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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Aguayo, Angela J., 1974– author.
Title: Documentary resistance : social change and participatory media / Angela J. Aguayo.
Description: [New York, New York] : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018054422 (print) | LCCN 2019010774 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190676230 (updf) | ISBN 9780190676247 (epub) | ISBN 9780190676254 (oso) | ISBN 9780190676216 (cloth :alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190676223 (paperback :alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Documentary films—United States. | Documentary films— Social aspects—United States. | Social change—United States.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.D6 (ebook) | LCC PN1995.9.D6 A33 2019 (print) | DDC 070.1/8—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018054422
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
This book is dedicated to my ancestors, who dared to dream and sacrifice for who I could become.
And to my son Zachary, whose energy and excitement about the future fuels my daily resolve for justice.
Contents
Preface ix
About the Companion Website xiii
1. Introduction: Documentary Resistance 1
2. A Critical History of Documentary and Participatory Media Cultures 27
3. Documentary Goes Popular: The Rise of Digital Media Cultures 61
4. Laboring under Documentary: Collective Identification and the Collapse of the American Working Class 103
5. Subjugated Histories and Affective Resistance: Abortion Documentaries as Botched Political Subjectivity 149
6. Street Tapes: The People’s History of Unjustified Police Force 183
7. Conclusion: The Documentary Commons and Conditions of Resistance 227
Notes 241 References 255 Index 271
Preface
When I think of pivotal moments I experienced while writing this book, one particular memory comes to the surface. As I began researching documentary film in historical archives and poking around film collections in libraries and museums, I asked archivists, curators, and librarians how to search for political films. I asked this question without realizing how it violated hard disciplinary boundaries set in place precisely to hinder such an investigation. The reoccurring looks of bewilderment I received will long remain with me, a sign that I was clearly offroading in interdisciplinary history, moving away from the well-worn trails of the cinema archive. At the time, I was too naïve to realize that the question I was asking was unanswerable within the existing classification frameworks. Cinema history was organized to tell the story of auteurs and great films; cinema archives are arranged to preserve a “high art,” above the base reaches of “low” politics.
I would like to be able to report that this is where my research trouble ended, but when I packed up my recording equipment and traveled across the country to ask filmmakers, activists, funders, and distributors about social change documentary, the look I received when I asked the question, “Do you make activist documentary?” was almost as uncomfortable as the look the archivists had given me when I asked about finding political films. The way media creators squirmed, talked around, and resisted the term activist was fascinating. It was as though the question forced them to decide between activist and artistic subjectivity. Some filmmakers went to great lengths to explain the incompatibility of these subjectivities, resisting the way an “activist” orientation could taint the creation of “art.” Others gladly accepted the label and leaned into this mode of production thinking. The tension between the aesthetic and political hangs over documentary history, obscuring a dynamic capacity for documentary to exceed the cinema. Studying documentary’s position at the intersection of other social formations, such as civic engagement and social protest, contributes to understanding the shifts of democratic practice. After discovering these obstacles to establishing a basic shared vocabulary for
documentary and social change, you might think I would give up, but something kept pulling at me.
My involvement with documentary and social change was almost accidental. It started in the summer of 2000, when I found myself at the University of Texas working toward a PhD in Communication Studies, with a focus on rhetoric, media, and social movements. I began taking video production classes because the readings I did for my PhD course work did not always align with my activist production experiences. I was bringing my Hi8 video camera to protests and demonstrations in the area, recording things I had never seen on television, from the collective joys of mass mobilization to the unjust use of police force. Media production became a way for me to use the theories of communication and rhetoric I was studying in the actual process of political struggle. This meant experimenting with theories of identification while editing activist street tapes and crafting political images around points of stasis in my efforts to circulate grassroots narratives. This period in my life happened to coincide with one of the most significant technological shifts of our time, the movement from analog to digital. This shift radically transformed the process of making, manipulating, and circulating documentary discourse.
I found myself in a position where I had to confront the mounting tension I felt between my studies and my production practice. The story of documentary and social change begins before a film is made, exists on and off screen, and lingers long after it is shown, but the scholars I was reading viewed the screen as the dominant frame for meaning construction. There is a deep disparity between the way documentary and social change happens in the streets and the way it is (or is not) articulated in scholarship. This divide covers a rich terrain of social knowledge that has not yet been deeply explored in the study of documentary: the public capacities of documentary that exceed cinema. There are opportunities for social change at every point in the creative process, from the moment one starts asking questions through postproduction and circulation. This book is an attempt to step into this void of academic understanding and create space for different approaches to knowledge production, exposing intellectual pathways that could help us navigate the world as it evolves.
