[by Christopher Smith]
The rhetorical capacity of the camera has changed both the way social protest is captured by onlookers, but has also helped to establish a means by which statements of political, social, or economic activism may help determine its efficacy—a new criteria was established during the twentieth century, of what "looks good" for the television and still cameras. From red carpet celebrity appearances to network television anchors to filmmakers and politicians, one's own appearance and voice transmitted across electronic means has become a new and fluid form of rhetoric. When Nixon sweated and stammered his way through televised, live, and unedited Presidential debates in 1960—and went on to lose the race to Kennedy—he hired a young and aspiring production assistant to help him "look good" on television, to present himself as newly calm and clear, stern and thoughtful. Within a decade, Nixon had an effective public image, the sum of the rhetoric crafted by a careful team (Joe McGinnis' The Selling of the President 1968 is a fantastic description of this transformative process)—and the young production assistant, Roger Ailes, would go on to create and head Fox News, on behalf of the Murdoch empire. How does the action of "looking good" take place today, in films, news, and on the wild and wicked web?
The rhetorical capacity of the camera has changed both the way social protest is captured by onlookers, but has also helped to establish a means by which statements of political, social, or economic activism may help determine its efficacy—a new criteria was established during the twentieth century, of what "looks good" for the television and still cameras. From red carpet celebrity appearances to network television anchors to filmmakers and politicians, one's own appearance and voice transmitted across electronic means has become a new and fluid form of rhetoric. When Nixon sweated and stammered his way through televised, live, and unedited Presidential debates in 1960—and went on to lose the race to Kennedy—he hired a young and aspiring production assistant to help him "look good" on television, to present himself as newly calm and clear, stern and thoughtful. Within a decade, Nixon had an effective public image, the sum of the rhetoric crafted by a careful team (Joe McGinnis' The Selling of the President 1968 is a fantastic description of this transformative process)—and the young production assistant, Roger Ailes, would go on to create and head Fox News, on behalf of the Murdoch empire. How does the action of "looking good" take place today, in films, news, and on the wild and wicked web?
Context for Valerie Smith's work regarding films that appeal to specific racial groups is useful in understanding the lineage and evolution of our collective on-camera rhetoric. Since the time of her writing, some of her presumptions regarding the efficacy of documentary film may be challenged by the popularity of artists like Michael Moore, and the continued and heightened high regard for the works of Spike Lee. While "documentarians [still seem] unlikely to achieve the popularity of directors of fiction films" (p. 62), Smith's (1992) assumptions about the commercial viability of "nonfiction films" (p. 61) may have been unseated by a recent trend in nonfiction television, film and culture: reality television, now clearly established as a genre of popular entertainment, seeks the presentation—however awkwardly rendered—of individuals' narratives, without the façade sought by the rhetorical cameras of the twentieth century. Do reality television programs, from Hoarders to Hardcore Pawn, represent the "intimate, if not contiguous, relation to an externally verifiable reality" (p. 60) Smith identifies in the movies of the early 1990s? If Andy Warhol was correct, that we may all be delivered our requisite fifteen minutes of fame within the corporate portals of reality television, are producers interested in making individuals and their narratives 'look good?' What is the "intimate [and] externally verifiable reality" that can help define this emerging realm of nonfiction narrative?
If Smith's characterization of the import and reception of black feature films in 1992 was critical to the development of rhetoric and representation in film, James Allen's website Without Sanctuary serves as contrast: without the expectations of a manufactured plot, a rising action, and a benevolent resolution sandwiched between segments of corporate commercials, Allen's work in compiling images, and their presentation on a web page, helps establish a genre technologically unavailable at the time of Smith's writing. Self-described 'picker' James Allen, narrating the short film declared that, "in America, everything is for sale, even a national shame" (2005). He describes how his collecting and presenting photographic postcards of lynchings across the United States during the early 1900s has "engendered" in him a fear of "the majority," and how a specific "image layered a pall of grief over my fears." Those who peruse his site are witness to scenes of horrific and public death; the viewer endures "the endless replay of anguish," as Allen ruminates and speculates about the motivations of those depicted as watching the hangings and swaying bodies. Is such a website—a work of visual rhetoric, devised specifically to represent moments when citizens have looked far from 'good' but perhaps at their most reprehensible and repugnant—effective, as an act of protest, of representation long after the grave facts? Does the visual representation of individuals or groups looking 'less-than-good' at moments in history constitute an act of protest?
Websites may have helped reinforce Allen's notion that "in America, everything is for sale"; a published collection of his images remains available, though their representation online may have undermined his profits. Allen's website includes an active and public forum, in which comments on the lynching photographs from educators, students, and web users at large have sought to make meaning of and increase understanding of what Allen described in his short film as "the cold steel trigger in the human heart"—what drove these crowds to these terrible moments. Discussions found on the forum provided unique and fluid contextualization for the collection. One participant, username ansar1013, posted on August 11, 2011, under the "Where Was God?" thread on the Without Sanctuary website: "I am here to establish a system of justice in this world and replace this current system of injustice. These lynchings that were done can only be blamed on the cowards and punks in the crowd that lacked the testicular fortitude to fight for right. People know what is right from wrong. We just lack the balls to do something about it. So instead of getting bogged down into some GOD talk we should discuss strategies and tactics to completely destroy this current system of injustice" (ansar1013, 2011). Theological arguments, pedagogical applications, and individuals' constructive criticism all aid in making sense of Allen's photographic documentary; perhaps the site remains proof that we, as a culture and population, are still seeking full context for the rhetorical abilities of the camera. The creative genre that accommodates the compilation and distribution of images (of others, taken by others) may still be evolving. Perhaps we are still trying to understand what it means to 'look good' on film, and in the digital age. The choices in 'looking good' that are ours and in the present-tense are not the same as the choices made by those in the past: be them crowds gathered around trees for nefarious and horrific reasons during the first decade of the last century, or the populations represented by filmmakers twenty years ago.
Allen, J. (2005). Without Sanctuary [film]. Retrieved from http://withoutsanctuary.org
Ansar1013. (11 Aug. 2011). "Where Was God?" [forum post]. Retrieved from http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html
Smith, V. "The Documentary Impulse in Contemporary African American Film." In Black Popular Culture: A Project by Michele Wallace, ed. Gina Dent. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992.
Chris’ invocation of reality television underscores for me the paradox that emerged from this set of readings – one that Elizabeth succinctly paraphrases when she points out that “Smith notes how the fictional films created by and depicting African-American community life rely on verisimilitude, the appearance of truth and factuality, when the documentaries, a nonfictional genre by convention, reveal instead the slipperiness of reality.” The question that came up again and again in these readings was what counts for authenticity? And then a second related question followed close on its heels: what is authenticity in the context of art-making?
ReplyDeleteToll makes a special claim to truth for her collection of art created in Holocaust death camps, suggesting that such work cannot be judged by traditional aesthetic standards. For my own part, I find myself wondering about the artist’s intentions—were they trying to do something “artistic” or were they “merely” trying to document the horrific acts that were so strangely invisible to the world stage. With the hindsight of the photographs of liberated prisoners to compare, it is hard not to see how deeply realistic the works are. My impulse is to think of this as evidentiary rather than artistic—to simply say “This happened.” But when we’re talking about atrocities, maybe the special kinds of truth claims made by art serve as a supplement to that documentary impulse. Maybe there is art in simply saying, “This happened.”