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InMedia The French Journal of Media Studies
4 | 2013 Exploring War Memories in American Documentaries
Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/657 DOI: 10.4000/inmedia.657 ISSN: 2259-4728
Publisher Center for Research on the English-Speaking World (CREW)
Electronic reference InMedia, 4 | 2013, « Exploring War Memories in American Documentaries » [Online], Online since 12 November 2013, connection on 25 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/ 657 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/inmedia.657
This text was automatically generated on 25 September 2020.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Exploring War Memories in American Documentaries From Film Archives to Digital Filmmaking
From Film Archives to Digital Filmmaking: Exploring War Memories in American Documentaries Georges Fournier and Delphine Letort
Television’s “True Stories”: Paratexts and the Promotion of HBO’s Band of Brothers and The Pacific Debra Ramsay
“How Could You Forget That?”: Representing Collective and Traumatic Memories in Winter Soldier Daniel Grinberg
Control Room and the Staging of War Barry Mauer
The War Tapes: Documenting the Iraq War with Digital Cameras Delphine Letort
Documenting Virtual War Calvin Fagan
Varia
Crafting the Web New Media Craft in British and American Contemporary Art Charlotte Gould
Bibliographical Essay
Audio-Visual: Disembodied Voices in Theory Anaïs Le Fèvre-Berthelot
Interview
Broken Beyond Repair:Warren Spector on the History of Video Games Warren Spector and Carl Therrien
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Critical Perspective
Information and Communication Sciences as Critical Social Sciences Fabien Granjon
Conference Reviews
The Canadian Communication Tradition 4-7 June 2013, University of Victoria, British Columbia Christopher Ali
Book Reviews
Marta Boni, Adrienne Boutang, Barbara Laborde and Lucie Merijeau (eds), Théorème #17, Networking images. Approches interdisciplinaires des images en réseau Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2013, 158 pages David Peyron
David Gauntlett, Making is Connecting, The social meaning of creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0 Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011, 232 pages Nicolas Thély
Debbie Ging, Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 264 pages Estelle Epinoux
John Mullen, ‘The show must go on!’ La Chanson populaire en Grande-Bretagne pendant la Grande Guerre, 1914-1918 Paris: L’Harmattan, collection “L’Aire Anglophone”, 2012, 287 pages Yann Béliard
Isabelle Rigoni and Eugenie Saitta (eds), Mediating Cultural Diversity in a Globalized Public Space New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 192 pages Christopher Ali
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Exploring War Memories in American Documentaries From Film Archives to Digital Filmmaking
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From Film Archives to Digital Filmmaking: Exploring War Memories in American Documentaries
Georges Fournier and Delphine Letort
EDITOR'S NOTE
This dossier was followed for InMedia by Cecilia Tirtaine and Thibaut Clément.
1 The memory of American wars has been largely influenced by iconic visuals, used either to promote patriotic cohesion behind the rationale for war or to question the motivations behind the United States military involvement abroad.1 War documentaries, while serving conflicting perspectives in times of war, participate in the construction of sites of memory while retrospectively engaging with war issues.2 Incorporating archive footage as a source of historical knowledge, these nonfiction films produce ‘modern memory’ which, according to Pierre Nora, ‘relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image.’3 Based on first-hand interviews and witness statements that convey the authenticity the genre strives for, war documentaries aim to bring to light the untold stories of the war, shaping private, repressed, or confessed memories into shared, public collective memory.4 This construction of collective memory has increasingly become a self- conscious endeavor given the soldiers who now provide visual records of war with their digital cameras.
2 Drawing on personal and public archives, war documentaries can hardly reconcile the dual perspective that underlies the framing of war. In his discussion of the Vietnam War, Milton J. Bates pits the perceptions of the man on the battlefield against the knowledge of the military command to shed light on the gap of knowledge between the two:
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The man on the hilltop, whether he is an elected political leader or one of those civilian or military technocrats whom Noam Chomsky called the ‘new Mandarins,’ knows better than the man in the valley because he knows so much more and knows it dispassionately.5
3 From the soldiers’ accounts to the version formulated by government officials, documentaries highlight the distance that separates the ordinary grunt from the control room. Whether they are based on media archive footage or on witnesses’ visual and oral accounts, documentaries craft a history of war that often obscures rather than clarifies the nature of experience amidst the fog of war.
4 Political philosopher Michael Walzer contends that ‘hypocrisy is rife in wartime discourse,’6 highlighting the layers of deception, and even self-deception, that weigh on war narratives. Not only do lies and truth mingle in the official reports that attempt to manipulate public opinion in favour of a pro-war stance, but they also merge in the memories of veterans whose combat experiences may not be accurate. It is in this sense that military historian Roger J. Spiller metaphorically calls combat history’s ‘darkest corner’: an allusion to the confusion that shrouds battle on the front.7
5 In this issue of InMedia, contributors were prompted to investigate the recent evolutions of war documentary, while keeping in mind the impact of digital technologies and the growth of corporate media. The authors of the collected articles emphasize the link between war documentary filmmaking and the shaping of collective memory, which has become a self-conscious effort on the parts of producers and directors. Clearly, war documentaries have become important cultural commodities, which Debra Ramsay demonstrates by analysing the marketing strategies behind Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010), two docudrama miniseries that endorse a nostalgic discourse while contributing to shaping the memory of World War II through re-enacted combat scenes. Filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks evoke the powerful impact of the battles as interviewed veterans remember them in spectacular scenes, while simultaneously illustrating the influence of commercial television on documentary filmmaking. Promoted as authentic documents through the ‘look of period combat footage,’ the series nonetheless convey an American perspective that the author defines through a close examination of all paratextual materials. Ramsay underscores the connection between the series and the construction of collective memory, using the commemoration of the war to reinforce the myth of the ‘good war’ which World War II has come to epitomize in collective memory.
6 Although many fiction films exist about the role of memory in the Vietnam War, few documentaries have taken up this subject. This absence is particularly concerning because testimonies can proffer stunning revelations concerning the aftermath of conflict, such as repressed memories of traumatized veterans, post-war erasures, and other distortions in both official and popular memory. Little attention has been given to the way nations deal with the memories of war crimes, and this is particularly true for the USA and the Vietnam War. Daniel Grinberg addresses these issues in his study of Winter Soldier, a 1972 collaborative documentary. The film spans three days during which Vietnam veterans, gathered in Detroit, recount the atrocities committed there and the falsifications designed to hide crimes. In “Depictions of Memory in Winter Soldier as Indicator of Cultural Memory,” Daniel Grinberg aptly shows the processes of erasure found within both official and collective memory. His study of the confrontation between personal and official discourses serves to highlight the entanglements and the difficulty of a nation coming to terms with this trauma.
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Deductive in its approach, Grinberg’s work delves into the delicate connections and interactions between public history and personal testimony; it explores how nations come to terms with their memory.
7 As this year marks the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq, several articles in this issue aim to assess the impact of digital technologies on documentary filmmaking. Barry Mauer explores the relationships between the media and the political and military spheres in the early days of the Iraq war through a study of Jehane Noujaim’s Control Room (2004). The complexity of war images broadcast on TV channels beseeches us to keep in mind national and international interests, whether private or institutional. The author makes a case for increased fairness and calls for the mediascape to represent war differently in order to avoid cliché images, which have become ubiquitous in news and current affairs. Mauer pursues the staging complicit in all representation and advocates a dramatic approach that would take into account theories related to rhetoric. In the second part of this essay, the author ponders over the role of journalists as independent reporters or agents of propaganda.
8 Through a detailed analysis of The War Tapes (Deborah Scranton, 2006), which incorporates a selection of footage filmed by American military men deployed on the ground, Delphine Letort interrogates the power of digital cameras in shaping the perception of the Iraq war. Gaining authenticity from its home movie aesthetics, The War Tapes captures the soldiers’ intimate war experiences, shedding light on traumatic events whose haunting power lasts long after the men return to their homeland. In particular, Scranton’s re-purposing of the original stock footage subdues the soldiers’ critical voices, deflecting attention from the war itself to the soldiers’ suffering. The produced film thus highlights the role of embedded digital cameras and the blurring line between private and public memories.8
9 Calvin Fagan underlines that the cinéma vérité mode, adopted in most documentaries made on the Iraq war, fails to grasp the complexities of the new technological context in which the military operate. Fagan posits that the hybridity between fiction and nonfiction is a result of documentary filmmaking’s adaptation to war’s digital mediation. Full Battle Rattle (Tony Gerber/Jesse Moss, 2008) and Serious Games (Harun Farocki, 2009-2010) are reflexive works that question the use of digital media in the training of the military. These documentaries highlight the developments of new technologies and show their contribution to the virtualisation of war, which primarily affects the soldiers’ relationship with the enemy. Collective memory is undoubtedly conditioned by the ways in which recent conflicts are represented and captured.
10 The present contributions offer insight into the representations of war that claim to be testimonial, whether they are personal testimonies or pro-filmic elements easily accessible through modern technological tools or re-enactments. At a time when the United States has had to reassess its military role, reconsider its interventions, and face new forms of warfare, there arises a need to revisit questions about the representation of war and how memories of past wars affect policy-making, debates to which the present issue contributes.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bates, Milton J. The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996.
Barnouw, Eric. Documentary: A History of Non-Fiction Film. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 [1974].
Chapman, Jane. Issues in Contemporary Documentary. Cambridge UK & Malden USA: Polity Press, 2009.
Ferro, Marc. Cinema and History. Translated by Naomi Greene. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988.
Fussel, Paul. The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern War. London: Scribner’s, 1991.
Hariman, Robert and John Louis Lucaites. No Caption Needed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Hoskins, Andrew and Ben O’Loughlin. War and Media, the Emergence of Diffused War. Cambridge & Malden: Polity Press, 2010.
McBride, Joseph. Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 2011.
Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory, (Spring, 1989): 7-24. http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/201/articles/ 89NoraLieuxIntroRepresentations.pdf. Accessed September 9, 2013.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010 [2001].
Nichols, Bill. “The Voice of Documentary.” In New Challenges for Documentary, edited by Alan Rosenthal and John Corner, 17−34. New York & Manchester: University Press, 2005 [1985].
Walzer, Michael. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. New York: Basic Books, 1977.
NOTES
1. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007). 2. “Lieux de mémoire originate with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, and notarize bills because such activities no longer occur naturally.” Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory, (Spring, 1989), 12.
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5. Milton J. Bates, The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 220. 6. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 20. 7. Roger J. Spiller cited in Paul Fussel (ed.), The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern War (London: Scribner’s, 1991), 313. 8. Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin, War and Media, the Emergence of Diffused War (Cambridge & Malden: Polity Press, 2010), 22-23.
AUTHORS
GEORGES FOURNIER Georges Fournier is Senior Lecturer in English Civilisation at the Department of Foreign Languages of the Jean Moulin University of Lyon. His main research interest lies in British authored television. He has published many articles on political docudrama and is currently conducting research in factual programming.
DELPHINE LETORT Delphine Letort is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Le Mans (France) where she teaches American civilisation and film studies. Her research explores the relationship between history, memory, and film in American fiction and nonfiction cinema— including war documentaries and African American television films. She studies the ideological construction of stereotypes and the politics of representation developed in Hollywood productions.
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Television’s “True Stories”: Paratexts and the Promotion of HBO’s Band of Brothers and The Pacific
Debra Ramsay
1 In 1998, and in the wake of the commercial success of Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg approached the American cable television network HBO with a proposed adaptation of Stephen Ambrose’s 1992 book Band of Brothers. Constructed primarily from interviews with surviving veterans and published with their endorsement, Ambrose’s book charts the history of the members of an American paratrooper company, Company E, known as ‘Easy’, in World War II. Despite the extraordinary budget demanded by Spielberg and Hanks’ vision for the series, HBO had no hesitation in agreeing to back the project at a cost of $125m, making it the most expensive television series of its time. Band of Brothers was broadcast by HBO in 2001, with the first episode airing just before September 11th. Perhaps because of the historical and emotional resonance of that day in America, viewing figures tapered off as the series progressed. However, Band of Brothers has since become not only HBO’s best-selling DVD, but also the highest grossing TV-to-DVD release to date.1 The success of the series in the sell-through market helps explain why, just under a decade later, HBO once again agreed, in Spielberg’s words, to ‘[make] room on their schedule’ and in their budget, this time at a cost of $250m, for a similar ten-part miniseries, The Pacific.2 In contrast to its predecessor, however, The Pacific concentrates on the experiences of just three individuals – Eugene Sledge, Robert Leckie and John Basilone – rather than an entire company, and shifts attention away from the war in Europe. The Pacific is based on memoirs written by Sledge and Leckie, and on public and historical accounts of Basilone’s life.
2 The two series conform to Tom Hoffer and Richard Nelson’s description of docudrama as ‘informative yet entertaining in a way [that is] impossible for the traditional documentary.’3 Drawn from the memories and memoirs of American soldiers who fought in World War II, both series prominently feature interviews with surviving veterans at the beginning of each episode; The Pacific augments these interviews with
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archival footage of the war, as well as graphics and historical information supplied by Hanks’ voice-over—conventions common to war documentaries on television since The World at War (Thames Television, 1973). The high-profile involvement of Hanks and Spielberg, the extravagant budgets, and the production of hypermediated, spectacular battle sequences (unusual not only for television but also for film), combine to set the two series apart from what Hoffer and Nelson refer to as ‘traditional documentary’.4 Spielberg identifies Band of Brothers and The Pacific as ‘semi-documentaries’ and suggests that as such, they are not bound by the ‘rules’ of ‘mainstream’ televisual drama (nor, implicitly, by those governing documentary), but by the ‘rules’ imposed by the memories of the veterans themselves.5 In order to tell the story of Easy Company, for example, Band of Brothers departs from ‘mainstream’ television by featuring a cast of largely unknown actors in multiple storylines and the lack a central character, while The Pacific ‘‘break[s] every narrative rule’, as Hanks puts it, because it concentrates on battles that proved unimportant in the larger framework of the war.6 Both series are further distinguished from ‘commercial’ television, according to Spielberg, because they are intended as ‘honor roll[s] of valor and sacrifice’ to the veterans.7
3 Despite Spielberg’s claims to the contrary, HBO nevertheless has commercial imperatives in investing in two such expensive mini-series. The idea that the two series are outside of ‘mainstream’ television is itself an important one for HBO, as it conforms to the subscription network’s carefully constructed brand identity as a purveyor of distinctive and culturally significant original programming of such ‘quality’ that it is ‘not TV. It’s HBO.’8 However, even within HBO’s usual discourses of distinction, Band of Brothers and The Pacific were marketed as extraordinary. Although the series themselves negotiate the interstices between documentary and drama, the paratextual network constructed by HBO’s marketing strategies at the time of their original broadcast, and into their subsequent release on DVD and Blu-Ray, does not so much blur the boundaries between documentary and drama as eradicate them completely. As Jonathan Gray points out, paratexts ‘create texts, they manage them and they fill them with many of the meanings we associate with them.’ Consequently, as Gray goes on to explain, the welter of material that accumulates around and within any mediated text should be considered as ‘anything but peripheral’.9 Focussing solely on the content within a television series or film thus runs the risk of constructing an incomplete picture of how that text functions and is understood. In this article, therefore, I suggest that the category of ‘docudrama’ is inadequate for a full understanding of the position that HBO has carved out for Band of Brothers and The Pacific within the framework of historical representations of World War II. Instead, I want to consider how the paratextual network of both series identifies them as definitive, authoritative historical accounts that organize and interpret memories and experiences of World War II not only for Americans, but for the world. Drawing on the idea of metanarrative as defined by John Stephens and Robyn McCallum as a ‘global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience’, I suggest that Band of Brothers and The Pacific are presented through their paratextual network as metadocumentaries - totalizing narratives of World War II that provide primary mechanisms through which to understand the war.10
4 While my intention is to focus on strands of the paratextual network that surrounds Band of Brothers and The Pacific, I begin with a brief examination of the two series themselves before moving on to the preliminary marketing drives that preceded their initial broadcast dates. Taking into account Gray’s point that ‘intangible entities’ also
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function as paratexts, I concentrate on the premiers of both series in order to establish how these events endorse the series by imbricating them within official ceremonies of commemoration and to identify what the premiers imply for HBO.11 Next, I move on to explore how the ‘bonus’ features available on the DVD and Blu-Ray box sets of the two series - specifically the ‘Making of’ and ‘Timeline’ features - not only extend HBO’s initial marketing strategies, but also situate the series within an intricate textual frame that works to position Band of Brothers and The Pacific as more than either documentary or drama or a combination of the two, but as unmediated windows into the past. Ultimately, I seek to explore the following question: how do televisual strategies of promotion and representation inflect our understanding of the relationship between television, history, and documentary?
‘Real, True Stories:’ Band of Brothers and The Pacific
‘The true story of Easy Company.’ Intertitle from Band of Brothers Trailer ‘We had all given up that the story would ever be told. The real, true story.’12 Richard Greer, 1st Marine Division, Pacific veteran
5 Before moving on to a discussion of the paratextual network that surrounds the two series, it is important to understand the ‘creative symbiosis,’ as Thomas Schatz refers to it, between past and present, drama and documentary, at work in Band of Brothers and The Pacific.13 In attempting to tell the ‘real, true’ story of Easy Company and the Marines in the Pacific, Band of Brothers and The Pacific construct what Tom Hanks refers to as an ‘under the helmet’ perspective of World War II.14 In both series, the war is filtered through the memories and experiences of American soldiers who saw active combat. Band of Brothers and The Pacific are indicative of the significance of the memories of veterans in determining what should be remembered and commemorated from World War II in America. The privileging of the memories of soldiers above all other recollections of the war is perhaps unsurprising given that the majority of the American wartime generation experienced the war indirectly, as the U.S. was one of the few nations to emerge from the war relatively unscathed in terms of damage to home ground. However, it is in the deference to the veteran’s memory that the tension between history and memory frequently becomes apparent. The so-called ‘Enola Gay controversy’ of 1995, which involved the removal of material documenting the impact of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the Japanese from an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute following several veterans’ organisations’ vehement protests, provides one example of what Pierre Nora identifies as the ‘oppositional’ relationship between memory and history.15 As the Enola Gay incident demonstrates, privileging the memory of the soldier as the quintessential narrative of World War II may overwrite the memories and experiences of others. By selecting the ‘under the helmet’ perspective of the war, Band of Brothers and The Pacific impose a broader conception of World War II historicity that suggests that any historical accounts can and should be refracted through the memories of the ordinary soldier. In both series, a supposed more encompassing vision of war is offered through a series of battles fought in spaces inhabited primarily by soldiers and rendered extraordinary through the awe- inspiring spectacle of industrialised warfare. The battlefields of both Europe and the Pacific are translated here through what Geoff King refers to as a ‘spectacular-
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authentic’ aesthetic – a combination of the look of period combat footage with contemporary techniques of filmmaking such as computer generated imagery.16
6 The Marine landing on the island of Peleliu in the Pacific (The Pacific, 5:10) is particularly useful as an example of the ‘under the helmet’ perspective that Hanks describes and also illustrates King’s ‘spectacular-authentic’ aesthetic. While the sequence resembles the faded imagery of films such as The Battle for Midway (John Ford, 1943) and With the Marines at Tarawa (U.S.M.C, 1944) in its colour palette and style, it also utilizes computer-generated imagery—for example, in recreating the numerous Higgens boats used in the landing. The construction of this sequence is closely reminiscent of the landing sequence in Normandy as portrayed in Saving Private Ryan and deploys similar techniques to mimic combat photography: unstable camerawork replicates the look of hand-held footage and moments when the lens is spattered with mud or debris creates a sense of hypermediated immediacy.
7 However, no combat cameraman of the time would have focussed on individual soldiers the way that the camera does in this sequence. The sequence alternates between long shots of the shelling of the beach, the other landing boats, and close-ups of the Marines, with a specific focus on Eugene Sledge (played here by Joseph Mazello). A moment of concentrated auditory and visual identification with Sledge is designed to mimic the emotional shock and sensory impact of a mortar blast on the beach and ensures that the scene is not only viewed through Sledge’s eyes, but also experienced via his somatic reactions.17 The aesthetic construction of combat in the landing sequence locates Sledge as the vulnerable human figure at the centre of the carnage and chaos of the battlefield and generates empathy for him by allowing the spectator to experience this moment of combat vicariously through his senses. The spaces of war are thus rendered extraordinary by a combination of the somatic impact of the spectacle of modern warfare, recreated through a ‘spectacular-authentic’ aesthetic, and the display of powerful emotions by the male soldier.18
8 Visceral battle sequences, such as the one above, are focal points of both series, and they contrast sharply with the sombre tone of the documentary-style interviews with the veterans that precede each episode. That the impact of these moments of combat is still alive in the present is illustrated by the observable psychological scars evident in the sometimes emotional testimony of the veterans. The emotional affect, enacted by the confluence of the present for the veterans and the past as it plays out in the dramatized recreations, is intensely persuasive. Contrary to usual documentary conventions, the veterans are not identified until the final episode of each series, and at first viewing it is difficult, if not at times impossible, to match them with the actors playing their younger incarnations in the dramatic recreations of their past. With nothing to identify them as individuals, the veterans become defined through the notion of generation – these are old men talking about the past in general terms, in contrast to the individual experiences of the young men who are living it. The choice to keep the identities of the veterans obscured until the final episode of each series means that their individuality becomes blurred in the present and absorbed into their identity as members of the so-called ‘Greatest Generation,’ with their individual testimony folded into that of their contemporaries. The interviews thus create the impression that this is a ‘generation’ telling its story, with individual memories reconstituted as an agreed, negotiated version of the past. The ‘real, true’ story of the wartime generation that both series relate is consequently one in which white, male voices dominate, and
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the cost of the war appears to rest almost entirely on their shoulders. Soldiers—or, more specifically, white, male, American soldiers—emerge as the primary victims of World War II. Together, Band of Brothers and The Pacific are thus not so much a depiction of the American experience of World War II, but more a depiction of World War II as an American experience.
9 The ‘under the helmet perspective’ of the two series, with its focus on the battlefields of World War II, makes fighting between soldiers the defining experience of the war. However, in reality, the experience of combat was relatively rare, with only 25% of the U.S. Army (which in turn comprised less than 10% of the total U.S. armed forces) coming under enemy fire throughout the entire war.19 The reduction of a total war to exclusive, liminal moments of masculine relationships, sacrifice, and endeavour in both series not only inadvertently perpetuates war’s appeal, but also obviates the necessity of questioning the morality or suitability of a military response to a given situation. Neither series questions the necessity of war. “Why We Fight” (9:10 of Band of Brothers) rearticulates the cultural memory of the American soldier as represented in Frank Capra’s film of the same title (1945) as liberator of the oppressed and defender of democracy, as it depicts Easy Company’s liberation of a concentration camp. While the reasons behind America’s involvement in World War II are never quite as clearly defined in The Pacific, there can be no doubt that the soldiers’ ‘cause is just,’ as Sledge’s captain tells him in “Peleliu Airfield” (6:10). There is of course no question that World War II was a necessary war waged against totalitarian and aggressive regimes, but the overall reduction of war to fighting between soldiers preserves the idea that war can be waged ‘justly’ in that the terrible impact of war on civilians never registers in any compelling way in either series, despite the fact that civilian casualties outweighed military casualties on all sides in World War II.20 Band of Brothers and The Pacific thus draw on and perpetuate a pre-existing national narrative of World War II as America’s ‘Good War’ – a war in which America altruistically came to the defence of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ and rescued the world from oppression.
10 The combination of veteran testimony, spectacular, hypermediated battle sequences, and affecting performances blends documentary conventions and the dramatic techniques of filmmaking to create a convincing and compelling framework for the series’ particular perspective of the conflict. Older ideologies associated with the war are thus repackaged for a contemporary audience, and memory is re-presented as history. Given the repurposing of older ideologies, the interaction between memory and history, and the balance of the individual soldiers’ memories and histories with the experiences and history of the ‘Greatest Generation’, the two series align with Pierre Nora’s criteria for what he calls ‘lieux de mémoire.’ In particular, they comply with Nora’s definition of lieux de mémoire as ‘hybrids’ composed of ‘endless rounds of the collective and the individual, the prosaic and the sacred, the immutable and the fleeting.’21 Like Nora’s lieux, they operate on three levels – ‘material, symbolic and functional.’22 They exist as material objects in the form of DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, but they are also symbolic in that they characterise the identity of a generation through the experiences of a few. The ‘under the helmet’ perspective of conflict is shaded with nostalgia for the perceived moral certainties of World War II and for the ‘Greatest Generation,’ which is defined here primarily through its soldiers. For Nora, the ‘will to remember’ precedes the existence of lieux de mémoire.23 It is precisely the ‘will to remember’ that allows Band of Brothers and The Pacific to be folded easily into moments of commemoration. As a result, the two series facilitate a level of promotion for HBO’s
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brand identity that is not possible through any other series, a point that will become apparent in the next section. Nora acknowledges that lieux exist within complex networks of sites and texts and suggests that it is ‘up to us’ to acknowledge and analyse the ramifications of such interactions.24 With this in mind, in the following section I want to explore how a network of texts generated by HBO endorses the two series as ‘real, true stories’ and continues the process of contorting nostalgia and memory into history. From the outset, Band of Brothers and The Pacific were marketed as event-status programmes and highlighted as special even within HBO’s usual discourses of distinction.
‘Big, Important, Powerful:’ Premieres and Pre-Release Promotion
11 The value of event-status programmes, as John Caldwell points out, lies not only in their ability to attract viewers, but in their capacity to function as ‘high-profile banner carriers’ of a channel’s brand identity.25 For a cable network reliant on subscription fees rather than advertising for revenue, HBO’s considerable investment into two miniseries with limited potential for generating long-term interest and attendant subscribers, should be understood through the specific opportunities afforded by their subject matter to enhance and extend the HBO brand. As Chris Albrecht, Chief Executive of HBO at the time the Band of Brothers deal was brokered, points out, the series presented the opportunity to ‘have the audience see the kinds of projects that HBO stands for.’26 Designed to ‘honor’ the veterans and by extension, America’s role in the war, Band of Brothers and The Pacific enable HBO to reach far beyond its subscriber pool and to align its brand with the values inherent in social acts of commemoration. As an indication of the significance of the two miniseries for HBO, the promotional budget of between $10 and $15 million allocated to Band of Brothers and later to The Pacific amounted to more than that devoted to promoting immensely popular and long- running series such as The Sopranos (HBO, 1999-2007) and Sex and the City (HBO, 1998-2004).27 Eric Kessler, Chief of Marketing for HBO when Band of Brothers was broadcast, sums up the preliminary marketing strategy for the series thus: ‘We want people to say, “That looks big, important, powerful, and I need to see that.”’ 28
12 Carefully crafted links between both series and commemorative events are crucial to establishing them as ‘big, important, powerful’ television. In the case of Band of Brothers, HBO spent over a year arranging for the premiere of the series to be held as part of the celebrations for the fifty-seventh anniversary of D-Day in Normandy at Utah Beach in 2001. Forty-seven of the surviving members of Easy Company and their families were flown out for a special screening of one of the first episodes of the series. Invitations to the event were extended to various heads of state as well as to the descendants of Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Similarly, for the premiere of The Pacific, HBO flew 250 veterans to Washington DC for a special wreath- laying ceremony held at the World War II Veteran’s memorial. The Veteran’s memorial itself is, in turn, connected to Band of Brothers. Hanks was the national spokesman during the campaign for its creation and announcements advocating support for its construction accompanied the initial advertising for Band of Brothers in the U.S. Furthermore, HBO is listed on the memorial’s website as one of the donors. The wreath laying was followed by a screening of an episode of The Pacific at the White House,
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attended not only by President Obama, but also by members of Congress and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The two premiers were widely covered in news media, allowing HBO to align itself with notions of public service and to develop its brand identity on both a national and international stage.
13 While the premieres of both series imbricate them within official acts of commemoration, the marketing surrounding the build-up of their initial broadcast uses the scale of the productions to distinguish them from previous representations of war in film and television. Mary Ann Doane identifies the ‘activation of special effects and spectacle in the documentary format’ as a way for television to counter ‘its own tendency toward the levelling of signification.’29 In the case of Band of Brothers and The Pacific, the high production values required for the spectacular recreation of industrialised warfare are utilised within the promotional material of the series to set them apart not only from ‘ordinary’ televisual documentaries and dramas, but also from cinematic dramatizations of World War II.30 The widely-publicised ‘quest’, as Hanks calls it, for ‘authenticity’ in the production process is what allows other aspects of the paratextual to suggest that the series achieve an unprecedented level of immediacy by allowing viewers direct access to the past itself.31 The official HBO website for Band of Brothers informs users that they can ‘experience the war’ through the series; The Pacific’s webpage goes further by implying that viewing the series equates to bearing ‘witness [to] the conflict’.32 To a certain extent, the promotion of Band of Brothers and The Pacific can be considered typical for a cable channel whose entire marketing strategy revolves around identifying all of its original programming as special or distinct in order to maintain its edge in a crowded and fiercely competitive industry. However, it is important to look beyond the marketing hyperbole to consider how the two series are identified within the textual milieu and generated through the premieres, websites, and promotions.
14 The links between the series and commemorative events function as official endorsements of the version of World War II history put forward by Band of Brothers and The Pacific. The presence of the veterans at each memorial ceremony, and in the previews of each episode, acts as a ‘site of truth’, to adopt a phrase from Marita Sturken, and adds cultural weight.33 The veterans’ general validation of the series as ‘not Hollywood’ but ‘real,’ carries an inviolable authority by virtue of their status as survivors and enhances the notion disseminated by the websites that Band of Brothers and The Pacific offer direct access to the past. 34 The two series emerge from this paratextual surround not as dramatized recreations of the memories of individuals, but as windows into World War II. By inextricably entangling the two series within officially endorsed and internationally significant moments of memorialisation, and emphasising their ability to allow viewers to ‘witness’ or ‘experience’ the past through superior production values, the paratextual network surrounding Band of Brothers and The Pacific allocates them a place in the history of World War II as sanctioned, definitive accounts – metadocumentaries that are bigger, more important and more powerful than ‘mainstream’ television or film. This fits within HBO’s brand identity of delivering original programming that is ‘not TV’, and also extends the life of the series into syndication and the lucrative sell-through market.
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More Than ‘Just Making a Movie:’ DVD and Blu-Ray
15 Due to the proliferation of television channels facilitating the sales of series into syndication, the development of online viewing practices and streaming video platforms, and ubiquitous DVD and Blu-Ray products, restricting the analysis of a television series purely to the moment of its broadcast risks a limited understanding of the ongoing ‘construction, evaluation and preservation’ of that programme’s cultural significance or potential ‘historical worth.’35 Band of Brothers and The Pacific have done well in syndication, with their connection to dates of commemoration guaranteeing annual repeats. The sale of Band of Brothers to the History Channel (which predominantly features documentaries) in 2003 further enhanced its status as an historically significant account of World War II; and The Pacific was aired in the U.K. in 2010 on BskyB, a channel normally reserved exclusively for film, which speaks to the series’ high production values. However, in this section I want to focus particularly on the DVD and Blu-Ray box sets of the two series. Like the pre-broadcast material surrounding Band of Brothers and The Pacific, the box sets locate them within a network of texts through which viewers are invited to interpret their content and assess their status. The process of maintaining the connections between the two series and the memorialisation of World War II begins even before the box sets have been opened or the discs viewed.
16 The release dates of Band of Brothers and The Pacific can be considered as further examples of ‘intangible’ paratexts. First released early in November 2002 in both the U.S. and U.K. markets, the box set of Band of Brothers was packaged as a ‘Commemorative Gift Set’ to coincide with Remembrance Day (U.K.) or Veterans’ Day (as it is referred to in the U.S.) on 11th November. All subsequent releases of Band of Brothers (and also of The Pacific) in the sell-through market have been timed for release on or near this date. The DVD and Blu-Ray sets of Band of Brothers and The Pacific are thus positioned as mementos of larger processes of memorialization after their inscription into commemorative events through the series’ premiers. The commercial success of the two series, particularly Band of Brothers, is directly attributable to their connection to memorialization according to Hanks, ‘because people keep buying [the box sets] every Veterans’ Day, every Christmas, every D-Day.’ 36 The release of the box sets in November not only allows HBO to take advantage of the free publicity generated by the groundswell of remembrance that occurs around Veterans’ Day, but also marks the series as representative of the cultural heritage associated with the memorialisation of World War II.
17 The packaging of the box sets in turn works as a paratext that informs the consumer of their cultural value as mnemonic objects. Special limited editions of the sets in both DVD and Blu-Ray formats (the Band of Brothers version was released in November 2007, The Pacific’s in November 2010) take the form of burnished tin boxes, replicating the look and feel of objects that might be manufactured for military purposes. But whether available in the limited edition or in the more regular packaging, the sets reconfigure scenes from the series to resemble faded photographs from World War II, recalling and repurposing the monochromatic, grainy images of war photographers such as Frank Capra, and locating the series within the same iconic lexicon. As Jonathan Gray notes, it is of course standard practice for the DVD and Blu-Ray box sets of television series, which are usually more expensive than those of films, to be aestheticized in ways that
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make them attractive as collectibles, but the packaging of Band of Brothers and The Pacific additionally encodes them as historical artefacts. This encoding gives the series a cultural significance that distinguishes them from others that might be purely fictional, and their status as mementos of commemorative events infuses them with an emotional gravitas that separates them from documentaries.37
18 The ‘extra features’ available on the box sets themselves constitute a network of texts that not only surrounds, but also penetrates the series. Now a standard feature of most DVD or Blu-Ray box sets, such ‘bonus’ material is usually considered in terms of industrial synergy as a means to extend promotional strategies beyond the broadcast date of a television series or the release date of a film.38 There is no denying that the extra features available on the Band of Brothers and The Pacific box sets perform a promotional function, but they also promise to promote a ‘deeper historical understanding’ of the events around which the series are structured, as the menu for The Pacific Blu-Ray Extra Feature disc asserts. As such, they contribute to the understanding and evaluation of the two series, and can provide insight into the relationship between Band of Brothers and The Pacific and television, history, and documentary.
19 To begin with, the ‘Making of’ documentaries for the two series, ‘Making of Band of Brothers’ (HBO, 2001) and ‘Making The Pacific’ (HBO, 2010), extend HBO’s pre-broadcast strategies by repeated references to the size and scale of the ‘epic’ productions. However, they also continue to connect the two series with memorialisation. The concentration camp set for “Why We Fight” (Band of Brothers, 9:10), is described by director David Frankel in the ‘Making of’ as a ‘monument to people who died in camps rather than a movie set’, and actor Richard Speight (who plays Sgt. Warren ‘Skip’ Muck) urges those who watch the series to commit to memory the actions of the men of Easy Company. Similarly, in ‘Making The Pacific’, actor John Seda (Basilone), remarks that the series is more significant than ‘just making a movie’ because it is about ‘honouring’ the veterans ‘the way they should be honoured’. Such observations identify the two series as ‘monumental’ in the true sense of the word as structures (or indeed, lieux de mémoire) or artefacts that serve as reminders of the past. As a consequence, the act of watching them is consecrated with the same sense of veneration that accompanies public rituals of commemoration. The Band of Brothers box set contains a segment on the series premier in Normandy, which includes interviews not only with the veterans and filmmakers, but also with Susan Eisenhower, Winston S. Churchill, and Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, who all endorse the series as ‘powerful’ television and ensure the status of the series as a commemorative object. Evidence of how the box sets have indeed become adopted within individual practices of commemoration can be found online, where viewers attest to watching them annually as part of private rituals on Veterans’ Day and other days of remembrance.39
20 However, the ‘Making of’ features do more than simply invite viewers to consider the two series as memorials to World War II. They also legitimize the production process itself as a means of generating historical knowledge. In a familiar trope within the promotional surround of many war films, the ‘Making of’ documentaries equate the production process with waging war.40 ‘We became soldiers’, asserts actor Ross McCall (Joe Liebgott in Band of Brothers), while Dale Dye, military advisor for both series, notes in ‘Making The Pacific’, ‘we never say the word movie, we never say the word “actor”. We refer to the “mission.”’ Research combines with the production process to enable
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the cast and crew of both series to ‘get at the truth’ and tell the story ‘the way it was’, in the words of Tony To and Gary Goetzman, two of The Pacific’s producers (‘Making The Pacific). As a result, the ‘Making of’ segments invite the viewer to consider Band of Brothers and The Pacific not as dramatic reconstructions of historical events, but as if the cast and crew ‘were actually back in the 1940s [. . .] actually shooting stuff for real,’ as Ken Daly, Visual Effects Supervisor suggests in ‘The Making of Band of Brothers’. These kinds of exaggerated statements are not unusual in the promotional material of war films and the degree to which viewers accept them is, of course, open to debate. What is at stake here, however, is how they re-negotiate the always uncertain boundaries between fictional and factual representations of the past, and in the case of these two series, shift them out of dramatic recreation and into the realm of ‘stuff’ shot ‘for real’ – into the realm, in other words, of war documentary.
21 The idea that Band of Brothers and The Pacific are not creative interpretations of memories of World War II, but somehow offer direct access to the past is further enhanced by features available only in the Blu-Ray format of both series – the ‘Timeline’ in Band of Brothers and the ‘Enhanced Viewing’ feature in The Pacific. Both are interactive features that allow the viewer to ‘click’ on icons supplying maps, information on various battles, details on the capabilities and uses of various weapons and vehicles, and information regarding the individual soldiers in the series. A ‘picture- in-picture’ feature in the form of a pop-out window allows for ongoing commentary from veterans and historians as well as archive footage to run alongside events in the series. Documentary filmmaker Leslie Woodhead once expressed the wish for a ‘kind of “television footnotes”’ to signpost the differences between imaginative reconstructions of material and concrete historical sources.41 It could be suggested that these features have some of the functions of footnotes, as they allow for the insertion of concrete historical information into the series themselves. However, the penetration of the series by historical material in the case of Band of Brothers and The Pacific does not so much signpost the differences between the series and historical accounts of World War II as smooth over them. The structural composition of the ‘picture-in-picture’ and timeline features foregrounds the commentary, while the series run in the background, creating the peculiar sense that the series form the bedrock upon which historical narratives of the past are constructed, and not the other way around. The Timeline and Enhanced Viewing features thus situate Band of Brothers and The Pacific as metadocumentaries by implying that the two series provide the values and perspectives through which World War II should be understood.
22 The paratextual network generated by and through the DVD and Blu-Ray box sets of Band of Brothers and The Pacific not only extends the pre-broadcast marketing of the series, but also combines with those paratexts to form an intricate array of material that infuses the two series with a sense of historical and cultural value. Central to the discourse evident throughout the paratextual array is the idea of the series not as ‘semi-documentaries’ or ‘docudramas’, but as metadocumentaries capable of not only defining and organising the experiences and memories of World War II into authoritative narratives, but also able to offer direct access to the past. By situating Band of Brothers and The Pacific as definitive, officially endorsed versions of the past, the paratextual network that surrounds them effectively fills in the spaces between dramatic recreation and documentary, creating a closed version of the past that shuts out the possibility of that sense of ‘partial knowledge and suspended closure, the sense
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of incompleteness and the need for retrospection’ that Bill Nichols identifies as essential to an understanding of history.42
23 Band of Brothers and The Pacific are elegiac paeans to the American soldiers who fought in World War II. They possess what Peter Rollins calls a ‘dangerous beauty’ identifiable within the ‘drama of commemoration’ that diverts attention from the causes of war and the complexities of soldiers’ relationship to combat.43 The series offer compelling narrative structures, explore moments of physical and emotional extremes through hypermediated representations of combat, and interlink the individual memories of soldiers to broader conceptualisations of cultural heritage. But in doing so, they encourage their own kind of forgetfulness for the members of the ‘Greatest Generation’ excluded from the ‘brotherhood’ of soldiers: the members of other races and nations who fought in the war, the women who did the same, and most importantly, the civilians who ultimately bore the brunt of the war’s impact.
24 Despite all claims to the contrary, Band of Brothers and The Pacific are products of television. As such, they are part of ‘televisual rituals of historical exhibitionism’ used by networks such as HBO to legitimate their status as purveyors of meaningful, distinctive, and valuable cultural commodities.44 The extravagant budgets allocated to marketing the two series indicates their significance to HBO, but HBO’s strategies of promotion and representation also produce an array of texts that intertwine with the series themselves and realign their relationship to history and memory. The carefully crafted links between the series and international memorials function as intangible paratexts that powerfully affirm the ‘drama of commemoration’ as presented through the narratives of the two series as official history. Moreover, the attendance of veterans, historians, politicians, and dignitaries at the premiers of the two series not only endorses HBO’s brand, but also implies a belief in the ability of television in general to produce ‘big, important and powerful’ cultural texts. While the two series reflect and reconfigure the cultural values and assumptions connected with the notion of World War II as America’s ‘Good War’, pervasive claims in the series’ paratext—such as articles, interviews with the filmmakers, and the official websites that allow viewers to witness the past from ‘under the helmet’ of the soldiers who experienced it— downplay the ideological implications inherent in such a perspective. The idea that the two series offer direct access to the past is further enhanced by the numerous texts and intertexts of the DVD and Blu-Ray box sets. Some extra features knit history and memory into the fabric of the series themselves by integrating reminiscences from the veterans and commentary from historians with moments from each episode. Others equate the production process with waging war, and suggest that erasing temporal distance is simply a question of combining research with costly and innovative techniques of filmmaking and emotive performances.
25 The commercial success of Band of Brothers and The Pacific in the Blu-Ray and DVD markets, according to Tom Hanks, illustrates that ‘great television can be something that lives on people’s library shelves, much like classic literature.’45 Whether or not the two series can be equated with ‘classic literature,’ Hanks’ comment reveals a changing perception of the role and purpose of television. Framed by their paratextual network as both ‘must-see’ and ‘must-have’ television, Band of Brothers and The Pacific establish a claim to being memorable and iconic in their own right. Understanding the two series purely as docudramas consequently limits the understanding of their ongoing significance in the intertextual network that makes up the history of World War II.
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Alternatively, approaching the series as lieux de mémoire situated within an intricate network of paratexts that emphasise their importance as definitive histories helps to shed light on the processes by which television, a medium usually associated with a relentless focus on the present, generates cultural products that assume the mantle of authoritative and persuasive accounts of the past.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bennett, James and Tom Brown, eds. Film and Television after DVD. New York: Routledge,
2008.
Caldwell, John. Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
Doane, Mary Ann. “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe” in The Historical Film: History and Memory in the Media. Edited by Marcia Landy, 269-285. London: Athlone Press, 2001.
Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and other Media Paratexts. New York and London: New York University Press, 2010.
Hoffer, Tom and Richard Nelson. “Docudrama on American Television” in Why Docudrama? Fact- fiction on Film and TV. Edited by Alan Rosenthal, 64-77. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999).
King, Geoff. “Seriously Spectacular: ‘Authenticity’ and ‘Art’ in the War Epic” in Hollywood and War: The Film Reader. David Slocum, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 287-302.
Leverette, Marc, Brian L. Ott and Cara Louise Buckley, eds. It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post- Television Era. New York, NY: Routledge, 2008.
Nichols, Bill. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Ramsay, Debra. Through a Glass, Darkly: American Media and the Memory of World War II. Doctoral thesis, University of Nottingham, 2012, unpublished.
Ramsay, Debra. ‘Flagging up History: The Past as a DVD Bonus Feature’ in A Companion to the Historical Film, edited by Robert Rosenstone & Constantin Parvulescu, 53-70. Malden, MA: Wiley- Blackwell, 2013`.
Ramsay, Debra. “Spectacle in the First Person Shooter – ‘Something to See’.” Film and Media Conference. University of London, June, 2013.
Rollins, Peter. “Victory at Sea.” In Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age, edited by Gary R. Edgerton and Peter Rollins, 103-122. Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001.
Rosenthal, Alan, ed. Why Docudrama? Fact-Fiction on Film and TV. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.
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Schatz, Thomas. “Band of Brothers” in The Essential HBO Reader, edited by Gary R. Edgerton, and Jeffrey P. Jones, 125-134. Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008/
Stephens, John and Robyn McCallum. Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998.
Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: the Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic and the politics of remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Torgovnick, Marianna. The War Complex: World War II in our Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Wetta, Frank J and Stephen J Curley. Celluloid Wars: A Guide to Film and the American Experience of War. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.
Discography
Band of Brothers (HBO, DreamWorks SKG, DreamWorks Television, Playtone, 2001):
Commemorative Edition DVD Box Set, HBO, Warner Home Video, 2002:
‘The Making of Band of Brothers.’ Writer/Producer, Joan Finn, 2001.
‘Premiere at Normandy.’ (Entertainment News, 2001)
Band of Brothers Blu-Ray Box Set, HBO, Warner Home Video, 2008
The Pacific (HBO, DreamWorks SKG, DreamWorks Television, Playtone, 2010):
Blu-Ray Box Set, HBO, Warner Home Video 2010: ‘Making The Pacific.’ Executive Producers, Chris Spencer and Karen Sands, 2010
NOTES
1. Bill Keveney, “Hanks and Spielberg return to WWII together for The Pacific,” USA Today, December 3, 2010, accessed January 22, 2011, http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2010-03-12 Pacific12_CV_N.htm. 2. Sara Wayland, “Steven Spielberg Interview HBO’s The Pacific,” Collider, February 4, 2010, accessed October 13, 2011, http://collider.com/steven-spielberg-interview-hbo-the-pacific/15813/. 3. Tom Hoffer and Richard Nelson, “Docudrama on American Television” in Why Docudrama? Fact- fiction on Film and TV, ed. Alan Rosenthal, (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 64. 4. Hoffer and Nelson, “Docudrama on American Television,” 64. 5. Spielberg uses HBO’s flagship series The Sopranos as an example of ‘mainstream TV’, suggesting that Band of Brothers and The Pacific are distinctive even within HBO’s production of ‘quality’ television. David Gritten, “In Good Company,” Radio Times, (September 29 – October 5, 2001): 46. 6. Stephen Armstrong, “The Pacific,” Radio Times, (April 3-9, 2010): 26. 7. “Interview with Steven Spielberg”, TV NZ, no posting date, accessed October 8, 2011, http:// tvnz.co.nz/the-pacific/interview-steven-spielberg-3403539. 8. A great deal has been written on the creation of HBO’s brand identity as a purveyor of programmes that are different from mainstream television. For comprehensive collections, see Gary Edgerton and Jeffrey Jones, eds, The Essential HBO Reader (Kentucky: The University Press of
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Kentucky, 2008) and Marc Leverett, Brian Ott and Cara Louise Buckley, eds. It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008). 9. Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and other Media Paratexts (New York and London: New York University Press, 2010), 6. 10. John Stephens and Robyn McCallum, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998), 6. 11. Gray, Show Sold Separately, 6. 12. Greer in “Making The Pacific” (HBO, 2010). 13. Thomas Schatz, “Band of Brothers” in Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones, eds, The Essential HBO Reader (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 133. 14. Stephen Armstrong, “The Mother of all Wars,” The Sunday Times: Culture, March 14, 2010, 4-5. 15. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Vol: Conflicts and Divisions, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996-98), 3. 16. Geoff King, “Seriously Spectacular,” in Hollywood and War: The Film Reader, ed. David Slocum, (New York: Routledge, 2006), 292. 17. A very similar moment occurs in Saving Private Ryan’s landing sequence. 18. The analysis of this scene is taken from a conference paper, “Spectacle in the First Person Shooter – ‘Something to See’”, Debra Ramsay, Film and Media Conference, University of London, June, 1013. 19. James F. Dunnegan, How to Make War: A Comprehensive Guide to Modern Warfare (New York: Quill, 1983), 215, quoted in Frank J. Wetta, and Stephen J. Curley, eds, Celluloid Wars: A Guide to Film and the American Experience of War (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), 44. 20. While exact figures are difficult to obtain, civilians are believed to account for over half the mortality rates of World War II. Marianna Torgovnick, The War Complex: World War II in our Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 41. 21. Nora, Realms of Memory, 15. 22. Nora, Realms of Memory, 14. 23. Nora, Realms of Memory, 14. 24. Nora, Realms of Memory, 19. 25. John Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 162. 26. Chris Albrecht in “Television Notebook Fox Exec Tout Fiction,” David Kronke and Valerie Kuklenski, Daily News (LA California), (July 18, 2001), accessed October 12, 2009, http:// www.thefreelibrary.com/ TELEVISION+NOTEBOOK+FOX+EXECS+TOUT+FICTION%2c+SUCCUMB+TO+REALITY.(L.A....- a079094844 27. Allison Romano, “On HBO, war is hype,” Broadcasting and Cable, 131, No. 34 (August 13, 2001): 18, accessed May 7, 2013, http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/91190-On_HBO_war_is_hype.php. 28. Kessler, in Romano, “On HBO, war is hype”. 29. Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe” in Marcia Landy, ed., The Historical Film: History and Memory in the Media, (London: Athlone Press, 2001), 272. 30. For a representative article on Band of Brothers, see “D-Day Unveiling for War Epic”, BBC news, Entertainment, TV and Radio, June 7, 2001, accessed May7, 2013, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ entertainment/1373148.stm and Armstrong, “The Mother of all Wars,” for an example on The Pacific. 31. Hanks in Armstrong, “The Mother of All Wars,” 5.