Documentary Resistance rereads documentary history with a focus on participatory media cultures, attempting to understand some of the more concrete ways documentary engages social change. Scholars have had periods of magical thinking about documentary’s revolutionary potential, but they have not sufficiently investigated how the force of cinematic intervention might manifest in micro-interactions, local struggles, collective experiments, and in the stories of people who have direct experience with this engagement. Documentary circulation creates something new in politics, a space I call a documentary commons, which continually grows, takes shape, and expands its participatory capacities. I extend this idea of the documentary commons by focusing on the period of history when technology shifts from analog tools into a digital landscape.
Underlying the study of documentary and social change is a story about people’s movements, the powerful interventions made possible through collaborative action with others. If collective identification around shared interests is the most powerful force we have to combat the institutional structures that contain our autonomy, there is a type of political agency that only manifests in collaboration with others. The histories of struggles, represented and channeled through documentary, continue in our contemporary environment. These book chapters are commitments to understanding the vital struggles around race, class, and gender that underpin our most pressing social problems. I am particularly grateful to the filmmakers, activists, curators, and critics who opened up their lives and shared their experiences to help us understand this shifting documentary landscape, including Barbara Abrash, Pat Aufderheide, Jennifer Baumgardner, Ronit Bezalel, Skip Blumberg, Mike Bonanno, Maria Juliana Byck, Sarah Chapman, Salome Chasnoff, Tony Chauncy, Antonino D’Ambrosio, Larry Daressa, Kirby Dick, Brian Drolet, Larry Duncun, Jill Friedberg, Josh Fox, Tami Gold, Stephen Gong, Pam Haldeman, Sue Harris, Judith Helfand, Judy Hoffman, Mary Kerr, Penny Lane, Wendy Levy, Anne Lewis, Linda Litowsky, Marty Lucas, Cornelius Moore, Jennifer Morris, Dee Mosbacher, Justine Nagan, Doug Norbert, Lourdes Portillo, DA Pennebaker, Gordon Quinn, Karen Ranucci, Stefan Ray, Brigid Reagan, Amy Richards, Jim Sommers, Lauren Sorenson, Ellen Spiro, George C. Stoney, Judy Tam, Dorothy Thigpen, Keiko Tsuno, Lois Vossen, Martha Wallner, Tom Weinberg, Garry Wilkison, Denise Zaccardi, Steve Zelzer, and Debra Zimmerman.
This book would not be possible without the material and institutional support of Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. To support the field research and completion of this book project, I was awarded a Faculty Seed Grant and the Judge William Holmes Cook Professorship, as well as sabbatical release. This internal funding was critical to sustaining the scope of this project. My colleagues in the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University have been incredible champions of this work. I deeply appreciate the support of Dean Deborah Tudor, Dean Dafna Lemish, Dean Gary Kolb, John D. H. Downing, Jyotsna Kapur, Cade Bursell, Howard Motyl, Jan Roddy, Lilly Boruszkowski, Jennida Chase, Wago Kreider, Lisa Brooten, and Sarah Lewison. Much of this research began at Eastern Illinois University, where I was awarded the Redden Funds Grant and the Council on Faculty Research Grant to complete preliminary research into this project. I am grateful for their willingness to support such an ambitious proposal.
I dearly appreciate Senior Editor Norm Hirschy and Oxford University Press for the dedicated support they have shown for Documentary Resistance. With the sustained help of assistant editor Lauralee Yeary, Norm has guided this project with precision and ease, allowing the book to develop beyond my expectations. One of my favorite books from Oxford University Press is Eric Barnouw’s Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. This book shaped my thinking around documentary
as a movement of people committed to creating social change with cinematic vision. His essential book trails off in an exciting part of the story, just as the digital landscape radically transforms the possibilities of the documentary impulse. This book is my contribution to documentary history, picking up where Barnouw leaves off and documenting the shifts into a burgeoning digital world of participatory engagement.
