To embody the ultimate transgression–having a child die before their parent (especially at the metaphorical hands of an unpopular war)–facilitates a kind of credibility with growing import in our contemporary political landscape…
Fever in the Archive Funk House April 24, 2007
So I spent some of my day planning my trip to New York. Right now, I am calling around to different film archives, trying to figure out how this collection process works. I have never really researched in primary document archives before, so this is a completely new experience for me. I am hoping to find a host of activist documentary that I am specifically looking for and hoping to come upon new treasures.
So, today I was reprimanded and helped by the collections specialist at Anthology Film Archives. Apparently, I need names…names, names, names. I cannot ask for a GENRE or search by CONTENT, I must have names!
And then I was gently reminded that the archive is not interested in politics but fine cinematic works.
So I asked if they had any work generated by film collectives in the late 1960s-70s. That is a big category, I was told…could I be more specific? Ok, the names weren’t rolling off my tongue. How about the Raindance Corporation? I think I hit a nerve because I felt the wheels turning inside the head of the collections specialist. He told me to hold on and set the phone down, he put me on hold for five minutes while he looked around the room for something (that’s what it sounded like)? Bingo, the archive had a special screening of Ira Schneider’s work with the Raindance Corporation a few months back and might be able to obtain copies (if they do not already have them).
So I am one for one …and now I need to make a list.
Historical Documentary and its Biases April 18, 2007
In graduate school, I remember sitting in my advanced production course taught by a highly esteemed documentary filmmaker wondering about the politics of historical documentary. The instructor’s area of expertise was historical documentary and I asked a very simple (at least I thought so) question generated from my interaction with Ken Burns films: “Is there a Howard Zinn of documentary film?” I asked. What I was trying to address was buried in the assumptions of my question. More specifically, is there a historical documentary filmmaker committed to telling history from the bottom? Is there any trend or obligation in historical documentary to tell history from the position of those citizens who have historically been denied a public or political voice?
The answer I received from my instructor was less than satisfying. “History is history,” he insisted, “If you do your job, those stories are present.” Yeah, well, tell that to the authors of the numerous history books I read in school growing up. History is partial, selective, discerning, and interpretive.
Imagine my surprise when I realized a group of concerned citizens finally took Ken Burns to task:
Ken Burns Agrees To Expand Documentary
Inclusion of Minority WWII Service Members Follows Latino Protests
By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 18, 2007; C01
Filmmaker Ken Burns agreed yesterday to re-cut his PBS documentary on World War II to include footage about the contributions of Latino and American Indian service members — and not to present the material apart from his 14 1/2 -hour series.
Burns’s pledge to integrate an unspecified amount of footage into “The War” was made yesterday at a meeting in Washington with representatives of several organizations that have protested the film, which is scheduled to air in September. They contend that the series underplays the role of Latinos and American Indians in the war effort.
This is the first time that Burns — who produced such PBS documentaries as “Baseball,” “Jazz” and the monumental “Civil War” — has agreed to alter one of his films as a result of public pressure.
The organizations — including the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the National Council of La Raza — were not mollified by PBS’s pledge last week that Burns would add material. PBS had declared that the film already was complete.
PBS’s statement last week raised concerns that new material would appear “as an add-on before a break,” said Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, a University of Texas journalism professor who earlier this year helped rally a coalition of groups.
“We didn’t want it to be an afterthought,” said Rivas-Rodriguez, who directs the university’s U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project.
“When he started he had one idea, but he’s been questioned about it and made to realize that doing it between breaks was not really going to cut it.”
During yesterday’s afternoon meeting, Burns told members of the coalition that wartime contributions of Latinos and American Indians would be incorporated into the film, including the DVD version, and in teaching materials that will accompany it.
At an earlier meeting yesterday with Latino leaders and members of Congress, Burns and PBS President Paula Kerger introduced Austin documentarian Hector Galan, who will work with Burns to produce additional footage. Galan has produced several documentaries, including “Chicano! History of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement” in 1996 for PBS.
