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OFF THE RADAR

By Thom Fowler

April 4, 2003

Jill Sharpe Looks for the Positive Ways People Are Shaping Their World

Jill Sharpe is a Canadian independent documentary film maker. Her 1994 documentary, RAY BRADBURY – AN AMERICAN ICON was nominated for a Cable Ace award. Her most recent film CULTURE JAM – HIJACKING COMMERCIAL CULTURE introduces us to a world of people whose art takes the form of reshaping the messages that corporate advertisers craft about their clients’ brands.

The Billboard Liberation Front likes to paint over roadside billboards to augment the pre-existing images and message to tell a very different, socially critical story. They call it “improving” the billboard. Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping stages guerilla theatre happenings in Disney stores and other easy targets of commodified culture to disrupt the point of consumption and draw attention to the process of production (which can involve exploitative labor practices and pollution). The doc also introduces us to the main themes and vocabulary of culture jamming. For example, “commodified culture” which describes culture as being tied to the buying and selling of objects or experiences.

"Culture jamming is a radical artistic form of expression that involves subverting media space," says Ms. Sharpe. the term "culture jamming" was coined by the San Francisco Bay Area band NEGATIVLAND who gained notoriety when they were sued in 1991 for making a version of U2's "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" that included off-color off-camera comments about the original by AMERICAN TOP 40 host Casey Kasem. The term was first discussed as a cultural phenomenon by writer Mark Dery in the essay, HACKING AND SLASHING IN THE EMPIRE OF THE SIGNS which has been republished by the Open Magazine Pamphlet series.

CULTURE JAM also follows the story of Carly Stasko, a young Canadian woman who finds creative ways to repurpose public space to break down other people’s ideas about their personal power and the extent to which they can control the environment. We also see Carly talk to a group of high school students about advertising and media and the hallucinatory web it can spin around our awareness of the world.

The film has played in numerous international film festivals and was given a special screening at Slamdance 2003. Slamdance, which runs concurrent to Sundance in Park City, Utah, has been an important venue for first time, low budget film makers and several Slamdance alums have gone on to win coveted industry awards and wide critical acclaim, like the director of MEMENTO, Christopher Nolan ('99 award-winner FOLLOWING) and MONSTER'S BALL director Marc Forster ('96 Audience Award winner LOUNGERS), which won Halle Berry the Oscar for Best Actress in 2002.

Ms. Sharpe called me collect from the Los Angeles International Airport (aka LAX) on a short stop between flights in order to do this interview. She was returning from Taiwan where she was presenting her film as part of a Canadian cultural exchange and was headed back to her home in Mexico where she has no phone.

The impact of CULTURE JAM has been much greater than she anticipated and she talks to me about what exactly culture jamming is, the response the film has been getting and what has happened to the film since it was released. One thing that struck me was her sense of urgency and determination to help other people reclaim the old-fashioned interpersonal bonds that held a culture together before we all became anonymous strangers politely navigating around each other in shopping malls.

It seems to me that she longs for community, for meaningful and personal interaction with other people, and she feels that living in a culture where we most often encounter other people at moments that require us to spend money, deprives her of that sense of connection to the intangibles. She feels we have stronger relationships to brand name products than to each other and her basic criticism is that corporations with that much invisible control over our lives is not a good thing.

Thom: How was Taiwan?

Jill Sharpe: It was pretty phenomenal. The film had played in Bangkok and Singapore but I had never accompanied it so doing Q-and-A’s with audiences was really interesting. Taiwan has been an incredible, industrial economic success for the past 20 years so its like one continual shopping mall. I have never seen so much signage.

Thom: How did audiences respond to the film out there?

Jill Sharpe:I think was really valuable to present Culture Jam out there, more valuable than in our culture. There is no resistance to consumerism happening there. It’s a complete embracing. At certain times people wondered if I had been influenced by communist film making. You could really see people’s minds clicking. Like they had never thought of any other possible alternative. They are so inundated. The whole city is entire shops. There is very little green space or places for people to meet. It’s just huge shopping malls and stores like the kind you find in Tokyo. Other than the Chinese language and everyone being Chinese, Taiwan is so Westernized.

