{"id":5549,"title":"Transnational Documentaries: A Manifesto","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/transnational-documentaries-manifesto","version":"a1db189eca34288f8fdff9f97b3c5967ddbe499a9b5a1e9926c78a6438641c37","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4376501+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"John Hess"},{"role":"Author","name":"Patricia R. Zimmermann"}],"authorKeys":["Hess, John","Patricia Zimmermann"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Afterimage","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Visual Studies Workshop","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"February 1997","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Rochester, New York","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"24","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"4","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0444","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Transnational Documentaries: A Manifesto.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/transnational-documentaries-manifesto.","publication":"John Hess; Patricia R. Zimmermann. Transnational Documentaries: A Manifesto. Afterimage. Visual Studies Workshop. February 1997.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5549.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0444","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"},{"label":"http://people.rfem.or.kr/macbride/","url":"http://people.rfem.or.kr/macbride/","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":58756},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":765}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"I. Introduction A new world (image) order is indeed emerging. But it differs greatly from the one then-President George Bush prophesied during the 1991 Gulf War and the one President Bill Clinton fantasized in his 1992 and 1996 State of the Union addresses. While Bill Clinton argued for V-chips to control media violence in the home and Internet connections in every school to salvage public education, his speech-focusing exclusively on media content-symptomatically repressed his unwavering, unexamined support for a totally unregulated concentration of media transnationals that will inhibit diversity, public debate, access and democracy. On February 1, 1996, Congress overwhelmingly passed a new telecommunications law that effectively eliminates all constraints upon both vertical integration and horizontal concentration across industries. It will accelerate media megamergers. Writing in The Washington Post, Jonathan Tasini, president of the National Writers Union, declared that this law ushers in a new era of media \u0022Robber Barons\u0022: it advances unrestrained transnational communication oligopolies, effectively annihilating freedom of speech and democratic control over media content. Tasini says, \u0022Before it\u0027s too late, the public must snatch back the reins.\u0022 (1) The current corporate transnational media universe, for example, features the most intensive cross-media merger activity in history, which has, for all intents and purposes, rendered competition an obsolete practice and concept: Disney/ABC Capital Cities, Turner/Time-Warner, Westinghouse/CBS, Sony-Columbia. According to a recent issue of Variety that tracked globalization, once the mergers are completed, the Disney and Turner combines will become the two largest media companies on the globe, with operations and distribution spanning every continent and nearly every technology. In the midst of this corporate struggle for worldwide domination, however, new media practices and new transnational media organizations have emerged to challenge and remake connections between people across borders: anti-copyright work that deconstructs corporate images, the Gulf War Paper Tiger project on satellite, media pirates interrupting signals with low-end technologies internationally, the Guerrilla Girls\u0027 World Wide Web sites, indigenous Fourth World broadcasting and international documentary co-productions and community samizdat video on the war in Bosnia. We need to reimagine radical media for the twenty-first century, throwing out oppositions of dominant and alternative media formulated during a different period of late capitalism. In this vein, we propose a provisional construct of transnational documentaries as a strategic and political move in a period of rampant civil wars, unprecedented corporate transnational concentration and degradation of humanity across the globe. We want to reclaim the term transnational in order to radicalize it. We need new imaginings to navigate and investigate the relationships between progressive documentaries and the post-cold war world. Projects are currently being launched around the globe to combat the rapid diminishment of the public sphere through globalization. The MacBride Roundtable on Communication, instituted in the late 1980s as a global consortium of policy activists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), scholars and creators, meets yearly in different locations around the globe to, as its founding statutes declare, \u0022promote democratisation of mass media, telecommunications and electronic networks, in line with the Right to Communicate as a basic human right of individuals and communities.\u0022 The 8th MacBride Roundtable in Seoul, South Korea, held from August 24-27, 1996, interrogated the \u0022new authoritarian forms\u0022 emerging in new technologies, such as \u0022privacy\u0022 of transmission, intellectual property rights and copyright, as well as censorship and life threatening situations for journalists in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia. The Roundtable also pushed for building alliances among video NGOs beyond the national level in order to track the \u0022activities and strategies of transnational corporations as they affect the lives of workers.