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32. The original Band of Brothers website, constructed by AOL, is no longer available, but the website for The Pacific, established by hbo.com, can still be accessed on http://www.hbo.com/the- pacific/index.html 33. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 120. 34. Veteran Herbert Suerth in “Premiere in Normandy” (Entertainment News, 2001) 35. Debra Ramsay, “Flagging up History: The Past as a DVD Bonus Feature” in A Companion to the Historical Film, eds. Robert Rosenstone & Constantin Parvulescu. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 69. 36. Tom Hanks in “Tom Hanks Returns to The Pacific,” Dave Itzkoff, New York Times: Arts Beat, June 3, 2010, accessed on 8 October, 2011, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/tom-hanks-returns-to-the-pacific/ 37. Gray, Show Sold Separately, 107. 38. Caldwell, “Prefiguring DVD Bonus Tracks,” in Film and Television after DVD, James Bennett and Tom Brown, (New York: Routledge, 2008), 161. 39. For example, a long-running thread on IMDb’s message boards structured specifically around the subject of repeat viewings of Band of Brothers provides evidence of the incorporation of the series into private moments of memorialisation. One poster writes, ‘we watch it once a year, sometimes on D-Day, or sometimes Veteran's day’ (posted November 16, 2008). Another starts viewing the series ‘ten days before Memorial Day, it makes the day even more meaningful’ (posted May 14, 2009). Band of Brothers: Message Boards: ‘Sign here if you watch BOB at least once a year.’ Accessed on May 31, 2010, http://pro.imdb.com/title/tt0185906/board/thread/114317081?d=114317081&p=1#114317081 This thread has since been archived, but others concerning repeat viewings persist. 40. I explore this trope as it relates to film in more detail in Ramsay, “Flagging up History”, 66. 41. Leslie Woodhead, “The Guardian Lecture: Dramatized Documentary” in Why Docudrama? Fact- Fiction on Film and TV, ed. Alan Rosenthal (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 109. 42. It is important to note that paratextual networks may also open up film or television to alternative interpretations and historical perspectives, as I argue in Ramsay, “Flagging up History”. Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 147. 43. Peter Rollins, “Victory at Sea,” in Gary R. Edgerton and Peter Rollins, eds, Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age (Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 117. 44. John Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 167. 45. Will Lawrence, “Tom Hanks Interview on The Pacific,” The Telegraph, 1 April, 2010, accessed on 8 October, 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/7527926/Tom-Hanks-interview-on-The- Pacific.html.
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ABSTRACTS
World War II’s long and enduring history on television is illustrated by the continued circulation of documentaries such as The World at War (Thames Television, 1973). While documentaries such as these can be considered a collection of memories, my interest in this article is to consider what happens when such a collection is positioned by televisual marketing strategies as more than either documentary or drama. I examine two ‘docudramas’ - Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010), co-productions of HBO, Playtone and DreamWorks SKG – and their paratextual networks. I expose the industrial interests underlying HBO’s marketing strategies and move beyond the moment of broadcast to examine how the paratextual network generated via DVD and Blu-Ray posits the two series as authoritative histories. My goal is to demonstrate that the category of ‘docudrama’ may be inadequate for understanding how the series’ paratextual network identifies and situates them within larger historical representations of World War II. Ultimately, I seek to answer the following question: how do paratextual networks of promotion and representation inflect our understanding of the relationship between television, history, and documentary?
INDEX
Keywords: World War II, HBO, docudrama, Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks
AUTHOR
DEBRA RAMSAY Debra Ramsay is an independent scholar who teaches part-time at Leicester University. This article is an adaptation of a chapter from her unpublished doctoral thesis, Through a Glass, Darkly: American Media and the Memory of World War II (Nottingham University, 2012). Ramsay has served on the editorial board of Scope and is an assistant and contributor to Critical Studies in Television (CST online). She has presented a number of papers at international conferences and has published articles on digital games and the memory of war, and on the impact of DVD on the historical film.
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“How Could You Forget That?”: Representing Collective and Traumatic Memories in Winter Soldier
Daniel Grinberg
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The author would like to thank Brett Bowles, Edward Bowen, Derek Horn, and the anonymous peer-reviewers for reading earlier drafts of this article and providing their valuable feedback.
1 “If one dude got up and rapped all this shit, they’d hang him,” Scott Shimabukuro tells his fellow veterans in the 1972 documentary Winter Soldier.1 “But they can’t deny the testimony of all these dudes in the room.” Hoping to “remove the blinders and the blinds from in front of America’s eyes,”2 116 veterans and 16 civilians gathered at Howard Johnson’s New Center Motor Lodge in Detroit, Michigan on January 31 and February 1 and 2, 1971 to speak at the Vietnam Veterans Against The War’s (VVAW) Winter Soldier Investigation hearings.3 Over those three days, the majority of these 132 individuals4 publicly testified to atrocities they participated in or witnessed in Vietnam from 1963 to 1970. They described rape, torture, murder, and massacres that John Kerry characterized as acts that were “committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”5 Yet, despite the significance of these cumulative recollections, nearly all of the journalists and television camera crews there neglected to report on it; the footage shot for Winter Soldier remains the only public audiovisual record of the event.6
2 In the following article, I propose that this documentary is an especially valuable historiographical text because its representations of memory reflect, critique, and, to a growing degree, help construct collective national memory. Through a close textual
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reading, I will demonstrate how the film links veterans’ individual acts of recall to the larger lacunae of social and institutional remembrance. Incorporating historical documents and transcripts and the film’s paratextual elements, I will also explicate how Winter Soldier, created by the nineteen-member Winterfilm Collective, itself constitutes a work of collective memory. Finally, by examining the documentary’s reception—particularly its thirty-three-year delay in receiving widespread theatrical distribution and the thirty-four-year delay in the release of a home-viewing format—I will suggest how this visualization of atrocity can also be understood as a traumatic memory repressed within the national consciousness.
3 Fittingly, for a war characterized by disputed official accounts, contentious battles over monuments, and a post-war “decade-long amnesia,”7 the lens of memory has made a substantial contribution to Vietnam War scholarship across disciplines.8 Memory as an analytic lens has also been notably applied to a diverse range of Vietnam War fiction films.9 However, considering Paula Rabinowitz’s observation that “[d]ocumentary cinema is intimately tied to historical memory” and “often functions as an historical document itself,” there has been surprisingly little scholarship specifically regarding memory and the Vietnam War documentary.10
4 In addition, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a new wave of historical scholarship arose to reexamine the impact of the Winter Soldier investigations.11 As David Cortright noted in 2002, “After being misunderstood and overlooked for decades, the war resistance of soldiers and veterans is finally receiving the attention it deserves.”12 Yet, presumably because of its decades-long lack of theatrical distribution and commercial availability, the documentary Winter Soldier is only mentioned tangentially in these accounts. Therefore, this article will strive to connect memory studies and documentary studies and demonstrate why this vital film merits more thorough scholarly consideration.
5 The rediscovery of this forty-one-year-old document is timely because of its lucid indictment of unchecked American military power. At a moment when the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are still reverberating globally, the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay remains in operation in its eleventh year, and the Obama administration was recently advocating for military intervention in Syria, it is imperative to reassess the nuances of preceding conflicts like Vietnam for perspective. Though there are meaningful and well-documented distinctions between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the many disturbing parallels between the two also necessitate deeper investigations in how American-led wars are waged, archived, and recalled especially as the United States continues to engage in new conflicts.13 Furthermore, revisiting Winter Soldier, which centers on the testimonies and traumas of veterans, could simultaneously shed light on the precarious state of veteran services and the ongoing crises concerning veterans’ mental and physical health. According to a comprehensive 2013 report conducted by the Department of Veterans Affairs Mental Health Services, veterans now commit suicide every 65 minutes or at a rate of 22 per day, an alarming statistic that should remind us of the danger of overlooking the physical and psychic repercussions of war.14 This figure also educes that the film is not the relic of a bygone era, but that it can instructively speak to fundamental contemporary issues.
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Textual Representations of Memory
6 I begin by analyzing how the film textually links individual and collective acts of memory. In particular, I want to demonstrate how it connects veterans’ inabilities to recall specific incidents and the national desire to selectively forget the war. In one such emblematic instance of a memory lapse, the documentary shows Kenneth Campbell approaching fellow veteran Scott Camil during a pre-testimony interview. Campbell begins listing details of Camil’s service and adds, “I thought I recognized you. I was sitting over there, trying to figure out who the hell you were, man.” Campbell asks Camil if he knows about “a ville wiped out, in Quang Tri,” prompting the latter man to volunteer, “Yeah, I was there. . . . The first thing we do was burn down the village and kill everybody.” Despite the horrific nature of this offensive, Camil marvels, “I didn’t even remember that. . . . I forgot all about that one.” Campbell’s incredulous response is perhaps even more illustrative of the complex and thorny nature of memory: “How could you forget that? I remember it and I wasn’t even in on it.”
7 Tellingly, Camil only remembers this event when Campbell questions him about it. Camil shows a clear willingness to investigate this memory further, saying, “Whenever they’re questioning me, they’ll have to get me to elaborate on that.” In a subsequent direct address to the camera, he also states that he finds discussing these traumatic recollections therapeutic, but he has difficulty locating people outside of the university system who will listen. When trying to openly communicate with his family, for instance, Camil notes, “[T]hey all say ‘you’re crazy . . . how can you think like that?’” Because, as James Pennebaker and Becky Banasik observe, “language is a social act” and verbalizing an event “can influence the way the event is organized in memory and, perhaps, recalled in the future,” Camil’s lack of recall exemplifies the civilian disinclination to engage his memories.15 Because the act of hearing a memory verbalized can also prolong and intensify the memory for the listener, the civilians’ avoidance of these conversations circumscribes their own fuller remembrances of the war as well.16 Yet, substantiating Camil’s sentiments that “[i]t still bothers me sometimes” and “[I haven’t] gotten it out of my system,” Pennebaker and Banasik also observe, “When people do not want to or cannot openly talk about an important event, they continue to think and even dream about it. . . . Ironically, then, actively trying not to think about an event can contribute to a collective memory in ways that may be as powerful if not more so than events that are openly discussed.”17
8 We encounter another lapse through William Hatton, a former Marine who reports carrying around a pistol “for no apparent reason” upon his return and pulling the weapon on a janitor in a fit of rage. As a result of this assault, Hatton says, “It came . . . as a real surprise the stuff that just started coming back.” Namely, he testifies to his participation in a group of Marines brutally stoning a Vietnamese boy to death. As photos of villager children running along roadsides appear onscreen, he admits, “We just smeared him. We just wiped him out. . . . It was looked upon as funny. We all laughed about it and then we forgot about it and it took me about a year to even be able to recall the situation.” Although Hatton never explains this gap, it is retrospectively evident that his experience typifies symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Known as post-Vietnam syndrome at the time, the most prominent aspect of this condition is that the memories of traumatic experiences remain inaccessible until various stressors or stimuli reactivate them and render them perceptible.18
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9 The film makes clear that Hatton’s repression is not remarkable or unique, but a pervasive occurrence among Vietnam veterans. As Hatton is testifying, the camera zooms out and shows him sitting among his fellow panelists. Although a few look over to him, most are so unfazed by his revelations that they evince no reaction. Moreover, the editing emphasizes the commonality of Hatton’s experience by following it with James Duffy’s statement about killing another Vietnamese boy. Duffy testifies: My first reaction, and my flight engineer, he was observing this too, our first reaction was, I guess, you’d call normal. It would be horror, pain, and then I realized that I caught myself immediately and I said, ‘No, you can’t do that,’ because you develop a shell while you are in the military. They brainwash you. They, they take all the humanness out of you, and you develop this crust which enables you to survive in Vietnam. And if you let that protective shell down, even for a second . . . it’s the difference between you flipping out or managing to make it through. And I caught myself letting the shell down and I tightened up right away and started laughing about it and joking about it with the flight engineer, and he sort of moved on the same logic ’cause I guess . . . it sort of knocked his shell down too.
10 Both Hatton and Duffy describe their repressions collectively, with the former saying, “we forgot about it” and the latter saying that he and the flight engineer shared “the same logic.” Fred Turner observes, “Between 1959 and 1973, more than a million and a half Americans saw combat in Vietnam. When they came home, psychologists estimate that as many as 40 percent of them brought with them some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.”19 Thus, these documented lapses, along with Camil’s and numerous others, stand in for an epidemic of post-traumatic repressions.
11 I also argue that Hatton’s yearlong lack of recall is metonymic of a larger national repression. Because the veterans were not only victims but also victimizers, performing mass slaughter under the American aegis, his lapse may be attributable to the effects of what Raya Morag calls “perpetrator trauma.”20 Yet, since soldiers are authorized proxies of the nations that fund them and send them to fight, I believe that Hatton’s repression also parallels a collective desire to evade “a concomitant acknowledgement of societal perpetration.”21 Because the public watched a daily stream of news images of the conflict that Michael Arlen dubbed the “living-room war”22 and Michael Mandelbaum called “the television war,” absorbing gruesome images that proffered a more constant and visceral experience of war than preceding media, viewers were also continually reminded of the consequences of their ancillary involvement.23 Thus, as Roger Silverstone posits, “If audiences refuse to take . . . responsibility, then they are morally culpable. And we are all audiences now.”24
12 In the film, we see sporadic glimpses of the Detroit audience watching the testimonies, but in one scene, while scanning the crowd, the camera zooms in and lingers on a crying woman. Her head is bent down and she is covering her face, as if to shield herself from witnessing any more or even to deny her presence. For me, she typifies what I call a traumatized ‘citizen perpetrator,’ simultaneously misled and complicit, both removed and involved. Regarding this phenomenon, Peter Marin writes, “None of us has faced the specter of his own culpability—not Nixon’s, not Kissinger’s—but the way in which each of us, actively or passively, contributed to the killing, the taxes we paid, officials we elected, the endless . . . influences that made countless young men willing to kill.”25 Jeffrey Jay notes, “The veteran’s [psychological] conflicts are not his alone, but are bound to the trauma and guilt of the nation. And our failure to deal with our guilt renders the veteran the symptom-carrier for society.”26 Robert Jay Lifton, the
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psychologist who popularized the term ‘post-Vietnam syndrome,’ also states, “Americans as a national group have become participants in, and survivors of, a sustained pattern of killing and dying . . . and we are left with the numbing and brutalization required to . . . fend off a sense of guilt.”27
13 We witness another revealing lapse in the opening scene of Winter Soldier. Conducting a pre-testimony interview, Joe Bangert asks veteran Rusty Sachs his age, prompting Sachs to look up and hesitantly reply, “Twenty- . . . seven.” When Bangert asks him to list his dates of service, his eyes squeeze shut before he answers, “August ’66, September ’67.” Bangert then inquires if Sachs has ever witnessed “prisoners thrown from helicopters.” Smiling widely, Sachs describes in evocative detail how men from his squadron “used to blindfold guys with safety wire and pull it real tight, so the copper wire is tearing into their eyes and nose” and “have contests to see how far they could throw the bound bodies out of the airplanes.” Yet, when asked to approximate how many people he has seen killed this way, Sachs has trouble providing an estimate. “In the . . . two-digit numbers, say,” he speculates. “Somewhere between fifteen and fifty probably.”
14 As the exchange develops, the film suggests that Sachs’ individual inability to remember the number of casualties results from sanctioned military policy. He says, “We were told, ‘Do not count prisoners when loading ’em on board the aircraft. Count ’em when you unload ’em . . . because the numbers may not jibe.’” By retroactively documenting these adjusted totals, the soldiers did not have to account for missing Vietnamese prisoners and could treat them as expendable non-entities. Sachs also states that “you never know” who is an enemy combatant or a civilian, but that all dead bodies are automatically counted in the former category. The film validates Sachs’ assertion by including a later interview with Camil, in which he confirms that slippery statistics was standard practice. “You could’ve killed one enemy,” he says, “and by the time it would get up to the high command . . . you killed fifty of them, because they couldn’t say they lost five men taking one. So the body count is a bunch of shit.” Camil also mentions reading a newspaper account of an operation he participated in and finding intentionally incorrect figures meant to mislead “the people at home.” In addition, we see Scott Moore testify that their accounting was:
A case of the colonels going into competition and making up more bodies than they really had. And this was, of course, passed on down to the company commanders, platoon leaders, and the squad leaders. So, hell, we were reporting stuff, water buffalo in some cases, and shadows. . . . Other firefights, the count would be 80, 90, and personally I only saw two, three bodies. So it’s a totally inflated system. What’s happened is, the American public’s been lied to.
15 Cumulatively, the three men’s statements demonstrate how inexact and biased official memory is in times of war. Roy Baumeister and Stephen Hastings note that “it is relatively easy and common to take some shreds of historical truth and blow them up into a major, important myth” and embellish “minor achievements into glorious triumphs.”28 Grossly inflating the size of dead Viet Cong soldiers also allows the military to minimize its transgressions as necessary responses to the enemy or to attribute offenses it commits to this exaggerated aggressor. As Camil’s experience with the newspaper suggests, even historiography and journalistic reporting may not convey accurate, objective retellings of these events. Because stories about the war
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frequently contained overstated figures, the American public, like Rusty Sachs, could no longer trust its recollection of statistics. When these numbers come into doubt, the accounts of events they undergird invariably become suspect and uncertain as well.
A Critique of Historiography
16 Winter Soldier bolsters its critique by textually connecting Vietnam War memorialization to other moments of selective remembering and forgetting within American historiography. It does this conspicuously with its title, a term created by VVAW members and adopted in 1971 during the hearings the film documents.29 The term inverts the opening lines of The American Crisis, the call-to-arms Thomas Paine wrote during the American Revolution: “These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”30 According to organizer William Crandell, “The identification with Paine’s pamphlet marked the beginning of VVAW’s self-awareness that ours was a revolutionary role, and it noted our embracing of the American tradition of revolution.”31 The documentary foregrounds this connection from the first frame, displaying the film title and a copyright symbol dated 1972 as Winterfilm Collective member Rhetta Barron states, “In the winter of 1776, at Valley Forge, Tom Paine wrote. . . .” Her oral evocation of “the winter of 1776” and the visualizations of “Winter” and “1972” conflate the two moments and juxtapose Detroit (and by extension, sites like Quang Tri and Saigon) with perhaps the most iconic battleground in American history.
17 However, by invoking such a pivotal moment, Barron’s recitation of Paine’s quote also ironizes the differences between the American Revolution and Vietnam and punctures our recollection of “the half-imagined, heavily mythologized America of the past.”32 Whereas in Paine’s era, the eponymous “crisis” was the struggle to overthrow a colonizing power, the crisis in 1972 was the assertion of American imperialism in a foreign revolution. Furthermore, although Paine wrote his pamphlet to goad soldiers into fighting, the onscreen veterans are defined by their opposition to the Vietnam conflict. Thus, the documentary (via the organizers who selected the event name) revises Paine’s intent, positing that the current revolutionary act in “the times that try men’s souls” is not to wage war, but rather to remember the war and publicly testify to its atrocities.
18 The film’s citation of Paine concurrently reminds us of history’s capacity to forget and revise. Although Paine is now nationally heroized, he was an iconoclast who was ostracized during much of his lifetime. In Paine’s final years, his rival William Cobbett wrote, “Like Judas he will be remembered by posterity.”33 Craig Nelson notes that, for centuries, Paine was incorrectly “remembered as a filthy, poverty-stricken, drunken wastrel” because his views were “so provocative and so uncompromising that he faced the gibbet and the blade everywhere he published.”34 Thus, by drawing on Paine’s radically shifting commemoration, the film connotatively upholds the righteousness of the veterans’ cause and argues that history will similarly vindicate their courage to speak out.
19 The documentary also includes numerous instances of non-white soldiers criticizing the racialized nature of historiography and their position in collective memory. In a heated debate occurring outside of the testimony, we see an unidentified black veteran
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object to the hearings’ effacement of black history. When he tries to broach this discussion, another veteran defensively interjects, “We didn’t say anything about race —” to which he replies, “No shit. That’s how come you ain’t got no black people behind you. Because you forgot about racism, man!” His protest reflects the rampant racial inequity in the American military, where African-Americans, averaging between 9 and 10 percent of the military personnel serving in Vietnam, were drafted at disproportionately high rates, were more likely to be placed in combat units, and suffered higher casualty rates.35 While others audibly insist on a need for unity, the veteran urges them to recognize the singularity of the black struggle and implicitly educes the national legacies of slavery, segregation, and institutional discrimination. He says, “Being black is a deep thing. I know you get tired of hearing it, but it’s some shit that is out there. The only way a brother can live when he get out of school, if he ain’t got no smarts, is to go in the army, man. . . . We only have one or two outlets to go, man. You got three or four. . . . You got those variables. We don’t.”
20 The veteran also points out how mass media both reflect and shape racist myths and how they influence historical remembrance. He states, “I watch television whenever I get the chance. I don’t watch for entertainment. You know what I watch? I watch all the whitewashing they throw on you everyday, man. Like, shit about Indians. Now they let the Indians win. But for years, they didn’t. But, for years, when you was a little kid, you sucked that shit right up. That’s what you believed the real shot was.” We see Native American veteran Evan Haney similarly testify, “When I was small, I was exposed to this [racism]. . . . [O]n television, when I watched the Indian and the cavalry, I would root for the cavalry.” Such hegemonic renarrativizations efface uncomfortable events and minority perspectives and reinforce these distortions within public memory on a national scale. The Winterfilm documentarians note this tendency in the American televisual representation of Vietnam as well, writing, “The face of an enemy was not on the television screen. They were reportedly hiding in the jungles. But we saw many Vietnamese people. We saw dead and wounded bodies.”36
21 The documentary also registers the erasure of Vietnamese memory, albeit primarily through its invisibility. The Winter Soldier organizers arranged to have Vietnamese war survivors “tell the people of the United States and Canada what we are doing to their country” via closed-circuit television in Windsor, Canada, but the Canadian government denied them visas.37 Consequently, no Vietnamese perspective appeared at the hearings and those recollections are likewise absent from the public record and the film. Instead, we hear Scott Camil relate how the Marines taught him to conceptualize his enemy, saying, “The Vietnamese were gooks. We didn’t just call the VC, the NVA gooks. All Vietnamese were gooks and they were slant-eyes, zips, they were Orientals, and they were inferior to us.” In his testimony, Dennis Caldwell also links the loss of Vietnamese memory to American intrusion, saying, “There were hundreds and hundreds of villages marked on the map I had with me, all kinds of names on the map, but you get over that area, and there’s nothing there at all.” Because, as Marita Sturken observes, “remembering is in itself a kind of forgetting,” these soldiers’ memories foreground their own experiences, threatening to supersede memories of the Vietnamese “in their roles as collaborators, victims, enemies, or simply the people on whose land and over whom (supposedly) this war was fought.”38
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The Text as Collective Memory
22 Along with the onscreen representations of memory, I argue that Winter Soldier itself constitutes a form of collective memory. Most evidently, there is the film’s content and the event that it documents. VVAW organized the Winter Soldier hearings to coalesce the individual, fragmented recollections of veterans into a shared narrative and disseminate it to an unaware public. Mark Lenix justified his presence in Detroit as a representative of multitudes, saying, “[I]f I saw it, I’m sure there are a lot of veterans who aren’t here who saw it,” and Don Donner said his panel’s testimonies would speak to “what the war has done to us individually and collectively.”39 Explaining the hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, John Kerry expressed that these voices also intended to influence future remembrances of Vietnam, remarking that “when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say ‘Vietnam’ and not mean . . . a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.”40
23 Documenting these memories, the footage we see onscreen also reveals that this putatively single film text is actually an assemblage of individual recordings. The diverse shooting styles of the documentarians remind us that Winter Soldier is the product of a nineteen-member group called the Winterfilm Collective and that no one camera or observer could have captured all of these varied perspectives.41 Describing the filmmaking process, Winterfilm member Roger Phenix says, “First thing we did was just look at everything. And that was the first point at which we all saw together what each other had seen individually and it was an incredibly bonding experience.”42 The group’s identification as a collective and their eight-month editing process involving “five or six people working at a time” and “many veterans giving input” further reflect their deliberately collaborative spirit.43 Their former insistence on anonymity and still- uncredited contributions also allow their work not only to stand for the group, but to epitomize the memories of the larger audience, evoking Michael Schudson’s supposition that memory is not “a property of individual minds” but “most often [a] social and interactive” process.44 Yet, the necessary condensation of three days of testimony and interviews into more than 100 hours of footage and ultimately, a 95- minute work also evinces that the documentary genre inherently remains a subjectively reduced and arranged representation of what Claude Lanzmann calls “traces of traces.”45
24 Unlike Amos Vogel who, in his 1972 review of Winter Soldier, contended, “[T]he work is . . . primarily a social artifact, whose informational content outweighs its artistic merits,” I argue that the documentary’s sometimes raw aesthetics not only reflect but enhance the testimonies.46 The grainy, outdated black-and-white film the documentarians used because of their extremely limited funds gives the contemporaneous footage the feel of a recovered historical relic. If “the mimetic image claims to represent what is, in fact, unrepresentable,”47 as Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas argue, then the low quality and lack of color of the footage here instead accentuates that the output of memory can substantially diverge from the input. The uneven lighting and awkward angles required to capture some of the impromptu conversations and overall cinéma vérité approach further confirm that audiovisual images, like memories, are not impartial or infallible, but marked with the conditions
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that catalyzed their creation. As Sharon Willis notes, film also bears “the material traces of its own exhibition, like scratches, that inscribe a memory within it” and its materiality causes it to chemically deteriorate over time, much like the distortion and loss of recall that can accompany aging.48 Even the DVD of the documentary manifests these filmic scars onscreen, reminding us of the fragility of retention.
25 However, the camera’s ontological capabilities also enable Winter Soldier not only, in the words of Bill Nichols, to “describe and interpret the world of collective experience” but to participate in “the actual construction of social reality” and thus, the construction of collective memory.49 Paula Rabinowitz elaborates, stating: “Filming an essentially ephemeral event, a vanishing custom, a disappearing species, a transitory occurrence is the motivation behind most documentary images. Documentary films provide a stability to an ever-changing reality, freezing the images within their frames.”50 When eleven members of the Winterfilm Collective reunite to discuss the creation of Winter Soldier in 2004, their dialogue acknowledges this desire to establish a more permanent archive out of intangible events. Roger Phenix remarks, “The fact that we caught it meant that there was a certain legitimacy . . . that would have gone into thin air had it not been on film. The fact that it was on film, even though most of [the public] never even saw the film, meant that it really existed and that it was real and important.”51
26 Thus, by providing audiovisual evidence and what Walter Benjamin calls “a simultaneous collective experience” of these testimonies, Winter Soldier constructs the memory of the event for viewers who did not attend the hearings.52 Through the act of documentation, these viewers become secondhand eyewitnesses and gain mediated but still relatively direct access to the sights and sounds of the proceedings. Comparing the cinematic experience to reading the transcript, Vogel rightly notes this film “renders academic any disputes as to the relative effectiveness of word as against image. There is simply no substitute for seeing the faces of the men as they testify, their strain, tears, hesitations, and artless innocence.”53 Similarly, Roxana Waterson argues that “in films of testimony, prolonged close-ups of human faces not only provide us with an important part of the evidence (the chance to analyze non-verbal elements of communication) but also enable us as audience to do our share of the work as receptive, empathic listeners, sharing even if distantly in the event of the testifying.”54 For younger generations whose collective memories of Vietnam are largely constituted by mainstream Hollywood fiction films, Winter Soldier offers an alternative, or at least additional, way to recollect the war.
Reception as Metric
27 Next, by analyzing the reception of Winter Soldier, I contend that reading the documentary as a kind of traumatic memory enables us to understand the vast differential of responses it has received. In 1972, when it was completed, the film was briefly shown at the Whitney Museum and for one week at the Cinema 2 in New York City, but the filmmakers could not secure wider U.S. theatrical distribution.55 Also rejected by public television stations and the three major national television networks, 56 the film did air once on WNET, the PBS affiliate in New York, after a planned newsfeed did not come through.57 Winterfilm Collective member Fred Aronow reminisced, “I’ve heard that three million people saw Winter Soldier entirely by mistake! Unannounced!”58 In addition, the filmmakers organized private screenings at private
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homes, community venues, and schools.59 Beyond these marginal viewings however, the film’s domestic reception paralleled the reaction to the hearings themselves, which had been almost entirely ignored by national news organizations. Tellingly, Winter Soldier received a far warmer European reception in the 1970s. It played at the Cannes, Berlin, and Amsterdam Film Festivals and, as Winterfilm Collective member Bob Fiore recalls, “it was distributed throughout Europe and shown in theaters in France and in England and on television in Germany.”60
28 Newspaper and magazine reviews from that era suggest that witnessing the testimonies, even through filmic mediation, was too distressing for many Americans. In 1972, William Wolf observed, “The memory of this documentary could well haunt you for life” and that the soldiers’ stories “shake you up and are numbing in cumulative horror.”61 Amos Vogel deemed watching veteran Evan Haney cry “an unbearable moment” and said, “This is a film that must be shown in prime time evening on national television and never will be.”62 Jake McCarthy, in a response titled “A Film You Shouldn’t See,” wrote, “I’ve hardly ever walked out on [a movie]. I did the other night, though, because I couldn’t handle it.”63 He reported leaving one hour into the film, explaining, “The magnitude of what has gone wrong in Vietnam has caused us to tuck the war’s atrocities and terrors into our national subconscious. The film Winter Soldier trots them back out again, and the role of American GIs in the war seems to become too ugly to accept.”64 As Marita Sturken notes, representations of Vietnam that were too shocking or disruptive ceded to fictionalized docudramas in which “uncomfortable histories of traumatic events can be smoothed over, retold, and ascribed new meanings.”65 Thus, to circumvent what Jonathan Schell describes as “find[ing] ourselves, almost against our will, looking through the eyes of the perpetrators” and triggering harrowing memories of the war, the documentary remained mostly unseen and commercially suppressed in the United States.66
29 In 2005, thirty-three years after its creation, the film received a limited U.S. theatrical release and appeared on DVD in 2006, finally making it widely viewable and available for purchase. This was largely motivated by a revived focus on Vietnam, following the Presidential nomination of John Kerry (who briefly appears in the film) in 2004 and the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth alleging that Kerry had distorted his service record and lied about troops committing atrocities. The group also issued a new challenge to the credibility of the Winter Soldier investigations, and Steve Pitkin, a veteran who appears in the documentary, filed an affidavit claiming that Kerry and others forced him to give false testimony.67 Amidst this revived battle to define the war’s historiographical legacy, Winter Soldier, with its persuasive inclusion of photographic documentation of atrocities and audiovisual evidence of the hearings, was well situated to return to public consciousness.
30 Amidst the second Iraq War, which observers frequently compared to Vietnam and which Vietnam historian David Maraniss deemed an instance of “history repeating itself,” the documentary also functioned as a record chronicling a similarly overburdened military, deceitful administration, and complicit media.68 According to the film’s press kit, the Winter Soldier testimonies “eerily remind us of recent tortures and murders of prisoners held in detention by the American military. The terrible abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo have sometimes been reported as unprecedented. The voices of the veterans in Winter Soldier attest that they were not.”69 Indeed, in March 2008, dozens of veterans convened the Winter
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Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan investigations to testify to analogous atrocities they witnessed and committed while serving in those conflict zones.70
31 In 2005, critics also largely championed the documentary’s wider theatrical release, urging audiences to see the film by pronouncing it “indispensable”71 and “essential”72 viewing. While these critics, like their 1970s counterparts, emphasized the intense, disturbing nature of the testimonies, they expressed few of the reservations and little of the resignation evident in Vogel’s or McCarthy’s 1972 reviews. In her Washington Post review, Ann Hornaday stated that Winter Soldier “is an important historical document, an eerily prescient antiwar plea and a dazzling example of filmmaking at its most iconographically potent. But at its best, it is the eloquent, unforgettable tale of profound moral reckoning.”73 Some critics, expressing a similar sentiment to this article, upheld the documentary’s revived potential to disabuse public misperceptions about Vietnam. For instance, Jonathan Rosenbaum, in the Chicago Reader, noted that the veterans’ “simple reality exposes the well-made, Oscar-winning, racist fantasies of The Deer Hunter as unconscionable acts of self-justification and self-deception.” 74 Writing about Winter Soldier during the second Iraq War, critics also frequently drew parallels between Vietnam and Iraq as justifications to revisit the documentary. At least one reviewer, Johnny Ray Huston of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, did express a cynicism and weariness comparable to the 1972 critics. He predicted that the discredited accusations challenging the hearings’ veracity would be another way for viewers to avoid confronting their own complicity, saying, “Nothing could be easier than to blindly state that Winter Soldier is more a work of fiction than fact. It sure would help citizens of an ethically starved and immoral country that’s repeating the outrage of Vietnam to sleep easier.”75
32 On one hand, the film’s reappearance within this contentious new context corroborates Yael Zerubavel’s notion that “collective memory continuously negotiates between available historical and current social and political agendas.”76 However, conceiving of Winter Soldier as a traumatic memory also reframes atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan as stressors that jarred the film’s atrocities back into the American psyche after decades of repression. Cathy Caruth’s observation that trauma “does not simply serve as record of the past but precisely registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned” also concretizes the documentary as a useful barometer of collective post- Vietnam trauma and recovery.77 Because the passage of time dilutes the controversial issues of individual and societal responsibility and dulls the intensity of collective remembrance, we can observe that the Winter Soldier testimonies are now estranged and disassociated enough to be more easily reabsorbed into public memory and employed as a historicized reference point. Yet, as the counter historical disputes of the Swift Boat controversy manifest, the Vietnam War’s memorialization remains an emotional and factious battle still being waged. As the Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan testimonies also unfortunately confirm, collective American memory has only selectively acknowledged the atrocities of Vietnam thus far. It has not yet given Winter Soldier, or the veterans and casualties the documentary archives, the prominent and comprehensive remembrance they deserve.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arlen, Michael J. Living-Room War. 1969; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997.
Baumeister, Roy F. and Stephen Hastings. “Distortions of Collective Memory: How Groups Flatter and Deceive Themselves.” In Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives, edited by James W. Pennebaker, Dario Paez, and Bernard Rimé, 277-293. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968, 217-252.
Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Cortright, David. “Review Essay: The Winter Soldiers Movement: GIs and Veterans Against the Vietnam War.” Peace and Change 27, no. 1 (2002): 118-124.
Crandell, William. “Opening Statement of William Crandell – Winter Soldier Investigation.” The Sixties Project. http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/ Winter_Soldier/WS_02_opening.html.
Duncan, Don. “Closing Statement – Winter Soldier Investigation.” The Sixties Project. http:// www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/ WS_53_Closing.html.
Guerin, Frances and Roger Hallas, eds. The Image and the Witness. London: Wallflower Press, 2007.
Hagopian, Patrick. The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and The Politics of Healing. Ann Arbor, MI: Sheridan Books, 2009.
Hornaday, Ann. “‘Soldier’: Recounting Unspeakable Acts of War.” Washington Post, December 9, 2005. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/08/ AR2005120800682.html.
Hunt, Andrew E. The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
Huston, Johnny Ray. “Coldest ‘Winter’ Ever: A little-seen superb Vietnam doc explodes again today.” San Francisco Bay-Guardian, Aug. 31 – Sept. 6, 2005. http://www.sfbg.com/39/48/ art_film_winter_soldier.html.
Iraq Veterans Against the War and Aaron Glantz. Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008.
Jay, Jeffrey A. “After Vietnam: In Pursuit of Scapegoats.” Harper’s Magazine, July 1978.
Kemp, Janet and Robert Bossarte. “Suicide Data Report – 2012.” U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Mental Health Services, 2012. http://www.va.gov/opa/docs/Suicide-Data-Report-2012-final.pdf.
Kerry, John. “Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee Foreign Relations – April 23, 1971.” The Sixties Project. http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/ sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/VVAW_Kerry_Senate.html.
Klawans, Stuart. “Eat The Document.” The Nation, August 29, 2005.
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Klein, Michael. “Historical Memory, Film, and the Vietnam Era.” In From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, edited by Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, 19-40. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Knoll, Erin and Judith Nies McFadden, eds. War Crimes and the American Conscience. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
Kowal, Jessica. “‘Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President.’” Salon, November 17, 2003. http:// www.salon.com/2003/11/17/iraq_viet.
Krystal, John H., Steven M. Southwick, and Dennis S. Charney. “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: Psychobiological Mechanisms of Traumatic Remembrance.” Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, edited by In Daniel L. Schacter, 150-172. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Lachman, Elly. “Winter Soldier Press Kit,” PDF on Winter Soldier DVD, 2005.
Laderman, Scott. Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory. Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
Lanzmann, Claude. “Le lieu et la parole.” In Au sujet de Shoah: Le Film de Claude Lanzmann, edited by Michel Deguy, 293-305. Paris: Belin, 1990.
Mandelbaum, Michael. “Vietnam: The Television War.” Daedalus 111, no. 4 (1982): 157-169.
Marin, Peter. “Coming to terms with Vietnam: Settling our moral debts.” Harper’s Magazine, December 1980.
McCarthy, Jake. “A Film You Shouldn’t See.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 23, 1972. Winter Soldier Film. http://wintersoldierfilm.com/reviews_102372_stlouis.htm.
Morag, Raya. “Perpetrator Trauma and Current Israeli Documentary Cinema.” Camera Obscura 80, vol. 27, no. 2 (2012): 92-133.
Moser, Richard. The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996.
Nelson, Craig. Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.
Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Nicosia, Gerald. Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2001.
Paine, Thomas. The American Crisis. 1776; Philadelphia, PA: Styner and Cist, 1776- 1777.
Pennebaker, James W. and Becky L. Banasik. “On the Creation and Maintenance of Collective Memories: History as Social Psychology.” In, eds, Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives, edited by James W. Pennebaker, Dario Paez, and Bernard Rimé, 3-19. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997.
Rabinowitz, Paula. “Wreckage Upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory.” History and Theory 32, no. 2 (1993): 119-137.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Arms and the Men.” Chicago Reader, September 16, 2005. http:// www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/arms-and-the-men/Content?oid=919893.
Schell, Jonathan. “The Talk of the Town: Notes and Comment.” New Yorker, December 20, 1969.
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Schudson, Michael. Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Schwenkel, Christina. The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009.
Silverstone, Roger. “Complicity and collusion in the mediation of everyday life.” New Literary History 33 (2002): 761-780.
Stacewicz, Richard. Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans Against The War. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997.
Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.
Turner, Fred. Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory. New York: Anchor Books, 1996.
Vogel, Amos. “Atrocities and Artless Innocence.” Village Voice, February 3, 1972. Winter Soldier Film. http://wintersoldierfilm.com/reviews_020372_voice.htm.
Waterson, Roxana. “Trajectories of Memory: Documentary Film and the Transmission of Testimony.” History and Anthropology 18, no. 1 (2007): 51-73.
Westheider, James E. Fighting on Two Fronts: African Americans and the Vietnam War. New York: New York University Press, 1997.
Willis, Sharon. “Lost Objects: The Museum of Cinema.” In The Renewal of Cultural Studies, edited by Paul Smith, 93-102. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011.
Wilson, Ron. “Review: Winter Soldier (1972).” The Moving Image 7, no. 1 (2007): 122-124.
Wolf, William. “Winter Soldier Review.” Cue Magazine, May 13, 1972. Winter Soldier Film. http:// wintersoldierfilm.com/reviews_051372_cue.htm.
Zerubavel, Yael. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Filmography
A Conversation with the Filmmakers (Michael Lesser, 2005). Bonus feature on Winter Soldier DVD.
The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978).
Winter Soldier (Winterfilm Collective, 1972).
NOTES
1. Winter Soldier, directed by Winterfilm Collective (1972; Harrington Park, NJ: Milliarium Zero, 2006), DVD. All of the quotations without citations in this article, such as the one by Shimabukuro, are direct quotes from this documentary. 2. Don Duncan, “Closing Statement – Winter Soldier Investigation,” The Sixties Project, http:// www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/ WS_53_Closing.html. 3. Andrew E. Hunt, The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 68.
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4. Demonstrating the imprecise nature of historiography, writers and historians have documented the number of testifiers at these hearings as “a little over 100 veterans” (Nicosia 87), “more than one hundred veterans and sixteen civilians” (Hunt 71), “more than 125 veterans” (Lachman 3), “150 veterans” (Hagopian 53 and Stacewicz 234), “200 young veterans” (McCarthy), and “more than 200 ex-GIs” (Vogel). Reviewing the hearing transcripts in their entirety, I counted 132 individuals who testified—116 veterans and 16 civilians. Perhaps confounding the inexactitude, the transcript also occasionally attributes remarks to an “Unidentified Panelist” or “Panelist,” not clarifying if additional people testified but were not credited or if the record did not document which of the previously credited panelists made these remarks. A full transcription of the Winter Soldier hearings can be found at The Sixties Project at http:// www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_entry.html and as a PDF on the Winter Soldier DVD. Senator Mark Hatfield also added the entirety of the remarks into the Congressional Record as Extensions and Remarks 2825-2900, 2903-2936 on April 7, 1971. 5. John Kerry, “Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee Foreign Relations – April 23, 1971,” The Sixties Project, http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/ sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/VVAW_Kerry_Senate.html. 6. Elly Lachman, “Winter Soldier Press Kit,” PDF on Winter Soldier DVD, 2005, 5, 3. 7. Richard R. Moser, The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 2. 8. Some of these works are Patrick Hagopian’s The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and The Politics of Healing (Ann Arbor, MI: Sheridan Books, 2009); Scott Laderman’s Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); and Christina Schwenkel’s The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009). 9. Examples of this application can be found in Marita Sturken’s Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Crisis, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); Michael Klein’s article “Historical Memory, Film, and the Vietnam Era” in Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, eds., From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); and Fred Turner’s Echoes of Combat: Trauma, Memory, and the Vietnam War (New York: Anchor Books, 1996). 10. Paula Rabinowitz, “Wreckage Upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory,” History and Theory 32, no. 2 (1993): 119. 11. This new wave of scholarship includes the aforementioned The New Winter Soldiers by Moser and The Turning by Hunt, as well as Richard Stacewicz’s Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997) and Gerald Nicosia’s Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2001). 12. David Cortright, “Review Essay: The Winter Soldiers Movement: GIs and Veterans Against the Vietnam War,” Peace and Change 27, no. 1 (2002): 119. 13. For one discussion of the similarities and differences between Iraq and Vietnam, see Jessica Kowal’s “‘Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President,’” Salon, November 17, 2003, http:// www.salon.com/2003/11/17/iraq_viet. 14. Janet Kemp and Robert Bossarte, “Suicide Data Report – 2012,” U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs Mental Health Services, 18. http://www.va.gov/opa/docs/Suicide-Data-Report-2012- final.pdf. 15. James W. Pennebaker and Becky L. Banasik, “On the Creation and Maintenance of Collective Memories: History as Social Psychology.” In James W. Pennebaker, Dario Paez, and Bernard Rimé, eds, Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 7. 16. Pennebaker and Banasik, “On the Creation and Maintenance of Collective Memories”, 8.
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17. Pennebaker and Banasik, “On the Creation and Maintenance of Collective Memories”, 11. 18. John H. Krystal, Steven M. Southwick, and Dennis S. Charney, “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: Psychobiological Mechanisms of Traumatic Remembrance” in Daniel L. Schacter, ed, Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 150. 19. Turner, Echoes of Combat, 18. 20. Raya Morag, “Perpetrator Trauma and Current Israeli Documentary Cinema,” Camera Obscura 80, vol. 27, no. 2 (2012): 93. 21. Morag, “Perpetrator Trauma and Current Israeli Documentary Cinema,” 95. 22. Michael J. Arlen, Living Room-War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 6. 23. Michael Mandelbaum, “Vietnam: The Television War,” Daedalus 111, no. 4 (1982): 157, 161. 24. Roger Silverstone, “Complicity and collusion in the mediation of everyday life,” New Literary History 33 (2002): 774. 25. Peter Marin, “Coming to Terms with Vietnam: Settling Our Moral Debts,” Harper’s Magazine, December 1980, 42. 26. Jeffrey A. Jay, “After Vietnam: I. In Pursuit of Scapegoats,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1978, 14. 27. Robert Jay Lifton quoted in Erwin Knoll and Judith Nies McFadden, eds., War Crimes and the American Conscience (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 107-108. 28. Roy F. Baumeister and Stephen Hastings, “Distortions of Collective Memory: How Groups Flatter and Deceive Themselves” in Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives, 282-283. 29. Stacewicz, Winter Soldiers, 5. 30. Thomas Paine, The American Crisis (Philadelphia, PA: Styner and Cist, 1776-1777). An image of the text is here: http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/history/american-crisis.html. 31. William Crandell quoted in Nicosia, 79. 32. Turner, Echoes of Combat, 21. 33. William Cobbett quoted in Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 5. 34. Nelson, Thomas Paine, 8, 10. 35. James E. Westheider, Fighting on Two Fronts: African Americans and the Vietnam War (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 13, 20, 12. 36. Winterfilm Collective, “Remarks by the filmmakers providing a brief historical context for viewing Winter Soldier,” PDF on Winter Soldier DVD, 2006, 1. 37. William Crandell, “Opening Statement of William Crandell – Winter Soldier Investigation,” The Sixties Project, http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/ Winter_Soldier/WS_02_opening.html. 38. Sturken, “Tangled Memories,” 82, 62. 39. Don Donner quoted in “1st, 4th, and 9th Infantry Divisions – Winter Soldier Investigation,” The Sixties Project, http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/ WS_45_1Infantry.html. 40. Kerry, “Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement.” 41. Like the discrepancies concerning the number of people testifying, it is revealing how the number of credited filmmakers fluctuates in historical accounts and reviews. For example, an intertitle in the DVD bonus feature A Conversation With the Filmmakers represents the number of Winterfilm Collective members as “about 17,” Nicosia attributes the documentary to “fifteen peace activists” (84), and Stacewicz simply credits “an independent filmmaker” (267). I have taken the count of nineteen from the Winter Soldier Press Kit, which lists all nineteen members. 42. A Conversation with the Filmmakers, directed by Michael Lesser (2005; Harrington Park, NJ: Milliarium Zero, 2006), bonus feature on Winter Soldier DVD.
