In the early years of the French Revolution, the red flag was a sign of martial law, displayed by the gendarmerie to warn civilians that if they didn't disperse they would be fired on. But in July 1792 the Jacobin journalist Jean-Louis Carra printed on the flag, in black letters, 'Martial Law of the Sovereign People Against Rebellion by the Executive Power', thus making the red flag the flag of revolution.¹

Since that moment, and for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the colour red has symbolised the fight against oppression and the pursuit of a social organisation based on equality. Today, however, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, red is again seen as a sign of warning, in contrast to the colour green understood as that of nature, of openness, of the originary and the authentic - and perhaps, too, of the market. What perhaps is the colour's key note - disruption - still remains, but what is being disrupted has changed: if originally it symbolized an end to disorder (that of the revolutionary masses) and later an end to a certain order (of the State, or of capitalism), today it is again used, at least in the West, to warn against disorders (of illegal immigrants, of terror attacks and non-Western values) which threaten the social and productive relations of late capitalism.

This story of changes in the meaning of a sign, of its appropriation and subsequent loss by a certain position, is key to understanding how individuals organise (or disorganise) their life in common. Both social structures and political struggles can be partially accounted for by means of such stories; signs or images are rejected, or adopted and articulated with other signs and images, in such a manner that they contribute to stabilising, destabilising or mobilizing people or groups. In this process, as in Carra's case, agency and strategy can play an important role, but that is not always the case, as signs often drift into different constellations as if by chance. What seems essential to these displacements is that the final articulation of a collection of signs and images, always in relation to specific discourses, enables or reinforces a certain type of social and political practice, in detriment of and in opposition to others. An analysis of how this takes place should, in the last instance, provide tools for the construction of articulations that make possible specific political goals. And the explicit articulation and distribution of that analysis, in a way that guarantees that everyone has access to it, could perhaps contribute to the cause of an egalitarian, emancipatory politics - as exploitation always comes with either the obscuring of the mechanisms that support and reinforce it, or a disbelief in the possibility that things could be different.

Hito Steyerl's video November (2004) tells the story of one of these images, that of a friend from her youth, Andrea Wolf, as Wolf drifts from B-movie kung-fu fighter to martyr of the Kurdish liberation movement. In between these two extremes, Wolf is given many roles: an 'attractive' woman (as the film's voiceover says) and a friend; a female fighter in a fictional story (who uses martial arts instead of weapons) and an armed revolutionary (who also teaches martial arts to her fellow female fighters); a martyr for the Kurdish cause (executed by Turkish security forces) and a terrorist in hiding (according to the Turkish and German governments). Her two names (Andrea Wolf and Sehît Rohanî, which she adopted when joining the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK) already signify these shifts, but while this change was her choice, the full extent of the transformation of her image was not. As November shows, the destiny of her own image - paraded in the streets of Berlin next to that of PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan - from the moment it was captured (in photograph, film or video) was out of her hands.

As a study of the image of a woman situated in the context of a liberation movement (though it is not just that), November recalls Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's film Letter to Jane: An Investigation about a Still (1972), in which an image of Jane Fonda in Vietnam published in L'Express in 1972 is analysed, as the title says, in the form of a film-letter addressed to the actress.²³ And they play this part through the asking of questions - such as what is important in an image, what it shows and doesn't show, whether there is a connection between what the image does and how it does it and, finally, whether it relates to reactionary or revolutionary political positions.⁴

The film uses the picture to discuss, in the first place, how an image - Fonda's - and its meaning are constructed, not only within the image itself (by the position of the actress within the frame, the angle of the camera or her expression of interest, concern and understanding) but also by the text that accompanies it (by a caption that describes a situation that is, in very simple terms, not necessarily the one that can be seen in the image, or by an accompanying essay that selectively refers to a wider context) and the way that these relate to the material conditions of its production and distribution. Secondly, and in equally important terms, the film reflects on the role of the filmmaker (or, in generic terms, the intellectual) within such a political context. This is not done in order to respond to the question of what part the intellectuals should play in the revolution - Godard and Gorin dismiss this as a paralysing question that is not relevant to the revolution - but in order to actually play a part in it.

