arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

Profile

Mark Saunders, mars 2000, le quartier de la Gare de Midi a Bruxelles.
Saunders travaille depuis les annees '80 comme realisateur, d'abord avec le groupe Despite TV, ensuite avec Spectacle TV.
Pendants les annees '80 Despite TV a filme et documente les attaques sans merci de la «dame de fer» Margareth Thatcher, contre le systeme social en Angleterre. Ainsi des films sur des greves des imprimeurs du conglomerat de presse de Rupert Murdoch, sur la greve des infirmieres et sur les actions contre le "developpement urbain" des London Docklands ont vu le jour.
Ce dernier sujet est elabore dans cet interview.
Ensuite, Despite et Spectacle ont suivi les actions massives contre le Poll Tax (qui imposait une taxe scandaleusement discriminatoire a l'electorat britannique, copiee d'une taxe coloniale qui avait existee en Afrique du Sud lorsque ce pays etait encoure une colonie de l'Empire britannique).
Mark Saunders est surtout connu par le film The Truth Lies in Rostock (La Verite ment/se trouve a Rostock) dans lequel les attentats de skins contre un centre d'asile et la passivite de la police dans cette ville de l'Allemagne 'de l'Est" en 1992 sont decortiques.

NEWSMANAGEMENT MEANS MISINFORMATION

Q. Mark Saunders, what was your most revealing experience with corporate media in your 20 years of work ?

MS : One of the events that particularly kind of hit me was when Despite TV was making a video about the poll-tax. The main march went into a square in London called Trafalgar Square. And when they showed it on the news, it was clear that there where cameras, 4 or 5 camera from ITN news, around Trafalgar Square. But when it was broadcast, the events were out of chronology, the order of the events was changed.
For instance, we found one camera that was filming down the street from high on the building and could see very clearly what was going on. And what was used in the news was cut the moment before the vans, these police-vehicles drove into the crowd. But the fact that the police drove into the crowd was very relevant information.
And because we were looking at the actual rushes before they were edited, it was clear that in the editing that actually stopped, that they'd actually cut it just before that event happened.
This is just one of many examples of how news has its own agenda, based on press releases, based on official versions ef events. And however conscious it is, particularly in newsinformation, material is edited to fit the story that's been told.

I suppose that a lot of the work that we do is more the other way round. We look at videomaterial from the point of view of trying to find out what actually happened. Starting from that is key evidence.
One extreme level is news management, another level is a kind of professional lazyness that generates what can be quite important misinformation. Because people's perception, critique and analysis of a situation is based on the information they get from the media. And if the information from the media has already been changed and manipulated, then...
I think the classic example is the example prior to the Gulf War in the United Nations in New York. There was this young woman who presented to the United Nations this story about Saddam Hussein's army going in and switching of incubators and destroying a children's hospital. This information outraged the people in the Council of the United Nations. And that night was the night when they put their support behind Operation Desert Storm.
But a week or two later, it became known that this woman was actually the daughter of the ambassador to - I think it was either Kuwait or one of the neighbouring countries. That was another example where you could see that the timing of information is a key. After the event ...people were saying this woman never had been to this hospital to see it. And after the war I saw a programme where they showed the hospital and nothing had been destroyed. So then we knew that this was a complete fabrication. So you can have information and whether it is true, doesn't actually matter in the short term.
Our history, our contempory recent history is full of these examples where...you know, the story that is being told in the media at some point they say : "Ah, we got it wrong, this was'nt the correct information". But that information already has had its effect. And the fact that a few people can say : "Yeah, but this isn't how it was" is too late, it doesn't change anything.

So in all the programmes that I've worked on, we always come across examples of how media are misreporting or sometimes of just open and overt newsmanagement.

