When I received my review copy of Spirit Level Film’s latest documentary, The Fear Factory, through my letterbox a few days ago, I had little idea what to expect. A few seconds in, as the ominous music begins to play and the image of a foetus looms into view accompanied by the voiceover telling us that young offenders will be growing up in gaol and that we are heading for the largest prison population that any country could imagine having, it became clear to me that this was a film that was attempting to ask a number of crucial questions of deep moral and social significance. But did it answer them satisfactorily?

The timing of The Fear Factory couldn’t have been more appropriate, emerging as it has just as the return of John Venables to prison for an unspecified violation kicked up a media storm and a renewed public outcry over the murder of James Bulger. The central point that the filmmakers want to get across is that when it comes to crime and punishment, we are as far removed as one can possibly imagine from the evidence-based policy that this government claimed to represent. Instead what we have is moral panic fed by an hysterical media in which the public’s fear of youth crime is wholly disproportionate to any real statistics. What this has led to is an “arms race” between the main political parties over who can appear toughest on crime as both engage in a race to the bottom to bring in tougher penalties and build more prisons whilst the population behind bars soars.

These points are, for the most part, conveyed through a series of somewhat awkwardly cut interviews with prominent talking heads. Having managed to bag the likes of Cherie Blair, Dominic Grieve, David Howarth and an eloquent murderer who now writes for The Guardian, the filmmakers have clearly assembled an impressive roster. However, with very little else besides the odd flash here and there of what could be archive footage, a stereotypically deep and menacing narration and a second or two of questionably selected music, the overreliance on truth by authority makes for a documentary that is informative, but not terribly engaging. The most entertaining moment comes when the Deputy Editor of The Sun attempts to tell us that because politicians listen to the bullshit he puts in the editorial on a whim, they have no principles.

It is quite evident, of course, that The Fear Factory is not there to entertain, or even to inform, but to persuade. Whilst it features a few comments from oppositional figures, they are largely there to look stupid and look stupid they do. This is not an expose or investigative journalism. This is a propaganda film and it should make no apologies about that. Besides decrying the rising prison population and the media and political hysteria that have caused it, the film asks us to question whether people are born bad or if their crimes are a product of the society in which they grew up, and it touches upon the philosophy of prison itself – whether it should be a means of reform or retribution.

Where the filmmakers stand on this issue is quite clear, but my personal feeling is the message, which at times sounds like it is being shouted from a soapbox, will divide opinion. It is easy for bleeding heart liberals like myself who studied Foucault in their second year Social & Political Sciences paper at Cambridge to agree with everything The Fear Factory has to say. I very much doubt those who are paid £700k a year to demonise Britain’s youth in the country’s most odious tabloids will be swayed and for them this film, much like prison, will sadly be more retributive than reformative.

In any case, The Fear Factory is well worth a look and is available for pre-order on DVD now.

Like Starsuckers, reviewed last week, Ondi Timoner’s We Live in Public is a confused film. It’s a documentary about ‘the most brilliant dot.com millionaire you’ve never heard of’ [actually that would probably be all of them] ― a chap called Josh Harris.

Not that even if you had heard of him, you’d necessarily have recognised the brilliant dot.com millionaire, since he seems to have spent much of his life, including many of his board-meetings, dressed as his fully made-up, alter-ego ‘Luvvy the Clown’. An unusually hideous look even for a man who during his better moments (and in this film they’re precious few) appears damply constipated.

Whether getting the jump on the market in online porn chat and cheap-as-chips MTV really marks out Harris as a media visionary, I’ll let you decide. Nevertheless he oversaw two projects which have eerie resonance with much of contemporary online culture.

The first project ― part art-installation, part monumental vanity-project ― involved locking up and catering for, about a hundred volunteers in a windowless New York apartment block, filled with cameras and televisions, which allowed the participants to snoop on one another, in any location, at any time. Harris’ prototype Big Brother in fact went rather further than any of the progressively more gruesome TV versions, by including a basement filled with automatic weapons, and a white-tiled prison cell in which theatrical interrogations were held, the tone pitched somewhere between the Stanford Prisone Experiment and a Max Mosley wet dream. Ultimately the police shut the event down though not before most of the inhabitants had gone from a short-lived orgiastic euphoria into a black hysterical mania; while Harris (who had by now sold his own business to become ‘an artist’) had burned through most of his personal fortune.

