GLIMPSECULTURE

Sixty Cameras Against the War

Right-Click Here To Download - MPEG-4 File (27min, 156MB)
Video originally hosted online at:Internet Archive

I originally thought of this piece as a pure experiment, getting five cameras on a rally and visually syncing them up as part of my ongoing exploring of multichannel narrative. I took two of my own cameras on a freezing February morning in 2003, pushed through the throngs on Third and Second Avenue and made it to the "World Says No To War," rally on First Avenue, where I got names of eight or ten people I ran into with cameras. I wasn't sure if I was going to do anything with this, until I went to a meeting of 'New Yorkers Say No To War,' later that week and heard the stories of how people couldn't get to the rally that afternoon. Of the 30 people in the room - all of them committed to getting New York City out of the centerpiece for the invasion of Iraq -- only five actually made it to first avenue, the rest stopped by cops on horseback, holding pens, arrests and pepper-spray.

This needed to be made, and thus I ended up getting video footage from sources as diverse as upstate media collectives, to abandoned Indymedia tapes on Walker St., to my goddaughter's nextdoor neighrbor in a penthouse on 1st Avenue.. And then Chrissie Iles, my upstairs neighbor and the film and video curator for the Whitney, told me if I did something with this material, she'd put it up at the Whitney, where she was planning a series of anti-war films to coincide with teh Republican invasion of NYC that August. She presciently tying together films against the VietNam War from the 60's and the Iraq War now. This decided the film's twenty-five minute length - at the time, that's the space she had.

So that's what happened. Hence this film's hybrid quality: it is both a testimony of the rally itself, and its repression by the NYPD under the tutelage of Bloomberg and the new head of NYPC intelligence, fresh from the CIA. Only many years later, did we learn that this level of suppression was part of a wide-ranging scheme to sell the war in Iraq on the embers of the World Trade Tower's attack. New York City wa central to this myth; the NYPD and federal government didn't belittle, repress, arrest, infiltrate, and marginalize the anti-war movment becuase they thought we were wrong. They did it because they knew we were right. If you read the posters and listen to the words of the people here, you'll see only predictions of what eventually happened: No Blood for Oil; Another VietNam.

The idea that nobody knew we were being lied to is media elite bullshit. We knew; we just weren't heard. And, as you can see from this video, it wasn't for lack of trying.

On the experimental level, the most remarkable thing by far was that my intern, Jesse Bull and I discovered, as tapes came in over the following months - that there were people shooting the same moments at the exact same time, unbeknownst to each other and often from wildly different angles and different times. Jesse painstakingly figured out the different internal clocks - of the half who even had theirs own - and, by establishing a base time line, and using a map of the upper east side of Manhattan to figure out who was where (good media activists ALWAYS zoom up to the street signs!) then lining these up on video tracks, cutting where different cameras were turned on and off, then eyeballing and finding moments of synchroncity, we were able to find several of these moments - one has up to seven different cameras turning off and on at the same event: a guy in a purple sweatshirt who stands on a police van, of all things, leading a cheer and shaking his fist. Thank God for that upraised purple arm of his - whoever he is.

Thus, I believe it's one of the first - if not the first - instance of random simultanaeity if otherwise unconnected footage. Errol Morris's new documentary on the Abu Gharub photographs details the same process for the three cameras that were being used there] [put in link], and in fact, the description of how the government prosecutor lined up these three cameras almost precisely mirrors what Jesse and I went through - albeit with the moving images of video.

By the end of the movie, not only are viewers appalled at the treatment by the police, but, from a multichannel point of view, the thing that staggered me was this: having experimented and pondered for years and years on how different cameras can film the same scene, I still could never have come up with the approaches that any two people, shooting the same exact event, will cover that - when and how they'll zoom, there they'll be placed, when they turn the camera on and off. It was like being inside sixty different pairs of eyes. The penultimate shot, where Frank Craven is on a rooftop over Second Avenue and Jennifer is across the street and they're both shooting the same arrest - was a revelation to me.

Sixty Cameras Against The War - or 60 CATW, as we came to call it - was funded by a $5000 grant from the family foundation of an old friend of mine, Dan Weissman, who also loaned us hard drives and other equipment. All of the camera people gave me this onetime usage for their video; hence i've never tried to get it distributed, since it was originally intended for a onetime installation as a media installation. Thus I never put it on the festival circuit, and its screening history is limited to the months before the election of 2004: i know everyone gave their time and effort in our hopes to defeat Bush and in this, sadly, we obviously failed.

However, it survives as a document both of the wildly under-represented anti-war movement of this city and this country, at a time when the mainstream media were not merely buying, but trumpeting the Bush/Cheney lies about the war. And, as what i believe is the first time a documentary has used other people's videos.

Whitney Museum from Aug, 25 - Oct. 24 2004, curated by Chrissie Iles and Sam Durant.
Imagine Film Festival - Two Boots Pioneer Theater, a city-wide festival of arts in protest of the Republican National Convention, August, 2004.
Films To See Before You Vote, a DVD_festival in a box which toured 14 battleground states in the 2004 election, along with works by Robert Greenwald, David O. Russell and Spike Lee, curated by Jim Browne.
Screened at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) October 26th-October 31st, 2004.

Getting Arrested - I posted this as part of PictureNY's campaign to change the proposed rules on video and film cameras from the Maor's Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting (MOFTB) in the summer of 2007. The video itself comes from my camera being left on while NYPD officers throw me to the ground and handcuff me for refusing to move from the sidewalk during an anti-corporate greed rally in September, 2002.