Late last month, the CRTC, Canada’s broadcast regulator, released a decision to allow private television networks in Canada to sell content to cable and satellite carriers. This decision was made, according to the regulator, to acknowledge the fact that television industry in Canada has emerged as a set of digital bundles owned by three dominant groups: CTV Globemedia Inc., Canwest Television Ltd Partnerships, and Rogers Communication.1

Private broadcasters are losing money, apparently, partly because they are spending record amounts on foreign (read American) content. Nevertheless, all three companies are diversified into different media and on-line ventures, including wireless. Losses today are part of a shifting business plan and with these kinds of decisions from the CRTC, private broadcasters will be in no doubt that the regulator is on their side. Predictably enough, this decision has riled the cable companies, ventures that provide no content and made something in the vicinity of 25% profits last year, although public response seems muted. The issue of negotiating fees is being brought to the Federal Court of Appeal.

None of this may sound too earth-shaking. The privatization of the Canadian media and the relaxing of ownership rules has been underway ever since the air first buzzed with broadcast signals in the 1920s. But a number of key shifts are implied by this decision nonetheless.

For starters, this decision may be the way the CRTC is backing into a series of difficult policy issues related to digital platforms and new media usage patterns. Canada isn’t set for the digital TV switch over until August 2011, but many people are already making their own digital sets from their computers. In the same week as the decision was released, Ipsos Reid announced the results of a poll of Canadian leisure time that claimed that internet usage has just edged out television watching: 18 hours to 17. 2 That’s per person per week. Needless to say, some of those internet hours are spent watching TV shows. On the internet there are no Canadian content laws. In fact, Jacob Glick, a representative of Google, said recently that such restrictive content laws are not even necessary anymore. “More Canadian content can be seen, created and enjoyed in ways never before possible,” Glick announced to a House of Commons committee convened to study the effects of new media on Canadian culture. 3 If fees are passed on to subscribers by the cable companies, as they’ve suggested they’ll do, viewers may decide to cancel cable altogether and tune in through the internet. This is a country where changes in cable packages and pricing can bring citizens out into the streets. This is what happened in 1995 when Rogers added a new fee of $2.65 to cable bills for an additional seven Canadian specialty channels. Subscribers didn’t have to keep the channels, but they needed to specify that they didn’t want them in order to avoid the hike (the so-called negative billing option). Canadians showed their wrath (was it the $30 per year, or the ready access to hours and hours of Canadian-produced content? Maybe both) and the strategy was duly changed.4

Knowing that Canadians are very touchy about their cable bill, the decision to force the cable companies to negotiate fees with the broadcasters—and most likely raise their fees to keep up their robust profits—does seem like a crucial aspect of this decision. But perhaps it is a smokescreen for an even more insidious question and one that the Canadian government has been cautiously avoiding: copyright.

It turns out that the negotiation of fees hinges on the issue of copyright as rebroadcasting is a form of copying or dissemination. The current act regulating copyright is 25 years old. It doesn’t even begin to cover issues central to the digital age. In the absence of legislation, the most recent case being used to govern issues of copyright was heard by the Supreme Court in 2004 (CCH Canadian ltd v Law Society of Upper Canada). It concerns photocopying. There is no doubt that the Copyright Act requires updating. Yet the way in which the legislation is crafted will be crucial for the Canadian public. Will fair dealing be given the same weight as the rights of large copyright holders? Will educational exemptions be made sacrosanct? This question is germane in relation to this CRTC decision. Will forcing the courts to define copyright in relation to program relay have some effect on internet television practices, including streaming and re-mixing? Does making a decision with regard to copyright as it pertains to corporate revenue risk leaving the public out of the equation?

As part of this decision, the CRTC also demanded that networks continue to spend at least 30% of their revenue on making Canadian TV shows, about where the level of spending has been for the past few years. In addition, 5% of gross revenue must be spent on programs of “national interest” (documentaries and children’s programs mostly), 75% of which must be allocated to programming created by independent producers. However, with revenues at all-time lows, this doesn’t translate into strong support for beleaguered Canadian producers. However, a few days later, the government announced a new $350 million Canadian Media Fund, which sounded pretty good.5 Turns out this isn’t actually new money, though. It combines, and slightly enlarges, the current Canadian Television and Canadian New Media Funds. This makes some sense: the funds are converging in the same way the media are. The flip side of this new political economy of production, however, is that producers are compelled to produce content for multiple platforms. A documentary film must have on-line content to go along with it. A journalist must also have a blog. All of this convergence means that there may actually be less content drawn out across more formats. These light regulations on the industry mean very little for media producers. Cultural producers are being forced into the “free” provision of their work on the internet, clearly not a strategy that bodes well for the fostering of new talent.

