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, it is the creation of new world-views, and all the messiness that this entails, that engenders revolutionary praxis. e result is a fascinating behind-the-scenes account that draws on months of ethnographic fieldwork. We are offered intimate access to workshops, production sets, editorial meetings, press conferences, and on-location shootings. e author is sympathetic to the core values of CatiaTVe and, by extension, to the egalitarian drive that for some underpinned the Bolivarian Revolution. It is much to her credit, then, that her analysis foregrounds tensions within the collective and carefully examines contradictions in their strategies. e book’s framing of CatiaTVe as a legacy of New Latin American Cinema makes it an essential reference for researchers of film and participatory film-making. e mediascape in Venezuela has seen a dramatic decline in diversity since the research was conducted. As such, Channeling the State also constitutes an important, if lamentable, historical artefact. U L R J Poetica: Schrien zur Literatur, Übersetzungen und Gedichte. By G S. Ed. by H K-O, H M, M- T, and S W in collaboration with T H. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag. . pp. € ISBN – –––. is magnificent collection contains a cornucopia of texts by the doyen of twentiethcentury Jewish Studies, who was also a master of German literature. It collects essays, translations, reviews, poems, and letters; and its subjects range from the Song of Songs to the Book of Job, from the Talmud to the Zohar, and from Bialek MLR, ., and Agnon to Martin Buber. Indeed, this volume places Scholem on a par with the finest German Jewish thinkers, alongside Moses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen, inasmuch as he raises his philological commentary to the level of philosophy . e essays illuminate topics such as translation, the Talmudic style, Aramaic, or the nature of language with its ‘heavenly alphabet’. Scholem’s insights into areas far beyond his specialism such as the Halakhah and the Aggadah are as incisive as they are definitive. roughout we follow a scintillating intelligence in pursuit of truth. e dialogue between religion and politics which sustains Scholem’s endeavours is manifest from the start, as he enters the polemical fray: whether taking issue with Buber or performing a hatchet job on Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, he battles against mediocrity and cant with the ferocity of a prophet. When his contemporaries were celebrating the First World War, he assailed the hostilities in a poem that attacks the ‘Mythos der Völkermord’. Yet he can be conciliatory, too, as in his poem to Ingeborg Bachmann with its typical scepticism: ‘Die Stunde der Erlösung ist vorüber’. In ditching Messianism he had the courage to discard one of the central tenets of Judaism. Ironically, nothing better shows the depth and intensity of the German–Jewish symbiosis, the existence of which he denied, than Scholem’s commentary on Luther...
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Oct 27, 2024
Rebekka Friedman 
Open Access
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