\u0022 In the United States, the National Labor Committee has presented a successful model for using video to document the lives of workers in the textile industries. They spearheaded the successful 1995 campaign against GAP for exploiting child workers in Central America with their video Zoned for Slavery (1994). The tape chronicles how young women are forced to work long hours, fed birth control pills to control their fertility and policed at the manufacturing plants. In one scene, the Korean owners of a textile plant in El Salvador order the video camera to leave the premises, but the camera still rolls. The tape and the ensuing campaign mobilized the NAACP, church groups, women\u0027s groups and anti-NAFTA labor groups, and propelled Bob Herbert to write several Op-Ed pieces for The New York Times. The National Labor Committee is currently exposing the Disney Corporation\u0027s exploitation of the textile workers who produce Disney\u0027s insignia clothing with a video titled Walt Disney in Haiti (1996). In October, the National Labor Committee announced that it would expand its attack against Disney by looking into the company\u0027s operations in Burma, a country ruled by an authoritarian military dictatorship. We consider this project a polemical intervention into the emerging transnationalization of the world. For example, during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, AT\u0026T featured commercials lauding their global communications and information networks with montages of international athletes dressed in costumes from various countries high jumping, throwing the javelin and running. We want to bring into the current discussions of the new global hegemony-primarily economic and technological to date-a focus on oppositional cultural practices, aesthetics and policies. These multiple, fluid and mobile interventions into global communication flows require not only new forms of theorization about radical media, but also bold and innovative artistic and policy strategies, as well as \u0022raids\u0022 across borders. This new work-on video, film, the Internet-moves simultaneously between the local, the regional, the national and the global, defying repressive nationalist territorialization. Not simply a scholarly effort to create new theoretical labyrinths, we see transnational documentaries as a crucial organizational effort to connect thinking about media from all over the globe in order to open up new conceptual territories for both the theory and practice of film and other media. Indeed, this project seeks to deterritorialize documentary history and theory from its location in the North and West in order to provisionally think through new ways of making connections across real and imaginary borders of immigration, race, class, gender, identity, diaspora and nation. We believe that media scholars and activists need to think through the shifting, multiple relationships between the South and East, North and West as fluid, intersecting categories that are never stable or fixed. For example, Guillermo G\u00F3mez-Pe\u00F1a\u0027s El Naftazteca: Pirate Cyber-TV for A.D. 2000 (1995) was a live satellite broadcast mixing together English and Spanish, phone-ins, MTV-inspired deconstructive clips from Hollywood and Mexican films, images of \u0022Aztecs,\u0022 a virtual reality piece of a Mexican crossing the border and a talk show host dressed in a pastiche of Aztec headdress, a mariachi suit and Native American garb presenting newscasts about the new world where Anglos are a minority. The piece combines the old technology of cable access and radio call-ins with the new technologies of cyberspace, virtual reality and satellites to destroy the border between new and old technologies, English and Spanish, Mexico and the U.S. II. Transnational Theory Transnationalization will define the twenty-first century. Many diverse writers, from Benjamin Barber to Zillah Eisenstein to Hans Magnus Enzenberger to Susan Sontag to Cornel West argue that the twenty-first century commenced with the revolutions and geopolitical restructurings of 1989. A powerful body of work has erupted within the last five years in political theory, political economy, sociology, feminist theory and postcolonial studies to chart the operations and effects of the globalized economy. Writers from a variety of fields and theoretical positions such as Aijaz Ahmad, Arjun Appadurai, Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, David Morley and Kevin Robins, Robert Reich and Malcolm Waters have outlined the economic contours and psychic/cultural operations of the new world order. Several journals have also emerged in the last five years to track transnational developments: Public Culture, Third Text, Diaspora, boundary 2. Many commentators argue that the transnational economy is different from the old (although still present and constantly mutating) multinational economy headquartered in nation states. Masao Miyoshi, in an influential article published in Critical Inquiry (Summer 1993), offers an important distinction between the multinational and transnational corporation. He argues that the multinational corporation-headquartered in the new/old nation state but operating in a number of countries-is gradually denationalizing and transnationalizing. He observes, \u0022a truly transnational corporation, on the other hand, might no longer be tied to its nation of origin but is adrift and mobile, ready to settle anywhere and exploit any state including its own, as long as the affiliation serves its own interest.\u0022 Several general theoretical contours of transnationalism can be distinguished across a variety of disciplines and sources ranging from literary theory to political economy to political theory to feminist theory to postcolonial theory to The New York Times and The New Yorker descriptions of new telecommunications business mergers. Transnational enterprises are structured horizontally and vertically simultaneously. They are flexible and fluid, in constant adaptation and mutation to changing political and social conditions. They rely on computer technologies to increase the speed of all communications and business transactions, thereby dislocating capital from a specific location. They constantly prey upon, produce, cultivate and appropriate plurality and diversity rather than negotiating between fixed power blocs as during the Cold War. Communications and culture constitute central economic fulcrums of the transnational era, as media political economists Armand Mattelart and Herbert Schiller have elucidated. Rather than a model of domination, the transnational operates in multiple sedimentary layers of finance, media, culture and politics. These theoretical markers point to a paradox that requires analysis. On the one hand, they reflect the language of corporate management and reengineering. The corporate desire for endless flexibility and diversity, as Jeremey Rifkin shows in The End of Work (1995), has triggered one of the most devastating workplace downsizings in U.S. history, a process expedited by new communications technologies such as computers and by new production and distribution systems. Workers at all levels of industry-secretaries, factory workers, accountants, college faculty, middle managers-are losing jobs across all sectors of manufacturing, professional work, service and education, despite large corporate profits and a bull market. No job will remain the same in the twenty-first century. Work-whether in Toyota factories, radio stations or college classrooms-is being reengineered, restructured, deskilled, multiskilled and sped up. For corporatist transnationalism, racial, gender, ethnic and sexual identities are to be dematerialized, depoliticized, declawed and decorporalized into new, further segmented markets for the new a","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":58756,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}