I am also tremendously grateful to the generous colleagues who provided constructive criticism on portions of this work, including Dana Cloud, Chris Robé, Lisa Foster, Julia Lesage, Chuck Kleinhans, Kristen Hoerl, Anne Demo, Sarah Projanski, and Sarah VanGundy. Many people, consciously or not, provided critical insights at conferences, passing in hallways, in collaborative meetings, and while working together in the process of organizing life. I am grateful to the following people who are a significant influence on this project: Rob Asen, Jennifer Asenas, Deirdre Boyle, Dan Brouwer, Karma Chavez, Richard Cherwitz, Cara Finnegan, Terri Fredrick, DeeDee Halleck, Melissa Hubbard, Kevin Johnson, Casey Kelly, Megan Lotts, Steve Macek, Shane Miller, Phaedra Pezzullo, B. Ruby Rich, Clemencia Rodriguez, Mehdi Semati, Tim Steffensmeier, Carrie Wilson-Brown, Rebecca Walker, Jaime Wright, Amy Young, and Patricia Zimmermann. There was a generous village that came together to help organize the research for this project. I am thankful for the graduate assistants who dedicated labor and care: Molly Brandonis, Katie Griffis, Abimbola Iyun, Joseph Valle, and Mark Walters. There are also a handful of people who have shaped my process, pushing me into productive spaces with an unwavering belief in my ability to figure it all out. Thank you for showing me a little light so that I could find my way: Matt Taylor, Liana Koeppel, Sharon Downey, Karen Rasmussen, Dana Cloud, Ellen Spiro, Rosa Eberly, Ronald Greene, Chuck Morris, Alex Juhasz, and Angharad Valdivia. To my glorious band of friends and family who keep me buoyant in rough and calm seas, thank you for your love and support: Larry and Sarah Aguayo, Alex Hivoltze-Jimenez, Caroline Rankin, Felicia Coco, Christopher DeSurra, Nicole Sieber, Angela Reinoehl, my parents, Florencio and Cheryl Aguayo as well as my extended family Finally, I would like to thank my life partner, coconspirator, and project doula, Daniel Elgin. Dan lives his feminism every single day, placing energy and resources behind my ability to complete this project and many others like it. The Elgin family, Joan and Gary, provide invaluable support by stepping in to be our village at a moment’s notice. Thank you for helping make this dream come true.
Angela J. Aguayo Carbondale, IL October 2018
About the Companion Website
www.oup.com/us/documentaryresistance
This companion website includes a small sample of the raw interview data generated in the research process. These extended interviews with filmmakers continue the conversation started by Documentary Resistance: Social Change and Participatory Media. You will find interview clips from eight featured filmmakers discussing historical context around specific productions, questions of ethics, descriptions of production culture, and experiences with documentary in the process of social change.
Documentary Resistance
Cinema, with its status as both popular and “high” art and its ability to creatively reimagine linear depictions of time and causality, offers filmmakers and audiences new ways to visualize themselves and their futures. When communities are disenfranchised and marginalized or when injustice is buried by the news feed, motion picture storytelling can fill in what is elided from dominant media narratives. By drawing attention to the public imaginary’s willful amnesia, cinematic representation creates empathetic pathways to a more inclusive public commons. Coming into its own during the Progressive Era, a period of widespread activism and political reform that spanned the years 1890–1920, motion picture technology attracted educators, activists, and moral leaders. As this technology progressed, the belief grew that movies could help solve society’s problems. In the years before 1919, “social problem” or “thought films” were used to sway mass audiences. These films were sociological, addressing unsavory behavior or social delinquency as well as systemic problems such as poverty, capturing the attention of audiences seeking more than entertainment. Instead of providing escape, these motion pictures engaged audiences with the political power of novel representations, riveting viewers with reflections of daily life that could compel hearts, change minds, and give spectators a motivation to act. Historically, in moments of political and social crisis, the documentary impulse has intervened in the political process, challenging viewers to engage in the world around them.
The story of documentary and social change in the United States is one of self-determination. People—often of humble means—demanding recognition and dignity for themselves and their communities have used the documentary to find pathways into a better life. In 1909, fifty years after the end of slavery, Booker T. Washington commissioned his first documentary, projecting new images of a free and self-determining African American working class on community screens across the nation. In the 1930s, workers risked financial destitution and their own safety to document collective responses to abusive working conditions. Galvanized by
technological ingenuity that made formerly cumbersome cameras mobile, people documented workers’ struggles in the streets. The story of documentary is a story of people unwilling to give up on the dream of an inclusive democracy, harnessing the use of moving images, the form of film, and the mode of documentary to represent their demands for a better world. In the 1960s, for example, women were dying from dirty medical procedures in makeshift operating rooms. The horror of back-alley abortions and the lack of access to birth control led women to pick up film cameras and demand a new vision for women’s health. This required an unwavering belief in the inclusivity and diversity of democracy as women were met with exploitation and marginalization. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) workers in the 1990s, suffering widespread discrimination and at the risk of losing their jobs, picked up cameras to demand labor protections and adequate access to medical care. The evolution of documentary production has seen media makers attacked and arrested, including Lester Balog, who spent forty-five days in jail for screening a labor documentary for striking agricultural workers. In these acts of resistance, beginning with a refusal of consent and compliance, activists set limits on the authority of others by demonstrating “the failure to adapt one’s behavior to the demands of the state, of the law and of capital.”1 Even when they were oppressed by the powerful, these filmmakers persisted, and their media practices proliferated and propagated new ideas and dreams. The story of documentary and social change in the United States is a story of self-determination and the long and treacherous roads of resistance we have traveled and continue to travel to achieve these ends. Documentary’s potent collision with political struggle is deeply woven into every layer of the United States’ social world.
