Chris Rob� is an associate professor in Film and Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University. He has published essays on radical media in journals like Jump Cut, Rethinking Marxism, and Journal of Film and Video and written a monograph titled Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture. He is also a frequent contributor to the online journal PopMatters.
"Christopher Rob�'s meticulously researched Breaking the Spell
traces the roots of contemporary, anarchist-inflected video and
Internet activism and clearly demonstrates the affinities between
the anti-authoritarian ethos and aesthetic of collectives from the
'60s and '70s--such as Newsreel and the Videofreex--and their
contemporary descendants. Rob�'s nuanced perspective enables him to
both celebrate and critique anarchist forays into guerrilla media.
Breaking the Spell is an invaluable guide to the contemporary
anarchist media landscape that will prove useful for activists as
well as scholars."
--Richard Porton, author of Film and the Anarchist Imagination
"Breaking the Spell is a highly readable history of U.S. activism
against neoliberal capitalism from the perspective of 'Anarchist
Filmmakers, Videotape Guerrillas, and Digital Ninjas, ' the
subtitle of the book. Based on ninety interviews, careful readings
of hundreds of videos, and his own participant observation, Rob�
links the development of better-known video makers such as Video
Freex, Paper Tiger Television, ActUp and Indymedia with activist
media-makers among key protest movements, such as the League of
Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit, Oregon's Cascadia Forest
Defenders, the day workers of Voces Mobiles/Mobile Voices in Los
Angeles, and the indigenous youth in Out of Your Backpack Media.
Underscored by significant tensions of class, race/ethnicity, and
gender among the groups and the videos discussed, Rob� traces the
continuing concerns with radical horizontalism in the making of
media and of collective organizing against the state and capitalist
institutions. Drawing on autonomist Marxist theory, the profiles
clearly demonstrate how media making has become integral to all
forms of anti-capitalist mobilizing, as well as to the formation of
new collective subjectivities and cultures."
--Dorothy Kidd. Professor and Chair, Department of Media Studies,
University of San Francisco "Christopher Rob�'s Breaking the Spell
takes off where John Downing's Radical Media leaves us: continuing
a history of North American movement-based media to include today's
internet, memes, and other forms of radically accessible digital
media. In the process, he fills in many critical blanks through a
unique method that incorporates ethnographic research with activist
media makers, generous close readings of a range of videos, a
writer's fine words detailing history, and a political theorist's
command of anarchist and anarchist-inflected movements since the
1960s. Ever attentive to the contradictions within Left
organizations, particularly those built within the network logics
of neoliberalism, Rob� carefully details both the repetitive
exclusions of women, people of color, queers, working people, and
people of the global South from many of these otherwise worthy
activist traditions, while as carefully pointing to
movement-inspired solutions. He demonstrates how messy media
activism creates powerful video work where process rules over
product, where subjectivity and collectivity are nurtured and
developed, and where production and reception are themselves a form
of prefigurative politics where video does not merely represent but
is activism. A great read for scholars, activists, and media makers
alike, Breaking the Spell attends closely to the hard questions of
media activism: the role of violence, aesthetics, media literacy,
and access within social justice movements and their media."
--Alexandra Juhasz, media activist and author of AIDS TV: Identity,
Community and Alternative Video
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