The Books of My Life: History and the Media

 

Ever since the advent of historical documentaries on television, something that arguably began in Great Britain with the BBC’s 26 part documentary on World War I titled The Great War in 1964, professional historians have debated the quality of television history. For at least some academic historians, television histories, be they the lecture style, the presenter style, or the you are there form of television history, have a number of inherent problems. They are, some maintain, too image oriented. They are too selective. They make too much use of “historical” reconstructions. They simplify historical, theoretical, and methodological complexities way too much often in the service of seeking a wider audience, something that is always pressing when it comes to television including public television particularly these days. They too often focus on wars.

The fact of the matter, however, is that many television histories are done with the assistance of professional historians, as was the case with The Great War and many others since, and some have even been presented by academic historians themselves, though this hasn’t resulted in a diminishment in the number of those criticising the genre for its supposed simplification and in some cases, perversion of history. Given this it should not be a surprise that not all professional, let alone amateur historians, agree with the negative assessment of television history, something the papers contained in David Cannadine’s edited collection History and the Media (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Palgrave, 2004), a collection of papers presented at a conference on the media and history in London along with a couple of essays reproduced from magazines, point up. For many of the contributors to this collection television history is not inherently ahistorical or anti-historical. For many of these commentators television history is no more or less selective and manipulated than traditional history with its emphasis on the written word. For them the quality of history depends not on whether histories are in written form or not, but on the quality of the history including the television history.

The contributions to History and the Media can be divided thematically into several utlimately ideal types. There are the essays by television insiders which explore the history of television history such as those by Taylor Downing and Roger Smither who tries to the answer to the question as to why so many television histories have focused on war. There are the essays by professional historians like Simon Schama and Ian Kershaw, the two essays that were originally published in magazines, which explore the problems of television histories while offering defences of the BBC television histories they presented, A History of Britain in Schama’s case, or worked on, The Nazis: A Warning from History in Kershaw’s case. There are the essays by those amateur historians responsible for noted television histories of the past including that of Jeremy Isaacs, one of those responsible for what some consider the zenith of television history (me included), the 26 part The World at War a television history of World War II commissioned by ITV and broadcast in 1973, and that of Melvin Bragg, who reflects on his role in the making of and presenting of The Adventure of English from 2003 for the BBC. There is the essay by Max Hastings which raises questions about the genre of television history itself while simultaneously ruminating on the cultural reasons for why so many academics envy those professionals and amateurs who make television histories. There are the somewhat tangential essays by Jean Seaton on approaches to the history of broadcasting, David Puttnam on Hollywood’s special effects laden simplifications and perversions of reality, and John Tusa’s on the need to create a culture of authenticity and truth in broadcast organisations. 

Speaking of authenticity, while some of the essays in the collection do explore the manipulative techniques television histories use to tell their tale, techniques such as historical reconstructions, images and iconography, editing, music, and selectivity, for example, none, and this is not surprising given the fetishising cultures of the historical and journalistic professions, take this to its logical reflexive endpoint, namely to the fact that no television history or documentaries in general for that matter, can and do capture reality or real life. All television histories and documentaries, just like fictional films and fictional television programmes, may represent reality, they may be naturalistic including emotionally naturalistic, but they can’t be real because they are inherently selective and because they use editing, mise-en-scene, and music to manipulate time, space, perspective, and emotions in viewers contrary to the claims expectations of many professionals and amateurs for whom all art should and must be “real". Of course, in reality audiences, particularly lowest common denominator audiences, would be bored to death by a live stream of the real daily lives of any selected someones. Many of them instead genuflect before the altar of that most unreal of movie forms, superhero movies, a genre that includes virtually all films focusing on crime fighters and the military these days. Needless to say, the need many have for fantasy pervades a lot of historical documentaries today as well as fictional books, films and television shows, documentaries that feed their audiences appetite for a history they can be proud of whether it if of the formulaic we did it or the formulaic we are going to do it happy ending variety. The only genre of history documentaries that comes in for this kind of reflexive treatment are the you are there historical documentaries like 1900 House which are regarded by those commentators who bother to comment on them at all as unredeemable, as fundamentally not real television history. 

I enjoyed the essays in History and the Media immensely. I learned a lot from them, thought a lot about what they said, and was ultimately entertained by all of them. I recommend this admittedly only somewhat coherent collections of essays to anyone interested in the intersections between media and history, history and the media.

The Books of My Life: Seven Up

In 1964 ITV broadcast a documentary called Seven Up!. As Stella Bruzzi notes in her monograph Seven Up (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2007), Seven Up! was the brainchild of an Australian and a Canadian working in Britain who wanted to explore the impact of class on the present and futures of English girls and boys. To get at the impact of class on English youth the makers of Seven Up! chose ten males and four women, some from the upper class, some from the middle class, the class the Up Series celebrates, claims Bruzzi, and some from the working class, and one minority. "Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man", Seven Up!, quoting Ignatius of Loyola, declared. The fourteen were asked questions, some where shown at play, some at school, and all were brought together at the end of the 40 minute long "episode" at the zoo so that the camera and the voice of god narrator could "observe" how the fourteen interacted with each other.

As Bruzzi notes, Seven Up! was initially a one off. ITV, however, decided to revisit the participants in a second installment in the series in 1970, Seven Plus 7. Since then ITV and Michael Apted, one of the researchers in Seven Up! and now the chief interviewer and director starting with the third installment in the series, have revisited as many of the participants who wanted to be participate every seven years in 21 Up (1977), 28 Up (1984), 35 Up (1991), 42 Up (1998), 49 Up (2005), 56 Up (2012), and 62 Up (2019). the most recent installment of the series. As a result, as Bruzzi notes, the Up Series has become one of  the most celebrated and iconic documentaries and perhaps the most celebrated and iconic documentary series ever, has been mimicked by a host of other Up like documentaries, and has influenced a host of documentaries that came after it.

Bruzzi's monograph on the Up Series is a good workmanlike exploration of the series. In her monograph Bruzzi briefly explores the influences on the series, the contextual background to the series, the production of the series, the "participants" in the series, the influence of the series, and the "narrative" structure of the series. Bruzzi's monograph is enhanced by interviews with two of the "children", Michael Apted, and executive producer Claire Lewis.

Bruzzi's monograph puts Up into the context of the realist tradition of documentary cinema with its emphasis on exploring everyday life and the direct documentary tradition. Bruzzi also explores the changes in the series over its 66 year history. Bruzzi argues that the Up Series changed with 28 Up, transforming itself from a series focused collectively on class with most of the interviews conducted along the class based lines of the "children", to one in which interviews were conducted individually with the 'participants. Bruzzi argues that the tragic trajectory of one of the lives of one of the "children", Neil, was one of the main factors for this change to a more individualistic format, as were changes in the television documentary form itself as television documentaries became more focused on the lives of individuals in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Up Series has stuck with this format ever since. As a result of this change from a more collectively focused documentary to a more individualistically focused one, a change marked by a change from the juxtaposition of posh participants to working class "participants to individual interviews, Bruzzi argues, the narrative of the Up Series changed somewhat and, like other documentaries that focused on individual lives, used the individual lives of the "children" to make points about the broader social and cultural contexts of the lives of the "children" As Bruzzi notes, over the years the "children" and particularly Neil, have become kind of "reality" stars and the Up Series became a forerunner and role model of the "reality" shows of the late 20th century and early 21st. Many of the "participants" also became, very early on in the series, critics of how the series portrayed giving the series a reflexive quality. This was one of the reasons, as Bruzzi notes, that some of the "children" refused to participate in later installments in the series.

If you haven't seen the Up Series it is definitely worth your time. If you are looking for a good guide to this documentary bildungsroman, Bruzzi's introduction and exploration of it, is also worth your time. Bruzzi's textual analysis of the series alone is probably worth the price of admission  even if some might like to see more production analysis of the series grounded in a greater degree of archival research.

American Banality versus Norwegian Humanity: Musings on Twin Sisters

I just watched a fascinating documentary on PBS about two Chinese twins, Twin Sisters, one raised in the urban US the other in rural small town Norway. The documentary showed how the Norwegian twins life revolved around family, nature, hiking, biking, school, and natural beauty. The American twins life, on the other hand, revolved around shopping, dolls who wore the same dresses she did, and event after event be it violin practise or soccer practise. At the end of the documentary the male of the American couple that had adopted one of the Chinese twin sisters remarked about how homes in rural small town Norway were built so families could enjoy each other. I would add that they were also built so the family could enjoy the beauty of the fjord on which the town they lived in lay. For me the life of the Norwegian twin showed how hollow and banal the life of the American twin was compared to the life of her sister in Norway. It showed to me how much we in the US have lost since the 1980s thanks to the octopus that is American consumer capitalism.

I See the Mulberries but Where is the Forest?

Recently I watched Mulberry Child, a 2011 documentary about Jian Ping, a young girl who came of age during Mao's great leap forward and Mao's cultural revolution, on PBS's Asia Pacific Heritage Month. Like so many documentaries of this ilk, however, Mulberry Child, which is apparently based on a memoir of the same name, fails to put events in post WWII China into broader contexts, in this case the broader context of Western imperialism. It should not be surprising, by the way, that this is the same problem with the Western media coverage of the current crisis in the Ukraine. Mulberry Child has two other major problems as well. First there's that pesky Western penchant for personal interest stories, a genre that seems to demand the disappearance of broader contexts, and second, that pesky documentary tendency for reenactments, a penchant I find jarring, ahistorical, fiction like, and unfortunate. All this said, I still recommend this documentary. But watch it with a critical sense of history in mind.

In Praise of John Berger

As David Lavery recently reminded me in one of his blog posts John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the great if not the greatest documentary on art, the photographic image, and the social and cultural contexts of art and photography. It is also, in my opinion at least, one of the greatest television documentaries ever made.

I first heard about Berger in a Religion and Phenomenology class I took at Indiana University in the early 1980s. Dr. James Hart, our professor guide for the seminar, assigned Berger's book Ways of Seeing for us to read. I soon learned that Ways of Seeing actually began life as a documentary Ways of Seeing. Ways first appeared as a four part documentary on the BBC in 1972. I don't remember when I first saw the documentary. Sometime in the early 1980s. What I do remember is that I saw it, like I saw so much else that has had an immense impact on my intellectual and aesthetic life, on PBS.

Ways of Seeing was intended to be a critique of Sir Kenneth Clark's thirteen part 1969 BBC documentary Civilisation, a documentary that, as the title suggests, counterpointed the supposedly rational civilisation of the West and its art against the superstitious world and art of the non-Western world, and the book Clark wrote as a companion to the show, a book that Berger mentions in Ways of Seeing. Part one of Ways of Seeing draws on the work of the Frankfurt School theorist and cultural historian Walter Benjamin, particularly his influential essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", to explore how the mechanical reproduction of "great art" has changed our perceptions of painting. Part two explores the the depiction of the female nude in art. Part three explores how art has acquired a kind of sacred and sublime quality and how this sublime quality has been translated into economic value in a West dominated by capitalism, and how landscapes themselves have come to reflect capitalist ownership. Part four explores the language of advertising and how advertisements have taken on the ownership quality of oil paintings and the male objectification and desire aspects of paintings of female nudes.

I have long wanted to get a copy of Ways of Seeing on DVD. Sadly neither the BBC nor any other DVD company specialising in documentary has released it. The BBC interestingly has released Clark's incredibly dated and outmoded Civilisation. Despite Ways of Seeing's lack of availability all is not lost, however, thanks to the brave new world of the World Wide Web. You can watch all four episodes of Ways of Seeing complete on YouTube, something I joyously noticed over three years ago.

Berger is sadly almost virtually forgotten and virtually neglected today while Mulvay is de rigueur in film classes. Far too many have forgotten the important role he and his Ways of Seeing played in the development of theory of the male gaze. I have always found his historically sensitive tracing of the male gaze from the art of aristocrats through to contemporary adverts more compelling than Mulvay's more psychoanalytic psychobabble approach to male objectification. Far too many have forgotten the important role he played in bringing Benjamin to a broader audience thanks to Ways of Seeing in both its documentary and book form. And far too many have forgotten how important a writer of non-fiction and fiction he was. The film he co-wrote with Swiss director Alain Tanner, Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000/Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976), is one of the great forgotten films (it is not even available on DVD in the US or UK) of the golden age of foreign cinema (ah the eyes of a Yank), a film, Dave Kehr rightly notes, brought together Brechtian and Godardian alienation effect and Renoirian humanism giving viewers a humane exploration of a group of leftists who try to keep sixties hopes alive as the sixties morph into the seventies and asked us viewers to do the same. In an era in which casino capitalism and its images have run amok I think it is time for us to rediscover the work and the tempered hope of John Berger.

Viewing
Ways of Seeing, Episode One

Ways of Seeing, Episode Two

Ways of Seeing, Episode Three

Ways of Seeing, Episode Four

Reading
"Ways of Seeing Opened Our Eyes to Visual Culture"

"Ways of Seeing "How We Made It: John Berger and Michael Dibb on Ways of Seeing"

"Ways of Seeing "Through the Looking-Glass: John Berger's Groundbreaking Book Ways of Seeing Started Life as a Seventies Television Series, Repeated for the First Time Tonight."

Reading Watchers Watching: Lecture Notes on Ethnographic Film

Reading Watchers Watching was a lecture I was asked to give in 2010 on ethnographic film to Dr. Gerald Zahavi's Honour's Introduction to Documentary Studies class. Given that I had a master's in Cultural Anthropology and a long standing interest in film--I took classes with James Naremore--who showed my Semiology of Cinema class Jean Rouch's Chronique d'un été--Peter Bondanella, and Harry Geduld at Indiana--and that I was a historian it was a request I gladly accepted. I enjoyed looking back, if in brief, at the history of ethnographic film, its impact, and its parodies and satires--have loved Bunuel since the 1970s--and I enjoyed lecturing to and talking to the wonderful and eager students in Gerry's class. I hope you enjoy it too.

Introduction
Documentaries are as old, even older than the cinema itself. In fact, there were "documentaries" before there were documentary films. In the 19th century slide shows were presented to audiences by lecturers using magic lanterns. Protestant missionaries, for instance, made use of magic lantern shows to display to audiences the horrors of colonialism and imperialism in places like the Belgian Congo and China. American Robert Edwin Peary presented a slide lecture on his attempt to make it to the North Pole. Part of that slide lecture included Peary's brief discussion of the “Esquimaux” (the Inuit).

Documentary films have a long history as well. Some of the earliest motion pictures recorded boxing matches, trains arriving at train stations, city scenes, and staged events (see suggested early documentary viewings below). They were "documentaries", in other words. There have been and continue to be several “genres” of documentary film—-newsreels, adventure/expedition films, historical documentaries, political documentaries, and the genre I am going to focus on in this lecture, ethnographic film. Ethnographic cinema, the subject of this talk, was and is intimately connected with the discipline of Anthropology in general and Cultural Anthropology and Social Anthropology in particular.

Curtis and Flaherty
In the earliest days of cinema there was some interest in what we today call ethnography. The Lumiere Brothers sent cameramen to Asia and Africa to film the “natives”. James White of Edison travelled to the US West, Hawaii, Mexico, and Egypt to film the “natives”. The earliest example of ethnographic film, if we accept the notion that anthropology is distinguished from sociology by the former's study of the “primitive” and the latter's study of the industrial world, however, is probably Edward Curtis's In the Land of the Headhunters (1914).

Curtis was an amateur ethnographer and, as a result, the bête noire of “professional anthropologist” Franz Boas. Curtis's In the Land of the Headhunters (aka, In the Land of the War Canoes), a film on the Kwakiutl Indians of North America's West Coast, is a romanticised, sensationalised, and melodramatic of Kwakiutl culture. It is also an example of what has come to be called “salvage anthropology” since the Kwakiutl culture Curtis filmed had already been impacted and changed by Western contact long before Curtis and his camera arrived in British Columbia. In order to film “traditional” elements of Kwakiutl society Curtis had to reconstruct the pre-European elements of Kwakiutl “culture” to Boas's great consternation. The moral of this story? Ethnographic cinema, just like Anthropology, began as an “amateur” “salvage” operation undertaken by gentleman scholars.

Though Curtis's reconstruction of Kwakiutl life before the Europeans may have been among the first ethnographic films, Robert Flaherty (1884-1951) was probably the first of ethnographic cinemas auteurist stars. Flaherty born in Detroit, Michigan, made a number of highly praised and important ethnographic films over the course of his professional life including Nanook of the North, Moana, Man of Aran, Louisiana Story, and, with the famous German film auteur F.W. Murnau (1888-1931), Tabu: A Tale of the South Seas.

