In the Name of the People? A Closer Look at Politicized Documentary Filmmaking: The Case of El Salvador K. Cheasty Miller Introduction As the camera begins filming on Tape #17 it captures a hot, sunny day in the mountains of El Salvador. Four scruffy Americans trek happily through the forest, laughing and calling back and forth. Clearly animated, their enthusiasm leaps off the screen: they have just returned from the capital city, San Salvador, where they have finished filming guerrilla forces in action, fighting a classic type of urban warfare. Out of a total nineteen reels of archived, unedited footage shot, this is the first time the viewer has ever seen these men, who until now have only been disembodied voices off-screen, posing questions, muttering comments, and discussing various filming logistics. For six weeks they have lived in the mountains with a guerrilla band from the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional, or FMLN. They have traveled halfway across the country and risked death in the street battles they just filmed to capture the story of a revolutionary movement in a small Central American country unknown to most Americans. This moment is a catharsis, the culmination of their work and the end of their journey. Unguarded and exuberant, they exult in their triumph. “Hey, man, whaddaya think—have we got a movie?” calls a voice off-screen to one of the men on camera. “No,” comes the reply: “we’ve got a FILM!!”1 The difference between a “movie” and a “film” is significant. The former implies wide commercial appeal, high entertainment value, low intellectual content, and perhaps a “Hollywood” formula. The latter implies a niche market of sophisticated, discerning viewers, and a carefully constructed, meaningful presentation of information with layered significances. 1 Benson Latin American Collection (University of Texas at Austin) [henceforth BLAC], “In the Name of the People Unedited Film Collection” [henceforth INPUFC], tape 17. 1 This latter description is how these men in their frankest moments, imagined their documentary project―as a film, entailing all that the word implied. Their documentary, In the Name of the People, garnered much critical acclaim.2 In the short term, it helped heighten desires in the American political left to end U.S. involvement in El Salvador’s Civil War. In the long term, the nineteen archived unedited tapes of the Salvadoran guerrillas have provided historians a unique opportunity to delve more deeply into the way the filmmakers organized and edited their footage to create the documentary. This paper analyzes the documentary, In the Name of the People, by comparing the themes captured in the unedited, archived footage to how they are portrayed in the final cut. In the process, it also offers a methodology to assist scholars that use documentary film as an historical artifact, and provides a revisionist study of the guerrilla experience in El Salvador’s Civil War. Contextualizing the Revolutionary Movement Since colonial times a few large landowning families have dominated El Salvador and controlled its peasantry through a nearly feudal system of patronage and dependency. In 1932 the peasants finally rose up under the leadership of Farabundo Martí, the national liberation fighter. Their goal was to break up El Salvador’s historic land patterns and power structures. The uprising was brief; the military quickly quashed the rebellion, executed Martí, and massacred 30,000 peasants. It then established a corrupt dictatorship that ruled El Salvador with an iron fist for the next fifty years. In the 1960s and 70s, however, the military’s iron grip began to weaken, in part due to a liberationist movement within the Catholic Church. Catholic priests and nuns began preaching a new kind of gospel to the people of El Salvador: liberation theology. Peasants grasped the new theology quickly, and acquired a new sense of justice and community formation to press for 2 Frank Christopher, In the Name of the People (New York: First Run Icarus Films, 1984). DVD. http://www.frif.com/cat97/f-j/in_the_n.html. This documentary was not only an Academy Award Nominee, but also won Best Feature Documentary of 1985, and the 1985 Blue Ribbon Award at the American Film Festival. 2 political change. They formed new organizational units called Christian Base Communities (CEBs) and began training leaders to help secure changes in the status quo. Many Salvadorans who later rose to leadership positions within the revolutionary movement received their first education and training in the CEBs. In the 1970s the path to political change initially seemed to rest with the Christian Democratic Party, but consecutive fraudulent elections gradually de-legitimized the ballot as a viable option for political reform. Soon, a fragmented revolutionary movement emerged and gained organizational strength. Its principal targets were the Salvadoran military, which—under U.S. financial patronage—ran the country, and the paramilitary death squads that