The wide mediatic representation and distribution of the Vietnam War carry heavy weight in the discourse of postcolonial Vietnam, a period that spans several decades from the end of French colonialism in 1954 to the reunification of North and South Vietnam on 30 April 1975 as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, a name it retains today. However, the plethora of moving and still images produced across the globe based on historical and fictional accounts of Vietnam’s history, especially that of the war, fail to tell a cohesive and unified narrative—from the West to the Far East the war has been relentlessly and variously recounted—and in the United States alone, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War in the 1970s and 80s, the war became “a resource for the American culture industry”.1 Publishers, television, film and music producers contributed to immortalise the war into a “media-myth”, each adding its own elements to the many mutations of the war, but still incapable of representing it fully in its complexity.2

In order to contribute to the discourse of postcolonial Vietnam through visual culture, this paper examines the critical work by Vietnamese filmmaker Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Vietnam The Movie (2016)—a collage documentary that combines several excerpts from Vietnam-related movies. Thus, this article analyses the cultural and aesthetic approach the movie foregrounds in collecting and preserving postcolonial moving images to reframe Vietnam’s recent history. By compiling visual depictions of iconic and historically significant events in a creative assemblage—from Hollywood cinema to arthouse and Asian films—Vietnam The Movie traces Vietnam’s history between the end of French rule in the 1950s to the conclusion of the Vietnam War. Because the perception of Vietnam in recent history is to a large extent based on the events surrounding the war, the period framed by the movie is of critical relevance to the investigation of the corresponding resituated images conducted by this paper.

Furthermore this paper focuses on the formal elements employed by Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s readaptation of existing footage through her method of stitching together excerpts from various films that feature the war—geographically diverse visual interpretations based on differing viewpoints at different time periods. For this purpose, this paper is informed primarily by two concerns: first, to look at the plurality of histories and, arguably, the ownership of memory. While “one history” is often adapted to subjective national agendas, memory or the act of recollection is paramount to a community’s contemplation of its past,3 a notion this paper puts forward as illustrated by the composite anatomy of Vietnam The Movie; second, to explore and analyse the visual strategies that enable Vietnam The Movie to appropriate and resituate, in its discourse of postcolonial Vietnam, historical images or depictions of significant events, as well as their politics of aesthetics. Within the rubric of decoding Vietnam The Movie’s “ways of seeing” the war, that is, as John Berger argues, to see through the camera’s altered field of vision, this investigation must also take into account the use of sound, voice, soundtrack and background noise from the various excerpts, which are equally interpolated and reassembled in such a way to often disorient the viewers’ interaction with the work.4

War and history: in context

The structure of Vietnam The Movie is broadly an historical one by appropriating selected archival footage in a documentary format that allows, in pioneering documentary maker John Grierson’s words, “original” scenes to tell the story.5 The film opens chronologically, as the war itself had unfolded, with an extract from the French film Indochine (1992), revealing an intimate conversation between the protagonist Eliane and her adopted son Etienne about their relationship. The location is Geneva; crucially, the intensity of their encounter reflects the magnitude of a concurrent event, the Geneva Conference that was formalised on 21 July 1954. By early May 1954, France had relinquished any claim to Vietnamese territory. Furthermore, the Geneva Accords delineated the northern and southern zones in Vietnam to which opposing troops of each origin were instructed to return to. These events of 1954 marked the beginning of the involvement of the United States and the ensuing Vietnam War.

After the opening sequence appropriated from Indochine, Vietnam The Movie cuts to a series of clips from Born on the Fourth of July (1989), The Deer Hunter (1978) and Forrest Gump (1994), with the respective protagonists expressing their intentions or hesitations to go to war halfway around the world. From Born on the Fourth of July, Ron Kovic’s father does not dissuade his son from going to Vietnam but deplores, “…13,000 miles, it’s a long way to go to fight a war.”6 The audience is transported to the thick of the American War, commonly referred to as the Vietnam War, and, to a lesser degree, the Second Indochina War. With an estimated 1.1 million Vietnamese and 58,000 American deaths,7 the Vietnam War effectively started after the Geneva Conference was formalised. The bloodshed between the American-backed South Vietnamese government and North Vietnam, backed by the Soviet Union and China, lasted over 20 years, ending with the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese troops, with the defeat of US and the reunification of Vietnam.

As Winston Churchill once asserted, “history is written by the victors”, the history of Vietnam should have perhaps been told differently, for the most vocal accounts of the war have been given by not the victorious but the defeated—an inequality of voices that Vietnam-war writer and academic Viet Thanh Nguyen explains in these terms: “…while the United States lost the war, in fact, it won the war in memory on most of the world’s cultural front outside of Vietnam, dominating as it does movie making, books publishing, fine art, and the production of historical archives.”8 While I will return to the theme of memory later in this essay, here I would like to focus on the mediatic effect that , the Vietnam War has generated in recent history through the proliferation of its reinterpretations, each escaping a singularity of viewpoint, from books recording and recounting the events, to documentaries and films, largely, though not uniquely, through the lens of American culture. In this plurality of histories, fitted to fulfill national and political agendas, can we find order and linearity of meaning? Filmmaker Nguyễn Trinh Thi seems to ponder on the various connotations of Vietnam, a name that has become synonymous with war.

To frontline the sentiments that prompted Nguyễn Trinh Thi to create Vietnam The Movie, the film’s first frame, preceding the excerpt from Indochina discussed above, is a laconic text in black and white:

In the year 2000 I was invited to speak to a group of school children in New York City about my country. To start the conversation I asked the students some questions to see what they knew of Vietnam. “Do you know what the capital of Vietnam is?” I asked. Nobody had an answer, except for one boy who said “Vietnam War!”

These unceremonious words foreground and anticipate Vietnam The Movie’s composite anatomy of 36 excerpts from Vietnam-related movies—varying from productions that deal directly with the war to those that observe the pervasive seepage of the distant war into everyday life. The filmmaker shares in our recent interview:

I collected and watched videos from many different sources, anything I could find, including army and educational films from US. […] In Vietnam The Movie, the rule is that every single clip used in the film has to contain the word ‘Vietnam’. […] Gradually I reduced documentary and didactic materials and focused more on fiction. My original focus was not on war films, but on the perceptions of Vietnam from outside. But naturally the perceptions are mostly of the Vietnam War anyway.9

The recycled footage, some dating back as early as 1958, such as the American film The Quiet American, to the 1970 West German film Der amerikanische Soldat (The American Soldier) and Bengali film Pratidwandi (The Adversary), are adapted and treated with surgical precision as archival fragments to re-examine Vietnam’s recent history through the lens of the familiar, albeit visually subverted, popular culture.

Archive and memory of the war

A side note here is in order to explain the word ‘archival’. In general, the public audience may perceive an ‘archive’ as a collection of historical documents or records that provide information about a place, institution, or group of people. This perception holds relevance to the context of this paper; when we watch these films, renowned accounts by illustrious “authors”, we need to remember that they are, after all, a second-hand, somewhat subjective interpretation of Vietnam’s history. This logic then begs the question of whether or not these films become a “secondary archive” of the actual events that had taken place in Vietnam, thus complicating the value of revisiting them. To a large extent, these films represent the prevailing popular media and information transmission of the Vietnam War in the last 40 years. The archival value of these films in relation to Vietnam The Movie, I argue, is paramount in their visual-cultural legacy in defining the national identity of Vietnam through the collective memory of the Vietnam War.

Memory, as we understand it, is the mechanism that enables us to store and retrieve information for the purpose of influencing future actions or emotions. Collective memory, or memoir collective as introduced by French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, is the common experience and information shared by a community. Halbwachs’ theory argues that memory can only function within a collective context, and that within the collectivity each individual or group of individuals will have a subjective memory of a collective experience.10

Yet, memory is a biological mechanism that not only enables the faculty of recalling, but also purports how recognition is produced, that is, how the “industry of memory”, to borrow a term coined by Viet Thanh Nguyen, creates selective memories, in this case, the memories of the Vietnam War. In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s terms the Hollywood system and its movies are an “industry of memory”, which includes “the material and ideological forces that determine how and why memories are produced and circulated, and who has access to, and control of, the memory industries.”11

Collective memories are not necessarily uniform since they are based on the memory of unique individuals. In the case of the Vietnam War, the American and Vietnamese individual and collective memories are equally relevant, however, unequally presented to global attention. The former has stronger and wider mediatic power than the latter. Indeed, what have remained imprinted in our minds over the last 40 years are the iconic sequences of the Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter, the “Ride of the Valkyries” assault in Apocalypse Now (1979) or disc jockey Adrian Cronauer’s (played by Robin Williams) comedic radio broadcasts in Good Morning, Vietnam­ (1987), to name but a few. By subverting the linearity of selected fictional productions—archival material in their own right—Vietnam The Movie is able to challenge and reposition the collective memory of the war, shaped over time by the aesthetics of the very same productions. Mediatically, these productions were made to emphasise, celebrate, condemn or simply tell the story of the war.

It is these productions that have been intervened upon in Vietnam The Movie, dissected into fragments and stitched together through visual assimilation, consequently, lending an elusive sense of narration to the work where no story is actually told, no logic is actually followed except the “logic of forms”, where each clip leads to the next by association of ideas, or forms.12

Abiding by the visual strategy of association, the viewer’s eye, in constant struggle for linearity of narrative and further frustrated by the complexity of sounds and dialogues, establishes the optic connection between the disparate clips. This assimilation in turn enacts a deeper, personal relation to the excerpts that leads the viewer to reconsider, and to reposition, preconceptions of the war. Thus the assemblage of recycled footage acquires a new, “alternative” aesthetic.

Association as strategy: the creative montage

What follows is a formal analysis of two instances where this ‘strategy’ of association is, in my opinion, particularly evident. The first example is at approximately 13 minutes into the movie where two excerpts—one from the American film The Green Berets (1968) and the other from the French film La Chinoise (1967)—are juxtaposed based on association of language and intellectual expectations. The two extracts are merged at the point where the American reporter Beckworth expresses to Green Beret Colonel Mike Kirby his concerns that “this is simply a war between the Vietnamese people”; the premise is a briefing at a secured military area, which includes a show-and-tell of US and Vietnamese ordinance. The conundrum left suspended in the words of reporter Beckworth of whether or not the war indeed involved only the Vietnamese peoples is addressed almost seamlessly by the main character of La Chinoise, the young, revolutionary-inspired Guillaume, through his paradoxical parade of sunglasses covered with the flags of the various nations involved in the Vietnam War.13

The seamless juncture of the two overtly disparate excerpts is commendable, thus the war’s raison d’être through the “lenses” of the American propaganda morphs quite literally into the multiples lenses worn by anti-American, French alter ego, Guillaume. The second example is the intellectual combustion between the French collective movie Loin du Vietnam (1967),14 followed by the American advertisement Batman for US Savings Bonds (1966). The premises are set by the intellectual crescendo of a male Parisian who declares, “I know a place where they give ‘Vietnam meals’. For 1000 francs you can get a bowl of rice, the proceeds go to the Red Cross.”15 His inflammatory monologue on the intellectual climate of the war bleeds into, quite remarkably, the US advertisement to raise money for the war—Batman, the familiar and benevolent superhero, reads a personal message from President Johnson asking children to invest in Savings Bonds in support of the troops in Vietnam “to [learn] the lesson of practical citizenship…and to [give] important support to the cause of freedom and to the men who fight for us in Vietnam.”16 Here, too, the intellectual association defies any logic, abiding to the association of forms whereby one ethos is replaced and subverted by the other.

This method of creative montage, or editing, that disorients the viewer and undermines the central idea of the movie, is crucial to Vietnam The Movie. Sergei Eisenstein, one of the pioneering theorists of film montage, introduced the idea of montage as early as 1932 as a technique to contrast images or sequences to determine visual and intellectual responses from the public—to produce a shock-effect that in turn elicits an active engagement of the spectator—“the shocks provide the only opportunity of perceiving the ideological aspect of what is being shown, the final ideological conclusion”.17 Similarly, Walter Benjamin in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” comments at length on the importance of the camera in constructing the narrative of the film through the editing process by which disparate moments are assembled mechanically to tell a story.18 Creative montage is not new to Nguyễn Trinh Thi. Often working with existing footage, Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s practice operates between fiction and documentary, film and art. This allows the artist and film director to operate at different levels in various formats, from the thought-process structure of the essay film to the documentary style production that makes use of existing archival material. “My interest in making work [from archival footage] is to ‘collaborate’ with the material, which means during the process I will have to negotiate with them,” Nguyễn Trinh Thi says, further explaining in our recent interview, that while dealing with existing footage she ensures to confine her practice within specific criteria.19

Opening and closing: in conclusion

In Vietnam The Movie, some of the parameters for the selection of footage were that each clip had to contain the word ‘Vietnam’ (as stated earlier in the paper) and that the movie would be organised chronologically (as described, from the Geneva Conference to the end of the Vietnam War) to somewhat relate the perilous journeys of the “typical” soldiers, from the youngsters freshly enlisted for the war, their return home, to their lives as war veterans. Indeed in the two closing excerpts—Ann Hui’s Boat People (1982) and Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her) (1967), which, unlike the opening sequences, are Asian and European films—the camera slows down and pans over reflective scenarios that convey the sense of void that comes with the end of the war—and the end of an era.20 The syncopated rhythm of rupture, dissonance and discontinuity of the chaotic rolling of images and sounds throughout Vietnam The Movie comes to a halt, replaced by the sparse dialogue between photojournalist Shaomi Akutagawa and the government agent Mr Nguyen. In the background, the sun is setting on the coast of Danang, where Akutagawa was invited to document life after the war. The shot closes with Mr Nguyen’s lasting words: “Vietnam has won her revolution, but I have lost mine.”21 The frame crucially dissolves to Godard’s voice-over in the film 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, where we return to the theme of war and memory, or, rather, the loss of memory “driving through the street of dreams”.22

J’ecoute la pubilicite a ma radio. Grace a E-S-S-O, je conduis sur la rue des reves et j’oublie le reste. J’oublie Hiroshima; j’oublie Auschwitz, j’oublie Budapest; j’oublie le Vietnam; j’oublie le SMIG; j’oublie la crise du logement; j’oublie la famine aux Indes.

I listen to the adverts on my radio. Thanks to ESSO I drive on the street of dreams and I forget the rest. I forget Hiroshima, I forget Auschwitz, I forget Budapest, I forget Vietnam; I forget the minimum wage, I forget the housing crisis, I forget the famine in India.

The use of a voice-over clip at this late point in the movie finally harmonises image and sound, in this case the incorporeal voice of Godard, towards an intimate moment of reflection. In the 1970s Godard produced a number of movies, many featured in Vietnam The Movie, in which he expresses his concerns over the war and explores the role of the artist as activist and art as activism. Throughout his artistic production Godard relates to the cinematic medium as the archive of time, and as the conduit between history and memory.

Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s decision in adopting Godard’s work to sign off Vietnam The Movie sends a crucial message to the attentive viewer, that the cinematic medium is indeed empowered as a record of history through memory and recollection. However, Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s actual selection and collection of archival material, negotiated and re-situated in Vietnam The Movie, offers to the viewer an alternative memory of history, even if lost to the multiplicity of symbol and intent, that is as collective as it is individual.

Hence, to summarise, this essay hopes to contribute to the discourse of postcolonial Vietnam through visual culture by examining Vietnam The Movie’s strategy of adopting the creative montage of excerpts from Vietnam-related movies to re-evaluate the country’s recent history. To do so this paper not only looks at the plurality of histories and, arguably, the ownership of memory through the notion of collective memory, but also explores and analyses the visual strategies that enabled Vietnam The Movie to appropriate and resituate, in the discourse of postcolonial Vietnam, historical images or depictions of significant events as reproduced by contemporary mediatic culture.

Appendix A—Interview transcript

Email interview May 7–11, 2017

Transcribed: November 24, 2017, edited for brevity

May 7, 2017

Loredana Paracciani (LP):

While researching Vietnam The Movie, did you access the original war archive of the United States? Are there any Vietnamese video archives? If so, are they accessible?

Nguyễn Trinh Thi (NTT):

I collected and watched videos from many different sources, anything I could find, including army and educational films from US. My first editing of Vietnam The Movie included many of those. Gradually, I reduced documentary and didactic materials and focused more on fiction. The archive in US we can access online is https://archive.org. There is the national film archive in Vietnam, controlled by the government and very hard to access.