Nanook of the North (1922) is a documentary film about an Inuit family living in the Arctic Circle. Filmed near Hudson Bay in Quebec, Canada Nanook was the first large scale documentary ever made clocking in at around 79 minutes. Nanook, as was the case with many other early ethnographic films, was funded by a private corporation, in Nanook’s case the French fur company Revillion Freres.

Like Curtis Flaherty engaged in “salvage” ethnography. By the time Flaherty arrived in the north the Inuit had already been westernised so Flaherty had to reconstruct “traditional” elements of Inuit society and culture for the camera eye. Additionally, like Curtis’s In the Land of the Headhunters, Flaherty’s Nanook of the North had a narrative, a story, around which the documentary revolved, specifically one of Flaherty's favourite themes, humans against nature.

Flaherty’s later documentaries Moana (1926), Man of Aran (1934), Louisiana Story (1948), and Tabu: A Tale of the South Seas (1931) followed a pattern similar to Nanook. Moana was filmed in Safune on the island of Savai'i in Samoa. Man of Aran was filmed on the Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland. Since both “cultures” had been impacted by westerners” the “traditional” culture of both had to be reconstructed before they could be filmed. Both were suffused with the humans against nature theme that seems to be central to Flaherty's aesthetic. Louisiana Story (1948), funded by the American corporate giant Standard Oil, focused on a young boy, his pet raccoon, the bayou around him, and the decision of the boy's father to allow to an oil rig to be built on his land. Not surprisingly, given who funded the film, Louisiana Story emphasised how the oil rigs were “harmony” with the environment. Tabu (1931), was filmed on Bora Bora in the South Pacific. The film focuses on the romance between two young lovers who decide to escape from their village when the young female lover is chosen as the new maid of the gods making her tabu to her young male lover. Moving into new territory, at least for Flaherty—is this the influence of Murnau?—Tabu is more humans against humans than humans against nature.

Flaherty, of course, important though he was and is, wasn't the only prominent ethnographic filmmaker in the early years of anthropological cinema. There was also Ernest Schoedsack and Merrian C. Cooper who made the Paramount funded Grass (1925), which focused on the Bakhtiani tribe as they made their annual struggle across the rugged mountains of Persia (Iran), and Chang (1928), which centred on the survival strategies of a peasant family in the jungles of Siam (Thailand). The fictional elements in both documentaries laid the foundation for Shoedsack's and Cooper's first great fiction film, King Kong (1933). There were the world travellers Osa and Martin Johnson whose sound film Congorilla: Adventures Among the Big Apes and Little People of Central Africa (1932) had a few scenes of pygmies filmed in the Belgian Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo). There were Leon Poirier and Andre Sauvauge whose La croissiere jeune, funded by the French automobile giant Citroen, followed, not surprisingly, a Citroen automobile as it made its way from Beirut to Beijing and took in some ethnographic colour along the way. There were Knud Rasmussen and Frederich Dalseim whose tale of Inuit love Palos bruderfaerd (1934), was shot in Greenland, a Danish colonial possession.

From "Fact" to Parody and Satire
Though the work of Flaherty in particular was praised by many not everyone shared in the praise for ethnographic documentaries Noted Marxist and surrealist auteur Luis Bunuel, for instance, satirised and parodied the adventurer/ethnographer subgenre and its ethnocentrisms and stereotypes and caricatures to great intellectual and humourous effect in his documentary anti-documentary Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pain (1935). In Las Hurdes Bunuel tries to force the viewer to confront the ethnocentric arrogance and single voice paternalism he saw as inherent in the cinematic form (the debate over these issues, by the way, would enervate much reflexive anthropological theoretical discussion in the 1980s and 1990s).

Beyond the “Primitive”
If we broaden our idea of what constitutes ethnographic film a number of other documentary films of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s become relevant to the history of ethnographic cinema. The 1920s saw a number of “city symphonies” appear including Charles Sheeler's and Paul Strand's jazz inflected Manhatta (1921), Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures (1926), Walter Ruttman's (1887-1941) Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt/Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927), and Dziga Vertov's (1896-1954) Chelovek s Kinoapparatum/Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Each of these films gave cinema goers a look, a generally celebratory look (modernity as utopia), a sometimes critical look (modernity as anomic and alienating), into life in the metropolis's of Manhattan, Paris, Berlin, Kiev, Odessa, and Moscow respectively.

Other films offered a celebratory peek at specific aspects of city life. Joris Ivens's Die brug (1928), for instance, focused on a Rotterdam bridge as it opened and closed to let ship traffic pass though it as well as the trains that crossed it and the characters who passed over and around it. It wasn't only cities or engineering feats that came in for celebration in early documentary cinema. Soviet documentarists like Viktor Turin (1929's Turksib), Mikhail Kalatozov (1930's Sol Svaneti), and Dziga Vertov (1931's Donbass Symphony and 1934's Three Songs of Lenin) celebrate the engineering triumphs of the new Soviet state. Leni Riefenstahl's (1902-2003) staged Triumph des Willens/Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) celebrate Hitler, Nazism, the modern Olympics, and (presumed) Aryan superiority. Producer, director, writer and critic John Grierson (1898-1972)--it was Grierson writing as “The Moviegoer” in The New York Sun (8 February 1926) who first used the term “documentary” in a review of Flaherty's Moana—made the film Drifters (1929) which celebrated Britain's commercial fishers. Grierson later helped found the important National Film Commission (1936), later the National Film Board/Office national du film du Canada (NFB/ONB), helped draft the National Film Act (Canada) (1939), was appointed Government Film Commissioner (Canada) (1939), and led the NFB/ONF during the years in which it produced “propaganda” films celebrating Canadian life. World War Two, of course, saw virtually every nation involved in the war produce documentary propaganda in support of the “war effort”.

Not everyone came to praise documentaries in service to the nation-state. Luis Bunuel (1900-1983), and Jean Vigo (1905-1934) and Vertov's brother Boris Kaufman (1897-1980) poked fun at all of this celebratory documentary film making. Bunuel's critical surrealist films Un chien andalou/An Andalusian Dog (1929) L'age d'or/Age of Gold (1930), which he made with Salvador Dali, took a poke at modern love, the church, the state, the modern city, and the modern bourgeoisie. Vigo's and Kaufman's A Propos de Nice satirises a French society Vigo and Kaufman saw as superficial and in a state of putrefaction.

Criticism of the state did not always come from cinematic “outsiders” like Bunuel and Vigo. Sometimes government-funded films bit the hand that fed. The US government funded (funded by the Resettlement Administration) The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938) directed by Pare Lorentz had an air of melancholy to them, it was the era of depression and dust bowl after all, as the transformations of the Great Plains and Mississippi Valley the two films trace also left environmental problems in their wake.

Though the study of documentary and ethnographic film focuses almost exclusively on non-fiction films it is worth remembering that in the wake of World War II documentary film making also influenced fiction cinema. Post World War Two Italian Neorealism, for instance, specifically films by auteurs Roberto Rosselini (1906-1977)—Roma città aperta/Rome, Open City (1945)—and Vittorio de Sica (1902-1974)—Sciuscià/Shoeshine (1946) and Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thief (1948)—all bear the marks of documentary newsreel techniques and have an ethnographic feel to them.

Jean Rouch and the Fine Art of the Reflexive Ethnographic Film
The best-known and arguably the most influential documentary and ethnographic filmmaker in the post World War II period was Jean Rouch. Rouch was a “professional ethnologist”. Born in Paris in 1917 Rouch initially trained as a civil engineer. While riding out World War Two in West Africa, however, he developed an interest in anthropology. After World War Two Rouch returned to Paris where he entered the Musee de l'homme to study social anthropology and ethnography with noted ethnologists Marcel Mauss and Marcel Griaule. Griaule, who at the time was beginning to utilise film in his fieldwork in Africa, stimulated a similar interest in Rouch.

