Culture of Domination

Ronald Reagan had been elected US president in 1981, and began the long unwinding of post-war progressive economic and social policy awaited by the American ruling class, but which had produced social welfare and full employment for the 50’s and into the 60’s when a combination of the cost of the Vietnam war and the Arab oil shock produced an economic crash. Initiating a program of de-regulation of industry, and of finance capital, and an aggressive anti-union assault, he began the process of offshoring, globalised production and finance, and the beginnings of the financialisation of capital and its oligarchisation that we now face. At the time we were unaware of the extent to which this would polarise and destroy and feudalise the society we were in but we could see the beginnings of the rollback and the destruction.The tape begins with a series of interviews with unemployed people, and shows, depressingly, how years of relentless propagandized media, misinformation, and commodification had destroyed any awareness of the politics of their position that they may have had in the 30’s and 40’s. Blaming immigrants, blaming the unions, blaming the unknowable forces of the economy, unable to see their situation as anything more than their own, they struggle to articulate something that would have been crystal clear 40 years earlier. A depressing picture of a cowed and ignorant workforce. Overlaid is a continuous stream of upbeat consumer messages, shallow exhortations to “live rich, rich, rich “ which often drowns out the voices of the unemployed interviewees. The picture rolls, is barely stable, is always on the edge of collapse.The second section takes the form of an improvised setting in which two unemployed autoworkers meet to fish, midweek, and swap ideas. The camera pans around repeatedly, jump cuts from shot to shot, the editing jumps forward, backward, repeats, intercuts alternative takes, discussions of what they will say, and a sound rehearsal played on-set, to make a story that can that only be pieced together in its totality, and in which the real time base of the recording is one element in the construction of the piece. In which all elements before after and during the improvisation assume equal importance, in an attempt to break down the transparency of the image and the shot. The final section of a reception for the upper class of San Francisco ends with a quotation from Brecht.The didactic nature of the project, and yet the disruptive manner in which it was carried out, upsets any attempt now to view this as a widening of the audience from the experimental film base, and undoubtedly would have alienated any of my political audience too. To what extent can the image construct, and its power to re-present the world of our immediate perception be said to embody a particular and political ideology? And to what extent can that ideology (for every organization of perception is couched within an ideology, or ideologies) be challenged and our awareness of it be productively changed, by the disruption of that construct?