Tweets Don't Burn Down Police Stations

This piece first appeared in the Big Issue last week. Sorry to not be 100% focussed on cinema - but if I wrote a cinema piece now it would just be about how No Strings Attached and Friends with Benefits are exactly the same film. And that's not new or interesting for anyone.

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On August 1^st, the first day of Ramadan, the army violently removed the tents, stages and speakers the protestors, street-sellers and bystanders that together made up the 3^rd occupation of Tahrir square in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. After three weeks, numbers had dwindled, people’s minds were on the month of Ramadan ahead, and the Army took the chance to strike. There was nothing anyone could do.

Among the activists who were occupying the square, several are regular tweeters, bloggers etc who have a deep connection to their smartphones. These are the ones who’ve been on the cover of Time Magazine, cracked gags with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, been profiled by the New Yorker, had PBS programmes named after them. They were, in the mainstream consciousness of the Western world, the startlingly familiar vanguard of freedom in a hostile and confusing world. They were the faces that forced the long overdue realization that Arab cities house more than just the West’s fears and fantasies, that Arabs are more than just the foil to the West’s hero. They marched to Tahrir firing off tweets instead of bullets. 

But tweets do not burn down police stations, the country’s torture centres. Facebook alone can’t keep the army out.

The internet shapes the world we live in. Of course people used it. But its role, and the role of social media in particular, has been massively overplayed. If anything, it was the moment the government switched the internet off that they sealed Mubarak’s fate. It signalled the momentousness of what was happening,  and it forced people out on the streets to find things out for themselves on January 28^th.

Far more important than Facebook’s organisational capacity, were the hundreds of young men and women who gave their lives battling the government’s brutality. The men on the front lines who won control of Qasr el-Nil Bridge inch by inch, who torched the hated National Democratic Party headquarters, who chased the police entirely out of Cairo for three days. The innocent bystanders who were shot by snipers in Shobra. The young woman in Sohag bludgeoned to death by government paramilitaries. The Revolution, at its heart, wanted to be nonviolent – but that privilege was won through great sacrifice.

Rather than focussing on the fleeting significance of a tweet, we should remember the decades of street activism that paved the way for 2011 to erupt. For years, academics, intellectuals, activists insisted on their right to protest in the streets. They were routinely surrounded by thousands of riot police, they were arrested and shipped off to jails in the desert with murderers and rapists, they were attacked and beaten in the streets. It’s easy to go out and march when the crowd stretches as far as the eye can see, it’s a lot harder when there are only 200 of you. But we wouldn’t be where we are today without their dedication.

Instead of embracing the de-contextualized narrative of the immediate power of social media, let’s acknowledge that it was the mass industrial action, the strikes that swept the country, that brought the government to its knees. The next day, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces removed Mubarak. This was not a Revolution born of technology. It was born of years of injustice and corruption, it was born of the neoliberal dismantling and auctioning off of the state.

And it was born of humiliation. The last time we saw street protests of a significant size was when Gaza was being destroyed and we were aiding and abetting keeping our Palestinian cousins locked in their lethal prison. This was a Revolution born of decades of submission to American foreign policy and Israeli interests.

The deep fascination with the social media narrative is nothing more than an evolved  Orientalism – it reeks of fantasy, of exoticization. At an event in London someone asked if it was because young men and women in Egypt had used Western invented tools like Facebook that they took to the streets to demand a Western-style freedom. If I could have clambered through the audience and slapped him in the face with my shoe I would have, but it would have re-enforced an unhealthy stereotype.

The point is that the struggle in Egypt is universal – as we’ve seen from Wisconsin to Madrid to Athens – and it’s not yet won. It will take more patience, more planning and more pain than the online worlds of social media usually engender to win this one.

In The Desert of Choice

There are about 3,500 cinema screens in the UK. This week they are showing 43 films. In Egypt, there are 20 films showing across about 230 screens.

It’s a better ratio, but the range of what’s on offer is just as narrow. In the UK, I would consider 10 of those titles independent. In Egypt, there’s only 1.

The puzzling thing about this narrowing of choice is that is seems to run counter to the main selling point of living in a modern capitalist society. Everywhere else it is choice that is being highlighted – from the spectrum of fruits and vegetables on display in Waitrose to the towering wall of jeans lined up before you in Uni Qlo – affordability, disposability and variety are the cornerstones of consumer culture. This is firmly entrenched in British life and is (or, hopefully, was) arriving rapidly in Egypt. So why are we so lacking in cinematic variety, since it is mostly so disposable?