As a result of this investigation, an image that seems fairly simple (a female Western celebrity engaging with a revolutionary cause and lending her image to it) is presented as a complex articulation of pictorial and discursive elements - a complexity that the authors identify with revolutionary positions, as described in the film by Fidel Castro's words: 'For revolutionaries there are never obvious truths. They are an invention of Imperialism.'

Letter to Jane was the last film Godard and Gorin made together as the radical film collective Dziga Vertov Group. In 1970 Godard wrote a manifesto in which he defined his position as a filmmaker (and, by extension, that of the Dziga Vertov Group) with the following words: 'For us, currently militants within film practice, our tasks are still theoretical. To think in a different way in order to make the revolution…'.⁵ He continues, 'Each image and each sound, each combination of images and sounds, is an instance of relations of forces, and our task is to orientate those forces against those of our common enemy'.⁶ But the use of theory is equivocal here, if by it we understand something like pure, disinterested knowledge. Because, as Godard also writes, 'To make propaganda is to pose problems on a carpet. A film is a flying carpet that can travel anywhere. There is no magic. It is a political work.'⁷ So any kind of analysis or enquiry, any posing of problems or asking of questions, is a function of a specific political goal, of an alignment with a specific position, made in response to a particular conjuncture.

The clarity of purpose suggested by Godard's words seems to belong, back in November, to what Hito Steyerl identifies in her film as 'the time of October' - the time of the revolution and of internationalism, the time when the enemy was easily identifiable and when the political subject who fights it could be constructed without complication. As the film says, in 'the time of November' - our time, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Real Socialism - revolution is not possible, as struggles are local and impossible to communicate, never mind universalise. This historical narrative, explicit within Steyerl's film, often has been used to characterize her work and to set it apart from earlier forms of politicised filmmaking. But, as Castro's words suggest, the time of October as a time of clarity is perhaps the result of a similar construction to that of Jane Fonda's picture in Vietnam. Within November, the idea of 'October' as a past time when revolution was possible is not an accurate and nostalgic portrayal of the past, but an image of a fictional time that serves as a counterpoint to a current situation, and inhabits it.⁸ So 'then' is 'now'.

This 'complication' of time, in November, is parallel to a complication of space: the film recounts how, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the GDR's military equipment was sold to Turkey and used by the Turkish army in its war against the Kurdish separatists. The voiceover concludes that 'Kurdistan is also here [in Berlin]'. Such transposition, which was also present in Fonda's picture (which took French viewers to Vietnam), provides the title for another film by Godard - this time in collaboration with Anne-Marie Melville - Ici et ailleurs (1976). The film reworks footage, made by Godard and Gorin, for an unfinished film about the Palestine liberation movement titled Jusqu'à la victoire. In Ici et ailleurs, the failure to portray the real fight in the original film gives origin to a reflection of the strategies that documentary narrative necessarily relies on in order to produce an effect of reality.⁹ The filmmakers' response to that failure is encapsulated in a very simple shift: if, in the initial sequences of the film taken from the original Palestine footage, the camera shows fighters shooting their guns, later in the film we only hear the gun shots but do not see them. In November only the latter is the case, when, during the opening sequences, a similar sound of gunfire can be heard. The soundtrack, dissociated from the images, adopts a different meaning, as do the images dissociated from their original soundtrack - perhaps because the old one is substituted by a new one, or perhaps, like the scenes from Steyerl's early B-movie that were included in November, because no sound was ever recorded - that is, the images never actually made any sound.

