Leshu Torchin
University of St Andrews, Film Studies, Faculty Member
- Media Activism, Online Fandom, Global Citizenship, Cinema and Socio-Political Consciousness, Cultural Heritage, Social Activism, and 21 more'Third Cinema' Theory and Third World Radical Films, Media (Anthropology), Activist Ethnography, Anthropology of Media, Hacktivism, Media Anthropology, Film Industries, Documentary (Film Studies), Human Rights in Latin America, Film-tourism (set-jetting), Human Trafficking, Genocide Studies, Animated Documentary, Film Studies, Gender Studies, Human Rights, Feminist Theory, Media, Popular Culture, Social Change, and Documentary Filmedit
- I research how screen media (film, video, the Internet, and other moving image/audio visual technologies) bear witnes... moreI research how screen media (film, video, the Internet, and other moving image/audio visual technologies) bear witness to human rights abuses and genocide in order to foster global citizenship and activist publics.
My work has sought to intervene into the Enlightenment style conviction that underpins many approaches to human rights media, namely that if people see something, they will do something. Although contemporary scholarship compels our recognition that media are not transparent delivery systems, and that messages are not necessarily decoded as encoded, the faith in exposure remains seductive.
Drawing on Bourdieu's field of cultural production, I advance the field of witnessing. This framework complicates and enriches the terrain, allowing us to consider the numerous agents and actors involved in the production of testimony and action. My methodology combines studies of the text and the circuits through which it travels. This two-pronged approach takes up the formal strategies that help to cultivate concern and emotional responses (empathy, compassion, outrage, solidarity) and the practices that help channel these emotions into action.
Contributing to this scholarship are issues of media convergence and new media technologies (e.g. fandom and citizens, the movement of testimony across media, transmedia campaigns, video games and advocacy, etc.)
My book, Creating the Witness: Genocide in the Age of Film, Video and the Internet (forthcoming) takes up these issues in an examination of case studies ranging from the humanitarian response to the Armenian Genocide (including film activism with 'Ravished Armenia' and early celebrity diplomacy with child star Jackie Cooper) to the witnessing to Darfur taking place online (Google Earth, Take Action Games, and the videos appearing on Citizen Tube).
My interest in human rights, globalisation and film informs my contribution to the co- authored book Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe (St Andrews Film Studies, 2010) (with William Brown and Dina Iordanova) and my new project on Economic Human Rights.
Select publications:
(Forthcoming) "White Band's Burden: Live 8 and Humanitarian Synergy," in Meg McLagan and Yates McGee (eds), Visual Cultures of Non- Governmental Politics, (Zone Publishing/MIT Press)
(Forthcoming) "Anne Frank and the Moving Image," in Jeffrey Shandler and Barabra Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (eds), Mediating Anne Frank (Indiana University Press).
"Trafficking and Video" In Media Res "Human Rights", November 9-November 12.
"Cultural Learnings of Borat For Make Benefit Glorious Study of Documentary," Film & History, Vol. 38.1 (Spring 2008).
"Influencing Representation: Equal Access and Roma Social Inclusion" in Third Text, 22.3 (March 2008), pp. 387-296.
"Since We Forgot: Remembrance and Recognition of the Armenian Genocide in Virtual Archives," in Roger Hallas and Frances Guerin (eds), The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (Wallflower Press, 2007), pp. 82-97.
"Ravished Armenia: Visual Media, Humanitarian Advocacy, and the Formation of Witnessing Publics," American Anthropologist; 108 March 2006: 214-220.edit
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Human trafficking has always been a popular topic in cinema, with the film The Silent Traffic in Souls< promoting reform as early as 1913. Since then the idea of human trafficking has been revised at various times and within... more
Human trafficking has always been a popular topic in cinema, with the film The Silent Traffic in Souls< promoting reform as early as 1913. Since then the idea of human trafficking has been revised at various times and within various contexts, as in the past decade, where the rise in migration and the demise of national borders have turned human traffic into one of the dominant narratives of contemporary cinema. This study focuses on the current cycle of films that play upon trafficking anxieties. Like their subject, these essays are transnational in nature, reflecting on films that depict white slavery, drug trafficking, and undocumented labor. The volume considers films by such internationally renowned directors as Amos Gitaï (Promised Land, 2004), the Dardenne Brothers (Lorna's Silence, 2008), Nick Broomfield (Ghosts, 2006), Michael Winterbottom (In This World, 2002), and Ulrich Seidl (Import/Export, 2002). A range of documentary and activist films are also examined, as well as examples from popular genres, such as Pierre Morel's Taken (2008) and Brad Anderson's Transsiberian (2008).
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After the “flamboyant fever dream” and ontological experimentations of The Act of Killing (2013), Joshua Oppenheimer's latest film, The Look of Silence, comes as something of a shock. A poetic, intimate film, it relies on more... more
After the “flamboyant fever dream” and ontological experimentations of The Act of Killing (2013), Joshua Oppenheimer's latest film, The Look of Silence, comes as something of a shock. A poetic, intimate film, it relies on more traditional documentary styles, interviews, and observation in particular. At the same time, the film illustrates the challenges of documentary testimony, both practical (in terms of collection, credibility, and deployment) and existential (as a hybrid of truth and fiction). The challenges and oscillation offer a way of expressing the conditions of the survivors, caught between a past they know to be true and the amnesiac historiography that surrounds them. Although such strategies produce a similar destabilization of ontological and epistemological certainty akin to those found in Killing, there is nonetheless a departure as the sobriety confers a moral authority that enables this film to be deployed in social justice projects.