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43. A Conversation with the Filmmakers. 44. Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 51-52. 45. Claude Lanzmann, “Le lieu et la parole,” in Au sujet de Shoah: Le Film de Claude Lanzmann, ed. Michel Deguy (Paris: Belin, 1990), 304. 46. Amos Vogel, “Atrocities and Artless Innocence” from Village Voice, February 3, 1972, Winter Soldier Film, http://wintersoldierfilm.com/reviews_020372_voice.htm. 47. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas, introduction to The Image and the Witness, eds. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 2. 48. Sharon Willis, “Lost Objects: The Museum of Cinema,” in The Renewal of Cultural Studies, ed. Paul Smith (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011), 93-94. 49. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 10. 50. Rabinowitz, “Wreckage Upon Wreckage,” 120. 51. A Conversation with the Filmmakers. 52. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 234. 53. Vogel, “Atrocities and Artless Innocence.” 54. Roxana Waterson, “Trajectories of Memory: Documentary Film and the Transmission of Testimony,” History and Anthropology 18, no. 1 (2007): 70. 55. Lachman, “Winter Soldier Presskit,” 3. 56. Ron Wilson, “Review: Winter Soldier (1972)” from The Moving Image 7, no. 1 (2007): 123. 57. Wilson, “Review: Winter Soldier (1972),” 123. 58. A Conversation with the Filmmakers. 59. Winterfilm Collective, 3. 60. Winterfilm Collective, 3. 61. William Wolf, “Winter Soldier Review,” from Cue Magazine, May 13, 1972, Winter Soldier Film, http://wintersoldierfilm.com/reviews_051372_cue.htm. 62. Vogel, “Atrocities and Artless Innocence.” 63. Jake McCarthy, “A Film You Shouldn’t See” from St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 23, 1972, Winter Soldier Film, http://wintersoldierfilm.com/reviews_102372_stlouis.htm. 64. McCarthy, “A Film You Shouldn’t See.” 65. Sturken, “Tangled Memories,” 85. 66. Jonathan Schell, “The Talk of the Town: Notes and Comment,” New Yorker, December 20, 1969, 27. 67. Johnny Ray Huston, “Coldest “Winter” Ever: A little-seen superb Vietnam doc explodes again today,” San Francisco Bay-Guardian, August 31 – September 6, 2005, http://www.sfbg.com/39/48/ art_film_winter_soldier.html. 68. Kowal, “Welcome to Vietnam.” 69. Lachman, “Winter Soldier Presskit,” 3. 70. Iraq Veterans Against the War and Aaron Glantz, Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), 6. 71. Stuart Klawans, “Eat The Document,” The Nation, August 29, 2005, 42. 72. Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Arms and the Men,” Chicago Reader, September 16, 2005, http:// www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/arms-and-the-men/Content?oid=919893. 73. Ann Hornaday, “’Soldier’: Recounting Unspeakable Acts of War,” Washington Post, December 9, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/08/ AR2005120800682.html. 74. Rosenbaum, “Arms and the Men.” 75. Huston, “Coldest ‘Winter’ Ever.”
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76. Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 5. 77. Cathy Caruth, introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 151.
ABSTRACTS
This article examines the 1972 Vietnam War documentary Winter Soldier (The Winterfilm Collective), the only remaining public audiovisual record of the momentous 1971 Winter Soldier investigation, through the lens of memory. It considers textual appearances of repressed and traumatic memories and how they stand in for larger national and institutional repressions. It also theorizes how the film and the event it documents constitute forms of collective memories. Finally, the article looks at the film’s troubled reception and commercial suppression in 1972 and finally, its return to public consciousness in 2005 as a metric of national traumatization and recovery.
INDEX
Keywords: Vietnam War, documentary, memory, atrocity, trauma
AUTHOR
DANIEL GRINBERG Daniel Grinberg is a graduate student and associate instructor studying Film and Media in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. His current research focuses on war documentaries, particularly through the lenses of memory and spatiality, as well as postcolonial representations of colonial histories and digital dissidence in repressive regimes. Some of his upcoming projects will interrogate gendered spaces in Vietnam War documentaries and the state repression of Octobre à Paris (Jacques Panijel, 1962), a film memorializing the 1961 French police massacre of Algerian demonstrators.
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Control Room and the Staging of War
Barry Mauer
The description of a war can be a weapon of war.1
1 Jehane Noujaim’s documentary, Control Room (2004), focuses on the Al Jazeera news channel in the early days of the Iraq War. Control Room answers Donald Rumsfeld’s charge that Al Jazeera sides with terrorists; Control Room shows Al Jazeera’s staff faithfully translating the pronouncements of Bush administration figures, striving for balance, and putting themselves at great risk to get the stories that western journalists were not covering. In the film’s darkest sequence, we learn that Tarek Ayyoub, an Al Jazeera reporter, died from an American bomb attack while he was on the job in Baghdad, raising the question of whether the U.S. targeted Al Jazeera’s offices in order to silence the station. Control Room was not filmed in Baghdad, however, but in Qatar, the location of U.S. Central Command (aka CentCom) and Al Jazeera headquarters. Though the military conflict between the U.S. and Iraq did not extend there, Qatar became a battlefield of representation as Al Jazeera and CentCom battled each other for control over representation.
2 By focusing on the contested arena of media representation during the early days of the Iraq War, Noujaim’s Control Room makes a vital contribution to the debate over media producers’ relationships to centers of political and military power in a time of war. The film demonstrates that we need ways to navigate the flood of misinformation and competing points of view that surround us. Like other documentaries that dealt with media representations of the Iraq War, such as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 (2004), Danny Schechter’s WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception (2004), Jeremy Earp and Sut Jhally’s Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire (2004), John Pilger’s The War You Don’t See (2010), and Robert Greenwald’s Uncovered: The War on Iraq (2004), Control Room shows us symptoms of a damaged public sphere and a mass media that fails to do its public duty. What distinguished Control Room from these films is its cinéma vérité style; there is no narrator to provide an argument about the war. Rather, Control Room relies on arguments made by its subjects and on the power of editing to make its case.
3 This essay analyzes Control Room in order to gauge the power of documentary to restore the public sphere. What factors shape the making of news during times of war? How
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can viewers learn to navigate the competing media frames and narratives about war? How can dedicated documentarians make more democratic a public sphere that has been badly damaged by corporate media consolidation and government propaganda? Finally, can rhetoric and poetics shed light on the choices made by documentary filmmakers during times of war and the ways in which target audiences are expected to make sense of their films?
4 Rhetoric and poetics, I argue, can help us understand the arena of public discourse, supplementing political media analyses proposed in the works of Jean Baudrillard and others. Noujaim’s film fosters attention to the kinds of pseudo-events discussed by Baudrillard. For example, the film shows uncritical American media outlets repeating the packaged statements of military officials about the announced “rescue” of Private Jessica Lynch.2
5 Institutional analyses, such as the entertaining and enlightening work of Herbert Schiller, examine the structures of media entities; who owns the media? How does it “package consciousness”?3 These are worthy questions and Schiller provides an excellent critique of the ways in which corporate control of the media has stifled dissent. Schiller, who wrote much of his work before the days of global telecommunications, was skeptical of the power of independent media to challenge corporate control because, he argued, it must still abide by the rules of profitability in a capitalist society.4 Nevertheless, independent media has grown in recent years and represented a significant challenge to the Bush administration. Also a challenge to the Bush administration was foreign media, as evidenced by the efforts the administration took to marginalize, discredit, or bomb these sources, especially Al Jazeera, during the selling and prosecution of the war. To understand how independent and foreign media present challenges to government and to media conglomerates in the U.S., I turn to Douglas Kellner’s view that media is a contested arena that requires audiences to learn critical tools in order to understand it.5 A textual analysis of Noujaim’s film reveals the ways in which she seeks to educate the viewer to decipher the making and framing of the news.
6 Bill Nichols puts Aristotelian rhetoric to good use in his discussion of the effects of documentary.6 He reminds us that the categories of proofs, including ethical, emotional, and demonstrative, shape the documentarian’s filmmaking choices in an attempt to persuade audiences of the filmmaker’s argument. By going “backstage” to show how media managers stage war for mass consumption, Control Room stages the media contest in a self-reflexive gesture. If we accompany our viewing of Control Room with lessons about rhetoric and poetics—which aids in understanding the staging of war as drama—we can become thoughtful media critics and engage effectively in the process of making the public sphere more democratic.
7 Control Room shows us journalists and political players engaged in staging our images of war. To stage a war is to arrange the combatants before the battlefield. Another meaning of the word staging involves the presentation of war to the public. Like theater, war requires settings and players and the various media outlets portray these elements in different ways. Are we witnessing liberation from a brutal dictator or the hostile takeover of a sovereign country? The interpretation depends on which channel we watch and on our ideological assumptions. The outcome of the military contest between Saddam’s forces and the U.S-led coalition may have been obvious from the start, but the control of the war’s narrative was not. Later in the war, as the search for
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Saddam’s alleged WMD failed, stories about torture at Abu Ghraib emerged, and the insurgency intensified, the U.S. government lost more control over the narrative.
Dramatis Personae
8 Control Room largely follows cinéma vérité conventions, capturing events on the fly, though it does employ some montage to great effect in rendering the director’s answers to Rumsfeld’s charges against Al Jazeera. Though cinéma vérité does not stage the events it captures, I argue in this section, following the work of Erving Goffman, that life follows art and that we can understand the real-life conflicts captured by Noujaim in dramatic terms.
9 Control Room is not obviously a drama, yet it has dramatic features. The three main characters in the film—Al Jazeera senior producers Hassan Ibrahim and Sameer Khader, and U.S. Central Command Press Officer Captain Josh Rushing—all media workers, are engaged in a dramatic contest of representation, and the stakes of the contest are enormous. Is the war justified? Is the U.S. presence in Iraq an act of liberation or a hostile invasion? Is Al Jazeera a news station or a source of propaganda? Control Room posits that the war is not justified, that the U.S. presence in Iraq is a hostile invasion and that Al Jazeera is a source of news, but it makes its arguments through demonstration, dialogue, and editing rather than through on-screen or voice-over narration.
10 The characters in Control Room are not actors, and the action is not scripted. Yet a drama perspective reveals how struggles for power and control that are played out in real life owe something to fictional drama and vice-versa. Bill Nichols’ concept of “virtual performance” is useful here: Virtual performance presents the logic of actual performance without signs of conscious awareness that this presentation is an act . . . Virtual performance, or the everyday presentation of self, derives from a culturally specific system of meanings surrounding facial expressions, changes of vocal tone or pitch, shifts in body posture, gestures, and so on—those very elements that actors train themselves to control at will.7
11 The bridge between reality and drama is even stronger in the sociological work of Erving Goffman on character contests.8 Goffman argues that people judge the behaviors of others in real life using the same standards by which they judge characters in fictional drama. Thus real life actors construct and/or frame dramatic encounters to showcase the character traits they wish their audience to attribute to them.
12 A special type of character contest, called a run-in, occurs when two characters want opposing outcomes and neither character backs down. Goffman states that run-ins are played for a number of stakes: to gain attributes of “good character” (such as courage, honesty, fidelity, etc.) by acting out those attributes; to maintain self-control; to establish and maintain boundaries; to define the self at the expense of others; and to decide who gets to have their way. Additionally, such contests can have numerous outcomes: an overmatched player can lose a contest but win character through bravery, grace, or irony; a well-matched but honorable player can win character by losing a run-in to an opponent who stoops to dirty tactics; and a player who wins against a weaker opponent may lose character by acquiring the traits of a bully. The determination of who “wins” a character contest belongs to the audience, who judges
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not only the manifest outcome, but also the respective strengths and weaknesses of the agonistes and the fairness of the tactics they use.
13 At the risk of accepting the argument that corporations and government entities are people, I argue that Al Jazeera and CentCom were agonistes in a character contest over the representation of the war in Iraq. During wartime, mass media corporations and government agencies have the means to affect the audience’s picture of the military and ideological struggle. By shaping the narrative, such as by censoring information about the tactics of one side or by overestimating the strengths of the other, these entities can tip the audience and thus the outcome of the military and ideological character contests. Since many U.S. media corporations became enmeshed and embedded with the Pentagon, Al Jazeera’s fight for an alternative view put it in direct conflict with the Pentagon.
14 Control Room portrays Al Jazeera as the overmatched player. We see Al Jazeera bravely defend itself against unethical and far stronger opponents, while Donald Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials use censorship and lies to manipulate the media picture. Rumsfeld, in turn, openly accuses Al Jazeera of lying, broadcasting anti-American propaganda, and violating proper journalistic conventions against showing prisoners and casualties.
15 Though war may appear to be a contest in which there are no rules other than brute force, our understanding of war is highly structured according to the dramatic principles outlined by Goffman. The Bush administration sold the Iraq war to the public primarily as a war of self-defense against Saddam Hussein’s WMD and his supposed ties to Al Qaeda, and to a lesser extent as a war of liberation against a tyrant bent on creating an empire in the region. Throughout much of the world outside the U.S., these justifications for war were met with near total rejection. Clearly, however, the Bush administration succeeded in launching the war because its false justifications were accepted to a large extent by U.S. media and thereafter by much of the American public.9 Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim states, however, that he has absolute faith in both the U.S. Constitution and the American people to correct the flawed policies of the Bush administration.
16 Self-defense was the rhetorical glue that held American public opinion together on the eve of the war. As Al Jazeera senior producer Sameer Khader opines in Control Room, “The American media were hijacked by some people within the administration . . . to make the Americans always feel that they are under siege and there is a threat and this threat was represented by Saddam Hussein and Iraq.” A war of self-defense is easy to justify and we can understand the nature of its appeal by describing it in the terms Goffman provides. Self-defense implies the defender is of good character, especially if the effort is to defend other weaker members of the group.10 It implies the defender has maintained self-control and has only struck back as a last resort in the face of imminent attack. A war of self-defense seeks to establish and maintain boundaries, such as those boundaries protecting security and law, against an enemy that would subvert them. It can define the self at the expense of others, which works extremely well if you can portray the others as evil and yourself as good. And clearly, a war of self- defense can determine who gets to have their way. While Control Room does not explicitly discredit each of the Bush administration’s claims to self-defense, it clearly does not accept them either.
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17 The Bush administration’s argument that the war in Iraq was in self-defense was never very strong: Saddam had never attacked the U.S.; there was no proof he possessed either weapons of mass destruction or had any ties to al Qaeda; and his military had been greatly degraded by the previous Gulf War, years of sanctions, and a strictly enforced no-fly zone. Nevertheless, much of the American public, as a result of propaganda, came to believe Saddam was a threat to them. Other documentaries, such as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, deconstruct Bush’s pro-war arguments, but Control Room presents a more ground-level view of the media war.
18 Al Jazeera entered the media agora, and by doing so, it offered viewpoints that contrasted with those of most American corporate media outlets. The American media, with few exceptions, had fallen in line behind the Bush administration by cheerleading the war and self-censoring. The battle for public opinion engaged by Al Jazeera was fought largely over the question of media conventions. Al Jazeera showed dead and grieving civilians, dead U.S. troops, and captured U.S. prisoners of war. American TV rarely showed these images, but why? Did the U.S. government control the American media?11
19 Control Room uses archive footage to deconstruct the Bush administration’s and Pentagon officials’ war discourses; they blamed Al Jazeera for using dirty tactics, and thus fighting unfairly in the war of representation. A key issue in Control Room is Al Jazeera’s portrayal of civilian casualties. Rumsfeld states that Arab television showed things that are “flat not true”12 in order to incite against the Americans. Khader counters Rumsfeld by pointing to a picture of a wounded child on Al Jazeera, “Rumsfeld called this incitement. I call it true journalism.”
20 Another key issue discussed in Control Room is whether Al Jazeera was wrong to have shown footage of captured American POWs, which was videotaped by Iraqi officials. In the film, we see George W. Bush exiting his helicopter, preceded by his dog, then his wife Laura. Bush answers reporters’ questions about U.S. prisoners. Bush says he “expects them to be treated humanely, and uh just like we’re treating the prisoners that we have captured humanely.”13 We then see a video of a U.S. prisoner. An off- screen person with an Arabic accent asks, “Why did you come from America?” “Because I was told to come here.” “You come to kill Iraqi people?” “No. I come to fix broke stuff.”
21 Al Jazeera senior producer Hassan Ibrahim says, “Rumsfeld is saying that parading the footage of these captives is a violation of the Geneva Convention.” He adds, “What do you call Guantanamo Bay, what you call the Iraqi soldiers parading yesterday on American television, what do you call bombing a city without authorization from the UN Security Council?” Noujaim cuts to Joanne Tucker, a manager of Al Jazeera, being interviewed by an American journalist, who tells her there is a lot of pressure on Al Jazeera to withdraw images showing captured U.S. troops. Tucker argues for showing the footage, stating this “is not a clean war.” Asked if Al Jazeera is capable of being objective, she replies, “Are any U.S. journalists objective about this war?” Tucker points out that Al Jazeera was criticized for showing images of captured and dead U.S. troops, but “if there were true neutrality, all information from all sides would be welcomed.”
22 Next Noujaim cuts to CentCom’s Captain Rushing who takes up the other side of the debate by stating that the images of dead U.S. soldiers on Al Jazeera, which Noujaim shows while he speaks, made him sick and that U.S. news does not show those kinds of images. Yet Rushing adds that the images of wounded Iraqis he saw the following night
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on Al Jazeera, which Noujaim also shows while he speaks, did not bother him as much, and that he is able to imagine himself in the shoes of Al Jazeera staff having the opposite reactions. In a moment of profound self-realization, he admits of his partisanship, “It makes me hate war.”
23 Compared to Captain Rushing, a model of reasonableness and self-awareness,14 Donald Rumsfeld appears to be little more than a two-dimensional villain from a Hollywood melodrama. One difference between a scripted melodrama and reality is that in Control Room there is no poetic justice in which the wicked are punished. “We are dealing with people who are willing to lie to the world to make their case,” Rumsfeld says. Yet Rumsfeld remains unpunished for lying about Iraqi WMD and for ordering the abusive treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and other sites. Instead, he continues to justify his case for war.
24 Control Room repeatedly emphasizes how small Al Jazeera is compared to the might of the U.S. military.15 It sets up its audience to “root for the little guy.” The Al Jazeera staff members are hardworking and ordinary. They are overweight, balding, chain smoking, unglamorous. They seem particularly vulnerable as well. The beginning of Control Room foreshadows the death of Tarek Ayyoub many times. We see reporters donning their new “working gear”: flak vests and helmets. Mohamed Jasem, general manager of Al Jazeera, tells us that the station gave their locations in major Iraqi cities to Washington and to the Pentagon. Noujaim cuts to shots of bombs falling. We see an Al Jazeera reporter on the roof of a building. Explosions occur behind him. He ducks. The camera pulls back; we realize the image is on a television screen. We see a radio operator in Al Jazeera’s office yelling “Baghdad? Baghdad?” into his microphone. We hear no answer. This moment occurred at the beginning of the U.S. bombardment, but it was not the day Tarek Ayyoub died. Control Room dramatizes the work of journalists in a war environment, thus framing them as heroes too.
25 The character conflict within Control Room reaches its crisis at the moment of Ayyoub’s death. A crisis is the point when the drama’s protagonists, in this case Al Jazeera’s Khader and CentCom’s Rushing, face their greatest challenges. Khader makes clear he sees the attack as the Bush administration’s message to the station that it was being targeted because it is “not one hundred percent against Saddam.”16 But Khader is not deterred. He says of the killing of Ayyoub, “For me it was a crime that should be avenged, or at least investigated.” A press release from the U.S. states that coalition forces came under significant heavy fire from the Al Jazeera building, but the time leading up to the attack was caught on video. No weapons fire from the building is apparent. We see a plane turn and fly toward the building and unleash its payload. Control Room uses visual proof, where available, to stand up against verbal arguments.
26 CentCom’s Captain Rushing faces a crisis too at this point. He denies that the American bombing that killed Tarek Ayyoub was aimed at silencing Al Jazeera. He states that if the U.S. had wanted to shut down any media coverage, the army could have done it. Rushing also doubts the message was to turn the media down because the end result of the bombing was to turn it up. Yet an Al Jazeera staffer, commenting later, states that potential interview subjects said they would not speak to him after the attack, fearing they will be targeted.17 Control Room, through discourse and editing, reveals the competition over the interpretation of events: a struggle of power over the framing of the news.
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27 Captain Rushing is an appealing figure because of his apparent sincerity and his dawning realization that the war is a tragedy. Noujaim treats him sympathetically, focusing on his attractive face in close up. Regardless of the true motives of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, Rushing seems to have believed sincerely that the U.S. was liberating Iraq and that the collision of the two worlds—Arab and American—could be turned towards their mutual interests. During the course of the film, he comes to see that the war has only spawned more hatred and mistrust. Rushing’s hamartia, a Greek term applied to the error in judgment leading to the downfall of the tragic hero, does not lead Rushing himself to suffer a calamitous downfall.18 Nevertheless, Rushing’s goal —to convince the Arab people that the U.S. is their ally—collapses. The death of Tarek Ayyoub is a reversal (peripitea) that signals the end of this possibility, at least to Rushing. By the end of the film, Rushing recognizes (anagnorisis: the movement from ignorance to knowledge) that he has not learned enough about Arabs. Rushing claims, “We [Americans] don’t want to occupy Baghdad.” Ibrahim counters, “you are.” In response, Rushing says if he gets out of the Marines, he wants to do something with the Palestinian issue. Ibrahim invites Rushing to dinner, signifying Control Room’s appeal for ongoing dialogue across cultures.
Representation as War (or War as Representation)
28 At its core, war is a means of settling a disagreement, whether that dispute focuses on boundaries, values, or power. If one group of people is strong enough to physically defeat their opponents, they win the war, though their viewpoint may not win the battle for representation.
29 Twentieth-century philosopher Michel Foucault inverted Clausewitz’s phrase “War is politics by other means” to “Politics is the continuation of war by other means.”19 Foucault confronts us with the ways in which arguments, politics, and war are almost inextricably intertwined. Since philosophers present different ideas about the proper form of argumentation, there is no essential or eternal reason why argument and war must be intertwined. Yet the existence of a real war brings out the most eristic of arguments. As Al Jazeera’s Sameer Khader says at the beginning of Control Room, “You cannot wage a war without rumors, without media, without propaganda.”
30 In Control Room we perceive a clear metaphor between the war itself and the war of representation—the higher the perceived stakes go, the more fierce the battle for representation and rhetorical dominance becomes. The line between rhetorical eristics and military action is porous indeed. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson theorize that language is metaphorically structured and that our concept of argument is structured in terms of war: It is important to see that we don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan and use strategies. If we find a position indefensible, we can abandon it and take a new line of attack. Many of the things we do in arguing are practically structured by the concept of war. Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle, and the structure of an argument––attack, defense, counterattack, etc.––reflects this. It is in this sense that the ARGUMENT AS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; it structures the actions we perform in arguing.20
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31 If we think about arguments as a form of war, we can see that different kinds of war lead to different kinds of arguments. For instance, a war might be thought of as a type of game in which a player wins one time but the opponent might win the next. Or war might be imagined as a way to force others to submit to one’s will. Finally, war can be imagined as a way to annihilate opponents––like the Punic wars of antiquity, or Hitler’s wars. Depending upon which metaphor of war is invoked, a different form of argument develops as a result. The Bush administration and its allies seemed to shift their definition of war as the conflict escalated. To maintain the fiction that its war was about liberation, it had to appear to care about the Iraqi people, yet it also declared its intentions to “take the gloves off,” a thinly-veiled threat to use unrestrained violence, it endorsed torture, and it declared free-fire zones in which soldiers were ordered to kill anything that moved.
32 When Rumsfeld criticizes Al Jazeera for showing Iraqi civilians injured in U.S. bombing attacks, Hassan Ibrahim, a senior producer of Al Jazeera and one of the three main characters of Control Room, points to the hypocrisy of American rhetoric about the war. “You are the most powerful nation on earth, I agree. You can defeat everybody, I agree. You can crush everyone, I agree. But don’t ask us to love it as well!” Captain Josh Rushing of CentCom tries to defend against charges that the war is aimed at the Iraqi population by arguing that the U.S. purchased precision bombs at 100 times the cost of conventional bombs in order to minimize civilian casualties. Ibrahim responds, “You’re still killing civilians, my friend . . . Since Vietnam, the picture has changed. And now in the Arab world, of course, we’ve come to discover the wonders of television much later than the rest of the world. . . . The idea of another Arab capital occupied is really fueling anger.” Rushing appears speechless.
33 Despite their disagreements, Rushing and Ibrahim engage in dialogue with each other, and Rushing seems to change his beliefs when challenged. Warlike arguments, by contrast, seldom encourage other people to hear one’s point of view. While there is clearly a proper role for warlike arguments in news and documentary,21 there should also be space for dialogue as well. Dialogue makes argumentation a supportive communicative endeavor. Rather than thinking of arguments as wars in which we “attack” our opponents, causing them to “dig in,” “retrench,” and “put up their defenses,” we could think of argumentation as a form of cooperative teaching, in which we employ such ethical forms of persuasion as modeling, reflecting, and giving feedback. Such cooperative efforts occur many times among the characters featured in Control Room. Noujaim films the dialogues of Al Jazeera personnel involved in the making of the news, she films dialogues among opponents such as Ibrahim and Rushing, and she captures dialogues that occur via a single character, such as the moment when Rushing notices his own bias regarding American casualties versus Iraqi casualties. Noujaim is trying to persuade her audience that dialogue is possible and desirable during war. Such dialogue, however, requires a safe space and willing participants. Ironically, Control Room opens a space for dialogue in the heart of the media agora during a war.
34 In ancient Greece, public arguments occurred in the agora, or marketplace. The agora ostensibly provided a forum for argumentation and the rational exchange of ideas that shifted the means of battle from armed conflict to verbal conflict, but Plato was suspicious of the argumentation in the agora because the winners were often Sophists who knew how to win by distorting the truth.22 Plato wanted to take discourse out of
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the brutal marketplace of ideas and create spaces of dialogue in which interlocutors traded souls, or at least traded one another’s viewpoints.23 For Plato, debate should be structured as a dialogue among allies who share a common quest for the truth, not as a winner-take-all war.24 Al Jazeera is a news organization, not a philosophy club, and thus does not abide by Plato’s ideal. Khader is keen for Al Jazeera to stick to the facts—in one scene he berates a staffer for putting an anti-American diatribe on the air. Control Room, however, is far more philosophical, showing us scenes in which the participants ask each other to trade views, as when Ibrahim reminds Rushing to think about how Arabs view images of civilian casualties.
35 Though Control Room captures the reality of the journalist as agon, the film itself promotes an ethos not of eristics, but of dialogue. It presents a model of public deliberation grounded in reasonableness and balance in opposition to bellicose and extreme rhetoric. Muafak Tawfik, a translator for Al Jazeera, seems to speak for Noujaim when he says ruefully that the war is radicalizing people: “There’ll be no more room for people like me who speak softly and rationally.” The greatest irony of Noujaim’s film is that the model of thoughtful public discourse she champions—carried on by the film’s trio of central characters, Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim and Khader and CentCom’s Rushing—occurs in private, off the air. Without Noujaim’s film we would not have learned of their ambivalences, their doubts, and their struggles to make sense of the catastrophe unfolding around them. If these characters had broadcast their ambivalences over the airwaves, their comments might have cost them their jobs. In other words, dialogue still flickers during wartime, but usually off the air. In the arena of public opinion, dialogue has little to no room during war.
36 As an independent film, Control Room can reach an audience that seeks an alternative to the bellicose rhetoric of the mainstream media agora. Noujaim’s effort to bring the thoughtful private deliberations of Ibrahim, Khader, and Rushing to the public seems worthy. In the face of tremendous propaganda and abuses from Bush’s neoconservative cabal, Middle Eastern autocrats, and Islamic extremists, thoughtful deliberation is practically lost. Such discourse is too quiet to be heard above the shouting, the noise, and the violence, and those who most need to hear it—those caught up in the narratives of Manichean struggle—are the least likely to hear it. Additionally, our journalism apparatus does not support such dialogue, but instead encourages flag waving, shouting and polarization.
37 Makers of war documentaries face numerous choices. Among these is the decision to favor either eristics or dialogue in their presentation. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Noujaim’s film promotes dialogue as an attractive alternative to propaganda. Yet thoughtful deliberation may take too long during times of crisis and it is too quiet to cut through the noise of the propaganda machines. Other documentary films about the Iraq war, such as Fahrenheit 911, WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception, Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire, The War You Don’t See, and Uncovered: The War on Iraq try to do just that. They take strong advocacy positions, making arguments against the war that they intend to win. They marshal evidence, experts, powerful rhetorical skills, and compelling sights and sounds to cut through the noise and to address the many catastrophes—in government and in the media—that both led to the war and followed from it.
38 Those hoping to promote a global democratic public sphere might desire a referee who could ensure fair play in the media agora, but that ideal seems remote. Also remote is
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the possibility for a dialogic space to emerge in the midst of the agora, though Control Room’s Ibrahim and Rushing show that it is possible. Until we have a viable alternative media universe, refereeing the existing media players and promoting dialogue may be our next best hopes. And until that goal is met, fighting eristics with eristics––fire with fire––is, regrettably, the most effective option remaining to us.
War Documentary and the Public Sphere
39 Most documentarians making films about the Iraq War seem driven by a desire to improve the public sphere by offering information and perspectives censored from corporate and government controlled media outlets. These filmmakers promote the values of transparency, of public participation, and of reasonableness. They are often shocked and angry at the scenes they witness, yet many maintain an ethos of fairness and reasonableness. Despite their best efforts to protect, enhance, and expand the public sphere, the obstacles facing makers of independent war documentaries are substantial. Not only do they have trouble gaining access to information,25 they also face great physical danger, political risks,26 and trouble finding distribution. In some ways, independent documentary filmmakers are similar to Al Jazeera, which appears as a scrappy startup with an alternative point of view, many obstacles to overcome, and a desire to find an audience.
40 Al Jazeera’s struggles to create an alternative media perspective reveal a paradox in our system of modern journalism: we need a mediated frame to understand modern war but it is almost inevitable that those who create such frames will wind up inside them, further complicating the picture. The emergence of this paradox is due, in part, to the global 24-hour news and entertainment apparatus that has arisen with the advent of satellite broadcasting and the Internet. As a result of this apparatus, media consumers are now able to access multiple films, multiple channels, and multiple viewpoints. The war of images occurs in real time. Each film and each channel can now re-frame the other’s perspective as it provides its own frame for the narrative of the war. No one stands above the fray. Today’s postmodern media environment stands in stark contrast to the media environment that existed during World War I, in which images and stories traveled more slowly and there were fewer of them competing in the same arena. In recent years, the battle for control of the media frame has become increasingly complicated, setting up its players—the documentarians, program directors, journalists, and military spokespeople—in a new arena in which they must consider themselves both as raisoneurs (commentators) and as agonists, caught in the stories they try to make.
41 Critics such as Paul Arthur27 and Rand Richards Cooper28 argue that documentary films which employ authorial voice and establish historical context, such as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, are more relevant than cinéma vérité films like Control Room. For instance, Control Room does little to contextualize the events it portrays.29 Arthur writes: We receive scant instruction on [Al Jazeera’s] previous history, the size of its staff, number of bureaus, sources of funding, daily programming schedule, to say nothing of the role of religion in editorial and content decisions, the status of women, and so on. Indeed, even processes by which stories are assigned, gathered, edited, and produced are beyond Control Room’s narrow scope. Nor are we privy to the institutional structure or divisions of labor at CentCom. The lack of such
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information signals a disinterest in precisely the sort of contextual description that can lead to informed, ‘big picture’ judgments.30
42 Control Room provides limited information about how CentCom tries to control the narrative of the war by manipulating a mostly compliant press, but without a broader context, this information might make little sense to viewers. How much explanation is necessary in a documentary? Bill Nichols cites Bertolt Brecht on this question: Bertolt Brecht pointed to one kind of excess particularly pertinent to the documentary text when he argued that a photograph of the Krupp munition works does nothing to explain the reality of that enterprise: its forced labor practices, its margin of profit, its ties to the Nazi regime, and so on. Explanation, like narrative, takes time.31
43 Excess—the context that exceeds the frame—is a major factor in our reading of Control Room, which appeals mainly to an audience that already knows something about the war and about the media. As an avid media consumer, I had already seen at least a dozen documentaries about the Iraq War and the political machinations and propaganda campaign leading up to it, had read several books about it, and had read hundreds of articles about it before I watched Control Room. Without background knowledge, an audience viewing Control Room would be less likely to make sense of the war, of the crisis within journalism, or of the need for urgent political action. I found Control Room compelling because it showed me things I didn’t know; it revealed the complex lives and choices faced by the media players in the center of the battle for representation. Because it is an on-the-fly cinéma vérité-style film, Control Room uses the power of surprise, often lacking in more didactic films, because we see events unfold and people react to them in the moment.
44 I agree with Arthur that Control Room lacks the framing to contextualize many of the events it portrays. As Arthur points out, Al Jazeera and CentCom may hire “truth- seeking” individuals, but this fact tells us almost nothing about the organizations, and without a “more detailed political-economic framework,” we are left to make only the most facile of inferences about these organizations. Additionally, Cooper notes that Control Room champions fairness, but with an air of futility. This air of futility is most clearly represented by Sameer Khader’s frequent shrugs and his jaded pronouncements, such as “There is one single thing that will be left: victory, and that’s it. People like victory. You don’t have to justify it. Once you are victorious, that’s it.” Khader’s fatalism does little to encourage its audience to engage in political action.
45 By contrast, Fahrenheit 911, timed strategically to ambush Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, entertains no doubts either about the wrongness of Bush’s actions or about the need for political action, such as voting him out of office, to reverse Bush’s agenda. Released in hundreds of theaters across the U.S., Fahrenheit 911 garnered massive media coverage and had at least some hope of influencing events in the short term. By these criteria, Control Room was a failure.
46 Perhaps the proper way to view Control Room is to perceive it not as an urgent call to promote dialogue and fairness during the immediate crisis of war, aims that may have been hopeless in any case once the war started, but as a course correction over the long term; once this war is over, the film suggests, individuals, organizations, and nations should strive to engage in more dialogue and to be more fair. However, the film also implies that we just need a few more thoughtful individuals, rather than more democratic institutions, to make this change. Though I agree that we need more thoughtful individuals and believe that Noujaim’s film makes an important
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contribution towards this effort, I believe documentary can and should do more to bring about a long-term course correction. Documentary can and should support a global democratic public sphere. It can and should examine institutions, and when necessary, call for their reform. But the means to instituting such a deliberative public sphere might require both dialogue and eristics.
47 In order to magnify the didactic power of his documentaries, a filmmaker such as Michael Moore, who owes much to John Grierson,32 tends to use many of the same tactics as the propagandists he opposes. Though Moore does not share Grierson’s allegiance to the state, he does tell his audience what to think about and how to think about it. As Cooper notes, Moore, in battling the Bush administration’s propaganda, “fights fire with fire.”33 Noujaim, by contrast, focuses primarily on the conflicts faced by her characters rather than on arguments. In letting viewers decide what to think, she sacrifices most of the director’s didactic power. At their extremes, the didactic/ advocacy tradition undermines the democratic values it purports to nurture, while the cinéma vérité tradition is more democratic in terms of its means but may be less effective in the face of propaganda. Of course, it is too easy to posit a false dichotomy here. There are filmmakers who work across both traditions.
48 Noujaim comes closest to such a hybrid style when responding to Donald Rumsfeld, who complains that Al Jazeera plays propaganda: “What they do is is when there’s a bomb goes down, they grab some children and some women and pretend that the bomb hit the women and the children.” Noujaim cuts away from Rumsfeld to show television images of severely injured children, making Rumsfeld appear to lie. Sameer Khader replies, “We wanted to show that any war has a human cost.” Noujaim’s sequence implies a thesis and refutation, but without a formal argument. Instead, Control Room stays mainly in the cinéma vérité tradition: The chief virtue of Noujaim’s version, aside from the up-close-and-personal take on three striking personalities, is its allegorical defense of a tradition of independent documentary ostensibly free of government or corporate coercion. That is, if the elaborated contrast between putatively democratic American network news and state-sponsored reporting at Al Jazeera is shown to be misguided at best, and possibly inverted, Noujaim’s own cinematic method and implied mode of circulation is validated internally not just as an alternative to the two disparate media systems under consideration but as superior to them in freedom of expression, ability to elicit identification with its subjects, and in the liberal values that undergird its creative process. In short, to the extent that CNN or Fox News fall short of achieving the goal of true independence, and to the extent that Al Jazeera struggles mightily to do the same, cinéma vérité as practiced by the likes of Noujaim is proposed as redeeming the promise of an ecumenical, ‘un-controlled’ cinema.34
49 A documentary filmmaker, no matter which style he or she chooses, can encourage the audience to raise productive questions or can work to diminish them. Control Room, perhaps inadvertently, does the latter on occasion. For instance, American media during the Iraq War almost never showed images of Iraqi civilian casualties, of American prisoners of war, or of American dead. Al Jazeera showed all of these things. Control Room might have raised questions about American media policies, how they have changed, what forces were at work in changing them, and what the consequences of such changes have been. By focusing on individual characters rather than on policies, the film steers us away from questions about these institutions.35 Without understanding the forces of history, audiences have little hope of changing them.
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50 A global democratic public sphere requires a theoria, which was a group of trusted witnesses in ancient Greece who provided an official version of events that would become the basis of public deliberation. The collapse of journalistic integrity in America—represented most dramatically by New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s bogus reporting about Iraq’s supposed WMD, which she basically transcribed from Dick Cheney’s misinformation campaign—has made the need for a new theoria, one free of state control but rigorous and uncompromising, all the more pressing.36 As new media entities such as Al Jazeera enter the fray, they become part of the story themselves. Documentary film can contextualize this battle for hegemony of representation, but they cannot escape it. Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 provided some context, but became controversial when pro-war partisans attacked it. Unlike Fahrenheit 911, Control Room remained relatively uncontroversial and did not become a major part of the story it covered. Seen in conjunction with Moore’s film, as well as those by Greenwald, Schecter and others, Control Room appears as part of a movement within documentary that challenges propaganda and points in the direction of a new theoria and a more democratic and more global public sphere.
51 Viewers also have a role to play in creating a more democratic and global public sphere. Armed with an ethical sense, some training in rhetoric and poetics, and additional historical research into the relevant institutions, viewers should be better able to navigate the competing media frames and narratives about both war and the war of representation. A more critical media audience will demand a more critical media.
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Plato. The Euthydemus. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Rampton, Sheldon and John Stauber. Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq. New York: Tarcher Penguin, 2003.
Sarvan, Charles Ponnuthrai,. “Revisiting Foucault: War in Peace and the Question of ‘Power,’” in Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (August 10, 2012), http://www.jdslanka.org/index.php/ 2012-01-30-09-31-17/reflections/166-revisiting-foucault-war-in-peace-and-the-question-of- power.
Schiller, Herbert. “The Corporation and the Production of Culture,” in Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover Of Public Expression. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Schiller, Herbert. The Mind Managers. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975.
Tatham, Steve. Losing Arab Hearts & Minds: The Coalition, Al-Jazeera & Muslim Public Opinion. London: Hurst & Co, 2006.
Zayani, Mohamed. The Al Jazeera Phenomenon: Critical Perspectives On New Arab Media. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005.
NOTES
1. Charles Ponnuthrai Sarvan, “Revisiting Foucault: War in Peace and the Question of ‘Power,’” in Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, August 10, 2012, http://www.jdslanka.org/index.php/ 2012-01-30-09-31-17/reflections/166-revisiting-foucault-war-in-peace-and-the-question-of- power. Accessed May 7, 2013. 2. Jessica Lynch had already been rescued by Iraqis before the raid by U.S. troops. Mark Morford, “The Big Lie of Jessica Lynch,” The San Francisco Chronicle, September 5, 2003. 3. Herbert Schiller, The Mind Managers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975). 4. Herbert Schiller, “The Corporation and the Production of Culture,” in Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover Of Public Expression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 5. See for example Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, “Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical/Reconstructive Approach,” Cultural Politics, Vol 1. No. 1 (2005). 6. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 134-164. 7. Nichols, Representing Reality, 122. 8. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959).
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9. In October 2002, 66% of Americans believed—falsely—that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks. 79% believed—falsely—that Iraq already had or would soon have nuclear weapons. Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq (New York: Tarcher Penguin, 2003, 78-9). In May 2003, 79% of Americans believed the war was justified. Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei “Washington Post May 1, 2003 Gallup poll,” The Washington Post, May 17, 2003. In less than two years, support for the war nearly collapsed, with majorities believing that the war was not worth the cost, that it should not have been fought, that they disapproved of the way the Bush administration handled the war, and that the U.S. went to war on incorrect assumptions. Dana Milbank and Claudia Deane, “Poll Finds Dimmer View of Iraq War, 52% Say U.S. Has Not Become Safer,” The Washington Post, June 8, 2005. 10. Bush officials frequently stated they were preventing Iraq from attacking Americans in another 9/11 type of attack. 11. Among the Bush administration’s media manipulation tactics were the following: creating fake news to be distributed through the media; bribing journalists; criticizing all dissenting reports as politically motivated; placing friendly journalists in front of press conferences while ignoring journalists who ask challenging questions; consolidating media control; making large areas of government policy secret; embedding reporters with troops; and placing Kenneth Tomlinson, a highly partisan operative, in charge of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “ The Battle for the Control of the Press,” The Yurica Report, 2005. Control Room does not engage these issues directly. It is up to viewers to find out on their own. 12. He argued that Iraqis were moving supposed victims to sites of American attacks in order to frame the Americans. 13. Whenever we hear the words of Bush or Rumsfeld in Control Room, the irony and hypocrisy is thick enough to cut with a knife. 14. In 2006, Al Jazeera International hired Rushing as a commentator, after the Pentagon banned him from giving interviews to the press, as he had done during the filming of Control Room. 15. Al Jazeera had an audience of around 40 million at the start of the Iraq war. It no longer seems small; it has since grown to employ thousands and reaches an audience of hundreds of millions. 16. Al Jazeera was no friend of Saddam, either. Control Room includes a clip of Saddam’s information minister complaining that Al Jazeera plays American propaganda. 17. See Robert Fisk, “No Wonder Al-Jazeera Was a Target,” The Independent, October 26, 2005. Fisk has no doubt the attack was meant to silence Al Jazeera. 18. He gets a promotion from lieutenant to captain at some point during the film. 19. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76 (New York: Picador, 2003),15. 20. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 4. 21. At the very least, we need warlike arguments to defend against those used against us by propagandists. 22. Plato’s characterized version of Socrates targets the Sophists as deceivers, though it remains unclear whether his portrayal of the Sophists is accurate; few Sophist texts survive. Nevertheless, the term Sophist has taken on a pejorative meaning today. The expert deceivers of today create what Boorstin refers to as media events, which are events that exist solely to create publicity. The toppling of the Saddam statue appears to be just such an event. These media events are adopted into the media agora often with glee from media outlet themselves, who are always looking for a good story and good pictures. 23. Though Socrates participated in the marketplace, he exposed its supposedly wise men, such as Protagoras, as frauds. In Phaedrus, Socrates participated in a more ideal setting for dialogue: outside the city walls with only one interlocutor.
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24. Ironically, the Greek culture that allowed for the luxury of dialogue was founded on brutal wars of conquest and on slavery. 25. Noujaim’s initial request to Al Jazeera to document their newsroom was declined. 26. Laura Poitras, director of My Country, My Country, a 2006 film about life in Iraq under U.S. occupation that was nominated for an Academy Award, was placed on the Department of Homeland Security’s terror watch list and has been detained and harassed by government agents for years. 27. Paul Arthur, “Control Room,” Cineaste (Fall 2004), 44-6. 28. Rand Richards Cooper, “At War: ‘Fahrenheit 911’ and ‘Control Room,’” Commonweal, Vol. 131, No. 14, August 13 2004, 26-7. 29. Given the relative brevity and limited aims of this article, I prefer to omit this larger context here and to refer the reader to numerous books telling the “big picture” Al Jazeera story. Among them are: Marc Lynch, Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Hugh Miles, Al Jazeera: The Inside Story of the Arab News Channel That Is Challenging the West (New York, Grove Press, 2005). Mohammed el-Nawawy and Adel Iskandar Al-Jazeera: How the Free Arab News Network Scooped the World and Changed the Middle East (Boulder: Westview Press, 2002). Steve Tatham, Losing Arab Hearts & Minds: The Coalition, Al-Jazeera & Muslim Public Opinion (London: Hurst & Co, 2006). Mohamed Zayani, The Al Jazeera Phenomenon: Critical Perspectives On New Arab Media (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005). 30. Paul Arthur, “Control Room,” Cineaste (Fall 2004), 45. 31. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 143. 32. Bill Nichols, in “Documentary Film and the Avant-Garde,” summarizes the didactic tradition: Grierson championed long and hard for a documentary film practice that persuaded more than informed, guided more than observed. The social orator undertook the task of offering moral and political guidance to the confused masses by means of emotionally (rhetorically) compelling argument. Fulfillment lay in carrying out one’s responsibilities to the common goals embodied in the nation-state. Grierson’s discussions of meanings and values, virtues and models, never occurred in a realm of timeless contemplation. They played a crucial role in developing what Foucault would call “strategies of domination” in relation to the alternatives posed by the European avant-garde and the Soviet model. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer, 2001), 600. 33. Rands Richard Cooper, “At War: ‘Fahrenheit 911’ and ‘Control Room,’” Commonweal, Vol. 131, No. 14, August 13, 2004, 27. 34. Paul Arthur, “Control Room,” Cineaste (Fall 2004), 45. 35. For instance, Al Jazeera was started with a loan from the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa. How much influence, if any, did the Emir have on the network’s reporting? 36. I recommend the following article for an analysis of the U.S. media’s collapse: Gary Kamiya, “Iraq: Why the Media Failed,” Salon Magazine, April 10, 2007, http://www.salon.com/opinion/ kamiya/2007/04/10/media_failure/print.html
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ABSTRACTS
This essay assesses Control Room (Jehane Noujaim, 2004) to gauge documentary film’s capacity to restore the public sphere. What factors shape the making of news during times of war? How can viewers learn to navigate the competing media frames and narratives about war? How can dedicated documentarians make more democratic a public sphere that has been badly damaged by corporate media consolidation and government propaganda? Finally, can rhetoric and poetics shed light on the choices made by documentary filmmakers during times of war and the ways in which target audiences are expected to make sense of their films?
INDEX
Keywords: Cinéma Vérité, Iraq War, Al Jazeera, journalism, drama
AUTHOR
BARRY MAUER Barry Jason Mauer teaches in the Texts and Technology Ph.D. Program at the University of Central Florida and is associate professor in the English Department, where he has served since 1999. His published work focuses on developing new research practices in the arts and humanities.
