Ten Years of Studies in Documentary Film

Deane Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138104914
• eBook ISBN: 9781351590693
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume will be a 'time capsule' of the first 10 years of Studies in Documentary Film (2007–2016), tracing not only the development of the journal but also of documentary studies in the same period. Issues such as the rise of digital documentary forms and authorship, documentary activism, and the Chinese Independent documentary, as well as diverse political issues, will be raised in the introduction and evidenced in the articles. The chapters have been chosen for the various themes they raise in documentary studies but also the broader field of documentary scholarship (including publishing), and the rise of the internet as a powerful force in documentary studies.

‘Testimony in the umbra of trauma: film and video portraits of survival’

Janet Walker

Abstract
As testimony-based documentary films and audio-visual testimonial archives proliferate around the globe, we must ask probing questions about how to mobilize these materials for historiographic purposes. Scholarship from the disciplines of psychology, history and the law amply illustrates that the truths of eyewitness testimony about catastrophic past events may not lie on the surface. This article explores how current findings about the vagaries of memory together with the analytic strategies of film studies can help us comprehend (1) the contingent truths of direct testimony by documentary film subjects, and (2) the historical significance of the films created in, through and beyond their affecting words. Emphasis is on experimental documentary practices rather than seamless, conventional ones. Moving testimonies, whether part of the new, grand archival projects or contained within individual documentaries, are most effective when their complicated, recursive, even forgetful aspects are emphasized and acknowledged.

With the possible exception of Stephen Wiltshire, the artist who was heralded in boyhood as an ‘autistic savant’ for the phenomenally accurate drawings of buildings and cityscapes that he created from memory, hind-sight is a frayed and baggy proposition. ‘Memory […] is an unstable and destabilizing term’, write Katherine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (Hodgkin and Radstone 2003: 2). ‘Forgetting is a necessary component in the construction of memory’, explains Marita Sturken (1997: 7). Or, as memory researchers David Payne and Jason Blackwell put it, ‘[M]emory errors are not bothersome anomalies to be explained away or minimized, but rather they reflect the normal processes by which we interpret the world around us’ (Payne and Blackwell 1998: 3).

Further – if not qualitatively different – complications arise when memories refer to catastrophic past events. Elizabeth Waites has shown convincingly that ‘memory for traumatic events can be extremely veridical’ – more veridical even than memories for everyday events when it comes to the ‘gist’ of memory (Waites 1993: 28). And yet, she also makes it clear that the components of traumatic memory exist in an altered and disorganized state. Chronological linearity is often broken; internal audio-visuality fragmented, marked by repetition, and centred on retrospective events that the mind simultaneously calls attention to and deflects attention from. As Jonathan Shay has written, based on his work with Vietnam War veterans, ‘severe trauma explodes the cohesion of consciousness’ (Shay 1994: 188).

Taking into account claims about traumatic memory’s verisimilitude, that is, its inartificial aspect, and the insistently convincing findings about the vicissitudes of memory, we arrive at a rather nuanced – and daunting – view of traumatic memory. Based on internal cues, there appears to be no way to differentiate between veridical and pseudo memory in the mise-en-scène of the mind. Moreover, traumatic events can and often do catalyse the very amnesias and mistakes in memory that are then received as undermining the legitimacy of retrospective accounts in which they figure. I’ve termed this the ‘traumatic paradox’ (Walker 2003).

Consider an example from my own back yard: the Michael Jackson case. While Santa Barbara District Attorney Tom Sneddon marshalled eyewitness testimony in his attempt to prove that Jackson is a long-time sexual predator, lead defence attorney Thomas Messereau denounced the charges as ‘fictitious, bogus, and they never happened’ (Chawkins 2005b: A1). The latter proceeded by poking holes in the stories of the accuser, his mother, his brother and his sister, confidently racking up inconsistency after inconsistency: ‘But that copy of (the salacious magazine) Barely Legal is dated August 2003 […] That was months after you and your family left Neverland’ (Chawkins 2005a: B1). So you didn’t actually see Jackson pour the wine, parade stark naked, touch your brother’s genitals; so you did know where to find the key to the wine cellar and you could see the clock tower through the trees at Neverland. The teenagers are lying little ingrates, groomed by a con-artist mother to bilk celebrities made vulnerable by their wealth. Or, from the prosecution’s perspective, the accuser is a cancer survivor whose last wish to meet Michael Jackson degenerated into victimization at the hands of a child abuse perpetrator. Either/or, true/false, fiction/non-fiction. Even clinical and forensic psychologist Stan Katz, witness for the prosecution and author of a book dealing with child abuse allegations, cleaved to a binary paradigm in which testimony is true or false, lying or veracious (Pfeifer and Chawkins 2005: B6). There are actually passages in the California Jury Instructions that state unequivocally: ‘Failure of recollection is common. Innocent misrecollection is not uncommon’ (CALJIC 2006: 2.21.1 and 2.91). But in this case, the instruction was studiously ignored by counsel. The legal process, with its strategically separative structure of prosecution and defence, can be quite resistant to complex notions of trauma and memory. This is a universe that cannot conceive of wronged and deserving grifters or a guilty and vulnerable pop star, let alone the thought that a boy may misremember precisely because he was traumatized.¹

And yet, the will to collect and authorize oral testimony – including video testimony – as a significant historiographic tool has never been greater. The University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education archive revels in its achievement of having video-taped 52,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors and refugees, cross-referenced and collated to fill what the Foundation website characterizes as a historically valuable archive. If watched 24 hours a day, seven days a week, these testimonies would take more than thirteen years to consume; the largest public database in the world. Another testimonial archive of worldwide importance is that of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 22,000 written testimonies were collected of which some 2,000 were video-taped and publicly broadcast on television or radio.²

Documentary film-making has followed suit. If, in years past, documentary film scholars regarded the ‘talking head’ as evidence of a lack of expressive force on the part of film and film-maker, now, forty years after the birth of direct cinema, film-makers are realizing the probative powers of testimony in the direct address documentary.