In our contemporary media ecology, popular culture often demonstrates that truth is more compelling than fiction. The documentary genre, with audiences growing in leaps and bounds, has captured the mass imaginary in the past twenty years. There is a robust but selective commercial market for documentary, led by HBO, PBS, ESPN, Sundance, and Tribeca. Short-form documentary is increasingly present in public culture, with major media outlets like the New York Times, National Public Radio, and The Atlantic now investing in short-form production. Documentary moving image has advanced from the margins of the mediascape to inhabit the spaces of popular media and online circulation.2 Political documentary is readily visible, accessible, and present in popular culture and sometimes proves tremendously influential. As many film critics suggest, documentary viewers are left with “the feeling that these are more than just movies.”3 Technological innovations at the turn of the century, including the standardization of the internet and developments in mobile recording, helped move the influence of documentary and its audience beyond the screen, creating the potential for cross-platform experiences and the emergence of digitally connected participatory media cultures. Filmmakers at the inception of moving-image technology could never have imagined the unprecedented emphasis on media engagement in our current
historical moment.4 The evolution of mobile media technology, our social media habits, and the omnipresence of multiple media platforms have resulted in new and evolving ways of interacting with the media screen: “The defining narrative of our online moment concerns the decline of text, and the exploding reach and power of audio and video.”5 These conditions of digital culture coincide with significant contemporary political and social upheaval. This moment bears witness to multiple sectors of society experiencing a crippling economic crisis, growing dissatisfaction with representative government, and widespread disillusionment with state institutions. This combination of historical and technological conditions has given rise to emerging participatory media culture(s) that are engaged in recording life, addressing publics, exposing exploitation, facilitating media witnessing, and wresting back the means of media production and circulation from the hands of the powerful.
These intersecting documentary media cultures have produced a growing participatory commons that uses collective social practices of creating, remixing, and sharing documentary recordings as a means of engaging politics. The present volume responds to this charged contemporary reemergence of documentary movingimage culture(s), investigating the ways the genre is harnessed as a tool of political engagement and exhibiting protest functions such as witnessing, petitioning, solidification, polarization, and promulgation. This project explores how “antagonism opens the possibility not only for questioning ideologies and hegemonic discourse that sustain relations of oppression and marginalization but for beginning to articulate alternatives.”6 Antagonism in the form of open friction and opposition is critical; it fuels the social change process in a way that produces opportunities for collective conjuring. In addition to recognizing the protest function of documentary, it is important to ask practical questions about the everyday ways the genre engages and enacts the process of social change. The tempo of social transformation is slow, and the struggle is often incremental; where does documentary fit? As new media technologies emerge, altering who is speaking and to whom, documentary studies and practices rest on the precipice of history, an incredible vantage point from which to realize the long-theorized potential of the genre to support democracy and social transformation.
The contemporary documentary audience includes home media makers who can systematically recirculate documentary discourse and enter into conversation with existing, often activist, participatory media publics. As Jonathan Kahana explains, documentary makes “visible the invisible or ‘phantom’ realities that shape the experience of the ordinary Americans in whose name power is exercised and contested.”7 The evolving ties between documentary and digital innovation in a turbulent political moment has created promising new spaces of civic engagement. As Jane Gaines suggests, “The reason for using films instead of leaflets and pamphlets in the context of organizing is that films make their appeals through the senses . . . where the ideal viewer is poised to intervene in the world that so closely resembles the one
represented on screen.”8 Although many are grappling with the question, little existing theoretical research attempts to understand documentary as a material force of social change.
