History and Modern Media

A Personal Journey

John Mraz

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780826501448, 9780826501455
• eBook ISBN: 9780826501462
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Mexican History

In History and Modern Media, John Mraz largely focuses on Mexican photography and his innovative methodology that examines historical photographs by employing the concepts of genre and function. He developed this method in extensive work on photojournalism; it is tested here through examining two genres: Indianist imagery as an expression of imperial, neo-colonizing, and decolonizing photography, and progressive photography as embodied in worker and laborist imagery, as well as feminist and decolonizing visuality.

The book interweaves an autobiographical narrative with concrete research. Mraz describes the resistance he encountered in US academia to this new way of showing and describing the past in films and photographs, as well as some illuminating experiences as a visiting professor at several US universities. More importantly, he reflects on what it has meant to move to Mexico and become a Mexican. Mexico is home to a thriving school of photohistorians perhaps unequaled in the world. Some were trained in art history, and a few continue to pursue that discipline. However, the great majority work from the discipline known as "photohistory" which focuses on vernacular photographs made outside of artistic intentions.

A central premise of the book is that knowing the cultures of the past and of the other is crucial in societies dominated by short-term and parochial thinking, and that today's hyper-audiovisuality requires historians to use modern media to offer their knowledge as alternatives to the "perpetual present" in which we live.

Part I. Cinehistories

CHAPTER 1

Doing History with Light and Sound

From Compilation Films to Interview-Based Documentaries

Watching a coast as it slips by the sea is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, “Come and find out.”

Joseph Conrad*

Back in the early 1960s, the renowned cinehistorian Jay Leyda decided to write about compilation films, a now-familiar form and concept. However, he opens his book by describing his surprise at what he encountered, “When I fixed upon this subject I was somewhat taken aback by the fact that there was no name for it.” He invented compilation films, but even he felt that it was “an awkward, incomprehensible and unacceptable term for this form.”¹ I believe that it is quite meaningful that those of us who wish to do history of and with modern media are constantly frustrated when we try to define with words that which we are attempting to do. I began my odyssey employing the term audiovisual history, but it brings too readily to mind the boring informational and propagandist movies that many of us were subjected to in high school. It does not convey the seriousness with which today’s historians struggle to carry out research and tell our stories about the past through the media of our age.

After moving to Mexico in 1981, I abandoned the word audiovisual and attempted to redeem the widely employed term historia gráfica from its commonly accepted meaning in that country, where it refers to works that are almost always illustrationist and officialist politico-military histories of Great Men and their heroic deeds in forging the nation.² Moreover, historia gráfica, or visual history (yet another option), refers only to the ocular element, leaving aside the sound track.³ In a moment of despair, I decided that photo-phonic history (historia fotofónica) was a solution, but this term is even more unwieldy, unintelligible and, frankly, ugly than compilation films.

How are we to describe our role in doing history with and of modern media? We could employ multimedia, as did a couple of British historians, although it calls to mind many of the secondary school associations with audiovisual.⁴ I sense that these problems of nomenclature will only be resolved as we proceed in our efforts to bring the study and recounting of history into today’s context of technical images and sounds. For the present, I will limit myself to defining historians who work rigorously with photographs as photohistorians. While I recognize in the next chapter that there are two different approaches—doing histories with photographs and doing history of photographs—there is often so much overlap between these tasks in the actual investigations that it makes sense to describe the discipline as photohistory.

In this chapter, I will avoid the larger issues raised by the multiple forms of modern media and confine myself to attempting to determine how we should describe history as done with pictures in movement accompanied by a sound track. Calling them motion pictures sounds awfully dated, and to say movies plays into the hands of those colleagues who have ridiculed our efforts, often with the rejoinder, “I like to go to the movies too, but that’s not history.” We are no longer making films because they are not made on celluloid, and by the same token neither are we producing videotapes. I think the solution is to describe them in the format in which they were presented, but to talk of the area in general as cinehistory that is to say, “history in movement.”⁵ Hence, I would describe any historian who tries to do history with cinema, and/or analyzes the ways it has been done by other directors, as a cinehistorian.

COMPILATION CINEMA

Compilation films are made up of pre-existing shots that are edited into a new work, which “has to indicate that the film used originated at some time in the past.”⁶ The compilation utilizes the documentary aura of the footage, which is carved by the director-editor into a new and essentially independent work that reflects his or her own purpose and ideology. An oft-cited early example is Spain (1939), created by Esther Schub, a Soviet director and editor who was a friend of Sergei Eisenstein, and “brought intelligence, taste and a sense of social responsibility into this generally despised employment [editing]”; Leyda described the film as a masterpiece: “Its brilliant execution is all to communicate a feeling, an experience—akin to a great work of history, not objective or rounded, but personal and passionate.”⁷ Here, it is important to understand that his strategy was designed to convey history in a new way, not simply apply the media to producing more lucrative costume dramas.