assassinated anyone who tried to change El Salvador’s power structure. In 1979 a group of young military officers finally staged a bloodless coup, but the resulting junta soon proved too weak and ineffective to control the army or its death squads. With oppression rising to thirty murders per day and mass slaughters in the cities and countryside, Salvadorans began to flee their country. The state’s crack down on “subversives” continued, and the United States—concerned over the spread of communism—maintained its financial and military support of the Salvadoran government. It is within this context that the filmmakers of In the Name of the People entered El Salvador to produce a documentary that would inform the American people about this revolutionary struggle and their government’s complicity in the repressive campaign waged by the Salvadoran military. Documentary Film: History or Artifact? In the Name of the People is an excellent example of revolutionary documentary filmmaking. Directed by Frank Christopher and written by Alex Drehsler, the film covers the six weeks these filmmakers spent with the FMLN and explains the history of their revolt. It introduces the audience to both the leadership and the common soldier, and details the revolutionary movement’s political goals. The documentary is well edited, well written, and never wavers from portraying the filmmakers’ storyline through interviews, narration, and 3 compelling visual evidence. The film’s unedited archived footage also is an especially valuable primary source for scholars examining the history of El Salvador’s Civil War, and the analytical utility of revolutionary documentary as a genre. The film is not, however, an entirely faithful interpretation of the lives of the Salvadoran guerrillas. Indeed, how could it be? There were thousands of individuals in the FMLN, each with multiple and complex motivations for “incorporating in the struggle.”3 No 75-minute film could capture any single “truth” about such a diverse group. The filmmakers compiled over nineteen hours of raw footage, but in the end they included perhaps only 5 percent of that material in their 75-minute film.4 As with most storytelling, the filmmakers carefully wrote and edited In the Name of the People to tell the story they wanted to tell. The final product, therefore, reflects their truth, but not necessarily the truth. By crafting and telling a particular history, the filmmakers actually became historians themselves, shaping the way that the filmed past would be understood and examined by future generations. Yet the “research” that these historians/filmmakers left behind poses a unique challenge to other historians, for there is a qualitative difference between the historical evidence a documentary provides versus the evidence contained in a book a historian writes. While a historian’s book relies on document-based, photographic, or even film-based research, the footnotes and bibliography are verifiable—other scholars can go back and re- examine the historian’s work. By contrast, in filmed “research” the “bibliography” largely ends up on the cutting room floor, leaving scholars to reference only the finished film and impeding closer scrutiny of the documentary itself as historical evidence. Just as historians do, filmmakers also research and write history, but the film they produce also constitutes an historical artifact—one that captures both a piece of history and the historians’ broader worldview and agenda. In this sense, a documentary, like any other historical 3 “Incorporarse a la lucha,” literally “incorporate in the struggle” was the universal terminology for joining or siding with the revolution in the El Salvadoran Civil War. 4 The filmmakers also included other footage from CBS and ABC news stock Frank Christopher, interview with the author, 24 April 2006. 4 document, is valuable not simply for what it says about the subject, but also for what it teaches us about the authors. Consequently, historians who study documentaries should ask not only why the filmmakers told the particular stories they did, but why others were absent. Alternate stories are always there, but they must be brought out and examined to create a fuller picture of an historical event. Documentary Film as an Historical Source As a unique type of historical document, film documentaries provide scholars valuable evidence of historical events. However, historians must carefully evaluate and interpret this evidence. Toward these ends, a useful methodology entails a healthy appreciation of three key factors: (1) the exaggerated veracity of documentary film, (2) the viewers’ tendency to accept uncritically that which is shown and fail to ponder that which is not shown, and (3) the filmmakers’ ability to alter original footage through careful editing. The exaggerated veracity of documentary film derives from its powerful visual effect, in that viewers tend to trust something they have “seen with their own eyes” over something they have merely read or heard.