Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” chant the thousands of bicyclers in San Francisco’s Justin Herman Plaza. Gathered for the monthly Critical Mass ride, this gleeful mob will pour into city streets after work, stopping traffic, angering motorists, and generally having a good time. Since Critical Mass’ founding a decade ago, the group has emerged in hundreds of cities, from Warsaw to Taipei.

Though some are just along for the ride, many cyclists have anti-car sentiments they wish to make known. “End Petrotyranny,” reads the hand-written sign pinned to the back of one rider. “The war and our car use is completely connected,” he says as he waits for the March ride to begin.

“The auto is bad technology–gasoline, pollution, isolation, war,” rattles off Critical Mass co-founder Chris Carlsson as he taps on the drums and cowbell that festoon his bike. A wire sprouting from his black hat dangles a dollar bill that jumps to his rhythm.

Then, true to the group’s anarchist principles, the riders lumber off spontaneously with no predetermined route or leader. It’s time to take back the streets from those hurtling steel boxes, if only for an evening.

Critical Mass and its like-minded brethern are the public face of the anti-car movement, doing whatever it takes to discourage, annoy, and guilt-trip drivers off the road. For them, the car is the root of most evil, poisoning the environment and chewing up communities. The two- and three-car garage, the parking lot, and the elevated highway have usurped front porches, dense shops, and vibrant downtown hubs. Whether cars are wee Minis or hulking Hummers, they are “big, greedy, and aggressive,” in the words of Charles Komanoff, an activist who works with www.cars-suck.org and the Bridge Tolls Advocacy Project. “They make everything the same, and they crowd out everything else.”

Though contemporary anti-car protest has its roots in 1960s activism, today rebellion foments in policy institutes, environmentalist organizations, fringe political groups, and academia. In the form of Arianna Huffington’s anti-SUV ads and the What Would Jesus Drive? campaign, it even threatens to go mainstream. For the most part, today’s activists have spurned old-school revolutionary rhetoric. They are confronting the beast on its own terms: Armed with economic analysis and appeals to free markets, they hope to slay the dragon of American auto-dependence and usher in an era of clean mass transit and dense, vibrant urbanity.

The theoretical backbone behind opposition to automobiles is the search for the “true cost” of driving. To reverse the transformation cars have imposed on our cities and communities, the argument goes, drivers should pay for the havoc cars wreak. If transportation were priced fairly, anti-car activists claim, people would choose places to live that favor dense, urban areas and relegate the car to occasional family trips and Sunday drives. Although anti-car papers debate the “true cost” of driving–a figure proving to be rather slippery–some critics claim that the anti-car argument is riddled with economic errors and that the debate goes much deeper to basic issues of freedom and coercion.

Anti-car activity?

Surrogate feet

One of the most inescapable papers on the true cost of driving is “Going Rate: What it Really Costs to Drive,” a 1992 paper from the World Resources Institute. “Motorists today do not directly pay anything close to the full costs of their driving decisions,” writes co-author James MacKenzie. The current transportation system, he says, favors cars by providing direct and indirect subsidies to drivers. MacKenzie posits that this produces a distorted, inefficient market and encourages people to drive excessively.
  
A host of reports from organizations such as the World Resources Institute and the Sierra Club claim to show that automobiles are massively subsidized by both the government and those who bear the costs of pollution, noise, and accidents. The amount of the subsidy varies from $300 billion per year, calculated in the “Going Rate” report, to a staggering $2.1 trillion, as reported by the Sierra Club.

Anti-automobile economists claim that although drivers do pay for their vehicle operating costs and some percentage of road construction and maintenance, they don’t pay for many other costs: roadway land value; municipal services such as highway police that cater to drivers; air, water, and noise pollution; accident costs; resource consumption; land-use impacts; military expenditures in the Middle East to protect oil supplies; and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. For example, according to the Federal Highway Administration, federal, state, and local disbursements for highways were $129 billion in 2000, while user-fee receipts from fuel and vehicle taxes and tolls totaled only $77 billion. The rest of that $52 billion came from general fund appropriations, property taxes, and “other taxes and fees.” These appropriations comprise a direct subsidy, analysts like MacKenzie say.

Congestion is another large external cost–one not created by a producer or consumer. With free access to the roads at all times, drivers do not have to pay more to drive during commutes, when demand for driving is highest. The result of this “market failure” is traffic jams that wastes the time of drivers, time that MacKenzie estimates to be worth at least $100 billion a year.

In essence, writes Alvin Spivak, author of the anti-car tract The Elephant in the Bedroom, our policy toward the car is like the Soviet policy toward bread: The price is kept so artificially low that over-consumption is bound to occur. According to Spivak, Soviet economics in former President Mikhail Gorbachev’s time made rolls so cheap they were often used as surrogate soccer balls. In the United States, cars have become surrogate feet, Spivak argues–and our use of them has mushroomed out of control because using them seems almost free.

Unable to compete against this giveaway, mass transit, once privatized and profitable, is unable to pay its own way. The government has had to take over and, despite intervention, those hapless souls in America who cannot afford a car are ill served by limping bus and rail systems.

Anti-car papers claim that the solution to these two broken systems–the overused auto and ineffectual mass transit–is to restore the free market to transportation. Whether through an increased gas tax that would push the cost per gallon to anywhere from $2.86 to $16.11 (the range is due to different reports’ findings), congestion pricing, or increased user fees, once people start paying for their use of the roads and the damage they cause to the environment, a whole new pattern of transportation use will emerge.

In Europe, where drivers pay up to three times the amount Americans pay for a gallon of gas, it has not been difficult to implement high gas taxes. Gas taxes are not earmarked for highway and road expenses in Europe, and politicians are more willing to raise the tax to increase general revenue. But in the United States, where gas tax revenue must go toward road projects–though increasingly it is being used for mass transit projects, too–raising the price of driving is a tough sell. Some would argue that the gas tax is a third rail that politicians will never touch for fear of angering a public that considers low gas prices a birthright.

