The artist and filmmaker, Melanie Gilligan, may be best known for her trilogy Crisis in the Credit System (2008), Popular Unrest (2010), and The Common Sense (2014), a set of films that offered one of the earliest and most interesting moving image engagements with the processes and effects of financialisation. Fittingly for visitors to Weird Economies, the trilogy was resolutely weird in its refusal of the realist modes most regularly associated with documenting the financial sector. Instead, it drew heavily on forms and genres taken from popular narrative cinema, most typically science fiction, crime thriller, and financial news parody. Initially conceived as works made for online distribution and broken down into small chapters, Gilligan’s films were also screened extensively in galleries and at art and film festivals. Accompanied by several significant cultural-political essays that engage in detail with modes of adaptation to, and resistance against, the increasing financialisation of everyday life, Gilligan’s early work involved consideration of questions of performativity and affect in her examination of the increasingly dense incursions of finance not just into contemporary work practices but to broader questions of subjectivity. Despite her acknowledgement of finance’s restructuring of social relations, and the difficulties of imagining ways of living beyond finance capital, Gilligan’s trilogy also offered playful, speculative, and arguably optimistic moments as it tested out scenarios and encounters with finance. Her films at this point articulate the potential of ‘performative reorderings’ of the social field as a way of exploring resistance to the extensive power of finance, using the moving image as a medium to depict role-playing and performance in the challenging times after the financial crisis of 2008 and outlining the potential for performative redistributions of power as a mode of forming a community understanding that could counter finance’s reach. 

In this exploration of what might ground the bonds between newly emerging collectives in the years after the financial crisis, Gilligan addressed the Occupy movement, Los Indignados in Spain, and other grassroots initiatives, focusing on key aspects of these collaborative modes of self-organisation that lie in shared yet uncommunicable experiences that cannot be explained by recourse to rational decision-making. Here, she referenced the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon to argue that, just as our ideas are formed socially, so are our sensations and feelings, which are trans-individual qualities that cut across our separate individual subjective lives and link us in differential relations to one another’.¹ This recourse to addressing the political potential of affect and its collective, shared, and trans-individual aspects, allowed Gilligan to address the impact of wider political and social forces such as financialisation and the meshing of contemporary biopolitics and capital on the individual without renouncing the possibility of collective responses. Across Gilligan’s finance trilogy and addressed in her critical essays of the period is the exploration of the possibility of a radical collective subjectivity that might gesture towards a point of survival and resistance in the face of capital’s adaptive totality. 

Melanie Gilligan’s films in the decade after the finance trilogy continue this exploration of the possibilities for a collective response to the deleterious effects of capitalism. These works include The Bay Area Protests (2016-22), a 70-minute single-screen essay centred on three periods of protest in Oakland, California, Crowds (2019), an episodic fiction narrative on employment practices in Orlando, Florida, Home Together (2020-22), a video series of three episodes on co-living shared housing in Oak Hill, Ontario, and Health as Individual vs Health as Social (2021), a dual screen embedded installation made in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. This corpus explores the concrete lived situations of their protagonists as they attempt to pitch themselves against capital’s abstract laws of accumulation. Although these films adopt a more realist mode than previously and forgo at least some of the performative constructions and media parodies that came to the fore in the finance trilogy, they draw on montages of found footage, interviews and substantial elements of fictionalisation in their composition. The use of fiction accords with Gilligan’s methodology across her films that, although the end of capitalism seems desirable and urgent, the exact nature of social conditions outside its processes of accumulation cannot be fully imagined and must in part be fictions that we work with provisionally.²

Crowds was first shown at Art Basel in Switzerland in 2019. It is a fictional piece with documentary elements that addresses contemporary working conditions in the hospitality sector. Crowds is structured into five distinct episodes, each lasting between 11 and 17 minutes, that in installations are typically shown on five monitors arranged at various angles on top of an architectural floor plan drawing. The episodes focus on the city of Orlando, Florida, that brands itself as a major hub of hospitality and tourism, welcoming millions of visitors a year and growing ever wealthier through these sectors. The five episodes are bookended at the start and finish by scenes that focus in long shot on the arrival and movement of tourist groups at the airport and terminals, finding their way into the city. Gilligan’s film shows how the regulation of employment and the spatial organisation of the city make Orlando unlivable for more vulnerable residents who work to support its businesses. The ‘crowds’ of the title, then, refers both to the huge numbers of visitors and to the collective experiences of the often-isolated workers who serve them.

