Paranormal TV December 22, 2007
Of all my television peccadilloes, my unusual appetite for paranormal TV is perhaps, my biggest sin.
I am so exited every Wednesday when I get to watch my newest paranormal TV crush. Recently, I stumbled upon a new-ish show on Court TV that I think is the most intriguing deployment of the ghost hunting arts meets reality TV that I have seen in a while. Before you go passing judgment, you have to understand that paranormal TV has always been an essential part of my entertainment pallet. Every since my dad use to put me on his lap on Sundays when we would watch Leonard Neymoy in the groundbreaking television show “In Search of…” and the time my mother and aunt took me to the drive-in to see Amityville horror (the first one), I have been intrigued by the media representation of paranormal phenomenon.
So, every Wednesday there is a new episode of Haunting Evidence. The series “takes the paranormal/crime-solving phenomenon one step further by following psychic profiler Carla Baron, medium John J. Oliver, and paranormal investigator Patrick Burns as they visit “haunted” crime scenes.” Working together, this unconventional team of experts finds clues that will provide new insights into real-life cases that have gone cold. The show is like a cross between Cold Case Files and Ghost Hunters. Deploying some of the tactics of my favorite plumbers by day, ghost hunters by night friends on the show Ghost Hunters, the Haunting Evidence crew takes it to a whole new level. The focus is less on proving a paranormal plane exists and more on helping police catch the bad folks who have murdered the spirits lingering in the world beyond.
Recently a dear friend and out of town house guest had the opportunity to experience with me, the joy of Haunting Evidence. He had a slightly different take. He was concerned with the families of these involved, being lead astray and given hope by these paranormal charlatans. I admit, the very construction of Haunting Evidence encourages and condones spectacle. Of course my favorite Medium, John J. Oliver, could do his paranormal “thang” outside of the TV frame. There is no real reason to record and broadcast his psychic insights while he wears fabulous designer sunglasses BUT the camera allows me to be there with him. The framing and composition encourages me to see the world through his sunglass covered eyes…. it encourages me to meditate on the very same evidence and use my own psychic ability to solve the case (By the way, I went to the show’s website and took their psychic ability test and scored unusually high).
In the last two weeks, a new paranormal TV show has made a splash on the re-run saturated screen. Paranormal State follows a spiritual team of students out of Penn State University who investigate haunting phenomenon currently terrorizing folks in the material plane. I am fascinated by Paranormal State because it is like a cross between Ghost Hunters, Dr. Phil and the Exorcist with a tad more emphasis on spiritual warfare (demons vs. angels) than most of the shows in this genre. The paranormal team descends on a family with the usual investigating team and equipment but also brings along priests, occult experts, family therapists, and the folks you call when one needs an exorcist. The camera functions as evidence of the omnipresent battle of good and evil ranging around us, including a reoccurring guest spot of a demon (whose name we will not speak) that seems to be chasing the lead investigator.
The Camera As A Tool of Spiritual Upheaval: My primary preoccupation with this genre of television is the varied ways in which the camera functions to construct a spiritual world. The use of inferred heat cameras to record moving spiritual energy, the deployment of sound recording to capture Electronic Voice Phenomenon and the inclusion of people who have heightened psychic ability to register the kind of paranormal activity in the air all rests upon the assumption that there is a world in play beyond our reason and sense perception. In the TV show Ghost Hunters, the images captured with the camera function as proof to affirm or deny the existence of paranormal phenomenon. On the other hand, the Haunting Evidence camera encourages the audience to play along with the investigation, the images function to affirm actions taken in a police investigation where psychic phenomena is legitimized as an important tool of knowledge production. Finally, Paranormal State uses the camera as evidence of spiritual warfare, a soldier in the Army of good (so to speak). We are encouraged to mediate on a spiritual battle around us. Like we don’t have enough to worry about in terms of a real war on the material plane?
The Summer of the Archive July 16, 2007
A few weeks ago, the chair of my department asked me to come into his office, the Dean wanted my input on a project. In the last few years the dean and others in the arts community have started the Embarrass Valley Film Festival. Each festival is centered around a particular artist who grew up or went to school in the local area. Last year the festival featured Burl Ives, a musician and actor of many political contradictions. Since then, the dean had secured quite a bit of money to produce a documentary trailer for a historical, PBS-like documentary on Burl Ives, in the efforts to raise more money for a larger project. The dean then asks/inquires, “…and we need your help.” Coincidently, no one in the room (besides me) had ever been a part of a documentary production process.
Now, I am no dummy, so I know that when the Dean asks for your help, there is not a lot of choice in the matter. My first question was…”Who is Burl Ives? Why do a documentary on this cat?” Now, this was an interesting moment for me because I have never been part of a project where I was hired for my skills and not driven by passion for the topic. This was…maybe…a luxury I had not fully been conscious of before this moment.