Ethnology was not the only influence on Rouch. During the course of his professional life Rouch praised documentarist Dziga Vertov as a director of “films that beget films” and once referred to documentarist Robert Flaherty as “one of the greatest” metteurs-en-scene (metteur-en-scene was a term coined by the influential critic Andre Bazin, founder of the influential film journal Cahiers du cinéma, to refer to the mise-en-scene of specific directors; Rouch's use of this term shows the extent of his relationship to the critical revolution in film analysis going on in Paris in the 1950s mostly in the pages of Cahiers and the other significant French film journal and competitor to Cahiers, Positif). The influence of both Vertov and Flaherty is evident in Rouch's own work.

Dziga Vertov once claimed that cinéma-vérité at its best catches life unawares. This seems as apt a description of the many of “documentaries” of French auteur Jean Rouch as any as historian Jean-Andre Fieschi points out. Rouch's early ethnological shorts (Brian Winston refers to this Rouch as Rouch 1) made between the late 1940s and early 1950s were largely filmic representations of West African cultural practises. Rouch's camera was a discreet presence. Commentaries were added to aid Western audiences in understanding the cultural practises they were seeing on screen. A brief resume of the subjects of Rouch's films—funeral rites (Cimetiere dans la falaise (1951)), hunting (La Chase au lion a l'arc (1965)), fishing (Bataille sur le grand fleuve (1951)), spiritual practises, possession rituals (Les Maitres fous (1955), Cantate pour deux generaux (1990)), rain-making rituals (Yenendi de Yantalla (1970)), celebrations (Baby Ghana (1957)), cultural issues like war and slavery (Babatou ou les trois conseils (1976)), marriage (Boulevards d'Afrique (1988)), gender, race religion, and upbringing (Folie ordinaire d'une fille de Cham (1986)), and the daily lives of migrant workers (Moi, un Noir (1959))—would seem to be the standard subjects of documentary film making. Five early shorts (La circoncision (1948-1949), Bataille sur le grand fleuve (1950-1951), Cimetiere dans la falaise (1950-1951), Les hommes qui font la pluie (1950-1951), and Les gens du mill (1950-1951)) brought together under the title Les fils de l'eau (1952/1955, first shown 1958), for example, focus on various aspects in the lives of a tribe in Niger—their prayers for rain, the coming of rain, their sowing and harvesting of millet, their burial rites, their circumcisions, their hippopotamus hunt—with its commentary derived from the local dialect, local tribal chants, and local tribal music—and would thus seem to confirm this first impression.

This first impression, however, would be a mistaken first impression. Rouch's experiments in cinema and his move away from “realist” practise actually began very early. Les hommes qui font la pluie (1951) focuses on magical rites which attempt to restore fertility to a drought ridden French colony Niger. The film ends with what is perhaps meant to be a miracle as rain falls bringing much needed water to the parched earth. The “miracle” isn't the only cinematic manipulation in the film. Rouch paints the film in washed out and uneven colours. Jaguar (1954-1967, first shown 1971) focuses on a hazardous quest and a succession of ordeals. Its narrative is meandering. Its form is the serial. Les Maitres fous (1955) explores annual ceremony of the hanka, the demons of power, in Ghana. People from everyday life populate the film—urban labourers, waiters, workers. Its focus is a stage by stage portrayal of the hanka. As the film proceeds those carrying out the ritual become possessed, their bodies contort, they foam at the mouth, they mix the blood of slaughtered dogs with the yolks of eggs and get drunk from the mixture. They even adopt the personas of their colonial masters. In the film Rouch explores the cathartic aspects of this ritual. In Les Maitres fous Rouch manipulates colour. “Everyday reality” is depicted in images of red and green. He manipulates images: he depicts red and green images of horse guards against a lush prairie background as a counterpoint to the hanka. The point of this seems to be to make connections between the rituals of the “savage” and the “civilised”, between imperialised and imperialiser, critiquing the distinctions in the process (cf. the montage theory of Eisenstein). Moi, un noir (1959), which for Jean-Andre Fieschi is a turning point in Rouch's work, portrays a group an individuals from Treichville in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire revealing their fantasies through their adoption of movie star pseudonyms (Eddie Constantine, Edward G. Robinson, Tarzan, Dorothy Lamour). In this film the viewer is pushed to ask who is speaking in the film, whether these speeches are monologues or not, and even whether the characters in the documentaries are “real” or not.

Starting with Moi, un Noir Rouch's more reflexive “documentaries” give us a cinema of behaviours, dreams, subjectivities, daydreams, desires, improvisations, complicities, and collective creations. In Moi, un Noir Rouch's camera becomes a provocateur which stimulates or precipitates situations, conflicts, expeditions that would otherwise not take place. (take that cinema verite). No longer does Rouch pretend the camera isn't there. Rather he foregrounds its presence. Filming becomes a means of creation. With Moi, un Noir Rouch's cinema becomes a cinema of collective creation and reflexivity. In Moi participants reveal what they chose to while the camera is running. After seeing themselves on screen they then comment on what is on screen reshaping what is going on on screen in the process. The intimate Chronique d'un été (1961), probably Rouch's best known work internationally, filmed by Rouch, Michel Brault, and sociologist Edgar Morin with light weight sound equipment and wide angle cameras developed by Brault, finds the trio reveling in reflexivity and spontaneity as they move through Paris, Rouch once said he wanted to explore “[t]he strange tribes that live in Paris”), and the south of France in the midst of the colonial and imperial crisis in Algeria, asking passers-by if they “are happy”. As he had done with Moi Rouch and Morin showed the finished film to those they questioned, asked them to comment on their responses, filmed these responses, introduced participants to each other, and edited all of these into the finished film. Rouch, Brault, and Morin called what they did cinéma-vérité in homage to Vertov's kino-pravda (camera truth or, more poetically, the camera eye).

Rouch was not solely a “documentarist”. He also contributed Gare du Nord (1965) to the collaborative fiction film Paris vu par, (Winston's Rouch 3). Filmed like his “ethnographic films”, edited to make it appear as though it was shot in one long take, it actually took two, Gard, with its documentary like sounds and images, mimics real time (a la Alfred Hitchcock's Rope). Rouch's hugging camera focuses on a young married couple as they argue in their flat, follows the wife as she leaves the flat, almost gets hit by a car, is apologised to by the driver of that car, walks with that driver across a bridge over a railway, is told by the driver that he will kill himself if she doesn't come with him, and ends with her refusal to go with him and the drivers death. Is anyone happy in this film?

For R.F. Cousins, Jean Rouch was a pioneer of cinéma vérité and a pioneer of improvised film psychodramas. For Jean-Andre Fieschi, Rouch's work, like Vertov's before him, was a cinema of repudiations—a repudiation of Hollywood cinema, a repudiation of Hollywood actors, a repudiation of Hollywood style acting, a repudiation of Hollywood décor, a repudiation of Hollywood classical montage, and a repudiation of the cinéma vérité of Richard Leacock and Company. For Fieschi Rouch is the great vérité illusionist. He is narrator, storyteller, outsider, and bricoleur mixing events, reports, fictions, diverse locations, into an almost surreal final product. His is a work, says Fieschi, of spontaneity, juxtapositions, contradictions, discomfort, novelty, whimsy, automism, inspiration, and science/fiction.

But let's let Rouch speak for himself:
Rouch: “When I'm making a film, it takes a few minutes getting started, then I see the film taking shape in the viewfinder of my camera, and I know that at any given moment whether what I'm getting is good or not. The constant tension is exhausting, but it's an excitement absolutely essential if one is to bring off this aleatory pursuit of the most effective images and sounds, without ever being certain until you're shooting the final sequences what the result will be...Oh, the number of unfinished films I've made because nothing happened—a ritual possession dance in which nobody got possessed; because it grew dark; because I ran out of film...”

“What are these films, what outlandish name distinguishes them from the rest? Do they exist? I have no idea yet, but I do know that there are certain very rare occasions when, without the aid of a single subtitle, the spectator suddenly understands an unknown tongue, takes part in strange ceremonies, wanders in towns or though landscapes he has never seen but which he recognises perfectly...Only the cinema can perform this miracle, though no particular aesthetic can reveal the mechanism, and no special technique can set it in motion: neither clever counterpointing in the cutting, nor the use of some stereophonic Cinerama process can create such wonders...It is as if there were no more cameras, no more sound recorders, no more photo-electric cells, none of the welter of accessories and technicians which comprise the great ritual of classic cinema. But the film-makers of today prefer not to venture into those dangerous paths; and only fools and madmen and children dare to push the forbidden buttons.” (Positif, November 1955)

Over the years Rouch has received extensive praise for his film, particularly his early films. Not everyone, however, has come to praise Rouch. The reasons for the discomfort of some for Rouch's films foreground what would, by the late 1960s, become a major theme in reflective social and cultural anthropology—the embededness of ethnologists and ethnographers within forms of discursive power in general (cf. the social constructionists and Foucault) and their relationship to Western colonial power in particular. As Erik Barnouw points out many Africans and a few Western critics thought his early films like Les Maitres fous reinforced Western perceptions and images of Africans as savages. Rouch responded to this, as I noted earlier, by incorporating the voices of “subjects” into Jaguar and Moi, un noir. Others, like Roy Armes, have criticised some of Rouch's later work for its inadequate preparation, banality of dialogue, and problematic editing.