In a sense it was kind of sad for me to. The representative of the Canadian cultural trade program that was sponsoring my trip said, “Let’s go for a coffee.” The first place he took me to was a Starbucks. There are all sorts of Starbucks lining the streets of Taipei. I just groaned.

They also took me to a nice Taiwanese tea-house so I did have some cultural experience while I was there.

Thom: What are culture jammers and what are they trying to do?

Jill Sharpe:I spend the whole film trying not to define them so clearly. Because it’s not really a movement. It’s not really a group. It’s more a technique that had started in the early 60s, or even before that with the Dadaists. You can see different inspirations and roots of culture jamming, but it’s not a new form in terms of our era of mass media.

Culture jamming is a radical artistic form of expression that involves subverting media space.

Thom: What does that mean “subverting media space?”

Jill Sharpe:It involves surprise. It’s not just obliteration of signs. It’s something that will sneak up and surprise you and invert itself. For example, you could put up a website about George Bush in order to protest his policies. In the culture jamming way you could make it look like the official George Bush website. You could have a website that is so close that people call it up on their computers thinking that it’s the official website. But once they get in and start reading the first page and it all sounds official, all of a sudden different realities are being presented. And then maybe you realize, “What is this? Is this a hoax? Where am I?”

I think its important to not define culture jamming that clearly. I think its something organic in responding to the times.

Thom: Is subvertising just an expression of deep resentment of the have nots against the haves?

Jill Sharpe:I really don’t think so. I think a lot of people get culture jamming confused with the anti-globalization movement. They aren’t the same thing. Culture jamming is a technique. It’s not always a response against. Sometimes it’s just an injection of a new way to act that is outside of our mainstream culture. Carly Stasko, one of the subjects in the documentary, gets dressed up with her friends in fancy dresses and hands out champagne and orange juice on the morning subway rush hour ride. What they are doing there is subverting the mainstream culture where people just get in the metro in hordes and while moving in an urban environment, they don’t talk to each other.

Thom: It’s kind of like the Fluxus Group with their guerilla street theatre pranks. Or the Cacophony Society.

Jill Sharpe:Exactly. It’s not always about ads or brands. You could be doing culture jamming and have it be something else. Like guerilla gardening. One morning Carly and her friends got up at 6 am and planted sunflowers at every bus stop shelter in the city. They are changing the way they normally act within a given space.

A lot of the culture jammers have a lot. These are not poor, disenfranchised people necessarily. And like Jack [Napier, Midnight Billboard Editor of the Billboard Liberation Front] says, he likes nice cars, he likes nice things and dinners in fancy restaurants. He’s not anti-consumer. He does what he does because he thinks the ads are really dumb. It would be easy to say, “These people are just upset because they don’t have as much.” But there is something deeper. There is the question of ownership over our mental environment. Corporate advertising is dictating that there are certain values and certain ways to think en masse and that is creating our culture and our reality, which isn’t looking too good these days.

Thom: Are you familiar with Hakim Bey’s idea of the “Temporary Autonomous Zone?”

Jill Sharpe:That sounds like an interesting idea

Thom: The temporary autonomous zone is kind of like the weather. The phenomenon occurs when people suspend their cultural programming and create what feels appropriate around them in an act of radical self-liberation.

Jill Sharpe: That’s really interesting and I think that’s really important. Sometimes culture jamming might be a reaction to a subject or in support of another way of being but more than just talking about companies or politics there is this high idea that you are liberating what we are expecting.

Thom: What has been the reception to your documentary thus far?

Jill Sharpe:It depends where I am but generally it gets a really good reception. It’s been bad that hasn’t been seen in the US much. It’s been profiled in 15 international film festivals. If there’s press on the film then people come out to see it and generally we’ve been “Most Popular Film” and we got an extra screening at two international film festivals and that’s competing with feature films. People laugh and they get pretty excited. I’ve had people hijack my Q-and-A and use it to meet and give out information and assemble people so its pretty lively. It’s a lively response. There hasn’t been a lot of criticism. There has been some. I’m shocked that the Canadian government actually sponsored me to go to Taiwan to present CULTURE JAM.

