ABSTRACT

In non-fiction film-making, we can follow the development and the changes in the figure of the everybody in several forms of factual cinema, especially in the form of (anti-)newsreels. This is a documentary form that, in its key development stages, intensively approached various revolutionary ferments, labour and student movements, liberation endeavours and confrontational campaigns. Following the main historical episodes of the radical newsreel, this paper explores some contemporary collectives and individual actors that most prominently foreground the new images of the everybody, which replaced the heroic figures of the social struggles of modernism. The main attention is devoted to the work of the American photographer and film-maker Jem Cohen, the French philosopher, activist and cineaste Sylvain George and the Slovenian ad hoc collective Newsreel Front. Despite differences in their cinematic approaches, visions and techniques, their common denominator is their devotion to the figure of the refugee, the migrant worker or the member of the Occupy movement. Analysis of their newsreels therefore reveals the mobbish, violent and migrant images characteristic of the emblems of the recent newsreels, which constitute the main iconography of some of the current representations of the everybody. This is a figure that is in a state of becoming imperceptible—so at the stage of becoming that entails the elimination of everything that refers to an individual’s objective determinations, connects them to social formations and moulds them according to the identification model of recognition. At the same time, the production of non-consensual images is also a process of developing a “democratic aesthetics” (George 2017) with the fundamental demand for devising a community based on the possibility of self-expression, self-representation and self-reflection of everybody.