Quarterly Review of Film and Video

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Underground Media in Chile: Counterpublics in

Dictatorship and Democracy

Vladimir Rosas

To cite this article: Vladimir Rosas (2020): Underground Media in Chile: Counterpublics
in Dictatorship and Democracy, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, DOI:
10.1080/10509208.2020.1764321

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QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO
https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2020.1764321

Underground Media in Chile: Counterpublics in

Dictatorship and Democracy
Vladimir Rosas

Introduction
On October 5th, 1988, a groundbreaking development happened in Chile.
General Augusto Pinochet called for a plebiscite to whether allow him to
rule the country for eight more years in addition to the 15 year-long dicta-
torship he led or return to democracy. Unlike the referendum for the
Constitution of 1980, now there would be a registry of voters, and political
campaigns on media. Chileans took to the ballot box and voted ‘no’, setting
the scene for an open election to occur by 1989, which would include the
traditional fare, such as opposition candidates running for presidency, pol-
itical pluralism and elections for a new legislature in Congress, an institu-
tion that remained closed since the coup September 11th, 1973.
Opportunities to rebuild the country seemed to be appearing everywhere,
which was enormously motivating for those who wanted Pinochet to step
down. Finally, the opposition coalition—Concertaci
on de Partidos por la
Democracia—won the 1989 presidential and parliamentary elections.
Pinochet did not continue in the presidency, but he kept his role of
Commander in Chief of the Army until 1998. Thus, the events of 1989 rep-
resented a mere glimpse of a young democracy that was subsequently
unable to deal with the remnants of the previous regime, including a series
of laws designed to reinforce precise authoritarian mechanisms and institu-
tions, arranged under Pinochet’s influence (Garret
on Merino, 1995, 148).
This unbalance was not only evident in political terms; it could also be
seen in the audiovisual media, which failed to give a voice to those who
had been oppressed during the dictatorship, with the ‘media establishment’
that had been drawn up under Pinochet’s rule remaining intact
(Sorensen, 2009).
The impact on audiovisual media during the Chilean dictatorship was
devastating. One of the first actions Pinochet assumed after having
Vladimir Rosas is a Chilean journalist, film critic and independent researcher. Rosas is an associate professor on
Experimental Media at the Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, Santiago, Chile, and has been an
associate professor on Film Esthetics and Language in Universidad Cat
olica de la Sant
ısima Concepci

on (Chile)
and Universidad San Sebasti
an (Chile). Rosas received his MA Film and Screen Studies at Goldsmiths, University
of London, and is currently undertaking a PhD in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick.
ß 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 R. VLADIMIR

overthrown the Socialist president Salvador Allende on September 11th,

1973, was take control of the public television broadcaster TVN.
Eventually, the rest of the university-owned networks had tended to back
him or ignore political issues in order to remain on air. It was in this con-
text, and with the import of new technology such as video cassettes, that
opponents to the dictatorship created video material to inform people
about the atrocities being committed by Pinochet’s regime. Telean
alisis, a
monthly TV news report recorded on tape and distributed on VHS by pre-
ordered mail, is the most relevant example of how to overcome media con-
trols during this period. Indeed, it proved to play a pivotal role in
contesting the dictatorship’s censorship via underground means.
Throughout its 48 episodes, Telean
alisis aired news on protests against the
regime, including examples of police violence. As well as this, it also pro-
vided new forms of entertainment, such as music videos clips or reports on
break-dancers. The team behind Telean
alisis even took part in the filming
of the ‘No’ political broadcast (Stern, 2006) in 19881, which was used as an
opportunity to give the entire country a hopeful message via this brand-
new audiovisual style.
Foreign NGOs financed most underground media during the dictator-
ship, and following the arrival of democracy, many media outlets were
forced to close due to limits in funding (Li~ nero, 2010). Thus, many of the
people that were involved in underground media (including the ones
behind Telean
alisis) began to work for mainstream networks or created
their own production companies. There were a few attempts to create alter-
native media during the period of democracy (in particular the satirical
magazine The Clinic2 in 1998), but the composition of this type of media
led it to agree with the demands of commercial advertising.
Soon after this, Chilean society entered into a hyper-liberalized market
system, which discouraged political practices within the workplace. Hence,
the process of media exclusion moved toward underprivileged groups, such
as union workers, leaving their political activities receiving little attention3.
Restrictions were imposed on the media through institutional, corporate
structures, in which the media itself operated: namely pressure from adver-
tisers. A vital example of the above is the Walmart-Lider strike that
occurred in December 2014. Although Walmart-Lider is the biggest super-
market chain in Chile, with consumers experiencing daily disruption as a
result of it, the big TV networks neglected to report on it. A small number
of alternative media platforms covered the strike, but these took place
mostly online, and mainstream media only covered the outcome of the
strike, albeit very lightly.
It was within this context of social struggle and absence in media cover-
age, that the self-taught filmmaker Renato Dennis began filming the strike.
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 3

He had identified himself with an independent strand of activism in previ-

ous films. First, De la Sala de Clases a la Lucha de Clases (From the
Classroom to the Class Struggle) about the Student Revolution that took
place that year, although it was only released in 2017 due to funding prob-
lems. In the meantime, Dennis also created his one-person production
company Cordones Audiovisuales, focused on union-funded documentaries
that portray labor uprisings. That is why, in 2015, he created the Trilog
ıa
de la Insurrecci
on Laboral (The Trilogy of Labor Uprisings), comprised of
three films. The first film, A Fierro, was a criticism of the problems faced
by bus drivers in Santiago’s Public Transportation System. The second film
was Aperrando, Aperrando, about a coordinated strike from two different
companies owned by the same businessman. The final film was El Piquete
del 5–6 (Picket line from 5–6), about the aforementioned Walmart-
Lider strike.
El Piquete del 5–6 covers the strike as it occurs across different Walmart
branches in Santiago. Here, the demonstrators are given the opportunity to
express themselves and speak of what they have experienced under the
pressure of the supermarket owners. In this work, Dennis has borrowed
specific strategies from Telean
alisis that were used by the latter to depict an
oppositional public. In this article, I want to focus on how new under-
ground media (in this case, the work of Renato Dennis with Cordones
Audiovisuales) may or may not be influenced by the old underground
media (in this case, Telean
alisis) in terms of contesting dominant media’s
blocked coverage, whilst also acknowledging the different historical and
political contexts.
Finally, I will navigate between the terms ‘underground’ and ‘alternative’
to refer to Telean
alisis and Cordones Audiovisuales respectively, bearing in
mind the clandestine characteristics ‘underground media’ has due to its
unlawfulness, which is defined as (referred to press) ‘illegal newspapers
published in a country where publications are censored’4. ‘Alternative
media’, however, overarches a number of approaches, all of them aiming to
explain it as outside the borders of the dominant standard (Guedes Bailey
et al. 2008).

Method
I have selected a comparative method to investigate how the opportunities
and limitations of alternative media have changed following the introduc-
tion of new forms of media, especially considering the impact across differ-
ent historical periods. In his book ‘Alternative media’, Chris Atton drew up
a typology of alternative and radical media that consisted of six elements,
which can be divided into two categories: products and processes. The
4 R. VLADIMIR

method used in this research, therefore, considers these two main catego-
ries under the names of Production and Distribution.
First of all, the Production category will consider both the product (the text)
and the people who produce it. For the former, the text will be analyzed in
terms of representational strategies, the primary focus here, and the manner
they work to construct an oppositional sphere through the text. The strategies
of Trilog
ıa de la Insurrecci
on Laboral and Telean
alisis will be assessed and com-
pared, with their historical contexts considered, as well as how they depict their
subject. For the latter, the analysis will address the production agency, whether
it is collective or solitary, and the reasons behind the chosen strategy. Finally,
as an overarching matter, the discussion will look at finance. Funding is a crit-
ical factor that determines how these projects get produced, and it is an essen-
tial part of this comparison, also affecting the next category.
Regarding Distribution, I will analyze the material infrastructures of cir-
culation for both scenarios, and the potentials of these strategies within
their historical context. The analysis of the distribution strategies also pays
attention to the diverse types of text circulation, for example, public film
screenings, or individual viewings. In this regard, and in spite of the avail-
ability of the alternative media, consumers of this type of media tend to
represent a selective part of the population (Sorensen, 2009, 7). This is true
in both examples and helps to shape the oppositional public, a situation
that will be explained further in this article.
The primary sources of the comparative study will be the episodes of
Telean
alisis and the three documentaries from the Cordones Audiovisuales
trilogy, with particular attention given to El Piquete del 5–6 when examin-
ing the barriers to coverage. These audiovisual artifacts have provided the
tools for textual analysis, allowing me to establish many of the characteris-
tics drawn under the Production category.
In the case of Telean
alisis, I have paid attention to the shift in its visual
style during its time of airing. Another substantial source is an undergradu-
ate thesis written by Jos
e Luis Navarrete Rovano and Rodolfo Andr
es
G
arate Cisternas (2002), that includes a discussion between the Telean
alisis’
members regarding the financing of alternative media under Pinochet’s
regime. Finally, I interviewed three people who were directly involved in
the creative and production aspects of this project in order to clarify spe-
cific concerns on production strategies and the distribution scheme. Their
testimonies were valuable and reflected the importance of their work in
opening up a space for an oppositional public. That being said, it must be
mentioned that a comparison of the interviewees’ testimonies with the
research work done by Navarrete Rovano and G
arate Cisternas reveals the
fallibility of the memories of the team members. After all, they were discus-
sing a project they were involved in more than 30 years ago5.
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 5

With regards to Cordones Audiovisuales, I met the creator Renato Dennis

following one of his screenings at SOAS in London, and he agreed to be
interviewed both about his work, and his point of view on the development
of alternative media in Chile. Dennis was eager to talk since his work has
not been broadly researched in academic terms. Therefore, Dennis’s
answers and the screening of his three documentaries are the primary sour-
ces for the analysis of Cordones Audiovisuales.