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The War Tapes: Documenting the Iraq War with Digital Cameras
Delphine Letort
1 The spread of digital cameras contributed to shaping the representations of the Iraq war, offering soldiers the means to film themselves in the course of duty and providing Iraqi insurgents with the opportunity to spotlight their acts of resistance. The availability of an Internet network also made it possible for Americans and Iraqis alike to give a first-hand account of their experience of combat (mainly represented by the random explosions of Improvised Explosive Devices) – although the soldiers’ videos gained prominence on Youtube.1 The Vietnam War had also been filmed by soldiers who brought along super 8 mm movie cameras and film cartridges on deployment; however, these military filmmakers needed to have their films processed before they could view the taped images, which limited the scope of their filmmaking to candid reporting. The recovered tapes provided archival footage for the twelve films comprised in the Vietnam Home Movies released in the 1980s, 2 the study of which highlights the contrast with the new technologies that have democratized the process of filmmaking and increased the soldiers’ agency in the making of war images. With their integrated display screens, digital cameras offer immediate access to the recorded footage, turning filmmakers into viewers of the scenes they witness. Using The War Tapes as a case study, I argue that the instantaneity of the process prompts the soldiers to cast a self-conscious look at the events unfolding before their eyes and at their roles in them. The soldiers of the Iraq War assume a critically reflective stance when looking through the viewfinder of their cameras, articulating an analytical discourse that is missing from the Vietnam War tapes.
2 Critics of the Iraq War emphasize the power of digital cameras, embedded in the vehicles of the soldiers and in the prison of Abu Ghraib, to control the narrative and the reception of the war.3 Literary critic W. J. T. Mitchell contends that photographs were exploited to shock and traumatize the enemy, providing “images meant to appal and demoralize, images designed to replicate themselves endlessly and to infect the collective imaginary of global populations.”4 This observation underscores the ideological underpinning of all war images, which urges us to question their use in
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documentaries, for there seems to be an oxymoronic contradiction in the association of the terms “war” and “documentaries”: the “impression of authenticity” which defines the documentary as a genre, based on the notion of fidelity that resides in the mimetic power of the image,5 is undermined by the ideological backdrop that pervades the waging of war. Investigating the war urges an engagement with the facts and the motives behind them, which challenges the documentary’s claim to truth.
3 While the focus on the soldiers’ experience anchors the narrative of The War Tapes on their ground activities, the collaboration with Deborah Scranton may stand in the way of an authentic rendering of the war. Contrary to the statement appearing on the DVD cover and advertising The War Tapes as “the first war movie filmed by soldiers themselves,”6 the documentary does not provide unfiltered access to the soldiers’ experience insofar as the director constructs a narrative arc through their stories. Internet access at the Anaconda base camp permitted regular contact with the filmmaker whereas the military authorities had the final say over whether the tapes could be forwarded or not – scenes of combat in Fallujah were censored.7 Scranton served as editor for The War Tapes, selecting from among 800 hours of raw footage the sequences that were to be included in her ninety-minute film. The images recorded may provide a direct view into ground war operations; however, filmmaker Scranton uses them as primary documents in her own documentary, which explores the impact of the war on the home front. From interviews with relatives who endure the pain of absence to happy reunion scenes taking place on the soldiers’ return from the front, The War Tapes highlights the distance between the soldiers’ military and civilian life. Scranton also inserts television news extracts in counterpoint to the soldiers’ footage, pointing to the discrepancy between the media’s representation of the war and the men’s views of their own actions. Labelled a “war movie” in the advertising slogans, The War Tapes remediates some tropes of the fiction war films, identifying the soldiers as character types with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder by the end of the documentary.
4 The overall film offers an intimate portrait of Steve Pink, Mike Moriarty, and Zach Bazzi – three National Guardsmen who joined the New Hampshire Army Reserve and accepted to collaborate with Scranton, embarking her cameras in their one-year long tour of duty with Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 172nd Infantry Regiment in the Sunni Triangle. The documentary shapes an informative narrative of the war, using editing to fashion a collective war diary, with each soldier conveying his personal views of the actions he participates in. As a proxy director whose role was limited to giving a list of advice concerning filmmaking, Scranton nonetheless makes her presence felt through editing and musical effects that dramatize some events and undermine self- representation. The War Tapes prompts us to interrogate the ethics of war documentaries, most of which have promoted anti-war goals through the compilation of footage in opposition to media representations of the war since Vietnam.
Portraying the Soldiers through Digital Cameras
5 The War Tapes significantly merges two narrative threads, opposing the events filmed live to voice-over comments, which articulate reflective views that could have been inscribed in a diary. Digital cameras extend the practice of writing in a diary insofar as they introduce critical distance with the events recorded, which can be reviewed and explained retrospectively. From moments of action to moments of respite, the tapes
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suggest that the soldiers’ life on the front is divided according to a double time frame: when engaged in military operations, the men are focused on saving their own lives; when returning to their base, they look back at the ordeals they have just gone through and start processing the events into a narrative of their own. Discussing Vietnam Home Movies, war film scholar Guy Westwell argues that the “movies made by these amateur filmmakers provided a way of coping with the experience of the war and, upon returning home, a way of communicating that experience to their friends and families.”8 While The War Tapes serves a similar purpose, allowing the soldiers to fashion their war stories by representing themselves through the use of digital cameras which they tied to their helmets, Humvee dashboards and gun turrets, the introduction of cameras in the frames is a constant reminder of the film’s self-reflexive construction, articulating an awareness of the war as spectacle. While digital cameras give direct access to the soldiers’ daily life, they also permit the filmed subjects to consciously represent themselves, for the display screens allow them to see how they look and even to delete the most unflattering shots.
6 Rather than write diaries and letters as the Civil War soldiers did in the nineteenth century, today’s soldiers send emails, tweet messages, and talk to cameras. Speaking in front of the camera prompts the soldiers to reflect on their war experiences, thereby allowing the camera to substitute itself to the diary many soldiers used in the past to write about their missions. The War Tapes combines the observational stance with the performative mode of documentary filmmaking, as the film cuts from what the soldiers’ cameras candidly recorded when tied to their helmets to their self-conscious address at the camera. The sequences shot by the soldiers themselves adopt the formal structures which film scholar Jim Lane associates with autobiographical documentaries: In the case of autobiographical documentaries, this back-and-forth play between being viewed or framed by the camera and framing that which is viewed is typical. These views of the camera, though heterogeneous as individual shots, are retrospectively ascribed to someone’s authority in the world of the film. […] The views are ascribed to a body. The act of filming becomes an act of scene narration, which is one level of documentary voice. The exchange of the camera becomes an exchange of views, views anchored in an understanding of who people are, both in the documentary narrative and where they are in an actual space.9
7 The original footage provided by the military men typically alternates viewpoints, cutting from what they see to their faces. “I’m watching you watching me” comments Moriarty when exchanging looks with Iraqi children who parody his YMCA dance choreography in a moment of innocent complicity that starkly contrasts with the previous sequence detailing all types of attacks that the military undergo on the ground – including Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs) and Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIED) [15:15]. The film cuts from a long shot of the children standing opposite Moriarty to a high-angle close shot of his face; the distance between the American and the Iraqis is marked visually by the lack of proximity, which the camera enhances when placed behind Moriarty and capturing the figures communicating through body language imitation. Moriarty’s self-conscious comments about the unfolding scene pinpoint the sense of otherness that nurtures distrust and suspicion. Framing suggests that the two parties would rather keep at a safe distance from each other while being intrigued by each other.
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8 Cameras are used as self-reflexive tools which the soldiers exploit to voice their views on the war, posing as soldiers preparing to go to war in the opening sequence – which echoes the characterizing process employed in the credit sequence of Nick Broomsfield’s Battle for Haditha (2007). In The War Tapes, Steve Pink, Mike Moriarty, and Zach Bazzi introduce themselves by adopting a self-conscious pose: they look straight at the camera as though addressing the viewers, ostentatiously playing the roles of soldiers. Cross editing allows a diversity of portraits to emerge among the military unit, which undermines the notion of uniformity and conformity among the Army. Pink confesses he made “a rash decision” when enlisting whereas Moriarty recalls that he called a recruiter after visiting Ground Zero in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Bazzi voices a critical view, pointing to the patriotic myth that many soldiers seem to endorse when accounting for their enrolment, which is illustrated by Moriarty himself and the embedded footage of his filming the smoking ashes of the World Trade Centre. Bazzi’s cultural background as a youth who grew up in Lebanon in the Middle East before immigrating to the United States makes him more critical of the army’s procedures. His speaking fluent Arabic allows him to connect with the local population and to overcome a language and culture barrier that leads to tragic misunderstandings as he explains in the film, evoking the example of hand signs used by American soldiers to demand Iraqi drivers stop their cars when coming close to a roadblock. This gesture is interpreted as a greeting by Iraqis, who run the risk of getting shot by panicking soldiers when failing to comply with their orders. Bazzi does not systematically view the local civilians as potential threats in opposition to Moriarty: the first talks to children whereas the latter views them as a possible source danger, expressing the paranoiac state of mind which is born out of guerrilla fighting.10
9 Cameras seem to nurture this distrust among the military themselves as they view them as another possible threat. When Pink pans the military bunk beds in the barracks of his military base in New Hampshire, he provokes hostile reactions on the parts of other infantrymen who voice their annoyance at the intruding camera gaze. “We’re not supposed to talk to the media,” one of them observes, eschewing Pink’s inquisitive glance. “I’m not the media” he retorts [04:00], which suggests the ambiguity of the role taken by the infantrymen as cameramen whose lack of professionalism may reduce the Iraq war tapes project to a home movie. Pink, however, comments on his previous experience with filmmaking during and after his college years, which aroused his awareness of journalistic practices: “I could tell there isn’t any way you can truthfully tell a story without putting a slant on it.” [5:00] Equipped with digital cameras, which they conspicuously display in front of other military men, the soldiers of The War Tapes are aware that they are participating in a project that extends beyond the family realm. This awareness politicizes their comments in opposition to the statements presented in the Vietnam Home Movies, which framed the war through the visual idiom of home movies according to Guy Westwell.11 The author argues that the Vietnam tapes were filmed for domestic consumption, which led the actors to deflect attention away from the war itself to reassuring activities on the military base. The mobility of digital cameras undermines the home movie approach in The War Tapes; their omniscient presence is made visible through shaky movements that testify to the dangers surrounding the soldiers on an everyday basis both inside and outside the military camp. Pink points out the exact spot for the camera in the Humvee turret (“It’s the mark for the camera right here” [13:50]) and later films another soldier holding a camera in his hand [15:34]. The war being fought is also being filmed.
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Narrating the War through the Soldiers’ Voice
10 The War Tapes alternates between different narrative levels, which allow the filmmaker to convey different points of view and to fashion a narrative that unveils her commitment to an anti-war message. While many critics deem that Scranton remains neutral as regards the war message endorsed by the film, a close analysis of editing points to the opposite. The filmmaker enhances the soldiers’ political comments, which betray a measure of cynicism on their parts as they realise the discrepancy between their expectations prior to deployment and the nature of their everyday missions on Iraq. Television screens are recurrent features in the soldiers’ footage, creating a mise- en-abyme in the documentary insofar as the digital cameras capture diverging attitudes around the television set. On the eve of departure for Iraq, the soldiers watch NBC news presenter declare: “It was a historical moment for Iraq today. A temporary constitution was signed, a first step for the elections in summer and a major accomplishment for the US of what is expected to be a long and difficult path.” The camera pans around the room, spotlighting the men’s different responses in the face of the announcement: some watch television with an air of satisfaction whereas others play chess in a state of indifference. Snippets from a private conversation can be overheard: “Daddy’s got to go to work. Why? Just because.” [09:30] The war’s objectives are hardly translatable in terms of family life, which the blanks in the phone conversation reveal. The scene enhances the deception of the media’s discourse and the ideological framing of the war, which cannot be remediated in an intimate discussion.
11 As a narrator, Scranton emphasizes the absurdity of the war through the editing process, which lingers on moments of inaction when the soldiers are left on their own dealing with their fears for what might happen. The film cuts from a home sequence showing how Moriarty’s wife and children cope with the absence of the man from his home to his performing his duty on the front: the filmmaker sheds light on the man’s fatherly role by connecting the two sequences through a focus on the children. Moriarty interrogates the goals of his daily missions, observing the surreal aspect of waging ground war in a civilian quarter as children walk away from school: Here we are in a fighting position with machine guns and Mark 19s. But this is actually someone’s backyard right below us. There is this little boy that plays there. He’s kind of wandering, talking to himself and torturing his little chicken just over there. This little kid is in a world of his own, surrounded by all this stuff. Funny little kids in the middle of a war zone. I just hope they don’t turn bad as they get older as many of them do.
12 His camera emphasizes the distance between the warrior’s attitude and the quiet, innocent landscape he is scrutinizing: the long-shot framing expresses his inquisitive, suspicious look at the local population whom the soldiers view as possible threats.
13 Editing further heightens the sense of threat in the face of imminent danger that cannot be controlled. Scranton fast-forwards the film to convey the tense, repetitive routine of Humvee patrolling the roads under the stress of random attacks [25:00]. The one-minute sequence aptly connotes the soldiers’ vulnerability to external assaults and the sense of alienation that isolates them from their immediate surrounding. The editor tampers with the original footage to build up the risks that the characters face: music adds tension to the soundtrack—a mix of original sounds of a horn beeping and men crying out at the bad traffic. Moriarty’s voice-over recalls the nerve-wracking
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drive, which the film conveys by changing the film speed, thereby introducing a subjective dimension that illustrates the soldier’s stress and self-imposed discipline: “You almost had to have a false sense of security in this business.” The film slows down when the traffic blocks the Humvee, connoting unpredictable looming danger associated with a delayed flight. After his unit takes fire when overtaking a line of trucks on the road, Moriarty can be heard: “If you didn’t have any faith you’d probably have a very hard time living that way everyday” [26:52]. The Humvee races down the road, suggesting the soldier’s desire to reach his destination alive. The fast-forwarded sequence translates the emotional intensity of the drive, evoking the highly subjective experience of the soldiers’ daily ground missions. Film form stresses mood and tone, which makes performative documentaries all the more compelling according to film critic Bill Nichols: They want us to feel on a visceral level more than understand on a conceptual level. Performative documentaries intensify the rhetorical desire to be compelling and tie it less to a persuasive goal than an affective one – to have us feel or experience the world in a particular way as vividly as possible.12
14 Scranton explains the stress of the Iraq war through the frightful drive that is part of a never-ending routine in the film. The documentary’s focus on driving through IED target zones generates a sense of repetition, which The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) turns into a loose structure, suggesting the aimlessness of the American military occupation in Iraq.13 Editing creates a similar effect in The War Tapes, simultaneously allowing the soldiers to emerge as positive characters whose individual courage stands out. The juxtaposition of sequences filmed in New Hampshire and in Iraq pinpoints the divide between civilian and military life, underscoring the extraordinary situations faced by the ordinary men.
15 Although Scranton provided space for the soldiers to gain a voice in the war, she also portrays them through the conventions of war films. Guy Westwell defines the ‘noble grunt’ film as a subgenre that acknowledges the “war is hell” paradigm while showing the “work is shouldered in good faith and with positive results.”14 In The War Tapes, the tight focus on the individual fighting men draws attention to the emotional path each of them follows: Moriarty’s commitment to Iraq stems from his desire to shake off a state of depression, which he refers to in his emails; Bazzi’s mother believes her son looks for a masculine identity figure by running away from her into the Army; Pink confesses that he was striving for meaning after college. The film highlights the transformation that the war produces on each of them: the confrontation to death has a redeeming power and accounts for the ambiguity of the film’s political message. The ideological background to the war becomes secondary to the individual situation embodied by each man.
16 The myth of the war as noble and necessary is nonetheless put to the test through the soldiers’ frustrated and powerless gaze at the spoils of the military industrial complex15 – represented by the cemetery of broken vehicles which Moriarty visits with his camera [56:00]. The lines of decaying vehicles echo the long lines of trucks blocking the roads of Iraq, providing a symbol for war profiteering. This provokes heavy criticism from the witness soldiers who have no illusion as to the economic interests they are serving, especially when the Army is charged $56 for the use of two trays at the lunch counter. Moriarty explains that “our primary mission is convoy security. We go out everyday to the KBR/Halliburton truck yard, we escort their convoy to wherever ... and we take one back,” whereas Pink contends that “the KBR trucks are more of a target than we are.”
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Both agree to the futility of their task insofar as the soldiers risk their lives to protect the assets of giant corporations, which take advantage of the privatization of the services within the Army to increase their profits. Sergeant Duncan Domey, who provided original footage but whose portrait is not developed in the film, further argues: “We’re moving cheese. Cheese, food, soda, paper, supplies and fuel too.” The word “cheese” epitomizes the system of war profiteering in the soldiers’ mouth, connoting their frustration at the money-making venture which the war in Iraq represents for some corporations whose assets the soldiers are expected to defend and to risk their lives for. Squad leader Kevin Shangraw depicts the extent of war privatization by filming all the shops run by KBR/Halliburton at the Anaconda base: “Take every store in your town, every gas station, police department, fire department, and let it all be run by one company. I mean, that's basically what they do. They have their hand in anything you can think of. KBR runs all our chow halls” [24:00].
17 Communication scholar Jane Chapman underscores that performative documentaries prompt the filmed participants to actively fashion the narrative of their own stories, for they self-reflexively use the power of the camera to articulate personal and political dilemmas: “The participants seem to be generating their own cinematic text, rather than being guided. This gives the impression that they are integral to the text and to the production device, rather than merely being recorded by it.”16 In The War Tapes, the military cameramen stage themselves while depicting their life on the front. Pink speaks to the camera to explain that part of his work consists in providing security for septic waste trucks, which Bazzi interprets humorously by addressing the camera as if he were a reporter presenting a scene for the media. The mise-en-scene orchestrated by Bazzi himself emphasizes the irony of the situation, for he behaves as a witness to an event that he wishes to draw attention to: standing in the foreground, he comments on the waste truck dumping dirty water in the ditches behind him. “We are bringing democracy and vegetation to Iraq. You can even see a small rainbow!” he observes in a self-derisive manner, mocking his own role as a soldier whose work should be to fight for something greater. The film then cuts to a television extract of President Bush declaring on April 28, 2004: “This is a day of great hope for Iraq. The Iraqi people have left behind one of the worst regimes on the Middle East and their country is becoming the world’s newest democracy.” Editing highlights the distance between the commander in chief and the grunts, whose experience of democracy in Iraq is restricted by the implication of private enterprises and the guerrilla war tactics represented by Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), Vehicle Born Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIEDs), and Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs). The use of digital cameras politicizes the documentary by making the soldiers look at the war through the viewfinder of their cameras. Not only does the frame reduce their vision to their individual fights, highlighting the distance between the political discourses heard on television and their ground experience, but it also conveys the men’s intimate experience with death through repeated mortar attacks. Digital cameras build a fragmentary view of the war, which pinpoints the isolation of the men on the ground.17
Documenting the Trauma of War
18 In her seminal study of Issues in Contemporary Documentary, Jane Chapman devotes several pages to The War Tapes and emphasizes that the digital technology used by the
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filmmaker permitted her to gain direct access to “‘hotwash’, a military term for an immediate reaction after an event, a reaction missing from official military report that results in a softened and professionalized overview of occurrences in the field.”18 Rather than highlight the immediate responses to the events witnessed, I argue that the film enhances their “belated impact” which trauma theorist Cathy Caruth links to the definition of post-traumatic stress disorder: The experience of trauma, the fact of latency, would thus seem to consist, not in the forgetting of a reality that can hence be fully known, but in an inherent latency within the experience itself. The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all.19
19 The War Tapes underlines the soldiers’ belated response to the horror scenes they attend. Through the use of retrospective comments expressed in voice-over, the film underscores the time gap between what is seen and what is verbalized afterwards. After an IED attack takes place outside the military base, Moriarty goes back to the dark barracks and ponders: About an hour of being back here you start thinking about what you’ve just been through, there’s a guy saying prayers at the table and we all got choked up, it comes down like a ton of bricks, how close you came to never see your family again, never see my kids again…
20 His camera captures the figures of the men sitting in silence and looking at photographs of dear ones in the dark. Moriarty’s face appears in a close-up on screen; however, the night-vision image gives him a ghostly appearance, which is reinforced by the use of a voice-over: his voice can be heard although his lips do not move, thus turning belatedness into a visual effect. Editing conveys the distance between Moriarty’s reflections as he looks back at the events of the day and the events he tries not to remember by focusing on the photographs of his children.
21 The War Tapes repeatedly uses the soldiers’ voice-over commentaries, most of which were recorded after the soldiers’ return to New Hampshire,20 thereby pinpointing the distance between the events taking place and the soldiers’ memory of them. Belatedness is further signified by Pink’s voice-over reading of his war diary: Scranton interweaves close-ups on the handwritten pages and camera footage of the events they refer to, thereby establishing a link between the filmed events and their subsequent narrativization. The film proceeds to a form of suture by using the retrospective narrative as a commentary that tries to introduce order in the confusion of the filmed events. The visuals signify the haunting power of war images, illustrating the words that convey the shock of the traumatized subject. Scranton’s editing is conspicuous as she uses a dissolve from Steve Pink’s written diary to the footage his words refer to. The voice-over utters the sentences as the camera pans them in close-ups, suggesting that the film uses re-enactment on the part of the soldiers. Rather than convey the distance with the narrated events, the lingering voice-over enhances the power of the haunting images in the present.
22 Following the opening sequence, Pink’s voice-over starts reading the words of his journal, which superimpose on his facial features: “I want to kill. I may have already killed one or some of these bastards with the Mark 19 Grenade.” The voice-over gives us access to interiority; however, it is also used as a self-reflexive tool to comment on the events witnessed and the recorded images. The camera allows the soldier to recount and to verbalize what he saw, including the horrors that shocked him:
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Today was the first day I shook a man’s hand that wasn’t attached to his arm. I was the first one there and immediately clamped Reggie’s brachial artery. I looked down and he had his hand dangling from the exposed bone that used to be his elbow, like a child’s safety clipped mitten dangling from their winter coat. If I play the odds one of us will die before the tour is over. It’s something that I don’t like to think about.
23 Trauma consists in the revival of an event, its re-enactment, which the film underlines by showing footage that echo such words. Editing relates the sequence filmed on the spot by a hand-held camera investigating the remains of a bombed car with Steve Pink’s journal, suggesting that the scene witnessed cannot easily be forgotten. The footage testifies to the soldier’s physical presence on the scene as his shadow is cast on the ground that his camera focuses on, especially on the blood puddles spreading around. The unstable camera zooms on the burnt corpse of a man dangling out of a bombed car, while the voice of the soldiers depicts the facts: “This is the scene north. They just removed a body or half a body. I think there was nothing left from the abdomen down.” The scene is given a context by the voice-over, reading from Pink’s journal once again, suggesting the time lapse between the events seen and their enduring power on the mind: I remember giving three IV’s, bandaging several wounded. Soldiers sitting in the corner of a sandbag wall shaking, screaming. Medics who were terrified and couldn’t perform. I later heard that Iraqi casualties were not to be treated in Taji. They can work on the post for pennies but can’t die there. They’ve got to die outside. If one of those incompetent medical officers told me to stop treatment I would have slit his throat right there.
24 Cathy Caruth draws on Freud’s analysis of shellshock when suggesting that traumatic experience “is an experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs.”21 The film emphasizes the fact that the voice-over commentary is disconnected from the visual narrative, positing the impossible narrativization of the events as they happen and are witnessed by the soldiers.
25 Quite interestingly, the film opens with a sequence that crops up again in the narrative [39:00], using the same quotes from Pink’s journal in the commentary: “Every once in awhile as we’re driving down the road or creeping along a patrol, I have a reoccurring epiphany – this is happening and will have a lasting impact on me for the rest of my life.” The repetition of the same images and the same sentence allows the film to convey the sense of trauma which, according to sociologist Kai Erikson, is marked by haunting images which prompt the traumatized individual to relive the past: A chronicler of passing events may report that the episode itself lasted no more than an instant – a gunshot, say – but the traumatized mind holds on to that moment, preventing it from slipping back into its proper chronological place in the past, and relives it over and over again in the compulsive musings of the day and the seething dreams of night.22
26 Scranton uses editing to explain the impact of traumatic war events: the opening sequence is replicated again in the middle of the film, suggesting the enduring power of an event that has not been assimilated. The footage used to articulate trauma refers to the moment when Pink’s platoon enters Fallujah: the sequence opens with a long shot of the city from which clouds of smoke rise up. A sense of confusion quickly seeps in as we view the scene through a camera tied to one of the soldiers’ helmet: the men are suddenly under fire and start running away for protection; the recorded footage restricts our view to shaky images that betray the panic that strikes the men who can
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neither identify the shooters nor locate the exact place of their hiding aggressors. The sound of pounding gunshots conveys the sense of vulnerability and terror among the assailed men. The pace of action does not seem to allow them to understand or to grasp the whole scene. The setting looks deserted; three men throw a grenade in what looks like an abandoned house, when a voice cries out of the blue: “Sergeant Smith’s down!”
27 While The War Tapes provides a raw record of dangerous actions, during which the soldiers are more preoccupied with saving their own lives than posing in front of the camera, it also offers intimate moments with the soldiers as they discuss their fears or meet up with their families. The end of the film focuses on their return to civilian life through interviews with their loved ones, who testify about the destructive impact of trauma. Pink’s girlfriend mentions his nightmares whereas Moriarty’s wife recalls his extreme reaction when he unexpectedly pulled the steering wheel fearing she had not spotted a pedestrian who was about to cross the street. The event resonates with the embedded sequence of an Iraqi woman being run over by his Humvee, which keeps haunting him long after his return to New Hampshire. The film gives insight into the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which Caruth identifies as follows: While the precise definition of post-traumatic stress disorder is contested, most descriptions generally agree that there is a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event.23
28 The War Tapes conveys the subjective experience of the war by blurring the boundaries between two documentary modes: the soldiers participate in the process of filmmaking, inviting the viewer and the editor to observe the war through their eyes. The whole process produces intimacy and draws sympathy for the men as Scranton’s editing crafts a narrative of the war that emphasizes the emotional impact of fighting on the individual soldiers and undermines the political comments of her characters.
29 Although The War Tapes formulates a critique of the Iraq war, pointing to the unethical conduct among profiteering companies, it eschews an overtly anti-war message by siding with the soldiers whose characterization sheds light on qualities of bravery and selflessness that transcend the gross abuses of war profiteers. Guy Westwell argues that “contemporary war cinema’s resolute focus on traumatized young men [which] also enables a redemptive narrative of therapeutic healing to be brought to bear.”24 The soldiers are portrayed as unordinary characters, whose commitment to patriotic values has a redeeming power. Identified with the bodies of the military, the cameras enhance the perception they have of themselves as possible targets, drawing sympathy for their plight. The film’s documentary value resides in the power of digital cameras to overcome the distance of an external eye; the horror the soldiers witness is integrated into their everyday life on the front and at home. The voice-over endeavours to reconcile the narrative gap between the present and the past, and the images and the soundtrack – a void that signifies the lingering sense of trauma.
30 The soldiers’ critical voices nonetheless lose power and meaning as they are interwoven in a narrative fashioned by the filmmaker, who is eager to enhance the emotional impact of the war and its haunting effect. As the soldiers retrospectively comment on their Iraqi experience, Scranton uses editing to highlight the physical and mental traces of the conflict on the men whose return to civilian life is forever compromised. The documentary does not romanticize the soldiers’ war memories like
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Vietnam Home Movies, focusing instead on the signs of post-traumatic stress disorder that convey their difficult readjustment to civilian society. The War Tapes thus endorses the prevailing discourse on “The War on Terror,” making the soldiers appear either as victims (Pink, Moriarty) or heroes (Bazzi). Cultural studies scholar Martin Barker argues that the reference to post-traumatic stress disorder draws attention away from acts of war and places the emphasis on the soldiers instead. According to him, this shift in focus is the incipient message of a “toxic genre”: With the smell of science and the promise of remedies, PTSD has come to function as a key metaphor for America inspecting itself within safe margins. What does it achieve? It offers soldiers a self-justifying account of their situation. It ‘explains’ abuses as unintentional outbursts. It generates positive-smelling narratives. It helps making suffering ‘American.’ 25
31 Try as she might to recover the soldiers’ authentic experience by giving authorial power to the men who discuss their actions while filming, Scranton remediates their footage in a narrative that espouses the dominant view of the war. The soldiers were given some measure of agency through the cameras they were entrusted with; however, their voices are subdued by the filmmaker’s editing, interfering with the war narrative they may have produced if they lacked Scranton’s guidance. Through remediation, Scranton appropriates their stock footage in a story that contributes to constructing the collective memory of the Iraq war, shedding light on notions of American sacrifice and suffering. The pain they feel long afterwards redeems the soldiers’ participation in tragic events – such as the killing of a civilian woman whose body was run over by a speeding Humvee on an Iraqi road in the dark of night. Complicit with the ideological lens as identified by Barker, is the personal lens through which the war stories are told throughout the documentary. The videos capture the sense of guilt that lingers long after returning to the homeland, thereby allowing the viewer to share in the soldiers’ suffering.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bacevich, Andrew J. The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Barker, Martin. A ‘Toxic Genre’: The Iraq War Films. London: Pluto Press, 2011.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience, Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Chapman, Jane. Issues in Contemporary Documentary. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2009.
Clover, Joshua. “Allegory Bomb.” Film Quarterly, 63 (2), 9.
Kai Erikson. “Notes on Trauma and Community.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 183-199. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Lane, Jim. The Autobiographical Documentary in America. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.
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Mitchell, W. J. T. Cloning Terror, The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001, 2010.
Strangelove, Michael. Watching Youtube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto, 2010.
Westwell, Guy. “The Domestic Vistion of Vietnam Home Movies.” In The Image and the Witness, Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, edited by Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas, 143-155. London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2008.
Webography http://thewartapes.com/the_film/TWT_PressNotes_10_27_final.pdf
NOTES
1. Michael Strangelove observes that Youtube permitted the viral spread of such videos: “While videos made by insurgents remain ‘underground’ on Youtube, it is easy to locate images of insurgents being killed in Iraq by occupying forces. Also, videos of IED attacks on occupying forces within Iraq are widespread and attract millions of viewers. In May 2007 there were approximately 2,300 videos tagged with the letters ‘IED’. By November 2009 this number had swelled to 9,620.” Michael Strangelove, Watching Youtube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto, 2010), 152. 2. “Stored in box rooms, garages and attics, these amateur films formed a haphazard archive that remained untapped until the mid-1980s when a commercial video production company, Vietnam Archives Inc., collected and distributed them under the title Vietnam Home Movies.” Guy Westwell, “The Domestic Vision of Vietnam Home Movies” in The Image and the Witness, Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, eds. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas, (London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2008), 143. 3. Mitchell points to the photo of Corporal Edward Chin hooding the head of Saddam’s statue with an American flag on April 10, 2003, as a case of visual miscommunication: “The flag-hooded Saddam became, like the images of his capture and execution, a symbol of outrage and shame to the Arab masses. Like many other images of American triumphalism during the invasion of Iraq, it helped to mobilize Iraqi nationalism and to recruit jihadists from other Arab countries […]. W. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror, The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 90-91. 4. W. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror, 2. 5. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (2001; Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010), xiii. 6. See the press notes: http://thewartapes.com/the_film/TWT_PressNotes_10_27_final.pdf
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10. Moriarty observes Bazzi sympathize with local Iraqi youths and ironically comments: “You see Sergeant Bazzi communicate with local people. I think he might be a spy. I don’t quite trust him. He’s playing against us. You see! The deal is sealed! A handshake! A fraternity! What a traitor!” Bazzi’s ability to speak with the local population makes his otherness stand out among the military. 11. “The institutional space of the Army – regimented, strictly hierarchical and bureaucratically impersonal – is de-emphasized in favour of an imaginary space modelled on the family. The Army as structure is replaced with the all-male unit located around the interior of the helicopter and the tents in which the men live and where they spend most of their non-combat time. This ensures a tight, nuclear-family-sized focalisation for the home movies and acts as a surrogate for a more conventionally conceived home.” Westwell, “The Domestic Vision of Vietnam Home Movies ”, 146. 12. Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 203. 13. Joshua Clover, “Allegory Bomb” in Film Quarterly, 63 (2), 9. 14. Westwell, “The Domestic Vision of Vietnam Home Movies”, 26. 15. Andrew J. Bacevich argues that “Americans in our own time have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. To a degree without precedent in US history, Americans have come to define the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals.” Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. 16. Chapman, Issues in Contemporary Documentary, 106. 17. In Standard Operating Procedure (2008), Errol Morris strives to recover the stories behind the digital photographs that spurred the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004. The filmmaker highlights the incomplete narrative the snapshots encapsulate by relating to the soldiers’ retrospective accounts. Using a rigid mise-en-scene technique known as the interrotron, he however fails to overturn the implicated soldiers’ image as “monsters”. Scranton empowers the soldiers whom she allows to perform themselves whereas Morris enhances his interviewees’ complacent attitude in a setting that seems to replicate the oppressive conditions of the prison. See XXX. 18. Chapman, Issues in Contemporary Documentary, 82. 19. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 17. 20. In the interviews added in the bonus section of the DVD, Pink explains that he read from his diary for the film after his return to New Hampshire. 21. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 5. The writer further explains: “In its general definition, trauma is described as the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena. Traumatic experience, beyond the psychological dimension of suffering it involves, suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness. The repetitions of the traumatic event – which remain unavailable to consciousness but intrude repeatedly on sight – thus suggest a larger relation to the event that extends beyond what can simply be seen or what can be known, and is inextricably tied up with the belatedness and incomprehensibility that remain at the heart of this repetitive seeing.” Idem, 91-92 22. Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth ed., Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 185. 23. Cathy Caruth, “Introduction” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 4. Kai Erikson further explains: “Traumatized people often scan the surrounding world anxiously for signs of danger, breaking into explosive rages and reacting with a start to ordinary sights and sounds, but at the
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same time, all that nervous activity takes place against a numbed gray background of depression, feelings of helplessness, and a general closing off of the spirit, as the mind tries to insulate itself from further harm. Above all, trauma involves a continual reliving of some wounding experience in daydreams and nightmares, flashbacks and hallucinations, and in a compulsive seeking out of similar circumstances.” Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community”, Idem, 184. 24. Westwell, “The Domestic Vision of Vietnam Home Movies”, 31. 25. Martin Barker, A ‘Toxic Genre’: The Iraq War Films (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 98-99.
ABSTRACTS
Not only do digital cameras allow ground soldiers to film the war as they live it, but they also give them access to self-representation. Interestingly, digital cameras have often replaced the war diary, permitting the soldiers to look back at the events of the day and to retrospectively discuss what they went through. Film director Deborah Scranton used the footage provided by a few soldiers whom she distributed digital cameras to fashion an original narrative of the Iraq war in The War Tapes (2006). Her film interweaves various types of footage, combining the soldiers’ authorial voice with her own. As editor and narrator, Scranton enhances the distance between life on the front and back in civilian society. Through a close examination of the produced film, this article aims to assess the impact of digital cameras on the representation of war in documentary filmmaking.
INDEX
Keywords: Iraq war, documentary, digital media, soldiers, Vietnam War
AUTHOR
DELPHINE LETORT Delphine Letort is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Le Mans (France) where she teaches American civilisation and film studies. Her research explores the relationship between history, memory, and film in American fiction and nonfiction cinema— including war documentaries and African American television films. She studies the ideological construction of stereotypes and the politics of representation developed in Hollywood productions.
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Documenting Virtual War
Calvin Fagan
New technologies of imitation and simulation as well as surveillance and speed had collapsed the geographical distance, chronological duration, the gap itself between the reality and virtuality of war. As the confusion of one for the other grows, we face the danger of a new kind of trauma without sight, drama without tragedy, where television wars and video war games blur together.1
1 This paper will consider the challenge posed to cinematic notions of documentary realism by the emergence of digital imaging technology. Clearly, this has been a key topic within film studies for many years now, with debates largely centred on the indexical capacities of analogue film versus the manipulability of the digital image. Yet, rather than rehashing the issues of digital media’s permeation of the cinematic apparatus, I intend to approach the question from a somewhat different angle. By examining instead the mediation of warfare through digital interfaces (i.e. digital imaging with the military apparatus), I will explore the extent to which this can be considered a virtualisation of war, and subsequently consider the consequences that this may have for documentary notions of witnessing or the evidential recording of historical events.
2 It is important to note that military and cinematic imaging technologies are not mutually exclusive, as Paul Virilio (among others) has forcefully emphasised for almost thirty years now. Yet more recent works by Tim Lenoir, James Der Darian and Roger Stahl have demonstrated how military modes of imaging war are increasingly dependent upon collaborations with the gaming industry. Lenoir was among the first to highlight this trend, coining the term ‘military-entertainment-complex’ to denote the convergence of military simulators and video game graphics, from the collaboration between Sega and GE Aerospace through to the implementation of the Institute for Creative Technologies, specifically charged with developing hybrid modes of simulating war that are deployable in both military applications and gaming environments.2
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3 Such projects are explored further in James Der Darian’s Virtuous War, which charts how military modes of imaging war have evolved from the ‘cinema[tic] techniques’3 described by Virilio into a digital composite of ‘computer simulation, media dissimulation, global surveillance and networked warfare.’4 Focussing primarily upon simulated warfare environments such as the ‘Synthetic Theatre of War (STOW), a prototype of immersive virtual environments that could use overhead reconnaissance, satellite communications, and massive parallel computing to integrate virtual, live, and constructive simulations of war in real time,’5 Der Darian notes how the deployment of such technologies for both preparative training and live, networked execution of warfare is beginning to erode the ‘gap itself between the reality and virtuality of war.’6 Thus, as simulative war comes to resemble gaming to an ever-greater degree, Der Darian’s work poses urgent questions regarding the collapse of distinctions between preparation/execution and the virtual/real of warfare.
4 This convergence of military imaging technologies with the virtual, CG environments of simulators and commercial video games has created what Roger Stahl terms an ‘interactive war,’ with media representations of war no longer inviting passive consumption but rather exhorting the viewer to interactivity as a ‘virtual citizen- soldier,’ embedded within a discursive regime dominated by gaming as the ‘primary interface governing the civic experience of war.’7 As television news coverage begins to incorporate ‘first person relationships with weapons’8 and games such as Kuma War ‘attempt to re-create the television war in playable real-time,’9 Stahl observes a fundamental ‘shift in the locus of authorisation, a shift from propaganda per se to the integration of war into existent practices of consumption.’10 This mode of immersive interactivity is fundamentally dependent upon the technological convergence highlighted by Lenoir and Der Darian. If, as Stahl notes, the weaponry interface of the AC130 Spectre gunship is technologically and perceptually indistinguishable in Pentagon-released war footage (replayed across news media outlets and archived on YouTube) and within the gameplay of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series,11 then it is precisely this ontological levelling-effect of digital convergence (particularly the specific technological collaboration between the military and gaming industry) that enables the interactive mode to connect with, or ‘recreate,’ the virtualised space of war as it is depicted in ostensibly non-fictional media sources.
5 Clearly, this has a somewhat disruptive effect upon the long-established complicity between the military and the film industry. Film once had a privileged position in the documenting of war, both in terms of photochemical indexicality and an invaluable, exclusive access to the battlefield and actual equipment of war; a relationship that was developed particularly through the newsreel and propaganda campaigns of WWI and WWII. Yet this claim to non-fictional authenticity has become rather precarious. If, as Brian Winston has argued, documentary authenticity is now read ‘intertextually,’12 rather than being an indexically determined ‘formal quality of the text itself,’13 documentary film is placed in a somewhat problematic position since the non-fictional images of contemporary warfare played out on television and Youtube now arguably bear a greater aesthetic resemblance to gaming than newsreel/documentary. As such, viewers may now be inclined to associate the playable drone interface of video games such as Modern Warfare, or the realistic apparatus of the military-sponsored America’s Army with military authenticity, to a greater degree than the aesthetic of documentary film.
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6 Thus the very process of digitalising the military apparatus poses a fundamentally new challenge to documentary filmmakers. In particular, the historical reliance upon the evidentiality of the profilmic field, which privileges embodied, localised human interaction, becomes distinctly problematic in this context. The advent of remotely operated drone strikes and potential developments of AI and robotics clearly indicate that embodied presence is gradually ceding precedence to screen-based mediation, collapsing geographical distance and virtualising the very space of war.
7 Very few contemporary war documentaries have genuinely evolved to incorporate such changes in the waging of warfare, with the majority of Iraq/Afghanistan documentaries still maintaining a classical vérité approach to documenting the grunt’s- eye view of war. This paper will critically examine the continued tenability of such modes, considering whether this form of witnessing can function as a critique of virtual warfare – in terms of demonstrating the unchanging human cost – or rather, whether it may instead lend credence and justification to what Der Darian terms the collapse of the ‘reality and virtuality of war.’14 Subsequently, I will explore to what extent the effects of digital convergence can be read in the proliferation of hybrid documentary/ fiction forms, such as Brian de Palma’s emulation of diverse amateur/institutional digital aesthetics in Redacted (2007). Finally, I will present readings of two films that attempt to engage directly with the virtuality of contemporary warfare by documenting military simulations. Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss’ Full Battle Rattle (2008) and Harun Farocki’s Serious Games (2009-10) will be discussed both in terms of the unique contributions they make to evidencing such rarely seen technological processes of simulating war, and in terms of the adaptations of documentary form required to engage with the virtuality of digital modes of imaging warfare.
The Embattled Realist Mode
8 Many of the documentaries made in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq tended to employ a mixture of expert-opinion interviews, media dissimulation, and political rhetoric to critique (or support, albeit in fewer cases) the grounds for war – Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, 2004) being perhaps the most prominent example. Yet the dominant mode of response to the war by documentary filmmakers, emerging particularly since 2005 and continuing throughout the war in Afghanistan, has been to employ the techniques of cinema vérité to closely follow the day-to-day experiences of a handful of military personnel throughout the course of a single deployment. Films such as The War Tapes (Deborah Scranton, 2006) and Gunner Palace (Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, 2004) have earned the sobriquet ‘Grunt Docs’15 for their strict limitation of perspective to the immediate experiences of relatively low-ranking ground troops, typically eliding any wider perspective or argument regarding the strategy or indeed validity of the war. This sub-genre has a historical lineage that Patricia Aufderheide dates back to John Huston’s Battle of San Pietro (1945) and Martin Barker identifies as having developed during Vietnam to denote ‘ordinary soldiers… who do not have ideas or commitments beyond their situation.’16 While its proliferation during the Iraq War is likely technologically-motivated, with the plethora of amateur video diaries by soldiers and embedded reporters even allowing documentary filmmakers to direct by proxy or simply edit together pre-existent material, the
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viability of this type of filmmaking as an evidential mode of documenting war is contestable.
9 A useful introduction to some of the critical issues surrounding this mode of filmmaking is provided by the ‘War, Documentary and Iraq’ dossier in a 2007 issue of Framework, in which articles by Charles Musser, Jane Gaines, and Patricia Aufderheide contributed to a debate over the relative merits of political rhetoric, vérité, and formal modernism as documentary responses to the war. Musser posits the vérité trend as a direct reaction against the competing truth claims of rhetorically argued documentaries such as Robert Greenwald’s Uncovered: The Whole Truth About The Iraq War (2003), noting that the vérité mode appears to offer viewers ‘a relatively direct, un- preconceived and non-ideological insight into the grunt’s-eye view of the world …[as the] basis for its truth value.’17 Its limitation, in Musser’s account, is that ‘the “dark side” – the corruption and interrogation techniques that have turned the war into a nightmare – does not yield itself to the camera in this way.’18
10 Gaines and Aufderheide present more polar opinions on the vérité war documentary. Gaines, attempting to construct a ‘Leftist rapprochement with documentary realism,’19 vehemently asserts that ‘the real historical material world of and about the Iraq conflict is the gold standard’20 and searches for moments within these films during which an ‘immediately analytic camera’ reveals ‘things coming unraveled, finding, for instance, the myth that occupiers are liberators exposed in the most ordinary moment.’ 21 Conversely, Aufderheide claims that ‘new technologies do not really change the stories about soldiers in the field very much,’ finding only the perpetuation of a voyeuristic thrill of skirting death, which she dismisses as ‘emotional pornography.’ She is particularly sceptical of the notion that this style is suited to political critique, claiming that its limitation of perspective and mode of audience engagement may instead ‘quell debate.’22
11 At issue with the vérité observational mode, then, is as much what this approach elides as what it actively contributes to the documenting of war. In the accounts of Musser and Aufderheide, the most significant omission is an engagement with the wider political context. Yet a closer reading of The War Tapes and Gunner Palace, two films generally figured as typical of the Iraq Grunt Doc mode, can demonstrate that in fact intermedial excerpts of news reports are essential to establishing the disjunctive political perspectives that comprise the terms of each film’s political debate.
12 Scranton punctuates The War Tapes with television news reports at regular intervals, often with the films’ subjects gathering to watch, as if to imply that their identification with the wider progress of the war is key to maintaining a sense of cohesion or structure to the seemingly random IED explosions and other attacks. The film also features a diegetic critique of the corrupt inefficacy of KBR/Halliburton, and a comic- ironic cut from the roadside dumping of septic waste (replete with a rainbow) to George W. Bush proclaiming ‘a day of great hope for Iraqis.’ There is, therefore a clear attempt to at least gesture toward a wider political context than what is diegetically captured by the subjects’ cameras. Generally, though, these media extracts appear to function as an illusory ‘truth’ to be punctured by the vérité material, most frequently by undermining the notion of ‘major conflict’ being concluded by demonstrating how this statement ‘conflicts with what we’re seeing and dealing with every day.’ Similarly, Gunner Palace layers non-diegetic radio reports over the soundtrack in order to provide
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the same sense of a wider media narrative, and also courts political opinions from its subjects through distinctly structured interviews.
13 However, while some indications of the overarching political context are made, the exclusive focus upon ground-level troops elides any clear portrayal of the military- technological context outside of these localised experiences. Neither film betrays any sense of the relationship of the troops depicted to other units, let alone the higher- ranking orchestration of networked warfare. Thus, I would suggest that the problematic elision within this group of Grunt Docs is not so much the wider political context as it is the technological context. The above accounts by Lenoir, Der Darian, and Stahl portray a fundamental technological evolution in the waging of war that is simply not commensurate with the stasis of the vérité mode, which portrays an experience of warfare largely unchanged since the Vietnam era. Both Musser and Aufderheide seem on the verge of identifying this issue, with the assertions that, respectively, vérité does not capture the ‘dark side’ of war, and that new technologies do not appear to have changed the soldiering experience. I would, however, tweak their arguments slightly to insist that, firstly, the ‘dark side’ connotes not only torture but also the broader process of virtually executed warfare (conceived through simulations and carried out without regard for local context), and secondly, that by ‘new technologies’, one incorporates not only the proliferation of handheld digital cameras among soldiers but also newer digital modes of mediating warfare (drone interfaces, satellite surveillance, etc.).
14 The issue is then somewhat clarified: the stylistic and aesthetic continuity of the vérité mode, which may have offered a novel degree of subjective intimacy during Vietnam, is perhaps no longer suited to engaging with the technological complexities of contemporary warfare. As a generic approach to documenting war, vérité’s strengths lie in the observation of subjective, localised experience and the demonstration of the ongoing human cost of warfare. I do not intend to minimise the significance of this, and The War Tapes in particular is admirable in its portrayal of the traumatic psychological after-effects of war for Moriarty and Bazzi’s growing disaffection. Yet the question remains as to whether this humanist approach is capable of documenting the changing nature of warfare as ground-level, face-to-face interaction is gradually supplanted by the disembodiment of screen-based mediation. Indeed, the vérité focus on individual actions and values, and the notion that this grounded, humanist observation can provide access to a greater ‘truth’ than news media accounts is beginning to appear rather outmoded as digital technologies gradually supplant the reliance on embodied interaction in favour of mediated observation and remote action. As the dominant mode of documentary response to contemporary war then, vérité may problematically divert attention from such technological issues by representing warfare as largely unchanged since the Vietnam era. One could even argue that this form of documenting war lends a (perhaps inadvertent, yet problematic) sense of validation or authentication to practices of contemporary warfare, since such straightforwardly realist representations may counterbalance broader tendencies towards virtualising distanciation and simulative engagement.
