DEATH PROOF Amy Ongiri I had started to feel like the world had been invaded rative challenge to conventions around race, gender, by a past that we could recognize but no longer and sexuality. They also question the notion that understand. Something told me that my own mem- the historical past is effectively dead because of its Trauma, Memory, and ory was going. I was noticing too many things with- seemingly fixed status as a static object in structures out being able to say much about them other than of nostalgia and memory. Film, video, and installa- Black Power Era Images that I had seen them before. Though I could no lon- tion work by Fusco, Julien, Pettibon, Kerry James ger match every face from that time with a name, I Marshall, Bill Jones and Suzy Lake, Lyle Ashton still recognized hers. Like most of those who had seen Harris, and Carrie Mae Weems position still pho- in Contemporary Visual Culture her, I hardly knew who she was. What I did know tography in ways that challenge the boundaries of was that her image cast a long shadow. new media and the prevalent notion that the radi- —Narrator speaking of Angela Davis in cal ideologies of the Black Power era are necessarily Coco Fusco’s a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert dead. These films act as a mediation of the political n Death 24x a Second, Laura Mulvey argues that in that they negotiate between the material physi- cinematic images belie the deathlike qualities cal reality of history, nostalgia, and the failed uto- I of still photography because of their ability to pian aspirations of the liberation movements that invoke the appearance of life through motion. This they represent. But they also represent, as well as essay examines film and video projects that use (re)present, an archive of negotiation around the found footage and still images from the Black Power materiality of the still image and the spectacular era by redeploying them in experimental film and nature of the moving image. Laura Mulvey begins digital formats. Ofen highly didactic and formu- her essay “The Index and the Uncanny: Life and laic in their original form, the Black Panther Party’s Death in the Photograph” with Rosalind Krauss’s (BPP) imagery of guns, fists, and men in militarized assertion that still photography is situated “at the formations contested prevailing notions of race, crossroads of science and spiritualism” and thus power, and masculinity. Similarly, groups like the generates “associations with life afer death, while Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) are most ofen also supplying, for the first time in human history, remembered through their spectacular representa- a mechanized imprint of reality.”1 Mulvey’s deploy- tion in visual media culture rather than through ment of Krauss thus locates photography as both an their political actions or agendas. index of physicality and as a signifier of what lies Video and film projects such as Raymond Petti- beyond the physical; for her, it is “the uncanny.” I bon and David Markey’s Citizen Tania (1989), Fred wish to explore this canon of films in relationship Ho and Paul Chan’s Black Panther Suite (1998), to an uncanny that is both pictorial and political. Isaac Julien’s Baltimore (2003), Sharon Hayes’s The SLA and the BPP differed widely in ideol- Symbionese Liberation Army, Screed #16, Patricia ogy, methodology, and political impact, but the two Hearst’s Second Tape (2003), Coco Fusco’s a/k/a groups shared an investment in redefining media Mrs. George Gilbert (2004), and Goran Hugo Ols- culture through spectacular moments of what Regis son’s Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (2011) mobi- Debray would label “armed propaganda.” In his lize Black Power images in a formal as well as nar- widely influential 1967 account of guerrilla war- Raymond Pettibon, Citizen Tania, 2009. DVD video, 86 min. © Raymond Pettibon. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles Journal of Contemporary African Art • 29 • Fall 2011 44 • Nka Ongiri Nka • 45 DOI 10.1215/10757163-1496327 © 2011 by Nka Publications fare in Latin America, Revolution in the Revolution, For Debord, the spectacle becomes a defining fea- the Panthers garnered as “media star revolution- leaves a mark on the unconscious, a kind of index Debray builds on the philosophy of Che Guevara, of ture of capitalist society because it begins to define aries” when they were lampooned in Tom Wolfe’s of the psyche that parallels the photograph’s trace of whom he was a close associate, to argue that mass everything from social structures to social relation- influential 1970 essay Radical Chic. Their impact as an original event.”11 Cinema is, ultimately, a collec- revolution might be triggered by the spectacle of ships. He writes: “The spectacle is not a collection visual icons was such that they were both referenced tion of still images set in motion by the cinematic revolution created by small guerrilla forces. This of images, but a social