The revolution was (over)televised: reconstructing the Venezuelan media coup of 11 April 2002

Abstract

This article considers a series of documentaries revisiting the Venezuelan coup of 11 April 2002. These documentaries have attempted to reconstruct the event, relying on witness testimony, television coverage and on-the-ground reportage and home movies. The documentaries’ appropriation of televised footage allows us to reassess the so-called ‘media coup’ and to discuss the theoretical implications of re-using televisual footage to re-articulate historical traumatic events. The events of April 2002 provide a rich site to examine: first, the evolving national mediascape and the contestation of public and private spaces; secondly, the changing paradigms of political filmmaking in the Latin American context, suggesting how uses of television and new media help us expand the theater of the political documentary; and, thirdly, the medium-specific challenges of revolutionary cinema where political testimony becomes (re)mediated in a political space that conflates physical and virtual political space.

Keywords:

• Hugo Chávez
• media coup
• trauma
• memory
• television
• liveness
• catastrophe

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Paula Amad, John D. Peters, and Erica Stein for their illuminating suggestions and ideas as I worked through earlier drafts of this essay.

Notes

1. Hereafter, this essay refers to The Revolution Will Not Be Televised as The Revolution; X-Ray of a Lie as X-Ray; and Puente Llaguno claves de una massacre as Puente Llaguno.

2. The documentaries discussed in this essay have different production, distribution, and exhibition histories that represent an expanding constellation of documentary film practice in Venezuela. The Revolution's reception is discussed in Schiller (2009, pp. 492–493). Irish directors Donaghy and O'Briain received initial support from Ireland's film board for The Revolution, in addition to support from Dutch, German, British and French television. The film was initially broadcast on European television before airing on Venezuelan television in April 2003. The film's exhibition expanded into theaters in Venezuela as well as festivals in Europe and the United States. The Revolution is still broadcast on Venezuelan state-sponsored television and circulated by Venezuelan state institutions. X-Ray and Puente Llaguno both emerge as partisan responses directed by Venezuelan nationals. The former was filmed at a ‘cine-forum’ held at the Metropolitan University in Caracas on 21 October 2003, and depicts the filmmakers and a panel of experts presenting their analysis of the footage from The Revolution. The latter was produced by the independent documentary production cooperative Panafilms, emerging from the cineclubs of the 1970s and 1980s and founded in 1997, with additional support from the ANMCLA (Asociación Nacional de Medios Comunitarios Libres y Alternativos [National Association of Free and Alternative Community Media]). Palacios's film is still broadcast on public television networks and was part of the Villa del Cine's Cine para llevar [Film to Go] program in 2008, packaged and circulated through state support as DVD inserts included in print media distributed in marginal communities.

3. The use of the term phantasmagoric follows Walter Benjamin's ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ (1978, p. 152). The term often is connected to Raymond Williams's mobile privatisation (1975, p. 19). Both authors figure prominently in this essay due to their interest in changes in human perception as a function of modernity as well as the effect of these changes on the categories of experience and history.