter-intelligence can argue whether Durham has correctly interpreted the appropriate modalities of FBI procedure. Very possibly, Durham is correct. Yet even if he is, isn’t this all kind of underwhelming? Durham’s sponsors hoped to reveal a globe-spanning conspiracy to vilify an innocent Donald Trump. What he delivered for them instead was a list of arguable procedural infractions by the FBI.

Not to belittle the importance of procedural infractions—perpetrators can go free if the infraction is serious enough—but such an infraction doesn’t necessarily make the perp innocent. If the case is dropped because of faulty procedures, that’s a sanction against police misconduct, not an absolution of the accused.

Post-Durham, we are exactly where we were pre-Durham.

U.S. government agencies have meticulously documented the help Russian espionage agencies provided to the Trump campaign in 2016. It is a matter of record that the Trump campaign wanted and sought even more help—specifically, that it tried to communicate with WikiLeaks about material from hacked Democratic Party communications.

People in the Trump orbit were caught lying and lying again about their Russian connections. As president, Trump took extraordinary pains to conceal his discussions with Putin, even from other members of his own administration.

That’s all beyond dispute. Durham’s efforts to reopen the disputes failed miserably. What may matter more, however, is what the Durham report does, rather than what it says. What the report says is in essence a classic Miranda-rights criminal defense of a kind that conservatives dislike when it benefits a mugger or a car thief: “The cops messed up in this way or that, and therefore my client must go free, even though we all know he did exactly what he is accused of.”

But what the report does is offer an excuse and escape to Republicans and conservatives who want to protect Trump without outright defending him. Durham tells the story of Trump-Russia while deleting both Trump and Russia. A great many people are eager for that telling. It changes the subject to something much less uncomfortable than the evidence that the Trump presidency was compromised by a corrupt foreign dictatorship.

This revisionism also offers partisans an exciting future possibility: a justification for new rounds of post-Trump culture war. Dan Crenshaw, for example, is a rising leader in the Republican Party—one who has always kept some moral and political distance from Trump, and who is firmly anchored to the pro-Ukraine, anti-Putin side of the GOP House caucus. Yet even he tweeted after Durham:

I’ve never been a reactive “lock ’em up” type. But this Durham report is a lock ’em up moment. We should be looking for statutes that apply to these egregious violations of public trust. If they don’t exist, it’s time we create them so it never happens again.

Similarly, Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador and a candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination, today demanded retaliation against the FBI: “If we can’t hold the FBI accountable for the Russian hoax, we are no different from South Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo. This type of corruption should never happen in America.”

Crenshaw’s and Haley’s menacing but vague language makes clear that they both understand there’s almost certainly no statute to invoke here. They are not calling for measures consistent with the rule of law but are instead appealing to dark fantasies of cultural revenge. But fantasies of cultural revenge are a powerful resource in Republican politics. Durham’s report provides hope that this resource can be distilled and bottled for future use, all its Trump-vintage muck boiled away.

Why Democracies Fail

 

From The Intercept:

The Spanish observers included members of the left-leaning Podemos party; EH Bildu, a Basque nationalist coalition; and a senator from Esquerra Republicana, a Catalonian leftist party. The observers were in the Kurdish-majority city of Siirt when they were arrested and taken to a police station on Sunday, the day of the election. Officers then went to the hotel where the observers were staying and arrested the remaining members of the delegation, who joined their comrades in detention at the police station. They were held until Monday morning and released on the condition they leave the country, escorted to the airport and flown back to Spain on Monday and Tuesday. 

Ismael Cortés, a national congressional deputy with Podemos, and Miriam Ojeda, a representative of the International Secretariat of Podemos, were among those detained. Spain and Turkey are both members of NATO.

“The situation of the retention and expulsion as a delegation that we have experienced is just one example of the greater context of repression and persecution of the opposition that has been experienced for years in Turkey and that has the Kurdish people as a special objective,” said Cortés. “We are concerned about the situation of the members and supporters of the YSP and HDP party and the respect for their fundamental, civil, and political rights.”