I think what happens is that people in places, even in conservative spaces, the film finds someone that it speaks to and they create a space for the film. Do you know what I mean?

Thom: Yeah, I do know exactly what you mean.

Jill Sharpe:That’s why the film has been moving in and out of places so well. Some people are looking for this material. Carly’s section of the film has been made into a film media literacy kit that is going to become a larger media literacy kit to take to all the high schools in Canada. I got a call from someone in Poland wanting to translate it into Polish.

Thom: How was the reception at Slamdance?

Jill Sharpe:I didn’t go, so I don’t really have an idea. They gave us an honorary screening rather than being in the main competition because Slamdance is for new film makers [CULTURE JAM is not Ms. Sharpe's first film – Thom]. I don’t think Slamdance is that largely attended.

Thom: I didn’t go to Sundance 2003 but 2002 I was working on a story about all the other smaller festivals that happen alongside Sundance so I spent some time in the Slamdance arena. The smaller festivals just don’t get a lot of people in general but Slamdance is one of the more important mini-festivals in terms of the larger film industry. You get a different kind of a film coming through Slamdance.

Jill Sharpe: I was very please we got the film into Slamdance. We always wanted it to get into Slamdance. So we were really excited. I just couldn’t afford to travel with the film to Utah. The film has been in a few American film festivals and we got a call from PBS’ INDEPENDENT LENS saying , “We want to review Culture Jam for our series,” but then they turned it down. I was surprised at that and I called back and asked why. They said, “Well, the jury didn’t think it was journalistic enough.” And I just thought, “What is a series called INDEPENDENT LENS doing looking for more journalism?”

Thom: PBS has been getting kind of conservative lately.

Jill Sharpe: I know they are conservative. In general, the media outlets in the US are so tough. Getting it into places there is not easy. My film came out right after September 11 and I’d already named it, “Hijacking Commercial Culture.” And I think at after that point, anything called “activism” was being received with more skepticism. You live in the US so maybe you have some perspective on this.

Thom: At the time, the country went two ways. The activist community, if you can call it a community, all those people who were already working on progressive social issues before September 11 2001 went into overdrive because they saw what was going to be possible now that the government had a compelling reason to change the terrain of our basic civil rights and focus on foreign issues and neglect domestic issues. But now people aren’t so focused on terrorism even though the government spin machine is still putting it there. [This interview was conducted before the war on Iraq began, which you all know has monopolized the news media and the messages coming out of the Pentagon are not to raise support for an impending war, but to continue to elicit support from the American population through a careful representation of why we are in a war and what that means for America - Thom].

Since all the American media outlets get their information about the government from government agents, basically, and not necessarily journalists, that is what gets “reported” or conveyed, rather. A lot of the information we need to be an informed democracy coming through the mainstream American media is either corporate or government spin. And it all comes from the same public relations firms.

But I think people are starting to get immune to that again, in general. College students are once again being college students. And your everyday folks on the street are talking about our pressing social issues not as this black and white picture, but seeing that issues about the war, the economy, the environment and foreign relations is much more complicated.

You can get someone else to do your taxes, but nobody can figure out your conception of the world for you.

Jill Sharpe: I grabbed a few American magazines, like TIME and I was reading the Taiwan press and I’ve noticed that things are still getting whitewashed. The spin machine is still out there, but nobody is really believing it. That’s amazing. I guess this is the next evolution. There has been enough journalism for people to have some doubts.

Thom: Exactly. Enough information has come to light over the last couple years that would make any conscientious person ask, “What’s really going on here?”

Jill Sharpe: THE ECONOMIST magazine, a normally conservative magazine, almost right-wing. I was expecting all the rhetoric to be about “Protect the oil.” But that’s not happening.

Thom: My perspective is a little colored. When I am in journalist mode, I try to stay objective about whatever story I’m working, but in my commentator mode, I have my personal agendas to attend to. I’m always filtering information through my biased point of view. But it’s a point of view that has found ample evidence to support it as something like, “truth.”

Jill Sharpe: Yeah, through a variety of different sources. I don’t know what the spirit of protest is like the US right now. After Seattle, it seems like doors got closed and public protesters got stomped on a lot faster. It became a harder climate for public protest.