But even if it were politically feasible, some say proponents of an increased gas tax are not necessarily using sound economic analysis, despite their claims of “fair pricing.” In the exhaustive report, “The Annualized Social Cost of Motor Vehicle Use in the U.S.,” University of California at Davis economist Mark Delucchi writes that “there is not a single external cost, with the possible exception of CO2 emissions from vehicles, that in principle is properly addressed by a gas tax.” He argues that the majority of external costs imposed by drivers are not a function of how much gas they use. For example, Delucchi says a gas tax would not be a fair way to compensate for noise pollution because gas consumption is not necessarily related to the amount of noise a car produces. A Harley-Davidson motorcycle or a broken muffler will out-noise a Toyota Camry any day, regardless of gas consumption.

Cutting through downtown.

Driving wherever? Priceless

But even if we could accurately determine all the costs driving imposes on society, would that necessarily mean that driving cars is nothing but one big cost? No, critics argue. As any economist can tell you, cost is just one factor. To properly estimate the worth of something, one must weigh its cost against its benefits–something most anti-car analysts have been accused of failing to do.
  
“I think they are trying to affect a cultural revolution,” says Roy Cordato, an economist with the John Locke Foundation, explaining why those who argue against cars don’t factor in the benefits they bring. Cordato calls the reports he has read, including MacKenzie’s piece and tracts from the Sierra Club, “intellectually dishonest…hyperbolic at best, and just outright deceitful.” The anti-automobile leaders are so wrapped up in imposing their vision of society on the public, he says, that they ignore contradictory data and sound economic analysis.

Cordato is a self-described libertarian who loves living on an acre-and-a-half while still being able to drive just thirty minutes to his office in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. Originally from upstate New York, he speaks with northeastern impatience when the subject turns to anti-car arguments. The costs they are trying to measure, Cordato asserts, are not measurable, and the benefits that are supposed to accrue from a full-cost pricing plan are unknowable. “So-called analyses of the full cost of driving,” he says, “can come to any conclusion the analyst desires.”

The problem, argues Cordato, is that anti-car analysts misunderstand or misuse the economic concept of cost, which refers to opportunity costs–the amount of satisfaction foregone by undertaking a certain activity. For example, if someone must choose between going to the beach or the ballgame and chooses the ballgame, the cost of that decision is the value placed on going to the beach. This value is plainly subjective.

To know the costs of driving, then, “the analysts would have to know the subjectively determined preferences of all the individuals whose lives would be affected” by any changes to the current situation. Because this is impossible, says Cordato, any so-called “full-cost analysis” of driving should not be the basis for a policy that would cause the drastic lifestyle changes advocated by anti-car arguments.

Cordato uses the example of an asthmatic to illustrate his point. We cannot say with certainty that someone with asthma is “better off” in a society where a high gas tax, which theoretically will reduce airborne particulate matter, improves her medical condition. Perhaps the asthmatic values the flexibility and freedom she associates with automobiles more than easier breathing. How are we to know this unless we ask her? And how are we to know, in general, what every individual in society prefers?

Further, if advocates of the full-cost pricing scheme are trying to correct for “market failure”–the linchpin concept in their case against the car–why do they advocate more governmental intervention in the form of taxes, other pricing schemes, or mass transit, Cordato asks. “The transportation system is a mess because there is a lack of markets,” he says. This absence of markets produces a supply of roads that does not reflect demand and generates costs such as noise and pollution that users do not pay. But since we have a completely socialized road system–a centralized authority determines where and when roads are built and does not charge users the market value of using the system–we cannot blame the free market for the system’s failure. “The markets have not failed,” Cordato says. “It is the government, which has a monopoly on the road system, which has failed.”

Highway revolt.

Route 66, Inc.?

Cordato agrees that there is an automobile problem. Roads are under- and overused, and cars cause damages for which victims are not compensated. He points to the interstate highway system as an example: “So much of it is just a waste of concrete. You’ve got miles and miles of super-highway that is empty most of the time.” His solution is to take planning out of the hands of the inept government, privatize the roads and have operators charge people to drive on them, which is abhorrent to anti-car activists. Privatization would take politics out of transit choices and leave them up to the consumer, not the lobbyists. Costly, unprofitable enterprises like unused highways, subways, and light rail likely would go bankrupt. Private bus companies would flourish–not a bright prospect for those who want to lessen or even eradicate car use.
  
For Cordato, central planners and the government can never respond to demand as well as the market, in which millions of individuals make specific economic decisions in incredibly varied situations. When a central authority tries to determine what all these individuals need, then allocate resources and charge fees accordingly, he warns others to be on the lookout for bread-roll soccer balls.

Even if planners could determine what needed to go where and when, special interests would tear their designs apart. Libertarians fear that when you couple these tendencies with the coercive power of the government–eminent domain in the field of town and transportation planning–you have disaster: Just look at the highways that roll through uninhabited ranch lands or have decimated the urban fabric, ripping through neighborhoods in the face of local opposition.

But if roads were privatized, Cordato argues, people would get what they demand. Privatization also would go further in solving the problem of external costs that concern anti-car activists. Whereas now it is virtually impossible to sue the government for pollution caused by the use of its roadways, private companies would not enjoy the government’s luxury of “sovereign immunity” and would have to take issues of harm into account when they plan the construction and operation of roads. If too many people are able to sue a company for the pollution and noise that accompanies the superhighway planned for their backyard, the company probably won’t build it.

What the issue comes down to for libertarians is individual freedom as opposed to the coercive nature of centralized planning. We simply can’t know if society will be “better off” with reduced car use unless we claim to know what is good for all individuals and force that “good” upon them. Only the free market can give individuals what they want without forcing them to comply with the vision of a few far-away planners, argue those who oppose regulating car use.

“Freedom is the one value that allows other values to flourish,” Cordato says. This, he reiterates, is the nut of the debate, something either dismissed or not discussed in anti-car literature. “I want people to get what they want,” he says, with the usual caveat of not allowing the coercion of others. But the anti-car activists, he claims, don’t seem to want that.