Hubert T. Lacroix, president and CEO of the CBC, called this decision a “dark day” for the public broadcaster.6 Left out of the decision altogether because it is constitutionally prevented from selling its signal as part of its mandate of public service, the CBC is being rendered less and less relevant in the Canadian media landscape with each passing day. As any university professor in Canada can attest, our students are only dimly aware of the CBC and are not piqued by that fondly felt frustration that is familiar to many of us who grew up in the 20th century. Its programming decisions on television and radio to play the entertainment game have meant the alienation of many older viewers as well.

Clearly, Canadian culture, like local news, is a relic of a bygone era. Both are replaced by statistics of minutes spent in front of screens and the new imperatives of digital leisure. With the decision to open up the market to foreign-owned wireless providers Global Live and Wind Mobile made by the federal government last month, it seems only a matter of time before the same fate befalls any of the digital leisure providers.7 From there, the national television and film industry will be nothing but a memory. Even Youtube Canada, launched in 2007, has become a rivulet in the ocean that is Youtube. The unfortunate aspect of all this is that it proves what the critics have said all along about communicative capitalism. 8 It only simulates the democratic potentials that it simultaneously eradicates. The worst part is, it happens right before our eyes through a series of mind-numbing policy decisions like this one. And before you know it, the hope of Canadian broadcasting—and the internet for that matter—is sadly dashed.

Image Credits:

1.CRTC: Canada’s Broadcast Regulator
2.Viewing to English Language Services
3.The government announced a new $350 million Canadian Media Fund

Please feel free to comment.

1. Susan Krashinsky, “CRTC” favours broadcasters in TV shakeup ” The Globe and Mail. March 23, 2010. A1.
2. ”Weekly Internet Usage Overtakes Television Watching.” Ipsos website, March 22, 2010 (http://www.ipsos-na.com/newspolls/pressrelease.aspx?id=4720). Accessed April 1, 2010.
3. Bill Curry, “No room for Canadian content rules online, Google warns MPs.” The Globe and Mail. March 3, 2010, A6.
4. D’Arcy Jenish, “Cable gets zapped: a wave of consumer protest prompts Rogers to rethink the launch of new channels,” Maclean’s 1995
   (http://www.faqs.org/abstracts/News-opinion-and-commentary/Cable-gets-zapped-a-wave-of-consumer-protest-prompts-rogers-to-rethink-the-launch-of-new-channels.html) Accessed April 1, 2010
5. ”The Canada New Media Fund will launch April 1, 2010.” Telefilm website. http://www.telefilm.gc.ca/03/311.asp?lang=en&fond_id=3) Accessed April 1, 2010.
6. ”Dark day for public broadcasting: CBC/Radio-Canada denied value-for-signal by CRTC.” Press release. CBC website. March 22, 2010. (http://www.cbc.radio-canada.ca/valueforsignal/home.shtml). Accessed April 1, 2010.
7. Jacquie McNish, “CRTC decision won’t end network-cable slugfest.” The Globe and Mail. March 23, 2010, A2.
8. Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2002.

Allan King’s “actuality drama” about the life of an ordinary couple, A Married Couple, is 40. In the simplest terms, A Married Couple observes the relationship of a white, middle class couple in mid-life (he is 40, she is 30) with a young family. They wrestle with their intimacy and simultaneously with social gender roles in the nuclear family. Billy works in advertising; Antoinette works in the home. In place of plot, the film offers a compelling series of set pieces in which repetitious emotional scripts are enacted. Although the couple seems unhappy with the marriage most of the time, and many of the scenes are of fighting, they also seem ill equipped to resolve their difficulties. Or, put differently, the viewer is invited to see that awareness and even insight about problems doesn’t necessarily lead to change.