This is a big concern. Because it is so important that people, if you're going to have an intelligent discussion and people have....you know, public opinion is so important in democracies. And really we should have the right to have information that is being put to us in a way that we can make our own decisions.
So much of our information is (pre-gurgitated), it has already been massaged, manipulated, sometimes just because there is a kind of semi-official view of any event that is happening.
A lot of the work that we do is actually...not just looking at these stories to find another version, but more the fact that it is just very obvious that there is another version, and exploring what that is.

BACKGROUND : le 31 mars 1990 une grande manifestation a lieu dans le centre de Londres contre le fameux Poll Tax, un systeme de vote base sur les revenues. La manif deborde serieusement. Selon les teles (et selon la police) les forces de maintien de l'ordre ont ete provoquees par des "hooligans".
Avec ses propres images et celles d'autres media-activistes, Despite TV reconstitue les evenements et demontre que des vehicules de la police se sont enfonces dans la manifestation ce qui cquse les incidents.
Despite demontre egalement que des reporteurs des JT ont sciemment inverse la chronologie de leurs images pour pouvoir inculper les manifestants.

MEDIA-ACTIVISTS PARTICIPATE

Q. You were at the so-called Battle of Trafalgar with a few crews. Was this because you wanted to take part as demonstrators against the Poll Tax or was it because you knew in advance what was going to happen in mainstream-media ?

MS : No, the thing with the Poll Tax is that of course it was a very big issue in England. But we as Despite TV we were making a programme about the social and political implications of the Poll Tax . Because even though it was a big media issue and there was a big controversy about the Poll Tax in the media, the media was concentrating... For instance, the Duke of Westminster who owns huge areas of London paid zero Poll Tax and a young person in Brixton paid 600 £ a year. But the whole critique in the media was about the inequities of the Poll Tax in terms of just financial impact on people.

We were more concerned - and we did'nt see this debate anywhere in the media - about the fact that it was the first time that people had to be paying a tax before they could vote.
Because if you voted, then you'd be registered for Poll Tax and a lot of people were against the registration, Full Stop. It penalised extended families. So, if you had a single parent with two or three kids around the age of 18, then this household would be paying 600 £ each.
It also appeared that it was a way of introducing in a backdoor-way identity cards. After all, the Poll Tax system was a British colonial system that was introduced in South-Africa. It was how they controlled the situation by people effectively having to pay Poll Tax.

But we actually went to the demonstration because we had been working on a programme about this aspect of the Poll Tax and we just wanted to get some nice shots for our title scene.
We knew it was goint to be a big event . We were quite a large group of people and we had three cameras, we took three cameras. And it made sense to have one near the front of the march, one at the middle and one at the end. So we went there. And it was obvious all the people who were there had a view of the events that was just completely different to the official media version. That prompted us to say : "OK, maybe with our three cameras we just don't have enough. But let's find out if other people were filming".
And so, we based our programme on a whole series of eyewitness-interviews that we did in the week after it happened. Our finished programme din't get broadcast until six months after.
So, we did an extensive range of interviews with eyewitnesses and we build up a whole picture based on information both in the press and from individuals and from video, to rebuild the picture.

But we were also of course against the Poll Tax and we were on the demonstration.
This happened in 1990, in the early days ! We were using S-VHS-cameras. What happend in Seattle in 1999 is probably an example that now to have a camera with you is a lot more commonplace. People who are doing things and keep a camera with them, they kind of blur.... There isn't a separation in the way that : there is people demonstrating and the media that claim some objective space but are just watching it.
This is all about people making their own media.

The biggest problem is how people get this material shown, how get access to existing broadcast ? But these things are changing. It may be the access that things like Webcasting are creating, although they are also contributing to ghettoisation of certain kinds of information.
For instance, we did a programme based in Rostock which is how fascists attacked an asylum-home in 1992. This programme went out on TV at 9 o'clock in a terrestrial station Channel Four, and the audience was whatever point-7 of a million people.
If that programme would only have been shown on some anti-fascist webcast, then it would have had very little effect because most people would have been automatically sympathetic to the story and might also have access to alternative sources of information.
The important thing is passing information to people in a way that you're breaking out of people's specialisms and this is why public service television at the moment still occupies a space where point-7 million people at 9 o'clock on Mondaynight are all watching the same programme. I think this is something that is changing very fast and the size of audiences is changing very fast. If audiences become too specialist then they're equally open to have limited information...