Americans have a history of revolting against what Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, called the centralized city planning of “high-minded social thinkers.” This April, residents of San Francisco, home of the first American highway revolt in 1959, tore down some of the elevated highway built across busy Market Street. The lesson seems clear: Far-away authorities and social engineers have no business determining local issues. Are anti-car advocates following the central planning footsteps of the highway builders of yore? If so, the revolutionary visions of the movement could simply lead to more rebellion. In our culture of freedom and choice, utopia may have to be won one driver at a time.

Story Index
                    
MARKETPLACE >

A portion of each sale goes to Inthefray.com

Driving Forces: The Automobile, its Enemies, and the Politics of Mobility
By James Dunn | Brookings Institution Press | 1998
Amazon.com

ORGANIZATIONS >

Bridge Toll Advocacy Project
URL: http://www.bridgetolls.org
New York

Car Busters
URL: http://www.carbusters.org
Prague, Czech Republic

Cars Suck
URL: http://www.cars-suck.org
New York

Critical Mass
URL: http://www.critical-mass.org
Worldwide
Note: There is no official Critical Mass web site; this is just one of many sites devoted to the ride

Federal Highway Administration
URL: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov
Washington, D.C.

John Locke Foundation
URL: http://www.johnlocke.org
Raleigh, North Carolina

Victoria Transport Policy Institute
URL: http://www.vtpi.org
Victoria, British Columbia
A wealth of information on transportation issues, including a huge annotated bibliography on transportation at URL: http://www.vtpi.org/bib.xls

University of California Transportation Center
URL: http://www.uctc.net
Berkeley, California
Download or order scholarly articles on transportation issues, often at no charge.

World Resources Institute
URL: http://www.wri.org
Washington, D.C.
Published the influential report “The Going Rate: What It Really Costs to Drive.”

TOPICS > COST OF DRIVING >

“America’s Autos on Welfare”
URL: http://www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/articles/subsidies.asp
Sierra Club | 1996
A summary of the economic analyses of the cost of driving.

“The Annualized Social Cost of Motor Vehicle Use in the U.S., 1990-1991”
URL: http://www.uctc.net/papers/311.pdf
By Mark Delucchi | Institute of Transportation Studies | 1997
The above link is to an overview of Delucchi’s extensive report. For additional sections, see URL: http://www.uctc.net/papers/papersnumber.html#300

“The Central Planning Of Lifestyles: Automobility and The Illusion of Full Cost Pricing”
URL: http://www.cei.org/gencon/025,01606.cfm
By Roy Cordato | The Competitive Enterprise Institute | 1997
Criticizes arguments made by economic analyses that purport to show that autos receive subsidies.

The Elephant in the Bedroom
URL: http://www.flora.org/afo/elephant-cont.html
By Alvin Spivak and Stanley Hart | Samizdat Press | 1992
Book that purports to show that autos are receiving giant subsidies. The entire book is online

“Saving Energy in U.S. Transportation”
URL: http://www.wws.princeton.edu/~ota/disk1/1994/9432_n.html
United States Congress, Office of Technology Assessment | July 1994
Full PDF of the article on the cost of driving and other transportation issues. The Office of Technology Assessment is now defunct.

TOPICS > LIBERTARIANISM >

Brief introduction to libertarianism
URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/
Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy
A scholarly and more objective introduction than those found below.
URL: http:// www.libertariansim.org
URL: http://www.self-gov.org/libertarianism.html.
Good bibliography, including books and articles on left and right libertarianism as well as some critical publications.

“

In The Fray Contributor

The faded grandeur of a burned-out neighborhood cinema hall is no match for newer Delhi multiplexes.

It was the end of March, Delhi was heating up after a brief winter, and revolution was in the air. Even the festival program knew it: There is a revolution in the air,” it said. “A great democratic vista of the people’s work is opening up.” Digital video, that most subversive of tape formats, had finally come to India, heralded by the apostles of independent film. And the 2001 Digital Talkies International Film Festival was to be its showcase, its forum, its Mecca. The assembled moviegoers were critical, but ready to escape the tyranny of Bollywood epics, to see new stories told by new authors, to give up, at least temporarily, the dreamy quality of celluloid for the grainy and gritty drama of digital video.

For Delhi’s up-and-coming generation of filmmakers, digital was more than just another film format. Digital, in a word, meant democracy. Consumer digital video cameras cost tens of thousands of dollars less than 16mm or 35mm film cameras, use cheap tapes as opposed to costly film stock, and create footage that can be edited on a home computer and easily distributed on DVD or over the Internet. Though criticized by some for its granular, unbeautiful look, digital video was clearly a cost-effective way of shooting, ideal for strapped filmmakers breaking away from Bollywood.

And break away they did. By most measures, Asia’s first-ever digital film festival was a huge success. The sponsorship was generous, the jury internationally acclaimed, and the screenings full. Digital Talkies, the festival organizer, saw two of their own features win awards. The company was ready to pursue distribution full tilt: in theaters, on TV, and via broadband Internet. The shackles that kept Indian film from experimentation, from innovation–from anything not involving an extravagant dance number shifting from Egypt to the Alps with every refrain–were finally being unlocked, and it seemed there was no looking back.

Yet something went wrong. Two years later, digital video’s promised democratization of the Indian film industry has yet to happen. Some filmmakers say the blame lies with Digital Talkies. After the smashing success of its 2001 festival, the company lined up even more films for the following year. But the 2002 festival was postponed to March 2003. Then, abruptly, it was canceled. And the new generation that Digital Talkies had helped inspire–filmmakers who truly believed that digital was the “next generation” of entertainment–suddenly discovered their work no longer had a venue.

Indie filmmakers embrace DV, commercial concerns hold back–the tale is a familiar one. In the United States, critically acclaimed films like Dancer in the Dark, last summer’s The Fast Runner, and this winter’s Personal Velocity (awarded best cinematography at Sundance) have racked up decent profits in art-house box offices. But despite the messianic attempts of George Lucas, who shot and distributed his latest Star Wars film digitally, Hollywood has been slow to bank its celluloid infrastructure on the promise of a digital future. Theaters have been reluctant to invest, scared off by the $100,000-plus price tags of digital projectors. And even digital-friendly chains like Madstone, which planned to open digital theaters nationwide, have ended up sticking with more traditional products in order to stay afloat.