Harris’ next project was to Big Brother his own life online, by sticking cameras up throughout his flat (with a dedication that extended to a spy-cam in his toilet bowl) and streaming the resulting film online 24 hours a day. Surprisingly Harris had a girlfriend at this point; less surprisingly she soon left him ― though whether this was because of the project itself or the simple result of living with a lunatic sociopath isn’t really discussed. The most interesting aspect of the project came from what was initially one of its by-products― the couple’s online chats with their viewers. For both of them the chats became an obsession, craving sympathy from their unseen arbiters; those capable of judgment but not punishment. Or more prosaically it reminded me of watching relationships explode on Facebook.

Like a character from Evelyn Waugh, Harris is last glimpsed living in deepest Africa as far away from new technology ― and by his own admission, his creditor’s ― as Luvvy and himself could manage.

Whether Harris’ story really does suggest the future for the rest of us is a moot point. In spite of a somewhat breathless commentary, and being at least half an hour too long, Timoner’s doc is worth looking out for on DVD because, whilst it is currently showing at select art house cinemas, it’s unlikely to make a much wider appearance.

Following our review of his new film, Starsuckers, we caught up with BAFTA-nominated director, Chris Atkins. Atkins made his name with the much admired Taking Liberties, a documentary on the erosion of civil liberties in Blair’s Britain. His latest offering, which premiered this year at the 53rd London Film Festival, is an exposé of the cult of celebrity and media misinformation. Talking to him about celebrity, media and politics, we found out why he finds Tony Blair a terrific liar and just why Simon Cowell would be a terrifying Prime Minister.

The Third Estate: So tell us about your new film.

Chris Atkins: In PR speak: it’s a romp through all the reasons we’re hooked on fame and then an expose of the people who are dealing it to us. I think that’s what I settled on. It a thesis led movie. I wanted to look at why we’re attracted to something so blatantly harmful and to look at the real reasons behind that from a scientific point of view. Then to look behind the curtain of the media, not celebrities themselves but the institutions and individuals who profit from it.

The Third Estate: I was thinking about that. There struck me as being two strands to the film: why we’re affected by fame and how the media manipulate us by abusing this knowledge ― but I wasn’t always clear on the connection. It seemed to have a lot of targets – the public are a target for being gullible. Celebrities for being stupid. The media for doing several things wrong – not reporting hard news, creating a myth of celebrity, giving into PR on the one hand but toppling governments on the other…

Chris Atkins: Yes, it’s a complex, messy area, so to paint an honest picture, you need a complex messy film. My last film, Taking Liberties, people seemed to get more, although Taking Liberties wasn’t a particularly honest picture. It was an argument about how the government, specifically Tony Blair, had taken away our liberties. But that isn’t the case; it’s a very simplified image. In Starsuckers I wanted to be more honest. The problem is it’s very complex. I wanted to build up a thesis to say there are a group of individuals holding the cards here. They pretend they have our better interests at heart but they don’t. That’s the core of it really.

The Third Estate: You do believe there’s almost a cabal of individuals then?

Chris Atkins: No, it’s not in the standard conspiracy theorist sense at all. It’s more of a kind of attitude than a secret society or anything as clear cut as that. A contract should exist between the media and the public. The public trust news media to have their interests at heart ― and they fundamentally don’t. They don’t care about the public; they don’t really care about the truth. And I say this as an insider: I’ve worked in the media for twelve years and we certainly don’t give a stuff about the public. We give a stuff about our wallets and having a jolly good time. Which is fine if you’re honest about it. But if you’re not honest about it, which most of the news media isn’t, they still have this facade of requiring trust and they don’t repay that trust.

The Third Estate: Much of the film reminded me of an aside in Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent where he talks about sports programmes as being a deliberate irrelevance people get sidetracked into so that they aren’t more politically engaged. But isn’t the truth about celebrity less sinister? Isn’t it simply cheaper to report, a by-product of an economic shift in the media?