Making historical documentaries with already-existing imagery and sounds is a widely practiced genre today. The works have been realized with widely varying degrees of success in somehow bridging the demands of historians and those of a public (including historians) that expects a certain level of production quality and esthetic power. The capacity to say what you want to say with cinema bears a direct relation to the technical infrastructure available. I often compare writing and mediamaking by describing my experiences of editing the videotape Innovating Nicaragua/Nicaragua innovando (1986–87). The low-budget equipment on which I could afford to rent editing time was a “straight-cut” system that was incapable of doing a dissolve. Hence, I could not say whatever it is that a dissolve (or any other special effect) says—which will vary according to the context in which it is used. This is a situation somewhat akin to a writer being told that he or she could not use a comma. The audience expectations created by well-financed and technologically advanced “perfect cinema” pose a formidable competition that we, as cinehistorians, find very difficult to meet in terms of technical quality, although digitalization is transforming this situation.⁸

The US media has been prolific in producing long-running series of historical compilation documentaries. Unsurprisingly, the first was composed of war footage. Victory at Sea was an enormously popular commercial television series made up of World War II imagery, and its twenty-six individual segments “reached more human beings than any other motion picture or TV series in history.”⁹ The fact that it began to be broadcast in 1952–1953, during the Korean War—and in the midst of the Cold War—indicates that it was intended to foster militarism among the populace. Another US television series of note, The Civil War, was broadcast on the Public Broadcasting Service during 1990, and depicted combat in a decidedly less triumphalist tone. Ken Burns directed the nine-segment narrative on the 1861–1865 conflict that “was seen by more viewers than any other program in the history of the PBS.”¹⁰ It became a noteworthy cultural event and was the work that has most provoked US historians to grapple critically with the issues raised by cinehistory, at least as practiced by Burns.¹¹

A French historical compilation, Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), utilized documentary footage of World War II to powerfully debunk the myth of French resistance to Nazi occupation. This work also caused a cultural stir and was banned from French television until 1982, although I am unaware if French historians were as moved as their US colleagues to enter into the polemic. While both US series are well-produced cinematic reflections on the past, they fall short of The Sorrow and the Pity as cinehistory, for its narrative complexity makes it one of the preeminent examples of this genre.

DOING HISTORICAL CINEMA

Ophuls’s masterpiece came to the University of California at Santa Barbara in the early 1970s, and I was no doubt inspired by it when I began to make Super 8mm compilation films in 1972. The first was Coming Apart: America in the 1960s, for which I teamed up with two fellow history graduate students, Joyce Baker and Perry Kaufman.¹² It was largely composed of photographs we shot from magazines such as Life and Look, as well as from coffee-table tomes; we tried to dynamize the images by zooming in and out (a common curse of beginning filmmakers), and panning when possible. The technical resources were primitive, and a major problem was lighting the images: as incredible as it seems today, UCSB had no copy stands, let alone equipment for animating still photos. We had to borrow stage lamps from the theater arts department and set them up around a cafeteria table on which we filmed. They were very hot, so shooting under them was quite uncomfortable, and we often touched the delicate lamps, burning ourselves and shorting them out, as we tried to move the heavy bound magazines into positions that would allow us to shoot the photos.

We obtained moving footage by filming documentary video off a television screen, such as Martin Luther King’s speech the night before he was killed. Unfortunately, the lack of synchronization between the videotape and the Super 8mm film caused black bands to roll across the screen when those parts were projected. We used 1960’s music, and dubbed in contemporary speeches. We eschewed omniscient narration, in part because it would have sounded like so many of the boring documentaries we knew too well. And it might have been difficult for the three of us to agree on a voice-over narrative given the passionate disagreements we often had in those effervescent days. Nonetheless, we worked well together in our collaborative endeavor, which was characteristic of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The work was edited in the rapid-fire style of television commercials, a poor model for doing good cinehistory.

The film was accepted at an academic congress: the Pacific Coast Branch meeting of the American Historical Association. This was something extraordinary for graduate students in those days, because we were vetoed from participating in conferences. We also showed the film to other groups around Santa Barbara. We did not know how to place the sound track on the film, so the relation between the images and the sound track changed every time it was shown: the film always moved at twenty-four frames a second, thanks to the sprocket holes, but the audio tape stretched. The result was always aleatoric, and sometimes surprisingly incisive; at other times it was unfortunate.

