30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle
If I had to review Rustin Thomp-son’s video documentary 30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle in only three words, I’d say it’s honest, energizing agitprop. Some readers may regard this as an oxymoron, but it’s one account of the Seattle events I’ve been waiting for, receiving its world premiere at the Chicago Underground Film Festival this Sunday at 1:30 PM. Yet the information it has to convey is almost entirely of the you-are-there variety–there’s no genuine analysis. It evokes 60s demonstrations in a number of ways–including such standbys as bare-breasted, body-painted teenyboppers and burning dollar bills–and pays particular attention to the music performed by demonstrators (one folksinger even sounds like Arlo Guthrie), coming much closer in feeling to something like Woodstock than to radical 60s documentaries produced by Newsreel. But it’s a good deal more personal than either genre. In fact, what marks 30 Frames a Second as agitprop is Thompson’s own political conversion, seemingly brought about by his participation in the events.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Thompson’s apparent naivete ensures that a significant part of his thinking is his discovery that Americans aren’t as politically apathetic as he’d assumed (“My illusion of a meek, complacent population was forever shattered”) and that some are even incensed about the abuses and ravages of multinational corporations. Indeed, for him this documentary is first and last an American story–and I have to confess that when I first read about the protests in Seattle, I leaped to a similarly shortsighted conclusion. Like Thompson, I felt that the resurgence of 60s activism I’d expected at some point was finally taking shape, though the fresh alliances making it possible were reconfiguring old party lines and political divisions; but I also regarded the event somewhat more broadly as a happy sequel to Tiananmen Square in spring 1989. Still, it was hard not to read the demonstrations in ethnocentric terms.
Obviously what interested Thomp-son most is also what I most wanted to see–material about the demonstrations that didn’t make it onto the news. But both of us needed some historical context for the events in Seattle, and both of us found somewhat mythic substitutes. Thompson includes two other short film clips in 30 Frames a Second, one from Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, a film about the 1968 Democratic convention riots that’s a touchstone for 60s activism, and the other from the last scene in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, a 1940 touchstone for 30s populism. I guess leapfrogging from California in the 30s to Chicago in the 60s to Seattle in 1999 represents some kind of history, however telescoped, but it’s a history of feeling, not of thought or achievement. Even Thompson’s subtitle, The WTO in Seattle, seems a bit off-kilter, pointing not to his real subject but to the event that occasioned the demonstrations.
Klein views branding and activist responses to it as being in symbiotic relationship, an interaction highlighted in a couple of key passages in different parts of the book. “Branding…has taken a fairly straightforward relationship between buyer and seller and–through the quest to turn brands into media providers, arts producers, town squares and social philosophers–transformed it into something much more invasive and profound. For the past decade, multinationals like Nike, Microsoft and Starbucks have sought to become the chief communicators of all that is good and cherished in our culture: art, sports, community, connection, equality. But the more successful this project is, the more vulnerable these companies become: if brands are indeed intimately entangled with our culture and our identities, when they do wrong, their crimes are not dismissed as merely the misdemeanors of another corporation trying to make a buck. Instead, many of the people who inhabit their branded worlds feel complicit in their wrongs, both guilty and connected. But this connection is a volatile one: it is not the old-style loyalty between lifelong employee and corporate boss; rather, this is a connection more akin to the relationship of fan and celebrity: emotionally intense but shallow enough to turn on a dime.”
It’s obvious that seeing this global protest movement in terms of an American resurgence in activism is only sampling a small piece of the pie. And despite Thompson’s clips, nationalities and political loyalties are no longer defined the way they were in the 30s or 60s, especially now that governments kowtow to the brands rather than the other way around. (A Washington-based labor activist explains in Klein’s book that he focuses his efforts on the Nike corporation “because we have more influence on a brand name than we do on our own governments.”) Thompson’s interest in a march of 50,000 people organized by Teamsters and another march of steelworkers against the WTO seems motivated by the irony of these “mainstream” American political groups joining forces with young activists.