Chris Atkins: Absolutely. It’s all economic. Well no, it’s initially economic, without question. It’s cheap, it’s reliable, it’s not controversial and it sells papers. People watch it for the reasons we list in the film and it starts delivering that media to us in a very predictable and affordable way. It’s almost replacing content. When you talk to commissioners the first thing they ask is what celebrity is in this television programme ― before they ask you what the programme is about. The celebrity is more important than what they’re surrounded by. That’s a wholesale shift in the way the media is generated. That’s happened in the last five years in both commercial channels and sadly the BBC as well. Yes, it’s initially commercial but once it starts being used for political reasons, for charities and activism, it starts becoming a real problem. It’s not just – here are some entertaining people doing some entertaining things – yes they’ve completely devalued truth in news – some people don’t seem to have a problem with that, I do – but when that moves into the political sphere, good causes, charities ― you’re in a whole heap of shit. Because what people are basically saying is that when celebrities are involved, truth doesn’t matter. Those are the dots we try to join together.

The Third Estate: I was just wondering; you say five years ago ― I’m sorry I’m looking at your Taking Liberties poster – and I’m reminded of the Gilligan affair. Was that perhaps the turning point for news reporting?

Chris Atkins: It certainly was a turning point, but I don’t see that it sits immediately inside this argument. Still it was a turning point on both sides. Gilligan didn’t check his facts. He went out on a limb, made something up. One thing out of 99 other things that were rock solid and they pulled him apart on it. I always look at Gilligan whenever I tempted to guild the lily, which is extremely frequently. So our Live 8 sequence – everything in that is bullet proof – because every night you think Gilligan: the entire argument could be pulled apart by one loose fact or slip of the tongue.

The Third Estate: Which reminds of the question I meant to ask at the start – how are the lawsuits going?

Chris Atkins: We’re in Private Eye this week. We’re front of media news. We had two Guardian front covers that doesn’t mean anything – Private Eye ― front of media news… We haven’t been sued by anyone this week. The whole Carter-Ruck thing was absolutely hilarious. At the time I was half-laughing, half-screaming. They shot themselves in the foot on various levels, one they’re wrong in law, two they managed to pick the world’s most unpopular law firm to initiate the injunction and three, most importantly, they managed to get the timing of the screening wrong. So they started trying to bring an injunction, not realising the press screening had already begun. We had to tell them ‘that’s happening now, 250 journalists are watching your client who’s 50 foot high in a Leicester Square cinema at this moment in time. The cat’s slightly out the bag.’

The Third Estate: So you’re not allowed to reveal anything that was bleeped out during the Max Clifford sequence?

Chris Atkins: No, absolutely not. For two reasons – one is obviously a libel point of view. I can’t back it up. I don’t know if it’s true or not. It’s Max rambling. Secondly, more importantly, I don’t want the film to become a source of celebrity gossip as we are critiquing sources of salacious, celebrity gossip. We would have been quite rightly burned by the critics if we had. The purpose of that sequence is to show what Max Clifford is prepared to do to protect his critics, which is contrary to the chubby nice guy image he portrays in the media.

The Third Estate: On matters litigious: you take a small shot at the Press Complaints Commission…

Chris Atkins: I’d hoped it was as big a shot as I could, but…

The Third Estate: Sorry. I noticed that one of your contributors, Nick Davies, was in the news recently. The News of the World has just beaten off the story he published in the Guardian about their phone tapping techniques after a PCC investigation?

Chris Atkins: Well they would, wouldn’t they? An organisation controlled by newspaper editors comes down on the side of newspaper editors.

The Third Estate: So would you support a state run PCC?

Chris Atkins: No, I’d support an independent run PCC. We manage to have these for all sorts of things; we have an independent police complaints commission. We’re about to have something independent for MPs and banks. Why not for the Press? Why can’t you and I do it? This is what the newspapers are terrified of. The PCC is purportedly there to protect the public from the press. It’s not. Everyone knows it’s not. It’s there to protect the press. As always the public suffers. You have newspaper editors winding up to tell you how scared they are by the adjudication of the PCC and reporters on the ground flatly contradicting that. We’ve not heard anything from the PCC about the revelations in the film and I think that proves our point.

