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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Some Recent Photographs

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

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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The Benefits of Working for the Extreme Right

 

Eugene Robinson writes, linking ideology to the benefits of doing the bidding for the right:

Thanks to reporting this month by ProPublica, we now know that Thomas and his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a hard-right Republican activist, have been treated to lavish vacations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars by Harlan Crow, a politically active Texas billionaire. These jaunts included a vacation in Indonesia in 2019 that involved flights on Crow’s private jet and an island-hopping tour on a superyacht — a nine-day trip that alone would have cost the couple more than $500,000. If they had paid for it themselves. Which they did not.

There were also other trips on Crow’s jet and frequent stays at properties he owns in the Adirondacks and in East Texas, according to ProPublica. Accompanying the Thomases as guests, at times, were conservative business executives and thought leaders.

And for some reason, Thomas failed to report any of these gifts — any of them — on the disclosure forms he is required to submit annually.

Nor did Thomas disclose the fact that Crow purchased the Georgia house the justice’s mother lives in, then made tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of improvements to the dwelling, ProPublica subsequently revealed.

We should have seen this coming. From 2003 to 2007, on his disclosure forms, Thomas checked the box labeled “none” for his wife’s income. During that period, Ginni Thomas earned more than $686,000 from the conservative Heritage Foundation. When called on the lie, Thomas said it was an error “due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions.”

Likewise, regarding the trips he took at Crow’s expense, Thomas issued a statement claiming that early in his time on the Supreme Court, he “was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.”

Stop laughing. All right, yes, it is hilarious. Thomas expects the nation to take seriously his views on the subtlest contours of the Constitution. He also expects us to believe he cannot understand a clear and simple instruction on a disclosure form; that he sees no distinction between “personal hospitality” and trips halfway around the world by private jet; and that he sees nothing wrong about having a member of the board of the conservative American Enterprise Institute purchase and fix up his mother’s house.

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Karl Berger Gone at 88

 

From WRTI and Michael West, news of Karl Berger's passing away and a good review of his accomplishments. A free musician with great musical sensibilities regardless of the genre. A mentor to many:

Karl Berger, a vibraphonist, pianist, composer, and educator who served as a mentor and father figure for generations of improvising avant-garde musicians, died on April 9 at Albany Medical Center in Albany, NY. He was 10 days past his 88th birthday.

His death was confirmed by Chuck ver Straeten, a former student and longtime family friend who was at Berger’s bedside when he passed. Ver Straeten tells WRTI that the cause of death was complications following gastrointestinal surgery.

Born and raised in Germany, Berger was part of the first wave of European musicians to pursue free jazz in the 1960s. His breakthrough came in ‘65, when as a vibraphonist he joined trumpeter Don Cherry’s band in Paris; the following year he traveled to the United States to perform on Cherry’s album Symphony for Improvisers. He recorded his own self-titled debut a few months later, and made his home in the States for the next six decades.

Along with Cherry, his résumé included work with bassist Dave Holland, drummers Jack DeJohnette and Ed Blackwell, and saxophonists Lee Konitz, Ivo Perelman and Ornette Coleman. Coleman was Berger’s primary inspiration (and later his mentor), an influence apparent in his vibraphone style: hard-swinging, informed by the blues, eschewing chords to tell a story in single-note lines that he sometimes doubled with his voice.

Berger was also an accomplished pianist, playing the keys with a more chordal and pensive style — but no less exploratory or melodic. “His musicianship was off the charts,” bassist Michael Bisio, another frequent collaborator, tells WRTI. “He was absolutely one of the most underrated musicians, maybe of all time.”

Berger’s most far-reaching achievement, however, was as an educator. Together with his wife, vocalist Ingrid Sertso, and Coleman, he co-founded the Creative Music Studio, producing workshops and concerts throughout the Woodstock area before purchasing a resort property in the Catskill foothills. CMS, which Berger served as longtime director, focuses on teaching improvising musicians to develop their own aesthetics, and to draw and mesh ideas from across genres, traditions, and international borders. From 1972 to 1984, it offered instructional workshops, master classes, multi-week intensives, and hundreds of live performances. In its prime it was considered a premiere school of contemporary creative music.