70 hours of footage shot over ten weeks was edited down to just over 96 minutes. Even those 70 hours represent but a fragment of the eight years Billy and Antoinette had spent together by the time the film was shot in the summer of 1968. Rather than see the film as a transparent window onto the Edwards’ relationship, King astutely labelled the film more generically as about a particular kind of relationship—marriage—and frankly acknowledged the effect of both camera and editor on the everyday performances filmed. As King put it, “One has to be very, very clear. Billy and Antoinette in the film are not Billy and Antoinette Edwards, the couple who exist and live at 323 Rushton Road. They are characters, images on celluloid in a film drama. To say that they are in any other sense true, other than being true to our experience of the world and people we have known and ourselves, is philosophical nonsense. There is no way ninety minutes in a film of Billy and Antoinette can be the same as the actual real life of Billy and Antoinette.”1

A Married Couple had an impact on the growing area of non-fiction drama and was cited as an inspiration by Craig Gilbert, producer of An American Family, itself often credited with being an inspiration for reality TV.2 Today, in an era characterized by the dominance of reality-based programming, the importance of the film as a pioneer in mobilizing observational media in personal spaces is inarguable. Yet, as time passes, the originality and insight of A Married Couple comes into even greater focus.

Although the idea of recording and exposing everyday life is arguably a foundational part of the documentary impulse, a corrective to the artificial fantasy of mainstream fiction perhaps, King’s version was entirely of its moment. In the late 1960s, traditional domestic and cinematic forms were both, in different ways, being brought under scrutiny. King’s concept of using observational documentary to explore the changing experience of the nuclear family was extremely timely. But its interactive form is perhaps its greatest innovation. The film is connected at once to practices of action therapy and avant-garde theatre.

Psychodrama’s emphasis on group interaction and “relationship-based psychotherapy” became a significant influence on the post-war self-help movement.3 According to this theory, acting out became a way of bringing the unconscious to the surface. At the same time as the theatrical was becoming a popular cultural idiom, practitioners of experimental and avant-garde theatre were questioning the conventions of the stage. The sentiment of avant-garde theatre of this period can be encapsulated by the following question: “How do we know we are watching theatre and not simply observing the world around us?” For many artists experimenting with theatrical practice, the answer was to place emphasis on the frame itself as the technology that created spectator and theatrical event alike. Groups such as the Living Theatre brought these questions to the fore, attempting to bring about revolutions in perception, which could be brought to bear outside of the theatrical experience. If perceptual patterns reinforced social norms—indeed were social norms—then interrupting perception at the artistic level could have an effect on other social regulations. The avant-garde’s ideas about the blurring of lines between art and life influenced the 1960s counterculture’s even looser ideas about be-ins and happenings.

Although not usually thought about in this context, observational cinema emerged in the same period and shared some features with post-war avant-garde theatrical theory and therapeutic discourse alike. Its lightweight hand-held cameras and tape-recorders were developed in order to allow for the capture of uncontrolled, spontaneous situations. Theatre could now take place anywhere. The sense of “being there” was an essential part of what lent this kind of filmmaking its sense of authenticity. Not only was the emphasis on authentic performance, but, as in the theatrical avant-garde, the observational cinema frame is clearly accentuated.

There was, on the part of some observational filmmakers, and likely film subjects as well, a direct engagement with the discourses of therapy. Ever since anthropologist-filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin had encouraged people to talk in the presence of the camera in Chronique d’une été (1961), observational filmmakers had been open to the role of camera as provocateur. What was being captured on film were precisely the kinds of heightened performances the camera could elicit. While American observational filmmaking tended to emphasize public performance, another strain, including King’s, focussed on the private realm and the need for intimate communication and personal self-reflection. For this strand of filmmaking truth has a psychoanalytic resonance “because of the way the camera brings to the surface what is normally hidden or repressed in the subject’s social personality.”4 This psychological or therapeutic understanding was closely related to the relationship of the filmmaker to film subject. In a sense both were equally exposed and the interaction had to be an ethical one predicated on mutual trust.

Reality-based media are now central in mainstream culture, of course. Their production and analysis would certainly be enriched by attention to historical predecessors such as A Married Couple. For instance, today, with a preponderance of reality-based programming on television, aspects of the idea of everyday performance have become commonplace. The fact of ordinary people performing for the camera has become an increasingly common aspect of both everyday amateur media usage and large-scale entertainment. Questions of authenticity are routinely invoked. Yet the social analysis mobilized by 1960s practitioners and theorists of observation, performance and theatricality is often lost. Frequently, truth is conflated with the technological means of reproduction. The avant-garde idea of using media experimentation to challenge social norms and frameworks of perception is lost. Gone too are ideas of the heightening of experience in front of a camera to enhance participant insight. If anything, today’s reality television naturalizes rather than questions the Social Darwinism of competitive capitalism and the governmentalized social context of neoliberalism that it exposes.5