Jean Rouch died in February of 2004. During the course of his career he co-founded the International Ethnographic and Sociological Film Committee at the Musee de l'homme (1952) with Andre-Leon Gourhan and he collaborated with prominent ethnographers like Roger Rosenfelder, Germaine Dieterlen, and Quebec's Michel Brault and Claude Jutra.

After Rouch
Jean Rouch's reflexive ethnographic films did not spell the end of non-reflexive ethnographic cinema. 1952 saw Margaret Mead's and Gregory Bateson's Childhood Rivalry in Bali and New Guinea appear. 1956 saw the appearance of John Marshall's Peabody Museum (Harvard) funded study of a Kalahari Bushman giraffe hunt The Hunters. The 1960s saw the rise to prominence of the cinéma vérité of the Drew Associates (Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Hope Ryder, Joyce Chopra, and James Lipscomb) who collectively, with funding from Time-Life, and, after the demise of Drew Associates, individually explored American politics (the Wisconsin primary battle between JFK and Hubert Humphrey, Primary, 1960, Drew Associates), American musical celebrities (Bob Dylan, Don't Look Back, Pennbaker, 1966), American economics and the farm crisis, (For Auction: An American Hero, 1986, Leacock), and even, somewhat atypically for the American practitioners of vérité, a more middle class American icon (the trials and travails of a Bible salesman, Salesman, the Maysles, 1969). In Great Britain Michael Apted gave us the “realist” (if increasingly somewhat self-conscious) documentary bildungsroman the Up Series (7 Up, 7 Plus 7, 21 Up, 28 Up, 35 Up, 42 Up, 49 Up, and 56 Up). 1963 saw the appearance of Robert Gardner's exploration of Dani (New Guinea) ritualistic warfare and revenge Dead Birds, a film that proved controversial when it was learned that the voice of the Dani protagonist of the film Weyak was dubbed by American anthropologist Karl Heider. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. 1975 saw the appearance of Napoleon Chagnon's, Tim Asch's, and Patsy Asch's study of the Yanomamo The Axe Fight. One critic would later suggest that the fact that Chagnon distributed machetes only to some of the Yanomamo in the village gave rise to the behaviours recorded in the film. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Chagnon and the Asch would go on to make 22 subsequent documentaries on the Yanomamo almost all of them would bring controversy in their wake.

Nor did reflexive film, documentary or fiction, die with Jean Rouch. Mary and Maxine Tsosie (with anthropologists Sol Worth and Jon Adair) brought us Spirit of the Navajos (1966) a film which tried to speak for the Navajo. Kidlat Tahimik gave us I am Furious Yellow (1981-1993) which traced the development of each of Tahimik's three sons. Frances Peters brought us Tent City (1992) which explored Aboriginal land rights issues from the Aboriginal “point of view”. Michael Moore gave us Roger & Me (1989) which followed Moore's increasingly self-conscious attempts to interview GM president Roger Smith. Louis Theroux has done a number of entertaining, enlightening, mystifying, misleading, controversial, somewhat autobiographical, and moralistic documentaries for the BBC for his Weird Weekends series and beyond over the years. All of these foregrounded reflexivity or the participatory (in trendy terms, dialogic) nature of documentary filmmaking.

Beyond ostensibly non-fiction films the influence of documentary filmmaking can be seen almost everywhere in the cinematic universe. The influence of Jean Rouch's reflexive cinema can readily be seen in the work of filmmakers like Jean Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Chris Marker, and Jean Marie Straub. The influence of more “realist” and “reflexive” documentary film techniques can be seen in TV shows like Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in particular in the famous episode “The Body” (5:16, 27 February 2001, UPN, written and directed by Buffy creator Joss Whedon), Whedon’s Firefly, Ricky Gervais’s The Office, the brilliant The Thick of It (which is grounded in improvisation), the brilliant Outnumbered (which also uses improvisation), many of the films of Eric Rohmer which are, at least in part, documents dissecting contemporary bourgeois lives, and the films of Robert Bresson and the Dardennes Brothers, which are, at least in part, documents exploring the lives of that rarest of fiction film species, particularly in Hollywood, the poor.

References
Roy Armes, French Cinema Since 1946, Volume Two: The Personal Style (London: Tantivy Press, second edition, 1970), pp. 159-166)
R.F. Cousins, "Rouch, Jean" in Andrew Sarris (ed.), The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia (Detroit: Visible Ink, 1998), pp. 434-438
Jean-André Fieschi, "Jean Rouch" in Richard Roud (ed.), Cinema A Critical Dictionary: The Major Film-Makers (New York: Viking, 1980), pp. 901-909

Suggested Early Documentary Video Viewings
Sandow
Thomas Edison, William KL Dickson, 1894
Carmencita
Thomas Edison, 1894
Ringkampfer
Max Skladonowsky, 1895
Die Boxende Kanguruh
Max Skladonowsky, 1895
L'Arrivée d'un Train a la Ciotat/Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat
Lumiere Brothers, Louis and Auguste, 1895
Broadway at Union Square, New York City
Louis Lumiere, 1896
Miners Leaving Pendlebury Colliery
Mitchell and Kenyon, 1901
Nude Woman by Waterfall (manipulated erotic documentary)
Claude Friese-Greene, 1920

The Devil and President Obama

So some people are upset that the History Channel “documentary” The Bible (2013)—I use this term advisedly since the “documentary” is clearly told from a Christian perspective—apparently has an Obama look alike playing Satan and are crying foul. Others, particularly those on the right, however, are urging calm, noting that the parodying of American presidents is hardly novel and that parodies of American presidents has a long pedigree, that the resemblance between Satan and Obama questionable anyway, and that we must ascertain the intent of Roma Downey of Touched by an Angel fame and Mark Burnett of Survivor fame (Survivor was the British and later American version of Swedish television network SVT's Expedition Robinson), the producers of The Bible for the History Channel, if we are to come to any conclusions about whether Downey and Burnett intended to link Obama and Satan in their “documentary”.

Those who raise this question of intent are right, we need to try to ascertain the intent of the “authors” of The Bible. Both Downey, who perhaps not unsurprisingly played Mary the mother of Jesus in the "documentary". and Burnett claim that it was not their intention to find an actor who resembled Obama to play Satan. Downey and Burnett claim that the charge that they hired an actor who looked like Obama to play Satan was intentional “…is utter nonsense. The actor who played Satan, Mehdi Ouazanni, is a highly acclaimed Moroccan actor…has previously played parts in several Biblical epics—including Satanic characters long before Barack Obama was elected as our President” and that they and the History Channel have the highest respect for President Obama.”

So should we take Downey and Burnett at their word? What would be interesting to explore with respect to the issue of intent is the politics of Downey and Burnett. So I did a little research. According to one source, Downey, a "devout [Irish] Catholic", supported Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness for president of Ireland in 2011. McGuinness, like Downey, is a devout Catholic and is an Irish nationalist. He was likely a high-ranking member of the IRA and was likely involved, in some way, shape, or form, in violence conducted by the IRA during the years of “the Troubles”. McGuinness later came to have a decent relationship with Unionist nationalist Ian Paisley, condemned recent IRA splinter group violence, and ran on an anti-EU austerity programme when he ran for Irish president in 2011. Burnett—who was born in Britain but is now a naturalised US citizen—though he has allied himself professionally with two of Obama’s most strident critics, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump (Sarah Palin’s Alaska and The Apprentice)—has a record of donating to democratic causes. Contradiction?