Cinema's combination of an ability to make things mean something new with the capacity to serve as a space for self-reflection makes the medium a paradigmatic product of Romantic poetics.¹⁰ Images, both those taken by the filmmaker and those that he or she finds 'already made', are articulated in such a way that they say something that they would likely be unable or unwilling to say on their own. And, at the same time, the author of that speech is allowed to reflect explicitly on his or her position in relation to it. (Although this also means that he or she is entitled to not do so.) Steyerl's films and videos, like Godard's or Chris Marker's work, are exemplary cases of this type of poetics - they could be characterized as the articulation of seemingly disparate material through a montage that makes that material speak. But what sets Steyerl's work apart from that of other filmmakers, even that of Godard's or Marker's, is the extreme to which her films and videos develop this laying bare of the author's relation to the work and its subject. In November, this is done through the presentation of an apparently truthful account of an autobiographical story that is later exposed as partially staged. Whether it is fully staged or not - like the question about the role of the intellectuals in politics - is irrelevant. In November, Steyerl's voiceover talks about her old friend Andrea, the B-movie they made together, her re-encounter with Andrea's image and the process of making the video (November) about her. But instead of presenting this as a guarantee for the truth of her story, she shows footage of herself acting the role of a 'sensitive, contained and understanding filmmaker' in a PKK demonstration in Berlin in response to a request from another documentary filmmaker. Such a gesture, not far from Fonda's in her Vietnam picture, dismisses the claim to truthfulness suggested by the autobiographical account. However, self-reflection is further displaced by Steyerl's voice, saying that in November it is 'Not I telling the story, but the story tells me', implying that the filmmaker's agency is not the key factor to consider.¹¹ And that is indeed the case, not because she is 'really told' by the story, but because November constructs an image of Hito Steyerl as an attractive woman, as an engaged filmmaker, as the young friend of Andrea, etc., so that her image goes through the same process as Andrea's did in the film.¹²

Steyerl's video Lovely Andrea (2007) further explores this transition from the setting up of a self-critical author to its disappearance behind his or her image, and does so by chronicling Steyerl's quest to locate a bondage picture of herself that was taken when she was a student in Japan in the late 1980s. The video is formally similar to November, in its combination of filmed footage and popular found material, although this time the exercise in self-reflection doesn't rely on Steyerl's voiceover but is dispersed via other voices, making the disappearance of the author within the work more explicit. Further, the protagonist of the video is arguably not Steyerl but Asagi Ageha, an assistant to Steyerl in the work, the simultaneous translator in her interviews and herself a self-suspension (bondage) performer. In effect, as Edmund Burke observed of Tristram Shandy (1759-67), in Lovely Andrea 'the story of the hero's life is the smallest part of the author's concern. The story is in reality made nothing more than a vehicle for satire on a great variety of subjects'.¹³ Here, again, it is irrelevant whether Steyerl ever posed for that photograph, or whether the image she ends up finding is hers. That story, which one of the interviewees calls a 'nice mystery novel', is not the purpose of the work. In fact, the work doesn't 'know' what its purpose is. Lovely Andrea is framed, at its beginning and end, by the same question, addressed to Steyerl by a man off-camera: 'what is your film about?'

The 'great variety of subjects' that Steyerl deals with in the video include local and global structures of political control and domination, the position of women within those structures, the constructed nature of documentary images, the modes of availability of images through video and the internet, the commercial value of those images (including artworks) and the subversive potential of submission and role play. The film jumps from one to the other (from the Japanese bondage industry to Guantánamo to Spider-Man to Abu Ghraib) in a manner that the connection is based as much on analysis as - again like in Tristram Shandy - on wit. That makes for a fast-paced, highly entertaining video, spiced with a soundtrack of extremely popular songs by the likes of Depeche Mode, X-Ray Spex, Pet Shop Boys, Donna Summer and The Spinners.