Galan offered few specifics on what might be added, but his hiring was a welcome step, said Ivan Roman, the executive director of the Hispanic journalists’ association. “He’s very well-respected,” Roman said. “Whatever it’s going to be, it’s not going to be a patch or something just slapped together.”
Roman called the meeting “a good-faith effort.” Still, he cautioned that “the proof will be in the pudding.”
Although “The War” isn’t scheduled to air till the fall, the deadline for the DVD version is mid-June, giving Burns and Galan limited time to interview, shoot, write and reedit the documentary.
Burns and his crew spoke with more than 500 people for the project, but apparently no Latino or Native American veterans were interviewed. The narrative is weaved around the wartime experiences of people in four towns: Sacramento; Waterbury, Conn.; Mobile, Ala.; and Luverne, Minn.
Burns was not available for comment yesterday. PBS spokeswoman Lea Sloan, who attended the private meetings, said Burns’s statements yesterday should clear up any confusion about how the new material would be used.
Sloan said the decision to change the film was based on a number of conversations with the various groups. “We listened,” she said. “It’s a judgment call. We judge [complaints] on the merits and decide.”
Last week, PBS programming chief John Wilson said that Burns’s film was complete and that new material would be placed within the documentary’s “footprint” — raising concerns among some advocates.
Sloan said new material would be “seamlessly” integrated into the film. “We hope this clarifies the situation,” she said.
In a separate action, Burns and PBS agreed yesterday to help the Library of Congress collect oral histories of the war for the library’s Veterans History Project. Since its inception in 2000, the project has collected interviews with about 45,000 veterans. Burns will contribute a “field guide” to the project, providing advice to amateur interviewers on lighting, interviewing and videotaping.
A Venacular Cinematic Discourse April 9, 2007
Growing up as the daughter of a United Auto Worker in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s had a formative impact on my life and scholarship. In moments of labor struggle (and sometimes against my mother’s wishes) my father routinely brought me along to a strike line where I held a sign and shouted chats about workers. I am not sure I really understood what I was doing then but my father made sure I understood that things are not always as what they seem. At that time, there were very few images on television that looked like my life, people who looked like my father and his union comrades or stories that dealt with what it was like for your parents to come home laid off from work or to make the difficult decision to go on strike in an effort to avoid further exploitation. I can only images what it would have been like to see our struggle on the televisual screen. Which speaks to the power and importance of many labor films produced during the 1970s, specifically those circulated by the Kartemquin video collective in Chicago.
I am in the exploratory stages of larger project that attempts to understand the visual discourse of authenticity. The basis for appeals to historical and visual authenticity encompass a variety of civic levels and media contexts. In our bustling media ecology, some political narratives are allowed to circulate at the cost of others on the grounds of an implied connection to “reality” or “truth.” The visual, a vessel of potential meaning construction, can also mark “more authentic” narratives through particular forms and cues. A cursory meditation on the contemporary use of hand held camera work in television production, rough documentary framing in fiction film text, and unconventional or amateur composition in broadcast documentary suggests that the visual has properties connected to the authentic that may have their legacy in grassroots media.
In the early 1960s heightened political crisis and the development of low-cost video technology created the breeding ground for a new population of filmmakers. The people from the margins were making their own news and activists were creating their own media. By giving people access to tools that allowed them to document their lives and negotiate the world on their own terms, the early activist movement created a vernacular space that countered the prevailing dominate ideology of broadcast television: “[V]ideo could involve people by making them active participants in the “video environment” rather than passive viewers of network TV fare…video’s potential [was] to offer people a variety of viewpoints rather than the official, objective one”(Boyle 6) promoted by network news. Although video equipment was developed in the late 1950s, it was cumbersome, stationary, complex and expensive. The first genuinely portable video equipment, the half-inch, reel-to-reel consumer video porta-pak was launched in 1968 (Freedman). This gave the baby boomers access to the resources to make their own brand of television. This “new brand of television,” also called guerrilla television, was part of a larger alternative media tide that swept across the country during the late 1960s through the 1970s.