Two main dynamics come to the fore. There is a focus throughout on a central protagonist, Irene, played by an actor, whose individual experience of the working and accommodation conditions of Orlando is frequently placed in a collective context, often using interviews and voiceovers that pick up and expand on the individual encounters that Irene undergoes. The voiceovers act regularly as recollections of conversations that Irene has had with local workers, seemingly coming into her thoughts when she realises that the isolated problems and challenges that she faces around job security, low wages, unstable housing possibilities and access to food shops are shared widely across Orlando’s working population. Secondly, and relatedly, Gilligan explores the documentary form itself, a mode that bases itself typically on the witnessing and charting of authentic experience. Here, Gilligan stretches the form to explore how its foundation in the real might be augmented by imaginative fictionalisation, by placing Irene into real-life site-specific working situations, thus drawing on creativity, play and performance in narrating a singular working life against the context of the wider social environment. Gilligan has regularly returned to the notion of Benjaminian ‘allegory’: to the idea of presenting a fragment out of which the totality of the contemporary capitalist system can be understood, the individual experience allowing simultaneously the story of the greater whole to be indicated.³ The location of Orlando heightens the allegorical function of the film in that the capitalist relations in the city present an intensified expression of contemporary capitalist relations in terms of the suppressed wage conditions, the inadequate and racially segregated housing situation, the inadequate transport system and the absorption of highly vulnerable undocumented migrant workers into the hospitality sector work force employed in the city. Irene’s own story is narrated against the backdrop of a city whose work force generally shares in her economic precarity. Orlando here plays itself but also, at the time of filming in 2019, stands in allegorical relation to the tensions between capital and labour under the first Trump presidency (2016-2020). 

In line with Gilligan’s use of parodies of popular media forms in the financial trilogy, Crowds opens with scenes that mimic tourist adverts with its images of palm trees growing on a small island in a lake and the bustle of a major freeway set to music before a focus on crowds of tourists emerging from the airport. Gilligan’s handheld camera then adopts a cinéma verité style with handheld tremors and occasional out-of-focus framings as it isolates Irene seemingly at work at Denny’s diner. There are rapid cuts and no voiceover as we see Irene at work clearing tables before finishing her shift and going home, the camera appearing to document the menial tasks she must complete. Despite its documentary affect and real-life location, this is one of several fictionalised set ups by the filmmaker where her actor is placed at the diner as if she works there. Later, Irene is filmed in a quasi-documentary mode giving out flyers on Orlando’s streets, amongst tourists and visitors and finally in the first episode, she performs welcoming phrases and faces in her mirror at home, reinforcing that performance is multi-layered in Gilligan’s rendering: Irene is performing the role of a hospitality worker, while the worker in the hospitality sector is also subject to the demand to perform in the execution of their paid labour. There are intercuts that collectivise Irene’s fictionalised working day, alluding to the way that companies subcontract employment to suppress wages and workers’ rights, and to the tiredness felt by individual workers as their energy is sapped by the draining working conditions they experience as they try to take pride in their work. 

The second episode begins by juxtaposing images of small groups of tourists on escalators and walkways with an interview with a hospitality industry worker talking about how the tourist sector involves a large proportion of working-class people in the area. This opening montage effectively makes visible the large numbers of visitors to the region against the invisibility of the huge supporting workforce and their challenges in thinking about themselves as a group with a collective agency and power. Irene is filmed taking the bus and staring out over an intersection of freeways crossing one of the many lakes in Orlando in a scene that echoes the famous sequence in Alexander Kluge’s allegorical 1966 award-winning film, Yesterday Girl, that features his protagonist Anita G. homeless and looking for work, carrying a suitcase with her and washing her feet and shoes in the River Rhine, with the major metropolis of Cologne in West Germany in the background. In a scene that breaks again with the realist mode, Irene finishes her cleaning shift and travels to see her cat, Mitzi. As she walks down the street where Mitzi’s current keepers live, she recounts out loud an uncanny tale of a couple being persuaded to buy a large house by a real estate vendor and moving in and exploring it room by room. Over time, the house buyers experience a strange sensation whereby the house walls are no longer stable and become porous to the world outside. The affect produced here is fairy-tale like, particularly with the proximity of the never-seen cat, and the large houses with nobody at home or signs of life on the street outside. In its breaking of social realism, this scene can be considered alongside Irene’s experience in the swimming pool and ‘performance’ in the car park in the next episode that also draw on this unsettling surreal mode.

Irene takes on several commissions during Service Week, working initially as a children’s party entertainer, refilling and distributing water balloons to a group of kids. Most of the second half of this third episode is given over to the irruption of playfulness into the working hours and a withdrawal from the immersive nature of the reality effect Gilligan has produced in documenting Irene’s various jobs as Irene first falls into the pool that she is cleaning. Gilligan films from underwater a succession of objects floating past the camera, from plastic pool furniture to an apple, grapes and a wine glass. After reflecting on the pool fall, Irene is filmed in the car part of The Home Depot. Using the lines that mark out the individual parking spaces, Irene acts out a situationist-style dérive that involves walking the lines of the parking bays as if on a tightrope, balancing and jumping across the gaps, shutting a car door repeatedly to test for differences in sound and weight as it closes, and lying horizontally in one of the parking bays as night falls and the car park empties. This reclamation of urban space from its purpose of facilitating consumption and its reuse as an adult playground breaks with the social realism prevalent in Crowds.

Halfway through the fourth episode the signs of collectivity that have been in the background of the film previously become prominent in the large meeting of union members, principally Unite Here, where they share communal food before sitting in at the state parliament debate on adopting new legislation on policing undocumented workers. The episode shows in different ways how Orlando’s exploitative economic arrangements are wholly racialised. As Irene goes to a cleaning job in a wealthy racially segregated suburb, her interviewees reveal that the hospitality sector labour force draws heavily on migrants, many of them undocumented and thus with minimal employment rights. They suffer suppressed wages and are housed in the cheap hotels along the main freeway where they also often work, taking on the most menial of jobs, often being required to clock out while continuing to work unpaid hours. The collective meeting in the second half is part of a campaign to strengthen labour rights undertaken by the unions and to oppose proposed legislation that would allow the ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) greater powers to police migrant workers and to target specifically undocumented Latinx workers who may be subject to deportation threats. 

In the final episode, Gilligan again turns to fictionalisation as Irene recounts another tale, this time about a town that collectively is becoming poor. The town in question cannot halt its decline, attempting to stimulate investment, consumption, business, but gradually declining to the point where its inhabitants grow inactive and physically weak with hunger as they can neither grow enough to eat nor afford to import it. This fictional town is presented to the viewer as the counterpoint to the seemingly booming metropolitan area of Orlando that has a growing population but a service economy that supports tourism and hospitality through wage suppression and insufficient affordable housing, denying workers the opportunity to achieve stable living conditions. The chronic low wage, high rent, short term housing environment with poor public transport in the city means that workers lead chronically unstable lives. As Orlando grows bigger it also grows poorer because of the serious inequality built into its economic model. The workers supporting its huge tourist economy are, we are told, paying the price for the city’s success. As Irene notes, these low wage hospitality jobs seem in perpetual circulation. The film ends as it started with images of more tourists coming to the city, the crowds dependent on the poorly paid and insecure workforce.

Health as Individual vs Health as Social continues to address the condition of the individual as part of a wider social formation as it foregrounds in its title the struggle to rethink what are increasingly presented as individual concerns under capitalism as pertaining instead to wider social forces. Exhibited as a two-channel video installation, Health as Social was made in 2021 and responds to the recent pandemic that laid bare the inequities of treatment, well-being, and support in many affected countries. The installation is constructed in the form of two films that run simultaneously, as a smaller tv screen is embedded in a larger projection screen so that the two narratives proceed alongside each other and occupy the same flattened plane. On the smaller screen, Melanie Gilligan’s personal account of being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and her attempts to continue her work while coping with and concealing her worsening condition is framed by a montage of fragments from vox pop interviews made in the inner city Kreuzberg area of Berlin as the area’s residents struggle to resume their lives after the relaxation of the Covid-19 lockdowns. As in Crowds, the individual’s concrete experience is placed against a wider frame of reference to the collective, in Crowds often through sound, through the interviews and voiceovers that widened Irene’s story and here through interviews but also through the literal embedding of the individual narrative inside the multiplicity of voices of the Berlin residents. Many of the Berliners interviewed have similar tales of living and in some cases working through Covid-19 with heart conditions, depression, epilepsy and diabetes. 

In the ‘health as individual’ narrative, Gilligan directs three actors who voice her autobiographical script. The actors are filmed separately (though framed occupying the same space), shot in the countryside with the city skyline on the horizon. This formal composition immediately comments on Gilligan’s narrative of how she experienced her illness in isolation. The use of the three actors renders three individual utterances of Gilligan’s account, thus making it immediately less individual and one that becomes performed and embodied by the three different actors who offer subtly varying articulations and emphases as they deliver their lines. This deindividualising move is even more pronounced when the three actors speak the lines simultaneously as a chorus making Gilligan’s account explicitly more of a shared experience and a collective social concern.

The form of the embedded video thus correlates to the level of content in addressing health as an individual versus a social concern, in that the script sets out how Gilligan is talking publicly about the nature of her condition for the first time after having concealed it for several years to not reduce her chances of continuing her work, fulfilling commitments and accepting commissions even when experiencing a debilitating flare up. The Covid-19 pandemic and the inequitable situation facing those who might contract the virus and see their illness in an individual and isolated way has made Gilligan’s account urgent and potentially empowering for others. The embedded video addresses the vulnerability felt by Gilligan on diagnosis and in living with her condition for over twenty years. The narration points out Gilligan’s concern that given the individualistic way that illness is framed in society, to speak publicly about her fear that her status might change her standing in the wider social world, leading her not to trust others with knowledge about her debilitating condition. She explains how she wanted to control how the social world saw her but that by concealing her situation, she realised that she was closing herself off from any potential solidarity with others and the collective strength that can come from understanding health challenges as social and political. In Gilligan’s case, and like others in her interviews, her condition is closely related to the wider environment as it is triggered by stress that can come from social, particularly work, pressures.

On the larger screen and running simultaneously with the embedded account is a montage of largely street interviews where Gilligan, working with two translators, asks up to a dozen Berliners about their experiences during the pandemic. The interviews are intercut into a montage with most sequences featuring onscreen for under 30 seconds. This fast cutting works formally to propose that the responses are not isolated and individual but that the interviewees often find themselves facing similar or overlapping problems. The social whole speaks, as it were, through many individual voices, linking to the chorus effect achieved through the three actors narrating Gilligan’s individual account on the smaller screen. Most answers highlight how the experience of the pandemic is framed by its effect on already challenging labour, housing, and educational situations, affecting particularly those living already with serious and chronic health conditions or other vulnerabilities, and exacerbated by various levels of discrimination on the grounds of ethnicity and migration background, race, gender, sexuality, able-bodiedness, addiction and HIV-status. The film aligns with research elsewhere during the pandemic that established that racial and accompanying economic factors made specific groups more likely to have preexisting health conditions, such as diabetes, asthma, heart disease, and obesity, to be poorer, to be underemployed or employed in public-facing jobs that didn’t allow a pivot to working from home, and to live in substandard housing, to have lower access to vaccination programmes, all interconnecting conditions that led to greater vulnerability to Covid and ultimately to higher death rates.⁴ Here, health is certainly social, and rests on systemic factors and ultimately government policy and priorities rather than on the behaviour or disposition of the individual.

There are signs of a collective response to the situation in some of the interviews. One interviewee outlines how he is part of a group, the Gorillas Workers Collective, organising over housing and employment issues faced by those in short-time and casual employment with the Gorillas food delivery start up. These are primarily workers who lost jobs during the pandemic or with a migration background and with minimal visa provision who are forced to take whatever work they can to survive, described by their employers as ‘bottom feeders’ and whose contracts offer minimal rights and are easy to terminate, forced to work overtime without extra pay and compensated instead by food or other goods. As another of Gilligan’s interviewees notes, echoing some of the respondents in Crowds, the poor wages, inadequate housing, and exploitative work conditions are intertwined and have a long history. Another interviewee describes how her neighbourhood has come together to offer community support in the form of a Help Station, often organised via a WhatsApp group, offering a meeting space to talk through shared problems, and with shopping, cooking, and caring for those in need, particularly the older residents and the sick. The interviewee ends the film by saying that they wanted to make sure people weren’t left on their own as ‘that’s what keeps us together, not sick’. 

The problems of thinking collectively are raised again in Home Together, made between 2020 and 2022, that in its title references a mode of moving beyond the individual. It comprises a video series of three episodes that overlaps with Health as Individual and Health as Social in its concern for a rethinking of health conditions as socially caused and socially impactful rather than as something to be borne in isolation. The three episodes, lasting between 15 and 27 minutes each, address the attempts by interviewee Jeanette Ledwith to establish co-living housing in the context of ageing demographics in North America. Ledwith’s renovated house has been set up to encourage residents to opt in to live in a small community, yet finding people to commit to the project is narrated as challenging throughout and by the final episode she seems to have reached the decision to sell off Oak Hill without having been able to establish a co-living community. The extensive interviews with Ledwith as we are shown around the renovated house are intercut with exterior shots of the quiet and desirable neighbourhood and with extensive sequences of found footage, presented typically without connecting voiceover. These sections of footage recount the initial policy reactions in early 2020 to the Covid-19 pandemic which gravely exacerbated already existing inequalities. We are shown how businesses and restaurants are shut down, how traffic jams form at food banks, how health care workers are striking and how Amazon workers are also taking industrial action over hazardous conditions. The footage shows how the impact of the pandemic can be felt by those vulnerable to rent payments as in many cases it is impossible to earn any money. The pandemic causes further devastation in prisons and in care homes, not least because of the lack of access to PPE and other protective clothing. The issue that Jeanette Ledwith’s proposed co-living shared housing addresses, that of dignified care for the ageing, is contextualised by an interview with a Toronto-based health researcher, Seong-gee Um, who raises concerns about how ageing disproportionately affects quality of life and access to care and benefits of immigrant seniors. 

This racialised inequitable distribution of care resources is continued as a theme in the second of the three videos, where the interviewee discloses that immigrated demographics are less likely to receive publicly funded care as they age and more likely to rely on family support. Some of the issues surrounding the plan for co-living shared housing are aired as Jeanette Ledwith proposes that potential applicants to her co-living shared housing scheme are not yet emotionally ready to downsize their existing houses and to leave family support structures to participate in a new collective.