To make things trickier, all the money needs to be encumbered (i.e. needs to be spent) by the end of July. Which means, I am headin’ to Washington DC to spend some special time at the library of congress. Its kind of exciting, after spending time at archives in New York, San Francisco, Austin, Chicago…I feel like I am wrapping up the summer at the mother of all archives. The size and scope of the LOC is a bit intimidating but I feel like I am about to walk into Willy Wonka’s candy store. Its almost worth the guilt generated from the writing I am not getting done while I am traveling.
I am also hoping to do some work on the activist documentary book while I am in DC. The city is home to the Center for Social Media and a few other organizations I am interested in interviewing. Again, more discovery, less writing…the pressure of producing really sucks.
Something Feeling Like An Indiana Jones Moment… May 12, 2007
9:30 AM: I am sitting at my new favorite coffee shop on 3rd Ave, eating my bowl of fruit and yogurt, contemplating the piles of scanning I will do today. Its only Friday and I think I have archive fatigue.
More documents…and history…and interviews…and papers. I am building up my tolerance for seeking out anything that looks like activism or politics in video history. Well, I am looking for more than activist documentary but essentially, grassroots video history in New York is intertwined with a counter-culture/hippy/avant guard artist movement. So most grassroots activist documentary is video but not all documentary video is activist. Which begs the questions, how does one assess the political and/or activist merits of a documentary? This is the matter that will plague my archiving process and essentially narrow the parameters of the book.
Yesterday, I had a face to face with the previously mentioned helper from Anthology Film Archives. He was very nice and obviously a cinephile with little patients for the likes of me (or so it seemed). The archive has lots of paper files I need to look at but no real screening material to speak of (most of their prints are in original format and difficult to watch). I was referred to Video Data Bank for those materials. After being told of their many paper treasures and armed with my laptop and portable scanner, I grabbed a cab and headed south to Anthology in the AM.
Lesson #1 for the weary anthropologist…”You Got to Roll with the Punches.”
11:00 AM: So they set up a table in the lobby for me to work on. I set up my laptop and scanner…I am ready for history to jump up into my lap and sing to me (maybe I had too much coffee this morning). After waiting for 10-15 minutes, the archivist comes down and says…there is a problem. Yadda Yadda Yadda…boxes that I need to look at are trapped and inaccessible due to roofing project on the building. We have a very nice conversation about the acrobatics of my project and he apologizes for the mix up. So, I decide to have a nice Thai lunch and trek off to next archive hot spot, the NYU library.
Lesson #2 for the resilient anthropologist…”Ask About the Details.”
1:00 PM: So I made arrangements to see all of the research materials generated during the development of Boyle’s Guerrilla Television book. Its the biggest find yet and lots of material to help me decipher whose doing activist work and whose primarily making video (maybe) art. Except, they have very strict rules in special collections about copying and scanning…all of it is a no no unless I get permission from head librarian who is gone for the day. So much for lugging my scanner around the city. I am only allowed to have one file at a time (there are hundreds of files and 16 boxes) and I can only have my laptop and one notepad at the table. Not even a pen, they provide me with a pencil. Lots of great finds…interviews, correspondences, flyers, video catalogues, news clippings. Lots of things that will help me for my upcoming trips to Austin, San Francisco and Chicago. I can spend days here camped out in a tent in the middle of the reading room (if they would let me). I only get through a 1/10 of the holdings before closing time but I found some real treasures! Things are coming together…
Adventures of Activist Documentary Girl in the City May 10, 2007
So many of my concerns about not having things to do, people to see and archives to discover was a much ado about nothing. Now, my biggest issue is deciding what I can feasibly fit into my week long adventure.
New York has brought much clarity to this book project–roughly centered on exploring the potential for documentary texts to organize and facilitate democratic culture by conceptualizing the camera as an activist tool. Essentially, it is a book with quite a broad scope as of now, focusing on the last 40 years of activist documentary. But more specifically, I am looking for documentary texts that are more than political, they open up a space for activism…and that is much harder to determine 30+ years later with little public documentation or in an archive with no supporting materials. I like this stage, collecting, exploring and learning as much as I can. Focusing this work into a manageable book project will not be so carefree or easy.
I had a chat with a wonderfully smart and helpful scholar yesterday who hooked me up with contacts, phone numbers and great ideas! I also had an interesting visit to a non-descript building that houses Paper Tiger TV and Deep Dish TV. I hit a jackpot at Paper Tiger where the office manager showed me all their training manuals for teaching community production in the last 25 years as well as a new documentary they are putting together about the collective’s history.
Today, tomorrow and Saturday are my library archive days. This portion of my trip will take me to the New York Public Library to explore the AIDS Activist Video Archive, Anthology Film Archives and the NYU Library to check out Deirdre Boyle’s interview transcripts from her book on the guerrilla television movement. Thank you Deirdre for archiving your work in a library so other can build on it! This little discovery helped focus my time here in NYC on things other than trying to track down video activist from the 1970s…I’ll save that for another trip.
The Cindy Sheehan Effect April 29, 2007
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…
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
Gettin’ By With A Little Help From Our Friends… March 28, 2007
I grew up watching Jacques Cousteau documentaries about the deep mysteries of the ocean, a space I could visit daily growing up near the beach towns of Southern California. Spending Sunday afternoons watching these image paintings with my father, learning about the ocean is one of my fondest childhood memories. These iconic documentaries frame the journey through the largely unknown (and unseen) world of the ocean as a progressive expedition, finding and exploring, rummaging around in a world that is clearly not ours.
