Media Power

"We are the bow and arrow. Totonaco. The walking wind. Triqui. We are the heart and blood. Tzeltal. The warrior and protector".

The creation of a revolutionary media is essential in the battle for hearts and minds and as such it is interesting to note the Zapatista poets consider themselves the bow and arrow, the heart and blood. This mirrors events as during the armed uprising in 1994 as the Zaptista became their own media mini-empire. They became the instigators of creation and distribution.

There are two aspects of a media product; the creation of the content and the distribution of the content. It is the second of these aspects that traditionally creates the problem. In filmmaking terms, while anyone can make a film, getting it seen is another matter all together. Costs of film creation may be reducible to the cost of a camera, but distributing this film through cinemas or video shops would be another problem altogether. Even assuming you can reach a distribution deal, you've got to physically manufacture the copies to send out - to reach a sizable number of people means it's not a small scale operation. As the complexity of your media operation increases, so does the vested interests in the form of the content and so can the gulf between creator and audience.

Fore example: During the Second World War, the French Resistance found it vital to get information out for general consumption to counter the Nazi controlled press. They found there was no shortage of content; willing writers were abundant and news could be gathered from resistance contacts and by listening to Allied radio transmissions. The resistance had difficulties in physically producing the newspapers; paper, printing presses and then distributing them clandestinely. Production could be as crude as handwritten pages; distribution could be as basic as throwing handfuls of flyers in the air in crowded places.

If we look to the distribution models of mainstream film, the apparent demands of the audience (no subtitles, no black and white, must have a US lead actor/actress, no subversive/underground content, racial and gender bias) and the arguments of how these demands influence the creators is well documented. The creator ends up missing the vision of her/his film in favour of second guessing the audiences supposed needs. The form becomes formulaic, predictable and institutionalised. It becomes reality tampered with on an unprecedented scale.

With the Zapatistas, through the Internet, there was control of both the means of production and the means of distribution. Digital information can have unlimited numbers of copies made, flawlessly each time. Through the Internet, all the distribution problems dissolve; information on the web is accessible to all, regardless of geographic boundaries, there is no need for a complex distribution infrastructure.

Look back to Cinema Verite and it's goal of purity. This model of production and distribution offers the content creator the dissolution of barriers between creator and audience.

Read the third and final part of The Zapatista: Post-Modern Revolutionaries & Filmmaking....Exponential Distribution.