BACKGROUND : le 24 aout 1992 un groupe de skins commence a assieger un immeuble dans lequel un centre (ouvert !) pour demandeurs d'asile est incorpore. Trois nuits de suite, les incidents se reproduisent sans que la police n'intervient. Une cooperative locale decide de produire un film ensemble avec Mark Saunders pour decouvrir ce qui s'est veritablement passe. Saunders reste huit mois a Rostock. Le film s'appellera The truth lies in Rostock.
La version officielle est totalement detruite. Il se fait que par exemple "les carences" de la police ne sont pas du au fait "que l'ancienne police communiste soit incapable". Au contraire : le nouveau chef de la police de Rostock est un expert (de Baader-Meinhof et l'extr�me-droite) venu de l'Ouest, qui par apr�s recoit d'ailleurs une promotion !

COMMUNITY-LED INVESTIGATION

Q. I think the word community is a very important aspect of the work that you do, and you also tend to seek your experts or specialists within the communities that you work with ?

MS : Yeah, exactly. To ask the idea of an expert is different of the perceived image of an expert as used in the media.
We consider experts, people who are either somehow involved in stories. In Rostock our experts were people who lived on that estate, they were active as youthworkers or involved in the local council, and they had information that they thought the public should know.
So, yes, I suppose that a lot of the programmes we made with Spectacle, you could say : what they have in common is that they are a kind of community-led investigations into events.
The reason why that is important is because this media-position of objectivity isn't possible. You know, no human is really capable of moving himselves into pure objectivity. So I think it is more honest to say : "OK, well these people have their information and it comes from their position". And then at least, if people think : "OK, that person would say that because is that kind of person", that is clear at least.

But if it is some disengaged voice of objectivity, you don't know whether that information has come because they went to interview the burgermeister and gave his particular line on this story.
The way the media operate, sometimes it has just to do with the economics of television. That is an important area. The event that we were covering in Rostock, it was well covered by the German media. But the reality was that maybe one journalist from Der Spiegel would go to Rostock for maybe two days and he would interview the Burgermeister and the chief of police.
But if all of those people would have agreed on an official public line in the form of press-statements, then it doesn't matter how much analysis Der Spiegel was putting on to the story.

If the source of information has alreay been quite controlled and people go to a community and look for community leaders for the simple reason that you cannot put a microphone under the nose of the community and that you got to have a person, then.....
I would suggest that the whole notion of community leaders is demanded by the media. A community leader is someone you can go and interview and talk to . But it is a strange concept. Because, you get a lot of stories which never get from underneath the surface, because community leaders have their own agenda of course,just as much as city officials who are very concerned to have some kind of media-management.
So you can interview a community leader and quite easily find other people who have a completely different view. And very often it is based on information that they have first hand , that they know because they work in the council office, or because they were living next door to this house that was attacked and could see out of their window.
So on a very basic level, for instance in Rostock, the official police view was that that one night it was very quiet and it didn't look that there was going to be any trouble. But we did ran into people who were living in the building next to it and some people who had filmed from another building and it was very clear that this wasn't the case at all.

So quite often questions are not even being asked. Because people feel, like when they read the paper or they watch TV, that they got the whole information.
I think everyone now understands that we were all led by the nose through the Gulf War. The information that maybe was perceived to be damaging to public support for the Gulf War, comes out 4 or 5 years later when it just becomes a bit of a curiosity, "Did You Know ?", or just fascinating bits of information.

What is important is that these alternative views of news are somehow made available to people so that you can ask the right questions as a member of the audience.

YOU DON'T LEAD COMMUNITY-EXPERTS BY THE NOSE

Q. You worked on the London Docklands and took a few of these community experts with you to an interview, which was kind of a shock to the person being interviewed ?

MS : Yeah, there was a situation in East London, in the old docks, where there was going to be a huge redevelopment. And the whole agenda for this redevelopment was to build an extension to the financial City of London district.
And of course there were communities there, who had always been living in very bad conditions, with very poor social services or public transport. And here was an opportunity for the first time probably ever to address these questions.
Now, the chief executive of the Development Corporation had refused to talk to any of the community leaders. They had never managed to have a meeting with him. And we were doing a programme to look at all this. Because this was our community, this was the community that we served.
So we wanted to have an interview with the chief executive, which he agreed to do. And when we arrived, our interviewers were two women who were the leaders of this community group trying to put pressure on the London Docklands Development Corporation. They were our interviewers.

There is an obvious rationale to that which is....
If we would have just one of us as an interviewer, of course we can do some research, but it would be limited. So, if we asked a question and were given an answer that maybe was a bit of a clever answer, that was avoiding the real question, we probably would have gone on to the next question, and wouldn't have been expert enough to challenge the answer.
But the fact that the interviewer was someone who knew every single detail of what had happened in the past three years, the whole level of the interview was completely different. It wasn't possible for this chief executive to simply say : "yes, we've done a lot for the local community, we're building houses, we're doing this, we're doing that...". Because, there were two people who just knew exactly what the truth of it was.
And that again is a good concrete example of who is the expert.

The same happened in Rostock when we did do an interview with the chief of police. Our interviewer was one of the people who had been involved in discussions with the police, they were part of an alternative youth centre. They had developped a lot of research and had information that had come through the antifa-movement to see who had been involved.
This same thing is in the programme, it is that very vivid point where it was key whether or not it was quiet on this particular night or it was very obvious that there'd be trouble. Because that was the third day of people surrounding the centre and throwing petrolbombs.
The official line that the chief of police was bringing out was that it was a very quiet night and that was why there was no police there.
An interviewer who didn't know that backgroundinformation and hadn't been there when it was happening, would had probably just accepted that as the answer that was being generally accepted in the media. Because people have a tendency to believe the official version. And there is not really a culture of questioning the official version.

The other thing about the media is that - and in particular our newsinformation - it has no memory. It's like every day is a new day, and there is no history to any of these stories. It's the eternal present of newsinformation. We can all see that in the way the information was coming to us during Kosovo.
The actual context or background to this information is missing. Everything is actually packaged as a newsitem. And what analysis there is, is working with only half the information sometimes.

GROUPS OF PEOPLE CONTRIBUTE TO THE AUESTIONS WE ASK

Q. Do you think you have to be polite with officials ?
MS : I don't think there is ever any necessity not to be polite. In the sense that, I mean, none of these issues are personal (laughs).

Q. I mean : you make an official appointment with this executive without saying that you're bringing other people ?

MS : No, we said that we would be coming with some interviewers. And the fact is : why would it actually make a difference to this person ? I mean, if he's prepared to do an interview and answer questions, the fact that he might get questions that are a bit more difficult for him to answer than if we were just visiting media from a newspaper or something, I think that that's.... I mean most of these official people : it's their job to answer these questions. Surely that's the whole idea. Their job isn't simply just to give official usefull bits of information, to keep or paint some kind of picture. You can understand, in another area, why they would do that. It is actually their job and responsability to answer these questions.
And you could say that the fact that this chief executive avoided any contact with the community groups is quite outrageous ! Particularly as his organisation was spending a lot of money on its public image as being a kind of accountable, userfriendly organisation that was improving things.... Because if they did any improvement they let anyone know about it.

In the programme that we did Despite The City, I mean.... They had built what is known as the City Airport, a short take-off airport. They had build it right next to this big residential area. They put aside the local communities objections by saying : "there will never be jets taking of from this airport". But within six months of the airport being opened, they were testing jets. And where at the time we were doing the interview, the people who were asking the questions knew that they were testing jets because they could see them out their window !
Whereas if a journalist had just gone and he would say : "No, we are never gonna use jets", which is what he did try and say, that journalist would simply report that. And everyone would say : "Ah, but that's OK !"

