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
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