The proliferation of reality-based TV today makes a re-examination of A Married Couple all the more astonishing. How might reality TV question the social order rather than reproducing it? How might film and videomakers work with their subjects to craft interactive hybrids such as the “actuality drama”? King, who died last year, said: “I thought it would be fascinating and illuminating to stay with the couple and observe… Most particularly, I was concerned with a marriage in crisis and wanted to observe the kinds of ways in which a couple misperceive each other and carry into the relationship anxieties, childhood patterns, all the things that make up one’s own personality and character. But these inevitably distort the other person and make true intimacy or true connection difficult. … It puzzled me that people always seemed to get less from marriage than they wanted.”6

Four decades on, A Married Couple still shows how reality-based media might operate to propose questions and spark engagement from participants and viewers alike.

Image Credits:

1. A Married Couple
2. A Marriage in crisis
3. Allan King

Please feel free to comment.

1. Alan Rosenthal, “A Married Couple,” in Alan Rosenthal, ed. The New Documentary in Action: A Casebook in Film Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 32.
2. Jeffrey Ruoff, An American Family (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 12.
   
3. Paul Wilkins, Psychodrama (London: Sage, 1999), 12.
4. Michael Chanan, The Politics of Documentary (London: BFI, 2007), 215.
5. Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2004); Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Better Living Through Reality TV. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.
6. Alan Rosenthal, “A Married Couple,” in Alan Rosenthal, ed. The New Documentary in Action: A Casebook in Film Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 23.
   

On October 11, 2009, Guy Laliberté, professional clown and founder of Cirque de Soleil, returned, weak but happy, from a 12-day trip to the international space station in orbit around Earth. Laliberté had paid $35 million to the company Space Adventures for the opportunity to be a tourist aboard the station. While in space, Laliberté had helped to produce a global media event, broadcast live on Radio-Canada, the French language service of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and streamed on-line through the website Onedrop.org. The goal of the two hour show, entitled “Moving Stars and Earth for Water,” was to raise awareness about the fragility of the global eco-system, particularly the precarious state of the world’s fresh water, and especially to draw attention to the plight of the world’s poor for whom unclean water can be the source of disease and premature death. The show, called by Laliberté a “poetic social mission in space,” is a fascinating confluence of edutainment, celebrity philanthropy, popular environmentalism, post-cold war neo-liberal politics, and what used to be considered the media event.

In 1992, Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz identified the festive viewing occasions of live events on television, which they termed media events. They saw these moments when people gathered around the set to watch sanctioned, planned events of national and international significance taking place in real time as emblematic of the kind of global stage television alone was capable of producing. Audiences approaching a billion people could gather virtually to watch the moon landing, state weddings and funerals, the activities of dignitaries, even certain sporting events, and in these moments experience their place in an “imagined community” in the “live broadcasting of history.” Perhaps Dayan and Katz were considering these moments in the early 1990s precisely because they were coming to an end. Already by that time, the limited spectrum of postwar television was being replaced by cable and digital bandwidth expansion.

For many reasons, technological, economic and political, today media events are few and far between. Broadcasting’s unprecedented audiences have been displaced by the archival ethos of the Internet. People don’t need to gather together physically when they can watch from work computers and mobile screens, as they did, for instance, during the Michael Jackson funeral. Broadcasters are less likely to share feeds today and, even during big events, dozens of other television channels continue to stick to their own programming. The mass audience imagined—and worried about—by postwar political and media theorists has well and truly been replaced by a multiplicity of publics using a variety of non-broadcast media.

In this context, Laliberté’s project is all the more surprising. The two hour show, apparently mixed live on October 9 from a variety of elements, including feed from the space station, illustrated lectures by Al Gore and David Suzuki, public service announcements, music videos, and the performances of singers and dancers in 14 cities, including Montreal, Moscow, Marrakesh, Rio de Janeiro, Osaka and Johannesburg, in many ways simulated the simultaneity and global reach of television. However, its narrator, a successful and wealthy entrepreneur—albeit with a red clown nose—is a far cry from the state broadcaster voices of media events past. In the new media event, as in much contemporary global activism that is covered by the media, wealth and celebrity status are the requisite elements of entitlement. The confluence of entertainment, wealth and political voice is perhaps best exemplified by Bono, who has made it a mission in recent years to exert a messianic personal pressure on politicians to affect national policies. Bono and U2 figure prominently in the One Drop video, being the only group given a direct video link-up to Laliberté. Laliberté’s message is seamlessly incorporated into a huge stadium show U2 gave on October 9 in Tampa. The anodyne message about clean water is encapsulated in Bono’s unwitting parody of a TV interviewer’s question to Laliberté: “How does our little planet look, Guy?” And Laliberté’s political message dissolves into some playful grasping at his red clown nose as it floats around his head in zero gravity.