LP:                  As part of my paper I am investigating the relevance of archival material and what is available on the Vietnam War besides film productions. Would you call these film productions a “secondary archive”? After all, they do provide (bias) information.

NTT:               My original focus was not on war films, but on the perceptions of Vietnam from outside. But naturally the perceptions are mostly of the Vietnam War anyway. Ultimately, with Vietnam The Movie, I was more interested in the popular perceptions around the world, though, not so much the official ones.

May 10, 2017

LP:                  Which do you feel were the political and aesthetic implications for you in making Vietnam The Movie? Did you ask yourself what was politically correct? What was the main element that steered your narrative—or absence of logical narrative?

NTT:               I guess I don’t ask myself what was politically correct. My interest in making work is to ‘collaborate’ with the material, which means during the process I will have to negotiate with them. Therefore I do not work with a top-down attitude. Although I might be the one who comes up with the rule of the game. In Vietnam The Movie, the rule is that every single clip that used in the film has to contain the word ‘Vietnam’, preferably if a character utters that word. I also have some logic for the flow of the film: 1. The clips are organised to tell the story of the war/history by a chronological order. You can see it commences with the end of the Indochina War, then the start, progression, acceleration, and end of the American War, then after the war; 2. It follows the story of the individual soldier, from leaving for Vietnam, his arrival, being injured [at war], back to America, [and his life as] veteran etc. The film follows a logic of association rather than a logic of dramatic narrative as in conventional cinema.

The film attempts a re-reading of this composed archive while resisting the comprehensibility and linearity of history. The anticipation of perspective in this new narrative is illusive; there is the logic of form through which no overt conclusion can be reached. In the complex nature of this narrative, the multilayered perspective of many can only permit a shifting and fragmented history that is full of gaps; unlike its authorised cousin, it is naturally incomplete.

May 11, 2017

LP:                  The last work by Godard is a crucial work, I think, not strictly about the war but for its cinematic value—also for the theme of memory and history. I wonder was it a conscious and strategic decision to place this work at the end (besides the previous excerpts)? Have you been inspired by him in your practice?

NTT:               Godard’s films mention ‘Vietnam’ the most times—in six or seven films. You might have noticed that many of the films I used in Vietnam The Movie were not war films or films on Vietnam per se. Rather I was more interested in the ones where the Vietnam War was the “backdrop”, like if you were living in Europe and watch the Vietnam War happening on television in the background. Though it seeps into your subconsciousness, somehow, for example, the scene from Persona by Bergman in which the woman watches TV in her hospital ward.

It is very interesting for me to look at Godard’s works regarding the Vietnam War, and his thinking as an artist and intellectual on how to engage with such a faraway war, or, maybe more generally, the relationship between art and activism. This theme reoccurs in many of his works, from Masculin/Feminin and La Chinoise in the 1960s to Tout va bien and Here and Elsewhere in the 1970s. This self-reflection concerns me quite often in my practice.

The placing of the last scene in the film was very significant indeed. The very last picture that we left the film with was of the advertisement of consumer products. I think at that point, Godard was probably quite pessimistic with the leftist movement in Europe. I think this picture can hint to my perspective to postwar present-day Vietnam as well.

Notes:

1 For the mediatic power of the Vietnam War, see Rick Berg, “Losing Vietnam: Covering the War in the Age of Technology,” Cultural Critique No. 3 American Representation of Vietnam (Spring 1986): 92–125.

2 Ibid.

3 Referencing Freud, writer and academic Viet Thanh Nguyen insists on the importance of memory, and the need to work through the past not only individually but also collectively in the case of war trauma of large communities. See Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Massachusetts: Havard University Press, 2016), 16–17.

4 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1975), 12.

5 In his 1932 essay “First Principles of Documentary”, Grierson insists on the importance of the documentary as a tool to observe life, which could be channelled in an art form. In this sense, the “original” actor and scene are more suitable than their fiction counterparts in understanding the reality around us. Grierson coined the term “documentary” based on his mode of practice. See John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary (1932),” in The European Cinema Reader, ed. Catherine Fowler (London: Routledge, 2002), 39–48.

6 Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Vietnam The Movie (Hanoi, 2016), 4:23–5:00.

7 Andrew Wiest, The Vietnam War 1956–1975 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 85.

8 Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016), 14–15.

9 Nguyễn Trinh Thi, email interview with author, May 7, 2017. See Appendix A for the interview transcript.

10 Halbwachs takes the example of how pilgrims to the Holy Land over the centuries have evoked very different images of the events of Jesus’ life. See Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

11 Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016), 107.

12 Nguyễn Trinh Thi, email interview with author, May 10, 2017. In her statement, Nguyen Trinh also declares, “There is the logic of form through which no overt conclusion can be reached.” See Appendix A for the interview transcript.

13 Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Vietnam The Movie (Hanoi, 2016), 13:20–14:54.

14 Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam), directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Joris Ivens, William Klein and Claude Lelouch, symbolically inaugurated the rise of left-wing cinema and the political upheaval known as May 1968. See “Loin du Vietnam (1967), Joris Ivens and Left Bank documentary,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, accessed June 1, 2017, https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc53.2011/WaughVietnam/3.html.

15 Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Vietnam The Movie (Hanoi, 2016), 23:46–23:48.

16 Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Vietnam The Movie (Hanoi, 2016), 24:23–24:50.

17 Eisenstein is considered the father of montage. Since he first introduced montage, it has been adopted in filmmaking in attempts to extend the imaginative possibilities of the film. See Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1949).

18 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 217–52.

19 Nguyễn Trinh Thi, email interview with author, May 10, 2017. See Appendix A for the interview transcript.

20 In Godard’s voice-over in 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, he hints to the fact that he had been brought to zero, “…and I have to start from there”, which refers to the end of the Hollywood cinematic example. See Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (New York City: Henry Holt and Company, 2008), 291.

21 Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Vietnam The Movie (Hanoi, 2016), 45:37–45:40.

22 Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Vietnam The Movie (Hanoi, 2016), 45:56–46:37.

Notes on Contributor:

Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani is an independent curator, writer and lecturer of Southeast Asian contemporary art. Encompassing critical social and political issues, Loredana’s rigorous research and continuous dialogue with artists and art professionals leverage Southeast Asian contemporary art through her collaborative curatorial  projects.Based in London and Bangkok, Loredana is currently editing a debut compilation of essays titled Interlaced Journeys: Diaspora and the Contemporary in Southeast Asian Art that explores the connections between diasporic movements and contemporary art in Southeast Asia.

Bibliography:

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 217–52.

Berg, Rick. “Losing Vietnam: Covering the War in the Age of Technology,” Cultural Critique No. 3 American Representation of Vietnam (Spring 1986): 92–125.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1975.

Brody, Richard. Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (New York City: Henry Holt and Company, 2008).

Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1949).

Grierson, John. “First Principles of Documentary (1932),” in The European Cinema Reader, ed. Catherine Fowler (London: Routledge, 2002), 39–48.

Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory, ed. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

“Loin du Vietnam (1967), Joris Ivens and Left Bank documentary,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, accessed June 1, 2017, https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc53.2011/WaughVietnam/3.html

Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Vietnam The Movie (Hanoi, 2016).

Wiest, Andrew. The Vietnam War 1956–1975 (New York: Routledge, 2002).

Nguyễn Trinh Thi, email interview with author, May 7, 2017.

Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Massachusetts: Havard University Press, 2016).

 

 

 

 

Much documentary making which follows in the Griersonian tradition is still predicated on the ongoing binary axis of the testimony of victim¹ and filmmaker as voice-giver.² In the production of documentary projects about social issues, an unspoken contract between maker and participant is established, where in return for the participation, the filmmakers make an artefact with will bear witness to their stories, experiences and trauma. However, often the pressure to provide convincing evidence through affective and persuasive means from testimony can burden the participant and the participatory relationship. The reliance on first-person accounts of people in crisis also presents the problem of sustained listening in both the filmmaking process as well as the finished film. New ecologies of documentary making have seen shifts in this traditional paradigm with movements towards participatory and collaborative filmmaking practices that include processes that diverge from producing conventional artefacts through heritage processes. This has been an attempt to recast power differentials, and allow for more open-ended and multivalent conceptions of knowledge, non-didactic meanings and multiple voices to be included. Often these projects exist in forms that include not only the linear but also the non or multi-linear, web-based, interactive or mobile. These forms allow for a more rhizomatic³ spread through documentary spaces and destabilise traditional binary relationships more prevalent in documentary industries.

According to Paula Rabinowitz, documentary’s “purpose is to speak and confer value on the objects it speaks about”⁴. This observation acknowledges Nichols’s concept of “documentary voice”⁵ and how it frames the world and speaks through the text in its address to the audience. In addition to the stylistic elements and aspects of authorship, documentary voice is also composed of the verbal participation, often through interviews. And through these interviews, valued is conferred on the world through articulated experience. This foregrounds the linguistic as the dominant mode of constructing knowledge. This article proposes a lateral shift in participatory documentary practice and theory that allows for a vital-materialist focus on the ecology of place, material and other non-linguistic modes of participation. I will discuss my documentary work- in-progress, The Park, which focuses on the sudden eviction of long-term residents at an outer suburban caravan park in Melbourne. These residents are predominantly elderly, disabled or unemployed and many have been living in the park for up to thirty years. The eviction of these residents has caused much trauma through displacement, significant loss of finances and illness and death. Drawing on JaneBennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010), I claim that decentralising the role of first person accounts and situating the human voice among a range of other conceptualisations of participation through training the camera and microphone towards the other evidence of the documentary world can ease the burden of the affective labour of first-person accounts of trauma. This shift towards the material landscape and environment as participatory pro-filmic elements, which convey experience and tell stories, can create resonant documentary material that allows for a re-invigorated method of listening to social issues beyond the linguistic.

The Park: some background

At the beginning of 2017, the one hundred and eighty permanent residents at the Wantirna Residential Park were given a letter saying they would need to vacate by January 2018. The land on which they have been living had been sold to a developer who has three hundred townhouses planned. Some of these residents have been there for nearly thirty years. They had retired there and had been planning to live out their time in the leafy streets of this caravan park which provided a low-cost, safe and convenient alternative to owning a more conventional house. For these residents, many elderly, disabled and/or on low incomes, there are few viable options of where to go next. The Park traces the final eight months of this place and the eviction of the residents. This project is a collection of short films which focus on the people as both individuals and part of a community, the place and the environment, and the objects and structures. The Park touches on social issues such as grass-roots activism, land ownership, politics, housing affordability as well the degradation of the built environment through abandonment and the natural environment that has grown around this space.

I began The Park project after reading a newspaper article in The Guardian Australia. The Wantirna Residential Park had been owned by four people who then sold it to a developer to build three hundred town houses. While the residents don’t own the land, they do own their houses which largely consist of portable cabins which have had extensions such as structures and decks built on. They also have well-developed gardens; evidence of years of work and money. These have become permanent fixtures in the park and are either costly to relocate or cannot be moved. In May 2017, after getting in contact with one of the organisers of the Wantirna Residents’ Action Group (W.R.A.G.), I was invited out to a meeting the following day. There were about sixty people there, all of whom had grievances and concerns about how they had been treated, what their legal rights were and what would happen to them next. I felt like this was the edge of a movement of resistance. Peter Gray, one of the organisers, outlined his idea that they should fight for compensation since there was no chance of them being able to continue living there. I made a plan to return to do some interviews. Over the past few months, I have been out to the caravan park about twenty times. A small group of residents, sometimes three or four, sometimes ten and sometimes only Peter, are standing on the roadside with signs and petitions. Each time, there are more and more houses for sale or demolished. I encounter the same core group of residents each time. While they are trying to escalate the action, life is moving on for many of them as the number of residents remaining dwindle. I am acutely aware that my actions as a documentary maker cannot effect change, just as Peter knows that his binders of documents, collection of handwritten letters by the residents, radio appearances, newspaper articles and current affairs interviews will also not effect change. By Christmas 2017, most residents will have moved. Watching this process begs the question faced by many documentary makers; what happens to the documentary process when so much of it feels futile? One of the enduring questions in this project is how to continually document a situation which is traumatic for most the participants to speak of. And subsequently, how can I create works around these issues that will engage an audience in hearing these stories. The Park is an ongoing project of a collection of short films around this event. Rather than a textual analysis of documentary artefacts, this article discusses my documentary practice underpinned by theoretical concepts.

Documentary participation as affective labour

Documentary filmmaking can request much of its participants with the trade-off that the stories and experiences are made visible, issues and events are brought to light and some knowledge or change might be made. While not all documentaries involve participation, much work that is of a social or political nature rely on first-person accounts, testimony and interviews. This form of participation has the underlying intention of the veracity of lived experience. The spoken word gives the sense of what it is like to be that person in that place at that time. While a wide variety of participatory approaches are available to the documentary maker, the interview endures as the primary evidence of lived experience, constructed and conveyed or performed through the speaking subject. Often the interview is taken as evidence and the use of interviews to elicit and translate experience continue to be problematised through their equation with facts. Trinh T Minh-ha argues that if documentary is to ask questions and present multiple ways of knowing, it must resist its “totalizing quest” in favour of more open texts which defy singular didactic knowledge despite their finite and closed form.⁶ Rather, Trinh claims, documentary should create a “space in which meaning remains fascinated by what escapes it and what exceeds it… displacing and emptying out the totality of establishment”.⁷ The representational problem of the interview is its perceived indexicality which Trinh claims is predicated on “authenticity”.⁸ While we often believe what documentary presents to us, this testimony is often part of a complex performance of self and expectations which rely heavily on being able to convincingly articulate what is felt and often beyond linguistic conceptualisation.

Documentary traditionally places the speaking subject at the centre of the film in telling the story and constructing the reality. According to Rabinowitz, “Testimony is always a partial truth, so when film-makers authorise their subjects to speak and thus provoke their audiences to act, it can only be a supplementary gesture towards truth. Yet the ‘political’ documentary often fails to register this, presenting, like the ethnographer, the appearance of ‘wholeness’.” What to do with the voices? Isaac Julien also claims that the problem of featuring testimony from people who have been previously denied a voice in documentary is one of representation. How do you present these voices without it becoming the totalising “authentic” voice?⁹ Both of these present challenges to questions of representation; of creating a context which has an internal critique. The representation of reality is always fraught, especially when relying solely on the speaking subject.

Although testimony still has the power to produce affects, these are increasingly manipulated and rendered ineffectual with audiences often numbed to the spectacle of difference, novelty and a media-rich environment. In documentary films, strategies are used to appeal to emotions as an end unto itself; intensified for entertainment. Rabinowitz asks how can documentary’s call to action be activated without relying on melodrama to create this desire. It is through a process of making the audience feel uncomfortable enough to take action that she claims has more potential power than just through the creation of affects.¹⁰ The desire provoked in the spectator is one of intersubjective identification is not enough to create a response.

The request of the participant in documentary can be considered one of labour. Regarding human action as labour frames our endeavours within a neo-liberal context where everything is considered an exchange of value and of potential return. Labour is a contractual arrangement usually quantified through the exchange of time for financial renumeration. However, while participatory practices in documentary involve some kind of action and therefore labour, there is rarely any payment involved. While documentary has been traditionally thought of as indicative of power differentials between the filmmaker who is seen to have control and power in the final artefact that is produced, the reality is often more complex. This easy binary is often predicated on model which, with continually shrinking documentary budgets and products commissioned, is increasingly rare. Much documentary production now exists outside of funding with people pursuing projects for various reasons, impelled by their own desires and motivations. Especially in socially oriented documentary, a lot of the work is done without payment or funding. Rather, the filmmakers often make significant financial contributions in addition to the hours of unpaid labour. Silke Panse raises the point that documentary production has largely moved into the field of leisure with much of the work done being immaterial labour.¹¹ Hardt and Negri describe immaterial labour as “labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication”.¹² With the shift away from labour being equated with the production of material artefacts, immaterial labour composes much of the work that is done for financial renumeration. Hardt and Negri describe three components of this immaterial labour with affective labor as “human contact and interaction… This labor is immaterial, even if it is corporeal and affective involves the production and manipulation of affect and requires (virtual and actual) human contact, labor in the bodily mode”.¹³

Every one of the residents that I meet wants to talk. They are concerned both for themselves as well as for others less visible: the sick, the elderly, those with mental health issues, those that do not leave their houses. This is a complex mix of people and are warm and friendly and it is easy to empathise with their situation. Every time I encounter Con, he tells me about his three sons that he raised here and his dad living nearby who has cancer. He speaks down the barrel of the camera, addressing the imagined politicians and the audience, making visible his despair.