Literature Review
The primary focus of this research is to analyze how the media operated in
the public sphere and its existence as a form of underground media. The
analysis is, therefore, grounded on three writings: Nancy Fraser’s concept
of subaltern counterpublics; Michael Warner’s circulation of discourse
within the counterpublics; and finally, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s
construction of the proletarian public sphere, taking into account its sys-
tematic negation, and how people that are excluded from the mainstream
create their own collective experiences.
Nancy Fraser criticized Habermas’ idea of a unified, all-inclusive public
sphere for being inaccurate and undesirable (Sorensen, 2009, 16). She, as
well as Negt and Kluge, point out that Habermas refers mostly to the bour-
geoisie, and she proposes instead that there are multiple spheres. ‘The bour-
geois public was never the public. On the contrary, virtually
contemporaneous with the bourgeois public there arose a host of competing
counter-publics, elite women’s public, and working-class publics’ (Fraser,
1990, 61). Regarding these many public spheres, Fraser ‘propose[d] to call
these subaltern counterpublics in order to signal that they are parallel discur-
sive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circu-
late counter-discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their
identities, interests, and needs’ (1990, 67).
Michael Warner explained in his essay ‘Publics and Counterpublics’ that
a concrete public may come into being concerning the text and its circula-
tion (Warner, 2005, 66), with ‘a public [being] a space of discourse organ-
ized by nothing other than discourse itself’ (2005, 67). The public is
embodied in the circulation of texts throughout time and creates a social
space where the public can interact. This characteristic is not exclusive to
counter-publics, but what differentiates it from a more general public is its
dominancy and its role in power relations. For Warner, ‘a counterpublic
maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate
status. The cultural horizon against which it marks itself off is not just a
general or wider public but a dominant one’ (2005, 119). Throughout his
essay, Warner discusses the seven factors that define a public, emphasizing
6 R. VLADIMIR

the temporality of the circulation of discourse. This approach is interesting

to work with, since both Telean
alisis and Cordones Audiovisuales, regardless
of their temporal context, aim their work at an oppositional public.
Finally, in Public Sphere and Experience, Negt and Kluge explored the
material conditions in which the counterpublic works. They coined the
term Proletarian Public Sphere, a form of political organization that
responds against publicity, and is given both to Bourgeois and Industrial-
Capitalists. Negt and Kluge explained that ‘the interests of workers can,
since they are unrealized, be organized only if they enter into a context of
living [counterpublic], in other words into a proletarian public sphere’
(1993, 57). In the foreword of Public Sphere and Experience, Miriam
Hansen argued that the Proletarian Public Sphere could be constructed dis-
cursively from its systematic negation. Here, ‘[counterpublics] offers forms
of solidarity and reciprocity that are grounded in a collective experience of
marginalization and expropriation’ (xxxvi).
Kn€odler-Bunte, Lennox, and Lennox (1975), when addressing Negt and
Kluge’s book, made it clear that the production of alternative media must
consider its sociopolitical context: ‘the organization of counter-productions
by cooperating leftist groups in the media can only result from the unifica-
tion of socialist praxis. [ … ] it would be illusory for left groups in the
media to imagine that a mass left press would have a chance in the struggle
against the capitalist cultural industry’ (1975, 71). In Chilean reality, this
process of unification was possible under Pinochet’s regime. This is because
the counterpublic in a dictatorship tends to be homogeneous, and is recog-
nizable as the group that holds power, making it an easier target.
Therefore, the question is how Cordones Audiovisuales could achieve a
similar goal within a democratic context that deploys media concentration.

Making Alternative Media: Representational Strategies

The American scholar Steve J. Stern has explained that toward the end of
the 1970s, the dictatorship lifted some of its censorship of the media to
align itself with the idea of openness brought on by neoliberal economics.
Stern pointed out that ‘by the time of the plebiscite and constitutional tran-
sition of 1980–81, a cluster of critical media managed to publish, albeit in a
climate of harassment that encouraged cautious language’ (2006, 299).
Stern, as well as Li~ nero, provided examples of this type of media, which
were mainly magazines: Hoy, Solidaridad, Mensaje, Apsi, La Bicicleta and
An
alisis. Pinochet’s regime could only close printed media after assessing
its content–printing and circulation could not be forbidden in advance.
Printed media did face distribution problems, however, such as the closure
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 7

of the printing houses, or refusal from newspaper store owners who did
not want to risk getting into trouble by association.
Since the Pinochet regime controlled broadcasting signals, alternative
audiovisual projects had to rely on new video technology. The independent
theater group Ictus launched in 1978 an underground media project, Ictus
TV, consisting of video recordings of plays and fictional short films, which
were later screened in community centers, mostly in working-class sectors
of Santiago (Li~nero, 2010, 26).
It was within this context that Telean
alisis emerged as an audiovisual
version of the magazine An
alisis, which was also part of Emisi
on6. The
cameraman Dragomir Yankovic and the psychologist Jorge Leiva, members
of the Christian Left movement, approached An
alisis’ editor Juan Pablo
C
ardenas in 1984 to propose the video recording of the magazine’s inter-
view (under the Conversando con … —‘Talking with … ’—section). Having
agreed on the idea, C
ardenas commissioned the journalist Fernando
Paulsen to lead the project, and he called on Augusto G
ongora to take
charge of Telean
alisis (G
arate and Navarrete, 2002, 51–55). The active link
between the two forms of media meant that journalists worked for both
An
alisis magazine and Telean
alisis, with double the workload of a trad-
itional journalist.
During the dictatorship, creating a regular TV news report was consid-
ered a reckless idea. Indeed, all previous efforts to create audiovisual con-
tent had focused on isolated products, such as documentaries or video
essays, to avoid the chances of being tracked by the secret police (CNI)7.
Fernando Acu~ na, one of the producers of Telean
alisis, expressed Pinochet
as having deep concerns regarding television: ‘There was a certain freedom
for newspapers and radios during the dictatorship, although those media
could face closure. However, regarding audiovisual, Pinochet’s advisors told
him not to allow it, recalling it as one of the reasons Nixon lost the elec-
tion after Americans saw the atrocities of the Vietnam War on TV. TV is
the most influential media’8.
The first episode of Telean
alisis was released in October 1984, and it
included two reports, which portrayed events neglected by dominant media
back then, namely Jornada por la Vida, and La protesta de Septiembre. The
first item detailed a day of prayer and peaceful demonstration called by the
Catholic Church, and the second addressed the environment prior to a civil
protest. As Li~ nero pointed out, Telean
alisis represented a shift in video
making, highlighting the importance of journalism and its creators’ yearn-
ing for a TV news report rather than a militant documentary (Li~ nero,
2010, 62–63). These first two reports were indicative of the journalistic style
that Telean
alisis went on to develop. The show directly addressed socially
disadvantaged groups, making them relatable to people through the
8 R. VLADIMIR