The Third Estate: Going back a bit: you mentioned the character of the film. A lot of the character of the film comes from your voiceover, which is slightly grating – the kind of voice that you associate with voices that are deliberately patronising you.

Chris Atkins: Yes, that was actually deliberate.

The Third Estate: I guessed, but I was wondering whether you were trying to anger your audience into reacting? What was the thinking?

Chris Atkins: It’s a fair point. People have said he’s patronising, he’s glib and annoying and yes that was all quite deliberate. Whether I would make those deliberate choices again, I don’t know. What I was trying to do was create a Tony Blair. I needed a central villain. I didn’t want it to be about any one media corporation; or about Rupert Murdoch or Viacom or Max Clifford. I wanted it to be about all of them and none of them. So I created a satirical, ironic entity to bind them all together. He’s not there to be liked. There’s an artistic question opened up as to whether that’s a sensible thing to do: to have a central narrator you’re supposed to hate. That happens all the time in literature, in fiction. I’ve never seen it done before in a doc. Some people like the concept, some people absolutely hate it. I had a situation where I was trying to pull together a thesis about something most people believe they know a lot about. If I was to present it in a straight way – ‘I’m Chris Atkins I think celebrity culture’s bad’ – that would be absolutely ghastly. Who am I to tell people not to trust the media? So I wanted to turn it on its head and make it flippant. The voice encapsulates the editor of The Sun, the editor of the BBC News website when he puts up an article on Cheryl Cole rather than a news article.

The Third Estate: After the press screening, you mentioned that the material for the film lacked a top or bottom and I was wondering if, say, a Marxist had come along they would say ‘Well there is a bottom, it’s embedded power structures etc, etc’ but you’re not heading down that line?

Chris Atkins: When I said it didn’t have a top or bottom, I felt that was more to do with a creative film making problem. We had ten points in the thesis so it was deciding in which order do they come? Actually the order is quite straight forward. It’s where the fuck do you start, where the fuck do you end? That’s what I meant. In terms of ‘embedded in power structures’ ― celebrity is the face of capitalism. That’s a given. It is a mechanism for selling and giving an illusion of contentment. I believe all the arguments we gave on how celebrity is a means of control are essentially reheating the same argument that capitalism and money are a means of control. So yes I would concur that it has a starting point in the ability of those with power to control those without.

The Third Estate: A section of the film talks about celebrities in the Lithuanian parliament. I was just wondering if you could comment on that part of the film, and whether the true message of the film isn’t that people should be wary of celebrities entering politics, but that socially conscience people need to turn themselves into celebrities in order to affect change?

Chris Atkins: I think we just need to treat celebrities as dangerous. Just as 20 cups of coffee in a day is dangerous. Celebrities have a place we need to be extremely wary of allowing them to move spheres. I know that’s stating the obvious, but it’s happening a lot. In Lithuania you had a situation where, in young democracy, which at the same time was discovering new media – it was in a sense natural that entertainers quickly entered politics. Reality television was a massive success there, partly because voting was new to them. Voting for politicians and voting on reality shows seemed similar and in fact became one and the same thing. It became natural for celebrities in reality shows to stand for government. So they formed a party, became part of a government coalition and it’s a disaster. Their popularity rating has gone through the floor. It’s a kind of metaphor for what could, and I think may well, happen in the West. Consider the poll among young people taken recently about who they’d most like to see as Prime Minister: Simon Cowell came top of the list.

The Third Estate: That’s terrifying.

Chris Atkins: So people say, well it’s crazy ― those crazy Lithuanians, but it is happening here. Once you put celebrities into this sphere, damaging things happen. But nobody in the media questions it. The media are trained to be nice to celebrities and not question them. When we got our passes to film on red carpets, we were briefed not to ask celebrities anything challenging. So when they go into politics, with the level of scrutiny politicians receive, there’s a fundamental contradiction.

The Third Estate: So your message to celebrities would be to stay out of politics?

