Resurrecting Guerrilla Television: The Revolutions of Early Independent Video

When video cameras first became widely available in the late 1960s, a global network of artists, activists, and documentarians quickly had the same realization: video is not merely a new format; video will change EVERYTHING about moving image media. Over the next decade-plus, idealistic videomakers fought to overturn the top-down hierarchies of the film and TV industries to create a true “people’s television” that encouraged participation, feedback, and contributions from its audience. The proponents of Guerrilla Television threw out the rules of media, filming ordinary people in their own communities, and the revolution quickly spread. The result was a remarkably democratic movement, one in which communities that rarely appeared on network television – women, poor people, people of color, political radicals, queer people – told their own stories. 

This symposium – and a series of related screenings and discussions – brings together artists, scholars, and archivists to discuss the legacies of this crucial but underappreciated era of independent media, starting with a screening on Friday, April 19 of key works of Guerrilla Television, introduced by the videomakers.

View the full schedule of events here. Register for free here.

Presented with Media Burn and Video Data Bank. Made possible by the generous co-sponsorship of the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, Chicago Studies, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, and the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture.