Video Activism
by GIBBY ZOBEL, Big Issue news@bigissue.com
They came, they filmed, they got arrested. but did the video activists change the way news is reported?
The eviction of anti-road protesters from Claremont Road in East London took four days, cost £2 million and involved 700 police, 200 bailiffs and 400 security guards. In those pre-Swampy days of 1994, when road protesters were but a twinkle in a Coronation Street script writer’s eye, this epic battle received precisely 0.5 seconds of coverage on the national TV news. Paul O’Connor was there – as he had been throughout the urban siege to stop the M11 link road being built – and he was armed. “I got the camcorder at first because people were getting beaten up all the time,” he says. The camcorders multiplied, the footage built up, the activists organised and the pioneering film You’ve Gotta Be Chokin’ became the first in the can for Undercurrents, the alternative video news service.This month, five award-winning, ground-breaking, crowd-pulling years later, marks the end. Undercurrents – the video magazine – is no more. Gasps sound across the fields of genetically-modified crops, digging stops down the tunnels of the latest road protest and in the headquarters of the Forward Intelligence Team, police blink in disbelief.
For at any protest anywhere in the past few years you could practically guarantee at least one of ‘camcordistas’ would be in the thick of the action. To direct action activists, it’s the equivalent of the closure of the BBC World Service to ex-pats, if you’ll excuse the mixed-media metaphor.
Paul has been an ever-present lynchpin throughout the production of the series. “I’m like one of those bind weeds that you can never get rid of,” he says. But now, he’s reached burn-out: “There are too few people doing too much trying to survive on too little.” Undercurrents sprang out of the chasm created by the mainstream media’s failure to cover grass roots opposition to the Criminal Justice Act 1994.
When a march of 100,000 protesters ended in a riot in Hyde Park, the mainstream media finally took notice. “We tried national news but they were not interested in the issues,” says Paul. “They were interested in two seconds of people falling or something being smashedŠ But this wobbly, crap footage was powerful and amazing. It was like nothing else people had seen before.” A review of Undercurrents 1 on ITV’s Little Picture Show pointed the way. “It was on late at night and suddenly all six phones of our lit up for two hours, non-stop,” says Paul. There was always a DIY feel to the whole thing. Every penny went into buying an editing suite after the first video was knocked out in co-founder Jamie Hartzell’s bedroom. Their ‘blank’ tapes were blagged from skips thrown out by ad firms in Soho. Despite being sold in the so-called ‘aromatherapy ghetto’ – the shelves of green, hippy, peace shops and via mail order – an estimated 200,000 people have seen the videos – and that’s globally: Undercurrents 9 has just been screened in Ethiopia and Albania.
“I grew up in County Dublin amid fields and farms,” says Paul. “When I was 12, it became part of the city of Dublin. Everything was paved over. We used to smash things up to stop them building the houses. That all came back to me in the M11 protest really. It made sense that this whole thing was like a cycle. It re-confirmed activism for me.”
Undercurrents quickly expanded its scope from the initial road-building debate, encouraging links across the spectrum of protest to eventually cover issues like the deaths of black people in custody. No Justice, No Peace, covered the death of Brian Douglas. “I saw the news report of the same protest, and it was so bland – straightjacket TV. That’s when we realised how TV is made. Our video was powerful – pure anger,” says Paul.
Helen Iles is a media teacher at Carmarthen College in south-west Wales.”Undercurrents is absolutely vital,” she says. “It widened horizons, and didn’t pretend to be unbiased, whereas most news is presented as objective or natural.” Although the closing credits have rolled for the last time,Undercurrents will become an educational resource. The Undercurrents archive, run by Roddy Mansfield, will continue to exist. “It will be a crucial training and empowerment resource for many years to come,” he says.
And for Paul? “This is only the end of the beginning. Undercurrents has probably run its course in terms of radical environmental direct action. I think social issues is where it needs to go. How many times do you hear the voices of the Chinese community, for example? We set out to challenge TV and TV news reporting and we have done that. Second, was to create video activists and I think we’ve succeeded on that. We’ve seen real people inspired. We wanted to connect single issues. I think it’s amazing what we have achieved.”
underc@gn.apc.orghttp://www.undercurrrents.org