Forgive me if I get a little dizzy thinking about the (empathetic yet anthropomorphic) state of contemporary wildlife documentary. It is not unusual for the cinematic and televisual form of the genre to encourage identification with animals in human terms. This formulation of contemporary wildlife documetary encourages the audience to read these films in a manner that 1) attributes human characteristics to natural phenomenon and 2) attribute human characteristics to animals. The documentary narrative, framing, content selection and editing techniques serve to preserve this framework.
In his seminal article on wildlife documentaries, Derek Bouse argues that after years of exposure, audiences have developed certain expectations about films depicting the behavior of animals. Wildlife filmmakers are therefore obligated to play into these conventions. The result is a distinct film genre with its own recognizable patterns and codes (120). Scholars have recognized several patters of wildlife documentaries from the reliance on narrativization, to adult themes of violence and death. Perhaps the most interesting and powerful of these forms is the importation of human family systems, emotions and relationship upon the animal kingdom. Put another way, this particular manifestation of the documentary form is an attempt to understand wildlife exploration as an insightful meditation into human nature.
The Animal Planet’s wildly popular show Meerkat Manor routinely attributes rational intentions and human emotion into the plot narratives explaining the social and communal structures of the African Meerkats. Even more so, the marketing for the television strongly encourages identification in human terms.
Beloved animal lover Steve Irwin’s series of shows—which continue to air after his death—are built around explaining animals in human terms, so much so that very little physical and emotional distance exists between human and animal.
However, the circulation of the wildlife documentary rhetoric as justification and exploration into human behavior is a unique function of this cinematic identification.
In the summer of 2005, a sentimental wildlife documentary was the sleeper hit of the movie season (Puig 1). March of the Penguins, made by a French documentary team and packaged specifically for United States distribution, follows the mating and birthing season of Antarctica’s fierce emperor penguin. To the surprise of many in the film industry, March of the Penguins grossed over $75 million in the US box office (Scott 74) and ranked second behind Fahrenheit 9/11 as the top grossing documentary of all time (Smith 12).
The film was advertised as an epic wildlife documentary with a heart; however, the subtle but familiar sub-text produced public speculation about the political agenda in disguise. For the vast majority of the public, the documentary was another spectacular wildlife film, an episode in a recent movie trend. For a very particular audience, the rhetoric of March of the Penguins circulated as narrative that naturalized a Christian fundamentalist political agenda. Conservative critic and radio host Michael Medved was quoted in the New York Times supporting the documentary: “the motion picture of the summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and childrearing” (Miller 2).
After the release of the documentary, the political and religious right as well as some members of the mainstream press began to regard the penguins as a paragon of family values and an ideal example of monogamy. Not to mention, a pretty strong case for intelligent design. As articulated by a news columnist, some fans regard the stars of the documentary “as big-screen embodiments of the kind of traditional domestic values that back-sliding humans have all but abandoned, as well as proof that divine intention, rather than blind chance, is the engine of creation” (Scott 1). Hence, the cinematic form of March of the Penguins could encourages audience members to naturalize particular lifestyle values such as monogamy and/or heterosexuality from the depiction of the penguin’s lifecycle in the documentary. For audiences who have an interest and investment in the public anxiety over the values circulating around sexuality in contemporary society, March of the Penguins was a flashpoint, a kind of evidence used to inform several contemporary political controversies. The box office success of March of the Penguins is unexpected, however, the tendency for this inconspicuous wildlife film to ignite a political firestorm around fervently contested social norms such as heterosexuality, mating, marriage and monogamy is unusual.
The advertisements about the Animal Planet’s new television show, Ms. Adventure went into heavy circulation this spring and I wonder if wildlife documentary as a form has taken a kinder, gentler, narcissistic turn. The new television show kicked off its inaugural season by selling the exploration of the animal kingdom as an insight into human nature. Do animals love and mate like us? Well that is the contemporary face of the interaction between the wild and the documentary camera. And we are gettin’ by with a little help (and some insight from) our friends…..
Bouse, Derek. “Are Wildlife Films Really ‘Nature Documentaries’?” Critical Studies in
Mass Communication 15 (1998): 116-140.
Miller, Jonathan. “March of the Conservatives: Penguin Film as Political Fodder.” New
York Times 13 Sept. 2005: 2.
Puig, Claudia. “March of the Penguins is Generating Heat.” USA Today 12 July 2005: 1.
Scott, A.O. “The Hollywood-Style Documentary.” New York Times 11 Dec. 2005: 74.
Scott, A.O. “Reading From Left to Right.” New York Times 25 Sept. 2005: 1.
*the ideas in this post were generated from “The Re-visioned American Dream: The Wildlife
Documentary Form as Conservative Nostalgia.” In Social Issues in Disguise Ed. Dr. Barry Brummett. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2007.
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