Watching others' troubles : revisiting 'The Film Act' and spectatorship in activist film festivals

Activist film festivals, films and their audiences come together within a communal space to fulfil a particular contract, one that centres on the broad aim of social change (Iordanova 2012; Torchin 2012). These spaces, it is hoped, will aid in “transforming spectators into responsible historical subjects” (Brenez 2012). This is achieved, or, rather, enhanced, I argue, through a negotiation of the three elements – films, film festival and spectators – into a set of relationships that bind them differently were their activities not “activist”. In this chapter, I focus on each element in different measure, mostly because I am primarily interested in refuting a long-standing acceptance in the literature dealing with spectatorship of the sorts of images screened in these festivals, as one that promotes a relationship of “distance”. Furthermore, much of this is premised on the idea that these images represent a uni-dimensionalized “suffering”, which demands of the powerful spectator a response that can ultimately lead to aversion and apathy. The discourse of “distant suffering” (Boltanski 1999; Sontag 2003) emerges, I argue, from a history of gazing at humanitarian images in the powerful west from a particular context and frame; I have called this “the humanitarian gaze” (Tascón 2015). In this chapter, I propose that activist film festivals, particularly, enhance the possibility of creating “responsible historical subjects” through a process that is similar to that described by Third Cinema’s “the film act” (Getino and Solanas 1969). This attempts to position spectators in a relationship with films that is intended to close the distance with the film subject, but also to construct a more equal relationship, one where complexity may emerge more readily