Over the past century, documentary film and video have routinely intervened in social change processes, with mixed results. Although some documentaries have functioned as a significant political force, others have been nothing more than a small flicker on the cinematic landscape. We can see this in the contrast between Fredrick Wiseman’s work, which resulted in significant social change—altering the privacy regulations for state mental institutions9 and the participatory media street tapes that emerged from video collectives in the 1970s. These collectives, such as the People’s Video Theater and Video Freex, began to surface following the proliferation of lightweight, inexpensive, portable video technology, which provided the tools for representing absent voices in a troubled democracy. As Deidre Boyle10 and DeeDee Halleck11 noted, however, these tapes did little to improve civic participation or ignite systematic social change. In 1988, Errol Morris debuted A Thin Blue Line, which helped secure the release of Randall Adams, a falsely convicted death row inmate. During this same time, several historical documentaries about abortion history, such as Back-Alley Detroit and From Danger to Dignity, were released and functioned primarily to create cultural change through education, with little connection to the active political struggles around abortion. A surge in high-profile advocacy-oriented documentaries at the turn of the century, including Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Super Size Me (2004), Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices (2005), and An Inconvenient Truth (2006), left news reporters, critics, educators, and politicians wondering how these documentary events might impact the contingent social and political landscape.12
Discussions of documentary and social change take place under a variety of conceptual labels: participatory media, solidarity documentary, advocacy documentary, committed documentary, agit-prop documentary, social justice documentary, and activist documentary. The media identified by these terms often share common concerns and an intention to participate in the struggle for social justice, but they are not equally engaged in the process of social change. As film critic A. O. Scott notes, “There may be more well-intentioned bad non-fiction movies than any other kind, films that satisfy the moral aspirations of their makers, but not much else.”13 This book investigates exactly what happens when documentary discourse succeeds or fails in intervening in the process of social change and how films made during specific moments of history reveal a new understanding of the status of the nonfiction image.
Documentary and social change is a broad and emerging area of research, conducted mostly by social scientists and critical scholars engaged in assessing the reception, learning, and collective processes facilitated by documentaries,14 as well as the historical and political context of documentary circulation.15 As David Whiteman notes, “ investigations of the political impact of documentary film have
typically been guided by a quite narrow ‘individualistic model’ of assessment that does not reflect the diverse and layered potential of the genre to intervene in the process of social transformation.”16 It is well established that documentary can function as a democratic tool with civic potential,17 but little research has been done on the specific practices through which documentaries engage, call forth, and speak to media publics for social change.18 The current scholarship lacks (1) a serious theoretical consideration of social change as it is facilitated by the documentary experience; (2) an understanding of social change documentary as an action, not a subgenre; (3) a broader historical account of influential but little known film communities (undocumented community screenings and practices, an account of influential underground filmmakers, and a framework for understanding rare but noteworthy activist works); (4) a bridging of documentary scholarship and practice that seeks a more holistic understanding of the social function of the field; and (5) an interpretation of the possibilities for social change documentary as technology shifts from an analog environment into a digital culture of participatory media publics. This book hopes to address these underdeveloped areas of research by building on established interdisciplinary work in documentary studies.
Most social change documentary manifests locally, with community-based organizing and coalition building with other struggles, coalescing in participatory media cultures invested in change. The scope of this study, which is focused on the U.S. documentary and historical context, is significantly determined by the very local character of the genre’s enactment. The project acknowledges that documentary travels beyond the nation-state and that its global impacts are undeniable, but the local, grounded, and specific ways participatory media cultures coalesce around documentary within the borders of the nation-state are the primary focus. The flows of economic support for documentary production are partially determined by the commitments of specific nation-states to cultivate media production and its uses. In contrast to the United States, for example, Canada has historically shown strong government commitment to funding and cultivating the democratic possibilities of documentary.19 These values and commitments shape how government resources are used to support the documentary field in terms of financial and cultural infrastructure. In other words, the possibilities of documentary culture are often constrained by the nation-state.