Thom: I think the spirit of protest is still enormous. People keep calling it a peace movement but I see it like the progressive movement finding a second wind.

Jill Sharpe: I don’t think they are publishing much about peace rallies. I was in Mexico and didn’t hear much and I though, “Surely, there must be rallies going on.”

Thom: CNN, the week after the last Global Day of Protest, in Mid- February, people finally got it. So CNN for like a week or two started covering what they were calling the anti-war movement or the peace movement and then depending on how conservative the commentator is, the anti-American movement. So there’s just been a lot of confusion. Everyone wants to put there propaganda into the mix on both the left and the right. People are just coming together and saying, “We really need to come together and work together to change the way we live and to understand how we live because we don’t want to live in the inevitable future based on how everything is now.”

I think that is what the protests are really about. Not just, “We don’t want to go to war with Iraq.” That has been an effective, unforeseen device that’s gotten people out of their homes and into the streets and talking to other people who think the way they do in much the same way that the tragedy of September 11 was the unforeseen device that got people to look closely at America’s relationship to the rest of the world.

The legacy of this period in history will hopefully be a re-prioritization of public policy to focus on human quality of life issues.

Jill Sharpe: So that’s a good thing?

Thom: I think so, because there is dialog happening instead of people feeling like they are all alone with their ideas and their basic discomfort with the status quo or the lop-sided picture of American foreign policy coming through the American media.

Jill Sharpe: How big have the protests been in the United States? Has there been a protest as big as the Seattle WTO protest?

Thom: I don’t know how many people showed up in Seattle at that epic IMF/WTO protest. The last peace rally in San Francisco, there were 150-200 thousand people and in New York there were half a million people.

Jill Sharpe:Half a million people?

Thom: Yeah, in London there were a million people, in Barcelona there were a million people, in France, there were a million people.

Jill Sharpe:Oh my god.

Thom: I guess you haven’t been watching the news much. February 15 2003, the global response to an impending war was enormous. Millions of people took to the streets. That’s how organized it was. Everyone showed up on the same day. Except for San Francisco because the Chinese New Years parade was that Saturday. So they had theirs the next day. And then even more people came out for the March 15th rally. They are happening about once a month and I keep thinking people are going to get burnt out and not show up but they just keep getting bigger and bigger.

Thom: What is your personal interest in Culture Jamming?

Jill Sharpe:I’m always working on stories that look at people’s power. The thing in common among all my documentaries is that they all look at people’s power in a given a situation. One was about a woman who had cancer. But it looked at the power she had to live her life. Another film, I looked at the power of protective accompaniment where people worked to help human rights activists stay alive longer in countries run by state-sponsored terror. I was looking at the power of civilians to organize and protect human rights.

In various levels of struggle, whether its in their own minds, or in our governments or in society and in this particular one, I was looking at what I think is a symptom of a much deeper sickness which is essentially what I call the closing down and ownership of media space and our media world where advertisements and corporations have the power to mold our culture. Culture jamming was interesting to me because it is a self-survival technique. It is something that looks at the power of the individual and helps the individual survive so I was obviously interested in that.

Thom: How did you come to see the world of media as you do?

Jill Sharpe:I had been working in media for 15 years. I’m an independent documentary film maker. I got into documentary film because from the very beginning I wanted to inject non-mainstream ideas into the mainstream media and I saw media as a powerful communicator. We have a multi-channel universe but that doesn’t really mean we have any more freedom of expression. We have a dilution of voice, we have a dilution of funding for ideas within the very fabric of the arts and media.

I’ve been very lucky because I’ve traveled and lived in other societies. I’ve had that privilege to go to different places where I’m out of my culture. And then when I come back and see these signs saying a mortgage is so important and I see these values the ads put up that are smokescreens to the real issues. I’ve beginning to think that our culture and the comfort level expected by our society works like a drug. It’s very dangerous. When I look around at society, I see what Orwell wrote about in 1984. That it’s coming.

Thom: Or trying to.