15 This question becomes even more pressing in relation to the war in Afghanistan and disparate drone strikes around the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The simple fact that no documentary filmmakers have as yet even attempted to depict the ongoing drone war indicates a glaring discrepancy between current documentary practice and the possibilities afforded by gaming. Given the convergence of military and gaming digital
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imaging technologies, drone warfare became almost instantaneously playable as (among other titles) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, while filmmakers are still apparently struggling to conceive of ways to document the increasingly disparate, disembodied practices of postmodern LIC (Low Intensity Conflict) warfare.
16 In part, this absence is of course reinforced by the relative secrecy of CIA operated drone strikes, the locations of which are far more difficult for filmmakers to access than, for instance, the rather more visible urban battlefields of Iraq (particularly given the opportunities for embedding during the invasion). Yet, on the very margins of documentary practice, there are emergent signs of moving-image works attempting to engage with the issue of drones, which may suggest potential alternatives to vérité in depicting the wider military-technological context of contemporary warfare.
17 “America’s New Air Force,” a short video profile of the Creech Air Force Base in the Mojave desert produced for CBS’ 60 Minutes series, sketches a basic and rather innocuous portrait of drone warfare primarily through interviews with drone operators working on the site. While the interviews do not facilitate any serious debate over the use of drones and declassified excerpts of drone imaging from actual missions are presented entirely in isolation from local context, there is nonetheless one brief scene that begins to articulate a visual grammar of drone warfare. This is a simple shot/reverse-shot depicting a drone view of the presenter and camera crew from above, followed by a ground level shot of the presenter gazing upward and seeing nothing but ‘blue sky.’ While it would be disingenuous to attribute any radical progress in imaging drone warfare to “America’s New Air Force,” this short scene does nonetheless provide a rare attempt to visually integrate drone and ground level imaging, revealing the fundamental imbalance of power between these perspectives that is inaugurated by the drone’s capacity to “see” while itself remaining invisible.
18 Furthermore, Omer Fast’s Five Thousand Feet Is The Best, presented at the Venice Biennale and subsequently at the Imperial War Museum in London, offers perhaps the first rigorous audiovisual study of drone warfare. A looped 30-minute video installation that combines documentary, docudrama, and fictional tropes, Fast’s film comprises two distinct but interweaved strands. In the first, Fast interviews a real former drone pilot whose identity is obscured, and whose recollections of military action, ‘virtual stress,’ and PTSD are predominantly presented in voiceover and juxtaposed with aerial tracking shots of suburban New England and the Las Vegas strip. The second strand features a scripted “interview” with an actor portraying a drone pilot, who strenuously digresses from Fast’s questions (‘What is the difference between you and someone who sits in an airplane?’) to instead launch narrated docudrama-style tales whose only relevance to drones is (as the interviewee puts it) the ‘moral’ imperative to ‘keep your work life and your domestic life separate.’
19 Five Thousand Feet does not contain any actual documentary footage of drone warfare, yet the film poetically revolves around this absence, evocatively juxtaposing (for instance) an anecdote about the importance of heat signatures in detecting buried IEDs with the glaring lights of the Las Vegas skyline. Through such juxtapositions, the thematic recurrence of PTSD, and the peculiar bleeding in the fictional pilot’s final tale between details of civilian and military life,23 the film consistently blurs the boundaries between war zones and domesticity, between documentary and fiction, and ultimately, between virtual and embodied presence. As such, Fast’s film, while certainly not strictly classifiable as documentary, nonetheless demonstrates a highly inventive approach to
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reconfiguring documentary tropes for the depiction of drone warfare, progressively moving beyond the stasis of the vérité mode to evoke the complex virtuality of contemporary military technologies.
The Interstices of Documentary and Fiction
20 If one examines the wider genre of war cinema for recent formal changes that may constitute a creative response or adaptation to the advent of the digital, perhaps the most noticeable trend is for blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction. This is not entirely without historical analogue, since fiction films have incorporated war documentary footage at least as far back as D.W. Griffiths’ Hearts of the World (1918), while 84 Charlie Mopic (Patrick Shane Duncan, 1989) borrowed the vérité documentary aesthetic wholesale for its fictional recreation of the Vietnam War. Yet there has certainly been an intensification of this trend, and a greater degree of near- unclassifiable hybridity, over the last ten years or so in (to give just a few examples): the combined use of actual military personnel and professional actors Battle for Haditha (Nick Broomfield, 2007) and Act of Valour (Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh, 2012); the use of journalistic source material in Green Zone (Paul Greengrass, 2010), In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007) and, somewhat more contentiously, Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012); and the simulation of a diverse range of non-fictional modes in Redacted (Brian de Palma, 2007). It would be rather simplistic and of doubtful value to posit any singular function for this hybridity in such a diverse group of films, which range from the bolstering of authenticity for ostensibly fictional films (Act of Valour being the extreme of this pole) to experimental docudrama approaches which simply liberate some of the more dogmatic conventions of documentary filmmaking.
21 Yet one could argue that, broadly, there seems to be an evolution of the documentary form, through which it is now regarded less as a privileged mode of indexical objectivity, and more as a fluid combination of generic tropes that are increasingly adaptable and potentially hybridised. This is clearly mirrored in current writing on documentary theory. Brian Winston, as noted earlier, has commented upon the ways in which the evidential claim of documentary objectivity has eroded, transforming notions of authenticity from indexicality to the realm of audience reception. The very act of reading authenticity intertextually would thus imply its fluidity and potential to evolve through new contexts and forms. Indeed, Stella Bruzzi’s New Documentary defines the form as ‘performative acts, inherently fluid and unstable,’24 and observes how contemporary documentary filmmaking ‘has in various ways returned to its more relaxed roots with dramatisation, performance, and other forms of fictionalisation and narrativisation becoming once more predominant.’25
22 However, both Bruzzi and Bill Nichols still appear to cling to a somewhat nostalgic notion of evidentiality, now relegated to the level of the ‘mere footage’26 or ‘the ‘document’ at its heart’27 that comprise the raw material which filmmakers, through creative interpretation, fashion into documentary itself. Nichols insists that such footage ‘serves as empirical or factual evidence… [and] offers no perspective and has no voice, or a very faint one’28 and even equates such ‘documents (including photographs and archival footage)’ with ‘physical evidence such as fingerprints, hair or blood samples, DNA, and so forth’ in a list of ‘inartistic proof.’29 Bruzzi’s account of the ‘document’ allows for a greater degree of evidential indeterminacy, as she notes that it
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is ‘infinitely accessible through interpretation and recontextualisation … a mutable, not a constant, point of reference,’30 yet there remains a hint of impartiality attached to the ‘document’ through the very act of its division from documentary proper.
23 Among the group of films listed above, perhaps the most formally radical and complexly hybridised – and thus most challenging to notions of the evidential document – is Brian de Palma’s Redacted. The film’s epigraph declares it to be ‘inspired by an incident widely reported to have occurred in Iraq,’ yet the film constantly straddles the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, weaving together a range of ostensibly non-fictional aesthetic modes, from soldier’s video diaries to television news reports, into a complex fictional whole.
24 As Martin Barker’s reading of the film notes, de Palma’s aesthetic is rooted in a carefully studied imitation of the wave of soldiers’ video diaries uploaded to YouTube (prior to institutional restrictions on such practices) that ‘created a recognisable look to the conflict.’31 The primary issue with these YouTube diaries, in Barker’s account, is ‘the question of the trustworthiness of those images,’ since he queries whether there can be ‘authentic images when so much is clearly staged, posed and edited.’32
25 De Palma’s simulation of the video diary aesthetic seems keenly aware of the performativity and perspective embedded in this footage. They are not merely present to lend the film’s depiction of the Iraq War some vague sense of authenticity, but rather to explore how performativity and implicit perspective belie the associations of impartiality and evidentiality attached to such ostensibly non-fictional sources. Although many of the film’s critics appear unconvinced as to the degree of realist- effect achieved by de Palma’s imitation of the video diaries, I would argue that the heightened sense of performativity they contain is key to the film’s innovative blurring of fictional and documentary forms and to the highlighting of their structured perspective and implicit audiences. The soldiers can be clearly seen negotiating the boundaries of generic, raucous barracks behaviour with the demands of their responsibilities to friends and family at home. Furthermore, the embedded news reports, particularly in the division between Western media (‘CEN’) and the Middle Eastern (‘ATV’), betray a similar sense that documentary authenticity is performed, subject to the demands of a particular pre-determined audience interest.
26 By undermining notions of evidential impartiality, demonstrating the limitations of what the video diary, television news report, CCTV footage, etc. can offer in terms of structured meaning, and combining each of these elements into an innovative hybrid form which freely fictionalises around a reported but undocumented real event, de Palma’s film is a fascinating example of the evolution of the documentary form for an era of digitised, virtualised war. Admittedly, Redacted’s formal experimentation can only really be argued to engage with the virtuality of war in the sense of its permeation by media representations, rather than the virtuality resulting directly from its military-technological simulation. Nonetheless, the film’s exemplary engagement of documentary/fiction hybridity and experimentation with intermediality at least evince an attempt to expand the boundaries of what film can achieve in capturing and performatively evidencing the interpenetration of contemporary war and digital media.
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Documenting Virtual War
27 This final section will present extended readings of two documentaries which have explicitly taken military simulations as their subject, and thus offer the most direct engagement with the high-tech virtuality of contemporary war as outlined by Lenoir, Der Darian, and Stahl. The two films under discussion are Full Battle Rattle, an otherwise fairly conventional documentary which focuses upon a military training simulation of Iraq set up in the US National Training Centre; and Harun Farocki’s Serious Games, a series of documentary / video installation shorts, predominantly recorded in the Twentynine Palms Marine base and featuring CG (computer generated) simulations used for both training purposes and the treatment of PTSD.
28 Full Battle Rattle charts the progress of a US army battalion through immersive training scenarios in the simulated Iraqi town of Medina Wasl (created at the Fort Irwin National Training Centre, one of the locations covered in Virtuous War). The simulation – just one ‘town’ that is part of a larger, interconnected, simulation of Iraq – comprises role-playing Iraqi refugees as the local community, insurgents who plot to disrupt the battalion’s missions in the town, and even a simulation of the media, who film and broadcast televised reports. This is combined with technological simulations of battle and injuries, using the MILES (Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System) harness to record the outcomes of virtual combat with insurgents.
29 For this simulation to be effective as a training scenario, it clearly needs to be sufficiently immersive to induce the participants into behaving as though it were real, a point which is testified to within one of the film’s interviews:
30 Everybody that arrives at the NTC knows that they’re coming here for training. By the second or third day of the training that kind of disappears. The soldiers get into the reality of what they’re doing, and even though they are out here in the middle of the Mojave desert, in a simulated Iraq, it gets real, and they get lost in the scenario.
31 The documentary thus offers, on one level, a portrait of subjects immersed in a simulated reality. In terms of its representation for the viewer, however, the film does not attempt to achieve a comparable mode of subjective immersion. Despite opening with a series of medium and long establishing shots which seem to locate the action in Iraq, followed by a burst of handheld, rapidly edited action sequences, the film shortly thereafter reorients the viewer as an off-screen voice yells “Everybody stop” and the seemingly dead and wounded rise to their feet. Beyond this brief but smart metafictional commentary on the capacity of film to create similarly immersive, simulated ‘realities,’ the film is otherwise structured through a somewhat conventional mix of direct-to-camera interviews interspersed with narrative developments of the scenario. As such, the viewer is basically precluded from the level of immersion demonstrated by the film’s subjects.
32 In Mike Dillon’s review of the film, he considers this a ‘fail[ure] to pursue the implications of its own status regarding media’s engagement with a war famously called “fictitious” by fellow documentarian Michael Moore in his incendiary 2003 Oscar speech,’ arguing that it is ultimately ‘uncommitted to any form of political commentary.’33 Certainly, the veracity of the simulated Iraq afforded opportunities for the filmmakers to engage in a greater degree of formal or ontological play, perhaps
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through a more ambiguous and challenging blurring of the boundaries between real Iraq, simulated Iraq, and the complicity of film in virtualising such distinctions – an opportunity which is largely passed over in favour of more conventional documentary tropes which attempt to erect a critical distance from the simulation depicted. While the film is undoubtedly more interesting for its subject matter than any formal experimentation, it does nonetheless make a unique contribution to documenting the processes by which this simulation is constructed. By repeatedly cutting away from Medina Wasl to interviews with the architects of this simulation, Gerber/Moss are able to simultaneously document the immersion of the subjects and dissimulate the processes which contribute to the very structuring of the simulated Iraq.
33 Despite the lack of formal innovation though, the film still implicitly raises pertinent questions regarding how simulative training may translate rather unequivocally into the virtualised execution of war. This is particularly prominent in the film’s ending, in which the town’s gradual descent into anarchy is suddenly appeased with tentative promises of support for local construction projects and the subsequent relinquishing of power to local authorities. Viewed in the context of real events following the invasion of Iraq, this moment is highly evocative of fragility of peace in occupied Iraq. Der Darian’s notion of the collapse in distinctions between preparation/execution and the virtual/real of warfare is here powerfully realised, as the simulations are revealed to be guided more by preconceived results than genuine response to local contexts.
34 Harun Farocki’s Serious Games series of documentary / video installation shorts demonstrate a similarly direct engagement with the mediated virtuality of warfare. In the first instalment, Watson Is Down, Farocki presents a formal innovation which is central to the series’ straddling of the virtual/real: a split-screen aesthetic, with one side embedded within the CG simulation of battlespace, and the other focussed upon the trainees as they communicate with other units and attempt to co-ordinate an effective strategy for networked warfare. This formal strategy solves, in the simplest manner possible, a perennial problem of documenting virtual war, since either of these two interconnected screens taken in isolation would appear rather insufficient. The former is essentially a filmed record of gameplay, dominated entirely by video game aesthetics and thus not necessarily ‘filmic’; the latter consists solely of a recording of military personnel interacting with screens and would be dramatically rather flat without the parallel visualisation of the simulated environment. In the very act of split- screen juxtaposition then, Farocki finds a formally effective method to informatively and dramatically document the waging of virtual, screen-mediated war, solving a problem that has clearly challenged many documentarists whose formal approaches are predicated upon the grounding of embodied interaction.
35 Watson Is Down thus provides a valuable insight into the current state of military simulative training procedures, whose significance in virtualising warfare is highlighted by Der Darian. Through the course of the film, Farocki demonstrates how software such as the Virtual Battle Space 2 program is used to co-ordinate networked warfare and instil controlled behavioural responses to the detection of threats, represented by the explosive devices and ‘enemies’ interjected into the scenario by the instructor.
36 Three Dead experiments with a different formal manner of juxtaposing the virtual and (apparently) real, in this case abandoning the split-screen aesthetic in favour of a dramatic cut between two versions of the same environment (one live action, one CG)
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in the middle of the film. The first section initially appears to be a plausible depiction of a small Iraqi town, but, much like Full Battle Rattle, is ultimately revealed as a live-action simulation taking place in the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Centre at Twentynine Palms. The film depicts an incident of insurgency in a mosque which the trainee units must respond to. Subsequently, Farocki cuts to a CG version of this same terrain, traversed through a long aerial tracking shot and accompanied by a dramatic score. On the whole, Three Dead is rather short on contextualising detail, with the predominant emphasis placed upon the increasingly virtualising convergence of these forms as the aesthetic evolves from the cinematic to that of the digitised realm gaming and simulations.
37 Immersion, the longest and perhaps most interesting of the Serious Games shorts, reverts to the split-screen aesthetic to depict the use of CG simulations for the treatment of PTSD. One screen documents the recounting of a traumatic incident by a seemingly inexperienced recruit, sent on a first tour of Iraq, whose partner on a routine mission was killed by an unidentified explosion. This soldier is wearing a head-mounted display unit, the CG environment of which attempts to reconstruct the scene of the incident as accurately as possible and is depicted for the viewer on the left-hand side of the film’s split screen. At several points during the recitation of the traumatic incident, the soldier appears on the verge of breakdown, reporting to the counsellor/instructor feelings of nausea and a high SUDS (glossed as Subjective Units of Disturbance Scale, rated between 0 and 100) rating of 80-90. This immaculately convincing performance comes to an abrupt conclusion as the applause of an undetected audience breaks out and the soldier removes his headset, casually joking that ‘some of the nausea was real.’
38 Immersion thus perfectly demonstrates and encapsulates the layers of virtuality that insulate virtual war against the straightforward evidential mode of documentary filmmaking. The film’s ending startles the viewer out of the passive consumption of this war story and invokes a heightened consciousness of the degree of performativity involved in the translation of real events into simulated reconstructions. Furthermore, this introduction of formal reflexivity invites the viewer to reflect further upon the technological virtualisation of war that takes place through both the ‘Virtual Reality Exposure for PTSD’ program and the corresponding training applications. Implicit through each of these films, then, is a study of the ontological transformation of real- life events into CG reconstructions and, in turn, realistic training simulations.
39 Both Farocki’s Serious Games and Gerber/Moss’ Full Battle Rattle can therefore be considered complementary ways of engaging the documentary form with what Der Darian terms ‘virtual theory.’ Der Darian distinguishes ‘virtual theory’ from both realist and idealist approaches to studying war, positing that ‘world politics is also in need of a virtual theory that explores how reality is seen, framed, read, and generated in the conceptualisation and actualisation of the global event,’ particularly through studying ways in which ‘technical media constitute new virtual states of meaning and being.’34 Serious Games and Full Battle Rattle are unique among contemporary documentary filmmaking in their attempts to directly engage with questions of virtuality, disembodiment, and performativity that permeate the simulative preparation and execution of recent wars. Furthermore, the formal innovations of Serious Games demonstrate a creative adaptation of the documentary mode and aesthetic, matching an incorporation of the intermediality of digital interfaces to the embodied, humanist grounding which has long been a strength of the war documentary.
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40 This paper has explored various ways in which documentary film has responded to the challenges posed by digital media’s virtualisation of contemporary warfare (as outlined in works by Tim Lenoir, James Der Darian, and Roger Stahl). I have argued that the cinema vérité mode employed in the majority of Iraq War documentaries may, contrary to many accounts which critique its perceived apoliticism, be problematic more for the elision of the wider technological context. Films such as The War Tapes and Gunner Palace maintain individual interaction as the locus of warfare, and thus serve to authenticate the embodied reality of contemporary wars despite the countervailing tendencies toward virtualisation and disembodiment. Posing the question of how the documentary form may adapt in order to engage with this virtual realm of simulation and high-tech mediation, I have explored the recent trend toward hybrid documentary/fiction modes, with a specific focus upon the ways in which Redacted’s incorporation of digital media aesthetics represents an innovative attempt to stretch the boundaries of documentation and evidentiality. Finally, I have argued that Full Battle Rattle and Serious Games provide the most concerted effort among recent filmmaking to document the specific processes by which military simulations effect a virtualisation of war, offering the viewer a rare glimpse of the elements of networked warfare which are beginning to erode the military reliance upon embodied interaction and abstract war toward virtualised remote action.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aufderheide, Patricia. “Your Country, My Country: How Films About The Iraq War Construct Publics.” Framework 48.2 (2007): 56-65.
Barker, Martin. A ‘Toxic Genre’: The Iraq War Films. London: Pluto Press, 2011.
Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge, 2006.
Der Darian, James. Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network. 2nd Ed. Oxon: Routledge, 2009.
Dillon, Mike. “Full Battle Rattle (Review).” Film & History 42.2 (2012): 118-122
Gaines, Jane. “The Production of Outrage: The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition.” Framework 48.2 (2007): 36-55.
Lenoir, Tim. “All but War is Simulation: The Military-Entertainment Complex.” Configurations 8.3 (2000): 289-335.
Musser, Charles. “Film Truth in the Age of George W. Bush.” Framework 48.2 (2007): 9-35.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 2nd Ed. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2010.
Stahl, Roger. Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2010.
Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Verso, 1989.
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Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real II: Documentary – Grierson and Beyond. London: BFI, 2008.
Filmography
“America’s New Air Force,” 60 Minutes (CBS, 2009), http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/? id=5245555n
Five Thousand Feet Is The Best (Omer Fast, 2011)
Full Battle Rattle (Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss, 2008)
Gunner Palace (Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, 2004)
Redacted (Brian de Palma, 2007)
Serious Games (Haroun Farocki, 2009-10)
The War Tapes (Deborah Scranton, 2006)
NOTES
1. James Der Darian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network, 2nd ed. (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2009), 10. 2. Tim Lenoir, “All but War is Simulation: The Military Entertainment Complex,” Configurations 8.3 (2000): 317; 328-34. 3. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989), 1. 4. Der Darian, Virtuous War, xx. 5. Der Darian, Virtuous War, 14. 6. Der Darian, Virtuous War, 10. 7. Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media and Popular Culture (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2010), 18. 8. Stahl, Militainment, Inc., 42. 9. Stahl, Militainment, Inc., 92. 10. Stahl, Militainment, Inc., 138. 11. Stahl, Militainment, Inc., 101-3. 12. Brian Winston, Claiming the Real II: Documentary - Grierson and Beyond (London: BFI, 2008), 229. 13. Winston, Claiming the Real, 113. 14. Der Darian, Virtuous War, 10. 15. Patricia Aufderheide, “Your Country, My Country: How Films About The Iraq War Construct Publics,” Framework 48.2 (2007), 59. 16. Martin Barker, A ‘Toxic Genre’: The Iraq War Films (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 66. 17. Charles Musser, “Film Truth in the Age of George W. Bush,” Framework 48.2 (2007), 26. 18. Musser, “Film Truth,” 30. 19. Jane Gaines, “The Production of Outrage: The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition,” Framework 48.2 (2007), 41. 20. Gaines, “Production of Outrage,” 46. 21. Gaines, “Production of Outrage,” 47. 22. Aufderheide, “Your Country, My Country,” 60-1. 23. This anecdote, which seemingly begins with a family vacation, takes on gradually darker hues as the family encounter a group of roadside construction workers. Through a disjunctive slippage in the narration, the workers’ tools are transformed into weapons, and the entire group end up
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victims of a Hellfire missile launched from the drone that has apparently been observing them throughout. 24. Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary, 2nd ed. (London, Routledge: 2006), 1. 25. Bruzzi, New Documentary, 8. 26. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 2nd ed. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2010), 75. 27. Bruzzi, New Documentary, 16. 28. Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 125. 29. Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 78. 30. Bruzzi, New Documentary, 26. 31. Barker, A ‘Toxic Genre,’ 36. 32. Barker, A ‘Toxic Genre,’ 36. 33. Mike Dillon, “Full Battle Rattle (Review),” Film & History 42.2 (2012), 120. 34. Der Darian, Virtuous War, 220.
ABSTRACTS
This paper draws upon contemporary studies of military imaging to illustrate the shift in the execution of warfare from embodied human interaction toward the virtualising distanciation of technological mediation and remotely-operated, networked warfare. Considering the viability of a range of documentary forms for evidentially capturing this evolution, the author argues that the cinema vérité mode which dominated filmmakers’ responses to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars – with its grounding in subjective, embodied experience – fails to engage with the wider technological context and perhaps problematically validates an unchanging, realist vision of war contrary to virtualising trends. Conversely, it is contended that the proliferation of hybrid documentary/fiction modes may constitute a creative adaptation to digital mediations of war, as exemplified by the formal and intermedial innovations of Redacted. Finally, two documentaries that specifically engage with military simulations – Tony Gerber/Jesse Moss’ Full Battle Rattle (2008) and Harun Farocki’s Serious Games (2009-10) – are extensively analysed in terms of their diegetic and formal contributions to documenting the technological virtualisation of war.
INDEX
Keywords: war, technology, documentary, digital media, simulation
AUTHOR
CALVIN FAGAN Calvin Fagan is studying for a PhD in film studies at Queen Mary, University of London. His thesis project is entitled ‘Digital Media and the Contemporary War Film: Virtuality, Embodiment, Immersion’ and explores the use of digital military technologies in war cinema. Current research
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interests include the intersections of film, digital media, and military technology, particularly in terms of embodiment and machinic imaging.
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Varia
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Crafting the Web New Media Craft in British and American Contemporary Art
Charlotte Gould
1 The words medium, media and mediums are sometimes confused and even interchangeable because they can be used with a Latin plural or not. Interestingly, this terminology brings together the fields of communication and the materiality of art. The visual arts of the end of the twentieth-century have increasingly been described as 'mixed-media', while the plural 'mediums' has also been used to account for the diversity of supports which today can constitute a work of art: these go from the traditional canvas, to found objects or even the absence of support when the artwork is dematerialized – a conceptual approach which today includes the online practice of net.art.1 In terms of communication and information, media have also become more numerous and varied since entering the digital age. These have not been developments which have simply run parallel because the visual arts have been interested in reflecting these communicational changes and, by incorporating them as technical supports, have used them as signposts of their own contemporaneity.
Medium Specificity after Modernism
2 In her 2011 collection of her own essays Perpetual Inventory, Rosalind Krauss muses upon her signature theoretical concept, the “post-medium condition,” namely the contemporary abandonment of the modernist emphasis on the medium as the source of artistic significance. She debunks it for being a “monstrous myth.”2 Krauss sees in the post-medium condition of contemporary art something of a postmodern incoherence. This relinquishment of integrity which conceptual art inaugurated at the end of the sixties spelt, for Krauss, the end of serious art. She devotes much of Perpetual Inventory, and most of her activity as a critic, to drawing together the threads of the newly invented or found mediums for art into a coherent aesthetic (not to say formal) enterprise which might be able to prolong the modernist ideal of reflexivity (without the exclusivity). Her stance is therefore not synonymous with a rejection of any post- painting or post-sculpture art, but on the contrary, an embracing of the new mediums of art, which does not regard them as contingent. In her crusade against medium-
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contingency, she writes both about artists who are reinventing the medium – and this can mean painting –, and about artists who use a non-traditional medium reflexively. She alludes here to “strange new apparatuses” often adopted from commercial culture and she often uses the phrase “technical support” rather than medium simply because the second term has become ideologically-laden since the 1980s and construed by some as almost reactionary. The modernist ambition of reflexiveness is something that can be achieved today with artists engaging not simply with the newness of their supports, but also with the conditions and histories of what might still be mediums.
3 New art seems to have been defined in the last few decades by two main conditions which have to do with mediation: the pulling of the medium away from its discipline of origin in order to integrate it within an undisciplined body of work (video referencing painting, painting as sculpture, etc.), and the infinite replay of art in the media (which is thus recorded, archived, televised, or even advertised). While Greenberg’s modernist theory that every discipline should be firmly entrenched within its area of competence might have been dismissed at the end of the twentieth century, most works produced today assert a surprising element of reflexivity: they address their own materiality and the codes attached to their support. Still, a common trait of recent contemporary works is that, often, the specificity they address is that of other mediums. This is something Thierry de Duve has identified as originating with the readymade3 and which can be argued concerning many contemporary works: indeed, Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy installation is about the importance of medicine in our lives, but also mostly about painting.4
4 The many post-modernist “technical supports” Krauss is interested in may not be specific, yet they allow for a continuity with modernist ideals by making reflexivity possible outside of traditional mediums (her essays focus mainly on video art). Krauss insists on the fact that 'good' work has to refer recursively to its medium, therefore making quite clear that her expertise is that of an art critic intent on making a distinction between good and bad art.
5 What we wish to demonstrate here is that, by accepting the possibility of a recursiveness of contemporary technical supports (i.e. supports reflecting themselves), one can best approach art which looks at the same time to the specificity of a traditional medium and to non-specific media. This article wishes to inscribe the recent trend in contemporary craft, namely contemporary artists taking up traditional crafts in technological ways, within a larger history of the artistic medium. The trend for online craft and for craftivism has been identified in many recent essays; see for example how Jack Bratich and Heidi Brush describe the merging of the digital and the tactile.5 What this paper wishes to focus on, is the articulation between contemporary art using craft and the new media. Beyond the humorous novelty of knitting with computers or making online patchworks, what the conflation of craft and new technology demonstrates is that the reflexive possibility of one medium can today work in conjunction with the reflexivity of technological media in a manner which enlightens the contemporary condition of both.
Mediums of the Past, Media of the Present
6 Krauss herself makes the connection between medium and media by adapting Marshall McLuhan's 1964 pronouncement “The medium is the message”6 into “the medium is
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the memory.”7 While in the sixties McLuhan had dramatically turned the spotlight on electronic media, Krauss has always wanted to continue to see the medium as a source of meaning as well as a receptacle of history. However, a clear dichotomy between medium and media has been contradicted by recent media trends. The association of medium with memory (the past), as suggested by Krauss, and media with construction and with a technically-advanced production of its own meaning (the future) has been upset by the recent fashion for remixing, recycling and updating.
7 Simon Reynolds’ 2011 Retromania, Pop Culture’s Addiction to its own past, demonstrates how YouTube’s proliferating labyrinth of collective recollection can be a prime example of a crisis of overdocumentation triggered by digital technology. When cultural data is dematerialized, our capacity to store, sort and access it is vastly increased. The digital compression of text, images and audio means that issues of space and cost no longer deter us from keeping anything and everything that seems remotely interesting. Now user-friendly technology (mobile-phone cameras, scanners, etc.) makes it irresistible to share photographs, songs and mixtapes, excerpts from television, vintage magazines, which then stay online. YouTube has implemented a major shift by making available to us the astronomic expansion of humanity’s resources of memory. The fantasy of total recall is made almost real by the instant access made possible by the web’s cultural databases. Search engines have obliterated the delay of searching through libraries, museums or record shops. Culturally, this means that the past is right there below the surface of the present, its recollection all too easy. Stylistically, the retro fashion in pop music, design and clothing is a testament to this growing presence of the past on the cultural scene of the twenty-first century.
8 The modernist credo had been that art should push forward towards new territories. Could these territories have become the past? Simon Reynolds sees super-hybridity as an attempt to complete the equation of postmodernism + internet =? In Frieze’s superhybridity issue,8 art writer Jennifer Allen goes even further when she argues that the Internet has rendered postmodernism obsolete as an artistic strategy by assimilating its principles, making them ubiquitous and accessible to anyone, making them the fabric of everyday life. For her, a theory has been replaced by a technology that does the same job more effectively, especially when, being able to access vintage formats, it finds its own way of escaping the mainstream.
9 In his 2004 essay Postproduction Nicolas Bourriaud argues that creativity today is about strategies of mixing and combining products with the DJ as model for artistic practice, erasing the distinction between consuming and producing with the skill of finding original pathways through signs. Overproduction and overinformation create this cultural ecosystem. However, one can wonder if this theoretical justification is not mainly aimed at allaying the anxieties of today's artists concerning the production of something original.
10 Still, excess reference to the past can today work as an inscription into the present, and as a generational positioning in the context of an absence of completely new forms. For many artists today, the answer to the crisis of originality has been to invest anew in traditional forms which, once they have acquired the status of references, also acquire a new mode of existence. This has recently been the case for drawing and the traditional skills of craftsmanship, for an exploration of new possibilities in painting, but also for a new way of approaching craft, which allows for reconsiderations of genre, status and ideology. It is more specifically the resurgence of traditional craft within
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today’s most advanced artistic practices, which we would like to explore before we can connect them with the latest media technologies they have come to be associated with. Indeed, the long gendered history of craft makes it an especially potent medium in terms of the artistic and political history it references.
Feminist Art History as an Oxymoron
11 In the foreword to her book The Subversive Stitch. Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, Rozsika Parker makes the following declaration: “To know the history of embroidery is to know the history of women.” Such a statement makes immediately clear that embroidery is not simply any kind of medium, whether in art or in craft, but a gendered one, or more exactly, a supremely and paradigmatically gendered one. The Subversive Stitch, with its clever pun, is a title which appears alongside other seminal books on feminism and art by Parker, or rather the difficult association of the two concepts. Indeed, “feminist art history,” according to Griselda Pollock in Differencing the Canon, Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories, “is an oxymoron.”9 In their written collaboration, Old Mistresses, Women, Art and Ideology,10 Parker and Pollock grant stitching, embroidering and the patchwork a central place in the history of women’s art. Working the threads has had a strategic role, which is also a problematic one. Indeed, feminists have long established that the historical stratification in fine arts was due to sex inequality, with art the prerogative of men when the production of women was to be termed craft. Historically, the 16th century was transitional. Before, men were embroiderers to the king. Pollock and Parker claim that because there was no Renaissance for women, the handling of the crafts was handed down to them while men were becoming individual artists and geniuses. Hence the feminine and domestic associations of embroidery. Besides being objects and apt family heirlooms, quilts more generally came to be construed as women’s cultural heritage, the products of specifically feminine rites of passage and an area in which women controlled the education of their daughters. Over the centuries, this ambiguous medium was an element either of alienation or of liberation, but mostly, it appeared as an occupation painstaking enough to keep temptation at bay, or in the words of Rozsika Parker: “Embroidery also evokes the stereotype of the virgin in opposition to the whore, an infantilizing representation of women’s sexuality.”11 The young girls who were taught the art of embroidery through the creation of samplers were attending a school for stereotypical femininity: they would learn about patience, submissiveness, service, obedience and modesty, their samplers usually carrying pious and self-denying verses and prayers, with the exceptional expressive message or form recorded on some of them (in which the bored wife or ambitious little girl give free reign to their complaints about the man’s world they inhabit)12. And while the verses that many samplers or embroidered objects bore expressed an ideology of femininity, feminine creativity was mainly expressed technically rather than through subject matter or even text because of the general use of patterns.
12 In Britain, the Victorians seemed to drive in the idea of an obvious association between women and embroidery. When rediscovering mediaeval embroidery, they identified it as a nurturing and natural activity fit for women. J.E. Millais’ Shakespearian Mariana (1851), for example, presents a particularly alluring mediaeval woman kept virtuous by the labour-intensive occupation. It is interesting to see the sewing women as a
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paradigmatic painterly subject, especially in the 19th century, making women still enough to be painted and turning them into sights rather than active figures. By making the link between women and embroidery seem natural, the Victorians managed to conceal the complex social, political and economic factors that had connected the two since the Middle Ages. Of course, there were exceptions, as with Anna Elizabeth Blunden’s political The Seamstress (The Song of the Shirt) (1854). 13 Still, while the oppression suffered at the hands of greedy capitalist bosses was denounced in poetry and in painting, it was because sewing was considered exclusively a feminine activity, not the contrary. Women’s work was decidedly not understood on a par with men’s work, as Beth Harris explains pointing to the not-so-progressive nature of this campaign waged against the exploitation of seamstresses who had hitherto been exclusively devoted to the care of their families and homes: In the literature of the period the needle itself often stood for women's ‘natural’ place in the home, and carried powerful associations of domestic bliss and maternal devotion. Where other female workers were seen to develop masculine characteristics, the seamstress remained a ‘woman.’ It is no wonder then that needlework performed by women for the marketplace, for strangers (not unlike prostitution), became a source of intense anxiety. Ideological notions of motherhood, home, morality and national stability all became dislocated when the needle moved from the home to the garret.14
13 It was only as late as 1894 that Jessie R. Newbery opened a needlework class at Glasgow School of Art and curated an exhibition alongside Charles Rennie MacIntosh in which, by doing away with unoriginal patterns, embroidery was, for once, presented as a genuine art form, produced by women who could therefore be considered genuine artists and free agents. One of the Glasgow Girls, Newbery single-handedly raised the status of creative needlework, and was responsible for creating the embroidered rose motif which came to become an emblem of the Glasgow Style.
14 At the same time, the Suffragettes turned women’s works into both a political platform and a British tradition, using them in a tactical way: inspired by the banners deployed by the Trades Union movement of the 1840s, they designed and stitched their own within The Suffrage Atelier. Using purple, green and white pieces of fabric, the colors of the British Women’s Suffrage Movement, they were able to refute the masculine or butch stereotypes about them and reassure potential new recruits. Stitching as a tactical and political activity drawing on its specifically feminine associations was to be taken up again by the Women’s Peace Movement protesting around and against the American air base on Greenham Common at the end of the seventies.
15 And yet it took over half a century to establish the total transformation of women’s work into art. Rozsika Parker comments thus on the dichotomy between art and craft as a gendered issue: “When women paint, it is acknowledged to be art. When women embroider, it is seen not as art, but entirely as the expression of femininity. And, crucially, it is categorized as craft.”15 This has been explained by feminist art historians who have pointed to the way art practices are inscribed in a visual culture, which replicates the structure of the patriarchal ideology.
16 In the 1960s and 1970s, with Modernism as the dominant paradigm of an almost exclusively male art world (see Linda Nochlin’s provocatively titled Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,16 a seminal text which points to a structurally paternalistic history of art), some women artists decided to assume a deliberate continuity with the traditional arts of quilting and sewing. Miriam Schapiro opened the way in the US with
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her ‘femmages’ (based on the word homage), which were to address both the need to reassess the history of women artists and their difficult position in contemporary art practices. Bits of fabric were to close the gap between studio work and a macho art scene and the reality of home and of womanhood. Naturally, embroidery and stitching were instrumental in the construction of a feminine identity within the home. What American and British women artists did in the 1970s was move stitching outside of the home, of what was accepted as a feminine domestic realm. The first step out was taken by proxy, still enacted by a man, or to be more specific, a postman. “Feministo” was a project initiated in 1974 by Kate Walker and Sally Gollop in which women artists were to exchange artworks by post. Most of these artworks had to do with life inside the house and many were pieces of quilt and embroidery. The collection of these postal artworks eventually became an exhibition called “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Housewife.” After having avoided so-called ‘female techniques’ like sewing, knitting or weaving because they did not want to be categorized as ‘feminine artists,’ women were suddenly embracing household images and crafts.
17 The most iconic, but also most controversial, fibre-based artwork of the 1970s is Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974-1979), a celebration of female achievement rescued from historical invisibility. On a large triangular table, embroidered runners and vagina-shaped plates were set for thirty-nine famous names such as Virginia Woolf, Georgia O’Keeffe, Sacajawea or Isadora Duncan. The names of nine-hundred-and- ninety-nine less famous women were inscribed onto a heritage floor and banners. The mix of craft skills, domestic femininity and a then omnipresent cunt imagery set in a Last Supper-like religious atmosphere made for a dramatic exhibition of gender politics. However, the paradigm shift of the 1980s in which body-oriented, utopian practices were replaced by poststructuralist feminist art theory and deconstruction meant that, with time, Chicago’s piece was criticized for being too essentialist.
Reclaiming Craft Today
18 If women artists at the turn of the century have inherited these struggles, their identity is no longer defined simply by a shared female experience. Should we be surprised to see women artists today working with embroidery when feminism has become more of a background than a central identity and at a time when it is no longer necessary to ask, in Britain at least, if there are any great women artists? Goldsmiths’ College, today’s hothouse of British creativity and, in the 1980s and 1990s, school to the Young British Artists (YBAs), was the first British school in the sixties to deliver a diploma in embroidery.
19 One of the most prominent YBAs is Tracey Emin. Her appliquéd blankets engage both in the long tradition of the patchwork quilt as symbol of domestic femininity in Britain and the US and of its more recent use in demonstrations and political statements of women’s rights, the iconoclasm and faux-spontaneity of her texts at odds with the relatively painstaking procedure of sewing together all the pieces of fabric and letters. In her work, the traditional medium lends momentum to the marginalized experiences of working-class femininity, to the voice of self-styled “Mad Tracey from Margate” (a phrase embroidered into some of her quilts).
20 Just as the patchwork quilt is a symbol of the home, presenting the reality of home and of the self rather than of the studio, Emin’s work seems to focus on the idea of a
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displacing of the locus of creation: Emin has often chosen to make herself one of the objects of her exhibitions, setting them up in different ingenious ways. “The Shop” (1993), which she set up with Sarah Lucas, presented their handicraft to visitors who could purchase most of the motley items. “The Tracey Emin Museum” (1995-1997) in which she would often spend the night, sometimes sewing and knitting, was a personal bid at artistic stardom—and a successful one at that. For Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1997) a gallery was configured in such a way that Emin could be peeped at through a hole in a partition working naked on recreating famous paintings of the history of art (incidentally all by male artists, Edward Munch, Yves Klein, etc.). In many instances, she is all at the same time artist, model and subject-matter of her work. The coincidence between artwork and the locus of the invention of the artwork in My Bed (1999) made for a scandalous show during that year’s Turner Prize. But her practice moves from the collective (the quilting bee which she recreates with assistants or friends when working on her appliquéd blankets) to the intimate, the individual and autobiographical.
21 The first time I was pregnant I started to crochet the baby a shawl (1990-2000), is both a touching and interesting piece, which presents some yarn and two needles under a glass case, but also an accompanying text. The crochet was never created and the medium becomes displaced, it is one that never happened, that was interrupted, just like the pregnancy. Here, the story of the needlework and that behind its interruption are substituted for the needlework itself, allowing for the possibility of dematerialized craft.
22 Along Mad Tracey from Margate, we can also find a description of herself as “International Woman.” The tag stresses a link to her childhood (the hotel run by her mother in Margate was called International Hotel), but it is mostly an identification of herself as a contemporary woman artist, one who travels the world and has become a media personality. In I’ve got it all (2000), Tracey Emin is photographed with her legs outspread, mimicking the attitude of Hannah Wilke in her photograph What Does This Represent? What Do You Represent? (Reinhardt) (1979-1984), a feminist take on Ad Reinhardt’s cartoon about abstract painting. While Wilke posed naked surrounded by toy guns, Emin is dressed in Vivienne Westwood and presses large quantities of bank notes to her crotch. Here, the link to seventies feminist art is one of reference rather than continuity. Rather than speaking form the margins of art, Emin is at the centre, where her art is worth big bucks. And while seventies artists used embroidering and sewing for its traditional and popular associations, Emin projects it into international mass culture. She is a fashion icon who fronts a campaign for Vivienne Westwood and dresses in her clothes for some of her artworks and high profile social events.
23 London-based artist Michelle Charles worked in New York for twenty years before coming back to England. Her 2008 self-titled exhibition at Kettle’s Yard opened with a video of someone’s hands knitting. This was followed by her painted work representing wool knit around a knitting needle, a craft work in progress which is a minute painterly representation. Charles was part of “Purl”, a 2004 exhibition at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture in London which brought together the work of three British and three American artists: Laurie Addis, Charles, Michelle Grabner, Jane Langley, Kathleen Mullaniff and Jennifer Wright. They were asked to respond to the museum’s craft collection with artworks. By recalling the history of gendered practices, the exhibition stressed how medium hierarchies can today be challenged. This is done
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especially by building bridges between the multimedia character of textile craft and its mathematical structure based on repetition, and its relevance in the computer age of coding.
Michelle Charles, Knitting - Still from a Film, 2008, used by kind permission of the artist
Michelle Charles, Knitting, Series 1, 2001-02, used by kind permission of the artist
From Artistic Heirloom to Craftivism
24 Emin and Charles provide demonstrations of the strategies of displacement and of mediation at work in contemporary sewing, knitting, quilt and embroidery. The way these techniques allow for a reinterpretation of traditional loci (the studio vs the home,
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parochialism vs international stardom) and of traditional medium (spontaneity vs templates, popular vs mass culture) means they can play a role in contemporary debates about women and art, but also about the very materiality and topicality of today’s works. The feminist struggle around the appropriation and celebration of craft seems to have more recently appeared as the template for new political struggles. Many of the practitioners of textile art working today in Britain as well as in the USA live in countries that are dependent on outsourced labour and in which workers are often alienated due to the fact that they do not see the result of their labour. Embroidery can suggest a counterpoint to the workings of a global economy and is thus used militantly by some. This means that many contemporary artists, mostly women, but also some men,17 make embroidery subversive, but also that in order to introduce radicalism into their practice, they tend to fuse what are today understood as being the tools of the activist (the internet, blogs, twitter, etc. new technology in general) with what is seen as a more traditional practice, but one which, along with other materials identified with craft (wood turning, clay, lace) has lately been at the forefront of creativity.18
25 Over the last ten years, craft and new technology have seemed a counterintuitive bedfellows: a return to hand making and tactility should be opposed and appearing as a counterpoint to the impersonal and immaterial digital age. Indeed, the recent craze surrounding knitting and everything handmade might have had to do with the fact that people pick up knitting needles as an escape from the dematerialized productions and interactions offered by computers. In the face of everything fast and technological, they want something real, time-consuming and homemade.19 And yet, handicraft often brings them back online, because they go searching for instructions or tips, and they discover that there’s an actual online community of blogging crafters, which feeds things back into the digital environment.20 Today, artists and craftspeople have started to think through this complementarity, this proximity and a possible analogy between the two and how these resemblances have projected craft into 21st century art practice as well as political preoccupations.
26 Recently, a whole host of exhibitions have centered on the surprisingly subversive, fashionable and up-to-date use being made of craft by contemporary artists. Their titles are telling: “Gender Stitchery” (Carleton College, 2007), “Pricked, Extreme Embroidery” (NY, 2008), “Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting” (Indianapolis, 2007), “Thread as the Line” (Arlington, 2008), “Craftivism” (Green Bay, 2008), “40 Under 40: Craft Futures” (Washington, 2012-2013), all following in the footsteps, ten years down the road, of the seminal “The Subversive Stitch, Women and Textiles Today” (Manchester, 1998, a reference to Roszika Parker’s eponymous book). Embroidery and knitting are considered to be radical new artistic practices first of all because they are crafts. The interest on the part of contemporary visual artists started out for this reason but also because they are gendered ones to boot. Today, an artist like Cal Lane, who is Canadian but who studied in New York, makes lace doilies out of industrial steel using welding machinery as a commentary on their traditional association with femininity. The use of materials associated with craft as well as their processing: wood, clay, and especially fiber, is seen as a way of reinvigorating art practice.
27 Male embroiderers and knitters also contradict stereotypes. Michael Raedecker integrates it into his painting. Dave Cole turns knitting into an ultra-macho endeavor by including heavy machinery in his performance The Knitting Machine, 2005, and
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comments: “knitting is a trope for work, a metaphor for every kind of production.”21 Usually, in these contemporary works, a delicate domesticity is belied by a radical content or by an imposing scale. Making the domestic public, going public with the domestic means opening up doors: art becomes more inclusive (both of women as artists and of men as knitters) and at the same time, society is urged to be more inclusive too.
28 Handicraft functions as a symbol of community and communication, having traditionally been the reason (sometimes the excuse for) gatherings of women around the same activity and a pastime that allowed conversation to take place (something which is alluded to in Liz Collins’s Knitting Nation, 2005-2006, which invited participation on the part of the audience). Women’s work could thus be considered the original communication network, although not really a long distance one, even though we could consider that some discussions were continued through space since some patchworks have been known to travel, taken up again by a woman where another one had left it after travelling some distance. By using craft to devise a participatory activity, artists like Liz Collins invent wiki-embroidery. Craft as a social space means the recreation of a local community, the establishing of networks, both a traditional function and truly up-to-date instances of Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics.
