NOT LONG AGO, we reviewed a couple of books about the late-2000 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization.

Today, we look at a couple of videotaped documentaries chronicling these same events, Trade Off and This Is What Democracy Looks Like.

Trade Off was directed by Shaya Mercer, produced by ex-LA filmmaker Thomas Lee Wright, and made with a centralized crew (though with liberal use of TV footage of the conference and the protests).

Democracy comes from the Independent Media Center (which opened as a clearinghouse for WTO-protest alterna-media coverage and remains open) and Big Noise Films. The IMC has issued two other tapes packaged from its collected WTO footage, but this is the one it’s most heavily promoting online and in “alternative” print media.

It’s also the slickest. Directors Jill Freidberg and Rick Rowley gathered footage from some 100 contributing IMC volunteers as well as a dozen or two core crew members. It’s narrated by Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy rapper Michael Franti and bigtime actress Susan Sarandon. It’s got all the modern digital-editing schticks that can now be accomplished on a low budget.

Both tapes offer the same heroes (third-world feminists, steelworkers, Ruckus Society organizers), villains (corporations, politicians, cops), and storyline (a massive groundswell of concerned folk from all over gather to take over the streets, get inhumanely roughed up by bad cops, take credit for the breakdown of negotiations inside the WTO conference, and start an exciting new era of mass activism).

But there are differences, especially in what each tape’s curators choose to include.

Trade Off, while made by professionals who might have been expected to dwell on the story’s exciting visuals, spends more time discussing the issues behind world trade and the centralization of political and economic power by big business and international financiers.

Democracy, despite coming from an activist organization with a political agenda to sell, prefers to dwell more on the spectacle of the protests themselves. It depicts the protestors and their organizers as the new counterculture heroes, and emphasizes the feel-good aspects of the protesting experience (the shared community, the sense of empowerment).

But as I’ve been saying these past 15 months, the protests will have ultimately failed if their only legacy is as a future nostalgia topic for the middle-aged of tomorrow.

So it’s Trade Off that expresses the best hope for a worthwhile WTO-protest legacy, one in which more folk become informed about the complexities of the issues surrounding their lives and livelihoods, then take an active role in helping change them.

As the black activist site Seditionists.org quotes author Barbara Ehrenreich, “There is a difference, the true seditionist would argue, between a revolution and a gesture of macho defiance. Gestures are cheap. They feel good, they blow off some rage. But revolutions, violent or otherwise, are made by people who have learned how to count very slowly to ten.”

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ELSEWHERE:

• Our pal Tom Frank explores the pro-money, anti-politics, anti-complaining schtick at its Ground Zero, Singapore….