This relation to popular culture (both in singular elements within the work and its montage), perhaps even more so than the extreme self-reflection of her films and videos, distinguishes Steyerl's work from other attempts at politicised filmmaking. Although elements of popular culture can often be found in this type of work - markedly in Godard's films - the way that they are treated always suggests a reluctance to engage with that material as potentially effective in political terms. This is possibly due to the identification of such material with the culture industry and its role in the reproduction of the social conditions of exploitation. But Steyerl seems to embrace it with joy. Her work recognises the ambivalent nature of popular culture - in November she calls Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) an 'incredibly tacky film' - but this does not stop her from identifying the film's big breasted heroines as the role models for her and Andrea's early B-movie. Indeed she acknowledges them as some of the very few role models of strong women she and Andrea were aware of at the time.¹⁴ Regardless of the original function, Steyerl here demonstrates that these images can work as effective tools. Or, rather, they must be approached as available tools within an ideological struggle - precisely because of their availability and appeal as items of popular culture.

The benefit of using popular elements within cultural production as part of a political programme of emancipation was proposed during 'the time of October' as the idea of Proletkult. As Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote in 1920, in order to aid the revolution it is necessary to elaborate a 'proletarian culture' that absorbs the elements of previously existing culture that bear the imprint of common humanity. This should be done 'Not [through] the invention of a new proletarian culture, but the developmentexisting culture, from the point of view of the Marxist world outlook and the conditions of life and struggle of the proletariat in the period of its dictatorship.'¹⁵ Crucially, this process involves a transformation or 'recasting' of those elements - as Steyerl does when she inserts images of Spider-Man and examples of torture in Abu Ghraib on a television monitor instead of the bound, naked women who were supposed to appear, thereby comingling and contaminating the three formerly separate fields of pornography, the 'war on terror' and children's entertainment. Essential to this understanding of revolutionary cultural production is a rejection of the idea that ideological elements (such as those of popular culture) belong to the dominant class and simply reproduce the social relations that guarantee its position. As politics takes place in the realm of the ideological - of the imaginary relations with which individuals represent their real conditions - in order for there to be a possibility of change ideological elements cannot be understood as simply a function of the class in power. This is not, as Étienne Balibar suggests, because ideological elements (such as justice, fairness and equality) need to originate in the exploited classes in order to be universalised as a common imaginary, but because only specific articulations of several ideological elements (and not the element themselves) can be associated with a class.¹⁶ Returning to Godard's image of the flying carpet, only when ideological elements have been examined in relation to particular problems and interrogated in particular contexts can a class character be identified. This is more so the case in social formations where a large amount of the population does not participate directly in dominant production relations - as happens in contemporary capitalism. For the middle classes, interpellations from popular culture play a much more important role than those of class in the constitution of their general ideological structure.¹⁷ Because of this, as Ernesto Laclau points out in his attempt to define populism as a political form, popular traditions are privileged instances for the ideological crystallisation of resistance to oppression in general, a resistance that can be 'longer lasting than class ideologies and … constitute a structural frame of reference of greater stability'.¹⁸ At the same time, popular traditions 'do not constitute consistent and organised discourses but merely elements which can only exist in articulation with class discourses, [which] explains why the most divergent political movements appeal to the same ideological symbols.'¹⁹

Elements of popular culture in November and Lovely Andrea could be seen to play a role similar to that played by popular traditions within Laclau's discussion of populism. Pornography, Depeche Mode, Russ Meyer, Spider-Man and the Berlin Wall are all ideological elements with an appeal and reach that emancipatory political discourse has lost today. In the face of the fragmentation of life within the social and production relations of late capitalism, they can perhaps provide the 'common language' or 'new form of literacy' that Steyerl has claimed for as a political tool.²⁰ Through the pivotal role of these popular images and sounds, her films have shown that is possible not only to offer a critical image of the world through the moving image (within or without an art context), but also to share strategies and tools for political struggle.²¹ This makes her films a new model of politicised filmmaking, one for which the term 'populist' - in reference to 'the popular' and not to 'the people' - is perhaps a compliment rather than a critique.

- Pablo Lafuente