Chris Atkins: No, celebrities are irrelevant to the whole thing. If I was a celebrity being paid five million pounds a movie with people telling me I was brilliant every day, I would think I could change the world. That’s natural, the human mind does that to anyone. It’s called Acquired Narcissism Syndrome. I don’t blame the celebrities from thinking they can stop wars. That’s just natural; they’re cretins. The problem I have is when the media doesn’t challenge that. It doesn’t stand there and go ‘hang on a fricking minute what the hell is Angelina Jolie doing in Iraq?’

The Third Estate: To play devil’s advocate there’s an argument which I think is well expressed in a Kundera novel – there’s a march in Cambodia against land mines. An American actress goes along with what are mainly a group of French academics one of whom challenges her ‘what are you doing here? This isn’t a beauty parade.’ The actress replies that it is her social duty. Without her, the academics aren’t going to attract any attention to the problem and so she has to be seen there.

Chris Atkins: That’s a common argument. The problem again is the media. Why do the media only cover something if there’s some airhead blonde fronting it? Why don’t they cover it anyway? The celebrity is like a band aid, a much deeper problem with our media. For the celebrity to say I alone can change this problem is again part of this Acquired Narcissism Syndrome. This happened to Tony Blair a lot – my being somewhere will change things just by my presence. I’ve worked with actors for a decade. That’s how they feel, as if they’re the centre of the universe. It’s natural for them to get on a plane once a year and go somewhere a bit cold and pretend they’re making a difference. The problem is where the media follow in droves and repeat their banal state-the-bleeding-obvious points without question, but don’t go there when the celebrities aren’t around.

The Third Estate: If God is dead, Communism is the God that’s failed, we don’t believe in progress any more, Capitalism is on its knees and the American Dream has turned nightmare – isn’t celebrity all we have left to believe in? What’s the alternative?

Chris Atkins: God knows. I certainly would concur there’s a deep seated need for it to the extent it’s genetic, that we have behavioural urges to congregate around strong figures. In terms of what we do instead? When you have a world evermore mediatised and celebrity is the best way of delivering it; celebrity is here to stay. I think we need people to be more honest or more responsible. If the media said ― what you’re about to read is harmful and very little of it is true – I would have no problem. But we’re coming to a stage where media corporations are as powerful, if not more powerful, than governments.

The Third Estate: Which is strange when so much of the media is shrinking.

Chris Atkins: Well it is and it isn’t. Traditional structures are falling apart and in a sense all that remains is celebrity driven entertainment news. That’s doing well. Hard news is falling by the wayside and we’re left with a homogenised celebrity entertainment ether, which is everywhere but says nothing.

The Third Estate: Someone at the premiere asked a question about whether you’d prefer a weaker media – and argued, going back somewhat, that Anthony Eden, for example, would simply refuse to answer questions he wasn’t interested in. Surely that’s not preferable?

Chris Atkins: No, I’m not sitting here saying the media’s a terrible thing. Certainly from a political perspective we have this fantastic scrutiny, so that Twitter and blogs are able to protect the Houses of Parliament from a bloody law firm. It was absolutely astonishing. I was in the Guardian when all that kicked off. The whole Little Brother thing, the way people can take photographs of police beating newspaper vendors ― of course the media can protect us and scrutinise those in power more than they ever could. I would be the last person to try and roll any of that back. But it also means that the News of the World, with all the terrible ghastly things it does, hides behind the freedom of speech argument. It’s used as a shield for all kinds of illicit practices.

The Third Estate: I was struck by the Eden comment because, although he may have ignored the press, he ultimately fell on a lie. By comparison Blair lied continuously, and was caught out lying, but he survived. Doesn’t that suggest there’s too much competing media perhaps – the cacophony argument?

Chris Atkins: Well no, Blair just lied better. He used the media better. He changed how Downing Street briefings were done, by using that fantastic tool of celebrity PR – access. If you toed the line, ran the report the way the government wanted you to, you would get photos of Tony and Cherie. But if you didn’t and you ran an article asking ‘Where the fuck are these weapons of mass destruction?’ you’d be shut out of the briefing. No copy and as a journalist you’ll be in shit. That’s why Blair could get away with everything. It was a Max Clifford technique – there’s very little difference between Max Clifford and Alistair Campbell. Both in getting things written they want written, and stopping the publication of things they don’t want to see. It’s a celebrity PR trick.