The third and final episode uses techniques of fictionalisation to address the community nature of shared housing through the character, Theresa, who is researching co-housing online. It is most effective in bridging the individual experience narrated by Ledwith with the wider social context that potential applicants might face. Theresa contacts one of the co-housing communities which returns her call and hears her concerns over the way that housing collectives respond to applicants with long-term health issues. Theresa’s lack of confidence in the answers she hears suggests that the co-living communities operate with a particular able-bodied bias, despite the promotional material that Theresa accesses saying that ‘it is the most important thing to be able to care for each other’. Again, the question of health is foregrounded as one where under capitalism the individual is pressured to attempt to resolve their own conditions in isolation, with little help from the state or other communities. As Theresa articulates it, everyone gets ill some time and ill health is not an individual failing but something that should be supported mutually. 

The Bay Area Protests was completed, like Home Together, in 2022 and similarly bears the traces in its use of found footage of the recent Covid-19 lockdowns. Additionally, its final quarter is dominated by the impact of the Black Lives Matter protests in the US and subsequently in cities across the globe in the wake of the murder in 2020 of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. 

Gilligan’s complex film started as a project during a residency at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco in 2016 and charts a history of collective organising and community resistance in Oakland. It responds to three pivotal events in Oakland that mobilised protesters and activists, namely the killing of Oscar Grant at Fruitvale Station by Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer Johannes Mehserle in 2009, an event that for some critics inspired the later formal establishment of the Black Lives Matter movement after the killing in 2013 of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, the mass student protest against a 32% tuition fee hike by the University of California also in 2009 as a response to austerity measures in the wake of the financial crisis, and the Oakland encampment during the Occupy movement in 2011 and 2012. Using substantial archival footage, it brings together a documentary approach in chronicling the key events and the subsequent protests, with a substantial element of fictionalisation and performance that imagines discussions and conversations amongst the protesters themselves and between protesters and representatives of the legal system in court cross-examinations. In this, The Bay Area Protests sets found footage material alongside imagined reenactments and stagings in both the authentic Marin County courthouse and in the imagined space of the Kaiser Convention Center, the target of a prospective occupation by the Occupy Oakland commune in January 2012 that was never fully actualised. The enactments, then, are a hypothetical what if, as the film imagines the challenges of establishing collective decision-making and social relations beyond capital accumulation.

Gilligan’s strategic use of fictionalisation is notable from the beginning as the film opens with a three-minute montage that juxtaposes a series of protagonists arriving from the darkened wings onto a bare stage as they survey the suitability of their location and make preparations for an undefined action – a performance? an occupation? - with panning shots and stills of the iconic Marin County Superior Court complex, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 1962, and with brief found footage of a politician clipped saying ‘hit the floor’ followed by black and white stills in the aftermath of an armed police shoot out. There is at this point no voiceover or added non-diegetic explanatory material to orient the viewer about the time frame or the links across different media forms and different locations between the protagonists and the darkened auditorium, the courthouse, and the almost-militarised armed police presence in the stills.

The historical context that ties what we have seen to the wider capitalist system emerges with the subsequent footage of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger making a statement about California’s grave financial situation and dwindling tax revenues after the financial crisis. This footage gives way to the first dramatic reconstruction, with the actors that we saw appearing on the empty stage at the beginning taking up roles as judge and witnesses inside the Marin County courthouse as they address California’s decision to furlough public employees, to cut welfare safety nets and to dramatically increase the tuition fees paid by students rather than to raise the rates of taxation on the wealthy to cover the budgetary shortfall. One witness ties the various waves of protest covered by the film directly to the austerity decisions taken in the aftermath of the financial crisis. This approach suggests that the three actualisations of protest might be seen as one single overlapping present that is marked out by the failures of capitalism and the consequent economic burden placed on the poorest, by the systemically racist treatment of everyday life and political protest by police, and by the failure of the courts to offer a space for the just consideration of protest, conflict and dissent. 