Q. Did you learn to use tricks or tactics to get what you are after ?

MS : For sure we plan our interviews. We would plan our interviews in the sense that groups of people would contribute to the kinds of questions that we would ask. And like any journalists do, we would arrange our questions in a way that you're looking for the contradictions. You're looking for areas where what's being said doesn't fit with the reality. So, yeah, for sure there is a strategy in doing an interview.

There is also a lot of analysis and preparation that you can do before an interview like that, which is actually having a critical analysis of the information that these people might give.
We would look at all the press cuttings, look at all the previous statements. Sometimes in these situations or some of the stories that we've covered, for sure there is a cover-up of some sort.
You can't just say to an official : "First question, is there a cover-up ?" and expect them to answer : "Oh, yes there is...". No, of course you have to extract it somehow. So yeah, we do plan our interviews.

In Rostock one of the films we all sat down to watch as a group was the All The President's Men, with Dustin Hofman and Robert Redford. It is a very good film to watch, from the point of view of how official stories are produced and how people....
Sometimes the story is not in what people say but in what they don't say or in how and what they deny. We had that in Rostock where the minister of the Interior, the Innenminister, was offering an excuse that we weren't really asking him to offer.
And the fact that he offered us this excuse alerted us to look at his denial and the content of his denial. Because in a way it pointed to exactly what it was that he was trying to cover up.

But we've never done an interview where someone felt personally upset by the way we've interviewed them. The interview we did with this Innenminister and with the chief of police was extremely friendly.
It is just that, you know, he had said something but we had a lot of images and pictures and testimonials to contradict with. So in the programme you hear him telling one story and you see another.
But there was no animosity, and certainly it's counterproductive anyway. I mean, what you actually want is information.
If we think that someone is going to be contradicting himselves, then of course it is cleaver to get them to say, to get them to confirm one story before you challenge that.

HUMOUR AS A SHORT-CUT TO MAKE A STATEMENT

Q. I think you use a lot of humour in the images and programmes you make. Is that important ?

M : Yeah I think it is. It's important on lots of different levels. I mean common humour is actually a very usefull way of communicating things. It has impact, it's a way of expressing a space that isn't necessarily there by only working with what people say.
For instance in The Truth Lies in Rostock, there is a very shocking programme in the sense that I think most audiences are completely shocked by the difference between what the officials say and what people can see on the screen.
Sometimes an audience's reaction is almost to laugh at the difference between what is being said and what they can see. And that is not a kind of a deliberate use of humour but I think humour has a place in our reaction to some of these things.
In the beginning of that programme people laugh a bit at the way the officials are talking which ads to the dramatic impact. But, by the end, you've moved from being kind of thinking : "that's a bit of a joke", to being outraged... I mean, it's more dramatic if people are laughing and then at the end they are crying, as in a play or in a book. It has more dramatic impact.

Humour gives you a licence to say some things which is too difficult to explain. It can be a sort of short cut at making a statement. All of the kind of things that Monty Python did, I mean, I know it's just humour, but it actually made people kind of look at things in a different way. And that is the whole point.
If you like the three panel cartoon you get in your newspaper, it is all based on changing peoples expectations. You expect what is bein set up in the first frame of the cartoon. But the last frame checkturns (?) it around and that is how we're told a joke. The process is : we're being led to expect one thing and suddenly it flips to something else and that is what makes us laugh.

We totally avoid trivialising anything by using humour. But it is a way of putting across... In certain situations it can be a very usefull way of engaging the audience in what we are talking about. But of course we wouldn't do anything that completely trivialised the content. I mean, you can have a very light jokey approach to a serious subject without trivialising the content of what you are saying.

(there is more to follow....check this website)