The Third Estate: I can see some media commentators arguing that perhaps we don’t mind having liars at the top, culture has shifted. Rather than the media leading the public up the garden path, the media is simply reflective of contemporary mores.

Chris Atkins: Personally, I don’t want to think that’s true. Maybe it is true, in which case it’s a sad state of affairs if we’ve become desensitised to the idea of liars in office. I like the idea people trusted Tony Blair and that trust was simply misplaced. But people can get very angry: look at the row over MPs expenses. That was unheard of, certainly in all the time I’ve been watching politics. They were fiddling just a few grand.

The Third Estate: Compared to the bankers.

Chris Atkins: Compared to the bankers billions, yes. But I think it was more about trust and honesty than the money. Yes, it’s very annoying it happened in a recession – but literally more got written about that duck house than about RBS. We as people want to trust our leaders. We get very angry when our trust is abused. Celebrity reporting, PR spin coming from the world of entertainment into politics, brings with it this unbearably toxic effect.

The Third Estate: Where should people go for their news?

Chris Atkins: I get asked this all the time. I don’t have any particular answer. It’s interesting how many news outlets just recycle newswire. I’d say cut out the middle man, go to PA and Reuters. But I really don’t know. Hopefully out of this catastrophe in news people will come who want to invest in investigative journalism. Journalists who take their time to generate copy and charge for it, so that people go to those suppliers in a way that people go to a good brand. A lot of brands are in trouble at the moment. I read the Guardian but they run a lot of PR nonsense as well ―they ran our stories! Not that there wasn’t news value in that but we were essentially trying to sell our movie. Ultimately I don’t have a good answer.

The Third Estate: Why have you chosen to put this documentary into cinema ahead of television?

Chris Atkins: From our point of view, there’s no way this would be made for TV. Look at TV docs ― Dispatches: reporter in a taxi shouting at the camera. Panorama: Jeremy Vine shouting at the camera. Investigative journalism in television is pretty much dead. Certainly making a stand and taking on something as powerful as the tabloid press wouldn’t be thought of. Television makes things like Jeremy Clarkson going on a wine tasting course or Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, except he’s only a hundred miles away from the actual fighting. If you want to do something ballsy and revelatory in Britain it has to be done for the cinema. Then once it’s been out in the cinema, we’ve got our 4* reviews and people have tried to sue and failed, television comes sheepishly crawling in saying this is far more exciting than anything we’ve put on this year. Please can we buy it from you and start it with a big caveat saying ‘this is nothing to do with Channel 4, we’ve just bought, we didn’t make it, this is not our opinion’. That happened with Taking Liberties and will happen with this.

The Third Estate: You’re selling to Channel 4 rather than the BBC?

Chris Atkins: Yes. The BBC feature quite prominently in it. No one else picked up on this, but in fact the guy who commissioned the Live 8 documentaries, we feature as Bob Geldof basically rewriting history, is Richard Klein. He’s head of BBC 4. If we were going to sell to the BBC, he’d be the person buying.

The Third Estate: What would you say to people who want to make this kind of film?

Chris Atkins: Well you can’t ― that’s the problem. You can’t go to the BBC because they were part of it. Richard Curtis is a god at the BBC. Look at Comic Relief. People at 4 buy stuff from Brook Lapping which is Bob Geldof’s company. They’re all mates. It’s part of the problem. When you start to do something that criticises the media it becomes almost impossible. You need them to help. You say ‘there’s this oil company I want to doc on’, they say go ‘ahead here’s some cash’. You say, ‘there’s this media company I want to examine’, they say ‘my wife works there’. You have to lock the doors and do it independently.

www.starsuckersmovie.com

‘Starsuckers’ is the new documentary film by Chris Atkins, (Director of the Blair-baiting polemic ‘Taking Liberties’) which created a bit of a stir at the London Film Festival both by preleasing clips of tabloid journalists offering cash for trash stories about celeb boob-jobs, whilst being simultaneously sued by Max Clifford. The Guardian particularly loved the exposé of tabloid malpractice which chimed with the work of their reporter Nick Davies (who himself appears in the film).