Beyond all this we know that Downey and Burnett promoted The Bible at mega-churches around the country, including Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Orange County, California and that the show had an advisory board that consisted in part of Rick Warren, Paul Eshleman of Campus Crusade for Christ, and Jim Daly of Focus on the Family, and has been endorsed by Bishop Michael Sheridan, Bishop T.D. Jakes, evangelical entertainer Pat Boone, and Christian Pastor Joel Osteen. And while evangelical radical Tony Campolo and noted poet Maya Angelou also endorsed The Bible as well it is hard not to see the fact that The Bible's advisory board is made up primarily of cultural conservatives and the fact that it is cultural conservatives who have, by and large made up most of those who have endorsed the programme, as very revealing about The Bible's substance and target audience.

One of the more interesting articles I ran across while I was doing a little quick research was one in the Daily Kos. The writer of the article, one caunceydevega, raises interesting questions about Downey’s and Burnett's representations of "race" and attempts at multiculturalism in the The Bible and rightly points out that representations don't come from thin air. The moral of the story, in other words, is that we mustn't forget that Obama has been portrayed over the last five years as a fascist, a Nazi, a clown, Mickey Mouse, an Uncle Tom, a shuffling lay about Black, and has been accused of everything from wanting to kill old people to not being a “real American” or an American at all.

If Downey and Burnett, despite their claims to the contrary, really did want to tie Obama and Satan together several questions come to mind: Why are Downey and Burnett doing a Bart "I didn't do it" Simpson? Do they simply not have the ovaries (Downey) and balls (Barnett) of their parodic "convictions"? Those in the past who did polemicise against American presidents did have the balls—the press of the past was a man’s game—of their convictions. There was some nasty stuff said about George Washington and even nastier stuff said about Washington’s big federalist "PM" Hamilton. There was some nasty stuff said Thomas Jefferson when he ran for president including references to his sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, and his anti-Christianity (grist for those who lack an understanding of early American deism and mistake Jeff for a fundamentalist or evangelical). Many on the left questioned George W. Bush’s intelligence and argued that he was a puppet on the Dick Cheney string. Why are Downey and Burnett, if it was their intention, so unwilling to take responsibility for their parody? Too sophomoric?

Oh one last thing before I end this short essay, I hope there is no hypocrisy here, no "right wingers", in other words, who blasted "left wingers" in the past for their nasty representations of Bush and how they demeaned the office of the president in these nasty representations who are now jumping with orgasmic over the Obama as Satan "parody of Downey and Burnett. I suspect, however, that hypocrisy is running amok. Humans are humans after all.

So anyway Americans, remember as you are sitting down for turkey or tofurkey and cranberries at your next Christmas (or Chrismukkah) meal your president is the devil. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA...

Capsule Television Reviews: The Education of Michelle Rhee

I watched the PBS Frontline documentary on Michelle Rhee on Tuesday night and on Wednesday afternoon. As is almost always the case Frontline's "The Education of Michelle Rhee" was, as is typical of PBS programmes, enlightening, educational, and thought provoking.

I had heard the name Michelle Rhee before, largely, I suspect because of NPR coverage of the controversies swirling around her during her three year tenure as the chancellor of the Washington, DC Public School System from 2007 to 2010. I really didn't know much about her and the reforms she proposed and initiated in the DC schools, however. Thanks to the wonderful "The Education of Michelle Rhee" I now know something about the educational reform ideology of Michelle Rhee.

The Ann Arbor born and Cornell and Harvard educated, in Government and Public Policy, Rhee, as she tells us during the "The Education of Michelle Rhee", is a Korean who, when she was appointed by the newly elected mayor of Washington DC Adrian Fenty to run the DC school system, had never run a school system before. Rhee did have teaching and educational reform experience, however. She taught for three years through the non-profit Teach in America programme, an organisation she learned about while watching PBS, in what she describes in "The Education of Michelle Rhee", as one on the toughest elementary schools in Baltimore. After a successful three year teaching stint Rhee founded the New Teacher Project in Philadelphia in 1997 to train professionals to teach in urban schools primarily in New York, Chicago, Miami and Philadelphia. It was Rhee's experience as head of the New Teacher Project that led the DC school system to ask her to redesign its hiring and recruitment process. From there it was but a short jump to the chancellorship of the Washington DC Public School system.

Chancellor Rhee granted Frontline educational reporter John Merrow extensive access to her and to her attempts to change Washington's schools during her tenure as chancellor, something that is hard not to read, at least in part, as an act of self-promotion and publicity seeking akin to her appearance on the cover of Time Magazine with broom in hand. In "The Education of Michelle Rhee" we see Rhee talk to faculty and administration. We see Rhee walk through Washington's schools. We see Rhee interact with students. We see Rhee initiate a test to measure teacher performance based on student performance on the DC CAS, Comprehensive Assessment System. We see Rhee take on the teacher unions and the tenure system. We see Rhee take on parents. We see Rhee grease the political wheels in order to acquire almost absolute authority over the DC school system including the right to unilaterally hire and fire. We see Rhee close schools whose enrollment is too small. We see Rhee do many of the things some educational reformers, particularly on the American political right and in corporate board rooms, had been urging schools and politicians to do for years. We even get to see Rhee fire a principal whose face has been technologically ghosted just like one of those perp pervs on one of those stings of child and teen predators we used to see regularly on NBC's Dateline. When asked by Merrow if she felt "compassion" for the man who she just terminated Rhee said "no" but rather she felt good because she had just let someone go who wasn't doing his job.

At first, as Merrow and "The Education of Michelle Rhee" tells us, Rhee's reforms seemed to work. Test scores and graduation rates in one "the worst school system in America" rose. Rhee's reforms and her treatment of employees of the DC Public School System and parents made her a number of enemies, however, particularly among DC's teachers, teacher unions, administrators, parents, and politicians. Eventually Rhee's enemies banded together and after the defeat of Fenty by Vincent Gray, a Washington City Councilman who initially supported Rhee's reforms but then turned against our White Knight, at the polls, Rhee resigned as chancellor of DC's schools. Rhee went on to found StudentsFirst in 2010, an organisation that lobbies for educational reforms Rhee favours, drafts educational reform legislation consistent with Rhee's reform proposals, and backs political candidates that share Rhee's reform perspective.

If the story ended here it would be a tale of a White Knight who rode into town to bring much needed change and reform but who was stymied in doing so by entrenched bureaucratic interests looking out for their own petty interests and by parents who just didn't get it. But the story doesn't end there. As "The Education of Michelle Rhee" goes on to tell us, those vaunted test and graduation rate achievements during Rhee's reign--increased elementary and secondary school standardized test pass rates in reading and math and increased system-wide high school graduation rates--are not necessarily what they at first seem. The US Department of Education Inspector General and a USA Today study found high rates of erasures of wrong answers and their replacement with right answers on the DC CAS at one "model" school, something the USA Today reporter who wrote the story calls the statistical equivalent of winning the lottery. A former employee of the school system, Adell Cothorne, claims she witnessed teachers changing wrong answers to right ones one evening after school-- remember student achievement on the tests is what determines whether teachers and principals will be kept on--and that once she changed the locks on the storage units in which tests were stored test scores went down. A private company, Caveon Test Security, was hired to look at the issue of erasures and it along with an investigation by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education headed by a Bush appointee could find no evidence that cheating went on in DC's schools. Both of those investigations, as "The Education of Michelle Rhee" notes, however, were limited. Rhee's success in DC, in other words, may not be the success she and others have touted.

While there is much to admire about Rhee--her commitment to improving education and her commitment to improving student achievement, for instance, a commitment her biographer Richard Whitmore calls zealotry in the documentary, a zealotry that I think borders on self righteous messianism--her approach to educational reform is not beyond criticism. First and foremost, Rhee seems to place most of the blame for student underachievement on tests on teachers. She does this in part, I think, because she tends to do what we humans often do, she sees her ability to improve the grades of her troubled Baltimore students in those three years that she was a model teacher, as something that every teacher has the potential ability to do if only those teachers would be more like her and do more like her. Rhee the fetishiser. The problems with this perspective are several. First, yes there may be some bad teachers out there. Yes many of these bad teachers may be bad because they have burned out out there. The reasons for teacher burnout, however, may be less that they are bad teachers than that they have found out after years of teaching that the interest of some students in a liberal arts education is limited if not non-existent. Some teachers may feel, in other words, that they are banging their heads against a brass wall of student disinterest. Second, it is simply easier for Rhee to blame teachers for student failure than to blame the students themselves or their parents because god forbid that we wreck the self-esteem of little Dick and Jane, god forbid that we offend the parents whose political support we may need, and god forbid that we take a critical look at a school system that mandates a one size fits all educational model. Third, there is the issue of Rhee's success itself. As Frontline reminds us Rhee or Rhee's principal, the person Rhee blames for the what turns out to be exaggerated claims that her students at Baltimore’s Harlem Park Elementary moved from the 13th to 90th percentile on standardized tests over the two-year period while she was a teacher in Baltimore, and one of the Bee Eater's--a name Rhee acquired after she reportedly killed and ate a bee in her Baltimore classroom--own students said in an interview with Frontline that she was one of the few who really took learning to heart during her tenure in Rhee's class.