This project, focused on the documentary history of the United States, attempts to create a more solid foundation for discussions of documentary and social change by paying close attention to the kind of small-scale organizing that often gets lost in studies focused on global documentary. Tracing the genre’s form and function over time, this study is an effort to distill important aspects of documentary, observing how the field has been shaped by national investments and constraints. Participatory media cultures, the “imagined communities” around which social change documentary is often built, construct a sense of affiliation that is bound up in national identity.20 As Jeffrey Geiger suggests, “Films, with the discourses that
surround them and the institutions that support them, are a central means through which the idea of the national is articulated and culturally determined.”21 In the case of U.S. documentary, this includes a strong tradition of resisting the “universal nation and its narrational strategies through its location within contestatory newly emerging identities and social collectives.”22 The focus on U.S. documentary acknowledges the political structures of the nation-state that often undergird social change processes, as well as the slippery way documentary can seep into a global audience. Documentary has the capacity to translate experience and make it available for interpretation23 and to call attention to or facilitate conversation about problems that plague the national consciousness. It can also help audiences “imagine ideas and futures beyond its immediate framework and subject matter.”24 It is this capacity of imagining that translates into political potency.
This book proposes that the influence of social change documentary is primarily constitutive; it provides a sense of shared identification around which an audience can be oriented. Documentary offers a grid of intelligibility for audiences, creating structures for making sense of global reality and navigating which subjectivities to adopt in relation to the struggles on the screen.25 Social change documentary is also about context, timing, and appropriate discourse. The rhetorical influence of documentary is not primarily determined by aesthetic articulation or moving content, although good art does require good content; what turns a documentary screening into a documentary event is the context. By shifting focus from a traditional understanding of social change documentary—as a series of intentions and aesthetics—to look more broadly at how documentary engages political structure(s), our understanding of the scope and function of documentary’s transformative potential expands. This project is invested in defining social change documentary by its agency and the action, movement, and transformative potential in concrete historical contexts. Through the unpredictable pathways of circulation, documentaries live on beyond their initial moments of production and screening. Rather than propping up an approved canonical definition of what constitutes documentary based on academic tradition, this book asks how the documentary impulse is moving people into action. Sometimes we find that this impulse leads to traditional filmmaking, and other times it manifests in more vernacular inflections of moving-image production. Expanding the scope of the study to include vernacular documentary expression provides a broad framework to consider how the status of the documentary impulse might constitute a significant and evolving public commons.
Documentary travels along pathways that can create collective participatory cultures invested in political movement. We are seeing more and more examples of documentary discourse going beyond dissemination of ideas to facilitate the active exchange of political ideas. The intersections of multiple participatory media cultures around the documentary impulse form a growing public commons26 united by media objects and events and defined by participation. By bringing
groups together and moving collective action forward, this documentary commons creates spaces for diverse people to share in modes of deliberation and the work of establishing the infrastructure needed to sustain relational connection, as well as making possible the production of new discourses that generate political arenas of intervention. The origins of this commons can be traced through the collective social practices of documentary history, found in the articulated truth of vernacular voices forged through traditions of resistance.27 Hardt and Negri suggest understanding the function of the commons as a way to confront power, “Revealing some of these really existing forms of the common is a first step toward establishing the bases for an exodus of the multitude from its relation with capital.”28 The documentary commons is a critical site of intervention where the underrepresented confront the structures of power. With all their optimism about the commons, however, Hardt and Negri remain uncertain about how communities are mobilized into an assemblage and connect with a “unit of action.”29 Documentary history is a series of these actions, with a growing force that is mapped on to the practices of political knowing in the United States.
This introductory chapter provides context for the book’s analysis of social change documentary by addressing the ways the field of documentary and social change is shifting with the emergence of digital media technology. I begin by outlining the problems in the field and then link together the foundational concepts of this book: social change, agency, and collective identification.
The Trouble with Documentary and Social Change
There is no easy ethical position once a filmmaker decides to become entangled with the life circumstances of the subjects he or she portrays.
Professor Linda Williams in Collecting Visible Evidence
While academic scholarship has been slow to address the possibilities of documentary engagement, commercial media and philanthropic institutions were quick to adopt approaches to “strategic outreach,” “audience engagement,” and “impact.” With the unprecedented commercial boom of documentary at the turn of the 21st century, the collapse of arts funding, and the new distribution models made possible by digital technologies, by 2008 the “conceptual and practical architecture that comprises what we call ‘documentary’ began to unravel.”30 This revolution in socially responsible filmmaking ushered in new actors who began contributing to the documentary field. “Filmanthropists,” who are often technology entrepreneurs, continue to make significant cash investments in documentary work, which they hope will produce financial returns and social impact, creating a “double bottom line.” Some believed this approach would create more sustainable production practices by making the nonprofit world responsible for financial discipline.31 The
result, however, has been an uncritical and market-based approach to understanding documentary and social change.