Jill Sharpe: And that’s through media. Any way the people are keeping their individual thoughts or individual voices is important. It’s starting at such a young age. Advertising child psychologists help shape commercials for your two year old so they can establish some brand identification. I don’t think parents stand that much of a chance, really. And speaking to friends with kids, you see it coming, you see the behavior of the child being modified. If we really want to have some control over society and to our human process and our own humanity, we must either develop a self-defense tactic to what’s going on in the meantime and hopefully be able to have some laws around our mental environment that doesn’t allow for complete ad saturation. You see corporations pressing these big suburban vehicles and now everyone and their dog has one. They are gas guzzling hogs. People drive them even though they are three kilometers from their jobs and they never go back-country 4-wheel drive. It’s advertising that’s created this desire and in all these ads are about how great your life is driving this vehicle and how important that’s going to be. Nothing is said about what the cost of that vehicle really is to our society.

What I like about culture jamming is that it uses humor and humor is powerful especially in these days when people are feeling really overwhelmed by the issues and overwhelmed by the quantity of the issues and that was a way for me to talk about and raise some questions in the viewers about the deeper issues of what’s going on but do it in a way that’s real accessible for people because they get to laugh. So I thought it was a way to open some doors.

Thom: What is your personal vision for an alternative to the consumer culture?

Jill Sharpe:I haven’t thought much about that. I may still be in the reaction mode. Your question is so important. In a realistic sense I’m not talking about an overthrow of the capitalist system, but I’m certainly talking about a restriction on advertising. Certainly out of washrooms and out of elevators and out of the movie theatres where you pay twelve bucks to see a cinema but they are still selling you a mortgage at the same time. Certainly out of the schools. Absolutely out of the schools.

It’s hard to see how that will come about. We’ve managed to make some guidelines for the natural environment so hopefully the next thing will be some guidelines for the mental environment.

Thom: What is the impact of all this advertising? What does it do to people?

Jill Sharpe: Generally it makes them feel inadequate. It makes insignificant things what is front and center on people’s minds. Like whether you are slim or fat or tan or have a nice car or whether your friends like you. It’s getting away from real human values or valuing ourselves. But I wouldn’t say its just advertising. We also see the loss of public space and what has replaced it is the shopping mall. I mean, really what I think we need to do is try and nurture those places where we talk to each other. And even though film is a one-way communication, my film, in some ways I feel guilty about it because it’s another one-way barrage. But one thing I love doing is Q-and-As with the audience and get the audience talking to each other and I think we need to encourage people to still have those spaces.

I’m living in Mexico right now and there is still the zocolo, the city square, where people come and walk around. Old towns were created, and it’s the same in Europe, where there was a public space at the center of the town which was a park and in Mexican culture people go every Friday and Saturday night, even in small little towns and they just walk around like a thousand times around the square. What I’m talking about is a place where people meet and talk that’s outside of the advertising narrative. Outside of the pre-packaged media event which says we’ll go to a cinema, go to a play. But just public spaces where people get together to hang out that doesn’t have to be associated with purchasing.

Thom: In what ways are our generation media-savvy?

Jill Sharpe:I’m 38, so the youth of today featured in the film are even more pressured than before because they are being raised in an era of brands. Brand marketing wasn’t even so strong when I was a teenager. And now we have more forms of media with the Internet, that wasn’t there when I was a teenager. We have a saturation of advertising in our mental environment that is unprecedented. So this is the mediated environment kids are growing up in but I wouldn’t say they are more media literate. I think media literacy is a really important core program in high schools. We need to have media literacy programs. And they should be in film schools too. People are learning how to make films with no education in media literacy.

Thom: What is media literacy?

Jill Sharpe:It’s about reading what’s behind the making of media. Understanding that it’s a limited perspective being presented to you. That it’s all manipulated.

Thom: Are there any books or magazines you’d recommend about Culture Jamming or about anything at all you think people should be thinking about?

Jill Sharpe:There’s obviously ADBUSTERS. I think what’s more important than reading about culture jamming is to actually try some things. It’s an experiential thing. One of the best things is just to use a search engine on the Internet for culture jamming. I think there are more references on the web than there are in books. The Billboard Liberation Front has a whole how-to guide called “The Art & Science of Billboard Improvement” on their website. It’s 20 pages long and really detailed.