I give Frontline an A+ for "The Education of Michelle Rhee". I give Rhee an A for effort, a D for her educational reform philosophy, and a D- for her failure to really take seriously the broader contexts in which students and schools are embedded, things like TV, music, computers, mp3 players, cultural capital, class, status, poverty rates. I give her a F for not recognising the role parents play in schools and student education, don't forget that many American parents believe evolution and global warming are myths and that the creation myths of the Bible are true--45% in a recent poll said they believe in creationism--and that many of these same parents while proclaiming the divinity of the American Constitution out of one side of their mouth try to undermine the constitutional separation of religion and state out of the other. I give her a F for thinking that education in all its complexity can be measured solely by a test that teachers spend, unfortunately for real education, most of their time teaching for because their livelihoods depend on it. All of these play important roles in student motivation just as much if not more than teachers do. In the end it is hard to escape the conclusion that Rhee herself is part of the problem with education in the United States because she doesn't recognise that the very reforms she is pushing, particularly the notion that you can measure educational achievement or the lack thereof via a test, is itself undermining the very thing it presumably hopes to save, true liberal arts education. The Michelle Rhee School of Educational Administration, after all, is the educational version of Taylorism. Taylorism, which is all about numbers and humans as mental automatons, and its simple minded postivist understanding of the social sciences, humanities, and arts, kills any semblance of critical thinking. Welcome to Rhee's brave new world.

Suggestions for Further Reading:
Diane Ravitch's Blog: A Site to Discuss Better Education for All
Taking Note: Thoughts on Education from John Merrow

Capsule Television Reviews: The Abolitionists

I am sure that many of you know by now that I am a PBS junkie and a documentary junkie. I watch a lot of PBS and I watch a lot of documentaries particularly on PBS.

Last evening I watched part one of the three part documentary The Abolitionists which made its debut on PBS last night. The Abolitionists tells the tale of the American abolitionist movement that, while it has precedents from the late eighteenth century, really became a force in American cultural, intellectual, and political life between the 1820s and the Civil War. The Abolitionists tells its tale of those who wanted an immediate end to slavery in America by focusing on five of its most prominent "members", Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown and Angelina Grimké. All five were, to use a metaphor, the large planets around which the anti-slavery movement, immediate and gradualist, revolved, and as such a focus on each of them allows the documentary to tell the broader tale of the immediate and the gradualist anti-slavery movements. The Abolitionists recounts it epic saga through the tried and sometimes true methods the history documentary--talking academic heads, photographs, newspapers, and, in The Abolitionists case, re-enactments.

Truth be told I am not much of a re-enactment sort of guy. But there is, as there was in PBS's wonderful six part God in America series from 2010, a lot to like in the re-enactments in The Abolitionists. There's so much to like, in fact, that, as I was watching, I couldn't help but think about how wonderful it would be if the makers of The Abolitionists had made a Downton Abbey style television epic called The Grimkes of Charleston. I can see it in my mind's eye now, The Grimkes of Charleston, an epic tale of love, honour, morality, immorality, human meanness, human compassion, and social and cultural change complete with action, adventure, beautiful stately homes, strong willed mothers, strong willed daughters, electra complexes, driven sons, wicked slave holders, horrid slave quarters, gorgeous costumes upstairs, romance, disappointment, back stabbing, seeking after power, edge of your seat escapes, and tragedy, a tragedy of such dimensions it has impacted the United States ever since. Move over Downton Abbey.

There was much to like about part one of The Abolitionists beyond its re-enactments and my dreams of it becoming an American dramatic and soapy television show. It was entertaining. It was informative. It was nice to see the filmmakers pay attention to the religious motivations of many of our five abolitionists all of whom, in some, way, shape, or form, were impacted by Quaker ideology and Quaker practise--the Quakers, after all, were the first group to outlaw slave holding among its members. The Abolitionists is well worth watching as are most of the documentaries on PBS whether they are part of the American Experience, as was the case here, Frontline, Independent Lens, Global Voices, POV, or America Reframed series. I can't wait to see more of Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown in the upcoming episodes. Highly recommended.

Capsule Film Reviews: Borat and When Borat Came to Town/Carmen Meets Borat

2006’s Borat: Cultural Learings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (20th Century Fox, director, Larry David)—note that USSRish subtitle—is the most recent in a long line of mockumentaries. The mockumentary, the faux documentary, goes back at least to the noted marxist and surrealist auteur Luis Bunuel. Bunuel reacted to the documentary realism of famed documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North, 1922, Moana, 1926, Man of Aran, 1934, Louisiana Story, 1948, and Tabu, 1931, co-directed with German auteur F.W. Murnau)—a documentary realism that was actually part fiction since Flaherty like Edward Curtis before him staged scenes in his documentaries and added fictional narrative elements to them by satirising and parodying the adventurer/ethnographic film subgenre to humourous effect in his documentary anti-documentary Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pain (1933). In Las Hurdes Bunuel takes his camera into the poverty ridden Les Hurdes region of Spain and forces viewers to confront the ethnocentric arrogance and single voice paternalism he saw as inherent in the cinematic form including the cinematic form of documentaries. Bunuel’s deconstruction of ethnographic imperialism, by the way, would prove prophetic. Forty years after Les Hurdes anthropologists themselves would go all reflexive and ask whether their ethnographic discourse itself, because it was written in the objective voice of a Western ethnographer by a Western ethnographer, was itself imperialist.

Eventually others would follow in the parodic and satricial faux documentary footsteps of Bunuel. In 1967 director Jim McBride gave us David Holtzman's Diary, a mock documentary about several days in the life of a documentary filmmaker. In 1969 director Woody Allen's gave us his mockumentary about a small time criminal and his run of bad luck, Take the Money and Run (ABC). In 1978 Eric Idle of Monty Python fame, who did some hilarious faux mockumentaries for the Monty Python sketch show on the BBC including 1969's hilarious Hell's Grannies, gave us a mockumentary about a Beatles like group called the Rutles, All You Need is Cash. In 1984 Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Rob Reiner gave us, This is Spinal Tap (MGM), a mockumentary that follows a legendary but past their prime hard rock band on its hilarious, pretentious, pathetic, and perhaps final gig across America. One of the writers of This is Spinal Tap, Christopher Guest, went on to make a number of highly regarded improvisatory mockumentaries with a stock company of actors including Waiting for Guffman (1996), Best in Show (2000), and A Mighty Wind (2003), which poked satiric and parodic fun at the theatre, dog shows, and folk music respectively.

Mockumentaries have not, in the post This is Spinal Tap era, been a monopoly of Christopher Guest and his mock doc stock company. Noted New Zealand directors Peter Jackson and Costa Botes made the mockumentary Forgotten Silver which satirized, sometimes savagely, Kiwi nationalism and gullibility in its tale of a forgotten New Zealand filmmaker who invented the tracking shot, colour film, and who shot film of the first man to fly, a New Zealander, the last seemingly corroborating something many Kiwis had long believed, that a New Zealander was the first man to fly. Forgotten Silver was taken by many Kiwis as the gospel truth when it was shown on TV NZ 1 in 1995. It was aided and abetted in this by one of New Zealand’s leading television and radio publications, The Listener, which played along with the joke by publishing an article in its pages which suggested that New Zealanders watch this wonderful documentary about an unknown Kiwi hero. Not every Kiwi found the joke humourous, however, as the film hit a tender spot in New Zealand culture, its ethnocentric nationalism, angering many in the process as the angry letters TV New Zealand received from disappointed viewers who wanted to believe the old myth that New Zealand was first in flight show. Many viewers wanted to believe in the faux filmmaker discovered in Forgotten Silver because they wanted to believe that his achievements were New Zealand’s achievements.