depiction of their problems, and creating a discourse focused on people

that are generally unheard.
Jornada por la Vida opened with Augusto G
ongora, microphone in
hand, an off-camera narrator, and a number of interviews. If it was not for
the fact that TV news reports in Pinochet’s Chile tended to be over-
explanatory, lacking in on-site interviewees, or any discussion about differ-
ent points of view, it could have been said that Jornada por la Vida
resembled a traditional TV news report9. However, it evolved from some-
thing more precarious in terms of style. G
ongora, speaking about the pilot
episode of Telean
alisis, recalled that, ‘We needed to put the camera on the
streets because that is the point of the video–portability. Portability gives
you freedom and having the camera on the streets changes the discourse,
changes the possible interviewees and changes the language. [ … ] I asked
him [Fernando Paulsen] to take the camera out onto the streets and get
more ordinary people, not to get stuck interviewing politicians’ (G
ongora
interviewed by G
arate and Navarrete, 2002, 55). Therefore, by interviewing
people in the streets, Jornadas por la Vida was an improvement in the on-
screen portrayal of ordinary people.
In his typology of alternative media, Chris Atton understood the product
as involving content and form (2002, 27–28). In Telean
alisis, as well as
other forms of alternative media, both the content and the form were dif-
ferent from that found in dominant media, which mostly portrayed
Pinochet’s activities and non-influential international news. In this regard,
La protesta de Septiembre is significant for showing the consequences of
violent police repression outside the Vicariate of Solidarity10. Indeed, from
within the demonstration, the coverage resembled that of a war corres-
pondent. The report in the next episode, Protesta y Ocupaci
on Militar, pre-
sented a more contextual strategy about the military occupation of La
Victoria neighborhood, a widely known working-class part of Santiago,
where people highly identified with Pinochet’s opposition. The narrative
established a timeline of people’s daily lives and how they operated, includ-
ing the disruption they faced by the presence and intimidation of the
Carabineros. The style included little mediation aside from the provision of
titles, although later it depicts interviews with neighbors about the current
political situation. However, the police brutality was mostly portrayed with
live sound and without narration.
Exactly 30 years later, Renato Dennis used this strategy of recording pol-
itical opponents in their direct confrontation with authority, in his film El
Piquete del 5–6. This is evident in two scenes: firstly, during an argument
between a police officer and a union leader after the latter explained to his
supermarket coworkers through a megaphone that street police officers can
be differentiated from their bosses by the quality of the uniform’s fabric.
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 9

This was a public undermining of police authority, but the union leader
argued that police officers were in fact from the same working-class back-
ground as the supermarket workers on strike. In the second scene, Evelyn,
another union leader, supports weaker union cells at various Walmart-
Lider branches across Santiago. She took charge of a branch closure,
encouraged the consumers to buy from alternative supermarkets, and even
confronted the private guards and branch manager, defending the legal
background of the strike. By presenting this sequence of events, Dennis
was able to delve into the construction of the counterpublic union worker
space. This was a space where dominant power could be confronted in
reality, and not just in a symbolic sense, such as in the Telean
alisis reports
described above. ‘I feel that Juan Carlos [the union leader with the mega-
phone] was empowered by his role of leader and well-informed of what he
can and cannot do. He knew the legal boundaries of a strike. I have seen
him in the past educating workers and students on how to deal
with strikes”11.
It is crucial to frame Dennis’ work around disadvantaged groups and
their struggle within a neoliberal context, shooting several short films that
were related to grassroots protest and political views. He explained that ‘In
October 2014, when I was walking through Santa Rosa street, I saw a strike
outside a building. I asked them what they were doing, and they answered
me they were about to vote for the strike. So, I went there the following
day, and I talked with the union leaders of SUBUS12. I told them about my
previous work in documentary filmmaking and unions and proposed to
them to cover the strike. I had a positive answer from them, later in
November from the people of Aperrando, Aperrando, and finally from the
union of Walmart-Lider in December. It was pretty quick’13.
In order to comprehend the context Dennis developed his discourse, and
how this played a vital part in representational strategy, attention needs to
be paid to how dominant media continued to neglect underprivileged
groups, even after the return to democracy. In his PhD dissertation ‘The
Media in the Chilean Transition to Democracy: Context, Process and
Evaluation (1990–2000)’, Antonio Castillo explained that ‘while the military
regime played a central role in the formation of a highly concentrated
media system; the governments of the transition [did] not develop any pol-
icy to reverse such a situation’ (2006, 195). This helped the dominant
media consolidate its presence in the public ground to the detriment of
alternative media projects. These forms of media were ‘unable to compete
in the non-regulated and highly commercial media environment, [therefore
they] were forced to close their operations leaving a profound vacuum in
the Chilean communication system’ (2006, 200). Television was subject to
transformation when it was opened up to private enterprise in the final
10 R. VLADIMIR

months of the dictatorship (Tironi and Sunkel, 2000, 186), becoming more
commercially-orientated and dependent on advertising, which encouraged
to create less critical and more entertaining content toward the end of the
1990s. No longer owned by the universities, a process of delegation
occurred in which the ownership of most audiovisual media transferred to
private enterprises. Negt and Kluge created their Theory of Delegation for
the educational arena, although it also applies for media: ‘Whereas the state
looks for effective ways of preventing the participation of left-wing groups
in the educational system, it reveals itself to be ‘liberal’ toward the privat-
ization of infrastructures of the educational and scientific sphere [ … ] by a
private educational sector that is not even geared to public interests” (1993,
70). Here, new private media owners pursued private interests that were
represented by access to massive audiences and advertisement possibilities,
reinforcing the dominant ideology, and pushing other social actors away
from nationwide coverage.
All of this was the result, in audiovisual terms, of what Sara C. Motta
wrote regarding the changing role of the Chilean Socialist Party, the PSCh,
and subsequently, the Concertaci
on14 Coalition. Once a counter-hegemonic
political party of the working class, it became a party of the hegemonic
state apparatus under the name of ‘modernization’: ‘The role the PSCh, as
part of the Concertaci
on, has played in relation to the working classes has
been one of co-opting, delegitimizing or silencing the political agency of
their subaltern base’ (2008, 318). Motta also quoted Chilean sociologist
Tom
as Moulian, who commented that ‘Other choices, especially those that
present themselves as critical or alternatives to the struggle for institutional
political power, have no access, or minimal access, to political and symbolic
opportunities’ (2008, 318). This process of co-optation explains why those
in counterpublic spheres were hesitant about inheriting these elites of
the past.
In 2011, secondary and university student unions, motivated by the pro-
found neoliberal policies on education, demonstrated against the govern-
ment and demanded changes in the educational system (Cabalin, 2012).
Renato Dennis argued that this movement ‘helped the country to become
more involved in politics, allowing the appearance of more alternative
media. People [in social movements] wanted to express themselves, and the
mainstream media was not giving them enough coverage, or they were
focusing mostly on the riots that followed the peaceful protests’15.
Indeed, media coverage of social movements on mainstream networks
focused on riots, violence and enforced stereotypes, rather than dealing
with the movements’ aims16. Locally, this was clear in newspapers such as
La Tercera and El Mercurio17, and has been explained by Llanos as being
politically motivated, in order to present social movements as a menace to
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 11

neoliberal politics (Llanos Reyes, 2015, 9–10). Globally, this strategy of

focusing on street violence has been applied during the coverage of the
World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 2000 showing ‘protesters
as misinformed people or individuals involved in the destruction of private
property and engaging in acts of violence in public spaces; their views on
global capitalism and social injustice were portrayed in a condescending
and dismissive manner’ (Guedes Bailey, Cammaerts and Carpentier, 2007,
16). This justifies Dennis’ claim that the dominant media chooses to focus
on riots rather than providing a critique. In Aperrando, Aperrando, we can
see the frustration of C
esar, the union secretary. He knew that the media
had no interest, and explained to the camera amid a demonstration that
the ‘mass communication media have neglected us. The other day we had
the GOPE18 here, because of a bomb scare … we could not get attention
even with that!’
Numerous social movements emerged following the student demonstra-
tions in 2011, all of which represented a variety of counterpublics that
could exist in a democratic Chile, without fear of being prosecuted or
labeled as illegal. Despite this, Dennis chose to focus on just one specific
group for his documentary trilogy: union workers. Aside from the explan-
ation Dennis provided above, he also explained that ‘I have feelings about
syndicalism because both my father and my grandfather were union lead-
ers. So, after 2011 I started relating to workers’ strikes and filming their
activities as a form of political support by trying to spread those videos
online. Secondly, most union activities are invisible to the media. I firmly
believe this is a strategy of the neoliberal system to keep workers ignorant
of their rights. And third, many workers who want to unionize in the com-
panies they work for that do not have an established union yet, are har-
assed and receive pressure to give up that idea’19. Dennis deployed all of
these representations as subjects in his documentaries (such as the first
example described in this article: Juan Pablo arguing with a police officer.)
They introduce the viewer to the workers’ self-organization and the cre-
ation of a counterpublic that has been developed by the workers in
response to the many mechanisms of negation and silencing of the hege-
monic media. This is what Negt and Kluge meant when they defined the
Proletarian Public Sphere as the working-class’ defense organization: ‘[the
worker] has to reify himself and turn himself into an instrument so that he
can fight the enemy. He does not develop conditions necessary for life, but
rather combative skills, which are oriented toward the enemy. [ … ] If the
worker or his organization wins, he must, first of all, develop a new mode
of production and a new way of life.’ (1993, 61).
On the other hand, Telean
alisis embraced more diverse counterpublics,
embodying Nancy Fraser’s statement on subaltern counterpublics as parallel
12 R. VLADIMIR