Panse claims that documentary making is prescriptive in the moment of filming and “can add to the affective manual labour of the worker”.¹⁴ While Panse’s observations relate to documenting workers who are burdened with additional pressure of having to appear productive or happy or with whatever expression is required in the moment of filming to demonstrate their workerness, similar affective behaviour is required when conducting filmed interviews of people affected by a traumatic experience. Not only do the participants live their experience in the present, they are subject to a double-act of re-living it over and over again for the purpose of being recorded. Affect is the currency of the documentary protagonist that catalyses identification with the documentary viewer. Additionally, through the interview, the probing and direction of the participant can exacerbate this.

Each time I visit Charlie’s home, the Australia flag on the pole outside is a bit more tattered. And each time I film Charlie, he seems more resigned to the fact that he has to move. In our first afternoon on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in June, he talks about having a barbecue to roast the developer. He tells me he has nowhere to go and that they’ll have to bulldoze him out of there. In the second interview, he briefly acknowledges his imminent move. He’s not sure where it will be to but is on a waiting-list on public housing. He has started packing away his Elvis CDs and Clive Cussler books. I see him over the next few months and ask him to film him some more. He tells me that he’s done enough, the anger that was so surface in the past has given way to resignation. One day I find his place empty. His cabin is half gone and I find the palimpsest of living among the detritus that remains.

Sometimes I forget. I forget that I am not only trying to make a film, but that I am also engaging and interacting with people who are experiencing difficulty. That I am there to listen and bear witness, however effective or not this is, even if I am not always filming. But the film is also the evidence of their struggle and their involvement in the filming and the thing that is produced from the affective labour. Sometimes I forget that I need a certain cushion of time between arriving at the park and beginning filming. I need this time to reconnect, to rediscover the rapport, to catch up on what has been happening, to look at documents and evidence that has been collected. This place has a different sense of time and the usual drop by for a quick chat and interview doesn’t work. Sometimes it becomes difficult to even pick up the camera and start filming as though it breaks the connection we are having.

What did they say? Yeah it’s sad but what can we do?

In August, at one of the roadside protests, I meet some the residents I have interviewed and tell them that I have just been to a documentary conference. I tell them that I presented some of the material I have been filming at the park. I almost tell them that I “I talked about this project” as though their lives and experiences and filmic representations have become my ‘project’. One of them said, “What did they say? Yeah it’s sad but what can we do?”. And then she asked about the film and said she’d buy a DVD. I feel the burden and responsibility that the labour they have provided has not been reciprocated with a film yet. I also feel that I cannot make something that will change the situation. We all know this is true. When one of the residents, Diana, tells me that she has attempted suicide and no-one can do anything to help, I agree and acknowledge that my being here and filming will also not do anything.

In new ecologies of documentary practice which has seen an expansion into processes and forms beyond the traditional linear and which often rely more heavily on participatory acts that involve the subjects taking on some of the labour of the documentary maker, John Dovey makes a case for the potential for exploitation.¹⁵ In these practices, participants might produce their own material which then becomes part of the larger documentary project. The question of the affective labour from the participant is rarely discussed in practice as it is often conceived that they take part in the documentary for reasons of their own. But what is required of a participant can be quite demanding. They might be directed to redo an action in multiple takes, with different framing so that there is enough material for the edit. The time commitment can also be much more involved than predicted by both subject and filmmaker. Reality, as it appears for documentary film, is directed with a request made on the participant. The issue of payment is also problematic and is rarely an aspect of the exchange of labour in documentary production. This is premised on the idea that once the transaction involves financial renumeration, a certain level of authenticity can be compromised where people may choose to participate for material gain rather than other reasons. In his handbook on documentary techniques and strategies, Michael Rabiger claims that, “To pay people would mean purchasing the truth, truth you want to hear, which destroys your film’s credibility”.¹⁶ Rabiger acknowledges there are some exceptions, one including where there is an obvious imbalance in economics,that it is ethical to contribute either through money or in-kind gifts or payment of services.

Expansion of documentary participation beyond the human

Participation in documentary films has traditionally been conceptualised through the linguistic contributions through either interviews or onscreen interactions between participants as central to the narrative of the film. Elizabeth Cowrie asks, “How then, does documentary participate in the construction of discourses of knowledge and reality as not only the “said” but also the “shown”?¹⁷ Whenever I turn the camera on, the residents of the caravan park relive their experiences. My initial appearance on the scene presents an opportunity for these accounts to be recorded. And despite my awareness that I am not the “voice-giver” it’s also easy to slip into a role that feels desired by the participants. My camera bears witness to the effects of this situation but while I listen through the camera, I also struggle with the limits of the spoken word. Rabinowitz claims, “As ‘star’ of the documentary, the presence of the body, especially the body in pain, signifies truth and readiness which seem to defy contextualisation”¹⁸ Although she goes on to say that without the presence of the filmmaker in the frame, the camera is disembodied and “the filmed bodies are over-invested with meaning yet deprived of agency”¹⁹. The over-dependence on the speaking subject creates a dissonance with the notion of agency because it is if the more they speak, the less ability they have to effect change through the filming process. And with an excess of speaking and accounts of their personal situations, another challenge I face as a documentary filmmaker, is how to constantly be receptive to the event that I am filming and how to keep listening.

Some days when I go out to the park, I just spend time walking around the streets with my camera noticing what is changing. On a particularly windy day, I film the wind and its effect on the flags, the trees, the wind chimes, the interior of a demolished cabin. I want to give more presence to what is here. I move in close to the piles of insulation that are disintegrating into the earth. A snail crosses the path and disappears under a sheet of metal. I film the insides of a cabin that are now external as half the house has been taken. After the people leave, what material remains?

Drawing on theories of a material account of political action, Jane Bennett presents another paradigm which can be extrapolated to documentary filmmaking. In her book, Vibrant Matter, Bennett asks, “What if we loosened the tie between participation and human language use, encountering the world as a swarm of vibrant materials entering and leaving agental assemblages?”²⁰ She asks what effects material conditions and nonhuman forces might end up exerting on greater events that directly affect humans and vice-versa implicating an extended an ecology of effects.²¹ In her examples, she cites how everything, either animate or inanimate is composed of matter that is in constant movement and vibration. This active or vibrant matter comes together to enact agency in the world to create an event. So although often this matter does not have enough agency independently, together it forms more than the sum of its parts thereby creating an event.²² A theory of vibrant matter destabilises the human with linguistic competence as the sole actant in events.

Thinking of the material that occupies the documentary world as vibrant matter, and as extended elements of participation in the story of the film, opens up a space for a greater contribution towards the concept of documentary participation when looking at a situation or a crisis. This accounts for another sense of the world where the documentary takes place; providing additional evidence to what traditionally has been presented through the spoken word. The filming process foregrounds this vibrant matter within the pro-filmic space as a participant in the construction of the project. This also expands the concept of voice beyond the linguistic towards a material conception. This requires thinking through Bennett’s concept of “vibrant matter” in two parts. To consider the caravan park as a site of swarming vibrant matter and how this might be translated as documentary participation would involve thinking of a documentary site as an ecology containing the elements found in this space; the land in which it occupies; wedged between the freeway and the highway. And also the plants and trees; a combination of native gum trees with English style gardens, the materials of the buildings and the disintegration that becomes part of the land underneath; the bees, the flies and other insects buzzing around; the leaking tap slowly wearing a hole where the incessant drops land; the flags in a various array of disintegration. Noting these observed materials in the park is not a reductivist reading of the vitality of matter but rather an acknowledgement of one aspect of this theory. It is a Latourian description.

The second account and application of Bennett’s “vibrant matter” concerns how the non-human materials of this place might be translated as documentary participation and evidence of experience, beyond the linguistic. This enacts part of a broader ecology for the audience to enter into the world that this event is occurring in. This presents a more subtle way that allows for a rendering of the situation. This is not to diminish the impact of the human cost at the heart of what is happening in the caravan park and this project. The expansion of participation to the material elements through the lens of a vitalist account of the site does not negate the effect that this is having on the residents. It is not a flat ontology where all matter is created equal. And I am not equating a pane of glass covered in cobwebs with a person displaced from their home of twenty-two years. Rather, I am proposing a documentary approach that might allow the audience to access this world with a renewed approach to listening to this event through the material in addition to the human testimony. This approach enacts a practice of documentary-making that requires ever-shifting means of production and strategies of seeing and hearing in order to re-present narratives that have been commodified and normalised. These socially-situated events, despite the specificity of each of this situations, also represent yet another case of the effects of human-centred greed and late capitalism.

In positioning vibrant matter as a social and political methodology, Bennett draws on Rancière’s “partition of the sensible”²³ as a way to destabilise the human-centric position of agency and power. Rancière presents this partition as an arbitrary line between political agents and those without power. This is a division between “what is visible and what is not, of what can be heard from the inaudible”.²⁴ Rancière locates power within the use of language and claims this partition is disrupted through an equality of speaking beings. Applying Rancière’s theory with Bennett’s reimagining of this divide between those with power and those without, in a how we represent a documentary world such as the caravan park, we can broaden participation through giving agency to those elements not usually assigned power as speaking beings. While Rancière might base his emancipation on the speaking subject, not all subjects are equal in their ability to speak or to be subsequently heard. This calls forth the necessity to enable other ways of speaking that might dislodge the conventional structures of documentary discourse. This is where Bennett draws analogies between Rancière and vibrant matter; in their shared ability to disrupt binaries and afford agency where previously it may have been perceived as mute.²⁵ With an excess of affective stimulus, how else can documentary speak, and through what processes can it make itself heard? Through a vital materialist theory, the traditional binary between the speaking subject and objects are rethought as co-existing in a shared ecology of constantly shifting relations. As a documentary practice, foregrounding the materiality of the effects on the caravan park as evidence allows a shift from the over-reliance on the speaking documentary subject.

Enabling listening in documentary

The last time I went out to the park, I hardly saw anyone. It was early on a warm Friday morning and I wanted to catch the light as it arrived before the heat of the sun. Summer is approaching and there’s a dryness to the air. Last Sunday they held their final roadside protest as there are too few people to attend anymore. After collecting thousands of signatures, all the petitions have been submitted to the state government. The presence of the stencilled spray-painted For Sale signs is overwhelming. Piles of the insulation, pine wood, old televisions, sheet metal and green waste accumulate on the edges of the streets. Small clumps waiting for something. I look through windows into houses where I have filmed and out the other side into thirsty gardens. The Australia flags that remain are almost completely faded or disintegrated. There is no one left here to speak, nothing else left to say. I film the presence and the absence while I listen the quiet buzz of distant traffic, bees and crickets.

To rethink documentary participation manifested as vital materialism can allow us to approach the idea of listening as a philosophical concept.²⁶ This expands beyond the linguistic and the human-centred so as to hear what might be said in other ways through presencing evidence and knowledge. This alleviates the affective demand on the documentary participant. Here, I take Gemma Fiumara’s approach to listening as a philosophical concept:

In a culture determined by the technology of information the human condition is ever more scrutinized and exposed, as if the dominant tendency were to seek out ever more ‘interesting’ material, with the result that we are increasingly immunised through exposure to human suffering as it is passed to us by the media. This humans seem to reconcile themselves to indifference while they are induced to say: ‘We know everything and we can’t do anything about it.²⁷

A vital materialist account of the documentary space allows for an approach that adds richness to the documentary material and supports the human participants. While these stories that very much represent the present climate of late-capitalism, disenfranchisement, destruction of communities and issues around home are essential to be heard, we also need alternative approaches to the documentary representations of such events. And while much documentary relies on finding the ‘new’ or what Fiumara calls the ‘interesting’ subject matter, this should also not mean that those stories and events that appear to be so common in contemporary times are not heard. We just need a rethinking of the documentary space and approaches that enable listening. Additionally, also a continual reliance on first-person testimony as the truth conveying vehicle of the personal, economic, environmental cost of such situations can also be burdensome for the participant living the trauma that they speak of. This is not an anti-humanist position to negate the human subject position, rather that the materiality of evidence or the evidence of materiality can work in support of the human. When the affective demand of the human experience might create a burden, or with a lack of listening might not be heard, then the other images that are silent or at least present alternative perspectives can support a broader approach to participation.

I started filming The Park as a project that would be largely “character-driven” and would follow the participants as they fought to either save their caravan park from destruction or won financial compensation. There was also the possibility that they would all just move off in their disparate directions at the end of the year. The Park was largely about the people who occupied this land and their stories of being victims of a developer. But over time, I realised that to focus solely on the residents through how they were able to tell their stories and narrate their experience was only one form of knowing, one aspect of truth. I also witnessed that while words might constitute a direct way of conveying experience, they can also be rendered ineffective. This can be through the repetition of the speech act as well as the lack of ability to listen to these stories. Evidence of how the caravan park was changing was also essential in supporting the residents. Through also incorporating filming strategies that focused on how this space was taking over allowed the creation of more open documentary images that support the more affective onslaught of human suffering. Focusing on the role of vibrant matter as it engages in its own representation of this event allows it have agency in participating in the story-telling world of The Park.

Notes

Bibliography

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Cowrie, Elizabeth. Recording Reality, Desiring the Real. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Deleuze, Gilles, Massumi, Brian and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987

Dovey, John. “Documentary Ecosystems. Collaboration and Exploitation.” New Documentary Ecologies: Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses, 2014: 11-32.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.

Nichols, Bill. “What gives documentary a voice of their own?” Film Quarterly 36.3 1983, 17-30.

Rabiger, Michael. Directing the Documentary. 4th ed. Amsterdam ; Boston: Focal Press, 2004.

Rabinowitz, Paula. They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary. London ; New York: Verso, 1994.

Rancière, J. & Panagia, D. & Bowlby, R. . “Ten Theses on Politics.” Theory & Event vol. 5.no. 3, 2001.

Fiumara, Gemma. The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening. London ; New York: Routledge, 1995.

Panse, Silke. “The Work of the Documentary Protagonist.” A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film. Eds. Juhasz, Alexandra and Alisa Lebow. UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. p. 149

Trinh, T Minh-ha. “The Totalizing Quest for Meaning.” Theorizing Documentary. Ed. Renov, Michael. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Trinh, T Minh-ha. “Documentary Is/Not a Name” October Vol. 52 Spring, 1990. pp. 76-98

Trinh, T. Minh-Ha. Framer Framed. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Winston, Brian. “The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary.” Image Ethics: The Moral Rights of Subjects in Photographs, Film, and Television. Ed. Gross, Larry, Katz, John Stuart, Ruby, Jay. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988: 34-57

An oft-identified pleasure to be drawn from the documentary is that films of this type offer the viewer an opportunity to learn about an aspect of the historical world. Bill Nichols describes this as the attraction of “epistephilia,” a promise that “Knowledge can be ours, its acquisition will afford us pleasure”.[i] Along similar lines, Brian Winston argues that the documentary is popularly valued as a means by which the viewer can judicially examine and develop conclusions regarding the nature of real occurrences, since films of this type are thought to belong within a lineage that encompasses oral interrogation as a feature of a trial or cross-examination, while its mechanically generated images ally it with “pictorial representation as a mode of scientific evidence”.[ii] Often seen as a vehicle for the investigation of pressing contemporary issues, the documentary is also commonly thought to operate as a form of journalistic reportage. Indeed, the beginnings of documentary filmmaking in the 1920s coincide with the assertive promotion of objectivity in journalism as a means to bring social science-like rigor to news reporting through the elevation of objective facts over subjective opinion.[iii] In light of these common ways of considering the documentary, this type of filmmaking is often placed in binary opposition to fiction filmmaking, an approach that “is predicated on the existence of a fact/fiction dichotomy, with documentary on one side, and drama on the other”.[iv]

In truth, in both concept and practice, documentary filmmaking is heterogeneous and “mobilizes no finite inventory of techniques, addresses no set number of issues, and adopts no completely known taxonomy of forms, styles, or modes”.[v] But in the popular imagination, as in the taxonomy of documentaries that are most commonly studied by film scholars, serious-minded documentaries that serve a journalistic, educational, democracy-fostering, justice-advancing, or nation-building function are often presented as the clearest illustration of what documentaries can and should be. To think of the documentary only in terms of films that fit these criteria, or to focus on the connection between documentary viewing and epistephilia, is to ignore that audiences routinely derive other pleasures from documentaries. Indeed, there is a vast catalogue of documentaries that show no sign that they are intended to encourage the sober act of epistephilia on the part of the viewer, whether these be exploitation documentaries, emotion-laden propaganda films, or any of the other types of documentary that have found receptive audiences but are largely overlooked and treated as ‘unwelcome’ in both popular and scholarly thinking about the documentary.