The observers also said in a statement to The Intercept that several members of the Kurdish YSP party were also arrested. Their fate is not known, and the Erdogan government did not respond to requests for comment. “This new and intolerable example of repression demonstrates the authoritarian drift of the regime of Erdogan, which undermines the democratic principles and fundamental rights of the Turkish citizenry and, especially, of the peoples present in this territory, such as the Kurdish,” the observers said in the statement.

Rigged Capitalism

A review of Martin Wolf's new book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Jonathan Kirschner at the LARB :

Wolf’s central argument is that capitalism and democracy are inherently interdependent, yet also often in tension with one another—and managing the balance of that indispensable relationship is akin to walking a tightrope. In traditional autocracies, the economy has been captured by those that control the state, and that control is the basis of their power (which is why they are so reluctant to let go of the reins of authority). Liberal democracies today face the inverse problem: the capture of the state by those that control the economy. This is plutocracy, and aside from the injustice it visits on societies, it is also profoundly dangerous, because in democratic plutocracies (like the United States today), the simmering frustrations of mass polities will at some point lead to the voluntary election of an autocrat: “[I]nsecurity and fear are gateways to tyranny.” Decades of stagnant incomes, rising inequality, and the erosion of high-quality jobs for the middle class and the less-educated have allowed the relationship between capitalism and democracy to become dangerously unbalanced. The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism argues that the fault lies with the failure of public policy to tame the excesses of capitalism; it warns that those excesses will unleash the forces that destroy democracy.

Economic inequality, on the rise for 50 years, has soared to ever greater extremes in recent decades. As Wolf reports, from 1993 to 2015, the real income of the top 1 percent of the population in the United States nearly doubled; for everybody else, over those same years, aggregate real income grew by 14 percent. More pointedly, as the very rich got much, much richer from 2005 to 2014, 81 percent of US households had flat or falling real income—a weighty reminder that we continue to live in a world defined by the Global Financial Crisis and its aftermath. Returning to the terrain of The Shifts and the Shocks, Wolf observes that the Wall Street titans who caused the crisis “mostly walked off with large fortunes, while tens of millions of innocent people’s lives were ruined”—a catastrophe exacerbated by the swift, misguided application of austerity measures as soon as it became clear that a complete financial meltdown would be avoided.

The role of the Global Financial Crisis (and the dismal political management of its aftermath) in exacerbating trends in inequality—and, at least as important, further fueling perceptions that the system was corrupt and fundamentally unfair—ought not be underestimated. Nor should it necessarily surprise. Wolf shows that the 1931 international financial crisis served as a tipping point in public support for the Nazi party in Germany, which won 2.6 percent of the vote in 1928 and 37.3 percent in 1932, and he cites a fascinating new academic paper that underscores this chilling point. The 1931 crisis, a global upheaval that sent the world economy reeling, started in Austria and then spread to (pre-Nazi) Germany, leading to the collapse of that country’s second largest bank. This accelerated the Nazi movement, according to the study, as “localities affected by Danatbank’s failure voted significantly more for the Hitler movement.” In any event, with or without this sobering parallel, as Adam Tooze argued in Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018), the norm-shattering American presidential election campaign of 2016 can only be understood in the context of the widespread revulsion at the 2008 crisis and that which followed. The emergence of new, powerful, populist movements from both the left and the right (and the inconceivable nomination of an inexperienced, ignorant reality-TV celebrity to be the Grand Old Party’s standard-bearer), is directly attributable to those societally backbreaking events.