discursive arenas (Fraser, 1990, 67). Although a hyper liberalized economy

was on its way by 1984, the political landscape was more binary at this
stage, with a considerable number of groups existing under the umbrella of
opposing Pinochet. Many of these arrays of people were visible in
Telean
alisis’ episodes, including high school students who participated in
educational video workshops in their school, as part of the report Las
im
agenes de los j
ovenes (October 1987) (Labb
e, 2017, 147). In another
report, El Juego de Chile (May 1989), an indigenous community in south-
ern Chile were shown gathering around a pal
ın20 match. One episode
detailed a day in the life of cartoneros, the people who scrape a living by
collecting cardboard to recycle (Vivir de la basura, September 1985). This
diverse set of individuals is part of a more comprehensive project, in which
Rodrigo Moreno, a journalism student who worked for Telean
alisis from
January 1986, explained as being a result of the show wanting ‘to represent
new people, new activities. For instance, in Estrellas en la Esquina
(January-February 1989) we focused on these kids who just wanted to
break-dance, who might seem completely unaware of the political struggle
of the dictatorship and closer to capitalist entertainment, but in a way, they
had their own discourse of freedom’21. Although documentaries about
punk music had already been made, such as the one directed by the film-
maker Gonzalo Justiniano in 1984, titled Guerreros Pacifistas, these repre-
sented the subject in vertical terms, establishing connections with other
cultural products and trying to explain their behavior with the director
talking on their behalf. According to Tadeo-Fuica and Ram
ırez-Soto, ‘In
[Guerreros Pacifistas], the director continuously reveals his presence
through different devices, notably montage—which insistently draws upon
images of the cult science fiction film Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)—
the use of video special effects and the incorporation of video clip esthetics’
(2015, 716). In Estrellas en la Esquina, the break-dancers’ representation is
given by the subjects themselves; they are the ones who explain their real-
ity, without visible mediation, aside from the testimonies and one reenact-
ment that introduces the report. Moreno and the filmmaker Cristi
an Galaz,
who was also part of the Telean
alisis team, discussed if they were going to
interview ‘the break-dancer’s neighbors, a sociologist, or someone who
might explain this to us. ‘However, Galaz convinced me to go forward with
just recording them and trying to understand their codes: discarding other
things and focusing on them’ (Moreno interviewed by G
arate and
Navarrete, 2002, 135).
Nancy Fraser established that ‘in stratified societies, subaltern counter-
publics have a dual character. On the one hand, they function as spaces of
withdrawal and regroupment, on the other hand, they also function as
bases and training grounds for agitation activities directed toward wider
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 13

publics. It is precisely in the dialectic between these two functions that their
emancipatory potential resides’ (1990, 68). In Telean
alisis’ episodes, this is
represented by how dominant media have neglected underprivileged peo-
ple, and also through the empowerment of counterpublic members and the
depiction of their self-organization. This self-organization aimed to create
an awareness of the material conditions that many underprivileged groups
faced daily and how a common strategy would provide an answer to con-
front those inequalities. The report Combiatiendo el hambre (February-
March 1985) showed the solidarity amongst women who collectively
cooked to feed their families in the slums of North and East Santiago. It
also portrayed interviews with the women in charge of organizing these
ollas comunes22, in order to uncover a solution to their unemployment and
poverty (Bilbao and Ram
ırez, 2017, 93). This acted as a model of liberating
communication, and it was theoretically grounded by the Brazilian philoso-
pher Paulo Freire, who influenced the creation of alternative media in
Latin America through his theory of conscientization. Clemencia Rodr
ıguez
stated that ‘Freire believed that certain communication strategies based on
democratic interaction, human dignity, solidarity, and empathy could liber-
ate communities from their state of alienation, passivity; and silence’ (2003,
180). Freire’s thinking permeated Latin American grassroots video projects
and empowered ordinary people to overcome their neglect by the dominant
media. This has also been the case in Cordones Audiovisuales, with the self-
organization of the counterpublic demonstrated through the union con-
fronting business owners. Kirsten Sehnbruch argued that unions in Chile
were weakened after 20 years of center-left governments, which saw an
‘increasing degree of employment flexibilization that has accompanied this
process of insertion [of the Chilean economy] into globalized and highly
competitive markets’ (2012, 10). Since unions are portrayed as weak, union
workers and their demands are not usually a subject in mainstream media
in Chile. Therefore, the Trilog
ıa de la Insurrecci
on Laboral is an example of
Freire’s terms in practice.
Rephrasing Habermas, it is possible to state that during Pinochet’s
regime there was a (unique) public sphere, but instead of ‘the dictatorship
of the bourgeoisie’ (Negt and Kluge, 1993, 55), there was a dominant class
who held and led the public sphere, made up of the oligarchy who sup-
ported the coup in 197323. The control of this public sphere was enforced
by repressive means such as curfews, the imprisonment of opponents, and
more subtly by media control. This (single) public sphere would remain
relevant in the transition toward democracy due to unchanged media own-
ership, and it would be enforced through the neglect of underprivileged
groups and their demands, and ultimately the removal of political discus-
sion on screen. Sunkel and Geoffrey (2001, 147) have explained that
14 R. VLADIMIR

‘Chilean businesspeople are ideologically homogeneous, taught under neo-

liberal economics and conservative values, which permeates not only the
media owners but the advertisers’). This means that control came is carried
out by economic obstacles, rather than the repressive means of the past.

Production Strategies and Horizontality

It is also necessary to analyze the prominence of ordinary people in con-
structing an oppositional public. They were able to do this through the
horizontal means of producing the audiovisual artifact, taking into consid-
eration the technological gaps and media literacy. This is in line with
Freire’s claim of liberating communication, which consists of an attempt to
comprehend a historically ‘damaged’ epistemological relationship between
the Latin American subject and his/her reality (Rodr
ıguez and Murphy,
1997, 31–32). By giving the subject the means to construct a discourse in
audiovisual terms, a democratic interaction is achieved between the pro-
ducers of the content and the members of the counterpublics who were
now able to express themselves.
Fernando Acu~ na and Rodrigo Moreno have explained the horizontal
na recalled that ‘every
production strategy that existed in Telean
alisis. Acu~
Monday we saw the news guidelines for the week, over a communal break-
fast where every member of Telean
alisis discussed how to cover a specific
story. That horizontality between editors, journalists, and camera people
worked because it enriched the scope’24. This was a virtuous strategy, which
was also supported by Marcelo Ferrari, one of the journalists who also took
part in Telean
alisis and who was still a student at the time. ‘We discussed
how different styles and genres would allow us to represent the political
struggle. We understood our style as a form of political struggle by audiovi-
sual means’25. However, this strategy of discussing politically relevant con-
tent was not restricted to the in-house team, since Moreno also used it to
produce a report on members of a community that built a water
channel.”El agua Bajo el Cielo was a report in December 1988 about
Toconao, an area in the Atacama Desert, which suffered from a drought
and required water supply. Regarding its production, Moreno explained
that ‘we went to Toconao for about four days, sleeping in a local school
managed by a cooperative which was also in charge of the water channel-
ing. We started to get involved with them, and one night we were checking
the recordings and thought that it could be a good idea to check that
recording all together with the locals involved, so we invited them to watch
it, and they started to share their thoughts on what they were watching,
giving us feedback. It became a really participative process’26. Although it
was not planned, the shooting in Toconao was able to move instinctively
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 15

toward Freire’s claim. This enabled it to address the issues and interests of
its audience, involving active participation from the viewer, and in this
case, the oppositional public. In Moreno’s case, it exercised the displacing
of the hegemony of the image-producer, making the subject active in their
own discursive construction.
Beyond Atton’s framework, which considers production and distribu-
tion, Atkinson also incorporated Jennifer Rauch’s idea of the audience’s
interpretation within alternative media interaction. In this respect,
‘alternative media is not so much an issue of content or organizational
practices of production, as much as it is the interpretative strategies
through which audiences read it’ (Atkinson 2010, 17, 40). The subjects
addressed represent the audience, and in the case of Telean
alisis, many
of their episodes were able to meet the concerns of the subaltern coun-
terpublics. Therefore, the audience participates in the production process
by providing the guidelines on what the production team might address,
taking into consideration the audience’s interest–that is, the interests of
the counterpublic. In the context of the technological gap of the 1980s,
alternative media producers were symbolically appointed by the oppos-
itional public as they possessed the means to create a new kind of
media, allowing the audience to actively participate, as described by
Moreno and used in El Agua Bajo el Cielo. However, this task should
not be understood as a moral duty or a tacit mandate, but instead as
how specific circumstances—the availability of means–can allow a spe-
cific group of people—the producers of content—to provide the oppos-
itional public access to an unheard voice.
The strategies employed by Telean
alisis, including engaging with the
community directly, were not without their technological difficulties. By
the time the Cordones Audiovisuales’ documentaries were filmed in 2014,
however, video technology had been made available for the masses. In the
words of Michael Chanan, ‘one of the reasons digital video makes a differ-
ence is that production can be achieved in highly economic budgets by
small, agile units with highly flexible skills and working practices.’ (Michael
Chanan, 2007, 9) This allowed Dennis not only to move across the strikes
more efficiently but also to let the subject carry the camera and tell their
own story, such as in a video diary format. This technique was used in El
Piquete del 5–6 in a scene where the union leaders held the camera in a car
and passed it to Vikingo, a unionized Walmart-Lider worker who was
tasked with physically repelling the guards in case of confrontation.
Vikingo explained his role to the camera while the rest of the members in
the car talked to each other in the background about planning the closure
of the branch they were about to visit. Dennis justified this creative deci-
sion in both representational and discursive terms: ‘I do not believe in the
16 R. VLADIMIR

filmmaker’s hegemony in the production process but a collective creation.