The interlinking of found footage documenting key events and fictionalised enactments in the courtroom and the stage space of the Kaiser Convention Center is matched by the interlinking of the three waves of protest. As the protagonists from the start of the film are making initial plans about the logistics of their occupation, another character, who claims to be from the neighbourhood, appears on stage and asks one of the activists what they are doing there and whether he has personally lost his job in the austerity measures. In place of a direct answer, there is a hard cut to a courtroom reenactment where the actor playing the activist appears as a lawyer presenting testimony after the killing of Oscar Grant in 2009, two years earlier. This interleaving of timelines and of the documentary with the imaginary creates the effect of presenting the years of protest undertaken by the more marginalised of Oakland’s residents as one single and linked ongoing struggle against economic injustice and racist state, police, and judicial power. Gilligan makes clear through her choice of archival material the degree to which racial minorities are discriminated against economically and by the police and criminal justice system, using footage of Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s 2018 speech to Barnard College to underscore that ‘race is the way that class inequality is mediated or managed in American capitalism’.⁵ As the courtroom reenactments suggest, Gilligan finds the criminal justice system at fault in its failure to understand and acknowledge fully the context of protest and dissent in the wake of institutional racism and widespread police violence against black people in the Oakland area.

Gilligan’s film considers wider political developments in US politics in recent decades, with the rise in witnessing police brutality gathered from mobile phone footage to the clampdown on potential uprisings suggested via footage of David Graeber talking about the fear of the neoliberal establishment about possible domestic insurrection along the lines of the Black Panther movement of the 1970s and the sophisticated counter-intelligence and surveillance methods to pre-empt this. Gilligan incorporates substantial footage of the Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland in 1966, and of Angela Davis’s speeches in the decade following to offer context about the long history of radicalism and protest for human rights and black liberation in the city, suggesting that the state and police have existed in a long-term condition of antagonism with many of their own residents. The film cuts back to the enactment of the occupation that it is imagined being undertaken by the Occupy Oakland protesters in 2011 against the background of large-scale un- and underemployment and welfare cuts, with the community organising for itself, against the wishes of the state. 

This heralds a pivotal section in Gilligan’s film as, in keeping with her interest across her films in ways of conceiving the social collective outside the constraints of capitalist accumulation, it imagines how the community might work together to support citizens effectively and without the brutal and often racist policing that is depicted throughout the film. After footage of the Black Panther Party, whose activities included community support and healthcare programmes, and the violent police and state response in the 1960s and 1970s to suppress what was seen as a threat to US internal security, Gilligan constructs a complex mediated set of discussions around the failures of contemporary capitalism to provide the basics for its population. Filming her actors playing both Occupy Oakland activists from the Oakland Commune and courtroom judges and witnesses, the activists step in and out of character, reading their lines from scripts. When the camera cuts to courtroom discussions of the actions of the occupation, the same actors take on different roles as participants in the legal process. As they summarise in court, ‘for a time the camp was a collective force whose aim was not simply to oppose austerity, corporate greed, and the financial system, but capitalism itself’. Gilligan foregrounds also the challenges facing a non-hierarchical collective that attempts to include all voices in its decision-making. As the activists in the imagined occupation of the Kaiser Convention Center discuss collective decision-making, some praise the way that power is held equally while others counter that it led to lengthy meetings and endless disagreements. The mid-section of The Bay Area Protests tests out the attempt by the Oakland Commune at establishing collective ways of living, providing mutual aid and solidarity, and attempting to construct a community space where shared needs can be met under a way of living that is outside capitalism. The activists reflect on the desirability of a broader based protest movement, as seen briefly in footage of the mass march on the Port of Oakland. The attempted occupation of the vacant Kaiser Convention Center came when the protesters were cleared from their camp in the renamed ‘Oscar Grant’ Plaza and wanted to establish a new community space to be inside during the winter and to set up a kitchen to feed the homeless. The Oakland Commune had been providing food, shelter, medical care and other necessities: as the interviewee explains, people were being proactive about meeting the needs of those around them. The ‘activists’ in the imagined space talk to camera about social reproduction and how ‘most people saw the camp as a way of living outside capitalism’. One activist argues how they realised quickly their limitations and that this had not been a better way of life outside capitalism that they had imagined. The reflection in the imagined occupied space concludes with a shared sense of frustration at not being able to come up with solutions but also a will to try to find a way to escape from the deadlock they outline.