Political crisis in conjunction with the technological innovation of video precipitated new visual forms of the activist documentary impulse. One of these new visual differences included recording content in streets, meetings and private conversations; events and spaces that older, clunky and more expensive equipment rarely recorded. These newly recorded environments where also the domain of the working class and the camera met citizens in the public spaces of vernacular dissent. In these moments the camera becomes part of the street protest, interacting and engaging with political struggle as opposed to representing it. This produced an anti-slick street aesthetic marked by shaky hand-held camera images, out of focus segments, beheaded protesting bodies, fast and out of focused pans, in-camera editing and various technical imperfections. These films were also marked by unconventional yet refreshing visual framing in the form up unstable close-up shots, center framing, long interview sustained shots and frequent reframing during interviews. If you have gone to film school or taken production classes this might be called not controlling your environment or not eliminating empty space.
My current research is begining to explore the character of the visual discourse produced from the early activist video movement of the late 1960s-70s and I am beginning with two film produced out of the Kartemquin Video Collective, “HSA Strike 1975” and “What’s Happening at Local 70” There is diminutive scholarship recognizing the importance of the early activist movement and even less attention paid to the importance of labor film during this periods of intense grassroots video production.
Precisely, What kind political and visual work does radical labor documentary accomplish during the historical moment some have term “the guerilla television movement?
Kartemquin films like “HSA Strike 1975” and “What’s Happening at Local 70” function to disseminate a distinct vernacular cinematic language. That is, a cinematic language directly connected to and interacting with the communities seeking social justice. This cinematic language should be understood in contrast to simply representing the interests of marginalized and exploited communities. The markers and cues of this vernacular cinematic language emerge from the social conditions of their production and include visual forms like unconventional framing, an anti-slick street aesthetic and a significant focus on public speech as a means to bear witness. The reflection of labor as negotiation and struggle in documentary form order and organize political meaning and contestation, becoming the basis of shared experience, and creating an environment of competing narratives that construct historical, social and political authenticity. Many of these impromptu visual markers functioned to make activist video distinct from mass produced broadcast images. In other words, these images become the video version of the quintessential “zine” to the mass produced magazine text.
I am looking forward to traveling to New York, Chicago and San Francisco in the next couple of months as I begin the research and interview phase for my book project on the oral history of activist documentary film and video. I am going to be meeting with activist who made films in the 1970 with the first video port a paks, searching in old film archives and drawing many historical and conceptual maps…I can’t wait!
Boyle, Deirdre. Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997.
Freedman, Eric. “Activist Television.” The Museum of Broadcast Communications
Webpage8Sept.2005
We feel fine…the greatest website ever… April 7, 2007
You must go to this website…it monitors blogs all across the world searching for “I feel…..” statements. You can monitor the emotional pulse of the whole wide blogging world! Make sure you check out all the qualitative and quantitative ways you can visually measure how freakin’ sad everyone seems. Cheers!
http://www.wefeelfine.org/
Bro Rape: A UTUBE Phenomenon? April 3, 2007
I am shocked…a little. A little stupefied…but more importantly I don’t even know how to respond to this:
*The following video may be offensive and it is certainly problematic but worthy of a moment to think about what is going on here. Now, the clip is 8 minutes and you don’t have to watch the whole thing to get the idea.
A cry from the depths of the in-the-closet gay experience or blatant homophobia? Or both? Regardless the video has been viewed close to two million times and it has a fan base of over 8,000 viewers while producing a variety of lively responses. Such reviews include:
HandjobfromGod says: “Funnier than anything I’ve seen on SNL in years. It nails the stereotype with exquisite accuracy.”
nikanj says: “One of my mates tries to get his straight mates drunk and do sexual things with them. It’s the funniest thing to watch.”
macunaima says: “brilliant! You guys should get a TV show. I hope HBO is scouting YouTube.”