Hollywood, of course, is no Bollywood. India is the world’s largest film producer, releasing over 800 features a year. It boasts a strong industry infrastructure, three billion tickets sold annually, and a proliferation of multiplexes in urban centers. India is also diverse, with 70 percent of the population living in rural or remote areas and over 18 recognized languages. There is no end of new stories to be told. Whether these stories make their way to film, however, is a different matter. The struggle over digital video in India has become a struggle over who gets to tell the stories.

So far, the revolution has stalled. While Hollywood looks for ways to cash in on the U.S. indie craze, the appetite for art-house films in India remains restricted to urban areas and a certain cultural elite. Independent film in India has been around since Satyajit Ray made his famous Apu trilogy in the 1950s, and “parallel cinema” is still supported by the government. But filmmakers in India have yet to convince mainstream audiences, especially the majority living outside the big cities, to try something other than masala, the tried-and-true Mumbai mix of action, family tragedy, and song and dance.

Masala is the mush you’ll find in the 200 features that Bollywood puts out every year. Each costs an average of Ru 50,000,000 ($1 million), lasts around three hours, and allows little room for anything that smacks of originality. Those who can afford Ru 150 ($3) see these films in plush multiplexes that rival any suburban movie theater in America. Alongside imported Hollywood hits, films like Kabhi Khusi, Kabhi Gam (Sometimes Happiness, Sometimes Sadness) show the same big stars rearranged in different poses. The stadium seats recline, the surround sound embraces, cell phones interrupt, and at intermission, you can even eat nachos.

Yet all is not well in Bollywood these days. The sure-fire formula has fared poorly in recent years. Last year, 90 percent of big releases were box office flops.

So in the summer of 2000, when two twenty-something scions of commercial empires, Pia Singh and Hari Bhartiya, started chatting during a course at New York University, there seemed at least as many reasons to float a digital production and distribution company in India as in America, where similar startups were magnets for venture capital. The two returned to India, teamed up with director Shekhar Kapur (The Four Feathers), and recruited a luminous board of advisors, including Mira Nair, director of the crossover success Monsoon Wedding. By March 2001, with the backing of the goliath India Tobacco Company, they had organized the first Digital Talkies International Film Festival.

Two girls take time out from begging near a multiplex in South Delhi.

‘He’s a policeman. How can he be homosexual?’

Yamini Tiaari, Digital Talkies’ head of production, is still in her twenties, a hipster who trades the traditional Hindi “accha,” the equivalent of “okay,” for a breezy “coolio, coolio.” Ensconced in her office in the back of a yet-to-be resurrected cinema hall in Old Delhi, Tiaari describes the 2001 festival as history in the making. “It was brilliant, a huge huge success. Even the 10 a.m. screenings were full.”

Tiaari’s exuberance is not unwarranted. Of the roughly 175 films submitted to the 2001 festival, 40 percent were Indian. Before plans for the follow-up 2002 festival were scrapped, organizers had already collected 150 entries from India alone, 75 percent created with the Digital Talkies competition in mind.

Yet as early as that first festival, there were signs that digital video might not fare so well in India. Two features–both produced by Digital Talkies and intended afterward for domestic distribution–did not receive the censor’s sanction to be shown.

India’s Central Board of Film Certification tightly controls which domestic films are distributed for public viewing. The board’s definition of obscenity tends to disallow novel and/or realistic portrayals of romantic relationships, while lascivious dance sequences and even rape are easily approved. The latest round of films to be rejected included Anand Patwardhan’s War and Peace, which criticizes India’s nuclear weapons program. Most filmmakers don’t bother fighting the censors; Patwardhan’s willingness to wage a costly court battle against the board is an exception.

When the board nixed their features at the last minute, Digital Talkies was in a bind. Divya Drishti, about a quack fortune teller’s involvement in a suburban community’s sexual intrigues, and Urf Professor, a profane flick about a Mumbai hit man, were quickly moved to the British Council’s auditorium, thus temporarily evading Indian law. Though they saved their star projects from getting no play at all, Digital Talkies had to make do with inferior projection and limited seating of 150. Any hopes of future distribution in India were firmly squashed.

Festival organizer Siddarth Kumar was outraged. In his eyes, Indian films were singled out unfairly for censoring while foreign films escaped. “I showed pornography at 9 a.m. that came from Czechoslovakia,” he says. Then there was the board’s hypersensitivity to the portrayal of a gay police officer in Divya Drishti. Fellow organizer Ankur Tewari describes their objection: “He holds a very responsible position in Indian society. He’s a policeman. How can he be homosexual?”

Digital Talkies’ unforeseen brush with censorship wasn’t the only blow to the fledgling company. Though the 2001 festival created a great deal of enthusiasm, it broke even and didn’t yield the profit-making deals the organizers had hoped for. Still, the second annual festival was planned for March 2002. But by the time that date drew nigh, access to broadband Internet (which would have allowed digital films to be beamed to theaters and even viewers at home) was still spotty throughout the country, and India-Pakistan border tensions were discouraging sponsors. Frustrated entrants were postponed for one month, then two, then an entire year for a festival which has yet to materialize. Essentially, Digital Talkies pulled the plug. Critics accuse them of canceling the entire movement in the process.

“‘Go out there and make your film, we’ll help you in every way we can’–that was the premise that Ankur and I tried to market,” says Kumar, who is now running his own production company with Tewari. In the festival program, Digital Talkies promised as much–to “help independent filmmakers tell their stories, and to ensure a pathway for those stories to an audience.” But, today, the company’s stance has changed. “We are not in a position to aid digital filmmakers at this time,” goes the official line. Digital Talkies says it is focusing on producing ads for television on film and Digibeta (a video format used on television), creating an MTV sitcom, and developing a fleet of traditional cinema halls. From Kumar’s perspective, the move is a betrayal. “Instead of a movement for independent filmmakers, DV has become a cheap way for people to produce the same shit they have been producing all their life,” he says. “There’s very little activity left now because the support that Digital Talkies promised was dropped when they realized that there were no immediate returns to be made.”