The documentary industry celebrated and embraced the concept of “impact.” Influenced by the “functionalist orientation” of social entrepreneurs, filmmakers are expected to demonstrate political influence through specific “performance criteria by which some change can be imagined and then assessed.”32 This uncritical, ahistorical approach to public engagement with documentary produced evaluation tools and metrics for assessing social change. In the new century, emerging documentaries received industry funding based on measurable impact, regardless of whether the actions serve the injustices on the screen. The results of this marketbased approach to social change have included building nonprofit coalitions, ensuring that the documentary reaches target audiences, and tailoring documentary messaging to meet the perceived needs of activists.
The market approach to social change documentary is problematic, both conceptually and in practice. It flips the focus of the creative process from storytelling to campaign outcomes, leaving the creative team to negotiate with stakeholders who may or may not help in the production process or social change. The metrics model of assessment does not build on an understanding of social change documentary in its historical context; it elides the role of larger social and political currents to influence productive circulation for social change. It is an approach uncritical of institutions and their role in sustaining status quo power relationships, substituting contact with activist communities for real measures of social change. The connection between story, action, and material forces of change is still obscure. I would suggest that the corporate embrace of social change in the form of “impact” should be treated with some suspicion.
This book acknowledges that an account of social change documentary must address complex personhood33 in the production process, both on the screen and in exchanges with the audience. Sociologist Avery Gordon suggests that complex personhood means that all people “remember and forget, are beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others.” The condition of power in society in which some people matter and others do not, “even those called ‘other’ are never never that.” Most importantly for this study: “Complex personhood means that the stories people tell about themselves, about their troubles, about their social worlds, about their society’s problems are entangled and weaved between what is immediately available as a story and what their imaginations are reaching toward.” Documentary intervenes to widen and diversify the stories available to our public imaginaries, providing the data for our own collective field of vision. These conditions generate a complex personhood, where “groups of people will act together, that they will vehemently disagree with and sometimes harm each other, and that they will do both at the same time.” People act on their own interests and on behalf of the interests of others—often in unpredictable ways—working collectively and generously toward social change. We should not withdraw from this complex
arena of social exchange because it defies our desire for stability and resists simple assessment through calculations and metrics. Rather, we need an energized, scholarly effort to map this terrain to produce insight into how documentary engages communities to productively move people into action in relation to specific historical context.
One potential pitfall for social change documentary in practice is the tendency to embrace activism for the sake of access or institutional support, only to replace the important and difficult work of social change with a simple curation of images representing social injustice. Researchers of all varieties often visit marginalized communities to study, collect data, record stories, and then disappear. This has led to what Gubrium and Harper identify as “research fatigue,” or a general distrust of academic researchers and media makers in the communities being researched. There is often well-founded concern about researchers’ motives for recording the historical memories and traumas of underserved communities, instilling a fear that this kind of documentation will lead to problematic political tourism.
Tourism is a fraught framework for thinking about public engagement. In her book, Toxic Tourism, Phaedra Pezzullo suggests that tourism in all its varied capacities—as a public practice, a counterexperience of everyday life, and an educational experience—involves an outsider in unfamiliar territory walking on precious ethical ground. We can resist the problems of tourism by first recognizing its “unpleasant, offensive, and harmful” consequences.34 Pezzullo ultimately suggests that tours and tourism have political possibilities worth contemplating, but documentary as a field, industry, and practice has yet to seriously consider its own tourism problem. Production impulses that move toward political tourism demand further scrutiny, now more than ever.
A few years ago, along with a small production crew, I joined a delegation of teachers, community activists, students, and journalists on a trip to Juarez and Chihuahua, Mexico. We spent the week learning about the social, political, and economic collisions occurring on the U.S./Mexican border, specifically seeking to understand how and why these conditions contributed to systematic violence toward young women. The circumstances of this atrocious violence, which documentary filmmaker Lourdes Portillo highlights in Senorita Extraviada (2001), have evolved and exploded in recent decades. We discussed our intentions with the delegation before we arrived; we told them we wanted to learn about the situation and possibly use what we recorded to bring visibility and mobilize communities to demand justice for the missing women. To our surprise, American activists and scholars who had been working on the border for the last ten years met us with caution. Claiming to speak on behalf of the many families we would encounter during our trip, they expressed concern about a revolving door of media makers who have, as they put it, “[c]ome to Mexico to record the pain of these families for their own benefit, promising to bring visibility to the issue only to never be heard from again.” Not only were we surprised by this caution, but it created a firm line between those who are
experiencing this injustice and those who are on the outside. It did not feel good to be told we were on the outside. My family was from this region of Mexico; I shared the same last name of a few women on the missing list, and I had traveled there as a child. I felt connected, and I identified with the struggle to find justice for the disappeared women. What I had to confront is that I had enormous privileges that were invisible to me: I could travel back and forth across the border without consequence. I had the confidence that, as a doctoral candidate in the United States who would soon become a professor, my voice mattered. I could leave the danger around me and not leave everything I loved behind. I had the money and resources to leave this injustice behind. Our documentary production team needed to understand this dynamic in order to avoid speaking for the voiceless and move forward collaborating and speaking with them.
