Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela by Naomi Schiller

Abstract

MLR, .,   Transilvania Unplugged) both individually and collectively explore the existential tensions produced by prescriptive notions of national identity by asserting the complexity of individual experiences of affect and belonging (p. ). is monograph is a timely and significant contribution to understanding the effect of Bolivarian cultural policy, and its inherent contradictions, on the ‘minor’ contemporary literature produced by Venezuelans (p. ), both within the country and in exile. More broadly, it will appeal to scholars and students interested in the tensions between national cultural policies, publishing, and experimental literature. U  R P P Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela. By N S. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. . xiv+ pp. $.. ISBN ––––. How does a DIY film club become a television station? is is one of the questions behind Channeling the State, a book that investigates the workings of CatiaTVe, a government-sponsored, community-led broadcaster that, since , has operated from Caracas. In its prime the channel aired eighteen hours a day. Seventy per cent of content was created by residents of Catia, a low-income district of the capital. Schiller traces the station’s origins to . Its directors began as a group of students and activists who established a community film club in the neighbourhood of Manicomio. With government funding, they bought a  mm film projector and hung a makeshi screen from the raers of an open-air sports centre. ey invited the people of Catia to watch the revolutionary missives of the s, when anti-capitalist Latin American film-makers resolved to use their chosen media to promote social change, and to challenge the hegemony of Hollywood. Perhaps frustrated by low turnouts, the Manicomio Film Club soon purchased a VHS player and built a collection of pirate videos. ese included action blockbusters and Disney animations, giving showtime to the man who, quite literally, gave a friendly face to aggressive free-market policies and who suppressed unionization among his cartoonists. e organizers, we are informed, were aware of such contradictions . ey counteracted a desire to attract larger audiences with discussions that deconstructed these commercial features. Schiller’s opening with a brief history of the Cine Club confirms that the s was an exciting, if challenging, time for film-makers in Venezuela. Although the country spent most of the decade reeling from an economic crisis, it would also eventually, in , see the creation of a National Film Commission (CNAC). Many of CNAC’s directors and associates had graduated from the school of New Latin American Cinema, which in  held a keystone festival in the Venezuelan city of Mérida. Following the principles of revolutionary film, the CNAC sought to engage with the popular urban sectors and, around the time of its inauguration, premiered feature films in Catia. In  the Manicomio Film Club acquired a hand-held camera and began making local-interest newsreels that were screened in public  Reviews spaces. e watershed election of Hugo Chávez in —which serves as Schiller’s point of departure—initiated the process known as the Bolivarian Revolution, creating new opportunities for grass-roots media. A suite of constitutional reforms provided the legal and infrastructural frameworks that allowed for the formalization of CatiaTVe. e community channel, like dozens across the nation, acquired permission to broadcast on the television network. In many respects, the Manicomio Film Club anticipated the Bolivarian tenor of local autonomy, although it received more governmental funding once CatiaTVe expanded its operations. Did this new proximity between state and people entail the co-optation of grass-roots labour? No, is Schiller’s unwavering answer, because the state is neither ‘a coherent thing to be seized’ (p. ) nor a ‘collection of institutions always already predisposed to enacting a particular kind of politics’ (p. ), but, instead, the ‘ever-unfolding result of daily power-laden interactions between poor and elite social actors’ (p. ). Participating in debates over agency, power, and representation in the Bolivarian Revolution, she argues that the creators of CatiaTVe ‘experienced, understood, and created the state through the process of making media’ (p. ). us Channeling the State rehearses its argument not by analysing content or ratings. Rather, Schiller claims, much along the lines of New Latin American Cinema...