“Business is business,” says Vijaya Singh, Pia Singh’s twenty-nine-year-old cousin, a former banker who now oversees Digital Talkies’ production house and festival. “We really believe in the concept [of digital video], but maybe we’re a little too early. We had to get from this idealistic platform onto the reality bandwagon.” Those who “don’t see the virtue of morphing” with the times, Singh says, “exhibit a childlike behavioral pattern.” She offers this advice for future filmmakers: “Do what you want to do but don’t be foolish. There is no point wasting money, effort, and aspirations.”

Kumar describes his old group at Digital Talkies as “dukandars,” Hindi for “someone who keeps a shop.” “That’s anathema for an independent filmmaker, he cannot associate himself with someone who is a shopkeeper,” he says. Yet Kumar is no impractical idealist. He wouldn’t mind being a dukandar himself, so long as he can devote himself to independent rather than mainstream pursuits–sort of like an Indian Harvey Weinstein.

In spite of all that’s happened, Kumar still sees profit in DV. “You could have done the festival a second year with other sponsors for half the cost because now you had expertise. You might have made some money if you took that content and represented it and made deals abroad to sell it, especially in Europe.” He points to the Karachi International Film Festival as an example of what can be accomplished with fewer resources and greater determination. “It’s not that there is less censorship in Pakistan, it’s just that those people have proved themselves to be a more committed bunch than us. They started [their] festival in 2001, nine months after ours, and they managed to do it a second time. That’s key in a festival.”

Other filmmakers have fewer regrets. Sidarth Srinivasnan, director of the banned film Divya Drishti, doesn’t put much stock in digital video changing the playing field. “Whatever revolutionary change is going to happen,” he says, “is going to come from the commercial arena.” Though DV helped him break into the industry with his first feature, Srinivasnan questions the benefit of setting the masses loose with the technology. “If thousands of people who harbored dreams of making movies were able to make them on DV, you’d have loads of shit,” he says. “The thing with 35mm is, it automatically distinguishes the boys from the men.”

Lining up for a Bollywood blockbuster outside a classic cinema hall.

Telling a different story

Though chastened, the prophets of digital video have not yet given up on India. Twenty-seven-year-old grassroots activist Venkatesh Veeraraghavan is one of the true believers. The founder of a cooperative of like-minded digital producers, he is campaigning to expand audio-visual curriculum offerings in schools and is working on an experimental film from footage shot in a North Delhi slum.

Veeraraghavan can often be found in front of his Macintosh computer, “the finest of species,” in an understatedly cool South Delhi studio that doubles as his living quarters. Black-and-white track-lit portraits of Gandhi, Snoop Doggy Dog, and Courtney Love look on as his hands orchestrate the techno score he has created to accompany shots of poor and beautiful children celebrating Diwali, the Indian festival of lights.

The frames are mesmerizing, granting access to domestic scenes that as yet have no place on the screens of Indian theaters: a six-year-old cleaning a spoon with sand, two eight-year-old girls smiling uncertainly at the intrusion of a camera, a bold boy twisting the lens 180 degrees so he can watch himself grimacing into the viewfinder. Veeraraghavan’s children belong to a laboring community from Uttar Pradesh that relocated to Delhi for work. His camera follows them closely, jerking frequently, at one point letting loose in an ebullient spin. Pinks and greens stand out, giving the shots a painted quality. As the sun goes down and the children light candles and sparklers, the limitations of natural light evoke memory, emulating the home footage of a childhood birthday party.

Veeraraghavan doesn’t own the Sony Digital 8 he uses to shoot the children. He borrows a friend’s camera on the weekends, then spends the rest of the week editing the film on his Mac. It took two months for his subjects to get used to a stranger, but it helped that he had no dollies, no lights, no crew to get in the way–just a camera the size of a shoebox.

While Verraraghavan toils away on his experimental film, other digital filmmakers have settled for now on less ambitious uses for their high technology. The more market-minded duo of Kumar and Tewari are using digital video to shoot documentary footage that they hope to sell in Europe. Their production company, Framework, is banking on hopes that Indian culture will become the latest exotic fashion in countries like Sweden, where Tewari believes “Asia is the flavor of the next three seasons.” Even Digital Talkies insists it hasn’t left the digital-video market just yet. Vijaya Singh talks about making space on the schedule for a “Digital Film Month” at one of their local theaters, with donated or sponsored equipment.

The sad truth is, even if there were digital theaters in India, there wouldn’t be enough digital content to show. Yet developing that content seems impossible without access to audiences. Resolving this chicken-and-egg scenario may take several years. But India has several things working in its favor: a growing film audience, a relatively light (and thus easily replaced) investment in standard projectors and other traditional technology, a well-established and skilled filmmaking industry, a large information technology sector, and the potential for establishing broadband networks that could bring digital video into every Indian home.

What happens next may depend on the fate of Let’s Talk. By director Ram Madhvani, it’s the first Indian movie to be shot on DV, transferred to film, and distributed to domestic audiences. The novel story, with only two rooms and two characters, portrays a young woman struggling to inform her husband that he is not the father of her baby. Let’s Talk was released in December to a limited number of cinemas. Will it win over audiences used to panoramic song-and-dance numbers? Bollywood will be watching.

