Behind the camera

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An old film camera

Body Beautiful

During the inter-war period, Britain went from being a nation of unhealthy weaklings to a country obsessed with public health. Find out more in the summary of the Body Beautiful programme.

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Nation On Film

One step beyond the socio-cultural documentarists are the ideological-political activists, who have used film not just to document conditions but to campaign for change. Running parallel to the liberal Griersonians of the 1930s were the communist film and photo groups, using audio-visual media from the heart of their working-class communities to fight for social improvement. Taking their cue from the Soviet Union - the pioneering workers' state which had harnessed cinema to the cause of the revolution - these groups got hold of still and movie cameras and made films about events like hunger marches, free of the censorious comments of official newsreel coverage. Other campaigning and pressure groups did the same, making films to advance their cause, whether it was religious, tee-total, anti-war, pro-strike or whatever. Pitted against the limited resources of these 'outsiders' were the limitless, official resources of the state, making film and videos as part of their PR function to educate and persuade the public of their policies on health, housing, childcare and education.

The state often branded the unofficial users of film as 'ideological', missing the point that they themselves were ideological, and the even larger point that we understand today - thanks to the work of theorists like Roland Barthes - that all images and audio-visual end-products are ideological. They all have meaning if you take them apart and dig deeply, and usually that meaning involves the operation of some form of power relations. In a capitalist system, say the radical theorists, all images have the function of naturalising the world, making it appear as fixed and unchanging or unchangeable. As we learn from the critical work of John Berger, even the most innocent artistic portrait through the century is encoded in terms of power, with the prime message being usually the social or ideological power of the sitter. What has been interesting is the way that technology has gradually democratised this process of documenting the world, so that the means of production of images are now potentially in the hands of everyone in the video and digital age. But a warning is usually needed to accompany this progressive development. This spreading of power may be illusory, as real economic and political power is still in the hands of the global giants of technology - computer and media corporations - who will always have the last word when it comes to the development and use of the various technologies and the images created with them. Which leaves us with our final question - how much real power do we current, consumer-users of film have?

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