Paper Tiger Television

1999 documentary film, first broadcast in daily half-hour installments, about the November 1999 protests against the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, Washington.

Judith Williamson examines consumer culture in America, from the multiplication of products and their functions to capitalism’s colonization of the body. What is the meaning of freedom in modern day America? Is it the freedom to change the world or the freedom to change our socks?

This video highlights the existence of two community radio stations and the people who make them work. Mbanna Kantako's one watt of truth, Black Liberation Radio, is in Springfield, Illinois. In Galway, Ireland there is a very different station called Galway Pirate Women. For many years this group has programmed radio about the social and political life of, for and by women in Ireland.

This live show features the energetic analysis of television network news by Brian Winston. Winston looks at the news as a unique institution, governed by its own conventions and constraints.

Historian, political philosopher, environmentalist, and anarchist Murray Bookchin demonstrates how Time magazine obliterates time in this 1982 episode of Paper Tiger Television. Time is soothing. The events in Time look nothing like the events experienced by those at them. The news in Time happens elsewhere, happens to others. Time is reliable. It comes each week, and with it, past, present, and future merge to the point of disappearance. Like television, Time lulls readers into complacency because the news is given an even, consistent tone. All issues are treated the same, with the same bland distance. Time makes a reality so unreal, so colorless. The news in Time comes written and photographed in a comforting tone that treats events as inconsequential and thus encourages a notion of not just a false sense of security, but a sense that our actions are without consequence.

In this live performance for Paper Tiger Television's public-access cable program in New York, Rosler deconstructs the messages in Vogue and its advertising. Rosler looks at the institutional slants of the magazine industry and the fashion industry's reliance on sweatshops.

Born to be Sold is Paper Tiger Television and Rosler's acerbic and witty interpretation of the notorious "Baby M" case, in which a natural — "surrogate" — mother and father of a baby fought each other for custody of the child. Rosler assumes various roles of the participants in the controversy, from the baby to the sperm, from the lawyer to the judge, as well as the two women in the case. Reconstructing the story from its trial by media and the court transcripts, Rosler views "surrogate" mother Mary Beth Whitehead's actions as an attempt to defy the identity assigned by her class and gender, and sees the verdict favoring the Sterns as an endorsement of the father's phallic right, his jurisprudential entitlement. Her analysis demonstrates how political, class and ideological systems are played out on the body of the woman.

While global capitalism is a defining feature of our times, many engage in an anti-capitalist resistance. MARKET THIS! is a timely documentary that explores the desire for radical politics and culture in the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Two-Spirited and Transgender community. The documentary began in 1999 after the Queeruption gathering in New York City. During workshops and caucuses and through discussion and entertainment, participants came together to explore ways that this community can sustain and validate itself without supporting a system that actively exploits poor people, women, People of Color, g/b/l/TS/t people. This video takes the dialogue from Queeruption one step further. MARKET THIS! considers both the successes as well as the problems which resulted most visibly (and ironically) from a lack of involvement and presence of People of Color and Transgender people.

How does the "cultured" gorilla, i.e. Koko, come to represent universal man? Author and cultural critic Donna Haraway untangles the web of meanings, tracing what gets to count as nature, for whom and when, and how much it costs to produce nature at a particular moment in history for a particular group of people.