This is something I have been doing for a while in previous works with
students in tomas27. I am interested in that collective process, and I give
the camera to the people whenever I can’28.
Unlike Telean
alisis, which had a more depictive approach of letting peo-
ple talk for themselves on camera, Dennis’ involvement is more visible.
Following a more activist path, he argued for an active link between the
filmmaker and the political work itself. ‘The idea behind El Piquete del 5–6
is that everyone must join in the fight, so in a scene, I jeer at a guard. I
think the creator needs to be involved in what is being done; I distrust the
hidden director. I definitely see the film as a political instrument, support-
ing political struggle’29. This effort to highlight the creator’s involvement
can be seen in his other works, A Fierro, and Aperrando, Aperrando, in
which during a union meeting the union leader addresses the fact that a
documentary about the movement is being made, with the workers clap-
ping and looking at the camera. This viewpoint of being a filmmaker com-
mitted to the political struggle is clearly inspired by Cuban Cinema and its
revolutionary strand of documentary that searched for ‘the most effective
form in which to militate for moral aims without losing sight of reality’
(Chanan, 2004, 221). Another inspiration was the Third Cinema of Solanas
and Gettino, (mostly thanks to 1968s La Hora de los Hornos), which estab-
lished a ‘school’ of political documentary across Latin America (Traverso
and Crowder-Taraborrelli, 2015).
Guedes Bailey, Cammaerts, and Carpentier have commented that ‘what
is considered ‘alternative’ at a certain point in time could be defined as
mainstream at another point in time’ (2007, 18). This is true of stylistic
decisions that are made in order to depict members of the counterpublic.
In this respect, Telean
alisis sought to give a voice to the unheard within
the limits of the technology of the 1980s. This plan of action was later
embraced by Cordones Audiovisuales and went further in not only talking
on their behalf but also in allowing people to speak for themselves. The
enhancement in production techniques also allowed both the subject and
the producer to take on the roles of protagonist, blurring the differences
between the two.

Financing Alternative Media

Finance plays an overarching role in the production of alternative media,
and therefore it has a significant impact on its content and form. There are
inherent financial weaknesses that alternative media faces due to its struc-
tural and intrinsic characteristics: ‘Being small-scale, independent, and hori-
zontally structured organizations carrying nondominant discourses and
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 17

representations hardly guarantees financial and organizational stability’

(Guedes Bailey et al., 2007, 20). Financial constraints were particularly rele-
vant under Pinochet’s dictatorship, since the appearance of alternative
media was dependent on European organizations, as in the case of
Telean
alisis, which was mostly financed by NGOs. As Fernando Acu~ na, the
producer of Telean
alisis recalled, ‘Roberto Celed
30
on attracted interest from
Dutch church-related NGOs, such as the Catholic organization Factenaxis
and the Evangelical organization ICUO. A priest named Theo Petersen was
interested in backing the project from the Netherlands. Later, there were
other financial contributions from the Italian Centro Internazionale
Crocevia and the NGO COSV’31. This strong link with the churches corre-
sponded with the Chilean Catholic Church’s criticism of the regime, which
marked a break from the Church’s stance on other Latin American dicta-
torships. Borrows explained that in the case of Chile, ‘the government faced
severe criticism from numerous church leaders and treated the church as
an opponent, thus intensifying its image as an oppressive regime bent on
consistent violation of human rights.’ (Bowers, 1988, 51)
Besides, Acu~ na was hired in part to diversify financial sources. ‘G

ongora
appointed me as an executive producer, and we needed to bring money in
for our budget. That is why we made an episode on the work done by the
Evangelical Church, commissioned by the Worldwide Council of
Evangelical Churches.’32 Here, he is referring to the episode Semillas del
Viento, released in August 1988, which covered the link between these
churches, their spiritual work, and the grassroots world. At times, the expli-
cit support that the Telean
alisis project received from organizations influ-
enced the representational strategies of the depicted subjects. The problem,
however, is ‘how to avoid dependence on external finance which will pre-
vent the development of autonomy’ (Group Comedia, 1984, 96).
Telean
alisis faced this problem on the return to democracy in late 1989,
with finance beginning to break down, which made Acu~ na realize the pro-
ject was about to end. ‘When Aylwin won, all the NGOs from Europe who
backed us came and told us they had decided to leave Chile and to go to
Haiti. We asked them not to leave us so suddenly … That transition
was terrible’33.
Cordones Audiovisuales did not experience this same dependency prob-
lem, as it did not require as much money to complete its projects. The
films were primarily financially backed by the unions involved, and Renato
Dennis explained: ‘I do not make films for commercial profit; I do not
want to get rich by making them, although I would like one day to live
from them. Nonetheless, my primary purpose is to join in the political
struggle from the beginning’34. This aligns Dennis with the DIY media-
making strategies that were highlighted by Coyer, Dowmunt, and Fountain,
18 R. VLADIMIR

that would enable the creation of alternative media that is not financially
dependent (2007, 279–280). The differences between the two forms of alter-
native media are apparent, with Telean
alisis being a journalistic job, with
its staff being paid and working in rented office spaces. Cordones
Audiovisuales, meanwhile, embraced an activist stand that saw the money
being used mainly for editing purposes, with the crew receiving little reim-
bursement. As Dennis explained, in the case of ‘El piquete del 5–6 people
financed the documentary with a number between 200 and 300 lucas
($200.000 and $300.000 CLP35), which I used to pay the editor. The money
went to production, to editing and a few other expenses’36. In a hyper lib-
eralized economy, underground media is forced to find creative ways to
fund its existence, since ‘under capitalism, without money, alternative
media production rests on the self-exploitation of media producers, low-
cost production techniques and the usage of alternative distribution chan-
nels’ (Sandoval and Fuchs, 2010, 143). This is more visible in Dennis’ case,
since he is the director, screenwriter, cameraman and producer.
Nevertheless, there were problems with De la Sala de Clases a la Lucha de
Clases, as there was no funding plan. Therefore its post-production was
forced to stop many times37.
As with the work of Telean
alisis, the funding source and the expected
representational strategy were also able to blur the purpose of alternative
media in creating an oppositional public. As in Telean
alisis’ Evangelical
Church item, Dennis also faced issues with how information was presented.
In the closing of his film A Fierro, the outcome of the strike was described
during the midst of a meeting of workers/bus drivers from Santiago’s pub-
lic transport system. Dennis commented: ‘I feel this documentary did not
show what really happened. Months later, I found out that many of the
agreements reached during the strike negotiations were not fully imple-
mented. I showed a victorious ending in that documentary as they achieved
what they were looking for … The union financed the documentary, so it
was subject to their leaders’ approval. It was not about censorship, but
ultimately the triumph the union said they achieved was not real’38. Dennis
decided later to add a corollary at the end of A Fierro, which detailed that
the ‘general feeling on the strike’s outcome is that it did not fulfill all work-
ers’ demands. However, union strength in this strike is a triumph for syn-
dicalism and workers organizations for future negotiations, hopefully, with
better results for worker’’.
Group Comedia have cited the British example of how the alternative
press ‘has failed to create any secure economic foundation for its continued
existence” (1984, 98–99), especially on a long-term basis. The sector is in a
state of precariousness, with the financing of alternative media potentially
dependent on the same methods as dominant media, which would see its
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 19

emancipatory aims being thwarted by the need to tie itself to advertising.

Problems would arise when the backer of alternative media promoted a
viewpoint directly related to his or her interests, and that viewpoint may
conflict with the filmmaker’s beliefs. Facing this financial dilemma, it is
possible to recontextualize Nancy Fraser’s statement of participatory parity
(1990, 63), which is meant in response to the exclusion of dominant public
spheres. However, even within counterpublics, and when taking horizontal-
ity as a media production strategy, there still is an unbalanced relation of
power between the backer and the media maker. In this respect, there is
always a remaining quota of verticality given by the financing, whether for
the continuity of the project (in the case of Telean
alisis) or the content’s
discourse (in the specific examples provided above in both media).

