Spots Electorales. El espectáculo de la democracia - Soymenos.net

Campaign Diary Roberto AlfaCampaign Diary Roberto Alfa48 499 days to goThis morning we started a shoot. I likepublicists, camera operators, art directors:they know what this is all about. And I knowwhen we meet in the bathroom. Few words andmeasured and mechanical lines. Professionalpeople who don’t get carried away by whimsor doubts. The boss turned up on set righton time. While he was having his make-updone, we went over the text and the tone. It’snot easy trying to convince such a self-centredperson. He’s repeatedly queried some of theexpressions used and says they aren’t verycolloquial. He’s happy close up, when he’spinching and patting people’s cheeks in agesture which revolts me but which he thinksis winning. You’ve got to give it to him.Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. Yeah,his smile will be a disaster, but that cheekyself-confidence he’s got is good for us. When hesays what he really thinks, which doesn’t happenvery often, he’s crystal clear. I’ve seen himconvince his advisors of things which noneof them would have given a red cent for halfan hour before. It reminds me of a desperategeneral who went to tell Hitler that there wasno petrol left and carrying on the battle wasnext to impossible. After half an hour with thedictator he came out of the office really excitedand shouted out “We’re going to win the war,we don’t need petrol!” Those moments areelectrifying, but they’ll never be seen. You can’tshow those attitudes. Miguel couldn’t hopefor a better weapon. After a couple of hoursof hard bargaining we managed to get himto stick to the script, but we couldn’t stop himpointing his finger at the camera or gettingoff his stool. Finally we’ve had to drop thesteadicams, making it look a bit fictionalwhich I personally find annoying.Sudden split with political audiovisual workAs the defi nition of militant cinema is complex, it shouldnot be equated with documentary or non-fi ction cinema,or solely and exclusively with what is produced outsidehabitual commercial structures. It is a non-alienatingcinema, which does not wish to restrict itself to tellingfables detached from human reality but rather toinquire into the conditions of that reality and, as far asit can, to help change them. These political or agitpropcinema movements, one of whose major historical referencepoints is the epic political and dialectical cinemamade by the great Russian filmmakers in the silentmovie era, will grow in a series of tendencies whosegoal is the transmission of ideology and will becomeimportant in various historical and social contexts.With the passage of time we fi nd, running in lockstepwith the technical evolution of the image, the developmentof communication strategies in both the cinemaand on television driven by new technology. But allof this genealogy, historically rich both in theoreticaloutput and in fi lms, would in some way be restrictedfrom the point of view of contemporary “video politics”since the effi cacy of marketing and advertisinghas progressively drained away all ideological argument.It could be said that what would have been thenatural development of a militant conception of theaudiovisual media has been abruptly cut off in thebranch of election ads in favour of the trivialisation ofthe message, also extendable to the “commercialisation”of political campaigns. The fi nal overlap betweenadvertising and propaganda (even though this divisionhas been a source of much comment since academicsbecame interested in it) imposes itself from the conceptionto the formalisation of the electoral product andthus triggers a powerful mechanism for change in thepolitical arena.Nonetheless, this approach might lead one to think thatclassical cinematographic practice would be differentfrom modern-day political videos in that it would notbe trivial, something which would certainly be questionablein the light of the many products derived fromfascist and communist ideology.Walter Benjamin wrote about the sterilisation of politicsas a fascist strategy, and from a contemporary perspectivethis needs to be looked at again with renewedinterest. In all recent election campaigns we have seenhow the propaganda of very different political movementsincreasingly yields to specific aesthetic criteria,with a profusion of plastic resources from very variedreference points and applied to the various politicaland partisan discourses. If Benjamin was right andthese fascist strategies contributed to the conversionof humanity into a spectacle in itself, we might start topoint out where we are on the road, at the risk of beingdevastated by the evidence of an abandonment ofprinciples. If the devaluation of the democratic systemhas become the aestheticisation of politics, it is no surprisethat Alfa should have detected the growing trendtowards the democratisation of fascism.