29 We find in contemporary art the resurgence of a commitment to a collaborative practice. This is the case with Sabrina Gschwandtner’s Wartime Knitting Circle, 2007, an allusion to knitting’s historical role as a mobilizing activity, as a way of taking part and even protesting, but in this case in the context of the war in Iraq. Here the traditional association of craft and war, and, above all, of craft and national identity is questioned. Art critic Julia Bryan-Wilson has coined the expression “crisis craft” to describe this movement which emerged in the 1970s and has known new developments during more recent moments of crisis.22
30 The relationship between craft and new technology also functions analogically: the complexity of repetitive and extended sequences necessary in knitting and embroidering can be compared to the workings of a computer. For Freddie Robins, whose website allows users to make nonsensical garments with graphic designs based on knitted patterns, computer programming instructions are like knitting instructions because each depends on translating complicated information into a type of esoteric shorthand.23 Also a false move or a dropped stitch can cause both to unravel.
31 Taking part in the 2008 “Craft Hackers” panel at New York’s New Museum a group of artists discussed the use of crafting techniques to explore high-tech culture and the relationship between needlework and computer programming. Among them were Christy Matson, who uses Jacquard looms to knit landscape images from computer games; Ben Fino-Radin, who embroiders retired computer punch cards (Personal Computer, 2007); and Cody Trepte, whose needlepoint sculptures translate the World Wide Web into yarn and plastic, one pixel at a time. Also among them, American artist Cat Mazza, who turns moving images into stills knit in yarn. With her website http:// www.microrevolt.org, Mazza uses knitting as resistance to sweatshop labour and allows a domestic practice to take on the global economy. One of her best-known works is in the shape of the infamous Nike swoosh: Cat Mazza has used microRevolt.org to solicit four-by-four-inch knitted squares from contributors around the world for her Nike Blanket Petition (2007) in protest of sweatshop labour and asking for fair-labour policies for Nike workers. The interface of the website allowed petitioners to identify their
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square online rather than sign a conventional petition. Incidentally, the connection of the two fields also stresses a parallel with unjust conditions in computer manufacturing (think the production of the iPhone5 by workers who have come to be dubbed “iSlaves” by the human rights group Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior). The campaign thus defends skills which are sometimes lost because of globalization. She has also created knitting machines to turn her embroideries into computer animation programmes, pixels turned into stitches and vice-versa. The two media used relate her approach to cyberfeminism. Mazza says: “I use Web media to reach audiences beyond the museum. In fact this connects back to craft, because craft, like the Internet, is also seen as a democratizing medium, a social network that operates outside the institution.”24
32 On her site, there is also a free software program called “knitpro” which translates a still or moving image directly into patterns for knitting, crocheting or needlework so that handicraft can go digital.25 The stitches, knit and purl, can here be compared to a computer’s binary machine code, ones and zeros. Her Logoknit Series, 2003, a series of knitted garments with stitched corporate logos of sweatshop offenders (Disney, GAP, Barbie, etc.) is in the same vein. The political activism of craft can thus be feminist of course, but also a way of addressing globalization, this because handicraft means making one thing from start to finish and is therefore a form of anti-taylorism. Such work allows for the recognition of labour and skills in art as well as in industry (where it is often hidden abroad, imagined to be always machine made when sometimes children are sewing together our sneakers).26
Craft Lab
33 In his 2011 book Making is Connecting, The Social Meaning of Creativity, From DIY and Knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0, David Gauntlett analyzes the social dimension of this participation culture. The book presents the many ways in which creative material is both showcased and created online in a democratic way, with the cultural impulse coming from the grassroots. Gauntlett believes the origins of the sharing ethos of the online craft community can be found in the writings and craft practice of William Morris. These new online communities include knitting and embroidering, but also garden guerrilla, or home electronics. People converging online to make things they want to make, with fulfillment and happiness among the main objectives. Fab Labs, the emanation of Media Labs, appear as the most evolved technical embodiments of this participatory culture. They are technical, but their ethics, as well as some of their end products, mean they could be considered the online future of craft, and therefore also of art based on craft. Using open-source techniques, their aim is to emancipate objects from traditional manufacturing and commercial circuits, to help artists, engineers and hackers learn and share. Fab Labs around the world, in order to be able to use the name, have to obey the charter drawn up by the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT where Neil Gershenfeld came up with the name.27 Indeed, while Fab Labs allow end- users to create objects at home, at school or in small-shared laboratories, the charter insists on the fact that whatever new coding they might have come up with, they need to share online.
34 Lately, Fab Labs have met textile and fashion. The most famous Fab Lab invention is the 3D scanner and printer, a technique which can be used to share patterns and cut out
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textile designs. Leah Buechley, director of the High-Low Tech group at MIT, is inventing what she calls “augmented fashion” by using a microcontroller called LilyPad, which can be sewn into fabric to make it interactive. Her jackets equipped with turn signals which indicate with large luminous arrows which way a cyclist is about to turn are simple yet groundbreaking.28 With Buechley, the knitting bee has gone digital without forsaking its communal ideal.
35 Fab Labs around the world are now bringing together technicians obsessed with the original ideals of craft culture and artists interested in the myriad possibilities of new modes of designing and making. Their very existence seems to have been adumbrated by the creative possibilities of online craft. By providing a broader context for craft, Fab Labs will probably augment artists’ studio practice while keeping alive the alternative ideals of the handmade.
Old Mediums, New Media
36 How striking that embroidery and more generally craft, with its history as long as painting (but one mainly lived in its shadow), and with its gendered associations, can weave together, in a very contemporary manner, the questions of globalized labour, war, the relationship between North and South, digital culture, feminism, queerness, collaboration and modern socializing, thus materially telling the story of our contemporary predicament. Its layered history and malleability seem to have resonated with current issues of community, identity, and production in a post- medium art context open to different material possibilities, old and new. Its utopian quality has today been reclaimed by hackers, engineers, DIY coders and digital dreamers, as well as by artists, in creative and surprising ways, confirming the possibility for the continuation of the modernist ideal of medium specificity in a contemporary context, even if two different media are often needed to each explore the specificity of the other, one old, one new. Something which the title of a 2010 exhibition seems to convey perfectly: “Craftwerk 2.0.”29
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Nochlin, Linda. Women, Art and Power and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
Parker, Rozsika and Griselda Pollock. Old Mistresses, Women, Art and Ideology. London: Pandora, 1981.
Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch, Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. London: The Women’s Press, 1984.
Pollock, Griselda. Differencing the Canon. Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. London / New York: Routledge, 1999.
Revere McFadden, David, Jennifer Scanlan and Jennifer Steifle Edwards. Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting. New York: Museum of Arts and Design, 2007.
Reynolds, Simon. Retromania. Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber, 2011.
Roberts, John. The Intangibilities of Form. London: Verso, 2007.
Stallabrass, Julian. Internet Art. The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce. London: Tate Publishing, 2003.
NOTES
1. On the history of net.art, see the writings of Geert Lovink, David Garcia and Matthew Fuller which were introduced to a French audience by Annick Bureaud and Nathalie Magnan when they edited Connexions: Art, Réseaux, Médias (Paris: Ecole de Beaux-Arts, 2002). See also Julian Stallabrass’s critique Internet Art. The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce (London: Tate Publishing, 2003). For discussions of the notion of post-internet art as a condition rather than a genre and therefore art which is not necessarily online, see The Image Object Post-Internet (2010) by Artie Vierkant http://jstchillin.org/artie/vierkant.html, and Within Post-Internet (2011) by Louis Doulas (2011) http://pooool.info/uncategorized/within-post-internet-part-i/, both accessed October 2013. 2. Rosalind Krauss, Perpetual Inventory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), xiv.
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3. Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism. On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 4. Charlotte Gould, “La critique et les critiques autour du (et dans le) Young British Art” in Emilienne Baneth-Nouailhetas ed. La Critique, Le Critique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 163-7 5. Jack Z. Bratich and Heidi M. Brush, Fabricating Activism, Craft-Work, Popular Culture, Gender (Utopian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2, 2011): pp. 233-260. 6. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: Mentor, 1964), chapter 1. 7. Krauss, Perpetual Inventory, 19. 8. Frieze, 133 (September 2010), accessed online June 25, 2013 http://www.frieze.com/issue/ article/postmodern-postmortem/ 9. Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon. Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London / New York: Routledge, 1999), 8. 10. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses, Women, Art and Ideology (London: Pandora, 1981). 11. Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch, Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: The Women’s Press, 1984), 2. 12. Contemporary English artist Freddie Robins’s confrontational It Sucks (2005) seems to pay homage to these attempts at subversion. Her handknit shawl of delicate Shetland lace is so pale that, were it not for its title, we would perhaps miss this modern purled voicing of discontent. She also plays against the traditional, comfortable and domestic associations of craft in Craft Kills (2002), a knitted St Sebastian figure pierced by knitting needles (the artist remarked soon after that knitting needles were now forbidden aboard aircraft for safety reasons and had acquired weaponry status). The work of Los Angeles artist Lisa Ann Auerbach relies on he same kind of tension between the mild-mannered associations of knitwear and political slogans. 13. The painting is an illustration of Thomas Hood’s poem “The Song of the Shirt” which in 1843 told the plight of the distressed and exploited needlewomen whose sad stories recounted in popular newspapers had captured the public’s imagination: Oh, Men, with Sisters dear! Oh, men, with Mothers and Wives! It is not linen you're wearing out, But human creatures' lives! Stitch — stitch — stitch, In poverty, hunger and dirt, Sewing at once, with a double thread, A Shroud as well as a Shirt R.B. Inglis et al., Adventures in English Literature (Toronto: W.J. Gage, 1952), 436. 14. Beth Harris, “The Works of Women are Symbolical” in The Victorian Seamstress in the 1840s, Ph.D. Dissertation (City University of New York, 1997), excerpted online at http:// www.victorianweb.org/gender/ugoretz1.html accessed October 1, 2012. See also the volume she edited, Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005). 15. Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 4-5. 16. Linda Nochlin, Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 147-58, chapter 7. 17. In 2004, the British crafts council presented an exhibition called “Boys who Sew.” The bland, descriptive aspect of this title was of course compensated by its explosive content. Unexpected as the possibility of male sewing might have sounded, how was it however that the subject should be ‘boys’ rather than ‘men’? Yinka Shonibare, Michael Raedecker, Neil MacGinnis, Hew Locke were among the artists featured in the show. The difficult titling of such an exhibition seems to point to the fact that textiles remain in the vanguard of feminist art practices, but with the post-
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feminist doctrine expanding to include issues to do with homosexuality and colonialism. And with Grayson Perry’s well-publicized transvestism, queerness and the inversion of gender actually underscore the latter's centrality. 18. A phenomenon of which the renewed interest in drawing at the very beginning of the twenty-first century was also exemplary. 19. This disenchantment with online communities has been commented upon by British artists Thomson & Craighead in their 2007 Google Tea Towels, actual tea towels embroidered with a series of authentic search engine results for the following Google requests: 'Please Help Me', 'Is Anybody there?', 'Please listen to me' and, 'Can you hear me?'. 20. Garth Johnson lists a series of craft websites in the chapter “Down the Tube: In Search of Internet Craft” in Cortney Heimerl and Faythe Levine eds, Handmade Nation, The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and Design (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), 30-35. Among the most popular, we can mention etsy.com (eBay for the indie craft community), extremecraft.com and redefiningcraft.com 21. Quoted by Cate McQuaid, “Stars and Stripes & Heavy Machinery” (Boston Globe, July 1, 2005). 22. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Craft Crisis: Handmade Art and Activism since 1970 (to be published by University of Chicago Press). 23. www.freddierobins.com, a site, the layout of which resembles a craft fair booth. 24. Cat Mazza quoted by Julia Bryan-Wilson, “The Politics of Craft” (New York: Modern Painters, February 2008): 81. 25. http://www.microrevolt.org/knitPro.htm accessed June 24, 2013. 26. The notion of deskilling has been applied both to economies that replace skilled labour with technologies and semi-skilled or unskilled workers, and to art, with Benjamin Buchloh describing the way twentieth-century art has persistently endeavoured to eliminate manual virtuosity. See, Benjamin Buchloh, Neo-Avant-Garde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2003), but also John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form (London: Verso, 2007) which explores the dialectic of skill-deskilling-reskilling. 27. The Fab Lab (Fabrication Laboratory) program of the CBA (The Center for Bits and Atoms, simply because Fab Lab researchers explore new ways of turning digital information, bits, into physical objects, atoms), http://fab.cba.mit.edu/ See the special of Wired, “The Lab That’s Inventing the Future” (London: Condé Nast, November 2012). 28. MCD special issue “Internet of Things” (Paris: Musiques et Cultures Digitales, January 2011): 67. See also http://hlt.media.mit.edu/?p=466 and http://computationaltextiles.blogspot.fr/ 29. “Craftwerk 2.0: New Household Tactics for the Popular Crafts”, Jönköpings Läns Museum, 19 September 2009-21 March 2010, curated by Clara Åhlvik and Otto von Busch.
ABSTRACTS
The history of craft and textile is a long and gendered one which contemporary artists have picked up on since the 1960s precisely because it tells such a long story. Today, the craftivism of the twentieth century has entered a new phase which also allows artists to reflect on their position both in a post-medium and a post-Internet era. What this article aims to do is to address the question of the contemporary art medium in the Internet age by looking more specifically at what could have been the practice most resistent to an online treatment: textile art. By analyzing
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works by American and British artists such as Michelle Charles, Tracey Emin, Cat Mazza or Liz Collins among others, we wish to demonstrate that it is precisely this very old and political history of craft as a tactical medium which allows for it to open up so many new media possibilities in the form of knitting videos, wiki-embroidery, fab lab textile creations, and more generally a reconciliation of the digital and the handmade.
INDEX
Keywords: contemporary art, craft, textile art, medium, media, post-medium era, craftivism, feminism, online art, material culture
AUTHOR
CHARLOTTE GOULD Charlotte Gould is senior lecturer in British art and civilization at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. Her research interest focuses on contemporary British art. She wrote her PhD thesis on the Young British Artists in 2003 and, in 2012, was co-editor of Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the present published by Ashgate.
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Bibliographical Essay
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Audio-Visual: Disembodied Voices in Theory
Anaïs Le Fèvre-Berthelot
1 The debates around film sound coincide with ontological discussions about the cinematic medium. The issue of the voice-over in this context is particularly telling as speech has often been seen as a threat to the purity of film. Yet, cinema has never been silent and, from the medium’s very inception, sound was always supposed to go along with moving images;1 and while synchronized film sound generalized almost ninety years ago, television has always been an audio-visual medium, where the voice plays a crucial part.
2 Compared with the flow of contributions centering on the image, the silence of academics on sound in audio-visual media was at times deafening. This visual emphasis of cinema studies may be the product of a visual bias in western culture. The primacy of the image in audiovisual media may also stem from the elusiveness of sound as an object. Tools are seemingly lacking for aspects of film sounds other than music, if only to describe sound itself. By nature hard to render in words (in everyday life, we frequently rely on visual or tactile metaphors to describe a sound), sound is usually considered for what it signifies or stands for rather than for itself. Another complication to the study of film sound, its history and its reception arises from the transient quality of sound, and from the lack of adequate tools for discussing the variety of audiences’ experience. By focusing on the treatment of a specific type of film sound –the disembodied voice– this essay sets out to determine how theorists have tried to overcome such obstacles, allowing traditional frontiers to shift between image, sound, and spectator in audiovisual media.
3 The topic of film sound is of course too vast to conduct an exhaustive review. The scope of this essay will be restricted to the asynchronous voice in fictional audiovisual production.2 The numerous studies on the transition from silent to sound film as well as the specific production linked to film music will therefore not be included in this review.3 The evolution of analyses of the disembodied voice is quite representative of the larger trends of the field. It underlines the issues at stake in the debates that surround the terminology of film sounds (should we speak of a “voice-over,” a “voice-
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off,” an “acousmatic voice,” or a “narrating voice”?). In addition, such analyses provide a good example of the difficulty in pinpointing the location of a sound (what is “in” and what is “off”?), and also throw light on the sound-image and sound-spectator relationships (how/from where is this voice heard?).
4 The field of film sound studies was built on the basis of discussions that followed the generalization of synchronized film sound in the 1930s. A brief overview of these debates is necessary to better situate and understand the subsequent approaches of the disembodied voice. Following this theoretical introduction, we will be able to distinguish three perspectives that have marked the approach of the asynchronous voice in audiovisual media and should be analyzed more precisely. Borrowing from semiology and narratology, an essentially descriptive approach first appears that raises issues of taxonomy. Heavily influenced by Lacanian theories and their later adaptations by feminist film theorists, a second approach emerges that introduces the figure of the subject and emphasizes the possible meanings of the disembodied voice. These approaches focus on sound and voice for what they signify rather than as signifiers. This limitation can be overcome by semio-pragmatic or cognitive approaches that take into account the experiences of audiences in their diversity. While most studies of sound in audio-visual media have concerned film, this final part will give us the opportunity to consider the specificity of the televisual medium and the way it has been tackled by some theorists.
Previously in Film Sound Studies
5 Classical sound theory was built on the premise that cinema was essentially a visual medium. Early critics therefore considered sound with skepticism when synchronized sound was introduced and generalized in the late 1920s. This original discussion of film sound informed the debate for almost fifty years. Opponents of film sound generally did not refuse sound as a whole, but thought that the introduction of speech threatened the purity of cinematic language. This original bias led directors and theorists to denounce synchronous speech as something that was at best redundant, and that at worst corrupted the purity of the image.4 Theoretician-directors such as René Clair5 or the Soviet directors Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov6 thus expressed their hostility towards the intrusion of synchronous speech in cinema. Some advocated a contrapuntal or asynchronous use of sound to preserve the power of the image. The fear that, with sound, cinema would be assimilated to filmed theater was also expressed by critics such as Rudolf Arnheim, who wrote in 1938 a severe criticism of talkies in “A New Laocoön: Artistic Composites and the Talking Films”. In this essay, he regrets the “impressive decline of artistic excellence” linked to the growing presence of “visually poor scenes full of dialogue.”7
6 When synchronized sound became an inescapable dimension of films, the debate moved from the definition of cinema as a visual medium to the defense of realist aesthetics. Although they viewed sound more positively as a potential source of added realism, later critics still fell victim to what Rick Altman calls the “ontological fallacy,” whereby cinema is essentially considered as a visual medium “and the images must be/ are the primary carriers of the film’s meaning and structure.”8 Traditional hierarchies favoring the image were still very strong in the first writings that took sound into account. Siegfried Kracauer’s chapter on “Dialogue and Sound” in his Theory of Film is
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thus an attempt at a theory of sound that posits sounds as part of material reality and, therefore, as intrinsically cinematic. However, by giving primacy to cinema’s visual nature, Kracauer fails to subvert traditional hierarchies: “For sound films to be true to the basic aesthetic principle, their significant communications must originate with their pictures.”9 In the same train of thought, the idea of sound as a source of added realism in cinema is also expressed by Jean-Louis Baudry in his essay, “Le Dispositif,” on the cinematic apparatus. Drawing a parallel between cinema and Plato’s cave, Baudry reduces sound to an element that helps make the “artifice as resembling as possible.”10 Written in the 1970s, this article shows the persistence of essentialist approaches of the medium.
7 Despite their shortcomings, such reconsiderations of film sound led to efforts to establish taxonomies describing the audio phenomenon. In 1935, Raymond Spottiswoode in his Grammar of the Film classified film sound into three categories “natural sound,” “speech” and “music,” and suggested that sounds be categorized according to their position on two scales: the “realistic—non-realistic” and the “parallel —contrastive.”11 He also defined different types of uses for each sound: realistic, selective, commentative, tonal, etc. Likewise, in 1946, Pierre Schaeffer, a French composer, filmmaker and theoretician, wrote a series of short articles on the non- visual element of cinema classifying film sound into three normative categories, from most to least realistic: noise, speech and music.12 Although such classifications were anchored in industrial practice as they coincide with the way the film soundtrack was mixed,13 the main criterion for categorization remained realism, which led to prescriptive conclusions about the use of sound and speech in films. Schaeffer eventually claims, like Kracauer and Baudry, that speech should be nothing but “an echo of reality.”14 In the end, this vocabulary, which still forms the basis for discussion today, is grounded in the supposedly unequal relation between sound and image. As a result, even though these seminal writings are landmark contributions to the field, their relevance is also somewhat limited by their authors’ normative perspective, which distinguishes between good and bad sound practices.
8 Ontological considerations about cinema progressively gave way to analyses of sound for and in itself. Technological innovations such as the Dolby system15 led to a surge of interest from the mid-1970s onwards and oriented critics towards an approach that took into account the physical, historical and semiological aspects of film sound.16 In a series of four seminal articles published in Les Cahiers du Cinéma,17 Claude Bailblé delineates issues that proved central in the following years, such as the role of technology, the centrality of voice, the history of film sound, etc. American and French scholars quickly followed Bailblé’s trail with the publication of the sixtieth issue of Yale French Studies18 on cinema sound. Presented by the editor Rick Altman as a “remedial” publication, this special issue sought to encourage academics to write more about sound. In this issue, the articles bring together historical and theoretical perspectives, from feminism and psychoanalysis to semiotics. This variety of approaches shows that sound had become a real object of study.
9 As illustrated by his concept of “audio-vision”, Michel Chion, the French composer, filmmaker, critic, teacher and scholar, aims to go beyond traditional hierarchies. In his various books published on the topic from 1982 onwards, Chion debates over the (in)equality of sound and images. His work underlines the specificity of film sound in relation to the film as a whole. He thus focuses on the combination of sound with other
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cinematic elements. The notion of “audio-vision” points to a perceptive practice induced by audiovisual media19 – that is, in Chion’s own words: the type of perception proper to the experience of film and television (…) wherein the image is the conscious focus of attention, but one to which the sound supplies at every moment a series of effects, sensations, and meanings.20 Chion’s argument that sight and hearing are not divisible eventually points to sound perception as a social construct.
10 The social nature of sound perception was taken into account by Rick Altman among others, notably in the reader he edited twelve years after the Cinema/Sound issue of Yale French Studies. Altman’s Sound Theory, Sound Practice21 was one of the major anthologies on the topic of film sound.22 The evolution of sound studies can be measured by comparing the contents of both publications edited by Rick Altman. The film sound specialist regrets that in Cinema/Sound “the sounds of silent films are hardly mentioned; sound technology is almost entirely neglected; no attention is paid to non- narrative, non-feature, or non-western films.”23 By contrast, in the 1992 anthology, Altman embraced a different approach, this time taking into account the context of production and reception of a film. To this end, the film is no longer to be considered as a text but as an event. This fruitful perspective allows the contributors to tackle issues of instability, materiality, multi-discursivity or mediation in relation to film sound. Altman has many followers including Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda who edited in 2009 a collection of essays on critical studies in film sound and underline that “part of our work as sound scholars entails locating these seemingly ‘natural’ relationships and exposing how they have been artificially constructed.”24
From the Text to the Audience: Issues of Taxonomy
11 The variety of approaches of film sound outlined above is echoed in the works of critics that revolve around the problematic status of the voice. Because it is so closely linked to speech, the voice-over has suffered from similarly negative reviews based on the same ontological fallacy: why tell what you can show?25 The first difficulty one encounters when wanting to talk about film sound is the lack of an adequate lexicon. The various attempts at a classification of film voice usually revolve around the vocabulary of narratology (“diegetic” and its multiple variations: homo-, extra-, meta-,etc.) and around the in/off/over triad. As a result of the interest for the location of the source of sound, naming the voice when it is not attached to a source visible on screen has become a key issue and a scholar writing on the topic cannot but justify the terms he or she has selected, as the lexicon inscribes the author within a particular tradition.26
12 In an article published in the 1973 issue of Ça/Cinéma, Daniel Percheron, provides a taxonomy in line with those offered by Kracauer, Spottiswoode or Schaeffer, as he tries to “differentiate between the iconic and diegetic functions of the sound-track, as well as to distinguish between music, words, and sound effects.”27 Percheron focuses on the “on/off” distinction as the basis for a more specific categorization. To illustrate this distinction, he isolates four types of “off” voice-over (interior monologue, unmarked “off” voice-over, voice-over on flashback, and commentary) which can be “specified by their relationships to 1) the diegesis; 2) synchronization with the image track; and 3) the mode of communication”28 Expanding on such categories, Percheron re-integrates
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all cinematic sounds into a synthetic diagram that underlines the complexity of off sound. Percheron’s model sustains a textual approach of the film, as he produces a hierarchy of film sounds concluding that “only the spoken word can constitute a highly significant system.”29
13 Still in a textual perspective, Sarah Kozloff, a film professor at Vassar, wrote a short book entitled Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film.30 After opening her book on a defense of voice-over and a history of this device, Kozloff uses narratological and semiological tools borrowed from Genette and Metz to investigate the narrative function of first and third-person narrating voice-overs. She thus defines four types of narrators depending on whether they are “framing” or “embedded” and “heterodiegetic” or “homodiegetic”. Kozloff’s primary concern is to determine who is speaking, from where and to say what. She insists that those different types of narrators are “always embedded within the image-maker’s discourse.”31 The paradox of the relationship between the voice-over narrator and the image-maker from the spectators’ point of view provides fruitful leads for further research on the topic, as Kozloff does not elaborate on this question. Despite its sometimes excessively textual approach of the medium, which tends to erase the physical dimension of the voice, the author suggests new, compelling perspectives of study such as a historical or a gender approach of voice-over. Textual approaches such as these stem from the desire to rehabilitate speech in cinema, but would benefit from a more diverse vocabulary that allows to consider film sounds as events.
14 Despite the influence of narratology in film studies, film sound studies really emerged as a discipline at a time when psychoanalytic and feminist theories were a major influence in film studies. Thus the field was influenced by those theories in the 1970s and 1980s. In La Voix au cinéma,32 published in 1982, Chion draws heavily from Lacanian theories, assimilating voice in cinema with a fetish and insisting on the power of voice. According to Chion, the voice that comes from nowhere takes us back to the early stage of life in utero. This analysis of the disembodied voice led Chion to theorize the “acousmaton,”33 this “sensory phantom constituted by a sound whose source is invisible.”34 Omnipotent and omniscient, the acousmaton, or acousmatic being, derives its power from the voice’s relation to something primal. Many writers on film sound attribute power to the disembodied voice.35 This is, however, a presumption that deserves closer examination and should not be taken for granted.
15 Influenced by psychoanalytic approaches, feminist theorists Mary Ann Doane and Kaja Silverman embraced this presumption and strove to delineate precisely different types of voice in cinema. In “The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” Doane relies on the criterion of space to distinguish between synchronous voice, voice- off (i.e. the character is outside the frame), interior monologue, voice-over in a flashback, and disembodied voice-over.36 In “Dis-Embodying the Female Voice,” Silverman’s categorization is built around the notion of “embodiment,” her point being that the female voice is always brought back to the female body (contrary to the male voice-over, which is more often detached from the body).37 This notion produces a taxonomy similar to that elaborated by Doane. The association implied by these authors of synchronous speech with feminization (and therefore disempowerment) through embodiment, as a result of patriarchal ideology, quickly shows its limits. The example of the female voice-over in Joseph Mankiewicz’s A Letter to Three Wives is thus dismissed by Silverman as an exception she does not bother to account for.38 The search
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for a taxonomy tending to cover all possible combinations may have led critics to lose sight of the specificity of each occurrence. The strict definition of each type of voice/ image combination becomes even more problematic when, to each combination, a meaning is applied with no consideration for the general context.
16 In other works, critics seem more aware of this risk and offer vocabularies that take into account the heterogeneity of the voices and the various effects they may have. Chion was one of the first to underline that even though film sound must be analyzed in relation to the images, a merely additive approach is not convincing. The notion of “audio-vision” describes the mutual influence of sound and image in the production of a new entity. In all his works on sound, Chion’s avowed aim has been to delineate the frontiers of the “study of heard sound.” The bilingual glossary he put online in 2012 sums up more than thirty years of research on the topic of sound. This text shows Chion’s systematic endeavor to create a specific taxonomy to “think and talk about film sound.”39 Yet, it also underlines the difficulty of creating a vocabulary specific to film sound. Michel Chion’s list of terms is long and full of neologisms that are not always easy to work with. Film scholars, when they refer to Chion, use only a small selection of his concepts. Alongside the “acousmaton,” the “tricircle” is one such concept. First introduced in Le Son au cinéma,40 the tricircle is a model for analyzing the status of sound in relation to the images. Chion calls this typology the “tricircle” as it can be modeled as a circle divided into three equal parts representing three zones: offscreen, off, and in. In the tricircle, the separations are as important as the zones, since they emphasize the necessity to think about the passage from one zone to another. This model has the advantage of emphasizing the permeability of film sound events, such categories being usually more efficient when they are flexible. Alain Boillat mentions the tricircle model in his study of the voice-over, in which he also insists on the continuum of functions that can be attributed to the voice.41
17 This instability and ever shifting status of film sound categories are essential. For this reason, Britta Sjogren chose in her book on the female voice in film to use the term “voice-off.”42 Her choice is influenced in part by the time she spent in France, but also by her desire to build an “analytic framework that allows for the unforeseen and for the contradictory exceptions enunciation produces.”43 The choice of an unstable term is in keeping with Sjogren’s project, namely to underline the paradox of the use of the female voice in cinema as a differentiating device. It is the very mutability of the voice-off that characterizes it—the way it slips free of the image, glides in and out of its attachments to its apparent body, moving from (in Doane and Silverman’s terms) voice-over to voice-off to embodied voice-over to badly synched sound and back again.44
18 Such flexible classifications tend to better take into account the spectators’ perception of film sound. Chion thus writes that the division of sound into three (flexible) types is “implicit and intuitive even for the non-theoretician spectator.”45
19 In his textbook on the analysis of film sequences, Laurent Jullier goes further in the focus on the point of audition of the spectators. He defines the voice-off as the voice of “speakers” or “lecturers” who speak from somewhere off-screen that does not belong to the diegesis.46 Jullier classifies these voices according to the way they address the spectators. His classification insists on the implied position attributed to the spectators, who can be positioned for instance as investigators, students, or confidante, depending on the way the speaker addresses them. Jullier then proceeds to determine eight
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functions of the voice that are among the most common in films. The voice can thus be phatic, conative, explicative, metanarrative, testimonial, evaluative, designative, or have a performative function (Jullier calls it the “genie function”) as in Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), when Addison De Witt has the power to freeze the image. Jullier’s categorization is in keeping with his approach of film through reception and with his emphasis on spectatorship. The various approaches of film sound since the 1970s have contributed to the evolution of the field, from normative classifications concerned with the purity of the cinematic medium and considering mostly the sound-image relationship in a realist perspective to more flexible taxonomies that try to take into account the variety of sound events and the specificity of the audience’s experience. Film sound and film voice have thus come to be acknowledged as complex phenomena in their own right.
Through the Acoustic Mirror and What Was Found There
20 The influence of psychoanalytic and feminist theories has been central in the development of film sound studies in the 1970s and 1980s.47 In his articles on film sound published in Les Cahiers du Cinéma, Claude Bailblé insists on the role of the voice in the birth of the subject.48 Michel Chion also underlines Lacan’s central role in creating the voice as an object of study.49 Angelo Restivo explains this centrality of the voice in Lacanian theory by saying that the voice is to be conceived as “correlative to the gaze; it is that which ‘sticks in the throat’ in relation to the signification of meaning.”50
21 Through the work of psychoanalysts like Guy Rosolato51 and Denis Vasse52 the voice has thus become the focus of some approaches of film sound. Both Rosolato and Vasse insist on the voice being related to the Mother and to a pre-Oedipal union. This perspective underlies Chion’s analysis of the acousmaton and his definition of the voice as a link, an extension of the umbilical cord. Lacanian theories also underlie Chion’s treatment of the female voice which he defines as an absolute as he writes: “The male scream outlines a territory, the female scream refers to the infinite, it swallows everything in itself, it is centripetal and fascinating, while the male scream is centrifugal and structuring.”53 About the evolution of psychoanalytic sound theory in the 1990s, Angelo Restivo writes that it can be summarized in one sentence: “Michel Chion interpreted by Slavoj Zizek.”54 By that, he means that Zizek appropriated a few of Chion’s terms, and notably the acousmaton, to ground them in Lacanian theory. According to Restivo, psychoanalytic film sound studies now combine close attention to formal details with ideological analyses.
22 In La Voix au cinéma, Michel Chion explains the surge of interest for the voice by the feminist focus on an object considered more fluid and less strict (and therefore less masculine) than writing. The voice was a territory of freedom women had to conquer. The interest of feminist critics for the notion of the fetish is most famously represented by Laura Mulvey’s essay on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”55 Most emblematic of a second generation of feminist film critics that tried to revise Laura Mulvey’s original model are Mary Ann Doane and Kaja Silverman whose books both tackle the role of the voice-over in classical cinema. Voice-over constitutes a productive area of investigation because of its equivocal status between fiction and the spectator’s world. Traditionally associated with femininity, voice can be used in film as a mark of
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authority. Feminist writers thus try to come to terms with the paradox of the female voice-over. Mary Ann Doane is the author of several articles on the topic of film sound56 and writes about the voice-over in The Desire to Desire, her book on the woman’s film.57 Doane explains that she takes psychoanalytical scenarios as models, “but they are models only insofar as they are symptomatic of a more generalizable cultural repression of the feminine.”58 Although Doane regrets that feminist theory “frequently and overhastily collapses the opposition between social and psychical subjects, closing the gap prematurely,”59 later feminist critics also failed to remedy this problem. In 1988, Kaja Silverman wrote The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema,60 yet another work of reference on the issue. The expression “acoustic mirror” was coined by Guy Rosolato and taken up by Silverman to comprehend “a range of ‘subjective’ issues, from castration, projection, disavowal, and fantasy to narcissism, melancholia, and the negative Oedipus complex.”61 Both Doane and Silverman insist on the link between the voice and the body, asserting that classical films “hold the female voice and body insistently to the interior of the diegesis, while relegating the male subject to a position of apparent discursive exteriority by identifying him with mastering speech, vision, or hearing.”62 In this perspective, the female voice-over becomes a paradox that is solved by systematizing the symptoms of patriarchy. Although Silverman criticizes Chion’s approach of the gendered voice as adopting “much of the symptomatic value of a Hollywood film”63 she would later find herself reproached with the very same flaw, notably by Rick Altman and Britta Sjogren.64
23 Rick Altman denounces those approaches as pertaining to the ontological fallacy formerly reserved to enemies of film sound.65 He criticizes the psychoanalytic approach to the voice in cinema as a “transhistoric proposal” and regrets that “an apparently ontological claim about the role of sound has been allowed to take precedence over actual analysis of sound’s functioning.”66 To some extent, Britta Sjogren fulfills Altman’s wish for “historically grounded claims and close analyses of particular films rather than ontological speculations that presume to cover all possible practices.”67 She studies the voice-off as “a marker of difference, an undeniable asset that marks the creative flex of contradiction that runs through the group of films examined […].”68 Although Sjogren relies on psychoanalysis to some extent, she tries to go beyond what can be seen as its hierarchical approach to gender and to the medium. By re-reading Vasse and Rosolato, Sjogren confronts Doane and Silverman’s pessimistic conclusion on the representation of women in cinema. According to Sjogren, because she focuses on demonstrating how the female subject is contained in films, Silverman deprives herself from the possibility of seeing a female subject. Silverman reproduces Chion’s bias by associating the feminine with the body and the image, while subjectivity is necessarily masculine. Sjogren also criticizes Chion for offering no theory “as to how this voice-off [the female voice-off used to represent oblivion] may function relative to the spectator.”69
24 Anchoring her feminist analysis of women’s voices in classical Hollywood cinema in the history of the technologies of sound reproduction, Amy Lawrence had, before Sjogren, developped a slightly different approach of the female voice in cinema.70 She sees in the ideology of sound reproduction a bias against the female voice that bore consequence for sound film. Lawrence thus dissects three obstacles opposed to the presence of women’s voices: “the myth of woman’s ‘naturally’ less powerful voice, technical deficiencies, and […] ‘cultural distaste’ for women’s voice.”71 Each of these “problems” is “a tangle of technological and economic exigencies, […] suffused with ideological
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assumptions about woman’s ‘place.’”72 Even though Lawrence still relies on feminist psychoanalytic approaches in her analyses of sequences, her thoughts on the mutual influence of technology and ideology relying on archives make her demonstration about the specificity of the female voice more convincing than Silverman’s work.
25 Theories about the potential meanings of the voice-over in film show their limits when they are not paired with contextual analyses. Too often in these theories, the voice is considered as text and its physical and historical dimensions are overlooked. The other limit faced by these approaches is their notion of the spectator as a unique ahistorical entity. Flexible categories that take the variety of sound events and the diversity of the audiences’ experiences into account therefore appear to be more productive.
Hearing Voices
26 Some critics have thus chosen to focus on the spectators’ experience of sound in relation with production, images, and cultural context. This approach has led to historical research on the evolution of recording technologies or the ancestors of the voice-over. Taking the spectators into account also allows one to focus on reception conditions as well as practices pertaining to film sound and to the voice. To consider the various factors at stake in the production and reception of film sound, it is necessary to combine approaches and methodologies. Rick Altman thus states: When we understood cinema as text, we borrowed our terminology and our methodology from previously established textual domains. An understanding of cinema as event requires new terms and models for a new type of multi- dimensional analysis.73 Altman defends an approach to cinema and film sound that considers “cinema events as the intersection of many separate lines of endeavor, throughout the production, reception, and cultural spheres.”74 In this perspective, the diversity of the spectators must be taken into account, and the specific psychoanalytic explanation of the spectator’s desire is not satisfactory. Focusing on film sounds is also a way not to forget that film is “always the product of a performance.”75 Rick Altman has paved the way to different analyses of film sound that link theory, aesthetics and history.
27 In one of the few monographs on the voice-over in cinema, Jean Châteauvert adopts a semio-pragmatic perspective76 to define the voice-over narrator and identify the elements that weigh on our perception of this voice.77 In his study, Châteauvert applies a new narratological model to cinema. He mentions the “listening instruction” implied by the spectators’ desire to see the film. Indeed, Châteauvert sees the narrative structure as a device to direct our understanding of the film –one that, he insists, would not work without the spectator’s personal encyclopedia of references necessary to make sense out of a sound. The dynamic relation between the contents of the film and the conditions of reception is essential to a semio-pragmatic approach.
28 Alain Boillat expands on the historical approach first sketched out by Châteauvert and Sarah Kozloff, as well as relies on Altman’s work in his important research on the history of the voice-over. In Du bonimenteur à la voix-over, he analyzes early practices of orality, storytelling and commentary linked to images.78 Throughout his book, he is conscious of the necessity to consider the specificity of recorded film sound. Thanks to the definition of a continuum going from “attraction-voice” to “narration-voice” (from the voice that catches our attention to the voice that tells a story), the author opens
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new perspectives on the relations between audio and visual phenomena, thus discussing key notions in film studies. Although Boillat’s discourse focuses on cinema, his conclusion mentions the new uses of the voice-over and outlines potential areas that could be studied thanks to his theoretical framework. He thus states that: dubbing, post-synchronization of animated films and voice-mail belong to the action-voice model, while radio hosting, and advertising correspond to the attraction-voice model, mainstream films and video-games resort to narration- voice, while other productions (trailers, websites, etc.) are somewhere in between the latter two.79
29 In a pragmatic perspective, François Jost briefly outlined three ways to study television sound in its own right.80 The first is theoretical and implies analyzing the audience’s new skills as well as the way sounds work across various TV genres. The second approach is historical and aims at showing the shift from intermediality to intergenericity. Finally, the third perspective is aesthetic and seeks to determine how television sounds, speech, and music are paired with images. These three approaches aim at comprehending the way television sound flux requires specific enunciative and cognitive skills from the audience. In a brief analysis of American television series as symptoms of our societies, Jost describes the use of the voice-over device in recent popular series as the result of the growing importance of intimacy.81 Although the size of this latter book prevented the author from following the paths outlined above, the study of the voice-over in television series would certainly benefit from the perspectives sketched out by Jost.
30 Laurent Jullier is the main representative of French film researchers adopting a cognitivist perspective that could correspond to the first path described by Jost. Jullier’s approach combines different tools and goes further than Châteauvert in his analysis of reading processes implied by filmic and televisual narratives. Although his book, Les Sons au cinéma et à la télévision: précis d’analyse de la bande-son, treats television and cinema somewhat interchangeably, one difference he does point out is that in television a-filmic sounds are more common and lead to a blending of the three cinematic spaces (on, off, over).82 A few years later, Jullier developed this analysis in a paper on speech and sound in television from a cognitivist perspective.83 In this paper, Jullier distinguishes between two modes of television spectatorship: being “in front” (television comes across as a mere “screen” whose contents do not engage the viewer’s attention fully); and being “inside” (television appears as a “window” whose contents engage the viewer’s attention and allow for identification or even interaction). Jullier relies on cognitive psychology to study the auditory position of the spectator in the TV- as-window model. He shows that some categories used for the analysis of cinema sound are not as productive when applied to television: it is the case, for instance, of the oppositions between on and off or diegetic and extra-diegetic. Jullier also details the technological specificities of TV sound, which is generally smoother and conceals spatiality to erase the off-space. Thus, the way voices are recorded and mixed on television encourages vertical causality (the illusion that sound and image, because they are synchronous, have a causal relationship). Finally, while television voices do have power (owing to their combination of two models, that of the storytelling mother and the lecturer), Jullier insists that this power should not be overestimated. The power of the voices, he explains, stems essentially from the power of language.
31 These new perspectives underline the evolution of the study of sound in audiovisual media since the generalization of synchronized film sound. The rise of audiovisual
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media other than film and television, and the generalization of the use of the voice by such media reinforce the need for theoretical tools that apprehend the audio- phenomenon in relation with the contexts of production and reception.
32 In writings about film sound, it has been customary to lament the absence of research on the subject. However, this bibliographical overview of the discussions over voice in cinema shows that there is a growing and diverse literature on the subject. The focus on the asynchronous voice allows to touch on the various debates about taxonomy and theoretical perspectives that have stirred the academic community. From the generalization of synchronized sound to the advent of a new century marked by the emergence of new audiovisual phenomena, critics have followed a movement from film as text to audience reception.
33 First, film critics tried to assess the contribution of sound to film. After the first denunciations of synchronous speech as a redundant tool that threatened the purity of the medium, theorists tried to define sound in relation with the images. Although they usually preserved a hierarchy that favored the visual, their first attempts at a taxonomy pointed to film sound as a possible object of research. When film sound studies really developed from the late 1970s onwards, the first issue was with developing an appropriate vocabulary. The English language’s distinction between on, off and over, sometimes seemed insufficient to critics who multiplied the categories to talk about sound, sometimes at the risk of obscuring discussion. The issue of taxonomy has been further complicated for French critics who have to deal with an imprecise translation of voice-over into voix-off. Nonetheless, the solution retained by most is to keep the traditional triad while insisting on the porosity of each category. Yet, it is important to keep in mind that in the area of film sound studies, the preference for certain terms may be linked to particular approaches. As film sound studies developed, they followed the theoretical path trodden by film studies in general. Thus, the psychoanalytic approach was adopted by several critics with even more enthusiasm when they chose to focus on the voice. Feminist scholars, who in the aftermath of Mulvey were concerned with issues of fetishism in film, saw in the female voice in cinema a topic that would demonstrate the patriarchal nature of the cinematic apparatus. Their contributions to the field remain landmarks for anyone studying the voice in audiovisual media. Despite the surge of interest for film sound that went hand in hand with such approaches, they were criticized for essentializing cinema through their lack of historical perspective and by not taking into account the variety of audience members.
34 With the coming of age of film sound studies, new perspectives have emerged. Scholars felt the need to combine different methodologies to comprehend the various facets of films as events. History, aesthetics, narratology, semiology, pragmatics and cognitive sciences are some of the approaches theoreticians have associated to take into account the particular contexts that influence the production and reception of film sound. They have also led to the analysis of the specificity of television sound. Such approaches have developed tools that can be applied to other audiovisual media, where the power of the voice is not to be underestimated.84
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NOTES
1. On this topic, see Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 2. For an overview about voice in films not restricted to the voice over and with an emphasis on the physical aspect of sound, see Martin Shingler, “Fasten Your Seatbelts and Prick Up Your Ears: The Dramatic Human Voice in Film,” Scope 5 (2006). 3. In sound studies, the two most developed areas of research concern film music and the transition from silent to sound film. For a bibliography about these topics see Claudia Gorbman, "Bibliography on Sound in Film," Yale French Studies 60 (1980). 4. Extracts from many of these early writings on film sound can be found in Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, eds, Film Sound: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 5. René Clair, "The Art of Sound," in Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, Film Sound: Theory and Practice. 6. Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov, "A Statement," in Weis and Belton, Film Sound: Theory and Practice. 7. Rudolf Arnheim, "A New Laocoön: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film," in Weis and Belton, Film Sound: Theory and Practice.