The amount of films on offer these days feels more suited to 1950s life. Consumerism was no less heavily advertised back then, but there wasn’t the technology to offer you 3,00 varieties of Nikes, so you chose from a handful. And everyone walked around looking the same. And they saw that it was good.

Then, as Adam Curtis argues in his excellent film, The Century of the Self, the rise of the politics of individualism was accompanied by manufacturing progress that allowed brands to offer consumers vastly more choice; a shift that was sold as a new ability to ‘express’ yourself and your personality through your products.

But what happened in cinema? How is that we are still languishing behind with 1950s levels of choice when there are hundreds of films out there? If I walk in to supermarket I would now, appallingly, expect to be able to find Kenyan roses, Malagasy prawns, Peruvian avocadoes, Chinese televisions and American sunglasses. All year round, 24 hours a day. I have a thousand channels on my satellite dish. I can afford to fly wherever I want in Europe. I can read tweets from around the world instantly. But when it comes to cinematic experience my decisions are still being made for me by the same people that have been running the cartel since it began. And they couldn’t be more limited. 

I understand that the products in the supermarket are available because of the exploitation of the vast disparities of wealth between Europe and the South. And yes, it is clear that Hollywood can’t make as many films as Levis can make jeans. The point is that the less desirable aspects of modern life are supposed to be outweighed by luxuries like endless variety - also rather gratingly known as 'the spice of life'. And if that's what people are used to, if they accept that life is something that needs spicing then how come we allow ourselves to be kept in this flavourless desert of choice? Why do we, in fact, encourage it when there are so many interesting films being made out there?

If you live in Darlington and you’ve got some kind of an intellectual date and you don’t want to take her to a film about a wizard that lives in people’s pockets (‘he’s in here’) or penguins or angry monkeys then you’re out of luck. You’d have to go to Newcastle, which ruins everything. If you drive then you can’t settle in to a bar to dissect the apes’ motivation and thrill at each other’s wit until the early hours. If you take the train then you’ve got to hurry for the last one like a teenager and the long, dark night journey home is a greater foe than most first dates can handle. Either way, it’s a non-starter. 

If you’re in Egypt you have to take her to Lebanon. 

And yet there seems to be no agitation for change. Box office revenues go up and up and up, as does their Dark Prince, popcorn sales. 

But everything breaks. Something broke in the UK last week and I am excited to be returning for a few days. I’m excited to walk through the streets, to talk to people, even to read what the lousy tabloids are saying. If this level of street politics and debate is going on everywhere, then the riots – intended or not - have certainly achieved something. 

For the first time in my generation the politics of protest are alive and there is the possibility of really grabbing this moment to push for change. So, film-makers, what can you do to help? Hollywood and Odeon will never change if we don’t make them. There’s no doubt that Odeon sells more popcorn to Justin Bieber fans than Bela Tarr aficionados. So we have to make them believe they can, at least, sell a few lousy tickets. And if we believe that cinema plays a part in shaping our culture, then everyone has to step up and take responsibility for changing the system. 

If we were a couple of years in to the future and I had my first gritty, bload-soaked Western in the can we could start an experiment now. But, unfortunately, I’m not there yet. But here are a few ideas.

Let’s assume you’ve got an independent distributor and you’re lined up to play two weeks in a Curzon. They’ve got no money for advertising and they’re not expecting anything big from your film. You, however, know it’s a masterpiece. So you’ve got to do something yourself or it’s going to sink. These are some things you could do:

- Attack the mainstream. Get some mates and a graffiti stencil and spray an advert for your film on top of every Hollywood movie poster you can find. 

- Invite artists to work on the campaign with you. Offer people creative roles on your next film if their work fits with yours. 

- Have free public screenings in parks and squares to build up some hype. 

- Take a couple of choice scenes and get your film-makers friends to add them on to their DVDs as hidden extras. You could even have the whole film scattered across 60 other films being released that year, if you have a distributor with a lot of films. [That one’s probably a bit unrealistic]

- Start a campaign, collect signatures to pressure mainstream cinemas. 

- Declare that one seat from the first evening's screening will be randomly selected and given a speaking role in your next film. Or one seat from every screening can be an extra (Griffiths got people to pay to be extras!)