Distribution
The material infrastructures of circulation present both in Telean
alisis and
Cordones Audiovisuales did not need their content to be spread in order to
reach the nation. Besides, this media’s goal, especially in the cases analyzed
here, is to reveal what dominant media neglects about counterpublics and
therefore to develop a discourse attractive enough to discuss, in political
and in agitational terms. Thus, despite different times and technological
developments, there was a shared spirit behind getting a discourse circula-
ted–namely, to overcome the infrastructures of dominant media distribu-
tion through alternative means, preferably at a low cost. However, since
disadvantaged groups lack the resources of dominant groups, ‘no product
of the alternative press can ever hope to reach circulation figures compar-
able with its mainstream counterparts.’ (Atton, 2002, 39).
Following Atton’s typology, a number of elements can be found in the
process of alternative media; the distributive use, the transformed social
relations, and the transformed communication process (2002, 27). While
these three elements are outside of the product itself, its construction can
be fed in part from the last two elements. Nevertheless, in this article, dis-
tribution will be understood as a whole category, and it is used in order to
establish whether or not is possible to see if a recognizable public space
can be created through the circulation of texts.
Distribution here considers Fraser’s concept of stratified societies, which
are ‘societies whose basic institutional framework generates unequal social
groups in structural relations of dominance and subordination’ (1990, 66).
This concept is drawn upon in the section Representational Strategies
regarding the subject, and it details their depiction and involvement in
trading with the image-maker. It works here to describe the social charac-
teristics of the counterpublic sphere, and it is used to demonstrate when
20 R. VLADIMIR

the circulated text has, in terms of power relations within the same group,
been able to highlight how ‘the proliferation of subaltern counterpublics
means a widening of discursive contestation’ (Fraser, 1990, 67). A particu-
lar audience is one of the definitions Michael Warner used to explain what
the public is (among many others), which in the case of the counterpublic
is also defined as a ‘self-organized space by discourse’ (2002, 75).
Therefore, horizontality, which is primarily acknowledged throughout this
article as referring to the strategies that underground media use to produce
texts, could also be applied to distribution, as its circulation plan does not
reflect the vertical strategies that dominant media applies in developing a
network dependent on passive spectatorship.
Telean
alisis took advantage of video technology as a tool for overcoming
censorship, but also because of its nascent massiveness–at least, amongst
organizations. This strategy was inspired by the experience of the Ayatollah
Khomeini’s communication strategy during his exile in Paris. Fernando
Paulsen, Telean
alisis’ first director, explained that ‘[The Sha] had imported
copy machines for Iranian public offices. Therefore, he had developed a
strong technological network based on copy machines, which was assessed
by the Ayatollah. So, after [the Ayatollah] made his speech, it was transmit-
ted via phone, transcribed and later photocopied in all public offices. Next
day, the Ayatollah’s message had reached all of Iran. He used his oppo-
nent’s technology for his own purposes’ (Paulsen interviewed by G
arate
and Navarrete, 2002, 59). This idea is supported by Sorensen (2009), who
mentions Anabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi’s claim of
spearheading the photocopy plan, and how it was used to oppose state-
controlled television in Iran (25). As mentioned, during the 1980s, video
technology was imported from the United States to Chile, and it helped
create an emerging consumption of tapes in the marketplace during the
last years of the dictatorship.
Telean
alisis was produced on tape, and it was impossible to broadcast it
through traditional means or rent it out on tape from a video store.
Instead, a clandestine distribution network was created. The person put in
charge of this task was Cristi
an Cruz, who developed a network of sub-
scribers who were provided with a VHS tape containing Telean
alisis’ latest
episode (Li~ nero, 2010, 60). An essential number of Telean
alisis’ subscribers
were local NGOs who had the chance to access the tapes for free and on
request (G
arate and Navarrete, 2002, 59), a strategy that helped spread the
message among oppositional publics in the early stages. Expanding on this,
Cristi
an Cruz explained that there were ‘300 subscribers which meant 300
places where Telean
alisis was being screened. Plus, we also had a rental sys-
tem for different organizations or students. We also borrowed movies that
had been banned in Chile, like Missing39‘(Cruz interviewed by G
arate and
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 21

Navarrete, 2002, 129). As well as receiving funding from NGOs, Fernando

Acu~ na also pointed out that subscribers were charged a fee. ‘There were
many NGOs who funded us, but also part of the money came from sub-
scribers. They got a VHS tape, and since we had a short tape supply, some
people even returned the VHS tape to us so that we could put the follow-
ing episode just after the last one they watched’40. The project team were
well aware of piracy issues, but instead of seeing this as something that
could jeopardize Telean
alisis, Acu~ na argued that ‘[organizations and civil-
ians] used to pirate videotapes with our content. We did not have an issue
with that. We wanted them to.’41 This demonstrates that although there
was an organized distribution scheme, the circulation of Telean
alisis was
also aimed at decentralization, encouraging people to create more copies
and therefore, renouncing the goal of commercial profit. Eventually, it
evolved into a horizontal distribution with the primordial goal being the
spreading of the text and the discourse among Pinochet’s opponents. This
is in a similar vein to the Anti-Copyright statement of distributive use,
which some forms of alternative media followed in the 1990s, and which
aimed at ‘deliberate decentralization and relinquishment of control of the
processes of reproduction and distribution of alternative publications by
their original publishers’. (Atton, 2002, 42–44).
This process of decentralized circulation has been currently reshaped
into new forms of distribution, in significant part due to the appearance of
digital media such as social networks and online videos. While Telean
alisis
was distributed manually via VHS, Cordones Audiovisuales is uploaded to
online platforms with vast possibilities of sharing. Speaking about this
topic, Renato Dennis explained: ‘I upload my documentaries through my
official Facebook page and my YouTube channel, which represent less hier-
archical ways of distributing my work [ … ] online platforms help alterna-
tive media and groups of people to spread their message and configure a
memoir of everything that is going on these days.’42 When it comes to the
circulation of underground or alternative texts, digital media have played a
crucial part in the repurposing of Freir
es understanding of liberating com-
munication. For instance, Diamond has coined the term ‘liberation technol-
ogies’ in order to refer to social platforms on the Internet, allowing people
to express themselves more actively. Although he acknowledges that tech-
nology itself is not emancipatory per se, Diamond does argue that unlike
analog media, digital media entails ‘new possibilities for pluralizing flows of
information and widening the scope of commentary, debate, and dissent’
(2010, 71–72). In this regard, Askanius argued that ‘it is precisely in non-
political spaces such as the favorite social networking sites primarily mod-
eled for diversion and entertainment, such as YouTube, that individuals
start to ‘form a public’ and engage in informal, counter-hegemonic political
22 R. VLADIMIR

activity’ (2012, 36), creating channels for the virtualization of discourse

away from the physical space, for example in the case of the Santiago-based
strikes depicted by Cordones Audiovisuales.
As stated above, online strategies for distributing texts may virtualize the
counterpublic sphere and provide new locations for the circulation of dis-
course. This emphasizes what Dimitra Milioni argued, that ‘the transforma-
tive potential of the internet resides in weaving together the different
aspects of the democratic public life, such as information acquisition and
opinion formation, political discussion, identity building and collective
action. By facilitating the construction of active publics it suggests a
changed notion of the public sphere’ (Milioni, 2009, 413) Warner’s state-
ment that it is ‘not texts themselves [that] create publics, but the concaten-
ation of texts through time’ (2005, 90) leaves room for redefining the
spaces where text circulates, which can today be through digital formats,
creating a digital sphere where the interaction of strangers can help spread
messages of social struggle. However, Azkanius, quoting Juhaz, has pointed
out that there ‘is generally little media strategy in the use of YouTube for
political activism. Instead, the abundance of radical videos circulating on
its pages could be considered an expression of how the site provides a cost-
free and ‘handy’ platform ideal for staging spectacular events and messages
in an age of media saturation and post visibility’ (2012, 17). It could be
said, therefore, that the digital distribution of Cordones Audiovisuales lacks
any strategy, apart from merely uploading documentaries and sharing them
among the director’s own immediate online networks. While this may well
be a step in the right direction, it fails to reach a wider audience unless it
considers other counterpublics aside from unions. As mentioned by Leung
and Fee, ‘if selective exposure predominates, one can expect
Internet alternative media users to be largely restricted to people with con-
gruent preexisting views.’ (2014, 342). There is a delicate balance between
alternative media addressing the counterpublic it is already committed to,
and its rejection of the dominant media strategies involved with reaching a
larger audience, if not the entire public sphere (in Habermas terms).
While there are a significant number of digital platforms, many have
acknowledged its weaknesses in achieving a wider circulation. The most
meaningful distribution of Trilog
ıa de la Insurrecci
on Laboral was found to
be public screenings. Not only does this involve the screening of the film,
but it also allows for the possibility of a discussion (especially when Dennis
presents his work personally), and even the sale of DVDs of the trilogy.
Dennis recalled that ‘El piquete del 5–6 was shown at Londres 38, although
that occasion was focused on generating a profound talk regarding social
injustice with the audience, which is the most important goal after a
screening: to reflect about the social condition’43. Gatherings such as these
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 23