Against the background of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, with footage of large-scale protests in the aftermath of the killings of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and George Floyd in 2020 and calls to come together against ongoing brutal and racist policing, Gilligan includes an alternative model of community relations established briefly in Chicago in 2016. Activists occupied a vacant lot across from the renowned Chicago Police Department’s ‘Black Site’ on Homan Square, a building reported to house a section of the CPD responsible for snatch squads and torture, primarily against black and brown citizens, to establish a community hub. The ‘Freedom Square’ sit in organised by the #LetUsBreathe Collective lasted nearly six weeks and provided mental and physical health care, food, housing, education and legal advice while protesting police brutality at the Homan Square site. This attempt to imagine a safe community without brutal policing was reconvened in 2020 as part of the wave of major BLM protests with a call to defund the police. This project gives an example of what Gilligan is seeking across her films, of a way of founding community living outside capitalism and outside violent policing, with basic human needs met by collective action. Similarly, there is footage of the barricaded camp set up at the intersection where George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis where an activist camp has established a greenhouse, library, clothing depository and medical services for those in need. Gilligan’s film finishes abruptly. In the final section, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is featured talking about how the existence of the US’s four hundred billionaires in 2018, during the first Trump presidency, is predicated on the continuing poverty of the 45 million worst-off in the country, followed by a black screen.

Given the dramatic movements since late 2023 that have unveiled a reshaped global geopolitical order and intensified domestic inequalities, Melanie Gilligan’s series of films are pertinent as they chronicle protest and attempts at community building from the preceding fifteen years. The four films were produced and exhibited between 2016 and 2022, the time periods predominantly of the first Trump presidency and the initial period in power of Joe Biden. Gilligan’s films are timely, not necessarily in charting exactly where we are now, although the protest in Crowds against enhanced ICE powers lands as especially poignant given the increased intensity of current anti-migrant measures, but in acutely picking up on how capitalist precarity, racist policing, and discriminatory social policies in comparatively wealthy countries enact daily injustices on those most vulnerable. In this, they shed light on some of the failures of domestic policy that have in part led to the lurch to the far-right in several countries and, importantly, offer up moments of collective solidarity that might offer alternatives to the growing tendency towards violent ethnic nationalism and authoritarianism. 

As the US sees the first months of the second Trump administration and a lurch further to the right, Gilligan’s themes have become more pertinent. Richard Seymour has argued recently that the emergence of charismatic leaders is largely symptomatic of this rightwards move, while the underlying and easily overlooked cause is an often-widespread sense of societal despair and isolation, largely attributable to failures in macroeconomic policy, in the ability of institutional democracy to adapt to fast-changing situations, and in frayed social relations and forms of collective life. Seymour argues that what has facilitated the reemergence of far-right movements into the mainstream is certainly to do with the inequitable distribution of resources, particularly in terms of higher wages, secure jobs and affordable housing, but that it is not just shortfalls in the material realm that have triggered the resentments and violences we are now seeing but also and significantly in our dwindling sense of social interaction, community, and collective agency. For Seymour, it is through ‘the eros of collective action, that the passions are formed’: it is in this understanding of oneself as a social agent, giving expression to communal needs and hopes, that we enjoy the most satisfying sense of our lives, and, as such, acts as our best defence against the dubious calls of ethnic nationalism and violence.⁶

Looking at Melanie Gilligan’s films now, at a point in time when we are experiencing the earliest signs of just how devastating and brutalising the second presidency of Donald Trump might be in changing our understanding of the social and the collective, is to go back to this moment just before, when protests and collectives were already demanding an alternative route. This is not to suggest that Gilligan’s films take as their direct subject the move to the right, just that across the series of films, as seemingly diverse in their forms as in their themes, there comes into visibility an articulation and defence of the social, of the collective, of the gains of working together on a larger political project.