- Make something up. Invent an actor and say she died during filming. That’ll get you media interest. And then even more interest when you charmingly reveal it was a fake. 

That’s ten minutes worth of ideas. Maybe you think they’re all crap. That’s fine. The point is we need to see some invention. It’s great the independent cinemas of the world still exist, but we need film-makers and audiences to work with them to get us out of this spiralling chasm of doom. So let’s get thinking.

London / Cairo / Lynne Ramsey

My life has always been between London and Cairo, so when the riots erupted across the UK, I wrote a couple of short pieces on the view from Cairo.

One for the Guardian (14.8.11) and one for Occupied Cairo (11.8.11)

Meanwhile, it's incredibly exciting that Lynne Ramsey is back on the scene. Her debut film, Ratcatcher, is packed full of lessons about how to make a strikingly original, artistic, socially engaged film on a tight budget. I wasn't wild about Morvern Callar but can't deny that it pulsed with style and artistic ideas.

I can't find my favourite scene from Ratcatcher on Youtube, but this sequence gives you an idea of the tone of the film, and hints at the raw emotion Ramsey is able to tap in to. She creates a deep sense of interior sensuality alongside the familiar grit of UK social realism, pulls incredible, physical performances from her child actors and even throws in moments of fantasy that don't go too heavy on whimsey. Which is not easy when you consider how overused that imagination-will-set-you-free trope is.



Ramsey wins major prizes every time she picks up a camera so get ready for We Need to Talk About Kevin. She's got some money and star force behind her, has a snappy trailer with an expensive sounding score - but it doesn't look like she's sold out. This doesn't look like a Hellboy or Harry Potter 3.

Close-ups on Crotches

Short piece commissioned by BBC World Service. Aired on Sunday 7th August.

Whatever comes next, we will always have that moment to hold on to. A moment, an image that will live forever. A moment filled with disbelief, with pride, with hope for our future.

Egypt’s ex-president, Hosni Mubarak, lay on a stretcher in a cage playing the victim and the whole country stopped.

How could such a frail, old man have kept down a whole people for 30 years?

He could have been in a wheelchair – apparently he was in one backstage – but he went for the full recline in an attempt to twist the spectacle to his advantage. But manipulation of his public image has never been Mubarak’s strong suit. His attempts to foster a personality cult, the constant papering of the country with posters of him in various military, administrative, grandfatherly poses – were invariably met with indifference.

And here, lying on his stretcher, this charade of frailty was betrayed by his still-blackened hair, his blinging watch, his occasional smiling comments whispered to his son.

But he was mostly obscured. His sons loyally worked the angles and blocked the cameras, leaving the audience to endure uncomfortable close ups of Alaa Mubarak’s crotch. And giving us constant reminders that it wasn’t just this old man on his own that kept Egypt on her knees for so long. That he was building a dynasty.

Al shaab yureed usqat al-nizam

The people demand the removal of the regime

These are the words that have rung across our world this year. And one man does not make a regime. We have to clean out the whole stable. We have to dismantle decades of local and international chains of corruption and oppression.

In the courtroom’s dock, Mubarak’s son, Gamal, stood with the poise and attitude of a dictator inwaiting. When ex-Minister of the Interior, Habib al-Adly, left the building he was all smiles and handshakes with former associates. The head has been removed but the regime is still very much in place.

The business elites and police state have taken a back seat and the Army are now in control. But the Revolution and Revolutionaries are alive and alert and working every day.  

Whatever comes next, people will never forget what we achieved in January. We filled the streets with millions of living bodies, and those bodies carried a list of demands before them. The demands are difficult and far-reaching. We can’t achieve them all on our own. Our brothers and sisters everywhere – from Wisconsin to Madrid to Kampala - have to work with us in our push to make the world a fairer place.

But we made a great step this week. We won a great victory. Whatever happens next, the whole world has seen that you can bring a dictator to trial in 6 months if you can just put enough bodies with enough determination on the street.

Some people were expecting Hollywood, they wanted a whole season of Law and Order played out in front of them. That’s not how it works in reality. It looked chaotic. But trials here always do if you don’t understand the system. It wasn’t glossy. And that’s good. That means we can believe what we’re seeing is more than just spectacle. 

It means we can believe we have taken another step towards removing the enormous military and security apparatus that - in the name of ‘stability’  - has for so long crushed the will and the needs and the dreams of a people.