In the present, we can ponder what is it that draws viewers to current high-profile documentaries which, rather than delivering certitude about their truthfulness, withhold from the viewer an ability to know whether or not what they see onscreen is an accurate representation of actual historical events or not. Some of these documentaries, such as Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012) and Radiant City (Gary Burns and Jim Brown, 2006), keep the viewer in a state of uncertainty regarding their truthfulness for much of their screen time, before delivering some form of ‘reveal’ within the film text or through other channels soon after the film’s release, thereby making it clear to the viewer where their truthfulness begins and ends. For instance, the hybrid documentary Radiant City mixes a series of interviews with real urban planning experts with an entirely staged depiction of the day-to-day life of a fictitious suburban family. From early in the film, there are elements that lead the viewer to wonder about the veracity of the family depicted onscreen, but it is not until close to the film’s end that it is conclusively revealed that the Moss family is being performed by actors, albeit ones who draw on their own suburban lives for their onscreen performance. In a similar fashion, viewers of Stories We Tell can see from the film’s end credits that the home movie footage that prominently features in the film is not authentic footage of director Sarah Polley’s family, but instead has been staged for the film with the scenes performed by actors.

Other documentaries, such as Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010) and The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012), offer no such clarity. As with the films mentioned above, Exit Through the Gift Shop withholds from the viewer certainty as to where truth and fiction within it begins or ends, but it offers no final reveal regarding the truthfulness or fakeness of what is seen onscreen. As a film critic pondered in a review of Exit Through the Gift Shop, “Riddle? Yes. Enigma? Sure. Documentary?”[vi] Another commentator writing on the same film immediately prior to the Academy Awards noted, “Exit Through the Gift Shop is undoubtedly the most buzzed-about film in the documentary feature category. But the uncomfortable question persists: Is  it real?”[vii] The U.S. film critic Roger Ebert went to the heart of the matter when he wrote , “The widespread speculation that Exit Through the Gift Shop is a hoax only adds to its fascination”.[viii] In a similar manner, the documentary Catfish (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, 2010) has been the source of widespread speculation regarding its veracity, and at minimum appears to contain a number of scenes that have been re-staged if not entirely fabricated. In this instance, the directors emphatically argue that the film is not staged, although their assessment may be informed more by the practice of reality television creation than the standards of rigorous nonfiction media production.

Nichols argues that viewers can respond to documentary films in numerous ways, “from curiosity and fascination to pity and charity, from poetic appreciation to anger or rage, from scientific scrutiny to inflamed hysteria,” but these varied responses “all function as modes of engagement with representations of the historical world”.[ix] With films such as Exit Through the Gift Shop and The Act of Killing, something else happens: the viewer is never certain of the veracity of the film they view, or how or whether it relates to the historical world. This indicates that the attraction of these films is not based in epistephilia, but instead derives from an experience of ‘distanzo’, a feeling of wavering doubt or uncertainty, and a state of ‘not knowing for certain’ whether a film can be adequately described as a documentary or not.

There is a robust body of literature examining the various heterogeneous styles adopted by documentary filmmakers, past and present. These range from studies examining works that mimic, are inspired by, or appropriate the conventions of the documentary, such as mockumentaries,[x] docudramas,[xi] documentary style reality television shows,[xii] and self-reflexive or category-defying films that seek to educate the viewer about the operation of the documentary by blurring fact and fiction.[xiii] In this literature it is acknowledged that viewers are drawn to these various types of film by the promise of a variety of experiences. Thus, Alexandra Juhasz argues that fake documentaries are experienced as “a documentary with a twist”, with the ‘twist’ likely to be a key source of pleasure for the viewer.[xiv] But in general, in scholarly literature, the reception of documentary film by actual audiences, and the pleasures that viewers derive from the experience remains unevenly and in many ways inadequately explored. For instance, while useful insight into documentary viewership is provided by scholars who have examined audience reception and cinema,[xv] the important conclusions revealed by sociology and psychology-based media effects literature have not been comprehensively applied to a study of the documentary, or indeed to the cinema in general.[xvi] Countering this omission is not the goal of my study, but in a related way I do seek to both disrupt the common tendency of connecting documentary viewership primarily to pleasures associated with epistephilia, and to propose that the field of documentary film studies can benefit from drawing on media and communication theories developed in the fields of sociology and psychology.  With this end in mind, in this study I argue that contrary to common expectations for the documentary, for the viewer a powerful feature of documentary film viewership can be entering into a state of ‘not knowing’, as seen in the instances of Exit Through the Gift Shop and The Act of Killing.

EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP

Following a premiere at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in 2010, Exit Through the Gift Shop was well received by critics and garnered a nomination for an Academy Award in the documentary category. With regard to its formal organization and syntax, Exit Through the Gift Shop is constructed along familiar lines. It depicts a chronology of events in the life in its central character Thierry Guetta, from his introduction to the world of street art and first meetings with leading artists in that arena, to his emergence as an artist in his own right as Mr. Brainwash. The use of point of view shots and a narration by Guetta establishes that this sequence of events is presented from Guetta’s perspective, and the film employs familiar performative elements of the type found in documentaries that are autobiography-rooted such as Blue Vinyl (Judith Helfand and Daniel B. Gold, 2002) and The Brainwashing of My Dad (Jen Senko, 2015), or that  incorporate a significant element of personal disclosure on the part of the filmmaker, such as Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (Kurt Kuenne, 2008) or Stories We Tell. Thus, Exit Through the Gift Shop is in style and syntax similar to other contemporary documentary works, thereby leading us to wonder if Banksy has appropriated familiar features of recently made films to covertly construct a fake documentary .

This was the belief of many commentators and critics who wrote about Exit Through the Gift Shop in the mainstream press or blogosphere. In The Los Angeles Times, investigative reporter Jason Felch argues that the film should be treated with suspicion since it “is anchored by two of the least reliable narrators in memory: Banksy, the anonymous British street artist; and Thierry Guetta, an eccentric French émigré to Los Angeles whose obsessive filming happens to capture the world of high-concept graffiti”.[xvii] In a report that casts doubt on the film’s truthfulness, Felch focuses not on what is seen in the film but instead on examining public records to establish whether or not Guetta is actually a real person. It is unusual to see a documentary film subject examined in this way, but Felch reports that “The details of Guetta’s unlikely biography are broadly supported by a review of public records,” from his arrival in LA in the early 1980s and registration of a Social Security number, to his launching of a vintage clothes shop.[xviii] But Felch cautions, the evidence of Guetta’s biography does not prove “whether his latest incarnation, Mr. Brainwash, is sincere”.[xix]

Writing for the magazine Fast Company, Alissa Walker is unequivocal in arguing that the film is a hoax by Banksy, and offers a range of evidence in support of this conclusion. She states that Mr. Brainwash’s show, which dominates the latter half of Exit Through the Gift Shop, “was an intricate prank being pulled on all of us by Banksy… with [Shepard] Fairey as his accomplice,” with the film taking “that prank one step further”.[xx] Walker argues that Banksy and Fairey convinced Guetta to pose as a “budding graffiti artist wannabe so he and Fairey could ‘direct’ him in real life—manufacturing a brand new persona that both celebrates and criticizes the over-commercialization of street art”.[xxi] In support of this theory she argues that viewers never actually see Guetta create any art.  The artwork itself seems to be manufactured by Banksy’s and Fairey’s artmaking teams, and Mr. Brainwash’s show is produced by individuals with past involvement in producing Banksy show or supporting Fairey’s arts and culture magazine Swindle.[xxii] Turning to the film’s narrative, Walker argues that the events seen onscreen are far-fetched: the central premise of Guetta’s relationship with Banksy and Fairey is that the artists were grateful to have someone videotape their nighttime street art activities, but “neither artist has ever had a problem attracting would-be documentarians,” and there’s “plenty of footage (even in the movie) of Banksy’s own people documenting him working on walls in the West Bank, before he ever met Guetta”.[xxiii] Capping off these fabrications, Walker argues that viewers of the film are “spoonfed bizarre, effusive comments… about how famous Mr. Brainwash is, how his career has totally eclipsed that of Banksy and Fairey”, and Banksy himself is behind these “tongue-in-cheek” comments.[xxiv]

The mystery of the film’s credibility as documentary was sustained by Banksy’s predictably idiosyncratic behavior when the film was exhibited at film festivals. During the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, the artist did not appear for the usual round of press conferences, screenings, or receptions, but his artwork appeared on storefront walls in the town. At the Berlin International Film Festival, the filmmaker cancelled a news conference for the film at short notice, instead presenting a prepared statement by videotape, in which his appearance and voice are disguised in the same way as they are in the film.[xxv] Banksy states that the events seen in the film are not a fabrication, and that the real surprise of the film’s far-fetched storyline is “because every bit of it’s true”.[xxvi] The producer of Exit Through the Gift Shop, Jaimie D’Cruz, affirms Banksy’s statement that neither the film nor Guetta’s career are a fabrication, stating “We wouldn’t be able to create something as extraordinary as the rise of Thierry Guetta … We didn’t have the intent, we didn’t have the inclination to do that, to… stage a prank on the world”.[xxvii] However, these comments by Banksy and others connected to the film have not quelled speculation that the film is a hoax. After all, as Felch argues, Banksy’s claims are “coming from an unidentifiable artist whose work includes titles such as ‘I can’t believe you morons actually buy this …’”.[xxviii]

There is no need here to establish whether the film is a hoax or not, or to identify which features of the narrative could be fake. The key issue is that speculation about the film’s status as a documentary is an integral feature of its reception, both in the public discussion of the film through various media channels, as well as when one is actually viewing it. This indicates that a feature of the viewing pleasure delivered by Exit Through the Gift Shop is not the acquisition of knowledge, but rather the uncertainties the film proposes. Uncertainty can be defined as a condition where there is insufficient information as to whether an event has occurred or will occur, thereby denying the individual the ability to know how to respond to pre-existing conditions or to be able to predict what is to come in the future.[xxix] Psychologists Timothy D. Wilson, David B. Centerbar, Deborah A. Kermer, and Daniel T. Gilbert argue that uncertainty is widely viewed pejoratively, and “Most synonyms of the word uncertainty have decidedly unpleasant connotations, such as doubt and insecurity”.[xxx] Uncertainty, they argue, is a potential source of “debilitating anxieties,” and therefore we seek to eradicate it by gathering facts, forming opinions, and generating theories “in an attempt to transform the unknown into the known—to make the world a bit less puzzling and more predictable by reducing… uncertainty about it”.[xxxi]

 

As one among our society’s “discourses of sobriety”,[xxxii] the documentary often serves as a tool for the rationalization and spread of fact-based knowledge and social or political ideas and norms, all processes that offer explanations and frameworks that can make our lives more predictable. Unlike fiction films, which present novel stories and therefore invite continuous speculation on the part of the viewer as to what will happen next or how the narrative will end, the documentary commonly operates as a closing-off of uncertainty as rational explanations are delivered over the course of their progress. Thus, the documentary can serve as a communication medium that provides order and makes the world more predictable, and like other actions that displace uncertainty, “the cost is that a predictable world sometimes seems less delicious, less exciting, less poignant”.[xxxiii] Indeed, Wilson, Centerbar, Kermer, and Gilbert proffer the term “pleasure paradox” to highlight how events that are predictable in their outcome “evoke less intense emotions than unpredictable events, which means that the reduction of uncertainty can entail the reduction of pleasure”.[xxxiv] An interesting feature of the research conducted by these psychologists is that their conclusions are based on studies involving film viewership. In one such study, a sampling of “participants watched a pleasurable movie based on a true story and were then provided with two possible accounts of what happened to the main character after the movie was made. Participants who remained in this state of uncertainty were in a good mood for significantly longer than participants who were told either that the first or second account was true.”[xxxv] This led the researchers to conclude, “If people understood the pleasure paradox, they might make conscious decisions about how to manage their emotions… People might opt to remain uncertain about pleasurable events by, for example, not watching the last few minutes of a movie that they know will have a happy ending”.[xxxvi]

The pleasure associated with uncertainty is well known in relation to the fiction film, where the plot twists of thrillers or detective stories  bring to the fore this experience. But pleasures of this kind get less attention with regard to the study of the documentary, despite the presence of detective story-like investigative documentaries or drama-laden documentaries that withhold knowledge of how they will end until their final moments. With regard to Exit Through the Gift Shop we can further add that the film’s pleasingly upbeat tenor, humor, and rebellious spirit is amplified for the audience by post-screening feelings of uncertainty as to the nature of what has been viewed. In psychology, the “uncertainty intensification hypothesis”, proposes that uncertainty makes unpleasant events more unpleasant than they would be if uncertainty were not present.[xxxvii] While this hypothesis is commonly accepted, Yoav Bar-Anan, Timothy D. Wilson and Daniel T. Gilbert argue that uncertainty can also make “pleasant events more pleasant”.[xxxviii] Here it is likely that the pleasure associated with viewing Guetta’s idiosyncratic antics and Banksy’s beguiling trickery in Exit Through the Gift Shop is amplified by the uncertainty of not knowing where truth or fiction begins or ends in the film.

UNCERTAINTY AS DISCOMFORT

In counterpoint to the uncertainty generated by Exit Through the Gift Shop is the experience of viewing the controversial award-winning documentary The Act of Killing, a film that orchestrates feelings of uncertainty on the part of the viewer towards a very different outcome. In The Act of Killing, perpetrators of Indonesia’s 1965-66 mass killings of ethnic Chinese and others identified as communist sympathizers describe their actions and recreate for the camera a series of vignettes depicting how they carried out the killings. These unlikely documentary subjects offer little more than an occasional nod to doubt or remorse for the killings they carried out, crimes for which they still have impunity, since they are supported by Indonesia’s present-day paramilitary organizations and political leadership. The film’s most prominent character, Anwar Congo, a repellant but charismatic petty criminal who became the leader of the most powerful death squad in Northern Sumatra, is thought to have personally killed hundreds of people. Writing on The Act of Killing for The Guardian, Nick Fraser states, “I don’t feel we want to be doing this. It feels wrong and it certainly looks wrong to me. Something has gone missing here. How badly do we want to hear from these people, after all? Wouldn’t it be better if we were told something about the individuals whose lives they took?”[xxxix] He adds, the film does not “enhance our knowledge of the 1960s Indonesian killings… I feel that no one should be asked to sit through repeated demonstrations of the art of garrotting. Instead of an investigation, or indeed a genuine recreation, we’ve ended somewhere else—in a high-minded snuff movie”.[xl]

In The Act of Killing, the viewer is denied a distanced viewing position from which the actions and testimony of those seen onscreen can be kept at arm’s length and judged with neat certainty. The film seems not to occupy any moral or judicial high ground, and instead the killers themselves, in some instances with glee, appear to direct the film as they reenact the murders they committed. On The Act of Killing, Nichols writes: “Here is a film that confounds the mind,” creating a state of “befuddlement” as “a clear distinction between fictional and documentary representation fails to materialize, followed by our mind-boggling astonishment at the casual embrace of the killers and their paramilitary cohort by the current government”.[xli] This experience is heightened since  “Oppenheimer chooses not to clearly indicate where reenactment, fantasy, and social reality diverge”.[xlii] The perplexing experience of viewing The Act of Killing bears similarity to viewing Luis Buñuel’s surrealism-inspired ethnographic documentary Las Hurdes (1933). Depicting conditions in the impoverished Las Hurdes region of northern Spain, Buñuel’s film shocks the viewer “because its antihumanism allows no position from which to judge; there appears to be no ethical perspective within the film… no comfortable subject position”.[xliii] When challenged over whether The Act of Killing should be thought of as a documentary, documentary maker Errol Morris—who served as one of the film’s executive producers—responded, “Of course it’s a documentary… Documentary is not about form, a set of rules that are either followed or not, it’s an investigation into the nature of the real world, into what people thought and why they thought what they thought”.[xliv] Filmmaker Werner Herzog, another of the film’s executive directors, argues that without the inclusion of the scenes scripted by the death squad members “you would end up with a self-righteous, mediocre film you would see on television”.[xlv]

While the onscreen film text of The Act of Killing withholds much from the viewer, it is likely that many viewers will go to other sources for information about a film, either before or after watching it, and in this way some of their befuddlement will be allayed. On the film’s website, director Oppenheimer reveals the intent of his filmmaking in Indonesia, including describing his involvement in an earlier film, The Globalization Tapes (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2003), which was made with the participation of Indonesian workers’ organizations and presents the experience of those who suffered at the hands of the death squad members seen in The Act of Killing. Thus, as Nichols observes, the film’s web-based materials “provide the moral and political orientation the film withholds. It is as if Oppenheimer knows full well what we want and need to know but withholds it to thrust us into a more visceral, perturbed state of reception”.[xlvi] Indeed, the information presented through these other channels does not fully resolve for the viewer where truth or fiction lie in The Act of Killing, since the authenticity or significance of some scenes, such as the one that appears to depict Congo physically retching as he reflects on the murders he committed, is still not elucidated for the viewer. Nor do these extra-textual materials inoculate the viewer from being positioned as a partial accomplice to the present-day filmmaking of the death squad members, as they engage in staging and memorializing their past actions for the camera and viewer.

The Act of Killing blasts apart our expectation of the social documentary, a practice of filmmaking that commonly leans towards the circulation of earnest depictions of social problems, while employing voice-over commentary or the testimony of sober-minded experts in order to maintain a clear stance of moral probity. Writing in the 1920s on the need for objective news reporting, Walter Lippman argued that journalists should be “patient and fearless men of science who have labored to see what the world really is,” while possessing “a keen understanding of the quantitative importance of particular facts”.[xlvii] Belief in the importance of objectivity was an effort to encourage the masses to make decisions based on factual evidence, rather than be swayed by the whims of subjective opinion, and to strengthen democracy by countering the threat posed to it by propaganda.[xlviii] Similar social science-inflected positivist thinking underwrites our expectations for documentary filmmaking, where, as objective reporters on real events, documentarians are expected to deliver clear-cut truths, particularly those that seem likely to lead to social progress. In contrast to these expectations, Oppenheimer seems to abandon his responsibilities as a director by allowing murderers to use the documentary put before us for their own propaganda purposes as they seek to reaffirm in the present that their past actions were admirable and justified.

From the viewer’s perspective the experience of viewing The Act of Killing is a disorienting and distressing one, and the film “confounds the mind and unnerves the body; it throws our sense of certainty into question”.[xlix] In contrast to the prolonged pleasure that is sustained by the uncertainty generated by viewing Exit Through the Gift Shop, the uncertainty that accompanies viewing The Act of Killing promotes feelings of discomfort. By withholding from the viewer certainty with regard to the veracity of what is seen onscreen, as well as assurance that the viewer and the film’s director occupy a moral high ground vis-à-vis the murderous subjects, Oppenheimer harnesses uncertainty to make his film indigestible for the viewer. The uncertainty that the viewer experiences when viewing The Act of Killing, to again employ the “uncertainty intensification hypothesis”, makes unpleasant events more unpleasant than they would be without uncertainty.[l] Indeed there are signs that this indigestibility is a source of the film’s strength as a politically committed documentary, and since its release the film has successfully added momentum to demands inside and beyond Indonesia that the bloodbath of the 1960s be recognized and justice delivered for its victims, including an acknowledgement that the killings took place with de facto approval from the U.S. government.[li]

CONCLUSION

Films that create uncertainty for the viewer are not a new turn in documentary filmmaking and there are many examples of “experimental documentary made by graduates of art schools or university-based film or visual anthropology programs… in service of a theoretically savvy poststructuralist or postcolonial critique”,[lii] or in order to “educate viewers about the uncertain links among objectivity, knowledge, and power”.[liii] But the theatrical distribution of Exit Through the Gift Shop and The Act of Killing, as well as the widespread circulation of these two films through video-on-demand services and on DVD, illustrates a mainstreaming of work that brings to the fore issues of this kind, with the added dimension that neither or these two films ultimately offers a clear-cut lesson about the nature of documentary or the representation of reality. Rather, both remain open and unconcluded. These films underscore that the documentary can deliver to viewers a range of pleasures, or as The Act of Killing illustrates, powerful displeasures. Recognizing this invites us to further explore documentary film beyond the canon as it has commonly been presented in histories and scholarship,[liv] and to direct attention to documentaries that disrupt the idea that the dominant area of documentary film production has been serious and high-minded works that are linked to erudite acts of epistephilia. In addition, drawing attention to the varied experiences that viewers can draw from documentaries allows us to reevaluate the operation of what we can loosely term ‘serious documentaries’, those social documentaries that are commonly seen as archetypal to all documentary making, so as to consider the array of pleasures these films actually deliver for audiences, including pleasures that were not intended or expected by their makers.

Notes

[i] Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 205.

[ii] Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 127.

[iii] Richard Streckfuss, “Objectivity in Journalism: A Search and a Reassessment”, Journalism Quarterly (1990) 67:4, 975.

[iv] Jane Roscoe and Craig High, Faking It: Mock-documentary and the Subversion of Factuality (Manchester & New York: University of Manchester Press, 2001), 7.

[v] Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary,12.

[vi] Melena Ryzik, “Riddle? Yes. Enigma? Sure. Documentary?” The New York Times, 14 April 2010. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/movies/14banksy.html (accessed 25 September 2017).

[vii] Jason Felch, “Getting at the truth of ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’”. The Los Angeles Times, 11 February 2011. Available online: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/22/entertainment/la-et-oscar-exit-20110222 (accessed 25 September 2017).

[viii] Roger Ebert, “Exit Through the Gift Shop”. RogerEbert.com, 28 April 2010. Available online: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/exit-through-the-gift-shop-2010 (accessed 25 September 2010).

[ix] Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, 178.

[x] Jane Roscoe and Craig High, Faking It: Mock-documentary and the Subversion of Factuality, 2001.

[xi] Paget, Derek, No Other Way to Tell It: Dramadoc/Docudrama on Television. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1998.

[xii] Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004.

Jon Dovey, Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television. London: Pluto Press, 2000.

Brenton, Sam, and Reuben Cohen, Shooting People: Adventures in Reality TV. London & New York: Verso, 2003.

[xiii] Alexandra Juhasz, and Jesse Lerner, “Introduction: Phony Definitions and Troubling Taxonomies of the Fake Documentary”. In F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006, 1-38.

Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.

[xiv] Ibid 8.

[xv] Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception. New York & London: New York University Press, 2000.

[xvi] Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann (Edit), Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research. Mahwah, New Jersey & London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.

Hadley Cantril, The Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947.

Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Lazarsfeld, Paul F. and Robert K. Merton, “Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Action”. In Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, edited by Bernard Rosenberg & David Manning White. Glencoe: The Press and Falcon’s Wing Press, 1957, 457-473.

[xvii] Jason Felch, “Getting at the truth of ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’”. The Los Angeles Times, 11 February 2011. Available online: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/22/entertainment/la-et-oscar-exit-20110222 (accessed 25 September 2017).

[xviii] Ibid.

[xix] Ibid.

[xx] Alissa Walker, “Here’s Why the Banksy Movie Is a Banksy Prank”. Fast Company, 15 April 2010. Available online: https://www.fastcompany.com/1616365/heres-why-banksy-movie-banksy-prank (accessed 7 October 2017).

[xxi] Ibid.

[xxii] Ibid.

[xxiii] Ibid.

[xxiv] Ibid.

[xxv] Melena Ryzik, “Riddle? Yes. Enigma? Sure. Documentary?” The New York Times, 14 April 2010. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/movies/14banksy.html (accessed 25 September 2017).

[xxvi] Shelley Leopold, “Banksy Revealed?” LA Weekly, 8 April 2010. Available online: http://www.laweekly.com/arts/banksy-revealed-2164479 (accessed 7 October 2017).

[xxvii] Talk of the Nation, “Banksy’s ‘Exit’ Reveals Street Art Secrets … Sort Of”. National Public Radio, 22 February 2011. Radio broadcast transcript. Available online: http://www.npr.org/2011/02/22/133966402/banksys-exit-reveals-street-art-world-sort-of (accessed 7 October 2017).

[xxviii] Jason Felch, “Getting at the truth of ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’”.

[xxix] F. H. Knight, Risk, uncertainty, and profit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921.

[xxx] Timothy D. Wilson, David B. Centerbar, Deborah A. Kermer, and Daniel T. Gilbert, “The Pleasures of Uncertainty: Prolonging Positive Moods in Ways People Do Not Anticipate”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 88:1, 2005, 5.

[xxxi] Ibid, 5.

[xxxii] Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary.

[xxxiii] Timothy D. Wilson, David B. Centerbar, Deborah A. Kermer, and Daniel T. Gilbert, “The Pleasures of Uncertainty: Prolonging Positive Moods in Ways People Do Not Anticipate”, 5.

[xxxiv] Ibid, 5.

[xxxv] Yoav Bar-Anan, Timothy D. Wilson and Daniel T. Gilbert, “The Feeling of Uncertainty Intensifies Affective Reactions”. Emotion 9(1), 2009, 123.

[xxxvi] Timothy D. Wilson, David B. Centerbar, Deborah A. Kermer, and Daniel T. Gilbert, “The Pleasures of Uncertainty: Prolonging Positive Moods in Ways People Do Not Anticipate”, 7.

[xxxvii] Yoav Bar-Anan, Timothy D. Wilson and Daniel T. Gilbert, “The Feeling of Uncertainty Intensifies Affective Reactions”, 123.

[xxxviii] Ibid, 123.

[xxxix] Nick Fraser, “The Act of Killing: don’t give an Oscar to this snuff movie”. The Guardian, 22 February 2014. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/23/act-of-killing-dont-give-oscar-snuff-movie-indonesia (accessed 7 October 2017).

[xl] Ibid.

[xli] Bill Nichols, “Irony, Cruelty, Evil (and a Wink) in The Act of Killing”. Film Quarterly, 67:2, 2013, 25.

[xlii] Ibid, 25.

[xliii] Catherine Russell, “Surrealist Ethnography: Las Hurdes and the Documentary Unconscious”. In F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006, 112.

[xliv] Larry Rohter, “A Movie’s Killers Are All Too Real”. The New York Times, 12 July 2013. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/movies/the-act-of-killing-and-indonesian-death-squads.html (accessed 7 October 2017).

[xlv] Ibid.

[xlvi] Bill Nichols, “Irony, Cruelty, Evil (and a Wink) in The Act of Killing”, 29.

[xlvii] Richard Streckfuss, “Objectivity in Journalism: A Search and a Reassessment”, 978.

[xlviii] Ibid, 975.

[xlix] Bill Nichols, “Irony, Cruelty, Evil (and a Wink) in The Act of Killing”, 28.

[l] Yoav Bar-Anan, Timothy D. Wilson and Daniel T. Gilbert, “The Feeling of Uncertainty Intensifies Affective Reactions”, 123.

[li] Hannah Beech, “U.S. Stood by as Indonesia Killed a Half-Million People, Papers Show”. The New York Times, 18 October 2017. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/world/asia/indonesia-cables-communist-massacres.html (accessed 18 October 2017).

[lii] Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, “Introduction: Phony Definitions and Troubling Taxonomies of the Fake Documentary”, 21.

[liii] Ibid, 12.

[liv] Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane. A New History of Documentary Film. New York & London: Continuum, 2005.

Notes on Contributor:

Lyell Davies teaches cinema and media studies at The City University of New York. His research explores documentary cinema and communication rights activism, and his documentaries have aired on US public television and screened at film festivals around the world.

Bibliography

Andrejevic, Mark. Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004.

Bar-Anan, Yoav, Timothy D. Wilson and Daniel T. Gilbert. “The Feeling of Uncertainty Intensifies Affective Reactions”. Emotion 9(1), 2009, 123-127.

Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Beech, Hannah. “U.S. Stood by as Indonesia Killed a Half-Million People, Papers Show”. The New York Times, 18 October 2017. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/world/asia/indonesia-cables-communist-massacres.html (accessed 18 October 2017).

Brenton, Sam, and Reuben Cohen. Shooting People: Adventures in Reality TV. London & New York: Verso, 2003.

Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Bryant, Jennings, and Dolf Zillmann (Edit). Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research. Mahwah, New Jersey & London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.

Cantril, Hadley. The Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947.

Dayan, Daniel and Elihu Katz. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Dovey, Jon. Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television. London: Pluto Press, 2000.

Ebert, Roger. “Exit Through the Gift Shop”. RogerEbert.com, 28 April 2010. Available online: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/exit-through-the-gift-shop-2010 (accessed 25 September 2010).

Ellis, Jack C. and Betsy A. McLane. A New History of Documentary Film. New York & London: Continuum, 2005.

Felch, Jason. “Getting at the truth of ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’”. The Los Angeles Times, 11 February 2011. Available online: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/22/entertainment/la-et-oscar-exit-20110222 (accessed 25 September 2017).

Fraser, Nick. “The Act of Killing: don’t give an Oscar to this snuff movie”. The Guardian, 22 February 2014. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/23/act-of-killing-dont-give-oscar-snuff-movie-indonesia (accessed 7 October 2017).

Juhasz, Alexandra, and Jesse Lerner. “Introduction: Phony Definitions and Troubling Taxonomies of the Fake Documentary”. In F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006, 1-38.

Knight, F. H., Risk, uncertainty, and profit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921.

Lazarsfeld, Paul F. and Robert K. Merton. “Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Action”. In Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, edited by Bernard Rosenberg & David Manning White. Glencoe: The Press and Falcon’s Wing Press, 1957, 457-473.

Leopold, Shelley. “Banksy Revealed?” LA Weekly, 8 April 2010. Available online: http://www.laweekly.com/arts/banksy-revealed-2164479 (accessed 7 October 2017).

Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991.

Nichols, Bill. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Nichols, Bill. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Nichols, Bill. “Irony, Cruelty, Evil (and a Wink) in The Act of Killing”. Film Quarterly, 67:2, 2013, 25-29.

Paget, Derek. No Other Way to Tell It: Dramadoc/Docudrama on Television. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1998.

Rohter, Larry. “A Movie’s Killers Are All Too Real”. The New York Times, 12 July 2013. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/movies/the-act-of-killing-and-indonesian-death-squads.html (accessed 7 October 2017).

Roscoe, Jane, & Craig Hight. Faking It: Mock-documentary and the Subversion of Factuality. Manchester & New York: University of Manchester Press, 2001.

Russell, Catherine. “Surrealist Ethnography: Las Hurdes and the Documentary Unconscious”. In F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006, 99-115.

Ryzik, Melena. “Riddle? Yes. Enigma? Sure. Documentary?” The New York Times, 14 April 2010. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/movies/14banksy.html (accessed 25 September 2017).

Staiger, Janet. Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception. New York & London: New York University Press, 2000.

Streckfuss, Richard. “Objectivity in Journalism: A Search and a Reassessment”. Journalism Quarterly. 67:4, 1990, 973-983.

Talk of the Nation. “Banksy’s ‘Exit’ Reveals Street Art Secrets … Sort Of”. National Public Radio, 22 February 2011. Radio broadcast transcript. Available online: http://www.npr.org/2011/02/22/133966402/banksys-exit-reveals-street-art-world-sort-of (accessed 7 October 2017).

Walker, Alissa. “Here’s Why the Banksy Movie Is a Banksy Prank”. Fast Company, 15 April 2010. Available online: https://www.fastcompany.com/1616365/heres-why-banksy-movie-banksy-prank (accessed 7 October 2017).

Wilson, Timothy D., David B. Centerbar, Deborah A. Kermer, and Daniel T. Gilbert. “The Pleasures of Uncertainty: Prolonging Positive Moods in Ways People Do Not Anticipate”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 88:1, 2005, 5–21

Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: British Film Institute, 1995.

 

There’s no money for documentaries.

– Emile de Antonio[i]

Where any view of Money exists Art cannot be carried on, but War only.

-William Blake (as quoted by P. Adams Sitney)[ii]

On 21 October 2017, U.S. President Donald J. Trump proclaimed with his all-too-characteristic boldness and bluster that he would order the release of all classified files related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A 1992 law, however, already had stipulated that these files were to be released by no later than 26 October 2017, and in the five days leading up to 26 October, Trump’s all-too-uncharacteristic reserve and caution seemed to intervene and thousands of documents were suppressed from release for the sake of further review[iii]. That 1992 law, the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, was passed after the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK (1991) with the intent of making public nearly all of the documents related to the assassination within 25 years in order to quell the curiosity and undercut the claims of conspiracy theorists[iv]. The continued suppression of thousands of documents after all this time – even with the release now of many thousands more – surely renews further concerns of doubt and conspiracy. Indeed, the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination just a few years back led to a boom in publications, their titles alone revealing the perpetuation of conspiracy theories (e.g., Joseph McBride’s Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and the Officer J.D. Tippit or Philip Shenon’s A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination – emphases mine).

The steady churn of commercial work related to the Kennedy assassination suggests the existence of an established industry in which there is still as much money to be made as there are angles and avenues of doubt and conspiracy to explore. Such was not the case back in the mid-1960s when documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio was trying to secure financing to make Rush to Judgment, his collaboration with Mark Lane, the attorney who was hired by Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother Marguerite to represent her son before the Warren Commission. In 1966, Lane published Rush to Judgment, a lengthy and systematic critique of the 26-volume Warren Commission report, and de Antonio’s film of the same title was to serve as a companion film to Lane’s book. Lane famously had great difficulty getting Rush to Judgment published, even though it would end up on the New York Times bestseller list for over seven months – entering the list at #9 in September 1966 and then peaking at #1 from late November through the beginning of January 1967[v]. The fundraising and production of the film version – significantly more costly than publishing the book and attempted before they could ride on the coattails of the book’s success – was impeded by its controversial subject matter, which de Antonio described as an “attack on the Establishment and government . . . a very hot potato”[vi]. As de Antonio himself conceded, “for this film, it was almost impossible to raise money”[vii].

Further complicating de Antonio’s fundraising effort was his innovative approach to documentary filmmaking. By virtue of the straightforward polemics of his films – the manner in which he lays bare his personal/political opinions via the practice of compilation – de Antonio has become canonized within studies of the documentary tradition. Bill Nichols, for example, frequently labels de Antonio and his films as “innovative” and “pioneering”[viii]. Thomas Waugh identifies de Antonio as “the pioneer and the foremost practitioner of the new documentary sensibility which has at long last reached the fore”[ix]. This ‘new documentary sensibility’ of a collage-based aesthetic in the service of an overtly subjective stance has become one of the mainstream modes of contemporary documentary, albeit in modified form. Critical and commercial successes such as Our Daily Bread (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2005), An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006), Food, Inc. (Robert Kenner, 2008), and 13^th (Ava DuVernay, 2016) – even hit pieces such as Hillary: The Movie (Alan Peterson, 2008) – owe much to de Antonio’s pioneering stylistic and thematic vigor.

De Antonio’s polemics and aesthetics prevented him from seeking funding through television, a key source of financing for his contemporaries. De Antonio’s most notable American peers in the sixties were affiliated with Robert Drew and were proponents of what they called ‘cinema verité’ (‘cinema truth’), a documentary movement most scholars now label as ‘direct cinema’, related to but distinct from the French documentary movement ‘cinéma vérité’[x]. Capitalizing on technological developments such as lightweight cameras and synchronous sound recording, Drew Associates – Robert Drew and his team of now recognized luminaries such as Richard Leacock, the Maysles brothers and D.A. Pennebaker – argued that their decision to limit voiceover narration and minimize filmmaker intervention led to a more realistic and more objective account of the events being filmed[xi]. This fly-on-the-wall approach proved compatible with ABC Television’s commitment to public affairs programming[xii]. Because Drew Associates claimed to present both sides of a contentious issue objectively and without commentary, their films were seen as journalism and Robert Drew was hired as a producer on ABC’s Close-Up series[xiii]. (The equating of these documentaries with journalism actually led to tension and discord in the news division at ABC[xiv].) Although Drew Associates’ contract with ABC led to only four films in the early sixties, the direct cinema/cinema verité style proved television friendly. Frederick Wiseman, for example, was able to secure contracts for his films with New York’s PBS station WNET through the early eighties[xv].

Although de Antonio’s films were similar to direct cinema in their limiting of voiceover narration and their seeming minimization of the presence of the filmmaker, they were far from presenting anything close to a façade of objectivity. De Antonio’s genius was the arrangement of found footage in the service of an oft-scathing argument. With his first film Point of Order (1964), he exposed Senator Joseph McCarthy’s indecency during the Army-McCarthy hearings[xvi]. With Rush to Judgment, his second film, de Antonio aimed to take on the Warren Commission report. American television networks would balk at such ambitions, as program sponsors would be wary of underwriting overtly controversial material. De Antonio’s polemical virtuosic style and his status as a still fairly un-established filmmaker forced him to become creative in seeking funding. Singling out Rush to Judgment, Robert C. Ladendorf writes, “The difficulty of raising funds for an independent film is best illustrated by Rush to Judgment, involving the most complicated and unique financial arrangement of de Antonio’s films”[xvii]. Unfortunately, Ladendorf does not offer a comprehensive account of the funding for any of de Antonio’s films, so this essay focuses on such details for the financing of Rush to Judgment. The widely held notion that de Antonio financed his films fairly easily through the generosity of his wealthy friends can be tested here. Moreover, the struggles he faced allow for generalizations to be made concerning the difficulties faced by other independent documentary filmmakers working both then and now. Of further interest is the fact that the financing system de Antonio employed for Rush to Judgment was outlined in a 1961 article in Film Culture that gave tips to filmmakers on how to finance their films. Not only was de Antonio a founding member of the group that published this guide, but he also helped contribute in the writing of this article. This financing system, adapted from a strategy for financing theatrical productions, looks quite similar to what we all now recognize as a crowdfunding – crowdfunding in the age before social media, if you will. De Antonio, therefore, can be seen as not only an innovator in documentary film style, but also as a practitioner of an innovation in film financing, one that he became forced to depend upon. The remainder of this essay describes how de Antonio would leverage his personality to secure funding with respect to a particular financing strategy – the syndication approach – and examines how the financing particulars for Rush to Judgment offer an example of this proposed strategy in action.

Salesmanship at the Intersection of Personality and Politics

Emile de Antonio led a fast-paced, on-the-edge, celebrity-filled lifestyle and made masterfully polemical films ranging from the humorous to the scathing. It is not surprising, therefore, that the scholarship on de Antonio has approached him and his work by way of his personality and politics. The single lengthiest account of de Antonio, Randolph Lewis’s Emile de Antonio: Radical Filmmaker in Cold War America, combines both approaches by synthesizing de Antonio’s personal anecdotes and political opinions in a career biography spanning from Point of Order in the early sixties to Mr. Hoover and I in the late eighties. Interestingly, de Antonio himself has managed to direct the focus of much of the writing about him and his work, as his own words have consistently served as the foundation for the scholarship concerning him. Most of the literature on de Antonio is either comprised of or based upon interviews he did during the three decades of his documentary filmmaking career. In the only other large-scale volume on de Antonio, Douglas Kellner and Dan Streible’s essential Emile de Antonio: A Reader, about half the book is devoted to either interviews with de Antonio or excerpts written by de Antonio himself. Indeed, de Antonio proves an entertaining and provoking writer and interviewee. It is particularly fascinating, moreover, to examine how, within many interviews, de Antonio manages to direct and redirect the conversation again and again toward two topics: his sensational personal life and his leftist politics. Even if his interviewer does not prompt him to discuss such issues directly, he will invariably raise them anyway and festively ramble about them at length. In the following excerpt from a 1978 interview conducted by Alan Rosenthal, consider how de Antonio’s responses repeatedly spin toward the personally and politically salacious:

How did you get into documentary? What was the starting point for you?

I began in 1961 with a film called Point of Order. My life up until that point had been very much living by my wits. Unlike most filmmakers I was an intellectual. I went to Harvard and did graduate work at Columbia. At college I joined the Young Communist League, and the John Reed Society. In fact, for someone who is not much of a joiner, I joined everything political I could. Later I taught philosophy [at the College of William and Mary] but thought that was a mug’s game. So I became a one-day-a-year business person. I made a lot of money one day a year. I was a Marxist among capitalists but became depoliticized by my army experiences in World War II. Afterwards I got into alcohol and women. I was married five times and lived with countless other ones. I read a lot and led a generally chaotic bohemian life. In 1959 I became a communist again – unaffiliated – and also got interested in film, which I had always disliked. I had admired the Marx brothers, W. C. Fields and the early Soviets, but I did not go to the movies as Americans did. I mean a year would go by without [my] seeing a picture.

Why did you suddenly become political again in 1959?

I think I sniffed in the air that politics might work again. I knew Kennedy and I was more uncomfortable with his election than I was with Eisenhower’s or Truman’s. I started meeting young radicals who were political for the first time. During the fifties I had as friends what you might call the homosexual avant-garde. My best friends were John Cage, Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns, who used to come to my house in the country, and get drunk, and talk.[xviii]

In his first response, de Antonio answers a rather general question about his initial interests in documentary filmmaking with an autobiographical overview of both his personal and political entanglements. The second question, specifically about de Antonio’s politics, draws directly from de Antonio’s first response. De Antonio responds by associating his politics with his friends, and he proceeds to list some celebrity artists who just happen to be among his closest acquaintances. With such constant name-dropping, and with open declarations such as “Every film I’ve made is a political film; it was intentionally a political film”[xix] and “The documentary film artist lives in opposition. He or she is nurtured best on revolutionary soil”[xx], de Antonio has, either consciously or unconsciously, single-handedly established the foundation on which all scholarship about him is built.

Indeed, de Antonio’s personality and politics loom large. As a pioneer of documentary form and voice, de Antonio must have faced some difficulties, not only as a result of making unconventional films (such as being under government surveillance, which would prove to be the case with de Antonio), but also just in the very attempt of making these unconventional films. A proposal for such an unconventional film probably would have difficulty guaranteeing an exhibition venue, which, in turn, would make the securing of financing more difficult. Yet de Antonio would be the first to admit that he was well connected. Yes, de Antonio made radical films, the subject matter of which probably would make raising money difficult, but de Antonio knew scores of famous and rich people. The assumed solution, therefore, seems easy: de Antonio hit up his friends to finance his films. As de Antonio himself asserts, “All my films are financed by, for lack of a better term, ‘rich liberals’; usually, they are people who have been friends of mine for a long time”[xxi]. But was fundraising really just that easy? For the most part, it looks as though de Antonio did raise money from his friends. As he told one interviewer, “I have always been good at raising money. I have raised over one million dollars to make leftwing films. I don’t come from a poor background and I have always known people with money”[xxii]. Even more succinct, yet ambiguous, is his claim that “It was always easy. I never had any trouble raising money”[xxiii]. For the most part, scholars seem to take de Antonio at his word. As the issue of financing does not seem to be a problem, it does not get discussed at any great length. Usually, any mention of financing is anecdotal and simply demonstrates de Antonio’s precious connections. Consider, for example, how the financing for Point of Order (1963) is succinctly and thrillingly narrated by Randolph Lewis: “de Antonio paid a visit to a friend named Elliot Pratt, a liberal heir to the Standard Oil fortune. Over hamburgers and drinks at a Manhattan diner that ended with the millionaire leaving a ten-cent tip (an irony that stuck in the filmmaker’s memory), de Antonio persuaded Pratt to contribute $100,000”[xxiv].

Robert C. Ladendorf, however, connects de Antonio’s financing difficulties to his politics: “As a result of his independent filmmaking status and radical reputation, de Antonio had to spend much of his creative time collecting money to begin as well as to finish his documentaries. He did not have the Hollywood luxury of concentrating fully on the creative process of filmmaking. He had to talk financing first”[xxv]. Randolph Lewis’s chapter on Rush to Judgment suggests financing troubles and briefly outlines some figures, but concentrates more on de Antonio’s political and personal life during the making of this film: how de Antonio heard of Kennedy’s murder from Andy Warhol while at Jasper Johns’s apartment, how Paul McCartney was going to write the score for the film because he wanted to be more than just a Beatle, how de Antonio and his crew were harassed by local police as they filmed in Dallas, how the film dismantles the Warren Commission’s Report. As we shall see, de Antonio capitalized on his personality and his connections in order to promote his politics and artistry. Starting with Rush to Judgment, de Antonio would rely upon multiple friends – along with the friends and associates of these friends (a crowdfunding model?) – in order to fund his work.

The New American Cinema Group and the Syndication Approach to Film Financing

De Antonio’s introduction into the world of independent filmmaking occurred by way of distribution. He worked as the distributor for the landmark Beat film Pull My Daisy (1959), directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, based on an un-produced play by Jack Kerouac and starring painters and poets such as Larry Rivers and Allen Ginsberg. It was through his participation in Pull My Daisy that de Antonio became involved with the New American Cinema Group. De Antonio, along with 22 others involved with independent filmmaking (such as Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, and Peter Bogdanovich), was invited by Jonas Mekas and Lewis Allen to the Group’s inaugural meeting on 28 September 1960. On that day, De Antonio was elected to a temporary executive board, also consisting of Shirley Clarke, Edward Bland, Jonas Mekas and Lewis Allen. (Note how many luminaries of American independent cinema have been brought together here!) Randolph Lewis identifies de Antonio’s involvement with the New American Cinema Group as “his first tentative step toward film”[xxvi], but Lewis suggests that the Group did not influence de Antonio. He writes that de Antonio soon separated from the Group over the issue of profit – because de Antonio apparently felt that the Group was not as interested in generating a profit from its films as he was[xxvii]. While it appears that de Antonio’s involvement with the Group was quite brief, I believe that this period was very instructive, perhaps even formative. In examining two articles published by the New American Cinema Group, I think that it is here where de Antonio learned the method for independent film financing he would later adopt.

“The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group,” proclaimed on 30 September 1960, lists nine tenets by which the Group sought to change the practices of film production, distribution, and exhibition in the United States. The Group makes explicit – and perhaps this is what de Antonio would later find so problematic – that “We are not joining together to make money. We are joining together to make films. We are joining together to build the New American Cinema”[xxviii]. Three of the Group’s tenets appear pertinent to de Antonio and film financing. The first tenet declares, “We therefore reject the interference of producers, distributors and investors until our work is ready to be projected on the screen”[xxix]. The third tenet states, “We are seeking new forms of financing, working towards a reorganization of film investing methods, setting up the basis for a free film industry”[xxx]. These two tenets, calling for interference-free investors and a new method of film investing, will be elaborated below. The sixth tenet is also of interest, as it specifically applies to de Antonio: “We plan to establish our own cooperative distribution center. This task has been entrusted to Emile de Antonio, our charter member”[xxxi].

Moreover, de Antonio himself helped to contribute to an article titled “The Methods and Problems of Film Financing”, released by the New American Cinema Group and appearing in the same issue. The article was divided into four sections, each with its own contributor. De Antonio’s section, the fourth, titled “A Real Mediocre Conspiracy”, is more of a diatribe against Hollywood (“the arid allegory of The Misfits, the phony charm of Around the World in Eighty Days, the fake sociology of The Apartment”) than an actual discussion of methods or problems related to film financing[xxxii]. The other three sections, however, do explore three different strategies for film financing. Don Gillin, a film distributor and producer, explains “Film Financing through a Distribution Firm”, while Aldolfas Mekas describes “Financing through Laboratories”. But it is the section titled “The Syndication Approach to Film Financing”, prepared by Lewis Allen and Jack M. Perlman, that appears most relevant to de Antonio, for in the syndication approach we find de Antonio’s future strategy for film financing.

The following is the “General Statement” of the syndication approach:

In this approach the production budget is raised by selling interest in the film to one or more individual investors who may or may not be persons friendly to either the producer or to members of the cast, or to the property, etc. The disadvantages of this approach are: (1) many individual investors are highly sophisticated when it comes to evaluating the situation; (2) the syndication may have to be filed with the SEC. The advantages of this approach are (1) the producer is completely free from artistic control on the part of the money interests; (2) the producer need not put up a completion bond and in fact does not even legally obligate himself to complete the film; and (3) there may be no other way to finance the film.[xxxiii]

The third advantage alone seems reason enough to follow the syndication approach, but one important appeal is the artistic autonomy of a filmmaker from investors – which is also the first tenet of the Group’s First Statement. It should be noted that the two authors of this approach had a background in theater: Lewis Allen was a theater producer; Jack Perlman, a theatrical attorney. They were merely applying a conventional model for Broadway financing to independent film financing.

