Une minute pour une image. (Francia / France) Agnes Varda, 1982 A 170 episode TV series broadcast by French channel FR3. After exploring reality and imagination through still images in her film Ulysse, Agnes Varda conceived Une minute pour une image, where an unidentified photograph is projected on the screen and lay observers of different nationalities and professions offer 60 seconds of commentary on that image. Following the principle of an “Imaginary Album”, the photographs might be from anonymous photographers, of from well known artists such as Doisneau, Caujolle, Cartier-Bresson, Delpire or Varda herself. Varda’s work consisted simply in finding the right commentators, and filming the commentaries, choosing the camera angles and the right close-ups of the photographs.
Video-Nou (España / Spain) 1977-1983 The Video-Nou Collective was formed after a conference on video art organised by the Buenos Aires CAIC centre at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona in 1977. Their art practice focused on horizontal, two-way participative communication in the field of what was then known in Spain as “promoting socio-cultural activities”, which in their case consisted in videos they made with the collaboration of groups from the same contexts in which said videos were then distributed.
Paper Tiger Television (EUA) Paper Tiger Television, founded in New York City in 1981, is an open media collective dedicated to raising media literacy and challenging corporate control over mainstream media. From the perspective of grassroots community activism, PTTV expose corporate manipulation, provide critical analysis of media, educate about the communications industry and highlight issues that are absent from mainstream information sources.
100 Jours. Poitiers, France, The 100 Jours collective seeks alternatives to the dominant audiovisual forms purveyed by the mass media; their project was simultaneously a political and a cinematographic experiment, consisting in 100 short films by local and international visual artists, screened in the 100 days before the second round of the French presidential election in 2012. Following the principles of post-May 1968 cinema (Medvedkin Group, Chris Marker, René Vautier, Yann le Masson, etc.), 100 Jours seeks a type of political film where the authorial gaze is able to generate new imaginaries, exploring issues connected with the denunciation of injustice and contemporary forms of struggle.
The Battle of Orgreave. Jeremy Diller. UK/Reino Unido 2001, The UK miners' strike of 1984–85 was a major industrial action affecting the British coal industry. It was a defining moment in British industrial relations, and its defeat significantly weakened the British trade union movement. The Battle of Orgreave is the name given to a confrontation between police and picketing miners at a British Steel coking plant in Orgreave, South Yorkshire, in 1984. In 2001, conceptual artist Jeremy Diller organised a re-enactment of the event which was filmed by film director Mike Figgis for a Channel 4 documentary. The re-enactment featured 800 people including 280 local residents, and a number of people (police and picketers) from the original encounter. The film juxtaposes still pictures of the actual 1984 events and footage of the 2001 re-enactment, along with moving testimonies offering new perspectives on what happened.
