Version>02
Several videos by members of the Guerrilla News Network echo the antiestablishment politics of the late-60s counterculture video pioneers. GNN’s cofounders, Stephen Marshall and Josh Shore, who met while working for MTV, state their aesthetic on their Web site: “Guerrilla News Videos are music videos for people who think.” Their minidocumentaries “aim to rock as hard as they inform, shock and inspire.” Talking heads in various GNN works offer sound bites such as “Information is the ultimate weapon” and “Wars are not won in the battlefield; they’re won in the minds of people.” Some expert argues, “The success of business propaganda in persuading us for so long that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the 20th century.” Another expert cautions, “Important information [is] drowned out by the noise of spectacle.”
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Also compelling is Principal’s Office, an anonymous video distributed by Cellmedia in which the authorities manage to retaliate, at least briefly, against the camcorder artist. This is the one tape in “Version>02” that succeeds in appearing undesigned. To its credit, this is the sort of populist subversion we don’t get on America’s Funniest Home Videos. We see tape apparently shot by a kid aiming at his high school friends between classes in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1992. The school disciplinarian confiscates the camcorder in the cafeteria and takes it–still running–and the student to the principal’s office. “This asshole was taking pictures in the cafeteria,” she reports to the principal. Then she turns her attention to the kid. “I don’t know who you think you are. I don’t know what you think you are.” I think he’s a hero of the video resistance, for as artless and accidental as his tape seems, it nonetheless accomplishes its critique with a clarity missing from the other videos being screened this weekend.