I had found what I most loved doing, so in 1973 I co-directed another Super 8mm compilation film, Cracks in the Wall: America/the Fifties, with another history graduate student who was an expert in sound recording, Ray Tracy, as well as an undergraduate, Roger Nelson.¹³ I was working as a teaching assistant in a large US-history course, and the idea occurred to me that we could use a section of the class to make a film that focused on the 1950s; the professor, Carroll Pursell, backed the project. We announced the section in the large lecture class and attracted a group of students who found that more interesting than participating in section discussions. Again we made extensive use of popular illustrated magazines and published photography; the sound track was composed of interviews with people who lived through the era, and music from the 1950s.

The most intriguing part of the film was utilizing home movie footage shot by my father years before. For example, when we focused on US imperialism and the constant public mobilization it required, we incorporated color 8mm footage of my brother and I playing at war, fully decked out in army surplus uniforms from World War II and the Korean conflict. Our shirts and jackets were overlaid with sewed-on, many-hued insignia of different outfits and ranks. Atop this attire, we wore cartridge belts for firearms from pistols to machine guns, first aid kits carried by medics, gas mask containers, and other equipment. We had helmets on our heads (both plastic liner and steel shell), and we were fully armed with toy rifles and pistols. Willing cannon fodder for US neocolonialism, our warrior-like jumping about—shooting and hiding and falling as if dead—was interspersed with still photographs from illustrated magazines that documented US invasions worldwide, linking the generalized militarization of that society to the domestic acceptance of imperial policy.

My memory is that I hit upon this esthetic strategy intuitively. The footage seemed to cry out for inclusion, offering the opportunity to recontextualize it and compelling spectators to look at familiar scenes in significantly different ways, as well as making their minds more alert to the larger purport of what was happening in these old home movies. As cinehistorian Bill Nichols has commented, “The core idea of the compilation film revolves around not only montage and photomontage but also ostranenie. . . . The ‘making strange’ of things familiar”: “An ‘aha’ moment occurs when something familiar and known is seen in an unfamiliar, new way.”¹⁴ This was a largely unexplored esthetic strategy in US documentaries, with the exception of Emile de Antonio’s works, and perhaps I could claim it as an example of self-reflexivity, a distanciation à la Jean-Luc Godard. Home movies have more recently become a rich source of experimentation in independent cinema, as the widely recognized Stories We Tell (Polley, 2012) demonstrated. I continue to believe that family images—still and moving, real or faux (as in some moments of Stories)—can provide an invaluable source to audiovisual historians. The use we made of the footage was certainly in line with the critical component of Leyda’s conception, which was also an element of the Frankfort School’s insistence on transforming the unapparent and unconscious into visible consciousness. Leyda cites Siegfried Kracauer: “The most familiar, that which continues to condition our involuntary reactions and spontaneous impulses, is thus made to appear as the most alien.”¹⁵

The sound track for Cracks in the Wall was composed of interviews and music from the period, which were mixed together and juxtaposed with the images; again, we avoided the omniscient narrator. Having discovered that we could put the track on the Super 8mm print in Los Angeles, we left behind the aleatoricism of the earlier effort. The most entertaining snippet of sound was provided by actress Jane Wyatt, the devoted wife and mother figure from the very popular television show Father Knows Best (1954–1960). At one point, she reflected upon that patriarchal and Pollyannish series, saying that, though the show might appear ingenuous from the perspective of the 1970s, “I thought it was real.” We used that statement a couple of times to great ironic effect.

We were invited to show the film at a historical conference, the Anglo-American Historical Convention, by Patrick Griffin, a history professor at California State University at Long Beach who had begun making films and knew of our efforts.¹⁶ On reflection, I believe that the fact that he worked in a university of lesser prestige (in his case, a California State University rather than a University of California) was perhaps one reason he felt free to explore alternative modes of doing history (although he soon left academia). Given the composition of and prestige among their faculties, I believe that the great universities of the world will be among the last to open themselves to modern media. We wrote up the experiment for The History Teacher, a journal that had demonstrated a developing interest in new forms of history, so we got both a cong...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Reminiscences on the Voyage from an Audiovisual Periphery toward a Disciplinary Center
• Part I. Cinehistories
• Part II. Photohistories
• Notes
• Bibliography