have been replicated across unions, high schools, and community centers
in Santiago, with communal moments occurring when the circulation of
the text enables people to participate in a reflexive process during the post-
screening talk. Michael Warner explored these examples of social discus-
sion that creates the counterpublic: ‘Between the discourse that comes
before and the discourse that comes after, one must postulate some link.
Furthermore, the link has a social character; it is not mere consecu-
tiveness in time, but a context of interaction’ (2005, 62). That social
character can be found in the exchanges between participant members
from other counterpublics (using a broader meaning of this term), and
how they have regarded the subjects depicted in the trilogy. According
to Dennis, all three documentaries were first shown to the unions
involved, but the workers already held ‘preexisting views’ toward the
films. A growing active audience related to social injustices of any
kind–namely, any subaltern counterpublic–can widen the reflexive circu-
lation of the texts.
However, the online platforms where Dennis uploads his films help him
to pursue a more decentralized scheme. Also, uploading his documentaries
is a strategy that subsequently seeks to generate an archive of labor strug-
gle. ‘I have the feeling these works are always present. Although these
works were seen when I released them, they can be watched by a special-
ized audience, students, scholars … I feel they are works which will be val-
ued throughout time, like a memory. I feel they are not currently valued in
that way’44.
Screenings that include group meetings for discussions are a common
strategy in distributing alternative media because it allows for a more
intimate dialog amongst the members of an audience both during, and
after, the screening. The (not so) public screenings of Telean
alisis were
held by a number of subscribed NGOs and the Vicariate of Solidarity,
which helped to distribute more copies of Telean
alisis to their branches
across Chile. Unlike Cordones Audiovisuales, the stakes were higher for
viewers of these films, with participants risking prosecution.45
As well as distributing VHS copies on a monthly basis, the team behind
Telean
alisis were also interested in producing their own screenings, similar
to the Ictus’ experience.46 This was possible thanks to the financial support
of the Italian Cooperation Agency COSV, which allowed the team to
acquire a mobile exhibition unit in mid-1989 (after the October 1998 pleb-
iscite that was lost by Pinochet). The unit was used in the regions of
Santiago and Valparaiso in order to spread Telean
alisis’ work, which by
that time was widely known among Pinochet’s opponents. Therefore, it had
a more discursive meaning, since they did not apply for a permit to set up
the unit in the public space. According to Fernando Acu~ na, ‘we arrived in
24 R. VLADIMIR

a Volkswagen Transporter Kombi, and we set up a giant screen in the mid-

dle of a [local] football field without permits. Sometimes we needed to flee
from the Police’47.
‘The discourse of a public,’ explained Michael Warner, ‘is a linguistic
form from which the social conditions of its own possibility are in large
part derived. [ … ] A public seems to be self-organized by discourse, but in
fact requires preexisting forms and channels of circulation.’ (2005, 75) In
this regard, both Telean
alisis’ team and Renato Dennis actively created the
material conditions for the circulation of the text. The latter, primarily,
feeds from the experience of the former in terms of acknowledging that a
decentralized strategy of distribution helps a text to disseminate its know-
ledge more easily amongst the counterpublics. Ultimately, it can be said
that both projects had the vision to point out a discursive need that had
not yet found a place. In the case of Telean
alisis, the consistency in deliver-
ing new episodes every month allowed this project to establish grassroots
support. Its ability in recording, producing and distributing a total of 48
episodes was crucial for the continued interest and existence of alternative
media during the adverse conditions of a dictatorship.
On the other hand, the decentralized distribution of Cordones
Audiovisuales allowed for a union-based discourse that was able to gain
more visibility outside the boundaries of its specific counterpublic.
However, an online-based scheme may not achieve the experience of on-
site screenings in the sense of generating reflexive discussion. ‘The Internet
is not a quick-fix for democracy or participation. While it does open up
spaces for the distribution of alternative discourses, to debate life, politics,
and culture, or to mobilize, there remains a need to bring those discourses
and interaction beyond the online to the offline world of the political’
(Guedes Bailey et al., 2007, 99).

Conclusion
Chile has experienced a slow transition from a dictatorship to a democracy.
The process can be defined by Modonesi’s Gramsci-inspired concept of
Passive Revolution, which explains how Center or Center-Left governments
in South America prioritize political stability over pluralist speech, espe-
cially when the local aristocracy remain alongside military power. This path
‘involve[d] a process of modernization pushed forward from above, which
partially and carefully recognizes demands coming from those positioned
below; through this process, the state managers guarantee the passivity and
silence of the popular movements rather than their complicity’ (cited in
Webber, 2016, 1859–1860). Thus, after 1990, the new democratic govern-
ment managed to push counterpublics to the side, taking their support
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 25

for granted by presenting itself as the only plausible option to avoid a

right-wing government. This process subsequently resulted in underprivil-
eged groups being neglected by the dominant media, and lacking the
material means to create their own communication channels, just like dur-
ing the dictatorship.
It was the emergence of video technology, alongside the unique historical
context of Pinochet’s regime, which helped to create Telean
alisis. The TV
show confronted the dictatorship through audiovisual strategies, and its
team was comprised of highly educated people with means, technical
knowledge, and a sophisticated cultural background48. The repurposing of
this new technology meant that private entertainment became significant in
articulating the concerns of the counterpublic, and of circulating a dis-
course of contestation across the country. In this regard, the proliferation
of digital video and online technologies have paved the way for video-
activists who now have the means to distribute their message at a consider-
ably low financial cost. However, this situation of over-visibility brings to
mind Miriam Hansen’s idea of how the proliferation of subaltern counter-
publics does not necessarily lead to these forces becoming relevant. ‘The
oppositional energy of individual groups and subcultures is more often
neutralized in the marketplace [ … ] in a reductive competition of victim-
izations’ (xxxvii). Furthermore, although the appearance of many subaltern
counterpublics could encourage interaction amongst them, it could also
lead to an arena where subaltern counterpublic spheres compete with each
other, overlapping their discourses and possibly nullifying them. In this
scenario, strategy plays a vital role.
Meanwhile, Cordones Audiovisuales has survived not only because it has
managed to work with a small budget, but also because it has inherited
many of the strategies Telean
alisis used in the past in order to create a con-
sistent alternative media. Three of the latter’s central plans of action were
inherited by the former, namely the horizontality of its production, the
depiction of the subject as a self-organized group, and the pursuance of a
decentralized distribution scheme (even if it was not intended this way).
All of these procedures respond to how alternative media may be able to
achieve relative success, whilst remaining coherent to the audience they
address, and without relying on the material infrastructures that dominant
media has at its disposal. It was horizontality that allowed Dennis to
remove himself from the authorship and encourage a collective creation.
Importantly, the self-organization of the counterpublic’s depiction empow-
ers the audience as an active subject instead of deploying compassion and
mercifulness. Finally, a decentralized distribution aims toward a reflexive
discussion of people that are engaged in the discourse and facilitates its cir-
culation. Most importantly, Dennis is capable of articulating and shaping a
26 R. VLADIMIR

common adversary in his three documentaries: the neoliberal busi-

ness owner.
Thus, Cordones Audiovisuales’ text has helped in constructing an oppos-
itional public, through its opening up audiovisual media to underprivileged
people and indirectly allowing them to organize around a discourse. This is
similar to the techniques of the Telean
alisis team, but with Cordones
Audiovisuales, instead, targeting economic power. In this regard, the histor-
ical practices of Telean
alisis shaped Cordones Audiovisuales’ strategies of
production and distribution. Both contained a particular focus on represen-
tation, although the latter repurposed some of these strategies, situating
them within a neoliberal context.
One essential characteristic that Cordones Audiovisuales took from
Telean
alisis was its aim to remain consistent throughout time. The method
used by Dennis to do this, however, is utterly different from that of his
predecessor. By creating a one-person production company, Dennis was
less dependent on a production team and therefore able to avoid the many
financial costs that could have been involved, such as renting offices or
paying salaries. This strategy provides a legacy to future media alternatives
that may be considering how to subsist and remain relevant to their coun-
terpublic spheres. Not only does it keep the money flow to the minimum,
but it also allowed Dennis to travel extensively with his subjects, getting
more directly involved with their concerns and making them part of the
collective production, when taking a stand on the union counterpub-
lic’s discourse.
On the other hand, Telean
alisis responded to a more conventional style
of TV news–at least at the beginning–and was required to meet delivery
times, produce more diverse content, and therefore, showcase highlights
instead of the same kind of close encounters Dennis was able to achieve.
Telean
alisis’ role was to create an alternative to the mainstream of Chilean
TV news and ultimately target an oppositional public. This explains the
depiction of the many counterpublics in their text, which demanded coor-
dinated teamwork that resulted in several reports that took just a few days
to create. In that regard, Cordones Audiovisuales’ approach can be viewed
as more immersive.
This specific comparison has aimed to open up a path in local Chilean
research about how far the new alternative media have inherited the strat-
egies of the old alternative media. Nevertheless, its relevance in overcoming
neglection from mainstream media outlets came to light in Chile again
from October 18, 2019 onwards, when a series of demonstrations in
response to a rise in the Santiago Metro’s subway fare started, eventually
addressing issues of the increased cost of living and making social inequal-
ities more visible. In this regard, independent media and members of the
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 27