relation among people, medi- in popular blaxploitation films and featured in films apparatus and is thus the “death at 24x a second” went against the popular ideology of revolution- ated by images”; it is “a Weltanschauung which has by French New Wave directors Agnes Varda (Black to which Mulvey’s title refers. It offers, according ary social change espoused by its major contempo- become actual, materially translated. It is a world Panthers — Huey!, 1968) and Jean- Luc Godard to Mulvey, a medium that arrests and registers the rary actors, including Fidel Castro, who famously vision which has become objectified.”7 (Sympathy for the Devil, 1968). Most of the contem- experience of the history. She writes, “Cinema will asserted that “the duty of every revolutionary is to In 1968, a year afer Debord published Society porary video work that references the radical his- increasingly become a source of collective memory make the revolution,”2 or Guevara himself, who vig- of the Spectacle and Debray published Revolution tory of the 1960s and 1970s uses the more iconic of the twentieth century for those who missed liv- orously denigrated “coffee- shop theories” and “the in the Revolution, Guevara would be killed in the images from this period. ing through it.”12 do- nothing attitude of those pseudo- revolutionaries jungles of Bolivia afer failing to incite revolution Laura Mulvey’s Death at 24x a Second rumi- a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert draws its title from the who procrastinate under the pretext that nothing there, and Larry Neal would declare the Black Arts nates on the relationship between still photogra- name that Angela Davis used while underground, can be done against a professional army.”3 Gue- movement “the sister to the Black Power concept.”8 phy, history, and death. Mulvey focuses on Sigmund attempting to avoid capture as one of the FBI’s Ten vara instead declared: “Where one really learns is Groups such as the SLA and the BPP sought to Freud’s concept of the uncanny as a moment of Most Wanted. The video mixes dramatized re- in a revolutionary war; every minute teaches you shatter the stranglehold that dominant media and frisson between the conscious and the unconscious more than a million volumes of books. You mature advertising had over visual culture by consciously mind to examine the photograph’s tie to the idea in the extraordinary university of experience.”4 By attempting to disrupt existing image culture with a of death as something always present as a moment contrast, Debray would argue that revolution “must kind of “armed propaganda” shaped at least partly of anxiety and return for the subconscious but also have the support of the masses or disappear” and by the Black Arts movement’s belief that black cul- always disavowed by the conscious mind. Photog- that this support could be created not only through ture should reflect a uniquely black aesthetic. The raphy as a medium is particularly tied to the ques- the action of revolution itself but also through the BPP’s entry into media culture was its dramatic tion of death by the historical circumstances of its spectacle it created, proving that “a soldier and a protest in 1967 at the California statehouse in Sac- birth as a technology on the cusp of a modernity policeman are no more bulletproof than anyone ramento against proposed legislation to ban the that was still oscillating between the spiritual and else.”5 Debray and those he influenced thus created carrying of firearms in public. Two factors greatly supernaturalism of religion and the secularism of the “revolutionary” act of mediation that “revolu- enhanced the drama of the Panthers’ appearance: the mechanical and scientific. One need only look tionaries” performed at the nexus of the “real” of they were armed with rifles and outfitted in their at Freud’s 1918 study Totem and Taboo, tellingly history and the material traces of that act in media signature black leather jackets and berets, and Gov- subtitled Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of culture. ernor Ronald Reagan was holding a press confer- Savages and Neurotics, to see the limitations that In his Society of the Spectacle — first published ence on the statehouse lawn at the time. Though Freud presents in imagining the psychic lives and Coco Fusco, a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert, 2004. Video, 31 min. in 1967, the same year as Debray’s Revolution in the the Panthers had fewer than fify members at that cultural imaginations of non- European people.10 Image © the artist. Courtesy Video Data Bank Revolution — Guy Debord connects commodity point, pictures of the event were on the front page However, African American culture’s deep invest- fetishism to social transformation by revealing how of several national newspapers, including the New ment in the haunting of the past in the present and creations of scenes of surveillance that are ambigu- the spectacle had come to dominate contemporary York Times.