Global Histories of Workers Film and Video

In 1936, the Norwegian Labour Party (DNA) for the first time was using film as a propaganda medium on a large scale in a Parliament election campaign. Two propaganda films were produced, 40 prints were distributed, and were reportedly seen by an audience of 300,000 in a country with a population of 3.5 million and contributed to an election result that would put the Labour Party in charge of Norwegian politics until 1965. While the Norwegian labour movement had used film sporadically in the previous years, the 1936 election became the definite breakthrough for the most successful workers´ film movement in Europe in the years leading up to World War II.

However, inspiration for these activities came from other countries. The main inspiration was, of course, Soviet film — the Labour party was the only West European social democratic party to have been a formal member of the Communist International. Norway was also one of the few European countries where Eisenstein´s Battleship Potemkin was not banned. There were also close ties with the varied attempts at creating a workers´ film movement in Germany prior to 1933. Another important source of inspiration were the film activities of the Austrian Social democratic party (SPÖ). This paper aims at showing how such international exchange functioned as models for film production and distribution of film for the Norwegian working class in this period.

This presentation examines the Proletarian Film League of Japan (Prokino, 1929-1934) within the context of growing international interest in continuing adult education during the early decades of the twentieth century. In particular, this talk will explain Prokino’s connections to university- and community-based institutions that supported workers’ and farmers’ continuing education—such as the New Man Society, the Tokyo Imperial University Settlement, and agricultural cooperatives and federations.

Compulsory education was introduced to Japan in 1886. By 1907, all children were required to attend school for at least six years. Although this requirement was not extended again until the post-WWII Allied Occupation, Japanese social reformers became interested in adult education as early as the 1920s. In particular, the rapid urbanization of Tokyo, the universal suffrage movement, and the spread of radical political thought sparked widespread interest in workers’ civic education on both sides of the political spectrum.

In examining Prokino’s pedagogical writings and activities, I approach Prokino as a social organization that used cinema pragmatically—as a tool for education and political mobilization. Prokino’s connections to educators, activists, and reformers allow us to understand how activism, arts, and civic education intersected in the interwar period. I argue that this approach represents a break with the “national cinema studies” scholarly paradigm, which has primarily situated Prokino’s work within a developmental narrative of Japanese film history. In contrast, I situate Prokino’s film education activities globally and attempt to understand Prokino’s relationships to elite intellectuals, as well as the working class.

Before the 1980s, government censorship had almost entirely repressed documentary filmmaking in South Korea. But with the emergence of the Minjung Movement and the struggle for democracy, university students created clandestine film clubs to study political film and they began to use Super 8 to document their own political resistance and to create community life. As these projects matured, the students affiliated themselves with both agricultural and industrial workers, initially making films about their political organizing. But, as had happened similarly with the radical newsreels in the US in the late 1960s, these attempts to make films about the working class quickly transformed into teaching and assisting working-class activists in making their own films and integrating film, and eventually video, into their political activity. Rather than being represented, the workers began to represent themselves. As a result, a spectrum of democratic productive relationships between filmmakers and workers were inaugurated. We will review some of the major film collectives, chart in more detail the emergence of Labor News Production (LNP) in 1989, the most important participatory communication project, and briefly consider some of the films made by other organizations, including Sanggye-dong Olympics (Sanggye-dong Community 1988), and The Night Before the Strike (Jangsangotmae film group, 1990).