Research Interests: Sociology, Testimony, Silence, Indonesia, Documentary Film, and 7 moreGenocide, Existentialism, Witnessing, Credibility, DREAM, Certainty, and PN
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The binary opposition of authenticity and artificiality, complete with a narrative of artifice’s conquest of the authentic, haunts much of Tourism Studies. Tourists, as modern figures, seek the authentic in order to escape from their own... more
The binary opposition of authenticity and artificiality, complete with a narrative of artifice’s conquest of the authentic, haunts much of Tourism Studies. Tourists, as modern figures, seek the authentic in order to escape from their own world, increasingly dictated by simulacra, or the Post-Tourist, as postmodern figure, revels in the consumption of sign worlds, delighting in the buoyancy of unanchored referents. Continuing this trajectory leaves us, and the tourist, with nowhere to go. The Manhattan TV Tour, a tour of New York City according to television locations, suggests another relationship between these conflicted poles. Rather than offering a simulated, seamless entry into the fictive, the tour drags representational, cultural and historical files into each site and thus performs the spatial incongruities (‘bloopers’) of each site. This performance requires a constant negotiation of space for the tourist, a negotiation not entirely unlike that demanded in the very act of wa...
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Leshu Torchin uses Sorry to Bother You, Boots Riley's genre-defying take on race, slavery, and capitalism in 21st century America, as a launching pad for a broader discussion of what she terms the “economic rights” film. Often global... more
Leshu Torchin uses Sorry to Bother You, Boots Riley's genre-defying take on race, slavery, and capitalism in 21st century America, as a launching pad for a broader discussion of what she terms the “economic rights” film. Often global in scope, these films argue for rights to sustenance, shelter, education, health, and labor while mapping out the myriad systems that impede access to these rights. Torchin suggests that Sorry's playful hybridity, combining science fiction, performance art, and even corporate-video mockumentary to invoke recent experimentations in black American media, belies a preoccupation around labor that positions the film within the “economic rights” film's robust legacy.
Abstract: The 1948 UN Convention on Genocide signaled an international commitment to the protection of imperiled communities. However, the lack of operative treaty bodies assigned to monitor global compliance has undermined the... more
Abstract: The 1948 UN Convention on Genocide signaled an international commitment to the protection of imperiled communities. However, the lack of operative treaty bodies assigned to monitor global compliance has undermined the effectiveness of this law rendering it little ...
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In the 2000–2001 school year, Organization Drom (Drom), a human rights non‐governmental organisation (NGO), with support from the Open Society Institute (OSI), launched an educational desegregation programme in Vidin, Bulgaria. Three... more
In the 2000–2001 school year, Organization Drom (Drom), a human rights non‐governmental organisation (NGO), with support from the Open Society Institute (OSI), launched an educational desegregation programme in Vidin, Bulgaria. Three hundred Romani children from the Nov Pat Romani neighbourhood were enrolled in six mainstream (non‐Romani) schools. Drom (the Romani word for 'road'), run by Romani and non‐Romani activists and chaired by Donka Panayotova, an educator of Romani origin, worked in ...
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Borat 's fictional voyage - complete with interviews, staged encounters, and provocations - is not so distant from the documentary tradition, which has been on shaky ontological and epistemological ground since Auguste and Louis Lumire... more
Borat 's fictional voyage - complete with interviews, staged encounters, and provocations - is not so distant from the documentary tradition, which has been on shaky ontological and epistemological ground since Auguste and Louis Lumire staged their first actualities and Robert Flaherty enlisted Allakariallak to play Nanook in Nanook of the North (1922), a re-enactment of past Inuit life. In an era in which digital manipulations and suspect documentary practices call the truth-status of the mode into doubt, Borat illustrates a difficult middle ground: a thrilling yet slippery territory that defies easy dichotomies of truth and fiction, us and them, primitive and civilised, mockumentary and documentary, reference and performance.
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Commentary on Justin Bieber's visit to the Anne Frank Museum and the ensuing kerfuffle regarding his inscription in the visitors' book.
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Commentary on the 'Museum' advert for the HTC First Phone featuring Facebook Home.
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Commentary on the response to Thatcher's death and the value of the street parties.
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A review/short essay on The Green Wave, a (partially) animated documentary about the Green Revolution.
Like many human rights abuses, the phenomenon of human trafficking poses challenges to representation. As an illicit practice, the networks and processes are difficult to monitor. However, film and video provide means for visualising... more
Like many human rights abuses, the phenomenon of human trafficking poses challenges to representation. As an illicit practice, the networks and processes are difficult to monitor. However, film and video provide means for visualising these unseen systems, and have, in recent years, been mobilised to support anti-trafficking campaigns and legislation. This entry discusses this issue or representation and activism..
This entry is also part of a much larger project, a book co-authored with William Brown and Dina Iordanova called 'Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe' and which is available here:
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/filmbooks/books/moving/
This entry is also part of a much larger project, a book co-authored with William Brown and Dina Iordanova called 'Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe' and which is available here:
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/filmbooks/books/moving/