Tina Askanius - Cardiff University

genre see appendix 1-4). Other labels
used to describe this mode of video are
‘protest trailers’, ‘demo-teasers’, protest
promos’, ‘call out videos’, or ‘riot porn’.
Explicitly calling for political action, the
mobilisation video urges viewers to take
action by joining a protest in the streets,
or to engage online by further spreading
the call for action in personal networks.
These are short, piecemeal, bite-sized
slogans most often adapted to the time
frame of a television advertisement. As a
flexible genre, guiding rather than
determining styles and strategies,
mobilisation videos follow a set of shared
dramaturgic rules. They bring together
discursive resources and historical
genres to stage injustice as a spectacle
that requires action and set up a given
space of action for the viewer. This is
often done by drawing upon footage and
photographs from previous demonstrations
and actions that are reappropriated
and given new meaning in
new calls for action. Mobilisation videos
end with concrete directions for how to
act upon what is witnessed on screen,
usually by providing a link to a website
where the viewer can get additional,
more detailed information on the
promoted event (see fig. 1).
Figure 1. Pay-off in a mobilisation video for
the ESF2008 (see appendix 1)
Characterised by a stark visual contrast
between evil-doers and benefactors, a
problem and its solution, the condensed
narrative of the mobilisation video seeks
www.cf.ac.uk/JOMECjournal
to reduce complex political issues to a
feasible space of action. The story told in
order to ‘rally the troops’ (Gregory et al.
2005: 10) obviously differs from
mobilisation videos intended for a
broader audience of non-activists. A
fruitful distinction can therefore be made
within this genre between the videos, reeducating
and re-solidifying solidarity
among the already converted, and the
videos used to ‘initiate, convert or recruit
new adherers’ (Gaines 2007: 87). Yet
another useful notion for understanding
the dramaturgy of these calls for action
is the idea of ‘body genres’ used to
describe the commonalities of works
that make us want to do something and
are designed for the ‘production of
outrage’ to galvanize ‘body works’ (Gaines
2007). In an online context, ‘body genres’
aim to physically move the body of the
spectator away from the screen into the
street.
Witness videos
The witness video is a label used to
designate videos documenting specific
unjust conditions or political wrongdoings/doers,
police brutality, human
rights violations etc. These caught-oncamera
snapshots are often recorded on
mobile cell phones and uploaded
without much editing (for an example,
see appendix 5). While these videos
dominantly apply strategies of realism,
using the bumpy handheld aesthetic to
induce authenticity and a sense of ‘being
there’, others rely on more performative
strategies, setting the footage to music
and adding on-screen graphics, voiceover
or text. In these videos, the space of
action is often implied rather than
explicated (as opposed to the
mobilisation videos that provide much
more explicit directions for action).
Chanan (2011) dubs this kind of video
6
@JOMECjournal