Chumminess between global celebrities is evoked from the outset, when Al Gore introduces David Suzuki as a “mutual friend.” Of course the piece also works as a piece of eco-branding for Cirque de Soleil, the troupe that made Laliberté rich. Their presence as a fixture in Las Vegas and a global touring phenomenon gives a clue to Laliberté’s perspective. In one Cirque number featured in the video, acrobats in an array of international—or multicultural—traditional costumes gather together to contribute to a First Nations rain dance. This is the prerogative of a “poetic social mission,” no doubt, but it does make for a confusing political message. Who, exactly, would not be supportive of Laliberté’s drive to clean up the world’s water? How has industrial capital worked against the very people Laliberté is now mobilizing in his quest for a reconstituted natural purity? What is to be done?

The neo-liberal project operates through the self-responsibilization of the subject. The celebrity activist is a version of this individualism writ large. As someone who has benefited disproportionately, they must be seen to give back disproportionately. Their individual success gives them a special status in a society predicated on that myth. But in so doing they obscure modes of response available to the less financially endowed. Each drop creates a ripple, is the manifest political message of the event. But a $35 million drop that falls from space clearly creates the largest one. In this context the participation of the French wing of CBC is clearly significant. For despite this celebration of home-grown global arts entrepreneurialism, Radio-Canada is still a public broadcaster with a public mandate. Aside from the multiple appearances of Cirque (in Montreal, Las Vegas and Moscow), the script is threaded together by a story from the award-winning Canadian author of Life of Pi, Yann Martel, and was partly supported by the Canadian Space Agency.

Martel’s story takes the form of a creation fable in which the characters are the Sun and the Moon. However, unlike in traditional myths of origin, the Sun and the Moon in this version are disputing the causes and solutions for pollution and climate change. Sections of the story are read by Martel, as well as a chorus of other readers from around the world in a variety of languages, including Shakira, Bindi Irwin, Touria Ikbal, Matthew McConaughey, Gilberto Gil, Julie Payette, and Salma Heyek. The circulation and performance of this story is revealing. The story draws upon a generic version of a traditional creation myth. The genre is reworked by a contemporary Canadian writer. His words are then put into the mouths of people of a number of cultural backgrounds and spoken in an array of languages, rendering it a global myth of cosmic response to inadequate human care of the earth. As in all mythic languages, as this one transcends place and time, it also moves away from history and messy world geo-politics, the very things that might make our current situation legible and give members of the viewing audience real guidance about political action. Its cosmic bodies are both anthropomorphized and decontextualized, little surprise in a piece sponsored by four space agencies (Canadian, European, Russian and American) and one space travel agency, Space Adventures. In a post-space race space era, space tourism makes as much sense as the scientific experiments the astronauts are carrying out to develop water- harnessing technologies such as urine recycling for a contaminated world.

Over 80 years ago Siegfried Kracauer suggested that we may learn more about our era from its “surface-level expressions” than from its stated claims about itself. Our corporate media sphere, news and entertainment alike, is characterized by claims about the importance of environmentalism. (The One Drop website offers observations about the dire straits of a billion people in our world and asks us to join their cause by subscribing to their feed.) But our “frivolous” entertainments, of which Cirque de Soleil is of course one, tell a story of the mass ornament not unlike the one Busby Berkeley style musicals told to Kracauer (referenced directly in this broadcast by the musical number performed by the Russian child dancers). And the message is this: we are members of a vast global audience. Politicians do not represent us (the only one who appears is Al Gore, now retired); activists and other citizens of the world have no platform of their own. Only as bodies orchestrated into spectacle and spectator may the voiceless millions be given a vision of themselves. The global Cirque de Soleil has enlivened an ancient popular form and, wittingly or not, turned media event into media circus.

Image Credits: (coming ASAP!)

Please feel free to comment.