Political Filmmaking as Militant Inquiry

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This research asks whether political filmmaking can be understood as 'militant inquiry'-my term for modes of collective activist-led research that join knowledge production with action for social transformation. Like other modes of activism, political film culture takes new forms in the digital age. Groups such as Plateforme d'Enquete Militantes use camera phones to document migrants' working conditions; online video platforms such as Labournet host free content produced internationally by or with campaigning groups. These examples demonstrate the versatile potential of audiovisual militant inquiry in a globalising world. But such technologies, being often geared towards atomised production and consumption, arguably fail to create collectivities among marginalised communities. My work explores this problem by analysing these contemporary projects in a comparative frame with two groups from the 1968 era, the 'golden age' of political film collectives (Grant 2016). I reread the work of the Feminist Cinema Collective (Italy) and Grupo Ukamau (Bolivia) as militant inquiry that refashioned film form and practice as a feminist and anti-colonial means for collectivity in communities marginalised by race, gender and imperialism. Through this lens, I bring such work to bear upon contemporary practices, exploring the possibilities for collective audiovisual inquiry today.Research background and questionsAdamson (2018) argues that digital, amateur modes of political filmmaking find their 'prehistory' in the film collectives of the 68 era-'the first cycle of international uprisings where [...] portable cinematic technologies [...] were widely available'. Such perspectives can be understood within a tradition of 'media archaeology' that excavates the radical experiments of the past to understand the contradictions of the present (Elsaesser 2016). But while Adamson and others (Hamblin 2019; Grant 2016) recognise the 68-era film collectives' attempts to build collectivity through aesthetic production, none have connected their readings with the many recent studies of activist research, workers' inquiry or militant investigation, practices that I group together as 'militant inquiry'.From 2014-16 I co-organised two militant inquiry projects in Delhi-one with university workers, one with steel workers-holding interviews, producing collaborative newspapers and running study groups. I brought this into my academic work via my MA dissertation, a pilot project for this PhD, examining political film collectives in relation to theories of militant inquiry. This gives me a thorough understanding of existing research on this subject, including gaps in the literature. In particular, historical accounts (e.g. Hoffman 2018) have tended to be male-centred and Eurocentric. I address this by centring the work of feminist and anti-colonial groups. I build upon the work of scholars (Figiel et al. 2014) whose analyses of inquiring practices produce new theoretical work on the subject, and I contribute to efforts (Hitchcock 2018) to explore what militant inquiry means for cultural theory. This will have impact beyond media and cultural studies, not only for the social sciences, but also outside the university, for radical media projects such as Labournet, and activist groups practising militant inquiry such as Notes From Below.To consider political filmmaking as militant inquiry, I ask:- how audiovisual media are used to communicate with different communities- how they can forge new collectivities- how they operate alongside/differently to other media.The above are the bases of my three research questions:- How is film language reworked in different geo-cultural and political situations to enable inquiry?- How can film practices develop militant inquiry for co-research?- How have non-audiovisual media historically been used for militant inquiry and how is film situated in relation to this?