This scenario highlights a key problem for social change media: the potential for exploitation and armchair political tourism exists in the processes of both documentary production and consumption. The tourism metaphor refers to the connections between media production, audiences, and justice movements. It is important to ask in whose interests documentary images of social injustice are being created and circulated. In her book Justice Interruptus, Nancy Fraser reminds theorists to identify two types of injustice in the process of social change: (1) socioeconomic injustice, which is a result of the political economic structure, and (2) cultural or symbolic injustice, which is rooted in social patterns of representation, interpretation, and communication. Fraser warns that we must not conflate these types of injustice nor substitute one for the other.35 In the realm of documentary, this prompts us to complicate our thinking about the relationship between the cultural recognition work of social change documentary and the real-world redistribution of resources in service of the injustices on the documentary screen. The process of social transformation is laborious and complex, and includes necessary bodies in motion.36 Without collective bodies in motion to act on behalf of the cultural and economic injustices presented on the screen, cultural change can distract from necessary socioeconomic change. There are blurred lines between the creative teams working on documentaries and the people whose stories are being recorded, sometimes resulting in the prioritizing of aesthetic and production interests over those of the people whose story is being told. This point must be considered as we begin theorizing about social change in the documentary context.
Thirty years ago, Bill Nichols addressed these concerns as axiographics—how values and ethics of representations come to be understood within a space. This involves the nature of consent, codes of conduct, and ethical implications of production. Nichols explains: “An indexical bond exists between the image and the ethics that produced it. The image provides evidence not only on behalf of an argument but also gives evidence of the politics and ethics of its maker.”37 For Nichols, these ethical concerns are like fingerprints on the screen, available for the critic to discover. However, this is a rather indirect way to address this matter. The screen,
the indexical bond, does indeed provide a residue of values and ethics, but how this shows up in the creative process, embedded in the process of invention in the form of shared interests, is not so clearly transparent.
Labor activist and documentary filmmaker Anne Lewis describes the tourism phenomenon of documentary exploitation as cultural rape; it represents the systematic documentation of social injustice motivated by a media maker’s quest for success and personal gain, while the needs of the marginalized and exploited bodies on the screen play a supporting role.38 It is invested in the recognition of the politics of documentary without concern for the redistribution of resources needed to actually solve the problem. This kind of disconnection between documentary filmmaking and social change action is a toxic exchange and is often reflected in the institutions that provide funding for such films. Larry Daressa of California Newsreel argues as follows:
After thirty years, I’ve come to the conclusion that the conventional cycle of funding, producing and then distributing these projects in the hope they will meet some audience’s needs must be reversed so that we start from those needs. . . . Perhaps we should declare a moratorium on social change filmmaking until we establish procedures which ensure productions will be accountable to organizing needs and can function as integrated parts of longterm strategies for social change. . . . I would insist that media projects which do justify themselves in terms of social objectives must be rigorously evaluated as to how efficiently they will contribute to those objectives. Otherwise we will continue to get banal art and puerile politics pretending to be a significant social service.39
In light of these issues, I suggest three considerations for approaching the study and production of social change documentary. First, social problems are a productive place to begin for filmmakers and scholars. As creative thinkers, we are encouraged to invest in research agendas and productions that satisfy our interests and curiosities. What if we started with social problems and sorted out our curiosities within that range? Second, the connections between the maker, the documentary, and the audience of the recorded social injustice should matter to those who study and practice social change documentary. Emerging methods of studying the genre can help us unpack the mechanisms of these critical connections that currently sit in the margins of documentary studies. Third, in a world in which documentary practitioners are often encouraged to make claims about serving communities as a condition for funding, scholars have an opportunity to critically engage the connection between documentary and social change to make it more apparent for intervention. Echoing the slippery issues of telling the stories of underserved communities, critical scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang offer this meditation: “How do we learn from and respect the wisdom and desires in the stories that we (over)hear,