What seems most important in Allen and Perlman’s approach is that the independent filmmaker/director acts as producer in order to be in charge of his own financing. Allen and Perlman, however, suggest that the filmmaker distance himself financially from both his film and his investors and form a corporation, described as follows:

A corporation is a separate legal entity which is set up and becomes the owner of the film. The corporation, once set up, issues stock to the producer and to the investors. The proportions in which the stock is issued reflects the financial deal worked out between the producer and the investors. The great advantage of a corporation is that it acts as a shield protecting both the producer and the investors from any personal liability to the outside world in connection with obligations incurred in the making or distribution of the film. The disadvantage of a corporation is that whatever profits are made on the film will be taxed twice – first as income to the corporation and secondly as dividends to the stockholders.[xxxiv]

Allen and Perlman suggest that the corporation’s profits be split, “Similar syndications on Broadway are traditionally 50% to the producer, 50% to the investors”[xxxv].

Although this model may seem fairly self-evident in retrospect, the fact that the New American Cinema Group felt that it needed to be explained in print perhaps indicates that it might have not been that obvious at the time. In any case, as we will see, de Antonio clearly followed the syndication approach. As de Antonio was involved with this article, he either learned of or at least refined his understanding of this approach from Allen and Perlman before he began making films several months later.

The financing of Rush to Judgment

On 22 November 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated, Officer J. D. Tippit was killed, and Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested. Two days later, Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby. One week after the assassination, on 29 November, President Johnson established the Warren Commission with the expressed purpose “to evaluate all the facts and circumstances that surround such assassination, including the subsequent violent death of the man charged with the assassination, and to report to me its findings and conclusions”[xxxvi]. By December, Mark Lane published his first article on the evidence against Oswald and was retained by Marguerite Oswald to represent her son before the Warren Commission. In February of 1964, de Antonio met with Lane for the first time and proposed the basic film concept for Rush to Judgment. De Antonio and Lane agreed to three conditions before they would begin on the film: “1) the Warren Report had to be published; 2) Lane’s book had to be finished; and 3) the funds had to be raised”[xxxvii]. On 27 September 1964, the 888-page Warren Report was submitted to the White House. The 26 volumes of Testimony and Exhibits were published on 23 November 1964, one year and one day after Kennedy’s assassination. In December of 1965, de Antonio began acquiring stock footage. In March and April of 1966, Lane, de Antonio, and the rest of the film crew traveled to Dallas to shoot portions of his film. In August, Lane’s book Rush to Judgment was published and became a #1 non-fiction bestseller. In November, de Antonio officially finished his film, and it was released in 1967.

From the above chronology, we see that the securing of financing was, not surprisingly, an explicit precondition to the production of Rush to Judgment. We also see that more than a year passed between the publication of the Warren Report (November 1964) and the beginning of film production (December 1965). During this year, de Antonio worked to raise money for Rush to Judgment while pursuing other projects on the side. Although the extant financial records are, as described by Ladendorf, “partial and scattered”[xxxviii], I believe that I have been able to reconstruct much of the financing particulars for this film.

Following the syndicated approach to film financing, de Antonio established a separate production company for each film he made. With Rush to Judgment, de Antonio actually established two companies, one in England and one in the United States. As for de Antonio’s lucrative connections, it is difficult to surmise why exactly they were not forthcoming on this particular project (unless this film was, as de Antonio suggested, too hot a potato). But it should be noted that Rush to Judgment comes early in de Antonio’s career. Even with the all-around praise and recognition he earned with Point of Order, his reputation might not have been strong enough to help obtain investors, and the ease for which he received funding for Point of Order might have been a fluke. Perhaps it was with – and therefore after – Rush to Judgment that de Antonio began receiving the notice and sponsorship of the celebrities of whom he could later boast more confidently. For example, Paul Newman, Robert Ryan, Leonard Bernstein, and three Rockefeller heiresses all helped finance de Antonio’s next film In the Year of the Pig. Also note that de Antonio was in England during part of this hiatus, so he might have not been in regular contact with his usual circuit of wealthy friends. Furthermore, de Antonio was somewhat preoccupied with another project.

During the hiatus, Mark Lane persuaded de Antonio to visit him in England, where de Antonio met the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Lane was acquainted with Ralph Schoenman, the Secretary of the Lord Bertrand Russell World Peace Foundation, and de Antonio met both Russell and Schoenman through Lane. Also through Lane, de Antonio met Richard Stark,[xxxix] whom Randolph Lewis identifies as “an heir to the Buster Brown shoe fortune”[xl]. Lane had met Stark through either Schoenman or his British contacts. De Antonio proposed to Russell to make a documentary, more specifically, a living obituary about his life and accomplishments. Russell seemed fond of such novelty and agreed, even offering Lane and de Antonio seats on the Board of Directors of his Peace Foundation. Though this project was never fully realized – Lewis describes the process in considerable detail in his book – the four investors for the Bertrand Russell film were Lane, de Antonio, Stark, and Schoenman, through the Peace Foundation.

These four investors, along with an Englishman named Mark Peploe, created Current Events Documentary Films Limited, which was originally to produce the Bertrand Russell living obituary project. The Managing Directors of the company were Richard Stark and Mark Peploe; the Board of Directors were de Antonio, Lane, and Stark[xli]. When the living obituary project fell through, this company served to produce Rush to Judgment. Voting stock was issued and distributed as follows: 40% to de Antonio, 40% to Lane, 10% to Schoenman and 10% to Stark.[xlii] A project proposal issued sometime in 1965 summarized the initial production strategy for Rush to Judgment:

Nature of Film

A feature length film which will consist of stock footage, existing stills, reconstructions and re-enactments as well as live footage to be shot in Dallas, Washington and New York. The live footage will consist mainly of interviews with witnesses to the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas, as well as interviews with members and staff of the Warren Commission. Current Events Documentary Films Limited has already in its possession tapes and stills never before published in any media. These are of a highly controversial and sensational nature. An English film crew will be sent to the United States in mid-December to film the interviews. Projected completion date for the picture is March 1966. The nature of the film will be didactic and argumentative in that it will compare the Warren Commission’s own evidence contained in its published twenty-six volumes of testimony and exhibits with the Warren Commission’s conclusions contained in the one-volume Warren Commission Report. The film will offer no conclusions and will indulge in no speculation. It will, however, fill the judicial void left by the murder of Oswald and the subsequent secret proceedings of the Warren Commission. The film will constitute the only trial afforded to Lee Harvey Oswald with each viewer serving as a juror.[xliii]

This proposal served as printed material for prospective investors. It stipulated the division of profits as follows: “50% to Investors; 50% to Production/Creative staff including Producer, Director, Writer”[xliv]. It is unclear exactly how much money the company had at this time, and the value of each percentage of voting stock is also unclear. Whatever the company’s financial situation, the proposal also listed the following budget to be distributed to potential investors, included below as Figure 1. It is also unclear which of these investors first signed on with Current Events Documentary Films Limited. De Antonio apparently did not get along with Schoenman, and Stark was slow in bringing in the money that he promised. Stark’s investment, in fact, largely came from his father[xlv]. De Antonio acquired stock footage for the film from VisNews in England and returned to the United States. Soon after, Judgement [sic] Films Corporation was founded in New York, with de Antonio as President and Secretary and Lane as Vice President and Treasurer[xlvi]. As for the funding situation, de Antonio explained, “I had to go to England to raise the money . . . It was impossible to raise the money in the United States, because this subject really touched the psychic uneasiness of America about as deeply as anything we’ve had to face, including the war”[xlvii]. All of the major investors for Rush to Judgment were brought in by Lane, not de Antonio (associates of his associate), and these investors, mostly British, ultimately invested in Judgement Films Corporation – a few, no doubt, by having their investment transferred over from Current Events Documentary Films Limited. De Antonio likely chose to form this second company so that it would be easier to make the film in the United States. He also had a tendency to create an entirely separate company for each of his film projects, so not carrying over the same company for the aborted film project might have offered some financial or legal safeguards.

Proposed Budget

1	Acquisition of stock footage and still material (this includes royalty payments, duplicate negatives and striking of positive prints)	$15,500
2	Production in Dallas, New York, Washington, etc. (this includes transportation, accommodations, etc. for film crew), the purchasing and processing of film, rental of equipment for a minimal crew of Director, Cameraman, Sound, plus Assistant	$9,000
3	Editing expenses (Editing Room and equipment plus Editor and Assistant Editor)	$4,000
4	Mix, opticals, animation stand work, sound transfer, and negative work	$3,000
5	Administrative expenses	$2,500
6	Acquisition of exclusive interview material in Dallas	$6,000
7	Transport and duty on film	$2,000
8	Salaries for Director, Producer, Writer are now being negotiated with the Corporation. It is understood that in no case will any salary exceed an amount of $300 per week. Salaries will terminate upon delivery of an answer print.	$14,000
Total		$56,000

Figure 1: Proposed budget (1965) for Rush to Judgment.[xlviii]

 

The list of investors in Judgement Films Corporation, with their respective share holdings, is included below in Figure 2. These were all non-voting shares, with each share worth $600. These investors did not, therefore, have influence in any creative aspects of the film’s production. They were only entitled to a return on their investment, provided that the film indeed made money. Was the film to generate actual profit, then the proportioning of the shares allowed for respective profit distribution back to the investors, with each share being worth slightly less than one percent – 0.88% – of the company’s investment stock. Based on Figure 2, the total amount raised was $68,300. Lewis reports that the film was ultimately budgeted at $75,000[xlix]. In any case, give or take a few thousand, the budget seems to be around $70,000. Note that this list below is reproduced from an affidavit de Antonio would offer a few years later during a lawsuit filed by Richard Stark against Mark Lane, which seems to contradict anecdotal evidence of other investors[l].

Many of these investors were brought in by Lane, as de Antonio freely admitted, “the money came from extraordinary sources . . . friends of Mark’s”[li]. The biggest investor, Oscar Lewenstein, worked as an associate producer on Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, 1963), and soon would go on to produce several other prestige and/or art films, such as the Jeanne Moreau vehicles Mademoiselle (Tony Richardson, 1966) and La Mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black, François Truffaut, 1967). Lane and de Antonio met Lewenstein through the Peace Foundation, and they must have made a considerable impression, as Lewenstein’s fifty-share investment accounts for almost half of the film’s budgeted investment (50 shares x $600 a share = $30,000). Ladendorf claimed that Lewenstein’s investment actually was done through Woodfall Films, an English company comprised of Oscar Lewenstein, John Osborne, and Tony Richardson. Ladendorf argues that “It is unclear why the firm invested in the film”[lii], but it does not seem clear that Lewenstein’s company ever actually made such an investment at all.

 

List of Investors in the Judgement Films Corporation

Name and Address	Number of Shares
Lionel Rogosin 144 Bleecher Street New York, New York	8 1/3
Oscar Lewenstein 11A Curzon Street London, W1, England	50
Mrs. Hiram R. Mallinson 169 E. 69th Street New York, New York	1
Hercules Bellville 77 Cadogan Gardens London, SW3, England	2 1/3
Madelyn Goddard 12 Rogers Avenue Bellport, L.I., New York	2
Warren Tate 22 Hans Road London, SW3, England	1/2
Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation 344 Shaver’s Place, Haymarket London, SW1, England	26 2/3
Norman Eisner, c/o Lincoln Press 35 9th Avenue New York, New York	1
Richard Stark, c/o Stark 380 Arlington Way Menlo Park, California	22

Figure 2: Final list of investors for Rush to Judgment.[liii]

 

Ladendorf’s assertion likely comes from de Antonio’s claim that he got money “from people like Tony Richardson and Oscar Lewenstein of Woodfall Films”[liv]. In actuality, it seems that Lewenstein made his investment personally, not corporately, as there is no Woodfall Films letterhead on any of his correspondence, and there does not seem to be evidence of corporate correspondence with either Osborne or Richardson. Yet in an interview with Film Comment, de Antonio mentioned receiving private investments from Lewenstein, Osborne, and Richardson[lv]. Concerning Richardson’s motivation for this contribution to help finance the film, Ladendorf quotes de Antonio’s assertion that Richardson, although disagreeing with de Antonio’s position on Oswald, thought that his idea was “very commercial”[lvi]. It is likely that the funds had already been promised for the Russell project and were simply transferred to Rush to Judgment without objection. In any case, the most probable assumption is that the investor(s) initially invested out of friendship – they being friends of new friends.

As for the other investors in the film, Douglas Kellner and Dan Streible have identified Madelyn – a.k.a. Madeleine – Goddard as a “socialite”, presumably an acquaintance of Lane[lvii]. From de Antonio’s letters, Hiram Mallinson appears to be his own personal acquaintance. Interestingly, her investment entitled her to only “one half of one percent of the proceeds”, which is different from the proposal for Current Events Documentary Films Limited[lviii]. It is unclear whether Mallinson was aware of her reduced profit entitlement by one half of one percent – whether she knowingly contributed money with a lesser return rate out of friendship and generosity, or whether de Antonio managed a little scheming (a financing strategy surely not unique to de Antonio). Oscar Lewenstein, on the other hand, was returned the appropriate percentage of 50% of the profits. Lionel Rogosin – de Antonio’s friend, New American Cinema Group associate, and filmmaker of such socially conscious films as Come Back, Africa (1956) and On the Bowery (1957) – refused to invest in the company’s stock[lix]. Opting out of the company’s profit guarantee, he instead issued a five-thousand-dollar loan, which was represented in the company’s finance chart in terms of share holdings in the company (8.33 shares x $600 a share = $4,998)[lx].

As for the film’s reception and profitability, Rush to Judgment was not a commercial success in the United States. In his review in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther compared the film favorably to Lane’s book: “this dramatic materialization of witnesses before the eye and ear has much more immediacy and impact than the printed word in covering the thesis of Mr. Lane”[lxi]. But Crowther also noted that “The testimony, however vivid and forcefully presented, is, at best, rather sketchy and speculative”, and he even complained that “Two or three interviews conducted by Mr. Lane look egregiously staged by him and Emile de Antonio”[lxii]. De Antonio himself later claimed, “with Rush to Judgment, people threatened to cut the seats of the theater with knives, so the theater just dropped the picture”[lxiii]. However, the film did manage to make a small profit. Impact Films, Inc. paid Judgement Films $50,000 to distribute the film in the United States, where it was screened primary on college campuses[lxiv]. De Antonio was sometimes paid to accompany his film for Q&A sessions afterward; for example, Dartmouth College arranged to pay $700 for both screening rights and de Antonio’s participation on the evening of 16 January 1967, an arrangement similar to what had been done the previous year for Point of Order[lxv]. While Rush to Judgment was not carried by any American television networks, it was purchased by European stations. De Antonio later recollected, “I got most of my money for that film in England and from British television”[lxvi], and, in fact, the BBC paid Judgement Films $30,000 for broadcast rights[lxvii]. From these two sales alone, we see that the film made back cost – and this is before the inclusion of foreign distribution sales of a few hundred dollars each for France, West Germany, Denmark and Sweden, where de Antonio was apparently well received. A full estimate of the profit earned by the film is difficult to ascertain, as there appears to be a comparatively paltry number of documents relating to the film’s exhibition history. I suspect that this sketchy document trail is strategic in consideration of the contentious – even litigious – falling out experienced by nearly all principal parties involved in the film soon after it was completed.

The above details, even if incomplete, do give a sense of not only how the syndication approach is applied in actual practice, but also how a filmmaker can modify the terms of investment in order to appease particular financers – or even withhold money to increase self-profit. Moreover, de Antonio’s Rush to Judgment demonstrates some of the possible permutations of the syndication approach model. By offering and allowing for varying levels or degrees of return on investment and in relying on the support and connections of wealthy friends and associates, de Antonio seems to anticipate and take advantage of the same processes that are fairly standard in crowdfunding campaigns we see today. De Antonio had the flexibility to reward different levels of contribution, much like the step-return system found on sites such as Kickstarter (e.g., “pledge $50 or more and you get X, but pledge $100 or more and you get X + Y”). The syndication approach allowed for widely varying levels of investment, with financial risk dispersed among a larger number of investors. Just as in crowdfunding campaigns today, these investors all originated from de Antonio’s social network – limited, as it were, to one, two, or three degrees removed from his own personal contacts. Electronic social media has allowed for far greater degrees of remove and even completely removed or anonymous investments, but these differences seem to be more a matter of degree than kind. The example of Rush to Judgment suggests that even with a model – or a standardized procedure in general – independent filmmaking is still a catch-as-catch-can process in which personal connections and sheer luck are necessary. Plus there is a particular – and socially theoretically fanciful – irony: filmmakers like de Antonio who seek to critique the establishment are often dependent upon those who constitute and/or have benefited from that very establishment for support.