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8. Rick Altman, "Introduction: Four and a Half Film Fallacies," in Rick Altman, ed, Sound Theory, Sound Practice (New York; London: Routledge, 1992), 14. 9. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 103. 10. Jean-Louis Baudry, "Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité," Communications, no. 23 (1975): 61. The original reads: "en complétant la séance de projection par l’audition, en montrant en quelque sorte la nécessité de toucher le plus grand nombre de sens possibles, en tout cas les deux principaux, il paraît bien répondre à la nécessité de redoubler la réalité de la manière la plus exacte possible, de rendre son artifice autant qu’il se peut ressemblant." 11. Raymond Spottiswoode, A Grammar of the Film: An Analysis of Film Technique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), 48-49. 12. Pierre Schaeffer, "L’Elément non visuel au cinéma (1): analyse de la "bande-son"," La Revue du Cinéma, no. 1 (1946); "L’Elément non visuel au cinéma (2): conception de la musique," La Revue du Cinéma, no. 2 (1946); "L’Elément non visuel au cinéma (3): psychologie du rapport vision- audition," La Revue du Cinéma, no. 3 (1946). 13. On industrial production of film sound see Dominique Avron, “Remarques sur le travail du son dans la production cinématographique standardisée,” in Dominique Noguez, ed, Cinéma: théorie, lectures (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978). 14. On a side note, Schaeffer nevertheless proved quite forward-looking in his calls for film scholars and psychologists to work on sensations. 15. On this topic see Gianluca Sergi, The Dolby Era: Film Sound in Contemporary Hollywood (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004). 16. Some pioneers defended the importance of film sound earlier, thus foreshadowing the trend of the following decades. See for instance François Chevassu, “Le cinéma est sonore”, La Revue du cinéma/Image et son, no. 215 (1968). 17. Claude Bailblé, "Programmation de l’écoute (1)," Les Cahiers du cinéma no. 292 (1978); "Programmation de l’écoute (2)," Les Cahiers du cinéma no. 293 (1978); "Programmation de l’écoute (3)," Les Cahiers du cinéma no. 297 (1979); "Programmation de l’écoute (4)," Les Cahiers du cinéma no. 299, (1979). 18. Rick Altman, ed, Cinema/Sound, vol. 60, Yale French Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). 19. Michel Chion, L’Audio-vision: son et image au cinéma, 2nd ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1997). 20. Michel Chion, "100 concepts pour penser et décrire le cinéma sonore,"
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26. Most English-speaking researchers choose the term voice-over as a generic term. In French, the traditional expression “voix off” tends to be replaced by “voix over,” “off” being reserved for a voice whose source is in the diegesis but outside the frame. 27. Daniel Percheron and Marcia Butzel, "Sound in Cinema and its Relationship to Image and Diegesis," Yale French Studies, no. 60 (1980): 16. 28. Percheron and Butzel, "Sound in Cinema," 20. 29. Percheron and Butzel, "Sound in Cinema," 23. 30. Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 31. Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers, 45. 32. Michel Chion, La Voix au cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, Éditions de l’Étoile, 1982). 33. Chion’s term of the "acousmaton" comes from the word "acousmatique," which was revived by Pierre Schaeffer in the 1950s. Here it is carefully defined and has been taken up by various critics. 34. Michel Chion, "100 concepts pour penser et décrire le cinéma sonore,"
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que le cri de l’homme est centrifuge et structurant. Le point de cri est comme le point de butée des mots, la sortie de l’être." 54. Restivo, "Recent Approaches to Psychoanalytic Sound Theory," 137. 55. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, no. 3 (1975). 56. Doane, "The Voice in the Cinema." Mary Ann Doane, "Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing," in Elisabeth Weis and John Belto, eds, Film Sound: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 57. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 58. Doane, The Desire to Desire, 21. 59. Doane, The Desire to Desire, 8. 60. Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror. 61. Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, ix. 62. Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, ix. 63. Kaja Silverman, "A Voice to Match: The Female Voice in Classic Cinema," Iris 3, no. 1 (1985): 60. 64. For a thorough criticism of Silverman’s Acoustic Mirror, see Sjogren, Into the Vortex, who claims that Silverman remains trapped by a visual bias that sees “the image as primary and the voice as, in a sense, its prisoner” (14). 65. Altman, "Introduction." 66. Altman, "Introduction," 39. 67. Altman, "Introduction," 39. 68. Sjogren, Into the Vortex, 3-4. 69. Sjogren, Into the Vortex, 61. 70. Amy Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991). 71. Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus, 29. 72. Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus, 32. 73. Rick Altman, "The Material Heterogeneity of Recorded Sound," in Altman, Sound Theory, Sound Practice, 15. 74. Altman, Sound Theory, Sound Practice, 7. 75. Altman, Sound Theory, Sound Practice, 9. 76. The semio-pragmatic approach is defined by Roger Odin as a heuristic model that assumes a text is produced in a two-fold process: in the space of production and in the space of reception. This approach was outlined in Odin’s PhD dissertation published in 1982 “Approche de la relation images-sons en termes de communication”, L’Analyse sémiologique des films. PhD dissertation, EHESS. It is explained in further details in De la fiction (Bruxelles: De Boeck, 2000). 77. Jean Châteauvert, Des mots à l’image: la voix over au cinéma (Québec; Paris: Nuit blanche éditeur; Méridiens Klincksieck, 1996). 78. Boillat, Du bonimenteur à la voix-over. 79. Boillat, Du bonimenteur à la voix-over, 498. The original reads: "Ainsi les régimes vocaux identifiés dans ce travail permettent à mon sens de distinguer les principaux domaines d’application de la voix-over, ainsi que des procédés plus spécifiques à l’intérieur de ceux-ci: le doublage, la post-synchronisation de films d’animation et les boîtes vocales relèvent de la voix- action, l’animation radio et la publicité de la voix-attraction, les films industriels, CD-ROM et jeux vidéo de la voix-narration, alors que d’autres productions se situent entre ces deux dernières (les bandes-annonces, les sites Web, etc.)." 80. François Jost, "Un continent perdu: le son à la télévision," in Dominique Nasta and Didier Huvelle, ed., Le Son en perspective: nouvelles recherches/New Perspectives in Sound Studies (Bruxelles: P.I.E. - Peter Lang, 2004).
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81. François Jost, De quoi les séries américaines sont-elles le symptôme ? (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2011), 37. 82. Laurent Jullier, Les Sons au cinéma et à la télévision: précis d’analyse de la bande-son (Paris: Armand Colin, 1995), 111. 83. Laurent Jullier, "Etre devant/Etre dedans. Son et parole à la télévision d’un point de vue cognitiviste," in Guillaume Soulez, ed, Téléparoles (Séminaire INA/Université de Metz, 2000). 84. See Graeme Harper, Ruth Doughty and Jochen Eisentraut, eds, Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: An Overview (New York: Continuum, 2009). This impressive volume of over 800 pages includes almost fifty essays, whose diversity testifies to the dynamism of the field. These notably include a contribution on music in videogames, another on the semiotics of the voice, one on the figure of the sound designer, several essays on sound in television (fiction, reality-TV, news…) as well as many more on the various uses of sound in cinema.
ABSTRACTS
After a survey of the major critical trends since the generalization of synchronized film sound, this bibliographical essay sets out to delineate the way film sound studies have developed around issues of taxonomy, meaning, and reception. Focusing on the treatment of the disembodied voice by various theorists, three trends can be identified: borrowing from semiology and narratology, an essentially descriptive approach first emerges that creates a new vocabulary to talk about sound and analyze the links between sound and image. A second approach emphasizes the possible meanings of the disembodied voice, a trend heavily influenced by Lacanian theories and their later adaptations by feminist film theorists. Finally, some researchers have opted for semio- pragmatic or cognitive approaches that take into account the experience of audiences. These different approaches underline the way film sound has evolved as an object of study, to be considered as a complex and flexible phenomenon. They also have developed tools that can be applied to other audiovisual media in which the role of sound and the voice should not be underestimated.
INDEX
Keywords: film sound, voice-over, audiovisual, reception, television
AUTHOR
ANAÏS LE FÈVRE-BERTHELOT Anaïs Le Fèvre-Berthelot is a doctoral student at the Paris 3 - Sorbonne Nouvelle University. She is currently working on women’s voices in contemporary American TV series.
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Interview
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Broken Beyond Repair: Warren Spector on the History of Video Games
Warren Spector and Carl Therrien
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This interview was conducted by email in August 2013.
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1 In 2010, I received a postdoctoral research grant from FQRSC to study the history of video games.1 Usually you get this type of grant to go work in an established research center. While preparing the grant proposal, I discovered that there are not many permanent facilities relevant to this kind of research in academia. The rules had to be bent somewhat; my project would lead me to many different research centers in North America and Europe. I visited the last edition of the traveling exhibit Videotopia in Tallahassee (FL), the Computerspielmuseum in Berlin, the ViGaMus in Rome, and many other exhibits in the Silicon Valley area.2 As you play the original arcade machines in Videotopia or at the California Extreme yearly gathering, you cannot help but wonder: what about all these games I cannot play right now? All these exhibits and the many journalistic books on the history of video games… what kind of access did the curators / journalists have? When access was impossible, did they rely on the same unreliable information – and sometimes flat out distortions – on the popular web databases that I had to rely on so often as a young game scholar?
2 This opening paragraph might sound pessimistic. It is not meant to minimize in any way the tremendous research done by journalists, the thoughtful attention of numerous curators to come up with engaging exhibits – let alone the emergence of many video game museums – or the dedication of the gamer community in itself, who has been more proactive than any other audience in the preservation of artefacts and development of accurate databases. But for all the complete ROM digital game sets being archived, all the relevant magazines being painstakingly scanned page by page, and all the information being entered in major data hubs such as Mobygames or Arcade History, chunks of this culture are dying on a daily basis. Preservation efforts have to be accelerated and solutions put forth before thousands of video games become broken beyond repair.
3 During this research project, I had the opportunity to meet many scholars concerned with the preservation and presentation of video game history. Espen Aarseth (IT Copenhagen), Raiford Guins (Stony Brook University), Henry Lowood (Stanford Libraries) and myself had the idea to create the History of Games international conference3 in order to lay out the methodological problems, share insight and solutions, and altogether to stimulate research on the history of games. Not that academia is de facto better or even necessary in this process. But it can play a decisive role in gathering interest and resources, as well as legitimize a culture even when the industry responsible for the cultural production does not see value in it. To our surprise, some key figures manifested their interest in our project before we could even dream of implicating the industry. This interview came about thanks to the generosity of Warren Spector, who agreed to participate in the conference and who is deeply concerned with the history of video games.
4 The History of Games committee divided the conference into three tracks: telling history (creating narratives out of the large amount of relevant data, or museum exhibits that ‘show and tell’ the history of games), working with history (doing archeological research on older games and relevant documents, material and digital preservation) and building history (being aware of methodological issues and the
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cultural fascinations that dictate how any historian works and constructs history). In the following contribution, I will present some concerns about these issues, along with some of the work being done to address them. The interview with Warren Spector will shed further light on the history of games and the challenges faced by young historians.
5 Thanks to postdoctoral funding, I have spent several weeks exploring the Cabrinety collection at Stanford Libraries, which includes over 15,000 titles. The collection is so large that it is stored off-campus; you have to page the boxes online to access their content the next day at the Special Collections desk of the Green Library. The content of those boxes had not been given extensive archival treatment at the time. Moreover, one can only access the game packaging and manual inside the library; there are no set protocols to experience the software on the actual platforms. This limited access can be justified easily with preservation goals. Notwithstanding these limitations, the Cabrinety collection gave me more accessibility than most game scholars out there could ever dream of.
6 Stanford is not the only institution that can provide first-hand access to a massive collection of games and relevant paratextual elements. The Strong Museum of Play started collecting video game artefacts in 2006; the operation – 50,000 games strong and growing – is now led by The International Center for the History of Electronic Games. As we learned at the conference, Jon-Paul Dyson was able to help Brenda Romero when she stumbled upon Sirtech design documents for sale on eBay. Romero’s delivery of the anecdote – of a prized game designer finding her legacy dilapidated to the highest bidder – really made the absurd nature of the situation come forward, almost to comical effect. But comedy soon gave way to the painfully obvious: the video game industry, for the most part, has no memory.
7 Again, not everything is doom and gloom. Since 1994 in France and more recently at the Library of Congress in the United States, publishers have to give physical copies of their games to complete the copyright process.4 In Montreal, the local WB Games, Eidos and Electronic Arts studios have started to give copies of their games to the national archives. Old timers like Taito and Nintendo are making efforts to salvage circuit boards and design documents.5 However, the industry is facing a very difficult period, with the exploding costs of triple-A production and marketing, and the commercial failure of more than 80% of games.6 The sector is under tremendous stress. Company archives are not a big concern in a context where everybody is working overtime to get the game out on time. The industry needs extensions: more storage (infrastructures to store the artefacts), more processing power (individuals dedicated to the process of corporate memory), and more financial power (funds, in a context where even large corporations struggle to cut it even or make a profit). In the meantime, researchers working on the history of games will have a hard time finding company archives to conduct their studies.
8 One can only tell as much as one can work with. Accessibility is going to get worse before it gets better. Many games and systems are already lost or unlikely to be found in a functional state. Games that were distributed on magnetic media (cassettes, floppy discs) are failing as this piece is being written, and the early generations of CD-ROM drives and discs are also quite fragile. While the ROM chips used in NES and Genesis cartridges are likely to last much longer, the availability of the console itself becomes problematic; many fail within 10 years of operation, and replacement parts will become
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harder to find as technology continues to evolve. Maybe hardware makers could be convinced to rebuild and redistribute hardware and software for historical purposes? One could observe that these corporations can “pass away” too.
9 At this point, digital preservation might appear as the obvious solution. Indeed, copies of CD and cartridge data are readily available, with high standards and procedures established by the underground preservation community.7 Many great emulators exist for a vast array of older systems. However, these tremendous contributions also bring new complications to the table. ROM digital copies cannot be transferred easily to the original support of the game and run on the original hardware. Most emulators do not reproduce the hardware processes of older consoles perfectly (for lack of programming time and / or efficiency). Distortion in the execution of the games on these virtual platforms occurs more frequently than the typical researcher can detect; how could it be noticed if the source was never played or played a long time ago? Since the whole arcade paradigm of video game design relied on split second timing and twitching abilities, these issues might not be as trivial as they sound. If enemies or projectiles start moving at even slightly different speeds, the gameplay experience might be altered significantly.
10 Available traces determine the history that can be told. Concurrently, contemporary fascinations inevitably dictate what should be discarded, and what should be preserved. As historians of media, we are fascinated by the progressive technical mastery and the phenomenal industrial expansion associated with video games. Our timelines are populated with first instances of major technological breakthroughs, platforms, studios, corporations, and with a few salient great-grandfather figures. Even if the glorifying story of video games appears to build itself under our very eyes, stories are never just reported; storytellers build it more or less consciously. Many books and exhibits on the topic still use techno-industrial period markers: the ever convenient platform wars, where complex machinery is reduced to a meaningless bit-rating; the first major commercial success, the crash, and the arrival of major corporations.8 The accumulation of technology and the expansive nature of the industry necessitate so much attention that one is left to wonder what there is to say about the actual experience of playing games.9 How has play culture evolved over time? Digital Play (Kline et al., 2003) and Donovan’s Replay (2010) already have some answers for us that go beyond the contemporary fascination with casual vs. hardcore gamers. On top of preserving information about technology and industrial growth, we need to find ways to preserve the experience of game playing and its evolution in order to provide a more engaging portrait of the medium’s history.
11 In his foreword to Dillon’s The Golden Age of Video Games (2011), Ted Dabney wrote: There is a lot of controversy over who invented the first ‘video game’ […] Some say it was Ralph Baer while others say it was Nolan Bushnell. The truth is, it was Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray in 1947. The real question should be ‘Who created the video game industry? Nolan and I get the credit for that one. (2011: ix)
12 Faced with such a self-assured statement, comforting us with ever more specific facts about techno-geniuses and industrial grandeur, I would like to oppose the following: what would be the real question(s) if we asked game players, designers, scholars, critics? What would they have to say about the history of video games? I had the opportunity to reflect on these issues with someone who is a little bit of all of that (and a lot of some of that): Warren Spector.
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13 Spector has played a major role as a designer and producer in many development studios since the 1980s. He was part of the original “game canon” committee put forth by Henry Lowood and took part in the first international conference on the history of games. He has been actively trying to make the video game industry pay more attention to the preservation problems that lie ahead. His experience as a film scholar also makes him a relevant interlocutor to discuss the current academic concern of how video game history is told.
CT: The video game industry right now is risky business, with a vast majority of games not recouping the initial investment. At the same time, institutions such as museums and universities are under financial stress. In this context, where do you think the resources necessary for game preservation should come from? WS: Wow, I wish I knew! So far, it seems as if a lot of the money is coming from angel investors – people in and out of the game business or the game playing community who care enough to donate money, materials and time. For now, as you say, funding is a problem everywhere. All we can do is keep beating the bushes to flush out potential investors. Frankly, one of my biggest frustrations is how anti-philanthropic many moneyed developers are. There’s money for flashy cars and mansions but not for charity – or, in our case, games preservation. That’s just sad.
CT: Do you see the “monetization of retro gaming” through official channels (i.e. buying virtual copies of older games on digital distribution platforms) as a viable solution to these financial problems? WS: I don’t see any possibility of large scale retro game monetization… no… For starters, I doubt there’s a big enough audience to provide enough money to provide sufficient funding to solve financial problems. Having said that, I don’t think the dollars and cents of retro-monetization strategies are the real problem. The real problem is that the publishers who own trademarks and copyright will never let it happen. You’d think they wouldn’t care about properties and games they haven’t exploited in years, but you’d be wrong. My experience of trying to resurrect old properties can be summed up in a single sentence. No publisher has ever said it explicitly, but their message is clear – “If I own it, it has value.” They act as if that were gospel and won’t let loose of much, even in the service of a good cause. Of course, that’s just been my experience and my observation. I could be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. But, regardless, the critical element in monetizing preservation by making old games available depends on finding the rights holders (often more difficult than you might expect) and then convincing them to let loose of things they don’t want to risk losing.
CT: Technologies die, corporations too. Most of the video game hardware and storage media will become broken beyond repair, and unlikely to be remanufactured in their original form in the future. What are your thoughts on emulation? Do you consider the translation of classics on newer platforms, with different audiovisual technologies and interfaces, a travesty of the original experience? Considering the great disparity of these technologies to
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begin with, in the world of personal computers at the very least, do you think such attachment to the original experience is illusory in itself? WS: There are really a few questions here. Before I get to them, let me agree with your “broken beyond repair” comment. Hardware and media deteriorate and the ability to repair it becomes more and more difficult with the passage of time. Emulation seems like a great answer. I’m a huge supporter. But I’m also a fan and a history buff, not a rights holder who sees emulation as just a way to compromise and, possibly, lose the rights to properties the courts perceive as insufficiently protected. Emulation should be a bigger part of the preservation equation, but I fear it won’t be. Now, to your second question – translation of classics to new platforms – there are two ways to approach that option. As a player, if not as a purist or historian, I’m a fan of both. First, there’s the option of recreating the look, sounds and feel of the original. That’s terrific. It’s hard to imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to do that (other than the publishers) Second, there’s the idea of updating old games – updating graphics, sound, UI. As a player, I love this, too. It doesn’t seem like much of a preservation solution, but it’s a ton of fun when you get your hands on an old favourite and see it dressed in modern garb.
CT: You’ve spoken fondly of the Disney archives and the creative opportunities it opened for your team at Junction Point working on Epic Mickey. You have clearly expressed the benefits of such in-house company archives. Why do you think other studios are, for the most part, still oblivious to such benefits? The unstable nature of the industry also seems responsible for the destruction of relevant material (Vivendi didn’t care for the Sierra archives when they acquired the studio, for instance). How could we incite the industry to realize the commercial value – let alone the cultural value! – of preserving its own legacy? And beyond in-house archives, do you think it is possible that more relevant artefacts (design documents, source code) would be given to preservation institutions in such a secretive and competitive creative culture? WS: I’m pretty comfortable saying the Disney Archives – the most remarkable collection of its kind that I know of – exists only because Walt Disney himself wanted to preserve his, and his company’s history. I’ve spent most of my life fighting the urge to give in to the “great man” theory of history, but in this case, I think it’s the right answer. Whether from ego or pragmatism, Walt saw the value in preserving history, so history was preserved. I’m certain there was more to the story than that, but, you know, when the legend becomes the fact, print the legend and all… Why don’t we see similar things happening in video games? I guess you could say we don’t have any great men. I don’t really believe that, of course, but we do have a lot of people and companies that are so narrowly focused on what comes next, in a medium where everything changes every five years or so, thanks to hardware advances no other medium has had to deal with, they don’t think about history much. In that way, they… we… are not so different from most of the non-Disney folks in Hollywood. Sure, David O. Selznick and Gloria Swanson were packrats, but folks like John Ford and others didn’t see any value in the ephemera associated with their work. They tossed it. Frankly, I think it’s going to take a lot of work and an ongoing effort to get video game companies to see the value in the past, to see that the expense associated with
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preservation is a good way to spend money that could be spent on new product. I’m not sure developers and publishers will ever see the value of internal archives. And I’m not sure it’s sensible to encourage them to do so – we want access to materials – limited access as I already said, and if the developers and publishers are in control of historical materials we’ll have to deal with very limited access. Worse, in some ways, we’ll have to deal with inconsistent preservation approaches. And can you imagine the chaos of each company cataloguing materials in whatever manner they choose? It’d be crazy. The real answer, I think, is to bug the developers and publishers to endow regional centers of preservation and to donate materials. In that way, materials could be catalogued and preserved in a consistent manner. Man, am I a dreamer! Pardon me while I put my cynical mask back on.
CT: As a producer for many major projects at Origin Systems and Ion Storm, you had the opportunity to overview all the aspects involved in the existence of a video game: technological research and development, game design, marketing strategies, etc. From your experience, what documents / artefacts generated during these processes are the most important to preserve? WS: My varied experience notwithstanding, I think you’re asking a question no one can really answer today. There’s simply no way of telling what future generations of fans, scholars, historians and critics will find interesting, necessary or important. As a grad student studying the history and meaning-making strategies of television, I found the old show, Happy Days, the most interesting program to work with. I doubt many people would view Happy Days as great art. I did. My Masters Thesis was on Warner Brothers cartoons. What’s important about that? But that’s all high-level stuff – important, but not exactly what you were asking. You want to know what materials are most important to preserve? I’ll tell you. All of them. If you’re studying the evolution of design, you want and need design documents, emails, test data… If you’re studying the marketing of games, you need box designs, ad mockups, maybe even t-shirts (or Oswald the Lucky Rabbit ears!)… If you’re studying the business of games, you want budgets, schedules and so on. And if you’re studying the work of a single developer, you might want his or her report cards and elementary school drawings! There is no such thing as the “most important” thing to preserve. Preserve as much of it as possible, I say.
CT: Can you give us a concrete example of documents used in the production of some of the major games you worked on that would have been especially relevant to preserve and study? WS: You’re really not going to let me off the hook on this “most important thing to preserve” thing, are you? Okay, I’ll answer, but bear in mind that all you’re getting here is what I think is most interesting… right now… given my biases and interests. That having been said, I always think it’s interesting (and fun) to look not just at a single concept or design document, but at a series of them, over time. Seeing how a game evolves over time is fascinating. Frankly, it’s fascinating even when you’re in the middle of the development process that forces an evolution of ideas. How do you adjust to budget changes, release date changes, team capabilities and interests
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without losing the spark, the core idea that made you want to make a game in the first place? Specifically, from my own work, I guess I’d pick Deus Ex. That game changed in pretty much every detail over time, thanks to team input, engine constraints, team interests, trying things that ended up not working… But for all the changes, the finished game reflected with almost uncanny precision the original vision of a game I imagined five years before we shipped. To get the full picture, you’d need to access schedules, recruiting paperwork, emails, concept art and builds. But you could at least get a tiny, view-through-a-crack-in-the-wall view of how the process of change affected Deus Ex by looking at the dozens of design document drafts.
CT: In another life, you have studied to become a film critic and have taught classes on cinema. Cinema studies have developed critical and theoretical readings of the medium’s history, as we can see in the academic works of Noel Burch, Tom Gunning, Youssef Ishagpour and André Gaudreault among many others. Similar work is emerging when it comes to the history of games. For instance, Digital Play (Kline et al., 2003) puts emphasis on the concept of “militarized masculinity”; Tristan Donovan’s Replay (2010) tries to delineate aesthetic schools such as the French touch and English surrealism. What do you think of such readings of history? WS: I think we’re still very much in the early days of games criticism. We live in a world of reviews, purely functional and aimed at enthusiasts, and, at the same time, in a world of hardcore, academic, no-one-but-academics-can-understand-or-care work. What we’re lacking is a more mainstream, accessible body of critical thought about games. For my money, we need a lot less Noel Burch, Peter Wollen and Christian Metz and a lot more Andrew Sarris, Robert Warshow, James Agee, Manny Farber and David Thomson10. Academics tend to talk only to each other, in language that seems willfully designed to obfuscate and keep normal people out. Reviewers tend to talk only to fans and, again, keep normal people out. That leaves an obvious, gaping hole in our critical corpus – serious, popular criticism, accessible to those normal folks everyone currently engaged in the study of games seems intent on pushing away. Where’s our damn Andrew Sarris!
CT: Technological innovation and industrial landmarks often act as period markers in video game history books. Information on platforms, game engines, major game studios and industrial structure has been documented through journalistic accounts and offer a reassuring “fact-based” vision of history. The progressive technical mastery and industrial growth seem to naturally invite us to build overarching glorifying narratives. Yet the culture of play goes beyond the technological and industrial aspects. Do you perceive major turning points in the evolution of this culture throughout the development of video games? Should we rather speak of overlapping paradigms in game design and game playing, which becomes more or less preeminent at various moments in history and locations around the world? WS: First, I’d argue we haven’t done a great, or at least comprehensive, job of capturing the history of video games – that “fact-based” vision you talk about. Obviously, we’ve done a better job of that than we have of critical analysis of how games make meaning, what sorts of meaning they can and do make, how meaning and meaning-making conventions have changed over time and how the culture of games and game players has changed. There’s a ton of work to be done in those areas.
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I think it’s fine to think in terms of overlapping paradigms in design and play – it’s overly simplistic to assume that media grow, change and mature in discrete, linear chunks. However, just beginning to think about the critical and historical changes in games culture, broadly speaking, is a good and necessary thing. If someone wants to think about discrete eras, design paradigms and player profiles, I’m fine with that. We just need to start thinking about the games medium as something more than a way for kids to waste time that could be better spent reading about or living life (as if books are better than games in some cosmic sense and games aren’t a part of life!).
CT: You have contributed to the creation of games that are known to push the boundaries and merge mechanics from different genres (such as Wing Commander, Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Deus Ex). Recently, academic books focusing on genres have emerged (Horror Video Games, edited by Bernard Perron, 2009; Guns, Grenades, and Grunts: First- Person Shooter Games, edited by Voorhees et al., 2012). Considering the fluidity of exchanges and unstable nature of genres, do you think it is problematic to approach video game history through the study of smaller corpus defined by genre? WS: I’ve thought about genre in games so much over the years it makes my head hurt! As you point out, my design approach is dominated by a self-conscious melding of “genres,” but think about that for a minute. In most (all?) other media, genres are defined by content alone. Westerns are set in the American West, feature guys on horseback chasing down other guys on horseback, guys protecting schools, farms, Indian attacks, cattlemen vs. farmers and so on. War films, gangster films, horror films… all are defined by their content. Even the larger categories – “musicals,” “comedies,” “melodramas” and the like – are content-driven, though with some formal differentiators as well. Games clearly feature genres that can be classified by their content, but I’d argue any useful definition of genre in games must put play patterns at the forefront. Certainly that’s what I’ve always tried to do in thwarting player (and publisher!) expectations. Deus Ex is a genre piece to the extent that it’s a near future science fiction game, but there are lots of those out there for players to enjoy. The genre-blending that, I hope, distinguishes Deus Ex from all those other games, is the tripartite approach to gameplay (i.e., you can play the game as a shooter, a stealth game or as a roleplaying game dominated by interaction with non-player characters). If Deus Ex had combined science fiction and western content conventions, it would have been ridiculous. Game genres have to be defined by gameplay first, and only secondarily by content.
CT: In closing: what are some of the games you feel have not received the necessary attention in order to reflect on their influence in the history of the medium? WS: Huh. Interesting question… I could rattle off a list of games I think of as “influential,” but most of them have been recognized as such and given plenty of attention. Let me think about some unsung heroes… Okay, start with a Japanese RPG – Suikoden. That game influenced a lot of us, in terms of how we approach player choice, the power of customization (of a home base, in the cause of Suikoden) and the power of changing gameplay based on what you do or don’t do as you play (e.g., shifting information, quests and capabilities based on which characters you help and which you don’t).
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Next, I’d go with Paul Neurath’s Space Rogue. That game combined first-person space combat simulation, orthogonal RPG [Role-Playing Game] play and simple arcade gameplay. That game taught many lessons to the few who paid attention upon its release. I’m not sure it qualifies as a game that didn’t receive enough attention, but I think it’s interesting the way Ico changed the way a lot of developers thought, and think, about games. There have been “save the princess” games since the dawn of time. But Ico was the first to make that idea visceral and personal. The power of touch… of your character holding the virtual hand of another… the need to balance protection of a character slower and seemingly weaker than you are, with the need to explore a world and battle enemies… I mean, are you serious? The creativity required to conceive such a game is mind-blowing. And ever since, it seems like every acclaimed game features some variation of the guy-accompanied-by-girl-in-need-of-saving scenario. That screams “influence” to me. At risk of seeming self-serving, I’d throw Ultima Underworld into the mix. All credit to the Blue Sky (later Looking Glass) team for creating the first real-time, 3D, fully texture-mapped, first-person game… ever. And even if you want to dispute that, it was clearly the first roleplaying game with that set of characteristics. In a sense, every first-person RPG that’s followed owes a debt to Underworld. I wonder how many developers realize that. Given our lack of respect for history, would that surprise anyone?...
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Burnham, Van. Supercade. A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971-1984. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003.
Donovan, Tristan. Replay. The History of Video Games. East Sussex: Yellow Ant, 2010.
Dillon, Roberto. The Golden Age of Video Games. CRC Press, 2011.
Herman, Leonard. Phoenix. The Fall & Rise of Videogames. Springfield: Rolenta Press, [1994] 2001.
Huhtamo, Erkki and Jussi Parikka eds. Media Archaeology. Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011.
Kent, Steven L. The Ultimate History of Video Games. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001.
Kline, Steven, Nick Dyer-Whiteford and Greig De Peuter. Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.
Lowood, Henry. “Videogames in Computer Space: The Complex History of Pong”, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Special Issue, 2009.
Maher, Jimmy. The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012.
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Montfort, Nick and Ian Bogost. Racing the Beam. The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009.
Perron, Bernard ed. Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2009.
Poole, Steven. Trigger Happy. Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000.
Therrien, Carl. “Video Games Caught Up In History. Accessibility, Teleological Distortion and Other Methodological Issues,” in Before the Crash: Early Video Game History, edited by M.J.P. Wolf, 9-30. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012.
Voorhees, Gerald A., Joshua Call and Katie Whitlock eds. Guns, Grenades, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games. New York: Continuum, 2012.
Wolf, Mark J.P. ed. The Video Game Explosion. A History From Pong to Playstation and Beyond, Wesport: Greenwood Press, 2008.
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NOTES
1. Fonds Québécois de Recherche sur la Société et la Culture. 2. Videotopia was the first travelling exhibit dedicated to video games and opened in 1996 at the Carnegie Science Center. Acknowledging “the destruction of the majority of these games and fearing the loss of their historical importance”, the Electronics Conservancy organization set out to find and restore 400 rare arcade cabinets, while also collecting home video game systems. Before its final showing in Tallahassee, most of the collection had been sold to the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester. 3. www.history-of-games.com 4. In 2007, following a proposition from major universities led by games researcher Henry Lowood from Stanford, the Library of Congress announced it would preserve a “game canon” formed of the ten “most significant” titles ; the collection has been expending ever since. Lowood was also responsible for the academic research project “How They Got Game : The History and Culture of Interactive Simulations and Video Games” at Stanford University. 5. For more information on the way different corporations handle preservation issues, see John Andersen’s “Where Games Go To Sleep” three-part feature on Gamasutra. http:// www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6271/where_games_go_to_sleep_the_game_.php 6. Triple-A is a common superlative expression referring to games which benefit from significant development and marketing budgets from major studios. 7. For instance, The Old School Emulation Center project (TOSEC) established a clear protocol to archive and name ROM sets ; users constantly update lists about software released on more than 200 platforms. http://www.tosecdev.org/ 8. ‘Platform wars’ is the common term referring to the cycles of console production. This commercial ‘warfare’ attracts a lot of attention and provides a tempting decoupage of video game history into generations. It should be noted that the actual production of games console is not as regular as such markers suggest, and that video game hardware cannot be understood properly when it is reduced to the bit-rating of the main processor. 9. Again, this is not meant to diminish the importance of the journalistic accounts focusing on industry (Kent, 2001) or the numerous academic efforts to explain the intricate technological
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aspects in a way that is more accessible to the research community. See, among others, the founding volume of the Platform studies series, Racing the Beam (Bogost & Montfort, 2009). 10. Editor’s note : these are major American film critics.
AUTHORS
WARREN SPECTOR Warren Spector is a veteran comic book author, novelist, film reviewer, electronic game designer/producer. He has worked in the game industry since 1983 and is a fixture in the Austin game development community. Though now firmly entrenched in the electronic gaming world, Warren Spector’s gaming roots are in the pen-and-paper game business. Through his career as a game director/producer, Spector oversaw the development of many renowned games such as Ultima Worlds of Adventure: Martian Dreams, Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, System Shock, Ultima VII: Part 2, Serpent Isle, Wings of Glory, Cybermage, Deus Ex, Thief: Deadly Shadows, and more recently Disney Epic Mickey. In addition, Spector is an Assistant Instructor for film and television studies at the University of Texas in Austin and the author of numerous magazine and newspaper articles. In 2011, he received the Pulcinella Award from the Cartoons on the Bay conference, in recognition of his body of work. In 2012, he was awarded the Game Developers Choice Lifetime Achievement Award as well as an honorary doctorate by Columbia College, Chicago.
CARL THERRIEN Carl Therrien is an assistant professor in the new video game studies program at Université de Montréal. He was the co-founder and main organizer of the first international conference on the history of games held in Montreal in 2013. He worked on a postdoctoral research project on the history of video games, and completed a Ph.D. thesis about the formal and psychological aspects of immersion in fictional worlds. Major publications include the opening chapter in Mark J.P. Wolf’s Before the Crash (Wayne State University Press, 2012), many entries in Greenwood’s Encyclopedia of Video Games (2012), a historical contribution in Bernard Perron’s anthology on Horror Video Games (McFarland & Company, 2009), and an upcoming paper on the rise of cooperative address in game design (IEEE Handbook on video games).
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Critical Perspective
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Information and Communication Sciences as Critical Social Sciences
Fabien Granjon Translation : Divina Frau-Meigs
1 For most social scientists, holding a critical stance consists mostly in epistemological vigilance. The researchers whose works are anchored in Information and Communication Sciences (ICS) share, in their majority, this understanding of criticism as the main standards held in social sciences. So we can read that following the example of “all other human sciences, [it is] as they try to explain and/or to understand phenomena, [that they] are critical by nature.”1 This positioning thus makes science, objectivation and criticism coincide at little to no expense, and passes off the essential work of discussion of the models of analysis (concepts, hypotheses, etc.) and of reflexivity as sufficient to the work of criticism.
2 To criticize turns out to be, rather, one of the operations by which any activity of research begins and without which it does not begin—at least not really. The gesture of criticism, in fact is not only inaugural: it is indefinitely recalled, throughout the stages which lead from the opening of a survey to its completion, then to the writing of its results and finally to their evaluation by the peers—an evaluation to which the “laymen” contribute also sometimes, but with other criteria. In this perspective, to speak of the necessity of criticism in the social sciences, is not, primarily to call upon a political imperative. It is to recall, above all, a technical requirement […]. That this essential technical obligation at the core of the practice of the social sciences is conducive to the production of knowledge and of visions about the social world that suggest alternatives that can therefore potentially have political effects on the functioning of the societies under study, is obvious2.
3 Deliberately political, the social sciences (among which ICS) would thus be equivocal and ambiguous. This would be acceptable, however, if they were to be so “in addition” as it were. Our position is that it is not possible to consider that a science is fully critical if it satisfies itself only with fulfilling methodological requirements (to break with common sense) and, by so doing, with making sure to make visible or to inform about little or badly known social realities. In other words, the merits of the aforementioned
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criticism cannot confine themselves, according to us, to the overtaking of epistemological obstacles. If we admit that the theoretical models that intend to reflect social reality always do so with epistemological imperatives and specific interests, then we must agree that epistemological criticism is only one (crucial) element enabling the evaluation of scientific productions.
4 To the epistemological stakes coupling the domain of communication to that of the social sciences other investments need to be added, that question, this time on the political level, the relationships between communication, the social order and the diverse strategies for social change and that also question the value of theoretical constructs under this angle. Criticism cannot thus amount to epistemological criticism that is only one of its pillars, that of disillusionment, but it needs to be extended by a more elaborate work, a work over the negative, the deconstruction and the defetishisation of social reality. It is, according to us, this other type of positioning that would enable ICS to be completely critical, that is to say in full capacity of being reflexive about themselves but also to describe, analyse, understand and evaluate3.
5 The objective of knowledge inherent in criticism relates primarily to the revelation of the various forms of domination that are applied within the framework of a social order that presses on the present and that, most of the time, are the object of a misunderstanding (i.e. not necessarily of an ignorance) from the social subjects which undergo them. Practising the social sciences (among which we count ICS) from a critical perspective can be considered as a form of participation in the “teamwork of political invention”:4 give reasons for action, supply the weapons of indignation and, by so doing, contribute to the liberation of the potential for mobilization that might exert some leverage on reality.
6 Criticism can open to a “positive,” to a social progress that needs to be updated in moments when politics become more radical. Against the evidence of common sense, it purports to raise the veil on the truth of social relationships which never appear totally for what they are and adorn themselves with symbolic ornaments that disguise them and contribute to their acceptability (e.g. via media work). Criticism thus contributes to make reality and social order unacceptable and invites to act on this reality, well aware besides that theorization could only be one of the multiple resources of politics.
A Plea for Critical Information and Communication Sciences
7 In France, the body of literature dealing with the encounter of information and communication sciences with criticism is not very large, far from it. There are some works however that are considered as relevant to a critical perspective, but the texts trying to clarify the critical referential and the way it can/must be mobilized within the framework of research in ICS are, to say the least, extremely rare. The works which present sectorial applications of criticism generally connected to domains of specific practices (cultural and “creative” industries, media, internationalization, social uses of ICTS, etc.) or to singular research trends (Frankfurt School, political economy of communication, Cultural Studies, “institutional communication”, etc.) are less rare. In spite of this solid but tenuous presence, criticism on the whole does not occupy a particularly important place within the information and communication sciences, even if, and it must be underlined, it seems to have regained some academic terrain in the last few years, boosting the “pleas for critical research in France.”5
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8 The locus of criticism is neither natural, nor reserved and turns out not to be very comfortable, but the “corpse” still moves and even seems to show obvious signs of vitality. The libido sciendi continues to flow within the body of the critical community and to animate it, in spite of the condescending indictments of certain penitents who hastily try to justify their own renunciation and consider that “critical claims are [just] a career move, as much as any other, fostering a logics of clans and tribes. And that the fact of moaning on its supposed depreciation is a way of institutional and politicking positioning [sic].”6 Why should the critical researchers complain? It is not a question of complaining.
9 Today, more numerous and more regular initiatives are visible than during the last twenty years. They appear in dedicated events, conferences and seminars. They unfold their own editorial production and their educational supply is far from negligible. Nevertheless, if criticism gains in visibility, it weighs relatively little in the internal debates in information and communication sciences and it deserves to be more publicised (i.e. set in contradictory debate). Dictionaries, textbooks, encyclopaedias, mappings and bibliographies in the field that purport to provide a relatively complete panorama of the scientific sensibilities within ICS tend to cover them tenuously, if they mention them at all. The proceedings of the yearly national conferences of French National Association for Information and Communication Sciences (SFSIC) testify to a presence that is spectral rather than stable.
10 At the beginning of 1990s, Pierre Mœglin already regretted this situation that he identified as a consequence of the combined attacks led against criticism by the various functionalisms, the “subject-oriented researches,” the prevalence of expertise and the very crisis within criticism itself. It seems to us that, twenty years later, these logics are still more or less at work, which can be deplored. It would moreover be necessary to locate exactly the various updates, and also their evolutions, as well as to limit the new assaults that are carried against it.
11 As for us, if we were to mention only one kind of threats, we would probably emphasize at first those that weaken criticism “from within,” and repeat emphatically how much a simple moral agreement about the questioning of social order, and the attendant communication social facts, could not suffice to establish a critical policy for SIC. One has indeed to recognize that on the subject, the texts aiming at going beyond the simple exercise of sectorial assessments and literature reviews (however necessary and useful they may be) to reach some epistemological distance are not numerous7. And yet, the price to pay to reach a semblance of unity within criticism —while at the same time respectful of its various constitutive differences—, lies in these attempts to try to clear the main points of articulation of criticism, diverse such as it is, that can get organized within SIC.
Toward Critical Interdisciplinarity
12 One of these “epistemological hinges” is undoubtedly interdisciplinarity, to be understood neither as an artefact playing a rhetoric part of identification in the abstract economy of information and communication sciences, nor as a strategic support of distinction in the opposition to other disciplines within the social sciences. Our thesis is that, to become a real principle of epistemological demarcation, interdisciplinarity needs to be first and foremost critical.
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13 Inherently characterised by their transversality, SIC are supposed to find part of their coherence and their autonomy in their supposed capacity to establish bridges between disciplinary fields by adopting specific domains of study (the media, ICTS, etc.). If there is indeed one element information and communication sciences would definitely not want to part with (and correctly so), it is their wilful determination to maintain the interdisciplinary project at the very core of the field. Interdisciplinarity is recognized as quintessential heuristics and it is considered as the disciplinary foundation of these “crossroads sciences”.
14 We have to admit that if ICS are in line with other disciplines by often borrowing from them their concepts and their theoretical frameworks, the latter also interfere in the field of communication research, by being interested in the objects which SIC would be tempted to claim as being part of their (exclusive) enjoyment. Besides, the social sciences also develop epistemologies of complementarity that take shape within a constructivist paradigm advocating the study of mediations and social constructions, rather than the study of the things and the essences.
15 This epistemological attitude is indeed shared by many of the “new sociologies”8 with which the information and communication sciences sometimes engage in “conflicts of territory,” but on which —this is to be recalled— they also took support to emerge. The proposal of theoretical postures overcoming the traditional contradictions between idealism and materialism, micro and macro levels of analysis, collective and individual perspectives, subject and object, etc., cannot be decently presented as an exclusive feature of SIC.
16 If the analysis of communication phenomena has everything to gain by distancing itself from binary epistemologies and by adopting a positioning that gives primacy to relations over essences, this principle should not be exclusively attributed to SIC, nor obviously be reserved to them. So, to assert that “the will to build complex objects, characterized by a multiplicity of fitted levels, is not present in the disciplines from which SIC borrow”9 is a matter either of a lazy (or feigned) poor understanding of the social sciences, or a self-fulfilling prophecy.
17 Interdisciplinarity, when it is neither rhetoric, nor strategic, but truly critical requires the gathering of varied but compatible theoretical determinations. It refuses “disciplinary subdivisions in the name of the transversality of all the social objects” and tends to generalize “the multireferential and complementarist approach.”10 It considers these necessities while maintaining a distance from theoretical hybridization without control. Critical interdiciplinarity has nothing to do with postmodern theories that tend to multiply the abstract borrowings and to juxtapose notions without taking into account models of analysis to which they belong originally, or even axiological foundations that support these analytical models.
18 From the perspective of criticism, the interdisciplinary principle does not justify itself so much by the singular (e.g. “communicational”) complexity of the objects that it purports to understand, as by the critical outlook that underlies it. In this regard, what characterizes research on the social facts of communication maybe that they address classes of phenomena playing for some (e.g. the media facts) an obvious role in the adjustment of people’s lives to the imperatives of contemporary society. But more still (because this role is rather widely distributed: politics, education, etc.), the peculiarity of the “communicational” may be due to the fact that, somehow or other, it always contributes to the establishment of such facticity, that is pseudo-concrete in nature11
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and so potentially can be overcome: “the object of critical research is not to study communication in its contexts. It is to deal with it as a component within situations that through it can be globally accounted for”12 This important comment invites us to envisage communication in connection with the conditions of production and reproduction of the social relationships that frame them. Being interested for example in media, ICTS or cultural industries urges to consider these so-called “communicational” realities in relation to other larger social dynamics, a challenge which only a completely critical —that is dialectical— interdisciplinarity, is capable of meeting.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bourdieu, Pierre. Contre-feux 2. Paris: Liber, 2001.
Brohm Jean-Marie. ‘‘Sociologie critique et critique de la sociologie.’’ Éducation et Société 13 (2004): 71-84.
Corbalan, Jean-Antoine. ‘‘Inventer du (des) sens aux SIC.’’ Les recherches en information et communication et leurs perspectives. Histoire, objet, pouvoir, méthode, 13ème Congrès national des sciences de l’information et de la communication (Marseille, SFSIC, 7-9 octobre 2002) 371-375.
Corcuff, Philippe. Les nouvelles sociologies. Constructions de la réalité sociale. Paris: Nathan, 1995.
Granjon, Fabien. ‘‘La critique est-elle indigne de la sociologie ?’’ Sociologie 3 1 (2012): 75-86.
Haag, Pascale and Cyril Lemieux. ‘‘Critiquer : une nécessité.’’ In Faire des sciences sociales. Critiquer, edited by Pascale Haag, Cyril Lemieux, 13-27. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2012.
Kosik, Karel. La dialectique du concret. Paris: Les Éditions de la passion, 1988.
Le Moënne, Christian. ‘‘Crise de la critique idéologico-politique et recherches en Sciences humaines et sociales’’. In Communications-organisations et pensées critiques, edited by Thomas Heller, Romain Huët and Bénédicte Vidaillet, 45-56. Lille: PUL Septentrion, 2013.
Mattelart Armand and Michèle Mattelart. De l’usage des médias en temps de crise. Paris: Alain Moreau, 1979.
Miège, Bernard. L’information-communication, objet de connaissance. Bruxelles: De Boeck, 2004.
Miège, Bernard and Pierre Mœglin. ‘‘Défendre la recherche critique.’’ L’Avenir. La recherche en information communication. International Conference Inforcom 90 (Aix-en-Provence, Université de Provence, SFSIC, 24-26 mai 1990) : 129-136.
Mœglin, Pierre. ‘‘Actualité de la recherche critique.’’ Cinémaction 63, March 1992: 131-136.
Perret, Jean-Baptiste. ‘‘Les SIC : essai de définition’’. In Les sciences de l’information et de la communication, edited by Eric Dacheux (Paris : CNRS éditions, 2009): 115-132.
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NOTES
1. Jean-Antoine Corbalan, ‘‘Inventer du (des) sens aux SIC,’’ in Les recherches en information et communication et leurs perspectives. Histoire, objet, pouvoir, méthode, 13ème Congrès national des sciences de l’information et de la communication (Marseille, SFSIC, 7-9 octobre 2002), 373. 2. Pascale Haag and Cyril Lemieux, ‘‘Critiquer : une nécessité,’’ in Faire des sciences sociales. Critiquer, ed. Pascale Haag and Cyril Lemieux (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2012), 13-14. 3. Fabien Granjon , ‘‘La critique est-elle indigne de la sociologie ?’’ in Sociologie 3 1 (2012): 75-86. 4. Pierre Bourdieu, Contre-feux 2 (Paris: Liber, 2001). 5. Armand Mattelart and Michèle Mattelart, De l’usage des médias en temps de crise (Paris: Alain Moreau, 1979). 6. Christian Le Moënne, ‘‘Crise de la critique idéologico-politique et recherches en Sciences humaines et sociales,’’ in Communications-organisations et pensées critiques, ed. Thomas Heller, Romain Huët and Bénédicte Vidaillet (Lille: PUL Septentrion, 2013), 45-56. 7. e.g. Bernard Miège and Pierre Mœglin, ‘‘Défendre la recherche critique,’’ L’Avenir. La recherche en information communication, International Conference Inforco, 90 (Aix-en-Provence, Université de Provence, SFSIC, 24-26 mai 1990): 129-136. Pierre Mœglin, ‘‘Actualité de la recherche critique,’’ Cinémaction 63, March 1992: 131-136. Bernard Miège, L’information-communication, objet de connaissance (Bruxelles: De Boeck, 2004). 8. Philippe Corcuff, Les nouvelles sociologies. Constructions de la réalité sociale (Paris: Nathan, 1995). 9. Jean-Baptiste Perret, ‘‘Les SIC : essai de définition,’’ in Les sciences de l’information et de la communication, ed. Eric Dacheux (Paris : CNRS éditions, 2009): 115-132. 127) 10. Jean-Marie Brohm,‘‘Sociologie critique et critique de la sociologie,’’ in Éducation et Société 13 (2004): 80. 11. Karel Kosik, La dialectique du concret (Paris: Les Éditions de la passion, 1988). 12. Mœglin, ‘‘Actualité de la recherche critique,’’ 135.