BentSlightly says: “Preppy Frat Boys make a spoof upon their repressed sexuality. Charming!”
spefi says: “HOLY SHIT, THIS IS GREAT FILM, fucking incredible”
bman32x says: “It was like an all you could rape buffet…”
wearingaredjacket says:”If they didn’t want to be raped they wouldn’t walk around the way they do with their popped collared shirts and their Live Strong braclets their Ambercrombie Water Polo t-shirts…”
The utube phenomenon and video blogging has brought us a great many new experiences and ways of interacting with “a public” and with one another. From mainstream politics to grassroots celebrity, vlogging is functioning as a new form of public cultural negotiation. The contemporary means of video production are fairly accessible and the audience plentiful. Several months ago a series of utube videos began cropping up under the search terms of “bro rape.” Some of these video were dramatic re-enactments, bogus investigative news reports, impromptu drunken shenanigans, and real life exploits, all addressing the same issue: a certain kind of guy, also know as a bro, who under the guise of hanging out, attempts physical (maybe sexual?) contact as playful male behavior.
But, before you pass this off these videos as drunken, frat boy homophobia, you should see this version:
This video has been viewed substantially less (about 14,000 times) and has received qualitatively different responses from roughly the same audience (both videos are catalogued under the same search terms). The comments on the second video included things like:
“wow thats easily the gayest thing Ive ever seen. You guys dont compare to the real bro rape. not funny at all. just gross. You all seemed to like it too much.”
“omg actual bro rape… wait i think it was consentional…. then its not rape…. its just bro sex… since they dont wanna be called gay…”
“Gayest video ever.. and just because your on a bed together but how you talk, and everything..”
From the creators: “Sorry to disappoint but we’re straight boys. and single, ladies..rawr”
From the creators:”yeah that would be me. the gay thing would be news to my gf though..who happens to be hott. BOOYA”
“Of course your “girlfriend” is hot, hot girls ALWAYS go for gay men.”
This specific vlogging phenomenon is problematic for more than a few reasons. First and foremost, the videos draw a connection between what is going on here and the experience of rape, most likely to focus attention to the role of consent in these situations. Generating over 1500 responses, the first video actually generated a tread about this problematic rape analogy:
iwannabeanonymous (2 days ago): I don’t think rape can ever be made funny. Especially by a bunch of men who’ll never know what it’s like.
GlennMate (2 days ago):Rape is a serious thing, yes. But don’t be all uptight about it; it’s just an attempt at comedy done quite well.
iwannabeanonymous (1 day ago): …But that’s my point. There are some things that can’t and shouldn’t be made into a comedy.
dore12 (5 months ago): Part 1-I watched this thinking that it was a serious report. While I realize that this video was meant to be a comedy, its premise is horrifying. Just because rape victims are usually women, it is not “funny” to create a video about male rape victims. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, “15% of men who lived with a man as a couple reported being raped/assaulted or stalked by a male cohabitant.” So “bro rape,” if understood as a man raping another man, does happen.
dore12 (5 months ago): Part 2-There are so many horrifying statistics about rape. According to the UCSC Rape Prevention Education website, “[a]n estimated 91% of victims of rape are female, 9% are male.” How do you think male victims would react to this video? In fact, how would rape victims in general react to this video? I agree that the acting is pretty good and that the dialogue is well thought out in and of itself, but I just cannot ignore the idea behind this video.
YouShouldSeeMyDayJob (5 months ago): dude, you’re just another example of an American trying to make our country more politically correct. speak for yourself not other people. let them speak for themselves. are you honestly offended? why? you weren’t raped were you? if not then why do you feel you have to be offended at this? calm down, it’s just a video
steelplug (4 months ago): I know that the film might make bro-rape seem funny…but bro-rape is not a laughing matter. I know, because I was a victim. Beware of Bro-Rapists.
katxc6 (4 months ago): How can you make FUN of rape? That’s horrible.
Joker9805 (4 months ago): cause rape is funny
dresdentraeger (4 months ago): because rape is HILARIOUS, that’s how.
With a growing number of bro rape submissions on utube (up to 88 and counting), one can’t help but thinking…what are we working out here?
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