public have been covering the demonstrations and unveiling scenes of

police brutality by their own means, especially through social media
streaming, videos and posts. Roberto Herrscher, in a column in The New
York Times on December 12, 2019, addressed the distrust of the people
toward mainstream media, citing a statement of a number of Journalism
Student Unions across Chile, denouncing networks of ‘criminalising pro-
tests, resorting to censorship, prioritizing government sources and misrep-
resenting information by showing only violence in the streets, but
overlooking human rights violations committed by special task forces and
military’ (cited by Herrscher, 2019).
Thus, claims against the role mainstream media plays in reinforcing a
narrative still remain in Chile as a reminder of a dark past. Hence, alterna-
tive images become a document, and subsequentially and archive, of an
overlooked reality, in the same sense the virtualization of Cordones’ text
could help to assess unions’ contribution to Chilean society without aban-
doning its rebellious nature. Alternatively, perhaps, could follow
Telean
alisis’ steps, whose episodes can be watched at the Museum of
Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile, and since 2009 it has
become part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World program. Nevertheless,
the process of becoming a historical document could also lead to institu-
tionalization, jeopardizing the alternative and the underground.

Notes
1. As explained at the beginning of the Introduction, Augusto Pinochet called for a
referendum to ask the people if he could remain in power. The options were Si and
No (Yes and No). The Si campaign was headed by the government, while the
opposition led the No campaign. This campaign also considered a 20-minute-long
political broadcast, 10 minutes each, called Franja. This was the first time the
opposition could access mainstream media. A fictional feature film about this
campaign was released in 2012 called ‘No’ directed by Pablo Larrain, starring Gael
Garc
ıa Bernal and Luis Gnecco, and which was nominated for an Academy Award.
2. ‘The Clinic’ is a satirical weekly-newspaper created after Augusto Pinochet’s
indictment and arrest in London on October 10th, 1998. ‘The Clinic’ was named after
London Clinic’s sign above the main door, the place where Pinochet remained
hospitalized until he was transferred to Virginia Waters.
3. Nevertheless, in Chilean media it is common for the Copper Industry workers’ strikes
to receive a lot of attention, since the country has been the world’s top copper
producer for over 30 years, and almost 50% of the country’s exports come from
copper-related products. It is common to see Copper Industry strikes portrayed in
dominant media in terms of the damage they cause to the nation’s economy.
4. Underground press. (2006). In P. H. Collin (Ed.), Dictionary of publishing and
printing (3rd ed.). London, UK: A&C Black. Retrieved from https://search.
credoreference.com/content/entry/acbpublishing/underground_press/0?institution
Id=1872
28 R. VLADIMIR

5. One of the intended interviewees for this research, Augusto G
ongora, was diagnosed
with Alzheimer in 2017 and kept the news a secret. He recently went public about his
illness in late July 2018. Others, like Manuel Puerto, who took part in Telean
alisis’
distribution scheme, or Dragomir Yankovic, who brought the idea of video making to
Telean
alisis, have died.
6. Emisi
on was a publishing house anchoring An
alisis magazine and Telean
alisis.
7. CNI or Central Nacional de Informaciones (National Centre of Informations) was
Pinochet’s intelligence service between 1977 and 1990.
8. Interview with Fernando Acu~ na, June 29, 2018.
9. The prime example of this type of TV was 60 Minutos (60 Minutes), broadcasted by
TVN from 1977 to 1988.
10. Vicariate of Solidarity was a human rights organization of the Chilean Catholic
Church during Pinochet’s regime. Its best-known leader was Cardinal Ra
ul
Silva Henr
ıquez.
11. Interview with Renato Dennis, July 31, 2018.
12. SUBUS is one of the transport groups that operate in Santiago’s public
transport system.
13. Interview with Renato Dennis, July 3, 2018.
14. Concertaci
on was a political coalition integrated by Socialists, Radical Social
Democrats and Christian Democrats that organized opposition to Pinochet in
institutional terms and ruled Chile after Pinochet left office, between 1990 and 2010.
15. Interview with Renato Dennis, July 3rd, 2018.
16. An example on this in English can be found in The Guardian’s coverage: https://
www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/05/chile-student-protests-violence
17. El Mercurio is the most influential newspaper in Chile. During Allende’s government
between 1970 and 1973, El Mercurio was a platform for the destabilization of
Allende’s politics by the US Foreign Policy (Alvear and Lugo-Ocando, 2016).
18. GOPE (Grupo de Operaciones Especiales; Special Task Force) is the high-risk wing of
the Chilean police force. It is widespread in Chile to call GOPE for a bomb scare
when a group of people seeks disruption.
19. Interview with Renato Dennis, July 31, 2018.
20. Pal
ın is a traditional sport played by the Mapuche people in southern Chile with
cultural purposes. It is similar to hockey.
21. Interview with Rodrigo Moreno, July 26, 2018.
22. Ollas comunes were self-organized soup kitchens which, according to Chilean
anthropologist Clarisa Hardy, were created in the context of poverty to overcome low
salaries. Although relevant during Pinochet time, they first appeared after the Great
Depression in Chile between 1930 and 1932.
23. Negt and Kluge’s definition considers a developed industrial society such as the
German one. However, the reframing within the Chilean context bears in mind the
lack of industrialism in the national economy, which was mostly composed of
agricultural landowners.
24. Interview with Fernando Acu~ na, June 29, 2018.
25. Interview with Marcelo Ferrari, August 1, 2018.
26. Interview with Rodrigo Moreno, July 26, 2018.
27. Tomas, regarding educational buildings, refers to the act of students occupying the
building (the department or faculty) and preventing professors or administrative
personnel from entering it. It is a common pressure measure amongst students
in Chile.
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 29

28. Interview with Renato Dennis, July 3, 2018.

29. Interview with Renato Dennis, July 3, 2018
30. Roberto Celed
on was a lawyer who took part in An
alisis magazine.
31. Interview with Fernando Acu~ na, June 29, 2018.
32. Interview with Fernando Acu~ na, June 29, 2018.
33. Interview with Fernando Acu~ na, June 29, 2018.
34. Interview with Renato Dennis, July 3rd, 2018.
35. 1 pound ¼ 1.000 Chilean Peso (CLP), approximately.
36. Interview with Renato Dennis, July 3, 2018.
37. Despite not being part of this essay, it is essential to state what Dennis learned about
overcoming financial constraints in this specific documentary, because of its scale,
which was applied in the Trilogy, on keeping production control in hand, and short
in the shooting.
38. Interview with Renato Dennis, July 3rd, 2018.
39. Missing is a movie from 1982 directed by Costa-Gavras, starring Sissy Spacek and
Jack Lemmon, based on the true story of American journalist Charles Horman, who
disappeared in the coup of 1973. The movie was banned in Chile during
Pinochet’s regime.
40. Interview with Fernando Acu~ na, June 29, 2018.
41. Interview with Fernando Acu~ na, June 29, 2018.
42. Dennis’s Trilog
ıa de la Insurrecci
on Laboral (The Trilogy of Labour Uprisings) was
edited by Videotecas de la Memoria, which is part of Londres 38, the address and also
the name of an organization advocating the defence of Human Rights in Chile:
building was used between 1973 and 1975 as a detention and torture centre.
43. Interview with Renato Dennis, July 3, 2018.
44. Interview with Renato Dennis, July 3, 2018.
45. At the beginning of every Telean
alisis episode, there was a message that said:
"Prohibida su difusi
on en Chile" (Distribution is forbidden in Chile), which in theory
meant that its content was aimed at international audiences. Therefore there was no
obligation to submit every episode to Censor’s Office in Chile. Nevertheless, it was a
legal trick that was never tested.
46. According to Acu~ na, he once came across a screening by accident. ‘I was passing by a
building in [the neighbourhood of] Providencia, and I heard Telean
alisis from a hall
across the pavement. There was a bunch of people watching it. It was fascinating!’
(Interview with Acu~ na, June 29, 2018).
47. Interview with Fernando Acu~ na, June 29, 2018
48. Almost all Telean
alisis team comes from Pontificia Universidad Cat
olica de Chile,
which along with Universidad de Chile are the two most renowned universities in the
country. However, Pontificia Universidad Cat
olica de Chile is known as an upper-
class university, regardless of its student’s political ideas.

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