The organization’s facility in Woodstock, New York closed in 1984, but CMS survived in the forms of “World Jazz Encounters” workshops held throughout the world; Sertso Recording Studio in Woodstock (which Berger and Sertso founded in 2004); and more than 500 CMS concert recordings that are now archived at Columbia University Library.

Berger also taught at the New School, the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts, and University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for many years before reviving CMS in 2013, with Sertso as his co-artistic director. “What Karl and Ingrid created was such a unique place,” says ver Straeten. “It really brought together people from all over the world, created such a brotherhood and sisterhood. Karl was incredibly encouraging to everyone to just go exploring.”

“It’s a world,” Berger explained of his concept of music in a 2014 interview with Monk Rowe. “And once you go there, you’re in the world of spontaneity, and you’re no longer in the thinking world…. But everybody can go there. Everybody, whether you play or not.”

Karl Hans Berger was born on March 30, 1935, in Heidelberg, Germany. He began playing classical piano when he was 10, though encountering a live jam session by American musicians at age 14 redirected his interests.

In his twenties he landed a gig as house pianist at Heidelberg’s Club 54, where he got lessons in modern jazz from American soldiers. “The surrounding Army and Air Force stations had all bands,” he told Rowe. “In those bands played a few jazz musicians who later became pretty well known, such as Cedar Walton, or Lex Humphries, and Don Ellis. And they would all come to that club … and we would be playing every night ‘til five in the morning.”

After earning a PhD in musicology from the University of Berlin in 1963, Berger played with the likes of multi-reedist Eric Dolphy and saxophonist Steve Lacy before moving to Paris in 1965. After settling in New York with Sertso in 1966, he became a key figure in the avant-garde music scene, working behind Cherry, Roswell Rudd, Carla Bley, and John McLaughlin. He also built his own career as a leader in earnest, putting together multiple ensembles in both the US and Europe.

 

Dismantling Democracy Bit by Bit

 

From Jamelle Bouie in the NY Times:

The reality of the “parents’ rights” movement is that it is meant to empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents to dictate education and curriculums to the rest of the community. It is, in essence, an institutionalization of the heckler’s veto, in which a single parent — or any individual, really — can remove hundreds of books or shut down lessons on the basis of the political discomfort they feel. “Parents’ rights,” in other words, is when some parents have the right to dominate all the others.

And, of course, the point of this movement — the point of creating this state-sanctioned heckler’s veto — is to undermine public education through a thousand little cuts, each meant to weaken public support for teachers and public schools, and to open the floodgates to policies that siphon funds and resources from public institutions and pumps them into private ones. The Texas bill I mentioned, for instance, would give taxpayer dollars to parents who chose to opt out of public schools for private schools or even home-schooling.

The culture war that conservatives are currently waging over education is, like the culture wars in other areas of American society, a cover for a more material and ideological agenda. The screaming over “wokeness” and “D.E.I.” is just another Trojan horse for a relentless effort to dismantle a pillar of American democracy that, for all of its flaws, is still one of the country’s most powerful engines for economic and social mobility.

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Some Believable Humor

From The Onion, but it seems oh so real:

WASHINGTON—Claiming the new system would make things simpler for everyone and avoid confusing mix-ups, Congress passed a joint resolution Tuesday that would reclassify every citizen’s race according to their net worth. “It is resolved by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives that any American whose wealth exceeds $1 million shall be white,” read the bipartisan legislation, which went on to state that citizens who were dissatisfied with the race they were assigned under the new criteria would be “free to pull themselves up by their bootstraps” in order to reach a racial category of greater privilege. “Now, regardless of the color of their skin, those who are rich will receive all the rights a wealthy person is entitled to in this country. Meanwhile, those with a net worth in the six figures, though they cannot be white, will still qualify as Asian, with the social scale moving downward from there to Latino and Black. This should go a long way toward making our racial stereotypes as accurate as possible.” In an attempt to deal a final blow to the complications of intersectionality, Congress was reportedly taking up additional legislation to ensure everyone earning above the median income level was classified as a man, and everyone below it as a woman.