Moreover, the 2008 crisis was not an exogenous shock; it was an accident waiting to happen, encouraged—and indeed rendered virtually inevitable—by the (politically buttressed) financialization of the American economy. It is hard to overstate the consequences of the rise of finance—and its transformation from a crucial facilitator of economic activity to an end in itself (for some). The pernicious metastasization of finance throughout the economy contributed to an orgy of reckless speculation—seen, to take one example, in the explosive growth of the (purported) value of derivatives transactions from $72 billion in 1998 to $653 billion a decade later. As Wolf archly observes, “[l]ittle of this expansion of financial balance sheets went into financing fresh investment,” and he finds it “hard to disagree” with the assessment that much of this activity is “socially useless.” This echoes John Maynard Keynes, who long ago reminded readers that, in a capitalist society, “the proper social purpose” of finance is “to direct new investment” towards productive enterprises. But “when the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”

This is no small matter, as the financialization of the economy, especially after the 1990s, and the fortunes amassed from that process, were part and parcel of a larger shift towards “rigged capitalism”—the emergence of which The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism places at the heart of the matter. In a remarkable (and laudable) intellectual evolution, Wolf, who welcomed and celebrated the Thatcher revolution in Britain, and not so long ago penned the book Why Globalization Works (2004), now attributes the crisis of our time to “what Adam Smith warned us against—the tendency of the powerful to rig the economic and political systems against the rest of society.” Superseding a well-ordered market society, rigged capitalism—a toxic brew of developments and practices including financialization, winner-take-all markets, reduced competition, increased rent-seeking behavior (the use of concentrated economic power to extract monopoly profits), tax avoidance and evasion, and the erosion of ethical standards—has led to a widespread loss of confidence in the legitimacy of democracy.

The Shifts and the Shocks decried a system in which “well-connected insiders” are “shielded from loss but impose massive costs on everybody else.” Democratic Capitalism emphasizes that this problem transcends the financial sector. In a country with half a million people in jail for minor drug offenses, “the members of the Sackler family,” who “bear heavy responsibility for […] probably the worst drug-related scandal since the opium wars,” are “not going to prison, but are just losing some of their billions of dollars.” As Wolf incisively (and inarguably) observes, “[s]uch power without accountability is a monstrous privilege, redolent of feudalism more than of a contemporary liberal democracy.”

These pathologies run deep, and well below the headlines. The use of political power to undermine competition—which must thrive at the heart of any capitalist society—is an endemic attribute of rigged capitalism. (And it is why we pay higher prices for most things than a “free market” would levy.) Many if not most giant corporations are now monopolies or near-monopolies, a situation that, as any card-carrying professional economist of even the most conservative stripe would agree, generates inefficiencies, rent-seeking behavior, and outright exploitation. Many markets have become shielded, protections reinforced by access to the corridors of power, with wealth extracted from consumers (and workers) in consequence: consider the atrocity of unskilled workers in fast food restaurants being forced to sign “non-compete” clauses, an act of collusive wage suppression.

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The Shadow Says

 

An interview with Steve Vladeck, the author of The Shadow Docket,  in The Atlantic:

Adam Serwer: What is the shadow docket? And why should people care?

Steve Vladeck: The term shadow docket is this evocative shorthand that Chicago law professor Will Baude coined in 2015, not as a pejorative, but just as an umbrella term to capture everything the Supreme Court does other than thoroughly explained, merits decisions [on the regular docket]. Will’s insight, which I’ve somewhat shamelessly appropriated, is that a lot of important stuff happens in the more technical side of the Court’s docket—important stuff that affects all of us, that shapes the law and lower courts, and that we sort of ignored at our peril. And what’s remarkable about that is that Will wrote that in 2015. And if anything, the last eight years have actually dramatically underscored just how right he was.

Serwer: How did the shadow docket change during the Trump administration?

Vladeck: It’s common for those who like to defend the Court to say, “There’s always been a shadow docket.” That’s true. The really big shift during the Trump administration is in how the Court used one slice of the shadow docket, what we might call the emergency docket. These are contexts in which a party is asking the Court to step in while a case is working its way through the courts, and either freeze a lower-court ruling or block government action that lower courts refuse to block.