The film is a jaunty, if uneven, investigation into the public’s, apparently insatiable, appetite for celeb gossip, alongside the media’s manipulation of this rather unsavoury diet. And it has a number hits: Clifford filmed secretly boasting about news stories he’s fabricated and covered up, examples of the seepage of ‘celebrity news values’ (or rather lack of them) into the reporting of politics, the corresponding movement of celebrities themselves into politics and a meticulously researched critique of the grossly smug Live8 concerts, which will doubtless have Bob Geldof’s apparatchiks vetting Youtube for years to come. Ultimately, however, the film’s guiding thesis, that celebrity is used by the media to control the masses, is both too obvious and too reductive to be especially interesting.

At a cinematic level it also suffers from a grating voiceover, intended to represent the media as a whole, but which seems more like a gimmick used to disguise an intrinsic lack of faith in the film’s own suppositions. Perhaps unsurprisingly this voiceover tends to vanish during the strongest sections in which ‘good old fashioned’ news reporting, truth as the voice of authority, takes over.

It’s a pity ‘Starsuckers’ is so hit and miss because as the media shifts into a digital age something fascinating is happening, not simply in the dispiriting thought that our main news sources are now PR companies and press officers rather than journalists, but in the distinction between media and the general public, and between the public figure and the private citizen.

As regards the media overall? Personally I’m with Baudrillard’s assessment (from a book first published in 1985 – no, there’s no new news)― ‘We should agree neither with those who praise the beneficial use of the media, nor with those who scream about manipulation, for the simple reason there is no relation between a system of meaning and a system of simulation’.

The net result for individuals, as he saw it, was ‘stupor; a radical uncertainty as to our own desires, our own choices, our own opinions, our own will. This is the clearest result of the whole media environment, of the information which makes demands on us from all sides and which is as good as blackmail.’

Stay tuned for The Third Estate’s exclusive interview with director Chris Atkins, coming to a computer screen near you tomorrow…

Guest post by Carl Packman

102 Minutes That Changed America, the brave documentary that aired on Channel 4 yesterday, made for very tough viewing.

The camera was very intrusive, and actually seemed to infuriate people, but it did what was best in documenting some very sombre and terrifying moments. People, covered in dust and debris, would wave their hands as if to say I’ve been in there, fuck off with your camera, and against their sensitivities managed to catch both their anger and their vulnerabilities. The viewer asks themselves the important question, definitely on the lips of those commissioning the programme: is watching this programme not tantamount to voyeurism, or, should I be watching these terrified people in their terror climaxes?

The answer should be no, but what is posterity worth? When Kevin Carter, the nobel prize winning photographer, was asked about filming South African necklacing – the act of filling a rubber tyre with petrol, placing it round a victims neck and setting on fire – he replied:

“I was appalled at what they were doing. I was appalled at what I was doing. But then people started talking about those pictures… then I felt that maybe my actions hadn’t been at all bad. Being a witness to something this horrible wasn’t necessarily such a bad thing to do.”

It was in 1993 that Carter took the photograph of a small girl in famine ridden Sudan, that took him to the long road of depression. What should a photographer do, should s/he attempt to help the subject, does art trump life, what moral proximity does the artist have towards his or her subject if any, and should this jeopardise his or her art or commitment?

It was these questions, and many more that Carter suffered before he took his own life at the age of 33 by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window.

Robert Capa, the Spanish civil war photographer famous for his photograph Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, was held in very high esteem for his very graphic and personal display of the other war against fascism. This year a Spanish professor, José Manuel Susperregui, published a book titled Shadows of Photography, which demonstrated that Capa’s photograph could not have been taken where it was alleged to have been, using separate photographic evidence.

Tough as it may be, sometimes, in order to save your corner, you have to come clean on your allies. In order to keep the Spanish Republican message alive, and by saving the right from using it to their advantage, the truth of Capa had to be released. Similarly, two Canadian documentary filmmakers were once making a film on Michael Moore, the leftwing polemicist, from a supportive bent. However, after weeks of specialising in the remit of Moore, they soon realised that much of his work was born out fiction, covered behind the gonzo-esque, perverting the realm of the anti-war movement in America – which obviously needed all the support it could gather. The point of the filmmakers’ – Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine – efforts could not have been better summed up by the title of their film; Manufacturing Dissent.