Story Index

CONTRIBUTORS >

The writer
Nicole Leistikow, Inthefray.com News Editor

ORGANIZATIONS >

Catalyst Fusion Lab
Delhi-based cooperative of digital filmmakers.
URL: http://www.catalystfusionlab.org

Digital Talkies
URL: http://www.digitaltalkies.com

Karachi International Film Festival
URL: http://www.karafilmfest.com/home.htm

Madstone Theaters
Site of the upscale, art-house U.S. theater chain.
URL: http://www.madstonetheaters.com

National Film Development Corporation
The Mumbai-based Indian government agency that subsidizes and supports independent film.
URL: http://www.nfdcindia.com

PEOPLE >

Satyajit Ray biography
A short bio of Ray, arguably India’s best-known independent filmmaker.
URL: http://www.upperstall.com/people/satyajitray.html

TOPICS > BOLLYWOOD >

“Bollywood”
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
URL: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywood

TOPICS > DIGITAL VIDEO >

Digital Cinema Magazine
Los Angeles-based magazine of the digital video industry.
URL: http://www.uemedia.com/CPC/digitalcinemamag

Dogme95
A Danish collective of film directors who typically shoot on consumer DV cameras.
URL: http://www.dogme95.dk

“India’s First DV Film Deserves Kudos”
By Deepa Gumaste | Rediff Movies | November 2002
URL: http://www.rediff.com/entertai/2002/nov/26mami.htm

Let’s Talk
Official site of Ram Madhvani’s latest digital film.
URL: http://www.letstalkmovie.com

“Methods: Film or Video”
Unhollywood Guide to Movie Making
URL: http://unhollywood.com/film-vid.htm

“

Nicole Leistikow

“So where’s Marcus going to school?” Since Sara S. first enrolled her then two-year-old son at Bolton Hill Nursery in Baltimore, the question has become more and more frequent. (The pressure has grown so uncomfortable, in fact, that Marcus and Sara are not their real names.) Now that Marcus is turning five and starting kindergarten in the fall, Sara is starting to avoid the neighbors and acquaintances who broach the subject at nearly every opportunity. To Sara, the judgment in their words and tone is explicit: “It doesn’t imply, it says, these people are going to judge us by the decision we make.”

Sara’s situation isn’t as familiar as it sounds. She’s not just another hyper-competitive urban mother whose child’s future will be plunged into non-Ivy League darkness if not accepted into the perfect prestige kindergarten. The pressure on Sara is of an entirely different nature — a vocal group of parents in the middle-class Bolton Hill neighborhood is encouraging her to enroll Marcus in an experimental public school in one of the nation’s most maligned school systems.

If Baltimore City Public Schools was a brand name, its image would require a massive reinvention. Among many middle-class parents in the city and its suburbs, the mere mention of BCPS evokes incompetence, inefficiency, academic stagnation, and physical peril. Like many cities across the country, Baltimore is experimenting with new ways to restore faith in its schools. Though Maryland is not among the thirty-plus states that have passed legislation allowing charter schools, it did approve the New Schools Initiative in 1995. The nine public schools created under this mandate, like charter schools, have more flexibility in curriculum development and student and staff selection, and are run by outside operators contracted by the school board.

Hardly any of the young professionals buying bargain houses in Baltimore want their children to go to their local public school. This is no less true in Bolton Hill, a gay and arts-friendly neighborhood of nineteenth-century brick townhouses on Baltimore’s predominantly black and poor west side, than in less progressive parts of the city. The idealistic dream of becoming part of a renaissance and moving back to a city where “white flight” has not yet slowed, stalls out on the subject of education. It remains to be seen whether Baltimore’s New Initiative Schools will be able to sell themselves to these middle-class parents, whose needs have historically been met by the city and county’s numerous private schools. And alternative public schools still need to address the generations-old problems of race and class that still divide some parts of Baltimore into a black/white city.

In Bolton Hill, a growing group of parents are deciding whether to return to the public school system. Midtown Academy, a New Initiative School, is gaining converts from the ranks of Bolton Hill Nursery, a popular daycare and pre-kindergarten school. Besides Midtown, there are two other options: the traditionally public Mount Royal Elementary and a host of private schools anywhere from fifteen to ninety minutes away. For Bolton Hill parents, shopping for schools before their child turns five is an agonizing process complicated by a wide variety of practical concerns, moral and political values, and social aspirations. The stakes are high, sometimes pitting dearly held convictions about the value of public school in a democracy against the intense fear of not doing right by a child. One’s choice is closely monitored in this small community, and judged accordingly.

Pounding the pavement

Much of the pressure on Sara S. and other parents comes from Bolton Hill resident John Lau. The ringleader of a campaign to fill the ten kindergarten slots reserved for Bolton Hill kids at Midtown Academy, John lives with wife Iris and daughter Hannah just a few blocks away from both Sara and Bolton Hill Nursery. The upright piano and violin in the corner of their small living room attest to their interest in playing chamber music with friends. Hannah, one of Marcus’s classmates at the Nursery, has her own little desk in the dining room, on which her current projects are neatly organized.

Till now, Bolton Hill has scorned Midtown, with most of the slots going to residents of Reservoir Hill, a blacker, poorer neighborhood whose children mostly attend Mount Royal, a larger K-8 school of 850 students. (The other ten slots of Midtown’s twenty-person incoming class are reserved for Reservoir Hill; any remaining open spaces are filled by lottery.) Midtown is much newer and smaller that Mount Royal, with only one class in each grade. Since it opened in 1997 with grades kindergarten through third, the school has added one grade a year, and will offer eighth grade starting in the fall. John guesses that the upper grades “are probably 90 percent African American, the lower grades probably 70 percent,” and that kindergarten this fall “could be up to 50-50” if the mostly white parents in Bolton Hill follow through on their promises to enroll their kids. “The school’s trying to diversify, but no one wants to be the first,” he says.

John, who first experienced American public schooling when he immigrated to Tennessee from China at age fourteen, is determined to change Bolton Hill’s under-utilization of Midtown. It was he who convinced Iris, who came to America from China only when she was ready to get her MBA, that public school could be valuable. “I think a little adversity is good for kids,” he explains. “I would like for Hannah to be able to see that there are people struggling, that life is not just everything given to you, and appreciate what she has, and that she has to work for it.” He also thinks Bolton Hill’s kids and their well-educated, well-off parents are the key to the school’s success. “I would say that maybe half of the reason [we’re sending Hannah there] is because…we want to see the school succeed.”