AUTHORS
FABIEN GRANJON Université Paris 8 Vincennes à Saint-Denis – CEMTI
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Conference Reviews
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The Canadian Communication Tradition 4-7 June 2013, University of Victoria, British Columbia
Christopher Ali
EDITOR'S NOTE
Canadian Communication Association Annual Conference
Canadian Communication Thought
1 In his book, Canadian Communication Thought, Robert Babe argues for the recognition of a distinctly Canadian paradigm of communication studies.1 Grounding his observations in the scholarship of “ten foundational thinkers” – particularly Dallas Smythe, Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan – Babe describes ‘Canadian Communication Thought’ as being inherently dialectical, critical, holistic, ontological, oriented towards political economy, and concerned with mediation, power, democracy and dynamic change.2
2 Dialectics and critical theory are at the forefront of this Canadian paradigm, representing the country’s unique political and geographic terrain. Its dialectical predispositions stem from several factors including the country’s embrace of British conservatism and a spirit of “collectivity and commonality;” its proximity to the United States and the differences between a “garrison mentality” of “communitarianism” in Canada and a frontier mentality of individualism in the US; and a geographic landscape that engenders both “bleakness” and “imagination.”3 The push and pull between languages (English and French), cultures (a multicultural society with a visible First Nations population), and normative concerns for democracy, equality, and power further underscore a dialectical and critical tradition of hermeneutic inquiry. Accordingly, …foundational Canadian communication thought emphasizes the importance and the power of the human imagination, and it studies how our imaginations are
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moulded, or at least influenced, by prevailing institutions, by predominant media of communication, by our stories or myths, by our educational system, and by our place in the world.4
3 Proximity to the United States is another contributing factor to this dialectic Canadian identity as: “Canadians are normally immersed in American media, and so are quite aware of American perspectives, even while knowing that these perspectives do not necessarily represent accurately the Canadian situation.”5 In concert, these aforementioned characteristics demarcate the Canadian communication research and scholarly experience and tradition as different and separate from that of the United States. Communications research in America (according to Babe) grew out of a tradition of studying ‘transmission;’ what Harold Lasswell called “administrative research,” and exhibited an attitude that eschewed critical interrogation of the media industries which generate huge sums of individual and corporate capital in the country.6 In countenance to the United States, as Babe further observes, “for Canadians, democracy in part means resistance to hegemonic incursions from outside the country so of course Canadian scholarship, even in the mainstream, is more critical.”7
4 Attending the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Communications Association (CCA) held in Victoria, British Columbia, in June 2013, one could not help but notice that these traditions remain the hallmarks of Canadian communication studies long after the passing of Innis, Smythe and McLuhan.
The Canadian Communication Association in the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences
5 Held annually, the CCA Conference brings together Canada’s communication scholars and those from abroad as part of a larger event known as the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Organized by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, ‘Congress’ serves a unique function as an umbrella event for the annual meetings of over 70 associations of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. This year’s Congress, with the theme ‘@ the edge’ was hosted by the University of Victoria and brought together thousands of scholars over eight days. Associations include everything from Sociology and Political Science, to the Canadian Association for the Study of Names, and, of course, the Canadian Communication Association.8
6 The CCA portion of Congress was held over three days, and featured 340 presentations by 386 researchers from Canada and the United States. Those unfamiliar to CCA may be interested to learn that the conference is bilingual, representing Canada’s two official languages, with participants able to present in both English and French. With geography and landscape playing key roles in the development of Canadian communication thought, Victoria was a fitting setting for this conference, being literally ‘at the edge’ of Canada, and representing a site of inspiration for many Canadian artists and scholars. The University of Victoria did not fall short in this regard, and offered a breathtaking campus that combines natural and built environments.
7 As expected, universities from British Columbia – Simon Fraser University, The University of British Columbia, Royal Roads and University of Victoria – were well represented, as were several Quebecois institutions – l’Université Laval, l’Université de Montréal, Concordia University and l’Université du Québec. The University of Alberta
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also had a particularly strong showing given their lack of a communications or media studies programs.
8 The dialectical and critical theoretical trajectories outlined by Babe were keenly observed by the two keynote speakers. The first speaker, Dr Silvestra Marinello of l’Université de Montréal spoke about ‘Exemplarity and Film’ and discussed the discursive construction of film as exemplar of the human condition. The second keynote was given by Dr Arthur Kroker of the University of Victoria. In this address, titled ‘Technologies of the Posthuman,’ Dr Kroker spoke passionately about the intersection of bodies, society, and technology – both literal and figurative - and discussed the dystopic potentialities engendered within the digital age. Perhaps in no other presentation were the characteristics of critical theory and dialectical hermeneutic inquiry more strongly embodied than in Dr Kroker’s lecture. While sometimes verging on the dense jargon of which critical cultural studies has been accused, Dr Kroker argued that we have entered the age of the ‘Posthuman’ wherein digital technologies occupy places of uncertainty and ‘undecidability.’
9 Two awards are also handed out yearly at the CCA Conference. To encourage and promote Canadian communications scholarship, the Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize recognizes the best book of the year published by a Canadian scholar as selected by a jury from nominations solicited throughout the year. In June, the Robinson Prize was awarded to Dr Bart Beaty from the University of Calgary for his book Comics versus Art (University of Toronto Press, 2012). Dr Beaty’s book focuses on the shifting relationship between the supposedly ‘low’ culture world of comics and the institutions of the ‘high’ art world. The Beaverbrook Media@McGill Student Paper Prize, selected by a jury which includes the President of the CCA, recognizes the top student paper at CCA and in June was awarded to doctoral candidate Nora Draper of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, for her paper “Rethinking Citizen photojournalism: Mediated Witnessing and the Obligations of Citizen Bystanders.”
10 A particularly popular panel was that on Network Surveillance, Censorship and Privacy, where Nora Draper presented her award-winning paper which addressed the challenges engendered by the emerging identity of the ‘citizen journalist’ particularly in its (potentially dialectic) relationship to the State and to mass media. Draper used a case study of citizen journalism practices during and after the 2010 Vancouver Stanley Cup riots to support her argument, noting that concerns arise when citizen journalism is used as an element of surveillance. At the same panel, Dr Jonathan Obar from the University of Toronto gave a presentation on the ‘IXMaps Project,’ an innovative mapping tool used to track digital data packet transmissions.9 Dr Obar documented how in the milliseconds that it takes for data to get from one Canadian computer to another, many data packets (such as emails) are sent through servers in the United States, leaving them susceptible to the American Patriot Act and thus readable by American government agencies. This ‘Boomerang Routing,’ he contends, opens up numerous challenges to Canadian electronic and political sovereignty, Canadians’ individual privacy, and suggests a larger political economic framework of digital data transmission in North America.10 Dr Obar accentuated his presentation with a video that visually traced the flow of data packets from one Toronto office building to another via Chicago, therein demonstrating how even transmissions beginning and ending in the same Canadian city, often flow through American servers.
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11 Policy analysis has been another hallmark of Canadian communication studies so much so that some have argued that ‘policy studies’ have become overly synonymous with Canadian communication studies (Wagman, 2010).11 Nonetheless, this vein of research represents important contributions to the Canadian scholarly corpus, and was the subject of several panels in Victoria. Of particular note was a proposal by University of Ottawa Professor Dr Jeremy Shtern to build an online platform that would support scholarship on Canadian communication policy issues in a more timely fashion than the traditional journal route. This faster turnaround would allow scholars to better contribute to ongoing policy and regulatory debates in a meaningful way. The online ‘portal,’ Shtern suggests, could be operated adjacent to the website of the Canadian Journal of Communication, with contributing articles falling somewhere between a policy report and an academic peer-reviewed article.
12 A bird’s eye view of the 2013 CCA conference would suggest that the Canadian communications tradition is being well tended to by young scholars both within and outside of Canada. Ms Draper, Dr Obar and Dr Shtern, for instance, represent the new generation of innovative and dynamic Canadian communications scholarship, all the while embodying the foundations of Canadian communication thought as outlined by Babe. Nevertheless, one could also not help but note a distinct lack of senior faculty at CCA 2013. For Canadian scholarship to continue as a distinct and dynamic field within the larger domain of communication and media studies, senior and junior researchers must meet the challenges together; the spirit of collectivity and community – the ‘garrison mentality’ - so valued by early writers, embodied in both their scholarship and in practice.12
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Babe, Robert E. Canadian Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Writers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Babe, Robert E. “Innis and the Emergence of Canadian Communication/Media Studies,” Global Media Journal – Canadian Edition, Vol. 1, Issue 1, (2008): 9-23.
Hamilton, Sheryl N. “Considering Critical Communication Studies in Canada,” in Mediascapes: New Patterns in Canadian Communication, edited by Leslie Regan Shade, 9-26. Toronto: Nelson Education, 2010.
IXmaps. http://www.ixmaps.ca/index.php
Obar, Jonathan and Andrew Clement. “Internet Surveillance and Boomerang Routing: A Call for Canadian Network Sovereignty,” SSRN Working Paper Series (2013). http://papers.ssrn.com/ sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2311792
Wagman, Ira. “On the Policy Reflex in Canadian Communication Studies,” Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol. 35 (2010): 619-630.
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NOTES
1. Robert E. Babe, Canadian Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Writers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 2. Hamilton (2010) makes the important rebuttal that we must be careful not to take such claims at face value, and instead must interrogate the nature of what it means to be ‘critical,’ and more importantly, what it means to be ‘Canadian’ (see also Wagman (2010) on these points). 3. Babe, Canadian Communication Thought, Chapter 1. 4. Babe, Canadian Communication Thought, 32. 5. Robert E. Babe, “Innis and the Emergence of Canadian Communication/Media Studies,” Global Media Journal – Canadian Edition, Vol. 1, Issue 1, (2008): 19. 6. Babe, “Innis and the Emergence of Canadian Communication/Media Studies,” 19. 7. Babe, “Innis and the Emergence of Canadian Communication/Media Studies,” 19. 8. For more about the Federation for the Humanities and the Social Sciences, along with information about its annual meeting see: http://www.congress2013.ca/about-congress. 9. For more, see the IXmaps website at: http://www.ixmaps.ca/index.php. 10. See also Jonathan Obar and Andrew Clement, “Internet Surveillance and Boomerang Routing: A Call for Canadian Network Sovereignty,” SSRN Working Paper Series (2013). http:// papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2311792
AUTHOR
CHRISTOPHER ALI University of Virginia
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Book Reviews
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Marta Boni, Adrienne Boutang, Barbara Laborde and Lucie Merijeau (eds), Théorème #17, Networking images. Approches interdisciplinaires des images en réseau Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2013, 158 pages
David Peyron
REFERENCES
Marta Boni, Adrienne Boutang, Barbara Laborde and Lucie Merijeau (eds), Théorème #17, Networking images. Approches interdisciplinaires des images en réseau, Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2013, 158 pages
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1 Does the existence of new media and networks and (consequently) new practices imply new ways of relating to images and other kinds of representation? This may be the central question that defines the core project in the latest issue of French academic journal Théorème. Nevertheless, like all first questions that guide us through a research field or a conceptual elaboration, each word must be considered with critical perspective. The deconstruction of all the concepts presented in this question is probably as important as the answer itself. Can we actually talk of ‘new media’, or are they only new layouts, classical practices but in another context and in a different shape? What does the word ‘network’ mean in a contemporary context, is it related to the internet or to people? Does it mean that we are literally immersed in a flow of images, those we see and those we create from other representations, as it is metaphorically depicted on the cover (a picture of someone taking a picture of the ads on Times Square)? Finally, is the way we make sense of images and create our own repertoire of representations really shifted by the emerging process of participation in the digital worlds?
2 As I said, most of our conceptual tools and every aspect of these phenomena have to be explored and rearticulated with caution. Two main obstacles must be avoided: the presumption that everything is new so no ‘old’ paradigm of analysis can be used, and, at the other extreme, that nothing has changed so it becomes hard to explain anything that happened in the mediascape over the last decade.
3 Most of the authors of this collective, and above all interdisciplinary, volume try to find a balance between these two extreme positions. Within eleven relatively short articles (one is in two parts), they tackle the challenge of offering an interdisciplinary overview and a transversal conceptualization of both notions of network and images.
4 The idea of network brings forth considerations of technology, circulation and audience participation. In their introduction, Laurent Creton and Laurent Jullier elaborate on the many fantasies surrounding the growth of computer networks since the golden age of science fiction in the fifties (7). Such representations are still very potent in our contemporary imagination. That is why they emphasize the human factor at stake in any kind of interpretation of the status of images in a networking environment.
5 To embrace each side of the concepts, the book is organized in four main parts, each in correspondence with the others. The first is probably the most theoretical and explores the metaphorical definitions of the word screen within a conceptual and historical framework while addressing what is really spread in modern networks. The author of the first text, Francesco Casseti, reminds us that even if the term ‘screen’ is still used to describe an interface between our minds and media content, it no longer means to passively absorb images but to try intentionally to catch some fragments extracted
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from a chaotic flow in a perpetually shifting shape (29). We are eager to make sense of this ensemble of representations through our own interpretations rather than receiving information in a prepackaged and stable structure. This theoretical point has a very deep impact and enlightens every other contribution in this collective essay. The notions of circulation of information and flow resonate on a large scale in the second text of the first part. There, Eric Maigret rearticulates the positions of Henry Jenkins, a leading figure of the last decade in the field of cultural studies. He considers media as a multifaceted flow where a massive amount of micro elements including images, sounds, and texts, from and across many platforms are constantly circulating (39). The audience, every one of us, then builds a hierarchy in the flow and adds their contribution to the flow and therefore becomes an essential cog in the machine. It encourages reaffirming what researchers in media studies have explained for a long time now, that we have to consider cultural objects, and their audience, as the different sides of the same coin. This key point opens the discussion towards the idea that there are multiple flows of multiple elements and that the users of technology and the consumers of media are one of these (41). With the emergence of a participatory culture and digital platforms to express taste (i.e hierarchy) and appropriation (i.e participation from the identity point of view) of images through commentary, sharing, or remix, culture can be seen as an amalgam of bottom-up and top-down processes (36).
6 Many of the other articles, presenting concrete field work, deal with this approach. Increasingly, the web has become a site of consumer participation and interactions between authors and an audience whose roles have become much more blurred. Although, in the last essay, Geneviève Sellier shows very accurately in her analysis of readers’ letters to a popular French magazine that these phenomena are not entirely new (143), it is undeniable that the internet has changed the scale of consumer involvement and visibility in the public sphere.
7 Even what we usually consider as the most secretive of practices, for example watching pornography, has become a shared phenomenon (59). Clarisse Smith explains that pornography offers many ways to participate including uploading homemade movies, commenting, and sharing preferences. This encourages new aesthetics, the pleasure in finding a rare video or the creation of one’s own movie from the assemblage of scattered fragments (64). The purpose of such practices is to carve a unique path through the multitude of images at our disposal. It is a way to express our identities and to have both a shared and individualistic experience that changes the way we see our own bodies. Even celebrities’ bodies are shaped by the spreading of media content and phenomena such as virality. Lady Gaga, pop icon par excellence, is, for instance, becoming less a human being than a cult ‘object’. According to Agnese Vallar, who uses the very effective theoretical tools of Umberto Eco, from the cultural economy of stardom emerge some reflexive icons, people who are aware of the participatory culture and of the multiple interpretations and play with it. Lady Gaga would be one of them, like Madonna before her. Furnishing her video clips (which are seen and shared millions of times on Youtube) with many intertextual references to her own work and to others, she creates a huge cultural repertoire that every modern community can relate to. Every micro element can then be interpreted, remixed, and become, through her self-representation and her self-consciousness of her status, a thoroughfare where people can construct collective identities. Afterward, these people enjoy making their own parodies or spreading the videos with a comment emphasizing the micro elements they prefer (53). In return the pop star gives feedback and encourages this special
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relationship through her Twitter account, which is one of the most followed in the world. She creates what Jonathan Gray calls a paratext (89), in this case something that is not her music or her video-clips, but something more which has become as important as the rest of the production. According to Gray, who uses the example of the very famous TV show The Simpsons, this kind of paratext is a key to understanding the way we interpret cultural objects. This paratext encompasses commentary from the authors, from amateurs, critics, and also toys, video-games, comic-books and so on (92). The Simpsons, just like Lady Gaga, are never interpreted without this halo of “complementary” text. Every piece of art is a network and the sense we make of it emerges from our entanglement in this web (98). Even physical devices such as DVDs are becoming much more self-constructed and encourage us to enjoy the paratext surrounding the movie (commentary, director’s cut…) (Leonardo Quaresima, Valentina Re, 75). The frontiers between art, culture, media, marketing, grassroots and top down phenomena are becoming less and less well defined. This is of chief importance in cultural industries and has some convergence with the concept of transmedia as used by Jenkins. So like the cult body of Lady Gaga, the cult TV show The Simpsons can only be analyzed in studies that embrace simultaneously the way the network of intertextuality is created and produced, and the participation of the audience in these processes (98). From this new kind of encounter emerges the voice of communities that express their collective identity through the circulation, the appropriation and reinterpretation of the media itself. The relationship between creators and consumers has always existed but with the advent of digital networks it has become increasingly visible and transparent and now supports the emergence of communities. Marion Froger and Djema Maazouzi studying a webfilm about exile from post-war Algeria, explain that the author not only creates an online movie but also a sphere of “extimity” (exposed intimity) where people who recognize themselves in the journey of the hero can reinforce their feelings of being part of a community (115). This shared experience then becomes very fragile and the filmmaker must be aware of the special relationship he is starting and perpetually enhancing while just filming a trip to Algeria (114). The age of networking images is also the age of networking communities through images, more liminal and fluid communities that require some central connection to bind the individual identities together (116). Not everyone is so thrilled about using the notion of community as a tool to analyze every kind of media representation. While recognizing the importance of a specific identity projection in the relationship between audiences and authors in a networking environment, Guillaume Soulez tends to reject the concept, or specifically the now famous notion of interpretive communities, first coined by Stanley Fish. According to Soulez, the scale of this heuristic categorization is too large to understand what is at stake in every interpretive work, particularly in the age of the Web where everyone can be a critic and have multiple flows of data influencing his reception (121). From this perspective and context, the interpretive process on the internet is not something we can enclose in little boxes but a complex social structure (128). It is from a similar kind of statement that Laurent Jullier uses the very powerful tool of ANT (actor-network-theory), a theory designed in the eighties by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour among others (132). The great advantage of this theory is that it rejects all pre-conceived social categories insisting on what actors do and say and the chains of mediations that make them for example express any taste, any judgment on a movie. Jullier uses ANT to show how the movie Uncle Boonmee is criticized and the different strategies to interpret this work of art. These strategies and
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the movie itself are two networks interacting with each other and the researcher can only search for the point of origin of any kind of discourse (142).
8 This collective volume does not address the impact of networks on the way we produce and experience images (Youtube videos, DVD, webfilms, pornography, traditional cinema…); nevertheless, it offers a very rich, contrasted and well documented panorama that could be an ideal introduction to this question as well as a bibliographical goldmine on the subject.
AUTHOR
DAVID PEYRON Université Nanterre, Paris 10
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David Gauntlett, Making is Connecting, The social meaning of creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0 Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011, 232 pages
Nicolas Thély
REFERENCES
David Gauntlett, Making is Connecting, The social meaning of creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011, 232 pages
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1 Creativity contributes to favoring social links. This is the thesis of a new essay by David Gauntlett. Without distinguishing between major arts and minor arts, between amateur and professional practices, the sociologist is interested in “every day arts,” the ones that appear on the Internet and which concern the handmade and the Do It Yourself.
2 The concept of creativity is central to the research of David Gauntlett who, since 2006, has been Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster. Creativity even affects his own research methods. Indeed, David Gauntlett uses a very original model of inquiry that assigns a key role to Lego bricks, these colored bricks usually available for children to develop their imagination. David Gauntlett explains why in his previous book Creative Explorations: New approaches to identities and audiences (2007).
3 While this may seem surprising or eccentric, one can nevertheless understand why: it is worth remembering that the Lego brick and the digital brick were invented at the same period in the late 1940s. Both bricks have become generational standards because they have structured the imagination of people who explore today's digital practices: the Lego brick is also an important artistic pattern in the repertoire of visual forms of contemporary art and mass culture, particularly apt to represent the pixel.
4 For David Gauntlett, the Lego brick has real experimental virtues in the conduct of research: it helps reveal situations, express and develop scenarios and inner uses for the non-physical or virtual network world 2.0. This is how, while he was engaged in holding seminars on creative visual research, the thesis of his new book, Making is Connecting, suddenly dawned on him. He illustrates this well in the first pages of his essay through four visuals showing how the three major operations of creativity (making, sharing, and collaboration) are now almost contemporaneous. Thanks to the Web protocols 2.0 which encode know-how, the burdensomeness of traditional channels of cooperation in the world of creativity has become a thing of the past.
5 But the revealing power of this method does not exclude the usual scientific work. Therefore, the challenge of David Gauntlett’s new book is to seek the theoretical and intellectual filiations of this new performative statement (making is connecting) that has been operational since the advent of Web 2.0. The world described by David Gauntlett is that of all creative practices that revitalize themselves thanks to the Internet and which somehow form the common basis of digital culture. Three examples are Wikipedia (knowledge), Ravelry (knitting), Kiva (microfinance). For the sociologist the archetype of this new regime of creativity is YouTube because it concentrates three key principles: a framework for participation, being agnostic about content, and fostering community.
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6 In the controversy that animates the debate on the meaning and usage of these platforms, users (people) are generally apprehended through the figure of the amateur. In 2007, Andrew Keen severely condemned amateurish practices in his book The Cult of the Amateur (How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy) because, according to him, the amateur’s activities are compromising the knowledge economy and technical and management skills. In France, this new culture was instead defended by sociologist Patrice Flichy in his latest book Le Sacre de l’amateur, Sociologie des passions ordinaires à l’ère numérique (The Consecration of the Amateur). For Flichy, the contemporary web has become the kingdom of amateurs, he calls them “quidam” (an everyman of sorts).
7 David Gauntlett avoids this major semantic pitfall by placing at the center of this debate the creativity of millions of Internet users, he seeks to understand how creativity that eludes the industry helps to create social links and to produce another flow of knowledge and expertise. In this essay, the reader will find neither real case studies nor portraits of people who could serve as examples or models. The sociologist has chosen to deliver a very academic text in which he examines the potential theoretical filiations of digital creativity and ideological boundaries too.
8 At first, David Gauntlett goes back to the late 19th century when tensions arose again between art and craft under the pressure of societal changes caused by the Industrial Revolution. He presents the background and philosophy of the two major figures of the Arts and Crafts movement: John Ruskin, painter and poet, who argued that “the thought and the craft of making, the mental and the physical, were united in the same process” (np); and William Morris, textile designer, furniture designer and editor, who thought “The best artist was a workman still, the humblest workman was an artist”. David Gauntlett finds in these attitudes the values of DIY’s ethical culture, the passion for craft industry and neglected practices, the pleasure of making something for someone else: “DIY is, therefore, part of the original Arts and Crafts message – but processed through American optimism, and communicated in a cheerful and unpretentious way.”
9 Secondly, David Gauntlett examines the values that could explain why people are longing for social relationships through creativity. Succinctly looking at current research about happiness, the sociologist sees happiness as a determining factor. But the reader should not interpret happiness as a metaphysical value that might ethically condition the thoughts and actions of Web 2.0 users. Readers must conceive happiness as pleasure, satisfaction. David Gauntlett also regrets that studies on social capital provide little evidence to think about creativity as a factor for social linking. Approaching very briefly the founding theories of Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman, David Gauntlett focuses on the analysis of Robert Putnam for whom social capital is based on the network of knowledge. These analyses might have brought sense to the discussion, accusing television in particular of destroying any social links, yet they are often at odds with the arisal of social media.
10 Thirdly, David Gauntlett turns to the track of Ivan Illich who embodies the figure of the one who has been able to envisage a very open-minded productivity and the question of the transmission of knowledge. Taking up the concepts of “tools” and “conviviality” developed by Illich, David Gauntlett makes the link with the new culture taking shape at the beginning of the 1970s when computers were designed as open devices. Today, the Apple company seems to have closed this field with its digital tablet. If David
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Gauntlett praises the development of services that allow people to be creative and build relationships, he is not fooled by the twilight zones around such a way of living. To deposit personal data and ensure content for these platforms, means exposing oneself to Internet algorithmic speculations.
11 Making is Connecting is a deceptively cheerful book. If the purpose of the book is to discuss creativity, the reader will quickly understand how David Gauntlett measures the epistemological gap between the digital world and the theoretical tools devised in a non-digital culture. But for those interested in the proliferation of Fablabs and the rise of DIY culture, this book provides an original and constructive discussion. It echoes the question of emancipation as formulated in the 1980s by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière. The word “emancipation” means the blurring of boundaries between those who act and those who watch, between individuals and members of a collective body: the rebuilding “here and now" of the sharing of space and time, of work and leisure. Gauntlett’s study thus contributes to the debate about the invention and recognition of people’s emancipation, a fundamental concept of humanism and for modern and contemporary democracies.
AUTHOR
NICOLAS THÉLY Université de Haute Bretagne, Rennes 2
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Debbie Ging, Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 264 pages
Estelle Epinoux
REFERENCES
Debbie Ging, Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 264 pages
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1 Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema was written by Debbie Ging, who is a lecturer in Film and Media Studies at Dublin City University’s School of Communications in Ireland. Her book falls into the field of media studies and more precisely film studies. It is divided into nine chapters which interweave the notions of gender, nation, identity and masculinity. The author centres her research around the concept of masculinity, unveiling its multiple understandings within the context of Irish society past and present. She questions the evolving nature of images of Irish masculinity and the impact these evolutions have had on the “changing historical relation between nation, cinema and masculinity in Ireland” (1). The author deems such an examination relevant as the subject of masculinity has slowly emerged as a topic of public interest and debate in the past two decades in Ireland. The book studies the evolution of the images of men and masculinity in the Irish filmic production, these images being referred to as “non- normative imaginings” (18). The author focuses on analysing the films themselves. The articulation favoured is that “cinema talks to social realities as much as it talks of them” (16). The aim of the author is to scrutinize within the Irish filmic output, the dominant representations of and discourses on masculinity, and how that output can respond to or can be articulated with the public discourses on this topic. Thus her book is not organized in a chronological order, as the author pinpoints that male types, narrative themes and generic trends often cut across decades. Masculinity is explored through different prisms: in early Irish films, in films dealing with paternal masculinity, with boys institutions, with republicanism, with underclass men or criminals, even through the way speaking but also silence are portrayed in films. The author also questions different typologies of men: ‘marginalised men’, ‘men of violence’, ‘queer fellas’, men portrayed in films dealing with the troubles, without failing to read these male figures within their cultural, political and social Irish contexts, past and present. It is through that progress that the book describes the different masculinities which are at work in Irish films.
2 Ging studies a wide panel of films, displaying the way masculinity has been portrayed throughout the history of Irish cinema. Her analysis is supported by several references to American, British and Australian cinemas, providing her research with a relevant comparative approach, as similarities are raised between these different national cinemas. The films under scrutiny in the book are numerous and were chosen among the entire Irish film production, from the beginnings of Irish cinema until today. The selection of films was made “by identifying key, recurrent themes, sub-genres and male types” which were said to have “something substantial to say about men and manhood”
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(17). The films chosen include, among others: Knocknagow (1918), The Islandman (1938), About Adam (2000), Intermission (2003) and Sensation (2011). Film production is understood as a “partly autonomous structure” (18) and films are not considered as “simply reflect(ing) contemporary social discourses but are in fact creators of discourse themselves” (16). Thus, films provide an “overview of the impact that the economic, (gender-) political and cultural shifts in Ireland have had on representation of and discourses around men and masculinities in this country” (16).
3 The author identifies the three main trends of images of masculinity in Irish films; the films directed during the first wave (1970s-1980s) which were based on criticism and deconstruction, those belonging to the second wave (1990s) which were mainly characterised by both criticism and openness and finally, those from the third wave (2000s) which is part of a reconstruction process, a “more complex wave which overlaps the two previous waves” (209) and which mainly highlights a phase of crisis when “new variants of hegemonic masculinity are becoming increasingly hybridised” (157).
4 The most interesting if not challenging aspect of the book is when the author defines what she refers to as that ‘reconstruction’ period of the images of masculinity. The author reads the new images of masculinity within the general context of Irish cinema, accentuating both the internal as well as the external impacts on Irish films and on their images of Irish masculinity. She alludes to the “boundaries of national cinema (which) are less clear” (209) and within which the notion of masculinity itself has become “increasingly hybridised” (209). The author stresses that today it is difficult to establish clear categories for the main images of masculinity.
5 She also contextualizes Irish images of masculinity within their historical framework, emphasizing that these ‘new’ or ‘reconstructed’ images owe more to ‘Ireland’s neoliberal present’ than to its ‘colonial past’. Breaking away from the recurring theme of postcoloniality when dealing with Irish history, the author postulates that the new images of masculinity are the result of an evolution of genderscape at large, moving away from an exclusive Irish perspective on the question. It is within this new complex context and taking into account the effects of globalisation that, according to the author, Irish images of masculinity are located in “new spaces, opening up for more self-reflexive and non normative meditation on men and masculinity” (212).
AUTHOR
ESTELLE EPINOUX Université de Limoges
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John Mullen, ‘The show must go on!’ La Chanson populaire en Grande-Bretagne pendant la Grande Guerre, 1914-1918 Paris: L’Harmattan, collection “L’Aire Anglophone”, 2012, 287 pages
Yann Béliard
REFERENCES
John Mullen, ‘The show must go on!’ La Chanson populaire en Grande-Bretagne pendant la Grande Guerre, 1914-1918, Paris: L’Harmattan, collection “L’Aire Anglophone”, 2012, 287 pages.
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On 30-31 August 2014, an international conference entitled ‘The Music of War: 1914-1918’ will be held at the British Library to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. The call for papers published by convenors Jane Angell and Rachel Moore (Royal Holloway, University of London) reads as the perfect introduction for the book under review: “ In recent years there has been a welcome increase in scholarly attention to musical activity during the First World War, and this has begun to reveal the multiple and complex roles of music during the conflict. For civilians and soldiers alike, music of all kinds played a central part in the battle, whether as entertainment, as a powerful means to boost morale, as a vehicle of government propaganda, as a therapeutic tool, or as part of commemoration rituals.” John Mullen’s The Show Must Go On! is indeed a fascinating reflection of and contribution to that growing field of study. A senior lecturer in British studies at UPEC (Université Paris Est Créteil Val de Marne), John Mullen is the one and only French scholar to have published extensively on the topic of popular music in Great Britain during the Great War, mostly in the French academic press – the only other French researcher in the British music-hall industry being Angèle David-Guillou (Université Paris 4), who is currently completing a much- expected doctoral thesis on musicians’ unions in the Edwardian age, under the supervision of Professor Fabrice Bensimon. Mullen’s study, informed by his concern for all forms of popular protest in the long nineteenth century, stands at the crossroads of two important streams: the ongoing rediscovery of the First World War “from below” (as embodied in France by historians Nicolas Offenstadt or Rémy Cazals); and the emergence of leisure as a legitimate object for historical research (an option defended and illustrated, among many others on the French side of the English Channel, by Emmanuel Roudaut). The book is composed of eight chapters – in fact six if one excludes the much shorter introduction and conclusion –, four of which terminate with the portrait of a music hall star (in order of appearance: Harry Lauder, Vesta Tilley, Marie Lloyd and Harry Champion). It also includes statistical tables showing what themes were the most frequent in the wartime commercial and non-commercial song production; a political, military and cultural timeline extending from January 1914 to December 1918; and a ten-page long list of the songs mentioned in the book. As the introduction emphasises, the book sums up months of research in the pages of the national and specialised press – in particular The Performer and The Encore. The topic is approached thematically (chapter two explores the economic structures of the music hall, chapter three the mosaic of genres) without neglecting the evolution in the content of the songs as the
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war dragged on (chapter four). Of the last three chapters, which are all utterly unputdownable (chapter five deals with the representation of women and chapter six with that of the war), the final one (chapter seven) is to be praised more highly for its evocation of the songs conceived outside of the music hall. The ambivalent use of church hymns is well underlined: while so many were meant to support the war effort, the fact that the tunes were universal made it easy to transform them into tools for fraternisation with ‘the enemy’ during the first winters on the front. Poignant passages are devoted to the songs produced by the Tommies themselves, to their bitter sense of humour (“If you’re looking for the general, I know where he is…”) and to a rejection of the hierarchy that was not so plain inside the French or German armies. As a book written for francophone readers belonging to the general public, The Show Must Go On! reaches its target beautifully: it allows the French honnête homme to access, in a pleasant and ever entertaining way, the results of the inquiries that have been led over the past years into the complexities of popular music during the Great War. The web link indications are useful, the sheer quantity of material studied is impressive (more than one thousand songs altogether), the insistence on the economic dimension of cultural productions is welcome. The author’s empathy for the common people also stands out as one of the book’s crucial qualities. Following Bernard Porter’s and Andrew Thompson’s warnings about the relativity of domestic imperialism, Mullen refuses to take the public’s jingoism for granted and gives due recognition to the dissenting power of song-writing and song-performing in the trenches. The same personal attention to the oppressed sections of British society accounts for the important place given by the author to the key dimensions of race and gender. Unless they are put off rather than charmed by the occasional anglicisme, French readers will undoubtedly find plenty to appreciate in Mullen’s synthesis. Whether the book is destined to become compulsory reading for academics, be they musicologists or cultural historians, or the classic handbook for students specialising in history or cultural studies is yet another question. For reasons that are mostly due, one guesses, to the editorial constraints weighing on the author, The Show Must Go On! is at times frustrating. The reader is provided neither with an index nor with a bibliography and the summary is incomplete, as it does not include the headings of the numerous subparts. The biographical vignettes, however colourful, offer little new information: instead of limiting his choice to four of the most successful performers of the period, the author would have stimulated the specialist’s curiosity if he had selected more obscure artists, with careers more specifically linked to the wartime context. A small factual mistake spotted on page 41: Board of Trade arbitrator George Ranken Askwith, who was called to intervene in the music industry troubles, just as he was in the mining or shipping industries, was not raised to the peerage until 1920, so he was not “Lord Askwith” during the Great Labour Unrest of 1910-1914 nor during the post-1916 militant revival. Possibly the biggest source of irritation for the reader is simply caused by the author’s (or more plausibly the editor’s) decision to systematically translate the words of the songs into French, without presenting the original text in the footnotes. Though the lyrics have been carefully and indeed rather cleverly transposed from one language into the other, the phonetic – and poetic – dimension of the songs is therefore lost in translation. Even a French reader with limited mastering of Shakespeare’s idiom would surely have appreciated a taste of ‘the real thing’; and that absence can only be
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partially compensated by the consulting of the video and audio online resources referred to in the book. Would 2014 not be the perfect timing for a translation of Mullen’s work into English, and its publication in a deluxe edition comprising a larger array of illustrations and – more importantly still – a CD-box? Should such a dream come true, it would probably make sense to change two elements on the cover: both the light-hearted title (“The show must go on!”) and the consensual picture (“The song they sing as they march along: it’s a long, long way to Tipperary”) might be swapped for more equivocal ones, espousing Mullen’s fundamental option: to complexify traditional visions of patriotic unanimity and present a more nuanced analysis than John Brophy and Eric Partridge (The Long Trail – What the British Soldier Sang and Said in the Great War of 1914-1918, London: André Deutsch, 1965). All in all, there is much to admire in John Mullen’s book and its very limitations can be seen as appealing. Arguably, the scholar in search of a state of the art theoretical framework or of an in-depth historiographical overview may be disappointed: the book’s vocation is clearly not to subsume Peter Bailey’s Music Hall: the Business of Pleasure (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986). But it is precisely that modesty which makes Mullen’s study accessible and enjoyable for the greatest number. One may deplore the overwhelming place occupied by London in the enquiry: what about Cardiff and Glasgow, or Liverpool and Hull? On the other hand, when a book leaves you wanting to know more – about the shape of wartime music in Ireland or in the Dominions, for example –, it is generally the sign that the author has more than satisfactorily reached his aim: not only to share his knowledge but to open new perspectives. To conclude this review, I would like to quote once again from the ‘Music of War’ conference webpage: “From the sound of artillery to the drone of Zeppelins, those living through the First World War were only too familiar with the sounds of war, whether on the home or fighting fronts. These ominous sounds of death and destruction formed a backdrop to the alternative sounds of war: music-making. (…) The forthcoming centenary of the war is a timely opportunity to reconsider the fundamental role of music and musicians during the exceptional circumstances of 1914-1918.” Published two years ahead of the British Library event, John Mullen’s rich and lively study does exactly that. And though I am not 100% sure he would approve of the following suggestion, why not read it alongside John Major’s My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall (London: HarperCollins, 2012)? And tant pis (too bad) for the speakers of French, or for those who only wish to hear one side of the story.
AUTHOR
YANN BÉLIARD Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3
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Isabelle Rigoni and Eugenie Saitta (eds), Mediating Cultural Diversity in a Globalized Public Space New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 192 pages
Christopher Ali
REFERENCES
Isabelle Rigoni and Eugenie Saitta (eds), Mediating Cultural Diversity in a Globalized Public Space, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 192 pages
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1 In 2000, Curran and Park published an influential edited collection with a clear aim: to “de-westernize media studies”. In doing so, they put a term to what many had believed for quite some time: we need to look beyond the west. The theme of de- westernizing media studies certainly caught on, as did two related areas to Curran and Park’s call: the study of diasporic and ethnic minority media both within western countries, and also as examples of the global circulation and mobility of texts, genres, people and capital (Appadurai, 1996). While Curran and Park’s goal was to emphasize research from places outside the “Anglo-American orbit” (11), these parallel interests on transnational, diasporic, ‘ethnic’, minority, and migrant media productions have become equally important sites for scholarly inquiry. Diasporic media are seminal communicatory practices that connect migrant and mobile communities with their territorial homes, and have been of interest to scholars for decades (i.e. Nacify, 1993; Karim, 2003; Husband, 2000). In the spirit of de-westernizing media studies, the case studies brought together by Rigoni and Saitta are important contributions to understanding cultural diversity in global media practices.
2 The book focuses on the production of ‘ethnic’ and minority media and communicatory practices within the global circulation of ideas and texts, and the “widespread democratization of access to technological tools,” (1). The chapters emerged primarily from a conference on Alternative Self-Representation held in Paris in March 2010. The overall aim of both the conference and the book is to position ethnic media practitioners as vibrant and productive agents within the production of media and culture (2). That said the editors make four critical assertions in their introduction that tempers any assumption of myopic celebration of ethnic media as unquestionably emancipatory and democratic. First, they recognize that acknowledging the democratization of technology does not mean “celebrating the new per se” (2). In other words, old and new media are equal partners in ethnic media production practices. Moreover, the digital divide, while slowly abating, still resonates within more countries than where it is being bridged. The Internet, therefore, has limits. Second, they observe that ethnic media is not a singular, homogeneous or hermetically sealed genre of texts, but are diverse and complex. Third, they remind the reader that ethnic media is not by default “subversive by the very fact of their ethnic identity” (3). Fourth, they contend that it is false to position ‘ethnic’ and ‘mainstream’ media as diametrically opposed. To do so, “would be to deny the complexity of journalism and the relationships which exist between different types of media” (3).
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3 While not enumerated as such, a fifth critical assertion is the deliberate choice to focus on “mobility” rather than on “migration” in assessing diasporic and ethnic media (5). This important distinction recognizes that with the rise in access to ICTs, “individuals no longer have to cross borders in order to create and maintain links with others across the globe” (5). It is also a commentary on the role of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ in media production and consumption. They suggest the notion of “co-presence” to emphasize that “circulation is no longer just about physical displacement within space; without being geographically mobile, without even being a migrant in the strictest sense, an individual can nonetheless be part of a ‘culture of mobility’” (6, quoting Rigoni, forthcoming). Mobility, therefore, has become a defining feature of migratory and ethnic media practices.
4 Not only are these assertions useful for framing the critical disposition of the chapters, but they are also transportable to other scholarly domains not necessarily related to ethnic minority media. These critical assertions also anticipate the general argument of the book that “ethnic minority media, insofar as they constitute partial public spaces, do not always in fact succeed in appearing as tools of counter-hegemony, despite their frequently stated desire to be seen as alternative media” (9). Echoing this pluralistic understanding of ethnic media, the authors position “public space” not as a fixed concept, but rather one of “collective reconstruction” – a malleable space impacted by hegemonic ideology (9). This collection thus offers a critical perspective on ethnic media which recognizes its normative value, but which is not prepared to uncritically celebrate its existence.
5 Mediating Cultural Diversity is divided in three sections, with Rigoni and Saitta’s introduction providing the central themes and overall argument. Part One’s two case studies inquire as to “The Internet as a Space of Super-Diversity?” Both chapters celebrate the Internet as a space and place for diasporic communication and representation. Bailey’s chapter uses Deuleuze and Guattari’s conceptual framework of rhizomatic and arbolic thinking to argue that the Internet is useful for the facilitation of rhizomatic spaces for ethnic and diasporic groups (23). In other words, the Internet can facilitate a “smooth space” of anti-hierarchical, “non-linear, anarchic and nomadic” relationships (23). Through a case study of the participatory website “African Women in Europe,” Bailey suggests that this site represents “‘speaking spaces’ for diasporic and ethnic groups that potentially strengthen groups through their self- representation, interconnected stories, and create alternative public spheres that might interact with mainstream spheres to enable them to sustain the articulation of cultural difference” (31). Similarly upholding the role of the Internet to facilitate democratic discourse, Nedelcu’s chapter focuses on the online response to campaigns of racial and ethnic prejudice in Switzerland against Romanian migrants, and the online transnational mobilization of diasporic Romanians. Nedelcu argues that the development of ICTs and the Internet in particular offers both “space for democratic expression of migrant minorities” through the facilitation of “netizenship” – a new “form of participation and active citizenship” – and “create[s] basic conditions for collective agency, gathering migrant and non-migrant populations across borders” (48-49).
6 Contrasting with these rather favourable views of the relationship between migrant communities and online spaces, Part Two offers a more critical perspective. Titley’s chapter focuses on the shifting discourse from “multiculturalism” to “diversity” within
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certain countries in Europe (especially Ireland) to avoid what he sees as the negative connotations of the discourse of “multiculturalism” (61). Navaz and Ferrer investigate the difficulties of migrant Latin American journalists in Spain and note how further research needs to interrogate the “tensions between market and citizenship” rather than take them for granted (90). Of all the chapters, however, it is arguably Bozdag, Hepp and Suna’s that represents the keystone of the book. The authors offer a conceptual and methodological overview of diasporic media focusing on the concept of “diasporic networking,” and ask whether “diasporic media really offer an ‘alternative’ space” (96). Importantly, the authors offer a definition of “diasporic media,” something that is absent and perhaps even lacking in other chapters. They define the practice as “the media that are produced by and for migrants and deal with issues that are of specific interest for the members of diasporic communities,” (97). They argue that diasporic media need to be understood within the spectrum of media production – rather than isolated and studied on its own. This suggests a more complex ecological understanding of media and cultural production. Scholars also need to be reminded that ethnic media are only used for the purposes of establishing migrant “public spheres” but also for entertainment (110-11). They conclude that the lexicon of “diasporic media” may be more useful than that of “alternative media” or “alternative public spheres” since, while they are not homogeneous, they are nevertheless “orientated towards the diasporic community in a thematic-organizational sense and are on that account building a focus for the networking of diasporas” (111).
7 While offering a conceptual understanding of the place of diasporic media within a media ecosystem, Bozdag, Hepp and Suna also bring to the fore a relationship that could use more robust discussion: the relationship and boundaries between “diasporic media” and what scholars have called “community media” (Howley, 2005), “radical media” (Downing, 2001), “alternative media” (Atton, 2002) or “citizens’ media” (Rodriguez, 2001). What is the relationship between these media practices, and are they best described as separate entities or as porous categories? Is there benefit to thinking in terms of bridges between these supposedly democratic media practices or are they best left apart?
8 The final part of the book interrogates the role of diasporic media as counter- hegemonic practices. Thussu’s chapter, for instance, argues that Bollywood simultaneously disrupts “U.S. cultural hegemony” and creates “its own version of hegemony” (119). Ferron’s chapter comes closest to addressing the question posed in the previous paragraph: the relationship between diasporic and community media. He positions minority media as an iteration of “alternative media,” using case studies of Mexican neo-Zapatista indigenous media, and “Palestinian Arab media in Israel- Palestine” (137). While attempting to define alternative media Ferron sees its various conceptualizations (community, alternative, radical, etc…) as synonymous, and positions certain examples of ethnic minority media in Mexico and Israel as examples of “alternative media”. Tempering this inclusiveness however, he also makes note of the contentious debate between indigenous media and community media in Mexico. He concludes by reinforcing several themes in the book: that alternative, and ethnic minority media cannot be understood in isolation from “mainstream media,” that alternative media is not a homogeneous media practice, and that “community, ethnic minority, alternative media do not necessarily have a democratic impact on the public space” (150). He suggests thinking about ethnic minority media and alternative media
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through a more nuanced perspective of “civil society media” and “social movement media” to better encapsulate the political agendas of these practices.
9 Through an analysis of the “Black African Press in the United Kingdom” Ogunyemi’s chapter concludes the book by restating one of its central theses: that ethnic media do not always represent hegemonic resistance or alternative politics, but rather can also serve to replicate mainstream media practices. Here, Britain’s black African press serves to “replicate the sourcing routines of its mainstream counterparts by monitoring the same official channels” (165). The author concludes however that such an elite discourse reflects editors’ desire to promote underreported ethnic minority stories, rather than on promoting alternative voices. This highlights an existential dilemma not only within ethnic minority media, but “alternative,” “community,” “citizens” or “radical” media more generally: to replicate mainstream practices and thereby gain potential visibility, or to promote alternative and internal voices and aim to strengthen ties to existing communities.
10 If one were to search for a place where this research could be expanded it would be in the area of probing the conceptual boundaries of migrant, diasporic or ethnic media, and the relationships with other participatory media practices such as alternative, community, radical, or citizens’ media. Ferron’s chapter along with Bozdag, Hepp and Suna begin such a conversation about building bridges within culturally diverse media within a globalized public space. Specifically, their research anticipates the question: what are the benefits and shortcomings of separating these practices, empirically, methodologically, and conceptually? Such questioning represents the strength of the book, rather than a weakness, because it opens up avenues for inquiry and interrogation. As the authors constantly remind the reader, diasporic and ethnic media are not static, singular or homogenous practices but rather complex and dynamic activities, and their contributions need to be understood as such.
11 Back in 2000, Curran and Park argued, “media studies will benefit from developing a wider comparative perspective” (15). This book certainly contributes to this benefit, and offers unique empirical and theoretical contributions to the study of ethnic media. While not for the uninitiated reader, each chapter is well positioned to be added to advanced undergraduate or graduate syllabi on diasporic, migrant, mobile, ethnic or transnational media, as they are self-contained, and offer a valuable contribution to this important and dynamic field.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Appadurai, A. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Atton, C. Alternative Media. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2002.
Curran, J. & Park, M.J. “Beyond Globalization Theory”. In De-Westernizing Media Studies, edited by J. Curran and M.J. Park, 3-18. London: Routledge, 2000.
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Downing, J. Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2001.
Howley, K. Community Media: People, Places, and Communication Technologies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Husband, C. “Media and the Public Sphere in Multi-Ethnic Societies”. In Ethnic Minorities and the Media, edited by S. Cottle, 199-214. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000.
Karim, K.H. “Mapping Diasporic Mediascapes”. In The Media of Diaspora, edited by K. H. Karim, 1-18. London: Routledge, 2003. Nacify, H. The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Rodriguez, C. Fissures in the Mediascape: An International Study of Citizens' Media. Cresskill: Hampton Press, 2001.
AUTHOR
CHRISTOPHER ALI University of Pennsylvania
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