Re-Viva la Revolución! Part 1

Fittingly, the following posts are a revival of academic work I abandoned when I became ill in early 2017. I have re-structured, edited and split apart this draft of an article to form a series of blog posts to put the research out there and as part of the redrafting process in case the full essay is any good to submit somewhere or keep for an essay collection of my own. I hope someone out there gets something out of it.

Reimagining Mediatized Conflict in Good Vibrations and No (Introduction)

Although the scales vastly differ, Chile and Northern Ireland bear similarities regarding their borderlands and political pasts. The small UK region of Northern Ireland (population of 1.8 million in 14,000 square kilometres) shares a currently open border and an island with the Republic of Ireland.¹ The country of Chile (population of 19 million in 756,000 square kilometres) consists of a substantial strip along the west coast of Latin America’s Southern Cone. As well as geopolitical borders, both are shaped by natural frontiers of coastlines and hill and mountain ranges, with both capital cities nestled in valleys.² Both areas have long-lasting territorial tensions deriving from historical westerly colonization. In the latter half of the twentieth century, both witnessed periods of intense political violence, the victims and survivors of which struggle for recognition in contemporary future-facing socio-politics shaped in the wake of history-making referenda. These were the 1988 Chilean plebiscite to either consent to the continuation of General Pinochet’s dictatorial presidency or call a democratic general election, and whether or not to implement the 1998 Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement to bring an end to civil conflict. In saying ‘no’ to Pinochet and ‘yes’ to the agreement, the majority of the voting electorate in both circumstances (56% and 71%, respectively) embraced peace, democracy and the concept of happiness – desirable notions which were convincingly marketed in alternative propaganda campaigns.

The cover of the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement features a heteronormative family unit silhouetted against a natural frontier of water during sunrise or sunset, connoting endings and beginnings. The parents look towards the son who is framed in the sun’s halo while the apparently older daughter evens out the 3-point perspective. The message conveyed by the sun setting on the old and rising on a bright new dawn to the benefit of future (male-led) progenies was, presumably, aimed at a conservative majority that privileges the normative familial unit in addition to the many who simply wanted the violence to stop. In Chile, the No campaign’s daily 15-minute television slot in the weeks before the ballot made extensive use of an emotive jingle that assured Chilean society that its happiness was coming and that saying no would return democratic autonomy to the people, while the largely upbeat images demonstrated how carefree post-dictatorship life would be. Loaded audio-visual languages were vital in the success of these campaigns, and a broad concern of this study lies in the ways that such techniques and media artefacts now also function as memories which are used to critically remember and remediate those pasts.

In places transitioning from conflict and dictatorships such as Northern Ireland and Chile, archival materials are often implemented in cultural responses which on the surface tell the stories of the past, but which also re-evaluate those stories. Fictional representations from and about these regions and their difficult recent histories are grounded by the archive while excavating and engaging critically with its content. Led by the ways that the loosely biographical archive-based period features Good Vibrations (dirs. Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn, UK/Ireland, 2012) based on the punk counter-culture in late-1970s Northern Ireland, and No (dir. Pablo Larraín, Chile, 2012) which reimagines the 1988 plebiscite in Chile, negotiate between personal and communal remembering and forgetting, this study probes the revolutionary potential of appropriating ‘old’ media artefacts in holding the past mediatization of events up for scrutiny by re-mediatizing archival media materials. Indeed, Good Vibrations pointedly refers to ‘the revolutionary potential of the 7-inch single’ – in many ways the salvation and source of tension for many of the film’s characters. Analogue technologies are ‘revived’ in a similar way in No, begging further discussion of links between archival media artefacts and the wider (commercial) culture of retro and vintage.

There is much to be determined regarding the significance of the use of archival materials as memory in contemporary re-imaginings of troubled pasts, for which comparative analysis of Good Vibrations and No provides an indicative point of departure. Here, I am especially concerned with the political aesthetics of sequences in the films that make extensive use of television archives, and intend to examine the wider implications of intermedial archive-based practice in contemporary film production with relevance to post-conflict and post-dictatorship cultures. I ask: do acts of reviving/replaying past revolutions in contemporary archive-based films have the ability to facilitate new or repeated revolutionary actions? If so, do films such as these provide examples of instances where cultural products influence social change? Perhaps these are unanswerable questions, certainly in the scope of the following comparative analysis. I think, in small localized ways at least, such work can and does have the power to effect change – a power which strengthens over time through active inquiry and widening discussion. But I cannot help but feel that power and inquiry is consistently shut down and dispersed when they trouble the status quo, regardless of who holds political sway. It is my hope that my little examination helps in some way to remind viewers to be active rather than passive consumers of cultural products about revolutions, which can themselves be revolutionary as well as entertaining as long as we don’t forget about their political potential.

1 At the time of writing, free movement is facilitated by membership of the European Union, but the UK’s 2016 referendum in which 52% of the voting electorate opted to leave the EU may soon change that, and arrangements in the final approach to leaving fully on 31 December 2020 remain unclear.

2 In El botón de nácar/The Pearl Button (2015), director Patricio Guzmán explains how the Andes mountain range cuts Chile off from the rest of the continent, and how its many offshore islands still populated by some remaining native Kawésqar water people and other tribes make it akin to an archipelago, which is what what are often referred to as ‘the British Isles’ are off the west coast of Europe.

 

Look out for part 2 next Friday

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