The dream of a neighborhood school

John’s optimism seems shared at Midtown Academy itself. Principal Diane Isle is stern as she passes a few stragglers stepping out of line on their way to art class, but her overall effect is that of a determined and enthusiastic cheerleader. Her purple headband, blue velour jumpsuit, and bouncy blond hair don’t hurt either. She shows off her small building proudly. An art room displays models of Grecian pottery that students are attempting to replicate. An English room sports the sign “The Biggest Sin in Writing is to Be Boring!” Most classrooms have at least two adults, twenty-two or fewer kids, and a surprising amount of one-on-one instruction. Part of the explanation is that Midtown has excellent relationships with teacher training programs in the city and benefits from a core of interns. Isle actively courts Bolton Hill parents and knows that a high teacher-to-pupil ratio is a strong selling point. And Midtown, like all schools in Baltimore, is focused on raising its Maryland State Performance Assessment Program (MSPAP) scores. This year the school did well, averaging 41.9 (the goal is an average score of 70 out of 100), nearly twice the average for the rest of Baltimore City’s public schools.

Midtown’s ninety-hour-per-year parent volunteer requirement also virtually ensures that high-powered parents will be directly involved in maintaining the school. At the same time, this requirement may put pressure on poorer, less available families to either shape up or ship out. But for now, the main problem is a lack of space. They’ve been efficient with what they have — their physical education program, for example, is focused around Tae Kwon Do taught in the cafeteria. However they desperately want to expand and are being hampered by some resistance in the neighborhood, primarily from nearby residents who don’t appreciate the sounds of children getting out of school.

But for John, a neighborhood school — noise and all — complements his vision of an ideal city life. He has been in Bolton Hill for six years and describes it as “real community that you can’t find anywhere else.” He imagines the suburbs as a place where “you just drive up and your garage door opens, you pull your car in and the garage door closes, the TV turns on and that’s the end of the day.” So John carries out his campaign, whether at the local swimming club or at the Hidden Bean, the local corner coffee shop. Because there are only ten slots, assigned by lottery, John jokes about being too successful in his efforts to convince other Bolton Hill parents to give Midtown a try. “It’s ironic that we’re now thinking that maybe we should apply to private schools as a back up,” he says, but finishes with a genuine “but that’s good!”

Although Mount Royal is also a neighborhood school only two blocks away from the Lau family, they aren’t considering the predominantly black school, not even as a back up. If Hannah’s “the only person of only one race then she may not feel too comfortable,” says John. “Just to be honest.”

Opting out of the ‘experiment’

WHERE TO NEXT? While their parents contemplate the next step, students get to work at Bolton Hill Nursery school. (Nicole Leistikow)

Sara S. has a smiling brown face and doesn’t hesitate to voice her opinions. An attorney for the state of Maryland, she calls herself “an older mom” at age forty-six, is well-established in her career, and is dedicated to driving Marcus to extracurricular activities such as gymnastics (though she wishes Marcus’s dad would do some of the chauffeuring as well). Her kitchen has been taken over by Marcus, who is building extensive highways for his Hot Wheels out of masking tape. Both the kitchen and the dining room feature elaborate collections of his artwork, toys, and projects. There is a comfortable messiness about the place, a feeling that one could begin a special project, and others would respect it, even if it got in the way, as much as practicality allowed.

In a recent conference with Marcus’s teacher at Bolton Hill Nursery, Sara learned that her son sometimes “refuses to speak in circle time,” an evaluation that has furthered her resolve to consider a private school. “[Marcus] is not pushy,” she explains, “so if someone gets in front of him, most of the time that person can get in front of him.” She was frustrated watching one of his Saturday gymnastics classes. “My kid was constantly overlooked in a class of eleven because he’s quiet and no trouble,” she says, citing “inexperienced teachers” who spent all their time wrangling ill-behaved children back into line. Marcus, Sara says, missed one turn on the rings, one turn on the trampoline, and two turns doing somersaults.

She believes that the small class size and higher teacher retention rate of a private school will be best for her son’s personality, and she seems to relish having the option of sending her son to prestigious McDonogh, the $14,000-a-year private school that’s their number one choice. McDonogh’s campus emulates a university’s, with a separate library and an indoor swimming pool. Sara’s own educational experience was “in an insolated, lower middle-class African American environment. Up until the time I was a teenager I don’t think I ever had, except for in youth orchestra, any regular contact outside of the black community in D.C.” She’s glad Marcus is growing up in a more diverse, more “realistic” setting.

Midtown Academy is Marcus’s parents’ number three choice, after the private Grace and St. Peter’s. Sara was insulted when a white colleague, who had struggled to send her own kids to private Roland Park Country Day, advised her to check out Midtown. Seeing her associate’s suggestion “as some kind of classist-slash-racist statement,” she resented the assumption that because she is black, she doesn’t have the resources to send Marcus to a private school. “She has two girls that she had to raise by herself, but she struggled to send them to a private school,” says Sara of her co-worker. “She stretched it, but I should just settle for this public school? She’s never been and she knows nothing about it, except for what she’s read.” The ability to consider a private school signifies an important advantage to Sara, especially in this city. Even if Midtown were “the number one [public] school in Baltimore City,” she says, “I still would have concerns and still would consider sending him somewhere that I thought he’d be a little bit more protected.”

Sara echoes the refrain of many parents when she says, “I don’t want to experiment with my child.” Though she is in favor of public schooling in general, and although Midtown offers many advantages that Mount Royal does not, it hasn’t been around long enough for Sara to see it as reliable. And she resents pressure from people in the neighborhood “who feel this experiment is the right thing to do, supporting the public school system, and if you don’t do that, you’re doing something that is not the right thing to do, as in wrong, as in politically incorrect and maybe morally also.”

Although Sara has a friend in the school system who told her not to overlook Mount Royal because of its strong reputation and high standardized test scores, she did not seriously consider it for Marcus. She echoes the sentiments of many Bolton Hillers when she says, “I have seen the kids coming back and forth from Mount Royal and I haven’t been particularly impressed with their behavior in public.” Because of resident complaints that the students litter and are rowdy, the school developed a “character education program” and stationed volunteers at problem intersections to supervise children’s behavior on their way to and from school. Despite these efforts, relations with the neighborhood remain somewhat strained.

