My video works reconceive television drama and non-fiction moving images to investigate contemporary socio-political conditions, especially the systemic relationships between labor, economics and politics, in order to investigate people’s roles within them. These films focus on the current social crisis. My art practice PhD at the Royal Institute of Art has focused on questions related to making films against capitalism. I see the fight against capitalism as against a system of exchange that everyone takes part in, but which helps no one. Opposing capitalism means opposing exploitative labour conditions, all forms of systemic discrimination and the role of the state within these. Films that are against capitalism involve knowledge that opposes it, however this involves different types of knowledge beyond the ways that knowledge about capitalism is conventionally conceived. Affective, associative thought and knowledge that develops from practice need to be part of films that communicate about a world beyond capitalism.
My PhD project Films Against Capitalism comprises video works and writing. The video works reflect my approaches to making films against capitalism while the writing begins with a discussion of my video works and broadens this to describe films against capitalism as a breadth of possibilities. The pressing matter of capital’s crisis is connected to the converging long-term environmental, social, economic and health crises of the present moment. All of these crises are intertwined. Societies are currently confronting many systemic forms of discrimination, some of which preceded capitalism. There are many aspects of the current social crisis that involve racism, and the present moment has brought fascist governments and groups into power, leading to a period when people urgently need to fight the racism, fascism, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia and ableism that the far-right is promoting. From the anger after the Grenfell Tower fire to the George Floyd Rebellion, people see that systemic racism is used to disregard and criminalize people, putting them in danger and pushing them into informal labour markets. Meanwhile, the health crisis of COVID-19 in recent years has coincided with a crisis in housing, labour and care, and beyond this it brought to light prevailing views that regard societies not as societies, but as collections of disconnected individuals. Such an approach is vastly inadequate when confronted with a health crisis such as COVID-19, that caused capitalist social systems to break down.
In my PhD project the focus is to show how people experience capitalist abstractions. What is most needed right now is art and film that looks at the details of capitalist oppression but does so by communicating imaginings, emotions, and poses material problems. Moreover, it is necessary to fight capitalism not with a view only to its larger structures but also to the ways that systemic oppressions take the forms of specific conditions in people’s lives. This is one of the reasons why film is important as a means to oppose capital. Films can tie together societal and structural levels of situations with the details of people’s experiences. My PhD project is the result of a period when I have made two major changes to my video projects: I have immersed the production of my video projects in social conditions – whether this is achieved by, for example, working throughout the city of Orlando as I did in Crowds or working with participants as I did in Home Together. TV-style fiction, a distinctive part of my artistic practice, meets documentary. This has made it possible for me to look at people’s concrete situations.
About Films Against Capitalism
– Melanie Gilligan