Satire and parody wasn’t only the province of mockumentaries. The “documentaries”, if you can call them that, of the American Michael Moore and the Briton Louis Theroux, who works in the documentary unit of the BBC, continued the Bunuelian tradition of satire through “documentary”. Moore’s Roger and Me (1989), Bowling for Columbine (2002), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), and Sicko (2007), and his television shows TV Nation (NBC/BBC2, 1994-1995) and The Awful Truth (Channel 4/Bravo, 1999-2000) “documented” and simultaneously satirised and parodied everything from corporate tyranny and criminality, the American obsession with guns, the Bush presidency, American health care, American homophobia, and beyond. Theroux, who worked with Moore on The Awful Truth, in episodes of his Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends (BBC, 1998-2000) and in his BBC2 specials like The Most Hated Family in America>, “documented”, satirised, and self-righteously parodied everything from American right wing religion, American racists, American wrestling culture, American UFO nuts, and Westerners who went to Thailand looking for young brides. Theroux, by the way, in his When Louis Met… (BBC2, 2000-2002) series, met Jimmy, Jimmy Savile, and asked him about rumours of his penchant for young girls.

The latest in this long line of mockumentary satirists and parodists is the Brit Sacha Baron Cohen. The latest in a long line of Cambridge educated and Jewish actor-comedians, Cohen uses his characters of Borat, Brüno, Ali G, and the dictator Admiral General Aladeen to document, mock, and shock audiences of The 11 O’Clock Show (Channel 4, 1998-2000), Da Ali G Show (Channel 4, 2000, HBO, 2003-2006), and more recently on the big screen in Borat (20th Century Fox, 2006), Brüno (Universal, 2009), and The Dictator (Paramount, 2012). Like many of his mockumentary forebears Cohen uses his sketches to mock the sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and nationalist prejudices of those they chose to document. Whether those Cohen wants to mock share the prejudices of Borat, whether they are laughing at Borat and his political incorrectness, whether they are being patronising, or whether they are trying to maintain good manners, however, is a question worth asking and exploring.

Borat, which I watched recently, tells the tale of a Kazakh documentary filmmaker and his producer (Ken Davitan) who come to the United States to learn from America, "the greatest nation in the world", and take the lessons learned back to Kazakhstan. While in America, however, Borat falls in love with someone he sees while watching TV in his hotel room, C.J, Pamela Anderson, one of the faux breasted Baywatch babes on the American television show Baywatch (1989-1990, syndicated, 1991-2001). So its off to California to find her and marry her in Kazakh style—Borat as road movie mockumentary. Along the way Borat meets a driving instructor, interviews American politicians, goes to a rodeo where he enraptures than offends the audience in a speech that sounds a bit like Mark Twain's "War Prayer", is interviewed on a local news show, trains in the fine art of etiquette, stays at a bed and breakfast run by a Jewish couple, visits an antique shop run by a couple whose shop reflects their devotion to their idea of the Confederacy, and catches a lift from a group of University of South Carolina frat brothers. For those watching closely, by the way, it is clear that the journey as represented in the film is geographically and chronologically out of order.

Borat is funny, sometimes very funny, because it shows, a la Theroux, just how sexist, racist, homophobic, and nationalist, and bizarre some Americans are. But it also shows, as Christopher Hitchens noted in an article in Slate, just how patient many Americans are with Borat despite his limited English and his political incorrectness, none more so than the supermarket clerk who tells Borat when he asks again and again what this—cheese, butter, margarine and horseradish—what this is in a scene cut from the final film but which can be found as an extra on the DVD of Borat. One presumes that this scene was removed because it shows just how patient the supermarket clerk was in the face of Borat’s interminable questions about what each packet of cheese, butter, and margarine and didn't have the shock value of the other sketches. What patient supermarket clerk says about the American customer is always right retail mantra and the consumerisation of the US and the West, by the way, I find terrifying.

Some were apparently taken in by Cohen’s masquerade and weren’t, in retrospect, happy about it. Cohen was sued by a driving instructor from Baltimore that he went to in order to learn how to drive for misrepresentation. He was sued by two of the drunken, sex obsessed, and misogynous University of South Carolina frat boys he met on the road for defamation of character, a rather absurd charge since they clearly defamed themselves thanks to booze more than Borat. These controversies almost certainly added to Borat's box office receipts as controversy, free publicity, almost always does for a film.

Not everyone was apparently taken in by Borat. Pamela Sue Anderson apparently knew what she was getting in for and it may have cost her her marriage to the annoying Kid Rock. Nor did everyone find Borat’s joke humourous in the first place. Many in Kazakhstan found the depiction of their nation as a backward country of horses, horse drawn cars, prostitutes, abortionists, raging wives, and ethnocentric nationalist anthems—it touched nationalist nerves after all—offensive.

The village that masqueraded as Borat’s Kazakh hometown, Glod, Dâmboviţa, Romania, was not happy either. They sued Twentieth Century Fox and Cohen for misrepresenting the village as ignorant, incestuous, and a home to prostitutes and abortionists. Filmmaker Mercedes Stalenhoef tells this tale in her 2008 documentary When Borat Came to Town/Carmen Meets Borat (BBC/PBS) along with tale of the dreams and finally shattered dreams, of a 17 year old resident of Glod, Ionela Carmen, whose father, apparently one of the wealthiest residents of the village, travels to London along with three other villagers in order to sue Borat and 20th Century Fox for their depiction of Glod. The suit, as the film tells us, was another of these failed dreams. The suit was thrown out of court. It is these failed dreams, Carmen’s failed dream of getting out of Glod so she can live a life like that she sees in the Spanish telenovela she watches on television and Glod’s failed dreams of making lots of money from Borat, that makes When Borat Came to Town/Carmen Meets Borat so powerful and finally so pathetic. In the wake of the fall of communism, a fall Carmen’s father laments at one point in the documentary, the only hope rural Glod, and one imagines other places in rural Eastern Europe, seems to have is that it win the lottery by winning a suit against a Western conglomerate or that it will get a hand out from the West. Welcome to the modern world of corporate globalisation. In a way, Stalenhoef’s documentary with its depiction of rural Eastern European poverty and the despair and defeat it breeds takes us back to the serious part of Luis Bunuel's Las Hurdes. The more things change the more they stay the same. Poverty remains alive and well in the midst of greater and greater wealth of the few. And that, dear unreaders, is not funny.

I give Borat and When Borat Came to Town/Carmen Meets Borat three stars each. Recommended.

The Irrationalism of Emotion...

I watched the fascinating documentary The Cuban Missile Crisis: Three Men Go to War on PBS last week. I was struck in particular by what one of the academic and intellectual taking heads said in that documentary. Americans, to paraphrase him, are like werewolves affected by the full moon when it comes to Cuba. They can't and have never been able to deal rationally with a nation many think of as an extension of and a playground of the United States and which others think of, in an obfuscating and dissembling nostalgic purple haze, as a utopia before the Revolution.

This statement, a statement I agree with, by the way, got me thinking about those people who hate American's current president of the United States, Barack Obama. I have long thought that the hatred many Americans have for Obama is similar to the hatred many Americans, particularly those first and second generation Cuban exiles living in Miami, have for Cuba and Castro. They are both grounded in emotion, elite and privileged class emotions in the first instance and racist tinged emotions in the second.

The problem with emotional hallucinations, the emotional hatred of Cuba and the emotional hatred of Obama, is that both are hallucinations and that that they both bear no relationship to reality. When you actually look objectively at Barack Obama, for instance, he is clearly cut out of the same foreign policy cloth as Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and George W. Bush. Just as Kennedy followed in Eisenhower's footsteps on Cuba and Vietnam Obama has followed in the footsteps of foreign policy initiatives laid down in the Bush administration that preceded him and even expanded them. Obama's continuation of and expansion of drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere and Obama's continuation of the plans to kill Osama bin Laden immediately come to mind here.

Given these similarities one has to look for other reasons for the irrational hatred many Americans have for President Obama. And I think, as I have already mentioned, that the thing one has to look at is good old fashioned American racism, an American racism that has long been linked to rhetorics of state rights, anti-communism, anti-socialism, anti-liberalism, and Supreme Court activism among others. You have to look to, in other words, irrational culturally constructed emotions.