And during the Trump administration, we see the Court intervening far more often, in non-death-penalty cases, where the emergency interventions are having statewide and nationwide effects. And so instead of the Court allowing an execution to proceed or freezing one, you have the Court allowing a Trump immigration policy to be carried out perhaps for three years, or freezing a state COVID restriction. That’s a huge qualitative shift. We also saw the Court doing this a lot more often. So there’s also a quantitative uptick. And all the while, the Court is hewing to its norm of not usually explaining any of these procedural orders. And so the Court is providing no rationale, no vote count, nor even telling us who wrote whatever the Court has said on the subject.

Serwer: How did COVID affect the shadow docket?

Vladeck: First we had the flurry of religious-liberty challenges to stay COVID-mitigation policies. And we saw these especially in blue states, where the claims were that COVID restrictions, insofar as they operated on houses of worship or other religious gatherings, violated the free-exercise clause.

Here we saw the Court’s most aggressive use of the shadow docket, repeatedly intervening—and especially after Justice Amy Coney Barrett replaced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—to block these policies in New York, to block them in California, to block them in Colorado, to block them in New Jersey. The COVID cases pushed the Court to expand the scope of religious-liberty protection in the Constitution entirely through these emergency orders, orders that were usually unexplained and never had the same process as merits cases. And that’s especially telling because all this is happening as the Court has on its merits docket cases that would have given the justices similar opportunities to expand the free-exercise clause.

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The Fog of Wokeness

Jamelle Bouie from the NYT:

If Biden has potential weaknesses, however, it is also true that he doesn’t lack for real advantages. Along with low unemployment, there’s been meaningful economic growth, and he can point to significant legislative accomplishments. The Democratic Party is behind him; he has no serious rivals for the nomination.

But Biden’s biggest advantage has to do with the opposition — the Republican Party has gotten weird.

It’s not just that Republican policies are well outside the mainstream, but that the party itself has tipped over into something very strange.

I had this thought while watching a clip of Ron DeSantis speak from a lectern to an audience we can’t see. In the video, which his press team highlighted on Twitter, DeSantis decries the “woke mind virus,” which he calls “a form of cultural Marxism that tries to divide us based on identity politics.”

Now, I can follow this as a professional internet user and political observer. I know that “woke mind virus” is a term of art for the (condescending and misguided) idea that progressive views on race and gender are an outside contagion threatening the minds of young people who might otherwise reject structural explanations of racial inequality and embrace a traditional vision of the gender binary. I know that “cultural Marxism” is a right-wing buzzword meant to sound scary and imposing.

To a normal person, on the other hand, this language is borderline unintelligible. It doesn’t tell you anything; it doesn’t obviously mean anything; and it’s quite likely to be far afield of your interests and concerns.

DeSantis is a regular offender when it comes to speaking in the jargon of culture war-obsessed conservatives, but he’s not the only one. And it’s not just a problem of jargon. Republican politicians — from presidential contenders to anonymous state legislators — are monomaniacally focused on banning books, fighting “wokeness” and harassing transgender people. Some Republicans are even still denying the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, doubling down on the election-related conspiracies that hobbled many Republican candidates in the midterms.

Not only do Americans not care about the various Republican obsessions — in a recent Fox News poll 1 percent of respondents said “wokeness” was “the most important issue facing the country today” — but a large majority say that those obsessions have gone too far. According to Fox, 60 percent of Americans said “book banning by school boards” was a major problem. Fifty-seven percent said the same for political attacks on families with transgender children.

It is not for nothing that in Biden’s first TV ad of the 2024 campaign, he took specific aim at conservative book bans as a threat to freedom and American democracy.

And yet there’s no sign that Republicans will relent and shift focus. Just the opposite, in fact; the party is poised to lurch even further down the road of its alienating preoccupations. On abortion, for example, Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, says candidates need to address the issue “head on” in 2024 — that they can’t be “uncomfortable” on the issue and need to say “I’m proud to be pro-life.”

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