SCALE REVIEWS

Alex and Antonia before Antonia's first radio interview at AirAmerica (still from SCALE: Measuring Might in the Media Age)

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Chuck Tyron writes in the Chutry Experiment: "Alex’s documentary is a “little” film in the best sense of that term: intimate and reflective without being intrusive, and she and Antonia consistently reflect on the role of the camera in mediating what is happening onscreen, a theme that is introduced in the opening sequence when Antonia and Alex plan the scene they are about to perform.  Shots of Alex, reflected in a darkened window, camera in hand, also remind us that we are watching a constructed artifact, something that is actively making meaning, unlike most news shows that seek to hide their seams to create the illusion of objective truth.

I’ll admit that I’m somewhat skeptical of one of the underlying assumptions suggested by the film and by the framing on Scale’s Snag page, which asks whether “regular people can use the media” to expand the reach of their voices, in part because it seems to treat the media, which I regard, in part, as a vast collective of individual people often with competing agendas, too homogeneously (that is by implicitly excluding those in the media from the category of “regular people”).  This is beyond the intended scope of Alex’s documentary, but I’ve also found myself interested in thinking about how we are experiencing a different sort of scale-shift in the field of journalism right now as a number of major local newspapers are going bankrupt or shifting to online-only editions, with once powerful voices now becoming somewhat muted in relationship to their digital counterparts, a question that seems to be a dominant one at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival.  And yet, as I move into my seventh year of blogging, I continue to find myself returning to some of the questions Alex raises in this film, about how political speech is shaped by the media in which we communicate.  And I’m especially glad that I’ve had the blog as a means of working through many of those reflections with such an attentive, critical audience. (see more on his blog)