The above references – if they have any common theme – is to try and communicate a truth, even if using methods that don’t exactly weigh up as such. Kevin Carter’s profile as one who captures a truth haunted him until his dying day, Capa was willing to stage events in order to send a message across the world detailing the horrors of the Francoist regime – even if this event was fictitious. Sometimes the only way an artist can record the nearest representation to truth, is by recreating it, sometimes truth is not real enough. Perhaps Michael Moore could argue this case also, but two leftist documentary filmmakers were willing to spill the beans to save their corner.

These are the criteria for infiltrating the truth as its happening, for limiting ones own remit to that of the artist – the bearer of the potentially worldwide message – and not the saviour, or at least not in any immediate sense. Does Channel 4′s 9/11 documentary do just that? I’d risk saying not in this instance, the location shots seemed brave, and there was no fear of tweaking the truth of the events, only it seemed to mostly interfere. For what it’s worth, it did capture emotion fraught with fear, but did this hold the same weight as say Kevin Carter, or was it perversion, a glimpse at vulnerability for a public energised by action? I’d risk an accusation of the latter.

It never fails to annoy me when it’s claimed that some group or other is the ‘last’ group that it’s acceptable to be prejudiced about. Sure, there’s no denying we live in relatively enlightened times, but there are any number of marginalised sections of society that you can get away with offending without any fear of backlash. Don’t believe me? Well, off the top of my head, how about people who are mentally ill, or transsexual, or poor and white (yes, the whole chav thing – it’s just sneering at people who are worse off than you; stop trying to justify it)?  Or how about gypsies? If you doubt that they face prejudice, try taking a look at definition 6 (or definitions 1,4 and 7, to a lesser extent) on urbandictionary’s entry for the word. (Yes, I’m well aware that part of the point of urban dictionary is to try to be shocking, but there‘s a difference between pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable for comedic purposes and simple bigotry. That’s clearly an example of the latter.)

Anyway, while I was vaguely aware that gypsies were marginalised and suffered prejudice, I knew very little about the context and origins of that prejudice, or indeed about gypsy culture at all, so a documentary on iPlayer that claimed to be about precisely that, I was pretty keen to watch it seemed a good chance to learn more. Admittedly it might have been a bit optimistic of me to expect so much from a documentary that had a title like Gypsy Child Thieves, but the blurb for the programme claimed it would show “the racism and discrimination suffered by the Romani people”. In fact there was far less background information than I’d have liked, and unfortunately – while I’m sure this wasn’t what filmmaker Liviu Tipurita intended – a worrying amount of ammunition for the bigots.

The film certainly delivered on the promise of the title; there was plenty of grainy footage of attempted robberies by young Roma children in Spain and Italy, as well as interviews with the same children back at the camps where they lived. And there was some genuinely shocking material as well: the way that the titular child thieves are beaten and coerced into a life of crime by their handlers (or their own parents), and the disturbing revelation that Romani girls are traditionally married off (and the marriages consummated) when they’re just 12 or 13 years old. There was also some footage of a street party held by the Lega Nord (a populist right-wing political party in Italy) to celebrate the destruction of a Romani camp, at which one man openly spoke of his desire to kill Gypsies. But if this film is all you’ve got to go on, antipathy towards Gypsies is almost made to seem understandable, as so much is left unexplained. Why do so many Romani people steal for a living? Why do they live in squalid camps on the outskirts of cities? Why do they so often refuse help from the Social Services? Why is it that they’re so marginalised all over Europe?

Even when Tipurita travelled to Romania (where many Roma who emigrate to Western Europe arrive from) with the supposed aim of finding answers to some of these questions, he didn’t really seem to get anywhere. The best we were given was an extended interview with Breliante, a Romani organised criminal who provided the illuminating insight that “the thieving is no longer a national problem. It’s happening on an international scale.” Liviu Tipurita is clearly a talented documentary-maker, but this felt like a serious missed opportunity.

You can watch Gypsy Child Thieves on iPlayer before 8pm on Wednesday the 9^th September, as long as you’re in the UK.