The school on the wrong side of the street

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD”: Students on their way to Mount Royal Elementary in Bolton Hill, a Baltimore neighborhood. (Nicole Leistikow)

Few Bolton Hill parents bring up the topic of Mount Royal voluntarily, or can boast of having actually set foot inside the building. And though the school is only a block away from Midtown, one woman located Mount Royal “on the other side of the neighborhood.” It may have been a slip of the tongue, but others also exaggerate the geographic distance of the school. Indeed, there is a cultural and class distance between Bolton Hill and Mount Royal, and that may be what many in the neighborhood unconsciously perceive.

Mount Royal principal Mark Frankel actually isn’t much interested in why Bolton Hill parents, as a rule of thumb, do not even consider Mount Royal as an option. Frankel, in his early fifties, is short and dapper, and looks more like a winning lawyer in his suit and glasses than an elementary school principal. His humor and charm serve him well, because he doesn’t mince words. He is blunt in his surmises about Bolton Hill’s lack of interest in Mount Royal, which he says is 99.8 percent African American. “I think parents want their kids to be with children like them,” he says. “Certain schools are better calling cards.” In Frankel’s ideal world, the main determinant in school choice should be high standards.

And Mount Royal’s high standards have delivered. The school performs in the top 5 percent of schools receiving Title 1 funds (federal monies for disadvantaged institutions). Though 80 percent of its students receiving free or reduced lunch, the school’s MSPAP scores averaged 38.8 this year and its fifth graders typically score first in the state in math. Classes sizes are eighteen and under in the lower school, and twenty-five in grades six through eight. Linda Eberhart, Baltimore City’s teacher of the year, teaches at Mount Royal and touts the school at every public appearance. And while Frankel’s school has had positive coverage on CNN and NBC, Bolton Hillers still aren’t convinced that there’s a jewel hiding in their midst.

But the stigma of being part of BCPS seems impossible to overcome. Parents like Sara, for example, cite concerns about violence at the school. In fact, Frankel had to fight to retain the school police officer — the expense was deemed unnecessary because no incidents had ever been reported. “We don’t market the school,” says Frankel of Bolton Hill. His decision not to focus on recruiting middle-class parents suggests he sees the effort as a losing battle.

Why don’t Bolton Hill parents, who are enthusiastic about public schooling, see Mount Royal as a brand they can trust? Or even a brand they want to know more about? Cindy Patak, who sent two daughters to Mount Royal and now has one at Midtown, suggests possible answers.

What goes unsaid

Cindy is a youthful-looking city planner in her early forties, with spiky hair and black leather jacket. Over coffee at the Hidden Bean, Cindy sighs in frustration. “I know a lot of people in Bolton Hill couldn’t believe I ever sent my kids to Mount Royal,” she says. “I’m just tired of hearing the same response or lack of response — they stutter and they look to find words that are acceptable. They kind of lament about education in the city of Baltimore as a whole.”

Cindy actually lives outside of Bolton Hill in Union Square, a small enclave of middle-class families situated around a green in SoWeBo (southwest Baltimore), which is otherwise one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. When she moved there in 1988, Mount Royal was accepting students outside its “zone” to its Gifted and Talented Program (since disbanded). She is satisfied with the education her two daughters, Eleina and Lela, received there, though by the time Lela graduated from eighth grade the school was experiencing some difficulties.

Cindy is adamant about her daughters’ right to a free public education, and did consider Mount Royal once again for her youngest daughter. But by that time, getting in from outside the neighborhood was virtually impossible. She is glad that seven-year-old Alicia is in second grade at Midtown, which may not be admitting kids outside the neighborhood this year if Bolton Hill fills up its ten slots. Although Bolton Hill’s previous reluctance to try Midtown may have benefited Alicia, Cindy is critical about neighborhood attitudes. “A lot of parents from Bolton Hill Nursery did not send their kids to Midtown, and while they used a lot of other words for it, I think a lot did have to do with race,” she says. “Everyone talked about how great [the school] was, and what a great idea,” but when it came down to it, only two children followed Alicia to Midtown from nursery school.

Yet Cindy, who is white, is more comfortable with Alicia, whose father is African American, at the more diverse Midtown. She feels Lela and Eleina, who are half Moroccan, may have suffered from an attitude at Mount Royal, typical in Baltimore, that insists on dividing people into black and white categories that don’t always apply. Midtown is more diverse, more bi-racial, and more open. This openness may be what is changing the minds of so many parents in Bolton Hill — parents who have been skittish about choosing a predominately black school for their children — for the first time this year. Midtown offers a convenient compromise.

A new year, a new class, a New School

Next fall, a new kindergarten class will enter Midtown Academy. And even if Bolton Hillers renege on their promises to attend, at least Midtown was in the running. Mount Royal was not. Despite high test scores, a strong reputation, and a principal who excels in obtaining resources, it is seen by many as simply a poor black school — and therefore, quite simply, not a choice. Unfazed, Mark Frankel is focused on serving his majority poor, majority black children and their parents. He does not intend to address middle-class fears, or to change his school’s image to something more attractive to Bolton Hill parents.

Midtown’s success in shaping itself into something more alternative and fashionable is a result of its ability to distinguish and distance itself from traditional public schools like Mount Royal — racially, culturally, and academically. Midtown Academy shows that middle-class parents will come back to the public school system, but only if courted appropriately. In that sense, the experiment has been a success. But for other public schools, it seems, all the work in the world may not change the minds of the middle class.

In the meantime, acceptance letters were mailed out last week. At least twelve Bolton Hill families — a record number — applied to Midtown Academy. For the first time in its history, the school’s Bolton Hill slots are filled, and some families had to be turned down. John Lau describes the competition this year as a “180 degree turn” from last year, when only two Bolton Hill kids enrolled. Hannah Lau was accepted, and her father will find out in the fall if his vision of a neighborhood school is shared.”

Nicole Leistikow