Furthermore, even with a standardized financing plan, de Antonio’s case proves himself exceptional, as demonstrated in his boasts about his financing strategies. He later mused, “I’ve noticed an enormous difference in my fundraising ability today as opposed to eight or nine years ago. You become unclean after a while and the times have changed”[lxviii]. He further boasted, “I’ve a moderately good record of making my own high-handed rules which is that I pay people back but they get no profit because I figure that they have more money than they need anyway. But they’re entitled to be paid back and they get a tax benefit”[lxix]. Such incentives – of either the possibility of profit or, at minimum, a tax write-off – could be offered to potential film investors as a minimum guarantee of some personal economic benefit from the process. De Antonio, however, explained his more fortunate (and rarified) financial situation as follows:

. . . you can donate [film materials] to the University of Wisconsin and claim a tax write-off on their declared value. The film then becomes part of the University’s archive – and I’m lucky, of course, because there’s an archive about me at the University of Wisconsin – and they make it available for study by scholars, film historians, and the like. If you’re in a high tax bracket, you make a fairly good profit just getting your money back plus that later tax write-off. It’s a very good inducement and should be used by young filmmakers who know rich people.[lxx]

Indeed, most independent documentary filmmakers do not have the advantage of wealthy associates, nor do they have the privilege of archival holdings of their work, particularly when they are starting out. But the promise of appeasing the tax burden of potential investors is certainly an investment strategy struggling filmmakers can pursue – a new pledge level on Kickstarter? The syndication approach to film financing, as exemplified by de Antonio’s Rush to Judgment, could still serve as a model, or at least an interesting example, of independent film financing, although it still illustrates de Antonio’s unique, privileged position. Shirley Clarke, another member of the New American Cinema Group, used a variation of this financing approach with her films – though it should be noted that she, too, comes from a privileged background as an heiress to the inventor of the Phillips screwdriver[lxxi]. Not surprisingly, however, the syndication approach has not proven to be the panacea for the financing woes of the independent filmmaker, and a point need not be made that a considerable variety of articles and guidebooks on independent film financing have since been, and continue to be, published. No doubt, each instance of successful financing for an independent film production appears as nothing short of a minor miracle, and, based on the publications concerning them, each of these successful instances seems positioned to serve as a model for future ambitious, cash-strapped independent filmmakers. Filmmaker Michael Moore certainly has proven to be heir and two-fold to de Antonio’s skill of promoting his own personality and politics and leveraging that personality for future projects, which is still no easy task for him. The specific example of de Antonio’s Rush to Judgment can perhaps provide some comfort to the frustrated aspiring filmmaker, for even with a formidable drive, a visionary style, an innovative financing strategy, and wealthy connections in hand, the particulars of actually getting that money still proves to be, at best, a hassle.

Notes

[i] Mark Lane and Emile de Antonio, “Rush to Judgment: A Conversation with Mark Lane and Emile de Antonio,” Film Comment 4, no. 2/3 (1967): 17.

[ii] P. Adams Sitney et al., “What Are the New Critics Saying?” Film Culture 42 (1966): 78.

[iii] Michael D. Shear, “Trump to Release Kennedy Killing Papers,” New York Times, October 22, 2017, A27.

[iv] Peter Baker and Scott Shane, “U.S. Releases Some, But Not All, of the J.F.K. File,” New York Times, October 27, 2017, A1.

[v] “Best Seller List,” New York Times, September 18, 1966, 399; “Best Seller List,” New York Times, December 4, 1966, 224; “Best Seller List,” New York Times, December 11, 372; “Best Seller List,” New York Times, January 8, 1967, 285; “Best Seller List,” New York Times, March 26, 1967, 270.

[vi] Lane and de Antonio, “Rush to Judgment,” 3.

[vii] Bernard Weiner, “Radical Scavenging: An Interview with Emile de Antonio,” Film Quarterly 25 (Fall 1971): 7.

[viii] Bill Nichols, “Newsreel, 1967-1972: Film and Revolution,” in “Show Us Life”: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, ed. Thomas Waugh (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984), 136; Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 197; Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 48.

[ix] Thomas Waugh, “Beyond Vérité: Emile de Antonio and the New Documentary of the Seventies,” in Movies and Methods, vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 34.

[x] For greater context and an early history of direct cinema in the United States, see, for example, Stephen Mamber, Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974).

[xi] For an analysis of direct cinema and its purported objectivity, see Jeanne Hall, “Realism as a Style in Cinema Verite: A Critical Analysis of Primary,” Cinema Journal 30, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 24-50.

[xii] See, for example, Robert C. Allen, “The Beginnings of American Cinema Verité,” in Film History: Theory and Practice, ed. Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery (Boston: McGraw Hill, 1985), 215-41.

[xiii] “Television’s School of Storm & Stress: Robert Drew’s Documentaries Aim at Photographic Realism,” Broadcasting, March 6, 1961, 82-84; “Kennedys to Star,” Broadcasting, July 29, 1963, 93.

[xiv] “Daly’s Exit,” Weekly Television Digest, November 21, 1960, 7.

[xv] Barry Keith Grant, Voyages of Discovery: The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 7; Brian Winston, “‘A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma’: Wiseman and Public Television,” Studies in Documentary Film 3, no. 2 (November 2009): 95.

[xvi] For an analysis of de Antonio’s compilation technique in his first film, see Vance Kepley, Jr., “The Order of Point of Order,” Film History 13, no. 2 (2001): 200-15.

[xvii] Robert C. Ladendorf, “Resistance to Vision: The Effects of Censorship and Other Restraints on Emile de Antonio’s Political Documentaries,” MA thesis (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1977), 45.

[xviii] Alan Rosenthal, “Emile de Antonio: An Interview,” Film Quarterly 32, no.1 (Fall 1978): 4.

[xix] Kay Johnson and Monika Jensen, “Film as an Agent of Social Change; The Role of the Filmmaker: Three Views – Emile de Antonio, Ousmane Sembene and Marcel Ophuls,” Arts in Society 10, no. 2 (1973): 211.

[xx] Barbara Zheutlin, “The Art and Politics of the Documentary: A Symposium,” Cineaste 11, no. 3 (1981): 19.

[xxi] Weiner, “Radical Scavenging,” 7.

[xxii] Alan Rosenthal, “Emile de Antonio,” 5.

[xxiii] Gary Crowdus and Dan Georgakas, “History Is the Theme of All My Films: An Interview with Emile de Antonio,” Cineaste 12, no. 2 (1982): 27.

[xxiv] Randolph Lewis, Emile de Antonio: Radical Filmmaker in Cold War America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 30-31.

[xxv] Ladendorf, “Resistance to Vision,” 36.

[xxvi] Lewis, Emile de Antonio, 26.

[xxvii] Lewis, Emile de Antonio, 28.

[xxviii] Lewis Allen, Jonas Mekas, et al., “The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group,” Film Culture 22/23 (Summer 1961): 133.

[xxix] Allen et al., “The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group,” 131.

[xxx] Allen et al., “The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group,” 132.

[xxxi] Allen et al., “The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group,” 132.

[xxxii] Lewis Allen, Jack Perlman, et al., “The Methods and Problems of Film Financing.” Film Culture 22/23 (Summer 1961): 156.

[xxxiii] Allen et al., “The Methods and Problems of Film Financing,” 151.

[xxxiv] Allen et al., “The Methods and Problems of Film Financing,” 152.

[xxxv] Allen et al., “The Methods and Problems of Film Financing,” 152.

[xxxvi] This chronology was written by de Antonio for his ‘Notes on the film Rush to Judgment’, in Emile de Antonio papers, box 4, folder 1.

[xxxvii] Ladendorf, “Resistance to Vision,” 46-47.

[xxxviii] Ladendorf, “Resistance to Vision,” 38.

[xxxix] Letter from Mark Lane to Emile de Antonio (Summer 1965), in Emile de Antonio papers, box 13, folder 6.

[xl] Lewis, Emile de Antonio, 55.

[xli] Evidenced by company files and stationary letterhead, in Emile de Antonio papers, box 21, folder 1.

[xlii] Letter from Mark Lane to G. L. Bindman (17 March 1966), in Emile de Antonio papers, box 54, folder 4.

[xliii] Emile de Antonio papers, box 21, folder 1.

[xliv] Emile de Antonio papers, box 21, folder 1.

[xlv] Letter from Richard Stark to Emile de Antonio (5 February 1966), in Emile de Antonio papers, box 21, folder 1.

[xlvi] Letter from Edward J. Ennis to Judgement Films Corporation (9 March 1966), in Emile de Antonio papers, box 21, folder 1.

[xlvii] Weiner, “Radical Scavenging,” 7.

[xlviii] Emile de Antonio papers, box 21, folder 1.

[xlix] Lewis, Emile de Antonio, 58.

[l] Lewis, Emile de Antonio, 58.

[li] Lane and de Antonio, “Rush to Judgment,” 3.

[lii] Ladendorf, “Resistance to Vision,” 48.

[liii] Affidavit by Emile de Antonio in the case of Richard L. Stark et al. v. Mark Lane et al., Superior Court, City and County of San Francisco, State of California, No. 596993 (18 June 1969), in Emile de Antonio papers, box 21, folder 3.

[liv] Weiner, “Radical Scavenging,” 7.

[lv] Lane and de Antonio, “Rush to Judgment,” 3.

[lvi] Ladendorf, “Resistance to Vision,” 48.

[lvii] Douglas Kellner and Dan Streible, eds, Emile de Antonio: A Reader (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 28.

[lviii] Letter from Emile de Antonio to Mrs. Hiram R. Mallinson (11 March 1966), in Emile de Antonio papers, box 21, folder 1.

[lix] Letter from Nahum A. Bernstein to Lionel Rogosin (15 March 1966), in Emile de Antonio papers, box 21, folder 1.

[lx] Emile de Antonio papers, box 21, folder 1.

[lxi] Bosley Crowther, “The Screen: Mark Lane vs. the Warren Report – Rush to Judgment at Carnegie Hall Cinema,” New York Times, June 3, 1967, 34C.

[lxii] Bosley Crowther, “The Screen: Mark Lane vs. the Warren Report,” 34C.

[lxiii] Weiner, “Radical Scavenging,” 5.

[lxiv] Memorandum of Agreement between Impact Films, Inc. and Judgement Films Corporation (19 December 1966), in Emile de Antonio papers, box 21, folder 1.

[lxv] Letter to Emile de Antonio from J. B. Watson, Jr. (9 December 1966), in Emile de Antonio papers, box 21, folder 1.

[lxvi] Bruce Jackson, “Conversations with Emile de Antonio,” Senses of Cinema 31 (April 2004), http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/politics-and-the-documentary/emile_de_antonio/.

[lxvii] Letter from Emile de Antonio to Oscar Lowenstein (25 November 1966), in Emile de Antonio papers, box 21, folder 1.

[lxviii] Crowdus and Georgakas, “History Is the Theme of All My Films,” 27.

[lxix] Crowdus and Georgakas, “History Is the Theme of All My Films,” 27.

[lxx] Crowdus and Georgakas, “History Is the Theme of All My Films,” 27-28.

[lxxi] Blaine Allan, “The New American Cinema and the Beat Generation, 1956-1960,” PhD diss (Northwestern University, 1984), 236.

Notes on Contributor:

Vincent Bohlinger is Associate Professor and Director of Film Studies at Rhode Island College. He is currently working on a book on Soviet film style from the late 1920s through the mid- 1930s and is co-editing a volume on Russian and Soviet movie stars.

Bibliography:

Allan, Blaine. “The New American Cinema and the Beat Generation, 1956-1960.” PhD diss, Northwestern University, 1984.

Allen, Lewis, Jack Perlman, et al. “The Methods and Problems of Film Financing.” Film Culture 22/23 (Summer 1961): 151-57.

Allen, Lewis, Jonas Mekas, et al. “The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group.” Film Culture 22/23 (Summer 1961): 130-33.

Allen, Robert C. “The Beginnings of American Cinema Verité.” In Film History: Theory and Practice, edited by Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, 215-41. Boston: McGraw Hill.

Baker, Peter, and Scott Shane. “U.S. Releases Some, But Not All, of the J.F.K. File.” New York Times, October 27, 2017.

Crowdus, Gary, and Dan Georgakas. “History Is the Theme of All My Films: An Interview with Emile de Antonio.” Cineaste 12, no. 2 (1982): 20-28.

Crowther, Bosley. “The Screen: Mark Lane vs. the Warren Report – Rush to Judgment at Carnegie Hall Cinema.” New York Times, June 3, 1967.

“Daly’s Exit,” Weekly Television Digest, November 21, 1960.

De Antonio, Emile. Documents on Rush to Judgment, Boxes 4, 13, 21, 22, 54, 55, 67, 72, and 83. In Emile de Antonio Papers. Madison: The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and the State Historical Society.

Grant, Barry Keith. Voyages of Discovery: The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

Hall, Jeanne. “Realism as a Style in Cinema Verite: A Critical Analysis of Primary.” Cinema Journal 30, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 24-50.

Jackson, Bruce. “Conversations with Emile de Antonio.” Senses of Cinema 31 (April 2004). http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/politics-and-the-documentary/emile_de_antonio/.

Jackson, Bruce, ed. Emile de Antonio in Buffalo. Buffalo: Center for Studies in American Culture, 2003.

Johnson, Kay, and Monika Jensen. “Film as an Agent of Social Change; The Role of the Filmmaker: Three Views – Emile de Antonio, Ousmane Sembene and Marcel Ophuls.” Arts in Society 10, no. 2 (1973): 208-33.

“Kennedys to Star.” Broadcasting, July 29, 1963.

Kepley, Jr., Vance. “The Order of Point of Order.” Film History 13, no. 2 (2001): 200-15.

Kellner, Douglas, and Dan Streible, eds. Emile de Antonio: A Reader, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Ladendorf, Robert C. “Resistance to Vision: The Effects of Censorship and Other Restraints on Emile de Antonio’s Political Documentaries.” MA thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1977.

Lane, Mark. Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J. D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966.

—. A Citizen’s Dissent: Mark Lane Replies. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968.

Lane, Mark, and Emile de Antonio. “Rush to Judgment: A Conversation with Mark Lane and Emile de Antonio.” Film Comment 4, no. 2/3 (Fall/Winter 1967): 2-18.

Lewis, Randolph. Emile de Antonio: Radical Filmmaker in Cold War America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.

Mamber, Stephen. Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1974.

McBride, Joseph. Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and the Officer J.D. Tippit. Berkeley: Hightower, 2013.

Mekas, Jonas, Shirley Clarke, William Van Dyke, et al. “Film Unions and the Low-Budget Independent Film Production – an exploratory discussion.” Film Culture 22/23 (Summer 1961): 134-50.

Minnett, Mark. “Millhouse: The Problems and Opportunities of Political Cinema.” Film History 26, no. 1 (2014): 108-35.

Nichols, Bill. Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.

—. “Newsreel, 1967-1972: Film and Revolution.” In “Show Us Life”: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, edited by Thomas Waugh, 135-53. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984.

—. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

Rosenthal, Alan. “Emile de Antonio: An Interview.” Film Quarterly 32, no.1 (Fall 1978): 4-17.

Shear, Michael D. “Trump to Release Kennedy Killing Papers.” New York Times, October 22, 2017.

Shenon, Philip. A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2013.

Sitney, P. Adams, Ken Kelman, et al. “What Are the New Critics Saying?” Film Culture 42 (Fall 1966): 76-88.

“Television’s School of Storm & Stress: Robert Drew’s Documentaries Aim at Photographic Realism.” Broadcasting, March 6, 1961.

Tuchman, Mitch. “Freedom of Information.” Film Comment 26, no. 4 (July/August 1990): 66, 68.

Waugh, Thomas. “Beyond Vérité: Emile de Antonio and the New Documentary of the Seventies.” In Movies and Methods, vol. 2, edited by Bill Nichols, 233-58. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Weiner, Bernard. “Radical Scavenging: An Interview with Emile de Antonio.” Film Quarterly 25 (Fall 1971): 3-15.

Winston, Brian. “A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma”: Wiseman and Public Television.” Studies in Documentary Film 3, no. 2 (November 2009): 95-111.

Zheutlin, Barbara. “The Art and Politics of the Documentary: A Symposium.” Cineaste 11, no. 3 (1981): 12-21.