Chris Robé is a professor in Film and Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University. He focuses on issues of community media, radical filmmaking, and digital activism. He has published essays on radical media in journals like Jump Cut, Rethinking Marxism, and Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. His first book is Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture. He is also a contributor to the PopMatters and Cineaste.
His current work concerns state repression and video activism regarding animal rights campaigns, copwatch and community organizing among working-class communities of color, counter-summit protesting, and anti-Muslim-American surveillance and resistances to it. In his spare time, he is an organizer for his faculty union.
Breaking the Spell: A History of Anarchist Filmmakers, Videotape Guerrillas, and Digital Ninjas
SKU: 9781629632339
Author: Chris Robé
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 9781629632339
Published: 4/2017
Format: Paperback, ePub, PDF, mobi
Size: 9 x 6
Page count: 480
Subjects: Political Activism/Media Studies
Praise
“Christopher Robé’s meticulously researched Breaking the Spell
traces the roots of contemporary, anarchist-inflected video and
Internet activism and clearly demonstrates the affinities between the
anti-authoritarian ethos and aesthetic of collectives from the ‘60s and
‘70s—such as Newsreel and the Videofreex—and their contemporary
descendants. Robé’s nuanced perspective enables him to both celebrate
and critique anarchist forays into guerrilla media. Breaking the Spell
is an invaluable guide to the contemporary anarchist media landscape
that will prove useful for activists as well as scholars.”
—Richard Porton, author of Film and the Anarchist Imagination
“Breaking the Spell is a highly readable history of U.S.
activism against neoliberal capitalism from the perspective of
“Anarchist Filmmakers, Videotape Guerrillas, and Digital Ninjas,” the
subtitle of the book. Based on ninety interviews, careful readings of
hundreds of videos, and his own participant observation, Robé links the
development of better-known video makers such as Video Freex, Paper
Tiger Television, ActUp and Indymedia with activist media-makers among
key protest movements, such as the League of Revolutionary Black Workers
in Detroit, Oregon’s Cascadia Forest Defenders, the day workers of
Voces Mobiles/Mobile Voices in Los Angeles, and the indigenous youth in
Out of Your Backpack Media. Underscored by significant tensions of
class, race/ethnicity, and gender among the groups and the videos
discussed, Robé traces the continuing concerns with radical
horizontalism in the making of media and of collective organizing
against the state and capitalist institutions. Drawing on autonomist
Marxist theory, the profiles clearly demonstrate how media making has
become integral to all forms of anti-capitalist mobilizing, as well as
to the formation of new collective subjectivities and cultures.”
—Dorothy Kidd. Professor and Chair, Department of Media Studies, University of San Francisco
“Christopher Robé’s Breaking the Spell takes off where John Downing’s Radical Media
leaves us: continuing a history of North American movement-based media
to include today’s internet, memes, and other forms of radically
accessible digital media. In the process, he fills in many critical
blanks through a unique method that incorporates ethnographic research
with activist media makers, generous close readings of a range of
videos, a writer’s fine words detailing history, and a political
theorist’s command of anarchist and anarchist-inflected movements since
the 1960s. Ever attentive to the contradictions within Left
organizations, particularly those built within the network logics of
neoliberalism, Robé carefully details both the repetitive exclusions of
women, people of color, queers, working people, and people of the global
South from many of these otherwise worthy activist traditions, while as
carefully pointing to movement-inspired solutions. He demonstrates how
messy media activism creates powerful video work where process rules
over product, where subjectivity and collectivity are nurtured and
developed, and where production and reception are themselves a form of
prefigurative politics where video does not merely represent but is
activism. A great read for scholars, activists, and media makers alike, Breaking the Spell
attends closely to the hard questions of media activism: the role of
violence, aesthetics, media literacy, and access within social justice
movements and their media.”
—Alexandra Juhasz, media activist and author of AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video
Book Events
april, 2024
No Events
Reviews
Interviews
- Chris Robé on reactionary populism, progressive Hollywood, Eisenstein, anarchism, and surveillance
- “Smashing the Surveillance State” ft. Chris Robé on Coffee with Comrades
- Breaking the Spell: An Interview with Author Chris Robé
- Five Questions with Chris Robe
- Chris Robé Interview on Raging Chicken Radio
- 5 Questions with Chris Robe
Mentions
Blog
- Chris Robé on reactionary populism, progressive Hollywood, Eisenstein, anarchism, and surveillance
- Essay #75: Chris Robé, Anarchism, Video Activism and State Repression
- Aca-Media : A panel on Organizing the Academic Workplace.
- Film Adjusting the Focus on Somali-Americans
- The Rise and Fall of Female Silent Filmmakers