Ten documentary films have been produced directly by the Shoah Foundation, derived from testimonies in the video history archive.³ The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale is also the source of documentary works. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the United States has recognized direct address documentaries with top awards. Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000), The Last Days (1998), and Anne Frank Remembered (1995) – all on the subject of the Holocaust – have garnered Oscars for best documentary as has Errol Morris’s The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) a compelling and stylish documentary that consists, amazingly, of a feature-length interview with former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Spike Lee’s magisterial When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) uses the moving testimony of survivors to mark the one-year anniversary of the human, environmental and governmental devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on the US Gulf coast.

This is all to credit – and celebrate – the magnificent humanitarian achievements in video testimony. It feels ethically necessary to comprehend the powerfully moving retrospective accounts contained in these video archives and documentary films as conduits to historical truth. In the documentary Witness: Voices of the Holocaust (1999), a former prisoner of war at Malthausen describes seeing a guard in the slave-labour wood-working shop run another prisoner’s arm under a bandsaw blade and throw the severed arm into the corner. In front of the lens of a video camera in South Africa, a victim of apartheid tells of watching her husband and three children being doused with petrol and burned to death. These state-sanctioned instances of brutality, multiplied by the hundreds of thousands, matter.

But where does this leave us in terms of history, memory and media? One shrinks from the prospect of impugning the credibility of retrospective eyewitness accounts when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has struggled mightily against four decades of state-sponsored denial or when Holocaust deniers are poised to pounce on contradictions within and among testimonies as evidence that the Holocaust was a hoax.⁴

And yet, given the vicissitudes of memory, it should come as no surprise that eyewitness testimonies may contain factual errors. A woman testifying to a gathering of historians mistakenly remembered an event she had eye-witnessed, claiming that four crematoria chimneys rather than only one were blown up during an uprising at Auschwitz. ‘The flames shot into the sky’, she recalled. ‘People were running. It was unbelievable’ (Laub 1992: 59). Another video interview subject reported having seen a conveyor belt that ferried dead bodies to the Auschwitz crematorium, when no such apparatus existed.⁵

The urge to disavow mistaken testimony – to whisk or wish away its unreliable narrators for the good of the dependable majority – is quite understandable. But I would like to advocate the opposite. Of course, enhanced corroborative efforts must be made to evaluate and secure the historical legitimacy of interview subjects. As one of my favourite historians, Errol Morris, would say, the truth is difficult but not impossible to know. Nevertheless, the reconstructive nature of traumatic memory opens an opportunity to reclaim mistaken memory and forgetting from the acid rain of denial.

Certainly we have an ethical and political obligation to remember, archive and act on the aftermath of catastrophic events. But the true wealth of testimonial archives will not be realized as long as curators and conservators, documentary film-makers, cultural critics and the general public depend on word-perfect recall to secure the reliability of retrospective accounts by interview subjects. We must risk the thought – and act on the knowledge – that events are subject to reconstruction as they are experienced, re-imagined, reported, recorded, and that that process is affected by the interplay of psychological and socio/cultural/political forces. We must expand the roles of mistaken memory and even forgetting in the historiography – and textual analysis – of testimony.

Accordingly, this essay explores the awkward disconnect between the psychology of memory and the audio-visual historiography of testimony about catastrophic past events. And it suggests some possibilities for electrifying the gap. Debates concerning history, memory and media are crucial for understanding public ‘discourses of sobriety’ (Nichols 1991: 3–4), including journalism, jurisprudence, politics and image archiveship: specifically, the great video testimonial projects that are proliferating around the world in the names of truth and reconciliation.

Curating memory

Critical theoretical work on testimony is subtler than institutionally mandated assumptions of archival practice, but even here the relationship between history and memory remains under-theorized. Lawrence Langer, writing about the ‘ruins of memory’, characterizes various memory tropes: ‘deep memory’, ‘anguished memory’, ‘humiliated memory’, and so on. Extracting a passage from a woman’s testimony, Langer emphasizes the persistence of memory.

I want to talk about a certain time [confided Ida Fink] [a time] not measured in months and years. For so long I have wanted to talk about this time, and not in the way I will talk about it now […]I was afraid […] that [a] second time, which is measured in months and years, had buried the other time under a layer of years, that this second time had crushed the first and destroyed it within me. But no. Today, digging around in the ruins of memory, I found it fresh and untouched by forgetfulness.

(Langer 1991: epigraph)

An achingly beautiful quote. But Langer uses it as a reference point in bracketing off questions of referentiality.

How credible can...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. ‘Testimony in the umbra of trauma: film and video portraits of survival’
• 2. The field of digital documentary: a challenge to documentary theorists
• 3. Two Laws still: notes on resonance
• 4. Documenting the political: some issues
• 5. Reassembling the nation: Iraq in Fragments and the acoustics of occupation
• 6. ‘Documentary Filmmaking in the Postmodern Age: Errol Morris & The Fog of Truth’
• 7. Interactive documentary: setting the field
• 8. What is documentary mise-en-scène? Coutinho’s mannerism and Salles’s ‘mauvaise conscience’
• 9. The poetic mode as depiction: sense-value and Gideon Koppel’s sleep furiously
• 10. Personal camera as public intervention: remembering the Cultural Revolution in Chinese independent documentary films
• Index